Nature, Technology and Conscious Evolution
A Post-human Constructive Philosophy
COSMOGENESIS AND INDIVIDUATION
The turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth saw the implementation of what has been called the Second Industrial Revolution marked by universal electrification, mass production and the birth of the world market. This brought the post-Enlightenment episteme into the properly modern phase of its actualization, the practical horizon of a global humanity. For the first time in human history, the assumption of a species identity for all humans and the yoking of all humanity in a common global life made itself a ubiquitous anthropological possibility. The ontological consequences of such an epistemic change were dimly grasped by the leading thinkers of the time, in their varied ramifications. These included ideas which projected a global expansion of human subjectivity, read retrospectively back to cosmogenetic processes. It should be noted that Enlightenment philosophies had already arrived at a formalization of an evolutionary ideology in Hegel’s philosophy of history, which saw an involved rationality in Matter and a cosmic Time Spirit (Zeitgeist) working out its experiments in synthesizing opposites towards the emergence of the Logos as free thought in social and political life.1 In this lineage of thought, a deterministic principle of evolution is assumed, whose intelligence motives cosmogenesis. It is important to note that creature agency is undervalued in this process, the progressive experiments of the Zeitgeist leave their results culturally fossilized moving on to other ‘races’ (an east-to-west drift) and human subjectivity remains bounded within predetermined limits. Nietzsche’s refusal of ideological truths on the grounds of their being historically contingent and politically established and his exaltation of human agency as the instrument of a cosmogenetic will to power was largely a reaction to Hegel’s deterministic evolutionism. The new evolutionary philosophies which arose through the last decades of the nineteenth century and over the first half of the twentieth century were closer, in this regard, to Nietzsche in positing immanent forms of evolution in which creature/human agency played a key part and human subjectivity underwent radical change/expansion. It should also be noted that such philosophies arose in the wake of Darwinian evolution, but whereas the latter was restricted to morphological change based on accidental functional adaptations in which agency or consciousness played no part, the new philosophies recognized changes in consciousness underlying evolutionary processes and resulting from immanent ideas actualized through acts of will.
Three such thinkers of this period are the two Frenchmen Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) and the Indian, Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950). In looking for a common key to describe the works of these thinkers, one can isolate a convergent identification of cosmogenesis and individuation in their works. ‘Cosmogenesis’ is a term used by Teilhard to refer to a process of increasing complexity, self-organization and self-awareness of the cosmos.2 ‘Individuation’ seems more common in its usage but is deceptive due to its varied connotations and inflections. Presently, this term is more usually associated with C.G. Jung (1875–1961), a psychological emergence of singular personhood out of the amorphous Unconscious and its movement towards universalization.3 Though such a process could have practical similarities with individuation as theorized by more recent philosophers like Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989)4 and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995),5 these latter include an ontological foundation to individuation which is absent in Jung. Closer in sense to these later thinkers, Henri Bergson (1859–1941) uses the term to refer to creative differentiation of instances,6 and Teilhard and Sri Aurobindo, though they don’t explicitly use the term, refer to ontogenetic processes akin to individuation. Teilhard, for example, writes of hominization, personalization, anthropogenesis and christogenesis as roughly synonymous terms to a becoming-individual of the cosmos7 (which is simultaneously a becoming-cosmos of the individual), while a similar evolution towards universalization of the person-element (purusha) in the cosmos is envisaged by Sri Aurobindo in what he calls psychisization.8
METAPHYSICS OF CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION
In Teilhard9 and Sri Aurobindo10 a panentheistic consciousness is immanent in all entities in the cosmos and seeks to individuate itself through them. In the case of Bergson,11 a creative immanent consciousness in the cosmos and all its creatures, the élan vital, multiplies diversity and pushes towards an increasing complexity that can be intuited and be the source of knowledge and action in each of its creatures according to their orientation and capacity. Such an ontogenetic foundation evades the hubris of anthropocentrism but empowers the individual, variously locating the evolutionary will as entity agency. This is where these thinkers differ from philosophers of deterministic history, such as Hegel, for whom cosmogenetic agency, even when immanent, can be said to be located in a transcendence within the immanence. In these thinkers, one finds both these dimensions of transcendence and immanence assuming active potency in beings/entities, along a gradient in which Teilhard can be seen as slanted closer to the transcendence and Bergson towards the immanence. Of the three, Sri Aurobindo, while acknowledging an immune transcendence, yet posits two other forms of self-perception of this transcendence, an objectified self-perception (Matter as cosmic immanence of the Subject) and a self-multiplied prospection as every individual possibility within this immanence, or in other words, the complete immanence of conscious Being (Brahman) in every particle of the material cosmos, thus representing a coeval individual agency in conjunction with cosmic agency.12 While individual agency has been instinctually active and secondary to cosmic agency (‘Nature’) prior to the appearance of the human, individualized consciousness in the human represents a new level of conscious independence from cosmic agency and thus able to determine its own destiny, superseding Nature’s conditioning and capable of transforming it.13
Sri Aurobindo’s theological metaphysics has profound correspondences with Teilhard’s Christology, founded on an exile and redemption mythos. In Teilhard’s mystical Christology, the ‘redemption’ is not ‘completed’ by the historical personage of Christ, but this historical event becomes a symbolic promise for its multiplied realization in human individuals leading to a cosmic ‘return’ through christogenesis in the individualized collective realization of the ‘Omega Point’.14 The separation from Origin implied in a mythos of exile is also present in Sri Aurobindo; though, founded in the Vedic theme of sacrifice as expressed in the Purusha Sukta,15 such a separation is not an ‘act of Evil’ burdened on the human and thus requiring redemption, but rather an ‘act of God’ on the body of God, and thus a self-sacrifice, leading to an ontology of separation in which, nevertheless, the One becomes self-multiplied as monadic immanence.16 Similarly, instead of ‘redemption’, then, the evolutionary drift of such a cosmic condition would be a recovery of cosmic and transcendental Oneness through identification of each individual with the fullness of Purusha (Being as Person), reconstituting its sacrificed body in a collective manifestation which Sri Aurobindo referred to as a ‘divine life’ on earth.17
However, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, individual agency coexists with cosmic agency in Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysics. This implies a theology in which the Vedic sacrifice of Purusha (Person, the ‘Who’) is accompanied (in fact, preceded) by the sacrifice of Prakriti (Cosmos, the ‘What’), creating the substantial and operational cosmic condition of Inconscience in which the fragmented dismemberment of Purusha may seed itself.18 This cosmic latency of Consciousness self-constrained as Inconscience becomes the basis for the evolution of Nature. According to Sri Aurobindo, all evolution is accomplished through the double process of memorial aspiration (ascent of consciousness) and responsive grace (descent of consciousness).19 The stirrings of the memory of Consciousness within the Inconscient turn into an ‘ascending aspiration’20 which invokes the ‘descent’ of successive gradations of Consciousness, each with its characteristic properties marking its difference in kind. Such a successive gradation of Consciousness in Nature (Prakriti) based in the Inconscience of Matter affords increasing possibilities of freedom and self-manifestation (swayambhu) to the individualized immanence of Purusha in each of its dispersed units. Thus, the evolution of Prakriti affords the evolution of Purusha.21
EVOLUTION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PRAXIS OF SRI AUROBINDO
In Sri Aurobindo’s cosmology of consciousness, the Purusha (person-element) is present in the particulate appearance of Matter as physical or material purusha, a spiritual inherence; in discrete life forms as vital purusha (pantheist or animist soul) and with the appearance of Mind, as mental purusha (conscious observer or witness). These three qualitative differentiations of the soul–nature dyad are emergent phenomena of the evolution of cosmic nature. This immanence of Purusha acts as the cosmogenetic individuating property in each of its prakritic (matter, life, mind) manifestations. Hence, each of these successive forms of personhood is more ‘awake’ than its predecessor, better able to experience its freedom and sovereignty from its constraining bounds of nature and hence express greater agency. In the human, the coexistence of physical, vital and mental prakriti implies the triple presence of physical, vital and mental purushas or conscious centres/souls, a compound and heterogeneous existence in which the freedom of the intelligence (buddhi) from the rest of the human constitution enables a higher degree of potential freedom of the mental purusha, resulting in an alienation from Nature but also holding the possibility of its transcendence and conscious reidentification.22 Such a possibility of purusha’s freedom in one of the constituents of prakriti results in what may be called an anthropogenesis,23 a new form of ontogenesis in the human. This anthropogenesis is a new birth of personhood, described by Sri Aurobindo in terms of the appearance of a more centralized dimension of immanent purusha in the human, capable of integrating the physical, vital and mental purushas. Sri Aurobindo refers to this central purusha as ‘psychic being’ or ‘soul personality’.24 At this point, Purusha’s emergent evolution is capable of taking an independent turn, no longer dependent on the evolution of Prakriti (cosmic nature) but able to transcend, master and transform Prakriti.25
Being free of the burden of guilt, Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary monadology may be seen as an individualized ‘adventure of consciousness and joy’ and in this respect closer to Bergson’s (and Nietzsche’s) personal exercise of a cosmic creativity (élan vital/will-to-power). It is also in this respect that such an exercise of personal creative will has been theorized by Sri Aurobindo as a praxis discursively continuous with long traditions of Indian yoga,26 though put to a life-affirming end of social and cosmic transformation. Thus, of these three thinkers, Sri Aurobindo provides the most developed methodology for a cosmic and transcendental expansion of (post-)human personhood, based in the capacities of the source of individuation – the psychic being – to integrate the personality, identify itself with cosmic being (Overmind) and finally transcend cosmic existence in an identity with a transcendental source, the Supermind.27 Each of these developmental phases may be thought of as a phase of cosmogenetic individuation, yielding collective (social and cosmic) transformations. Sri Aurobindo refers to this process as ‘the triple transformation’.28 Yet, as one can see from the above, such a process is intensely psychological, a ‘practical psychology’29 as Sri Aurobindo terms it, which seems to minimize or invalidate any concern for social or cultural conditions.
Such an appearance, however, is misleading and arises due to the disciplinary specialization of discourse as an epistemic aspect of modernity. We have noted how Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysics involves relationally the evolution of universal conditions (prakriti) and individuation of consciousness (purusha). This relationality does not disappear with the emergence of the human. If the practical psychology of the triple transformation is concerned primarily with ontic evolution of the Purusha as outlined in Sri Aurobindo’s philosophical (The Life Divine, 2005) and ‘yogic’ (The Synthesis of Yoga, 1999) works, Sri Aurobindo’s social and political texts delineate the continuing evolution of prakriti (nature) at the level of human society, moving towards global conditions of human unity, a trajectory fraught not merely with promise but danger, needing political and ethical negotiation through its relationship with human agency.30 But the implications of such ethical and political agency are easily lost sight of, due to the above-mentioned separation of his social and psychological texts and the privileging of the latter over the former.
This continuing evolution of prakriti at the level of human society and civilization in its varied relations with human choices (evolution of purusha) can be elaborated into a critique of modernity, something Sri Aurobindo himself undertakes to some extent in his social and political texts.31 He presages a phase of globalization led by capital and outlines the dangers of ‘economic barbarism’ and fascist politics.32 He predicts the eventuality of a world government and analyses the struggles of individual and subcultural agency in the face of homogenizing or hegemonizing tendencies.33 He stages the opposition of superpower politics and federalist participation.34 He sees the importance of promoting the forces of individual freedom, fraternity and internationalism over the ideological investments of state-controlled planning or aggressive nativism or religious fundamentalism.35 At the micro-social level of the individual and the community, he promotes increasing autonomy with direct individual participation in shaping the communitarian life moving in the direction of a spiritual anarchy. Yet, as I discuss in the next paragraph, the ubiquitous mediation of technology as the sign of contemporaneity, emerging after his time, is not independently addressed by Sri Aurobindo.
While a comparative study of these three thinkers would be very interesting (and has been attempted in part by several scholars), what concerns me here is the contemporary relevance of the paradigm or episteme that finds form in these thinkers. In this regard it is the unthought within the thought, the obvious medium of existence that often makes possible the perception of an idea but remains invisible or imperceptible and concretizes itself over time, demanding a new engagement. Such is the place of technology in the articulation of these thinkers. One may say that the question of human subjectivity and its transformation (the ‘who’) accompanies the thought of post-Enlightenment modernity from its inception as part of its anthropological project. But it is tied to the question of the transformation of the world (the ‘what’) as it arises from its knowledge (science). This project of world transformation is attributed to the application of science – that is, technology – and thus the appearance of new assessments of the relation of human subjectivity to the cosmos with the advent of new technologies is almost to be expected. Yet the possibilities opened up by the new technologies on human consciousness are elided in the new philosophies of conscious evolution and/or the evolution of consciousness. To be fair to these philosophers, it isn’t as if they ignore the advances of science and technology. Along with other humanistic thinkers of this period, they hold an ambiguous view of technology, part critique of its alienating and destructive effects from/on nature and part admiration for its productive and world-uniting possibilities. But technology does not receive a systematic treatment in relation to the possibilities of human consciousness from any of these thinkers.
HEIDEGGER AND THE QUESTION CONCERNING TECHNOLOGY
Indeed, it is only after the passing of this generation of thinkers and more properly from about the 1960s that technology becomes increasingly addressed with reference to consciousness, due to its ontological ubiquity. Perhaps the first serious and systematic consideration of this kind was Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ published in 1954.36 In this essay, Heidegger seeks out the ‘essence of technology’ and finds it not in technology itself but in the kind of revealing it makes possible. Heidegger relates technology, in its essence, to fabrication, a ‘making’ which is ‘indebted’ to four kinds of ‘causes’ – the earth as a provider of raw materials, a form of self-disclosure and gifting in relation to the human (material cause); the history of cultural forms, related to the function it serves (formal cause); the use and larger contextual goal or terminal function within which the fabricated object serves its function, ultimately a sacralizing or sacrificing to a transcendent realm or order (final cause); and the human fashioner who addresses all these causes and shapes the functional object (efficient cause).37 Attention to all these causes or ‘obligations’/‘debts’ makes the work of technology (techne) equivalent to a work of art, or invoking Heidegger’s Greek term, poiesis.38 Modern technology, Heidegger avers, does not respect the material cause or final cause. It challenges and sets itself upon the earth and it ignores the sacralizing function of aspiring for the Transcendent, the openness to the messianic future.39 Heidegger uses two terms, ‘enframing’ (Gestell) and ‘standing reserve’ (Bestand), to describe the alienating and violent form of disclosure involved in modern technology,40 marked by information exploitation, ordering all subjects and objects in the cosmos as static resources always available to be put to one’s bidding. This alienation from the temporality or seasonality of the earth and its power to disclose the self-manifestation of Being, as well as its rupture from the sacred sphere, is the chronic malaise of our times, the epistemic violence of modern technology. Enframing thus refers to an attempt at a spatial reduction of cosmic contents, a mode of existence in which all things are objectified as resource, shorn of the mystery of temporal disclosure or spatial openness. Standing reserve is another way of addressing the status of beings or subjects thus reduced, objectified, commodified and exploited. As a mode of existence, therefore, modern technology is seen by Heidegger as modernity’s episteme, utilizing the methodology and the systemic objectifying descriptology of science to ‘gather’ reality into a single flattened frame so as to order its contents at will.41 Such an ontological critique of technology puts us in view at once of both the globalization and alienation of our times. An abstract, absolute description of the world usurps the place of the world. Modern and contemporary continental philosophy leans heavily on this insight of Heidegger. It becomes the basis for Habermas’s ‘colonization of the lifeworld’42 and of Jean Baudrillard’s ‘virtual reality’.43 Looked at in terms closer to us, in the key of contemporary technology which Heidegger was not privy to, one could say that what Heidegger describes here is a mode of existence where reality is perceived as an omni-database with all entities classified and organized in terms of their relations and properties, waiting to be ‘harvested’, ‘utilized’ or ‘exploited’ by whoever had power to access this construct. Undoubtedly, such a view seems bleak, holding little comfort or positive potential for human subjectivity. In relation to the philosophers of conscious evolution I started with, if human subjects are brought without exception under a regime of objectification and potential exploitation, they have little wriggle room to expand subjectively, and the promise of an integration and cosmisization of the human subject would seem an impossibility. Of course, such an ontology would also be uneven, affording degrees of freedom and privilege in access and exploitation of the ‘standing reserve’. But under a universal ontology, even such subject positions of privilege in power and capital would be constrained to the maintenance of the ontological order. Heidegger’s appeal is a return to poiesis, respect for the four causes or debts that human beings find themselves embedded in all their fabrications (homo faber) or technological undertakings (techne). This would need a ‘wresting’ of agency from the established order of our times and the re-establishment of a more ‘authentic’ mode of existence in the individual and the collective, the creation of a new ‘I’ and ‘we’ that resists the automatic gravitation of slippage into the ‘they’.44, 45
Apart from this foregrounding of technology as the epistemic ontology of our times, in situating beings existentially within a temporal horizon constituted by the self-disclosure of Being, Heidegger created a language that folded interiority in historicity, thus articulating simultaneously the realities of the individual and society. The wresting of poiesis from an objectified techne is a praxis historically embedded within the modern horizon of Being. Such a praxis can be related to the practical psychology of yoga, a revolutionary transformation of subjective consciousness making possible a new horizon of Being’s self-disclosure. This overcoming of the disciplinary specialization and separation of psychological and sociological studies marked a departure from the considerations of an earlier generation, like that of the philosophers of creative evolution we have considered, such as Sri Aurobindo, whose works had been produced in disciplinary isolation, as mentioned above, much to their detriment. Continental philosophers, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu and Gilles Deleuze, who have followed in the wake of Heidegger, have continued an articulation that undercuts such disciplinary boundaries.
