Crystals and Membranes: Individuation and Temporality
In order to escape from what he calls the hylomorphic schema, which has oriented occidental metaphysics towards a substantialism which fore-closes becoming, Simondon transforms the philosophy of individuation. Every doctrine according to which individuation results from the impression of an exterior principle, like a mould, on to the material individual, such that form remains external to matter, invokes the this schema. By presupposing the hierarchical subordination of matter to a transcendent form, the constituted individual is considered to be explicable on the basis of a principle of individuation anterior to it. However, the presupposition of a preformed principle of individuation that transcends the operation of individuation renders the becoming of the individual as a real process impossible to explain. Simondon therefore challenges the notion that the process of individuation can be considered in a unitary manner, and refuses to presuppose that the principle of this individuation can be conceived as a formal cause exterior to the real process. Purely nominal, abstract and explicative, the principle of individuation must become the genetic principle contemporary with real individuation.
What is in question is thus no longer individuated being, being come into being, but rather the real genetic process of its transformation. Simondon’s work thus opens on to a new conception of time as ontogenesis, such that becoming is no longer conceived as the becoming of individuated being, but rather as the becoming of the individuation of being.
THE CRYSTAL AND INDIVIDUATION
A Logic of Metastable Becoming
Simondon thus engages in a project of immense scope: the reformulation of metaphysics on the basis of a critique of the hylomorphic schema. It is this project that allows him to critique in the same gesture the Aristotelian separation of matter and form in nature and sensation, the Kantian separation between matter and form, or sensibility and understanding, along with every separation between matter and form that conceives of form as an eminent, transcendent and explanatory principle, rather than conceiving of it at the level of forces. Simondon judges that the Ancients had to privilege a conception of stable being on the basis of their cosmology, itself put into play by their epistemology. To the extent that they only conceived of being in a state of equilibrium, they were led to privilege a formal conception of individuation by taking form and matter separately, leaving the operation of individuation itself in the dark, a darkness Simondon proposes to illuminate. For this, we must pass from an ontology of being to an ontology of becoming, an ontogenesis, made possible by the objective knowledge that contemporary science proposes of becoming through the study of the conditions of metastable systems.
This epistemological transformation provides for the conceptualization of a being in becoming, on the condition of understanding a ‘metastable’ genesis, which is to say a type of equilibrium which is no longer situated at the lowest level of potential energy – that of stability, all the Ancients were capable of thinking – but which theorizes the transformations operating in a system which has not yet exhausted its potential difference, with the augmentation of order or information (negentropy) which can result from it. The concept of metastability intertwines the theory of information and the physics of phase shifts in matter, which Simondon gives a metaphysical extension by applying it to every field of individuation; metastability thus qualifies the conditions of every actualization. Metastable being, in disequilibrium, involves this state of asymmetrical disequilibrium which accounts for tension and the production of the new.
Metastability thus becomes the key concept of a philosophy of becoming. Simondon applies this new conception to philosophy, freeing metaphysics from hylomorphism, and producing a new theory of culture which extends material and vital individuation into the processes of psychic and collective individuation. Metastability, a transgeneric concept, allows for an ethics of differentiation, and engages with natural formations and political affects on the same terrain. Simondon applies it to theories of matter in the study of crystallization, and shows that it applies as well to theories of life, in the analysis of the interior milieu or the membrane, as it does to the social formations of culture. This Bergsonian or even Spinozist continuism, which treats matter, organism and both psychic and collective individuation on the same plane, allows for a new conception of time; becoming integrates the accident and contingency, or rather makes of determinism and indetermination two limit cases, in order to think the emergence of singularities. Metastability, or the theory of the phases of being, thus opens on to a theory of transductive time.
