In this chapter I will discuss the theory of organology, which examines the interaction between an organism and a machine. We can argue that organology appears as an attempt to overcome the opposition between mechanism and vitalism: mechanism explains living beings according to the laws of physics and chemistry, whereas vitalists argue that to understand living beings we have to presume the existence of some non-physical force. In the first part of the twentieth century we can see an attempt to overcome this opposition – this is the theory of organicism. Both vitalists and organicists stress the teleological behaviour of organisms; however, they differ in how they explain the organising principle of organisms: vitalists assert some non-physical entity, a vital force, whereas organicists insist that wholeness and organisation can be explained without such notions (Haraway 2004: 34). Organismic biologists assert that to understand the phenomenon of life we have to explain its ‘organisation’ or ‘organising relations’. These organising relations are immanent in the physical structure of the organism, therefore living beings can be defined in terms of ‘self-organisation’ (Capra 1997: 25). This attention to the patterns of organisation, which was implicit in living beings, became the main question of cybernetics, which examines the self-organising functioning of a new generation of machines. Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics as the science of ‘control and communication in the animal and the machine’ (Wiener 1985). Cybernetics overcomes the opposition between mechanism and vitalism by analysing both living and non-living beings as self-organising structures supported by information and feedback.

Besides these influential theoretical stances, we can discern another current named ‘organology’. The term ‘organology’ was proposed by Georges Canguilhem in his text ‘Machine and Organism’. Canguilhem traces the term to Bergson's Creative Evolution, saying that it is a treatise on organology, although Bergson never used the term. Thus, organology not only examines the relationships between machines and organisms, but also treats machines as an extension of the human organism and its organs. Referring to his predecessors, such as Ernst Kapp, Alfred Espinas and André Leroi-Gourhan, Canguilhem argues that tools and technologies can be understood as extensions of biological organisms.