Chapter 2 of Part 2 begins much more lucidly than the preceding chapter on biological individuation. While I'm not completely clear why this should be so, I think one reason may be the unstable intermediate position of purely biological individuation in Simondon's overall theory. The book begins with physical individuation, and the present chapter discusses psychic individuation as a part of the collective individuation that Simondon calls the transindividual. It's not clear yet whether he conceives the transindividual as the end of the process of individuation, but it is certainly the end of the book. So a purely biological individuation has to fit somewhere between these starting and ending points. And since, as we'll see presently, Simondon considers perception to be an aspect of physic individuation, he draws the boundary of the psyche at a lower threshold than many might. For example, it's clear that he would attribute an individualized psyche to each of my cats. Once we let go of our anthropocentric bias in defining the psychic realm, it becomes pretty hard to limit its spread down the taxonomic tree of life. The narrow space then left to the purely biological individual perhaps goes some way in explaining the difficulties of the last chapter, as well as its reliance on examples mainly derived from the life of colenterates; certainly no mammal lacks a psyche.
In a way though, this same problem of instability effects the psychic realm as well. In fact, since each type of individuation is inserted inside the preceding one, it seems that psychic individuation would be even less stable biological individuation. This is part of the design of Simondon's system -- each new level is more metastable than the last. That is, it represents a more precarious equilibrium, but one that, by the same token, can incorporate a much wider range of both internal and external information. As the individuations cascade, each leads on to the next with increasing rapidity. Each resolves a problem at the previous level ... by creating even more problems at the next level. Simondon actually introduced us to this idea in the previous chapter, where he again used the concept of neoteny to relate psychic to vital individuation.
... the appeal to psychical life is like a slowing down of the living being, which conserves this slowing down in an extended and metastable state that is rich in potentials. The essential difference between simple life and the psyche consists in the fact that affectivity does not perform the same role in these two modes of existence; in life, affectivity has a regulative value; it dominates the other functions and guarantees this ongoing individuation that is life itself; in the psyche, affectivity is pressed on all sides; it poses problems instead of resolving them and leaves the problems of the perceptive-active functions unresolved. The entrance into psychical existence essentially manifests as the appearance of a new problematic which is higher and more difficult and which cannot receive any veritable solution from within the living being, properly speaking, conceived within its limits as an individuated being (I, 177)
This whole section (2.1.1.2 -- pgs. 177-180) was rather obscure at the time. When we return to discuss affectivity in the next post we'll be able to make more sense of it. But the basic idea we need from it now is just that perception is an integration of disparate sensations that solves some vital problem.
Simondon treats the perception of an object as a type of individuation, a specifically psychic individuation that occurs within an ongoing vital one. This way of approaching things cuts across a lot of stale debates about truth and objectivity because it takes perception out of the domain of representation. My percept of a cat is not a little picture of a cat in my brain, nor is it any coded version of that picture such as the firing of the 'cat neuron'. Perception is not something that happens in the head of the subject, but between the subject and object, and its value does not lie in representing the world, but in organizing action in it. In this way, perceptions are both structured by the world, and also return to structure it. As with every other individuation, it's really the mutual resonance or feedback between two sides -- the structure of the subject and the structure of the object -- that allows for the individuation of a perception. Or if we state this the other way around, taking the non-dual perspective, perception is a phase shift in the subject-object system that crystallizes a subject which sees and an object which is seen.
Before perception, before the genesis of the form that perception precisely is, the relation of incompatibility between the subject and the milieu only exists as a potential, similar to the forces that exist in the phase of metastability of the supersaturated solution or the supercooled solid, or even in the phase of metastability of the relation between a species and its milieu. Perception is not the grasping of a form but the resolution of a conflict, the discovery of a compatibility, the invention of a form. This form that perception is modifies not only the relation between the object and the subject, but also the structure of the object and the structure of the subject. (I, 259)
These days, after contributions from behavioral economics, psychology, and meditation, I think it's easier for us to appreciate how the structure of the subject contributes to perception in a way that has nothing to do with representation. Put simply, we are good at perceiving things that are salient to us, and pretty bad at perceiving anything else. We don't even see the gorilla if we're busy counting. Stopping with this idea though can give us the impression that perception is nothing but selection. As if all the possible objects were given in their full detail in advance and we merely chose to pick out some of them and not others. This doesn't account for the generation of these possible objects as objects of perception. What holds them together as objects? Part of the answer lies again in the structure of the subject. We select traits to characterize objects as relevant because we plan to do something with them. Every perception is an incipient action, even if it remains unperformed. But these perceptions are shaped by the success or failure of past actions, and so depend on the real structure of the object. We are not just making this up. If we perceive an object where the world does not afford one, we are in for a bad afternoon. The feedback loop between subject and object cannot close to create a perception without contributions from both sides.
There's a sense, then, in which the perception of an object is like an extension or continuation of the physical individuation that created it. For perception to happen, this physical system must be coupled to the psychical system. Objects of perception fall out of this coupled system as so many distinct frequencies of resonance, as it were. We discover a bundle of correlated real properties of a physical individuation that make the object useful for us, in our ongoing vital individuation. Simondon calls these resonances the quantum nature of perception. The idea is that while physical reality is continuous (at least relative to our scale), we interact with it in a discreet manner. But we can do this only because reality itself allows for it -- its continuity naturally comes divided up by thresholds created by the phase shifts of the physical individuation.
