1 Originary technicity
Aporias of the origin: Derrida and Stiegler
In the introduction, I briefly touched on a set of ideas that form the core of Stiegler’s philosophy: originary technicity, general organology and the pharmakon. This group of concepts is constantly rearticulated in Stiegler’s critique of hyperindustrial society; each sustains its critical power in relation to the other’s schematization of the dynamics of memory, desire and mimesis that is played out in the technological environment of human society. However, the structure of the argument that Stiegler develops in Technics and Time does, I believe, lend a certain privilege to the idea of originary technicity. It is only insofar as he is able to show that time and history proceed from the co-determination of the human species and its technological supplements that Stiegler’s general organology is able to trace the libidinal dynamics of loss and recuperation that arise with the hyperindustrial organization of society. And so we need to start with the question of the origin of the first hominids, which means examining Stiegler’s reading of Derrida in part one of the first volume of Technics and Time, ‘The Invention of the Human’ (Stiegler, 1998: 21–179).
The essence of Stiegler’s argument is that the emergence of human beings as a distinct species, which he dates from the first known tool users (Zinjanthropus), can be traced to the co-determination of physiological development, cognitive specialization and the use of tools to facilitate the cooperative organization of life. I will come to this argument in a moment. For now it is sufficient to reiterate that, for Stiegler, there is no point in the evolution of the human species from which ‘technics’, conceived as the system of interrelated usages and innovations that arise from the manipulation of objects as tools, is absent. The origin of Homo sapiens lies in the establishment of a reciprocal relationship between technics, as the condition of increased productivity, security and power over nature, and the success of the pre-hominid species from which human beings are descended. What Stiegler refers to as ‘technics’ is woven into the development of humanity; it is the organization of life not just as defensive and productive modes of cooperation, but also as the singular forms of culture and spiritual sensibility that arise from the elevation of human beings beyond a state of mere subsistence. The relationship between ‘the human’ and ‘the technological’ that Stiegler traces throughout his work is, therefore, organological: each of the elements has a relative independence, and so it is only possible to understand their historical relationship through the reciprocal effects that each has upon the other. However, one of the key elements of the originary technicity thesis that Stiegler presents in Technics and Time is that the development of technological programmes constitutes the determining, pre-individual condition of human life and its cultural differentiation (1998: 81). So, in the light of his commitment to deconstruction, and his work with Derrida on the nature of technics, I will begin this chapter with an examination of Stiegler’s relationship to Derrida’s critique of the Western tradition of ontology.
The question concerning technology, or more specifically, the question of the relationship between the human and the technological, the ‘who’ and the ‘what’, cannot be adequately addressed from within the operational discourses that have emerged in technoscientific society. If we are to develop a critical position on this relationship (its history, contemporary effects and future possibilities) we must first attend to the ways in which technics, as the system of tertiary supports for culture and economy, has been conceived in the Western philosophical tradition. In order to do this we need to begin with a discussion of the concept of ontology, or the theory of being, as it has developed within this tradition. There are some crucial principles that we can highlight in order to show how the effects of technology have been marginalized in conventional philosophical discussions of man, ethics, freedom and political sovereignty. First of all, Western metaphysics has tended to demand the establishment of a first principle, the ‘unmoved mover’, whose singular necessity is the foundation from which all other contingencies are derived. Here we might include Plato’s idea of Forms and Pythagoras’s number theory as expressions of the immanent unity of being. Second, this originary being is conceived as possessing a miraculous agency that produces all the differentiations of the world from within itself. And so, for Stiegler, there is a genealogical connection between ‘the One’ that is postulated in Platonic thought, the Judeo-Christian concept of God, and the principles of rational theology developed in Enlightenment philosophy. Third, the act of creation that proceeds from the existence of ‘the One’ is the final reference of all particularity and contingency; it is the point to which we are returned by suitably concentrated analyses of the relationships between different classes of being: the human and the animal, men and women, nature and society. Fourth, the doctrine of ontology includes an ethico-theological designation of existence; its categorization of the world seeks to reflect the immanent unity of the origin and, as such, pursues a hierarchical organization of life based on the relative proximity of particular modes of being to the act of creation. This confluence of formal categorization and practical judgement is played out with absolute precision in Aristotle’s ethics; it is here that the satisfactions of particular individuals (convivial friendship, fulfilling work, familial love) are revealed as relative goods whose substance depends on the activity of reflection carried out by those souls who are able to apprehend the unity of the origin (Aristotle, 1962). Finally, the relationship between the ethical, political and aesthetic forms through which human beings are elevated beyond mere subsistence, and the integrity of the origin, is such that it establishes the latter as the beginning of an ethical life that precedes, both conceptually and historically, the technical supplementation of the human species. The origin, in other words, is unaffected by its technological supplements (Stiegler, 1998: 100–104).
