Theory & Event

Volume 13, Issue 4, 2010

Technics and the Human Sensorium:
Rethinking Media Theory through the Body
Mark Cot
mark.cote@vu.edu.au
The freedom of the hand almost necessarily implies a technical activity different from the apes and
commands the use of artificial organs, that is, of implements. Tools appear as a secretion of the
anthropoids body and brain. Up to this stage, exteriorisation was an evolutive biological tendency.
From now on it becomes a technical tendency The emergence of tools as a species characteristic
marks the frontier between animal and human initiating a long transitional period during which sociology
slowly took over from zoology (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 90).

Introduction
The import of media cannot be expressed solely on the level of discourse. Media and technology1 are not
adequately reckoned with only in discursive terms of social construction or ideology. The myriad effects of media
have always exceeded the bounds of representation. While there is a rich and important body of scholarship on
the symbolic and cultural significance of media, much work remains to be done in examining media as an everexpanding collection of technological artifacts, as sensorial vectors with concrete experiential effects. Especially
in our historical moment of ubiquitous mobile digital networks, it is necessary to consider media in terms of its prelinguistic and pre-cognitive effects in the human sensorium. As such, the following constitutes an intervention in a
growing and diverse body of literature which examines the social and political role of affect and sensation.2 Here
this intervention comes in a rearticulation of the relationship between the human and technology. That is, media
and technology will be positioned in a return to the senses as something other than an external force which
degrades, occludes, biases, or distorts the otherwise natural condition of the human. Indeed, it will be argued that
there is no a priori or natural configuration of the human sensorium; rather, that sensory perception is only ever
calibrated in relation to technics. As such, it presents an imperative not just to think about the media but to feel it.
This will entail rethinking a number of long-standing binary oppositions: between the interiority-exteriority of
thought, and natural human-artificial life.
At stake, is not just our understanding of our contemporary mediated existence and its political implications, but
the provocative claim that we have never been human; that is, technology will be presented not as a prosthetic
supplement to the biological body but as comprising an originary condition, a defining characteristic of the human.
This entails a sustained critical interrogation of techneespecially as it relates to the human. Readers likely will
be familiar with the classical Greek distinction beginning, on the one hand, with episteme, as pure, or theoretical
knowledge, the stuff proper to philosophy which is produced in critical dialogue. On the other hand, techne is
practical knowledge emanating from skill, art, and practice. In the works of antiquity, such as Platos Phaedrus3
1

At times, this paper uses technics and technology almost interchangeably. Both are derivatives of the
Greek techne, with the latter stemming from discourses on techne (techne + logos). Common usage
today renders technology as objects or artifacts. Herein, technics is used with reference to those
technological artifacts, but to further emphasize the practical knowledge, skills and differentiated
ability to act which accompanies technology. Most importantly, this includes its constitutive role in the
sensorium.
2
There is a growing field of scholarship on this topic which includes, but is not limited to the works of
Massumi, Connolly, Clough, and Panagia.
3
See this well-known passage which clearly expresses Platos belief that true knowledge only comes
by the recollection of this originary knowledgean interior process and thus covalent with the pure
state of human nature. Techne, however, is a source of contamination: If men learn writing, it will
implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which
is written, calling things to remembrance no longer form within themselves, but by means of external
marks. What you have discovered is not a recipe for memory but for reminder (157).

among others, a clear hierarchy is set wherein knowledge produced or accessed by the philosophic episteme
(such as the Platonic ideal form) has precedence and is valued over that produced via sophistic techne. It is
under such a hierarchy that Plato can condemn knowledge produced and supported by writing (as a manifestation
of techne) as both a contaminant and lesser derivative of the epistemic knowledge or logos of critical dialogue.
What I propose here is not an inversion of this relation but its implosion. Through a media theory of embodiment,
there is both a rearticulation of the human and technics into transductive4 relations, and a radical repositioning of
affect and sensation as both mediated and prefiguring the purported rationality of political thought. In short, this
entails a new way to both think and feel the political via technics.
Let us begin by briefly going back to the future, as it were, to not a lament of the relationship between the body,
technology, and the political, but a celebration. One hundred years ago, the front page of the conservative
Parisian daily Le Figaro prominently featured the Futurist Manifesto, written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as a
paean to machinery, to speed, to aggression, and to violence.
We want to exalt movements of aggression, the beauty of speed [] We want to glorify warthe only
cure for the worldmilitarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful ideas
which kill, and contempt for women [] We want to demolish museums, libraries, academies of every
kind, we will fight against morality, feminism (Appollonio, 1973, 21-22)

There are three things I wish to bring forward from this proto-fascist tract.5 One is its particular masculinized
vision of technology: as a means to extend mans domination over nature. Specifically, technology is presented
as an instrument subject to a masculinized will to power. The Futurists fetishize technologys external objective
form, as machines encasing the fleshbe it in two tons of a speeding metal car, or multiple bodies encased in ten
tons of a metal tank flattening all organic and inorganic material in its path. In short, technology is figured as a
disembodied force that can be fused with the maleand one over which man has definitive agency. The second
is to restate the Manifestos explicit misogyny; expressed clearly as contempt for women. There is no space for
what in the gendered imaginary of the Futurists would be feminine attributessensuality, care, or affect. Indeed,
technology was not only a cathartic other, in both its applied and aesthetic forms, but the means for a violent
assault on such suspect attributes of femininity.6 The third is that the manifesto remains solely at the discursive
level, considering technology only as a figuration to construct what Cinzia Blum calls a fiction of power; that is,
how the Futurists utilized the newspaper in order to deliver a collective statement directed at a mass audience, in
which the articulation of an aesthetic and political program is transformed into a literary construct (196, 198).
I revisit the Futurist Manifesto, not to reaffirm affect as feminine but as an initial provocation to move beyond the
modernist separation of the human, technology and nature, and to open up the positive political realm of the
sensuous, of affect as the domain that generates resonances between body and technology. That is, my aim is to
contribute to a new model of embodied technology.7 My focus is on the role of media in this embodied, affective
relationship. I will proceed by establishing a theoretical foundation for such an inquiry, beginning with a brief
selective review of both feminist critiques of, and a post-phenomenological approach to the body and technology.
I will then engage and trouble the ancient binary of the human and technology first through the work of Andre
Leroi-Gourhan who provides paleo-anthropological evidence of an originary technicity of the human, wherein there
was never a natural state of the human outside a constitutive relation with technology.
Then I will briefly consider some of the ramifications of this innovative thesis of originary technicity as pursued by
Jacques Derrida who deploys it to deconstruct logocentrism by positing technics as always already constitutive of
4

