Timothy Jackson: I really do think Simondon is becoming a very timely figure, and I think it’s probably underappreciated that his stated goal is to refound—have a novel axiomatic for the humanities, basically, or the human sciences. Like, to really break—I mean, like Whitehead, obviously—but to really break down that boundary between the two cultures.
Matt Segall: Well, let’s just dive in then. We have Dan McQuillan’s article, “Data Science’s Machinic Neoplatonism.” That was published, and then “Simondon and Novalis: Notes for a Romantic Mechanology,” by Brian Norton. And yeah, I’ve been dancing around the edges of Simondon for a while, read little fragments, really, and this article by Norton that connects him to Novalis—I didn’t really know, I knew through you really the Jung influence, and I would assume that Deleuze, being such a deep reader of Simondon, maybe got his Jung through Simondon, or in some sense.
Timothy Jackson: Well, I think, because he was writing about Jung pretty early on. Actually, I think it might be even prior to that.
Matt Segall: Okay.
Timothy Jackson: Yeah.
Matt Segall: Nice. I would have—I mean, I read Deleuze before I realized that Jung and Guattari drew productively, generatively, on Jung in Anti-Oedipus and elsewhere. I think.
Timothy Jackson: Yeah, he’s mentioned in a bunch of places. And so certainly in Deleuze’s early writing, Coldness and Cruelty. I think he’s mentioned in Difference and Repetition. He’s there in A Thousand Plateaus as well, but in the “One or Several Wolves” plateau. And I think one doesn’t want to overstate Jung’s influence. And I think Jungians, of which I’m not one—
Matt Segall: Right.
Timothy Jackson: —have a tendency, because I’m not a Jungian, have a tendency—
Matt Segall: He says, “I’m glad I’m not a Jungian.” Yeah.
Timothy Jackson: Thank God I’m Jung and not a Jungian. They have a tendency to see Jung everywhere, and I think on the one hand, there’s this—there’s this likelihood that anyone coming out of Freud to some degree, but differing from Freud on key issues might converge on a sort of quasi-Jungian way of seeing things, even though it’s always worth pointing out that Jung had a very highly developed sort of theoretical perspective prior to meeting Freud, and a lot of their differences were primary and maintained. But certainly Freud is a big influence on Jung, and I think we can probably say Jung is a big influence on Freud actually as well.
But the point being that there is convergence here. So when it’s like Lacan sounds like Jung, like he’s a bit Jungian. And sometimes maybe that’s got nothing to do with him actually being influenced by Jung. Maybe it’s a kind of differing from Freud in a way that puts them convergently into the same kind of orbit. At the same time, I do think it’s true that Jung—he’s clearly a very influential figure, but also often disavowed by people who are either trying to maintain their academic credentials in some sense, because Jung, of course, had this kind of fraught relationship. He kind of went off and had his own community in some sense, and it was a little bit minoritarian, but then very influential in the broader culture, of course. So I think there might be a bit of disavowal sometimes as well, and then I also think there’s just this phenomenon where people sometimes talk less about their most profound influences than they do about everyone else that they’re kind of bouncing off. And I think you could even say that about Deleuze and Simondon, because I think that Simondon is a huge influence on Deleuze, and Deleuze definitely talks about Simondon in a bunch of places, and he writes a review in, I think, 1966 or 1967 of that part of Simondon’s thesis on Individuation, which had been released, which was the first two parts, so physical and vital individuation, but not the psychic individuation stuff. Interestingly, that was not published until like 1989 or something ridiculous. Maybe it was in the eighties or nineties. But I think the whole thing was finally published together for the first time in French in 2005, and then in 2013 for the first time in English, translated by my friend Taylor Adkins. Amazing, like monumental work, just translating this book, because it’s difficult.
But I think, yeah, in a lot of people have commented on this. Particularly in Difference and Repetition, where it’s relatively fresh after Deleuze’s known encounter, like documented encounter with Simondon’s work in the mid-sixties a few years previously, and the influence is pretty profound, and he is mentioned, but not nearly as much as he might be given the extent of the influence. And I think we might say something similar about the Jung-Simondon relationship. Because I mean just to finish this little riff, there’s a key moment at the end of a presentation that Simondon gives called “Form, Information, and Potentials,” which is a presentation that he gives to a panel of sort of peers and reviewers. I’m not sure if it’s actually a thesis defense per se, but it is an academic presentation which is intended to be a summary of his major thesis, which is the individuation book, and it’s to people like Paul Ricoeur and I think Jean Hyppolite, and like, big, heavyweight French philosophers of the previous generation. And at the very end of that presentation where he essentially summarizes the project on individuation, he has a paragraph about—which I could read, even though this chat today is not about Jung and Simondon necessarily, but on the Jungian schema of individuation, which he says Jung has derived from alchemy.
And even though, probably worth noting, that Jung only really starts—even though he mentions it from time to time—he starts his intensive engagement with alchemy from the sort of late twenties, thirties. So it’s really only in the second or the latter part of Jung’s career that he’s really devoted to alchemy, which, again, though, gives you some sense of what Simondon might have been reading, because I think a lot of people who refer to Jung have only read some of the early work.
Matt Segall: Whereas I think this is a suggestion that Simondon has had a deeper engagement with Jung than that. Anyway.
Timothy Jackson: If we take this schema, says Simondon, from Jung, and at which Jung takes from alchemy, and we generalize it and augment it by including information—so Simondon is very much also coming out of cybernetics and a critique of cybernetics, but a kind of immanent critique, because he’s taking on a lot from Wiener. We talked about this last time. And metastability from thermodynamics. And there Simondon does kind of presage the development of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. He has a vision of metastability which is in some sense kind of ahead of its time. But so, if we take the Jungian schema of individuation, we add information, we add metastability, then we can refound a new axiomatic—well, we can derive a novel axiomatic for refounding the human sciences, which is a kind of pompous claim. But this is his whole project. And so when he’s presenting that project to a bunch of heavy hitters, he chooses to reference Jung and alchemy, and say that building from this we can achieve what is ultimately, I think, the positive goal of Simondon’s whole philosophy. So the influence strikes me as pretty profound.
Matt Segall: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I mentioned these influences on Simondon and Simondon’s influence on Deleuze just to say that I’ve been derelict in actually spending time properly with Simondon’s work. But this article connecting him to Novalis and the whole romantic nature philosophy tradition, I think just really makes me feel even more derelict in not having read him yet. But I think the connection to alchemy—I’m glad you brought that up, because it seems to me that so much of what Novalis was suggesting about the relationship between human beings and nature as mediated by technology and technique, experimentation, is very much—Novalis is trying to offer a post-Newtonian—and as we know, Newton was an alchemist himself, but a post-Newtonian sort of recuperation of alchemy, in light of contemporary mechanistic science. How can we understand the machinic in a way that is not opposed to the living, the virtual, but is actually an extension of, or a medium within which and through which spirit or nature, spiritual nature—I think Spinoza is in the background here, too—but this idea of the poet-engineer, right, and the way of attempting to become imaginative in a way that would be magical in the sense of being able to transform the material world.
And that concepts aren’t just hidden away in the transcendental understanding. Concepts actually have effects in the material world. They have energetic consequences. And Novalis really wanted to, I think, in a very alchemical way, return the potency of this absolute idealism as a mode of philosophizing, turn the potency of it back toward nature so as to recognize the role of the human being as—I mean, he said, the human being is like—our role is to educate the earth. It’s not an exact quote, but he—the role of art is to transform nature. And so these are just all the alchemical themes that I’m trying to draw out here at the start, because I think they’re really important for understanding what’s motivating the whole romantic movement and Novalis in particular.
