Aarhus University Seminar

7 February 2018

Bernard Stiegler

Introduction

The analyses that I will present in what follows, which summarize a work in progress,
can only be understood if we know what is meant by what I call tertiary retention.
Retention in general is, according to Husserl, that which is retained from the
passage of time. Primary retention is retained as time passes; it is what is retained as
presence. A landscape appears to me, it is present to me, and I contemplate it: I
retain it by allowing my eyes to gaze across its presence. This is also what Kant called
the synthesis of apprehension. Secondary retention is what is retained from what has
now passed, on the basis of what have now become past primary retentions. It makes
possible what Kant called the synthesis of reproduction.
What I myself call tertiary retention is both present and past. It is present
because it presents itself to me, and it is past because it retains something from the
past. This relates to what Heidegger called Weltgeschichtlichkeit, and it is the condition
of what Kant described as the synthesis of recognition. Furthermore, today it has
become the main dimension of all industrial investment – via so-called ‘information
technology’.
In what follows, I would like to convince you that the concept of information
has always been rather slipshod and dubious, even though it lies at the centre of
Simondon’s philosophy – which, moreover, refers only to the notion of information.

1
From the theory of Forms to the theory of information

The foundation of information theory lies in its reference to the theory of entropy
and negentropy. And it is striking to note that when Simondon discusses questions
of entropy and negentropy1, he ignores the arguments advanced by Schrödinger in
What is Life?, while conversely, and as the cognitivists will do, he posits that the
notion of form, whether it comes from Greek philosophy or the theory of Forms,
should be replaced by that of information:

The notion of form must be replaced by that of information, which presupposes the
existence of a system in a state of metastable equilibrium that can individuate itself;
information, unlike form, is never a unique term, but the meaning or significance
[signification] that arises from a disparation.2

Such a substitution is clearly necessary and legitimate, at least as a first step: it is a

matter of reconsidering form from a systemic, dynamic and processual perspective, rather
than in terms of the idealist tradition that originates in Plato and continues right up
until phenomenology, and to which the psychology of forms (Gestalt psychology)
remains fundamentally tied.
But this convoking of information theory, which underpins this whole
enterprise, comes at a price: Simondon fundamentally neglects the question of the
calculation of probabilities as that which constitutes the limit of the notion of information
– a negligence whose correlate is his ignorance of the primordial question of the
pharmakon and the question of its play between what we will here call ‘anthropy’ and
‘neganthropy’, as well as the issue to which this gives rise, namely, the question of
the improbable.
The ‘notion of information’ thus leads to an impasse, the source of which lies
in Simondon’s debate with Wiener and cybernetics – something already discussed in
Technics and Time, 1.3 Specifying the contours of what he calls his ‘mechanology’,
which is an organology of machines inasmuch as they produce functional integrations, Simondon
posits that, like ‘natural spontaneously produced objects’4, and, in particular, like
living beings, technical beings must be subject to inductive study within a

1
For example, Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 2007), p. 50,
which is equivalent to Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information
(Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2013), p. 548.
2
Ibid., p. 28/p. 35.
3
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and
George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 78.
4
Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John
Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), p. 50.

2
 science of correlations and transformations that would be a general technology or
mechanology5,

and that would be more akin to biology than to physics. Whereas Wiener’s
cybernetics involves an

improper identification of the technical object with the natural object and more specifically
with the living being,6

Simondon’s mechanology posits on the contrary that

the only thing we can say is that technical objects tend toward concretization, whereas
natural objects, such as living beings, are concrete to begin with.7

What ultimately constitutes the technical dynamic, such that with industrial machines
(which is to say with the Anthropocene) it tends towards concretization, is therefore, for
Simondon, and unlike Wiener (according to Simondon), the protentional capabilities of
the noetic manufacturing being, that is, its ends, its purposes (its finalities), without which

physical causality could not […] have produced a positive and efficient concretization.8

The question of the technical dynamic – which we are here calling ‘exosomatization’
– is for Simondon, then, ultimately the question of the relationship between noetic
organic matter and what I have referred to in Technics and Time, 1 as organized inorganic
matter, such that it pro-duces an epiphylogenesis, which raises the question of the
primordial coupling (the ‘correlation’) between these two inseparable dimensions of exosomatic
organization. This is why, in principle [en droit], the living human being cannot be
eliminated from this organization.
And yet, is this not in fact the outcome of the computational and absolute
proletarianization to which cybernetics has led – and which would thus amount to
an absolute non-knowledge? Is this not what has become obvious sixty years after
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects was written and twenty-five years after the
World Wide Web was opened to the global ‘public’? Such is the question of
contemporary pharmacology, which, approaching the extreme limit of the Anthropocene,

5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., p. 51, my italics.
8
Ibid.

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confronts us with this irrational state of fact in which the algorithmic automaton, made
possible by Moore’s pseudo-law and borne along by its techno-logical
performativity, ‘disrupts’ theoretical models – models which seem to be powerless in
the face of this state of affairs.
Simondon, then, fails to consider the pharmacological question that
mechanology (organology) bears within it inasmuch as it stems from
exosomatization. Because of this, he cannot conceive or anticipate the more-than-tragic
situation into which the biosphere as a whole has been delivered by purely and simply
computational and informational capitalism. It is in what I call the ‘absence of epoch’ and
the delirious ordeal of denial referred to as ‘post-truth’ that the effective reality of the
post-truth age unfolds, an age that Heidegger alone really saw coming – however it
seems to me that he did so without having been able to analyse its profound
causality. Such an analysis necessarily involves raising the questions of entropy and
of what we are calling neganthropy, and these questions demand not a rejection or
condemnation of calculation, but rather its refunctionalization.
And so if, on the one hand:

• it is only with reservation that we can agree with Simondon when he writes:

One mustn’t confuse the tendency toward concretization with the status of entirely
concrete existence. To a certain extent, every technical object has residual aspects
of abstraction; one must go right to the limit and speak of technical objects as if
they were natural objects. Technical objects must be studied in their evolution in
order to discern the process of concretization as a tendency; but one mustn’t isolate
the last product of technical evolution in order to declare it entirely concrete; it is
more concrete than the preceding ones, yet it is still artificial9,

then, on the other hand, we must insist on refining Simondon’s analysis by positing
that, in addition:

• in industrial concretization, the noetic living thing no longer commands – even

though, as was said in Technics and Time, 1, it operates. But this operator is no
longer the Operator that Deleuze discusses with respect to quasi-causality: it
is proletarianized – as a ‘designer’ [concepteur] or as a consumer as well as
producer. What is a proletarianized ‘designer’? It is someone who manipulates
concepts emerging from automated understanding but does so devoid of syntheses
emerging from dis-automatized reason, that is, devoid of any ability to

9
Ibid.

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 synthesize protentions capable of converging towards a kingdom of ends.
Such a designer thereby becomes the non-dialectical servant of an information
system, where this is a kind of servitude in which the servant does not learn anything
(contrary to the servant, Knecht, of the famous ‘master-slave dialectic’, or,
more accurately, the dialectic of ‘lord and bondsman’]).

If it is thanks to Simondon (reader of the Grundrisse) that we can say this,

nevertheless Simondon himself has a restricted understanding of this state of fact,
which he gives a transitional and epiphenomenal status, if not purely accidental: the
task of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects is to dispel what he regards as a
misunderstanding. What he describes when he refers to Marx is indeed a process of
disindividuation, but from it he draws absolutely no consequences with respect to
the inherently pharmacological character of exosomatization as an exteriorization
that generates a state of fact capable of dissolving knowledge – into absolute non-
knowledge.
It is, however, the protentional capacities of the operator that are locked away
in the proletarianization of the ‘knowledge worker’ – which is the ‘effective reality’
of ‘cognitive capitalism’. This capturing of protentions, replacing them with the
automatic production of protentions generated by ‘smart marketing’ on the basis of
mimetic and pseudo-personalized models, leads to the liquidation of what, in the
first edition of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes as the synthesis of recognition:
this third synthesis of the transcendental imagination is the condition of the
convergence of the experience of the knowing subject in a rational unity constituting
a transcendental affinity and thus forming the horizon of truth.
In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, the concretization of the
industrial machine occurs (as for instance the operation of a thermal, locomotive or
electric engine, or the turbine of a tidal power plant) when it must leave behind the
purely technical milieu in order to form, together with the natural milieu, a ‘techno-
geographical associated milieu’, generated by the object itself in the course of what
Simondon calls its ‘naturalization’. In Automatic Society, Volume 1, however, I argued
that it is precisely by becoming the human, and not just physical, techno-geographical
associated milieu – via the equipping of half the world’s population with the piece
of digital exosomatic equipment that is the smartphone, that is, the personal, mobile
computer, constantly eliciting and capturing so-called ‘data’ (digital tertiary
retentions) – that this commodified retentional milieu continuously provokes, activates
and calculates arrangements of retentions and protentions that lead precisely to their
psychic and social disintegration.