The concept of transduction is taken from Gilbert Simondon who used it to emphasize the relation
itself over the things related. As such, it facilitates an understanding of complex, constitutive relations
marked more by recursivity than by linear causality.
5
It should be noted that despite the manifest fascistic tendencies of the Futurist Movement, it was
variegated enough that some have found more expressive political possibilities in the work of certain
members. For example, see Manning on the Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni and his concept of
artistic movement.
6 For an overview of various feminist critiques of the Futurists, see the noted works by Blum, Orban, and
Spackman.
7
There is an important emerging body of work in media theory which insists on embodiment. Some of
the most cogent works are as follows: Hayles debunks the notion of disembodied information which
was central to early cybernetics; Terranova further adumbrates the political ramifications of embodied
information; and Hansen (2000, 2004) outlines the aesthetic dimensions of embodied technology,
especially in digital form.

the grammatological. In turn, I will present contributions by contemporary media philosopher Bernard Stiegler who
builds upon the aforementioned and explicates the implications of an originary technicity of the human more
specifically in terms of media. In considering paleo-anthropological evidence for the originary technicity of the
human, and its unsettling of an originary logos uncontaminated by techne, I can then consider the stakes for
media, not just in terms of specific artifacts but in what media theorist Mark Hansen calls medium as an
environment for life. Hansen considers this technological embodiment in aesthetic terms, specifically how the
digital image has itself become a process and, as such, has become irreducibly bound up with the activity of the
body (2004, 10).
I will conclude by engaging the political stakes of the generalized and differentiating technological mediation of
affect. That is, if the human sensorium is always already mediated, so to are political sensibilities and the
imaginary. Of particular relevance to media theory is in squaring this with the temporal-spatial multiplicity of the
political body, a condition always common to the human but infinitely more visible in our age of ubiquitous
connectivity and mediation. In short, what are the political stakes in the attempt to square the differential affect of
a Cartesian geometry of the body with the quantum non-locality of the virtual, 8 especially if the corporeal and
virtual are never separate but instead transductively related? As such, I will conclude with reference to a creative
political experiment wherein, paraphrasing Stiegler, technology is deployed as an innovative pursuit of life by
means other than (strictly biological) life.
Theorizing Cyborgs, or, Humans and Machines
Not so long ago, technology was being vetted anew in the face of the purported end of the human. In that context,
in the very pages of this journal, Adrian Mackenzie proffered an important proposition:
[W]hat mode of life has recourse to a relentless and intensely symbiotic association with machines?
Such an evaluation can be undertaken only if the terms "life" and "machines" are subjected to refreshed
scrutiny (Mackenzie).

Donna Haraway, perhaps more than anyone, helped animate the emergence of the supposed post-human. A
question that will reappear again in these pages is post-what? Just what is that human and how is it being so
radically rearticulated by technology?
Haraways work was innovative for going beyond the discursive, revealing the limitations of much of constructivist
theory which often lumps technology in an undifferentiated pile with gender. Such an approach can have the
unintended effect of reinforcing the gendered imaginary of the Futurists but from an inverse perspective.
Haraway, on the other hand, emerges from the well-established but fluid field of scholarly inquiry of
cyberfeminism,9 which unties the often vexatious relations between gender and technology. The Cyborg
Manifesto stands as a hallmark therein, probing the changing relationship between humans and technology,
wherein the human, as a living system enters into a mutually dependent relationship with non-living technological
systems. Haraway, as if inspired by the misogyny of the Futurists, critically unravels the supposed dichotomy
between the purported masculine essence of technology, and feminine natures. Indeed, the figure of the cyborg
critically deconstructs the feminine subject by transgressing the socially constructed boundaries of nature, the
organic and inorganic, as well as gender and technology. This marks one of the manifestos more deft conceptual
maneuvers: the implosion of the binary of technology as masculine and nature as feminine. Such a pretext is
shattered further with the proliferation of cyborgs wherein there has been a literal invasion of technology into the
body, with the famed OncomouseTM acting as a sentinel species for the biotechnological future of homo sapiens.
Such an understanding of the relations between humans and technology problematizes a strict division between
nature and culture, recognizing the hybrid material construction of the human in networked relations with
technology. Most relevant is how Haraway popularized an understanding of the prosthetic nature of the human, a
supplementary condition which is critically unpacked further by the aforementioned triumvirate. For purposes here
though, strict limitations remain with the cyborgs thesis. While there is a shared capacity for agency, the inorganic
8

For the original usage of these terms which capture the fundamentally different temporo-spatial states
of being in the material and virtual, see respectively Cubitt, and Clough, Goldberg, Schiff, Weeks and
Willse. I should hasten to add that the originary usage of Cartesian geometry as it relates to media is
with Gilles Deleuzes description of the cartoon image in Cinema: The movement-image. I cite Cubitt
because his article proposes a post-Cartesian politics which strongly resonates with this paper.
9
For a broader overview of the diverse body of cyberfeminist research, amongst others see Bradiotti,
Plant, and Wajcman.

of technology remains radically exterior to the human, as opposed to as a constitutive vector of exteriorization.
The interiority-exteriority of the human-technology relation must be newly explicated in order for the composition of
the sensorium to be more adequately taken into account. In other words, how might we better understand
conscious interiority in relation to an inorganic material exteriority?
Post-phenomenology, as practiced by Don Ihde, takes a step in that direction, towards understanding the humans
immersion in different technological artifacts and technics, which are as quotidian as they are fantastical. Its basic
premise is that all human-technology relations are also body-technology relations:
Human embodiment is presupposed in and by our technologies, particularly those related to the
production of knowledge, including scientific instrumentation, communication technologies, and the new
forms of virtual reality, simulation and modeling devices (Ihde 2003, 5).