For both Derrida and Stiegler it is the question of the origin that defines Western philosophy; being, God and spirit are, in essence, attempts to designate the totality which is the cause of all differentiation within the world, and which designates the proper relationships between humanity and nature, men and women, and the sacred and the profane. So, if we are to continue to practice philosophy, as we must, this can no longer take the form of seeking the legislative powers of the origin in every expression of difference and contingency. What philosophical critique must do is, first, to reflect on the processes though which the symbolic power of the origin has been undermined by the technological systems of modernity; and second, to examine the relationship between these processes and the nationalisms, fundamentalisms and racisms through which the origin has returned to our disenchanted world. These are the two most urgent questions raised by the evolution of techno-scientific society. For if it is the case that the return of ‘the One’, as the symbolic unity of moral, political and religious experience, has been made practically impossible by the prosthetic transformation of life, then we are faced with the question of how to develop post-ontological models of ethical and political community. In the light of this, I will begin by examining Derrida’s account of ‘the grammé’ as a quasi-transcendental structure that has always haunted the diremption of the origin; it is here that Stiegler identifies the pharmacological effect of technology on the reproduction of ethical life as revealed necessity (Stiegler, 2009a: 90–96).
The concept of the grammé is a central theme that is sustained in the three seminal works through which Derrida launched the project of deconstruction in the mid-1960s: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology. In what follows I will focus on Derrida’s exposition of the relationship between speech and writing in Of Grammatology, simply because it is here that the questions of the presence of the origin and the effects of technological supplementation are discussed in the most detail. Derrida’s Copernican revolution is to argue that the grammé is the condition of ontology; it is what opens the possibility of gathering all of the elements of existence into a hierarchical organization in which ‘the One’ is staged as the immanent unity of everything. As such, it is inseparable from the cognitive, conceptual, juridical and aesthetic signifiers through which totality is actually articulated as totality; it is the originary trace that initiates the diremption of ‘the One’ and its temporal-historical return to itself. Therefore, what Derrida is proposing in Of Grammatology is that the essence of God, or spirit, or being is grammatological, and that as such, the forms of rational sovereignty which they support are co-implicated in the perpetuation of violence (racism, patriarchy, religious sectarianism etc.) and the chance of a democracy to come which this violence makes possible. As Derrida puts it:
To come to recognize … that the sense of being is not a transcendental or trans-epochal signified … but already, in a truly unheard of sense, a determining signifying trace, is to affirm that within the decisive concept of onto-ontological difference, all is not to be thought in one go: entity and being, ontic and ontological, “onto-ontological” are, in an original style, derivative with regard to difference … differentiation by itself would be more originary [than being], but one would no longer be able to call it “origin” or “ground,” those notions belonging essentially to the history of onto-theology, the system functioning as the efficacy of difference. It can, however, be thought of in the closest proximity to itself only on one condition: that one begins by determining it as the onto-ontological difference before erasing that determination.
