Techno-genesis: Reconceptualising geography’s technology from ontology to ontogenesis

Abstract

Technologies have been theorised to understand their powers to produce spacetimes – notably through Bernard Stiegler’s reading of technics as constitutive of human ontology. However, less attention has been paid to how technologies shape spacetimes according to their own distinct logics of evolution, the result being a tendency to reduce technological agency to a question of its effects on human being. The first half of the paper elaborates this problem in conversation with geographies of the digital turn. The second half introduces an alternative approach through Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic notion of technology characterised by its own logics of evolution – what I term techno-genesis.

The genesis of the technical object must effectively be a part of its existence, and the relation of man [sic.] to the technical object must contain this attention to the continued genesis of the technical object. (Simondon, 2017: 255).

[T]he more one compares living beings to automatic machines, the more one understands their functions but the less one understands their genesis. (Canguilhem, 2008: 90).

I Introduction

The concepts of technology and technics have gained a certain prominence in human geography wherein there is an interest in understanding the power of technologies to shape the production of spacetimes – processes that have been variously explored through notions such as cloud (Amoore, 2018), geotechnology (Gallagher et al., 2017), post-human agency (Rose, 2017), atmosphere (Lin, 2022), technicity (Kinsley, 2014), phase (Ash, 2017), automation (Bissell, 2018), and world (McCormack, 2017). This recent attention to the technological production of spacetimes can be seen as a continuation of a wider effort to articulate how technologies enact specific kinds of affective powers distinct to human interaction (Ash et al., 2018a; McLean, 2020; Pink and Fors, 2017; Thrift, 2005). Such engagements with the capacities of technology to affect the consistency of thought and subjectivity take on a wider socio-technical significance by contributing ways to understand the agency of spatial media to structure the thresholds of human perception in quite abstract, yet politically motivated, ways (Lally, 2017; Elwood and Leszczynski, 2013; Turnbull et al., 2022).

However, problems occur when the specific determining powers of technologies are understood too closely in terms of the ontology of the human. In human geography, Bernard Stiegler’s (1998) conceptualisation of technology in terms of technics has done much to help apprehend the agential powers of technology (Kinsley, 2014, 2015; Rose, 2017; Ash, 2015, 2016, 2017; Wilson, 2015; Bissell, 2014, 2018) – particularly for theorising how human life is recomposed by technologies via certain spatio-temporal modes of exteriorisation (Stiegler, 1998, 2009, 2010a). Yet, in this paper, I argue Stiegler’s concept of technology is hindered by a lingering anthropocentrism that poses certain problems to the way geographers understand the relationship between the agential capacities of technologies and the production of spacetimes. ¹ Central to this critique is to say that founding the concepts of technology and technics within a question of the origin of human being, as Stiegler (1998) does, confines the study of technological spacetimes to something extensive of human ontology – a manoeuvre that is less open to the way technologies intervene in wider ontopolitical matters of concern (Whatmore, 2013; Massumi, 2015).

Contra Stiegler’s reading of technics as a technological dimension of human being, I advance the term “techno-genesis” as one way to understand the technological organisation of spacetimes according to some quite abstract technological processes that remain irreducible to questions of human ontology. As Kinsley (2014: 371) notes, after Stiegler techno-genesis is ‘the idea that humans and technology co-evolved together, that you do not get one without the other’. However, drawing on Simondon’s (2017) ontogenetic reading of technology and his burgeoning interlocutors in geography (Gabrys, 2016; Ash, 2017; Berlin and Brice, 2022; Lapworth, 2020; Roberts, 2017; Dekeyser, 2018; Woodward et al., 2015; Tedeschi, 2019), I develop techno-genesis differently as a way of heightening attention to the distinct agency and capacity for modifying spacetimes enacted by technologies. My central argument is to say that techno-genesis offers one way for geographers to approach technology not as a de-fault of human ontology (Stiegler, 1998), or a vague form of non-human relationality, but as a specific mode of existence defined in terms of ontogenesis as ‘coming-into-being’ (Simondon, 2017). In conversation with geographies of the digital turn, I explore this mode of existence through Gilbert Simondon’s notions of the vital, the concretising, and the technical lineage – concepts that are noteworthy because they home-in on a potentially significant idea: that the technological production of spacetimes can be understood through a concept of technology defined ontogenetically through its own logics of evolution and capacities for invention.

Developing this argument, the paper is organised into four parts. The first examines the relationship between the geographical concept of technology and production of spacetimes in the context of the digital turn. The second develops the problem with conceptualising technology ontologically in terms of Stiegler’s technics. The third focuses on Simondon’s reading of technology as a question of techno-genesis. The fourth illustrates the contribution of techno-genesis to research in human geography amidst the digital turn.