And then, with regard to Jung, yeah, he begins that deep study of the alchemical tradition, I think, in the very late twenties and then in the thirties. But he was—he kind of, during his creative illness in the second decade, around World War One, when he’s creating the Red Book, he’s kind of practicing alchemy without knowing it, and sort of engaging in—he’s not literally mixing chemicals and stuff, but he’s making mandalas. He’s painting. He’s doing active imagination in a way that is very much mediated by the arts, the art of writing, obviously, but also painting, sculpture, his whole tower. He’s exploring his imagination in a very material way.
Timothy Jackson: 100%, I think. So I’ve just recently been reading about the Jung-Pauli relationship and Jung’s usage of Pauli’s dream material in a bunch of both lectures and writings on individuation. And there’s just a couple of things here that I just pulled up. This is not entirely the subject of the discussion, but in terms of Jung’s systematic engagement with alchemy, so Jung himself said that he discovered alchemy in 1910 through the works of Herbert Silberer. Although there’s a note here, I think, saying that in fact, he got that book in 1912 or whatever. But anyway, most people link Jung’s deeper acquaintance with alchemy—so he mentions it a number of times in, like, Symbols of Transformation and stuff pretty early on. But then, for a lot of people, a really key sort of watershed moment is the encounter with Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower, which Jung then does interpret as an alchemical text, and he writes this famous commentary on it, which is really, really fascinating. It’s actually what I cribbed from for one of my papers. We’re talking about a connection between Jung and Dennett actually with the self or the ego-self, more in the Dennettian terms, and ego more in Jungian terms, because Jung, of course, has the self with a capital S as a much more encompassing notion as the center of narrative gravity, basically, which is the Dennettian term, but is essentially how Jung describes it in that commentary, and talks about the descent on the one hand, of ego into self. But essentially, the lowering of the threshold of consciousness, and essentially the dissolution of the ego narrative opening up to this possibility of individuation, which is very Simondonian in a sense, right, because it is a decrease in the constraints associated with the kind of—I think of the ego in this sense as a dissipative system in the psyche, but the constraints associated with the current arrangement of the individual, and indeed, like in the ego, the way the individual sees itself. Essentially, I am this kind of thing—a decrease in those kinds of constraints which is a kind of raising or accessing, or eliciting of that pre-individual charge in Simondonian terms, which is what enables one to become a novel individual, enables the passage of individuation. And so Jung is talking all about that stuff in that Secret of the Golden Flower commentary which he got in 1925. But then in this essay on the Pauli—basically, they’re just saying that his acquaintance and deeper acquaintance with alchemy was kind of gradual, and then he got very, very seriously into it in the early thirties, and by the mid-thirties, he’s sort of shifting towards a real focus on that.
Anyway, not that that matters all that much. But yeah, I think one of the resonances between Simondon and Novalis that’s drawn out here, and that fits with a lot of the things you were just saying about techne—this is just a very Aristotelian notion as well that techne mediates between the human and nature. And so there’s a way of getting into—which maybe we will get to—a sort of Simondonian and post-Simondonian notion, where I will sometimes say life is technical, right? Because niche construction, for example, is kind of a technicity in a way, right? It’s controlling some of the degrees of freedom of your environment, to create a kind of mediation between yourself and the environment beyond that constructed niche. So making a sort of slightly more stable or hospitable condition for oneself or whatever, and of course niche construction itself begins with just the fact that by being here I change here. By being in an environment, I will change that environment just by breathing out, or whatever it is. And of course you can go all the way back to, as my friend Jason Tuckwell does, to cyanobacteria and the great oxygenation event, and through their processes of respiration totally inadvertently, not as a kind of intentional, so far as we know, selected form of niche construction, but through the discovery of photosynthesis essentially and the production of oxygen as a waste byproduct, they completely change the biosphere, or really start to create the biosphere.
I think just one of the things—that resonance I was going to bring out is that they do talk about here, that Simondon’s philosophy of technology is a philosophy of nature. And so I think that the resonance with alchemy there is that alchemy is a philosophy of nature, right? So you could have almost taken alchemy—we just happen to be talking about alchemy out of the mix, and just said that it is a kind of—it’s a recovery of, or a prolongation of, or a revivification of philosophy of nature, as a pushback against the mechanical philosophy.
Matt Segall: Yeah. And just to emphasize the role of the poet for Novalis in both the relevance of poetry to the philosophy of nature. For Novalis, precisely through the way that techne, including writing, mediates between the human being and nature. Norton talks about how literary experimentation plays a role in technological thinking.
And the way that we are—I was just at this conference on AI and consciousness, and the way that we’re obsessed with large language models as potential carriers of consciousness, I think, is to me a symptom of the temptation that we have because of the power of the literary imagination to over-enchant our machines. But at the same time, it’s very apparent to me that there is a poetics. Heidegger has this whole meditation on poiesis and techne, and the way that they’re both forms of productivity and bringing forth, and yet techne for him is more like a challenging forth, I think, is how it’s often translated. I wish I knew the German. Whereas poiesis is a kind of—has this quality of letting be, or letting become.
Timothy Jackson: A clearing, opening a clearing in being.
Matt Segall: Yeah, and it seems to me that so much of our cultural life right now, which is shaped by metaphor, by the metaphors that poets initially construct and that then become ossified and just treated as everyday phrases—that cultural life is being challenged by these engineering achievements in the domain of machine learning and various advances in the realm of computation. And I think we were in desperate need of again, like poet-engineers in Novalis’s sense, to redescribe the situation, and that description is never merely sort of ethically neutral. All description has a hidden prescriptive element to it, just as all technologies have ethical consequences, moral consequences. And so I think, attending to literary experimentation and poetic playfulness in terms of how we language these things, and, like you and I are always talking about—well, animism, panpsychism, materialism—like, should we really be hammering on about materialism? When I think you and I are more concerned about the ways that a certain kind of deterministic mechanism is actually rooted in a very abstract and idealistic mode of thought. And we want to preserve this more concrete sense of materiality as lively and yeah, animate, right?
And so I think this is why I’m so excited to see how influential the romantic tradition was on Simondon, because I feel like we shouldn’t underestimate the role—like words are not just confetti or frosting for human beings. While we might think that words have less material consequence than the machines themselves, I think the very word “machine” carries such power and charge. And what do we even mean by that anymore? There’s a certain conception of the machine as just being parts outside of other parts that many people in biology who still want to use mechanistic metaphors are no longer actually wanting to be identified with. They have a different kind of cybernetic or even autopoietic or FEP-style mechanism, or in Guattari’s sense of the machinic. There are other ways of talking about this that I think help us avoid again that dualism between the organic and the mechanistic which I’m hopefully, I think, because of reading more Simondon and interacting with Mike Levin all the time, starting to loosen that dichotomization.
And so yeah, I mean, maybe I would love to hear your sense of how Novalis’s—which I don’t think it was mentioned in this article, but he eventually calls it his magical idealism—how that might interface with your own preference for a kind of animistic materialism. And whether or not—I think if you’re not familiar with magical idealism in Novalis’s sense, it’s kind of like his attempt to re-enchant the natural world and bring mind and organized matter back into a kind of synchronicity, to use the Pauli-Jung term. So that we’re no longer imagining that the human ego is anything but, as Schelling would put it, the highest potency of nature. And so is this magical idealism, on the one hand, could seem like the exact opposite of animistic materialism. But I really feel like they coincide. Especially.
Timothy Jackson: Well, it’s an immanentizing, right? So it’s a reembedding of mind. And in this essay, techne, technicity or mechanology in this Simondonian sense, which he’s following on from Canguilhem there, and Canguilhem’s notion of a generalized organology. But mechanology being about the way in which machines or technical objects undergo this process of concretization, which is a kind of evolutionary process which Simondon, in order to describe it, Simondon draws a lot on analogies from biological evolutionary processes. But a key thing here is that the technical object undergoes concretization. So it kind of becomes more what it’s—it’s a very teleological notion of evolution. So it becomes—and I mean, it sounds a little bit like Jung, and sometimes in places where I don’t particularly like Jung’s phrasing, but it becomes more what it’s supposed to be. In some sense, it becomes more faithful to some kind of technical schema which was in the mind of the inventor when they—
Matt Segall: Isn’t it also that it’s internalizing more of what it would need from its environment, so that it becomes more like a perpetual motion machine, not as a limit case, but not actually achieving that, but moving closer to that?
