Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media

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 the very origin of the human.