Simondon and “Technological Vitalism”: Technics as a Biological Phenomenon

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.