Book Review - Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed

[John Bailey]

(this review drops a bunch of stuff which seems of great interest to
Pynchon, or at least crops up in his novels with regularity)

Mackenzie, Adrian (2002) Transductions: bodies and machines at speed.
London and New York: Continuum.

By Chris Chesher (c.chesher at unsw.edu.au)
Originally written for *Poststructuralism and radical politics* --
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/psrpsg/index.html
January 2003



What’s the difference between a hand-axe and a thermonuclear bomb?

This is one of the ambitious questions that Adrian Mackenzie sets
himself in the book Transductions: bodies and machines at speed.
Mackenzie argues that serious answers to this kind of question have too
often been occluded by a polarisation of analysis between those who see
nuclear weapons as progress, and those who see them as catastrophe.
Neither reading adequately accounts for the convoluted, folded
historical continuum between ancient artefacts and modern technology.

Both apologists and critics of technology tend to see new technical
developments as evidence of changes in human affairs without
recognising the operation of non-human components within these
historical changes. Technology is entirely imbricated with historical
transformations in language, society and culture.
Working in a space cleared by authors in science and technology studies
such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, Mackenzie addresses with great
subtlety and specificity the ways in which human and non-human actors
are mixed together.  As well as the axe and the H-bomb, he uses a
number of examples including clocks, a networked computer game,
performances of the new media artist Stelarc, biotechnology and
databases.

However, Mackenzie is not offering a reading of contemporary
technological controversies. The term ‘technology’ itself is already
too loaded as a problem-fetish. Following Bernard Stiegler and Gilbert
Simondon he prefers the term ‘technicity’. Technicity encompasses
heterogenous and extended components — technical, social, biological,
geographic and linguistic. Any single tool is only ever a technical
element in a wider ensemble. The technicity of the hydrogen bomb
incorporates the extended and historically specific combinations of
knowledge, labour, socio-political milieux and simulation technologies
with which the device emerged.

The key concept of the book is in the title: the transduction (another
term taken from Simondon). Transductions convert between different
domains. For example, a microphone is a transducer that converts sound
into electrical energy, connecting physical realities with electronic
realities. However, the transduction is a very broad concept that
applies to not only to engineering, but also to a whole range of
physical, biological mental and social processes. There are physical
transductions when crystals form in a solution. There are biological
transductions when genetic information moves from viruses into living
cells.

Mackenzie analyses the highly extended transductions between computer
simulations and hydrogen bombs. If technicity mediates diverse and even
incompatible realities, transductions are the events that connect these
components to sustain a contingent metastability.

Mackenzie’s approach privileges ontogenesis rather than ontology: not
being, but processes by which entities come into being. Even apparently
formed beings have zones of contingency that are constantly stabilised
to maintain bodies through time. He extends Judith Butler’s
anti-essentialist accounts of gendered embodiment to argue that
differences between human and non-human are also contingent. This is
combined with Simondon’s contrast between living and non-living in
terms of different transductive operations: living things remain open
to their environment, establishing constantly fluctuating boundaries
between interior and exterior. However, as Mackenzie shows, non-living
things, particularly technical systems, have their own modes of
transduction. This approach makes it possible to investigate ensembles
that comprise technologies and humans without privileging either as the
originator of events. Technology is neither reduced to being an outcome
of social processes (social determinism), nor to being a force that
transforms the social (technological determinism). Instead, the task is
to trace the topologies of their transduction within particular
historical singularities of technicity. Technologies not only serve to
determine some predictable outcomes, but also structure degrees of
indetermination.

A transductive approach extends the domain of the political beyond
language and institutions: ‘politics is in technology just as much as
it is in the more visible and enunciative domains of collective
symbolic interactions.’ (43) However, Mackenzie doesn’t pursue
political questions per se, focusing more on the philosophical
questions of the ways in which technical changes alter the capacities
of bodies, and their experiences of time. In performing Ping body,
Stelarc opens his body to the data traffic on the Internet, which
actually changes what it is to be human. In playing the networked
computer game Avara, users anticipate and accommodate network
latencies, incorporating the indeterminacies of data traffic flows into
the experience of their own bodies.  These case studies are not
metaphors but exemplars of transductions in process. Their significance
is not (only) at the level of meaning, but in how they demonstrate the
altered topologies that condition what bodies can do, and how events
play out over time.

In developing and demonstrating an approach that extends theorisation
of technology beyond textual criticism, social analysis, phenomenology
and psychoanalysis, Mackenzie’s work has connections with a wider
contemporary literature in critical theory. It does not have the
detailed ethnographic grounding of many in actor-network science and
technology studies, but borrows many of its theoretical innovations. It
shares some of the theoretical concerns of Brian Massumi’s recent work
on movement, affect and sensation, and Manuel de Landa’s Intensive
science and virtual philosophy, without their strong identification
with Deleuzian philosophy. Like these works, it is quite abstract and
highly theoretical. But it is necessarily difficult because it is
working at the edge of what is representable, and is well worth the
time and effort.


References

Delanda, Manuel (2002) Intensive science and virtual philosophy, London
and New York: Continuum.
Massumi, Brian (2002) Parables for the virtual. Movement, affect,
sensation, Durham and London: Duke University Press.



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