barthelemy - individuation and knowledge, the refutation of idealism in simondons heritage in france

Individuation and Knowledge: The “refutation of idealism” inSimondon’s Heritage in France

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Mark Hayward, Arne De Boever

SubStance, Volume 41, Number 3, 2012 (Issue 129), pp. 60-75 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin PressDOI: 10.1353/sub.2012.0030

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Individuation and Knowledge: The “refutation of idealism” in Simondon’s Heritage in France

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy

1. The “double fundamental problem” in Stiegler’s relation to Simondon

In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s book Technics and Time. Stiegler is internationally known as the inheritor of another French philosopher whose work is currently being rediscovered worldwide: Gilbert Simondon. In Stiegler’s work, this Simondonian heritage plays itself out in the domain of continental phi-losophy. The thesis maintained here will be the following: there is another relation to Simondon that is possible, one that also takes up the major problems we’ve inherited from the continental philosophical tradition.

The double fundamental philosophical problem raised in Stiegler’s debate with Simondon is the following:

A) On the one hand, how are we to interpret Simondon’s most fundamental thought, namely his thesis that knowledge of individua-tion is itself the individuation of knowledge? This thesis is the properly Simondonian way of “overcoming” [dépassement] the opposition between subject and object. This overcoming is, of course, something that has been sought after by all the great continental thinkers from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to the six proposed volumes of Stiegler’s Technics and Time.1 This follows a trajectory that also passes through Fichte, Husserl, and then Heidegger/Derrida, but also through Schelling, Bergson and Simondon/Deleuze.2 Stiegler’s most fundamental thought develops the encounter between Heidegger and Simondon. The opposition between subject and object, whose overcoming is sought by continental philosophy (which is always in search of itself in its difference from science) is the definitive ground of all the classical oppositions we need to subvert, oppositions initially combated by Kant: between empiricism and innateness, idealism and realism, dogmatism and skepticism. In posing his fundamental thesis about knowledge of individuation as the individuation of knowledge, Simondon has proposed a new way of overcoming the subject/object opposition whose interpretation will turn out to be problematic.


61Simondon and Stiegler on Individuation and Knowledge

B) On the other hand—and this is the second fundamental problem raised by Stiegler in his debate with Simondon—what is the status of the reality that Simondon calls “pre-individual”? What is the status of this reality from which all individuation proceeds, and whose existence Simondon hypothesizes in order to make sense of the genesis of each individual—physical, vital or psycho-social? I will show that there is an intimate connection between this second fundamental philosophi-cal problem and the first, and that this is why Stiegler is in debate with Simondon on two aspects of what, in the end, will turn out to be what I call “the double fundamental philosophical problem.”

But before we get to that, the first part of this essay will recall some of the general trends in Simondon’s thought that seem in need of defense and development.

2. Overview of Simondon’s main propositions In Simondon, the absolutely central notion of individuation does

not refer to a differentiating individualization—as is the case with Jung, in whose theoretical work individuation is a central notion as well—but rather to a physical, vital, or psycho-social genesis. One should also re-member that this latter “regime of individuation,” to borrow Simondon’s phrase, is also called the “transindividual” when it is a question of fore-grounding the fact that the “collective” is “taken as axiomatic in resolving the psychic problem” (L’Individuation psychique, 22). The technical object is defined in Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques as “the support and the symbol of that relation that we would like to call ‘transindividual’. … Serving as intermediary, the technical object thus creates an inter-human relation that is the model of transindividuality” (247-248). We are there-fore talking about a genetic ontology in Simondon—genetic in the sense of genesis—placed in the service of a new Encyclopedism3 that revolves around the two main propositions.

The first is that Simondon wants to unify the sciences in order to then refound the human sciences more specifically on the basis of the continu-ity between vital individuation and psycho-social individuation. Through this, he can begin to theorize on the far side of the artificial separation between psychology and sociology about whether the “purely psychic” and the “purely social” are merely “limit-cases,” as Simondon puts it, of a specter that is crucially and indissociably psycho-social.

