A Plea for Technological Activism at the European Borders

摘要

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Such a binary can be traced back to Gilbert Simondon's On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects in which he analyzed what he called the two contradictory attitudes to technical objects that ‘our culture’ entertains: ‘on the one hand, it treats them as pure and simple assemblies of material that are quite without true meaning and that only provide utility. On the other hand, it assumes that these objects are also robots, and that they harbor intentions hostile to man’ (Simondon, 1958 Simondon, G. 1958/1980. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects Available at http://english.duke.edu/uploads/assets/Simondon_MEOT_part_1.pdf [Google Scholar], p. 3). In a sense, Migration does something quite similar by implicitly assuming that the degree of perfection of the ‘migration machine’ is proportional to its degree of automatism, i.e. of ‘dehumanization’. Simondon criticized such a view by stating that ‘[t]he real perfecting of machines […] relates to the fact that the functioning of the machine conceals a certain margin of indetermination’ (1958, p. 4). Following this line of thought, the attempt to ‘humanize’ the (migration) machine would exactly be part of perfecting its functioning. The importance of Bernard Stiegler's seminal Technics and Time cannot be overstated concerning this point. Although it is not possible to elaborate on it here, his argument for the fact that technologies possess a—non-anthropological—temporality and dynamics of their own could be of great interest to the further conceptualization of their specific political potential. That is, a potential that transgresses politico-ideological views in which technology is envisioned as a mere tool as well as attempts to make it an inextricable part of politics.