In an effort to speed things up, I'm going to attempt to cover all of Chapter 2 in a single post. This is a bit ambitious, since it contains both a number of subtle philosophical points and a bunch of detailed technical discussion. However, I think the basic thrust of the chapter is pretty clear. Last time we came to the conclusion that the individual, properly speaking, is whatever can continue a process of individuation. We also know that this process requires both certain energetic conditions as a well as a singularity that allows for some of the system's potential energy to become actual. But we're still not sure how this process might function in the absence of human intervention, because we only discovered the need to describe it as a result of discussing the hylomorphic schema's failure to adequately account for the individual physical brick produce in a technical operation. So in this chapter, Simondon will move on from his critique of hylomorphism to provide a positive model of physical individuation that illustrates exactly how the process works in nature. While he uses the term "allagmatic" to describe this operation, we could as easily call it the 'crystallization schema' of individuation, because a detailed consideration of crystal growth will serve as the fundamental analogy for all purely physical individuation. Why does Simdondon choose to investigate crystallization? Because it provides a very pure example of an individuation that immediately subverts the paradigm of substance. Water vapor and ice are precisely not different substances, yet they are clearly different individuals. In fact, it's not even clear if we should consider water vapor an individual at all, or if so, on what level. So studying crystallization provides a perfect way to study how the individual is produced from the pre-individual, which is of course the overarching goal of the whole book.
Structures and Potential Energy
1.2.1.1 The Potential Energy and the Reality of the System; Equivalence of Potential Energies; Dissymmetry and Energetic Exchanges
With that orientation in mind, we can see that this chapter consists in Simondon separately taking up each part of the process of individuation -- the energetic conditions, the singularity, and their relation. He begins by discussing what it means for a system to have potential energy. While this is related to the standard definition of potential energy in physics, Simondon wants more precise than usual about how we use this term. Potential energy only exists as such if it can be converted into some real change in the system. What we're interested in is the system's potential to support individuation. This effectively precludes a system resting at some stable equilibrium from having any potential energy -- by definition, these are systems that are no longer changing, and so by implication they cannot be involved in an ongoing process of individuation. It's instructive to consider the physicist's immediate objection to this definition of potential energy. For example, don't we usually think of a hot gas as having potential energy even though it may exist in a state of internal equilibrium where the average temperature is uniform throughout? Of course we do, but notably only because we never imagine that the hot gas is the only thing in the system. We imagine hooking it up to something, say another material that it heats up or a piston that it pushes. But then it's not the gas itself that has potential energy, but this larger system that we imagined coupled to it, a system which we imagine changing precisely because it is not at equilibrium. So if we try to imagine a system that has potential energy in itself, we are forced consider a non-equilibrium system that has some sort of asymmetry or heterogeneity built into it.
The capacity for an energy to be potential is strictly linked to the presence of a heterogeneity, i.e. of dissymmetry relative to another energetic support (I, 55)
Simondon draws some profound consequences from this relatively simple observation. Because it means that energy cannot be a simple scalar quantity that belongs to a single body in itself. There is no absolute energy. Energy requires duality, multiplicity. A single energetic system must already have parts. Energy then must be about the relation between parts, and not just characterize the individual substances that comprise those parts. In fact, for Simondon as much as Deleuze, what is real is always relation, and never the in-itself. However, what mainly interests Simondon in this chapter is the way that the reality of a relation like potential energy can actually be converted into 'substance' (though this is speaking loosely, since he's already described how the substance of substance, as it were, is relation). Potential energy can be actualized. As we'll see, this is what happens when a crystal grows in a suitable medium.
But the reality of potential energy is not that of an object or a substance consisting in itself and "having no need of anything else in order to exist"; indeed, it requires a system, i.e. at least another term. No doubt, we must struggle against the habit that leads us to grant the highest degree of being to sub- stance conceived as absolute reality, i.e. reality without relation. Relation is not a pure epiphenomenon; it is convertible into substantial terms, and this conversion is reversible, like that of potential energy into actual energy. (I, 56)
But before we get to this point where potential energy is actualized in an irreversible way by literally crystallizing into a substance, SImondon seems to want to make sure we understand the subtleties of his definition by illustrating some cases where the actualization of a potential energy is reversible. These are systems where potential energy can be converted into a structure and then converted back into potential energy with no loss. Though, since Simondon illustrates the idea by considering different types of pendulums, his example ends up straining our normal usage of "structure".
