Between smartphones and metaphysics

What does technology reveal to us today? Something like the crimson afterglow of the bombs falling on Paris in 1943, which are the same colour as strawberries and Bordeaux wine, as Jünger notes whilst savouring the multisensory scene from the terrace of the Hôtel Raphaël? No. Not quite. That was the power of twentieth-century technology, the war of materials, not unlike the one he had encountered in Flanders, Champagne, the Somme and Lorraine, and which was seen again, at the start of this century, in Iraq. But technology is far swifter than the apocalyptics and the conformists. In recent months we have seen drones outmanoeuvre aircraft carriers: the triumph of a technology that draws its power from the greatest of forces, the infinite power of recording – that is, in this instance, that ubiquitous and automatic form of retention that is the digital.

Here is the event that sheds more light than the flashes of bombs, the defining feature of our age. Not technology, nor retention – which have existed since the dawn of time – but the technological explosion of recording made possible by digital technology. Now, every technical innovation is also a metaphysical revelation. Not because it alters the structure of reality, but because it makes visible a feature that had always existed without revealing itself so clearly. This explosion, that of our times, is not limited to multiplying entities, like the mirrors and the copula abhorred by Borges’ heresiarch: it reveals that the world is made, even before being, of duration. That is to say, not of being in time, like an island in a current: but of being that arises from duration, like a volcano emerging from the waters, and from the persistence that transforms the eruption into an island. To be or not to be does not mean possessing some sort of existential ‘virtus’. It means to endure or not to endure, manifesting or failing to manifest the force I call ‘hysteresis’.

To the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, I reply: there is something because the world is governed by hysteresis. And if I say this with such calmness – or even audacity – it is because the digital age, the transformation of life into data, now offers its most evident manifestation. And, just as we learn from the digital world, hysteresis is not limited to deferring or preserving for future use. It stabilises, gives form, produces effects. It is not the shadow of a lost origin, but the driving force behind an active genesis in which nothingness is transformed into being—not through some mysterious addition of substance, but because the trace repeats itself, accumulates and generates a structure capable of offering resistance and manifesting permanence.

We always find good reasons to complain, yet we ought to acknowledge how fortunate we are to be living in one of the most metaphysical eras in history: one in which digital technology has brought to everyone’s attention the magic by which nothing, or almost nothing, is transformed into being. Instead of cursing technology, let us take seriously what lies before our eyes. Words, actions, expressions, intentions, needs and desires are transformed into data, filling archives and feeding artificial intelligence. What was once lost, day after day, is now poised to become movement and light, to live and not merely to be relived.

I emphasise the digital aspect because it was mobile phones that offered me the ‘occasio cognoscendi’ of the new metaphysics. Once the telephone had been rendered absolutely wireless, it was transformed into a writing machine and then a recording machine. Why? Is it not more natural to speak? And if, from speaking, we have returned en masse to writing, leaving more traces than ever before, must we conclude that we are slaves to technology, as is mechanically repeated, or that what occurs in the empirical realm reveals to us the origin and the transcendental? Technology, as in a procession, brings to light things of ancient origin. The mobile phone does not degrade our social coexistence: it reveals its elementary structures. It tells us what our ancestors were seeking as they sat around a campfire, whilst carving a bone for its beauty or to make a lunar calendar. It is necessary to leave traces: this is why the speaking machine immediately becomes a writing machine; and this is the essence of social reality – the recording that makes promises, habits and predictions possible.

How does "The Genealogy of Morals" begin? By describing its fundamental task: to construct an animal capable of making a promise, that is, of incurring a debt. To incur a debt means to retain the memory of something and transform it into a social object: debt. There is no promise without hysteresis, because there is no promise without a trace that survives the very moment it was made. To promise is to ensure that the past continues to operate in the future. This applies to our documents, to our feelings, but also to the so-called ‘strong force’, the nuclear interaction that holds quarks together within protons and neutrons. Gluons (from ‘glue’), the particles that mediate this interaction, do not merely transmit an interaction: they interact with one another, producing a field that intensifies with distance rather than attenuating, and making it impossible to separate the quarks permanently.

Thus, at its most fundamental level, matter is not held together by a substance, but by a force that binds. Gluons do not constitute the foundation of matter in the sense of a first principle: they show that the foundation of the world lies within the world itself and consists in binding. It is a foundation that rests on nothing else, for there is nothing beneath it to support it: there is simply the force that binds. This fact builds a bridge from the social realm—which we can observe with the naked eye—to the invisible. Debts require memory; gluons hold quarks together. Not because one imitates the other or derives from it, but because they are two manifestations—one social and the other physical—of the same metaphysical property: hysteresis. The dynamis that sustains the world is not that of four elephants on the back of a giant tortoise swimming in the cosmic ocean. It is hysteresis: the fact that something persists, when vanishing would be infinitely simpler, more economical and, if we are to believe the nihilists, even more desirable.

