Infra-Psychic Individualization: Transductive Connections and the Genesis of Living Techniques1
In the biotechnological age, life has taken a dramatic form; today’s life is not only concerned with technology, it co-emerges with it. Contemporary biotechnological interventions create intelligent machines, responsive materials, hybrids, cyborgs, semi-living beings, partial life, chimeras: all categories referring to monstrous entities whose demonstrations orchestrate our evolutionary dis/continuities – all kinds of biotechnical individuals. By foregrounding the relationships between life, technique and the environment, I investigate here the potential for the integration of life’s materials and processes into design practices that give rise to what I call living techniques or techniques of bringing to life (techniques du faire vivant). Living techniques amount to life’s operational and creative identity by raising the question of the level of complexity at which life presents itself as an emerging property. Central to this question is these living techniques’ political field of emergence: that is, living techniques’ potential to discover new goals in the course of their becoming as well as to invent new forms of actions to achieve these goals. The complex relationships between perception and action are therefore at stake.
Gilbert Simondon’s thought holds great potential to think – or rethink – the political relations entangled in the process of coupling life’s materials and processes with technology. One could argue that contemporary debates about biotechnology combine the two principal themes of Simondon’s work: (1) the modes of existence of technical objects and (2) the concept of individuation. A key aspect of his thought revolves around the application of the concept of the individual to that of the technical object. This peculiar contribution opens up a conceptual milieu for thinking about the onto-epistemology of the emergence of living techniques as biotechnical individuals.
Living techniques’ ontology is irremediably dynamic. Their becoming follows a series of forceful relations whose operations give birth to bios and tekhne-. The way we foster the political but also the ontological implications of the emergence of this new class of beings is therefore at stake. In order to articulate a politics of dynamic becoming, a programme of individuation in cooperation – one which acknowledges the becoming of the object and the subject, of bios and tekhnē- – certainly stands out as a point of departure for engaging with the monstrous unpublished works produced by sciences and technology. Simondon’s theory of individuation notably asserts this mutual becoming of subjects and objects, of quasi-objects and/or partial subjects.2 ‘Objectivity and subjectivity’, he says, ‘arise between the living and its milieu, between man and the world, at a moment where the world does not have a complete object status, nor man a complete subject one.’3
Living techniques’ individuation questions their potential to operate at the intersection of the born and the manufactured, between the natural and the artificial. It puts a demand on their capacity to respond creatively to the problematic tensions they encounter in the relationships they share with their environment (relationships from which they also emerge): that is to say, their capacity to individuate psychically. According to Simondon, there are five phases of individuation: vital, physical, psychic, collective and transindividual. These different phases do not follow one another in succession; rather they complement or supplement – they complexify – one another. They are not chronological but correlative. That is why one should not distinguish them substantially, but rather focus on the ‘rhythm of their becoming’: that is, on the ‘differences of speed in the process of their formation’.4 Simondon’s theory of individuation cannot be thought outside the relationship between the individual’s ontogenesis and its milieu (which in turn are also related to a generative field of emergence, or plane of immanence, what he calls pre-individual nature: namely, a reality charged with potentials, a reality to which I will come back later).
Psychic individualization arises when biophysical individuals face ‘environmental’ conflicts – problematic or yet to be resolved relationships with their milieu. Psychic individualization is therefore synonymous with a creative response to ‘ecological’ tensions. These tensions may actuate a reactivation of biophysical individuals’ potentialities and generate processes of individuation that reach new levels of magnitude. The reactivation of a biophysical individual’s charge of potentialities is conditioned by this individual’s coming into a collective. The emergence of collective individuation is that which conditions the actualization of these potentialities, potentialities that would otherwise not achieve full expression/signification. As we shall see, the coming into a collective introduces the possibility for an amplification of the potentials of the biophysical individual, for a coupling that reaches another level of magnitude and goes beyond the individual’s already constituted individualities. Hence the couplings that result from the amplification of biophysical potentials, and unlock the likelihood for new actions to emerge. From this perspective, investigating the potential of biotechnical individuals to individualize psychically (and therefore collectively) becomes the key aspect of living techniques’ political field of emergence: their capacity to individuate inventively and creatively within the relations they share with their environment.
In order to focus the discussion on the materiality (both corporeal and incorporeal) of living techniques, I will address the emergence of replicative life in the context of recent work on protocells. Protocell technology is conceptualized here in terms of an emerging biotechnical individual and it is asked whether they hold creative relationships with their environment. In doing so, I elicit the possibility for Simondon’s thinking to offer operational tools of engagement with contemporary biotechnological development by exploring the possibilities of protocell technology to (1) individuate infra-psychically and (2) generate biotechnical, though non-human, collectives. For Simondon, however, psycho-collective individuation seems only to be enacted by and through a human subject. Consequently, his argument tends to negate the possibility for non-human living entities – for biotechnical individuals – to individuate psychically.
