Information:
Individuation according to Simondon

Instructor: Cécile Malaspina Date & Time: May 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th, June 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: What is it that distinguishes information from a random event? It is, according to Simondon, its catalyzing effect on a process of individuation. Information, thus conceived, is synonymous with the sense of individuation [le sens de l’individuation], affine with the potentialities specific to it, and conducive to amplifying its intrinsic orientation.

The first part of this Survey Seminar will consist of situating the key elements of Simondon’s conception of information regarding what is, on the face of it, an anachronistic revival of the scholastic problem of individuation. This will allow us to carefully distinguish the concept of individuation from that of mere ontogenesis, with which it overlaps without being synonymous. Only once we situate Simondon’s conception of information in the paradigmatic reorientation of speculative realism can we begin to truly grasp the insufficiency that he diagnoses in the concept of information according to cybernetics and information theory.

The second part of this Seminar will deal with the often-deplored reduction of information to quantitative parameters at the expense of signification. Simondon’s critique of a reductive conception of information indeed deserves elucidation but also relativization, not only because of a certain blurriness in his account of ‘negentropy’ and ‘information entropy’ but also because the issue of signification does not account exhaustively for Simondon’s more substantive divergence on metaphysical grounds.

The third part of this Seminar will discuss Simondon’s divergence from cybernetics and information theory with particular attention to his emphasis on the role of disadaptation in developmental psychology. This will enable contemporary readers of Simondon to resist what Isabelle Stengers has so adroitly singled out as a danger of pietism and to amplify instead the extent to which his conception of information can still be understood as the ‘immanent vector of complexity and experimentation’ that Stengers rightly demands.

 

IMAGE: Geoffrey Farmer, Leaves Of Grass, 2013.

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