Crystallization and Transductive Time
Crystallization, the Simondonian example par excellence, allows for a definition of individuation that combats with a polemical vigour the hylomorphic schema by accounting for individuation as a transductive modulation. The crystal provides the simplest image of transduction; beginning with a very small seed, it grows in every direction within its pre-individual milieu, each already formed layer serving as the structuring basis of the next molecular stratum in the process of being constituted through an amplifying reticulation.2 Transduction consists of this individuation in progress, whose elements are as follows: a pre-individual milieu of individuation, here a mother-liquor, a supersaturated solution rich in potential and in metastable equilibrium, that the second agent of crystallization, the seed, makes ‘take’ in an aggressive fashion. Individuation operates with this first heterogenous couple: the pre-individual milieu and the catalytic singularity. The crystalline seed figures this eruption of singularity, which brings the metastable milieu to the point of disparation. The crystal thus emerges as a result, an individuation which creatively resolves the tension between the disparate reals of the mother-liquor and the seed. As Simondon explains,
the extreme terms attained by the transductive operation do not preexist this operation; its dynamism provides the primitive tension in the system of heterogenous being that dephases and develops the dimensions through which it is structured; it does not arise from a tension between the terms which will be attained and discarded at the extreme limits of transduction. (IGPB 31)
Becoming is therefore not produced between terms given in advance, but consists of this transductive tension, which produces the terms in the course of its process, such that the ontological monism of a being subject to the occurrence of accidents must be replaced with a pluralism of phases; as such, individuation will no longer concern individuating being, but rather the becoming of individuation.
In order to be made concrete, the individuation of the crystal reclaims the encounter between a metastable milieu and the singularity that emerges. It is this encounter, throw of the dice, or aleatory chance which gives rise to its own necessity, that Simondon subsumes under the term ‘problematic disparation’, and which allows for the theorization of this mixture of the aleatory and dependent which changes the conception of necessity, which relies upon a transductive theory of time.
If the catalytic encounter is aleatory, the processes that it induces are constrained, since nothing necessitates this encounter. Or rather, it itself depends on the conditions required by the system in the process of being constituted, in which the conditions for crystallization are not preexistent. In order for the encounter to come about, it is again necessary that the singularity emerges as information for this nascent system. And for this, different conditions are required.
The first condition is the irruption of a singularity. The seed – which is to say, an impurity, intentionally introduced in the case of artificial crystallization – must intervene in order to be able to play the role of catalytic singularity bearing information. It is this that Simondon calls a problematic disparation: an emergent tension of problematic heterogeneous elements, which requires the production of a new dimension in order to resolve the disparity, such as the constructive production of a third dimension or volume in the case of binocular vision, which emerges in order to resolve the parallax difference of two incompatible retinas. But in order for the disparation to work, it is, second, necessary for the singularity to emerge in a pre-individual milieu, whose metastability promotes disparation with the introduced singularity (here, the seed). Not every milieu can play this role. A compatibility must therefore exist between the milieu and the seed, a compatibility which is above all not of the order of identity, but rather of difference.
It is this conflictual emergence, which determines the problematic encounter between pre-individual milieu and singularity, that Simondon defines as disparation. In order for the latter to arise, a supplementary condition is required, which Simondon describes as the internal resonance between milieu and singularity: which is to say, an objective problematic which allows for the emergence of the singularity as information in the system. The crystalline solution, a pre-individual milieu in a metastable state, can only begin to emerge, begin to crystallize, on this condition: that a seed, which must ‘resonate’ with the milieu in order to produce disparation, be introduced, to which the individual responds as a resolution of the problem.
The individual must therefore be conceived of as an operation, putting the disparation of the pre-individual milieu to work in order to resolve progressively the disparation of the system. One can thus speak of a veritable interiority of the crystal, to the extent that it incorporates a primitively amorphous matter, rich in potential, into the milieu in which it is developed, progressively structuring it according to its specific prescriptive disposition. The crystalline seed resolves the disparative problematic of the metastable solution and guides crystallization through iteration. In radiating out from its point of introduction, the crystalline structure spreads a fraction at a time. An individual crystal is thus formed, whose regularity, transparency and organization explain the fascination that it has, from the Renaissance to Romanticism, given rise to – a physico-chemical structure whose growth can be observed.
