824090

research-article2019
CGJ0010.1177/1474474018824090Cultural GeographiesKeating

Article
cultural geographies

Pre-individual affects: Gilbert

1­–16
© The Author(s) 2019
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Simondon and the individuation sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474018824090
DOI: 10.1177/1474474018824090
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Thomas P Keating
UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Australia

Abstract
This article develops the theoretical relationship between affect and the pre-individual. It does so to
respond to a recent tendency to posit affect as vague form of relationality exceeding the individual.
Instead, the article outlines how affect, as a concept that draws upon a certain Deleuze–Spinozian
line of thought, is at least as much a process corresponding to virtuality and potentiality as it is one
that pertains to embodied individuals. Instructing this move is the writing of Gilbert Simondon, a
philosopher who conceptualises affect in terms of pre-individual potentials exceeding the individual.
Engaging with Simondon’s conceptualisation of individuation and perception as a way to trace the
importance of these pre-individual processes, affect is understood more precisely as a potentialised
orientation of non-individuated relationality. More significantly, though, the article argues that
Simondon’s notion of the pre-individual can be used to develop an ontogenetic logic of affect, through
which thought is directed towards processes of individuation exceeding the individual but that,
nevertheless, modify the genesis of affection, perception and action – an argument I make tangible
through a brief discussion of John Hull’s writing on sense and perceptual experience. An ontogenetic
logic of affect, I suggest, demands that the thought schemas through which social scientists evaluate
processes of affect be open to these pre-individual potentials that orientate perceptive experience.

Keywords
affect, individuation, non-representational geographies, perception, relations, Simondon

The human mind is capable of perceiving a great many things, and is the more capable, the more its body
can be disposed in a great many ways.1

Introduction
In the ‘multi-platform’ film project Notes on Blindness, John Hull is heard accounting his journey
into a perceptual world beyond sight, wherein audio cassette recordings, actor-performed
lip-synching, and compact, at-times distorted, video sequences combine to evoke something of a

Corresponding author:
Thomas P Keating, UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Northcott Drive, Canberra, ACT 2610,
Australia.
Email: thomas.patrick.keating@gmail.com
2 cultural geographies 00(0)

world teeming with tactile and acoustic sense. Doubtless, John’s journey is a deeply personal one,
where the anxiety and despair experienced after losing the memory of his wife’s face is elsewhere
offset by a joyousness felt in the sensuous complexity of a 9-o’clock rainfall. And yet, as is also the
case in every passing moment, the events in his account contain a degree of something impersonal:
here it is expressed through indefinite pronouns, blurred movements of light and dark, water cas-
cading onto concrete and a series of ‘disembodied voices’.2 Assuredly, the film, like the related
book,3 is about perceptive experience (how this differs between different blind people), spirituality
(in Christianity and humanism), memory (its loss and reformation) and nostalgia (for sighted life)
– each of which are variously documented through a series of audio cassette recordings dating back
to 1983. But Notes on Blindness is also about the very idea of blindness: about blindness as a con-
cept and about how perceptive experience – far from merely being something willed by a subject
– has a surprising, impersonal capacity to arrive ‘unsummoned’.4
This article develops the theoretical relationship between affect and the pre-individual – the
former often used to signal questions around the production of thought and perceptive experience,
and the latter often used to signal something of the impersonal and pre-cognitive. It does so to
highlight the way that affect, as a concept that draws upon a certain Deleuze–Spinozian line of
thought, is at least as much a process corresponding to virtuality and potentiality as it is one that
pertains to actualised human and nonhuman individuals.5 This staging of the pre-individuality of
affect has two aims. First, it considers how theorising the pre-individual might contribute to the
various ways affect has recently been understood across cultural geography and the social sciences
as an intensity6 that is formative in, but not equivalent to, the production of sense7 and experience.8
Second, the article explores how thinking through the pre-individual responds to a recent call for a
conceptual vocabulary of affect capable of apprehending the specific kinds of processes and rela-
tions structuring our experience of the world yet exceeding the individual subject.9
Pursuing these aims, the article focuses on the writing of Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989): a
French philosopher who conceptualises affect10 not as something corresponding to individuals,
but in terms of a pre-individual potentiality exceeding the individual. Advancing a philosophy
of individuation adequate to the task of explaining the invention and reproduction of human,
physical and technological forms of life, Simondon deploys the concept of affect in specific
moments within his work: from problematising the individual as a principle of explanation,11 to
questioning the relationship between aesthetics and technology,12 to his formulation of the gen-
esis of sense and perception in living bodies13 – to name just three significant trajectories.14 In
doing so, the relationship between affect and the pre-individual takes on a specific role in
explaining the principle of individuation. Understood as an incessant and ontologically primary
process of creative constitution, individuation defines the way in which an individual exists as
a becoming-being from a system of potentialised incompatibility.15 The task of foregrounding
these potentialised yet incompatible systems of individuation is central to Simondon’s philoso-
phy, which, above all else, endeavours to think through processes of individuation without
relying on pre-existing or pre-eminent individual things as a constitutive source or principle for
such processes. Instead, Simondon treats individuation as its own principle of constitution that
implicates individual subjectivity and sense through certain orienting relations between affect
and the pre-individual. Here, and in a restrictive sense, the pre-individual refers to a system
‘preserved with the individual being, and which contains potentials and virtualities’.16 Put sim-
ply, for Simondon, the pre-individual refers to a potentialised system that acts as a source of
future individuations. To understand the individual through individuation, as Simondon would
have us do, means asserting that it is only ever a partial result within an ongoing process of
creative emergence, which is guided in part by certain kinds of affective processes and relations
among pre-individual potential.
Keating 3

Before launching into an account of the promise of Simondon’s philosophy of individuation for
attending to processes and relations of affect, it is first worth emphasising that attempts to concep-
tualise affect in terms of pre-individual potential are hardly new; on the contrary, it was Deleuze17
who acknowledged the importance of Simondon’s writing on affect and found in his philosophy
the ‘first thought-out theory of impersonal and pre-individual singularities’.18 And notwithstanding
certain divergences that exist between Simondon and Deleuze’s respective usage of the concept of
the pre-individual,19 clearly this term has long provided an important motif for Deleuze–Spinozian
theories of affect in their accounts of the movement of impersonal intensity between bodies.20 As
an impersonal intensity, this concept of affect becomes significant when it offers a way to direct
our individuated thoughts and sensibilities towards the ‘virtual field of what might happen next’.21
Through descriptors like the impersonal, pre-personal, and pre-conscious, then, there already
exists a theoretical relationship between affect and the pre-individual that gestures towards becom-
ing relations of affect – a relationship that challenges the tendency to privilege subjective relations
as foundational in the production of conscious experience.
However, less work has been done to understand how Simondon’s philosophy of individuation
specifically intervenes in ongoing debates within the recent turn to affect.22 This is perhaps surpris-
ing as Deleuze develops Simondon’s theory of pre-individual singularities into an entire project of
‘transcendental empiricism’, which offers a way of thinking about both affect and sense as events
that are individuating but liberated from the logics of a ‘substantial and constituting subject’.23 Yet
theorising affect and the pre-individual after Simondon demands some precision24 if it is to avoid
becoming an all-too-general acknowledgement of an excessive or more-than-individual form of
affective process and relationality. As Anderson notes,

