The birth of techno-logos: the writing of Simondon as a techno-aesthetic

object
"Arché, dove 'il nascimento comanda.'" (Colli 1996)

Natalia Ortiz Maldonado and Gonzalo S.

Aguirre

Abstract

We propose to approach Simondon's writing as a techno-aesthetic object, as a

singular prose of thought. To do so requires assuming Simondon's technological
proposal as the creation of a new mode of knowledge about the technicality of
objects, abandoning the idea that the word "technology" can serve to designate a
given state of things. This proposal, cultural and educational at the same time,
requires a new way of approaching the world, starting with the way we approach
reading. The techno-aesthetics of Simondon's writing also requires a techno-
aesthetic reading.

Keywords: technology; techno-aesthetic object; writing; thought prose

1- Introduction

Gilbert Simondon's work recovers three lost objects from Modern Philosophy:
the metaphysical object, the technical object, and the normative object (always
next to the aesthetic object). This triple conceptual recovery has its correlate in
educational proposals to give concrete place to that recovery. Thus, a
Mechanology or Psychology of machines. Thus the urgent need for a new
technology, a new techno-logos, a "science of correlations and transformations,” a
new discourse on technique that at least alters the contemporary ear before the
word "technology.” This notion has been fixed to such a point that it refers to a
certain set of "electro-digital" technical objects without taking into account the
philosophical conception that encompasses them. Expressions such as "I don't
get along with technology" commonly indicate that one is not a user of any digital
social network, but do not give reasons why no musical instrument is played or
someone is not dedicated to sculpture, or does not use blenders or any other
household appliance. Much less do they account for a specific discomfort with a
conception (logos) of the technique or even with a technique of the logos, with a
specific techno-logos.

Well, here we try to account for Gilbert Simondon's discomfort with the
current conception of technique and technical objects. The current techno-logos
enables "technology" to be thought as if it were a certain state of things and not a
discursive conception of the techno-aesthetic processes at play. Moreover, we
would like to point out that this techno-logos also turns out to be a techno-
aesthetic object whose mode of production and composition today responds to
the same characteristics of what we call "technology."

The notion of techno-aesthetics would be a tributary of the old notion of

techné, where art and technique are integrated to give rise to works of either an
operative character or an affective-emotional character, or a link between the
two. These works, in turn, may or may not appear as concrete objects, thus
giving rise to "metaphysical objects" of thought that point to the presence of non-
phenomenal forces that convey what Simondon calls the process of individuation
and that would require a kind of "ritual of perception" capable of valuing them,
of restoring the lost aura of the works in the era of perceptive normativity to that
which has not even remained, as Nietzsche indicated in "History of an Error,” the
phenomenal world; hardly a statistical reverberation that we call "world.”

In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1960), aesthetic

experience emerges as a (precarious) mediation between religiosity (as a link
with the indeterminate forces of the world, the universal tendency) and
technique (as a link with the materiality of the world, the particular tendency).
But according to Simondon religiosity became a concept and abstraction, while
technicality was reduced to mere function and utility, in ignorance of the entity
of the object and the power that inhabits it. For us, beings of post-magic,
aesthetics would be a dimension that allows us to (precariously) link the
universal forces with the materiality of the world, and in this measure allows us
to return beings (spiritual, technical, of thought) to the experience of the process
of individuation. The value of aesthetic thought, Simondon points out, lies in
being able to link radically singular experiences with each other, a value that
could enrich the dimension of science and philosophy which, like everything else,
would be debated in the double alienation of abstraction and utilitarianism.

In On the Mode of Existence... aestheticism emerges as a direct experience

of pre-individual power, it is pre-categorial and incommunicable, and it is
located at the antipodes of what Modernity called art. Aestheticism is not a
communicative link between living beings, it does not represent or reflect
anything, it is not transferable, nor is it necessarily found within a certain
institution. It is ubiquitous, insofar as the whole process of individuation is its
stage and any object located in a place or at a key moment can be an access road:
a hydroelectric power station, a promontory, the interior of a forest, a screw, but
also a painting, a piece of music, the gesture of a hand, etc.

In aesthetic beings it is clearly perceived what in reality is proper to all

beings: that the pre-individual powers inhabit them and exceed them (or, in
other words, every object can be an aesthetic object). In the aesthetic experience
there is an exchange and an expansion between the individual and the world,
between the individual and the forces that cannot be known or dominated. When
the mountaineer reaches the top of a mountain, he does not do it to dominate it
but to establish with it a bond that Simondon calls "friendship.” In this becoming
of the ascent to the highest peak, mountain and mountaineer co-individuate,
expand reciprocally, and expand to the world. An update of possibilities takes
place there and, from then on, the way is opened for new unthinkable
experiences before the ascent.

