Abstract
In his Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information Simondon places his theory at distance from both phenomenology and structuralism. This is evidenced by his choice of elaborating the concept of the ‘transindividual’ by way of refuting the phenomenological concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ and the structuralist concept of ‘symbolic system’. In his main oeuvre he describes the transindividual regime of individuation differently from both the way in which the relation ‘to the Other’ (à Autrui) is – for phenomenology – the (transcendental) institution of intersubjectivity, and from the way in which the symbolic structure is – for structuralism – the functioning of society itself out of any ‘natural link’. This chapter situates Simondon’s theory of symbolic function in relation to phenomenology and structuralism through the analysis of his seminar Imagination and Invention (1965–1966).
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- 1.
A rapid glance through the discussion on the symbolic function at the time is offered by the paradigmatic form assumed by the debate that took place during the 1950s between structuralism and phenomenology on the heritage of Mauss’s Essai sur le don (1923–1924). According to Lévi-Strauss, Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss (1950), in Mauss the concept of symbol would be partially compatible with structuralism insofar as it becomes more and more detached from the Durkheimian theory of the collective subject and representation. The following year Claude Lefort, L’échange et la lutte des hommes (1951) (published in Sartre’s review Les temps modernes), contested from a phenomenological perspective Lévi-Strauss’s supposed cancellation of the individual in the whole of the social system and in the impersonal abstraction of symbolic function. At the end of the decade, on the occasion of Lévi-Strauss’s candidature to the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty wrote De Mauss à Lévi-Strauss (1959a), where he looked for a convergence between the two perspectives.
- 2.
These courses of general psychology were attended by a mixed group of psychologists and philosophers. In the organisation of studies in force until 1966–1967 the courses for the Certificat de psychologie générale were the base for both the degree of psychology and for one of the four qualifying courses for the teaching of philosophy. Favez-Boutonier is part of the generation of Daniel Lagache, in 1953 cofounder of the Société française de psychanalyse with Lacan, with whom he also founded the Association Psychanalytique de France in 1964, after the scission from which Lacan’s École freudienne de Paris had emerged. A quick glance at the authors quoted in Favez-Boutonier’s course is sufficient to give evidence for a connection to IMIN, in particular in the third part where Simondon relies on the problem posed about the relation between image and symbol.
- 3.
‘The existence of different categories of image-objects [objets-images], the third reality between the subjective and the objective, requires a particular kind of analysis which one might call, in the proper sense of the term, phenomenological, since it is peculiar to this kind of reality to manifest and impose its nature of image’ (IMIN 15).
- 4.
See above, n. 1.
- 5.
The reference to Espinas (1987) relies on Canguilhem 1952: 122–23. The program was also, although in a different way, Bergsonian, insofar as it allowed ‘the term biology the large sense it should have, and which it will probably acquire one day’ (Bergson 1932: 103) (see Chap. 8, n. 2). Once established that in IMIN Simondon ‘refuses to return to the anthropological presupposition of thought as the privilege of man’ (Lefebvre 2012: 65–66), I am trying here to push this hypothesis towards the ‘living system’.
- 6.
As I will show, the term metastability represents a notable exception: its partial usage is still carried on by Simondon in further writings, along with the relative concept of a state far from equilibrium full of potentials.
- 7.
IMIN was a course for both psychologists and philosophers. See above, n. 2.
- 8.
Published in the volume VIII of the Encyclopédie Française, entitled La vie mentale. In it Lacan reformulates the Jungian concept of ‘family complex’ in the terms of his ‘mirror stage’, thus anticipating the structuralist development of his thought during the 1950s, but still maintaining a ‘genealogical’ approach to the problems of law and the institution of the symbolic order. On the tormented writing of this text and its different versions, see Roudinesco 1993: 193 ff., where the author also delves into Lacan’s (quite shared indeed) debt towards Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt (see below, n. 19).
- 9.
‘The sign is, in relation to the thing, a supplementary term; the black table exists and is in itself complete without the word that refers to it […] the symbol, on the contrary, entertains an analytic relationship with the symbolised. Symbols are couples: this means that a symbol is the fragment of a primordial whole which has been divided following an accidental line’ (IMIN 4–5). IMIN 4 refers to Favez-Boutonier 1962–1963: 92–93. Her argument takes its start from Ortigues 1962: 203, where the author differentiates the image which tries to make the object present and the sign which accepts its absence: the symbol, instead, is an image employed as a sign, that is – one might say – an image which does not pretend to provide ‘presence’.
- 10.
In the conclusion, the author reaffirms the distinction and the natural continuity between image and symbol (Favez-Boutonier 1962–1963: 107–19).
- 11.
- 12.
