Technicity

by Arthur T. Bradley

Marcuse has argued (although for different reasons), “technological rationality has become political rationality,”

“The synecdoche that substitutes part for whole and whole for part is in fact a metaphor, powerful enough to transform temporal contiguity into an infinite duration.”[126]

machine (as the “figure” of a generalised technology) discloses man’s being as event-state of the unthought; of the excess of thought; of futurity, temporalisation, or technological imminence.

Hardt and Negri’s remarks on the state of economic globalisation, “the importance of the revolution of Renaissance humanism. Ni Dieu, ni maître, ni l’homme—no transcendent power or measure will determine the values of our world. Value will be determined only by humanity’s own continuous innovation and creation.”

Mankind—humanity—is thus neither transcended nor contradicted by the machine, but instead, as Derrida contends, is “produced by the very possibility of the machine.” That is, by “the machine-like expropriation” by which the so-called essence of man’s being is encountered by way of “technicity, programming, repetition, or iterability.”

In Jacques Derrida’s view, we live in a state of originary technicity.

our “nature” is constituted by a relation to technological prostheses.

“human” is thus the product of an aporetic relation between interiority and exteriority where each term defines, and contaminates, its other.

Bernard Stiegler.

crisis about what—if anything—might now be said to be “proper”

to hum...

This can be witnessed in the recent debate—gathering together voices from science fiction, cultural theory and the human, life and cognitive science...

If posthumanist theory seeks to plunge the Cartesian subject into the world of material embodiments, what is striking is how resiliently it clings—whether for strategic or essential reasons—to such recognisably humanist concepts as agency; self-reflexiveness and even the concept of a core human “nature.”

posthumanism becomes the platform not for awful prophecies about the death of the human but for a deeply reassuring, almost self-congratulatory, affirmation of the enduring richness and complexity of human nature:

“it is our basic human nature to annex, exploit and incorporate nonbiological stuff deep into our mental profiles.”[137]

The classical definition of technology as something that exists only in relation to the human—even if that relation is an “originary” one—is still prioritised over an investigation into technics as an independent material force or process.

It is between Derrida and Stiegler that the thesis of the “originary technicity” of the human receives its most rigorous and powerful formulation.

the “who” of humanity and the “what” of technology, to use Stiegler’s well-known formula, are bound together in an insoluble, aporetic relation.

Stiegler’s attempt to collapse the opposition between the human and the technical leads him to reinstate what is undoubtedly a radicalised, but still recognisable, version of homo faber as the only being who is constituted by technology.

To quickly summarise, Derrida argues that what we call the human is constituted not by any positive essence, being or substance but by a differential relation to what ostensibly lies beyond it: we “are,” so to speak, our own outside.

If the identity of the human is always bound up with its non-human prostheses, then Derrida argues that this insight throws into crisis the whole project of establishing a specifically human science: what he calls “grammatology” cannot be a “science of man” like anthropology because its opening gesture is to call the “name of man” into question.

Derrida’s philosophy of technology famously takes the form of a concept of archē-writing that forms the general condition not simply of language but of consciousness, perception, memory, affect, ideality, indeed, the entire field of subjectivity.

However, what makes the phenomenological reduction of the world possible—and thus access to ideality—is, as Derrida shows, nothing other than writing.

If writing makes possible the phenomenological reduction, and the reduction, in turn, is what gives access to the ideal, then this means that technology is already inside the ideal as its condition of possibility: technicity is, to put it another way, irreducible.

“Différance is culture as nature different and deferred, differing-deferring: all the others of physis—technē, nomos, thesis, society, freedom, history, mind, etc.”[147]

For Derrida,

what begins as a mere prosthesis or supplement to the thinking or acting subject is now revealed to be an irreducible condition of thought, consciousness and subjectivity.

“originary” or constitutive

mnemo-technical supplements that—according to his own critique of Husserl—make the ideality of logic itself possible?

The, shall we say, categorical imperative, the unconditional duty of all negotiation, would be to let the future have a future [de laisser de l’avenir à l’avenir], to let or make it come, or in any case to leave the possibility of the future open.

with Stiegler that the hypothesis of an originary relation between the living and the non-living is expanded from Derrida’s—still

he argues that the human can be defined neither biologically nor transcendentally because it comes into being through technics:

Stiegler argues that the origin of the human lies in an evolutionary “process of exteriorisation” into technical artefacts that begins with the carving of the first flint tool: we are nothing outside our capacity to prostheticise ourselves.

aporia or différance between the human and the tool

“The technical inventing the human, the human inventing the technical.”

history of the human that operates “independently of all anthropologism”[160]: what, he asks, if we have never been humans at all?

humanity is constituted by an originary lack of defining qualities—what he calls a “default” of origin [le défaut d’origine]—that must be supplemented from outside by technics.

Stiegler articulates three different forms of memory: genetic memory (which is programmed into our DNA); epigenetic memory (which we acquire during our lifetime and is stored in the central nervous system) and, finally, epiphylogenetic memory (which is embodied in technical systems or artefacts).

Stiegler argues that the human is the only epiphylogenetic being because it is constituted not simply by genetic or epigenetic experience—as is the case with plant or animal life—but by its ability to record, stockpile and transmit those experiences in exteriorised form: flint tools, language, writing, computer programmes are all kinds of memory.

On the other, the tool transforms what it is to be human by enabling us to experience individually what we have never naturally lived: our collective memory, culture or tradition is the product of technics.

epigenetic experiences are stored, accumulated and transmitted from generation to generation in the form of technical objects.

it is the moment in the history of life where zoē begins to map itself epiphylogenetically onto technē: what we call the human is “a living being characterised in its forms of life by the non-living.”

technical—what Deleuze, for instance, would call the machinic—constitution

As a number of recent thinkers have argued,[171] one way of tracing the contingency—which is to say the violence—of any anthropological system is through its exclusion of the animal

human as the defining epiphylogenetic being

opposite is the case: animals use tools, manufacture tools, fashion repertoires of simple and complex tool types, construct embryonic versions of tool-kits and, finally, transmit this knowledge from one generation to the next in a way that is at least close to epiphylogenesis.

If we may never reach the literal or historical end of man, we may at least be in a position to trace the philosophical closure—the conceptual limits, finitude or contingency—of the anthropocentric system.

In Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technology, Derrida’s implicit ego cogito is replaced with a radicalised version of homo faber—where man both makes tools and is made by them—but

Some forty years ago, Derrida, with his characteristic prescience, was already indicating the revealing function of this technology, which enabled us to think beyond the closure of traditional metaphysics and towards a philosophy of the programme.

The history of human technology could therefore, schematically, be characterised as an evolution from the tool (human agent plus instrument) to the machine (human agent plus mechanism) to the cybernetic machine (programme plus mechanism).