Retentions (Primary, Secondary, Tertiary)
Origin: Edmund Husserl (primary and secondary retentions) & Bernard Stiegler (tertiary retentions)
Definition
Stiegler borrows the concept of retention from Husserl and articulates it in three levels.
Primary retention is immediate memory — what consciousness retains within the present perceptual flow: the musical note just past that gives meaning to the current note. Without it, no coherent perception is possible.
Secondary retention is recollection — memory constituted by experience and learning. It is personal, singular, and disappears with the individual. It is what determines which primary retentions we select and how we interpret them.
Tertiary retention is memory externalized in technical objects: writing, books, recordings, databases. It survives the individual and enables intergenerational transmission independent of bodies. Tertiary retentions constitute the milieu in which our secondary retentions operate a selection of our primary retentions.
In my writings
LLMs fall within the category of tertiary retentions, but with a particularity that warrants deeper reflection. Unlike a book or a database (inert supports that the individual must actively mobilize), LLMs produce information generatively. The user does not need to activate their secondary and primary retentions in the same way to access it: the machine directly produces a formed, structured, seemingly reasoned response.
Generative AI increases the speed of access to knowledge while short-circuiting the process by which this knowledge constitutes itself as understanding. It reduces the need to activate one’s own retentions — and it is precisely this activation that forms, that individuates, that constitutes the professional.