Physical Signification of Technical Form-Taking

1.1.2.1 Physical Conditions of Technical Form-Taking 

At the end of the previous section, Simondon pointed out that a necessary explanation for the powerful historical influence of the hylomorphic model is its resonance with a particular type of hierarchical social system.  There have been various versions of this social structure over time, but all of them share the division of society into those who give orders and those who carry them out.  The idea that individuals are created by bringing together two separate components called matter and form mirrors this social division. However, whether we think of this hierarchical social system as composed of masters and slaves, or landowners and artisans, or capital and labor, Simondon doesn't think that society alone is a sufficient explanation for the dominance of hylomorphism.  So, in what feels like a bit of a Kantian move to examine the conditions of possibility of this schema, the beginning of this section investigates what matter itself needs to be like for it to be in-form-able.  After that, Simondon returns to deal with the parallel question of the conditions of possibility of form, which as we saw runs through a particular social system.  Form requires information, which in the case of technical production depends on human intention.

Form-taking itself requires matter, form and energy, and singularity. But, for a raw matter and a pure form to be able to divide two technical half-chains that will be rejoined by the grasping of singular information, it is necessary that raw matter already contain, before any elaboration, something that can forge a system leading to the terminal point of the half-chain whose origin is pure form. This condition must be sought in the natural world before any sort of human elaboration. Matter must be structured in a certain way for it to already have the properties that are the condition of form-taking. (I, 37)

For matter to be available for the hylomorphic schema, it has to already contain implicit forms.  Matter cannot be a completely 'raw' non-thing, utterly without form, if form is to be able to attach to it, so to speak.  Or, to put it the other way around, even 'raw' matter already contains a formal structure.  As we saw with the brick, the process of imparting form requires a certain type of matter, and does not stamp or mold a form from outside so much as coax out and integrate forms that are already possible, already implicit, in the matter.  In the case of the clay, it may appear as if we actively put these implicit forms into the matter by preparing the homogeneity that would enable us to effectively mold it into any form we want.  But, by employing the example of woodworking this time, Simondon aims to demonstrate that this type of homogeneity is something we can only put into the matter by taking out all the implicit forms that the 'raw' matter began with.  Even a 'formless' matter has an implicit form as its condition of possibility -- in this case the possibility that almost all of the implicit forms can be removed from this matter in order to homogenize it.  In the end, "form-taking" is not so much form-creation or form-imposition as a process of prolonging and transforming the forms already implicit in matter.  Matter never begins as homogeneous, but as filled with all sorts of formal heterogeneities; plastic matter is created through a process of selection and subtraction.   

Simondon identifies three levels of implicit form involved in a raw matter such as wood.  First, since the raw matter comes from nature, it isn't raw at all, but structured in all kinds of natural ways.  To state the obvious fact that we often leave out of our technical worldview: we get wood from trees.  Not all trees are identical.  Different individual trees are suitable for different purposes because of their shape, their type of wood, their size, etc ... The wood matter is already formed in a completely objective way independently of the technical use we make of it.  In fact, this use is constrained by the form of the tree -- you can't make a six foot wide beam out of a four foot wide tree.  

Second, the wood matter is individuated not just at the level of the whole tree, but at the level of the fibers that compose the tree internally.  Wood has a grain.  Its fibers form a pattern that dictates whether it will make a strong or weak material.  These formal patterns are a kind of information contained in the matter, information we can 'read' by approaching it with different tools.  Simondon contrasts the working of wood with a wedge and with a lathe.  Splitting wood with a wedge or working it with a drawknife follows the grain of the wood, and even respects its knots, drawing out and using the forms implicit in it.  But using these tools requires a feedback loop between the information implicit in the wood and the intention of the woodworker who incorporates this information into his overall design.