In order to engage creatively in such an anthropomorphic misreading of Simondon’s individuation, I refer to some operational tools found in Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. Whitehead’s notion of ‘poles of mentality’ (the intermixing of physicality and mentality) will be used to open up Simondon’s conception of the subject. I will therefore investigate the ways in which Whitehead’s physico-mental intermixing, when grasped from the ontogenetic becoming of protocells, generates new milieus of association that activate a protocell’s infra-psychic individualization. Whitehead’s application of the subject to non-humans amounts to a non-anthropomorphic understanding of the subject and offers productive tools for the analysis of the transformative processes immanent to non-human entities.
By offering a critical analysis of the anthropomorphism associated with Simondon’s notion of individuation, I evoke the potential for non-human life (here protocell technology) to individuate psychically, meaning, their capacity to reconnect with their potentials in ways that activate their power of amplification: that is to say, their capacity to achieve greater orders of magnitude by coming into collectives. Though some of Simondon’s ideas will not appear as fundamentally new, a combined reading of the two themes that animate his thought has, in my opinion, not yet been fully expanded. The understanding of technical objects as activators of individuation has been addressed, although the application of the concept of the individual to that of technical objects has not been given adequate attention. Accordingly, I suggest that Simondon’s contribution can activate a restaging of the relational frameworks within which contemporary technological interventions on biological systems are conceptualized.
INDIVIDUATION AS PROCESS OF RETICULATION
Before addressing the individuation process of protocell technology and its psycho-collective phase, let me first introduce Simondon’s theory of individuation. Some preliminary ontological and epistemological considerations will lay the necessary foundations for a better understanding of its five phases. Simondon argues that the fundamental epistemological postulate of his theory is that ‘the relation between two relations is itself a relation.’5 For him, a relation does not relate two pre-existing terms; rather, it emerges through constituting the terms as relations. Hence, relations constitute Being’s modalities and are simultaneous to the terms to which they provide existence. ‘A relation’, he says, ‘does not arise between two individuated terms; it is rather an aspect of the internal resonance of a system of individuation.’6 The notion of internal resonance amounts to the incompletion of the individual, to the individual’s permanent becoming. It also insists on the fact that the evolutionary transformations of the individual are immanent to Being. Simondon asserts the primacy of Being over the individual. He considers the individual as a ‘relative reality’, as a ‘phase of Being’. Accordingly, individuation insists on Beings’ constitutive relations (Being-in-relation) rather than on constituted Beings (or Beings’ existing conditions). When Being is understood as a ‘Being-in-relation’, it cannot be reduced to a constituted individual that would exhaust its potentialities. It is therefore the process of individuation, which shall be explained, rather than Being that allows the explanation to be found. ‘Individuation is thus considered alone as ontogenetic, as the operation of the complete Being [Simondon’s emphasis].’7 And so, ontogenesis accounts simultaneously for the genesis and the becoming of Being.
For Simondon, Being-in-relation is a multiplicity, a ‘non-un’ (not-one), which can be seized by and through a reality that is both prior and simultaneous to individuation: the pre-individual nature. The pre-individual nature is a ‘reality charged with potentials actually existing as potentials, as the energy of a metastable system’.8 Nature is, for Simondon, a source of generation: a reality carried by the individual, a reality that is not ‘man’s opposite, but the first phase of Being, the second phase being the opposition between the individual and the environment’.9 Here the act of carrying generates a confusion of sense. Carrying a charge of potentials does not mean that the individual contains the potential of his own becoming. This confusion can be solved by referring to the way in which Brian Massumi qualifies the virtual. ‘The virtual [here the pre-individual nature] is not contained in any actual form assumed by things or states of things [here the individual]’; by contrast, it ‘runs in the transitions from one form to another’.10 Simondon’s description of the pre-individual nature is analogical to Massumi’s qualification of the virtual: the pre-individual runs in between the individual’s different phases of individuation. Conceptualized as such, the pre-individual nature is a zone of indetermination charged with the individual’s potentials, the reality of his becoming.
For Simondon, individuation is not attributable to the becoming of the individual and to its relation with the pre-individual nature alone. The individual is always coupled with an associated milieu, which acts as the individual’s complement. Hence, the process of individuation is the complete system within which the genesis of the individual takes place. This system as a whole is concerned with the relations between three terms: the individual, the associated milieu, and the pre-individual nature that bridges the former two. The pre-individual nature is the primitive unity from which both the individual and the associated milieu are split (dédoublés). The individual is therefore in relation to the pre-individual nature by and through its associated milieu. The fact that Being is a multiplicity, a ‘non-un’ becomes clearer; being is both the individual and its associated milieu, and that relationality is reticulated by and through the pre-individual nature.
