Temporality and technical, psychic and collective individuations in the work of Simondon

Abstract

temporality and technical, psychic and collective individuations in the work of Simondon. Simondon describes technical artefacts as possessing a tendency towards increasing organisation, in a process of individuation. In the case where a dynamic relation actually constitutes the terms of the relation itself, and this constitution occurs in the very process of individuation of a technical artefact, one speaks of the individuation as occurring in a transductive manner. Transduction is a dynamic relationship because, starting from a pre-individual horizon, it tends towards unity without ever becoming rigidly fixed: perpetually out of phase, the transductive process is essentially temporal in nature. In another text, Simondon describes psychosocial individuation in the same terms, as a transductive process on a preindividual background. However, Simondon never articulated these two aspects of his work. It is nevertheless tempting to advance the thesis that the articulation between psychic individuality and collective individuality in the course of epi-phylogenesis is realized precisely by technical artefacts, which are both traces and heritage. Drawing on Heidegger and Derrida, this article seeks to designate the irreducible advance of technics which, as the original temporal difference, constitutes the horizon of all psycho-social individuation.

Keywords

• individual/collective
• epi-phylogenesis
• individuation
• technical artifact
• psychic
• Temporality
• transduction.
• transduction