Hayward Geoghegan SimondonIssue

Introduction
Catching Up With Simondon

Mark Hayward
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
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 thirtyodd years of philosophizing, he examined the relation of the technical to
the cultural and elaborated a quasi-technicist account of ontology itself.
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 unknown 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 stigmatization he spent his entire career challenging. After Simondons death,
had been constructed to protect (French) philosophy from his peculiar
unpublished texts, and waves of secondary tributes and interpretations
spread across the French philosophical scene.1 Italian, German, and Spanand 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
Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2012
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
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 Simondons thought,
which loosely correspond to his account of the technical object in Du mode
dexistence des objets techniques and his reconceptualization of ontology as
onto-genesis, developed in Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et
dinformation. We show that Simondons continuing relevance is grounded
in his simultaneous engagement with both technique and individuation.
We do this by exploring Simondons 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 interlocutor for the majority of contributors in their engagement with Simondon),
we advocate for a more open approach to Simondons philosophy that
is adequate to the task of philosophy in the contemporary moment. In
drawing the reader closer to the complexity and ambiguity of Simondons
thought, we hope this collection will also initiate a new round of debate
among Anglophone readers.
1. Simondon in the Context of Post-War France
Simondon belonged to an eminent generation of French thinkers
who came of age during World War II and its aftermath. Much ink has
philosophy on French theory and poststructuralism.3 These debates
decisive: namely, the postwar reconstruction of the French economy according 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 industrialized, decolonized, and urban one meant that the things modernization needededucated middle managers, for instance, or affordable
automobiles and other mature consumer durables, or a set of social
of ex-colonial laborersburst 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
Schmidgens essay in this collection captures this moment when recalling
the work of engineer-turned-novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet4 and Barthess
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
Catching up with Simondon
sophisticated deconstruction of mythological machines. He could have

equally cited Jean-Luc Godards dystopian depiction of a state run by
computers and the real-life efforts by the French Prfecture de Police to
and track Algerian terrorists.5 All of these efforts elaborated upon a wellestablished French technocracy, but the new technologiesparticularly
those associated with the computer and cyberneticsreinvigorated the
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
efeller Foundation and other American groups in the French universities
transformed French higher education.6 Claude Lvi-Strauss, for example,
1940s through the early 1950s, he also worked with the Rockefeller Foundation and other organizations to promote cybernetics and information
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 Collge 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.
regard. Canguilhem wrote a number of historical and philosophical texts
aimed at historicizing aspects of the cybernetic problematic (feedback,
9
Simondon was also critical
of cybernetics and information theory, expressing strong objections to
cyberneticians tendency to erase the distinction between living and techticPlatonic, some would saypolitical program.10 But at the heart of
in a form adequate to the demands of philosophy, and also an attempt to
recast philosophy in alignment with the suggestions of cybernetics. He described Wieners Cybernetics as a work of enormous ambition that was,
nological and mathematical (Communication, 195-96, note 6). Simondon
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
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 transductionan informational practice of converting energy or transmissions
from one form into anotherinto the heart of his philosophical analysis.
ontology itself with information processes of communication, connecting his work with cybernetics even if he refused to restrict himself to the
11
2. Beyond Cybernetics
Cybernetics and postwar science marked the occasion and, to some
extent, the stakes of his invention. Yet, the motivation for the appropriation of cybernetic and informatic concepts was not simply a question of
historical circumstance. The integration of cybernetics and information
to re-frame philosophical accounts of human being.12 Adapting cybernetics 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.
Gregory Bateson, information emerged as the common currency of
13
However, moving beyond the cybernetiprocess-oriented ontology. Rather than the content shared between a
sender and receiver as described in Claude Shannons celebrated
theory of information, 14 Simondon suggested that his approach involved
the quality of information or informatic tension (tension dinformation)
(Lindividuation
of information from more widely circulated interpretations, he develops
an understanding of the term that transforms communication and interaction into processes through which individuals are constituted. Simondon
elaborates the ontological transposition of information in his explanation
of the term given early on in Lindividuation a la lumire des notions de forme
et dinformation. 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
individuation discovers the dimension according to which these two
disparate facts might become a system.. (ibid., 31, our translation)
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
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 genesis of beings.15
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
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Why this emphasis
on a mode of existence, rather simply on the technical objects themselves? 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 excludes 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 genesis of technical objects in relation to other and complementary modes of
existencefor example, organic beings. Again, thematics from cybernetics
resound throughout this account. But whereas the founder of cybernetics
man beingsuggesting that the technical was in some sense a modern
and contingent disruption in a previously holistic cultureSimondon
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
he framed his writings as interventions that extend well beyond the established 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
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 Simondons philosophy provides the rigor and
cyberneticians often confused comments upon human being.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
It is along similar lines that we might better understand his project

of re-formulating the human sciences, which stands behind his work in
Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation. In traverschemistry, mathematics, communication engineering, foundries, and
factories, Simondon elaborates a vision of ontology and knowledge as
ics and information theory provide a philosophical method that allows
As both Xavier Guchet and Jean-Hugues Barthlmy note in their contributions 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 matterwhat
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 Mackenzie 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 Simondons elaboration of individuation 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, Simondons heterodox appropriation of cybernetic 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 embodiments.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.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
3. Simondon and Stiegler

complicated paths along which his work has been circulated. As already
noted, Simondon is best known for the publication of his major and minor
and traces the sporadic and inconsistent reception of Simondons work
more generally. Although De la mode dexistence 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 country 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
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.
encountered Simondons 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 primary interlocutor for discussions of Simondons philosophy. Taking up
Simondons interest in the role of technology in ontogenesis, it is Stiegler
who has gone furthest in developing a philosophy of technics that elaborates issues close to those raised by Simondons discussion of cybernetics
possible to trace the entire arc of his engagement with Simondon within
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.
Technics and Time series (1994),
Stiegler develops his view that the individual subject, as well as collectivities, organize themselves by means of the exteriorization of facultiesa
claim he elaborates into his thesis of epiphylogenesis (the thesis that life
develops by means of something other than life.) It is Simondons elaboration of the technical object as the externalization and concretization of
knowledge that is one of Stieglers 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
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 particular mode of the genesis of the individual and the forms of collectivity
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
10
in Simondons work. However, this is a position that Stiegler has made

more absolute and fundamental to his philosophy as it has developed. In
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 (LIndividuation, 304-306). Psychosocial individuals and
collectivities emerge by means of a process of radical transformation,
level of what Simondon calls the transindividual. Such transformations
occur, for Simondon and Stiegler alike, by means of technical objects,
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 remain distinct in Simondon.
As Barthlmy convincingly argues here, echoed by Hansen, Stiegler
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 effectively departing from Simondons understanding of the relation between
the technical and the social; he is replacing Simondons understanding
of the ongoing relationship between the pre-individual and forms of individuation 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 Stieglers development of Simondons thought as
one that privileges the latters insight into the place of technique within
Simondons 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 Stieglers 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 Simondons 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 problematics in Simondons thought ambiguous, it is an approach that attempts
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
11
to recognize and better understand their mutual interdependence. For

