I'm excited to get back to Simondon after the long detour his On The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects inspired. I've only read the first 30 pages of Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, but I can already see that this one is going to be epic. Simondon aims to provide the philosophical framework that would support the vortical worldview at work in Macy's book. In other words, he's going to develop the surprisingly deep implications of the idea that, "it's turtles all the way down". Since this is the unofficial motto of Deleuze's philosophy of immanence, you are likely not surprised to hear that Simondon also promises to cast some light on the book that launched a thousand blog posts: Difference & Repetition. But in fact as we'll see from examining the introduction, the connections between these two philosophers go far deeper than a shared general worldview. I think Individuation was a massive influence on Deleuze in general, but on D&R in particular. So pop some popcorn, this book is going to be a long one ...
First off, skip the Foreword. I don't know who Jacques Garelli is, but he produces the customary academic word salad. It's not worthy of Simondon, who, while a very technical writer with an unusual fetish for semicolons, is about as clear and dry as French philosophy gets. Unlike Deleuze, who often writes in an attempt to produce the effects his philosophy describes, Simondon remains firmly in the camp of expositing a theory. He has a complicated idea which he'd like to transmit to us as best he can, and writes with barely more style than your average engineer. The introduction breaks down into three parts: 1) A description of the problem of individuation and an orientation to the concept of the pre-individual necessary to resolve it. 2) A discussion of how individuation cannot be a single process accomplished at a stroke, but must consist in a cascade of individuations, together with an introduction to the four cascading levels Simondon will cover -- physical, living, psychic, and social or collective. 3) Some meta level reflections on the consequences of this viewpoint and a preliminary description of the type of thinking it represents.
We can see this in the very first paragraph of his introduction, which states the problem he will tackle with admirable clarity.
Why is it that we appear to encounter a world filled with distinct, separated, individual things? Our usual responses to this problem beg the question. If we say that the things we find in the world, like clocks and spiders and the idea of Justice, are produced due to the interactions of smaller things like atoms, we have not answered the question. Why are there individual atoms? It doesn't turn out to matter whether we think the atoms are material or ideal, they are still pre-constituted individuals that we take for granted. Likewise, if we adopt Aristotle's idea that an individual is the coming together of matter and form, we have again presumed that the reality of this particular individual is derived from another pre-existing individual, in this case the form. But why does that individual exist? Both these responses send us in circles, and satisfy us insofar as we quickly stop asking questions because we already recovered exactly what we were expecting -- the unity and identity of the individual we started with.
But the real question was why there are any individuals at all. Maybe there are no individuals. If we really want to understand how individuals come to be, we need to look for one of Nozick's "invisible hand" explanations that would tell us how individuals arise from somethings that are not individuals. In short, we need to look for what Simondon calls an "operation" of individuation, a process by which individuals come to be. Or do not come to be. At least, do not come to be the fully distinct and finished entities we usually presume with this term. If we take the reality of individuals for granted, if we presume we already know what this term means, and then search for a principle of individuation which produces exactly this, and only this, outcome, we've gone little beyond suggesting that, "Opium induces sleep because it has a soporific quality." The principle of individuation -- the interaction of atoms or the marriage of matter and form -- produces individuals because it is an individual producing principle.
Simondon instead proposes a theory of the dynamics of pre-individual being that would account for the production of individuals as in some sense a byproduct of its operation. This operation does not presuppose individuals, does not produce completely finished individuals, and will not produce only individuals. In this sense it represents a true onto-genesis, a process that spontaneously generates the being of an individual rather than slyly importing it as a given principle.
It's obvious that "pre-individual being" has got to be some strange stuff. It can be neither form nor matter in the conventional sense. It cannot contain individuals, nor itself be an individual. Yet it must somehow be capable of giving rise to individuals. So it is a type of being that already contains some inherent dimension of becoming. At least at first, Simondon's preferred image for the pre-individual is a supersatured fluid out of which a crystal can precipitate. There are a few important points to make about this metaphor. First, the pre-individual is not a homogenous entity. It differs within itself or contains internal tensions or differences in potential that prevent it from completely coinciding with itself. This internal heterogeneity is precisely why it can become individuals through an operation that Simondon likens to a phase transition.
Second, as a result, notions of individual identity don't apply to it in the same way that they don't apply to Deleuze's conception of a multiplicity. The pre-individual is irreducibly multiple not because it contains many things (units that could only be individuals) but because of its potential to overflow itself, so to speak, and in the process of produce individuals without exhausting itself. Clearly we're talking about something that defies our usual zero-sum binary logic
So the pre-individual is more like a field than an object, though Simondon seems to be reticent to use this term and instead usually describes it as a "system". In any case, the point is again that 'the' pre-individual is not a single totality or whole that contains individuals as parts, nor is it the simple aggregate of all individuals. As we'll see in more detail later, you can neither deduce individuals from it, nor induce it as a whole by combining individuals. In short, the pre-individual is not the 'largest holon' which I think secretly lurks in the thought of those who employ this term. It is not Being or Gaia or World or Whole. And it's important to see that its distinction from these harmonious and unitary individuals is not just a technical one, but a whole matter of tone. For Simondon, the pre-individual is under stress, riven with tension, animated by a dynamic that threatens to split it apart. As his reference to Leibniz makes clear, it is anything but a pre-established harmony of beings.
Of course, the metaphor of the crystal is just meant to start imagining what Simondon means by individuation. The pre-individual system is not exhausted by a single process of individuation but produces an entire cascade of individuations. So Simondon's ambitious program will proceed from the physical individuation of the crystal to the organic individuation of living beings, and from there to psychic and social individuations as distinct strata in their own right. At each level, the basic idea is repeated; the pre-individual differentiates into an individual-milieu pair through a phase shift. But each new individuation extends the previous one, rather than being built on top of the latter. So it appears that Simondon's process of individuation never actually produces a complete and final individual!
We get a preliminary sense of how this might work from his description of the individuation of living beings. What makes them alive is precisely that they are not done becoming individuals.
At this point, some might be tempted to describe Simondon's cascade of individuations as the creation of a 'holarchy'. It sounds like there are different levels, each higher level depends on the one beneath, and while there is no clear bottom or top, the pre-individual seems to be a Whole capable of embracing all of these perspectives. However, we've already seen how Simondon's pre-individual is precisely not a whole. And we can now clearly see that his cascade of individuations is precisely not one where finished and parts come together to form a whole, which in turn serves as a part of a higher whole. In Simondon's scheme, what enables us to pass from one level to another is that the parts are not fully individuated. They still contain within themselves some unresolved potential, and they still maintain an internal relationship with the pre-individual.
The fact that the living individual is not completely individuated is what allows for it to serve as the theater for a psychic individuation. But it's not so much that the living being serves a sort of pre-individual field in its own right as that it never really stopped being the larger pre-individual field. The initial living individual is just a stage in individuation. This psychic individuation arises from the living being's representation of its own problems and its own possibility for solving them, in other words, from its ability to model itself as subject. But since this model would have to take into account other living individuals operating with this same model, the continued individuation of life into psyche happens in the context of a collective individuation which is "vaster" than a single individual. Or at least this is how I read the very compressed sketch of what the table of contents indicates will occupy two-thirds of the book.
I think this promises to be an interesting way of looking at things. It emphasizes again that, while we might call new levels of individuation "emergent", they are not built on top of old levels the way the second floor is built on top of the first. The second emerges here only because the first is incomplete and therefore unstable in itself, and only through the act of relating the instability or metastability in one person to that in another. This seems to capture precisely the way my self is constructed as already so socialized that it seems a misnomer to call it "mine". In short, there is a feedback loop between psychic and collective individuation. Upon reflection It seems to me that this topological feature is the most important difference between the pre-individual and the holon (see ENDNOTE). Relations between individual subjects are produced as a dimension of collective individuation not a reconnection of previously finished individuals. Similarly, since the psychic subject is only individuated in a collective milieu, relations between a single individual subject and an objective world are also produced through the interaction of a psychic and collective individuations. Simondon refers to this reciprocal relationship between psychic and collective individuation as the "transindividual".
Clearly, this information refers back to the necessary heterogeneity of the pre-individual. Information can only exist in a system that isn't stable (see footnote 12). This may be another way of stating Bateson's definition of information as difference that makes a difference. The walls in my house take in all kinds of "information" about the ambient air temperature, but without the thermostat, nothing much happens as a result of all this data collection. Information must propagate.
The final section of the introduction is a meta level reflection on some of the peculiarities of Simondon's method. We've already mentioned some of these oddities. To think about the pre-individual, we have to leave behind the idea that relation is something that happens between two pre-existing substantial entities, and instead see it as a 'thing' in its own right, a mode or dimension of being. This seems almost identical to Deleuze's notion of difference thought in itself, not as the difference between things or the remainder left by comparing identities. We also have to leave behind classical logical concepts like the principle of the excluded middle that only apply to a realm where identity is already defined. In particular, we have to leave behind the methods of both induction and deduction and create a type of thinking Simondon calls "transduction".
What makes this new logic especially interesting is that transduction is not simply a type of thinking, but an operation of being. Transduction is the very process of individuation we've been talking about, the process by which a metastable pre-individual being (partially) resolves its tensions by splitting into two sides linked by, and separated by, an individual structure. The individual here is less a thing, but a relation taken as a thing. Which means that we should hear a technical overtone in this term -- eg. a photosensor transduces light into an electrical current, thus linking two distinct realms -- in addition to the logical one.
Finally, Simondon briefly comments on the way that the concept of transduction means we have to modify Aristotle's influential hylomorphic model. We'll have much more to say about this next time, but we can already see a few key points. In a sense, Simondon is more sympathetic to the hylomorphic model of individuation than to the substantialist or atomist one. It's transparently obvious that atomism begs the question of how individuals are formed by presuming individual atoms exist, whereas with hylomorphism we have to think more carefully about the situation. The problem is not so much the idea that both form and matter exist and are distinct. The problem is with with our unstated presumption that individuals are created when a transcendent ethereal form is stamped on a compliant homogeneous matter. What hylomorphism takes for granted is the already individuated form and the perfectly individuable matter. Simondon's transduction is precisely not like stamping or molding a totally plastic material. In this case, the form arises from within a 'matter' that is anything but homogenous. As we've seen, this is an in-forming.
First off, skip the Foreword. I don't know who Jacques Garelli is, but he produces the customary academic word salad. It's not worthy of Simondon, who, while a very technical writer with an unusual fetish for semicolons, is about as clear and dry as French philosophy gets. Unlike Deleuze, who often writes in an attempt to produce the effects his philosophy describes, Simondon remains firmly in the camp of expositing a theory. He has a complicated idea which he'd like to transmit to us as best he can, and writes with barely more style than your average engineer. The introduction breaks down into three parts: 1) A description of the problem of individuation and an orientation to the concept of the pre-individual necessary to resolve it. 2) A discussion of how individuation cannot be a single process accomplished at a stroke, but must consist in a cascade of individuations, together with an introduction to the four cascading levels Simondon will cover -- physical, living, psychic, and social or collective. 3) Some meta level reflections on the consequences of this viewpoint and a preliminary description of the type of thinking it represents.
1 ----------------
The self-centered monism of substantialistic thought is opposed to the bipolarity of the hylomorphic schema. Yet both of these two ways of approaching the reality of the individual have something in common: both suppose that there is a principle of individuation prior to individuation itself that is capable of explaining, producing, and guiding it. We are prompted to revisit the conditions of the individual's existence starting from the constituted and given individual. (I, 1)
Why is it that we appear to encounter a world filled with distinct, separated, individual things? Our usual responses to this problem beg the question. If we say that the things we find in the world, like clocks and spiders and the idea of Justice, are produced due to the interactions of smaller things like atoms, we have not answered the question. Why are there individual atoms? It doesn't turn out to matter whether we think the atoms are material or ideal, they are still pre-constituted individuals that we take for granted. Likewise, if we adopt Aristotle's idea that an individual is the coming together of matter and form, we have again presumed that the reality of this particular individual is derived from another pre-existing individual, in this case the form. But why does that individual exist? Both these responses send us in circles, and satisfy us insofar as we quickly stop asking questions because we already recovered exactly what we were expecting -- the unity and identity of the individual we started with.
