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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Computer software (operating systems, web browsers, word processors, etc.) structure our daily lives. Comprising both a user interface and the electronic circuits of the machine it is printed to, software represents a hybrid object at the crossroads of materiality and immateriality. But is it, strictly speaking, a technical object ? By examining the status of software against the criteria of philosophy of classic techniques, in particular that of Gilbert Simondon, this book lays the groundwork of a philosophical reflection on this subject. Further, in order to help introduce readers to problematics, lines of code and explanatory schemas have been provided.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Simondon’s Philosophy of Technics: A Work Program
1.1. A philosophy of technicity
1.2. The Simondonian method: approaching the technical object as closely as possible
1.3. Confronting Simondon’s thoughts with computers
2 Genetic Study of Technology: the Software Program, A Technical Object?
2.1. Definition and problem statement of the digital object
2.2. Constructing the software program from the margin of indeterminacy
2.3. The levels of technicity of software
3 Psychosocial Study of Free Software
3.1. The problem of the industrial technical object
3.2. The promise of openness of software as a postindustrial technical object
3.3. Bricolage with the digital technical object
Conclusion
Glossary
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Principle of the networking component and illustration of the HTTP pr...
Figure 2.2. Diachronic diagram of the rendering engine. For a color version of t...
Figure 2.3. Synchronic diagram of the browser. For a color version of this figur...
Figure 2.4. Implementation of the source code. For a color version of this figur...
Figure 2.5. Viewofthe WorldWideWeb browser (1990). (Source: www.w3.org/People/Be...
Figure 2.6. View of the Mozilla Firefox browser (2017)
Figure 2.7. Screenshot of the lines of code that initialize an object of class n...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1. Deleting the content of the HTML page using the Beastify extension. ...
Figure 3.2. Illustration of how Beastify works on the Website http://www.philoso...
Figure 3.3. How bugs are handled by Bugzilla. For a color version of this Figure...
Figure 3.4. Screenshot of the Interface of Bugzilla. For a color Version ofthis ...
Glossary
Figure G.1. Categories of open-source and non-open-source software
1
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Technological Prospects and Social Applications Set
coordinated byBruno Salgue
Volume 3
Prospective Philosophy of Software
A Simondonian Study
Coline Ferrarato
First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUKwww.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USAwww.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2019
The rights of Coline Ferrarato to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950362
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-443-8
Acknowledgements
This book is the culmination of the work performed during the second year of a Master’s of Philosophy degree jointly supervised by the École normale supérieure and the école des hautes études en sciences sociales during the academic year of 2016–2017. My wärmest thanks go out to ISTE, and especially Bruno Salgues, for making this publication possible.
I would also like to thank:
– Mathias Girel and Éric Guichard, who taught me to ask the right questions (and attempt to ans wer them);
– Mete Demircigil, an unflinching partner while navigating uncertain waters.
Each and every person who patiently guided me through the meandering universe of Computers:
– Ehe Michel, for the “discovery” of the margin of indeterminacy;
– François Taiani and Davide Frey, for their sharp explanations of browsers;
– Mathieu and Lunar, for their extreme availability and my discovery of the world of programming;
– Rémi Hubscher, for explaining the inner workings of Mozilla Firefox;
– Emmanuel St-James, for intellectual rigor and conversation;
– Hellekin, for worldwide meetings on open software;
– Stéphanie Ouillon, for her availability and insight into the study of types in computer science.
Those who provided illumination on Simondon: Irlande Saurin and Jean-Yves Chateau.
Alicia Basso Boccabella, Juliette Fleurant, Lucie Leszez and Lucile Marion, who heard far too much about this memoir.
Pascale, Dino, and Léo Ferrarato.
Introduction
“The most powerful cause of alienation in the contemporary world resides in this misunderstanding of the machine, which is not an alienation caused by the machine, but by the non-knowledge of its nature and its essence, by way of its absence from the world of significations, and its omission from the table of values and concepts that make up culture” [SIM 58].
