RELATED TERMS: Design and Philosophy
Artifactuality
As Victor Margolin (2006: 107) comments, design is the conception and planning of the artificial. The scope and boundaries of design are intimately entwined with our understanding of the limits of the artificial. As design continues to make incursions into realms that were once considered as belonging to nature, so does its conceptual scope widen, leading to situations that Jacques Derrida (1994) characterises as artifactual and actuvirtual, that is, situations where previously accepted boundaries between the (f)actual and the artificial and between the actual and the virtual, seem to blur and cease to guide thought reliably.
It is in an interview entitled ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality’, that Jacques Derrida (1994: 28) introduces these two portmanteau terms: artifactuality and actuvirtuality.
By artifactuality, he means to point out that,
“actuality is indeed made: it is important to know what it is made of, but it is even more necessary to recognise that it is made. It is not given, but actively produced; it is sorted, invested and performatively interpreted by a range of hierarchising and selective procedures – factitious or artificial procedures which are always subservient to various powers and interests of which their ‘subjects’ and agents (producers and consumers of actuality, always interpreters, and in some cases ‘philosophers’ too), are never sufficiently aware. The ‘reality’ of ‘actuality’ – however individual, irreducible, stubborn, painful or tragic it may be – only reaches us through fictional devices. The only way to analyse it is through a work of resistance, of vigilant counter-interpretation, etc.”
Stiegler uses the notion of artifactuality in the context of his discussion of the transformation of libidinal energy through the processes of sublimation and de-sublimation. For Freud, Lemmens (2019) explains, drives differ from animal instincts in that they have no particular goal. Through sublimation, drives are bound and oriented toward social and cultural investments. In the process, they transformed into desires. Understood in this way, sublimation is a process of accumulating and orienting libidinal energy. Freud defined libidinal energy as the energy of the individual and collective psyche, expressed through affective and cognitive or noetic dispositions, such as love, passion, dedication, wonder, curiosity and the will to know. Marcuse later argued that de-sublimation causes desires to regress back into drives (Lemmens, 2019).
For Stiegler, in contrast to Freud, sublimation and de-sublimation are fundamentally modulated or mediated by technologies, that is, by a technical system or milieu of mnemotechnologies. For Stiegler, this ecology of spirit must thus be understood in terms of an ecology of desire or a ‘libidinal ecology’.
It is this intimate relation between desire or affectivity, on the one hand, and technology, on the other hand, that Stiegler describes as ‘the artifactuality of desire’ in The Lost Spirit of Capitalism: “desire is constituted through its artefactuality” (Stiegler, 2014: 46). From Stiegler’s perspective, the problem is not biopower or capitalism but lack of attention, leading to failure to remember and failure to learn, and lack of desire caused by desublimation (Lindberg, 2020) .
The relevance of this debate for design practice is that the Stieglerian notions of mnemotechnologies, media technologies and technical systems are being interpreted here as a web or an ecology of ‘designs’ of different kinds, intensities and complexities. Thus, to paraphrase Stiegler, the intimate relation between desire or affectivity, on the one hand, and designs, on the other hand, is what constitutes the artifactualisation of desire. From a Stieglerian perspective, the noetic is fundamentally enabled and conditioned by the technical: Stiegler thinks noesis essentially as technesis. Taking up this perspective, Peter Lemmens (2019) proposes to talk explicitly about the techno-noosphere. The argument presented here is that designs, woven together into a performing design ecology, ‘are’ the techno-noosphere; rather, they assist in the realisation of the techno-noosphere through their processes of artifactualisation.
Actuvirtuality
In addition to highlighting such artificial syntheses, including synthetic images, synthetic voices and all the prosthetic supplements which can be substituted for real actuality, Derrida (1994: 29) also points to a concept of virtuality, including virtual images and virtual spaces, but most importantly virtual outcomes or events. He notes that,
“Clearly it is no longer possible to contrast virtuality with actual reality, along the lines of the serene old philosophical distinction between power and act, dynamis and energeia, the potentiality of matter and the determining form of a telos, and hence of progress, etc. Virtuality now reaches right into the structure of the eventual event and imprints itself there; it affects both the time and the space of images, discourses, and ‘news’ or ‘information’ – in fact everything which connects us to actuality, to the unappeasable reality of its supposed present.”
(Derrida, 1994: 29)
In sum, designs are both artifactual and actuvirtual!
References
Derrida, J. (1994) The Deconstruction of actuality, Radical Philosophy, 68 (Autumn 1994), pp. 28–41. Available at: https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp68_interview_derrida.pdf (Accessed: 3 April 2020).
Derrida, J. (2002) Artifactualities, in Bajorek, J. (tran.) Echographies of television: filmed interviews [of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler]. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, pp. 1–27.
Lemmens, P. (2019) Web 3.0 and The Web of Life. Attuning the Noosphere with (the Intelligences of) the Biosphere in the Context of the Anthropocene, Glimpse, 20, pp. 1–15. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2066/204691 (Accessed: 12 September 2021).
Lindberg, S. (2020) Politics of digital learning – thinking education with Bernard Stiegler, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52(4), pp. 384–396. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1586531.
Lucy, N. (2004) A Derrida Dictionary. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
Margolin, V. (2002) The Politics of the artificial: essays on design and design studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Simon, H. (1996) The Sciences of the artificial. 3rd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stiegler, B. (2013) What makes life worth living: on pharmacology. Translated by D. Ross. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Stiegler, B. (2014) The Lost spirit of capitalism. Disbelief and discredit Volume 3. Translated by D. Ross. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
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