When I wrote last I got into a little Stiegler by accident, because I was reading it at the time…. hrm, maybe I should have written more then. Regardless, before getting into some specific responses I have some general thoughts about Technics and Time.
A student came into the Writing Center last week ranting and raving (consequently at a couple of my students) about how her teacher, a good friend of mine, was “obsessed” with technology and thought that robots were going to take over the world. I doubt that, a lot, in fact I’m pretty sure the teacher/friend was probably trying to teach her students about the idea of exteriorilization–that stuff that Stiegler and Leroi-Gourhan are pretty obsessive about. We store bits of ourselves and our memories outside ourselves in the exterior milieu–we publish, we make stuff. It lives longer than us. Furthermore, it is *more* than each of us.
Even if we, as a species, begin to exteriorilize (darn I can’t spell that word) and remember less, I don’t think that–as the student was ranting away about–that we become less human. It might be a philosophical sticky point, but we define what it is to be human. In fact, unlike all other animals, our ability to define what is human for ourself is one thing that sets us apart.
Our development of tools since the stop of “formal evolution” of our bodies, then, is the one thing that I think may make us human. Huh (qua? hah, sorry, I was getting sick of that word)? At the point we began to make tools, we enabled the eventual equality of sexes/races/etc. Have we gotten there? Well, no. But if we can externalize all of the things that we would have to rely upon certain parts of our naturally faulty anatomy for, if we can create prosthesises, we can eventually hope for some sort of human equality as well.
Furthermore, as long as we exist, we continue to create for ourselves what it means to be human. Therefore, we will probably never say to ourselves, “Hey there selves, we’re no longer human. We should probably call ourselves ‘homo somethingerotherelse’ now.” Nope, that one is never going to happen. Instead, unlike all the other animals, we are given the choice to give ourselves a name (and do) and are likely to hold onto it.
Therefore, unlike the student that thought her teacher was crazy because “robots are never going to take over the world” I’d like to take a slightly sleep deprived and family-encrazed moment to suggest that instead humans will continue to take over the world.)
And now for some quotes:
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“New technical systems are born with the appearance of the limits of the preceding systems, owing to which progress is essentially discontinuous” (33).
I once heard, though I cannot remember where, an argument against this point that stated that when new technological systems are discovered there is often a renaissance eventually (ala steampunk) of older technology, a romanticizing of it, if you will, that proves that people always had the same degree of technological sensibility and knowledge that they do today. I believe the example given was that old machine (see here) that seems to many to be an ancient computer. In response to this counterargument I believe one could back up Stiegler here by suggesting that it is only within the new technological system that we can recognize the significance of some objects of the old.
“Technical discovery cannot be typified by the mere development and implementation of a scientific discovery. Such an ‘implementation,’ when it occurs, is itself autonomously inventive, following a logic that is not the logic of science” (34).
Every time I read the words “discovery” or “invention” I can’t help but be dragged back into the old discovery vs. invention in the classroom arguments that were repeated ad nauseum the first term I was a student here.
So I ask my audience, which is more important for students to learn–invention or discovery? Which would Stiegler claim is more important?
Sometimes it seemed as though composition is afraid of discovery…. at least, in the discussions I’ve participated in it seems that way. Do we want invention? Or are we ready to settle in and wait for discovery? Hrm….
