Ticked Off

Deleuze and Guattarri repeatedly refer to German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, and particularly to the memorable portrait of the inner world of the tick with which he begins A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans.  At the end of this post, I'll look back at the precise contexts of these references.  But I should begin by spelling out a little of Uexküll's philosophy, because it's clear to me in retrospect that D&G cannot have subscribed wholeheartedly to Uexküll's ideas.  They would surely object to the way he extends Kant's schema of a priori subjectivity to the animals.  And the notion of a harmonious music of nature scored by a transcendent divine composer is, at least as we usually understand this concept, totally foreign to their philosophy.  There are of course things that they have learned from Uexküll.  His attribution of a subjectivity to animals serves to deflate our human pretension to uniqueness.  And his vision of Nature does at least highlight a 'musical' inter-connectedness of the natural world, one that seems ludicrous to attribute purely to chance encounter.  All of this is to say that I didn't find quite what I was expecting in Uexküll -- or perhaps I should have expected D&G's idiosyncratic reinterpretation of his ideas.  While A Foray ... and A Theory of Meaning (two separate monographs published together in this translation) certainly fit within the individuation project we've been working on, Uexküll's work will end up figuring more for historical interest than something which independently advances our understanding.  In the end, he just applies Leibniz's ideas about the monad and pre-established harmony to the world of animal behavior. 

Uexküll's core idea is that the subject creates its own world, which he calls its umwelt.  The translator renders this into English as "environment" (except in the title), which runs the risk of making it sound passive and objective.  An animal's umwelt is an entirely subjective construction that contains all the features of the world relevant to that animal.  Features of what we would normally call the environment that are not relevant to the animal fall outside its umwelt, and literally cease to exist for that animal.  Uxeküll's classic example is the world of the tick.  For the tick, only three things in all of creation are relevant -- the odor of mammal which lures it to drop off its stalk of grass, the temperature of whatever it falls on as a result, and the feeling of skin as opposed to hair which guides its burrowing and blood sucking.  These three "perception marks" are enough to sustain the life of a tick, and so this is all its world consists of.  Since the tick doesn't differentiate between types of grass it climbs on or mammals it falls on or time of day or anything else, none of these factors enter into its simple world.  From our perspective, we see this as a selection of the environment (or a particular folding of it, if we use Leibniz's metaphor), but for the tick, there is nothing to select from -- these three features are all that exist.  Every environment is a horizon of being, so to speak.

The umwelt is an interesting idea that obviously has more than a grain of truth in it.  It seems hard to see how we could deny a meaningful inner world to animals anymore than to, say, Helen Keller, just because their sensory organs are configured differently than ours.  We also know that our own sensory organs only present to us a small slice of all the features of the world that can possibly be perceived.  My cats hear sounds and see things that I can't, and these are the senses that really tie the room together, for me, before we even get to my impoverished sense of smell.  So we too select our world from all the possible worlds in ways that we never become aware of.  Through this selective and subjective construction, the world appears as meaningful, as filled with objects relevant to our purposes and not merely as a random chaos of sensory data.  Thinking about this sort of subjective relativism makes palpable that we simply don't experience an 'objective' world without meaning or quality, and questions the centrality and 'normality' of human experience.  This is a valuable contribution that drives home the critical part of Kant's philosophy in an intuitive way.  We have no access to the thing-in-itself, or what Uexküll calls the indifferent "surroundings" -- instead we experience a subjective world.  Just spending time around an animal can teach us this important point.

Unfortunately Uexküll seems content to also accept Kant's idea that this subjectivity is synthesized in an a priori manner.  This schema is insufficient for a lot of reasons, but in this context it leaves us unable to explain how animals originate and evolve, and so has the paradoxical effect of reducing these subjects to static automata.  