II Geography’s technology: Spacetimes

Geographers have long explored the ways technologies reconfigure the production and experience of time and space. In doing so, technology or the technological continue to be posited, though often implicitly, in terms of the materialities of hardware and software infrastructures (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011), cyber-space (Adams, 1997), smart cities (Vanolo, 2014), security structures (Dwyer, 2023; Thornton, 2015), platforms (Langley and Leyshon, 2017), and through associations with work at the intersection of tissue economies (Fannin, 2014), nuclear matter (Alexis-Martin and Davies, 2017), and biotechnology (Greenhough and Roe, 2006) to name a few. Technology, across these diverse conversations, gains some consistency as a broad referent describing any number of systems performing certain operational processes. This broad notion of technology, which encompasses, amongst other things, physical machines and pharmaceuticals, continues to be employed within research investigating the powers of technologies to produce spacetimes that can modify the production thought and subjectivity. Spacetimes, following McCormack (2013: 205), are defined as ‘intervals of potential’ that affect the movement and experience of thought in specific ways. For my purposes in this paper, spacetimes are approached as one way to theorise the determining powers of technologies. Acknowledging this breadth of scope, this paper contributes to geographical conversations around the digital turn (Ash et al., 2018b) by developing the relationship between geography’s concept of technology and the production of spacetimes in two areas.

Agency

First, the paper contributes to the way technologies are conceptualised as exhibiting distinct agencies with the capacity to shape the production of geographical knowledge. Clearly, anglophone geography has long engaged with the agencies of the digital – particularly in the way that quantitative geographical information system sciences have for decades treated digital technologies as ‘tools for environmental management’ (Wilbanks, 2004: 5) and as a ‘vehicle for new levels of sophistication and innovation in framing geographical research questions’ (Higgitt, 2008: 2). One way geography’s recent turn to the digital gains some specificity, however, is in examining how the remaking of geographical knowledge through digital technologies has a number of political consequences (Maalsen, 2023) – such as in connection to smart city governance (Kitchin et al., 2015; Das and Zhang, 2021), public activism (Datta, 2018; McLean, 2020), and environmental governance (Machen and Nost, 2021; Turnbull et al., 2022). To understand this, Datta’s (2018) work on postcolonial urbanism is notable. Datta argues that the turn to the digital as a popular urban development strategy in India has led to parallel formation of the chatur citizen, characterised as a ‘politically engaged citizen rooted in multiple publics and spatialities – far removed from the consensual citizens in the service of urban governance’ (p.415). As with the notion of the urban hacker, the promise of understanding the chatur as form of citizen subjectivity is that it adds complexity to accounts about the way digital infrastructures alter forms of urban living. With the chatur citizen, digital technologies are agentially involved in producing alternative publics with ‘entangled performances’ (Datta, 2018: 416) of political action across the human and the technological.

However, one enduring problem for the digital turn’s theorisation of the agential capacity of technology to modify urban life is the way that “technology” too often becomes implicitly conceptualised at once as a cultural object of research and as a vague all-enveloping surround. As Murphie and Potts (2003) explain, the tendency towards vague conceptualisations of technology in the social sciences is not necessarily new:

Throughout the industrial and post-industrial periods, technology has become so ubiquitous that is has been said that we now live in technology, surrounded by technological systems and dependent on them. ‘Technology’ has been generalized to the point of abstraction: it suggests an overarching system that we inhabit. (Murphie and Potts, 2003: 4)

As something that includes language and semiotics (Derrida, 1981; McLuhan, 1994), technology would be that most abstract of geographical concepts concerning how various foldings of space and time become operationalised as a system that produces the possibility of “thought” as such. Concerning both an object of research and an overarching system of thought, the task of conceptualising technology thus presents certain challenges, particularly if it is to avoid tending towards ambiguity. Such challenges are identifiable in the context of geography’s digital turn, wherein there is a concern that ‘if everything becomes “digital” then “digital” becomes an empty signifier and unworthy of distinct denotation’ (Ash et al., 2018b: 35). As an object of this geographical turn, the “technological” and the “digital” therefore bear certain hallmarks of a recent sense that technologies are today becoming more pervasive and ubiquitous (Kinsley, 2011; Rose, 2016). For the task of thinking the agency of technologies to modify spacetimes, it thus becomes challenging to locate a technology as an object of analytical thought: interfaces, algorithms, language, and material networks of hardware and software infrastructures all enact certain technological modifications to environments that make it difficult to parse out conceptual distinctions between the digital and the analogue.

Contrasting with previous conceptualisations of technology in geography that treat the technological as a human tool for managing nature-society relationships (Wilbanks, 2004), I focus on the sense that technology itself offers distinct modes of existence whose ontogenesis is irreducible to human utility. Advancing understandings of technology’s specific ontogenetic capacities and modes of existence, following Simondon, I contribute to geographical research that prioritises questions of ontogenesis over an ontology of individuated terms (Roberts, 2017; Berlin and Brice, 2022; Williams, 2021; Lapworth, 2020; Tedeschi, 2019). Prioritising ontogenesis for developing a geographical concept of technology is significant because it helps to understand how technologies modify spatio-temporal processes with other elements in an environment with increasing degrees of seamlessness, or what Simondon (2017) terms concretisation. To exemplify this briefly, Massumi’s analysis of the US government’s use of pre-emptive security technologies is useful (also Anderson, 2010). Drawing on Simondon, Massumi (2015) shows how pre-emptive security technologies, such as the Bush-era colour scale terror alert system, are notable not necessarily because of their powers as objects, but because they function seamlessly with other technologies and sign-producing systems to produce affects that far exceed the sum of their individuated parts. The colour scale terror alert system is able to modify the collective experiences of numerous subjects precisely because of its ontogenetic capacity to ‘enter into value-adding synchretic resonance’ (Massumi, 2015: 148) producing a wider (a)signifying capacity to shape how a subject acts in the future (Lazzarato, 2014; Keating, 2022). The technologies of the terror alert system have ontogenetic capacities, or what Massumi terms ‘ontopower’, insofar as they engage in the syncretic production of spacetimes with other technological security apparatus – in this case, the production of subjectivity through affects of fear (“high” terror alert) enacted by media, military preparedness, the moods of airport security staff, and so on (Massumi, 2015: 185). What matters in this example is thus an attention to the agencies of digital technologies in processes of collective subjectivation and bodily management that may be difficult to detect from the vantage point of the human subject – what Davies (2019: 530) refers to, in the context of real-time health tracking technologies, as a form of ‘techno-somatic rhythm’ capable of producing ‘a conformity to routines that are emergent, contingent and private’.

