Getting a Technology to Take a Step Forward

Pierre-Damien Huyghe I no longer know how or why I got to know of the magazine Milieux. I think I simply found it in a bookshop. Its ideas about technology interested me. I had possibly taken note of the fact that the group [that created it], included, in addition to François Dagognet, Jean-Claude Baune, whom I knew through his book La Technologie Introuvable [1980]. I think I wrote to the magazine one day, after reading it. Later on, Christian Bobin, the copy editor, suggested I attend a conference they were organizing at Le Creusot around the theme “In Praise of Poaching.” It was in those circumstances that I developed the first version of Tool and Method. […]

P-D H According to Baudelaire’s highly complex text, what might support the idea of a difference between artistic and technical practice? Baudelaire declared that art and industry are two separate things. But his perception of artistic practice is not that different from that of technical work. But he was caught in a double imperative—there must be a distinction, but he failed to perceive a distinctive difference upon observation of artists at work. So, my thesis is that he provided a suitable description of artistic work, insomuch as it is an execution, with a description of industrial work. The difference would have to do with, in one case, the vulnerability of the risk of taking flight, and the fleeting nature of the design. The artist is supposedly a “genius” for taking extremely ephemeral designs, and, despite that, finding ways of materializing them. In the artistic domain, the initial idea that informs the artist’s work is jeopardized by its essentially fleeting quality.

P-D H That was the very question I raised in the magazine Milieux in 1988. Why is art not thought of as a technological praxis? When I try to recapitulate my work since that article, I tell myself that it might consist of perceiving the sphere of art as an environment of technical/technological praxes, rather than symbolic activities. Why don’t people want to think of art as a technical/technological activity? This is a very broad question: in order deal with it, one must not only create a history of art, but also a history of the perceptions regarding art, to see the extent to which this idea has varied over time. The current use of the term “art” refers to something quite recent in the history of humanity, post-Renaissance. The Greeks did not have a word, or not just one word, in any case, to express this. In addition, the term itself has two possible etymologies. To be sure, there is ars which might, out of convention, serve as a translation of technè. Although the roots are very different, the semantic fields of these two terms actually overlap (a “work of art,” ars in Latin, is certainly a technical fact, a case of technè). But there is also artus, articulation. Perhaps when the Greeks said technè, they meant the articulation of something which has to do with an idea, with something which has to do with materiality. But it is complicated to precisely juxtapose the word artus with the word technè. […]

P-D H Upon rereading the article, that’s what struck me most. I even wonder if, essentially, I haven’t gone backwards instead of forwards on that matter. I point out that the French words “appareil” and “apparat”—respectively “apparatus” and “pomp or ceremony”—have the same etymology. The term “apparatus of consciousness” questions what brings out the dimension of consciousness of the human mind, or the mind, period. Humans are not like other animals. They are capable of manipulating the way they appear in the world, creating the appearance of a presence of mind, that is to say, they have the ability to lend a certain ceremony to all that, and provide themselves with a presence in which they not only perceive themselves, but notice themselves in the very perception—they catch sight of themselves. It seemed to me that it was possible to regard certain pictures as technical objects in the state of “apparatuses of consciousness.” In any event, what was involved for me was seeing art and technology in the same tradition. Even if the picture and the camera (in French appareil photographique) do not stem from the same technicity, I wanted to think of both of them as ways, for the human mind, of “equipping itself.” I was still painting at the time, sometimes collages with images coming from the world of reproduction, and I was trying to go against Baudelaire, by not separating photography and painting. The way of managing to do that involved precisely this notion of “apparatus.” The appareil is not an inert object existing independently of us. The camera only gains substance at the moment when I am with it, in the process of working with it, and looking through its viewfinder. The end of the article tries to say as much. It seems to me that there is no reciprocal autonomy, of human minds on the one hand and technical objects on the other. Everything is in a relationship of continuity. […]

