BILL VIOLA WITH GILBERT SIMONDON

Abstract

This essay undertakes a joint exploration of Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and Bill Viola’s video art to propose an ontogenetic model of ecology and a corresponding political praxis, or eco-politics, predicated on the affects of collective individuation. I examine several of Viola’s works that are most explicitly engaged with ecological thinking. These video works enact collective subjectivities related to the emergence of existential territories (The Path), flooding events (The Deluge; The Raft), or simply a confluence of bodies and water devoid of catastrophic implications (The Reflecting Pool). The collective subjectivities enacted in these videos prioritize the ecological event or existential territory over the individual subject, as well as over a social model based on commercial exchanges and interindividual relations. Instead, collective individuation and the discovery of the transindividual serve as catalysts of an affective attunement with the forces of Nature. Under these conditions, the ecological crisis has the potential to become the exceptional event that can serve as the point of inflection for a new immanent relation with Nature.