"It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth." - John Steinbeck
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I have been putting off reading Simondon because he seems like one of those authors who had already articulated ideas that have been percolating in my brain for some time now. I always try as much as possible to avoid being 'contaminated' by the formulations of others before I work out my own thoughts on particular philosophical issues. However as Simondon's work continues to be translated, and as I keep encountering his ideas in various settings, I think its time for me to begin swimming upstream in that river."Simondon developed a theory of individual and collective individuation in which the individual subject is considered as an effect of individuation, rather than as a cause. Thus the individual atom is replaced by the neverending process of individuation. Simondon also conceived of "pre-individual fields" as the funds making individuation itself possible. Individuation is an always incomplete process, always leaving a "pre-individual" left-over, itself making possible future individuations. Furthermore, individuation always creates both an individual and a collective subject, which individuate themselves together." [source]
The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis
By Gilbert Simondon
The reality of being as an individual may be approached in two ways: either via a substantialist path whereby being is considered as consistent in its unity, given to itself, founded upon itself, not created, resistant to that which it is not; or via a hylomorphic path, whereby the individual is considered to be created by the coming together of form and matter. The self-centered monism of substantialism is opposed to the bipolarity of the hylomorphic schema.
However, there is something that these two approaches to the reality of the individual have in common: both presuppose the existence of a principle of individuation that is anterior to the individuation itself, one that may be used to explain, produce, and conduct this individuation. Starting from the constituted and given individual, an attempt is made to step back to the conditions of its existence. This manner of posing the problem of individuation--starting from the observation of the existence of individuals--conceals a presupposition that must be examined, because it entails an important aspect for the proposed solutions and slips into the search for the principle of individuation. It is the individual, as a constituted individual, that is the interesting reality, the reality that must be explained.
The principle of individuation will be sought as a principle capable of explaining the characteristics of the individual, without a necessary relation to other aspects of being that could be correlatives of the appearance of an individuated reality. Such a research perspective gives an ontological privilege to the constituted individual. It therefore runs the risk of not producing a true ontogenesis--that is, of not placing the individual into the system of reality in which the individuation occurs.
Fractal Ontology also has a short list of key concepts here - along with a few translations and several post about Simondon's work.In his review [of Simondon's L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique], Deleuze stresses that Simondon articulates a rigorous distinction between individuality and singularity due to an examination of the principle of individuation. Simondon begins with the problem of inferring a principle of individuation because current schools of thought tend to view the individual as a given. This confers an ontological privilege to an already constructed individual. But Simondon sees this view as a backwards approach, or what he terms reverse ontogenesis. In fact, because Simondon believes that individuation is merely one stage in the becoming of a being and thus is not the totality of a being, individuality falsely attributes a unity and identity to a heterogeneous milieu of forces from which the pre-individual nature of a being enters into communication with another order of magnitude. Thus, instead of focusing on the individual in order to infer the principle of individuation, Simondon asserts from the beginning that his project is to understand the individual in terms of individuation, which can be considered now as ontogenesis itself. (Taylor Atkins)
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Excerpts:
Today, the avant-gardes have all but disappeared, the front line is as impossible to draw as the precise boundaries of terrorist networks, and the well arrayed labels “archaic,” “reactionary,” “progressive” seem to hover haphazardly like a cloud of mosquitoes. If there is one thing that has vanished, it is the idea of a flow of time moving inevitably and irreversibly forward that can be predicted by clear sighted thinkers. The spirit of the age, if there is such a Zeitgeist, is rather that everything that had been taken for granted in the modernist grand narrative of Progress is fully reversible and that it is impossible to trust in the clear-sightedness of anyone —especially academics. (p.2-3)Even though the word “composition” is a bit too long and windy, what is nice is that it underlines that things have to be put together (Latin componere) while retaining their heterogeneity… Above all, a composition can fail and thus retains what is most important in the notion of constructivism (a label which I could have used as well, had it not been already taken by art history). It thus draws attention away from the irrelevant difference between what is constructed and what is not constructed, toward the crucial difference between what is well or badly constructed, well or badly composed. What is to be composed may, at any point, be decomposed. (p.3)With critique, you may debunk, reveal, unveil, but only as long as you establish, through this process of creative destruction, a privileged access to the world of reality behind the veils of appearances. Critique, in other words, has all the limits of utopia: it relies on the certainty of the world beyond this world. By contrast, for compositionism, there is no world of beyond. It is all about immanence.The difference is not moot, because what can be critiqued cannot be composed. It is really a mundane question of having the right tools for the right job. With a hammer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together. It is no more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than it is to cook with a seesaw. Its limitations are greater still, for the hammer of critique can only prevail if, behind the slowly dismantled wall of appearances, is finally revealed the netherworld of reality. But when there is nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique suddenly looks like another call to nihilism. What is the use of poking holes in delusions, if nothing more true is revealed beneath? (p.4)
Martin Jacques is the author of When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. He is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, IDEAS, a centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy, and a visiting research fellow at the LSE’s Asia Research Centre. He is a columnist for the Guardian and the New Statesman.
