Excerpt
The Closed and the Open in Bergson and Simondon
One of Simondon’s implicit interlocutors is Henri Bergson. References to Bergson are often critical, but Bergson’s ideas are nonetheless an important source for Simondon’s own concepts. This article examines the paradigm of closed and open social systems, originally conceived by Bergson in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Bergson and Simondon are both interested in the question of how to overcome ‘closure’ in social systems and how to instigate ways of opening closed social groups in pursuit of a society that could be called ‘open.’ Symptomatic of closed social groups is a partial normativity that relies on principles of inclusion and exclusion, distinguishing those who belong to a group from those who do not. Those whose behavior is adapted to the group’s norms are included, while those who resist regulation are rejected and remain outside. Such a ‘closed morality’ is necessarily linked to binary moral values such as useful and harmful, good and bad. How can a social group free itself of closed morality, embrace ethical innovation and a spirit of universal values? How to achieve a leap beyond this narrow circle of thinking, judging and acting?
In his book The Two Sources, which was written in the shadow of World War I and with a vague foreboding of the world conflict to follow, Bergson calls for exceptional leaders that incorporate moral creativity and love of humanity. He develops an account of the figure of the mystic as a saving power. Roughly three decades later, Simondon completed his doctoral thesis, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, a voluminous draft that included at the very end a [End Page 60] Complementary Note, which investigated the “objective foundations” for a type of relation that he calls “transindividual.”1 For Simondon, transindividual relations are a passage toward innovation and societal opening. Technical transindividuality in particular, he claims, can fulfill this function. He proposes the idea that those endowed with a “technical mentality” can act as mediators or “amplificatory relays” for changing a society’s normativity and introducing new universal values. Thus, according to Simondon, it is the figure of the technician that instantiates an emancipatory transindividual relationship.
The figure of the mystic and the figure of the technician are both inventive characters: through their actions, whether moral invention or technical invention, they are supposed to contribute to the opening of societies that are caught in a circle of closure. However, in spite of these superficial similarities, there are crucial differences in the ways Bergson and Simondon conceive the paradigm of closed and open social systems. Thus, before we can assess their proposed solutions to the ethical problem – and raise the question of whether we are dealing in one case or the other with a sort of Nietzschean ‘ethics of heroism’ – we will have to look at the central concepts of their social philosophies. How do they envisage the threshold between nature and human social organizations? How can we understand the genesis and becoming of social individuation? Both thinkers attribute a central role to emotions, albeit in different ways. For Bergson, an open morality and the creation of universal values cannot be separated from emotional investments, just as artistic creation requires a role for sensibility and feelings. For Simondon, affects are a driving factor of individualization, the becoming of subjects capable of entering transindividual relations. After having examined Bergson’s and Simondon’s conceptions of social individuation, we will be able to evaluate their solutions to the ethical problem of closed and open social systems and consider their respective contribution in light of our own time.
1. Bergson’s paradigm of closed and open social systems
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion is Bergson’s final and long-awaited book in which he finally lays out his social and moral philosophy.2 His aim is to conceive socio-political forms of human relations in continuity with nature, since the human being as “political animal” is still a living being placed at one end of the divergent lines of evolution (Two Sources 95). Moreover, Bergson understands human systems of morality in relation to evolved biological instincts: “all morality […] is in essence biological” (91). This statement is difficult to interpret; Bergson certainly does not want to reduce the specificity of human life and experience to its species-being. However, what he clearly rejects is a strict separation [End Page 61] between the human and the living world that is presupposed, for instance, in Kantian deontological ethics based on an a-historical faculty of reason. For Bergson, intelligence is an evolutionary product of nature that has proved useful in solving problems that we as living beings encounter in the world.
The emergence of human societies, Bergson argues, was to some extent pre-figured by nature, since nature supplied a “vague and incomplete schema” of sociability, “while leaving all latitude to our intelligence and our will to follow its indications” (Two Sources 263; my translations). Social life is immanent in evolution, “like a vague ideal” (19), and naturally unfolds through organization, forms of coordination as well as subordination of elements, and this is the case whether it be human societies or social forms of organization among non-human animals. However, the distinction between human societies and those of bees or ants is that the social forms of the latter are prescribed by nature: they are rigid, functional organizations that leave hardly any room for variation or change such as humans are capable of. The social organizations of hymenoptera are relatively invariant and dependent on instinct, whereas human social formations rely on a set of rules and laws that are variable and open to transformation (19). “[O]nly one thing is natural,” about human social formations, which is “the necessity of rule” (20). According to Bergson, the particular rules and obligations of human societies are incidental or contingent, but always rest at bottom on the notion of obligation as a whole – the necessary fact that there should be obligations. This is what he calls the “totality of obligations” (15): it is a force that asserts itself and “which is necessarily the one that best imitates instinct” (18). This necessity resembles the power of instinct in its inescapable force, and hence, rather out of convenience, Bergson speaks of a virtual social instinct. Yet, “[w]hat we must perpetually recall is that, no one obligation being instinctive, obligation as a whole would have been instinct if human societies were not, so to speak, ballasted with variability and intelligence. It is a virtual instinct, like that which lies behind the habit of speech” (20). While speech always takes place in a particular semiotic system based on arbitrary conventions, the mere fact that we use speech is natural. Likewise, what is necessary with regard to human social formations is the habit of contracting habits, or the “social claim” that rules there must be. Hence, what Bergson intends is not that human societies should be considered a product of instinct in a direct continuation of natural evolution. Intelligence and will posit social norms that start to become ingrained as social habits, which rather “imitate” the force of vital norms. All of these habits he considers “incidental” but the habit of contracting these habits is the most fundamental and powerful of all: it [End Page 62] “is necessarily the one which best imitates instinct” (18). This is precisely the imperative that there must be obligations, which he sees as “being at the basis of societies and a necessary condition of their existence,” and he adds that it “would have a force comparable to that of instinct in respect of both intensity and regularity” (18). Only in this sense is the aggregate of social habits an extension of vital norms: they can be traced back to a fundamental habit of contracting habits. Bergson does not equate vital and social norms.
