Stiegler Reading Notes

Bernard Stiegler. Technics and Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

1)
Epimetheus is not simply the forgetful one, […] he is also the one who is forgotten. The forgotten of metaphysics. The forgotten of thought. And the forgotten of forgetting when thought thinks itself as forgetting.[1]

And,

Memory is forgetting.[2]

Technics is the exteriorization of memory, which allows for systemization and repetition.  The figure of Epimetheus represents this double-fault of forgetting and reflexivity.  Elsewhere in Technics and Time, Stiegler writes, “the paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorization without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorization.”[3] This is why Epimetheus’ original act of forgetting is important.  If the condition of knowledge itself is made possible through the prostheses of technics, it can’t be positively known.  There is no origin, only a de-fault of non-origin. To illustrate this point, Stiegler writes of Epimetheus’ reflection on his forgetting is a “re-turn that is always too late.”[4]  That is, knowledge of our being in the world does not come from an authentic presence, but rather, is constituted differentially in relation to that non-origin of being (experience) through a process of exteriorization (prosthesis) that is supplementary.  As an exteriorization, memory cannot be made present to consciousness.

2)
Man invents, discovers, finds (eurisko), imagines (mékhané), and realizes what he imagines: prostheses, expedients. A pros-thesis is what is placed in front, that is, what is outside, outside what it is placed in front of. However, if what is outside constitutes the very being of what it lies outside of, then this being is outside itself. The being of humankind is to be outside itself. In order to make up for the fault of Epimetheus, Prometheus gives humans the present of putting them outside themselves.[5]

This quote is closely related to the one above through Stiegler’s discussion of humans as constituted through exteriorization (Prometheus’s gift).  Where the quote above critiques a philosophy of being as presence and posits an incommensurability of experience, here he speaks of humans as ‘technical beings.’  That is, humans have no qualities in themselves, but rather become the qualities of their extended technicity.[6]  In this sense, it is linked to another quote elsewhere in the book,
The technical inventing the human, the human inventing the technical. Technics as inventive as well as invented. This hypothesis destroys the traditional thought of technics, from Plato to Heidegger and beyond.[7]

Here is speaks of the co-possibility of technics and human, the ‘who’ and the ‘what,’ in a mutual coming-to-be.  Important here is the break from philosophies that separate episteme and techne.  For Stiegler the two are interwined because the human is, by the very fact of its technicity.  This ‘technical being’ becomes human by “means other than life.”[8]

The distinction between prostheses as in ‘in front of’—anticipation—in this quote, and the afterthought of memory in the last, establishes a temporality constituted through technics.  Here we have a link to Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, in that existence is temporal because it lies between what was and what will be.  That is, knowledge of the past allows anticipation for the future.  Stiegler uses the story of Pandora and the theme of elpis to illustrate the neutral and incommensurable situation of the temporal being,
“I stopped mortals from foreseeing death.” “What cure did you discover for that ill?,” the chorus asks. “I sowed in them blind hopes,” Prometheus replies. It is not the foreseeing of ill, the foreknowledge of death, which carries the name here of elpis; on the contrary, elpis, housed among humans, as is Pandora, constitutes through her very blindness the antidote to foresight.[9]

And,
Thus, in the anticipation, always already hidden, of their end—the knot that binds together prométheia and épimétheia—the temporality of mortals is set up. As in the Heideggerian existential analytic, this knowledge of the end, which is also a nonknowing, forms the primordial situation out of which each person conducts himself or herself. Elpis could be seen as (the relation) to the indeterminate, that is (the anticipation of) the future, and as such, “the essential phenomenon of time.”[10]

Where Stiegler takes issue with Heidegger is on the points that a) we have no direct access to this unlived past, and b) neither do we have access to the experience of our own death.  Thus, the temporality of existence is constituted prosthetically—we are always outside our own existence.  So, Dasein presupposes a theory of being based on this exterioriztion—technics—which Heidegger fails to do.

3)
Through sacrifice mortals are put in their place: between the beasts and the gods, in this in-between (between appearing and disappearing) resulting from a deviation.[11]

And,
Politics is an art, a technics, imprinted in every mortal as the originary feeling of the divine coup of technicity itself.[12]

Stiegler engages here in a discussion about how humanity’s shared ex-centricity opens to the question of politics.  Beginning with the Hesiodic version of the Pythagorean myth, he relates the cult of sacrifice to the political community. Humanity’s lot lies between those of animals and gods:  we are mortal like animals, yet we have the stolen gift of power/potential that places us outside the origin. This feeling of the end, coupled with the technicity imprinted in all humans (represented by Hermes in the Protagorean version) enables the “community of those who have no community” in both practice (through letter and law) and essence (the deferred immanence of an end). [13]  The political dimension of technics is important to further an understanding of what Stiegler means when he says that we are pharmacological beings.  Because technics was stolen from the gods there is an inherent danger in our inability to properly wield the power/potential, but at the same time, in it lies our redemption from completely destroying ourselves.

