THE DIALECTICS OF PLASTICITY : A LUPASCIAN ANALYSIS
Joseph BRENNER is a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin and is the son of the American sculptor Michael Brenner (Lithuania, 1885 – New York, 1969). He made post-doctoral studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before pursuing his international career at Du Pont de Nemours (Geneva). Member of several. societies of philosophy, logic and sciences (American Association for the Advancement off Science; New York Academy of Sciences; Swiss Society for Logic and the Philosophy of Science), he will be interested very early by the work of the logician Stephan Lupasco and will develop since 1998 a close cooperation with the physicist Basarab Nicolescu, president of the CIRET, in order to make known the work of Lupasco in the language of Shakespeare, but also to extend this work to various fields like mathematics, logic and epistemology. He will do two conferences about this subject : “Logic, art and transdisciplinarity: A new logic for the new reality” approaching the lupascian system and the levels of reality of Nicolescu by centring them on a Transdisciplinary approach of technoethic art and “Stephan Lupasco and Florentin Smarandache: Conflicting Logics of Contradiction and an Included Middle ” comparing the principle of dynamic opposition (PDO) and the logic of the third included of Lupasco to the neutrosophic logic of Florentin Smarandache (2003). More recently, he will write a book on his own design of the lupascian precepts “Logic in reality” published at Springer Verlag (2008). It develops a nonpropositional system of LIR or of logics registered in reality. The axiomatic of the LIR formalized with elegance by the author permit neophytes to approach the complex systems, the ontology and the logic of contradiction with simplicity and transdisciplinarity. Many examples illustrate it in physics, biology, philosophy of sciences and metaphysics. The concepts of emergence, of causality, of space time, of levels of reality, of evolution of the alive systems or of determinism and indeterminism are thus approached. In this article written for PLASTIR, Joseph Brenner makes us the honour to develop dialectical plasticity such as MW Debono conceptualizes it and put it in prospect with the lupascian approach and the system of LIR. His analysis of the concept of plasticity is particularly relevant in the meaning that, on the one hand, it falls under the logician approach of the author who synthesizes the Transdisciplinary approaches of reality, and on the other hand, it does not call upon any “spirit of school”. What does he says in substance? First of all that the integration of the principle of plasticity is a need for people that wants to fill the gaps between science and poetry, logical and aesthetic values or between the various disciplinary and social languages mutually hermetic the ones with the others. Then, that plasticity is at the same time a physical property and an onto-epistemic process which is expressed at the interface of the physical and cognitive phenomena, generating a convergent or congruent approach phenomena rather than their separation. This attitude reveals inseparability between subject and object, science and art and the need to be lived without schizophrenia. According to the author, who compare the plastic systems, transdisciplinary and the LIR throughout the article, it is a change of prospect for reality and a new semantics that we need. He clearly shows that while describing in what the development of the “complexes of plasticity” and the principle of coexistence (PCE) and co-significance (PCS) presented by Debono united to the principle of dynamic opposition (PDO) rising from the logic of Lupasco and the LIR of Brenner as to the three pillars of transdisciplinarity enacted by Nicolescu can lead to a more complete description of the perceived reality of the world. One would lead thus according to Brenner to “a logic of and in reality”, rather than to remain in a logic of the “coming whole”; one would obviously see in what the ubiquity of plasticity does not constitute a handicap but a great force, that, – I quote the author which makes a parallel with the transdisciplinary approach -, to refer “ what there is between, through and beyond the individual forms”; one would involve oneself finally, by avoiding the trap of the metaphors, in what the own metaphysics of the universe – its poetic – wants to say to us.
THE DIGITAL FINGERPRINT OF THE SOUL
Philippe QUÉAU is a polytechnician and a specialist internationally recognized in the sciences of information and of communication. He was in particular research director at the National institute of the audio-visual (INA) during twenty years being responsible of a group of research on televirtuality and created the Imagina program, international rendezvous on synthesized image. During these years, he will carry out several series TV on the synthesized images, the first French film in 3D “House Flies” with André Martin and the first world connection of televirtuality per telephone link with immersion 3D “in” the abbey of Cluny. He will then be named director of the Division of the department of Information at the UNESCO in Paris, then in Moscow (2003) and currently in Morocco, where he his in charge of the Rabbat’s office covering all Maghreb countries. Parallel to these innovating and extremely rich approaches, Philippe Queau is the author of “Metaxu – Theory of intermediate art” and of “the Virtual one – Virtues and Giddinesses”, at Champ Vallon/INA Ed. respectively published in 1989 and 1993, and more recently of “Planet of the spirits. For a cyberspace policye”, at Odile Jacob Ed. (2000). What strikes in this course, it is the constancy and the permanent innovation which permit the author to transcend in real-time the most pointed technological advancements. But, far from behaving as a technocrat or a post-modern philosopher, Philippe Queau makes us penetrate in the heart of the image, in what it has of more iconic and more revealing of ourselves, in what it conveys of art, emotion and direction. Thus, Metaxu explores all the facets of this intermediate art in which we take all part, that located at the interface between image and language, between nature and culture, between symbol and significance. Cyberethics is then what the author wishes to develop in order to avoid hypertechnology for hypertehcnology. Metaxu has the same root that metaplasticity, it is thus not the fruit of the chance if that led the author to offer this article to us whose title “The digital fingerprint of the soul” borrowed from David Fincher author of the film “The strange story of Benjamin Button”, is already a program, that of the “double language of the modern ideology as for the life and to art”, and a consent, that of the nominalist approach on the nature of the universals. We let to you now discover it with delight. [Metaxu, the blog of Philippe Queau: http://queau.eu/]