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 What makes this development possible is the fact that the technical functions
integrated by this concretization are based exclusively on the statistical calculations
imposed by the business models of these platforms, these calculations being
perfectly homogenous with market principles according to which every use value
must be turned into exchange value – but where automatic protentions thereby come
to replace every noetic protention, that is, every synthesis that would be incalculable
for analytical understanding, and hence come to replace every end: in this way,
analytical understanding comes to replace what Aristotle called ‘final causality’ and
what Kant called the ‘kingdom of ends’.
Hence it is that such a becoming functionally and systemically installs the
absence of epoch, an epoch devoid of protentions, which I have described in Dans
la disruption. This is possible, however, only because information, as defined in the
information theory mobilized by Simondon to replace the theory of Forms, is
intrinsically calculable – by statistical probabilities that utilize the ‘H constant’ that
turns out to be identical to the Boltzmann constant.

Living with pharmaka

If the analysis proposed here and in Automatic Society, Volume 1 is well-founded, then
it is crucial to understand how Simondon, perfectly in tune with an epoch that
remained stuck in the dogmatic progressivism characteristic of the metaphysics of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and ignoring all the problems that afflict
the Anthropocene, was able to neglect the high probability of an entropic becoming
that, for his part, Wiener conceived as a ‘fascist ant-state’10, and one provoked by a
purely probabilistic conception of information. Understanding this means going
back to Simondon’s concept of information, which he confines to the status of
notion, but via which he forms the concept of disparation – taken up from
physiology [where it is used to describe the way in which the strictly speaking
incompatible perspectives of the left and right eye are nevertheless combined in
stereoscopic vision, enabling depth perception – trans.].
The Simondonian notion of information is directly tied to that of disparation:
this is shown by the analysis of algorithmic governmentality that Automatic Society,
Volume 1 takes up from the article by Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy entitled
‘Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation. Le disparate

10
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (London: Free Association
Books, 1989), p. 52.

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comme condition d’individuation par la relation?’11 In this text, however, Berns and
Rouvroy raise the question both of an inverted recuperation or appropriation of the
concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by ‘platform capitalism’ (which we are
here calling ‘smart capitalism’) and of a machinic concretization and reversal of what
Simondon describes as a process of transindividuation – which in Guattari becomes
what he called the ‘dividual’, via a process of ‘dividualization’.
The pharmacological dimension of the information industry based on
information theory escapes Simondon’s notice, even though it is his work alone that
makes it possible to describe this concretization through an inversion that arises
from the rhizomatic horizontality of the networks deployed by algorithmic
governmentality, and

for the benefit of an imminent and eminently plastic normativity (Deleuze and Guattari,
1980) [that] is not necessarily favourable to the emergence of new forms of life in the sense
of an emancipation described by Deleuze and Guattari in the form of an exceeding of the
plane of organization by the plane of immanence.12

(This remark must be refined and qualified, however, since Deleuze and Guattari
reject the question of emancipation, and to neglect this point, which is not just
peripheral, is symptomatic of a repression of the aporias of ‘French Theory’, aporias
that its heirs have avoided – and which, in our opinion, directly involve the notions
of machine, information and entropy.)
The issue at stake is precisely ignorance of the question of tertiary retention,
which requires the conception of a hyper-materiality that Simondon made thinkable
and necessary, but which he himself, quite paradoxically, was incapable of thinking,
even though he was the one who made it thinkable – and did so through the way in
which he conceived information.
Simondon does not investigate:

• either the computational reductionism contained in the probabilistic notions of

entropy or negentropy applied to information by, notably, Shannon, Wiener
and Brillouin – this computationalism then being taken up by cognitivism;

11
Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy, ‘Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives
d’émancipation’, Réseaux 177 (2013), pp. 163–96.
12
Ibid., p. 185.