You can see the problem clearly if you consider Uexküll's theory of meaning.  On the one hand, he clearly loves the beauty of nature and the cleverness of animals, and he wants to restore a romantic fascination with what his generation was busy reducing to a machine.  So he doesn't just describe the structure of animal worlds, but tries to lure us into these, as if he would make us hear the subjective poetry at the heart of the tick's paean to delicious mammal blood.  Biology, for Uexküll, cannot be reduced to the meaningless material interactions of physiology.  On the other hand, he bases the meaning of an animal's world entirely on the functions it fulfills for the animal.  To a tick, the meaning of the scent of mammal is "jump", the meaning of the warm body encountered is "hold on", and the meaning of the feeling of skin is "burrow".  These successive perceptions and actions are linked in an overall cycle of life that moves inevitably from waiting to feeding to laying eggs and dying.  Meaning is only created by the closure of a what Uexküll calls a "functional cycle", a perception-action loop that fulfills the purpose of the animal and allows it to reproduce.  So from the perspective of the tick, we're not uncovering a world any more meaningful than the one we might attribute to my thermostat.  Despite the vitalist and aesthetic point of departure, he has reduced the concept of meaning to the information processing algorithm needed to maintain equilibrium. 

In short, for Uexküll, meaning is fixed and static.  It consists in the a priori synthetic judgements of various animal subjects.  Clearly, this perspective takes the form of the subject for granted and will not help us understand how it could have been created nor how it can change.  Which also means that Nature's harmony remains a fundamentally mysterious thing we have no means of explaining.  Uexküll waxes poetic about the harmony of nature.  Given his presumptions however, none of this music can be heard from within Nature, but only from the perspective of someone following along with the score from the outside.  Because each animal remains imprisoned in its own subjective bubble, a bubble instinctively set to maintain itself and exclude anything that doesn't contribute to that.  The tick itself has no understanding of why it fits together so well with the mammal, and no mechanism is proposed for how this fit came into being (Uexküll is a scathing critic of Darwinism).  Nor, as we've seen, is the human in a fundamentally different position.  As Leibniz saw long ago, if the subject is a priori and eternal, then all its relations with other subjects must also be a priori and eternal.  As Garfield pointed out, if you remove the subject from space and time, you imprison it in an a priori that makes its relationship to the world fundamentally problematic.  I don't know how Kant handled the problem of other minds, or if indeed his universalist philosophy really has more than one Subject, properly speaking.  But Uexküll at least takes the same direction as Leibniz -- the harmony of Nature can only be the product of divine composition.  Subjects can only fit together as melody and counterpoint because of a pre-established harmony.  There has to be a Plan.

Of course, somehow, Uexküll himself caught wind of this plan.  He gives no explanation for how this might have happened.  It was probably because he was a Nazi.  Just kidding.  It's obvious that we in the West have long dreamed of finding a perspective that encompasses all other perspectives, of uncovering a Rosetta Stone of meaning which translates all the other meanings.  Call it the umwelt of the panopticon.  Or call it scientism.  Because, after all, isn't it science what has let us transcend our biological umwelt and discover the true objective "surroundings" at the root of every umwelt?  And isn't that why they put us in change of the planet?  Without a conception of how the umwelt is constructed and modifiable, every subject falls into the trap of thinking that its current world is all there is. 

P.S.  The references D&G make to Uexküll fall into two categories.  First, they like the story of the tick.  Not so much because it makes the tick's world subjectively meaningful, but because it shows the tick as a collection of active and passive affects.  The tick is related to its environment by what can affect it and by how it can affect its environment.  Indeed, for D&G, the tick is this relation.  This is similar to how Deleuze always approaches Spinoza's conception of power.  A thing is defined by all that it can do, and all that can be done to it, ie. by its capacities or power.  So these references are a bit like turning Uexküll's tick subject inside out.  Second, in the context of coding and territoriality, they like the idea of nature as a musical composition.  Notably, they leave out the harmonious part.  Instead, they talk about the way the spider "captures the code" of the fly, and composes its web in counterpoint to this code, and the way territory as a whole makes the environment expressive through a careful composition of marks.  In the latter case, however, the marks cannot be exclusively subjective, as territorial animals are also (always?) social.  My territory makes no sense without you hearing the music that composes its boundary.  Uexküll's Plan then becomes a Plane of consistency -- more like an open space in which marks become available to affect others.  But this plane is 'harmonious' only in the sense that anything can (in principle) affect anything else; we cannot know the connections in advance.  So again, they've almost inverted Uexküll's image of a finished Plan, and turned his symphony into a sort of dissonant harmony.  This is univocity or the disjunctive synthesis -- "crowned anarchy".