The crystal, in being individuated, is temporalized. This is why Simondon defines transduction as a tension of heterogenous being that changes phase and develops new dimensions through which it is structured. The development of the crystal takes place on the basis of the initial insertion of the seed, and crystallization spreads in every direction, each crystallized molecular layer serving as the structuring basis for the layer that forms next. The seed must be conceived of as an effective singularity in this tense hylomorphic state, in order for the polarization of amorphous substance by the crystalline seed to be possible. Under these conditions, it acts as an instance of structuring information that crystallizes the milieu and which takes hold around this initial point; the first layer of crystallized molecules thus polarizes step by step the other layers around their edges (IGPB 85–6).
Crystallization manifests the appearance of dimensions and structures in the process of becoming. At issue is a shift between phases and not states. Simondon compels us to conceive of individuation as a series of dynamic transformations, marshalling our capacity to theorize change. First, a crystalline solution at the point of supersaturation, then the introduction of a crystalline seed capable of producing this problematic tension, then the disparation which precipitates the formation of the crystalline individual, before, finally, the emergence of the crystal, as a creative response to the disparation of the system. There is here a succession of transductive phase-changes, since each rearrangement of the system provides the starting-point for a new transformation.
Transduction, Disparation, Modulation
The relations between transduction and disparation must now be accounted for more precisely. Transduction qualifies not only the individuation of the crystal in process, but also the operation of thought capable of theorizing these phase-changes and the thought of becoming. It therefore involves the operation of creative structuration through which each structured region provides the principle of constitution for the following region, according to the step-by-step propagation that we have seen in the growth of the crystal. Since it is defined by this succession of dephasings and restructurations which form concatenating cascades, the discovery of a solution marks the point of crystallization which sets in motion a new structuration of the field and entirely modifies it at each stage of the process.
Transduction thus implies a new conception of temporality conceived as creation and differentiation: structuration by heterogenous disparation that leads into a complete reconfiguration of the field, starting from a new, differentiating restructuration. Here, disparation qualifies the type of transductive structuration that operates by engaging two disparate realities in a problematic tension – here the seed and the crystal, the pre-individual milieu and the singularity bearing transformation. It therefore consists in a problematic tension, which is resolved through the appearance of a new dimension, the formation of the individual crystal. Individuation is thus revealed at the same time as ‘the solution of a conflict, the discovery of an incompatibility, the invention of a form’.3
With this analysis of the formation of systems, Simondon proposes a conception of the relations between form and matter which completely transforms the hylomorphic schema. The first result of this analysis consists in this new conception of form which requires the constitution of the individual and its milieu, an emergent individuation responding to a metastable situation that resolves and thus transforms an objective disparation within the pre-individual milieu, and thus the transformation of the milieu, to be thought together. Since there is, first of all, no aparation of a constituted individual in an amorphous milieu, but only one which already has form, modulation by disparation between the milieu and the seed acts like an accident, a catalytic event. For Simondon, ‘the individual is not only the result but the milieu of individuation’ (IGPB 115). It is never first, nor even contemporary with its own individuation, since what characterizes the conditions of its aparation is the existence of a problematic disparation which brings the supersaturated mother-liquor into resonance with the crystalline seed. The condition of individuation is therefore the metastable disparation of the milieu: which is to say, the dephasing of a reality into disparate orders. This in turn implies a fundamental difference, a state of dissymmetry which produces a new individuation – for example, the crystal.
Second, the example of the crystal casts light on the necessarily associated character of the milieu and the individual. The individual comes into being as that which is distinguished, as the result of creative disparation between its milieu and the singularity introduced by the structural seed. Its introduction as event, as singularity, determines pre-individual substance – ‘amorphous’, writes Simondon, which is to say lacking order rather than form – to ‘take form’. Simondon therefore proposes a new theory of form, transductive and material, which arises through the resolution of a problematic in the state of disparation and is no longer conceived as an active principle imposed on matter. In reality, it engages in a modulation with its associated milieu. This taking-form is brought about through the modulation between milieu and individual.