Rather than taking a subject-centered approach, which has long been displaced by myriad continental critiques,
Ihde recalls the work of John Dewey in proposing post-phenomenology as pragmatic phenomenology, with an
empirical focus on things themselves. He substitutes subjectivity for embodiment, taking up an inheritance from
Merleau-Pontys phantoms of internal experienceBodies cannot be transcendental; they are existential (12).
That is, rather than linking Merleau-Pontys phantoms to external experience per se, he wipes off the residue of
subjectivity and instead posits its manifestation via an embodied external contextualization. Furthermore, Ihde
emphasizes that embodiment is always gendered and cultured, working off the Foucauldian concept of the social
body. But in a move that, at least for this reader, renders this insight unnecessarily opaque, Ihde insists upon a
clumsy formulation of body one and body two, respectively the lived body under the sign of Merleau-Ponty and
the cultural body under the sign of Foucault (14).
Is there a more elegant solution which brings together the multiple valences of embodiment as being an agent of
both action and perception as well as being culturally configured? Specifically, and again, might we not more
productively rearticulate the very parameters of the human vis--vis technology? Ihde does get close to the kind of
recursive relation that this conceptual pursuit has been slouching towards:
What remains phenomenological is the inter-relationality of embodied being in a concrete and material
world. If I make technologies; they, in turn, make me (21).

The me made here is suggestive of the notion of medium as environment for life, of the selective actualization of
environment which only ever occurs via a differentially-calibrated sensorium, vis--vis technology. Such a model
allows for a more nuanced account of the materiality constitutive of the ongoing actualization of the environment.
As well, its constructivist inflection of embodiment means that technological elements can be differentially
positioned on various socio-cultural and political-economic axes. Finally, the relational emphasis is structured
within a reflexive dynamic. Thus, when Ihde offers his well-known example of new temporal-spatial embodiment
manifested by Galileo and his telescope, one can ask the question of whether Galileo would be Galileo without his
telescope (2002). More to the point of what follows, who or what invented what or whom, Galileo or the
telescope?
Thinking about Technics: The Human, Gesture and Speech
We were prepared to accept anything except to learn that it all began with the feet (Leroi-Gourhan, 65).

How might one factor the vicissitudes which have let paleo-anthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan such a relatively
obscure scholar, at least outside of his native France. In the 1930s, he studied ethnology under Marcel Mauss,
undertook widespread structuralist analysis of Paleolithic art,10 subsequently embarking on his decades-long study
of technics, particularly in prehistory, and eventually rising to hold the Chair in Prehistory at the Collge de France
from 1968 to 1982, almost exactly coterminous with Foucaults Chair in the History of Systems of Thought.
10

While it will not be covered in detail here, Leroi-Gourhan extends his work on the deeply recursive and
relational quality of technics to aesthetics and is worthy of its own consideration: Indeed, Leroi-Gourhan made a
very original contribution in the field of aesthetics, which was carried further by French ethnologists. Instead of
directly analyzing stylefor him an essential component of ethnicity and ethnic identityhe preferred to analyze
aesthetics, a much broader field that is not limited to creating images materialized in artistic production but
extends to living as a whole through rhythms, forms, and flavors. Leroi-Gourhan wanted to take into account not
only auditory and visual representations but also the totality of the sensory apparatus. Within this framework, style
became the means through which ethnic groups put their imprint on forms, values, and rhythms (Audouze 295,
emphasis added).

Leroi-Gourhan had an avowedly catholic approach to scholarship, with his multidisciplinarity ranging across
paleontology, physiology, ethnology, the history of art, technology, and biology. Claude Levi-Strauss, a
contemporary, whose more strict structuralist approach often led to the perception of their being at odds with one
another, wrote of Leroi-Gourhan upon his death in 1986,
When one rereads his writings on physical anthropology, technology, prehistoric archaeology and art,
one sees that the key idea that governed his thinking was always to study the interrelations between
things rather than the things themselves, to try to reduce the chaotic diversity of the empirical data to
invariant relations and to use . . . a method of transformations (Audouze 281-2).

His first major works, LHomme et la matiere and Milieu et technique, comprise a veritable encyclopedia of
prehistoric technics, and developed an innovative methodology for studying technology, eschewing a typology of
the tools themselves and instead focusing on the technical modes of action on matter. Leroi-Gourhan put forward
a tripartite dimensionality for understanding prehistoric technics: the external milieu of the environment actualized
by that tool; the interior milieu of the intellectual capital of that hominid group; and, finally, the technical milieu, the
socioeconomic and cultural factors inscribed into the tools themselves. It is the former site, the external milieu,
where we can get a first sense of how technics couples with an environment to reconfigure the environment in
which the human lives. It is the latter site, the technical milieu, which will later be identified as an inorganic
repository of memory as it is characteristic of all tools to be a site of accumulation, of the sedimentation and
exteriorization of knowledge and practicesindeed, of memory itself. This technical exteriorization, as we shall
see, will be put forward as a fundamental extra-biological dynamic in the very process of the evolution of the
human.
The first step toward technical exteriorization begins not with tools but with the feet. Leroi-Gourhans recognition
of the importance of this first step was not a wholly innovative idea; he enthusiastically acknowledges his
intellectual inheritance on this matter, quoting in near amazement the 4th c. C.E. Cappadocian theologian St.
Gregory of Nyssa:
So it was thanks to the manner in which our bodies are organized that our mind, like a musician, struck
the note of language within us and we became capable of speech. This privilege would surely never
have been ours if our lips had been required to perform the onerous and difficult task of procuring
nourishment for our bodies. But our hands took over that task, releasing our mouths for the service of
speech (25).