He considers three types of pendulums that transform energy in three different ways. First, there's the familiar pendulum of freshman physics, which converts the gravitational potential energy of maximum deflection in one direction into the kinetic energy of the swinging bob and back into an equal gravitational potential at the point of maximum deflection in the opposite direction. Second, there's the curious Holweck-Lejay pendulum, which inverts the situation and fixes the bob above the rotation point at the end of a flexible spring which oscillates back and forth as the pull of gravity plays tug of war with the bend in the spring. This non-linear pendulum effectively converts a potential energy equal to the difference between the gravitational potential and the elastic potential into kinetic energy and back again. So if the spring were perfectly balanced with gravity, the period of oscillation would be infinite, which is to say that it would not oscillate at all (observing the frequency of this pendulum apparently provides a much more accurate way of measuring gravity, based on choosing a spring with a potential very close that of gravity, so that the period produced is quite long and easy to measure accurately). Third, Simondon discusses two coupled simple pendulums. In this case, the underlying potential energy driver is again gravity, but if we start only one pendulum swinging we see that this potential is converted into a kinetic energy, which serves as a potential energy to start the other oscillator moving. So it appears as if the potential energy is being transferred from one part of the system to another. All of these examples illustrate the way potential energy can be converted into a "structure" -- in this case the behavior of motion or rest of the pendulums -- and back into potential energy. And in each case, this potential energy depends on some asymmetry in the system that prevents it from stopping at its point of greatest stability. The simple pendulum is symmetrical with respect to displacements about the bottom position, but these positions together have an identical asymmetric potential with respect to that point. The Holweck-Lejay pendulum relies on a carefully balanced asymmetry between gravitational and elastic forces. And the coupled pendulums obviously represent a system with two distinct parts (as long as they are not started with equal amplitude and phase, in which case the problem reduces to the first type of pendulum). It's their asymmetry that allows each of these systems to change potential energy into kinetic and back again. Which is basically the definition of oscillation.
1.2.1.2 Different Orders of Potential Energy; Notions of Phase Changes and of the Stable and Metastable Equilibrium of a State. Tammann's Theory
As we mentioned though, not all transformations of potential energy are reversible, and Simondon now takes up the example of crystal formation to illustrate exactly how energy can be more permanently converted into something we would typically call a structure. In the context though, it's important to note that this doesn't entail any loss of energy. Simondon still conceives of this as a conversion of one type of potential energy into another, only this time it's not an interconversion of the potentials at the tops of a pendulum's swing, nor a conversion of the difference between gravitational and elastic potential into motion, but a conversion of one order or scale of potential energy into another. This changing of the order of potential energy turns out to be exactly what we mean my thermodynamic irreversibility. Entropy always increases in a closed system because energy that began as macroscopic is converted into microscopic form. A crystal of course is an example of the opposite sort of irreversibility because it constitutes a (local) entropy decrease. In fact, the arising of a structure and a local entropy decrease are almost synonymous. A crystal structure results from the conversion of a microscopic potential energy into a macroscopic form. It's a link between these two orders of energy. In a sense, macroscopic form is nothing other than microscopic organization, but this organization is only possible with the emission or absorption of potential energy. Which is precisely to say that energy can be converted into structure.
Simondon illustrates his philosophical idea that crystallization represents a substantialization of relation (potential energy) with a particularly obscure and subtle technical example. He explains Tammann's theory of the crystallization of an amorphous solid in enough detail that I had to read it several times before I figured out what was going on. I don't think it's worth going into the details except to say that he could have used a better phase diagram. The overall point he's trying to convey is that there can be two forms of a material, an amorphous one like glass and a crystalline one, both of which we normally consider 'solid', that can convert into one another under certain energetic circumstances. But these conversions are inevitably accompanied by the emission or absorption of energy in the form of latent heat or of volumetric change of the crystal. So it's the energy of an overall system that defines the limits of where a structurally stable individual can form.
