[Chapter]

We have now considered objects from the point of view of their objective systematization (interior design and atmosphere) and from that of their subjective systematization (collecting). Let us next turn our attention to their connotations -- and hence to their ideological significance.

Technical Connotation: Automatism

If formal connotation is summed up in the word FASHION, [99] technical connotation is epitomized by the notion of AUTOMATISM, which is the major concept of the modern object's mechanistic triumphalism, the ideal of its mythology. What automatism means is that the object, in its particular function, takes on the connotation of an absolute. [100]

An example borrowed from Gilbert Simondon well illustrates this slipping to technical connotation via the idea of automatism. [101] From the strictly technological
[p. 110]
standpoint the elimination of the starting-handle makes the mechanical operation of cars more complicated, because it subordinates it to the use of electrical power from a storage battery that is external to the system. This increased complication -- and abstractness -- is nevertheless presented as progress, as a sign of modernity. Thanks to the connotation of automatism, which in fact masks a structural weakness, cars with starting-handles now seem outdated, and those without, modern. Of course, one might argue that the lack of a starting-handle serves a function every bit as real as the handle itself, namely the satisfaction of the desire for automatism. In the same way the chrome-plating and giant tail fins that weigh a car down could be said to serve the function of satisfying the demand for status. But the fulfilment of such secondary functions clearly militates against the material structure of the technical object. Even though so many unintegrated features remain both in the engine and in the external design of cars, the manufacturers tout excessive automatism in accessories as the last word in mechanical achievement. The same goes for the systematic resort to servo-mechanisms, whose most immediate effect is to render an object more fragile, thus raising its cost, shortening its effective life, and hastening its replacement.

`Functional' Transcendence

The degree to which a machine approaches perfection is thus everywhere presented as proportional to its degree of automatism. The fact is, however, that automating machines means sacrificing a very great deal of potential functionality. In order to automate a practical object, it is necessary to stereotype it in its function, thus making it more fragile. Far from having any intrinsic technical advantages, automatism always embodies the risk of arresting technical advance, for so long as an object has not been automated it remains susceptible of redesign, of self-transcendence through incorporation into a larger functional whole. When it becomes automatic, on the other hand, its function is fulfilled, certainly, but it is also hermetically sealed. Automatism amounts to a closing-off, to a sort of functional self-sufficiency which exiles man to the irresponsibility of a mere spectator. Contained within it is the dream of a dominated world, of a formally perfected technicity that serves an inert and dreamy humanity.
[p. 111]

Current technological thinking rejects this tendency in principle, and holds that true perfection in machines -- one genuinely founded on an increasing level of technicity and hence expressing true `functionality' -- depends not on more automatism but on a certain margin of indeterminacy which lets the machine respond to information from outside. The highly technical machine is thus an open structure, and a universe of such open-ended machines presupposes man as organizer and living interpreter, But even if the automatizing tendency is repulsed at the highest technological level, the fact remains that in practice it is continually pushing objects into a dangerous abstractness. Automatism is king, and its fascination is indeed so powerful precisely because it is not that of a technical rationality: rather, we come under its spell because we experience it as a basic desire, as the imaginary truth of the object, in comparison with which the object's structure and concrete function leave us cold. Consider merely our continual wishing for `everything to work by itself, for every object to perform this miracle of minimum effort in the carrying out of its assigned function. For the user, automatism means a wondrous absence of activity, and the enjoyment this procures is comparable to that derived, on another plane, from seeing without being seen: an esoteric satisfaction experienced at the most everyday level. The fact that every automated object may lead us into often unchangeable stereotypical behaviour constitutes no real challenge to this immediate demand of ours: the desire for automatism is there first -- it takes priority over objective practice. And if it is so firmly rooted that the myth of its formal realization presents an almost material obstacle to the open-ended structuring of techniques and needs, the reason is that it is rooted in objects as our own image. [102]

Because the automated object `works by itself, its resemblance to the autonomous human being is unmistakable, and the fascination thus created carries the day. We are in the presence of a new anthropomorphism. Formerly the image of man was clearly imprinted in the morphology and the manner of use of tools, of furniture, or of the house itself. [103] In the perfected technical object this compliance
[p. 112]
has been destroyed, but it has been replaced by a symbolism of superstructural rather than primary functions: it is no longer his gestures, his energy his needs and the image of his body that man projects into automated objects, but instead the autonomy of his consciousness, his power of control, his own individual nature, his personhood.

This supra-functionality of human consciousness is, in the end, what automatism strives to echo in the object. In a way that parallels the formal self-transcendence of the human individual, automatism aspires to be a sort of ne plus ultra of the object, enabling it to transcend its function. And automatism, too, uses a kind of formal abstraction to conceal structural defects, defence mechanisms and objective determinants. That perfect and perfectly autonomous monad which is the governing dream of subjectivity is thus also very clearly the dream that haunts objects. Emancipated from its former naïve animism and too-human meanings, the object finds the elements of its modern mythology in its own technical existence (thanks to the projection into the technical domain of the absolute formal autonomy of individual consciousness). And automatism, as one of the paths that this object continues to follow, invariably leads to an over-signification of man in his formal essence and in his unconscious desires -- thus setting up an obstinate barrier to the object's own concrete structural goal, which is `to change life'.

Man, for his part, by automating his objects and rendering them multifunctional instead of striving to structure his practices in a fluid and open-ended manner, reveals in a way what part he himself plays in a technical society: that of the most beautiful all-purpose object, that of an instrumental model.

