Adaptation does not change the means of becoming; it merely repeats and reproduces. Doctrines which insist that the essential activity of living things is adaptation assume that there exists, in the surrounding environment, some goal to be attained. Obstacles separate the subject from what he wants, obliging him to adapt as best he can to the forces that surround him. He either uses his cunning to circumvent these obstacles, or allows himself to be carried along. Simondon’s inventor has a different conception of existence. He is not a man of conflict. He opposes nothing. He integrates. He doesn’t seek to attain a specific goal, he attempts to find order and connection across the different worlds that he inhabits. For the inventor, there is not only ‘a food object or a prey object, but a world of nourishment and a world of avoiding predators, or a world of sexuality’. These worlds overlap and encroach upon one another. They are not radically heterogeneous, but neither can they be neatly superimposed, one atop the other. Their coexistence is not a given, but rather a problem to be overcome. This problem, manifest in the tension that precedes choice, the fluctuatio animi of which Spinoza wrote, implies a choice and an action. For Simondon, the individual invents – and invents technologies in particular – because, fundamentally, he must invent in order to establish coherence in the world.
Pascal Chabot, The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation
