The disparity between culture & technics

Abstract

This essay serves as an introduction to the Special Issue entitled ‘Culture & Technics: The Politics of Simondon’s Du Mode’. This issue follows the pivotal and important translation of Gilbert Simodon's supplementary dissertation, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, which offers a rich and layered approach to technics which, through his other works, we see integrated into an entire philosophical approach. This Issue seeks to consider how we might read Simondon today in what is a completely transformed technical epoch from his own, faced with new technological and global challenges. After briefly introducing, first, some comments on Simondon’s account of the process of disparation, this essay will make some observations on how Simondon conceptualised the relation between culture and technics. It is the space between these two latter notions – and the potential for their systematic, open, and processual integration–in which this introduction contextualises this Special Issue.