Accueil
"The term ‘acceleration’, popularised in current philosophical debates,can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: first, to the successionof political, scientific and especially technological transformations in recent history, with an emphasis on the rhythm of these transformations (see e.g. Rosa 2013). It is then used, in a somewhat messianic tone, to consider these transformations as leading towards a technological end of History termed ‘Singularity’. It can also refer to a specific brand of avant-garde politics, termed ‘accelerationist’, which proposes to match these transformations on the level of political action. This last form of acceleration traces its lineage in Deleuzian thought (among others). This complex nexus of philosophical, technological and political understandings of acceleration requires a conceptual clarification in order to deploy it in a meaningful way." (p.499)
"It is not an exaggeration to say that intensity constitutes the main element of Simondon’s theory of individuation. Intensity produces a mode of propagation with speed and non linear acceleration. Simondon calls this form of propagation transduction. Simondon’s concept of individuation aims at reconciling becoming and being, hence allowing a new way of philosophising that allows an understanding contemporary to science and technology. Simondon starts with individuation rather than individuals, since an individual is never stable but rather metastable, that is, in a constant process of individuation. Taken together with the notion of the pre-individual –the potential which cannot be exhausted by individuation–a new cycle of individuation is perpetually generated, without a definitive stabilisation. Simondon’s theory of individuation attempts to overthrow the Aristotelian hylomorphism, which considers form (morphè) and matter (hylè) as the intuitive model to comprehend being (Simondon 2005). The reason is that such hylomorphism fails to reconcile being and becoming, and hence opposes being to becoming. The strategy of Simondon, as shown in the first pages of L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, is to oppose the mould (that which gives form) with a concept of modulation (2005: 45–
; while the mould is a fixed concept, which imprints a predetermined form onto formless matter, the process of modulation functions through a process of dynamic interaction between different actors, which are carriers of information. Simondon’s example is that of brick-making: hylomorphic thinking sees the clay as deformed and formed by the mould (i.e. the mould being the form, and clay being the matter) ; modulative thinking sees brick-making as operational, as resulting from the interactions of different actors: the wall of the mould, the ingredients in the clay, the hands of the worker, the moisture of the clay, the temperature, and so on. Brick-making is rather conceived in this case as a modulation of information." (pp.500-501)
"Individuation is determined by the internal dynamic within the individual and the various relations to its milieu. The example to which Simondon often refers for explaining his theory of individuation is the crystallisation of a supersaturated solution. A supersaturated solutionis one in which the amount of dissolved material exceeds the normal amount that the solvent can support. Let us consider a supersaturated solution of sodium chloride (salt): when a small amount of energy (e.g. heat) is given to the solution, a process of crystallisation starts taking place in which energy and information propagate transductively and crystal seeds thus formed also release heat to speed up the process (Simondon 2005: 77–84). Simondon (1960, 2005) uses crystallisation as a paradigm to create an analogy between individuation of physical being, living being and psychical being, that serves as a general model of individuation. Though this analogy is questionable, it serves as the fundamental image of individuation.
Here transduction is the synonym of speed in Simondon’s concept of individuation. It has to be distinguished from induction and deduction, which belong to the classical logic. Classical logic operates on the inference of propositions, while transduction leads to a transformation of the structure of being in question. Transduction is conditioned and governed by the intensity resulting from tensions and incompatibilities. We can push this even further by saying that his principle work, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, consists in reading form in terms of information and information in terms of intensity, or what he calls signification, disparation. Disparation is the condition of individuation, playing a crucial role in physical, living and psychical beings. An example of living being in parallel to crystallisation is the auto-correction of the retinal images. The final image that one has is the resolution of the incompatibility and asymmetry between the left and right retinal images. The disparation between the two demands a resolution in order to maintain the continuity and unity of perception. Gilles Deleuze makes the notion of intensity his own in Difference and Repetition ; he reappropriates Simondon’s notion of individuation, and furthers it by connecting it explicitly to intensity: ‘Individuation is the act by which intensity determines differential relations to become actualised,along the lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates’ (Deleuze 1994: 246)." (p.501)
"Hence for Deleuze, individuation is an act produced by an intensity. It resembles the supersaturated solution, in which a thres hold is reached and the process of individuation starts to resolve the tensions that emerged around the crystal seeds. Compared with Simondon, Deleuze defines clearly the characteristics of intensity as related to difference. Intensity is difference initself (222). While Simondon’s conception of intensity entails a critique of Aristotelian hylomorphism, Deleuze’s aims at a critique of Kant’s concepts of sensibility and understanding. Against Kant, Deleuze shows that perception is neither governed by the pure intuitions, nor the categories of understanding, but rather by the intensity of the sensible, followed by its structural genesis." (pp.501-502)