The limits of a structural type of domain of stability are determined by energetic considerations. This is why, in order to broach the study of physical individuation properly speaking, we wanted to define the energetic aspect of the relation between two physical structures. An energetic characteristic is linked to every structure, but, inversely, a modification of the structural characteristic of this system can correspond to any modification of the energetic conditions of this system. (I, 67)
Conversely, the formation of an individual crystal corresponds to, and in fact can reveal, an energetic change in a system. Some of the potential energy of an amorphous solid can be converted into a crystal. And then this crystal can melt and release its structure as potential energy again. But these types of conversions of potential energy are not generally reversible because they involve a discontinuity between two completely different states of the system.
Conversely, the state changes undergone by the system forces us to consider a certain energy linked to the structure, an energy which is indeed a potential energy, but which is not capable of an ongoing transformation; for this reason, it cannot be considered suitable for the case of identity or of equality defined above. This energy can only be measured in a state change of the system; while the state remains, it is conflated with the very conditions of stability of this state. This is why we will choose to name those energies that express the limits of stability of a structural state as structural potential energies. These potential energies constitute the real source of the formal conditions of possible geneses. (I, 68)
The overall point is basically that structure = change in energy.
Individuation and System States
1.2.2.1 Individuation and Crystalline Allotropic Forms; Being and Relation
So some systems can transform their potential energy into a structure under some conditions. This phase transition behavior is a necessary condition for individuation. But are the energetic and material conditions alone sufficient to account for the individual produced? Simondon thinks not, and he illustrates this conclusion by considering another situation where an amorphous matter can crystallize in either of two possible configurations (allotropy is probably best known as what distinguishes graphite from diamond despite the fact that they are both just carbon lattices). Even at the same temperature and pressure, supercooled liquid sulfur can crystallize as either prismatic or octahedral crystals (or, it turns out, in a bewildering array of other forms). Which one (if either) of these forms appears depends on whether a seed or germ of that type is present in the material as it cools. Even super cold water won't freeze without a crystal nucleus to get it started. Again, I'll skip the technical details because the important point is just that the process of individuation requires a singularity to get started in addition to some appropriate energetic conditions. Which means that individuation isn't simple determined by the instantaneous conditions of the system, but depends on its entire history of development.
A stable individuality is thus formed when two conditions are met: a certain structure must correspond to a certain energetic state of the system. But this structure is not directly produced by the energetic state alone, for it is distinct from the latter; the initiation of structuration is critical; most often in crystallization germs are deposited from the exterior. Thus, there is a historical aspect to the manifestation of a structure in a substance, insofar as the structural germ must appear. Pure energetic determinism does not suffice for a substance to attain its state of stability. The beginning of structuring individuation is an event for the system in a metastable state. Thus, in general, even in the simplest process of individuation, a relation takes place between the body under consideration and the temporal existence of beings external to it that intervene as the evental conditions of its structuration. The constituted individual holds within it the synthesis of energetic and material conditions and of an informational condition, which is generally not immanent. (I, 70)
From this example we can also start to better understand how Simondon's notion of individuation doesn't really have anything to do with the individual as we normally use this term. Individuation is always relative; the present individual is not the final individual, unless it happens to represent the lowest possible potential energy state of the system. The same process of individuation can result in one crystal state or another, or first one then another (or vice versa). Different individuals can result from the same individuation. However, describing it this way presumes that we know what individuals we're talking about apart from the process of individuation. Since this is precisely the thinking that Simondon wants to avoid, it might be more accurate to say that the individual is always the cutting edge of individuation. The particular individual we find is always the most stable possible state of the system, given all the conditions and history. It's what a system can do with the right energy and singularity. When these conditions change, the individual will transform into another individual, making it a sort of 'unit' of becoming. If, on the contrary, the individual persists, this is because that persistence represents the most stable state achievable by the system under the conditions -- conditions which necessarily include the presence and effect of the 'prior' individual, which acts as a singularity for the one following it. We might say that the individual is constantly transforming, though sometimes into 'itself'.
