Abstract
Simondon’s research articulates different perspectives on the question of technics, far from both Heideggerian technophobia and the positivistic (and in part the cybernetic) technocratic dream. His philosophy draws the line of an irreversible path, and sees the appropriation of technics as a binding necessity: technical ‘openness’ is not for Simondon a simple judgement of value, it is also a palaeoanthropological evidence that – as it is for Bergson in the Deux sources – ‘calls for a bigger soul [supplément d’âme]’, a goal which Simondon believed was intrinsic to technics itself. As I shall explain, it is in close contact with such a vision – derived from both Durkheim and Bergson – that Simondon intends to develop a political pedagogy of the ‘technical mentality’. But his philosophy of individuation entails a conception of technical progress and human historicity that contrasts with every ‘mythical’ quest for a foundation of social systems – natural or historical – on an alleged human essence or on the élan vital itself. On the contrary, Simondon advances a radically open and inventive conception of the evolution of social systems and of what he calls ‘human progress’. It is from this perspective that Simondon’s philosophy forces the political problem of connecting technological development and different cultures to be posed by rejecting, at the same time, the complementary simplifications of the Eurocentric faith in the civilising power of technological progress, and of the ‘communitarian’ regression inspired by Heidegger’s anti-technological stance.
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Notes
- 1.
On the relation between Heidegger’s philosophy of technics and Simondon’s, see at least Chateau (1994) and the volume edited by Vaisse (2006). In fact, Simondon’s explicit references to Heidegger are quite rare and mainly concerned with a critique of his reduction of the essence of technicity, and consequently of the technical object, to Gestell, to a ‘framing’ and thus ‘alienating objectivation of human experience’: against this reduction of technical objects to mere ‘utensils [ustensiles]’, Simondon repeatedly affirms the essential ‘historicity of the technical object’ (MEOT 222, PST 128–29).
- 2.
Durkheim (1912) will explicitly deny this possibility. In this text, however, he is already quite critical towards Guyau’s hypothesis: ‘In order to demonstrate that it [religion] has no future, one should demonstrate that the reasons that made it necessary have disappeared. And since these reasons are sociological, one should find out what change in the nature of societies has to take place, which would make religion useless and impossible’ (Durkheim 1887: 310).
- 3.
‘Thus it is seen that whatever has been done in the name of religion cannot have been done in vain: for it is necessarily the society that did it, and it is humanity that has reaped the fruits’ (Durkheim 1912: 600). This clearly recalls Comte’s confidence in a society that ‘cannot be completely wrong concerning its real needs’ because of its ‘founding aphorism: there is neither society without government nor government without society’ (Comte 1852, II, V).
- 4.
‘How could it spread, even diluted and enfeebled as it must necessarily be, in a humanity obsessed by the fear of hunger?’ (Bergson 1932: 329).
- 5.
This is the first text Simondon published when he was still teaching at the Lycée Descartes of Tours, where he carried on didactical experimentation in a small technology lab (PI 115).
- 6.
On ‘technical mentality’ as a prism through which one can glimpse Simondon’s overcoming of phenomenology (in relation not only to Merleau-Ponty, but also to Mikel Dufrenne), see Carrozzini (2011). On this ground, the author accurately analyses Simondon’s technological paradigmatism in his courses of general psychology, reads his conception of ‘technical culture’ against the background of Jacques Lafitte’s ‘science des machines’, and develops a critique of Simondon’s techno-aesthetics. On the normative function and social effects of (the relationship with) technological artefacts, one can widely draw from Bruno Latour’s work (see for instance Latour 2002, where he hints at Simondon’s theoretical contribution), such as Simondon’s claim that technologists have ‘to be the representative for technical objects’ (MEOT 151); on the regulatory function of Simondon’s philosophy of technology see also Schmidgen (2012).
- 7.
His emancipatory promise only deals here with the pedagogical-political function of the open ‘post-industrial technical object’: because of its double-layered structure, it would both maintain a relation with its actual functioning and the opening to future invention.
- 8.
- 9.
In this sense an ethical decision compatible with the status of technicity depends on both culture as the milieu which mediates different norms, and the immediate decision according to an ‘already given intellectual schema or vital attitude’ (NC 506–7) (Sect. 8.3). The two limit cases can be formalised as two different relations between values and decision displayed by Dumont 1983: 290–98.
- 10.
In this late essay Simondon displays some of his alternatives to nuclear development and the integration of alternative energetic sources. Furthermore, he refers to the loss of elders and their social function, in order to explain how ‘closed social groups’ are the outcome of an only apparently open and progressive society, in fact closed to the operative schemas of the past (TP 117). The active ‘recovery’ of those schemas is a political priority both for technical and social functions (TP 108 ff.). In fact, in Simondon’s words, ‘technical devices have a fundamental schema which can be at times untimely […] this schema can come back into existence, be reactivated and integrated into a new, more complex device. There is something eternal in a technical schema. And this is what is always present and can be conserved in things’ (MECD 87).