"The Deleuzian intensity qua difference can be compared with what Simondon calls tension. Instead of using terms such as ‘nature’ and ‘the preindividual’, Deleuze refers to intensity as virtual and potential. Matter cannot be reduced to extensive qualities which can be measured in terms of space, like Descartes’ example of the wax or the sponge. In contrast to the extensive quality, the intensive quantity indicates the singularity of its being and cannot be decomposed into multiple units. For example, let us say 31◦C: it is not 10 + 21, nor 1 × 31, but rather it is singular in itself. The same goes for velocity and acceleration, which are intensive quantities that cannot be divided without changing in nature each time (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 483). Kant’s conceptualisation of time and space as extensive quantities in intuition cannot account for intensive quantities." (p.502)
"Deleuze did not restric this understanding of intensity to one of the four Kantian categories, and instead goes further by combining it with Simondon’s relational metaphysics, so as to join quantity as well as the two other dynamic categories, relation and modality. Intensity hence allows Deleuze to disengage from the transcendental field to the plane of immanence, from the logic of representation to a logic of intensity, whose transformation is regulated by differences instead of transcendental principles. Or more precisely, as Anne Sauvagnargues (2009: 319) shows, difference becomes a transcendental principle. The reframing of metaphysics through intensity in the thought of both Simondon and Deleuze has taken wings, through discoveries in modern sciences –in embryology, geology, perception, and so on– and outlines a new metaphysics, which could be termed ontogenesis rather than ontology in the classical sense." (p.503)
"How does the notion of acceleration enable us to put the paradigm of intensity to use for an understanding of the trajectory of capitalism and technological progress ? In a basic sense, intensity and acceleration are correlated within individuation, since intensity drives towards a structural transformation. Here arises a noteworthy divergence between the projects of Simondon and Deleuze with regards to intensity: while the former identifies intensity as a crucial element of a generic process (individuation), the latter takes intensity as the name of Being qua difference. These two paths of thinking provide us with distinct ways of understanding the role of intensity within social and technological processes. Simondon seems to be more cautious in treating acceleration and progress, since for him they remain tethered to the ontological question of individuation, and appear therefore as phases of individuation within the social and collective realm. On the other hand, having in Difference and Repetition identified intensity with the root of qualitative duration (Deleuze 1994:238–9), Deleuze, through his collaboration with Félix Guattari, arrives at a conception of historical development that takes flows and desire (i.e. specific variations of intensity) as the main agents of history. In Anti-Oedipus, they proclaim that revolution is to be attained by an accentuation of intensification, which they term ‘deterritorialisation’, rather than a reactionary opposition to the general flow or process." (pp.503-504)
"This conception has provided readers of Deleuze and Guattari with a striking though deeply ambiguous programme for an exit from the capitalist system of production. It has also become a focus of analysis for the various or even diametrically opposed accelerationist proposals in recent years, most notably, on one hand Nick Land (2014), who advocates for a technologically driven anti-Statist and inhuman capitalism, and on the other hand, Alex Williamsand Nick Srnicek, whose ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’ (2014) pushes forward an intensification of political agency in order to appropriately deal with the economic and technological transformationsthat characterise late capitalism." (p.504)
"The central thesis of Anti-Oedipus is that capitalism, as a historical phenomenon, is both contingent upon desire (which is the name of a politicised intensity, originary and ubiquitous) and fundamentally unstable. The capitalist order can only sustain itself by harnessing desire to its own ends; and to do so, it must tear down pre-existing social and political orders. Throughout this process, ‘capitalism liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it towards this limit’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 139–40). This limit, which is the body without organs that the schizo experiences, opens up the possibility of an outside from the capitalist order ; it is in this sense that ‘the schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process ...is the potential for revolution’ (341). The horizon of acceleration as described in Anti-Oedipus is therefore this limit beyond which the flow of desire, of intensity, would overrun capitalism having rendered it incapable of controlling its own basic processes. The Deleuzo-Guattarian politics, in this context, consists in the multiple manners through which a break from the structure of reterritorialising powers can be devised. However, insofar as it is committed to the possibility of such an escape, Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal falls prey to the pointed criticism of accelerationist metaphysics of desire, as formulated by Robin Mackay: ‘The fatal mistake of accelerationism was to believe that, on the horizon of the deterritorialisation opened up by capital, there would be disclosed an originary desire that could flow free of instituted structures of power’ (Mackay 2015: 238). It is notable in this context that, while Deleuze maintains a metaphysics of desire and intensity throughout his work, his ‘accelerationist proposal’ seems to recede into the background over the years, first with the substitution of the concept of assemblage for that of desiring machines in A Thousand Plateaus, and then with later, critical,reflexions.