In Bergson’s view, human social formations, seemingly preordained by nature, attain a kind of social cohesion through a system of obligations, fixed in codes of law and incorporated in customs and habits. They can be characterized as ‘closed societies’ because their morality remains a closed one, whose “essential characteristic is […] to include at any moment a certain number of individuals, and exclude others” (Two Sources 22). A closed society operates through a schema of inclusion and exclusion; it is based on a morality that proliferates binary values such as good or bad, obedient or disobedient, useful or harmful. The moral obligations that we feel we have toward others do not include the whole of humanity. Our loyalty, solidarity and love may include our family and fellow citizens, but this attitude is not extended to humanity in general: “For between the nation, however big, and humanity there lies the whole distance from the finite to the indefinite, from the closed to the open” (24). As long as the human soul cannot make this leap, morally and emotionally, to embrace all of humankind in its moral attitude, it “revolves in a circle” (44), trapped in a closed society. The overall forward movement of the élan vital, the creative principle of life, has come to a halt (44).
The question Bergson poses is how to overcome this impasse, what the sources might be for a radical transformation, leading toward a single, open society that embraces all humanity (Two Sources 86). Although this may never exist, Bergson takes it as a fact that there have been “exceptional souls” that have aspired precisely to this, “who thus, instead of remaining within the limits of the group and going no further than the solidarity laid down by nature, were borne on a great surge of love towards humanity in general” (86). As examples, he cites the “saints of Christianity, sages of Greece, prophets of Israel, the Arahants of Buddhism” (26). He emphasizes that open morality has to be embodied in individuals, unlike the closed morality of obligation that is inscribed in impersonal formulas and imperative orders. Open morality calls for the imitation of examples, closed morality demands obedience to law:
That which can communicate open morality, propagate it, cannot be a corpus of doctrines or an institution. The power of a feeling cannot be triggered except by an example; hence the necessary role of a hero [End Page 63] of morality, famous or anonymous (the exemplary figure among these being the Christ of the Gospels). We must not believe, however, that the figure of the exemplary hero fills the void of the open: if imitation is necessary, it is also, strictly speaking, the imitation of nothing. There is no set of rules, norms, or conduct to follow: what must be imitated is an attitude, a tendency of the mind, and a capacity to act. (600)
Bergson places these exceptional souls in continuity with the generative impulse of life, the élan vital. This principle has often been misunderstood as a transcendent, vitalist principle, obscure in its origin and impossible to verify. Yet what it describes is wholly immanent to nature itself: continuous becoming (or duration) and continuous creation. Importantly, Bergson does not speak of an impersonal and abstract principle of movement in general: becoming is multiple and differently expressed in evolutionary, qualitative, or extensive becoming (Creative Evolution 330), and the suggestion of a single abstract principle may be a consequence of language. Bergson himself sometimes links his idea to Spinoza’s notion of natura naturans (Two Sources 49). What makes the saint, the sage, and the mystic exceptional characters is that they can wrest themselves from the stupor of natura naturata, liberate the soul that revolves in a circle, by reaching back to its creative condition of becoming.3 It means that the figure of the mystic has to reconnect with the natura naturans and place himself back into becoming.4 Following the figure of the mystic, therefore, means to embrace open becoming, to adopt “an attitude, a tendency of the mind, and a capacity to act” – in Simondon’s words, to follow a kind of movement of disindividuation.
The saint, the sage, and the mystic are inventive characters; they create new emotions and values, just as a musician creates new feelings through music (Bergson, Two Sources 32). Values such as justice, democracy, liberty, and equality are never given or known, but in need of invention. Although the words exist, they are empty placeholders so long as they have not been given a practical content and meaning (271). Bergson aims at universal values that are not abstract but concrete because they have to be invented each time under new conditions. Implicit in Bergson’s almost mystical account of exceptional souls is a profound conception of values as concrete universals and a rich theory of creative emotions (“emotions which beget thought” [35]). It is neither instinct nor intelligence that inspire these moral leaders but emotion, as we will see in more detail later. For now, let us turn to Simondon.
2. Simondon’s genetic schema of individuation
In his main thesis as well as the Complementary Note, Simondon develops the central ideas of his social philosophy. Most important is the distinction between community and society – concepts indebted to [End Page 64] Bergson’s closed/open paradigm. However, Simondon is also critical of Bergson’s account. He, too, seeks to avoid a strict separation between the vital and the social, hence rejecting any anthropology that ascribes an essence to man (Individuation 332) and any sociology that thinks its object as a domain separate from nature. But he cannot agree with Bergson’s notion of élan vital, which he interprets as a virtual, creative surge actualizing itself by carrying individuals toward a social form (Mode of Existence 168-9).
