Technophany, A Journal for Philosophy and Technology
Technophany, published by Radboud University Press, was founded in view of the need to create a singular and unconventional space for reflections on philosophy and technology, which is diminishing today due to dogmatic academic practices and their reluctance to confront challenges imposed by the industrial world. Technophany aims to facilitate original reflections and provocations on the philosophy and history of technology, and contribute to the reshaping of the contemporary landscape of thought.
Introduction of the special issue dedicated to Jean-François Lyotard (10. August 1924, Versailles–21. April 1998) on the occasion of his centennial anniversary.
Copyright (c) 2024 Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Silicon Valley CEOs have postponed their trip to Mars to seize power on Earth instead. Let’s take this opportunity—even if it’s a sombre one—to philosophically affirm our planetary condition: however situated we may be (in terms of race, class, and gender), we are cosmologically un-situatable, i.e. exceeding any terrestrial situation. Escaping all terrestrial power, this cosmological freedom can be a last resort when democracy, attacked by authoritarian technologies and neo-dictatorships, is fading away.
Copyright (c) 2024 Frédéric Neyrat https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Permanent Condition of First Contact: Bogna Konior’s The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
Bogna Konior’s The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025) departs from the “socially engaged journalism” that dominates internet scholarship to recover an older link between computation and ufology, recasting the internet as a site of first contact. Drawing on Liu Cixin’s game-theoretic answer to the Fermi Paradox, Konior underscores AI systems’ continuous ingestion of online communication as training data, arguing that it collapses the distinction between speaking about and speaking to algorithms. Intelligence, in her account, inheres in strategic concealment, yielding an “inverse Turing Test” in which genuine cognition would remain undetectable. From this follows a Wallfacer strategy: the tactical deployment of silence, deception, and abstraction within an architecture engineered to collapse deliberation into reaction. Yet this prescription sits in tension with her characterization of online communication as compulsive and pre-reflexive, raising the question of whether strategic opacity is available to organisms constitutively driven toward disclosure. This review proposes that the discordance can be negotiated by reframing the communicative impulse as autonomic rather than automatic. Read in this light, Konior’s text may itself function as an adversarial payload, encoding structural indeterminacy into the datasets it ostensibly theorizes. For audiences who have grown weary of emancipatory manifestos and the defeatist critiques that shadow them, Konior provides a realism sturdy enough to inhabit the forest without surrendering to it.
Copyright (c) 2024 Metehan Kandemir, William Morgan, PhD https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Entropic Exchanges: An Interview with Clayton Crockett on Entropy in Energy, Life, and Politics
Copyright (c) 2024 Joshua Hanan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This is a review of Leif Weatherby's 2025 book Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.
Copyright (c) 2024 William Stewart https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper develops a theoretical framework to analyse human and non-human entities as socio-biotechnical configurations shaped by historically sedimented power relations. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, post-ANT developments, and Andrew Feenberg’s critical constructivism, the argument integrates these perspectives within a Marxist approach that foregrounds the dialectic between contingency and necessity. The concepts of threads and fabrics conceptualise how networks stabilise asymmetries, consolidate exclusions, and produce fractured totalities. Capital is theorised not as a background condition but as a structuring actant that inscribes values, configures topologies, and organises the logic of valorisation. Technical codes materialise hegemonic positions within socio-biotechnical entities, while resistance and obduracy mark the persistence of the non-identical. The paper further examines how class position and subjective identification mediate technological design, showing how socio-biotechnical entities embody contested inscriptions of meaning, function, and control. Through this lens, technology is reinterpreted as a site of struggle within a historically structured socio-biotechnical totality.
Copyright (c) 2026 Horacio Correa Lucero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Tradition and Modernity in Yuk Hui’s Cosmotechnical Thinking
This article explores Yuk Hui's cosmotechnical thinking, focusing on how technological development is influenced by culture, and the possibility of technodiversity. Yuk Hui introduces the concept of cosmotechnics, which links technology to specific cultural cosmologies, and argues for the necessity of technodiversity to counter the homogenizing effects of modern technology. However, it remains a question how technodiversity is to be realized exactly. This article claims this follows from Hui’s classical interpretation of the relation between tradition and modernity and his noöcentric approach to cultural traditions. By criticizing this position, this article aims to bring Hui’s thinking into contact with other ways of thinking, which can lead to a fruitful conversation and open a possible pathway to technodiversity.
