This article addresses two interrelated questions in Simondon's philosophy of technology: First, is knowledge artifactual? The Greeks denigrated _technē_ (technics) in favor of _epistêmê_ (knowledge) and considered knowledge to be primarily conceptual, discursive, theoretical, and propositional. Simondon's work points to the possibility that knowledge is primarily _artifactual_ and not propositional. This leads to a second, more difficult, question: If knowledge is primarily artifactual, what led the Greeks to consider knowledge to be primarily discursive and conceptual? I analyze the response (...) given by thinkers such as McLuhan, Havelock, and Goody: it was the technology of _writing_ that made explicit the fundamental elements of language (letters, words, sentences, prose), and thereby separating words from their objects and sentences from their use in conversation — a detachment and "decontextualization" of language through the artifice of writing that became the condition for focusing on definitions, truth, logic, and formal rationality. Logic, in this sense, finds its condition in technics. (shrink)

These 17 essays covers all aspects of Bernard Stiegler's work, from poststructuralism, anthropology and psychoanalysis to his work on the politics of memory, 'libidinal economy', technoscience and aesthetics, keeping a focus on his key theory of technics throughout.

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 1, pp 60 - 84 This article takes up Heidegger’s commentary on Rimbaud’s _Lettres du voyant_ as the starting point for an exploration of the question of rhythm in Heidegger’s thought, and an attempt to situate it within his understanding of technics and Being. Besides pursuing a historical study of the concept of rhythm in Heidegger’s work, this article proposes to understand rhythm through the concept of individuation. It responds to the French philosopher Jacques (...) Garelli’s critique of Heidegger that the latter ignores the question of individuation and always starts with beings that are already individuated. On the contrary, this article attempts to sketch a theory of individuation of rhythm in Heidegger’s proper thinking through a re-interpretation of the _Fug_—a word he used to translate the Greek word δίκη and words derived from it: joint, structure, submission, etc. (shrink)

These 17 essays covers all aspects of Bernard Stiegler's work, from poststructuralism, anthropology and psychoanalysis to his work on the politics of memory, 'libidinal economy', technoscience and aesthetics, keeping a focus on his key theory of technics throughout. Stiegler brings together key concepts from Plato, Freud, Derrida and Simondon to argue that the human is 'invented' through technics rather than a product of purely biological evolution. Stiegler is a thinker at the forefront of our contemporary concerns with consumerism, (...) technology, inter-generational division, political apathy and economic crisis. His ambitious project is to go beyond these sources of social distress to uncover and examine precisely 'what makes life worth living'. Contributors include: Stephen Barker, University of California Irvine and translator of Steigler; Richard Beardsworth, American University of Paris and translator of Stiegler; Miguel de Beistegui; University of Warwick; Marc Crepon, Ecole normale superieure and co-founder of Stiegler's think tank, Ars Industrialis and Daniel Ross, co-director of 'The Ister', the award-winning film on Heidegger, and translator of Stiegler. (shrink)

The nature of creative engagement with computers and software presents a number of challenges to 4E cognition and requires the development of analytical frameworks that can encompass cognitive processes as they extend across material and informational realms. Here I argue that an enactive view of mind allows for better understanding of digital practice by advancing a dynamic, transactional, and affective framework for the analysis of computational design. This enactive framework is in part developed through the Material Engagement Theory put forward (...) by Lambros Malafouris, in part from the phenomenologically inspired philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. Both advance temporality, technics and technique as key to understanding human creative imagination and their work can support each other in different ways; Stiegler allows for a theorisation of digital tools largely missing from the cognitive archaeology of Malafouris, whilst Malafouris provides a cognitive theory to further develop key ideas in Stiegler’s philosophy. Bringing their work together through Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, I develop the concept of enactive individuation and apply this to the analysis of a case of robotic design and fabrication from my fieldwork with digital architects and engineers. This case allows for further exploration of how enactivism might productively be extended into the digital realm by underscoring the explorative engagement at heart of even highly systematic work with computers and software. (shrink)

The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified "facts." What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us systematically astray. Many of our (...) standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. And as long as we lack the ability to make our situation intelligible, all of the "data" in the world will make no difference.;From the Introduction. (shrink)

Reconciliation and the Technics of Healing Content Type Journal Article Pages 235-237 DOI 10.1007/s11673-011-9318-y Authors Paul A. Komesaroff, Monash Centre for Ethics in Medicine and Society, Monash University, Melbourne, Vic., Australia Elizabeth Kath, Global Cities Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne, Vic., Australia Paul James, Global Cities Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne, Vic., Australia Journal Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Online ISSN 1872-4353 Print ISSN 1176-7529 Journal Volume Volume 8 Journal Issue Volume 8, Number 3.