Second, it is a question of showing how technics is essential to culture. This task cannot be accomplished unless we understand that the psycho-physiological alienation favored by the becoming-industrial of culture and labor is not caused by technics itself, but by a bad coupling of man and machine, with the meaning of the latter having been misun-


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derstood. Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques makes this goal clear from the get-go when it announces that the goal of the book is to make the reader “become conscious” of this proper “meaning.”4

We can assume that Simondon will not be able to reconcile culture and technics (his second goal) unless he also reconciles technics with nature, and culture with nature. This is the architectonic point of his philosophical engagement. He is attempting to think becoming technical as an extension of a broader process of becoming that is the process of individuation of natural beings. A concluding passage from Simondon’s 1965-1966 course titled Imagination et Invention (published in 2008) formu-lates in its own way the conception I would like to defend:

A created object is not a materialized image posed arbitrarily in the world like an object among other objects, one that overlays nature with a supplement of artifice. It is, in its origin, and remains, in its function, a system for coupling the living being with its milieu, a double point at which the subjective and objective worlds communicate. In social species, this point is threefold because it also becomes a path for rela-tions among individuals, organizing their reciprocal functions. In these cases, the threefold point is also a social organizer. (186)

In this passage, we see the idea—already present in the work of Canguilhem and Leroi-Gourhan (and before them Ernst Kapp and Alfred Espinas)—that the artifact extends the relationship of the living organism with its milieu. Simondon uses the example of the bird’s nest to explain this. But the passage just cited adds another thesis: in “social species,” the artifact also serves to mediate between the individual and the col-lective because it organizes the “reciprocal functions” of the individuals according to Simondon. In his work, this merely means that artifacts are “social organizers”; hence it is difficult to exclude insects and their arti-facts—such as a wasp’s nest—from the thesis, and reserve it for humanity alone. However, Simondon already remarks in his book L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information that the “purely social” aspect of insects is “vital unity at its most basic level” while the “real collective” is a “transindividuality” whose reality is psycho-social and not “purely social.”5 The individual constructs itself therein as a psychism, through social relations.

Therefore, only primates and (to an even greater degree) humans provide examples of societies that have developed without damaging the individuality of individuals. Instead, they have done so as the very condi-tion of this individuality, which as a result is able to achieve a complexity Simondon calls “personality.” The latter certainly seems to be a paradoxi-cal reality: in it, the maximum of individuality is also the inseparability of the psychic and the social. However, this needs to be understood as an



application of Simondon’s doctrine of “the realism of relations,” which claims that relations produce being, and that individuality is augmented through the multiplication (via unfolding) of the relation. Simondon is thus at the same time anti-substantialist—because the individual is relation, not “substance”—and anti-reductionist—since the process of individua-tion reinforces individuality by multiplying relations as it passes from the physical to the vital to the psycho-social realm of individuation.

More generally, the paradoxical character of Simondon’s thought is thus what allows him to subvert the classical alternatives in the Western philosophical tradition. These paradoxes are not contradictions since, in-sofar as it describes processes of individuation, Simondon’s entire genetic ontology rests upon what he calls the “hypothesis of the preindividual.” Pre-individual reality is postulated as being “more than unity,” which is not the same as a dialectical “non-unity.6 For Simondon, the contradic-tions claimed by dialectic thought cannot be resolved; in this, they differ from paradoxes, which only doxa takes to be insurmountable. As for the “hypothesis” of the preindividual, it is fundamentally substantiated by the “more than unity” of the microphysical reality of which each thing is composed—the famous wave-particle duality of quantum physics, whose role in Simondon’s thought I will soon clarify.

But let’s return for now to the connection between nature and culture via technics. Because the artifact for Simondon is a “social organizer” among social species in general, we know that among primates (and even more so among humans) the artifact becomes the “prosthesis” (as Simondon writes at the beginning of his 1965-1966 course) that acts as the intermediary through which the social will nourish the psychic. As is well known, his thesis regarding the construction of the psycho-social on the basis of artifacts has today been radicalized by Bernard Stiegler. In his work, Stiegler has extended the thought of both Simondon and Leroi-Gourhan by arguing that the artifact is the “crutch of the mind” acting as an “exteriorization of memory” that paradoxically makes possible the construction of interiority itself, insofar as the psychic is nourished by the social via the artifact. (Stiegler, Technics and Time vol. 1). We must grant this particular point to Stiegler; in my view, he thus formulates the conditions according to which culture extends nature via technics.

