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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2023
Architectural Technicities
Michel Foucault asks us to consider technology in a much broader sense, one that is not confined only to what can traditionally be called the ‘hard sciences’ but wishes to encompass a population of practices, including institutions and practices of governance (Foucault 2000: 364). Foucault advances a concept in which technology is understood as any practical rationality governed by a conscious goal: techne (Foucault 2000: 364). If an artefact and its capacity for niche construction is conceptualised with a focus on its interventive and manipulative agency, then the very concept of technology – the production and control of artefacts – can surpass the binaries between social and material, human and non-human. In Foucault’s words, ‘if one placed the history of architecture back in this general history of techne, in this wide sense of the word, one would have a more interesting guiding concept than by the opposition between the exact sciences and the inexact ones’ (Foucault 2000: 364).
Gilbert Simondon shares similar concerns: at the heart of one of his most important books, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), lies the conflict between culture and technology. According to Simondon, this conflict is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of technology which, at least in cultural terms, positions it as a foreign reality (Simondon 2017: 134). For that reason, Simondon proposes the term ‘technical culture’, suggesting a way of thinking which surpasses that conflict. The point of departure for a way of thinking which no longer considers technology and culture apart is a shift of focus from the usage and utility of technical objects. Aiming to provoke an awareness of the modes of existence of technical objects, one should instead focus on the genesis of the objects themselves (Simondon 2017: xi).
Simondon does this by developing the concept of technicity. For Simondon, technicity is fully relational, abductive and deals with a constant becoming. If one aims to avoid reductionism, then, Simondon advises us, one should also study beyond the technical objects to the technicity of these objects as a mode of relation between human and world (Simondon 2017: 162).
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