Abstract

The guiding claim of this issue is that one grasps a politics of the technical through the study of the cultural practice of handling tools in society. This issue is devoted to a nootechnics of the digital, which defines the importance given to both life and thought in the technogenesis of objects (both artefac- tual and technical). If the ontogenesis once resided in the relation between form and matter, we are now moving toward the question of a nootechno- genesis that resides in the relation between noos and techné. Nootechnogene- sis does not separate the emergence of technics and life. Instead, it offers a mode for thinking about the genesis of both noos (intuition, intelligence, flair, intention) and techné (technique, craft, art) as the condition and the conse- quence of our cultural condition, of our ability to mediate and negotiate dif- ferent realms of reality. Nootechnics refers to the psycho-cultural practices of care and empowerment. It supposes the wiring of a transductive unity between beings and technical objects. This transductive unity is what allows noos and techné to operate in a relational mediation toward one another and to restructure the dynamic relations between elements within a system. For that matter, nootechnics refers to care and empowerment as structural oper- ations; they promote a relational ontology of mediation needed to implement changes.