In terms of time, the individual is not in the past but in the present, for it only continues to conserve its individuality to the extent that this constitutive combination of conditions persists in and is extended by the individual itself. The individual exists such that the mixture of matter and energy that constitutes it is in the present. This is what could be called the active consistency of the individual. This is why every individual can be a condition of becoming: a stable crystal can be the germ for a metastable substance in a state of crystalline or liquid supercooling. (I, 74)
We have to use the infamous 'scare quotes' around that 'itself' because because this line of thinking opens up tricky but fascinating questions of identity. Simondon only briefly addresses the topic in this chapter, but I suspect he will return to it in greater detail at some point (perhaps when he talks about quantum mechanics in 1.3.3.2). The problem is that our crystal metaphor contains an ambiguity. On the one hand, we have used the term individual almost synonymously with the precise state of the system constituted by given energetic and singular conditions. We mean this particular crystal here, with a particular size and shape and set of defects, surrounded by a particular amount of amorphous material, and so on. On the other hand, we sometimes seemed to mean the particular type of crystal (prismatic or octahedral) on the presumption that all crystals of that type are effectively the same individual, albeit perhaps of different sizes, which can be distinguished from other crystals and from the amorphous medium. So are we talking about a point in phase space, or a whole region? This ambiguity seems to be coupled to another ambiguity in the text or translation. Sometimes the phrase "particular being" appears where we would expect "individual" to be.
... it is possible based on the discontinuities of conditions to define types that correspond to domains of stability or metastability; then, within these types, it is possible to define particular beings that differ from one another based on that which (within the limits of the type) is capable of a finer, sometimes continuous variation, like the speed of cooling. (I, 72)
Perhaps "mu" is the best response to this ambiguity. The individual is neither a point nor a region in phase space, but something more like the possibility of movement through this space. Unfortunately, I don't understand that answer well enough to avoid getting hit with a stick. What seems clear to me at this point is that Simondon is trying to explain the origin of macroscopic individuals like a crystal we can see. At this level of scale, the particular being we find acts like a point within a region marked off as, for example, "ETAT CRISTALLIN" on the phase space diagram on pg. 62. That's because, as his example of volcanic rocks (pg. 72) better indicates, this region is never pure. No macroscopic crystal consists in a perfect lattice of a single type (pg. 73). However, it's important to note that this does not mean that the real individuals are the pure types of crystal that any mixed macroscopic crystal consists of. From a macroscopic perspective, those pure type are merely abstractions. All we have in front of us is a real crystal in all its impure complexity, whose detailed structure reflects the entire history of its genesis. The trajectory of that history tells us about the type and the particularity of the crystal at the same time. The fact that it passed into a certain region of phase space through a discontinuous structural transformation (ie. crystallization) determined its type, while the particular point in that region tells us about the finer details of the structure that can vary continuously from crystal to crystal. So type and particularity aren't different level of ontology, they're just names for discontinuous and continuous properties of a real individual.
There are types because these conditions vary discontinuously by delimiting domains of stability; but because within these domains of stability certain parameters, which are part of the conditions, vary more finely, each particular being is different from a certain number of others. The original particularity of a being is not different in nature from its typological reality. The particular being does not possess its most singular characteristics any more so than its typological characteristics. Both the former and the latter are individual because they result from the encounter of energetic conditions and singularities, the latter of which are historical and local. (I, 73)
Those final two lines articulate a very subtle point that might seem somewhat academic in the case of a macroscopic crystal. I would actually have been tempted to state it almost the opposite way Simondon did. It's not that a type possesses a certain range of possible variations in characteristics which then possess individuals that instantiate those particular variables. This is how we imagine the model of genus and species working -- like a top down tree. Instead, its that an individual possesses a type and a particularity because of how it was formed. The real given is the individual, or rather the process of individuation which at any moment results in a more or less stable individual. The problem is not that type and particularity don't mean anything real or are merely human imposed abstractions. The trajectory of individuation has real continuities and discontinuities. But an individual isn't built from these types and their variation or from a synthesis of types. The individual is simply the unique trajectory.
