Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) - Softcover

Stiegler, Bernard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804730148 ISBN 13: 9780804730143

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Disorientation is the first publication in English of the second volume of Technics and Time, in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to technics, such as Heidegger and Simondon.The author's broad intent is to respond to Western philosophy's historical exclusion of technics and techniques from its metaphysical questionings, and in so doing to rescue critical and philosophical thinking. For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls "the industrial temporalization of consciousness." Here, demonstrating that technology-including alphabetical writing-is memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find "cardinal points" to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment.

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Bernard Stiegler is Head of the Department of Cultural Development at the Pompidou Center in Paris and co-founder of the political group Ars Industrialis. In the last five years alone, he has authored seventeen books.

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TECHNICS AND TIME, 2

DisorientationBy Bernard Stiegler

Stanford University Press

ISBN: 978-0-8047-3014-3

Contents

Translator's Note..............................................ixIntroduction...................................................11 The Orthographic Age.........................................122 The Genesis of Disorientation................................653 The Industrialization of Memory..............................974 Temporal Object and Retentional Finitude.....................188Notes..........................................................245Select Bibliography............................................261

Chapter One

The Orthographic Age

By the public use of one's own reason I understand the use that anyone as a scholar makes of reason before the entire literate world.

—Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"

Orthography, Orthotheses, and Photography

In the final chapter of The Fault of Epimetheus, I asked: "If the already-there is what constitutes temporality in that it opens me out to my historiality, must not this already-there also be constitutive in its positive facticity, both positively constitutive and historially constitutive, in the sense that its material organization in form constitutes historiality itself, prior to and beyond history?" (240). In enumerating the principal elements of a positive response to this question, Heidegger nonetheless excludes one particular hypothesis.

To account correctly for Dasein's historiality would be, first of all, to account for the very possibility of accounting for it, to analyze the conditions through which Dasein is capable of thematizing its own historiality, and that would only be possible when this historial Dasein conquers its historicity and thus enters into the history of being (as forgetting of being): in the following, we shall explore why this history is indissolubly that of the letter and of citizenship. Writing, in its alphabetic specificity, as exact recording, an orthographics, that liberates a new possibility of access to the past, configures properly historical temporality.

The already-there is positively and historially constitutive in its facticity, and the inaugurality of History within historiality occurs along with the techno-logic emergence of an orthography of the already-there. To plumb this hypothesis more deeply is to develop a history of the supplement whose fundamental concepts have yet to be elaborated beyond that bequeathed to us by Of Grammatology.

It is necessary at this point to abandon the primordially phonologic understanding of alphabetic writing in order to privilege its orthographic character. What does orthos, orthotes, mean? What irreducible connection is woven between the integrity of the geometric line and the accuracy of the minutes and records of secular law and politics? Marcel Detienne (1988) sees this emergence of exactitude, so important to Husserl, as preceding the phonology of the new forms of writing that constituted Greco-political debate. Philosophy has always understood orthography as separate from phonology in that it posits rectitude (the rigor of aletheia, the uprightness of all rules "for the soul's direction") within the phone as present to itself; that is, within the who. I suggest that this presence-to-self is no more than the effect of the techno-logic exactitude of the what, a techno-logy also at work in the polishing of forms from which proto-geometric invention (Husserl 1970 [1939]), and thus the possibility of idealities, will emerge.

The essential characteristic of orthographic (called phono-logic) writing is the exactitude of the recording of the voice rather than the exactitude of the recording of the voice: it is a matter of recording rather than voice. Similarly, photography is an exact recording, and this is why I shall here make a case that may appear paradoxical: to revert to the question of writing when speaking of the phenomenology of the photograph as laid out by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. I shall keep the photograph separate from all its "phonocentric" temptations, in order to discover that in addition to orthographic writing, other kinds of quite precise recordings also exist; this grouping I shall call memory's orthothetic substructure [support].

Photo-Graphic Certitude as Conjunction of Past and Reality

[Walter] Benjamin's essay ["A Short History of Photography"] and [Roland] Barthes's last book [Camera Lucida] could well be the two major texts on the question of the Referent in technical modernity.

—Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l'autre (1987)

The phenomenological goal to which Roland Barthes devotes himself in Camera Lucida is to learn at all costs what photography is "in itself, by what essential feature it is to be distinguished from the community of images" (Barthes 1982 [1980], 3), and the thematic of the Referent that Barthes develops initiates a photo-graphic correlation combining "death and the referent in a single system" (Derrida 1987, 291): I can now actually see someone dead; that is, who has not passed away. The past is present in the photograph. The dead live. The photograph "implies 'the return of the dead' in the very structure of the image and in the phenomenon of the image." The photograph's intentionality is the Reference, as certitude, that the photographed object was. "I call 'photographic referent' not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it." And contrary to discourse, which always carries within it the possibility of its being fiction, which is also the possibility of all generalization, "in the photograph I can never deny that the thing was there. A double appears there: reality and the past" (Barthes 1982 [1980], 76). This conjunction is the very principle of photo-graphic certitude. Just such a viewing of the photograph's essence demonstrates the intentionality of photography: photography's noema is "that was."

As the conjunction of the past and of reality, the photograph's referent only appears in its predication—an effect in which "a little spark of chance, of the here and now" (Benjamin 1977, 200) can be left in reserve. This predication is the miracle of identical repetition of what took place only once. Photo-graphed, a singular instant has disappeared forever, which at the same time will remain forever and return endlessly in the repetition of the radically paradoxical contingent, as improbable and a priori as impossible as the return of the dead. An instant, an instant that as such would not be able to return.

As repetition, this "as such" signifies an objectivity: that of the photographic lens. Within the realm of photographic objectivity, the referent "adheres" to its recording. The result is that stylization is excluded from the photograph, as is generalization. This mechanical relationality of adherence (of exactitude) is what identifies the very instant of the Real as such.

Conjunction as Photographic That-has-been

The traditional photographic device activates numerous techniques, in two complementary operations: the optical and mechanical system of lens and shutter, and the chemical support system by which the lens's object is revealed. The spectrum, as revelation of the chemical reaction on photosensitive...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804730148
• ISBN 13: 9780804730143
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 267
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande