Books by Andrea Bardin
This combination of historiography and theory offers the growing Anglophone readership interested... more This combination of historiography and theory offers the growing Anglophone readership interested in the ideas of Gilbert Simondon a thorough and unprecedented survey of the French philosopher’s entire oeuvre. The publication, which breaks new ground in its thoroughness and breadth of analysis, systematically traces the interconnections between Simondon’s philosophy of science and technology on the one hand, and his political philosophy on the other.
The author sets Simondon’s ideas in the context of the epistemology of the late 1950s and the 1960s in France, the milieu that shaped a generation of key French thinkers such as Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida. This volume explores Simondon’s sources, which were as eclectic as they were influential: from the philosophy of Bergson to the cybernetics of Wiener, from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to the epistemology of Canguilhem, and from Bachelard’s philosophy of science to the positivist sociology and anthropology of luminaries such as Durkheim and Leroi-Gourhan. It also tackles aspects of Simondon’s philosophy that relate to Heidegger and Elull in their concern with the ontological relationship between technology and society, and discusses key scholars of Simondon such as Barthélémy, Combes, Stiegler, and Virno, as well as the work of contemporary protagonists in the philosophical debate on the relevance of technique. The author’s intimate knowledge of Simondon’s language allows him to resolve many of the semantic errors and misinterpretations that have plagued reactions to Simondon’s many philosophical neologisms, often drawn from his scientific studies.
È possibile ricavare dall’opera di Gilbert Simondon non soltanto delle suggestioni, ma anche degl... more È possibile ricavare dall’opera di Gilbert Simondon non soltanto delle suggestioni, ma anche degli elementi di filosofia politica? Questo libro tenta di farlo considerandone l’intero corpus e scavando nelle sue fonti: da Bergson a Wiener, attraverso le tradizioni fenomenologica ed epistemologica, cui appartengono i suoi maestri Merleau-Ponty e Canguilhem, fino alla sociologia francese letta attraverso le lenti della paleoetnologia di Leroi-Gourhan. La prima parte analizza il modo in cui Simondon riconfigura l'apparato concettuale della filosofia grazie a strumenti tipici del pensiero scientifico ed epistemologico, in particolare la fisica dei quanta, la termodinamica e la cibernetica. La seconda parte mostra quale sia l’incidenza di modelli biologici nella teorizzazione dei processi di genesi e funzionamento dei sistemi sociali e ne analizza la matrice bergsoniana. Tre intermezzi seguono il filo del dibattito suscitato dalla recente riscoperta di Simondon, intrecciandolo ad una teoria della produzione tecnico-simbolica di cui la terza parte svela la dimensione autenticamente politica, che investe la dinamica costitutiva del legame sociale e problematizza il concetto di natura umana. Per Simondon solo la programmazione di un intervento pedagogico-politico sulle infrastrutture tecnologiche tocca direttamente le nervature costitutive del sistema sociale ed implica - oltre che una problematizzazione dello statuto ontologico della società - una riflessione sullo statuto epistemologico e sulla forza predittiva delle scienze che di essa si occupano, aprendo in questo modo al problema dell'efficacia effettiva dell'universo culturale all’interno del quale tali scienze sono elaborate e quell’intervento programmato. È questa infine la congiuntura entro la quale l’opera di Simondon ci chiama a interrogare l’effettualità politica del pensiero filosofico.
Talks by Andrea Bardin
https://hematkhabar.ir/content/89281/
Journal Articles by Andrea Bardin
The Sociological Review, 2022
In this article we analyse the idea of progress and show that, since its early-modern inception, ... more In this article we analyse the idea of progress and show that, since its early-modern inception, it has relied on a twofold commitment. On the one hand, it rests on a project of mathematical modelisation of natural and social reality, deterministically conceived. On the other hand, it requires the production of a stable social order capable of implementing that model. This stance, we argue, is still dominant and defines the ‘(hyper-)modern condition’. Following Gilbert Simondon, we take the cybernetic notion of dynamic stability (‘homeostasis’) as paradigmatic of the hyper-modern condition. As we explain, this core notion has covered multiple epistemic domains, including the social sciences, and contributed to reformulate the modern idea of progress within the terms dictated by neoliberal governmentality. The connection we establish between cybernetics and neoliberalism will eventually allow us to use Simondon’s theory against both. In our view, Simondon’s concept of ‘metastability’ supports an alternative understanding of progress based on the ideas of social change and the government of normative invention, which includes the opening of social systems to a future beyond their own preservation.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2022
Human nature is something of a taboo on the left wing of contemporary political theory and scarce... more Human nature is something of a taboo on the left wing of contemporary political theory and scarcely more than a commonsense assumption on its right wing. This article aims to expose the taboo and to challenge the assumption. There is no way, we argue, to defeat conservative political theory without delving into political anthropology. With this purpose in mind, our article analyses the writings of Marx and Engels, and Simondon's concepts of the transindividual and technics. It shows that Simondon's theory of technics allows new interpretations of many of the themes scattered in Marx's and Engels's works and helps to formulate a materialist political anthropology which entails a political project of liberating 'human nature' from labour.