Leroi-Gourhan adds to this preternatural insight by stepping even further back in evolutionary time, to the feet as it
were. Indeed, he went even further back, to what he calls an ongoing series of liberations: the freeing of the
whole body from the liquid element in turn followed by the permanent elevation of the head from the ground,
and finally reaching a point of concurrence with St. Gregory of Nyssa, the hand from the requirement of
locomotion before adding the missing link: the brain from the facial mask (25).
So what do these liberations then entail, beyond freedom from immersion in water, from pronation to the ground,
of the hands from locomotion, and the brain from a cranial squeeze? For one, this process of exteriorizations is
constantly subjected to a double-articulation of liberation and actualization. Given the focus in this paper on the
return to the senses, we can restate these liberations as radical breaks in the modalities through which the world
is experienced, from one sensoria to another. Consider, for example, the endurance of these atavistic sensoria on
ideal-form models of our purported natural human condition. That is, even though the sensory experience of life in
the water or firmly on the ground was wholly preexistent to the human, there is a persistence of the notion of a
shared sensorial ratio and mode of perceptionas if the body were naturally in an unmediated state, purely
immanent to its environment. In other words, a stubborn insistence that our human experience fully and
exclusivelyat least in a natural sensetranspires through a biological vector of exteriorization. LeroiGourhans model runs counter to such naturalistic accounts.
Standing in contrast, then, is an account which begins with the feet. Leroi-Gourhan inventively presents
bipedalism as marking the end of the pre-human sensorial calibration in which exteriorization is enacted strictly via
the body itself, as a biological process. This because biological exclusivity is precluded by the emergent role of
technics wherein the proto-human vector of exteriorization becomes as much technical as it is biological. A
question in need of clarification arises here: exteriorization as who, or, rather, exteriorization through what? To
answer that requires a return to Leroi-Gourhans aforementioned epigram: it all begins with the feet. To make
sense of the importance of the bipedal turn, the feet must be situated on a strictly defined path which leads to the

exteriorization of the human via technics: first through mobility, then through its manifestations of liberation, and
finally via exteriorization.
Darwin began with cognition, hence his cerebral model of evolution; Leroi-Gourhan begins with locomotion. To
say it all begins with the feet indicates a cascade of incidental by-products of bipedalism. Some four million years
ago there appeared the first definitely bipedal hominid, Australopithecus anamensis. Standing on two feet freed
the hands for grasping and eventually manipulating objects in the environment. Thus it is the liberation of the
hands which radically expands the sensorial possibilities of the anterior field of the human:
[A] facial pole governed by the actions of the head and a manual pole governed by the actions of the
forelimb. The two poles act in close relationship to perform the most elaborate technical operations (31).

Technical operations, elaborate or otherwise, were made manifest some two million years ago, with fossil
evidence of the oldest lithic industry. These simple Oldowan stone tools (rocks with a few pieces struck away to
form a sharp edge), constructed by Homo habilis, are the first examples of technics in the archeological record.
Curiously, until the appearance of the much more sophisticated Acheulean handaxe lithic industry remained
entirely unchanged across the archeological record for about one million years. Furthermore, the fossil record of
that era shows that the braincase of our hominid ancestors was much smaller, about half the size of modern
humans (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 61).
This takes us to what Stiegler, following Derrida, will identify as an aporetic centre in Leroi-Gourhans model of the
originary condition of the human. What this suggests is that the brain, the cognitive wellspring of interiorityso
important to ancient Greek notions of the transcendental nature of knowledgewas neither a priori to technics nor
a coterminous driving force. Instead, it was absent, at least in its larger and more advanced form. Tools did not
appear because bigger-brained hominids were looking for something new to do; rather, it all began with the feet.
Cranial expansion is just one of many recursive by-products of an upright posture (and we will consider the
expansion of the brain, or corticalization shortly when we discuss Stiegler). Walking upright requires a vertical
vertebrae which, in turn, is able to physically support a larger skull. It also requires morphological adjustments of
the skull for balance, namely the base of the skull shortens as the capacity of the brain pan expands. Thus it is
bipedalism which acts serendipitously to support the potential of the enlargement of the brain as it structurally
increases the capacity of the brain pan into which a larger brain can evolve. But it is technics, as provocatively
suggested by Leroi-Gourhan, which recursively facilitates the actual enlargement of the brain. In other words,
Leroi-Gourhan situates tools and the brain in a deeply complex and recursive relation, wherein, both impact the
other but only ever in the milieus of mobility, liberation, and exteriorization.
Questions remain. Darwins cerebral model would suggest lithic industry appeared because of the most
sagacious among our hominid ancestors. Leroi-Gourhan sees it differently. Somehow, somewhere an
Australanthropian picked up sharp edged stones and used them as an extension of the hand, as if their brains
and bodies had gradually exuded them (106). Technics, therefore, emerges first as a zoological and not a cultural
phenomenon; at this point the process of liberation was in nascent process, as was the relationship between
technics and the body.
For the period in the archeological record in which technics seemingly remained only a zoological feature, LeroiGourhan explicitly compares the lithic industry of the proto-human Australanthropians to the way an animal has
claws (97). That is, technics stood solely as induced by the bipedal skeletal system as if biologically exuded,
bereft of any imprint of what might be considered human thought. A very different model of the pre-human thus
emerges, one already infused with technics, albeit a technics that is a zoological feature. This serves up the
evocative image of a veritable array of prehistoric cyborgs walking across now-extinct lineages. We, the
inheritors? Technics as an originary condition of the human? One important by-product of this sometimes
seemingly contradictory paradigm is that it caught the sustained attentions of first Jacques Derrida and later
Bernard Stiegler.
What is of specific interest to those interlocutors is Leroi-Gourhans thesis that lithic industry, especially in its more
sophisticated form, also manifests the pre-condition for language. In other words, it is the operational syntax of
technics, the actual production of prehistoric tools, which are a structural precondition of any possible language.
This profound effect, though not fully explicated, was suggested by Leroi-Gourhan: after a million years of interiorexterior recursivity, he suggests a rupture: tools and language are neurologically linked and cannot be dissociated
within the social structure of humankind (emphasis added, Leroi-Gourhan, 114). In other words, to make tools
requires a fixed and flexible set of gestures operating under a general syntax which results from a transduction of
the brain and its physical environment. To this, Leroi-Gourhan adds, if we pursue the parallel with language
we find a similar process taking place (114). The syntactically organized sequence, then, is a product of the

incipient-humans newly fortified (and externalized) memory, enabling the development of more complex technics.
The operating syntax of technics is literally marked in the traces of knapped flint, thereby exteriorizing memory,
and, in turn, acting as a precondition for language.
What is typically and rightly stressed here is that the development of technics requires anticipation of future use,
preservation in the actual tool, and conceptual permanence. But what I want to stress is how these series of
operations, manifested in technics, also act to differentially calibrate the sensorium. In other words, that the
deployment of these tools alter the structural coupling of the human and environmentwhich includes, most
fundamentally, the human sensorium. In this manner, atavistic sensoria are, from here on, subject to constant
recalibration via technics. On then, from the feet to the hands to the mouth.
Derrida and Stiegler: The Originary Technicity of the Human
The enterprise of returning strategically, ideally, to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact,
normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication,
deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have
proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure
before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before
the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical
exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent (Derrida 1988, 93).

