The first chapter of part 2 is so sprawling, difficult, and seemingly disorganized that I'm not sure how to handle it. Basicailly, it investigates how the notion of individuation that Simondon developed with such care and consistency in his exploration of crystal formation might apply to the biological realm. So, what is a biological individual and what makes it different from a physical individual? Unfortunately, either life is so complicated that Simondon finds it difficult to consistently extend his schema into this area, or I am so dense that I haven't understood how the extension works. Either way, while interesting in many respects, this chapter is confusing enough that I can't succinctly answer the question. The best I'll be able to do is noodle for a while on the problem.
The root of the difficulty in defining the living individual is that life comes in so many levels. There's what we usually call the living individual, namely myself or my cat. But then there seem to be things that operate like individuals inside these -- to some extent, my cells have an individual 'life' of their own. On the other hand, my individual life is pretty heavily dependent on the group in which I live, which forces us to ask whether this group is the true individual. In fact, if we follow the analogy of crystal formation and attribute the reality of the individual to the capacity for an in principle unlimited propagation whose expending front phase shifts the matter it encounters, then it seems we should call the species the living individual. After all, I cannot personally reproduce myself as an identity, nor expand indefinitely in time or space, but I do appear to be at least partly responsible for propagating (or in my case failing to propagate) the human species. So perhaps what we usually call a living individual is better thought of as a sub-individual, a site at which the species individual crystalizes the environment, as it were.
In short, the problem is that there are too many levels that could serve as candidates for the unit of vital individuation. And what's worse, these levels are clearly all related. Me, my cells, and the I writing to you somehow all operate together. These interrelations seem to mire us in hopeless complexity, and that's definitely how I feel about much of this chapter. But in a way, these complex interrelations seem to be part of the solution for Simondon -- vital individuation is precisely the sort of process that breaks down into these distinct but interrelated levels. This is analogous to the way physical individuation linked together but also separated two different scales of organization, the micro (singular, structural) and the macro (energetic). In this chapter, Simondon no longer mentions the micro and the macro, which seem to have been replaced with the distinction and interrelation between interior and exterior milieus and the paired concepts of integration and differentiation. What before was a simple phase shift propagating itself by perfect repetition only at the edge of a crystal now becomes a reaction that can only advance by changing form. But this propagation of difference, this constant mutation, nevertheless constitutes the same individuation. It puts me in mind of Schrodinger's definition of life as an aperiodic crystal. In other words, life seems to be a sort of individuation that can only continue if it breaks down into levels. It's almost as if the unit of life can only propagate by splitting.
The idea that individuation continues by fragmenting the individual into levels might seem like a sort of vitalism. The sub-levels could appear to be mere tools of the higher levels, all the way up to the highest level where a mysterious Life runs the whole hierarchy. But Simondon conceives of this process entirely in terms of matter-energy and information, so if it constitutes a vitalism it's of a peculiar materialist flavor. We've already seen that Simondon's idea of 'inert' (ie. non-organic) matter is entirely different from the hylomorphic model. Physical matter is already potentiated, already capable of forming itself under the correct conditions. So we don't need the vital to explain complex and interesting organizations of matter. In fact, Simondon begins the chapter (pg. 170) by implying (somewhat contrary to what I've suggested above) that we don't necessarily even need the vital to explain a complex multi-level individual. This fits with his overarching goal of showing us a continuity of individuation between the physical and the vital. We need to always keep in mind the idea of neoteny that appeared at the end of the last chapter -- the vital individual is not constructed on top of the completed physical individual but instead inserted inside of an incomplete physical individuation. A species is a very strange way to crystallize an environment into similar units, one that in turn requires the complex individuality of these similar units to proceed. In this type of thinking there can be no sharp dividing line between inorganic and organic matter, since the latter merely extends the possible behavioral space of the former.
However, as always, Simondon's in principle continuities are broken up by thresholds -- phase transitions where new stuff is created out of the same old stuff. In this case the threshold seems to involve not the absolute level of organization, but what Simondon calls the "regime of information" (pg. 208) -- essentially a measure of how information propagates in a system. While it's not completely clear to me how these two concepts interrelate, it seems that the regime of information refers to something like the topology of a causal network (as opposed to simply its number of levels -- though it seems like there ought to be some relation between these characteristics). What parts of the system are densely interconnected and what parts sparsely? Do distinct parts of the system function mostly independently, with only a weak coupling, or on the contrary, do we need to integrate information from a whole hierarchy of levels to understand what's going on at a single particular level? Perhaps the idea is that with an increase in the absolute number of levels, we come to a point where the combinatorial possibilities of interlinking these levels reaches a phase transition? I'm imagining something like phase transitions in network wiring diagrams. At any rate, where the crystal only propagated information locally and at its edge in Euclidean space, in the living individual, information can propagate non-locally in both space and time (pg. 225). The Euclidean interior of a crystal has nothing to with the operation of individuation happening at its edge. You can hollow out the crystal and it will continue to grow. However, the entire complex organization of the Euclidean interior of a living organism is necessary for its propagation. In fact, we can say that this entire interior is in contact with the exterior in a living individuation (pg. 253). The result is a non-Euclidean topology where the inside appears distinct from the edge of the individual. In other words, the living individual has a sort of depth to it where the physical individual is totally superficial, it 'lives' only at its edge.
For Simondon, depth is a dimension that opens up when disparate things are integrated as different aspects of a single system. Which means that individuation is almost defined as the creation of depth. His favorite image for this is the way that the two distinct 2D optical images of our eyes can be integrated into a single 3D image that resolves their conflict. While this integration of differentiation is at the core of all individuations, it seems to be particularly emphasized in the case of the multi-level living individuals because it seems it can be repeated in a fractal pattern. This image begins to help us account for the difficulty we had in defining the proper unit of vital individuation at the outset. In fact, it seems that the interior of the living individual can often function as the exterior milieu of another individuation. Life seems prone to plunging into depth.
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