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Informational Ontology: The Meaning of Gilbert Simondon' s Concept of Individuation
Abstract
The French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) was the first true philosopher of information, yet he remains relatively unknown outside of his native France. This situation is curious, given the warm reception his work has received from a small group of internationally renowned thinkers. Simondon's lifelong project was to expound the appearance of what I call an " informational ontology, " a subject that deserves to be addresses at length. This article limits itself by focusing on three aspects of Simondon's philosophy of information. First, it situates Simondon within the French intellectual scene in post-World War II Europe to get sense of his cultural milieu. Second, it positions Simondon's work in the context of the American cybernetic tradition from which it emerged. Finally, it offers an exegesis of Simondon's informational ontology, a radically new materialism that stands to change contemporary debates surrounding issues related to information, communication, and technology.
... If information is despatialised -i.e. taken out of context and fixed somewhere else, transformed into data (Iliadis, 2013) -it becomes part of the moral categorisation and stigmatising statements that contemporary cities have been suffering from. ...
... Here the data are but interfaces, relentlessly, dynamically producing and fixing themselves in layers of interaction among bodies. The focus here is on how flows of data (interpreting data as an externalisation and stratification of ethical affections through information) operate through bodies, how affective and situated activities, at different levels, contribute to (or are spoiled by) the engineering of actions and policies, and how after-event informational traces, far from disappearing, shape the bodies and their process of individuation (Iliadis, 2013) -and are crystallised in layers of raw data, maps, and statistics that may have, in turn, a specific impact over the whole city. ...
This article explores an ethical approach to urban planning, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming. A central argument in this study is that the reality policymakers face when deciding how to pursue good (in the moral sense) actions or how to eschew bad ones is ontologically unpredictable and unstable. Unpredictability and instability are characteristics of urban assemblages, which compose and decompose affecting each other in a positive or negative way. Following Deleuze and Spinoza, this paper claims that urban composition and decomposition are good (empowering) and bad (harming), respectively, in an ethical and amoral sense. However, moral and fixed values, often left unchallenged in urban planning and policymaking, fail to describe these ethical transitions among assemblages: in fact, urban planning and policies’ unavoidable conatus, namely their survival as rational system, is to avoid direct confrontation with ethical and dangerous happenings and, instead, increase their power of acting so as to make urban bodies docile, controlled and normalised through standardised moral categories and classifications. These categories are but ethically generated information shorn of their situated and eventful role, acquiring the shape of data and transformed into fixed layers of apparently stable and predictable reality.
... Simondon's work is perhaps best known for the innovative approaches to the question of individuation and technology set out in his two most influential texts: On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (originally published in France in 1958) and Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information (the first part published in 1964 and the second in 1989). While Simondon was relatively unfamiliar to the English-speaking academic community for a long time, his work has gained recognition through recent translations of his major works (Simondon 2017(Simondon , 2020a(Simondon , 2020b, as well as various secondary books and articles published across sociology, media and cultural studies, and philosophy (see Iliadis 2013;Mills 2015). His work has also found an increasing audience within human geography as a radically new basis for addressing contemporary debates around things like technology, materiality, subjectivity, ethics, and space (Keating 2023;Lapworth 2020;Merriman 2023;Robert 2017). ...
... The strong process theory of agency we develop here, then, parallels existing conceptions of organizational becoming (see Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), yet explicates the role agency plays in this process by situating it within the communicative encounters of individuation processes (events) through which organizational realities are formed (Bencherki & Iliadis, 2021;Iliadis, 2013). Agency is therefore not an individual (human) being's capacity to act, but occurs through the expression of excess action (affect), which may augment the ability to act of different kinds of individuation processes, such as persons, teams, organizations, or other social collectives. ...