Individuation is the result of an encounter between a structural condition and an energetic condition, an encounter which must also be actualized in order for individuation to take place. From this steadfast solidarity between the individual and its milieu of constitution follows an indifferentiation of the individual and its milieu in individuation, since the individual which results – for example, the crystal – emerges along with its milieu.
Individuation is therefore conceived as a relation in becoming – that is, in a synthetic, plural and passive fashion rather than in terms of a completed unity. The individual is never dissociable from its process of individuation, which literally coproduces the individual and its associated milieu together. As such, the individual must be defined as an encounter, a result, but also as the milieu of individuation, through a succession of configuring phases. The individual is the result of a process of individuation that brings about the formed individual and the milieu of individuation together. From the point of view of this ecological vision, the associated milieu becomes as morphogenetic as an organ. Individuation and the transformation that it renders in its milieu cannot be dissociated; in reality, the formation of the individual and the transformation through which it takes place must always be theorized together, in terms of a disparative becoming.
The concept of the individual completely changes; neither unified nor identical, it becomes relative, phased, perpetually putting into play a process of individuation and an associated milieu. The individual is thus never relative to a single order of reality but is always transductive, implying a disparation between different dimensions, arising as the resolution of a problematic, a tension between disparates. It appears as a response, as genetic as it is dynamic. In reality, the unitary individual does not exist; there are only multiple processes of individuation. Furthermore, the individual invokes neither unity nor identity, since it reclaims the heterogeneity of the phases from which it emerges through differentiation.
Internal Resonance
The various elements of this extraordinary analysis can be recapitulated as follows: first, relation is primary, being is relation, and relations are external to their terms. Second, properties are always relational, and only come into play in the service of what Simondon calls, in a fine phrase, ‘the interruption of becoming’, the introduction of a singularity. It follows, third, that time is not external to the individual, but intervenes as a fundamental asymmetry and relation of differentiation, at the limit of the individual, a striking consequence that will only be explicable once we consider the individuation of the living, and the analysis of the membrane. Fourth, transduction, or the genesis of a structure in a milieu in a state of pre-individual tension, requires what Simondon calls internal resonance – that is, a disparative point of entry, or a problematic coupling between the different realities that it engages in communication.
Simondon thus entirely renovates the conception of form, proposing an intensive and material theory of formation and emergent information. Far from being external to the matter which it transforms, form acts at the level of forces and functions as a signal: that is, as an instance of information capable of catalysing a process through the irruption of an emergent singularity in a system, engaging disparates in a system of correspondence.
Internal resonance is thus defined as the situation of a system-in-tension that makes possible individuation. It is an instance of information, in the sense Simondon gives to this term: not a defined, quantifiable and stable magnitude, but a relation, and even a moment of individuation. The emergence of form presupposes the presence of information and serves as the transductive basis for information, such that information is the transition of being which is dephased and which becomes: it is ‘the seed around which a new individuation will be able to be achieved’, and constitutes the transductivity of different phases of individuation (IGPB 241). It thus functions on the near side of a certain threshold. This is because, as Simondon specifies, ‘there is only information when what emits signals and what receives them form a system. Information is between the two halves of a system engaged in a relation of disparation’ (IGPB 221, n30).
The greater the disparation, the more information grows, but only up to a certain point, beyond which it is quickly nullified. Simondon explains with recourse to the example of stereoscopic photographs, which present two images and force the brain to induce between them a disparative resonance in order to create a single unified image: the further the photographs are separated, the better the effect, but only up to a certain distance, beyond which the effect is no longer produced.
