The inventor and the hunter

A long quote from "The philosophy of Simondon: between technology and individuation" by Pascal Chabot, page 18.

The inventor 

The inventor has a sense of the future and is therefore a historical being. Mircea Eliade, cited by Simondon, described the recent advent of historical self-awareness in modern societies, explaining why 'moderns' prefer invention to adaptation. 

Invention was forbidden in archaic societies: it upset the cosmic order.  Traditional peoples had cosmogonies that told of the birth of the world and the life of the gods.  They imitated these mythical narratives.  Their acts took on meaning, 'reality', only insofar as they repeated the acts long ago performed by the gods or the ancestors.  The warrior is brave because the sacred warrior proved his bravery in illo tempore: in the mythical time of origins.  Objects and actions derive their value from the fact that they participate in a reality that transcends them.  Nutrition is not a simple, physiological operation: it renews a communion.  Marriage and orgies alike echo mythical prototypes.  'They are repeated,' writes Eliade, 'because they were consecrated in the beginning ... by gods, ancestor, or heroes.'  

The inner quote is from:

M. Eliade (trans. Willard R Trask) The Myth of the Eternal Return, New York: Pantheon Books, 1965, p. 15.

This perspective -- which itself seems a bit atavistic as spoken above -- feels quite resonant with quotes from J. Leach about the Reite people of PNG, quoted (at far too great length) in our current working draft.  Leach explains how Reite people are "created" and also how hunting (for example) "re-creates", operating at once on both a physical and mythical level.  Gendered roles are important (men are the ones who hunt) and Leach seems to think of hunting as a sort of generalized sexual relations.

It seems possible to "replay" this thinking into Greek mythology (and perhaps Eliade already has material on that, I'd like to have a look at his book) and thereby refigure the gendered roles of Hermes and Hestia -- and to extrapolate from that into a discussion on the role of "the message" (see Vattimo quote in previous blog post) -- and from there (back again) to a more-or-less Simondonian theory of the technologies of communication (viz., phatics).

That would be quite a lot to swallow, so I think I'll leave it there for now.  Just a quick remark that the Chabot book is really excellent: it manages to be accessible and engaging without being shallow.  It feels more like "popular" writing than Combes's book, which he puts to good use.  Let me illustrate that (from p. 40-41):

[A]s Muriel Combes astutely notes, Simondon 'consistently denounces the alienation of human beings in general. ... Thus, the bankers are said to be "just as alienated in relation to the machine as the members of the new proletariat.'"  The difficulty of Simondon's position is that it only takes individual situations into account in terms of their relation to technology, and not on their own terms.  From a Simondonian point of view, conflicts and alienation are always caused by a misunderstanding of technology.  The extreme difficulty and even 'unrealism' of this position are evident in practice.  How can we conceptualize the situation in terms of the technical object and the communicative possibilities it presents, when so much else is lacking?  'Simondon,' writes Combes, 'doesn't recognize that the perspective of the workers on machines has any value.  At no point does he ask himself if workers' violent hostility to machines might express something about their relationship to technology, other than mere short-sightedness ...  It is difficult to understand why, even as he deplored the fact that in labour, the machine was understood only as a means to an end, Simondon never took into account the specific experience of technology that followed from this fact.  In this experience, it was not as a man that the worker entered the factory but as part of a mutilated humanity.'

This business of a "mutilated humanity" seems really important -- it's the social field again.  And (back to the case of "archaic societies" from Eliade, we might guess that their social field is not mutilated.  Similar to Sloterdijk's reflections on the circular form of villages in Spheres II.

And remember, what do these villages have at their center, but a fire, which is where both Hestia (mythological level) and phatics (etymology but also "architectonic" level) come into the discussion; see earlier blog posts.

I feel like there are way too many strands and themes here and what I'd really like would be some time and space to bring them together in a coherent form.  It's challenging to do that when most of my research energy is being directed into other papers.  But I'll get some respite from that from tomorrow!