On the Mode of Existence of

Technical Objects

Gilbert Simondon

Translated by Ninian Mellamphy,

Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy

I. The Notion of Phase Applied to Becoming: Technicity

as Phase
This study postulates that technicity is one of the two fundamental
phases of the mode of existence of the ensemble constituted by man and
the world. By phase, we do not mean one temporal moment replaced by
another, but an aspect that results from a division of being and that is
opposed to another aspect. This sense of the word phase is inspired by
the notion of phase relation in physics; one cannot conceive of a phase
except in relation to another or to several other phases; in a system of
phases there is a relation of equilibrium and of reciprocal tensions; the
present system of all the phases taken together is the complete reality,
not each phase, itself since a phase is a phase only in relation to others,
and it is distinguished from them in a manner that is totally independent
of notions of genus and species. Finally, the existence of a plurality of
phases defines the reality of a neutral centre of equilibrium in relation
to which the phase-shift exists. This schema is very different from the
dialectical schema, because it implies neither necessary succession nor
the intervention of negativity as engine of progress; moreover, in the
schema of phases, the opposition exists only in the particular case of a
biphase structure.
The adoption of such a schema founded on the notion of phase is
destined to put in play a principle according to which the temporal
development of a living reality proceeds by division from an initial active
centre and then by regrouping after the advance of each separate reality

Deleuze Studies 5.3 (2011): 407424

DOI: 10.3366/dls.2011.0029
Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/dls

408 Gilbert Simondon

resulting from the division. Each separate reality is a symbol of the other,
just as one phase is a symbol of the other or of others; no phase, as phase,
is in equilibrium in relation to itself, nor does it have complete truth or
reality: every phase is partial, abstract, and unbalanced; only the system
of phases is in equilibrium at its neutral point; its truth and its reality
are this neutral point, the procession and conversion in relation to this
neutral point.
We suppose that technicity results from a phase-shift of a central,
original and unique mode of being in the world, the magical mode; the
phase that balances technicity is the religious mode of being. Aesthetic
thinking emerges at the neutral point between technics and religion, at
the moment of the division of primitive magical unity: this is not a phase
but, rather, a permanent reminder of the rupture of the unity of the
magical mode of being and a search for a future unity.
Each phase in turn divides into a theoretical mode and a practical
mode; there is thus a practical mode of technics and a practical mode of
religion, as well as a theoretical mode of technics and a theoretical mode
of religion.
Just as the distance between technics and religion generates aesthetic
thinking, so the distance between the two theoretical modes (the
technical and the religious) generates scientific knowledge as mediation
between technics and religion. The distance between the practical
technical mode and the practical religious mode generates ethical
thinking. Aesthetic thinking is therefore a mediation between technics
and religion that is more primitive than science and ethics, for the birth
of science and ethics requires a prior division within technics and religion
between the theoretical mode and the practical mode. From this results
the fact that aesthetic thinking is truly situated at the neutral point,
extending the existence of magic, whereas science on the one hand
and ethics on the other are in conflict in relation to the neutral point,
since there is the same distance between them as there is between the
theoretical mode and the practical mode in technics and in religion. If
science and ethics could have converged and united, they would have
coincided in the neutral axis of this genetic system, thereby providing
a second analogue of magical unity, over and above the incomplete
aesthetic thinking that is its first analogue, incomplete because it allows
the phase-shift between technics and religion to subsist. This second
analogue would be complete; it would replace at once magic and
aesthetics; but perhaps it is only a simple tendency playing a normative
role, since nothing proves that the distance between the theoretical mode
and the practical mode can be completely bridged.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects 409