Copyright (c) 2024 Bart Gulden https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this article, I reflect on Deleuze’s provocative critique of the second law of thermodynamics in Difference and Repetition by drawing his philosophy into conversation with cosmology—specifically quantum physics. In dialogue with the work of the late Bill Ross, whose recent Order and the Virtual represents the most substantial critical engagement with the entropic principle vis-à-vis Deleuze, I turn to the physicist David Bohm’s distinction between explicate and implicate orders, which Ross argues bear strong similarities to Deleuze’s actual and virtual, respectively. Bohm’s theory, as Ross and others have pointed out, entails a recognition of the pluripotent creative potential of the quantum dynamisms that give rise to the spatiotemporal order—what Deleuze would describe as non-exhaustive intensive differences that are only apparently cancelled out in extensity. Here, with reference to Deleuze’s distinction between the divine and human games, and their respective distributions of chance, I propose—following Ross and Bohm, as well as contemporary loop quantum gravity—an alternative to string theory most commonly associated with the physicist Carlo Rovelli: that whereas the emergent regularities of the macroscopic world are inexorably bound to the arrow of time and thus to the law of entropy, this is not the case for the divine game that takes place within the quantum foam, and that it is here that the Eventum tantum takes place in which all of chance—including said laws—are continuously redistributed. Turning to the both non-continuous and continuous nature of this evental dynamism relative to quantum and macrophysical realities respectively, I close by considering Ross’s eschewal of dynamic systems theory in favour of other quantum-theoretic resources and suggest that perhaps both can be usefully employed to think the reciprocal becomings of Deleuze and the philosophy of cosmology.
Copyright (c) 2024 Aragorn Eloff https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Dis-automating Automaton: Intelligence Between Automaticity and Disruption
Book review of David W. Bates’s An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking With Machines From Descartes to The Digital Age
Copyright (c) 2024 Alan Diaz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Which Method is Cartesian? Descartes, Lacan, and the “Accumulation of Knowledge”
Most philosophical Lacanians instinctively take Lacan’s engagement with Descartes – not to mention his explicit formulations about not only the identity of the psychoanalytic and Cartesian methods but also, moreover, that of the subject of psychoanalysis and the cogito – as comprising a crucial and unequivocal philosophical repère. Nonetheless, there is a line of thought in Lacan’s oeuvre that this orientation leaves completely unaccounted for: Lacan’s decisive point regarding knowledge as accumulation. In his recently published twelfth Seminar (Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse) from February of this year, Lacan argues that the cogito is a hinge between knowledge “in its pre-accumulative state,” to the extent that it is capable of being doubted, and knowledge as a “mode of production” which predates and even motivates capitalist accumulation. It is on this basis that we can comprehend Lacan’s seemingly conflictual or even contradictory claims that, on the one hand, Descartes inaugurates modern science by leaving the eternal truths to God (Seminar XI) and, on the other hand, that modern science forecloses truth (“Science and Truth”).
Copyright (c) 2024 Emily Laurent-Monaghan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Shadows And Everything Between: What Is Lost When Technology Takes Over
Technology has a long history of influencing humanity. While this statement seems monolithic and perhaps deterministic, this essay intends first to illustrate, in small part, the impacts of technology, and second, to discuss a possible way forward amid the technological change. I will follow the impact of electric light on Japanese aesthetics, particularly from the perspective of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and his essay, In Praise of Shadows. Then, I will extend the conception of electric light into digital technologies in general, the goal being to connect the loss of beauty in Tanizaki’s view to the broader detriment of humanity via the digital environment. As electric light redefined beauty for Tanizaki’s Japan, so, too, have digital technologies redefined what we consider human interaction and information. Lastly, in a call for awareness and human solidarity, I will suggest that resistance is not futile. Indeed, it is imperative if we intend to free ourselves from the matrix we have fashioned and enabled.
Copyright (c) 2024 Joshua Clements https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Good, The Bad and the Grimdark: Why Technological Mastery Precludes Collective Self-Mastery
This paper argues that a modern technological society devoted to socially determined ends is impossible. This “Grimdark Thesis” assumes a posthumanist “New Substantivist” theory of technology whose upshot is that modernity renders technical entities abstract and highly repeatable. Abstract technology is functionally indeterminate and counter-final, lacking either intrinsic or extrinsic teleology. In particular, I argue that extrinsic teleology – e.g., socially determined ends – is foreclosed by modelling a technological society as a Hyperagent – a maximally mutable being capable of arbitrary changes to its technical or material substrate. Finally, I consider whether this technological “Outside” can be reintegrated into the normative space of reasons as lack or negation, along the lines explored in contemporary Hegelian/Lacanian theories of the Subject. I argue that there are no grounds for assuming that the barred subject assumed by Hegelians/Lacanians is a transcendental invariant, implying the Technological Outside is a subtracted but not a constitutive lack.