But the real question was why there are any individuals at all. Maybe there are no individuals. If we really want to understand how individuals come to be, we need to look for one of Nozick's "invisible hand" explanations that would tell us how individuals arise from somethings that are not individuals. In short, we need to look for what Simondon calls an "operation" of individuation, a process by which individuals come to be. Or do not come to be. At least, do not come to be the fully distinct and finished entities we usually presume with this term. If we take the reality of individuals for granted, if we presume we already know what this term means, and then search for a principle of individuation which produces exactly this, and only this, outcome, we've gone little beyond suggesting that, "Opium induces sleep because it has a soporific quality." The principle of individuation -- the interaction of atoms or the marriage of matter and form -- produces individuals because it is an individual producing principle.
The principle of individuation will be sought as a principle that is capable of accounting for the characteristics of the individual without a necessary relation with the other aspects of the being that could be correlative to the appearance of a real individuated entity. Such a perspective of research grants an ontological privilege to the constituted individual. (I,1)
Simondon instead proposes a theory of the dynamics of pre-individual being that would account for the production of individuals as in some sense a byproduct of its operation. This operation does not presuppose individuals, does not produce completely finished individuals, and will not produce only individuals. In this sense it represents a true onto-genesis, a process that spontaneously generates the being of an individual rather than slyly importing it as a given principle.
The individual would then be grasped as a relative reality, a certain phase of being which supposes a pre-individual reality prior to it and which, even after individuation, does not fully exist all by itself, for individuation does not exhaust in a single stroke the potentials of pre-individual reality, and, moreover, what individuation manifests is not merely the individual but the individual-milieu coupling (I, 3)
It's obvious that "pre-individual being" has got to be some strange stuff. It can be neither form nor matter in the conventional sense. It cannot contain individuals, nor itself be an individual. Yet it must somehow be capable of giving rise to individuals. So it is a type of being that already contains some inherent dimension of becoming. At least at first, Simondon's preferred image for the pre-individual is a supersatured fluid out of which a crystal can precipitate. There are a few important points to make about this metaphor. First, the pre-individual is not a homogenous entity. It differs within itself or contains internal tensions or differences in potential that prevent it from completely coinciding with itself. This internal heterogeneity is precisely why it can become individuals through an operation that Simondon likens to a phase transition.
... becoming is a dimension of the being and corresponds to the being's capacity to phase- shift with respect to itself, to resolve itself by phase-shifting; pre-individual being is being in which no phase exists; the being in which an individuation is completed is that in which a resolution appears through the division of the being into phases, i.e. becoming; becoming is not a framework in which the being exists; it is the being's dimension, the mode of resolution of an incompatibility that is rich in potentials (I, 4)
Second, as a result, notions of individual identity don't apply to it in the same way that they don't apply to Deleuze's conception of a multiplicity. The pre-individual is irreducibly multiple not because it contains many things (units that could only be individuals) but because of its potential to overflow itself, so to speak, and in the process of produce individuals without exhausting itself. Clearly we're talking about something that defies our usual zero-sum binary logic
In order to think individuation, we must consider being not as substance or matter or form, but as a tense, supersaturated system above the level of unity, as not merely consisting in itself, and as unable to be thought adequately by means of the principle of the excluded middle; the concrete being or complete being, i.e. pre-individual being, is a being that is more than a unity. (I, 4)
So the pre-individual is more like a field than an object, though Simondon seems to be reticent to use this term and instead usually describes it as a "system". In any case, the point is again that 'the' pre-individual is not a single totality or whole that contains individuals as parts, nor is it the simple aggregate of all individuals. As we'll see in more detail later, you can neither deduce individuals from it, nor induce it as a whole by combining individuals. In short, the pre-individual is not the 'largest holon' which I think secretly lurks in the thought of those who employ this term. It is not Being or Gaia or World or Whole. And it's important to see that its distinction from these harmonious and unitary individuals is not just a technical one, but a whole matter of tone. For Simondon, the pre-individual is under stress, riven with tension, animated by a dynamic that threatens to split it apart. As his reference to Leibniz makes clear, it is anything but a pre-established harmony of beings.
