What the fuck is LeMaire

I was forced to return my copy of "On the Mode of Technical Objects" by Simondon to the library yesterday. I'm abhorrently selfish in the way that I shockingly appropriate whatever physical literature I am reading at the moment, regardless if it actually is in my full ownership or not. In all my library loans, I have not once accommodated for the following reader and direly take it upon myself to engrave my  penciled annotations upon the pages and litter its corners with a Post-it note wasteland. Alarmed by the $300 "Lost Book Fee" that served as consequence for inability to depart from my now-platted documentation, it dawned on me that this book was quite special, so I ordered a personal copy for myself online and took 7 hours copying the loan's exact etchings into its ancillary replicate.

I've developed a fancy for tying various miscellaneous objects onto a piece of pink yarn and adorn it as a rudimentary form of necklace. In the beginning of the year, it was a piece of wood my roommate gave me, two months ago it was an aluminum button, and most recently, a hair comb. It's funny, when most people remark upon it in passing, there seems to be a common thread of inquiry regarding whether I use this comb to brush my hair throughout the day while simultaneously adorning it as pendant. What differentiates the aesthetic object from the tool? From an object of use? Simondon says, "If by tool, one understands the technical object enabling one to prolong and arm the body in order to accomplish a gesture, and by instrument the technical object that enables one to prolong and adapt the body in order to achieve better perception; the instrument is a tool of perception."

I fetishize these objects, by stringing it I am assigning it to something other than its material being. It is an obtrusive fetishization in the way that I force upon the comb the characteristics that belong to the human mind of aesthetic sociality and capacity for abstraction. If we are constituted in and through a memory that exceeds our consciousness, we can thus be decomposed by mechanisation and reproduction of that memory. A comb, its teeth, its designated form as prong, laborer of the strait, is impressed upon our collective memory as creatures who groom ourselves. 

To understand the individual's usage for tool, you need to inscribe the individual as part of a process of which one is only a phase. The general form and understanding of what a comb is can be seen as process of Simondonian transindividuation. What exists as a comb is the community of the individuals who groom their hair. And this is extremely interesting. Because it says in fact that the comb as shared object is a power of individuation, but never the sole individuation as such. It is the circuit created created by the users of the comb, which essentially defines the individuation of the comb. When you are individuating yourself in relation to another comb user—for instance, we are now in conversation and I am individuating myself as the comb user who has chosen to string it around my neck. But in reading this verbiage from me, you are individuating yourself through my discourse on the comb. You can individuate through my discourse on the comb by adherence with my discourse, but it’s also equally possible to individuate oneself by its contradiction, its negation, if you do not agree with my usage of the comb. 

Cependant, some technical objects can be both servile and aesthetic: "the hammer is a tool, even though, through the receptors of kinaesthetic and vibratry tactile sensitivity, we can subtly perceive the instant when the nail starts to writhe or to split the wood and penetrate it too fast; the hammer must effectively act on the tip so as to drive it in, so that, according to the manner in which this operation of driving in the tip is executed definite information is communicated to the senses of the one who holds the hammer in his hand."

Equally, the conditions of individuation are simultaneous the conditions of disindividuation. Someone on my Tiktok commented, "It looks like a DIY dupe of the Gua Sha Lemaire necklace." 

It sounds like you're eternalizing a curse in Austronesian phonetics when you say it out loud: 

DU:P GUAH SHAA LAA MEHR. (I had to pronounce it out loud as I was reading this comment because none of these words meant anything to me.)

Why do people continue to identify their forms of transindividual processes with capital, with brand, with the economy, even as it exploits them? Because desire is a uniformity of action and production. Our modern economy is essentially monetary, essentially apple-cored on a nucleus of post-Fordist consumptive mania, because we are an economy of desire and belief, and thus articulation becomes invention and diffusion becomes imitation. The judgment of something to be good, what one determines desirable, is when one wishes to strive for it. One of my favorites Lazzarato said that immaterial labour is what produces the information or affective dimension of a commodity. So then what becomes of my initiation of the comb's immaterial transindividuation? Why must we ascribe it to LeMaire? Is LeMaire how you choose to define your gestures in mediation between fantasy and daily life? Is LeMaire the transindividual circuit of discourse that you have chosen to define yourselves in relation to this world? What the fuck is LeMaire?

If transindividuality is the refusal of a false binary between individual and society and collective existence, I stake myself as apprentice of the tool, NOT the aesthetic instrument. We now exist in the age of soft power, necessarily defined by participatory forms of production and consumption. It's hard for some of you to understand that this force operates without the coercion or violence of hard power, and until we all collectively transindividually do so, we will continue to see ourselves as kingdoms within a kingdom, failing to see the coercisons underlying our apparent freedom.

The neoclassical economists and Marxism are actually quite similar, in that by what they exclude: the realm of pre-individual imitation and adaptation. Marx and Friedman both transformed subjectivity, the basis of how desire transforms, into something calcuable, uniform, and predictable. For both of them, they failed to see the transindividual, they needed a defined binary between the qualitative and quantitative for the conceptual paradigm of "political economy" to constitute any particular object. 

To return to Simondon's usage of hammer as both tool and aesthe: "hammer must effectively act on the tip so as to drive it in, so that, according to the manner in which this operation of driving in the tip is executed definite information is communicated to the senses of the one who holds the hammer in his hand; the hammer is thus first a tool, since it is as a result of its tool-function that it can serve as an instrument; even when the hammer is used as a pure instrument, it is still, primarily, a tool: the mason recognizes the quality of a stone with his hammer, but for this to happen the hammer must partially chip away at the stone."  

The Hammer

By Carl Sandburg

I have seen

The old gods go

And the new gods come.

Day by day

And year by year

The idols fall

And the idols rise.

Today

I worship the hammer.

As apprentice of the tool, of the hammer, I am rejecting of both the individual and holism when I wear the comb around my neck. Because today, tomorrow, and forever on I shall worship the hammer.