Abstract
It is generally taken as obvious that artificial objects are fabricated, and that the technical process of producing artificial entities is a fabrication. The paradigm of fabrication may serve as a reference for a whole series of technical activities: the production of objects and tools, the construction of buildings, of infrastructures, the synthesis of substances which do not exist in nature. It is the art of making; it applies equally to the art of the craftsman (unique creations) and to industrial fabrication (the serial production of a number of identical objects).
We aim to show that besides fabrication, there is another model of technical action, that may variously be called “steering,” “stewardship” or “husbandry” but for which we will use here the more generic term of “piloting.” It resides on using natural forces or living beings, or on orienting natural processes in order to obtain desired results. These are the multiple ways of adjusting to nature as could be done with a partner. These are not the arts of making but of doing-with, of inducing things to happen. To such a model belong agriculture and animal-raising, all the arts of controlled fermentation, as well as therapy.
It is not a question of successive periods in the history of technology: these two models are neither mutually exclusive nor do they follow one after the other. A certain number of recent technologies (nanotechnologies, biotechnologies), which are generally considered as fabrications, can equally well be considered under the heading of piloting. We will attempt to show that the latter characterization is actually preferable; the advantage being that far from separating technologies and nature and making them independent realities, it makes it possible to understand how technologies can act in and with nature.
This chapter has been written in French for this volume and translated by John Stewart, University of Technology Compiègne.
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- 1.
The NBIC convergence (between nano-, bio-, info- technologies and cognitive science) has been a watchword of American nanotechnology programs since 2002.
- 2.
This is the reason why we speak of piloting. We could certainly have taken other figures of doing-with, but it seems to us that the navigator, to the extent that he has to accommodate himself to natural forces over which he has no control, is a prime example of this mode of acting, taking into full account the context in which it occurs.
- 3.
Such exchanges and such relations carry certain obligations, which we have designated by the expression “the domestic contract.” What we want to say by this expression is that the relations within these mixed communities – and human communities have always been mixed communities including animals – are not “natural” relations (they are neither automatic, nor inscribed in a pre-existing natural order); on the contrary they are the result of a history, they are fashioned by a certain form of free mutual consent, which has to be renewed from generation to generation, to the form of society which is created in this way (Larrère and Larrère 2001).
- 4.
The work of Marie-Claire Frederic (2014) offers an impressive panorama of the considerable set of practices which make it possible to preserve foodstuffs without cooking and without additives.
- 5.
“All things which are artificial are by that very token natural.” (Descartes 1641: IV §203)
- 6.
- 7.
Even if cybernetics does include, in its very name, a central reference to piloting (kubernêtês, pilot), it is based on the postulate of an equivalence between finalized behaviors and mechanisms that can be calculated (analyzed into a finite sequence of operations). Thus cybernetics has oscillated between an art of piloting which exploits the complexity and context-dependency of systems and a reductionist science for which everything can be represented and regenerated from discrete code (Dupuy 2000; see also Dupuy in this volume).
- 8.
This phrase was found, written in chalk on Feynman’s blackboard, at his death in 1988.
- 9.
See also Dupuy (2008): “The truly metaphysical aim of this program, whose ambitions have already triggered a technological, industrial and military race at the scale of the planet, is to make man into a demiurge, or more modestly “the engineer of evolutionary processes.”
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Acknowledgements
A preliminary version of this text has been discussed by Bernadette Bensaude Vincent and Pierre de Jouvancourt during the authors’ workshop held in Paris Sorbonne on 22–23 June 2015 in view of the preparation of the collective book.
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Larrère, C., Larrère, R. (2018). Technology and Nature. In: Loeve, S., Guchet, X., Bensaude Vincent, B. (eds) French Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89518-5_12
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