Technological Determinism, Control, and Education: Neil Postman and Bernard Stiegler

Upon re-reading Neil Postman's Technopology: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, I found many parallels to calls from Bernard Stiegler. I am still unsure whether this should trouble me. Stiegler's detailed philosophical reading of Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida is surely not for nought. However, it may be worthwhile to look at the difference between Postman and Stiegler.

The issue here is one of control. The question concerning technology either revolves around technology's "good" or "badness" or "neutrality," or, alternately, our ability to control it. I would like to argue here that Stiegler's "politics of memory" does not imply that we can control technology or that we can slow the process down (such as Virilio, who Stiegler uses generously in TT2), but that we can engage with it. Postman, in contrast, seems to suggest that we can control technology, even though he offers many examples of how technology's effects cannot be controlled or sometimes even predicted.

For Postman, the question of any new technology, is to ask what it may undo rather than what it can do (Postman 5). This already sets up his narrative as one characterized by nostalgia, as Sid Dobrin pointed out to me yesterday. Still, Postman recognizes, as does Stiegler that technology is never "neutral" because there is no technology "in itself." Instead, technology always enters into a particular situation and as such is pharmacological.

Postman misses this pharmacological aspect of technology; instead, he frames it as if technology has a telos: "once a technology is admitted; it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do" (Postman 7). He seems to see the technology as entering society as if from an alien force. That is, at one point, for Postman, technologies did not "attack" "the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced" (23). Postman seems unaware that (at least this is Stiegler's argument) that technics came first, and constituted the very possibility of culture in the first place. But once again, it is hard to disagree with statements such as the following:

embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. (Postman 13). 

Both Postman and Stiegler are concerned with how technologies alter education. Postman's main concern seems to be the television, a technology important to Stiegler as well ("Telecracy against Democracy"), but also the computer. Postman's views of the possibilities inherent in the computer are dated, as he argues that computers carry a banner of "private learning," "individual problem-solving." In his defense, Postman's book is pre-social network. Thus, later in this book, he characterizes computers as mainly calculating devices in the service of "Technopoly."

For Postman, the ideal time to live was not what he calls "tool using cultures" nor our contemporary moment, but what he calls a "technocracy," which emerged in the 19th century with the industrial revolution: Following Marx, he acknowledges alienation and poor work conditions, but he seems to think that back then we were more conscious of  them as evil things that must be eradicated. This is why one can call his orientation rather nostalgic compared to Stiegler (although Stiegler might be nostalgic for something else: the family? I need to read Taking Care). Postman writes,

And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated [. . .] The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation for the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy. (44)

Technocracy also gave us "political and religious freedom," the idea of "progress." Postman thus concludes that "technocracy will not overwhelm us" (44-45). Technocracy does not render religion, for instance, totally ineffectual: "there still existed holy men and the concept of sin" (45).

This seems about as far away from Stiegler as one can possibly get. However, Stiegler too uses the word "spirit" as a positive term. The difference, one might argue, is that for Stiegler "spirit" must also be tied to a Freudian libidinal economy and the concept of mass affect. We get the sense that Stiegler does not long for a time when religion told us what to do; rather, much like Greg Ulmer, aesthetics and art -- various compositions -- should become an integrative paradigm. More on this later.

Returning to Postman, he sees an insidious transition between his beloved technocracy and Technopoloy. Technopology is "totalitarian technocracy" (48). Postman defines Technopoly's "thought world" via Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management:

The beliefs that the primary, if not the only goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that inf act human jdugment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.(51)

 From here, Postman laments the proliferation of information without any guiding structure (for instance, the schools). I do not think that Stiegler necessarily would disagree with this diagnosis. Indeed, this is not a far cry from Stiegler's claim in Decadence of Industrial Democracies:

the reduction of trust (and of time, that is, of belief in the future) to pure calculation, which would be capable of therefore eliminating anything incalculable, is what radically destroys all trust, because it destroys all possibility of believing: all the possibility of believing in the indetermination of the future, of the future as indeterminate and in this indetermination as chance, an opening to the future as to its improbability, that is, to the future as irreducibly singular. (45) 

Ironically, for all of his laments against calculability, if we are to believe Postman, the goal is to try and predict the future (to calculate it) and we do this by paying attention to the "telos" of technology. Ignoring Derrida's important argument that the condition for the possibility of the incalculable is also calculation, the machinic, repetition, etc. Postman condemns calculation tout-court, seeing in the concept of calculation "numerical measurement." This is the type of calculation, indeed, that Derrida or Deleuze (or maybe Stiegler) might call a "bad repetition." The repetition that does not repeat in a singular way.

Still, its notable that the gist of both thinkers map onto one another. Stiegler, like Postman, even points back toward religion as the force that once maintained those "consistencies" (infinitized tendencies that do not strictly exist -- for more on this, see Stiegler's new book, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology).

Postman increasingly fears the autonomy of technology and technique. He seems to believe that technology can once again be subject to our control. The problem, he argues, is that we have surrendered that control to "management" and to an autonomy of techniques that have become naturalized in the belief that these technical solutions can solve our problems for us. Once again, I do not think that Stiegler is in disagreement. However, his major point is not that "we" as human beings should take back control from the autonomous machines, but that we must participate in the constitution of culture through technical objects. Without this political-cultural-economic participation, the consumer remains alienated. Furthermore, Stiegler knows there is no unified "we" as a starting point, but, following Simondon, that it is through this participation that "we" emerges.

Postman uses stronger language: "And so it is necessary to understand where our techniques come from and what they are good for; we must make them visible so that they may be restored to our sovereignty" (143). The "our" he is referring to, I think, is citizens as opposed to so called "experts."

Who are these experts? Scientists. Yes, indeed, apropos of recent debates between Stephone Pinker and Leon Wielselter, Postman is concerned with what he calls "scientism." Scientism is characterized by three principles:

1.) Methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior

2.) Social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize humanity on a rational and humane basis.

3.) The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality

(Postman 147)

Scientism, in other words, is the belief that "science" can guide our moral and ethical belief in humanity. Scientism, as Postman suggests and as Nietzsche taught us long ago, is Science as God.

As I've pointed out before, "science" itself is an abstraction. Postman is less concerned with "science" and more with "social sciences" such as psychology and sociology - precisely the kind of "science" practiced by Pinker and co. The problem with Postman's analysis is not that he reveals the quite obvious humanities point about social science (social science tells morality narratives too), but that he seems to think that the "hard" sciences are an autonomous realm of discovery, a la Galileo (science teaches us how the heavens go, not how to go to heaven). But this refuses to acknowledge that the hard sciences, too, are now "technosciences" (and have always been technoscience). Postman writes, "unlike science, social research never discovers anything" (157). To this I say, science does not merely "discover" anything. In Technics and Time 3, Stiegler writes,

Contrary to the ideal of pure, classical scientific constativity, the essence of technology, is in fact always performative. Far from describing what is i.e., the real, technoscientific invention (whose adoption is called  'invention' insofar as it brings to light a novelty that transforms being) is the inscription of a possible that always remains excessive to being, which means to the description of the reality of being. (203-204)

That is, even the narratives and inventions of science are always an instantiation of the possible rather than a discovery of the real. This also should tell us that even though Postman may be correct that the moral directives we discover in "social science" research can also be discerned and invented by the humanities, that the humanities does not have some sort of monopoly on meaning -- just that we don't do all the bullshit that gets us to such obvious conclusions (that make the conclusions more "factual" or "scientific").