Conclusion

Simondon uses his concluding chapter to try and situate his theory of individuation relative to two perennial philosophical questions.  First, his theory has clear implications for understanding how Being relates to Becoming.  Second, he sketches out some ethical implications.  Discussing his thoughts on these topics gives us the perfect way to examine what we should take away from Simondon's brilliant, but quite complex, theory of individuation.

While it may at first seem counterintuitive in a book devoted entirely to the concept of individuation, Simondon here at the end reminds us that the individual is just one phase of "the being".  The being does not begin as an individual, and what has been individuated does not exhaust the being.  Instead, the individual is just a phase of being sandwiched between the pre- and trans-individual, the phase in which being becomes something particular through individuation.  Becoming is thus not opposed to Being, but included within it as one of its phases.  Naturally, this has some deep implications for how we think of Being, because we usually understand this concept on the model of the constituted and finished individual.  If the only kind of being were this completely individuated kind, then Being as a whole could be nothing but a creator god or the sum of all the atomic beings -- nothing but another individual.  This is presumably why Simondon rarely uses the term "Being" and instead talks about "the being".  The being, even the being that we normally consider individuated like myself or my cats, is more than just the individual.  As a concrete reality, the being contains within itself something of the pre-individual, some charge of potential that allows it to become.  This same logic applies even to the being we call Being, which for Simondon corresponds to the pre-individual.  Being is constantly overflowing itself in becoming individuated.  As Simondon put it, it phase-shifts with respect to itself.  Individuation is the process of the becoming of being, "the being's becoming", which means that becoming is not something foreign to being that befalls it from the outside, but a dimension internal to being, the dimension through which the being becomes more than itself. 

As always, at the root of the problem is the question of identity.  And what Simondon has given us is a theory of the production of identity designed to account for its existence without taking it for granted.  Since the being is not identical to itself, it is precisely this self-difference that provides the potential for the creation of identity.  Identity crystallizes. The field of being polarizes when its differences begin to resonate internally and drive it into a self-amplifying split between the identity of the individual and the complementary identity of its milieu.  Thus is born the reciprocal relation of figure and ground, subject and object.  There's no question that Simondon's philosophy contributes greatly to our understanding of nondualism by so carefully investigating the mechanism through which duality is produced, including the duality of Being and Becoming.

We can see all the most interesting aspects of this dualizing mechanism in Simondon's analysis of crystallization.  1) The amorphous medium harbors an energetic potential and a singularity that make it capable of becoming more than itself.  In contrast to 'original Being', it begins as both less and more than unity.  2) The crystal appears through a process that splits the amorphous pre-individual into individual and milieu.  These two are not opposites, but complements that could not exist without one another.  3) Then the crystal grows, the split propagates.  In the case of the crystal, the effect of the individual on its environment allows it to propagate indefinitely and unchanged.  But more complex biological or psychic individuations propagate by reciprocally transforming both their environment and themselves.  Their identity is no longer a simple conservation though reiteration, but a continuity of transformation.  All of this is summed up in Simondon's idea that the individual is not a stable substance, but a metastable solution to a problem.  It is a solution in the sense that it resolves some energetic tension in the pre-individual system.  But this solution is neither unique nor a completely stable equilibrium.  And this latent instability opens up the possibility of new problems and new solutions.  The individual is a metastability that leads to more metastability. 

