The Anthropic Loop: Displacement, Saturation, Return — Formalizing a Mechanism, from Kapp to Stiegler

Existing frameworks for tracking displaced costs describe segments of the displacement — the shift (Kapp), the aggregate balance (Georgescu-Roegen), the attentional toll (Stiegler) — but not the full cycle that links them. This paper formalises the anthropic loop: a social system displaces its disorder towards a receptacle (E1), the load accumulates (E2) until saturation (E3), returns to the emitting system (E4), which re-displaces towards a new receptacle or reconfigures (E5). The apparatus holds in nine definitions, five states, three conditions — two of receptacle saturation, one of transfer arrest — four forms of return, and six propositions of differentiated status: one methodological postulate, two structural corollaries, three empirical propositions. The claimed contribution is threefold: the articulation of receptacle, mediation, latency and transmutation into a transhistorical institutional state machine; condition C3, which treats the invisibility of a transfer as a maintenance cost; and an ex ante protocol disciplining both the assertion of displacement and the certification of internalisation. Anthropy (Lalut) — a mechanism of circulation — is explicitly distinguished from anthropy (Stiegler), a measure of production.