What Stiegler is really calling for is for politics. Hard science, natural science -- neither is isolated from politics, as Bruno Latour shows so convincingly throughout his entire career.

The Great Symbol Drain and The Loving Resistance Fighter: What is to be done?

Postman argues that our symbols are being drained of their meaning, mostly through their overuse and abuse. In a forthcoming article on M.T. Anderson's Feed, the genesis of which can be found here, I argue that this society is so cut off from history that marketing has re-appropriated narratives and symbols almost to no effect. How could the society even understand the reference made to the bible in one of the advertisements if all of their information comes from a constant feed of new information rather than knowledge (a distinction made by Stiegler in his important article "Anamnesis and Hypomnesis"). Furthermore, Stiegler's forthcoming book, Technics and Time 4 is subtitled "Symbols and diabols." It does seem like both Stiegler and Postman are both concerned with the "draining" of the power of certain symbols -- a metaphor that recalls the sapping of the vital bodily fluid, the potency, of any given symbol. My guess is that Stiegler's analysis will be more rigorous than Postman's and at least attempt to take into account Derrida's essays on metaphor. Whereas Postman wishes these symbols still retained their potency, Stiegler's question is which symbols should be selected.

Postman laments advertising and marketing, rather than reading marketing theory in order to gain insight into marketing's function. In this way, he does not practice what he preaches: he does not inquire into the production of marketing ideology, simply asserting that it destroyed our most powerful guiding symbols. Rather than using advertising as a way to make new symbols (as I think Greg Ulmer is arguing for), he decries its irrationality and dishonesty. Although he mentions that marketing is linked to "depth psychology," the intricate history between Freud's nephew, Ed Bernays, and the advertising industry is in no way noted. For that history, we have to turn to Adam Curtis's documentary, Century of the Self.

Where Stiegler speaks of our collection of tertiary retentions, our collective memory inscribed in technical objects, Postman refers to a rather conservative notion of "tradition." He appeals to tradition, against advertising, claiming that advertising has no right to adopt traditional symbols. At his most polemic, he uses an unfortunate metaphor in our contemporary times: "The constraints are so few that we may call this a form of cultural rape, sanctioned by an ideology that gives boundless supremacy to technological progress and is indifferent to the unraveling of tradition" (170). Postman is adamant that we must maintain a distinction between the sacred and profane -- a distinction whose implications for politics has been analyzed throughout the work of Giorgio Agamben.

Furthermore, Postman relies on the concept of "narrative" in a way that completely ignores the postmodern critique of a meta-narrative. Stiegler's "politics of memory" is hardly meant to suggest a unified narrative of history and understanding. Yes, it is an attempt at escaping cultural relativism that emerged from poor readings of postmodern philosophy, but Postman seems unconcerned with idiomatic difference.

We can sense Postman's impending conservatism when he mentions E.D. Hirsch and Alan Bloom. Postman critiques Hirsch's inane idea of "cultural literacy" of an "educated person," but reads Bloom in a favorable light! Postman also writes that we need a "national" (read: American) narrative rather than a transnational narrative. This is again in contrast to Stiegler, who argues for a transnational intellectual community which would be based on criteria. It is this latter aspect (criteria) that something like "facebook" does not allow us to do. Facebook does not allow the users to constantly interrogate and adjust the criteria of their organization. Instead, the changes in facebook are imposed from without. How many of us have said at one point or another, "Oh, look what Zuckerberg did to my facebook? A timeline? Oh, that's cute. A newsfeed? Oh shit, this is gonna suck." Facebook has evolved, but not through the participation and recommendations of its users who are barred from knowing the reasons for the interfaces transformations.

Despite Postman's more blatant conservatism and rhetoric -- and the lack of nuance in his argument-- both Postman and Stiegler arrive at similar educational imperatives. This begins with both arguing that central to our future is the future of our educational institutions. Both ask: What are our educational institutions for?

In an interview with Marcel O'Gorman, Stiegler says,

It's very important to study how maps are created. This is not taught in school, because we only teach the end results. We don't teach the process of the production of knowledge. It's a mistake. [. . .] We believe its necessary to revist the history of the construction of occidental knowledge, integrating these new technologies not just as a means of transmitting knowledge, as both objects to be explored and instruments for exploration. (470)

In Technopoly, Postman explains that we should hold

to the idea that to become educated means to become aware of the origins and growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced; to learn how to participate, even if as a listener. (188)

But the problem, and the crucial difference, between Postman and Stiegler is that the former believes "the structure of the subject-matter curriculum that exists in most schools at present is entirely usable" (188). For Postman, its a question of making these subjects coherent, "a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness" of what they learn. This course of action, I think, describes the ideal of something like my own public liberal arts institution's goal. For Postman it's about understanding the past; for Stiegler, its a question of constantly (re)making the past and present in preparation for the indeterminate future.

Stiegler is making new institutions whereas Postman wants reform. Postman also clearly prefers "classical" art to our mere entertainment. He writes, "the schools must make available the products of classical art forms precisely because they are not so available and because they demand a different order of sensibility and response" (197).

This is suspicious and indicates Postman's implicit iconoclasm. Against "images," he presents us with "ideas" and classical art that demand a different sensibility. These artworks, however, do not demand a different sensibility "in themselves," but because they were from a different time period. I am not against teaching art from the past; however, art history and education cannot simply be, as Jack Stenner says referring to one of his students, "pictures of jesus." Its not the art of the past, but the art of the present --including the mass media -- that may be useful to bring students into the importance of symbols and what makes life worth living. This is Greg Ulmer's project and, I would like to believe, Stiegler is following suit.

But aside from the many problems with Postman's analysis, I generally agree with him that our education should be more focused on the humanities and that "technopoly" has sacrificed some of what makes our life meaning for the sake of efficiency and meaningless calculation and information. However, whereas Postman makes this an almost moral crusade, I prefer to frame the problem in terms of an intergenerational "politics of memory" and the processes of collective individuation via Stiegler and Simondon. Postman's "we" is an ideal we, a static we that does not attend to tendencies and desire.

For Stiegler, we may not be able to predict and control technologies, to weild it as sovereign subjects, but we can respond to it and hopefully invent not only new ways of "using" it, but inventing new technologies that can herald a new apparatus. Ulmer calls our current apparatus: electracy.

Responding to Richard Beardsworth's Response to Bernard Stiegler

In his article, "Technology and Politics: A Response to Bernard Stiegler," Richard Beardsworth (author of Derrida and the Political) argues that Stiegler's work suffers from a 'technological determinism." While he praises Stiegler's political engagement and his brilliant re-reading of Husserl through Derrida, he argues that Stiegler does not take into account the many "non-technological" details and distinctions in our current economic. This leads Stiegler to a too bleak view of the possibilities inherent in capitalism and levels the multitude of affects available in contemporary society.

I find Beardsworth's critique to be very odd, since it seems that in his most recent work, Stiegler is, if not optimistic, at least offers contemporary technologies (produced by capitalism) as a way out of what Stiegler calls a "generalized proletarianism." Beardsworth point out that Stiegler has shifted Marx's alienation from the "producer" to the "consumer." While he doesn't quite say that this move is "illegitimate" he approaches it when he calls Stiegler's conception of our contemporary condition as "too Greek." Here, Beardsworth is referring to Stiegler's return to Plato's concern with the play of hypomnesis and anamnesis.

