On the Ontology of Digital Sensitivity: Simondon, Latour, and Stiegler on a New Perceptual Grammar

In the era of total digitalization, when artificial neural networks curate our attention and social networks function as machines for producing affects, the question of how we perceive the world takes on not just an academic but a sharply social character. This article proposes a radical ontological shift in understanding the digital age, asserting that the key political field of the 21st century is the very structure of human perception. Through the synthesis of the concepts of technical individuation by Simondon, Stiegler's "pharmacology" of attention, and Latour's actor-network theory, we demonstrate that digital technologies are not merely tools but active co-architects of a new "perceptual grammar." This grammar is a hidden set of rules and filters that determine what can be seen, heard, and felt. It is produced in hybrid networks where algorithms, interfaces, and user practices interweave into a new mode of sensibility that requires its own deconstruction. The novelty of the approach lies in the rejection of viewing technology as a neutral mediator. Hence, the methodological approach of the research is based on the sequential application of three theoretical optics: the concept of individuation (Simondon), actor-network theory (Latour), and the pharmacological approach (Stiegler). This three-tiered method, ascending from ontological justification through empirical tracing to critical evaluation, allows us not only to describe but also to problematize the politics of digital sensitivity in all its complexity. The relevance of this research is determined by the unprecedented challenge that technological platforms pose to human agency and autonomy. If Simondon provides an ontological basis by understanding technology as a condition for the possibility of individuation itself, and Latour serves as a method for empirically tracing the assemblages that produce reality, then Stiegler introduces a critical and political vector. His analysis of the "proletarianization of sensitivity" under the pressure of the attention industry allows us to pose the following central question: "Whose interests and what logics (economic, political, ideological) crystallize in this new perceptual grammar?" Thus, the article insists that the struggle for the future is a struggle for the very "material" of experience and calls for the development of a new "therapeutics" of digital sensitivity capable of resisting its total capitalization.

Simondon, Stiegler, Latour, pre-individual, transindividual, individuation, pharmacon, quasi-object, actor, actor-network