Abstract
Although a whole series of attempts flourished, which have aimed to discover in Simondon’s ‘transindividual’ a supposedly latent political philosophy, the very ‘existence’ of Simondon’s political thought is quite problematic. I believe Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is better understood as having something actually political at stake. In fact, Simondon’s political thought is to be looked for in the complex conception of human nature and social processes that can be derived from his epistemology. On this basis, an explanation of the ‘archetypal’ role played by ‘philosophical thought’ in his texts will show how it carries on a political function, by endorsing the destabilising power of collective invention and allowing for its integration in the regulatory apparatus of social systems. From this perspective Simondon’s philosophy can be a useful tool for questioning the ideological efficacy of the models provided by the traditional epistemology of social systems within the global political milieu emerged through the planetary development of technology.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Although the complex debate on the ‘political’ Simondon can be said to begin with Deleuze (1966) it was, in fact, initiated by Balibar (1993), Stiegler (1994) and Combes (1999). Also Hottois (1993) attempted a ‘political’ reading of the issue of ‘technical culture’, although less concerned with the theme of the transindividual. Other interesting interpretations, more or less critical of the ‘political’ Simondon, can be found in Stengers (2004) and in Guchet (2010). The interest for the ‘political’ Simondon has also extended beyond the Francophone milieu. In Italy Simondon has directly been received as a political philosopher since Virno’s translation (2001), occasionally raising the interest of radical left thinkers, such as Virno himself, Agamben, Negri, Esposito, and Morfino (2008): the latter is particularly concerned with the connection between ontology and politics, a line of research which seems to also orient South American researchers (see for instance Rodriguez 2009). In English, Toscano (2002) had from early on challenged the topic, while more recently Del Lucchese (2009) and some collective works and journal issues have appeared. Following the translations of Stiegler’s and Combes’s works interest is spreading, while Simondon’s oeuvres are in course of translation in many languages worldwide, English included. I discussed the earlier stage of this debate on the ‘political’ Simondon in Bardin (2010), in particular Intermezzo I and II.
- 2.
Concerning Simondon’s use of the expression ‘mode of thought’ as referring both to theory and practice, see Sect. 10.2.
- 3.
The terms ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ respectively translate ‘das Politische’ and ‘die Politik’ in German, ‘la politique’ and ‘le politique’ in French, and ‘la politica’ and ‘il politico’ in Italian. But this terminological distinction, and notably the expression ‘the political’, is in fact ‘the name of a problem which traces the conceptual and empirical incompletion of politics’ (Valentine 2006: 506). The opposition is typical of a tradition of political thought concerned with the critique of the modern conception of state sovereignty, well exemplified by Carl Schmitt’s (1932) conception of the political as a ‘transhistorical category’ pointing to the original formation and defence of the community (Bates 2012: 22). In radical political thought the concept traditionally served to oppose extra-institutional action to the institutional structure and regulation of the state. In this sense, the true space of ‘the political’ would be, in short, what a politics of state governance submitted to the laws of global capitalistic economy tends to ideologically and physically cancel. I am unaware of whether Soulez was or was not interested in this kind of operation. I am just attempting to transfer his close reading of Bergson’s Deux sources to what Simondon mainly derived from this same text.
- 4.
‘Political and social thought is considered here of the same order as religion, and can be treated in the same way’ (MEOT 217).
- 5.
Simondon refers to pragmatism, communism and national socialism, all of which he pictures as characterised by a mythology of technology (Bardin 2013: 27 ff.).
- 6.
It is perhaps possible to push this hypothesis up to the point of stating that what Simondon calls ‘archetype’ is quite close to Piaget’s notion of schema. It is not by chance that, highlighting Bergson’s influence on Simondon, Van Caneghem refers at the same time to Piaget, since both would ‘conceive the living being not as a thing, but rather as superposition of dynamical schemas’ (Van Caneghem 1989: 818). Also along the way Gesell (1946) and Piaget influenced Simondon’s concept of ‘evolution’, see Sect. 11.3, n. 19.
