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This chapter investigates how Albert Lautman and Gilbert Simondon influenced Gilles Deleuze's development of his philosophical concept of the problem or problematic Idea and his philosophy of event. It explains that Deleuze outlined a highly abstract concept of the problematic Idea using differential calculus and some of the meta-mathematical theses of Lautman. He also followed the work of Simondon to develop a general theory of intensive individuation which relates this problematic Idea to actual things in so far as it is necessary to posit it as an ideal pre-individual field.

This chapter evaluates the influence of Gilbert Simondon on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. It suggests that attention to Simondon's presence in Deleuze's thought permits us to move beyond the false alternatives presented by the recent debate on French Thought and cybernetics. The chapter discusses how Deleuze's use of the notion of the disparate compares with political interpretations of Simondon's understanding of the powers of the pre-individual. It also analyses Deleuze's statement that he parted company with Simondon only in drawing conclusions in light of the two thinkers' estimations of the role of ethics in capitalist society.

The Introduction sets out how transatlantic avant-gardes probed the intricate relationships between socio-technical ensembles, the human body and the quotidian operations of urban living. In the early twentieth century, these bathetic processes had been camouflaged by sublime cultural narratives that magnified the presence of technology in the public sphere while shrouding key aspects of its operations and functions. Beginning with a famous anecdote by Gertrude Stein, in which she describes an encounter between Pablo Picasso and a camouflaged cannon, the Introduction explores how technology became a cipher for avant-gardes’ encounter with modernity in the First World War. Following a survey of its key subjects and chapter synopses, the first section engages with the work of Gilbert Simondon to triangulate key technological terms and concepts, before applying them to modernist and avant-garde studies. The subsequent section builds ‘techno-bathetic’ frameworks from those concepts to critique the means by which technology is transduced into culture. Finally, analyses of Marcel Duchamp’s Encore à cet astre [Once More to This Star] and the radical Harlem Renaissance journal Fire!! illustrate how vanguardists deployed technicity as a crucial creative practice for intervening in cultural narratives and promulgating social change.

Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology, particularly his nonideological materialism, is considered to be a direct contrast to the dystopian tones found in Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society. This liberation of nonhuman objects from merely instrumental consideration also foreshadows Michel Serres and Bruno Latour’s notion of what constitutes quasi-object and quasi-subject. Bruno Latour’s book, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, is reminiscent of Simondon’s theory that discarded technical objects remain in a state of virtual suspension, something like a technological afterlife. This chapter discusses further parallels between the works of Simondon and Latour, notably their mutual positioning of human-machine interrelations on the same plane of being, as well as some methodological issues for the philosophy and sociology of technology.

The introduction outlines how we are living in an automated posthuman future with smart machines that blur boundary between human and non-human. The chapter also summarizes the general problems with humanism and posthumanism for instrumentalizing the human, and documents how both work too closely with neoliberalism and financial capital. How neoliberalism functions like culture and has created a world of economic ontology are also addressed. The author then traces problems with notions of agency based on subjectivity including the posthuman and object-oriented ontology, and proposes a different strategy for thinking agency along Gilbert Simondon’s notion of transindividuation that he calls ahuman. The ahuman is then defined as a stable figuration that embodies dynamic processes and forces that actually frame reality. The chapter ends with a discussion of the aesthetic as new figurations of existence that can be mobilized for alternative political purposes, as well as a brief outline of the chapters.

Drawing on Simondon’s vision of the primitive magical universe—the original harmonious mode of existence of the human in the world—the chapter proposes that a new algorithmic magical and animistic universe is in the making in our contemporary computational world. By framing the immersive experience of computation and its sensibilities, perceptions, and affects through Simondon’s magical unity, where humans are an integral part of a totalizing and harmonious whole, the chapter looks at the black mirrors of our digital screens as the portals into a new magical and animistic reticulation of the human and the nonhuman. This perspective locates the algorithm within a genealogy of the relationship between technology and magic, and reads it as a mysterious form of nonhuman intelligence performing in inscrutable ways. It is the increasing autonomous agency and digital uncertainty of algorithms that engenders a new magical and animistic universe.

This chapter takes the refrain from Sun Ra’s film Space Is the Place as an opening for a discussion about how the temporalities of particular Afrofuturist cultural productions participate in reorienting speculative imaginations toward the presently impossible, thereby emphasizing the salience of Gilbert Simondon’s theory of “transindividuation” as an intervention into Western conceptualizations of Being.

This chapter analyses the work of composer Anestis Logothetis. It explores Logothetis's compositional technique and experimental form of musical notation as an aesthetic and implicitly ethico-political engagement, and offers a precise mapping of a musical machine, drawing not only on Gilles Deleuze's work but also on that of Gilbert Simondon. The chapter argues that artistic compositions such as Logothetis's are cybernetic and improvisational scores for collective experimentation.

Chapter 1 outlines the genesis of digital objects by looking at the history of mark-up languages, from GML to HTML, XML and the web ontologies proposed by the semantic web movement. This chapter reads this technical history in parallel with Simondon's analysis of technical objects.

