Hayward Geoghegan SimondonIssue

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IntroductionCatching Up With SimondonMark Hayward

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan

$V�D�\RXQJ�SKLORVRSKHU�*LOEHUW�6LPRQGRQ�LGHQWLÀHG�WHFKQRORJ\�DV�a site of obsession, anxiety, and misunderstanding within contemporary culture. “Culture,” he wrote, “has become a system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics” (Mode of Existence, 1). According to Simondon, technique and technology ubiquitously structured thought and practice, especially in the contemporary world, yet philosophical tradition relegated the technical to an obscure zone of conceptual neglect. Simondon took the intimacy and obscurity that surrounded our relation to the technical as a clarion call to philosophy. Over the course of thirty-odd years of philosophizing, he examined the relation of the technical to the cultural and elaborated a quasi-technicist account of ontology itself. <HW�ZKLOH�KH�PDGH�GHÀQLWH�SURJUHVV� WRZDUG� UH�DFTXDLQWLQJ� WKH�ZRUOG�of culture with the world of technics, his own philosophy found a less fortunate fate; even as his theses were quietly disseminated throughout structuralist and poststructuralist thought, and were covertly conveyed into Anglophone thought, his name and his work remained largely un-known and misunderstood.

At the time of his death in 1989 it appeared that his philosophy and its association with technics would become a victim of that same stigma-tization he spent his entire career challenging. After Simondon’s death, D� WULFNOH�DQG� WKHQ�D�ÁRRG�RI�ZRUNV�GHOXJHG�ZKDWHYHU�GHIHQVH�V\VWHP�had been constructed to protect (French) philosophy from his peculiar DQG�RIWHQ�VXEYHUVLYH�ZRUN��5H�SXEOLFDWLRQV�RI�ROG�WH[WV��ÀUVW�SULQWLQJV�RI�unpublished texts, and waves of secondary tributes and interpretations spread across the French philosophical scene.1 Italian, German, and Span-LVK�WUDQVODWLRQV�IROORZHG��+LV�UROH�DV�DQ�LQÁXHQFH�XSRQ�*LOOHV�'HOHX]H�and as a predecessor of actor-network theory was acknowledged, while his promise for new materialisms and process philosophy became an object of debate.2 Yet even today his work remains largely unknown, and the long-promised translations of his major texts continue to languish in prominent university publishing houses. For these reasons, we look upon this collection of essays not so much as an introduction, but as an

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attempt to catch up with a thinker we regard as both central and obscure in contemporary theory debates.

This essay will outline the two major areas of Simondon’s thought, which loosely correspond to his account of the technical object in Du mode d’existence des objets techniques and his reconceptualization of ontology as onto-genesis, developed in L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. We show that Simondon’s continuing relevance is grounded in his simultaneous engagement with both technique and individuation. We do this by exploring Simondon’s relationship with cybernetics, here interpreted as the seminal moment for the understanding of technique and ontology present across his work. The essays that follow expand on the intersection between his process-oriented ontology of individuation and the philosophy of technology in surprising and, at moments, contradictory ways. By contrasting the approach taken in this issue to the philosophy of technics found in the work of Bernard Stiegler (the primary interlocu-tor for the majority of contributors in their engagement with Simondon), we advocate for a more open approach to Simondon’s philosophy that is adequate to the task of philosophy in the contemporary moment. In drawing the reader closer to the complexity and ambiguity of Simondon’s thought, we hope this collection will also initiate a new round of debate among Anglophone readers.

1. Simondon in the Context of Post-War FranceSimondon belonged to an eminent generation of French thinkers

who came of age during World War II and its aftermath. Much ink has EHHQ�GHYRWHG�WR�WKH�VLJQLÀFDQFH�RI�WKH�*HUPDQ�RFFXSDWLRQ�DQG�*HUPDQ�philosophy on “French theory” and poststructuralism.3 These debates IRUHVWDOOHG� LQYHVWLJDWLRQ� LQWR�DQRWKHU� VHW�RI� LQÁXHQFHV�� DUJXDEO\�PRUH�decisive: namely, the postwar reconstruction of the French economy ac-cording to industrial, technological, and economic models associated with American enterprise. Kristin Ross writes of this transformation:

The speed with which French society was transformed after the war from a rural, empire-oriented, Catholic country into a fully industrial-ized, decolonized, and urban one meant that the things moderniza-tion needed—educated middle managers, for instance, or affordable automobiles and other “mature” consumer durables, or a set of social VFLHQFHV�WKDW�IROORZHG�VFLHQWLÀF��IXQFWLRQDOLVW�PRGHOV��RU�D�ZRUN�IRUFH�of ex-colonial laborers—burst onto a society that still cherished prewar outlooks with all the force, excitement, disruption, and horror of the genuinely new. (4)

Fascination and apprehension over new technologies of research, control, and automation swept French culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Henning Schmidgen’s essay in this collection captures this moment when recalling the work of engineer-turned-novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet4 and Barthes’s

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5Catching up with Simondon

sophisticated deconstruction of mythological machines. He could have equally cited Jean-Luc Godard’s dystopian depiction of a state run by computers and the real-life efforts by the French Préfecture de Police to UH�WRRO�WKHLU�OHJHQGDU\�́ ÀFKLHUVµ�ZLWK�,%0�FRPSXWHUV�LQ�RUGHU�WR�LGHQWLI\�and track Algerian terrorists.5 All of these efforts elaborated upon a well-established French technocracy, but the new technologies—particularly those associated with the computer and cybernetics—reinvigorated the IDQWDV\�RI�D�VWDWH�UXQ�ZLWK�PDFKLQLF�HIÀFLHQF\�DQG�SUHFLVLRQ��

Within the French university system the impact of new sciences and technologies was even more pronounced. The postwar transmission of wartime research across the Atlantic, the return of exile intellectuals from (QJODQG�DQG�WKH�8QLWHG�6WDWHV��DQG�KLJK�SURÀOH�LQWHUYHQWLRQV�E\�WKH�5RFN-efeller Foundation and other American groups in the French universities transformed French higher education.6 Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, HPERGLHG�HDFK�RI�WKHVH�LQÁXHQFHV��,Q�DGGLWLRQ�WR�DFWLQJ�DV�FXOWXUDO�DQG�VFLHQWLÀF�UHSUHVHQWDWLYH�IRU�WKH�)UHQFK�VWDWH�DQG�81(6&2�IURP�WKH�ODWH�1940s through the early 1950s, he also worked with the Rockefeller Foun-dation and other organizations to promote cybernetics and information WKHRU\�LQ�)UDQFH�DIWHU�WKH�ZDU��7KH�IRXQGHU�RI�F\EHUQHWLFV�KLPVHOI��1RUEHUW�Wiener, singled out France as a special site for developing his research. His celebrated book Cybernetics was published simultaneously in the United States and France, and he lectured at the Collège de France and on Radio France in the late 1940s and early 1950s.7 Well into the early 1970s, philosophy and the human sciences in France would continue to grapple with conceptual themes introduced during this period.

With the possible exception of Raymond Ruyer,8 Gilbert Simondon was the only French philosopher to have earnestly attempted a fullscale re-evaluation of philosophy and of cybernetics in light of one another. &DQJXLOKHP��KLV�GRFWRUDO�VXSHUYLVRU��PD\�KDYH�EHHQ�LQÁXHQWLDO�LQ�WKLV�regard. Canguilhem wrote a number of historical and philosophical texts aimed at historicizing aspects of the cybernetic problematic (feedback, UHÁH[�� LQIRUPDWLRQ��WKH�WKLQNLQJ�PDFKLQH��9 Simondon was also critical of cybernetics and information theory, expressing strong objections to cyberneticians’ tendency to erase the distinction between living and tech-QLFDO�V\VWHPV��DQG�H[SUHVVLQJ�VNHSWLFLVP�RYHU�1RUEHUW�:HLQHU·V�URPDQ-tic—Platonic, some would say—political program.10 But at the heart of 6LPRQGRQ·V�SURMHFW�LV�DQ�DWWHPSW�WR�UH�GHSOR\�WKH�ÀQGLQJV�RI�F\EHUQHWLFV�in a form adequate to the demands of philosophy, and also an attempt to recast philosophy in alignment with the suggestions of cybernetics. He de-scribed Wiener’s Cybernetics as a “work of enormous ambition” that was, ´PRUH�D�GLVFRXUVH�RQ�PHWKRG�WKDQ�D�GHÀQLWLYH�ZRUN��DQG�ZKLFK�UHPLQGV�RQH�RI�'HVFDUWHV��,W�LV�D�SKLORVRSKLFDO�ZRUN�WKDW�LV�RQO\�VHFRQGDULO\�WHFK-nological and mathematical” (Communication, 195-96, note 6). Simondon



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advocated the reconceptualization of processes of individuation not only in terms of stability, but also metastability, concepts that resounded with the cyberneticians’ preoccupation with life and society as homeostatic or self-regulating mechanisms. He transposed the concept of “transduc-tion”—an informational practice of converting energy or transmissions from one form into another—into the heart of his philosophical analysis. 0RVW�LPSRUWDQWO\��KH�LGHQWLÀHG�ELRORJ\��WHFKQLTXH��VRFLDO�LQWHUDFWLRQ��DQG�ontology itself with information processes of communication, connect-ing his work with cybernetics even if he refused to restrict himself to the GLVFRXUVH�DQG�ÀQGLQJV�RI�F\EHUQHWLFLDQV�11

2. Beyond CyberneticsCybernetics and postwar science marked the occasion and, to some

extent, the stakes of his invention. Yet, the motivation for the appropria-tion of cybernetic and informatic concepts was not simply a question of historical circumstance. The integration of cybernetics and information WKHRU\�LQWR�WKH�SUREOHPDWLFV�RI�SKLORVRSKLFDO�UHÁHFWLRQ�HQDEOHG�6LPRQGRQ�to re-frame philosophical accounts of human being.12 Adapting cybernet-ics’ emphasis on communication, he supplemented it with concepts from psychology, the physical sciences, and biology. This furnished Simondon with operational concepts that could be adapted across the wide range of domains his philosophy addressed.

)RU�6LPRQGRQ��DV�IRU�F\EHUQHWLFLDQV�VXFK�DV�1RUEHUW�:LHQHU�DQG�Gregory Bateson, “information” emerged as the common currency of WKLV�JUDQG�VFLHQWLÀF�V\QWKHVLV�13 However, moving beyond the cyberneti-FLDQV��6LPRQGRQ�GHÀQHG�LQIRUPDWLRQ�DV�WKH�EDVLV�IRU�D�JHQHUDWLYH�DQG�process-oriented ontology. Rather than the content shared between a “sender” and “receiver” as described in Claude Shannon’s celebrated theory of information, 14 Simondon suggested that his approach involved D�WXUQ�DZD\�IURP�WKH�TXDQWLÀFDWLRQ�RI�LQIRUPDWLRQ�LQ�RUGHU�WR�VSHDN�RI�“the quality of information or informatic tension (tension d’information)” (L’individuation��'LVWLQJXLVKLQJ�KLV�RZQ�LQWHUSUHWDWLRQ�RI�WKH�FRQFHSW�of information from more widely circulated interpretations, he develops an understanding of the term that transforms communication and interac-tion into processes through which individuals are constituted. Simondon elaborates the ontological transposition of information in his explanation of the term given early on in L’individuation a la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. He writes:

Information never relates to a single and homogenous reality, but to two orders in a state of disparation… it is the tension between two GLVSDUDWH�IDFWV��LW�LV�WKH�VLJQLÀFDWLRQ�WKDW�DULVHV�ZKHQ�DQ�RSHUDWLRQ�RI�individuation discovers the dimension according to which these two disparate facts might become a system.. (ibid., 31, our translation)



By linking information to a “state of disparation,” Simondon is adapting a term borrowed from optics to describe the way in which stereoscopic vision integrates two images into a single perception, to explain the gen-esis of beings.15��0DNLQJ�WKLV�´VWDWHµ�RI�GLVSDULW\�FHQWUDO�WR�KLV�GHÀQLWLRQ�of information goes well beyond the transmission of data between two pre-established entities. Rather, “information” designates the fundamental process through which being itself is articulated or generated via dynamic interactions with other beings and the environment.

The conception of information as both interactive and ontologically constitutive found in his major thesis illuminates the peculiar title of his ÀUVW�WKHVLV��On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Why this emphasis on a “mode of existence,” rather simply on the “technical objects” them-selves? Precisely because this focus on differential genesis and emergence prohibits speaking of “technical objects” in isolation or as a “being” unto themselves. Much as Simondon rejects an account of the human that ex-cludes technical objects, so too an account of technical objects themselves would be necessarily partial and incomplete. However the turn toward “modes of existence” underscores the differential and informational gen-esis of technical objects in relation to other and complementary modes of existence—for example, organic beings. Again, thematics from cybernetics resound throughout this account. But whereas the founder of cybernetics 1RUEHUW�:LHQHU�XOWLPDWHO\�UHFRLOHG�DW�F\EHUQHWLFV·�SURPLVH�WR�XSVHW�KX-man being—suggesting that the technical was in some sense a modern and contingent disruption in a previously holistic culture—Simondon seized upon the technical disruptions of modernity as an occasion to rethink human “modes of existence” as having an essential relation to technical beings.16

+RZHYHU��KLV�VLJQLÀFDQFH�DV�D�SKLORVRSKHU�GHSHQGV�RQ�WKH�IDFW�WKDW�he framed his writings as interventions that extend well beyond the es-tablished frameworks of cybernetics. In his minor dissertation17 entitled On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon takes great pains to frame the question of technology as a part of an account of co-constitutive and holistic relations among organic and non-organic beings. He begins the book by noting that the opposition between culture and technics, man and machine, is based upon an antiquated and ill-conceived prejudice. He declares his intent to begin overcoming this prejudice. He goes on to explain that, “what philosophy has to achieve in this respect is analogous WR�ZKDW�WKH�DEROLWLRQ�RI�VODYHU\�DFKLHYHG�LQ�DIÀUPLQJ�WKH�ZRUWK�RI�WKH�individual human being” (De la Mode, 9). Cybernetics’ rejection of absolute distinctions among humans, animals, and machines enabled an initial step toward this analysis, but Simondon’s philosophy provides the rigor and UHÁHFWLRQ�IRU�PRYLQJ�EH\RQG�WKH�WHFKQR�K\SH�DQG�IDGGLVK�UDWLRQDOLVP�RI�cyberneticians’ often confused comments upon human being.



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It is along similar lines that we might better understand his project of re-formulating the human sciences, which stands behind his work in L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. In travers-LQJ�ÀQGLQJV�DQG�ÀJXUHV�IURP�FODVVLFDO�DQG�PHGLHYDO�SKLORVRSK\��PRGHUQ�chemistry, mathematics, communication engineering, foundries, and factories, Simondon elaborates a vision of ontology and knowledge as FRQVWLWXWLYHO\�KHWHURJHQHRXV�\HW� LQGLVVRFLDEO\� OLQNHG�ÀHOGV��&\EHUQHW-ics and information theory provide a philosophical method that allows KLP�WR�GHYHORS�D�XQLÀHG�VFKHPD�IRU�SKLORVRSKLFDO��VRFLDO�DQG�VFLHQWLÀF�ÀHOGV³ZKDW�6LPRQGRQ�WHUPV�D[LRPDWL]DWLRQ��/·LQGLYLGXDWLRQ��As both Xavier Guchet and Jean-Hugues Barthélémy note in their contri-butions to this volume, the axiomatization of the human sciences was not secondary to his critique of the concept of the individual. Both are directly related to his critique of the distinction between form and matter—what KH�FDOOV�K\ORPRUSKLVP³DV�GHÀQLQJ�WKH�ZD\�LQ�ZKLFK�LQGLYLGXDWHG�EH-ings had previously been understood in philosophy.18 Claiming that this foundational distinction is erroneous both empirically and analytically, Simondon describes how individuation as an onto-informational genesis can make sense of how knowledge and being intersect. As Adrian Mack-enzie explains, “Since living entities individuate continuously, rather than being formed once, they are information. They are continuous, variable processes of matter-taking-form” (50). The turn to information as an ontological concept is the foundation of Simondon’s elaboration of indi-viduation as a process that could bring together the different regimes of being (physical, biological, psycho-social) and knowledge about beings in their plurality and difference.

In both these texts, Simondon’s heterodox appropriation of cyber-netic concepts opens the path to a philosophical method that challenges traditional philosophical analysis through a new analysis of technology and of being. Methodologically, by resisting the historicism or ideological critiques of some of his contemporaries, Simondon takes up cybernetics in order to stage an experimental confrontation and analysis of ontology, society and technique. Conceptually, this opens up a way of engaging with the philosophical tradition and the contemporary world that does not fall back into distinctions among philosophy, science and the social. For Simondon, there can be no Cartesian retreat into the chambers of the mind. The philosopher and the epistemologist, as well as the engineer and the sociologist, must descend into the streets, factories, and theaters where being is articulated, confronting its multiple and varied embodi-ments.19 From this perspective, philosophy itself must not only confront, but also submit to the multiplicity of an historical, lived, heterogeneous, and ultimately material world.



3. Simondon and Stiegler,W�LV�GLIÀFXOW�WR�GLVFXVV�6LPRQGRQ·V�WKRXJKW�ZLWKRXW�DOVR�QRWLQJ�WKH�

complicated paths along which his work has been circulated. As already noted, Simondon is best known for the publication of his major and minor WKHVHV��7KH�SHFXOLDU�KLVWRU\�RI�WKHVH�WH[WV·�SXEOLFDWLRQ�LQ�VRPH�ZD\�UHÁHFWV�and traces the sporadic and inconsistent reception of Simondon’s work more generally. Although De la mode d’existence des objets techniques was published in 1958 and by all accounts given a positive reception among French philosophers and engineers, it quickly went out of print. In a coun-try where academics pride themselves on their private libraries, it was hard to come by copies of the text. The fate of his major thesis proved more FRPSOLFDWHG�DQG�XQIRUWXQDWH��7KH�ÀUVW�SDUW��RQ�SK\VLFDO�DQG�ELRORJLFDO�individuation, was published in 1960. The second part, on psycho-social individuation, was not published until 1989. It was only in 2005 that the work was published in its entirety in a single volume.

'XH�WR�WKH�IUDJPHQWHG�SXEOLFDWLRQ�RI�KLV�ZRUN��UHDGHUV�KDYH�RIWHQ�encountered Simondon’s thought in second-hand fashion, with his key insights re-framed. For this reason, it is not surprising that in the essays that follow, it is the work of Bernard Stiegler that often stands as the pri-mary interlocutor for discussions of Simondon’s philosophy. Taking up Simondon’s interest in the role of technology in ontogenesis, it is Stiegler who has gone furthest in developing a philosophy of technics that elabo-rates issues close to those raised by Simondon’s discussion of cybernetics DQG�LQIRUPDWLRQ�WKHRU\��6WLHJOHU�LV�DQ�H[WUHPHO\�SUROLÀF�ZULWHU��LW�LV�QRW�possible to trace the entire arc of his engagement with Simondon within WKH�FRQÀQHV�RI� WKLV� LQWURGXFWLRQ��+RZHYHU��JLYHQ�KLV�UHOHYDQFH� WR� WKLV�collection as well as the extent to which his writings have shaped current perceptions of Simondon in the Anglophone world, it is necessary to draw attention to the complexity of the relationship between the two thinkers.

%HJLQQLQJ�ZLWK�WKH�ÀUVW�YROXPH�RI�KLV Technics and Time series (1994), Stiegler develops his view that the individual subject, as well as collectivi-ties, organize themselves by means of the exteriorization of faculties—a claim he elaborates into his thesis of epiphylogenesis (the thesis that life develops by means of something other than life.) It is Simondon’s elabo-ration of the technical object as the externalization and concretization of knowledge that is one of Stiegler’s key inspirations for this fundamental claim of his philosophy (along with the writing of Leroi-Gourham, whose work was also of tremendous importance for Simondon.) 20

$V�ERWK�0DUN�%��1��+DQVHQ�DQG�-HDQ�+XJXHV�%DUWKpOpP\�SRLQW�RXW�in their contributions to this volume, the particular reading that Stiegler offers of this process is, in effect, a generalization of what is only one par-ticular mode of the genesis of the individual and the forms of collectivity



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in Simondon’s work. However, this is a position that Stiegler has made more absolute and fundamental to his philosophy as it has developed. In 6LPRQGRQ·V�ZULWLQJV��WKH�SUH�LQGLYLGXDO�LV�GHÀQHG�DV�WKDW�DVSHFW�RI�EHLQJ�which is ontologically prior to any form of individuation whatsoever, yet which remains the source for any future individuation that has, is or could take place (L’Individuation, 304-306). Psychosocial individuals and collectivities emerge by means of a process of radical transformation, RU�WUDQVGXFWLRQ��ZKLFK�UH�FRQÀJXUHV�WKH�PDWHULDO�DQG�LPPDWHULDO�DW�WKH�level of what Simondon calls the “transindividual.” Such transformations occur, for Simondon and Stiegler alike, by means of technical objects, ZKLFK�6LPRQGRQ�GHÀQHV�DV�´WKH�VXSSRUW�DQG�WKH�V\PERO�RI�WKDW�UHODWLRQ�that we would like to call ‘transindividual’” (Du Mode, 247). Thus, the transindividual draws upon the pre-individual as a source of potential, innovation and change by means of the technical object (or what Stiegler will also call prostheses), yet the pre-individual and transindividual re-main distinct in Simondon.

As Barthélémy convincingly argues here, echoed by Hansen, Stiegler KDV�DIÀUPHG�ZLWK�LQFUHDVLQJ�IRUFH��SDUWLFXODUO\�LQ�WKH�WKLUG�YROXPH�RI�Technics and Time) that the pre-individual is itself technically-constituted, as a site of “tertiary retention” made up of technically inscribed forms of cultural and social memory.21 By arguing this position, Stiegler is effec-tively departing from Simondon’s understanding of the relation between the technical and the social; he is replacing Simondon’s understanding of the ongoing relationship between the pre-individual and forms of in-dividuation with one where technique understood as the inscription of experience is ubiquitous (volume three of Technics and Time is occupied with cinematic time, with antecedents going back to Kant and beyond.) In this way, we might read Stiegler’s development of Simondon’s thought as one that privileges the latter’s insight into the place of technique within Simondon’s attempt to understand the relationship between being and technology.

The path taken by Stiegler runs the risk of reducing the complexity of relations between technology and being, a reduction that Simondon is careful to avoid. As Hansen writes elsewhere, “What Simondon depicts then is a co-evolution between two independently-evolving domains, the technical and the human.”22 Stiegler’s radicalization of the thesis of epiphylogenesis transforms the relational conception of the technical object elaborated by Simondon into the universal concept of technics. This reduces Simondon’s ontology to a subset of his conception of the technique. In this introduction and the essays that follow, we have sought to elaborate a different relationship between these two problematics. Even at the risk of rendering the relationship between the two major problemat-ics in Simondon’s thought ambiguous, it is an approach that attempts



to recognize and better understand their mutual interdependence. For this reason, we have focused on the relationality and transformativity of Simondon’s conception of information rather than the notion of technics he develops. We believe that such an approach lays the groundwork for ways of understanding how technical objects might be embedded in a more general ontology and epistemology of individuation.

��5H�FRQÀJXULQJ�7HFKQLTXH�,Q�WKH�ÀUVW�HVVD\�LQ�WKLV�YROXPH��+HQQLQJ�6FKPLGJHQ�VLWXDWHV�6L-

mondon’s writing on technology in the context of the social and cultural changes taking place in France after the Second World War. It allows the reader unfamiliar with Simondon’s work to better understand what UHPDLQV�GLIÀFXOW�LQ�KLV�GLVFXVVLRQ�RI�WKH�WHFKQLFDO�REMHFW�ZLWK�UHJDUG�WR�received understandings of technology and the politics of living with ma-FKLQHV��1HDU�WKH�HQG�RI�WKH�HVVD\��6FKPLGJHQ�UHPLQGV�XV�WKDW�DQ�LPSRUWDQW�aspect of Simondon’s philosophy was the development of a normative ethics. Although he does not engage with this ethics as it was developed in Simondon’s writing on individuation, he does point us toward the ways in which Simondon saw the ethics of the evolution of technology taking shape with regard to the structure of technical objects as well as the forms of interaction they solicited from humans. This is a theme that would occupy Simondon throughout his career, even constituting the VXEMHFW�RI�RQH�RI�KLV�ÀQDO�SXEOLFDWLRQV�

Although conceived and developed independently, the essays by 0DUN�%��1��+DQVHQ�DQG�%DUWKpOpP\�FDQ�EH�UHDG�DV�DWWHPSWV�WR�GHYHORS�the problematic that organizes this special issue: namely to understand the structure that being takes on when it emerges on the grounds of modern technology. Engaging with the full breadth of Simondon’s work, both essays involve extended engagements with Simondon’s understanding of individuation, the relationship between individuation and invention, and the role that technique places in the process of individuation. Both authors are interested in how Simondon develops the concept of the pre-LQGLYLGXDO��'HÀQHG�LQ�D�YDULHW\�RI�ZD\V��WKH�SUH�LQGLYLGXDO�LV�WKH�VRXUFH�of individuation, being the site of all potential modes of existence. As becomes clear, however, the pre-individual should not be taken as suggest-LQJ�WKDW�WKLV�ÀHOG�RI�SRWHQWLDO�RQO\�SUHFHGHV�WKH�HPHUJHQFH�RI�DQ\�IRUP�RI�individuation whatsoever. Rather, the pre-individual, as potential, contin-ues to drive ongoing processes of individuation, becoming manifest and present at all levels of individuation. This includes processes of psycho-social individuation, which Simondon also calls the transindividual. The relationship between potential understood as the pre-individual and the transindividual is perhaps the most elusive aspect of Simondon’s work, DQG�ERWK�DXWKRUV�HODERUDWH�VRPH�RI�WKH�UHDVRQV�IRU�WKLV�GLIÀFXOW\�



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In Barthélémy, we see how the continual relation between the pre-individual and the transindividual comes to impact the status of knowl-edge understood as a particular form of individuation. Barthélémy frames his elaboration of the identity between knowledge and individuation that is posited in Simondon (his claim that “knowledge of individuation is the individuation of knowledge) as part of a debate with the work of Stiegler. He argues that Stiegler’s focus on the prosthetic genesis of being leads him to ignore Simondon’s claim that it is the pre-individual and not the transindividual (which is to say the psycho-social) that is the sort of innovation and genesis. For Barthélémy, the approach offered by Stiegler is one that forecloses the radically inventive nature of individuation put forward by Simondon by framing it exclusively within the realm of tech-nique. By offering a different reading of Simondon’s original claim, this essay lays out the foundation for a more radical rethinking of the nature of human individuation.

