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.
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