One day as we sat down to continue writing this book, our word processing software refused to “open” a blank page. The software license had expired. Payment was required to renew the subscription, and our words were being held hostage. This situation is a limit-experience. It shows that the digital object of a “blank page” is not entirely as it seems – in other words, our direct perception does not suffice to judge the identity of the object. We are misled by the appearance that the software developers chose to give their word processing service: a blank page1. What is presented as a simple object is in fact an interface, an image that we have chosen to give the complex underlying technical mechanism. The limit-experience reveals our lack of understanding of the medium, so easily presumed an ally. But any work created with it is conditional on the payment of the subscription; it is alienated from us and does not truly belong to us.
This disillusionment is not unusual in university settings. It is a symptom of the two faces of the so-called “digital”: a nebulous mass of technical objects and protocols, of which inner workings are hidden.
A general technical definition of the term “digital” would cite the set of closely entwined devices exchanging information that can be reduced to binary code2. This includes any terminal connected to the Internet, or indeed any other network3. Computer science, the subject of this study, is one of the branches of digital technology4.
The computer science aspect of digital technology is challenging because it studies social and technical realities that overlap very little. The definition given above is specific to our own times; our relationship with computers has evolved over history. When computers first began to spread in the 1970s, some of the dissenting movements of the American Left rejected them as symbols of bureaucracy and the establishment. Students feared the appearance of these new and imposing machines whose development was closely linked to the Second World War and the conflicts of the Cold War. This example from the United States shows that, in its infancy, computer science was part of the public discourse; it was subject to cultural reflection.
THE BEGINNINGS OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY.– Fred Turner [TUR 12] cites a speech by the student Mario Savio, held on December 2, 1964 to protest the president of the board of directors of the university, whom he views as a “manager”:
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus – and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it – that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
This position is typical for the countercultural activism of the 1960s in the United States. Turner analyzes the two factions of this movement, both of which declared themselves opposed to computer science: the “new left” and the “new communalists”. For computer science, the 1960s represented a transition period between the age of large systems and the age of gradual miniaturization. From the early 1950s onward, these large systems initiated various important research programs, leading to their commercialization. They were had associations with the military-industrial complex; for instance, the Whirlwind, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951, was connected to radar stations to alert the United States military in the event of a Russian airstrike. Known as mechanographs at the time, these systems were large enough to fill entire rooms and were completely inaccessible to the general public; a mechanograph system was worth four million old francs, enough to buy four Citroën DS cars. The age of computer miniaturization began in the late 1960s. The first miniature computer to achieve commercial success was the Apple II (Altair 8800), designed in 1975, the first of a long line of increasingly compact computers [LAZ 16].
As the miniaturization and large-scale commercialization of computers continued, discussion of the stakes raised by the technicity of computer science gradually disappeared from the public discourse. Computers were no longer imposing machines; they increasingly felt like auxiliary devices for daily life, objects of marketing and desire. The social reality of today’s computers is like the word processor’s blank page; we live alongside them on a daily basis and use them without questioning what lies beneath their appearance. In this sense, digital technology5 is a “technical milieu” [FRI 66] that surrounds us, and our relationship with it is conditioned by habit.
Technical criteria no longer suffice to give a definition of digital technology. Instead, it must be understood by the internal tension coursing through it. Digital technology is an extremely heavy technical system that has gradually been reduced to an everyday utility-driven relationship, without ever fully examining its stakes. This technical system has become one of the unspoken assumptions of our culture.
Our modern age is caught in a major paradox. Even though digital technicity is eminently pervasive [BAC 04] and structures our existence, most of us are digitally “illiterate” [GUI 15]. We are not capable of dismantling the machines that we use every day or understanding the lines of code executed by familiar software. Even after 60 years, the diagnosis established in the introduction of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects [SIM 12]6 remains relevant. Published in 1958, this book, Gilbert Simondon’s secondary thesis, aims to “raise awareness of the meaning of technical objects” [SIM 12, first sentence of the introduction]. This awareness raising is necessary because certain cultural spheres are faced by a technical reality that they reject.