Timothy Jackson: Yeah, well, this is exactly where I’m going. I mean, I think we should get to the perpetual motion machine, because I think it’s a really interesting thing that Novalis was obviously somewhat obsessed with, like a lot of people have been. And there are ways, I think, in which that notion was sort of lambasted and ridiculed under the auspices of—in the context of the mechanical philosophy, whereas there’s this kind of romantic need or compulsion to resuscitate that idea. And I do think there are ways that we can and we should. So I think that’s somewhere that we should go. But yeah, this is absolutely what I was going towards—that basically the technical object achieves or undergoes this process of concretization. It doesn’t actually achieve it because it never becomes fully concrete. Whereas Simondon says that a natural object is concrete from the get-go. It achieves this through an integration into an assemblage basically outside of which it has no—to use some Guattarian—like powers of enunciation. It can’t do anything. It has no autonomy. It can’t do anything except in this relational network of users and designers and blah blah blah. And we can think there’s a lot of rich things you could dive off into here because there’s a notion of kind of exaptation here where one thing that a technical object nonetheless retains is this capacity to be abstracted from one context, from one kind of sociocultural technical assemblage and port it into another one. But there it will do other things. It will have different powers of expression or enunciation, and that could lead to a different concretization trajectory. It will become something else in that kind of context. And I think that it’s really important to note that this is one of the ways that in this paper and quoting Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, who’s a very noted Simondon scholar, they talk about this process.
And also about how there’s an analogy here, but it’s absolutely not about reducing the living organism to a machine, but where the analogy kind of almost doesn’t go far enough in the Barthélémy quotes that are given there, and maybe even in Simondon, is that yes, okay, a living object or a natural object, whatever, a bio-object, vital object is concrete from the get-go, because it emerges in this kind of relational nexus, and its genesis is enabled by the set of relations, both diachronic, evolutionary, and synchronic ecological. But it also similarly has no power of enunciation outside of a context. It has no autonomy in some idealized sense, right? And this is one of—you and I’ve hit on this a lot with a critique of autopoiesis, which is also a critique that Guattari makes of autopoiesis. I also think we should get there, because there’s an interesting connection with autopoiesis and a kind of naive image of a perpetual motion machine.
But so technical objects are not so different from natural objects in the sense that neither of them can do anything outside of a relational context, and either of them kind of—it just doesn’t make sense to imagine either the genesis of how they came to have the kind of form and capacities, powers that they have. But you can stick a natural object in a vacuum. It’s going to be dead pretty quickly.
Matt Segall: So on the organology and mechanology, just to get clear on that distinction—it’s basically a special-general distinction, right? Organs are specialized, and the idea with mechanology is this is a general way of exploring how we create new tools instead of how we use already existing tools. Is that more or less the distinction? Or what would you add to that?
Timothy Jackson: I think that the—it’s yeah. It’s actually confusing, because we have to trace it again through Canguilhem. And I would need to revisit some of this stuff, but my recollection of what Canguilhem is getting at is precisely moving in this direction towards mechanology, but I’m not sure if he uses that term. When he speaks about a generalized organology, he’s speaking kind of about treating technical objects like we would treat biological organs to some extent, so like as these organized systems that have again particular kind of functions, particular capacities in relational contexts. And so with Simondon, the distinction, I mean, as it’s mentioned in this paper as well, is more along the lines of what you’re saying, and he sort of implies that organology would be treating technical elements, or technical objects kind of in isolation and just studying them in themselves, in some sense, whereas a mechanology is about what they can do in contexts, and about how there, again, those—just as in biological evolution, the capacities, powers to do things in context are what actually shape their ongoing evolution. Right? So yeah, it’s less abstract because it’s not about taking the technical object and just studying it, and like, what are its properties in isolation. In some way, it’s more like, what does it do in this context? And how are its properties actually derived from what it is initially intended to do? Then the ways in which it fails, perhaps to do that initial thing well and has to be changed in this kind of concretization is an iterative conjectures and refutations kind of process of evolution, where you make the thing, and then only by having constructed it do you realize that, oh, my original schema didn’t take into account the fact that this part of the mechanism would be interfering with the function of this part of the mechanism, for example. So we need to make it more efficient or more effective by redesigning it. But that only happens in the process of actually making it. And then this kind of feedback, and again, always in a context, what is it intended to do? What can it do? Given this range of parameters, given this range of relations, and that—I do want to circle back to the magic idealism thing, because this is a kind of animism in the sense that animism is a relational philosophy. Or at least this is the way I’m treating animism, following people like Nurit Bird-David and others in the sort of so-called ontological turn in anthropology and the reclaiming of animism, and all of that—less about these hidden interiorities, less about consciousness.
And I also want to touch on this obsession with consciousness that you mentioned. But this notion of animism is less about that. But everything’s ground—I think, to use David Abram’s phrase—like with a tiny mind inside it, and more that what everything is, and so its powers of expression, its capacities, is relationally defined. What I am is a function of what I’m in relationship with. And this is how Simondon is thinking about the technical object. And of course, how in kind of evolution and ecology and biology, we think about biological organisms. But this is a generalization of a relational philosophy, right.
Matt Segall: So Norton’s article, I think, was connecting what Novalis calls the art of invention to mechanology, whereas organology would be something more like how do we use the tools that have already been invented? And then I’m also thinking of a connection to Deleuze and Guattari. But I think they actually got it through Artaud, the body without organs would be more like—
Timothy Jackson: Do they? Yeah.
Matt Segall: —the mechanological way of not being overly canalized by an already over-determined, over-specialized organ system or tool, and being able to, through a line of flight, discover some invent, some new way of engaging, finding mediation with the environment.
Timothy Jackson: Yeah. So I think, yes, they get the body without organs from Artaud. And I think there are very concrete ways to think about the body without organs, how to become a body without organs. And the kind of pre-individual charge—it’s a very Simondonian notion, even though they’re dressing it up in poetic terms from Artaud. I mean, it’s also a very perennial notion. It’s there in Jung, for example. But it’s kind of all over. But in Simondonian terms the body without organs would be kind of like the pre-individual charge that the individual maintains, which is all—we talked about this a lot last time—all of that kind of stochastic variation that’s going on within an individual organism which is grist for the mill of selection/elicitation. That is what enables the organism to become something other, a contextually elicited need to be something new. So I think you’re very right to connect it with the art of invention there absolutely, and Simondon is totally obsessed with that. One of his major seminar series is called Imagination and Invention. This is later, after all the individuation work and the mode of existence of technical objects, and all that. This is a huge, huge theme for him. Yeah.
Matt Segall: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you mentioned the relational animism that you would want to defend. And I think it’s—I just want to make sure people understand when you mentioned David Abram, and this idea that there are tiny minds inside of everything, that that would be the view he would critique. That’s kind of the constitutive panpsychist view, and David Abram would much prefer these days to talk about—if he’s going to use the term mind, he would want to locate it more like in the air between us, shared breath, rather than inside of us as separate beings. And so it’s very much a relational understanding of what animacy might mean. And I think Novalis, like Schelling in a way, they were seeking what I think we could call a relational absolute. Novalis is studying Fichte very closely, and I mean so was Schelling, and yet there was something—though Novalis does end up calling his view magical idealism, he and Schelling both wanted to—they felt that Fichte wasn’t doing justice to nature, to the materiality of the world, and was overemphasizing the I, the ego, the Ich. And maybe it would be instructive just to read what Novalis has to say about the Absolute or the unconditioned, and then what Simondon has to say about Novalis on the Absolute. I think there’d be a lot for us to discuss there. So Novalis says, and this is from Pollen, this sort of set of fragments, which is like the romantic genre Novalis writes:
“We look for the unconditioned or the absolute everywhere, and only ever find things or the conditioned. Once one has the passion for the absolute and cannot put it away, there is no way out but to constantly contradict oneself and to bring together opposing extremes. After all, the principle of contradiction inevitably arises, and one can only choose to make oneself suffer because of it, or desire to ennoble its necessity through the acknowledgement of free action.”
