Abstract
The reference to Leroi-Gourhan is central to Simondon’s conception of the relation between biology, technology and the social system. This chapter explores Leroi-Gourhan’s influence on Simondon, particularly relying on Evolution and Technics (1943–1945), the work in two volumes that the latter read under the influence of George Canguilhem. It is on the basis of Canguilhem’s idea of a ‘general organology’ and Leroi-Gourhan’s palaeoanthropology that Simondon understands the different kinds of normativities implied by the biological and technical processes which structure and frame what he names the ‘transindividual’. On this background I shall try to read Simondon’s conception of culture as the regulatory mechanism through which the social system makes the different normativities it emerges from and is crossed by compatible. Hence it will be possible to grasp the ethical and political function Simondon attributes to the figure of the ‘technician’ as dependent on the kind of collective normativity it embodies rather than on some kind of individual heroic features.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Originally – along with Aspects du vitalisme and Le vivant et son milieu – it was part of a cycle of lectures Canguilhem held at the Collège philosophique in 1946–1947. All these lectures were later published in La connaissance de la vie (1952).
- 2.
According to Canguilhem, such a project, first sketched by Alfred Espinas (1897), would continue through Bergson (1907) and along the path covered by Leroi-Gourhan (Canguilhem 1952: 122–25). In fact Bergson (1932) conceives the tool as a prolongation of the same vital function of the organ, but adds a remark concerning the peculiar acceleration of human history due to the shift from one to the other. It is worth underlining that the meaning attributed by Simondon to the expression ‘general organology’ in MEOT 65 – as already highlighted by Stiegler (1994) – is limited to the study of technical elements; but what is at stake here is the concept, not the expression: and to this concern it must be recalled that technicity is carried by the element precisely because it is detachable from the set and therefore capable of transduction (MEOT 73).
- 3.
As I will explain, Leroi-Gourhan’s work is part of the same French tradition – ‘sociological’ in the wider sense – the influence of which, although not always evident, is crucial for the understanding of the political aspect of Simondon’s work.
- 4.
As previously clarified, at the time two theses were scheduled for a PhD, which preluded to the entering of French academia (see p. 1, n. 1).
- 5.
Simondon follows Leroi-Gourhan (via Canguilhem) in differentiating the tool [outil] and instrument [instrument]: the one conceived as a means of action on the environment (e.g. hammer), the other one as a means for gathering information from the environment (e.g. lenses). Where this distinction is not relevant, I will use the term tool. This distinction is, of course, precisely what an epistemology of subatomic physics calls into question according to Bachelard (1951); but this is not relevant at the scale of the hominisation process.
- 6.
It is worth noticing that such a characterisation of invention, in which the active and the passive functions are indiscernible – quite close to the Simondonian indeed – was reformulated by Leroi-Gourhan 20 years later in terms of a direct connection between ‘favourable milieu’ and ‘impersonality’: ‘in my Milieu et techniques I stressed the importance of a “favourable milieu” in the phenomenon of invention, and the fact that this phenomenon is usually impersonal in character’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1964: 223). In fact, from this perspective loan and invention become almost indiscernible, at least in relation to the mechanisms of their emergence (Leroi-Gourhan 1945: 461).
- 7.
‘When assimilated, the object is marked by two conditions: it receives the personal footprint of the new group […] and was bended to the exigencies of the raw materials present in its new habitat’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1945: 382). After establishing the difference between solutions concretised in ‘universal objects […] shared by all humanity’, the emergence of which depends on the ‘powerful’ influence of the external milieu, and ‘complex objects […] linked to a determinate ethnical group’, Leroi-Gourhan adds: ‘for each object one should balance the two causes: that is why there are no pure examples’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1943: 293).
- 8.
The two volumes of Evolution et technique first appear in the bibliography of MEOT, but only in the Entretien sur la mécanologie (1968) does Simondon explicitly declare his debt towards Leroi-Gourhan. The recently published fragment “Anthropo-technologie” (1961a) provides further evidence of Simondon’s debt.
- 9.
Although grounded on a different conception of information processes (Sect. 2.2), the concept is already in Wiener: ‘It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part’ (Wiener 1950: 18; see also 68 ff.).
- 10.
Norms and values are therefore the becoming of the social system, its ‘double’ historicity: ‘there is a historicity of the emergence of values as there is a historicity of the constitution of norms’. A historicity characterising the opening and closing of social systems and, with it, of their ethics (I 333).
- 11.
In this circumstance Simondon sketches the figure of the sage: ‘this directive force which continues cannot be a norm. The research of an absolute norm [mimes] the eternity and in-temporality within the becoming of a life: in the meantime vital and social becoming continues and the sage is reduced to the image of the sage’ (I 332). An analysis would be required of the notion of ‘wisdom’ he presents when evoking Zarathustra (I 280–82). For a first account of the theme of ethics in Simondon’s philosophy, see Hottois (1993).
- 12.