Indeed, in sharp contrast with the fervour and enthusiasm of Anti-Oedipus, the cautionary and even despondent conclusions of the later text, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (1992), are striking (Noys 2012: 71). In this short article, written towards the end of his career, Deleuze, building on his previous work on Foucault, takes up Foucault’s description of the transition from a society of sovereignty to the disciplinary society in the nineteenth century, and theorises that we have now arrived at what he calls societies of control. The ‘mutation’, as Deleuze puts it, to this new stage of societal power is characterised by a shift to new forms of operation, which are no longer operating through enclosure of space, and where power neither explicitly nordirectly imposes its constraints on individuals (as was the case in the forms of control dissected by Foucault in his work on prisons). In this sense, while the general dynamic of capitalism analysed inDeleuze’s earlier work remains active, the mode of technical and social reterritorialisation has undergone a major shift which requires a renewed approach. We are now faced with a type of control that operates through the creation of spaces for individuals, where they enjoy an apparent freedom to tangle and to create as long as the products of their activities and creations follow a logic of forces set up from the outside. Deleuze describes this transition in Simondonian terms: the first form of control–direct intervention–is akin to moulding (moulage), while the second form of control is described in terms of modulation (Deleuze 1992: 4). Since modulation functions in terms of intensity, the techniques of control societies can be effectively used to regulate individuation processes themselves: intensities such as desire, psychical power, social relations, and even love, become susceptible to regulation. This technical aspect of individuation is not evident in Deleuze before the ‘Postscript’, which seems to radically push the modulation of intensity from its ontological paradigm towards a distinctly political one." (pp.505-506)
"Deleuze’s application of Simondonian concepts within a critical analysis of contemporary techno-political paradigms is striking for several reasons. First of all, it implies a major (if quite discreet) re-evaluation of Simondon’s technological writing on political grounds. While the pre-Guattarian Deleuze took significant inspiration from Simondon’s work on individuation, his later concept of the machine, which occupies a central role in his work with Guattari, seems to have been developed quite separately from Simondon’s work on technic sand technology ; indeed, the concept of the machine at work in Anti-Oedipus is a transversal rather than technical concept. Machines, in this framework, are understood as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements (extracted from libidinal, social and economic fields ; see Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 32–3), and this entails a marginalisation of strictly technical approaches to machines (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 398–400), which takes Deleuze and Guattari quite far away from Simondon’s analyses. This can be interpreted as an implicit critique,on Deleuze’s part, of what Anne Sauvagnargues terms the lack of a polemical phase in Simondon, a phase that is central to Deleuze’s conception of philosophy (Sauvagnargues 2009: 255–6): Simondon’s individuation, rather than being related to difference, is neutralised as ontogenesis, and there are only problematics in individuation (since it is the condition under which a transductive process can be triggered) but no problematics of individuation. For instance, when Simondon use sthe term ‘disindividuation’, he does not mean anything negative, rather he means one of the phases of individuation, in which the precedent structure of the being in question dissolved in favour of the emergence of a new order." (pp.506-507)
"In Simondon’s work, the question of acceleration, which he undertakes through the notion of progress, is very much localised ; while no direct statement in favour of deceleration is to be found in Simondon, there is a cautious, and almost conservative approach towards the question of technological development. Simondon here resorts to an analogy between individuation and human progress, where the human progres sis understood in terms of cycles, characterised by different technological developments, or rather ‘objective concretisations’ (see Simondon 2015). While Simondon is no revolutionary, his mechanology aims to provide the means for resistance against alienation, understood as alienation between the worker and the technical apparatus of production (in a converse manner from the traditional Marxian definition of alienation between the worker and the products of his or her labour). For Simondon, alienation is not simply the alienation of the worker, but also of the technical object itself (for instance, being treated as a slave): On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects opens with this very question, where capital is depicted as being simply the amplifying factor of alienation, while the fundamental alienation of industrial societies resides in the misunderstanding and the ignorance of technology. Simondon argues that only with a proper understanding of the human–technology relation can we bridge the gap between workers and their means of production that is constitutive of alienation. It maybe argued here that Simondon is blind to the question of political economy at the centre of Marx’s critique of capitalism ; nonetheless, Simondon’s analyses of technology and his vision of a mechanology provide some critical reflections on the current theoretical approaches to acceleration." (pp.507-508)
"One must admit that the question of intensity does not occupy an obvious place in Simondon’s mechanology ; and unlike Deleuze, for whom the question of intensity is immanent in all his works, Simondon sometimes is at odds to fully integrate his metaphysics with his theory of technical objects. What we can say with some assurance is that an acceleration of what Simondon terms ‘concretisation’ of technical objects (the process by which the causal mechanism with intechnical objects becomes more and more materialised and concrete), does not necessarily lead to progress. On the contrary, such an acceleration only leads humans into a worse process of alienation. Simondon does not aim at a classical humanist critique of technological alienation as the contamination of human spirit by machines, but rather wants to find a new relation between humanity and technology. This Simondonian treatment of the question of progress can be found in the article ‘The Limits of Human Progress: A Critical Study’ ([1959] 2010) as well as the recently published posthumous work ‘Le progrès, rythmes et modalités’ (2015); we will here restrict our analysis to the first article, which is a response to Raymond Ruyer (1958) on the question of technological acceleration in relation to the limits of human progress. Ruyer rejected the idea of Antoine Cournot that technological progress was a regular and linear accretion, describing it rather as an ‘accelerated explosion’, and argued that the exponential acceleration of technology will stop at some point (Ruyer 1958: 416).We cannot elaborate on Ruyer’s arguments here, but it is interesting to note that by the end of the article, he states that even though the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century brought misery to a large part of the population, he believes that ‘once the technical skeletonis stabilized, life can begin its games and fancies anew’ (Ruyer 1958: 423). Rather than presupposing a definite end to human progress, Simondon proposes to understand human progress in terms of cycles characterised by the internal resonance between human being and objective concretisation."(pp.508-509)
"We can understand ‘internal resonance’ in terms of intensity, as an intensity characteristic of the transformative process of individuation before it becomes metastable ; that is to say, before a new cycle begins. Simondon identifies here three cycles, namely ‘man–language’, ‘man–religion’ and ‘man–technology’. In the ‘man–technology’ cycle, Simondon observes a new objective concretisation, which is no longer that of natural language, or religious rituals, with the production of ‘technical individuals’. Simondon ([1958] 2012) argues that industrialisation has produced both technical individuals and a technical system composed of connected individuals, which exclude human beings. Or more precisely, in the preindustrial times, human beings, working with tools, were able to create an associated milieu, and thereby metaphorically functioned as technical individuals themselves ; however, in the industrial era, humans lost the status of ‘technical individuals’, as they were excluded from the centre (meaning that they lose the central role in production) by the industrial technical individuals (Simondon [1958] 2012: 100–2), and have to take up tasks such as pressing buttons and feeding the assembly lines. This critique of decentring does not come out of a nostalgia for the old humanism, but rather a worry that the ‘man–technology’ relation is transformed by industrialisation into a slave–slave relation: one is slave of the other. Bernard Stiegler calls, quite adequately, this process of the loss of knowledge ‘proletarisation’ (Stiegler 2010):proletarisation does not mean that one becomes poor or workingclass, but rather becomes de-skilled, since he or she is no longerable to sustain themselves by the use of their knowledge or skills. However, we have to notice that the shift of the human away from the centre is not a necessary consequence of the ‘man–technology’ cycle, as Simondon noted, since technology’s power to remove human beings from the centre is relatively weak compared with that of language and religion." (p.509)
"Here we should go back to the earlier distinction between two kinds of acceleration ; first, an acceleration which does not lead to the completion of the cycle of progress, but rather prolongs it, always further decentres the human from all activities ; second, an acceleration that is essential to the completion of the individuation determined by the internal resonance. Aside either from an acceleration which leads towards a general proletarisation of human beings, or from an indefinite waiting for a revolutionary moment with communist patience, Simondon shows another path from which to consider the human–technology relation in order to bring the cycle of progress to completion. This corresponds to two paths we can find in Deleuze and Simondon concerning acceleration as the correlate of intensity: one thinks of a programme of revolution, and the other considers a programme of evolution.