Heidegger’s originality and break with the past may also be seen in his rejection of metaphysical idealism in favour of an ontology grounded in phenomenology. This turn in Heidegger may more properly be credited to his teacher, Edmund Husserl, the father of modern phenomenology, who felt that the modern domination of epistemology by science could no longer be overlooked by philosophy, which needed, in response, to refuse metaphysical speculation but also to eschew science’s privileged objectification. Heidegger goes one step further in overcoming the subject–object dualism through his ontology and thus inaugurates a trend in which the critique of and break with metaphysics is treated as final. Thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, following in the wake of Heidegger and largely in continuation of his work, have shied away not only from metaphysics but also from ontology as a result, more concerned to situate ontology in historical and political determination. Among this generation of important late-twentieth-century continental thinkers, only Gilles Deleuze, influenced strongly by Bergson, has continued to address metaphysics and ontology, but from a vantage of empiricism and ontogenesis. As a result, Deleuze can be constellated in important ways with our philosophers of evolution. However, I am not including a consideration of his ideas here, except where relevant, because though he has commented on technology in our times, this is not one of his primary concerns. Nonetheless, he was profoundly influenced by his contemporary, Gilbert Simondon, who engaged deeply with the question of technology, and in this chapter I wish to relate the ideas of conscious evolution to Simondon’s thinking on ontogenesis and technicity.
MCLUHAN: MEDIA TECHNOLOGY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
However, before that, in thinking of a later generation who have engaged the ideas of the philosophers of conscious evolution with the ubiquity and ontology of modern technology, one must consider the Canadian philosopher of media technology Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980). Both McLuhan and Simondon may be seen to have direct links to the philosophers of conscious evolution – McLuhan to Teilhard de Chardin and Simondon to Bergson.46 Though McLuhan’s references to Teilhard are few, the cultural critic Tom Wolfe has pointed to the pervasive influence and substructural presence of Teilhard’s ideas in McLuhan’s insights on media.47 McLuhan is responsible for a large number of neologisms that have become current in contemporary popular culture, three of his most well-known phrases being ‘global village’, the distinction between ‘hot and cool media’48 and ‘the medium is the message’,49 later further finessed in the eponymous book title The Medium is the Message.50 Regarding technology both as an exteriorization and amputation of human organs and capacities, such as the nervous system or the memory,51 McLuhan articulated many of the ideas that have led to contemporary posthumanist thought. In seeing new technologies as amputations of human capacity, he was echoing Plato’s concerns with ‘writing’ as a technology leading to the attenuation and eventual loss of human memory (Phaedrus), but this was counterbalanced, for McLuhan, by the global expansion of collective consciousness made possible by technologies of communication, transportation and exchange. Yet, though the gains of collective consciousness were promising, the natural attenuation of individual capacities and the subjection of the individual to mass determinants were problematic consequences of technology that McLuhan was much concerned about all his life.
He saw and wrote of the subject-altering powers of media arising from new equations and engagements of the human sensory system52 and reinflected this idea more powerfully in terms of ontological subjection in the tweaked variant ‘the medium is the message’. One can easily see the extended mileage of this idea in contemporary posthumanist thought, as in Katherine Hayles’s books How We Became Posthuman (1999) or My Mother Was a Computer (2005). McLuhan was developing his ideas in a world dominated by television and died in 1980, prior to the emergence of the desktop computer and long before the appearance of the World Wide Web. Yet, his pronouncements predict a world characterized by these developments in the 1960s. He discussed the ontological changes related to transitions of dominant media from print through film and television to multimedia and interdependent computing, coining the phrase ‘global village’ to describe the last phase. In his 1962 text The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, he describes the promises and dangers of such a society:
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. […] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. […] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.53 , 54
One can see here the recovery of a collective human unity, now extended to a global dimension, out of the fragmentation implied in the complexification of tribal culture with the ascendance of civilization, marked as per McLuhan by print media and its subjective correlate of individualism. But at the same time, it is a return of subjective inundation by mass behaviours and instincts (tribal drums), least common denominators of consciousness (terrors) and surveillance and control by corporate or ideological authority (Big Brother). Behind this global culture one may intuit the cosmogenesis of Teilhard, a materialization of a cosmic consciousness or noosphere mediated by technology. Yet, for Teilhard, such a collective dimension could only be a stage in anthropogenesis, a precursor to christogenesis, or the generation of a cosmic and transcendental individual in each person. McLuhan could perceive the dangers and difficulties towards this eventuation, its easy derailment under the powers of subjection conditioning individuals more ubiquitously than ever before.
In response, he sought ways to maximize creative expression under these circumstances, indicating conditions and practices enabling agency, engagement and the autonomy and expansion of subjectivity. It is in such a context that, in his text Understanding Media, he distinguished between ‘hot and cool media’, media which enabled consumption and disabled participation (hot) as against those that were intrinsically interactive (cool).55 Interestingly, he classes movies as being hot and television as cool, due to the latter needing more mental and emotional interactive response than the former. Today, such a distinction seems odd in the context of television, to which we more commonly attribute the function of producing ‘couch potatoes’. However, the distinction could be seen as valuable in general for our consideration. McLuhan was not blind to the relative scale of these terms and displays his prescience once again when he compares television and multimedia computing:
The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.56
When compared to Heidegger, we see that McLuhan does not subscribe to the former’s unrelieved pessimism regarding modern technology, though he is not naive about the detrimental effects of conditioning and state or corporate control implied by it. Instead he opens the possibility of achieving a Teilhardian vision of collective noogenesis through new technologies. This promissory note extended by McLuhan has informed a number of contemporary techno-optimists, who feel that the World Wide Web, in conjunction with other global telecommunication technologies, has inaugurated a new utopian age for humankind. In Gilbert Simondon, we will see another late-twentieth-century contemporary of McLuhan who holds out similar horizons for the human future, albeit with greater nuance and further reach. The question of human subjectivity inaugurated by Heidegger in terms of modern ontology remains, however. To what extent are human beings available to realize such a promise, or are they all the better transformed into fodder bereft of agency within enormous global systems of surveillance, classification, control and use, conditioned to believe that they are happy and free through dynamic and ubiquitous technologies of memory, persuasion and invisibility, as predicted by Gilles Deleuze in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’?