(1976: 23–24; emphasis in the original)
As such, the origin can only ‘work’ as an origin insofar as it comes to the historical present as a trace that is dispersed into all of the contingencies it is supposed to inhabit as a determining cause and historical telos. So, to put things in terms of the temporal logic through which Derrida sets out to destabilize the presuppositions of political ontology: the origin can only come from the absolute past as a trace which is simultaneously the condition of ethical life (as legality, obedience, submission and legitimate authority) and the possibility of a future which exceeds the sovereign violence of God, spirit or being (Derrida, 1976: 61, 1990: 262–273).
Derrida’s account of the effects of the grammé gives rise to some fundamental questions which I will return to in my exposition of Stiegler’s work on technics. First of all, what exactly is the political gesture of deconstruction? For if it is the case that the quasi-transcendental structures that Derrida identifies have radically destabilized the regime of political sovereignty, what kind of political manifesto is it possible to pursue? Second, given Stiegler’s commitment to Derrida’s style of philosophical critique, how is the question concerning technology related to the concepts of the grammé, trace and arche-writing? Or, to put things slightly differently, how should we conceptualize the power of technological programmes to obscure and degrade the promise of democracy to come that is implicit in the idea of the pre-originary trace? Third, how do Stiegler’s originary technicity thesis, and its attendant ideas of spirit, organology and pharmakon, transform the politics of spirit whose outline is discernible in post-ontological strictures of deconstruction? As we will see, these questions do not submit to one-dimensional answers. They are already being played out across the networked programmes of hyperindustrial society, and so the chapters that follow will try to give a sense of Stiegler’s reworking of the ethical and political demands that are implicit in deconstruction. For the moment, however, we need to examine his inheritance of the concept of technicity from Derrida’s work on the economy of speech and writing (Stiegler, 2013c).
In Of Grammatology, Derrida examines the question of the relationship between human subjectivity and the primordial ‘state of nature’ in his reading of Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on the Origin of Language’. Rousseau’s position is that there is an originary relationship between humanity and nature whose traces are discernible in the ‘natural’ traits of sympathy and fellow feeling, the vestiges of which can still be found in modern human beings. His claim is that before the beginning of history, there was a time in which human beings lived an edenic existence in which the bounty of nature sustained their peaceful, solitary lives without property, industry or technicity. It was here, then, that human nature was originally formed; the experience of unchanging plenty that was bestowed by God is what made human beings essentially peaceful and cooperative. According to Rousseau, the expressive form that arises from this primordial experience is speech; it is the cadence and music of the voice that articulates the sense of originary fellowship that is inscribed by God in the soul of every human being (1988: 49–84). What institutes the beginning of human history as violence, jealousy and war is an unaccountable act of God; the world is knocked off its axis and human existence is subsequently tyrannized by the harshness of the seasons and scarcity of natural resources. It is this exposure to the strictures of life in the post-edenic world that gives rise to the artificiality of writing. Faced with the necessity of organizing themselves into social groups, human beings develop a language in which the purposive articulation of need is the determining factor. And so the language that develops within primitive associations is essentially functional; it is tied to an economy of subsistence whose necessities deprive the voice of its natural music and evocation of human community (Derrida, 1976: 171–192). It is this utilitarian language that prepares the way for writing, because the written word, and the orthographic regime that comes with it, are hypostatizations of the arrested phonemic power of the voice. What follows from this are all of the ills to which human beings have been subject since the loss of their convocative speaking of the voice of nature (ibid.: 167–171). So, once the orthographic regime has established the calculation of surplus and the designation of property rights as the foundation of society, the destructive emotions of jealousy, envy and resentment take hold of the soul and determine the violent course of human history.