In order to indicate the true nature of technical objects, it is therefore
necessary to resort to a study of the entire genesis of the relations
between man and the world; the technicity of objects would then seem to
be one of the two phases of the relation of man to the world engendered
by the division of primitive magical unity. Should technicity then be
considered as a simple moment in a genesis? Yes, in a certain sense:
there is certainly something transitory in technicity, which itself becomes
divided into theory and practice and participates in the subsequent
genesis of theoretical thinking and of practical thinking. But, in another
sense, there is something definitive in the opposition of technicity
to religiosity, because mans primitive way of being in the world
(magic) can be thought to provide inexhaustibly an indefinite number of
successive contributions that can be divided into a technical phase and
a religious phase; in this manner, although effectively there is succession
in genesis, the successive stages of the different geneses are simultaneous
within culture, and there are relations and interactions not only between
simultaneous phases but also between successive stages; hence, technics
can encounter not only religion and aesthetic thinking but also science
and ethics. Now, if one adopts the genetic postulate, one notices that a
science or an ethics can never encounter a religion or a technics on a truly
common ground, since the modes of thinking that are different in degree
(for example a science and a technique) and that exist at the same time do
not constitute a single genetic lineage, do not issue from the same surge
of the primitive magical universe. True and balanced relations only exist
between phases of the same level (for example a technical ensemble and
a religion) or between successive degrees of genesis that are part of the
same lineage (for example between the stage of technics and of religions
in the seventeenth century and the contemporary stage of science and of
ethics). True relations exist only in a genetic ensemble balanced around
a neutral point, envisaged in its totality.
This is precisely the goal to be reached: reflexive thinking has a
mission to redress and refine the successive waves of genesis by which
the primitive unity of the relation of man to the world becomes divided
and comes to sustain science and ethics through technics and religion,
between which aesthetic thinking develops. In these successive divisions,
primitive unity would be lost if science and ethics were not able to come
together at the end of the genesis; philosophical thinking is inserted
between theoretical thinking and practical thinking, in the extension of
aesthetic thinking and of the original magical unity.
Now, to make possible the unity of scientific knowledge and of ethics
in philosophical thinking, the sources of science and of ethics have to be

410 Gilbert Simondon

of the same degree, contemporaneous one with the other, and must have
arrived at the same point of genetic development. The genesis of technics
and of religion conditions that of science and of ethics. Philosophy is its
own condition, for as soon as reflexive thinking begins, it has the power
to perfect whichever of the geneses that has not been entirely achieved,
by becoming aware of the sense of the genetic process itself. So, to be able
to pose the philosophical problem of the relations between knowledge
and ethics in a profound manner, it would be necessary first of all to
complete the genesis of technics and the genesis of religious thinking, or
at the very least (for this task would be infinite) to know the real meaning
of these two geneses.

II. The Phase-Shift of Primitive Magical Unity

In order to understand the true relation of technics to other functions of
human thinking, one must start with the primitive magical unity of the
relations of man and world; through this examination it is possible to
understand why philosophical thinking should complete the integration
of technical reality into culture, which is only possible by freeing the
sense of the genesis of technics, by the founding of a technology; so,
the disparity between technics and religion subsides, harmful as it is
to the intended reflexive synthesis of knowledge and ethics. Philosophy
must found technology, which is the ecumenism of technics, because if
ethics and the sciences are to meet up in reflection, a unity of technics
and a unity of religious thinking needs to precede the division of each
of these forms of thinking into a theoretical mode and a practical
mode.
The genesis of a particular phase can be described in itself; but it
cannot be really known in its sense and, consequently, understood in
its postulation of unity, unless it is repositioned in the totality of its
genesis, as a phase in relation to other phases. This is why in trying to
understand technicity it is not enough to start with constituted technical
objects; objects emerge at a certain moment, but technicity precedes
and surpasses them; technical objects result from an objectification of
technicity; they are produced by it, yet technicity is not exhausted in
these objects and is not entirely contained in them.
If we eliminate the idea of a dialectical relation between successive
stages of the relation between man and the world, what could be the
engine of successive divisions during which technicity emerges? It is
possible to appeal to the theory of Forms, and to generalise the relation
that it establishes between figure and ground. Gestalt theory draws its

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects 411

basic principle from the hylemorphic schema of ancient philosophy,
applied to modern considerations of physical morphogenesis: the
structuring of a system would depend on spontaneous modifications
tending towards a stable state of equilibrium. In reality, it seems that
a distinction should be made between a stable equilibrium and a
metastable equilibrium. The emergence of the distinction between figure
and ground results from a state of tension, from the incompatibility
of the system in relation to itself, from what one could call the
oversaturation of the system. But the structuring is not the discovery
of the lowest level of equilibrium: stable equilibrium, in which all
potential would be actualised, would correspond to the death of any
possibility of further transformation; so, living systems, precisely those
that manifest the greatest organisational spontaneity, are systems of
metastable equilibrium. The discovery of a structure is at least a
provisional resolution of incompatibilities, but it is not the destruction of
potentials; the system continues to live and to evolve; it is not degraded
by the emergence of structure; it remains tense and capable of being
modified.
If one agrees to accept this corrective and to replace the notion of
stability with that of metastability, then it seems that the Theory of
Forms may account for fundamental stages in the evolution of the
relation between man and the world.
Primitive magical unity is the vital relational link between man and
the world, defining a universe at once subjective and objective prior
to any distinction between object and subject, and consequently also
prior to any emergence of the separate object. The primitive mode of
the relation of man to the world can be thought of as not only prior to
the objectification of the world, but even to the segregation of objective
unities in the field that will become the objective field. Man finds that
he is bound to a universe that is experienced as a milieu. The emergence
of the object can only happen through the isolation and fragmentation
of the mediation between man and the world; and according to the
principle proposed, this objectification of a mediation must have as
correlative, in relation to the primitive neutral centre, the subjectification
of mediation. The mediation between man and the world becomes
objectified as a technical object, in the same way as it is subjectified
as a religious mediator; but this objectification and this subjectification,
contrary and complementary, are preceded by a primary stage of the
relation to the world, the magical stage, in which the mediation is as yet
neither subjective nor objective, neither fragmented nor universalised,
and is the simplest and most fundamental structuring of the milieu of