SIMONDON’S PROCESS METAPHYSICS
Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) is undoubtedly the most sophisticated of the late-twentieth-century philosophers of technology, who have continued in the wake of the early-twentieth-century philosophers of evolution. As mentioned before, he was influenced by Bergson, whose idea of creative evolution and inventive fertility of becoming receives an updated treatment contemporary with a constellation of more recent concepts associated with modern science such as emergence, systems theory, chaos theory, information theory, cybernetics and self-regulating systems.57 This is not to say that Simondon drew from these concepts, rather he represents a milieu of thought in which such concepts were emerging and have since become current. As per my characterization at the beginning of this article, the central idea in Simondon’s oeuvre could be delineated as ‘cosmogenetic individuation’, though as a form of becoming and not as a metaphysical principle. In keeping with the post-Husserlian dictum in philosophy to keep away from idealistic metaphysics, Simondon does not develop an elaborate theory grounding becoming in a transcendent principle or choice, as does Teilhard or Sri Aurobindo. Rather, he positions the structures of becoming within becoming itself, proceeding empirically to verify and describe his ontogenetic processes. In this, however, he is not too far from Sri Aurobindo, whose metaphysics (darshan) is based in a praxis of transformation (yoga) which has an empirical basis for participation in a ‘cosmogenetic individuation’. Moreover, though Sri Aurobindo’s panentheism involves a spiritual transcendence and material immanence, these do not exist as an ontological duality, or as a top-down/active-passive hylomorphism,58 but rather as an ‘effective’ duality existing as forms of self-perception in perpetual relation. As such, it wouldn’t be too far to see them as coexisting heterogeneous orders of becoming in disparation, using the model of Simondon.
Simondon’s process metaphysics deals with a pure immanence of becoming. In his thought, a stable unitary Being would remain transcendent and be incapable of manifestation. However, a purely unstable being would lead to a chaotic manifestation. Instead, he posits a ‘metastable’ Being, ‘more than a unity and an identity’, in other words marked by a radical excess, which can double itself through a phase shift (referred to by Simondon as ‘disparation’) and thus generate gradients of exchange between two heterogeneous series, which are problematic fields of becoming.59 Each solution to such a problem would be a singular individuation that would remain in metastable equilibrium with the larger field or problematic (the milieu) and the totality of the metastable being (pre-individual being). Though relatively stable at the point of individuation, each individuated being and its milieu would remain capable of further individuation due to its continued metastability in relation to pre-individual being. Such further individuations may push an individuated being into another order of solutions belonging to a different problematic gradient, expressing new properties and degrees of freedom and agency. The information exchange along each gradient of becoming would be modulated by the properties of the medium of exchange, thus determining commonalities, degrees of variance and boundaries of each order of individuation. Simondon referred to these information transfers between heterogeneous gradients and media and leading to resolution and individuation as ‘transduction’. Thus, individuation remained an ‘open’ and ever-unfinished process, representing a negentropic tendency of Being generating ever-higher orders of cosmogenetic individual and collective becoming.
ORDERS OF INDIVIDUATION: SIMONDON AND SRI AUROBINDO
Simondon identifies three such orders of individuation, the physical, the vital and the psychic. Physical individuation pertains to entities of material nature, vital individuation refers to the order of living beings and psychic individuation is of mental subjects (human beings). As discussed, each of these individuations occurs at the levels of the individual and the milieu. One may bring to mind here the evolution of purusha (person) and prakriti (cosmic/psychological nature) along the modalities of physical, vital and mental consciousness in Sri Aurobindo. The evolution of prakriti along each of these levels can be related to the individuation of the milieu, while the evolution of purusha corresponds to the individuation of the individual. One may also note that Sri Aurobindo includes the evolution of the psychic being, which expands into the triple transformation and leads to the cosmogenesis of the individual and beyond.
In Simondon’s case, psychic individuation is an order of mental evolution which extends vital individuation, just as the latter extends physical individuation into an order of living beings. The transition from physical individuation to vital individuation is accompanied with the formation of an interiority and exteriority (individual and milieu) with more elaborate relations between the two through the development of sensation (perception) and intensity (affect), marking the interior and leading to increasingly efficient phylogenetic lineages (evolutes) of internal structuration and external action conserving an autopoietic dynamic entity. In the further transition from vital to psychic individuation, mentality emerges as a new order of properties transforming the vital elements and structures of the interior and resulting in a new relation with the exterior milieu. Thus, perception and affect of vital individuation are mentalized into thought and emotion, along with other properties of their commingling, such as imagination, ethics, aesthesis and Eros. Mediating the transfer of information between interior and exterior, these properties tend to structure not only the interior but also the exterior of the individual through their ability to develop commonalities of signification. This sets up a collective individuation in synchrony with individual individuation. The leap in power of agency represented by this new order of psychic individuation is given distinction by Simondon by naming the interior (individual) individuation as individualization and the collective individuation as transindividuation. Thus, transindividuation is the process towards a universalized collective socius enabling an open-ended diverse individuation in individual and collective existence.
It is important to keep in mind that for Simondon, ontogenetic individuation is an ongoing and never-finished process. It expresses and conserves the ubiquitous drive for unity and eternity60 across the differentiated though undetermined potentia of the radically infinite pre-individual. Thus, every order and instance of individuating entities preserves within itself the infinity of the pre-individual, expanding its structure of relationality across both interiority and exteriority through an evolution of its powers. At the level of psychic individuation, individual agency participates in elaborating individuation across the boundary separating inside and outside in terms of ‘two seemingly opposite, though reciprocally codependent directions: … interiorizing the exterior, while, exteriorizing the interior’.61 Such an agency grants content to Simondon’s revised idea of ‘soul’.62 Soul for Simondon, then, is an emergent property, the appearance of an individualized personality as a stage of cosmogenetic individuation, that of the transindividual.