Social reality, then, is merely the arena in which hysteresis becomes most evident, if we take the trouble to reflect upon it. Social reality does not depend on the intentions of its actors, but on the documents that govern social acts and can operate even in the absence of intentio auctoris. A contract is valid because it is written down and filed: the drunken sailor enlisted in the Royal Navy was genuinely enlisted, even though, when he ticked the box, he did not know what he was doing. If a social act continues to operate over time, it is because a record preserves its effects. Registration counts for more than intention. This is why 21st-century capital is no longer, as Thomas Piketty still maintained in 2013, financial capital, but digital capital – that is, the recording of humanity’s entire way of life available on the web. The explosion of chatbots in 2022, made possible by the accumulation of registrations of all kinds during the pandemic, offered further confirmation of the unprecedented power of recording. After all, the workings of large language models are no different from our own use of language. We could never intend to say something unless there was first something to say, within a vocabulary that predates us and which we learnt when our intentions were limited to the need for nourishment and protection.

I now feel obliged to explain why I am using such an unusual term as ‘hysteresis’, rather than resorting to the many words already available – memory, permanence, persistence, retention – to designate a force that I describe as universal. The reason is simple. All these words denote a condition, a faculty or a result. Hysteresis, on the other hand, gives its name to a process and a force: not simply to the fact that something remains, but to the way in which what remains continues to act. The term, as is all the more true for a concept that emphasises duration and survival, has its own history (but if you’re not interested, you can skip the next paragraph).

The term was coined in 1881 by the physicist James Alfred Ewing to describe the tendency of ferromagnetic materials to retain their magnetisation even after the external field has been removed: the persistence of effects beyond their causes. A hysteretic material does not return to its starting point when the stress ceases; it carries with it the history of the forces that have acted upon it. This is what is today often – and somewhat overusedly – termed ‘resilience’, but it is also what Sartre, in his "Critique of Dialectical Reason", explicitly designates as hysteresis when describing the practical-inert: praxis, once objectified, survives the subjects who produced it and returns to them as a force that conditions every subsequent action. The past is not simply over and done with: it continues to exert its influence. David Lewis, in a completely different vein, shows that even conventions do not depend on a constantly renewed intention: they persist because their very persistence makes it rational to continue following them. Finally, Pierre Bourdieu takes up the concept to explain the structural lag between the habitus and the field: embodied dispositions outlive changes in the environment and, precisely for this reason, continue to produce effects.

In all these cases, the same structure comes into play: something survives the cause that produced it and, precisely because it survives, continues to act. This persistence is not an appendix: it is one of the conditions that make it possible. But there is much more to it, at least in my view, than in physics and in my philosophical precursors. Hysteresis is not merely a property of magnetic materials or social arrangements. It is the foundation of a metaphysics that abandons the ontocentric obsession to turn its attention to what makes possible not only being, but also acting, knowing and willing. For, before asking ourselves what exists, we must understand how something acquires stability, duration and permanence. If this is the case – and here, once again, is the great gift bestowed upon us by the digital age – any metaphysics that takes being for granted, rather than explaining the process through which it is constituted, fails to fulfil its promise of totality. Hysteresis shows how being emerges from the accumulation of traces, from their preservation and from their taking on form and meaning. But the same applies to action: I could not write this article if every word vanished the moment I typed it. It applies to knowledge: you could not read it if writing did not preserve what has been thought – not for what it is (written signs), but for what it signifies. Finally, it applies to volition: deciding to open this newspaper, or to close it once you reach this line, has nothing to do with being, and everything to do with the interruption of a process, with a decision, with the arising of a will.

Here, the question of hysteresis intersects with that of force. The world, as Michele Silenzi suggested in the article that opened this series, is a field of forces, a web of relationships in which everything is part of a system of collisions and resistances, attractions and repulsions. Now, in Ancient Greek, dynamis – as Silenzi also pointed out – means ‘force’, but it also means ‘power’, that is, that which can happen precisely because it possesses the force to do so. If this is the case, there is no force stronger than receptivity – the capacity to welcome, retain and preserve. Capacity is the highest form of passivity, but precisely for this reason it is also the highest form of power: it is from this, in fact, that the capacity to act and even to understand derives – which does not mean, first and foremost, to dominate something, but to be able to contain it, to ‘become capable of it’. Memory recalls, matter repeats. This is why both the world of culture and the world of nature exist.

It’s getting late, so I’ll wrap up. Time passes, but not by being consumed in a fleeting instant that gives rise to the paradoxes faced by Aristotle and common sense: if the instant does not exist, how can time – which is made up of instants – exist? If, on the other hand, it does exist, then things from ten thousand years ago would be contemporary with those of the present. Inscribed time, the stigmè, the instant that becomes grammè – a line, an arrow of time, entropy, wear and tear, the fate of all flesh and the end of all things – is a succession of steps, a ziggurat in which the present carries the whole of the past with it. Derrida taught me this, over a coffee, with a casual remark, when he was seventy – that is, my age: at seventy, one is not merely seventy, but one embodies all the ages that continue to operate within us. It was not merely the reflection of a man growing old, but the description of a structure in which time is not the container of entities, but is contained within every entity, in every action, in every act of cognition, in every act of volition.

I assure you: it is literally like that. Being seventy does not simply mean being a seventy-year-old, but – to borrow Proust’s metaphor from the final page of "In Search of Lost Time" – finding oneself on stilts that make one’s step uncertain. And those stilts are not simply the signs of ageing, a stiff neck or, more romantically, a scar reminiscent of a duel in one’s youth. They are the precise determination of how our body and spirit will react to a shock or a hope, unlike a forty-year-old or a twenty-year-old, for reasons that are both physiological and historical – that is to say, for metaphysical reasons. It is so easy to see this in life. I wish it were just as easy to see it in thought.