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 • or the singularity of what, after vital negentropy, becomes, with
exosomatization, noetic singularity, such that it always calls for the invention of an
art of living with pharmaka.

Simondon’s positions on information are all the more strange and paradoxical in
that they contradict both his analysis of technics qua process of individuation in On
the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects13, and the assertion that the transindividual can
be constituted only if supported by technical objects, as this passage from the
conclusion of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects indicates, which we have
already quoted and discussed on several occasions:

The technical object taken according to its essence, which is to say the technical object
insofar as it has been invented, thought and willed, and taken up [assumé] by a human
subject, becomes the medium [le support] and symbol of this relationship, which we would
like to name transindividual.14

The technical object, then, is a support, and is so as tertiary retention. But it is also
a symbol and an exosomatic organ, which circulates, which is detachable, exchanged,
and charged with potential – a potential that may be transitional, magical, religious,
artistic, monumental, fetishized, economic and so on. And it thereby constitutes, and via
a thousand other aspects, functionalities that are associated with every kind of noesis as such
(measurement, indication, datability, marking, etc.).
According to the introduction to L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme
et d’information, then, the transindividual is meaning or significance [signification], which
thus presupposes, according to On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, a support
for these objects. Yet on the other hand, Simondon also states that signification is
information. Given these statements, it is impossible to understand how information
could ever be separated from its supports, or how it would be possible to consider
psychic and collective individuation without taking account of the phase-shifts of technical
individuation that constitute the technical milieu that is exosomatization.
These confusions ultimately stem:

13
Simondon certainly never said that technics is a process of individuation. But we have
highlighted – notably in Symbolic Misery – that, when he has referred to the technical individual that
the machine becomes, forming technical ensembles and techno-geographic milieus, and stated that
the individual is posited in principle as what stems from a process of individuation, technics does
then indeed amount to a process of individuation as such – associated with psychosocial
individuation, and vice versa.
14
Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, p. 252.

8
 • from Simondon’s neglect of Schrödinger’s reflections on life, where negative
entropy, which we must understand as anti-entropy and not just negentropy,
appears for what it is in life, namely, the struggle to defer entropy through the
differentiation of vital organs (through their individuation15), and as vital
différance; not as information, nor as ‘negentropy’ in the sense of information
theory, but as the co-genesis and effective concretization of what thereby
constitutes an in-dividual, that is, an in-divisible; not just the tendency towards
concretization that is the functional integration of the machine, but as organic
concretization that constitutes an organism;

• from ignorance of the questions raised by Alfred Lotka, who showed that
exosomatic organogenesis opens up a new form of life16 – as Canguilhem said
in terms that were different but that still referred to technical life17 – in which
this différance becomes noetic, and constitutes what Simondon called psychic
and collective individuation.

The consequence of the fact that machinic functional integration is only a tendency is
that when the conditions by which it can be sustainably accomplished are ignored –
and accomplished as that exosomatic différance generated by protentions derived from
psychic and collective individuals, just as, equally, they are themselves transductively
generated, psychic and collective individuals coupling and co-individuating
themselves with machinic individuation occurring within complex exorganisms –
machinic integration disintegrates: it cannot last, it becomes an entropic indifférance,
and does so because it is irrational.
Machinic functional integration that ignores the neganthropic conditions of
its accomplishment is irrational and cannot last in law [en droit]. Yet it remains the
case that very often today, and in fact, and despite being irrational, it nevertheless does
endure – not sustainably, not durably, so to speak, but on a scale that we call short or
medium term, where time crashes in on itself via what we refer to as speculation
precisely because it is highly irrational. Such is the age of post-truth that is our lot,
enclosing us within an Anthropocene from which we cannot hope to find our way
out unless we shatter this state of fact through a new state of law.

