Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media

According to Susan Oyama, a “developmental system” is defined as “a heterogeneous and causally complex mix of interacting entities and influences that produces the life cycle of an organism. [...]it is sufficiently determined so that the individuation operated in relation to it would not be illusory but determined and consistent; however, it is not itself individual but system, and its determination is nothing other than being precisely the associated milieu of an individual or, better, of an individuation: a set of realities (potential energies) that have no other unity than that of the system formed with a given individual, in the cadre of a given individuation (meaning that all these realities could enter in other relations amongst themselves, as well as with others, to be the principle of an other individuation). [...]what Simondon accomplishes here is to establish a correlation between technical individualization and psychic individualization, and, more fundamentally, to expose the basis for this correlation in the associated mental milieu that is at once the “middle term between life and conscious thinking” and the “middle term between the natural world and the manufactured structures of the technical object.” [...]even if we were to grant that these images operate by stimulating a perceptual event in their viewers—via what I would want to call their supplementary aesthetic dimension—this event remains in the service of visualizing the imperceptible preconditions of another, necessarily already past, perception. Because of the ineliminable temporal gap constitutive of perception, Marey’s images simply cannot impact present perception directly, at the time of its happening, and can at most impact perception indirectly, by feeding information about our past experience (information that cannot be accessed through our present experience) forward into our future experience-to-come.