Cart 412
Class 2
The section of Simondon's paper that we read was about the technical
individuation. at first i thought he meant of people, but rather a new vocabulary
is being exercised here in which a technical individual, as i understood it,
is any device having an associated milieu in which the associated milieu has
an affect on a technical object. The recurrent causality of the milieu makes
the technical object into a technical individual. (he also talks about the technical
ensemble and how it's success depends very much on the technical objects having
a relative level of individualization, probably as not to overcome on another)
I think at this point it has weighed on me that the entire section is extreemely
technical in both a good and bad way. Good, because he clearly knows what he is
talking about and is making clear metaphores with very real and technically alive
examples. The problem is that those technical metaphores are too technical for
anyone who didn't deal with old audio systems or vacuum tubes to effectively deal with.
Ultimetly, the difference between the technical ensemble and the individual object
is the point that the ensemble does not want to be affected by the milieu of individuals
nor, to some extent, the technical elements from which they are composed
(""Infra-individual technical objects" as he put it).
Am i still curious as to how he makes the distinction as to where or why an element
is what it is as opposed to it's own individual object. How do we know at which level
we stand? There isn't very much mention of people in the text, except when reffering
to the ear as an extension of the final device, and maybe it's from that point that
we can, first identify an ensemble by knowing if it is affected by milieu, then by
understanding where they are within the sub systems.