Similarly concerned with the relationship between the pre-individual and technique, Hansen develops the generative and emergent relationship between the pre-individual (as source of individuation) and technique (as site of transindividuation) as a way of thinking about the manifold relationships between individuals and immersive, distributed media HQYLURQPHQWV��0RUH�VSHFLÀFDOO\��+DQVHQ�XVHV�6LPRQGRQ·V�WKLQNLQJ�RI�WKH�relationship between individuation and the preindvidual to make sense of the inability to perceive the nature of the manifold relations with tech-nology we enter into when we interact with such environments. He does so by developing what he calls the “operational blindness” of perception in media environments. By operational blindness, Hansen is describing the fact that “human consciousness does not and cannot experience the functioning of the technically-distributed system to which it belongs as a direct perception, which is to say, at the time that it is occurring.” Unlike Stiegler, who transposes technique into the root of all forms of individu-ation, Hansen’s essay focuses on the ways in which particular media technologies “engineer” our relation to the pre-individual. In challenging Stiegler’s characterization of the pre-individual as the repository of tertiary memories, Hansen uses Simondon’s theorization of individuation to offer a more complex understanding of the relationships among technique, cul-ture and experience than has been found in Stiegler’s recent work (where the media industries are increasingly characterized along lines borrowed from Adorno and Horkheimer’s “culture industry.”)

Finally, the essay by Xavier Guchet draws our attention to the ways in which Simondon himself sought to contextualize his thought in the concept of cultural and technical knowledge. Returning to the problematic opened up by Barthélémy, Guchet elaborates how Simondon’s epistemol-



ogy did not stop at the individual, but was also engaged in re-thinking the structures according to which knowledge is organized socially. Guchet traces how Simondon’s project of “axiomatising” the human sciences on grounds adequate to the contemporary moment develops in his thought via a carefully balanced re-thinking of the nature of the human subject, in line with knowledge about humans. For Simondon, this was part of his larger project of re-founding humanism for the modern age. In his essay, Guchet explains that it is Simondon’s engagement with technology that comes to stand as the core of his project to bring together the re-formulated KXPDQ�VFLHQFHV�DURXQG�D�UDGLFDOO\� UHFRQÀJXUHG�XQGHUVWDQGLQJ�RI� WKH�human.

��7RZDUG�DQ�([SDQGHG�,QKHULWDQFHIn a late essay on the relationship between technics and ethics, Si-

mondon concludes his discussion of the ethical dangers and possibilities of technologies by considering recycling and recuperation, by which he means the use of the old in new contexts, as a possible model for an ethi-cal practice (“Trois Perspectives,” 107-118). He links this ethical practice to what he call technologie approfondie, which might be translated as “in-depth technology,” explaining that, “in-depth technology must not only learn to invent the new, but to reinsert and reactualize the old in order to build a present in the service of the future” (ibid., 118). The core of the ethics of technology that Simondon elaborates is the desire to “bring life and functionality back to old conceptions that are recuperated within a contemporary habitat”” (ibid., 115). Simondon concludes that technique on LWV�RZQ�LV�LQVXIÀFLHQW�IRU�WKH�GHYHORSPHQW�RI�VXFK�D�SUDFWLFH�DQG�UHTXLUHV�D�UHÁH[LYH�VXEMHFW�IRU�WKLV�WR�RFFXU��7ZHQW\�ÀYH�\HDUV�DIWHU�WKH�SXEOLFDWLRQ�of his book on technical objects, we can see that Simondon continued to situate technique and technology within a broader philosophical project of rethinking social and epistemological norms, even though the markers of cybernetic discourse have long since disappeared.

By way of conclusion, we would like to take the ethics he elabo-rates as a guide for how to read Simondon today. In a 2002 essay Isabelle Stengers raised the question of how to “inherit” Simondon.23 Though often critical of Simondon’s concepts and understanding of technics, she approaches this question as part of an effort to think about what “tools’” Si-mondon’s thought gives us, and how we might most effectively use them. (302). While the essays gathered here are considerably more favorable toward the contributions Simondon’s thought can make to contemporary debates in philosophy and critical theory, we might take from Stengers’s essay a way of reading Simondon that follows the spirit of his ethics. This would be an approach that does not simply seek to situate his work in the



14


SDQWKHRQ�RI�JUHDW�)UHQFK�WKLQNHUV��EXW�WR�UHWXUQ�LW�WR�XVH��DQG�ÀQG�QHZ�“functions” for his concepts. As English translations of Simondon’s texts become more readily available, we hope that this collection will stand not so much as an “introduction” to Simondon (the question of what is fundamental or essential to him remains unsettled) but as an occasion for expanding the possibility of his inheritance. It is our hope that this will enable the debates over Simondon to expand, and enable his work to be taken up in contemporary Anglophone discussions, ranging from the philosophy of technology to debates about the relationships among ontology, politics and ethics.

1RWHVThe editors would like to thank Rob Mitchell and Rebecca Evans for their help and advice in putting

together this special issue. 1. For a selection of this work, Jacques Roux (ed.), Gilbert Simondon: Une pensée operative

(Saint Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne 2002). A further indication of interest in Simondon is evidenced by the creation of the journal Cahiers Simondon, edited by Jean-Hugues Barthélémy and published by Harmattan since 2009. Also, since 2007, his course notes have be published, including: Cours sur la perception (Chatou: Editions La transparence, 2007), Imagination et invention (Chatou: Editions La transparence, 2008) and Communication et information (Chatou: Editions La transparence, 2010).��:LWK�UHJDUG�WR�6LPRQGRQ·V�UHODWLRQVKLS�WR�'HOHX]H�VHH�$QQH�6DXYDJQDUJXHV��Deleuze:

L’empirisme transcendental (Paris: PUF, 2010) and Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan ��,Q�WHUPV�RI�WKH�UHODWLRQVKLS�EHWZHHQ�6LPRQGRQ�DQG�$FWRU�1HWZRUN�7KHRU\��VHH�Bruno Latour, “Prendre le pli des technique,” Réseaux (Issy-les-Moulineaux 2010) 13-31.

3. See for example The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993); and Responses: On Paul De Man’s Wartime Journalism��HG��:HUQHU�+DPDFKHU��1HLO�+HUW]��DQG�7KRPDV�.HHQDQ��/LQFROQ��8QLYHUVLW\�RI�1HEUDVND�3UHVV��

4. See also Ross, 75.��6HH�1HLO�0DF0DVWHU��́ ,GHQWLI\LQJ�¶7HUURULVWV·�LQ�3DULV��$�3ROLFH�([SHULPHQW�ZLWK�,%0�0D-

chines during the Algerian War,” French Politics, Culture & Society 28, no. 3 (2010): 23-45.6. See Brigitte Mazon, Aux origines de L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales: le rôle du

mécénat américain (1920-1960) (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1988).��6HH�'DYLG�0LQGHOO��6ODYD�*HURYLWFK��DQG�-pU{PH�6HJDO��́ )URP�&RPPXQLFDWLRQV�(QJLQHHU-

ing to Communications Science,” in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History, ed. Mark :DONHU��1HZ�<RUN��5RXWOHGJH��²��

8. See Raymond Ruyer, La Cybernetique et l’origine de l’information (Paris: Flammarion, 1954).9. See Georges Canguilhem, /D�)RUPDWLRQ�'X�&RQFHSW�'H�5pÁH[H�$X[�;9,,H�(W�;9,,,H�6LqFOHV�

(Paris: J. Vrin, 1977); Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Incorporations, ed. Sanford Kwinter and Jonathan Crary, trans. Mark Cohen and Randall Cherry, vol. 6 �1HZ�<RUN��1<��=RQH��0,7�3UHVV��*HRUJHV�&DQJXLOKHP��´/H�FRQFHSW�HW�OD�vie,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain��QR��²��

10. See Simondon, Du Mode d’Existence Des Objets Techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 44, 49, ��²��

11. On the relationship between cybernetics and biology in Simondon, see Henning Schmid-gen, “Thinking Technological and Biological Beings: Gilbert Simondon’s Philosophy of Machines,” Revista do Departamento de Psicologia, UFF (2005). Available from: http://



www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-80232005000200002&lng=en&nrm=iso

��2Q�6LPRQGRQ�DQG�%HLQJ��VHH�(ULFK�+|UO��́ 'LH�RIIHQH�0DVFKLQH��+HLGHJJHU��*�QWKHU�XQG�6LPRQGRQ��EHU�GLH�WHFKQRORJLVFKH�%HGLQJXQJ�µ�MLN, no. 123 (2008): 632-655.

��6HH�1RUEHUW�:HLQHU��Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and in the Machine� �1HZ�<RUN��:LOH\��*UHJRU\�%DWHVRQ��Steps to an Ecology of Mind� �1HZ�York: Ballantine Books 1972).

14. See Claude E. Shannon, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 29-125.

15. For further discussion of the importance and meaning of disparation in Simondon, see $OEHUWR�7RVFDQR��´7KH�'LVSDUDWH��2QWRORJ\�DQG�3ROLWLFV�LQ�6LPRQGRQ�µSDSHU�GHOLYHUHG�at the Society for European Philosophy/Forum for European Philosophy annual confer-ence, University of Sussex, 9 September 2007. Available from: http://www.after1968.org/app/webroot/uploads/Toscano_Ontology_Politics_Simondon.pdf.

��2Q�1RUEHUW�:LHQHU·V�DQ[LHWLHV�WKDW�F\EHUQHWLFV�WKUHDWHQHG�OLEHUDO�VXEMHFWLYLW\�VHH�1��Katherine Hayles, +RZ�:H�%HFDPH�3RVWKXPDQ��9LUWXDO�%RGLHV�LQ�&\EHUQHWLFV��/LWHUDWXUH��DQG�Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

17. In France scholars write two dissertations, one “major” and one “minor.”18. The critique of hylomorphism and the development of the concept of individuation

LV� WKH� VXEMHFW� RI� WKH�ÀUVW� FKDSWHU�RI� 6LPRQGRQ·V�ERRN�RQ� LQGLYLGXDWLRQ� �6LPRQGRQ��L’individuation, 39-66.)

19. For a philosophical and Heideggerian interpretation along these lines, see Bernard Stiegler, “The Theater of Individuation: Phase-Shift and Resolution in Simondon and Heidegger,” trans. Kristina Lebedeva, Parrhesia, no. 7 (2009): 46-57.

��%RWK�RI�WKHVH�FRUH�DUJXPHQWV�IRU�6WLHJOHU·V�WKRXJKW�DUH�ÀUVW�ODLG�RXW�LQ�%HUQDUG�6WLHJOHU��Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. George Collins and Richard Beard-sworth. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1998). They are further developed in the later volumes of the series.

��$OWKRXJK�ÀUVW�LQWURGXFHG�LQ�Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, this argument recurs in most of Stiegler’s texts since.

��0DUN�+DQVHQ��´¶5HDOWLPH�6\QWKHVLV·�DQG� WKH�'LIIpUDQFH�RI� WKH�%RG\��7HFKQRFXOWXUDO�6WXGLHV�LQ�WKH�:DNH�RI�'HFRQVWUXFWLRQ�µ�Culture Machine, Vol. 6 (2004), URL: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/9/8 (last accessed Oc-tober 24, 2011).

23. See Isabelle Stengers, “How should we inherit Simondon?” In Gilbert Simondon: Une pensée operative, 299-315.

Works CitedMackenzie, Adrian. Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed. London: Continuum, 2006).Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture.

Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995.Simondon, Gilbert. Communication et Information: Cours et Conférences��HG��1DWKDOLH�6LPRQGRQ��

Chatou: Editions de la Transparence, 2010.——. Du Mode d’Existence Des Objets Techniques��3DULV��$XELHU��7UDQV��E\�1LQLDQ�0HO-

lamphy as On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. London, Ontario: University of Western Ontario, 1980.

——. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Jerome Mil-lon, 2006.

³³��́ 7URLV�3HUVSHFWLYHV�SRXU�XQH�UpÁH[LRQ�VXU�O·pWKLTXH�HW�OD�WHFKQLTXH�µ�Annales de l’institut de philosophie et de sciences morales. Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1983.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Trans. Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010.


© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2012

16

Inside the Black Box:Simondon’s Politics of TechnologyHenning Schmidgen

In 1923, Paul Valéry created an artificial world of antiquity. In it the sea could wash up things which, because of their brilliance, hardness, and unfamiliar form, interrupted and irritated well-established habits of thought. Nature or art? Given or created? Earthly or heavenly? Eupalinos, the architect, does not find himself in the position to decide. He throws back into the sea the shiny, ball-like thing he had picked up from the shore only seconds before.1

In the 1950s, the situation has changed markedly. Parisian consumer society uses the polished floors of exhibition halls and salesrooms to create encounters with similarly enigmatic and wonderful objects. However, one can no longer take these objects into one’s hand, nor throw them away. Things insist, as do the questions, for both department store and com-mercial fair visitors, as well as for those attending the machine show that accompanied the Paris Cybernetics Congress in 1951.2

Roland Barthes has brilliantly characterized the features of this thing-experience. In October 1955, the Citroën D.S. 19 was presented at the Parisian car show “Salon de l’Automobile.” At the end of the first day, Citroën’s sales managers counted a sensational 12,000 orders for the car. Two years later, in Mythologies, Barthes published his compelling analysis of “The New Citroën.” In it he summarizes the process from the initial presentation of the futuristic vehicle to its massive distribution. Boiled down to a formula, Barthes’s conclusion is the following: first it’s an awe-inspiring gothic cathedral, then a utilitarian kitchen (88-90).

According to Barthes, the cultural appropriation of the D.S. (a pun on “déesse,” i.e. “Goddess”) goes from admiring a magical thing to using a mere apparatus; from seeing something to touching it; and from the outer skin to the interior of the technical object. As a result, a somewhat uncanny “alchemy of speed” is brought down to the familiar principle of gourmandise, “a relish in driving.” What at first sight seemed a quasi-sacred object—a thing “descended from another universe”—transforms itself, at the very moment one eventually sits behind the steering wheel, into a cozy object of daily use: “The dashboard looks more like the work-ing surface of a modern kitchen than the control-room of a factory” (89).


17Simondon’s Politics of Technology

In Barthes’ eyes, this is not an arbitrary move. It might only take a quarter of an hour, but the work of mediation, of “exorcism”—with Agamben, we might even say “profanation”3 —that takes place here with respect to a car aims at a long-term goal. With telling ambivalence, Barthes describes this goal as “petit-bourgeois advancement,” la promotion petite-bourgeoise (90).

However, in the case of the car, the appropriating move from out-side to interior does not truly get one closer to the technical object. In fact, its inner side—seats, dashboard, etc.—is only another outside of the same object, a folding of its exterior. Even here the relation to the car is dominated by the “entomological” smoothness of its body, the seamless transitions from metal to glass and vice-versa. Hence the polished per-fection of the dashboard: every gap, fissure, and hole that would remind the user of the “technical and typically human operation of assembling” must be erased (88).

It is this same smoothness and slickness that turns the D.S. into a medium. The new Citroën is not a thing filled with “metaphysical subtle-ties,” but a transmitter of news coming from a region beyond nature. As Barthes explains: “We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transfor-mation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales” (ibid.).

There is a definite leitmotiv in Barthes’ writings; the heavenly mute-ness of certain things fascinated him not only in Mythologies, but also in his discussion of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels (Les gommes) and Georges Bataille’s obscene narrations (L’histoire de l’œil), as well as in his study of Japanese culture.4 However, in 1950s France, Barthes was not the only thinker interested in the mythology of objects, and this collective interest paved the way for an ethnography of the present later developed by Marc Augé, Bruno Latour and others.5

In 1954, art historian Michel Carrouges published his famous inves-tigation of “bachelor machines” in Marcel Duchamp and Franz Kafka, an explicit contribution to the study of the (machine-)mythologies created by modern societies. Two years later, another art historian, Pierre Francastel, completed a study of art and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, largely inspired by Lewis Mumford and Sigfried Giedion, and which began with a chapter on the “myth of mechanization.” As early as 1951, economist Jean Fourastié’s Machinisme et bien-être described the machine age as a realization of the Faust myth, his main topic being the domina-tion and transformation of nature by human technology.6

Henning Schmidgen


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Gilbert Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques also starts with a discussion of machine mythology.7 Based on empirical studies of internal machine structures, Simondon criticizes the contemporary fasci-nation with robots and other “mechanical slaves” as relying on an errone-ous understanding of technological progress. According to Simondon, the decisive criterion for technological perfection is openness and flexibility, rather than automation. The empirical character of this discussion is one of the reasons why, at least in France, Simondon’s book quickly became a “classical reference in the eyes of all of those who are studying our techno-logical modernity.”8 In fact, authors as diverse as Herbert Marcuse, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze have referred to Simondon’s philosophy of technology and its terminological innovations, such as the process of “concretization” (the increase of functional over-determination inside the technical object), the issue of “hypertelia” (overspecialization in techni-cal objects that result in functional disadvantages), and the distinction between “major” and “minor uses” of technical objects (similar to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s later distinction between engineer and bricoleur).9

Focusing on the introduction of Du mode d’existence des objets tech-niques, this essay explores Simondon’s approach to technology by placing his seminal book in the discursive landscape of France in the late 1950s. It shows that Simondon’s approach combines heterogeneous scientific and philosophical discourses on technology and the question of the object in a postwar consumer society—from Pierre-Maxime Schuhl and Georges Canguilhem to Norbert Wiener—to develop a highly original theory of technology and suggests an innovative form of politics aimed at better representing technical objects in contemporary society and culture.

What follows is divided into three sections. The first deals with Simondon’s critique of treatments of the machine as the “slave” of con-temporary society. It shows that Simondon takes up an historical argument initially made by philosopher Pierre-Maxime Schuhl in his Machinisme et philosophie (1938). Reedited in 1947 and reviewed by historian of science Alexandre Koyré, Schuhl’s book highlights the problem of a social block-age of technological progress. Simondon argues that a similar blockage is about to occur in contemporary culture, especially if this culture contin-ues to treat machines conservatively, as potentially threatening carriers of tools. Culture has to take into account the open and flexible nature of modern machines, in particular the computer.

In the second section, the paper discusses Simondon’s interpreta-tion of machines as evolving entities characterized by internal conflicts in their structures and functions. Studying examples such as the combustion engine and the vacuum tube, Simondon literally opens the “black box” of technology, looking closely at the inside of concrete objects that he has



disassembled mechanically and then reassembles by means of serial pho-tographs. Although Simondon stresses the vitality of machines, he does not biologize them. In contrast to Ernst Kapp’s theory of organ projection, for example, Simondon avoids directly referring technical objects to the human body. And while Georges Canguilhem highlights the importance of technique as a biological activity, Simondon sticks with the object as the decisive phenomenon of technology. According to him, technical objects are material entities which, with respect to the relation of human beings to nature, function as crucial mediators (médiateurs).

In the third section, the paper refers Simondon’s views of our tech-nological culture (or anti-culture) to Norbert Wiener’s ideas about mass media and information technology. According to Wiener, information technology is a crucial “homeostatic factor” of all societies. In contrast, Simondon argues in favor of a small-scale approach to the problem of technology, in particular by focusing on human individuals and their local networks. According to Simondon, technical objects that have to be represented in our culture by human individuals increase our technologi-cal knowledge and familiarity with machines.

1. CriticismNot every discourse that concerns the myth of the machine leads

to a discussion of technical objects. However, Simondon begins with this myth, and like Barthes, distinguishes two poles of cultural attitudes and behavior concerning technology. On one side he places helpless ad-miration of technology as a “sacred object;” on the other, non-reflective reduction of technology to everyday instrument. Hence, in the opening pages of his book, Simondon presents the figure of the philosopher as a critic of “myths and stereotypes” (MEOT-E 7). This philosopher’s initial observation is that an imbalance or asymmetry exists in contemporary culture. Despite the fact that today’s society is thoroughly technological, it is characterized by the remarkable fact that it demarcates itself from technology. The common expression of this demarcation is the opposi-tion between man and machine. According to Simondon, this contrast manifests itself in two forms: first, a reduction of machines to the status of simple devices or assemblages of matter that are constantly used but granted neither significance nor sense; second, and as a kind of response to the first attitude, there emerges an almost unlimited admiration for machines. Humans glorify technical objects as perfect automata or ro-bots, and this fascination with their features and performance leads to technology-centered utopias.

This double-sided demarcation between the technical and the hu-man—technology seen as a sphere that is remote from human beings—is

Henning Schmidgen


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in Simondon’s eyes reinforced by the fact that we have limited cultural resources for consciously handling things. Only quite specific kinds of things are appreciated culturally as significant and precious—-esthetic ob-jects (paintings, novels, etc.) or religious objects (insignia, relics, etc.). This poverty of cultural competence with respect to things leads to confusion when we handle technical objects. Instead of recognizing them as technical objects, one either takes them to be designer items, or overestimates their value, seeing them as authentic marvels and sacrosanct achievements.

What is lacking, then, is recognition and valuation of two seem-ingly opposed facts. On the one hand, we should take into account that tools and machines are made, driven and controlled by human beings. As Simondon puts it, the reality of technology is a genuinely human real-ity, full of activity and productiveness (MEOT-E 1). On the other hand, we should be aware of the fact that technical objects have a “life of their own”— a specific mode of existence that can only be explored and defined in more detail if it is compared to the modes of existence of other objects (esthetic, religious, etc.) and other beings (human as well as non-human) (MEOT-E 12). Only by means of this double operation, which takes into account both continuities and discontinuities in the relation between hu-man beings and technical beings, can we contribute to what Simondon sees as a completion and expansion of what is called, in contemporary societies, “culture” and “humanism.”

Now the cultural asymmetry that the philosopher diagnoses at the beginning of his study is also an a-synchronicity (Ungleichzeitigkeit). Both ignoring and admiring technology demonstrates, in Simondon’s view, that in the very heart of modernity an archaic pattern perpetuates itself. According to him, the society of the 20th century continues to comport itself toward technical objects as if it were a society of the 19th century. Its paradigms of thinking and acting remain tied to craft and agriculture, and have never really adapted to cities and industries. Hence a narrow-minded antipathy toward technology exists alongside a futuristic fascination for technology. From the perspective of this antipathy, technical objects manifest themselves as barbarian invaders: “Culture behaves toward the technical object much in the same way as a man caught up in primitive xenophobia behaves toward a stranger” (MEOT-E 1). Machines have the status of foreign workers. We rely on them and their service, we know their names and types, but do not want to learn anything more specific about them. We do not wish to have closer relations to those beings, let alone enter into “dialogues” with them. We’re not sure: is there any com-mon language available for such a dialogue? We feel comfortable stressing the need for closer integration of machines into our human patterns of living. But we have a hard time facilitating such integration in concrete and practical ways.



Simondon goes even further. In the very first paragraph of his study he portrays machines as the slaves of modern society:

The purpose of this study is to attempt to stimulate awareness of the significance [sens] of technical objects. Culture has become a system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics. This is the result of the assumption that technical objects contain no human reality. We should like to show that culture fails to take into account that in techni-cal reality there is a human reality, and that, if it is fully to play its role, culture must come to terms with technical entities [les êtres techniques] as part of its body of knowledge and values. Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects must be the result of philosophic con-sideration; what philosophy has to achieve in this respect is analogous to what the abolition of slavery achieved in affirming the worth of the individual human being. (MEOT-E 1)

The provocative nature of this passage is intentional. As in sci-fi novels, traditional cultural criticism has often described man as “slave to the machine.” Simondon inverts this figure. It is not man who is slave to the machine; rather, technical beings have become subject, as slaves, to human beings.

The comparison of humans and technical beings that is the basis of this argument may seem exaggerated. In place of humanism, Simondon substitutes only an expansion of anthropomorphism. However, he could rely on and refer to contemporary discourses that actually described automata and robots as “mechanical slaves.” According to the cyberneti-cally inspired techno-enthusiast Albert Ducrocq, for example, increasing exploitation of these slaves will contribute to solving, finally, basic human problems such as work, health, security, etc. (Ducrocq, 10).

The parallel that Simondon draws is more convincing, moreover, if we recall that slavery in antiquity went hand-in-hand with the loss of all rights otherwise granted by birth or origin. Precisely because this is also the case for machines, Simondon seeks to reconstruct the emergence and evolution of technical objects. At this point in his text, then, his interest in the emergence and evolution of machines appears as a first step toward integrating technical slaves into our culture.

