The following paper attempts to articulate a distinctly materialist notion of emergence and the formation of patterns by way of re-visiting two texts that have been considered oddities, if not embarrassments, by the subsequent developments of their respective disciplines: Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology and Engels’s Dialectic of Nature. Both texts are strikingly similar in their speculative engagement with the natural sciences and in their potential to inform a renewed engagement with the question of the relation between technology and (...) life. In the concept of “path-breaking” [Bahnung] Freud understands perceptions as inscribing themselves in the structure of the very perceiving apparatus through repetition of what one could call a “material trace” (Sybille Krämer). This notion of the “material trace” can be connected to the key thrust of Engels’s “objective dialectics” in that it “concerns a model of structural emergence”(Hartmut Winkler). I want to propose that these texts can potentially enrich our understanding of how mental formations such as memory take shape and how subjectivity is constituted in material processes. That is, once Freud and Engels are read through recent philosophical thinking on technology (Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou) and the concept of recursivity (Yuk Hui). This approach can also supply resources for a Marxist notion of ideology—namely by performing a turn from a critique that is primarily concerned with the question of how we can penetrate false appearances towards a materialist account of how (“false”) appearances, something like “real abstractions” (Alfred Sohn-Rethel), can emerge out of the “flat plane” of matter. (shrink)

In this article I will try to suggest a transdisciplinary framework in order to analyse the contemporary ecological polycrisis which is usually described as the Entropocene era. According to French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, the Anthropocence can be understoodas an Entropocene, because the current ecological crisis consists in a process of massive increase of entropy in all its forms : thermodynamic entropy (that is, dissipation of physical or chemical energy), biological entropy (as the destruction of biodiversity), and psycho-social entropy (as the (...) reduction of knowledge to data and calculations, through digital disruptive technologies). In order to analyze this situation, we need a transversal conception of entropy : from Bergson’s philosophy of life to Stiegler’s philosophy of technics, going through Schrodinger’s physics, Wiener’s cybernetics, Lotka’s biology and Levi-Strauss’s anthropology, I will try to build a conceptual history of entropies and to explore its economic and political consequences, in order to open new paths beyond the Entropocene era.In this article I will try to suggest a transdisciplinary conception of entropy in order to analyse the contemporary ecological polycrisis which is usually described as the Anthropocene era. According to French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, the Anthropocence can be understood as an Entropocene, becausethe current ecological crisis consists of a process of massive increases of entropy in all its forms: thermodynamic entropy (that is, dissipation of physical or chemical energy), biological entropy (as the destruction of biodiversity), and psycho-social entropy (as the reduction of knowledge to data and calculations, through digital disruptive technologies). In order to analyse this situation, we need a transversal conception of entropy: from Bergson’s philosophy of life to Stiegler’s philosophy of technics, through Schrodinger’s physics, Wiener’s cybernetics, Lotka’s biology and Levi-Strauss’s anthropology, I will try to build a conceptual history of entropies from a Stieglerian point of view and to explore its economic and political consequences in Stiegler’s thought, in order to open new paths beyond the Entropocene era. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the concept of entropy in Ivan Illich’s overall thinking and deliver a dialog with other authors. Our goals are twofold. First, we aim at pointing out how Illich's early work is relevant for critically thinking about entropy in its relationship to forms of social organization and technology usage. Secondly, we point to how Illich’s later works consider a planetary responsibility. By gathering matter, energy and information, technology is an ambiguous force of both hominization and alienation, (...) world-building and world destruction. For an early Illich, liberation from such new heteronomy was possible. The late Illich, however, adverts against the dangers of a collective responsibility. The attempt to “save life” is a necrophiliac manipulation, dependent on a planetary extension of promethean power. Instead, humankind must nurture the return of Epimetheus: a powerless relationship with the future that places hope as the constitutive force of social fabric. (shrink)

