Pre-individuality and individuation: Simondon and a critique to the idea of subject

Pré-individualidade e individuação: Simondon e uma crítica à ideia de sujeito

Abstract

The text intends to exhibit some considerations around some specific questions about the thought of Gilbert Simondon, such as, for example, the notions of individuation and pre-individuality. Simondon will address in his work, a critique developed around the search in tradition for a kind of originary principle, called by Simondon inverted ontogenesis. Simondon presents a critique of the philosophy of consciousness and, in a contrary position, speaks of 'modes of individuation', instead of an idea of objective or subjective synthesis. According to Simondon, when thinking about the individual/life and its genesis, an analysis is carried out based on the individuation processes and their evidence, as opposed to the idea of form and matter. If there are no forms and no subjects, we can only think of differentiation (of a thing, of an animal, of a person), only through affects and dynamic intensities. There is no development plan, only relationships and differentiations.

Keywords Individuation; Pre-individual; Differentiation; Subject

Resumo

O texto pretende expor algumas considerações em torno de algumas questões específicas do pensamento de Gilbert Simondon, como as noções de individuação e pré-individualidade. Simondon abordará, em sua obra, uma crítica desenvolvida em torno da busca na tradição por uma espécie de princípio originário, chamado por Simondon de ontogênese invertida. Simondon apresenta uma crítica à filosofia da consciência e em uma posição contrária, nos fala de ‘modos de individuação’, em lugar de uma ideia de síntese objetiva ou subjetiva. Segundo Simondon, no momento em que se pensa o indivíduo, a vida e sua gênese, faz-se uma análise a partir dos processos de individuação e sua evidência, em contraposição à ideia de forma e matéria. Se não há formas e nem sujeitos, nós só poderemos pensar a diferenciação (de uma coisa, de um animal, de uma pessoa), apenas pelos afetos e intensidades dinâmicas. Não há um plano de desenvolvimento, apenas relações e diferenciações.

Palavras-chave: Individuação; Pré-individual; Diferenciação; Sujeito.

Introduction

This paper aims to present Gilbert Simondon’s absolute critique positioning related to the main issues surrounding the thoughts known as “philosophies of the subject”. Since modernity, the so-called “philosophers of consciousness” and/or those who do or claim a philosophy of consciousness as the epicentre of their thinking, have been pointing out to us what Simondon denominated as the region of purified transcendental consciousness as indispensable to achieving a founding and a self-founding basis of the world. On the otherside, we’ll show Simondon’s relevance as a critic of the theses of this philosophical tradition and from that we will point it out how this critical position is fundamental as to a analytical reference surrounding the philosophy of consciousness and its problems, the latter, also intensely demarcated by the simondonian problematic field¹.

The idea of a purified transcendental consciousness will find in Simondon a deep counterpoint, as we’ll see, a profound counterpoint, as so, what we intend is to build a conceptual strategy from some of the problems thought by Simondon, among them, the subject’s dissolution into myriads in favor of the intensities of modes or a transversal communication that doesn’t respect the synthesis of the cogito or I think.

Simondon will show us that it’s now necessary to talk about individuation when thinking about the individual. That means that to understand the problem of the being, its urgent that we take some distance from the concepts of substance, form, identity, matter, subject, after all,

The classical logic cannot be used to think individuation, because it makes us to think the operation of individuation with concepts and nexus between concepts, which can only be applied to the results of operation of individuation, considered in a partial manner (Simondon, 2020, p. 29).

Simondon, the individual, the Subject and the individuation

Gilbert Simondon, in his work L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologiaue (1964) will treat it since the beginning of the principle of individuation².

The principle of individuation will be researched as a principle capable of dealing with the characters of the individual, without the necessary relation of the other aspects of the being, which could be corelatives with the appearing of the real individual. Such perspective of research gives a ontological privilege to the constituted individual. There´s a risk in not operating a true ontogenesis, in not replacing the individual in a system of reality which a individuation produces itself. (Simondon, 2005, p. 23).

Right on the introduction of L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (2005), Simondon talks about two principles or two moments to think the world: the atomist (substantialist), where the individuals are constituted from a primary or first reality (the atoms); and the hilemorfic, where individuals are thought of the junction between matter (hylé) and form (morphé). It is then understood that based on the idea of the existence of these two perspectives in the Western tradition, we’ll have common characteristics between them, which are:

1 - There’s a principle prior to individuation as it is;

2 - To think the individual as a constituted and defined individual, as it is, finished. In other words, its effective existence is the pin point to problematize a principle.