Much modern science and ethics debate is on high-profile problems such as animal organ transplantation, genetic engineering and fetal tissue research, in discourse that assumes technical tones. Other work, such as narrative ethics, expresses the failed promise of technology in the vivid detail of human experience. However, the essential nature of contemporary technology remains largely opaque to our present ethical lens on health care and on society. The limited controversies of modern science and ethics perpetuate ‘technics’, a technical, problem-solving (...) mindset that fails to grapple successfully with the complexity of technology. A critical dialectic between practice and scholarship widens the ethical conversation in nursing to consider technology as an ongoing set of daily and fundamental moral choices on how we live. Critical text on technology recovers ethics from the limits of technics, and assists nurses to develop an inherent knowedge of technology that is needed to provide ethical care in a technological world. (shrink)

Lewis Mumford was the author of more than thirty influential books, many of which expounded his views on the perils of urban sprawl and a society obsessed with technics. This text provides the essence of Mumford's views on the distinct yet interpenetrating roles of technology and the arts in modern culture.

The Foundations of Meta-Technics is a rigorous phenomenological analysis of the transcendence of anthropomorphic, anthropocentric, and geocentric technology in terms of the new meta-technical forms of space and time. The book draws out the epistemological and ontological implications of an emerging meta-technical supernature in which space and time are perceived by trans-human means and from trans-terrestrial perspectives. This book is especially valuable to philosophers in either the phenomenological or continental tradition.

The Foundations of Meta-Technics is a rigorous phenomenological analysis of the transcendence of anthropomorphic, anthropocentric, and geocentric technology in terms of the new meta-technical forms of space and time. The book draws out the epistemological and ontological implications of an emerging meta-technical supernature in which space and time are perceived by trans-human means and from trans-terrestrial perspectives. This book is especially valuable to philosophers in either the phenomenological or continental tradition.

The purpose of this article is to explore the close link between technology and death in the philosophical writings of Lewis Mumford. Mumford famously argued that throughout the history of western civilization we find intertwined two competing forms of technics; the democratic biotechnic form and the authoritarian monotechnic form. The former technics were said to be strongly compatible with an organic form of life while the latter were said to be allied to a mechanical power complex. What is (...) perhaps less well known is the extent to which Mumford characterizes the authoritarian technical form as being a technics of death. This article will argue that the connection between death and technics is a key theme in Mumford’s philosophy of technology. In addition to elaborating this theme and detailing how it informs Mumford’s other positions on the nature of technology, this article will also argue that Mumford’s theory of a technics of death bears witness, both implicitly and explicitly, to the influence of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death instinct. Freud’s account of the death instinct will be outlined briefly and its influence on Mumford’s writings will be explained. Death, in Mumford’s technological writings, has a generally negative function and serves to warn humanity of the perilous course that its technological civilization is set upon. However it also has a positive function in that it encourages man to transcend its biological existence in acts of creativity and purpose. Death, in this positive sense, serves the purpose of life whereas, in the negative sense, it hinders it. The role of death, in both aspects, will be explored and related to Mumford’s overall perspective on technics and life. It is argued that Mumford’s philosophy of technology cannot be fully understood without an awareness of his views on death and its role in the life of technological society. (shrink)

Chinese scholars began to reflect on technics and technology during ancient times. The earliest effort in recorded history is the Yijing, which has been attributed to the Western Zhou dynasty. What was originally a book of divination also contains philosophical reflections on technics which have influenced views of later generations. The philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Daoism have also contributed to Chinese philosophy of technics and technology, although they tended to promote opposing attitudes. In addition, there are (...) influential practical texts such as two technical manuals, the Kaogong ji and Tiangong kaiwu. Summarizing from all these sources, three key ideas that distinguish Chinese from Western thinking about traditional technics and eventually modern technology are the absence of a Creator god (or, more positively, a sense of the material world as self- subsisting), an emphasis on practice (and the primacy of practical or political affairs in human life), and a concern for harmony between heaven and earth (that is, between human beings with the larger world in which they live). (shrink)

The formation of philosophy of technics as a separate branch of philosophical knowledge is considered, the main approaches to the analysis of the phenomenon of technics, separating technical and humanitarian methodological areas, are outlined. The nature of technics in the humanitarian aspect and the relationship with different forms of human activity based on the concepts of L. Mumford, X. Ortega y Gasset, M. Heidegger, J. Ellyulya is analysed. It is defined that although the technics is an (...) expression of the nature of a human being, the danger of the operation does not lie primarily in the human habitat destruction, but in transforming of the essence. The necessity of critical and technical understanding of technics is emphasized. Key words: technics, philosophy of technics, human, culture. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, and Bernard Stiegler each argued in their own way that, ever since its inception in ancient Greece, western philosophy is incapable of thinking technics, which reaches its clearest expression in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. According to Heidegger, Kant articulated the essence of modern technics as enframing (Gestell) without understanding the nature of his own insight, while Simondon claimed that transcendental philosophy is structurally incapable of thinking technics as its answer to the question (...) of technics either comes too early (a priori) or too later (a posteriori). Stiegler synthesized both positions in his claim that Kant was incapable of acknowledging the technical constitution of his own consciousness. All three thinkers thus argue, in one way or another, that Kant was essentially incapable of seeing, understanding, let alone thinking, technics. The intention of this book is two-fold. On the one hand, it argues that, despite Heidegger, Simondon, and Stiegler's inability of recognizing it, there is an explicit concept of technics at work in Kant's philosophy. This technics is however not a technics that was overlooked by Heidegger, Simondon, and Stiegler. Instead, this book shows that, from the Critique of Pure Reason (1780) until the posthumously published Opus Postumum (1796-1803), transcendental philosophy is at once constituted against, while at the same time relying upon, and proceeding from technics. On the other hand, this book engages with the broader relation between philosophy and technics. If there is indeed such a thing as a Kantian thought on technics, then Kant can no longer be considered philosophy's most prominent 'techno-oblivious' thinker. The question about the relation between Kant and technics is thus nothing less than a question about the relation between philosophy and technics as a whole. (shrink)

This response article argues that the question of “extrahuman relations” obtains on not just one level but two. It is not just a question of our relations to nonhuman forms of life—such as, for example, the embodiment and finitude we share with other beings. It's also a question of a second form of finitude that obtains in our prosthetic subjection to any semiotic system whatsoever that makes possible “our” concepts, “our” recognition and articulation of our “nonhuman relations” in the first (...) place. By examining the bird poems of Wallace Stevens, I demonstrate that with the question of extrahuman relations we are always talking, in other words, not about a thematics but about a technics of address. (shrink)

Abstract‘Artwork as technics’ opens discussion on activating aesthetics in educational contexts by arguing that we require some fundamental revision in understanding relations between aesthetics and technology in contexts where education is primarily encountered instrumentally and technologically. The paper addresses this through the writing of the French theorist of technology, Bernard Stiegler, as well as extending Stiegler’s own discussion on the work of Martin Heidegger concerning the work of art and technology. Crucial to this discussion is recognition of the thinking (...) of the late eighteenth-century German poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, on the work of Heidegger. The paper questions whether such recognition also extends crucial aspects of Stiegler’s own thinking. (shrink)

Hadot establece una oposición excluyente entre naturaleza y técnica —oposición que, según él, se remonta al mundo griego—, presentando (en acuerdo con Heidegger) una actitud pesimista ante la técnica moderna. En cambio, Ortega subraya que la finalidad de la técnica no es dominar la naturaleza, sino permitir que el hombre siga siendo lo que es, aunque para ello se vea obligado a modificarla. La naturaleza de la técnica radica en ofrecer al ser humano las herramientas para poder defenderse de las (...) agresiones de la naturaleza circundante. Esto está lejos de ser algo obvio, pues la naturaleza se ha ocultado de tal manera en el ámbito de la técnica que cuesta mucho esfuerzo detectar su presencia. Esta es una de las tareas más acuciantes a las que se enfrenta la filosofía hoy. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the claim that objectivity, in classical phenomenology, is best read as an instituted invariant: not a static given but the diachronic achievement of cooperative validation within transcendental intersubjectivity, mediated by technics—above all, writing and inscription—that ensure the iterability, transmissibility, and public critique of sense. The essay unfolds in five movements. The first revisits Husserl’s critique of the mathematization of essences, showing how the very ideality of meaning depends on technical exteriorizations—above all writing—which sustain intergenerational (...) communication and open the space for a non-reductive account of objectivity. The second turns to Fink’s analysis of objectivation and mundanization, redefining science as a form of supra-individual habituality. The third expands on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of expressive technicity, in which linguistic and artistic expression institutes fields of objectivity through indirect language and style. A fourth section develops a comparative synthesis—sociogenesis, diachrony, technics—and formulates criteria for instituted objectivity (addressability, iterability, transmissibility, responsivity). The conclusion bridges classical phenomenology and contemporary debates on digital technics, arguing that what endures is not what withdraws from history, but what remains fit to be repeated, challenged, and renewed within it. (shrink)

This article argues that we can understand Jean Epstein's theory of photogénie as an instance of technics. Starting from a reading of Epstein's final fictional film Le Tempestaire, we can see that Epstein collapses the distinction between human and technological. This insight leads to a discussion of Epstein's theory of photogénie more generally, and one that highlights the term's relationship to temporality. This temporal dimension recalls Bernard Stiegler's discussion of technics in Technics and Time. As the series (...) evolves, Stiegler increasingly foregrounds cinema as technics, and the essay ends with a discussion of the ways that Epstein's understanding of photogénie can press on Stiegler's claims. (shrink)

Ours are Days of Decision and it's indispensable to transform our technics. For it, we must abandon the inherited conception of technics based on neutrality and autonomy. To this end, in this article we develop a socio-historical ontology for technics that argues: (a) To understand technics we have to take into consideration technical objects, handling, and the degree of guidance of the animal user. (b) Each technics is inseparable from its society. (c) The idea of (...) a free use of technics is illusory. There are always unexpected impacts and various uses of a given technics. (d) Technologies of the Capitalocene are imperial. (e) Technologies have acquired a destructive inertia and we have the obligation to understand technological development as a political phenomenon. (f) In order to go beyond the Capitalocene and advance towards Degrowth, we have to move from imperial technologies to humble technics. (shrink)

In a previous paper linking Simondon to biological and systems-theoretical discourses in autopoiesis and debates about contemporary technogenesis, I have argued that Simondon’s ontology of individuation furnishes a basis to theorize the “agency” of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly today, into alliances with sophisticated, computational technologies.1 In concert with researchers like Andy Clark and N. Katherine Hayles, I embrace the “technical distribution” of cognition and perception as a way of understanding (...) the complex couplings between humans and machines that are typical in our contemporary world, but that have, in fact, been part of human techno-genesis since .. (shrink)

Sonic Intimacy asks us who—or what—deserves to have a voice, beyond the human. Arguing that our ears are far too narrowly attuned to our own species, the book explores four different types of voices: the cybernetic, the gendered, the creaturely, and the ecological. Through both a conceptual framework and a series of case studies, Dominic Pettman tracks some of the ways in which these voices intersect and interact. He demonstrates how intimacy is forged through the ear, perhaps even more than (...) through any other sense, mode, or medium. The voice, then, is what creates intimacy, both fleeting and lasting, not only between people, but also between animals, machines, and even natural elements: those presumed not to have a voice in the first place. Taken together, the manifold, material, actual voices of the world, whether primarily natural or technological, are a complex cacophony that is desperately trying to tell us something about the rapidly failing health of the planet and its inhabitants. As Pettman cautions, we would do well to listen. (shrink)

What are the politics of technical knowledge in the world of contemporary art? Intellectual apprehensions of art, by privileging the insights of texts, (critical) theory, and abstract ideas over and above the empirical truths of objects themselves, do not simply explain contemporary art—they sustain it. They define how contemporary art can and should be known and, in turn, the forms of experience that are conceptually relevant to this understanding. Always already present within the art world, however, if largely invisible across (...) its ranks, is an entirely different way of knowing that concretely contests these defining ways by which art is conventionally understood.Technical knowledge is a vital presence in the world of contemporary art. Technical practitioners—fabricators, riggers, engineers, and conservators, among others—work behind the scenes to set into place the material conditions of what contemporary art is, how it is evolving, and how museums and gallery spaces are, in their architectures, evolving along with it. In this article, I draw on firsthand interviews with fabricators at the Walla Walla Foundry, a commercial art foundry in Walla Walla, Washington, to dissect how these individuals engage art on their own terms, thus challenging the academic epistemology of the institutional art world they invisibly define. This epistemic tension (between academic and technical ways of knowing), I argue, is relevant to our scholarly understanding of what the philosopher Peter Osborne has called “postconceptual” art. It also raises critical methodological questions for the discipline of art history writ large. (shrink)