- 11.
Simondon’s proposed solution is the introduction of the tractor insofar as an ‘indefinitely utilisable concrete open machine’ (APM 16). The project of a ‘human engineering’ is always present in Simondon’s research between 1958–1962, i.e. in the majority of his writings, plus his summary of the Entretiens de Mysore (1959) and his paper at the Colloque de Royaumont on the concept of information. See also his reference to the ‘human engineering’ developed by Myrdal (1944) (PST 132). See also Friedmann (1956), which inspired his criticism of Durkheim’s optimistic views on the relationship between division of labour and the development of an organic solidarity. This book was in general for Simondon a major reference to the problem of alienated labour (PST 333, MT 350).
- 12.
It has not been possible to establish a straightforward connection between the philosophies of Simondon and Jean Hyppolite, who was his directeur de thèse for Individuation, although the concept of ‘reflexive thought’ seems to invite such an attempt in relation, for instance, to the latter’s (Hegelian) overcoming of the (Kantian) opposition between reflection and being (Hyppolite 1953, Chap. 2). Yet perhaps a more meaningful link has been traced through the concept of ‘prostheticity’ in Chap. 10, n. 28.
- 13.
In other writings Simondon admits that ‘technical culture’ and ‘technical taste’ are both preconditions of the integration of technicity into culture (NC 520–22). This function is shared by the technical and the artistic object, with the difference that the latter is in general ‘accepted only if it reflects an already existing vital dynamism’ (NC 515), while the technical object carries on a normativity essentially antagonistic to the communitarian one, since it ‘modifies the code of values of a closed society’ (NC 513), at least as long as it is not ‘captured’ by communitarian symbolism.
- 14.
It is interesting to note that Simondon apparently shapes his thesis against Bergson through a Bergsonian argument: ‘it cannot be granted that open religions actually exist, nor that the opposition between closed and open religions is as sharp as Bergson claims; but the opening is a function common to different religions, each of them being also partially closed’ (MEOT 232).
- 15.
‘The ordinary meaning of the word “techno-logy” refers to modern technics in so far as it would be the application of the logos to science. Simondon reinterprets this word as the study (logos) of technics’ (Barthélémy 2012: 229).
- 16.
What I imply here is that there is much more for political thought in Simondon’s epistemology and ontology than we could imagine on the basis of his more strictly political claims. I owe a debt here: ‘we will leave to others the task to evaluate the value and success of Simondon’s pedagogical reform. What is worth noting is that this cultural perspective does not allow him to develop the problem his oeuvre nevertheless poses’ (Aspe and Combes 2004). For a critical interpretation of the limitations implicit in Simondon’s ‘political’ thought and the opportunities it offers, see Stiegler (2006a, b). Mine will be displayed in Chap. 12.
- 17.
Simondon hardly resists the temptation to provide his own ‘grand narrative’. Each phase of ‘human progress’ would follow the same pattern: growth, saturation, hypertrophy of automatism, and the opening of a new modality of concretisation.
- 18.
The macroscopic technical model is an underground spring cyclically emitting water displayed by Ruyer (1954) and schematically drawn by Simondon in MEC 140.
- 19.
On Simondon’s debt towards Gesell (1946), see Sect. 5.1. On the debt towards Piaget see Petit (2010) and the way it is highlighted in Barthélémy’s simondonian ‘dictionary’: ‘Like Jean Piaget before him, Simondon uses this term [transduction], which is at the same time technological and biological, in order to give it a new meaning, one that will become absolutely central in the thought of individuation’ (De Boever et al. 2012: 230). In effect, Piaget’s description of the passage of the child from the egocentric pre-operational to the operational stages might be the model of the process of individuation as a ‘transduction’ itself (Sect. 1.3). As Guchet explains, Simondon’s analysis of ‘technical evolution’ is strictly connected to Leroi-Gourhan’s description of the process of objectivation that makes the human being-nature relationship less and less anthropocentric (Guchet 2008: 23). I will just add that in Leroi-Gourhan’s view ‘technical evolution’ seems to acquire a meaning at the scale of ‘geological evolution’, as Deleuze and Guattari did not fail to notice in the third chapter of their Mille Plateaux (1980), which widely draws from Leroi-Gourhan and Simondon.
- 20.
