Gilbert Simondon and the Technical Mentalities and Transindividual Affects of Art-science

Art-science: Culture and Technics

The last few decades have seen a veritable explosion of interest, within and beyond the academy, in the field of ‘art-science’ collaborations. ‘Art-science’ is a term used in the literature to refer to a multiplicity of interdisciplinary collaborations situated at the interface of the arts, sciences and technology, including practices such as bioart, nanoart and forms of new media art. Such practices have been embraced in the discourses of institutions and funding bodies as an important avenue to promote enhanced cultural dialogue and awareness of scientific debates and problems (Miller, 2014). In their survey of UK-based art-science collaborations, Barry and Born (2013) have highlighted how much of the discourse about art-science remains powerfully informed by C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 Rede lecture on The Two Cultures. In this lecture, Snow lamented the ever-growing ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ between the arts and sciences and argued for the intellectual and political-economic value of bridging this supposed cultural divide. In a second edition of the essay written in response to critics, Snow (1964) anticipates the possibilities for the emergence of what he calls a ‘third culture’ based on the active exchange and dialogue between artists and scientists (Rabinow, 1994). But whereas Snow’s focus was specifically on raising the scientific and technical illiteracy of the political elite in Britain, what we have seen in discussions over the last few decades is a shift towards an emphasis on the question of how to enhance public engagement with science and technology (Barry and Born, 2013). Art-science initiatives are thus presented as a vital strategy here, whose value is seen to lie in their capacity to raise public understanding of new technologies and their implications for society, and to contribute to the formation of a new culture of science.

Another thinker, writing at the same time as Snow but from a different intellectual and political context, who was also especially attuned to the potentials for a new technical and scientific culture was the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon. In the opening lines of his classic 1958 work – On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects – Simondon highlights how his study is motivated by the attempt to forge a different relationship of culture to technics, which, he claims, has fallen out of step with the becoming of technological objects. ‘Culture’, he writes, ‘has constituted itself as a defence system against technics’, with the pernicious effect of creating a stark opposition between the supposedly humanistic values of society and the dehumanizing, utilitarian schemas of technology (Simondon, 2017: 15). Simondon argues that we can find this dualism manifesting in a variety of cultural discourses on technology, from representations in science-fiction film and literature of technology as a dangerous, ‘foreign’ reality that threatens the essential unity of the human, to philosophical discussions of the dehumanizing alienation of workers in relationship to machines under industrial capitalism. What defines the novelty of Simondon’s response to this conflict is the claim that achieving a potential rebalancing of human and machine is not just a political economic matter of transforming production (á la Marx) or reforming our educational institutions (á la Snow), but is instead, first and foremost, a philosophical problem: It concerns our very capacities to think technology in the reality of its inventive becoming. Connecting with a core theme of his major ontological work – L’Individuation a la Lumiere des Notions des Forme et d’Information (Simondon, 2013) – Simondon argues that conventional philosophies of technology are beholden to a hylomorphic logic of thought that reduces technological objects to mere ‘assemblages of matter, devoid of signification, and merely presenting a utility’ (Simondon, 2017: 17). Through this hylomorphic lens, then, culture understands technology as ‘purely utilitarian, which is to say as concatenations of means’, and thus as an activity bound to the terms and parameters of the already-existing (Simondon, 2015: 19). The innovation of Simondon’s philosophy of technology lies in his attempt to think technology from the standpoint of its own singular and inventive processes of individuation. Simondon writes that instead of a hylomorphic and hierarchical conflict between ‘two cultures’ (as Snow argues), what we have instead is a conflict ‘between two forms of technique’, each involving ‘activities of manipulation’ that intervene in the transformative co-becoming of human and world (Simondon, 2015: 18). The difference is that whereas culture intervenes directly on the subject through the cultivation of new habits and behaviours (as in forms of training or education), technology works indirectly by means of changes to the environment that provoke new processes of vital and psycho-social individuation. ¹ As Simondon writes:

Every technical gesture engages the future, modifies both world and man [sic], as the species whose environment that world is. The technical gesture does not exhaust itself in its utility as means; it leads to an immediate result, but also provokes a transformation in the environment, which rebounds onto living species, man [sic] included […] It goes beyond the very limits of the ends belonging to a present state of affairs, to needs that, to a certain extent, exhaust and surpass themselves. (Simondon, 2015: 19)