Theory, Culture & Society, 2021
This paper responds to an invitation to historians of political thought to enter the debate on ne... more This paper responds to an invitation to historians of political thought to enter the debate on new materialism (Dillet and Delevennes, 2018). It combines Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with some aspects of post-humanist and new materialist thought, without abandoning a more classically ‘historical’ characterization of materialism. Two keywords drawn from Barad and Simondon respectively – ‘ontoepistemology’ and ‘axiontology’ – represent the red thread of a narrative that connects the early modern invention of civil science (emblematically represented here by the ‘conceptual couple’ Descartes-Hobbes) to Wiener’s cybernetic theory of society. The political stakes common to these forms of mechanical materialism were attacked ontologically, epistemologically and politically by Simondon. His approach, I will argue, opens the path for a genuine materialist critique of the political anthropology implicit in modern political thought, and shifts political thinking from politics conceived as a problem to be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2018
Gilbert Simondon has recently attracted the interest of political philosophers and theorists, des... more Gilbert Simondon has recently attracted the interest of political philosophers and theorists, despite he is rather renowned as a philosopher of technics – as the author of Of the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects – who also elaborated a general theory of complex systems in Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information. A group of scholars has developed Gilles Deleuze’s early suggestion that Simondon’s social ontology might offer the basis for a re-theorisation of radical democracy. Others, following Herbert Marcuse, have instead focused on Simondon’s analysis of the relationship between technology and society. However, only a joint study of Simondon’s two major works can reveal their implicit political stakes. As I will argue, Simondon’s anti-Aristotelianism and his anti-Heideggerian understanding of the Greek origins of philosophy, allow us to conceive philosophical thought as a ‘tradition of invention’, that is, a pedagogical technē endowed with the political task of maintaining the openness of the social system and allowing normative invention to emerge from within.
History of Political Thought, 2019
After abandoning the approach taken in The Elements of Law, Hobbes used De Cive to establish his ... more After abandoning the approach taken in The Elements of Law, Hobbes used De Cive to establish his new civil science on a materialist basis, thus challenging the dualist foundations of Descartes’s mechanical philosophy. This shift is analysed here with close reference to the discontinuity in Hobbes’s use of the concepts of ‘laws of nature’ and ‘right reason’. The article argues that, the descriptive nature of mechanics notwithstanding, De Cive’s foundational aim left civil science with the normative task of producing its own material conditions of possibility until, in Leviathan, Hobbes went as far as reconsidering Plato’s philosophical commitment to political pedagogy.
Implications Philosophiques, 2019
This paper examines Simondon’s political thought within the context of his broader philosophical ... more This paper examines Simondon’s political thought within the context of his broader philosophical project. This project has two connected aims. First, an attempt to establish a unified epistemological foundation for the human sciences. Second, a political pedagogy that emerges from his account of technics. Both depend on Simondon’s critique of metaphysical dualism, which entails a rejection of ontological substantialism and determinism. Within this critical framework Simondon elaborates the concepts of information and technicity that ground his development of an ontology of processes (an ‘ontogenesis’), an epistemology of analogical (or ‘transductive’) knowledge, and a political theory of collective (or ‘transindividual’) invention.
Cet article présente la pensée politique de Simondon dans le contexte plus large de son oeuvre philosophique. Cette dernière est habitée par deux projets couplés : d'un côté celui d'une unification épistémologique des sciences humaines, de l'autre, un projet politico-pédagogique qui s'enracine dans sa philosophie de la technique. Le deux dépendent de la même critique du dualisme métaphysique, qui se prolonge dans une opposition nette au substantialisme et au déterminisme ontologiques. C'est dans un tel cadre que Simondon élabore les concepts d'information et de technicité qui fondent le développement d'une ontologie des processus (une « ontogenèse »), d'une épistémologie de la connaissance analogique (ou « transductive »), et d'une théorie politique de l'invention collective (ou « transindividuelle »).