this reason, we have focused on the relationality and transformativity of
Simondons 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.
mondons 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 Simondons work to better understand what
received understandings of technology and the politics of living with maaspect of Simondons philosophy was the development of a normative
ethics. Although he does not engage with this ethics as it was developed
in Simondons 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
Although conceived and developed independently, the essays by
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 Simondons work, both
essays involve extended engagements with Simondons 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 preof individuation, being the site of all potential modes of existence. As
becomes clear, however, the pre-individual should not be taken as suggestindividuation whatsoever. Rather, the pre-individual, as potential, continues to drive ongoing processes of individuation, becoming manifest and
present at all levels of individuation. This includes processes of psychosocial 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 Simondons work,
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
12
In Barthlmy, we see how the continual relation between the preindividual and the transindividual comes to impact the status of knowledge understood as a particular form of individuation. Barthlmy 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 Stieglers focus on the prosthetic genesis of being
leads him to ignore Simondons 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 Barthlmy, 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 technique. By offering a different reading of Simondons 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
relationship between individuation and the preindvidual to make sense
of the inability to perceive the nature of the manifold relations with technology 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 individuation, Hansens essay focuses on the ways in which particular media
technologies engineer our relation to the pre-individual. In challenging
Stieglers characterization of the pre-individual as the repository of tertiary
memories, Hansen uses Simondons theorization of individuation to offer
a more complex understanding of the relationships among technique, culture and experience than has been found in Stieglers recent work (where
the media industries are increasingly characterized along lines borrowed
from Adorno and Horkheimers 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 Barthlmy, Guchet elaborates how Simondons epistemol-
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
13
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 Simondons 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 Simondons engagement with technology that
comes to stand as the core of his project to bring together the re-formulated
human.
In a late essay on the relationship between technics and ethics, Simondon 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 ethical practice (Trois Perspectives, 107-118). He links this ethical practice
to what he call technologie approfondie, which might be translated as indepth 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
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 elaborates 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 Simondons concepts and understanding of technics, she
approaches this question as part of an effort to think about what tools Simondons thought gives us, and how we might most effectively use them.
(302). While the essays gathered here are considerably more favorable
toward the contributions Simondons thought can make to contemporary
debates in philosophy and critical theory, we might take from Stengerss
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
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
14
functions for his concepts. As English translations of Simondons 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.
The 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 pense operative
(Saint Etienne: Publications de lUniversit de Saint-tienne 2002). A further indication of
interest in Simondon is evidenced by the creation of the journal Cahiers Simondon, edited
by Jean-Hugues Barthlmy 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).
Deleuze:
Lempirisme transcendental (Paris: PUF, 2010) and Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production:
Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Bruno Latour, Prendre le pli des technique, Rseaux (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 Mans Wartime Journalism
4. See also Ross, 75.
chines during the Algerian War, French Politics, Culture & Society 28, no. 3 (2010): 23-45.
6. See Brigitte Mazon, Aux origines de Lcole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales: le rle du
mcnat amricain (1920-1960) (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1988).
ing to Communications Science, in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History, ed. Mark
8. See Raymond Ruyer, La Cybernetique et lorigine de linformation (Paris: Flammarion, 1954).
9. See Georges Canguilhem,
(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
vie, Revue Philosophique de Louvain
10. See Simondon, Du Mode dExistence Des Objets Techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 44, 49,
11. On the relationship between cybernetics and biology in Simondon, see Henning Schmidgen, Thinking Technological and Biological Beings: Gilbert Simondons Philosophy of
Machines, Revista do Departamento de Psicologia, UFF (2005). Available from: http://
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15
www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-80232005000200002&lng=en
&nrm=iso
MLN, no. 123 (2008): 632-655.
Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and in the
Machine
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
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
at the Society for European Philosophy/Forum for European Philosophy annual conference, University of Sussex, 9 September 2007. Available from: http://www.after1968.
org/app/webroot/uploads/Toscano_Ontology_Politics_Simondon.pdf.
Katherine Hayles,
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
Lindividuation, 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.
Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. George Collins and Richard Beardsworth. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1998). They are further developed in
the later volumes of the series.
Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, this argument
recurs in most of Stieglers texts since.
Culture Machine, Vol. 6 (2004), URL: http://
www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/9/8 (last accessed October 24, 2011).
23. See Isabelle Stengers, How should we inherit Simondon? In Gilbert Simondon: Une
pense operative, 299-315.
Works Cited
Mackenzie, 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 Confrences
Chatou: Editions de la Transparence, 2010.
. Du Mode dExistence Des Objets Techniques
lamphy as On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. London, Ontario: University of
Western Ontario, 1980.
. Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation. Grenoble: Jerome Millon, 2006.
Annales de linstitut
de philosophie et de sciences morales. Brussels: Editions de lUniversit de Bruxelles, 1983.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Trans.
Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
Inside the Black Box:

Simondons Politics of Technology
Henning Schmidgen
In 1923, Paul Valry 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 ones hand, nor throw them away.
Things insist, as do the questions, for both department store and commercial 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 Citron D.S. 19 was presented at
the Parisian car show Salon de lAutomobile. At the end of the first day,
Citrons sales managers counted a sensational 12,000 orders for the car.
Two years later, in Mythologies, Barthes published his compelling analysis
of The New Citron. In it he summarizes the process from the initial
presentation of the futuristic vehicle to its massive distribution. Boiled
down to a formula, Barthess conclusion is the following: first its an aweinspiring gothic cathedral, then a utilitarian kitchen (88-90).
According to Barthes, the cultural appropriation of the D.S. (a pun
on desse, 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 quasisacred objecta thing descended from another universetransforms
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 working surface of a modern kitchen than the control-room of a factory (89).
16
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In Barthes eyes, this is not an arbitrary move. It might only take

a quarter of an hour, but the work of mediation, of exorcismwith
Agamben, we might even say profanation3 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 petitebourgeoise (90).
However, in the case of the car, the appropriating move from outside to interior does not truly get one closer to the technical object. In
fact, its inner sideseats, 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 perfection 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 Citron is not a thing filled with metaphysical subtleties, 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 transformation 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 muteness of certain things fascinated him not only in Mythologies, but also in
his discussion of Alain Robbe-Grillets novels (Les gommes) and Georges
Batailles obscene narrations (Lhistoire de lil), 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
Aug, Bruno Latour and others.5
In 1954, art historian Michel Carrouges published his famous investigation 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 Fourastis Machinisme et bien-tre described the machine
age as a realization of the Faust myth, his main topic being the domination and transformation of nature by human technology.6
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Henning Schmidgen
Gilbert Simondons Du mode dexistence des objets techniques also starts

with a discussion of machine mythology.7 Based on empirical studies of
internal machine structures, Simondon criticizes the contemporary fascination with robots and other mechanical slaves as relying on an erroneous 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, Simondons book quickly became a
classical reference in the eyes of all of those who are studying our technological modernity.8 In fact, authors as diverse as Herbert Marcuse, Jean
Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze have referred to Simondons 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 technical objects that result in functional disadvantages), and the distinction
between major and minor uses of technical objects (similar to Claude
Lvi-Strausss later distinction between engineer and bricoleur).9
Focusing on the introduction of Du mode dexistence des objets techniques, this essay explores Simondons approach to technology by placing
his seminal book in the discursive landscape of France in the late 1950s. It
shows that Simondons approach combines heterogeneous scientific and
philosophical discourses on technology and the question of the object in
a postwar consumer societyfrom Pierre-Maxime Schuhl and Georges
Canguilhem to Norbert Wienerto 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
Simondons critique of treatments of the machine as the slave of contemporary 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 Koyr, Schuhls book highlights the problem of a social blockage of technological progress. Simondon argues that a similar blockage is
about to occur in contemporary culture, especially if this culture continues 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 Simondons interpretation 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
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
19
disassembled mechanically and then reassembles by means of serial photographs. Although Simondon stresses the vitality of machines, he does
not biologize them. In contrast to Ernst Kapps 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 (mdiateurs).
In the third section, the paper refers Simondons views of our technological culture (or anti-culture) to Norbert Wieners 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 technological knowledge and familiarity with machines.
1. Criticism
Not 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 admiration 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 philosophers initial
observation is that an imbalance or asymmetry exists in contemporary
culture. Despite the fact that todays 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 opposition 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 robots, and this fascination with their features and performance leads to
technology-centered utopias.
This double-sided demarcation between the technical and the humantechnology seen as a sphere that is remote from human beingsis
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Henning Schmidgen
in Simondons 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 objects (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 seemingly 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 reality, 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-E12). Only by means of this double operation, which takes into
account both continuities and discontinuities in the relation between human 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 Simondons 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. Were not sure: is there any common 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.
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21
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 technical 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 tres 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 consideration; 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 cybernetically 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, Simondons claim that machines are slaves resonated 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
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Henning Schmidgen
(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 Koyr 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, Koyr reminded his readers of the fact that one
of the characteristic features of Aristotles 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 futurea danger expressed
in contemporary societies via cultural blockage toward technology. This
blockage is seen in that non-reflective use of technical objects that dominates our everyday experience. At the same time, this blockage leads to a
misconception of what technical progress meansa misconception that
is transmitted by the mythological image of the robot.
According to Simondon, it is precisely not an increasing automation (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 waysmachines
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 Simondons project of machine-slave-liberation as a means for integrating
technical objects into culture.
2. Interpretation
After playing the part of the critic, Simondons philosopher takes
up a second role. This is the role of interpreterthe 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 understood as a dynamic relation between potentials that are literally realized
in the technical object and that develop there via inner resonances. Here,
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23
the originality of Simondons 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, assumes a kind of transparent fullness. He looks at the potentials and relations condensed in the technical object, which concretize themselves by
means of functional over-determinationand, by the same token, confer
consistence on this object so that it can be seen as a specific mode of
existence (MEOT-E8). 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 (nest plus
en lutte avec lui-mme) (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 beings 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 (mdiateurs) between nature and humans. As in the
case of Barthes, Simondons 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 substancethe ancient idea that bodies in the widest sense result from
imprinting a form (morph) to matter (hyl). 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. Implicitly, 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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Henning Schmidgen
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 morph and hyl, 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, LIndividuation, 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 technology, and his argument concerning the creation of tools by exteriorizing
organic formsparticularly forms derived from the handremained
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
(LIndividuation, 51). However, his argument is not as causally-oriented
as Kapps. Rather, Simondon prefers a description of functional connections, and in particular dynamic schemes (MEOT-E7) 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-E4, my emphasis).
This image of crystallization refers back to Simondons important
study of the individual and its physical-biological genesis. In that study,
Simondons principal doctoral thesis, crystallization is the base analogy
for the process of individuation of matter. Thus, Simondons conception of
the emergence of tools refers not to the lived body (as in Kapp), but to matter itself and to its crystallization in human as well as non-human forms.
There is another twist by means of which Simondon distances himself from a projection theory of technology. With respect to the body-tool
relation that he highlights, the effect of prolongation is not one-dimensional, 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 necessary 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
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25
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 follownot once and for all, but again and againduring the
realization of his plan by means of the technical object that he employs.15
3. Politics
After playing the critic and the interpreter, Simondons 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 objects, it can contribute to an understanding of the sense of these mediating objects. However, these tasks are only of value, both politically and
socially (MEOT-E7) 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 expression, proofs and forms. It is a system of schemes, symbols, qualities,
analogies that has regulatory effects in the broadest sense. Culture emerges from the life of the group and from there it is transferred to the gestures of those who carry out group-leading functions, while the group
defines the schemes of these gestures and attributes norms to them
(MEOT-E6-7). On the one hand, culture appears as that which enables
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Henning Schmidgen
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 regulatory communication among those who share that culture (MEOT-E6).
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 communication. 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 Wieners view (MEOT 150).
Unlike the author of Cybernetics, the French philosopher puts trust in the
balancing powers of the communityi.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 excluded from it. It is precisely this kind of a transitional state of affairs that
prepares, in Simondons 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-E9).
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
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27
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 machinessuch as between a pilot oscillator and
another oscillator synchronized by impulsesthe 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 individual 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 others interpretation;
for each of them he is the real, inspiring form of the groups 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 Simondons bringing together
of these two technologies an anticipation of the Internet. However,
this is precisely what it is not. Rather, Simondons discussion of culture
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Henning Schmidgen
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.
Conclusion
The difference between Simondon and Wiener is obvious. It is true
that Simondon acknowledged cybernetics as a contribution to the general phenomenology of machines and recognized in it a new approach
to the inductive study of technical objects.16 However, he is quite critical
of Wieners fascination with a specific type of machine, i.e. feedback
mechanisms, and argues against what he sees as Wieners 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 Wieners claims about the way in which social
homeostasis functions in the case of communication means and news
services. In his eyes, Wieners 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 communication 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 individualization 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--vis those humans whom we believe contribute essentially to our cultural life: writers, artists, and other especially
visible personalities.
If one takes Simondons 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.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
29
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, Sauver lobjet 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 technical 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 (Sauver lobjet 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 Citron: From the aesthetical and technical
point of view, a truck seems to me purer than a simple car (ibid.149).
Along with cars, todays culture has become saturated with digital
media technology. However, even in the age of ubiquitous computing,
Simondons 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 growing interest in Google, Facebook, and Twitter and their impact on societal
phenomenafrom democracy to issues of authorshiplittle interest is
directed towards the technical objects and ensembles that makes their
use possible. In this situation, Simondons 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 objects. The main issue in this regard is the problem of regulation. Simondon
insists on this point: the principal feature of technological improvement
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
Henning Schmidgen
30
is not an increase in automation but the emergence and evolution of

machines that are open to regulation. In this perspective, digital technologies 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
Notes
I 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 Valry, Eupalinos. Or, the Architect, transl. and with a preface by William McCausland, Stewart, London: Oxford University Press, 1932.
2. The context for this congress was provided by Nobert Wieners lectureship at the Collge 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 Aug, 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 clibataires, Paris: Arcanes, 1954; Pierre Francastel, Art
et technique aux XIXe et XXe sicles, Paris: Minuit, 1956; and Jean Fourasti, Machinisme
et bien-tre, Paris: Minuit, 1951.
7. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode dexistence des objets techniques, dition augmente dune
prface de John Hart et dune 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 Simondons book that are not included in Mellamphys 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,
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
31
and Paul Dumouchel, Gilberts Simondons 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 Flix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. In addition, see Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage
Mind [1962], transl. by George Weidenfield, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
10. On philosophy of technology in France, see Daniel Crzuell, 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 Hofstadter, 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 Resolution 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: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p.20-24, and Grgoire Chamayou, Prsentation, in Ernst
Kapp, Principes dune philosophie de la technique, Paris: Vrin, 2007, p.7-44.
15. On this point, see also Brian Massumi, A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Derivations from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, p.10.
16. On cybernetics and phenomenology see also Franois Russo, La cybernetique situe
dans une phnomnologie gnrale des machines, Thales 7 (1953): 69-75.
Works Cited
Aristotle, Politics. Trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Barthes, Roland. The New Citron, 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. Lre des robots, Paris: Julliard, 1953.
Koyr, Alexandre. Les philosophes et la machine [1948], in Etudes dhistoire de la pense
philosophique. Paris: Gallimard, 1971
Schuhl, Pierre-Maxime. Machinisme et philosophie, 2nd rev. ed. Paris: PUF, 1947
Simondon, Gilbert. Du mode dexistence des objets techniques, 3rd ed., augmente dune prface
de John Hart et dune postface de Yves Deforge. Paris: Aubier, 1989 (1st ed. 1958).
. Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation. Grenoble: Millon, 2005.
. Sauver lobjet 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.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality:

