Kindle Notes & Highlights
In Stiegler’s terms, the “what” (technics) invents the “who” (humans) at the same time that it is invented.
is our inscriptions in the nonliving, in what is dead (technics) which constitutes transcendence.
writing. That this memory aid is in itself nonliving, that it exceeds the biological, will also mean that its description must be of a different order to the biological.
They are systems which humans enter into and take on as their own, which are transformed in time as technical artefacts.
Together, technics, technique and language constitute a third layer.
This is what Stiegler means by epi...
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the logic of epiphylogenesis, the preservation in technical objects of epigenetic experience.
Eldredge’s diagrams, the phenomena of horizontal transfer and retroactivity must be the basis of any theory of technical evolution, if we wish to capture the difference between technics and biology.
transmission of information by non-genetic means: memetics.
Leroi-Gourhan proposes that the evolution of man is characterised by a “freeing of memory”—the exteriorisation of human capacities and genetic traits (what he calls “organs”) into technics.
The most striking material fact is certainly the “freeing” of tools, but the fundamental fact is really the freeing of the word and our unique ability to transfer our memory to a social organism outside ourselves.[292]
From the appearance of Homo Sapiens, the constitution of this external social memory dominates all problems of human evolution.
humanity is nothing but a process of “exteriorisation,”
Our memory is transferred to books, our “strength multiplied in the ox, our fist improved in the hammer.”
we can trace all contemporary technologies back to this process of exteriorisation.
he contends that technics is itself in perpetual transformation; it evolves in its organisation. It is at once its own milieu, separate from that of the human animal. This evolution is parallel to the evolution of the human, but it also organises itself.
there is a systematicity to the evolution of technics, a kind of techno-logic which is not entirely human.
When we look at particular machines in retrospect, it would appear that they were inevitable in some sense; as if they were guided by “archetypes”:
For Leroi-Gourhan, the human inventor is always guided by archetypes. He is but a combinatory genius,[297] selecting from and giving culturally specific embodiment to these archetypes.
So the human has a particular relationship to technics—that of exteriorisation—but at the same time, the technical milieu has its own dynamic which guides the process of invention itself, which exists beyond and before the inventor.
For Stiegler, there is no “ghost” in the machine, no platonic essence we are striving towards. “The organising principle of the technical object is in this object qua tendency, aim and end.”[302]
To put it simply, technical objects are either taken up by human society or they are forgotten.
The inventor, for Stiegler, is not even a “combinatory” genius; he is but a passive observer, reading a message that already exists in the technical object.
Dawkins, memetics has been heavily influenced by evolutionary biology.[305] It uses a biological analogy to explain the transfer of non-genetic information between human beings, and between human beings and technical artefacts.
it postulates the existence of another evolutionary agent—a replicator—to explain cultural change over time. This agent is called the “meme.”
Dawkins defines a meme as a “unit of cultural inheritence,” a piece of information propagated through imitation, undergoing a process of selection where the most efficient, rapid and successful replicators survive.
Common examples include TV jingles, recipes and religious beliefs.
In the literature on memetics, material cultural artefacts like books, pots and computer screens are referred to as “environmental contingencies” (Boyd & Richerson), “containers” (Blackmore) and “vehicles” for selfish replicators (Dawkins). Human culture has evolved so rapidly due to a disembodied entity that we transmit to each other like radio signals—the meme.
That which is preserved and transmitted in cultural evolution is information—in a media-neutral and language-neutral sense.
In our theory, we will keep the inventor’s role, but it will be qua an actor listening to cues from the object itself, “reading from the text of matter.”
to explore the history of intelligent machines from the perspective of the machines themselves,
[the robot historian] would, for example, recognise that the logical structures of computer hardware were once incarnated in the human body in the form of empirical problem-solving recipes … these may then be captured into a general-purpose, “infallible” recipe (known as an “algorithm”). When this happens we may say that logical structures have “migrated” from the human body to the rules that make up a logical notation
logic of technical remembering (epiphylogenesis).
computer by its form—an electronic machine conveying information encoded as binary logic across silicon circuits,
At the end of the nineteenth century, the word “computer” meant a human operating a calculator. Early in the twentieth century, these “computers” became large group of mostly female humans performing mathematical calculations by hand or on slide rules, housed in large warehouses.
Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenesis.
The uses and functions of a technical object can never be known, these will only be realised in the evolution of the object itself.
This lineage, of which the synthetic act of invention is the ancestor, cannot be identified by a particular material form or human use. For Simondon, it can only be identified by a group of procedures or processes that remain stable throughout the evolutional lineage.
After Eldredge, we have established that technical objects transform themselves in time, they engage in horizontal transfer and retroactivity. After Stiegler, we have established that this dynamic constitutes a break from genetic evolution, and that this break in turn constitutes its own milieu.
And after Leroi-Gourhan and De Landa, we have suggested that these techniques originate in human processes, human processes which are themselves already technological.
However, any technique, once externalised into a technical artefact, will engender new structures and new techniques. If a technique may be defined as itself a technical being, then its incarnation qua material artefact may be seen as “the being passing out of step with itself,”[328] a becoming individualised.
Julian Dibbell: “in the strange new world of immateriality toward which the engines of production have long been driving us, we can now at last make out the contours of a more familiar realm of the insubstantial—the
Benjamin, what is to be valued is the “optical unconscious,” cinema’s machinic vision of a world that is itself machined with a dense grid of lines. Cinema can expand or shrink space, extend or compress time, it can cut together images of diverse scales or forms—intimations of topology. It creates a “Spielraum,” a playroom, for dividing up the machine world otherwise.
Guy Debord: “But this life and this cinema are both equally paltry; and that is why you could actually exchange one for the other with indifference.”[366] Boredom reigns.
If it took twenty years to get from Brecht or Benjamin’s optimism to Debord’s boredom, the same cycle in net time took perhaps five years. Geert Lovink: “Cyberspace at the dawn of the 21st century can no longer position itself in a utopian void of seamless possibilities.”
civil disorder comes from below, but revolutions come from above,
the algorithm consumes the topographic and turns it into the topological. In the database, all description is numerical, equivalent in form. In principle everything within it can be related to or transformed into everything else.
Rather than a politics of allegory, an economics of allegorithm operates, selecting and reducing possibilities.
The possible and the actual reverse positions. It is the possible that is real. If the algorithm can produce it as an outcome from the database, it exists.
Its ambition is not only to embrace the recording of the world but the world of recording.
