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Madeleine Chalmers, "French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
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A
Hi, I'm Gina Stam, Associate professor of French at the University of Alabama for the New Books Network, and with me today is Dr. Madeline Chalmers, the author of French Technological Thought and the Non Human turn, published in 2024 by Edinburgh University Press. Dr. Chalmers is a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK and holds a DPHIL from the University of Oxford. She's been the recipient of or shortlisted a number of prestigious essay prizes and has written numerous articles as well on topics ranging from the modernist authors. We'll discuss more in her book To Automation and the Idea of Bricolage, as well as editing a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies on French perspectives in conflict in 2022. Dr. Chalmers, thank you so much for being with us.
- [02:24]
C
Thank you for inviting me.
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A
So the title of your book is French Technological Thought and the Non Human Turn, but there is a third unsaid term that is equally as important, and we could call this Catholicism, theology, or maybe even God. Could you tell us about the relationship between all these things that you would like to demonstrate in the book, of course.
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C
So we often think of the non human turn as materialist and in particular as a turn away from Christian or onto theological frameworks where the human is made in the image of God, has dominion over the world and the animals and so on. But the lines of influence that I trace in this book back through French influences such as Gilles Deleuze, Gilles Berciment and Henri Berton actually lead us to what might seem a very unexpected source for that tradition of vitalist thinking. Late 19th century French mystic, Catholic revival. And all of a sudden those references to Nicholas of Cusa or De Hexeity in Deleuze no longer seem accidental or not worthy of comment. They start to point back to what I think is a quite distinctive movement in French thought, a kind of entanglement of philosophy with the and avant garde literature. And that's the story that I try to tell in this book with technology as a focus.
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A
And what was your trajectory to arrive at the subject matter in general and how did you come to this topic in particular?
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C
So I'd always been interested in technology ever since I was an undergraduate. My undergraduate dissertation was on Villiers de Lis, Le Danse la Feature and Alfred Jari's Le Journal, both of which make it into chapter two. So I'd always been interested in how tech technology was explored and problematised and imagined within fiction. And then as a master's student, I started to read post human and non human theory. And what I realized was that far from just being in dialogue or trying to put this historic literary corpus in dialogue with this contemporary theory, I realized that they were actually part of one ongoing conversation. And that was really the genesis of the PhD project and ultimately of this book, was actually trying to tell that long unbroken story.
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A
Yeah. And continuing on that line of thinking, while your endpoint is Le Tour via Deleuze, the way you get there is not necessarily how we might assume. It's not the story that we all kind of know. Could you talk a little bit about how you chose or developed your corpus, some of which are pretty unknown authors these days, and in particular about the importance of the Fantasiacra period for you and your work?
- [05:12]
C
You're absolutely right. There are many potential routes. When I say French philosophy of technology, lots of listeners might immediately think of people like Bernau, Stigler, who I've written on in other projects. They might think of Jacques Ellie. There are lots of potential French philosophers of technology. So this really is, as you say, one specific genealogical strand. It came about, because I followed effectively the footnotes, the references that, say, Jane Bennet makes within her work to Bergson, to Deleuze, following that trajectory back through Simondon, and then also picking up, I suppose, on comments that might previously have been treated as throwaway. So, for example, Simondon's references to surrealism, which I bring out in the book and establishes us, not just passing remarks, but actually part of his bigger project. And that does lead all the way back to the fin de siecle. And it's actually people like Vigny de Lisle, Adon, Alfred Jarry, Marcel Schwab, who might only be known to these neviamis now, but who crop up consistently in works by Roussel, in Roussel's correspondence, in works by Deleuze and Guattari, where they are fundamental, in the opening pages of l', Antiodipe, those are the names that we find as they're thinking about desiring machines. So the van der Sieck is really the source. And, you know, there was a great delight in finding those extraordinary coincidences that aren't really coincidences, but where you come across a name that you don't expect to see somewhere where you don't expect to see it. So it was that really a little bit of literary detective work and following those chains of influence and references and readings. And as I say, because the founder Sieck was where I started as an undergraduate, where I started to think about these ideas, it was the starting point that led me to consider these questions of technology more broadly.
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A
And you employ the term technologos for the way technology acts within the works that you study. What does this mean for you? And in particular, what are the multiple aspects of the Logos you're trying to bring attention to?
