Simondon, Cybernetics, Critical Disability

Here, I take up Gilbert Simondon’s work on cybernetics, adaptation, and normativity from a critical disability perspective. Working with disability and Simondon may be surprising, given that there has been no Anglophone literature explicitly connecting disability or crip studies to his works. But in calling for a critical disability perspective, I invoke the words of Julie Avril Minich, who defines critical disability studies as methodology that “involves scrutinizing not bodily or mental impairments but the social norms that define particular attributes as impairments, as well as the social conditions that concentrate stigmatized attributes in particular populations” (“Enabling Whom?”). To accomplish this, I focus on Simondon’s criticism that cybernetics narrowly focuses on self-regulatory operations which maintain homeostatic equilibrium such that adaptation itself is the deciding criterion of normativity. Simondon therefore helps unpack how constitutive defining and eliminating disability was to cybernetics and demonstrates that the normative concerns of cybernetics, despite their objective appearance, were ultimately rooted in an implicit sociology.

Thus, I would like to situate Simondon in a growing body of scholarship excavating the various genealogies of information theory and cybernetics, and their complicated relation to disability, colonialism, and social welfare programs.¹ Simondon no doubt benefited from and contributed to this legacy, and himself was deeply steeped in contemporary cybernetic circles. However, his incisive reflections on the normative limitations of cybernetics offer an avenue to think through cybernetics’ material impacts on disability. In light of these concerns, Simondon’s own philosophy, I argue, forecloses the possibility of stable disability identity. Therefore, I ask how Simondon and critical disability [End Page 219] projects today might enrich each other around modern concerns about the limitations of identity-based approaches.

I deal primarily with Simondon’s works from the 1950s and ’60s, including his two theses, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information and On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, in addition to other contemporaneous essays.² Here, Simondon’s central reference for cybernetics is Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, but I refer to “cybernetics” as the general study of control and communication in systems. Though Simondon’s general critique of cybernetics has been commented on, I begin with Simondon’s reception and transformation of cybernetic thought. In general, Simondon is less interested in harsh polemics and in proving the worthlessness of other positions, but more in reconfiguration and enhancement. Jean-Yves Chateau’s remarks regarding Simondon’s citational practice in his 1965–66 psychology course, Imagination and Invention, ring true for his entire oeuvre. Chateau writes that “Simondon does not oppose specific theses: he tries to show, rather, that every thesis has an element of truth, even if it is insufficient. One must find the point of view from which it can be completed, or, rather, from which reality appears as complete” (xx; emphasis in original).

Cybernetics, Information, Adaptation

While Simondon often situates Individuation and Technical Objects in contradistinction to Wiener’s Cybernetics, it is worth briefly reviewing two earlier essays for Simondon’s comments on the benefits of cybernetic thought: “Cybernetics and Philosophy,” and “Epistemology of Cybernetics.”³ In these works, Simondon analyzes the methodology of cybernetics and asks what it offers Western philosophy and science. Although commentators have been more interested in Simondon’s criticisms of cybernetics, these essays are a key source to understand what Simondon believed was valuable about it and how he conceptualized his inheritance and transformation of cybernetics.⁴

The merit of cybernetics for Simondon is that it investigates operations and does not study structures, unlike other forms of disciplinary inquiry such as positivism and critical philosophy, two forms of “phenomenalist objectivism” (“Epistemology of Cybernetics”). Cybernetics, instead, deals with operations between established disciplines and does not aim to reduce complex processes to simpler ones, but rather establishes equivalent operative relationships between situations. It seeks an identity of relationships, not a relationship of (substantialist) identity (“Cybernétique et philosophie” 42). Simondon terms this the method of cybernetic induction. Wiener describes cybernetics with the colonial metaphor of a “no-man’s land,” inhabiting the spaces in [End Page 220] between established fields (4-5). For Simondon, however, the purview of cybernetics is not uncharted and uncolonized territory, but should be thought as “a complementary view on the same world” (“Epistemology of Cybernetics”). Cybernetics thus endeavors to understand equivalent operations between different, established structures.

If we pose the title “Epistemology of Cybernetics” as a question, Simondon might answer that it was the epistemology of the scientific team (190: translation of “l’épistémologie cybernétique, celle de l’équipe scientifique“). Simondon believes that the weekly symposia amongst scientists from various disciplines which Wiener describes in the introduction to Cybernetics evinces the unique methodological contribution of cybernetics. Just as cybernetics studies operations, relations, and compossibilities beyond and between the individual disciplines, cybernetics is the operative system of the collective subject due to the fact that it is the result of a heterogeneous group of researchers.

Though Simondon had yet to write his principal theses at the point of composing these early essays, one can identify key themes in his later works that he credits to cybernetics, such as the emphasis on the convertibility of structures and operations without assuming an intermediary or overarching structure. Even in these essays, Simondon defines his work against Wiener’s Cybernetics, but it is sometimes difficult to maintain a clear distinction between Simondon’s project and cybernetics. For example, he claims that cybernetics has a lot to teach philosophy about the notion of causality and the individual, but in Individuation it is clear that cybernetics is not the primary means by which to understand the individual (“Cybernétique et philosophie” 48). Perhaps typical of Simondon’s attitude is his reflection on Wiener’s choice of the name cybernetics. In discussing its etymology from the Greek κυβερνήτης (“helmsman”), Simondon claims the reference to “steering lends itself well to automation and the realisation of a teleological mechanism… However, a word like allagmatics (theory of conversions) would be more universal and would envelop, for example, a study like that of the operations through which a text can be translated from one language to another” (“Epistemology of Cybernetics”). Simondon diagnoses cybernetics with a limited interest in automation and teleology. He suggests the alternative “allagmatics” would have been a better name, for it is more universal, as if it were possible for cybernetics to have been allagmatics. However, at the end of this essay, Simondon will name his proposed method “allagmatics.” While Simondon’s allagmatics surpasses the limitations of cybernetics, it could not have existed without cybernetics paving the way.

Having outlined the value that Simondon placed in cybernetics as a study of operations, I transition to his criticism. I am most interested in Simondon’s ontogenetic critique of the cybernetic understanding of [End Page 221] adaptation. The critique of adaptationism is a central refrain throughout Simondon’s work, and it is important to note that he applies it not only to cybernetics, but also to Gestalt psychology and certain forms of evolutionary biology.⁵ The arguments against adaptationism are inseparable from his own notions of metastability, information, and transduction, so I rehearse some of Simondon’s reformulation of information theory. This reformulation has been well commented on, but I investigate its relevance for critical disability projects by exploring the temporal dynamics of adaptationism’s normative assumptions and what Simondon’s alternatives might proffer.

