Perception is an individuation in itself, but it also serves as a sub-individual in the ongoing individuation of a psyche. In a way, Simondon already touched on this theme in the prior chapter when he discussed how important the orientation of the entire subject is for the act of perception. In this section, he goes into more detail about how perception fits into its context as one half of a psychic synthesis that prolongs a vital individuation. We already know that the other half of this synthesis is action, so the question is exactly how these two sides get coordinated in a feedback loop. The answer is the central orienting force of what Simondon calls the "affective-emotive" regime. This is the subconscious layer that acts as an interface between the actions of autonomic animal unconscious and the representational perceptions of a conscious psyche. For Simondon, this sort of transitional zone is always the center of an individuation, in this case the individuation of the psyche.
Affectivity and emotivity would thus be the transductive form of the psyche par excellence, the intermediary between clear consciousness and subconsciousness, a continual link of the individual to itself and to the world, or rather the link between the relation of the individual to itself and the link of the individual to the world. At the level of affectivity and emotivity, the relation of causality and the relation of finality are not opposed: every affectivo-emotive movement is simultaneously judgment and preformed action; it is really bipolar in its unity (I, 273)
Since affectivity in general is just this connection between how it is on the inside and how it is on the outside, all living beings possess some form of it. But since Simondon has now broached the psychic realm, it allows him his first chance to begin to talk about some of the more perennial philosophical puzzles of human experience. For example, if it's really the subconscious affective-emotive level that articulates our subjective individuality, then communication between two subjects must run through this level, rather than the conscious symbolic level (pg. 275). In addition, our own sense of personal identity, and in particular any sense of this identity's perserverance after death must also be a question of affective-emotive, and not substantial, continuity (pg. 276). Our intimation of immortality is a completely real feeling (pg. 277). In fact, the affective-emotive realm contains our entire spiritual life because it is precisely what connects what it within us to what surpasses us, what joins the here and now to the great beyond. Often we imagine that spiritual life is some abstract life of the mind represented in tangible form by the books and music and films that outlive our biology. But what is the point of knowing that 'your spirit will live on' if it is not connected to another spiritual being? The joy we imagine from contemplating the Buddha's influence or our own 'legacy' arises only in the present moment. Which is perhaps the only reason we give a shit about the 'future of the human race' -- if you all die tomorrow, who will read my blog!?
Culture gives too much weight to written, spoken, expressed, or recorded spirituality. This spirituality, which tends toward eternity through its own objective forces, is nevertheless not the only one; it is only one of the two dimensions of lived spirituality; the other, that of the spirituality of the instant, which does not seek eternity and shines like the light of a glance only to fade away afterwards, also really exists. Spirituality would have no signification if there were not this luminous adherence to the present, this manifestation that gives an absolute value to the instant and consummates within itself sensation, perception, and action. Spirituality is not another life, nor is it the same life; it is other and same, it is the signification of the coherence of the other and the same in a superior life. Spirituality is the signification of the being as separate and attached, as alone and as a member of the collective (I, 278)
With this mention of "the collective" we can start to see the beginnings of Simondon's theory of the transindividual. Though it follows from his overall concept of individuation, this unique and somewhat counterintuitive theory casts a surprisingly light on what it means to be individuated human psyche, so it deserves to be explored in a bit of depth before we proceed with our discussion of affect and emotion.
Right from the start, we've seen that one of the constants of Simondon's theory is the way the individual connects two distinct levels or scales or orders of magnitude. The crystal connects a micro to a macromolecular scale by relating a singularity to an energetic system. A biological individual (I think) connects a growing species (an aperiodic crystal) to the variations in its environment. Both of these individuals resolve a problem of growth because they actualize a potential energy that allows the information of a singularity to propagate through a medium. In the first case, this information propagates as the unchanged structure of the crystal, while in the second case, the information propagated is the local variations necessary for crystallizing a more complex milieu. In both cases, the individual is an intermediate level that allows a larger and smaller level to communicate.
The individual is always between things, a structure that at once links and separates, an active polarized membrane. The psychic individual is no different. It links and separates the vital unconscious and the 'conscious' realm beyond the animal. Since individual biological affect was already introduced as the way a species spreads by polarizing the environment along certain lines, it would seem that a fuller development of psychic life begins with the time variation of affect. Psychic life begins when the preprogrammed affective reflexes of the species are not longer sufficient for its propagation. [This isn't quite right, but we'll come back to the relations of sensation, affect, and emotion shortly] Affections now have to be integrated, through a learning process, in order to propagate through a more rapidly varying environment. But this environment is now filled with other psychic individuals undergoing the same process of individuation. The now more dynamic environment is what Simondon means by the collective or the transindividual. This shouldn't be confused with the inter-individual, which gives us the impression that the collective is a relation between already fully formed individuals, and might even make us think that we're only talking about a relationship between individuals within the same species (though it does seem to me that there is an outstanding question here about the relationship of the species to the transindividual). The transindividual is closer to the pre-individual soup that of course never actually went away in this scheme. Just like with the Tao, there's no individuation that exhausts the pre-individual or discharges all of its potential. The psychic individual is the link between the biological individual and this yet-to-be-formed wider world, and it's this link that Simondon is calling "spiritual". It seems that it's less about our relationship with other beings than a relationship between the process by which we are formed and the process by which these others are formed.
