Article

Theory, Culture & Society

2021, Vol. 38(5) 25–44
Simondon Contra New ! The Author(s) 2021

Materialism: Political Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Anthropology Reloaded DOI: 10.1177/02632764211012047
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs

Andrea Bardin
Oxford Brookes University

Abstract
This paper responds to an invitation to historians of political thought to enter the
debate on new materialism. It combines Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with
some aspects of post-humanist and new materialist thought, without abandoning a
more classically ‘historical’ characterization of materialism. Two keywords drawn
from Barad and Simondon respectively – ‘ontoepistemology’ and ‘axiontology’ –
represent the red thread of a narrative that connects the early modern invention
of civil science (emblematically represented here by the ‘conceptual couple’
Descartes-Hobbes) to Wiener’s cybernetic theory of society. The political stakes
common to these forms of mechanical materialism were attacked ontologically, epis-
temologically and politically by Simondon. His approach, I will argue, opens the path
for a genuine materialist critique of the political anthropology implicit in modern
political thought, and shifts political thinking from politics conceived as a problem to
be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation.

Keywords
Barad, Descartes, Hobbes, new materialism, political anthropology, Simondon, Wiener

Il y a des lignes qui sont des monstres: la droite, la serpentine

régulière, surtout deux parallèles. Quand l’homme les établit, les
éléments les rongent. Les mousses, les accidents rompent les lignes
droites de ses monuments [. . .] Il serait intéressant de vérifier si les
lignes régulières ne sont que dans le cerveau de l’homme.
(Delacroix, Notes sur les lignes).

In this paper I will cross Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with

some aspects of post-humanist and ‘new materialist’ thought while, at the

Corresponding author: Andrea Bardin. Email: [email protected]

TCS Online Forum: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/
26 Theory, Culture & Society 38(5)

same time, remaining within the ambit of a more classically ‘historical’

characterization of materialism. I will specifically focus on Simondon’s
early paper ‘Epistemology of Cybernetics’ [Épiste´mologie de la cyberne´-
tique] (written in 1953 and posthumously published as Simondon, 2016a),
in which he was still elaborating what would soon become his theory of
individuation, later fully developed in Individuation in Light of Notions of
Form and Information [L’individuation à la lumie`re des notions de forme et
d’information] (Simondon, 2005 [1958]). I will also hint at some aspects
that I take as relevant for my purpose in Karen Barad’s work (2003,
2007), implying that a nexus between these two research trajectories
could be better explored by an analysis of their approaches to quantum
mechanics as a critique of the modern mechanical worldview. The rela-
tion between Simondon’s philosophy and quantum mechanics has
recently been studied in detail (Bontems and De Ronde, 2019), and the
relation between Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and the fem-
inist questioning of identity has now been on the philosophical agenda
for a while (cf. Harvey et al., 2008; Grosz, 2012). My rather limited goal
in this paper is to emphasize the political stakes often implicit in
Simondon’s ontological and epistemological research and suggest that
these can be relevant for many of the reflections presently carried on
under the label of ‘new materialism’.
Openly a ‘humanist’, Simondon was certainly not – at least on his own
terms – a materialist. That said, there is something that directly connects
new materialism to Simondon: a common fascination with technology and
science (notably the theory of information), an attempt to conceive of
matter as ‘agency’ (in particular in relation to thermodynamics and quan-
tum physics), and the project of developing, on that basis, a social ontol-
ogy. This is something that has been recently referred to as ‘re-engagement
with science’, ‘reconceptualization of agency’ and ‘reliance on a ‘‘flat’’
ontology’ (Choat, 2018: 1028). Moreover, this corresponds to three of
the passwords that have been widely used to enter Simondon’s oeuvre:
technicity, metastability, and the transindividual. The first (technicity), was
first used by Bernard Stiegler (1994); the second (transindividual) by
Étienne Balibar (1997) and Muriel Combes (1999); the third (metastability)
by a recent wave of research building on Simondon’s theory of informa-
tion (Blanco and Rodriguez, 2015; Hui, 2016; Mills, 2016). I am not going
to privilege any of these entry points into Simondon’s philosophy or pre-
tend to achieve a synthesis of such interpretations. His philosophy of indi-
viduation was indeed a conceptual network that related all these elements
without aiming at a final synthesis. As this paper will point out, this is the
very reason why Simondon’s apparently outdated attempt to develop a
‘new humanism’ (Simondon, 2016b) should be included in the ‘post-huma-
nist’ agenda of new materialism.
Furthering the effort carried on by his master Georges Canguilhem
within the life sciences, Simondon challenged the very concept of
Bardin 27

immutable ‘laws’ in both the natural and social sciences, along with the
foundationalist project attached to it since early modernity. What the sys-
tematic form of Simondon’s main works may conceal is the radical com-
mitment to conceptual experimentation that animates the encyclopaedic
enterprise he intended to carry on beyond phenomenology and structural-
ism. Simondon’s theory of individuation distanced itself at the same time
from the anthropocentrism implicit in the phenomenological concept of
sense, and the structuralist mechanization of social dynamics, vindicating
the experimental and inventive role played by philosophical thinking within
society. Entitled neither to assume a supreme function of epistemological
foundation nor to establish a privileged point of view over nature, for
Simondon philosophy is always playing catch-up with the historical
changes of technoscience as well as the complexity of material processes.
Far from this being a mark of frailty, it commits philosophy to play a
somewhat ‘interstitial’ yet crucial role in all the fields of scientific research,
which can still be a guide for the practice of materialist thinking today.
The present article specifically stresses the connection between ontol-
ogy, epistemology and political thought in Simondon’s theory of indi-
viduation and uses it as a materialist tool to challenge the modern
conception of a political theory based on the knowledge of (the laws
of) human nature, and the relation it implied between political thought
and the practice of politics. Two philosophical questions thus form the
leitmotif of the paper: How do we theorize the natural and the social, and
the knowledge of the human they produce together? How should we
relate science and politics, knowledge and political decision and action?
Implicit in these two questions is the problem of how to relate science
and politics without reducing one to the other, either by collapsing pol-
itics into techno-scientific planning (that is, technocracy) or by reducing
technoscience to an instrument of the pure voluntarism of political deci-
sion (that is, fascism). After a brief premise and partial vindication of
what I name – borrowing Engels’ expression – ‘vulgar’ mechanical
materialism, I will introduce the two keywords that – drawn from
Barad and Simondon – will orient my reflection: ‘ontoepistemology’
and ‘axiontology’. I will then develop my narrative, which connects the
early modern invention of ‘civil science’ within the conjuncture
Descartes-Hobbes up to Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, by exploring
some passages where Simondon sketches a critique of modern mechan-
ical philosophy, and others where he assesses the political implications of
Wiener’s cybernetic theory of society.
My final suggestion is that the study of Simondon’s philosophy of
individuation, and notably his concept of ‘metastability’, can help us
take a step beyond the modern understanding of politics as a problem
posed by the ‘social unsociability’ of human nature and to be solved by
either a universal theory of politics or a blind commitment to political
decisionism. It is my wager that Simondon’s philosophy of individuation
28 Theory, Culture & Society 38(5)

helps explore what materialism can still offer to political thought, beyond
those versions of materialism that were and are integral parts of this
modern view of politics, and therefore unable to challenge it. A genuine
materialist approach, I will argue, allows us to shift political thinking
from the search for a universal solution based on what human nature is
assumed to be to politics as a strategic experimentation on what human
nature can become.

Premise on ‘Vulgar’ Materialism and Two Keywords:

Ontoepistemology and Axiontology
Let me clarify something trivial. As a materialist, I take the writing of
this paper as situated – naturally, technically and historically. The uni-
verse, our planet, and the emergence of life and our species precede and
are the natural-historical pre-conditions of the emergence of social
groups and therefore technics, language, thought, and of course science
and philosophy etc., and – last but not least – our talking and thinking
today. In short, ‘nature’ is – along with history – the condition of pos-
sibility of everything we call human. As a consequence, I tend to feel at
ease with the mechanical materialism assumed in much popular and sci-
entific common sense, and with thinkers that are crystal clear about their
belief that nature precedes thought, whatever their arguments, and how-
ever they are expressed. And this paper is, to a certain extent, a vindica-
tion of ‘vulgar’ materialism as a starting point, but also implies a critique
of it as ahistorical and implicitly dualist. However problematic and per-
haps philosophically naive, what I call ‘vulgar’ materialism is a clean
rejection of philosophies that would like to see nature as overall depend-
ent on the human subject. The naturalistic formula of this materialist
wisdom is offered by Simondon himself:

Human beings and their technology are a low grade singularity in

the universe, entirely surpassed by the cosmos in space, power and
time [. . .] One is eventually confronted with the inferiority of art
[techne] compared to nature when considering the conditions of
existence of the author of art, as a species or variety, the homo
faber. (Simondon, 2014c: 199)

This form of materialism has the merit of clarifying the problem. It

postulates a field of immanence and rejects, at least in principle, all
imagination of reality as included within the horizon of the subject –
whether the latter be conceived in terms of perception, language, dis-
course, thought or any other sort of Geist or che`re. On this starting
point, Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and Barad’s agential real-
ism resonate when they both critically address the state of the art of
philosophical research in a materialist way. This is how Barad opens
Bardin 29

her article on ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding

of How Matter Comes to Matter’:

Language has been granted too much power. [. . .] it seems that at

every turn lately every ‘thing’ – even materiality – is turned into a
matter of language or some other form of cultural representation.
(Barad, 2003: 801)

And this is Simondon’s reply to Ricœur during the debate following the
presentation of his paper Forme information potentiels at the Socie´te´
Française de Philosophie:

But how can one admit that nature is part of the discourse? This is
the postulate grounding your argument, and I will reject it abso-
lutely [. . .] No, there is a theory of speech far in excess of what might
be admitted; it is giving value to speech. There is a theory of nature,
in what I have tried to present. (Simondon, 2019: 579, 582)

I do not believe such a stance can be theoretically founded – and yet it

can be taken as a postulate, against the mirroring ‘idealistic’ assumption
of an inescapable phenomenological horizon within which no natural-
historical pre-condition can be thought to exist prior to the emergence of
the (human) subject. I believe the adoption of an ‘idealistic’ horizon
cannot be theoretically justified either. These assumptions precede the
arguments meant to provide their foundations, and can only be studied
within the paradigms they have contributed to generate. Indeed, as I am
going to explain, stating that there can be no metaphysical foundation of
either materialism or idealism, but only decision, is already a genuinely
materialist claim.
The critical force of a straightforward materialist assumption is, in
short, one of simplification. It can set a whole philosophical agenda
that includes the reflection on its own preconditions. Its limitation is,
however, that it tends to perpetuate a violent attitude that cancels the
extraordinary complexity of matter, reducing it to simplistic representa-
tions elaborated by human thinking. This attitude, shared by all sorts of
reductionist ‘religious’, ‘spiritual’ or even ‘dialectical’ world views, also
includes the ‘vulgar’ mechanical materialism attacked by Engels, in
which nature (including human nature) is deemed as regulated by
‘laws’ that have been in fact elaborated by human imagination and
reason. This world picture, having emerged in early modernity, will be
the object of my critique through the lenses of Simondon and Barad’s
philosophically adverted forms of materialism. What I would like to
make clear for the moment is that ‘vulgar’ materialism does not fail
for lack of wisdom (you are born, you live, you die: try and make
sense of it). Rather it fails philosophically because it is not consistently,
30 Theory, Culture & Society 38(5)