How does agency emerge eventfully in processes of organizational becoming? This article aims to address this question by developing a process theory of agency based on Gilbert Simondon's philosophical writings on individuation as a communicative phenomenon and Brian Massumi's writings on affect. This theory views agency as an affective force, expressed as a communicative event, that governs the transition from one process of individuation to another, producing an enhanced ability to act and potentially leading to a collective process of transindividuation that is essential to organizational becoming. In turn, this article not only offers novel theoretical as well as methodological insights for organizational research, but also highlights researchers' ethical responsibilities toward those whose individuation is precarious and who may not be able to partake in certain processes of organizational becoming.
Immense, all-encompassing bush fires. Paralyzing floods. The global pandemic. The seemingly endless stream of disasters that beset us may be rationalized in terms of the move from the benign Holocene wherein human civilization flourished, to the malign Anthropocene, through which we are creating the conditions for our own extinction. Education and its research sit in the middle of this epochal shift. Scientific investigation establishes and verifies what has happened in the past, including the patterns and rhythms that may continue. However, education, as defined by learning in the present is also concerned with the future, especially in terms of the proven facts of climate change and collectively working out what to do about them. Subsequently, this chapter will argue that a new science of educational research is required to shift pedagogy, the curriculum, and educational practice from its current settings to ones that will provoke meaningful change in the Anthropocene. This new science of educational research will be based on a re-evaluation of time in educational research from the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon, Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick. In general, this theorization of a new science of time in educational research sees a shift from phenomenologically based notions of temporality to materially embodied concepts of time that simultaneously inhabit ‘more-than-human’ worlds.
This paper clarifies Gilbert Simondon’s notion of information by presenting the historical-epistemological context from which it emerges, as well as the solutions it presents to the conceptual problems of the time. I give special attention to the conceptualizations proposed by cybernetics, information theory, and biology. In addition, the conceptual changes of Simondon’s notion of information are analyzed in accordance to three of the main moments of his thought (classified by Juan Manuel Heredia): a) 1944-1958, b) 1959-1968, and c) 1968-1983. This gives a fuller sense to the meaning of information in Simondon’s work.
In this article, I posit that for the field of architecture to come to a distinctly architectural application of computational technologies it requires the elaboration of a concept of critical technics. This is premised on a systems-view of technical development, which highlights the importance of time and situatedness for any consideration of change, genesis or becoming. In order to then construct an architectural technicity that can grapple with the external character of technical development, I argue – using the philosophy of technology of Gilbert Simondon and Stafford Beer’s management cybernetics – that what is needed for this is a radical opening-up of the architectural process in the form of a democratisation, to augment architecture’s capacity for producing alternate futurity.
Data on human behavior have become a highly valuable commodity under contemporary capitalism. Psychology’s stronghold on knowledge about individuals is thus threatened by new enterprises that lack formal commitments to public wellbeing: social media platforms. For Shoshana Zuboff, this represents a new form of capitalism—surveillance capitalism—where information technologies not only generate data from user activity, but effectively repurpose this data to shape behavior for corporate gains. We argue that Zuboff’s analysis, while a useful starting point, frames problems related to social media at a macrosociological level in ways that obscure the possibility for effective collective action. We then demonstrate how insights from Karl Marx and Gilbert Simondon can help psychologists understand the profound shifts in subjectivity elicited by hyper-networked digital media landscapes. Their shared process-relational ontology foreshadows a collective form of subjectivity in response to contemporary capitalism, something which Zuboff alludes to but fails to fully explain.
This article explores the theme of nihilism from the perspective of post-continental philosophy by focusing on semiotics and information theory and the question of “meaning” at stake between them. Nihilism is characterised here as an avatar of the counter-Enlightenment tradition. Post-continental philosophy is defined by a positive revaluation of reason, science, and technology, which were critiqued for their nihilistic effects by key continental philosophers. Rather than critiquing nihilism, then, post-continental philosophers have tended to affirm it. This article argues that, despite appearances, such developments in fact allow a deepened response to nihilism, considered as an existential problem. It does so by using Lyotard’s critique of semiotics to show how the kind of linguistic and cultural meaning associated with continental philosophy is itself a kind of nihilism. It then examines Meillassoux’s theory of the meaningless sign and Laruelle’s idea of the secret truth of Hermes to argue that this new paradigm of post-continental philosophy allows a response to nihilism by offering an alternative to semiotic meaning. Thus freed, this new paradigm allows the embrace of information theory as a plural articulation of meanings grounded in meaningless data, which enables a superior response to nihilism in the information age.
