Unweaving the Program: Bernard Stiegler and the Hegemony of Technology

Abstract

Stiegler’s approach is twofold. Firstly, his repetition of the history of metaphysics aims to uncover technics as the suppressed, foundational supplement: the originary prostheticity of thought. For example, Stiegler locates in Rousseau’s and Leroi-Gourhan’s accounts of the appearance of the human a suppression of technics; a forgotten origin that must be veiled over by a second origin: a miraculous birth of the human proper (as intellectual substance or symbolic consciousness). Stiegler, on the contrary, argues that technics is the decisive event in the historical genesis of the human; in fact, both the human and technicity proper appear at the same moment. Secondly, Stiegler inhabits the work of certain figures (in particular Simondon, Husserl and Leroi-Gourhan) from whom he adopts and adapts some key conceptual tools, such as tendency, individuation, tertiary retention, exteriorisation and program. There is a less successful attempt to engage with a range of scientific and technological developments; in particular genetics and biotechnology, which will be discussed here shortly. The application of technics as a theoretical framework, in a traditional sense, is not entirely commensurable with the deconstructive side ofStiegler’s project. On one hand Stiegler uses technics to think beyond the aporia at the heart of philosophy, the limit of thought at the origin of the great fault-lines of western thought. At times Stiegler’s argument veers towards a kind of reductionism and essentialism about technics. One of the targets of this paper is this tendency to shrink the history of technology into a logical trajectory that thinks technics in terms of writing and related metaphors. This logic rests on a series of ontological ruptures, in particular a radical division between the living and the nonliving. As we shall see, these issues are interwoven with a number of other problems. In particular, I focus in Stiegler’s mobilisation of informatic models applied to processes of enculturation, the barrier between the living and the nonliving, and to figure the technical contamination of the living. The notion of “program”, a central tool of Stiegler’s project, will be given special attention. There is also some tension arising from Stiegler’s attempt to combine distinct approaches (such as Leroi-Gourhan’s, Simondon’s and Derrida’s) that find their genesis in quite different philosophical concerns and fields of application. I will conclude by advancing an alternative myth to that of Prometheus: the Sumerian story of Inanna and the transmission of technics into civilisation. This myth suggests another way of approaching the question of technics, with perhaps a more interesting or liberating conclusion: there is no technics, no technology above and beyond pure differentiation.