Surprisingly, Beardsworth relies on a "classical" reading of the modern economy, implicitly accepting the narrative that the the economy is divorced from social whole. He accepts as a matter of course that the economy, via modernization, is separate from the social, which is not the case in Greek society. For Beardsworth, there is no escape from capital as our governing logic. The best we can do, then, is to find "the right strategies to tame the excesses of global capitalism" (188). He puts it succinctly on the next page:

 "Since there is no systemic alternative to capitalism at this moment in history, the question of political economy is one of whether effective regulation of capitalism is possible or not for the world as a whole" (189). 

To be fair, Beardsworth makes a good point that capital is global, and Stiegler does seem to suggest at times that, for instance, Europe might lead the way in this new "politics of memory." However, in a recent talk, Stiegler argues that we need a global network of intellectuals committed to research. Whether this includes economists, strictly dealing with the global economy of capital, is an open question, but one may speculate that this must be the case. It's also questionable if the goal for Stiegler is the eradication of or an alternative to capitalism. Surely, if it is an "alternative" to capitalism, it is one that comes through capitalism and the technological affordances made possible by its system.

But for Beardsworth, it is global capitalism as a system, one that needs to be analyzed on a particular and empirical level, that alienates us from forming a "we" rather than the problem of collective knowledge. I really don't know how to argue against this point, except that Beardsworth only really seems to suggest that in addition to Stiegler's call for a pharmacological politics of memory, political-economic critique should go on as usual. His example, for instance, is the regulation of offshore capital.

But then, ironically, is not Beardsworth offering a "technical" solution to a very "cultural" problem , one that is constituted by our originary technicity? That is, doesn't Beardsworth suggest here that it is not a philosophical problem of the "waning of affect," but that we should simply "regulate" and try and control, to reign in the effects of capitalism (c.f. Jameson on affect)? While this "devils in the details" approach certainly allows us to move forward "progressively" is this enough? Furthermore, what would the role of the academy, the arts, and the Humanities be for such a solution? Is Beardsworth really suggesting that humanities scholars have little to contribute except "empirical" critiques of global capital, which will ultimately read to anyone outside English and philosophy departments as silly and insufficiently knowledgable?

Stiegler's attentiveness to "psychopower" and the ways in which particular technologies (for instance, marketing, which we will return to when we get to Postman) are used to control us indicates that far from making "generalized" claims without "empirical" evidence, Stiegler is very interested in using the insights of scientific research to his benefit. The point remains though: Stiegler does not speak of the specificity of the economic system (if indeed it is autonomous from 'the social').

Following the narrative of Beardsworth's article, I turn now to Stiegler's transformation of Freud. Acknowledging that Stiegler's reading of Freud is imaginative and "dynamic," Beardsworth essentially argues that this "technological" reading of the libidinal economy denies "the specific autonomy" of the domain under question. This domain? The autonomy of the depth-psychological.

This is a strange turn -- the autonomy of the depth psychological? Stiegler's point, following many recent scholars, is the that "brain" or even the conscious/unconscious is not merely located in our heads, but distributed in our environment, as it always has been, through hypomnesis. How, one might ask, can we talk about the autonomy of the depth psychological? Beardsworth here seems to accept the idea that neuroscience is the final word on what he calls the "mind-body" complex. What we are seeing now, however, is that some neuroscientists are saying, essentially, Spinoza was right! (Damasio). Beardsworth clearly doesn't accept the radical re-reading of technics, as he calls technology a mere "background condition" for the whole "psychic apparatus" (is not the 'psychic apparatus' itself a distributed technology?). Instead of a close reading of Stiegler's adoption of Freudian concepts, Beardsworth returns to Freud's concepts in order to, essentially, make the same point as Stiegler will have made:

One must, however, wait to see what new forms of parenthood adopt the hyperindustrial support and what new forms of sublimation will come to structure the coming generations' sense of conscience. These new forms may be weaker than either traditional or modern forms of close social bond [. . .] I am arguing that we cannot know at this very early stage of our hyperindustrial age, although Stiegler is nevertheless right to call for critical synthesis. The political adoption of the hyperindustrial support will take time--as did monotheism to adopt non-orthographic writing and the social contract to adopt the alphabetical word. (195) 

I do not think Stiegler thinks that such adoption comes automatically or that it won't take time. As he says in another place, the pharmakon always enters as a poison, not a cure. However, the poison is the condition for the possibility of the cure, as it is only by poisoning (the operation of deconstruction) that the possibility of the 'new' arrives. So I have to disagree with Beardsworth that for Stiegler the pharmakon represents an "ambivalence" rather than an "aporia" (as it does in Derrida) because its not that its either/or, but that the pharmakon is both/and -- and this is necessary for the operation of pharmacology. Thus, although Beardsworth is right that Stiegler probably shows a little too conservative when he speaks of generations "losing" their superego, as if there once was one, in Taking Care, I do not think they are that far apart in their position regarding the libidinal economy.

****side note**** -- Although in a recent interview Stiegler has promised us a more thorough engagement with Freud and Lacan in volume 5 of Technics and Time, it is worth noting how little Lacanians have attempted a critique/reading of Stiegler. Is it possible that this "superego" is something very close to the ego-ideal, or would it be more akin to Lacan's "Name of the Father" (the symbolic)?

Furthermore, Beardsworth seems unaware (and perhaps these articles were not published at the time of writing) that Stiegler sees a lot of potential in internet technologies, especially since we now have the possibility of producing meta-data as individual citizens. Beardsworth writes, "the internet is already creative politically. Education must certainly help to supplement this emerging creativity with the art of judgment" (195).

Me lecturing on Stiegler. Photo courtesy of Juan Griego

Ecology and the Environmental Humanities @ Rice University -- A reflection

Coming soon!

Memory, Technology, and Biology in M.T. Anderson's Feed

"Look at us! You don't have the feed! You are the feed! You're feed! You're being eaten! You're raised for food! Look at what you've made yourselves! -- Feed, pg 202

M.T. Anderson wrote his novel Feed in 2001 and published in 2002, but it was recently republished in a 2012 edition. I initially thought it was just recently written and even after reading the text I thought "How relevant!" This might not be the first science fiction novel to explore the idea that the internet is in our brains, but it does so with an awareness of how that might affect our biological being in a very visceral, fleshy way that I don't remember even Delaney's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand exploring (despite the fact that the book explores the problem of desire).

Anderson writes in his postscript to the 2012 edition that he didn't set out to "predict future tech" but to think "about the cultural conditions as they already were then." He was less concerned about the technologies themselves than how they were used by commercial forces, who of course will be the ones to control these technologies. Perhaps more importantly, he notes that we are less and less sure of how the technologies got to where they are (and thus who controls them): " As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder for any of us to keep track of how things were made and how they got to us. Yet at the same time, whenever we buy something, we're also putting a 'yea' vote for the system that put it together. We're responsible for a world we don't understand."

Personal Advertising

Indeed, our advertisements, even though they are not implanted within our skull, structure, predict, and form our desires in a FEEDback loop of information. Instead of watching TV on a separate device, TV can be viewed post-air time on sites like HULU that will give you a "choice" of which Ad you would like to view (usually for the same product) as well as containing a button in the upper right hand corner that asks "Is this ad relevant to you?" Based on our purchases (and moreover even our VIEWS!) on Amazon.com and other sites, the site will then recommend other things for you to buy, personalizing the range of your purchases.
The same thing happens in Feed to a more extreme degree because the person guiding  purchases is in your head and can track what you look at in a physical mall or what you order through your feed in your head. The narrator describes the power of the Feed in the following passage:

It knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. It can tell you how to get them, and help you make buying decisions that are hard. Everything we think and feel is taken in by the corporations, mainly by data ones like Feedlink and OnFeed and American Feedware, and they make a special profile, one that's keyed just to you, and then they give it to their branch companies, or other companies buy them, and they can get to know what it is we need, so all you have to do is want something and there is a chance it will be yours. (48)

I can't help but recall the Prilosec OTC commercial with America's favorite dumbass. Larry the Cable Guy:  "Cuz this is America. We don't make just things you want. We make things you didn't even KNOW you wanted!"

