“You can’t have a non-political sociology”: Stiegler on practical pharmacology

Below is a transcription of Bernard Stiegler’s response to a question I posed to him on 19th March 2014, prefaced by some of my own comments for context and summary, and reproduced with Professor Stiegler’s permission. I have deliberately transcribed the response (which was conversational and improvised) as accurately as possible but tidied up some of the syntax for clarity. I hope it will be stimulating for others mining a similar seam and welcome comments. 

Stiegler’s final Media Philosophy lecture series at Goldsmiths (his contract has now run out) was titled The Automatic Society and was, in large part, a presentation of his response to Chris Anderson’s claim that big data heralds ‘the end of theory’ – Anderson is here used as a metonym for the increasingly pervasive reliance on information, statistics, algorithms, etc. as a more ‘accurate’ and ‘efficient’ means of accessing truth and delivering answers than hermeneutics. Google’s founding principle – that ours is not to reason why, such that we cannot presume to know what people want to know until they want to know it – gets extended to all domains of investigation. Anderson writes the following:

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

For Stiegler, this represents a third stage of proletarianisation: the final step in the rendering obsolete of knowledge in its entirety. The mechanical repetition and automation of industrial capital that we traditionally call ‘alienation’ obscures practical knowledge – savoir faire; the invasive technologies of the post-industrial era are deleterious to attention and intergenerational understanding – savoir vivre; finally, in the hyper-industrial context, we are relieved of the need for epistemology and the scientific method – savoir théorie (or, more drastically, savoir penser). It is this distanciation from a perceived need for theoretical knowledge that Stiegler finds himself arguing against.

Similar arguments and conversations have taken place within the domain of social theory, by Nick Gane for example, while Savage and Burrows (2007) have taken this further, suggesting that big social data has deep and concerning implications for empirical sociological research – particularly for the tried and tested qual-quant interface techniques of the sample survey and the in-depth interview. In my own case, I am interested in the individuation processes that a workplace deeply associated with the ideals of ‘creativity’ (the music industry) might allow for. Though I may not always use Stiegler’s vocabulary, I am in agreement with him that this requires a commitment, not just to exploring the agency of the individual (as rational choice theorists might suggest), to mapping the social (as constructionists might have it), or adapting to an autonomous techno-logic (as with hard materialists), but in the interpenetrations between the three. In my case, the focus is on work and workers in major record labels: but this should also mean thinking through the relations between 1) artists, consumers, researchers…; 2) companies, political institutions, unions…; and 3) recording technologies, distribution networks, social media… The set of techniques that are required do so is not always clear. Given that my background positions me as already-inside this associated milieu (if awkwardly so), I have tended towards an auto-ethnographic sensibility – and perhaps this speaks a little to what Stiegler describes below as a sociology that is always a psycho-sociology (see also his Acting Out for autobiographical reflections on the philosophical act).

But he also indicates that this might not be enough; that one cannot take for granted the psychic autonomy of the researcher. And so, Stiegler emphasises the pro-active (potentially disruptive) role of the researcher – endorsing a kind of action research – and the need to take advantage of new (‘contributive’) technologies as they evolve. It is very important for him to acknowledge:

1)             That research is always itself a process of individuation: one is always caught inside the sphere that one is researching, such that to research is always an ethical or political act – even, or especially, if one imagines and positions oneself as a disinterested (‘scientific’) observer (a statistician, for example, or management consultant, or policy-maker). To research is always to bind oneself to a potential future: one always researches in the name of something. Latour is particularly criticised for failing to account for this adequately.

2)             That one is always mediated in carrying out one’s research and that one’s research is always mediated in its dissemination. What tools do we use; how do they influence our commitments; what belief do we have in their trustworthiness; in the access they provide to a kind of truth; what kinds of critical reflexivity do they demand? One might particularly criticise Boltanski & Chiapello along these lines for their lack of reflection on their method of corpus construction. But this takes on further resonance in an age where much stock is taken (in the UK at least) by the role of academic ‘impact’ and public engagement, which so often demands an interaction with the media (social or otherwise).

 

Stiegler appears committed, of recent, to engaging with popular conceptions of contemporary technologies, as expressed by people like Chris Anderson or Nicholas Carr – bastions of the TED-friendly creative class/thought-leadership model that replaces the ivory-clad academic or the public intellectual – and to exploring the impact of global corporations (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.) on the potentialities of everyday experience. Stiegler’s final lecture was somewhat more practically oriented than the previous four – he talked about the use of MOOCs and POOCs (the latter new to me), as well as his work with the Institut de Recherche et Innovation in Paris, investigating digital humanities and building new tools for learning: note-taking software, social books, and so on – and it was against this context that it seemed appropriate to bring up the question that had concerned me in my earlier post: given Stiegler’s chief contributions regarding technical being (epiphylogenesis) and the simultaneous divergence of technics as curative/poison (pharmacology), alongside his insistence upon always holding together psychic, social, and technical domains (general organology), how might this translate into a coherent empirical method for investigating the world? If his particular brand of critique is gaining traction outside of France and outside the fairly hermetic world of continental philosophy (and it would appear as such), then it seems self-evident that such questions will become increasingly important.

 

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TB: I’ve got a very boring, pragmatic question, which is about the demands the theoretical framework you have developed make on empirical research. I wondered if you had any reflections on that because, as someone researching the music industry – as a hyper-industrial organ, as a workplace, as a ‘desirable’ industry – it’s very difficult to think the relationship between philosophy and sociology, for instance, or between critique and science. The reason I ask is because I’ve read several interviews in which you have criticised Latour, or Boltanski and Chiapello, for failing to really think this through properly: in terms of desire, for instance; or the Thing/das Ding. So I guess the question is, what an organological, or pharmacological – Stieglerian – sociology might look like.

