The Fragile Skin of the World

Jean-Luc Nancy, Cory Stockwell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509549177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Certain philosophers of Antiquity compared the world to a large animal; but if the world were an animal, it would have a skin similar to the skin that envelops each living being and gives it unity. The world is neither an animal nor a machine but an interminable jumble whose destination is nothing other than the maelstrom in which the very idea of the world slips away. The world has no skin other than the turbulence that makes histories, customs, moments of grandeur and decadence. Because it is not a skin, this extension of space-time is much more fragile than the skins that are already always fragile, because everything here touches its extremities.

The world is everything that passes between us – ourselves and everything that happens to us, everything that becomes of our contacts, our gazes, our movements; and through referrals from skin to skin, from the fleeting to the immemorial, you reach, without even knowing it, the entire actuality of the world: the act of its existence. This act is made up of works and disasters, splendours, horrors, and catastrophes. As long as it is ours, it is the act of an infinite emergence that is all the sense there is: a sense that incessantly goes from skin to skin and is itself never enveloped by anything.

The texts in this volume are all oriented by the concern for what is currently happening to us – we, late humanoids – when we arrive at an extremity of our history, whether this extremity should turn out to be a stage, a rupture, or quite simply a last breath.

II
From Ontology to Technology

1

Illogical Technology

Technology dies hard: this is clear of the word and of the thing – though it is not clear that the thing is independent of the word. This word, in any case, coolly resists the denunciation of its lexical monstrosity. This denunciation began a long time ago: the French Wikipedia article on the word makes note of it, with reference to Jacques Ellul, which makes for almost a half century of caution – one also finds without difficulty more recent reminders or prolongations.¹ The dictionaries themselves admit their confusion. The famous Merriam-Webster (which must serve as an authority here since the discussion, for socio-technological reasons, essentially concerns English . . .) unhesitatingly and unflinchingly brings together the original definition (from 1829) – the ‘systematic treatment of an art’ – with a first sense, the ‘practical application of knowledge’ (along with the synonym ‘engineering’), followed by a second that states: ‘manner of accomplishing a task especially useful during technical processes, methods, or knowledge’.²

How not to be confused in the face of such incoherence? On the one hand, one moves abruptly from the theoretical treatment of an art (the most classical sense of ‘technics’) to the application of a knowledge, which in sum constitutes an inversion of sense (from knowing an art to applying a knowledge), coupled with a side-stepping of the meaning that is proper to ‘art’, which seems to be replaced by that of ‘practical application’ (an expression that smacks of pleonasm). And if one then, to look at this more closely, turns to the synonym ‘engineering’, one finds the following: ‘the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people’.

One should not forget that the word ‘engineer’ itself has a Franco-English co-provenance: its source is the Latin ingeniare, which evokes ingeniousness,³ the capacity to devise a method with a determined aim – in short, the fabrication of engines made to accomplish this or that task (engines of war seem to have been the first, around the thirteenth century, to mobilize this semantics).

If we return now to the second sense given for ‘technology’ (‘manner of accomplishing . . .’), it is easier to perceive the sleight of hand: what is at stake is the execution, through technical means, of a practical task of a technical character, in other words mobilizing natural energy for human ends. One would be hard pressed to say in what way logic presides over this technics (unless one considers the old sense, ‘study of an art’). The pompous term ‘technology’ does nothing more than envelop ‘technics’ in a more imposing aura.⁴

There is nothing new about any of this – there hasn’t been since the Greek definition of technē that Aristotle was the first to gather together formally: knowledge that permits the attainment of ends not offered by nature. Nothing new besides two additions: on the one hand, this knowledge ‘applies’ sciences, or science ‘and mathematics’ (the distinction and the cooperation in question are both left in the shadows), and on the other hand this application mobilizes natural energy.

One might think that these two additions should have been implicit for Aristotle, but this is far from certain. His thought contains the idea of a theoretical knowledge that has its end in itself and constitutes the summit of wise conduct rather than a resource for useful applications. On the other hand, a technē for him is a specific expertise, proper to a precise end (making a bed, labouring), and which has little to do with mobilizing every possible natural resource in the service of human utility.