Information is a recognized fundamental notion across the sciences and humanities, which is crucial to understanding physical computation, communication, and human cognition. The Philosophy of Information brings together the most important perspectives on information. It includes major technical approaches, while also setting out the historical backgrounds of information as well as its contemporary role in many academic fields. Also, special unifying topics are high-lighted that play across many fields, while we also aim at identifying relevant themes for philosophical reflection. There is no established area yet of Philosophy of Information, and this Handbook can help shape one, making sure it is well grounded in scientific expertise. As a side benefit, a book like this can facilitate contacts and collaboration among diverse academic milieus sharing a common interest in information.
Addressing techniques
Based on the notion of a mode of existence developed by Gilbert Simondon and especially Etienne Souriau, the question of techniques can be addressed without us being limited by the excessive presence of one of the results: technical objects. We can then try to define the mode of the technique as a movement, a project, a pleating, a very particular form of transcendence, which has not received from philosophy the treatment that its importance and ubiquity warrant. The notion of instauration proposed by Souriau enables us to re-examine the question of construction, but freed from the ambiguities of constructivism.
Information is a recognized fundamental notion across the sciences and humanities, which is crucial to understanding physical computation, communication, and human cognition. The Philosophy of Information brings together the most important perspectives on information. It includes major technical approaches, while also setting out the historical backgrounds of information as well as its contemporary role in many academic fields. Also, special unifying topics are high-lighted that play across many fields, while we also aim at identifying relevant themes for philosophical reflection. There is no established area yet of Philosophy of Information, and this Handbook can help shape one, making sure it is well grounded in scientific expertise. As a side benefit, a book like this can facilitate contacts and collaboration among diverse academic milieus sharing a common interest in information.
On the Origin of Objects is the culmination of Brian Cantwell Smith's decade-long investigation into the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of computation, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. Based on a sustained critique of the formal tradition that underlies the reigning views, he presents an argument for an embedded, participatory, "irreductionist," metaphysical alternative. Smith seeks nothing less than to revise our understanding not only of the machines we build but also of the world with which they interact.
On the Origin of Objects is the culmination of Brian Cantwell Smith's decade-long investigation into the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of computation, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. Based on a sustained critique of the formal tradition that underlies the reigning views, he presents an argument for an embedded, participatory, "irreductionist," metaphysical alternative. Smith seeks nothing less than to revise our understanding not only of the machines we build but also of the world with which they interact.
Smith's ambitious project begins as a search for a comprehensive theory of computation, able to do empirical justice to practice and conceptual justice to the computational theory of mind. A rigorous commitment to these two criteria ultimately leads him to recommend a radical overhaul of our traditional conception of metaphysics.
Everything that exists—objects, properties, life, practice—lies Smith claims in the "middle distance," an intermediate realm of partial engagement with and partial separation from, the enveloping world. Patterns of separation and engagement are taken to underlie a single notion unifying representation and ontology: that of subjects' "registration" of the world around them.
Along the way, Smith offers many fascinating ideas: the distinction between particularity and individuality, the methodological notion of an "inscription error," an argument that there are no individuals within physics, various deconstructions of the type-instance distinction, an analysis of formality as overly disconnected ("discreteness run amok"), a conception of the boundaries of objects as properties of unruly interactions between objects and subjects, an argument for the theoretical centrality of reference preservation, and a theatrical, acrobatic metaphor for the contortions involved in the preservation of reference and resultant stabilization of objects. Sidebars and diagrams throughout the book help clarify and guide Smith's highly original and compelling argument.
Bradford Books imprint