- 7.
- 8.
See above, Sect. 6.2.
- 9.
‘The concept of individuation plays a large role in our psychology. In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology. Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation having for its goal the development of the individual personality […] As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationship and not to isolation […] Individuation is practically the same as the development of consciousness out of the original state of identity. It is thus an extension of the sphere of consciousness, an enriching of conscious psychological life’ (Jung 1921: 637–39).
- 10.
The reference to Eliade is important here, because he was part of the Eranos circle (whose members used to meet annually in Switzerland). Since the beginning in the 1930s until the 1970s the circle reunited scholars and intellectuals of different specialisation (biology, psychology, anthropology religious studies), some of whom – namely Jung, Eliade and Portmann – Simondon often made reference to.
- 11.
To this regard it is worth recalling Adolf Portmann, another ‘adept’ to the Eranos group (see the previous note), whose text on zoology Animal forms and patterns (1948) Simondon included in the bibliography of Individuation. In Les bases biologiques d’un nouvel humanisme (1951), Portmann notes that the peculiarity of homo sapiens is grounded on the anomalous length and articulation of what the author names ‘gestation period’, which would last for the 266 days from conception to birth plus at least another thirteen extra-uterine months (Portmann 1951: 221). Biology makes the human being thus a ‘form of life’ dependent on the ‘particularity of each existence’ and – so to speak – ontologically linked to an ethics of responsibility: ‘this responsibility summons up a table of values that biology can only contribute to establish, but that must essentially derive from a wider vision of our existence, a vision that will provide principles apt to orient human behaviour’ (79). Also Virno’s interpretation of Simondon’s concept of the ‘pre-individual’ points to a political anthropology, and he sees in ‘neoteny’ a typical human feature that would characterise political praxis (Virno 2003: 158). If the contingency of political praxis is well underlined by Virno, it seems thus to be definitively located in the biological phase, at the outset of the process, and not in the process itself. For this reason Virno’s reading appears on this point surprisingly closer to Portmann than to Simondon.
- 12.
‘To postulate that […] there are no lost islands of becoming, no domains eternally closed in themselves, and there is no absolute autarchy of the instant, is to claim that each gesture has a meaning as information and it is symbolic in relation to life or to the totality of lives’ (I 333). Hence the importance, for Simondon, of the Romanian figure of the inheritor (I 250), and his conception of the individual as ‘a “temporal parallax” in the organisation of the intermediate zone between our present action and the cultural horizon, far, stable and collective’ (IPM 1451). This is also the meaning of the “perpetual nekuia” Simondon evokes in I 250 probably relying on Cumont (1949). An interesting artistic development of this theme is offered by Duhem 2013b.
- 13.
It is in this sense that – following Bergson’s idea that, in order to expand, open religion requires a myth-making function – Simondon conceives of belief and myth also as ‘amplifying projections’ (IMIN 44).
- 14.
As already noted in Sect. 9.4, Merleau-Ponty’s seminar on L’institution offers one of the possible perspectives for the understanding of Simondon’s conception of institution at the threshold between the biological and the social. According to Merleau-Ponty, organised series of ‘symbolic matrices’ ‘appear where men and the givens of nature or of the past meet’ and can ‘leave their footprint of the course of things’ and then disappear due to ‘internal disintegration’ or because they change their nature. (Merleau-Ponty 1955: 28).
- 15.
As many others of his generation, Simondon saw in Sartre the champion and the model of a ‘fighting wing of humanism’, to whom one should address a philosophical request of emancipation. And this is what Simondon does, in this early writing, when requesting the integration of ‘cultural humanism’ with the traditionally excluded issue of technics.
- 16.
In other words it is the milieu ‘through which the human being regulates its relation to the world and to itself’ (MEOT 227).
- 17.
I partially owe this formulation of the concept of ‘reflexivity’ to Guchet, Ontologie sociale et technologie, a paper he delivered at the conference Between Deleuze and Simondon, organised by Warwick University in Venice the 18/09/2009.