Copyright (c) 2024 David Roden https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article examines how contemporary media technologies transform the conditions of visuality, challenging anthropocentric models of perception historically grounded in the human gaze. Drawing on the philosophies of Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler, it argues that vision is not merely extended by technical apparatuses but reconfigured through processes of technological individuation and transindividuation. From optical devices and perspectival systems to algorithmic media and machine vision, the image progressively detaches from embodied human perception and becomes an operational entity within technical infrastructures. Through an analysis of historical and contemporary media systems, the article develops the concept of distant visuality to describe modes of seeing that function beyond phenomenological experience. In this context, vision emerges as a distributed process shaped by material, computational and mnemonic systems, marking a transition toward the deanthropologization of perception and the emergence of posthuman and nonhuman regimes of visuality.
Copyright (c) 2024 Renzo Filinich https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
On Relational Memory through Archaeology, Technics, and Organization
This paper conceptualizes a notion of memory based on the philosophy of archaeology, with particular emphasis on early Baltic computational mnemonic technic. Early Baltic mnemonic technic manifested as a form of memorization through gesticulations with small clay figurines, enabling the recording and retaining of larger quantities of things being counted. This interactive and material nature of memorization challenges such isolationistic ontologies as hylomorphism, suggesting that memory should not be understood as a distinct passive faculty operating solely via inner mental representations. Contrasting this definition, a relational ontology–emphasizing interactions, entanglements, and engagements–can be extended to memory. Therefore, depending on various networks of relationships, memory emerges in new and ever-changing forms of practical operations. Following this perspective, computational mnemonic technic highlight technical and organizational aspects of relational memory. These aspects are interpreted in light of Leroi-Gourhan’s theory (Gesture and Speech 1993 [1964-65]), proposing that, insofar as memory is modulated by technical determinations, it also enables the organization of anticipations for future actions.
Copyright (c) 2024 Dominykas Barusevičius https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Involuntary phrases for the 21st Century: “No phrase is the first.” §184
In an interview in 1978, Lyotard was asked if he believed a “communication volontaire” is possible. The difficulty of translating this phrase—“self-directed” or “voluntary” communication?—is enhanced by the fact that such a notion seems oddly out of time. Lyotard’s reply invokes aspects of the strange and strained relationship between his most philosophical book, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, and his most popular, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in particular the shift from Wittgensteinian ideas of “language games” to that of phrase regimen and its attending critique of anthropocentrism. Is there, in this shift, a move that echoes current aspects of ecocriticism and into which it might, in turn, feed? The possibility of a “communication volontaire” will be considered through the inter-relationship of both texts, Lyotard’s own response in relation to his teachings at the university of Vincennes, and through artworks which perform aspects of this voluntary process.
Copyright (c) 2024 Kiff Bamford https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Assembling Intelligence: Transitioning from a Politics of Control to a Politics of Configuration
The concept of intelligence is deeply ambiguous and entangled with historical narratives of colonialism and eugenics. The contemporary understanding of intelligence still reflects such narratives: it is understood in human-centric terms, as a property defined by goal-oriented cognitive capacities. This leads to what we term a politics of control, which relies on historically established patterns of exclusion to establish political structures with colonial connotations. In response, this paper proposes an alternative framework called the Assemblage Theory of Intelligence (ATOI). ATOI understands intelligence in terms of the dynamic relationships and activities within an assemblage and moves us from a politics of control to a politics of configuration. We illustrate ATOI through a discussion of the human-in-the-loop (HITL) methodology in AI development. Contrary to the dominant narrative, where humans are seen as controlling the loop, we reconceive HITL as an assemblage where human and machine elements configure and mutually shape each other.
Copyright (c) 2024 Dario Amenophi Perfigli, Bas de Boer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Is The Universal Turing Machine a Capitalist Super-Machine?