412 Gilbert Simondon

a living being: the birth of a network of privileged points of exchange
between the being and the milieu.
The magical universe is already structured, but according to a mode
that is prior to the segregation of object and subject; this primitive
mode of structuring is the one that distinguishes figure from ground by
marking key-points in the universe. If the universe were deprived of every
structure, the relation between the living being and its milieu could occur
in a continuous time and a continuous space, without privileged moment
or place. In fact, preceding the segregation of unities, a reticulation
of space and time is established that highlights privileged places and
moments, as if all of mans power to act and all the capacity of the
world to influence man were concentrated in these places and in these
moments. These places and these moments possess, concentrate, and
express the forces contained in the ground reality that supports them.
These sites and these moments are not separate realities; they draw their
force from the ground that they dominate; but they localise and focalise
the attitude of the living vis--vis its milieu.
According to this general genetic hypothesis, we suppose that the
primitive mode of existence of man in the world corresponds to a
primitive union, prior to any division, of subjectivity and objectivity.
The primary structuring, corresponding to the emergence of a figure
and a ground in this mode of existence, is what gives birth to the
magical universe. The magical universe is structured according to the
most primitive and most fecund of organisations: that of the reticulation
of the world into privileged places and privileged moments. A privileged
place, a place that has a power, is one which draws into itself all the
force and efficacy of the domain it delimits; it summarises and contains
the force of a compact mass of reality; it summarises and governs it, as
a highland governs and dominates a lowland; the elevated peak is the
lord of the mountain,1 just as the most impenetrable part of the wood
is where all its reality resides. The magical world is in this way made
of a network of places and things that have a power and are bound to
other things and other places that also have a power. Such a path, such
an enclosure, such a temenos contains all the force of the land, and is
the key-point of the reality and of the spontaneity of things, as well as
of their accessibility.
In such a network of key-points, of high-places, there is a primitive
indistinction regarding human reality and the reality of the objective
world. These key-points are real and objective, but in them the human
being is immediately united with the world, both to be influenced by
it and to act upon it; they are places of contact and of mixed, mutual

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects 413

reality, places of exchange and of communication because they form a
knot between both realities.
Yet magical thought is the first, because it corresponds to the
simplest, most concrete, most immense and most supple structuring:
that of reticulation. In the totality constituted by man and the world
there emerges as the primary structure a network of privileged sites
that make possible the insertion of human effort, and through which
exchanges between man and the world are carried out. Each singular
site concentrates within itself the capacity to have control over a portion
of the world that it specifically represents and whose reality it conveys
in communication with man. These singular sites could be called keypoints controlling the man-world relationship in a reversible way, for
the world influences man just as man influences the world. The summits
of mountains or certain narrow passes are in this way naturally magical,
because they govern a region. The heart of the forest and the centre of a
plain are not just geographical realities metaphorically or geometrically
designated: they are realities that concentrate natural powers as they
focalise human effort: they are figural structures in relation to the masse
that supports them and that constitutes their ground.
In general, we look to superstition when we want to find an example
of the schemas of magical thinking in the actual conditions of life.
In fact, superstitions are faded vestiges of magical thinking and, in a
search for its real essence, they can only be misleading. On the other
hand, to understand the meaning of magical thinking, it is advisable to
resort to high, noble and sacred forms of thought that require a clear
and insightful effort. That, for example, is the affective, representative
and voluntary substratum that supports an ascent or an exploration.
Perhaps the desire for conquest and the sense of competition underlie
the motivation that makes it possible to move from everyday existence
to exceptional acts; but certainly when the desire for conquest is invoked,
it is a matter of making an individual act legitimate for a community. In
fact, in the individual being or in the group limited to those who perform
the exceptional act, the thinking implemented is much more primitive
and much more elaborate.
Ascent, exploration, and, more generally, every pioneering act consists
in adhering to the key-points that nature presents. Climbing a slope
in order to go towards the summit is to make ones way towards the
privileged place that commands the entire mountainous massif, not
in order to dominate or to take possession of it, but to enter into a
friendly relationship with it. Man and nature are not strictly speaking
enemies before such accession to the key-point, but strangers to one