This general framework enables one to understand individuation as a reticulation process of the relations between the individual and its associated milieu, a process made possible by connecting the individual and its milieu to their primitive unity, the pre-individual nature. Let me now encounter the connections that these processual and genetic relations share with the concretization process proper to technical objects. There are indeed some great resonances between individuation and technical concretization. According to Simondon, technical evolution occurs through the passage from an abstract object to a concrete one, where concretization is the name of the process that takes place in between both forms, a process that acknowledges the way in which they mutually in-form one another. Concretization as a process insists on the indeterminate, on the not yet fully concrete, and in so doing, it opens up a space of indeterminacy and reveals the creative difference of the biotechnical becoming. Indeed, the passage from the abstract to the concrete is determined by singular points that contain numerous variations; the concrete form is therefore not directly linked to the abstract one. The passage is one of creative difference. Such an understanding of technical becoming makes visible the field of emergence of technical objects that tends to vanish in the fully concretized objects that emerge from it. Here, as with individuation, concretization is an ontogentic process doubled with becoming.
Nevertheless, the ‘form’ generated, whether concretized or individuated, must not be understood in terms of a static form – that is, in terms of a constituted, complete and stable individual – but rather as a dynamic form: a metastable individual. For Simondon, equilibrium is always already metastable. The individual can achieve a structure, but as it is always coupled with an associated milieu and pre-individual nature, this structure is never stable. Through processes of internal development and progressive saturation – that is, by conservation of primary tensions – technical individuals produce structures. Thus a technical individual emerges through a process of ‘resolution of primary tensions and a preservation of these tensions in the form of structure’ but ‘the discovery of a structure is indeed the resolution, at least provisory, of the incompatibilities, but it does not destroy the potentials; the system remains tense and able to modify itself.’11 Technological lineages develop as stability plateaus emerge within the technical environment. Once they have reached a particular saturation point in their evolution – that is, after having accumulated various micro-changes saturating their technical environment – reconfigurations occur in order to allow new exploitations and new expansions into the environment itself. Concretization as a process operates within incompatibilities that force technical objects to perform compromises between requirements in conflict. In technical evolution, incompatibilities are means for realization rather than obstacles. As Simondon puts it, technical objects ‘evolve through internal redistribution of functions between compatible units . . . specialization does not occur function by function but rather synergy by synergy’.12
CHRONO-TOPOLOGIES: LIFE AS MODE OF RELATION
The analogical relationships between technical concretization and individuation raise the question of the passage from physical to biological individuation. As Muriel Combes notes in her excellent book on Simondon, ‘the difference that exists between the physical and the biological domains is the one which distinguishes a primary individuation of inert systems and a secondary individuation of living systems’.13 She adds that it is necessary to ‘conceive biological individuation not as something that adds determinations to an already individuated being, but rather as a process that slows down physical individuation’.14 Biophysical individuation is therefore not a synthesis but a connection. Following this logic, Simondon qualifies the living as an interior ‘theatre of individuation’ coupled with a physical exteriority and he argues for the space of interiority to constitute the living’s difference.
The physical individual, perpetually de-centered, perpetually peripheral to itself, active at the limit of its domain, does not have a veritable interiority; the living individual, on the contrary, does have a veritable interiority because individuation carries itself out within the individual; the interior is constitutive in the living individual, whereas in the physical individual, only the limit is constitutive . . . Within itself, the living is a nexus of informative communication; it is a system within a system, containing within itself a mediation between two orders of magnitude.15
In this context, life’s difference is that its topological configuration generates a space of interiority that allows it to perform its own limitation and its own organization when receiving in-formation. Conversely, inert matter does not have the capacity for structural ontogenesis.16 Following this line of argument, Simondon claims that the membrane constitutes life’s most important mediating element and insists on the fact that the polarized and asymmetrical character of cellular permeability is at the basis of every function. According to him, the membrane is a sine qua non condition of the living. In addition to being alive, it maintains the milieu of interiority in relation to the milieu of exteriority. It acts as a force of connection, as a link, as a nexus.
