Introduction to a special issue of the journal entitled 'Gilbert Simondon: media and technics'.

In developing the concept of assemblages, Gilles Deleuze draws at least some inspiration from Gilbert Simondon’s concept of information. While his acknowledgement of Simondon’s influence is almost entirely positive, Deleuze explicitly distances himself from the concept of information in order to avoid its link to the field of cybernetics. However, a Deleuzian informational ontology could instead be leveraged as an alternative to cybernetics. Drawing on the Spinozan link between the work of Deleuze and Simondon, it is possible to develop a (...) hybrid informational ontology. This system can not only offer a different approach to information, data and technology than the essentialist concept of information embraced by cybernetics, but also aligns well with recent research in the biological sciences that has disrupted a long-held concept of individuals as entirely separate and autonomous. Shifting away from the Platonic Form to a Deleuzian/simondonian in-formation furthers the post-human project aimed at understanding processes of subjectivation at multiple scales, including the micro and macro. (shrink)

The dream of control is to be, simultaneously, absolutely generic and absolutely singular; seeing all and seeing every “person” in her singularity, purely immanent to her very life, her bios: a prosthetic God. The Cybernetic Organon, the “second schema of intelligibility” has enabled this transition between the generic and the singular by short-circuiting individuation and the universal-individual continuum. The works of Foucault, Deleuze, and many more recent philosophers are based around the inherence of individuation to all control and government and (...) the conception of control as necessarily transcendent. I will argue, with Rouvroy and Stiegler, for the immanence of cybernetic control as embodied most recently in Big- Data. But while Rouvroy separates the bodily and the affects from the domain of cybernetics and even proposes embodiment and affective desire as antidotes to cybernetic control, I will show how the immanence of cybernetics actually extends to the pure, bare life of individuals by allying itself with their body, affects and drives, the sub-subjective and the infra-personal. The fact that the latter have been championed for so long as the ultimate battlefronts against control, especially by Deleuze, gives us all the more reason to question them. In trying to re-evaluate the Deleuzian philosophy of immanence, I have engaged two philosophers whose conceptions of the latter greatly influenced Deleuze, namely Hume and Ruyer. (shrink)

This article argues that Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology is useful for both science and technology studies and critical theory. The synthesis has political implications. It offers an argument for the rationality of democratic interventions by citizens into decisions concerning technology. The new framework opens a perspective on the radical transformation of technology required by ecological modernization and sustainability. In so doing, it suggests new applications of STS methods to politics as well as a reconstruction of the Frankfurt School’s “rational (...) critique of reason.”. (shrink)

Two key themes structure the work of French philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon: the processes of individuation and the nature of technical objects. Moreover, these two themes are also at the heart of contemporary debates within Ethics and Bioethics. Indeed, the question of the individual is a key concern in both Virtue Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care, while the hyper-technical reality of the present stage of medical technology is a key reason for both the urgency for and the success (...) of the field of Bioethics. And yet, despite its potential for thinking about these issues, Simondon’s philosophy remains largely unknown. Rather than exploring Simondon’s complex ontology for itself, the aim of this paper is to establish what contribution his work can make in Ethics and Bioethics on two essential questions: the relational structure of the self and the nature of the human-technology relation. I argue that Simondon’s re-conceptualization of the individual harmonizes with perspectives in Feminist Bioethics (particularly the Ethics of Care) and points toward what I call an “open” Virtue Ethics that takes relations to be essential. In order to establish this connection, I explore at length the relational approach to Feminist Bioethics offered by Susan Sherwin’s work. I argue that a Simondonian account of technology and of the individual furthers the relational understanding of the self, offers a characterization of Virtue Ethics that is in harmony with the Ethics of Care, and clarifies a notion of responsibility that is implicated in the complex reality of the modern technological milieu. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler is known as a leading philosopher of technics. He has developed an original interpretation of technics as an externalized epiphylogenetic memory that remembers in the p...

Summary Based on Clausius’ phrasing of a “transformational content” and the resulting 2nd law of thermodynamics, I demonstrated that Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects is historically situated at the threshold of understanding open systems thermodynamics and the related concepts of balance. Furthermore, I showed that Gestalt theory, as represented by Wolfgang Köhler, at least reproduced, if not partially anticipated or even prepared this development of 20th century thinking. Finally, I gave some short examples of how (...) Simondon applied the figure/ground distinction to human perception, memory, and a general theory of becoming and I introduced his proposal to analyse “the grounds” just as thoroughly as the laws of figuration. (shrink)