The Elementary Forms of Electronic Life: Exploring Metallic Affects with Deleuze and Simondon

• In Event: Elements: Thinking Our Present Elementally - II

Abstract

The elementary forms of electronic life are “elemental media”, “enabling environments that provide habitats for diverse forms of life, including other media” (Peters 2015:3). They are also, and because of that, contemporary “transindividual affects”, in the sense proposed by Simondon (1958). In this paper, I propose to explore Simondon's thesis of the “operatory principle” of the diode (i.e.: asymmetric conductance) as an instance of the elementary forms of electronic life. In this exploration, I will draw from the insights Deleuze offered in a lecture at Vincennes in 1979, and also from my own research on metallic chemical elements involved in the manufacture of smartphones (Ferreira 2019).
According to Deleuze (1979), european music underwent “a kind of process of metallization” that made audible (specially by means of novel use of metal instruments and the operation of “ionization”) the complex "co-extensivity of metal and matter”, the fact that “metal is the conductor [conducteur] of all matter”. The topic has been creatively revisited recently in Galloway and Thacker's (2007:142) image of “a metalmorphosis of living forms”, as well as in Cline's (2014) notes on “metallic affects”, but none referred to Simondon's centrality. In this paper, and with the help of Deleuze's insights, I propose to present Simondon's ontogenesis of technicity – based on the principle of controlled/asymmetric electric conductivity – and of collective individuation – based on the structuration of affect – as conceptual means to explore the elementary forms of electronic life.

Author

• Pedro Peixoto Ferreira, Unicamp