Mark B. N. Hansen
I have been a reader of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s work since shortly after the publication, in 1998, of the English translation of his first major philosophical text, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998). As I have recounted elsewhere, my discovery of Stiegler’s work had a profound impact on me, opening an opportunity for me to suture my train ing in Continental philosophy and deconstruction with my newer interests in media art and culture (Hansen 2012). With his conviction that Derridean “différance” required technical specification, as well as his attention to the great analog recording technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth cen turies, Stiegler’s work forged a concrete connection between the phenome nological and postphenomenological tradition and the “media science” of German critic Friedrich Kittler and his disciples. And, in a more general sense, Stiegler’s impassioned plea for a reversal of Western philosophy’s repression of technics made the resources of this tradition immediately relevant, indeed excitingly so, for the analysis of how digital media was then (and is still) revolutionizing the ways we live, work, think, and sense.
The focus of my initial interest in Stiegler’s work was his inspired refunctionalization of the great Husserlian project of developing a phenomenology of time consciousness, and specifically his updated theorization of the temporal object as a crucial concept for understanding the impact of technical culture on human experience. By supplementing Edmund Husserl’s analysis of time consciousness with a third, and properly technical form of memory—what Stiegler dubbed “tertiary retention” (meaning, essentially, recorded memories, e.g., films, sound recordings, photographs, etc.)—and by insisting on the “foundational role” of tertiary retention for the entire Husserlian account of time consciousness, Stiegler’s work introduced technics into the very heart of the intimate operation of time consciousness. In this way, Stiegler transformed the Husserlian temporal object from a mental object operating within the immanent domain of time consciousness into a properly technical object existing in the objective world, and thus outside time consciousness, but nonetheless central to—indeed, contaminating of—the very intimate core of subjectivity that is time consciousness.
The fundamental payoff of Stiegler’s contamination of time consciousness and his correlative objectification of the temporal object is the idea that technical recording lays bare the structure of time consciousness and, indeed, that it is only in the era of technical recording that we can properly excavate the structure of time consciousness. Technical recording makes it possible for the same temporal object (be it a music recording, a film, or a digital video) to be experienced more than one time, which in turn makes it possible for time consciousness to compare its distinct experiences of the same temporal object and to assess how its memory (Husserl’s “recollection,” which Stiegler calls “secondary retention”) of its first experience (“primary retention”) selectively impacts its second experience (“primary retention”), and so on, with each new experience of the same temporal object. By demonstrating in this way that time consciousness depends on its interactions with technical temporal objects—or more precisely, that it includes technical memories as crucial elements of its very operationality—Stiegler develops the theoretical basis for a broad understanding of technics as the very condition for culture.
This broad understanding has remained the focus of Stiegler’s work as it has progressed from its initial concern with the excavation and critique of the philosophical repression of technics (primarily in the three published volumes of Technics and Time) to a focus on the critique of the libidinal economy of contemporary capitalism (Symbolic Misery series, Disbelief and Discredit series) and, increasingly, an engaged commitment to developing the theoretical and practical resources for a “new critique of political economy” along with the correlative creation of a “new spirit” of economic life, if not indeed of capitalism itself (For a New Critique of Political Economy, Reenchantment of the World).1
Throughout all of Stiegler’s various engagements, the focus on the human and the predicament of human life remains paramount. This focus is, at least in part, the product of Stiegler’s understanding of the correlation between technics and culture: as he develops it in the first volume of Technics and Time, appropriately subtitled The Fault of Epimetheus, the conjunction of the human with the technical is accidental, but is nonetheless—or indeed, is as such—species-defining. Stiegler deploys the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus to make this point: focusing on Epimetheus’s “fault,” his forgetting to reserve some defining characteristic for human beings in his allotment of powers to the mortal creatures, Stiegler emphasizes how human skills in the arts and in using fire, skills in the area of technē given to humans by Prometheus’s theft, are correlated with humans’ status as forgotten, incomplete beings. Human beings are originarily lacking an origin or essence. By emphasizing the Epimethean side of the myth, Stiegler thus underscores the correlation with technics as the vehicle for humans to become human: humans are constituted contingently through their species-defining coupling with technics.
As a consequence of their essential default, humans evolve, they become human, both through genetic inheritance and through the transmission of culture. Stiegler dubs this latter form of evolution “epiphylogenesis,” meaning the evolution of the living by means other than life. The Technics and Time project as a whole, and much of Stiegler’s subsequent work, can be understood as a working-through of this fundamental insight: for if humans evolve through the transmission of culture and if this transmission is dependent on technics, then it follows that technics is, as Stiegler puts it, “the condition of culture” (2004b: 59).