It's a this point that the question of ethics begins.  What 'should' the individual do?  Simply realize the truth that they are much more than a lone individual.  See that they are always paired with a complementary milieu and that their actions have an impact on everything around them.  The ethical force of this vision, however, doesn't stem from the projected impact of our actions on other individuals just like ourselves.  Simondon is not rediscovering the universalizing force of Kant's categorical imperative.  Because the goal is not to act so as to be able to propagate the same action forever (which would be the effect of everyone following the categorical imperative), as if the point of metastability were only to arrive at complete stability.  Instead the goal is to act so as to expand the possibilities of action of the entire system of which our individuality is merely a part or phase.  The prime directive of an ethics metastability is to preserve metastability.  We want our actions to inspire other actions, that continue individuations that in one sense we are, and that in another sense, are just passing through us. 

The moral act is one that can spread out, phase-shift into lateral acts and link up with other acts by spreading out from its single active center. Far from being the encounter of a matter and a form, of an impulse and a norm, a desire and a rule, an empirical reality and a transcendental reality, the moral act is this reality that is more than unity and that spreads out from itself on both sides by joining with other realities of the same type; to reprise Malebranche's formula concerning freedom, according to which man is said to have movement to always go further, it could be asserted that the free act, or the moral act, is one that has enough reality to go beyond itself and encounter other acts. (I, 378 -- The footnote to this reads: In other words, one that contains within itself a power of amplification.)

Those unfamiliar with the cultivation of the Eternal Return may ask why it is 'better' to preserve metastability.  Why is overcoming our self more ethical than preserving our self?  And indeed, from the perspective of a substantialist view of the individual self, one which divides the world into a pure exterior that follows objective laws and a pure interior wherein lies subjective 'free will', there's really no answer to this question.  Once you have separated them, you can't get from 'is' to 'ought'. But Simondon's whole philosophy of individuation runs counter to precisely this split.  We are constantly in the process of constructing our identities, of overcoming ourselves through ourselves and becoming who we are.  Without this constant transformation there is no 'us'.  We do not inhabit a single instant in time but crystallize an entire past trajectory and possible future into an eternal present.  We remain an individual only by being more than an individual.  And if our acts don't create us and recreate us, if they don't amplify what counts as us, then there simply won't be many more acts.  An individual that closes doors as they go eventually ends up surrounded by closed doors -- hemmed in, diminished, and dead.  Opening, instead, leads to more opening, and on to the endlessly repeated cycle of opening that is the Eternal Return -- a gift economy of pure circulation.

The act that is more than unity, that cannot reside and consist only in itself but also resides and is completed in an infinity of other acts, is an act whose relation to other acts is signification and possesses the value of information. By taking generosity as the foundation of morality, Descartes revealed this power of the act to extend beyond itself. But, since he wanted to found a provisional morality, i.e. a morality that only looks ahead, he did not indicate the retroactive force of the act, which is just as important as its proactive force. Each act takes up the past again and encounters it anew; each moral act resists becoming and does not allow itself to be covered over as past; its proactive force is that through which it will always belong to the system of the present, able to be evoked again in its reality, extended, taken up again by an act, later on according to the date, but contemporaneous with the first act according to the dynamic reality of being's becoming. Acts construct a reciprocal simultaneity, a network that does not allow itself to be reduced by the uni-dimensionality of the successive. An act is moral to the extent that it has, by virtue of its central reality, the power to eventually become simultaneous with respect to another act. (I, 378)