[A]rguing that entities are ‘relationally constituted’ has become automatic, a habit to be mastered and
repeated. Little more than the most basic starting point, it tells us nothing specific about different affects
and what they do.25

Acknowledging this concern, conceptualising affect and the pre-individual not only demands
critical attention to impersonal processes and relations exceeding the individual but it also raises
the question of how to specifically theorise these excessive processes and relations without falling
back onto the logics of individualised subjects or bodies. Acting at the excesses of individuated
subjectivity, these processes and relations are particularly important given human geography’s
enduring interest in developing approaches to research that pay attention to ‘the non-visible, the
non-verbal and the non-obvious’ production of social life.26 Decisively, Simondon’s philosophy
of individuation provides a number of conceptual foci that consider processes of affect not simply
as relations between individual entities but also as something operating in a pre-individual phase
consisting of ‘non-individuated’ potentiality:27 a pre-individual ‘system of virtualities, potentials
and forces on the way’.28 Theorising affect together with this pre-individual system, Simondon
advances a future-oriented and inventive theory of becoming-being as emerging from both actu-
alised individuals and individuating systems. Taking the lead from Claire Colebrook, such a focus
on the theoretical relation between affect and the pre-individual demands an understanding of the
former as strictly intensive and distinct from the concept of affection in its emphasis on how pro-
cesses exceeding the individual nevertheless structure new possibilities for individual thought and
lived experience.29 Developing out of Colebrook’s critique of the tendency to fold the (intensive)
meaning of affect into the ready-made logics and anticipations of individual experience (exten-
sive affections), this article pursues a concept of affect as it is inflected in the work of Simondon,
Spinoza and Deleuze as a way to more specifically conceptualise the processes of affect exceed-
ing the individual.30
4 cultural geographies 00(0)

Developing this conceptual line of thought about the way affect exceeds individuated terms, the
remainder of this article has two parts. The first part begins with Spinoza’s notion of the affective
body, a starting point that foregrounds the problem with conceptualising affect too strongly in
terms of the individual. The second part of the article outlines why Simondon’s conceptualisation
of affect and the pre-individual demands an attention to the specific kinds of processes and rela-
tions that exist among non-individuated forms of potentiality. The key point is to stage the signifi-
cance of attending to these processes and relations of affect in terms of the pre-individual – an
argument I attempt to make tangible through a brief discussion of John Hull’s writing on sense and
perceptual experience. The article concludes by detailing how Simondon’s conceptual terms
instructs an ontogenetic logic of affect – one that demands that the thought schemas through which
social scientists evaluate the affective production of perceptive experience be opened up to these
virtual forms of action.

Affect: exceeding the individual

In a restricted sense, affect as a concept can be associated with a relatively small set of philoso-
phers: Baruch Spinoza, William James, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze – and a recent push within
the social sciences to apprehend notions of agency and experience that challenge the exceptional-
ism of the human body or subject. This recent turn to affect is an inflection of a longer-run debate
that puts into question the relationship between mind and body, insisting that affect – far from
describing something intrinsic to an individual body or subject31 – is resolutely the ‘ability to affect
and be affected’.32 Although oft-cited, this conceptualisation is worth focussing on as it goes some
way to explaining how affect can become stymied when conceptualised too strongly in terms of the
givenness of an individual.33 An individual body, as it is understood for Spinoza, is ‘not distin-
guished in respect to substance’34 but by ‘motion and rest, speed and slowness’.35 As a moving
composite of many individuals, Spinoza’s affective body is defined in terms of kinesis rather than
substance, and insists that the way we think about the body is not enveloped within the individual,
but more acutely concerns the future of the body as an ongoing process of intensive actualisation
of that which is not yet individual.36
If for Spinoza the body is to be understood as an ongoing composition of speed and slowness
able to affect and to be affected, the concept of affect would not merely be an individual experience
or reaction to an intensive event. Instead, and more expansively, affect would be the intensive
event: ‘a qualitative change, equally corporeal and mental, in the intensity of the being’s power to
persevere’.37 Defining affect as an intensive event that is at once corporeal and mental is not to
suggest such events are predicated on individual bodies, objects or subjects. Rather, the Deleuze–
Spinozian turn to affect signals a specific change in emphasis: from affect as a power attributed to
an individual to a concept of affect as a pre-individual virtuality proceeding from ‘pure imma-
nence’.38 While not in strict opposition, this change in emphasis is significant insofar as these
intensive processes can be conceptualised to understand affect as a transformative event that may,
or may not, modify the conditions that compose individual subjects and objects. In focussing on
these conditions of transformation, the turn to affect invites a series of post-Cartesian shifts:

[F]rom privileging the organic body to exploring nonorganic life . . . from focusing on an economy of
production and consumption to focusing on the economic circulation of pre-individual bodily capacities or
affects in the domain of biopolitical control.39

The recent turn to affect suggests that it is now – amid emerging configurations of bodies, tech-
nologies and matter – that we might better understand those pre-individual powers acting beyond the
Keating 5

