The Concept of Technology in Western Philosophy
In this chapter, I suggest that the problem of ‘new technologies’, and of the kind of knowledge that can be produced about them, cannot be addressed without radically reconsidering what we mean by ‘knowledge’ in relation to ‘technology’ in a broader sense. I also argue that, as a preliminary step, the received concepts of technology need to be put into question. By received concepts of technology I mean the ways in which technology has been understood primarily by the Western philosophical tradition. This turn to the philosophical conceptions of technology in the context of media and cultural studies might seem somewhat daring or even misjudged. However, I argue that media and cultural studies can highly benefit from a productive dialogue with philosophy on the subject of technology. In fact, a debate on the relevance of philosophical thought has taken place, from time to time, throughout the history of media and cultural studies. This debate has mainly focused on ‘theory’, that is, on specific developments in French structuralist and poststructuralist thought, such as semiotics and deconstruction. Nevertheless, I want to point out here that this capacity for questioning its own conceptual framework is precisely what enables media and cultural studies to think technology originally and innovatively, and therefore to interrogate what we mean by technology in the first place.
To give but one example, in his famous essay ‘Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies’, Stuart Hall takes into consideration the tension between theoretical and political dimensions that for him determines the specificity of cultural studies. He writes:
Both in the British and the American context, cultural studies has drawn the attention itself, not just because of sometimes dazzling internal theoretical development, but because it holds theoretical and political questions in an ever irresolvable but permanent tension. It constantly allows one to irritate, bother, and disturb the other, without insisting on some final theoretical closure.[1]
According to Hall, the theoretical encounters with structuralism and poststructuralism have forced cultural studies to constantly question itself and to keep its identity open and heterogeneous. And yet what holds the field together is its politically committed nature. Hall comments: ‘[n]ot that there is one politics already inscribed within it. But there is something at stake in cultural studies in a way that I think, and hope, is not exactly true of many other very important intellectual and critical practices.’[2]
In his book of 2002 entitled Culture in Bits, Gary Hall observes that, while acknowledging the tension between theory and politics, Stuart Hall is actually inclined to give priority to the latter: therefore politics remains that which limits the destabilizing and decentring effects of theory.[3] Gary Hall takes a much more far-reaching stance by suggesting that theory itself has political relevance in cultural studies. For him, by enabling reflexivity within cultural studies, theory also enables cultural studies to become particularly aware of the influences that the university as a political and institutional structure exerts on the production of knowledge, including knowledge produced within cultural studies. Thinking politically means first of all being attentive to the institutional forces that shape thought itself, such as the constitution and regulation of cultural studies practitioners’ competences by the university. Therefore, since the ability to question inherited conceptual frameworks appears to be one of cultural studies’ points of strength, and since Software Theory aims at ‘demystifying’ new technologies and developing new forms of knowledge about technology and software within media and cultural studies, I want to argue here that a reexamination of the philosophical conceptions of technology is a convenient starting point for my argument.
Indeed, as Bernard Stiegler remarks, “Western philosophy has always found it rather difficult to think about technology.” In the first volume of Technics and Time, Stiegler points out how, while the extraordinary technological changes of our age need to be conceptualized and made intelligible as soon as possible, in attempting to achieve this intelligibility one cannot rely on any available account of technology in the Western philosophical tradition: ‘At its very origin and up until now, philosophy has repressed technics as an object of thought. Technics is the unthought.’[4] Although later on in his work Stiegler identifies a few exceptions to this philosophical refusal to openly approach technology—namely, the thought of several French philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, and that of Martin Heidegger—he nevertheless points out that philosophical reflection has traditionally pushed technology to its own margins. And yet, a critical evaluation of such reflection shows how the concept of technology has always been tightly connected to the concepts of ‘knowledge’, ‘language’, and ‘humanity’.
For this reason, in the present chapter, I take into consideration a number of philosophers who have attempted a conceptualization of technology and dealt with the difficulty of producing knowledge about it. I examine both the dominant philosophical conception of technology based on the Aristotelian thought, which substantially reduces technology to a mere instrument, and the work of those thinkers who have distanced themselves from such an instrumental understanding and have instead proposed a view of technology as a fundamental characteristic of human beings. I refer mainly, but not exclusively, to the work of Heidegger, Stiegler, Derrida, and the French palaeontologist André Leroi-Gourhan. The work of all these thinkers shows that philosophy has constituted itself precisely in relation (and in opposition) to technological knowledge, and therefore it points to the need for the radical rethinking of philosophy itself if an understanding of technology is to be made possible.
Tracing a map of the philosophical thought on technology is not an easy task. In order to start exploring this problem, let me follow for a moment the innovative genealogy proposed by Stiegler.[5] Stiegler’s position on the relationship between philosophy and technology is quite striking. Although, as we have seen above, he argues for the ‘urgency and necessity of an encounter between philosophy and technology’, he actually views philosophy as traditionally and constitutively incapable of thinking technology.[6] For him, philosophy has always ‘repressed’ technology as an object of thought. Even more significantly, from the very beginning Western philosophy has distinguished itself from technology, and has in fact identified itself as not technology. It has done so by separating technê from epistêmê. Epistêmê is the Greek word most often translated as ‘knowledge’, while technê is translated as either ‘craft’ or ‘art’.[7] The separation between technê and epistêmê was rooted in the political arena of fifth-century Athens, and it associated technê with the rhetorical skills of the Sophists. As professional rhetoricians, the Sophists were skilled in the construction of political arguments. Their skillfulness (technê) was perceived as indifference to establishing truth or, worse, as an attempt to make truth instrumental to power. As such, Sophists’ technê came to be opposed to true knowledge. Therefore, truth remained the only object of epistêmê, which in turn was identified with philosophy. This substantially political move deprived technical knowledge of any value.
The subsequent step in the devaluation of technology was made by Aristotle through his definition of a ‘technical being’ as something that does not have an own end in itself and that is just a tool used by someone else for their ends.[8] In other words, the exclusion of technology from philosophy has been founded on the concept of instrumentality: technical knowledge has been interpreted as instrumental, and therefore as non-philosophy. To quote Timothy Clark, ‘the conception of technology that . . . has dominated Western thought for almost three thousand years’ can be synthesized as follows: ‘[t]he traditional, Aristotelian view is that technology is extrinsic to human nature as a tool which is used to bring about certain ends. Technology is applied science, an instrument of knowledge. The inverse of this conception, now commonly heard, is that the instrument has taken control of its maker, the creation control of its creator (Frankenstein’s monster).’[9] Moreover, instrumentality has gained a new importance during the process of the industrialization of the Western world. Accordingly, technology has slowly acquired a new place in philosophical thought. Science has in fact become more and more instrumental (to economy, to war) in the course of the last two centuries, therefore gradually renouncing its character of ‘pure’ knowledge. At the same time, philosophy has become interested in the ‘technicization’ of science. As an example of this one can think of Edmund Husserl’s work on the arithmeticization of geometry.[10] Importantly, as Stiegler also points out, the Platonic conception of technicization as the loss of memory is still at the basis of Husserl’s understanding of algebra.[11] I will come back to Plato’s understanding of technology in a moment. For now it is worth remembering that in his dialogue Phaedrus Plato famously associates writing, understood as a technique to aid memory, with the loss of true memory, which for Plato is anamnesis, or recollection of an ideal truth. From this perspective, which again separates knowledge from technology, writing is devalued because of its instrumentality.[12]
To recapitulate the above argument, the devaluation of technology in Western philosophy goes hand in hand with the devaluation of writing. What I want to argue here is that the relationship established by Stiegler between technology and writing as both excluded by knowledge and encompassed by the concept of instrumentality assumes a particular importance in the context of the study of new technologies. The question to be posed at this point is not just whether an instrumental concept of technology is adequate for an understanding of new technologies, but also: if new technologies exceed and destabilize the concept of instrumentality, do they not also destabilize the concept of writing? And what would the consequences of such a destabilization be for the investigation of software?