Simondon calls this way of conceiving the individuation (atomist and hilemorfic) of inverted ontogenesis, considering that for him is needed to know the individual through individuation, instead of the individuation through the individual³ (Simondon, 2005, p. 24). He has no interest in the elaboration of a theory in search of a principle or a origin of individuation⁴. What is truly his interest is to think the aspects of an individual as a “being in individuation”. Considering this, its founded in Simondon, a concern with a concrete description of the ontogenesis, in other words, the operation of individuation doesn’t limit itself on the atomist and hilemorfic binarism. In the Topic II - chapter II Individuation et information, Simondon talks precisely about the problem of the ontogenesis and also make some reservation concerning its understanding:

One could say that the ontogenesis is a perpetuated problematic, going from solution to solution until its adult form which is a complete stability; nonetheless, its complete maturation isn´t achieved for all its functions and being structures at the same time; ontogenesis multiple ways proceed in parallel having sometimes interchanging activities which makes the process of growth affects the whole set of functions, then another, followed by a third, then returning to the first one; it seems that this capability to solve problems it’s a little bit limited and appears as an operation of the being over itself, na operation that has a systematic unit and cannot affect all aspects of the being at the same time (Simondon, p. 206).

The problem that is now emphasize in this analysis by Simondon is not of a constituted subject. The latter would become nothing more than “something relative to”, that is, a phase. Such a critic means that previously to the constituted individual, there is a pre-individual reality (full and complete absence of an identity stablished by a principle or foundation). Still, knowing that there is a becoming at stake, even passing through the process of individuation, there’s nothing that can guarantee the crystallization of a substantialized being.

According to Orlandi,

The individual isn’t just the result, but the individuation’s in-between. However, precisely from this point of view, the individuation is not coextensive to the being; it must represent a moment which is neither the whole being nor the first. It must be “situable”, determinable in relation to being, in a movement which will take us to pass from the pre-individual to the individual. Individuation’s previous condition, according to Simondon, it’s the existence of a metastable system. Philosophy fell into two previous aporias because it didn’t recognized the existence of such systems. But what essentially defines a metastable system it’s the existence of a “disparation”, at least of two orders of magnitude, two scales of disparate reality, among which doesn’t yet exists interactive communication (1993, p. 120-121).

We find ourselves, for that matter, in front of the old problem of the first origin of philosophy to quote Heidegger, that, in which, by epistemic convenience, resumes itself as the opposition between being and becoming. In this case, the becoming, it isn’t seen anymore as the “negation of being”, but on the contrary, it’s his aspect, a dynamic or passage. The being’s motion is when he unphases in relation to itself. A type of property or quality which is positive to the being.

The individuation, according to Simondon, is never stationary. The idea of permanency or immobility, under no circumstances can guarantee any means of preserving the being. In an opposite direction, the being conserves itself in his own movement. In its metastability.

According to this perspective, the individualizing form is correlative to the progressive degradation of the system’s potential energy, which is of pre-individual regime. Therefore, a form is, in its formation, an energy in the process of stabilization and matches, when it is carried out, to the highest level of negentropy (Garelli, 1994, p. 54).

In an evidently perspective attributed from the reading that Gilles Deleuze proposes about the simondonian work, we can recognize that, what is all about, is a “folding operation”⁵. Maybe we can define like this what Simondon calls it individuation. Therefore, for example, we take that which is alive; it participates in a “theater of individuation” in which the movements are marked by resonances, approximations, differentiations and permanent communications. In this theater, the individual simultaneously presents itself as a system of individualization, individualizing system and a system individualizing in itself. We say that it is a system within a system. Always contemporary to itself, always realizing itself in a communication process within itself, which Simondon calls it an internal resonance.

The pre-individual nature that stays associated to the individual is a source of future metastable states, where new individuations can come from. According to this hypothesis, it would be possible to consider every true relationship as having come into being and as developing within a new individuation; the relation doesn´t come between two terms known as individuals; it’s an aspect of internal resonance of a system of individuations; it’s a part of the system’s state. This living Thing, which is, at the same time, more and less than the unit, holds a inner problematic and may come as an element in a even broader problematic than its own being. Participation, for the individual, is the fact of being an element in a broader individuation through the pre-individual reality card that the individual contains, that is, thanks to the potentials it harbors (Simondon, 2005, p. 22-23).