As we saw earlier, Sri Aurobindo uses the term ‘psychic being’ to refer to the soul personality in human beings. Though in his case, the immanence of the principle of individuation or personhood in all entities, which he calls purusha or ‘psychic entity’, ensures their ongoing evolution, conscious agency towards the integration of interiority (inner being) within itself and with its social and natural milieus is also accomplished through the emergence of the psychic being at the level of the mentalized human. Thus, psychic being, for Sri Aurobindo, is not a static structure. Moreover, if we are to consider Sri Aurobindo’s psychic principle of individuation in terms of essential operational property rather than substance, this is given by him as ‘aspiration’, whether subconscious agent in non-human living beings (psychic entity) or conscious agent in humans (psychic being). Sri Aurobindo’s description of ‘aspiration’ can be expressed in terms identical with Simondon’s description of the essential ‘soul’ quality operational within the individuation of every individual – ‘the desire for eternity’.63 As mentioned earlier, in Sri Aurobindo, it is this immanent aspiration which receives a response from the Transcendent, opening new possibilities of becoming which allow for the creative expression of new powers of being in the individual, resulting in greater states of stabilized relational integration. At the human level, the emergence of conscious agency in the psychic being allows for this aspiration to be consciously formulated, focused and intensified, leading to the integration of the internal elements of the physical, vital and mental beings (the ‘inner being’) around the psychic aspiration, a process called ‘psychisization’. This is further extended by the universalization of the individual (cosmisization) followed by the integration of the psychisized and cosmisized individual with a transcendental consciousness (supramentalization), affording a cosmic transformation so as to express states of being not yet manifest in Nature. This is the revised content Sri Aurobindo gives to the Sanskrit term ‘yoga’, traditionally used to refer to processes of psychophysical practice leading to an escape from the cosmic condition, either in an ineffable transcendental trance (samadhi) or an extra-cosmic ‘heaven’ (loka) of perfection. In Sri Aurobindo, yoga instead becomes a process for the transformation of life through a heightened power of integration achieved through an extension of consciousness. Translating to the Simondonian key, if psychisization can be thought of as the individuation of the individual, cosmisization may be related to states of collective integration tantamount to transindividuation.
In Sri Aurobindo’s own texts however, he does not see cosmisization and supramentalization in terms of transindividuation but as the results of the freedom and extension of individual consciousness and personhood (psychic being) achieved through the exercise of consciousness. Rather, states of cosmic and supramental consciousness achieved by groups of individuals are seen by him as the prerequisites for a kind of transindividuation, which he calls the ‘gnostic community’. Theorized by him more in terms of a universal philosophical anthropology and individual psychological praxis in his philosophical and psychological texts, in his social and political texts and in practice in the habitus of his ashram in Pondicherry, the relationship between the psychic and the collective developments include a cultural dimension pertaining to global or planetary unity. In 1968, after Sri Aurobindo’s passing, his spiritual partner and collaborator, Mirra Alfassa aka The Mother, founded the city of Auroville as a ‘planetary city’ and a ‘site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity’. She also coined the term ‘collective yoga’ to refer to the relational extension of the individual yoga at the collective level, open to a planetary culture, and increasingly spoke of the processes of universalization or cosmisization in terms of ‘collective yoga’ using a language which, though inflected in terms of consciousness, is distinctly reminiscent of what Simondon would call transindividuation.
DYNAMICS OF (TRANS)INDIVIDUATION
To draw this comparison closer, we may consider the dynamics of individuation and transindividuation as described by Simondon and Sri Aurobindo/the Mother. In Simondon, there is no substantial principle of individuation in beings but a process which expresses it as a result of ontogenetic metastability. The process monism implied in this gives significance to the becoming of being and all beings of becoming for Simondon. Thus, time takes its meaning from evolutionary processes of individuation leading to transindividuation and beyond. Time here does not follow a pregiven telos but stabilizations of individuation increasing in complexity and efficiency towards the integration, power and relationality of transindividuation. Each such stabilization is effected through an integration of elements expressing their powers and properties in ways that maximize their efficiency of functional integration of interiority and formation of a stable relationship with the external milieu. This state of stabilization in an individual’s individuation is termed ‘concretization’ by Simondon. Simondon speaks of the concretization phase of individuation in a being as a precipitation of ‘the future’, demonstrating the operation of a nascent transindividuation at all stages of individuation. In effect, this idea of the communication of information from the future, a reversal of time’s arrow, is hardly different from the precipitation of transcendental conditions as a response to psychic aspiration in Sri Aurobindo.
Tracing back to the cosmogenesis of Teilhard, one can see here how Simondon revises the transcendental metaphysics of the former to affirm the simultaneity of a double process of cosmogenesis materializing itself through transindividuation – individuals becoming cosmos and cosmos becoming individual. Though the structuration of this double process becomes materially articulated at the level of psychic individuation, the process itself is primordial and originary.
Individuation at this level, as at all levels, is accomplished across heterogeneous orders of being through transduction. The process monism of Simondon makes for the emergence of analogical morphologies and potentia across the different orders of becoming. These form nodes of resonance within and across the emergent orders that can amplify through intensification and exchange information through transduction. Such information transfer between elements of a unit and between units in a collective, interacting under the immanent impulse of ‘the desire for eternity’, activates the relations of individuation and transindividuation within and between self-organizing individuals and across different orders of their becoming. This causes the internal and external structures and functions to differentiate and evolve in classes of beings along phylogenetic lineages. The concretization phase of individuation occurs at a stage when the autopoietic entity achieves a state of functional integration where its elements express their powers not merely as parts of the whole but as co-adapting superpositionalities of the whole.