Embedded here is Stiegler’s quarrel with Derrida. Derrida articulates différance as the history of all life, however, Stiegler finds an inherent contradiction that delineates the human from the animal on the basis of technicity,
To articulate the living onto the nonliving, is that not already a gesture from after the rupture when you are already no longer in pure phusis? There is something of an indecision about différance: it is the history of life in general, but this history is (only) given (as) (dating from) after the rupture, whereas the rupture is, if not nothing, then at least much less than what the classic divide between humanity and animality signifies.[14]

Stiegler, Bernard. “The Therapeutics and Pharmacology of Attention” Taking Care of          Youth and the Generations. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. 72-93.

1)
In order to be made available to marketing imperatives, the brain must early on be literally deprived of consciousness in the sense that the creation of synaptic circuits responsible for the attention formation resulting in ‘consciousness’ is blocked by the channeling of attention toward the programming industry’s objects.[15]

To begin to unpack this statement, we must first understand Stiegler’s investment in the issue.  Having worked in the television industry, he witnessed firsthand the economics and power enacted in the name of marketing by “those who control television.”[16]
His line of thought is also indebted to the Frankfurt School and their critique of the culture industry.  Here, Stiegler directs his criticism to the ‘programming industry,’ which I believe specifies the television, or any media controlled by marketing interests. In television, the term ‘programming’ refers to the content and scheduling of TV shows.  I believe he is using this term as a double entendre—much like Shukin’s use of the word ‘rendering’—to describe the relationship between content, planning, and control enacted by this industry. Throughout the chapter, Stiegler explains how the programming industry short-circuits individuation by blocking the synaptogenetic process.  By doing so, Stiegler demonstrates the subjugation of the human body by a technology of power as a way to manage society in the interest of capital.  This issue of biopower is explicitly raised at the end of the chapter, where Stiegler suggests fighting the contemporary battle of intelligence through ‘hygiene’ described as “the governing of the self and others.”[17]

This quotation from Stiegler is reminiscent of the movie the Matrix, where it is revealed that humans are farmed to provide energy for machines: “The Matrix is a computer generated dream-world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into [a battery].”[18]  In the case of the programming industry, however, humans ‘farmed’ as currency delivering machines.

2)
[…] one of the principle motivations of the generation characterized by hyperattention and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for playing video games is that the games provide active and critical training in which the player is required to learn.[19]

Here, I am reminded of game studies and electronic literature theorist, Espen Arseth’s concept of ergodic texts where “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.” [20]  Through this movement the reader constructs a semiotic sequence. Instead of passively absorbing a text the reader must interpret and make decisions.

3)
There is a great danger in suggesting an agreement between deep attention and hyper attention if this agreement does not consist […] of a regrounding of hyper attention as such.[21]

And,

Every kind of attentional device created by […] varying grammatizational forms must be systematically indexed and defined in terms of its psychotechnical and psychotechnological effects, but also in terms of possibilities for linkages with other older or more recent layers.  And, most important of all would be to identify various forms of attention according to the kinds of retentional and protentional flux brought about in them […], each one of which is quite specific.[22]

Stiegler cautions that Hayles’ doesn’t provide for the influence and motives of the industries responsible for the ‘generational’ desymbolizing and deindividuating in her account of hyperattention and ADHD.  If hyper attention is solicited by industry for the consumption of objects, its integration with deep attention would not lead to the kind of maturity we hope to achieve.  He proposes that any integration between the two modalities of attention, to be of any effect, should be grounded in a critical analysis of their structure and mechanisms, the object of attention, and the context in which the object is grammatized.

To achieve a precision of definitions, Stiegler reads Hayles’ idea of hyper-attention as a state between a) ‘attention without consciousness’ similar to animal vigilance that distributes the focus of concentrating between the ‘real’ and the ‘possible,’ and b) “floating listening, which is equipped with an interwoven symbolic medium ‘structured like a language,’” whose dream-like logic promotes “the possibility for accidental connections.”[23]  This he distinguishes from a merely captive kind of attention that is unfocussed and dispersed across a multiplicity of media stimuli. Here, he is describing infra-attention that is more “’hypersolicited’ than hyperattentive.”[24]  Thus, we must make a distinction between informational consumerism, which results in a loss of attention, and configurations of distributed attention that can potentially lead to and buttress deep attention.