It is worth recalling here the brief text Pour une notion de situation dialectique: some posthumously published working-notes originally drafted – as Carrozzini explains – in view of the Colloque de Royaumont (18–23 September 1960) La dialectique to which Simondon eventually did not take part (Carrozzini 2005: 107). As it often happens, Simondon seems to attempt a ‘reform’ of the concept arguing that ‘dialectics only exists in the form of a situation’ (SD 114). In this sense from this truly ‘ontological-political’ text one can derive that there is no actual historical process that is not ‘dialectical’ in the sense of a discovery-invention of a new compatibility. The same strategy is also carried on in Individuation, where the term ‘dialectics’ is opposed to ‘transduction’ (I 111) and ‘phase’ (I 322–23), but at the same time ‘redeemed’ by conceiving ‘dialectical stages’ as ‘phases of being’ (I 323). As Guchet noted, despite Simondon moves from an explicit denial of dialectics to the dialectical drawing of ‘technical evolution’, ‘an exam of the texts demonstrates that the break is less deep than it appeared to be’ (Guchet 2005: 251).
- 21.
This would have occurred thanks to the accomplishment of the process of automation and the consequent liberation of labour prospected by Georges Friedmann (1946).
- 22.
Simondon’s question on technology (‘Will technology become industry as language became grammar and religion theology?’ LPH 271) clearly relies on Bergson’s understanding of history as a risk: ‘We do not believe in the fatality of history’ (Bergson 1932: 312). And yet Bergson’s mystical optimism often seems to exorcise the risk: ‘Let us not merely say, as we did above, that the mystical summons up the mechanical. We must add that the body, now larger, calls for a bigger soul, and that mechanicism should mean mysticism. The origins of the process of mechanization are indeed more mystical than we might imagine. Machinery will find its true vocation again, it will render services in proportion to its power, only if mankind, which it has bowed still lower to the earth, can succeed, through it, in standing erect and looking heavenwards’ (Bergson 1932: 330–31).
- 23.
Simondon’s stance should be probably considered still quite far from Gould’s theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (on this topic see LaMarre 2013: 101 ff.), but it is certainly close to Gould’s claim – against the ‘ultra-Darwinian’ Dennet (1995) – for the fecundity of the Lamarckian paradigm for the explanation of cultural change: ‘Human cultural change operates fundamentally in the Lamarckian mode, while genetic evolution remains firmly Darwinian. Lamarckian processes are so labile, so directional, and so rapid that they overwhelm Darwinian rates of change. Since Lamarckian and Darwinian systems work so differently, cultural change will receive only limited (and metaphorical) illumination from Darwinism’ (Gould 1997: 52).
- 24.
Given the importance of the concept of ‘singularity’ in Deleuze’s philosophy and the way he draws on Simondon’s terms since his review to Simondon’s IGPB (Deleuze 1966), a clarification is needed concerning the difference in usage. For both philosophers the concept of ‘singularity’ points to a discontinuity concerning processes, but they conceive the relation between ‘singularity’ and ‘individual’ differently. Deleuze situates the individual on a different scale (molar) in relation to the pre-individual regime of singularity-events (molecular) his ‘transcendental-empiricism’ is concerned with. On the contrary, for Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, the individual is to be understood as a part of a discontinuous process without reducing it to a kind of epiphenomenon of molecular features. Indeed, Simondon’s use of the terms ‘singular’ or ‘singularity’ is a very restricted one, which refers to a structured individual when it is the result or the trigger of a process of individuation. Transductive processes are therefore aleatory precisely due to this ‘historical’ aspect in their genesis. In this sense Toscano’s ‘idea of the individual as a “theatre” rather than an “agent” of individuation’ (Toscano 2006: 150) probably fits Deleuze’s philosophy better than Simondon’s: according to the latter the individual as a system is both a ‘theatre’ and an ‘agent’ of individuation such as ‘the living is both the agent and the theatre of individuation’ (I 29) (see above Chap. 1).
- 25.
With these expressions Lévi-Strauss differentiates ‘cold societies’ ‘the internal climate of which is close to the zero degree of historical temperature’ (i.e. with low and constant number of components and mechanical functioning) from ‘warm societies, which appeared in different places on earth following the Neolithic revolution’ (i.e. with a growing number of components and ever-expanding functions) (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 309–310; see also Lévi-Strauss 1960). As highlighted by Clastres (1974), ethnological ethnocentrism prevalently focuses on the distinction between a-historical (‘primitive’) societies and societies the historicity of which is primarily linked to the process of industrialisation and therefore to the concept of progress. To this criticism, however, it would be perhaps interesting to add Levi-Strauss’s magical-religious characterisation of ‘savage thought’ as inherently related to the affective force of ‘pure historicity’ and yet not affected with the concern for continuity typical of ‘domesticated thought’: savage thought is essentially ‘discontinuous and analogical’ (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 320–21, 348–49).
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
Simondon’s complete bibliography and a list of abbreviations are provided in the Appendix.
References
Simondon’s complete bibliography and a list of abbreviations are provided in the Appendix.
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Bardin, A. (2015). The Mysticism of (Technical) Evolution. In: Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9831-0_11
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