Collective Individuation and the Foundations of the Transindividual

As the title suggests, this final chapter deals with the highest or deepest level of individuation -- a collective individuation.  This is the level that we would ordinarily think of as corresponding to society.  And while Simondon occasionally uses this term, he has something much larger and more subtle in mind than simply the groups of human individuals that it evokes.  The collective individual is the transindividual.  Last time, we tried to explain the transindividual is a realm of relations of relations.  In this chapter however, Simondon makes clear that this isn't quite right.  The transindividual is an individuation of the pre-individual charges that remains inside multiple individuals.  Since no individuation is final, each individual still harbors a non-individuated part hidden within it.  These "pre-individual charges", as Simondon calls them, can begin to resonate together and crystallize a structure of their own in the form of the collective, or transindvidual.  Here, the 'trans' is functioning literally in the sense of across or through, as opposed to between (which is how I read it last chapter).  The transindividual is not formed from the matter of finished individuals, but is an individuation of what remains unfinished in them.  Like other individuations, it's a direct form-producing individuation of a pre-individual matter, but in this case it must operate across the bridge, as it were, of the individuals.  This defines the sense in which it a collective individuation.  The collective individual that it produces is not a collection of individuals, but the individuation of a single individual from a collection of pre-individual realities that are held as distinct because they are in a sense trapped within individuated individuals.  So it's like a society of not-individuals.

I think this chapter also explains why Simondon did not want to accord psychic individuation the status of a true individuation, and instead started calling it an individualization that was just an extension of the vital individuation.  True individuations are defined as the phase transition of a pre-individual being.  The individual appears directly out of the pre-individual just as the crystal appears directly out of the amorphous medium as the structure capable of splitting this medium into the complementary duals of individual and milieu.  It is the resonance of a singularity (which can also be an earlier stage of the individuation) and an unstructured potential energy.  By contrast, the psychic 'individuation' (aka individualization) that Simondon describes is created through the relations between changes in the interior and exterior of an already (partially) individuated being.  It's just a time varying extension of the same vital individuation that defined the interior and exterior of a living being.  Which is to say that psychic individuation doesn't go all the way back to the pre-individual but works by creating changes in the already individuated.  Simondon never makes this connection, but it seems to me that evolution would be like a very slow psychic individuation, or conversely, we could see the psyche as a very fast form of evolution, along the lines of Popper's idea that our hypotheses die in our stead.  

So the psyche isn't really a new individuation but just an extension or acceleration of a vital one (the psyche is like a neoteny of the vital).  Neverthless, because the psychic individuation starts to put the boundaries of the individual into question on a more rapid timescale, it has the tendency to lead the individual beyond itself.  This is why the psyche is the gateway to the transindividual (pg. 178).  It's as if the psychic individuation leads to so much variability in the vital individual it extends that it blows this individual apart by exposing it to itself as a variable process.  We see that we are not a substance but just a sort of feedback loop.  Who am I?  For Simondon, this creates a psychic crisis point that leads beyond the relationship between changes in a relative interior and a relative exterior, and towards what we might call the relationship of an absolute interior to an absolute exterior.  This is the relationship between the pre-individual contained within the individual that powered its internal evolution and the pre-individual outside the individual, the pre-individual potentials trapped within another individual.  We might be tempted to think of the latter as simply the milieu of the individual.  But just as the individual carries a pre-individual charge within it, its complementary milieu also contains a pre-individual charge.  If the vital individual is not complete, then neither is its milieu, which is always just the complement of the individual.  Psychic individuation leads beyond itself because it puts an interior pre-individual into contact with an exterior pre-individual, and their coupling causes this whole dispersed or fragmented pre-individual realm to resonate or crystalize into the transindividual.  The transindividual is the crystallization of the dispersed pre-individuals, which makes it a true individuation.  But this strange new phase of being can only come about if there has been a prior individuation.

[There's a question here that seem obvious but goes completely unaddressed: If there's no real psychic individuation, why is there a biological or vital one?  And if there's no separate vital individuation because it too is predicated on an individuated physical matter, then doesn't this rob even the physical individuation of its distinction?  Are we not left with simple individuation, full stop, as one ongoing process or phase of being that comes between the pre- and the trans-individual?]

