The Closed and the Open in Bergson and Simondon

This article examines the notion of so-called ‘closed’ social systems and investigates potential ways of overcoming closure in the pursuit of a society that could be called ‘open.’ Bergson sets up the problem of closed and open social formations in his last work The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), where he develops an account of the figure of the mystic as a saving power. Simondon takes up the closed/open paradigm from Bergson, transforming it into a theory of types of relations, and suggesting the notion of transindividual relationships as a passage for innovation and societal opening. For Simondon, it is the figure of the technician that instantiates an emancipatory transindividual relationship. The mystic and technician are both inventive characters: through their action, whether moral invention or technical invention, they are imagined to contribute to the opening of societies that are caught in a circle of closure.