Derrida reviewed favorably Leroi-Gourhans Le Geste et Parole when it was released in the mid-1960s which, in
turn, helped inspire Part 1 of On Grammatology, Writing Before the Letter. Leroi-Gourhans key theoretical
gesture, which most appealed to Derrida, was his assault on the great binary of nature and culture, dissolving the
separation of anatomy and biology from writing and figuration. Derrida found this to be powerful ammunition
against the erstwhile natural state of the human, which he targets in that text in the work of Rousseau. It is
germane to add that, implicit in the model of the natural state of the human, is a concomitant naturally configured
human sensorium.
The full richness of Derridas engagement with Leroi-Gourhan exceeds the focus of this paper.11 What is of
relevance, however, is how Derrida deploys paleo-anthropological evidence as a material support of his critique of
logocentrism and his counterintuitive account of the originary human. After all, the deconstructive project of
grammatology was not only aimed as a critique of logocentrism but also to unsettle accounts of the natural human,
because it asks first, as its characteristic question, the question of the name of man [sic] (1998, 83). What I take
as most relevant here is how it helps to further denaturalize the human and its sensorium ordered by a
transcendent interiority. For Derrida this commences an assault on the metaphysics of presence in its logocentric
privileging of speech over writing, wherein speech is the original signifier and writing a mere derivative. That
speech is accorded presence is because of its interiority, which from the Greeks on, denoted the transcendental
signified. But Derrida seized an opportunity to undermine the primacy of both a natural transcendence and
speech in his idea of the trace which manifested in technics, even in its most primitive form. That trace, emergent
in the beveled edged of knapped flint, is interpreted by Derrida as a kind of gramme, a concept which otherwise
denotes the mark or productive force in signification (and in writing, as the smallest discernable unit). Importantly,
the trace or gramme of technics demonstrably predates the gramme of the written word, and with the support of
Leroi-Gourhans model, that of speech itself. Thus there is a double-movement here which undermines both
logocentrism and the notion of the natural human. Logocentrism is challenged, as speech can no longer be

11

There have, of course, been other works to note the importance of techne to Derridas work. A few noteworthy
ones include Richard Beardsworth, translator of the first volume of Technics and Time, who highlighted these
connections in various close readings of Stiegler. As well, Critchley notes its foundational importance for a
political reading of Derrida: Although, to say the very least, this is not how he has been read, might not Derrida
best be approached as a thinker of originary technicity? In this respect, it is worth reconsidering a number of
examples of classical deconstruction: if one thinks of Derridas insistence on the role of writing given by Husserl
in the construction of ideality in The Origin of Geometry, or the irreducibility of the indicative sign in La voix et le
phnomene, or the place of writing in the constitution of logos and phone in Platos Pharmacy, or the logic of
iterability in Signature, Event, Context, then each of these discrete arguments might plausibly be viewed as
claims for the irreducibility of technics, where the grammatological would be equiprimordial with the technological.
That is, there is a necessity for a detour through technics in the constitution of the philosophical episteme, whether
this is a realm of dialogue, of the soul conversing with itself, auto-affection, or the pure ideality of speech and
meaning (174).

considered a priori to writing. Furthermore, notions of interiority as a transcendental wellspring of human

knowledge are equally confounded, given that memory was always already exteriorized via technics.
Following Leroi-Gourhans conceptual schema, Derrida also posits the gramme as the link between the biological
and the cultural.
Since genetic inscription and the short programmatic chains regulating the behaviour of the amoeba or
the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo
sapiens, the possibility of the gramme structures the movement of its history according to rigorously
original levels, types, and rhythms (84).

Keeping in mind that the concept of the gramme was developed as a means to counter logocentrism, we should
remember that there is an ancillary tendency in Derridas work to prioritize language over sensation. Here though,
the intent is to expand the biological and cultural ramifications of the gramme. Derrida expounds diffrance as
the history of the gramme and, in turn, as a process of exteriorization, which acts to expand conditions of
possibility of diffrance. The very concept of diffrance was put forward by Derrida in part as an innovative means
for responding to Husserlian phenomenology; thus diffrance as a history of the gramme invokes for Derrida the
notion of the cybernetic program. Cybernetics, as such, is intelligible only in terms of a history of the possibility of
the trace as the unity of a double-movement of protention and retention (84). Derrida is directly responding to
Husserls attempts to account for our perception of the temporality of events, from the musical to the linguistic.
The trace of the gramme is key for Derridas critical response. It is the gramme which links the Husserlian
concepts of retention and protention, or memory and anticipation. The gramme, as manifested in technics, marks
a crucial way in which the cognitive state of perception remains in flux, rendering structurally problematic such
general phenomenological accounts. This point is deserving of expansion via media theory wherein the gramme
can be transposed to media artifacts proper. The invoked cybernetic program stands to signify the originary,
transductive relations between the human and technology, and importantly, this situates the sensorium and
perception as always already mediated in ever-proliferating modes of exteriorization (or differentiation)
If, as Derrida asserts, the gramme and diffrance mark stages in the history of life then these articulations
resonate with the aforementioned series of liberations put forth by Leroi-Gourhan. First from water, then from the
earth, toward the liberation of memory. This liberation is also an exteriorization:
an exteriorization always already begun but always larger than the trace which, beginning from the
elementary programs of so-called instinctive behavior up to the constitution of electronic card-indexes
and reading machines enlarges diffrance and the possibility of putting in reserve (Derrida, 84).