What makes certain simple tools simpler, like the drawknife, which does ex- cellent work, is that, due to their non-automaticity and the non-geometrical character of their movement, which is entirely supported by the hand and not by an external system of reference (like the lathe), these tools allow for us to grasp continuous and precise signals that invite us to follow the implicit forms of workable matter. (I, 38)

By contrast, because working wood with the lathe ignores the form of the wood, it only works well with wood that doesn't have a strong grain structure, and so more closely approximates a homogeneous matter.  The lathe may undoubtedly enable us to impose a greater variety of explicit forms on the wood than the drawknife, but this is only at the cost of losing the advantages provided by the wood's implicit form -- for example, wood without a grain or where the grain has been ignored is weaker and less flexible.  

Third, 'raw' wood matter is also already formed at a level even smaller than grain.  Wood is cellular.  As Simondon points out, the implicit cellular form provides an absolute limit to the explicit forms wood can be take on.  We cannot, to follow his somewhat odd example, make a wood filter  that would catch things smaller than the size of the wood cells.  Wood matter has a smallest characteristic scale on which is the already formed, and anything we would like to do with it must be built above this scale.

... the only forms that can be imposed by the technical operation are those of an order of magnitude superior to the elementary im- plicit forms of the matter utilized.13 The discontinuity of matter intervenes as form, and what happens at the level of the element happens at the level of the haecceity of the ensembles ... (I, 39)

 

Thus, matter is already implicitly formed at the level of the natural ensemble from which it is taken, at the level of the elements that compose it, and at the level of an individual piece being used by the woodworker.  It's no surprise to find that these are the three levels of technical objects in Simondon's scheme.

As the name suggests, none of these implicit forms are given to matter by human use.  Technical production merely avails itself of these objective forms already present in the matter.  In fact, without these forms, there couldn't be any "matter" for technology to operate on.  Here, Simondon coincides entirely with Arthur's observation that technology always harnesses an objective natural phenomenon.  In short, the world has to be structured before we can structure it.  


1.1.2.2 Qualities and Implicit Physical Form

A skeptic might wonder if Simondon is merely belaboring the obvious.  Of course matter has to have certain qualities if we are to use it in particular technical operations.  Try making a marshmallow house or a steel mattress.  The question, though, is where those qualities come from.  We can only make matter with specific qualities we desire because the matter already has implicit forms which lend themselves to these qualifications.  In other words, there is no "un-qualified" matter.  Simondon observes that what we usually refer to as the "qualities" of some material are in fact the statistics of its implicit forms.  Wood is strong along a certain axis because the implicit forms of its fibers tend to line up in that direction.

Quite a few qualities—particularly those relative to superficial states, like smoothness, granulation, polish, coarseness, and softness—designate statistically predictable implicit forms: this qualification is merely a global evaluation linked to the magnitude of a certain implicit form generally presented by a certain matter.  (I,41)


 

Here again, we see the concept of a distinction in scale or order of magnitude that Simondon has mentioned multiple times.  Quality is like the macroscopic average of a microscopic implicit form variable.  Thus quality only exists relative to a particular technical operation at a particular scale.  We are the ones who attribute a particular quality to matter, based on what we'd like to do with it at a given time.  We take an average of the implicit forms that are relevant to the level we're interested in.  As we've seen though, these forms exist objectively on every level of matter.  This may mean we can discuss the quality of matter at a variety of scales, but also shows us that the scale of quality is always an order of magnitude higher than the scale of implicit form. 

It can thus be asserted that the technical operation reveals and utilizes already existing material forms and moreover constitutes them from other forms on a scale larger than implicit natural forms work upon; the technical operation integrates implicit forms rather than imposing a totally new and foreign form on a matter that would remain passive vis-à-vis this form; technical form-taking is not an absolute genesis of haecceity; the haecceity of the technical object is preceded and supported by several layers of natural haecceity that it systematizes, reveals, and clarifies and that comodulate the operation of form-taking (I, 41)

 

Once we drop the notion of a hylomorphic matter qualified only by its pure plasticity, the actual history of material technology makes a lot more sense.  We began by exploiting a matter that contained a tremendous wealth of implicit forms readily available at the scale of an individual human -- forms specific to the organic individuals that surrounded us.  It's only a long process of technical development that enables us to produce the matter that the hylomorphic schema takes as its starting point, a matter whose natural origin has been erased. 

