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Introduction
Philosopher, amateur technologist, and Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne, Gilbert Simondon produced a wide-ranging and original body of work. In a time of increased specialization and compartmentalisation of knowledge within disciplines, he worked towards a global vision of the connections between technology, science, psychology and philosophy. In the tradition of the encyclopaedists of the French Enlightenment, Simondon strove to produce a concrete philosophy that could confront problems of technology and society, cultural movements, and the evolution of psychology. He developed a philosophy of the emotions and sought to understand the consequences of technological change for civilizations. Inspired as much by Ionian physiology as by cybernetics, his was a philosophy of singularities. The encyclopaedists sought to trace the circumference of the sphere that encompasses all human knowledge. For Simondon, the centre of this ever-widening sphere is philosophical wonder. Wonder at the origins of natural and technological phenomena, channelled into a systematic interrogation of the processes that engender and perpetuate them.
Simondon was born on 2 October 1924 at Saint-Etienne in France, and died in 1989. Admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1944, he went on to teach philosophy at the Lycée Descartes in the city of Tours, from 1948 to 1955. During his tenure at the school he substituted for the physics instructor whenever possible, and inducted his 2students into the workings of the numerous machines and electronic devices which he had installed in the school’s basements. In 1960, he became a professor at the University of Poitiers, where he established a psychology laboratory. In 1963, he was appointed to the Sorbonne, where he again led the psychology lab. Not all of his time, however, was devoted to libraries and laboratories. He was also the father of seven children. His entire oeuvre bears witness to an extreme sensitivity to nature and a level of erudition befitting a true Renaissance man.[1]
Simondon saw himself first and foremost as a teacher and researcher, and invested little effort into overseeing the publication of his work. The somewhat roundabout manner in which his doctoral thesis was published bears testament to this. His first book, which was to remain his best-known work, was published in 1958. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects) was only a supplementary appendix to his doctoral thesis. His second book, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (The Physico-Biological Genesis of the Individual), which constituted the first part of his primary thesis, was published in 1964 and reissued in 1995. The second part of this thesis, L’individuation psychique et collective (Psychic and Collective Individuation), did not appear until 1989, twenty-five years later.
The gaps between these dates make it clear that Simondon’s work was, for decades, in a kind of ‘purgatory’.[2] It was rarely cited during his lifetime, except by the sociologist Georges Friedmann and, most famously, by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The philosophy of technology interested few in France at the time. It was a Canadian senator and specialist in mechanical engineering, Jean Le Moyne, who was the first to ask for a public interview with Simondon. The 3response to Simondon’s philosophical reflections was fairly subdued. He gave only two interviews in total. The second, published in the literary magazine Esprit in 1983, was an appeal to ‘save the technical object’.
Simondon retired from teaching in 1984, and it was not until six years later, one year after his death, that Cahiers Philosophiques devoted a special issue to his work. In 1991, the phenomenologist Jacques Garelli dedicated considerable space to Simondon in his book Rhythms and Worlds. In 1992, an English translation of some twenty pages from the introduction to his thesis on the individual appeared in a New York publication, Incorporation, which brought together studies of cinema, cyberculture and philosophy. The following year, Gilbert Hottois published the first book devoted solely to Simondon’s work. In 1994, another special issue, this time in the journal of the Collège International de Philosophie, signalled Simondon’s rise to philosophical notoriety. More articles on Simondon’s work began to appear. In 1999, Muriel Combes published her book Simondon. Individu et collectivité (Simondon: Individual and Collective), subtitled Pour une philosophie du transindividuel (For a trans-individual philosophy). In 2002, some of my colleagues and I put together a volume of studies on Simondon for Éditions Vrin, and Jacques Roux published papers from a colloquium at Saint Etienne under the title Gilbert Simondon: Une Pensée Opérative (Gilbert Simondon: Operational Thought).
Why this interest after three decades of silence? What has made Simondon suddenly relevant? He brought something new to philosophy: a way of thinking about the modes of existence of individuals and objects. To speak of the ‘mode of existence’ of an individual supposes that there are also modes of existence that are not individuated. The world is more than a sum of individuals. We live in a network where the pre-individual plays a significant role. Simondon speaks also of a mode of existence of technical objects. He 4means by this that the object is more than just any thing. The product of an invention, it is defined by its relationship with an environment that it also modifies.
This is the singularity of Simondon’s philosophy. Possessing a rare capacity for detached contemplation, he moved beyond established controversies to explore truly novel territory. The period during which he wrote saw the rise of two groups with opposing attitudes towards the role of technology in modern society: the technocrats and the first ecologists. He addressed his most severe criticisms to the technocrats, whose view of technology as a commodity to be exploited for power and profit filled him with horror. His attitude towards the nascent ecology movement was more nuanced. There is, running through his philosophy, an idea of the spontaneous creativity of nature, inspired by the teachings of the Pre-Socratics. Having devoted extensive study to all manner of natural phenomena, he firmly supported the ecologists’ respect for natural cycles and their devotion to the preservation of endangered species, but he rejected their antagonism towards science and technology.
Simondon’s position in this debate is undeniably original. He is philosophically incapable of siding with one particular camp. The objective of his philosophy, in essence, is to establish connections between what appear to be opposing forces. His writings often evoke a sense of coincidentia oppositorum. He sees invention as the productive manifestation of a union of opposites. Relationships also occupy a central place in his philosophy of nature and humanity, which he described as a ‘philosophy of individuation’. For Simondon, the complexity of the relations involved in this process of individuation is a source of wonder.
The centrality of relations is something that Simondon intuits, and the concept of intuition is itself a central aspect of Simondon’s philosophical approach. It is at once general, of cosmic dimensions, and local, on the level of the individual. It is neither deduced from sound 5principles nor constructed based on single operations. This singular intuition is unique to Simondon, although close in certain respects to Bergson and in others to Rousseau. It brings a stunning richness to his vision of the world, a sensitivity to transformations and interactions between the individual and non-individuated modes of being. The ideal that inspires Simondon’s philosophy is one of harmony or, more precisely, resonance between nature, humans and human technology.
In the first part of this book, we will examine some important moments in the history of technology, as illuminated by Simondon’s philosophy: The encyclopaedia of Diderot and d’Alembert, Marx and the industrial revolution, and cybernetics. We will engage with questions of progress and alienation, economy and memory.
The second part is devoted to the concept of individuation. Bricks, crystals, coral colonies, the psyche, the collective and the imagination are examples taken by Simondon to demonstrate the impact of becoming and of time on individuals.
Finally, the third part attempts to bridge the gap between individuation and technology. It poses fundamental questions: What was the influence of Jungian psychology on Simondon’s thought? How should we interpret his vision of a convergence between technology and the sacred? And if there is such a thing as technological ‘progress’, should we conceive of a parallel moral ‘progress’?
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Introduction
[1] As attested to by M. Mouillaud in the Annuaire 1990 des Anciens Élèves de l’École Normale Supérieure (1990 Alumni Directory of the École Normale Supérieure), p. 3.
[2] G. Hottois, Simondon et la philosophie de la ‘culture technique’, Brussels: De Boeck, 1993.