P-D H A good point: why, in fact, hasn’t this been developed? But I indicated an avenue and I nevertheless see that after twenty-five years someone is picking up on it. At the time, in 1988, I liked those ways of making questions resonate. It fitted in with the idea of finishing and preparation that I mentioned earlier: the author does not deliver a finished product to the reader. So we can urge people to read by making the terms resonate in a way that is not completely explained and harmonized. It remains in a state of tension. The basis of the explanation lies in the fact that I understand in “method” the Greek word odos which means “path” or “way.” The method is, first of all, a way. I am using the word in a radical sense and I am saying that, as it happens, we are lacking a path or way in a certain number of experiences. Descartes makes short shrift of this. The Cartesian principle consists of calling into question everything that has to do with experience. But his famous Discourse on Method is literally based on a fiction. If I wasn’t afraid of anachronism, I would say that it has to do with things novelistic. It is the story of a person who shuts himself away and cuts himself off from the experience of the world. Three centuries later, this is what phenomenology would explore the other way round. There is a movement of the mind through the world—the experience of humanity which carries out a movement capable of appearing erratic and haphazard, in which, nevertheless, philosophy finds meaning. The world equips itself, regulates itself and deregulates itself. Something in human experience has to do with a method which is not calculated, calculable or projected, and a path in which output is not an absolute value. I thought that I’d found this idea not so long ago, whereas it was already present in this article. […]

P-D H At the time, I was reading Plato a lot, and it influenced me a great deal. I wanted to get away from a whole series of considerations about him, which in my view wrongly concerned him. For example, the idea, that, in order to start doing something, it is necessary to eschew the material, and start purely from an idea. Is this what is being re-enacted in painting by the first preparation, which erases all traces on the surface and radically whitens it? But this is already a choice of conduct. I put forward the hypothesis that doing something is never starting from nothing, and that one is not obliged to make a clean sweep ;to level things—in order, for example, to start constructing, and initiating something like an architecture in the world. This is anti-Cartesian. On the basis of the terms of later discussions, we might say that this is not “modernist” in the sense whereby modernism, and not “modernity,” consists precisely in leveling things in order to commence. In that 1988 article, in any event where artists were concerned, one never starts from nothing. By extension, is design the name of an activity involving radical creation, developing in a world of tabulae rasae, or, on the contrary, something which “makes do”? I would support the idea that what concerns us, we humans, is not the tabula rasa, but rather making do. Making something (and not “creating”) is not necessarily making something new, it is not creating in the sense of getting something to exist which did not exist at all before. Perhaps what matters is doing things differently with the same resource. This is precisely what Merleau-Ponty proposes in his comparison with language. One does not begin to talk by getting rid of language. Nor does speaking consist of creating words which did not exist. It is rather a matter of getting something, language, to take a step forward using means which already exist. By comparison, an artist’s work consists in taking a step towards a technical medium.

P-D H I’m still dealing with the previous question… At that time, I was not the least bit interested in design, I don’t even know if I knew it existed. My seminar on the Bauhaus began almost ten years later, in 1996. Design is not concerned with what is new. It consists rather in advancing inventions that are already there, already given. This is what I nowadays call “discovering.” Not inventing, but discovering. […]

P-D H One readily changes tools, but it’s often to make the same thing, just more economically. This was a historical problem of design, and also a problem for it—the fact of all that industrial production consisting in using different tools, new machines, in fact, to make what one was already making. In the end, design didn’t place the most emphasis there…

P-D H The “economic” factor is linked to rationality, to a sense, economic as it happens, of output. Much of what one today calls “innovation” is, incidentally, caught up in this. It is not a matter of making something new, but rather of incorporating something new, without this necessarily being seen in the making, in the fact. The viewpoint of the article, given that at that particular moment I was painting with, in a nutshell, traditional tools, was certainly not to precipitate myself into the latest innovations in terms of tools. The issue raised is very clearly to make something that is new out of something that is old. That was my question: the creation of a painting today. Not making an antiquated painting, but rather borrowing an old technique, in order to create something new. As far as I’m concerned, I am being engulfed by a river of inventions which are being stifled (you don’t actually truly perceive them). Here, I’m clearly talking about computer technology. In my story, in my artistic practice, between the old technique that I was trying to push forward, and the most recent techniques that clashed with it in a certain way, there came a point when I had to redefine everything. Perhaps this is where designers of computer programs find themselves today: they are just taking a step forward. But for reasons of ego or reputation, or to feel good about themselves, they prefer to refer to themselves as the “creators” of programs or objects.

