[Commlist] CFP: Culture.s of Technics, innovation and communication: imaginaries, potentialities, utopias

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AAC Volume 11, n°1|2022, Download PDF of this call at shorturl.at/iFGHY


Culture.s of Technics, innovation and communication: imaginaries, 
potentialities, utopias

Issue edited by Eleni Mitropoulou and Carsten Wilhelm, to be released in 
January 2022

Open Access, No author payment a.k.a No Article Processing Charges

Deadline for proposals (English or French): May 15, 2021 (full papers 
due 1 december, 2021)

This issue of the journal Interfaces Numériques centers on the 
contemporary relationship between Technics and Culture against the 
backdrop of an (im)possible technicist culture (Ellul, 1988: 165-182) as 
well as the consequences of the technical as independent of (human) 
intentions (Jonas, 1979). This field of reflection is well established 
in the Information and Communication Sciences at an international level, 
including discussions of “mediatization/datafication,” “responsibility,” 
and “sustainability” in the face of the dynamics of highly technicized 
communication cultures (Couldry and Hepp, 2016; Waisbord, 2019).  These 
dynamics are yet to be understood and analyzed more deeply. In the midst 
of the rise of digital technologies and in light of the seminal classic 
works on technics by Benjamin, Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon or De Certeau and 
works devoted to the relationship between technology and culture 
(Humbert, 1991; De Noblet, 1981), a multidisciplinary approach in the 
humanities and social sciences is needed on these questions. They are as 
urgent in the media industries, which are now resolutely digital, as in 
the creative industries (or those claiming to be such), defined by 
UNESCO (2009) and according to information and communication scholars’ 
works (Bouquillon, Miège & Moeglin, 2013).

The communication industries are mediated, creative, and by essence, 
cultural. They are industrial notably by “the repeated implementation of 
techniques to obtain a certain number of results” (Humbert, 1991, p. 
54-55) or by the place that quantification and data occupy in its 
professional practices (Martin, 2020). The usual relations or ruptures 
between culture and technics will be summoned here to be exceeded in 
favor of a mutual recognition of their role in society: culture feeds on 
technics and technics has meaning essentially in its cultural context. 
This interaction produces pragmatic as much as symbolic results: tools, 
language, uses, relations, know-how, soft skills, materiality, 
representation: “[Humans] and technics form a complex, they are 
inseparable, [humans] invent themselves in Technics and Technics invent 
themselves in [humans]. This couple is a process where life negotiates 
with the non-living by organizing it, but in such a way that this 
organization makes system and has its own laws” (Stiegler, 1998: 190, 
our translation).

With the current issue, our aim is to question what configures culture 
and technology as a milieu. How do they hold together as they interfere 
(Ricœur, 1990)? The root of the word culture itself contains the idea 
of cultivation and at the same time of the transformation of matter 
(Williams, 1985). Is it technology that transforms the culture of 
communication at the risk of standardizing it or is it culture or rather 
cultural hegemonies that lead to technical transformations (Pignier & 
Robert, 2015) and their more or less diversified appropriations? And 
beyond that, how does technology relate to the transformations of 
objects and practices of culture (Doueihi, 2011)? The notion 
of transformation emerges as operational in this regard, especially if 
we approach the relationship between culture and technology through the 
example of communication between beings. A certain level of change is 
needed for a technical element to produce a cultural paradigm equivalent 
to the changes induced by the emergence of writing (Souchier, Jeanneret 
and Le Marec, 2003), industrialization or computational reason 
(Bachimont, 2010).

Technical culture.s thus expresses the situation produced by a technical 
irruption or the irruption of a technology when it takes root in a 
society at a socially and historically given moment, when it transforms 
the state of things and the states of mind proper to the devices and 
practices of communication by being included in those processes while at 
the same time finding in part its own sources in these same 
contextualized practices. It is the perception by society at this given 
moment of a discontinuity, and potentially of a disruption, that 
manifests the evaluation of a technology by its culture; this evaluation 
might, for example, be “innovative”. The situated character of the 
latter – manufactured, for example, by accompanying discourse (discours 
d’escorte) or encouraged by the doxa – will – in the scope of our 
special issue – imply a critical reflection, an openness to comparative 
perspectives on the social, cultural, local, historical or international 
level.

Producers just as much as users of technology are agents in the making 
of technical culture, of a culture of operations and projects, of 
promises and of feats of technology, planned or experienced, and of the 
dismissal and non-lieux of technology. It is depending on hopes, 
successes and failures that the cultures of the technical are at the 
same time something factual (because they manifest the production of 
technology in society) and something transcendent (because they invest 
the technical rationality with creativity and design).

