Simondon and Jung: Re-thinking individuation

8 SIMONDON AND JUNG: RE-THINKING INDIVIDUATION Mark Saban My aim in this chapter is to examine Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation from a very partial perspective: that of Jung’s psychology. Simondon has, I think, some things to say that might enrich the ways in which we might approach key aspects of analytical psychology. I am a Jungian analyst and not a philosopher. I am very aware that this means I am in danger of doing what Jungians (and Jung himself ) have historically been very good at doing: colonising alien disciplines, appropriating (and thereby distorting) the fruits of those disciplines, and forcing the whole into service for the greater good of Jungian psychology. The pages of Jungian journals are littered with half-digested, half-thought neuroscience, quantum physics, postmodern philosophy—in much the same way they used to be strewn with barely understood ideas from anthropology, ethology, and theology. In this case, however, I am encouraged by the important fact that Simondon is a member of a very select group: important modern thinkers who have not only read Jung, but quote him, and not only quote him but quote him approvingly, and not only quote him approvingly but incorporate and develop his ideas within their philosophy. Simondon is then capable of thinking forward—rigorously and critically— what Jung describes as the “central concept of [his] psychology” ( Jung and Jaffé 1989, p. 209): the “individuation process”. One might suggest that he is capable of individuating individuation. Jungians will not be surprised to note that Simondon’s Jung-connection gets him into trouble with otherwise supportive critics. David Scott, in his important English-language commentary on Simondon’s magnum opus, suggests that “Simondon’s preference for Jung over Freud is both illuminating and, from our contemporary perspective, perhaps a bit odd. Still, we must remember that TNFUK_08_HOSM_C008_docbook_new_indd.indd 91 AU: Reference citation ‘Jung 1989’ has been changed to ‘Jung and Jaffé 1989’ to match with the reference list. Please check and confirm. 23-10-2019 10.53.18 PM 92 Mark Saban Deleuze and Guattari likewise speak admiringly of Jung” (Scott 2014, pp. 91–92, note 9). Bernard Stiegler is less generous: In my opinion Simondon understands nothing about psychoanalysis, because what he writes about it is so poor and even hostile. I believe it is because he started out with Jung toward individuation, that he understands nothing Freud says. (Stiegler 2012, p. 164) However, although his commentators are bemused and embarrassed by Simondon’s interest in Jung, they are unable to ignore it, or indeed his critical attitude toward Freud and psychoanalysis. Who was Simondon? Born in 1924, Gilbert Simondon was early influenced by the pre-Socratic philosophers, by Friedrich Nietzsche, and by Henri Bergson. He pursued his philosophical studies under the supervision of, among others, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and philosophers of science Gaston Bachelard (another philosopher sympathetic to Jung), and his pupil, Georges Canghuilem. Though refusing to categorise his thinking as either phenomenology or philosophy of science, Simondon maintained a close interest in science, and particularly what the French call la technique: which we might approximately translate as technology. Indeed, it was Simondon’s secondary thesis, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the mode of existence of technical objects) (Simondon 2012), first published in 1958, that made his name in philosophy, so that for many years, especially in the English-speaking world, Simondon was wrongly identified as primarily a philosopher of technology. Simondon’s main thesis, L’ individuation à la lumière des notions de Forme et d’Information (Individuation in the light of the notions of form and information) (Simondon 2005), was only published in its entirety in the year of his death, 1989. However, Gilles Deleuze glowingly reviewed a section of this magnum opus, entitled L’ individu et sa génèse physico-biologique (Individuation and its physical-biological genesis) (Simondon 1995) in 1966 (Deleuze 2001). In several of Deleuze’s writings he refers to Simondon’s ideas on individuation as an important influence on his own philosophy. It seems likely that Deleuze’s own Jungian influence predisposed him in favour of a thinker who overtly espoused aspects of Jung’s psychology.1 However, it is only in recent years that Simondon has begun to receive serious attention as an important thinker in his own right, even in his native country. His reception in the English-speaking world has been severely hampered by the fact that many of his most important works remain untranslated. Despite this, interest in Simondon seems to be rapidly gathering steam. The appeal of his philosophy of individuation is its breadth: it is applied to the inorganic realm, to the TNFUK_08_HOSM_C008_docbook_new_indd.indd 92 23-10-2019 10.53.18 PM Simondon and Jung: Re-thinking individuation 93 realm of living beings, and, as the second part of his thesis puts it, to the psychic and collective. It is this last arena of individuation that is of particular interest in the context of Jung’s psychology. Simondon has much to say about psychic individuation (i.e., the individuation of the individual psyche) and much to say about the individuation of the collective, but what is perhaps most interesting and most important about Simondon’s thought is that it has things to say about the ways in which the psychic and collective are necessarily interwoven—a field he calls the transindividual. Simondon’s individuation For Simondon the attempt to think the world starting with individuals, objects, or substances is already misguided. What matters is not entities but process and relation. He therefore focuses primarily upon genesis: the process by which things, persons, collectives, become what they now are and indeed continue to become until death – this process of becoming he calls, after Jung, individuation (Simondon 2005, 1995). One problem with thinking in terms of entities, Simondon claims, is that it assumes that there is only one kind of equilibrium—stable equilibrium—in which all potential transformation has been already exhausted. However, when we think in terms of individuation, he suggests, we are acknowledging another kind of equilibrium: metastable equilibrium. By metastability Simondon means a tense balance—beyond stability—that holds a high energy potential. A metastable system is always more than itself, because it contains not only its present capacities but also an ongoing potential for self-transformation or mutation. This potential can only be tapped to the extent that it can be actualized, structured, or positioned at another level. Metastable systems contain contrary potentials, potentials that are incompatible and therefore require resolution through the creation of a new structure, form, phase, or level to express them. The metastable system presupposes the existence of what he calls a disparation [disparity] between “two disparate scales of reality between which there is as yet no interactive communication” (Deleuze 2004, p. 87). For Simondon, individuation is thus always in a sense a resolution to the problem of disparation. In the case of crystallisation the disparation occurs between the singularity of the seed crystal and the preindividual system in a metastable state (the super-cooled liquid). The result is the individuation of the ice crystal within the mother liquid. The crystal will continue to individuate so long as it is within the metastable mother liquid. So much for individuation on the physical level. There is however a kind of step change when we move on to what Simondon calls the vital level (i.e., the realm of living things), because the individuation of living beings can never be completed in the way that a crystal can. This is because on the vital level a truly stable equilibrium is never reached. It is also the case that the disparation from which the individuation of living beings proceeds exists not only, as in the case TNFUK_08_HOSM_C008_docbook_new_indd.indd 93 23-10-2019 10.53.18 PM 94 Mark Saban AU: Reference ‘Simondon 2009’ is cited in the text but not provided in the reference list. Please check and provide the details for these references. of the crystal, between internal and external milieus but also through internal resonance. The living being integrates elements of the external milieu into its internal organisation and the resultant internal metastability means that the ongoing individuation of a living being is one of interminable development. This means that, as Simondon puts it: “The living individual is a system of individuation, an individuating system and a system individuating itself ” (Simondon, 2009, p. 7). The preindividual At any moment in the process of individuation, the regime of metastability presents itself as a disparation between the subject as individual (the product of previous individuations) and another dimension which Simondon calls “the preindividual”. The preindividual reality is never exhausted but is carried forward within it, so that the constituted individual transports within itself a charge of preindividual reality, which means that it is animated by, and rich in, potentials. If we translate this insight into depth psychological terms, when he refers to the preindividual Simondon seems to be pointing to a factor that is close to what Jung articulates as the collective unconscious, a resource of “archetypal” potential that is available to every human subject, especially at moments of problematic transition—puberty for example, often experienced by the ego (in projection) as an outer threat or problem, but which ultimately enables individual transformation. It is the ongoing encounter between the subject ego and the collective unconscious that constitutes, for Jung, the process of psychological individuation. For both Simondon and Jung the ongoing phases of individuation show up as attempts to resolve the tense character of the metastable state, which is experienced by the subject as a problematic conflict. In Jungian terms we might see this as the difficult encounter between ego and unconscious. Where, however, Simondon goes further than Jung is in his concept of the transindividual, which is that central aspect of psychic individuation which engages with the psychosocial. The transindividual Simondon argues that a purely sociological approach, which seeks to explain human behaviour while starting from the assumption of an entity entitled “society”, provides just as partial an account as a purely psychological approach, which, starting from the other pole, seeks to explain human behaviour starting with the assumption of the psychological individual as primary. By placing the emphasis upon individuation processes, rather than upon entities (individuals or societies) that may or may not emerge from those processes, and upon the relations which emerge between these processes, Simondon requires us to take seriously both individual and collective individuation—processes which are, for him, intimately connected: as he says, “The two individuations, psychic and TNFUK_08_HOSM_C008_docbook_new_indd.indd 94 23-10-2019 10.53.18 PM Simondon and Jung: Re-thinking individuation 95 collective … allow us to define a category of transindividual that tries to take into account their systematic unity” (Simondon 2009, p. 29). For Simondon the transindividual is not a unifying of individual and society. It is rather a relation of two relations: the relation that is interior to the individual (the psychic) and the relation which is exterior to the individual (the collective). Psyche, which is neither an enclosed interior nor a pure exteriority, is therefore situated at the intersection of a double polarity, between the relation to the world and others and the relation to self (Combes 2013, p. 30). Now, Simondon makes an important move here (and one which places him squarely in the company of Frosh and others who have recently attempted to think the psychosocial (Frosh, 2014, 2016, 2018; Frosh and Baraitser, 2008)—he situates affectivity and the emotions at the centre of individuality, since they mediate between these two relations—individual/self and individual/world. There is something paradoxical here: affectivity includes a relation between the constituted individual (ego) and that not-yet-individuated (preindividual) reality that, as we have seen, any living individuating being carries with it. This is because it is our affective life that reminds us that we are not only individual egos. It does so by presenting us with the problem of what Simondon describes as “the heterogeneity between perceptual worlds [the world of observing subject and observed object] and the affective world, between the individual and the preindividual” (Simondon 2009, p. 253). For Simondon, the subject is then always both “individual and more-thanindividual; it is incompatible with itself ” (Simondon 2009). For Simondon this tension cannot be resolved solely within the subject (any attempt to do so induces neurosis), but only in relation with others. It is only within the unity of the collective—as a milieu in which perception and emotion can be unified—that a subject can bring together these two sides of its psychic activity and to some degree coincide with itself. As Simondon puts it: Relation to others puts us into question as individuated being; it situates us, making us face others as being young or old, sick or healthy, strong or weak, man or woman: yet we are not young or old absolutely in this relation; we are younger or older than another; we are stronger or weaker as well. (Simondon 2009, p. 266) His point is that in relationship with others it is the affective: that by which we are always already engaged with others, that comes into play alongside and in tension with what he calls the perceptual dimension, and that which brings into play a sense of separation between subject and object. However, in normal life our interaction with others is intersubjective—ego interacts with ego. The transindividual is only achieved when we move beyond this horizontal engagement into one that enables the subject to interact with the collective that, as it were, lies beneath or beyond. The transindividual requires TNFUK_08_HOSM_C008_docbook_new_indd.indd 95 AU: Reference ‘Simondon 2009’ is cited in the text but not provided in the reference list. Please check and provide the details for these references. AU: Reference ‘Simondon 2009’ is cited in the text but not provided in the reference list. Please check and provide the details for these references. AU: Reference ‘Simondon 2009’ is cited in the text but not provided in the reference list. Please check and provide the details for these references. AU: Reference ‘Simondon 2009’ is cited in the text but not provided in the reference list. Please check and provide the details for these references. 23-10-2019 10.53.18 PM 96 Mark Saban the obliteration of interindividual (ego/ego) relations with others because access to the true nature of “collective” can only occur through the preindividual zone, which is outside of functional relations between individuals. What gets loosened through this encounter with the preindividual is the constitution of the ego; the ego needs to be, as it were, dis-individuated in order that a new individuation can occur. This is experienced as a profound challenge to those everyday aspects of community that normally disguise the preindividual. It is this encounter, articulated as the relativisation of the ego in the face of the collective unconscious, that plays such an important part in Jungian individuation, though on an emphatically intrapsychic level. Simondon says that such an event cannot be brought about by voluntary decision: it requires an unforeseeable event. The other must cease to be merely part of a functioning intersubjective system and becomes that which puts me in question. We begin to attain to psychological individuation through the transindividual, but it gets experienced as dis-individuation. As Muriel Combes puts it, Simondon’s claim that psychological individuality “is elaborated in elaborating transindividuality,” “indicates that the aptitude for the collective, that is, the presence of the collective within the subject in the form of an unstructured preindividual potential, constitutes a condition for the relation of the subject to itself ” (Simondon 1995, 2005 ). This would suggest that we can only have a relationship to ourselves (to our “inside”) when we are turned toward the outside. Combes continues: AU: Reference ‘Simondon 2009’ is cited in the text but not provided in the reference list. Please check and provide the details for these references. It is not relation to self [ego] that comes first and makes the collective possible, but relation to what, in the [wider] self, surpasses the individual, communicating without mediation with a nonindividual share in the other. What gives consistency to relation to self, what gives consistency to the psychological dimension of the individual, is something in the individual surpassing the individual, turning it toward the collective; what is real in the psychological is transindividual. (Simondon 2009, pp. 40–41) In this way, Simondon posits a conception of a subject who is in effect “nothing more than the operation of relating two individuations, psychic and collective, reciprocally determined and, as such, in time and of time, conditioned and conditioning” (Scott 2014, p. 127). By rethinking individuation in this way Simondon frees up depth psychology’s potential to find a creative engagement with the psychosocial. He moves beyond Jung who by identifying psyche with interiority gets trapped within an individualistic model whereby society is seen as at best an outer obstacle to the freedom of the subject to achieve the inner journey of individuation. However, Simondon is, in my view, making available a potential that is already, in an unthematized state, present within Jung’s ideas. So it is that Jung’s collective TNFUK_08_HOSM_C008_docbook_new_indd.indd 96 23-10-2019 10.53.18 PM Simondon and Jung: Re-thinking individuation 97 unconscious can be re-visioned in the form of a preindividual that enables a deep engagement with both inner and outer collective. Psychological individuality, then, is never merely the product of psychic individuation, but rather the result of what in this individuation is directed toward an opening toward the collective. “Psychological individuality is necessarily constituted at the very center of the constitution of the collective” (Combes 2013, p. 39). Simondon and Jung I hope this brief introduction has, albeit sketchily, pointed to the potential that Simondon’s thinking has to loosen up certain problems within Jungian studies: such as Jung’s tendency to psychologise, his tendency to favour an atomised vision of society as a collection of psychological individuals, and his tendency to represent the interior of the individual as of central importance, and to downplay the exterior—the outer other—as trivial. In fact, the sophistication of Simondon’s philosophical approach to individuation-as-process offers a way to move beyond simplistic binaries like inner/outer, and individual/collective. And yet, there remain important resonances between Simondon’s vision and that of Jung. Simondon’s preindividual opens up the possibility of a re-thinking of the collective unconscious/archetypal realm, which in Jung’s writings and in the writings of his successors can become limited to static reified places in some inner topology, such that some Jungian writing becomes not much more than a highly reductive inventory of archetypes. Simondon’s emphasis upon the ontological primacy of process, enables us to re-vision this dimension as the metastable preindividual, always exceeding the ego and always carried forward from one phase of individuation to the next, constantly challenging the constituted individual (by which it is experienced as “other”) to new individuations. This enables us to concentrate upon the way this disparation is occurring here and now, how this tension, this conflict has the capacity to disindividuate the ego and push us toward the transindividual. Here, in the political psychosocial realm lies the greatest contrast with Jung, and the greatest opportunity. Note 1 See Christian Kerslake’s Deleuze and the Unconscious (Kerslake, 2007). References Combes, M., 2013. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. Deleuze, G., 2001. Review of Gilbert Simondon’s L’individu et sa genese physicobiologique (1966). Pli Warwick J. Philos. 12, 43–49. TNFUK_08_HOSM_C008_docbook_new_indd.indd 97 23-10-2019 10.53.18 PM 98 Mark Saban Deleuze, G., 2004. Desert Islands: and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Semiotexte: Los Angeles, CA, Cambridge, MA. Frosh, S., 2014. The nature of the psychosocial: debates from studies in the psychosocial. J. Psycho-Soc. Stud. 8, 159–169. Frosh, S., 2016. Towards a psychosocial psychoanalysis. Am. Imago 73, 469–482. Frosh, S., 2018. Rethinking psychoanalysis in the psychosocial. Psychoanal. Cult. Soc. 23, 5–14. Frosh, S., Baraitser, L., 2008. Psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies. Psychoanal. Cult. Soc. 13, 346–365. Jung, C.G., and Jaffé, A., 1989. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage Books: New York. Kerslake, C., 2007. Deleuze and the Unconscious. Continuum: London & New York. Scott, D., 2014. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. Simondon, G., 1995. L’ individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Editions Jérôme Millon: Grenoble. Simondon, G., 2005. L’ individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’ information. Editions Jérôme Millon: Grenoble. Simondon, G., 2012. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Editions Aubier: Paris. Stiegler, B., 2012. A rational theory of miracles: on pharmacology and transindividuation. New Form. 77, 164–184. TNFUK_08_HOSM_C008_docbook_new_indd.indd 98 23-10-2019 10.53.18 PM