P-D H One of the premises of my book À Quoi Tient le Design [2014] is that design comes “second.” It can only start doing or making something in its own name, something that is not the everyday stuff of industrial production, because it is based on something already there. Computer and program design, if it exists, was not, and is not, the beginning of computer science and the notion of programming. It came about because, at a given moment, human consciousness “appropriates” it. When I was producing paintings, I didn’t make my own paints the way artists in the grand classical tradition did; I bought them ready-made, and God knows how careful I was, in choosing the brand, checking the quality of the oils, etc. Consequently, working with those industrial paints enabled me to produce a kind of painting whose resources had been developed a good century earlier. Likewise, on another scale, program design begins fifty years after from the inventions that led to the computer. There’s something “secondary” there. […]

P-D H It’s the first text that proposes it and, incidentally, it was one of the first texts I published. In 1988, “appareil/apparatus,” at that particular time, belonged, for me, to Merleau-Ponty, whom I quote in the article. It was the idea of borrowing something from Merleau-Ponty’s text to move it into another context and in fact bring that word “apparatus” into existence. I think that what preoccupied me a lot at the time was the resonance with “apprêt,” which means “preparation,” (preparation in painting, the apparat or “appearance”…), it was not the camera, which is discussed in a perfunctory manner in the article. So I haven’t really thought about the technical aspects of photography, as such. For example, I still talk about “taking” the shot. Basically I’m not wrong on the basics regarding the comment I made about framing. But today, I would have avoided the terms “shot” and “capture.” From now on, in fact, I’m trying to describe all photographic operations in terms of openness. Photographing is not about “taking” or “capturing,” it’s about opening a machine, using the camera to “open on” to something. The right position implied by the word “appareil/apparatus” is rather to say that it’s possible to nuance this openness, as in painting, when we speak of nuance in terms of colors.

P-D H Absolutely, that’s exactly it. On this point, I think the very end of the article needs to be read again: “In this sense, there is no moment when, with the work being regarded as a finished product, the apparatus might be temporarily set aside until the next time we make use of it.” The fact is that I’ve gradually forgotten the idea that an “apparatus” is something which one cannot set aside. Or rather that one is never really without an “apparatus,” even if, as I have just said, it is standing idle, or if I’m beside it. I’ve obviously used the example of the camera a great deal; the adjustable camera, both being small, objective, material “things,” in order to explain what I meant by “apparatus,” but, in so doing, to a certain degree, I have objectivized the concept. I’m a talking animal but I don’t always talk. So I don’t consistently activate my capacity to “adorn myself with” language. It’s not because I’m not doing anything with it at any given moment that I no longer have any relation to it. This point is made at the end of the article, on which my later work has been a bit silent. I was struck by this when I re-read it. There’s something rather energetic about having said that there’s no human mind or being in the world without any apparatus.

P-D H Yes, perhaps because they haven’t gauged the scope of the meaning of the word “tool” much beyond the implement with which they are working. It would seem to me more interesting if they say that it’s the “thingy”—not the machine—with which they are working. The thingy. In the word “thingy” there are a myriad of possibilities which disappear in the use usually made of the word “tool.” It is traditionally seen as a mere complement, an effective means of execution, something that serially increases effects. There’s this basically Cartesian idea of being master, possessor, and sovereign. But it also implies struggling with the available information of one’s time, with everything around us, and possibly, even in a despairing and desperate way. There is plenty to say about the way in which designers stress the intentionality of their work, when they present its result. It’s the same with artists, and with those who teach artists, and who talk like this: “The artist appropriates a tool in order to…” These words are scary.