As I say, this distinction is subtle, and doesn't become really interesting until Simondon considers the possibility that certain systems at a microscopic level might actually possess regions of phase space that have only a finite number of points. If we imagine that only a single value is occasionally possible, then the region would reduce to a point, and an individual passing into it what be a real and direct incarnation of a type. In that case, every process of individuation that exhibits that discontinuous structural change would end up producing an identical individual.
If, within the interior of the same domain of stability, conditions that are still variable are not capable of an infinity of values but merely a finite number of values, it will have to be acknowledged that the number of effectively different beings able to appear is finite. In a certain quantity of substance, there could then be several identical beings that seem indiscernible.(I, 73)
This sort of situation would represent a quantized or atomized reality. All the hydrogen atoms are equivalent. And Simondon considers this a perfectly real variety of individuation that often happens in nature at very small scales. His point is just that the reality here is still the process of individuation that combines energetic and singular historical conditions. The reality is still the individual hydrogen atom produced in just this way at just this time and place by quantum vacuum fluctuations or whatever the physicist are into these days. But this individuality is degenerate in the mathematical sense because it reduces to a type in this particular system. So the apparently simple individuals that atomism takes for granted are actually complex special cases of a general process of individuation.
To seek the principle of individuation in matter, form, or force is to be condemned to only explaining individuation in these seemingly simple particulars, like, for example, that of the molecule or the atom. Instead of constituting the individual's genesis, this would be to suppose this genesis as already formed in the formal, material, or energetic elements and, due to these elements already harboring individuation, to generate through composition an individuation that is in fact simpler. (I, 74)
Now we can appreciate the reason Simondon began his discussion of physical individuation by talking about allotropic crystals and not atoms. It doesn't make sense to start a discussion of spheres with a study of the point. Of course he believes that atoms exist and that all physical matter is a combination of atoms. But this type of explanation doesn't get at how the individuals are made, regardless of whether its the individual matter or the individual atom that interests us. By considering an allotropic crystal, we bypass a host of possible objections. It's the same stuff, made of the same atoms in the same conditions that nevertheless can sometimes crystallize in two possible forms. We can't explain the individual crystal in a reductive bottom up manner as just determined by a combination of atoms and their forces specified in some equations. Instead we have to talk about how the energetic and material conditions interact with a seed singularity in a historical process.
Finally, Simondon rounds out this section with some light epistemology. Though several pages were taken out of the later edition, they contain such a fascinating swipe at Kant's theory of the a priori that I can resist reflecting on them. The basic idea is straightforward, but has some pretty startling consequences. We've seen that for Simondon the being of the individual is fundamentally relation. It's not a term but a process that establishes a relation between 'terms' of different orders of magnitude. So things are relations. But our knowledge of things is also a relation, in this case a relation between ourselves and the thing. Which is to say that knowledge is a relation of relations. If we assume that this second order relation is still a true relation -- an individual that connects two disparate orders of reality -- then we've discovered that our knowledge itself is actually the same sort of reality as what we usually call a thing. In short, thoughts are things because things aren't like we thought.
Now that we've removed the categorical gulf between thoughts and things, Kant's prohibition on our knowledge of the thing-in-itself falls apart. The noumenon isn't a substance separated from all other substances, and in particular from a substantial self. It's a relation. And we have direct experience of what relation is like, both through our experience of our self and of the world around us. In fact, it's doubtful we are or can experience anything other than relation. So it turns out that we can know the thing-in-itself, so long as we understand that the thing is precisely not in-itself, and neither is our knowledge of it. The a priori forms of our sensibility are not distinct from the a priori conditions of possibility of anything else, and this condition is simply relation -- the linking of asymmetrical sides of an energetic system across a singularity. And as we'll discuss a bit more in the next section, the simplest analogy for relation is Time, whose form is pure asymmetric succession.
