Anticipation over the Long Time Span

Over the long time span – that of phylogenesis –, where the notion of intentionality loses its meaning (but where the reflexive capacity residing in matter is still expressed), this process evokes the double plasticity discussed by Bernard Stiegler – and before him by Leroi-Gourhan – in the evolution of the hominids up to Homo sapiens, which he describes in this passage we have already mentioned:

During this period a cortex/flint coupling is then elaborated, living matter/inert matter, in which a double plasticity is woven, where the duration of mineral matter informs, and at the same time is informed by, the fluidity of “spiritual” im-matter (which is still a matter, a mode of being, differing, of matter) […] ¹

This dynamic, which has linked the human to technics since the dawn of time, is to be grasped as a transductive relation, that is, a relation in which the structuring of one of the terms conditions, at the same time, the future structuring of the other. We had also emphasized the fact that, for Stiegler, during the evolution of the human species, the development of ever more complex technics was possible only because, in an associated process, the hominids were developing a sense of anticipation, which is already consciousness, according to the philosopher – as anticipation of death –, and which also implies a symbolic functioning. But Stiegler emphasizes here another aspect, which for us is fundamental: anticipation, the driving force of the evolutionary process, is not distributed symmetrically within the human-technics transductive relation. Indeed, technics (the what) is devoid of anticipation; anticipation is the exclusive heritage of the living – here, of the human (the who):

the concretizing dynamic of the what presupposed an anticipation by the who: the self-conditioning of the techno-geographical associated milieu cannot do without an inventive function that stands on the side of the human operator².

Just like the anticipation considered by Stiegler over the long time span, artistic intentionality also seems to us to be asymmetrically distributed within the transductive relation that links the human to the machine, in a shorter temporality, that of the creative process. Indeed, artistic intentionality, which sets off and guides this process, resides exclusively in the living – here the human – that is, in the artist, the who of the creative process, the what being constituted by the means of creation he employs. This intentionality will be led to evolve, certainly, affected by experiential contact with matter; it will even have to confront or bring into play other intentionalities – also human – crystallized in the machine. Indeed, if the machine can harbor forms of intentionality in its structure, these always concern the human — the economic-technological-military complex that designed and built the dispositifs used by the artist —, who introduced them into the machine, directly or indirectly, in a strategically planned or collateral way.

Moreover, the emphasis placed on the associated milieu in Stiegler’s remarks refers to the attention he pays to the thought of Gilbert Simondon, for whom the technical object becomes concrete only by producing the milieu that surrounds it, while being dependent on an inventive function that particularly interests us.

1. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 171.↩︎

2. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 385.↩︎