414 Gilbert Simondon

other. Until it has been climbed, the summit is only a summit, a place
higher than the others. The ascent gives it the character of a place that
is more fully developed, elaborate and non-abstract, a place where this
exchange between the world and man occurs. The summit is the place
from which the whole massif is seen in an absolute way, while views
from all other places are relative and incomplete, making one wish for
the summit point of view. An expedition or a navigation that makes it
possible to reach a continent by an established route does not conquer
anything; nevertheless, in magical thinking they are valid in that they
make possible contact with the continent in a privileged place that is
a key-point. The magical universe is made up of the network of places
providing access to every domain of reality: it consists of thresholds,
summits, boundaries and crossing points that are connected to one
another by their singularity and their exceptional nature.
This network of boundaries is not only spatial but also temporal;
there are notable dates and privileged moments to begin one action or
another. Besides, the very notion of beginning is magical, even if every
particular value is denied on the date of the beginning; the beginning
of an action that is to last and the first act of what should be a long
series ought not to have in themselves a particular majesty and power of
direction, if they were thought to be controlling the entire duration of the
action and the whole sequence of efforts, propitious or otherwise; dates
are privileged points of time that make possible an exchange between
human intention and the spontaneous unfolding of events. These are the
temporal structures by which man is inserted in natural becoming, just as
the influence of natural time affects each human life, becoming destiny.
In civilised life today, a great many institutions concern magical
thinking but are hidden by utilitarian concepts that indirectly justify
them; in particular, time off, festivals and vacations compensate with
their magical charge for the loss of magical power imposed by civilised
urban life. Thus, vacation trips, that are thought to provide rest and
diversion, are in fact a quest for key-points old or new; these points can
be the big city for country people, or the countryside for city dwellers,
but more generally they are not any particular site in the city or the
countryside; it [ the key-point ] is the shore or the high mountain or
even the border crossed on the way to a foreign land. Public holidays
are related to privileged moments of time; occasionally, a conjunction of
singular moments and singular sites is possible.
So, ordinary time and ordinary space serve as ground for these figures;
dissociated from the ground, figures would lose their meaning; time
off and celebrations are not a release from ordinary life by suspending

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects 415

ordinary life, but a search for privileged places and dates in relation to
the continuous ground.
This figural structure is inherent in the world, rather than detached;
it is the reticulation of the universe in privileged key-points at which
exchanges happen between the living being and its milieu. Now, it
is precisely this reticular structure that goes out of phase when there
is a shift from the original magical unity to technics and to religion:
figure and ground separate by becoming detached from the universe
to which they adhered. The key points become objective, retaining
only their functional mediatory characteristics, becoming instrumental,
mobile, capable of efficiency in any place and at any time; as figure,
the key-points, detached from the ground for which they were the key,
become technical objects, transportable and abstracted from the milieu.
At the same time, the key-points lose their mutual reticulation and
their power of distant influence on the reality that surrounded them;
as technical objects they have only one action upon contact, site by site,
instant by instant. This rupture of the network of key-points frees the
characteristics of the ground, and these in turn become detached from
their own ground, narrowly qualitative and concrete, in order to hover
over the whole universe, throughout space and throughout time, in the
form of detached powers and forces above the world. While the keypoints become objective in the form of concretised tools and instruments,
the ground powers become subjective by becoming personified in the
form of the divine and the sacred (Gods, heroes, priests).
The primitive reticulation of the magical world is thus the source of an
objectification and a subjectification that are in conflict; at the moment
of the rupture of the initial structuring, the fact that the figure becomes
detached from the ground is expressed by another detachment: figure
and ground themselves are freed from their concrete adherence to the
universe and take contrasting pathways; the figure becomes fragmented,
whereas the ground qualities and forces become universalised: this
break-up and this universalising are forms of becoming, the figure
becoming an abstract figure, and grounds becoming a single abstract
ground. This phase-shift of the mediation into figural characteristics
and ground characteristics translates into the emergence of a distance
between man and the world. The meditation itself, instead of being a
simple structuring of the universe, takes on a certain density; it becomes
objectified in technics and becomes subjectified in religion, making the
first object appear in the technical object and the first subject appear in
divinity, when previously there had been a single unity of the living and
its milieu: objectivity and subjectivity emerge between the living and its