In order to develop this point, it is important to examine further the alternative tradition of thought on technology that, again according to Stiegler, starts with Heidegger and is not based on the concept of instrumentality. Clark calls this the tradition of ‘originary technicity’—a term he borrows from Richard Beardsworth.[13] This term assumes a paradoxical character only if one remains situated within the instrumental conceptualization of technology: if technology were instrumental, it could not be originary—that is, constitutive of the human. Therefore, the concept of ‘originary technicity’ resists the utilitarian conception of technology. To clarify what he means by ‘originary technicity’, Clark refers to the 1992 novel The Turing Option, coauthored by Marvin Minsky, a leading theorist in the field of Artificial Intelligence.[14] In order to regain his cognitive capacities after a shooting accident has severely damaged his brain, the protagonist of the novel, Brian Delaney, has a small computer implanted into his skull as a prosthesis. After the surgery he starts reconstructing the knowledge he had before the shooting. The novel shows him trying to catch up with himself through his former notes and getting an intense feeling that the self that wrote those notes in the past is lost forever. Clark uses this story as a brilliant figuration of the fact that no self-consciousness can be reached without technology. He comments: ‘Delaney’s experience in The Turing Option is only different in degree from the normal working of the mind from minute to minute. . . . No thinking—no interiority of the psyche—can be conceived apart from technics in the guise of systems of signs which it may seem to employ but which are a condition of its own identity.’[15] Here ‘technics’ is not understood in terms of massive engineering works but as ‘the subtler intimacy of the relation of technology to human thinking’, and especially as ‘the intimacy between technology and language’.[16] Such an understanding of technology ostensibly draws on Heidegger’s thought, as well as on Derrida’s and Stiegler’s.
As Stiegler points out, it is Heiddeger’s understanding of technology that offers the first opportunity to rethink instrumentality and consequently the relationship between technology and knowledge.[17] Famously, Heidegger saw technology as responsible for ‘the spiritual decline of the earth’. Nonetheless he was also the first philosopher to seriously think technology after Marx. As Mark Poster notices in his rereading of Heidegger’s 1955 essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’—a rereading that explicitly tests the validity of Heidegger’s thought for an understanding of new technologies—Heidegger’s antipathy towards technology was accompanied by an enormous sensitivity to the problem of technology itself. According to Poster, Heidegger was ‘no simple technophobe.’[18] In fact, the central point of Heidegger’s argument in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ is not technology per se but modern humanity’s way of being. Technology characterizes modern ‘culture’—the term that Poster chooses for Heidegger’s Dasein.[19] For Heidegger, humanity has to ‘bring itself forth’ in order to be, and it does so in part through its use of things—that is, through technology. In this context, technology is understood as a whole process of setting up the world. As long as humanity is aware of this process, it has a free relation to itself. This was the case in ancient Greece, where technology was openly visible and integrated into culture. However, in the modern age, technology has become a way of using things which brings humanity forth, while at the same time concealing this very process—that is, concealing technology itself. Ultimately, modern technology ‘challenges’ nature: it does violence to it and reduces it to an available resource. In so doing, it also reduces humanity to the same status, since humanity as part of nature becomes a servant of technology. Heidegger calls this process ‘enframing’. His hope is that humankind recognizes this process of enframing and becomes capable of developing a kind of technology which would be completely different from today’s.[20]
This brief, even schematic, synthesis of Heidegger’s thought nevertheless allows us to see that he does not view technology as essentially instrumental. On the contrary, technology is for him a way of being in the world. This is the sense of his famous affirmation that ‘the essence of technics is nothing technical.’[21] According to Stiegler, this is precisely what makes Heidegger’s understanding of technology so interesting. Heidegger suggests that, if we keep thinking technology as a ‘means’, we will never be able to understand what technology is. In other words, we cannot think technology efficaciously as long as we remain in the frame of mind of instrumentality.
Heidegger’s understanding of technology is deeply connected to his conception of time. For him, calculation has its roots in our relation to the future and in our attempt to determine future possibilities, which we fear precisely because they appear indeterminate. Heidegger describes this process as ‘anticipation’ or ‘concern’: our attempt to control (or to anticipate) the uncertainty of the future creates the basis for calculation, or for circumscribing the realm of possible futures. Understood in a broader historical context, this is what Heidegger identifies as the turning of Western thought into calculation in the modern age. This is also why for him technology has a central role in defining modernity. On the other hand, modern technology also opens up for us the possibility of radically reconceiving technology itself by becoming conscious of the instrumental approach which has characterized our understanding of technology since Aristotle. This is why Stiegler praises Heidegger as the first philosopher who dares to propose a radical reconceptualization of technology.[22]
Stiegler also identifies a ‘Marxist offshoot’ to Heidegger’s thought—developed for instance by Jürgen Habermas—which nonetheless did not manage to escape an instrumental conception of technology.[23] It is worth mentioning Habermas’s work briefly because his position seems to underlie much of the contemporary debate on the political and ethical aspects of new technologies. And yet, Habermas’s theory of technology, albeit extremely interesting, does not account for the way in which contemporary technology works, and therefore does not contribute to its demystification as much as Heidegger’s thought does. Unlike Heidegger, Habermas does not propose a radical reconceptualization of the philosophical conception of technology. He identifies in modern society a form of technocracy, that is, of political domination which is not recognizable as such because it derives its legitimation not from the political arena but rather from scientific and technical knowledge. More precisely, the nature of technocracy is to confuse political legitimation and techno-scientific legitimation, therefore making techno-scientific knowledge the only visible source of legitimacy, and transforming any opportunity for political debate into a malfunction in a society that needs to be fixed. Technocracy substantially depoliticizes society. Furthermore, language itself is ‘technicized’, since technical and scientific frames of mind spread all over society and include also communication. Habermas and Heidegger both conceptualize technical modernity as a paradoxical situation in which technology ends up doing a disservice to humanity rather than being in its service. Nevertheless, Habermas continues to analyze technology in terms of ends and means. He suggests that we pursue a liberation of language from its technicization, and that we turn technology into an object of democratic debate in a free language. On the contrary, Heidegger problematizes the very concept of ‘means’ and, much more radically, suggests that we rethink ‘the bond originarily formed by, and between, humanity, technics, and language’.[24]
In sum, for Habermas, technology can be treated as an object of a discussion that takes place in a transparent language and that is based on what he calls ‘good reasons’—that is, rationally convincing arguments. He seems to believe that technology does not have any real effect on language itself, or at the very least that the language of politics can be separated from the language of techno-science. Furthermore, he does not really take into account the transformation that information and communication technologies introduce in the ‘public sphere’, which is supposed to be the space of a democratic debate.[25] Even when examining biotechnologies and acknowledging their radical novelty, he does not seem to break free from the general framework of instrumentality.
For instance, in The Future of Human Nature, Habermas claims that biotechnologies generate unprecedented moral problems and that genetic technologies are capable of affecting what it means to be human.[26] Enhancement-oriented genetic practices seem to him to entail an asymmetrical relationship of influence between generations, since the genetic programming of a child threatens his future freedom when it comes to choosing and shaping his own destiny. The collective deliberative process that seems to be Habermas’s favoured solution when dealing with both technology and politics does not function here because future generations cannot take part in it. Habermas’s attempt to solve this problem consists in proposing the concept of ‘species ethics’—that is, the domain of decisions made by the human species as a whole about the question of what it means to be human. Our concern for ensuring future persons’ status as free and equal beings is situated by Habermas at the level of species ethics. Therefore, although he understands genetic technology as deeply troubling the very idea of humanity, he ultimately reinforces the latter by simply shifting the traditional values of individuality, equality, and freedom to the level of the species. What it means to be human remains unquestioned, and so do the possible political consequences of such questioning.
In contrast to Habermas, I want to reiterate my earlier point that a deeper understanding of technology and of its relation with the human is needed if we are to understand the political implications of new technologies. In other words, we need to rethink technology philosophically if we want to think it politically. The question is not one of discussing technology ‘democratically’ through a ‘freed’ language. It is rather a matter of recognizing the mutually constitutive implications of technology and language—via the concept of instrumentality—and therefore of radically rethinking both terms together, since there is no way of (re)thinking one without the other.
In order to clarify the concept of ‘originary technicity’ further and to investigate its significance for my analysis of new technologies, let me now return to Stiegler’s work. What Clark calls ‘originary technicity’, Stiegler names ‘originary prostheticity’ of the human.[27] To clarify this concept further, it is helpful to examine the third volume of Technics and Time, particularly where—in dialogue with Derrida—Stiegler reworks Husserl’s philosophy of time.[28] Stiegler’s philosophy of technology is based on the central premise that the human has always been technological. Stiegler draws here on the work of the French paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan, who tightly connects the appearance of the human with tool use. For Stiegler, too, the human coemerges with tool use. He writes:
Human beings disappear; their histories remain. This is a huge difference from all other living beings. Among the various traces humans leave behind, some are products with entirely different ends from any ‘conversation with memory’: a clay pot, for example, is not a tool made to transmit memory. But it does so, spontaneously, nonetheless, which is why archaeologists consult it in their research: pots, etc., are often the only witnesses to the most ancient cultural episodes.[29]
From this perspective, technology carries the traces of past events. In Mark Hansen’s words, it is ‘the support for the inscription of memory’—that is, technology is always a memory aid, and only through memory do human beings gain access to their own past, and therefore become aware of themselves, or gain a consciousness.[30] Any technical instrument registers and transmits the memory of its use. For instance, a carved stone used as a knife preserves the act of cutting, thus becoming a support for memory. In this sense, technology is the condition of the constitution of our relation to the past.
In sum, it can be said that human beings ‘exteriorize’ their memory into technological objects, which in turn are nothing but memory exteriorized. Importantly, by doing this the human species becomes able to suspend its genetic program and to evolve through means other than animal instincts—that is, in Stiegler’s words, to ‘pursue life through means other than life’. Stiegler gives the name ‘epiphylogenesis’ to this process.[31] Epiphylogenesis is the transformation and evolution of the human species through its relationship with technology, rather than only on the basis of its genetic program. Furthermore, by functioning as a support for memory, a technical object for Stiegler forms the condition for the givenness of time in any concrete situation. For this reason, he maintains that human beings can experience themselves only through technology.[32] This formulation becomes much clearer if we consider cinema, which for Stiegler is the emblematic technology of contemporaneity. Hansen comments:
More than any other technology (and certainly more than literature), it is cinema in its contemporary form as global television that frames time for us and gives us a surrogate temporal object in whose reflection we become privy to the flux of our own consciousness. At the same time, by opening consciousness onto the past, onto the non-lived tradition of historicality, onto otherness of that which does not belong to the experience of consciousness, cinema qua temporal object captures the contemporary manifestation of the interdependence of the who and the what, of the human subject and the technical other. Put bluntly, we become who we are by inheriting a past destined to us through cinema.[33]
For Stiegler, cinema (and, by extension, technology) makes available to us the experience of others, and therefore constitutes a striking example of the relation between technological objects and time. Hansen’s complex passage, based on Stiegler’s rereading of Husserl’s phenomenological thought, which in turn constitutes the basis of Stiegler’s analysis of the relation between technology and time, opens up a whole new series of questions in relation to my investigation of new technologies. First, by analogy, one could ask: what kind of temporality becomes accessible to us through new technologies, and more specifically through software? We could say that software-based technologies, such as real-time technologies, can, on the one hand, bypass the human perception of time.[34] On the other hand, different kinds of software-based technologies, such as word processors, operate on a much more ‘human’ scale of temporality. Moreover, common to all software-based technologies is the fact that, before they become operative, they must be programmed—that is, software must be designed and developed. Therefore, one could ask a second question: what kind of temporality do we access through programming and what kind of relation to ourselves do we establish through software? Here I want to suggest that Stiegler’s rereading of Husserl’s phenomenology can help with answering these questions.
The experience of others that we have not directly experienced but that becomes accessible to us because it has been recorded is what Stiegler calls ‘tertiary memory’.[35] Stiegler draws here on Husserl’s concept of ‘image-consciousness’. An example of image-consciousness is for Husserl a painting ‘where the artist . . . archives her experience in the form of a memory trace’.[36] This trace is an image of the past and of the memory of the artist, but it is not an image of the lived past of the viewer. While for this reason Husserl excludes image-consciousness from any role in time-consciousness, Stiegler reverses the argument: for him tertiary memory (that is, memory that has not been lived through by us) is the very condition of time-consciousness. In other words, Stiegler foregrounds a consequence of Husserl’s thought that Husserl himself hesitated to recognize: namely, the intrinsically technical basis of our consciousness of time.
To be more specific, Husserl recognizes that we cannot grasp temporality by a direct analysis of consciousness, and that we necessarily need to examine ‘an object that is itself temporal’. A temporal object is defined as ‘an object that is not simply in time but is constituted through time and whose properly objective flux coincides with the flux of consciousness when it is experienced by a consciousness. Husserl’s favoured example is a musical melody.’[37] As Hansen points out in his careful analysis of Stiegler’s thought, by focusing on the temporal object Stiegler can complicate Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness and introduce technology into it at a deeper level than Husserl himself does—that is, at the level of ‘primary retention’. What is important here is that Stiegler reverses Husserl’s hierarchy. We do not have a primary understanding of time and then technology: it is rather technology that gives us an understanding of time. The reason for this is that we always find ourselves in the midst of a horizon—a world already constituted by and comprising both what we had experienced in the past and the past we never experienced (but that was experienced by others and given to us through technical memory supports).[38] To recapitulate Stiegler’s argument, the relationship between time and technology is for him a fundamental one, since technology constitutes the condition for our experience of time. But to what extent is this understanding of technology as recorded experience—that is, as memory—helpful in our investigation of software-based technologies and of software? If software is exteriorized memory, what does it record? Or—to rephrase the question—what would it mean to analyze software as a ‘temporal object’ (in Husserl’s terms), or as ‘a technical object’ (in Stiegler’s terms)?
The idea of the technical object was in fact formulated for the first time by the French palaeontologist André Leroi-Gourhan. In his 1964 book, Le Geste et la Parole, Leroi-Gourhan presents technology as a privileged point of access to the understanding of human evolution—indeed, as the pivot of a unified theory of human evolution. For him, anthropology must be founded on technology, understood as the study of human material culture. He identifies the vertical posture, the use of the hand for purposes other than locomotion, and the presence of tools and language as characteristics of the human species. For Leroi-Gourhan, freedom of the hand during locomotion implies the beginning of technical activity, in the same way that manual expertise frees the mouth from procuring nourishment and makes it available for speech. However simplified this synthesis, we can say that Leroi-Gourhan views evolution as a series of liberations taking place from the Paleozoic to the Quaternary eras, and from fish to human. Even more importantly, he asserts ‘not only that language is a characteristic of humans as are tools, but also that both are the expression of the same intrinsically human property’.[39] Language and tools evolve together, for they are ‘neurologically linked and cannot be dissociated within the social structures of humankind’.[40] In this context, Leroi-Gourhan proposes what is generally considered to be his fundamental contribution to anthropology and archaeology—that is, the concept of ‘operating sequence’ as a kind of sequential organization that underlies both language and technology. For Leroi-Gourhan, culture, that emerges with Homo sapiens, is also an operating sequence—a program, a process of exteriorization, the ‘placing outside ourselves’ (and consequent socialization) of what in the rest of the animal world remains at the level of instinct. Importantly, this process of exteriorization, both of tools and of memory, enables Leroi-Gourhan to integrate contemporary technology into a unitary process of biocultural evolution. For him, today evolution has reached the stage of the exteriorization of the brain in computers. He envisions a possible future in which human beings become simply outdated, and the future of the species as species resides in intelligent machines. Thus, not only does Leroi-Gourhan explain culture as the exteriorization of memory but ultimately he is able to integrate the transmission of exteriorized (or collective) memory—that is, of culture—into a historical progression through the stages of oral transmission, written transmission, and, finally, ‘electronic transmission’. For him, computers belong to the latest phase, as the furthest example of the exteriorization of memory.