In this sense automatism and personalization do not contradict one another in the slightest. Automatism is simply personalization dreamt in terms of the object. It is the most finished, the most sublime form of the inessential -- of that marginal differentiation which subtends man's personalized relationship to his objects. [104]
[p. 113]

Functional Aberration: Gadgets

Automatism per se is simply a technical deviation, but it opens the door to a whole world of functional delusion, to the entire range of manufactured objects in which a role is played by irrational complexity, obsessive detail, eccentric technicity or gratuitous formalism. In this poly-, para-, hyper- and meta-functional sphere, the object, at its farthest remove from objective determinants, is completely taken over by the imaginary. We have seen that automatism always embodies an irrational projection of consciousness; in this `schizofunctional' world, however, nothing leaves a trace except obsessions pure and simple. There is a complete pataphysics of the object awaiting description here, a science of imaginary technical solutions.

If we ask, apropos of the objects that surround us, what is structural and what is astructural about them, or if we ask to what extent they are technical objects and to what extent accessories, gadgets or merely formal markers, we shall soon conclude -- our highly neo-technical environment notwithstanding -- that we live in a largely rhetorical and allegorical atmosphere. Indeed, it is the baroque, with its predilection for the allegorical, its new discursive individualism based on redundant forms and tricked-up materials, and its demiurgic formalism, that is the true inaugurating moment of the modern age. The baroque clearly foreshadows on the artistic plane all the themes and myths of our technological civilization, right down to its paroxysmic formalism of detail and movement.

Once this point is reached, the technical balance of objects is upset. Too many accessory functions are introduced from the point of view of which the object answers no need other than the need to function; it answers, in other words, to the functional superstition according to which for any operation there is -- there must be -- a corresponding object, and if none exists then one must be invented. As in the tinkering tradition of the Concours Lépine, [105] no true innovation is to be seen, but by juggling stereotyped techniques objects are created that are at once incredibly specific in their function and absolutely useless. So precise is the function proposed, in fact, that it can only be a pretext: such objects are subjectively functional, that is to
[p. 114]
say, obsessional. As for the opposite, `aesthetic', approach, which omits function altogether and exalts the beauty of pure mechanism, this ultimately amounts to the same thing. For the inventor at the Concours Lépine, the creation of a solar-powered boiled-egg opener or some other equally dotty gadget is merely an excuse for obsessive manipulation and contemplation. Like all obsessions, moreover, this particular variety has its poetic side, as manifested to a greater or lesser degree in Picabia's machines, in Tinguely's mechanical constructions, in the simple clockwork of a discarded watch, or in any object whose original use we simply cannot remember but whose mechanism still arouses a sort of delighted fascination in us. Something that serves no purpose whatsoever may in this sense still serve us.

Pseudo-Functionality: Gizmos

This empty functionalism is well summed up by the word `gizmo'. [106] A gizmo does have an operational value, but whereas the function of a machine is explicit in its name, a gizmo, in the context of the functional paradigm, is always an indeterminate term with, in addition, the pejorative connotation of `the thing without a name' or `the thing I cannot name' (there is something immoral about an object whose exact purpose one does not know). The fact remains that it works. As a sort of dangling parenthesis, as an object detached from its function, what the `gizmo' or the `thingummyjig' suggests is a vague and limitless functionality -- or perhaps better the mental picture of an imaginary functionality.

It would be impossible to classify the whole range of obsessional polyfunctionality. From Marcel Aymé's `vistemboir', whose nature is a mystery to everyone, though everyone is sure it does have a use, to that `Something' which in the Radio Luxembourg guessing game is the subject of endless questions whereby thousands of listeners try to find the name of some minute item (e. g. the strip made of a special stainless alloy that is fitted in a slide trombone which ensures that ... etc., etc.), and from Sunday-afternoon pottering to James Bond-style super-gadgetry, there
[p. 115]
extends a panoply of wondrous accessories culminating in the immense industrial output of everyday objects -- gadgets or gizmos -- whose obsessional degree of specialization easily matches the old-fashioned baroque imagination of the amateur inventor. What is one to say of the ultrasound washing-up machine which removes encrusted food from dishes without the intervention of the human hand, the toaster with a nine-level browning control, or the electric cocktail swizzle-stick? At the serial and industrial level, what was once merely charming eccentricity or individual neurosis becomes a daily and ceaseless assault on the mind, which is either overtaken by panic or over-excited by sheer detail.

It is frightening to consider just how many things fall into the category of gizmos, just how many of our objects are covered by this empty concept. It is not difficult to see that the proliferation of technical detail here corresponds in each of us to an immense conceptual failure, and that our language is a very long way indeed behind the structures and functional articulation of the objects that we use, as it were, naturally. Our civilization has more and more objects and fewer and fewer names for them. The word `machine', in becoming applicable to the realm of social labour, has acquired a precise enough generic sense; as recently as the late eighteenth century, however, it had much the same meaning as `gizmo' today. Words like `gizmo' now cover all those things which, on account of their specialization and because they answer to no true collective need, cannot be referred to as machines, and thus assume a mythological character. If `machine' belongs to the sphere of functional `language', `gizmo' belongs to the subjective sphere of `speech'. It goes without saying that in a civilization where such unnameable objects (or at any rate objects designated only in the loosest way, by means of neologism or paraphrase) are multiplying, resistance to mythology is perforce far weaker than in civilizations whose objects are clearly known and denominated down to their most detailed aspects. Today we live in a world of what Georges Friedmann calls Sunday drivers -- people who have never opened the bonnets of their cars, people for whom functioning is not merely the function of things but also their mystery.

