Technical machines and evolution

How does one tell the story of a machine? Can we say that technical machines have their own genealogies, their own evolutionary dynamic? The technical artifact constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or a line. At a cursory level, we can see this in the fact that technical machines come in generations; they adapt and adopt characteristics over time, 'one suppressing the other as it becomes obsolete.'[2] So are we to understand this dynamic from a biological, a zoological or a sociological perspective? I want to locate a dynamic in technics that stems neither from the soul nor from human societies, which grants the technical object its own materiality, its own limits and resistances, which allows us to think technical objects in their historical differentiations. This calls for a new consideration of technicity, and a new consideration of the human being in relation to technics. The task will be difficult -- 'at its very origin and up until now, philosophy has repressed technics as an object of thought. Technics is the unthought.'[3] This essay will be a collection of notes towards such a perspective; it will be a prolegomena to the history of a technical machine, a history which is not included here and which has yet to be written. In this essay I will be exploring the work of Bernard Stiegler in relation to technicity and to human thought, but my task will not be to invert the history of philosophy itself, to 'imagine the human as what is invented' by technics.[4] I do not wish to put forward a theory of human evolution. My intention is much narrower, or perhaps more jaded; I want to clear a space in which a technical object might evolve, and in which I might trace such an evolution.