The individual - in this case, the living self - never will be a unit, once the complexity which envelops him as a “means” of a pre-individual reality that composes it. In other words, potential. The “self” in this case, would be constituted by a complex of individuations, aspects of a pre-individual reality that passes by him, preventing us to talk about a “pure self” outside time, space and world. Individuation in Simondon dissolves into the collective the idea of a “self” or a “subject” through a force of a pre-individual and, therefore, impersonal reality.

The individuation complex is the process in which express the difference in its more radical meaning, in other words, it takes its appearance in phenomenic terms. The individual then as a type of “being”, is nothing more than differentiation. Individuation makes the difference to show up. It is your own production in the corresponding variation of your own becoming. It’s in the “means” of the becoming that the difference is made as intensity.

According to Simondon, when you think about the subject-individual and its genesis, you do an analyses based on the process of individuation and its evidence, counterpoint to the idea form and matter. To Simondon, it’s a mistake to think about the idea of understanding the individuation after the realization of “man-form”. The way of thinking about the individuation is different, its backwards. We will not need to hold to the idea of unity or dualism. What we have is nothing more than metastable movement as a constitutive element of the individual. A crossing that envelops and sets him aside, overtaking him. It wouldn’t be excessive to say that the individual is the effect of something that intersect him⁶.

Based on the problematic surrounding this critic to a “static genesis”, its unbearable to think the subject-individual from the idea of “origin” or as an element carrying a sense of the world, like a immanent consciousness. The subject-individual would be only a “phase”, composed not of an identity that qualifies him as a being. Far from that, he understands a pre-individual and impersonal reality, where the individuation, in its own complexity, maintains itself in a constant state of tension.

That said, following Simondon’s conceptual formulations, we observe that the individual isn’t the one who guides the truth in its adequacy with the thing; on the contrary, there will always be something unfinished and unsuitable in the individuation process in its pre-individual reality (which presents itself as a flow of tendencies). Is in this meaning, that we couldn´t help but emphasize that we enter into the problem of the “becoming”; now as a factual perspective to think the being-individual who advances and dephases himself. What we have when thinking about the problem of the individual it’s an idea of dispersion instead of stagnation, same as a pre-individual potential, where the individuation its always an act, differentiating itself. An over-saturation of the individual: the being conserver itself through its becoming.

Simondon’s differentiation idea, which he called transductivity matches the operations which there’s the movement of the pre-individual to the individuation. Be it, the individuation a social or psychic one, doesn’t matter, they are two tension points intertwined. What Simondon affirm is that, in this tension typical of the pre-individual, the relations of uncertainty puts in crisis any attempt to detach the individual and its modes of individuation.

We understand by transduction a physical, biological, mental, social operation through which an activity propagates itself bit by bit within a domain, substantiating this propagation over a domain structure which its operated from place to place: each region of the constituted structure serves the next region as a principle of constitution, although a modification extends progressively at the same time as the structuring operation... “(...) The transductive operation its an amplifying reticular structure. Its an individuation in progress. It can, in the physical domain, be carried out in the simplest way in the form of a progressive iteration; but it can, in more complex domains, like in the domains of vital metastability or psychic problematic, constantly advance e propagate itself in a domain of heterogeneity; there´s transduction when there´s activity from the center of the being, structural and functional, going in different directions from this center, as if multiple dimensions of the being was to be appearing surrounding the being; the transduction is the correlative appearing of dimensions and structures in the being in a state of pre-individual tension, in other words, in a being that is more than unity and more than identity and that still isn’t dephased regarding itself in multiple dimensions (Simondon, 1964, p. 18-19).

What qualifies the pre-individual state is precisely the degree of indetermination and the transformations that they constitute. In this case, the individual for Simondon, as a result of a nomad movement, asserts itself in a metastability. This concept doesn’t support, within it, the notion of individual, personal, fully realized and finalized identity. The metastability is achieved with the individual’s over-saturation (the becoming as a dimension of being). According to Simondon, we can’t talk about an individual’s identity (and difference) without talking directly about the identity of the technical objects⁷, as if the identity of the self was achievable in a process of adaptation between subject and object. For Simondon, this is not possible because the same objects are also not fully constituted by a cogito or a pure self, indicating a simple relationship of reciprocity. It is effectively an implication with the culture.