In sum, Leroi-Gourhan’s theory proves rather interesting for an examination of software-based technologies, because it explicitly addresses the development of what I have called ‘software-based technologies’—and what he calls ‘intelligent machines’—from an anthropological point of view, and because it strives to position computers within the process of biocultural evolution.[41] In fact, he should be credited for stimulating the reconceptualization of software-based technologies within a general frame of reference that escapes the concept of instrumentality and that regards technology as constitutive of the human. However, it is important to notice that Leroi-Gourhan does not seem able to answer the very question he opens up—namely, the question of the emergence of the ‘operational sequence’ (and therefore of language, technology, and ultimately of humanity) as a result of the interaction between the brain and the physical environment. Therefore, as Stiegler shows in the first volume of Technics and Time, it is precisely as a general frame of reference—that is, as a theory of originary technicity—that Leroi-Gourhan’s thought proves less satisfactory.[42]
In critical dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler proposes an alternative answer to the dilemma of the origin of technology and of the human. His solution is based on the concept of the ‘technical object’ as ‘organized inorganic matter’ (matière inorganique organisée)—a further clarification of the idea of technology as the support for consciousness. For Stiegler, organized inorganic matter is matter which transforms itself in time as technical object. These transformations are the condition of the human temporalization of time, in the sense that each time technological objects undergo radical evolution the temporalization of time changes. As Richard Beardsworth has convincingly pointed out, this concept of the technical object holds two orders of consequences: it allows us to think the transformation of technology through time, while at the same time exposing the crucial role that technology plays in the constitution of the human experience of time.[43] According to Stiegler, material objects from the stone instrument to the portable computer change our way of perceiving time, and therefore affect the emergence of our identity and our understanding of what it means to be human.
Thus, Stiegler’s articulation of matter as ‘inorganic organized matter’ allows for a history of human culture as—in Beardsworth’s terms—‘the history of the differentiation of the originary complex human-technical.’[44] Beardsworth’s formulation is significant because it shows exactly how Stiegler resolves Leroi-Gourhan’s impasse on the origin of technology. For Stiegler, the mutual constitutivity of technology and the human makes it impossible to decide which is the origin of the other. Nevertheless, we can tell the history of how this reciprocal ongoing constitution takes place over time. We can investigate how human beings and technology coevolve without having to decide which one to prioritize. Stiegler names this process within which the human and the technical mutually constitute each other ‘the originary complex who-what.’[45]
To summarize, human beings, technology, and culture are part of the same process of exteriorization, which, as we have seen earlier, Stiegler names ‘ephiphylogenesis’. For him we have emerged as human beings as a ‘result’ of three kinds of memory: our genetic memory, the ‘individual’ memory—or the memory of our central nervous system (which is responsible for our remembering of experiences, and which Stiegler names ‘epigenetic’), and the techno-logical (‘epiphylogenetic’) memory, which preserves the experiences of past generations in the tools and language we inherit from the past, and therefore is an ‘externalized’, shared memory.[46] With epiphylogenesis the human being reaches a new relationship with its environment—a relationship mediated through technology. Technology carries with it memories of the past—not only of the individual past, but of the past generations. In this sense, it can be said that the ‘who’ (the human being) invents technology, but at the same time it is invented (‘instructed’) by it, by the memory of past experiences that technology carries.[47] This is the sense of the mutual co-constitution of the ‘who’ and the ‘what’, of technology and the human. Stiegler’s answer to Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropological impasse on technology is to emphasize that there is actually no way to distinguish between the material aspects of technology and the temporality it carries with it—and therefore there is no way to separate technology from culture, or technology from the human. But what would it mean to investigate software as ‘organized inorganic matter’? What would the consequences of thinking software within the framework of originary technicity be? In what way is software a ‘what’ that constitutes the ‘who’ that interacts with it? In what way is one constituted by software as much as one produces and uses it?
What I want to emphasize here is that, however important, Stiegler’s reflections on originary technicity cannot be transferred into the analysis of software uncritically. The main question that needs to be addressed is the distinction operated by Stiegler between technics and mnemotechnics, which is fundamental to his understanding of contemporary technologies as a major break in the history of technology. In the third volume of Technics and Time, he explains:
[The] independence of the mnemotechnical relative to systems of technical production is no longer the case today: the new global technical system has become a global mnemotechnical system in which technical and mnemotechnical systems have fused and have become, at the same time, global. . . . The global technical system has become essentially a mnemotechnical system of industrial production of tertiary retentions, and thus of the retentional selection criteria for the flux of consciousness inscribed in the processes of adoption.[48]
For Stiegler, while all kinds of technology always transmit memories, some have been produced expressly with a view to transmitting memories. Stiegler gives the name of ‘mnemotechnics’ to technologies specifically devoted to the transmission of memory (for instance, writing, photography, phonography, and cinematography). He explains: ‘[T]echnics is before all else a memory support, what I have called epiphylogenesis. But not all technics is a mnemo-technique: the first mnemotechnical systems appeared, it seems, after the Neolithic era, eventually to become the various forms of writing we know and use today.’[49]
In Stiegler’s view, technical systems precede mnemotechnical systems. When he investigates the historical transformation of technology, he focuses on technical systems—that is, mainly technological systems of production. In the first volume of Technics and Time, he draws on Bertrand Gille’s concept of ‘technical system’ as a moment of stability in time, or a point of equilibrium in the process of technical change that characterizes history.[50] This point of equilibrium is expressed in a particular technology. In other words, every civilization constitutes itself around a technical system, which is in turn organized around a dominant technology. Every technical system has in itself a potential for change, and actually undergoes evolutionary transformations and periods of crisis. During a crisis, a technical system evolves at great speed, causing ‘dis-adjustments’ with the other social systems—such as economy, politics, education, and so forth, and it can only return to (relative) stability when these other systems have ‘adopted’ the new technical system.
As we have seen above, for Stiegler the contemporary globalized industrial technical system (whose beginnings took root in England at the end of the eighteenth century) has entered an epoch of permanent innovation, becoming fundamentally unstable. Such globalization of the industrial technical system has been made possible, to a great extent, by information and communication technologies, which facilitate, for instance, the automation and control of remote production and distribution, the international circulation of capital, and the opening up of intercontinental markets. The contemporary global system represents a break in the history of technology precisely because of the newly acquired importance of information and communication technologies. Until recently, mnemotechnics had always evolved slower than the technical systems of material transformation. While the latter underwent substantial changes from the age of ancient Greeks to the Industrial Revolution, alphabetic writing remained more or less stable. This independence has now ceased to exist, since communication and information industries have become the centre of the technical system of production and—more generally—the decisive element of the global technological system. This has in turn led to a change in our perception of space and time. For instance, the distances and the delay in the circulation of messages tend to be nullified by global networks, and ‘day and night themselves have become confused by the artificial light of the electric bulb and the cathode-ray tube.’[51] Our mechanisms of orientation are therefore profoundly disturbed.
The question of software as inorganic organized matter becomes thus the question of the place of software in the globalized mnemotechnical system. Such a question needs to be reformulated as follows: what kind of mnemotechnics is software? And—even more importantly—is Stiegler’s distinction between technics and mnemotechnics meaningful for an investigation of software in the first place? To understand this extremely important point, one must be reminded that—as we have seen earlier on—while commenting upon the novel The Turing Option, Clark describes technology as ‘systems of signs’; thus, for him, originary technicity seems to have an intrinsic relation to what Stiegler calls mnemotechnics.[52] Conversely, Stiegler’s distinction between the two is based on the following argument: every technics (for instance, pottery) carries the memory of a past experience; but only mnemotechnics (for instance, writing) are conceived with the primary purpose of carrying the memory of a past experience. In Stiegler’s argument, the emphasis is on the aim, or end, of different technologies: some technologies are conceived just for recording, others are not.
At this point I want to advance the following proposition: software transgresses Stiegler’s distinction between technics and mnemotechnics. Although this thesis needs to be proved, it is important to position it first of all as a problem. Take, for instance, the definition of software as the totality of all computer programs as well as all the written texts related to computer programs given by software engineering.[53] According to this definition, software can be thought of as a totality of ‘documents’ or ‘texts’ written in natural and formal languages, and therefore—in Stiegler’s terms—as mnemotechnics. On the other hand, it cannot be said that the main purpose of software is recording in the same way that it is for writing or cinema. It could be argued that the main purpose of software is to make things happen in the world (for instance, to change the polarities of the electronic circuits within a computer on which software is executed). This is why software might be the point where Stiegler’s distinction between technics and mnemotechnics is suspended.[54]
To a certain extent, by introducing the distinction between technics and mnemotechnics, Stiegler involuntarily reintroduces the separation between the technical and the symbolic that he deconstructs in Leroi-Gourhan. Certainly, in the third volume of Technics and Time, Stiegler speaks of a convergence between technics and mnemotechnics, but in a much more general sense—that is, as a convergence of technologies of production with information and communication technologies. For him, undoubtedly, information and communication technologies fall under the rubric of mnemotechnics—or technology that has recording as its primary aim. Ultimately, in order to distinguish between technics and mnemotechnics, Stiegler resorts to the concept of the aim (or the end) of technology, therefore seemingly falling back into an instrumental conception of technology—which obviously contradicts his understanding of technology as originary.
But, if software calls into question the distinction between technics and mnemotechnics, how is one supposed to think software within the framework of originary technicity? In what way is the relationship between the technical and the symbolic articulated in software? As we have seen, Clark states that the thinkers of originary technicity situate the question of technology ‘in the subtle intimacy’ of the relation between technology and language. Moreover, according to Clark, Jacques Derrida is one of the most important thinkers of originary technicity precisely because he ‘takes on the radical consequences of conceiving technical objects (including systems of signs) as having a mode of being that resists being totally understood in terms of some posited function or purpose for human being’.[55] By his refusal to explain either technology or language in instrumental, functionalist terms Derrida resists the widespread denigration of the ‘merely’ technical in Western thought. In fact, Derrida makes references to technology and to the importance of technicity for the definition of the human throughout his whole work. Moreover, his conception of technology as something that cannot be understood within the conceptual framework of instrumentality is inseparable from his understanding of writing. For him, as for Stiegler, the devaluation of instrumentality that can be traced back to Plato’s Phaedrus cannot be separated from the devaluation of writing.
Famously, Derrida’s reflection on writing is crucial to the whole of his theory, and lies at the core of his criticism of Western metaphysics. Derrida’s goal is not a reversal of priorities—namely, the prioritizing of writing over speech—but a critique of the whole of Western metaphysics that he understands as ‘logocentric’. As Gayatri Spivak points out in her introduction to Of Grammatology, the term ‘writing’ is used by Derrida to name a whole strategy of investigation, not merely ‘writing in the narrow sense’ as a kind of notation on a material support.[56] Thus, Derrida writes Of Grammatology not to pursue a mere valorization of writing over speech, but to present the repression of writing ‘in the narrow sense’ as a symptom of logocentrism that forbids us to recognize that everything is pervaded by the structure of ‘writing in general’—that is, an eternal escaping of the ‘thing itself’.[57] Derrida argues that speech too is structured like writing. There is no structural distinction between writing and speech—except that, in the history of metaphysics, writing has been repressed and read as a surrogate of speech. In the chapter ‘The end of the book and the beginning of writing’ of Of Grammatology, Derrida maintains that today writing can no longer be thought as ‘a particular, derivative, auxiliary form of language in general’, or as ‘an exterior surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of the signifier.’[58] Making writing instrumental is a move of Western metaphysics, and it is paired with the notion of speech as fully present. From this perspective, writing is seen as an interpretation of original speech, as technology in the service of language. However, Derrida suggests that language could only be a ‘mode’ or an aspect of writing.
Derrida’s questioning of logocentrism goes hand in hand with his questioning of the instrumental conception of technology. In Mémoires for Paul de Man, he states that ‘[t]here is no deconstruction which does not . . . begin by calling again into question the dissociation between thought and technology, especially when it has a hierarchical vocation, however secret, subtle, sublime or denied it may be.’[59] Thus, once again, Derrida makes it explicit that the dissociation between thought and technology is—as is every other binary opposition—hierarchical, since it implies the devaluation of one of the two terms of the binary—in this case, technology. For this reason Clark suggests that ‘originary technicity’ can be considered another name for Derrida’s ‘writing in the general sense’.[60] As Derrida states in Of Grammatology: ‘[w]riting is not an auxiliary in the service of science—and possibly its object—but first, as Husserl in particular points out in The Origin of Geometry, the condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity. Before being its object, writing is the condition of the episteme.’[61] This passage is crucial for clarifying the relationship that Derrida establishes between writing and thought, and ultimately for his understanding of technology as constitutive of the human. As Clark explains, for Derrida ‘writing enregisters the past in a way that produces a new relation to the present and the future, which may now be conceived within the horizon of an historical temporality, and as an element of ideality.’[62] Thus, the written mark gives us the possibility of keeping trace of the past and enables us to acquire a sense of time. Clearly Derrida views writing—understood here as technology, or the technological capacity of registering the past—as a constitutive condition of thought. Consequently, technology cannot be understood through the opposition between technê and epistêmê, because it precedes and enables such an opposition. But what would all this mean for an investigation of software? To be more specific, in what way would the reformulation of ‘originary technicity’ in terms of Derrida’s ‘writing in general’ advance our analysis of software? This reformulation of the problem amounts on the one hand—as we have already seen—to asking what the significance of the study of software for an understanding of the relationship between technology and the human is. On the other hand, it opens up the methodological question of whether and in what way software should be approached as a historically specific technology. In order to start addressing both of these questions, let me now examine Derrida’s rereading of Leroi-Gourhan’s work in Of Grammatology.
For Derrida, Leroi-Gourhan has shown in Le geste et la parole that the historical perspective that associates humanity with the emergence of writing (and therefore excludes peoples ‘without writing’ from history) is profoundly ethnocentric. In fact, it shortsightedly denies the characteristic of humanity to peoples that do not actually lack ‘writing’, but only ‘a certain type of writing’—that is, alphabetic writing.[63] To explain this point Derrida draws on Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of ‘linearization’. For Leroi-Gourhan, the emergence of alphabetic writing must be understood as a process of linearization. In his analysis of the emergence of graphism, Leroi-Gourhan emphasizes what he considers to be the underestimated link between figurative art and writing. ‘[I]n its origins’, he states, ‘figurative art was directly linked with language and was much closer to writing (in the broadest sense) than to what we understand by a work of art.’[64]
Given the difficulty of separating primitive figurative art from language, he proposes the name ‘picto-ideography’ for this general figurative mindframe. Yet he is very clear that such a mindframe does not correspond to writing ‘in its infancy.’[65] Such an interpretation would amount to applying to the study of graphism a mentality influenced by four thousand years of alphabetic writing—something that linguists have often done, for instance, when studying pictograms. But ‘picto-ideography’ signals an originary independence of graphism from the mental attitude that constitutes the basis of what Leroi-Gourhan calls ‘linearization’.