2- The techno-aesthetic mystery

In 1982 Simondon replied in a letter to Derrida who had invited him to join the
International College of Philosophy. Instead of accepting the invitation,
Simondon asks how it can be possible that, when it comes to the teaching of
philosophy and technique, this College does not grant any curricular space to
religiosity, that is to say, to practices and ideas occupied by the link with the
indeterminate, with the forces that religions have turned abstract but that
continue to inhabit the world. In the same letter, he proposes the notion of
techno-aesthetics: technique because aesthetics, he says, aesthetics because
technique. Magical experience and technical experience, heterogeneous in their
procedures, notions, and sensitivities, do not exclude each other but transduce,
which is why it is possible to see what is aesthetic in technique and what is
technical in aesthetics. Techno-aesthetics refers to a region that is defined by two
questions: a specific affection and a way of dealing with mystery.

Aesthetics is not only or primarily the sensation of the 'consumer'

of the work of art. It is also, and more originally still, the more or
less rich sensory ray of the artist himself: a certain contact that is
being manipulated. We feel the aesthetic affection soldering a metal
or placing a lag bolt. (Simondon 2017: 371)

What in On the Mode of Existence... appears as the reciprocal exchange and

expansion between man and world now emerges as a "sensory ray.” Aesthetics is
not a discourse about art or any mode of the sensorial in the one who
contemplates, but it is the experience of the one who executes an act. A piece of
erotica articulates the indeterminate with the body and its sensibility in a
definitive way: the ray. The nervous system, that network of multiple
electromagnetic impulses, receives that which passes through it as impersonal
(or sacred, as Simone Weil points out) but also as the diaphanous materiality of
the pierced body.

The "sensorial ray" opens a perceptive channel, or better still, a

perception at the moment when the cultural perceptive web is anesthetized by
an excess of data. As Buck-Morss and Mircea Eliade point out, while Benjamin
reformulates the psychoanalytic theory of shock to formulate the hypothesis of
collective anaesthesia, the philosophy of religions points out that every initiation
is preceded by the "experience of lightning" where a change in the sensory
regime takes place: you see what you did not see, you change your skin, you hear
new sounds. In this way Simondon's aesthetic perspective enables the work of a
political thought occupied by sensitive regimentation in societies of hyper-
stimulus, where the experience of lightning destabilises the plot of the present
and allows the perceptual and intellectual distance of critique to be established.
 Along with the sensory experience, both in On the Mode of Existence... and
in the letter to Derrida, Simondon insists on the presence of an aesthetic
mystery:

It is the original reality that remains mute, not present, past and yet
to be lived, in a quasi immediate and therefore mysterious way. What
is central is the mystery, itself unrepresented. (2017: 371)

The techno-aesthetic mystery appears as the imminence of that which has not
yet happened and whose latency is perceived. Irrepresentable and patent, the
mystery appears in the aesthetic experience as the imminence of the pre-
individual charge that inhabits and pierces. The feeling, the pathos, of this
experience, adds Simondon, is the joy that derives from composing, from co-
individuating, from amplifying... Techno-aesthetics implies both an estrangement
from the world (after its apperception) and an enchantment of the world (after
its mystery), both a remoteness from disciplined perceptions and an encounter
with the preindividual forces and the joy of this amplifying composition. From
these elaborations it can be thought that between the sensitive experience and
the experience of thought there is a hiatus but not an abyss, there is a proteic
articulation between the beam of possible experiences that does not indicate
hierarchy nor dominion.

We cannot know individuation (in this case techno-aesthetic

individuation) because the experience of thought does not provoke the silences
that are essential for sensible non-representability. But neither can we know it
because the individuation, the becoming, by principle does not stop between the
attempt of fixation that the concepts realize. Far from all obscurantism but also
from all spontaneity, Simondon adds: but we can individuate ourselves and
individuate in ourselves. We can adapt ourselves to that becoming which, in the
case of techno-aesthetics, means, in Nietzschean terms, to experience the field of
the (not always) innominate forces of which we are a part. The technique
appears geometrically as an interbreeding of forces, concludes Simondon and
puts an end to the letter to Derrida (2017).
3- Philosophical thought must operate the integration of the technical
reality in the universal culture founding a technology i

There is a mismatch between the culture that governs men and machines: these
tend to govern men because men believe they use them and, therefore, they do
not relate culturally to them. They do not relate to them through the culture that
governs them and that would also govern technical objects.