Simondon’s most important reformulation of Wiener’s and information theorists’ work is of the notion of information itself, most explicitly addressed in “Form, Information, and Potentials,” presented to the Société Française de Philosophie in 1960. The information theorists offer a probabilistic definition of information as negentropy, or “the inverse of the process of degradation” between sender and receiver (686). This definition of information may be legitimate for certain technical relationships, but is insufficient for expansion to other domains, such as the psycho-social, since a tighter relationship would necessitate less information. He claims that a non-probabilistic, qualitative term must be added, which he describes as information’s tension. Simondon explains that “a theory of the tension of information supposes that the possible series of receivers are open: the tension of information is proportional to a schema’s capacity to be received as information by receivers that are not defined in advance” (689). Information, due to the tension between disparate states, can be measured by its ability to actualize potentials in a metastable field which can only be released with the formation of a new structure. Therefore, form-taking occurs when there is a “particular type of rapport that exists between the structural germ’s tension of information and the informable metastable domain, which harbors a potential energy” (689-90; emphasis in original). Thus, Simondon can speak of hylomorphism’s high information potential due its structuration of huge fields of (metastable) thought. While information requires the tension between disparates, Simondon defines its operation as transduction, “a discovery of dimensions whose system makes the dimensions of each of the terms communicate, such that the complete reality of each of the terms of the domain can become organized into newly discovered structures without loss or reduction” (Individuation, 15). Information and metastability are necessary for individuation, but the process of resolving tensions via new structuration or discovery of another dimension is transduction.

Simondon repeatedly criticizes cybernetics for equating technical regulatory systems and automata with living beings, not on substantialist grounds, but for informational differences. He claims that cybernetics [End Page 222] introduces

the recurring aim of information on a relay apparatus as the basic schema that allows for an active adaptation to a spontaneous finality. This technical realization of a finalized conduct has served as a model of intelligibility for the study of a large number of regulations—or of regulation failures—in the living, both human and non-human, and of phenomena subject to becoming. (“Technical Mentality” 3)

Information as negentropy allows for a technical system to adapt to a certain finality or end, meaning it actively adapts to reach homeostasis, which cybernetics then extrapolates to other phenomena subject to becoming, such as biological systems. We can notice, too, that the cybernetic privileging of active adaptation via feedback becomes the implicit standard for recognizing regulation failures, suggesting that breakdown and pathology are the sine qua non of cybernetics in Simondon’s summary.

While certain automata may homeostatically adapt to a finality, according to Simondon adaptation alone is insufficient for living beings. For him, “the living being resolves problems, not just by adapting, i.e. by modifying its relation to the milieu (like a machine is capable of doing), but by modifying itself, by inventing new internal structures, and by completely introducing itself into the axiomatic of vital problems” (Individuation 7). Even in “Cybernetics and Philosophy,” Simondon warns of the danger of calling machines that adapt alive. It is not only the way in which the organism adapts that is different from machines, but also to what the organism adapts that sets it apart. When describing the genesis of man’s relations to the world in Technical Objects, Simondon gives an account of the organism/milieu relationship beyond adaptationism:

The relation of man to the world is not a simple adaptation, governed by a law of self-regulating finality that would find ever increasingly stable states of equilibrium; on the contrary, the evolution of this relation, in which technicity participates among other modes of being, manifests an ability to evolve that grows at each stage, discovering new forms and forces capable of making it evolve even more, rather than stabilizing it and making it tend toward more and more limited fluctuations; the very notion of finality, applied to this coming-into-being, appears inadequate, since one can indeed find limited finalities within this coming-into-being (search for food, defense against destructive forces), but there is no unique and superior end that one could superimpose on all aspects of evolution in order to coordinate them and account for their orientation through the search for an end that would be superior to all particular ends. (169)

Adaptation to a specific milieu is governed by a certain finality by which a system can regulate its operations. The end is to reach stable equilibrium with a milieu, which many technical and biological systems are capable of. However, for systems of coming-into-being, that is, transductive systems [End Page 223] in metastable milieus, such as a vital individual, there is no one pre-given finality that could coherently bring together all operations. This is why the introduction of metastable equilibrium is so critical to Simondon’s project. Regulatory adaptation to reach stable equilibrium must be along some axis of finality. But for metastable relations there is not one possible overarching end in accordance with which to organize, due to the presence of multiple sources of informational tension.

Simondon fleshes out this claim more fully in the Individuation work, in some of “the finest pages of the book” as Deleuze remarks in his review of Simondon’s L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (87). Simondon labels the model of adaptation to a certain milieu along a specific finality both hodological and topological, since it presupposes an already individuated individual within a separate, stable milieu in which there is a barrier to a goal that the individual adapts to. For Simondon, this model obscures ontogenesis as process in its assumption of the individual. Therefore, we must account for hodological space itself as process:

Before hodological space, there is this overlap of perspectives that does not allow for the apprehension of the determined obstacle, since there are no dimensions with respect to which the single ensemble would be organized. The fluctuatio animi that precedes the resolute action is not a hesitation between several objects or even several paths, but an unstable collection of incompatible, almost similar, and therefore disparate, ensembles. The subject before action is caught between several worlds, between several orders; action is the discovery of the signification of this disparation, of that through which the particularities of each ensemble are integrated into a broader and richer ensemble, which has a new dimension. (Individuation 232-3)

The overlap of disparate realities is what constitutes the pre-hodological in which there is no single goal to unify perception.⁶ These overlapping disparates constitute the tension of information. In fact, perception itself is only possible as a transductive resolution of these realities. Hence, Simondon claims there are different ensembles of perception waiting, a claim that he will go on to greatly expand upon and refine in his lectures On Perception and Imagination and Invention.

When Simondon mentions “disparation” we must think of disparation’s origin in optics. The retinal images from the right eye and the left are disparate, but sight occurs neither from averaging the two nor removing what is unique to each; rather, the disparate images resolve to a new dimension, three-dimensional sight. This kind of disparation occurs during individuation. While the disparate ensembles in pre-hodological space are responsible for tension (information), they are given meaning by the resolution of perception and then action via transduction. The vital individual contains various drives and tendencies, but different perceptual ensembles contain elements incompatible with these. There [End Page 224] may be food objects, predators, mates, etc., but adaptation “creates the milieu and the being relative to the milieu, the being’s paths” (Individuation 235). This milieu in/with which the being acts is metastable, and adaptation itself does not lead to a state of stable equilibrium, for stability “cannot explain action to any extent, for it is the system within which no transformation is possible, since all potentials have been exhausted: it is a dead system” (235).

