Wednesday 2 February 2011

Technology is therefore social before it is technical (or I am a programmer!)

“What is it that Foucault call a machine, be it abstract or concrete (he speaks of the machine-prison, but equally of the machine-school, the machine-hospital, and so on)? The concrete machines are the two-form assemblages or mechanism, whereas the abstract machine is the informal diagram. In other words, the machines are social before being technical. Or, rather, there a human technology which exists before a material technology. No doubt the latter develops its effects within the whole social field; but in order for it to be even possible, the tools or material machines have to be chosen first of all by a diagram and taken up by assemblages. Historian have often been confronted by this requirement: the so-called hoptile armies are part of the phalanx assemblage; the stirrup is selected by the diagram of feudalism; the burrowing stick, the hoe and the plough do not form a linear progression but refer respectively to collective machines which vary with the density of the population and the time of the fallow. In this respect, Foucault shows how the rifle exists as a tool only in the sense that is 'a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or the immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible (and composable] segments.
Technology is therefore social before it is technical" Deleuze Foucault p.34

...

“The history of forms, the archive, is doubled by an evolution of forces, the diagram. The forces appear in 'every relation from one point to another': a diagram is a map, or rather several imposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. Thus there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. It is on the basis of the 'struggles' of each age, and the style of these struggles, that we can understand the succession of diagrams or the way in which they become linked up again above and beyond the discontinuities. For each diagram testifies to the twisting line of the outside spoken of by Melville, without beginning or end, an oceanic line of passes through all points of resistance, pitches diagrams against one another, and operates always as the most recent. And what a strange twist of the line was 1968, the line with a thousand aberrations! From this we can get the triple definition of writing: to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: 'I am a cartographer'.” Deleuze Foucault p.37-38

From this we can get the triple definition of programming: to program is to struggle and resist; to program is to become; to program is to draw a map: 'I am a programmer!'.

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