Double-Sided Artifact

A heuristic distinction articulated by Décarie-Daigneault (2024), drawing on Philippe Grosos's Des profondeurs de nos cavernes (2021): an artifact understood as combining two sides — voluntary expression + collateral trace — both of which must be encountered together to enable an intersubjective engagement across time. Voluntary expression is the artifact's intentional content (the painted figure, the engraved sign, the inscription). Collateral trace is what surrounds the expression with the embodied evidence of the lives that produced it (the handprint, the footprint, the soot smudge from a torch). Without the trace, the expression is anonymous and confined to projection; without the expression, the trace is empty embodiment (the fossil case).

The methodological hinge of Décarie-Daigneault 2024's argument: cave paintings of Chauvet are an exemplary type of encounter — the liminal class — precisely because they are double-sided. The paradigm-case is "Crooked Finger": his painted handprints (voluntary expression) and the surrounding traces of his progression through the cave (collateral trace, including the morphological features that individuate him) together generate the transtemporal plane on which his passence can be disclosed.

Key Points

  • Two sides, both necessary, neither sufficient. Voluntary expression alone leaves the encounter in monological projection; collateral trace alone leaves us with empty embodiment. The double-sidedness is what generates the intersubjective engagement.
  • Drawn from Grosos but synthesized by Décarie-Daigneault. Grosos (2021) marks the distinction between the "numerous signs intentionally painted or engraved on the walls" and the "emotion-inducing footprints" surrounding them. Décarie-Daigneault makes the distinction structurally load-bearing for a typology of encounters.
  • The fossil is the limit case (one side: collateral trace only). Toadvine's fossil is the encounter-with-trace-without-expression. It generates the vertigo of deep time (because it is genuine encounter) but does not generate the plane of transtemporality (because there is no addressable singular).
  • The anonymous expression is the symmetrical limit case (one side: voluntary expression only). A note "do not forget the celery" found in a metro seat-crack is voluntary expression without context; the encounter delivers an anonymous signification confined to my projections.
  • The historical figure is the easy case (both sides, on our scale). Marie-Antoinette in Petit Trianon is double-sided — voluntary expressions (letters, decisions) and collateral traces (the petit trianon itself, daily-life records). Both sides give her a presence in our memory close to the personal historical figures we feel we "know."
  • The double-sided cave painting is the limit-but-not-breaking case. Voluntary expression (the painting) + collateral trace (the handprint, the footprint, the morphological individuation) at the limit of our capacity to contract the past, but not breaking it. The condition for the liminal encounter.

Details

Grosos's Distinction

Philippe Grosos in Des profondeurs de nos cavernes — Préhistoire – Art – Philosophie (Paris: Cerf, 2021) p. 43:

"There are also, [...] intentional or not, these emotion-inducing footprints, often attributed to some very young people, such as the Aurignacian footprints attributable to 'a ten-year-old child in the Croisillion gallery' (Clottes, 2001, p. 212), at the deepest end of the Chauvet-Pont d'Arc cave."

The Croisillion-gallery footprints are the paradigm of the collateral trace side of the artifact. They are not voluntary expressions in the way the wall paintings are; they are bodily incidences. But they are deeply expressive in another way: they make salient the embodied life that was lived in the cave, opening an existential space where we sense someone was at play, hiding, dancing.

Grosos articulates this distinction without naming it as a structural typology. Décarie-Daigneault 2024 takes up the distinction and gives it the work of organizing a typology of encounters.

The Metro Examples

Décarie-Daigneault 2024 §2.2 articulates the negative cases via metro vignettes:

  • Trace without expression: imagining the life of someone sitting across from you in the metro. "Are they coming back from work? Are they coming home to a family? Do they have unfulfilled dreams? Do they sleep well at night?" The corporeal presence opens these possibilities, but no true intersubjective engagement is possible — what I imagine "remains confined to the realm of my own projections and desires."
  • Expression without trace: stumbling on a piece of paper in the crack between two metro seats with "do not forget the celery" written on it. "I will be left with an anonymous signification that will speak to me only as far as my guesses and imagination will bring me."

Each side considered alone leaves the encounter in monological engagement. Both sides together generate dialogical engagement.

Why Both Sides Are Needed

Décarie-Daigneault 2024 §2.2:

"Considered alone, the two sides of the artifact — the voluntary expression (the painting), and the collateral traces — respectively leave us in a monological engagement with the clues and traces that we encounter. However, it is important to note that cases where a side is missing or inexistant, such as an encounter with a non-expressive trace or with an expression without context, are still to be considered as encounters, insofar as they are still events that bring about change and transformation within memory, and that 'force us to think', as Deleuze would say. As Toadvine showed, the fossil, this asubjective signifier cloaked in a veil of aloofness and anonymity, can very well set us on the path of an immemorial time. As I will now suggest, the depth of memory can be opened differently in the case of an artifact that we encounter as double-sided."