Typical of Simondon’s ontogenetic critique, adaptation must not be jettisoned entirely but accounted for within its specificity. In “Form, Information, and Potentials,” he outlines a different relation to adaptation that a vital individual might have, citing behavioral studies on infants. Simondon explains that while there may be a series of adaptive adjustments to meet certain finalities, such as feeding behavior, crucially there are also periods of dedifferentiation and disadaptation. A vital individual is necessarily a process of continual phase shifts and dephasings with recurrent, critical periods of restructuration. In Simondon’s words,

it is possible to interpret the ontogenesis of behavior as created by the succession of highly formalized and individualized moments of full adaptation to the external world and of moments characterized on the contrary by the presence of a tension which appears to the purely behaviorist observer as a disadaptation and consequently as a regression but which in reality show that the organism is in the process of constituting within it what could be called systems of potentials.(691)

Adaptation cannot account fully for ontogenesis, for disadaptation is equally important as a strategy to constitute a system of potentials. As we have seen, vital individuals differ from other forms of being like machines in that they can change their internal structure, and in the process disadapt, dedifferentiate, and shore up potential for restructuration.⁷ This disadaptation, Simondon claims, is characterized by tension, meaning that it is an informational period in which the vital individual can recreate its milieu anew in which actions have new significance.

I would like to reflect on Simondon’s claims about temporality in the quote above. There are at least three temporalities at work here. The first is the serial time of successive movements of adaptive behaviors, moments in accordance with structuration to a milieu. There are also movements of potential, Simondon claims, characterized by the shoring up of informational tension and dedifferentiation, a kind of remaking of both the milieu and the individual itself. Third, but not least of all, is the temporality according to the pure “behaviorist,” whether it be a psychologist, ethologist, etc., to whom the movements of potential are viewed as “a regression.” I linger on this regression. Regression from what, exactly? On what timeline was the observed behavior evaluated as backwards movement? [End Page 225]

We might think of the logic of normative development here, in which there is the assumption of linear, continuous progress made constantly and consistently along a fixed path. With development, a subject continues to adapt via systems of feedback in a kind of dialectical movement. As Simondon’s example intimates, development is a profoundly more prescriptive enterprise than descriptive. Developmental logic has been the center of critique in critical disability and crip time studies for its normative violence and inter-articulations with other social categories.⁸ Development as linear progress has been too germane for the taxonomizing and pathologizing of perceived differences from this timeline in ways beyond mere description and into materialization and substantiation, as Mel Chen’s Intoxicated details. Phrases describing individuals with mental disabilities, such as “they have the mental capacity of a five-year-old” inevitably draw on and reify this logic, which has a long history of entanglement with racialization, as Blumenbach’s developmental theory of the five human races exemplifies. Development directly influences disability legislation, what medical interventions, such as sterilization, are considered appropriate, and conceptualizations of what constitutes adequate care.⁹ Simondon might say that development possesses a high degree of information potential, given its modulation of immense terrains of thought. Chen suggests, however, that “we might also keep close watch on development’s own clock, attending to what it reveals about its multiple fabrications, about the interweavings of the ways that race, geography, sexuality, and disability are the very things that give form and texture to that thing we call ordinary time” (61). Rather than being a stagnant given, development’s temporal schemata necessarily inform and are informed by what Simondon calls an implicit sociology, social concerns undergirding normative judgements, as I demonstrate in the next section.

Simondon’s work on organisms and information draws on rather normative studies of development, and his own formulations of adaptation and disadaptation might be employed to bolster developmental logic.¹⁰ However, Simondon can be of aid in that he gestures toward a critique of development itself, and therefore also its concomitant concepts of regression, delay, and slowness, which we can explore through Simondon’s comments on the ontogenesis of temporality.¹¹ For Simondon, time itself is transductive. In Individuation, Simondon explores the individual at physical, vital, psychic, and collective levels, in each of which temporal relations operate differently (Sauvagnargues). The physical individual possesses a proper history in that its transductive capacity exists at its limits, rendering the interior of the individual its structural memory. But it is with the vital individual that temporality itself comes into play as its [End Page 226] first transductivity. According to Simondon,

the fundamental type of vital transduction is the temporal series, which is both integrative and differentiating; the identity of a living being is composed of its temporality. An error could be made by conceiving temporality as a pure differentiation, as the necessity of an ongoing and renewed choice; individual life is differentiation to the extent that it is integration; here there is a complementary relation that cannot lose one of its two terms without itself ceasing to exist by transforming into a false differentiation. (175)

The vital individual is a veritable theater of individuation, a folding-inon-itself and prolongation of the physical. Vital individuals can change their internal structure, as we have seen, through two operations, integration and differentiation. Time is the transduction of integration and differentiation, meaning it is the compossibility of integration and differentiation via recurrent causality that resolves into a new dimension without loss of complexity. For this reason, time as transduction is not a unit of measurement (even though it may be conceived as continuity and instants, or divided into purportedly continuous phases of development), but rather “an expression of the dimensionality of the being that is individuating” (15).

If we recognize adaptationism as another permutation of development, we begin to perceive some of the payoff of reading Simondon and critical disability works together. Wiener’s view of the imperative to adapt and respond to a milieu (thanks, in part, to the definition of information as negentropy) dovetails with logics of continuous improvement, development, and progress. Simondon’s formulations of metastability and transduction, however, exposes the limitations of adaptationism. The ontogenetic critique of development’s high information potential underlines its constitutive function. We must remember that, for Simondon, “the relation between two relations is itself a relation” (Individuation 76; emphasis in original). Relation is the foundation of Simondon’s ontology, which includes epistemological relations, such as between the “knowing” behaviorist and “regressed” subject. A neat separation between ontology and epistemology, therefore, cannot be maintained. Critical disability studies enriches Simondon by showcasing the extent to which social, temporal logics modulate both the recognition of and material basis for individuality in a kind of cumulative causality, whereby the image of regressed subject in relation to the behaviorist goes out into the world as an organizing force of disparate ensembles.¹² It is these implicitly normative concerns which, as I will argue, Simondon’s critique of cybernetics articulates so well. [End Page 227]

Normativity, Disability, Irreducibility

So far, I have explored Simondon’s critique of cybernetics through his comments on the insufficiency of adaptation and homeostatic functioning as a consequence of defining information as negentropy. But where I believe the value of Simondon’s critique for critical disability work lies is in its demonstration of the normativity undergirding cybernetics’ interest in finality, adaptation, and equivalent functionality. The cybernetic preoccupation with self-regulation in maintenance of a homeostatic finality renders adaptation itself normative, a kind of implicit standard against which to judge the pathological. Simondon’s notion of implicit sociology showcases how constitutive the failure to adapt was to cybernetic interventions.