In this article, I argue that if indeed the field of art-science represents an important contemporary site for the formation of an alternate technical culture then it is because of the new technical mentalities that its practices might cultivate. The topic of an unpublished essay only recently translated into English (Simondon, 2012a); technical mentality is a crucial yet underexplored concept in Simondon’s philosophy which, as Bardin and Carrozini (2017: 29) put it, ‘works as an intermediate dimension between technicity and culture’. It thus serves as something of a ‘missing link’ between Simondon’s account of the process of technical invention and the psychic and collective individuation of subjects, which have often been treated as separate concerns in the Anglophone literature (Chabot, 2013). In the following section, I unpack this important concept, highlighting how the ‘technical mentality’ is more than simply an ideological or subjective category as in traditional forms of critical theory, and instead comprises a metastable field of ‘modes of thought, affective tendencies and ethical values’ that modulate how we think about and materially engage with technologies (Simondon, 2012a: 13). Simondon’s notion of technical mentality thus extends beyond just the conceptual to also refer to the capacity of technologies to transform aesthetic and embodied capacities of perceiving and feeling, hence his occasional use of the compound term ‘techno-aesthetics’ (Simondon, 2012b). Art and aesthetic practices, following Simondon, constitute a privileged field for changing our technical mentality beyond functional logics of utility, and which might give rise to a new ‘mentality of individuation’ that would attune thinking to the inventive forces of technology (De Boever, 2014: 310).

To explore this potential, the second half of the article turn to an encounter with the art-science practice of Art Orienté objet (AOo), whose ongoing collaborative works seek to challenge and transform the technical mentality of the growing field of contemporary synthetic biology, which combines an exceptionalist image of the human body in relation to the natural world with an ‘engineering mindset’ that perceives nonhuman life as a passive material subjectable to manipulation and control (Zurr, 2012: 289). Art-science practices, like those of Art Orienté objet, deploy the tools and technologies of the contemporary sciences but in a way that seek to challenge their core ontological premises. At stake in art-science encounters is therefore nothing less than a different image of the world, shifting from a ‘scientific paradigm’ of representation and control to an ‘aesthetic paradigm’ of thought that embraces unknowability and becoming (Hynes, 2019: 113). What Art Orienté objet’s work stages more forcefully than other art-science practices, however, is a new vision of the human body within this world of becoming: a body that does not stand at a transcendent remove from this world’s forces, but one which is instead enmeshed in and transformed by the nonhuman and technoscientific assemblages that comprise the human’s milieu of emergence today (Gerlach and Jellis, 2015; Dewsbury, 2015; Sharpe et al., 2014).

Technical Mentalities

If technology becomes industry and takes defensive refuge in a new feudalism of technicians, researchers, and administrators it will evolve like language and religion towards closure, centring on itself instead of continuing to form, with man, an ensemble in the process of becoming. (Simondon, 2010: 232)

Put simply, the technical mentality constitutes our operative mode of thinking and doing technology. Simondon also describes it as the ‘driving force of progress’, a bold claim which needs a little clarification (Chabot, 2013: 67). In the essay ‘Limits to Human Progress’, Simondon (2015) is explicitly critical of dominant approaches, including Marxian theories of techno-social evolution, that theorize technological progress in exclusively commercial and economic terms (based on a teleological march towards pre-envisioned ends), framing it instead as primarily an ontological matter (or, to be more precise, ontogenetic, since it concerns the becoming of being). Technological progress is therefore registered, first and foremost, in terms of the capacity of technologies to ‘change mentalities, ways of life, even the human body […] the technological object carries the seeds of a “new” humanity’ (Chabot, 2013: 47). These ontogenetic capacities are a core theme of the ‘Technical Mentality’ essay, in which Simondon (2012a) traces how the shifting technical mentalities defining different epochs (the artisanal, industrial and post-industrial) transform the individuation of technological objects and the nature of human–machine relations. In the artisanal (or ‘pre-industrial’) epoch, the artisan entertains an immediate relation to both the affective and cognitive dimensions of technical individuation: The figure of the artisan comprises both the ‘source of energy’ (i.e. ‘the availability of gesture, the exercise of muscular force’) and the ‘source of information’ (‘the exercise of the sensorial equipment, enriched by education, that controls and regulates the application of the learned gestures to the concrete materiality of the workable material’) (Simondon, 2012a: 5–6). In other words, in the artisanal modality, it is usually the same individual that invents, constructs and repairs the technological object. However, with the advent of industrialization, we witness the growing separation of these processes, with different individuals attending to different tasks in an ever-finer division of labour. As Simondon (2012a: 7) writes

