Scott - Gilbert Simondons Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide

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Gilbert Simondons

Psychic and Collective
Individuation

A Critical Introduction
and Guide

DAVID SCOTT

EDINBURGH

University Press

David Scott, 2014

Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun - Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jacksons Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
www.euppublishing.com

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and printed and bound in Great Britain by
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 5450 5 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5451 2 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5449 9 (paperback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 9574 4 (epub)

The right of David Scott to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements

First I would like to acknowledge Carol MacDonald at Edinburgh University Press for all her assistance along the way, especially for how easy she made this process. I would like to thank Len Lawlor, my friend and role model, Robert Bernasconi, who made my philosophical path possible, and Tom Nenon for his inspired teaching. A special thanks is owed to Steve DeCaroli and Valerie Saint-Amand for their encouragement. I also would like to acknowledge Patricia and Ken Scott who prepared the way for my writing this book. And lastly and most importantly, I am especially grateful to my amazing wife for her tireless editing and proofreading skills (with jokes in the margins). Her editorial and philosophical skills are incomparable.

Abbreviations

Introduction

THE TEXT

Gilbert Simondons Lindividuation psychique et collective (Psychic and Collective Individuation, hereafter IPC) is an exceptional work that emerges out of the fog of chatter and philosophical loquacity with an impact that extends far beyond the number of readers who actually turn its pages. For too long Simondon has been the treasured secret of a significant, restricted, and admiring coterie most significantly among them Gilles Deleuze, Simondons steadfast advocate. But we can also count among the admirers of Simondons work Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Isabelle Stengers, and Bernard Stiegler.

If Simondon was known at all, it was largely on the merits of Du mode dexistence des objets techniques (Of the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, hereafter MEOT), published in 1958. The stated goal of MEOT is a better knowledge of technical objects. Simondon argues that by better understanding our relationship with the technical objects fashioned to regulate our existence in the world, we create for ourselves the possibility of a new idea of what it means to be human, on the basis of a knowledge that correlates technology with human processes of existence. Human reality lives through technology. A machines structures function by fixing and crystallizing the human gesture. In fact, today MEOT continues to draw the most attention, particularly in Media Studies and Communication Studies researching the role technology plays in the development of culture across the disciplines. Still, we must remain cognizant that, while MEOT is undoubtedly important, having obvious far-reaching implications, Simondon himself saw it as only an adjunct to his shockingly brilliant primary doctoral thesis, Lindividuation la lumire des notionsde forme et dinformation (Individuation in Light of the Notions of Form and Information, hereafter IL). Let us say, MEOT concretely dramatizes the descriptive metaphysics and epistemology presented in his primary thesis. It would not be until 2005 that the full thesis would be published. Beside MEOT, only the first part of the main thesis, Lindividu et sa gense physico-biologique (Individuation and its Physico-Biological Genesis, hereafter IGPB) was published during Simondons lifetime in 1964. IPC is the second part of his main thesis; however, it was not published until 1989. Because IPC was intended by Simondon to be the final part of his main thesis, IL the convergence of the reflections of the two prior works, MEOT and IGPB I take it as bringing to full maturity his philosophical thought.

TWO SUPPOSITIONS: IT IS DIFFICULT AND IT IS PHILOSOPHY

Two suppositions organize my study of Simondons IPC: Simondons work is extremely difficult and it is a work of philosophy. One should not be under any illusions that Simondons work is easy to read. He makes the reader work. It must be said that Simondon is not a graceful writer. His sentences are clogged with subordinate clauses, chained not always comfortably with semi-colons. His syntax often turns back upon itself. He also has a tendency not to qualify his pronoun references. When reading him in French, one often has the feeling of being swept downstream by a violent current, with only momentary rests where the river pools between rocks. This pause is only momentary and then we readers are swooshed downstream, sometimes pushed beneath the surface, sometimes catching an overhanging branch and pulling ourselves above the surface as we are carried along. We have to ask ourselves, what is the nature of this difficulty? And is whatever we encounter in his work worth the struggle?

I would posit that Simondons writing is actually the logical extension of the stress he places on the operational nature of thinking. That is to say, Simondons own prose and his way of structuring IPC illustrates through its mode of expression the very operation of individuation that is this works object at the level of thought. Its repetitions and paradoxes stem from the fact that IPC takes itself to be the dramatization of thought in action. The difficulty of Simondons writing style takes itself to be both a reflection on the practice of doing philosophy and a reflection of the individuation of thought. Reflective intuition is how Simondon describes the nature of thoughts operationality when thinking is engendered in thought. And more specifically, philosophical intuition is not just a forming of a priori or a posteriori knowledge, philosophy situating itself somehow before or after what it has knowledge of; instead, the act of doing philosophy is, forSimondon, an operation that makes itself contemporaneous with the existence of the being it intuitively grasps.

This brings me to the second supposition orienting my study of IPC. I would like to affirm unequivocally that IPC, and my own critical study of it, are works of philosophy. How could we not take this to betray anything other than a kind of willful naivety, especially if we place it within the context of current market trends and the state of the publishing industry? For alas, who reads philosophy today? This is probably a question for another day. For now I must insist that my exposition and analysis, critical and speculative, insists on finding its point of orientation within the methodologies, questions, problems, and traditions of philosophy. More pro-grammatically this means that the many references in IPC to theories and concepts borrowed from physics, biochemistry, physiology, embryology, sociology, and psychology will not be fully addressed. Part of the reason for this is practical: I do not want to risk writing a work too much longer than the text it hopes to explain. However, more theoretically, it is clear that in the resources Simondon draws upon to formulate the problem of individuation (the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza), his particular identification of this problem is fundamentally ontological (ontogenesis), as is the manner he adopts for its explication. Lastly, I believe it would be dangerous for me to insinuate that Simondon implicitly accepts a hierarchical relationship between philosophy and the sciences, with the latter more important. I am compelled to favor philosophy over science for at least one reason: because of the stress Simondon places on the role of reflexivity, both as the very operational mode of philosophy and as the impetus for the constitution of the sciences as knowledge. All philosophical activity, by reason of the reflexivity of thought, is also a reform of the mode of knowledge, and has repercussions for a theory of knowledge (MEOT 233).