Culture constitute itself in a defense system against techniques; well, this defense comes as a men’s defense assuming that the technical objects doesn´t include human reality. We wanted to show that culture ignores the human reality within the technical reality and to fully perform its role, culture needs to incorporate the technical beings as a means of knowledge and a meaning of values (Simondon, 1969, p. 9-16).

The individual will always be something to become, a kind of individuating dynamic. The individual as an organism in the process of individuation, possesses in itself, a potential configuration of individuation. This characteristic Simondon calls it the internal resonance, after all, resonance is relentless internal movement that silences only with the end of the individuation process⁸. The individual, for Simondon, while engaged by the processes of individuation, implies and adapts to the environment, modifying itself accordingly with its internal needs - is like an equation: pressure from the environment/from the outside producing an individuation as a new organization. And in this process doesn’t exist a beginning and an end. From there, we could think in a “history of the individual” or a ontological problem of the individual’s genesis.

The individuation process is always broader than the individual, because it does not end in itself. What’s in the place of the individual is a territory of infinite singularities.

At this point, it’s necessary for us to make a critique about the problem of the individuation and its coextensive bond towards the being. We have initially the idea that the process of individuation must be thought of with the reference to individuals already constituted; the requirement of a necessary determination of a previous principle of individuation as a criterion for analyzing individuation itself. Moving away from this idea, Simondon says that the being is formed by two units:

• the unit of identity, stability and stillness;

• the transdutive unit, which dephases itself and overflow in every side.

This overflowing of the “being” - as a becoming of the being - he names it individuation. Theres a undepletion of the being. What is less important is the being and its identity, definition and form. What specially matters is to think the individual from his modes of individuation and within this mode, the character of pre-individuality and impersonality (an individuation without a subject). What happens in Simondon is the contrary. For him, it’s wrong to think the being as substance, form and matter. Such categories must be abandoned. In another way, such concepts appears: internal resonance, information, energetic potency. To think the pre-individual and its problematic field, what we have is a big “plan” loaded with potential, a metastable system in over-saturations relationships, a tension state of the individuations and differentiations generator system.

As we can see, Simondon’s way is different in relation to the major tradition. That which was to be believed as a principle and a condition to formation is now seen as derivations. The idea of substance or hilemorfism theory are insufficient to understand or to describe the ontogenesis. We outlined here, in an organized way, the two center lines in which the problem of individuation on traditional approaches and then on Simondon is based upon:

1 - the traditional approach suggests a succession process in the operationalization of individuation. At first, we have the principle of individuation, then the operation of this principle and at last, the appearance of the constituted subject-individual.

2 - in Simondon we have the opposite. At first, he looks at the individuation and not the individual. The operation and not the principle. The individuated it’s only the effect or the result of the whole operation that produces it.

We can notice that for Simondon, the individuation isn’t a process that is found “outside the being”, just as coextensivity ; on the contrary, it will always be in a relationship with the being - from pre-individual to the individual. In that manner, the individual is thought always as a relative reality, never static. He’s just a “phase” of the being and not its totality. This relativity - which in a way we can define as “perspectivistic”, in a way that stablishes an affirmation in a qualitative mode of being and not only just a quantitative point of view or location - of the being is guaranteed by the pre-individual reality in which the individuated doesn’t even appears or exists. In a more radical way, even after the constitution of the individual, there’s nothing that can guarantee his permanence, in a kind of status perennis, because there’s an intermittent flow in the processes of individuation and there’s no depletion of the being, of the potentials of the pre-individual reality.

In some way, we could state that all Simondon’s work is due in the attempt to understand the genesis of the individuals within the whole process of individuation. Well, according to a conceptual conquest of contemporary philosophy, to talk about genesis is not the same as talk about origin. It’s in this search that Simondon finds a meaning in the individuals genesis in the concept of becoming. Instead of “origin”, we talked of becoming: as a being that unfolds and dephases and individuates itself. The becoming as a dimension of the being individuating itself, accomplishing itself, it can only be understood through the notion of supersaturation - state of pre-individuality - a type of unwavering self-structure and dephasing. In this become between the being’s structure and dephasing, the individual loses its state of simple effect or result, but it transforms in a means of individuation. According to Simondon, the appearance of the dualism individual-means it’s a result of individuation.