In comparison, Sri Aurobindo’s monism is both substantial and processual.64 The immanence of the purusha as psychic entity, and in the human as psychic being, catalyses a similar information transfer within and across the different orders of being in the individual and between individuals in the form of physical aspiration, vital aspiration and mental aspiration, evolving in agency and power of integration around the psychic centre. At the human level, it is possible to intensify this action more consciously, leading to an accelerated tendency towards integration (psychisization) in the individual and the collective (transindividual).65 As mentioned earlier, for the transindividuation of the human being, the Mother articulated this integration in terms that echo the condition of elemental superposition in the concretization phase of Simondon, though in terms appropriate to the expansion of individual consciousness:
Sri Aurobindo tells us that a true community – what he calls a gnostic or supramental community – can exist only on the basis of the inner realisation of each of its members, each one realising his real, concrete unity and identity with all the other members of the community, that is, each one should feel not like just one member united in some way with all the others, but all as one, within himself. For each one the others must be himself as much as his own body, and not mentally and artificially, but by a fact of consciousness, by an inner realization.66
Again, in 1973, the year of her passing, the Mother gave a New Year message which tied the goal of psychic evolution to a collective yoga at the planetary level: ‘When you are conscious of the whole world at the same time, then you can become conscious of the Divine’.67
TRANSINDIVIDUATION, TECHNOLOGY AND COLLECTIVE YOGA
What is meant by being conscious of the whole world at the same time? It seems to me the preparation of a psychic subjectivity identified with the subjective life of the world and its pre-individual excess. How can one prepare oneself to be conscious of the whole world at the same time? For the followers of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, who have privileged his yoga texts, this might mean the expansion of individual consciousness through meditation and union with a cosmic consciousness. But those who read his social texts or who have been privy to the Mother’s texts on collective yoga or her words related to Auroville may say that it is through the intensification of aspiration, its extension in relations and its psychic engagement with the cultural history of the world. For Simondon, this would be the preparation for the planetary transindividual:
All individual ensembles have thus a sort of non-structured ground from which a new individuation can be produced. The psycho-social is the transindividual: it is this reality that the individuated being transports with itself, this load of being for future individuations.68
Such a preparation would bring to light the history of technology for Simondon. If the major part of Simondon’s doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne was titled ‘Psychic and Collective Individuation’, his minor paper, which was published first both in the French original and the English translation, and for which he is better known, is ‘The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects’. Following the anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon sees a technogenetic individuation co-evolving with psychic individuation in the human as an inevitable differentiation towards transindividuation. Machines intervene to bridge the rupture between humans and nature arising from the displacement of a primitive vital individuation to the order of a ‘civilized’ mental individuation; yet machines, which emerge to heal human alienation, eventuate in alienating humans even further. Yet, technical objects are neither fully determined nor contiguous with humans. As a mode of existence, though conceptually and functionally bound to human becoming, they represent an order of independent individuation. The evolution of lineages of technical objects, Simondon shows, follows like other forms of individuation, a transductive process leading to an efficient stabilization of elements that has its own life outside of individual inventors, manufacturers or commercial interests. Simondon sees the individuation of technical objects following three orders related to three historical phases of human individuation: the premodern agrarian phase marked by artisanal manual tools, the modern industrial phase marked by thermodynamic engine-driven machines and the postmodern and post-industrial phase marked by information processing.
If the human relationship with technology during the pre-industrial phase was one which involved physical skill and implied a harmonious relationship between human, technical object and nature, the modern industrial phase has been one of increasing alienation between these three. Modern industrial machines have an enormous footprint and consume huge quantities of natural resources, disturbing the earth’s ecological balance and depleting her reserves; mass-produce enormous quantities of finished products, for which large industries of persuasion must be formed so as to manufacture desire for consumption; and excrete tremendous quantities of waste which must be disposed, poisoning the earth and the habitats of the underprivileged. To produce, operate and maintain these machines, human beings must subject their bodies to the movements, speeds, temperatures, pressures and other unnatural properties of large-scale thermodynamic machines and their ensembles. Simondon sees these conditions of human–machine interaction as an unpleasant phase in their mutual transduction, resulting in the alienation that humanists have attributed to the machine. However, even in the 1960s, Simondon foresaw the overpassing of this phase and its replacement by a new post-industrial phase of information processing, where the individuation of microprocessor-based, information-processing computational devices would tend towards networks of collective ensembles accessible through terminals and offer a ubiquitous medium and milieu for planetary transindividuation.69 Indeed, like McLuhan, Simondon was seeing these visions of the future in the 1960s. Freed from subjection to industrial complexes, human beings would be able to interact creatively with nature and the world through a mostly invisible layer of the being of technology individuated collectively in relation with human transindividuation.
Is this the inexorable future utopia towards which global humanity is moving today with its P2P smart phones and other networked digital prosthetics and bionics? Is the experience of ‘being conscious of the whole world at the same time’, announced by the Mother as the distant goal of an arduous spiritual development, just a form of cheap purchase universally bestowed upon humanity through the transindividuation of technology? Was Heidegger’s ontological subjection by the new mode of Being’s disclosure through technology– seen as modernity’s episteme – but a mistaken identification of a passing phase for the noons of the future?
Simondon’s brilliance has been acknowledged by many major thinkers of his and our times. One of his greatest contemporaries, who reviewed his thesis with unreserved praise and borrowed heavily from him in his own work, was Gilles Deleuze, and one of the great philosophers of our times, who continues to be indebted to him and thinks using his concepts of psychic and collective individuation, is Bernard Stiegler. Writing in the 1980s, Deleuze, in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, warns about the mutations of capital from the industrial to the post-industrial age. If the ubiquitous presence of the machine extended an era of biopolitics related to the disciplining of human bodies in keeping with the needs of industry in the age of thermodynamic machines, our age of information processing sees a new kind of subjection. The miniaturization and invisibility of the machine hides its versatile and flexible control over human lives. The enhanced flexibility of work and movement, increased plethora of choices and extended reach over time and space present a commodified freedom and happiness, within which capital controls human lives, denying true creative engagement with pre-individual being, which would make new individuations possible. Similarly, in our own times, Bernard Stiegler has warned about real-time corporate and governmental profiling and targeting, fragmentation of subjectivity through chronic technologies of attention capture and the remaking of public memories through mnemotechnics.
What Simondon saw as the promise of a new utopian phase of human–machine transduction/transindividuation leading to an individual and collective cosmogenesis is not a given that will arise automatically through the press of new buttons. Simondon was not oblivious to these dangers. The transindividuation of humans and their co-individuation with machines could move, in his opinion, towards the fulfilment of its positive possibilities, only following the break from conditioning, the habitual structures of the ‘inter-individual’ and the emergence of individuating personal agency. In asserting this, Simondon aligns himself with Nietzsche, drawing on the latter’s rendition of Zarathustra, the prophet who extricates himself from his entanglement with the crowd that has embraced mediocrity, devoid of aspiration, through a period of isolation and silence. This asceticism and the related parable of the funambulist lays the ground for the conditions of subjective agency towards transindividuation, a preparation not dissimilar from that enunciated by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, drawing on the traditions of yoga for their own purposes of planetary unity. Moreover, as articulated by the prophet at the end of the parable, what is further required is the need for a milieu of like individuals available and ready for transindividuation, collective conditions requiring a wresting of the individual from the ubiquitous co-optation of global capital, analogous to the call given by Heidegger in his analysis of modern technology.