Thanks to Simondon’s theoretical intuitions and anticipations, we are no longer able to ignore the advances of scientific disciplines like ethology, a discipline he held in high esteem. Ethology studies animal behavior in order to discover the cultural and technical dimension of “natural forms of life” such as the forms of life of the great apes, who are first of all bio-psychic individuals, but whose psychism is nourished by the collective,



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and produces artifacts. Following Simondon, I therefore deny the discon-nection he calls “anthropological”—the essentialist disconnect between the living and the human being, because I do not believe (unlike others throughout the history of Western philosophy) that “reason is innate and proper to the human being.” Nor do I believe that human beings have a “psychic” or on the contrary a “social” essence, points that can be found even in Freud and Marx..7 Rather, I believe in the biological potential of the human being—a potential that must be actualized in a form that is crucially and indissociably psycho-social, with the “purely psychic” and “purely social” being mere limit-cases.

By denying the anthropological disconnection, I also deny the reduc-tion (likewise anthropological) of technics into a simple set of means to be used by human beings. This anthropological reduction (overcome today) consisted of not seeing technics as a cultural finality capable of changing the human being; instead, the reality of technics was only considered within the narrow frame of human labor—and in such a way that the human being was considered a given. I must stress here the connection between these two objections: the refusal to divide culture from nature, on the one hand, and, on the other, the refusal to divide technics from culture. For this connection comes about through the refusal, which is always there in Simondon’s case, of a third opposition: that between technics and nature. To make the connection between these three refusals of traditional oppositions more precise, and as a way to take up again these refusals in the order in which they have been explained, let us say the following: to think the continuity between nature and culture need not lead us to place technics outside of culture, as if it were “anti-natural” and thus an obstacle to the continuity between nature and culture. Technics is not an obstacle, but precisely that which prolongs nature and opens it to culture. This is also why those who, like Simondon, want to reconcile culture and technics should not presuppose that technics and culture somehow find each other in their opposition to nature. Simondon himself has already pondered the difficult, simultaneous overcoming of the three oppositions of nature/culture, nature/technics, and culture/technics. Indeed, in order to fundamentally reconcile culture and technics, Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques has made the first steps towards their common reconcili-ation with nature.

Therefore, I believe in the possibility of deriving culture from nature via technics. This powerful thesis rests on a broader assumption, which addresses less than the thesis, but whose validity I should nevertheless discuss and defend. If we want to derive culture from nature via technics, we must assume that nature is anterior to technics and to culture. Such an assumption, as evident as it seems, must today be argued rather than dogmatically admitted.



3. The debate with Stiegler on the status of the “preindividual”: From the philosophical problem of the “refutation of idealism” to the epistemological problem of interpretation in quantum physics

Today, more than ever before, one could indeed raise the following objection to what I have presented: namely, that everything that can be said about nature is the result of a technically conditioned culture. This is notably so in the physical and biological sciences, where nothing can be said about nature unless it is based upon technologically produced experimental verifications whose interface is, furthermore, a mathematical instrument. I think, and I would like to explain here, that this objection is definitively the true ground—even though it has remained implicit—of Stiegler’s discourse on the “preindividual” as something that is “always already technical.” Remember that the preindividual is that from which all individuation proceeds. Yet, Stiegler offers an argument according to which the preindividual is itself constitutively techno-logical and is ceaselessly technologically reconfigured.

In Stiegler’s thought, this thesis is presented as radical because it is outlined not just in its “weak” version, but also its “strong” version. For him, it is not just about affirming—and this would be the “weak” version of his thesis—that technics plays the role of preindividual that makes possible the passage from vital individuation to transindividual individu-ation. In Simondon, this passage is enabled by a “provisional emotional disindividuation,” whereas technics is, for its part, a “phase” of culture at the same time that it is the “support” for a relation that is a “model of transindividuality.”8 Furthermore, in connection with this first point (the “weak” version of the thesis) it is worth noting that Stiegler relies for this on an ambiguity in Simondon’s thought: Simondon envisages different forms of preindividuality at each stage of the process of individuation; moreover, he occasionally calls the trans-individual itself “non structured,” assimilating it on these occasions with the pre-individual.9 We understand that, since for Stiegler the transindividual realm is prosthetically founded, the equivalence between the transindividual and the pre-individual, even if it shows up only occasionally in Simondon, furnishes the pretext for thinking the preindividual as constitutively technological.

However, the root of this debate seems to lie elsewhere because, as I already noted, Stiegler’s thesis is much more radical. He wants to ar-gue—and this is the “strong” version of his thesis—that the preindividual source of nature, whether it be vital or even physical, is itself ceaselessly reconfigured by technics through the becoming metastable of technics itself. The core of the argument is, therefore, that it is not just a question of the inseparability of different levels of individuation, but also of Stiegler’s reduction of the pre-individual to the techno-scientific mode of knowledge



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that one can have of it. As Stiegler says in an unpublished interview with Thierry Bardini, nature “does not exist” because it is “constructed.”