Unity, which is characteristic of the individuated being, and identity, which authorizes the usage of the principle of the excluded middle, do not apply to pre-individual being, which explains why the world cannot be recomposed after the fact with monads, even by adding other principles like sufficient reason in order to organize these monads into a universe (I,4)
In fact, Simondon consistently notes how important it is that the pre-individual contain large enough differences within itself that it can support two irreconcilable orders of magnitude. The individual is then precisely the structure that allows these disparate orders -- the molecular and the molar, just as D&G will call them in A Thousand Plateaus -- to communicate. The individual (partially) resolves the tension that plies the pre-individual. Its structuring represents the phase transition of a metastable system from one partially stable equilibrium to another. The best metaphor is again the advancing limit of a crystal, the place where some of the potential energy of the supersatured fluid (a molar, systems levels variable) is dissipated into catalyzing a change in phase from liquid to solid (whose precise structure depends on the molecular components of the fluid). The limit of an individual crystal comes into being as a mediation between these scales, as a macro-molecular phenomenon. The crystal is the structure that resolves the problem or tension posed by the fluid pre-individual system.
While a potential energy (the condition of a superior order of magnitude) is actualized, a matter is organized and divided (the condition of an inferior order of magnitude) into structured individuals on an intermediate order of magnitude that develops through a mediate process of amplification. What leads to crystallization and underpins it is the energetic regime of the metastable system, but the crystals' form expresses certain molecular or atomic characteristics of the constituting chemical species. (I, 6)
2 ----------------------
We get a preliminary sense of how this might work from his description of the individuation of living beings. What makes them alive is precisely that they are not done becoming individuals.
The living being conserves within itself an ongoing activity of individuation; it is not merely a result of individuation, like the crystal or molecule, but a theater of individuation. (I,7)
Since we're already familiar with Simondon's ideas about technical objects, and his important distinction between life and even the most advanced, intelligent, and 'autonomous' technology, we can see that this ability to extend its individuation is what makes life so distinctive. The machine cannot change goals or modify itself. Its individuation is complete the moment it is produced, and while, within limits, it can adapt to a changing environment, it cannot become. It is only what it is, and never overflows itself into something novel.
At this point, some might be tempted to describe Simondon's cascade of individuations as the creation of a 'holarchy'. It sounds like there are different levels, each higher level depends on the one beneath, and while there is no clear bottom or top, the pre-individual seems to be a Whole capable of embracing all of these perspectives. However, we've already seen how Simondon's pre-individual is precisely not a whole. And we can now clearly see that his cascade of individuations is precisely not one where finished and parts come together to form a whole, which in turn serves as a part of a higher whole. In Simondon's scheme, what enables us to pass from one level to another is that the parts are not fully individuated. They still contain within themselves some unresolved potential, and they still maintain an internal relationship with the pre-individual.
This living being, which is both more and less than unity, conveys an interior problematic and can enter as an element into a problematic that is vaster than its own being. For the individual, participation is the fact of being an element in a vaster individuation through the intermediary of the charge of pre-individual reality that the individual contains, i.e. due to the potentials that it harbors. (I,8)
However, the psychical being cannot resolve its own problematic in itself; its charge of pre-individual reality, at the same time as it is individuating as a psychical being that surpasses the limits of the individuated being and incorporates the living being in a system of the world and the subject, makes participation possible as a condition of the individuation of the collective; insofar as it is collective, individuation turns the individual into a group individual that is associated with the group through the pre-individual reality that the individual bears, a pre-individual reality that, paired with the pre-individual reality of other individuals, individuates into a collective unit. The collective and psychical individuations are both reciprocal with respect to one another; they make it possible to define a category of the transindividual, which attempts to account for the systematic unity of interior (psychical) individuation and exterior (collective) individuation. (I,9)
The notion of the transindividual corresponds to the collective taken as the axiomatic that resolves the psychical problematic. (I,11)
Finally, the introduction briefly sketches a new definition of information that seems to generalize the relationship between psychic and collective individuations. The idea seems to be that all individuations proceed by passing information between two incompatible levels of a system so that they can coexist. In-formation, internal to the pre-individual, is what allows form to appear.
