postmechanical

English

Etymology

From post- +‎ mechanical.

Adjective

postmechanical

1. (mechanics, engineering) Occurring after a mechanical process has completed.
   • 1989, William Winchell, Realistic Cost Estimating for Manufacturing, page 121:

     Postmechanical operations include: (1) removal of excess weld metal, slag, and weld spatter, (2) rough or finish machining to dimensional requirements of the weldment, and (3) metal conditioning processes such as peening or roll planishing to reduce cracking tendencies physically and to increase weld bead strength.

   • 2015, Charles C. Lemert, Structural Lie: Small Clues to Global Things, page 16:

     Industrial capitalism, in its hard metallic form, is melted away from the hard core of global capitalism […] from human labor time to postmechanical production processes where human labor is reduced to assemblage work, the wastage of which forms the assemblages of human posturban communities.

   • 2019, Jose Antonio Olivares, ‎Daniel Puyol, ‎Juan Antonio Melero, Wastewater Treatment Residues as Resources for Biorefinery Products and Biofuels, page 27:

     Primary sludge is generated by postmechanical treatment after the primary stage, whereas waste-activated sludge is generated via biological treatment by transformation of soluble contamination (mainly C, N, and P) into particulate biomass.

2. Occurring after the end of the machine age.

   Antonym: premechanical

   • 1997, Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix, page 97:

     As Barglow noted in the beginning of this section, how one imagines the human position in the new postmechanical age recalls performance anixeties, penetration metaphors, and phobias of the womb.

   • 2005, D. A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church:

     Is the postmodern world. postmechanical? If the age of the machine include computers and the entire digital world, just watch postmoderns on their cell phones.

   • 2022, Jonathan Sheehan, ‎Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century, page 299:

     By 1763, he was actively wrestling with exactly the questions that we have seen repeatedly put on the table in the postmechanical age.