This reduction of the preindividual to its techno-scientific mode of knowledge should not be denounced ipso facto as confused, because it takes its argument from Simondon himself. On the one hand, given that knowledge of individuation is also the individuation of knowledge, we would no longer be able to oppose the subject and object, in such a way that the mode of knowledge and that which is known are no longer dis-tinguishable a priori. On the other hand, the preindividual is that which only possesses indirect indications of presence—indications that are justly furnished by quantum physics, which has put forward the revolu-tionary argument about a quantum of action: here, there are no objects without interaction. Instead, we get a technological interaction between a measuring apparatus and a measured object. In this sense, the source of Stiegler’s thesis is based on a theory of knowledge, even if this source remains entirely implicit in his work.

Where does this lead us if we take this source for Stiegler’s argument seriously? I do not believe in the thesis that the preindividual is “consti-tutively technological,” even though I agree that the quantum of action in quantum physics demands a profound phenomeno-technical rethinking of the theory of knowledge.10 The problem with Stiegler’s thesis, in my view, is its treatment of the famous issue of the refutation of idealism—a problem that has, since Kant, accompanied the greatest thinkers in the continental tradition in their attempts to overcome the fundamental op-position between subject and object. We might very well admit that the trans-individual is prosthetically based, and that this prosthetic base (which Stiegler calls the “third strand” of psychic and collective indi-viduation) is characterized by a metastability. We might even seriously consider that this prosthetic base of the transindividual plays the same role as the vital potential—which is in fact pre-vital and even pre-physical, but carried by the living being. But such a constitutively technological preindividual will not allow us to truly find the world again unless it is itself derived from a history of the living being.

This is not to say that the preindividual as such is derivative. How-ever, to the extent that it would be carried by technical becoming, it would have to have been carried first by living beings, up to the prosthetic be-ing that is the psycho-social human individual. At one point in the first volume of Technics and Time, Stiegler seems to offer this derivation of the human being from the living in connection with the work of Leroi-Gourhan. However, in the third volume he argues that the refutation of idealism rests exclusively on the external presence of the prostheses of human consciousness.



The problem of the refutation of idealism was born in the Critique of Pure Reason where Kant calls attention to the “scandal” that philoso-phers had yet to provide evidence, beyond all idealist temptation, that the world existed.11 Heidegger would later respond in section 43 of Be-ing and Time that the true scandal is that we demand a demonstration of the existence of the world since the world is always already given, if we truly understand our “being-in-the-world” that is Dasein. Stiegler, for his part, reproaches Heidegger in the third volume of Technics and Time for not having seen that this being-in-the-world by which the very question of needing to refute idealism is dissolved, is constituted by the “pros-theses” as the constitutive exteriority of the who—the “who” in Stiegler being what Heidegger called Dasein.12 In other words, Stiegler—and this is the force of his argument—reproaches Heidegger for not having seen the true reason why the question of the refutation of idealism is indeed resolved: if the world is always already given, it is because I am unable to have consciousness of myself except thanks to those “crutches of the mind” that are there outside of me.

In fact, behind this reproach to Heidegger there is a common problem in the refutation of idealism that forces Stiegler to share with Heidegger the thesis that, by virtue of the being-in-the-world that is the only way of resolving the refutation of idealism, one must start with the “who.” In Stiegler’s thought, it is the relationship between the “who” and the “what” (the prosthesis) that is the starting point. Through this Stieglerian optic, the living being cannot be thought philosophically except through privation, starting from this “who” that is prosthetically based. This thesis of the secondarity of the ontological thematization of the living being in relation to the thinking of the “who” is more or less Heidegger’s thesis presented in section 10 of Being and Time. This explains why Stiegler does not identify his “ontological” thought with classic ontology. Elsewhere, he refuses the Heideggerian idea of “fundamental ontology” because the Heidegger who is important for Stiegler is the first Heidegger, the one of Sein und Zeit, who constructs an existential analytic but not yet a fundamental ontology.