... information is never relative to a single and homogeneous reality but to two orders in a state of disparation ... it is the tension between two disparate reals, it is the signification that will emerge when an operation of individuation will dis- cover the dimension according to which two disparate reals can become a system; information is therefore an initiation of individuation, a requirement for individuation, for the passage from the metastable to the stable, it is never a given thing ... information is that through which the non-resolved system's incompatibility becomes an organizational dimension in the resolution; information supposes a phase change of a system (I,11)
3 -------------
But contrary to deduction, transduction does not go elsewhere to seek a principle to resolve the problem of a domain: it extracts the resolving structure from the very tensions of this domain, just as the supersaturated solution crystallizes due to its own potentials and according to the chemical species that it holds, not with the contribution of some foreign form. It is also not comparable to induction, for induction truly conserves the characteristics of the terms of reality included in the studied domain, drawing the structures of the analysis from these terms themselves, but it only conserves what is positive in these terms, i.e. what is common to all terms, thereby eliminating what is singular from them; on the contrary, transduction is a discovery of dimensions whose system makes the dimensions of each of the terms communicate, such that the complete reality of each of the terms of the domain can become organized into newly discovered structures without loss or reduction (I, 15)
Transduction corresponds to this existence of rapports that takes hold when pre-individual being individuates; it expresses individuation and allows for individuation to be thought; it is therefore a notion that is both metaphysical and logical; it applies to ontogenesis and is ontogenesis itself. (I,14)
This idea gives very precise and technical form to a Deleuzian thought I've long been fond of -- thoughts are 'things' too. Thinking is ontologically creative. It doesn't represent being, it makes more of it. Or as Macy put it, the knower and the known co-arise.
Finally, Simondon briefly comments on the way that the concept of transduction means we have to modify Aristotle's influential hylomorphic model. We'll have much more to say about this next time, but we can already see a few key points. In a sense, Simondon is more sympathetic to the hylomorphic model of individuation than to the substantialist or atomist one. It's transparently obvious that atomism begs the question of how individuals are formed by presuming individual atoms exist, whereas with hylomorphism we have to think more carefully about the situation. The problem is not so much the idea that both form and matter exist and are distinct. The problem is with with our unstated presumption that individuals are created when a transcendent ethereal form is stamped on a compliant homogeneous matter. What hylomorphism takes for granted is the already individuated form and the perfectly individuable matter. Simondon's transduction is precisely not like stamping or molding a totally plastic material. In this case, the form arises from within a 'matter' that is anything but homogenous. As we've seen, this is an in-forming.
The notion of form must be replaced with that of information, which supposes the existence of a system in a state of metastable equilibrium that can individuate; unlike form, information is never a single term but the signification that emerges from a disparation. (I,16)
At first this might come off as a relatively unimportant terminological distinction. We just replace "form" with "information". But thinking about this change highlights how subtly ingrained is the hylomorphic model. Many of us who think we've left this scheme behind (eg. Macy) are still ensnared in it. When someone describes the reality of an individual as a "pattern" that emerges in the flow of some "material" they may at first appear to be talking about the same thing as a Simondon. And I think they are trying to, or talking loosely about the same idea. But they often still have a tendency to substantialize this pattern, making it into the definition of a complete individual, distinct from all others. We often equate an individual and a pattern in one-to-one correspondence -- as in, "my body is really just the pattern of continuity that keeps the ship of Theseus afloat". What is this but the revenge of the hylomorphic model? How is the reality of an individual pattern different from the reality of Aristotle's form? And how could this abstract pattern that we can suddenly recognize when it "emerges" be helpful in explaining the creation, and not just the instantiation, of individuals? Instead of form or pattern, Simondon suggests that we need to think about informing or patterning. This is inherently an ongoing process in which the individual produced cannot be thought by themselves or in isolation. For Simondon, there is no reality to "a" pattern, no form of an individual in itself. There is only information that necessarily involves communication between disparate scales of pre-individual being. In this case a single pattern is already multiple.
