No Future
The necessary question is the following: if the futurity of Dasein is constituted in the "authentic" repetition of a having-been, and if this is what grants Dasein's difference, its idiomaticity and its consistency, then what would be the effect of a dynamic of the "what" that short-circuits the work of différance? Today's generation says: no future. Does this mean there is no longer any différance, that in the world of "real time" there can be no future? To answer this question affirmatively would not simply be to say that tekhne produces falling, because tekhne was already what gave différance, gave time.
In The Concept of Time Heidegger argues that a clock can show us the now, but that no clock ever shows the past or the future. With this argument, Heidegger intends to privilege the "who" over the "what," but the question is to know what one means by a clock. Does not the clock constitute the possibility of being-futural? Does the time without time of no future translate the error of technics, or rather the techno-logical fate of Dasein itself? When Heidegger later thinks "being without beings," does he not acknowledge the disappearance of time? Heidegger's work from 1924 onwards aims at the question of "real time" (as in, real-time broadcast, without delay).
"To fix" does not mean to determine but to establish, that is, fixing also establishes the possibility of the indetermination of multiple determinations. Heidegger mistakenly identifies fixing and determination in relation to the clock. For Heidegger, the fundamental phenomenon of time is the future, whereas measuring time is attempting to determine the indeterminate, hence a form of evading the end. But, Stiegler asks, is measuring the only thing a clock does, or that fixing does? Writing in general was firstly a site of measurement, so could one not say that writing is a clock? For Heidegger, concealment lies in wanting to calculate the incalculable, or prove the improbable, rather than experiencing these. But if writing is both technical and a clock (an objective memory), through which différance opens, then the Heideggerian themes of authenticity and falling only make sense from a non-metaphysical understanding of technics that Heidegger never finally achieves.
"Direct" democracy, as non-deferred, "live" democracy—as for instance in televisually-conducted opinion polls—is an example of the speed with which the "living present" is today synthesised. Thus the problem is not simply that it is calculative. Calculation gives the possibility of fixing durably, opening up difference and deferral. The meaning of "fixing" is not exhausted by the concept of calculation. Calculation is also the possibility of the tradition, as that which is recorded and passed on, and thus das Man, the "one" or the "they," refers both to tradition and to what today we call the "media." The historiality of Dasein is the question of its individuation, which is constituted in repetition. At stake today is the loss of the sense of historiality, the elimination of the différance of history, the elimination of repetition as return not to the same but to the other, and the feeling that we live today in a perpetual "present." It is a matter of knowing the causes of this tendency.
Read more about this topic: Technics And Time, 1, Part II: The Fault of Epimetheus, Already There
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man’s nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become “Golems,” they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone
That science may have staked the future on?
He seems to say the reason why so much
Should come to nothing must be fairly faced.....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)