The effects of this amplification and complication of the industrial world is to spread out the different roles from each other: not only the source of information from the source of energy and the source of primary material, but even the different tasks of information contribution […] the figure of the unhappy inventor came about at the same time as that of the dehumanised worker: it is its counter-type and arises from the same cause

To overcome this alienation, and to rebalance technics and culture, Simondon does not advocate something like a ‘return’ to a pre-industrial approach to technics: The artisanal mode of production, he argues, is inadequate to both the scale and nature of the needs of contemporary societies (Simondon, 2012a: 8). Instead, the opposition between the artisanal and industrial modality is to be replaced by ‘the firm orientation of a voluntary push towards the development of technical networks, which are post-industrial and thus recover a continuous level [of operation]’ (Simondon, 2012a: 13). Simondon saw glimpses of such a nascent ‘post-industrial technical mentality’ in the operational thinking of post-war cybernetics, and in new technical networks and objects that contained within their design the potentials to be ‘enlarged, continued, amplified’ (such as Le Corbusier’s monastery of Sainte Marie de la Tourette) (Simondon, 2012a: 13). He also notes how this post-industrial mentality is embodied in a new kind of technical subject (contemporary examples would be hackers and craftivists) in which the distance between the activities of invention, construction and repair/maintenance is reduced (Hui, 2018): ‘the three types converge towards the image of the technician, this time both intellectual and handyman, who knows at the same time how to calculate and how to install a cabling’ (Simondon, 2012a: 10).

However, Simondon (2012a: 1) strikes a note of caution that this post-industrial technical mentality is still emerging and is therefore ‘incomplete and at risk of being prematurely considered as monstrous and unbalanced’. Specifically, he writes that the technical mentality is riven by a conflict between two opposing tendencies: that of ‘closure’ and ‘openness’. The tendency towards closure is apparent in the economization and commodification of technics, in which the technical object’s own internal powers of becoming (or ‘concretisation’) become subordinated to the pursuit of economic ends. ³ Simondon argued that this can be seen in the growing intrusion of psycho-social and cultural factors (fashion, decoration) into technical concretizations, and the unrelenting rhythms of capitalist innovation and consumption, which serve to intensify the obsolescence of technologies: ‘a car deteriorates quickly because it was made to be seen rather than used’ (Simondon, 2012a: 11). Another pernicious implication of this pursuit of commercial interests has been the closure of technical objects through various legal, institutional and technical mechanisms (such as patents, warranties and forms of anti-tampering features or software) that attempt to place constraints on what technical apparatuses can do and become (Dekeyser, 2018). These artificial limits serve to encourage an ignorance in both thought and practice of the material realities of technical individuation. ‘Openness’, in contrast, represents ‘the sign of the perfection of the technical mentality’ (Simondon, 2012a: 13). Simondon writes that a technical object or process is ‘open’ to the extent that it can maintain its ontogenetic process of concretization, creatively resolving the incompatibilities and tensions of its surrounding environment towards the invention of new material orders that transform pre-established boundaries and expectations of what is possible (Bardin and Carrozzini, 2017; Roberts, 2018). In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon (2017: 18) adds that the ‘open machine’ is one whose functioning is defined by a wider ‘margin of indetermination’, which allows the machine to be sensitive to outside information, to generate new connections with other (technical and vital) systems and to reconfigure the dominant forms of value and modes of thought circulating in the social field.

I argue that it is precisely in terms of a critical and creative engagement with this tension between technoscientific openness and closure that we can frame the ethico-politics stakes of contemporary art-science practices. If one thing unites the otherwise very disparate landscape of art-science collaborations it is often this belief in and commitment to an ethos of ‘openness’ (broadly defined) that is a foundational principle for their thinking and practice. In a few, and more overtly critical, cases, we encounter art-science projects that explicitly target the various tendencies towards closure that define contemporary technoscientific capitalism (Rajan, 2006): from the enclosure of the bodily and genetic commons in legal patents and private informational databases (Eduardo Kac); to the high economic costs and institutional barriers to access biotechnical equipment and research (Mary Maggic); as well as an excessive regulatory landscape that polices ‘correct’ engagement with biotechnological materials over fears of potential ‘bioterror’ and ‘bioerror’ (Critical Art Ensemble). However, and following Simondon, I want to work with a more ontological sense of ‘openness’ than the one usually encountered in the social science discourse on art-science, where it is typically framed as a pragmatic matter of facilitating ‘public engagement’ with technology, or instrumentally in terms of the ‘democratisation of science’ through raising cultural awareness of scientific issues and debates. Here, instead, openness refers to the formation of a new technical mentality, one in which thought remains open to technology’s indeterminate process of becoming. What art-science practices have the capacity to enact, I argue, is a starkly different technical mentality compared to the ontogenetic closure that defines the technical mentality of technoscientific capitalism. In the remaining sections of the article, I trace the contours of this nascent technical mentality along the three main axes highlighted by Simondon: in terms of its manifestation in ‘cognitive schemas, affective modalities, and norms of action’ (2012a: 13). Specifically, I highlight how this technical mentality is one that valorizes transindividual (rather than interindividual) thought; an aesthetic attitude of invention (rather than the technocratic emphasis on ‘innovation’); and the individuation of new ethical values (instead of the application of pre-established norms).

Transindividual Thought

One of the most visible areas of art-science practice today is work that is situated at the interface of the life sciences, biotechnologies and art. Grouped under the banner of ‘bioart’, a consistent theme across these practices is their emphasis on self-experimentation, foregrounding the living body as a pliable site of affective exchange with the nonhuman and the technical (Kellett, 2018; Lapworth, 2015a; Mitchell, 2010). Bioart has therefore emerged as a key focus of scholars in contemporary body studies interested in probing the ontological and ethical implications of new biotechnologies in relation to, for example, the biotechnical modification and ‘hacking’ of the (post)human body (Stelarc, ORLAN), the political aesthetics of genetic modification (Critical Art Ensemble, Neal White), the scientific and artistic manipulation of human and nonhuman tissues (Tissue Culture & Art, Anna Dumitriu) and transspecies encounters (Art Orienté objet, Adam Zaretsky and Ai Hasegawa). This interest in bioart reflects what it arguably dramatizes more powerfully than any other creative practice: namely, a vision of the body as what Andrew Pickering (2016) terms an ‘ontological theatre’, which co-implicates manifold forms of human and nonhuman life. The recent work of Art Orienté objet – an art-science collaboration formed in 1991 by artists Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin – especially stands out here for its attempts to repurpose biological systems and technologies to creatively explore the contemporary conditions of human embodiment and its material imbrication within more-than-human ecologies. ⁴ Laval-Jeantet and Mangin have stated that an ongoing preoccupation of their practice has been the accelerating loss of global biodiversity, with their work probing how the human body might be harnessed to sustain the life of threatened animal species (such as Skin Culture (1997) in which they had images of soon-to-be extinct species tattooed on skin cultures grown from their own cells). This is also a theme of one of their most famous works of recent years – May the Horse Live in Me! (Que le cheval vive en moi) – a piece initially performed on 22 February 2011 at Gallery Kapelica in Ljubljana, Slovenia. For this performance, which had as its setting a mock laboratory constructed in the galleryspace, Laval-Jeanet underwent a medical procedure in which she was injected with fractionated horse plasma. She then donned prosthetic, horse-like stilts to perform a ‘communication ritual’ in which she walked around the gallery space accompanied by a horse. The performance then concluded with another medical procedure in which the ‘chimeric’ human-horse blood was extracted from her body and preserved as material documentation of the piece. In subsequent exhibitions vials of the frozen blood have been displayed alongside videos of the performance. ⁵ Like other forms of body-based performance art, the piece demanded a high degree of physical exertion and self-management on the part of the artist (Hilton, 2013). In the months leading up to the performance, Laval-Jeantet received a series of injections of horse immunoglobins into her blood stream to gradually build up her immune system’s tolerance to the horse plasma and to prevent the likelihood of her suffering anaphylactic shock from the transfusion. In a post-performance interview, Laval-Jeantet reported experiencing the effects of these molecular transformations manifesting at the level of her bodily functions and nervous system:

I had the feeling of being extra-human […] I was not in my usual body. I was hyper-powerful, hyper-sensitive, hyper-nervous. I had all of the emotions of a herbivore. I couldn’t sleep and I felt a little bit like I was becoming a horse ⁶

However, and as Muriel Combes (2012) clarifies in her incredibly rich study of Simondon’s thought, the transindividual is not something already-given, but is rather something that must be invented. Here, again, we encounter the significance of Simondon’s argument for a new technical mentality, as he argues that the ‘technical object adequately understood and put to work can allow for the emergence of the transindividual’ (Combes, 2012: 77). Technology can fulfil this operation because, as Simondon (2017: 16) writes in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, it ‘holds something of the human within itself: […] unrecognised, materialised, subjugated, but human nonetheless’. This ‘something human’ is technology’s own preindividual reality – its margin of indetermination – comprising forces and potentials that the technical object deposits into the collective as the seeds for future individuations (Sauvagnargues, 2012). For Simondon, if we are alienated from technology it is not just as workers or consumers alienated from the means of production, but also, and just as importantly, we are alienated in our thinking from technology’s preindividual potential which can only be actualized by way of the transindividual. Therefore, overcoming alienation is as much about transforming thought as it is about transforming the existing political economic order. Simondon (2017: 253) argues that both philosophy and art, through their different encounters with technology and science, have the potential to contribute much to this task of reducing alienation by opening a thinking of technological objects ‘not as the other of the human but as themselves containing something of human nature’. This was the urgent task facing Simondon in the context of the post-war European technocracy in which he was writing. And it is a task that is taken up in the work of Art Orienté objet, but one which is also importantly updated for our contemporary era of the Anthropocene, in artistic projects which are concerned as much with the co-becoming of humans and machines (the ‘human in the technological’) as they are with the ‘nonhuman that is always-already in the human’. For Art Orienté objet, this is the most urgent problem facing culture and thought today: how to transform and overcome the alienation of the human from the nonhuman and technical forces that compose and surround it.

Affective Modalities: Technoaesthetic Invention

At the heart of the post-industrial, technical mentality is a tension between two affective modalities that we might term, following Simondon, the technocratic and technoaesthetic attitudes. The technocratic attitude is one that reduces technology to a servile instrument used in the pursuit of ever-greater economic productivity, efficiency and rationalization. The destructive impacts of this technocratic attitude on human and nonhuman forms of life are everywhere apparent in our contemporary world: from the ecological devastation wrought by new fracking technologies, to the development of invasive biotechnologies that facilitate the increased extraction and realization of biological ‘surplus value’ from socially marginalized bodies (Cooper, 2012; Fannin, 2013). What Simondon (2012b) identifies as the technoaesthetic attitude, on the other hand, is diametrically opposed to the technocratic, preferring ‘the surprising to the predictable’ (Chabot, 2013: 142). Instead of being oriented around (economic) logics of productivity, Simondon writes that the technoaesthetic is guided by an ethics of invention. Invention in Simondon’s philosophy is something very different to mere ‘innovation’ – the contemporary buzzword found in everything from government investment strategies to the discourse of academic funding councils – which is a hylomorphic term where scientific and technological developments remain subservient to the pregiven needs and wants of human subjects. Technical ‘invention’, meanwhile, is a non-hylomorphic process since it involves the transformation of thought and action along trajectories that could not have been anticipated in advance. Brian Massumi (2009: 39–40) talks about this inventive process in terms of an ‘energetic leap into the new’:

The moment of invention is when the two sets of potentials click together, coupling into a single continuous system. A synergy clicks in. A new ‘regime of functioning’ has suddenly leapt into existence. A ‘threshold’ has been crossed, like a quantum leap to a qualitatively new plane of operation. (Massumi, 2009: 39)