Information is thus a notion at once plural, relational and phased; it can never be relative to an homogenous being but requires of necessity two orders in a state of disparation. Disparation no longer only demands the condition of a difference or disparity, but equally involves an internal resonance, which allows the system to communicate; information is thus never given or pre-existent. It is, as Simondon brilliantly puts it, ‘the signification that suddenly emerges’ – grammatically marking the nature of its creation through this leap into the future – ‘when an operation of individuation will discover the dimension in which two disparate reals can become a system’ (IGPB 31). In the exemplary case of binocular vision, disparation takes place between two retinal images, on the condition that the tension between them, a gap necessary in order for the image in depth to arise and which intervenes as the signification of the duality of the two images, is maintained.
Thus information is tension and not term; it relies upon a minimally disparative problematic and engages the future in order to resolve emergent states. It always implies a change of phase, a heterogeneity which is able to appear as decisive. For Simondon, information is ‘the sense [sens] according to which a system individuates’: ‘information is therefore a primer of individuation, a demand of individuation, it is never something given’ (IGPB 221). Tension and not term, it presupposes a system in a disparative state, and requires a problematic. Simondon thus calls a signal that which is transmitted in the process of disparation; form, that in relation to which the signal is received; and information, that which is integrated into the functioning of the receptor after the test of disparation between extrinsic signal (seed) and intrinsic form (mother-liquor) (IGPB 222).
THE MEMBRANE, AND LIFE IN THE FOLDS
If the analyses that Simondon presents of the crystal, of individuation and disparation, transform the conception of becoming, his analysis of life is even more remarkable. Two spatiotemporal conditions are required in order to define life: a spatial or topological determination, folding [plissement], and its chronogenetic consequence, the instantiation of a temporality that hems in its wake the outskirts of the living, and bifurcates through the differentiation of relative interiorities and exteriorities. This difference between interior and exterior is temporalized within lived temporality and within an emergent exteriority, and actualizes the threshold of the living by unfolding in the real the difference between matter and memory, past and future. Life emerges as a fold in the tissue of matter and brings about a bifurcation in the transductive logic of crystalline individuation.
At work here is an inspired reprise of the Bergsonian theme of the image as a fold in matter, later taken up by Deleuze, equally for whom life must be able to be defined on the plane of immanence of material forces. It is in just this way that Simondon proceeds; life does not depend on specific chemical constituants, but only on the differential disposition of matters which is not perceptible on the physico-chemical plane. Vital subjectivity is never anything more than a topological arrangement: a spatial enfolding translated by a chronogenesis. It does not emerge in the form of a sudden rupture, in the form of special structural or energetic conditions, but due to a simple torsion of materiality. It proceeds on the basis of an entirely spatial individuation, the apparition of a specific tissue equipped with the chemical property of functioning as a limit endowed by a selective permeability: a membrane. This allows for the emergence of a new property of time, at the level of vital individuation; from this point on, dissociation or differentiation of a multiple temporality is added to transductive becoming, distinguishing at the level of present actuality the irruptive streams of the past and the future.
The membrane is defined with reference to two properties implied in this spatiotemporal differentiation: a selective porosity, which allows only certain elements to pass, and which animates the surface by endowing it with a functional metastable property. In addition, second, it is also characterized by an even more remarkable property: this porosity is polar. It animates this selective porosity or differential selection in both centripetal and centrifugal directions, allowing some bodies to pass through in selective opposition to the passage of other such bodies (IGPB 223). To define the living is to describe, as Michaux said, life in the folds, this arrangement of matter which proceeds from the functional characteristics of the membrane, allowing certain substances and not others to pass, and organizing space according to the characteristic asymmetry of the living. In doing so, it promotes the emergence of an entirely new property. Inducing a sense of circulation, the membrane literally constitutes interiority; it creates it.
This is why the membrane must not be understood as an inert limit, the border of the interiority of the living. In polarizing, it defines a milieu of interiority. It in no way presupposes a constituted interiority, but is, to the contrary, what differentiates the interior from the exterior, and which produces this differentiation in the polar and simultaneously beneficent and detrimental mode. The polarity of the membrane distinguishes the favourable (which it integrates and retains) from the unfavourable (which it avoids and rejects) in a Spinozist manner. The functional and active polarity of the membrane configures the external milieu as much as it constitutes its internal milieu.
