Introduction

It started with curiosity: The name of the French philosopher seemed to pop up here and there, while we were working on dissertations and postdoc-projects. Not just, as we already knew, in the works of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler and German media historians like Bernhard Siegert and Erich Hörl, but also in books and articles by John Durham Peters, Elisabeth Grosz and Yuk Hui. Simondon seemed to be relevant when discussing the question of technology in the Anthropocene, digging into neo-cybernetic trends within critical theory, understanding New Materialism and challenging AI-philosophy. What was it about this French philosopher that could inspire so many different thinkers and fields of thoughts? We soon realized that we did not know very many people who had worked with the ideas of Simondon, and thus, set forth to produce some texts on him. With this issue, we do not intend to give a comprehensive introduction to Simondon’s philosophy. What we hope to do, is to offer a handful of reflections upon how to use Simondon today. We do this by publishing an article on the politics of problems in the thinking of Simondon and Gilles Deleuze, written by Stefano Daechsel and a three-part interview on Simondon’s oeuvre with Yale-professors Gary Tomlinson, John Durham Peters and Paul North, conducted by Johan Fredrikzon. In addition, we have pieced together a few editorial texts: An overview of interesting articles and books on Simondon that we came across as we edited this volume, and a brief vocabulary of Simondonian thought. The article and interview provide several answers to the question why Simondon is a relevant thinker today. Gary Tomlinson argues that Simondon offers key insights to evolutionary studies: He is able to bridge the gap between cultural and evolutionary biology. This is due to the Simondonian understanding of culture, Tomlinson argues, as something that arises in evolution and also shapes it. ”We were toolmakers before we were human”, as Tomlinson writes in the article ”Semiotic Epicycles and Emergent Thresholds in Human Evolution” (Glass-bead.org, 2017), which he quotes in the interview. Furthermore, Simondon flirts with what John Durham Peters calls neo-Thomism, a view of the history of technology that is not transcendental, nor teleologically determined or based on an idea of progress, but that is nevertheless intelligible. As John Durham Peters says in his interview: ”Thomism gives you a potential of the world as an intelligible totality, much like James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake: a vision of the world as a knowable whole.” Simondon’s philosophy according to Durham Peters is ”Aristotelian in the sense that nature has a structure which in some ways corresponds to the structure of understanding (…), the processes by which nature works and the processes by which technology works are analogous”. Most importantly, Simondon identifies possible strategies for resistance. Studying technology is necessary for us to act as political individuals, Stefano Daechsel argues in his article on Simondon and Deleuze. ”[T]here is an urgency to Simondon’s call for a technical culture that would foster a ‘genuine awareness of technical realities (…)’, such an awareness of technology ‘possesses political and social value’.” We need to delve into the technical realities, not in order to liberate ourselves from technology, but in order to modify and gain some kind of agency as technological beings. With reference to Robert de Niro’s character in Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil (1985), Paul North also reflects upon the agency of the individual through the figure of the tinkerer: ”The kind of freedom where you can do anything, like ex nihilo creation. Simondon wants nothing to do with that. It is the middle person, the one who can take an invention and actually make it into a form of life, bring it in line with the milieu and allow each to change the other, that is interesting for Simondon.” Toward the end of the interview, North claims philosophy of technology today is looking for new resources in order to comprehend the world we live in. Mazzilli-Daechsel begins his article by stating that we need a way out of our politics of defeatism today. Simondon is a useful source to go to, in both regards. We hope this volume demonstrates that. In addition to the section on Simondon, this issue of Sensorium Journal features two reviews, on the recent complete transcript of the Macy Conferences edited by Claus Pias and two books in the series “Understanding Media Ecology”. We hope you enjoy your reading!

Simondon’s Technical Culture and a Politics of Problems

There is a timeliness to Gilbert Simondon’s call in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958) for a technical culture that fosters a ”genuine awareness of technical realities.” Writing in the context of mid-20th century France, Simondon worried about a lack of technological understanding and envisaged a technical culture in which technological education would be considered as essential as literacy to meaningful participation in society. Sixty years on, the need for widespread technological awareness is greater than ever. The aim of this article is to clarify and support this claim by examining it through the lens of a politics of problems that can be found in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968).