The 1960s technology invoked above marks but a stage in a process which connects the origins of the human to
the ongoing differentiation of the human sensorium via technics. It is a process, Derrida acknowledges, animated
by mechanist and technicist language at the very moment when it is precisely a question of retrieving the
origin and the possibility of movement, of the machine, of the techne, or orientation in general (84-85). The
challenge proposed entails seeing the recursive unity of gesture and speech, of the body and thought and of tool
and thought. As such, what becomes increasingly impossible is finding there an origin of the human not already
marked by techne.
To Derridas challenge we can add the need to see the originary unity of technics and the sensorium. This
insistence on the sensorial qualities of technics reminds us of how, before the beveled edges of knapped flint can
carry the trace or the gramme which will later manifest in linguistic form, it first exists in the realm of the senses: to
see and feel stones of proper size and density, to strike the stone thusly, to feel the sharpness of its edge, and to
observe and remember this operational syntax is a pre-linguistic process in every sense. Leroi-Gourhan, when
writing of the culmination of the technical exteriorization of the human in the 1960s, emphasized the texture and
form of the substance being processed, its examination by ponderal, tactile, thermosensitive, or photosensitive
organs that transmit their findings to automatic regulating centres and of the operational centrality of such
sensory organs (251). Whether it be a properly cybernetic articulation of high modernity or of the Lower
Paleolithic, technics are always acting as vectors of exteriorization, and in turn, creating environments for living.
Further, it is not just a matter of the sensuous qualities of technics, but the manner in which technical vectors of
exteriorization recalibrate the sensorium.
The fundamental point that I want to make is that in the beginning was not the word, but the trace, and its first
manifestation was in a differentiated sensorium, not an operational syntax which could lead to speech. Yet in this
account there is a key related element which remains in need of clarificationthe aporetic origin of the human
and it is Stiegler who best explicated that which was suggested by Leroi-Gourhan and inspirational to Derrida. In

the first of his groundbreaking three-volume Technics and Time, Stiegler asks the question, And [what] if we
already were no longer humans? (136). Thus he at once posits a decisive event for the appearance of the
human while simultaneously deconstructing the human subject. The emergence of technics marks both the
appearance of the human and simultaneously signals it originary aporia. This stands in contradistinction from
much of Western thought and metaphysics wherein the human emerged whole with access to transcendental
knowledge. Under this model, technics can only be a contaminant, standing in opposition to language, and
distorting the senses. Instead, I want to follow an alternate trajectory, contra Rousseau, wherein technics is not a
belated addition to the human blighting its natural state; rather, it was already there before the first origin:
technical exteriorization was but the pursuit of the very movement of life (163).
In other words, the human was never outside of a constitutive relation with technics. It is exteriorization that marks
the very threshold of the human; it is technics acting as the vector of exteriorization which reveals the lack inherent
in the natural human, indeed manifesting its aporia. As such, exteriorization is not a rupture with nature; instead, it
is a new organization of life, an organic-inorganic coupling, facilitating anticipation, reflexivity, and symbolic
thought. But how to determine a singular moment or element amongst the myriad components of this dispositif of
the human? Stiegler felt that Leroi-Gourhan hedged on this point, as he posited it with the Neanderthals with their
new cultural objects and practices like burials, dyes and other curiositiesthe exteriorization of nonconcrete
symbols (167). Stiegler is more strictly Derridean in that the trace or gramme of the earliest stone tools
presuppose the possibility of a more complex, symbolic, non-technical expression. Thus Stiegler insists on an
indissociability of the technical and symbolic, as for him it is the syntax of the operating sequence which links the
concrete expression of technics to the abstract symbolism of language.
A number of seemingly intractable questions further haunt the originary human, comprised, as it is, by a lack. For
instance, there the impossibility of nominating either the organic or inorganic entitythat is the human, or toolas
determinate in its emergence. Further, there is the inability to clearly separate the interiority and exteriority of the
human, given the fundamentally recursive relation between tools and consciousness. Stiegler emphasizes these
aporias, noting that the human and technics pursue a process engaged long before the rupturea new
organization of diffrance, a diffrance of diffrance (178).
Recall that for Leroi-Gourhan the earliest stone tools were seemingly exuded as if new biological features of the
hominid while the brain case remained very small. Stiegler conceptualizes a driving dynamic out of this aporetic
origin by emphasizing the relation between tools and the distinctive neurological development of the human. In
this coupling of the tool and brain, Stiegler asks,
[W]hat mirage of the cortex is experienced [sprouve], as pathbreaking, in the hardness of the flint; what
plasticity of gray matter corresponds to the flake of mineral matter; what proto-stage of the mirror is thus
installed (135).

What is suggested is a shift from a purely biological evolutionary process to one impacted by extra-biological
factors. This entails the recursive correlation between technical exteriority and conscious interiority as facilitating
the process of corticalizationthe development of advanced brain functions like memory, perception, thought,
language, and consciousness. The key is the effect of the exteriorization of memory wherein lithic industry acts as
an inorganic repository of memory. That stone tools are preserved in their form well beyond the biological lifespan of their makers sets off a process of emergent causality, whereby tools effect the biological process of
evolution which equally impacts upon the development of technics. This results in a very different original
dynamic of the human: recursivity between the tool and cortex with neither originary nor determining. Equally,
technics facilitate an ongoing process of radical differentiation whereby the environment of the human and its
sensorium is actualized through this technical vector of exteriorization.
Stiegler deploys the term epiphylogenesis to denote this process of exteriorization and development of the
humanan originary assemblage of the body and technology; and a structural coupling of the human and its
environment. Epi denotes the accumulation of experience in technics; phylogenesis denotes a dynamic
morphogenetic process, whereby there is a branching off in a taxonomic order. In other words, epiphylogenesis
signifies the process whereby homo habilis breaks off into a new lineage from previous hominids: witness the
originary human. But it is only through a structural coupling with technology that homo is differentiated from its
evolutionary forbearers. It is technology that serves as a new medium for the transmission of memory in a manner
that exceeds biological time. To say that technology is an inorganic repository of memory is to say that it
preserves epigenetic experience. This technical exteriorization of memory or artificial memory support,
differentiates the human sense of time, transmitting a collective nonlived past into the present, and facilitating a
sense of futurity or anticipation. Stiegler calls this epiphylogenetic memory techno-logical memory.

