CHAPTER 2

SIMONDON INFORMATION

Perhaps the next step to take would be to reject either an information constructivism (where information is a product of external forces that renders information an effect of these relations) as well as information realism (where information is presented as an objective truth about nature and thus positioned as its cause). In either of these formulations we are given a strict binary choice between declaring information as a prescriptive foundation or an end product of forces and relations. In more dangerous contexts, information constructivism can lead to an ideologization of information, and information realism may simply be a fog in which one can hide ideology. Information constructivism may never narrow the gulf between what information signifies and its analog in reality since, very much the issue in social constructivism, what the information refers to is locked in a mediation process that is a sign referring to––not reality––other signs in a simulacral network. Such dangers aside, curiously very little attention has been paid to the idea that transduction may function as an alternative to models of deduction and induction that currently dominate either generalized or unified theories of information. This chapter is an attempt to explore and expand upon Gilbert Simondon’s use of the word information in his philosophy with a view to emphasizing its importance in an operant ontology. As a model, Simondon information (hereafter SI) would reject either the formulation of information based on hylomorphic or substantialist accounts that assume a primacy of individuation prior to the operant process by which individuation manifests itself. In the substantialist account information would be viewed in largely Platonic terms as an abstract form or essence distributed in matter, and largely resembles a wide range of digital ontologies; in the hylomorphic account qua Aristotle, information would still qualify as an essence, but one that is extracted by thought from matter. Epistemologically, it is by this thought-based elimination of matter from what is observed that the substance of the thing is knowable because of our access to its form. In the hylomorphic scheme it may not be difficult to determine what role Aristotle would assign information: as truly something that in-forms matter by granting it qualities such as shape, size, colour, and so forth. It is this assumption, along with the Platonic idea of an abstract form, that Simondon rejects.

Gilbert Simondon: Deleuzian Precursor? There is still a conspicuous dearth of Simondon’s works translated in English despite his major contribution to understanding technology and individuation. Although there have been some notable and long-standing advocates, such as Brian

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Massumi, for bringing Simondon’s work to the attention of the English speaking community, the uptake is still relatively slow, but the work is no less prescient of the current condition of the technical world today. Simondon’s works have had an appreciable impact, to greater or lesser degrees, among such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze and Bernhard Stiegler. Although Simondon may wrongly be considered within the broadly construed camp of cybernetics, Simondon distinguished himself outside of cybernetics to confront the issue of ontology and its reliance on the principium individuationis, arguing that individual objects are not so much defined against other objects, but by the relations between objects in an ongoing process of individuation. Gilles Deleuze attributes some inspiration to the works of Simondon, but arguably the degree to which Deleuze might be indebted to Simondon’s work on the preindividual and the process of individuation as it feeds into Deleuze’s concept of the virtual-intensive-actual circuit might be much more. At the very least, it might be agreed that Simondon’s influence in Deleuze’s work is felt as much as other influences in Deleuze’s oeuvre, including Leibniz, Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson. It has been only more recently that the secondary literature on Deleuze has placed more emphasis on the Simondonian influences.

INDIVIDUATION AND TRANSDUCTION

Simondon asserts that one cannot begin with the already constituted individual to explain the process or the manifestation of individuation. Simondon rejects the principle of individuation and instead adopts the process of individuation instead. Moreover, one cannot reverse engineer by observation of individuals some core or primitive principle of individuation that will unify all subsequent individuations. Instead, Simondon invites us to consider Becoming as a dimension of Being that expresses itself in Being’s de-phasing of itself. At the level of the pre-individual, there is only full potentiality, and it is only when individuation occurs that we encounter Becoming as a process of de-phasing. And yet, throughout this process of de-phasing, we are not left with the dialectical idea of progressive determinations that exhaust an initial supply of potentiality and exhaust any remainder in the act of synthesis; instead, potentiality is perpetual as individuation is itself perpetual, and this is guaranteed by the pre-individual nature of metastability. The potentiality of any temporary individuation is taken up immanently within that individuation whereby the next individuation occurs ad infinitum. The metastable state exists as both a supersaturated milieu akin to the virtual, and a superposition with its actualization where Being de-phases itself in the emergence of individuation, the resolution of the disparation that does not exhaust the potentials of the metastable state of the preindividual. For example, a pattern (such as the way a particular manifestation of Being as individual in a corresponding relational series with an environment) emerges out of the initial genesis of the individual, which is sustained by the rich potentials of the pre-individual. This presents us with a relative organization of the actual, a kind of particular or temporary ensemble in a time

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