Governing Metastability: Reopening the Question of Progress with Gilbert Simondon

Abstract

The article proposes a critical reopening of the question of progress based on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, by opposing the category of metastability to the notion of homeostasis derived from cybernetics. The authors argue that the modern idea of progress, inherited from mechanical determinism and reiterated by the cybernetic sciences, is “mythical” insofar as it reduces dynamic processes to fixed states and obscures the inventive and contingent dimension of becoming. This conception rests on a double ontoepistemological reduction: the reduction of reality to calculable structures and of science to operations of calculation, thereby sustaining a teleological and deterministic vision of historical development. Within this framework, cybernetics appears as the paradigm of the (hyper)modern condition and as the epistemological foundation of contemporary forms of government, in particular neoliberal governmentality, which privileges mechanisms of selfregulation, risk management, and the preservation of homeostatic equilibria. Such a model transforms progress into a continuous adaptation to the market’s “eternal present,” neutralizing conflict, subjectivity, and social invention. By contrast, the Simondonian notion of metastability conceives social systems as traversed by productive tensions and by a structural margin of indeterminacy. Progress then ceases to be understood as a march toward a predetermined end and comes to signify the invention of new goals, mediated by the relationship between humans, the world, and technical objects. Governing progress, in this sense, entails assuming the risk of normative invention, accepting the possibility of failure, and opening systems to futures that exceed their own existence.