Instead, Simondon suggests his own dynamic model of individuation: the “hypothesis” of a “genetic schema,” according to which “coming-into-being is not the actualization of a virtuality […]: coming-into being is a series of spurts of structurations of a system, or of a successive individuation of system” (169). He is interested in dynamic systems, the energetic conditions and actual spatio-temporal processes they contain, seeking “functional analogies that link together a large number of processes of individuation belonging to extremely different domains” (208). He refers to physical, biological and psychosocial domains but he does not presume them to be distinct and pre-established structures that could simply be contrasted. Rather, he seeks to identify analogical processes within these various fields and observes how they vary, how they spread, become slowed down (neotenization), reach new plateaus, and how new processes are inserted. Thus, Simondon is not trying to identify domains or superimpose structures but is comparing relational activities which, for him, have the status of being (Individuation 8, 12-13).
One might think that Simondon’s position is not far from a Bergsonian dynamism, but Bergson conceived becoming only in terms of time, i.e., duration, the actualization of a virtuality, whereas Simondon’s operational schematism is always temporal and spatial and occurs in actual systems rich in tensions and potential energy. This genetic schema borrows its main concepts from physical science. The notion of metastability, for instance, allows Simondon to think dynamic genesis without relying on a metaphysical, if only virtual (i.e., immanent) principle such as the élan vital. The “primitive genetic schema” is supposed to explain “the successive stages of an individuating structuration, going from metastable state to metastable state by means of successive inventions of structures” (Mode of Existence 169). Metastability, that is, an energetic state far from equilibrium, is the condition that accounts for becoming.
Returning to our question of the threshold between nature and social systems, what does Simondon’s genetic schema of individuation mean for the way he conceives the emergence of human social formations? In a rather enigmatic remark, he declares that “society does not really emerge from the mutual presence of several individuals […]: it is the [End Page 65] operation and the condition of operation through which is created a mode of presence more complex than the presence of the individuated being alone” (Individuation 328). To begin with, we can state that a society is not simply a sum of denumerable individuals. First of all, an individual is never reducible to its individuated being, since for Simondon it always retains a charge of ‘pre-individual reality.’ This reality is the milieu that forms an ensemble with the individuated being, and at the same time is that inner potential for further transformations that the individual carries along with it. According to Simondon,
one could call nature this pre-individual reality that the individual bears with it by seeking to rediscover in the word nature the significations that the pre-Socratic philosophers gave it: […] nature is the reality of the possible, in the form of this ἄπειρον [ápeiron] from which Anaximander makes every individuated form emerge: Nature is not the contrary of Man, but the first phase of the being […]. According to the hypothesis presented here, ἄπειρον would remain in the individual, like a crystal that retains its mother liquor, and this charge of ἄπειρον would allow it to go toward a second individuation. (Individuation 343)
Simondon adopts a phase-shift model, according to which the first phase of being is nature as a metastable field, an unlimited pre-physical and prevital charge. The first phase shift occurs with processes of individuating structuration that lead to the individuated being and its milieu. At this first stage of individuation Simondon speaks equally of living and nonliving beings (whether crystals, viruses, bacteria, protozoa, or metazoa): the distinction is not between substantially different domains but between individuating processes that vary according to chronological, topological and informational parameters. A central feature is that the process of individuation in the case of living beings is ongoing and involves all the modalities of time. Whereas the individuation of a crystal terminates at the point at which the supersaturated solution is exhausted, a living being is in continuous exchange with its milieu: the membrane relates interiority, its accumulated past, with the exterior milieu that harbors future possibilities. Living beings are able to receive information from the milieu and modify their own structures in agreement with their purposes through recursive causality. This feedback mechanism is typical for living systems (as well as technical systems, such as machines designed to function through auto-regulation).
For our purposes the more interesting moment is the second phase-shift relevant to vital individuation. Unlike the first type of individuation, Simondon uses the term ‘individualization’ for the second; it involves the emergence of the psychosocial or what Simondon calls ‘transindividual relation.’ The psychosocial is a transindividual reality which can best be defined as a “relation of relations” (Combes 26) because it consists [End Page 66] of a set of participatory relations between subjects that are themselves relationally defined. A subject is not simply an individual. Simondon applauds Bergson for rejecting the view that reduces an individual being to an analyzable structure, given all at once in its actuality. However, by insisting on an individual’s dynamic nature, Bergson completely ignored structural realities. Simondon objects that “he has privileged intraindividual dynamism at the expense of structural realities that are just as intraindividual and important” (Individuation 308). Bergson was biased toward the temporal dimension and “has remained prejudiced against spatiality” (Individuation 308). In Simondon’s view, a subject is a ‘polyphasic being’ that has a temporal and spatial dimensionality (Individuation 358, original italics): it consists structurally of a coexistence of different phases, some latent but no less real: “The grand divisions of the real […] become phases, which are never totally simultaneous in actualization but nevertheless exist either as functional and structural actuality or as potentials; the potential becomes a phase of the actually existing real, instead of being pure virtuality” (Individuation 359, original italics). Simondon names these phases that compose the subject “the pre-individual phase, the individuated phase, and the transindividual phase, all of which partially but not completely correspond to what is designated by the concepts of nature, individual, and spirituality” (Individuation 348-9).
