"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right." Ani DiFranco
"Put away your tool." (Shakespeare)
"A tool is always intrinsically simple, however elaborate its mechanism may be, but a work of art, which is a complex of many stages and levels of criss-crossed intentions, is always intrinsically complicated, however simple its effect may seem." George Kubler, The Shape of Time, p. 11.
Jim Dine hammers
Tool and organ:
Gesture and Speech, André Leroi-Gourhan argues that there is a fundamental continuity from the biological to the sociological and that this continuity is realized through the mediation of technology. For Leroi-Gourhan, erect posture leads to new relation between face / hand / tool. He describes the tool as process of exteriorization of the body. He describes technology as “the continuation of life by means other than life”. . Acccording to Stiegler, unlike other mammals, humans remain generalists who specialize—as and when required—by exteriorizing these specialized capabilities in the technical domain outside of the human body. This exteriorization is also simultaneously reflected (or mirrored) back as a process of interiorization where the technologies become embodied by the humans who use them. Stiegler argues that the human and the technical are co-original—in other words that the technical did not emerge out of the (already constituted) human or the human out of the (already constituted) technical but that these two ontological domains co-constituted each other from the very start. Stiegler contends that conscious reflection in (proto)humans first emerged with the use of stone tools because the materiality of the tool acted as an external marker of a past need, as an “archive” of its function. The stone tool (its texture, color, weight), in calling attention to its projected and recollected use, produced the first hollow of reflection.
(see prosthesis)
Henri Focillon describes the relationship between the hand and the tool as a human familiarity, whose harmony is composed of the subtlest give-and-take, not just a matter of habit. (The Life of Forms in Art, p109.) "Once the hand has need of this self-extension in matter, the tool itself becomes what the hand makes it. The tool is more than a machine. " The "exact meeting place" of form, matter, tool, and hand is the touch.
Heidegger discusses tools in Being and Time, claiming that there is no such thing as "a" technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities. For phenomenological analysis, the human-technology relation in the tool is an embodiment relation, as opposed to a hermeneutic or alterity relation. (?) "Equipment is essentially 'something in order to'." (p.97) Heidegger finds an embodied model for understanding the generation of knowledge in the praxis of tool use. He describes the everyday pragmatic relation of equipment or tools as ready-to-hand . (a condition similar to Levi-Strauss's description of bricolage ? see myth.) Heidegger calls the more disengaged, knowledge relation the present-at-hand . While philosophy might generally privilege the latter, epistemological object, Heidegger explores the ready-to-hand as part of a totality of involvements in which lurks an ontological relationship to the world. (This is the basis of his inversion of the science/ technology relation.)
Heidegger's often analyzed example is the hammer. Before being an epistemological object, its being-a-hammer is primarily in relation to work. The hammer in use achieves what Don Ihde calls " instrumental transparency." It "withdraws" when in use, but becomes conspicuous again when broken or missing. (see forgetting) Its dynamic being is contextual. It belongs to a tool-context that includes the nails, the shingles, the carpentry project, etc., which contains, at least implicitly, a way of relating to an entire environment and with it to an implicit "world." In the words of Abraham Maslow, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail."
Ihde qualifies his notion of "instrumental transparency" with the observation that this transparency is never total, that "technology always carries with it a partial or quasi-transparency, which is the price of the extension of magnification that technologies give." (Technology and Lifeworld, p.75) The romanticizing of technology (whether utopian or dystopian) hinges on this desire for total transparency.
Anthropologists have long accepted that tool use and bipedalism co-evolved together. Bipedalism facilitated the use and especially the transport of tools; tool use in turn bestowed such decisive fitness advantage that it had the effect of accelerating bipedalism. This co-evolutionary spiral involved both cultural and biological changes, including for example the opposable thumb and the skeletal transformations that bipedalism broughtabout. Stanley Ambrose (2001), an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, has demonstrated a similar dynamic at work in the practice of fashioning compound tools (tools with more than one part that have to be assembled in sequential order, such as a stone ax with a handle, bindings and a stone insert). Evidence indicates that compound tools were contemporaneous with the accelerated development of Broca’s area in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in language use. Ambrose speculates that the sequential and hierarchical ordering required in the fashioning of compound tools co-evolved with language because language, like compound tools, requires the sequential ordering of reproducible and discrete units. (Katherine Hayles)
Is the difference between the tool and the machine as simple as its source of power: muscular (human or animal) in the former case, and non-organic in the latter ?
For Marx, the tool is the instrument of labor "which seizes upon the object of labor and modifies it as desired." (Capital, p494) and the machine is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operation as the worker formerly did with similar tools." (p.495) The machine replaces the worker, not the tool. "it is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labor, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labor...also indicate the social relations within which men work." (p286) The manufacturing period (which is prior to large-scale mechanical manufacture) " simplifies, improves and multiplies the instruments of labor by adapting them to the exclusive and special functions of each kind of worker. It thus creates at the same time the material conditions for the existence of machinery, which consists of a combination of simple instruments." (p.461)
Is the combination of the human and the tool a machine?