2. Simondon as a Neo-Scholastic?

Johan Fredrikzon spent one and a half years as a visiting research assistant at the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University 2018/2019. Some months before he arrived, a two-day workshop on Simondon was held by the Yale-Düsseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media, titled Modes of Technical Objects, with scholars from the US and Germany. Fredrikzon decided to engage a few of the workshop participants for this special issue of Sensorium, with the purpose to discuss perspectives on Simondon as a theoretical instrument for thinking technology, how the French philosopher matters in their work, and why there seems to be a revival in the interest in the writing of Simondon these days. On behalf of the Sensorium journal, the interviewer would like to thank the three interviewees for their generous participation. About John Durham Peters: John Durham Peters is María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University. Peters has been a creative force in media studies for many years and his thinking continues to influence academic environments throughout the world. His book The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, 2015) was an attempt to rethink the concept of media by including weather, dolphins and fire to the infrastructural landscape of digital communications and climate change. His new book, in cooperation with Kenneth Cmiel, is called Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (Chicago, 2020).

1. Abstract Machines

Johan Fredrikzon spent one and a half years as a visiting research assistant at the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University 2018/2019. Some months before he arrived, a two-day workshop on Simondon was held by the Yale-Düsseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media, titled Modes of Technical Objects, with scholars from the US and Germany. Fredrikzon decided to engage a few of the workshop participants for this special issue of Sensorium, with the purpose to discuss perspectives on Simondon as a theoretical instrument for thinking technology, how the French philosopher matters in their work, and why there seems to be a revival in the interest in the writing of Simondon these days. About Gary Tomlinson: Gary Tomlinson is John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and the Humanities and director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. Tomlinson has taught and written about the history of opera and early-modern musical thought and practice, but also on the philosophy of history and anthropological theory. In his current research, he combines humanistic theory with evolutionary science and archaeology to search for the role of culture in the evolution of man. Following A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (MIT Press, 2015), his new book Culture and the Course of Human Evolution (Chicago, 2018) deepens the theoretical framework on how culture has shaped biology.

Vocabulary

This vocabulary is inspired by ”A Short List of Gilbert Simondon’s Vocabulary” on the blog Fractalontology, but for the most part based on the article and interviews in this issue of Sensorium Journal. For more concepts, see: Fractalontology.wordpress.com.

Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences

Claus Pias (ed.), Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946–1953. The Complete Transactions (Diaphanes, 2016)

Recommended Articles and Books

Gilbert Simondon has inspired many thinkers. We have gathered some books and articles on Simondon and Simondon-inspired thought in philosophy and critical theory that have caught our interest during the editing of this volume.

Understanding Media Ecology

Dennis D. Cali, Mapping Media Ecology: Introduction to the Field (Peter Lang, 2017) Lance Strate, Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition (Peter Lang, 2017)

3. Constrained Freedom

Johan Fredrikzon spent one and a half years as a visiting research assistant at the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University 2018/2019. Some months before he arrived, a two-day workshop on Simondon was held by the Yale-Düsseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media, titled Modes of Technical Objects, with scholars from the US and Germany. Fredrikzon decided to engage a few of the workshop participants for this special issue of Sensorium, with the purpose to discuss perspectives on Simondon as a theoretical instrument for thinking technology, how the French philosopher matters in their work, and why there seems to be a revival in the interest in the writing of Simondon these days. On behalf of the Sensorium journal, the interviewer would like to thank the three interviewees for their generous participation. About Paul North: Paul North is Professor at the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at Yale University. He teaches on media and literature from Ancient Greece through the romantic and enlightenment traditions into 20th century literary and critical theory. In The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford, 2015) North presented a largely unknown Kafka based on readings of the famous writer’s theoretical works at the end of World War I. Paul North’s new book, Bizarre Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness (Zone Books, 2021) diverges from centuries of thought focused on the idea of difference to engage deeply with the concept of likeness: in evolution, in natural and social worlds, in language and in art. More on: paulnorth.org.

Gyroskopiske konsekvenser

Mark SeltzerThe Official WorldDuke University Press, 2016