[Tlhrough technical activity, the human creates mediations, and these mediations are detachable from the individual who produces and thinks them. The individual expresses itself in them, but does not adhere to them. The machine possesses a sort of impersonality which allows it to become the instrument of another human. The human reality that it crystallizes in itself is alienable, precisely because it is detachable.... The technical object, conceived and constructed by the human, does not limit itself to creating a mediation between the human and nature.... It accords its human content a structure similar to that accorded natural objects and permits the insertion of the natural effects of this human reality into the world.... A convertibility of the human into the natural and of the natural into the human is instituted through the technical schematism.26
Put in Merleau-Pontyian terminology, this mutual interpenetration of the human and the natural could be said to actualize the écart of primary tactility—the gap between embodiment and technicity—that yields the asymmetrical interpenetration of the flesh of my body and the flesh of the world.
In fact, this connection to the primordial écart is precisely why technics can facilitate the convertibility that allows biologically and psychically individuated human beings to participate in a transindividual collective individuation:
[T]he technical world offers an indefinite affordance [disponibilité] of groupings and connections. For it is the result of a liberation of human reality crystallized in the technical object. To construct a technical object is to prepare an affordance ... beyond the interindividual relation which is not maintained through an operational activity, a mental and practical universe of technicity is instituted, in which human beings communicate through what they invent. The technical object understood according to its essence—the technical object such that it has been invented, conceived and desired, and taken up by a human subject—becomes the support and the symbol of that relation we want to call transindividual.... By the intermediary of the technical object, an interhuman relation is thus created that forms the very model of transindividuality. What is meant by this is a relation that does not place individuals into relation by means of their already constituted individuality, ... nor by means of what is identical in every human subject, ... but by means of the charge of preindividual reality, of this charge of nature that is conserved with the individual being and that contains potentials and virtuality. (246–248)
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