If noumena are indeed not pure substance but also consist of relations (like exchanges of energy or passages of structures from one domain of reality to another domain of reality), and if relation has the same status of reality as the terms themselves, as we have tried to show in the preceding examples—insofar as relation is not an accident relative to a substance but a constitutive, energetic and structural condition that is extended in the existence of constituted beings—then the a priori forms of sensibility that allow us to grasp relations because they are a power of organizing according to succession or according to simultaneity do not create an irremediable relativity of knowledge. If relation effectively has the value of truth, then both the relation within the subject and the relation between the subject and the object can have the value of reality. (I, 75)
I think this recasting of the problem of knowledge is profound because it immediately steers us away from the problem of how to judge the truth of a pure reflective knowledge. There is no such thing. All knowledge is as active as any other thing in the world. In fact, the world contains only actions, only verbs, that create passages from one state to another. And as a part of the world, our knowledge is no different. There's nothing, including our thought, that sits above or outside the world and has no impact on it. The difference between true knowledge and error then lies not in its representational accuracy, but in whether the relation it creates or expresses is stable or merely metastable and subject to change as circumstances change. As Kuhn demonstrated long ago, our knowledge can undergo paradigm shifts that look just like phase transitions. But this doesn't 'disprove' or 'invalidate' the old knowledge any more than the transition to a new allotrope 'disproves' the prior crystal structure. What's happened is simply that a previously stable equilibrium has become unstable due to some change in social, psychological, or physical conditions, ie. some change in the energetic and singular conditions that individuate knowledge.
1.2.2.2 Individuation as the Genesis of Crystalline Forms Starting from an Amorphous Mass
Let me recapitulate the trajectory of the argument to set up Simondon's final step in this chapter. The question is how to make an individual. Chapter 1 showed us that you cannot make an individual from abstract matter and form, but that these two have to be brought together as such by some system that encompasses both. Chapter 2 begins by examining what Simondon has started to call the "hylomorphic situation" in which an asymmetric non-equilibrium system contains potential energy. This is the first positive requirement for individuation -- the existence of a potential energy of structural transformation. These energetic conditions alone are not sufficient however. The particular type of sulfur crystal which precipitates depends on the presence of a particular historical singularity in the form of a seed of one type or another. This is the second positive requirement for individual -- the presence of a singularity that crystallizes the system by transforming potential energy into actual structure. However, it turns out that these two conditions are not the complete story of individuation. The third positive requirement for individuation is that the singularity present be capable of catalyzing this particular system's transformation. In other words, there has to be some sort of match or fit or resonance between the singularity and the energetic conditions. They have to belong to one another.
This third condition might seem kinda obvious given the examples Simondon has used so far. Of course supercooled sulfur will form a prismatic sulfur crystal in the presence of a prismatic sulfur seed. But where did this initial seed come from? What triggers the first step where we just begin to pass from amorphous mass to crystalline solid? There has to be some sort of singularity that is expressly not a tiny crystal. In fact, this singularity may have nothing to do with sulfur at all. Consider again the instructions for supercooling water. The flask has to be cleaned with acid and free of scratches because all kinds of impurity can serve as seeds for ice formation. All kinds, but of course, not any kind of impurity or asymmetry (for example, we can use a cylinder, not a sphere for the experiment, despite the former's lower degree of symmetry). The particular singularity has to correspond to the particular energetic system in question. This is why Simondon again takes up the examination of crystals, and specifically considers how we move from the pre-individual amorphous state to a state where there is an individual crystal seed.
What he uncovers is a fairly subtle point that is easy to overlook on the first reading. Because the real question is not so much how the seed itself forms as how some symmetry breaking cascades into further symmetry breaking. We said that all kinds of things can serve as seeds; there are always asymmetries in a system if we go looking for them. But we never know whether these asymmetries will serve as singularities by looking at them in-themselves. We can only discover in retrospect, as it were, that this asymmetry constituted a singularity for this system. We only find out that this was the initial crystal seed by watching how it amplifies itself, by how it propagates itself or spreads through the milieu. The singularity 'in-itself' is truly a sort of nothing. But under the right conditions, that singularity can constitute a crystal seed whose advancing front is defined by a series of points that each serve as the same type of singularity with respect to the uncrystallized medium. The crystal propagates at its edge, or better yet, the crystal as an individual simply is this mobile edge that serves as interface between two different states of the system. So the individual isn't really a spatial phenomenon contained in the initial seed which just happens to grow larger. It would be more appropriate to say that is the the act of growth itself, or the capacity of the system to crystallize under certain energetic and singular conditions. In other words, the individual is resonance, relation, not substance.