15
The individuation of organs is a question raised by Nietzsche.
16
Alfred J. Lotka, ‘The Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle’, Human Biology 17 (1945), pp.
167–94.
17
Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett with Robert S.
Cohen (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 200–1.

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 For the exosomatic form of life, knowledge and its supports, which are always
themselves exosomatic – and hence shareable by complex exorganisms and thus
capable of generating the transindividual, which, in the West, with the institution of
universities, is organized into faculties, and which in other societies takes other forms –
knowledge and its supports thus constitute, for the exosomatic form of life, vital
functions in the sense of Canguilhem18 and in the sense of Whitehead.
These functions, however, can no longer be thought within the framework of
entropy or anti-entropy as these have been theorized from thermodynamics to
cybernetics: they require a theory of anthropy and neganthropy – because
exosomatic organs are pharmaka. We will come back to this in more detail – and with
Yuk Hui – in terms of the notion of information in Simondon. Before doing so,
however, we need to clarify the scope and stakes of these issues.

The conjunction of thermodynamics and theories of information

The generalization of questions of entropy, negentropy and anti-entropy beyond

physics and biology unfolded after Schrödinger and revolved around the theory of
information formulated by Shannon or in his wake – via physics with Brillouin
(Science and Information Theory, 1959), or as a counter-effect on biology with Atlan
(L’organisation biologique et la théorie de l’information, 1972).
Mathieu Triclot has shown that Shannon, having developed his theory of
information by taking the constant H from the work of Harry Nyquist and Ralph
Hartley, and having posited, by referring to Hartley19, that this constant H be used
to describe the calculation and value of information according to its probability and

18
Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. xviii: ‘In concrete terms, knowledge consists in the
search for security via the reduction of obstacles; it consists in the construction of theories that
proceed by assimilation. It is thus a general method for the direct or indirect resolution of tensions
between man and milieu. [I]ts end […] is to allow man a new equilibrium with the world, a new
form and organization of his life. [K]nowledge undoes the experience of life, seeking to analyze
its failures so as to abstract from it both a rationale for prudence (sapience, science, etc.) and,
eventually, laws for success, in order to help man remake what life has made without him, in him,
or outside of him.’
19
Claude Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, in N.J.A. Sloane and Aaron D.
Wyner (eds), Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers (New York: Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers, Inc., 1993), pp. 19–20: ‘Quantities of the form H = – Σ pi log pi […] play a
central role in information […]. The form of H will be recognized as that of entropy as defined in
certain formuations of statistical mechanics where pi is the probability of a system being in cell i of
its phase space. H is then, for example, the H in Boltzmann’s famous H theorem. We shall call H
= – Σ pi log pi the entropy of the set of probabilities p1, …, pn.’

10
its improbability, found that this constant H ‘conjoins’ with the way Boltzmann
himself quantified thermodynamic entropy in terms of the calculation of
probabilities:

The H in Shannon’s theorem conjoins […] by a piece of good luck to the H of Hartley
(the unit of information, now forgotten) and the H of Boltzmann (the statistical
interpretation of the thermodynamic concept of entropy).20

In 1948, Shannon worked in the telecommunications sector: his goal was to

optimize (in this case, to limit as much as possible) the spectrum of the signal to be
transmitted (the ‘bandwidth’) in order to provide a receiver with information
broadcast by a transmitter (hence the paper is entitled ‘A Mathematical Theory of
Communication’).
The informational content of a signal is tied to its improbability, understood
here as measurable uncertainty, which is itself defined negatively in relation to
positively-conceived certainty. This is presented by Umberto Eco in the following
terms:

Information theory tries to calculate the quantity of information contained in a particular

message. If, for instance, on August 4 the weather forecaster says, ‘Tomorrow, no snow’,
the amount of information I get is very limited; my own experience would have easily
allowed me to reach that conclusion. On the other hand, if on August 4 the forecaster says,
‘Tomorrow, snow’, then the amount of information I get is considerable, given the
improbability of the event.21

