Abstract
The chapter clarifies the object of Simondon’s philosophy of individuation by tackling the problem of the ‘pre-individual’. The concept of the pre-individual Simondon develops in Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information is both an outcome of his ontological approach inspired by quantum physics and the mark of a persisting debt to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in particular to the courses on nature he delivered while Simondon was writing his book. In this sense the choice of the term ‘pre-individual’ is quite revealing: on the one hand it indicates the attempt to abandon the theme of ‘perception’ as an alleged solution for the problem of the transcendental horizon, on the other hand it entails the reformulation – not the disappearance, in fact – of the problem of the subject. As the analysis of the debate following the lecture Simondon delivered at the Société française de philosophie will show, this perspective allows us to measure how far Simondon’s theory of information is influenced by the phenomenological concepts of perception, sense, and consciousness, while shifting towards the critical fecundity of natural philosophy Merleau-Ponty had widely recognised.
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Notes
- 1.
On the original partition of Individuation in two sections, see Chap. 1, n. 28.
- 2.
In underlining Simondon’s debt towards Merleau-Ponty, I do not mean to reduce the former to an epigone of the latter, but rather to grasp his phenomenological background together with the originality of his philosophy of individuation. However, following what Descombes says about Merleau-Ponty (‘to connect thing and consciousness it was necessary to write a philosophy of nature’ Descombes 1979: 73), the hypothesis that Individuation could be the continuation of a legacy is at very least to be taken seriously.
- 3.
See especially I 321–32.
- 4.
‘As a phase we do not mean a temporal moment replaced by another […] in a system of phases there is a relation of equilibrium and reciprocal tensions; the complete reality is the actual system of all phases, not each phase in itself’ (MEOT 159). On the phrase ‘phase-shift’, see above Chap. 1, n. 11.
- 5.
It was the last part (out of 10) of Sect. 1.3 of the original thesis: in fact the only part of that chapter to be published (as Sect. 2.4) in IGPB (now in I 148–53). In the first edition of IGPB in 1964, not only were the subsections devoted to psychic and collective individuation omitted, but also the section concerning physical individuation was considerably cut, and this chapter was the only one to survive the editing of the third part. See the Brief Note on the editorial vicissitudes of Individuation (Appendix to this volume).
- 6.
See also I 319, n. 4. To represent this schema of development Simondon refers to the notion of ‘neoteny’, which he seems to consider only metaphorically (see I 152 e I 324 for the expression néoténiser). In biology ‘neoteny’ or ‘juvenilization’ refers to the retention by adults of morphological and physiological features typical of previous developing phases. For an interesting attempt to link the concepts of neoteny and metastability, highlighting Simondon’s Canguilhemian heritage, see Morizot (2011).
- 7.
‘Physics does not display the existence of a pre-individual reality, but it shows the existence of different individualised geneses starting from determinate state conditions’ (I 327).
- 8.
As I will show, when Simondon admits the possibility of an intuitive knowledge, intuition does not exclude the concept (Sect. 4.3).
- 9.
La structure du comportement, in fact, already questioned the concept of perception. See in particular the third chapter, divided into three parts (concerning the physical, biological and human fields) converging towards perception.
- 10.
This is the title given to the text, the notes and the summaries [résumées] of three courses held at Collège de France: Le concept de nature (1956-57); Le concept de nature. L’animalité, le corps humain, passage à la culture (1957-58); Le concept de nature. Nature et Logos: le corps humain (1959-60). Since I am focusing on Simondon’s problematic relationship with his master’s philosophy before completing Individuation (1958), I will not refer to Merleau-Ponty’s writings subsequent to the courses on nature of 1956-57 and 1957-58, and last of all to his posthumous Le visible et l’invisible. However, if a word is to be said, it is worth stressing that the concept of ‘nature’ can be inscribed in a long history of revisiting the same problem, the last modulation of which will be the concept of chair (Mancini 1987: 299).
- 11.
The statement is clearly directed against phenomenology.
- 12.
What I am claiming is in contrast with Barbaras’ assumption that Simondon’s course is part of a phenomenological analysis of perception as ‘the source and norm of the different modalities of our relations with the world, however complex and far from perception they be’ (Barbaras 2005: XVI).
- 13.
About Simondon bending the Ionian concept of physis towards the notion of pre-individual, see also MEOT 203 and HNI 339–40.
- 14.
Initially published in the Bulletin of the Société, posthumously added as the second part of the introduction to IPC in 1989, the text can be found also in the Millon edition of Individuation, unfortunately still deprived of the debate we are going to analyse here. I shall therefore refer to the paper as FIP, giving the page numbers of Individuation, while the subsequent discussion will be referred to as FIPD, giving the page numbers of the Bulletin pdf version (unfortunately with different page numbering), which is now available in the official site of the Société française de philosophie.