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C
Absolutely. So on the one hand, there's the Logos with that lowercase l, which we are familiar with in its kind of rhetorical sense, being connected to ideas of rationality or language. But of course, in Greek philosophy, everything has its own Logos, its own mode of being, and its own mode of expressing that being in the world. And then on the other hand, there's that Logos with the capital L referring to the divine word incarnate in Christ. In Catholic theology, as in the famous opening of John's Gospel, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And technologos is my own coinage to try to describe a particular configuration emerging in this particular historic moment in the fondness in France to describe the overlaying of Catholic theology, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes subverted. Or riffed on with the emergence of new technological forms, telephones, phonographs and so on, and the creation of a literary object, the book or the text, as itself a kind of technical form in its own right. So it's really a term that is trying to capture the way that within the corpus, I'm looking at all of those seemingly unrelated elements intermesh very closely technology, not just as a subject matter for these writers, but as a form through which they're thinking about what it means to be in the world.
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A
Absolutely. And what is the importance of sacramentality in technological thought for your first group of authors, even those who are avowedly agnostic or atheist according to themselves?
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C
Yes. So sacramentality, that idea that external material signs can express an inward grace, throughoutpouring of grace, is the means through which writers, particularly now forgotten writers like Ernest E. L', Ore, the Catholic polemicist, think technology. So Hilaut has this wonderful image of the steam that powers a steam train as being a kind of index pointing back to the actions of the Holy Spirit, which is just as invisible but just as powerful. So sacramentalism works in a very obvious way for someone like Ido, but it also works for people like Zola, where they take the idea, the external material world, as expressing something, a dynamic, a force, but they empty it of the theology. So in this, in the example I use in the book, is Zola thinking about the sort of bomb that's prepared by the anarchists in Paris in his Troisville trilogy, where there, obviously it's a bomb that's being set off underneath Sacre Coeur, where the kind of actions of the anarchists are being contrasted with what Zorola perceives to be the failure of the Catholic Church to live out its mission of love for humanity. So he's using the form and the ideas and the vocabularies, but modifying them for his own, as you say, agnostic, secular kind of version. So that's the kind of link that I'm trying to make that often writers are not Catholic, they can even be aboutly anti Catholic. But there's something about the form, the forms, the motifs, the ideas of Catholicism that is effective, that does read in that time and place, because of the influence and the way that those ways of thinking about the world have sunk down deep into that culture. They manifest even in agnostic or atheistic works. So that's the sort of contrast I'm drawing out there in sacramentalism. That relationship between the material world and the spiritual or the immaterial world is A recurring motif in, in this writing.
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A
Thank you. And another theological or biblical concept that you invoke, starting with the second chapter, is that of the fiat. So what are the two sides of this idea that you bring out? And can you give me an example of how it appears in the works that you write about?
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C
Absolutely. So I think when we hear the word fiat, we might think of fiat as an action that's being done. This is the sort of famous fiat looks let there be light in Genesis. Genesis of course being a particular kind of point of contention in the non human turn as the sort of source for that sort of anthropocentric worldview. But of course, within the Bible that initial Old Testament fiat is counterbalanced or continued, shall we say, in the New Testament, by the Virgin Mary's fiat, Mihi. So let it be done to me in the Annunciation, when she accepts to be the mother of Christ. So what those two sides of the fiat introduce are these ideas not just of agency, which is such a major term in the non human term, thinking about giving agency to non human entities, for example, but also of its opposite, which is not passivity, but patience, understood in its kind of etymological sense as that suffering or having things done to you. What happens in the stories that I'm looking at in that chapter that includes Vignette du Linadans les future, which contains fairly obvious references from its very title to that notion of Eve and Mary as the new Eve? What happens in Jaris de sur Mal, where we have a kind of super male who at the end is crucified and compared to a Christ like figure. We have it in Marseille Schwab, where the opening of John's Gospel in the beginning was the word is sort of articulated by a speaking, an obscene speaking machine that then explodes. All of these different stories are taking these fiats, these acts of creation or the acceptance of creation, and through remixing in some more or less blasphemous ways, the kind of incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, they are making these new technologies, phonographs, steam trains, telephones, whatever it may be, they are making them sort of post figures of the New Testament story and the history of salvation. All of this within that moment of spiritual crisis in the fin de siecle. So it's a sort of looking to the new, but thinking back to that old story or those old stories, and.
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A
In that echo that you bring out between the Old Testament fiat and the New Testament fiat, that leads us to another concept that seems pretty important. For your analysis, which is that of typology, which you understand as having its own variable temporality, this is a term that might not be completely familiar to literary scholars. So could you tell us what typology is in a theological context and how it appears in these fictions of technology?