 

BS: What a question! First I would say that I don’t believe in sociology or in psychology. Not because I believe in philosophy. But I believe that we must overcome the opposition between psychology and sociology. This is the reason for which I believe that we must read Simondon, because the first project of Simondon was to overcome this opposition – between, let’s say, social sciences and human sciences. He said that it was a division of work organised by industry but that it doesn’t work for thought. And I believe that, for example, Latour, even Chiapello and Boltanski, are far too lost in this opposition.

Now, concerning Boltanski, my problem is that his concept of desire is bad. He is completely confused between desire and drive for example. And when he describes, let’s say, a libidinal economy of capitalism – when he says, for example, that, concerning the ‘artistic critique’ used by capitalism for creating new ways of marketing, etc, etc., speaking about ‘authenticity’, ‘genuine’ climates produced by, for example, Chinese restaurants: ‘you will feel China’, etc – it’s absolutely stupid! Their examples are absolutely stupid! It’s clearly exactly the contrary. But he can’t see that it is stupid because his own concept of desire is stupid. He has no concept of desire. Now, I don’t believe that his work is not at all valuable and useful. I used it, personally, and I read it very carefully. I found a lot of things in this work very interesting. But the global, theoretical apparatus, if you want, behind this for me is extremely problematic. [TB: See the newly translated The Lost Spirit of Capitalism for further critique of Boltanski & Chiapello]

I have other problems with Latour – who doesn’t believe in science. And for me, it is a problem. So we can say, “to believe in science is a paralogism: you don’t believe in science”. [But, I would respond that] I don’t believe that you don’t believe in science! I believe that you need a kind of belief for science. And when I say that, it is with Nietzsche. Now, this use of ‘believe’ is not a pejorative use of belief. It is very complicated to understand: what does it mean, belief? When you love somebody, for example, you believe in somebody. And if we agree with Diotima, with the Symposium, that knowledge is necessarily an experience of love of the object of knowledge – because, as Diotima says, the object of knowledge is an object of desire – and if we agree to say that desire is necessarily a kind of belief, then science is a kind of belief.

Now, I said that because you asked me, “what about Latour?” But my other problem is that he doesn’t believe in public politics and in public power – in projection, anticipation, affirmation of alternatives, etc. For him this doesn’t work and I disagree completely with this. I believe precisely that – you asked me what a pharmacological sociology is – ‘pharmacological’ means that sociology is politics. You can’t have a non-political sociology.

When you practice sociology you are incarnating a point of view which is an interpretation of the future. And even a scientific work is an interpretation. In mathematicians, for example, you have, let’s call them, ‘little’ mathematicians – that is, people like engineers, etc – using mathematics but not transforming mathematics. And you have, for example, mathematicians like Whitehead or Lobachevsky – they interpret geometry, they interpret mathematics. It is here that you have science, not in the application of solving an equation, etc, because now you can make this big machine…Science is a process of individuation – a specific type of individuation, with specific rules, etc.

My, let’s say, sociology of this is a psycho-sociology, because I say that psychic individuation is always a social individuation, so it’s not possible to separate the two, they’re both impossible [to keep apart] – you must distinguish the two but you can’t separate [them] – so you can’t do good science with this separation. You’ll only be able to produce a science for capital. That is, for making efficient propositions – but not formally and finally satisfying causes, to speak here also with Whitehead, [in terms of] causality.

So, if I tried – and I do try – to practice a kind of psycho-sociology, which is for me politics, my socio-psychology is a socio-psychology of the processes of creating the conditions for choosing between alternatives, for making society and psychic individuals capable to distinguish these alternative possibilities, and to produce these organological possibilities. When I say ‘to produce’, I refer here to Latour particularly, I think; I don’t believe that it is possible to talk about technics and particularly about industrial technology, to talk in a relevant way about this, without producing them. This is the reason for which personally I develop softwares, I develop platforms, technical platforms; I work with a lot of industrial companies, etc, etc. Because it is impossible to understand what is at stake if you don’t do that. I don’t believe in the ‘outside’ position which would allow you to speak about tendencies of technologies. I don’t believe in this at all.

So it’s an experimental psycho-sociology; experimental in different ways. Also, practicing what I call ‘contributive research’. That is, a practice of action research in the time of contributive technologies that digital is offering us. We can do a lot of things with them. But this is completely different compared to the classical academic activity of research.

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Mapping territory, tracing history: towards a Stieglerian social method?

Thanks to a hyper-reference from Terence Blake, this blog gained quite a few new followers over the Christmas period which has encouraged me to do a little more with it. The site emerged as an adjunct to a reading group tackling the first volume of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics & Time; it was originally envisioned as a place for continuing discussions online as well as enabling group contributions. In the event, outside of a few email exchanges, our conversations tended to be limited to the classroom and tentative plans for expanding the reading group were foiled by the real-life commitments of both myself and others. So I’ve decided to ‘own’ the blog a bit more, relating it to my own research, and continuing to build up some of the resources which many tell me have so far found to be of use when negotiating the Stieglerian universe. I intend to tidy it up a bit, add some more content, and potentially move towards some more reading group activity if the interest is there (it is on my part) – to this end I would welcome comments and communication from like minds!

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But first some ground clearing. I have no strict philosophical training: my academic history paints me as a musician seduced down the path of cultural studies and critical theory, although equally formative was a professional career in a major record label (where, were it not for my research funding, I would most likely still be). I currently find myself in a university department ostensibly characterised as a confluence of disparate social sciences but somewhat uncomfortably housed within a classically-oriented school of arts and humanities. Which is finally, I suppose, a reasonably good metaphor for my interests: innately recoiling from the idea of being a ‘scientist’, I’m interested in humans, processes, and creative capacities. This plays out in the empirical focus of my doctoral research on individuals working in the music industry after the ‘digital revolution’.