Sense

Second, the paper contributes to research arguing that understanding how technologies modify spacetimes requires different kinds of conceptualisation capable of stretching the human’s habituated capacities to sense material infrastructures (Amoore, 2018; Gabrys, 2016). Building out of social constructivist approaches to technologies (Bingham, 1996), the relationship between sense and digital technology has been reworked in geography through new materialist theories (Kinsley, 2014). Politically, one idea that is central for new materialist scholars is to develop alternative speculative stories (Bertram, 2016) that respond to the tendency to bifurcate human and non-human matter into discrete ontological realities (Coole and Frost, 2010). Writing at the intersection of new materialist, feminist, and speculative philosophies, Engelmann et al. (2022: 238) develops how a community-led satellite imaging network – open-weather – offers ways to understand how ‘alternative earth-images can mediate local conditions, express uneven relationships to environments, and facilitate moments of intimacy between strangers’. This focus on how digital technologies participate in the production of political collectives (Taffel, 2019) concerns at once the role of technologies in reshaping how the human relates to various techno-geographical milieux (Gabrys, 2016) and also the capacities of technologies to offer alternative forms of sense and experience through certain forms of digital entanglement (Turnbull et al., 2022: 18-21).

The question of how digital technologies offer ways to remake the subject’s capacity to sense environments has also been engaged in geography through sonic methods and techniques (Margulies, 2023; Doughty and Drozdzewski, 2022; Rousell et al., 2022). Gallagher et al. (2017: 628) develop understandings of digitally mediated sense through the concept of ‘geotechnologies’ referring to ‘the relations between audio technologies, materials, animals, and geophysical phenomena’ – relations that are significant for attending to the non-human materiality of sound. One implication of the concept of geotechnologies is that it becomes possible to problematise the anthropocentrism that typically characterises geographic practices of listening, wherein geotechnologies refer to the way certain audio technologies offer opportunities to ‘situate the human subject as a relatively marginal element amongst many resounding bodies, contributing to a more disparate, relational understanding of the world’ (Gallagher et al., 2017: 630). However, one issue for the task of approaching the capacity of technologies to modify spacetimes is that it becomes difficult to know precisely what makes geotechnologies “technological”, or how technology specifically intervenes in certain kinds of relations that would be distinct to other non-human relations. As a referent for a range of different human and non-human relations, geotechnologies thus risks underplaying the conceptual significance of the technological as something distinguishable to materials, animals, or geophysical phenomena.

Differently, this paper develops technology as a concept that is distinguishable to other kinds of non-human materiality. In doing so I want to advance the way technologies are understood as participating in the production of an ‘eventful techno-genesis’ that ‘triggers new occasions and associations to band together and make a difference’ (Whatmore, 2013: 46). In recent anglophone human geography, this line of thinking has also been developed through Stiegler’s philosophy of technics, which has been pivotal for thinking about the non-human powers of technologies via notions of technicity (Kinsley, 2014), inorganic objects (Ash, 2015), post-human agency (Rose, 2017), attention capture (Wilson, 2015), and automation (Bissell, 2018). Whilst informed by this research for understanding how technologies modify spacetimes, the paper pivots at this point to outline the problem with Stiegler’s notion of technics ² before suggesting why Simondon offers a distinct, and potentially fruitful, reconceptualisation of technology and its production of spacetimes. The effort, in doing so, is not to dismiss Stiegler’s technics for sake of an adversarial conceit: rather, it is to address the tendency to read Simondon through Stiegler (c.f. Ash, 2015; Hui, 2016), without acknowledging how this reading involves significant re-adjustments (Stiegler et al., 2012: 166) – not least being a commitment to an ontological metaphysics at the expense of technology’s ontogenesis.

III Problematising technics

In Technics and Time 1 (1998), Stiegler’s conceptualisation of technology and technics can be understood as a response to two interrelated lines of thought. On the one hand, he argues that Western metaphysics has from its inception repressed the question of technology by prioritising a pursuit of epistēmē over technê. In developing this argument, Stiegler posits that the main task of philosophy is to assert the ontological primacy of technics to human existence. On the other hand, though, this Western metaphysical repression at once constitutes technics as that which is ‘unthought’ (Stiegler, 1998: ix). The idea of technics as unthought, what he also describes as the ‘not-yet’ of thought, is vital for Stiegler’s whole corpus which sees in technics both an originary condition of human being and the possibility of thinking the future. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of the trace, Stiegler’s technics refigures the technical object not merely as a human tool but as a whole ensemble that modifies time itself via ‘collective and impersonal memory’ (James, 2012: 65; also Stiegler, 2001). As a question of collective memory, technics offers humans the ‘capacity profoundly to transform the conditions of being together, the terms of the law, the rules of life, etc.’ (Stiegler, 2003: 155). In pushing philosophy to confront questions of technology and technics, one of Stiegler’s (1998: 16) major contributions is his argument that the human is defined from the outset by an essential ontological ‘de-fault of origin’, since for the human to live it must, before all else, variously adapt through technics. As Moore writes:

What makes life human is its constitutive openness to being rewritten by technics, and it is by adopting technics that we anticipate change, stave off the need for survival of the fittest. (Moore, 2013: 32)

Here we get a sense of Stiegler’s affirmative reading of technology: the human is capacitated to live through its technical constitution, and it is through technics that the human can live differently by being ‘rewritten’ via individuating processes of technical ‘exteriorization’ (Stiegler, 1998: 141-142). Technics thus refers to a ‘process of exteriorisation, the use of means, of media and mediation by which the human takes shape. Hominisation is technicization’ (Critchley, 1999: 175).

As a process concerning the fons et origo of human being, technics not only defines a primary condition of human existence but also describes a specific adaptive function that extends human powers to anticipate and adjust to the future – what Stiegler terms a ‘human temporality’ that is exterior to the human (Stiegler, 2003: 156). If, for Stiegler, technics concerns the origin of human being, then it is here that we can discern two problems with this conceptualisation of technics and technology as a question of human ontology.

First concerns the way Stiegler’s (1998) commitment to asserting the ontological primacy of technics to human being risks instigating a specific figure of the human and the body as a basis for thinking about technological capacities and spacetimes. Crucially, whilst Stiegler’s technics does concern the origin of human being, this is not to say he attempts to articulate an essentialised form of human nature. As Kinsley (2014: 373) explains, for Stiegler ‘there are no essential, or a priori, human qualities in this argument but “the human” is distinct’. In part, the human is distinct – if not essential – because Stiegler is interested in accounting how ‘the human’ as such ‘invents himself [sic.] in the technical by inventing the tool’ (Stiegler, 1998: 141).

Stiegler’s commitment to understanding the invention of the human is partly because his technics is also indebted to Heidegger’s writing on technology. If, for Heidegger (1977), technics reveals the repression of questions of being and finitude within a modern project of ecological exploitation and human exceptionalism, and then for Stiegler, technics can be read precisely as a response to this ontological finitude. Yet, to focus on technology as a primary condition of human ontology risks assuming, though often implicitly, that technics could account for a universal process of human exteriorisation. When Stiegler (2009: 76) writes that technics can be understood as a ‘tendency’ that ‘runs across ethnic diversity universally – it is its différance’, clearly this is not to impose some universal figure of the human or the human body without ethnic diversity and difference. Rather, it suggests that technics is primarily a source of différance that the human is universally subject to via the same ontologically primary processes of technical constitution and exteriorisation (technics as de-fault of origin). The problem with this manoeuvre, however, is that it risks underplaying questions of difference in relation to technological exteriorisation.

To develop this problem briefly, one can turn to instances where the assumed universality of human exteriorisation via technics fails and, in its wake, produces certain kinds of racialised and technologically mediated violence (Blas, 2014). Magnet (2011: 45), for example, demonstrates how biometric and facial recognition technologies – and the disciplinary spacetimes produced therein – have often failed to recognise non-white bodies who are positioned within such systems as more informationally complex than white faces. Intersecting theorisations of the black technical object (Amaro, 2023), one connected problem here is the tendency to assume that technologies and techniques of exteriorisation – in this case the technological capacity for facial recognition – might be understood quite generally as if they were disconnected from the dominant bodily tropes that informed their invention. After Stiegler, it is not always clear how to understand the relationship between, on the one hand, this distinct notion of a primordially deficient “human” exteriorised by technics and, on the other hand, the role of bodily difference in affecting processes of human exteriorisation via technics.

Second, and relatedly, is how reading technology and technics in terms of the constitution of human ontology leads Stiegler to dismiss a central tenet of Simondon’s thought: namely, his theorisation of technology in terms of ontogenesis. For Stiegler (2015: 63), ontogenesis represents an ‘imprudent’ term within Simondon’s philosophy that fails to distinguish between different vital ‘regimes of individuation’ operating at the level of the human and the non-human. These regimes are important for Stiegler, who seeks to update Simondon’s writing (Barker, 2013: 261) in order to uniquely conceptualise a ‘technical individuation’ that is categorically distinct from Simondon’s physical and vital forms of individuation. Yet, this dismissal of ontogenesis is unfortunate because it bypasses some of the radicalism of Simondon’s philosophy of technology and technics, that is, his attempt to develop a conceptual repertoire for understanding the life of technologies according to their own logics that are irreducible to human being and human-technology relations.

Pursuing this line of thought about the life of technologies, the next section develops a techno-genetic reading of technology after Simondon that, quite differently to Stiegler, goes at great lengths to conceptualise technology and technics without any recourse into human ontology and its distinct exteriorising relationship to technological things. As developed by Whatmore (2013: 37-38), techno-genesis can be understood as a term that accounts how a situated ‘co-evolution’ of the human and technological comes to enact specific ‘powers’ and forms of ‘political inventiveness’ that shape the coming-into-being of much wider onto-political events. In what follows, I develop this line of thinking in a new direction by focussing on how Simondon’s conceptualisation of technology offers a way to understand these techno-genetic powers and forms of inventiveness distinctly through three foci: the vital, the concretising, and the technical lineage.

IV Techno-genesis

By thinking in terms of ontogenesis, Simondon is quite careful to resist positioning his theory of technology and technics in terms of human being. Partly, this is because Simondon’s (2017: 16) On the Modes of Existence of Technical Objects criticises a tendency to refer to technology in terms of its human ‘utility function’, since approaching technology as a question of human utility is to lose sight of its specific genetic qualities. Instead, conceptualising technology and technics ontogenetically requires modes of thinking about technological objects and processes that are irreducible to humanist frames. On this point Simondon is quite clear: a theory of technics cannot be based upon a ‘facile humanism’ (Simondon, 2017: 15) that assumes the powers of technology can be understood only insofar as they concern the intelligibility of the human. Rather, Simondon (2017) states that technology or the technical object must be ‘defined through its genesis’ (p.20): technology [tékhnē] is a ‘unit of coming-into-being’ (p.26) that emerges from a ‘theatre of a certain number of reciprocal causal relations’ (p.32). ³ For Simondon, technology is defined as the production and ongoing emergence of successive systems of coherence that determines thresholds of functioning through its existence amongst the operations of other technical objects. Technics, meanwhile, concerns the relationship between technical objects, thought, and knowledge (Simondon, 2017: 255): it is the study of the modes of thought used to think technology. ⁴ These notions of technology and technics take on great significance in Simondon’s writing in aiming to develop new forms of compatibility between culture, technology, and systems of knowledge. As with Stiegler, Simondon (2017: 255-260) is well aware of the need to raise the conceptual importance of technics in order to understand how the inventive and creative capacities of technologies extend philosophy’s attention to what counts as “life”. Yet, unlike Stiegler, Simondon begins not with the question of human being and ontology, but with a question of how technologies change; ‘technical objects must be studied in their evolution’ (Simondon, 2017: 51), since they are not part of an originary human technicity but a set of evolving relations irreducible to human being.

The significance of Simondon’s commitment to studying the evolution of technologies is that it leads him towards a novel ontogenetic understanding of technological change. Whereas ontological approaches to technics have come to mean a focus on individuality – of technological objects that relate to other objects and subjects inter-individually (Ash, 2015) – ontogenesis would be an attempt to experiment with a different manner of thought, wherein the primacy of process – of a world primordially defined by unrelenting events of differentiation – might be prioritised to understand the specific creative and agential capacities of technology in their own terms. This ontogenetic manner of thought is what Simondon (2017: 214-215) refers to as ‘inductive thinking’ capable of maintaining a focus on the question of what technologies do, rather than a question of their essence or their appearance to the human subject. For Simondon, theorising technology is not a question of essences – “what defines a technological object as such?” – but of geneses – “what are the conditions that produce a technology’s coming-into-being?”

As ontogenetic, technologies have creative capacities of invention and adaption that do not necessarily join up with the lifeworld of the human. To note the more-than-human capacities of technologies is, of course, nothing new. Technology is perhaps conventionally understood as that most inhuman of concepts (Colebrook, 2010): is it possible to think of a single theory of technology that posits technics as exactly the same as human life? The inhumanity of technology lies at the heart of Marxist theories of technological change where technologies are the ideological harbingers of a modernity that would alienate the human from its own labour power (Harvey, 2003). Distinctly, however, Simondon conceptualises technology as a particular mode of existence that is not merely a determining force on human life. After Étienne Souriau (see Stengers and Latour, 2016), Simondon (2017: 167) uses ‘mode of existence’ to refer to a discrete ‘independent reality’ coming-into-being according to its own logics of adaption, and with its own capacities to structure ways of relating to an environment. For both Souriau (2016) and Simondon, modes of existence describe something of the ‘existential incompleteness of beings’ (Haumont, 2002: 80) whose continual genesis must be explained without appeals to another philosophical reality (substance, form, and God). As a mode of existence, technologies are therefore elevated to a new status in philosophical thinking since their ongoing techno-genesis is revealed as distinct to other physical, spiritual, or organismic modes of existence (Latour, 2013). In what follows, I flesh out the uniqueness of Simondon’s conceptualisation of the mode of existence of technology in three ways.

The first concerns how, for Simondon, technologies problematise what is conventionally counted as vital life. Indeed, perhaps what is the most exciting about Simondon’s writing on technology is how it might contribute to geographical conversations about vitalism and (non-)life (Roberts and Dewsbury, 2021; Braun, 2008). Significant to this rethinking of life is that Simondon goes to great lengths to avoid conflating the evolution of technologies with the evolution of organic individuals (Barthélémy, 2015). Drawing on the writing of Raymond Ruyer, Georges Canguilhem, and André Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon develops a particular vitalist problem, namely, that thinking about the evolution of technology as analogous to the evolution of the organism leads to a failure to see the creative capacities of technologies to adapt to and modify environments according to their own distinct modes of organisation. On this point, Ruyer (1975), Canguilhem (2008), Leroi-Gourhan (1993), and Simondon (2017) are unequivocal: the evolution of technologies occur via logics that are in no way equivalent to the evolution associated with biological organisms. Reacting to a tendency within 20^th century cybernetics to equate technological evolution to the evolution of the organism, Simondon instead identifies in technologies a number of distinct logics of alteration and change. Different to organisms, technologies are defined as a ‘coupling between the living and non-living’ (Simondon 2017: xvi) that bring together, amongst other things, natural (energy, matter, and time) and social forces (design, culture, and memory) within a system that would then produce new capacities for technological operation. Hence, when Simondon (2017: 140) writes that ‘[t]here is something alive in a technical ensemble’ it is because technology has a mode of existence that is different to other forms of non-human materiality. As a specific mode of existence, precisely what characterises technological life for Simondon requires a new appreciation of technological processes and logics of adaption that bears no simple analogy to the organism.

To exemplify how technologies might be understood to have particular vital qualities, Simondon (2017: 27-30) refers to the invention of the gasoline combustion engine. What he sees in the first functioning iterations of the combustion engine is the capacity for technologies to modify spacetimes by discovering their own logics of technological adaption. The first working combustion engine adapted insofar as it exhibited the surprising tendency to draw-in air during ignition, and hence counteract a problem of overheating and self-destruction. What is significant in this process, for Simondon, is the tendency for technologies like the combustion engine to exceed the anticipations and intentions of the designer. In this case, the engine’s successful invention is not merely the outcome of a series of anticipations executed by a human designer; rather, it is the outcome of an event of technological evolution occurring due to a surprising tendency of the engine cylinder itself to take-in air and enact a process of cooling within a wider technical system. However seemingly modest this event may be, it is precisely this adaptive capacity that leads Simondon to attribute certain vital qualities to technologies that complicate clear-cut distinctions between life and non-life: by taking-in air the engine self-adapts to its surrounding milieu and exhibits distinct powers of adjustment. As Woodward et al. (2015: 503) note, what is unique in Simondon’s approach here is how he ‘exposes the active role of the technical object in its own production’. This active role of technology is designated “vital” for Simondon because it concerns forms of creativity that do not necessarily correspond to anticipations and decisions made by a human designer, and yet are significant for grasping much wider processes of technological creativity and agency.

The second is concretisation. In attributing technologies with certain vital qualities to discover their own forms of invention, Simondon is tasked with explaining how technologies specifically evolve in ways that are distinct to processes of organismic evolution. For this he develops the concept of concretisation as a new theory of technological evolution. Concretisation describes a specific logic of technological adaption and mutation towards increasing levels of “concreteness”. As a theory of evolution that would be different to organismic evolution, concretisation accounts for the sense that the ‘true stages of the technical object’s improvement occur through…mutations which are oriented’ (Simondon, 2017: 43).

For a technology to concretise, it must engage in various processes of adaption that ensure it is less reliant on extraneous systems for its continued functioning. Returning to the combustion engine, by taking-in air the engine is able to perform more concretely with its surrounding milieu since it is no longer reliant on the human input of subsystems of water for cooling but is instead able to maintain its own functioning by taking-in air that is supplied by the engine. The logic of concretisation is different to other logics of organismic evolution because, as Simondon (2020a: 25-51) explains, organisms are concrete at their genesis insofar as they emerge through processes of embryogenesis capable of entirely self-forming their own evolution. Technologies, meanwhile, begin existence as a designed ‘abstract system’ (Simondon, 2017: 25-29) that must source corrections and different directions of convergence that allow them to evolve. This logic of concretisation is just as applicable to digital technologies (Gabrys, 2016; Hui, 2016), as Dekeyser (2018: 1431-1436) makes clear in the context of urban infrastructures, because concrete technological systems are, firstly, more responsive to the particularities of a given environment and, secondly, increasingly able to enact specific spatio-temporal modifications to an environment with higher degrees of reliability. As an adaptive relation between technology and wider environmental systems, concretisation explains how technologies become increasingly coherent with an environment by forming what Simondon (2017: 58) terms a ‘techno-geographic milieu’. The formation of a techno-geographic milieu is significant for understanding how technologies evolve in distinct ways because this milieu propels technologies into new unforeseen possibilities for future concretisation and invention.

The third is the concept of a technical lineage – a term Simondon (2017: 26) develops through the notion of a phylogenetic lineage used for the classification of biological entities to understand how evolution has been shaped by interactions between genetic groupings of organisms, or what are known as “phyla”. For Simondon, the technical lineage refers to a particular kind of genealogical abstraction that explains how technological evolution through time is guided and structured by certain kinds of material and energetic thresholds. Technical lineages concern the definite stages of technological evolution understood in terms of certain ‘structures and schemas’ (Simondon, 2017: 26) organising the possibilities for technological concretisation. However, conceptualising technologies in terms of technical lineages is not to say they evolve through a predictable series of linear steps. Rather, as Tedeschi (2019: 10) explains, for Simondon technologies concretise distinctly via ‘non-linear leaps of individuation’ between different technical lineages that often exist anterior to the logics of human design. Technical lineages are thus notable for approaching technology as techno-genesis because they produce an ‘intrinsic normativity’ (Simondon, 2017: 195) orientating the future concretisation of technologies. To exemplify this, Simondon refers again to the combustion engine:

The gasoline engine is not this or that engine given in time and space, but the fact that there is a succession, a continuity that runs through the first engines to those we currently know and which are still evolving…The shape of the combustion chamber, the shape and size of the valves, and the shape of the piston all belong to the same system within which a multitude of reciprocal causalities exist…the shape of the cylinder head, as well as the metal it is made of, produce a certain temperature in the spark plug electrodes in relation to all the other elements of the cycle; this temperature in turn causes a reaction leading to the characteristics of ignition and hence to the entire cycle. (Simondon, 2017: 26-27)

