Simondon: investigating the pre-organizational

Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) was a radical process thinker; forms of relatedness and not objects were his focus. This is all the more remarkable as he was not a vitalist prioritizing Gaia or autopoesis. He based his thought on analyses of technology/technics and communication/cybernetics, and in both cases rejected the perspective of the machine or message as in itself objectifiable. Life objects, machines and societies, according to Simondon, individuate; that is, they are self-evolving, self-generating and self-differentiating in what he calls processes of ‘transduction'. Simondon, in fact, is more a thinker of transindividuation than of individuation. His is a theory of how the pre-individual leads to the transindividual, without the individual ever really playing much of a role. The motor of change and activity is ‘transduction' – or a force of form-taking that operates on the pre-individual level. Transduction is, thus, the life-force of Simondon's becoming. It is the energy that propels action, change, event and occurrence. No one in particular is the subject of transduction; transduction is the pre-individual manifestation of an all-encompassing process of genesis. Simondon attends to the genesis of the person, society, information, collective, technology, organization, whatever. We will see that his descriptions of becoming are powerful and theoretically important, but that his ontology (or philosophy) needs to be debated. Transduction is very problematic; how or whether it is knowable (epistemology) remains unclear; and transduction would seem to escape the individual and/or collective will – becoming an all-important life-force outside political or ethical control. Sub-processes of transduction, such as in the development of machines or even social technologies, have been rigorously documented and examined. Simondon studies genesis or how things come to be as they are. Currently, there is renewed interest in his thought, we think because he challenges unreflective functionalism – things are not just as they are: they evolve and become, oppose and break down, signify and deny, reveal and hide. Simondon provides a window on a world of complexification and change; he is a thinker of instability and dynamics; a thinker who matches our contemporary circumstances. This introduction will discuss possible contributions of Simondon to organizational studies, where his process perspective challenges many usual approaches. The emphasis on the pre-individual triggers reflection of what could be called the ‘pre-organizational' and poses a whole series of theoretical and practical questions.