Derrida’s analysis of Rousseau’s construction of the relationship between speech, as the primordial expression of human essence, and writing, as the artificial means by which that essence is corrupted, brings us back to the logic of the trace. As we have seen, Derrida’s notion of arche-writing is a quasi-transcendental structure that, along with the grammé, is the condition of the ontological categories through which subjectivity and ethical life have been conceived in Western philosophy. In Of Grammatology, Derrida presents Rousseau’s account of the origin of language as making a false distinction between the plenitude of the voice and the artificiality of writing. The ‘first origin’ of humanity in the edenic world of guiltless satisfaction is mythic, not just in the sense of its being beyond empirical verification, but because the mythos itself depends on the logic of the trace. As self-conscious beings, we can only sense, conceive and imagine through the orthographic devices (of writing) that give us the means to determine our thoughts. Writing, in other words, is not external to thought, nor does it come after the fantastical plenitude of life in the state of nature. If we can think and express ourselves this is because there is an essential, and an essentially unstable, relationship between speech and writing, voice and inscription, memory and perception that is the condition of our living in the shifting economy of the social (Derrida, 1976: 216–229). And so, for Derrida, Rousseau’s appeal to the primordial voice of nature can never move beyond his rejection of the formal freedoms of bourgeois subjectivity and his nostalgia for the Greek agora. His vision of a new modernity is informed by the need to reconstitute the general will of the people in assemblies that allow them to experience directly the affective cadence and constitutive power of the voice. To approach the problems of modernity in this way, however, is to neglect the fact that human life has, from the very beginning, been lived through cultural-theological systems whose presence is maintained by the general economy of arche-writing. And so if we are to address the question of the fate of assemblies, of community and of the general will, we will have to do this in the light of the ‘artificial’ processes of constitution and dissemination that determine the time of modernity.
We should be clear from the start that Stiegler acknowledges a considerable debt to Derrida, particularly his opening up of philosophy to the questions posed by the technological systems that have transformed human life and sociality. However, we should also recognize that his thought attempts to develop a different version of deconstruction that begins by seeking to revise Derrida’s concept of arche-writing. In a paper he wrote three years after the publication of the first volume of Technics and Time, Stiegler made the following remark about Derrida’s grammatological analysis: ‘the epochality [of the origin] appears … not only as writing, but as “transcendental technicity”, or rather, “quasi-transcendental” technicity. The whole question is, for us, the nature and status of this “quasi” (2001: 247; emphasis in the original).
In Derrida’s thought, writing is conceived as a transcendental structure that both gives and withdraws the onto-theological foundation of life; it is the condition of all plenitude, substance and sovereignty, and the chance of a democracy to come that exceeds the established hierarchies of difference. Writing, in other words, is the condition of what Derrida calls différance, or the events of singularity that haunt the sovereign power of the origin and open up the chance of political dissensus to which we, as historical beings, are responsible. Now, for Stiegler, the question that emerges from this designation of writing as ‘quasi-transcendental technicity’ (that is, the formal grammatological system without which the question of being and its revelation would never arise) concerns the fate of différance in the economy of hyperindustrial society. Stiegler’s contention is that the formative influence of technics on consciousness entails a self-creativity on the part of human beings, whose contingent effects are dispersed throughout the technological organization of society (2001: 254).
Stiegler follows this line of argument into the question of faith that is raised by the representation of the past through virtual and informatic programmes. As we have seen, the non-lived past that is experienced as constitutive of our living present is never ‘there’ as such; it is always given through the effects of the grammé that destabilize the mythologies of cultural identification. The absolute past of the supplement, which Derrida sets up as the paradoxical foundation of the living present, cannot be erased in the history of technological supplements: it is always recalled by them (Derrida, 1976: 66). It is this ‘recollection’ of the non-lived past that, for Stiegler, reveals an existential dimension of the logic of technicity that, perhaps, is underplayed in Derrida’s version of deconstruction. The ‘empirical history’ of the programmes through which the past is presented as the existential foundation of community (in the formative power of the ancestor and the funeral oration) has no essential relationship to the transcendental promise of arche-writing. For Stiegler, it is the technicity of the trace, which begins with the simple inscription of nature and moves from orthographic writing to digital systems, ‘which supports the synthesis of faith’ (2001; emphasis in the original). And so the most rigorous application of the deconstructive idea of the grammé to our lived experience of justice and community in technoscientific society must concentrate on the multiple sources of human disorientatio...