To understand the concept of linearization better, one must start from Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of language as a ‘world of symbols’ that ‘parallels the real world and provides us with our means of coming to grips with reality’.[66] For Leroi-Gourhan, graphism is not dependent on spoken language, although the two belong to the same realm. Leroi-Gourhan views the emergence of alphabetic writing as associated with the technoeconomic development of the Mediterranean and European group of civilizations. At a certain point in time during this process, writing became subordinated to spoken language. Before that—Leroi-Gourhan states—the hand had its own language, which was sight-related, while the face possessed another one, which was related to hearing. He explains:
At the linear graphism stage that characterizes writing, the relationship between the two fields undergoes yet another development. Written language, phoneticized and linear in space, becomes completely subordinated to spoken language, which is phonetic and linear in time. The dualism between graphic and verbal disappears, and the whole of human linguistic apparatus becomes a single instrument for expressing and preserving thought—which itself is channelled increasingly toward reasoning.[67]
By becoming a means for the phonetic recording of speech, writing becomes a technology. It is actually placed at the level of the tool, or of ‘technology’ in its instrumental sense. As a tool, its efficiency becomes proportional to what Leroi-Gourhan views as a ‘constriction’ of its figurative force, pursued precisely through an increasing linearization of symbols. Leroi-Gourhan calls this process ‘the adoption of a regimented form of writing’ that opens the way ‘to the unrestrained development of a technical utilitarianism’.[68]
Expanding on Leroi-Gourhan’s view of phonetic writing as ‘rooted in a past of nonlinear writing’, and on the concept of the linearization of writing as the victory of ‘the irreversible temporality of sound’, Derrida relates the emergence of phonetic writing to a linear understanding of time and history.[69] For him, linearization is nothing but the constitution of the ‘line’ as a norm, a model—and yet, one must keep in mind that the line is just a model, however privileged. The linear conception of writing implies a linear conception of time—that is, a conception of time as homogeneous and involved in a continuous movement, be it straight or circular. Derrida draws on Heidegger’s argument that this conception of time characterizes all ontology from Aristotle to Hegel—that is, all Western thought. Therefore, and this is the main point of Derrida’s thesis, ‘the meditation upon writing and the deconstruction of the history of philosophy become inseparable.’[70]
However simplified, this reconstruction of Derrida’s argument demonstrates how, in his rereading of Leroi-Gourhan’s theory, Derrida understands the relationship of the human with writing and with technology as constitutive of the human rather than instrumental. Writing has become what it is through a process of linearization, and in doing so it has become instrumental to speech. Since the model of the line also characterizes the idea of time in Western thought, questioning the idea of language as linear implies questioning the role of the line as a model, and thus the concept of time as modeled on the line. It also implies questioning the foundations of Western thought (by means of a strategy of investigation that, as we have seen, Derrida names ‘writing in general’, or ‘writing in the broader sense’). At this point it becomes clear why, if we follow Derrida’s approach to originary technicity, a new understanding of technology (as intimately related to language and writing) entails a rethinking of Western philosophy—ambitious as this task may be.
It is worth noting here that in Of Grammatology Derrida expressly highlights how the reconceptualization of the Western tradition of thought is particularly urgent today. Such a rethinking is what Derrida famously calls ‘the end of the book’, or the end of linear writing. According to Derrida, we are suspended today between two eras of writing—and this is why we can also reread our past differently. Actually, the ‘uneasiness’ of philosophy in the past century is due to an increasing destabilization of the model of the line. He states that what is thought today cannot be written in a book—that is, it cannot be thought through with a linear model—any more than contemporary mathematics can be taught with an abacus. This inadequacy does not only apply to the current moment in time, but it comes to the fore today more clearly than ever. Derrida writes:
The history of writing is erected [by Leroi-Gourhan] on the base of the history of the grammé as an adventure of relationships between the face and the hand. Here, by a precaution whose schema we must constantly repeat, let us specify that the history of writing is not explained by what we believe we know of the face and the hand, of the glance, of the spoken word, and of the gesture. We must, on the contrary, disturb this familiar knowledge, and awaken a meaning of hand and face in terms of that history.[71]
For Derrida, what is most relevant in Leroi-Gourhan’s history of writing is that it problematizes our conception of the human (‘what we believe we know of the face and the hand’). Yet the focus of Derrida’s work is not the concrete analysis of historical systems of writing, since, as we have seen, he differentiates ‘writing in general’ from any such system. With regard to my investigation of software, then, Derrida’s understanding of what Clark calls ‘originary technicity’ has two important implications. On the one hand, it confirms the fundamental relationship between technology and the human, and it supports the need for a radical questioning of both concepts—and ultimately of Western thought. On the other hand, Derrida leaves open the question of how to investigate a historically specific technology (for instance, software) without losing its significance for a radical rethinking of the relationship between technology and the human. It is actually Stiegler’s fundamental rereading of Derrida’s thought in Technics and Time that allows for such an investigation. In order to understand this important point further, it is now worth returning once again to the examination of Stiegler’s work.
For Stiegler, the emergence of the technique of linear writing radically transforms the modes of cultural transmission from generation to generation. In fact, from the point of view of Greek pre-Socratic thought, which does not presume the immortality of the soul, the dead can nevertheless return as ghosts that transmit an inheritance, and such inheritance is deemed to come from a spirit (esprit) that crosses generations. This is the pre-Socratic image of cultural transmission. In contrast, the appearance of linear writing allows for the transmission of culture ‘as a unified spirit, precisely through the unification of language enabled by literalization’.[72] Drawing once again on Leroi-Gourhan and Derrida, Stiegler insists that the emergence of the model of the line has changed both the transmission of culture and the modes of thought.
According to Stiegler, the Sophists themselves are a by-product of this process. The years between the seventh and the fifth century BCE are witness to the arrival of the grammatists, the masters of letters, and later on, of the Sophists, who ‘go on systematically to develop a technique of language that quickly acquires a critical dimension, in so far as this technique of developed language will in turn engender a moral crisis’.[73] Thus, sophistry is not an oral technique; rather, it presupposes writing.[74] Accordingly, Plato criticizes the Sophists because they manage to speak well, ‘but they learn everything by heart, by means of this techno-logical “hypomnesis” that is logography, the preliminary writing out of speeches. It is because writing exists that the Sophists can learn the apparently “oral” technique of language that is rhetorical construction.’[75] In the Ion Plato even makes a connection between poets and Sophists, claiming that they work along the same lines of falsehood: ‘[s]ophists, poets, are only liars, that is to say, technicians.’[76] This powerful image of the technician as a liar constitutes the summation of Plato’s devaluation of technology and writing.
To summarize, Stiegler points out that, on the one hand, the question of technology, considered as the object of repression, ‘is a question that emerges with and by its denunciation by Plato’. It arises ‘above all as a denial, and in this sense therefore as a kind of forgetting’—and this is quite paradoxical, since in Phaedrus what Plato blames technology for is precisely its power of forgetting.[77] On the other hand, it can be said that the question of technology appears well before Plato: as we have just seen, it arises in the context of the transformation of the Greek cities, associated with the development of navigation, money, and above all mnemotechnics, that is to say of technologies capable of transforming the conditions of social and political life and of thought. Ultimately, technê and epistêmê—that is, knowledge and technology—share a relationship with writing, the fundamental mnemotechnics. In turn, mnemotechnics, and technology in general, reveal a constitutive connection with temporality.
