The Ecology of the Technical Object

Ecology is a question because the human is a technological animal, because the human relation to nature is technological; ecology thus concerns the originary technicity of the human. In developing that thesis against the background of the work of Simondon, this article argues that the analysis of technicity developed in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects is fundamental to Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, preventing the latter work from falling back into the anthropomorphism it seeks to avoid. In Simondon’s terms, the technical object would function as a type of internal resonance throughout Individuation, a metastability that phase-shifts the concept with respect to itself. Read through this lens, his ideas shed a different light on what transpires between human and environment, and his generalizable “transduction” destabilizes even as it undergirds his schema of individuation.