So the not-self in me gets together with the not-self in you and everything else, and together they make a subject.  This is another term that Simondon has introduced before (pg. 280 in the chapter on the psyche), without really remaking on it (just as he introduced the notion of individualization in the chapter on biology but waited till his discussion of psychic individualization to give it a more distinctive meaning).  The subject is not quite the same as the individual, regardless of whether the latter is meant to refer to the vital individual or the psychic 'individual' (if indeed these are different).  Simondon may have given us the impression that the subject was merely another name for the psyche, but it appears that the two realities differ in kind.  The subject is neither the pre- nor vital nor the psychic nor the trans- individual.  Instead, it seems to be something more like the triple point of these phases of being.

The subject being can be conceived as a more or less perfectly coherent system of three successive phases of being: the pre-individual phase, the individuated phase, and the transindividual phase, all of which partially but not completely correspond to what is designated by the concepts of nature, individual, and spirituality. The subject is not a phase of being opposed to that of the object, but the condensed and systematized unity of the three phases of being. (I, 348)

While SImondon does not explicitly use this analogy here, and didn't fully develop the idea in On The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, it seems that something like a triple point will be necessary to explain how his schema can account for the existence of his own monograph.  From what vantage point can we write about the "phases of being" as if they were all laid before us?  Are we not one of these phases?  Simondon has robustly critiqued transcendence on a number of occasions (admittedly pairing this with a critique of immanence, though he means this in the sense that the whole world is 'immanent' to something like Leibniz's monad).  So it seems unlikely that there is any coherent perspective completely outside his system.  However, the idea of an equilibrium point where all the phases are present seems like it would provide a possible solution.  As humans we could still be vital individuals, but situated at a point where we are also something more than individuals, at a place where the pre-individual, the individual, and the transindividual all interact.  It's not clear to me exactly how this would work, but it seems a promising line of thought.

There's a lot more in this final chapter than the high level overview I've taken.  Particularly, it would be interesting to reread the chapters on biological and psychic individuation now that we have a better sense of how the story ends.  The whole theory of emotion and affect would probably appear in a different light if it were informed from the start by the spin that Simondon gives it at the very end (pg. 350).  While it contains many brilliant insights and Simondon does his best to use clear language, I wouldn't want to defend the organization of the book.

Psychical Individuation and the Problematic of Ontogenesis

As we approach the end of the book, I'm getting worried that Simondon may not be able to sew up all the dangling threads he has created.  Like a man who sketched a mural too large for the amount of paint he had, some areas are going to go without color.  This analogy is the only way I can understand why some of rather clear implications of his theory, implications which would help us grasp its full contours, go either totally undrawn or are only mentioned in passing.  So at this point I'd like to approach this third section on psychic individuation from a slightly higher altitude that will hopefully help to bring Simondon's whole theory into better focus.  It's even possible that this is how he intended it to be read.  In that case, the three sections in this chapter on psychic individuation would be designed to work their way up from the nuts and bolts of the psyche (perception) to its overall form (affectivo-emotive) before finally examining its place as a development inside an ongoing vital individuation.  I found this order confusing because it puts the overview that orients us to the whole question of the psyche only at the end of a long discussion about how it operates.  But, as counter-intuitive as this may seem, it actually would be just like Simondon to examine in detail how it works before discussing what it is. 

Simondon begins this section by introducing a distinction between individuation -- the physical or biological individuation he has been talking about since the start -- and individualization -- which seems to be reserved in this section for describing the psychic realm.  While he repeatedly mentioned individualization back in the chapter on biology (pgs. 205, 211, 214 etc...) I didn't note any difference between the two terms at the time.  However, it seems that all along Simondon has had in mind that life can be individuated without being individualized, and in fact, this is probably part of the curious 'shrinking' of the purely biological realm I mentioned a while back.  Individualization, it turns out, is a step beyond individuation.  It is the propagation or continuation of individuation by other means.  Though he never puts it quite this way, it seems to begin when the action of the individuated organism starts to have a larger impact on its milieu, creating in turn changes in the organism that then lead to further changes in the milieu, and etc ... What would it mean for this runaway feedback loop to 'stabilize' into a structure in the same way that we've seen other individuations crystallize a metastable structure out of an energetic milieu?  In this case, the required structure wouldn't just relate a crystal's surface to its amorphous milieu or even relate a biological individual's interior to its exterior.  It would have to relate changes in an interior to changes in an exterior in such a way that we would discover a continuity of identity despite a continually fluctuating boundary that divides the two.  This is of course exactly how he described the psychic or spiritual world functioning in the last section.