Yann Ollivier presents the same kind of reasoning in other terms, but he also adds
to it the notion of the unit of information, the ‘bit’ (that is, binary digit):

If the transmitter always says the same thing, the quantity of information provided by an
additional repetition is null. The simplest case is the following: the receiver expects
information of the yes/no type, the yes and the no being a priori each as likely as the other.
When the source transmits either a yes or a no, we consider that the receiver has received
one unit of information (one bit). In other words: a unit of information is when one has, a
priori, a set of two possibilities, and one of them is realized.22

20
Mathieu Triclot, ‘Information et entropie. Un double jeu avec les probabilités’, Journal Electronique
d’Histoire des Probabilités et de la Statistique 3:2 (2007), p. 12. Simondon himself does not forget
Hartley’s unit: he refers to it in his analysis of Shannon’s information theory.
21
Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1989), p. 45.
22
Yann Ollivier, ‘La théorie de l’information: l’origine de l’entropie’, available at:
<http://www.yann-ollivier.org/entropie/entropie1>.

11
This basic definition – the case where the receiver ‘expects information of the yes/no
type’ – is the basis on which the calculation of probabilities will be combined with
binary calculation and then generalized with the technology of computers:

Suppose we have a set of possible events whose probabilities of occurrence are p1 , p2 , …,

pn. These probabilities are known but that is all we know concerning which event will occur.
Can we find a measure of how much ‘choice’ is involved in the selection of the event or
of how uncertain we are of the outcome?23

The combination of probabilities and binary calculation makes it possible to measure

uncertainty in a way that provides the ‘quantity’ of information, according to
Shannon, and this is so because the more a result is uncertain, the more it is the case
that knowledge of that result informs me and matters to me.
The analogy with entropy comes about because, for Shannon, it is a matter of
saving on ‘bandwidth’, ‘economizing’ it by optimizing not just the coding of
information but its effective transmission as a signal along a wire, in order to
eliminate information that is the most probable, and therefore the least interesting:

The definition of quantity of information proposed by Shannon presents […] a striking

analogy with the definition of a particular physical quantity, entropy. This similarity
between the functions led Shannon, on Norbert Wiener’s advice, to give the name
‘entropy’ to his definition of the quantity of information.24

Shannon himself told the story of the conversation he had with von Neumann that
led to calling this measurement entropy:

I thought of calling it ‘information’, but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it
‘uncertainty’. When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von
Neumann told me, ‘You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your
uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already
has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really
is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.’25

23
Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, p. 18, quoted in Triclot, ‘Information et
entropie’, p. 7.
24
Triclot, ‘Information et entropie’, p. 12.
25
Claude Shannon, quoted in Myron Tribus and E.C. McIrvine, ‘Energy and Information’, Scientific
American 225:3 (September 1971).

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The amplification of the tension of information, an element of the archaeology of the concept of
individuation in Simondon

Yuk Hui outlines a kind of archaeology of the difficulties that arise in Simondon
around the notion of information and with respect to entropy and negentropy. His
research shows how and why Simondon explains, during a conference at Royaumont
in 1962, that the problems of quantification and measurement that occupy Shannon
and later Wiener are not sufficient for a definition of information, and yet, in the
end, how Simondon offers no critique of the computational definition as such, and
fails to explore the notion of negentropy.
In 1960, in a lecture given to the Société française de philosophie that will be
taken up again in the introduction to L’individuation psychique et collective, then included
as a supplement in L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information under
the title ‘Forme, information, potentiels’, Simondon clearly rejects the probabilistic
conception of negative entropy, or negentropy:

We must find something that makes it possible to define the best form as the one that
possesses the highest degree of information, and this cannot be done on the basis of the
negentropic scheme, of probabilistic research. In other words, we must add a non-
probabilistic term to information theory, […] one that refers to the quality of information, or
to a tension of information.26