One of the ways we can articulate the difference between the mentalities of ‘technocratic innovation’ and ‘technoaesthetic invention’ is in terms of axiology (Simondon, 2012a), or the question of value. The technocratic attitude has only the production and extraction of economic surplus-value on its mind, which ‘subordinates value to function, making utility the arbiter of value’ (Massumi, 2017: 345). Technoaesthetic invention, by contrast, relates to the creation of what Massumi (2011: 53) terms ‘event-value’, or the capacity of technologies to ‘push further to the indeterminate but relationally potentialized fringes of existing situations, beyond the limits of current framings or regulatory principles’ (Massumi, 2011: 53). In the technoaesthetic encounter, then, the emergence of new values is directly connected to the invention of new possibilities of thought and life. So, whereas the technocratic has as its ambition the optimization of productivity, the technoaesthetic is instead concerned with the intensification of affect and the activation of hitherto unimagined potentials. I argue that it is along these axiological lines that we might distinguish the stakes of the performative ‘bioart’ of groups like Art Orienté objet from dominant strands of the contemporary field of ‘biohacking’, which also explore the creative potentials of bodily modification and self-experimentation through the repurposing of biotechnologies (Delfanti, 2013). One of the most notable communities within the broader biohacking field is the (predominantly United States) ‘Quantitative Self’/‘Lifelogging’ movement, in which individuals use various technologies (such as calorie trackers and sleep apps, implantable chips and electronic sensors and injections of hormones and other chemicals) to track and optimize their bodily output or performance. The ambition of such biohacking practices is thus to ‘enhance the body’s productivity’ often in relation to work or fitness (Moore, 2018). For the artists of Art Orienté objet, however, the aim of their biotechnological interventions is not simply about enhancing bodily output according to specific quantitative measures but is instead more a qualitative matter of amplifying the nonhuman registers and intensities of experience. The question that their artistic practice addresses is thus one that is resolutely affective, concerned with the new kinds of sensations and affects that biotechnologically mediated encounters with the nonhuman might give rise to.

This amplification of affective connections between bodies has important ethical value in Simondon’s philosophy of becoming. ‘Ethical reality’, he writes, ‘is indeed structured in a network, that is, acts take on resonance with one another [and] contain within themselves a power of amplification […] the value of an act is its amplitude, its capacity for transductive spacing out’ (Simondon, 2013: 323–324). What is amplified in the ethical act are precisely the links between the preindividual potentials and forces that comprise different bodies, and which carry these bodies towards an ‘enterprise of collective transformation’ (Combes, 2012: 65). What Art Orienté objet’s May the Horse Live in Me! foregrounds, through their repurposing of various biotechnologies (blood fractionation processes and immunosuppressant drugs), is the role that technical activity can play in facilitating the resonance and amplification of the molecular forces and preindividual potentials traversing human and nonhuman bodies. Through their art-science projects, thought once again encounters the material and technological milieu that conditions human action from which we have been estranged through our dominant modes of thinking (Manning, 2010). The ethical problem their work forces us to confront, and one I take up in the following section, is how from out of this milieu we might start to invent novel modes of attachment ‘to the transductive nature of beings, both living and nonliving, with new transindividual modalities for amplifying action’ (Combes, 2012: 78).

Ethics and the Individuation of Values: Attachment to Life

In May 2012, a year after the performance of May the Horse Live in Me, Art Orienté objet participated in an event at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris as part of the Trust Me I’m An Artist project – led by artist Anna Dumitriu and ethicist Bobbie Farsides – in which an art-science project would be presented to a committee (modelled on a conventional bioethical committee) who would debate the ethical implications, risks and responsibilities of the proposed work (Bureaud, 2018). ⁷ For this event, Art Orienté objet presented a proposal to re-enact their previous work but this time using panda rather than horse blood (which was in fact their original plan, but which had to be abandoned due to the difficulties of obtaining panda blood for artistic use), in a performance entitled May the Panda Live in Me (Que le Pande Vive en Moi). In presenting their recommendations, one of the committee members (the biologist Pierre-Henri Gouyon) drew a distinction between the act of eating horse meat and the act of transfusing horse blood into the artist’s body: whereas the former is unlikely to generate much public moral outcry (especially in France where there is less cultural taboo around eating horse in comparison with Anglo-Saxon countries), the latter is ethically problematic as it is doing something that, in his words, ‘contravenes natural laws’ through the crossing of blood lines, in addition to amplifying cultural anxieties around the disintegration of notions of bodily integrity and selfhood through biotechnical interventions (Sharp, 2000). Here, it seems that the ‘problematic’ aspect of the project relates not primarily to the potential harm inflicted on the nonhuman animal, but rather relates to a perceived transgression of supposedly ‘natural’ limits and norms. Laval-Jeantet and Mangin responded to Gouyon by asking when life is ever not transgressing these ontological limits: The human body is constantly incorporating the nonhuman outside through for example, respiration, ingestion and (over much longer time-frames) processes of symbiogenesis and genetic drift (Gilbert et al., 2012).