Certainly, in his preface to the second edition of Simondon’s L’individuation psychique et collective, Stiegler applies the idea of an exit from ontology to Simondon himself, in the sense that ontology is under-stood as the objectifying description of a state, whereas in Simondon, ontogenesis is the individuating description of a process of individuation. But Stiegler intends to differentiate himself from Simondon and fully to accomplish this exit from ontology in his own work, in the sense that for Stiegler the knowledge of individuation is not truly the individuation of knowledge, unless one thinks this process of individuation from where it



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has led us. This is why Stiegler only wants to think of the psycho-socio-technical becoming at the present point [suivant son actualité]. This how we arrive at Stiegler’s conviction—never written, but often spoken and applied on a daily basis—that thinking is not relevant unless it nourishes action, and vice-versa. We can therefore understand why Stiegler has recently argued that the question of philosophy is the political question of the transindividual.

Here we come to a truly abyssal question: what exactly does the thesis that knowledge of individuation is the individuation of knowledge mean? In Simondon’s work, the thesis appears in the final lines of his in-troduction to L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, where he writes:

We cannot know individuation as it is commonly understood. We can only individuate, individuate ourselves, and individuate in us. This insight is, in the margins of what is properly called knowledge, an analogy between two operations, which is a certain mode of communication. The individuation of the reality that is exterior to the subject is grasped by the subject thanks to the analogical individuation of knowledge in the subject. But it is through the individuation of knowledge (and not by means of knowledge alone) that the individuation of non-subjective beings is known. These beings can be known through the knowledge of the subject, but the individuation of beings cannot be grasped except through the individuation of the knowledge of the subject. (36)

There is, then, in this last affirmation, and even in the proposition that precedes it, an ambiguity. Indeed, we may consider this passage to say that only the “knowledge” of individuation individuates knowledge at the same time that it comes to know. But the passage may also be saying that the knowledge of individuation consists of an analogy between subject and object based on the reflexive return of knowledge on itself; non-reflexive knowledge on the other hand also individuates knowledge, but without this reflexive return. The first reading seems closest to the passage itself, but one of its consequences is that it turns philosophical “knowledge” into a knowledge that is superior to scientific knowledge. The second reading allows us to set philosophy apart thanks to its uniquely reflexive character, and not due to its ability to individuate knowledge. We must, as I understand it, privilege this second reading because there is no other place in his work where Simondon suggests that scientific knowledge does not individuate knowledge. He merely notes that scientific knowledge thinks already individuated structures rather than genetic operations.

Stiegler’s position and philosophical practice complicate the situ-ation even further, since he implicitly proposes a third interpretation of the thesis—which he takes up in his very own way—that knowledge of individuation is individuation of knowledge. In Stiegler’s work, the



thesis turns into the idea that the knowledge of individuation—because it takes as its “object” that which is not ob-ject, but which individuates itself in the “subject” knowing itself)—must each time reflexively take into account the new prosthetic conditions of the very thought that is realized in a discourse that is from now on radically post-ontological. The entire question then becomes knowing whether the taking into account of these conditions of thought justifies the passage, which Stiegler has put into operation, to a privileged thematization—one that would always have to be started anew—of the actual becoming of the three “strands” of psycho-socio-technical becoming.

4. Quantum physics as paradigm of the philosophical knowledge of individuation

I would like to propose here a settlement between these different interpretations of the thesis that knowledge of individuation is the indi-viduation of knowledge. This settlement can be reached if we begin once more from the particularity of quantum physics. This starting point will allow us to return to the refutation of idealism, to provide a response that is new, yet compatible with the Simondonian enterprise of a gen-eral ontogenesis—one that would not make it impossible to first think nature so as to then let psycho-socio-technical individuation emerge. As noted earlier, quantum physics calls for a phenomeno-technical theory of knowledge according to which, thanks to the famous quantum of ac-tion, no object can be known without interaction between such an object and that which measures it. Rather than deduce from this that nature is only what we make of it, and that it is only the being-in-the-world of the “who” (whether prosthetic or not) that “always already” refutes idealism, I would like to insist on the following: this nature that is “produced” in laboratories is only defined by interaction, by virtue of what it is. The quantum of action is not only the minimal and unavoidable interaction between the measured object and the measuring apparatus. It is also the object itself. This does not mean that interaction would be anything more than a deformation of the object—in other words, that interaction would be a creation of the object. Rather, this means that quantum physics has access to reality such as it is at its smallest scale, where being consists of becoming—a becoming by relation. This is the truth of Simondon’s “real-ism of relations.” Following Simondon, one can thus say that quantum physics reaches the “thing in itself” because it offers the thing as the set of relations from which a “phenomenon” proceeds. In other words, if quantum physics is able to integrate into its mathematical formalism the



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interaction between the measured object and the measuring apparatus, it is because the object itself is nothing but interaction.