ENDNOTE ---------------
I'm not sure why I'm so allergic to the terms holon and holarchy. It may simply be an artifact my first encounter with it in Ken Wilbur shortly after college. Everything about Wilbur's thinking fell into nice neat concentric circles. But since nothing can simply fall this way, in fact everything needed to be rammed into this shape. Immediately following Wilbur, the prison book club (thanks to my dear cellmate EA) read A Thousand Plateaus. The contrast between Wilbur's neatly pruned tree and Deleuze's rhizome couldn't have been more plain.
However, I've never actually read Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine, so I don't know the whole history of the holon concept. Still, recent encounters have made me cautious about the term. Macy sometimes employs the term in the loose sense of asserting that it's turtles all the way down, a shorthand metaphor I obviously find unproblematic. But she also sometimes employs the term in the more technical sense of 'autonomous sub-entity', which as I've pointed out leads us to imagine that each level is built on top of the stability of the previous one, with levels appearing in simple ascending order without any possibility of feedback between them. Finally, contrary to her whole hypothesis, she also seems to think that calling nature a holarchy somehow magically turns it into a harmonious unity, an assumption I've already highlighted as particularly objectionable.
But then I also recently came across a mention of holarchy in Niel Theise's Notes on Complexity, and he employs the term in a very different manner. Near the end of Chapter 8 Theise, having talked about a descending scale of realities that passes from the body, through cells, molecules, atoms, to quantum 'wavicles', goes on to observe that we should consider the body a holarchy because it can be viewed equally accurately from any of these perspectives.
This seems like a fine observation, and appears to be close to the quote from Koestler here, so perhaps this is closer to the original meaning. But do we really need a whole new word to capture the idea that things can be seen from a variety of perspectives and scales? What was the matter with perspectivism? And have we addressed the fact that the objects discovered at these scales need not neatly nest inside one another spatially as this examples suggest nor even coincide? Are these even the same object? If so, exactly what ties them together? They seem related, but haven't we closed a lot of doors if we take their relation for granted. Haven't we simply presumed that there is a single object when this is precisely the important question? Indeed, Theise's next paragraph makes the gap in the logic here obvious, because he jumps from the idea of perspectivism straight to the idea of cosmic unity, in what is a clear logical non-sequitur.
Similarly, our bodies are not solid objects at a "higher level" and cells at a "lower level" and molecules still "further down", though we have used that shorthand to construct our complexity view of the universe. Instead, we should say that a body as a holarchy appears as a solid object from one perspective, as a community of cells from a different perspective, and as a cloud of molecules from a still different perspective. (NC, 47% on my Kindle)
This seems like a fine observation, and appears to be close to the quote from Koestler here, so perhaps this is closer to the original meaning. But do we really need a whole new word to capture the idea that things can be seen from a variety of perspectives and scales? What was the matter with perspectivism? And have we addressed the fact that the objects discovered at these scales need not neatly nest inside one another spatially as this examples suggest nor even coincide? Are these even the same object? If so, exactly what ties them together? They seem related, but haven't we closed a lot of doors if we take their relation for granted. Haven't we simply presumed that there is a single object when this is precisely the important question? Indeed, Theise's next paragraph makes the gap in the logic here obvious, because he jumps from the idea of perspectivism straight to the idea of cosmic unity, in what is a clear logical non-sequitur.
If the universe is a unity, one vast holarchy of self-organizing complex systems, then we have to consider that what it true for any part is true for the whole. (NC, 47%)
From here he will go straight into the ethical implications of the fact that 'we are one'. This as I pointed out, is a reliable indicator of the tone of the concept of holarchy. We should get along because we are all just parts of one great big universe! But if there's one thing that Simondon is already uncovering, it's that the relationship of individual to world cannot be one of part to whole. You can't get back to a pre-individual world just by adding up already constituted individuals.
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