Understood in terms of the reciprocal causalities between tendencies of matter, a technology only exists insofar as it is able to constitute a technical lineage: it is through the causal relations of technological evolution (concretisation) that we come to understand how technologies are produced and hold together under finite directions of convergence (the technological phylum). On one level, a technical lineage – such as the reciprocal technological schema that combines the engine’s cylinder head, the qualities of the metal as a conductor of heat, and the separate temperature threshold that must be reached to achieve ignition – conditions and structures how a technology adapts towards greater levels of concreteness. Insofar as the possibilities for technological action are organised around certain threshold limits (heat, conduction etc.), this lineage acts as a stabilised genre of ontogenesis – what Simondon (2020a: 35) terms ‘internal resonance’ – that informs subsequent iterations of the combustion engine by orienting the concretisation of a technological system.

Just as in biology phylogenesis is seen as the ‘mechanical cause’ of ontogenesis (Løvtrup, 1978: 127-130), understanding connections between the different lineages of technologies is a generative task for Simondon, who sees in this idea the guided ontogenesis of new ‘normative values’ (Simondon, 2017: 229) that transform both future technological invention and collective processes of subjectivation. Rather than dissolving the human into the technical, Simondon articulates a specific evolutionary logic of technologies – a logic that would be used to remake technical culture and resolve the conventional opposition between the human and the technical worlds (Combes, 2013). Yet, despite this attention to remaking human and technical worlds, Simondon’s theorisation of concretising technical lineages clearly presents particular challenges, as Roberts (2017: 550) notes, since it provides no ‘existential guarantee’ that these human-technology couplings can be remade for the better. Rather, what it does is make amenable is the sense that remaking human-technology relations require not merely human action, but action at the level of the rhythms of technological systems that hold together through subtle interactions between technical lineages of concretisation. It is for this reason, therefore, that Simondon (2017: 17) begins his thesis on technology by qualifying the human subject as a ‘permanent organiser of a society of technical objects that need him [sic.] in the same way musicians in an orchestra need the conductor’. This analogy brings together Simondon’s whole approach to rethinking human-technology relations: technology is positioned not as a site of ontological constitution for human beings that are lacking, but as another mode of existence alongside the human for which its coming-into-being must be composed by subjects with the only a partial capacity for determining the rhythms of technical operations.

V Conclusions

Writing in this journal, Kinsley (2014) develops the concept of ‘technicity’ through Stiegler to better understand the materiality of the digital – ending by arguing for ‘a technogenetic understanding of the human and the technical as always already intertwined’ (p.379). In this paper, I have sought to take techno-genesis in a new direction via Simondon by defining it not in terms of a human-technology entwinement, but as something pertaining to the distinct evolutionary capacities of technologies that may fall outside of the orbit of the human. In doing so, this techno-genetic approach seeks to reconceptualise technology from a focus on ontology (Stiegler), to a focus ontogenesis (Simondon) – arguing that this shift is fruitful in the context of the digital turn for understanding the specific powers of technologies to modify spacetimes.

The reason for making this argument is not to dismiss Stiegler's conceptualisation of technology and technics. Clearly Stiegler offers much for geographical research, from his formulation of processes of grammatisation in his critique of capitalism (Stiegler, 2010b), to his theorisation of technological memory through tertiary retentions (Stiegler, 2009) to name just two areas. Rather, by developing an alternative reading a techno-genesis in this paper, the key point is to make space for understanding Simondon’s distinct contribution to conceptualising technology and technics as a thinker who is, at times, positioned as a natural ally to Stiegler thought (c.f. Hui, 2016; Ash, 2015) without necessarily acknowledging their significant conceptual divergences. Perhaps the most significant divergence here being how Simondon’s ontogenesis – dismissed by Stiegler (2015) – is formulated precisely to de-centre the primacy of human modes of thought. Techno-genesis, after Simondon, thus offers something unique by understanding technology as an entire mode of existence evolving according to abstract logics of invention and creativity that do not necessarily join up to the lifeworld of human being.

Put in terms of techno-genesis, technology defines specific modes of coming-into-being that have their own determining powers – powers I sought to articulate in terms of Simondon’s (2017) formulation of technology as vital, concertising, and pertaining to certain technical lineages. Resisting the dangers of relying on a notion of technological determinism removed from the social (Bingham, 1996), Simondon’s vital, concretising, and technical lineages are one way to grasp the modest determining powers of techno-genesis that demand unique logics for understanding the interplay of human-technology relations. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explain in relation to the writing of Simondon and Leroi-Gourhan, one can think about techno-genesis here in terms of the co-evolution of the hand-tool phylum, since:

the hand must not be thought of simply as an organ but instead as a coding (the digital code), a dynamic structuration, a dynamic formation (the manual form, or manual formal traits). The hand as a general form of content is extended in tools, which are themselves active forms implying substances, or formed matters... (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 60-61)

Which is to say that the morphology of the human hand is itself a product of the tool: it is the tool that has forced the hand to evolve around its technical lineage, as well as the tool evolving around the dexterity and functional capacities of the hand. As an outcome of techno-genesis, the human hand phylum and the non-human tool phylum are incorporated on the same ontogenetic plane of co-evolution: the hand and the tool emerge together to become the ‘servant of human technical intelligence’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 255) – a technological logic of evolution that has no predication on the constitution of human being and its appraisal of what technologies should do. To conclude, I want to suggest how an attention to the distinct logics of techno-genesis may offer opportunities for future research in the context of geography’s turn to the digital.