So, I’ve found that Stiegler’s interests and theoretical framework help with a lot of the hard work of drawing all this together – but I am a relative autodidact and philosophical naïf when it comes to deploying them rigorously. This site is inevitably a demonstration of my attempts to work through the problems I encounter in doing so. These are interpretive problems but they are also onto-epistemological and historico-contextual. Hence, the commentary that I’m building up is in some cases thematic but in others I will be trying to follow up some of the influences in Stiegler’s thought as well as exploring commonalities and dissonances with other contemporary lines of argument.

Some of this important work is helpfully being furthered by Terence Blake himself who, far more capably than I am able to, has spent a lot of time recently mapping the convergences and fault lines between such contemporary thinkers as Stiegler, Latour, Laruelle, Badiou and Harman – for example here. In different ways, some of the recent readers, guides, and syntheses (e.g. those by Alex Galloway, Ian James, Attridge/Elliot, Adrian Johnston, and to an extent, the Speculative Turn) also help us fill in some gaps, without being purely hagiographical about it. However, as far as I’m aware, there has been little real adoption or adaptation of Stieglerian thought by (English-language) sociological theory, the faddishness of which meaning that, at least from where I’m sitting, the dominance of Bourdieu and Giddens seems to have been only recently – but almost entirely – upended by critical realists à la Bhaskar or Archer and actor-network theorists following Latour and Law, leaving little room for much else (even if Habermas and Foucault still get a look in, while Hardt and Negri exert some influence on the peripheries). The few studies I know of that do tread this path (e.g. Adrian Mackenzie; Mitchell and Elwood; Sam Kinsley; James Ash – and I’m indebted to the latter two for pointers here) tend to view existing research through a Stieglerian prism of pharmacology and epiphylogenesis, rather than beginning from first ontological and epistemological principles and building empirical work from there. Stiegler himself has applied his perspective to such topics as the French political situation, social media, the care of the self, and particularly the problem of attention and education – but offers very little in the way of systematic method for doing so. This is a stumbling block for my purposes – but also potentially for the conceptual system as a whole if, to be scientifically crude, it remains untested.

But Stiegler does make a foundational ontological claim regarding the technical tendency (which is Leroi-Gourhan’s claim but Stiegler generalises it and applies it), one which has the potential to destabilise classical sociological models of structure and agency. A model for approaching this method based on such a claim might be the work of Latour which has translated its inhuman ontology quite productively into the empirical domain – but I would like to think that Stiegler’s reach might require a little more than merely Latour plus a bit of Winnicott (even if it will surely be depicted as such in times to come). In the linked post above, Blake complains of Latour’s insistence on obscuring his influences so that lines of confluence must be methodically traced rather than being pre-indicated. On the other hand, Stiegler’s tendency is quite the opposite, wearing his sources on his sleeve and often explicitly ventrioloquising himself through a choir of others’ voices – something which can be equally difficult to parse, as we found out in the reading group (in this sense Stiegler is clearly a ‘stronger poet’ if we use Harold Bloom’s language).

Meanwhile, engagements with his contemporaries are few and far between. On Latour, we have a few lines about not working through the thingness of Things (i.e. das Ding) in locating the Real and that’s about it. Similarly, as far as I can see, he has little to say on post-operaist lines of thought, beyond some mild comments on the end of work. I have only found comment on Friedrich Kittler in recorded conversation. A potential fellow-traveller who has seemingly been entirely ignored might even be Žižek (though the feeling is clearly mutual), particularly the Žižek  of Sublime Object and The Parallax View – although part of this might be down to Stiegler’s own uncertainty about Lacan. I would also like to see more commentary on Marx – particularly some clarity of exactly where Stiegler moves beyond the latter, as his quite fundamental indebtedness is not always obvious even when it is acknowledged.

Perhaps we will see more of this type of thing as more of Stiegler’s works get translated: we have Disbelief and Discredit vol. 3 and Re-Enchantment of the World to come in the next few months, the first of which seems to be a direct reply to Boltanski and Chiapello’s (sociologically incredibly influential) New Spirit of Capitalism. Talking about the latter, Stiegler says ‘I detest philosophers who talk about sociology without having read sociologists. But I also don’t like sociologists who talk about philosophy without having read philosophers. It’s very annoying’. Perhaps we can go some way towards a mutual corrective here.

Being/Human Festival

The King’s Arts & Humanities Festival this year is titled ‘Being/Human’ and features a number of talks, seminars, and workshops loosely based around boundaries/intersections between the human and its perceived others. It runs from 11th to 25th October and all events are totally free.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahfest/Programme/at-a-glance.aspx

There are absolutely loads of events and, needless to say, several overlaps with the themes of this group. Particularly of interest might be the following:

Animals and humans in modern science and medicine – two events: 1 / 2
AS Byatt on the early days of psychoanalysis
‘Prometheus-Empedocles Fragments’ – a multi-media performance-installation
Paul Gilroy on race (not) defining humanity
Digital humanities and digital humans
Biometrics and biopolitics (book launch)
Robots at the Science Museum
Virtual objects and haptic interfaces
Robotics and dance
Modernism and the ‘new’
Human creativity and the utopian impulse (via Bloch)
The human in Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and modern political theory

Reading Technics – The Future…

At the end of the final session, we talked about potential directions for the reading group. We agreed on taking a well-deserved break of a good month or so but most of us were keen to continue down the path we’ve begun. Several of us were interested in continuing on the Stiegler steamship and ploughing into the next two volumes (to mix transportation-based metaphors). However, the group consensus was to explore some related directions in technology and Stiegler-studies – which is convenient, as it means I can keep the blog going as it is, without changing the name.

No readings have been set just yet, we’re going to use the time to have a think about what has resonated most so far and find something we think suits the group in its new formation (an article, chapter, or other short-ish text or two). I am also open to other media: suggestions for complementary films, music, literature and so on, would be brilliant. We will probably meet once a month and I will continue to administrate. As it will be something different every week, newcomers will always be welcome.