The membrane thus defines the leap from the chemical to the living, and promotes the emergence of this new property: the difference between exterior and interior, the result of its differentiating action. The fold simultaneously produces interiority and exteriority, inside and outside, such that the inside is formed as ‘the outside of the outside’, to adapt Deleuze’s beautiful formula. The polarized membrane therefore folds its organic pellicule and curves around itself in order to rediscover, at the terminus of this torsion, its own milieu of interiority. Some, but not all, external bodies can pass into the interior, and an identical selection comes to bear on bodies of the internal milieu, some of whose elements migrate towards the exterior. The selective membrane is thus productive of its own interiority.
Now, this interiority and exteriority are not absolute but metastable, dynamic, relative to each other, and their interfacing surface is itself in becoming, in relation. The membrane thus brings about this polarity of milieus, in which interiority and exteriority remain entirely relative, and even dephase themselves, since the living is characterized as that which engenders a proliferation of interior and exterior milieus in the organism, without ever being content to oppose in a static way corporeal interior and an exterior world. The human body is thus characterized by the diversity of its interior spaces, the digestive cavities remaining exterior to the blood, which itself turns out to be relatively external to the glands that discharge their secretions into its flux, and so on. Exteriority and interiority are not therefore given as states but are entirely relational.
Thus, if the living substance contained in the membrane regenerates it, it is none the less necessary to define the living by this membrane, solely capable of producing the mobile distinction between interiority and exteriority since it polarizes and distinguishes substances that it admits or rejects, in one direction or another. The membrane defines the living, in accordance with the Simondonian formula, ‘the living lives at the limit, on the borders’, that Deleuze cites with admiration in The Logic of Sense; it is on the side of the limit, of the exteriority of the skin, that the characteristic polarity of life emerges as an aspect of the dynamic topology that itself fosters its own metastability.
The skin thus commands a properly superficial vital potential energy. It is in this non-metaphorical sense that Valery’s celebrated formula, ‘there’s nothing more profound than the skin’, attains its proper validity – not in terms of a facile inversion of surface and depth, but, because depth is literally produced, secreted by the skin. Only the characteristic polarity of the living membrane, the skin, determines this differentiation between interior and exterior that characterizes life. Without a doubt, this one-way permeability exists on the chemical level, but it characterizes life as a continued transduction. The crystal polarizes once and for all, but the membrane is continually repolarized. The individual is defined, in any case, as a system of transduction but, if this transduction becomes indirect and hierarchized in complex biological systems, it remains direct and belongs to a single level in physical systems. The crystal is only transductive on the margins, where it undergoes crystallization, its exteriority comes to bear only on its external layer. But even here, then, ‘interiority and exteriority are everywhere in living being’ (IGPB 159).
A second, equally strong consequence also follows. In separating interiority from exteriority, the polarized membrane differentiates the fluxes of temporality and creates the interiority of lived time. If the polarization of the membrane characterizes the living, it is not only topological and spatial, but chronogenetic, productive of time. The polarized pellicule, in distinguishing interiority and exteriority, separates the facets of the temporality of the living into two streams. The present emerges on the exterior of the membrane; it catalyses action and intervenes on the reality to come [à venir], however beneficent or detrimental this reality may be. What appears on the exterior may or may not be assimilated, may or may not do damage to the living individual; exteriority induces tendencies of assimilation or rejection, and provokes the imminent material encounter, the encounter to come. The future [avenir] depends on action, and is split between favourable and unfavourable, useful and harmful. Correlatively, what remains within the grasp of interiority is the organic memory of the living, its vital identity, its formula of repetition, the past – whence Simondon’s remarkable formula, often cited by Deleuze: ‘at the level of the polarised membrane, the interior past and the exterior future face one another’ (IGPB 226).4
The future and the past, topologically speaking, form the two sides of the membrane, which distinguishes the one side from the other. At the level of the skin interior and exterior are topologically distinguished, a border that also operates chronogenetically, the creator of time as much as it is of space. Kant wrongfully accounted for space and time in terms of internal and external sense, a priori forms of transcendental subjectivity, since, if the effectuation of forms is at issue, they are materially produced through the sensible metastability of the membrane, the polarity of living tissue.