Here Stiegler retains a strong Greek inflection of tekhne, designating skill, art, and craft. As Belinda Barnet notes,
Technics, for Stiegler, are always memory aidswhether they have been created explicitly so (for example,
language or photography) or not (pottery and rugs). This is what he means by epiphylogenesis (139). And it is
the preservation and transmission of epigenetic experience that gives human evolution an extra-genetic
characterthat is, as something more than a purely biological process. It equally provides structural access to
nonlived memory, which can take the appearance of tradition or transcendence.
The biological body, then, was always extended by technology, as an originary condition, rendering it
characteristic of the human, not a prosthetic supplement. In this important sense, it offers an affirmation to
Stieglers claim that we have never been human as such. In other words, how can we meaningfully separate the
human from its external prosthetic technical support? It is not that we can no longer make a distinction between
the biological body and technologyfor they are demonstrably different things. It is, however, that there is no
meaningful distinction between technology and the body, qua the human. As such, the bodily basis of experience
has always already been mediatedconditioned, or might one say contaminated, by a technical dimension.
To conclude this necessarily brief overview of epiphylogenesis, the profundity of technics, vis--vis the human,
emphasis should be given to its capacity for exteriorization and extension. This capacity manifests by the
technical exteriorization of our bodies into the environment. This is what is meant by technology as a vector of
exteriorization: it is an exterior and supplementary force acting on the otherwise biological process of evolution;
and further, it extends our ability to act, in what one might call an originary agency of assemblages. In short, our
ongoing selective actualization of environment only ever proceeds in concert with technics.
Hansen: Medium as Environment for Life
Technics can take the form of media artifacts; the manner in which they selectively actualize our environment
have been considered in related but different ways for some time within the long-established tradition of medium
theory. The centre of that variegated set of inquiries into the relationship between technology and society/the
human was the Toronto School, most famously in the work of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis and Walter Ong.
Their basic insight is that media artifacts significantly impact both culture and the human mind. On the one hand,
Innis examined how the dominant medium in a given historical period enabled and constrained forms of political
and economic organization in what he called the bias of communication. McLuhan, on the other hand, primarily
focused on the impact of media and communication systems on the calibration of the ratio of sensory perception.
But that tradition focused only on specific media artifacts and equally remained philosophically logocentric given
their shared preference for oral communication as the basis of social interaction. In this sense, traditional medium
theory remains of peripheral interest to the insights of technogenesis. The legacy of McLuhan has been briefly
cited by contemporary media theorist Mark Hansen in his appraisal of the work of in relation to digital media.
Hansens insight, however, is to move beyond the more narrowalbeit still importantexamination of different
media artifacts, be it literacy or electronic communication, toward that more generalized condition of the human in
which medium is an environment for life. In turn, this situates media in a persistent recursive relationship between
the human and technology, wherein a constant feedback loop recalibrates the ratio of sensory perception, in turn
constantly altering the composition of sensory selection, and, as a result, rearticulating the parameters of the
environment with which we are structurally coupled.
Traditional medium theory examines media artifacts as concrete mediations between the human and environment
in historically-specific formsand we can include Friedrich Kittler among those who study such technically-specific
forms of mediation. It is from this foundation that Hansen develops media theory but only by explicating key points
of differentiation. McLuhan, for example, can easily be situated within the aforementioned conceptualization of the
living basis of technics; however, he still presents media as an externality with a prosthetic effect on the human.
Kittler takes an even more pronounced position. Not only does he conceptualizes media as externalindeed as a
wholly disembodied force (in this specific sense resonating with the Futurists)he grants it, as Hansen contends,
an undue autonomy over the human and its ratio of sensory perception. In turn, this allows Kittler to boldly
commence his most famous work Gramophone, film, typewriter with the statement Media determine our situation
(xxxix). It is here that Hansens immersion in the technogenesis of the human comes to fruition, for, while we can
and should pay attention to particular media artifacts, how and when are we ever outside of, or in-between, media
or technics in general? As such, media indeed determines our situation, but only recursively, in the form of an
emergent causality, and not at all in the manner implied by Kittler. Quoting Hansen:
by giving the empirical-technical infrastructure for thought, by specifying a certain technical materiality
for the possibility of thinking, media remains an ineliminable, if unthematizable, aspect of the experience
that gives rise to thought (2006, 298).

The specificities of this empirical-technical infrastructure, however, is in a constant state of flux with new media
artifacts emerging in an ongoing, albeit punctuated, process. As such, Hansen recasts media as a kind of metacategory which seems to be transcendental, without, of course, being properly transcendental at all. In other
words, there is always an empirical component to media (as artifacts) which retains an experiential stability in the
event itself. Thus each changing artifactual form functions in a way related to Foucaults historical a priori or
Deleuzes empirical transcendentalism. While in any given historical moment, we can empirically point to the
embodiment of specific media artifacts, always prior to that is a more general state of medium as environment for
life. Herein lies Hansens decisive contribution:
medium names an ontological condition of humanization, the constitutive dimension of exteriorization
that is part and parcel of the transduction of technics and life (300).