- 18.
Also Baudrillard explicitly associates Simondon’s work with the critique of the model of the automaton, when writing that ‘AUTOMATISM […] is the major concept of the modern object’s mechanistic triumphalism, the ideal of its mythology’ (Baudrillard 1968: 153–54).
- 19.
For Simondon’s critique of the cybernetic concept of the automaton as a model for social systems, see above Chap. 7.
- 20.
‘The whole spectre of communitarianism and of essentialist identitarian demands simultaneously deflate when one draws the consequences of Simondon’s transindividualism. Each identity (personal, collective) is a problem, and not a given: a response provisional and in progress of one’s effort to persevere in being, in constitutive interaction with a certain milieu, and not a stable solution’ (Citton 2004).
- 21.
This is one of the earliest claims resonating in Simondon’s research: ‘it is too easy to rely on a permanent and universal human nature […] no universal human nature can be defined, since all events and singularities are part of humanity’ (HU 52).
- 22.
In some passages, to the technical ‘choices’ of a society, Simondon seems to attribute a dominant structuring impulse (MEOT 86–87).
- 23.
As Citton highlights, the concept of the transindividual functions in Simondon’s philosophy as an alternative to the ‘naive analogy’ of the body politic in which individual ‘members’ would play a fixed role, and therefore any reductionist reading of Simondon’s philosophy towards socio-biology should be avoided. Yet Citton’s reading should be complicated if we do not want to contradict Simondon’s struggle against a supposed ‘anthropological difference’ (Citton 2004). Relying on Simondon’s critique of the ‘anthropological prejudice’ shared by social positivism and cybernetics (both reducing the social system to homeostasis, Guchet 2011: 74–75) Guchet concludes his essay on the ‘social body’ in Simondon by proposing an interpretation that is quite close to mine concerning the relation between the themes of the transindividual and of technics Simondon developed in the two theses, and nevertheless he relies on a different conception of the anthropological difference: ‘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 materiality’ (Guchet 2011: 92).
- 24.
Quoting this text Marcuse underlines how – on the basis of modern science’s ‘pure and neutral’ theoretical reason – the capitalistic control of technology developed a process going from the ‘instrumentalization of things’ to the ‘instrumentalization of men’ (Marcuse 1964: 159). Along a similar path Feenbeerg explains that Simondon’s strive for a ‘concrete technology’ integrated to the development of social systems cannot rely on technics itself, it has to be ultimately linked to a non-capitalistic political choice (Feenberg 1991: 194–95). However, in his criticism to ‘technological rationality’ Marcuse does not consider that Simondon sees precisely in the liberation of machines the precondition for the liberation of human beings, as far as they carry on schemas of liberty opposed to the ‘schemas of slavery’ typical of their usage without knowledge. In this sense Simondon’s perspective cannot comply with any Marxist hypothesis of liberation of human beings through the ‘enslavement’ of machines: as Simondon clearly states, philosophical thought has to play a role towards technical objects ‘analogous to the one it played in the abolition of slavery and in the affirmation of the value of the human person’ (MEOT 9). As Toscano notes Marcuse, being unaware that Simondon’s nature ‘has a very different relation to technical reality than Hegelian nature’, fails to grasp that to Simondon the necessary condition for the emergence of a new finality in the collective is the freeing of the machines as ‘intercessors, mediators and converters’ that relate social and political collectivity to the ‘disparate’ becoming of nature (Toscano 2012: 114–15).
- 25.
The same notion allows Simondon to conceive publicity in relation to a ‘zone of technicity’ productive of cognitive structures with an archetypal function of ‘dispersion’ (EH 14–16).
- 26.
In this sense I perfectly agree with Toscano when he argues that ‘Simondon tries to think together nature and excess, technology and revolution, in a manner that might at least dislocate some of the common-places of the contemporary debate on ontology and politics’ (Toscano 2012: 107–108).
- 27.