So there’s something about the deed there. Practical action that Novalis thinks overcomes what remains for thought, contradictory, right? And so, in other words, magic is a kind of—it’s a way of taking action. It’s an exertion of will in an effort to change the material world, the real world out there. And so, while thought ends up needing these principles, like non-contradiction, excluded middle, principle of identity, you very often, if you just remain in thought, you become—you reach these aporias. You reach these like—Kant shows with his antinomies. Thought can prove either that the universe is eternal, or that it was created. And like, that space is infinite, or that it’s bounded. We can’t decide purely intellectually or conceptually. But Novalis seems to be suggesting, well, this is where magic comes in. This is where action comes in as a kind of a transmutation or a transformation of an antithesis into something new, a new synthesis which would be the relational absolute, I think, where it’s not like the absolute is something that stands before the world or above the world. It’s something that the world is continually producing out of itself through, in a way, a magical deed.
And Novalis has this way of trying to hold together the miraculous and the lawful in Pollen also. So again, he’s always dealing with these contradictions, which—it’s typical of all romantics. They want to think in terms of polarities instead of—but—
Timothy Jackson: There might be a way within a lot of this thought that the lawful aspect is actually a little bit too beholden to the mechanical philosophy, because they’re trying—and I mean, you see this in Kant, obviously, in a big way. No one wants to be in contradiction with Newton at that time, so they want to find the degrees of freedom that remain, even if we acknowledge Newton’s Newtonian universe’s absoluteness in itself. And so there might be the absolute associated with thought and this freedom that is in some sense excessive of the mechanical philosophy, but there’s a kind of taking for granted of it still, to some degree. Maybe not in all of these guys. I think they are also showing the way to seeing that law-like behavior is a kind of limit, is an emergent product. And this would be very much Simondon’s way of seeing things, and obviously Peirce’s way of seeing things—that law-like behavior, it’s not that it’s not real, but it is a secondary product of the process of open-ended evolution or individuation.
Matt Segall: One—
Timothy Jackson: I sent you this quote from Novalis.
Matt Segall: Yeah, do you have it?
Timothy Jackson: Oh, yeah. He said—well, Novalis said—”the proper essence of romanticism is to make absolute, to universalize and to classify the individual moment, or the individual situation.” I don’t even know if that is a direct quote; it’s probably a paraphrase. This is why mediations—sorry, going on with Simondon. That was the end of Simondon quoting Novalis. “This is why mediations are always necessary to try to account for this paradox. The myth, the narrative, the sign elevated to the status of symbol are attempts that present a topology of being and a systematic of time, in which a place or a moment are both a place among places, a moment among moments, and an exceptional place, a center of the value-laden world, or an exceptional instant, an absolute origin, an absolute end, polarizing the order of time.”
And I think there’s a way in which Simondon does want to take from that, but he’s also going to critique it. So he says, actually going on from that: “The romanticist searches for places and times of exception which are at once ends and limits, beings and origins, elements and the source that produces around it a field which is not this source, but comes from it and unifies beings.” It sounds so Simondonian, actually. But these are Simondon’s words, obviously. I think he’s approvingly talking about this, but then he says—and not just a moment—he’s actually turning against them there. And he’s saying they inevitably absolutize the individual, which is his persistent critique of the romantics. This is what he thinks about Schelling as well, and I don’t know if it’s just a straw man to be honest, or it’s a way that he’s trying to differentiate, maybe unconsciously amplifying the originality of his own thought. Because this is what he says you must not do, and it’s sort of like he’s saying they get so much right, these guys, but they always backslide at the last moment and absolutize the individual, whereas the individual always has to be the momentary achievement of the process which is, again, a momentary and ephemeral product, not absolute. But in terms of the relational absolute, he will also, of course, say that relations are primary. There are no relata without relations. I think he’s very much in this ballpark with these guys, but he wants to preserve a certain distance from them. He’s very much the poet-engineer, obviously—a quintessential example of that, really, because he is an actual engineer. But he’s also very clearly deeply steeped in the history of philosophy.
Some say he’s a very bad writer, but he can be very poetic, and he sees the process of writing as an instantiation, an embodiment of a practice of individuation. He will totally indulge himself, I think, in long, meditative, flowing passages that he doesn’t then edit afterwards. But it’s showing how the thought is emerging through this circling of different refrains, or indeed, through very idiosyncratic and exhaustively detailed descriptions of technical schemas. And then he’ll emerge from that at the end of chapters, or in little sections, with these very dense little pithy passages where he is condensing—but not synthesizing, because he’s anti-dialectical—the insights that are generated through that process of working through in the writing itself.
Matt Segall: Yeah, I mean, it almost sounds like, just listening to you describe Simondon’s wanting to honor but also distance himself from the romantics, that he’s exemplifying precisely what he’s critiquing in them by distinguishing his individual approach from his inheritance of the romantics. Which is—to be a romantic is to long for Symphilosophie, to this collective life that’s just this effervescent dialogue that gives rise to new ideas that you can’t really claim, you don’t know who actually came up with it. It just arises in the midst of friendship. And then yet this other tendency to, of course, want to be the creative genius that nobody else understands, and to break away from the pack. It’s this tension of opposites that you have to hold, that contradiction.
But yeah, I mean, there’s just a few lines from Novalis, and I can’t help—I want to share a few more of these that relate to what you were saying. And this significance of individuation, I think, is coming through in this one. It’s number 28 for those following along at home: “The highest task of education is to take control of one’s transcendental self, to be at the same time the I of one’s ego. The lack of appreciation and understanding for others is less strange without a perfect self-understanding. One will never learn to truly understand others.”
Timothy Jackson: “Perfect self-understanding”—I mean, I think in the Romantics, and it’s very much there in Jung, and I do think Simondon is better actually on this, at not rushing to the limit, as I say, not always totalizing, and in fact, explicitly pushing back against that move. And I think this is one of the best things—when I’m reading Jung through Simondon, which I think is a useful thing to do, Simondon is always problematizing those images of unity and totalization. Because things are more than a unity. And I think that is—I’m not going to pick on the use of “perfect,” I mean, I guess I am—but that’s the thing that Simondon wants to critique specifically in the Romantics, I think: their tendency to absolutize an image of unity or individuality.
Matt Segall: Yeah. But then he also says that we will never fully comprehend ourselves, but we will and can do much more than comprehend ourselves. So again, I think that’s between the thought and the deed. We can’t comprehend ourselves, but we can—I don’t know what he means—perform somehow through action, magically manifest, without understanding.
Timothy Jackson: This is a connection again to both animism and machinism, and so machinic animism, which we should get to in a moment.
Matt Segall: Yeah, we could get to that right now.
Timothy Jackson: Well, I wanted to—there was something that you said before about Goethe. And I wanted to also—because this essay, Brian Norton says in the abstract, and then I’m not sure if it’s even mentioned in the body of the essay, that Simondon draws on Goethe and E.T.A. Hoffmann in passing in “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.” He certainly draws on Hoffmann in passing. I’m not sure that he mentions Goethe in that book. At least there’s no index in the published version, and when I control-F my PDF of it, Goethe’s name does not come up. However, Goethe is mentioned elsewhere in a number of places by Simondon, and he is mentioned in Simondon’s “On the History of the Notion of the Individual,” which is a very long, like 200-page essay that Simondon did as part of the background research for his big project on individuation. He talks about Goethe there.