The consequence of this argument is important: rather than seeing in quantum physics something that would legitimize the thesis that the “preindividual” is always already technologically conditioned, it is neces-sary to recognize that in quantum physics, technics is “naturalized,” as Simondon would say, to the point of revealing the very basis of nature itself. Stiegler, who occasionally thinks the engendering of nature by tech-nics (“naturation” in his terms) can only willfully be ignoring this idea of the “naturalization” of technics. Contrary to naturation, Simondon’s “naturalization” of technics defines the point where his thinking of tech-nics opens up onto a new phenomeno-technical theory of knowledge. The naturalization of technics is, indeed, the integration of the laws of nature into technical progress.13 And if quantum physics integrates into its math-ematical formalism the interaction between the measured object and the measuring apparatus—an integration that might seem paradoxical if the formalism of physics is exclusively objective rather than reflexive—this is because the measured object is itself interaction.

From this perspective, what singularizes the quantum object is the following point: what is within it is objectified only insofar as it comes to be as interaction that is as a relation that makes the being itself through becoming. Quantum physics has a specific characteristic: it is a science of the very process of individuation insofar as it is primary and therefore the giver [donateur] of space and time (which are individuation’s “dimen-sions,” as Simondon writes). This is why, according to Simondon, the quantum duality of wave-particles is a paradigm for thinking the “more than unity” of Being “insofar as it is”—and not of being “insofar as it is individuated.” However, quantum reality is not strictly identified with the preindividual itself. Rather, it is the becoming of individuation in its relative indistinction vis-à-vis the preindividual from which this becoming proceeds. Quantum physics is the science of the real as radical genesis, or also of being as becoming.

But what distinguishes this science from philosophical knowledge of individuation, for which it yields a decisive paradigm? What distinguishes scientific knowledge of individuation from philosophical knowledge of individuation is not that the one would individuate knowledge while the other would not. Rather, it is that quantum reality reveals, without quantum physics being able to say so, the relative indistinction between the preindividual and its operation of individuation. Because it is able to speak of this relative indistinction, philosophical knowledge of indi-viduation is reflexive: it involves a process of individuation that always exceeds the very object that it is. Thus, it opens up onto the preindividual



and includes every possible individuation. This is why the philosophical knowledge of individuation is immediately a general ontogenesis, cover-ing not only the physical but also the vital and psycho-social regimes of individuation.

The refutation of idealism can be based on something other than the necessity of exterior “prostheses” for human consciousness—something other than the artifacts that would paradoxically constitute it. By saying this, I am certainly not calling into question the Stieglerian thesis that the interiority of consciousness is paradoxically developed through a process of self-exteriorization through artifacts (the so-called “crutches of the mind.”) I am merely arguing that there is no need for a “transcendent” “who” and its being-in-the-world (as one finds it in Heidegger, for ex-ample) in order to know that the world exists. The thought of the “who” is not first philosophy, contrary to what both Heidegger and Stiegler suggest.

However, I don’t want to suggest that the anteriority of physical and vital individuations in relation to psycho-social individuation allows Simondon to call his global onto-genesis a “first philosophy.” I believe that this sort of first philosophy would still be a knowledge that unwittingly turns the philosophizing individual into an absolute. I say “unwittingly” because what is at stake is the very attitude of philosophizing individuals themselves in their meaning-making practices: in Simondon and Stiegler, as in the entire tradition of Western philosophy up to the present day, the meanings of “individual,” “individuation,” “transindividual,” and “prosthesis” are ob-jectified meanings—meanings equated with things so that we can talk about what exists. As a result of this, however, objec-tified meaning does not constitute the philosophizing individual, which consequently presupposes itself to come first.

As I have shown elsewhere, Heidegger had an intuition of this fundamental difficulty traversing every philosophy, and the Wittgenstein of On Certainty did so as well.14 Neither of them, however, invented the pluri-dimensional explosion of meanings that presents the only path out of this deadlock. If the philosophizing individual does not want to abso-lutize her- or himself, she or he must, before anything else, think her- or himself as individuating meaning, because meaning is pluri-dimensional and cannot be reduced to the dimension of the ob-ject alone. Refuting idealism is, therefore, leaving knowledge to science, and thinking oneself as made by the meaning that surrounds one and that knowledge reduces to a single, misleading dimension—that of the ob-ject.

