Mill via Simondon

All paths in my theoretical research right now seem to lead back to Gilbert Simondon, who figures especially large in Massumi’s Ontopower and Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy.

 [I’ll note here that I have some reservations about Stiegler’s argument that Marx’s notion of proletarianization can be fully captured in what Stiegler calls “the grammatization of gesture” (39) and the subsequent externalization of memory in the technical object. It’s not that the idea isn’t sensible, but it is without a doubt a Simondonian reinterpretation of Marx rather than an exposition of it as such. Marx values the kind of machinic externalization that Stiegler highlights because the centralization of labor power in machines offers an opportunity for expropriation. In Theories of Surplus Value and the Grundrisse, when he discusses what we would understand to be proletarianization, Marx initially focuses on profit-taking and wage-relations before coming to the conclusion that machinic externalization matters most for these political reasons. The reason I emphasize this difference—and I discuss this in chapter one of my book—is that it elides issues of domination in capitalism, most especially their effects on the construction of gendered and racialized subjects. Much as I appreciate Stiegler’s discussion of grammatization and what he calls the technical individual—highlighting the individuation of technical objects and the elision of the humans from contemporary processes of individuation and collectivity—this aspect of his argument threatens to smooth over historical and theoretical problems that we need to think through in discussions of service economies.]

But what does Simondon have to do with Mill? I’m not sure I can answer that question fully yet, but it does seem to me that their theories of character and individuation bear interesting similarities. In part, this seems to be an effect, at least for Simondon, of Spinoza’s influence. I’ve read more about Spinoza than I like to think about, but this account of Spinoza from Pierre-François Moreau in David Scott’s book on Simondon was particularly striking after my reflections on character in Mill:

Moreau writes: “The feeling of finitude is the condition for the feeling of eternity and even, in a sense, it is the feeling of eternity.” Moreau believes that it is this same movement which in Spinoza permits the soul’s acceding to necessity while conscious that not everything is immediately necessary; as a result, it confronts its powerlessness, cultivating the aspiration for an escape from contingency. (81)

Simondon, Scott argues, discovers in the process of individuation the drive of necessity—something much like Spinoza’s conatus—as well as what he calls “the feeling that acknowledges the failure of individuation to ever complete itself, to be not yet completed in the collective” (81). This incompleteness is central to Simondon’s understanding of individuation, not as a lack but rather as an excess that allows new points of individuation to transpire. Rather than lack, individuation contains an incompatibility that opens not into a pre-existing collective but rather to the pre-individual. The results thus describe the constant process of individuation as the construction of individuals, subjects, and collectives from a field of the pre-individual.

On its face, this sounds very little like Mill. Certainly, Mill follows the hylomorphism that Simondon’s project attacks, and his imagined Ethology confronts without solution many of the problems of the constitution of individuals and societies that Simondon’s approach means to solve. Yet the feeling of incompleteness in Simondon suggests Mill’s feeling of moral freedom, the feeling that one is at once subject necessity and yet could do otherwise. The two notions are genetically different insofar as Simondon’s incompleteness means an embrace of difference and change as part of the individual, whereas Mill’s character is so determined by circumstances and habits that change is at best a distant and difficult possibility. And this is without attempting to account for the multiple levels of individuation and subjectivation in Simondon.

Yet I want to imagine Mill’s character, if only for a moment, in a different way, sans passive voice. What difference is there in saying character is formed by habits, rather than habits form character? Take habits as impersonal, character as a result of a cluster of habits, society as the habits of a cluster of characters. The contingencies that thwart Mill’s attempts to imagine a workable Ethology become a space of potentials…

Is it in Mill, if pushed hard enough, if turned in unexpected ways?