As early as “Epistemology of Cybernetics,” Simondon argues that the process of cybernetic induction yields a normativity. He analyzes the example of “the phenomenology of a mental patient” and the auto-oscillating electromechanical amplifier as analogous operations.¹³ Upon pairing amplifiers and human minds together as an identity of operations, the cyberneticist prefers to leave the “internal finality” of each system intact. For the human patient, this involves a psychoanalytic intervention that maintains cerebral connection rather than lobotomy. For the auto-oscillating amplifier, which is responding to itself and not its environment, this means modifying the system without reducing the amplification factor. According to Simondon, therefore, “from the operatory analogy, a normative idea that has scientific value emerges.”14 It is at the end of the cybernetic operation that a normativity emerges which becomes seemingly universal by virtue of its application to different systems. For cybernetics, this internal finality allows regulative homeostasis via adaptive feedback. The mandate of a system to adapt becomes so totalizing that any possibility of restructuration must be utilized in service of maintaining stable equilibrium. Cybernetic potential itself is normative.

Such normativity is what Simondon critiques. “The operation of cybernetics has no support,” he explains,

there’s no use for it to harbour an intense hierarchical normativity, since this normativity has no point of application. It would only be able to lead to an abstract pragmatism. With a remarkable honesty of mind, Norbert Wiener sensed this impossibility of bridging the gap between an operatory normativity and the being to which it would apply (whose structure is not defined in this normativity, which would lead to arbitrariness). This idea is expressed in the very last lines of Cybernetics. The application of normativity to an existing being cannot be done after the fact, when the structure and the operation are already defined apart from one another.¹⁵

As long as the Aristotelian assertion that there cannot be a science of the individual holds true, Andrea Bardin explains, the cybernetic “claim for [End Page 228] universality is soon converted into a project of techno-political construction of universality at the expense of the singularity of all actual processes” (“Simondon Contra” 12). The universal normativity of cybernetics is engendered by its focus on equivalent operations defined separately from the structures that positivism studies. What is needed is a way to study the interchange of operations and structures, which the study of individuality and individuation via information is best suited to accomplish. Simondon labels this new study of structural and operational interchange allagmatics.

Here, I take Simondon as making an argument about irreducibility. We have already reviewed his arguments about irreducibility of the metastable systems to a singular finality. But this is also the irreducibility of an individual to species and, in the opposite direction, the irreducibility of an individual to isolated, independent aberration, both of which the study of individuation surpasses. The operatory normativity Simondon critiques here is apparent in the application of the logic of development to individuals and its temporal schemata. Simondon’s own notion of temporality as the “expression of the dimensionality of the being that is individuating,” however, underscores the individual as a privileged locus for structural and operational equivalence, to which outside norms may be arbitrary.

With “irreducibility,” I also refer to Jasbir Puar’s formulations regarding the movement from “epistemological corrective to ontological irreducibility.” Puar is interested in how the study of affect might be put together with identity-centric approaches such as intersectionality, for “if affect makes identity cohere and dissolve—identity as the habituation of affect—it more forcefully marks the limits of identity itself” (The Right to Maim 19). Of course, Simondon is not responding to such concerns about post-structuralist fatigue around the notion of the subject itself or new materialisms. But putting Simondon into such conversations, I suggest, is helpful for thinking through possible gridlocks like identity/affect. For Simondon, the irreducibility of individuation does not assume a split between epistemology and ontology. Rather they are inseparable for him, which he captures with the term “axiontology,” referring to states before the split between operations and structures.¹⁶

One avenue to explore the stakes of Simondon’s irreducibility is to examine the definition of disability. As Simondon’s reception amongst political theorists makes apparent, stable identity is not a feasible mode of political participation, nor existence.¹⁷ This is in stark contrast to cybernetics, which, Simondon suggests, is predicated on precisely the identification of disability. Modern scholars of disability identity have critiqued it as a legal category of protection that is a product of, and supports, global capitalism. Certain forms of disability are now recruited into neoliberal forms of productivity under the label of accessibility, leading to a kind [End Page 229] of disability exceptionalism, to use Robert McRuer’s term, “while others are designated as surplus for resource extraction (Adler-Bolton and Vierkant).¹⁸ Disability as a (legal) identity is so intertwined with the proper performance of whiteness and cisgender normativity that its machinations with race and transness continue to be glossed over, unrecognized, or intentionally excluded.¹⁹ For these reasons, Puar theorizes beyond disability through the addition of “debility,” a longer, slower form of wearing down populations, and “capacity.” While certain disabled individuals may be capacitated under disability exceptionalism, their visibility, according to Puar, works in concert with the constant debilitation of other populations, including the exploited working class, homeless, colonized, and/or racialized with the extraction of labor necessary to capacitate.²⁰

I raise these points to demonstrate the toggling between neoliberal identity-based approaches and formulations beyond identity that modern disability/crip scholars grapple with. By putting Simondon alongside them, I do not posit him as a genealogical forebearer, nor offer his thought as a panacea. Simondon’s comments on cybernetics and normativity are in response to a different set of concerns. Rather, I ask what these conversations can add to Simondon and what Simondon might offer in return. I suggest that this modern toggling with identity can enrich Simondon’s work on the individual as a transduction by nuancing the critique of what Simondon calls an implicit sociology. Conversely, Simondon’s suggestion that the metastable individual is a transduction of the multiple and continuous is helpful for precisely understanding better the interarticulations of identity and what escapes identity.