Here, however, no specific reference is made to the notion of negative entropy or

negentropy as Schrödinger proposes to conceive it – neither here, nor in the second
part of L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, despite the fact that
it is devoted to ‘The Individuation of Living Things’.
This is, for us, a crucial issue and an incomprehensible oversight, given that
Schrödinger’s analysis introduces protention, albeit in a kind of negative fashion, as constituting the
dimension that is characteristic of organic matter, which leads us to refer here to vital
différance.
This seems all the more surprising given that the tension of information to which
Simondon referred in the previous quotation, a tension that constitutes disparation as
the potential of a differential, within a transductive relation that constitutes its terms
without preceding them – this tension presupposes a protention of the receiver. It
presupposes that the ‘receiver’ is already held out, tensed [tendu], which is to say

26
Simondon, ‘Forme, Information, Potentiels’, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et
d’information, p. 549.

13
expectant, at-tentive [at-tente], or, to formulate a word that both connotes and twists
Husserlian protention, in pro-tension.
It is protention that constitutes the possibility of such a tension, which, fuelled
by ‘information’, is in Simondon’s terms amplified by the latter, and amplifying the
information in return, but in a transductive return that does not amount simply to
‘feedback’. Hui summarizes this in the following way:

Signals […] carry information in (Simondon’s) strong sense if the information is amplified
by the metastable system that receives it, that is, if the disparation between the signals sent
and the reception schema of the receiver requires the invention of a meaning or
significance [signification].

Disparation is therefore, here, that which engenders the transindividual through information
conceived as a process, the transindividual being itself the metastabilized fruit of a relation
– between a psychic individual and the milieu of a collective individuation with which its psychic
individuation is always associated.

It is the resolution of a tension between the signal and the schema that produces meaning
[signification], that is, information in Simondon’s sense.

In-formation as relation – rather than as form – is the process by which the

transindividual is constituted locally. The transindividual: that is, meaning,
significance insofar as it belongs to a metastable system, welcoming disparity,
charged with potentials in its preindividual and more-than-individual phases, and
hence tensed, held-out.
This metastable system, which is always both in ex-cess and in default over that
which is always already (as traces, retentions) de-ceded/de-ceased on the basis of
this default (of being, as in-completion), harbours this tension that always expresses
and extends a tendency towards and a protension for that which is non-probabilistic in a
radical sense, that is, improbable in the most improbable sense.
But it is then necessary to understand the schema on the basis of its tertiary retentional
constitution, that is, according to the hyper-material specificities of its support or medium,
which is therefore inseparable from information as we are defining it here. And we
must understand it in terms of that techno-logical performativity that results in exosomatization.
It is because Simondon a priori excludes this hyper-materiality, which conditions the circuit of
transindividuation that is information as operation of individuation, that he can ignore
the pharmacology that psychosocial individuation always involves, and, in so doing,
ignore the always both therapeutic and toxic content of any psychic and collective
individuation co-generated by the technical individuation that is exosomatization.

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 If information in Simondon’s sense is not soluble into probabilities, and if, as
Yuk Hui says,

Jean-Yves Chateau asserts that Simondon intends to move away from quantification and
objectification, […] this is only partly true, because he did want to develop a theory that
simultaneously encompasses the quantity, the quality and the intensity of information.

The question of quantification is here obviously not a secondary, peripheral or

derivative one: it lies at the heart of the subject – if it is not, in a negative way (and
as incalculability), this heart itself. Only that which can be quantified is calculable –
including as probability that calculates the possible, and not the real. To what extent
[mesure] is the in-forming operation of disparation quantifiable, even if it is not
soluble into this quantification? And if it isn’t quantifiable, according to what excess
[démesure] is this the case?
In order to more precisely investigate these questions of the relationship
between calculation and the incalculable, Hui compares Simondon’s statements at the
1960 conference with those he makes during the debate that took place two years
later in Royaumont, between himself, Wiener and the cybernetician Donald
MacKay. He shows that in order to take stock of these issues, it is necessary to refer
to the proceedings of the eighth Macy conference, held in 1951, which Katherine
Hayles analysed in detail in How We Became Posthuman.
In 1951, MacKay and Shannon had a disagreement centred on a presentation
given by Alex Bavelas, a disciple of Kurt Lewin, in which Bavelas described a
cybernetics experiment that studied groups and group behaviour. During this
presentation, a conflict arose between Shannon and MacKay (later rediscovered by
Simondon in 1962) about how this experiment might be interpreted on the basis of
the concepts of information theory. Explaining the experiment, and attempting to
describe what was learned from it about group behaviour (in the terms of Lewin,
whom Simondon had read closely, and from whom he borrows his notion of ‘field’),
Bavelas stated that for members of the group, during the experiment,

an information process has occurred by which the probabilities that certain hypotheses are
correct have changed.