Simondon asserts that in order to approach the inherent duality between the living and the non-living, one should produce a topology of the living: namely, an analysis of the mediating relations between milieus of interiority and milieus of exteriority. However, such an analysis should not frontally differentiate spaces of interiority and exteriority, but amount to their coming together, to their common connective energy. Simondon adds that life not only is characterized by these mediating relations, but it is also a theatre of confrontation between an interior past and an exterior future. Every topological character, he says, has a chronological correlative, and vice versa. Chronology alone, however, implies a sort of linearity, whereas the relationship between the interior past and the exterior future is not linear. Topological individuals are also chronological because time breaks their spatial coherence. When the interior opens itself to the outside, it opens itself to the indeterminate, to a futurity, to a changing potential. From this perspective, life really exists in relationality by maintaining a chrono-topological structure. It would be correct to say here that life emerges from within, but is always in between.
According to Simondon life is a mode of relation. It is not the form of individuation, nor is it a vital substance opposed to a physical one. Life is a form only when considered a ‘dynamic form’ or a ‘form of process’: a form existing in relationality, a relational form. Life is a mode of relation conditioned by its capacity to maintain a topological structure. Life’s milieu of interiority is active. It is a relational milieu carried by the individual, a space of reconfiguration of the membrane that holds the potential to activate a change in the relational system by passing again through the membrane to exteriorize itself another time. This exact passage is one of the central questions concerning protocells: namely, whether they have an active space of interiority that can exteriorize itself.
PROTOCELLS: CHEMISTRY’S CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH BIOLOGY
The protocell is a technology currently developed in the field of synthetic biology, a field emerging at the intersection of the sciences and engineering that seeks to engineer biology and that claims to lay the foundations for the eventual invention / generation of a protocell proper. The core question regarding protocells concerns the initial transition from chemistry to Darwinian evolution; that is, it concerns how the evolution of life might have started on earth. Protocells are the object of an operational fiction. To date, they mainly operate on the level of science fiction; they fully perform on the discursive level but have yet to achieve concrete unity. They still exist in a dispersed abstract state, although have already begun an in vitro individuation process in the labs of synthetic biologists.
A protocell is an ordered structure, enclosed by a membrane that carries out some living activities, such as growth and division. According to Jack W. Szostak (Professor of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School), their basic elements can be grouped under two fundamental categories: (1) a membrane and (2) genetic information. Szostak does not include metabolism and replication, most likely because he associates (1) the membrane with the metabolism, as metabolic energy transfers are ensured by it, and (2) the capacity to replicate with both the membrane and genetic information. Szostak and his team use fatty acids, presumed to have been around when life first emerged on earth, to trigger the generation of the membrane. On the level of genetic information it is not clear whether they require RNA itself or a simpler progenitor material that might have been replaced later by RNA.17 As Szostak and his colleague Alonso Ricardo have argued,
recent experiments suggest it would have been possible for genetic molecules similar to DNA or to its close relative RNA to form spontaneously. And because these molecules can curl up in different shapes and act as rudimentary catalysts, they may have become able to copy themselves – to reproduce – without the need for proteins.18
The key point here is that they need to synthesize a system with (1) a membrane able to grow spontaneously, and (2) genetic information that also has the capacity to replicate spontaneously. Szostak’s team, however, has not yet successfully achieved the replication of genetic information. So, on the one hand, the protocell is based on its capacity spontaneously to generate (1) a membrane (and to replicate it) and (2) chains of RNA. On the other, it is based on its capacity to assemble the membrane and the RNA chain together. The latter has been successfully achieved. As Szostak explained in his Noble Prize lecture, they use a common clay mineral that triggers the assemblage of chains of RNA and membranes. This common clay mineral catalyses the assembly of membranes and brings the two together (the RNA chain – or genetic material – and the membrane). The problem yet to be solved is the replication of the genetic material.19 Protocells operate at the boundary between the physical and the biological, and the issue at stake is not whether they are alive, but that of the dynamic form that the relations between the physical and the biological take.
TRANSDUCTIVE CONNECTIONS: DYNAMIC FUTURE AS QUASI-CAUSE
Protocell technology is a form of design that triggers the emergence of connections between milieus of interiority and milieus of exteriority, but its incapacity to replicate cells that contain genetic material is a significant limit that questions the protocell membrane’s real capacity to connect the interior with the exterior. That is how the space of interiority is actively presented to the exterior on the limit of the living. In the protocell case, the limit expressed in the concretization process questions the transductive connectivities of its individuation process. The connections between milieus of interiority and milieus of exteriority, between past and future, are transductive. However, the transductive power of relational connection is not contained within the interior or the exterior, within the past or the future; rather it acts as an incorporeal cause that triggers or activates the coming together of these heterogeneous planes of operation according to what Simondon calls a process of disparation.