*

Aristotle was of course able to say that if the shuttles of weaving looms functioned all by themselves, we would have no need for slaves. Let us recall this famous passage:

For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet,

‘of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods’;

if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves. Here, however, another distinction must be drawn; the instruments commonly so called are instruments of production, whilst a possession is an instrument of action. The shuttle, for example, is not only of use; but something else is made by it, whereas of a garment or of a bed there is only the use. (Politics 1253b–1254a)⁵

The word automatoi is found in the text, concerning the ‘tripods of Hephaestus’. This imaginary automaticity of instruments serves here to assert that slaves are property in the same way as inanimate tools of production. The passage does not mention that aspect of the slave that is not ‘automatic’: namely, that he must be coerced. What is proper to a slave is the same as what is proper to an instrument of production. The slave not only belongs to the master, he belongs to him ‘entirely’, as the text states a little further on.

This is indeed awkward for Aristotle, who would prefer not to be confronted with the manifest contradiction between the idea of a man and that of an instrument of production. He is not, for all that, any less constrained to accept it and to put up with it, even if he does so reluctantly. This awkwardness explains the emergence of the ‘automation’ hypothesis. Automatism – of necessity divine, and so sophisticated that it is able to ‘divine’ the order it is meant to carry out (Aristotle uses a verb that literally means ‘to sense in advance’) – entails not only the liberation of the slave, but also that of the master, who will be almost free of having to give orders.

Starting with its first fleeting evocation, automatization (automation, as one now says of complex production systems) is envisaged as a liberation, undertaken to enhance the autonomy of the master’s will – the free intentions of the free man that come to trigger their fulfilments automatically. Note that this is the very definition of the will according to Kant: ‘the being’s power to be, through its presentations, [the] cause of the actuality of the objects of these presentations’.⁶ Today, to take one example among many, the desire to multiply the calculating power of computers is engendering the development of what will doubtlessly become the optical computer, the performance of which will go well beyond that of the electronic computer.

For Aristotle, utility was gauged by the necessity to make up for what is lacking in nature – which, for example, neither fabricates beds nor weaves cloth.

*

This gets us to technology: an operation of production derived from knowledge capable of mobilizing natural energy (the photon, in the example of optical computing), and of culminating, through its own power, in an end judged to be useful. How is usefulness measured? Precisely in the fact that it is possible and that, if it is possible to have an enormous power of calculation, it is thus possible to produce more power (of movement, of exchange, of mastery, etc.).

‘Technology’ thus gives away its secret: it is the logic of technics. All the linguistic acrobatics turn out to have been in vain. All that remains is a poorly formed word, similar to a slip of the tongue, and which simply states that technics must proceed according to its own logic. For Aristotle,⁷ this logic remained simply operational, if not to say (by extension) magical or mythological; for us, it has become simply and fully logical. This logic is based on the autonomy of a will. Not the will of a subject (be it human, individual, or collective), but that of a process that has mobilized not only ingeniousness, in its conception of engines and other devices (of ploughing, of navigation, of the capture of hydraulic or wind energies, of the measurement of time and calculation of distances, of the crossbreeding of animal and vegetable species, of the elaboration of law, etc.), but also engineering, in other words modern technology: a view of the world not as a cosmos but as a field for the exercise of forces – physical, chemical, electric, magnetic, etc. – the ingenious solicitation of which made it possible to go from imagining and dreaming to projecting and planning.

Around 1260, Roger Bacon writes:

One can produce instruments for sailing without oarsmen such that the largest ships, both riverboats and seagoing vessels, can be moved under the direction of a single man at a greater velocity than if they were filled with men. One can also make a chariot that moves at an unimaginable speed without horses [. . .]. And one can make an instrument for flying, such that a man sits in the middle of it, turning some sort of device by which artificially constructed wings beat the air in the way a flying bird does. [. . .] Moreover, one could easily make an instrument by which one man could violently draw to himself a thousand men against their will and attract other things in the same way. One can also make instruments for walking in seas and rivers, right down to the bottom, without bodily danger. [. . .] And one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Epigraph
• Overture
• I A Time to Come without Past or Future
• II From Ontology to Technology
• III Juan Manuel Garrido: Not the Universal, but the Unknown
• IV Right Here in the Present
• V The Accident and the Season
• VI Jean-Christophe Bailly: Havâ / Zamân
• VII The Fragile Skin of the World
• VIII Taking on Board (Of the World and of Singularity)
• End User License Agreement