416 Gilbert Simondon

milieu, between man and the world, at a moment when the world does
not yet have a complete status as object nor man a complete status as
subject. Moreover, it can be affirmed that objectivity is never completely
coextensive with the world, and that subjectivity is never completely
coextensive with man. It is only when the world is envisaged from a
technicist perspective and man is envisaged from a religious perspective
that one can be called a complete object and the other a complete
subject. Pure objectivity and pure subjectivity are modes of the mediation
between man and the world, in their first form.
Religion and technics are the organisation of two symmetrical and
contrasting mediations; but they form a couple, since each is but one
phase of the primitive mediation. In this sense, they do not have a
definitive autonomy. Furthermore, even when taken in the system that
they form, they cannot be considered as enclosing all the real, since they
are between man and the world, but do not contain the entire reality of
man and of the world, and cannot apply to it in a complete way. Because
of the gap between these two opposing aspects of mediation, science and
ethics deepen the relation between man and the world. With regard to
science and to ethics, the two primitive mediations play a normative role:
science and ethics are born in the interval defined by the gap between
technics and religion, by following the median direction; the precedence
that religion and technics have to science and ethics is of the same order
as the precedence that lines limiting an angle have to the bisector of
that angle: the sides of the angle may be indicated by short segments,
whereas the bisector can be extended indefinitely. Likewise, from the gap
that exists between very primitive technics and a very primitive religion,
a very elaborate science and very elaborate ethics can be progressively
constructed without being limited by, but only directed by, the basic
conditions of technics and religion.
The origin of the division that created technical thinking and religious
thinking can be attributed to a primitive structure of reticulation that
is truly functional. This division separated figure from ground, figure
providing the content of technics, and ground providing that of religion.
Whereas in the magical reticulation of the world, figure and ground
are reciprocal realities, technics and religion emerge when figure and
ground become detached from one another, in this way becoming
mobile, divisible, displaceable, and directly open to manipulation
because disconnected from the world. Technical thinking retains only
the schematism of structures, of what makes up the efficiency of action
on singular sites; these singular sites, detached from the world of which
they were the figure, detached also from one another, losing their

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects 417

immobilising reticular concatenation, become divisible and receptive as
well as reproducible and constructible. The elevated place becomes an
observation post, a watchtower constructed in the plain, or a tower
placed at the entrance to a gorge. At the beginning, technics are often
content to develop a privileged place, as when constructing a tower at
the summit of a hill, or placing a lighthouse on a promontory at the most
visible point. But technics can also successfully create the functionality
of privileged sites. Of natural realities technics retain only the figural
power, not the site and natural localisation on a determined ground
given prior to any human intervention. Dividing the schematisms more
and more, it makes something into a tool or an instrument, that is to say,
a fragment detached from the world capable of working efficiently in any
location and under any conditions, site by site, according to the intention
that directs it and at the moment when man so wishes. The accessibility
of the technical thing consists in its being freed from servitude to the
ground of the world. Technics are analytic, operating progressively and
by contact, leaving aside connection by influence. In magic the singular
place permits action over a whole domain, just as talking to the king
is enough to win over a whole people. In technics, on the other hand,
all of reality must be examined, touched and treated by the technical
object, detached from the world and available for use in any site at any
moment. The technical object is distinguishable from the natural being
in the sense that it is not part of the world. It intervenes as mediator
between man and the world; it is, therefore, the first detached object, for
the world is a unity, a milieu rather than an ensemble of objects; there
are in fact three types of reality: the world, the subject and the object,
which is an intermediary between the world and the subject, the primary
form of which is the technical object.

III. The Divergence of Technical Thinking and of

Religious Thinking
Technical thinking, which results from the rupture of the primitive
reticular structure of the magical world, and which retains those figural
elements that can be deposited in objects, tools, or instruments, gains
from this detachment an accessibility that makes possible its application
to every element of the world. However, this rupture also produces a
deficit: the tool or the technical instrument has retained only its figural
characteristics, and figural aspects that are detached from the ground
with which they had once been directly connected since they came from
a primary structuring that caused figure and ground to spring up as a

