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Your Bubble!
Berlin, May 17-19 – Galerie Nord


Techno-Aesthetics and the Externalisation of Personal Identity
Pietro Montani (Sapienza University of Rome)


1. I chose the topic “Extensions” because I would like to consider the
bubbles not as cages or prisons but as spaces in which relations mediated by
technique are produced.
What do we mean by “techno-aesthetics”?
The term applies to the fact that ever since appearing, Homo sapiens has
demonstrated a distinctive tendency to externalise, i.e. technicalize, many
aspects of his actions; and that this process is primarily linked to his sensitivity
(aesthesis - αἴσθησις in Ancient Greek).
It was Simondon, the philosopher mentioned yesterday by Vittorio Gallese,
who used this term in a letter addressed to Derrida, but not sent. Simondon
never developed this theme. I will do it, but in an autonomous direction.
I use the term “technical” in the minimal sense and define every external
or externalised investment of our bodies as technical. For instance, a stick used
to interact with the ground. The human body shows an extraordinary aptitude
to produce, increase and refine these processes of externalising sensitivity.
This techno-aesthetical predisposition, linked to the imagination, is the
condition of possibility of technical creativity which has been and remains Homo
sapiens’ principal adaptive resource.
Artistic creativity, in turn, is closely linked to technical creativity and
consists of a free simulation of its possibilities, marked by a reflective feature.
To conclude: the creativity of the human imagination is responsible for
technical outcomes – that are essential to the survival of our species – precisely

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because it was originally sustained by a techno-aesthetic, an externalised
sensitivity.

2. The idea of a creative imagination goes back a long way in the
philosophical tradition but it was Kant who gave this idea its most rigorous
basis. Kant attributed cognitive tasks to the imagination that neuroscience has
only recently been acknowledging even experimentally.
Kant saw the key task of the imagination as being to connect our
sensitivity (our ability to receive data from the outside world) to our cognitive
forms (our ability to organize conceptually these data).
Allow me an example of creative imagination. Let us think of the flexible
branches of a tree. The objective requirements of flexibility are easily perceived
by a chimpanzee, who is also able to use them, for instance, to get nourishment.
But when these requirements are perceived by homo sapiens, they can be
combined with another aspect – as objective as the former – that the
chimpanzee never perceives – although it can be taught to do that. Human
imagination actually recognizes another rule in a flexible branch: the possibility
of charging the branch with a force that can be discharged as a ballistic push.
I wish here to highlight three aspects of this essential interface
constructed by the imagination: a. it is embodied; b. it is connected with the basic
emotion of discovery: more precisely, a technical discovery; c. it is multimodal.
The imagination does not work with pictures alone but also with sensorimotor
schemas. This means that a techno-aesthetic coordinates with imaginative
processes on a level of general technical embodiment. We could say that the
imagination’s work consists essentially in this merger of the logical and the
somatic in an ‘emotionally marked’ context. We must, however, reiterate that
this would be impossible without a sensitivity that is spontaneously prolonged
in artefacts (an extended sensitivity).

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 This process, hugely rich in consequences, also exercises a performative
effect on the original experience of the self. Precisely for the construction of our
“technically extended” bubble.
This is the case of a small child placed before a mirror, an experience to
which Jacques Lacan, in particular, drew special attention.
Here, we clearly see that the child has a deeply emotional experience of
the self thanks to decentralisation and to the presence of an element external to
him, namely a technical artefact: the mirror.

3. This means there is a passage through a moment of technical alienation
or externalisation at the start of the identification process. The cognitive
equivalent of this process is extremely complex, and it occurs in the absence of
language and only thanks to the work of the imagination. The child explores a
conceptual sequence of the following type: “That is me – But ‘that’, i.e. my real
identity, is actually something else.”
We all know that this process is destined to become more complicated,
which occurs as soon as we consider ourselves on a timeline. The timeline of our
individuation processes – to use a Simondon term. As time passes, it is not only
my image that changes. My personality and my ethos change, too. The answer to
the question “Who am I?” becomes increasingly complex. Lastly, my self-
awareness also changes, as does the very certainty that I am something like a
“myself”, the continuity of which is guaranteed. Fractures, conflicts and
dispersion appear in the self.
This critical situation brings another passage that the philosopher Paul
Ricoeur recognised as the shift from an idem-identity to an ipse-identity. Ipse is
not identical to itself, rather it is the product of a labour of construction,
deconstruction and integration that occurs over time. This involves an
interesting modification in the process of technically externalising the personal

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identity. More precisely, a specific function of the imagination comes into play;
its narrative function. Who am I? I am the stories that I – or others – can tell
about me. My identity is conceived as a narrated identity.

4. I would like to end by asking which technical medium is most suitable
to the narrated version of personal identity. To simplify, I would say that two
paths unfold here. The dominant technical medium of the first is language. As
well as the great narrative universe, we have the helpful example of
psychoanalytical therapy, that can be understood as a long narrative experience
of construction and re-construction of identity.
The second path, on which I would like to dwell with a convincing
example, is that of multimedia narration, namely the field that is already
concerned with – and will ever more pervasively be concerned with – the
identification processes of so-called ‘digital natives’. The memory archive of
these generations will ever more massively be delocalised online. The arts
almost immediately realised the importance of these digital archives. So, I would
like to end with an example that is artistic, but not in the traditional sense.
I refer to Memofilm, a therapeutic aid adopted to treat certain forms of
Alzheimer’s and with excellent results. It consists of the following: a patient is
interviewed one or more times after which the Memofilm group produces for
him a short film (15 minutes), also incorporating information gathered from
other sources. This film is shown to the patient every day in the idea that its
reception may act as an externalised support that will partially reactivate some
parts of their memory and of their ability to feel emotions.
The results have been surprising, not simply because of the general
improvement in the patients’ memory integration – and so in quality of life – but
also in some cases because of a reduction or remission of significant symptoms
(like the control of bowel functions).

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 I would like to end by stressing what I believe to be one crucial last point.
In Freud’s great book The Interpretation of Dreams, and more specifically
the seventh and last chapter, he abandons the by then well raked-over field of
interpretation to wonder whether dreams serve a function – and if so, what this
may consist of – for the physiology of our brain-mind. To do this, Freud follows
the regressive processes of dreams to their remotest origin, namely the moment
when, in the absence of language, the imagination has completed its first
interactive explorations in the world environment (including the experience of
the mirror). An exploration of which I have already highlighted the technical and
emotional components
During this regressive process usually but not exclusively represented by
dreams and REM sleep, the imagination seems to repeat a task it carried out at
the time of its earliest beginnings. It reactivates neural sequences no longer used
in normal activities because they are too primitive and archaic, but nonetheless
essential not just to restore pieces of memory but also, so to speak, to regenerate
the plasticity of the neural processes.
Memofilm shows that something similar occurs not only physiologically in
our brain activity during REM sleep but also, in an externalised and technical
form, when an audio-visual text is administered.
We must add, finally, that compared with verbal language – i.e. our most
powerful semiotic system – an audio-visual multimedia text seems to reveal a
greater capacity to reach the innermost stratum of the narrative identity and
thereby launch processes of elaboration, in the two senses I have indicated:
memorial and neuroplastic.
We can presume that one of the functions of artistic creativity (one of
many, I must stress) is to re-enact the oldest general strategy with which the
imagination started to scan and organise our relationship with the world
environment. And that it is not unknown for aesthetic pleasure to recover

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emotions linked to these primitive forms of exploring the world. If this is true,
we could perhaps conclude that a successful aesthetic experience coincides, at
least in part, with something like a neuroplastic regeneration of the technical
practices underlying the externalized formation of the self.