On the idea of a Techno-Aesthetic culture in Gilbert Simondon

Abstract

This work aims to introduce the way in which Gilbert Simondon presents the relationship between the modes of existence of technical objects and their close connection or need for insertion of these objects in culture, aesthetic thought and philosophical thought. For him, there is an imperative need to recognize the importance of these objects in our society. Simondon points out that both culture and aesthetic thought, in different ways, are capable of inserting technical objects into society, since each of these activities, in its own specificity, performs a fundamental task. On the one hand, culture is what we bring with us, our history. Without it there is no becoming possible; on the other hand, aesthetic thinking is capable of interrupting the rupture between technology and religion since the beginning of our existence. But, despite this, the author still points out the importance of philosophical thought, which is, for him, the only one capable of providing the bases for a technological knowledge and founding a technology, precisely because of its neutrality, the same neutrality that the Aesthetic thinking loses out in trying to be functional or sacred. For Simondon, only at the level of thought, the most primitive and most elaborate of all, that is, philosophical thought, is it possible to intervene in a truly neutral, balanced and complete mediation between opposing phases. It is, therefore, the philosophical thought the only one able to assume the knowledge, the valorization and the finishing of the place of the technicality, in the set of the ways of being in the world of the man.