He’s talking about Herder, actually, right before Goethe, and he says: “Nature is then a force in becoming that produces new forms within the limits of the type that it has assigned itself,” starting with a primordial type. So I think Simondon will want to push back again on this notion of a primordial type. But “nature is then a force in becoming that produces new forms within the limits of the type that it has assigned itself. Nature is creative. This doctrine is also held by Goethe, who opposes his theory of epigenesis to that of the emboîtement”—so the preformation basically of germs, the pre-assembly of germs—”and also to that of the plenum of forms. Forms do not belong to the individual, nor even to the species which is in becoming, but to nature.”
And I think that resonated quite a bit with what you were saying about Goethe’s attention to what’s in between us, essentially. And that could be the relational absolute. That’s also for Simondon both the pre-individual but also the trans-individual. So that collective individuation is possible for Simondon because all of the individuals that are entering into relations have a shared charge of the pre-individual. So collective individuation, trans-individuation, or the trans-individual realm or layer of organization is enabled by the fact that everyone is embedded in the pre-individual.
And I think that’s quite resonant with what he’s attributing to Goethe there, particularly in forms not belonging to the individual, nor even to the species which is in becoming, but to nature. I still think there’s a way that—at least this is what Simondon wants to say—that these guys all sort of fall back on a notion of—there’s some kind of preformationism in their thought.
Matt Segall: Well, it’s the attempt to think processes of metamorphosis, and so to see whatever it is that is the Urpflanze—the archetypal dynamic form or potency of the plant—is somehow, while itself, the plant itself goes through a metamorphic process. It’s also a metamorphosis of whatever is animal, and whatever is chemical, and whatever is atomic. Nature is one impossible-to-decipher formative pattern that’s never the same twice, and yet is recognizably similar, that goes through this process of metamorphosis. And what Goethe does with his study of plant metamorphosis, Schelling then takes and projects onto the cosmos at large and tries to understand a process which you could easily misread as preformationism writ large, or you could understand the struggle towards a relational absolute and a sense of a formative patterning or a potency that is—I guess fractal is the best way to understand it. It’s like there’s a self-similarity, but there’s no fixed origin. It’s an ongoing process of origination.
And if you only think in terms of substance ontology, then you can only read what Schelling’s doing as preformationism. But if you see what might be possible in a process ontology, which isn’t just a new set of ideas but a whole new methodology also that brings art and science together, then you can, I think, avoid just collapsing it into a slightly modernized preformationism. It’s actually—yes, there’s building, there’s formation, but it is an expressive and evolutionary formation that cannot just be coiled back up again into a pre-existing, already actual unity.
Timothy Jackson: Yeah, no, I think that’s really important. And again, I think that is very much putting these guys in the territory that Simondon would want them to be in, the territory that Simondon is trying to develop himself. And actually, when I was planning this morning to look over my scribblings on these papers—and we will get to the Dan McQuillan paper, because I think it’s a really good one—I got stuck immediately on Novalis’s reference to the perpetuum mobile, and that actually led me down this rabbit hole where I ended up thinking about the difference between the Simondonian image of the pre-individual or the relationship between that and Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology. And maybe we’ll get to this. But one of the real challenges there is, again, if you are trying to avoid preformationism—this is the thing that you and I hit on all the time—how are you going to account for something getting going? If you have a completely structureless beginning, how would structure come into the world?
And Simondon is trying not to—at least we talked about it last time—he’s pointing to a limit. And the limit is this pre-individual, pre-phasic being, but which nonetheless has these incipient gradients and tensions in it. It can’t be absolutely flat and featureless. And possibly an issue—not that I have intimate familiarity with all the things he’s written and said about it—but with Penrose’s scheme is that what, at least at the level of the geometry, characterizes the conformal relationship between the distant past, the origin, and the omega of a cosmic epoch essentially is a kind of absolute featurelessness. And I think you would need a Simondonian notion where you’re saying, well, there’s no structure at this point, but there’s a kind of incipient canalization of process from which structure can arise. And it’s again, not describing the determinant actual conditions of origin. It’s kind of like, what is the limit concept we configure to be able to begin? What are we going to posit that’s minimally loaded in order to be able to begin reasoning about a process of evolution?
Matt Segall: I think Goethe says something like “science is the history of science,” and that connects to what you’re saying, because we have no unmediated access to the origin. And so whenever we—to say science is the history of science, it’s similar to what Novalis says, which is quoted in Norton’s article, that every science has a double history. There’s the history of the object that science is studying, and then there’s the history of the science itself and the concepts that science deploys in order to understand its objects. And so we have to, in order to understand the history of the universe, we also have to understand the history of science first, which makes it impossible for us to imagine we could have unmediated access to the objective facts of the matter about where the universe came from, because we’re always already caught up in a cultural process which is clearly historical, and we can’t get to the bottom of being in the cultural context. So what makes us think we could get to the bottom of matter in the natural context?
Timothy Jackson: For sure. And I mean, we just happen to be situated at a particular position in a history. And whenever—we’re always saying this—but whenever we look far enough back on any evolutionary lineage that we’re trying to reconstruct, we always hit a limit. We hit a singularity which is not a determinate object or origin. It’s precisely the limit. It’s a convergence and disappearance where beyond that point—and it, of course, depends on the amount of evidence that you can extract from extant variation to infer, to enable that reconstruction of that evolutionary history, and that can change. We might be able to see further and further back into time as we recover more evidence, as indeed is part of the recent history of contemporary biology, and learning to infer evolutionary histories through processes like comparative genomics and that sort of thing. But nonetheless, the principle is always going to remain that far enough back you’re going to encounter a limit.
And I think a big part of Simondon’s project is trying to figure that limit without binarizing it in the way that—well, there’s the absolutely irrational, characterless creativity as the ultimate, and then this absolutely irrational leap which is the origin of the Ur-attractor, the primordial nature of God. And Simondon is actually trying to figure that liminal zone, but also at the same time to say, well, we can’t go beyond that. But we must avoid preformationism at all costs, which is what I had read in the last session that we had where he says—without the prior formation, a signification that incorporates the data of the problem, albeit without the prior, only appears through the real becoming of resolutive invention.
That’s going to be a bit abstract the way that I jumped into that. But what I’m hoping to do—and this has been a bit of a deviation from—I was going to try and segue into machinism by going back to what Simondon had to say on Novalis. I can try and do that, or you can respond, and then I’ll try and do that.
Matt Segall: Well, I mean, I was just thinking about how I think for Novalis, at least—I don’t know if this is true for Simondon or not—but that limit that we reach when we try to decipher an origin or something isn’t to be understood as a kind of enclosure, like as a limit to our capacity to relate to something absolute. In the German idealist sense, the proper sense of the absolute—I mean, there’s so much in Novalis about finding through an inward journey, much like Jung’s process of active imagination and the dismemberment of the psyche and a journey into the collective unconscious, that you can actually—that bottoms out into that same limit.
Which I think when you—I think what Novalis’s point is, is that when we—there’s a limit to our capacity to recollect the past, and there’s a limit to our capacity to find the bottom of ourselves. And because those two limits connect, it actually allows us to form like a kind of lemniscate, and what was limited then becomes unlimited, becomes infinite, becomes absolute. And so what’s absolute is not the self. What’s absolute is not being, but the way in which they coincide. And that is another way of rendering what magical idealism means for Novalis, I think. This hidden correspondence between psyche and cosmos. It’s another way of talking about synchronicity again in Jung and Pauli’s sense.