In other words, like all of Simondon's structures, the structure of the individualized individual would be a relation, but in this case it would be relation of relations -- namely a relation of the individuated individual that constitutes the seed of the interior to the other individuated individuals that we collectively call the exterior.  This sort of relation of relations is what Simondon means by the transindividual.  He's employing this term literally -- the transindividual is the domain that stretches 'across' individuals and creates relations between individuated individuals who are already themselves relations.  However, aside from a alluding to it in an earlier (redacted) passage on epistemology, Simondon never quite explains the individualized individual as a relation of relations (individuated individuals).  It's not completely clear to me why he seems to avoid this conclusion.  But in the present section he seems to want to deny individualization (ie. psychic individuation) the status of true individuation.

It could be asked if there are individuals other than physical or living individuals and if it is possible to speak of psychical individuation. In fact, it actually seems that psychical individuation is an individualization rather than an individuation, if we agree to designate by individualization a type of process that is more restricted than individuation, insofar as it requires the support of the already individuated living being in order to develop; psychical functioning is not a functioning separate from the vital, but, after the initial individuation that provides a living being with its origin, there can be in the unity of this individual being two different functions, functions which are not superposed but which are (functionally) relative to another, just like the individual with respect to the associated milieu; thought and life are two complementary, rarely parallel functions; everything happens as if the living individual could once again be the theater of successive individuations that divide it into distinct domains.  (I, 296)

This is a puzzling passage, because there would seem to be a clear analogy between the way a vital individuation extends a physical individuation and the way the psychic individuation (aka. individualization) extends the vital.  In fact, right from the beginning he has characterized every individual (including the physical) as a "theater" of individuation; any individual is defined by its ability to propagate a process of individuation.  The only difference between the various levels of individuation seems to be in how they propagate their information.  Which brings us directly to another of the glaring omissions I mentioned at the outset.  Though he has nowhere summarized this important schema, it seems clear that physical individuation only propagates information locally in space and time.  The crystal can only grow at its surface, and only step by step.  As an individual, it really has no interior.   By contrast, the biological individual can propagate information non-locally in space, but only locally in time.  It too proceeds step by step, but since its entire interior can be in interaction with the exterior as the individuation advances, it introduces "remote relays" (pg. 225) in a previously Euclidean space.  The individual itself is a sort of non-local synthesis of space.  Finally, physic individuation introduces non-local connections in time (and inherits the non-local space of the biological individuation).  We'll see this more clearly in a moment, but the psyche is constructed as a synthesis of time, as a joining of the order of the simultaneous and the successive.  In a sense, psychic individuation introduces a temporal interior and exterior, where far flung memories and plans become part of me, here and now.  Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see why he leaves this parsimonious schema as merely implicit in stray passages.

