Text page
After Nature; The Dynamic Automation of Technical Objects
A page on technical objects and dynamic automation that makes cybernetic modernity legible beyond older organism-versus-machine oppositions.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that technical objects no longer fit the static image of the tool. Automation becomes dynamic, adaptive, and distributed, blurring the line between system behavior and designed function.
The text works by rethinking technical objects through process rather than use. Automation is treated as an evolving field of operations that folds feedback, environment, and abstraction together.
That matters because the capital section depends on a picture of modernity in which technical systems no longer merely serve pre-given ends. They become active participants in runaway abstraction.
How to read this text
Read for the shift from tool-thinking to process-thinking. That movement gives the page its conceptual leverage.
Notice how automation is made dynamic rather than static. The page becomes strongest once technical objects are read as open systems.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
From this standpoint, this chapter discusses the paradoxical overlapping between thought and automation by questioning the assumption that technoscience—and the contemporary convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science—cannot 7 AFTER NATURE The Dynamic Automation of Technical Objects LU C I A N A PA R I S I
Definition · paragraph 23
AFTER NATURE 177 theory’s conception of entropy can serve as a point of departure for the- orizing a third-order cybernetics in which the technical object needs to be understood in terms of a function of reasoning that is inorganic and nonbiologically bound to any particular organism.
Definition · paragraph 23
AFTER NATURE 177 theory’s conception of entropy can serve as a point of departure for the- orizing a third-order cybernetics in which the technical object needs to be understood in terms of a function of reasoning that is inorganic and nonbiologically bound to any particular organism. How we understand this functioning, however, involves not falling back into the representa- tional framework of cognitivism promoted in classic AI discussions.
Definition · paragraph 5
AFTER NATURE 159 technical object to become individuated as an ensemble of living energies (62). This is also how a technical object is able to acquire a natural state and thus cease to be the artifice of man. From this standpoint, to enter Simondon’s philosophy of technology is also to ask: What does it mean for artificial objects to become natu- ral?
Definition · paragraph 4
Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects should be the result of philosophical consideration” (1). The mode of existence of the technical object, however, is not to be thought in terms of prosthesis or artificial extension of an always already incomplete human nature.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.