Human-Technics: A Double Plasticity within a Transductive Relation

Not only the intellect but, more fundamentally, the structure of the brain (notably of the cerebral neocortex) and that of the body were shaped during hominization, in close connection with technics since the dawn of time. Indeed, the human brain evolved to suit the use of tools¹, tools that were in turn shaped by humans, in a back-and-forth process that stems from a double plasticity expressed over the long term (phylogenesis).

This process was studied by the paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan on the basis of material data: flints and other tools of the lithic industry, and fossil remains of hominids. Leroi-Gourhan demonstrates that the physiological evolution of hominids took place, from Australopithecus² to Homo sapiens³, in close connection with the appearance, development and then proliferation of tools made of stone, understood as a phenomenon of exteriorization of human capacities into inert matter. It is in this passage, from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens, over millions of years, that the human neocortex was formed, as tooling grew more complex.

Bernard Stiegler comments on the results of Leroi-Gourhan’s study in these words:

There is then elaborated, during this period, a cortex/flint coupling, living matter/inert matter, in which a double plasticity is woven, in which 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) […] Flint is the first reflecting memory, the first mirror⁴.

We thereby understand flint, arrows and tools as memory supports, capable of retaining in their forms the traces of gestures, which are thus transmitted from generation to generation. They belong to the growing panoply of material supplements that evolve with the human and extend its capacities, in a dynamic that Stiegler understands as grammatization, which can be defined as the “transformation of a temporal continuum into a spatial discrete⁵.” Contemporary analog and digital apparatuses are part of this process, which revolutionizes the thinking of technics:

The history of the gramme is also that of electronic files and of reading machines: a history of technics – the invention of the human is technics. As object as well as subject. Technics inventing the human, the human inventing technics. Technics inventing as much as invented. A hypothesis that ruins the traditional thinking of technics, from Plato to Heidegger and beyond⁶.

Bernard Stiegler thus brings the human-technical evolutionary process described by Leroi-Gourhan close to the notion of transductive relation, as forged by Gilbert Simondon, with which the philosopher likewise sought to reflect on the evolution of the human in connection with technics over the long term. With the notion of transductive relation, Simondon sought an alternative both to evolution conceived as a passive process of adaptation and to the expression of a Bergsonian vital impetus:

[…] it is not forbidden to appeal to a hypothesis that brings into play a genetic schema more primitive than the opposed aspects of adaptation and the vital impetus, and that encloses them both as abstract limit cases: that of the successive stages of individuating structuration, going from metastable state to metastable state by means of successive inventions of structures⁷.

Bernard Stiegler, for his part, underlines a fundamental difference between these two elements – human and technics – that co-structure each other: the faculty of anticipation, which can be associated with a form of intentionality. This faculty, the true engine of the transductive relation, belongs exclusively to the human (we will return to this), in a dynamic that Stiegler describes in Heideggerian terms: anticipation is the place of the human (the who) and not that of technics (the what):

What anticipates, wills, can, thinks and knows, I have named the who. The supplement of the who, its pro-thesis, is its what. The who is nothing without the what, because they are in a transductive relation in the process of exteriorization that pursues life, that is, differentiation, by means other than life. The who is not the what: there is a transductive relation only between different terms. There is a dynamic of the what, irreducible to that of the who (the logic of the supplement is not simply anthropological), but which needs that of the who as a power of anticipation⁸.

1. The role of the communicational needs associated with collective life would certainly also have to be considered.↩︎

2. In the paleoanthropological terminology of his time, in the twentieth century, Leroi-Gourhan uses the term Australanthropian. These are the hominids that lived between 4 and 2 million years ago.↩︎

3. Which Leroi-Gourhan designates, in accordance with the nomenclature of the time, as Neanthropians, not to be confused with Neanderthals.↩︎

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

5. http://arsindustrialis.org/vocabulaire-grammatisation-techniques-de-reproduction↩︎

6. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 166.↩︎

7. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, op. cit., p. 216.↩︎

8. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 321.↩︎