If we grant that our environment, and by extension our everyday view of the world, is thus largely shaped by functional simulacra, we are bound to ask what
[p. 116]
superstition serves to maintain and compensate for this conceptual inadequacy. What exactly is the key to this mysterious functioning of objects? The answer is a vague but tenacious obsession with a world-machine, with a universal mechanism. The machine and the gizmo are mutually exclusive. It is not that the machine is a perfected form, nor that the gizmo is a degraded one: rather, the two are different in kind, the first operating in the real, the second in the imaginary realm. `Machine' signifies, and in so doing structures, a particular real practical whole; `gizmo' signifies nothing more than a formal operation -- though that operation is the total operation of the world. The virtue of a gizmo may be ridiculous in reality, [107] but in the imagination it is universal. The electrical whatsit that extracts stones from fruit or some new vacuum-cleaner accessory for getting under sideboards are perhaps in the end not especially practical, but they do serve to reinforce the belief that for every need there is a possible mechanical answer, that every practical (and even psychological) problem may be foreseen, forestalled, resolved in advance by means of a technical object that is rational and adapted -- perfectly adapted. As for what exactly it is adapted to, that is of no consequence. The important thing is that the world should present the appearance of having already been `operated on'. The real referent of the gizmo is not a plum stone or the narrow space under the side-board, but nature in its entirety reinvented in accordance with the technical reality principle: a total simulacrum of an automated nature. This is its myth and its mystery. And like all mythologies, this one too has two sides to it: it mystifies man by submerging him in a functional dream, but it equally well mystifies the object by submerging it in the irrationality of human determinants. There is a close collusion between the human-all-too-human and the functional-all-too-functional: the impregnation of the human world by technical goals invariably implies technology's impregnation by human ones -- for better or for worse. We are, however, far more sensitive to human relationships being interfered with by the absurd and totalitarian concerns of technology than we are to technological development being interfered with by the absurd and totalitarian concerns of human beings. Yet
[p. 117]
it is unquestionably human irrationality and its figments which fuel the tendency for any machine to take on gizmo-like properties; it is they, in other words, which agitate functional phantasy behind any concrete functional praxis.

The true functionality of the gizmo is unconscious in character -- hence its fascination for us. That it should be absolutely functional absolutely adapted (though to what?), shows that this functionality and this adaptation must needs refer to a demand of a non-practical kind. The myth of a wonder-working functionality of the world is correlated with the phantasy of a wonder-working functionality of the body. There is a direct link between the paradigm of technical action executed by the world and the paradigm of sexual action executed by the subject; and in this perspective the gizmo, the ultimate tool, is basically a substitute for the phallus, the operative medium of function par excellence. Moreover, any object has something of the gizmo about it, for in proportion as its practical instrumentality fades it becomes susceptible of cathexis by a libidinal instrumentality. This is already true of the child's toy, or of any stone or piece of wood as perceived by `primitives'; as we have seen, `uncivilized' people can fetishize a simple pen, and `civilized' ones can do the same with absolutely any abandoned mechanical object or ancient artefact.

For any object whatsoever, in fact, the reality principle may be put in brackets. No sooner does an object lose its concrete practical aspect than it is transferred to the realm of mental practices. In short, behind every real object there is a dream object.

We have already discussed the case of antiques in this context. In their case, however, the transcendence or mental abstraction concerned the material or the form, and was bound up with a regressive birth complex; pseudo-functional objects or `gizmos', by contrast, are bound up with an abstract transcendence of the object's functioning, and hence with a projective, phallic power complex. Let me stress once more that this is an analytic distinction: whereas objects normally have but one real function, narrowly defined, their `mental' functionality is unlimited, and any number of phantasies may have a place therein. A distinct evolution in their imaginary aspect is nevertheless signalled by the shift from an animistic to an energetic structure: traditional objects tended to bear witness to our presence, being static symbols of our bodily organs, but technical objects hold a different kind of fascination in that they evoke a virtual energy, and are thus less receptacles
[p. 118]
of our presence than vehicles of our dynamic self-image. Here too, moreover, a reservation is called for; because the operation of energy itself tends to be down-played in the most modern devices, with their encapsulated and elliptical forms. In a world dominated by communications and information, the sight of energy at work has become a rarity. Miniaturization and gestural depletion erode symbolic expressiveness. [108] But we may take comfort in the fact that even if objects sometimes escape practical human control, they never escape the imagination. Modes of the imaginary follow modes of technological evolution, and it is therefore to be expected that the next mode of technical efficiency will give rise to a new imaginary mode. At present its traits are difficult to discern, but perhaps, in the wake of the animistic and energetic modes, we shall need to turn our attention to the structures of a cybernetic imaginary mode whose central myth will no longer be that of an absolute organicism, nor that of an absolute functionalism, but instead that of an absolute interrelatedness of the world. For the time being our everyday environment remains unevenly divided between the three. The old sideboard, the car and the tape recorder exist side by side in the one sphere, even though their imaginary modes of existence, just like their technical modes of existence, differ radically.

At all events, whatever the functioning of the object may be like, we invariably experience it as OUR functioning: whatever the object's efficient mode -- even should it be absurd, as in the case of the `gizmo' -- we project ourselves into that efficiency. In fact we do so especially when it is absurd, as witness the old phrase, at once magical and comical, according to which a thing `might always come in useful': while it is true that objects do indeed serve specific purposes at times, they are much more commonly good for everything and nothing, and in that case their true utility lies in the very fact that they `might always come in useful'.
[p. 119]

Metafunctionality: Robots

The ultimate expression of such imaginary projection is the object as dreamt up by science fiction -- the pure realm of the gizmo. We should be greatly mistaken were we to view science fiction as an escape from everyday reality: on the contrary, it is an extrapolation from the irrational tendencies of that reality through the free exercise of narrative invention. Although it is an invaluable witness to the civilization of the object, precisely because it heightens certain aspects thereof, science fiction has absolutely no prophetic value. It has practically nothing to do with the real future of technological development, for which it accounts in the future perfect tense, so to speak, drawing for nourishment on sublime archaisms and on a repertory of acquired forms and functions. It contains little in the way of structural invention, but it is an inexhaustible mine of imaginary solutions to stereotyped needs and functional requirements of an often marginal or mindboggling variety. In a way science fiction is the apotheosis of tinkering. But while its true exploratory value may be very feeble, it supplies us with a wealth of information on the unconscious.