Technics, Transindividuation,
and 21st-Century Media
Mark B. N. Hansen
In a previous paper linking Simondon to biological and systemstheoretical discourses in autopoiesis and debates about contemporary
technogenesis, I have argued that Simondons 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 researchers 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 technogenesis 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 hybridand arguably more realisticmodel 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 doesnt need to beand indeed
cannot bechanneled 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 modernitiesthe domains 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 consideredwe are now faced with the rather
32
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
Technics, Transindividuation, & 21st-Century Media
33
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-epistemological advantages using Simondons theory of individuation. Specifically, I
have sought to theorize environmental agency on the basis of Simondons
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 domain. 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 individuals operation), 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 originaryour originary environmental conditionthis 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 outsideor besidethe
focal attention of actants within smart environments. For this reason, the
intelligent space of contemporary life offers a kind of affordancean
unperceived or directly sensed affordancethat 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 occurrencea 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:
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
34
Mark B. N. Hansen
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 operation in consciousness.
In what follows, I want to flesh out how exactly Simondons thinking 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 systemenvironment 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 technologies and characterized by a unique temporal profile. What the distribution 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 Simondons thinking of individuation. Thus, in the second half
of this paper, I shall explore how the temporal dephasing of consciousness from its own operationalityits operational blindnesscorrelates
with Simondons 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 preperceptual operationality, and does so precisely to yield a new kind of individuationone that is transindividual and not psychically-differentiated or
-specified. We can thus conclude that there is at the very heart of Simondons thinking a notion of psychic blindness, and, following Simondons
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 Technicity
For Simondon, there is no individuation without a milieu. This
becomes clear in his discussion of the energetic foundations of individuation in the section of LIndividuation la lumire des notions de forme et
dinformation devoted to physical individuation:
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

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 individual 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 prolongation of a singularity. (63)
35
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 Simondons account does not coincide narrowly
and exclusively with the individual supported by an environment, as it
does in both Varelas and Luhmanns versions of systems theory; rather,
it names the vaster operations involved in an individuation encompassing 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 individuationa 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 Simondons ontology of individuation, it
retains its power outside the system (or individual) it informs.
For this reason, Simondons 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 ontogenesis that correlates development and evolution, leveling all categorical 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
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
36
Mark B. N. Hansen
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 (Evolutions 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 accounts of harboring an unreconstructed internalist predilection (Locating Development, 185-208).
What distinguishes Simondons conception of ontogenesis as
individuation, even from the anti-internalist models of DST, is his twotiered 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 Simondons usage, of the term milieu. In his gloss on Simondons
conception of milieu, Jean-Yves Chateau argues that the associated
milieu does not simply complement the individual, yielding an actualized 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 separation 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 individual 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
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
37
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 Chateaus account is his equivocation 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 Simondons 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
Simondons conception of individuation when, for example, he differentiates 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. (LIndividuation, 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 associated 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, individuSubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
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Mark B. N. Hansen
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
meansin relation to the tension within Simondons accountis 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 technical 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 Simondon 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 dexistence des objets
techniques that this genetic method reveals a process of recurrent causality 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
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
39
occurs through the schemas of creative imagination: The unity of the

future associated milieu in which are deployed the relations of causality 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 imagination1 (ibid., 58). Indeed, if we follow
Simondons 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
objectthat forms an associated milieu-to-comeis 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 imaginative 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 standpoint 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 actualvirtual 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 doubletiered process:
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Mark B. N. Hansen
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 structures 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 mediator 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 livingspecifically, the tension between life and thinking, living
individuation and psychic individualizationand 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 recurrent 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 development at issue here, we cannot overlook an apparent tension in Simondons
thinking: how can the individualized or structured technical object be
both one term in a relation of recurrent causality analogous to the recurrent 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, Simondons 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.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
41
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 thinkingrepresentations, images, certain
memories and certain perceptionsemergent 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 Simondons 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-formor better a fond-forma 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, extensions and intensifications of the play of relations and the fond-form relation
we have in ourselves? And isnt 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), doesnt 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 technologies, 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 technology would seem to stack the deck unfairly, to overlook the fundamental
dynamism of technics. Indeed, if we follow Simondon, who at one point
in LIndividuation urges us to replace the term virtual with metastable,3
we can never isolate technical machines from their coupling to human
invention and enactionfrom their constitutive margin of indetermi-
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Mark B. N. Hansen
nation. It is precisely such a margin of indetermination that informs

Simondons 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 invocation of the associated milieu as a means to characterize technologys
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 Mannings narrow focus on
a certain aspect of this coupling on how technical machines (or rather,
technically-generated artworks) can bring what she calls movements preacceleration into the scene of perceptionjettisons precisely what is crucial
for Simondon, namely the openiness or virtuality of the machine. What
Mannings 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 distribution 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 expansion 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 blindness 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 perceptioni.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 Mareys shift from the graphic method
to chronophotography. As we know from the work of Marta Braun and
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43
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 Mareys data-gathering acquired a pictorial status which is, in an
important sense, supplementary: in addition to being a visualization of
data concerning movement, Mareys chronophotographs also appear to
be pictures of that movement itself. At the heart of Mareys 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 temporal 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 dimension 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. Mareys images do not give us a visual interface onto the
imperceptible phases of movementan interface that would expand the
scope of our perception such that we could directly perceive perceptions
imperceptible incipience. Rather, they give us datadata that happens
to be conveyed visuallyabout 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 Mareys 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 Mareys chronophotographic images, including his final work on the movement of air,
do notand cannotdepict the collapse of perceptions 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 viewersvia what I would want
to call their supplementary aesthetic dimensionthis event remains in the
service of visualizing the imperceptible preconditions of another, necessarily
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Mark B. N. Hansen
already past, perception. Because of the ineliminable temporal gap constitutive of perception, Mareys images simply cannot impact present perception 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 information is machinic perceptionthat is, perception that can never actually be
our perception, we can see how this ineliminable temporal gap constitutive 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.
Simondons critics have recently underscored the absence of a meditation 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 doesnt
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 actualized individuation in Simondon. For Didi-Huberman, what is crucial
about the aesthetic dimension of Mareys chronophotographswhich
Didi-Huberman conceptualizes as a sensory poweris the way they
open a perceptual interface onto the sensory microindividuations that,
following Deleuzes conception of transcendental sensibility, virtually
precondition perception. Yet the point hereand the contrast with Manning could not be more starkis 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 Mareys
images expose the metastable state or tension between levels (quality,
quantity and intensity) that precedes perception: they expose the intensities in the relation of the world to the subject before these are resolved in
an actualized perception.
While Mareys images expose these intensities, these sensory microindividuations, to a different perception and hence catalyze a process of
perceptual individualization, the crucial point for Didi-Hubermanand
I wholly concuris 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 photographed by Marey in 1886, we understand that the trail, on the
image, is comprised on the basis of the complex relation that the wing
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45
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 combat, 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 photographically, 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, Mareys images function in a similar