418 Gilbert Simondon

single and continuous reality. In the magical universe, the figure was
the figure of a ground and the ground the ground of a figure; the real,
the unity of the real, was at once figure and ground; the question of
a possible lack of effectiveness of the figure on the ground or of the
influence of the ground on the figure could not have arisen, since figure
and ground constituted a single unity of being. On the other contrary, in
the case of technics, after the rupture, what the technical object retained
and established of figural characteristics finds any ground whatever
anonymous and foreign. The technical object has become a bearer of
form, a remnant of figural characteristics, and it tries to apply that form
to a ground that is now detached from the figure, because it has lost
its intimate inherent relationship and because it can be informed by any
form encountered, but in a violent, more or less imperfect manner; figure
and ground have become strangers and abstract in relation to one other.
The hylemorphic schema does not solely describe the genesis of living
beings; it might not even describe it essentially. Perhaps also it does
not derive from a well-thought-out and conceptualised experience of
technics: before the knowledge of the living being and before reflection
on technics, this implicit adequacy of figure and ground is broken by
technics. If the hylemorphic schema seems disengaged from technical
experience, this is because it is more a norm and an ideal than an
experience of the real. Technical experience, making use of vestiges
of figural elements and vestiges of ground characteristics, revives the
primary intuition of a mutual adherence of matter and form, of a
coupling preceding any division. In this sense, the hylemorphic schema
is correct, not because of the logical use of it in ancient philosophy,
but as an intuition of the structure of the universe for man before the
birth of technics. This relation cannot be organised as a hierarchy: it
cannot have in it increasingly successive and increasingly abstract stages
of matter and of form, because the real model of the relation between
matter and form is the primary structuring of the universe as figure and
ground; now, this structuring is true only if it is not abstract, if it is at
one stage only; the ground is really ground and the figure really figure,
and it cannot become ground for a higher figure. The manner in which
Aristotle describes the relations between form and matter, in particular
the supposition that matter aspires to form (matter aspires to form as the
female to the male) is already far from primitive magical thinking, for
that aspiration can only exist if there had been an earlier detachment; so,
it is a single being that is at once matter and form. Furthermore, perhaps
one should not say that only the individual being is made up of matter
and form; because the emergence of a figure-ground structure is prior to

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects 419

any segregation of units. The mutual relation of correspondence between
a given key-point and a given ground neither presupposes the isolation of
the key-point from the network of other key-points nor the discontinuity
of this ground from other grounds: it is a universe that is structured in
this way, not an ensemble of individuals. The first detached beings to
emerge after the rupture of the primitive reticulation are technical objects
and religious subjects, and they are responsible for figural characteristics
as they are for ground characteristics: therefore, they do not fully possess
matter and form.
The dissociation of the primitive structuring from the magical universe
entails a series of consequences for technics and religion, and through
them it conditions the later development of science and of ethics. In fact,
unity belongs to the magical world. The phase-shift that makes for an
opposition between technics and religion, in an irreducible way leaves
technical content with a status lesser than unity and leaves religious
content with a status greater than unity. This causes all the other
consequences. A proper understanding of the status of the technicity
of objects depends on its being grasped in terms of the development
that put the primitive unity out of phase. Religion, retaining its
ground characteristics (homogeneity, qualitative nature, indistinction
of elements within a system of mutual influences, long-range action
across space and time resulting in ubiquity and eternity), represents
the implementation of the functions of totality. A particular being, a
precise object of attention or of effort, is always considered in religious
thought to be smaller than real unity, inferior to the totality and included
within it, exceeded by the totality of space, and preceded and followed
by the immensity of time. Whether subject or object, the object, the
being, the individual is always understood to be less than unity, to
be dominated by a presaged totality that infinitely transcends it. The
source of the transcendence lies in the function of totality that dominates
the particular being; in the religious view of things this particular
being is understood in relation to a totality in which it participates,
because of which it exists, but which it can never completely express.
Religion universalises the function of totality, which is dissociated
and consequently freed from any figural attachment that limits it; the
grounds connected to the world in magical thinking, and consequently
limited by the very structuring of the magical universe, become in
religious thinking a limitless background, spatial as well as temporal.
They retain their positive ground qualities (forces, powers, influences,
quality), but rid themselves of their limits and the adherence that
attached them to a hic et nunc. They become absolute ground, totality

420 Gilbert Simondon

of ground. Advancement in the universe begins from liberated and, to
some extent, abstract magical grounds.
Religious thinking, after the disjunction of ground and figure, retains
the other part of the magical world: the ground, with its qualities,
its tensions, its forces; but this ground, too, like the figural schemas of
technics, becomes something detached from the world, abstracted from
the primitive milieu. And just as the figural schemas of technics, freed
from their adherence to the world, are affixed to tool or instrument in
the course of becoming objectified, the qualities of ground that technicity
makes available in the mobilisation of figures are affixed to subjects.
Technical objectification leading to the emergence of the technical
object, the mediator between man and the world, has a counterpart
in religious subjectification. Just as technical mediation is instituted
by means of something that becomes a technical object, so religious
mediation emerges as a result of the affixing of ground characteristics on
subjects, real or imaginary, divinities or priests. Religious subjectification
normally leads to mediation by the priest, while technical mediation
leads to mediation by the technical object. Technicity retains the figural
characteristics of the primitive complex of man and the world, while
religiosity retains the ground characteristics.
Technicity and religiosity are neither degraded forms of magic nor
relics of magic; they issue from the division of the primitive magical
complex, the reticulation of the original human milieu into figure and
ground. It is through their coupling that technics and religion are the
heirs of magic, not through each on its own. Religion is not more magical
than technics; it is the subjective phase of the result of division, whereas
technics are the objective phase of the very same division. Technics
and religion are contemporaries of each other, and, when each is taken
separately, they are more impoverished than the magic from which they
emerge.
Religion, therefore, has by nature the vocation to represent the
exigency of the totality; when it divides into a theoretical mode and a
practical mode, through theology it becomes the exigency of a systematic
representation of the real as an absolute unity; through morality, it
becomes for ethics the exigency of absolute norms of action that are
justified in the name of the totality and superior to all hypothetical,
that is to say particular, imperatives; to science as to ethics, religion
brings a principle of reference to the totality, which is the aspiration
to the unity of theoretical knowledge and to the absolute character
of the moral imperative. Religious inspiration constitutes a permanent
reminder of the relativity of one particular being with respect to an