that is historically, materialist. What is in fact ‘idealist’ in all sorts of

mechanical materialism is the attempt to provide a definitive foundation
for (scientific) knowledge and (ethical-political) action. Consistent histor-
ical materialism leaves no space for any sort of timeless laws of nature
and a universal, stable human nature. This would make of it an implicit
dualism opposing the becoming of matter to the eternity of truth(s).
There is indeed a genuinely materialist alternative to the commitment
to foundationalism shared by idealism and mechanical forms of materi-
alism as well. This alternative is what I intend to explore, along with its
political stakes, through the two keywords that I will borrow from Barad
and Simondon respectively: ‘ontoepistemology’ and ‘axiontology’.
According to Barad, ‘Ontoepistemology [is] the study of the intertwined
practices of knowing in being’ (Barad, 2007: 408, n 5), as opposed to ‘The
separation of epistemology from ontology’, which is ‘a reverberation of a
metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and
nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse’
(Barad, 2003: 829). Barad also explores the normative implications of
this approach and Simondon coins the neologism ‘axiontology’ to
explain how his ‘allagmatic theory [. . .] is axiontological’ because it
includes ‘a theory of knowledge’ as well as ‘a theory of value’
(Simondon, 2005: 565).1 In this sense he claims that ‘One cannot provide
a theory of knowledge that is not, at the same time, a theory of being,
and a theory of action as well’ (Simondon, 2016a: 214)
In what follows, I will show how a research path marked by these
quotes moves away from a) the ontoepistemological separation of science
and action theorized by western philosophy from Descartes to Kant, and
b) the forced technocratic connection of science and action explicitly
theorized by positivism (and organic to a Cartesian understanding of
technics). The two positions are in my view complementary: the latter
(technocratic connection) solves a false problem posed by the former
(ontoepistemological separation). This is the pattern: first you separate
humans from nature; second, you separate human rational knowledge
from human actions (and passions); third, you complain about the sep-
aration and the ‘irrationality’ of animal-automatic behaviour; fourth, you
solve the (imaginary) problem you have posed by reducing natural and
human bodily motion to some kind of universal law ultimately elabo-
rated – of course – by human minds.
Such an ideological move is perfectly described by Simondon himself
in his Two Lessons on Animal and Man, where he just needs a couple of
pages to dismantle the Cartesian separation of human reason and animal
life along with the mechanistic reduction of the former to the latter in the
19th and 20th century. This is, in Simondon’s words, the epoch ‘that
denies Cartesianism not in order to state the animal is a being of
reason and has an interiority, a being that has an affectivity’, but
rather to reduce all living beings, humans included, to Descartes’s
Bardin 31

mechanical representation of the animal in general as an automaton: ‘the

content of reality you put into the notion of animality, this content
allows us to characterize man. Namely, it is by the universalization of
the animal that human reality is dealt with’ (Simondon, 2011: 61).
Simondon’s point is that by reducing all forms of biological life to
Descartes’s res extensa one does not bring humanity back into nature,
but rather goes the other way round, and reduces nature – human nature
included – to the ‘mechanistic’ representation of reality provided by early
modern science. In other words, what is wrong with ‘vulgar’ materialist
reductionism is that it is insufficiently materialist. It does not respect the
complexity of matter. On the contrary, it reduces matter to a too human
imagination.

A Very Short Story of machines à gouverner from

Descartes-Hobbes to Wiener
In my narrative, the conceptual couple Descartes-Hobbes embodies the
systematic adoption of the mechanistic project of geometrization of
nature, human nature included, born in the 16th century. By ‘systematic’
I do not mean systematically developed by each of them, but rather
developed within their philosophies taken together as a whole.
Descartes and Hobbes were overt enemies, they personally hated each
other, and their metaphysics were radically opposed. Descartes was a
dualist, Hobbes was a monist; Descartes believed no science of politics
was possible, Hobbes believed he had founded the new ‘civil science’.
However, they shared the same mechanical view of the natural world as a
deterministic whole made of matter in motion, whose perfect science was
to be built by the application of the state-of-the-art mathematics of the
time to motion. As a result, they concurred in projecting on nature what
was at the time perhaps the highest product of human rational imagin-
ation (Euclidean geometry), thus generating modern mechanics. Given
that Hobbes was a monist and a materialist, I’ll take his philosophy as
the prototype of a form of materialism a) whose ontoepistemology is
based on the assumption of a separation between the eternity of scientific
knowledge and natural motion, and b) whose axiontology is based on the
forced connection of science and action through a technocratic politics
founded on that ontoepistemology. What I will maintain is that this form
of materialism is in fact an implicit dualism, which makes of Descartes-
Hobbes a proper conceptual couple. Let me provide some more details
on a narrative that, jumping on Simondon’s philosophy as a time travel
machine, leaps over a few centuries getting us directly to his critique to
Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics of society.
In Descartes we can find a fully developed ontoepistemology and the
open prohibition of axiontology. His philosophical imagination projects
geometrical determinism (i.e. an artificial product of human reason) on
32 Theory, Culture & Society 38(5)

nature, which is thus conceived as subject to the eternal ‘laws’ of mech-

anics. It situates the first principles of philosophy in a disembodied
Reason-Res cogitans that can measure and foresee all the outcomes of
the motion of matter from an external point of view. Descartes thus
reduces matter (human bodies and passions included, of course) to the
passive object of scientific knowledge, and confines the role of Reason to
the pure geometrical explanation of natural events, leaving no space for
any pure rational knowledge guiding ethical and political behaviour.
Indeed, Descartes’s metaphysics entails, according to Simondon, ‘an abso-
lute jump from the domain of being to the domain of value [devoir-être]’
precisely because ‘being is defined objectively as passive [res extensa]’
(Simondon, 2016a: 192). Given the metaphysical separation of res cogitans
and res extensa, and a passive concept of matter, no axiontology is pos-
sible, and Descartes coherently placed his embargo on the science of pol-
itics (unsurprisingly, while commenting on Machiavelli):

The main reasons for the actions of Princes are circumstances so

particular that, if one is not a Prince himself, or has not been shar-
ing their secrets for a long time, he cannot imagine. (Descartes,
1897–1913b: 492)

Despite the provisional morality he took care to establish as a succedan-

eum of this missing science, Descartes could barely hide the persistent
and unfulfilled desire to overcome his own prohibition that had inhabited
his philosophy since its early conception: the laws of nature – he claimed
– ‘are all inborn in our minds [mentibus nostris ingenitae] just as a king
would imprint his laws on the hearts of all his subjects if he had enough
power to do so’ (Descartes, 1897–1913a: 145).
Hobbes’s scientia civilis aimed precisely at overcoming the Cartesian
provisional veto on the science of politics by conceiving all sort of beings
as ‘matter in motion’, and knowledge and imagination themselves as
material motions in the human brain that determined human behaviour.
This ontoepistemological ‘move’ was meant to solve the axiontological
problem posed by Descartes. A direct ‘material’ relation between polit-
ical science and political action could be only established by an over-
whelming power capable of regulating the material motions of the human
brain, human imagination and passions, making human actions fit the
ordered, rational ‘laws’ of human nature (Bardin, 2016). Hobbes’s
Leviathan embodied this irresistible force in a powerful automaton, an
artificial body politic that offered a solution, at the same time epistemo-
logical and political, to the problem of the production of order (Shapin
and Schaffer, 2011: 92–109). In my view, this understanding of politics as
a disciplinary practice grounded on the implementation of mechanical
science is the prototype of all technocratic projects. Theoretically speak-
ing, it was a betrayal of materialism that reduced the political stakes of
Bardin 33

