Chaosophy - autonomous learning

to constitute a machine through recurrence and communications; the
existence of a "machinic phylum." Ergonomics comes close to this
point of view when it sets the general problem, no longer in terms
of adaptation or substitution-the adaptation of man to the
machine, and of the machine to man-but in terms of recurrent
communication within systems made up of men and machines. It
is true that just as ergonomists become convinced that they are
confining themselves in this way to a purely technological
approach, they raise the problems of power and oppression, of
revolution and desire, with an involuntary vigor that is infinitely
greater than in the adaptive approaches.
There is a classic schema that is inspired by the tool: the tool as
the extension and the projection of the living being, the operation
by means of which man progressively emerges, the evolution from
the tool to the machine, the reversal in which the machine grows
more and more independent of man .,. But this schema has many
drawbacks. It does not offer us any means to apprehend the reality
of desiring-machines and tneir presence throughout this circuit. It is
a biological and evolutive schema, which determines the machine as
an event occurring at a given moment in the mechanical lineage that
begins with the tool. It is humanistic and abstract, isolating the productive
forces from the social conditions of their exercise, involving
a man-nature dimension common to all the social forms, to which
are thus lent relations of evolution. It is imaginary, phantasmal and
solipsistic, even when it is applied to real tools, to real machines,
since it rests entirely on the hypothesis of projection (R6heim for
example, who adopts this schema, shows the analogy between the
physical projection of tools and the psychic projection of phantasies).!
We believe on the contrary that it is necessary to posit,fiom
the outset, the difference in nature between the tool and the
machine: the one as an agent of contact, the other as a factor of
communication; the one being projective, the other recurrent; the
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