This paper explores the hypothesis that capitalism might be understood as a computational phenomenon, akin to a program running on a Universal Turing Machine (UTM). Grounded in the principles of digital physics, Marxist theory, and techno-criticism, it proposes that if the universe is fundamentally computable, then socio-economic systems like capitalism could also be seen as outputs of this universal computational process, thus questioning whether capitalism emerges as a neutral outcome or as an inevitable consequence of its design. Drawing from philosophical and political critiques, the paper interrogates the implications of this hypothesis for human agency, resistance, and the construction of alternative social frameworks. The film Cube is used as a fictional case study to illustrate the dynamics of interacting with a capitalist super-machine. Furthermore, the paper reflects on quantum computing's impact on the UTM hypothesis.
Copyright (c) 2024 Bo Kampmann Walther https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Introduction to Computational Creativity
In the contemporary landscape of rapid technological advancements, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as an important factor in reshaping practices, world-views and expectations. One of the most intriguing and thought-provoking areas of AI's influence is its intersection with creativity. By deconstructing the cognitive processes involved in human creativity, researchers can design algorithms that simulate these processes. This involves machine learning, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, and other AI techniques that enable computers to recognize patterns, generate new ideas, and refine them through iterative processes. Can AI's outputs—whether in painting, composing, writing, or other forms of artistic production—be considered genuinely creative, or are they mere reflections of the data and rules we feed into these systems?
Computational Creativity Articles (Edited by Anna Longo)
Copyright (c) 2024 Technophany, A Journal for Philosophy and Technology
When Philosophy Becomes Cybernetics and Cybernetics Becomes Philosophy
This article examines the intersection of philosophy and cybernetics, proposing Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory as a crucial foundation for renewed cybernetics in the twenty- first century. By revisiting Norbert Wiener’s foundational insights and reinterpreting key cybernetic principles, it explores how Luhmann’s second-order observation and the concept of meaning challenge the traditional distinctions between human consciousness and technology. The paper argues that Luhmann’s approach not only addresses concerns of dehumanization in a technologically advanced society but also offers a dynamic framework for rethinking human self-perception and social organization without denying it cybernetic foundations. This exploration highlights the potential of systems theory to redefine the philosophical significance of cybernetics, providing tools for understanding the evolving interactions among humans, machines, and society in modernity.
Copyright (c) 2024 Technophany, A Journal for Philosophy and Technology https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Feenberg's Marcuse: Design, Ontology, and the Critique of Technology
A book review of Andrew Feenberg's The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse's Philosophy of Praxis that emphasizes how Feenberg develops a critical philosophy of technology from Marcuse's work.
This paper takes a retrospective look at Lyotard’s analysis of “the postmodern condition,” a century after his birth, and nearly a half-century since his highly influential book. Lyotard’s pessimistic view was that after the end of metanarratives, there is now no alternative to the liberal democratic capitalist “System,” which is governed by a technological-economic principle of “performativity.” Considering Lyotard’s thesis in the light of his own methodology of “signs of history,” I argue that it is no longer possible to hold this view. A number of key historical events point to massive fault-lines that have appeared in this System. Nevertheless, much of what Lyotard wrote in The Postmodern Condition about the growing influence of technology on social and political life has only been confirmed. The hypothesis this paper proposes is that the signs of system failure might at least open paths of resistance to technological hegemony.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ashley Woodward https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article critically assesses Lyotard’s notions of development and infancy. In The Inhuman, Lyotard opposes development as the name for contemporary capitalism and infancy as source of resistance. However, after Lyotard, Bernard Stiegler diagnoses our contemporary situation as infantilized. This implies that infancy is no longer opposed to development, but its accomplice. Stiegler therefore calls for a new maturity, which he primarily understands as responsibility and critical thinking. I argue that this remains one-sided, because Stiegler’s inspiration—Kant’s essay on Enlightenment—leads him to a primarily negative notion of infancy. Stiegler’s call for maturity is valuable but must be supplemented with Lyotard’s notion of infancy: infancy as potentiality and affectivity. Especially Lyotard’s understanding of affectivity allows for thinking the source of those practices such as art and philosophy that do not immediately serve an external end, be it development’s end of increasing performativity or Stiegler’s end of maturity.