By defining interiority as topological, relative and differential, Simondon allows for the taking into account of the temporal differentiation at the heart of becoming. The same analysis that carries weight for the production of interiority and exteriority also does so for the plurality of time, which is split between the actuality of the present, its relative past, and its tension towards the future. The individual is no longer, Simondon says, a ‘way of being’, but rather a ‘moment of being’, in so far as the logic of becoming leads into a differentiation of the phases of time. ‘After individuation, being has a past’: it is individuation that thus divides and dephases temporality (IGPB 232).
The purely functional difference between past and future is only inscribed in the living at its margins, in its folds. The temporality of the living is in no way continuous, unitary or durable but traverses in the movement of time the different phased temporalities of the interior past and the current exterior present. Living tissue produces time, supports this bundle of divergent temporal lines: past and future distinguished by virtue of a pure localization.
The future is concentrated in this relative exterior, while the past subsists in the relatively durable interiority of the organism. With this analysis, Simondon marks the point at which the spatial and temporal character of vital individuation must be understood in a strong sense. In separating a relative exterior milieu of action to come from a relative subsistent milieu of affection, the living produces a plurality, a differentiation of temporalities. While the borders of the skin, sensible contact, turn out to be the creator of temporality, organic depth condenses memory; interiority, harnessing duration, becomes a temporal condenser, a time trap.
This creative topological separation of interiority and exteriority takes account of the complex treatment to which Simondon subjects time, defined as metastable becoming and phases of being, and which opens on to a conception of the event that is decisive for contemporary philosophy, in particular that of Deleuze, who can write, following Simondon: ‘Events are like crystals, they become and grow only out of the edges, or on the edge.’5 This edge of the event, a surface of demarcation between the actual of transductive individuation and the tension that is played out between the future and the past in vital individuation, receives a new function in this analysis, where it accounts for a border that no longer passes between the interior and physical exterior of the membrane, but rather between psychic interiority and corporeal and perceptible exteriority. The Simondonian membrane can thus be appropriated by Deleuze in order to account for sense as that which produces difference between the exteriority of the states of bodies and the interiority of the incorporeal event. Just as the membrane produces the topological difference between the imminent exterior and the past interiority in Simondon, sense, for Deleuze, determines the difference between the exteriority of bodies and the incorporeal interiority of the pure event. As event, sense has the property of both broaching and separating actual corporeality from virtual thought.
For Simondon, as for Bergson or Deleuze, to be present would be to be – that is to say, to stop, to arrest becoming. This is why Simondon supplements his transductive logic of individuation, of the time of the present, of the density of bodies and of actualization, with becoming, the double streams of the past and the present, chronogenetic trails opened up by the membrane. The present is action; the real traverses the edges of the membrane, and fractures around the metaphysical selvage of the surface, differentiating itself into a temporality of the past and to come, which are never actual. From the transductive logic of individuation, we are led to a complex and phased temporality, producer of its own past and its own capacity for the future.
NOTES
| 1. | TN: The translator would like to thank Arne De Boever for his comments on an earlier draft of this translation. |
| 2. | Gilbert Simondon, L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995 [1964]), p. 31. This text will be cited hereafter as IGPB. |
| 3. | Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation psychique et collective: à la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastatique (Paris: Aubier, 1989), p. 77. |
| 4. | See also Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (London: Athlone, 1990), p. 104. |
| 5. | Ibid., p. 9. |