In his introduction, Simondon denounces the hypocrisy of a culture that, despite being increasingly dependent on technics, treats it as “a strange or foreign reality” [SIM 12, first sentence of the introduction]. His primary objective is to give technical objects an ontological dignity so that they may be reconciled with culture. According to Simondon, this task is incumbent on philosophical thought. To accomplish it, the author adopts a particular approach. He examines the machines themselves and attempts to establish their mode of existence by drawing from biology; this approach follows a “naturalist axis”7, which aligns Simondon with his contemporaries A. Leroi-Gourhan and J. Laffitte8. Most importantly, Simondon’s philosophy of technics is functionalist; an object is a technical object if it functions. The irreducible aspect of a technical object that characterizes its existence in the world is its functionality, reflected by a genesis and a process of concretization.
Simondon’s mechanology also represents a direct dialogue with Wiener’s cybernetics [WIE 65] – which already provides a connection to computer science. Simondon was not directly targeting computer science with his philosophy, but he was aware of its development. The introduction of MEOT cites the example of “calculating machines”, and the glossary includes an entry for “rocker switches” which cites the Eccles-Jordan circuit9.
SIMONDON AND COMPUTERS.– Simondon mentions computers in his introduction:
“Modern calculating machines are not pure automata; they are technical beings that, beyond their automatisms of addition (or of decision according to the operation of elementary switches), possess a great range of possibilities for the switching circuits, which allow for the coding of the machine’s operation by reducing its margin of indeterminacy” [SIM 12, p. 13].
Other ideas about computer science are scattered throughout his writing, albeit infrequently. The computers to which Simondon is referring are calculating machines that are still relatively unfamiliar to the general public: large mechanographic systems that perform calculations10. Even so, immediately after the introduction of MEOT, the analysis of “machines with a margin of indeterminacy” suggests that the author is proposing a conceptual framework that is sufficiently powerful to describe our contemporary technical reality.
This book seeks to follow the threads left behind by Simondon to understand one of our own contemporary technical realities. Culture still constitutes itself as a “defense system against technics” [SIM 12, p. 1], so we must consider the same questions today as Simondon in the 1960s.
What are our technical objects? Before we can answer this question, we need to precisely identify a certain region of the author’s thoughts: his philosophy of technics.
PUBLICATION HISTORY.– To understand Simondon’s philosophy of technics, his publication history is relevant. Simondon presented two theses, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (principal thesis) [SIM 13] and MEOT (secondary thesis). Both were defended in 1958, but only MEOT was published on this date. The history of the primary thesis was more erratic: the first part, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (IGPB), was published in 1964, and the second part, L’individuation psychique et collective (IPC), was published in 1989. The primary thesis was only published in full under its original title in 2005. The remaining lectures, articles and discussions were published gradually throughout the 2000s; Simondon’s most recent posthumous publication was in 2016, Sur la philosophie, a collection of lectures featuring discussions held between 1950 and 1980 [SIM 16]. Even just a few years ago, Simondon’s philosophy was largely unknown except for his secondary thesis, MEOT. Experts were aware of Simondon’s other works, but for the uninitiated the lack of published texts left gaps in the author’s philosophy. However, Simondon’s body of published work has been gradually enlarged over the past decade. A series of volumes was recently published by Presses universitaires de France (PUF) with previously unavailable texts, Sur la technique [SIM 14b], Sur la psychologie [SIM 15b] and Sur la philosophie [SIM 16], allowing Simondon’s legacy to be reassessed and new connections to be forged to illuminate his ideas.
We have chosen to argue from two texts: MEOT and a La Psychosociologie de la technicité11. Our texts therefore fit into the global perspective of a review of Simondon’s past work in the light of his “new” texts – PST is a lecture that was only published recently. The dialogue between these two books will enable us to redefine Simondon’s philosophy of technics by extending it with his psychosocial method. Our starting hypothesis is that both texts form a single coherent entity both by virtue of the theoretical back-and-forth between them and how they complement each other, and by the difficulties associated with any attempt to reconcile them.
Simondon’s philosophy of technics rests upon an observation: the divorce between technics and culture. This conceptual framework is defined by the dialogue between the two selected texts that we shall study.
Finally and most importantly, the use of a particular methodology is why the publication of MEOT reverberated so strongly through academia. John Hart explains this in his preface:
“As a scholarly work explaining the humanity contained in the machine, there was nothing like it in the entire philosophical corpus devoted to the machine; nothing, that is, which combined a philosophical treatment with the same proximity to the technical object” [SIM 12, preface by J. Hart].