More concretely, Simondon’s claim that machines are slaves reso-nated with contemporary discussions in French philosophy and the history of science. Since the late 1930s, philosopher Pierre-Maxime Schuhl had argued that slavery in antiquity had been a decisive obstacle to a more focused development and use of technology in that period. In Machinisme et philosophie, slavery functioned as a synonym for a “mental blockage” with respect to technology, an idea that Schuhl reiterated in 1947 in the second edition of his study. He explained there that in classic Greece, “If one did not make recourse to machines on a large scale, it was because there was no need to reduce manual labor, given the fact that one had

Henning Schmidgen


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(inexpensive and numerous) living machines ready at hand who were as distanced from the free man as animals, i.e., slaves” (10).

Shortly afterward, science historian Alexandre Koyré discussed and modified this “socio-psychological argument” and expressed his skepticism of “explaining” historically the specificities of the culture of technology in ancient Greece (336).10 However, in his extended review of Machinisme et philosophie, Koyré reminded his readers of the fact that one of the characteristic features of Aristotle’s philosophy lies in identifying “animate” and “inanimate tools.” A passage in his Politics, for example, can be literally read as cybernetic: “For a helmsman the rudder is a lifeless tool and the look-out man a live tool–-for an assistant in the arts belongs to the class of tools” (Aristotle, 17).

At the beginning of his study, Simondon returns to this relation of replacement between tool and assistant. His discussion does not evoke the question of cybernetics, however. Rather, it addresses the political theme of culturally rehabilitating machines and stimulating awareness of their significance and value. As a result, when Simondon portrays the machines of our times as “slaves,” we can also read this as referring to the danger of technical and social stagnation in the near future—a danger expressed in contemporary societies via cultural blockage toward technology. This blockage is seen in that non-reflective use of technical objects that domi-nates our everyday experience. At the same time, this blockage leads to a misconception of what technical progress means—a misconception that is transmitted by the mythological image of the robot.

According to Simondon, it is precisely not an increasing automa-tion (enslavement) of technical objects that characterizes technological improvement. Rather, we see the highest degree of technicity in the emergence of machines that can be used in multiple ways—machines with “margins of indetermination” that allow for flexible couplings with other machines and humans. As we will see below, this insight into the openness and controllability of technology is the necessary basis for Si-mondon’s project of machine-slave-liberation as a means for integrating technical objects into culture.

2. InterpretationAfter playing the part of the critic, Simondon’s philosopher takes

up a second role. This is the role of interpreter—the analyst of forces and their relations. The “significance” or “sense” (sens) of technology that he seeks to convey is not the “meaning” of a linguistic entity that could be determined via semantics or hermeneutics. Rather, sense is to be under-stood as a dynamic relation between potentials that are literally realized in the technical object and that develop there via inner resonances. Here,



the originality of Simondon’s project becomes especially apparent. The sense of technology is not derived from any kind of exterior reference to it, whether mediated by word, image or hand. Rather, it can be explored and inferred by reconstructing the history of force relations inside the technical object.

For Heidegger, the “thingyness” of things is described in terms of a cavity, an empty space in which heaven and earth, immortals and mortals gather. In cybernetics, the interior of the object appears similarly as dark, as the unobservable content of a black box.11 Simondon, by contrast, as-sumes a kind of transparent fullness. He looks at the potentials and rela-tions condensed in the technical object, which concretize themselves by means of “functional over-determination”—and, by the same token, confer “consistence” on this object so that it can be seen as a specific “mode of existence” (MEOT-E 8). From this perspective, the technical object presents itself as a “theater of a number of relationships of reciprocal causality” (MEOT-E 22). It is a scene of structural and functional conflicts that are solved gradually or suddenly. The overarching goal of the concretization process is a state in which the object is “no longer divided against itself” (MEOT-E 30), or, to be more precise, no longer fights with itself (n’est plus en lutte avec lui-même) (MEOT 34).12

This means, conversely, that “sense” is not to be understood as a simple biological phenomenon that could be deduced from the position of tools and machines in the physiological economy of the human organism. In contrast to Canguilhem, technology for Simondon is not a manifestation of an activity “rooted in the living being’s spontaneous effort to dominate the environment and organize it according to his values as a living being” (Canguilhem, 228-229).13 Simondon more cautiously speaks of technical objects as “mediators” (médiateurs) between nature and humans. As in the case of Barthes, Simondon’s study of the technical object prolongs itself into a discourse on media. However, where Barthes was, in this context, interested in the phenomenon of communication, Simondon orients his media theory of technology towards the problem of labor.

This becomes evident in his discussion of the “hyle-morphic model” of substance—the ancient idea that bodies in the widest sense result from imprinting a form (morphè) to matter (hylé). With respect to those activities that result in the emergence of technical objects, Simondon contests the validity of the hyle-morphic model, arguing that this model itself relies on a technical analogy, namely the fabrication of bricks. He opposes the image of the sculptor who, according to the hyle-morphic model, simply imposes his vision onto the marble block upon which he is working. Im-plicitly, Simondon then argues against the idea of the worker who has his product “in mind” before he produces it in reality and the scientist who

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understands technology as the mere result of applying well-established laws to given problems. Instead, he presents the creator of technical objects as acting in a region beneath morphè and hylé, a region in which forms are materialized and, simultaneously, matter is rendered formable. For this inter-actor, nature is not a homogeneous substance that can be fully controlled by artificial means, but is rather a mixed and multiple materiality, often filled with resistances, that transports a multiplicity of “implicit forms” (Simondon, L’Individuation, 55). The machine-maker has to cooperate with these matter-forms and form-matters if he would like to arrive at a new technical object. He places himself in this pre-figured and pre-fabricated realm, and moves within its tracks so that from them he can create an object.

This conception clearly differs from the theory of organ projection that Ernst Kapp had introduced into the philosophy of technology in the late 19th century. Kapp actually coined the phrase “philosophy of technol-ogy,” and his argument concerning the creation of tools by exteriorizing organic forms—particularly forms derived from the hand—remained highly attractive until at least the 1950s.14 With respect to tools such as the pincer and the hammer, Simondon similarly claims that they “extend as well as amplify and protect” isolated parts of the human organism (L’Individuation, 51). However, his argument is not as causally-oriented as Kapp’s. Rather, Simondon prefers a description of functional connec-tions, and in particular “dynamic schemes” (MEOT-E 7) of gestures. Yet even when he does argues for a slightly more causal connection, his image is different from that of Kapp; for Simondon, “Human reality resides in machines as human actions fixed and crystallized in functioning structures” (MEOT-E 4, my emphasis).

This image of crystallization refers back to Simondon’s important study of the individual and its physical-biological genesis. In that study, Simondon’s principal doctoral thesis, crystallization is the base analogy for the process of individuation of matter. Thus, Simondon’s conception of the emergence of tools refers not to the lived body (as in Kapp), but to mat-ter itself and to its crystallization in human as well as non-human forms.

There is another twist by means of which Simondon distances him-self from a projection theory of technology. With respect to the body-tool relation that he highlights, the effect of prolongation is not one-dimen-sional, and this is true even and especially in tools. As Simondon points out, and in keeping with theme of mediation noted (and quoted) above, the effect of prolongation leads back as well from the tool to the body: “Knowing how to use a tool does not just mean having acquired the neces-sary gestures; it also means that one is able, by means of the signals that come through the tool to the human being, to recognize the implicit form



of matter, exactly at the point where the tool is applied” (ibid., 53). In this sense, a planer, for example, is not simply a device that lifts off a more or less substantial strip of wood. It is, at the same time, a means that makes it possible to sense whether or not the strip can be removed smoothly, without producing slivers, or, if the movement suddenly feels harsh, is a movement in which one no longer is moving along the grain (ibid). To a certain degree, then, what holds true for the creator of technical objects also applies to the user of such objects: The carpenter does not deal with a raw and abstract stuff onto which he can impose his scheme by means of any given organ projection; rather, he is handling a “matter of signs” that he has to follow—not once and for all, but again and again—during the realization of his plan by means of the technical object that he employs.15

3. PoliticsAfter playing the critic and the interpreter, Simondon’s philosopher

again enters the scene, in a third role. One could speak of this role as that of future politician garbed in an ancient robe. Despite his refusal of the hyle-morphic model, Simondon makes clear in his study of technology as a whole that he reconnects his own reflection to an Aristotelian ontology which, at least initially, does not postulate any radical difference between natural and artificial products and/or processes. As we have already seen, this reconnection with Aristotelian thought is one of the preconditions for the comparison that Simondon draws between machine and slave—a comparison that in turn is a striking starting point for elaborating the specific mode of existence of technical objects. At the same time, however, Simondon argues that it is not Aristotelian philosophy that opens up a concrete perspective for extending and completing culture, but rather the latest state of technology. Philosophy is able to criticize myths and stereotypes, and by retracing the internal force relations of technical ob-jects, it can contribute to an understanding of the sense of these mediat-ing objects. However, these tasks are only of value, “both politically and socially” (MEOT-E 7) when philosophy actively enters the transitional zone between culture and technology. It is the notion of regulation that mediates this move.

For Simondon, culture is the “basis of meanings, modes of expres-sion, proofs and forms.” It is a system of “schemes, symbols, qualities, analogies” that has regulatory effects in the broadest sense. Culture emerg-es from the “life of the group” and from there it is transferred to the “ges-tures” of those who carry out group-leading functions, while the group defines the “schemes” of these gestures and attributes “norms” to them (MEOT-E 6-7). On the one hand, culture appears as that which enables

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any governance at all; on the other hand, culture relies on a delegation of this necessary power from those who govern to those who are governed and vice-versa (MEOT 150). As a consequence, the functioning of culture can be described in its basic outline thus: “a culture establishes regula-tory communication among those who share that culture” (MEOT-E 6).

Using the terminology of cybernetics, one might say that culture is a “homeostatic factor” in the life of societies. Insofar as culture is understood as a homeostatic factor, it occupies the precise position that Norbert Wiener assigned to news services and, more generally, all means of communica-tion. However, Wiener was skeptical as to whether communication means, even when taking place with “intelligence, skill, and honesty of purpose,” could oppose the forces of “buying and selling” which, according to him, were basically “anti-homeostatic” and dominated modern societies (190, 188). Moreover, Wiener was pessimistic that individuals or small groups would be able to enhance the homeostatic functions of modern societies. According to him, this was a reasoning relying on “the mode of thought of the mice when faced with the problem of belling the cat. Undoubtedly it would be very pleasant for us mice if the predatory cats of this world were to be belled, but – who is going to do it? (ibid, 189). Simondon thinks differently, and refers to the “bitterness” of Wiener’s view (MEOT 150). Unlike the author of Cybernetics, the French philosopher puts trust in the balancing powers of the community—i.e. culture in the sense of regulative connections (Bindung) and knowledge (Bildung).

According to Simondon, the present development of technology is characterized by assembling the machines in totalities (ensembles) that permit and require regulations. De facto, such ensembles are already part of culture, and it seems all the more bizarre that, de jure, they are still ex-cluded from it. It is precisely this kind of a transitional state of affairs that prepares, in Simondon’s eyes, the transition to a culture of technology: “Since technical reality has become regulatory, it can be integrated into culture, which is itself essentially regulatory” (MEOT-E 9).

He then quotes two examples in order to illustrate this “becoming regulatory” of technology. The first example is provided by “modern calculating machines.” These machines contain “a very great range of circuit-commutations which make it possible to program the working of the machine, e.g. to work out cubic roots or to translate from one language into another a simple text” (MEOT-E 5). This “openness” or “freedom in functioning” shows that calculating machines are not “pure automata” but technical beings with which human beings can cooperate in authentic ways.

It is a similar “margin of indetermination” that allows for assembling machines to become part of “coherent ensembles” within which they can mutually exchange information. At this point, Simondon introduces



his second example, the radio. In this case, too, he insists on the role of interaction and translation. Even if a direct exchange of information takes place between two machines—“such as between a pilot oscillator and another oscillator synchronized by impulses”—the human individual also intervenes “as a being who regulates the margin of indetermination so as to make it adaptable to the greatest possible exchange of information” (MEOT-E 5). Summarizing both examples, Simondon then adds that “the ensemble of open machines assumes man as permanent organizer and as a living interpreter of the interrelationships of machines” (MEOT-E 5).

Simondon suggests that the consequences of accepting these claims are far-reaching. Instead of continuing to conceive of himself as an indi-vidual who is confronted with isolated technical objects and who feels threatened or redeemed by them, man can position himself in a completely different way. He becomes a witness and interpreter of the difficulties of technical objects, and a mediator of their mutual relations. He starts to act as “a sociologist or psychologist of machines” (MEOT-E 6) who lives right among them:

Far from being the supervisor of a squad of slaves, man is the permanent organizer of a society of technical objects which need him as much as musicians in an orchestra need a conductor. The conductor can direct his musicians only because, like them, and with a similar intensity, he can interpret the piece of music performed; he determines the tempo of their performance, but as he does so his interpretative decisions are affected by the actual performance of the musicians; in fact, it is through him that the members of the orchestra affect each other’s interpretation; for each of them he is the real, inspiring form of the group’s existence as group; he is the central focus of interpretation of all of them in relation to each other. This is how man functions as permanent inventor and coordinator of the machines around him. He is among the machines that work with him. (MEOT-E 4)

The image of the democratic orchestra is highly evocative. In such an interaction with machines, based on margins of indeterminacy and sophisticated tuning, Simondon recognizes a genuinely cultural task, not just a matter for economists and/or engineers. As a result, it is not the worker in the factory or someone in an office working with a single machine who is prepared and able to understand this challenge in its cultural dimensions, nor is it the owner of a factory or its manager who submits the functioning of a technical ensemble to one specific purpose, i.e. capitalist profit. At the same time, however, the man-machine-concert should not be understood in the sense of a cultural utopia that would prolong the use of calculating machines and radio into the future.

If one was to be affected by what Canguilhem calls the “virus of the precursor,” one might be tempted to see in Simondon’s bringing together of these two technologies an “anticipation” of the Internet. However, this is precisely what it is not. Rather, Simondon’s discussion of culture

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and technology, circa 1951, is meant to improve our abilities to perceive, understand, and interact with contemporary technical ensembles such as laboratories, factories, or centers of calculation. However, what these ensembles represent is not just a technical but also a social potential. It is question here of “societies” of technical objects that overlap and interact in multiple ways with human societies. This idea is highlighted in the image of the orchestra, since the musicians who stand in for the machines are themselves complex assemblages of body and instrument.

ConclusionThe difference between Simondon and Wiener is obvious. It is true

that Simondon acknowledged cybernetics as a contribution to the gen-eral phenomenology of machines and recognized in it a new approach to the inductive study of technical objects.16 However, he is quite critical of Wiener’s fascination with a specific type of machine, i.e. feedback mechanisms, and argues against what he sees as Wiener’s over-arching tendency to compare technical with natural objects without also seeking to highlight specific differences between the two (MEOT-E 49-50). Simondon raises similar objections to Wiener’s claims about the way in which social homeostasis functions in the case of communication means and news services. In his eyes, Wiener’s approach runs the danger of reproducing a separation between culture and technology. In a sense, Wiener attempts to solve the regulation problem technologically, instead of embedding tools and techniques for regulation in cultural processes.

By contrast, what Simondon seeks are not new media and com-munication technologies, but individuals who would be able to describe and explain the orchestra-like interaction between human beings and technical beings. More concretely, he is in search of persons who, on the one hand, can position themselves at some remove from the individualiza-tion of technology, yet who also would have, on the other hand, enough “technical wisdom” (MEOT 148) that they would be able to function as authentic spokesmen in favor of machines. The principal task of these experts would consist in operating as “representatives of technical beings” (MEOT 151), in particular vis-à-vis those humans whom we believe con-tribute essentially to our cultural life: writers, artists, and other especially visible personalities.

If one takes Simondon’s allusions to cultural democracy seriously, then a large number of these “representatives of technical beings” would be required. As advocates of culture and technology, they would by no means be lobbyists acting in the name of some machine industry, but rather ambassadors of individual technical objects who, like political representatives, would facilitate acceptance and respect for these objects as significant components of cultural life.



Simondon leaves little doubt that this kind of political activity would not lead to great popularity. This is, at least, how one can read an interview he gave in the early 1980s. By this point, the automobile had become his prime example for the cultural necessity of liberating and “saving” the technical object, both from an increasingly careless means of production as well as from a degrading kind of use (Simondon, “Sau-ver l’objet technique,” 148). Even in his 1958 book, Simondon appeared skeptical of the technological significance of cars. According to him, the automation of car windows and the introduction of servo steering in fact represented technological complications, though car manufacturers and salesmen praised them as simplifications. More generally, he states: “The automobile, this technical object that is so charged with psychic and social implications, is not suitable for technical progress.” (MEOT-E 21).

In 1983, Simondon came back to this normative criticism of the tech-nical object, underscoring that the use of cars continues to be focused too much on its non-technical aspects: “I have seen a commercial that praised the footboards of a particular car. Such a beautification of the technical object by means of things other than its technicity has to be refused” (“Sau-ver l’objet technique,” 148). In principle, he continues, there is nothing about the aesthetization and/or erotization of technical objects to which we should object. However, such tendencies should refer to “margins of indetermination,” i.e. the technical openness of the object. The result is a kind of Bauhaus vision of the car that is in striking contrast to Barthes’ elegant appraisal of the new Citroën: “From the aesthetical and technical point of view, a truck seems to me purer than a simple car” (ibid.149).

Along with cars, today’s culture has become saturated with digital media technology. However, even in the age of ubiquitous computing, Simondon’s theory and politics of technology remains relevant and instructive. It continues to confront us with a double task. First, there is a persistent need to stimulate and develop awareness of the cultural significance and value of technical objects. While today there is a grow-ing interest in Google, Facebook, and Twitter and their impact on societal phenomena—from democracy to issues of authorship—little interest is directed towards the technical objects and ensembles that makes their use possible. In this situation, Simondon’s theory of technology asks us to draw our attention to the materiality of technical objects and ensembles that enable us to use these digital platforms: servers, cable networks, radio masts etc. It suggests developing an informed awareness of these largely invisible infrastructures and urges us to accept and respect them as crucial elements of our culture.

The second task consists of the normative criticism of technical ob-jects. The main issue in this regard is the problem of regulation. Simondon insists on this point: the principal feature of technological improvement

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is not an increase in automation but the emergence and evolution of machines that are open to regulation. In this perspective, digital technolo-gies with visually attractive yet ready-made and black-boxed interfaces appear as highly problematic. These technologies derive their popularity from a specific kind of aesthetics, rather than because they provide us with “margins of indetermination.” Similar problems are embodied in the vast array of technical objects that populate our everyday life, from refrigerators and washing machines to coffee makers. Simondon invites us to look inside these black boxes. This is why his philosophy of technology is an important contribution to understanding and shaping the material culture of contemporary societies.

Institute of Information and Media, Language and Culture (I: IMSK) University of Regensburg, Germany

NotesI would like to thank Rob Mitchell and Mark Hayward for their generous assistance in correcting

and improving the English version of this article.1. See Paul Valéry, Eupalinos. Or, the Architect, transl. and with a preface by William Mc-

Causland, Stewart, London: Oxford University Press, 1932.2. The context for this congress was provided by Nobert Wiener’s lectureship at the Col-

lège de France. See Pierre de Latil, Thinking by Machine. A Study of Cybernetics, transl. by Y. M. Golla, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1956, pp. 3-24.

3. See Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, transl. by Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2007.4. See Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, transl. by Richard Howard, New York: Hill and

Wang, 1983.5. Marc Augé, Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, transl. by John

Howe, London: Verso, 1995; An Anthropology of Contemporaneous Worlds, transl. by Amy Jacobs, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999; and Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, transl. by Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

6. Michel Carrouges, Les machines célibataires, Paris: Arcanes, 1954; Pierre Francastel, Art et technique aux XIXe et XXe siècles, Paris: Minuit, 1956; and Jean Fourastié, Machinisme et bien-être, Paris: Minuit, 1951.

7. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, Édition augmentée d’une préface de John Hart et d’une postface de Yves Deforge, 3rd ed., Paris, Aubier, 1989 (1st ed. 1958). In what follows I am quoting from the partial English translation by Ninian Mellamphy, published as typescript under the title On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, with a Preface by John Hart, University of Western Ontario, 1980. References are given in brackets with the short MEOT-E and the page number. In some cases, I have slightly modified this translation. Where further clarification was required, I co-quote the French original. Some quotations refer to parts of Simondon’s book that are not in-cluded in Mellamphy’s translation. In these cases, references are given in brackets with the short MEOT and the page number.

8. Gilbert Hottois, Simondon et la philosophie de la “culture technique,” Brussels: De Boeck, 1993, p.7. Up until today, the literature on Simondon has appeared primarily in the French-speaking countries. See, however, John Hart, “Preface,” in MEOT-E, pp. i-xxiii,



and Paul Dumouchel, “Gilbert‘s Simondon’s Plea for a Philosophy of Technology,” Inquiry 35, (3/4) (1992): 407-421.

9. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston: Beacon, 1964; Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects [1968], transl. by James Benedict, London/New York: Verso, 1995; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. In addition, see Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind [1962], transl. by George Weidenfield, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

10. On philosophy of technology in France, see Daniel Cérézuell, “Fear and Insight in French Philosophy and Technology,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 2 (1979): 53-75; and Jean-Yves Goffi, La philosophie de la technique, Paris: PUF, 1988.

11. See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, transl. by Albert Hof-stadter, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, p.165-186; and W. Ross Ashby, “The Black Box,” in An Introduction to Cybernetics, London: Chapman & Hall, 1956, p.86-117.

12. More generally, see Bernard Stiegler, “The Theater of Individuation. Phase-Shift and Reso-lution in Simondon and Heidegger,” transl. by Kristina Lebedeva, Parrhesia 7 (2009): 46-57.

13. See also his seminal article “Machine and Organism” [1952], in Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, transl. by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p.75-97.

14. Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Kultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten, Braunschweig: Westermann, 1877. On Kapp, see Carl Mitcham, Thinking through Technology. The Path between Engineering and Philosophy, Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1994, p.20-24, and Grégoire Chamayou, “Présentation,” in Ernst Kapp, Principes d’une philosophie de la technique, Paris: Vrin, 2007, p.7-44.

15. On this point, see also Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Derivations from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, p.10.

16. On cybernetics and phenomenology see also François Russo, “La cybernetique située dans une phénoménologie générale des machines,” Thales 7 (1953): 69-75.

Works CitedAristotle, Politics. Trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Barthes, Roland. “The New Citroën,” in Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Cape,

1972.Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. Trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett. New

York: Zone, 1989.Ducrocq, Albert. L’ère des robots, Paris: Julliard, 1953.Koyré, Alexandre. “Les philosophes et la machine” [1948], in Etudes d’histoire de la pensée

philosophique. Paris: Gallimard, 1971Schuhl, Pierre-Maxime. Machinisme et philosophie, 2nd rev. ed. Paris: PUF, 1947Simondon, Gilbert. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, 3rd ed., augmentée d’une préface

de John Hart et d’une postface de Yves Deforge. Paris: Aubier, 1989 (1st ed. 1958).——. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Millon, 2005.——. “Sauver l’objet technique (Entretien avec Anita Kechikian),” Esprit 7/4 (1983): 147-152.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics. Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.

New York/Paris: John Wiley/Hermann, 1948.



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Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century MediaMark B. N. Hansen

In a previous paper linking Simondon to biological and systems-theoretical discourses in autopoiesis and debates about contemporary technogenesis, I have argued that Simondon’s ontology of individuation furnishes a basis to theorize the “agency” of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly today, into alliances with sophisticated, computational technologies.1 In concert with research-ers like Andy Clark and N. Katherine Hayles, I embrace the “technical distribution” of cognition and perception as a way of understanding the complex couplings between humans and machines that are typical in our contemporary world, but that have, in fact, been part of human techno-genesis since the very origin of the human. On this model, which contrasts starkly with the concept of system that is central to systems-theoretical discourses from Varela to Luhmann, the technological elements of a system perform sophisticated cognitive tasks we can neither understand nor even account for; unlike the central tenet of systems-theoretical epistemology (the cut between system and environment), the technical distribution model eschews cognitive mastery in favor of a more hybrid—and argu-ably more “realistic”—model of action or enaction in the world. As I see it, the systems-theoretical cut attains cognitive and perceptual mastery for the system at a significant cost: the cost of cutting off the environment in any but the most trivial sense. Finding this cost too high, the technical distribution model gladly sacrifices mastery in order to enfranchise the environment as a source of enaction that doesn’t need to be—and indeed cannot be—channeled through the system.

In his own take on this distinction, Bruno Latour suggests that the messiness of a distributed model corresponds more accurately than the tidiness of systems distinctions to the experiential realities of our hybrid lifeworlds: “Instead of the surfaces so typical of first modernities—the ‘do-mains’ of science, of economy, of society, the ‘spheres’ of politics, values, norms, the ‘fields’ of symbolic capital, the separate and interconnected ‘systems’ so familiar to readers of Luhmann, where homogeneity and control could be calmly considered—we are now faced with the rather


33Technics, Transindividuation, & 21st-Century Media

horrible melting pots so vividly described by historians and sociologists of science” (35-48). I have given the name “system-environment hybrids” to these messy couplings, and have tried to describe their onto-epistemolog-ical advantages using Simondon’s theory of individuation. Specifically, I have sought to theorize environmental agency on the basis of Simondon’s insistence that, following their initial individuation, individuals continue to be coupled energetically and informationally not simply to “associated milieus” but, both through and beyond them, to the metastable domain of the pre-individual. This means that individuation includes a two-tiered coupling between individual and environment: an actual coupling with the associated milieu and a virtual coupling with the pre-individual do-main. As I see it, such a two-tiered coupling better captures the complex imbrication any individual enjoys with the environment, and it moves the conceptualization of the environment from something exclusively in the service of the individual to which it is coupled in actuality (including coupling to what is both exterior and interior to the individual’s opera-tion), to something that can embrace the quasi-independent cognitive and perceptual operation of the environment itself.