way to contemporary digital practices in sound art devoted to bringing microsounds into perception: the point of such work, like the point
of Mareys 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 reproduce 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 neverand can neverbe perceptually
actualized. And, insofar as it operates within the ineliminable temporal
gap constitutive of perception, this open machinelike open machines
generallygenerates 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 environmental 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 blindness 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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Mark B. N. Hansen
necessary and made possible by the technical distribution of psychic individualization. In todays 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 individualization that expressesin the form of an aesthetic supplementthe
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 diffrance, in favor of a psychism
rooted in the impersonal experience of environmental sensibility that
I shall later call intensity. Jean-Hugues Barthlmy 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 individuation. (Barthlmy 2005, 210)
The key point here is that transindividuationfar more than the psychic
individualization, whose dissolution is its correlaterequires the mobilization 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 simply 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 subjectivity 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 individual (cited in Barthlmy 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
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47
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 Simondons 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 Simondons 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 Transindividual
Having now clarified the correlations among technics, psychic disindividualization, and transindividuation, what remains for us to consider
is the broader question of the coupling of human and technics. Within
Simondons 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, following Barthlmys analysis, inhabits Simondons account of transindividuation. This tension stems from Simondons 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 conflatable with the pre-individual. Admitting that Simondons LIndividuation
occasionally encourages confusions concerning the difference between
transindividual and pre-individual, Barthlmy nonetheless ventures to
differentiate them along the lines Ive just suggestednamely, by specifying how the operation of transindividuation is, properly speaking, an individuation, and thus distinct, in some crucial sense, from the pre-individual
qua source for all individuation: transindividual individuationsince it is
indeed an individuationconstructs the radical individuality beyond the
individual itself, because it is the subject as individual-pre-individual
ensemble that individuates/is individuated [sindividue] (Barthlmy ,
Du Mort, 85). The distinction of the subject from the individual, and its
status as the individual-pre-individual ensembleas a process at once
actual and virtualis, for Barthlmy, what makes Simondons conception
of transindividual individuation difficultly thinkable.
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Mark B. N. Hansen
What remains to be addressed is the role technics plays in this individuation 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
Stieglers 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 associated with that dimension of the human which is exterior to its biological
or zoological individuation. As Barthlmy puts it,
The technical object that receives the pre-individual part of the subject
is also and reciprocally that which makes this subject undergo transindividual 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 Barthlmy also points out (namely, in his paper in the present 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 independently 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 dimension of experience. To that end, let me cite an important passage from
Simondons LIndividuation which, according to Barthlmy, underwrites
his above specification of the theoretical tension in Simondons work; the
passage is dedicated to the problematic of the reflexivity in individuation 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
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49
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 Barthlmy 2009, 83-84)
This clarification of the transindividuals relation to the individualdetachment without exteriority, interiorized or internalized othernesshelps
us resolve two problems associated with this theoretical tension at the
heart of Simondons mediation of individuation and technics. First, it
lets us pinpoint the crucial role that technical objects play in Simondons
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 Simondons turn to technics occurs within the framework of the
larger account of human-implicating individuation and of transindividuation as an element within it.
Nothing less is at stake in a crucial passage from Du Mode dexistence
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, humanimplicating individuation, the relation of internalized othernessdetachment without exterioritythat characterizes transindividuation cannot
but constrain us in our efforts to theorize the technical object. In this
respect, Simondons account of the technical object goes in a very different 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 latters transindividual individuation as dispersed
subjectivity.6
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Mark B. N. Hansen
We can now fully appreciate how Simondons analysis of technics in

Du Mode dexistence des objets techniques addresses the tension bequeathed
us by LIndividuation. The seeming paradox of a transindividual anterior
to the individual yet nonetheless distinct from the pre-individual predetermines how we must read Simondons 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
transformsand what is necessary to transformthe 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 introduces a certain asymmetry between the technical object as symbol, on
one hand, and as support, on the other. For whereas the symbolic dimension of the technical object correlates with its operation in bio-psychic
individuationit 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 individuation. That is why Barthlmy 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 subjectin 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 Simondons account into line with the reality of contemporary media culture. Let me now consider directly how
Simondons 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 Simondons
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, Simondons account is uniquely capable
of accounting for both the technical transformation at issue in the compu-
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51
tational revolution and for the experiential situation that is inseparable

from it. To put this even more bluntly, in Simondons ontology of individuation, the very same operationtechnical distributiongenerates 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 stagea stage which, as I have argued
elsewhere and in relation specifically to Stieglers work, is characterized
by a temporal synchronization between consciousness and technical
objectand 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) functions as the support for psychic disindividualization, I mean quite literally that technics intensifies human individuation by opening it up to
elements of sensory experienceor, better, of worldly sensibilitythat
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 Simondons ontology makes to it, or more specifically, how Simondons double-valenced
account of human-implicating individuationas correlated simultaneously with an actualized, associated milieu and with a pre-individual
domain of potentiality, and as a conjunction of bio-psychic individuation and transindividuationcan 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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Mark B. N. Hansen
either reducing the former to the latter or, alternatively, dismissing the
latter as merely epiphenomenal. More clearly than Whiteheads ontology
of actual entitites (at least on its orthodox reading), Simondons ontology
of individuation embraces the seeming paradox of a process of individuation encompassing both bio-psychical individuation and transindividual
individuationwhich 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 subindividual, 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, Simondons ontology helps to clarify the crucial role
potentiality plays in the paradigm of twenty-first-century media beyond,
and to some extent against, Whiteheads account. This clarifying function stems directly from Simondons critical stance on actualism and his
consequentand unequivocalembrace 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 Simondons position, as de
Beistegui properly characterizes it, concerns the ongoing role potentiality plays in individuationor, 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 individuated 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 Simondons

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 ongoing 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.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
53
As I see it, this formulation of the double-valenced operationality of