In the meantime, use the rest of the site to get some ideas, particularly the resources section (also check the submenus for related topics and thinkers), which I will continue to update and be happy to receive ideas for.

Thanks to everyone who has turned up so far; looking forward to seeing how the group progresses. Those who want to be involved, or have suggestions, should contact me by October 17th 2013.

Toby

Week 10 – The Disengagement of the ‘What’

In this final session, we tried to draw out the concluding sentiments of the book, which (as we noted) is not always easy when Stiegler insists on speaking in multiple voices, quoting at length, and revelling in rhetoric, right up to the last page. Nonetheless there are some important and original insights to be gained, ones which are generally more than the product of their influence, and which not only provide tools for apprehending the problems of technical being but through which we might also gain both the confidence and the framework for their analysis.

The first of these is the distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary retention, derived from Husserl’s phenomenology. The latter conceives of memory in terms of perception and recollection, through which we not only encounter worldly phenomena but also begin to reflect on them in the moment of their unfolding. In Husserl’s metaphor, we perceive the individual tones and qualities of a melody as they happen (primary retention); these then leave traces on our memory (secondary retentions), like a comet’s tail, that support and inflect our perception of subsequent tones, and which we must recollect in order to construct an arc of melodic progression to which we are able to ascribe meaning. There is a passive/active distinction here, between primary retention as something which happens to us and secondary retention as something we do with or to it. We do not recall every moment of our perception: there is an inevitable deterioriation such that our secondary retentions form an incomplete and ever-fading archive of primary retentions; but it is adequate enough for us to be able to reflect upon and interpret the world in socially-meaningful ways.

What Husserl does not allow is the exteriorisation of this retention. He calls it image-consciousness, which is, for him, of a different order to memory. It is a representation of a representation, at a level of abstraction that removes it from temporality. For Stiegler, unsurprisingly, this last is absolutely central: memory endures in tertiary material supports which we encounter as we enter into the world, and which shape (mediate, obstruct, accelerate, intervene in…) our experience of it (either implicitly or explicitly). Technical being is founded on this system of tertiary retentions that exist outside the body but in relation to it, as prosthetic memory. The distinction between primary and secondary memory is important for the French philosopher but he is also keen to demonstrate how they bleed into each other – and, significantly, how they are both inhabited by tertiary memory.

One of the problems we encountered was whether language, as the first and foremost prosthetic system, counts as an instance of tertiary memory per se. Does tertiary memory always have to be material, or corporeally independent? Language in use would seem to rely on secondary retention (meaning-making built up across a ‘large now’) which we deploy and alter dynamically – but that usage relies on our immersion in a pre-existing (if perpetually unsettled) framework. Stiegler himself speaks specifically of ‘ortho-thetic’ (lit: correctly set in place) technologies – that is, those technologies which record exactly (phonography, photography and so on), distinguished from writing, painting, etc. While this distinction is potentially problematic – particularly when we get to digitisation – it perhaps draws attention to language as an exemplary demonstration of the blurred lines between primary, secondary, and tertiary retention.

We were also concerned to question how Stiegler has superseded Heidegger by the end of the book. As we saw in the previous section, Husserl’s great pupil places great emphasis on the ‘already there’ of Dasein. Technical objects constitute the space of being – but they do so in ways that recede from us. They are things more often seen as present-at-hand rather ready-to-hand. Technology naturalises itself, becoming so intimate that it is in fact distant because it is not explicitly present. Heidegger calls this distancing through closeness ‘de-severance’ [Ent-fernung; French: é-loignement], in a passage that is worth quoting:

Seeing and hearing are distance-senses [Fernsinne] not because they are far reaching, but because it is in them that Dasein as deseverant mainly dwells. When, for instance, a man wears a pair of spectacles which are so close to him distantially that they are “sitting on his nose,” they are environmentally more remote from him than the picture hanging on the opposite wall. Such equipment has so little closeness that often it is proximally quite impossible to find. Equipment for seeing—and likewise for hearing, such as the telephone receiver—has what we have designated as the inconspicuousness of proximally ready-to-hand. So too, for instance, does the street, as equipment for walking. (p.251)

We see through the glasses and we see with the glasses but we do not see the glasses (while we are wearing them); in the same way, we do not just walk through the street, the street opens itself up to us as an environment optimised for walking. We do not reflect on this – perhaps an element of defamiliarisation, or détournement, or strategic alienation will help us to do so.

So my (technical) relationship to the world into which I am flung is constitutive of my being – all well and good. But it is always my relationship: Stiegler regrets that Heidegger does not follow through on the promise of the world-historial already-there  (the implication is perhaps that here lies the basis of a conservatism that will ultimately be his downfall). He is true to his idealist-phenomenological roots (bound by a tradition, perhaps) and insists on the primacy of the ‘who’ (in its being-toward-death) of the thanatalogical subject, entirely disengaged from the technical, or even social, ‘what’:

It is the world-historial having-been, concretized by “remains, monuments, and records that are still present-at-hand” that makes historical thematization possible. But it is the historiality of the historian’s existence [that] is the existential foundation for history as a science, even for its most trivial and ‘mechanical’ [handwerklich] procedures. (p.272)

Stiegler elevates the other – and suggests that it may, in fact, be a machine. For Heidegger, being takes place in a socio-technical world; for Stiegler, there is nothing but socio-technical being, which weaves a temporality that exceeds that of the human, whilst simultaneously constituting and organising it. Human time may be finite but it is so in contradistinction from the ‘what’ which is infinite, not in a theological sense but in the sense in which it is fixed in a moment of its own eternal reproduction.

