Technique

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches technology through the tool and through labour. He points out that Robinson's stay on his island begins with the effort to wrest tools and instruments from the wreck, not with a return to nature1. He distinguishes materialism from naturalism: the artificial is material, language, fire and the tool are bound together, and the Greek technè does not separate art from the craftsman's work2. Drawing on Hegel's Jena texts, he makes the instrument the middle term between the worker and the object: it is in the instrument that labour has its permanence, and it is the instrument that grounds progress. From Prometheus to prematurity, he sees the brain as a result of the tool3. Technology belongs to the understanding: it increases power without saying anything about ends, like Alberich's helmet in Das Rheingold4. Hence a constant thesis: putting technology on trial, in the manner of Heidegger, is reactionary. The one responsible is the subject who wields the tool, and it is the relations of production that must be judged, not the productive forces. Daedalus, the engineer who keeps to the measure, is its emblem56.

1. 1I comme île23 Dec 2014
2. 2#12 • Retour aux logiques du sujet2 Jul 2020
3. 3La mondanité chez Clouscard - Le monde comme "ruse de la raison"22 Jul 2023
4. 49 #12 Comment des sciences de l'histoire peuvent-elles être réelles?14 Jan 2021
5. 5#4.7 Angélique (de Nerval)12 Apr 2018
6. 6Et le sujet dans tout ça ? Hölderlin, Mallarmé et Baudelaire28 Sept 2022

Introduction produced automatically from the 6 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.