Transduction is a mode of dynamic efficiency that generates the possibilities for emergence by opening a gap between the result and the conditions of a situation, between its causes and finalities. Transduction is a dynamic relation that breaks with linear causality, a mode of relation that effects modifications or modulations by virtue of how elements hold together or come together, and that bears on all the elements at once. Transduction is not a linear causality but a quasi-cause. According to Brian Massumi, a quasi-cause is a cause that acts as a ‘formative participation of the future . . . because [it is] more like an attractor in chaos theory than an efficient material cause’.20 From this perspective, in the realm of transductive operations, it is the future that causes a change in the present.21 A future cause, however, ‘is not actually a cause; it is a virtual cause, or quasi-cause’.22
Following this logic, the field of emergence of the protocell is not alive in itself; it is the futurity of the field, its potential to generate a living entity, that acts as the cause of the protocell’s emergence. In fact, although the protocell has not yet expressed the necessary chrono-topological conditions for life to emerge (as it has not demonstrated its capacity to put its milieu of interiority in relation to its milieu of exteriority), its potential to emerge as a living technique resides in its transductive power of connection between an interior past and an exterior future.
Protocells are transductive in fiction and soon likely in fact. They break with linear causality and become according to a regime of associated causality and finality as their emergence necessitates specific conditionings and actions. Their becoming does not follow a linear logic because their emergence is the expression of a new dimension that breaks with linearity. Protocells are a mix between objective conditions and the action of a terminus, a mix of simultaneous impositions of constraints and new possibilities. These constraints or objective conditions are given to the situation without predetermining it since they are connected to the action of a terminus. Thus, protocells hold the potential to become living techniques according to their transductive or quasi-causal dynamism, according to ‘a memory of the future, which is the quasicausal force of tendency, as governed recursively by the futurity of the terminus toward which it tends’.23
The difference between the physical and the biological, between the interior and the exterior, is not a substantial difference. It is rather a relative difference that distinguishes the living individual according to its potential to fold the exteriority inside, to exteriorize it again and to effect changes in the overall system of relations. These processes take place by and through the membrane that acts as the mediator – or connector – of both spaces according to a chrono-topological structure. In a physical system the interior is a past that cannot exteriorize, that cannot individuate again. It has become inert and cannot cross the membrane again. In his famous example of the crystal, Simondon explains that matter within the crystal is inert but that it holds the potential to individuate again once it is in contact with its solution. Here the solution has become the interior past but it is also exterior to the crystal’s space of interiority; it presents itself as the crystal’s futurity. A living individual operates with an oriented memory – a memory that combines past and futurity and that makes possible the emergence of new forms of actions. The interior is not defined spatially or substantially; it is a form of enveloping of potentialities. It is a structure that carries tendencies and tropisms that give orientation without, however, dictating a pre-given final form, as it carries only implicit forms.
SUBJECT-BEING: INFRA OR MINIMAL PSYCHIC
Even though protocells have not yet fully performed the exteriorization of their space of interiority, they beckon the question as to whether they hold the potential to trigger the emergence of a sensorimotor schema that does not depend on DNA’s replicative machinery. DNA is known as the molecule that programs all aspects of the behaviour of living cells. However, as Szostak has argued, it is not certain that protocells necessarily require DNA to replicate. In other words, the question here is whether protocells can invent new dynamic structures by and through the relationships they share with their environment at a level situated below that of DNA. This is crucial, as research on the protocell focuses mainly on genetic information, replication and metabolism: meaning, on the possibility to preserve the protocell itself, its functional identity. In order to put protocells’ functional identity back into their operational field of emergence, I will refer to other protocols that foreground protocells’ sensorimotor through the investigation of their ability to move. The scientists working on these protocols recognize the importance of replication and metabolism but investigate movement as one of life’s most basic conditions: its continuous avoidance of equilibrium – far from equilibrium or metastable protocells. Hence, what is at stake with living techniques is not only their capacity to maintain a chrono-topological structure but also their ability to invent novel and dynamic ones: transductive individuals.
Movement brings protocells back into relational dynamism, back into process. As a mode of operational investigation, it speaks to the way in which Gilles Deleuze, following Henri Bergson, has defined the living: ‘one defines the living by the existence of an interval, a distance or a gap between the movement it receives and the one it gives, namely the movement it executes’.24 The key notion is the one of the executed movement, the interval between received and given movements. The interval, however, to be understood not in terms of a spatial movement alone, but also in terms of a qualitative variation that emerges over time, a temporal saturation – temporal movement – that expresses itself in the form of a moving movement. That temporal saturation is here equalized with psychic individualization.