Stiegler refers to Barthes’ reflections on photography to elucidate this (something he will do again at greater length in the second volume). In Camera Lucida Barthes famously meditates at length on family photographs of his recently deceased mother. In an effort to prioritise primary experience over secondary knowledge, here is a photograph of my mother, with her parents, circa 1949:

In the photograph, my grandmother, now in her late eighties, will have been a few years younger than I am now; my grandfather, who died before I was born, a few years older. I do not recognise any of these people, obviously, for I never knew them like this, but here they are, ‘ortho-thetically’ represented before me, and I know that this was them and that, for two of the three, it still is. I am unable to see my mother, new-born and unfamiliar to me, not really – her birth is incomprehensible to me – and yet she is present: in body of course; but also in the face of her own mother, staring at me quizzically, through the eye of a device that she saw seeing her and which now blends with my own eye. The photograph closes the gap between us, in a way – or it wants to close the gap. Through that machine, then through technologies of printing, storage, and finally of digital transfer and archiving, I am now looking at her, through time and in time, from a café in Waterloo – even if she still only sees that initial camera. In her I try to see the face and body of the nan that I know now. But it’s hard – I feel the temporal connection more than I am able to know it; my body recoils at the prospect of crude degradation that age brings with it.

I feel also the duality of present absence and absent presence in my granddad, a man I never knew, and who I know I will never know, who will always look this way to me (even if, in some later examples, his clothes are slightly more filled-out and his head less encumbered with hair). I can reflect on my grandparents’ age then, knowing what I know now, knowing to some extent the life that they will lead, the times that will be less happy, and the events that will eventually lead to my birth, and knowing the certainty of time and the end of time that they now, to me, represent. I ‘know’ this in a manner far more real than if I had heard it told to me: their eyes, and the vague surroundings of suburban London also represented in the picture, accuse me with the actuality of time – of their ‘time’ (their epoch and their everydayness), of the temporal distance that separates us, and the time (moment and process) that I now live.

These orthothetic tertiary retentions continue to live alongside us (they are con-temporary) and they burn themselves into the light of our own time. It is not just a photograph though – it is many, many thousands of photographs, endlessly produced and reproduced, alongside reams of film, sound, and computational information, rendering individual and social phenomenological instances exactly and materially. How can this not intervene and shape us anew every time we encounter it? This is not language, these are not stories – orthothetic representation makes a claim for absolute accuracy, direct and unmediated factual presentation. They naturalise themselves in this claim and we, forgetful Epimetheans, do not always do enough to reflect on it. This is why, according to Stiegler, there is a ‘pressing need for a politics of memory’ – one which of course shall be saved for the volumes to come.

Week 9 – Already There

Stiegler spends much of this section reiterating the previous chapter using a Heideggerian vocabulary, in order to move towards a critique of the latter philosopher (via an unlikely ally in Johnny Rotten). It is a long chapter and we did not make it all the way to the end. I’ve summarised below as much as we did manage.

The ‘originary de-fault of origin’ which Epimetheus represents forms the ground of an ‘already-there’: even if we have a selective relation to this ground (Epimetheia engendering a simultaneous forgetting and reflection in this regard), we nonetheless form an understanding of ourselves through our relation to each other, which itself is constituted through our relation to our past. Dasein is temporal: it is being-in-the-world insofar as it is being-with-each-other; it is through others that we inherit that which is ‘already there’ before us (a social tradition, technologically founded), with and against which we are constituted. The question, as Stiegler asks, is ‘that of addressing the modalities of instrumentality as such’ against this ‘already there’ – modalities which harbour three conditions: ‘the condition of idiomatic instrumentality’; of ‘massive indifferentiation’; and ‘the instrumental condition’ (p.206). That is, it is a question of excising the relations which are specific to particular technical objects and, in each case, of reconciling the determining factors of our inherited past with the potential produced by it, and of clarifying the subject-object relation (between the who and the what).

Stiegler is clear: the problem with Heidegger is not that he has a pejorative opinion of the relationship between humans and technics – contrary to several commentators’ beliefs he does not. Indeed, he gets this exactly right. It is not the philosophical task to choose to ‘oppose’ or ‘promote’ technology (as Hubert Dreyfus writes) but to ‘open oneself to it’, to allow it to ‘reveal’ itself – to reflect on its ‘already there’-ness. We have already heard this in Stiegler’s call for a reinstatement of the Epimetheus’ significance in the Protagorean myth.

Two types of time are distinguished – phenomenological time (the time of the who: Dasein) and technological time (the time of the what: clock-time). To get to grips with the latter is important, considering firstly that we are arguing that it constitutes the former, while secondly, acknowledging that technologies of recording (elaboration, conservation and transmission – that is, of historicity and facticity, of knowledge qua tradition) are undergoing radical change. So it is not time per se that we are investigating, but different ‘times’ (different modes of time). The clock allows us to measure time, to discretise it, in ways that also imply a knowledge of calendrical time, and of seasonal time (based on planetary cycles); we distinguish between the ‘now’ (the discrete moment) and cyclical movement (the endless return – cf. Prometheus’ eternal punishment). This ‘program’ (a technical system of temporality) is taken up by the ‘program industries’ (Stiegler’s take on the culture industry), which similarly play with the capturing of the now (in ‘real time’ broadcasting) and cyclical time (scheduling/programming).

Dasein, for Heidegger, is ‘improbable’ – non-determined, unpredictable, unprogrammable. We are individuals, individuated by our own experience of being-toward-death – that is, of being distinctly aware of both the imminence of death and also of never having the possibility of experiencing our own death. But we cannot live each moment in this knowledge; we retreat from it, putting it off so that we are able to function in life. This is replicated in our uncanny experience of technology, we retreat from the fact that it reminds us of our own Epimethean deficiency – our reliance on technical prostheticity ‘amounts to an immersion in the knowledge of nonknowing’ (219). So this difference (between who and what) is not ontological (subject and object); it is a exactly matter of différance: we are differentiated through this knowledge of death that is always deferred.