Australasian Philosophical Review, 2018
This article questions Balibar’s claim that Simondon’s concept of the transindividual does not fu... more This article questions Balibar’s claim that Simondon’s concept of the transindividual does not fulfil all the requirements (the ‘three orders of consideration’) for a materialist ‘philosophical anthropology’. In fact, we demonstrate that Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, and notably his concept of the transindividual, can be, as it were, included in a genealogy of aleatory materialism. Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is indeed a philosophy of the transindividual insofar as it involves the constant revision of the different historical forms taken by social relations in the coevolution of human beings and their techno-social and natural milieu. Simondon’s way of conceiving anthropogenesis as an open and ‘metastable’ field in which individuals and processes relate to each other maintaining their own knowledge in motion, marks, in our view, a materialist style of thinking. Against this background we analyse Simondon’s overcoming of the dichotomy between the individual and society through a ‘double rejection’, we sketch his theory of a ‘double source’ for social relations, and we explain in what sense, from his perspective, the transindividual ‘can be said in many ways’.
Along the path opened by Galileo’s mechanics, early modern mechanical philosophy provided the met... more Along the path opened by Galileo’s mechanics, early modern mechanical philosophy provided the metaphysical framework in which ‘matter in motion’ underwent a process of reduction to mathematical description and to physical explanation. The struggle against the monstrous contingency of matter in motion generated epistemological monsters in the domains of both the natural and civil science. In natural philosophy Descartes’s institution of Reason as a disembodied subject dominated the whole process. In political theory it was Hobbes who opposed the artificial unity of the body politic to the monstrous multiplicity of the multitude. Through a parallel analysis of the basic structure of Descartes’s and Hobbes’s enterprises, this article explains in which sense Hobbes’s peculiar form of materialism is in fact to be considered a surreptitious reduction of materialism to its ideological counterpart, Cartesian dualism, and to its implicit political-pedagogical project.
According to Simondon, it is through the implementation of a ‘technical
mentality’ that a technoc... more According to Simondon, it is through the implementation of a ‘technical
mentality’ that a technocratic system grounded on a communitarian
‘ethics of productivity’ can be transformed into a system of metastable
functioning as a value. Simondon’s overall project is twofold, aiming
both at a unified paradigm for the social sciences, and at a pedagogy of
technics, inspired by the concept of the technical mentality. The goal of
this article is to provide a conjoint and consistent analysis of Simondon’s
paradigm by connecting the concepts of ‘organising amplification’ and
‘technical mentality’.
"The impressive force of Badiou‟s philosophy resides in its capacity to directly question the con... more "The impressive force of Badiou‟s philosophy resides in its capacity to directly question the connection between ontology and politics. According to Badiou, the autonomy of politics as a „generic procedure‟ cannot be disjoined from the mathematical formalisation of the relationship between One and multiplicity. Crucial to his concern has been the reference to both Deleuze and Lacan, who he assumes have accomplished two different traditions in twentieth-century French philosophy: „vitalist mysticism‟ and „mathematising idealism‟. It is in the second one, although in discontinuity with Lacan, to which Badiou sutures his project.
The Lacanian concept of the „not-all‟, in its relation to the notion of singularity, is the theoretical tool which allows Badiou to shape his own thought in relation to both Deleuze and Lacan. According to Badiou, if the first did not escape the ontological identification of Being and the One, the second ended cancelling the radical contingency of the Subject. From his perspective the two failures are different outcomes of the same fundamental incapability of defining the ontological status of the event.
Our hypothesis is that the two lines of thought sketched by Badiou in fact share precisely the problem which emerges in his philosophy with exemplary clarity: it is the problem of conceiving and recognising the eruption of the entirely new (the event) within the given ontological horizon, namely the problem of revolution. The transposition of this problem from the political field appears to be the ground of Badiou‟s own mathematical ontology. The question posed by our essay is whether Badiou‟s ontological-political stance – although representing it in its purity – is actually part of the problem that haunted most of French (political) thought during the last century."
