The technological condition

ly envisaged by a spectator who only sees what goes into the workshop and what leaves it again without understanding the process as such. It is essentially an operation that is ordered by someone free and carried out by slaves.... The active character of form and the passive character of matter correspond to the transmission conditions of the order, which presupposes a social hierarchy.... The difference between form and matter, between soul and body, reflects a city that structure, involves the embedding of these actors in the digital, informationand CPU-intensive environment of new media and in automatic environmental technologies, which collectively represent the new dispositif of transformatory technologies. This ultimately transgresses the basic categorial dispositions and forms of intuition that have been controlled by the meaning-giving and meaning-carrying intentional subject, which was formerly the central actor and key protagonist of the sense culture, and it replaces this subject with a new nonintentional, distributed, technological subjectivity that is informed by machinic processes and speeds. Under the technological condition, the traditional categories of the meaning culture and its associated conceptual and intuitive regime—in other words, the pre-technological temporal and spatial relations of conscious subjects—simply forfeited their power to describe and provide evidence. It is increasingly apparent that the transcendentality expressed in these categories is limited, as it neglects all of the technology-saturated modes of production and operation of contemporary subjectivity. While Simondon still hoped to incorporate technical objects into the traditional world of meaning through his program of cultural reform, the evolution of technical objects had long since fundamentally transformed the sense culture itself and even the sense of sense. If the inferiorized and minorized technical object–which was once the degree zero of the sense culture, or let’s say its infamy–now appears in the technological age to be one of the main actors at the heart of the sense culture, then this fact represents an extremely far-reaching shift in the history of the subject and the object. It is a comprehensive treatment of this shift that has to be undertaken under the title the technological condition. In almost all of the diagnoses of the present, this profound transformation in the history of sense through technology is grasped, sometimes even contrary to their own intention. This occurs in a very significant way in the case of the so-called “post-hermeneutic,”26 which Dieter Mersch plausibly described as the philosophical underground of the twentieth century and the philosophical-political order of the day; and it actually occurs precisely where it emphasizes as its own core content the indeterminable, unjustifiable, inaccessible “other of sense” (Sinnandere) or the “fundamental negativity” of the “eccentric, exterior, or ecstatic”—in short, the “emphasis of the ex-.”27 For the “oblivion of ex-istence”28 of the hermeneutic sense culture, which Mersch rightfully assigns even to its most extreme and radical philosophical outsiders, like Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, only becomes recognizable, in my opinion, through the exof technology. The original exteriorization and “being outside oneself”—the original and unavoidable exteriority—on which the post-hermeneutic fascination with negativity and its pathos of the “discovery of an original wound”29 depends, is first accentuated and implemented historically through technology. In any case, the prominent protagonists of post-hermeneutic thought have themselves affirmed that the exof existence, which for them is unavoidable, exposes precisely the “‘essential’ technicity of existence”30 and the “essential technicity that makes up (the condition of) finitude”:31 a technicity that continually refers to the originary fault—the always absent, missing, faulty origin—out of which all existence is endlessly technical and given over to technical becoming.32 Another issue is whether technological sense can still be adequately understood using the concepts and figures of exteriority, negativity, uncertainty, lack and default, as a long tradition culminating in post-hermeneutics suggests, or whether technological means have already brought us to the post-history of negativity and its corresponding semantics, in the sense of Alexandre Kojève’s statement concerning the end of history. Even though up until now technics has been undoubtedly understood most strikingly in theoretical milieus fascinated with negativity, and it has repeatedly been conceived as a form of prosthetic compensation, externalization, extension, and supplement to the insufficiently equipped, incomplete, and indeterminately finite living being— in short, as the exteriorization of the primordial negativity of the human—this seemed thoroughly plausible under instrumental relations of being. These theories were based on the working subject’s relation to the world, as the working subject constantly had to negate and transform its conditions due to its own unavoidable needs. However, the technological displacement of sense could reveal a cybernetic constitution, which can hardly be described by means of a negative-anthropological or negative-ontological concept of finitude. I am thinking in particular of the immanentizing tendency, which is connected to the ecologization of being through the latest information and communication technologies, or also the interiorizing tendency resulting from nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, and the program of converging technologies. These are areas where technological development itself surpasses all of the established negativistic descriptions of the technical. THE TECHNOLOGICAL CONDITION ERICH HÖRL there is no radical break between the human and the material to which he gives form.”48 The outside, to be more accurate, is thereby strictly speaking nothing but an exteriorization of the working man. The theory of exteriorization, which views objects, tools, and indeed all technics in general as an extension and projection of the human—a theory that is still or rather once again prominent today—maps precisely the situation of the organic natural state, and therefore it still defines the image of technics from this point of view. Against this backdrop, hylomorphism proves to be the ontological program of this natural state, formulated since Aristotle, which separates the active subject, who gives form and meaning, from the passive material or object, which is formless and senseless. Under the conditions of the second mechanical natural state work is transformed into instrumental work, or rather, to be more precise, it becomes “an attribute of both living and non-living material forces.”49 The human itself is thus mechanized, as “human and non-human material forces are assimilated into one another and collectively constitute a unified, homogeneous machine.”50 Moscovici specifies that the main actor in this natural state, under the machine conditions of classical mechanics, is “the transmission mechanism, which serves as the intermediary between the machine tool and the power source and which lends the desired direction, intensity, and complexity to its movement.”51 Only the third, cybernetic natural state, which had just appeared at the time of Moscovici’s reflections, abandons the hylomorphic sense culture formed by classical instrumental technics and work. On the basis of information and communication technologies, the central activity becomes transinstrumental control performance, which can no longer be described using the opposition of form and matter. Moscovici saw this clearly, even though he still appeared to hold on to the concept of work: “Regulating work thus belongs to a new genus. Its task is not the forming of objects.”52 My thesis is that in cybernetic relations, in which the forming of objects is no longer the core activity of human and non-human actors—and that is the defining characteristic of the technological condition—there is at the same time also a shift in the status and sense of objects as such, or what an object even means, towards systemic, active, intelligent, and communicating objects. This shift implies a momentous redefinition of our entire objective condition and the place that we as subjects occupy therein. The modification of the sense culture that is technologically implemented in this way eventually leads to a fundamental ecological reorientation of the mode of cognition and being, whose contours we are only just beginning to recognize. In the first phase of the cybernetic natural state, the emergence of the technological condition was still commonly perceived and modeled from the theoretical and historical perspective of machines rather than objects, which was most likely due to a certain fixation on machines in the mechanical age. The transition from classical to transclassical machines that Gotthard Günther has repeatedly described since the 1950s, the already mentioned distinction between closed and open machines that was developed at the same time by Gilbert Simondon, Heinz von Foerster’s differentiation between trivial and non-trivial machines since the late 1960s, and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s distinction between autopoietic and allopoietic machines were all to some extent reflections cast into systematic differences that simultaneously expressed the transition from the technical to the technological world. Nevertheless, Simondon––undoubtedly in direct connection with Georges Canguilhem’s organology and later especially neocybernetic systems theories––already recognized the foundational object-historical tendencies and turned to questions and concepts that increasingly describe our technological condition, like milieu,environment or Umwelt. These concepts thus first attained their full actuality and scope through younger media-