Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media

In a previous paper linking Simondon to biological and systems-theoretical discourses in autopoiesis and debates about contemporary technogenesis, I have argued that Simondon’s ontology of individuation furnishes a basis to theorize the “agency” of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly today, into alliances with sophisticated, computational technologies.¹ In concert with researchers like Andy Clark and N. Katherine Hayles, I embrace the “technical distribution” of cognition and perception as a way of understanding the complex couplings between humans and machines that are typical in our contemporary world, but that have, in fact, been part of human techno-genesis since the very origin of the human. On this model, which contrasts starkly with the concept of system that is central to systems-theoretical discourses from Varela to Luhmann, the technological elements of a system perform sophisticated cognitive tasks we can neither understand nor even account for; unlike the central tenet of systems-theoretical epistemology (the cut between system and environment), the technical distribution model eschews cognitive mastery in favor of a more hybrid—and arguably more “realistic”—model of action or enaction in the world. As I see it, the systems-theoretical cut attains cognitive and perceptual mastery for the system at a significant cost: the cost of cutting off the environment in any but the most trivial sense. Finding this cost too high, the technical distribution model gladly sacrifices mastery in order to enfranchise the environment as a source of enaction that doesn’t need to be—and indeed cannot be—channeled through the system.

In his own take on this distinction, Bruno Latour suggests that the messiness of a distributed model corresponds more accurately than the tidiness of systems distinctions to the experiential realities of our hybrid lifeworlds: “Instead of the surfaces so typical of first modernities—the ‘domains’ of science, of economy, of society, the ‘spheres’ of politics, values, norms, the ‘fields’ of symbolic capital, the separate and interconnected ‘systems’ so familiar to readers of Luhmann, where homogeneity and control could be calmly considered—we are now faced with the rather horrible melting pots so vividly described by historians and sociologists of science” (35–48). I have given the name “system-environment hybrids” to these messy couplings, and have tried to describe their onto-epistemological advantages using Simondon’s theory of individuation. Specifically, I have sought to theorize environmental agency on the basis of Simondon’s insistence that, following their initial individuation, individuals continue to be coupled energetically and informationally not simply to “associated milieus” but, both through and beyond them, to the metastable domain of the pre-individual. This means that individuation includes a two-tiered coupling between individual and environment: an actual coupling with the associated milieu and a virtual coupling with the pre-individual domain. As I see it, such a two-tiered coupling better captures the complex imbrication any individual enjoys with the environment, and it moves the conceptualization of the environment from something exclusively in the service of the individual to which it is coupled in actuality (including coupling to what is both exterior and interior to the individual’s operation), to something that can embrace the quasi-independent cognitive and perceptual operation of the environment itself.

If this model describes a condition of the living human that is originary—our originary environmental condition—this condition itself has been brought into the open and made accessible through recent developments in technical distribution, which is also to say, in the technical infrastructure of the environment. So-called ubiquitous computing furnishes a perfect illustration: through the distribution of computation into the environment by means of now typical technologies including smart phones and RFID tags, space becomes animated with some agency of its own. One crucial feature of this animation is its occurrence largely outside—or beside—the focal attention of actants within smart environments. For this reason, the intelligent space of contemporary life offers a kind of affordance—an unperceived or directly sensed affordance—that differs fundamentally from affordances as they have been theorized, following...