Interobjectivity and Transindividuation

In the ‘creative destruction’ as it was described and theorized by Schumpeter, objects primarily have become commodities, which has led to a new regime of processes of transindividuation that produce the transindividual. Before ‘creative destruction’, things were furniture, moveable property, moveable goods furnishing immovable property – immobilizations which themselves belonged to this world of objects and things, as their framework. In this case, like the object or thing in the Melanesian gift economy, like the taonga of the Maoris, moveable and immovable supports of symbolic heritages passed on from generation to generation, ruled over collective or individual destinations according to a relationship of faithfulness to things – and through this, to significations that were transindividuated in the same process.

Objects, as inherited things, were vectors of memory and faithfulness to what constituted itself as horizons of shared significations that were passed on from generation to generation by the sole frequentation of those things that, insofar as they were thinglike, that is materialized, seemed stable – a stability which, however, supported and authorized a variability of the transindividual: a certain latitude in the interpretation of the meaning of those things, their virtuality, that is of the ‘potential of individuation’ that they have constituted as a pre-individual ground. In other words, transindividuation must be apprehended, not as a stable given, but as a metastable process – a process that specifies itself within each social regime. Marcel Mauss’s mana and hau, for example, constituted the magical regime of the metastability of things in Melanesia and New Zealand.

Whatever its form, a society is fundamentally an apparatus for the production of faithfulness. We have learned from Max Weber that capitalism transformed the type of faithfulness that had structured Western society, from a society grounded in the faith of monotheistic religious belief to a society based on trust as a form of fiduciary calculability. The crisis of capitalism that was unleashed in 2007, however, a crisis the extent of which was not revealed until 2008, has taught us that this transformation of faithfulness into calculability, effected through the fiduciary apparatus, has now encountered a limit where credit has undergone a massive reversal, turning into what I have tried to think of as ‘discredit,’ and as a completely new form of dis-belief. The subprime mortgage crisis and the swindles perpetrated by Bernie Madoff are symptoms of this situation.

This becoming, involving what Weber as well as Adorno referred to as the disenchantment ensuing from rationalization, is essentially tied to a process of grammatization, a process upon which a new dimension was conferred during the Renaissance by the printing press, which with the Reformation became a site of unprecedented politico-religious struggles. In the course of these struggles, the pharmacology of the mind and of spirit constituted by the Book, and by books, and the therapeutic that such pharmaka require, became the object of a spiritual conflict underpinning a new religious and secular therapeutic.

Although the pharmacology of mind and of spirit certainly cannot be reduced to its relationship with the Book and with books, it is this relationship that shapes its configuration And given that pharmacology in general is not limited to what affects the mind or spirit, it is therefore not reducible to the objects emerging from processes of grammatization, processes which, through industrialization, affect bodies in general, including their movements, perception, the higher functions of the central nervous system, and, now, social relations as such, the structure of the living, and the hypermaterial structure on the quantum scale, in the end integrating all objects – linked together within the ‘Internet of things’.

The printing press, as the main factor in what Sylvain Auroux calls the second technological revolution of grammatization, plays a decisive role in the linkage that, following the Reformation and as the beginning of capitalism, takes place between grammatization and pharmacology of minds on the one hand, and grammatization and pharmacology of bodies on the other. The printing press represents a mutation in the meaning of literal grammatization: a ‘pharmacological turn’ is produced that, however, precedes the grammatization of gestures constitutive of mechanical age, and consists in the submission of hypomnemata to the imperatives of accounting, that is of negotium. This transformation remains largely unthought, even though the turn will have been the object of a major spiritual struggle – the Reformation as a therapeutic of reading, and its secular struggle as the implementation of an instrumentality of accounting.