Defying every academic imperative, Simondon filled his complementary thesis with lengthy discussions of motors, diodes and triodes – examples of concrete technical objects.
This is why we can speak of a Simondonian gesture in the first part of MEOT. The philosopher is theoretically postulating the ontological dignity of technical objects, while simultaneously demonstrating these rights by giving a voice to technical objects as arguments themselves. This Simondonian method is this powerful act of inserting the technical object as an argument into discursive reasoning.
Despite its radical status within the philosophy of technics, the Simondonian method has fallen into a historiographical void.
Many studies on Simondon have examined the aspects of this method but few have studied in any depth the author’s use of examples as part of his ideas. This historiographical void echos a paradoxical feature of Simondonian studies; the Simondonian gesture has been discussed and praised for its relevance but never reproduced, even though it was intended to initiate a long series of philosophies that would be reconciled with the reality of their objects.
THE SIMONDONIAN CORPUS.– The various commentaries of Simondon’s method have differed in approach but have always been peripheral and not strictly speaking epistemological. From the most epistemological to the most general, we can cite:
– a comparative study by G. Carrozzini contrasting the mechanology of Simondon with that of Lafitte [CAR 09]; however, this study did not perform a detailed analysis of the argumentative features characterizing Simondon’s method;
– large monographs presenting the Simondonian technology with details of some of his examples; the monograph by Chabot [CHA 03], for example, invokes some of the technical examples deployed by Simondon to establish his commentary of the first part of MEOT;
– articles discussing the Simondonian method and schemas, in particular from the more general angle of encyclopedism – examples include Bontems in his article “Encyclopédisme et crise de la culture” [BON 06];
– an indirect but epistemological approach which we shall draw from, that was adopted by Barthélémy in
Simondon ou l’encyclopédisme génétique
and in particular [BAR 08b] to understand the inductive efforts made by Simondon in his genetic philosophy [SIM 13], based on Bachelard.
Studies of Simondon and computer science12 show that “the ambition to technically understand the computer object based on Simondon demands a redefinition of the technical schema that is inseparable from a meticulous study of the technical objects themselves” [GRO 16]. To understand digital technology in the light of Simondon, we must test Simondon’s technical schemas against a technical object. To reproduce the Simondonian method, we must theorize reflexively, then apply our efforts to a domain that is a priori unfamiliar to philosophy: the technics of computer science.
Accordingly, to create a dialogue between Simondon and computer science, we chose to present a concrete technical object and study its functionality. This object must derive from the digital world described above, which encompasses an array of heterogeneous realities under a single name. Software is one of the cardinal points of contemporary digital technics, understood as a program that instructs the computer machine of the actions that it must perform13.
To reproduce Simondon’s gesture, we must reproduce his method, and so we must approach our object of study with sufficient proximity that it may inform and be informed by Simondon’s categories of analysis. We must therefore select an example that can illustrate our analysis of software in full generality. We selected the web browser14 as a complex software program that plays a key role for every web user15; both the specialized technicity and the nodal nature of this digital object provide ample motivation for an analysis. We chose the Mozilla Firefox browser16 because it is open source17; this meant that we could access its source code, thus opening up intriguing forms of technical production.
We decided to familiarize ourselves with the functionality of the technical object by writing code and conducting interviews with programmers. We needed to understand the technical workings of software (through the lens of a web browser) from the inside, in the same way that Simondon studied the technical objects of his own time. Second, we needed to bring forth this knowledge into the reflexive discourse of philosophy, while making it accessible to the masses; like Simondon, we therefore introduced pedagogical tools that would allow a non-technical audience to understand the relevant technical arguments. We hope that this will allow readers to appreciate the questions associated with digital technology, while simultaneously facilitating critical distance and reflection. At the end of the book, there is a glossary of key terms and a bibliography. The arguments in the text are illustrated at various points by diagrams. For our work to be credible, the form must exemplify the substance; our petition for the concrete study of an object and call for pedagogy must be effectively accompanied by the fulfillment of both objectives.