The Feed is literally an organ, an integral part of your body: "Before that, computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe" (47). Electric media, in this sense, are less an extension of the body as McCluhan argues, but rather an incorporation, an organ that infiltrates and fuses with the brain. The Feed cannot actually be turned off, only disconnected, because, as Violet, one of the main characters point out, "it's tied in everywhere. They said the limbic system, the motor cortex. . .the hippocampus. They listed all this stuff. If the feed fails too severely, it could interfere with basic processes." (171).

This is the other side, the unthought possibility, of the utopic extropianism of thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil in his article "This is your Brain on Neural Implants." Kurzweil imagines a scenario very close to that of the Feed, shorn of its commercial aspects:

You undergo a procedure to replace a very small part of your brain with a nonbiological unit [. . .] As promised-- the procedure works perfectly--certain of your capabilities have improved. (You have a better memory perhaps). 

Perhaps the procedure does go well, but what about continued tech support? Kurzweil is most concerned to allay people's doubts about whether they are still "them," whether they still have a unified and unique identity; what he doesn't consider, is who controls and monitors this wetware? Kurzweil's use of language gives us a clue as to his ignorance of these potential problems: 

We have already largely outsourced our historical, intellectual, social, and personal memories to our devices and the cloud. The devices we interact with to access these memories will become smaller and smaller, making their way into our bodies. It will be a useful place to put them--we won't lose them that way. And in the coming years, we will continue on the path of gradual replacement and augmentation scenario until ultimately most of our thinking be in the cloud. 

 "Outsourcing" is a term we have heard a lot recently, or at least until our own economic crisis has taken front stage, particularly outsourcing jobs. I think it is worthwhile to give an exact definition of what outsourcing is to show how commercial interests always play a role in our outsourcing of memory: 

Outsourcing is the contracting out of a business process, which an organization may have previously performed internally or has a new need for, to an independent organization from which the process is purchased back as a service. (Wikipedia)

So let's think about this for a minute: Our memories, according to Kurzweil, are now outsourced, in the sense that we allow our memories to be systematically organized and controlled by the cloud interface and purchase them back as a service!  Even free programs like Dropbox only gives you so much memory space until you either pay them or sign up for something else. Even if we don't "pay" them actual money, it has now been made abundantly clear that the companies that produce services that "store" your memories are also using them for their ends. Just recently, Instagram has admitted that their service agreement allows them to use your photographs for advertisements. Although they just as quickly denied it and repealed their change to privacy policy. Still, we all know that Facebook is becoming more and more commercialized with their "promote" function and Facebook uses our information to advertise to us. Indeed, the "newsFEED" is not only loaded with friendly updates, but also notifications (that I have to believe are false) that so an so "likes Budweiser" or whatever company they decide to notify. In other words, Kurzweil's right that we have already outsourced our memories to the internet Cloud, but we still have private memories that are not uploaded, memories attached to sensation and perception that we can sometimes recall or set off with a smell, taste, or touch. These memories are still "ours" and a deep part of our being. 

The Tragedy of Violet

But what if those memories were outsourced, or tied into something that is controlled by a corporation whose sole purpose is profitable investments? This is where the narrative of Feed needs to be introduced. One could say that Feed has one sole narrator, Titus, who is a typical college teen in this near future society, but this would inaccurate. Why? Because the feed punctures the narration with its indirect discourse: snippets of advertisements, presidential speeches, and hacking messages pepper the text. The indirect discourse may be the most powerful and most challenging aspect of Feed for younger readers, but it also illustrates that Titus and his friends are conduits for the feed, full of multiple voices, but ultimately the voice commands them to do only one thing: consume. 

The story begins on the Moon, where bored teens travel to get fucked up either by drinking or by a kind of electrical scrambling of the brains they call "in mal" ("mal" is French for "bad" or "evil," but the novel also connects it to the Mall). Titus meets Violet, who is a bit strange to all of them because she uses strange words, like "suppuration," which the rest of the group have to look up on the Feed. I must note that I myself had to look up "suppuration" on my own "external" feed (google), finding that it meant "the formation or discharge of pus."  While dancing at a club, a "hacker" touches Titus, his friends, and Violet and all of them begin to broadcast the hacker's message: 

We enter a time of calamity. Blood on the tarmac. Fingers in the juicer. Towers of air frozen in the lunar wastes. Models dead on the runways, with their legs facing backward. Children with smiles that can't be undone. Chicken shall rot in the aisles. See the the pillars fall. (39)

They are taken away to the hospital and are told they must have their feed's turned off. We find out later that they were only "disconnected" since they could not be turned off. Everyone misses their feed because they can no longer silent chat to each other nor do they undergo the constant barrage of advertisements. 

Luckily, in this world, testimony is absolutely reliable in legal matters because they can simply subpoena your memories without having to worry about deterioration or distortion (56). Memories can also be "played" for people, not only as a visual, but a haptic experience. You can experience another person's memories as if you were in their position when the memory happened: like a record of an intimate VR experience. 

Most of the novel centers around the relationship between Titus and Violet, as well as Violet's attempt to resist the logic of the Feed. She decides that she will look at many random objects so that the feed cannot pin her down as a particular type of consumer. Violet clearly explains the mission of the Feed: 

Everything we've grown up with--the stories on the feed, the games, all of that--its all streamlining our personalities so we're easier to sell to. I mean they do these demographic studies that divide everyone into a few personality types, and then you get ads based on what you supposedly like. They try to figure out who you are, and to make you conform to one of their types for easy marketing. It's like a spiral: they keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets so used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything simpler. (95)

Instead, Violet decides to make a screwed customer profile so they cannot pin her down: "I'm not going to let them catalog me. I'm going to become invisible" (97). She starts looking at all sorts of things and realizes that once you look at this other stuff, the stuff that is not dictated by the feed, "you realize this obscure stuff isn't obscure at all. Each thing is like a whole world" (102). By introducing variety into her interests and desires (and not actually buying anything) she becomes invisible because she is an unpredictable customer. As we shall see, her life depends on her worthiness as an investment. 

But there is a price to be paid for being invisible. . .

As the novel progresses, we learn that Violet's feed is actually malfunctioning (probably another reason why Anderson chose the word "mal" for his drug-like state) and causing her to lose feeling and control over her bodily functions. Later, she tells Titus that she has lost one year of her memory. Violet begins to depend on Titus and to have fantasies of them doing all of these things that she wants to do; "normal" things that actually correspond to a typical bourgeois lifestyle, like "I want to rent a hotel room with you [Titus]. As Mister and Missus Smith" (230). Or, alternately, "And I want to go into 'the office' everyday, sometimes even on weekends, and be someone's administrative assistant, and complain to you through the feed while I'm at my desk about my bitch of a manager or my pervert boss" 

When she enrolls Titus to do this, he breaks up with her, unable to handle the idea that she will die soon. He even says, harshly, that he cannot sleep with her because it would be like sleeping with a zombie or a corpse!  Violet also sends Titus her memories because she knows that they cannot be preserved within her, but he simply deletes them, and lies to her, telling her that he never received the memories. 