In this turbulent world its essential to the process of individuation opposite to a steady balance, because indicates some sense of calm where all the actualizations had been made. It’s the total exclusion of the becoming. Instead of steady balance, Simondon talks about a metastability as a condition for the individuation and joined by this concept is the idea of disparity (as realities that still doesn’t communicate with each other). In this matter, the communication between subject and object is shaken in the simondonian metastable system⁹.

At this point, Simondon talks about dissolved subjects and objects. There’s no individual or subject in a fully determined and fully plenary meaning, but pre-individuality that is divided as singularities. Nature in its totality isn’t built by individuals, but “of domains of the being” that allows an individuation by encounters and affection. We quote the example given by Simondon himself about the implications between series: vegetal, solar cosmic and inframolecular order. The vegetable classifies and divides itself as soil chemical species and implicates itself also as the air and its elements. It’s the photosynthesis. The vegetal element is the realities non-communicable tension point in its pre-individual reality. This example can justify Simondon’s critique to the notion of form¹⁰ and matter. Both terms refer to a principle, a origin. As we’ve seen, Simondon denied this perspective. This example also suits us to make a critique about the traditional metaphysical philosophy, as it refers to the idea of a ordering principle, as the form of the pure constitutive self.

Exactly in this meaning, as we already talked about, according to Simondon, we do not have the idea of a foundation. What we have are pre-individuals states as a problematic field that unfurls towards the individuation as an organization of a solution, of a resolution for a objectively problematic system. We see that, for Simondon, information between subject and object is marked by a tension game, a disparation. But there’s an underlying tension to the information process, because it’s about two state orders of disparation: subject and object.

In the “self” there’s no possibility - as a given form - for us to see laid out all kinds of information, contrarily, the information as signification will appear from the individuation when it finds out that, between two different and separated being (subject and object), if one can think about the idea of system. The system is clear and possible, but from the disparity tension and not from the form-self regulated communicating relationship.

The consolidation of a system does not exempt the continuous movement of the individuation. A permanent individuation activity that processes in the living being. A theater of individuation in which the actions of the individual explode in its limits. The individuation as a moment of the “dephased being”, doesn’t eliminate the metastability. To explain it better, the individual always carries with him the load of a pre-individual reality, causing new individuations.

Starting from this questions, when Simondon talks about individual and means - subject and world -, he doesn’t rule out the psychic individuation, presenting it as an inner individuation. In this way, there is in Simondon a conception of perception based on the idea that it doesn’t mean only the “appreciation of a form” (or a mere acknowledgement). But its in the midst of the constituted set from the relationship between subject and the world, an act in which the subject “come up” with a form and modify its own structure at the same time that modify the form of the object. Maybe this psyche in Simondon, we could call it subjetivation.

The psyche and collective are constituted by individuations that come after the vital individuation. The psyche is the continuation of the vital individuation in a being which to settle its own problematic is obligated to intervene himself as an element of the problem, by its action, as a subject; the subject can be conceived as a unity of the being while an individuated live being and while a being that represents its action through the world as a dimension and an element of the world; the vital problems aren’t close upon themselves; its open axiomatic can only be saturated by undefined sequence of successive individuations that always engage in more pre-individual reality and incorporate relationship within the means; affectiveness and perception integrates in emotion and science that supposes a resource to new dimensions (Simondon, 1964, p. 12).

In the Intro of “L’individu el as genesè physico-biologique”, we find a quite enlightening observation and refers to the affirmation that we had recently done, in addition to providing the understanding that from the psyche, we can apprehend the notion of the transindividual, let’s see:

The collective intervenes as a resolution for the individual problematic, which means that the base of the collective reality its already partially encompassed in the individual, under the form of pre-individual reality that stays associated to the individuated reality; what is generally considered as a relationship because of the substancialization of the individual reality, is in fact a dimension of the individuation through which the individual becomes: the relationship, to the world and to the public, is a dimension of the individuation in which the individual participates from the pre-individual reality that individuates itself step by step (Simondon, 1964, p. 12-13).

The individuation is only possible through information and so that an information may be significative it needs the collective to exist. To receive an information, is for the subject, to fulfill in itself an individuation creating a collective relationship with the being from which signs come, signal. To unveil the originating significance of the message from the being or a diversity of beings it means to create the collective with them - the Community - and to individualize itself with the elements of this communicating series. In this case, there’s no difference between unveiling a significance and to exist publicly with the “being in relationship” in which the significance is discovered (tension play). That’s because it isn’t and inherited faculty, but it manifests between and through the beings.