organic-physiological constraints of the living individual.40 Affect theory, if it has had any ‘impact’
through its celebrated critique of Cartesianism, can be seen as an apparent way out of representational
and identity-based models of thought, where the virtuality and politics of affect is written about
beyond the meaning it has for the life of the individual human organism or subject. Invoking a non-
representational character of affect,41 it is this turn to affect that has elaborated a concept of intensive
force immanent to processes and relations that exceed the individual subject or organism. ‘For when
affective force is personalised or objectified as a problem for knowledge the problem of affect is
reduced to its use for us’.42 Affect, conceptualised non-representationally, is meaningful for individu-
ated subjects and objects but also exhibits something of the pre-individual.43
If the advent of affect theory in psychoanalysis sought to articulate affect as a ‘drive’ that recon-
figures the relationship between corporeal and psychic life,44 recent attention to the pre-individu-
ality of affect emphasises those singular and virtual potentials that open thought up to becoming
different. In doing so, this concept of affect works as a reminder that ‘an alternative articulation of
difference will not start from the individual, but from a much wider ecology of life’.45 Thus, to
speak of affect as a kind of pre-individual potential and intensive process is not to suggest these
potentials and relations need to be grounded with the production of subjective affections to become
meaningful. Indeed, the appearance of psychological theories and vocabularies within Deleuze–
Spinozian theories of affect is all too often used as justification to call for such grounding.46 The
problem with grounding the concept of affect within social psychological vocabularies is the ten-
dency to treat affect as a phenomenon correlative to ready-made forms of sense and sensibility,
rather than as an event that disposes the thinking body so as to transform what is possible to think
and perceive.47 This latter reading of affect is not about privileging the physical or the psychical
but concerns itself with articulating those non-representational processes enacted at the excesses of
subjective experience.48
Similar problems occur when the meaning derived from affect is too strongly understood in
terms of the ready-made categorisations of the embodied individual. As Colebrook argues, the turn
to affect has presided over a ‘privatisation’ of affect’s intensive and singular logics within the
bounded form of the organismic individual;49 a conceptual emphasis that occludes understandings
of affect as a force that exceeds individuality. The problem with subsuming the Deleuze–Spinozian
affective body onto the organism is that it posits its potentiality and transformative capacity as
merely an affordance for an individual subject or object. The danger here is to reduce Deleuze–
Spinozian affect to an organising relation between an environment and individual organism, in
which affect is meaningful only insofar as it enables the self-maintenance of the organism through
its own constitution of sense.50 Instead, following Simondon, what is needed is a concept of affect
that attends to those processes and relations exceeding the individual–milieu dyad, since ‘one can
not [sic] explain the individual by the milieu nor the milieu by the individual, and one cannot
reduce the one to the other’.51
Rather than rendering affect as a relation between environment and individual subjects or organ-
isms, Simondon’s concept of affect demands an understanding that ‘the actual world as a world of
subjects and objects has as its precondition a virtuality that exceeds it and provides the conditions
for its transformation’.52 If we are to avoid subordinating the transformative capacity of affect to
either the affections of the individual organism or to the relations between the individual and their
environment or milieu, it is through a conceptualisation that emphasises its pre-individual potenti-
ality that exceeds the individual. Theorising this transformative potentiality, the article now turns
to Simondon’s concepts of affect and the pre-individual to advance a logic of affect that accounts
for those processes and relations acting beyond the individual. Conceptualising affect in terms of
the pre-individual affirms the idea that there is something to be gained from expunging the dogma-
tism of the individual as a pre-eminent site for understanding affect; to conceptualise affect to
6 cultural geographies 00(0)

render uncertain individual-centred thought and expand what gets included into our accounts of an
experience of incipient thought and action.

The pre-individual: from affect (individuation) to affection

(individualisation)
If affect might be understood as an intensive event exceeding individuality, then this opens up an
important question about how to give consistency to the kinds of processes and relations that
exceed the individual, not least because such conceptual attention promises to expose thought to
the conditions of its transformation.53 Simondon’s concept of the pre-individual is particularly
relevant for pursuing this question insofar as it advances a certain affective logic that is different
from the ‘interindividual’ affective relations between an individual and its environment or milieu.54
This logic of relation is different since ‘Simondon extracts relations from the static order of predi-
cation and intelligibility which subtends the idea of a world of individuals, in order to present rela-
tion itself as an ontogenetic factor’.55 By insisting on an ontogenetic theory of relation that is no
longer merely concerned with explaining the ‘lived experience’ of an individual subject,56
Simondon’s concepts of affect and the pre-individual can be seen as both a contribution to, and
modification of, the terms of critical debates that question the logics used to explain how affect acts
as a specific form of relationality.57 In what follows, I therefore consider how virtual and intensive
relations of affect might be better understood by attending more resolutely to the conceptual reper-
toires of Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. In doing so, I emphasise how Simondon’s notion
of the pre-individual helps advance a transformative concept of affect as a constitutive element of
individuation, which overcomes a recent tendency to variously ground the processes and relations
of affect within the figure of the individual. To advance this idea, I focus on individuation and
perception – two trajectories within Simondon’s thought important for understanding how he con-
ceptualises affect in terms of pre-individual processes and relations.

Individuation
In The Genesis of the Individual, the introductory chapter to his primary thesis on individuation,
Simondon presents his notion of individuation as a way of working towards a theorisation of the
entire unfolding of ontogenesis, or being as becoming. In a remarkably detailed few pages setting
out an array of reoccurring conceptual terms, Simondon defines individuation as an incessant crea-
tive emergence; an indeterminable process of alternation in structure that seeks to avoid the error
of explaining becoming as something predicated upon a pre-constituted individual. Instead of
explaining individuation through a pre-eminent individual cause or agent, individuation is here
said to occur when heterogeneous realities that exceed the individual undergo a new relation and,
in doing so, partially and relatively resolve this heterogeneity through an ongoing transformative
event.58 Whereas Kantian theories of individuation take the individual as a terminal point from
which to explain creative processes, here individuation explains the ‘genesis or constitution of
relation itself’.59 The relations between these heterogeneous realities are only ever partially
resolved as, for Simondon, ‘relation is framed by the passage from disparateness or incompatibility
to relative systemic consistency, as being separates itself into phases or zones of compatibility
without thereby ever exhausting its potential, its excess’.60 Thus, individuation works as a way of
shifting thought away from a consideration of the genesis of unified beings onto the genesis of
relations enacted between heterogeneous realities or disparateness. In proposing a break from the
idea of the individual as a necessary start or end point to explain the genesis of the individual,
Keating 7

Simondon arrives at the conclusion that the principle of individuation – this incessant and indeter-
minable process of creative emergence – must be prioritised over the individual to explain the
emergence of relations that structure the individual.
Caught within individuation, the individual is not a pre-eminent substance or form but the out-
come of an event of taking form.61 Foregrounding individuations, Simondon problematises sys-
tems of thought that privilege an understanding of the individual as a unified substance composed
of originary elements – or what he refers to as a ‘substantialist atomism’. Beyond the assumption
of unity, the individual would be understood as ‘[a]nything that contributes to establishing rela-
tions’,62 where ‘relations’ refer not merely to interactions between substantialised individual terms
but, more broadly, the forming of a dimension within a process of individuation.63 As a dimension
of individuation, the individual is defined not by its unity or identity but by a necessary non-unity
or indefiniteness.64 To illustrate this idea, Simondon suggests that – in the case of the living indi-
vidual – we might think of a body as composed not only of originary elements (cells, atoms, mon-
ads etc.) but also of those cohesive and destructive forces that individuate the individual (these
include, but are not limited to, energetic forces of heat, light, sound).65
To acknowledge movements of force in the constitution of the individual means also to accept
that there can be no definitive individual that is complete and closed off to more-than-individual
processes of individuation. A ‘perfect individual’, Simondon writes, finalised and without the need
for further individuations is merely an abstraction.66 Instead, the individual always exists as an
incomplete and incompatible effect of individuation: ‘a partial and relative resolution manifest in
a system that contains latent potentials and harbours a certain incompatibility with itself’.67 It is
here that Simondon’s novel contribution becomes clear: the problem for philosophy is not ‘how to
explain the genesis of the unified individual?’ but ‘how to explain the genesis of a certain incom-
patibility and indefiniteness associated with the individual that ensures its participation in future
individuations?’ By foregrounding the need to direct thought towards those often overlooked rela-
tions of intensive force exceeding the individual, Simondon’s philosophy accords an understanding
of individuals as necessarily indefinite (potentialised, intensive) and incomplete (non-unified,
forceful) products of individuation.
The indefiniteness and incompatibility enabling the individuation of the individual is, for
Simondon, best explained through the concept of the pre-individual. The pre-individual is a ‘non-
structured base from which a new individuation might be produced’.68 As the source for future
individuations, the pre-individual is not merely a pooling of past possibilities insofar that it arrives
at the same time as the individual and exceeds it. Instead, the processes and relations associated
with this pre-individual non-structured base are conceptualised by Simondon through a language
of intensive and virtual force. Put in these terms, the pre-individual is not a collection of actualised
individual elements caught within an individuating system, but a

