Instrumentality
On Technical Objects and Orientations in the Later Middle Ages
Illuminating key moments in the intellectual history of the European Middle Ages, Instrumentality opens up the instrumental condition of the human for critical reflection and renewal. J. Allan Mitchell leads readers from three-dimensional objects to two-dimensional inscriptions and onward to overarching disciplinary norms in the early liberal and mechanical arts, showing how these instruments are indispensable to the past—and the future—of the arts and culture at large.
Illuminating key moments in the intellectual history of the European Middle Ages, Instrumentality opens up the instrumental condition of the human for critical reflection and renewal. J. Allan Mitchell reveals how, in the predigital past, we can recognize many of the operative technics, analytics, and metaphorics that continue to shape human sense and cognition today.
Exploring the diverse modalities of medieval instruments, Mitchell’s case studies encompass techniques as seemingly distinct as time-keeping mechanisms, mathematical diagrams, logical syllogisms, and the literary devices of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. A cultural and intellectual history, Mitchell’s work leads readers from three-dimensional objects (physical mechanisms) to two-dimensional inscriptions (maps and diagrams) and onward to overarching disciplinary norms in the early liberal and mechanical arts. Prying loose the subtle, adaptable, and generative concept of technical objects from limiting contemporary frameworks, he shows how these instruments are indispensable to the past—and the future—of the arts and culture at large.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Intelligent Objects
Planispheric Astrolabe—Ornament and Organopoiia—Multilingual Scientific Cultures—Multiscalar Models—Plane and Spherical Geometry—Technoscientific Hybrids—Fictus and Technical Figures—Womb, Mother, Spider, Horse—Hylomorphic and Epigenetic Change—Intensification and Extension of Sensation and Cognition
2. Graphic Interfaces
Flat Media—Point, Line, Curve—Documents as Devices—Diagrammatic Figures and Functions—Graphs, Maps, Games, and Other Inscribed Spaces of Action and Intellection—Mathematics and the Chord Diagram—Model Dependence and Metaphorical Transfer—Imagined Archery—Achieving Katascopos
3. Learning Devices, or Instruments of Language and Literature
Disciplines and Divisio Scientiae—Aristotelian Instrumenta Philosophiae—Logos in the Organon—Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetics—Possessio and Usus—Subalternation of the Sciences—Stories as Philosophy’s Instruments—Grammaticus, Criticus, Literatus—Science of Useful Devices—Mechanical Arts and the Invention of Literature
Conclusion: Toward a Critical Instrumentality
Critiquing Instruments—Heideggerian Equipmentality—Simondon’s Technical Objects and Stiegler’s Instrumental Condition—Technocratic Modernity and Instrumental Reason—Academic Working Conditions—Freire’s Instruments of Critical Discovery, and Other Available Models—Critical Instrumentality, or Retooling the Arts
Notes
Index
