The political and sociocultural transformations of the last 150 years have been determined primarily by technological development. Although the notion of technique has always been present in human myth and thought, today it is analyzed with academic rigor and renewed intensity through the philosophy of technology, a field closely related to the better-known philosophy of science.
Joining us today is Luis Mérida (1986), a senior technician in telecommunications and computer science and a PhD in philosophy (Autonomous University of Barcelona). He is not only a specialist in this field but also one of the leading experts on the work and thought of Gilbert Simondon in the entire Spanish-speaking world, and probably beyond. Mérida knows the technical world from within, as well as its ontological, metaphysical, and political implications. After translating Yuk Hui’s most recent book, Post-Europe, into Spanish, he has kindly granted us this interview for El Vórtice.
In both our present and immediate future, it seems that we must become skilled at managing various kinds of robots and artificial intelligences. We will no longer perform operational tasks ourselves; instead, we will supervise specialized physical and digital machines that perform them on our behalf. Is this not the role of the mechanologist that Gilbert Simondon foresaw? And what would distinguish such a mechanologist from today’s “gurus” of AI-powered solutions?
I don’t believe Simondon anticipated the world we currently inhabit. Viewed from today, his thought has an uchronic character (belonging to a different historical time.) In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (METO), Simondon makes a striking claim: before the Industrial Revolution, humans served as a kind of placeholder for a technical individual that had not yet been invented. One might consider the reciprocal idea: that the technical ensemble (industry) is now playing the role of a living ensemble still to be invented, one that properly belongs to the transindividual in a truly technical culture.
It is certainly tempting to interpret our role within technical networks as that of an orchestra conductor. Yet the reality is that we hardly hold the baton. Using the same metaphor, we might say our situation resembles someone who appears to conduct, because we see their arms move, but, in truth, he does not. The conductor’s arm movements obey the pattern dictated by the instruments themselves. The dialogue that true conducting requires is absent.
In short, there is a vast gulf between a user and a mechanologist. The user does not understand the mechanisms into which they are inserted or which they activate, and our technologies are designed precisely around this fact; what is now called “user experience.” And not all technical networks are the same. The so-called Internet of Things, for example, is an invisible system of surveillance, data extraction, and ultimately consumption-driven provocation. Your smart TV spies on you. At the end of the day, the business of big tech is “information.”
AI gurus, on the other hand, resemble mechanologists even less. They sell illusions—a pure exteriority without process. Whether it’s text, images, or code, what they offer is often an exteriority so frail it has visible cracks. We are told a hundred times over that now anyone can write their novel, make their own films, even produce songs with a single prompt. But they forget why stories matter to us in the first place. Art has an unavoidable communicative dimension. Analogy, in this case, of lived experience, is essential, even though nearly anything can become the object of aesthetic experience.
One of the most striking phenomena produced by generative AI is “vibe coding,” that is programming without the slightest understanding of how to write code, guided only by “vibes” or feelings. This illustrates better than anything the distance between such practices and mechanology. Mechanology requires an intimate understanding of technical objects. In this sense, not all automations are equal, some are genuinely better than others.
As Stiegler noted, data is destined to devalue. To survive the proletarianization of knowledge in which we currently find ourselves, what kind of education should contemporary and future engineers—and technologists more broadly—receive? Considering that “the knowledge of individuation is the individuation of knowledge,” do you believe we will ever see mechanology or the figure of the mechanologist formally established in universities?
Bernard Stiegler is perhaps the perfect complement for a contemporary reading of Simondon. As you point out, Stiegler distinguishes between knowledge and information (and it is important to understand the concepts beyond the words). Information, by definition, undergoes devaluation. Unlike knowledge, the more it is shared, the less it is worth.
It is difficult to make a prophesy, but one is unlikely to be mistaken in recognizing a tendency that has been growing for at least a century.
What characterizes this new drift is the attack on memory—curricula stripped of content, emphasis on “meaningfulness” or the affordances of information—and the insertion of psychological categories at the center of educational design (against boredom: motivation; against anxiety: emotional management). Note that I speak of information here in Stiegler’s sense. School is not a place for knowledge.