My thesis, therefore, is that neither Simondon nor Stiegler holds the key to the refutation of idealism, because neither one of them practices the problematic that defines first philosophy. For what is philosophically first is non-knowledge, and the positions of Simondon and Stiegler are



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still engaged with knowledge, or rather they are already engaged with knowledge, whereas they would need to yield the ontogenetic transla-tion, adequate but secondary, of first non-knowledge. It is by virtue of this operation of secondary translation that Stiegler’s thought of the psycho-social “who”—even though it is far from being philosophically first—prolongs and completes Simondon’s thinking of physical and vital individuation—an ontogenetic thought that even though adequate, is itself philosophically secondary.

The refutation of idealism therefore does not reside in the thought (supposedly fundamental) of the being in the world of the “who.” Rather, it resides in a practice of signification that allows the philosophizing individual to think her- or himself as constituted by meaning insofar as the latter would be a constitutive transcendence. In one sense, Heidegger posed the thesis of the world as a world of meaning that constitutes the Dasein, but this thesis of the finitude or non-originarity of Dasein was never applied by Heidegger to himself because, in order to apply it to himself, he would have had to invent a new signifying practice. Rather than objectifying these significations in order to affirm something about the world, such a practice would have needed to explode these signifi-cations pluri-dimensionally in order to reveal the different dimensions of the meaning that constitute me as a meaning-subject—or as meaning individuated.

As I have explained elsewhere, the different dimensions of meaning that my new philosophical problematic seeks to open up are economic production-consumption, ontological information, and axiological edu-cation.15 These different dimensions of the meaning-that-makes-me will then enable me to develop what I call a uni-dimensional secondary transla-tion of this problematic of first philosophy, which will finally engender (1) a philosophy of economic production-consumption, (2) a philosophy of ontological information—something already largely thought by Si-mondon and Stiegler, since genetic ontology is already understood by Simondon as a philosophy of information process—and (3) a philosophy of axiological education.

At this point, one could think that the position inaugurated by the new problematic of first philosophy—a problematic that requires the philosophizing individual to think her- or himself in her or his finitude and non-originarity, and therefore as meaning individuated into meaning-subject—merely radicalizes the way of thinking that I reproached Stiegler for practicing above: the fact that Stiegler begins philosophical discourse with the thematization of the “pyscho-social who.” In fact, however, this thought by the philosophizing individual of its own non-originarity is no longer ontogenetic. This is why it does not radicalize the way of thinking



that I reproached Stiegler for practicing: the thought of the non-originarity of the philosophizing individual is not the thought of a “psycho-social who,” but is a new form of “know thyself.” This is why its secondary ontogenetic translation— the philosophy of ontological information—will have to pass, with Simondon, through the thought of physical and vital individuation before taking up, with Stiegler, psycho-social individuation.

I am unable to explore in great detail here the reasons for such an architectonic state of affairs—that is, the reasons for such a system of sec-ondary translations of the problematic of first philosophy. I will merely point out in the form of a conclusion that Simondon flirted with the pos-sibility of a problematic of first philosophy that is not ontogenetic. At the beginning of the section entitled “The Necessity of Psychic Ontogenesis” which comes at the end of the third chapter of L’individuation psychique et collective, Simondon adds immediately after his qualification of the ontogenesis of “first philosophy”: “Unfortunately, it is impossible for the human subject to witness its own genesis” (163). Here Simondon is aware that the problematic of first philosophy must be knowledge of the self rather than a genetic ontology—even if he still retained the idea that this knowledge of self must necessarily be, just as it is in Hegel’s Phenom-enology of Spirit or even in the later Husserl, a description by the subject of its own genesis. It is for this reason that Simondon, in this particular instance, very logically judges the realization of the problematic of first philosophy impossible.

If, on the contrary, we radicalize the exigency of non-objectivation in applying it to the very significations manipulated by the philosophiz-ing individual, then genetic ontology is nothing more than a secondary translation of first non-knowledge in which the philosophizing individual, rather than objectifying the significations that she or he manipulates in order to speak about reality, explodes them in order to open up different dimensions of the meaning that constitutes her or him in the individual’s non-originarity. This “knowledge of the self” has the virtue of translating itself secondarily in each of the dimensions of meaning that will have been opened up and, in one of these dimensions, it has the virtue of rediscov-ering the genetic ontology of Simondon in suppressing the theoretical tensions that inhabit this ontology.16

This is my philosophical approach, and I have tried to show here how it can emerge from a “post-Simondonian” debate with Stiegler about the refutation of idealism.

