Abstract
Since the 1940s cybernetics had conceived the technological concept of information as a paradigm which could be at least in principle extended to all the fields of scientific research: biology, psychology, psychopathology, sociology and political economy. During the 1950s Simondon was adopting it as a key methodological tools for his philosophy of individuation. From this perspective his book Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information can be considered an experimental work in progress where the concepts of form and information, which Simondon borrows mainly from Gestalttheorie and cybernetics, are strongly revised in order to build an anti-substantialistic and non-deterministic philosophy of all kinds of physical, biological, psychic and social processes. In this chapter I shall follow the route traced by Simondon: after displaying his ‘double’ criticism to the concept of form – both Aristotelian and Gestalt-like –, I will delve into what he conceived as a ‘reform’ of the cybernetic concept of information.
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Notes
- 1.
Even Watson, Crick and Wilkins did not win the Nobel prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA before 1962. Born in the USA in the 1940s, during the 1950s cybernetics started to spread in France too. The conference Les machines à calculer et la pensée humaine of January 8th 1951 marks the initiation of a European audience to cybernetics (Guchet 2001: 231, n. 3; see also Guchet 2005, who quotes Simondon’s unpublished texts on cybernetics; Geoghegan and Hayward 2012: 4–8). It is worth noticing that already in 1950 a series of conferences organised by L. De Broglie had taken place, later published as La cybernétique. Théorie du signal et de l’information (1951), and the text appears in the bibliography of Individuation. The astonishingly short bibliography of Individuation (Canguilhem GC: 40.2.1) presents only twenty references, four of which were on cybernetics, eight on quantum physics, three on biology, and five on the human psyche. These texts are particularly important, because they are the only ‘official’ table of Simondon’s non philosophical sources for the book. In my interpretation I shall make substantial use of them.
- 2.
Simondon wrote the text in collaboration with F. Le Terrier. A letter he sent to Canguilhem in January 14th 1989, just a month before his death, not only gives some evidence of his mental illness at the time, but also testifies the value he attributed to this text about which he was still asking for advice from his former master (Canguilhem GC: 40.2.2). In France the relationship between social sciences and cybernetics was becoming quite à la page, thanks to the merging of structural linguistics, anthropology and psychoanalysis (in particular through the works of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan). The texts to which Simondon frequently refers are of course Wiener (1948) and (1950), plus the famous ‘Macy conferences’ held in New York from ‘46 to ‘53 (Pias 1946–53; three of them appear in the bibliography of Individuation and four in MEOT’s). The theme is also dominant in the text Simondon seems to rely on in order to build his argument: De Broglie (1951). As I will explain in Sect. 2.3, Simondon intends to answer the questions posed by Raymond Ruyer in La cybernétique et l’origine de l’information (1954).
- 3.
As said, Individuation and MEOT were Simondon’s two PhD theses (see p. 1, n. 1).
- 4.
On the contrary, ‘The hylomorphic schema entails and accepts an obscure zone: the central operational zone. It is the example and the model of all logical processes through which one attributes a key role to limit-cases, to extreme terms of a reality organised as a series’ (I 312).
- 5.
According to Simondon, Gestalttheorie’s ‘static’ conception of form fails to explain the dynamic character of the background and the differential nature of the figure: in fact, only a stimulus variation, not its ‘good form’, can produce information (I 236).
- 6.
The concept of ‘homeostasis’ refers to the tendency of some systems (notably organisms) to maintain stable functioning and constant properties. The notions of homeostasis and entropy play a central role in Simondon’s argument against cybernetics. For a wider discussion of the topic, see Chap. 7.
- 7.
The example of oscillators recurs frequently in Simondon’s writings, e.g. I 222–24, MEOT 134–37 and, notably linked to the notion of ‘field’, FIP 534, 539.
- 8.
The last examples are in fact to be ascribed to Deleuze rather than to Simondon. But also Simondon, as I will explain, is particularly concerned with code in organisms: ‘the content becomes the code’, ‘the living being transforms information into forms, a posteriori into a priori; but this a priori is always oriented towards the reception of information’ (MEOT 123, 137). A probable common reference – through Canguilhem 1952: 144 ff. – is J. von Uexküll (1934), the German ethologist who provides the well-known example of the milieu of the tick (Sect. 9.4).
- 9.
In physics the ‘internal resonance’ of a system is the progressive widening of its oscillation, due to the application of an external force with compatible frequency. Simondon’s usage of the concept is wider, including the actual functioning of any system. For a deeper discussion of the scale problems entailed by the concept of ‘internal resonance’, see Sect. 4.4.
- 10.
Wiener’s expression is ‘negative entropy’, later abbreviated as ‘negentropy’.
- 11.