Beyond the first two already mentioned, the phase of transindividuality is the discovery of signification that occurs in the collective dimension, but which is nonetheless indissociable from the other two phases. There is an overlapping of phases, which means that a subject cannot clearly be divided into a biological animal-nature and a psychosocial being. Nor can the psychosocial be thought as a direct continuation of the vital:
The psychosocial is transindividual: it is this reality that the individuated being carries, this charge of being for future individuations. This charge should not be called élan vital, since it is not exactly in continuity with vital individuation, although it extends life, which is a first individuation. (Individuation 340; translation modified)
We might be tempted to regard what Simondon calls ‘charge of nature,’ ‘apeiron,’ or ‘pre-individual reality’ as some creative potentiality akin to Bergson’s élan vital. What could be argued in Simondon’s favor is that his phase-shift model of individuation does not follow a flow of qualitative becoming; instead, it encompasses continuities and discontinuities, thresholds and leaps across thresholds, phases that overlap and coexist both in temporal and spatial dimensions. It is a relational and differential model that focuses on the different types of relations, different orders of magnitude that are incompatible, that create tensions and differences to be [End Page 67] resolved. Although he often speaks of domains or entities as if they were given structures, he understands them in dynamic and relational terms.
This we can clearly see when Simondon discusses the distinction between ‘community’ and ‘society’ – concepts that are inspired by Bergson’s distinction between closed and open social systems. Simondon agrees that “the distinction Bergson makes between closed societies and open societies is no doubt valid” (Individuation 410), but he is also critical of his account: ‘closed’ and ‘open’ are not so much attributes that characterize social structures as they are types of relation. Simondon is interested in the types of psycho-social relations that hold between subjects within a social system. The decisive distinction will be whether they are ‘interindividual relations’ or relations of transindividuality, the latter being realized in technical transindividuality in particular. Simondon appears to take over Bergson’s oppositional structure by simply tweaking the terms: he calls ‘communities’ ‘closed’ and ‘societies’ ‘open.’ However, these do not oppose each other as irreconcilable:
Every social group is a mixture of community and society, if a community is defined as a code of extrinsic obligations with respect to individuals, and if a society is defined as an interiority with respect to individuals (Individuation 415).
By the ‘interiority’ of a society, Simondon means that subjects are related to one another in a transindividual relationship that they constitute through creative action and as bearers of signification. As Simondon puts it, “open societies correspond to an influence of individuals over their mutual relations, while community, the statutory form of relation, does not require conscience to exist” (Individuation 410).
Simondon does not explain the term ‘conscience’ at length, but says that it refers to a subject’s capacity to relate the inception of its action “to what the subject strives to be at the end of this act” (Individuation 409). It is a “teleology” that is submitted to an “internal self-regulation” (409) – in my reading, conscience amounts to a capacity of desire through which the subject engages in purposeful projects, creates a relationship to the future and regulates its present conditions in view of its future goal. Considered at the level of groups, a transindividual relationship is a cycle of desire aimed toward a common meaningful project. By contrast, ‘interindividual relations’ that predominantly hold within a community are largely determined by automatic and stereotyped behaviors, forsaking conscience. Social automatism functions according to moral classifications, characterized by the categories of inclusion/exclusion as well as the bipolarity of values: “out of these primitive categories of inclusion and exclusion, which correspond to actions of assimilation and disassimilation, there develop annexed categories of purity and impurity, kindness and [End Page 68] harmfulness, which are the social roots of the notion of good and evil. […] The bipolarity of values reveals a community” (411). The parallels to Bergson’s description of closed society are obvious.
Simondon argues that transindividual relationships, typical of an open society, are in principle inclusive and escape the binary codes of morality, offering instead a “continuous infinity of degrees of value” thanks to ‘analogical thought’:
a society utilizes an analogical thought in the veritable sense of the term and does not acknowledge merely two values, but a continuous infinity of degrees of value, from nothingness to the perfect, without there being any opposition of categories of good and evil and of good and bad beings.
(Individuation 410).