See Sect. 4.1. Such as the transindividual, also the symbol is what really crosses the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ as the ‘mental symbol-image’ in the subject and as the materialisation of the ‘symbol-object’. Also in IMIN a double perspective necessarily follows on the same processes, the description of which depends on the side one choses to describe them: it is possible both to claim that the symbol-image elaborated within the subject can ‘borrow [emprunter le secours de] the materiality of the objects’ (IMIN 5), and to maintain that the ‘organising power’ of the ‘a posteriori image’ ‘continues when the situation [from which it emerged] ceases to exist’ (IMIN 20). Thus significations can circulate as linked to their origin and actually take part to the productivity of the symbolic function, only when they continue to ‘adhere to symbols’ (IMIN 132).
- 13.
‘Technicity at the level of the element is concretisation: it is what makes the element the actual product of a determined set, but not itself a set or individual. This characterisation makes the element detachable from the set [‘de l’élément’ is an evident editorial mistake] and liberates it for the constitution of new individuals’ (MEOT 73).
- 14.
‘The process of growth, maturation and decline, directly correspond to the common ground of images that constitute cultures, as norms for individual knowledge and action’ (IMIN 27).
- 15.
According to Van Caneghem (1989) the systematic absence of a theory of language in Simondon would depend on the ‘extreme and certainly excessive respect Simondon paid to the “territory” of his colleagues’ (Van Caneghem 1989: 816). Although academic opportunism might confirm Simondon’s resistance to treat the theme, it does not provide a definitive explanation.
- 16.
For Leroi-Gourhan the symbolic function, language in the wider sense, generally differentiates groupings based on instinct (species) from other based on language (ethnos). In analogy with the ‘exteriorisation of the organs involved in the carrying out of technics’, the ‘exteriorisation’ of memory makes of language a ‘particular form of memory’ which differentiates humans from other animals (Leroi-Gourhan 1965: 63–65). On Leroi-Gourhan’s influence on Simondon, see in particular Sects. 8.1 and 10.4. On this trajectory opened by Leroi-Gourhan are also based the ‘grammatologies’ of Derrida (1967) and Stiegler (1996) (see also Chap. 10, n. 28).
- 17.
This is not Merleau-Ponty’s stance, of course. According to him the systemic effects of the symbolic field on the relationship between organisms ground the institution of human societies (Merleau-Ponty 1954–1955: 49–50). Yet this is a necessary but not sufficient condition to grant a shift which always remains, for Merleau-Ponty, unbridgeable: ‘animal institution as “imprinting” […] does not have the value of a symbolic matrix’, since it does not own a force of ‘indefinite productivity’, due to the lack of any storage [mise en réserve] of historicity (39). Culture thus conceived as a field of ‘cultural knots’ (103) still marks a threshold in relation to ‘nature’ conceived as a kind of noumenal ground: the ‘non-instituted’ (Merleau-Ponty 1956–1960: 20).
- 18.
One out of three conferences held in 1946–1947 at the Collège philosophique, subsequently published in Canguilhem (1952).
- 19.
The German biologist Jakob von Uexküll made the concept of Umwelt a tool for ethologists and philosophers; Heidegger, for instance, used the concept to highlight the difference between human beings and animals which ‘do not have a World’. Uexküll’s little book Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen, was translated in French, according to a clearly French Heideggerian inflection, as Mondes animaux et monde humain (1934). Not only does the original title not suggest any difference between human beings and other animals, but Uexküll also uses in it the term ‘subject’ when referring to organisms, whether homo sapiens or not. Von Uexküll was a key author for more than a generation of French philosophers from Canguilhem to Deleuze (e.g. they both derive from him the well-known example of the milieu of the tick), and also including Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1956–1960: 220–234) and Simondon.
- 20.
It is worth recalling Canguilhem’s quick reference to Simondon’s IGPB when he hinted at ‘a new kind of Aristotelianism, on the condition, of course, that Aristotelian psychobiology and the modern technology of transmission would not be confused’ (Canguilhem 1943: 277–278).
- 21.
This connection between Canguilhem’s and Simondon’s epistemologies has been developed in Bardin (2015). Simondon’s necessity of overcoming Canguilhem’s ‘vitalism’ is possibly reinforced by the latter’s constant reference to perception, which evidences something more than a phenomenological blend in his approach. One should notice, for instance, the centrality of the ‘world of perception’ in determining the concept of milieu: ‘moreover, as a living, the human being does not escape from the general law of living beings. The milieu proper to it is the world of perception […] the environment to which the human being is supposed to react is originally centred on it’ (Canguilhem 1952: 152). Canguilhem concludes his essay stating that ‘if science is a fact in the world at the same time as it is a vision of the world, then it maintains a permanent and obligatory relation with perception’ (154).
- 22.
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). Techno-Symbolic Function. 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_9
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