Gilbert Simondon
Thinking every being from its genesis rather than from a given essence, and extending that demand to machines, which culture represses or mythologizes for want of understanding them.
French · 1924 – 1989
A graduate of the École normale supérieure and agrégé in philosophy, he taught at the Lycée Descartes in Tours, where he set up a technology workshop, then at the University of Poitiers and in Paris (the Sorbonne, then Paris V), where he also taught psychology. In 1958 he defended two theses. The principal one, on , first appeared in two partial volumes (L'Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, 1964; L'Individuation psychique et collective, 1989, the year of his death), then in full in 2005 under the title . The complementary one was published in 1958: . The 1964 edition is dedicated to the memory of ; reviewed it as early as 1966, then drew on it in Difference and Repetition (1968). Long confined to a narrow readership, the work found a wider reception from the 1980s-1990s, to which notably contributed.
Justification
The introduction to starts from a diagnosis: culture has set itself up as a system of defence against technics, which it either reduces to mere utensils or mythologizes as menacing robots. For , the strongest cause of is not the machine itself but the misunderstanding of its nature and essence. He therefore rejects instrumentalism as much as technophobia: the technical object has its own technicity and its own genesis, , through which its elements become interdependent. He sees in technical development a major possibility for transforming the human condition, on one condition: that culture take in the knowledge of machines, and that the human become their organizer and interpreter, neither master nor slave. Favourable but conditional, this stance sits slightly on the techno-optimist side: the confidence bears on what technics makes possible, not on the power it confers.
The strongest cause of alienation in the contemporary world resides in this misunderstanding of the machine, which is not an alienation caused by the machine, but by the non-knowledge of its nature and its essence.On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, introduction
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), introduction and part I · "Culture and Technics" (1965), reprinted in Sur la technique (2014)
Justification
takes up the Marxian analysis of the worker's and digs deeper. It does not stem only from ownership of the means of production, but from an incomplete relation to the machine, which the worker serves without understanding either its functioning or its overall organization. He refuses, moreover, to conceive technicity in terms of labour: it is technical activity, made of invention and regulation, that links the human to the machine, and industrial labour is only an impoverished form of it. The diagnosis of alienation thus bears on the industrial labour of his time, not on every activity; technical activity itself can fulfil the human, hence a secondary weight on fulfilment.
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), part II and conclusion
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Justification
For , breaking an individual down into already constituted elements is not enough to explain how it forms. produces a structure by resolving the tensions of a system charged with potentials, a system, and relation itself has reality there: it is not a link added between terms given in advance. The crystal forming in a supersaturated solution is its physical paradigm. This approach brings him close to the emergentist pole, without ascribing to him a general doctrine of unpredictable properties: his own vocabulary is that of operation and , the step-by-step spread of a structure.
Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (thesis 1958, publ. 2005), introduction and part I
Justification
wrote no ethics of nature; his position follows from his ontology. Nothing in it exists as a finished individual set over against a world: every being within a milieu with which it forms a system. The human is no exception, since its psychic and collective individuation extends vital individuation. Technics follows the same logic. The concrete technical object forms a coupling with its milieu, the , at once technical and geographical: the Guimbal turbine is driven by the river water, which cools it at the same time. This systemic view does not abolish transformative action, since the human acts on the milieu it exploits and develops, but it makes it a minor share: Simondon denounces the master-and-slave schema applied to machines. Hence a split in which membership of a network dominates, with a share of stewardship and a minor share of mastery. Membership renders the human's insertion into a web of interdependencies, not a doctrine of the intrinsic value of living beings, which he does not develop. The share of stewardship renders the singular role the human keeps, that of organizer and interpreter of technical ensembles, who must understand and regulate their relations: a responsibility of understanding more than an ethics of preservation. The position is a reconstruction: it draws from an ontology of individuation a place for the human that Simondon does not formulate in moral terms.
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), introduction and part I (the associated milieu, the Guimbal turbine) · Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (thesis 1958, publ. 2005), introduction
rejects the opposition between a constituted being that would endure and a becoming that would befall it from outside. He criticizes the hylomorphic schema inherited from , which explains the individual by a presupposed form and matter: modelled on the moulding of a brick, this schema forgets the operation that brings them into relation (Individuation…, introduction and part I). explains at once the formation of individuals, their relative stability and their transformations: becoming is a dimension of being, not what abolishes it.
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↓ Influence exerted
- reinterpreted byDeleuzeDeleuze reviewed L'Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique as early as 1966, then took up in Difference and Repetition (1968) Simondon's notions of individuation, the preindividual and metastability, folding them int…Read
- reinterpreted byStieglerStiegler makes Simondon one of his main sources: in Technics and Time, he takes up the genesis of technical objects and psychic and collective individuation, to argue that the human individuates itself with its techni…Read