Thus, a third condition is manifested that we have not been able to note in the preceding case because it was necessarily fulfilled, since the structural germ and the metastable substance were of the same chemical nature. Here it is no longer a question of the scalar quantity of potential energy nor of the pure vectoral properties of the structure carried by the germ, but a ques- tion of a third type of rapport (which can be called analogical) between the latent structures of the still amorphous substance and the germ's actual structure. This condition is required for there to be a veritable amplifying relation between this structure of the germ and this potential energy carried by an amorphous substance. (I, 81)
This relation is information. It's what allows a tiny crystal seed to grow into a macroscopic crystal. The energy for this transformation doesn't come from the internal power of the seed, but from the way that its tiny energy resonates with the larger energy initially external to it, thus amplifying the source. It's the same type of energy my words have when they cause you to fetch me a beer. I'm not driving the car, handling the money, and getting the beer all with my own energy. I'm using the tiny energy of my speaking to exploit yours. And just like the definition of information as surprisal, the individual relation begins with an act of symmetry breaking, or what Simondon calls polarization. The individual properly speaking is the ability of this symmetry breaking polarization to propagate, that is, for an initial difference to make a difference, at Bateson put it.
... the properties of a crystalline individual express and actualize the polarity or bundle of polarities that have presided over its genesis by pro- longing this polarity. A crystal, which is a structured matter, can become a structuring being; it is both the consequence and the cause of this polarization of matter, without which it would not exist. (I, 84)
I think this idea of resonance really helps us understand Simondon's conception of the individual as process or relation in a deeper way. The individual crystal is not in the seed nor the amorphous milieu. It doesn't have defined physical 'properties' of 'characteristics'. It is nothing but its ability to transform one set of substantial properties into another set, a transformation that always happens at the limit of these two phases. And this ability is the same thing as a potential amplification of an initial singularity.
The genetic properties of a crystal are prominently manifested on its surface; these are the limit's properties. Thus, if we want to be rigorous we cannot say the "properties of the crystal"; they are instead modalities of the relation between the crystal and the amorphous body. It is because the crystal is perpetually unfinished, in a maintained state of suspended genesis, that it possesses what can be uniquely called "properties"; these properties are in fact the ongoing disequilibrium manifested by the relations with the polarized fields or by the creation (at the limit of the crystal and around it) of a field that has a polarity determined by the crystal's structure. (I, 84)
At this point, as I alluded to earlier, Simondon makes his way back to the issue of time. Time is the perfect model of symmetry breaking. For this reason, we might say that the real limit that defines the crystal is the present. The present is where the structured past has a chance to crystallize the amorphous future. In this sense the individual is where being undergoes a phase change, where the actual crystallizes from the potential in a becoming, "... becoming is not opposed to being; it is the constitutive relation of being qua individual" (I, 85). But this means that the individual is neither potential nor actual, neither possible form nor actual matter, but exists only at the moment of transition, and in the way this moment, because of the resonance it creates, gives rise to different moments that are nevertheless the same, in a process of amplification. Thus the real individual doesn't lie in the hunk of structured sulfur that results from a process of crystallization, but is instead the whole family of moments where a point on the edge of the crystal served as seed for the amorphous milieu surrounding it. The macroscopic crystal is not so much the statistical average of these real individual moments as a depiction of their family tree.
It can certainly be said in a derivative sense that a certain amount of sulfur is individualized by the fact that it is presented in a determined allotropic form. But this determined state of the overall ensemble does nothing but express on the macroscopic level the underlying and most fundamental reality of existence in the mass of real individuals that have a community of origin. The individualized characteristic of the ensemble is merely the statistical expression of the existence of a certain number of real individuals. If an ensemble envelops many physical individuals from various origins and different structures, it is a mixture and remains poorly individualized. The veritable support of physical individuality is effectively the operation of elementary individuation, even if it only appears indirectly at the level of observation. (I, 85)
1.2.2.3 Epistemological Consequences: Reality of Relation and the Notion of Substance
Simdondon concludes this chapter with some reflections on the difference between the crystalline and the hylomorphic schemas of individualization. The most obvious one is that their definitions of the individual don't share the same understanding of interiority and exteriority. The substantial individual we associate with the hylomorphic model has a clear spatial inside and outside. It is a finite being whose limit separates self from not-self. By contrast, for the crystalline schema, the individual exists only in its constantly displaced limit, which is no longer what separates it from all other things, but what produces it as a connection or transition between system states.