Looking at the yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the arduous subjective disciplines necessary for ‘the triple transformation’ also need a milieu dedicated to inner development for its habitus, something less and less possible in our present age globally networked for corporate interests of production, seduction and consumption. Yet, to speak about an expansion or integration of consciousness without recourse to an engagement with technology is a romanticism that wills its self-exile and eventual obsolescence in the face of a globalizing technical milieu. New experimental collective environments are required for the development of subjective technologies (technics) freed from conditioning and rendered creative to co-individuate alongside distributed ensembles of information processing. Simondon’s techno-aesthetic milieu and Sri Aurobindo’s expansion of consciousness through yoga need creative engagement with a world culture made available through new forms of McLuhan’s ‘global village’ dedicated to perpetual cosmogenetic individuation. Enhanced subjective disciplines of psychisization and cosmisization as per Sri Aurobindo, or psychic and collective individuation as per Simondon, moving towards the self-making of new subjects ‘conscious of the whole world at the same time’, must arise as the subjective correlate of co-individuating technical ensembles under experimental conditions of the collective life. This is the promise of the future, but it needs relational post-human agency and a subjectivity that can measure itself against the objective materialization of the cosmos in the form of global technology.
NOTES
1Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, Reason in History. Trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
2Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man. Trans. Bernard Wall (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1959).
3Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).
4Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Paris: Editions Jerome Millon, 2005); David Scott, Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
5Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995).
6Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1988).
7Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man.
8Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine. Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vols. 21 and 22 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2005), 922–952.
9Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man.
10Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine.
11Bergson, Matter and Memory.
12Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 309–335.
13Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 856–879.
14Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001).
15The Purusha Sukta is hymn 90 in Book X of the Rig Veda. It presents infinite conscious Being as a transcendental Person who presents himself as cosmos and ‘sacrifices’ himself (becomes immanent) as the creatures and humans of various castes.
16Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga. Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vols. 23 and 24 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1999), 106; The Mother, Questions and Answers 1956. Volume 8, Collected Works of the Mother (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2004 [1977]), 74.
17Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1051–1108.
18Sri Aurobindo, The Mother with Letters on the Mother. Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo , Vol. 32 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2012), 17.
19Sri Aurobindo, The Mother with Letters on the Mother, 3; The Life Divine, 730–753.
20Aligning this thought to that of Teilhard’s and Simondon’s, this may be thought of as a ‘cosmogenetic intensity’.
21Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 272–274.
22Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 856–879.
23It should be noted that ontogenesis and anthropogenesis are terms more common to Teilhard than Sri Aurobindo; nevertheless, I have used these terms since I feel them to be appropriate.
24Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 856–879.
25Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 856–879.
26Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 41–52.
27Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 922–952.
28Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 922–952.
29Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 44.
30Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination. Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 25 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1997).
31Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination, 15–221.
32Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination, 44–54; 73–81.
33Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination, 279–578.
34Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination, 505–547.
35Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination , 548–570.
36Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1982).
37Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 6.
38Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 8, 34.
39Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 9–10.
40Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 11–13.
41Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 17.
42Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Thomas McCarthy (New York, NY: Beacon Press, 1984).
43Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
44Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1962), 415.
45It would be interesting to bring this viewpoint to bear on Michel Bauwens’s essay on P2P systems, which may be called a subject-oriented database model as opposed to top-down algorithmic or horizontal object-oriented models implied in the ‘enframing’ of ‘standing reserve’.
46Simondon is also known to have quoted Teilhard de Chardin favourably, and an important commentator on Simondon, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, has drawn attention to Simondon’s debt to Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin, especially to Chardin’s cosmogenetic individuation: https://fractalontology.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/translation-jean-hugues-barthelemy-on-simondon-bergson-and-teilhard-de-chardin/, accessed 4 October 2016.
47Tom Wolfe, Introduction to ‘Marshall McLuhan Speaks: Centennial 2011’, accessed 12 January 2014, 2011. http://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/introduction/.
48Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, NY: Mentor, 1964), 22.
49McLuhan, Understanding Media, chapter 1.
50McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the M e ssage: An Inventory of Effects (New York, NY: Random House, 1967).
51McLuhan, Understanding Media, 11.
52McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 41.
53McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 32.
54This passage is closely connected to McLuhan’s discussion of a passage by Teilhard de Chardin in his work The Phenomenon of Man.
55McLuhan, Understanding Media, 22.
56McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 158.
57Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Penser l’individuation. Simondon et la philosophie de la nature (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005).
58Simondon is concerned to reject the hylomorphic model which subordinates one principle to another in a dualistic master-slave or original-copy relation. Metaphysics, since Plato, has generally been conceived in this key as, for example, spirit/matter, soul/body, mind/body and culture/nature. Sri Aurobindo’s panentheism also eschews this form of hylomorphic relationship, extending agency relationally along all heterogeneous orders, as may be viewed from the following quote: ‘In a sense, the whole of creation may be said to be a movement between two involutions, Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of Matter, Matter in which also all is involved and out of which all evolves upward to the other pole of Spirit’ (Aurobindo, The Life Divine,137).
59Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 2007 [1989]).
60Scott, Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation, 103; Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective , 127.
61Scott, Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation, 103.
62Scott, Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation, 103, 104; Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective , 157–158.
63Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective, 157–158.
64In this sense, it is closer to the monism of Spinoza, and following him, Deleuze. This is what allows Deleuze to theorize extraordinary states of consciousness based on experimentation. Simondon, who is also deeply influenced by Spinoza, nevertheless, eschews the latter’s substantialism.
65Echoing Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo defines yoga in a number of places as ‘accelerated evolution’.
66The Mother, Questions and Answers, 141–142.
67The Mother, ‘New Year Message, 1973’, 1973, accessed 12 February 2014, http://sriaurobindoashram.com/Content.aspx?ContentURL=/_staticcontent/sriaurobindoashram/-07%20Messages/New%20year%20Messages/1973.htm.
68Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective, 193.
69‘Today,’ Simondon writes, ‘the technical tends to reside in ensembles; it can now become a basis of culture which will bring a power of unity and stability, making it adequate to the reality it expresses and rules’ (1989, p. 15).
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