But one memory he does "try on" and the reader finally understands that ones very life depends on feeding the feed. Violet had petitioned for customer support for her Feed from both Feedtech and other corporations, because her family cannot afford to pay for it. The Feed, according to the novel's world, is not covered by health insurance because despite the fact that it essentially merges with your most basic functions it is not medical! (219). Indeed, the feed is commercial through and through. She receives this devastating message from Feedtech: 

FeedTech and other investors reviewed your purchasing history, and we don't feel that you would be a reliable investment at this time. No one could get a 'handle' on your shopping habits. (246-47)

FeedTech has condemned her to death because she is no longer a worthwhile investment for the company. Instead of people investing in stocks, people become the stocks, they are the commodities, and their memories are merely mined for commercial purposes not only on a cultural, but personal, intimate, level. 

The Erasure of Cultural Memory through the Attenuation of Language and Commodification of History

Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of Feed is the lack of historical memory and context in the novel. History has been appropriated as fashion or been discarded as useless. The language used by the teens contains little concreteness or any allusive or metaphorical significance. Indeed, one thing that attracts Violet to Titus, as she tells him, "You're the only one who uses metaphor" (62). Language has become purely functional; It's no longer "Yeah, man" or "Yeah, girl" but  "yeah, unit" --specificity is erased. The kids favorite TV show is called What! Oh! A Thing! and the parents speak just as inadequately. No one writes anything down anymore, except Violet, and there don't seem to be any books. 

Furthermore, as the case of Violet's father tells us, programming languages that allow the user to control their hardware and software are obsolete. Fortran and BASIC are now the "dead languages" that no one needs anymore. He makes little money and tries to preserve not only programming languages, but the variety of English as well. As Violet tells Titus, "He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony so no one can simplify anything he says" (137). 

There are many allusions that the reader will catch, most importantly, Violet's father's statement that Titus should "hang with the Eloi" (290). When Titus doesn't get it, Violet's father says "Its a reference [. . .] To H.G. Wells' The Time Machine." He just keeps telling Titus to look it up, to read it. He doesn't want the reference to be easily consumed by Titus, as he says, echoing Anderson's statements in the afterword: 

We Americans [. . .] are only interested in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them [. . .] what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away. (290)

The members of this society consume everything. Not just products but history and culture. In one of the most disturbing scenes in the book to me, Titus's friends get out of their "upcar," wearing "torn up clothes" and looking like "they'd been burned up and hit with stuff" (158). When asked about it, they respond that this is the new fashion: Riot Gear: "Its retro. It's beat up to look like one of the twentieth century riots" (158). When Violet asks which one is the "Watts" riot, no one can answer her and they think its weird that she would try and understand the historical precedent. The scene surrounding the encounter  consists of Titus and his friends trying to say  good things about Coke to your friends 1000 times so as to get a free six pack. They repeat so many phrases about Coke, it becomes a magic word that sets off their craving. They think that they are cheating the companies, but they describe it so much that they decide they will go buy a six pack. Historical questions of riots are overridden by the mantra of Coca-Cola consumption. Corporate mentality erases collective memory of history. I may explore this further with references to Steigler's Technics and Time 3 in a later post. 

The erasure of history and the dominance of corporate fashion arrives at a point where people froze in their tracks from Nostalgia Feedback:

People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people thought it was another virus, and they were looking for groups like the Coalition of Pity, but it turned out that it was something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer and closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them.

People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people through it was another virus, and they were looking for groups like the Coalition Party, but it turned out it was due to something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them. (277). 

In a way, what is happening on a larger scale is a less extreme version of Violet's predicament. Violet writes to Titus, "What are we if we don't have a past?" and the irony of this statement is that if you don't have a purchasing history, you are nothing, you aren't a worthwhile investment.

The Nostalgia Feedback is only one negative effect of the Feed on everyone (and not just poor violet, who ends up dying as a result of her malfunctioning feed). The reader suspects that the Feed is also producing lesions on people's bodies as well as causing their hair to fall out. The body is also becoming transparent: "You can see like muscles and tendons and ligaments and stuff through the lesions," one character says of another (199).  The lesions eventually become a fashion statement so that one of Titus' friends actually gets artificial lesions that ooze just like real ones. The Feed has turned disease and detrioration into a fashion statement in order to keep people from realizing what's really happening to their bodies. Violet is the only one who sees the problem: "Shes a monster! A monster covered with cuts! She's a creature!" (202).

In this world, people have become the conduits, no, the servants of the corporations; their memories are only guaranteed by their purchasing histories and while Violet's story is tragic, the novel suggests that the rest of the society is about to collapse as well: "Everything was not always going well, because for most people, our hair fell out and we were bald, and we had less and less skin" (277). Titus even notes that "My mom had lost so much skin you could see her teeth even when her mouth was closed" (283). Truly if the reader pays attention to these little details, the reader might agree with Violet that these people are monsters, monsters created by the corporations that they created. Monsters we are feeding our own flesh to, so they can sell other shit back to us, satisfying our desires that the Feed as already created:

"Soylent Green is People! It's People!" 

Embodying Technesis: Part 1

Chapter 3: From Metaphor to Embodiment: Resisting Technesis

Systems Theory

In a response to a review of the book Embodying Technesis, Mark Hansen agrees that he may have given short shrift to systems theory. His discussion of systems theory, which he sees as a “positivation” of the deconstructive moment takes its departure from William Paulsen’s book that explicitly attempts to show how systems theory can help us to understand literature; from this example, Hansen argues that systems theory is still committed to a “relative exteriority” that ultimately leaves materiality out of the distinction of system and environment. The problem is that Hansen chooses one specific application of systems theory that is committed to explaining how it functions within literature (the domain of representation). Hansen argues that “commitment to representationalism” and the collapsing of literary and techno-scientific systems is the major problem he has with cultural studies’ appropriation of poststructualist theory (and some of the poststructuralist theory itself).

Hansen argues that systems theory actually isolates the system from environment, but Cary Wolfe’s reading of Luhmann argues that it is only through the closure of the system that the system can connect to the environment. He writes,

This self-referential closure, however, does not indicate solipsism, idealism, or isolation but is instead crucial to understanding a fundamental principle of what I call ‘openness from closure’ [. . .] in the self-referential mode of operation, closure is a form of broadening possible environmental contacts; closure increases, by constituting elements more capable of being determined, the complexity of the environment that is possible for the system (Wolfe 15).

Furthermore, the system that makes a distinction is not limited to human beings, but every system that can “make distinctions.” For instance, a cell makes a distinction between what is and what is not itself – creating an outside environment that is not the system. In contrast to the systems theory approach, Hansen, appears to argue that complexity arises autonomously from systems. He writes, “technology also functions as a key agent in the macroevolution, or complexification of the material world. Whereas technologies are always results of culturally determined processes, they are also privileged vehicles of the natural process of material complexification” (56). For Hansen, then, the rule is that technology is increasing material complexification and that this complexity is “negantropic.” In other words, it seems to me that for Hansen there is a “natural” negentropic force of technology that complexifies our world, a force having little to do with a “relative” exteriority. So even if Hansen maintains that this movement is “non-teleological” there still seems to be a telos: the elimination of entropy.

