Gilbert Simondon

Gilbert Simondon was a French philosopher whose two great works — L'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information (1958, his doctoral thesis) and Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958) — rewrote the philosophy of technology on foundations that departed radically from the humanist and phenomenological traditions of his contemporaries. He argued that modern Western culture had systematically misunderstood both technology and the relationship between form and matter, and that the two misunderstandings were connected. The hylomorphic model of making — form imposed on passive matter — was not a neutral theory but an ideological projection of master-slave social relations onto the maker-material relation. It saw matter only from outside, the way a person who commands others to make bricks sees the bricks, and erased the craftsperson's actual engagement with the clay from the account. Ingold absorbed this critique and extended it into ethnographic detail, but the philosophical foundation is Simondon's.