P-D H The instrumentalization of the tool is tantamount to the reduction of its presence in the world at the service of an intention. This is what Baudelaire said! Practical gestures and the handling of equipment are at the service of the ideal, of the intention which dominates, which is made use of, which orients, and provides perspective. I don’t dispute the fact that we may need them. But we have to see the difference between the necessary and the sufficient. […] There are situations which interest us and in which something happens that comes to us as we work and which was not part of the initial intention, which takes form and was not previously part of one’s perspective on the subject. Today, I think that certain techniques are terrible because they are limited to the intentional. This is what puts me at some remove from the end of the 1988 text. It’s better if a nuclear power station remains within the intent people have for it, otherwise it’s catastrophic. On the other hand, there are techniques where this sort of risk is not a factor. “Risk specialists” have a lot of trouble thinking that there may be techniques, including painting, photography and film, for which the risk factor is different, not necessarily disproportionate, like painting, photography, and film.

P-D H Most likely, yes. I remember when I was teaching a senior class in high school, there was an [essay] subject I always wanted to assign my students: “Tool, Instrument, Machine.” An instrument is something we seize as a means to an end. I’ve read that certain animals are capable of using instruments in the course of their experience of the world. To get hold of an object that interests them, they will grab a piece of wood, enabling them to shake something from a distance, and eventually make the object fall, so they can get close to it. The instrument is then abandoned. It is something which only momentarily extends the body, which is not the case with a tool. There is no abandonment of the tool. It is stored to be used again, and handed down from one generation to the next.

P-D H Oddly enough, we’re striving towards an instrumentalization of the tool. By that I mean that the user does not worry about the storage space and the upkeep of his tool. It’s the software and the program which take charge of that. Everything happens as if the tool were only worth something during its moment of service: it’s an instrument. This is why, indirectly, in Art et Industrie [1999] there’s a whole debate about the touch ;the experience—of tools with which one works. I made a mistake in Tool and Method when I referred to the photographic operation as “taking a shot” (prise de vue). We should think about the difference between “touch” and “taking,” or “grasping.” Even if one can say that in the age of cameras and computers the antiquated experience of the brush is obsolete, it still maintains a remarkable quality: its elasticity. I remember I used to have favorite brushes I had earmarked for the supple nature of their strength, and the quality of their hairs. You can more or less work with that, you can make that flexibility work. Those particular tools, as long as they are functional, become an “apparatus.” The risk with software packages is that you gain efficiency with these objects that are terribly adapted that one quickly gets the hang of. Often, when one says “this is my work tool,” one is in reality referring to an instrument. There’s something conceptually richer in the notion of tool.

P-D H It may be that “digital design” is not the right expression. It might be better to speak of design “using digital technology” or “in the digital age,” and not put across the idea that there might here be a design specific to digital. The question is knowing if this technique which we call “digital” alters the general conditions in which one can question oneself about the technique. The primary hypothesis to test is to try and answer no. Why might the digital not in its turn be a diversifiable technique, which can possess the quality of an “apparatus”? It seems to me that from the moment when a technique exists it is in principle like this. In a work well after the 1988 article, I discuss the hypothesis whereby, with the appearance of a new technique, we might be dealing with something that has created such an upheaval that nothing would ever be the same, like after a flood. This idea is frequently propounded by zealots of invention. But photography raises issues of technical conduct which can certainly not be dealt with in the same way as for painting, but which, in a certain way, are similar. There may or may not be pictorial virtuosity, and photographic virtuosity, just as there is, more or less, an economy of these techniques. Or more or less of art. I’m not putting forward the hypothesis that it’s all that different with the advent of digital. […]¹1 Excerpt of an interview with Pierre-Damien Huyghe by Anthony Masure at Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val on July 20–21, 2015, about the article “Tool and Method” (1988).