If this model describes a condition of the living human that is origi-nary—our originary environmental condition—this condition itself has been brought into the open and made accessible through recent developments in technical distribution, which is also to say, in the technical infrastructure of the environment. So-called ubiquitous computing furnishes a perfect illustration: through the distribution of computation into the environment by means of now typical technologies including smart phones and RFID tags, space becomes animated with some agency of its own. One crucial feature of this animation is its occurrence largely outside—or beside—the focal attention of actants within smart environments. For this reason, the intelligent space of contemporary life offers a kind of affordance—an unperceived or directly sensed affordance—that differs fundamentally from affordances as they have been theorized, following upon the work by James Gibson, in relation to media.2 When “we” act within such smart environments, our action is coupled with computational agents whose action is not only (at least in part) beyond our control, but also largely beyond our awareness. And while it is certainly possible for us to learn, either proleptically or after the fact, how exactly we are coupled to such smart environments, we can have absolutely no cognitive or perceptual access to the computational processes that inform them at the moment of their occurrence—a moment that I shall call their “operational present.” This foreclosure of access comprises what I shall refer to as the “operational blindness” of human consciousness. Such operational blindness obtains in situations involving technical distribution of cognition and perception:

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specifically, operational blindness names the ineliminable temporal gap separating the operation of a technically-distributed system-environment hybrid from any subsequent cognitive or perceptual account of its opera-tion in consciousness.

In what follows, I want to flesh out how exactly Simondon’s think-ing of individuation contributes to the task of theorizing our originary environmental condition in its contemporary instantiation. Yet my aim here goes well beyond the scope of my initial theorization of the system-environment hybrid in the paper mentioned previously, in two respects. First, I want to focus here on the significance of the operational blindness of consciousness specifically as it is related to contemporary technolo-gies and characterized by a unique temporal profile. What the distribu-tion of sensibility into smart environments accomplishes is nothing less than a separation between operationality and awareness, such that the latter always comes after the fact, and is characterized by a distinctive temporal belatedness. If this belatedness betokens a certain demotion of consciousness within contemporary media networks, it also informs a strategy for the feeding forward of data concerning operationality, such that consciousness, though foreclosed from experiencing it directly, can nonetheless take it into account in its ongoing, future-directed activity.

While the explication of this feed-forward structure of contemporary, twenty-first-century media is a task for another occasion, the temporal disparateness at its heart is central for a second development that directly concerns Simondon’s thinking of individuation. Thus, in the second half of this paper, I shall explore how the temporal dephasing of conscious-ness from its own operationality—its operational blindness—correlates with Simondon’s crucial claim that a certain psychic disindividualization is requisite for transindividuation to be initiated. On this understanding, transindividuation is an operation that acts directly at the level of preper-ceptual operationality, and does so precisely to yield a new kind of indi-viduation—one that is transindividual and not psychically-differentiated or -specified. We can thus conclude that there is at the very heart of Simon-don’s thinking a notion of psychic blindness, and, following Simondon’s own correlation of transindividuation with technics, that this blindness correlates directly with the operationality of twenty-first-century media.

1. Psychic Disindividualization as Correlate of TechnicityFor Simondon, there is no individuation without a milieu. This

becomes clear in his discussion of the energetic foundations of individu-ation in the section of L’Individuation á la lumière des notions de forme et d’information devoted to physical individuation:



The principle of individuation is not an isolated reality, localized in itself, pre-existing the individual as an already individualized germ of the individual. … the principle of individuation, in the strict sense of the term, is the complete system in which the genesis of the indi-vidual operates. … moreover, this system survives itself in the living individual, under the form of a milieu associated to the individual, in which individuation continues to operate. … life is thus a perpetual individuation, a continuous individuation across time, the prolonga-tion of a singularity. (63)

For Simondon, the associated milieu is at once both an external and an internal milieu, and is not equivalent to a physical or external environment; more precisely, the associated milieu is that with which the individual enjoys relations of communication and of energetic exchange that give it, or rather the system to which it (together with the associated milieu) belongs, “internal resonance.”

Indeed, Simondon insists that what makes it necessary to employ the term “system” is not the constraint imposed by an observer, as in the systems-theoretical account. “The limits of this system,” he notes, “are not arbitrarily cut off by the knowledge that the subject acquires of them.” Rather, the term system is necessary to “define the energetic condition, because there can only be potential energy in relation to the possible transformations of a definite system” (ibid.). What this means is that the “system” in Simondon’s account does not coincide narrowly and exclusively with the individual supported by an environment, as it does in both Varela’s and Luhmann’s versions of systems theory; rather, it names the vaster operations involved in an individuation encompass-ing the specific relationality between an individual and an associated milieu. In this account, the environment does not act exclusively on the individual, but impacts the entire system of individuation—a system that includes the individual and its associated milieu and the pre-individual domain to which this coupling continues to be open. In sum: whereas in systems theory, the agency of the environment is trivialized (reduced to its meaning for the system), in Simondon’s ontology of individuation, it retains its power “outside” the system (or “individual”) it informs.

For this reason, Simondon’s conception of individuation would seem to have more affinity with recent work in developmental systems theory than with both biological and systems-theoretical conceptions of autopoiesis. Developmental systems theory advances a conception of on-togenesis that correlates development and evolution, leveling all categori-cal divisions between organism and environment, and insisting on the equipotentiality of all factors in ontogenesis. According to Susan Oyama, a “developmental system” is defined as “a heterogeneous and causally complex mix of interacting entities and influences that produces the life

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cycle of an organism. The system includes the changing organism itself, because an organism contributes to its own future, but it encompasses much else as well” (Evolution’s Eye, 1). “A proper view of ontogeny,” she continues, “requires that the idea of ontogenesis apply not only to bodies and minds, but to information, plans, and all the other cognitive-causal entities … that supposedly regulate their development. Developmental information, in other words, has a developmental history. It neither preexists its operation nor arises from random disorder” (Ontogeny, 3). As against autopoietic theory specifically, Oyama stresses the symmetry of interactions across boundaries that lies at the heart of developmental systems theory:

In DST, causal interactions across a boundary are symmetrical. Insides and outsides define and ‘specify’ each other as developmental interactants, codetermining outcomes, so that responsibility for the result cannot be partitioned. No causally sufficient self-making here…; instead, we have mutually constructing relations of organisms and their developmental environments. (“Friends, Neighbors, and Boundaries,” 149)

Elsewhere and most succinctly, Oyama pithily accuses autopoietic ac-counts of harboring an unreconstructed “internalist predilection” (“Locat-ing Development,” 185-208).

What distinguishes Simondon’s conception of ontogenesis as individuation, even from the anti-internalist models of DST, is his two-tiered account of individual-environment coupling, which stems from his embedding of individuation in a theory of being as pre-individual metastability. Crucial to this distinction is a certain contestation, implicit in Simondon’s usage, of the term “milieu.” In his gloss on Simondon’s conception of milieu, Jean-Yves Chateau argues that the “associated milieu” does not simply complement the individual, yielding an actual-ized excess that fuels further individuation; rather, by means of the very individuation that yields the individual-associated milieu coupling, it places the individual in relation to the whole of being:

The notion of the milieu allows one simultaneously to think a separa-tion and a linkage with the all of non-individuated being; it is precisely that which insures that the separation with the pre-individual all is far from being a total separation, in the sense that the milieu is not only what, in the pre-individual all, is found to form a metastable system of potential energies, in which the de-phasing of this individuation was able to occur, but also that with which, after individuation, the indi-vidual maintains a relation of resonance on the interior of the system that it forms with it. Through its associated milieu the individual is in relation with the all of being…, without the risk of ending up by confounding itself with this all of being or by dissolving into it: the regime of energetic relations and of recurrent causality with its milieu is what has made its individuation happen. … This is equally to say that the milieu, as a milieu associated to a given individual, does not have the same



indetermination as the pre-individual in general, in the sense that the milieu is determined (while nonetheless forming part of the large pre-individual that is non-determined in itself). More precisely, it is sufficiently determined so that the individuation operated in relation to it would not be illusory but determined and consistent; however, it is not itself individual but system, and its determination is nothing other than being precisely the associated milieu of an individual or, better, of an individuation: a set of realities (potential energies) that have no other unity than that of the system formed with a given individual, in the cadre of a given individuation (meaning that all these realities could enter in other relations amongst themselves, as well as with others, to be the principle of an other individuation). (68-69, emphasis added)

For my purposes, what is most crucial in Chateau’s account is his equivo-cation over whether the associated milieu is coupled to an individual or to an individuation. As I see it, this equivocation comes down to whether individuation yields an individual or a system (in Simondon’s sense of the term)—that is, whether the environmental coupling it involves is entirely at the same order of being as it (which would make it a fully actualized coupling) or between disparate levels of being (which would make it virtual in some sense of the term).

This equivocation correlates to what I take to be a tension within Simondon’s conception of individuation when, for example, he differenti-ates the individual from the “SYMBOLON” that is being itself:

Instead of being the SYMBOLON, the individual “would be the result of a certain organizing event that happens in the heart of the SYMBOLON and distributes it into two complementary realities: the individual and the associated milieu after individuation. … The separated individual is a partial, incomplete being which can be adequately known only if one replaces it in the SYMBOLON from which it derives its origin. The model of being is either the SYMBOLON before the genesis of the individual, or else the individual-associated milieu couple after the genesis of the individual.” (L’Individuation, 63)

This either/or, however, cannot designate a relation of equivalence, since it correlates two elements that do not operate at the same level of being.

That much becomes clear when Simondon goes on to characterize individuation “as a doubling, a resolution, a non-symmetrical distribution occurring in a totality, on the basis of a singularity” (ibid.).1 As opposed to the individual-associated milieu couple, which comprises a relative stabilization of the metastability out of which it originated and which restricts metastable potentiality to the level of being of the individual, individuation entertains relations to multiple levels of reality, and thus belongs to the pre-individual in a much more expansive way than the as-sociated milieu. Individuation, as Simondon understands it, “would only be one of the possible becomings of a system, and would be capable as well of existing at several levels and in a more or less complete manner” (ibid.). Though it yields the individual-associated milieu couple, individu-

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ation “is an event and an operation at the heart of a reality more rich than the individual that results from it” and more rich, I would add, than the individual-associated milieu couple (ibid., 64). At the very least, what this means—in relation to the tension within Simondon’s account—is that one must operate with a doubled conception of individuation, for this latter is at once the process that yields the individual-associated milieu coupling and the ongoing relation to the domain of the pre-individual that informs the potentiality of the larger system (of individuation itself).

Though we find a very similar conception of the genesis of the tech-nical object in terms of its coupling with an associated milieu, in the case of technical objects, which result from a process of concretization (rather than individuation), things are a bit more complicated. There are several reasons for this, including the necessity of differentiating the associated milieu that conditions the concretization of the technical object from the geographical milieu against which it distinguishes itself, as well as the related necessity of differentiating the associated milieu from what Simon-don calls the “technical milieu.” The most significant factor contributing to this complexity, however, is the correlation of the “technicity” of the technical object not with its specific functioning but with a larger human mode of relating to the world. As Chateau puts it, not only is the “knowledge of technical objects not sufficient to know their ‘technicity,’” but “there is no necessity that this latter be found in ‘what they are in actuality’” (82). Part of the “virtuality” informing the concretization of technical objects, in other words, is due to their imbrication within human individuation—that is, due to their emergence from an act of technical invention. Thus Simondon can write: “it is not just technical objects that must be known at the level of what they are actually, but the technicity of these objects insofar as it comprises a mode of relation of the human to the world. … [only] the direct examination of technicity according to a genetic method” will discover its essence (Du Mode, 151-52).

We learn from section II of chapter II of Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques that this genetic method reveals a process of recurrent causal-ity linking technical objects to the natural world, and ultimately to an act of invention. In effect, the associated milieu of the technical object is a mediator between the technical realm and the natural world: a “mediator of the relation between the fabricated technical elements and the natural elements at the heart of which the technical being operates” (57). More precisely, it falls to “a mode of thinking capable of prevision and creative imagination” to gather together the “elements that materially constitute the technical object and that are separated from one another, without an associated milieu,” in virtue of a future organization. The organization of these separated elements in relation to an associated milieu-to-come



occurs through the schemas of creative imagination: “The unity of the future associated milieu in which are deployed the relations of causal-ity that permit the functioning of the new technical object is represented, performed as a role can be performed in the absence of the actual person, by the schemas of creative imagination”1 (ibid., 58). Indeed, if we follow Simondon’s account literally, we find that there is a thorough-going parallelism between the process of technical concretization in virtue of a future associated milieu and the dynamic processes of thinking: “the mental schemas react on one another during invention in the same way that the diverse dynamisms of the technical object react on one another in material functioning” (ibid.)

What this parallelism shows is that the source of virtuality that operates to organize the separate technical elements into a technical object—that forms an associated milieu-to-come—is the living human inventor. There is an overlap or partial identity between the associated milieu of the living inventor and the associated milieu-to-come of the technical object: “It is [only] because the living is an individual being that carries with it its associated milieu that the living can invent; this capacity of self-conditioning itself is the basis of the capacity to produce objects that self-condition themselves” (ibid.). When Simondon subsequently excavates the correlation of “form” and “dynamic background” [fond], it becomes clear that the virtuality at issue here involves the double-tiered coupling of individual and environment that yields the specificity of the system operating on a multi-leveled multistability. More simply put, the virtuality that informs the genesis of the associated milieu-to-come of the technical object is one that informs the entire individuation of the system, and not simply the functioning of the living individual with its delimited and fully actualized associated milieu. While Gestalt psychology has

... attributed force to form, … a more profound analysis of the imagi-native process would show without a doubt that what is determining and what plays an energetic role, is not the forms but what supports the forms, that is, the fond. Perpetually marginalized from the stand-point of attention, the fond is what contains the dynamisms; forms do not participate in forms but in the fond, which is the system of all the forms or rather the common reservoir of the tendencies of the forms, even before they exist separately in their own right and are constituted as an explicit system. (ibid.)

When Simondon correlates the form-fond coupling with the actual-virtual distinction, it becomes clear that the participation involved here emerges from the excess adherent to the system in individuation, and not just to the living individual-associated milieu coupling narrowly conceived. Participation, in short, is the result of invention as a double-tiered process:

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The relation of participation that connects the forms to the fond is a relation that steps over the present and diffuses an influence of the future on the present, of the virtual on the actual. [...] the fond is the system of virtualities, of potentials, of forces which lead, whereas the forms are the system of actuality. Invention is the taking in charge of the system of actuality by the system of virtualities, the creation of a unique system on the basis of these two systems. (ibid.)

And, while Simondon admits that we cannot know exactly how a system of forms can participate in a fond of virtualities, he insists that it does so according to the same mode of recurrent causality that organizes the struc-tures of the technical object in virtue of the dynamism of an associated milieu-to-come.

Accordingly, wherever it occurs, recurrent causality correlates two levels of being which, because one is metastable (or virtual) in relation to the other, are somehow in tension, albeit creative tension. When Simondon defines the associated milieu-to-come of the technical object as the media-tor between the natural world and the technical elements, it is precisely to emphasize this putting-into-recurrent-causal-relation. For what is at stake here is precisely a mediation between the metastability characteristic of the living—specifically, the tension between life and thinking, living individuation and psychic individualization—and what Simondon calls the “technical milieu.” In this respect, the associated-milieu-to-come of technical invention would seem to be nothing more nor less than a directed application of the associated mental milieu that is synonymous with the virtualities of the fond. (Later we shall refer to this double-valenced recur-rent causality as a proleptically-open and technically-enabled mobilization of the “real potentiality” for new actualizations, or, more precisely, for new actualizations within ongoing individuations.)

Focusing on the correlation of individuation and technical develop-ment at issue here, we cannot overlook an apparent tension in Simondon’s thinking: how can the individualized or structured technical object be both one term in a relation of recurrent causality analogous to the recur-rent causality between life and thinking, and at the same time, the product of this latter recurrent causality? At the end of this section on technical invention, Simondon’s introduction of the extensive kinship between life and thinking seems aimed at situating technical invention (and technical concretization, or the genesis of technical objects) within the larger genesis of psychic life. More precisely, what Simondon accomplishes here is to establish a correlation between technical individualization and psychic individualization, and, more fundamentally, to expose the basis for this correlation in the associated mental milieu that is at once the “middle term between life and conscious thinking” and the “middle term between the natural world and the manufactured structures of the technical object.”



The extensive kinship between life and thinking establishes that psychic individualization occurs on the basis of a metastability that is akin to, and builds upon, the tension generating life: just as “living material [blood, lymph nodes, conjunctive tissues, and so forth] creates an associated milieu for organs,” and thus is the “fond of organs,” so too are higher order elements of conscious thinking—representations, images, certain memories and certain perceptions—emergent from a “fond that lends them a direction and a homeostatic unity, and that carries from one to the other and from all to each an informed energy.” The fond, Simondon notes, is an implicit axiomatic: without it, “there would be no thinking being, but only a series of discontinuous representations without any links between them” (ibid., 60).

If this means that psychic individualization emerges on the basis of a fond that must be qualified as living, or more precisely, as a specification of the individuation of the living, it also means that technical invention and the individualization of technical objects emerge as a further specification of the recurrent causality generative of psychic individualization. This, it seems to me, is precisely what is at stake in Simondon’s insistence on the analogy between psychic individualization and technical invention: “We can,” he states, “create technical beings because we have in ourselves a play of relations and a matter-form”—or better a fond-form—a “relation that is very analogous to what we institute in the technical object” (ibid.). Would we be remiss to point out that technical objects are, in fact, exten-sions and intensifications of the play of relations and the fond-form relation we have in ourselves? And isn’t this equally to claim that they operate not autonomously, but always in correlation with our perceptual and cognitive experience? For when Simondon claims that “the individualized technical object is an object that has been invented, that is, produced by a play of recurrent causality between human life and thinking” (see his “Technical Individualization”), doesn’t he in fact inscribe technical objects within this recurrent causality and thus implicitly suggest that they might themselves extend the creativity of living individuation?

In her recent book Relationscapes, Erin Manning argues that tech-nologies, and in particular digital technologies, cannot partake of the virtual. If this is true in any sense, it is true only so long as technologies are narrowly considered in separation from the circuits melding them with humans and other living individuations. Yet to so conceive technol-ogy would seem to stack the deck unfairly, to overlook the fundamental dynamism of technics. Indeed, if we follow Simondon, who at one point in L’Individuation urges us to replace the term virtual with “metastable,”3 we can never isolate technical machines from their coupling to human invention and enaction—from their constitutive “margin of indetermi-

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nation.” It is precisely such a margin of indetermination that informs Simondon’s conception of “open machines” and that differentiates them from cybernetic automatons:

The true perfecting of machines, the one that increases their degree of technicity, does not correspond to an increase of automatism, but on the contrary to the fact that the functioning of a machine possesses a certain margin of indetermination. It is this margin that permits the machine to be sensitive to external information. … The machine that is endowed with a high technicity is an open machine, and the set of open machines assumes the human as permanent organizer, as living interpreter of machines in their relations with one another. (Du Mode, 11)

In invoking technogenesis to characterize how technology participates in the recomposition of bodies, Manning would seem to endorse precisely such a conception of the open machine. Consider, for example, her invo-cation of the associated milieu as a means to characterize technology’s role in ontogenesis: does this not put emphasis precisely on the coupling of machine with the complexity of human individuation? However we answer this question, it becomes clear that Manning’s narrow focus on a certain aspect of this coupling —on how technical machines (or rather, technically-generated artworks) can bring what she calls movement’s pre-acceleration into the scene of perception—jettisons precisely what is crucial for Simondon, namely the openiness or virtuality of the machine. What Manning’s deployment leaves out is the crucial capacity of machines to function beyond or outside of the experiential domain occupied by humans, but nonetheless in a broader coupling with them.

This is precisely the question that is posed by the technical distribu-tion of (human) perception and cognition, and I want now to invoke the example of Etienne-Jules Marey (an example also crucial for Manning, though for different reasons) in order to show how technologies amplify perceptual and cognitive functioning but without culminating in an ex-pansion of the scene of human perception. Such amplification involves the “operational blindness” of human consciousness, and we can now lend this a distinct Simondonian accent by renaming it the operational blind-ness of psychic individualization. Such operational blindness occurs when perception and cognition are technically distributed, and it designates the reality that human consciousness does not and cannot experience the functioning of the technically-distributed system to which it belongs as a direct perception—i.e. at the time that it is occurring. Moreover, the fact that any awareness that consciousness may gain of this systemic functioning must occur indirectly, and always only after the fact, will (as we shall see) inform the specificity of transindividuation as an individuation that bypasses the individual-associated milieu coupling and depends on the technical distribution of sensibility to do so.

Much has been made of Marey’s shift from the “graphic method” to chronophotography. As we know from the work of Marta Braun and



others, this shift was occasioned by the necessity for less intrusive and more data-rich techniques of inscription; specifically, Marey could not explore the movement of bird flight when his instruments obstructed that very movement.4 One unintended consequence of this shift, however, is that Marey’s data-gathering acquired a pictorial status which is, in an important sense, supplementary: in addition to being a visualization of data concerning movement, Marey’s chronophotographs also appear to be pictures of that movement itself. At the heart of Marey’s work there is a crucial doubling whereby an aesthetic supplement is added to the technical operation of chronophotography; accordingly, in the wake of chronophotography, we acquire a properly aesthetic interface onto data defined as “objective” precisely because of its inaccessiblity to direct (perceptual) experience. Although this doubling intensifies our relation to chronophotography, the key point is that it does nothing to alter the tem-poral disjunction between its operationality and our (necessarily belated) perceptual access to it.

That is why it is absolutely crucial for us to properly understand the status of this pictorial supplement, or more exactly, the status of the aesthetic dimension it introduces. Whatever added experiential dimen-sion the aesthetic supplements suggests, it does not and cannot comprise a direct access to the sensory basis of perception; it can only enhance our experience by offering some nonperceptual interface onto primordial sensibility. Marey’s images do not give us a visual interface onto the imperceptible phases of movement—an interface that would expand the scope of our perception such that we could directly perceive perception’s imperceptible incipience. Rather, they give us data—data that happens to be conveyed visually—about movement; but they also give us data about our perceptual processes. Yet, because it is temporally distanced from the operationality that the data measures, this data can never obtain the status of lived experience.

Of Marey’s commentators, no one grasps this situation more clearly than photography historian Joel Snyder who states that “there is [in Marey] no question of substituting mechanical instruments for a fallible human mediator and of correcting thereby what might otherwise have been falsified. … The graphic data show what otherwise cannot be found in the realm of events and processes detectable by human beings” (380, emphasis added). Respecting this distinction, we can readily see that Marey’s chro-nophotographic images, including his final work on the movement of air, do not—and cannot—depict the collapse of perception’s imperceptible virtuality into perception itself, as Manning would have it.

Indeed, even if we were to grant that these images operate by stimulating a perceptual event in their viewers—via what I would want to call their supplementary aesthetic dimension—this event remains in the service of visualizing the imperceptible preconditions of another, necessarily

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already past, perception. Because of the ineliminable temporal gap constitu-tive of perception, Marey’s images simply cannot impact present percep-tion directly, at the time of its happening, and can at most impact perception indirectly, by feeding information about our past experience (information that cannot be accessed through our present experience) forward into our future experience-to-come. And if we recall that the source of this informa-tion is machinic perception—that is, perception that can never actually be our perception, we can see how this ineliminable temporal gap constitu-tive of perception gets extended into what I am calling the operational blindness of psychic individualization. Or, to put it more precisely, we can see that the operational blindness of psychic individualization is the strict correlate of the technical distribution of perception and cognition.

Simondon’s critics have recently underscored the absence of a medi-tation on asethetics in his work; for such critics, notably Ludovic Duhem, the aesthetic forms a crucial supplement to the ethical, and specifically comprises a dimension, supplementary to the ethical act, which doesn’t get actualized.5 Taking up art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, I now want to suggest that this non-actualized aesthetic supplement has a direct affinity with the virtual force of the environment that, as I have argued, eludes the coupling of individual and associated milieu that yields actu-alized individuation in Simondon. For Didi-Huberman, what is crucial about the aesthetic dimension of Marey’s chronophotographs—which Didi-Huberman conceptualizes as a sensory power—is the way they open a perceptual interface onto the sensory microindividuations that, following Deleuze’s conception of “transcendental sensibility,” virtually precondition perception. Yet the point here—and the contrast with Man-ning could not be more stark—is not to bring these microindividuations into the perception they condition, but to let them shine forth in their own right. To put this in Simondonian terms, we might say that Marey’s images expose the metastable state or tension between levels (quality, quantity and intensity) that precedes perception: they expose the “inten-sities in the relation of the world to the subject” before these are resolved in an actualized perception.

