Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation 118 DESCARTES

Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation

DESCARTES’ MEMORY AND SOUL In the light of Simondon’s adapting Janet’s formulation of the problem of split personality, Simondon does something quite surprising: he takes this reformulation of the split personality and applies it to his interpretation of Descartes. We recall, of course, that Descartes’ meditations are predicated on demolishing all prior epistemological and metaphysical foundations which are found to be inadequate for establishing the definite stable basis for constituting clear and distinct ideas. This is what motivates his method of hyperbolic doubt: to test received opinions, beliefs, and unexamined judgments, to open oneself to reason’s true light. On this basis only is a true “first philosophy” possible. Simondon makes no pretense nor feigns false modesty when he, subsequently, couples the goal of ontogenesis with the challenge put to Descartes (and rationalism more generally): “According to this perspective, ontogenesis would be the point of depar- ture for philosophical thought; it would truly be the first philosophy, anterior to the theory of knowledge and to an ontology that follows from the theory of knowledge” (163, my italics).39 Simondon’s primary objective in interpreting Descartes is to illustrate the genesis of the conditions of validity of thought in the subject, which are not identical to those of the genesis of the individuated subject. The human subject’s genesis, thus, is separate and anterior to the genesis of thought. The cogito, including the methodological doubt preceding it and “I think therefore I am,” which results from the application of this doubt, does not constitute a “true genesis of the individuated subject: the subject of doubt must be anterior to the doubt” (164). The cogito “approaches” but never fully grasps the conditions of individuation since it makes the condition for ending doubt the subject’s turning inward: “the subject grasps itself at once as doubting being and object of its own doubt” (164). Simondon crucially points out that doubt is not simply a method. It is the privileged “operation” that “objectifies in the operation of doubt the doubting subject” (164). Between doubt doubting and doubt doubted, a relation of distance is constituted through which the continuity of the doubting operation is maintained. The subject recognizes its responsibility as subject of the doubt. And yet this doubt, once it achieves a new objective reality, detaches itself in becoming the object of a new doubt. Memory incarnates this operation’s continuity: it is simultaneously an operation of distance and reattachment.40 As an operation, doubt must be © Scott, David, Jul 28, 2014, Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation : A Critical Introduction Guide Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, ISBN: 9780748654512 transductive.

Memory is the realization of distance, gaining of objectivity without alienation. It is an extension of the limits of the subjective system, which gains an internal

118 Problematic of Ontogenesis and Psychic Individuation duality without cutting or separation: it is alterity and identity progressing together, forming themselves, and distinguishing themselves in the same movement. The memory’s content becomes symbol of the present “I”; it is the other part; the progress of memory is an asymmetrical splitting of the subject being, an individualization of the subject being. (164, my italics)