Within this turn, it is the relationship of otium and negotium that changes: this becoming actually ensues from a new socialization of hypomnemata, where they henceforth constitute, as account books spread and become commonplace (made possible by the massive movement of readers in which the Reformation essentially consists), the formation of a ratio which henceforth extends itself out not only as reason but as calculation – and does so prior to Descartes, in whom Heidegger sees the determining factor, whereas he was actually an aftereffect.

Divine logos becoming secular ratio is the foundation of America and it is well known how Weber draws attention in this regard to the historical meaning of the sermon in which Benjamin Franklin pushed pro nobis to an extreme, and about which Mark Taylor wrote in 1984: ‘The conclusion of this quest for salvation can be summed up by the theological doctrine implied in the formula pro nobis. What Christ means, claimed Luther, is grounded in ‘the fact’ that he lived and died for us.’1 This becoming is translated into the inscription found on the dollar bill which, by proposing that ‘In God we trust’, no longer states that we believe in God.

This strange evolution of the verb that designates the relationship of faithfulness of noetic creatures to their Creator would not be comprehensible were it not inscribed on paper currency, which thus constitutes a unit of accounting. And it is this relation to that which consists (and to He who consists) on a plane other than that of creatures, a relation constituted in a relation to the Book, which is hence affected by that which, in the words of Nietzsche, takes the name of nihilism (Heidegger claiming that with this name, for Nietzsche, it is the suprasensible in its totality that is put into question – we shall return to this point).

If Nietzsche could say that it will still be a long time before God’s murderers would comprehend their gesture – ‘I have come too early . . . This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard’2 – perhaps we, some 130 years after this pronouncement, have entered into the ordeal of this revelation as such: now perhaps the black night, and not only the shadows announcing it, at last befalls us, and as that Godless apocalypticism that presently haunts the entire world, given that since 2008 the consumerist model, by collapsing, made clear the fact that it is no longer only the fiduciary objects of logos, constituted by hypomnemata, which, in terms of their meaning and their social function, have changed in the course of the twentieth century, but everyday and familiar objects as well – and with them, and as what at bottom they alone can definitively shatter, das Ding, the Thing.

As for things – the Things about which Perec writes, and those that now form the ‘system of objects’ that made Baudrillard famous – they still constitute, until the beginning of the twentieth century, the shared milieu within which relations of faithfulness are formed: these things tied together, sealed and supported such relations as objects of inheritance, work, the formation of knowledge, shared activities, games, commerce of all kinds, etcetera, but also and above all, as transitional objects: those of the infans as well as those of sublimation.

Now, these thingly supports of everyday life, which supported the world and the making-world essentially grounded in and through this making-trust, have become disposable and structurally obsolescent as capitalism concretized what Schumpeter theorized in his Theory of Economic Evolution, namely, the chronic obsolescence of industrial products henceforth furnished and swept away by a permanent innovation leading to an ineluctably self-destructive short-termism. Today, it has become an utter commonplace to see objects disappear into garbage disposals and garage sales faster than they appear on the market.

Generalized disposability, which has today been imposed throughout the world, and which affects human beings and businesses as much as the objects they produce, along with the ideas and concepts these objects incarnate and disincarnate, has installed a systemic unfaithfulness orchestrated through marketing, and through which intergenerational relations are inverted: children now dictate to parents how to behave – that is what to buy.

More generally, it is the entire apparatus for the production of libidinal energy – that is for the rerouting and trans-formation of drive-based ends (which are structurally short-term) into social investments crystallized in the form of primary and secondary identifications, which presuppose idealizations and thus proteiform infinitizations – it is this entire apparatus for the sublimatory production of libidinal energy that is short-circuited and destroyed – and along with it, desire and its objects, if not the Thing itself.

Although all societies have always been grounded in the constitution and reign of faithfulness and trust (the roots of the fiduciary dimension in monetary economies), over the past century, and perhaps even since the death of God, our society rests on the development of unfaithfulness or infidelity: the systematic organization of consumption presupposes the abandonment of objects, institutions, relations, places and everything that can be controlled by a market, and which must therefore be abandoned by the symbolic dimension.