Copyright (c) 2024 Daan Keij https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article addresses the persistent challenge of rearticulating the question concerning Heidegger’s notion of technology in light of his National socialism. Contra Bernard Stiegler, it firstly argues that Heidegger did not simply forget about Epimetheus in his critique of technology as the promethean realisation of metaphysics. Following from this first claim, this article secondly proposes contra Stiegler’s project of ‘remembering technics’ that technics was never apprehended by the system of forces called philosophy to begin with and thus cannot be remembered in the usual sense neither. To explore this claim, this article engages Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis in Heidegger and 'the Jews'(1988), in which Lyotard problematises Heidegger’s project of remembering that a forgetting (of Being) takes place in all thought and representation of the world through his singular Kantian reading of the Freudian distinction between primary and secondary repression. By juxtaposing Lyotard's critique with Stiegler’s discourse, the article develops a new understanding of philosophy's repression of technics. It ultimately proposes that both the western philosophical tradition and contemporary German memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) must confront this repression—not as a forgotten memory, but as something that was never fully grasped to begin with. The question of recollecting and remembering what was never inscribed finally leads us back to ask the more encompassing question of the relation between anamnetic recollection and technical inscription in general. Finally, then, asking the question concerning technology in light of primary repression, this article proposes that the question of technology has always already been the question of how justice can be done in the face of the unforgotten, a question which becomes ever more urgent in times of new technological development.
Copyright (c) 2024 Franziska Aigner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Despite being one of the key figures in the philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century, Jean-François Lyotard’s ideas have not yet been properly explored. This article will start from some of the main misunderstandings surrounding his thought on history and technology in order to propose a broad reflection on the interest that Lyotard’s ideas still have for our present. To this end, some of the accelerationist interpretations of his work will be questioned.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sergio Meijide Casas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Moving and Exhausting Cosmos: A Discussion on Entropy
A discussion between Thomas Nail and Joel White on the philosophical status of entropy. The discussion explores Nail's kinetic materialism, movement, entropy and the notion of exhaustion.
Entropies (Edited by Joel White and Gerald Moore)
Book Review: The Digital and its Discontents by Aden Evens
Book review of Aden Evens’s The Digital and its Discontents.
Audrone Žukauskaitė’s book is a concise analysis of the place and role of the organism, or perhaps organic thinking, within the tradition of continental philosophy. In particular, it is interested in how the legacy of post-war French thought intersects with how we think biological systems today and suggests that this thinking should be renewed in order to address some of the more massive political deadlocks of the present namely the status of biopolitics and what to do with the concept of the anthropocene.
From the "Anamnesis of the Visible" to "Cartographic Anamnesis"
The starting point of the article is that cartography can be used as an epistemological and relational device to visualize and rethink relations between human beings and the world in the contemporary era. To provide elements in support to this hypothesis, the contribution intends to read some Lyotardian notions, such as "anamnesis", "rewriting", "figural", "libidinal set-up", "interworld" in relation to the cartographic device and to issues related to postmodern spatial production in architecture and geography. The aim will be to show how this pivotal concepts of Lyotard's aesthetics can be applied to think about a philosophy of technique and culture, which takes cartography as its object of study and investigation, particularly by soliciting the text Discourse, figure and by using the artistic and theoretical work of artists like Paul Klee and Gianfranco Baruchello, who are fundamental to lyotardian reflection.
Copyright (c) 2024 Anna De Martino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Book Review: Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua, Toward an Anthropology of Screens. Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting
In this text I offer a review of the book ‘Toward an Anthropology of Screens’ by Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua. After briefly introducing the operation proposed by the authors, I consider the salient points of the work. Finally, I propose an assessment of the relevance of the book in contemporary philosophical debate.
The Symbiosis Concept Applied to the Human Technological Culture
This article examines the concept of symbiosis as a premise for elucidating the origin of the human-technology relationship. The starting point is the work of the biologist Lynn Margulis, who introduced the concepts symbiosis and symbiogenesis in the biological sciences. Her idea is that a long-lasting physical association that as symbiosis may be defined, will eventually by symbiogenesis lead to an evolutionary novelty. From this perspective the human-technology relationship is explained using philosophical ideas of Bernard Stiegler and Helmuth Plessner, who both considered this relationship essential for being human. I explain what is typical about the human life form as it is thought by them. Basically, the difference between the human and other organisms is that in the human, something is moved outside that in animals stayed within. I explicate that this exteriorisation, as it is called by Stiegler, at the same time is an interiorisation. This movement should be considered as a form of endosymbiogenesis by which the long- lasting use of tools was cognitively internalized in mind and body and became eventually a condition for the origin of an organism with a technological culture—the human.