The authentic being of Dasein (in its futural anticipation, i.e. its possibility of self-determination) is lost in the (punk) ‘generation of today’s “time”’, who declare there to be ‘no future’, and refer to themselves as the ‘blank generation’ (the generation at the end of history) – Heidegger wondered if this would be the fate of those who live in the ‘real time’ of broadcasting that was just beginning to emerge with radio; Stiegler responds that this possibility is always held within techné, which produces (or constitutes) the phenomenology of time qua différance. The early Heidegger, at least, does not allow that technology might hold this constitutive property (even though he does insist on the human’s thrown-ness into a world already constituted for him); he always privileges the subject, the ‘who’. On the contrary, Stiegler says that mnemo-technologies of recording and transmission (those which create a tradition) ‘fix’ the past for us, even if they do not determine it (Heidegger does not grasp this distinction); they create the possibilities for individuation.

The clock effaces as it measures, as does writing – the latter, in fixing a tradition, being a way of marking time. Something is lost in the discretisation of clock-writing – that which is unrepresentable, or ‘improbable’. Experience being rendered as data, we lose the sense of différance, of lived anticipation and memory, and so become increasingly present-focused. This concretises in the real-time of live broadcast (‘breaking’) news, and election fever, for instance, or the phonographic voice of the Führer: the program industries as failure of tradition to make futurity manifest; that is the triumph of homogeneity over individuation.

The ‘individual’ is thus not the subject: it is a confluence of temporally motivated subject-object relations. It is the citizen within the community, gaining a sense of aido and diké from its socio-technical situatedness. It is a ‘belonging to an isonomy in and through which an autonomy is affirmed’ (230).

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[A brief aside: on Saturday I went to London Zoo. If you still struggle with the concept of the fault of Epimetheus, I heartily recommend spending fifteen minutes in the company of a caged gorilla, watching it watch you, noting its immense brute force coupled with its serene incapacity, and feeling the unheimlich combination of fascination and shame well up at the same time that it is reflected back (a reflection that is, of course, a projection). Stay there long enough so that, when it does inevitably approach the glass, you feel your muscles unwillingly contract in preparatory retreat and reflect on the genetic determination that locks us together with the animal, yet allows us to walk free of the enclosure, leaving it to its frozen existence in a technical system it cannot confront. To do so is not to learn the meaning of our originary de-fault but to remember it as it reveals itself experientially, and is, I think, wholly in the spirit of the book.]

Week 8 – Prometheus’ Liver

In this section Stiegler elucidates the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus in order to draw out the implications of a thesis based on originary technicity. To do so he relates the version of the myth found in Plato’s Protagoras and compares it to the version in Hesiod, as related by Jean-Pierre Vernant; somewhat obliquely, we found, he relies on the difference in the two accounts (a summary of both here). Stiegler’s basic complaint is that, philosophies of technics that do exist (most notably that of Heidegger) invariably invoke the myth of Prometheus – he who stole fire from the Gods, eventually engendering the modern rhetorical trope characterising science as ‘playing God’ – yet do not take account of Epimetheus (ironically himself the God of forgetting) – he who, when handing out differential qualities to all mortal beings so that they may live in equilibrium, forgot man, leaving him naked and inept. Stiegler quite reasonably points out that, if we are going to make use of this myth, then one cannot think the former without taking account of the latter.

Prometheus is important: it is he who delivers man out of animal ignorance, who gifts man with technical skill and knowledge; through him humans gain divine qualities. However, though we gain knowledge of the divine, becoming close to Gods, setting up religious sects and acts of worship (something found in all civilisations but never in the animal kingdom), in doing so we nonetheless make manifest our division from the Godly realm (Gods do not worship each other). Most significantly, this divine approach is only necessary because of Epimetheus’ original error. While the qualities animals make use of in their quest for survival (speed, size, claws, shells, etc) positively constitute them amongst each other, the quality of techne given to humans is compensatory; it makes up for a constituting lack. So techne is not purely a positive quality, not just something which differentiates humans from the animal kingdom, but also one which reminds man of his insufficiency, of his brute kinship. We are caught between the animal and the divine, almost both but not quite either.

This is the true quality of Epimetheus, engendering reflection on life and awareness of death: humility, shame, and fear. But the two brothers must be thought together: consequently we live in a state of elpis, blind hope, whereby, thanks to Prometheus, we have a knowledge of death – with divine foresight we know with certainty that it will one day arrive; but we also know that we cannot know when or how it will occur, or indeed what it involves (this is what Stiegler means when he has described technology as, more properly, a ‘thanatology’ – that is, Heidegger’s being-toward-death). As a result we also gain eris, competitive spirit (a kind of Ancient Greek neoliberalism), which drives us to go beyond our mortal state but can also turn us against each other, to self-destruct. In Hesiod, this is Pandora’s legacy: initially, humans are in a state of constant war; after Zeus intervenes, this becomes discourse and politics.

[A thanatological aside: this pleasingly pre-millennium-style page has much to draw our attention when it comes to thinking about (and escaping) death.]

This almost-but-not-quite-ness manifests also in our uncanny relation to the technical objects we are forced to invent to continue our survival: technology fascinates and frightens in equal amounts. They are reminders of our mortality and so we strategise to make their presence invisible by ‘naturalising’ technology; we work to neutralise the technical pharmakon by forgetting our reliance on prosthesis. We repress rather than work through this uneasy but constitutive relationship between phusis and techne. And so we reify life in artefacts that ‘destroy what gathers in an effective and active being-together’ such that this discomfort that manifests in anxiety is at the root of the political question of the individual and the community: ‘being-together is constantly threatened by its own activity […] Mortals, because they are prosthetic in their very being, are self-destructive’ (198).