Interpreting Descartes’ conception of memory in terms of its providing the present “I” with its “associated milieu,” for Simondon, “is the unity of the being as totality.” Memory provides the “I” with the means for integrating this doubling of the personality that happens in psychological disassocia- tion disorder so that unity can be re-subsumed into the being. Descartes, not Janet, not Freud, more usefully addresses this disorder. How? Because it is Descartes who conceives memory, so that it ensures that the “I” is already “more-than-individual.”41 Descartes’ privileging of nascent memory on the basis of its more directly revealing the subject’s existence proves, according to Simondon, that the subject’s substantial unity is established through the relationship of reciprocity between the doubt that has just been (vient d’être), just occurred, and actual doubt, “which is pres- ently (actuellement) in the middle of constituting itself” (166). It is well known that the most damning criticism leveled against Descartes is the charge of logical circularity of argument. Simondon neither ignores nor seeks an apology for Descartes’ logically irresolvable error. Instead, he ingeniously argues that if the imperative for clear and distinct ideas is to be satisfied, directing the unique relationship Descartes sets up between the operation of thought (the activity of doubt) and its structures (cogito, God, truth, res cogitans and res extensa), then the circularity of reasoning provides the basis for its own indispensability. And so, it is not a criticism of Cartesian circularity that Simondon offers but, rather, the disclosing of the fact that its operational (and thus, substantializing) imperative is required by the internal circular logic of its project.42 The return to a purely reflexive subjectivity is accomplished via a method of doubt unequivocally beholden to its being conditioned by and, indeed, reaffirming the consistency and unity of individuated being – that is, the cogito. And it is here that Simondon locates the “failure” of Cartesian circularity. No allowance is made for the “nascent distance” between actualized doubt, becoming the object of memory, and the anterior actualizing doubt (167). It is the difference between doubt as structure and doubt as operation which, as we have seen, is a fundamental relation- © Scott, David, Jul 28, 2014, Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation : A Critical Introduction Guide Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, ISBN: 9780748654512 ship in Simondon’s philosophy. Hence, for Simondon, individuation is never completed, it is only ever in the midst of making itself: “there is still more than the actual subject, insofar as there is distance between doubt and ‘I’ ” (167). For Descartes, this is not the case; the problem of individuation 119 Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation is avoided by the simple fact that it is prevented from being raised from the beginning. It is precluded from being raised because it is formulated from the beginning as originating from the individuated being. There is nothing left, nothing is left over, it has already been fully individuated. The Cartesian circle presumes this distance closed by the reflexive nature of the cogito. Reflexivity forms homogeneity and unity at the very center of the soul. Yet, despite his critique of Descartes’ substantialist metaphysic and the privilege granted to the individual epistemologically and ontologi- cally (in the form of the cogito), Simondon finds a precursor in Descartes. In “L’histoire de la notion d’individu,” more so than in IPC proper, Simondon reveals his admiration for and mistrust of Descartes more directly. We are able to see how closely Simondon wants to situate his own philosophy relative to Descartes when he claims that his most profound and novel contribution lies in his employing a mode of thought that raises to the level of actual being what “we would call today information.” Simondon suggests that what we call information Descartes calls “the objective reality of the idea.” As it was defined previously, information is that by which the incompatibility, the tension between at least two disparate realities of the non-resolved system, reaches the resolving organ- izing dimension. It is at that point that information becomes signification, emerging through the operation of individuation. Information is the form time assumes in the operation of individuation, the time it takes for signification to emerge. Further, Simondon continues: “In making of information a reality, Descartes gives to the individual the role of an operator (ouvrier) of information; this operator has limited forces, and recognizes an anterior and superior being to himself when he discovers a work of information that he cannot have made himself” (IL 440). Descartes’ overarching method foregrounds its own limitation, but this is only because it places the great- est emphasis on its own operational being. “Descartes privileged in the individual the operatory aspect of constructive thought, and more generally everything operatory” (IL 441). The operation of thought, at least in the case of Descartes, takes the form of the activity of reflexivity. Whether Descartes intended it or not, by the emphasis he places on the operationality of thought he requires thought to reflect upon the temporality that its own action commands. What is consciousness except the temporality of the operation of individuation, which determines its existence? In the operationality disclosed by Descartes in thought, time and the © Scott, David, Jul 28, 2014, Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation : A Critical Introduction Guide Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, ISBN: 9780748654512 “I think” no longer stand incompatibly and incomparably at odds; they are brought together transductively. “[Time] applies to ontogenesis and is ontogenesis itself” (IL 33). It is because of the memory and the imagination that the individual becomes 120 Problematic of Ontogenesis and Psychic Individuation individuated. These two faculties bring about and express the temporality of this individuation: the pure soul is the “present,” while the pure body is “the soul infinitely past or infinitely distanced into the future” (169). Body and soul are the emerging figments, only partially revealing time but, nonetheless, intimating the vaster and more indeterminate temporality of their individuation. Idiosyncratic, admittedly, but nonetheless brilliantly suggestive, Simondon interprets Descartes’ enacting of the radical estrangement of the body from the soul as, in fact, the precursor to a “new somatic reality.”

Consciousness is thus the mediation between two corporeal becomings – the soul and the body’s ascending movement toward the present and the descend- ing movement starting from the present. One could say that this movement of becoming, proceeding stage by stage, is transductive. The true scheme of real transduction is time, passage from state to state which is made by the very nature of the states, by their content and not by a scheme exterior to their succession: conceived thus, time is movement of being, real modification, reality which modifies and is modified, being at once what it leaves and what it takes, real, insofar as relational to the milieu of two states; to be of the passage, passing reality, reality as it passes, such is the transductive reality. (169)