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects 421

unconditional totality exceeding every object and every subject of
knowledge and of action.
Conversely, technics have a content that is always subordinate to
the status of the unity, because the schemas of efficiency and the
structures resulting from the fragmentation of the primitive network
of key-points cannot be applied to the totality of the world. By
nature, technical objects are multiple and divided; technical thinking,
enclosed in this plurality, can progress, but only by multiplying technical
objects, without being able to recapture the primitive unity. Even
when multiplying technical objects endlessly, it is impossible to find
an absolute adequacy to the world, since each of the objects attacks
the world in one place only and in one moment only; it is localised,
particularised; adding technical objects one to another can neither remake the world nor regain contact with the world in its unity, which
was the aim of magical thinking.
In connection with a specific object or with a specific task, technical
thinking is always inferior to unity: it can present several objects and
several means, and select the best; but nonetheless, it always remains
inadequate to the wholeness of the unity of the object or of the task.
Each schema, each object, each technical operation, is controlled and
guided by the whole from which it derives its ends and its orientation,
and which provides it with a never attained principle of unity that is
expressed by combining and multiplying its schemas.
Technical thinking has by nature the vocation to represent the pointof-view of the element; it adheres to the elementary function. Once
technicity is admitted into a domain it breaks it up and starts a chain
of successive and elementary mediations governed by the unity of
the domain and subordinated to it. Technical thinking conceives the
operation of an ensemble as a chain of elementary processes working
point by point and step by step; it localises and multiplies the schemas
of mediation, always remaining lesser than the unity. The element in
technical thinking is more stable, better understood, and in a certain
way more perfect than the ensemble; it is really an object, whereas
the ensemble always remains to a certain extent inherent in the world.
Religious thinking finds the opposite equilibrium: in it, the totality is
more stable, more powerful, and more viable than the element.
In the theoretical domain as in the ethical domain, technics are
concerned with the element. In the sciences the contribution of technics
consisted in making possible a representation of phenomena one by
one by breaking them down into simple elementary processes similar
to the operations of technical objects; such is the role of the mechanistic

422 Gilbert Simondon

hypothesis that enabled Descartes to represent the rainbow as an overall
result of the point by point trajectory taken by each luminous corpuscle
in each drop of rain in a cloud; and it was also according to the same
method that Descartes describes the functioning of the heart by breaking
down a complete cycle into simple successive operations and showing
that the functioning of the whole is the result of the play of elements
necessitated by their particular disposition (for example, that of each
valve). Descartes does not ask himself why the heart is made in this way,
with valves and cavities, but how it works given how it is made. The
application of schemas drawn from technics does not account for the
existence of the totality, taken as a unity, but does account for the point
by point and instant by instant functioning of that totality.
In the ethical domain, technical thinking not only introduces means
of action that are fragmentary and tied to the capacities of each object
that is becoming a utensil, but also a certain reduplication of the action
by technicity; a specific human action, considered with respect to its
results, could have been accomplished by a specific technical functioning
going through various stages; elements and moments of action have
their technical analogue; an effort of attention, of memory, could have
been replaced by a technical operation; technicity provides a partial
equivalence to the results of action; it accentuates awareness of the
action by the being who brings it to completion in the form of results; it
broadcasts and objectifies the results of the action through comparison
with those of the technical operation, breaking down the action into
partial results, into elementary completions. Just as in the sciences
technicity introduces the search for the how by a breaking down of
ensemble phenomena into elementary operations, so in ethics technicity
introduces the search for a breaking down of the overall action into the
elements of action; because the total action is envisaged as that which
produces a result, the breakdown of the action generated by technics
considers the elements of the action as gestures that achieve partial
results. Technicity assumes that an action is limited to its results; it is
not concerned with the subject of the action taken in its real totality,
nor even with an action in its totality, to the extent that the totality of
the action is founded on the unity of the subject. In ethics concern with
results is the analogue of the search for the how in the sciences; result and
process remain subordinate to the unity of the action or to the ensemble
of the real.
The postulation of an absolute and unconditional justification which
religion directs towards ethics translates into a search for the intention
as opposed to a search for the result that is inspired by technics. In the