The point is not that one-sided encounters are not encounters — they are. The point is that they open different kinds of depth. The fossil opens immemorial depth (vertigo, unraveling); the anonymous expression opens projection-bound depth (my own imagination); the double-sided artifact opens transtemporal depth (the plane on which the singular other inhabits my present in passence).

Crooked Finger as the Cave-Painting Paradigm

The concrete double-sided case in Chauvet:

  • Voluntary expression: the ochre handprints in the first room (and the hundreds of other handprints constituting the panel).
  • Collateral trace: the morphological features visible in the prints — slightly crooked auricular finger, hand size suggesting a man over 1.80 m tall — that allow Baffier (2012, p. 335) to attribute them to a specific individual; the further traces of the same individual deeper in the cave (per Baffier in Herzog 2010, 00:33:40).

The combination is what allows Crooked Finger to be disclosed in passence. Considered alone, the handprints would be anonymous expression (one of the many people who painted in the cave); considered alone, the morphological features would be empty trace (a body had a slightly crooked finger). Together, they make a singular other inhabit the cave across the depth of memory.

Empirical Data Belongs to the Collateral-Trace Side

A practical sub-doctrine: empirical investigation typically produces what belongs to the collateral-trace side. Carbon dating, morphological analysis of footprints/handprints, soot residue analysis, isotopic studies all infuse the trace with additional sense of temporal farness or embodied specificity. They do not "decode" the voluntary expression (this is what Grosos and Décarie-Daigneault both refuse to attempt for cave-art); they enrich the trace with the hyle of the past (MP IP p. 56) — the irreducible reality of the past that I cannot invent or create, only encounter.

This is the operational answer to the question: how do empirical data figure in a phenomenological encounter without flattening it back into objectivism? Empirical data participate in the encounter on the trace side, deepening the sense of temporal farness and individuating the singular other, but without claiming to decode the voluntary expression.

Connections

  • is the methodological hinge for encounter — different combinations of expression and trace generate different kinds of encounter (fossil-vertigo, projection-bound, historical, transtemporal-liminal)
  • is the structural condition for transtemporality — the plane of transtemporality is generated by encounters with double-sided artifacts; fossils cannot generate it
  • enables the disclosure of passence — the singular other in passence is disclosed only when both sides of the artifact are encountered together
  • connects to depth of time — the double-sidedness controls how much depth the encounter opens
  • contrasts with the fossil — Toadvine's fossil is the trace-only limit case; productive of vertigo, not of transtemporal coherence
  • contrasts with anonymous expression — finding-a-celery-note-in-the-metro is the expression-only limit case; productive of projection, not of dialogue
  • is informed by the hyle of the past — empirical data participate in the encounter on the trace side, infusing it with sense of temporal farness

Open Questions

  • Are there cases of artifacts that are more than double-sided? A monument with inscription, biographical record of its makers, surrounding archaeological remains, and contemporaneous textual reception might be triple- or quadruple-sided. Whether the typology generalizes to a graded sidedness (more sides → richer encounter) or saturates at two is unclear.
  • What about works whose expression is its own trace? A handwritten letter is voluntary expression; the handwriting itself is a collateral trace of the writer's body. The two sides are inseparable. This case does not threaten the typology but might count as a limit-case-of-the-paradigm worth exploring.
  • Does the typology apply to natural traces as well as artifacts? A footprint of a long-extinct megafauna is structurally similar to the cave-art footprints (collateral trace) but is unaccompanied by voluntary expression. It would be one-sided trace, akin to the fossil case. The wiki should track future ingests on this.

Sources

  • decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger — primary source. The structural articulation in §2.2 and the application to the Crooked Finger case in §2.3.
  • philippe-grosos — Des profondeurs de nos cavernes (2021); the original distinction between voluntary signs and surrounding traces.
  • dominique-baffier — Médium (2012); supplies the empirical basis for the Crooked Finger individuation that makes the double-sided structure concrete.

Synthetic Claims

  • candidate claim, see claims#cave-paintings-as-liminal-encounter — the cave painting (Chauvet, Crooked Finger paradigm) is an exemplary type of encounter — the liminal class — because it is double-sided. Voluntary expression alone leaves the encounter in projection; collateral trace alone leaves us with empty embodiment (the fossil case); the double-sidedness is what generates the singular having-been-here across the depth of geological time. The double-sided artifact is the structural condition of liminality.
  • candidate claim, see claims#transtemporality-as-double-sided-encounter-structure — the transtemporal plane (coherent coexistence of multiple heterogeneous temporalities) is generated by encounters with double-sided artifacts; fossils cannot generate it (one side: trace only). The page's typology (fossil-vertigo / projection-bound / historical / transtemporal-liminal) is the typology of which kinds of encounter generate which kinds of temporal-architectural plane.