When collective movements are the subject of Simondon’s reflection, he manifestly denies any unconditional a-priori approval of processes of innovation or social re-structuration. On the contrary, he clearly shows the essential ambiguity of any resurgence of the original energetic potentials of the magic phase, kind of attempts to revive ‘the political’ as an emergency measure in a state of crisis. Although on the one hand he highlights the efficacy of the belief in symbolic objects, capable of producing ‘powerful collective movements’ (IMIN 133), on the other hand he does not cease to underline the obscure double represented by the persisting actuality of the magic phase, which comes back in ‘the history of groups and cultures’, according to modalities that risk to be regressive (IMIN 137–38). And nevertheless, it is worth underlining that the ‘reformist’ approach to philosophical concepts typical of Simondon’s research appears to be the necessary basis for a ‘revolutionary’ philosophical invention of terms such as ‘transduction’, ‘metastability’, and ‘transindividual’ that have proved and still can give proof of philosophical and political fecundity. As De Boever notes by contrasting Simondon to Agamben, ‘to approach politics starting from a technical mentality brings us to consider the relation between human beings and the State apparatus as a metastable relation […] This brings about not the opposition of two poles, but rather the exploration, through accurate examination, of their common becoming’ (De Boever 2010: 127–28).
- 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
Balibar, É. 1993. Individualité et transindividualité chez Spinoza. (conference held on May the 15th 1993). In Architectures de la raison. Mélanges offerts à Alexandre Matheron, ed. Moreau, P.-F., 35–46. Fontenay-aux-Roses: ENS Editions (English trans. “Spinoza: from individuality to transindividuality.” Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis 71. Delft, 1997).
Bardin, A. 2008. Gilbert Simondon. Studio della nozione di animalità: note per un’antropologia politica. Kath’autón 2: 40–45.
Bardin, A. 2010. Epistemologia e politica in Gilbert Simondon. Individuazione, tecnica e sistemi sociali. Valdagno: FuoriRegistro.
Bardin, A. 2013. De l’homme à la matière, pour une ontologie difficile. Marx avec Simondon. Cahiers Simondon 5: 25–43.
Bates, D.W. 2012. States of war: enlightenment origins of the political. New York: Columbia University Press.
Baudrillard, J. 1968. Le Système des objets. Paris: Gallimard (English trans. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 1996).
Bergson, H. 1932. Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Paris: Alcan (English trans. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. London: Macmillan & Co., 1935).
Canguilhem, G. 1955. Le problème des régulations dans l’organisme et dans la société. In Ecrits sur la médecine, 101–125. Paris: Seuil, 2002. (First edition: Les Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 92:64–81).
Canguilhem, G. 1972. Régulation. In Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. 14. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis.
Carrozzini, G. 2005. Nota a ‘Per una nozione di situazione dialettica’. Il Protagora 33(5): 105–109.
Chabot, P., ed. 2003. La philosophie de Simondon. Paris: Vrin (English trans. The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation. London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
Citton, Y. 2004. Sept résonances de Simondon. Multitudes. “Politiques de l’ individuation. Penser avec Simondon” 2004/18. http://www.multitudes.net/category/l-edition-papier-en-ligne/Multitudes-18-Automne-2004/. Accessed 30 Dec 2014.
Combes, M. 1999. Gilbert simondon and the philosophy of the transindividual. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013 (First edition: Simondon. Individu et collectivité, pour une philosophie du transindividuel. Paris: PUF).
Cumont, F. 1949. Lux perpetua. Paris: Librarie Orientaliste Paul Gauthier.
De Boever, A. 2010. Agamben et Simondon: ontologie, technologie et politique. Cahiers Simondo 2: 117–128.
De Chardin, T. 1956. La place de l’homme dans la nature. Paris: Albin Michel.
Del Lucchese, F. 2009. Monstrous individuations: Deleuze, Simondon, and relational ontology. Differences 20(2–3): 179–193.
Deleuze, G. 1966. Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. In L’île déserte et autres textes, 120–124. Paris: Minuit.
Duhem, L. 2013b. Nekuia. Évocations de Simondon. http://www.ludovicduhem.com/#!nekuia/c17e2. Accessed 30 Dec 2014.