In Simondon there’s not the slightest possibility of solipsism. Withdrawing from this hypothesis, what we can find is always a transindividual reality, indicating with it, that there is in the subject an order of “unlimited” which is immanent; it’s part of life. The significance surpasses the individual and the pretentiousness to any kind of synthesis in the consciousness of this individual: the significance appears as transindividual of the collective, as a result of the forces between two phases of the being: pre-individual and individual. In the second chapter of his book, which is called: Individuation et Information, specifically the topic: Limites de l’individuation du vivant, Caractere de l’être, Nature du collectif, Simondon comment on the problem of transindividuality, and clearly shows a denial of a consciousness as a founding part of any heterogenic relation between beings:

The collective is not only reciprocity of actions; each action is significance because each action solves the problem of separated individuals and constitute itself as a symbol of the other actions; the synergy of actions is not only in fact a synergy, a solidarity that ends in results; to be structured as symbolic of the others is why each action possesses this capability of matching the past individual with the present individual. For the dimension of presence to exist, the gathering of various individuals is not necessary; is also necessary the reunion to be inscribed in its own dimensionality, and in them the present and the future to be correlatives of the dimension of the other beings by the mediation of this unity of the present: the present is that in which there is meaning, that through which a certain resonance is created from the past to the future and from the future to the past; the exchange of information from one being to another passes through the present; each being becomes reciprocal to itself as it becomes reciprocal in relation to others. The intra-individual integration is reciprocal of transindividual integration. The category of presence is also the category of transindividual (Simondon, 1964, p. 248-249).

So, we don’t get stuck in an almost or entirely chaotic reality, in view of Simondon’s presentation over the constitution of the being as “process of disparation” (disparity), we find in the transindividual reality the true point of resolution or significances. Setting aside what is commonly known as philosophy of consciousness, which stated that a kind of substantialization of the cogito or a primordiality in a consciousness as a unification synthesis, Simondon talks that the individual’s inner and outer relationship may be understood as participation. To talk about participation in Simondon immediately takes us to the modes of individuation. The individuated subject can be understood as unity of the being, but of a being that acts within the world, being himself a dimension of the world. The being does not ends or closes in itself. This problematic is constitutive to the existential play. Knowing this implication between subject-world, we cannot forget that we’ll always have around us a pre-individual reality (that one that still didn’t went by the process of individuation - identity - segment)¹¹.

The process of individuation (through perception and affection) is always conditioned by a community or a collective, still knowing that the series are different and heterogenic; they develop and implicate and condition one another.

However, the psychic being cannot see its own problematic; it takes charge of the pre-individual reality, at the same time that it individuates itself as a psychic being that surpasses the limits of the individuated live being and incorporates that live being in a system of the world and of the subject, allows a participation under the collective individuation form of condition, the individuation under the form of the collective makes the individual a group individual, associated to the group by the pre-individual reality that it brings in itself and that is reunited to the other individuals, individuates itself in a public unity (Simondon, 1964, p.12).

Final considerations

At last, Simondon weave a critic towards the hierarquization or a targeting from this individuations game based on a consciousness as a consciousness of something. In the place of this fight for an order in the world through significance and meaning (as the metaphysical tradition since modernity), Simondon will problematize that the idea of reciprocity will always escapes any dive in a totalizing consciousness. We can only define a systematic unity of an inner unity (psyche) through the category of the transindividual. Is like in somewhere in an everlasting consciousness (segmentarized), we had the pure and permanent becoming of the individuation, that is, successive movements of individuation generating successive situations of metastability. Therefore, Simondon’s speech is understood as he called a great theater of individuation.

When we think the problem of reality according to Simondon, we can’t follow the path that leads to the “essence” of this reality, as it was a privilege of one of the extreme terms of the relationship between consciousness and object. The mechanics of a theory of knowledge between subject and object (subject as locus of the concept and object as a passive reference to be known) relies upon the relationship in the being, of the being and the ways of being. Simondon thinks the relationship as a “modality of the being”. In this case, we immediately eliminate the principle of identity for being too inappropriate and not broad enough to think and understand the individuation. The understanding of the notion of individuation in Simondon matches or make notice to methodological and ontological losses in a theory of knowledge that have in its basis the idea of a constitutive knowing subject. The individual “structured” as identity reflects only one phase of the being. Seeking in the understanding of a pre-individual reality the ontogenesis of the individual consists of following the being in its genesis and carrying out the genesis of thought in the same movement that the genesis of the object takes place. What is observed, according to Simondon, is that in the theories of knowledge, there’s a privilege to the constitutive subject, forgetting the own subject´s operation of constitution, the real operation of the individual. The study of individuation takes a direction that demands a thought review of what concerns to the kind of logic in the philosophical ideas commonly understood, once that is impossible to establish a previous logic to deal about a pre-individual reality.

