Note on a note of Simondon

Note on a note of Simondon

In the section on Descartes in Simondon’s “History of the notion of the individual” is hidden a long footnote that is extremely important for understanding Simondon’s conception of the individual. What connection it has with Descartes, and why Simondon chose to insert it at this place is not clear. Due to an unfortunate editorial choice in the translation (in vol. II of Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Individuation), the footnotes are turned into endnotes, so many readers of the translation may miss endnote 95. The note is appended to a discussion of Descartes’ “provisional morality” in relation to Corneille’s play Le Cid. In the text itself Simondon describes the individual’s capacity to act in such a way as to transform the situation in which that action first appears as “the paradoxical aspect of the individual” (p. 566). To the word ‘paradoxical’ is appended the note in question, which I here give in full (pp. 703-705):

That according to which individual reality is not just ambivalent but consists of an internal duality that establishes an essential relation in it: in each of the points of view from which it can be grasped, the individual consists of the relation of two aspects: ontogenetic and phylogenetic, interiority and exteriority, substantiality and evental characteristic, freedom and determinism, aseity and participation, profound instinctivity and hyperconscious rationality. This ambivalent duality could be called the problematic or self-problematic nature of the individual: the individual does not encounter difficulties, he is a difficulty to himself; he calls himself into question and is his own problem; he encounters himself on his own path. As one of the clearest aspects of this self-problematic nature, let us cite the analogy of the meaning of life and the meaning of death, of the coming-to-be and passing-away of individuality. Individuality is circular causality, confrontation of oneself with oneself, affirmation and negation of oneself by oneself: every tendency is twinned, capable of being inverted through the suppression of one of the two branches; it is impossible to adopt either monism or dualism, which would be a suppression of recurrence, because there would no longer be but a single term or two isolated terms. There is neither one nor two terms but a term in the process of splitting [en train de se dédoubler] and two terms in the process of unifying [en train de s’unifier]. The individual is the ongoing relation of unity and duality.

The individual’s individuality is precisely transindividual, for the individual affirms its individuality by opposing its action to its substantiality (sacrifice, sympathy), but this sympathy and this sacrifice couldn’t exist without a relative substantiality of the individual at the start. Action moves [se meut], but it moves starting from a point that becomes a point of departure because action distances itself from this point. Relation has the status of being vis-à-vis the terms, and the terms find their value as terms in the act that establishes relation.

In this sense, it would be false to say that the individual is merely information. It is in fact auto-position of information, condition of information. Information can be posited only relative to a point of view, and there is no point of view except through individuality. The transductive reality of the individual depends on the fact that the individual possesses within itself an allagmatic dynamism that consists in its unity and its plurality, as well as the fundamental bipolarity of its tendencies. Furthermore, in the individual’s relation to other individuals and to nature or technical beings, the individual is invested in a transductive relation.

Finally, a third allagmatic rapport permits the first two rapports to exist and is conditioned by them: the allagmatic rapport between interiority and exteriority, between the interior transductive rapport and the exterior transductive rapport. Neither of the two initial rapports of interiority or exteriority would be stable without the third, which is the rapport of two rapports. But this latter would not exist without the former. There is simultaneity of three rapports. The transductive relation between the first two rapports is manifested by a link of analogy between their dynamic and static structures: these two rapports are transpositions of one another. But analogy is nothing but the symbolic aspect that reveals a transductive activity. In its reality, the rapport is transductive relation; it expresses itself externally as an analogical rapport. Analogy is the symbolic expression of transduction; analogy does not constitute transduction but merely expresses it. Plato’s study on this subject doesn’t just have methodological value, even if it is inspired by the technical paradigm of artistic imitation or the minting of coins based on an archetype: it supposes the transductive relation between the source of knowledge and the subject who knows, between the Good and the soul, between the Sun and the eye; the object is what materializes and mediates the transductive relation of knowledge. This transductive relation is asymmetrical in Plato, because the Sun and the eye, the Good and the soul are analogues without being on the same level in the order of beings. But we should note that based on the fundamental asymmetry between the model and the painting, between the idea of the shuttle and the shuttle, Plato seeks a symmetrical relation: the soul is sister of the ideas and not just analogue of the Good. The eye veritably emits a light that will encounter the light that comes from the Sun and the object.

(The footnote appears on pp. 437-438 of the French text.)

I highlight this footnote because it’s a sort of condensation of the entire book Individuation (vol. I of the English translation). Many of the themes and concepts first mentioned in the introduction to Individuation appear here: transduction, analogy, relation as having the status of being, etc. This text is, to my knowledge, the clearest statement that Simondon makes about the relationship between the human individual and the transindividual: “[t]he individual’s individuality is precisely transindividual”. It’s through willingness to sacrifice one’s life (“substantiality”) that one affirms one’s individuality to the highest degree; what one is as an individual is constituted in part by one’s relation to something outside oneself. (I’m not sure what the reference to ‘sympathy’ means here.) More generally, even aside from situations of sacrifice, the human individual is only constituted through its relation to something outside itself, that it relates to precisely by so constituting itself.

This text is also remarkable as being one of the most dialectical passages in Simondon’s works. Simondon is ambivalent about dialectics in Individuation: he criticizes dialectics (e.g., on pp. 15-16, 111, 364), which he identifies with the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” schema, but elsewhere (p. 315) he seems to use the term to describe his own account of individuation. In the footnote, he doesn’t explicitly use the term ‘dialectics’, but his depiction of the individual as one term becoming two and two becoming one is easily seen to be dialectical in nature. (Compare with the classic Maoist formula, “one divides into two”.)

A note on translation: I’ve highlighted some of the reflexive verbs (se dédoubler, s’unifier, se mouvoir) that appear in this passage. French reflexive verbs are hard to translate into English, as what are syntactically reflexive verbs are often, as in these cases, semantically middle voice verbs. The middle voice has only a marginal existence in English, so French reflexive/middle voice verbs generally have to be translated as either English reflexive verbs or passive voice verbs. The reflexive translation (e.g., “splits itself”, “unifies itself”) tends to suggest a greater sense of agency than the French text, as if the subject of the verb were a conscious agent performing the action, whereas the passive voice (“is split”, “is unified”) has a more static meaning than the French. The French reflexive/middle voice has instead the sense of a process or action, but without calling attention to the subject who performs it, which can’t be conveyed in any straightforward way in English. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the translation choices here, but I wanted to call attention to a nuance that doesn’t come across very well.