Dr Tim Deane-Freeman (Deakin) -Germinal Events: organisation and metastability in Simondon and Bergson
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\nDate: Friday 6 October 2023 | Time: 3.30pm | Venue: Deakin Downtown (also on zoom &ndash\; &ldquo\;hybrid&rdquo\; &ndash\; link below)
\n\nAbstract:
\nIn a preparatory manuscript for his primary doctoral thesis\, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information\, Gilbert Simondon will characterise Bergson&rsquo\;s project as an &ldquo\;aristocratism\,&rdquo\; predicated as it is on a schism which opposes a properly philosophical thought of temporal continuities (intuition)\, to &ldquo\;interested\, materialising\, spatialising and utilitarian thought\, i.e. thought attached to artificial or natural structures&hellip\;&rdquo\; For Simondon\, this distinction sees structure\, understood as an ensemble of discontinuous elements with the potential to effect productive differential relations (individuations)\, denigrated as the object of a &ldquo\;dishonoured\, dismissed\, and second-class intuition\,&rdquo\; rendering Bergson&rsquo\;s thought increasingly inadequate to contemporary developments in science and technology. Simondon&rsquo\;s attention to these developments\, and to &ldquo\;events&rdquo\; of discontinuity encountered in fields like quantum physics\, inorganic chemistry and non-equilibrium thermodynamics\, thus informs his own determination to articulate the inhuman and ontogenetic reality of structure. I&rsquo\;d like to suggest\, however\, that this initial precis hides a more complex reality\, and a profound solidarity between these thinkers&rsquo\; respective projects and ambitions. What both Bergson and Simondon share\, indeed\, is a hostility to interested and anthropocentric modes of conceptualisation which occlude a thought of evolution and emergence\, and an attendant conviction that philosophy must itself individuate against the horizon of scientific methods and innovations. In this context\, I argue that Simondon is perhaps already engaged in what Gilles Deleuze will subsequently call a &ldquo\;return to Bergson\,&rdquo\; extending and renewing the latter&rsquo\;s project to think with science in order to dislocate our all-too-human intellectual habitudes. I will close with some brief reflections on this latter point\, suggesting the pertinence of both Bergson and Simondon as ecological thinkers today.
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