“Individuated being is the one for which exists this ascent and descent of becoming in relationship to the central present. There is only the living and psychic individuated being insofar as it assumes time” (169, my italics). Time is the movement of being. The “I” modifies and is modified, transformed. The nature of this movement is transductive. Transductivity is the form of movement the operation takes and, as such, is synonymous with time. The relation of the individual and the milieu justifies rejection of any attempt either on the part of Cartesians (or, for that matter, Descartes himself) to give to the soul substance, “for the soul does not possess in itself all its reality” (171). The individuated being has a “soul,” it expresses time as internal to the outcome of any one particular living individuated state of being. For “the present is the operation of individuation. The present is not a permanent form; it occurs as form in operation, it finds form in individuation” (171). The present, therefore, achieves “presence” as the event’s signification or meaning emerges; the transductive operation reaches the phase constituting the relationship between the past and the future. Simondon refers to this event as a “double symbolization,” where a unitary form (no less precariously impermanent) is presented as both the © Scott, David, Jul 28, 2014, Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation : A Critical Introduction Guide Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, ISBN: 9780748654512 effective individual and its catalytic milieu. Simondon revises the notion of the soul (as was suggested earlier in this chapter): it is “the presence of the organism” (171–2) – that is to say, it is wholly and completely purely expressive of the temporality of individuation; it is time. 121 Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation The soul is conceived as what perpetuates the first operation of individuation that the being expresses and integrates because it results from it, but contains it and prolongs it, so although the genesis that made it being is truly its genesis, the soul intervenes as extension of this unity . . . [the soul] is presence to this symbol of the individual; it is at the very center of the individual, but it is also that by which it remains attached to what cannot be individual. (172)

There is no organism to which individuation is first; rather, one is only able to live “in being an organism which organizes and organizes itself in time” (171). Again, the issue is time or the temporality constituted in and constituting of individuation. “To live is to have a presence, to be present in relation to oneself (soi) and by relation to what is outside of self (hors de soi)” (171). The temporality of individuation determines the psychosomatic to be both somatic and social, for the relation of the present to the past and to the future is, for Simondon, analogous to the somato-psychic and “this other vaster relation of the complete individuated being to the world of other individuated beings” (171).

NOTES 1. Cf. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking Gender (New York: Routledge, 1990). Also, Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 2. This is part of the text of a speech Sojourner Truth delivered at a woman’s con- vention in 1852. Shirley W. Logan, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995). 3. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and more enduringly reflection is occupied with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” trans. Mary J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 269. 4. Plato, “Symposium,” trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato on Love: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades, with Selections from Republic, Laws, ed. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 208e–209e. 5. Cf. particularly the third essay “What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?” in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. 6. Simondon borrows from St Augustine the Latin expressions to support the assertion that an appeal is made sometimes to a superior and exterior force and © Scott, David, Jul 28, 2014, Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation : A Critical Introduction Guide Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, ISBN: 9780748654512 sometimes to profound depth of interiority, illustrated by In te redi; in interior homine habitat voluntas (Truth is indwelling is us) (De Vera Relig. XXXIX) and by Deus interior intimo meo, Deus superior superrimo meo (God who is more interior to me than I am to myself) (Confessions, III.6.11).

122 Problematic of Ontogenesis and Psychic Individuation 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 45. 8. Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. Susan M. Ruddick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 9. Cleanthes, “the wicked man is like a dog tied to a cart” – an image of moral determinism. 10. Ethics IVP4Dem 11. Here I am essentially borrowing Badiou’s critique of Deleuze’s metaphys- ics. Cf. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Theory out of Bounds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 12. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 20–1. Simondon’s presence is explicitly and implicitly apparent throughout this work. 13. Gilles Deleuze, “Dualism, Monism, Multiplicities,” lecture, March 26, 1973. 14. Chateau writes, “we catch a glimpse of how the allagmatic point of view leads to considering all reality not only as structure but as self-individuating being, and all individuated being not as a given substance, statically subsisting, but as becoming, relation, operation, ontogenesis.” Chateau, Le Vocabulaire de Gilbert Simondon, 14. 15. Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 131–2. 16. Therefore, rather than a duality of the normal and the pathological, which imposes a logical and social categorization on the vital, Canguilhem proposes an organism’s “health.” Simultaneity and successiveness are brought into relation, leading to the engendering of new norms: it is “the capacity to toler- ate variations in norms on which only the stability of situations and milieus – seemingly guaranteed yet in fact always necessarily precarious – confers a deceptive value of definitive normalcy.” Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 132. 17. Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 132, my italics. 18. Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 133. 19. “In reality, as in every domain of transductivity, there is in the psychological individual the entailment of a reality, at once continuous and multiple” (148–9). 20. “The dialectical relation of the individual to the world is transductive because it deploys a homogeneous and heterogeneous world, consistent and continuous but diversified, which neither belongs to physical nature nor life but to this universe in the midst of its constitution, which we might call ‘spirit’ [esprit: mind]. Now, this universe constructs the transductivity of life and the physical world by knowledge and action; it is the reciprocity of knowledge and action which permits this world to constitute itself not only as a mixture but as a veritable transductive relation” (152–3). 21. “The inquietude in vital security marks the advent of psychological individu- © Scott, David, Jul 28, 2014, Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation : A Critical Introduction Guide Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, ISBN: 9780748654512 ality, or at least its possibility of existence” (160). 22. Simondon argues, as a result, that the nature of psychological individuality is essentially “dialectical.” Does this mean that we must relegate the psychological to the role of negating action? In other words, must we see the psychological

