Kindle Notes & Highlights
Technicity is the emergent capacity of the human animal to elicit technology (replication) from an always already technological (informed, articulated, animated) world.
Niklas Luhmann, understand discourses as chains of discrete events
while writing cultures invest in material deposits and juxtapose the monumental duration of the writing medium to a transient temporality, oral cultures are vested in repetition and ritual.
literally burns memory into humans.
language too must be described in terms of a dialectic between linguistic practices and material deposits—deposits whose material location is dispersed among the heads of millions of language users.
on the social level, intertwines acts of inscription/ depositing with speech practices.
we will also have to distinguish between depositing into material storage devices and depositing into human memories. Ideally, material storage devices are supposed to preserve their contents faithfully. Human memories, on the other hand, tend to select, reconfigure and forget their contents; and we know from memory theory that this is the real achievement of human memory.
Forgetting, in that sense, is not a defect, but an absolutely necessary form of protection.
Forgetting appears to be a machine that transforms the infinite space of singular perceptions into subject structures;
Perhaps this is the most admirable aspect of language: as a social technology it transforms speech acts into compressed semantic-mental structures.
stereotypes and schemata assume their structure—even
a long chain of western movies has given shape to the genre,
Prior experience condenses into media competency, which, in turn, shapes a system of socio-symbolic topoi shared by both producers and receivers. It is time to retire the notion that v...
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it may be necessary to describe the production of meaning itself as a social technology, that is, in materialist and discourse-economical categories.
All that is solid melts into air,
In his book Life and Habit,[262] Samuel Butler argued that biological heredity was but one mode of memory, and that “all hereditary traits, whether of mind or body, are inherited in virtue of, and as a manifestation of, the same power whereby we are able to remember intelligently what we did half an hour, yesterday, or a twelvemonth since.”
Derrida
human memory is a prosthesis of the inside. It is neither inside nor outside, but constitutes a “relative interiority.”
For the moment, let us return to the problem raised by Eldredge; technical machines break the laws of genetics. From his perspective, this is because they are subject to intelligent design. Part of the reason Eldredge created these diagrams in the first place was to prove to the Creationists that intelligent design has its own dynamic, and this dynamic is radically different to what we find in nature.
As Aristotle puts it: “not one product of art has the source of its own production within itself.”
As an object, it must first be thought in the mind of a human, and then created.
The domain of “technics” is even more restricted; in general, it designates “the restricted and specified domain of tools, of instruments.”[271] These objects are not a fact, but the result of human thought. In this sense, technical objects might be taken as by definition human fabrications.
Humans create technics; technics do not pre-exist or constitute the human.
“At the beginning of history,” asserts Bernard Stiegler, “philosophy separates technē from episteme,”
Human thought (the philosophical episteme) is pitched against the sophistic technē (art or craft).
mnemotechnics and writing—techniques
Human memory was “the noblest region of … personality,”[274] an originary knowledge for which technē served as mere extension.
Platonic philosophy was constituted on this opposition between human knowledge, which is transcendental, and technics,
which lacks self-pr...
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Both philosophers put the idea of pure human memory into crisis, and consequently the idea of any access to a realm of thought uncontaminated by technics.
how does one write the genealogy of a machine,
It is impossible to deny the participation of human thought in the essence of machinism. But up to what point can this thought still be described as human?[281]
Is it humans that remember previous generations of machines, and where are these memories stored? We will approach it from the perspective of evolution.
Epiphylogenesis
Humans die, but their histories remain. This is what distinguishes them from animals.
Our awareness of death is what drives us to create archives, technologies of retention and storage.
For Eldredge, this is what we mean by the word “culture.” Culture is but a series of memorials. In fact, it is a gift to others—the gift of death.
Stiegler calls the structure epigenetic—it exists outside and in addition to the genetic, like a surrounding layer.
“those characteristics inherited outside of genetic encoding and transmission.”
not coded for in our genes, but which we acquire.
This is what Heidegger calls the already there, this “past that I never lived but that is nevertheless my past, without which I would never have had a past of my own.”
Language is a perfect example. It is not genetic;
In entering into language, it creates a past for us, and we acquire this past, which we continue as our own. We might call this acquisition an “event.”
this epigenetic event, is not lost when we die.
Stiegler calls this the epi-phylo-genetic structure, implying by that terminology a material genealogy proper to it. So he distinguishes here between three types of memories out of which the human develops: Genetic memory; memory of the central nervous system (epigenetic memory); and techno-logical memory [epi-phylogenetic memory].[289]
Stiegler locates or amalgamates “language,” “technics,” “technique” and “technology” within this third type of memory, epiphylogenesis.
Technics, however is afforded a special place here; although in common parlance it designates tools and instruments, Stiegler also uses the term in the Greek sense (technē). In other words, it designates skill, art and craft.
Language itself is also a technique, a skill, a mode of transmission—and thus it is a form of technics.
Technics, for Stiegler, are always memory aids—whether they have been created explicitly so (for example, language or photography, which are mnemotechnics) or not (pottery and rugs).
This is the paradox of Man: “a living being characterised in its forms of life by the nonliving,”[291] by its relation to death.