While Marey’s images expose these intensities, these sensory micro-individuations, to a different perception and hence catalyze a process of perceptual individualization, the crucial point for Didi-Huberman—and I wholly concur—is how they shift focus away from individual psychic perception and to the environmental condition of sensibility from which it emerges. I quote:

If we look again at the extraordinary image of the flying seagull pho-tographed by Marey in 1886, we understand that the “trail,” on the image, is comprised on the basis of the complex relation that the wing



maintains in time with the air. In a similar way, later on, the plumes of smoke are formed directly on the basis of a certain relation between the obstacle and the air. The image-wake [image-sillage] of the seagull appears precisely to be this “inherent difference” that we discovered thanks to Bergson: it is a difference, since it presupposes a dialectic, nearly a com-bat, and since it distances the seagull from its familiar appearance; it is an inherence, since the seagull itself creates, through its own movement, the alteration of its appearance in the air. The “inherent difference” must be understood on the model of a wave that springs up from the ocean but from which it is however never separated: a differentiated, conflictual form, but one that is inherent to its material milieu. … Here is precisely what can reorient our entire understanding of Mareysian images: they do not so much show us “some thing” whose form would be photo-graphically, absolutely or instantaneously, restituted; rather they show us the durational or momentary relation between a body in movement and a fluid milieu in which this movement occurs. (249, emphasis in original)

To give a contemporary analogy, Marey’s images function in a similar way to contemporary digital practices in sound art devoted to bring-ing microsounds into perception: the point of such work, like the point of Marey’s chronophotography, is not to confront perception with the transcendental sensible content that comprises its virtual precondition; rather, it is to expose the sensory operation of these microsounds and to expose it as, in some sense, autonomous from perception, as “experience” that occurs, that has real sensory impact, without directly yielding any perception whatsoever.

We can conclude from this that chronophotography does not repro-duce something that we are already able to experience, or indeed, something that we can ever directly experience. Rather, it supplements perception aesthetically, by coupling it to an open machine for recording, analyzing and visualizing the sensibility of the environment that forms a virtual source of our experience that need never—and can never—be perceptually actualized. And, insofar as it operates within the ineliminable temporal gap constitutive of perception, this open machine—like open machines generally—generates an operational blindness of perception or psychic individualization, a blindness which, we can now see, is simply the price to be paid for the technically-generated aesthetic exposure of environ-mental sensibility.

The technical object is the support for the collective re-individuation that yields what Simondon calls the “transindividual.” To specify what this means concretely, I want now to correlate this claim with what I have just argued concerning technical distribution and the operational blind-ness it imposes on psychic individualization in the very act of expanding (and to the very extent that it does expand) bio-psychic individuation. More precisely, I want to claim that transindividuation, understood as a distinct individuation from the individuation of the living, is both made

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necessary and made possible by the technical distribution of psychic individual-ization. In today’s world, it is this technical distribution that operates the psychic disindividualization requisite for transindividuation to occur: this technical distribution produces the operational blindness of psychic indi-vidualization that expresses—in the form of an aesthetic supplement—the temporal disjunction of operationality and awareness, of individuation and perception. Beyond that, yet by means of it, technical distribution thus requires and makes possible an individuation that bypasses the individual-associated milieu coupling in favor of a direct, nonperceptual individuation rooted in environmental sensibility.

As a distinct form of individuation, transindividuation bypasses the psychic domain understood as the domain of perceptual self-presence or, equally in this context, of perceptual différance, in favor of a “psychism” rooted in the impersonal “experience” of environmental sensibility that I shall later call “intensity.” Jean-Hugues Barthélémy seems to anticipate this situation:

The transindividual in effect realizes what we have called the second discontinuity of the psychic in relation to the vital, of which the psychic was in effect the paradoxical discontinuous prolongation. It is for this reason that the transindividual merits, more so than the psychic, the name of “regime.” But because this prolongation of the vital by the psychic also assures the prolongation of the vital by the transindividual, such a discontinuity is of a new type: it is only because the transindividual can no longer be thought according to the notions of the individual and of the associated milieu that it comprises an entirely distinct regime of individua-tion.” (Barthélémy 2005, 210)

The key point here is that transindividuation—far more than the psychic individualization, whose dissolution is its correlate—requires the mobili-zation of the virtual domain. It is a “regime” precisely because its genesis requires more potentiality than any coupling to a (necessarily actualized) associated milieu can give.

As catalysts for transindividuation, technical objects are not sim-ply “symbols” that “express” the pre-individual reality attached to the subject. Indeed, they can instigate transindividuations only because they bypass the subject (though, as we shall see, in favor of a dispersed subjec-tivity that emerges directly from sensibility). Technical objects transform the pre-individual reality associated with the living individual into an actualized source of energy which, as Simondon puts it, “surpasses the individual while still prolonging it: the transindividual is not exterior to the individual even though it detaches itself to some extent from the indi-vidual” (cited in Barthélémy 2005, 210). Technical objects not only make possible a surpassing of the individual, but they facilitate a surpassing of the “subject,” understood, following Simondon, as the individual



cognizant of its pre-individual reality and thus “out-of-phase” with itself. More precisely still, technical objects mediate between the subject and the pre-individual reality it experiences as its unsupportable actuality. In so doing, however (and here our analysis must go beyond the scope of Simondon’s account), they transform the very status of the “subject”: they dissolve the subject as a centripetal agent in favor of a distributed subjectivity closely attuned to the sensory affordances of the environment. In Simondon’s terms, we can say that technological objects transform the pre-individual reality that exceeds the individual into the basis for a new individuation, itself rooted in an actualizing of this excess in a subjective, but not subject-bound, experience.

2. Engineering the Pre-individual: Technics and the TransindividualHaving now clarified the correlations among technics, psychic dis-

individualization, and transindividuation, what remains for us to consider is the broader question of the coupling of human and technics. Within Simondon’s theory, this question arises in relation to the nonequivalence of the transindividual and the pre-individual. Transindividuation is a specific individuation that operates by channeling pre-individual energy. How are we to understand this relation between transindividual individuation and pre-individual source, if not in terms of the very hylomorphic model Simondon so vociferously denounces?

This question broaches a crucial “theoretical tension” which, fol-lowing Barthélémy’s analysis, inhabits Simondon’s account of transindi-viduation. This tension stems from Simondon’s claim, in his major work on individuation, that the transindividual is “anterior to the individual” without, however, being in any sense identical to or potentially conflat-able with the pre-individual. Admitting that Simondon’s L’Individuation occasionally encourages confusions concerning the difference between transindividual and pre-individual, Barthélémy nonetheless ventures to differentiate them along the lines I’ve just suggested—namely, by specify-ing how the operation of transindividuation is, properly speaking, an indi-viduation, and thus distinct, in some crucial sense, from the pre-individual qua source for all individuation: “transindividual individuation—since it is indeed an individuation—constructs the radical individuality beyond the individual itself, because it is the ‘subject’ as individual-pre-individual ensemble that individuates/is individuated [s’individue]” (Barthélémy , “Du Mort,” 85). The distinction of the subject from the individual, and its status as the individual-pre-individual ensemble—as a process at once actual and virtual—is, for Barthélémy, what makes Simondon’s conception of transindividual individuation “difficultly thinkable.”

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What remains to be addressed is the role technics plays in this indi-viduation and how, specifically, transindividuation can be said to depend on a certain relation with technical artifacts. Addressing this conjunction of transindividuation and technics will require us to explore exactly how the genesis of the transindividual both supports and refutes Bernard Stiegler’s thesis concerning epiphylogenesis, the evolution of life by means other than life. As the actualization of pre-individual potential in the form of mediation, technical objects furnish the support for transindividuation, and in so doing actualize the epiphylogenetic dimension of human evolution (Stiegler, 143). Technical objects thus convert the pre-individual excess associated with the living individual into a transindividual excess associ-ated with that dimension of the human which is exterior to its biological or zoological individuation. As Barthélémy puts it,

The technical object that receives the pre-individual part of the “subject” is also and reciprocally that which makes this “subject” undergo tran-sindividual individuation in its distinction from the pre-individual. The technical object simply is this mediation by which the transindividual is constituted in its incomprehensible psycho-social indissociability, … it furnishes the place where “the exterior is interiorized” and “the interior is exteriorized.” (2005, 228)

However, as Barthélémy also points out (namely, in his paper in the pres-ent volume), this exteriority is not and cannot be radical, on account of the anteriority of the living to the technical. The specific genesis of the transindividual I have sketched here thus parts company with Stiegler in that it locates psychosocial commonality not in the direct technical mediation of memory (tertiary memories, whether industrialized or personalized), but rather in the more indirect technical mediation of an environmental sensibility shared by living beings prior to and inde-pendently of their subsequent psychic individualizations as perceivers, subjects, or consciousnesses.

To gain a proper appreciation for the difference at issue here, we will have to explore more deeply the way that technics, in the very process of supporting transindividuation, opens a new non-individual subjective di-mension of experience. To that end, let me cite an important passage from Simondon’s L’Individuation which, according to Barthélémy, underwrites his above specification of the theoretical tension in Simondon’s work; the passage is dedicated to the “problematic of the reflexivity in individua-tion” and concerns the relation of the transindividual to immanence and transcendence:

…neither the idea of immanence nor the idea of transcendence can completely account for the characteristics of the transindividual in relation to the psychological individual. Transcendence and immanence are in effect defined and fixed before the moment when the individual becomes one of the terms of the relation in which it is integrated, but



whose other term was already given. Indeed, if one admits that the transindividual is self-constitutive, one will see that the schema of transcendence and the schema of immanence can account for this self-constitution only through their simultaneity and reciprocity. At each instant of self-constitution, the relation between the individual and the transindividual is effectively defined as what EXCEEDS THE INDIVIDUAL WHILE PROLONGING IT: the transindividual is not exterior to the individual and yet it is in a certain sense detached from it. (Simondon, cited in Barthélémy 2009, 83-84)

This clarification of the transindividual’s relation to the individual—de-tachment without exteriority, interiorized or internalized otherness—helps us resolve two problems associated with this “theoretical tension” at the heart of Simondon’s mediation of individuation and technics. First, it lets us pinpoint the crucial role that technical objects play in Simondon’s account of transindividuation: technical objects are what facilitates a form of relationality with preindividual environmental sensibility that is subjective without being subject-bound. Second, it reveals the extent to which Simondon’s turn to technics occurs within the framework of the larger account of human-implicating individuation and of transindividu-ation as an element within it.

Nothing less is at stake in a crucial passage from Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques where Simondon specifies how technics mediates the pre-individual for transindividuation:

Through the mediation of the technical object an interhuman relation is created that forms the model of transindividuality. By transindividual, we mean a relation that does not put individuals in relation through the means of their already constituted individuality that separates them one from the others, nor through the means of what is identical in all human subjects, for example a priori forms of sensibility, but rather by means of this charge of pre-individual reality, this charge of nature that is conserved with each individual being, and which contains potentials and virtuality.(247-48)

Given the participation of transindividuation within a broader, human-implicating individuation, the relation of internalized otherness—detach-ment without exteriority—that characterizes transindividuation cannot but constrain us in our efforts to theorize the technical object. In this respect, Simondon’s account of the technical object goes in a very differ-ent direction than that of Stiegler. For Simondon, the technical object is emphatically not a quasi-transcendental condition for transindividuation as such (as if it could be separated from the larger, human-implicating individuation in which, ultimately, it must be said to participate). Rather, it is a form of mediation between the pre-individual and the transindividual, or more precisely, a mediation between the pre-individual dimension of the subject and the latter’s transindividual individuation as dispersed subjectivity.6

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We can now fully appreciate how Simondon’s analysis of technics in Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques addresses the tension bequeathed us by L’Individuation. The seeming paradox of a transindividual anterior to the individual yet nonetheless distinct from the pre-individual prede-termines how we must read Simondon’s definition of the technical object as “the support and the symbol of this relation that we want to name transindividual” (Du Mode, 247). Bluntly put: the technical object is what transforms—and what is necessary to transform—the pre-individual charge into the source for transindividual individuation of dispersed subjectivity. This transformation forms a strict counterpart to the psychic disindividualization which, as I have argued, is requisite to prepare for the transindividual re-individuation (and dispersal) of the subject. In this respect, the operation of the technical object in transindividuation intro-duces a certain asymmetry between the technical object as “symbol,” on one hand, and as “support,” on the other. For whereas the symbolic di-mension of the technical object correlates with its operation in bio-psychic individuation—it expresses the pre-individual charge in a static form (as the subject)—its function as support for transindividuation is dynamic in the sense that it reindividuates the larger human-implicating individua-tion. That is why Barthélémy can argue that “to pass from the idea of the technical object as ‘symbol’ to that of the technical object as ‘support’ is to conceive that the technical object, insofar as it receives the pre-individual share of the ‘subject,’ is also and reciprocally what lets the ‘subject’ attain transindividual individuation in its distinction from the pre-individual” (2009, 85). On this reading, the technical object supports the operation of transindividuation specifically by deploying its own symbolic content—its expression of the pre-individual share attached to the subject—in the service of a new individuation which, as I have suggested, disperses that share into a non-subjective subjectivity.

At several points in my discussion thus far, I have hinted at certain updatings necessary to bring Simondon’s account into line with the real-ity of contemporary media culture. Let me now consider directly how Simondon’s account of transindividuation, insofar as it depends on a certain correlation with technics, can help us appreciate the experiential situation presented by contemporary developments in computational technics which, as I have argued elsewhere, have occasioned a paradigm shift in how media impact human experience. Most crucial for Simondon’s relevance here is the conjunction of psychic disindividualization and transindividuation in the figure of the technical object: because he locates technics within a human-implicating (though, to be sure, not necessarily a human-centered) individuation, Simondon’s account is uniquely capable of accounting for both the technical transformation at issue in the compu-



tational revolution and for the experiential situation that is inseparable from it. To put this even more bluntly, in Simondon’s ontology of individu-ation, the very same operation—technical distribution—generates both psychic disindividualization (at the level of bio-psychic individuation) and transindividuation proper. This is why I have stated more than once that technics not only facilitates transindividuation, but in fact it makes it necessary: transindividuation is a dimension of human-implicating individuation that correlates with the contemporary phase of technical development characterized by the technical distribution of sensibility.

To address the specificity of twenty-first-century media, and, in particular, the increasingly prominent operation of media at levels of experience that remain inaccessible to perceptual consciousness, we must reconceptualize the coupling of human and technics beyond the figure of the “technical object.” In the wake of computational technologies that distribute sensibility beyond consciousness, the correlation between human-implicating individuation and technics has moved beyond what we might think of as its objective stage—a stage which, as I have argued elsewhere and in relation specifically to Stiegler’s work, is characterized by a temporal synchronization between consciousness and technical object—and has entered a properly processual stage in which technics directly intensifies sub-perceptual dimensions of human experience and thus comes to mediate forms of transindividuation which, by maximizing the potential of the pre-individual, transform the very being of the human.

By specifying that technics (rather than the technical object) func-tions as the support for psychic disindividualization, I mean quite liter-ally that technics intensifies human individuation by opening it up to elements of sensory experience—or, better, of worldly sensibility—that remain inaccessible to higher-order, object-centered sense perception and conscious experience. This argument lies at the heart of my current work on twenty-first-century media, in which I deploy a broadly Whiteheadian ontology to describe the technical intensification of experience underway in our world today. Rather than rehearsing this general argument here, let me simply try to pinpoint the crucial contribution that Simondon’s ontol-ogy makes to it, or more specifically, how Simondon’s double-valenced account of human-implicating individuation—as correlated simultane-ously with an actualized, associated milieu and with a pre-individual domain of potentiality, and as a conjunction of bio-psychic individua-tion and transindividuation—can help us understand something that is also at work in Whitehead, though perhaps in less explicit terms. This is the capacity of human-implicating individuation to encompass both sub-perceptual, “microscale” experience of worldly sensibility and, at the same time, properly perceptual, “macroscale” experience, without

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either reducing the former to the latter or, alternatively, dismissing the latter as merely epiphenomenal. More clearly than Whitehead’s ontology of actual entitites (at least on its orthodox reading), Simondon’s ontology of individuation embraces the seeming paradox of a process of individu-ation encompassing both bio-psychical individuation and transindividual individuation—which is to say, two distinct forms of individuation, one of which is centered on the bio-psychical individual and its actualized coupling to an associated milieu, and another that emerges from the sub-individual, technically-supported impact of worldly sensibility operating as “pure potentiality” for collective individuations rooted in some shared element of pre-individual reality.

Beyond its crucial role in introducing technics into the discussion of individuation, Simondon’s ontology helps to clarify the crucial role potentiality plays in the paradigm of twenty-first-century media beyond, and to some extent against, Whitehead’s account. This clarifying func-tion stems directly from Simondon’s critical stance on actualism and his consequent—and unequivocal—embrace of potentiality. As philosopher Miguel de Beistegui explains, this stance allows Simondon “to privilege the relationality of being, as opposed to its identity, and its potentiality, as opposed to its actuality” (118). The crux of Simondon’s position, as de Beistegui properly characterizes it, concerns the ongoing role potential-ity plays in individuation—or, put another way, the longterm coupling between pre-individual potentiality and individuated actuality in the unfolding of any individuation. Simondon, de Beistegui continues,

envisages the individual on the basis of a horizon of problematicity, and as a solution to a pre-individual problem: it is a “mode of resolving an initial incompatibility that is rich in potentials” and the last phase of a “tense, oversaturated phenomenon, above the level of unity.” The pre-individual horizon or stratum is thus defined in terms of an incompatibility, an imbalance between potentials of energy, from which the constitution of an individual emerges progressively. The individu-ated individual emerges as the solution to a problem that is itself of a different nature. Let me emphasize that the individual always retains its pre-individual reality, even when fully individuated, and that its individuation does not exhaust all of its potentials at once. (119)

De Beistegui here pinpoints what is most significant about Simondon’s account of individuation: namely, that it is a solution to a problem at a different level, a resolution of a metastability, that does not simply close off that level or source of metastability, but that preserves an open and ongo-ing connection with it. In this respect, every individuation is a balancing act of sorts between a pre-individual, worldly potentiality that exceeds any specific individuation it may energize and a continuously reiterated process through which that potentiality is channeled and actualized.



As I see it, this formulation of the double-valenced operationality of individuation captures more clearly than does Whitehead’s ontology of actual entities (at least as understood by his critical orthodoxy) something about the way we experience twenty-first-century media which—and this is the key point—exerts its impact in large part by affecting the domain of potentiality directly, prior to and in some important sense autonomously from any actualization of that potentiality. The crucial point here is that media impacts human experience indirectly, through its contribution to the contrastive potentiality of the settled world of attained actualities that constitutes the “real potentiality” for future concrescences or subjective becomings.7

One important consequence of this understanding concerns the status of subjectivity in relation to media, and what Whitehead helps to show, aided by some key interpreters, is that media, by impacting the contrastive potentiality of the world, informs the operation of intensity which is, for philosopher Judith Jones (and I wholeheartedly concur) simply equivalent with—which simply is—the subject, though not the subject qua substance. “Intensive achievement,” Jones concludes, “is the formed agency of contrastive feeling. … The agency of contrast is the subject, the subject is the agency of contrast. To be a subject is to be a provoked instance of the agency of contrast, and that is all it is” (Jones, 130-31). What is crucial about this operation of intensity—of the subject as agency of contrast—is that it gives rise to a form of actuality which, unlike Whitehead’s canonical account of the concrescence (or subjective becoming) of actual entities, does not adhere to the narrow understand-ing of actuality as self-creating and thus does not stand in opposition to potentiality. Intensity, rather, is a form of actuality that emerges directly from potentiality in a manner not dissimilar to the emergence of individu-ation as the resolution of a pre-individual metastability.

On this front, we would have to question—or at least to temper—the conclusions to which Didier Debaise comes in his account of Whitehead’s differences from Simondon. Specifically, the operation of intensity must be understood as contributing to the domain of potentiality; as Jones puts it, “wherever the contrasts achieved by an individual are reiterated in another individual, the original individual is there in the agentive sense”8

As such, intensity institutes a certain continuity, a vibratory coupling, between potentiality and actuality. On the basis of this continuity, we can posit a convergence where Debaise sees only stark difference. To see why, let us consider Debaise’s conclusion:

Whitehead does not have, as Simondon does, any desire to “go beyond” the individual towards nature. Nature is not, in Process and Reality, what explains, this source of the possible, but what must be explained; it is

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not “pre-individual,” but manufactured, constructed, on the basis of a multiplicity of individual beings [êtres-individuels]. One could say that Whitehead tries to recover a thinking of individuation that, in its refusal of the classical notion of the individual, is quite close in its intention to that of Simondon, but that is however organized entirely around an overhaul of the concept of the individual. His ambition is to construct a veritable thinking of individuation that, however, would no longer be rooted in a reality … that would possess a chronological or ontological anteriority in relation to the individual and to which this latter could be reduced. (65)

I cite this passage from Debaise not only to contextualize my claim con-cerning intensity, but because it helps us to grasp how Whitehead and Simondon mutually illuminate one another.

Thus, under the pressure of Debaise’s indictment of Simondon for reducing the individual to nature qua abstract anterior reality, we are emboldened to consider how the “promiscuity” of intensity—its con-tinued operation in subsequent individuations—lends a concreteness or measure of determination to the pre-individual domain of potentiality. In a manner that is analogous to how eternal objects must be coupled with actualizations, and thus come to determine a “real” (as opposed to a “pure”) potentiality in Whitehead, the pre-individual is thus qualified by the very individuations it energizes and that contribute to the way that its (pre-individual) potentiality can inform future individuations. Such qualification allows us to historicize the pre-individual domain, and, at the limit, to correlate its contemporary operation with technical processes that qualify how the pre-individual (or nature) informs actual experience.

And, on the flipside, Simondon’s account of potentiality poses a challenge to Whitehead—a challenge that becomes unavoidable once we introduce intensity and move beyond any stark opposition between the actual and the potential. This challenge forces us to take seriously the way that the attained actualities composing Whitehead’s “real potentiality” operate as a pre-individual domain motivating subsequent actualizations. In the wake of those revisionary readings of Whitehead (most notably the readings of Jones and of Jorge Luis Nobo) that emphasize the ontologi-cal power of attained actualities, we can no longer lend near-exclusive privilege to the concrescent phase that produces new actual entities (or actualities in attainment), as Whitehead and the vast majority of his in-terpreters do.

Rather, what the revisonary position entails, as I have already suggested, is a radically environmental perspective on becoming, one in which the power of superjects (former concrescent actualities that have become part of the settled world) operates alongside the power of subjective concrescences, and indeed, forms something like a source of potentiality for the latter.9 The key point here is that the settled world of



attained actualities—the world of actualities that have been concretely determined by eternal objects (which have themselves become actual in some sense)—comprises a universe whose total causal efficacy exceeds any particular actualization that might arise on its basis. This is the do-main of “real potentiality” and it functions, or so I want to suggest, as a pre-individual or metastable domain for future actualizations; indeed, like Simondon’s pre-individual metastability, this total causal efficacy harbors forces that are in tension and that can only be resolved through new actualities which, following their genesis, are added back into the total causal nexus of metastable attained actualities.

Full exploration of the resonance between Simondon’s and White-head’s ontologies would require us to consider the function of nexuses and societies—groupings of actual entities that endure as groupings. It is these experiential entities (and not actual entities in themselves) that most closely approximate Simondonian individuations: insofar as they remain open to the broader domain of causal efficacy despite their common causal heritage, such enduring experiential entities are, like Simondonian indi-viduations, energized by the power of potentiality—the real potentiality of attained actualities operating as a pre-individual metastability. Yet because Simondon postulates a double-valenced relationality, according to which a given individuation remains open to and draws upon two distinct sources of potentiality—an actualized “associated milieu” and the metastable pre-individual domain itself—his conception of individuation is able to encompass an entire realm of experience for which Whitehead’s ontology seemingly makes no provision: namely, the causal interaction between relatively-integrated and more diffuse elements of an ongoing individuation. Put another way, Simondon’s theory, precisely because it locates the individual within—and thus foregrounds its incompleteness in relation to—distinct domains of potentiality, is able to grant the individual the status of a complexly enduring entity without rendering it a substance or closing off its openness to a pre-individual source of potentiality that it cannot be said to “manufacture” or to “construct” (as Debaise, here following Isabelle Stengers, would have it10).

To capitalize fully on this theoretical advantage, we must modify Simondon’s account of transindividuation in a way that I have already mentioned more than once, and that parallels our above updating of his understanding of technics. Thus, just as the technical object had to make way for technical processes that operate through far more complex im-brications with human activity, so too must the element of individuation that is liberated by psychic disindividualization—what Simondon simply, if problematically, calls the “subject”—be made to assume the full extent of its imbrication within the domain of potentiality. The crucial point

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at issue here concerns the “source” for transindividuation: accordingly, while transindividuation is instigated by technical distribution, it occurs in virtue of —and to the benefit of—a subjectivity that cannot be tied narrowly to the figure of the subject (or any other element of an already partially realized bio-psychical individuation), but arises from multiple sources of potentiality at various levels of the virtual-actual continuum. Thus, transindividuation befalls individuation—and modifies concrete bio-psychic individuations—from the worldly outside: it results when an already-underway, yet fundamentally incomplete and thus open bio-psychic individuation encounters a less integrated and less centripetally-unified subjectivity emanating directly from the contrasts or tensions within worldly sensibility. Thus, not only is the “subject” resolutely not a faculty of the individual (indeed, for Simondon, it is precisely what acts in the place of the individual), it is not a faculty at all. It is, rather, a power—the power of intensity or the agency of contrast—that is manifest wherever the domain of potentiality impinges on the future-oriented present. Transindividuation results from this subjective power insofar as it is infused directly into the real potentiality for becoming: it is produced by a force—the force of intensity—that emerges, as a resolution of sorts, directly out of encounters among elements of worldly sensibility.

