L’objet de cette recherche revient à interroger le rôle du hasard dans le processus d’individuation tel qu’il est théorisé par Gilbert Simondon. Dans cette perspective, le hasard, élaboré à partir du concept darwinien de chance, doit être considéré comme opérateur théorique et concept explicatif d’une théorie des processus de genèse de forme individuelle, et non comme un principe métaphysique ou une mesure de l’ignorance. Il qualifie dans l’individuation la modalité de la rencontre entre la singularité, qui donne forme à l’être individuel, et le milieu métastable individuel, susceptible de transformations. Suivant cette perspective, le hasard devient un des opérateurs de l’invention des structures individuelles singulières, plurielles, et novatrices, formes de vie et manières d’exister, qui sont élaborées comme solution à des problèmes par le processus d’individuation. Cette analyse de la pensée simondonienne va permettre de mettre en place les linéaments d’une théorie de la rencontre individuante, induisant une conception particulière de l’individualité humaine, qui est susceptible d’entrer en dialogue avec les thèses de la sociologie dispositionnelle (P. Bourdieu, B. Lahire). Comme invention, l’opération d’individuation sera alors analysable à partir du concept biologique d’exaptation (S. J. Gould), qui explicite dans l’évolution l’invention de couples structuro-fonctionnels nouveaux, à partir d’un jeu entre hasard et invention vitale. / This research aims to question the role of chance in the individuation process as it was theorized by Gilbert Simondon. In this context, chance, which was drawn up based on the Darwinian concept of chance, must be considered as a theoretical operator and as an explanatory concept of the genesis of individual form, and not as a metaphysical principle or as a measure of ignorance. It characterises within the individuation the modality of the encounter between the singularity which shapes the individual being and the individual metastable environment which is capable of being transformed. From this point of view, chance turns out to be one of the invention operators of singular, individual, plural and innovative structures which are ways of existing, created as solutions to problems by the individuation process itself. This analysis of Simondon’s philosophy allows us to outline a theory of the individuating encounter leading us to think of human individuality through a specific approach which enters into dialogue with the theses of the dispositional sociology (P. Bourdieu, B. Lahire). From an invention point of view, the individuation operation can thus be analysed using the biological concept of exaptation (S. J. Gould) which makes very explicit the invention of new structure-function couples in evolution based on an articulation between chance and vital invention.

The aim of this thesis is to report on a transdisciplinary approach, regarding the complexity of thinking about human embodiment in relation to machine embodiment. A practical dimension of this thesis is to elicit some principles for the design and evaluation of virtual embodiment. The transdisciplinary approach suggests, firstly, that a single discipline or reality is, on its own, not sufficient to explain the complexity and dynamism of the embodied interaction between the human and machine. Secondly, the thesis argues for thinking of transdisciplinary research as a process of individuation, becoming or transduction, that is, as a process of mediation between heterogeneous approaches rather than perceiving research as a stabilized cognitive schema designed to accumulate new outcomes to the already-there reality. Arguing for going beyond the individualized approaches to embodiment, this thesis analyzes three cases where the problems that appear in one case are resolved through the analysis of the following one. Consisting of three phases, this research moves from objective scientific ¿reality¿ to more phenomenological, subjective and complex realities. The first study employs a critical review of embodied conversational agents in human¿computer interaction (HCI) in a learning context using a comparative meta-analysis. Meta-analysis was applied because most of the studies for evaluating embodiment are experimental. A learning context was selected because the number of studies is suitable for meta-analysis and the findings could be generalized to other contexts. The analysis reveals that there is no ¿persona effect¿, that is, the expected positive effect of virtual embodiment on the participant¿s affective, perceptive and cognitive measures. On the contrary, it shows the reduction of virtual embodiment to image and a lack of consideration for the participant¿s embodiment and interaction, in addition to theoretical and methodological shortcomings. The second phase solves these problems by focusing on Mark Hansen¿s phenomenological account of embodiment in new media. The investigation shows that Hansen improves on the HCI account by focusing on the participant¿s dynamic interaction with new media. Nevertheless, his views of embodied perception and affection are underpinned by a subjective patriarchal account leading to object/subject and body/work polarizations. The final phase resolves this polarization by analyzing the controversial work of Alan Turing on intelligent machinery. The research provides a different reading of the Turing Machine based on Simondon¿s concept of individuation, repositioning its materiality from the abstract non-existent to the actual-virtual realm and investigating the reasons for its abstraction. It relates the emergence of multiple human¿machine encounters in Turing¿s work to the complex counter-becoming of what it describes as ¿the Turing Machine compound¿. / Ministry of Higher Education in the Sultanate of Oman

The motivating ambition of this thesis is the endeavour to think the subject anthropo-eccentrically, to free it of its conscious-agential overtones and to foreground instead the active organism in all its ecologically entangled, metabolically perspectival glory. I define the subject, in the course of the thesis, as a body productive of its own spatial and temporal fields, a body that lives its own space and time. Ecology is pluralized, made bodily. And the body itself is dynamicized and rendered porous—less an absolute limit than a variable topology separating, uniting, and enfolding organism and ecology, self and other, subject and world. I begin, in Chapter 1, with Deleuze and the rhythmic contractions that define the temporal pole of organismic subjectivity. In Chapter 2, I turn toward the way spaces are configured on the basis of the affective enaction of organismic life. This is organismic spatiality. In Chapter 3, I introduce Deleuze’s distinction between the actual and virtual in order to properly theorize the way organismic abilities and environmental layouts are pre-subjectively related such that actual organismic activity individuates a field of spatiotemporal experience. And as the structure of this relation fluctuates, so too does the framework of subjective experience, the sensorimotor-perceptual affects by which experience is defined. Organismic subjectivity is, as a consequence, both relentlessly dynamic and tied irreducibly to the organization of its own world. To think this entanglement is to think subjectivity as swarm, a concept that opens this theory onto an array of new possibilities—toward, to take only one example among a range of many, a human-technological entanglement that conceives scientific apparatuses in their integration with a collectively human subjectivity. I conclude the thesis with a brief gesture toward the implications carried by the development of such possibilities. / Thesis / Master of Philosophy (MA)