The question is – who is “positivizing” the deconstructive moment? Does Wolfe “positivize” Derrida when he claims,

Derrida and Luhmann converge on the same point from opposite directions; while Derrida emphasizes the final undecidability of any signifying instance, Luhmann stresses that even so systems must decide, they must selectively process the differences between information and utterance if they are to achieve adaptive resonance with their environment. Thus underneath this apparent divergence is a shared emphasis—against ‘relativism’ and ‘anything goes’ reflexivity—on the determinate specificity of the signifying or communicative instance that must be negotiated, which is precisely why in Limited Inc. Derrida rejects the term ‘indeterminacy’ because it occludes an understanding of the determinate oscillation between possibilities (for examples, of meaning, but also of acts). (23)

I would argue that, no, he does not. Indeed, it is important to see that Hansen is the one using thermodynamic theories of entropy/negentropy in service of his ontological claim of material complexification that results in negentropic force. Luhmann’s distinctions go further than the second-order cybernetic theories Hansen depends on that simply distinguish between information/noise (another distinction critiqued by Hansen).

Indeed, I think that it is important to note that Hansen’s more recent essay, “Media Theory” uses systems-theoretical terms to describe the media’s function in connect system and environment:

The medium, we might say, is implicated in living as essentially technical, in what I elsewhere call ‘technical life’; it is the operation of mediation—and perhaps also the support for the always concrete mediation—between a living being and the environment. In this sense, the medium perhaps names the very transduction between the organism and the environment that constitutes life as essentially technical; thus it is nothing less than a medium for the exteriorization of the living, and correlatively, for the selective actualization of the environment, a demarcation of a world, of an existential domain, from the unmarked environment as such” (300, italics mine).

Taking this quotation as a departure point and translating it into the language I used a minute ago, we might say that the medium (which is basically any exteriorizing medium – language, but, moreover, writing (Derrida) or communication (Luhmann)) helps to make a distinction, actualizing a different relation between system and environment.

Furthermore, I think we should read Hansen’s argument about “medium” as corresponding to the position he ascribes to Derrida in what Hansen calls Derrida’s ‘machine reduction of technology’: “Functionally, technology is limited to the role of material support for the ‘possibilities of the trace’; like writing in the restricted sense, it is merely the means by which differance exteriorizes and expresses itself” (84).Replace “differance” with the “exteriorization of the living” as a selective actualization of the environment and I think you will see why his position corresponds with Derrida’s, except that Derrida uses the “machine” metaphor and Hansen calls this “medium” (which is also what systems theory would call it if we remember Gumbrecht’s quote).

Hansen argues that Derrida and others who put technology into discourse, reducing technology to a text-machine, is “a defense against the threat posed by the radical material alterity of technology: by safely situating technology as the ‘other’ within thought, as the machinery of language integral to thought’s genesis, technesis neutralizes a more formidable ‘other’ that threatens the wholesale dissolution of the much cherished closure of representation” (87). Here, I would argue that the idea that human ‘thought’ or ‘writing’ as communication is integral to ourselves, to any human being – that we are always already “inhuman” would be much more terrifying. Thus, I think Hansen in a sense is defending against this position, which he partially amends in his essay “Media Theory.” Following Bernard Stiegler, Hansen argues that the break of the human from everything is else is also the invention of technics (299).  However, Hansen still maintains that, a bit contrary to his Lyotardian position in Embodying Technesis, that “no matter how cognitively sophisticated these technologies become, they operate only through their coupling with the human” (302). In this way, technology is not an “autonomous,” radically exterior force; rather, technology is only “quasi-autonomous”

Metalepsis

The key rhetorical move by which the poststructuralists reduce technology is metalepsis. Hansen defines the term as

a rhetorical figure describing the metonymical substitution of one (figurative) word for another or several others. Most often involving extreme compression and an ensuing obfuscation of the literal sense of the statement, metalepsis also, in certain cases, designates an inversion or conflation of cause and effect (91).

Thus, Hansen argues that metalepsis designates “the triumph of having so stationed technology, in one’s own work, that particular aspects of technology seem to be not preconditions of one’s description, but rather to be caused by one’s own production” (Hansen 92, original italics).

One of the issues with Hansen’s use of the text-machine is that he is reducing the text to an ideal form rather than a material artifact/medium that is one way “writing” happens. He is confusing “text” and “writing” with language, particularly language as representation: “As long as technology is made to derive from language, the postructuralist and constructivist idioms can confidently maintains their enabling conflation of technology’s robust materiality with the relative materiality that it possesses within the theater of representation” (93).

Greek ontology and the Machine Reduction

I hate to sound snotty, but if Derrida has reduced the machine to a textual metaphor, then Hansen has reduced the supplement to only one of its significations. Hansen quotes Aristotle on the meaning of techne, which contains two specific forms of mimesis: that which “carries to its end what physis is incapable of effecting” and the usual sense of “imitation” (Lacou-Labarthe qtd. in Hansen 95). Hansen argues that Derrida’s description of the supplement “could well be a gloss on Aristotle’s passage: “The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It is thus that art, techne, image, representation, convention etc. come as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire cumulating function” (Derrida qtd. in Hansen 95). Then Hansen moves on to say that in this form, the supplement, “retains a basic fidelity to Aristotelian techne” (95).

First, we must contextualize the passage that Hansen tears out of Derrida. The passage stems from the section From/Of Blindness to the Supplement, a section that discusses the function of the supplement in the text of Rousseau. Derrida says many times surrounding this passage quoted from Hansen that he is speaking about the supplement “in the text of Rousseau” (although, it might be worth pointing out that in “Typewriter Ribbon,” Derrida says that in de Man, the text of Rousseau becomes “exemplary of the text in general”)  It is extremely important to the rest of his argument to read what Hansen did not quote. Directly before the passage, Derrida writes,“For the concept of the supplement—which here determines that of the representative image—harbors within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange and as necessary” (144).

So, we already know that Hansen has not quoted the second signification. But even before we get there, directly after the passage Hansen quotes, Derrida writes, “This kind of supplementarity determines in a certain way all the conceptual oppositions which Rousseau inscribes the notion of Nature to the extent that it should be self-sufficient” (145). This part is quoted to show that the type of supplement is articulated within the context of the text of Rousseau specifically regarding nature. But let’s see what the other signification is:

substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. Somewhere something can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy” (145). More importantly, the next paragraph states, “this second signification of the supplement cannot be separated from the first [. . .] But their common function is shown in this: whether it adds or substitutes itself, the supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it” (145).

Although I am not quite sure what this means, the question is whether or not Hansen can really claim that Derrida’s notion of the supplement is a “gloss” on Aristotle’s concept of “techne” if he erases the context of the passage (Rousseau) and the second signification of the supplement. I think we may find that Derrida does not recuperate the supplement into the domain of thought, as Hansen claims.

Luck and the automatic (pgs 98-101) (some notes and Questions)

Chance:

Luck—“restricted domain of events, those capable of choosing” (humans)

Automatic—“to animals other than man, objects” etc.

The Difference:

1.)    luck ‘former’ “are for something in a sense that could be determined by their agent (i.e. according to the category of thought), while the latter are for something in a sense that cannot be so determined, that remains-in itself-indeterminate.

2.)    The final cause of an automatic event is external and thus can only make sense if understood by an intentional agent.

Hansen points out that Aristotle does not hold to the radical exteriority of the automatic and assimilates it into the domain of the mind. The automatic is “para physin in the sense that it cannot be tied down to a purpose immediately graspable by and attributable to an agent of thought or to nature. Its efficiency derives from something purely contingent and external in the subject it qualifies” (100). If we look back to Derrida’s description of the supplement, we see that is much more akin to “the automatic” than to Aristotle’s restricted definition of techne.