If twenty-first-century media harbors an affinity with transindi-viduation, it is not simply because of its predominant social dimension, the potential for collective organization and sharing that has caused it to be dubbed, in one of its avatars, “social media.” More fundamentally, it is because today’s media are able to access—and routinely operate by accessing—dimensions of our experience, of our open and ongoing in-dividuation, that lie beneath the personal or individual level. This fact is absolutely crucial for appreciating the specificity of twenty-first-century media. Rather than furnishing a recorded surrogate for that experience, as nineteenth- and twentieth-century recording media certainly did, twenty-first-century media exercises its force by influencing how experience occurs. Rather than intervening at the level of memory itself, twenty-first-century media impacts the distinct and quasi-autonomous microagencies that underlie memory’s integrated function, as well as other environmental dimensions that bear on that function. In a world increasingly supported by twenty-first-century media, the direct impact of media on human experience is thus massively overshadowed by its indirect impact; ac-cordingly, instead of furnishing prostheses that expand experiential capacities beyond the various inbuilt limits of our sense organs and memory, today’s media directly impact the very sensible continuum, the source of potentiality, from which delimited, agent- or faculty- centered, higher-order experience springs.



What I am calling twenty-first-century media—the host of contem-porary technologies that record and analyze data beyond the reach of our human sensory apparatus—can best be characterized by way of the fundamental shift in their address to experience. Put bluntly, today’s media no longer target human subjectivity as such (perceptual consciousness) but rather aim directly to target the non-subjective subjectivity at issue in worldly microsensibility. This shift in the address of media’s targeting is precisely why media’s determination of the pre-individual domain is such a crucial political issue for us today. For if it is the case that the pre-individual is not some abstract domain of nature, but is a source of “real potentiality” that is continuously being informed and reshaped by the actualizations or individuations to which it gives rise, then the question of its determination by media is nothing less than the question of the determination of the future.

In this respect, Stiegler is absolutely right to claim that the pre-individual is a thoroughly technical domain, even if he is mistaken in characterizing it in terms of the category of “tertiary memory.”11 (Tertiary memories are industrially-produced experiences which, though never lived by consciousness, could have been lived by consciousness; insofar as they form the predominant source of secondary memory in our world today, vastly eclipsing personal experience, as Stiegler suggests they do, they also form the basis for—and severely constrain—the anticipation of the future.) Against this characterization, but in line with Stiegler’s fun-damental insight concerning the technicity of the pre-individual, I would suggest that twenty-first-century media directly engineers the potentiality of the pre-individual, and thus comes to impact ongoing and future indi-viduations not as a repository of content to be drawn on as an immediate source for consciousness’s imagining of a viable future, but rather as a far more diffuse, multi-scalar and heterogeneous subjective power—in-tensity—that operates across all dimensions of the total causal situation and predetermines the future (where “predetermines” has the positive sense of enabling or facilitating) not just through the imaginings of a phe-nomenological subject, but in a whole host of materially-consequential, causally efficacious, and non-subjectively subjective ways.

Duke University

Notes1. Mark Hansen, “System-Environment Hybrids,” in Bruce Clarke and Mark Hansen, Emer-

gence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second Order Cybernetics (Durham: Duke UP, 2009).2. For example, in the work of Donald Norman. In particular, see Norman, The Invisible

Computer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 123-6.

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3. “In order for the relation of being to being to be possible, an individuation is necessary that envelops the beings between which the relation exists: that assumes that there exists in individuated beings a certain indeterminate charge, which is to say a charge of pre-individual reality that has passed across the operation of individuation without being effectively individuated. One can call this indeterminate charge nature. We must not conceive it as pure virtuality (which would be an abstract notion stemming in a certain sense from the hylemorphic schema), but as true reality charged with potentials that are actually existing as potentials, which is to say, as energy of a metastable system. The no-tion of virtuality must be replaced by that of metastability of a system.” (L’Individuation, 313)

4. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: the Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1995).

5. The question of this absence of the aesthetic in Simondon was the topic of Duhem’s talk at the Conference on Gilbert Simondon, held at the American University in Paris, May 2010. See also Ludovic Duhem, “La tache aveugle et le point seutre (Sur le double ‘faux départ’ de l’esthétique de Simondon),” in Cahiers Simondon, Numéro 1 (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Paris-Nord, 2009), 115-34.

6. Barthélémy argues that Stiegler “radicalizes and definitely modifies one of the major theses by means of which Simondon became famous as a thinker of technics. In effect, whereas Simondon made the technical object the ‘support’ of a human relation which was a ‘model of transindividuality,’ Stiegler claims that the artifact in general is the foundation of all transindividuality. In other words, no transindividual regime of individuation without a world of artifacts…” (“Penser après Simondon et par-delà Deleuze,” Cahiers Simondon, Numèro 2 [Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Paris-Nord, 2010], 135.

7. My current work explores how Whitehead’s conception of the extensive continuum as a primordially sensible or vibratory continuum furnishes the basis for conceptualizing the impact of twenty-first century media on and through potentiality.

8. “The pattern involved in an intense contrast is more than a mere arrangement of eternal objects. It is the feeling of the dynamic presence of the (other) individuals felt into the unity of a subject’s intensity. This is the only way to understand Whitehead’s repeated assertion of the vibratory character of actuality. No vibratory character has only one cycle qua that vibratory character – to be a vibratory character is to be an intensive imposition on all subsequent process, and, on the other end, to have emerged from the enduring vibrations of other insistent agencies of contrast. I see no other way of understanding why provision for fuure intensity is included in the category respecting ‘subjective’ concrescence” (Jones, 130-1).

9. This is the position of Nobo who argues for a “dative phase” in which former actualities which are now part of the settled world (what he, following Whitehead, calls attained actualities) are given for a new concrescence that, at this stage in the game, is still to come. See, Jorge Luis Nobo. Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 1986).

10 See Debaise, 65; this constructive account of Whitehead informs Stengers’ encyclopedic study of Whitehead, Penser avec Whitehead : Une libre et sauvage création de concepts (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

11. Stiegler develops his reading of Simondon, which he acknowledges to be a strong reading in Harold Bloom’s sense, in the third volume of Technics and Time (2001). The crucial argument of this reading – and the one to which I object – is the treatment of the preinvidividual as the repository of tertiary memories. As I see it, whatever the merits of Stiegler’s move here, and one is, as mentioned, the revelation that the pre-individual is technical, this identification jettisons the general energetics of Simondon’s work and the ways in which the pre-individual is a metastable potentiality, a potentiality involving tensions between levels of being.



Works CitedBarthélémy, Jean-Hugues. “Du Mort qui saisit le vif: Sur l’actualité de l’ontologie simondo-

nienne,” Cahiers Simondon, Numéro 1, 2009.——. Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2005.Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: the Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904). Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1995.Chateau, Jean-Yves. Le Vocabulaire de Simondon. Paris: Ellipses Éditions, 2008.Debaise, Didier. Un Empiricism spéculatif: Lecture de Procès et réalité de Whitehead. Paris:

Vrin, 2006.de Beistegui, Miguel. “Science and Ontology,” Angelaki 10:2 (August 2005): 109-22.Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Le Mouvement de toute chose,” in Mouvements de l’air: Étienne-

Jules Marey, photographe des fluides, eds. G. Didi-Huberman and L. Mannoni. Paris: Gal-limard, 2004.

Jones, Judith. Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998.

Latour, Bruno. “Is Re-Modernization Occurring – And If So, How to Prove It?: A Commentary on Ulrich Beck,” Theory, Culture and Society 20.2 (2003): 35-48.

Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2009.Oyama, Susan. Evolution’s Eye. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.——. “Friends, Neighbors, and Boundaries,” Ecological Psychology 21 (2009): 147-54.——. “Locating Development: Locating Developmental Systems,” in K.K. Schonik, K.

Nelson, S.A. Gelman, and P,H, Miller (eds.), Conceptual Development: Piaget’s Legacy. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999: 185-208.

——. The Ontogeny of Information. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000 [1985]).Simondon, Gilbert. Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier, 1989.——. L’Individuation á la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Paris: Éditions Jérôme

Millon, 2005.——. “Technical Individualization.” Trans. Karen Ocana in Interact or Die! There is Drama in

the Networks. Amsterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007.Snyder, Joel. “Visualization and Visibility,” in C. Jones and P. Galison, eds. Picturing Science,

Producing Art. New York: Routledge, 1998.Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, vol 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth

and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.



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Individuation and Knowledge: The “refutation of idealism” in Simondon’s Heritage in France

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy

1. The “double fundamental problem” in Stiegler’s relation to Simondon

In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s book Technics and Time. Stiegler is internationally known as the inheritor of another French philosopher whose work is currently being rediscovered worldwide: Gilbert Simondon. In Stiegler’s work, this Simondonian heritage plays itself out in the domain of continental phi-losophy. The thesis maintained here will be the following: there is another relation to Simondon that is possible, one that also takes up the major problems we’ve inherited from the continental philosophical tradition.

The double fundamental philosophical problem raised in Stiegler’s debate with Simondon is the following:

A) On the one hand, how are we to interpret Simondon’s most fundamental thought, namely his thesis that knowledge of individua-tion is itself the individuation of knowledge? This thesis is the properly Simondonian way of “overcoming” [dépassement] the opposition between subject and object. This overcoming is, of course, something that has been sought after by all the great continental thinkers from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to the six proposed volumes of Stiegler’s Technics and Time.1 This follows a trajectory that also passes through Fichte, Husserl, and then Heidegger/Derrida, but also through Schelling, Bergson and Simondon/Deleuze.2 Stiegler’s most fundamental thought develops the encounter between Heidegger and Simondon. The opposition between subject and object, whose overcoming is sought by continental philosophy (which is always in search of itself in its difference from science) is the definitive ground of all the classical oppositions we need to subvert, oppositions initially combated by Kant: between empiricism and innateness, idealism and realism, dogmatism and skepticism. In posing his fundamental thesis about knowledge of individuation as the individuation of knowledge, Simondon has proposed a new way of overcoming the subject/object opposition whose interpretation will turn out to be problematic.


61Simondon and Stiegler on Individuation and Knowledge

B) On the other hand—and this is the second fundamental problem raised by Stiegler in his debate with Simondon—what is the status of the reality that Simondon calls “pre-individual”? What is the status of this reality from which all individuation proceeds, and whose existence Simondon hypothesizes in order to make sense of the genesis of each individual—physical, vital or psycho-social? I will show that there is an intimate connection between this second fundamental philosophi-cal problem and the first, and that this is why Stiegler is in debate with Simondon on two aspects of what, in the end, will turn out to be what I call “the double fundamental philosophical problem.”

But before we get to that, the first part of this essay will recall some of the general trends in Simondon’s thought that seem in need of defense and development.

2. Overview of Simondon’s main propositions In Simondon, the absolutely central notion of individuation does

not refer to a differentiating individualization—as is the case with Jung, in whose theoretical work individuation is a central notion as well—but rather to a physical, vital, or psycho-social genesis. One should also re-member that this latter “regime of individuation,” to borrow Simondon’s phrase, is also called the “transindividual” when it is a question of fore-grounding the fact that the “collective” is “taken as axiomatic in resolving the psychic problem” (L’Individuation psychique, 22). The technical object is defined in Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques as “the support and the symbol of that relation that we would like to call ‘transindividual’. … Serving as intermediary, the technical object thus creates an inter-human relation that is the model of transindividuality” (247-248). We are there-fore talking about a genetic ontology in Simondon—genetic in the sense of genesis—placed in the service of a new Encyclopedism3 that revolves around the two main propositions.

The first is that Simondon wants to unify the sciences in order to then refound the human sciences more specifically on the basis of the continu-ity between vital individuation and psycho-social individuation. Through this, he can begin to theorize on the far side of the artificial separation between psychology and sociology about whether the “purely psychic” and the “purely social” are merely “limit-cases,” as Simondon puts it, of a specter that is crucially and indissociably psycho-social.

Second, it is a question of showing how technics is essential to culture. This task cannot be accomplished unless we understand that the psycho-physiological alienation favored by the becoming-industrial of culture and labor is not caused by technics itself, but by a bad coupling of man and machine, with the meaning of the latter having been misun-



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derstood. Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques makes this goal clear from the get-go when it announces that the goal of the book is to make the reader “become conscious” of this proper “meaning.”4

We can assume that Simondon will not be able to reconcile culture and technics (his second goal) unless he also reconciles technics with nature, and culture with nature. This is the architectonic point of his philosophical engagement. He is attempting to think becoming technical as an extension of a broader process of becoming that is the process of individuation of natural beings. A concluding passage from Simondon’s 1965-1966 course titled Imagination et Invention (published in 2008) formu-lates in its own way the conception I would like to defend:

A created object is not a materialized image posed arbitrarily in the world like an object among other objects, one that overlays nature with a supplement of artifice. It is, in its origin, and remains, in its function, a system for coupling the living being with its milieu, a double point at which the subjective and objective worlds communicate. In social species, this point is threefold because it also becomes a path for rela-tions among individuals, organizing their reciprocal functions. In these cases, the threefold point is also a social organizer. (186)

In this passage, we see the idea—already present in the work of Canguilhem and Leroi-Gourhan (and before them Ernst Kapp and Alfred Espinas)—that the artifact extends the relationship of the living organism with its milieu. Simondon uses the example of the bird’s nest to explain this. But the passage just cited adds another thesis: in “social species,” the artifact also serves to mediate between the individual and the col-lective because it organizes the “reciprocal functions” of the individuals according to Simondon. In his work, this merely means that artifacts are “social organizers”; hence it is difficult to exclude insects and their arti-facts—such as a wasp’s nest—from the thesis, and reserve it for humanity alone. However, Simondon already remarks in his book L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information that the “purely social” aspect of insects is “vital unity at its most basic level” while the “real collective” is a “transindividuality” whose reality is psycho-social and not “purely social.”5 The individual constructs itself therein as a psychism, through social relations.

Therefore, only primates and (to an even greater degree) humans provide examples of societies that have developed without damaging the individuality of individuals. Instead, they have done so as the very condi-tion of this individuality, which as a result is able to achieve a complexity Simondon calls “personality.” The latter certainly seems to be a paradoxi-cal reality: in it, the maximum of individuality is also the inseparability of the psychic and the social. However, this needs to be understood as an



application of Simondon’s doctrine of “the realism of relations,” which claims that relations produce being, and that individuality is augmented through the multiplication (via unfolding) of the relation. Simondon is thus at the same time anti-substantialist—because the individual is relation, not “substance”—and anti-reductionist—since the process of individua-tion reinforces individuality by multiplying relations as it passes from the physical to the vital to the psycho-social realm of individuation.

More generally, the paradoxical character of Simondon’s thought is thus what allows him to subvert the classical alternatives in the Western philosophical tradition. These paradoxes are not contradictions since, in-sofar as it describes processes of individuation, Simondon’s entire genetic ontology rests upon what he calls the “hypothesis of the preindividual.” Pre-individual reality is postulated as being “more than unity,” which is not the same as a dialectical “non-unity.6 For Simondon, the contradic-tions claimed by dialectic thought cannot be resolved; in this, they differ from paradoxes, which only doxa takes to be insurmountable. As for the “hypothesis” of the preindividual, it is fundamentally substantiated by the “more than unity” of the microphysical reality of which each thing is composed—the famous wave-particle duality of quantum physics, whose role in Simondon’s thought I will soon clarify.

But let’s return for now to the connection between nature and culture via technics. Because the artifact for Simondon is a “social organizer” among social species in general, we know that among primates (and even more so among humans) the artifact becomes the “prosthesis” (as Simondon writes at the beginning of his 1965-1966 course) that acts as the intermediary through which the social will nourish the psychic. As is well known, his thesis regarding the construction of the psycho-social on the basis of artifacts has today been radicalized by Bernard Stiegler. In his work, Stiegler has extended the thought of both Simondon and Leroi-Gourhan by arguing that the artifact is the “crutch of the mind” acting as an “exteriorization of memory” that paradoxically makes possible the construction of interiority itself, insofar as the psychic is nourished by the social via the artifact. (Stiegler, Technics and Time vol. 1). We must grant this particular point to Stiegler; in my view, he thus formulates the conditions according to which culture extends nature via technics.

Thanks to Simondon’s theoretical intuitions and anticipations, we are no longer able to ignore the advances of scientific disciplines like ethology, a discipline he held in high esteem. Ethology studies animal behavior in order to discover the cultural and technical dimension of “natural forms of life” such as the forms of life of the great apes, who are first of all bio-psychic individuals, but whose psychism is nourished by the collective,



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and produces artifacts. Following Simondon, I therefore deny the discon-nection he calls “anthropological”—the essentialist disconnect between the living and the human being, because I do not believe (unlike others throughout the history of Western philosophy) that “reason is innate and proper to the human being.” Nor do I believe that human beings have a “psychic” or on the contrary a “social” essence, points that can be found even in Freud and Marx..7 Rather, I believe in the biological potential of the human being—a potential that must be actualized in a form that is crucially and indissociably psycho-social, with the “purely psychic” and “purely social” being mere limit-cases.

By denying the anthropological disconnection, I also deny the reduc-tion (likewise anthropological) of technics into a simple set of means to be used by human beings. This anthropological reduction (overcome today) consisted of not seeing technics as a cultural finality capable of changing the human being; instead, the reality of technics was only considered within the narrow frame of human labor—and in such a way that the human being was considered a given. I must stress here the connection between these two objections: the refusal to divide culture from nature, on the one hand, and, on the other, the refusal to divide technics from culture. For this connection comes about through the refusal, which is always there in Simondon’s case, of a third opposition: that between technics and nature. To make the connection between these three refusals of traditional oppositions more precise, and as a way to take up again these refusals in the order in which they have been explained, let us say the following: to think the continuity between nature and culture need not lead us to place technics outside of culture, as if it were “anti-natural” and thus an obstacle to the continuity between nature and culture. Technics is not an obstacle, but precisely that which prolongs nature and opens it to culture. This is also why those who, like Simondon, want to reconcile culture and technics should not presuppose that technics and culture somehow find each other in their opposition to nature. Simondon himself has already pondered the difficult, simultaneous overcoming of the three oppositions of nature/culture, nature/technics, and culture/technics. Indeed, in order to fundamentally reconcile culture and technics, Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques has made the first steps towards their common reconcili-ation with nature.

Therefore, I believe in the possibility of deriving culture from nature via technics. This powerful thesis rests on a broader assumption, which addresses less than the thesis, but whose validity I should nevertheless discuss and defend. If we want to derive culture from nature via technics, we must assume that nature is anterior to technics and to culture. Such an assumption, as evident as it seems, must today be argued rather than dogmatically admitted.



3. The debate with Stiegler on the status of the “preindividual”: From the philosophical problem of the “refutation of idealism” to the epistemological problem of interpretation in quantum physics

Today, more than ever before, one could indeed raise the following objection to what I have presented: namely, that everything that can be said about nature is the result of a technically conditioned culture. This is notably so in the physical and biological sciences, where nothing can be said about nature unless it is based upon technologically produced experimental verifications whose interface is, furthermore, a mathematical instrument. I think, and I would like to explain here, that this objection is definitively the true ground—even though it has remained implicit—of Stiegler’s discourse on the “preindividual” as something that is “always already technical.” Remember that the preindividual is that from which all individuation proceeds. Yet, Stiegler offers an argument according to which the preindividual is itself constitutively techno-logical and is ceaselessly technologically reconfigured.

In Stiegler’s thought, this thesis is presented as radical because it is outlined not just in its “weak” version, but also its “strong” version. For him, it is not just about affirming—and this would be the “weak” version of his thesis—that technics plays the role of preindividual that makes possible the passage from vital individuation to transindividual individu-ation. In Simondon, this passage is enabled by a “provisional emotional disindividuation,” whereas technics is, for its part, a “phase” of culture at the same time that it is the “support” for a relation that is a “model of transindividuality.”8 Furthermore, in connection with this first point (the “weak” version of the thesis) it is worth noting that Stiegler relies for this on an ambiguity in Simondon’s thought: Simondon envisages different forms of preindividuality at each stage of the process of individuation; moreover, he occasionally calls the trans-individual itself “non structured,” assimilating it on these occasions with the pre-individual.9 We understand that, since for Stiegler the transindividual realm is prosthetically founded, the equivalence between the transindividual and the pre-individual, even if it shows up only occasionally in Simondon, furnishes the pretext for thinking the preindividual as constitutively technological.

However, the root of this debate seems to lie elsewhere because, as I already noted, Stiegler’s thesis is much more radical. He wants to ar-gue—and this is the “strong” version of his thesis—that the preindividual source of nature, whether it be vital or even physical, is itself ceaselessly reconfigured by technics through the becoming metastable of technics itself. The core of the argument is, therefore, that it is not just a question of the inseparability of different levels of individuation, but also of Stiegler’s reduction of the pre-individual to the techno-scientific mode of knowledge



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that one can have of it. As Stiegler says in an unpublished interview with Thierry Bardini, nature “does not exist” because it is “constructed.”

This reduction of the preindividual to its techno-scientific mode of knowledge should not be denounced ipso facto as confused, because it takes its argument from Simondon himself. On the one hand, given that knowledge of individuation is also the individuation of knowledge, we would no longer be able to oppose the subject and object, in such a way that the mode of knowledge and that which is known are no longer dis-tinguishable a priori. On the other hand, the preindividual is that which only possesses indirect indications of presence—indications that are justly furnished by quantum physics, which has put forward the revolu-tionary argument about a quantum of action: here, there are no objects without interaction. Instead, we get a technological interaction between a measuring apparatus and a measured object. In this sense, the source of Stiegler’s thesis is based on a theory of knowledge, even if this source remains entirely implicit in his work.

Where does this lead us if we take this source for Stiegler’s argument seriously? I do not believe in the thesis that the preindividual is “consti-tutively technological,” even though I agree that the quantum of action in quantum physics demands a profound phenomeno-technical rethinking of the theory of knowledge.10 The problem with Stiegler’s thesis, in my view, is its treatment of the famous issue of the refutation of idealism—a problem that has, since Kant, accompanied the greatest thinkers in the continental tradition in their attempts to overcome the fundamental op-position between subject and object. We might very well admit that the trans-individual is prosthetically based, and that this prosthetic base (which Stiegler calls the “third strand” of psychic and collective indi-viduation) is characterized by a metastability. We might even seriously consider that this prosthetic base of the transindividual plays the same role as the vital potential—which is in fact pre-vital and even pre-physical, but carried by the living being. But such a constitutively technological preindividual will not allow us to truly find the world again unless it is itself derived from a history of the living being.

This is not to say that the preindividual as such is derivative. How-ever, to the extent that it would be carried by technical becoming, it would have to have been carried first by living beings, up to the prosthetic be-ing that is the psycho-social human individual. At one point in the first volume of Technics and Time, Stiegler seems to offer this derivation of the human being from the living in connection with the work of Leroi-Gourhan. However, in the third volume he argues that the refutation of idealism rests exclusively on the external presence of the prostheses of human consciousness.



The problem of the refutation of idealism was born in the Critique of Pure Reason where Kant calls attention to the “scandal” that philoso-phers had yet to provide evidence, beyond all idealist temptation, that the world existed.11 Heidegger would later respond in section 43 of Be-ing and Time that the true scandal is that we demand a demonstration of the existence of the world since the world is always already given, if we truly understand our “being-in-the-world” that is Dasein. Stiegler, for his part, reproaches Heidegger in the third volume of Technics and Time for not having seen that this being-in-the-world by which the very question of needing to refute idealism is dissolved, is constituted by the “pros-theses” as the constitutive exteriority of the who—the “who” in Stiegler being what Heidegger called Dasein.12 In other words, Stiegler—and this is the force of his argument—reproaches Heidegger for not having seen the true reason why the question of the refutation of idealism is indeed resolved: if the world is always already given, it is because I am unable to have consciousness of myself except thanks to those “crutches of the mind” that are there outside of me.

In fact, behind this reproach to Heidegger there is a common problem in the refutation of idealism that forces Stiegler to share with Heidegger the thesis that, by virtue of the being-in-the-world that is the only way of resolving the refutation of idealism, one must start with the “who.” In Stiegler’s thought, it is the relationship between the “who” and the “what” (the prosthesis) that is the starting point. Through this Stieglerian optic, the living being cannot be thought philosophically except through privation, starting from this “who” that is prosthetically based. This thesis of the secondarity of the ontological thematization of the living being in relation to the thinking of the “who” is more or less Heidegger’s thesis presented in section 10 of Being and Time. This explains why Stiegler does not identify his “ontological” thought with classic ontology. Elsewhere, he refuses the Heideggerian idea of “fundamental ontology” because the Heidegger who is important for Stiegler is the first Heidegger, the one of Sein und Zeit, who constructs an existential analytic but not yet a fundamental ontology.

Certainly, in his preface to the second edition of Simondon’s L’individuation psychique et collective, Stiegler applies the idea of an exit from ontology to Simondon himself, in the sense that ontology is under-stood as the objectifying description of a state, whereas in Simondon, ontogenesis is the individuating description of a process of individuation. But Stiegler intends to differentiate himself from Simondon and fully to accomplish this exit from ontology in his own work, in the sense that for Stiegler the knowledge of individuation is not truly the individuation of knowledge, unless one thinks this process of individuation from where it



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has led us. This is why Stiegler only wants to think of the psycho-socio-technical becoming at the present point [suivant son actualité]. This how we arrive at Stiegler’s conviction—never written, but often spoken and applied on a daily basis—that thinking is not relevant unless it nourishes action, and vice-versa. We can therefore understand why Stiegler has recently argued that the question of philosophy is the political question of the transindividual.