Scientists who investigate protocells’ ability to move (for example, Martin Hanczyc from the University of Southern Denmark and Takashi Ikegami from the University of Kyoto) suggest that a protocell is a sensorimotor system. Their protocol consists of adding oil to a water phase. As oil has a greater density than water, it forms a ‘spherical oil droplet that sinks into water’.25 The oil–water interface is a boundary that interacts physically and chemically with the environment. They argue that the interface acts as the sensor of the system and that the motor system arises from the flow structure within the droplet. When the interface senses chemical gradients (pH), an ‘imbalance in the tension surrounding the droplet results in flow structures.’26 The observed flow structure (convection) triggers the motor of the system. Thus, movement in the system is a result of an ‘intimate coupling between a chemical reaction and the physical structure of the droplet’.27 In brief, their experiments suggest that convective flow and movement are responses to pH gradients. Convection is what keeps the droplet in an active state; it is that which regulates the equilibrium of the droplet – a metastable droplet. As Hanczyc explains,
the convection flow can resolve the instability and the droplet will stop moving. However, it continues to move because convection mixes up the droplet, bringing more chemicals to the interface, which then sustains the instability. So convection is the key in providing feedback (in this case physical feedback) to the system.28
This feedback loop, between shifting chemicals near the interior surface of the cell wall and the pH of the chemicals exterior to the cell, allows the droplet to ‘sense’ gradients and to respond by moving in the environment. This process also speaks to the chrono-topological structure. As the convection flow is inside the droplet, the resulting movement can also account for the exteriorization of the protocell (at a level below that of DNA).
Research carried out by these scientists closely encounters Simondon’s psychic phase of individuation, a phase which emerges when the structure between an individual and its environment is broken up, when a biophysical individual is shattered and calls upon the invention of a new structure.29 Psychic individualization’s deployment takes place on the preconscious level, and more precisely on what Simondon refers to as the subconscious: namely, the stratum found in between unconscious and conscious states.30 That relational stratum is, for him, the centre of individuality and is essentially affectivity and emotivity. Affectivity and emotivity, he says, are the psyche’s transductive forms par excellence. Together they link the individual to itself and to the world; they trigger both the individual’s auto- and hetero-positions – a bipolar individual. The process emerges with the experience, the sensation of a gradient, whose correlative is the response to a tropism (in contrast to a reflex): the act of seizing a direction. In other words, sensation orients an individual in the world along a series of gradients that tend toward perception. When the act of orientation faces the experience of various gradients, the individual experiences a conflict between a plurality of tropistic orientations and calls upon perception in order to resolve a sensitive contradiction. Tropisms are never overcome; they are integrated in a complex system that exhibits emerging properties. Affection is the experience of the resolved contradiction experienced as a becoming, one that anticipates further action with respect to a bipolar frame of reference: namely, the one that links the relationship of the individual to itself and to the world. This bipolarity is both emotional and collective; emotion is what links the individual to itself whereas the collective relates it to the world. This mode of operationalization asserts that the coming into collective is ultimately found in collective actio n but that it is primarily conditioned at the level of affectivoemotive themes.
Here the issue raised revolves around whether protocells’ movement is an automatic response (a reflex) or a tropism (quasi-automatic). Hanczyc and Ikegami mainly work on changing the size of the protocell to increase its internal instability. By so doing, they suggest that protocells’ ability to perceive is conditioned by both convection flow and shape. This is an extremely important combination, as it prevents a reductionist understanding of protocells that would reduce them to a geometrical substance. The droplet, they assert, can ‘sense’ a pH gradient ‘because the internal flow pattern and movement of the droplet change accordingly’.31 One could draw upon these conclusions and suggest that the flow pattern is what maintains protocells’ metastability and that the resulting movement acts as a resolving action to the sensation of pH gradients, as an act of selection that compensates for a change in the velocity of the reaction. Here I can only speculate, as experiments that concern these modes of selection are yet to be published. I will nevertheless highlight two tendencies that resonate with Simondon’s theory of individuation. First, Hanczyc and Ikegami report that in different experiments droplets climb to different gradients, which suggests that they are indeed capable of selecting. In addition, in a soon-to-be published paper, they investigate collective droplet behaviours and convey that droplets sometimes follow and sometimes avoid other droplets’ behaviours. Their experiments perform protocells’ incipient collective individuation as conditioned by shared affectivo-emotive themes.
Protocell technology still exists in a state of dispersal, though its concretization process is under way, and it has not yet fully exhausted itself. Nevertheless, the experiments upon which I draw for my analysis do understand protocells as individuals and highlight the relevance of Simondon’s contribution. Individuation is a process in action. Epistemologically, it would be absurd to anticipate how protocells’ psychic individualization gives rise to collective and transindividual phases of individuation. What protocells do not perform is Simondon’s subject. For him,
the problem of the subject is that of the heterogeneity between the perceptible and affective worlds, between the individual and the pre-individual; this problem is the problem of the subject qua subject: the subject is individual and other than individual; it is incompatible with itself.32
It can only coincide with itself in the collective. Protocell technology has not yet come into collective individuation. It would, however, be wrong not to consider them as subjects. Simondon’s individuation might consider life as a mode of relation; it never asserts that non-biological individuals might achieve a subjective level. Expanding Simondon’s approach to that of Whitehead’s speculative philosophy is an operational deviation that opens Simondon’s notion of subject to non-humans and even to non-biological individuals.