This is why it can be supposed that the first types of matter elaborated by humans were not absolutely raw matter but matter already structured on the scale of human tools and human hands: plant and animal products, already structured and specialized by their vital functions— like skin, bone, bark, the supple wood of the branch, and flexible vines—were certainly used rather than absolutely raw matter; these seemingly first matters are the vestiges of a living haecceity, and this is why they are already present themselves to the technical operation as elaborated, and whereby all that remains for the operation is to accommodate them. (I, 42)

1.1.2.3 Hylomorphic Ambivalence

The hylomorphic schema depends on the implicit formability of matter.  But it also depends on the 'matterability' of form.  If human technical intention could not take on material form, it could never interact with matter.  You can't literally fix radios by thinking; at some point you actually have to manipulate something in the physical world.  The materializeability of thought, its ability to have any real effect on the world, is another unstated assumption of the hylomorphic schema, one we've seen runs through a prior (or at least reciprocal) organic and social individuation of the thinker.  But while both of these are conditions of possibility for hylomorphism, the schema only gains explanatory traction for us because it reflects the lived perspectives of human subjects.  Matter must be formed; form must 'matter'; but we must also be able to see the essence of an individual only in the meeting of matter and form.  

Simondon situates this final requirement in the characteristics of the particular social systems that have embraced the hylomorphic model.  Basically, these are systems that maintain a separation between the one who thinks and the one who works.  Such systems then allow for two distinct perspectives on the creation of an individual.  

On the one hand, we can adopt the perspective of the pure thinker, the master or capitalist, who does no direct work.  We might call this the idealist perspective.  The master does not work, but instead simply gives orders.  But, from their perspective, they simply reiterate the same order each time they would like a particular class of individual to be created.  Make me a brick, or a log, or another dollar dollar bill.   Since the order is always identical, it's only the particular bit of matter used in constructing each of these that would differentiate the resulting individual objects that are produced.  To the master, except for the plurality of their instantiation, they're all the same brick.

... form, which is merely a fabricating intention, a voluntary arrangement, can neither age nor become; it is always the same, from one fabrication to another; it is at least the same qua intention for the consciousness of the one who thinks and gives the order of fabrication; it is the same abstractly for the one who controls the fabrication of a thousand bricks: he wants them all to be identical, of the same dimension, and according to the same geometrical figure. Whence results the fact that, when the one who thinks is not the one who works, there is in reality nothing in his thought except a single form for all the objects of the same collection: the form is generic not logically or physically but socially: a single order is given for all the bricks of the same type; this order consequently cannot differentiate the bricks effectively molded after fabrication into distinct individuals. (I, 43)

 

So, perhaps paradoxically, the idealist master situates the principle of individuation in matter, even if this matter is conceived as a purely inert plastic volume capable of taking on shape and producing a quantity of distinct individuals.  Here, however, Simondon adds an interesting observation about how the master's perspective on the pure interchangeability of matter remains incomplete and "subjective" (bottom of 44).  Because all orders to make a brick are not created equal, nor does the master distinguish the final bricks only by the particular volume of inert matter that composes them.  After all, there are my bricks and your bricks.  Orders are not quite universal Platonic forms because they remained attached in some sense to the subject who gave them.  And the resulting individual objects these orders produce inherit some of this attachment, as if the distinct substance of the ordering subject could somehow be transferred into the ordered objects.  Simondon observes this effect in the landowner who grows trees for market.

