brief notes on Bernard Stiegler's theory of "technics"

For me, one of the biggest “aha!” moments in Bernard Stiegler’s mathemagical (for someone not proficient in continental philosophy but very much keyed in to the specificities of modern media and theories thereof, I swear this thing reads like alchemy––in a good way…) Technics and Time 1, the Fault of Epimetheus (1998 [1994]) comes toward the close of the first full chapter titled “Theories of Technical Evolution. After moving through the wildly different (yet excellently synthesized) writings of Bertrand Gille on technical systems, André Leroi-Gourhan on the technological origins of the human, and Gilbert Simondon on autopoietic “concretization” of technical objects, Stiegler moves us into the pressing need for a theory of technics in our present technological moment. After all, the “technics” (an anglicization of the Ancient Greek concept of technê or tekhnê) of contemporary, everyday life seem far removed from the term’s original sense of handicraft, skill, or artisanal invention, a “making” or a “doing” in opposition to the “disinterested understanding” of epistêmê. (Ideally, I will put together a subsequent post tracking some of the shifts in meaning between technê andepistêmê, which tend all too often to stand as anchors in the virulent opposition between theory and practice). Today, we no longer work with tools, per se, but with machines and complex systems. We do not make or invent, but operate (and this goes far beyond some sort of programmer/end-user, mod/newb distinction; rather, it gets at a historical movement from technology and science to technoscience, from invention and discovery to institutionalized research and development).

…the human has no longer the inventive role but that of the operator. If he or she keeps the inventor’s role, it is qua an actor listening to cues from the object itself, reading from the text of matter. To draw further on the metaphor, the actor is not the author—and that is why existing technical objects are never thoroughly concrete; they are never consciously conceived and realized by the human from out of this ‘logic,’ which is strictly speaking empirical, experimental, and in a sense quasi-existential (it is the object’s mode of existence), the sense, namely, that this logic is revealed only in its realization, in the experience of the object itself, or, as it were, on stage, and not at the time of conception.” (75-6)

This gets at the very problem of writing about technological media (Stiegler problematically never mentions “media” save for references to the “mass media”––more on this below): media refer to an in-between substance rather than any particular object or event in itself. This perhaps could explain the fantastic variety of approaches to “media studies” and the great number of academic departments now positioning themselves as the discipline from which so launch a study of (the) media. On what does one’s focus fall in an account of a medium? What is mediated, and how? Rather than focusing on particular objects (gadgets, inventions, etc.) or specific contents (movies, news, undifferentiated data), Stiegler’s account zones in on a sort of performance theory of media, of a becoming-medium in the moment of use (for “medium” is surely what we mean once we speak about the potentialities and anticipations of the technical object rather than its hard material existence––the distension of the gadget in time rather than its silicon actuality). This is what attracts me to the concept of technics as a paradigm of media theory. This is the great virtue of books like Lucy Suchman’s Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (2007 [1987]) which includes transcripts of first-time user interactions with a XEROX machine, complete with typographical annotations to show inflection and a representation of lights and linguistic signals put out by the device. It is probably a safe claim that Stiegler’s theory of technics, the “realization” technical object “in the experience of the object itself,” is indeed a theory of media.

What I just can’t seem to swallow about Stiegler’s account is the sense that during this moment of interaction with the technical object, what Suchman would refer to as the “situated actions” of a user, the specificities of the operator’s interactions, the nature of her selections, and the volition behind them seem to have little presence in Stiegler’s text.

“The maieutic proper to the empiricism of what we are calling the experience of the technical object, which is its functioning, corresponds here as well to a selection of combinations. Operating on a backdrop of chance, the selection follows phyletic lines whose necessity is their horizon, dotted with mutations whose accidental effects become the new functional principles.” (76)

The “selections” made by the operator are seen here as a property of the technical object itself, in its particular configuration of limitations and possibilities, as if this set of limitations and possibilities attenuates in advance the “selections” to be made. Weaving in and out of Simondon’s texts and feeding off of their resonance with biological evolution, Stiegler continues:

“In evolving, the technical object constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or a line, a ‘family’ of which ‘the primitive technical object is the ancestor,’ and this generation is a ‘natural technical evolution.’ … The technical essence is the identity of the lineage, its family resemblance, the specificity of its patrimony, which is the secret of its singular becoming: ‘The technical essence is recognized in the fact that it remains stable through the evolutional lineage, and not only stable, but productive as well of structures and functions by internal development and progressive saturation’” (77).

We see a perverse flip on the horizon here, as if the machine is operating the human, determining in advance the kind and number of selections to be made by virtue of its cold “technical essence.” If the operations of the user are not determining this technical identity, what is? The presence of what Stiegler relegates to the category of “other systems”––economic, linguistic, sociological, educational, political, military, etc.––can perform only an “artificial attenuation” on the “natural evolution” of the technical system. So that when a state power with particular set of economic interests implements protectionist measures to influence the development of a certain technology (as when the Department of Defense announced a $550 million R&D initiative on flat panel television in 1993 to beat Japan to the market––no lie), this stands outside and separate from the “patrimony” of the device. But if this type of attempt to influence the selection of certain technical traits made on the macro-level of economic policy is deemed “artificial,” what makes selection on the level of the individual operator any less so?