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects 423

sciences, religious thinking introduces an appeal for absolute theoretical
unity that requires a search for the sense of becoming and the existence
of given phenomena (hence responding to the why?), whereas technical
thinking offers an examination of the how? for each of the phenomena.
Because its content is inferior to unity, technical thinking is the
paradigm for all inductive thinking, both in the theoretical order and
in the practical. It contains this inductive process in itself, prior to any
separation into practical and theoretical modes. Induction, in fact, is not
merely a logical process in the strict sense of the term; any process can be
considered to be a process of the inductive type if its content is inferior
to the status of unity, if it strives to attain unity or, at least, if it tends
towards unity from a plurality of elements, each of which is inferior to
unity. What induction takes hold of, what it starts from, is an element
that in itself is not sufficient and complete, and does not constitute a
unity; so, it exceeds each particular element by combining it with other
elements that are themselves particular, in order to find an analogue of
unity: in induction there is a search for the ground of reality from figural
elements that are fragments; to try to find a law beneath phenomena, as
in the induction of Bacon and Stuart Mill, or to try to find only what is
common to all individuals of a given species, as in Aristotles induction,
is to postulate that beyond the plurality of phenomena and of individuals
there exists a stable and common ground for reality, that is the unity of
the real.
It is no different in ethics that would directly derive from technics; to
want the whole duration of life to be a series of moments, to extract
from each situation what is pleasant in it, and to want to construct the
happiness of life by accumulating its agreeable elements, as did ancient
Eudaimonism or Utilitarianism, is to proceed in an inductive manner,
by trying to replace the unity of the duration of life and the unity of
human aspiration with a plurality of instants and with the homogeneity
of all successive desires. The elaboration to which Epicureanism submits
desires has one goal only, which is to incorporate them into the
continuity of an existence that proceeds in an accumulative manner:
for this, each of the desires must be dominated and surrounded by the
subject, made lesser than unity, so that it can be treated and manipulated
as a genuine element. This is why the passions are eliminated, since
they cannot be treated as elements; they are larger than the unity of
the subject; they dominate it, they come from farther away than it and
tend to go farther on than it, obliging it to exceed its limits. Lucretius
tries to destroy the passions from within, by showing that they are based
on errors; in fact, he fails to account for the element of tendency in

424 Gilbert Simondon

passion, that is to say, for the force that is inserted into the subject and
yet is more extensive than it, a force in relation to which it seems to be a
very limited being; tendency cannot be considered to be contained within
the subject as a unity. Wisdom, having restored the forces at the origin
of action to a status of inferiority with respect to the unity of the moral
subject, can organise them as elements and reconstruct a moral subject
within the natural subject; however, this moral subject never completely
attains the level of unity; between the reconstructed moral subject and
the natural subject there remains a void impossible to fill; the inductive
approach remains in plurality; it constructs a network of elements, but
this network cannot amount to a real unity. All ethical technics leave the
moral subject unsatisfied because they ignore its unity; the subject cannot
be content with a life that would be a series, even an uninterrupted series,
of happy moments; a life that is perfectly successful element by element
is still not a moral life; it lacks what makes it the life of a subject: unity.
But conversely, religious thinking, the foundation of obligation,
creates in ethical thought a search for unconditional justification which
makes every act and every subject appear to be inferior to real unity;
when related to a totality that expands endlessly, the moral act and
subject derive their significance solely from their relation with this
totality; the communication between the totality and the subject is
precarious, because at every moment the subject is drawn back to the
dimension of its own unity, which is not that of the totality; the ethical
subject is de-centered by religious exigency.
Excerpted from a translation in progress of Gilbert Simondon, On the
Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958); this particular excerpt
being Chapter One, The Genesis of Technicity, of Part Three, The
Essence of Technicity.
Ninian Mellamphy (Department of English, University of Western
Ontario)
Dan Mellamphy (Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism,
University of Western Ontario)
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Department of Political Science, University
of Western Ontario)

Notes
1. Not metaphorically but really: the geological folding and the eruption that built
the whole massif are oriented towards the peak. The promontory is the firmest
part of the chain eroded by the sea.