individuation captures more clearly than does Whiteheads ontology of
actual entities (at least as understood by his critical orthodoxy) something
about the way we experience twenty-first-century media whichand this
is the key pointexerts 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 withwhich simply isthe 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 intensityof the subject
as agency of contrastis that it gives rise to a form of actuality which,
unlike Whiteheads canonical account of the concrescence (or subjective
becoming) of actual entities, does not adhere to the narrow understanding 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 individuation as the resolution of a pre-individual metastability.
On this front, we would have to questionor at least to temperthe
conclusions to which Didier Debaise comes in his account of Whiteheads
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 sense8
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 Debaises 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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Mark B. N. Hansen
not pre-individual, but manufactured, constructed, on the basis of
a multiplicity of individual beings [tres-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 concerning intensity, but because it helps us to grasp how Whitehead and
Simondon mutually illuminate one another.
Thus, under the pressure of Debaises indictment of Simondon for
reducing the individual to nature qua abstract anterior reality, we are
emboldened to consider how the promiscuity of intensityits continued operation in subsequent individuationslends 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, Simondons account of potentiality poses a
challenge to Whiteheada 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 Whiteheads 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 ontological 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 interpreters 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
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
55
attained actualitiesthe 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 domain of real potentiality and it functions, or so I want to suggest, as a
pre-individual or metastable domain for future actualizations; indeed,
like Simondons 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 Simondons and Whiteheads ontologies would require us to consider the function of nexuses
and societiesgroupings 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 individuations, energized by the power of potentialitythe 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 potentialityan actualized associated milieu and the
metastable pre-individual domain itselfhis conception of individuation
is able to encompass an entire realm of experience for which Whiteheads
ontology seemingly makes no provision: namely, the causal interaction
between relatively-integrated and more diffuse elements of an ongoing
individuation. Put another way, Simondons theory, precisely because it
locates the individual withinand thus foregrounds its incompleteness in
relation todistinct 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
Simondons 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 imbrications with human activity, so too must the element of individuation
that is liberated by psychic disindividualizationwhat Simondon simply,
if problematically, calls the subjectbe made to assume the full extent
of its imbrication within the domain of potentiality. The crucial point
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Mark B. N. Hansen
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 ofa 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 individuationand modifies concrete
bio-psychic individuationsfrom the worldly outside: it results when
an already-underway, yet fundamentally incomplete and thus open biopsychic individuation encounters a less integrated and less centripetallyunified 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
powerthe power of intensity or the agency of contrastthat 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 forcethe force of intensitythat emerges, as a resolution of sorts,
directly out of encounters among elements of worldly sensibility.
If twenty-first-century media harbors an affinity with transindividuation, 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 todays media are able to accessand routinely operate by
accessingdimensions of our experience, of our open and ongoing individuation, 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, twentyfirst-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 memorys 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; accordingly, instead of furnishing prostheses that expand experiential
capacities beyond the various inbuilt limits of our sense organs and
memory, todays media directly impact the very sensible continuum, the
source of potentiality, from which delimited, agent- or faculty- centered,
higher-order experience springs.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
57
What I am calling twenty-first-century mediathe host of contemporary technologies that record and analyze data beyond the reach of
our human sensory apparatuscan best be characterized by way of the
fundamental shift in their address to experience. Put bluntly, todays 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 medias targeting
is precisely why medias determination of the pre-individual domain is
such a crucial political issue for us today. For if it is the case that the preindividual 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 preindividual 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 forand severely constrainthe anticipation of
the future.) Against this characterization, but in line with Stieglers fundamental 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 individuations not as a repository of content to be drawn on as an immediate
source for consciousnesss imagining of a viable future, but rather as a
far more diffuse, multi-scalar and heterogeneous subjective powerintensitythat 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 phenomenological subject, but in a whole host of materially-consequential,
causally efficacious, and non-subjectively subjective ways.
Duke University
Notes
1. Mark Hansen, System-Environment Hybrids, in Bruce Clarke and Mark Hansen, Emergence 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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Mark B. N. Hansen
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 preindividual 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 notion of virtuality must be replaced by that of metastability of a system. (LIndividuation,
313)
4. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: the Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
5. The question of this absence of the aesthetic in Simondon was the topic of Duhems 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
dpart de lesthtique de Simondon), in Cahiers Simondon, Numro 1 (Paris: Maison
des Sciences de lHomme de Paris-Nord, 2009), 115-34.
6. Barthlmy 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 aprs Simondon et par-del Deleuze, Cahiers
Simondon, Numro 2 [Paris: Maison des Sciences de lHomme de Paris-Nord, 2010], 135.
7. My current work explores how Whiteheads 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 subjects intensity. This is the only way to understand Whiteheads 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. Whiteheads 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 cration de concepts (Paris:
Seuil, 2002).
11. Stiegler develops his reading of Simondon, which he acknowledges to be a strong
reading in Harold Blooms 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 Stieglers move here, and one is, as mentioned, the revelation that the pre-individual
is technical, this identification jettisons the general energetics of Simondons work and
the ways in which the pre-individual is a metastable potentiality, a potentiality involving
tensions between levels of being.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Works Cited
59
Barthlmy, Jean-Hugues. Du Mort qui saisit le vif: Sur lactualit de lontologie simondonienne, Cahiers Simondon, Numro 1, 2009.
. Penser la connaissance et la technique aprs Simondon. Paris: Editions LHarmattan, 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 ditions, 2008.
Debaise, Didier. Un Empiricism spculatif: Lecture de Procs et ralit 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 lair: tienneJules Marey, photographe des fluides, eds. G. Didi-Huberman and L. Mannoni. Paris: Gallimard, 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. Evolutions 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: Piagets Legacy.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999: 185-208.
. The Ontogeny of Information. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000 [1985]).
Simondon, Gilbert. Du Mode dexistence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier, 1989.
. LIndividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation. Paris: ditions Jrme
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 Simondons Heritage in France
Jean-Hugues Barthlmy
1. The double fundamental problem

in Stieglers relation to Simondon
In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher
Bernard Stieglers 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 Stieglers work, this
Simondonian heritage plays itself out in the domain of continental philosophy. 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 weve inherited from the continental philosophical tradition.
The double fundamental philosophical problem raised in Stieglers
debate with Simondon is the following:
A) On the one hand, how are we to interpret Simondons most
fundamental thought, namely his thesis that knowledge of individuation is itself the individuation of knowledge? This thesis is the properly
Simondonian way of overcoming [dpassement] the opposition between
subject and object. This overcoming is, of course, something that has been
sought after by all the great continental thinkers from Kants Critique of
Pure Reason to the six proposed volumes of Stieglers 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 Stieglers 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.
60
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
Simondon and Stiegler on Individuation and Knowledge
61
B) On the other handand this is the second fundamental problem

raised by Stiegler in his debate with Simondonwhat 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
individualphysical, vital or psycho-social? I will show that there is
an intimate connection between this second fundamental philosophical 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 Simondons thought that seem in need of defense
and development.
2. Overview of Simondons main propositions
In Simondon, the absolutely central notion of individuation does
not refer to a differentiating individualizationas is the case with Jung,
in whose theoretical work individuation is a central notion as wellbut
rather to a physical, vital, or psycho-social genesis. One should also remember that this latter regime of individuation, to borrow Simondons
phrase, is also called the transindividual when it is a question of foregrounding the fact that the collective is taken as axiomatic in resolving
the psychic problem (LIndividuation psychique, 22). The technical object
is defined in Du Mode dexistence 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 therefore talking about a genetic ontology in Simondongenetic in the sense
of genesisplaced 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 continuity 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-
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
62
derstood. Du Mode dexistence 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 Simondons
1965-1966 course titled Imagination et Invention (published in 2008) formulates 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 relations among individuals, organizing their reciprocal functions. In these
cases, the threefold point is also a social organizer. (186)
In this passage, we see the ideaalready 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 birds 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 collective 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 artifactssuch as a wasps nestfrom the thesis, and reserve it for humanity
alone. However, Simondon already remarks in his book Lindividuation la
lumire des notions de forme et dinformation 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 condition of this individuality, which as a result is able to achieve a complexity
Simondon calls personality. The latter certainly seems to be a paradoxical 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
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
63
application of Simondons 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-substantialistbecause the individual is relation,
not substanceand anti-reductionistsince the process of individuation 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 Simondons thought is
thus what allows him to subvert the classical alternatives in the Western
philosophical tradition. These paradoxes are not contradictions since, insofar as it describes processes of individuation, Simondons 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 contradictions 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
composedthe famous wave-particle duality of quantum physics, whose
role in Simondons thought I will soon clarify.
But lets 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 LeroiGourhan 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 Simondons 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 biopsychic individuals, but whose psychism is nourished by the collective,
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64
and produces artifacts. Following Simondon, I therefore deny the disconnection he calls anthropologicalthe 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 beinga 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 reduction (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 laborand 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 Simondons 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 dexistence des
objets techniques has made the first steps towards their common reconciliation 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.
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65
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 groundeven though it has remained implicitof
Stieglers 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 Stieglers 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 affirmingand this would be the weak version
of his thesisthat technics plays the role of preindividual that makes
possible the passage from vital individuation to transindividual individuation. 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 Simondons 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, Stieglers thesis is much more radical. He wants to argueand this is the strong version of his thesisthat 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 Stieglers
reduction of the pre-individual to the techno-scientific mode of knowledge
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66
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 distinguishable a priori. On the other hand, the preindividual is that which
only possesses indirect indications of presenceindications that are
justly furnished by quantum physics, which has put forward the revolutionary 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 Stieglers 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 Stieglers argument
seriously? I do not believe in the thesis that the preindividual is constitutively 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 Stieglers thesis, in my
view, is its treatment of the famous issue of the refutation of idealisma
problem that has, since Kant, accompanied the greatest thinkers in the
continental tradition in their attempts to overcome the fundamental opposition 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 individuation) is characterized by a metastability. We might even seriously
consider that this prosthetic base of the transindividual plays the same
role as the vital potentialwhich 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. However, 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 being 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 LeroiGourhan. However, in the third volume he argues that the refutation of
idealism rests exclusively on the external presence of the prostheses of
human consciousness.
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67
The problem of the refutation of idealism was born in the Critique

