Vol. 3 No. 1 (2024): General Issue

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.

In this article I examine the problem of technique in Georges Bataille's social ontology by means of a counterpoint with Bernard Stiegler's philosophy. I will defend the following theses: 1. Bataille's concept of imperative of exclusion, defined as the foundation of the social, is, at the same time, the condition of technique. Moreover, technical objects are conditions of the social because they are ways of the contagion of this imperative. 2. Bataille's concept of society, illustrated by the figure of the whirlwinds, can be thought of as a form of neganthropy, as Stiegler understands it. I affirm therefore that Bataillean social ontology deserves a place in the history of the philosophy of technology in France.

Paul B. Preciado’s theory of the pharmacopornographic regime provides a radical theoretical analysis of the relationship between gender, technology and capitalism. Firstly, I explicate Preciado’s key concepts and argue that their overarching theoretical project illuminates neoliberal capitalism’s capture and commodification of sexual energies and desire. I contend that contemporary toxic heteronormativity in extreme online communities may be explained as reactionary internalisation/ resistance to this process. I conclude by suggesting Preciado’s theoretical insights gesture toward a progressive and emancipatory pathway for rethinking masculinity.

How do we conceive diversification in the milieu of technics? Though associated-milieu is a useful concept, the Indian terrain of techniques impels one to underscore the notion as a milieu of subversion. The paper begins with a reading of the seminal work done by Debiprasad Chattopadhaya analyzing the impediments in writing a history of ancient Indian science and technology. Whether his effort resuscitating a history of materialism succeeds in interpolating a history of techniques in India is a critique this paper explores, taking cues from Yuk Hui’s incisive reading of the perceived absence of traditions of technical thinking in China, or broadly Asia. Present paper builds on Hui’s concept of “cosmotechnics” alongside the notion of “associated milieus” of counter-cultural techniques of Yoga and Tantra. In the second half, the paper brings into view how these Indian thought and practice traditions of Tantra and Yoga as techniques of the cosmic self and the body are woven into counter-cultures eliciting a critical framework for thinking these associated-milieus as exiled and migrated milieus.

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.

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.

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.

Ruyer and his elements towards a metaphysics of information’s origination Critical notice on Raymond Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information

Review for:

Laura Tripaldi, Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2022. 192 pp. $18.95 (Paperback ISBN: 9781913029937)