In particular, science fiction demonstrates what we have recognized as the most profound -- albeit the most irrational -- feature of the modern object, namely its automatism. When it comes down to it, the genre has only ever invented one super-object: the ROBOT. Soon man will no longer even have to steer his lawnmower on a Sunday afternoon, because it will start itself up, and stop once the job is done, of its own accord. Is this the only conceivable fate of objects? The itinerary laid down for them, leading inexorably to the complete automation of their existing functions, [109]
[p. 120]
has far less to do with humanity's future technology than with its present psychological motivations. Consequently the myth of the robot may be said to cover all paths taken by the unconscious in the realm of objects. The robot is a symbolic microcosm of both man and the world, which is to say that it simultaneously replaces both man and the world, synthesizing absolute functionality and absolute anthropomorphism. Its antecedents were electrical household appliances (cf. the `automatic maid'). Fundamentally, therefore, the robot is simply the mythological end-product of a naïve phase of the imagination, a phase which implies the projection of a continual and visible functionality. For the substitution in question has to be visible: if it is to exert its fascination without creating insecurity, the robot must unequivocally reveal its nature as a mechanical prosthesis (its body is metallic, its gestures are discrete, jerky and unhuman). A robot that mimicked man to the point where its gestures had a truly human fluidity would create anxiety. What the robot must be is the symbol of a world at once entirely functionalized and entirely personalized, and hence reassuring at all levels; a world which can reincarnate the abstracted power of man just as far as is conceivable short of its being utterly engulfed by identification. [110]

If, for the unconscious, the robot is the perfect object that sums up all the others, this is not simply because it is a simulacrum of man as a functionally efficient being; rather, it is because, though the robot is indeed such a simulacrum, it is not so perfect in this regard as to be man's double, and because, for all its humanness, it always remains quite visibly an object, and hence a slave. In the last analysis, robots are always slaves. They may be endowed with any of the qualities that define human sovereignty except one, and that is sex. Their fascination and their symbolic value must operate under this one constraint. By virtue of their multifunctionalism
[p. 121]
they attest to man's phallic reign over the world, but at the same time, inasmuch as they are controlled, dominated, directed and rendered asexual, they also attest to a phallus that is enslaved, to a sexuality that is domesticated and unaccompanied by anxiety: all that remains is an obedient functionality embodied (so to speak) in an object which resembles me, an object to which the world is subject yet which is simultaneously subject to my will. In this way a threatening part of myself has been exorcized and turned into a sort of all-powerful slave, cast in my image, which I can use for purposes of self-aggrandizement.

It is thus not hard to understand the urge that exists to have all objects accede to the status of robots. This is the logical end of the object's unconscious psychological function. Its actual end, too -- for the robot can evolve no farther: it is frozen in its resemblance to man and in functional abstraction at all costs. Active genital sexuality expires here also, because, as projected into the robot, it is neutralized, deactivated, conjured away - itself immobilized within the object whose development it has terminated. The process of abstraction here is narcissistic; the universe of science fiction is asexual.

The robot is interesting on a number of other counts also. As the mythological end of the object, it gathers unto itself all the phantasies attendant upon our deepest relationships with our environment.

The robot is a slave, then, but let us not forget that the theme of slavery is always bound up -- even in the legend of the sorcerer's apprentice -- with the theme of revolt. In one form or another, robots in revolt are by no means rare in science fiction. And that revolt is implicit even when it is not manifest. The robot, like the slave, is both good and perfidious: good as a captive force; perfidious as a force that may break its chains. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, man has every reason to fear the resurrection of this force which he has exorcized and bound to his own image. It is in fact his own sexuality, liable now to turn against him, that he is afraid of. Once liberated, unchained and in revolt, sexuality becomes man`s mortal enemy. This is the lesson of the frequent and unpredictable revolts of robots, of the maleficent mutations that affect them, and even merely of the disquieting, ever-present threat of such brutal conversions occurring. Man is thus prey to the deepest forces within him: he finds himself confronted by a double who has enlisted his energies and
[p. 122]
whose appearance, according to legend, spells death. What the mechanical perfidy of the science-fiction robot means (beyond the implication of a functional breakdown of the environment) is that subjugated phallic energies are rising in revolt. These narratives propose two solutions in this situation. Sometimes man tames the `evil' forces that have been unleashed, and `moral' order is restored. Alternatively the forces embodied in the robot self-destruct: automatism is itself driven to suicide. The theme of the robot that goes off the rails and destroys itself is a common one -- indeed, it is closely akin to the theme of the robot in revolt. There is a secret apocalypse of objects -- or of the Object -- which fuels the passionate interest of the reader. It is tempting to connect this development to a moral denunciation of the diabolical nature of science, the point being that if technology is on its own road to damnation, man will be restored to an untrammelled nature. This moral theme unquestionably plays a part in fictional narratives, but it is at once too naïve and too rational. Morality per se fascinates no one, yet the anticipated disintegration of the robot produces a strange satisfaction. The recurrent phantasy of ritualistic fragmentation which is the culminating point of the object's functional triumphalism is determined less by a moral constraint than by a profound wish. The spectacle of death is relished, and if we accept the idea that the robot symbolizes a subjugated sexuality, then by extension the robot's disintegration must constitute for man the symbolic spectacle of the atomization of his own sexuality -- which he himself destroys, having pressed it into the service of his image. If we carry the Freudian view to its logical conclusion, we cannot but wonder whether this is not man's way of using technology in its most demented incarnations to celebrate the future occurrence of his own death, his way of renouncing his sexuality in order to be quit of all anxiety.