This is the reign of adaptation, as Lyotard emphasized in The Postmodern Condition, that is of flexible becoming, or even, following the expression of Zygmunt Bauman, a matter of becoming ‘liquid’: the motto of liberalism has become the liquidation of all relations of dependence created by the organization of faithfulness.3 Meanwhile, these relations of dependence founded on fidelity are replaced by an organization of dependence grounded in infidelity – in this case, in a pharmacological dependence on expedients (all objects becoming such expedients, that is substitutes for a lack that is not that of the desiring subject but rather of the addict, made dependent by their toxicomania).

This results in the addiction of the consumer without object – being without objects to which he can attach himself (given that the object belongs to a subject insofar as it supports a relation of attachment), he must endure the horrible ordeal of the emptiness and futility of the self, that is of the ‘loss of the feeling of being real’ – this is Winnicott’s expression for psychic suffering par excellence, but it is also the expression used by Richard Durn in his personal diary to describe his mental state three weeks before the massacre he committed in Nanterre, Paris, on 26 March 2002.

I must here make three comments:

1. The self, such as Winnicott tries to think it, and which stems in my view from what Simondon conceptualizes as psychic and collective individuation, is not reducible to the metaphysical self of consciousness: it is rather the self of the id, that is of the unconscious. This is what must here be thought – and if there were time, this would necessarily pass by way of Bateson’s theory of alcoholism.

2. The systemic destruction of faithfulness necessarily induced by permanent innovation and necessary to the consumerist economic system is inevitably also the systemic destruction of trust. Now, no economic system can function without a basis in a priori trust – it is the function of the fiduciary hypomnematon to stabilize this trust, but it cannot be produced by the system itself.

3. Such a basis is necessarily constituted by something incalculable, which is an improbability and an infinity, which was named God before His death – and which, in the same stroke, when the nihilistic destiny of rationalization began to impose itself, saw the emergence of the Thing.

In The Fault of Epimetheus, I attempted to establish that the anthropological fact (the origin of hominization) is the constitution of an epiphylogenetic milieu: a milieu constituted by artifacts that become functional supports of a technical memory that is added to species memory (phylogenetic memory) and to the memory of the nervous system (epigenetic memory).

In order to become supports of memory, however, and to be interiorized, and thus to constitute an imagination – that is a power to figure and to schematize – these things, which ‘spontaneously’ constitute themselves into mnesic supports, must also be supports of projection – of the Thing, that is of the default of origin (rather than of a simple lack) opening desire to infinity and to the infinity of its objects, of which things become the fetishes. Such a projection presupposes the formation of transitional space in Winnicott’s sense of the term.

Previously, the question of the pharmakon, a condition of the life of the spirit that can just as well turn into its opposite (that is turn it round and round like a top, or tourner en bourrique in French: to drive someone up a wall), this question was always set out on the basis of hypomnemata as ‘spiritual instruments’, that is, also, on the basis of the Platonic matrix of the problem of hypomnesis. Now:

1. The formation of things as epiphylogenetic supports occurs well before the emergence of hypomnesic supports strictly speaking.

2. A reading of Winnicott shows that it is a relation to a primary object, that is a transitional object, and insofar as it does not exist, that the primordial pharmacological process is initiated.

3. Current child psychiatry, faced with the enormous pathogenic effects of the immersion of the infantile psychic apparatus in the audiovisual media pool, has over the past few years pointed out, notably in the work of Zimmermann and Christakis, this primordial role of the relation to transitional objects – that is to the supports of motricity through which a world is opened up by being projected – the hyper-mediatized and hallucinatory milieu short-circuiting the sensory-motricity that Winnicott shows to be the condition of infantile psychogenesis.

