vacuum cleaner Print

Oslo Kahn: A presentation by Eric Vernhes. If you can afford it, you may employ someone to clean your home. In that case you are unlikely to have to handle a vacuum cleaner. So there are a number of gestures and cognitive processes related to the handling of this device that you will not be aware of. The somewhat paranoid (and at the same time interesting) aspect of Oslo Kahn's thinking is that the functionalist perspective of the relationship between the operator and the tool is reversed. Basically, he thinks that it is the technical object (the vacuum cleaner) which, through a gestural dialectic imposed by its use, dispenses a secret, encrypted and subliminal message to the operator to convince him of his identity and social classification. We are, it seems to me, not very far from Simondon's concept of individuation of the technical object, but in a modality where the tool does not only tend towards its ideal internal coherence, but also towards its coherence with the whole world by manipulating it on purpose! Gilbert Simondon is also often quoted by Oslo Kahn: "...The primacy of their function leads us to believe that they have no message other than the statement of their use. This is where we are wrong. Technical objects carry a performative purpose that acts upon us to shape the world in order to receive them and make our reality theirs. The result is that our world is more and more alien to us and we lose the use of it. Simondon professed that technology was man's natural mode of expression through the accumulation of millennia of "know-how". I think that technology has now reached a "know-being" that makes a car, a drill or a coffee machine act on us through a hidden dialectic that they implement by their mere presence. This is my certainty. Through the object, something speaks and works for an unknown purpose that we must discover." Citing this passage from one of our rare conversations, it occurs to me that Oslo Kahn may be the missing link between Gilbert Simondon and Philipp K. Dick. Such a conception of the world, full of technological objects whispering in our ears to impose a destiny that escapes us, creates in Oslo Kahn a disturbing relationship with this world and its contemporaries. Contrary to what he writes in the bio I asked him to write, I doubt that he has ever, in his life, left Göttenborg. Terrified by the most banal technological objects, he never leaves the suburban house in which he was born.