Abstract
A close analysis of Simondon’s theory of magic in the third part of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects clearly shows its reliance on Hubert and Mauss’s A General Theory of Magic (1902–03). This will demonstrate that a considerable source of Simondon’s philosophy of technics is sociological, and explain how he conceives the symbolic function as essentially ‘techno-symbolic’. Hence two important texts of the 1960s, The Psycho-Sociology of Technicity (1960–61) and Culture and Technics (1965), can be the key to explore the relationship between religious rituals and technical instruments in the production of culture. Among these writings one can appreciate Simondon’s continual analysis of the different normativities that cross social systems, and fully understand the peculiar function he attributed to technicity – following, again, Leroi-Gourhan – in shaping the functioning of social systems today, and making of technological progress a crucially political problem.
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Notes
- 1.
It is probably superfluous to recall the etymology of the term ‘symbol’: it comes from the Greek verb symballo, an amalgam of sym (together) and bole (throw), with the approximate meaning of ‘putting together’ two different parts. This is something Simondon himself does not fail to remind in his writings.
- 2.
This phenomenological conception of the human body as ‘symbolised’ will encounter Lacan’s criticism: ‘the structure of the organism in Goldstein, the structure of behaviour in Maurice Merleau-Ponty […] the soul has been presented for centuries as a spiritualised body, contemporary phenomenology makes of the body a corporalised soul’ (Lacan 1962–1963: 237–38).
- 3.
See in particular chapter XIII on Les milieux magiques, which clearly demonstrates Uexküll’s influence on Simondon. From his interesting analysis of the concept of milieu, Petit also derives that ‘Piaget’s genetic interactionism and Simondon’s genetic relationalism share the same ambition: to think the co-genesis of organism and milieu’ (Petit 2010: 64). Although he is well aware that ‘this answer is not a solution but a problem’, I believe the path he opens here is a very profitable one, given that Piaget’s profound influence on Simondon’s thought is still to be understood.
- 4.
This would explain why, when Simondon thanks Canguilhem for his remarks which allowed him to find out the definitive form of his work, he particularly refers to the fact that the third part ‘owns a lot to his suggestions’ (MEOT 7). Furthermore, it would explain why the direct references to the concepts and terms developed in Individuation – in particular to the term transindividual – only appear in the introduction of the third part and in the conclusion, as seemingly later additions aimed at justifying the relation between the two theses. All this seems to evidence that MEOT was the result of subsequent drafts, while it is acknowledged by scholars that Individuation was the product of a continuous and rapid writing experience. As a result, the first two parts and the third one are often different in style, semantic choices and contents. Parts one and two – the only ones included in the first unofficial English translation – have interested the philosophers of technology since their publication. On the contrary the third part – genuinely speculative – has been rarely taken into consideration by the critique, as Hottois complains when referring to Michel Simondon’s memory – Gilbert’s son – that this section of the book was the one his father was most attached to (Hottois 1994: 118). The third part of MEOT is indeed, when seen from an exegetic and philosophical political perspective, the most interesting. It is full of insights that will be later developed by Simondon in subsequent works, and the ontological status of politics in his oeuvre can only be understood starting from the subsequent phase-shifts of the human-world system the original configuration of which is the net of relations called in MEOT ‘magic primitive unity’ (Sect. 10.2). For an attempt to interpret the third part of MEOT in relation to Individuation, see Barthélémy (2011).
- 5.
The conditions of possibility for magic to be not only the source of techniques, but also of religions and are set in the Appendice as follows: ‘either magic is collective or the notion of the sacred is individual’ (Hubert and Mauss 1902–1903: 140). The Appendice is not present in the English version.
- 6.
This text was redacted by Mauss on the occasion of his candidature to the Collège de France, and published with the title L’œuvre de Mauss par lui même (1930). ‘We [Mauss and Hubert] found at the basis [of magic] and of religion, a vast common notion we named by a term borrowed from the Melanesian-Polynesian context, the term mana. This idea is perhaps more general than the one of the sacred. Hereafter Durkheim tried to sociologically deduce the idea of the sacred. We were never sure he was right and I still speak of a magic-religious background’ (Mauss 1930: 218). In fact, when displaying his conception of the origin of the institution in his Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912), Durkheim seemingly tried to ‘expel’ magic from the domain of religion (Karsenti 1997: 223).