For Whitehead, all entities, alive or not, feel the world. Apart from the experience of subjects, he says ‘there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness’.33 That which feels is, for him, a subject (or maybe more a subjectivity). All entities have a physical and a mental pole. The intermixing of mental and physical poles is a transductive reality based on affection (in opposition to cognition). Whitehead, here referring to psychologists, suggests ‘emotions, hopes, fears, inhibitions sense-perceptions arise, which physiologists ascribe to bodily functionings’34 and goes on to say that ‘what we perceive as present, is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation’.35 The physical pole is a past driven by the mental pole’s force of tendency. This intermixing develops the possibility for new forms of determination, for new modes of actions. Physico-mentality is active; it is a mode of activity. Following Whitehead and James, Massumi relates activity to the event, and not to the opposition between subjects and objects:
Neither potential nor activity is objectlike. They are more energetic than objectlike (provided that no presuppositions are made as to the physicality of ‘energy’ or the modes of causality involved in the energizing of events). For the basic category they suggest is just that: occurrence. Neither object nor subject: the event.36
An entity, or individuality of occasion, is the becoming between the poles; a subjective form is what happens in between. It is the reality of the in between, the event. ‘There is no subject separate from the event . . . the event itself is a subjective self-creation.’37 From this perspective, the protocell’s capacity for selection is not a subjective choice; it is the active reality of an event. As is the case in Simondon, Whitehead’s mentality is situated beyond stimuli reaction and below consciousness; mentality is for Whitehead active in all relationalities. Individuation, operating in this case analogically to mental and physical intertwining, ultimately makes no difference between living and non-living, between object and subject, and opens its subjective field to non-humans and non-biological entities. It is a subjectivity without subject.
TRANSDUCTIVE CONNECTIONS AS TECHNIQUES OF BRINGING TO LIFE
Simondon’s conception of life incorporates exterior / interior dynamical flows that make no substantial difference between the living and the non-living. His contribution foregrounds life as dynamic relational structure. Protocell technology amounts to the understanding of living techniques in terms of chemical individuals rather than biotechnical ones. However, the conceptualization of their becoming in terms of Simondon’s ontogenetic theory of the individuation process can shed light on the fact that living techniques do not lay claim for an essentialist or susbtantialist understanding of what life is. Whether living techniques are ‘really’ alive is not the point. The key issue is whether or not their becoming is analogical to that of living systems, whether they perform life’s relational form of process, whether their becoming is that of a chrono-topological structure that extends itself into affectivo-emotive themes in such a way that new forms of action might emerge. As a dynamic system that connects the interior past with the exterior future, the chrono-topological structure acts as the bootstrap of living techniques. Chrono-topologies are dynamic structures that condition the emergence of a psychic phase, of an individualizing individual. It is a structure that connects physical and mental poles, and that opens the gap between causes and finalities by maintaining the individual in metastable relation, one that constantly links to its associated milieu and pre-individual nature.
