Title:
The individual process: a dialogue on individuation, entanglement, and collectivism.
Author: Grace Pitman Ross
Publication Year/Date: May 2024
Document Version: Fine Art Hons dissertation
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https://doi.org/10.20933/100001303
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ABSTRACT:
There has been a long running philosophical discussion on what it means to be an individual. By examining life beyond human, the definition of ‘individual’ becomes less clear. Octopuses having multiple brains or trees being connected through their roots. This dissertation is a fictional discussion between Philosopher, Artist and Scholar investigating the boundaries of the individual in relation to natural and social environments; and the conditions of the collective examined through artist examples like Thomas Cole’s four-piece painting series
The Voyage of Life (1840). 1 And Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).2
With reference to the works of Pascal Chabot, Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, Anne Sauvanargues and Gilbert Simondon. Particularly Simondon’s Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, I created the voice of Philosopher.3 Using John Dewey, Ian Hoffrr and John Wiley I created the voice of Artist. And the scientific research of
1 Cole, Thomas. 1840. The Voyage of Life, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
2 Solaris. 1972. dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky (Mosfilm)
3 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023]
David Krakauer and Claudia Mills helped form all my voices but particularly completed my Scholar. Lastly Martin Heidegger’s Country Path Conversations is a book which has inspired the format of my dissertation.4 And the physical presentation took lots of inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even (The Green Box) (1934). 5
4 Heidegger, Martin. 2016. Country Path Conversations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press)
5 Duchamp, Marcell. 1934. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even (the Green Box)
THE INDIVIDUAL PROCESS:
SCHOLAR: What does ‘individual’ mean?
ARTIST: Individual could be a way of describing something unique, single in form. For example, we are each made up of individual atoms which allows us to be individual people.
PHILOSOPHER: Well, “the words ‘individual’ and ‘atom’ both literally mean ‘indivisible’: ‘individual’ from the Latin individuus; in- ‘not’ and divider ‘to divide’, and ‘atom’ from the Greek ἄτομος (atomos); ἀ- (a-) ‘not’ and τέμνω (temnō) ‘I cut’”.6
SCHOLAR: So, if an individual is unable to be separated from itself how can it realise its extent?
6 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p90
PHILOSOPHER: Through the process of individuation, it can be understood.
“Individuation is the result of an encounter between a structural condition and an energetic condition, an encounter which must also be actualized in order for individuation to take place. From this steadfast solidarity between the individual and its milieu of constitution follows an indifferentiation of the individual and its milieu in individuation, since the individual which results – for example, the crystal – emerges along with its milieu.”7 Therefore the individual and the environment rely on one another for their individual identity.
ARTIST: Is that not actually a matter of framework? You’ve said that the individual is only definable alongside its milieu. Therefore, could it not be argued that the milieu is part of that individual?
SCHOLAR: And would the same be said of products of individuals? Are artworks, buildings, laws, morals, or literature still of the individual once they’ve moved into a different milieu? Surely that is movement of energy and therefore is transferred to another individual.
7 Sauvanargues, Anne, Jon Roffe, Arne De Boever, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Sean Bowden, and others. 2013. Gilbert Simondon (Edinburgh University Press) p63
ARTIST: Absolutely. The “whole conception of morals is so individualistic” because they serve as rules for every person to singularly dictate their lives.8 And laws work similarly as a condition of environment, a way for individuals to communicate their morals and apply them fairly to the collective. Speaking of communication, all arts are a vital aspect of this, it “is by way of communication that art becomes the incomparable organ of instruction” and beyond social structures art provides a timeless expression of experience.9 That aspect of communication is vital for individuals, the collective is where individuals thrive, fundamentally we are social creatures. And it is through all this movement of energy that larger individuals form, beyond physical limitations.