Hence, the technical art of politics relies on hermeneia, the interpretive and translational act of interpretation between these sets of constituting relations: technics and nature; divinity and animality; Prometheus and Epimetheus. Hermes is sent to mediate, and make the endowments of aido (modesty, respect, humility) and dike (judgment/justice) which are distributed amongst all men, not just the philosophical elites, in order to counter this destructive binarism, and are as such the founding principles of the community and of civilisation. Prometheus’s punishment (of eternally and repeatedly having his liver eaten by Zeus’ eagle) appropriately enacts (‘mirrors’) the human condition of constantly renewed suffering – of hunger, cold, labour, and so on (the liver also considered as the seat of human emotions). And so it is here, after two hundred pages, that Stiegler has laid the groundwork for a society absolutely predicated on care and suffering; that is, for a politics wedded at birth to technics.

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One particular line of questioning that comes out of this chapter for me emerges from a comparison between this myth and the Judaeo-Christian creation myth. There are clear similarities: the administration of the beasts (Adam/Epimetheus); the deception of an omniscient God (YHWH/Zeus); the acquisition of divine knowledge (Eve/Prometheus); man’s subsequent alienation from God; the role of the first woman in spreading discord through curiosity/temptation (Eve/Pandora); the punishment of humans through the replacement of fruitful reproduction with agricultural work and childbirth (the double curse of labour). This particularly brings out the role of women as the sine qua non of the human other (the inhuman) – as Stiegler puts it: ‘the mark of sexual difference’ as the act of Zeus’ vengeance that ‘produces discord, the speaking of many tongues, and inequality’ (195). But there are also differences: Adam names the animals, while Epimetheus gifts them with their survival characteristics; transgression lies with humans in Genesis, rather than with Prometheus the Titan; Eve is a companion, while Pandora is a punishment; the key ‘(de-)fault of origin’ in Genesis is less stupidity and forgetfulness than curiosity and weak-will.

This close-but-not-quite relation between the two stories (both of them pillars of Western civilised thought) is no doubt the result of many centuries of mutual interpretation and redaction – I am not yet aware of a study that monitors this particular relation with scholarly rigour; but it poses the question of how our understanding of techne as constitutive quality might differ when the mythic subtleties alter, and what impact might be had by thinking them together. And what of Egyptian, Babylonian, Australo-aboriginal, Norse, or Vedic (etc.) mythology, or indeed of ancient astronauts? If we are trying to comprehend the ways in which we have understood ourselves and our relation to nature and to technology, then who is the ‘we’ here? Might this over-reliance on one particular (set of) creation myth(s) set up damaging ethnocentric limits on our understanding?

Week 7 – The Invention of the Human (pt. 2)

This week we spent most of our time trying to rearticulate the text as best we could. This is more or less how far we got.

Leroi-Gourhan gets us quite far with his account of hominization through tool-use; but only so far. There is a gap between homo faber and homo sapiens in Leroi-Gourhan which the anthropologist is not able to surmount. When he criticises Rousseau for thinking the distinctly human element of the human (i.e. human spirit, intelligence, etc) as a mere spiritual supplement to the animal ‘state of nature’, the former is unable to show how he is not also guilty of this binarism; he cannot adequately demonstrate a valid passage from the tool-making animal to the intelligent human.

Leroi-Gourhan’s narrative is one of an increasing complexity in the ‘sequence of operations’ of the construction of a tool (e.g. from the use of a rock to smash open a nut, to sharpening that rock with another rock, and finding ways of doing so more effectively, etc, etc), which constitutes different layers of anticipation and of memory. We move from survival-instinct (fight-or-flight mechanism) to reflection (upon what makes a good tool, how it might be used in the future, how it might be improved, how one goes about achieving this with efficiency, and so on); in other words, the human’s relation to the world changes from purely concrete (i.e. animal, determined by genetic programming) to one which incorporates increasing levels of abstraction (i.e. memory and foresight). It slowly emerges into the symbolic domain, acquiring the capacity for language, step by step (and, as Kittler notes, the world of the symbolic is, for Lacan, the world of the machine).

Stiegler points out that how this cannot be so by focusing on language. There can be no wholly concrete language (as Leroi-Gourhan suggests) – there is no way in which each object in the world (or rather, each phenomenological experience) can be attached to a different vocal signifier as this would be meaningless, there could be no possibility of communication (this is basic Saussure: all language is a system of relations, is a kind of differance). All words are, by necessity, already generalisations, or they are not linguistic. One does not emerge into the symbolic in stages; rather the subject and object construct each other in the same gesture.

Stiegler criticises Leroi-Gourhan for a kind of crude materialism that obfuscates his own reasoning. The enlargement of the brain (especially the pre-frontal cortex), motivated by the capacity for tool-use derived from the upright skeleton, drives the acquisition of language and constitutes the origin of the human – but this, for Stiegler, ‘explains nothing’, it is mere description (Rousseau understood this at least). In reality, he says, the brain and technical equipment exist as a structural coupling that de-/re-/co-form each other; a kind of mirror (proto)-stage, whereby consciousness is drawn out as a latent possibility, at the same time that tools develop as an always-possible extension of nature – this is what he calls an ‘instrumental maieutics’, which seems to have much in common with Heidegger’s Gestell; as a revealing of that which was already possible.

For Leroi-Gourhan, the human, having developed technics, is further along a continuum of evolutionary development than the animal; they are different manifestations of the same natural progression. For Stiegler, the human is both animal and technical at the same time as being not (merely) either. This last distinction is important: the human is a technical animal but technicity is not a supplement, it is not ‘added’ to the animal to free it from determination (this would be a restatement of Rousseau). The animal base (as instinct/genetic memory) is absolutely fundamental. Stiegler seems to speak of the human qua animal and of consciousness qua technics. It is only once we establish this that the possibility of agency that is necessary in constituting a human emerges (even as a micro-possibility).