Noology is the technical life of ideology. It works at the formal and technical production of knowledge, rather than focusing on the content displayed by a specific system of thought. There are two reasons why the notion of noology must play a role in today’s critical and political debates. First, the concept of ideology has lost its relevance since its everyday meaning is far removed from the original meaning Karl Marx gave it; today ideology mainly means “political doctrine,” right-wing, left-wing, (...) or the entire spectrum of shades between the two. Expressions such as “an ideology” or “ideologies” are used in critical analysis, while for Marx “ideology” has always come without any pronoun. Ideology now presents itself as an “inversion of causalities producing illusions.”1 The second reason has to do with the changes in the modes of production since the 1970s, and the rise of the post-Fordist economy, or “neoliberalism.” Since the 1970s, the end of ideologies has been proclaimed (epitomised by Daniel Bell). Given this context, noology critique demonstrates that the work of ideology in today’s economy plays out at an infrastructural level, in social organs that materially institutionalise thought and ideas, and not simply at the level of the immaterial culture of political parties and discourses (superstructure). (shrink)

Making sense of the world around us is a process involving both semiotic and material mediation—the use of signs and sign systems and various kinds of tools. As we use them, we experience them subjectively as extensions of our bodily selves and objectively as instruments for accessing the world with which we interact. Emphasizing this bipolar nature of language and technics, understood as intertwined "forms of sense," Robert Innis studies the multiple ways in which they are rooted in and (...) transform human perceptual structures in both their individual and social dimensions. The book foregrounds and is organized around the notion of "semiotic embodiment." Language and technics are viewed as "probes" upon which we rely, in which we are embodied, and that themselves embody and structure our primary modes of encountering the world. While making an important substantive contribution to present debates about the "biasing" of perception by language and technics, Innis also seeks to provide a methodological model of how complementary analytical resources from American pragmatist and various European traditions can be deployed fruitfully in the pursuit of new insights into the phenomenon of meaning-making. (shrink)

The development of immersive media-communication environments, and their theorization in terms of the `haptic', calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between sensuality and the ethics of contact. For the most part, the cultural theorization of the virtual which remains preoccupied with the visual has tended to limit its scope to the paradoxes, politics and ethics of representation. Much of media and cultural studies work, for instance, has adopted, directly or indirectly, the traditional visual and ocularcentric paradigm in its analyses (...) of cultural forms and technologies as these have become integrated into contemporary life. Whilst it has been argued, for instance by Mark Hansen in his recent books, that this paradigm is inadequate to digital media and the developments of human-machine interactions the digital introduces, few comentators have addressed how new developments in immersive sensory media environments bear on the ethics of communication. By way of a reflection on the themes of the tactility of contact and the ethics of touch in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this article critically evaluates the ethical significance of the `sensory extension' haptic media represent. It identifies and argues against the neo-positivist tendency of Hansen's reliance on the empiricism of the neurosciences whilst locating the resources for an ethics of touch in Levinas' concept of time as `diachrony'. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the work and ideas of philosopher Bernard Stiegler and articulates how they might be useful in educational leadership scholarship. The chapter introduces these ideas through an examination of key books and book series before shifting the focus more explicitly to education and educational leadership. The chapter provides a range of analytic tools with which to understand contexts of education in contemporary hyper-industrial capitalism and the effects of this on education and educational leadership. The notions of pharmakon and (...) psycho-power are used as demonstrations of tools for analysis. The chapter includes a glossary of key terms and also some key readings for those new to Stiegler’s work. (shrink)

Even as philosophers increasingly apply their analytical acumen to other subjects of intellectual study, technology is one area relegated to the sidelines. To help dispel such prejudice, this exercise in applied ontology explains why technology invites critical examination, enumerates the generic needs and perceived wants that it fulfills, and then supplies a taxonomy of technological devices individuated in terms of the functional roles that their designers or consumers intend for them. In light of the classificatory scheme developed, I conclude that (...) everything in space and time may be used to realize technological goals, necessitating a more inclusive understanding of technology and thereby a heightened awareness of its pervasive character. (shrink)