Université Paris Ouest NanterreMaison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris-Nord

translated by Mark Hayward and Arne De Boever



74


Notes1. Three volumes have already been published; all three have been translated: Bernard

Stiegler, La technique et le temps, Vols. 1, 2 and 3 (Paris: Galilée, 1994, 1996 and 2001); translations: Technics and Time, Vols. 1, 2 and 3, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 2009 and 2010).

2. On the decisive influence of Simondon on Deleuze, see the Chapters X-XI-XII in Anne Sauvagnargues, Deleuze. L’empirisme transcendental (Paris: PUF, 2009.) The influence of Simondon on Deleuze is the equivalent to that of Heidegger on Derrida, which s is why I write “Heidegger/Derrida” and “Simondon/Deleuze.”

3. See Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Simondon ou l’Encyclopédisme génétique (Paris: PUF, 2008).4. Here are the very first words of Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques: “Cette étude est

animée par l’intention de susciter une prise de conscience du sens des objets techniques. La culture s’est constituée en système de défense contre les techniques; or, cette défense se présente comme une défense de l’homme, supposant que les objets techniques ne contiennent pas de réalité humaine. Nous voudrions montrer que la culture ignore dans la réalité technique une réalité humaine, et que, pour jouer son rôle complet, la culture doit incorporer les êtres techniques sous forme de connaissance et de sens des valeurs” (9).

5. Here is the passage outlining the distinction between the “purely social” and the tran-sindividual as psycho-social: “L’être psychique, c’est-à-dire l’être qui accomplit le plus complètement possible les fonctions d’individuation en ne limitant pas l’individuation à cette première étape du vital, résout la disparition de sa problématique interne dans la mesure où il participe à l’individuation du collectif. Ce collectif, réalité transindividuelle obtenue par individuation des réalités pré-individuelles associées à une pluralité de vivants, se distingue du social pur et de l’individuel pur; le social pur existe, en effet, dans les sociétés animales; il ne nécessite pas pour exister une nouvelle individuation dilatant l’individuation vitale; il exprime la manière dont les vivants existent en société; c’est l’unité vitale au premier degré qui est directement sociale” (L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, 167).

6. See the Introduction and Conclusion to Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information.

7. See Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, “What New Humanism Today?” (Trans. Chris Turner). Cultural Politics, Vol. 6, no. 2, 2010 (Berg Publishers).

8. On these two points, see Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Simondon ou l’Encyclopédisme génétique, Chapters IV and V.

9. Simondon even writes that the transindividual is “that reality which the individuated being carries with itself, that call to being for future inviduations (cette réalité que l’être individué transporte avec lui, cette charge d’être pour des individuations futures”) (L’individua-tion psychique et collective, 193).

10. On this second point, see Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2005).

11. On the refutation of idealism in Kant, see Critique of Pure Reason, section “Critique of Paralogism 4 of Transcendental Psychology.”

12. On this point, see Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 2 : Disorientation.13. On this point, see my “Glossary: Fifty Key Terms in the Work of Gilbert Simondon”

(trans. Arne De Boever), in De Boever, Arne, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Wood-ward (eds.), Gilbert Simondon, Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 2011.

14. See J-H. Barthélémy, « Hegel et l’impensé de Heidegger », Kairos n°27, 2006, Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, op. cit. and « Penser après Simondon et par-delà Deleuze », Cahiers Simondon n°2, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2010.

15. On this point, see Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, “Penser après Simondon et par-delà Deleuze,” op. cit., and Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, op. cit., 240-268 & 281-286.

16. On these tensions, see the two volumes of my Penser l’individuation, (Paris: L’Harmattan), 2005.



Works CitedGilbert Simondon. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris : Aubier, 1958.——. Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et invention. Chatou: Editions de la Transparence, 2008.——. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Editions

Jérôme Millon, 2005. ——. L’individuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier, 1989.Stiegler, Bernard. La technique et le temps, Vols. 1, 2 and 3. Paris: Galilée, 1994, 1996 and 2001.

Translations: Technics and Time, Vols. 1, 2 and 3. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998, 2009 and 2010.

barthelemy - individuation and knowledge, the refutation of idealism in simondons heritage in france

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