123 Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation as wholly negative? Yet it is the anteriority that Simondon assigns it that must give us pause, for this invites us to question whether or not he understands the dialectic in an orthodox manner. Simondon’s conception of a psychic individuation supposes the existence of a pre-individual reality, a metastable system rich in potentials and, thus, conserving and indeed nurturing within itself, though indeterminate, the primordial individuation of being. Hegel rejects Spinoza on the grounds that real determination is impossible if one posits an absolute positivity of indeterminateness, anterior to the determined being. Simondon’s “dialectic” denies the negative any functional role; his dialectic is without synthesis. Simondon’s dialectic is of the problem, of the irresolvable problematic; it must be distinguished from the opposing of representations, made to coincide in an identity as the final act of negation. Problems are not givens but ideal “objecticities” that find within pre-individual reality their own sufficiency and acts of constitution, their pure potentiality for becoming. 23. Simondon gives a strict definition of “culture” in IPC 250. 24. Muriel Combes, “La Vie inespérée: vie et sujet entre biopouvoir et politique,” these de doctorat, Universite Paris 8–Vincennes Saint-Denis, 2002, 171, 206–31. Combes brilliantly develops Simondon’s conception of “spirituality” and compares it with Foucault’s later work. 25. Combes, “La Vie inespérée,” 172. 26. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 119. 27. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 55. 28. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 55. 29. “The only conceivable manner in which others can have for me the sense and status of existent others, thus and so determined, consists in their being constituted in me as others.” Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 128. 30. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 11–12. 31. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 3. 32. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 7. 33. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 12. 34. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 14. 35. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 178. 36. Igor Krtolica, “The Question of Anxiety in Gilbert Simondon,” trans. Jon Roffe, in Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, ed. Alex Murray, Arne De Boever, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woodward (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University © Scott, David, Jul 28, 2014, Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation : A Critical Introduction Guide Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, ISBN: 9780748654512 Press, 2012), 84. 37. Krtolica, “The Question of Anxiety in Gilbert Simondon,” 85. 38. Krtolica, “The Question of Anxiety in Gilbert Simondon,” 85. 39. This brief paragraph is more thoroughly addressed in the introduction.

124 Problematic of Ontogenesis and Psychic Individuation 40. The distinction between memory and imagination resides in the fact that the principle of the encounter between the “I” and the symbol of the “I” aligns itself on a dynamic tendency of the “I,” in the imagination, while in memory the principle of their encounter is in the symbol of the “I”: in both instances, there is a symbolization, but in the operation of memory, the symbol is the complement of the “I” for the individual and “I” for the milieu; whereas, in the imagination, it is the “I” that is individual and the symbol of the “I” that is milieu (165). 41. “The being that remembers is more than the ‘I’; it is more than individual; it is the individual more than some other thing” (165). And so Simondon finds that Descartes, if read ontogenetically, has a way to “cure” the problem of split personality, to invent a doubled non-actual or virtual “contre-moi” (counter- “I”) (165). 42. “Circularity is a limit-case; already the distance exists necessarily for the circularity to exist; but the circularity recovers and dissimulates the distance; this is why Descartes is able to substantialize what is not properly speaking a substance, to know (savoir) an operation: the soul is defined as res and as cogitans, supports of operation and operation in the midst of completing itself. Now, the unity and homogeneity of this being constitutes a support and an operation that can only be affirmed as far as the being-operation ensemble continues to perpetuate itself according to the same mode. If the activity stops or appears to stop, the permanence of the identity of the substance thus defined is threatened: hence, the problem of sleep and ruin of consciousness in Descartes, relative to the conception of the nature of the soul” (166). © Scott, David, Jul 28, 2014, Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation : A Critical Introduction Guide Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, ISBN: 9780748654512

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