SIMONDON ON THE NOTION OF THE PROBLEM

Abstract

In his main doctoral thesis, Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information, Simondon offers a genetic theory of individuation that takes into account the individuation of physical, biological, psychic and social systems. While he takes his main paradigm for the explanation of individuating processes from physical science and transfers the notions derived from it to other domains, he is careful not to reduce the regime of the living to the non-living. The notion of the problem plays a crucial role in this regard: the essential characteristic of life is its ability to solve problems through acts of invention. The living being is nothing but the perpetual resolution of problems. In his 1966 review, Gilles Deleuze recognises the “tremendous importance” of Simondon’s notion of the problem. However, in his own work Deleuze develops the concept in a very different way. This paper will examine Simondon’s use of the notion of the problem within his theory of individuation and point to its divergence from Deleuze’s.

Keywords:

• Simondon
• individuation
• problem
• life
• Deleuze

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The book entitled L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique [Individuation and its Physical-Biological Genesis] is only the first part of Simondon’s main doctoral thesis. It was published by Presses universitaires de France in 1964. The second part, L’Individuation psychique et collective [Psychic and Collective Individuation], was published by Aubier in 1989. Both books were finally collected in a single volume and published by Jérôme Millon in 2005. The following quotes are taken from the second edition of L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Millon, 2013); hereafter this work will be cited in the text as ILFI, followed by the page number. Since there is no English translation available at this time, all translations are mine.

2 See chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition, and also the “Ninth Series of the Problematic” in The Logic of Sense, published in 1969.

3 I discuss Deleuze’s notion of the problem in greater detail in my book Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas, especially chapter 3: “Ideas as Problems.”

4 See also the following quotation from Simondon’s book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, where he describes problem-solving as a “vital function,” characteristic of a temporal living being:

To solve a problem is to be able to step over it, to be capable of recasting the forms that are given within the problem and in which it consists. The solution of real problems is a vital function presupposing a recurrent mode of action that cannot exist in the machine: the recurrence of the future with respect to the present, of the virtual with respect to the actual. (156)

5 Jean-Hugues Barthélémy argues that “the theme of the living being contains the hidden unity of Simondon’s work, even beyond that first surface unity presented by the transversal theme of individuation” (19).

6 See section 2 of this article.

7 Anne Sauvagnargues ascribes to the concept of metastability a crucial, metaphysical function:

the concept of metastability intertwines the theory of information and the physics of phase shifts in matter, which Simondon gives a metaphysical extension by applying it to every field of individuation; metastability thus qualifies the conditions of every actualization. Metastable being, in disequilibrium, involves this state of asymmetrical disequilibrium which accounts for tension and the production of the new. (58)

Indeed, Simondon says in the concluding chapter: “we would like to say that the original state of being is a state that goes beyond coherence with itself, that exceeds its proper limits: original being is not stable, it is metastable” (ILFI 316).

8 To give the reader an impression of the detailed scale of Simondon’s analyses, here are a few examples that he discusses, with corresponding page ranges: the moulding of a brick (ILFI 39–45); crystallisation (85–97); particle physics (99–153) (this was not included in the 1964 publication of the first part); and marine organisms such as coral reefs (167–89).

9 In his complementary thesis On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon seems bolder in asserting the generalisability of the genetic schema of individuation:

The very notion of genesis, however, deserves to be made more precise: the word genesis is taken here in the sense defined in the study on Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and of Information, as the process of individuation in its generality. (168)

However, he immediately steps back by calling “the notion of the individuation of oversaturated systems, conceived as successive resolutions of tensions through the discovery of structures at the heart of a system rich in potentials” a “general hypothesis” (ibid.) that may replace previous explanatory models such as those of adaptation and Bergson’s élan vital. “This is why it is not forbidden to call upon a hypothesis that intervenes with a more primitive genetic schema than that of opposed aspects of adaptation and élan vital” (169).

10 It has to be emphasised, though, that Deleuze conceives of a new kind of universality: “Ideas are concrete universals” (Difference 176). For instance, the Idea of white light is a concrete universal and not simply an abstract generality; white light includes the variety of colours within its differential structure.

11 On the relationship between human beings and technical objects, see Simondon’s book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.