Entropy, often defined negatively as disorder or randomness within a system, is vital for organisation while also posing a threat to cyclical reproduction. Entropy is not equivalent to disorganisation, but rather a source of creativity at the local level, even if the tendency towards entropy persists globally. In this article, we build upon Bernard Stiegler’s understanding of entropy, and argue that the interplay of entropy and anti-entropy can be comprehended through Hegel’s notion of negativity, and draw upon the organisational approach (...) to biological systems, which introduces anti-entropy as akin to organisation. Thus, we address Stiegler’s lopsided criticisms of dialectical accounts and argue that the interplay between entropy and anti-entropy is inherently dialectical. We also employ the concept of habit to understand the dialectic of entropy and anti-entropy in the life of organisms, and the delicate balance between stability and plasticity that must be upheld for the thriving of both organisms and their environments. (shrink)

Originating from nineteenth century physics, the concept of entropy—a measure of disorder, randomness, and/or the dissipation of useful energy—underlay a cosmology where order and complexity were seen as highly improbable phenomena in a universe tending toward chaos and disorganisation. Nearly a century later, theoretical frameworks were developed for understanding the production of entropy as an enabling feature of self-organized complexity in the natural world. These ideas would contribute to establishing connections between the origins, development, and evolution of life and the (...) principles of a thermodynamic universe. For some, they also supplied the conceptual foundations for theorizing about a universal natural tendency driving the development of increasingly complex and ordered systems which amplify processes of entropy production and energy dissipation and dispersal. In this paper I chart a path through the aforementioned ideas and present their relevance in framing a relationship between our technological civilization and the Earth system. I then speculate about the prospect of a technosphere whose constitution and activity are aligned with thermodynamic principles of dissipation and entropy-production, drawing on theoretical biology and recent developments in bioengineering to envision a paradigm where technology becomes living matter itself. (shrink)

In this article, I use the dialogical ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer to evaluate whether generative AI is ready to join the ontological conversation that he considers humanity to be. Despite the technical advances of generative AI, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics reveals that it cannot function as a proxy human dialogue partner in pursuit of understanding. Even when free from anthropomorphic projections and reimagined as the “other”, generative AI is found to have a weak epistemology, lack of moral awareness, and no emotions. (...) Even so, it evokes a response in some users that places it on the threshold of being. The most promising dialogical role identified for generative AI is as a digital form of Gadamerian “text” currently constrained by copyright and technical design. Generative AI’s shortcomings risk inhibiting hermeneutical understanding through greater access to summarised knowledge. Nonetheless, the new technology is on the brink of joining the ontological conversation of humanity. (shrink)

Technofeminism has long known that it must be a multi-scalar feminism, that is, able to think, encounter, and negotiate these increasing scales of complexity that comprise our world, from the pharmacological to the planetary-computational. We read technofeminism as constitutively defined by its commitment to both realism and anti-essentialism, and contemporary technofeminisms to be epitomised by, on the one hand, the flat vitalist ontology of new materialism, and on the other, the trans-scalar rationalism of Xenofeminism. By examining these contemporary technofeminisms through (...) contemporary theorisations of the concept of scale, we show that they have a problem with what the latter identify as ‘scalar collapse’; these technofeminisms conceptualise the multi-scalarity of reality, in the last instance, via a collapse into either the ‘master scale’ of new materialist ‘matter’, or via the ‘trans-scalar zoom’ of Xenofeminist rationalism. As such, they recoil from the reality of scalar differences, undermining their commitment to realism (and therefore technics), as well as reducing scalar difference to one unitary, ‘metaphysical’ ground, placing them back within an essentialist collapse. Through examining contemporary theorisations of scale, we claim that in order to avoid such scalar collapse, any truly multi-scalar theory must think difference as both ontogenetic, in the Simondonian sense, and irreducibly at-least-two, in the sense of Irigaray’s concept of sexuate difference. Against any concerns that Irigaray’s notion of sexuate difference may be essentialist or determinist, we show that the ontogenetic character of this difference means it is irreducible and yet also open-ended, that is, open to multiply complex, topologically scalar transformations throughout subsequent individuations. It is this thinking of difference as this ontogenetic ‘at least two’ that can enable contemporary technofeminisms to be truly multi-scalar feminisms. (shrink)

Introduction to Technē and Feminism, Vol. 2 No. 1 (2023).