Living techniques are inventive in the sense that their becoming is not predetermined or precoded; they are transductive becoming. They must be able to respond creatively to their environment, to invent new connective structures that link them to themselves and their environment in unexpected ways. They ought to perform new forms of relationalities. Living techniques are techniques of emergence whose process of becoming is ontogenetic. Living techniques are not necessarily biological in the literal sense. They are relational techniques whose processes ultimately bring to life. The process as a whole is not conditioned by peculiar forces. Living techniques’ individuation is neither a vitalism, nor a substantialism. It is a dynamic form, a form of process, a mode of relation, a performative in-between – one that folds exteriority into a womb already pregnant with a past-futurity, an incipient process already present in the fringe of the indeterminacy of its driving force of tendency. Transductive connections are at play in the laboratories of protocells’ midwives, and they are amplifying; they are techniques of bringing to life. ‘Cut away the future, and the present collapses.’38
NOTES
| 1. | I want to thank Brian Massumi and Tim Lenoir for their productive comments on this paper. I am also grateful to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science for providing me with a stimulating milieu of exchange where I wrote the first draft. (I am particularly grateful to Hans Jörg Rheinberger, Didier Debaise, Henning Schmidgen and Julia Kursell.) Lastly, I want to thank Jamie L. Ferguson for her patience and language assistance. |
| 2. | Brian Massumi. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 71. |
| 3. | Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 2001), p. 168. |
| 4. | Muriel Combes, Simondon: Individu et collectivité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), p. 42. |
| 5. | Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2005), p. 83. |
| 6. | Simondon, L’Individuation, p. 29. |
| 7. | Simondon, L’Individuation, p. 25. |
| 8. | Simondon, L’Individuation, p. 313. |
| 9. | Simondon, L’Individuation, p. 305. |
| 10. | Brian Massumi, ‘Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible’, http://www.brianmassumi.com/textes/Sensing%20the%20Virtual.pdf. |
| 11. | Simondon, Du mode, p. 163. |
| 12. | Simondon, Du mode, p. 34. |
| 13. | Combes, Simondon, p. 41. |
| 14. | Combes, Simondon, p. 41. |
| 15. | Gilbert Simondon, ‘The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis’, trans. Greg Flanders, Parrhesia, 7 (2009). http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia07/parrhesia07_simondon1.pdf. |
| 16. | Simondon, L’Individuation, p. 131. |
| 17. | Jack W. Szostak, ‘Noble Prize Lecture’, http://nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1218&view=1. |
| 18. | Alonso Ricardo and Jack. W. Szostak, ‘Origins of Life on Earth’, Scientific American (2009), p. 54. |
| 19. | Craig Venter and his team recently challenged this limitation in their own work on synthesis of an artificial cell complete with DNA. Their protocol included a bacterial cell with protoplasm, a cell wall and DNA. They removed the DNA and reinserted an artificially created genome into the bacterium. The chromosome is capable of replicating, and takes over the bacterium within a couple of generations. While the protoplasm of the bacterium was present before the insertion of the genome, the DNA machinery completely takes over after it begins replicating and replaces the original protoplasm with its own unique protoplasm (see J. Craig Venter et al., ‘Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome’, Science, 329: 5987 (2010), pp. 52–6). But as I have explained above, the synthesis of a protocell might not require DNA itself. In addition, the difference with the genome inserted into the bacterium is that it is not self-generating. It does not replicate spontaneously. Besides these limitations, I would add that Venter’s team has not created a cell through synthetic processes. Rather, they have mimicked life. In fact, what Venter’s team means by ‘synthetic’ is that the synthetic genome takes over the bacterium. Their meaning of synthetic is more a rhetorical trope than an actual fact. In the same line of argument, Jim Collins, a bioengineer at Boston University, has argued that ‘what has been created is an organism with a synthesized natural genome. But it doesn’t represent the creation of life from scratch or the creation of a new life form’, which is the goal of protocell technology (see Nicholas Wade, ‘Researchers Say They Created a “Synthetic Cell” ’, The New York Times, 20 May [2010]). |
| 20. | Brian Massumi, ‘Of Microperception and Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics’, Inflexions (2009). http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_4/n3_massumihtml.html. |
| 21. | Brian Massumi, ‘Fear (The Spectrum Said)’, Positions, 13:1 (2005), p. 35. |
| 22. | Ibid. |
| 23. | Massumi, ‘Of Microperception’. |
| 24. | Gilles Deleuze, ‘Cours Vincennes–St Denis: Bergson, Matière et Mémoire (1981)’, http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=70&groupe=Image%20Mouvement%20Image%20Temps&langue=1. |
| 25. | Martin M. Hanczyc and Takashi Ikegami, ‘Protocells as Smart Agents for Architectural Design’, Technoetic Arts, 7 (2009), p. 118. |
| 26. | Martin M. Hanczyc and Takashi Ikegami, ‘Chemical Basis for Minimal Cognition’, Artificial Life, 16 (2010), p. 235. |
| 27. | Martin M. Hanczyc and Takashi Ikegami, ‘Protocells as Smart Agents for Architectural Design’, p. 118. |
| 28. | Quoted from the author’s personal correspondence with Martin Hanczyc. |
| 29. | Note here that Simondon does not refer to psychic individuation but rather to psychic individualization, as the psychic phase does not give rise to a new individual. Rather it complexifies an already existing individual; it is an individual in a process of individuation. While physical individuation and biological individuation give rise to an individual, psychic individualization is the individuation of an already individuated individual. |
| 30. | Simondon, L’Individuation, p. 248. |
| 31. | Hanczyc and Ikegami, ‘Chemical Basis for Minimal Cognition’, p. 235. |
| 32. | Simondon, L’Individuation, p. 253. |
| 33. | Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 167. |
| 34. | Alfred N. Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 189. |
| 35. | Alfred N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (New York: Cosimo, 2007), p. 77. |
| 36. | Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Arts of Experience, Politics of Expression (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). |
| 37. | Ibid. |
| 38. | Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas, p. 191. |