And I say school rather than university because, if mechanology is ever to reach the university, we must first rethink the educational stages that precede it. Simondon dedicated a text to this: Prolegomena to a Reconstruction of Education. Of course, this does not prevent mechanological research from occurring inside or outside academia. It simply does not grow on favorable ground.
Everything suggests that with the proliferation of generative AI, this tendency will become even more pronounced. If earlier one didn’t need to memorize because everything was on Google, now one needs it even less. ChatGPT can think for you, at a level that is advertised as equivalent to a person with a doctorate. Education itself reinforces the ontogenetic gap in the industrial technical object between producer and user.
Consumerism is rightly criticized, but it is rarely recognized that the user and the consumer are complementary figures, or even the same figure seen from two different perspectives.
The rift between culture and civilization does not seem likely to close soon; Western educational programs are designed to deepen this opposition, and our scientific production model emerges from the same source, despite calls for interdisciplinarity. The closest academia ever came to Simondon’s mechanology was cybernetics, and today that is, unfortunately, only a niche discipline.
How did Bernard Stiegler’s death affect you? If you had had the opportunity, what would you have asked him?
I never had the chance to meet him in person, nor even to contact him, sadly. When someone dies, certain potentials simply do not survive, no matter how much we devote ourselves to rituals of evocation. Anyone who has followed Stiegler’s work will recognize this.
In the 2018 reissue of Technics and Time, mention is made of a program that would have expanded the original trilogy with four additional volumes. Some books—such as Automatic Society—remain without their promised second part. It is a cliché, but philosophy engages deeply in necromancy: we never get the chance to question authors directly or to witness how new dialogues might have transformed their later work. What a philosopher could have thought becomes crystallized.
In that sense, we have lost the opportunity to witness, for several more decades, the influence that Yuk Hui would have exerted on Stiegler’s work. For my part, perhaps the real mystery is how Stiegler would have read—assuming he would have read it—my critique of his critique of Simondon’s notion of information. A minor matter, comparatively.
More than asking him anything, I am curious what he would have thought about generative AI. Especially given that these systems are the clearest confirmation of his thesis regarding the proletarianization of the capacity for thought. Fortunately, Stiegler left many successors. On these topics I recommend the work of Anne Alombert.
Although Simondon did not develop his ideas in Marxist terms, his philosophy does offer valuable perspectives on the problem of alienation and our relationship with machines and the means of production. So why wasn’t he more widely read during his time, especially at the height of Marxism–Leninism?
Dominique Lecourt successfully summarized the reasons why Simondon’s work received little to no attention when it first appeared. One reason was the overwhelming influence of Heidegger on discussions of technology. Another, as you noted, was Marx. Simondon did not speak about technology “in Marxian,” which was the dominant intellectual language of that era. Style alone was enough to make readers put him aside.
Academia has its fashions as well. A professor at the UAB, Joan Carles Cirera—who studied in the 1980s—once joked that even the epistemology taught back then was Marxist. By contrast, I studied in the very same university in the 2010s and barely studied Marx across four years of coursework.
The interesting thing is that Simondon’s concept of alienation does not refer to a living human individual stripped of the means of production by originary accumulation. Rather, it refers to a technical object deprived of psychic interiorization, of a corresponding subjectivation. Through this ontogenetic perspective, Simondon attempts to move beyond the capital–labor dialectic. His approach is not anti-capitalist but post-capitalist. The issue is not fundamentally economic but cultural and metaphysical. And it cannot be solved by expropriation, cooperatives, or shareholding societies. Only a reform of the technical object can give rise to a genuine “technical culture.”
Regardless of any personal sympathy he might have had toward Marxism, Simondon’s work constitutes a surpassing of it. But truly understanding this requires a more attentive reading. Anne Fagot-Largeault also noted this: the problem wasn’t that people didn’t read Simondon, it was that they didn’t understand him.
From the perspective of collective individuation or transindividuation, how would you describe digital communities? Are they simply another example of collective individuation, analogous to physical communities, or do they constitute a new type, a further step beyond typical transindividuation?
This is a genuinely complex question. I would not equate Simondon’s “collective individuation” with Stiegler’s “transindividuation,” even though they are related. But there is also terminological variability within Simondon himself.