‘Analogical thought,’ in Simondon’s sense, is a type of mimetic thought that is attuned to experienced realities, follows real processes and takes up their tendencies. It is an important method for Simondon: “the analogical method is valid if it concerns a world where beings are defined by their operations and not by their structures, by what they do and not by what they are” (Individuation 669). In contrast to a mere comparison that identifies resemblances between structures, the analogical method proceeds by means of identities of operations (668). Simondon’s paradigm example of an activity based on the analogical method is that of technical invention – instantiating a relation between a human and a technical being in a particular milieu: “The dynamism of thought is the same as that of technical objects; mental schemas react upon each other during invention in the same way the diverse dynamisms of the technical object will react upon each other in their material functioning” (Mode of Existence 60). In other words, the mental schemas of the technician reflect the synergistic functioning of a technical assemblage and its material components. The inventor has to ‘follow’ the material tendencies of the technical assemblage – an act very similar to Bergsonian intuition, only that analogical intuition grasps the temporal and spatial dynamisms of a system. However, before we can further examine Simondon’s figure of the technician and the notion of technical invention as ‘free activity’ that embraces universal values, we will need to look at the importance of affects or emotions for the constitution of transindividual relationships (Simondon) and for social becoming in Bergson.5
The affective problematic in Simondon, and supra-intellectual emotions in Bergson
Simondon’s notion of transindividual relationships reveals that he does not conceive of subject and collective as antithetical terms. In fact, subjects cannot truly exist outside psychosocial individuation. To [End Page 69] a certain extent, the level of the collective is already pre-figured in the subject as polyphasic being. In Simondon’s words: “Gathered with other subjects, the subject can correlatively be the theatre and agent of a second individuation that gives birth to the transindividual collective and links subject to other subjects” (Individuation 348). Of great importance is this idea of being ‘polyphasic,’ which implies that the subject is never identical to itself, due to the coexistence and incompleteness of different phases. There are always tensions, incompatibilities that trigger new processes of structuration. Symptomatic of this inner conflict is what Simondon calls the ‘affective problematic,’ constituted by multiple qualitative dyads in the general dimensionality of pleasure and pain (“joyful and sad, happy and unhappy, exhilarating and depressing, bitterness or bliss, the degrading and the ennobling” [285]). In simple cases, this affective problematic can be resolved into emotions that regulate a living being’s behavior, such as the fight or flight response in animals. However, affective problems often lead to disorientation and disadaptation: the animal with psychic experience will be subject to emotions that call its being into question. Simondon discusses the extreme case of anxiety, an emotion that painfully reveals the structural reality of the subject: its division into the pre-individual, undetermined charge of nature and its individuated being. In anxiety, the structures of the individuated being are suffused and threatened by pre-individual nature. This can lead to destruction if it remains a solitary subject and cannot resolve its tensions in the dimension of the transindividual, for instance through creative action and the discovery of signification. For this reason, what Simondon calls the subconscious layer of ‘affectivo-emotivity’ is of crucial importance: it is the operational zone of the transindividual: “Emotion is a calling into question of the being in its individual aspect insofar it is the capacity to evoke an individuation of the collective that will overlap and link the individuated being” (353).
In Simondon’s view, the individuated being is never an isolated substantive individual but rather a “singular point of an open infinity of relations” (Individuation 407). As polyphasic subject, it relates to the pre-individual reality that it contains – a relation that gives rise to a further transindividual individuation together with other subjects. The centrality of the affective problematic as the operational center of this secondary transindividuation cannot be understated. Likewise, emotions play a crucial role in Bergson’s account of ethical and socio-political innovation. For Bergson, the source of an open morality and religion is a matter of love of humanity. However, ‘humanity’ is not a thing, a simple identifiable object to which one could direct one’s feelings. This is why ‘love of humanity’ resists an intellectualist psychology of emotion, which would determine an emotion by its relation to an object. It would [End Page 70] claim that an emotion is accompanied by an idea or representation of the object that produces the emotion. Moreover, an intellectualist psychology would assume that a restricted emotion could be expanded to encompass a larger object. For instance, love of one’s family or love of one’s country could be expanded to become love of humanity. According to Bergson, there is a difference of kind, not of degree, between the first two types of love and the third. Whereas the love of one’s family and country are “infra-intellectual” emotions, i.e., they are reflections of an intellectualist representation of an object (Two Sources 35), love of humanity has no precise object. Intellectualist psychology is confused here by language: ‘humanity’ is nothing but an empty word. For Bergson, love of humanity is what he tentatively calls a “supra-intellectual” emotion; this “kind of emotion can alone be productive of ideas” (36). In other words, it is not accompanied by an idea of a given object but creates an idea.
Creation, for Bergson, is always a matter of emotion, and this can best be exemplified in art, literature or music. Music is one of Bergson’s preferred examples: a musician can create new feelings through their music – feelings that are not simply extracted from life by art but literally created in the musical work (Two Sources, 32). This musical emotion can be so powerful that
[w]e feel, while we listen, as though we could not desire anything else but what the music is suggesting to us, […]. Let the music express joy or grief, pity or love, every moment we are what it expresses. […] When music weeps, all humanity, all nature, weeps with it. In point of fact it does not introduce these feelings into us; it introduces us into them, as passers-by are forced into a street dance.”
(31-2)
In the same way, Bergson believes, moral creativity, or what he calls ‘moral invention’ (66), can also arouse us. The mystic is a moral pioneer or inventor that can draw us into creative emotion and an open attitude of mind. Just as a musician creates new feelings, so does the mystic create new ideas of (for instance) justice, democracy, liberty, equality, brother- or sisterhood. These words are certainly not new but what they mean has to be recreated; they cannot be defined once and for all: “How is it possible to ask for a precise definition of liberty and of equality when the future must lie open to all sorts of progress, and especially to the creation of new conditions under which it will be possible to have forms of liberty and equality which are impossible of realization, perhaps of conception, today?” (271). In this way, Bergson can stake a claim to universal values that are not abstract but concrete, because they have to be endowed with meaning in their precise historical circumstances of emergence. They are not merely intellectual representations because, first, they do not express a state already achieved but indicate a becoming and, second, are suffused by the emotion that created them and acts on the will. [End Page 71]
Let us look at Bergson’s example of democracy, which he conceives as a very late development (the so-called democracies in antiquity are for him ‘false democracies’ because they were “based on slavery” [Two Sources 270]). Of all political systems, Bergson suggests, democracy is “furthest removed from nature,” which would rather tend toward ‘closed societies.’ Democracy confers inviolable rights to all human beings; it proclaims liberty and equality – in Bergson’s words, two hostile sisters that are reconciled by the love of fraternity. This is democracy in its essence, Bergson says, but he does not suggest that this essence is somehow eternal, defined once and for all. Rather, a more proper expression than ‘democracy’ would be ‘becoming democratic,’ as Bergson emphasizes its temporal nature: “Of course it must be considered only as an ideal, or rather a signpost indicating the way in which humanity should progress. In the first place, it was more than anything else as a protest that it was introduced into the world” (271, my emphasis). In this passage the political significance of emotions and the ideas they produce becomes evident: they enter the world as ‘protest,’ as rebellious action against an established form of politics or regime of repression. Love of humanity is initially fueled by indignation that rejects the categories of inclusion and exclusion. In this respect, love of humanity is different from that of one’s family or fellow citizens, which reach their limit with those that do not belong to these groups.