The spiritual or psychic levels seems to be precisely what moves us from pain and pleasure to suffering and release -- the first has only a narrow biological meaning, while the second involves our a whole orientation to our self and to the world.
Pleasure and pain are generally interpreted as signifying that a favorable or unfavorable life event emerges and affects the being: in fact, this signification does not exist at the level of the pure individuated being; there may be purely somatic pains and pleasures; but affective-emotive modes also have a signification in the accomplishment of the relation between what is individual and pre-individual: positive affective states indicate the synergy between the constituted individuality and the movement of the actual individuation of the pre-individual; negative affective states are states of conflict between these two domains of the subject. (I, 278)
In a sense, we might say that it's a question of whether we 'line up' with or resonate with our own becoming. We might think of the transindividual as the collection of individuations-in-progress, which clearly gives our relationship to a reflexive character. It seems that with the opening of the psychic realm, the individual itself, the individual as a process of individuation begins to intervene in its own ongoing individuation. This is why Simondon will also talk about the psychic as a synthesis (always via resonant feedback, and not through some a priori subject) of emotion and perception that leads to action. [There's some confusion here since the beginning of the chapter (pg. 273) seems to make the affectivo-emotive the center of a synthesis that coordinates perception and action, while at the end of the chapter emotion appears to be integrated with perception through a collective action (pg. 290)] A spiritual life cannot be merely contemplative because it is not the act of a finished subject confronting a finished world, but the act by which subject and world co-create one another (pg. 281). In fact, when this feedback loop between emotion and action doesn't close because the subject comes to feel that it stands apart from the world, what we get is anxiety. Simondon devotes a whole section to anxiety or existential dread or Heideggerean being-towards-death or whathaveyou, in which he beautifully articulates the problem -- our life, considered by itself, is utterly meaningless.
... in anxiety, the subject feels itself to be a subject to the extent that it is negated; it bears its own existence in itself, it is weighed down by its existence as if it had to carry itself—a burden of the earth (ἄκθος αρούρης) [ákthos aroúres], as Homer says, but also a burden to itself, since the individuated being, instead of having the ability to find the solution to the problem of perceptions and the problem of affectivity, feels all problems flowing back into it; in anxiety, the subject feels as if it exists as a problem posed to itself, and it feels its division into pre-individual nature and individuated being; the individuated being is here and now, and this here and now prevent an infinity of other here and nows from coming into existence: the subject becomes conscious of itself as nature, as undetermined (ἄπειρον) [ápeiron], and as something that it will never be able to actualize into a here and now, that it will never be able to live; anxiety is diametrically opposed to the movement through which one takes refuge in one's individuality; in anxiety, the subject would like to resolve itself without going through the collective; it would like to come to the level of its unity by way of a resolution of its pre-individual being into an individual being, a direct resolution without mediation or delay; anxiety is an emotion without action, a feeling without perception; it is the pure reverberation of the being within itself. (I, 282)
What most interesting in all of this is not the complex details of Simondon's analysis of psychic individuation. More important is simply the idea that, first, we are constructed as an individual subject, and second, that this individuality centers on an affective-emotional level and not the conscious rational level we usually take for granted. These two ideas shift our whole orientation to the question of "what is the meaning of life?" in a much more useful direction. It becomes more of a question of seeing, and feeling, how meaning is created though living.
However, I would be remiss if I didn't jot down a few notes about Simondon's complex scheme in 2.2.2.6 (pgs. 285-291) in case they should come in handy later. The basic equation here is sensation/perception = affection/emotion. Sensations and affections are like basic organic building blocks that result in a polarization of the external and internal worlds (respectively) according to a set of gradients. They are related by the tropisms of simple organisms. Move towards the light. Follow that increasing concentration of food molecules. Perception and emotion are the higher level correlates of these same concepts, and they are related by action, properly speaking. So perceptions integrate sensations that have become complex and self-contradictory, and emotions do the same for the wild variety of affections we feel. Because of their integrative function, perception and emotion are more self-sustaining, more the cause of themselves, than sensation and affect. This is how the constitution of the psyche returns to intervene in its own unfolding.
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