The current fashion for `happenings' has brought the great science-fiction event of the `suicide' or murder of the object a little closer to home. The happening involves an orgiastic destruction and debasement of objects, a veritable hecatomb whereby our whole satiated culture revels in its own degradation and death. A recent fad in the United States amounts to a mass-marketing of the happening in the shape of novel contraptions, composed of gears, rods, shafts and what-have-you -- true jewels of useless functionality whose merit lies in the fact that they fall apart
[p. 123]
of their own accord, suddenly and irreparably; after a few hours of operation. These objects are exchanged as gifts, and the period during which they duly malfunction, disintegrate and die is the occasion for a social get-together.

A similar, though less extreme, phenomenon is the embodiment in certain present-day objects of a kind of fatum. Here the car once again has pride of place. The individual commits himself to a car for better or for worse. Certainly the car serves him, but he would seem to accept and expect something more from it: the sort of destiny which in the cinema, for example, is ritually represented by death in a road accident.

The Transformations of Technology

We may thus trace functional mythologies, born of technics itself, all the way to a sort of fatality in which the world-mastering technology seems to crystallize in the form of an inverse and threatening purpose. At this point it behoves us to do two things. In the first place, we must reframe the problem of the fragility of objects, and of their defection; for although in the first instance objects present themselves to us as reassuring, as factors of equilibrium, albeit of a neurotic kind, they are also in the end a factor of continual disillusionment. Secondly, we must challenge our society's implicit assumption that a rationality of ends and means governs the sphere of production and the technological project itself.

The object's dysfunctionality, its counter-purpose, is governed by two parallel sets of determinants: a socio-economic system of production and a psychological system of projection. It is the reciprocal involvement of these two systems, their collusion, that we need to define.

Technological society thrives on a tenacious myth, the myth of uninterrupted technical progress accompanied by a continuing moral `backwardness' of man relative thereto. These two claims are mutually supportive: moral `stagnation' transfigures technical progress and turns it into the only certain value, and hence the ultimate authority of our society; by the same token, the system of production is absolved of all responsibility. A supposed moral contradiction serves to conceal the true contradiction, which is the fact, precisely, that the present production
[p. 124]
system, while working for real technological progress, at the same time opposes it (along with any restructuring of social relationships to which it might lead). The myth of a happy convergence of technology, production and consumption masks all political and economic counter-purposes. How indeed could a system of techniques and objects conceivably progress harmoniously while the system of relations between the people who produced it continued to stagnate or regress? The fact is that humans and their techniques, needs and objects are structurally interlocked come what may. The indivisibility, within any single cultural sphere, of individual and social structures and of technical and functional modalities must surely be deemed axiomatic. Our technological civilization is no exception to the rule: techniques and objects therein suffer the same servitudes as human beings -- and the process of material organization, hence of objective technical progress, is subject to exactly the same blocks, deviations and regressions as the concrete process of the socialization of human relationships, hence of objective social progress.

There is a cancer of the object: the proliferation of astructural elements that underpins the object's triumphalism is a kind of cancer. It is upon such astructural elements (automatism, accessory features, inessential differences) that the entire social network of fashion and controlled consumption is founded. [111] They are the bulwark which tends to halt genuine technical development. On their account, while appearing to manifest all the metamorphic powers of a prodigious health, objects that are already saturated wear themselves out completely through convulsive formal variation and changes whose impact is strictly visual. `Technically speaking,' writes Lewis Mumford, `changes in form and style are signs of immaturity; they mark a period of transition. The error of capitalism as a creed lies in the attempt to make this period of transition a permanent one.' [112] And Mumford notes that in the United States, for example, after the grand wave of inventions which between 1910 and 1940 brought in the automobile, the aeroplane,
[p. 125]
the refrigerator, the television, and so on, significant invention practically petered out. Improvement, refinement, packaging -- anything to enhance the prestige of the object, but nothing by way of structural innovation. `The chief obstacle to the fuller development of the machine lies in the association of taste and fashion with waste and commercial profiteering.' [113] On the one hand, indeed, minor improvements, added complexity and ancillary systems sustain a false consciousness of `progress' and conceal the urgent necessity for fundamental changes (a `reformism' of the object, one might say). On the other hand, fashion -- which, with its inchoate proliferation of secondary systems, is ruled by chance -- is also the realm of an infinite recurrence of forms, and hence of maximum commercial prospects. There is in fact a fundamental antagonism between the verticality of technology and the horizontality of profit -- between the continual self-transcendence of technical invention and the closedness of a system of recurrent objects and forms beholden to the goals of production.

This is where we encounter the ambition of objects to act as replacements for human relationships. In its concrete function the object solves a practical problem, but in its inessential aspects it resolves a social or psychological conflict. Such, at any rate, is the modern `philosophy' of the object as understood by Ernest Dichter, prophet of motivation research, whose thesis boils down to the claim that for any source of tension whatsoever, for any individual or collective conflict, there must be an object capable of resolving it. [114] Just as there is a saint for every day of the year, so there is an object for every problem: the important thing is to manufacture and launch that object at the right moment. What Dichter deems an ideal solution, however, Mumford more accurately sees as a solution by default, but Mumford's conception of the object and of technics as substitute answers to human conflicts -- a conception which he extends within a critical perspective to our whole civilization -- is essentially the same as Dichter's. `The fact is', he writes,
[p. 126]

that an elaborate mechanical organization is often a temporary and expensive substitute for an effective social organization or for a sound biological adaptation.

Power machines have given a sort of licence to social inefficiency.