It is the synaptogenesis of the child that is structurally altered by the immersion of its brain in the mediatic milieu. This modification of cerebral circuits is the interiorization of a modification of social circuits –for this is what the brain is: a relational organ that plastically interiorizes social relational systems, themselves supported by things, objects and artifacts which weave human commerce as experiences of the Thing.

The interiorization of social circuits within cerebral circuits is what permits the constitution of transindividuation processes. Signification is itself the material of what Winnicott calls creativity, which echoes what Canguilhem calls normativity. And creativity is what produces meaning from significations shared by those who co-individuate themselves through a process of transindividuation.

In the course of a process of transindividuation, a psychic individual co-individuates itself with one or several other psychic individuals in such a way that their co-individuation leads them to agreement on the signification of an artefact – word, thing, practice, social convention, ritual, goal, etcetera.

In the most general way, within a dialogue – and what Mikhail Bakhtin called dialogism extends these questions well beyond the Socratic scene of inter-individual dialogue, inscribing them and complicating them in the diachronic space of what Julia Kristeva calls intertextuality,4 but also passes through what could be called, borrowing a term from Bruno Latour, interobjectivity – the protagonists co-individuate themselves, that is they trans-form themselves together, and this mutual trans-formation can confirm and even deepen a divergence or disagreement: not all dialogue leads to, nor necessarily even aims at, the production of a consensus. And from the moment of its birth, logos is defined as originating in polemos.

The fact remains that logical and dialogical activity also produces convergences through which what Simondon calls the transindividual, that is a body of shared significations is metastabilized.5 Scientific controversy, for example, essentially aims at such a convergence. This does not mean that it results in the homogenization of a body of theorems: the same signification, shared by many, may be the support of multiple meanings.

This is so because, beyond the finite provisional convergences through which significance is constituted, there remain convergences ‘to the infinite’: ideal objects, that is which do not exist, but which consist, and that I call ‘consistences’.

Meaning is the way in which a signification works through a process of individuation at the psychic as well as the collective level. Significance is the metastable element on the basis of which there can take place what Simondon describes as a phase difference or ‘de-phasing’, that is an instability – and which is the origin of what he names a ‘quantum leap’ in individuation, which is the crossing of a threshold in the process of individuation by which significance, recalling here that Wittgenstein defines ‘meaning’ as the shared use of a term, is infinitized.6

Meaning is a singular process of individuation (trans-formation) which makes possible common and shared use (significance) – of words for a speaker, or of other objects of social practices for a musician, a cook, a mason, a nanny or an architect. Meaning can then lead the psychic individual to develop and trans-form signification itself – either by extending it or through the way they comprehend it – and thus to contribute to the development of the collective individual constituted through transindividuation and the sharing of significations as a synchronically metastablized ensemble, an ensemble which thus takes a quantum leap and individuates itself, that is diachronizes itself. As such, the transindividual becomes for the psychic individual what Simondon calls the preindividual, that is a potential.

Circuits of transindividuation, formed in the dialogism in which human commerce in general consists, are founded on a relation of primordial confidence which, if one follows the clinical analyses of Winnicott, are elaborated in early childhood as the experience of the transitional object. This space opens up a relation to consistencies, that is to that which does not exist, but consists: a relation to what ‘makes life worth living’.

This relation of care constituted by the transitional object, that is by the first pharmakon, forms the basis of what becomes, as transitional space, an intermediate area of experience where objects of culture, of the arts, of religion and of science are formed. This intermediate area is neither inside nor outside, and strictly speaking it does not exist. But it consists: ‘Of every individual that has reached the stage of being a unit with a limiting membrane and an outside and an inside, it can be said that there is an inner reality . . . but is it enough? . . . the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute.’7

Spiritual mind is the interiorization après-coup of this non-interiority (as revenance), what Winnicott also calls potential space.8 This interiorization presupposes care, that is a process of learning through which an art of interiorization is developed – an art of living – that Winnicott calls creativity.