PHILOSOPHER: This is true to an extent, The symbiosis between the internal and the external creates the transindividual, “the transindividual is what is on the outside of the individual as well as inside”.10 Simply put
8 Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience (New-York: Minton, Balch and Co., (S.D) p346
9 Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience (New-York: Minton, Balch and Co., (S.D) p347
10 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023] p342
an individual is created through individuation, individuation is a phase of being that every consciousness experiences once becoming a tangible form. Whereas individualization is how a subject is shaped according to the conditions of its life. “The subject is double: he possesses general structures common to every human being combined with a personal idiosyncrasy.”11 For a transindividual the milieu is present for a secondary individuation where the subject becomes part of a collective and connected to other individuals, meaning the individual is both itself and its milieu at once.
SCHOALR: So, for any individuals to emerge there must be a presence of society since a milieu, by definition, is social.
PHILOSOPHER: While individuation is the first solidification of a subject it does not limit the individual “This phase, moreover, cannot exhaust the possibilities of pre-individual being”.12 The pre-individual is free from
11 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note. <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p115
12 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbert-
the ties of environment and the collective at this point as its options are limitless. Once transindividuality occurs there is an overlapping of subjects, not of individuals, as each being contains the pre-individual.
ARTIST: Whereas you say the linking of a collective is an overlapping of subjects The transference and transformation of energy and matter is where an individual emerges, and it’s the vitality of that overlap that means the collective is created. An easy visualisation of this are colonies.
simondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023] p348
SIPHONOPHORE (colonies):
SCHOLAR: Are you familiar with the species of siphonophore?
ARTIST: I don’t believe I am.
SCHOLAR: Siphonophore are organisms made up of thousands of individual zooids and these zooids rely on one another to survive as a colony. I think this species highlights the overlap of individuals and the dependency on mutualism. Zooids have separate roles within their colony, and they rely on one another for survival. One zooid groups role would be to protect the colony while another’s would be digesting its food.13
ARTIST: And that interconnectivity is something we see reflected in all of life, entire ecosystems exist in the precarious balance of its species. This collective state of existence is individual.
13 Natural World Facts. 2020. ‘Siphonophores, Drifting Colonies of Life’, Www.youtube.com
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvPrR0lMMb4> [accessed 18 September 2023]
PHILOSOPHER: “The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is 2400 km (roughly 1500 miles) long. It is sometimes considered the largest life form on earth. But is it an individual?”14 Well the physical proximity of micro-organisms is not what creates a unique being. If there is no central coordination and birth and death within the colony are singular from the rest, then the colony is made up of sub-individuals and is not individual. Sub-individuals have specialised roles within the colony, some provide nutrition, some reproduction, and others defence. An individual cannot be separated from itself.
ARTIST: So centralised coordination is key for the individual and singular deaths of sub-individuals, like human cells, are independent from the individual. Yet it feels critical to point out that an ecosystem has a coordinated purpose that you neglect to note, they are driven by the need to survive. This singular drive, which all life experiences.
14 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023], p91
TREES (colonies):
ARTIST: And let us look towards another type of individual. A tree.
It has a network under the soil which are its roots, and the tree relies on this part of itself to collect nutrients and provide strength against the weather above ground. Through certain types of fungus, tree roots are connected to one another and can communicate and even transfer nutrients accordingly. “It is shaped by the ideal of the network: each act must be coordinated with the other acts.”15 In fact, this wood wide network allows the oldest trees in a forest to protect younger trees and live in accordance with mutualism rather than individualism.16
SCHOLAR: So, the success of mutualism is proven by these ancient tree systems, working for the success of their species and not the individual tree. Could the same be applied to human society?
15 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p141
16 Real Science. 2021. ‘The Secret Language of Trees’, Www.youtube.com <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HiADisBfQ0> [accessed 16 June 2023]
PHILOSOPHER: In this context people are distinctly separate like a tree, however they are not divisible since people are linked by networks of “socially reproductive acts”, their social and individual identity, and therefore every person, is a product of others.17 While humans are not rooted, we certainly spread enregy and information in the manner that trees in forests do.
SCHOLAR: Would you not then consider this social chain centralised coordination? And therefore, society to be a collective individual. Collective because of the singular births and deaths that don’t compromise the colony, but still individual because of their crucial entanglement.
ARTIST: To further this “no one experience has a chance to complete itself because something else is entered upon so speedily.”18 Life is so fully intertwined that it would be impossible to separate and have truly solitary individuals, therefore it is fair to comment that the collective, the colony, is in fact individual.