This fourth and pivotal chapter turns to Gilles Deleuze as a formidable critic of the Kantian legacy in philosophy and a radical renovator of philosophy’s ability to think the new. Working primarily with Difference and Repetition as well as with related texts by Gilbert Simondon and Pierre Macherey, the chapter articulates a theory of literary production in which system and freedom appear in terms very different from those of the romantics. The claim is that Deleuze’s rethinking of determination as individuation, and of being as difference, provides the resources for a non-romantic conception of literary creation. In this new conception, the work retains a degree of consistency while at the same time is grasped as differing from its causes as well as from itself. By maintaining at one and the same time the integrity and the novelty of a literary work, this “heterogentic” model of literary production is uniquely suited to revealing what is most radical about the modernist project.

The aim of art for Deleuze and Guattari is to render perceptible forces that lie beyond perception and to capture, in what is given, the forces that are not given. They task artists with producing compounds of sensation, heterogeneous assemblages of affects and intensities, extracted from forces lying at the limits of sensibility. This chapter explores the forming of these assemblages through processes of capture orientated around practices employing sculptural methodologies. Although Deleuze and Guattari have little to say about sculpture in general or specific works, they refer to the sensations of stone and metal as vibrating according to the order of strong and weak rhythms. Drawing on the writing of Gilbert Simondon these rhythms are discussed as dynamic modulations that emphasise temporal appearance. And examined in relation to Jack Burnham’s use of systems thinking identified in the artworks, by artists such as Hans Haacke and Public Share, that register complex flows of matter-energy exchanges.

This chapter moves through a sequence of short meditations on Gilbert Simondon's theses on individuation, the contemporary syncope of meaning for Jean-Luc Nancy, Friedrich Nietzsche on Anaximander and Heraclitus, and the authoritarian clamp-down of theurgia, among others. The individuation of the individual is to be thought of as emerging from milieux and as happening in milieux. Human culture to be truly human passes into the hands of poetry where its soulblind matter resides in potentiality. Religion, state politics, law, philosophy, morality, among others, have been almost from the beginning bound to theurgia, an experience founded on authority rather than knowledge. The prehistoric world of the daimon was dominated by divine law and guilt; the historic world is dominated by their absence in the sense of their delimitation and internalisation, the absolute soulblind government by an angelic authority over a life of indifference and total spectacle.

The Afterword consolidates the book’s arguments about the spatial practices of the techno-bathetic avant-gardes, who harnessed the semantic power of technology to critique its broader cultural contexts. It extends Chapter 5’s discussion of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man by exploring how the unnamed protagonist critiqued the technicities by which white hegemonies sustained cultural dominance, while simultaneously introducing alternative approaches. As in other chapters, the Afterword locates the technological sublime at the root of this dominance; Ellison not only exposes the potent grip that its servile dialectics exert on Western imaginations, but also the bathetic contexts of their articulation in culture, which are often repressed. For Ellison, as for Gilbert Simondon, this occlusion is exemplified by the ‘robot’, a cultural creation that fuses technical discourses in engineering with industrial alienation and narratives of the technological sublime. By exposing the means by which techno-servility entered culture, and yoking it to racial difference, Ellison ‘plung[es] outside history’ to engender new modes of technological agency, in the US and beyond. The Afterword argues that Ellison’s diachronic strategies exemplify the task of techno-bathetic avant-gardes: to perform an intermediary critique of the technological sublime before introducing alternative, emancipatory narratives, which can gain traction in the public sphere.

This volume aims to examine and clarify the complex way in which Gilles Deleuze asserts the ontological priority of events over substances in his 1969 work The Logic of Sense. It examines the way in which Deleuze grounds this assertion by establishing a relation, the precise nature of which is shown in this chapter, between the works representative of several philosophers and intellectual movements, including the Stoics, Gottfried Leibniz, Albert Lautman, Gilbert Simondon, structuralism and psychoanalysis. It shows that The Logic of Sense's paradoxical element is nothing other than the problem of the event, or the problem of affirming the ontological priority of events over substances all the way down.

Between 2000 and 2010, Bruno Latour starts to shape his general theory of “regimes of enunciation” or “truth production.” In addition to science and technology, he considers religion, law and other areas. While his discussion of institutions and materiality remains tied to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the general framework is provided by an encounter between exegesis and phenomenology, i.e. between Rudolf Bultmann on the one side and Etienne Souriau as well as Gilbert Simondon on the other.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on how Gilles Deleuze asserted the ontological priority of events over substances in his 1969 work The Logic of Sense. It explains that Deleuze extracted from the work of several thinkers, including Gottfried Leibniz, the Stoics, and Gilbert Simondon, a number of event-related problems and a hybrid family of event-related concepts which can be said to resolve the ‘event’. The chapter also reviews the various stages of the way in which Deleuze constructed his concept of the event, spelling out how the event is to be understood if everything is ultimately to be thought of as ontologically dependent on events.