- 7.
See MEOT 156 e 161, and also MEOT 196, where he speaks of ‘primitive magic thought’.
- 8.
It is worth noting that Mauss’s description of the crowd phenomena does not fit Le Bon’s (1895) picture: they do not only threaten the social bond, they are also the moment of the possible formation of society.
- 9.
As Simondon himself will claim three years later, the original hypothesis of MEOT concerning the magic ‘net’ ‘presupposes an analysis of the structures of perception and action which discover in the word a certain number of key-points: an analysis which would follow the latest acquisitions of the theory of Form’ (PST 327).
- 10.
The choice appears consistent with Canguilhem’s suggestion: ‘the problem about the origin of the tool, the problem about the origin of society, the problem about origins in general, are unsolvable problems; the problems concerning origins are not historical problems. Receding to some anterior state is in no way particularly clarifying’ (Canguilhem 1955: 78; this part of the discussion only appeared in the original essay).
- 11.
Probably due to the anomalous writing process of the third part of MEOT. See above, n. 4.
- 12.
The ‘savage’ mode of perception and action characterises there the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic and therefore to the collective, which carried the extraction from the milieu of ‘pseudo-objects charged with the potential energy of a metastable system’ which determine the emergence of thought: ‘abstraction means to extract from’ (IMIN 136) (Sect. 9.2).
- 13.
Clearly pictured in Hottois (1994: 72).
- 14.
It is worth noting, however, that Simondon uses here the term ‘intersubjective’ to characterise collective individuation. This would confirm the hypothesis of an earlier phenomenological inspiration of Simondon reflected in the different layers of MEOT, with the later addition of the term – and elaboration of the concept of – transindividual. See above, n. 4.
- 15.
Simondon’s explicit statements concerning the technical constitution of the transindividual – well highlighted by Stiegler – have to be read carefully, since in MEOT it is not technicity, but magic, the original phase from which humanity emerges. In fact, although it is ‘the model of transindividuality’, technical activity never becomes for Simondon the only explanation of transindividual individuation: ‘technics and religion are the organisation of two symmetrical and opposite mediations, but they form a couple because they are each a phase of the primitive mediation and in this sense they are not endowed with a definitive autonomy’ (MEOT 169).
- 16.
Pages are not numbered.
- 17.
Charles Le Cœur, a former student of Malinowski, wrote his doctoral thesis in order to ‘resume the lesson of 10 years of African life [in Morocco]’ (Le Cœur 1939: 1). But the book is also a reflection on the ethical-political function of what today we would name cultural anthropology, through the criticism of two theories: Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of the primitive mentality and what Le Cœur calls ‘theory of economical rationalism’, in which he stigmatises the technocratic approach shared, in his view, by classical liberal theories and Marxism.
- 18.
‘For better or worse, we are brought back to opposing the ritual character of society to the utilitarianism of those who are part of it’ (Le Cœur 1939: 32).
- 19.
This part is not present in the 1930 edition of Durkheim’s book (Paris: PUF) and, consequently, in the English translation. On the same subject see also Durkheim (1924: 60 ff).
- 20.
Also Mauss declared he would accept Bergson’s concept of Homo faber only on the condition of revising the notion of invention out of any ‘mystery’. Invention is not a ‘creation’ but a ‘transformation’ of matter, the subject of which is not an individual élan but a ‘common effort’ (Mauss 1948: 75).
- 21.
Paper delivered at the Centre international de synthèse. In a note Leroi-Gourhan adds: ‘the object of this exposition had been initially treated in 1948–49 at the École des Hautes Études, and, during the same year, in two courses held at the University of Lyon’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1950: 89, n. 1).
- 22.
