Technics and Time, 1 - General Introduction

General Introduction

The book opens by taking note of the separation between tekhne and episteme, between technical and empirical knowledge, which has characterised the entire history of philosophy. This begins with the political struggle between the sophist and the philosopher who accuses the sophist of instrumentalising logos. Stiegler notes that Karl Marx was the first to think that the dynamic of technical evolution required a theory of its own, separate from the theory of the dynamism of biological evolution.

Stiegler introduces the thought that the temporality of human existence is irreducibly technical via the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger's Dasein, temporality is a question of inheritance, of drawing upon a past I have not lived casting me into an indeterminate future. But for Stiegler, it is crucial that my access to this non-lived past will always be technical and inscriptive. The technicity of the world reveals the world in its facticity. For Heidegger, however, this then becomes the ambiguity of modern technology: technics as both the obstacle and the chance of thought. And what makes technics such an obstacle is the violence it does to nature, to physis. Thus whereas technics should be in the service of humanity, it ends up doing humanity a disservice.

Stiegler derives from Bertrand Gille the argument that technics has entered into a state of permanent innovation. There is an ongoing divorce between the rhythms of cultural and technical evolution, symptomatic of the fact that today technics evolves more quickly than culture. It is as though we are today "breaking the time barrier," a fact which suggests that speed is older than time.

Stiegler concludes that the conjunction of technics and time, today, a conjunction indicated by the problematic of speed, calls for a new consideration of technicity. Technical objects, he argues, are inorganic organised beings, possessing their own dynamic, irreducible to physics and biology. Such inorganic organised beings are constitutive of both temporality and spatiality, these being the derivative decompositions of speed. If life is the conquest of mobility, technics, as a process of exteriorisation, is the pursuit of life by means other than life. What Heidegger cannot think is the constitutive role of technicity for authentic temporality. What Gilbert Simondon, with his thought of individuation, will therefore make it possible to think (even though he does not himself think it, no more than does Heidegger), is the originarily techno-logical constitutivity of temporality.