Today we call technology those technical objects that have been left
outside culture. The integrated ones are hardly noticeable: writing, tappets,
containers... Hence, it is necessary to recover, together with the technical object,
the normative object and the metaphysical (linking) object. The latter used to
correspond to the philosophical sphere and then to the religious sphere
(religare). Perhaps today it corresponds to the field of technique to assume this
force of link in itself. But if its technicality is not understood then the technique is
expressed only as dominating and not as a link; not even as linkable by a new
religious device of affective-emotive or cultural character, be it normative or
aesthetic. This new device will first of all have been expressed by the
Simondonian proposal of a Mechanology and, later in his work, by a techno-
aesthetic, when Simondon detected in the aesthetic domain the capacity to
assume contemporaneously that linking task.

4- The logos of technology is the logos of literature as a technique: towards

a techno-aesthetic writing or prose of thought.

"What links aesthetics with technique is a continuous spectrum." (Simondon 2017: 371)

There is an inherent birth of technique, its essence, its specific logos:

In a machine, there is a chain of operations of tools that act on each

other, which makes it that, in this transductive chain [neither
deductive nor inductive], each one of the elementary tools is at the
same time operant and operated, nature-object and subject-
operator. The logos of technology is said chaining (different from
 the gaze that the knowing subject throws on the known nature), the
metron of the transductive relation. (2017: 131)

This is why it is not only a question of generating a new logos about technique,
but also a logos or discourse that collects the logos of the technical object itself.
This collection can only be accomplished transductively or by real analogy. If
"the logos of the machine is the chain transfer, the multiplication of the elements
of mediation between the operator and the thing, since these elements act one on
the other in serial order" (Simondon 2017: 132), a prose will be needed whose
logos resonates with that of the technical object whether in its utensil, machinic,
or cybernetic phase.

According to Simondon there is a hermetic history of the logos of

techniqueii according to which three modes of operative collection can be traced:
the chemical technology of the alchemist, the physical technology of machines,
and an informational technology of cybernetics. Hence it is not only a question of
understanding the logos of technique, but also the historical conditions in which
this technicality is hermetically expressed. Mechanology would correspond to
the second hermetic phase of technique (that of machines). Perhaps for the third
cybernetic phase a new linking strategy is needed, characterized precisely by
Simondon's techno-aesthetic research. It is under these conditions that
Simondon can compare a contemporary car with a Roman child:

A car, after having been built, to be viable, must still be purchased, like
the Roman child who, after having been brought into the world by the
mother, was only admitted into life if he passed the elevation.iii (2017:
300)

It could be said that through the technical informational object the flight line of
the normative-cultural device in force passes, as in its chemical moment it could
have passed through the freed slaves. An open, generous technical mentality,
without technocratic phobias or optimisms, is therefore needed to give rise to
the pending mechanological task which, in turn, will enable the cultural and even
religious recovery of cognitive-operative schemes as modes of affection-emotion
expressed either in norms of evaluative action or in aesthetic objects: "If we look
for the sign of the perfection of the technical mentality, we can bring together in
a single criterion the manifestation of cognitive schemes, affective modalities and
norms of action: that of openness” (Simondon 2017: 302).

It is precisely here, in "The Technical Mentality," probably from 1961,

where the idea of a certain predominance of the so-called Fine Arts appears to
carry out the task that in MEOT was conceived mechanologically. At the same
time, in this writing the germ of the notion of the techno-aesthetics of 1982 can
already be found, with which the mechanical project of a psychology of machines
proposed in 1958 would be crowned. And it is that which, conserving the
epiphanic and contemplative features of a technical initiation, points out the
technical phase and the aesthetic phase of the technical objects:

The beauty of a tool is far from being solely functional. The object is a
manifestation, an epiphany. But can the object manifest its excellence,
reach entelecheia if we are content to contemplate it? (2017: 379)

Now, this condition of entelechy can also correspond to living beings, and also to
physical beings. According to the "process of individuation" they, as well as man
and technical objects, are insufflated by the same force of pre-individual
existence. Capturing this force, collecting it requires a technique that we will call
art or logo technique, assuming an expressive mutation in that collected force
that has now become logic (not neccesary logical). It is no longer a question of a
logos of or on technical objects or on aesthetic or normative or metaphysical
objects. Here we are witnessing the birth of technology as the capacity to capture
or collect the engendering force that gives rise to the process of individuation.

