Individuation
Origin: Gilbert Simondon
Definition
For Simondon, individuation designates the process by which an individual constitutes themselves, not as an entity given in advance, but as the result of a dynamic and permanent relationship with their milieu. The individual is never finished: they are always in the process of individuating, in tension between what they are and what they become through contact with their technical, social, and symbolic environment.
Applied to technology, individuation implies that technical objects are not mere neutral tools: they participate in the process by which the individual constitutes themselves. A tertiary retention (a book, a database, a digital tool) can foster individuation if it compels the user to actively appropriate what it contains, or hinder it if it short-circuits that appropriation.
In my writings
Individuation is the question underlying all my reflections on generative AI: to what extent does the use of generative AI foster or prevent the process by which an individual constitutes themselves as such? Does a user who delegates their reasoning to a machine still individuate as a lawyer? Or do they merely validate the results of a process that no longer passes through them?
This is why the practices I describe (grammatizing, observing, remaining the author) are practices of individuation as much as they are practices of resistance to proletarianization. They keep open the active relationship between the individual and their technical milieu, rather than letting it close into mere delegation.
Articles where this term is used
- Phenomenology of a practice with generative AI (2026)
- Knowing without doing. Doing without knowing.
- Grammatize and observe.