Simondon’s most explicit formulations about what could be called disability come from Individuation under the subsection “Insufficiency of the Notion of Adaptation to Explain Psychical Individuation.” He critiques Lawrence Kubie’s keynote to the 1949 Macy Conference of Cybernetics for positing that failure to adapt should be the criterion for the pathological. I quote Simondon at length:

One of the most characteristic traits of modern psychology and psychopathology is that they contain an implicit sociology that is inherent particularly to the normativity of their judgments. Certainly, these disciplines claim not to be normative and want to be merely objective; they are objective no doubt, but from the moment that the necessity of the distinction between the normal and the pathological appears, from the moment that it is merely necessary to determine a hierarchy by classifying behaviors or states according to a scale of levels, normativity once again arises. If we define this implicit normativity, it is not to argue against it in this part of our study, but because it obscures a whole aspect of the representation of the individual. If dynamics is included in the implicit normativity, one will be able to construct a psychological theory of the individual within which it will seem that no dynamics is [End Page 230] presupposed; in fact, this dynamics is present in implicit normativity, but it does not appear as a dynamics inherent to the object studied. If we analyzed the complete content of the dynamic notions employed by modern psychology (such as the normal and the pathological, high level states and low-level states, states of elevated psychical tension and states of low psychical tension), we would find that this implicit normativity conceals a sociology and even a sociotechnics that do not belong to the explicit foundations of psychology. (304-5; emphasis in original)

Simondon takes up the arguments of his advisor Canguilhem concerning conceptually demarking the pathological from the normal.²¹ Since psychopathology must make evaluations to define the pathological, it necessarily conceals an implicit sociology on which to base normative judgements. The reasoning for thinking through this implicit normativity is not to argue against it. His motivation here is that implicit sociology obscures the process of individuation if it reduces the individual to either normal or pathological. One must investigate the conditions under which normative judgements are rendered possible, and their subsequent occlusion under a guise of objectivity. We can think of Simondon’s earlier comments in “Epistemology of Cybernetics” on the futility of applying operational normativity to an individual after the fact, but here normativity is necessarily bound up with social dynamics that represent the individual.

Kubie advances his thesis by citing neuropathics’ constant disadaptation to success, and he assimilates adaptation to the law of gravity; for him, adaptation is not a norm but expresses the possibility of human existence. Simondon believes that this analogy is wrong on both ends and proceeds to elucidate other forces that affect matter beyond gravity, such as magnetic and electric fields, polarity, and radiation.²² Interindividual relations like gravity cannot be the basis for the study of the individual because they obscure the individual qua relation, in both physical and psychological dimensions. Disadaptation is key to Simondon’s reformulation of information and is as equally normative as adaptation. The principle of individuation is transduction through metastability, not maintenance of a homeostatic finality, as cybernetics would reduce all self-regulating systems. For Simondon, these approaches ignore the allagmatic compossibility of potential energy/structure of metastable systems which allow the living individual to modulate itself through perception and action.

After the discussion of Kubie’s address, Simondon offers some clarification to his comments about pathology. Because psychological individuation is transductive, like all individuation, “it is impossible to constitute in the study of the individual two types of forces or behaviors, i.e., normal behaviors and pathological behaviors,” he claims, since

either an infinity of types can be constituted or one alone, but never two alone. The constitution of two types does nothing but express the [End Page 231] bipolarity of normativity essential to a psychological classification that conceals an implicit sociology and sociotechnics. In fact, as in every domain of transductivity, there is in the psychological individual the unfolding of a reality that is simultaneously continuous and multiple. (Individuation 308)

One cannot define the pathological in contradistinction to the normative, since the psychological individual is not a substance. The same error of substantialism reduces all physical forces to gravity, showing that the effects of implicit sociology are not unique to the psychological domain. What is needed is the study of both “intraindividual dynamism” and “structural realities that are just as intraindividual and important,” without reduction to pure substance or pure dynamic flux (308). Simondon’s allgamatic stance therefore does not render his account post-disability, even as it is critical of implicit sociological concerns that define the pathological.²³ But it would be wrong to classify him as a precursor to a “critical realist” approach to disability that Simon Williams describes. The structures Simondon is interested in are just as implicated as dynamics in intraindividual and transindividual relations such that a neat separation of a ‘real’ biological body from its socio-cultural interpretation is untenable. The ontological and epistemological are not to be cleanly cleft. The individual as transduction has a center, but its multiplicity means it is irreducible to a stable identity, especially one predicated on the division of the pathological from the normal. This multiplicity suggests a proliferation of disability itself without being grounded in a pathological medico-legal identity.

Simondon’s comments on Kubie’s address highlight just how constitutive disability was to the cybernetic imperative for all systems to homeostatically adapt. Kubie gave his keynote in 1949, the year that “Cybernetics” was agreed to be added to the title of the Macy conferences in homage to Wiener’s book. Previously it was “the Cerebral Inhibition Meeting,” then “the Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biology and the Social Sciences Meeting.” Of the Macy Foundation’s origins, Geoghegan writes that “in keeping with Progressive Era theories of social hygiene, its officers viewed biology and welfare as part of public health. The cybernetics conferences belonged to that program of social hygiene” (41). Geoghegan unpacks just how implicated cybernetics is in a humanism (despite its reception as “post-human”), in which milieu Kubie’s address to the newly christened “Cybernetics” conference must be understood. Simondon’s critique of Kubie demonstrates that this humanism was predicated on the definition and subsequent elimination of the pathological and he elucidates the implicit sociotechnics that undergird this operation. Simondon’s own work is consequently brought into [End Page 232] relief since the transductive individual is the simultaneity of continuity and multiplicity irreducible to either a normal or pathological mode of existence.

Simondon’s articulation of cybernetics, adaptation, normativity is valuable for understanding the fraught relationship cybernetics has to lived disability. His notion of implicit sociology complements Mara Mills’s work on how the resourcing of disability as “assistive pretext” in 20^th-century media technology and cybernetics reinforced norms of human communication (“Deaf Jam”). Simondon’s writing suggests a route beyond a “normative vision of ultra-rationalized technocratic cyber-control,” to borrow Massumi’s phrase (23). My criticism is not to foreclose, however, the possible utility of thinking cybernetics with disability today. For instance, within Wiener’s cybernetic scheme, one crip scholar claims that “information loss and communication failure are resources for new ways of knowing disability, and thus become instruments of crip technoscience” (Felt 23). Because of its reliance on disability, one can mine cybernetics for possible configurations of multiplicity and continuity. However, it is important to think through Simondon’s critique anew as the legacy of cybernetics’ ableist reliance on disability still operates today as a bastion of normativity in areas such as AI image generating.²⁴

After Cybernetics, Wiener became interested in the vocoder, a device used to translate speech into visual representations of its sound waves. Wiener, however, theorized its application into a hearing glove, which would translate sound waves into tactile information, and assigned its creation to a graduate student, Leon Levine.²⁵ Quickly they learned that translating speech into frequencies low enough for the skin to register made understanding speech virtually impossible. This was not a problem, because for Wiener the principal benefit of the glove was to offer deaf individuals a feedback mechanism to correct what Wiener called their “grotesque and harsh intonation” (qtd. in Mills, “On Disability and Cybernetics” 87). The glove allowed them to grasp the gestalt of language, according to Wiener (Halpern 222). Levine followed suit in agreement, and they had Helen Keller test the glove in 1950.