Bergson’s account of the leap from infra-intellectual emotions to supra-intellectual love, from closed to open morality, verges on an energetic explanation not entirely removed from Simondon’s energeticism. When Bergson insists on the leap or threshold that has to be crossed, arising from incompatibilities or tensions, one is reminded of Simondon’s account of the genesis of emotion, which is an integral part of his overall phase-shift theory of individuation. In the fourth chapter of Creative Evolution, Bergson is concerned with the nature of movement or becoming. There he claims that movement cannot be explained by adding one moment in time to another, as if we moved along a timeline. Zeno’s ‘Paradox of the Arrow’ consisted precisely in this: if one is mapping the continuous movement of the arrow on the flight path it traces in space, it seems to be possible to reconstruct movement through a sequence of spatial points, at each of which the arrow is at rest. But movement cannot be reconstructed from imperceptible halts; only retrospectively, after the movement has been accomplished, it may look as if the arrow had been at each single point. Bergson writes:
it is this same illusion which we find in ethics when the continually expanding forms of relative justice are defined as growing approximations of absolute justice. The most we are entitled to say is [End Page 72] that once the latter is stated, the former might be regarded as so many halts along a road which, plotted out retrospectively by us, would lead to absolute justice. And even then we should have to add that there had been, not gradual progress, but at a certain epoch a sudden leap. – It would be interesting to determine the exact point at which this saltus took place.
(Two Sources 64)
The movement of becoming expressed in absolute justice must have come into the world by “a sudden leap.” It was no gradual process but the crossing of a threshold. Bergson refers to “long-standing inequalities” that lower classes had to suffer (65). Under the condition of this disparity and the slow decay of the ruling class, certain exceptional characters must have arisen among the latter (it is striking that here the moral hero comes – in a very Nietzschean way – from the class of the aristocrats, thus likely to be free of ressentiment and bad conscience). Bergson does not pursue these speculations. In the end, he remains with the fact of the moral hero, the exceptional soul or mystic, and it seems that one could rightly speak of an ethics of heroism in Bergson.
The question we will have to pursue in the final section is whether or not we likewise find an ethical hero in Simondon’s figure of the technician. Andrea Bardin argues that the ethical and political function that Simondon attributes to the technician is not grounded in individual heroic features (127), and this because of Simondon’s notion of the subject, which designates not a being but an act, a system of relations, dependent on a dimension of collectivity. It would be wrong to assume that an individual alone could carry out affective and ethical dynamisms that lead to political innovation. Nevertheless, as I will argue, there are certain remnants of mysticism in Simondon’s account of the technical inventor and the notion of ‘collective invention’ is not the whole story.
4. The ‘mysticism’ of technical invention
Simondon characterizes the technician or inventor as being in a dialogue with nature and the object. In his essay “Individuation and Invention,” he attempts a genealogy of the technician, tracing him back to the sorcerer, the physician, the priest – all figures that stood apart from the community because of their special powers and their relation to “the object insofar as it is hidden from or inaccessible to the people of the community” (Individuation 413). In the 6th century BCE, the philosophers Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes from the Greek cities of Ionia were technicians. They were skilled in experimental research and craftsmanship, and here Simondon locates the appearance of free thought. Today’s technicians, according to Simondon, are not specialized laborers or engineers, caught in interindividual work-relationships; [End Page 73]
the veritable technical activity today is in the domain of scientific research, which because it is research is oriented toward objects or properties of objects that are still unknown. Free individuals are those who carry out research and thereby institute a relation with the nonsocial object.(Individuation 413)
There seems here to be a necessary moment of distancing from communal relationships, taking a step back and instituting a new relation with a world of objects, with what Simondon calls ‘technical universe.’ This necessary condition of isolation becomes even more obvious in his main doctoral thesis:
the veritable transindividual relation only begins beyond solitude; it is constituted by the individual who called himself into question and not by the convergent sum of interindividual rapports. […] The veritable individual is one who has traversed solitude; what the individual discovers beyond solitude is the presence of a transindividual relation. The individual finds the universality of relation at the end of the trial that is imposed on him, and this trial is one of isolation.(313)
Simondon’s example is that of Pascal who discovers transindividuality in the reciprocal relation with Christ. Pascal is only capable of this new relation by negating his individual identity and discovering “the transcendent existence of a being in which the origin of all transindividuality resides” (314). The problem with this religious example is that it presupposes a transcendent origin of transindividuality, while Simondon insists that “the transindividual is self-constitutive” (314).