First is to note how Simondon provides a conceptual language for articulating abstract relations between technologies and environments besides a vague form of non-human relationality. Simondon is especially noteworthy for research in human geography because his articulation of the vital, concretising impulse of technologies according to technical lineages directs thought precisely towards those forms of technological organisation that are otherwise difficult to discern. As Landes (2014: 172) reflects, Simondon’s unique contribution is the discovery that ‘the technological object expresses a certain tendency of inorganic nature toward organization’. These organising tendencies may inform research, for example, into elemental (Adey, 2015; Simpson, 2019) and speculative (Kraftl, 2022; Fannin, 2022) geographies – particularly by heightening attention to how digital technologies concretise and begin to organise wider non-human elements (Massumi, 2015; Lazzarato, 2014; Raunig, 2016). Velkova (2021) has already examined something of this organising techno-genesis in apprehending how waste heat – a by-product of cloud computing data centres – is re-used in local energy grids defined by their own emergent thermopolitics and forms of metastable organisation. From a techno-genetic perspective, heat can be understood as concretised within an emerging techno-geographic milieu serving as ‘both a threat for servers and a commodity that can be sold, an object of imagination and speculation, a source of sensory pleasure for people and thermal comfort for machines, thereby shaping relations between subjects and objects’ (Velkova, 2021: 669).

Second is the potential for Simondon to contribute to research into technological intelligence and the algorithmic. Machen and Nost (2021), for example, have recently developed how algorithmic thinking produces certain reductive ‘abstractions’ that close down governmental decision-making in climate governance, such as by treating all environmental problems as inherently ‘solvable’ (p.561). While there has been much focus on the role on the effects of algorithmic thinking on various kinds of governance (Kwan, 2016; Kasapoglu et al., 2021), there has been less emphasis on tracing the specific logics of algorithmic thinking in its own terms. Thought about in terms of techno-genesis, it becomes important to understand the specific “intelligence” of digital technologies and how this becomes concretised within particular environments and political structures. Indeed, what Simondon (2017) discovers in his reaction against cybernetics in the mid-20th century is an enduring error in understanding the thinking computer and the thinking organism as directly analogous (e.g. Kurzweil, 2005). This analogy is misleading because it evaluates the artificial intelligence of technologies primarily in terms of their capacity to outstrip human intelligence – a manoeuvre that tends to overlook the specific ontogenetic intelligence enacted by technologies, including situated forms of algorithmic intelligence (Maalsen, 2023), which may remain incommensurable with contemporary understandings of human intellect. One pressing area for geographical research, therefore, is in articulating the specific intelligence produced through technical lineages of algorithmic technologies – such as by apprehending their uniquely ‘abductive logics’ (Parisi, 2019) – in order to understand the way algorithmic thinking may exceed, or entirely subvert, human thinking and the intentions of human design.

Third, and finally, is how techno-genesis contributes ways of understanding the participation of technologies in wider political processes and the production of subjectivity (Woodward et al., 2015). As Elwood (2021: 211) notes, ontogenetic theories of digital technologies often come with the promise of creating ‘possibilities for unanticipated forms of agency, subjectivity, or sociospatial relations’. Realising these possibilities, I contend, is about recognising how technologies can modify the subject’s ‘orientation to potential futures’ (McCormack, 2013: 36), and the different citizen formations produced therein (Datta, 2018). After Simondon, this political task is precisely about the distinct powers of technologies to produce ‘seeds of thought’ that can inculcate new collective norms, since:

the technical being...exists as a seed of thought that contains a normativity extending far beyond itself. The technical being in this second manner therefore constitutes a path that transmits from individual to individual a certain capacity of creation... (Simondon, 2020b: 414 emphasis added)

As a mode of existence containing certain capacities for creation, technologies exhibit powers to alter subjective norms in ways that exceed human intelligibility and anticipation. Simondon reveals that there are creative capacities of technology to modify the functioning of a much wider environmental milieu through normative operations of concretisation and lineages of reinvention. Technologies alter subjectivity in this manner because Simondon apprehends technology as ‘part of the collective potential that makes us human in particular ways as it individuates entities and our possibilities of relating’ (Gabrys, 2016: 11). To focus on how technologies individuate possibilities of relating is to encourage research into how automated relations of technologies structure decision-making and experience in ways that are imperceptible or at the margins of human perception (Amoore, 2018). Techno-genesis heightens attention to the subtle role of technologies in shaping their own evolution and concretisation in ways that prompt geographers to reconsider the agency attributed to the human subject amidst technological things. Reconsidering the agency allotted to the human subject means becoming much more attentive to the way technologies seed new ways of thinking – it is for this reason that Simondon (2017: 123) suggests ‘[t]here is more authentic culture in the gesture of a child who reinvents a technical device’ because this approach to technologies is not necessarily driven by collective social conventions (consumption, industrial demand etc.), but through a more open appreciation of a technology’s own possibilities for reinvention.