Simondonian Individuation as a Paradigm of the Apparatus-Based Arts

Simondonian individuation in particular took its place within the framework of this research-creation as a process of paradigmatic scope: it is a genesis of the individual – human or technical – that operates through a succession of metastable states, during which new structures are produced by drawing on what remains of the “preindividual.” This process proved fruitful¹ first of all for thinking the transformations associated with the changes of medium – from analog to digital – studied in the first chapter. It also made it possible to conceptualize the plasticity of artistic intentionality, which can be described as an intention-image². Finally, Simondonian individuation served to conceptualize the evolution of all the instances taking part in the apparatus-based creative process — human, machine, work, meaning — over the course of its temporality.

Moreover, the setting up of the computing machine as we have envisaged it³, which sees a symbolic layer being built upon a material, experiential and gestural foundation, can also be interpreted as a process of individuation, a machinic individuation that is to be articulated with that of the human, since these two entities – human and machine – evolve by co-structuring each other within the transductive relation that binds them.

We may also emphasize that this process of individuation takes as its starting point a preindividual state that echoes the “metaphysical” level to which the works led us in the central chapter. This preindividual state bears witness to “conditions of immanence” far more concrete than those emerging from the “preindividual plane” evoked by Deleuze – who draws inspiration from Simondon – as Jean-Hugues Barthélémy points out to us:

[…] where Simondon forges the concept of the “preindividual” on the basis of thermodynamics and quantum physics, and in order to designate a fundamental state of being that is “more than one” and therefore a source of becoming through individuation into an individual and an “associated milieu” – like the supersaturated solution that crystallizes into a crystal “individual” following the introduction of that “singularity” which is the crystalline seed –, Deleuze, for his part, thinks the “preindividual field” as containing IN itself SINGULARITIES, and to do so rereads Simondon in the light of mathematics rather than of contemporary physics⁴.

While Simondon describes this fundamental level on the basis of thermodynamics and quantum physics, Deleuze prefers mathematics, in a movement that remains immanent but gives too great a place to the transcendent – a Deleuzian tendency that seemed to us to manifest itself also with regard to the notion of the virtual, and that led us to prefer the proposal of Mark B. N. Hansen, who conceives of the virtual as a potentiality that is always actualized in an embodied way.

1. It proves particularly relevant as a mechanism forming part of the transductive relation that Bernard Stiegler built on the basis of Simondon’s thought.↩︎

2. This “intention-image” undergoes successive individuations within Simondon’s framework of thought.↩︎

3. See chapter 3: Machine, a Heap of Gestures.↩︎

4. Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Simondon et les enjeux de notre temps [en ligne]. 2011. disponible à l'adresse : https://arsindustrialis.org/simondon-et-les-enjeux-de-notre-temps.↩︎