Here we come to a truly abyssal question: what exactly does the thesis that knowledge of individuation is the individuation of knowledge mean? In Simondon’s work, the thesis appears in the final lines of his in-troduction to L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, where he writes:

We cannot know individuation as it is commonly understood. We can only individuate, individuate ourselves, and individuate in us. This insight is, in the margins of what is properly called knowledge, an analogy between two operations, which is a certain mode of communication. The individuation of the reality that is exterior to the subject is grasped by the subject thanks to the analogical individuation of knowledge in the subject. But it is through the individuation of knowledge (and not by means of knowledge alone) that the individuation of non-subjective beings is known. These beings can be known through the knowledge of the subject, but the individuation of beings cannot be grasped except through the individuation of the knowledge of the subject. (36)

There is, then, in this last affirmation, and even in the proposition that precedes it, an ambiguity. Indeed, we may consider this passage to say that only the “knowledge” of individuation individuates knowledge at the same time that it comes to know. But the passage may also be saying that the knowledge of individuation consists of an analogy between subject and object based on the reflexive return of knowledge on itself; non-reflexive knowledge on the other hand also individuates knowledge, but without this reflexive return. The first reading seems closest to the passage itself, but one of its consequences is that it turns philosophical “knowledge” into a knowledge that is superior to scientific knowledge. The second reading allows us to set philosophy apart thanks to its uniquely reflexive character, and not due to its ability to individuate knowledge. We must, as I understand it, privilege this second reading because there is no other place in his work where Simondon suggests that scientific knowledge does not individuate knowledge. He merely notes that scientific knowledge thinks already individuated structures rather than genetic operations.

Stiegler’s position and philosophical practice complicate the situ-ation even further, since he implicitly proposes a third interpretation of the thesis—which he takes up in his very own way—that knowledge of individuation is individuation of knowledge. In Stiegler’s work, the



thesis turns into the idea that the knowledge of individuation—because it takes as its “object” that which is not ob-ject, but which individuates itself in the “subject” knowing itself)—must each time reflexively take into account the new prosthetic conditions of the very thought that is realized in a discourse that is from now on radically post-ontological. The entire question then becomes knowing whether the taking into account of these conditions of thought justifies the passage, which Stiegler has put into operation, to a privileged thematization—one that would always have to be started anew—of the actual becoming of the three “strands” of psycho-socio-technical becoming.

4. Quantum physics as paradigm of the philosophical knowledge of individuation

I would like to propose here a settlement between these different interpretations of the thesis that knowledge of individuation is the indi-viduation of knowledge. This settlement can be reached if we begin once more from the particularity of quantum physics. This starting point will allow us to return to the refutation of idealism, to provide a response that is new, yet compatible with the Simondonian enterprise of a gen-eral ontogenesis—one that would not make it impossible to first think nature so as to then let psycho-socio-technical individuation emerge. As noted earlier, quantum physics calls for a phenomeno-technical theory of knowledge according to which, thanks to the famous quantum of ac-tion, no object can be known without interaction between such an object and that which measures it. Rather than deduce from this that nature is only what we make of it, and that it is only the being-in-the-world of the “who” (whether prosthetic or not) that “always already” refutes idealism, I would like to insist on the following: this nature that is “produced” in laboratories is only defined by interaction, by virtue of what it is. The quantum of action is not only the minimal and unavoidable interaction between the measured object and the measuring apparatus. It is also the object itself. This does not mean that interaction would be anything more than a deformation of the object—in other words, that interaction would be a creation of the object. Rather, this means that quantum physics has access to reality such as it is at its smallest scale, where being consists of becoming—a becoming by relation. This is the truth of Simondon’s “real-ism of relations.” Following Simondon, one can thus say that quantum physics reaches the “thing in itself” because it offers the thing as the set of relations from which a “phenomenon” proceeds. In other words, if quantum physics is able to integrate into its mathematical formalism the



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interaction between the measured object and the measuring apparatus, it is because the object itself is nothing but interaction.

The consequence of this argument is important: rather than seeing in quantum physics something that would legitimize the thesis that the “preindividual” is always already technologically conditioned, it is neces-sary to recognize that in quantum physics, technics is “naturalized,” as Simondon would say, to the point of revealing the very basis of nature itself. Stiegler, who occasionally thinks the engendering of nature by tech-nics (“naturation” in his terms) can only willfully be ignoring this idea of the “naturalization” of technics. Contrary to naturation, Simondon’s “naturalization” of technics defines the point where his thinking of tech-nics opens up onto a new phenomeno-technical theory of knowledge. The naturalization of technics is, indeed, the integration of the laws of nature into technical progress.13 And if quantum physics integrates into its math-ematical formalism the interaction between the measured object and the measuring apparatus—an integration that might seem paradoxical if the formalism of physics is exclusively objective rather than reflexive—this is because the measured object is itself interaction.

From this perspective, what singularizes the quantum object is the following point: what is within it is objectified only insofar as it comes to be as interaction that is as a relation that makes the being itself through becoming. Quantum physics has a specific characteristic: it is a science of the very process of individuation insofar as it is primary and therefore the giver [donateur] of space and time (which are individuation’s “dimen-sions,” as Simondon writes). This is why, according to Simondon, the quantum duality of wave-particles is a paradigm for thinking the “more than unity” of Being “insofar as it is”—and not of being “insofar as it is individuated.” However, quantum reality is not strictly identified with the preindividual itself. Rather, it is the becoming of individuation in its relative indistinction vis-à-vis the preindividual from which this becoming proceeds. Quantum physics is the science of the real as radical genesis, or also of being as becoming.

But what distinguishes this science from philosophical knowledge of individuation, for which it yields a decisive paradigm? What distinguishes scientific knowledge of individuation from philosophical knowledge of individuation is not that the one would individuate knowledge while the other would not. Rather, it is that quantum reality reveals, without quantum physics being able to say so, the relative indistinction between the preindividual and its operation of individuation. Because it is able to speak of this relative indistinction, philosophical knowledge of indi-viduation is reflexive: it involves a process of individuation that always exceeds the very object that it is. Thus, it opens up onto the preindividual



and includes every possible individuation. This is why the philosophical knowledge of individuation is immediately a general ontogenesis, cover-ing not only the physical but also the vital and psycho-social regimes of individuation.

The refutation of idealism can be based on something other than the necessity of exterior “prostheses” for human consciousness—something other than the artifacts that would paradoxically constitute it. By saying this, I am certainly not calling into question the Stieglerian thesis that the interiority of consciousness is paradoxically developed through a process of self-exteriorization through artifacts (the so-called “crutches of the mind.”) I am merely arguing that there is no need for a “transcendent” “who” and its being-in-the-world (as one finds it in Heidegger, for ex-ample) in order to know that the world exists. The thought of the “who” is not first philosophy, contrary to what both Heidegger and Stiegler suggest.

However, I don’t want to suggest that the anteriority of physical and vital individuations in relation to psycho-social individuation allows Simondon to call his global onto-genesis a “first philosophy.” I believe that this sort of first philosophy would still be a knowledge that unwittingly turns the philosophizing individual into an absolute. I say “unwittingly” because what is at stake is the very attitude of philosophizing individuals themselves in their meaning-making practices: in Simondon and Stiegler, as in the entire tradition of Western philosophy up to the present day, the meanings of “individual,” “individuation,” “transindividual,” and “prosthesis” are ob-jectified meanings—meanings equated with things so that we can talk about what exists. As a result of this, however, objec-tified meaning does not constitute the philosophizing individual, which consequently presupposes itself to come first.

As I have shown elsewhere, Heidegger had an intuition of this fundamental difficulty traversing every philosophy, and the Wittgenstein of On Certainty did so as well.14 Neither of them, however, invented the pluri-dimensional explosion of meanings that presents the only path out of this deadlock. If the philosophizing individual does not want to abso-lutize her- or himself, she or he must, before anything else, think her- or himself as individuating meaning, because meaning is pluri-dimensional and cannot be reduced to the dimension of the ob-ject alone. Refuting idealism is, therefore, leaving knowledge to science, and thinking oneself as made by the meaning that surrounds one and that knowledge reduces to a single, misleading dimension—that of the ob-ject.

My thesis, therefore, is that neither Simondon nor Stiegler holds the key to the refutation of idealism, because neither one of them practices the problematic that defines first philosophy. For what is philosophically first is non-knowledge, and the positions of Simondon and Stiegler are



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still engaged with knowledge, or rather they are already engaged with knowledge, whereas they would need to yield the ontogenetic transla-tion, adequate but secondary, of first non-knowledge. It is by virtue of this operation of secondary translation that Stiegler’s thought of the psycho-social “who”—even though it is far from being philosophically first—prolongs and completes Simondon’s thinking of physical and vital individuation—an ontogenetic thought that even though adequate, is itself philosophically secondary.

The refutation of idealism therefore does not reside in the thought (supposedly fundamental) of the being in the world of the “who.” Rather, it resides in a practice of signification that allows the philosophizing individual to think her- or himself as constituted by meaning insofar as the latter would be a constitutive transcendence. In one sense, Heidegger posed the thesis of the world as a world of meaning that constitutes the Dasein, but this thesis of the finitude or non-originarity of Dasein was never applied by Heidegger to himself because, in order to apply it to himself, he would have had to invent a new signifying practice. Rather than objectifying these significations in order to affirm something about the world, such a practice would have needed to explode these signifi-cations pluri-dimensionally in order to reveal the different dimensions of the meaning that constitute me as a meaning-subject—or as meaning individuated.

As I have explained elsewhere, the different dimensions of meaning that my new philosophical problematic seeks to open up are economic production-consumption, ontological information, and axiological edu-cation.15 These different dimensions of the meaning-that-makes-me will then enable me to develop what I call a uni-dimensional secondary transla-tion of this problematic of first philosophy, which will finally engender (1) a philosophy of economic production-consumption, (2) a philosophy of ontological information—something already largely thought by Si-mondon and Stiegler, since genetic ontology is already understood by Simondon as a philosophy of information process—and (3) a philosophy of axiological education.

At this point, one could think that the position inaugurated by the new problematic of first philosophy—a problematic that requires the philosophizing individual to think her- or himself in her or his finitude and non-originarity, and therefore as meaning individuated into meaning-subject—merely radicalizes the way of thinking that I reproached Stiegler for practicing above: the fact that Stiegler begins philosophical discourse with the thematization of the “pyscho-social who.” In fact, however, this thought by the philosophizing individual of its own non-originarity is no longer ontogenetic. This is why it does not radicalize the way of thinking



that I reproached Stiegler for practicing: the thought of the non-originarity of the philosophizing individual is not the thought of a “psycho-social who,” but is a new form of “know thyself.” This is why its secondary ontogenetic translation— the philosophy of ontological information—will have to pass, with Simondon, through the thought of physical and vital individuation before taking up, with Stiegler, psycho-social individuation.

I am unable to explore in great detail here the reasons for such an architectonic state of affairs—that is, the reasons for such a system of sec-ondary translations of the problematic of first philosophy. I will merely point out in the form of a conclusion that Simondon flirted with the pos-sibility of a problematic of first philosophy that is not ontogenetic. At the beginning of the section entitled “The Necessity of Psychic Ontogenesis” which comes at the end of the third chapter of L’individuation psychique et collective, Simondon adds immediately after his qualification of the ontogenesis of “first philosophy”: “Unfortunately, it is impossible for the human subject to witness its own genesis” (163). Here Simondon is aware that the problematic of first philosophy must be knowledge of the self rather than a genetic ontology—even if he still retained the idea that this knowledge of self must necessarily be, just as it is in Hegel’s Phenom-enology of Spirit or even in the later Husserl, a description by the subject of its own genesis. It is for this reason that Simondon, in this particular instance, very logically judges the realization of the problematic of first philosophy impossible.

If, on the contrary, we radicalize the exigency of non-objectivation in applying it to the very significations manipulated by the philosophiz-ing individual, then genetic ontology is nothing more than a secondary translation of first non-knowledge in which the philosophizing individual, rather than objectifying the significations that she or he manipulates in order to speak about reality, explodes them in order to open up different dimensions of the meaning that constitutes her or him in the individual’s non-originarity. This “knowledge of the self” has the virtue of translating itself secondarily in each of the dimensions of meaning that will have been opened up and, in one of these dimensions, it has the virtue of rediscov-ering the genetic ontology of Simondon in suppressing the theoretical tensions that inhabit this ontology.16

This is my philosophical approach, and I have tried to show here how it can emerge from a “post-Simondonian” debate with Stiegler about the refutation of idealism.

Université Paris Ouest NanterreMaison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris-Nord

translated by Mark Hayward and Arne De Boever



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Notes1. Three volumes have already been published; all three have been translated: Bernard

Stiegler, La technique et le temps, Vols. 1, 2 and 3 (Paris: Galilée, 1994, 1996 and 2001); translations: Technics and Time, Vols. 1, 2 and 3, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 2009 and 2010).

2. On the decisive influence of Simondon on Deleuze, see the Chapters X-XI-XII in Anne Sauvagnargues, Deleuze. L’empirisme transcendental (Paris: PUF, 2009.) The influence of Simondon on Deleuze is the equivalent to that of Heidegger on Derrida, which s is why I write “Heidegger/Derrida” and “Simondon/Deleuze.”

3. See Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Simondon ou l’Encyclopédisme génétique (Paris: PUF, 2008).4. Here are the very first words of Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques: “Cette étude est

animée par l’intention de susciter une prise de conscience du sens des objets techniques. La culture s’est constituée en système de défense contre les techniques; or, cette défense se présente comme une défense de l’homme, supposant que les objets techniques ne contiennent pas de réalité humaine. Nous voudrions montrer que la culture ignore dans la réalité technique une réalité humaine, et que, pour jouer son rôle complet, la culture doit incorporer les êtres techniques sous forme de connaissance et de sens des valeurs” (9).

5. Here is the passage outlining the distinction between the “purely social” and the tran-sindividual as psycho-social: “L’être psychique, c’est-à-dire l’être qui accomplit le plus complètement possible les fonctions d’individuation en ne limitant pas l’individuation à cette première étape du vital, résout la disparition de sa problématique interne dans la mesure où il participe à l’individuation du collectif. Ce collectif, réalité transindividuelle obtenue par individuation des réalités pré-individuelles associées à une pluralité de vivants, se distingue du social pur et de l’individuel pur; le social pur existe, en effet, dans les sociétés animales; il ne nécessite pas pour exister une nouvelle individuation dilatant l’individuation vitale; il exprime la manière dont les vivants existent en société; c’est l’unité vitale au premier degré qui est directement sociale” (L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, 167).

6. See the Introduction and Conclusion to Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information.

7. See Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, “What New Humanism Today?” (Trans. Chris Turner). Cultural Politics, Vol. 6, no. 2, 2010 (Berg Publishers).

8. On these two points, see Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Simondon ou l’Encyclopédisme génétique, Chapters IV and V.

9. Simondon even writes that the transindividual is “that reality which the individuated being carries with itself, that call to being for future inviduations (cette réalité que l’être individué transporte avec lui, cette charge d’être pour des individuations futures”) (L’individua-tion psychique et collective, 193).

10. On this second point, see Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2005).

11. On the refutation of idealism in Kant, see Critique of Pure Reason, section “Critique of Paralogism 4 of Transcendental Psychology.”

12. On this point, see Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 2 : Disorientation.13. On this point, see my “Glossary: Fifty Key Terms in the Work of Gilbert Simondon”

(trans. Arne De Boever), in De Boever, Arne, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Wood-ward (eds.), Gilbert Simondon, Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 2011.

14. See J-H. Barthélémy, « Hegel et l’impensé de Heidegger », Kairos n°27, 2006, Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, op. cit. and « Penser après Simondon et par-delà Deleuze », Cahiers Simondon n°2, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2010.

15. On this point, see Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, “Penser après Simondon et par-delà Deleuze,” op. cit., and Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, op. cit., 240-268 & 281-286.

16. On these tensions, see the two volumes of my Penser l’individuation, (Paris: L’Harmattan), 2005.



Works CitedGilbert Simondon. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris : Aubier, 1958.——. Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et invention. Chatou: Editions de la Transparence, 2008.——. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Editions

Jérôme Millon, 2005. ——. L’individuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier, 1989.Stiegler, Bernard. La technique et le temps, Vols. 1, 2 and 3. Paris: Galilée, 1994, 1996 and 2001.

Translations: Technics and Time, Vols. 1, 2 and 3. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998, 2009 and 2010.



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Technology, Sociology, Humanism: Simondon and the Problem of the Human SciencesXavier Guchet

“To Axiomatise” the Human SciencesBefore his death in 1989, Gilbert Simondon wrote two major books

consisting of his principal and complementary theses, both defended in 1958. The complementary thesis on the mode of existence of technical objects was published in 1958, while it was only in 1964 that sections of his principal thesis on individuation were made available to the public (and even then only the chapters dedicated to the regimes of physical and vital individuation, excluding those dealing with psychic and collective individuation.) Over the course of his career, Simondon produced other major texts, but only in the form of unpublished courses or conference presentations published in poorly distributed journals. Some of these texts have been published recently, while others will certainly also be made available in the near future.1 Needless to say, as a result of this publication history, Simondon’s readers have only had access to a limited portion of his work.

This situation explains the way that Simondon has been read by philosophers: first, as a thinker who proposed an original albeit per-plexing approach to thinking about technique; later on, he was read as a thinker who proposed a critique of metaphysics and a new concept of the individual. Simondon is usually read as both a thinker of technique and the author of an ontology of the individual. Some have dedicated themselves to the problem of unifying these two theses, to the question of understanding why Simondon dedicated himself in the 1950s to research-ing the technical object and, more specifically, industrial machinery, while at the same time developing a metaphysics of the individual. Although at first glance these two areas seem quite distinct, should we understand the redefinition of the individual as a necessary stage that must be passed through in order to speak accurately of machines? Or should we read the philosophy of technique as a simple illustration of his general philosophy of the individual? Or, should we refuse to privilege either of these themes over the other? Whatever the approach to this question, it is quite rare to find those who have tried to interpret the entirety of Simondon’s work


77Simondon and the Human Sciences

from the point of view of a confrontation between philosophy and the human sciences.

Reflecting on the state of the human sciences is not a minor issue in Simondon’s philosophy. One might argue that it is its guiding principle. Simondon accords it considerable importance in a seminar he presented at the Société Française de Philosophie in February 1960.2 Speaking to an audi-ence that included some of the most eminent figures in French philosophy at the time, he explained in detail what led him to undertake his research in the domains of ontology and technology. This was the claim that the human sciences lack “axiomatisation,” and that it is necessary to remedy this lacuna. In his presentation, Simondon did not give many details about what such an “axiomatisation” might mean. He simply specified that this regrettable situation has caused, and continues to cause, problems in the relationship between sociology and psychology, and that to “axiomatise” the human sciences would require, above all else, a redefinition of the relationship between sociology and psychology. Simondon suggested in a very allusive manner that this apparently crucial and urgent task demands both a philosophy of the technical object and a re-founding of concepts such as form, information and potential—concepts that are also the central concepts of his philosophy of the individual.

Simondon was age 36 at the time of this conference, had recently defended his theses, and was not yet a professor at the Sorbonne, so it was an occasion for him to make himself known to his peers by present-ing the general direction of his work. He chose to emphasize a problem that touched upon the human sciences and, in particular, psychology and sociology. This problem was, of course, at the heart of philosophi-cal debates at the time; structuralism was then widely discussed. And it seems that Simondon wanted to bring an original contribution of his own to these debates. However, before proceeding further, an initial point requires some explication: why so much attention—one might even say exclusive attention—to psychology and sociology? These are, after all, only two human sciences among a number of others, about which Simondon says very little. How might a reconsideration of the relationship between psychology and sociology resolve the problem of the entirety of the hu-man sciences and their lack of “axiomatisation”?

In his presentation, it quickly becomes clear that for Simondon, psychology and sociology are not human sciences like the others; their reciprocal exchange powerfully contributed to the emergence of the hu-man sciences as a new field of knowledge in the 19th century, constituting its poles and demarcating the epistemic ground of these nascent sciences. Their emergence must be seen as part of a new formulation of the anthro-pological thematic. A thematic that no longer turns around the question of

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the relation between the physical and the moral (as was the case during the 18th century), but touches upon the novel question of the relation between the physical and the psychological on the one hand, and the social on the other. The interiority of man and the exteriority of man: these are the great poles according to which the anthropological thematic comes to be reformulated. Man is now conceived of as a particularly unstable living being that can be influenced by all sorts of biological and social factors. This situation can lead to pathological behavior. As result, the influence-able and modifiable human is opposed with a response that entails norms and the regulation of conduct. These norms must be posed in terms that contain variations in behavior within certain limits. Beyond these limits, behaviors will be judged to be pathological. Influenceable—modifiable—normative response: this triad marks the constitutive epistemic ground of the human sciences.3

In his engagement with the human sciences, Simondon is looking to undo at its foundation the epistemic ground of the human sciences, and proposes to organize the exchange between psychology and sociology according to a completely different axis than that of the interiority and exteriority of man. To paraphrase far too briefly, Simondon’s position on this point is the following: human reality cannot be resolved as a problem of articulating psychological and sociological existence; it is not as though humans, as purely psychological beings, encounter the social afterwards (except in extreme and pathological cases). As Simondon writes (in a de-cidedly enigmatic manner that we will return to below): “the individual only enters into a relationship with the social by means of the social” (L’Individu, 295). In other words, the human sciences are insufficiently “axiomatised,” to the extent that psychology and sociology have taken abstractions as their objects, which is to say that the psychological cut off from the social is an abstraction, and vice-versa.

Therefore, to “axiomatise” the human sciences does not mean to impose a common formalism on these sciences; this is not a problem for the epistemology of the human sciences (nor is it a problem that belongs to philosophy, since the human sciences are capable of developing their own epistemology). Rather, it is question of bringing to light the philosophical preconceptions that have underwritten the development of the human sciences and constitute their epistemic ground (mainly, the preconception of the human as an interior-exterior categorized as normal or pathological), in order to show that this preconception offers an inadequate and abstract manner for speaking about the human. For this reason, to “axiomatise” the human sciences means to replace these abstractions with a philosophy of concrete human reality, or, in Simondon’s language, a philosophy of human individuation.

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When Simondon was developing his thought in the 1950s, psychol-ogy and sociology did not seem intent on defending their borders; indeed, probably neither field considered their respective domains as fortresses to protect. But already for Durkheim, as much as for Simondon, it was “dif-ficult to consider the social and the individual as confronting each other directly through the relationship between the individual and society.”4 In the twentieth century, numerous currents developed in social psychology that took up the task of describing man as a mix of the psychological and the social. Since Simondon criticizes both psychologism and sociologism for rendering the borders of their respective fields so rigid and imperme-able, he seems to be waging a battle without an enemy. While Simondon is very familiar with the relevant work in social psychology and cultural anthropology, this work does not satisfy the demand for “axiomatisation” that he presents as the guiding thread of his research. His argument can be summarized as follows: social psychology and cultural anthropology com-bine psychological and sociological analysis, but they do not ultimately renounce an underlying conception of man as psycho-social. Following this critique, to “axiomatise” the human sciences takes on an original and precise meaning for Simondon: fundamentally undoing what Foucault would later call the “anthropological prejudice” and withdrawing from the two axes according to which this thematic was formulated: the interiority and exteriority of man as well as the normal and the pathological. There is no interiority or exteriority of man. As for the aim of human society, this is not the maintenance of a state of equilibrium defined by a system of norms measured against pathological variations that might threaten it; rather, the aim of human society is to solicit invention and the creation of new norms.

It is, however, in his discussion of Cybernetics that Simondon comes to address the task of proposing a conception of human reality that is an alternative to the “anthropological prejudice” he critiques. In two remarkable texts dedicated to Cybernetics that were both written at the beginning of the 1950s—a period when the young science of “teleological mechanisms” was of little interest to French philosophers (with rare ex-ceptions, like Canguilhem, Ducassé and Ruyer)—he makes the following critique: Cybernetics was wrong to try to treat human societies according to homeostatic models inspired by living beings. Human societies, accord-ing to Simondon, are not homeostatic systems.5

On this point, he is very close to the critique made by Canguilhem in a 1955 presentation on “The Problem of regulation in organisms and in society.”6 While discussing Cannon’s ideas of applying the concept of homeostasis to human societies from the early 1930s, Canguilhem recalls that norms do not function in society in the same way that they do in

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organisms. While the biological norm is part of the functioning of the organism, social norms are not, and must be constructed (debated). It is a question of politics, not medicine or social prophylaxis; the aim of human society is not to maintain its equilibrium. In what follows, Canguilhem, like Simondon, turn towards Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where it is argued that “closed” morality and religion are without a doubt morality and religion of conservation. Their function is to preserve the stability of the existing social order. On the contrary, “open” morali-ties and religions have the function of returning human societies to the élan of creation, of unmaking the existing social order, inventing another order and becoming something else.

For this reason, it is necessary to clarify the conception of human reality—the regime of human individuation—that Simondon intends to substitute for the “anthropological prejudice.” To piece this together, it is necessary to consider some key sections of his principal thesis, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, dedicated to psychosocial individuation. It is in these chapters, which were strangely overlooked by the publisher of the thesis in 1964, that we find the prin-cipal elements of this “axiomatisation” of the human sciences of which Simondon speaks.