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C
Of course. So in biblical scholarship, typology is the notion that the Old Testament prefigures the new. In other words, that, for example, Eve in the Garden of Eden, who leads humanity into temptation, prefigures the figure of Mary in the New Testament, the new Eve, who helps to bring about humanity's salvation. Similarly, Christ is sometimes described as the second Adam, repairing or redeeming there where Adam fell. So this idea of typology, Old Testament prefiguring the new, in the fictions that I'm looking at, these Founders sect fictions, I've used the kind of term post figuring they almost are sort of retrospective typologies using the Catholic theological concepts or biblical motifs in order to think about technology, new technologies. And one sort of figure I found quite helpful, and this is the figure who really led me to articulate this in typological terms, is Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist who had this vision for a paradise where we would all be working because we would love work. And it's a sort of industrial utopia that he imagines, and he rather modestly describes himself as Christ's post cursor, in other words, kind of carrying on that sort of work. And in some sense that's what these writers are doing too. Rather than prefiguring something to come, they are looking back to something that has already happened and that particular nexus of why it happens at this time with these new technologies, that's what was so fascinating to me. And to see that pattern repeated over and over in these short stories by these writers and then picked up later on and sort of filtering into French kind of intellectual culture is what was so fascinating to me.
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A
And to pursue this notion of different temporalities, in chapter three, you discussed the relationship of communication of and about technology and temporality. So how does this relate to your larger point about the technologos and Catholicism? When did making plans get this complicated?
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- [18:13]
C
So this is one of the kind of most abstract sort of elements of the book. So I I talk in chapter three about the figure of Charles CRO, who is both a poet with, with whom readers may be familiar, but also is remembered as an inventor who never actually invented anything, but who in physical terms, but who came up with the ideas, the intellectual blueprints for the phonograph and color photography and many other inventions. And in that chapter I'm thinking about this temporality where something simultaneously exists but doesn't exist, where fiction prefigures but also has kind of created at the same time and cause. Patents were submitted to the Academie des Sciences under a strange system known as the pique cachet, where you can send in a sealed envelope with your patent is the wrong word, but your design. And it doesn't guarantee you any kind of rights except the right to be recognized as having come up with the idea. It can be unsealed at your request later on. And I was kind of fascinated by this idea of why you would do this. I'm fascinated as well by this figure who wouldn't, who wouldn't ever physically invent things, but said he was very happy for other people to use his designs to invent things in physical terms, to make the machines to make those technologies. But what fascinated him was the ideas themselves. So I'm thinking about those temporalities and the kind of virtuality that's at work there. So virtuality is the term that starts to emerge at that moment for thinking about technological development and for thinking as well about that idea of things that are present already but haven't yet come into material existence. So he provides that kind of link into starting to think through figures like books and like Shari, who are working much more with those kinds of ideas. So it's that kind of nebulous moment. What happens? Where do technologies come from? At what point can they be said to exist? At what point can they be said to have been discovered? And thinking about the temporality of that.
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A
And not unrelated to this question of temporality, is the end of time. So how do technological and religious imaginations of the Apocalypse connect in your corpus?
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C
Yes. Well, they connect not in the way that we might imagine, not always in the way that we might imagine with robots taking over the world. It does happen in one text. But what interests me is the way that the Apocalypse, which of course is a revelation, that's the etymology of that term, the veil being lifted, gets taken up to think about virtuality. So, of course, the Apocalypse is the end of the world in one sense, but it's also the opening up of another. It's not a full stop. It's a kind of comma, and then on into eternity. And what strikes me is that the Apocalypse, as some of these writers conceive of it, whether that's the very unknown Didier de Chousy in Ignis kind of proto science fiction, or whether it's Gerry or whether it's Bergson thinking about Revelation, thinking in terms of time machines and so on, is that notion of what we anticipate in the future always being based on what has come before, not an end, but a continuation, a reflection of what is already virtually present in our lives now. So that's that kind of point. We tip from DJ De Chouzi actually quoting the book of Apocalypse as he's imagining these sort of sentient automata taking over the world, as he's introducing this character of Cain, who is the biblical Cain, who has been sort of present on Earth ever since the Old Testament. We move from that kind of version of the Apocalypse to ideas of revelation, of kind of blurred boundaries between past, present and future in Jowy and Bergson. So we, again, a little bit like with Sola, we lost the Catholicism, but we retained kind of outward forms and sort of motifs of Catholicism. The Apocalypse remains in terms of its ideas about revelation and temporality, while losing seals and horsemen and, you know, killer automata, as it were.
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A
And Raymond Roussel may not be the most obviously spiritual of writers, but you weave his use of algorithmic processes into your discussions of the technologos. How does this algorithmic temporality play into a religious or Catholic understanding of his work?