We understand that Simondon's work is inscribed within this techno-

aesthetics that runs through the capacity to capture the expressive force of any
of the three phases in which Simondon unfolds the history of the logos of
technique. In short, we would like to state that writing itself can be approached
as a techno-aesthetic expression or object, as an entelechy. We understand that
therein lies Simondon's literary heritage and, at the same time, his commitment
to a "prose of thought"iv as a techno-aesthetic chance capable of recovering the
metaphysical object or, at least provisionally, the force of the link between the
technical operative objects and the normative affective-emotive objects. Under
these conditions, a merely operative and non-literary or non-aesthetic reading of
Simondon's work, and in particular of Individuation in the Light of Notions of
Form and Information, will move the reader away from the very essence of
Simondonian writing: transduction, the change of signal, the capture of the
germinal force of the individuation processes that give rise to physical, living,
psycho-social, technical, aesthetic, normative, and connecting beings such as
techno-aesthetics. Through the latter, the process of individuation can recognize
itself.

5- Writing of Simondon

Simondon writes about sacredness without falling into any of the usual
commonplaces: he does not surrender to the exotic, nor does he retreat to the
unusual. On the contrary, he deploys a precise machine where he does what he
says must be done: he articulates technique and sacredness. Technique of
writing, craft on grass and tone, handling quotations and silences, giving account
of a field, making arguments; magic as an opening point to other points, open
writing, as singularity and place of passage. Magic so that the machine does not
close in on itself.

"The sense of technicality will communicate with real sacredness when

there are not working priests but technical priests" (Simondon 2017: 87).
Simondon belongs to the lineage he himself points out.

Combes claims: not to flatten Simondon's power by privileging only one of

its dimensions (the technical one). Nor is it curious that this request should be
ignored: because Simondon is right that our civilization is prey to use and
automatism, stripped of itself; precisely because of this, sacredness cannot be
thought of together with technique. Individuation... is a grammar machine to
enable transduction, a grammatical transducer. If transindividuality is the key
notion so that thought does not close in on itself, the text Individuation…, as well
as other writings by Simondon, are techno-aesthetic artifacts created to make
transduction possible. This is why the text produces both links between
kingdoms and hiatuses and suspensions of writing: it is a specific technique and
not a narrative resource. The techno-aesthetic object that is Simondon's writing
allows him not to fall into one of the most sterilizing traps of the twentieth
century: that of the thought that gloats explaining its own impossibility. On the
contrary, his technical writing device is magical because it allows connections,
articulations, because it makes life proliferate. He manages to escape from the
endless game of immanence versus transcendence, not dodging it, but crossing
the playing field on foot. Walking.

Writing creates a continuous current. A process is narrated. A tension is

raised, a myth, an argument. It is told how the fire melted the metal. The path of
writing expresses a distance, the empty space between the steps, the extension
between two steps and not the step. The investigator of emptiness is the creator
of Chinese prose, in the same way that the man who seeks what is not done is the
creator of the text on minerals, motors, towers, promontories, hydroelectric
plants, pedagogical methods. There is no paradox: searching for what exists but
cannot be grasped, writing proliferates and moves between kingdoms. To
express the inexpressible, an enormous plane is expressed. Radiant. Opaque.
When writing concentrates on what happens, on what is similar between two
dimensions (on what is of nature in the technique, on what is sacred in the
collective, on what is erotic in a forge) it allows articulation. Take the steps. It
follows the vein. Proceeds. A writing that continues in this way, coupling itself,
does not need God, does not need the Subject or the undivided Self, nor Matter as
something external to its formv. That writing does not fear being lost, it does not
need to guarantee a unity. That writing does not fear because, although it may
seem strange, there is always the world (that is its guarantee).

To interpret is to join the life of the creature with the life of the idea. In
short, Benjamin said, all human knowledge, in order to be justified, must
articulate life with a star ideavi. Simondon also maintains that the project of the
unification of culture (which he says he wants to take "to the end") consists of
articulating technique with sacredness, and this task is called aesthetics. Forgive
me if all this is unintelligible, Benjamin said to Rang in the letter, but we are on
the very edge of a somewhat bad utensil. Astrology, he will say later, tells us that
we no longer have the perceptions to link constellations and men. However, we
have a place where the archaic forces of clairvoyance have been deposited, and
that archive is language. Perhaps Simondon's writing is like a Dionysian mirror
of that archive.

University of Buenos Aires

6- References

Aguirre, Gonzalo. “Simondon como educador. Una lectura transductiva en clave

latinoamericana.” In Blanco, Parente, Rodríguez and Vaccari, eds., Amar a las
máquinas. Cultura y técnica en Gilbert Simondon, 173-194. Buenos Aires: Paidó s,
2015.