Historians, philosophers, and physicists portray the 1920s and 1930s as a period of major theoretical breakthrough in physics, quantum mechanics, which led to the expansion of physics into the core of the atom and the growth and strengthening of the discipline. These important developments in scientific inquiry into the micro-world and light have turned historical attention away from other significant historical processes and from other equally important causes for the expansion of physics. World War II, on the other hand, is (...) often seen as the watershed moment when physics achieved new levels of social and technical engagement at a truly industrial scale. Historians have shown that military interests and government funding have shaped physics to unprecedented degree, and according to some, to the extent of discontinuity with earlier practices of research (Forman 1987; Kevles 1990; Kaiser 2002). In this vein, Stuart Leslie wrote, “Nothing in the prewar experience fully prepared academic scientists and their institutions for the scale and scope of a wartime mobilization that would transform the university, industry, and the federal government and their mutual interrelationships” (Leslie 1993, 6). While one can never befullyready for novelties, the contributors to this issue show that developments in interwar physics did prepare participants for their cold war interactions with industry and government. (shrink)

First published in 1932, this book, based on an address delivered in 1931, presents a concise and lucid summary of the philosophy of the author of _The Decline of the West_, Oswald Spengler. It was his conviction that the technical age — the culture of the machine age — which man had created in virtue of his unique capacity for individual as well as racial technique, had already reached its peak, and that the future held only catastrophe. He argued it (...) lacked progressive cultural life and instead was dominated by a lust for power and possession. The triumph of the machine led to mass regimentation rather than fewer workers and less work — spelling the doom of Western civilization. (shrink)

This collection of essays addresses recent and historical changes in the ways in which listening has been conceived as a cultural agency and act. It argues that listening, by emancipating from an essentially implied, passive-receiving, and subjected position, has become an explicit factor in culture and the object of proactive collective and individual politics.

This article explores the metamorphosis of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction through its engagement with life, death, and technics, emphasizing its reinterpretation by Bernard Stiegler. Beginning with Derrida’s deconstruction of the life/death opposition and the concept of arche-writing as central to the history of life, it examines Stiegler’s extension of these ideas through his notion of epiphylogenesis—the exteriorization of memory via technics. The paper highlights continuities and divergences by comparing their approaches, showing how Stiegler deepens Derrida’s insights into technics (...) while challenging anthropocentrism. Ultimately, the study positions technics as a critical factor in rethinking memory, temporality, and evolution, demonstrating its transformative implications for deconstruction. (shrink)

"My aim in this paper is to develop an ontology of media operations that is rooted in Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation. I position this media operative ontology in contrast to Bernhard Siegert’s understanding of operative ontology as a cultural technique. Drawing on Wolfgang Ernst, Henri Atlan, and Michel Serres, I argue that Siegert’s position compromises the extra-cultural operationality of technical media, and of techniques more generally, in its bid to redirect media theory from its Kittlerian trajectory. With his theory (...) of information as reception of environmental singularity by a metastable receiver, Simondon provides a mechanism for theorizing how extra-cultural operationality of technical media informs the production of culture and the distinctions upon which it rests, without compromising the alterity of technics. Mein Ziel in diesem Beitrag ist es, eine Ontologie von Medienoperationen zu entwickeln, die auf Gilbert Simondons Theorie der Individuation fußt. Auf der Grundlage von Wolfgang Ernst, Henri Atlan und Michel Serres behaupte ich, dass Siegerts Versuch, die Medientheorie von ihrer Kittlerschen Linie abzulenken, den Stellenwert der außerkulturellen Operationalität technischer Medien und der Techniken im Allgemeinen herabspielt. Mit seiner Theorie der Information als Empfang von umweltlicher Singularität durch einen metastabilen Empfänger bietet Simondon dagegen einen Mechanismus, dank dem theoretisch durchdacht werden kann, wie die außerkulturelle Operationalität der technischen Medien die Kulturproduktion und die Unterscheidungen, auf denen sie beruht, prägt, ohne die Andersheit der Technik zu reduzieren. ". (shrink)