His interest in East Asia began in 1993 with a holiday in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. After that, he found every reason or excuse he could find to spend time in the region, be it personal, for newspaper articles or television programs. In 1977, he became editor of Marxism Today, a post he held for fourteen years, transforming what was an obscure and dull journal into the most influential political publication in Britain, read and respected on the right and left alike.
In 1991, he closed Marxism Today and in 1994 became the deputy editor of the Independent newspaper, a post he held until 1996. In 1993 he co-founded the think-tank Demos.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Russian Nobel Prize winning author and historian. From 1945 to 1953 he was imprisoned for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin. Solzhenitsyn's work continued the realistic tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and provided sharp but popular commentaries on the flaws of both Eastern and Western cultures. The Relentless Cult of Novelty
By Alexander Solzhenitsyn
There is a long-accepted truth about art that “style is the man” (“le style est l'homme”). This means that every work of a skilled musician, artist or writer is shaped by an absolutely unique combination of personality traits, creative abilities and individual, as well as national, experience. And since such a combination can never be repeated, art (but I shall speak primarily of literature) possesses infinite variety across the ages and among different peoples. The divine plan is such that there is no limit to the appearance of ever new and dazzling creative talent, none of whom, however, negate in any way the works of their outstanding predecessors, even though they may be 500 or 2,000 years removed. The unending quest for what is new and fresh is never closed to us, but this does not deprive our grateful memory of all that came before.
No new work of art comes into existence (whether consciously or unconsciously) without an organic link to what was created earlier. But it is equally true that a healthy conservatism must be flexible both in terms of creation and perception, remaining equally sensitive to the old and to the new, to venerable and worthy traditions, and to the freedom to explore, without which no future can ever be born. At the same time the artist must not forget that creative freedom can be dangerous, for the fewer artistic limitations he imposes on his own work, the less chance he has for artistic success. The loss of a responsible organizing force weakens or even ruins the structure, the meaning and the ultimate value of a work of art.
Control: Conscious and Otherwise
By Christopher Suhler and Patricia Churchland
An important notion in moral philosophy and many legal systems is that certain circumstances can mitigate an individual’s responsibility for a transgression. Generally speaking, such situations are considered extenuating in virtue of their exceptional influence on a person’s ability to act and make decisions in a normal manner. The essence of the case for diminished responsibility is that these special circumstances impede the ability of a normal person to exercise self-control.
In recent years, however, this notion of diminished responsibility has come to wider attention in a quite unexpected way. Some researchers, drawing on findings from social psychology, have argued that situational forces may play a much larger role in behavior than traditionally assumed. The situational forces in question are often entirely ordinary, mundane and seemingly trivial. Given that such influences are pervasive, the general issue raised concerns control in commonplace cases. According to a condensed version of this view – which we call the Frail Control hypothesis for convenience – even in unexceptional conditions, humans have little control over their behavior. If correct, this line of argument could have widespread and dramatic ramifications, notably for our practices of attributing moral and legal responsibility. (We note that although in certain rare cases control and responsibility come apart, in most cases of moral and legal responsibility attribution, control and responsibility are closely linked.)
While agreeing that moral philosophy and the law can benefit from a greater understanding of developments in psychology and neuroscience, we suggest that the Frail Control challenge is markedly weakened once a wider range of data is considered. In our assessment, the Frail Control hypothesis underestimates the vigor of normal goal-maintenance in the face of distractions, and neglects the role of nonconscious aspects of control as displayed, for instance, in the exercise of cognitive, motor and social skills. Furthermore, a large psychological literature has demonstrated that nonconscious, automatic processes are pervasive and anything but “dumb”. Instead, they are often remarkably sophisticated and flexible in performing functions such as goal pursuit that were once considered the sole province of conscious cognition.
On the basis of these and other data, we develop an account of control that we believe goes some way toward sharpening the meaning of control – including nonconscious control – in a way that accommodates the role of nonconscious processes in nearly everything we do. the general conclusion we will be arguing for is that nonconscious processes can support a robust form of control and, by extension, that consciousness is not a necessary condition for control. One notable feature of our account is a model of control in which neurobiological criteria, rather than intuitive or behavioral criteria alone, define the boundaries of control. A significant virtue of this account, in light of the pervasiveness of automatic processes in our cognitive lives, is that it is agnostic as to whether the underlying processes are conscious or nonconscious.
"The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence."
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics Of Ambiguity, 1948, p. 129
“A postmodern science should not separate matter and consciousness and therefore not separate facts, meaning, and value. Science would then be inseparable from a kind of intrinsic morality, and truth and virtue would not be kept apart as they currently are in science. This separation is part of the reason we are in our current desperate situation.”
- Davis Bohm, Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World, 1988
"A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance."
- Rollo May, 1991, The Cry for Myth, 1991, p. 15
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