Stiegler’s understanding of the transformation of technology in time is crucially related to his ‘displacement’ of deconstruction that also results in his break with Heidegger. He explains:
Let’s say, for example, that one night I write the sentence: ‘it is dark’. I then reread this sentence twelve hours later and I say to myself: hang on, it’s not dark, it’s light. I have entered into the dialectic. What is to be done here? . . . That which makes consciousness be self-consciousness (i.e. consciousness that is conscious of contradiction with itself) is the fact that consciousness is capable of externalising itself.[78]
This passage is extremely important because it reformulates the concept of the technical constitution of consciousness that Clark explores in his analysis of The Turing Option.[79] Here what Stiegler—and Leroi-Gourhan before him—calls ‘exteriorization’ (which constitutes the basis of self-consciousness) is clearly pursued through writing. One writes ‘it is dark’, and when one rereads the note twelve hours later it is light. This produces, as Stiegler himself further clarifies, ‘a contradiction between times’, namely the time of consciousness when one wrote this and the time of consciousness when one reads this. Yet, one has the same consciousness, which is therefore ‘put in crisis’, and this crisis in turn raises self-awareness. The act of inscription—that is, of exteriorization—ultimately constitutes interiority, which does not precede exteriority, and vice versa.[80] As I have explained earlier, for Stiegler (again drawing on Leroi-Gourhan) the process of exteriorization constitutes the foundation of temporality, of language and of technical production, and requires a basic neurological ‘competence’—that is, ‘a level of suitable cortical and subcortical organization’.[81] This is Stiegler’s fundamental point of departure from Derrida’s thought. Through this departure he lays the foundation for the concrete study of historically specific technologies as fundamental to the understanding of the constitutive relationship between technology and the human.
Stiegler’s interpretation of the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus in the first volume of Technics and Time clarifies this point even further. According to the myth, Zeus gives Prometheus the task of distributing qualities and powers to the living creatures, but Prometheus leaves it to his twin brother Epimetheus to act in his place. Epimetheus hands out all the qualities to the living creatures and forgets to keep one for the human being. Human beings therefore appear here as characterized by a ‘lack of quality’. Stiegler comments that the human being is ‘a being by default, a being marked by its own original flaw or lack, that is to say afflicted with an original handicap’.[82] For this reason, Prometheus decides to steal technology—that is, fire—and gives it to human beings, in order to enable them to invent artefacts and to become capable of developing all qualities. With the gift of technology, a problem arises: mortals cannot agree on how to use artefacts, and consequently start fighting and destroying each other. In Stiegler’s words, ‘[t]hey are put in charge of their own fate, but nothing tells them what this fate is, because the lack [défaut] of origin is also a lack of purpose or end.’[83] Stiegler’s reworking of the myth clearly shows how for him technology raises the problem of decision, and how this encounter of the human with decision in turn constitutes what he calls ‘technical time’. Technical time emerges because human beings experience their capacity of making a difference in time through decision. Temporality is precisely this opening of the possibility of a decision, which is also the possibility of giving rise to the unpredictable, the new.
It is for this very reason that the historical specificity of technology is central to Stiegler’s thought. The human capability of deciding ‘what to become’ constitutes temporality. Moreover, human prostheticity—that is, the fact that human beings, to survive, require nonliving organs such as houses, clothes, sharpened flints, and all that Stiegler calls ‘organized inorganic matter’—forms the basis for memory, or better, for technical memory. As I have shown earlier on, unlike genetic and individual memory, technical memory coincides with the process of exteriorization that ‘enables the transmission of the individual experience of people from generation to generation, something inconceivable in animality’.[84] This inherited experience is what Stiegler calls ‘the world’—that is, a world that is always already haunted by ‘spirits’ in the pre-Socratic sense, always already constructed by the memories of others.
Stiegler departs from Heidegger precisely in his understanding of temporality. To simplify Stiegler’s complex argument, his disagreement with Heidegger revolves around the different importance that the two philosophers give to the historical specificity of technology. For Heidegger, temporality is originally technical, since to be a temporal being—that is, to exist—one has to be in the world, which for Heidegger is fundamentally the world of tools—or of technology. Nevertheless, Heidegger believes that the most authentic temporality is experienced by human beings as a relation to death. As human beings, we are structurally ignorant of the time and place of our own death, and this relation to death plunges us into an ‘absolute indetermination’.[85] We do not know the end of our life, both in the sense of its limit and of its meaning. In Stiegler’s terms, the content of our life is determined only after our death, that is, ‘too late’, when we are not able to witness it. According to Heidegger, human beings try to flee the permanent anguish of the indeterminacy of their death, and ultimately of their future. This is what Heidegger names ‘concern’—namely, the human beings’ attempt to foresee their unforeseeable future, to make certain the uncertain, to calculate something that is not calculable. Technology is part of this process, precisely because it is a means of controlling the future. Every technical field, from weather forecasts to financial analysis, attempts such calculation. But any such attempt tends to obscure human beings’ relation to death, and for this reason Stiegler ultimately finds Heidegger’s argument inconsistent—since, on the one hand, Heidegger views temporality as originally technical, while on the other hand, he believes that technology obscures ‘authentic’ temporality.
In sum, Stiegler’s departure from Heidegger, as well as his break with Derrida, are based on Stiegler’s own attention to the historic specificities of technology. He pays close attention to the fact that human beings, as beings who deal with decision, ‘are continuously called into question by the development of technics which overtake them’.[86] Here Stiegler brings to the fore the problem of making decisions regarding technology with which I have opened Software Theory—that is, the problem of how to think technology in a politically meaningful way. The term ‘overtaking’ is deployed by Stiegler with reference, once again, to Leroi-Gourhan’s and Gille’s thought, as well as Simondon’s: ‘people form technical objects, he argues, but these objects, because they themselves form a dynamic system, go on to overtake their makers.’[87] Technical objects form a ‘system’ because none of them is ever thinkable in isolation: a cassette—Stiegler exemplifies—is of no use without a tape recorder, which in turn is of no use without a microphone, electricity, and so on. Such systems are also dynamic: they change according to different tendencies that combine within society, and are negotiated through processes of decision.
I want to highlight here how Stiegler’s approach is extremely helpful in order to contextualize the necessity of making decisions about technology in the broadest possible perspective. In fact, such decisions do not just affect technology; they also change our experience of time, our modes of thought and, ultimately, our understanding of what it means to be human. On the one hand, if understood as originary, technology constitutes our sense of time—or, even better, we only gain a sense of time and memory, and therefore of who we are, through technology. On the other hand, technology as a system tends to overwhelm us, making it difficult to make decisions. Ultimately, we gain a sense of time through technology, and in turn every change in technology changes our sense of time—and this then changes the meaning that we give to the fact of being human. For this reason thinking technology in a politically effective and meaningful way involves much more than, for instance, discussing technology in a neutral and ‘free’ language, as Habermas would have it. Rather, it implies a radical problematization of the meaning of humanity. In fact, by making decisions on technology, we make decisions about what it means to be human. Ultimately, this is the sense of my affirmation that it is necessary to think technology philosophically in order to think it politically.
To conclude, Stiegler’s rereading of Derrida calls for a concrete analysis of historically specific technologies while keeping open the significance of such an analysis for a radical rethinking of the relationship between technology and the human. It therefore enables us to regard software in its historical specificity without losing the possibility of investigating its relationship to ‘originary technicity’ and, ultimately, to the question of what it means to be human. Whether and in what way such an investigation can be pursued will be the focus of the next chapter.