In non-modern biocultures, contextual human technicity has played a key role in shaping the behaviors and the morphology of non-human species, which in return has simultaneously modulated human morphology and behavior: behavior affords behavior. Studies intersecting anthropology and ecology have framed this process as a biological feedback in which species co-evolve through the constitution of biocultural diversification, thus producing negative entropy through technical activities.

If, as Canguilhem argues, the emergence of exosomatic life involves the introduction of a new inconstancy into life’s environment, then both juridical and scientific law can be understood as a response that aims at a new constancy or fidelity, but one that always requires interpretation. Today, however, there is a crisis of law, due to a speed differential between the speed of legal change and the speed of digital network technology. This crisis can be understood in relation to Stiegler’s account (...) of exosomatic life as involving three kinds of memory that struggle against the entropic tendency, but here we argue that there is also a fourth memory: the immune system. Taking this into account can further elucidate Stiegler’s claim that the pharmakon has a third, psychosocial dimension: the pharmakos. By understanding immune function not just as discriminating proper and foreign elements, or friend and enemy, but rather as a retentional and interpretive system, we can understand phenomena such as the designation of a scapegoat as a fault of interpretation that can be compared with accounts of the onset of paranoia. This in turn makes it possible to understand the crisis of contemporary experience as an anaphylactic reaction resulting from a collapse of resonance that amounts to a loss of the knowledge and desire required to live in tension, where the latter is the only meaningful definition of peace. (shrink)

A dominant strand of second wave feminism, represented in this essay by Firestone, is tied to a belief in technology to achieve reproductive justice, echoing Western somatophobic rationality. As such, it has difficulty formulating a critique of institutionalized reproductive technologies that have the capacity to perpetuate systemic racializing and misogynous violence, and envisioning a philosophy of reproductive justice where care for the body takes central stage. In this essay, we offer a perspective on achieving reproductive justice from an age-old position (...) largely neglected by feminism: that of midwifery. Midwifery has always been wary of technology in the field of reproduction, having first-hand experience with its consequences in birth and pregnancy, and has developed a field of scholarship critiquing its misuse. Simultaneously, midwifery negotiates technology from a position that prioritizes experiential, embodied, and tacit knowledge. Midwifery’s epistemological standpoint is that of a somatophilic rationality of thinking with the body, guarding women and birthing people’s reproductive autonomy through a specific technē that uses both technology and nature. A certain tendency in midwifery is, however, developing more and more towards an anti-technological essentialism. This essay therefore brings into dialogue Firestone’s Marxist women’s liberation through the elimination of biological sex with the help of technology, and midwifery’s somatophilic epistemic standpoint, to develop a feminist rational engagement with nature that can achieve reproductive justice, on the basis of their shared biological materialism. (shrink)

This article aims to reconstruct Simondon’s concept of technophany, which disperses throughout different writings that appeared posthumously and suggest how elaborating this concept could be understood as a significant philosophical task today. Technophany, namely the manifestation of technicity, is central to Simondon’s thought on techno-aesthetics and, more importantly, his intellectual project of reintegrating technology into culture. However, when we place Simondon’s concept of technophany in today’s context, namely the convergence of technology, art and design since the second half of the (...) 20th century, we see that technophanies are becoming more or less ordinary marketing phenomena of the tech industry. Then, could the concept of technophany still take up this task of reconciling technology and culture? Or, instead, is it reduced to a mere economic category, and Simondon’s techno-aesthetics is only a forerunner of today’s industrial marketing strategies? In order to respond to these questions, this article returns to the source of Simondon’s concept of technicity. It shows that there is an intimacy between technophany and Mircea Eliade’s concept of hierophany, and indeed, Simondon’s genesis of technicity vividly mirrors Eliade’s analysis of sacrality and its crisis in modern times. The concept of technophany acquires a new meaning, and it refuses to be a mere phenomenon of publicity as one might easily misread it. Technophany has the task of occupying the “no man’s land” between technicity and sacrality. However, what exactly does it mean? Through the reconstruction of the concept of technophany in Simondon’s thought, this article hopes to examine the limit of the concept and, at the same time, reconceptualise and prolong it. (shrink)