We can affirm, based on various points in his texts, that community still belongs to the domain of the purely biological, and thus lacks the contemporaneity of the individual as he relates to the group, which characterizes human societies. Even so, what is innovative about digital “communities” is that they are societies that could not exist without the technical networks that sustain them.
The key question, then, is the extent to which these technical networks mediate the character of the communities themselves—that is, how constitutive they are in shaping the group. There is little debate over whether they mediate; they clearly do. In that sense, the Internet differs little from a road, and a website, a social network, or a Discord server differs little from a building. A shop in Roblox is not so different from a shop in your neighborhood.
The main difference is speed and scale. These two factors enable communities to form (and persist), which would be impossible offline. This is not, in my view, a new type of individuation, but rather a new modality.
However, the more interesting phenomenon here is one Stiegler already described: collective desindividuation. This is the pharmacological nature of digital technical networks. They can foster group formation, but they can also liquefy social tissue. Platforms have become behavioral datafication machines, reinforcing certain behaviors through immediate dopaminergic gratification. In other words, by capturing attention, the technical network uses your brain as a kind of node.
Social networks create an illusion of transindividuality. The relationship collapses into a mere connection. The individual does not exit from within themselves. This movement could be seen as an abstraction of the transindividual that accompanies the concretization of technical networks. Pablo Manolo Rodríguez and Juan Manuel Heredia have explored this phenomenon in depth.
In science and engineering we are taught that natural phenomena obey the Principle of Least Action (Hamilton’s principle), they follow the path requiring the least effort or energy. This determines a mode of becoming, a way of individuating. From your perspective, could this principle be modeled as a morphogenetic field, given that it seems to cut across disciplines like economics, biology, and linguistics?
This idea is indeed one of the fundamental aspects of physical individuation: the tendency toward the most stable state (the one with the lowest potential energy, the lowest thermodynamic cost, etc.). And of course, this tendency does not disappear in other domains.
However, there is always a margin of indetermination, even in physical individuation, and this margin expands as modes of individuation overlay one another. I am not certain to what extent it could be considered a single principle governing the preindividual. What is Simondonian here is neither holism nor reductionism, but mesoism. Invoking parsimony may simply be convenient, a requirement of simplicity.
All the domains you mention exhibit a tendency toward overflow, excess, exuberance, expenditure. Ontogenesis has an inflationary character on which its evolution depends. Any anti-entropic behavior goes against this principle. Of course, the engineer must negotiate with nature for the least costly solution. Not merely for economic reasons: it is necessary if their inventions are to exhibit any trace of concreteness, of quasi-organicity.
The technical object is one more link in the genetic series of the world, and the Principle of Least Action is certainly an inescapable pre-relational variable that can be used to establish synergies in that series —to summon nature, so to speak. I’m not sure if that fully answers the question.
We should inquire into the genesis of being (ontogenesis) before assuming being (ontology). However, wouldn’t this lead us into a tautology, given that the notion of ontogenesis, once deconstructed, seems to return us to the very being from which everything starts?
The answer depends on how generous we want to be with our reading. Here we approach the limits of Simondon’s system. Indeed, one could argue that the term ontogenesis itself hides a certain tautology.
Simondon’s gesture is subtle. For him, to “flee ontology” does not mean to flee being, but rather to flee a monophasic conception of being —one that restricts being to what is already individuated, giving rise to a classificatory mindset and a self-aware logic. In this perspective, being is a preindividual unity that, in its genesis, splits or “phases” itself in relation to itself.
But this unity is not stable. A being that is already individuated is a relation born with—and therefore contemporary to—its terms, not posterior to them. What is being, for Simondon? A field. Yet unless one speaks from the vantage point of a specific paradigm, not much more can be said. Being can only be spoken through analogy.
Scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Bonaventure also grappled with the problem of individuation—some through seminal reason or Anthropology, others through a kind of mathematical theology where number has ontological weight. To the extent that Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is a-transcendental, wouldn’t his study of ontogenesis nonetheless share points of contact with ontotheology?
For Simondon, individuation is the philosophical problem par excellence. It is possible to establish such a connection. The key lies in how we define God. If God is understood as the principal category of metaphysics—that is, being—then yes: Deus sive Natura. They share the problem of individuation and could also share an impersonal conception of God.