The other implication of reading all the levels of individuation as analogous (as opposed to following the quote and distinguishing the physical and biological from the psychic) is that it allows us to see the domain of the transindividual begins right at the beginning.  Every process of individuation is the resonant relationship between a singularity and an energetic milieu.  While the first singularity of the physical crystal may be a mere nothing, a tiny symmetry breaking that looks nothing like the crystalline individual that will grow from it, the other steps in this individuation are seeded by the crystal structure itself.  The ongoing crystallization of the amorphous pre-individual milieu depends on the crystal itself as a partially formed individual.  So the process is not simply a relation of the pre-individual milieu to itself, but more of a synthesis or resonance between the relation of the crystal to its (past) self and the relation of the crystal to the milieu.  Even in the case of a crystal, this process of individuation is never finished, but we can always refer to the individual it produces in the instantaneous sense of the present moment.  If the transindividual is simply the space of relations between (always unfinished) individuals then it seems that even an ongoing physical individuation would invoke the transindividual.  All individuation would end up being a resonance between the pre-individual and the trans-individual.  While this would push the psyche back almost to the beginning of time, it creates another parsimonious continuity between the levels of individuation.  Individuation has always depended on a feedback loop where the individual as prorduct of individuation is einserted into the process of individuation.  Individuation is an inherently historical process (pg. 70).  Simondon spends most of the rest of this section examining exactly how this feedback happens with the psyche, or better said, how it creates the psyche.  While his discussion pertains specifically to psychic individuation, it seems to me that we could view this not as a radical change in type, but simply as an acceleration and deepening of the same feedback relation present in all individuations.  It's as if time becomes thick enough to interact with itself, just as the surface of the crystal acquired a depth to become a living being.  Seeing the same process at work throughout all individuations would also fit well with Simondon's idea of transductivity unity and phase transitions. 

In any event, though he uses completely different terms to describe it, Simondon makes clear in this section what remained more implicit in the last one -- the psyche at least is clearly a reflexive, recursive, fractal structure.  The biological individual becomes the theater of further individuation once it begins to relate changes within to changes without.  This allows for a spiritual or psychic realm where the interior of the individual is no longer fixed but variable over time.  It's as if the inside splits into two terms -- the prior individual or initial biological individual, and something like a map of how this individual changes in response to a changing world.  Here, Simondon describes this as a splitting of the biological individual into two functions -- thought and life, soul and body.  But the psychic term here explicitly includes a reference to itself, thus creating a reflexive loop.  The self is a relation of relations.  It is a relation established between the self and the world, both of which are relations.  So the self is the relation between (the relation between the self and the world) and (the relation between world and self).  So the self is the relation between (the relation between [the relation between (the relation between the self and the world) and (the relation between world and self)] and the world) and (the relation between world and [the relation between (the relation between the self and the world) and (the relation between world and self)]).  Etc ... Which sounds like some avant garde poetry. 

The important point here seems to be that the psyche is formed when the biological individual itself splits into individual and milieu in the same way that the pre-individual split into crystal and amorphous milieu.  The only difference is that this individuation is ambiguous.  It could be looked at either from the perspective of the new psychic individual created with the biological milieu, or from the perspective of the old biological individual who has acquired a new depth of internal milieu.  Which side is milieu and which side individual have become interchangeable, which creates an endless circling back and forth between them.  So it's not just that the biological individual splits and keeps on recursively splitting, but that we actually begin to lose track of the sides.  They remain distinct, but we begin to see how they are always complements to one another that arise in pairs.  Who sees this and how we arrive at a psychic synthesis that takes these views as reciprocally related is something I don't totally understand.  And yet somehow the psychic individual is finally able to grasp itself simultaneously as a both individual and milieu.  It's at this point that it seems to be able to view the entire process of splitting as a synthesis of time in which it unfolds and lives.

The present consists for the being in existing as individual and as milieu in a unitary way; however, this is only possible through the operation of ongoing individuation, which is analogous in itself to the initial individuation by which the somatopsychic being constitutes itself within a tensed and polarized systematic whole. The individual concentrates within it the dynamics that has given birth to it, and it perpetuates the first operation as a continued individuation; to live is to perpetuate an ongoing relative birth. It does not suffice to define the living being as an organism. The living being is an organ- ism depending on the initial individuation; but it can live only by being an organism that organizes and organizes itself through time; the organization of the organism is the result of an individual individuation that can be called absolute; but this organization is a condition of life, rather than life itself; it is a condition of the perpetuated birth that life is. To live is to have a presence, to be present relative to oneself and relative to what is outside oneself. (I, 325)

It's clear that this structure is related to Deleuze's idea of the time crystal.  But tracing the similarities and differences would be another project in itself.