From Social Psychology to Collective OntologyHowever, before going further, it is necessary to acknowledge that

addressing the question of human individuation through the psychosocial raises a difficulty. As Simondon recalls on several occasions, a philoso-phy of concrete human reality cannot begin by cutting the human off from life in general. It is this that motivates his rejection of what he calls “anthropology.” By “anthropology” he is not referring to the anthro-pological scholarship that fed his own thought (particularly the work of Leroi-Gourhan). Rather, he is taking on a doctrine that is “obliged to substantialize (substantialiser) both the individual and the social in order to give an essence to man.” He explains:

By itself, the idea of anthropology already carries the implicit affirma-tion of the specificity of Man, separate from life. Yet, it is quite certain that we cannot remove man from vital world without also removing life from man. Life is life including man and not life without man. It is life up to and including Man. There is life in its entirety, including Man. (L’Individu, 297)

Furthermore, during the meeting of the Société Française de Philosophie in February 1960, Simondon responded to a question from the audience by explaining that for him, an anthropology seemed “impossible.” In other words, there is no anthropology. There is only biology, in the sense of an expanded biology that includes Man. For this reason, according to Si-

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mondon, any proposal of a philosophy of concrete human reality should begin with life, and not with the psychosocial. After all, doesn’t beginning with the psychosocial still run the risk of framing human reality within an abstraction cut off from life?

To answer this question, it is useful to recall that Simondon was a student of Canguilhem, and that for Canguilhem man is the living crea-ture for whom social norms transform the meaning of biological norms. From this perspective, to begin with the psychosocial is not to presume a concept of the human cut off from life. It is, on the contrary, to try to understand how the psychic and collective individuation of man is reor-ganized down to the bedrock of vital individuation. Here we have a first glimpse of the terms according to which the problem of the relationship between human and technical individuation—that is, the links between the two theses defended by Simondon in 1958—can be posed.

There are two points worth keeping in mind: 1) an anthropology of the human cut off from life is impossible; 2) the human is the being who can make the norms of his collective existence shape the norms of his biological life. From this, the conclusion is clear: from the point of view of Canguilhem and Simondon, it makes no sense to reject technical interventions that affect man on the grounds that they might alter his biology (bringing to mind contemporary debates on bio-technology and nano-technology). But does this mean that that there is no limit to our bio-technical intervention into life, specifically regarding human beings? This is definitely not the conclusion Simondon draws. On the contrary, the philosophy of human individuation puts us in a position to make judgments on the value of bio-techniques. To say that man has no essence does not imply that everything is possible and permitted when it comes to bio-technical interventions. Between the invocation of “human nature” and “everything is permitted,” Simondon follows a difficult but necessary third path, upon which we will now focus.

The error made by the various currents of existing psycho-sociology is that they remain dependent on a major presupposition of classical metaphysics, which Simondon addresses in the first pages of his principal thesis. The presupposition is this: the only ontologically consistent real-ity is that of the individual being, and it is the individual that we must explain; the process of individuation itself has no status or ontological consistency. All sciences are sciences of constituted structures—structures void of all reference to their genesis. In the human sciences, this meta-physical presupposition translates into the division of scientific domains and the institutionalization of separate disciplines (psychology, sociology, etc.), even if a degree of porosity remains and a certain level of movement between disciplines is deemed possible after the fact.

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This is what happened in the case of psychology and sociology: both developed as sciences of already individuated, already structured realities—the psychic reality and the social reality—even though both acknowledged the necessity of fruitful exchanges. From this metaphysical perspective, which remained grounded in the psychosocial perspective of the period (according to Simondon), the relation between these struc-tures is posterior to the beings that are connected; it has no reality of its own. In this classical view, the only thing that matters and has ontological status is the structure itself; relation is of little interest. From this point of view, psychosocial existence can be interpreted as the relationship be-tween two pre-constituted domains: the psychic and the collective. As a result, classical metaphysics, the basis of the operation of individuation, is obliged to look for something that is already an individuated being and is assumed to retain the “principle of individuation” (for example, a determined psychic or social structure.) In order to explain the genesis of individuality, we are given an individual that is already there, presuppos-ing that which is in question. Simondon asks, how it is possible to avoid this circular argument?

According to him, it is necessary to begin from a situation where individuality is not presupposed in any way. It is, therefore, the operation of individuation itself that is of interest, giving status to the relation. In order to explain the genesis of individuality, it is necessary to begin with the existence of a system of reality that could be called “pre-individual,” a system rich in potential and in possible transformations. The genesis of individuality is the outcome of a re-organization of the system according to different complementary “phases.” The individuated being is not the only reality to come about from the act of individuation. It is only one of the phases of being, drawing on a complementary non-individuated reality. This description would surprise few in biology: we know very well that a living being doesn’t exist as an individuated being outside of its milieu only to enter into an already constituted milieu after the fact. The individuation of the living being and the constitution of its milieu are contemporary and complementary. Simondon raises this conception of biological individuality (which is also clearly developed in Canguilhem’s work) to the level of a general philosophy of ontogenesis defined as “a theory of the phases of being.” This is how Simondon offers the principle concepts and method of his program for the “axiomatisation” of psychol-ogy and sociology, considering the psychological and the social as two “phases” of human individuality. Both are the product of a process of “de-phasing” taking place within a system of pre-individual reality that is rich in potential.

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This system of pre-individual reality does not presuppose either the psychic register or the collective register: it consists of a system constituted by the individuation of life. The individuation of the living being does not exhaust all of the tensions or potentials contained in the pre-individual. The living being/milieu couple, the outcome of a “de-phasing” within a system of physio-chemical being, leaves some potential unused. Fur-thermore, the human organism is seemingly unique among living being in that it is unable to resolve its vital problems exclusively within the order of living things; indeed, it can only find solutions to its problems of adaptation by becoming something other than a “simple living thing,” Simondon explains. Here we might think of the analyses offered by Leroi-Gourhan on the equilibrium between the physical and the psychic in the human species—one that involves the exteriorization of biological func-tions through tools and machines as well as involving the exteriorization of living habits in the form of social memory. Gestures and speech (to take up the title of Leroi-Gourhan’s major work) constitute the two “phases” of hominization, the specifically human response to the problematic of life. It is a response that relies on the entry into a new regime of individuation beyond that of “simple” life. This analysis and the rapprochement with Leroi-Gourhan, allow us to rediscover a certain number of pre-requisites for thinking human individuation. First is the refusal to cut off the human from life in general; second, the refusal to consider humans according to the psycho-social doublet; third, the idea that by resolving the vital problematic and moving to a regime of individuation beyond that of life, humans have changed the meaning of what it means “to live.” To be human is to remove the psycho-social from the vital—not as cause and effect but as the solution to a problem—and then to allow psycho-social existence to affect the meaning of biological existence.

The Subject as OperationIt is probably in the chapters “On the Problematic of Ontogenesis and

Psychic Individuation” and “The Individual and the Social: The Individu-ation of the Group” that Simondon most explicitly clarifies his concept of human individuation (L’Individu, 263-306). In these pages, Simondon poses the question of the genesis of the individuated subject. He begins by establishing that Cartesian doubt gives no insight into this genesis. In effect, if Descartes was able to suggest that doubt allowed one to witness the genesis of the Cogito, it was because he confused two meanings of the word: there is on the one hand “doubting doubt,” the practice of doubt itself, and there is also “doubt doubted,” or the object of doubt. Descartes

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suggests that in the operation of doubting, the subject takes itself as the object of doubt; the subject is taken as the doubting subject, the operation of doubting becoming objective at the moment it is exercised. The “doubter” and the “doubted” coincide. However, Descartes neglects the disparity between the operation of doubting and the object of doubt, between the “doubter” and the “doubted,” a disparity that can never be overcome. I doubt myself while I am in the process of doubting, but the moment that I believe that I have the operation of doubting in hand in order to produce an object of doubt, it escapes me as an operation. Objectivized doubt is a doubting that has already passed; the actuality of the operation of doubt escapes objectivization. Simondon writes:

Doubt is a doubt-subject, the operation of doubting in the first person and also a doubt that detaches itself from the ongoing operation of doubt as doubt doubted, an already objective and accomplished opera-tion… Between doubt doubting and doubt doubted a certain distance is constituted through which is it possible to maintain the continuity of the operation. (Ibid., 285)

If it is impossible to witness the genesis of the subject, this is precisely because the subject is this disparity, this “distancing,” this “taking a dis-tance” that is at the same time an attachment. Descartes believed that he would be able to grasp the genesis of the Cogito because he thought of the Cogito as a structure or substance, “as res and as cogitans, both the support of the operation and the operation in the act of being accomplished” (ibid., 286). Yet the subject is not substance nor is it a structure; it is the reality of an operation that cannot be interpreted in terms of structures only. Simondon calls this taking a distance without alienation “memory.” Here, he is quite Bergsonian. The mistake of Descartes was to have supposed a symmetrical relationship between “doubter” and “doubted.” In the objectivation of the “doubted,” doubting effectively takes itself as “doubting” since both “doubter” and the “doubted” have the same structure and substantial support. To be more precise, the “doubter” and the “doubted” coincide according to Descartes because both are comprised of the same structural reality, and the objectivation of the “doubter” and the “doubted” does not alter their common structural identity. Therefore, instead of understanding the subject as an operation rather than a structure, we come to see that it is an asymmetrical relation that constitutes the subject—an asymmetry between a present operation that always escapes itself and an objective structure that always belongs to the past. It is the establishment of such an asymmetrical reciprocity between structures and operations in beings that Simondon calls individuation. Therefore, “the progress of memory is an asymmetric doubling of the subject being, an individualization of the subject being” (ibid., 285). This operation creates an asymmetry between the present and the past. Indeed, it constitutes the past as past, as a re-

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ticulated field. It is like the crystal formed in a crystalline solution. The present would be like the outer limit of the crystal’s formation, propagat-ing and prolonging the operation of taking form. Of course, this is only an approximation, since the past of the subject is not a completely dead and inert residue (as is the case with the crystal). As we know well, our current capacity to individuate and to individuate ourselves is enriched by all of our past. Indeed, our past continues to inform our present.

The past is therefore what Simondon calls a “symbol” of the self—a complementary reality of the actual self. The subject is more than the actual self; the current self and the past are two complementary “phases” of the subject. In the operation of memory, the past is the individual, structured. The actual self is like the milieu; it is a reservoir of potential. Simondon develops an analogous analysis that touches on the asymmetry of the present and the future, an asymmetry that constitutes itself through the operation of the imagination, rather than via memory. The difference between the two, memory and imagination, resides in a kind of chiasm. While in memory the “symbol” of the self (the past) is the individual, in the imagination it is the actual self that is the individual. The future is a field of potential, a zone of reality that is not individuated, a milieu. Therefore, the current self is both the individual and the milieu: the indi-vidual in relation to the future, and the milieu in relation to the past. The present of the self is therefore defined as “the transduction of the field of the future and the network of points of the past” (ibid., 288).

However, “the product of this psychic individuation,” Simondon writes, “is only psychic at its core. The pure psychic is actual. The past as the distant past, and the distant future are realities that tend to towards the somatic” (ibid., 287). The past and the future are corporeal. Consciousness is attached to the body by means of memory and imagination. The pure body and soul, the Cartesian res cogitans and res extensa are two extreme cases, two presumed abstractions on a psychophysical continuum consti-tuted by the transductivity of an operation. By transductivity, Simondon means specifically the conservation and propagation not of a constituted structure that maintains its own self-identity (which would be the identity of Cartesian substance), but of an operation that creates the asymmetry and the complementarity of “phases” within a system rich in potential. What defines the identity of the subject is not the permanence of a structure, but the permanence of that operation which structures a field of potential (the future) giving rise to a network of key-points (the past.) Therefore, the past and the future are the non-present, the inactual, and the body is “the pure past and future.” The soul is in the body in the same way that the present is between the future and the past. The soul is a transduction between two corporealities—that field of virtualities that is the future, and the network of key-points that is the past. Therefore, the body has a kind

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of double nature: the body is the milieu for the present self that draws upon virtualities, tensions and the future; it is also the individual for the actual self that sees it as that which carries the weight of the structures imposed by the socius. For Simondon, then, it is definitively by means of the body that I connect myself to the collective.

Transindividual Individuation and the Two Meanings of the SocialTherefore, in Simondon’s anti-substantialist approach, the prob-

lem of the social integration of the individual cannot be posed in terms of the direct encounter between the already constituted individual and an equally constituted society. Such a posing of the encounter between individual and society would only serve to reintroduce the prejudices of classical metaphysics by stipulating that reality can only be explained in reference to pre-existing structures. Subjects and collective individuation as operations would have no status, would have no ontological consis-tency. The problem of the individual’s social integration is, however, a problem of operations, and not a problem of the relationship between given structures. Social integration is an individuation, a process, whose terms of relation (the individual and society) appear as a result of a “de-phasing” and are the product of the relation itself. It is necessary to define a new regime of individuation within which the individual is constituted at the same time as the collective. This is to say a regime of individua-tion that renders what Simondon calls “personal individuation” and “social individuation” compatible and complementary to each other. To presuppose the compatibility of the relationship with the self (personal individuation) with the relationship with others (social individuation) is to beg the question, since the problem of human individuation rests entirely with the establishment of this compatibility.

Yet this compatibility is anything but guaranteed. In effect, personal and social individuation seem to march in opposite directions. Society requires individuated beings that can be integrated into an existing social order; they must construct their future according to the inherited norms of the past. Society also requires that each of its members take on a clearly defined social role, and fulfill a certain number of imposed goals.

The individual is presented with goals, with roles from which to choose. It must strive towards these roles, these types, and these images as well as be guided by structures that force it to develop in accord with them and accomplish them. For the individual being, society presents a network of positions and roles through which individual conduct must pass (ibid., 293). As a result, the individuated being is summoned to forge its future according to the network of key-points that define the past of a society. The future of the subject is the past of the society. This is the initial

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tension, the incompatibility, between personal and social individuation. As elsewhere in Simondon’s thought, this incompatibility summons a path towards a resolution, here via the entry of individuated beings into a new regime of individuation, one that would render personal and social indi-viduation compatible. Simondon calls this regime “the transindividual.”

He writes, “The integration of the individual into the social is done by means of the creation of an analogy at the level of function between the operation that defines individual presence and the operation that de-fines social presence. The individual must find a social individuation that includes its personal individuation” (ibid., 295). Taking on the terminol-ogy of North American social psychology, Simondon calls the collective dimension of the individual personality the in-group. The in-group (or the trans-individual) is not “a substantial reality that is superposed onto individual beings and conceived as being independent of them. It is the operation and the condition of operation by which a mode of presence is created that is more complex than the presence of individuated being alone” (L’Individu, 294). Furthermore, “The relationship between the individual and the trans-individual can be defined as that which exceeds the individual while also extending it. The trans-individual is not exterior to the individual, yet it is also separate from the individual” (ibid., 281). The trans-individual, or the in-group, takes on an aspect of transcendence in relation to personal individuation, yet it is not a transcendent structure in relation to individuals. This kind of transcendence with no transcendent structure “takes root in interiority” and “does not bring an aspect of exteriority but of extension in relation to the individual” (ibid.). Follow-ing Merleau-Ponty, Simondon wants to think the collective existence as a transcendence from within the individual (and not above the individual), which would suggest that the individual is not enclosed by its own limits. Nor is it to imply the supposition of a transcendent positivity—a pre-existing and overarching society.

The transcendence from within the individual and not above the individual originates in the charge of the pre-individual that always re-mains attached to the individual. The transindividual makes individuals communicate at the level of the pre-individual—a level that no individu-ation could completely exhaust, a level that is “still rich in potential and organizable forces” and makes possible entry into new individuations. Simondon writes:

Thus we can understand [by transindividuality] a relation that puts individuals in relation with each other not by means of their constituted individuality which separates them from each other, nor by means of that which is common to all human subjects, but by means of that charge of pre-individual reality, that charge from nature that is conserved in the individual being and which contains potential and virtuality. (Du mode d’existence, 248).

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We can communicate with others on the grounds of structures that are in us (for example the structures of language or the norms that the so-cius inculcates in us.) However, there is a part of ourselves that is not structured and allows us to invent, to introduce novelty into the world (here we find once more Canguilhem’s idea that the purpose of human society is not equilibrium but invention.) As a result, for Simondon the transindividual relation is

...what makes it possible for individuals to exist together as elements of a system that contains potential and metastability, expectations and tension and then the discovery of a structure and a functional organiza-tion that inegrate and resolve the problematic . . . ; The transindividual passes through the individual [an internal relation] as well as between individuals [an external relation]. (L’Individu, 302)

The true psychosocial is the trans-individual. The trans-individual rela-tion does not have “either a social or individual origin. It is placed in the individual and is carried by him” (L’Individu, 303). In other words, it is not transcendent to an individual, but

does not belong to it, nor is it a part of its system of being an individual… The individual conserves along with itself the pre-individual and all individuals together have a sort of non-structured base from which a new individuation might be produced. (Ibid.)

The passage to the trans-individual does not superpose a (collec-tive) individuation onto a previous (personal) individuation. Rather it complicates the personal individuation; it makes it “more complex.” In other words, transindividual individuation does not create a reality other than the individual one, but creates a new individual reality—which is a different statement. Henceforth, personal individuation involves the rela-tion with others. “The interiority of the group is a certain dimension of the individual personality, not a relation that is distinct from the individual. It is a zone of participation around the individual (ibid., 295).

The notion of out-group, as opposed to in-group, thus designates a social reality that appears as a transcendent reality, constraining and im-posing on individuated beings obligatory paths, structures of inherited order, codified roles, etc. This is why the idea that society is an exterior and transcendent reality is not entirely false or without grounds. An ontology of individuation does not lead to the pure and simple invalidation of this idea. On the contrary, it more clearly specifies it. The out-group is lived as the social as substance, but it is not the entirety of the social. The integra-tion into the out-group does not imply a pre-social individual. It refers to an individuated being that has already opened its personality to the very limits of the in-group. The social integration of individuals takes place through mediation of the in-group (except in extreme and pathological cases, such as delinquency or mental alienation. In these cases, any group appears to the individual as an exterior group). This is what Simondon

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means when he writes: “the individual does not enter into relation with the social but by means of social.” By this we can understand that the individual does not enter into relation with the out-group (which is the first meaning of the social) except by means of the in-group (which is its second meaning.)

Body and Transindividuality: Simondon and BergsonHowever, the creation of this zone of participation, paving the way

for a new individuation, involves the body:The individual’s own body extends to the limits of the in-group. Just as there exists a corporeal schema, there also exists a social schema that extends the limits of the self to the border between the in-group and the out-group. In a certain sense, we might consider the open group (in-group) to be the social body of the subject” (ibid., 294).

The out-group can itself be described as a larger body, a social organism. It is not necessary here to recall the long history of analogies between organisms and societies. The important conclusion to which Simondon’s analysis leads is that these analogies have two meanings, depending on whether we speak from the position of the in-group or the out-group. We recall that for Simondon, the body is at once the future and the past, a field of potentials and a network of keypoints. The social-organism body is that network of keypoints that imposes an ordering structure upon me. The social body, according to the in-group, is the field of virtualities through which I move in order to continue my personal individuation.

Such an analysis evokes things that common sense can experience: Isn’t the body what socializes us insofar as it is inculcated by a habitus (es-tablished structures) from a very young age? But isn’t the body also what allows me to free myself from established structures in order to become something else? Mauss wrote very well of the ambivalence of the body in his famous article on body techniques.7 In Simondon’s terms, the body of the subject is connected to both the in-group and the out-group at the same time. The individual’s relationship to “the in-group and its relationship to the out-group are both like the future and the past.”

The in-group is the source of virtualities, of tensions, in much the same way that the individual future is. It is a reservoir of presence. In the form of belief, belonging to the interiority of a group is defined as a non-structured tendency comparable to the future for the individual. It mixes with the future of the individual, but it also takes in the past of the individual, because the individual gives itself an origin, whether mythic of real, within this group. (L’Individu, 295)

This is the reason why both personal and group individuation in the in-group are compatible and complementary. One might even say that they are reciprocal; they march in concert, not in opposition to each other. The individual’s future and past coincide with the future and past of the in-

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group. The relationship with the out-group is the opposite. It is through the social past that the individuated being is required to let go of its future.

As a consequence, this philosophy of individuation involves a phi-losophy of the body that is compatible with the idea of transindividuality. How is it possible to understand that one’s own body can extend to include the limits of the in-group? The answer to this question resides in the claim that Simondon is indebted to Bergson. With regard to his understanding of the social, Simondon refers to Bergson in a critical manner. He criti-cizes him for making the distinction between open and closed societies (which he judges to be too absolute, too severe). “It is useless to proceed in the manner of Bergson, opposing open and closed groups. The social, at a small scale, is open, while at a large scale it is closed” (L’Individu, 294). The in-group and the out-group, or open and closed groups, are not opposed to each other like two mutually exclusive realities. Social inte-gration is integration into the out-group, but this integration relies upon a pre-existing openness of the individual personality to extend out to the limits of group belonging. Having said that, and independently of the fact that Bergson certainly did not oppose the two categories in the manner Simondon claims, it is in Bergson’s writings that we find the philosophy of the body that Simondon needs in order to think the transcendence of the individual.

In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson writes that our bodies “reach out to the stars.” “Yet, even physically, man is far from merely occupying the tiny space allotted to him… For if our body is matter for our consciousness, it is co-extensive with our consciousness, it comprises everything we perceive, it reaches as far as the stars” (221). Bergson goes on to explain that the enclosing of consciousness in the “minimal body,” delimited by the strictly defined corporeal envelope, leads us to neglect the “vast body” (that which is coextensive with all that we perceive), and is the product of a metaphysical illusion. He also specifies that the “minimal body” is not purely and simply absorbed into the “vast body,” but is the point from which the ensemble of the larger body changes. What does it mean?

According to Bergson, perception is not a representation; it is related to action. It is proportioned according to the possibility that I have to act on things. “Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action upon bodies (Matter and Memory, 30). Perception limits, frames the stuff of the universe. “Unlimited de jure, it confines itself de facto to indicating the degree of indetermination allowed to the acts of the special image that you call your body” (ibid., 34-35). My body, an image among images, selects among the universe aspects of things that are of interest for its possible action on them. It leaves aside that which does not concern

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its actions. Perception is not, therefore, a mental phenomenon; it takes shape in things and through it allows us to place ourselves among things.

So we clearly see that the immeasurably vast body of which Bergson speaks in The Two Sources of Religion and Morality is not a metaphor. It does not refer metaphorically to the “social body” (in the sense of Simondon’s out-group.) This larger body is nothing other than my body defined as a center of action. The crucial point of this Bergsonian analysis is that by defining the body as a center of action, and subordinating perception to action (as does Simondon), Bergson brings together in a very direct way the problem of multiple forms of existence and the problem of how to confront materiality. We discover that the way in which humans organize in groups is not entirely indifferent to the modes of confronting materiality according to the possibilities for action at a given moment. In Simondon’s terms, a philosophy of human individuation entails bringing together a theory of the transindividual—the “social body of the individual”—and a theory of technique—which is the way of bringing together man and materiality at a given moment in a given society. Here we see the unity of Simondon’s two theses.

ConclusionIn a period when diatribes against the “anti-humanism” of industrial

machines constituted almost the only philosophical discourse on technique and technology, Simondon seemed to be a resolutely iconoclastic thinker. By defending the idea that machines are cultural realities to the same de-gree as are works of art, he no doubt must have surprised many. Arguing that a philosophy of human individuation must begin to think humans on the grounds of their contemporary modes of engagement with the material world (on the grounds of technique), Simondon risked remain-ing misunderstood. However, he foregrounded major anthropological discoveries previously unacknowledged by philosophical reflection: that man becomes human as a result of a detour through the exterior world; he does this by confronting materiality and exteriorizing his biological functions through tools and social memory. While animals may have the capacity to develop elaborate social structures, humans seem to be the only living beings that have multiplied, enriched and complicated the forms of their social organization to the same extent that they have multiplied, enriched and complicated their engagement with materiality.

While there is certainly the use of technique in the animal world (and even technological mediations used by some animals), humans are the only living beings for whom the forms of social organization can be transformed through the eruption of new modes of engaging with ma-teriality. It is quite probably such a moment that we are witnessing with

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biotechnologies and nanotechnologies today. New relations to materiality are being constructed in the laboratory—relations that are likely to cause concern for contemporary forms of human social organization. Simondon wanted to develop in a philosophical register the claim made by paleo-anthropologists: that reality and human evolution owe their existence to the connection between modes of confronting materiality and grouping patterns (between technique and society). This connection is the source of the originality of the human situation in the world of living things, and it marks the outline of what Simondon calls a humanism for our time. Sociology, technology and humanism—these are the three pillars of the philosophy of human individuation offered by Simondon.

Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonnetranslated by Mark Hayward

Notes1. For example, the remarkable series of three conferences on the psychosociology of

technicity, delivered in Lyon in 1960-61, published in the Bulletin de L’Ecole Pratique de Psychologie et de Pédagogie de Lyon that still awaits republication.

2. « Forme, information, potentiel », in L’Individu à la lumière des notions de forme et d’infor-mation, Grenoble, Jérôme Millon, 2005, p. 531-551.

3. See Le Blanc G., L’Esprit des sciences humaines, Paris, Vrin, 2005.4. See also Karsenti B., La Société en personnes : études durkheimiennes, Paris, Economica, 2006.5. Unfortunately, these texts by Simondon have yet to be published.6. Canguilhem G., « The Problem of Regulations in Organisms and Society», in Writings

on Medicine, New York, Oxford University Press, 2011.7. See Mauss, Marcel. “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2:1, 70-88.

Works CitedBergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone

Books, 1990.——. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1963.Simondon, Gilbert. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier, 1958.——. L’Individu à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2005.——. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Millon, 2005.

Hayward Geoghegan SimondonIssue

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