What is important, however, as a condition for instituting a transindividual relation, is the requirement of calling one’s identity into question, a solitude or isolation from communal relationships. This requirement is reminiscent of ascetic religious practices, and thus Simondon’s technician, who institutes a technical transindividual relationship by inserting himself into the technical universe, bears a residue of the mystic or saint. We might wonder why Simondon needs this theoretical component – the “trial of isolation.” Would it not be better to avoid this mystical element and focus on the transindividual relationship as ‘collective invention,’ as consisting of an assemblage of institutions, scientific and technical publications, technical objects, scientists and technicians? The answer is that Simondon’s genetic schema of individuation requires a moment of disindividuation, which is a provisional stage on the way to participating in a broader individuation (Individuation 180). It is important to emphasize that Simondon’s notion of the transindividual is not a relation between individuals but between subjects that are never fully individuated, whose individuality is always at risk of being submerged by a rising tide of pre-individuality or undetermined nature. In fact, the charge of preindividuality is a condition [End Page 74] of creative action and invention: “it is not the individual who invents, it is the subject” (Mode of Existence 248).
Contrary to Bergson, Simondon does not require a heroic individual that embodies an open morality and can draw others in like “passersby […] forced into a street dance” (Two Sources 32). For Simondon the technical act is rather the result of the relation between two asymmetrical conditions: the subject of the inventor and the technical universe, which consists of technical objects that conserve the human effort of previous inventions. For Simondon, the technical object (or ‘being’) “exists as a seed of thought that contains a normativity extending far beyond itself. The technical being […] therefore constitutes a path that transmits from individual to individual a certain capacity of creation, as if there were a dynamism common to all research and a society of individuals who create technical beings” (Individuation 416). This propagation (or ‘transduction’) of creative energy requires the metastable dynamism of the whole system and cannot be reliant upon a particular type of individual. Thus, I agree with Andrea Bardin’s argument:
It is clear that, as far as the social system is concerned, there is no predetermined typology of the individual to carry on transduction, because in its metastable dynamics collective invention is essentially transindividual. In fact, the ethical act, which opens the social system, can be defined by its conditions of emergence and its function, rather than by the individuality in which it is – so to speak – embodied. (140)
There is therefore no ethics of heroism in Simondon’s conception of technical invention. However, he characterizes the figure of the technician by means of ‘free activity,’ or capacity for analogical thought. According to Simondon, the technician is not trapped in relations of labor, following orders given from outside. Technical activity is completely immersed in the operative system, in the modulation of the materials and functions, and only compliant with the laws of nature. It is a self-regulated and therefore free activity. Certainly, Simondon’s optimism about the free activity of the technician is highly questionable, given economic realities. At least today, the technician is not a lone inventor but usually an employee, working in the lab of a large corporation or a military- or state-funded institution.
What is also dubious is Simondon’s belief that the spread of technologies into closed communities can have a liberating effect due to the intrinsic normativity in technical objects. Simondon identifies a number of values inherent in technical objects, the most important of which are purity, openness, and universality. The purity of a technical object lies in its kernel of functioning and can be revealed under a superficial layer of social over-determinations. The ideal technical object is open, inasmuch as its parts can be replaced, adjusted or improved when it malfunctions [End Page 75] (“Technical Mentality” 12). Furthermore, a technical object is a carrier of information that is universally valid and communicable. As Charles Le Coeur writes in his book Le rite et l’outil. Essai sur le rationalisme social et la pluralité des civilisations (1939) – the only book of sociology that Simondon cites in his bibliography of The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects – “Whether one is French or Arab, a driver pushes the same accelerator and pulls the same brake, because there is only one way to make a car go. The same causes produce the same effects, no matter in which society we live” (qtd. in Bardin 177).
In contradistinction to culturally determined institutions and customs – forms of hospitality, greeting, apologies, etc. – technology introduces a universality into communities that, in Simondon’s view, opens up their codes of values. Simondon may be right to detect an enormous impact of technologies on culturally ‘closed’ communities, but what is surprising is his confidence that this impact will be ethical. We are forced to be much more cynical today, knowing that even technologies that initially promised a globally democratizing impact such as the Internet have been compromised through commercialization, censorship, and surveillance. The idea that technological innovation is an ethical power of opening can no longer convince us. Moreover, access to technologies is not guaranteed but (leaving the question of cost and availability aside) is often a socio-political issue (for instance, when governments ban women from driving cars). In his series of articles “Psychosociologie de la technicité” (1960-61) Simondon discusses the issue of offering technical education to women in particular, but his pedagogical-political program for implementing a technical culture seems to presuppose an already open democratic political regime. The ethical power and tendency toward opening that he proposes for technical activity have never been less clear.
Conclusion
I believe the paradigm of open and closed societies is still a useful one and can be relevant in our globalized capitalist world. The model of the State is intact; borders are ferociously protected; the schema of inclusion and exclusion operates against non-citizens as well as against those excluded within. By no means have we overcome a morality of binary values. So, what can we make of the suggestions offered by Bergson and Simondon, so long ‘after’ their work? These are simply some reflections on this problem.
Bergson’s account of open morality as part of a lived practice, as not fixated in impersonal formulas and codes of laws, as never fully accomplished but in becoming, can still inspire us today, and indeed has been taken up by other thinkers, for instance in the form of the conception [End Page 76] of ‘becoming-democratic.’ Equally interesting is the important role that Bergson ascribes to ‘creative emotions’: ‘supra-intellectual’ emotions that produce ideas rather than representing existing ones, forming universal ideas that enter the world as protest, include all of humanity in their scope and proclaim a new kind of concrete universality. His reflections on emotion and universality remain a promising path that awaits further elaboration. However, his account suffers from the fact that his figure of the mystic appears to borrow from an ethics of heroism. The individual, exceptional or not, can no longer serve to ground our hopes. A rather compelling feeling is that ethics can neither be expressed in impersonal formulae or laws nor in an exceptional type of individual.
