Bio-Socio-Technical Individuation

= concept from Bernard Stiegler

Description

Simon Licelles, in Delirium (see Youtube):

"Bio-socio-technological individuation, as you may have guessed, refers to and attempts to define the human being and humanity. With this concept, we quickly get to the very heart of the matter, and Bernard Stiegler made a major impact—he kicked the anthill of Western philosophy.

That is to say, philosophy is often perceived as the discipline that must reflect on questions of life (like in the Baccalaureate exam) and particularly on the great existential questions, such as "what is human existence?" And throughout history, there have been many proposals concerning the immortality of the soul, the rational animal, the thinking subject, Dasein, being-there, etc. Bio-socio-technical individuation is the latest development in this series, proposing a new model of thought that will describe the human and the conditions of its emergence.

This means that Stiegler bases his work on that of André Leroi-Gourhan, who demonstrated that the evolution of the brain volume of hominids followed the curve of the increasing complexity of the tools they produced and used. One might think that, indeed, the more intelligent they were, the more they could develop complex tools, but he argues the opposite, proposing that it was through using tools that we became intelligent.

A co-evolution took place, and it was the fact that individuals became bipedal, freeing their forelimbs from the necessity of locomotion, that allowed these limbs to hold tools and weapons for defense and hunting, and they became manufacturing hands. The fabrication and use of tools—technology—enabled reflexivity and opened the mind. This is also what spurred the development of language—gesture and speech—meaning transmission and sociality.

In short, even today, we would essentially be beings without essence, without divine or other origin, but rather the product, through our biological bodies, of the adoption of a series of techniques and technologies, which are transmitted to us first by our parents and by the societies in which we live: language, our posture, our way of walking, of eating—almost everything about us stems from a technique and becomes a culture.

We are, ultimately, beings caught in a process of individuation, constituted by the techniques and technologies that surround us and that we more or less adopt, thanks to our environment, that is, thanks to the more or less distant society that surrounds us.

Thus, we would be individuals woven from the techniques and technologies we employ, and always socio- because these techniques and technologies always require a society not only to be transmitted and produced, but even to be used—one cannot imagine a language without a society to use that language. We are bio-techno-sociological beings. We have always belonged to interconnections that Stiegler called: circuits of transindividuation; our current individuation depends on the individuation of others and on individuations of the past.

We will try to keep open this idea that we are bio-socio-technological beings. It is not obvious, it is new, but in our world, which is in the midst of upheavals that are themselves socio-technical, with the digitization of society, this concept should be central for substantial and future reflections. We will, in all likelihood, have to return to it regularly: it is a foundation. We have not yet drawn all the consequences from it; we can take an interest in observing how this concept is received and what influence it could have.

It may seem silly to put it this way, but Bio-socio-technical Individuation is therefore a completely new way of thinking about the human and the world; Stiegler has, in our view, opened up entirely new and still unexplored perspectives for Western philosophy."

( doc )