One of the ways we might understand this debate is in terms of the tension between two different images of ethical thought. The first is what we might term a moral image of thought which is concerned with judging actions by considering them in relation to transcendent norms or rules. Much of what passes for bioethical discourse today has a distinctly moralistic accent, operating through the application of pre-existing solutions to recognized problems, and thus reducing the emergence of the new to the terrain of the already-existing (Todd and Hynes, 2017). Ethical thinking, in contrast, is concerned with the creation of immanent values that involve a commitment to creative experimentation with the limits and capacities of bodies in ways that expand the possibilities of life (Smith, 2007). We find this distinction of transcendent moral norms and immanent ethical values at the heart of numerous philosophies of immanence, including in the thought of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze and Simondon. But what distinguishes Simondon’s theory of ethics is the way it attempts to theorize the mutually constitutive relationship of norms and values in a more explicit way in contrast to the more oppositional framings of morality and ethics that characterize some of the post-Deleuzian literature. In Simondon’s ethics, values constitute the preindividual of norms, where norms are the ‘individuated form that values take when they are categorised’ (Scott, 2014: 183). There is no oppositional hierarchy here for Simondon. Instead, values always traverse norms as their metastable condition, operating as immanent forces that ‘open norms to their own variability, to that tendency which they carry within that invites transformation’ (Scott, 2014: 186; Simondon 2013: 321). This metastable mutability of norms is something that Art Orienté objet’s art-science practice is explicitly attentive to, exploring disruptions to the various certainties underwriting the anthropocentric imaginaries of moral thought (the idea of an autonomous individual human body and the ontological separation of thought and matter) generated by our disindividuating encounters with technology and the nonhuman. Their work thus stretches dominant, moralistic understandings of the body to their limit, creatively exploring the capacity of cultural norms to, as Elizabeth Grosz (2017: 206) puts it, ‘undertake transductions […] that address the human’s (individual and collective) ongoing and ever-changing, ever-complexifying relations to the world it occupies’.

Another way we might conceive the ontogenetic sense of ethics encountered in Simondon’s work is a shift from a scientific to a more aesthetic appreciation of the inventive potentials of life. As David Lapoujade (2018: 59) notes (drawing here on the language of Bergson), the subject–object dualisms characterizing scientific abstractions constitute what he terms our habitual modes of ‘attention to life’, through which the human can only grasp life through the pregiven forms provided by the intelligence. Organized around representational logics of recognition, attention guides moral thought and action by ‘submitting our relationship with the external world to a schema of question/answer’ (Lapoujade, 2018: 61). However, Lapoujade also highlights how there is a different, more aesthetic, relationship of ‘attachment’ to life in which thought is ‘no longer attached to beings but to that which is movement in them – nothing but movement’ (Lapoujade, 2018: 72). Instead of merely reflecting on life and technology, we might understand the potential of art-science encounters like May the Horse Live in Me! in terms of how they generate sites of attachment to the immanent forces and open-ended tendencies comprising different bodies. This ethico-aesthetic mode of attachment to life is thus one defined by an inherent openness to the future, one that does not prefigure in advance what life might become (Hynes, 2013; Lapworth, 2016). By attaching itself to these unpredictable movements of becoming, ethical thinking has the capacity to ‘be both more responsive to and responsible for those forms of life that we have yet to encounter’ (Hynes, 2013: 1930), including the chimeric, cross-species entanglements that are the focus of Art Orienté objet’s creative works. An ontogenetic ethics also furnishes us with a different image of the ethical subject, who, for Simondon, is one that affirms rather than denies through their thought and action the share of preindividuality that binds them to other (human and nonhuman) bodies, and thus ‘refusing to become an absolute individual, closed domain of reality, detached singularity’ (Simondon, 2013: 245).