17 Hodder, Ian, and John Wiley. 2013. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell) p90
18 Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience (New-York: Minton, Balch and Co., (S.D), P45
PHILOSOPHER: Being within a collective of individuals differs from that of the colony. Whereas a colony is only created of sub-individuals the collective is perpetually encouraging growth of its youth and extending old age for the collective wellbeing. The individuals within have their own identity, a result of a first individuation. And after a second individuation they are a part of the collective, their social environment which is their milieu. The collective isn’t their milieu itself but rather “a set of participations in which it enters through this second individuation that choice is when it is expressed as a transindividual reality.”19 Transindividuals only occur within collectives and after integration into its milieu.
19 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023] p348
SLIME MOULD (many brains):
SCHOLAR: So, if a transindividual is indivisible from its collective milieu, just like the sub-individuals within a colony. Why do you refuse to acknowledge a coordinated drive within them? Why can’t they simply be individual?
ARTIST: The entire world is the individual; we are part of the network.
PHILOSOPHER: No, the world is a sum of individuals. Or rather “the world is more than a sum of individuals. We live in a network where the preindividual plays a significant role.”20 Pre-individual is of course before any ties to collectives and environments are formed, untethered the preindividual is not bound by any social entanglements and it’s important to understand that the pre-individuals form is determined by code, relating to classes of beings. At this point human formation doesn’t differ from a tree formation for example.
20 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note. <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p3
ARTIST: Exactly, so depending on the restrictions we put down, different individuals will appear because there is always the coordination for life present and there is a scientific argument here for this too, the Plasmodial Slime Mould. Other slime moulds can clearly be seen as colonies, whereas in the case of the Plasmodial it is more complex in form. This single celled organism contains millions of nuclei and as it searches for the bacteria for nutrients (reaching up to 30 square metres) it exhibits swarm intelligence and memory, able to solve combinational optimization programmes by testing all possible directions simultaneously.21
PHILOSOPHER: How intriguing, “a life that is so collective and with such strong bonds between individuals that the latter would no longer be anything but the different organs of a single whole constituting the veritable individual.”22 Each nucleus is complete, unlike sub-individual organisms with divided tasks, but there is no transindividuality occurring.
21 Real Science. 2023. ‘The Insane Biology Of: Slime Mold’, Www.youtube.com <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPOQQp8CCls> [accessed 16 June 2023]
22 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023] p201
SCHOLAR: And this can be applied to human bodies, our individual cells make localised choices like the slime nuclei. In fact, “the body’s cells each have a form and can subsist outside the body in tissue cultures.”23
PHILOSOPHER: So, this makes them a colony, the birth and death of cells promote life, but there is no individual identity for the cells. “The individual is ‘indivisible’, yet life is maintained within the individual through a process of cellular division. This peculiarity of language is a symptom of the problem. It is also occurring in atomism: the ‘a-tom’ is, by definition, indivisible, yet what energy is spent on splitting it into subatomic particles!”24 It is contradictory yet remains the case, while elements of life rely on one another, they do not become individual.
23 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note. <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p89
24 ibid p90
OCTOPUSES (many brains):
SCHOLAR: You recognised in the slime that life could become so collective for individuals that they were no longer identifiable as separate. It stands to reason that with that indivisibility they then be called individual. Further proof is the octopus. With approximately 500 million neurons, 350 million of which run along its 8 arms in independent clusters called ganglia. These ganglia mean each arm works independently of the centralised brain and gives the octopus the benefit of both centralised and localised control over its actions.25
PHILOSOPHER: Firstly, collectives are synonymous with evolution. So, from this point universal-
ARTIST: Therefore individual!
PHILOSOPHER: “Individuation is a general framework. It allows for infinite arrangements. It diversifies as living entities become more complex. In 25 Starr, Michelle. 2019. ‘Octopus Arms Are Capable of Making Decisions without Input from Their Brains’, ScienceAlert <https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-how-octopus-arms-make-decisionswithout-input-from-the-brain> [accessed 12 December 2023]
another sense it supposes choices, value judgements, fatalities. It remains universal: the fundamentals are fixed. But it is also singular. Individuation is a way of telling the story of life. It is a projective test, in which everyone sees what they want to see.”26 Similar to the slime there is argument of entire individuals within a single octopus.
