Abstract
This article shows technoscience as an extensively discussed concept in French and Belgian philosophy of technology, with major philosophers such as Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, Xavier Guchet and Gilbert Hottois.
Instead of telling the new narrative of a specific technoscientific object, this article reflects on an ontology of their mode of existence. Technoscientific objects open emerging research fields to indefinite possibilities, while they reorganize epistemic activities and orchestrate the development of technical networks, platforms and structures.
The main question here is to understand what is the ontological mode of existence of those objects and how they relate to the previously existing categories found in the work of Gilbert Simondon, that shaped the French philosophy of technology. To this end, we focus on a submicroscopic technoscientific object; namely the bio-object, and put forward an original analysis about the being of (bio)technoscientific objects in their own milieu.
This paper demonstrates that, even if Simondonian notions are critical to study (bio)technoscientific objects, these cannot be considered as proper technical objects. We propose that the mode of existence of bio-objects is closer to that of artificial objects than to technical ones. This peculiarity may be the reason why French philosophers are consistent in studying technoscience as an emerging technical field, with and beyond Simondon’s lenses.
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Notes
- 1.
The word techno-science is already mentioned in the PhD thesis of Gilbert Hottois, which was defended in 1977 and published in 1979 under the title L’inflation du langage dans la philosophie contemporaine, by the Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles. Hottois also publicly introduced this concept in the article “Ethique et techno-science” for the Belgian journal La pensée et les hommes in 1978.
- 2.
Sometimes, technoscience is also considered an ideal type based on responsible innovation and sustainable development. The aim is to understand and recognize spontaneous tendencies and collective behavior in things (“self-assembly, self-organisation or self-repair” (Bensaude Vincent et al., 2017, 7)) and how they could organize themselves concerning designed purposes.
- 3.
This term was coined in 1966 by the psychologist James J. Gibson. He defines it as a possibility that emanates first from the environment and that the subject receives and interprets: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment” (Gibson, 1979, 127).
- 4.
Summarily, hylomorphism is the idea that being is the compound of matter and form.
- 5.
For instance, the introduction “The genesis and ontology of technoscientific objects” of the book Research Objects in their Technological Setting explicitly tell “stories about the genesis and life of a selection of such [technoscientific] objects” (Bensaude Vincent et al., 2017, 8) (cancer stem cells, polar ice core, heroin, nuclear waste…), and the article “Matters of Interest: The Objects of Research in Science and Technoscience” also presents three objects as key examples: carbon, the OncoMouse and STM.
- 6.
“All true genesis, whether of being or of thought, has no origin, neither in the individual nor in his milieu, nor their adaptation” (Petit, 2017, 16).
- 7.
We reproduce this emblematic example for greater clarity. “Such is the case of the ensemble constituted by oil and water moving in and around the Guimbal turbine. This ensemble is concreted and individualized by recurrent thermal exchanges that take place within it: the faster the turbine spins, the more there is an increase in the heat generated by the generator through magnetic losses and the Joule effect; but the fester the turbine spins, the greater the increase in the turbulence of the oil around the rotor and that of the water around the crank-case, thereby activating the thermal exchanges between rotor and water” (Simondon, 2017, 59).
- 8.
(Simondon 2017, 56) The geographical world is sometimes called a “geographical milieu”, and the technical world a “technical milieu”.
- 9.
Extrinsic (or economic) considerations are they object’s causes that depend on the human environment. For instance, the availability of the materials that constitute the object, the organization of work and production, the economic interest of the manufacturer, the consumer’s demand, etc. These considerations condition the social existence of the technical object in a chain of production, distribution and consumption which make it both feasible and viable. Intrinsic (or technical) considerations, however, are the very possibilities of its inner realization. As the French philosopher Jean-Yves Château writes, they confront the difficulty of the object “to maintain itself in the being” (Château, 2010, 17). Both of them are needed for the technical object to have a viable reality of existence.
- 10.
The Simondonian associated milieu defines “the recurrence of causality within a milieu that the technical object creates around itself and that conditions it, just as it is conditioned by it” (Simondon, 2017, 59).
- 11.
One of the main etymological consideration that Heidegger reminded us of, and that shaped our understanding of the word technè, is undoubtedly that in Ancient Greek, “art [bore] the modest name technè” (Heidegger, 1977, 34). The discursive relationship between art and technè does not imply that art was reduced to craftsmanship; but that technè embraced a broader domain of experience that the one which is usually implied.
- 12.
(Simondon, 2017, 49) The coming-into-being of this artificial object can now only be sustained by the human mediation and control. “Its flowering has become a pure flowering, detached, anomic; the plant flowers until it is exhausted, without producing seeds. It loses its initial capacity of resistance against cold, drought, and sun; the regulations of the primitively natural object become the artificial regulations of the greenhouse” (Simondon, 2017, 49, emphasis mine).
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Lombard, J. (2023). French Philosophy of Technology and Technoscience: A Study on the Mode of Existence of Bio-objects. In: Bianco, G., Wolfe, C.T., Van de Vijver, G. (eds) Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20529-3_13
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