FROM THE CONCEPT OF PLASTICITY TO THE PLASTICITY OF THE CONCEPT
Eric Combet is PhD in philosophy and professor of preparatory classes. He teaches aesthetics at the higher school of Design Martiniere of Lyon and recently published “For the art, or the plasticity of mind” at Ellipses editions (2008) which received the Araxie Torossian Price 2006, decreed by the Academy of Science Morals and Policies. He defends in this book the thesis according to which “the art is essentially the activity by which the man, instead of fixing himself in his humanity, crosses his own spirit and tends towards a higher form of life” (note of the editor). PLASTIR is thus a place of predilection for this author whom we invited to discourse on the philosophical approach of the contradictory nature of plasticity. He yields readily with the exercise by distinguishing first the formed thing (plasma) from the formative action (plastiké) and by carrying out us in the heart of the axiomatic plastic: “at the same time rigidity of plasticization and fluidity of the change in forms” and “irritant plastic bomb attack of our binary oppositions”. The screen is thus thrown, a kind of “ontological threat… on our logical capacities” quickly raised by philosophers like Dagognet who sees in the plastics a possible catalysis or a place of dissolution of our selves and our subjectivity. Same report for the technical objects of Simondon where the plastic materiality reveals its hylemorphism, its endogenous capacity to autoengender. Thus, the author to describe this morphogenesis whose man is not the single workman: “The matter is organized, not only by its operation but in its operation, and the real morphogenesis of the object is a “ frayage of the plastid” in the form conceived by the man”. Another quoted philosophical approach, that of Malabou, who after having described the post Hegelian plasticity so well, warns to us here against the anti-plasticity, in other words the flexibility imposed to the workers by excessive capitalism or in very an other field by the neurological diseases or, the traumatisms, which makes them remain in the fixity (the inexorable plasticity of dead), the passive component of plasticity instead of imitate neuroplasticity or “the neuronal plastir”, in other words creativity and the free-referee of the human brain. What leads the author to distinguish the self-destruction from “the chaogonic plastic force” of the old Greeks. Plasticity is thus described as driving, evolutionary and being opposed to the decline of humanity. At this point of the description, Eric Combet fills us by pointing out what means the verb to plastir that we chose for title of our review, “one to be formed without formative subject” according to Simondon, a genesis process illustrated perfectly by “the always supplied connective energy “of the brain and finally a principle according to which “any thing is at the same time form and force, form in becoming”. To remain on the surface said Nietzsche vis-à-vis the will for power of the plastid… In the same way, Cezanne which opened to the plasticity of the forms and colours until exhaustion rather than to remain prisoner of “the immediate plasticity of the things”. However, as Combet raises it, the price to be paid is “a double abandonment of self and objectivation of the world” to plasticization (death), even to the plastic bomb attack. We need so an ethics of the modeller that plasticians like Penone or Didi Huberman completely integrated. One comes thus to the thought from the sculptor carving and to the plasticians of mind like Hegel, Kant, Deleuze or Bergson that Combet apostrophizes “dianoumenaly”, i.e. with a plasticity of the spirit whose transverse nature, fully corroborating the new epistemological paradigm of plasticity which we defend.
TWO PREPARED PIANOS : FIRST PART – IN THE SHADE : DESIRE AND NEUTRALITY
Mariana THIERIOT-LOISEL is coordinator of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Monastery of Saint Benoit in Sao Paulo in Brazil. She is currently doing a post-doctorate in philosophy of education at the Laval University in Canada under the direction of the Professor Thomas De Koninck. It is from this point of view that she studies the human factor and chooses to give it in prime time to PLASTIR. Three parts will be approached of which the first one is presented in this number. The title of this article is drawn from a composition of John Cage “Concerto for prepared piano” which passes by every season and ends in an autodafe: the interpreter, an Eastern musician burns the piano. The matter of the author in “Two prepared pianos” is thus to show that if one of the pianos burns or if there is an inevitable share of destruction in the production of a work, the other will be able at least to survive to the autodafe. The subject oscillates thus from the story to the transposition of the concerto of Cage in the world of the research, of the Manichaeism, of the philosophical knowledge, but also of the machine man and the social figuration: a solution, to grow together, to be intuitive, with the listening of his body. Mariana Thieriot-Loisel raises the question directly: “Which life do we want, ours or that of a myth, of a “niaiseux” fairy tale, dictated by the media, which is obstinated to deform the content our human relations ? ” And his answer is obstinately turned towards the human one, towards the defence of his weaknesses and his desires, towards the redemption of the stray researcher. And these retained desires, she expresses them via Rabindranath Tagore or of “the circle of the missing philosophers” whom she questions: “Which is the relation between desire and disease? Desire and neutrality? ” and analyzes in-depth: “Nowadays Socrate would be shown of paedophilia, Phaedra looked after with drugs, to cure of a “teaching incest” and possibly of his homosexuality. And yet is the history repeated and without this passion between two which create, I wonder whether the cultural transmission would take place? The culture is a life on which I am always irremediably late precise Rene Char ”. In filigree, one will read “the knowledge of the shade” like “the recognition of the presence of the desire”, a desire which needs direction, creativity and which enables us to cross all violence.