Barthélémy, Jean-Hugues. Penser l’individuation. Simondon et la philosophie de la

nature. París: L’Harmattan, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. “Cartas 1918-1939”, Revista Minerva nro 17, traducció n

Guadalupe Gonzá lez, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 1989. Disponible en
http://www.circulobellasartes.com/revistaminerva/articulo.php?id=468
(ú ltimo acceso el 20 de agosto de 2018).

Buck Morss, Susan. Walter Benjamin, escritor revolucionario. Las Cuarenta,

Buenos Aires, 2015.

Colli, Giorgio. Filosofia dell’espressione. Adelphi, Milano, 1996.

Combes, Muriel. Simondon. Una filosofía de lo transindividual. Cactus, Buenos

Aires, 2017.

Eliade, Mircea. Herreros y alquimistas. Alianza, Madrid, 2012.

Ferná ndez, Macedonio.No todo es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos,. Corregidor,

Buenos Aires, 2001.

Heredia, Juan Manuel. Simondon como índice de una problemática epocal.

Director: Pablo E. Rodríguez. Tesis doctoral inédita, Universidad de Buenos
Aires, 2017.

Morey, Miguel. Vidas de Nietzsche. Alianza, Madrid, 2018.

Ortiz Maldonado, Natalia. “La experiencia del mundo, su expansió n y la escritura.

La estética segú n Gilbert Simondon,” en Blanco, Parente, Rodríguez y Vaccari
(comps.), Amar a las máquinas. Cultura y técnica en Gilbert Simondon, 361-373.
Paidó s, Buenos Aires, 2018.

___ . “Razó n anestésica, tecnoestética y escritura. Modos de percibir la opacidad

de lo cercan, en I Jornadas de Filosofía 2016, UBA-FFyL, Buenos Aires, 2017.

Simondon, Gilbert. El modo de existencia de los objetos técnicos. Prometeo,

Buenos Aires, 2007.
___ . La individuación a la luz de las nociones de forma e información. Buenos Aires:
Cactus-La Cebra, 2009.

___ . Sobre la técnica. Cactus, Buenos Aires, 2017.

___ . Imaginación e invención (1965-1966), Cactus, Buenos Aires, 2013.

Weil, Simone. “La persona y lo sagrado” Escritos de Londres y últimas cartas.

Trotta, Madrid, 2000.
i
Same title as Part Two, IV of On the Mode of Existente of Technical Objects.
ii
Three hermeticisms that correspond to the moment of a closing that generalizes by anticipation: "that of
Antiquity descended from the living to the inorganic; that of the nineteenth century rose from the energy of
machines and the economy of production and consumption towards man as a worker, but also as a social being
and as the founder of cultural superstructures; the hermeticism sketched on the horizon is rather transductive
and proceeds according to a horizontal movement of extension by generalization and study of interactions in a
system of multiple states of equilibrium, with effects of circular reaction, amplification, self-amplification
(escalation) or self-stabilization” (2017: 169).
iii
A singular fact in Rome, the institution called elevatio: The pater lifted the infans from the floor and placed
them on his knees, that legitimized him, it was what made him the son and inscribed him in the lineage. It was an
almost obligatory gesture when it was about a son of the matrix, but of voluntary choice of the pater when it was
about the son of one of the concubines or of a slave. On the other hand the adoption by means of the elevatio of
children of others was very common. The children who were not "elevated" were foundlings, that is to say,
abandoned, exposed at the street door or in some alley where they could be picked up by some charitable soul...
or not.
iv
The notion is by Miguel Morey. Here is an active example: "The Prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra gives a first
magnificent example of a prose of thought that is constructed by means of scenes and figures, on a narrative
support” (2018: 284).
v
One would say that another writing that fulfills these characteristics is that of Macedonio Ferná ndez. Just
Macedonio himself affirms that Arthur Schopenhauer's metaphysical vision contains a unique fault attributable
“to a mere intellectual automatism, surreptitiously slipped in, in a moment of weakened control”;"Schopenhauer
repeats the distinction Subject-Object" (2001: 66-67), which would be a mere verbal entity, like Time, Ego, and
Matter.
vi
In a letter from Benjamin to his friend Christian Rang it is said that "ideas are the stars, as opposed to the sun of
revelation, they do not belong to the world of history but to the night of nature.” (1989: 8) Benjamin contrasts
one world, the world of history, the solar world, the world of the earth inhabited by the human, with another: the
world of revelation, the world of night, inhabited by nature that is power, apeiron, by gods and by star ideas. The
first corresponds to exegesis (which seeks to dominate what it names) as it corresponds to war; the second
corresponds to interpretation, as the path of those who follow the path of the stars, and in the best of cases, as
idea-star as well. From there, a methodology of constellations and zodiacs.