• 1
  Gilbert Simondon recently showed that a individuation presupposes, first of all, a metastable state, in other words, the existence of a “disparation” as two orders of magnitude or two heterogeneous scales of reality, at least, between which the potentials are distributed (Deleuze, 2018, p. 326). Simondon’s entire book seems to us a great deal, because presents the first rationalized theory of impersonal and pre-individual singularities. He explicitly proposes, based on these singularities, to do a genesis of both the living individual and the knowing subject. Therefore, it’s about a new conception of the transcendental (Deleuze, 2000, p. 107). Own translation.
• 2
  El nombre que el autor elige para designar aquello de lo que se habla en su libro impresiona por su carácter enigmático: no “la individuación de lo colectivo” ni “las individuaciones psíquica y colectiva”, sino “la individuación psíquica y colectiva”, expresión en singular que hace sostener juntos dos términos en la distancia unificadora de un ‘y’. El singular del título deja entender que va a tratarse en la obra de una única individuación, psíquica y colectiva, o también, como el autor escribe a veces suprimiendo al mismo tempo el estatuto problemático del “y”, psicosocial. Por lo tanto, se trataría de una individuación bifásica, de una operación para dos productos o resultados, el ser psíquico y el colectivo (Combes, 2017, p. 57-58).
• 3
  [...] connaître l’individu à travers l’individuation plutôt que l’individuation à partir de l’individu (Simondon, 2005, p. 24).
• 4
  La critique du príncipe d´individuation par Gilbert Simondon, que a pour corollaires, celles de forme, de matière, de substance, de termes fixes et stables, autonomes, posés comme des réalités en soi formant la structure du Monde, de relations, de jugement inductif et de jugement déductif (...) (Garelli, 2005, p. 10). Own translation.
• 5
  Not only this notion used here, but, many concepts mobilized in several moments of our text clearly refers to the almost seminal reading that Deleuze puts in motion in the sixties about Simondon’s work. It’s not our interest, nor our focus in this paper, to discuss this interpretation that the author of Difference and Repetition proposes about Simondon. We only pointed out that we are aware of the critics and objections in different grades in which this deleuzian reading was the object of. It’s not about, creating a purely deleuzian Simondon, nor to stablish a justified gesture which reinstates for Simondon its supposed original letter. We only use Deleuze as a interpretative key and fertile instrument, for us, in our analysis of the approached simondonian items.
• 6
  We neither find ourselves anymore in an individuated world build by fixated singularities organized by converging series, nor in front of determined individuals that express this world. We find ourselves now in front of a random point of singular spots, faced with the ambiguous sign of singularities, or faced by what represents this sign and its worth for a variety of these worlds and in a certain limit, to all, beyond the differences and the individuals who populate it (Deleuze, 2000, p. 118). Theater for sudden condensations, fusions, state changes of the exposed layers, distributions and relocation of singularities, a surface may grow indefinitely, like when two liquids dissolves each other. There is, therefore, a entire physics of surfaces as a deep effect of mixtures, which endlessly collects the variations, the pulsations of the entire universe and engulfs them in these mobile limits (Deleuze, 2000, p. 129). Own translation.
• 7
  Is not our epicentre in this paper to approach, in a specific way, the rich and decisive Simondon’s “Philosophy of Technique”, expressed in his analysis and later thinking - absolutely personal and singular -, of the technical objects; we just pointed out the necessity of a parallel analysis about it to give continuation in our work in this essay. Evidently, we’ll let this task for another opportunity, indicating, only, the reading of the topic IV Le fondements du transindividuel et l’individuation colectiva - Chapitre II - Individuation et invention for a better understanding about the concept of technical objects in Simondon. We call to attention, specially, to his work Du mode d’existence des objectos téchniques, published in 1969. Right on the introduction, the author calls to attention: The opposition put up between culture and technique, between man and machine, its false and unfounded; it covers nothing but ignorance or resentment. It masks behind an easy humanism a rich reality of human efforts and material forces that constitute the world of the technical objects, mediators between nature and men. Culture behaves towards the technical object like man towards the foreigner when he allows himself to be carried away by primitive xenophobia. The misoneism, guided against the machines, is not like the hatred towards the new but a refusal of a foreign reality. This strange being is still human and the complete culture will be the one that allows the discovering of the foreigner as a human. Similarly, the machine is the foreigner; is the foreigner in which is included the human, barely known, materialized, submissive, staying however human (p. 9-16). Own translation.
• 8
  A kind of reduction (different from that one presented by Husserl, which had in its perspective the appearing of a transcendental consciousness), where the individual fade, scape towards a “dephasing”, remaining only structures and potential affirmation forces in full expansion.
• 9
  For Gilles Deleuze, what is presented as a constitutive element of this relationship is dissymmetry (...) But what essentially defines a metastable system it’s the existence of a “disparation”, at least between two order of magnitude, two scales of different realities, in which there is no interactive communication. He implies, however, a fundamental difference, as a state of dissymmetry. If is, although, a system, it is to the extent that difference is like potential energy, like a potential difference divided between limits. In this matter, the idea of G. Simondon, it seems to be able to be reconnected to a theory of intensive quantities; whereas each intensive quantity is different. An intensive quantity comprises a difference in itself, it has E-E factors that extends to infinity and stablishes itself first between three different levels, heterogenic orders that will only enter into communication later, in extension. Like the metastable system, it is a structure (not yet a synthesis) of the heterogenic (Deleuze, 2003, p. 119-124). Own translation.
• 10
  At this moment, we´ll use the considerations of J. Ferrater Mora as he works the concept of Form in the Dictionary of Philosophy, tome II: “We will discuss in this entry about the form in its general philosophical and particularly metaphysical meaning. Aristotle introduces the notion of Form, sometimes, in the various passages of his work, but specially in the Physics and Metaphysics. Form is sometimes understood as a formal cause, in opposite to a material cause; this counterpoint between two kinds of cause is parallel to the more general counterpoint between formal cause and material cause. Matter is what something is made of, form is what determinates the matter to be something, that is, what something is for what it is. Therefore, in a wooden table, the wood is the matter which the table is made of, and the form is the template that the carpenter followed. From this point of view, the relationship between matter and form can be compared with the relationship between potency and act (...)” ”(...) The relationship potency-act makes us understand how things change (ontologically); the relationship matter-form allows us to understand how things are made up. Therefore, the problem of the pair of concepts matter-form is equivalent to the question of the composition of substances and, strictly speaking, of all realities. (our translation and underlining). Own translation.
• 11
  It becomes evident in this paragraph, the articulation between ontology and a kind of anthropological philosophy sui generis. This relation, in the simondonian work, would demand, once again, a specific text to deal with it. We leave here the need of such work, which could not be added in this paper´s space.
• Como citar: CRAIA, Eladio; JARDIM, Alex Fabiano Correia. Pré-individualidade e individuação: Simondon e uma crítica à ideia de sujeito. Revista de Filosofia Aurora, Curitiba: Editora PUCPRESS, v. 36, e202430846, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/2965-1557.036.e202430846.

References

• COMBES, Muriel. Simondon - una filosofia de lo transindividual. Buenos Aires: Cactus, 2017.
• DELEUZE, Gilles. Lógica do Sentido Trad. Luiz Roberto Salinas Fortes. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2000, 342 p.
• DELEUZE, Gilles Trad. Luiz Orlandi e Roberto Machado. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 2000, 493 p.
• DELEUZE, Gilles. A propósito de Simondon. In: PELBART, Peter P.; DA COSTA, Rogério (orgs). O reencantamento do concreto São Paulo: Hucitec, 2003, p.120-124.
• GARELLI, Jacques. Transduction et information. In: Gilbert Simondon - une pensée de l´individuation et de la techinique. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994, p. 55-68.
• ORLANDI, L. B. O indivíduo e sua implexa pré-individualidade. In: PELBART, Peter P.; DA COSTA, Rogério (orgs). O reencantamento do concreto São Paulo: Hucitec, 2003, p. 87-96.
• SIMONDON, Gilbert. L’individu et sa gênese physico-biologique Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964, 304 p.
• SIMONDON, Gilbert. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme e d’information Paris: Millon, 2005, 571 p.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  25 Nov 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  10 Oct 2023
• Accepted
  08 Sept 2024