SCHOLAR: So, are they individual?
PHILOSOPHER: We have the science to prove that both centralised and localised decisions are being made by the ganglia. But “collective consciousness is not formed by the joining of individual consciousnesses, no more than the social body arises from the joining of individual bodies ”27 In short, the collective is psychosomatic. This is not the case for an octopus, centralised coordination prove its individuality. “The existence of the collective is necessary for information to be
26 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note. <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p94
27 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023] p342
significative.”28 Humans rely on information to make choices and to communicate, “choice is a collective operation, a group foundation, a transindividual activity.”29 So transindividuality creates coordination and organisation.
ARTIST: Which can be proven with art.
28 ibid, p334
29 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023], p347
THE VOYAGE OF LIFE:
SCHOLAR: Can I ask how, or even if, art reflects the ideas we’ve discussed so far.
ARTIST: We exist where there is immense organisation internally and externally. And artworks enjoyed in a milieu “are signs of a unified collective life.”30 Furthermore, the process of remaking experience through expression is not isolated, there are layers. The event itself; the artist; and the person who views the art. Then the larger environment becomes shaped by art movements. One such movement being the Romantics which I mention because of their focus on the individual.31 Every culture has its collective individuality and “art is a strain in experience rather than an entity in itself.”32 It is part of the collective individual and cannot exist out with.
30 Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience (New-York: Minton, Balch and Co., (S.D), p81
31 Augustyn, Adam. 2022. ‘Romanticism’, Encyclopædia Britannica <https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism> [accessed 9 November 2023]
32 op cit, Dewey, p330
PHILOSOPHER: The use of ‘strain’ is interesting because information also travels in strains. That single strain is what allows individuation to occur. When a leaf is formed, a single strain of information starts this individuation, it unfurls and gives form to matter. It can receive and pass information as it grows, but far less than a fish. Change is constant and every living entity is defined by a plurality of inputs and outputs of information. “Information must be processed. The living entity digests information and determines the appropriate response. It is a network. Contrary to the theories of the scholastics, multiplicity is not a property of forms, but a feature of systems that regulate activity: nutrition, chemical defence mechanisms, etc. These systems of activity presuppose the existence of an internal milieu that is specific to life.”33 Anything formed without this duality, experiencing a single individuation to form it cannot be living, for example this applies to rocks. Individuation is definable as becoming, the individual is never separate from the process and the process is never complete. “The concept of the individual completely changes; neither unified nor identical, it becomes relative, phased, perpetually putting into play a process of individuation and an associated 33 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note. <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p90
milieu.”34 Energy, matter and information are all permanently flowing in complex and entangled webs, it is up to the individual to navigate this and through mutualism this is possible with far more stability.
34 Sauvanargues, Anne, Jon Roffe, Arne De Boever, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Sean Bowden, and others. 2013. Gilbert Simondon (Edinburgh University Press) p63
PART 1, CHILDHOOD:
ARTIST: I mentioned previously that the individual is about setting framework. This can be illustrated by a four-piece series by American Romantic artist Thomas Cole from 1840, titled The Voyage of Life. The first is named Childhood. 35
SCHOLAR: So, you are saying the subjects in these four paintings are individuals?
ARTIST: Yes, the landscape captured in each is an individual.
ARTIST: “The existence of art is the concrete proof of what has just been stated abstractly. It is proof that man uses the materials and energies of nature with intent to expand his own life”.36 Manmade products, such as artworks, expand an individual’s own identity beyond their person as separate people encounter the work.
ARTIST: I’ve said that viewing an individual is always dependant on the restrictions placed upon it, our organisation of species for example or in this case the boarder of a frame. All aspects of life depicted in this landscape create a single individual.
SCHOLAR: So, childhood. From what I can see, the infant in accompanied by an angelic figure standing over them; the plants and flowers are all firmly in bloom; and off to the right we see the rising light of the sun. It’s relatively still in this captured moment and particularly with the angelic imagery, feels protected and optimistic as dawn approaches.
ARTIST: Precisely. Cole has captured the new vibrant state we experience at the beginning of our life. This landscapes possibilities are
limitless to the child and beside them is their guardian keeping them safe.
PHILOSOPHER: While only just born, the infant is still predetermined as it “grows because it tends toward the adult; the acorn, which contains the virtual essence of the oak, the form of the oak in the implicit state, tends to become a fully developed adult tree.”37 The individuals outcome within childhood is to grow to maturity, just like with any species, in order to reproduce and then die. I see an individual within this painting. One who has been transformed by the first stage of individuation and, with the presence of the angelic figure, is in the process of the second individuation.
ARTIST: We’ve established that the vitality of connection is where individuals are formed. You say that the relevant connections are formed of same species. However, I see the connection of the river, the boat, the cliffs, and every leaf on those plants, all connected and all relying on one another. Their coordination is balancing one another. 37 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023] p681
PHILOSOPHER: I can agree that “nature is all-encompassing.”38 Which is why the “pre-individual is nature seized at its source, nature still untouched by determination, formless and limitless, but already full of a vitality that will be shaped by determination.”39 Raw unshaped nature is what that infant travels through, everything in that landscape is simply growing, there is know determined idea shaping it.
SCHOLAR: Yet all the life we see, relies on some other life to exist. Surely this unspoken coordination creates the individual!
PHILOSOPHER: “So there are only flows of matter, energy and information”40 Meaning when organic individuals are created by forms of physical-chemical-biological matter (e.g. atoms, cells, DNA) the material flows within the individual until it dies, and the energy
38 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note. <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p135
39 ibid, P85
40 Hodder, Ian, and John Wiley. 2013. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell) p4
dissipates into other forms. So really any singular organism is just a stage in matter transformation. Same goes for energy, burning wood until the fire dies, and all energy has dissipated. Information too, beginning as voice, then recorded and travelling digitally until being written down, language changes the information as it’s translated and so on.
SCHOLAR: And this is the argument most simply. All of life is matter, energy, and information. It’s all in a permanent state of transformation and universally driven through experience. It is individual.
PART 2, YOUTH:
ARTIST: Second from Thomas Cole’s series is Youth. 41 The infant has yet to reach maturity but has progressed into a person who can think for itself. Some distance from the angel now and reaching towards a heavenly place. In youth you are driven by dreams and the possible future, the wonder that used to surround you is still present but largely neglected as for the first time we are experiencing the worlds vastness. The “painting expresses nature and the human scene as a spectacle.”42 Youth is still a point of wonder and naively we focus on our dreams and forget our present.
41 Cole, Thomas. 1840. The Voyage of Life, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
42 Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience (New-York: Minton, Balch and Co., (S.D), p234
PHILOSOPHER: The plants in this individual are also more mature now as some particularly daunting trees have sprouted by the river.
SCHOLAR: And the individual is reflected in the environments continued warmth and steadiness.
ARTIST: “All deliberation, all conscious intent, grows out of things once performed organically through the interplay of natural energies.”43 As with discussing Childhood we are seeing a transformed state of energy, matter and information which has now become Youth. Part of the collective, youths begin to take their place within the milieu as they continue to mature.
PHILOSOPHER: It is always a matter of being and becoming, never is an individuated individual one without the other. So, the “pure individual is a pioneer. It abandons the habitual functions of nutrition, defence and reproduction within the colony. Its existence is a bridge. Without belonging to a colony.”44 With th appearance of the angel aside, within 43 Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience (New-York: Minton, Balch and Co., (S.D), p24
44 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note. <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p93
these paintings the figure is always alone, for this reason they can be described as the pure individual, a pioneer who has stepped away from habit and forges a unique path. Beyond this the pure individual casts away social convention to be guided by generative instinct, embracing change their future could see them inventing a machine or writing a new novel.
SCHOLAR: You say that the pure individual resists the colony, removes itself from nature’s fundamental limits and accordingly becomes the process of individuation itself. Can you explain how a colony fails to meet the same standard if we choose to consider the colony as individual.
PHILOSOPHER: To answer this, I must introduce group individuation which happens when individuals are both the milieu and part of a syncrystallization. A syncrystallization being several individuals with a group personality, which isn’t introduced by the group. It is a requirement that the group be partially indetermined, like the pre-individual, for the group individuation to occur. “The individuation that gives birth to the group is also an individuation of grouped individuals.”45 Just because of the presence of synchronised individuation, this doesn’t create a single
45 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023] p333
individual, it is still a group of them. If anything, this is the process that colonies go through, a colony still operates as a group even if individuation is present
SCHOLAR: Your argument being that grouped individuals dissolves an individual’s own potential growth and exploration for the sake of the colony. But life relies on this coordination, if all organisms were to seek the ideal of the pure individual, then surely life would fail.
ARTIST: I think the pure individual could be an aspiring goal so long as the harmony of nature, which we are certainly a part of, is appreciated. Just like the artworks of Cole, all art is an account “of the collective civilization that is the context in which works of art are produced and enjoyed.”46 If we acknowledge these connections then balance will be secure.
PART 3, MANHOOD:
ARTIST: Next in The Voyage of Life (1840) is Manhood, according to Cole this is the third stage of life and immediately you can see how turbulent the landscape is at this point.47
SCHOLAR: Their guardian is at a greater distance still, all the way in the clouds now.
ARTIST: “Each of us assimilates into himself something of the values and meanings contained in past experiences. But we do so in differing degrees 47 Cole, Thomas. 1840. The Voyage of Life, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
and at differing levels of selfhood. Some things sink deep, others stay on the surface and are easily displaced.”48 We see those values and experiences scored across the landscape in the baren and jagged rocks. “Then comes the need for expression. What is expressed will be neither the past events that have exercised their shaping influence nor yet the literal existing occasion. It will be, in the degree of its spontaneity, an intimate union of the features of present existence with the values that past experience have incorporated in personality. Immediacy and individuality, the traits that mark concrete existence, come from the present occasion; meaning, substance, content, from what is embedded in the self from the past.”49 Reaching maturity the figure is now fully grown and while continuing to develop all past experience will influence future decisions as they have been formed by them.
SCHOLAR: The pasts influence has built up a very turbulent landscape for our subject, the water is stormy and rushing, and the sun is entirely covered by dark clouds. Alone now, more than ever it is looking fairly hopeless.
48 Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience (New-York: Minton, Balch and Co., (S.D), p71
49 ibid p71
PHILOSOPHER: “And it is the collective that can resolve it. The connection with others stabilizes the individual divided between what he sees and what he feels.”50 The collective is crucial in bringing the individual out from the mindset of itself and towards collectivism, towards mutualism. “Individuation does not merely occur in the individual and for it; it also occurs around it and above it. The individual is translated through its centre of existence, converted into signification, perpetuated in information, whether implicit or explicit, vital or cultural, thereby waiting on successive individuals to reach maturity and resume the signs of information left behind by their predecessors: the individual encounters life in its maturity: entelechy is not merely internal or personal; it is an individuation in accordance with the collective.”51 At this point we can see all that the individual has endured and will continue to endure to reach old age. For the individual to live it must be its own individual agent, milieu, and individuation itself. Behaviour like
50 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note. <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p98
51 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023] p240
perception and adaption are lent to individuation. And so, the individual is driven by the duality of experience and the collective.
SCHOLAR: It seems that as the subject grows, the processes become more elaborate but as a consequence of this complexity some beauty in the nature is lost, as illustrated in this third painting.
PHILOSOPHER: “The collective is the communication that envelops and resolves individual disparations as a presence that is the synergy of actions, the coincidence of futures and pasts as an internal resonance of the collective.”52 We depend on our known history to create a future for our collective.
ARTIST: But it is not enough to just be informed of human history, to have a truly successful future we must also have knowledge of the worlds history to help us be a useful network in the world’s collective individual.