In fact, Simondon asserts that ‘among these values one can include culture’. And nevertheless he does not provide any hint on what these ‘absolute values’ would be based. My hypothesis is that the concept of ‘Culture’ expresses the absolute pervasiveness of ‘value’ as a transductive force in social systems.
- 13.
Furthermore, the risk run by culture is ambivalent. In fact, on the one hand it can simply adapt to the biological and technical normativities, and on the other hand it can totalise their symbolic capture, thus reducing them to mere homeostatic functions. In the first case culture would be reduced to ‘the promotion of the organic or the expression of the technical’ (NC 504), while in the second case it would determine the exclusion or recruitment of individuals in the social system according to symbols ‘of organic or technical nature’ (NC 509).
- 14.
‘Only technics is absolutely universalisable, since what resonates in it of the human being is so primitive, so close to the basic conditions of life, that each human being owns them in itself’ (LPH 272).
- 15.
Furthermore, according to Simondon technical thought would benefit from a ‘direct universality’ and the utmost communicability, thanks to the use of images that would avoid a ‘detour’ through the institution of language (MEOT 97–98). But this idea of images as codes mainly subtracted to cultural conditioning because directly linked to the perceptive apparatus seems frankly valid only within the boundaries of the mechanical techniques, i.e. within the project of the Encyclopédie.
- 16.
It is in this way that Simondon can for example detach the concept of ‘moral consciousness’ from any direct reference to the individual as such, and use it for indicating the shift between the exclusive and closed community and the transductive and open society (NC 509). It is precisely because it is grounded on ‘other than the vital necessities of a community’, that moral consciousness (the ‘sense of values’) entails the transductive opening characterising not only, but also the individual, whose transductive effort is suspended between the double risk of a solipsistic closure and a regressive (re)absorption into community, an ‘interioristic or communitarian deviation of transindividual spirituality’ (NC 508–509). It is precisely against the constraints of the normativity typical of the acte fou that Simondon evocates Zarathustra’s act of ‘going beyond’ (I 330 ff.). Is then the rupture of social normativity, the normative invention of the technical individual in itself political? Is the pure individual political as such, insofar it is a possible germ of collective individuation? This hypothesis of a basic political ‘power’ of the individual as such is not compatible with the results of Simondon’s thought and it can be assumed only through a partial reading of Individuation, in which the extension of the identification tout court of individual and political function would end up making of being itself a political issue, i.e. to make politics coincide with ontology. On the ‘acte fou’ interpreted from a political perspective, see Aspe and Combes (2004).
- 17.
In fact, the second and third subsections of the second section (see above Chap. 1, n. 28).
- 18.
In conformity with the typographical choices of the 2005 complete edition of Individuation, I insert between squared brackets the parts added in IGPB and later omitted in the IPC edition. It is worth noting that some variations, even important ones, have not been indicated as they should have (and this is precisely the case here). For a brief and clear account of these variations, see Carrozzini 2011: 156.
- 19.
‘Ethics expresses the sense of perpetual individuation, the stability of becoming of being as pre-indivuated and individuating’ (IPC 246).
- 20.
It is worth recalling that the Note was written in same period as the two theses. See the Appendix to this volume.
- 21.
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.
Aspe, B., and M. Combes. 2004. “L’acte fou.” Multitudes. “Politiques de l’ individuation. Penser avec Simondon” 2004/18. http://www.multitudes.net/category/l-edition-papier-en-ligne/Multitudes-18-Automne-2004/. Accessed 30 Dec 2014.
Bachelard, G. 1951. L’activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine. Paris: PUF.
Bergson, H. 1907. L’évolution créatrice. Paris: Alcan (English trans. Creative Evolution. London: Macmillan & Co., 1954).
Bergson, H. 1932. Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Paris: Alcan (English trans. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. London: Macmillan & Co., 1935).
Canguilhem, G. 1952. La connaissance de la vie. Paris: Vrin (English trans. Knowledge of Life. New York: Ordham University Press, 2008).
Carrozzini, G. 2011. Simondoniana. Commento storico-critico analitico de L’individuazione alla luce delle nozioni di forma e d’informazione. Milano: Mimesis.
Espinas, A.V. 1897. Les Origines de la technologie: étude sociologique. Paris: Alcan.
Hottois, G. 1993. Simondon et la philosophie de la “culture technique”. Bruxelles: De Boeck.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1943. Evolution et techniques I. L’homme et la matière. Paris: Albin Michel.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1945. Evolution et techniques II. Milieu et techniques. Paris: Albin Michel.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1957. Technique et société chez l’animal et chez l’homme. In Le fil du temps. Ethnologie et préhistoire, 68–84. Paris: Fayard 1983.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1964. Le geste et la parole. Technique et langage. Paris: Albin Michel (English trans: Gesture and Speech, I. Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 1993).
Stiegler, B. 1994. La technique et le temps. 1. La faute d’Épiméthée. Paris: Galilée.
Wiener, N. 1950. The human use of human beings. Cybernetics and society. London: Sphere Books, 1968.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bardin, A. (2015). Biological, Technical and Social Normativity. 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_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9831-0_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-9830-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-9831-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)