What humans perceive in objects when they grasp them as individual is therefore not an indefinite source of signals, an inexhaustible reality, like matter, which allows itself to be analyzed indefinitely; what they perceive is the reality of certain thresholds of intensity and of quality maintained by objects. ... the physical object is an organization of thresholds and of levels that is maintained and transposed throughout various situations; the physical object is a bundle of differential relations, and its perception as individual is the grasping of the coherence of this bundle of relations. A crystal is an individual not because it possesses a geometrical form or an ensemble of elementary particles, but because all of its (optical, thermal, elastic, electrical, piezo-electrical) properties undergo an abrupt variation when we pass from one facet to another (I, 264)
We don't see all of reality as it is. But what we do see is reality, or at least, something that can really happen to an objective reality. Amongst other things, many physical individuations are capable of being perceived because they have effects which propagate through the environment (and in particular, propagate through the part of the environment we call a nervous system) in a coherent way.
Perception then is like a resonance between what the object can do and what the subject can do. Simondon talks about the details of this resonance in two distinct but related ways -- in terms of orientation, and in terms of information. We've seen that since it is always characterized by a threshold or transition, every individuation involves a polarization or orientation of the milieu. Consider the crystal in the quote above. It's individuation as a structure distinguishes two sides where before there was one. A previously amorphous milieu acquires a direction. It's this orientation that actually allows the physical individuation of the crystal to continue or extend in the manner Simondon indicates. The crystal is not so much a substantial unity of atoms with a certain structure as it is a propagation of the process by which is polarizes its medium. That's why the crystal has identifiable 'properties' that make it distinct from its medium -- it has has different effects on other things than the uncrystalized solution, or perhaps better said, it's polarity means that it is taken up differently in other larger ongoing physical individuations. But the living individual also has a polarization or orientation. For the purely biological individual, Simondon seems to think that this orientation comes not from the individual itself but from the affectivity built into it in its role as a sub-individual which helps propagate the species as an individual (see pg. 177, and the distinction between drives and tendencies on pg. 183). But for a more individuated species (ie. where each member seems more unique to us, ie. where a physic individuation has already begun to be layered onto the vital level) this affectivity expands into a whole emotional orientation to self and world. What is it we personally fear and love? What do we desire? This individuation of a subject is also a sort of polarization or orientation. And of course, it's the resonance or lining up of these two orientations that constitutes a perception. To construct that object as desired is to couple the orientation we seek with the orientation the world offers to us. Perception has an innately emotional component.
The unit is perceived when the reorientation of the perceptive field can be effectuated in line with the object's own polarity. To perceive an animal is to discover the cephalocaudal axis and its orientation. To perceive a tree is to see in it the axis that goes from its roots to the end of its branches. Every time the tension of the system cannot be resolved into a structure, into an organization of the subject's polarity and of the object's polarity, an uneasiness remains that habit is hard pressed to destroy, even if every threat has been removed. (I, 261)
Simondon also talks about this resonance of subject and object in information theoretic terms. Here, his point is that perception is neither a process of finding the simplest and best forms in nature, such as the square and circle, nor in representing its complexity with perfect fidelity, but of discovering the most intense forms for the subject. Gestalt theory tried to argue that we innately perceive simple geometric forms because these were the 'good' forms that couple be found everywhere and combined into everything. In information theoretic terms though, these forms are highly compressible and therefore contain very little information in themselves. So then how would we know how to combine them into a useful perception? On the other hand, because of its technological roots, information theory imagines that more information -- more pixels, higher bit rates -- is always better, and that perception is just about gathering as much data as possible. In this case though, how would we know what to do with all this data? Representing the full complexity of reality is impossible for a finite nervous system and would moreover be completely useless to the biological organism. Information and Gestalt theory are both hylomorphic theories of perception that obscure the way subject and object interact. Instead, perception is all about finding the correct level of compressibility of the world's information for the particular needs of a given subject. The forms perceived will contain an intermediate amount of information, one that resonates with the problem of choice faced by the subject as well as the coherent nature of the objects' effect on the world. Simondon calls this the intensity of information, as opposed to its pure quantity or quality.
We can trace how these two perspectives on resonance come together in the following quotes. They also give you a sense of how Simondon's scheme could be compatible with the Bayesian inference model of perception (so long as we rid the foundations of the model of its atavistic reliance on the notion of representation -- note to self: is there some way to recharacterize the minimization problem of the free energy principle as a question of resonance?).
Above information as quantity and information as quality, there is what could be called information as intensity. The simplest and most geometrical image is not necessarily the most expressive; the image that has the most meaning for the perceiving subject is not necessarily the image that is most elaborated and meticulously analyzed in its details. The entire subject (with its tendencies, drives, and passions) must be considered in a concrete situation and not as a subject in the laboratory, i.e. a situation that generally has little emotive value. (I, 267)
The quantity of signals only produces an unpolarized ground; the structures of good forms only provide frameworks. It does not suffice to perceive details or ensembles organized in the unity of a good form: these details and ensembles must have meaning with respect to us and be grasped as intermediaries between the subject and the world, as signals that allow for the coupling of the subject and the world. The object is an exceptional reality; what is usually perceived is not the object but the world, which is polarized in such a way that the situation has a meaning. The object properly speaking only appears in an artificial situation that is somewhat exceptional. (I, 268)
It is not enough to simply say that perception consists in grasping organized wholes; in fact, perception is the act that organizes wholes; it introduces organization by analogically linking the forms contained in the subject to the signals received: to perceive is to retain the greatest possible quantity of signals inside the forms most deeply rooted in the subject; perception is not merely grasping forms or recording multiple juxtaposed or successive data; neither quality, quantity, the continuous, nor the discontinuous can explain this perceptive activity; perceptive activity is the mediation between quality and quantity; it is intensity, the grasping and organization of intensities in the relation of the world to the subject. (I, 269)
The overarching point is that perception is just like any other individuation. It is a transduction of energy into (in this case psychic) structure, a crystallization of a milieu based on its internal resonance, a partial resonance of the world with itself that allows two sides to be simultaneously distinguished and coupled.
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