[C]ommon reservoir of the tendencies of forms before they even exist as separate entities and are
constituted as an explicit system. The relationship of participation connecting the forms to the [pre-
individual] ground is a relation that straddles the present and imbues it with the potential influence of the
future, with an influence of the virtual on the actual. For the [pre-individual] ground is the system of
virtualities, potentials, and forces on the way . . .69

The pre-individual, as a potentialised ground [fond] exceeding actualised individual forms, is

advanced by Simondon to explain why the existence of an individual cannot be adequately theo-
rised in terms of its unity. The individual exists insofar as it can relate to a ‘charge of pre-individual
reality’70 that ensures continued individuations. As pre-individual, this potentialised and charged
reality exceeds any single actualisation and capture since ‘individuation does not exhaust in the
8 cultural geographies 00(0)

single act of its appearance all the potentials embedded in the pre-individual state’.71 Perpetually
exceeding any event of individuation, pre-individual potentials for Simondon refer to, in the broad-
est sense, any emergent energetic and material forces said to participate in a process of individua-
tion. In the case of the individual subject, this broad notion of potential is important as it maintains
the openness of the pre-individual within the ontogenesis of thought and experience, which directly
responds to the Kantian separation of, on the one hand, a subject containing a priori forms of sen-
sibility and, on the other hand, a world of sensation.72 As Sauvagnargues notes, for Simondon,
‘Kant wrongfully accounted for space and time in terms of internal and external sense, a priori
forms of transcendental subjectivity’.73 Far from a shift to a priori transcendental terms, the ‘pre’
in pre-individual is ontogenetic rather than chronological74 and denotes a potentialised source of
individuation ‘genetically prior’ to the pre-eminent logics of individual and world.75
Conceptualising the pre-individual as an ontogenetic source of individuation also provides
Simondon with an important referent to develop a transformative concept of affect.76 What is at
stake in his conceptualisation of affect is not a question of the enabling powers of individual sub-
jects, objects or worlds. Instead, Simondon refers to affect as one way to explain how virtualities
and potentials – this charge of pre-individual reality – modifies the genesis of thought and experi-
ence within living individuals.77 If we wanted to abruptly summarise the key idea that motivates
Simondon’s intervention into the concept of affect, we could say that he aims to show how affect
can be understood as a reorganising process of individuation occurring between an individual
subject and pre-individual reality. As Simondon puts it,

[A]ffectivity precedes and follows emotion; it is, in subject-being, what translates and perpetuates the
possibility of individuation into a collective . . . it is mediation between the pre-individual and the
individual.78

As a mediating structure of individuation, affect has a particular meaning that distinguishes it from
affection or emotion. On the one hand, affect [l’affectivité] describes a ‘gradient of becoming’ which
refers to a orienting axis of structuration between pre-individual reality and individualised subject(s).79
On the other hand, affection [l’affection] is an ‘index’ of becoming and refers to the realisation of an
affective gradient by an individuated subject.80 Put in terms of individuation, affection describes that
which precedes the experience of emotion within an individual subject and occurs through a process
of individualisation, or the ‘the individuation of an individuated being, resulting from an individua-
tion, [and creating] a new structuration within the individual’.81 Affect, meanwhile, is ontogenetically
prior to affection and refers to an individuation exchanged between an individual subject and pre-
individual reality that is expressed as self-constitutive temporal structure.82

Perception
If Simondon conceptualises affect as a potentialised gradient orienting processes of individuation,
this then would not be to pursue a general form of more-than-individual relationality. So while
Venn’s reading of Simondon’s concept of affect as a ‘relational force or energy’ akin to ‘gravity’
highlights the way it exceeds the individual,83 this description underplays some of the implications
of its pre-individual movement and relation. Instead, by foregrounding the relations of structura-
tion between individuality and the pre-individuality, Simondon discusses affect to offer a specific
ontogenetic logic for the virtual genesis of perception in living individuals.
To develop how the genesis of perception might be understood in terms of pre-individual poten-
tialised gradients, Simondon refers to a simple example of hot and cold thermal qualities.84 On the
one hand, as an individualised subjective experience hot and cold can be understood as affections:
Keating 9

actualised qualities perceived by a subject through a process of individualisation. On the other hand,
as a pre-individual affects hot and cold can be understood as sensations exceeding individual percep-
tion since, in a certain sense, they exist beyond individuated experience as expressions of two maxi-
mal terms on a scale of thermal quality: hot and cold exist in ‘an indefinite dyad of absolute and
opposed qualities’,85 which initiates an indeterminable affective potentialised gradient of the condi-
tions for experience. For Simondon, these indefinite and absolute pre-individual qualities orient the
subject before action and individuality86 by initiating individuation along a non-individuated poten-
tialised gradient of warming or cooling. And it is for this reason Simondon insists on distinguishing
affect from pleasure and pain,87 for the pre-individuality of affect also refers to virtual processes that
exceed affection or emotion – articulating the singularity of a body that can be ‘cold here and hot
there’ depending on its affective composition.88 As an indefinite dyad, pre-individual affects here
concern the singular thresholds structuring the possibilities for thermal experience, rather than their
individual actuality. The pre-individuality of affect is not contained within any individual or individu-
ation but by processes of singularisation – or what Simondon refers to as ‘haecceity’:89 the non-
individuated combinations through which new individuations and individualisations might occur.
As within the writing of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, Simondon’s concepts of affect and
the pre-individual are made specific by non-individuated processes and relations that can alter the
individuation of thought and experience of time and space. However, while Deleuze and Guattari
at times refer to affects as something that ‘could be said to exist in the absence of man’90 – insofar
as affects can be produced in painting, music, sculpture – Simondon meanwhile tends to refer to
affect within a certain ontogenetic logic of living individuals: from sensation (individual and pre-
individual reality), to affect (individuation of subject(s)), to affection (individualisation of individu-
alised subject(s)), to emotion (individualised signification), and finally action.91 Between sensation
and action, affect acts without predication on the figure of the individual insofar as it concerns
processes occurring at the limit of an individualised subject and pre-individual reality. This con-
ceptual logic is important since only the subject is said to engage in affective and pre-individual
processes of individuation: as soon as affect is individualised, it becomes a perceived feeling or
affection. Acting on subjects, but not necessarily individuals, affects operate more as ‘pre-individ-
ual feeling tendencies’92 than fully fledged affections. It is for this reason that Simondon writes
‘action is to perception what emotion is to affectivity’93 or, in other words, just as action is an
ontogenetic outcome of an individualising process of perception, emotion is the ontogenetic out-
come of an individuating process of affect. Refusing to dissolve the meaning of affect into embod-
ied experience, by asserting the primacy of forces and potentials to the becoming of being,
Simondon’s affect differs to affection in accounting for the pre-individual processes structuring the
genesis of perception as an affective orientation beyond the individual.
To make tangible the importance of Simondon’s understanding of perception for understanding
the relation between affect and the pre-individual, one can turn again to John Hull and his account
of the expressive qualities of rainfall as a perceptive experience beyond sight:

Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously
invisible things . . . Here the rain is striking the concrete, here it is splashing into the shallow pools which
have already formed . . . The whole scene is much more differentiated than I have been able to describe,
because everywhere are little breaks in the patterns, obstructions, projections, where some slight
interruption or difference of texture or of echo gives an additional detail or dimension to the scene . . .
The rain presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once, not merely remembered, not in anticipation,
but actually and now.94

In this vignette rain is expressed both in terms of John’s individualised perceptive experience
(a memory of a transformative perceptive experience), but also as a differentiating impersonal
10 cultural geographies 00(0)

event that exceeds his recollection. As an impersonal event, this account reveals something of the
pre-individual potentiality of rainfall: here it is expressed through the texture of concrete, chang-
ing depth of a surface, and the differing speeds and consistencies of water – its flow and patter. In
giving a sense of the excesses of a subject’s experience of rainfall, this event might be understood
in singular and ontogenetic terms wherein what gets foregrounded are pre-individual potential-
ised forces of expression – rain as a ‘pure power or quality . . . rain as affect’95 – that are resolutely
and always ‘in the act of happening’.96 The key point here is that perceptive experience, for
Simondon, as much as for Deleuze, has its origin in events imbued in indefinite potentials that
individuate a subject within pre-individual processes of ontogenesis: how the immediacy and
excessiveness of a sensuous event (rainfall) is expressed with and through a whole series of pre-
individual potentials (the indefinite qualities of rainfall entering into differing speeds, rhythms,
echoes and textures of sensation). This ontogenetic logic is notable because it explains the pro-
duction of new thought and experience in terms of potential orientations and tendencies without
holding the individual body or an environment as a container of possible affects. Instead, the pre-
individuality of affect serves as a reminder that transformations to perceptive experience are at
least partly owed to an individual’s openness to individuating compositional involvements with
pre-individual potentials exceeding the individual–milieu dyad.97

Conclusion
Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and his notion of the pre-individual concerns certain rela-
tions of affect that, while exceeding the individual, are determinable in the genesis of thought and
perceptive experience within an individual body. Foregrounding these pre-individual relations, the
aim of this article has been to develop a vocabulary of affect that is far more attentive to those
processes of individuation that exceed the individual. As pre-individual, affect would be a way of
articulating the genesis of a thought or experience from a pre-individual system of virtualities and
potentialities,98 without falling back on a certain individual–environment or interindividual reduc-
tionism. This notion of affect advances an understanding of the genesis of experience, not merely
as an outcome of relations between individual and the possibilities of a given environment but also
as an outcome of pre-individual potential. Thinking through Simondon’s philosophy, the article
argues that the pre-individual can be used to develop an ontogenetic logic of affect through which
thought is directed towards the expressive processes of individuation that constitute different
thresholds for the generation of affection, perception and action – a logic that has greater consist-
ency than a vague acknowledgement of affect as a constitutive relation between individuals.
If the turn to Deleuze–Spinozian affect has produced new ways of accounting for transformative
and impersonal relations between bodies, objects and environments, then the experience of the
embodied or organismic individual has come to be its raison d’être. Yet, conceptualising affect is
not only a question of exploring how environmental affordances and relations are constitutive of
the individual experience but it is also an important way of opening up thought to those non-indi-
viduated tendencies that reconstitute the pre-individual conditions for perceptive experience. In
one respect, conceptualising affect in terms of the pre-individual might seem like a depoliticising
move that abstracts individual subjective experience from the immediacy of the lived body.
However, for Simondon, the need to confront the pre-individuality of affect is precisely to chal-
lenge the tendency to subsume the potentiality of a lived moment into a priori forms of experience.
Asserting the primacy of individuation to the existence of individual subjects, Simondon develops
an ontogenetic logic that not so much resolves processes of affect into ready-made forms of per-
ceptual experience, but provides concepts that direct thought to the potentialised, intensive condi-
tions for the individuation and individualistion of experience.
Keating 11

An ontogenetic logic of affect takes individual experience as a resolution of a system of poten-

tials staging a new problematic, which acknowledges the movements of singular orientations of
potentiality in the production of new perceptive experience. If, for Simondon, existence is defined
by an axiomatic principle of individuation in a system of potentialised incompatibility, the key task
would not be to stultify the meaning of individual subjective experience, but to invent new con-
cepts for exposing thought to the conditions of its transformation, and to evaluate affect beyond the
logics of the human organism and its tendency to underplay the openness of intensive events. This
task is precisely about developing conceptual logics that try to ‘elucidate immediate experience in
its pluralism’99 by foregrounding those processes that too often remain ‘invisible, denigrated and
unimaginable’100 within individual-centred accounts of the production of perceptive experience.
Recognising an ontogenetic logic of affect, then, is about becoming more attuned to those indefi-
nite potentials that can structure different kinds of thought and experience, and to generate logics
for thinking about the genesis of thought and experience emergent from individuating orientations
exceeding the individual.
As a concept pertaining to these individuations, affect is one way to understand the ontogenetic
production of difference that, like John Hull’s recordings about the perceptive world of blindness,
tends to be shaped by an impersonal and unanticipated arrival of thought and experience. And as
Notes on Blindness posits, we might begin to recognise blurred light, disembodied voices or an
event of rainfall not only as something impersonal but also as an indeterminate potential to be
affected in ways we would not have thought possible.

Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the valuable feedback from three anonymous reviewers. This article is indebted
to the support I received from those in and around the University of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD
Thomas P Keating https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2334-5987

Notes
  1. B.Spinoza, Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 44.
   2. P.Middleton and J.Spinney, ‘Notes on Blindness: Press Notes’, 2016, <http://www.notesonblindness.
co.uk/press>
  3. J.Hull, On Sight and Insight: A Journey into the World of Blindness (London: Oneworld, 1997).
  4. Hull, On Sight and Insight, p. 66.
   5. This is not to deny that affect has been developed as a concept elsewhere. For instance, Tomkins’ four
volumes of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness develops a more committedly psychological conceptualisa-
tion of affect. Here, Tomkins conceptualises affect as a biological mechanism, a line of thought that
will have element of contestation with the notion of pre-individual affect developed here.
   6. Affect can be understood as an ‘intensity’ in the sense that it is imbricated in the production of ‘new
relations and lines of thought, opening different mappings or potentials among what is, what is lived,
and what might be thought’, rather than being ‘extensive’ of ‘already lived and actualized set of
phenomena’ (C.Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, vol. I (Chicago: Open
Humanities Press, 2014), p. 88.
   7. This has been explored especially at the intersection of geography and non-representational theory (see
J.D.Dewsbury, ‘Non-Representational Landscapes and the Performative Affective Forces of Habit:
12 cultural geographies 00(0)

From ‘Live’ to ‘Blank’’, cultural geographies, 22, 2015, pp. 29–47; D.McCormack, ‘Molecular Affects
in Human Geographies’, Environment and Planning A 39, 2007, pp. 359–77), as well as related work
into post-phenomenology (see J.Spinney, ‘Close Encounters? Mobile Methods, (Post)phenomenology
and Affect’, cultural geographies, 22, 2015, pp. 231–46).
   8. See J.Ash, ‘Technology and Affect: Towards a Theory of Inorganically Organised Objects’, Emotion,
Space and Society, 14, 2015, pp. 84–90; L.Dawney, ‘The Interruption: Investigating Subjectivation
and Affect’, Environment and Planning D, 31, 2014, pp. 628–44; A.Closs Stephens, ‘The Affective
Atmospheres of Nationalism’, cultural geographies, 23, 2015, pp. 181–98. For a fantastic theorisation of
‘indifference’ as an affective and differentiating experience, see M.Hynes, ‘Indifferent By Nature: A Post-
Humanist Reframing of the Problem of Indifference’, Environment and Planning A, 48, 2015, pp. 24–39.
  9. B.Anderson, Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp.
10–11. See an evocative engagement with affect that exceeds individual subjectivity in D.Crouch’s
paper ‘An Ecology of Values: Critically Interpreting John Newling’s Art’, cultural geographies, 22,
2015, pp. 361–8.
  10. Here, and henceforth, I am referring to what Simondon terms ‘affectivity’ [affectivité].
  11. See G.Simondon, ‘The Genesis of the Individual’, in J.Crary and S.Kwinter (eds) Incorporations (New
York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 297–319.
  12. See G.Simondon, ‘Technical Mentality’, in A.de Boever, A.Murray, J.Roffe and A.Woodward (eds)
Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 1–18.
 13. G.Simondon, Cours Sur la Perception: 1964–65 (Paris: Aubier, 2006).
  14. At the time of writing, much of Simondon’s work, including his thesis on individuation, is awaiting
translation into English. When quoting directly from these untranslated texts, this paper draws upon
excerpts from a number of readers of Simondon’s philosophy and provides page numbers correspond-
ing to the French and English texts, respectively.
  15. Simondon, ‘Genesis’, pp. 297–305.
 16. G.Simondon, On The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), p. 253.
  17. G.Deleuze, ‘Review of Gilbert Simondon’s “L'individu et sa Genese Physico-Biologique”’, Pli, 12,
2001, pp. 43–9, 48.
 18. G.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Continuum, 1990), p. 344n3.
  19. Different from Deleuze, Simondon resists understanding pre-individual potential through the notion of
‘the virtual’. In part, this is because for him ‘the virtual’ or ‘virtuality’ corresponds to a kind of ‘pure
power, absolute power’ (G.Simondon, Modes, p. 213) that risks falling into a Kantian formula that
invokes transcendental conditions for existence. Thus, contra Deleuze – who refers to the ‘virtual’ to
go beyond a transcendental language of the ‘possible’ (see D.Scott, Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and
Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2014), p. 17) – Simondon’s writing is at times quite critical of the virtual as something used to explain
individuating processes. The key point here is that both Deleuze and Simondon are wary of conceptual-
ising the pre-individual as a (Kantian) transcendental condition of experience, but that the latter refuses
to use the (singularised) notion of ‘the virtual’.
 20. B.Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press,
2002).
  21. J.D.Dewsbury, ‘Performativity and the Event: Enacting a Philosophy of Difference’, Environment and
Planning D, 18, 2000, pp. 473–96, 481.
  22. Though see A.Lapworth, ‘Theorizing Bioart Encounters After Gilbert Simondon’, Theory, Culture &
Society, 33, 2016, pp. 123–50; also E.Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (London:
Duke University Press, 2013); J.Ash, ‘Technology and affect’, pp. 84–90; C.Venn, ‘Individuation,
Relationality, Affect: Rethinking the Human in Relation to the Living’, Body & Society, 16, 2010, pp.
129–61.
 23. A.Sauvagnargues, Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2016), p. 70.
 24. Precision here should not be read as an attempt to instigate a ‘proper’ or ‘definitive’ account
of Simondon’s thought. Rather, precision (following N.Williams, ‘Creative Processes: From
Keating 13