Une tentative d'approche conjointe de Marx et de Simondon a affaire à deux penseurs dont la dista... more Une tentative d'approche conjointe de Marx et de Simondon a affaire à deux penseurs dont la distance est mise en évidence par les poids respectifs de leurs historiographies philosophiques : un jour peut-être, quand on pourra saisir la pensée de Simondon à partir de ses effets, on en parlera au pluriel, comme aujourd’hui on doit choisir entre plusieurs Marx. Donc, je parlerai du Marx auquel Simondon se réfère de manière polémique, en particulier à travers sa critique du paradigme du travail, auquel il oppose son nouveau paradigmatisme, anti-substantialiste et anti-déterministe. Ensuite, je discuterai - d’un point de vue marxien - les limites de l’approche politique simondonienne, pour finalement indiquer, dans son épistémologie, la source d’un nouveau paradigme pour une possible philosophie politique matérialiste. Ce n'est pas une démarche à laquelle Simondon aurait donné son accord, mais elle me semble permettre de saisir ce que sa philosophie nous autorise à penser : en fait, le but de mon intervention est de suggérer que l’ « épistémologie politique » de Simondon nous conduit à contester les présupposés théoriques sur lesquels la science politique moderne s’est développée, notamment l’anthropologie de la liberté et la physique du déterminisme.
CONTRO-RETORICA DELL'IDENTITÀ.
El tema de la identidad comunitaria parece emerger con insistencia en la retórica política contem... more El tema de la identidad comunitaria parece emerger con insistencia en la retórica política contemporánea hasta imponerse, por consiguiente, también en el debate filosófico. Como testimonio de esto podemos recordar los recientes trabajos de M. Castells, E. Laclau, G. Agamben, A. Negri, R.
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Books by Andrea Bardin
The author sets Simondon’s ideas in the context of the epistemology of the late 1950s and the 1960s in France, the milieu that shaped a generation of key French thinkers such as Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida. This volume explores Simondon’s sources, which were as eclectic as they were influential: from the philosophy of Bergson to the cybernetics of Wiener, from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to the epistemology of Canguilhem, and from Bachelard’s philosophy of science to the positivist sociology and anthropology of luminaries such as Durkheim and Leroi-Gourhan. It also tackles aspects of Simondon’s philosophy that relate to Heidegger and Elull in their concern with the ontological relationship between technology and society, and discusses key scholars of Simondon such as Barthélémy, Combes, Stiegler, and Virno, as well as the work of contemporary protagonists in the philosophical debate on the relevance of technique. The author’s intimate knowledge of Simondon’s language allows him to resolve many of the semantic errors and misinterpretations that have plagued reactions to Simondon’s many philosophical neologisms, often drawn from his scientific studies.
Talks by Andrea Bardin
Journal Articles by Andrea Bardin
Cet article présente la pensée politique de Simondon dans le contexte plus large de son oeuvre philosophique. Cette dernière est habitée par deux projets couplés : d'un côté celui d'une unification épistémologique des sciences humaines, de l'autre, un projet politico-pédagogique qui s'enracine dans sa philosophie de la technique. Le deux dépendent de la même critique du dualisme métaphysique, qui se prolonge dans une opposition nette au substantialisme et au déterminisme ontologiques. C'est dans un tel cadre que Simondon élabore les concepts d'information et de technicité qui fondent le développement d'une ontologie des processus (une « ontogenèse »), d'une épistémologie de la connaissance analogique (ou « transductive »), et d'une théorie politique de l'invention collective (ou « transindividuelle »).
mentality’ that a technocratic system grounded on a communitarian
‘ethics of productivity’ can be transformed into a system of metastable
functioning as a value. Simondon’s overall project is twofold, aiming
both at a unified paradigm for the social sciences, and at a pedagogy of
technics, inspired by the concept of the technical mentality. The goal of
this article is to provide a conjoint and consistent analysis of Simondon’s
paradigm by connecting the concepts of ‘organising amplification’ and
‘technical mentality’.
The Lacanian concept of the „not-all‟, in its relation to the notion of singularity, is the theoretical tool which allows Badiou to shape his own thought in relation to both Deleuze and Lacan. According to Badiou, if the first did not escape the ontological identification of Being and the One, the second ended cancelling the radical contingency of the Subject. From his perspective the two failures are different outcomes of the same fundamental incapability of defining the ontological status of the event.
Our hypothesis is that the two lines of thought sketched by Badiou in fact share precisely the problem which emerges in his philosophy with exemplary clarity: it is the problem of conceiving and recognising the eruption of the entirely new (the event) within the given ontological horizon, namely the problem of revolution. The transposition of this problem from the political field appears to be the ground of Badiou‟s own mathematical ontology. The question posed by our essay is whether Badiou‟s ontological-political stance – although representing it in its purity – is actually part of the problem that haunted most of French (political) thought during the last century."