And so yeah, I just wouldn’t want to, at least for Novalis, leave the impression that that sense of the irretrievability of the origin means that we are limited. It’s actually a sign of our intimacy with the absolute. And I don’t know to what extent Simondon goes there. But I think there’s a kind of incarnational element in—he’s a Christian alchemist, right? And so the alchemical act of transmutation is akin to this theurgical incarnational process whereby the human becomes divine. It’s almost like—not that Novalis was unhappy—but there’s something like Novalis is a more enchanted version of Nietzsche, or something. But there’s a similar call to like, look, this old god is dead. The new God must be created by us. It’s a kind of transformation of the human to become, in Nietzsche’s sense, worthy of the deed of killing God. But I think Novalis is less—he seems a little bit more sane than Nietzsche, I guess. Is there anything comparable in Simondon?
Timothy Jackson: Well, I think so, because I think there’s something very comparable to—I guess what Schelling would call a kind of indivisible remainder. That our encounter with the limit is because individuation is always ongoing or evolution is always ongoing, that it has this irreducibly pre-individual—not to try and load it with too many other terms—but you talked about this a lot last week as well, this irreducibly irrational, if you want, element to it. That it’s always a kind of—people may criticize a tendency to want to emphasize a going beyond, or a need to generate something new all the time. But the real point is that any achievement of structure is an achievement, is a product of the process which is just continually moving past that. It’s not necessarily about valorizing that ongoing genesis of novelty, or about devaluing the achievements of structure which function as enabling constraints and canalizing formal causes really on that ongoing, open-ended process that is, in some sense, incessantly flowing through and around and haloing that structure.
But I think it’s an obvious correlate of having this idea of there being this pre-individual charge that is always excessive of any structure, which means is always excessive of the purely rational, essentially of the form that you’re going to encounter these limits. And so the fact that we encounter the limit is the sign that we’re embedded in an active process. If we could fully reconstruct a past with a very determinate form, it would suggest that there was some kind of—again a different use of the term absolute—but absolute constraint. It would be more indicative of a preformationist mode of thinking.
How we then—just to try and do this quick segue through this—how we figure these limits. So Simondon, when he’s talking about Novalis there, he’s saying that mediations are always necessary to try and account for the paradox—the paradox of the existence of form and that which exceeds it, or the paradox of the origin itself. How do you figure the origins of structure without front-loading the possibility landscape, without regressing into a kind of preformationism? So he says mediations are always necessary to try to account for this paradox. The myth, the narrative, the sign elevated to the status of symbol are attempts that present a topology of being—which is really what Simondon is doing with the pre-individual, and it is a very topological image.
So he’s doing exactly what he’s attributing to—he’s trying—he’s sciencing it up as much as he possibly can, so he’s not just having recourse to myth or narrative or whatever. But he’s understanding, I think, that no matter how sciencey you are, no matter how much you’re taking from these technical schemas, you’re still going to be at that point where you are engaging—you would always say the mythopoetic, the narrative. I wrote a huge paper on this about evolution and narrative. So that use of language and natural language, and a kind of exploitation of the vagueness—but the virtuous vagueness of natural language in myth, poetry, narrative, etc.—is a way that we are forced to figure these limits.
And the way I wanted to bring this towards machinism, if possible, was—well, there’s quite a few things to try and connect here. Again going back to Simondon himself being this poet-engineer, and his writing as an act of individuation itself. So really thinking about then writing as a form of techne. It is itself a canalizing, a constraining, indeed a canalizing. We talked about this last week—language is a way that we canalize spontaneous brain function. I mean, that could be a very reductive way of figuring it. But again, to the extent that you’re listening to me, or anyone’s listening to this and learning from it, or even just perceiving it, there is a selecting, canalizing effect that the words are having on a latent capacity for novelty, for difference that a brain has, given all of the spontaneous and un-pre-canalized activity that’s going on at the level that is relevant to the canalization by language.
And so language is doing that. Speaking, writing is a doing. And this, I think, is the—I’m trying to connect it to the magical idealism here—that even when we’re just thinking and not writing or speaking to one another, we are doing something. And in fact, thought is a kind of behavior—which is not to try and reduce things to some sort of gross behaviorism—but to highlight the difference actually between the machinic animism in which every kind of thing that’s going on in an embodied system, including its cryptic behaviors, are doings in the world which are not only already behaviors, but which have immediate and direct effects on the more macro or externalized behaviors that that body is engaging in.
And this is the notion of machinism. Something that acts directly in the world, has powers of expression, is always embedded in really the plane of immanence. Everything is acting on everything at some level, and so getting away from that idea of the sequestered, hidden mind of the Western obsession with consciousness, and thinking more in terms of this relational animistic process of just always being embedded in real material systems that are constantly changing each other through doings, including those doings that are cryptic at some level.
Matt Segall: And so, as animal bodies, we have this sensory-motor form of selfhood and perceptible presence in the world, but we also, as human beings, as language possessors or possessed by it—the narrative self is a kind of machinic assemblage, and we’re constantly constructing ourself. And so when Novalis talks about magic, or when any of the German idealists talk about spirit, I think they’re talking about the power that words have. What is the self? What is personhood? These are linguistic constructs, which makes it seem like we’re saying it’s not real. But linguistic constructs have reshaped the planet at a geological level. So these are very real things.
And so when we think about how the romantics get over the Kantian split between concepts and percepts or intuition, but also between the transcendental self that’s free and the determined, mechanistic, natural world that appears to our senses—the romantics, I think, get over that by recuperating magic, alchemy, and making it clear that the miraculous is just the fact that through this machinic assemblage and this expression of desire, which of course meets friction—and so even Fichte had this sense of the check to the ego.
Timothy Jackson: That’s right, yeah. The Anstoss, which is necessary for—
Matt Segall: It is necessity itself, Ananke in Plato’s sense. It’s exactly that concept.
Timothy Jackson: Yeah, and necessary for doing anything, though. And I mean, to put it in the Plato sense, it’s necessary that the khôra, the khoric necessity has a kind of resistance to it, otherwise it wouldn’t be malleable—you wouldn’t be able to mold it. It can’t take the form precisely because of necessity. But it couldn’t take the form at all if it didn’t have that elasticity, that plasticity to it which is a kind of resistance. Simondon, again so good on this when he talks about the deficiencies of the hylomorphic schema and goes through the brick molding example. The clay is exerting a force on the mold, which is, of course, itself a materialized form. It’s obviously anything but immaterial. But the clay is itself exerting a reciprocal force, and it’s in the internal resonance between the forces that the form-taking actually occurs.
Matt Segall: So, we’ve had this conversation before about Aristotle, and how we, I think, retroactively think we understand what he meant by his hylomorphism when I feel like the reference in his perceptual encounter with the world, for what a lot of his words are referring to in terms of his experience of the world, I think are different than our current perceptions. There’s an evolution of consciousness which unfolds, which isn’t just new ideas to interpret the same perceptions. I think Aristotle was actually inhabiting a perceptual world very different from ours.
Timothy Jackson: I think it would be beneficial for us actually to also read Simondon on Aristotle, because I think there’s a tendency when people are talking about Simondon and his critique of hylomorphism to imagine that he’s saying, “Oh, Aristotle is—” he’s dismissing him. But Aristotle is like one of the most important philosophers to Simondon, who is always showing the middle way. He doesn’t get it perfectly right, and so Simondon is critiquing him. But at the same time, he’s very much building on Aristotle all the time. He’s actually much more dismissive of Plato, even though he has his own Platonism, too, like everybody, than he is of Aristotle. He makes a lot of usage of Aristotle, and really thinks he is the philosopher in some sense.
Matt Segall: When we say the soul is the form of the body, I think it’s very difficult to understand what that really meant for Aristotle. And in our modern time it’s much easier to imagine that forms are just something in the mind that are these abstractions that aren’t in any way materialized and have nothing to do with how we relate in the betweenness that constrains our interactions. But I think for Aristotle when he says something like that, he means not that the soul is inside of the body. If anything, the body is inside of soul as a relational matrix.
