Simondon’s Technical Culture and a Politics of Problems

There is a timeliness to Gilbert Simondon’s call in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958) for a technical culture that fosters a ”genuine awareness of technical realities.” Writing in the context of mid-20th century France, Simondon worried about a lack of technological understanding and envisaged a technical culture in which technological education would be considered as essential as literacy to meaningful participation in society. Sixty years on, the need for widespread technological awareness is greater than ever. The aim of this article is to clarify and support this claim by examining it through the lens of a politics of problems that can be found in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968).

From artificial intelligence to climate change, the big challenges of the 21 st century will revolve around the evolution and distribution of technology. The problems we face locally, nationally and globally are increasingly defined by technical conditions that feel so complex and opaque to the average person that it can induce a sense of impotence or apathy. It is against this backdrop that the thought of the 20 th century philosopher Gilbert Simondon is belatedly garnering interest within and outside of his native France.
There are many reasons for this delayed interest in Simondon, not least his influence on better known French philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler, but one of his most important and timely contributions is his call in On the To date, the literature on Deleuze and Simondon has largely dealt with the former's debt to the latter, particularly on the concept of individuation which plays an important role in both of their respective ontologies. ‡ While the exploration of * Simondon's two primary works, L'individuation à la lumière des notions de Deleuze,Simondon,and Relational Ontology," Differences 20,[2][3][179][180][181][182][183][184][185][186][187][188][189][190][191][192][193] the connections between their ontological frameworks is interesting and important, my focus here is to combine more overtly political elements of their philosophies in order to make a case for Simondon as a timely thinker that warrants our belated interest. *

A Deleuzian Politics of Problems
Although Difference and Repetition is first and foremost an exposition of Deleuze's ontology and his theory of transcendental empiricism, it also contains flashes of a political sensibility that is geared towards the formulation and solving of problems.
Deleuze develops his theory of problems most notably in the third chapter of Difference and Repetition, 'The Image of Thought,' which reads as a scathing critique of Deleuze's philosophical enemies, especially Descartes and Hegel. He also admonishes a "grotesque image of culture" † founded on an impoverished understanding of problems: We are led to believe that problems are given ready-made, and that they disappear in the responses or the solution [...] According to this infantile prejudice, the master sets a problem, our task is to solve it, and the result is accredited true or false by a powerful authority. It is also a social prejudice with the visible interest of maintaining us in an infantile state, which calls upon us to solve problems that come from elsewhere, consoling or distracting us by telling us that we have won simply by being able to respond: the problem as obstacle and the respondent as Hercules. ‡ In this passage, Deleuze lays out a number of challenges to the conventional understanding of a problem. Consider a multiple-choice standardised test: The person sitting the test is confronted with a question and a list of potential answers of which one is the correct response. Everything is given (ready-made) and the sole task of the testee is to correctly identify the answer, i.e., the problem's solution. Once the solution is identified, there is nothing left to do but to move on to the next question. It is possible to extend this notion of the ready-made problem to other facets of everyday life, be it the choices between consumer products -choices that we are led to believe are highly consequential (Pepsi or Coke?) -or deciding between political parties at the ballot box. In all these cases, the task is to choose among a given set of options.
Deleuze maintains that our societal fixation on finding the correct solutions to ready-made problems keeps us in a state of infantilisation because "the solution necessarily follows from the complete conditions under which the problem is determined as problem, from the means and the terms which are employed in order to pose it." * How a problem is formulated and framed determines which solutions are possible. For instance, when climate change is formulated as a problem of personal consumption, the proposed solutions are either to purchase products with smaller carbon footprints or to reduce one's consumption altogether. Under this formulation, the need for sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels as our primary source of energy is ignored, as are the collective efforts to accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels, solutions that only arise when the problem is formulated differently.
Thus, "a problem always finds the solution it merits, according to the conditions which determine it as a problem." † Granted, ready-made problems give us some agency -we still get to choose whether to buy organic or not -but they infantilise and distract us "from the most [undergone by a subject that are] destined to disappear in the formation of knowledge" ‡ but ontologically independent realities that are objective; their existence does not depend on "a thinking subject who exists in an independent and prior way," as the philosopher Sean Bowden explains. § That said, Aubrey Wasser rightly notes that Deleuze's problems are not recognisable in the same way as "objects of sense experience". ** Contrary to the latter, "[p]roblems are not unified and independently existing entities that might be perceived, conceptualized or picked-out as such by true empirical propositions". † † Deleuze himself describes problems as "multiplicities." ‡ ‡ A multiplicity is not "a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need * Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands andOther Texts 1953-1974, trans whatsoever of unity in order to form a system." * Understood as a multiplicity, a problem is a distinct system of "differential relations between genetic elements" † but it eludes a definitive determination or resolution. As a consequence, problems ‡ In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze proposes a tripartite ontology that partitions the real into three registers: the virtual, the intensive and the actual. For Deleuze, the "virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual." Every being has a virtual dimension, an intensive dimension and an actual dimension, and all three dimensions are equally real. A problem is the virtual dimension of a being or object that structures its actualisation by intensive differences. The agents of actualisation are intensive, but the conditions that structure actualisation are virtual. For Deleuze, "[t]he reality of the virtual is structure," but a structure that is not immutable or rigidly deterministic.

Simondon, Technics and the Politics of Problems in the 21 st Century
What then is the link between a politics centred on the formulation of problems and recently, the maker movement, a global network of people who make their own electronics and share their designs and experiences online and in person. These movements encourage people to move beyond the role of consumer to become makers and hackers who engage in the activity of invention and, in so doing, learn to pose and solve technological problems. They also resonate with Simondon's project because they depart from the paradigm of work which treats technical objects as means of production for a definite task. Instead, the maker movement and the movement for free and open source software approach technical objects as open sites of intervention and learning and their creations are designed to facilitate further experimentation rather than conceal their internal mechanisms as is often the case with commercial products. * A challenge, however, is that both movements have been vulnerable to industry capture and have had limited success in engaging people who do not already have a professional or educational background in computer science or design. Thus, the transition from a technologically illiterate culture to the technical culture that Simondon imagines will require more radical and structural changes to our socioeconomic order than can be achieved by makers and hackers alone. Indeed, without widespread technological education in schools and major changes to the way technology is regulated and developed, it is difficult to conceive of an inclusive and participatory technical culture that would enable more people to affect the trajectory of technology and engage in a politics of problems increasingly defined by technological conditions. * I develop this point and the relationship between the maker movement and Simondonian thought in Stefano Mazzilli-Daechsel, "Simondon and the maker movement," Culture, Theory and Critique, vol. 60, no. 3-4 (2019).