The machine, so far from being a sign in our present civilization of human power and order, is often an indication of ineptitude and social paralysis. [115]

It is difficult to assess the total cost to society as a whole of thus referring real conflicts and needs to the technical sphere, itself in thrall to fashion and forced consumption. But that cost is certainly colossal. If one considers the automobile, for instance, it is very hard now even to imagine what an extraordinary tool for the reorganization of human relations it might have been, thanks to its victory over space and the structural convergence of several techniques that it represented, so quickly did it become encrusted with parasitic functions defined by the requirements of prestige, comfort, unconscious projection, and so forth -- functions which first impeded and then blocked the automobile's essential function, which was human integration. Today the car is a completely inert object. Ever more thoroughly abstracted from its social function of transportation, while at the same time serving to trap that function within archaic modalities, it continues to undergo frantic transformations, revisions and metamorphoses within the limits of possibility of a structure that cannot be changed. And a whole civilization can come to a halt in the same way as the automobile.

Three collateral lines of development may be distinguished here. The first concerns the technical structuring of the object, implying the convergence of functions, integration, material form and economy. The second concerns a parallel structuring of the world and of nature: space is mastered, energy is controlled, materials are mobilized -- and a more meaningful and interrelated world emerges. Thirdly, human praxis, both individual and collective, is so structured as to foster an ever greater `relativity' and mobility, along with an open-ended integration and an
[p. 127]
`economy' of society analogous to that of the most highly evolved technical objects. Despite the discrepancies arising from the distinct dynamics of each of these levels, it may be observed that broadly speaking, whenever development slows or stops, it does so on all three at once. Once a technical object's development is arrested at a given outcome (which at the second level, in the case of the car, means a partial victory over space), it will henceforward do no more than continue to connote that frozen structure, to which all manner of subjective motivations will now return cathectically (regression at the third level). It is at this point that the technical object, having lost all dynamism, may enter into a relationship of fixed complementarity: car and house, for example, will come to constitute a closed system invested with conventional values, and the car, ceasing to serve relationship or exchange, will truly be nothing but an object of consumption: `Not alone have the older forms of technics served to constrain the development of the neotechnic economy: but the new inventions and devices have been frequently used to maintain, renew, and stabilize the structure of the old order.' [116] The automobile no longer removes obstacles between men; on the contrary, men now invest the automobile with that which separates them. Space mastered becomes an even greater obstacle than the space over which mastery was sought in the first place. [117]

Technics and the Unconscious System

All the same, we have eventually to ask ourselves whether there is not something more at the root of this relative stagnation of forms and techniques, this systematic
[p. 128]
deficit (whose remarkable efficiency in terms of social integration will nevertheless be confirmed below when we discuss `Models and Series'), than the self-interested dictatorship of a system of production, than an absolutely -- and absolutely alienating -- social agency. Whether, as Lewis Mumford puts it, it is simply a `social accident' that objects remain in a state of underdevelopment. If humanity were `innocent' in this respect, if the production system alone were responsible for technology's immaturity, there would indeed be an accident here -- a contradiction just as inexplicable as its diametrical opposite, the bourgeois fiction of `advanced' technology held back by moral `retardation'. The truth is that there is no accident, and even if we must assign the lion's share of responsibility to a production system, structurally linked to the social order, which exploits the entire society by means of a system of objects, we still cannot help concluding, in view of the system's permanence and solidity, that a collusion exists somewhere between the collective order of production and an individual order of needs, albeit an unconscious one. What I mean by `collusion' is a close relationship of negative complicity, or a set of reciprocal determinations, between the dysfunctionality of the socio-economic system and the far-reaching effects of the unconscious; the question was touched on above in connection with robots.

If connotation and personalization, fashion and automatism, all tend to focus upon those astructural features whose irrational motivations the logic of production seeks to control and systematize, this is perhaps also because man has neither a clear will to transcend nor any great prospect of transcending the aforementioned archaic structures of projection; or at least that he has a deep-seated resistance to sacrificing subjective, projective virtualities and their eternal recurrence on the altar of concrete structural development (both technical and social); or again, to put it in the simplest terms, that man has a profound resistance to imposing rationality upon the purely arbitrary goals of his needs. This may well constitute a fatal turn for the modus existendi of the object, as indeed of society as a whole. Once a certain point in technical development has been reached, and once primary needs have been satisfied, we may well demand a phantasied, allegorical and subconscious edibility of the object as much as, or even more than, an actual functionality. Why is it, after all, that the design of the automobile is not different: why is the driver's seat not
[p. 129]
positioned forward and the vehicle streamlined in such a way as to let the operator efficiently occupy the space he has to travel through, instead of placing him in a substitute house -- even, as it were, within a substitute subject endowed with projectile force? Surely the answer must be that the current form (even more exaggerated in racing cars, whose excessively long bonnet has every appearance of providing an absolute model here) facilitates an essential projection which is ultimately far more important than any progress in the art and science of travel.

Apparently man needs to overburden the world with this `unconscious' discourse of his, even at the cost of halting that world's development. The implications of this are very far-reaching. If indeed the astructural elements around which our most tenacious desires seem to crystallize are not just parallel functions, complications or overloads, but properly speaking dysfunctions, failures or aberrations relative to an objective structural order, if indeed a whole civilization appears ready to turn away on their account from a genuine revolution in its structures, and if indeed all this is not accidental, then we are justified in asking whether man, under cover of the myth of functional extravagance (or `personalized affluence'), which in fact conceals an obsession with his own image, does not after all incline much more towards an increasingly dysfunctional world than towards an increasingly functional one. He does appear, at any rate, to go along with the play of dysfunctions which is progressively turning our environment into a world of objects arrested in their growth by their own outgrowths, as it were, objects disappointed and disappointing to the very extent that they become personalized.