The author sets Simondon’s ideas in the context of the epistemology of the late 1950s and the 1960s in France, the milieu that shaped a generation of key French thinkers such as Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida. This volume explores Simondon’s sources, which were as eclectic as they were influential: from the philosophy of Bergson to the cybernetics of Wiener, from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to the epistemology of Canguilhem, and from Bachelard’s philosophy of science to the positivist sociology and anthropology of luminaries such as Durkheim and Leroi-Gourhan. It also tackles aspects of Simondon’s philosophy that relate to Heidegger and Elull in their concern with the ontological relationship between technology and society, and discusses key scholars of Simondon such as Barthélémy, Combes, Stiegler, and Virno, as well as the work of contemporary protagonists in the philosophical debate on the relevance of technique. The author’s intimate knowledge of Simondon’s language allows him to resolve many of the semantic errors and misinterpretations that have plagued reactions to Simondon’s many philosophical neologisms, often drawn from his scientific studies.
Cet article présente la pensée politique de Simondon dans le contexte plus large de son oeuvre philosophique. Cette dernière est habitée par deux projets couplés : d'un côté celui d'une unification épistémologique des sciences humaines, de l'autre, un projet politico-pédagogique qui s'enracine dans sa philosophie de la technique. Le deux dépendent de la même critique du dualisme métaphysique, qui se prolonge dans une opposition nette au substantialisme et au déterminisme ontologiques. C'est dans un tel cadre que Simondon élabore les concepts d'information et de technicité qui fondent le développement d'une ontologie des processus (une « ontogenèse »), d'une épistémologie de la connaissance analogique (ou « transductive »), et d'une théorie politique de l'invention collective (ou « transindividuelle »).
mentality’ that a technocratic system grounded on a communitarian
‘ethics of productivity’ can be transformed into a system of metastable
functioning as a value. Simondon’s overall project is twofold, aiming
both at a unified paradigm for the social sciences, and at a pedagogy of
technics, inspired by the concept of the technical mentality. The goal of
this article is to provide a conjoint and consistent analysis of Simondon’s
paradigm by connecting the concepts of ‘organising amplification’ and
‘technical mentality’.
The Lacanian concept of the „not-all‟, in its relation to the notion of singularity, is the theoretical tool which allows Badiou to shape his own thought in relation to both Deleuze and Lacan. According to Badiou, if the first did not escape the ontological identification of Being and the One, the second ended cancelling the radical contingency of the Subject. From his perspective the two failures are different outcomes of the same fundamental incapability of defining the ontological status of the event.
Our hypothesis is that the two lines of thought sketched by Badiou in fact share precisely the problem which emerges in his philosophy with exemplary clarity: it is the problem of conceiving and recognising the eruption of the entirely new (the event) within the given ontological horizon, namely the problem of revolution. The transposition of this problem from the political field appears to be the ground of Badiou‟s own mathematical ontology. The question posed by our essay is whether Badiou‟s ontological-political stance – although representing it in its purity – is actually part of the problem that haunted most of French (political) thought during the last century."
Récemment redécouverte, l’œuvre de Gilbert Simondon inspire des travaux novateurs bien au-delà des frontières académiques françaises. La décade « Gilbert Simondon ou l’invention du futur », qui se tint du 5 au 15 août 2013 au Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, a rassemblé des participants du monde entier et de toutes disciplines. Cette décade fut un intense moment d’émulation et d’échange où tous les orateurs, qu’ils soient spécialistes, comme Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Andrew Feenberg ou Bernard Stiegler, venus d’autres horizons, tels que Armand Hatchuel, Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji ou Thierry Gaudin, ou jeunes chercheurs, eurent à cœur d’offrir la pensée la plus vive et de la partager dans un esprit d’ouverture. Il en résulte un livre foisonnant où l’astrophysique côtoie la psychothérapie, où l’architecture dialogue avec l’informatique, etc., et où tous les savoirs tendent vers une circulation encyclopédique.
Ces Actes débutent avec la question des « transductions politiques de Simondon », qui eut été naguère perçue comme incongrue tant son œuvre paraissait décalée par rapport aux idéologies dominantes. Il est d’autant plus frappant que nombreux soient ceux qui y trouvent, aujourd’hui, les outils pour penser la relation entre les évolutions technologiques et les normativités sociales.
