George Simondon
Theory
Emanuele Leonardi:
"The philosophical project developed by Gilbert Simondon[2] over a period of twenty years is a highly complex and sophisticated one. Nonetheless, for the purposes of my argument it is sufficient to highlight two main theses through which a sharp line of demarcation has been drawn with regard to the Western metaphysical tradition. The first is the primacy of the process of individuation over individuated entities. From this perspective, Simondon’s polemical object has to be found in the various theoretical approaches that posit as prior a fixed principle that would be able to explain, produce and determine the course of subsequent processes of individuation. Constituted individualities are conceived of as given, immutable substances, so that the fundamental problem ends up being the recreation of the specific conditions that have made their existence possible. On the contrary, Simondon sees individuation as an operation, as a processual becoming by means of which structured individualities can emerge and relate to each other. At stake is the possibility to philosophically grasp the individual through individuation rather than individuation through the individual. As it is evident, the implications of this radical perspective are of primary importance:
The individual has to be understood as having a relative reality, occupying only a certain phase of being as a whole – a phase that therefore rests on a preceding pre-individual state, and that, even after individuation, does not exist in isolation since individuation does not exhaust in the singular act of its appearance all the potentials embedded in the pre-individual state. The process of individuation, moreover, does not bring to light just the individual, but also the individual-environment dyad. In this way the individual possesses only a relative existence in two senses: because it does not represent the totality of being, and because it is merely the result of a phase in the development of being during which this latter existed neither in the form of an individual nor as a principle of individuation. (Simondon, 2005: 12; author translation)
The second, closely linked theoretical statement is the primacy of relation over its own terms. As we have seen, the process of individuation requires a field of singularities, conceived of as pure intensities, basic energetic unities; subsequently, these tensive potentials are transformed into relatively stable structures, which in turn bring to the foreground new differential environments. From this standpoint, the emerging system is nothing more than a precarious equilibrium between a pre-individual field of intensities and a trans-individual range of problems that have to be solved through contingent and unexpected structural operations. By referring to the pre-individual field as ‘metastable’, Simondon intends to advance the idea that, prior to individuality, being is affected by inconsistency, populated by divergent tensions, and pregnant with incompatible potentials. Relationality emerges in this phase of being and is consequently able to account for the onto-genesis of individuated entities. Simondon is strongly critical towards the conceptual dichotomies – matter and form especially – which have traditionally proposed to explain the original manifestation of individuals. Real relations, according to him, are those relations that co-emerge with their terms. They are operations that integrate irreducible differences, ‘not the simple relation between two terms that could be adequately known by means of concepts, inasmuch as they would have an effectively separate existence’ (Simondon, 2005: 19; author translation). As Alberto Toscano appropriately notes:
Rather than the substantial support of relations that would inhere within it, (preindividual) being is defined as affected by disparation, that is, by the tension between incompatible – as yet unrelated – dimensions or potentials in being. (Toscano, 2006: 139)
To conclude this section, I would like to underline that, although Simondon’s emphasis is clearly on the operative and processual realities rather than on the static and individuated entities, the relationship between these two categories might be defined as a-symmetrical complementarity, since each of them represents the condition of possibility for the understanding of the other. And it is from this specific difference, of degree rather than of kind, that I will attempt to map out some internal resonances between the philosophy of individuation and the hypothesis of cognitive capitalism. Moreover, this complex/paradoxical complementarity between opposite terms will open up the theoretical terrain upon which the notion of impression, conceived of as a tool to produce a cartography of contemporary exploitation, grounds its logical justification and political effectiveness."