Interventions in Art to Intervallic Experiments Through Bergson’, Environment and Planning A, 48,
2016, pp. 1549–64) is to insist on the need to direct concepts to explain the conditions of singular
moments or events – an insistence that counteracts a tendency to develop concepts into more gener-
alisable and thus deadening terms.
 25. Anderson, Encountering Affect, pp. 10–11.
 26. R.Dowling, K.Lloyd and S.Suchet-Pearson, ‘Qualitative Methods 3: Experimenting, Picturing,
Sensing’, Progress in Human Geography, 42, 2018, pp. 779–88, 779.
 27. G.Simondon, L’individuation Psychique et Collective: à la Lumière des Notions de Forme, Information,
Potential et Métastabilité (Paris: Aubier, 1989), pp. 105–106, quoted in Scott, Psychic and Collective
Individuation, p. 88. Here, Simondon uses the term ‘potentiality’ to encompass something with a spe-
cific power to participate in processes of individuation. For Simondon, ‘potential’ is not defined in
general – as a virtual principle of possibility – but within a specific individuating system: ‘potential is
only potential within a certain domain of the real and not within all of the real in the stable system that
it forms’ (Simondon, Modes, p. 214). In this sense, Simondon insists that the notion of ‘potential’ never
refers to a general transcendental abstraction.
  28. G.Simondon, ‘Technical Individualization’, in J.Brouwer and A.Mulder (eds), Interact or Die (Chicago:
V2 Publishing, 2007), pp. 206–15, 208.
 29. Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, p. 88.
  30. Hence, my presentation of Simondon’s concept of affect will be selective and incomplete. For more
on the concept of affect in the work of Simondon, see Scott, Psychic and Collective Individuation, pp.
66–93.
  31. W.James, ‘The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience’, The Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology and Scientific Methods, 2, 1905, pp. 281–7.
 32. See B.Massumi, ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements’, in F.Guattari and G.Deleuze
(eds), A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 1987), pp. ix–xx, xvi. This definition corresponds
to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza and the distinction between ‘affectio’ and ‘affectus’. On the one hand,
‘affectio’ or affection describes the state of an affected body and therefore invokes an individualised
‘presence of the affecting body’ (see G.Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by R.Hurley
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 49). On the other hand, ‘affectus’ or affect is a becoming
action or passage of a body from one state to another. It is only by understanding that which emerges
between affectio and affectus that we can account for an enactment of ‘the increase or decrease of the
power of acting’ (Deleuze, Spinoza, p. 49). If conceptual priority is given to the latter within this paper,
this would be a question of emphasis and not a conflation of affectio and affectus.
  33. Here, one might note the surprising tendency to articulate ‘Deleuzian affect’ as primarily a process con-
cerning ‘the syncretic constitution of subjectivities’ and ‘embodiment’ (see J.Foster, ‘Dancing on the Grave
of Industry: Wenders, Bausch and the Affective Re-Performance of Environmental History’, cultural geog-
raphies, 25(2), 2018, pp. 319–38, 323), despite Deleuze’s resistance to conceptualising affect in terms of
the embodied subjectivity (for an exposition of this see Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, pp. 75–95).
 34. Spinoza, Ethics, p. 42.
 35. Spinoza, Ethics, p. 43.
  36. D.McCormack, ‘Engineering Affective Atmospheres on the Moving Geographies of the 1897 Andrée
Expedition’, cultural geographies, 15, 2008, pp. 413–30, 418–9.
 37. H.Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 29.
  38. Pure immanence has a relationship to the pre-individual insofar that it ‘is made up of virtualities, events,
singularities’ (see G.Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. by A.Boyman (New York: Zone
Books, 2001), p. 31). This relationship does not concern powers attributed to individuals since ‘imma-
nence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself’ (G.Deleuze, Pure Immanence, p. 27).
  39. P.Clough, ‘Introduction’, in P.Clough and J.Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 1–33, 2.
  40. Clough, ‘Introduction’, pp. 2–3.
  41. See N.Thrift, Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2008), pp.
171–97.
14 cultural geographies 00(0)

  42. M.Hynes and S.Sharpe, ‘AFFECT: An Unworkable Concept’, Angelaki, 20, 2015, pp. 115–29, 120.
  43. The pre-individuality of affect has been variously incited through the inorganic (see Ash, ‘Technology
and affect’), machinic (see T.Roberts, ‘From ‘New Materialism’ to ‘Machinic Assemblage’: Agency
and Affect in IKEA’, Environment and Planning A, 44, 2012, pp. 2512–29), molecular (McCormack,
‘Molecular Affects in Human Geographies’), sonic (see P.Simpson, ‘Sonic Affects and the Production
of Space: ‘Music by Handle’ and the Politics of Street Music in Victorian London’, cultural geogra-
phies, 24, 2017, pp. 89–109), atmospheric (McCormack, ‘Engineering Affective Atmospheres’) and
incorporeal (see Massumi, Parables for the Virtual) – to name only a few important trajectories. Whilst
remaining distinct, such foci are interlocutors to this pre-individual character of affect in their shared
intimations towards ‘the singular logics of the world in its becoming’ (J.D.Dewsbury, ‘Language and
the Event: The Unthought of Appearing Worlds’, in B.Anderson and P.Harrison (eds), Taking-Place:
Non-representational Theories and Geography (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 147–60, 155), through
which an event of thought becomes immanent to ‘a life’, made up of singular potentials, rather than life
in its given individuality (see G.Deleuze, Pure Immanence).
 44. Thrift, Non-representational Theory, p. 177.
  45. M.Lancione, ‘Racialised Dissatisfaction: Homelessness Management and the Everyday Assemblage of
Difference’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41, 2016, pp. 363–75, 366.
  46. See M.Wetherell, ‘Trends in the Turn to Affect: A Social Psychological Critique’, Body & Society 21,
2015, pp. 139–66.
 47. Spinoza, Ethics, p. 44.
  48. See Dewsbury, ‘Performativity and the Event’; McCormack, ‘Molecular Affects’; P.Harrison, ‘“How
Shall I Say It . . .?” Relating the Nonrelational’, Environment and Planning A, 39, 2007, pp. 590–608.
 49. Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, p. 81.
 50. See T.Posteraro, ‘Organismic Spatiality: Toward a Metaphysic of Composition’, Environment and
Planning D, 32, 2014, pp. 739–52, 744. In this autopoietic reading of affect, which also draws on
Simondon, Deleuze and Spinoza, an ‘organism determines the structure of its environment in terms of
how that environment is capable of affecting the organism’ (p. 748). As a site of determination, organisms
or ‘living beings do not discover sense; they constitute it’ (Posteraro, ‘Organismic Spatiality’, p. 750).
 51. Simondon wrote this in a letter to Jean Hyppolite in 1954 (see N.Simondon, ‘Biography: Some
Reflections on the Life and Work of Gilbert Simondon’, in Gilbert Simondon Site d'Information sur
l'œuvre et les Publications, 2014, <http://gilbert.simondon.fr/content/biography> (1 February 2017)).
  52. Hynes and Sharpe, ‘AFFECT’, p. 125.
  53. See Hynes and Sharpe, ‘AFFECT’; Thrift, Non-representational Theory.
  54. For an exposition of Simondon’s notion of the ‘interindividual’ see I.Krtolica, ‘The Question of Anxiety
in Gilbert Simondon’, in A.de Boever, A.Murray, J.Roffe and A.Woodward (eds), Gilbert Simondon:
Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 73–91.
 55. A.Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 137.
 56. T.Roberts, ‘Thinking Technology for the Anthropocene: Encountering 3D Printing through the
Philosophy of Gilbert Simondon’, cultural geographies, 24, 2017, pp. 539–54, 551.
  57. See Anderson, Encountering Affect, pp. 10–11. Also, for a critical engagement with the affective logics
of hope, see J.Gerlach, ‘Middle Hope’, cultural geographies, 24, 2017, pp. 333–9.
  58. Simondon, ‘Genesis’, p. 300.
 59. Toscano, Theatre of Production, p. 138.
 60. Toscano, Theatre of Production, p. 140.
  61. See B.Massumi, ‘“Technical Mentality” revisited’, Parrhesia, 7, 2009, pp. 36–45, 42.
  62. Simondon, ‘Genesis’, p. 298.
  63. Simondon, ‘Genesis’, pp. 308–9.
  64. Simondon uses the Greek word Apeiron when referring to the idea of the ‘indefinite’ or ‘indeterminate’
– a term taken from the pre-Socratic Greek philosophy of Anaximander. For a discussion of the signifi-
cance of this term in Simondon’s writing, see Scott, Psychic and Collective Individuation, pp. 141–3;
also M.Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2013), pp. 46–50.
Keating 15

