Pre-individual affects: Gilbert Simondon and the individuation of relation

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.