12 Simondon will extend the application of the notion of transduction to other domains, such that he finally comes to the following definition: “We understand by transduction a physical, biological, mental, social operation through which an activity propagates gradually within a domain, by founding this propagation on a structuration of the domain that is realised from one place to the next” (ILFI 32). What becomes evident here is Simondon’s analogical transfer of categories. However, it would be too hasty to conclude that there is one identical operation at work in each and every domain. Rather, the way that a structure actually propagates within a domain will be the object of a detailed study.

13 For a more detailed description of the cybernetic project and Simondon’s relation to it, see Mills 9–33.

14 The term “order of magnitude” actually refers to a whole number (i.e., a factor of 10) and is used (for instance, in physics) as part of a scaling method to estimate the size of a number. Here, it seems that Simondon wants to point to the utterly unequal “scales” of the terms of a relation. He provides the example of a plant, which establishes a communication between a superior and an inferior order of reality with regard to its own dimension. In this case, the two disparate orders of magnitude are an order of cosmic scale (sunlight energy and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere) and an order of infra-molecular scale (water molecules in the soil) (ILFI 34–35 n. 12). These two orders of magnitude communicate in the process of photosynthesis, in which light energy is transformed into chemical energy that fuels the organism’s activities.

15 For Simondon, there is no simple distinction between living beings, on the one hand, and beings that also think, on the other. Animals similar to humans could equally be confronted with psychic problems:

It is probable that animals sometimes find themselves in psychic situations. Only these situations that lead to acts of thought are less frequent among animals. Humans have available more extended psychic possibilities, in particular due to the resources of symbolism, and more frequently call on the psyche [ … ] But it is not a matter of nature, an essence serving to found an anthropology; it is simply that a threshold is crossed. The animal is better equipped to live than to think, and the human to think than to live. But both of them live and think, in an ordinary or an exceptional manner. (ILFI 165 n. 7)

16 The notion of “disparation” is borrowed from the theory of perception. It refers to the binocular disparity between the left and right retinal images. The problem of binocular vision is resolved only by the construction of a new dimension. Without cancelling out the parallax difference, the left and right retinal images form a system that is superior to the separate images inasmuch as it integrates all the elements in a new and higher dimension, the dimension of depth (see also ILFI 207). Simondon uses the term “disparation” as one of the key terms to describe the tensions between two different disparate series within a metastable field.

17 In Difference and Repetition (1968), and then again in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), Gilles Deleuze takes up this idea of sensations as differentials. For him as for Simondon, conscious perception is the crossing of a certain threshold of intensity. However, Deleuze’s main points of reference that he mentions explicitly are Leibniz, Kant and Maimon. Perhaps what motivates his preference is also the fact that he wishes to bestow a transcendental status on differentials: differentials or pure differences are virtual, that is, “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract,” to use Proust’s formula that Deleuze appreciates so much. For Simondon, the differential nature of sensations is simply their intensive physicality: he does not point to anything beyond the empirical.

18 The term “hodological space” (ILFI 210) is borrowed from the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin.

19 Spinoza defines the fluctuatio animi as follows: “This constitution of the mind which arises from two contrary affects is called vacillation of mind, which is therefore related to the affect as doubt is to the imagination” (Ethics, Part 3, Proposition 17, Scholium).

20 If participation in the collective is denied through external constraints, for instance in the case of the prolonged solitary confinement of prisoners on death row, the psychic effects are indeed, as Simondon suggests, perceptual disturbances (perceptual distortions, inability to focus, illusions and hallucinations) among others.

21 For a detailed interpretation of this remark, see Xavier Guchet’s article “Technology, Sociology, Humanism.”

22 One extreme would be the case in which the extension of the in-group equals zero and the social dimension of one’s personality has shrunk to one’s own existence, for instance in some cases of mental alienation or delinquency. The other extreme would be the indefinite expansion of the in-group such that it also comprises the out-group. Simondon refers to rare cases of charity, such as Christ or Francis of Assisi, for whom animals also belonged to the in-group (ILFI 286–87).

23 The temptation here is to conceive anxiety as a sort of “ontological feeling” (as in, for instance, Heidegger’s use of anxiety in Being and Time or Sartre’s conception of shame), which reveals to us our ontological condition, in Simondon’s case the heterogeneity between the individuated and the pre-individual reality. However, while this reading is possible it would run against Simondon’s cautious analogical method, which obliges him to look at particular cases and their specific conditions of individuation. Following this line of interpretation, anxiety designates here simply a fundamental problem of psychic individuation.