7, 1 (2024)

Technique and Writing

Philosophy, from its inception, coincides with its teaching. This teaching notably relies on a precondition: the use of a technique that philosophy extensively employs and perhaps, for this reason, as Plato attests, greatly distrusts: alphabetic writing. Flexible, synthetic, concise: without alphabetic writing, ultimately, logos and language would have scarcely colonized the world.
Philosophy begins when it systematically employs a tool capable of conveying thought, thereby betraying a more original condition of the logos, whose expression, through writing, is fatally diluted and almost dispersed. However, it is through the written form that the logos has become capable of knowing something of its own originality, which precedes and exceeds writing. Therefore, perhaps writing is not merely a tool, a corollary of thought, a vehicle for its manifestation, but rather what makes a radical and essential thought conceivable for thought. Writing is probably the place of a gesture that resembles self-denigration, a farewell to oneself that, nonetheless, cannot help but express itself through writing.
If the epistemic diffusion of writing at the expense of orality determines a more recent modality of the humanization process, fostering archiving and memory, nourishing traces of a world that can never be lost because something written inevitably remains to be accounted for. Thus, the hypothesis guiding this issue of Mechane is that the true ontogenetic process of humanity is incessantly writing not so much to communicate, but rather, to record – as Maurizio Ferraris notes. But to record what? Nothing less than a trace of “having been here.” More simply – following Derrida’s memorable deconstruction works – we can say there is no bios without a biography emerging somewhere, however forgotten. If things present themselves in this manner, before the word, the logos, there is writing, the technically proper switchback that coincides with every biography (from this point of view, clearly, any division between technical writing and creative writing lacks legitimacy). If writing provides support to the (human) necessity to communicate, detaching from the linearity of time thanks to its persistence, then it is possible to think that it is precisely through writing that forms of human communication push beyond communication and become signs, imprints, capable of triggering an evolutionary process whose significance cannot be calculated without considering this ontological aspect of writing: the self-recognition of humans as a species.
Considering these elements, we invite contributions focusing on the technical device of writing, understood as a tool for capturing and translating processes. In particular, the topics to be developed are as follows:

• The relationship between knowing and recording: the role of inscriptions in the construction of technical knowledge and scientific disciplines.
• The implications and impacts of new digitalized recording systems: how data collection and analysis technologies rewrite reality.
• The relationship between identity and writing: the creation of self and other made possible by traces and accounts.
• The writing of politics: the weight of rhetoric in defining problems and solutions in the public arena.

Submissions in Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish are welcome. Interested authors are requested to send a brief abstract (max 500 words) to mechane.journal@gmail.com by June 20, 2024. Authors of accepted proposals must submit the complete text (max. 40,000 characters) by September 15, 2024. Essays will undergo a peer-review process.

8, 2 (2024)

Technology and Power

From the earliest prehistoric evidence to the present day, the creation of technical objects and systems appears to be related to collective organizations that define their purposes and procedures. The social mechanisms in which power and technical actions arise, specialize, and sediment can be traced back to a co-originating relationship of mutual implication. Genealogically, as Bernard Stiegler observes following André Leroi-Gourhan, human society differs from that of large mammals and insects by the solidity it receives from technical objects capable of preserving and recirculating operational sequences and experiences. Philosophies and sociologies of technology have analyzed for decades the complex interaction between technology and social power, which eventuates in a multifaceted intertwining of human and non-human actors, material infrastructure and symbolic superstructure, means of production and interest groups.
Issue 8 of Mechane aims to explore the link between technology and power, emphasizing that this relationship not only determines the current or historical type of human organization and the modes of sociality practiced but also primarily affects the expectations for technological development and the demands for technical solutions to social problems. Besides, this is a crucial issue in the time of the climate crisis.
An inspiring perspective for examining the correlation between technology and power is undoubtedly that inaugurated by Michel Foucault, which triggers studies on the governance of people starting from the concept of “apparatus” understood as a heterogeneous set of discourses, architectural structures, laws, scientific statements, and more. From Foucault’s perspective, the compositions of technical and cultural products developed in each social configuration have the strategic function of manipulating power relations to rationally orient them in a certain direction. Based on this theory, authors such as Bernard Stiegler and Byung-Chul Han have problematized the impacts on the social fabric of current technological development fueled by profit maximization and centered on individual economic freedom, two power schemes that guide its paths. Another way to address the issue is that adopted by Bruno Latour, centred on networks that enable, divert, and hinder social action. These theoretical studies are complemented by historical ones, such as those conducted by Marc Bloch, Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, and Elizabeth Eisenstein, which highlight the complex trajectories that weave technical products and social formations.
Starting from these insights, we invite proposals for contributions on the theme “Technology and Power” for the eighth issue of Mechane. The theoretical lines to be developed include:

• The constitutive interrelation between technology and social order from the perspective of the philosophy and anthropology of technology.
• The contributions of the philosophy and sociology of technology to understanding the climate crisis.
• Descriptive and comparative analyses of the relationship between technique and the exercise of power in different historical epochs.
• The social, political, and economic presuppositions of the development of new tools of power (especially AI and big data).

Submissions in Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish are welcome. Interested authors are requested to send a brief abstract (max 500 words) to mechane.journal@gmail.com by August 30, 2024. Authors of accepted proposals must submit the complete text (max. 40,000 characters) by November 18, 2024. Essays will undergo a peer-review process.