At the same time as it comprises what, in my opinion, is most fruitful and urgent about Stiegler’s philosophy, the way Stiegler theorizes this fundamental correlation of human becoming with technics commits him to a certain anthropocentrism in his account of technics that, I will suggest, compromises his ability to theorize the becoming-environmental of the human currently being wrought by ubiquitous sensing technologies. In an account published elsewhere, I have made a related argument about Stiegler’s fundamental philosophical commitment to Husserl’s account of time consciousness and, specifically, his decision to theorize the technical contamination of the latter exclusively in terms of memory, which is to say, in the form of a content that could have been lived (even if it was not in fact lived) by human consciousness (Hansen 2012). I won’t repeat this argument here or say much more about the Technics and Time project but will instead turn to Stiegler’s theorization of “general organology” and “libidinal economy” in the two series (Symbolic Misery, Disbelief and Discredit) from the mid-2000s.
Before I do that, however, let me repeat my view of the crucial contribution Stiegler’s perspective makes for contemporary media theory and the political economy of a massively mediated world: in contrast to recent trends (including various strands of media theory, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology) that have stressed the operation of nonhuman actors with little concern for how they are deeply imbricated with humans (and indeed, in most cases, with no small amount of glee at their alleged autonomy), Stiegler’s approach begins with the idea that technical media are “ab-originally” correlated with the human, that their operation both conditions human becoming and culture and poses dangers to humans first and foremost. For Stiegler, in short, it makes little sense to address media and technics without simultaneously addressing the human, and on this fundamental point I wholeheartedly agree.
What I shall be questioning as I excavate Stiegler’s post-Technics and Time writings is thus not whether his basic approach is correct, promising, or indeed imperative but rather whether the terms on which he theorizes the human-technics coupling are adequate for engaging with the contemporary operation of technics. My excavation will focus in particular on the concept and operation of desire, which comes to the fore in Stiegler’s writings from the mid-2000s (the two series mentioned above), as (together with memory) the fundamental characteristic of human becoming. As we explore the concept/operation of desire and the theorization of technics in terms of the libidinal economy that it undergirds, the fundamental issue will be the following: Does the endorsement of desire and libidinal economy provide a viable remedy for what Stiegler has astutely diagnosed as the capture of available brain time? Or is it rather more of a throwback to a moment of cultural history (and of the theorization of culture) that has now been superseded, in large part, because of technical advance?
The writings of the mid-2000s, which for purposes of convenience I shall refer to as “Phase 2” of Stiegler’s career, bring the resources of his philosophical deconstruction of philosophy’s repression of technics to bear on the contemporary situation, both globally and in Europe in particular. In these writings, Stiegler addresses what he calls the technological epoch of technics, often by way of topical reference to current events. While it resembles Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the technological epoch of Being, Stiegler’s conceptualization inverts the tenor of Heidegger’s famous postulation that “the essence of technology is nothing technological” (Heidegger 1977: 35): for Stiegler, technology is through and through technical in the sense that it is a particular epoch in the history of the human-technics coupling. While culture is conditioned by technics, as we observed above, the modern epoch of technics is technical in a more precise sense—it is the technical epoch of technology:
One must carefully distinguish technics as a milieu of epiphylogenetic memory in general from what must be called mnemotechnics in the proper sense. Man is a cultural being precisely to the extent that he is also essentially a technical being: it is because he is surrounded by this third technical memory that he can accumulate the intergenerational experience often called culture; and it is also why it is absurd to oppose technics to culture: technics is the condition of culture insofar as it permits transmission. By contrast, there is an epoch of technics, called technology; it is our epoch, when culture enters into crisis, precisely because it becomes industrial and, as such, finds itself submitted to imperatives of market calculation. (Stiegler 2004b: 59–60)
While Stiegler’s analysis of the epoch of technology is rooted in his analysis of technics as epiphylogenetic memory, it focuses on mnemotechnics, and, more precisely, on mnemotechnologies, meaning technologies specifically intended to exteriorize human memory. (To illustrate the specificity of mnemotechnics/ mnemotechnology, Stiegler compares the flint tool of the Neolithic with the recording technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: although the former is not designed as a storage mechanism, it materializes cultural knowledge in a form that can be passed on; the latter, by contrast, are designed precisely to store and transmit human memory.)
