Poetics of Silicon, Reverie of the Will

On the horizon of this darkened landscape, however, lights are flickering, like those that Heidegger sees emanating from the lines of Hölderlin, who speaks the truth:

Bernard Stiegler, who left us precious avenues, envisaged an “alter-strategy of shock,” already mentioned earlier, which would aim to strategically transform – we were saying, in our own terms – the “arbitrary and violent²” glitches of capitalism into “new and necessary rights³.” He never ceased to recall, in multiple ways, that while the digital is traversed by alienating light-times and by the circulation of calculable information, it can also be the site of differing times, associated with forms of knowledge – which the philosopher opposes to information –, forms of knowledge that rest on the endurance of the trace⁴. If today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism⁵, as Fredric Jameson already suggested in 1994 in The Seeds of Time⁶, this would be a problem linked to our imagination, constantly degraded within a system that espouses its own parody, as emerges from the film Don’t Look Up (2021): what “program,” then, for the poet?

In his project, which sought to explore the intertwinings of the imagination with the materiality of the world, Gaston Bachelard left for last the consideration of earth, the only solid element alongside air, water and fire. The undertaking seemed easy in the face of the frankness of rigid bodies, as the philosopher himself points out. However, the “terrestrial” imagination marked the beginning of “countless difficulties and paradoxes⁷.” Indeed, the poet ends up admitting that flux leads to a reverie that seeks to grasp a form escaping perception, leading consciousness to want to grasp a substance intimately linked to a force⁸ – a force external to us: we experience this sensation before the algorithmic flows that surround us. By contrast, the evidence of the form of the solid, still according to Bachelard, awakens the creative imagination, which the philosopher proposes to distinguish from the reproductive imagination linked to flux. If a function of the real is to be associated with the reproductive imagination, thanks to which we adapt to a “reality stamped by social values⁹,” the creative imagination, on the contrary, refers to a function of the unreal, associated with a reverie that has nothing to do with relaxation, which Bachelard designates as the “reveries of the will.” We may deduce that the latter are to be built on stable ground and at the pace of human temporalities: they will stand as the condition of possibility of political reflection and action.

The digital image, image-world, when revealed by the artistic gesture, casts its lights onto other systems with which it intertwines in a very concrete way. The interest of preserving a thought of the support in the face of the hegemony of the signal, of cultivating an attention paid to the effects of traces in the face of the omnipresence of flows, does not respond only to the need to better understand the world as it presents itself, but also indicates the territory in which to anchor resistances in the face of algorithmic flows whose control escapes us.

A question emerges, one that could not be merely incidental, for it would help complete the play of correspondences that has taken shape over the course of the research around the plasticity of the digital image, a play from which the vision that the human individual might today form of themself is missing. It may open a dialogue with a sentence already introduced, which sought its meaning at the same time as it aimed to recount El túnel: “faced with these images, I wonder about everything that, despite our incessant movements, keeps settling into a fixed form, in which we sometimes struggle to recognize ourselves.” What shape might it take, the mode of existence of the contemporary individual, grasped as the immanent co-structuring of being and becoming, and in which the agency of matter would prevail over the consistency of form, while preceding it?

1. In Martin Heidegger, Essais et conférences, op. cit., p. 47.↩︎

2. Anne Alombert, Nous avons à devenir la quasi-cause du décès de Bernard Stiegler, op. cit.↩︎

3. Ibid.↩︎

4. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 473.↩︎

5. Reassured as we are today by the hypothesis that even after the end of the world, capitalism will manage to flourish “elsewhere,” for example on the planet Mars: it is less Elon Musk’s economic value than his symbolic role that keeps him in his place.↩︎

6. Fredric Jameson, The seeds of time. New York, NY : Columbia Univ. Press, 1994, p. xii.↩︎

7. Gaston Bachelard, La terre et les rêveries de la volonté: essai sur l’imagination de la matière. Paris : J. Corti, 1948, p. 2.↩︎

8. Ibid.↩︎

9. ibid., p. 3.↩︎