Chapter 4: Questioning the Machine Basis of Technology: Heidegger on Techne

In Rutsky’s book, he interprets high-tech as technology that reveals in the mode of poesis; For Heidegger and for Rutsky, poesis, as a revealing that brings-forth, puts us in a positive, “science-fictional” relationship with the future. Rutsky writes at the end of his book,

“These ‘other’ futures cannot be represented through rational analysis and predictions; they can only be imagined through a science-fictional process, an imaginative, aesthetic process that is similar to the bringing-forth that Heidegger saw in the Greek techne” (158).

While Rutsky sees this shift as promising and productive, following Heidegger’s lead, Hansen reads Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” as another symptom of technesis, arguing that “Heidegger’s reduction of technology thus functions to insure the domestication of modern technology within the frame of poiesis” (104).

Hansen first reads technology as an ontic supplement that contributes to our “fallenness” and “inauthentic” existence in idle chat and curiosity. The argument is that basically, technology infiltrates the purity of language: “What cybernetic technologies do is present the being of language as mere words cut off from their connection with a [. . .] ‘context of involvements’. In this sense, what Heidegger says of the typewriter is all the more true of the computer” (109).

Hansen argues that Heidegger only considers technologies which “can be thematized in explicit terms” because these are the only ones that can have a direct impact on our lives. He argues that there are two mediated practices which are left out of this category:

1.       Experiences in which there is no breakdown and hence no motivation to cross from the practical to the theoretical domain.

2.       Experience in which technology’s impulse (because it is molecular and diffuse) isi n pricinpel not recuperable through thematization.

I think we need to explore particularly what number 1 could possibly be referring to in terms of concrete technologies that Hansen seems to be referring to here.

In terms of “Question Concerning Technology,” it seems like Hansen comes to the opposite conclusion of Rutsky; namely, that far from the mode of poiesis being able to engage with high-tech, it actually cannot extend to the question of high-tech: “Whereas poiesis could coherently be applied to the forms of production known to the Greeks (“handcraft manufacture,” “artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery,” and physis) it simply cannot be extended to cover the category of modern production” (115). Instead, Hansen argues that “as long as it comprises a mode of poiesis or the revealing of Being, modern technology, in other words, can distinguished solely through its negativity—the way it obscures the meaning of Being” (118).

Given what we said about Rutsky’s tracing of the development of technologies back to an artisan, a producer – that such an origin of production is rare these days (see I, Pencil) I think we would be more apt to agree with Hansen’s critique rather than Rutsky’s affirmation of the Heideggerian poiesis.

Chapter 5: The Mechanics of Deconstruction: Derrida on De Man, or Poststructuralism in the Age of Cultural Studies

Hansen claims that Derrida effectively preserves the priority of Heideggerian poiesis, claiming that “privileging the trace as the withdrawl of truth, Derrida retains the very same priority of ontology for which Levinas rebukes Heidegger” (124). And again, on the next page: “by taking the being of what is and making it thoroughly dependent on the metaphysics of the text (and thus on the operation of techne), Derrida simply effaces the very category of radical exteriority and, along with it, all traces of materiality outside the space governed by textuality” (125).

“The functional analogy linking text with machine begins to function ontologically—and hence reductively—from the moment when deconstruction generalizes its claims to technology as such, rather than restricting them to technology in its textual form” (128).

“matter” is reduced to playing “the purely abstract role of that which resists idealization” (129)

We should recall Hansen’s understanding of the supplement, as it is crucial to his argument in this chapter on Derrida as well. Hansen writes, “technology simply supplements thought ith a material basis without which it could not function” and also, on the opposite page, “technology is made wholly coequivalent with the supplement and thus loses its truly radical force as a material obstacle to the onto-phenomenological movement of thought, a threat to thinking itself” (133). I have a hard time thinking how technology isn’t a threat to thinking itself while at the same time being the enabling condition for thought. It’s a threat to the purity of thought or to thought without any mediation – ideal thought.

De Man and Derrida’s ‘materiality’ of the text

Hansen argues that Derrida “ignores de Man’s introduction of the ‘material’—a category, I suggest, holds the relation of radical exteriority with respect to phenomenological thought or consciousness [Erinnerung]” (read pgs 138-`139 for a general summary of Hansen’s argument)

In Psyche: Inventions of the Other 1 Derrida is adamant that de Man’s notion of textual “materiality” is not matter. I will quote a few passages from the essay,  “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (within such limits),” which we would do well to read closely:

The materiality in question—is not a thing; it is not something (sensible or intelligible); it is not even the matter of a body [. . .] this nothing therefore operates, it forces, but as a force of resistance. It resists both beautiful form and matter as substantial and organic totality. This is one of the reasons that de Man never says, it seems to me, matter, but materiality [. . .] I would say that it is a materiality without matter (350)

This force of resistance without material substance derives from the dissociative and inorganic, disorganizing, disarticulating, and even disseminal power that de Man attributes to the letter “ (351)

First of all, the inscription of a textual event—and this will later be one of the traits of the materiality of matter—is a machine like deconstruction of the body proper. This is why I said, using a formulation that is not de Man’s, that materiality becomes a very useful generic name for all that resists appropriation (353).

The materiality of this event as a textual event is what is or makes itself independent of any subject or any desire (357).

On the one hand, we can read these statements as Hansen would – as a reduction of robust materiality into the relative exteriority of the text. However, might we also consider that these passages mean that the world is not a text in the sense that everything is “textualized” (turned into and object for literary hermeneutics). Indeed, in these above formulations, the textual event/world is not appropriable, which means that is not something that is simply “given to thinking.” Or at least, it cannot be subsumed and appropriated by the thinking subject.  Let us now look at how Derrida defines the text in his work:

In his essay “But beyond. . .,” Derrida writes that the text is,

always a field of forces: heterogeneous, differential, open, and so on . . .[Deconstructive readings and writings] are not simply analyses of discourses, such as, for example, the one you propose. They are also effective or active (as one says) interventions, in particular political and institutional interventions that transform contexts without limiting themselves to theoretical or constative utterances even though they must produce such utterances (168).

So the text is metaphorically described as a machine in some essays, but it is also described in other ways. Perhaps we can take this as a sign that Derrida finds the machinic metaphor convenient to describe the disarticulation of the text, but does not restrict technology (in the more “robust material” sense to an object (a text) for thinking. Furthermore, it’s not as though Derrida is unaware of the actual effects of material technology on someone, for instance, being filmed (see my last blog post on Echographies of Television).

Ch. 6: Psyche and Metaphor: Derrida’s Freud

“Through his proposed generalization, technology remains, in its essence, a means of archivation, of information storage; only now, in the postFreudian era, it finds itself spread over global dimensions. Stripped of all hints of autonomy, of a proper materiality, technology—as the materialization of the world’s resemblance to memory—is made to fit within a teleological history of the psyche and its ontogenetic production of thought and memory. Integrated into the textually given play of the world, technology comprises nothing more than a support for the Being-in-the-world of the psyche.” (147)

The question here is whether or not there is something wrong with conceiving of technology as forms of memory; specifically, exteriorizations of memory, as Stiegler puts it, tertiary retentions. In Katherine Hayles essay “Tech-TOC,” she argues that Stiegler’s privileging of tertiary retentions is problematic:

the biological capacity for memory (which can be seen as an evolutionary adaptation to carry the past into the present) is exteriorized, creating the possibility, through technics, for a person to experience through complex temporality something that never was experienced as a first-hand event, a possibility that Stiegler calls tertiary retention. This example, which Stiegler develops at length and to which he gives theoretical priority, should not cause us to lose sight of the more general proposition: that all technics imply, instantiate, and evolve through complex temporalities[JR1] . 