‘Also an organism partially functions according to its structure. But its structuring is manifestly not an operation depending on a existing structure […] in this sense the fundamental beings of microphysics resemble organisms’ (139). In the domain of microphysics ‘where the individuality of the constituents is partially scattered within the individuality of the system, experience reveals similar behaviours to those induced, in the psychic-organic individualities, by the existence of fields of consciousness of absolute overview [à survol absolu]’ (139–40). On Ruyer’s project of expanding the concept of form-structure, in order to overcome the opposition determinism/contingency, see Ruyer (1930).
- 12.
Wiener continues: ‘I think it is worth considering the relation between structure and function by means of a general theory of synthesis and analysis of machines’ (RO 131). Among the participants at the conference we can find scientists (N. Wiener, B. Mandelbrot, D. MacKay, A. Lwoff, L. Couffignal) and philosophers (J. Hyppolite, L. Goldmann, G. Granger, L. Sebag, M. Gueroult). Gueroult (president of the Royaumont International Philosophy Conferences Committee) declares he expects from the conference a contribution to the regeneration of Cartesian philosophy. In his paper Is Information Theory still Useful? the mathematician and IBM researcher Mandelbrot argues against the hypothesis of a future unification of sciences and the excessive publicity of a theory which, according to him, has already exhausted its ‘historical function’ (RO 98).
- 13.
The entire paper has been recently issued as API, but Simondon did not publish it during his lifetime.
- 14.
The concept of a ‘transductive’ amplification is used here by Simondon to cover the semantic field of ‘crystallisation’ as the counterpart of modulation. It is in a way the model of the primitive amplification generating structures: ‘transduction is precisely capable of creating structures starting from a homogeneous metastable milieu’ (API 174). In Individuation Simondon already referred to ‘a process of amplifying communication, the most primitive modality of which is transduction, which already exists in physical individuation’ (I 33, n. 10). Although the notion of ‘amplification’ often recurs in Simondon’s texts, it will never gain the epistemological centrality which characterizes the notion of transduction in Individuation. The same applies to the concept of ‘organising amplification’, although still present, for instance, in the course Formes et niveaux de l’information (1970–71), where Simondon proposes again the three typologies of amplification (Bontems 2006: 323).
- 15.
It is worth noting the French use of the expression ‘sciences humaines’, which approximately corresponds to the English ‘social sciences’, with the premise that it bears a major importance to the theory – and an implicit contraposition – of the natural and human domains. In what follows, if not strictly necessary, I will keep the English expression. The reader must therefore assume that, in the quotations, the expression ‘social sciences’ corresponds to the French ‘human sciences’.
- 16.
Merleau-Ponty died a few months before the conference, in May 1961. Three years later Simondon dedicated IGPB to Merleau-Ponty. Direct references to the latter are quite rare in Simondon’s works (e.g. in CSP) and indeed not particularly relevant. I shall not measure here Simondon’s unquestionable debt towards Merleau-Ponty as I will limit myself to the use of some of his theses in order to challenge a few problems in Simondon’s philosophy.
- 17.
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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Bontems, V. 2006. Encyclopédisme et crise de la culture. Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger “Gilbert Simondon” 2006/3: 311–324.
Canguilhem, G. (GC). Archives de Georges Canguilhem. Paris: CAPHES, ENS.
Canguilhem, G. 1952. La connaissance de la vie. Paris: Vrin (English trans. Knowledge of life. New York: Ordham University Press, 2008).
De Broglie, L. 1951. La cybernétique. Théorie du signal et de l’information. (With a preface of J. Loeb). Revue d’optique théorique et instrumental. Paris.
Geoghegan, B.D., and M. Hayward. 2012. Catching up with Simondon. SubStance 129(41/3): 3–15.
Guchet, X. 2001. Théorie du lien social, technologie et philosophie: Simondon lecteur de Merleau-Ponty. Les Études Philosophiques 50(2): 219–237.
Guchet, X. 2005. Simondon, la cybernétique et les sciences humaines. Genèse de l’ontologie simondonienne dans deux manuscrits sur la cybernétique. Chiasmi International 7: Merleau-Ponty. Vie et Individuation: 187–206.
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Ruyer, R. 1930. Esquisse d’une théorie de la structure. Paris: Alcan.
Ruyer, R. 1954. La cybernétique et l’origine de l’information. Paris: Flammarion.
Von Uexküll, J. 1934. Streifzüge durch die Umwellen von Tieren und Menschen – Bedeutungslehre. Berlin: Springer (French trans. Mondes animaux et monde humain. Suivi de La théorie de la signification. Paris: Denoël, 1965).
Wiener, N. 1948. Cybernetics: Or control of communication in the animal and the machine. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
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Bardin, A. (2015). Reforming the Concepts of Form and Information. 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_2
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