52 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023], p242
PART 4, OLD AGE:
ARTIST: Last in the Cole’s series is Old Age, the final stage of human growth.53 The turbulence has come to a standstill and light is finally reaching us again. Not only has our angel returned to our side, but they are also revealing to us a second angel from the heavens. While shadows still clouding a lot of the beauty and life we once saw, there is a peace brought by age which allows us to cast a realistic view on our future. Soon we’ll be amongst the figurative heavens where we’ll connect and become a part of all life around us, in a way that was impossible with a physical body. With death, comes a new form of individual.
PHILOSOPHER: Further transformation of matter and energy, we see the approach of this organism’s deterioration and the matter and energy within that being getting passed to other subjects.
SCHOLAR: After one’s death, their produced items, and collective connections, continue to exist beyond their physical life. These are forms of information, of matter, of energy, and so they are transferred to others within the collective and beyond. The reoccurring imagery of nature in The 53 Cole, Thomas. 1840. The Voyage of Life, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Voyage of Life series illustrates how vital the natural world is to our existence and how our development is reflected within it. It is inseparable from human experience and as a consequence, individual.
ARTIST: “As the developing growth of an individual from embryo to maturity is the result of interaction of organism with surroundings, so culture is the product not of efforts of men put forth in a void or just upon themselves, but of prolonged and cumulative interaction with environment.”54 Life is continuous and no part can be separated and expect to survive, proving that it is all part of the ultimate collective individual.
PHILOSOPHER: That is an argument for the aspect of life. But a subject that Thomas Cole himself is touching on is in the last painting is death. The individual in its perpetual state of here and now is permanently problem solving until it dies. “And death exists for the living being in two senses that do not coincide: it is hostile death, that of the rupture of meta- stable equilibrium, which is only maintained through its own functioning and its capacity of ongoing resolution: this death construes the very precariousness of individuation, its confrontation with the 54 Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience (New-York: Minton, Balch and Co., (S.D), p28
conditions of the world, the fact that it is engaged and takes risks and cannot always succeed; life is like a posed problem that may not be resolved or may be resolved badly: the axiomatic collapses in the very course of the resolution of the problem: a certain risk or happenstance from outside therefore exists in every life; the individual is not selfenclosed, and there is no destiny contained in it, for what it resolves is simultaneously the world and itself, the system of the world and itself.”55 Through the promise of death we can understand that an individual experiences life as itself and as the entire world, their only perception of the world is through their own experience and the only way we know it continues without us is by seeing other individuals die. Everything is ultimately the flow of matter and energy; death is simply the name for that point of transformation.
SCHOLAR: And so, our arguments ultimately reach an agreement. Regardless of where we place our framework of restrictions, a complete individual can be viewed within it. Whether that is a single tree, or the entire forest. The cells on a finger, or a town of people. Even in the most abstract forms we’ve proven that a landscape with trees, oceans, and people within 55 Simondon, Gilbert, and Taylor Adkins. 2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) <https://anarch.cc/uploads/gilbertsimondon/individuation-in-light-of-notions-of-form-and-information.pdf> [accessed 13 September 2023] p237
are collectively individual. To be individual is to be indivisible and therefore the world is individual.
SOLARIS (the conclusion):
SCHOLAR: Lastly let us look at a film which investigates the human experience while it’s aware of the collective being an individual. Solaris a film from 1972, written and directed by Andrey Tarkovsky.56 The film opens with a man, a psychologist, who is asked to travel to a space station orbiting a distant planet (Solaris) and observe its ocean which scientists believe to be a single sentient being. All attempts to understand this alien form ultimately fail and our psychologist eventually ends up joining
Solaris and is removed from the temporalities of human life and death as he truly allows himself to be part of the larger individual.
ARTIST: At one point in the film, Solaris reaches out to the space station and observes a painting, through experiencing a piece of art the alien is able to connect with some of the psychologist’s previous experiences and understand his emotions, a temporary collective is created between them. “They were organically connected with the particular interactions in human experience that were desired as the consequence of art.”57 While it is simple to observe an individual, even a fictional alien like Solaris, to form deeper understanding it takes the likes of art from a single person’s experience to open communication within the individual. Art allowed for experience to be shared and understood more openly and in the case of Solaris, let an alien experience the emotions of a human.
