The eye in the media: Materiality and technical individuation

Analysing the thoughts of theorists of technique and technology such as Gilbert Simondon (1958) and Bernard Stiegler (2018), we conclude that technique and technology constitute modes of individuals and their environment, as opposed to simple tools that prolong pre-existing capacities in individuals. Indeed, technique and technology enable diverse modes of individuation, whether at the individual, psychic, or social level. Thus each time change implies new technologies that structure the milieu suspending the existing programs. Stiegler called that suspension an epoché . This essay aims to account for the current material transformations that occur due to the interaction between the individual and new computational systems. These transformations have led to reformulate, to put in epoché , the old paradigms that focused on vision, perception, and the image from an anthropological point of view. To get there, I will explore the philosophical and theoretical resonances of artefacts from the perspective of Simondon’s information processing system approach. Additionally, I will incorporate Stiegler’s concept of deanthropologization to account for the new relationships that must be defined between individuals and machines, where classic concepts — such as the relationship between the image and human vision — must be reviewed. Currently, images are not limited to the visual because, as code, they can be processed by algorithms which do not need to “see”. Today, we also face a shift in scale, with an enormous mass of data that can be easily processed by algorithms, but not by individual humans. This is why the transformation of information into digital images or dataviz, that allow us to understand abstract and complex datafication, can be thought to establish new material relationships of individuation between algorithms and living beings.