of Pure Reason where Kant calls attention to the scandal that philosophers had yet to provide evidence, beyond all idealist temptation, that
the world existed.11 Heidegger would later respond in section 43 of Being 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 prostheses as the constitutive exteriority of the whothe who in Stiegler
being what Heidegger called Dasein.12 In other words, Stieglerand this
is the force of his argumentreproaches 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 Stieglers 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 Heideggers 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 Simondons
Lindividuation psychique et collective, Stiegler applies the idea of an exit
from ontology to Simondon himself, in the sense that ontology is understood 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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68
has led us. This is why Stiegler only wants to think of the psycho-sociotechnical becoming at the present point [suivant son actualit]. This how
we arrive at Stieglers convictionnever written, but often spoken and
applied on a daily basisthat 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 Simondons work, the thesis appears in the final lines of his introduction to Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation,
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.
Stieglers position and philosophical practice complicate the situation even further, since he implicitly proposes a third interpretation of
the thesiswhich he takes up in his very own waythat knowledge
of individuation is individuation of knowledge. In Stieglers work, the
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69
thesis turns into the idea that the knowledge of individuationbecause

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 thematizationone that would always
have to be started anewof 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 individuation 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 general ontogenesisone 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 action, 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 objectin 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
becominga becoming by relation. This is the truth of Simondons realism 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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70
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 necessary 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 technics (naturation in his terms) can only willfully be ignoring this idea
of the naturalization of technics. Contrary to naturation, Simondons
naturalization of technics defines the point where his thinking of technics 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 mathematical formalism the interaction between the measured object and the
measuring apparatusan integration that might seem paradoxical if the
formalism of physics is exclusively objective rather than reflexivethis
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 individuations dimensions, 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 isand 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--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 individuation is reflexive: it involves a process of individuation that always
exceeds the very object that it is. Thus, it opens up onto the preindividual
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
71
and includes every possible individuation. This is why the philosophical

knowledge of individuation is immediately a general ontogenesis, covering 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 consciousnesssomething
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 example) 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 dont 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 meaningsmeanings equated with things
so that we can talk about what exists. As a result of this, however, objectified 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 absolutize 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 dimensionthat 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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72
still engaged with knowledge, or rather they are already engaged with
knowledge, whereas they would need to yield the ontogenetic translation, adequate but secondary, of first non-knowledge. It is by virtue of
this operation of secondary translation that Stieglers thought of the
psycho-social whoeven though it is far from being philosophically
firstprolongs and completes Simondons thinking of physical and vital
individuationan 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 significations pluri-dimensionally in order to reveal the different dimensions
of the meaning that constitute me as a meaning-subjector 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 education.15 These different dimensions of the meaning-that-makes-me will
then enable me to develop what I call a uni-dimensional secondary translation of this problematic of first philosophy, which will finally engender
(1) a philosophy of economic production-consumption, (2) a philosophy
of ontological informationsomething already largely thought by Simondon and Stiegler, since genetic ontology is already understood by
Simondon as a philosophy of information processand (3) a philosophy
of axiological education.
At this point, one could think that the position inaugurated by the
new problematic of first philosophya 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 meaningsubjectmerely 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
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73
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 informationwill
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 affairsthat is, the reasons for such a system of secondary translations of the problematic of first philosophy. I will merely
point out in the form of a conclusion that Simondon flirted with the possibility 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 Lindividuation 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 ontologyeven if he still retained the idea that
this knowledge of self must necessarily be, just as it is in Hegels Phenomenology 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 philosophizing 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 individuals
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 rediscovering 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.
Universit Paris Ouest Nanterre
Maison des Sciences de lHomme Paris-Nord
translated by Mark Hayward and Arne De Boever
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
74
Notes
1. Three volumes have already been published; all three have been translated: Bernard
Stiegler, La technique et le temps, Vols. 1, 2 and 3 (Paris: Galile, 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. Lempirisme 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 Barthlmy, Simondon ou lEncyclopdisme gntique (Paris: PUF, 2008).
4. Here are the very first words of Du Mode dexistence des objets techniques: Cette tude est
anime par lintention de susciter une prise de conscience du sens des objets techniques.
La culture sest constitue en systme de dfense contre les techniques; or, cette dfense
se prsente comme une dfense de lhomme, supposant que les objets techniques ne
contiennent pas de ralit humaine. Nous voudrions montrer que la culture ignore dans la
ralit technique une ralit humaine, et que, pour jouer son rle complet, la culture doit
incorporer les tres 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 transindividual as psycho-social: Ltre psychique, cest--dire ltre qui accomplit le plus
compltement possible les fonctions dindividuation en ne limitant pas lindividuation
cette premire tape du vital, rsout la disparition de sa problmatique interne dans la
mesure o il participe lindividuation du collectif. Ce collectif, ralit transindividuelle
obtenue par individuation des ralits pr-individuelles associes une pluralit de
vivants, se distingue du social pur et de lindividuel pur; le social pur existe, en effet,
dans les socits animales; il ne ncessite pas pour exister une nouvelle individuation
dilatant lindividuation vitale; il exprime la manire dont les vivants existent en socit;
cest lunit vitale au premier degr qui est directement sociale (Lindividuation la
lumire des notions de forme et dinformation, 167).
6. See the Introduction and Conclusion to Gilbert Simondon, Lindividuation la lumire des
notions de forme et dinformation.
7. See Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, What New Humanism Today? (Trans. Chris Turner).
Cultural Politics, Vol. 6, no. 2, 2010 (Berg Publishers).
8. On these two points, see Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, Simondon ou lEncyclopdisme gntique,
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 ralit que ltre
individu transporte avec lui, cette charge dtre pour des individuations futures) (Lindividuation psychique et collective, 193).
10. On this second point, see Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, Penser la connaissance et la technique
aprs Simondon, (Paris: LHarmattan, 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 Woodward (eds.), Gilbert Simondon, Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press), 2011.
14. See J-H. Barthlmy, Hegel et limpens de Heidegger, Kairos n27, 2006, Penser la
connaissance et la technique aprs Simondon, op. cit. and Penser aprs Simondon et pardel Deleuze, Cahiers Simondon n2, Paris, LHarmattan, 2010.
15. On this point, see Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, Penser aprs Simondon et par-del Deleuze,
op. cit., and Penser la connaissance et la technique aprs Simondon, op. cit., 240-268 & 281-286.
16. On these tensions, see the two volumes of my Penser lindividuation, (Paris: LHarmattan),
2005.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Works Cited
75
Gilbert Simondon. Du mode dexistence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier, 1958.
. Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et invention. Chatou: Editions de la Transparence, 2008.
. Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation. Grenoble: Editions
Jrme Millon, 2005.
. Lindividuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier, 1989.
Stiegler, Bernard. La technique et le temps, Vols. 1, 2 and 3. Paris: Galile, 1994, 1996 and 2001.
Translations: Technics and Time, Vols. 1, 2 and 3. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998, 2009 and 2010.
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
Technology, Sociology, Humanism:

Simondon and the Problem
of the Human Sciences
Xavier Guchet
To Axiomatise the Human Sciences