Resonant with the notion of medium as environment for life is that of embodiment. From the stone tools cited by
Leroi-Gourhan to digital media, a common thread is that they all entail operations of embodiment, and in turn
mediate the sensorium. Medium as an environment for life is a continuation of the living basis of technics initiated
by epiphylogenesis and it reminds us that what all media mediates is life itself. Hansen could be situated, along
with Tiziana Terranova, Tim Lenoir, and Katherine Hayles, among many others, who have ushered in a new
phenomenology of media theory. The connecting thread is that of embodiment; embodiment of technics and
embodiment of information. In short, it is the body which acts as a filter, in conjunction with technics, selecting
from an excess of stimuli and in turn actualizing a recursively configured environment. The implications here,
amidst todays unprecedented proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies, intelligent machines,
and distributed networks is not the emergence of cyborgs or posthumansas the human has always been
configured with technics. Rather, it is that rational thought, including political judgment, is only ever occurring in
this assemblage of human and technics imbued with and typically predisposed by sub-perceptual affect. As such,
there is a pressing need for future research into what might be called medium as environment for the political life
of sensation.
Conclusion
In February 2009, there was published in Italy a Post-Futurist manifesto which, unlike the predecessor it was
critiquing, emphasized the centrality of the body and affect in relation to technology. Among other things, it states:
We want to sing of the danger of love, the daily creation of a sweet energy that is never dispersedWe
want to exalt tenderness, sleep and ecstasy, the frugality of needs and the pleasure of the senses.We
demand that art turns into a life-changing force. We seek to abolish the separation between poetry and
mass communication, to reclaim the power of media from the merchants and return it to the poets and
the sages.
[] We will sing of the infinite web of knowledge and invention, the immaterial technology that frees us
from physical hardship. We will sing of the rebellious cognitariat who is in touch with her own body. We
will sing to the infinity of the present and abandon the illusion of a future. (Berardi)

That manifesto, penned by Italian autonomist media theorist Franco Berardi, is connected to the rich tradition of
Italian media activism which deploys bodies simultaneously on the streets and in digital forms across distributed
networks. While it focuses as much on the need to wrest control of media from capital, it equally emphasizes
embodiment and the affect animating that constitutive relation. I will conclude by briefly citing a different
experiment in politicized media which puts into practice the preceding theory of embodiment in which the human
and technics are in transductive relation. As such, it does not so much return to the senses as it does stake out a
new mediated realm of the senses.
If rational thought, including political judgment, always proceeds amidst transductive mediation, imbued with and
predisposed by sub-perceptual affect, how might we envision new political possibilities, especially in our
contemporary condition of the increasing elision of the corporeal and virtual? Amidst possible polyvalent political
strategies we might begin with a video on YouTube titled In My Language 12 which has nearly one million views.
Produced by and featuring Amanda Baggs, a young autistic activist from Vermont, the first part of the video is a
montage of the radical sensorio-perceptual difference of Amandas world. In communication with her
environment, it might seem from an outside perspective to be no more than a series of tics, incoherent
vocalizations, and repetitive actions. Yet she confounds this dominant perspective when she sits behind her
computer and begins typing. A computerized voice intones It is only when I write something in your language that
you refer to me as having communication. She continues, forcing the viewer to reflect upon and reconsider what
12

The video can be accessed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc

they just saw, as she describes her actions: My language is not about designing words or visual symbols for
people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment. This video
demonstrates that her constant conversation. includes everything from the feeling of tap water flowing over her
face rubbing up and down on the pages of an open book.
Baggs is part of a new political movement called the Autistic Liberation Front (ALF), established in 2005, which
opposes the medicalization of autism through the search for a cure and instead demands public acceptance of
their radically differentiated sensorial reality under the logo Celebrate neurodiversity. They meet every Tuesday,
not in a community centre, but in the virtual reality of Second Life;13 they also have a page on Facebook. They are
in the process of building up an area of Second Life called Porcupine and establishing the Liberated Autistic
Territories of Second Life. That space includes an Autism Museum, the Borges Library featuring actual works
penned by autistic authors, a Memorial to victims of autism hating and the Einstein Auditorium which acts as a
meeting room. Amanda inhabits Porcupine with other activists, and she has painstakingly ensured that her avatar
resembles her right down to the inclusion of her myriad tics and mannerisms.
The ALF emerged from a multilayered exodus, both corporeal and virtual. Regarding the latter, in 2005 a Harvard
researcher established the private island of Brigadoon especially for those on the autistic spectrum. Some users,
however, chafed at the therapeutic orientation and created ALF as a result. Their first act was on Second Life
where they set about constructing Porcupine. The other exodus is corporeal, albeit one transductively related to
the virtual. Can one read this movement in relation to the series of liberations highlighted by Leroi-Gourhan,
remembering that the these once biological ruptures became facilitated by techne with the emergence of the
human? Witness Baggs insistence on retaining her corporeal particularity in virtual form. It is precisely the
immersion into a virtual world that makes Second Life such compelling technology for users from the autism
spectrum. As one observer notes:
Internet communicationemail, instant messaging, chat roomsslows down communication and dispels
with body language and the need to interpret facial expressions, all things which make it a particularly
friendly form of communication for people on the autistic spectrum (Boundy).

There is much to learn from the rich, complex and little understood neurodiversity movement. I only wish to note
how they use technological vectors of exteriorization as part of a collective, selective actualization of
environments. In all instances, technics functions as a means to socialize and organize amongst themselves, and
to demonstrate to others their humanity which is often overlooked in the natural world. These are indeed new
organizations of life which are clearly engaging a kind of Post-Cartesian politics of the material and virtual. I want
to draw out a final political stake with reference back to the relation between the human and technology vis--vis
the Greek categorizations of techne and phusis as it relates to the polis. Jill Frank offers an original interpretation
of these relations in her analysis of Aristotelian politics. She situates nature via phusis, as how a thing grows as
opposed to natura or how a thing is born precisely because it connotes no prior determination, fixed destiny, or
even congenital tendency (19-20). As such, it is societal habituation, not any inborn nature which limits
citizenship for Aristotle. Frank thus positions politics as that which renders phusis mutable.
I want to conclude by instead emphasizing the role of techne. Phusis is often distinguished from techne, on the
grounds that only the former is able to naturally determine itself, as Aristotle noted. But I am suggesting that vis-vis the human, phusis is not the opposite of techne. That is, an unequivocal distinction between natural life and
artificial life, between the corporeal and virtual, or between Cartesian geometry and quantum non-locality is
unsustainable. Under technogenesis, the originary human is always already transductively related to technics. As
such, it is techne which renders phusis mutable, especially in relation to the polis. In the words of Jean-Luc
Nancy, What does techne mean? It means knowing how to obtain from nature what it does not offer of itself
(Barison and Ross). It is a political lesson that ALF seems to have already learned, and one that seems
imperative that progressive political sensibilities obtain.
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