Conclusion

In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon (2017: 17) highlights how the cultivation of a new technoscientific culture is bound up with the emergence of a new kind of technical subject, which he terms the ‘mechanologist’. Such a subject has a creative role to play in reintroducing into culture ‘an awareness of the relation of machines and their relations with man [sic], and of the values implied in these relations’ (Simondon, 2017: 19). Simondon writes that the mechanologist represents an individual who embodies a technical mentality that compels them ‘to look after not only the utilisation of a technical being, but after the correlation of technical beings among each other’ (Simondon, 2017: 157). The mechanologist ‘exists at the same level’ as the technical ensemble (rather than above or below as in the master–slave dialectic of much technological theorizing) thinking technology from the standpoints of its becoming and acting as a mediator between the inventive potentials of different objects (Mills, 2016: 134). This theme of a new subject for a new technical and scientific culture is something that has also been taken up recently by Isabelle Stengers (2018: 9) in her manifesto for a new culture of ‘slow science’. In this text, she presents the figure of the ‘connoisseur’ as an agent of resistance to science’s claims to general authority, complicating the ‘thought habits’ of fast corporate technoscience, and problematizing notions of what does and doesn’t count. Existing somewhere in the liminal space between the figures of the expert and amateur, the connoisseur represents someone who ‘can appreciate the originality or relevance of an idea but also pay attention to problems and possibilities that were not taken into account in its production, but that might become important in other circumstances’ (Stengers, 2018: 9). I argue that art-science practitioners and groups, like Art Orienté objet, might be understood to combine elements of Stenger’s connoisseur and Simondon’s mechanologist: creating a new technical mentality that merges a commitment to a more open engagement with the risks and possibilities of scientific developments, with an enhanced sensitivity in thinking and practice to the indeterminate potentials of (bio)technologies to transform the already-existing and generate new collective becomings. A crucial part of this technical mentality, as I have argued, is a more transformative sense of the body in terms of its relational immersion within nonhuman ecologies. It might be tempting to frame this body through the language of ‘hybridity’, like much Science and Technology Studies-inflected work in contemporary body studies, where it is imagined as the emergent outcome of a multiplicity of interactions between human and nonhuman forms and agencies (Latour, 2004; Mol and Law, 2004; van der Ploeg, 2004). Indeed, Laval-Jeantet and Mangin (2007) themselves invoke the discourse and symbolism of the ‘Chimera’ to describe the performative enmeshing of human, animal and technical materialities in their work. However, and returning to Simondon’s distinction of the interindividual and transindividual, the concept of ‘hybrid bodies’ still retains an individualist ontology in thinking this relation as the co-mingling of already-individuated forms (Lapworth, 2015b). Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is much better positioned to grasp what is at stake here. Simondon’s main contribution to theories of the body, as Manning (2013: 19) notes, is to have ‘liberated it from the presupposition of a form’. The body for Simondon becomes reimagined as an ontogenetic process that is constantly being in-formed by its encounters with forces of its milieu. Simondon therefore refigures the traditional order of sense in social theory, shifting emphasis from the primacy of constituted individuals to the emergent processes of individuation: or, as Manning puts it (2013: 20), from static notions of the ‘body’ to events of ‘bodying’. What we might conventionally recognize and delineate as an individual body becomes reimagined in Simondon’s philosophy as a temporary phase or node in ongoing events of bodying that precede and exceed it. It is this transindividual process of bodying that the art-science encounters of Art Orienté objet performatively stage, dramatizing the imperceptible forces and nonhuman intensities that course through and transform human bodies.

Now, the potentials of art-science to engender new and transformative ways of thinking technology and embodiment are obviously not at play in all art-science collaborations. In fact, this potential might actually be something quite rare. As Barry and Born (2013) highlight, the utilitarian logics of institutions and funding bodies, and the short-term nature of many collaborations, has meant that art-science practices regularly operate under a ‘subordination-service’ model in which art would provide a decorative gloss to the ‘Truth’ of science. ⁸ And nor can the field of art-science collaborations achieve a transformation of our technical mentalities all alone. Instead, art-science joins a wider ‘ecology of practices’ within and beyond the institution, including DIYBiology and hobbyist biotech, forms of participatory and citizen science and the biohacking and cypherpunk movements, that attempt to find creative (and often subversive) ways of engaging with the dramatic shifts we are witnessing in the material and technical milieus comprising contemporary life (Stengers, 2018). Such practices, although often by divergent means, open a space through which to grasp the new affects, thoughts and values produced by technical becomings, and how these potentials might then reshape how we might think and live differently in relation to the nonhuman world.