But in Simondon, the preindividual being can only be thought of in its genesis. Thus we might say instead: Deus sive individuatio.
Earlier we mentioned analyzing the term “ontogenesis.” It proves impossible, because genesis is not posterior to being. Being only precedes genesis in a virtual and hypothetical sense. This clearly shows Simondon’s a-transcendentalism. In Simondon, there is no prior knowledge before individuation. By contrast, the being of ontotheology is monophasic—being anterior to genesis and unaffected by it. It is, in fact, unengendered. The world is merely a corollary of God, perfectly and completely determined in His essence.
One might think here of Aristotle’s unmoved mover, or similarly, Philipp Mainländer’s premundane unity.
Philosophical pessimism or rather, more specifically, experiencing life’s lack of meaning in its rawest form, is something only the brave can endure. Yet, as Ernesto Sábato notes in Men and Gears, doesn’t the stubborn, relentless persistence of life itself suggest a kind of meaning? Perhaps a meaning that exists whether or not we discover or decipher it. Furthermore, could suffering, as a universal experience, be the very condition of possibility for meaning?
Here one could battle Nietzsche, I suppose. The answer will depend greatly on the role and the degree of importance we grant to suffering. In the field of philosophy, especially with topics like these, almost anything can be defended.
Schopenhauer, for instance, claimed that the existence of even a single instance of suffering was enough to condemn the world. Nietzsche, by contrast, argued that what matters is whatever promotes life, and suffering can indeed promote it.
Like Sábato, Bergson spoke of what we might call an immanent logic of the living—of the joy of living within invention. Schopenhauer, again, conceived an immanent logic of life that inevitably leads to the negation of the will, regardless of the path taken.
Simondon also thought about this problem and can be considered, like Deleuze or Foucault, something of a neo-Nietzschean. In Simondon, pessimism appears as a mature and necessary attitude, but one that must push beyond itself through itself. I have called this position “trans-pessimism.”
Although it may sound like an easy or even contradictory solution, I am inclined to think that all answers are correct and, at the same time, none of them are.
After his meticulous analysis in his manifesto, Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) could not find a satisfactory solution to overcoming industrial society. Not having found it, he adopted what he considered coherent politics: sabotaging that society and attempting to destroy it, without hope of victory, before industrial society destroyed him. He eventually died by suicide in prison at age 81. Would you place the Unabomber within the tradition of philosophical pessimism, alongside Schopenhauer, Mainländer, or Cioran? Perhaps as a technopesimist?
Who knows whether such a solution can ever be found. The figure of the Unabomber is without doubt fascinating. There are reasons to fall into catastrophism. As Benatar says, whenever we speak of pessimism, we must ask: pessimistic about what? The term must be qualified.
If we agree to call him a technopesimist, Kaczynski would find himself in distinguished company. Technopesimism has arguably been the dominant tendency of 20th-century philosophy: Heidegger, Ellul, Anders…
What interests me more is not the futuristic dimension of their ideas—their predictions—but the present dimension, their call to action. This can be grouped under the label of neo-Luddism.
And I emphasize this because there remains a profound misunderstanding about the original Luddites. Even Simondon partly repeats this cliché. The worker who smashed machines during the riots was not reacting to being replaced by the machines; he did not understand that. In reality, he was occupying the place of the machine, not the other way around. Thus “Luddite” comes to mean ignorance and technophobia—just as “pessimist” is used dismissively in arguments.
Unabomber and Simondon are at opposite extremes, without doubt. Yet I think that, despite everything, an ethics of sabotage is as worthy of reflection as an ethics of destruction, an ethics of construction, or a dialectic of recovery—the three ethical perspectives Simondon proposes for thinking about technology.
Is it possible to deconstruct—even diagnose—societies through their technical culture? For instance, if two or more societies converge technologically, could we infer that they have undergone similar processes or operations of collective individuation?
Possibly—though what we mean by technical culture matters. The notion most relevant here is likely closer to Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics. For Simondon, however, no genuine technical culture has yet existed, not even in the so-called Western world (whatever “Western culture” is taken to mean).