Simondon’s evaluation of Bergson’s philosophy of technics is of course quite critical. According to him, although by connecting technical activity to Homo faber he had the merit to show the relation between technicity and intelligence. Bergson contributed by reducing technicity to utilitarianism, by situating it on the passive side of his ‘axiological dualism of closed and open, static and dynamic, work and dream’ (MEOT 254).
- 23.
This is the same theoretical standpoint from which Simondon (particularly in Individuation and in the Note complémentaire) preferred to adopt the term transindividual – neither referred to the individual nor to the social system – to name the more fundamental dynamics of which these latter terms are only parts.
- 24.
It is worth noting that also Leroi-Gourhan pays a surprising tribute to Simondon by including PST in the bibliography of his Le geste et la parole.
- 25.
Simondon refers to Eliade (1956a) when picturing the original phase. But it is clear that he identifies it with magic, while Eliade to religion: ‘For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others’ (Eliade 1956b: 25).
- 26.
These structures can also be conceived as ‘codes’ the psycho-social function of which is to ‘decode everyday reality in order to know, interpret and implement it with a determined action’ (PST 340).
- 27.
It cannot be excluded, of course, that agriculture could adopt – as in fact it does – operative modalities comparable to those of breeding (Simondon himself provides such an example referring to grafted rosebushes, the hypertelic adaptation of which makes them fragile and entirely dependent on their artificial milieu, CT 3).
- 28.
In a certain sense Simondon is more faithful to the first Leroi-Gourhan (Evolution et techniques), insofar as he eminently confers on techniques, rather then to the symbolic function, the status of the distinctive ‘mark’ of the human condition. In fact Le geste et la parole is structured around the relation-contraposition of two primordial activities of ‘liberation’ – technical and symbolic – of the human ‘social organism’ from the constraints of the natural milieu. The importance of the activity of symbolic production and exchange is particularly highlighted by Leroi-Gourhan, in particular the one providing a ‘liberation of memory’: ‘the most striking material fact is certainly the “freeing” of tools, but the fundamental fact is really the “freeing” of the word and our unique ability to transfer our memory to a social organism outside ourselves’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1965: 34). It is important here to refer to the key concept of ‘prostheticity’ recalled by Hyppolite during a discussion at the Royaumont Conference. After underlining how he appreciated the attempt to avoid any reference to ‘consciousness’, Hyppolite points at ‘prostheticity’ as the possible point of convergence of cybernetics and existentialism (RO 418). Also in Wiener’s paper the question of the prosthesis emerged as crucial for the understanding of a ‘human-technical system’ (Wiener 1962: 103–12). The theme was crucial to the project of a ‘general organology’ carried on by Bergson and Canguilhem (see Chap. 9, notably n. 16), and more recently by Stiegler who – starting from Leroi-Gourhan and Simondon – made of ‘prostheticity’ a key concept for his philosophy by conceiving the ‘prosthetic’ object as the support of processes of (trans)individuation in order to ground symbolic production on the technical ‘exteriorisation of memory’ (hypomnèmata) (Stiegler 1994).
- 29.
On the problematic expression ‘technical evolution’, see Sect. 11.3.
- 30.
This allowed Leroi-Gourhan to classify human groups according to the degree of technological development: ‘a less flexible language or a less developed religion can be borrowed; but one would not change the plough for the hoe’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1945: 522).
- 31.
‘Henri Bergson, assuming a different point of view, has clearly defined in Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion a static condition [état statique] in which human groups would turn in a spiral, changing from generation to generation a limited number of concepts, of prescriptions progressively complicated, and a dynamic condition [état dynamique] in which the groups would take the straight line of development of their tendencies. We would like to resume this, this extremely fruitful view, by adapting it to our point of view’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1945: 340).
- 32.
Simondon’s complete bibliography and a list of abbreviations are provided in the Appendix.
References
Simondon’s complete bibliography and a list of abbreviations are provided in the Appendix.
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Bardin, A. (2015). Magic, Technics and Culture. In: Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9831-0_10
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