Last revised on September 26, 2024 at 13:21:02. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.
Technology redoubles the world, transforming everything natural into artificial (Blumenberg 2020). Thereby it enhances our chances of survival and our control over the environment. The previously impossible turns out to be possible.
In doing so, it conditions us by including us in itself. With each round of development, we cease to be the same without ceasing to be conditioned by it. But we are still unable to condition our technical environment - it is not yet in our control.
However, if technology has made the first nature available to us, it should equally make the second nature so.
Artificiality is not our end, but our very beginning, or the everlasting human condition, the same in both antiquity and modernity (Leroi-Gourhan 1993). It is our destiny to rely on nothing but ourselves. In this regard, what remains is to understand - how to define what defines us? How to follow the path of technical mediation in order to achieve this?
Technical progress begins in the Renaissance (Gille 1966) with wooden appliances propelled by water and animal traction, which are replaced first by steam machinery during the first Industrial revolution, then by internal combustion engines and electric motors. Today, these are computer terminals networked to coordinate the work of disparate machines in large numbers.
Despite the qualitative difference between these technical systems (Gras 1997), the same process passes through them all, and with increasing speed. So the path from the pre-mechanical to mechanical stage took three centuries, while less than one century was needed to arrive at the second industrial revolution, and less than half of that for the digitalisation to commence. Each subjugated physical forces to machines on an ever larger scale. Therefore, as Bertrand Gille has shown (Gille 1986, 17), their common mover is mechanisation.
Due to it, where the effect on nature was manual, it becomes mechanical. By mechanising their actions, people turn them into a repetitive sequence of operations to extract value from external materials (Giedion 1948). The latter can be reproduced and scaled not only outside the original context but also almost without direct involvement. The evolution of technical mediation is thus about the expansion of automation (Séris 1987).
But when weaving looms are no longer a hundred, but a hundred thousand, then to coordinate their functioning, intellectual work has to be delegated. Automation here reaches a point where it must turn on itself - and continue as the automation of automation. This is why computer was invented and introduced.
Computerisation in this case is providing computational power to automate routine cognitive labour (Volle 2006, 66-102). As such, it has introduced a second machinisation that optimises the usage of the first (looms, in our instance).
But computers were able to do this not because of their computational power. Only by networking them together could they process such vast amounts of data. So many devices could collaborate on tasks that none of them could do on their own (Volle 2015).
In other words, the Internet allowed computerisation to succeed. When it became possible to transfer information between stations and synchronise them with each other, then computer became the centre of a new technical system (Volle 2000).
But what integrates numerous material functions is not itself material. For example, computer aided manufacturing (CAM) controls data from servers both for forming, milling, assembling, and for planning, transporting, storing (Kusiak 2018). Each operational node here acquires its role only through the network, which is not itself a node. This means that the physical state of an object now depends on the non-physical configuration it is part of. Or, the digital determines the non-digital.
So, in the contemporary technical system, the state of things changes things. The virtual is primary here, the actual is secondary. At the same time, their unity is problematic.
On the one hand, their dualism is false since the Internet began to be the new medium of our communications - what post, telegraph, telephone used to be (Lèvy 2001, xvi). Given that, in his attempt to find the real self beyond the web, Paul Miller admits that he can only be himself on the web (Miller 2013).
On the other, though overlapping everywhere - from flight control to navigator - these spheres stay separate in our perception.
In order to understand how to combine them, clarify these concepts.
The word virtual comes from the Latin virtualis, in turn derived from virtus, which means strength, power (Lèvy 1995). But besides, virtus means vertu in the sense of ability, quality (Quéau 1993, p. 26).
All these meanings refer to what in things is greater than themselves. For example, our cognitive faculties are virtualities, and their use is their actualisation - like vision and visible.
Hence, the virtual is not an object of thought devoid of autonomous existence. Neither is it the non-actual taken exclusively in its opposite to the actual. It is rather a non-actual gathering together everything that can happen in a particular situation. More precisely, it is the mediator between the contents of our consciousness and a reality independent of it (Quéau 2008, 73), or the milieu where the two can interact and transfer one into the other.
The above leaves the question: is it possible to deal with the virtual as such without having to cancel it?
Consider an illustration from optics:
If an image is created with a convergent, or positive lens, it can be seen on the screen, and is actual.
If it is created with a diverging, or negative lens (like a magnifying glass), it cannot be seen on the screen and is virtual (Hecht 2001).
If the first is equivalent to a real object, the second is to its own lens alone (remove it and everything disappears). The second is absolutely artificial. It is a representation that does not exist outside of its technological synthesis. And this is what renders it a particle of the virtual that we can manipulate.
Hitherto, all the reduplications of the world accomplished through technology have been increasingly effective ways of virtualising the actual. Reality has been abstracted and machinised to construct a second nature. Water flow was converted into motive power for a mill, fossilised remains of ancient life were transformed into fuel for an internal combustion engine, sunlight started to power batteries.
Nevertheless, all this time just the reality external to us has been machinised, while we ourselves have not. As a result, the technical system has identified with the state of the world, but has separated itself from us.
To overcome this rupture, it is necessary to find a point where we can affect it. This obviously cannot be another virtualisation - for the task here is not to enlarge the state foreign to us, but to reclaim it. Consequently, it must be actualisation. For only by actualising the virtual can we control it.
Globally, it is a question of machinising our very lives; locally, of establishing a medium of interaction between the digital and the physical. To be fully realised, digitalisation must also be phygitalisation.
Petr Zavisnov, 2024
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