Simondon, emotion, and individuation: The tensions of psychological life in digital worlds

This article develops new theoretical connections that offer insight regarding the status and operation of emotion in digitally mediated environments. I draw on Gilbert Simondon’s concepts of emotion and affectivity—as key dimensions of his philosophy of individuation—to articulate an account that situates emotion at the heart of psychological life, while accounting for its role in the continuous practices of (re)solving psychic and collective tensions. Simondon offers a model of the psychological subject as operating simultaneously in and through relations with itself as subject and with itself as part of the collective. This informs the analysis in this article seeking to demonstrate that the reductionism and individualising operation of emerging digitised models of emotion render them of limited value to understanding emotional life in digital worlds.