The substitutional aspect of the object, which a moment ago we noted was a decisive one, is even more in evidence here: it is even truer on the plane of unconscious conflicts than on that of social or conscious psychological ones, as evoked by Ernest Dichter and Lewis Mumford, that the use of technics -- and, more simply, the consumption of objects -- has secondary roles to play, imaginary solutions to offer. Technics as an effective mediation between man and the world is indeed the harder path. The easier path is the interpolation of a system of objects as an imaginary resolution of contradictions of every kind. This amounts to a short circuit between the technical order and the order of individual needs, a short circuit which exhausts the energies of both systems. Small wonder that the resulting system
[p. 130]
of objects should bear the stigma of defection: its structural deficiency reflects the contradiction to which the system offers a merely formal solution. As the individual or collective cover for one conflict or another, the system of objects is inevitably marked by its denial of those conflicts.

But what are the conflicts that objects are called upon to cover up? Humanity has its whole future wagered on the simultaneous harnessing of natural external forces and of the internal pressure of the libido, both of which it experiences as threatening and fateful. The unconscious economy of the system of objects is a mechanism of projection and domestication (or control) of the libido which brings an efficient principle to bear. The domination of nature and the production of goods are in effect a parallel benefit thereof. Unfortunately however, this admirable economy carries a dual risk for the human order: first there is the danger that sexuality might be in some sense conjured away and foreclosed in the technical realm, secondly the danger that this technical realm might in turn be disturbed in its development by the conflicted energy by which it has been invested. All the preconditions are thus assembled for the emergence of an insoluble contradiction, a permanent defection: the fact is that the system of objects as it operates today embodies an ever-present potential for consent to this sort of regression -- the lure of an end to sexuality, its definitive absorption in the recurrence and continual forward flight of the technical order.

In practice the technical order always retains a certain dynamism of its own that blocks the sort of infinite recurrence characteristic of a perfect regressive system of this kind (which is equivalent, strictly speaking, to death). The necessary conditions for such an eventuality are nevertheless present in our system of objects, and the system is haunted by the temptation of a reverse evolution which coexists in it with the potential for progress.

This temptation to regress towards what can only be called death as a way of escaping from sexual anxiety sometimes assumes forms -- still within the context of the technical order -- that are ever more spectacular and brutal. It may then be transformed into the temptation, truly tragic in its implications, to see this order itself turned against its instigator -- that is, against humanity; to see an ineluctable fate re-emerge from within the very technical order that had been designed to
[p. 131]
exorcize it -- a process akin to the one described by Freud, whereby repressed energy returns via the repressing agency itself and derails all mechanisms of defence. In contrast to the reassurance vouchsafed by a gradual regression, the tragic variety precipitates the dizzying sensations associated with such a brusque resolution of the conflict between the sexual drives and the ego. These sensations are a response to the eruption of hitherto contained energies within technical objects themselves -- that is to say, within the very symbols of mastery over the world. Two contradictory goals are pursued simultaneously: the inevitability of fate is challenged, yet at the same time sought. This contradiction is reflected in the economic order of production, which, though it produces ceaselessly, can produce only fragile objects -- objects that are partly dysfunctional and destined for an early death; the system thus works to destroy such objects as well as to produce them.

Let me stress once again that it is not the fragility of objects that is tragic, nor their death. Rather, it is the temptation represented by that fragility and that death. This temptation is satisfied in a way when an object fails us, even though this failing may at the same time inconvenience us or throw us into despair. This is the same kind of malign and vertiginous satisfaction that we encountered earlier, as projected into phantasies of revolt and destruction on the part of robots. The object takes its revenge. It becomes `personalized' -- in this case for the worse -- because it revolts. This hostile volte-face may shock us and take us by surprise, but there is no denying that a submissive attitude soon develops towards this revolt, which we treat as inevitable, and as evidence of a fragility that distinctly appeals to us. A technical hitch infuriates us, but an avalanche of technical hitches can fill us with glee; if a jug develops a crack we are pained, but if it smashes to smithereens there is satisfaction in it. Our reaction to an object's failure is in fact always ambiguous. This failure threatens our well-being, yet it gives material expression to the objection that we continually raise with respect to ourselves -- an objection which also demands satisfaction. As Ernest Dichter points out, you expect a cigarette lighter to work, but `you do not assume, or even desire, that your lighter would admirably perform under all conditions'. [118] One has merely to imagine an infallible object, and the disillusion it would
[p. 132]
inevitably entail in connection -- precisely -- with the aforementioned objection one has to oneself, in order to realize that infallibility invariably generates anxiety. The fact is that a world without fallibility would imply the definitive resorption of an inevitable fate -- and hence of sexuality. This is why we greet the slightest hint of a resurgence of fatefulness with deep satisfaction: the slightest breach allows sexuality to revive, even if for only a moment even if it takes the form of a hostile force (as it always does in this context), and even if its emergence in such circum-stances means failure, death and destruction. The underlying contradiction is thus resolved in contradictory fashion, but could things really go otherwise? [119]

Our `technological' civilization, as foreshadowed by the American model, is a world at once systematized and fragile. The system of objects is the embodiment of this systematization of fragility of ephemerality, of the ever more rapid recurrence of the repetition compulsion; the embodiment of satisfaction and disillusion; the embodiment of the problematical exorcism of the real conflicts that threaten individual and social relationships. With the advent of our consumer society, we are seemingly faced for the first time in history by an irreversible organized attempt to swamp society with objects and integrate it into an indispensable system designed to replace all open interaction between natural forces, needs and techniques. The principal basis of this system would appear to be the official, obligatory and supervised demise of the objects that it comprises: a gigantic collective `happening' whereby the death of the group itself is celebrated through the euphoric destruction or ritualistic devouring of objects and gestures. [120] Here again one could argue that nothing more is involved than an infantile disorder of the technological society, and attribute such growing pains entirely to the dysfunctionality of our present social structures -- i. e. to the capitalist order of production. The long-term prospect
[p. 133]
of a transcendence of the whole system would thus remain open. On the other hand, if something more is involved than the anarchic ends of a production system determined by social exploitation, if deeper conflicts in fact play a part -- highly individual conflicts, but extended onto the collective plane -- then any prospect of ultimate transcendence must be abandoned for ever. Are we contemplating the developmental problems of a society ultimately destined to become the best of all possible worlds, or, alternatively, an organized regression in the face of insoluble problems? Is all this the work of anarchic production relations or of the death instinct? What, in short, has made a civilization go wrong in this way? The question is still open.

Technical Connotation: Automatism

Note from page 109: 1. See my account of the rhetoric of forms as `atmospheric values', above, pp. 47 ff; for the sociological aspects, see `Models and Series' below.

Note from page 109: 2. Thus, in the realm of forms, the tail fins of a car connote speed in the absolute, and this on the basis of formal criteria.

Note from page 109: 3. Dm mode d'existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubicr, 1958), p. 26.

Note from page 111: 4. Of course there is resistance here and there; a kind of `heroic' personalization of driving, for instance, causes some people to disdain automatic gear-changing. But like it or not, such `personal' heroism is destined to disappear.

Note from page 111: 5. Indeed, to some extent this still holds good for mechanical objects. The automobile, for example, has always continued to be shaped, even in its essential vehicular function, by the image of man. In its silhouette, its forms, its internal organization, its mode of propulsion and its fuel, its development has persistently passed up all sorts of structural possibilities out of respect for the demands of human morphology, behaviour and psychology.

Note from page 112: 6. On personalization, see `Models and Series' below. Automatism is deeply implicated, moreover, in the motivations of fashion and the calculations of production: even the tiniest of increments in the degree of automatism is the surest way to decategorize entire classes of objects.

Note from page 113: 7. [Translator's note: The annual exhibition of the Association of French Inventors and Manufacturers, founded in 1902 by Louis Lépine.]

Note from page 114: 8. [Translator's note: I have used `gizmo' for the French catch-all term `machin', whose close kinship to the French `machine' is thus not apparent in the English.]

Note from page 116: 9. A minimal practical impingement on reality is nevertheless always required as a justification for the imaginary projection involved here.

Note from page 118: 10. In a world of miniaturized, mute, unmediated and impeccable appliances, the automobile, thanks to the dramatic visibility of engine and controls, remains the great exception -- and the spectacular object par excellence.

Note from page 119: 11. And perhaps -- who knows? -- to the total mimetism of `spontaneous' self-generation, with coffee mills giving birth to baby coffee mills, just as children imagine. But things could surely then go no farther, because a machine capable of manufacturing an identical machine is, strictly speaking, inconceivable. Such a situation would clearly represent the ultimate in autonomy (a logic which always ends in tautology), but it is a situation that the imaginary realm cannot embrace, because that would mean also embracing magical and infantile regression back to a stage where automatic duplication or scissiparity is possible. Such a machine would in any case be the height of absurdity: self-reproduction being its sole function, it could never pod peas at the same time. ... Reproduction is never the sole function of man himself. The imaginary is not synonymous with madness, and it must always effectively preserve the distinction between man and his double.

Note from page 120: 12. Let me return here for a moment to the fable of the eighteenth-century automaton that I recounted above (see p. 56). When the illusionist, at the pinnacle of his artistry, renders his own gestures mechanical and subtly changes his own appearance, his intention is to bring out his performance's true raison d'être, which is the pleasure to be derived from the difference between the automaton and the man. His audience would be far too alarmed if they were really unable to tell which figure was `real', and he knows full well that creating a perfect automaton, and hence a perfect identity, is far less important than giving play to difference -- and, indeed, that the very best outcome is that the spectators should take the machine for the man and the man for the machine.

Note from page 124: 13. See `Models and Series' below.

Note from page 124: 14. Technics and Civilization (see above, p. 57, note 37), p. 396. The decisiveness of capitalism in this regard is manifest for an entire period, certainly, but once a certain threshold in technological development and in the distribution of goods and products has been passed, things are far less cut and dried.

Note from page 125: 15. Ibid., p. 353.

Note from page 125: 16. See The Strategy of Desire (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), p. 84.

Note from page 126: 17. Mumford, Technics, pp. 275, 276 and 426 respectively.

Note from page 127: 18. Ibid., p. 266.

Note from page 127: 19. In a comparable way we may suppose that cinema and television have passed up, or are in the midst of passing up, vast concrete opportunities for `changing life'. As Edgar Morin has written:

Nobody is surprised by the fact that from the instant of its birth the cinematograph was drastically diverted from its apparent technical and scientific goals, that it was snapped up by show business and turned into the `cinema', with the result that developments that might have seemed natural were atrophied from the outset. (Le cinéma ou l'hanum imaginaire [Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1956], p. 15)

Note from page 131: 20. Dichter, The Strategy of Desire, p. 94.

Note from page 132: 21. A good illustration of this is the legend of the Student of Prague, according to which the protagonist's image steps out of the mirror and assumes the form of a double which haunts him (following the conclusion of a pact with the devil). Henceforward he has no reflection in the mirror, though his image continues to haunt him. One day, when the double happens (as in the primal scene) to be standing between him and the mirror, the student shoots and kills it -- which is to say, of course, that he kills himself, for the double has stripped him of his reality. Just before he dies, however, he rediscovers his true image in the shards of the broken mirror.

Note from page 132: 22. This is what Edgar Morin has called the nihilism of consumption.