But I think Novalis actually is able to render this in terms that are more digestible to the modern ear. So he says—Norton quotes him and says, selfhood for Novalis represents a material point of relation between machine and milieu. Quote Novalis: “The seed of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds touch, where they interpenetrate. It is at every point of their interpenetration.” And so this is a relational notion of the soul that I think might be closer to what Aristotle meant originally. Because remember, for Aristotle, with his contact epistemology, as I’ve heard it called, when you know the form of anything in the world, you’re actually—that form is almost being radiated into your soul from the soul of the thing that you’re coming to know. And so there’s a—it’s almost like—
Timothy Jackson: He didn’t have this language, but it’s almost like we need an electromagnetic theory of knowledge or something to understand how these forms vibrate from one location to another and become known.
Matt Segall: And isn’t that to just go back to magic? Sympatheia? That sympathetic magic that by coming into this resonance with an object and thus embodying, manifesting the form of that object within oneself, you can gain a certain kind of control over the degrees of freedom of that object. I mean, that’s the free energy principle, if you want. But actually, Simondon is also really great on this—that the organism, and again, there’s a long history of thinking in this way obviously—but it’s fascinating how the technical and the magical do fuse in fascinating ways. So Simondon would talk about the organism as internalizing an analog of the milieu.
And this is the sense in which an organism—not has in some idealist sense—but is a map or a model or an analog of its embedding environment. And it needs to track the dynamics of its environment in a relatively high fidelity way, but sparsely coupled to them. And so the key point there is that tracking them and maintaining an analog of them is not fusing with them, but is precisely what is required to differentiate yourself from them as well, because fusing with them is just dissipating into your environment. And then your dynamics are the same as the dynamic. You’re not an analog of it. You’re just a homologue of it. But in order to track relevant patterns in the environment and differentiate yourself from them, you need to maintain this analogical relationship to them as well, and that can extend to enabling you to take control over some of the degrees of freedom of your environment, which is the technical. That’s technicity. That is also, as we say, the magical in this sympathetic doctrine.
Matt Segall: Yeah. So there’s this sort of ethos that comes out of Fichte’s absolute or sometimes it’s just called subjective idealism, where the freedom of the human is meant to—because nature is nothing but the projection of the ego to meet, to provide resistance so that we can become self-conscious—the end goal, the project of history is for the freedom of the ego to master, to no longer need the resistance of something that appears external to us.
And I think Novalis is trying to suggest something slightly different from that, because he really wants to acknowledge, like Schelling, the autonomy of nature and not make it—because you read Fichte and then you see where the direction industrial civilization went, and you’re like, oh, actually, we might have thought this was a materialism. But it’s Fichte’s idealism that’s been playing out here where nature is perceived as mere mechanism, and human freedom is just approaching that mechanism as there for the picking to serve our own aggrandizement.
Timothy Jackson: Yeah. And it’s the opposite of the establishment of the perpetuum mobile. Because by trying to dominate, by taking resources from nature and using all the low entropy sources of energy that we can find and just burning them up, we are running things down towards a very particular end, and not enabling this open-ended evolutionary process to occur, which is a form of perpetual motion which may yet be scientifically justifiable. But let’s get to that. Let’s circle back and see if we can get there through the Dan McQuillan paper to some degree.
Matt Segall: I do have to say—my friend was calling me like ten times, and a text came through. A friend of mine’s having a minor emergency, not terrible emergency. But I’ll probably need to end about 2:15 my time. So that’s like fifteen minutes from now. Unfortunately.
Timothy Jackson: That’s a bummer, and obviously particularly a bummer that your friend is having a hard time. Well, let’s just touch on this then. I mean, there’s a lot in that McQuillan paper, and also the development of McQuillan’s thought, which I’m not super familiar with. But I heard him on Acid Horizon podcast like a year ago, maybe, talking about his book “Resisting AI.” And then I did order that book, but it never came, as I mentioned to you. But having read this paper on data science’s machinic neoplatonism, which we’re obviously not going to be able to do justice to now, I’m once again motivated to get a copy of that book.
But I think one of the real interesting connections here again is to this notion of machinism, and just to your point earlier, and what you said in your talk at the Edge Esalen conference—I read the transcript of which I thought was just so bang on. And obviously, it’s what I think as we’ve talked about it a lot. But there’s an obsession with consciousness. And in this context, like, are the machines conscious? And as you were saying, it’s a—yeah, that’s an interesting question. But there’s a concern that it might distract us from what they are doing to our consciousness, which is their machinic doing in the world.
And I would even go further and just say there’s an obsession with consciousness altogether here—their consciousness, what they’re doing to our consciousness. But it’s not consciousness. It’s behavior. What are—how are they animating us? And part of that is consciousness—part of that is, how are they changing what we think and feel, and all that. But what we think and feel is various forms of behavior, and they animate us. And so how are these things manipulating and shaping our behavior and our sociocultural milieu, so collective individuation, and of course, therefore, cultural evolution over longer periods of time? That’s the real question.
And this does hinge on their machinic aspects in the way that obviously it comes from Guattari originally and developed by Deleuze and Guattari. And then in this McQuillan paper he’s talking—we need to be focused on the direct intervention in the world that these models and the algorithms by which—he only talks about algorithms. But there is a distinction here between models and algorithms which is probably worth making—these models and the algorithms that are used to develop them are the direct interventions that they’re having in the world.
And I actually really like—and I think it’s prescient that—and you may want to defend Neoplatonism here—but that he aligns this with a form of Neoplatonism which is a preformationist vision, and this idea that there is a hidden language of reality. So he talks about Copernicus and Galileo and the Neoplatonism in the genesis of modern science. But there is a hidden language of reality that we don’t have direct access to, but it’s mathematical. Obviously it’s quantitative. And these machines now, in some sense, because they are operating purely on quantifiable data—so the datafication of things, the translation of all data of all kinds of media into numbers essentially—are acting directly in that hidden layer of reality which is the really real layer of reality, the true language. So in some sense they have access to something that we don’t, and this is reinforced, in fact, by their intrinsic opacity, so that no one really understands exactly what’s going on, even though we can understand the mathematical principles with very high fidelity. There is an intrinsic opacity to how these things work.
And what I think is prescient about it, and where I was hoping we would go—and I guess we’re not going to do perpetual mobility today either, that would have been fun—is you shared with me, and I haven’t read the paper yet, so anything I say about it has to be taken with the usual grain of salt and the realization that I’m not yet an enlightened being. But the so-called Platonic representation hypothesis where people are talking about how these LLMs with different training data and supposedly different algorithmic processes converge on a universal space of semantics. And so it’s a Platonic space.
And obviously, I think this is—well, I don’t want to be rude. But there’s a lot of critical things to say about that notion. But I think McQuillan, who is saying that data science—this is also a really important point—data science hides behind its claim that it’s just a model, it’s not actually representing anything objective, but that it has this unholy alliance with a certain kind of realist with a capital R, Platonist metaphysics which elides that apparent commitment to the “oh, it’s just a model.”
And I think that’s getting worse is basically the point. I’m compressing a lot of things to say. Now I think that’s getting worse. And what I was talking to you about during the week is that there’s an unholy alliance now between this kind of constructivist perspective, which to some extent can also be talked about in its relationship to second-order cybernetics, which is basically—in the Heinz von Foerster sense—we construct our own realities. There is a thing in itself, but the environment in itself contains no information. It’s noumenal. So naive Kantianism and reality is a pure construct, and of course you’ve been critical of that in the FEP discussions, and then—
Matt Segall: Strangely enough, also in enactivism, you could make a similar case. That that’s what they’re saying.