The above questions can be explored within the humanities and social 
sciences by the following possible approaches:

Design and industry

Design, today, is the object of vindication by designers themselves, but 
also of other actors who retain either its material dimension 
(Berrebi-Hoffmann, Bureau and Lallement, 2018), or the diversity of the 
methods (Beudon, 2017), the aura of creativity or a desired innovation 
(Jevnaker, 2010). But if we consider that a discipline is also 
instituted by the retrospectives that build and perpetuate its 
representation with a view to further developments, it is notable that 
design is constructed, mediated, through a staging of its artifacts and 
techniques. How to question the relation between culture and design? 
What can we say about its singular relationship to industry when design, 
a “project” discipline, is summoned, in a given cultural context, as a 
motif, as a figure within discourses on innovation, management or even 
organizations and in quite recent media conditions in and with “the 
digital”?

Promises and practices of change

Whether culturally situated or cross-cultural practices are involved, 
technology is deployed through its promise of change, innovation and 
progress. These notions challenge the expectations and desires of a 
culture because not all cultures want the same thing (Duchamp, 1999: 
183). How does technology fit in with the desire and/or imagination of a 
culture (Martuccelli, 2013), or even a doxa, i.e. a set of opinions 
received without discussion, as self-evident, in a given society? How 
does technology integrate into society or transform it differently 
according to its doxic or cultural motivation? Should we look for the 
problems for which technologies represent a solution in a given context 
and culture or are those contexts universal? Developing a reflection on 
the culture(s) of the technical allows us not to stray from an 
essentialist dimension for thinking about the technical: rather than 
pre-supposing change, innovation or progress, we can think about what 
makes (Simondon, 2001) change either effective, simulated or imagined at 
the heart of an ambient techno-enthusiasm, techno-criticism or 
techno-phobia (Treleani, 2014; Jarrige, 2014).

Norms, uses and governmentality

Although technical tools have allowed humanity to progressively detach 
itself, albeit partially, from biological constraints and have thus 
favored the “fabrication” of culture (Leroi-Gourhan, 1945), the 
interdependence between technology and the living is strong. If the 
ecological crisis is the crystallization of this issue, the 
Corona-crisis brings a very concrete, additional proof, in our lives. 
One ground on which this relationship is negotiated and organized are 
the norms that frame and stabilize these developments. Collective 
negotiations of norms are inseparable from controversies about values 
and are never free of cultural subtexts. Underneath the apparent 
simplification and stabilization of processes of production and use, 
standardization is at the base of a number of communicational, 
industrial and commercial issues. An analysis of the culture of 
technology must be interested in both the regimes of governmentality 
(Rouvroy and Berns, 2013) that are expressed in technical norms and the 
anthropological norms of use. An expression of “care of the self 
(souci de soi)” (Foucault, 1984) of users, and their ambitions of 
“responsibility” (Jonas, 1979), this individual orientation is also 
accompanied, particularly in the context of global challenges and crises 
(pandemic, climate, scarce resources) by collective questioning (ethical 
issues of artificial intelligence, digital sobriety…). How does the 
culture of digital technology play the card of global challenges and 
crises (...) to impose itself? In doing so, does it not tend to exclude 
and obscure other technical cultures that can, and could, confront these 
challenges and the issues that are linked to them?



Bibliography

BACHIMONT Bruno, 2010, Le sens de la technique : Le numérique et le 
calcul, Belles lettres.

BERREBI-HOFFMANN Isabelle, BUREAU Marie-Christine et LALLEMENT Michel, 
2018, Makers : enquête sur les laboratoires du changement social, Paris, 
Éditions du Seuil.

BEUDON Nicolas, 2017, « Mener un projet avec le design thinking », I2D – 
Information, données & documents, vol. 54, no 1.

BOUQUILLON Philippe, MIÈGE Bernard et MOEGLIN Pierre 
(2013), L’industrialisation des biens symbolique : Les industries 
créatives en regard des industries culturelles, Presses Universitaires 
de Grenoble.

COULDRY Nick et HEPP Andreas, 2016, The mediated construction of 
reality, Cambridge Polity.

DE NOBLET Jocelyn, 1981, Manifeste pour le développement de la culture 
technique, Centre de Recherche sur la Culture Technique.

DOUEIHI Milad (2011), « Un humanisme numérique », Communication & 
langages, vol. 167, n° 1, NecPlus.

DUCHAMP Robert, 1999, Méthodes de conception de produits nouveaux, 
Hermès Science Publications.

ELLUL Jacques, 1988, Le bluff technologique, Éditions Hachette.

FOUCAULT Michel, 1984. Le souci de soi. Histoire de la sexualité 
III, Gallimard.

HUMBERT Marc, 1991, « Perdre pour gagner ? Technique ou culture, 
technique et culture », Revue Espaces Temps, 45-46.

JARRIGE François, 2014, Technocritiques : Du refus des machines à la 
contestation des technosciences, La Découverte.

JEVNAKER Birgit Helene, 2010, « How Design Becomes Strategic », Design 
Management Journal, vol. 11, no1.

JONAS Hans, 1979, Le Principe responsabilité : une éthique pour la 
civilisation technologique, Éditions Cerf.

LEROI-GOURHAN André, 1945, Milieu et Techniques, Albin Michel.

MARTIN Olivier, 2020, L'empire des chiffres. Une sociologie de la 
quantification, Armand Colin.

MARTUCCELLI Danilo, 2016, « L’innovation, le nouvel imaginaire du 
changement », Quaderni [En ligne], 91, 
journals.openedition.org/quaderni/1007 
<http://journals.openedition.org/quaderni/1007> ; DOI : 
10.4000/quaderni.1007

PIGNIER Nicole et ROBERT Pascal (coord.), 2015, « Cultiver « le 
numérique » ?, revue Interfaces Numériques, vol. 4, n° 3/2015. Lien : 
https://www.unilim.fr/interfaces-numeriques/382 
<https://www.unilim.fr/interfaces-numeriques/382>

RICOEUR Paul, 1990, « Entre herméneutique et sémiotique – Hommage à A. 
J. Greimas », Nouveaux Actes Sémiotiques n° 7, Pulim.

ROUVROY Antoinette et BERNS Thomas, 2013, « Gouvernementalité 
algorithmique et perspectives d'émancipation. Le disparate comme 
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177, https://www.cairn.info/revue-reseaux-2013-1-page-163.htm

SIMONDON Gilbert, 2001, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, Aubier.

SOUCHIER Emmanuel, JEANNERET Yves et LE MAREC Joëlle (2003), Lire, 
écrire, récrire – Objets, signes et pratiques des médias informatisés. 
Bibliothèque publique d’information.

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», in Les cahiers de médiologie, 6(2), 
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et de croyance », Actes Sémiotiques [En ligne] n° 11.

TRÉSOR DE LA LANGUE FRANÇAISE INFORMATISÉ, http://www.atilf.fr/tlfi, 
ATILF - CNRS & Université de Lorraine

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Oxford University Press.


Submission information

The Submission should be made in the form of a proposal delivered as an 
attached file (file name of the author's name) in rtf, docx or odt 
format. It consists of two parts:

- A summary of the paper of 4,000 signs maximum, not including spaces;
- A short biography of the author(s), including scientific titles, 
research field, scientific position (the discipline in which the 
researcher is located), the section of affiliation.
The file must be returned, by e-mail, by May 15, 2021, 
to (eleni.mitropoulou /at/ uha.fr) and (carsten.wilhelm /at/ uha.fr). Reception will 
be acknowledged by e-mail.

Provisional schedule

- May 15, 2021: deadline for the reception of proposals;
- June 15, 2021: notification to the authors of the proposals;
- September 1, 2021: deadline for the submission of articles;
- September 1 to November 1, 2021: double-blind review and exchange with 
the authors;
- December 1, 2021: submission of final articles;
- January 2022: publication of the issue in both online (open access) 
and paper versions.


Selection process

The editorial committee will meet to select the abstracts and will give 
its answer in June 2021.
The complete article will have to be formatted according to the style 
sheet that will accompany the committee’s response (maximum 25,000 
characters, including spaces). It should be sent by e-mail before 
September 1, 2021 in two versions: one completely anonymous and the 
other nominative.
A second international committee will organize a double-blind reading of 
the articles and will send its recommendations to the authors by 
November 1, 2021.
The camera-ready final text must be returned by December 1, 2021.
Please note that articles which do not meet the deadlines and 
recommendations cannot be considered.

Contacts: (eleni.mitropoulou /at/ uha.fr) or (carsten.wilhelm /at/ uha.fr)


Interfaces Numériques is a scientific journal recognized as a qualifying 
journal in Information and Communication Sciences, and is currently 
under the direction of Nicole PIGNIER and Benoît DROUILLAT. Presentation 
of the journal ranked by the High Council for the Evaluation of Research 
and Higher Education (HCERES): https://www.unilim.fr/interfaces-numeriques/

Indexed at the DOAJ : 2258-7942 (Print) / 2259-1001 (Online)



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