It is the pharmakon – a proto-pharmakon – that here takes the name of transitional object. Within pharmacological space, which can only become therapeutic insofar as pharmaka form transitional objects of all kinds, autonomy is not what opposes heteronomy, but rather what adopts it as a default, which, more than a lack, is a necessary default, and is that ‘which makes the individual feel that life is worth living’.9

What Winnicott calls the self (‘the interior’) is constituted from the primordial default of interiority as adoption (as creativity, that is as individuation) of transitional space, interiorization being a co-individuation of this space itself (transitional space thus being constituted as a process of transindividuation in which circuits form).

Being pharmacological, transitional space becomes poisonous (that is, in the language of Winnicott, a form of ‘illness’) when it installs ‘a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters.’10

The transitional phenomena that characterize the psychic life of the infans ‘belong to the realm of illusion which is at the basis of initiation of experience. . . . This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belong to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant’s experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work.’11

In the course of this experience an economy is constituted which is that of investment in the object, through which the object can appear, that is be targeted and intentionalized: ‘In object-relating the subject allows certain alterations in the self to take place, of a kind that has caused us to invent the term cathexis. The object has become meaningful. Projection mechanisms and identifications have been oper­ating.’12 To which Winnicott adds this question: ‘If play is neither inside nor outside, where is it?’13

This question contains an echo of the following footnote by Derrida: ‘The radical possibility of all spectrality should be sought in the direction that Husserl identifies, in such a surprising but forceful way, as an intentional but non-real [non-réelle] component of the phenomenological lived experience, namely the noeme. Unlike the three other terms of the two correlations (noese-noeme, morphe-hule), this non-reality [non-réellité], this intentional but non-real inclusion of the noematic correlate is neither “in” the world nor “in” consciousness. But it is precisely the condition of any experience, any objectivity, any phenomenality, namely of any noetico-noematic correlation . . . Is it not . . . what inscribes the possibility of the other and of mourning right onto the phenomenality of the phenomenon?’14

The premature immersion of the infantile psychic apparatus in the pharmacological audiovisual milieu short-circuits the formation of circuits of transindividuation that link a social circuit and a cerebral circuit through the intermediary of a thing whereby what Winnicott calls a relationship of care is established, through which the fundamental confidence of the child is formed as the singularity of its relation to the Thing. The pharmacological audiovisual immersion cuts the child off from the transitional milieu and bars access to potential and transitional space, which is neither inside nor outside, but constitutes a relational structure on the basis of which relations of trust and faithfulness can be established.

The brain is a plastic space of reticulated inscriptions organized by the interiorization and, if you will, the retro-projection of relations linked with and through the supports of epiphylogenetic projection – through which nervous memory both exteriorizes and interiorizes itself, that is weaves itself by passing through its outside, by making a detour through a pharmacological milieu – and such that synaptic short-circuits can also occur.

Transitional space is just as pharmacological as the audiovisual milieu, which is of course also, and even pre-eminently, a transitional space. But audiovisual transitional space is purely and simply toxic for the infantile brain: if it can eventually become curative, this would only be on the basis of circuits formed by the motricity of the infantile transitional object.

I make these remarks in order to emphasize that the history of the supplement foreshadowed by the logic of the supplement, also referred to as grammatology, presupposes a general organology of the mind and spirit that forms and deforms itself under pharmacological constraint and as a relation between the psychosomatic, technical and social organs that are linked together as transductive relations, that is relations whose terms are constituted by the relation itself. At the heart of this organology lies a genealogy of the sensible – and of the relation to the suprasensible, which it is tempting to project here as the Thing itself – a genealogy that weaves a relation to consistencies, that is, to infinities.

This means that the organology of the brain must apprehend this organ as the primary support of grammatization – where the question of writing and of its psychic inscription, as well as of the inscription of verbal traces (Saussure and Freud), is posed beneath that of archi-writing, that is, also, beneath the topic of the ‘quasi-transcendental’ that laboriously accompanies it. Instead of this topic, it would be more fruitful to focus on that of potential or transitional space, which does not exist, being neither inside nor outside, but which consists – and projects that which makes life worth living.

