Tekhnè, Technique, Technologie

we and our fellow convenors of the 2009 conference of the Australian Society for French Studies invited contributions from the field of French Studies, broadly defined, to the discussion of these notions of “tekhne”, “technique” and “technology”. As might be expected, given the core business of many of us working in French Studies, various papers were received on technology and language learning. For this special number of the Australian Journal of French Studies, however, we wanted to trace the articulations across fields and times that the juxtaposition of these terms invokes in order to see, precisely, how the construction of self as individual or part of a collective has always been a matter of technique, an infolding of an outside, where in- and outside are mutually constitutive. All of the contributions in this volume speak to this in-folding of self and technology in their own ways and from within the various folds of the discipline of French Studies. The papers take as their objects a variety of specific technologies (weaving, transport, photography) and techniques (of oppression and resistance, of warfare, of representation, of rhetoric, of music and body, of locating otherness within the self), but they are concerned above all with the ambiguity of our relationship to technology/technique, of the role of technology in relation to the self, of the positions available to the self in relation to technology, and the shaping of the self through technique. Whilst there is a great deal of coherence to this volume, there is also great disparity. This is only fitting given the nature of the discipline of French Studies, which encompasses so many different kinds of research and activities

Cliché · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Linguistics · Media studies · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Relation (database · Representation (politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Variety (cybernetics · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Cultural Insights and Digital Impacts · Law · Philosophy