PHILOSOPHER: “Our minds inhabit a magical theatre that lacks a physical reality.”58 This space in our minds is impossible for another physical organisms to reach so instead we rely on what artworks and literature
57 Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience (New-York: Minton, Balch and Co., (S.D), p330
58 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note. <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p153
allow us to glimpse in order to form deeper connections. The individual exists as double at once, “he is alone and connected, isolated and part of the collective.”59
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ARTIST: Solaris is also an excellent visual display of the entanglement of life. While humans seek out reasons for life, our knowledge doesn’t equip us for the simple complexity of existence. We can spend our entire lives studying and still be ill equipped for the events we face while living. In the end, just like the psychologist, we must give in to experience, embrace the entire individual and our role within, so we can live fully.
59 ibid, p114
PHILOSOPHER: “Entanglements are identified empirically as specific flows of matter, energy, and information. Some are hyper-connected and very farflung. Others are local, short-term, and disengaged.”60 For example a plant taking water in through its roots is much more directly linked than a jellyfish whose tentacles brush atop some coral and registering that information which was previously the exact spot where an octopus had hidden Again, it comes to these three qualities of life. That is matter, that is energy, and that is information. Life cannot function without it, and all three must continue to move or face nonexistence.
ARTIST: And material goods are a way to facilitate these webs of energy. Solaris gives representation to this entanglement through all the events that take place, the scientists failure to contextualise the alien is what led to the psychologist being called; the psychologists background made him more susceptible to Solaris’ offered reality; even smaller moments such as rain filling a mug of tea prompting reflections on the psychologist’s past which brought his guilt back to surface.
60 Hodder, Ian, and John Wiley. 2013. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell) p105
ARTIST: Entanglement relies on relationships of both objects and organisms to operate. And objects rely on organisms to form them while organisms rely of objects for production. An inseparable dependency which allows entanglement to tangle further. As shown in Solaris the dependency of the psychologist’s relationship with his wife, even after her suicide, their entanglements causes him to carry a lot of guilt. “What is determinative (1:48:17)
is the entanglement itself, the totality of the links which hold and produce individual events, things, humans.”61 It all ties together.
PHILOSPHER: Ultimately, I think the philosophy of individuation aligns a lot with the ideas behind entanglement and the collective. As humans we are just “complex things with a particular form of life force. As individual humans we depend on other humans, that depend on each other and that depend on us. Other humans fall apart, go wrong and return to dust. As individual humans we become entangled in our debts, duties and obligations to other humans but also in the flows of minerals and organic matter through us.”62 As the events of Solaris unravel, we see the dependence and the dependency of humans become especially obvious when a select group are existing secluded on a space station. They rely on collective experiences and interactions to ground themselves and know they aren’t losing grip on reality. And again, it comes down to matter, energy, and information. We become fixated on how these transfers work and what they mean but eventually we also turn to dust.
61 Hodder, Ian, and John Wiley. 2013. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell), p112
62 ibid, p219
SCHOLAR: In sum, the individual is indivisible. With life being dependent on itself as much as death is dependent on it, all three of its elements are in constant movement to continue our existence and our part in it is to live our singular life before transferring our matter and energy to the next organisms while also passing our own information out into the collective. If we ever isolate a single part of life, any aspect at all, we can view an entire and complete individual within. But no matter where we look the individual is never truly solitary, there is always the mutual reliance on all other life for the individual’s existence.
SCHOLAR: To mention Solaris again, once the scientists are settled within the space station one turns to another while observing Solaris’ Ocean and says, “perhaps the reason we are here is to perceive for the first-time human beings as a reason to love?”63 Our purpose is within ourselves and no distantly discovered life form will change this. To existence is to be part of the collective individual, and we must act in the interest of mutualism if we wish to survive. “To exist is to be connected.” 64
63 Solaris. 1972. dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky (Mosfilm), 2:26:07
64 Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon (A&C Black) Translator’s Note. <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFbEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&ca d=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 13 September 2023] p77
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The end.