Shannon disagreed with this conclusion by objecting that

from the [theory of] communication point of view, the subjective probabilities do not enter at all.

To this MacKay replied by taking Bavelas’s side, proposing

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 that information be defined as ‘the change in a receiver’s mind-set, and thus with
meaning’.27

In-formation thus becomes a trans-formation – if not the trans-individual. Hui

shows that the stakes of this 1951 debate are those that are rediscovered in 1960 at
the Société française de philosophie, then in 1962 at Royaumont where MacKay and
Wiener are present. In criticizing Shannon,

MacKay […] defines ‘selective information’ and ‘structural information’, which are […]
close to what Simondon calls figure and ground. […] Selective information and structural
information change each other as a dynamic system. If ‘Shannon and Wiener define
information in terms of what it is, MacKay defines it in terms of what it does’ (Hayles, How
We Became Posthuman, p. 56). In other words, information must be conceived as a process.

Hui points out that this debate to a great extent anticipates the terms in which
Simondon will come to see the problem:

This resonates with Simondon’s definition in 1962, when he writes: ‘To be or not to be
information does not depend only on the internal character of a structure; information is not
a thing, but the operation of a thing that arrives in a system and produces a transformation.
Information cannot be defined outside this act of transformational impact [incidence] and this
operation of receiving’.28

In addition, Hui points out that when

MacKay affirms that ‘information is a distinction that makes a difference’29,

this conception is

27
R.K. Logan, ‘What Is Information?: Why Is It Relativistic and What Is Its Relationship to
Materiality, Meaning and Organization’, Information 3 (2012), p. 74. The quotation included here,
‘the change in a receiver’s mind-set, and thus with meaning’, is from N. Katherine Hayles, ‘The
Condition of Virtuality’, in Peter Lunenfeld (ed.), The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media
(Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1999), p. 74. The entire quotation from
Logan and Hayles quoted here is quoted in Yuk Hui, ‘Simondon et la question de l’information’,
p. 40, available at:
<http://digitalmilieu.net/documents/Hui_Simondon%20et%20Information_Cahiers%20Simon
don6.pdf>.
28
Hui, ‘Simondon et la question de l’information’, p. 42. The quotation is from Gilbert Simondon,
‘L’amplification dans les processus d’information’, Communication et information: cours et conférences
(Chatou: Les Éditions de la Transparence, 2010), p. 159.
29
Hui, ‘Simondon et la question de l’information’, p. 42. The quotation is from Donald Mackay,
Information, Mechanism and Meaning.

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 taken up by Bateson, who invents a much better known slogan […]: ‘information is
definable as a difference which makes a difference’.30

Here, we could replace the concept of information with that of writing in Derrida’s
sense – that is, of the trace, of retention and protention, which, in psychic and
collective individuation, can be primary, secondary or tertiary, either psychically or
collectively. But it would then be necessary to distinguish, as we will argue below,
between regimes of différant traces in such a way that the tertiary retention resulting
from exosomatization would inscribe in individuation – in an individuation that
would thereby have become psychosocial – different differences, so to speak, thus
constituting a noetic différance that we can begin to think [penser], and to think care-
fully [panser], as individuation with Simondon and Derrida – but beyond Simondon
and Derrida.

Translated by Daniel Ross.

30
Ibid. The quotation from Bateson can be found in Gregory Bateson, ‘A Cybernetics of “Self”:
A Theory of Alcoholism’, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry,
Evolution and Epistemology (Frogmore and London: Granada, 1973), p. 286.

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