It is precisely the question of adaptation, normativity, and implicit sociology at issue. The glove allowed deaf individuals to modify their voices via comparison with the feeling of non-deaf speakers. The hearing glove restores a kind of “internal finality” to deaf individuals by granting them the ability to actively adapt with the goal of sounding nondisabled. Under Wiener’s theory of perception, an organism should be able to ‘compensate’ for one sense with another to maintain homeostasis. As Simondon formulated, cybernetics leads to a universal view of adaptation as normative via self-regulation, such that dedifferentiation and [End Page 233] restructuration are subsumed as means to reach a finality. Fundamental here is an implicit sociology, with Wiener’s view that “speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement of man” in line with a hierarchy of senses at the time (qtd. in Mills, “On Disability and Cybernetics” 87). The emphasis on oral speech and hearing as an informational feedback system that reduces noise and recognizes patterns meant that other forms of communication, such as sign language, Braille, lip touching, and hand spelling, while more efficient, were of little interest. What is more, despite cybernetics’ totalizing normativity, its implicit sociology labeled certain subjects fit for intervention, and others as beyond recuperation and fit for confinement, incarceration, and/or elimination. For instance, Helen Keller was popular in cybernetics circles due to her interest in media devices, which contributed to her stylization in popular media outlets as an automaton and a living Galatea (Mills, “On Disability and Cybernetics” 101). Keller became less a person than a problem to think with. But her experience was certainly not universal. Erevelles and Minear detail the life of Junius Wilson, a poor Black deaf man born in 1908 in North Carolina, whose actions and non-communication were constructed as violent, leading to his institutionalization for most of his life. Given its preoccupation with disability, cybernetic research may have been an avenue for capacitating certain disabled identities while others were debilitated.

Upholding and justifying these implicit normative concerns were foundational to cybernetics as a field. We can recall that for Simondon cybernetic epistemology is an epistemology of the scientific team, due to its origins in interdisciplinary symposia. The normative values that came out of cybernetics, then, could perhaps gain a universality not only from their applicability to a diversity of regulating systems but also by confirming the communal biases of the group. This demonstrates how we might understand Simondon’s claim about the necessity to understand both “intraindividual dynamism” and “structural realities that are just as intraindividual and important.” While the individual is a privileged site for the allagmatic study of structures and operations, the individual cannot be substantialized, meaning that it must be understood as an intra-individual, transindividual, and allagmatic relation. It is through a critical disability studies framework that we can recognize the depth of cybernetics’ normativizing violence by recognizing its grounding in implicit sociology and deployment in concepts like development which contribute to informational tensions that are at the heart of individuation. Cybernetics did not just produce disabled subjects, but was informed by and further modified a metastable, differential field in which judgements about pathology, intervention, and elimination were rendered meaningful. [End Page 234]

Conclusion: Simondon and Critical Disability?

Simondon’s critique suggests that cybernetics is predicated on defining pathology and disability through normative concerns around notions like adaptation, which are ultimately undergirded by an implicit sociology. Reading Simondon alongside critical disability work is helpful for better articulating the extent of this implicit sociology. By way of conclusion, I would like to highlight how Simondon’s formulation of individuation via transduction and the impossibility of a normal/pathological dualism of identity might be read in concert with modern concerns about the importance and limitations of thinking through subjective identity categories.

Critical attention to race and disability’s couplings have generated important analyses for understanding their entanglements, as Minich’s “Enabling Whom?” and its reception by Jina B. Kim and Sami Schalk underscore. Scholars have critiqued moves to situate race and disability as analogous identities or nuances of one another, and have generally advocated their co-constitution alongside sexuality.²⁶ This work has placed needed intersectional pressure on the possibility of defining disability and race as separate, stable identities. Affect studies, such as those by Chen and Puar, have been helpful for breaking beyond liberal, identity-based and anthropocentric interventions. Within disability studies, James Overboe argues for taking impersonal life seriously. Inspired by Deleuzian immanence, affirming the impersonal for Overboe means “to affirm lives that are alive without intent or greater meaning imposed upon them, by themselves or others, and are located on a different register,” which has consequences for rethinking the ableist norms implicit in concepts such as intentionality and agency (242).

Despite the recognition of the limits of identity-based approaches, it would be a mistake to posit that critical analysis should forgo identity altogether. Therí Alyce Pickens argues that “as soon as decolonization opened up the space for those who had been objects of history to assert themselves as subjects, subjects faced their theoretical death. We have not moved beyond identity because we have not moved beyond whiteness as a standard, invisibilized though it may be” (7).²⁷ Overboe, too, states that we should not entirely do away with the self with agency. In response to this injunction, scholars in this vein toggle between identity-based approaches and those beyond identity. Puar in particular has appealed to Deleuze and Guattari’s categories of the molar and molecular, and their “differential interplay” to analyze this dynamic (The Right to Maim 119). For Puar, the molar and molecular map onto different modes of biopolitical governance, discipline and control, respectively, which are not opposites so much as complements. [End Page 235]

I want to briefly think about what Gilbert Simondon may offer these conversations, and what they in turn can offer Simondonian scholarship. Overboe’s investigation of impersonal life quotes from Deleuze’s Pure Immanence: “it is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence” (qtd. in Overboe 246). Deleuze in his review of Simondon attributes the importance of his work to the fact that “he rigorously distinguishes singularity and individuality” (87). Without collapsing Deleuze’s and Simondon’s philosophical differences concerning being, Deleuze’s reception suggests that we may mine Simondon for the interplay of the individual and singularities, or preindividual realities. Mark Hansen argues that one limitation of Deleuze and Guattari’s molar and molecular is that they do not adequately engage a notion of information, whereas Simondon’s individuation is something of a mediation between the molar and molecular.²⁸ In fact, Simondon suggests that the division of the molar from the molecular may be a product of substantialism (Individuation, 334).