  65. Simondon, ‘Genesis’, pp. 298–9. Yet ‘[l]iving matter is far from being purely indeterminate or purely
passive’ (Simondon, ‘Technical Individualization’, p. 210); rather, the point here is that
 
[i]t is not only the most obvious or best-defined structures of the body that take active roles in life.
Blood, lymph and connective tissues play a part in life. An individual is not only composed of a collec-
tion of organs interconnected to form a system. It is also composed of that which is neither organ nor
structure of living matter. (Simondon, ‘Technical Individualization’, p. 209)
 66. G.Simondon, L'individuation à la Lumière des Notions de Forme et d'Information, vol. II (Grenoble:
Jérôme Millon, 2013), p. 149.
  67. Simondon, ‘Genesis’, p. 300.
 68. Simondon, L’individuation Psychique et Collective, pp. 105–6, quoted in X.Guchet, ‘Technology,
Sociology, Humanism: Simondon and the Problem of the Human Sciences’, SubStance, 41, 2012, pp.
76–92.
  69. Simondon, ‘Technical Individualization’, p. 208.
  70. G.Simondon, ‘The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis’, Parrhesia, 7, 2009, pp. 4–16, 8.
  71. Simondon, ‘Genesis’, p. 300.
  72. See Simondon, Forme et d’information, p. 257.
 73. Sauvagnargues, Artmachines, p. 69.
 74. The pre-individual is ontologically rather than chronologically prior to individuation since ‘time
comes out of the pre-individual just like the other dimensions according to which individuation occurs’
(Simondon, ‘The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis’, p. 12). For more on the question of time in
Simondon, see T.LaMarre, ‘Afterword: Humans and Machines’, in T.LaMarre (ed.), Gilbert Simondon
and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013), pp. 79–108.
  75. Simondon, ‘Genesis’, p. 306.
  76. This ontogenetic reading of Simondon’s concept of the ‘pre-individual’ differs to Stiegler’s, for whom
the notion of ontogenesis is an ‘imprudent’ term within his philosophy of individuation (see B.Stiegler,
States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015),
p. 63).
  77. This focus on ‘living individuals’ is not without its problems: ‘Simondon notes the connection between
self-reflection and affect. He even extends the capacity for self-reflection to all living things – although
it is hard to see why his own analysis does not force him to extend it to all things, living or not’
(Massumi, Parables, p. 36). For Simondon, living individuals are distinguished from non-living indi-
viduals by their capacity to create certain forms of interior and exterior mediations that both participate
in and emerge from processes of individuation. For more on this distinction between life and non-
life (Simondon, ‘Genesis’, p. 318n5; also J.H.Barthélémy, Life and Technology: An Inquiry Into and
Beyond Simondon (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2015).
 78. G.Simondon, L'individuation à la Lumière des Notions de Forme et d'Information, vol. I (Grenoble:
Jérôme Millon, 2005), p. 252, quoted in C.Venn, ‘Individuation, Relationality, Affect’, p. 148.
 79. Simondon, L’individuation Psychique et Collective, 1989, p. 119, quoted in Scott, Psychic and
Collective Individuation, p. 71).
 80. Simondon, Forme et d'Information, pp. 254–5.
 81. Simondon, L’individuation Psychique et Collective, 1989, p. 132, quoted in Toscano, Theatre of
Production, p. 223n7. As individualisation always refers to the individuation within an individuated
being, Simondon sometimes replaces it with the term ‘psychic individuation’ (see J.H.Barthélémy, ‘Fifty
Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon’, in A.de Boever, A.Murray, J.Roffe and A.Woodward
(eds), Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp.
203–231, 213–4).
  82. See Simondon, Forme et d'Information, p. 254. Indeed, Simondon’s insistence that ‘we must not speak
of affective states as if they were distinct units of being . . . [but] affective exchanges between the indi-
viduated and the pre-individual’ (Scott, Psychic and Collective Individuation, p. 89) may go some way
to explaining his use of the term ‘l’affectivité’ ahead of ‘des affects’.
  83. Venn, ‘Individuation, Relationality, Affect’, p. 153.
16 cultural geographies 00(0)

 84. Simondon, Forme et d'Information, p. 253.

 85. Simondon, Forme et d'Information, p. 163, quoted in R.Nunes, ‘Politics in the Middle: For a Political
Interpretation of the Dualisms in Deleuze and Guattari’, Deleuze Studies, 4, pp. 104–126, 112.
  86. See Lapworth, ‘Theorizing Bioart Encounters After Gilbert Simondon’, pp. 16–19.
 87. Simondon, Forme et d'Information, p. 254.
  88. G.Deleuze and F.Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by B. Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 261.
  89. Simondon, ‘Genesis’, p. 298.
 90. G.Deleuze and F.Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by G.Burchell and H.Tomlinson (London:
Verso, 1994), p. 164.
  91. See Simondon, Forme et d'Information, pp. 247–53.
 92. Manning, Always More Than One, p. 28.
 93. Simondon, L’individuation Psychique et Collective, p. 107, quoted in Scott, Psychic and Collective
Individuation, p. 90.
 94. Hull, On Sight and Insight, pp. 26–7.
 95. G.Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. by H.Tomlinson and B.Habberjam (London:
Athlone, 1986), p. 111.
 96. J.L.Romanillos, ‘“Outside, it is Snowing”: Experience and Finitude in the Nonrepresentational
Landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet’, Environment and Planning D, 26, 2008, pp. 795–822, 817.
  97. For more on how these pre-individual potentials intersect with a Spinozian articulation of affect, see
Sharp, Politics of Renaturalization, p. 39.
  98. Simondon, ‘Technical Individualization’, p. 208.
 99. D.Debaise, Speculative Empiricism: Revisiting Whitehead (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2017), p. 2.
100. Dowling et al., ‘Qualitative methods 3’, p. 780.

Author biography
Thomas P Keating is a lecturer in human geography at UNSW Canberra. His research interests include the phi-
losophy of technology, ‘new’ technological interfaces with the body, and non-representational geographies.