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.