Le second chapitre porte sur « la technoesthétique et le design ». Simondon a montré que la pensée esthétique déborde les œuvres d’art et peut s’appliquer aux objets techniques. Mais il fraye aussi la voie à une esthétique interne à la réalité technique, c’est-à-dire à une techno-esthétique ne reposant plus sur la contemplation mais sur la participation à la technicité.
Le troisième thème, « la culture technologique », parait classique. Toutefois, les techniques de miniaturisations électroniques à l’échelle du nanomètre comme les instruments astronomiques qui repoussent l’horizon d’observation du cosmos, imposent à la Culture d’intégrer les schèmes techniques innovants de la communication entre les échelles.
Le quatrième chapitre, consacré au « préindividuel quantique », est caractérisé par un souci de contemporanéité. Il ne s’agit pas de revenir à l’interprétation proposée par Simondon en son temps, mais de partir du formalisme quantique en tachant de produire une interprétation de la mécanique quantique basée sur les notions de préindividualité, de potentialité et de phases.
Avec le cinquième chapitre, on aborde les enjeux de « l’information et les réseaux » en étudiant l’informatique et les technologies de la communication. Ces technologies conditionnant aussi l’individuation psychique et collective, le sixième chapitre prolonge l’enquête en direction du « sens du transindividuel », notamment en relation avec les nouvelles formes de mobilisation sociale. Enfin, ce cycle de réflexions ne saurait s’achever sans permettre au lecteur de prendre la tangente : le dernier chapitre est consacré à « une philosophie en devenir » et rassemble les interventions esquissant des lignes d’évolution possibles pour la philosophie de Simondon.
Premier jalon dans l’internationalisation des études simondoniennes, cet ouvrage propose donc un panorama des recherches menées à partir de la pensée de Simondon dans une perspective opératoire résolument orientée vers l’avenir.
Although Simondon, during the 1980s, attended René Thom’s seminars, and the latter dedicated a short article to the former after his death (Thom 1994), the absence of any direct reference to Thom’s writings in Simondon’s books shows no particular evidence of an actual historical link between the two thinkers. And, nevertheless, René Thom’s brief essay Halte au hasard, silence au bruit triggered an interesting dispute on determinism in the 1980s, La querelle du déterminisme (1990), which can be a valid step to understanding what Simondon was concerned with when he elaborated his philosophy of individuation.
A brief detour through this dispute will provide a standpoint from which to appreciate how Simondon’s theory of individuation contributes to a criticism of metaphysical assumptions which, unexpectedly, inhabit the most anti-metaphysical stances. Linking the concepts of singularity and historicity through the paradigmatic assumption of quantum physics, Simondon formulates a peculiar conception of transductive processes, which allows him to attack both determinism and indeterminism by way of an original critique - neither empiricist nor idealistic - of the concepts of substance and cause.
In fact, the approach through which Simondon challenges morphogenetic processes in Individuation is effective both at the epistemological and at the historico-philosophical level. Taking his stand on his master Canguilhem’s assumptions, Simondon’s philosophy of individuation contributes both to dismantle the undisputed premises of the querelle on determinism themselves and to reveal the very metaphysical nature of modern mechanistic ontology.""
Il suo progetto di un’assiomatica delle scienze umane deriva, in primo luogo, da una documentata e puntuale riflessione sulle tecniche, che Simondon proseguirà lungo tutto l’arco della sua produzione scientifica, ovvero dalla prima metà degli anni ’50 sino alla prima metà degli anni ‘80. A partire da alcune suggestioni durkheimiane e bergsoniane sulla sacralità e sulla funzione sociale del mito, Simondon si riferisce, seppur implicitamente, agli studi di Marcel Mauss e di Leroi-Gourhan, per sottolineare il ruolo decisivo svolto dalle tecniche nel cosiddetto processo di ominazione.
La sua riflessione sulla paradigmaticità degli schemi tecnici, che traducono la relazione originaria tra uomo e ambiente, lo induce ad elaborare una concezione affatto ambivalente del mito: da un lato, infatti, Simondon sviluppa una critica costante al rischio di “chiusura comunitaria” veicolato dal mito e dalla sacralità in generale, dall’altro tende a riprodurre, nell’ambito dell’operare tecnico, la ricerca di una funzione archetipica dello “schema tecnico”, in parte ispirata al lavoro di Jung ed Eliade.
Nella sua analisi della mancata integrazione simbolica della tecnica nella cultura contemporanea, Simondon analizza le condizioni di possibilità di una convergenza di tecnicità e sacralità, elaborando in questo senso la necessità di un progetto pedagogico, di carattere istituzionale, che ne possa integrare le rispettive funzioni all’interno dei meccanismi di riproduzione ed apertura del sistema sociale.