Putting aside their differences for the moment, both thinkers give confirmation to Williams and Srnicek’s critique that the humanist Left has not been able to think with technology, always falling back on the critique of alienation as a moral, rather than political, recourse. But since there are distinct strands of acceleration, we can consider the ways the general concept of an accelerationist politics should be pushed to its limit, as when Simondon talks about the limit of (the concept of) human progress: ‘The question of the limits of human progres scannot be posed without also posing the question of the limits of thought, because it is thought that appears as the principal repository of evolutionary potential in the human species’ (Simondon [1962])." (p.510)
"Simondon rejected ‘automation’ as the solution to the problem of alienation. For Simondon, automation is the ‘lowest level of perfection’, meaning that automation is not able to create an ‘internal resonance’ in the human–technology system, but is rather another way to treat machines as slaves (Simondon [1958] 2012: 127). We have reason to suspect that this critique of automation may not be applied to contemporary technologies such as artificial intelligence (which was not yet well developed at the time of Simondon’s writing), especially when we consider machines like Deep Blue or IBM Watson, as well as the introduction of human-centred design ; however, it is still valid in the sense that automation becomes more aggressive and determinant in our everyday life, especially commercial tools heavily driven by the market, which are still far away from what Simondon imagines to be an ideal case: in the way that musicians interact with the conductor of an orchestra." (p.511)
"Reflecting upon Simondon, Toscano tries to imagine what ‘a science of the revolution’ would be (Toscano 2012: 92). Toscano considers the pre-individual described by Simondon as a phase charged with energy and potential, such that, when a certain threshold is reached, a structural transformation is produced. Here appears an intriguing insight, of the
modulation of disparation as a revolutionary possibility. Toscano goes back to Simondon’s concept of the group, and sees the formation of the group as the revolutionary potential:
To truly catalyse the unfolding of a pre-revolutionary state, groups must thus disadapt themselves, deindividuate themselves. One could say that one of the conditions necessary for the invention of a revolutionary solution likely to amplify and integrate the new potentials brought by a metastable state is precisely that of demolishing old bonds, of affirming the difference in the midst of the social. (Toscano 2012: 92–3)
Here, Toscano signals a significant opening for thinking acceleration (as amplification) through Simondon’s work. However, what is lacking inToscano’s essay (largely due to the length) is the role of technology in Simondon’s thought, and its relation with the ‘amplification of potentials’, which is key to Toscano’s conceptualisation of the individuation of revolutions. To amplify is to intensify, and to intensify in this sense is to think technological infrastructures that allow such a resonance to emerge. Amplification is a question that occupied Simondon in the 1960s, as we can read from his contribution to the 1962 conference of the Colloque de Royaumont, where he draws on the working principle of the triode as an analogy for social amplification." (p.512)
"Different meanings of the word ‘disindividuation’ in Simondon and Stiegler. For Simondon, it is a necessary phase of individuation, the transition in which the old structure collapses so that a new structure can be formed. Stiegler uses this term to describe the difficulty of individuation, especially when one loses the intensity to individuate oneself from another; it leads to a loss of control, or rather an acceleration towards death. In his book Acting Out ([2003] 2009), Stiegler cites the story of the Nanterre massacre in 2002, when the 33-year-old Richard Durn shot eight councillors to death during a local council meeting and committed suicide the next day. For Stiegler, Durn’s act of killing came out of the loss of a primordial narcissism and he could not love himself and others any more ; or, in other words, he became an disindividuated individual. Disindividuation in the sense of Stiegler is a problematic that cannot be resolved, since the intensity does not create resonance, but rather tends towards its own negation, as a sort of ‘omega point’. Muriel Combes reformulates the set wo modes of ‘disindividuation’: one is a ‘catastrophic disindividuation of anxiety’ that leads to the destruction and dissolution of all experience ; the other is the ‘transindividual disindividuation’ that is the condition for new individuation (Combes 2012: 38)." (p.513)
"Deleuze formed his own, distinct criticism of Aristotle, Difference and Repetition, which focuses on the latter’s approach to Being through division and the use of Categories." (note 2 p.515)
"‘Associated milieu’ is an important term used by Simondon to characterise the technical individual, by differentiating it from technical elements and technical ensembles. Technical individuals own an associated milieu, which allows them to stabilise themselves. The associated milieu must be distinguished from the feedback logic of Norbert Wiener, since the concept of the associated milieu is not simply a mechanism within the object itself, but rather a techno-geographical concept." (note 14 p.515)
-Yuk Hui et Louis Morelle, "A Politics of Intensity: Some Aspects of Acceleration in Simondon and Deleuze", 2017: https://www.academia.edu/35063382/A_Politics_of_Intensity_Some_Aspects_of_Acceleration_in_Simondon_and_Deleuze
"It is not an exaggeration to say that intensity constitutes the main element of Simondon’s theory of individuation. Intensity produces a mode of propagation with speed and non linear acceleration. Simondon calls this form of propagation transduction. Simondon’s concept of individuation aims at reconciling becoming and being, hence allowing a new way of philosophising that allows an understanding contemporary to science and technology. Simondon starts with individuation rather than individuals, since an individual is never stable but rather metastable, that is, in a constant process of individuation. Taken together with the notion of the pre-individual –the potential which cannot be exhausted by individuation–a new cycle of individuation is perpetually generated, without a definitive stabilisation. Simondon’s theory of individuation attempts to overthrow the Aristotelian hylomorphism, which considers form (morphè) and matter (hylè) as the intuitive model to comprehend being (Simondon 2005). The reason is that such hylomorphism fails to reconcile being and becoming, and hence opposes being to becoming. The strategy of Simondon, as shown in the first pages of L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, is to oppose the mould (that which gives form) with a concept of modulation (2005: 45–