materialism to the foundational exigencies of Descartes’s dualist

metaphysics.2
Thanks to the reader’s benevolence and some time travel, in what fol-
lows I will be able to take this scheme as a model for my reading of
Simondon’s critique to Norbert Wiener’s concept of information, and
hence of his theory of government. During the 1950s Simondon worked
intensively on the concept of information under the guidance of Jean
Hippolyte, explicitly framing his research as an attempt to ‘reform’
Wiener’s concept of information in view of the conceptions of relationality
and indeterminacy conveyed by his interpretation of quantum theory. For
Simondon information emerges within a relation between two systems, it
does not pre-exist them, it is not entirely determined by their initial status,
and it contributes to shape and change the systems involved. In a word,
information cannot be understood in mechanical terms (Bardin, 2015: 25–
31). This work culminated in Simondon’s organization of the prestigious
international conference of Royaumont dedicated to ‘The Concept of
Information in Contemporary Science’, in which he also introduced
Wiener’s paper ‘Man and Machine’ (Simondon, 1965). In several of his
interventions during the conference Simondon stressed that the potential-
ities of the concept of information to serve both the natural and social
sciences were limited by its substantialist and determinist characterization
when conceived (as in Wiener’s case) according to the technological model
of cable transmission. Put simply, the substantialist and deterministic con-
cept of information adopted by Wiener was, according to Simondon, the
result of the projection of a technological model on the reality – and, we
may add, materiality – of information processes.
From this perspective, Simondon’s philosophy can support a general
critique of the re-emergence of the preoccupations of early-modern
ontoepistemology and axiontology within cybernetics. In view of
Simondon’s critique, Hobbes’s and Wiener’s general theories of processes
(physical, biological, technical, psycho-social) are both based on ‘the best
science available’ (mechanics or theory of information), and they display
an analogy of operations: a) their ontoepistemology reduces matter-
in-motion and information to passive ‘objects’ by projecting on them
mathematical determinism in order to found absolute knowledge; b)
their axiontology prescribes the paradoxical notion of the ‘value’ of a
neutral and technocratic political power that grants dynamic stability
to the body politic. In short, Wiener’s cybernetics can be said to revive
Hobbes’s mechanical materialism, substituting, as the basic element of
scientific analysis, matter with information (and Euclidean geometry with
advanced algebra), and providing the same answers to our two questions:
(1) How do we theorize the natural and the social, and their knowledge
together? Through a unified mathematical science of deterministic pro-
cesses. (2) How do we relate science and politics? By establishing a
technocratic relation between science and political organization.
34 Theory, Culture & Society 38(5)

The cybernetic concept of machine à gouverner3 perfectly summarizes

this position: its model for social systems is an automaton whose dynamic
functioning according to established principles aims at the self-preserva-
tion of political order. This homeostatic and deterministic model
dominates Hobbes’s Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a
Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill as well as Wiener’s The Human
Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, and ultimately leads to the
same authoritarian and technocratic solution to politics conceived as a
problem of foundation and preservation of the body politic by the gov-
ernment of human nature. This should be achieved through the implemen-
tation of a scientific model in which automatism and social reproduction
are privileged over invention and social experimentation. I believe that
these two projects are grounded on the same ‘reductive’ misconception
of materialism. Whether reducing material reality to the first principles
of Euclidean geometry or to the first principles of the cybernetic theory
of information, in both cases we are dealing with a programmatic cancel-
lation of the complexity and the surprising inventive possibilities of matter.
In both cases scientific models are projected on matter with the intent of
disciplining its behaviour, and making it comply with the abstract laws of
reason that allow for its mastery and ‘technocratic’ organization.
Two quotes are emblematic of these connected projects, both of which
show how a deliberate cancellation of the materiality and contingency of
becoming is the precondition for these scientific models to work in their
purity, and testify to the untamed resistance of matter (human matter
included) to its scientific ‘rationalization’. When he was laying the foun-
dations of the new mechanical science Galileo made it clear that ‘as far as
matter is concerned, its contingency affects the abstract propositions of
the geometer; and being these [propositions] so distorted that no perfect
science is thus possible, therefore the mathematician is relieved from
considering them’ (Galileo, 1964–8: 100). In a similar vein, more than
300 years later Ashby explained that before establishing the cybernetic
principles of a self-organizing system one had to ‘realize that two factors
must be excluded as irrelevant. The first is ‘‘materiality’’ [. . .] Also, to be
excluded as irrelevant is any reference to energy’ (Ashby, 1962: 260–1).
Now, if a ‘reduction’ of matter to its all too human formalizations is
what we aim to reject in both the ontoepistemological and the axionto-
logical domain, we should run the political risk of providing the formula
of a consistently historical materialism. And this is where Simondon’s
philosophy of individuation enters our story at last.

Simondon’s Philosophy of Individuation as a New

(Historical) Materialism?
So far I have argued that the deterministic materialism of both early
modern mechanics and most of cybernetics is insufficient for a materialist
Bardin 35

axiontology as long as it deals with universal laws of matter and informa-

tion in a sense that is strictly modern, namely based on the projection of an
abstract concept of deterministic rationality on the alleged a-historical
passivity of matter. This is an operation whose model is, in Simondon’s
words, still inscribed in the ‘hylomorphic schema’, that is Aristotle’s dual-
ist opposition of active form to passive matter. That is the model against
which Simondon elaborates his philosophy of ‘ontogenesis’ or ‘individu-
ation’,4 rejecting all sorts of metaphysical dualisms, and primarily the
‘opposition between the inert and the living deriving from the hylomorphic
schema’ (Simondon, 2005: 323). This project broadly concerns the com-
plex and systemic processes within which individuals are generated at all
levels: physico-chemical, biological, technical and psycho-social. I will
briefly introduce Simondon’s project here by going back one more time
to our keywords ‘ontoepistemology’ and ‘axiontology’, and phrasing the
problem as follows: Can we draw an axiontology on the basis of an
ontoepistemology conceived as individuation? How does this help avoid
the technocratic project carried on within modern materialism, as it were,
from Hobbes to Wiener? In other words, what normative consequences
can we draw from authentically materialist ontoepistemological premises
against mechanical materialism?
In Epistemology of Cybernetics Simondon claims that cybernetics con-
tains a ‘unipolar axiology’ (such as Spinoza’s doctrine, he adds) and yet it
cannot provide an ‘axiontology’ (Simondon, 2016a: 177–99).5 This is
because the normativity entailed by the cybernetic concept of society is
unsurprisingly close to Hobbes’s imagination of the body politic as an
automaton endowed with ‘artificiall life’ (Hobbes, 2012: 16), whose
necessity we can scientifically demonstrate through civil science ‘because
we make [it] ourselves’ (Hobbes, 1839–45: 184). For Simondon, Wiener’s
theory is still deterministic and ahistorical and therefore aims at pure
automatization. Allegedly neutral, it is in fact committed to ethical and
political normalization because, ultimately, it leaves no space for the
emergence (invention) of new norms:

Norbert Wiener seems to put forward an unnecessary assumption

[postulat de valeurs], namely, that proper homeostatic regulation is
an ultimate end of societies and the ideal that should drive every act
of government. In fact, just as the living rely on homeostases for
developing and becoming instead of remaining perpetually in the
same state, in the act of government there is also a force of absolute
origination [force d’avenement absolu], which, although relying on
homeostases, uses and exceeds them. (Simondon, 2017: 151)6

Simondon’s concept of ‘act of government’ is evidently quite far from the

understanding of politics as a problem to be solved on the basis of
an established concept of human nature, shared by Hobbes and
36 Theory, Culture & Society 38(5)

Wiener. By ‘act of government’ Simondon does not mean an act aimed at

the production and preservation of the artificial body politic in accord-
ance with norms deduced from a given political anthropology, but rather
a gesture of ‘invention’ based on the understanding of politics as a prob-
lematic field in which a solution cannot be planned from the outset.
Political normativity is thus conceived as the outcome of a process of
experimentation within a field of political struggles in which the very
notion of human nature is at stake (Bardin and Rodriguez, 2018: 59–61).
From Simondon’s perspective, the problem with Wiener’s theory, as with
much of modern political theory, is that it is abstract and apparently neu-
tral, and in fact intrinsically normative and inherently violent. Because it
cannot deal with the singularity of ontogenetic processes (i.e. processes of
individuation), its claim for universality is soon converted into a project of
techno-political construction of universality at the expense of the singular-
ity of all actual processes of psychical and collective individuation.
As Simondon explained, there can be no space for axiontology before
Aristotle’s rejection of a ‘science of the individual being’ is overcome
(Simondon, 2016a: 198). This notion of a ‘science of the individual being’
is quite tricky to say the least, and I believe it can only be squared if we take
Simondon’s theory as properly ‘axiontological’, that is capable of ‘introdu-
cing to the theory of knowledge as well as to the theory of values’
(Simondon, 2005: 565). This interpretation is certainly problematic, yet
I find it quite challenging because it obliges us to question Simondon’s
philosophical enterprise in a very political sense.
We might indeed ask ourselves what kind of political act Simondon’s
oeuvre implies: How does it work socially, what kind of political effects is
it expected to produce? Although we cannot tell this story in full now, we
can go back to our terminological landmarks once again, and take the
chance to define Simondon’s philosophy as (1) ontoepistemological [(a)
ontologically historical and (b) epistemologically reflexive] and (2) axion-
tological. This will show something more about a possible connection
between Simondon and new materialism.
1.a) Simondon’s philosophy is ontologically historical because
Simondon’s concepts of ‘historicity’ and ‘singularity’ extend beyond
strictly ‘human’ processes to organic as well as to physical processes.
All processes of individuation, at all levels, have a ‘margin of indeter-
minacy’ because they are triggered by ‘historical and local’ ‘singularities’
(Simondon, 2005: 81). At the physical level there are ‘historical singula-
rities brought about [apporte´es] by matter’ (Simondon, 2005: 57).
In crystallization, for example, ‘there is [. . .] an historical issue in the
occurrence of a structure in a substance: the structural germ has to
appear’ (Simondon, 2005: 79), and ‘the individuation of an allotropic
form starts from a singularity of historical nature’ (Simondon, 2005:
90). At the biological level, ‘the individualisation of the living being is
its real historicity’ (Simondon, 2005: 268). At the psychical level, ‘we
Bardin 37

believe any thought, precisely as far as it is real, is a relation, i.e. it entails

an historical aspect in its genesis’ (Simondon, 2005: 84), and this of
course includes all forms of knowledge, science and philosophical
thought. Finally, at the social level ‘there is historicity of the emergence
of values like there is historicity of the constitution of norms’ (Simondon,
2005: 333). Consequently, at all levels, individuation cannot be determin-
istically planned, although its conditions of possibility can be settled for
allowing it to emerge after a historical ‘trigger’ [amorce] provided by the
encounter of an individual structure and a system.7
1.b) Simondon’s philosophy is epistemologically reflexive because the
circular connection between nature and discourse (Simondon, 2016a:
193) cannot rely on an overarching totality or achieve any final synthesis.
Simondon’s well-known claim that the knowledge of individuation ‘can
only be grasped through the individuation [i.e. the ontogenesis] of the
subject’s knowledge’ (Simondon, 2005: 36) might of course be taken, in
its form, as a quite Hegelian claim. However, what in my view makes it a
genuinely materialist statement is the fact that, even in the most abstract
theorization, even when a general theory of information is concerned,
Simondon admits that philosophy can never provide the ultimate for-
mula of the ontogenetic processes it relies on, because ‘information is the
formula of individuation’, and therefore ‘it cannot preexist’ the very
individuation out of which it is generated (Simondon, 2005: 31). In
Simondon’s theory of individuation ‘knowledge is contemporary to the
individuation of the known and the knower’, which makes of each act of
knowledge an ontoepistemological process of individuation emerging
from physical, biological, technical and psychosocial processes and
returning to them (‘reflexively’) in the form of an act of knowledge,
and is in this sense ontologically singular and historical. This materialist
conception of reflexivity challenges the abstract universality implicit in all
sorts of ontological and epistemological dualisms: ‘I do not think I can
maintain the opposing dualism between subject and object, but, on the
contrary, must consider it as expressing the result of a [. . .] process of
individuation. It is the word ontogenesis that summarises the question’
(Simondon, 2019: 585). On this basis, Simondon even doubts that onto-
genesis can ever be ‘axiomatized’. Given that a ‘logic’ of ontogenesis is
always embedded in the ever ‘becoming’ subject-object relation it
emerges from, no universal logic can be formulated. However, this
very ‘ontoepistemological’ becoming is what prompts the recurrent
‘reflexive’ emergence of ‘philosophical thought’:

It might be that ontogenesis cannot be axiomatised. This would

explain the existence of philosophical thought as perpetually mar-
ginal in relation to all the other studies. Philosophy would be the
kind of thought set in motion by the implicit or explicit research of
ontogenesis in all orders of reality. (Simondon, 2005: 229)
38 Theory, Culture & Society 38(5)

2) Simondon’s philosophy is axiontological because it is inherently

normative, i.e. a normativity is inscribed in each ‘historical’ process of
individuation including each ontoepistemological ‘reflexive’ formulation
of it. But how do we formulate this normativity in terms that are not
abstract and a-historical? I really have an open question here. As said, I
am confident that Simondon’s concept of individuation as ontogenesis
may provide a rather satisfactory answer to our first question: How do
we theorize the natural and the social, and their knowledge together? Yet
what if there was no possible answer to our second question: How do we
relate science and politics? This question could be essentially – I mean by
definition – an open question, if we provide a ‘historical’ materialist
answer to the first one. We might think that any answer will do, insofar
as it would be itself a further process of individuation. However, ‘open’
does not mean indeterminate, merely defensive and entailing no action,
which would bring us to some postmodern version of the Cartesian rejec-
tion of a science of morality, de facto freeing political voluntarism
and authorizing all sorts of established economic and political power
in the name of an absolute will to crush the resistance of matter. On
the contrary, ‘open’ means here experimental, and committed to the
necessity of action on the side of matter. Let me phrase this as follows:
an axiontology coherent with a materialist ontoepistemology will work at
the ethical and political levels clinically, it will be experimental and cap-
able of deciding case by case, and it will be – far from being apparently
neutral – explicitly normative. With a paradigmatic reference to a tech-
nical process in quantum mechanics (which has more than an asson-
ance with Karen Barad’s ontoepistemological project), Simondon hints
at the political nature of philosophical thought as the propaedeutical and
‘kinematic’ process of posing a problem. Philosophy is taken here as a
clinical method of definition of a problematic field in which problems
can only be politically solved, without relying on ready-made theoretical
solutions:

To better pose such problems, [man] must be able to conduct him-

self like a regime selecting device, which analyses data according to
the mode best suited to the information received [. . .] Just as a single
laser beam [faisceau] can simultaneously trace two different curves,
by the method of quantum uncoupling in a double-slit experiment
[de´coupage en pointe] and through a constant movement that goes
from one curve to the other in a very short time [. . .] according to a
regime whose ability to grasp each problem is perhaps the highest
task philosophy can assume. (Simondon, 2015: 23)

Such a method, or rather operation, or, even better, such a ‘gesture’, will
require individual formulations and individual answers, or – to put it in
‘post-Simondonian’ terms – it will require axiontological decisions, and a
Bardin 39

crucial decision in political theory has to deal, implicitly or explicitly,

with a philosophical anthropology.8
My guess is that only from this perspective can we assess the political
stakes of Simondon’s powerful as well as fashionable concept of the
‘transindividual’ today, and, if we still want to call ourselves humanists
as Simondon did, we should probably run the risk of clarifying what kind
of humanity we are politically fighting for, both epistemologically and
politically. When Simondon writes about the human he always refers to a
work in progress, and sometimes goes so far as to blur the boundaries of
the human as such. For Simondon, the ‘transindividual’ defines a ‘field’
made of relations and processes in which psychical and collective indi-
viduation can ‘normally or exceptionally’ take place, and this field is not
species-specific: ‘it is not a matter of a nature, an essence, serving to
found an anthropology: it is just a threshold which is crossed. Animals
are better endowed for living than for thinking, human beings better for
thinking than for living. Both of them live and think, normally or excep-
tionally’ (Simondon, 2005 [1958]: 165). Whether he speaks of processes of
psychical and collective individuation in which physical, biological and
technical processes are involved as well, or some sort of ‘progress’ of
humanity as a whole, he consistently refutes the idea of a human ‘ontol-
ogy’ in terms of a human identity to be known and reproduced, or even
preserved. The ethical and political stakes of this ontoepistemological
decision can be appreciated in a passage in which Simondon appears
to explicitly contrast his understanding of the individual as individuation
to Wiener’s understanding of the individual as isolated and self-reprodu-
cing. This is Wiener in The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and
Society:

There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a

world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the
existence of these islands enables some of us to assert the existence
of progress. (Wiener, 1968: 11)

Thus, instead, Simondon in the concluding pages of Individuation:

To postulate that [. . .] there are no lost islands in becoming, no

domains eternally closed in themselves, and there is no absolute
autarchy of the instant, is to claim that each gesture has a meaning
as information and it is symbolic in relation to life and to the total-
ity of lives. (Simondon, 2005: 333)

What Simondon elsewhere evokes as a ‘perpetual nekuia’ (Simondon,

2005: 250) of the dead clearly shows here to be far from a celebration
of islands of ‘stability’. Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is
instead committed to ‘metastability’. In the first occurrence of the term
40 Theory, Culture & Society 38(5)

in his writings, Simondon attributes the concept of ‘metastability’ to

Wiener’s definition of the ‘evolutionary phase’ entered by industrial soci-
ety in the 20th century (Simondon, 2014a: 236). However, he explicitly
draws the term from thermodynamics, and employs it throughout his
philosophy of individuation to define systems not on the basis of their
stable ‘form’, but in relation to the potential energy involved in their
precarious but still lasting equilibrium. Again, like ‘historicity’, ‘metasta-
bility’ relates to the openness of systems at all levels and carries onto-
logical, epistemological and political meaning: it is ‘axiontological’. More
specifically, in Simondon’s philosophy ‘metastability’ refers to a mode of
‘resolution of tensions’ implying ‘values’ alternative to the values dictated
by ‘stability’ and the preservation of identity at all costs. In view of the
entropic tendency of all systems, stability is in fact a self-defeating
attempt to preserve in its current form what can only continue through
change and invention, and this leads to a slow and certain end: ‘death is
neither the resolution of all tensions nor the solution to any problem’
(Simondon, 2005: 206). In Simondon’s philosophy of individuation this is
not only the acknowledgement of a general feature of systems in the light
of thermodynamics, it is also the endorsement of a value learned from the
study of material, biological, technical and psychosocial processes of
individuation: ‘The decisive individuation is the one that maintains ten-
sions in a metastable equilibrium rather than exhausting them in a stable
equilibrium’ (Simondon, 2005: 206).
There is a price to pay, of course, for this axiontology. This means
abandoning the modern project based on the undisputed value of ‘sta-
bility’, that is the production, preservation and reproduction at all costs
of biological, psychical and social identities. Endorsing Simondon’s bet
for ‘metastability’ is certainly a risky and non-humanistic decision, the
effects of which we cannot, by definition, foresee. What is sure is that this
decision marks a path that leads to a different passion for reason, in
which being ‘rational’ means being open to the complexity of natural
systems and the singularity of all processes of individuation, rather than
closed to their reassuring representation provided by the techno-political
construction of universality. This is Simondon’s axiontological invitation
to abandon the ‘rationalistic’ control of nature (human nature included)
and embrace the ‘rational’ celebration of the agency of matter, whose
pendant is a shift of political thinking from politics conceived as a prob-
lem to be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation.

Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this work were presented in 2018 and 2019 at the Université de
Montréal, Universidade de São Paulo, King’s College London, Leuphana Universität
Lüneburg, Università degli Studi di Padova, and the Culture, Identities and Divisions
research group at Oxford Brookes University. I would like to thank all the convenors
and the audience members, as well as the three anonymous reviewers, for their questions
Bardin 41

and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Nathaniel Boyd, Dan Bulley, Mark

Neocleous and Pablo Rodriguez for their friendly fire on my Simondonian orthodoxy.

ORCID iD
Andrea Bardin https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7228-8195

Notes
1. The concept of ‘allagmatics’ is central to Simondon’s two programmatic texts
Allagmatique and Analyse des crite`res de l’individualite´, first published in the
1995 (posthumous) edition of L’individu et sa gene`se physico-biologique, mod-
erately diffused in L’individuation (Simondon, 2005) and then disappears
from his writings. We cannot say for sure whether Simondon’s idea of allag-
matics corresponds to the theory of individuation he elaborates during the
1950s, but this is my hypothesis (cf. Bardin, 2015: 13–18). What we know for
sure is that the ‘allagmatics’ he has in mind should be ‘scientific and philo-
sophical’ study of the structures and processes generating the ‘individuated
being’ (Simondon, 2016a: 198–99, 2005: 565).
2. Again, Simondon got it right when he saw Descartes’s ontology as entailing a
technocratic normativity: ‘The cartesian continuum [. . .] is not only a meta-
physical statement: it is also the axiom – at the same time ontological and
axiological – founding a way of thinking whose basic schemas coincide with
those of a purely technical operation of construction’ (Simondon, 2014b:
104).
3. The expression first appeared in the article ‘Une nouvelle science: la cyberne-
tique – Vers la machine à gouverner’, published in the newspaper Le Monde
on 28 December 1948. The author was – quite critically – introducing to the
French audience the publication of Wiener’s Cybernetics or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine in Paris, with the publisher
Hermann.
4. Simondon uses the terms ‘individuation’ and ‘ontogenesis’ interchangeably
(cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1959: 41).
5. However close Simondon’s philosophy may be to Deleuze’s reading of
Spinoza (Scott, 2017), there is no way to directly interpret Simondon as a
Spinozist. Étienne Balibar has recently pointed out that Simondon ‘generally
refuses to situate himself on the [Spinozian] terrain of philosophical anthro-
pology’ (Balibar, 2018: 6). Indeed, it was early noted by Filippo Del Lucchese
(2009) that Simondon’s sparse remarks show a quite unelaborated interpret-
ation of Spinoza’s philosophy. In Individuation Spinoza is pictured as a ‘hol-
istic’ thinker to be criticized for his reduction of individuality to substance as
a whole. As most of these readers have rightly intuited, Spinoza can, however,
be used as a key to the understanding of Simondon’s search for a relational
and processual ontology.
6. One might say that, while in Individuation à la lumie`re des notions de forme et
d’information Simondon explicitly aims at ‘reforming’ the cybernetic concept
of information, in Du mode d’existence des objets techniques – though in a
more ‘implicit’ fashion – he is challenging the (pseudo)cybernetic idea of
machines à gouverner.
42 Theory, Culture & Society 38(5)

7. In this sense the ‘idea of the individual as a ‘‘theatre’’ rather than an ‘‘agent’’
of individuation’ (Toscano, 2006: 150) fits more Deleuze than Simondon. For
Simondon the individual is both ‘agent’ (as a structure) and ‘theatre’ (as a
system) of individuation. In this sense he claims, for instance, that ‘the living
is both the agent and the theatre of individuation’ (Simondon, 2005: 29). For
the inception of Deleuze’s employment of Simondon’s concepts, see Deleuze’s
(1966) review of Simondon’s The Individual and Its Physico-Biological
Genesis. Cf. also Andrew Iliadis (2013: 95ff).
8. See also Karen Barad’s notion of apparatuses as ‘boundary-making practices’
(Barad, 2007: 148, 169 ff.).