The man who gives the matter to be elaborated places value on what he knows, what is attached to him, what he has surveyed and seen grow; for him, the initial concrete is the matter insofar as it is his, belongs to him, and this matter must be extended into objects; due to its quantity, this matter is a principle of the number of objects that will result from form-taking. This tree will become this or that plank; all the trees taken individually one-by-one will become this heap of planks; there is a passage from the haecceity of the trees to the haecceity of the planks. What this passage expresses is the permanence of what the subject recognizes of himself in the objects; the expression of the self here is the concrete relation of property, the bond of belonging  (I, 45)

 

[The sentence before this one contains an interesting aside.

Only a commercially abstract thought could fail to attach a price to the haecceity of the matter and fail to seek a principle of individuation in it. (I, 45)

It's of course possible to break down this subjective perspective of ownership, or at least increase its abstraction and distance it from the material world.  This is precisely the process by which ownership of material property becomes converted into capital through a "commercially abstract thought".  Eventually in fact, the only matter is capital, and the only distinction between units of matter is their belonging to a particular human subject.  All the dollars in the world are identical -- except you can't have any of mine.  This represents the extreme form of the hylomorphic model where matter has become completely abstract, homoegeneous, fluid, and plastic, and form has likewise been reduced to its barest abstract essence, becoming nothing but the pure possession of citizen 27b-6.  Since Simondon's comments come in the context of reflecting on the psychology of a landowner who produces timber for market, they made me think again of Cronon's detailed history of the origins of the Chicago commodity markets in Nature's Metropolis.   It takes a lot of preparation to produce a 'raw' commodity completely divorced from its origin.]

On the other hand, we can adopt the perspective of the worker who carries out the order, for whom thinking and working are conjoined.  We might call this the materialist perspective.  For them, the master's proprietary matter is nothing but raw material, or at best matter prepared to be homogeneous in the relevant respects.  When I'm actually making bricks, it doesn't much matter to whom the clay belonged.  Nor do I see one brick as different from another because of the distinct volumes of matter used to make them.  The bricks are different because I made them at different times, in different ways, perhaps overstuffing some molds, or not letting others dry properly. 

... each molding is directed by a set of particular psychical, perceptive, and somatic events; the veritable form (the one that directs the arrangement of the mold), the paste, and the regime of successive gestures change from one copy to the other like so many possible variations on the same theme; fatigue as well as the overall state of perception and of representation intervene in this particular operation, which is equivalent to a singular existence of a particular form for each act of fabrication, thereby translating into the reality of the object; the singularity, the principle of individuation, would then be in the information (I, 44)

 

So, again a bit paradoxically, the materialist sees the principle of individuation in the art used to form each brick, and in the distinct information imparted to each by the precise way the worker constructs them.  And, again, this perspective is not not completely consistent but contains a "subjective" element insofar as the artist identifies their effort as what makes one brick truly distinct from another.  This is why they sign and date their work, even if that notion sounds odd in the context of brick making.

The possibility of looking at individuation from either of these perspectives is what Simondon means by "hylomorphic ambivalence".  Both the master and the worker subscribe to the hylomorphic schema.  One sees all the individuation coming from the side of form while the other sees it coming from the side of matter.  Yet both acknowledge the necessity of both terms, both think that what is made by joining them as a fully distinct individual, and both subconsciously pattern this individuality on their own subjective idea of possession. 

Neither orderer nor worker looks at what makes something an individual in terms of what we would today call artisanal production.  Neither sees the entire supply chain of events (so to speak) as the complete set of transformations necessary for individuation.  This coffee, shade grown during the Guatemalan spring and harvested by a team of enanos dressed as superheroes, was hand roasted by Barack Obama before being brewed with glacial spring water at exactly 204 degrees.  That's what makes it this coffee ... which you're paying $17 a cup for.  I exaggerate the example to illustrate the type of 'de-commoditized' thinking we encounter more frequently these days, in which every aspect of the production of something is preserved as a transformation relevant to the individuation of the final product.  Simondon would have loved the farm to table movement.