; while the mould is a fixed concept, which imprints a predetermined form onto formless matter, the process of modulation functions through a process of dynamic interaction between different actors, which are carriers of information. Simondon’s example is that of brick-making: hylomorphic thinking sees the clay as deformed and formed by the mould (i.e. the mould being the form, and clay being the matter) ; modulative thinking sees brick-making as operational, as resulting from the interactions of different actors: the wall of the mould, the ingredients in the clay, the hands of the worker, the moisture of the clay, the temperature, and so on. Brick-making is rather conceived in this case as a modulation of information." (pp.500-501)"Individuation is determined by the internal dynamic within the individual and the various relations to its milieu. The example to which Simondon often refers for explaining his theory of individuation is the crystallisation of a supersaturated solution. A supersaturated solutionis one in which the amount of dissolved material exceeds the normal amount that the solvent can support. Let us consider a supersaturated solution of sodium chloride (salt): when a small amount of energy (e.g. heat) is given to the solution, a process of crystallisation starts taking place in which energy and information propagate transductively and crystal seeds thus formed also release heat to speed up the process (Simondon 2005: 77–84). Simondon (1960, 2005) uses crystallisation as a paradigm to create an analogy between individuation of physical being, living being and psychical being, that serves as a general model of individuation. Though this analogy is questionable, it serves as the fundamental image of individuation.
Here transduction is the synonym of speed in Simondon’s concept of individuation. It has to be distinguished from induction and deduction, which belong to the classical logic. Classical logic operates on the inference of propositions, while transduction leads to a transformation of the structure of being in question. Transduction is conditioned and governed by the intensity resulting from tensions and incompatibilities. We can push this even further by saying that his principle work, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, consists in reading form in terms of information and information in terms of intensity, or what he calls signification, disparation. Disparation is the condition of individuation, playing a crucial role in physical, living and psychical beings. An example of living being in parallel to crystallisation is the auto-correction of the retinal images. The final image that one has is the resolution of the incompatibility and asymmetry between the left and right retinal images. The disparation between the two demands a resolution in order to maintain the continuity and unity of perception. Gilles Deleuze makes the notion of intensity his own in Difference and Repetition ; he reappropriates Simondon’s notion of individuation, and furthers it by connecting it explicitly to intensity: ‘Individuation is the act by which intensity determines differential relations to become actualised,along the lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates’ (Deleuze 1994: 246)." (p.501)
"Hence for Deleuze, individuation is an act produced by an intensity. It resembles the supersaturated solution, in which a thres hold is reached and the process of individuation starts to resolve the tensions that emerged around the crystal seeds. Compared with Simondon, Deleuze defines clearly the characteristics of intensity as related to difference. Intensity is difference initself (222). While Simondon’s conception of intensity entails a critique of Aristotelian hylomorphism, Deleuze’s aims at a critique of Kant’s concepts of sensibility and understanding. Against Kant, Deleuze shows that perception is neither governed by the pure intuitions, nor the categories of understanding, but rather by the intensity of the sensible, followed by its structural genesis." (pp.501-502)
"The Deleuzian intensity qua difference can be compared with what Simondon calls tension. Instead of using terms such as ‘nature’ and ‘the preindividual’, Deleuze refers to intensity as virtual and potential. Matter cannot be reduced to extensive qualities which can be measured in terms of space, like Descartes’ example of the wax or the sponge. In contrast to the extensive quality, the intensive quantity indicates the singularity of its being and cannot be decomposed into multiple units. For example, let us say 31◦C: it is not 10 + 21, nor 1 × 31, but rather it is singular in itself. The same goes for velocity and acceleration, which are intensive quantities that cannot be divided without changing in nature each time (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 483). Kant’s conceptualisation of time and space as extensive quantities in intuition cannot account for intensive quantities." (p.502)
"Deleuze did not restric this understanding of intensity to one of the four Kantian categories, and instead goes further by combining it with Simondon’s relational metaphysics, so as to join quantity as well as the two other dynamic categories, relation and modality. Intensity hence allows Deleuze to disengage from the transcendental field to the plane of immanence, from the logic of representation to a logic of intensity, whose transformation is regulated by differences instead of transcendental principles. Or more precisely, as Anne Sauvagnargues (2009: 319) shows, difference becomes a transcendental principle. The reframing of metaphysics through intensity in the thought of both Simondon and Deleuze has taken wings, through discoveries in modern sciences –in embryology, geology, perception, and so on– and outlines a new metaphysics, which could be termed ontogenesis rather than ontology in the classical sense." (p.503)
"How does the notion of acceleration enable us to put the paradigm of intensity to use for an understanding of the trajectory of capitalism and technological progress ? In a basic sense, intensity and acceleration are correlated within individuation, since intensity drives towards a structural transformation. Here arises a noteworthy divergence between the projects of Simondon and Deleuze with regards to intensity: while the former identifies intensity as a crucial element of a generic process (individuation), the latter takes intensity as the name of Being qua difference. These two paths of thinking provide us with distinct ways of understanding the role of intensity within social and technological processes. Simondon seems to be more cautious in treating acceleration and progress, since for him they remain tethered to the ontological question of individuation, and appear therefore as phases of individuation within the social and collective realm. On the other hand, having in Difference and Repetition identified intensity with the root of qualitative duration (Deleuze 1994:238–9), Deleuze, through his collaboration with Félix Guattari, arrives at a conception of historical development that takes flows and desire (i.e. specific variations of intensity) as the main agents of history. In Anti-Oedipus, they proclaim that revolution is to be attained by an accentuation of intensification, which they term ‘deterritorialisation’, rather than a reactionary opposition to the general flow or process." (pp.503-504)
