"Experience is not a completed entity, but rather an event in which pre-individual affect begins its individuation through the mediation of the 'call'." This proposition fundamentally shifts the ontological locus of experience. If experience is conceptualized merely as a feeling already possessed by a subject, it becomes nothing more than the psychological residue of an already settled event. However, from the perspective of individuation, experience is not an accidental content superimposed upon a post-constituted individual; rather, it is a process of co-becoming between the individual and the world. Consequently, the core question is no longer "what experiences does the subject possess," but rather "how an unformed registration acquires the status of experience within its relation to the world."
Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation provides the foundational ontology for this transition. For Simondon, the individual is not the primordial unit of being, but a temporal phase produced through the process of individuation. Prior to individuation, what exists is not a vacuum, but a "pre-individual" state fraught with differences, tensions, and potentiality. These potentials have not yet been stabilized into discrete forms; thus, they cannot be directly equated with a completed subject or experience. Individuation is the rigorous process through which this potentiality acquires structural articulation under specific conditions and relations.
Through this trajectory, "affect" can be understood at the pre-individual level. Affect here does not denote an emotion that has already been identified, categorized, or narrated by the subject; instead, it signifies the intensities and differences that have not yet undergone full individuation. It is triggered at the threshold of contact between the subject and the environment, yet it does not manifest a stable subject-object boundary. Affect, therefore, is not the consummated form of experience, but the potentiality that underlies the very possibility of experience.
The "call," conversely, is the relational event that catalyzes this potentiality to activate the process of individuation. The call is neither a autonomous volition emitted by the subject, nor a unidirectional stimulus imposed upon the subject by externality; it acts as a trigger that restructures the relationship between the subject and the world. A person, a space, a work, a voice, a memory, or an event constitutes a call not because it transmits a pre-established meaning, but because it forces the unformed affect to awaken, thereby compelling experience to seek its articulation of form. Hence, the call is the intermediary agent that introduces pre-individual potential into the process of individuation.
Through this framework, a rigorous conceptual chain can be formulated: Pre-individual Potential → Affect → Call → Individuation → Experience. Affect supplies the unbound intensity, the call enables this intensity to enter a process of relational genesis, and individuation progressively structures it into a perceptible, recognizable, and narratable experience. Experience, therefore, is not a synonym for affect, but a contingent structure built post-individuation of affect.
This concurrently implies that experience possesses a dual nature coexisting simultaneously. On one hand, it must form a distinct individuality, otherwise it cannot be validated as "my" experience; on the other hand, it cannot be characterized as a closed, completed object, because it always retains a dimension of potentiality that has not been fully actualized. An experience is capable of generating new understanding, memory, and creative articulation precisely because the process of individuation never completely exhausts the pre-individual possibilities.
Thus, the essence of experience is not the "acquisition of a certain feeling," but rather the occurrence of an event of individuation within the call. The subject does not exist in a pre-completed state prior to experience to then merely receive the world; conversely, the subject itself is reconstituted within the generative process of experience. Experience thereby becomes an event of co-becoming between the subject and the world: the world touches pre-individual affect through the call, affect acquires formal articulation through individuation, and the resulting experience preserves the possibility of being called and generated anew. Experience, then, is not the teleological endpoint of existence, but a contingent phase in the continuous individuation of being.
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