Sobre o socius e as séries mecânicas

Abstract

Machines, as a landmark or condition of the era of industries, summed up a myriad of utopias and dystopias: between production, efficiency and freedom, between scarcity, control and servitude. Delegated to the substrates of central themes of the Social Sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries, machines could disturb them sometimes as potentially warlike and ungrateful beings, sometimes as vigorous and submissive proles. This thesis forges a historical bibliographic program in the Social Sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries where mechanical beings and organic beings strain their material protagonisms. What are the limits of the socius when the protagonism of the mechanical beings becomes capital in the course of organic beings? The historical bibliographic program of this thesis consists of four distinct explorations of this circumstance: (1) on the machines as object of a Social Science; (2) on the authority of the technical apparatus at labour; (3) on the industrial coincidence between mechanical and organic collective morphologies; (4) on the production and reproduction between organic and mechanical beings. Carrying out such a historical bibliographic program renders this thesis obsolete. But it does so as a strategy: it is necessary to take an obsolete perspective to exploit the subtle positions of the mechanical series in these peculiar variations of the Social Sciences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By avoiding the shortcuts of symbol, of meaning (and of mediation) this thesis offers an extraofficial point of view on the socius and the mechanical series in so-called social sciences.