Gilbert Simondon

Contextual Quote

"Among thinkers of ethics and techne of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon stands out as someone who put the co-emergent relationship of form and matter at the center of his thought. Rethinking the relationship between form and matter was key for Simondon in his attempt to theorize a novel relationship with technology that would be at the same time an ethical relationship with nature. For Simondon, much was at stake in articulating this relationship."

- Michel Fisch [1]

Discussion

Gilbert Simondon's Critique of Cybernetics

Arran Gare:

"Gilbert Simondon, ... a student of Merleau-Ponty ... subjected the claims of information science and cybernetics to a searching critique in his Ph.D. thesis, published as a book with a dedication to Merleau-Ponty, although it was also influenced by Jean Piaget. This work has only recently been translated into English as Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020), with a belated appreciation of its significance. Simondon’s major concern was to challenge and reformulate the notion of information as it had been developed by Shannon, Weaver, von Neuman, and Wiener, and along with information, the notion of cybernetics and the way it had been used as an analogy for living processes. Some of the ideas associated with this challenge were developed at a conference in Paris in July 1962, organized by Simondon, in which Norbert Wiener was a major participant (Bardin 2015, p.31). Simondon embraced the development of information science and cybernetics, seeing them as a creative hybrid of advances in logic and technology, but argued that the source of these ideas in technologies of communication must lead to the exclusion of what is most important when it comes to understanding information. He then pointed out the problems with the assumptions on which information science was developing. It presupposed an individual sending a message, an individual bit of information or signal and a code through which it is encoded, and an individual receiving the message by decoding it, as though information could be identified and understood in complete abstraction from the process of informing. Information is individuated as such only where there are metastable systems receptive to being informed. The problem is to account for this individuation. Living beings are theatres of individuation, and it is only when individuation is achieved and maintained, that mechanistic models of living processes have some applicability. Life is more fundamental than mechanisms, which always presuppose a life-based teleology. Without life, there would be no mechanisms, and life cannot be understood as just the sum of all its mechanisms. Simondon thus provided strong support for Hoffmeyer’s critique of information science when applied to biology (Gare, 2020)."

(https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp-4-2021-arran-gare-against-posthumanism-posthumanism-as-the-world-vision-of-house-slaves)