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C
So Roussel is one of those authors for whom there is no evidence of any sort of particular theological engagements whatsoever. So I'm coming at him from the perspective of his kind of computational or almost algorithmic composition method, the procedure that he describes in Commonger Chris Certaintime de Mesnivre, where he talks about taking syllables and playing with Sounds to generate different combinations of words and then trying to sort of bring them together, to reconcile them through a story. So to take a sound, take it in two different, direct, and then to find something that can bridge those different sentences. And Wendy Chun, the software theorist, has written about code and computation as a kind of logos. So it's often described or thought about in relation to theology, not just Chern, but Florian Kramer and so on. Code as language that makes things happen. And so it would be interesting to bring that into dialogue with Roussel, because whereas the code is logos, in that software theory, it's about authority and about command. With Roussel we have an almost ecological kind of code, an ecological kind of computation, where sounds can play off one another and where Roussel also experiments with adaptation of his own works. Something that's kind of often overlooked, I think the fact that he remixed some of his novels into plays, which he often had adapted by other people. So he didn't even necessarily always have complete control over those adaptations. So I wanted to think about how he's using notions of algorithm to be creative, to be ceaselessly inventive within his works. Again exploring those ideas of virtuality that sort of emerge quite strongly and linking that to that notion of perpetual creation and reinvention. And of course, there are just a couple of biblical motifs that he does allude to along the way. So of course I've picked up on those as well. But it really is that kind of counter to the way that code has been thought about in a theological context. I think he offers a perfect alternative to that.
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A
And to follow on this question of figures who may not immediately appear to fit into your framework, but ultimately do as we draw to the close of our time, you bring us up toward the present with Gilbert Simondon's technological thought. And he's not an unusual figure to discuss in the lineage of the non human turn. But how does he fit into the spiritual framework you are constructing here? And why do you feel it's necessary to arrive at him through Andre Breton and the Surrealists?
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C
Yes. So Simon dawn was one of those writers who, when I first encountered him, people said he writes about technology. And he writes about technology in a way that is very unusual for someone in the mid-1950s. He's not like Jackie Luna, anti technology. And he was presented to me very much as he is a non human think, almost avant alletre. But actually what struck me most when reading his work was the huge amount of wordage that he devotes to defining spirituality, to reflecting on what spirituality is, what it means within his conception of the world, his sort of theories of individuation. And I was particularly struck by a very long note at the end of his work on individuation about Surrealist objects. So for me, those things I had never heard anyone talk about, but they occupy quite a volume of space in his work. And it's almost as if sometimes people don't always know what to do with some of these digressions that actually, for me, are not digressions at all, but are part and parcel of that thinking of individuation. So the reason that I come to Simondon through the Surrealists is because coming in through the side entrance, as it were, as opposed to through the front door of Hubert Simondon allows us to draw out different things, perhaps, and to look at him afresh, rather than going to the same passages or the same sections that perhaps we might be used to seeing referred to elsewhere. So that's what I kind of hope this genealogy does. And using those, as I say, notes or passages that are just sort of brushed over or not even mentioned in other scholarship is a way to make sure that we are getting a holistic view, I suppose it links to. If I can come back to a question you asked earlier about the motivation for this kind of book. It relates a little bit, as a sort of early career scholar in the uk, to questions I was often asked about which period I was in, whether I was a dis novirmist or a vintiumiste, and also to whether I was a literature person or a theory person. And this book is the kind of response to that, that those distinctions, and if we keep to those distinctions, are actually blocking our view, our view of periods that are much more complex than that, and of relationships between forms or genres or modes of thinking that are actually much more complex. And so by coming into Simondon via Surrealism, not only am I drawing out a link that is there and that is if I would be there, he says the technical object is a Surrealist object quite explicitly. So I can kind of unpack that. But it's also a sort of statement about making that transition from thinking of literature and thought as separate things, to seeing thought, particularly French thought and its mode of expression as literary, and to seeing literature as itself a mode of thought. Vigno du di Ladon refers to Les futures in metaphysical fiction. So these boundaries are so porous. And that's kind of what I hope to draw out by doing slightly unexpected things with Simondant.
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A
Thank you so much for your very rich answers to all of my questions. And finally, before we go, do you have any upcoming projects you'd like to tell the listeners about?
- [30:15]
C
I am currently at work on a second monograph project, which, a little bit like this book, is a rangy genealogy. It's called diy An Alternative Intellectual History of France. And I'm looking at the sort of underside of French theory and finding some unexpected roots in esotericism, indigenous thought, bricolage, neurodivergence, and all sorts of forms of knowledge making that are marginalized or, in other ways, socially unsanctioned. So that's proving to be fascinating and ethically fascinating as well, territory to explore. So I'm deep into that project now and really looking forward to seeing where it takes me.
- [31:16]
A
Well, thank you so much again, Dr. Chalmers, for being with us.
- [31:20]
C
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.