Inside the Black Box: Simondon’s Politics of Technology

In 1923, Paul Valéry created an artificial world of antiquity. In it the sea could wash up things which, because of their brilliance, hardness, and unfamiliar form, interrupted and irritated well-established habits of thought. Nature or art? Given or created? Earthly or heavenly? Eupalinos, the architect, does not find himself in the position to decide. He throws back into the sea the shiny, ball-like thing he had picked up from the shore only seconds before.¹

In the 1950s, the situation has changed markedly. Parisian consumer society uses the polished floors of exhibition halls and salesrooms to create encounters with similarly enigmatic and wonderful objects. However, one can no longer take these objects into one’s hand, nor throw them away. Things insist, as do the questions, for both department store and commercial fair visitors, as well as for those attending the machine show that accompanied the Paris Cybernetics Congress in 1951.²

Roland Barthes has brilliantly characterized the features of this thing-experience. In October 1955, the Citroën D.S. 19 was presented at the Parisian car show “Salon de l’Automobile.” At the end of the first day, Citroën’s sales managers counted a sensational 12,000 orders for the car. Two years later, in Mythologies, Barthes published his compelling analysis of “The New Citroën.” In it he summarizes the process from the initial presentation of the futuristic vehicle to its massive distribution. Boiled down to a formula, Barthes’s conclusion is the following: first it’s an awe-inspiring gothic cathedral, then a utilitarian kitchen (88–90).

According to Barthes, the cultural appropriation of the D.S. (a pun on “déesse,” i.e. “Goddess”) goes from admiring a magical thing to using a mere apparatus; from seeing something to touching it; and from the outer skin to the interior of the technical object. As a result, a somewhat uncanny “alchemy of speed” is brought down to the familiar principle of gourmandise, “a relish in driving.” What at first sight seemed a quasi-sacred object—a thing “descended from another universe”—transforms itself, at the very moment one eventually sits behind the steering wheel, into a cozy object of daily use: “The dashboard looks more like the working surface of a modern kitchen than the control-room of a factory” (89).

In Barthes’ eyes, this is not an arbitrary move. It might only take a quarter of an hour, but the work of mediation, of “exorcism”—with Agamben, we might even say “profanation”^3—that takes place here with respect to a car aims at a long-term goal. With telling ambivalence, Barthes describes this goal as “petit-bourgeois advancement,” la promotion petitebourgeoise (90).

However, in the case of the car, the appropriating move from outside to interior does not truly get one closer to the technical object. In fact, its inner side—seats, dashboard, etc.—is only another outside of the same object, a folding of its exterior. Even here the relation to the car is dominated by the “entomological” smoothness of its body, the seamless transitions from metal to glass and vice-versa. Hence the polished perfection of the dashboard: every gap, fissure, and hole that would remind the user of the “technical and typically human operation of assembling” must be erased (88).

It is this same smoothness and slickness that turns the D.S. into a medium. The new Citroën is not a thing filled with “metaphysical subtleties,” but a transmitter of news coming from a region beyond nature. As Barthes explains: “We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales” (ibid.).

There is a definite leitmotiv in Barthes’ writings; the heavenly muteness of certain things fascinated him not only in Mythologies, but also...