In her introduction to the concept of technogenesis in How We Think, Hayles
departs from her focus on digital media and travels back to the mid-twentieth
century, building her analysis off of the theories of the French mechanologist
Gilbert Simondon who categorized technology into three interrelated, but
distinct, areas: technical elements, technical individuals, and technical
ensembles.
To give the most basic definitions of these terms, a
technical element is a part of the object, a technical individual is the unity
achieved through the collection of all of the parts, and a technical ensemble
is a technology necessary to create the object. Thus, in the case of an ax, a
technical element could be its handle, the technical individual would the ax
itself, and its technical ensemble could be the tool used to sharpen it or even
the craftsmen using the sharpening tool.
For Simondon, innovation occurs when technical elements (parts
of the object) are placed into new contexts, thus initiating the creation of
new technical individuals that are either more efficient iterations of the technical
individual from which it originated or an entirely new technical individual.
Hayles describes the former move to efficiency (which Simondon refers to as
“concretization”) as the integration of “conflicting requirements into
multipurpose solutions that enfold them together into intrinsic and necessary
circular causalities” (88). In other words, the objects themselves become
subordinated in a Heideggerian sense to the various goals for which they were
created.
As technology become more concrete and complex, there is a
corresponding decrease in the visibility of technical elements (parts) and an
increase in technical individuals (wholes). Although complex technology is not
bad in itself, it undoubtedly requires an increased amount of time in order to
understand how it operates, and not only that, it also forecloses productive
engagements with other technical elements due to the increased specificity and
integration of its parts. This increase in technological complexity is also
compounded by burdensome patent laws that restrict innovation by perpetuating the
fear of technological plagiarism.
Although subcultures devoted to promoting technologies which
emphasize part interconnectivity and exchangeability (technical elements) are
beginning to emerge in the form of hacker/maker spaces in cities and
universities across the country, the dominance of global capitalism has largely
determined the conditions of technological change in its continued emphasis on
the creation of discrete (and profitable) technical individuals.
In his chapter “Rethinking Repair,” Steven Jackson locates the
material consequences of this increased emphasis on technical individuals over technical
elements in Apple’s release of the 2012 MacBook Pro, a device which was widely
criticized for using parts that couldn’t be recycled and sticking to a design
aesthetic that made parts too difficult (if not impossible) to replace (Jackson,
235). The aesthetic and functional appeal of Apple-esque technology (minimal,
integrated, and intuitive) not only propagates an ideology of technological
illiteracy (thus stifling innovation), it also leads to unsustainable models of
technological production.
Bridging off the technical taxonomy provide by Simondon and
my brief analysis of technological innovation, I want to take what might seem
at first to be a strange digression to the field of writing studies as a way of
exploring how conceptualizing writing as a series of technical elements rather
than isolated technical individuals can generate the kind of complex ecological
approaches to the study of writing that Sid Dobrin describes in Postcomposition.
Technologies of
Writing
There is theoretical potential for writing studies within
Simondon’s concepts of technical elements, technical individuals, and
concretization. What happens when we blur the borders between these terms? Or are they already blurred within their
application to technology? Although one could definitely make the claim that an
ax head could be both a technical individual and a technical element, the
important idea (at least for composition theory) is that these definitions are
applied relationally rather than ontologically. In other words, its function as
an element (part of an ax) or individual (a technical object in itself) is
determined by its role within a particular system rather than by the limited possibilities
that might be prescribed upon it.
Hayles describes this contextual determinacy of technics as
“materiality” which she writes “is unlike physicality in being an emergent
property. It cannot be specified in advance, as though it existed ontologically
as a discrete entity” (91).
However, when looking at writing as a technology, there is
greater fluidity between technical elements and technical individuals,
determined largely by the degree to which the writing is deployed and perceived
in a specific context. For me, it seems that writing is often assumed first as
a technical individual. Although we are in a supposedly post-structuralist era
of textual theory, even the most poorly structured piece of writing is
typically approached as such (a structure). Thus, the default conception of a
text appears to be fairly generous. A piece of writing works unless it is
proven to be broken. Similar to Derrida’s claims about the purpose of
deconstruction, the point of composition theory is not to tear throw a wrench
in a functional system but merely to show that it was never functional in the
first place.
However, I don’t want to preach the salvation of Derridean
deconstruction for the future of writing studies. What I do want to do is think
about how shifting our conception of writing and reading from technical individuals to technical elements can
initiate innovative and individuated approaches to the production of writing
similar to the way that shifting our relationship to technology can result in
greater experimentation with previously separate technical elements.
Similar to the parts of a laptop, there needs to be an
increased emphasis on the interchangeability of the parts used to make a piece
of writing. Instead of viewing writing (especially technical writing) as an
organic form of discourse that emerges naturally from the writing subject, compositionists
should develop open source, collaborative networks of technical (elements of)
writing that encourage the kind of processual thinking that composition theory
has been championing for decades.
In viewing writing as a series of technical elements, the
field of composition can also begin to re-conceptualize its approach to
plagiarism which too often ignores theoretical critiques of textual
originality. Composition traditionally assumes that by allowing students to
intentionally plagiarize they may not develop themselves as original writers
capable of producing original texts. However, these is little proof that
remixing text necessarily leads to a decrease in originality. On the contrary,
many scholars of rhetoric and new media, such as Collin Gifford Brooke, view
originality itself as undergoing an definitional shift with the advent of new
media and the proliferation of instant access to large amounts of networked
information.
In Brooke’s estimation, originality is no longer the ability
to individualistically produce ideas within text (which Brooke argues falls
prey to the presence/absence binary criticized heavily by Hayles in How we
Became Posthuman) but rather the ability to collect and synthesize information
produced “originally” elsewhere (a move which aligns with Hayles’ claim that
pattern/randomness is the pivotal binary of the twenty first century).
The problem is not that we ask students to build something
before we ask them to repair it, the problem is that we are asking students to
build technical elements (the paragraph, the sentence, the word) while at the
same time building technical individuals (the essay, the research paper, the
synthesis essay). This is the most difficult part of writing: the element and
the individual coevolve and co-terminate (sometimes simultaneously) for writer
and reader alike.
But what if teaching writing foregrounded pattern identification
over content production, or, in other words, emphasized technical elements
rather than technical individuals? Instead of teaching writing through the capitalist
imperative of ownership (i.e. patents), or any other political ideology for
that matter, we need to teach writing as an ecological system which reacts to (and
acts upon) those who engage with its complexity.
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