"This conception has provided readers of Deleuze and Guattari with a striking though deeply ambiguous programme for an exit from the capitalist system of production. It has also become a focus of analysis for the various or even diametrically opposed accelerationist proposals in recent years, most notably, on one hand Nick Land (2014), who advocates for a technologically driven anti-Statist and inhuman capitalism, and on the other hand, Alex Williamsand Nick Srnicek, whose ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’ (2014) pushes forward an intensification of political agency in order to appropriately deal with the economic and technological transformationsthat characterise late capitalism." (p.504)
"The central thesis of Anti-Oedipus is that capitalism, as a historical phenomenon, is both contingent upon desire (which is the name of a politicised intensity, originary and ubiquitous) and fundamentally unstable. The capitalist order can only sustain itself by harnessing desire to its own ends; and to do so, it must tear down pre-existing social and political orders. Throughout this process, ‘capitalism liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it towards this limit’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 139–40). This limit, which is the body without organs that the schizo experiences, opens up the possibility of an outside from the capitalist order ; it is in this sense that ‘the schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process ...is the potential for revolution’ (341). The horizon of acceleration as described in Anti-Oedipus is therefore this limit beyond which the flow of desire, of intensity, would overrun capitalism having rendered it incapable of controlling its own basic processes. The Deleuzo-Guattarian politics, in this context, consists in the multiple manners through which a break from the structure of reterritorialising powers can be devised. However, insofar as it is committed to the possibility of such an escape, Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal falls prey to the pointed criticism of accelerationist metaphysics of desire, as formulated by Robin Mackay: ‘The fatal mistake of accelerationism was to believe that, on the horizon of the deterritorialisation opened up by capital, there would be disclosed an originary desire that could flow free of instituted structures of power’ (Mackay 2015: 238). It is notable in this context that, while Deleuze maintains a metaphysics of desire and intensity throughout his work, his ‘accelerationist proposal’ seems to recede into the background over the years, first with the substitution of the concept of assemblage for that of desiring machines in A Thousand Plateaus, and then with later, critical,reflexions.
Indeed, in sharp contrast with the fervour and enthusiasm of Anti-Oedipus, the cautionary and even despondent conclusions of the later text, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (1992), are striking (Noys 2012: 71). In this short article, written towards the end of his career, Deleuze, building on his previous work on Foucault, takes up Foucault’s description of the transition from a society of sovereignty to the disciplinary society in the nineteenth century, and theorises that we have now arrived at what he calls societies of control. The ‘mutation’, as Deleuze puts it, to this new stage of societal power is characterised by a shift to new forms of operation, which are no longer operating through enclosure of space, and where power neither explicitly nordirectly imposes its constraints on individuals (as was the case in the forms of control dissected by Foucault in his work on prisons). In this sense, while the general dynamic of capitalism analysed inDeleuze’s earlier work remains active, the mode of technical and social reterritorialisation has undergone a major shift which requires a renewed approach. We are now faced with a type of control that operates through the creation of spaces for individuals, where they enjoy an apparent freedom to tangle and to create as long as the products of their activities and creations follow a logic of forces set up from the outside. Deleuze describes this transition in Simondonian terms: the first form of control–direct intervention–is akin to moulding (moulage), while the second form of control is described in terms of modulation (Deleuze 1992: 4). Since modulation functions in terms of intensity, the techniques of control societies can be effectively used to regulate individuation processes themselves: intensities such as desire, psychical power, social relations, and even love, become susceptible to regulation. This technical aspect of individuation is not evident in Deleuze before the ‘Postscript’, which seems to radically push the modulation of intensity from its ontological paradigm towards a distinctly political one." (pp.505-506)
"Deleuze’s application of Simondonian concepts within a critical analysis of contemporary techno-political paradigms is striking for several reasons. First of all, it implies a major (if quite discreet) re-evaluation of Simondon’s technological writing on political grounds. While the pre-Guattarian Deleuze took significant inspiration from Simondon’s work on individuation, his later concept of the machine, which occupies a central role in his work with Guattari, seems to have been developed quite separately from Simondon’s work on technic sand technology ; indeed, the concept of the machine at work in Anti-Oedipus is a transversal rather than technical concept. Machines, in this framework, are understood as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements (extracted from libidinal, social and economic fields ; see Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 32–3), and this entails a marginalisation of strictly technical approaches to machines (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 398–400), which takes Deleuze and Guattari quite far away from Simondon’s analyses. This can be interpreted as an implicit critique,on Deleuze’s part, of what Anne Sauvagnargues terms the lack of a polemical phase in Simondon, a phase that is central to Deleuze’s conception of philosophy (Sauvagnargues 2009: 255–6): Simondon’s individuation, rather than being related to difference, is neutralised as ontogenesis, and there are only problematics in individuation (since it is the condition under which a transductive process can be triggered) but no problematics of individuation. For instance, when Simondon use sthe term ‘disindividuation’, he does not mean anything negative, rather he means one of the phases of individuation, in which the precedent structure of the being in question dissolved in favour of the emergence of a new order." (pp.506-507)