One advantage of studying software is that its highly specialized technical configuration could not possibly have been foreseen by Simondon18. Examining a digital object that had not yet materialized as such during the era of the philosopher himself might shed new light on his categories of analysis. Software provides a direct questioning of Simondon’s notion of the technical object. As we have noted, Simondon was studying machines and objects that were exclusively material; by contrast, software, viewed as a digital object, is not strictly speaking reducible to material components, but is made up of binary information.
Against this background, do the Simondonian categories of analysis allow us to view software as a technical object? In other words, is it possible to radicalize Simondonian functionalism to the point where it can be used to understand immaterial technical objects?
This question has three aspects. At the level of the general philosophy of technics, an answer would allow us, by way of Simondon’s functionalism, to establish a definition of a digital technical object that does not (fully) require materiality to be considered a technical object. This would signify a modified conception of technicity, partly detached from materiality. At the level of Simondonian philosophy, successfully erecting a definition of an immaterial digital object would have consequences for the second facet of his philosophy of technics, the psychosocial aspect; the particular configuration of a software would modify its contours. Finally, our object of study itself, the software, can be understood anew through a Simondonian lens.
We will adopt the following approach; reproducing the Simondonian gesture is a risky path to tread that would demand diligence and attention from any author to avoid misappropriation. We will require a precise commentary to define the dual framework of what we have called “Simondon’s philosophy of technics”: a conceptual framework (genetic and psychosocial philosophy of technics) and a methodological framework (demonstration by example). We will then seek to apply this framework to our selected digital object – a software program (and the example serving as a guiding thread, a web browser) – at the levels of genetic technology (Chapter 2) and psychosociology (Chapter 3).
Beyond a simple commentary, we wish to reproduce Simondon’s gesture. The entirety of our work strives to fulfill the program outlined Deforge’s claim in the postface of MEOT: “Our conclusion: republishing Simondon is good. Having many Simondons would be even better” [SIM 12, postface, end of the eighth open question, p. 325].
1
Indeed, word processing on a computer is not always presented as a blank page: a white window with a cursor, a black window in some cases, etc.
2
See the glossary, “Computer code” and “Source code”.
3
More local networks, e.g. operated by a company.
4
See the glossary, “Digital technology/computer science”.
5
For the rest of the introduction, we shall use the terms “digital technology” and “computer science” interchangeably, since we have now clarified that the expression “digital” is intended to refer to one of its branches, computer science.
6
Throughout the rest of the book,
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
(Originally
Du mode d’existence des objets techniques
) is abbreviated to MEOT.
7
According to a classification by Le Roux [LER 11], contrasting Simondon with the so-called “formalist axis” (e.g. Babbage and Reuleaux, as well as Couffignal and Riguet in France), which axiomatizes the mechanisms and elements that make up machines in a language or algebra.
8
For a comparison of Simondon’s ideas with other classical theories of the philosophy of technics, see section
1-1-1
.
9
The first electronic flip-flop circuit, the foundation of binary code.
10
The functionality of computers began to diversify with their miniaturization in the 1970s.
11
Throughout the rest of the book,
La Psychologie de la technicité
is abbreviated to PST. MEOT was defended in 1958 and published the same year, whereas PST is a lecture held in 1960–1961, published for the first time in 2014 by PUF in a collection of previously unpublished lectures,
Sur la technique
[SIM 14b].
12
These are primarily programming studies; they are discussed in
section 1.3
.
13
See the beginning of
Chapter 2
.
14
See
section 2.1.2
for a definition of the web browser.
15
See the glossary, “Web/Internet”.
16
Our examples are taken from version 53.0.3 of the browser, which was published on May 22, 2017. Mozilla Firefox is not the only open-source browser; it was also chosen for its popularity and the availability of documentation explaining how it works.
17
See the glossary, “Software (from the point of view of its production)”.
18
At the time, computers did not distinguish between
hardware
and
software
; a dissociation only arose in the late 1970s (see
section 3.2.3
).
1Simondon’s Philosophy of Technics: A Work Program
To reproduce Simondon’s gesture, we must clearly establish our position relative to his philosophy of technics. Our discussion, therefore, begins with a conceptual characterization of Simondon’s philosophy that draws from a dialogue between the two works of our corpus.