Deleuze and Guattari themselves appeal to Simondon in their discussion of itinerant metallurgy as material flow for his insistence on the energetic singularities of matter itself and on “variable intensive affects” of operations. Metallurgy, for them, communicates between smooth and striated space and is intermediary in that it is “autonomous, initially stretching itself between things, and between thoughts, to establish a whole new relation between thoughts and things” (408). Therefore, we might think of Simondon’s individuation as not an alternative to the molar and molecule but as their interrelation via quanta or thresholds. We can remember that the individual is transduction of both multiplicity and continuity, which “is both more and less than unity,” and “conveys an interior problematic and can enter as an element into a problematic that is vaster than its own being. For the individual, participation is the fact of being an element in a vaster individuation through the intermediary of the charge of pre-individual reality that the individual contains, i.e. due to the potentials that it harbors” (Individuation 8; emphases in original). As a transductive unity, the individual overflows itself as both more and less than a unity. Let us note the “and less,” which tends to be forgotten. With Overboe, we might assert that the potentials and singularities of life, as that which exceeds the personal, belong to pre-individuality potential and fashion an ethics adequate to it. However, recognition of what counts as an individual has undoubtedly been subject to an implicit sociology, such that whether one is grasped as more or less than an individual has been unevenly distributed as a means of biopolitics and sociotechnics, which in turns has material consequences. Individuation as mediation of molar and molecular elucidates not how the social shapes the material (another form of hylomorphic thought), but their inter-articulation. [End Page 236]

While Simondon does not often employ the term, critiquing implicit sociology is arguably consistent with much of his criticism. I have suggested that the notion of an implicit sociology specifies the normative operations of cybernetics, but it could also apply to his claim that the hylomorphic scheme originates from the division of labor in Athenian slave society (Individuation 35-6). Even the opposition between the inert and living, he attributes to hylomorphic thought. Reading Simondon alongside critical work today lets us understand the implications of implicit sociology better, as critical animal scholars have demonstrated the imbrications of raciality with speciation (e.g., Chen, Animacies). Thinking through the molar and molecular through individuation and information is helpful because, through the compossibility of structures and potentials, it highlights how knowledge qua relation participates in the normativity of implicit sociology, as we saw with development’s consequences.

If cybernetics is a privileged locus in which the normativity of an implicit sociology is clear, is it possible to move beyond norms? Should we? The question of ethics in Simondon’s work is, admittedly, a rather vexed one, and I do not have space for a detailed reading.²⁹ However, for him, “ethical reality is indeed structured in a network because there is a resonance of acts with respect to one another, not by way of their implicit or explicit norms, but directly in the system that they form, i.e. the being’s becoming; the reduction to norms is identical to the reduction to forms: it only involves one of the extreme terms of the real” (Individuation 377-8). Simondon does not advocate transcending norms altogether, as if such a move were possible, but rather localizes their scope. Ethics should not be founded on reaching homeostatic equilibrium, as Wiener might think. If norms guide stable equilibrium, then Simondon claims we need values to understand the transduction of norms between metastable systems. Reading critical disability work alongside Simondon suggests that the task of ethics is not only to understand the dynamic interrelation of norms and values, but also what implicit sociology underlies and structures their compossibility.

Notes:

1. Mara Mills and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, for example, highlight cybernetic interest in policing material bodies and social differences. Geoghegan argues that cybernetics represents a continuation of nineteenth century philanthropy and later technocratic liberalism designed to transcend human difference. Recently, Panagia locates Simondon as part of what he identifies as a “sentimental empiricist” strain of French thinkers in the 1950’s. Panagia argues that these philosophies of difference must be understood also as political critique of the contemporary French educational and colonial system for its emphasis on replication of the same, as seen in exercises like the explication de texte.

2. I leave open the question of the precise interrelation between Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (henceforth Individuation) and On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (henceforth Technical Objects), but the topics of cybernetics, adaptation, and normativity are themselves major, often intersecting, refrains throughout this period of Simondon’s works; when read together, they can help both cohere and complicate his oeuvre. While I deal with several of Simondon’s writings, I attempt to interrelate their positions without collapsing the chronological, generic, or philosophical specificity of each.

3. Both these essays were composed in 1953 and were found in a file titled “Recherches philosophiques,” during which time Simondon was putting together a cybernetics research group at the ENS that never came into fruition. I refer to the French edition of both; translations of “Epistemology of Cybernetics” come from Taylor Adkins.

4. On Simondon’s relationship to cybernetics, see, e.g., Schmidgen, Hayward and Geoghegan, Bardin, Epistemology and Political Philosophy (esp. pp. 25-31 and pp. 113-6), and Mills, Gilbert Simondon.

5. For a reading of Simondon’s account of the ontogenesis of humans and technical objects alongside evolutionary biologists who similarly critique adaptationism, see LaMarre pp. 100-8.

6. As his review suggests, Deleuze thought highly of Simondon’s conceptualization of prehodological space and refers to it in his discussion of the “cinema of the body” in Cinema 2: “The action-image presupposes a space in which ends, obstacles, means, subordinations, the principle and the secondary, predominances and loathings are distributed: a whole space which can be called ‘hodological’. But the body is initially caught in a quite different space, where disparate sets overlap and rival each other, without being able to organize themselves according to sensory-motor schemata” (203). To my reader still unsure about pre-hodological space, Deleuze suggests that the films of Jacques Doillon dramatize the inaction of the fluctuatio animi.

7. Simondon makes a similar claim in “Cybernetics and Philosophy” about quantum cyclochronies, drawing on the work of Nicholas Popov, in whose studies Simondon participated from 1951–54. See “Cybernétique et philosophie,” pp. 55-9, and Nathalie Simondon’s “Biography” for Simondon and Popov’s work.

8. The bibliography here is numerous, but some influential pieces are Kafer, Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” More recently, see Samuels and Freeman; and Chen, Intoxicated.

9. See, for example, Kafer’s analysis of the “Ashley Treatment,” a form of ‘humane’ hormonal attenuation and surgical removal of reproductive organs, and its varied complicities with development (47-68).

