Bernard Stiegler, a modern French philosopher of technology

(L-R) Stiegler, Zhang Yibing and Zhou Xian exchange ideas on how humans should think in super-industrial society at Nanjing University. 

 

Bernard Stiegler (1952- ) is a modern French philosopher of technology and student of the great French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who was known for developing deconstruction. In 1992, he received a doctorate degree under the supervision of Derrida from école des hautesétudes en sciences socials. In 2006, he founded the Institut de recherche et d’innovation at the Centre Georges-Pompidou and has served as the head ever since. His best-known works include Technics and Time and For a New Critique of Political Economy.

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In March 2015, Bernard Stiegler came to China and visited Nanjing University. Stiegler discussed technical control in the digital-Internet era and ideological criticism of new technology with such Chinese scholars as Zhang Yibing, director of the Center for Studies of Marxist Social Theory at Nanjing University, and Zhou Xian, dean of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanjing University and the Cheung Kong Scholar Chair Professor granted by the Ministry of Education.
 

Zhang: Is there a discontinuity or correlation between ontology and theory of ereignis?

 

Stiegler: For Martin Heidegger, technology did not exist as a means or tool but exists for showing a fundamental structure to the world, which indicates that Heidegger had already grasped the significance of technology on ontology. But the problem is that Heidegger didn’t include the role the steam engine played in his works. For me, the appearance of the steam engine, which paved the way for the First Industrial Revolution, launched a new historical paradigm and gave rise to epoch-making thought.

The steam engine brought about the paradigm of capital and labor, technological change to the West and even caused worldwide changes in economy, politics and culture, establishing a world under the charge of capitalism. At the same time, it was a scientific revolution. Studies from the perspective of scientific revolution have not been conducted, and this is what I’m trying to do.
 

By ignoring the constructive effect of technology, Heidegger was unable to refer to what I said about analyzing and solving the issue of entropy and negentropy of modern technological problems.
 

Zhang: In 1845, Karl Marx had already mentioned in his work Theses on Feuerbach that human nature is the sum of all social relations. Real materialism was no longer based on substantive and visible objects but the ontology of relationship, indicating that capital was not merely a productive factor but an entity that represents the convergence of capitalist productive relations and reproductive relations. So is there a contradiction between this ontology of relations and your theory of substitute technology? What do you think of it?

 

Stiegler: I think this is a question involving materiality, social relations and technology from the root. We can walk through an example to explain my opinion, that is, the relation between language and material technology.

For me, the invisible and unphysical language is a technology but language has a strong constructive power for activities of objective reality, so it definitely possesses materiality. Currently, language’s materiality has already achieved quicker and stronger spread through new sciences, revealing how the mind plays a function of materiality and how it can be understood through new sciences.

So, I think it is necessary to reanalyze and understand the constitutional form of current ideologies. With respect to this, I was certainly influenced by Marx’s The German Ideology when I initially thought about the origin of technology.
 

Zhang: Could you tell more details how Marx has influenced your works?

 

Stiegler: Marx’s The German Ideology delved into the issue I would later name “general organology,” which was the first philosophical work to open a window into the field of human organology. Louis Althusser completely buried the hint of objective historical materialism in Marx’s The German Ideology and even said that Marx’s The German Ideology was not a Marxist work. I completely disagree with him, and I believe that from this hint there emerged Marxism as it was later understood in the context of political economics.
 

However, Marx never laid bare the supporting basis behind human memories in the 19th century. In the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx distinctly described the relation between a bee and an architect as a metaphor. Marx thought that the most ordinary architect is much wiser than the smartest bee because the architect has already designed the building in the mind before he starts to work, which means that he has had “thoughts” in his head in the first place.
 

Actually, it contradicts what The German Ideology talks about at the beginning. From the very start, The German Ideology points out the relation between idea and existence and indicates that ideas are the outcome of society and are decided by the latter. Here, Marx elaborated that “thought” cannot have an independent existence at all. So in the later period, Marx brought “thought” or “rationalism” into Marxist discussions again. This just refers to the kernel issue I want to talk about—how an idea can be constructed and produced by the technological system and how it objectively and materially affects our social relations and practical activities, that is the practical problem of ideology.
 

Zhou: So how do you characterize the influence of the modern technological system on human thought and ideas?

 

Stiegler: I think that Edmund Husserl’s methodologies of philosophical analysis should be introduced when analyzing modern capitalist operations, especially his discussion on arithmetization and algebraization of modern sciences and analysis on inner time consciousness. When Husserl analyzed inner time consciousness, he has proposed the concept retention. Primary retention refers to the time felt at present, which belongs to the primary memory experienced at present. Secondary retention refers to the time activated by reminiscence, which belongs to the secondary memory experienced by recalling. From my perspective, the most significant is tertiary retention, which exists outside of the process of an individual’s inheritance and memory, and externally constitutes and impacts mankind’s collective memory and ideas via the technological system.

Tertiary retention controls the modern digital system at the root, radically changing all forms of protention and retention and has become the carrier of human consciousness and memory written by objective and material technology that exists outside of human life. And the formation of modern knowledge is bound to change. In this situation, the technological system of tertiary retention forms a complicated control system of psychology and technology which constitutes and dominates projection of the minds and attention of human beings, and even leads to proletarianization and immiserization of human thought and consciousness.
 

Particularly in the industrial era of the past few centuries that has been shaped by information technology, regardless of whether you are talking about written records or cinematographic art, human memory is produced by the advent of a new mechanical memory technique. The industrialization of memory has become real.
 

The historical course of the extragenetic collective memory and consciousness constituted by tertiary retention belongs to a “post-generation of germ line.” Under this psychological and technological system, individual and collective forms of time consciousness are both formed by a technological system of preservation and selection.
 

Our previous memories and meanings are saved in the system of substitute technology, which decides our present and the future. The global psychological and technological industrialized system has thoroughly monopolized the production of human thought and projection of attention. Humans’ existing consciousness and memory have become the most important shaping and controlling object in the entire capitalist industrial system.

 

Wang Guanglu, Wu Nan are reporters at the Chinese Social Sciences Today.