4)
[I]n Hayles’ description, it is not concentration that stabilizes the object as object of attention but the duration of its perception.[25]

In contrast to Hayles, Stiegler makes the argument that depth of attention has less to do with duration (because that could be due to captivation), than it does with transindividuation, which can be quite rapid. If individuation is the process through which a person becomes his/her ‘true self,’ transindividuation describes the co-individuation of the “I” with its socio-cultural milieu. It has more to do with connection and incorporation, as it constructs the object of attention.

5)
[N]ewly grammatized symbolic media are a network of pharmaka that have become extremely toxic and whose toxicity is systematically exploited by the merchants of the time of brain–time divested of conciousness.  But, it is also the only first aid kit that can possibly confront this care-less-ness.[26]

Present in this statement is the notion of the pharmakon as something that can both cure and kill.  While technologies can be dangerous if we are not critically aware of their of their capacity to transform and shape our thoughts and relation to knowledge toward catastrophic ends, they can also engender new forms of knowledge.  The idea of ‘Sorge,’ as both anxiety and care, runs as an undercurrent to this line of thought because at the end of the chapter, Stiegler proposes practice of ‘hygiene’ as a way of being in the world and caring for our collective situation.

This idea of the pharmakon resonates with Baudrillard’s essay “Prophylaxis and Virulence,” where he relates the pathology of the human body, through examples of AIDS and cancer, to larger implications of the social body.[27]  As systems – biological, social, and conceptual models – purify and protect themselves from contagion, they become immunodeficient.  They are increasingly susceptible to viral infection because they have lost their points of reference and difference. Once disparate domains infect each other by contracting conceptual forms and contagion spreads by bypassing all meaning in an effort to reproduce.  Thus, in sterilization lies susceptibility to disease.

6)
I believe in the difference of maturity and immaturity, majority and minority, and that difference will be at the horizon of humanity-to-come.[28]

Stiegler insists that is it the duty of those with intellectual maturity to ‘take care’ and take responsibility for the dire state of education of the younger generation. He is responding to interests of the programming industries (i.e.: France allowing commercial programming for pre-school children) that make ostriches out of us all.

7)  Random connections:

[W]hile playing a Mozart Fugue, [Glenn Gould] encountered the noise from a vacuum cleaner […], producing accidental occurrences that filtered into his interpretation.[29]

I am reminded of technology hacker/contemporary artist Cory Arcangel’s video piece “a couple of thousand short films about Glenn Gould,” 2008.  Arcangel recreated Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” by splicing together single notes from nearly 2,000 clips taken from YouTube.

Walking, which is also an ambulatory technique, allows for the concentration on an object in an organic relationship with the repetitive motion of one’s steps.[30]

I am reminded here of the Situationist practice of dérive—a subconscious drift through the city with the goal of encountering an authentic experience.

I count the musical score among the number of spatial objects, since it places music outside time.[31]

My favourite score, and perhaps the one that best illustrates music’s temporal reconstruction is John Cage’s “A Dip in the Lake—Ten Quick Steps, Sixty-one Waltzes and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity,” (1978).  It is a map of Chicago annotated with lines that are drawn to and from specific locations.  The piece consists of recordings taken at those locations.  Because each ‘note’ marks a specific place where the time of the recording is up to the player, it is bound to change each time it is played.

[1] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) 186.
[2] Marcel O’Gorman; Bernard Stiegler, “Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmacy: A Conversation” Configurations (August 2010), 18 (3), 466.
[3] Stiegler, TT1, 141.
[4] Ibid., 186.
[5] Ibid., 193.
[6] Ibid., 193-4.
[7] Ibid., 137.
[8] Ibid., 17.
[9] Vernant qtd. in Stiegler, TT1, 197.
[10] Stiegler, TT1, 197-8.
[11] Ibid., 190.
[12] Ibid., 201.
[13] Ibid., 201.
[14] Ibid., 139.
[15] Bernard Stiegler, “The Therapeutics and Pharmacology of Attention,” in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010) 72.
[16] O’Gorman; Stiegler, A Conversation, 463.
[17] Stiegler, Taking Care, 93.
[18] The Matrix, dirs. Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999.
[19] Stiegler, Taking Care, 76.
[20] Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1997) 1.
[21] Stiegler, Taking Care, 76.
[22] Ibid., 83.
[23] Ibid., 78-9.
[24] Ibid., 80.
[25] Ibid., 79.
[26] Ibid., 85.
[27] Jean Baudrillard, “Prophylaxis and Virulence,” The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London: Verso, 2002) 60-70.
[28] Stiegler, Taking Care, 86.
[29] Ibid., 81.
[30] Ibid., 82.
[31] Ibid., 84.