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Individuation
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Individuation
Individuation is a concept which appears in numerous fields. In very general
terms, it is the name given to processes whereby the undifferentiated tends
to become individual, or to those processes through which differentiated
components tend toward becoming a more indivisible whole.
The term serves sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, theologians and
embryologists, among others, and thus has been variously defined by
different scholars, including Arthur Schopenhauer, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung,
Erik Erikson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin. Nietzsche, for
example, offers an extensive discussion of the tension between impartial,
chaotic fluidity and individuated subjectivity in The Birth of Tragedy,
these dichotomous qualities embodied by the Dionysian and Apollonian
respectively. Nietzsche claims that the perpetual, unresolvable tension
between these two opposing aspects of nature fosters the conditions
necessary for the creation of tragic art.
In economics, individuation parallels specialization and increases the
efficiency of the division of labor. It serves as a means for individuals to
find comparative advantage in the marketplace.
Accounts of the process of individuation may be found in work by Gilbert
Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, David Bohm, and
Manuel De Landa.
[edit] Gilbert Simondon on individuation
In L'individuation psychique et collective, Gilbert Simondon developed a
theory of individual and collective individuation, in which the individual
subject is considered as an effect of individuation, rather than a cause.
Thus the individual atom is replaced by the neverending ontological process
of individuation. Simondon also conceived of "pre-individual fields" as the
funds making individuation itself possible. Individuation is an always
incomplete process, always leaving a "pre-individual" left-over, itself
making possible future individuations. Furthermore, individuation always
creates both an individual and a collective subject, which individuate
themselves together.
[edit] Bernard Stiegler on individuation
The philosophy of Bernard Stiegler draws upon and modifies the work of
Gilbert Simondon on individuation, as well as similar ideas in Friedrich
Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. During a talk given at the Tate Modern in 2004,
Stiegler summarized his understanding of individuation. The essential points
are the following:
* The I, as a psychic individual, can only be thought in relationship to a
we, which is a collective individual: the I is constituted in adopting a
collective tradition, which it inherits, and in which a plurality of Is
acknowledge each other’s existence.
* This inheritance is an adoption in that I can very well, as the French
grand-son of a German immigrant, recognise myself in a past that was not the
past of my ancestors, but that I can make my own; this process of adoption
is thus structurally factical.
* An I is essentially a process, and not a state, and this process is an in-dividuation
(it is a process of psychic individuation) as the tendency to become-one,
that is, to become indivisible.
* This tendency never accomplishes itself because it runs into a
counter-tendency with which it forms a metastable equilibrium (it must be
pointed out how close this conception of the dynamic of individuation is to
the Freudian theory of drives, but also to the thinking of Empedocles and of
Nietzsche).
* A we is also such a process (the process of collective individuation); the
individuation of the I is always inscribed in that of the we, whereas
conversely, the individuation of the we takes place only through those
individuations, polemical in nature, of the Is making it up.
* That which links the individuations of the I and the we is a
pre-individual milieu possessing positive conditions of effectiveness,
belonging to what Stiegler calls retentional apparatuses. These retentional
apparatuses arise from a technical milieu which is the condition of the
encounter of the I and the we: the individuation of the I and the we is in
this respect also the individuation of the technical system.
* The technical system is an apparatus which has a specific role (wherein
all objects are inserted: a technical object exists only insofar as it is
disposed within such an apparatus with other technical objects: this is what
Gilbert Simondon calls the technical group): the rifle, for example, and
more generally the technical becoming with which it forms a system, are thus
the possibility of the emergence of a disciplinary society, according to
Michel Foucault.
* The technical system is also that which founds the possibility of the
constitution of retentional apparatuses, springing from the processes of
grammatisation growing out of the process of individuation of the technical
system, and these retentional apparatuses are the basis for the dispositions
between the individuation of the I and the individuation of the we in a
single process of psychic, collective and technical individuation (where
grammatisation is a subset of technics) composed of three branches, each
branching out into processual groups.
* This process of triple individuation is itself inscribed in a vital
individuation which must be apprehended by a general organology as the vital
individuation of natural organs, the technological individuation of
artificial organs, and the psycho-social individuation of organisations
linking them together.
* In the process of individuation constitutive of general organology wherein
knowledge as such emerges, there are individuations of mnemo-technological
sub-systems which over-determine, qua specific organisations of what
Stiegler calls tertiary retentions, the organisation, the transmission and
the elaboration of knowledge stemming from the experience of the sensible.
Stiegler is also concerned with the destructive consequences for psychic and
collective individuation which may result from consumerism and consumer
capitalism (see, for example, Stiegler, The Disaffected Individual).
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