- 15.
Everything happens within a few minutes, which fill a dozen of pages. I will focus on three of Simondon’s ‘sub-discussions’: with Ricœur (FIPD 758–60), Hyppolite (760–63) and Berger (764–65). I will avoid quoting the page numbers to prevent the overburdening of the text.
- 16.
‘In my view, what precedes the social sciences is not nature, but the totality Man + Nature; is it possible, starting from a structure of thought borrowed from nature, to provide an axiomatisation of the totality Man + Nature?’ (FIPD 758).
- 17.
The theme of language is surprisingly marginal in Simondon’s production (Van Caneghem 1989: 816). The reasons will emerge during the exposition.
- 18.
In the transcription of the debate, a capital initial for ‘Signification’ is presented, but I find this editing choice wrong as far as it suggests the idea of a ‘totality’ which is quite far from Simondon’s final view: ‘there is no universe of discourse, neither there is a signification of all significations’ (FIPD 759).
- 19.
Hyppolite, directeur de thèse of Simondon for Individuation and a close friend of Merleau-Ponty’s, was the only one among the ‘public’ trying to mediate with Simondon’s position. Although no parts of Individuation had yet been published, Hyppolite implicitly referred to it when addressing Simondon as follows: ‘you omitted the theory of information you had nevertheless begun to develop in your thesis’. He also conceded that the theory of information could possibly explain the genesis of sense, by explicating ‘the difference between sense and message’. In his replies Simondon does not defend the cybernetic concept of information, and he rather rapidly presents his criticism of it. His choice is probably motivated by the fact that he admitted the problem of sense could not be resolved by a cybernetic theory of information, because of its incapability to differentiate significant and non significant randomness (Sect. 2.3).
- 20.
The issue of ‘structural germs’ is related to Simondon’s conception of archetype and cultural legacy, as I will explain in Sect. 12.2.
- 21.
First Ricœur: ‘hence the metaphoric essence of your transposition from the level of nature to the level of human significations’ (FIPD 759); then Hyppolite: ‘you are not going further than me, since you do not generate sense. You just have imagined it with potentials and tensions’ (FIPD 762); and eventually Berger: ‘I am using metaphors as well’ (FIPD 764).
- 22.
One cannot deny the existence, inside Individuation, of some passages in which the term ‘sense’ appears. Nevertheless, it happens in contexts ‘naturally’ connected to phenomenology (e.g. I 213–14), without entailing Simondon’s unconditional adherence to that perspective. Thus the ‘sense of the situation’ is essentially the polarisation of the world for the perceiving subject, but the subject does not precede, as its condition, the moment in which ‘information acquires a predominantly intensive meaning’: it rather emerges with the world from a single operation of coupling [couplage] (I 242). And again, in the conclusion, the question returns as still more complicated when, discussing the possibility of making of individuation a theory of being, Simondon claims that ‘information must have a sense in order to exist’ (I 328). Here the term ‘sense’ refers to a peculiar structure of the signal, which renders it compatible with the receiving system making of it a piece of information.
- 23.
Thus J. Wahl in the discussion at the Société: ‘There are some aspects of your thought I am inclined to approve and admire. All that puts your lecture beyond the classical attitudes of the idealistic theory of knowledge arouses my instinctive consent’ (FIPD 755).
- 24.
According to Guchet ‘by confronting cybernetics and the social sciences Simondon aims to provide a serious alternative to structuralism’ (Guchet 2005: 203). This perspective would explain Simondon’s attempt to ‘re-inscribe the transcendental into subjectivity, although without abandoning the acquisitions of the philosophies of concept’, thus preluding Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism (Guchet 2003: 140–41). Pursuing a different line of research, Barthélémy makes a massive use of the phenomenological notion of ‘sense’, pushing toward the hypothesis of a ‘self-transcendence’ of sense. From this perspective Individuation would have developed only the ‘regional ontology’ of a more generally inclusive relativisation [relativisation englobante] (Barthélémy 2005a: 48–59; Barthélémy 2005b: 231–86). Garelli even puts forward the project of a phenomenological analysis of the genesis of sense in Saussure by means of Simondon’s concept of metastability (Garelli 2003: 109, n. 68). I believe that Simondon’s philosophy can be situated between phenomenology and structuralism, without conceding to the first the privileged primacy of consciousness or subject, nor to the second its actual cancellation as a problem. And the key for the full understanding of his approach will be the reference to Canguilhem’s philosophy of life (see in particular Sect. 9.4).
- 25.
Simondon’s complete bibliography and a list of abbreviations are provided in the
References
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Bardin, A. (2015). The Object of a Philosophy of Individuation. 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_3
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