Techno-Aesthetics and Technics of the Body From Merleau-Ponty to Simondon and Back

In his account of technics, Leroi–Gourhan makes no essential distinction between the tool as a technical organ and the organ as a bodily element. A technical object —a biface, for example—emerges from the sensible matter in the same way as the hand insofar as they both are a “secretion of the body and the brain” and entail a “technique of the body”. In fact, technological tools and devices should never be considered in isolation, because they exist only in relation to the interminglings between bodies and society that they make possible or that make them possible. Thus, technicity, understood in its broadest sense as exteriorization, cannot be thought of as something that is merely added to a so-called “natural” core of embodied life but in its mutual implication with sensibility, that is, in its relationship with the development and historical evolution of the living body understood––in its inseparable connection with the mind–– as the junction between the sensible and the symbolic, the organic and the cultural, and perception and expression. In this paper, I investigate the reciprocal implications of embodied aesthetic thinking and technical thinking in order to show how technicity, as a cultural and symbolic attitude, is rooted in the aesthetic dimension of human experience, understood not only as the relationship to artistic creation but more radically as the human body’s ability to aesthetically engage with the world. In a complementary way, I examine the sensible genesis of the living body’s technicity and address the decisive question of how technics can inflect and catalyze changes in the human sensorium, thinking, and intersubjective relationships. My contribution articulates these questions in the wake of Merleau–Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, especially with regard to the connection between the living body’s motricity and symbolism, and on the basis of Simondon’s groundbreaking reflection on technics, particularly his conception of techno-aesthetics—that is, a primitive form of our contact with the world or of technics in its functional aspects—to develop a cross-reading of the theoretical account of the body and technics made by the two philosophers.