The finite being is the exact contrary of the limited being, for the finite being is self-limiting, since it does not possess a sufficient quantity of being to grow endlessly; on the contrary, in this indefinite being that the individual is, the dynamism of growing does not stop, since the successive stages of growing are like a number of relays due to which increasingly large quantities of potential energy are captured in order to organize and incorporate increasingly considerable amounts of amorphous matter. (I, 88)
Though it sounds odd to put it this way, because the crystalline individual is a being of the limit, it is by rights unlimited, infinite. The amplifying process of individuation gets as big as it can get, and the individual it produces thus has no inherent largest limit. In a sense, since the essence of the crystal is the feedback process by which the seed resonates with and converts the amorphous milieu into more crystal, the individual is eternal and self-producing. These words are easy to misinterpret though, so Simondon simply points out that the spatial growth of the crystal is always indefinite. And he gives a couple of interesting examples of how this same logic applies to the crystal shrinking through something like corrosion. Both the arising and the ceasing of the individual occur at the limit, in the eternal present.
So the crystal has no largest scale. But does it have a smallest scale? Indeed it does. Since it is produced by a transformation of an amorphous milieu into a regular lattice, the crystallization can only happen according to the spacing of the lattice. Or as Simondon puts it, the crystal milieu is periodic. The macroscopic edge of the crystal can be indefinitely large, but if we look carefully, this edge is composed of many microscopically ordered sites of crystallization with predictable gaps between them. Even though it can multiply itself through the crystal's growth, the smallest limit of the crystal can't be just anywhere. In fact though, this regular microscopic limit of the crystal is part of what allows it to grow into an indefinitely large macroscopic crystal that remains self-similar. The momentary sites of growth that are properly speaking the 'limited being' of the crystal are spaced periodically, which is what allows the macroscopic crystal to grow as large as it can without changing structure.
In fact, the shared source of the limit and the structuration is the milieu's periodicity. Here, with a more rational content, we rediscover the already indicated notion of the indefinite possibility of growth; the crystal can grow while conserving all its characteristics because it possesses a periodic structure; the growth is therefore always identical to itself; a crystal has no center that allows us to measure the distance of one point of its exterior contour with respect to its center; relative to the crystal's structure, its limit is no more distant from the center than the other points; the crystal's limit is in virtually every point, and it can really appear in each point through a cleavage. The words interiority and exteriority cannot be applied with their usual meaning to this reality that the crystal is. (I, 91)
The crystal as a structure isn't possible without the discontinuity of the periodic lattice at the microscopic level. If the molecular level were purely isotropic, with no polarization or symmetry breaking, and every point were equivalent to every other, the molar crystal could not form. In this sense, the individual always requires some small scale discontinuity or singularity. However, it also requires the energetic milieu that surrounds this discontinuity, and which it bathes in as a continuous potential energy that this singularity can draw from in crystallizing a structure. So we return to a point Simondon made in his introduction. The individual is an intermediate level of reality that links two disparate scales, two orders of magnitude. It's a relation that can create a substantial system with multiple parts.
This supposes that individuation exists on an intermediate level between the order of magnitude of the particulate elements and that of the molar ensemble of the complete system; on this intermediate level, individuation is an operation of amplifying structuration that makes the active properties of initially microphysical discontinuity pass to the macrophysical level; individuation is initiated on the level at which the discontinuous of the singular molecule is capable (in a milieu in a "hylomorphic situation" of metastability) of modulating an energy whose support is already a part of the continuum in the population of randomly arranged molecules, i.e. in a superior order of magnitude relative to the molar system. (I, 94)
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