Timothy Jackson: Yeah. And I mean, well, they’re coming out of second-order cybernetics in a really big way as well. And this is why we need this process-relational, constructive realist alternative. But there’s this increasingly concerning alliance between that and this tacit Platonism which might seem to be the opposite. But in some sense, structurally they collapse into each other in the figure of at least a naive reading of Kant. Because there is a reality. It’s noumenal, though we don’t have any access to that. So we are stuck in the world of appearances, to put it into Platonic language, and we are forever—unlike the demiurge, which is now the machinic algorithmic processes which have direct access to the world of forms—we’re forever divorced from that, stuck in the world of appearances. But hey, isn’t it lucky that we have these machines that can mediate for us and create the future for us?
Matt Segall: I mean, I think the way that—I really agree with you about the hard problem of consciousness framing not really being that helpful when you just get over consciousness in that sense. But I feel like I have the same reaction to the simulation hypothesis where people who take that seriously—I mean, I like, the Matrix is a really cool movie. Gnosticism is interesting as a historical phenomenon, but to take it seriously as somehow metaphysically explanatory, which is often suggested to be by people who do take it seriously, is like—it’s a bit like panspermia as an explanation for the origin of life. It’s like, okay, I guess we’ll save that problem for later then. It just pushes the buck back. And I find it singularly unconvincing and a symptom of misplaced concreteness and a symptom of, yeah, a kind of tacit Platonism.
Yeah, I mean, I recognize the trend you’re speaking to, and I think there’s a tendency to want to draw on a caricatured form of Platonism that doesn’t also inherit all of the problems that Plato himself raises about his own theory of forms in the dialogues. And so we need to be careful there. But I talked about this with Victoria Trumbull the other day. She wrote this dissertation on Bergson and Augustine about memory and the way in which those who have a computational understanding of—in the way that thought would be reduced to information processing, a digital type of computation, Turing machine computation. I know there are more sophisticated forms of computational thinking about this, but that this is a kind of—as Victoria pointed out—a kind of covert Pythagorean mysticism, to treat, to reify information as somehow having causal agency when information, as far as I can tell, is more like a way of measuring something. And so I always like to retort to the information ontology people that saying reality is made of information is like saying reality is made of inches or meters. It’s just a kind of category error, misplaced concreteness.
Timothy Jackson: Well, I think that’s where—we talked about it extensively last week, so people can go to the second half of our discussion last week. That’s where I think, if we are renovating the concept of information and also recognizing that Wiener is working on that exactly contemporaneous to Shannon and Weaver. So it’s not that one should necessarily have precedence here. There is a renovated concept of information which is developed by Wiener and Simondon. It’s a very big deal for Simondon, information, but it’s a very strong critique of the reductionist, purely quantitative form of information as measurement, as number of states, basically.
I mean, there’s so much to go in here, because this could also link us to the perpetuum mobile discussion. And in fact, the way that the information perspective on entropy does change the way we might feel about things like heat death, for example, and so the possibility of open-ended evolution. But again, we’ll have to save that for another time.
Matt Segall: Well, just on the heat death thing, I’m just looking for excuses to read more lines from Pollen. But Novalis says, line fragment 19, he says: “Life is the beginning of death. Life is for death’s sake. Death is the end and beginning at the same time, separation and closer interconnection to the self at the same time. The reduction is completed through death.”
Timothy Jackson: Can I read you something from Simondon in a second? Yeah, go on.
Matt Segall: Yeah. Well, just to speak to this new reading of thermodynamics, in terms of open flows rather than idealizing as if the universe as a whole was a closed system. There’s no such thing as a closed system. This is an idealization. And so, rather than thinking that thermodynamics implies that just everything’s running down, there’s plenty of room for—even, I mean, look at the role that death plays in evolution. It’s creative.
Timothy Jackson: And I mean, even if you’re thinking about just perpetual motion in a very gross sense, at heat death at maximum dissipation and entropy, it’s not that there’s no movement, it’s that there’s no correlation amongst the movements. It’s maximally chaotic. But it’s definitely moving.
But yeah, there’s this notion which I think I probably talked to you about before, but I don’t think on any of our videos, of a Simondonian death drive—and whether or not this is a death drive is a moot point right now. But Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, who’s actually quoted in that Novalis article, he has a great essay on the Simondonian death drive. Whether it should be considered a death drive or not—but Simondon says, and this is really important for the Jung connection actually with Simondon where we began. So this is something I’ll be developing a lot partly because there’s a death drive connection, so psychoanalytic connection, but also because there’s a very strong connection to death and rebirth mythology, and so katabasis. And so the notion of psychic katabasis, and the little deaths that occur in initiation processes, and all of that which is a huge part of Jung’s conception of individuation.
But Simondon says: “The fact that the individual is not eternal seems like something that should not be considered accidental. Life in its entirety can be considered a transductive series. Death, as the final event, is nothing but the consummation of a process of amortization”—neologism, Simondonian neologism—”that is contemporary with each vital operation, in so far as they are operations of individuation. Every operation of individuation deposits death in the individuated being, which is therefore progressively charged with something it cannot eliminate. This amortization is different from the degradation of the organs. It is essential to the activity of individuation.” So it basically means that things have to die in order for change to keep—
Matt Segall: Keep taking place.
Timothy Jackson: Right.
Matt Segall: The more Simondon I read, the more I’m like, oh, that’s where Deleuze got that from.
Timothy Jackson: Yeah, he’s obviously a really huge influence there, absolutely.
Matt Segall: Yeah, I mean, there’s a line in “What is Philosophy?” with Guattari about every thought—I mean, I’m just paraphrasing it—every thought creates a little death in us and kills the neurons that we’re using to think it with, which is an interesting sort of poetic flourish. But it just speaks to the creative role of entropy in allowing freedom from canalization—it opens out, opens up possibility. It’s not just—we get the wrong idea when we think of it as a running down.
Timothy Jackson: Well, exactly, because all that stochastic behavior which we talked about last week, two weeks ago, whenever it was, in the organism—obviously from genetic mutation itself, but stochastic gene expression, behavior itself, spontaneous brain activity, Brownian motion in and between cells of molecules—that’s all entropic from one point of view, but that is the generation of variation, of states that are potentially constrainable, that are potentially canalizable, that novel arrangements can emerge from. And this is the non-equilibrium thermodynamic story.
And Simondon himself says it very directly. But it’s weird how this still hasn’t reformed the dominant paradigm of contemporary physics. And Simondon is saying this before people like Ilya Prigogine and others—well, Prigogine is working at that time, but hasn’t really done his own philosophical treatment of his work. And Simondon’s like, look, closed systems are very, very rare, basically in nature. Almost unheard of. It’s much more normally the case that systems are in an open relationship with their milieu, and thus have this potentially open-ended capacity for evolution.
Matt Segall: It could be that the professionalization of science has created a situation where things have become so overly specialized and canalized that we need more entropy to free things up so that they’re capable of catching up—so that the scientific establishment as a whole is capable of catching up with what Simondon’s already pointing out about thermodynamics, and we can let go of this. Because I just feel like there’s still way too much inertia around mechanism in the old form of mechanistic determinism, in the Laplacian-Newtonian sense of it.
Timothy Jackson: Yeah. And I mean, it’s attractive because it gives us tractable equations that we can solve. It’s very helpful to have some of these assumptions built into our—
Matt Segall: The illusion of control over the natural world, as well.
Timothy Jackson: But I mean what you’re saying obviously channels and paraphrases Thomas Kuhn, who gets referenced a bunch of times in that Dan McQuillan article, actually. But there’s the joke that scientific revolutions proceed one death at a time, or whatever.
Matt Segall: Max Planck said that, yeah, pretty sure it was Max Planck.
Tim, I’m going to have to run. But I think obviously, we need to do a part two on these same papers and ideas.
Timothy Jackson: Yeah.
Matt Segall: We need to talk about perpetual motion. I want to get more into the data science McQuillan piece. So yeah, this will just be part one.
Timothy Jackson: Okay. All good.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?