The conference is open to anyone interested in a debate on Simondon, ecology, the digital, and politics. The event displays the complexity of Simondon’s philosophical enterprise and its relevance for researchers that are keen to cross disciplinary boundaries and explore new appropriations of his research.
Présentation
Récemment redécouverte, l’œuvre de Gilbert Simondon inspire des travaux novateurs bien au-delà des frontières académiques françaises. La décade « Gilbert Simondon ou l’invention du futur », qui se tint du 5 au 15 août 2013 au Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, a rassemblé des participants du monde entier et de toutes disciplines. Cette décade fut un intense moment d’émulation et d’échange où tous les orateurs, qu’ils soient spécialistes, comme Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Andrew Feenberg ou Bernard Stiegler, venus d’autres horizons, tels que Armand Hatchuel, Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji ou Thierry Gaudin, ou jeunes chercheurs, eurent à cœur d’offrir la pensée la plus vive et de la partager dans un esprit d’ouverture. Il en résulte un livre foisonnant où l’astrophysique côtoie la psychothérapie, où l’architecture dialogue avec l’informatique, etc., et où tous les savoirs tendent vers une circulation encyclopédique.
Ces Actes débutent avec la question des « transductions politiques de Simondon », qui eut été naguère perçue comme incongrue tant son œuvre paraissait décalée par rapport aux idéologies dominantes. Il est d’autant plus frappant que nombreux soient ceux qui y trouvent, aujourd’hui, les outils pour penser la relation entre les évolutions technologiques et les normativités sociales.
Le second chapitre porte sur « la technoesthétique et le design ». Simondon a montré que la pensée esthétique déborde les œuvres d’art et peut s’appliquer aux objets techniques. Mais il fraye aussi la voie à une esthétique interne à la réalité technique, c’est-à-dire à une techno-esthétique ne reposant plus sur la contemplation mais sur la participation à la technicité.
Le troisième thème, « la culture technologique », parait classique. Toutefois, les techniques de miniaturisations électroniques à l’échelle du nanomètre comme les instruments astronomiques qui repoussent l’horizon d’observation du cosmos, imposent à la Culture d’intégrer les schèmes techniques innovants de la communication entre les échelles.
Le quatrième chapitre, consacré au « préindividuel quantique », est caractérisé par un souci de contemporanéité. Il ne s’agit pas de revenir à l’interprétation proposée par Simondon en son temps, mais de partir du formalisme quantique en tachant de produire une interprétation de la mécanique quantique basée sur les notions de préindividualité, de potentialité et de phases.
Avec le cinquième chapitre, on aborde les enjeux de « l’information et les réseaux » en étudiant l’informatique et les technologies de la communication. Ces technologies conditionnant aussi l’individuation psychique et collective, le sixième chapitre prolonge l’enquête en direction du « sens du transindividuel », notamment en relation avec les nouvelles formes de mobilisation sociale. Enfin, ce cycle de réflexions ne saurait s’achever sans permettre au lecteur de prendre la tangente : le dernier chapitre est consacré à « une philosophie en devenir » et rassemble les interventions esquissant des lignes d’évolution possibles pour la philosophie de Simondon.
Premier jalon dans l’internationalisation des études simondoniennes, cet ouvrage propose donc un panorama des recherches menées à partir de la pensée de Simondon dans une perspective opératoire résolument orientée vers l’avenir.
In fact, during the 1640s, as his epistemology evolved, a parallel ideological progression took place in Hobbes’s civil science concerning the relation between science and power, which privileged one of the structural components of modern science: the tendency towards foundation, formalisation and the technical application of knowledge - in a word, deduction against experimentation. He began by supposing that science could be the solid base for civil power, but he increasingly conceived this as a circular relation in which politics had primacy, as it provided the material conditions for the possibility of science, while civil science just contributed (with the support of rhetoric) to the psychological conditions of possibility for civil power, i.e. public consent. This led Hobbes to a twofold ideological move: 1) he emptied the concept of ‘right reason’, both postulating the absolute absence of (divine) justice and embodying it in the deliberate fiction of the sovereign as a persona; 2) he made of ‘determinism’ both an ontological postulate (the guarantee of the neutrality and objectivity of science) and a rhetorical means of justification of the effective power of the laws of nature. Both assumptions reduced Hobbesian civil science to an ideological apology for state power.