Before 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, Simondons 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 perplexing 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 researching 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 Simondons work
76
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Simondon and the Human Sciences
77
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
Simondons philosophy. One might argue that it is its guiding principle.
Simondon accords it considerable importance in a seminar he presented at
the Socit Franaise de Philosophie in February 1960.2 Speaking to an audience 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 potentialconcepts 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 presenting 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 philosophical 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 attentionone might even say
exclusive attentionto 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 human 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 human 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 anthropological 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 influenceable 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. Influenceablemodifiable
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, Simondons 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 decidedly enigmatic manner that we will return to below): the individual
only enters into a relationship with the social by means of the social
(LIndividu, 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 Simondons language, a philosophy of
human individuation.
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When Simondon was developing his thought in the 1950s, psychology 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 difficult 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 impermeable, 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 combine 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 1950sa period when the young science of teleological
mechanisms was of little interest to French philosophers (with rare exceptions, like Canguilhem, Ducass 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, according 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 Cannons 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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Xavier Guchet
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 Bergsons 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 moralities and religions have the function of returning human societies to the
lan 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
realitythe regime of human individuationthat Simondon intends
to substitute for the anthropological prejudice. To piece this together,
it is necessary to consider some key sections of his principal thesis,
LIndividuation la lumiredes notions de forme et dinformation, 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 principal elements of this axiomatisation of the human sciences of which
Simondon speaks.
From Social Psychology to Collective Ontology
However, 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 philosophy 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 anthropological 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 affirmation 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. (LIndividu, 297)
Furthermore, during the meeting of the Socit Franaise 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 SiSubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
81
mondon, any proposal of a philosophy of concrete human reality should

begin with life, and not with the psychosocial. After all, doesnt 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 creature 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 reorganized 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 individuationthat is, the links between
the two theses defended by Simondon in 1958can 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 reality 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 structuresstructures
void of all reference to their genesis. In the human sciences, this metaphysical 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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Xavier Guchet
This is what happened in the case of psychology and sociology:

both developed as sciences of already individuated, already structured
realitiesthe psychic reality and the social realityeven 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 structures 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 between 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, presupposing 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 doesnt 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 Canguilhems
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 psychology 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. Furthermore, 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 LeroiGourhan on the equilibrium between the physical and the psychic in the
human speciesone that involves the exteriorization of biological functions 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-Gourhans 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 vitalnot as cause and
effect but as the solution to a problemand then to allow psycho-social
existence to affect the meaning of biological existence.
The Subject as Operation
It is probably in the chapters On the Problematic of Ontogenesis and
Psychic Individuation and The Individual and the Social: The Individuation of the Group that Simondon most explicitly clarifies his concept
of human individuation (LIndividu, 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 operation 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 distance 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 subjectan 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 reSubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
85
ticulated field. It is like the crystal formed in a crystalline solution. The

present would be like the outer limit of the crystals formation, propagating 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 selfa
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 individual 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 constituted 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 corporealitiesthat 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 Social
Therefore, in Simondons anti-substantialist approach, the problem 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 consistency. The problem of the individuals 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 dephasing 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 individuation 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 Simondons 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 individuation 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 defines social presence. The individual must find a social individuation that
includes its personal individuation (ibid., 295). Taking on the terminology 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 (LIndividu, 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.). Following 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 positivitya preexisting and overarching society.
The transcendence from within the individual and not above the
individual originates in the charge of the pre-individual that always remains attached to the individual. The transindividual makes individuals
communicate at the level of the pre-individuala level that no individuation 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 dexistence, 248).
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Xavier Guchet
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 socius 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 Canguilhems 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 organization that inegrate and resolve the problematic . . . ; The transindividual
passes through the individual [an internal relation] as well as between
individuals [an external relation]. (LIndividu, 302)
The true psychosocial is the trans-individual. The trans-individual relation does not have either a social or individual origin. It is placed in the
individual and is carried by him (LIndividu, 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 (collective) 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 realitywhich is a
different statement. Henceforth, personal individuation involves the relation 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 imposing 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 integration 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
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
89
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 Bergson
However, the creation of this zone of participation, paving the way
for a new individuation, involves the body:
The individuals 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 Simondons
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:
Isnt the body what socializes us insofar as it is inculcated by a habitus (established structures) from a very young age? But isnt 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 Simondons terms, the body of
the subject is connected to both the in-group and the out-group at the same
time. The individuals 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. (LIndividu, 295)
This is the reason why both personal and group individuation in the ingroup are compatible and complementary. One might even say that they
are reciprocal; they march in concert, not in opposition to each other. The
individuals future and past coincide with the future and past of the inSubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
90
Xavier Guchet
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 philosophy of the body that is compatible with the idea of transindividuality.
How is it possible to understand that ones 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 criticizes 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 (LIndividu,
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 integration 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 Bergsons 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
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
91
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 Simondons
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 Simondons
terms, a philosophy of human individuation entails bringing together a
theory of the transindividualthe social body of the individualand
a theory of techniquewhich is the way of bringing together man and
materiality at a given moment in a given society. Here we see the unity
of Simondons two theses.
Conclusion
In 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 degree 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 remaining 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 materiality. It is quite probably such a moment that we are witnessing with
SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012
Xavier Guchet
92
biotechnologies and nanotechnologies today. New relations to materiality

are being constructed in the laboratoryrelations 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 paleoanthropologists: 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 humanismthese are the three pillars of the
philosophy of human individuation offered by Simondon.
Universit Paris I Panthon-Sorbonne
translated by Mark Hayward
Notes
1. For example, the remarkable series of three conferences on the psychosociology of

technicity, delivered in Lyon in 1960-61, published in the Bulletin de LEcole Pratique de
Psychologie et de Pdagogie de Lyon that still awaits republication.
2. Forme, information, potentiel, in LIndividu la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation, Grenoble, Jrme Millon, 2005, p. 531-551.
3. See Le Blanc G., LEsprit des sciences humaines, Paris, Vrin, 2005.
4. See also Karsenti B., La Socit en personnes : tudes 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 Cited
Bergson, 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 dexistence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier, 1958.
. LIndividu la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation. Grenoble: Jrme Millon, 2005.
. Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation. Grenoble: Millon, 2005.
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Introduction

Catching Up With Simondon

a site of obsession, anxiety, and misunderstanding within contemporary

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

attempt to catch up with a thinker we regard as both central and obscure

Fascination and apprehension over new technologies of research, control,

Catching up with Simondon

sophisticated deconstruction of mythological machines. He could have

advocated the reconceptualization of processes of individuation not only

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Catching up with Simondon

By linking information to a state of disparation, Simondon is adapting

It is along similar lines that we might better understand his project

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Catching up with Simondon

3. Simondon and Stiegler

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

in Simondons work. However, this is a position that Stiegler has made

Catching up with Simondon

to recognize and better understand their mutual interdependence. For

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Catching up with Simondon

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

functions for his concepts. As English translations of Simondons texts

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Catching up with Simondon

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Inside the Black Box:

In 1923, Paul Valry created an artificial world of antiquity. In it the

Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2012

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Simondons Politics of Technology

In Barthes eyes, this is not an arbitrary move. It might only take

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Gilbert Simondons Du mode dexistence des objets techniques also starts

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Simondons Politics of Technology

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

in Simondons eyes reinforced by the fact that we have limited cultural

Simondons Politics of Technology

The provocative nature of this passage is intentional. As in sci-fi

(inexpensive and numerous) living machines ready at hand who were as

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Simondons Politics of Technology

the originality of Simondons project becomes especially apparent. The

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

understands technology as the mere result of applying well-established

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Simondons Politics of Technology

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

any governance at all; on the other hand, culture relies on a delegation of

Simondons Politics of Technology

The image of the democratic orchestra is highly evocative. In such

and technology, circa 1951, is meant to improve our abilities to perceive,

Simondons Politics of Technology

Simondon leaves little doubt that this kind of political activity

is not an increase in automation but the emergence and evolution of

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Simondons Politics of Technology

and Paul Dumouchel, Gilberts Simondons Plea for a Philosophy of Technology,

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality:

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012