Feenberg, A. 1991. Critical theory of technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gesell, A. 1946. The ontogenesis of infant behavior. In Manual of child psychology, chap. 6, ed. Carmichael, L., 295–331. New York/London: Wiley (French transl. L’ontogénèse du comportement de l’enfant. In Manuel de psychologie de l’enfant, vol. I, chap. 6, 470–527).
Guchet, X. 2010. Pour un humanisme technologique. Culture, technique et société dans la philosophie de Gilbert Simondon. Paris: PUF.
Guchet, X. 2011. Technology, sociology, humanism: Simondon and the problem of the human sciences. SubStance 129(41/3): 76–92 (First edition: “Le corps social du sujet.” Cahiers Simondon 3: 71–92).
Hottois, G. 1993. Simondon et la philosophie de la “culture technique”. Bruxelles: De Boeck.
Jung, C.G. 1921. Psychologische typen. Zürich und Stuttgart: Rascher Verlag (English trans. Psychological Types. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
Marcuse, H. 1964. One-dimensional man. London: Routledge and Keagan.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1955. Les aventures de la dialectique. Paris: Gallimard (English trans. Adventures of the Dialectic. Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1973).
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1959b. Notes de travail inédites. Cours 1959. Chiasmi International 7: Merleau-Ponty. Vie et Individuation: 39–42.
Morfino, V. 2008. Simondon e il transindividuale. Il Protagora 36(12): 395–400.
Portmann, A. 1948. Die Tiergestalt. Studien über die Bedeutung der tierischen Erscheinung. Basel: Rheinhardt Verlag (English trans. Animal Forms and Patterns. London: Faber and Faber, 1952).
Portmann, A. 1951. Les bases biologiques d’un nouvel humanisme. In Cahiers de philosophie: le problème de la vie, vol. 32, 59–79. Neuchatel: Éditions de la Baconnière.
Rodriguez, P.E. 2009. Prólogo. Individuar. De cristales, esponjas y afectos. In G. Simondon, La individuación a la luz de las nociones de forma y información, 11–19. Buenos Aires: Editorial Cactus y La Cebra Ediciones.
Schmitt, C. 1932. Der Begriff des Politischen. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. (English trans. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Soulez, P. 1989. Bergson politique. Paris: PUF.
Stengers, I. 2004. Résister à Simondon? Multitudes. Politiques de l’ individuation. Penser avec Simondon 2004/18: 55–62. http://www.multitudes.net/category/l-edition-papier-en-ligne/Multitudes-18-Automne-2004/. Accessed 30 Dec 2014.
Stiegler, B. 1994. La technique et le temps. 1. La faute d’Épiméthée. Paris: Galilée.
Stiegler, B. 2006. Chute et élévation. L’apolitique de Simondon. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’étranger “Gilbert Simondon” 196(3): 325–341.
Toscano, A. 2002. L’essere interattivo. Appunti ‘simondoniani’ su informazione e intelligenza sociale. DeriveApprodi 21(2002): 88–91.
Toscano, A. 2012. The disparate: ontology and politics in Simondon. The Warwick Journal of Philosophy Special Volume. Deleuze and Simondon: 107–117.
Valentine, J. 2006. The political. Theory Culture and Society 23(2–3): 505–511.
Van Caneghem, D. 1989. Hommage à Gilbert Simondon. Bulletin de Psychologie 42(392): 815–836.
Virno, P. 2001. Multitude et principe d’individuation. Multitudes. “Politiques de l’ individuation. Penser avec Simondon” 2004/18: 103–17. http://www.multitudes.net/category/l-edition-papier-en-ligne/Multitudes-18-Automne-2004/. Accessed 30 Dec 2014.
Virno, P. 2003. Quando il verbo si fa carne. Linguaggio e natura umana. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bardin, A. (2015). Regulation and Invention: Simondon’s Political Philosophy. 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_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9831-0_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-9830-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-9831-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)