So we end up with three types of memory: genetic (the code of genetic replication that is embodied in psycho-somatic action); epigenetic (lived human memory); and epiphylogenetic (technical exteriorisation). Later in his thought (beginning, I think, in volume two), this will be related (via Husserl) to primary, secondary, and tertiary retention – as immediate, recalled, and stored phenomenological experience. My genetic memory is what gives me two arms and two legs and makes me recoil when faced with danger; it replicates itself across a species. My epigenetic memory gives me a capacity for Russian, or ballroom dancing, is acquired through education and experience, and expires with the human individual; epiphylogenetic memory enables me to store my knowledge of these capacities, in order to compare with others and contribute to their education, even after I am gone. I think we also see here the beginnings of an understanding of ‘general organology’ of individuation (as per Disbelief and Discredit). For Leroi-Gourhan, this process seems to be a linear, telic movement – Stiegler urges us to think them together, in different combinations, with different emphases, but all at once.

A deliberately provocative question: how much of this argument is present in Dawkins’ meme theory? Stiegler deliberately evokes an understanding of technics coupled to biological evolution and Dawkins effectively explores ways in which evolution can continue (in Stiegler’s phrase) ‘by means other than life’, as the proliferation of epiphylogenetics (The Selfish Gene is the classic text but see also The Extended Phenotype on the extension of genetic selection to the domains of species and environment). The professional atheist’s unabashed positivism might be seen as a more extreme, and more typically arrogant, Anglo-empiricist brand of Leroi-Gourhan, and therefore subject to the same criticisms, but I’m not sure that there isn’t a more sympathetic reading to be had – particularly when a bit of Wikipedia-surfing leads to ideas in evolutionary biology like ‘dual inheritance theory’…

The Fall, Temporality, Stupidity, Shame

As has been noted in previous weeks, Stiegler seems to invoke the concept of the fall (qua second origin) as a key moment in the constitution of the human. There seemed to be three falls – the creation myth in Genesis, a developmental-psychological fall into the social-symbolic domain (i.e. the Lacanian mirror-stage, which by the end of Part One has been all but invoked directly), and the fall from the spirit realm into the body in Greek myth, as found in the Phaedrus. These three falls might, respectively, seem to exhibit three different temporalities, or three different relations to the origin: that of human history (where the fall constitutes the founding moment of the human race); that of individual development (the founding of the subject); and finally that of thought (the founding of the human condition as a battle for anamnesis).

The first two are linear developments at different rates (epigenetic and epiphylogenetic) and Stiegler seems to want to conflate them, or at least draw out the parallels – hence the naming of a ‘mirror proto-stage’ in early man. The third, however, seems to be a different type of relationship with the origin, a fall that eternally threatens thought with a return to amnesis; it’s a relationship that produces a distinctly circular temporality, rather than merely being subject to it (technics as time, rather than just technics in time).

I think it is this latter relation that leads Stiegler to his later focus on attention and on stupidity, when formulating an understanding of knowledge that is necessarily pharmacological: the threat of a return to stupidity (i.e. of disindividuation) as the inherent condition for a robust and creative knowledge and for new (and potentially liberating) circuits of transindividuation. He writes elsewhere of ‘that stupidity proper to knowledge, that is the impropriety of knowledge’.

No doubt we will hear more of this when we come to the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus. But I think this careful attention to the looming potential for hubris (the pride that comes before the fall, perhaps), which might be a shared quality of both revolutionary conservatism and utopian-socialist ‘projects’, also goes some way towards finding a key, not only to Stiegler’s commitment to the apparatus of pedagogy, but also to what we might perceive as his preference for political reform instead of overthrow. Following Deleuze, philosophy (as a productive act – of concepts, of time, as an approach to the limit), for Stiegler, properly emerges out of the experience of shame (as well as being fundamental to the concept of the fall) – and shame, for Marx, as for Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault after him, is ‘a revolution in itself‘.

Week 6 – Who? What? The Invention of the Human (more to come…)

This week we asked what exactly Stiegler was trying to achieve by invoking evolutionary theory, and by thinking Leroi-Gourhan and Rousseau with and, critically, against each other. Again we wondered exactly where Stiegler’s own voice was here – particularly considering that much of the chapter seems to restate the Derridean project (via the concept of differance but also in its stress on dissolving the animal/human barrier) but not always explicitly. Especially where the science is a bit dodgy (to say the least!), we tried to prise apart the general principles which seemed, nonetheless, to inhere. There will be more to say on some of these questions in the coming week…

Meanwhile, we might also like to look at Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am which has multiple resonances with this section. See Google Books for the full text and this article for just the first (most relevant) section – I have a PDF of this if you do not have access.
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Chris writes:

The question of a working definition of Gramme arose. I have “material trace of play of force” written in my notes, but see the section titled “Science and the Name of Man” in Chapter 3, Part 1 of “Of Grammatology” for more on how Derrida develops this term from Leroi-Gourhan.

Central focus of this section seemed to be laying a groundwork for understanding the passage from epigenesis to epiphylogenesis. The latter term describing the technical and therefore necessarily collective individuation (physical and psychical) of subjects… but the definition is going to become more nuanced over pretty much the rest of the book as far as I can tell.

Stiegler’s issues with his pet monkey (or the monkey’s issues with B.S. and his family) [as related in a Goldsmiths lecture, Stiegler once had a pet monkey but had to get rid of it when it ‘fell in love’ with him and became aggressive to the female members of the family] raise questions as to what degree different species can actually engage affectively: at what point does “engagement” become “simulation” due to actual, biophysical differences in development? In this connection see p. 140 of the text particularly.

We tried to find a working definition of “anterior field”. This is a term with definite, but qualified, meanings in anatomy (e.g. anterior heart field; anterior auditory field (neuro-anatomy)), L-G seems to use in a more general and evolutionary sense to mean a function of an evolved mode of physical orientation. See here (particularly page 4):

Click to access wk-2.pdf

and maybe: http://voiceimitator.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/andre-leroi-gourhan-gesture-and-speech.html