Along similar lines, one could dismiss Simondon’s account of the technician, but perhaps this would be too quick. Is the technician just an analogue of the mystic? Not quite. As we have seen, the technician is not an individual at all but a ‘subject.’ Simondon’s notion of the subject as a set of relations, constituted through its acts, can help us here. An ethics has to be expressed in practices, or acts, and thus lived transindividually. Simondon believes that his inventive character of the technician can fulfill the task of ethical innovation and political opening, in the sense that technical activity constitutes a transindividual relationship that reaches across times and spaces and conserves human thought and signification. Participation in technical transindividual relationships is principally open for all that have ‘technical taste’ and a ‘technical mentality.’ Social transformation can thus be propelled through collective action, free inventive acts that escape the logic of the market – or as Simondon says, “a morality of productivity” (Individuation 432). In our hyper-technicized times, however, it would be better to avoid formulating the ideal of collective action as technical activity, which seems impossible to extricate entirely from a complicity with the demands of the capitalist market, the state, etc. It may be that no quasi-evolutionary, progressive account of the development of technical objects is possible, for technologies change in kind as well as in degree, and so do the conditions of their ‘progress’ – from analogue to digital, for instance, wherein the role of a ‘social machine’ (Marx) grows ever more imbricated with the means of technical development. In the end, the technical machine is only part of a social assemblage.
The optimism of the enthusiast that we find in Simondon does not efface the fact that other aspects of his philosophy may be of interest for social and political theory. A number of thinkers including Bernard Stiegler, Muriel Combes, Jason Read, and Bardin have attempted to extract a political philosophy of the transindividual from Simondon. The challenge is to render the notion of the transindividual productive without reproducing the entire framework of Simondon’s genetic schema [End Page 77] of individuation. This schema, as we have seen, tries to identify analogical relations – whether physical, biological or psychosocial. But the supposed universality of the model, taken from physical science and applied to biological and socio-political processes alike, is a problem. This, I think, is where new inventions are needed, to broaden and deepen the conceptual tools, drawing from contemporary scientific and sociological resources for more nuanced theories of individuation.
Notes
1. Simondon removed this ‘Complementary Note: The Objective Foundations of the Transindividual’ from the original manuscript shortly before his oral examination in 1958. He later reintegrated a slightly revised version under the title ‘Complementary Note on the Consequences of the Notion of Individuation’ in the 1989 Aubier edition of L’Individuation psychique et collective, which basically comprised the second part of his original doctoral thesis.
2. For most of his lifetime, Bergson was a philosopher of international acclaim with not only intellectual but also political impact, given his collaboration with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in founding the League of Nations. It was thus all the more surprising to his contemporaries that nowhere in his major works did he develop a social and political philosophy. Bergson must have felt the expectation, and concluded the summary two-part Introduction (1922), intended to introduce the reader to his entire oeuvre, with the sentence “One is never compelled to write a book” (Creative Mind 95), as if to apologize for this gap. However, when he did finally publish The Two Sources in 1932, the zenith of his popularity had passed, and it did not match the success of his previous books.
3. As Bergson puts it in a slightly different context (namely when he speaks of the challenge for the philosopher to think in terms of time and becoming), what is required is “that we reverse the bent of our intellectual habits” (Creative Evolution 341). The French phrase is “qu’on remonte la pente des habitudes intellectuelles,” which can be rendered literally (in a slightly awkward translation): “to climb back up the slope of our intellectual habits.”
4. “Through those geniuses of the will, the impetus of life, traversing matter, wrests from it, for the future of the species, promises such as were out of the question when the species was being constituted. Hence in passing from social solidarity to the brotherhood of man, we break with one particular nature, but not with all nature. It might be said, by slightly distorting the terms of Spinoza, that it is to get back to natura naturans that we break away from natura naturata. Hence, between the first morality and the second, lies the whole distance between repose and movement.” (Two Sources 49)
5. What is still lacking is a comprehensive account of Simondon’s reflections on affects, while in the case of Bergson, an interesting advance in this direction is due to Michael Kelly (2013). As to the question whether Simondon or Bergson distinguish the various notions ‘affect,’ ‘affection,’ ‘feeling,’ or ’emotion,’ further research is needed. Simondon seems to use the French term affection in order to speak of pre-individual or a-subjective, fleeting states of becoming that are not yet constituted as a unity. By contrast, an ’emotion’ (in French, émotion) “presents itself as a totality and possesses a certain internal resonance that allows it to perpetuate itself” (Individuation 289). “[E]motion is the organization of affections” (290), which is metastable and allows for the passage from one emotion to another. Thus, it seems that affections are differential elements of an affective problematic, which an emotion integrates into a metastable organization but the tensions of which it cannot manage to resolve. However, it is not clear whether Simondon is always consistent in this use of terms. Bergson seems to use the French terms émotion and sentiment interchangeably. The distinction that is of greater import for him is that “between two kinds of emotion (émotion), two varieties of feelings (sentiment),” namely those he calls “infra-intellectual” and those he calls “supra-intellectual” (Two Sources 34-5). We will come to this distinction shortly.