Gilbert Simondon: Information, Technology and Media

I approached this book as an interested amateur - my reading on philosophy to date has largely been limited to introductory texts, supplemented by listening to occasional podcasts. This book represented a significant stretch for me as I imagine its target readership is probably postgraduate in a relevant field. That said, the writing, though academic, is clear. Mills provides enough guide ropes and hand holds; as a lay reader, with patience, careful reading and a good dictionary of philosophical terms, I was able to make progress. The book provides ample rewards for the time spent reading it. It describes Simondon’s theory of individuation; how objects , always in relation and always with the potential for further change, come into being and develop, and how information can be understood as that which provokes this individuation; The understanding of becoming is then developed into the concept of emergence of higher levels, each with their own chronology and topology that can fall in and out of phase. Simondons ideas concerning the development of the psychic realm and the transindividual are explained, as is his account of the image cycle. These insights are then applied to technology, and some time is spent contrasting and comparing Simondons work on man’s troubled relationship with technology to other thinkers in the field. The last chapters of the book suggest how Simondian insights can be applied to the study of Media, and to situating Simondon more broadly in a philosophical context. As a non philosopher, I would have been interested to know if Simondian concepts can be situated in a historical anthropological context, particularly with regards to magical unity; similarly should concepts such as psychic individuation be understood as occurring over an evolutionary timescale rather than simply in the development of a particular organism. This is not to criticise what has been written, simply that the concepts described would seem applicable to many disparate areas of study; the potential scope of this book is enormous. The breadth and depth of knowledge that must have been required to write it is humbling. Appropriately for a book about information, change and becoming, my own mental landscape felt altered by it’s reading and I was left wanting more. I thoroughly recommend it.

Great author! Great analysis!