References
Ashby, William Ross (1962) Principles of the self-organisation system. In Von
Foester, H. and Zoff, G.W. (eds) Principles of Self-Organization: Transactions
of the University of Illinois Symposium on Self-Organization, 8–9 June 1961.
Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 255–78.
Balibar, Étienne (1997) Spinoza: From individuality to transindividuality.
Mededelingen vanwege Het Spinozahuis 71: 3–46.
Balibar, Étienne (2018) Philosophies of the transindividual: Spinoza, Marx,
Freud, trans. M.E.G. Kelly. Australasian Philosophical Review 2(1): 5–25.
Barad, Karen (2003) Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of
how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
28(3): 801–31.
Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bardin, Andrea (2015) Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert
Simondon: Individuation, Technics, Social Systems. Dordrecht: Springer.
Bardin, Andrea (2016) The monstrosity of matter in motion: Galileo, Descartes,
and Hobbes’s political epistemology. Philosophy Today 60(1): 25–43.
Bardin, Andrea and Rodriguez, Pablo (2018) A vindication of Simondon’s pol-
itical anthropology. Australasian Philosophical Review 2(1): 54–61.
Blanco, Javier and Rodriguez, Pablo (2015) Sobre la fuerza y la actualidad de la
teorı́a simondoniana de la información. In: Blanco, Javier, et al. (eds) Amar a
las máquinas: Cultura y te´cnica en G. Simondon. Buenos Aires: Prometeo
Libros, pp. 95–120.
Bontems, Vincent and De Ronde, Christian (2019) Simondon and quantum
mechanics (or, on how the ‘preindividual’ hypothesis leads to a realistic but
non-substantialist interpretation of the orthodox quantum formalism).
Philosophy Today 63(3): 611–624.
Choat, Simon (2018) Science, agency and ontology: A historical-materialist
response to new materialism. Political Studies 66(4): 1027–42.
Combes, Muriel (1999) Simondon. Individu et collectivite´, pour une philosophie du
transindividuel. Paris: PUF.
De Boever, Arne, et al. (eds) (2012) Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1966) G. Simondon, L’individu et sa gene`se physico-biologique.
In: Deleuze, Gilles, L’ile de´serte et autres textes. Paris: Minuit, pp. 120–124.
Bardin 43

Descartes, René (1897–1913a [1630]) Lettre à Mersenne, 15 Avril 1630. In:

Adam, C. and Tannery, P. (eds) Œuvres de Descartes, 12 vols. Paris, Vol. I,
pp. 135–147.
Descartes, René (1897–1913b [1646]) Lettre à Élisabeth de Bohème, Septembre
1646. In: Adam, C. and Tannery, P. (eds) Œuvres de Descartes, 12 vols. Paris,
Vol. IV, pp. 486–93.
Dillet, Benoı̂t and Delevennes, Charles (2018) Questioning new materialism: An
introduction. Theory, Culture & Society 35(7–8): 5–20.
Galilei, Galileo (1964–8 [1602]) Lettera a Guidobaldo Del Monte. In: Favaro, A.
(ed.) Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale, 20 vols. Florence:
Barbera, Vol. X, p. 100.
Grosz, Elizabeth (2012) Identity and individuation: Some feminist reflections.
In: De Boever, Arne, et al. (eds) Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 37–56.
Harvey, Olivia, Popowski, Tamara and Sullivan, Carol (2008) Individuation and
feminism: A commentary on Gilbert Simondon’s ‘The Genesis of the
Individual’. Australian Feminist Studies 23(55): 101–111.
Hobbes, Thomas (1839–45 [1656]) Six lessons to the Savilian professors of the
mathematics. In: Molesworth, Sir W. (ed.) English Works of Thomas Hobbes
of Malmesbury, 11 vols. London, Vol. VII, pp. 181–356.
Hobbes, Thomas (2012 [1651]) Leviathan: The English and Latin Texts, ed.
Malcolm, N. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2 vols.
Hui, Yuk (2016) On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Iliadis, Andrew (2013) A new individuation: Deleuze’s Simondon connection.
MediaTropes IV(1): 83–100.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1959) Notes de travail inédites. Cours 1959. Chiasmi
International 7: Merleau-Ponty. Vie et Individuation, pp. 39–42.
Mills, Simon (2016) Gilbert Simondon: Information, Technology and Media.
London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon (2011) Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes,
Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Simondon, Gilbert (1965 [1962]) Presentation of Wiener’s ‘L’homme et la
machine’, in Le concept d’information, 5e`me colloque philosophique de
Royaumont. Paris: Minuit, pp. 99–100.
Simondon, Gilbert (2005 [1958]) L’individuation à la lumie`re des notions de forme
et d’information. Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Million.
Simondon, Gilbert (2011 [1963–4]) Two Lessons on Animal and Man, trans. D.S.
Burk. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing.
Simondon, Gilbert (2014a [1954]) Prolégomènes à une refonte de l’enseignement.
In: Sur la technique. Paris: PUF, pp. 233–253.
Simondon, Gilbert (2014b [1960–1]) Psychosociologie de la technicité. In: Sur la
technique. Paris: PUF, pp. 27–130.
Simondon, Gilbert (2014c [1980]) Art et nature (La maitrise technique de la
nature). In: Sur la technique, Paris: PUF, pp. 179–200.
Simondon, Gilbert (2015 [1965]) Culture and technics, trans. O.L. Fraser and G.
Menegalle. Radical Philosophy 189: 17–23.
Simondon, Gilbert (2016a [1953]) Épistémologie de la cybernétique. In: Sur la
Philosophie 1950–58. Paris: PUF, pp. 177–199.
44 Theory, Culture & Society 38(5)

Simondon, Gilbert (2016b [1953]) Humanisme culturel, humanisme négatif,

humanisme nouveau. In: Sur la Philosophie 1950–58. Paris: PUF, pp. 71–75.
Simondon, Gilbert (2016c) Étude de quelques problèmes d’épistémologie et de
théorie de la connaissance. In: Sur la Philosophie 1950–58. Paris: PUF, pp.
201–214.
Simondon, Gilbert (2017 [1958]) Of the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,
trans. C. Malaspina and J. Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing.
Simondon, Gilbert (2019 [1960]) Form, information, and potentials (summary
and debate), trans. A. Iliadis. Philosophy Today 63(3): 573–585 (http://www.
sofrphilo.fr/forme-information-potentiels/).
Stiegler, Bernard (1994) La technique et le temps. 1. La faute d’Épime´the´e. Paris:
Galilée.
Toscano, Alberto (2006) The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and
Individuation between Kant and Deleuze. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wiener, Norbert (1968 [1950]) The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics
and Society. London: Sphere Books.

Andrea Bardin is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Oxford Brookes

University. He is the author of many papers and a book on Gilbert
Simondon: Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon:
Individuation, Technics, Social Systems (Springer, 2015). He works on the
entanglement of science and political thought from early modernity to
the present.