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 284.
S. Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies”, 278.
Gary Hall, Culture in Bits: The Monstrous Future of Theory (London and New York: Continuum, 2002). Hall expands on this point in subsequent works, particularly G. Hall and Clare Birchall, eds., New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), and G. Hall, Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), ix.
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 2.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, xi.
Richard Parry, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Episteme and Techne,” 2003, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2003/entries/episteme-techne/.
See Nicomachean Ethics 6, 3–4 (Aristotle, The Complete Works [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968]).
Timothy Clark, “Deconstruction and Technology,” in Deconstructions. A User’s Guide, ed. Nicholas Royle (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 238.
During the ascent of Nazism in Germany, Husserl conceptualized the emergence of algebra (which had been ongoing since Galileo’s times) as a technique of calculation that emptied geometry of its visual content. According to Husserl, by becoming viable to calculation, geometry renounces its capacity of visualizing geometrical shapes—or, in Husserl’s terms, ‘spatio-temporal idealities’ (Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970], 44–45). Therefore, as Stiegler comments, ‘the technicization of science constitutes its eidetic blinding’ (Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 3). What must be emphasized here is that ‘calculation’ is a constitutive part of the concept of instrumentality.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 3.
Plato, The Collected Dialogues (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 275–77.
Clark, “Deconstruction and Technology,” 238; Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1996), 157.
Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky, The Turing Option (London: ROC, 1992).
Clark, “Deconstruction and Technology,” 240.
Clark, “Deconstruction and Technology,” 240.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 4.
Mark Poster, “High-tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc,” in The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, ed. Joanna Zylinska (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 17.
Poster, “High-tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc,” 18.
Poster, “High-tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc,” 18.
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 35.
Stiegler Technics and Time, 1, 7.
Stiegler Technics and Time, 1, 10.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 13.
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). See also Habermas, The Postnational Constellation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
Clark, “Deconstruction and Technology,” 240; Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 98–100.
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 131.
Mark B. N. Hansen, “‘Realtime Synthesis’ and the Différance of the Body: Technocultural Studies in the Wake of Deconstruction,” Culture Machine 5 (2003), n.p., http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/9/8.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 17.
Such an experience of the self is what philosophers have called ‘self-affection’ (Kant) or—and this is particularly important in Stiegler’s thought—‘internal time-consciousness’ (Husserl).
Hansen, “‘Realtime Synthesis’ and the Différance of the Body.”
‘Real-time’ technologies are technically defined as ‘technologies for which time is critical’, and they are typically involved in controlling complex apparatuses in potentially dangerous situations, such as airplanes during flight. Since these systems respond to changes in their environments as soon as they happen, sometimes at a speed of milliseconds, the time of response belongs to an order of temporality practically unperceivable by human beings. Paul Virilio has written extensively on the inhuman temporality of contemporary technologies. See, for instance, Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) and Open Sky (London: Verso, 1997).
Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 254.
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 316.
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 254.
In Mark Hansen’s words, for Stiegler ‘tertiary memories—meaning, basically, all experience that has been recorded and is reproducible—represent our means of inheriting the past, the prosthetic already-there, and, for this reason, actually condition the other two forms of memory. Stiegler emphasizes the technical specificity of tertiary memory, for it is only once consciousness has the capacity to experience the exact same recorded experience more than once that we can appreciate how secondary retention (the memory of the first or earlier experience[s]) influences a subsequent primary retention’ (Hansen, “‘Realtime Synthesis’ and the Différance of the Body”). Stiegler’s complex argument, which mobilizes and transforms Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness, is an extension of Derrida’s own deconstruction of Husserl’s distinction between primary retention and recollection (or secondary retention), and therefore between perception and imagination, and between presence and absence.
André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 113.
Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 114.
Interestingly, Leroi-Gourhan mentions the principle of the Jacquard loom as the model for early automatic machines based on punched cards, and ultimately for computers. For him, computers are nothing but books that have become progressively autonomous from their human reader by becoming capable of sorting out documentary material according to the same principles that inform loom weaving. The role of the loom in the history of the computer is well known. (See, for instance, Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison, eds., Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings by Charles Babbage and Others [New York: Dover, 1961].) Sadie Plant writes that ‘[t]he loom is the vanguard site of software development’ (Sadie Plant, “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics,” in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows [London: Sage, 1995], 46; see also Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture [London: Fourth Estate, 1998]). Fernand Braudel describes the loom as ‘the most complex human engine of them all’ (Fernand Braudel Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800 [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973], 247). Jacquard’s automated loom was based on the principle of punched cards, where the threads selected by each card were the ones that passed through its holes. This principle was not new (it had been used since early eighteenth century), but Jacquard strung the cards together in sequences, each of which constituted an ordered set of weaving operations—or, in Leroi-Gourhan’s words, a program. For this reason, when in the 1840s Charles Babbage started working on his Analytical Engine (which is generally considered the prototype of the computer), he modelled it on Jacquard’s strings of punched cards. His own contribution was to introduce ‘the possibility of bringing any particular card or set of cards onto use any number of times successively in the solution of one problem’ (Morrison and Morrison, Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 264; original emphasis). Thus, Babbage considered his machine as characterized by memory and foresight—that is, by the possibility of referring to past operations in order to act in the future. However limited, this account of the relationship between early computer prototypes and the principles of the loom shows the presence of an explicit connection between memory and time even in the early days of computing.
Although Stiegler’s understanding of technology as ‘exteriorization’ parallels Leroi-Gourhan’s paleontological theory, he clearly demonstrates that Leroi-Gourhan’s account of the coevolution of the human and the technological falls prey to the same difficulty that, in the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau confronted in ‘The Origin of Languages’—namely, the classical question of ‘the origin of man’ (Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 117–41). To simplify Stiegler’s argument, both Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan resort to a providentialist explanation of the origins of humanity (Rousseau through the intervention of God, Leroi-Gourhan through the emergence of the human capability of using symbols).
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 49. Richard Beardsworth, “From a Genealogy of Matter to a Politics of Memory: Stiegler’s Thinking of Technics,” Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology 2 (1995): 87.
Beardsworth, “From a Genealogy of Matter to a Politics of Memory,” 88.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 141.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 185.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 185.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 133.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 131.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 30–31.
Stiegler, Technics and Time 3, 134.
Clark, “Deconstruction and Technology,” 240.
Ian Sommerville, Software Engineering (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2011), 4.
Stiegler’s recent substitution of the distinction between ‘mnemotechnics’ and ‘mnemotechnologies’ for the one between ‘technics’ and ‘mnemotechnics’ serves mainly to emphasize the fact that technology is always a support for memory, and therefore it does not solve the problem. See, for instance, Bernard Stiegler, “Memory,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. Mark B. N. Hansen and W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 70.
Clark, “Deconstruction and Technology,” 240.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), lxix.
On the other hand, in the section of Of Grammatology about Lévi-Strauss, Derrida suggests that no definite distinction between writing in the ‘narrow’ and the ‘general’ sense can be traced, for one slips into the other.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 7.
Jacqued Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 108.
Clark, “Deconstruction and Technology,” 241.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 27.
Clark, “Deconstruction and Technology,” 241.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 83.
Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 190.
Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 195.
Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 195.
Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 210.
Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 212.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 85.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 86.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 84.
Bernard Stiegler, “Technics of Decision: An Interview,” Angelaki 8, no. 2 (2003), 154.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 155.
Stiegler’s assertion mirrors Derrida’s argument that we need to have a sense of writing in order to have a sense of orality. I will return to this point in Chapter 2.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 155.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 155.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 155.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 163.
Clark, “Deconstruction and Technology,” 240.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 163.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 164.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 156.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 156.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 159.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 159.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 162.
Stiegler, “Technics of Decision,” 162.