Anyhow, nothing rules out this kind of analysis. Yet I don’t think it is possible to speak of identical individuations; at most, individuations are analogous (and this is true in principle). Individuation cannot be treated generically. One must always turn to the particular case.
In a post-Europe scenario, Asia—led by China—seems poised to dominate technologically and economically. Yet this is only possible because Chinese industry has been thoroughly Westernized. From the viewpoint of the intimate relationship between technique and culture, would China truly be “winning,” or would this in fact be a victory of the West, having permeated Asian forms of making and thinking?
It’s an ambivalent scene. If we shift the goalposts enough, everyone “wins” something. If we speak of the European Union, it is difficult not to see it as a subsidiary of the United States. Recent geopolitical events make this clear: EU compliance with US tariff policy, increased military spending, its fraught relations with Russia and China, its stance on Ukraine, its paralysis regarding the genocide in Gaza, etc. Stiegler said that nowadays we are all “Americans.”
But the notion of the United States being, in a deep sense, also Europe—at least if “Europe” means Western Civilization—is not uncommon. Husserl already envisioned this. And by the same logic, one might say that Asia is also Europe. It is hard to deny that Asia has become Europeanized. The European techno-logical spirit has engulfed the world and, thus, its history is global history.
In this case, criticism of Eurocentrism becomes almost trivial.
Naturally, through modern European technology, Western epistemological and ontological assumptions enter any culture that adopts it. Yuk Hui discusses this in Post-Europe in the context of East Asian Europeanization.
However, Europe, in the geographical sense, ceased to be the world’s center after World War II. The notion of post-Europe arises from this fact, though Jan Patočka had already begun preparing a return to the spiritual idea of Europe—the Care for the Soul—as a way of thinking of an Europe after its collapse. Hui reinterprets this problem through the lens of a necessary individuation between East and West—precisely because this is not a question of winners or losers. That rhetoric only breeds identity retrenchment.
Your book Campos de forma is your interpretation of Simondon’s philosophy—Mérida’s Simondon. In it, you write with an engineer’s eye, almost like drawing the layout of a machine’s assembly process’ explosion. In this sense, beyond it being a work of pure philosophy, could it also be considered a techno-aesthetic proposal? Was there a poetic intention in “doing philosophy like an engineer”?
That is exactly how I’ve described my work with Simondon: something midway between a monograph, which intervenes only modestly, and a Deleuzian approach, which seeks—metaphorically speaking—bastard offspring.
To be a cybernetician is to think like an engineer. A preference for the schematic over the conceptual; attention to the particular rather than the general; an emphasis on operations; working through paradigms; reading other philosophies through their paradigms; and the fact that its claims have a hypothetical rather than an apodictic character—all of these are features of an engineering-inflected thought. What I’ve done is essentially to repeat Simondon’s gesture.
One may approach an author’s ideas in many ways: by critiquing specific theses, by problematizing the text from a certain standpoint, or even by trying to refute the entire system.
An author for whom I have unexpected sympathy is Paul Feyerabend, l’enfant terrible of the philosophy of science. Against the somewhat monolithic concept of paradigms in Kuhn, Feyerabend speaks of the proliferation (and coexistence) of rival theories and interpretations as the normal condition of science, and argues that strengthening them, rather than refuting or falsifying them, enriches inquiry. This applies to philosophy even more than to science. One can work with a system or program and see how far it can take you.
The unified interpretation I offer in Campos de forma follows this approach. It is often said that to be charitable one should read a philosophy in its own terms—but perhaps this is more than a concession. There is an aesthetic to philosophical writing. To think with an author sometimes requires not only respecting their style but following it. Hence the need to repeat the gesture without lapsing into empty aestheticism or “mannerism,” a line as thin as it is treacherous.
In a broad sense, every book is a techno-aesthetic device: its reading allows us to experience the world in a particular way. Meanwhile, Campos de forma, in that sense, is techno-aesthetic because it allows us to experience Simondon’s thought in a particular way. Introducing an engineering gaze carries a poetic dimension, but I don’t think it stems from intention; rather, it arises from the necessity of thinking Simondon simondonianly. It is ultimately a question of adequation.
Translated by Lara Corujo Rafay