In my presentation I shall provide the basic theoretical structure of this inaugural ideological move. In effect, Hobbes’s adoption of the Cartesian deductive model of science conferred to political theory not only its method, but also its ideological configuration. Not only did mechanistic determinism mark the birth of the ideology of science as a neutral form of knowledge, but Hobbes’s extension of mechanistic determinism to political theory also marked the birth of the ideology of technocracy as a neutral form of government. Thus, although early-modern deterministic mechanism contributed, thanks to Spinoza, to the destruction of the ancient faith in teleology as a theoretical tool for the justification of the existing state of things. In fact, with Hobbes, a kind of new teleology emerged within the same deterministic framework, in which the functioning of the body politic-automaton depended on an entirely predetermined goal: its continuation at all costs."
During the 1640s Hobbes’s scientia civilis progressively incorporated the dualistic epistemology of Descartes’s mechanicism into materialist philosophy by privileging one of the two structural features of modern science: the tendency towards ‘deduction’ rather than experimentation. This philosophical gesture, simultaneously epistemological and ideological, had considerable political consequences. For this reason Hobbes’s political theory will be read as an ideological response to the non-geometrical and non-mechanical functioning of ‘matter’, including ‘human matter’, evidenced by the threatening experimental practices carried on during the first half of the seventeenth century in both the Galilean science of nature and the English Civil War.
My argument is developed through three chapters. In Chapter One I briefly sketch the early debate concerning the epistemological status of mathematics and the ontological status of matter in motion, in order to understand what was at stake in the philosophical questioning of the subject and the object of the new Galilean science, as it resulted in Descartes’s metaphysical synthesis. My purpose is to analyse the effects of the philosophical debate around mechanics and its ontology of matter in Hobbes’s political theory, where political power and science became closely connected for both epistemological and political reasons.
Chapter Two is devoted to a close analysis of the development of Hobbes’s epistemology of civil science during the 1640s, and shows its ideological convergence with Descartes’s mechanicism. The peculiar positioning of De cive at the crossing of two ‘lines’ of research – epistemological and political – allows us to ‘calculate’ the impact of Hobbes’s systematic project on the development of his civil science. My aim is to show that an epistemological shift occurred in De cive which transformed Hobbes’s political theory from an ontology of the body politic based on the mechanics of light to an epistemology of the laws of nature conceived as the principles of right reason. The analysis of this transition particularly focuses on two connected issues: the concepts of ‘law(s) of nature’ and ‘right reason’, evidencing the discontinuity in the use of these concepts between The Elements of Law and De cive. Hence I shall enquire into Hobbes’s progressive consolidation of determinism during the 1640s, when he made of it an ontological postulate endowed with an epistemological function (the guarantee of the neutrality and objectivity of science) that would found the actual power of reason once it was implemented with civil power.
As explained in Chapter Three, Hobbes’s ideological interest during the 1640s in the questions that the epistemological shift of De cive had left wide open was a response to an epistemological and political exigency of foundation. The main instrument of such an operation was the redefinition and disciplinary organisation of human natural motion, which allowed for a reformulation of the ancient Platonic project according to the new geometrical science of motion. As a result, civil science had to provide civil power with its own material means of existence, requiring it to be supplemented by cultural technologies, such as rhetoric, religion, and history. As a matter of fact, Hobbes’s political-pedagogical project eventually became perfectly consistent with the dualistic world view on which Descartes had founded the new mechanical science of nature, and materialism could thus be reduced to the political agenda of mechanicism. This agenda entailed the convergence of sovereignty, science, and technocracy in a theory that would plan an artificial body politic as the only possible solution to the political problem posed by human nature.
My wider hypothesis is that this profoundly idealistic agenda still informs our understanding of nature and of the body politic. This agenda is epistemologically wrong, as far as it reduces the open method of science to the outdated metaphysical picture of it provided by Descartes, but is also politically bad, in so far as it suffocates politics itself by neutralising the emergence of political conflict and experimentation, labelling them as not only inessential but also dangerous to the body politic. On the contrary, philosophical materialism invites us to understand the self-organising tendency of matter as an undeniable risk implicit in the functioning of all systems, the social system included. But the early-modern agenda cannot be abandoned without the elaboration of a new epistemological agenda that takes into account the development of the twentieth century’s natural sciences. As I will explain in the conclusion, it is my conviction that this very framework allows for both the demystification of the early-modern conception of the deterministic machine and a new materialistic understanding of the relations between science and political power.