It seems that in Hansen’s “Media Theory,” he is following Stiegler, arguing that there is an “essential correlation of storage with life” (301). Even though he seems to follow Stiegler, Hansen seems less concerned with tertiary retention and more with secondary retention. Hansen writes,

As Stiegler has shown, the contemporary culture industries strive to exercise and maintain a stranglehold on cultural memory (secondary memory) by offering pre-programmed, media artifactual memory objects (tertiary memories) that, because of their seduction and their ubiquity work to erode the role of personal consciousness and to displace lived experience as the basis for secondary memory (304). 

The priority of secondary memory for Hansen is because, continuing his project in Embodying Technesis, he wants to still focus on lived experience. According to Hansen, digital technologies

empower personal secondary memory to reassert some control over the production of presencings [. . .] because they allow personal lived consciousness control over the flux of the media artifact that is its surrogate temporal object, they allow consciousness to live time (at least to some extent) according to its own rhythms. In sum, digital technologies restore some sense of agency that personal lived consciousness has (apparently) lost (304).

Hansen wants to create a “politics of presencing” to…supplement?... Stiegler and Derrida’s “politics of memory,” that both refer to in Echographies of Television.

My next blog post will address the Hansen’s last chapter of Embodying Technesis and the distinction Benjamin makes of different kinds of experience/memory and Stiegler’s reading of tertiary and secondary retentions. Is it plausible to see Stiegler’s tertiary retentions as “voluntary memory”? If so, how would this different from Hansen’s current project of a politics of presencing?

Genetic Code and General Equivalents

In Technics and Time 3, Bernard Stiegler argues that we (and for him, this means the university/educational structure) need to take control of our tertiary retentions, a term he adds to Husserl's primary and secondary retentions. Stiegler spends most of his book moving carefully through Husserl, Heidegger, Kant, and Simondon, but toward the end of the book he looks at a shift in the paradigm of science--from Kantian science to Techno-science; From the "real" to the "possible." His paradigmatic example is biotechnology that makes human beings themselves into a "state of possibles at a given moment of evolution" (Stiegler 202).

Stiegler worries about this externalization because of our inability to control these tertiary retentions. Biotechnology is controlled by industry and market standards rather than thinking through the "best" possiblities of becoming human. Stiegler argues that as our genes become tertiary retentions, that is "manipulable," we create a kind of "human industry" (212). In a way, Stiegler seems to worry about the possibility of a transformation of the human, in a way that post-humanist (or unhumanist) texts like Donna Haraway and Thierry Bardini's Junkware do not. 

In fact, it seems that Bardini is "ahead" of Stiegler on his assessment of the current state of technology. Both Stiegler and Bardini affirm that there is something "new" about our state of affairs, but they disagree what this newness is. 

In order to see where they may differ, we can look at both of their understandings of the "general equivalent." For Stiegler, "digital technology is in fact mutlifunctional in the sense that binary code is the new 'general equivalent' [. . .] This general equivalent produces unprecedented integrations: systematic, subject to the same rules of calculation and control ,the same economic, cultural, and social activities" (216). In other words, for Stiegler, the issue is who controls these tertiary retentions and who selects them? Stiegler is horrified at the idea that these tertiary retentions could organize, control, and reproduce on their own and it is a question of gaining control over these tertiary retentions rather than transforming the logic by which we approach them. He writes, 

systematic control of modes of reproduction and inheritance means that thsi logi can potentially be applied to every area of human life and will constitute many of the new markets of techno-industrial development--the 'new economy'--whose basis will obviously increasing knowledges containing reproductive rights. (Stiegler 223)

Again, Stiegler calls for criteria and control. Bardini explicitly argues that "IT IS NOT ABOUT CONTROL; today's Nexus is beyond control" (205). He claims that his analysis goes beyond, but follows the line of flight of D&G's societies of control to what he calls "genetic capitalism" (25). Genetic capitalism acknowledges taht "genes, cells, and organs are becoming the new commodities, but rather than seek a way to control these tertiary retentions, it may be the "junk" of our genes and cells where we might find "redemption." Junk is "the organizing principle of that which cannot be organized," which may challenge Stiegler's own words of "organized inorganic matter."

Bardini uses the phrase "Junk is. . ." a frustrating amount of times, each time attempting to expand the significance of junk, which he says is the "master trope" of our culture. Junk is neither trash (which is stuff we throw away that is completely useless) nor waste or garbage which "refers to an organic and complementary figure of shit; earth, soil" (Bardini 63). The 'saving power' of junk, for Bardini, is that there is "some affect" in junk and that junk may be something we can 'put to use'. By emphasizing the distinctions among junk, waste, garbage, and trash, Bardini distances himself from Heidegger's concept of "standing reserve." Standing-reserve is a challenging forth from Nature, calling man to organize it into a useful store of energy. Junk is something that has already been "organized" and then discarded--with the idea that it no longer has any use, but might have use someday again. Junkware is the kipple of our culture, to use Philip K. Dick's terms, rather than the organization of nature that creates culture/meaning for man.

Junk will be the origin of Bardini's new ubermensch, which, like Nietzsche's, must be understood as a figure rather than as something that has arrived already. He is careful to say that we are the "ante-posthumans, the not yet radically transformed beings" (154). He claims that we are, "to Homo Nexus what Neanderthal was to us: a bad, fleeting, memory, an afterthought. Our e-toys are his transitional objects" (156).

Indeed, in his cultural diagnosis of current culture, he draws from Stiegler ideas about our dis-affection. Following a quotation from Stiegler, he states "the capacity for reaction is exactly what this particular human being is cruelly lacking" (158). But while Bardini argues the need for feeling--a feeling/affect that junk may be able to provide--Stiegler still wants to argue for criteria and selection. More than Stiegler, at least in TT3, Bardini draws on an economy of desire: "one is afraid to lack the support that absence provides, renew desire, make presence more enjoyable" (164). He argues that we do not fear the posthuman because it might fail or become terrible, but rather than "we fear success [. . .] his coming will be our obsolescence" (164). In this sense, perhaps we can see Stiegler's fears as a symptom of what we might become and that our old way(s) of beings may be replaced with a new prosthetic.

If we follow Bardini, we might say that Stiegler is afraid of the posthuman because of a castration anxiety: "In return of course, one might then feel that the human person, at least symbolically, has been severed of this organ; or, in other words, today's disaffection alludes tot he castration anxiety that we feel with respect to Homo nexus" (165). Are not the prostheses of tertiary retentions, our detachable phalluses that we no longer have control of our own history, our own sense of the human?

Bardini is not unaware of the technoscientific/industrial complex that may 'control' our genetics, but it seems as though he thinks that thinking junkware, rather than rejecting it, is the only way to move forward into what he calls Homo Nexus. He offers a thought experiment: if our culture is 'junk', if our DNA is junk in the sense that "junk is always present potentiality of a renewed function," then these are the consequences and this is the world we have to live in--a world beyond control and calculation (213). And certainly beyond individuals: "no individuals, only individuations" (138).

I'm not quite sure, in the end, what Bardini is calling for, but I find it an interesting counterpoint to the more reserved program of Bernard Stiegler.