"In Simondon’s work, the question of acceleration, which he undertakes through the notion of progress, is very much localised ; while no direct statement in favour of deceleration is to be found in Simondon, there is a cautious, and almost conservative approach towards the question of technological development. Simondon here resorts to an analogy between individuation and human progress, where the human progres sis understood in terms of cycles, characterised by different technological developments, or rather ‘objective concretisations’ (see Simondon 2015). While Simondon is no revolutionary, his mechanology aims to provide the means for resistance against alienation, understood as alienation between the worker and the technical apparatus of production (in a converse manner from the traditional Marxian definition of alienation between the worker and the products of his or her labour). For Simondon, alienation is not simply the alienation of the worker, but also of the technical object itself (for instance, being treated as a slave): On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects opens with this very question, where capital is depicted as being simply the amplifying factor of alienation, while the fundamental alienation of industrial societies resides in the misunderstanding and the ignorance of technology. Simondon argues that only with a proper understanding of the human–technology relation can we bridge the gap between workers and their means of production that is constitutive of alienation. It maybe argued here that Simondon is blind to the question of political economy at the centre of Marx’s critique of capitalism ; nonetheless, Simondon’s analyses of technology and his vision of a mechanology provide some critical reflections on the current theoretical approaches to acceleration." (pp.507-508)
"One must admit that the question of intensity does not occupy an obvious place in Simondon’s mechanology ; and unlike Deleuze, for whom the question of intensity is immanent in all his works, Simondon sometimes is at odds to fully integrate his metaphysics with his theory of technical objects. What we can say with some assurance is that an acceleration of what Simondon terms ‘concretisation’ of technical objects (the process by which the causal mechanism with intechnical objects becomes more and more materialised and concrete), does not necessarily lead to progress. On the contrary, such an acceleration only leads humans into a worse process of alienation. Simondon does not aim at a classical humanist critique of technological alienation as the contamination of human spirit by machines, but rather wants to find a new relation between humanity and technology. This Simondonian treatment of the question of progress can be found in the article ‘The Limits of Human Progress: A Critical Study’ ([1959] 2010) as well as the recently published posthumous work ‘Le progrès, rythmes et modalités’ (2015); we will here restrict our analysis to the first article, which is a response to Raymond Ruyer (1958) on the question of technological acceleration in relation to the limits of human progress. Ruyer rejected the idea of Antoine Cournot that technological progress was a regular and linear accretion, describing it rather as an ‘accelerated explosion’, and argued that the exponential acceleration of technology will stop at some point (Ruyer 1958: 416).We cannot elaborate on Ruyer’s arguments here, but it is interesting to note that by the end of the article, he states that even though the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century brought misery to a large part of the population, he believes that ‘once the technical skeletonis stabilized, life can begin its games and fancies anew’ (Ruyer 1958: 423). Rather than presupposing a definite end to human progress, Simondon proposes to understand human progress in terms of cycles characterised by the internal resonance between human being and objective concretisation."(pp.508-509)
"We can understand ‘internal resonance’ in terms of intensity, as an intensity characteristic of the transformative process of individuation before it becomes metastable ; that is to say, before a new cycle begins. Simondon identifies here three cycles, namely ‘man–language’, ‘man–religion’ and ‘man–technology’. In the ‘man–technology’ cycle, Simondon observes a new objective concretisation, which is no longer that of natural language, or religious rituals, with the production of ‘technical individuals’. Simondon ([1958] 2012) argues that industrialisation has produced both technical individuals and a technical system composed of connected individuals, which exclude human beings. Or more precisely, in the preindustrial times, human beings, working with tools, were able to create an associated milieu, and thereby metaphorically functioned as technical individuals themselves ; however, in the industrial era, humans lost the status of ‘technical individuals’, as they were excluded from the centre (meaning that they lose the central role in production) by the industrial technical individuals (Simondon [1958] 2012: 100–2), and have to take up tasks such as pressing buttons and feeding the assembly lines. This critique of decentring does not come out of a nostalgia for the old humanism, but rather a worry that the ‘man–technology’ relation is transformed by industrialisation into a slave–slave relation: one is slave of the other. Bernard Stiegler calls, quite adequately, this process of the loss of knowledge ‘proletarisation’ (Stiegler 2010):proletarisation does not mean that one becomes poor or workingclass, but rather becomes de-skilled, since he or she is no longerable to sustain themselves by the use of their knowledge or skills. However, we have to notice that the shift of the human away from the centre is not a necessary consequence of the ‘man–technology’ cycle, as Simondon noted, since technology’s power to remove human beings from the centre is relatively weak compared with that of language and religion." (p.509)
"Here we should go back to the earlier distinction between two kinds of acceleration ; first, an acceleration which does not lead to the completion of the cycle of progress, but rather prolongs it, always further decentres the human from all activities ; second, an acceleration that is essential to the completion of the individuation determined by the internal resonance. Aside either from an acceleration which leads towards a general proletarisation of human beings, or from an indefinite waiting for a revolutionary moment with communist patience, Simondon shows another path from which to consider the human–technology relation in order to bring the cycle of progress to completion. This corresponds to two paths we can find in Deleuze and Simondon concerning acceleration as the correlate of intensity: one thinks of a programme of revolution, and the other considers a programme of evolution.