Grammatization extends well beyond writing and logos: it concerns all processes of discretization of the continuous, notably those of gesture and, as such, it describes both the proletarianization of the worker whose psycho-motor knowledge is discretized and harnessed by the machine, depriving him of his savoir-faire, his know-how, and the artificial audiovidual ‘perception’ that enables the analogical and then the digital discretization of the flux of images and sounds – by, however, creating short circuits, for example those that destroy the relation of care, that is the savoir vivre, the know-how-to-live, and the formation of confidence that provides access to consistencies: by barring access to the infinities without which neither confidence nor trust could be imagined.

As transitional support, every object is a pharmakon that brings with it the pharmacological constitution of those who live pharmaco-logically (us, affected by the Thing) and such that the constitution stretches and sometimes tears the soul that the psychic individual is insofar as, participating in collective individuation, it can disindividuate itself and in so doing disindividuate the collective, that is damage it, drive it towards the abyss. Because if there can be no psychic individuation without collective individuation, the converse is also true: there is no psychic disindividuation without collective disindividuation. Disindividuation is what Winnicott calls the false self.

Does the false self presuppose a true self that would be ‘authentic’ or ‘proper’? Clearly not: it is a transitional self, a relation woven beyond inside and outside, and must be thought on the basis of a pharmacology of the soul. This is the most gigantic point that Simondon makes in his L’individuation psychique et collective: it presents itself in this work as the question of the indefinite dyad, that is of a bipolarity that constitutes the play of tendencies throughout the psychic as well as the social individual, presented in Simondon as the ordeal of temptation. It is impossible to think either of the goodness or the evil of the soul, which are constitutive and dynamic tendencies (the dynamic of the drives, which supply energy to the libido, energy which is then dynamically rerouted or ‘diverted’), without taking these pharmaka into consideration, insofar as they can become poisonous.

The pharmacology of the soul is what Winnicott describes as its originally transitional dimension, the transitional object being also the means of falsification of the self as circuit, that is of the self as a relation for which the transitional object is the mediating factor. The human fact is essentially relational, and the psyche is formed relationally – that is by inscribing itself onto circuits of transindividuation – on the basis of transitional, that is technical and pharmacological facilitations [frayages, the French translation of the Freudian term Bahnung, used in relation to the neurological model of psychic functioning and containing the sense of the breaking open of a pathway] which presuppose mediators, curators, priests, but also parents, artists and therapists of all kinds. What Winnicott calls the environment, that is, transitional relational space, is here the crucial question: ‘Freud used the word “sublimation” to point the way to a place where cultural experience is meaningful, but perhaps he did not get so far as to tell us where in the mind cultural experience is. . . . Freud and Klein avoided . . . the full implication of dependence and therefore of the environmental factor.’15

As environment, the relational fabric ties together, through transitional and pharmacological mediations, a physiology, a history and a geography of the spirit. Circuits of transindividuation are circuits of desire, that is circulations of intensities that traverse and form networks by clearing the way – just as paths are cleared, and just as movement is proven, by moving – through which relations of attachment are tied together, philia, projections, identifications, acknowledgments, obligations, etcetera, but also deadlocks, confinements, boundaries and borders delimiting territories.

The pharmacology of the mind and of the spirit is a pharmacology of symbolic relations, but within which objects are the primary instances, and where what the Greeks called the sumbolon is an object. Prior to being constituted hypomnesically, the circuits of transindividuation whereby a mind is formed deploy themselves on the basis of infantile transitional relations, and as objects invested with spirit in the sense in which Husserl used this phrase when referring to books, but extending its use to all common objects: ‘a drinking glass, a house, a spoon, theatre, temple’ are Husserl’s examples of the way that familiar objects are always already spiritual objects.16