Stiegler’s analysis of mnemotechnics/mnemotechnology, for instance in the first chapter of Symbolic Misery, Volume 1, draws on his earlier account of tertiary memory as the basis for time consciousness, but he moves it in a slightly different direction. The earlier account culminated, in Technics and Time, 3, with a criticism of the Kantian schematism that forms the basis for Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s blistering indictment of the culture industry; Stiegler’s focus there was on the hyperindustrialization of consciousness wrought by contemporary media industries. In his more recent writings, by contrast, Stiegler focuses on the proliferation of “symbolic misery” that results from the “proletarianization” of the consumer; here it is not simply temporal disaffection but symbolic destitution that becomes the problem.
This difference marks a shift in emphasis that is not without significance for Stiegler’s recent turn to various forms of political engagement: in the writing from Phase 2, Stiegler accords the subject a depth and complexity, albeit largely as the subject of proletarianization, that was almost wholly absent in the earlier work. Thus, in the place of the purely passive subject of the culture industry’s schematism, which submitted countless indistinct consciousnesses to the same hypersynchronization, Stiegler now conceptualizes the subject as suffering a destitution of its symbolic dimension and, on the flip side, as holding the potential to restore this dimension, or at least to participate in such restoration. This shift is entirely fitting— and I would add, quite fruitful—given Stiegler’s career-long commitment to affirming the ab-original operation of technics in conditioning human becoming and culture.
Not only does this commitment differentiate Stiegler’s position from that of Adorno and Horkheimer (since technics, for Stiegler, does not— cannot—dehumanize the human), but it also makes clear that whatever solution might be found for the symbolic destitution Stiegler discovers in contemporary mnemotechnological culture cannot be a solution that simply turns against or away from technics. Rather, any viable solution must seek to deploy technics (that is, the mnemotechnologies of our technological epoch) differently, toward alternate ends. This insight provides the core of Stiegler’s conceptualization of the pharmakon and his development of a pharmacology of technics, the mantra of which is that only mnemotechnologies can solve the woes they themselves have wrought.
Stiegler defines symbolic misery as “the loss of individuation that results from the loss of participation in the production of symbols” (2004a: 33). In an analysis that exemplifies the just-mentioned shift in his treatment of the subject, Stiegler attributes this loss of individuation to the asymmetry introduced by capitalism in the age of analog recording technologies. In contrast to textual technologies that facilitate the “reversibility of the positions of reader and writer” and promote “communitization [communautisation],” analog mnemotechnologies drive a wedge between producer and consumer: “The sudden asymmetry introduced by analog mnemotechnologies breaks this horizon of literal tertiary retentions that carry the promise of a communitization by substituting for the isonomy among citizens (their equality before the law, the juridical and political name for the said communitization) an inequality between producers and consumers that stems from the new division of labor and of social roles enacted by the deployment of machinism. This symbolic inequality is at least as serious as the economic inequality that it complements: it rips individuals away from their time, which is to say, from themselves” (Stiegler 2004b: 90).
Stiegler’s analysis of this inequality marks his scaled-up commitment to the project of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, whose account of individuation at a host of levels—biological, psychic, collective, and technical—forms the theoretical basis for Phase 2 of Stiegler’s diagnosis of the coevolution of the human and technics in the industrial, which is to say, mnemotechnological, age.2 Together with the Freudian account of libidinal economy (of which more below), Simondon’s complex notion of individuation comes to displace (though only partially, as we’ll see) the Husserlian account of time consciousness as the philosophical investment central to this second phase of Stiegler’s career trajectory. Whereas Husserl’s account correlates with a passive subject suffering from industrial hypersynchronization, Simondon’s account offers a comprehensive excavation of the always ongoing process of individuation that, once correlated with its technical condition (what Stiegler will call “technical individuation”), furnishes a rich ground on which to theorize the phenomenon of symbolic misery.
The proximate focus of Stiegler’s scaled-up commitment to Simondon is the latter’s analysis of “proletarianization.” In his On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon demonstrates how industrialization—the advent of the machine tool—leads to a loss of individuation on the part of the industrial worker: as the latter increasingly becomes removed from the process of manufacture and relegated to the role of supervising machines, the value of skill is diminished along with the capacity to differentiate skilled work from unskilled work. What results is a general “proletarianization” of the worker. In his effort to update Simondon’s account for an analysis of mnemotechnological capitalism, Stiegler substitutes the consumer for the worker, and argues that the asymmetry between producer and consumer leads to a general “proletarianization” of the consumer:
Simondon demonstrated that the appearance of the machine tool provoked what he called a loss of individuation of the worker, who was deprived of his knowledge and reduced to the condition of pure servant of the machine. Insofar as it exteriorized this knowledge, the machine becomes the “technical individual” itself, in the place of the worker. . . . With analog technologies of temporal objects, a new loss of individuation is produced: a loss that deprives consciousnesses of their diachronicity, which is to say, of their singularity. (90– 91)