Putting aside their differences for the moment, both thinkers give confirmation to Williams and Srnicek’s critique that the humanist Left has not been able to think with technology, always falling back on the critique of alienation as a moral, rather than political, recourse. But since there are distinct strands of acceleration, we can consider the ways the general concept of an accelerationist politics should be pushed to its limit, as when Simondon talks about the limit of (the concept of) human progress: ‘The question of the limits of human progres scannot be posed without also posing the question of the limits of thought, because it is thought that appears as the principal repository of evolutionary potential in the human species’ (Simondon [1962])." (p.510)
"Simondon rejected ‘automation’ as the solution to the problem of alienation. For Simondon, automation is the ‘lowest level of perfection’, meaning that automation is not able to create an ‘internal resonance’ in the human–technology system, but is rather another way to treat machines as slaves (Simondon [1958] 2012: 127). We have reason to suspect that this critique of automation may not be applied to contemporary technologies such as artificial intelligence (which was not yet well developed at the time of Simondon’s writing), especially when we consider machines like Deep Blue or IBM Watson, as well as the introduction of human-centred design ; however, it is still valid in the sense that automation becomes more aggressive and determinant in our everyday life, especially commercial tools heavily driven by the market, which are still far away from what Simondon imagines to be an ideal case: in the way that musicians interact with the conductor of an orchestra." (p.511)
"Reflecting upon Simondon, Toscano tries to imagine what ‘a science of the revolution’ would be (Toscano 2012: 92). Toscano considers the pre-individual described by Simondon as a phase charged with energy and potential, such that, when a certain threshold is reached, a structural transformation is produced. Here appears an intriguing insight, of the
modulation of disparation as a revolutionary possibility. Toscano goes back to Simondon’s concept of the group, and sees the formation of the group as the revolutionary potential:
To truly catalyse the unfolding of a pre-revolutionary state, groups must thus disadapt themselves, deindividuate themselves. One could say that one of the conditions necessary for the invention of a revolutionary solution likely to amplify and integrate the new potentials brought by a metastable state is precisely that of demolishing old bonds, of affirming the difference in the midst of the social. (Toscano 2012: 92–3)
Here, Toscano signals a significant opening for thinking acceleration (as amplification) through Simondon’s work. However, what is lacking inToscano’s essay (largely due to the length) is the role of technology in Simondon’s thought, and its relation with the ‘amplification of potentials’, which is key to Toscano’s conceptualisation of the individuation of revolutions. To amplify is to intensify, and to intensify in this sense is to think technological infrastructures that allow such a resonance to emerge. Amplification is a question that occupied Simondon in the 1960s, as we can read from his contribution to the 1962 conference of the Colloque de Royaumont, where he draws on the working principle of the triode as an analogy for social amplification." (p.512)
"Different meanings of the word ‘disindividuation’ in Simondon and Stiegler. For Simondon, it is a necessary phase of individuation, the transition in which the old structure collapses so that a new structure can be formed. Stiegler uses this term to describe the difficulty of individuation, especially when one loses the intensity to individuate oneself from another; it leads to a loss of control, or rather an acceleration towards death. In his book Acting Out ([2003] 2009), Stiegler cites the story of the Nanterre massacre in 2002, when the 33-year-old Richard Durn shot eight councillors to death during a local council meeting and committed suicide the next day. For Stiegler, Durn’s act of killing came out of the loss of a primordial narcissism and he could not love himself and others any more ; or, in other words, he became an disindividuated individual. Disindividuation in the sense of Stiegler is a problematic that cannot be resolved, since the intensity does not create resonance, but rather tends towards its own negation, as a sort of ‘omega point’. Muriel Combes reformulates the set wo modes of ‘disindividuation’: one is a ‘catastrophic disindividuation of anxiety’ that leads to the destruction and dissolution of all experience ; the other is the ‘transindividual disindividuation’ that is the condition for new individuation (Combes 2012: 38)." (p.513)
"Deleuze formed his own, distinct criticism of Aristotle, Difference and Repetition, which focuses on the latter’s approach to Being through division and the use of Categories." (note 2 p.515)
"‘Associated milieu’ is an important term used by Simondon to characterise the technical individual, by differentiating it from technical elements and technical ensembles. Technical individuals own an associated milieu, which allows them to stabilise themselves. The associated milieu must be distinguished from the feedback logic of Norbert Wiener, since the concept of the associated milieu is not simply a mechanism within the object itself, but rather a techno-geographical concept." (note 14 p.515)
-Yuk Hui et Louis Morelle, "A Politics of Intensity: Some Aspects of Acceleration in Simondon and Deleuze", 2017: https://www.academia.edu/35063382/A_Politics_of_Intensity_Some_Aspects_of_Acceleration_in_Simondon_and_Deleuze