10. Deleuze and Guattari’s reception of Simondon’s critique of hylomorphism is instructive here. They write, “of course, it is always possible to ‘translate’ into a model that which escapes the model; thus, one may link the materiality’s power of variation to laws adapting a fixed form and a constant matter to one another. But this cannot be done without a distortion that consists in uprooting variables from the state of continuous variation, in order to extract from them fixed points and constant relations. Thus one throws the variables off, even changing the nature of the equations, which cease to be immanent to matter-movement (inequations, adequations). The question is not whether such a translation is conceptually legitimate—it is—but what intuition gets lost in it” (408-9).

11. Simondon himself reformulates development in the short essay “The Limits of Human Progress: A Critical Study,” originally published in 1958. Progress is not predicated on “its law of development as a function of time” (230), nor the succession or simultaneity individual systems, like human-language systems, human-religious systems, and human-technical systems, (cf. his discussion of phases of coming-into-being as a “relation of equilibrium and of reciprocal tensions,” Technical Objects, p. 173), but the systems’ saturation.

12. On the notion of cumulative causality, see Simondon, Imagination and Invention: “The circular causality that goes from the mind to objective reality through social processes of cumulative causality also goes from objective reality to the mind. Any image is susceptible to incorporation into a process of materializing or idealizing recurrence; deposited in fashion, art, monuments, technical objects, the image becomes a source of complex perceptions triggering movements, cognitive representations, affections, and emotions. Almost all man-made objects are in some way image-objects; they bear latent meanings, not merely cognitive but conative and affective-emotional; image-objects are quasi-organisms or at least seeds capable of being reborn and developing in the subject. Even outside of the subject, they multiply through group exchanges and activities, propagating and reproducing themselves in a neotenic state until they find the opportunity to become reabsorbed and redeployed until they reach an imaginal phase in which they are reincorporated into a new invention” (13).

13. For lobotomy, shock treatment, and psychoanalysis in Cybernetics, see Wiener, pp. 204-7.

14. Simondon, “Épistémologie de la cybernétique”: “De l’analogie opératoire sort une idée normative qui a une valeur scientifique” (191).

15. Text from Adkins’s translation. In “Form, Information, and Potentials,” I believe, Simondon helps explain his reference to Wiener’s “honesty of mind” at the end of Cybernetics when he notes how Wiener admits the difficulty of introducing probabilistic definitions of information to psycho-social domains.

16. On “axiontology,” see Simondon, “Epistemology of Cybernetics,” and Bardin, “Simondon Contra New Materialism.”

17. See, e.g., Andrea Bardin’s work, Grosz, and Panagia. Panagia writes that, “as individuations we don’t participate by expressing a consensus or by affirming a recognition because neither the stability of a solution nor the concreteness of an identity is available. Participation is thoroughly interactive and dynamic, irresolute and fundamentally associative and relational” (158).

18. See Puar, The Right to Maim pp. 36-41 on the ADA’s exclusion of “transvestism” as a proper disability and the fraught relationship of transgender subjectivity, disability and medicalization. On disability exceptionalism, see McRuer, pp. 42-8. On the troubles of defining disability, crip, and accessibility, especially alongside race, see Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined, pp. 7-17; Chen et al.; and Smilges.

19. Awkward-Rich offers a superb analysis of the disavowals from sickness and disability that allowed the normative (white) trans subject to emerge, and asks what identifications and alliances are rendered impossible.

20. McRuer, however, wonders whether debility supersedes disability under Puar’s model and if “crip” instead may not assume that disability has been exhausted (22-3). However, “crip” itself is not free from its own analytic trouble; see above note 18.

21. On Simondon’s debt to Canguilhem in these pages, see Scott pp. 106-10. For Canguilhem’s work as a link between Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and technics, see Schmidgen and Carrozzini.

22. We may compare Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on gravity as foundational to striated space and the logos of royal science: “the force of gravity lies at the basis of a laminar, striated, homogeneous, and centered space; it forms the foundation for those multiplicities termed metric, or arborescent, whose dimensions are independent of the situation and are expressed with the aid of units and points (movements from one point to another)… The nomos, or dispars, is altogether different… Each time a new field opened up in science—under conditions making this a far more important notion than that of form or object—it proved irreducible to the field of attraction and the model of the gravitational forces, although not contradictory to them” (370).

23. As Scott asserts, “If an epistemological shift from the dualism to the question of health is invited, one is granted the normative power, ontologically, to question other norms credited with physiological explanation, inviting new ways of structuring the relationship of the living as it adapts to a given milieu without denying that it carries the risk of illness” (110).

24. Take, for example, the free-to-use AI image generating website Dezgo.com, which employs the popular Stable Diffusion model. Using the text-to-image feature, one is instructed to write any prompt and the program will produce an image. If the “more options” tab is expanded, however, there is a space to add negative prompts for what should not be included, which is by default filled out with the following: “ugly, tiling, poorly drawn hands, poorly drawn feet, poorly drawn face, out of frame, extra limbs, disfigured, deformed, body out of frame, blurry, bad anatomy, blurred, watermark, grainy, signature, cut off, draft.” (Accessed April 13, 2024)

25. On Wiener, the vocoder, and the hearing glove, see Mills, “On Disability and Cybernetics” and Halpern pp. 225-30.

26. For critique of how treating race as analogous to gender recenters the categorically white subject, see Schueller and Puar, “‘I’d rather be a cyborg’”; for race and disability analogies in particular, see Pickens pp. 1-4. For a critique of the nuance model, see Erevelles and Minear. On co-constitution see Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined and Chen, Intoxicated; but for an important discussion of the limitations of co-constitution, see Pickens pp. 23-49.

27. Non-hierarchical analyses, such as the rhizome, are also not exempt from Pickens’s argument. Chen et al. claim that “horizontality can also be a site of violence and encroachment; horizontality can imply discreteness as much as connection. The rhizome doesn’t eliminate the possibility of single source growth from iconic, dubious schematic origins, and it does not remove the fantasy of territorial growth from its fantasy of distribution of knowledge. Even the rhizome can be colonial. And metaphors of waves, trees, and even rhizomes can be tools not only of white disability studies, but also of settler and imperial disability studies” (16).

28. Simondon writes that “individuation is an operation of amplifying structuration that makes the active properties of initially microphysical discontinuity pass to the macrophysical level; individuation is initiated on the level at which the discontinuous of the singular molecule is capable… of modulating an energy whose support is already a part of the continuum in the population of randomly arranged molecules” (Individuation 94).

29. For an intriguing reading of Simondon’s ethics between Individuation and Technical Objects, see Combes, pp. 57-78. On the ethics of the conclusion of Individuation, see Scott, pp. 177-99.