The Thought of Bernard Stiegler by Abbinnett Ross;

Author:Abbinnett, Ross;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Thus, Simondon’s analysis of the relationship between social and technological evolution, maintains that the latter has an independent necessity that is enacted through the agency of human beings. This evolution takes place through a process of concretization: each system becomes part of the associated milieux of the others, and each provides a set of specific techniques that can be utilized in the development of a plurality of different technological programmes. Stiegler’s reading of Simondon maintains that although his work sketches the outline of an organological relationship between human beings and their technological systems, he tends to neglect the economic and political elements that are involved in the shaping of the systemic organization of industrial modernity. And so if we are properly to understand the ‘internal necessity’ that drives the evolution of technological programmes, we must conceptualize its relationship to the economic and political factors through which that necessity has always been mediated, intensified, curtailed and disseminated. Foucault’s formulation of the biopower thesis is important because it provides an account of how the elements of economy, technological necessity and political representation are related to one another in the historical unfolding of human society (Stiegler, 2011b: 81–85). Stiegler takes this up in his account of ‘The Second Origin’ in the first volume of Technics and Time. He argues that Rousseau’s fiction of the noble savage depicts his self-sufficiency as something that is maintained by technological instruments; he always has some degree of technological advantage over the elements and wild beasts, for he is equipped with primitive clothing and weapons. This quasi-original state of self-sufficiency is, for Rousseau, marked by the fact that death is not experienced as an impending certainty; there is almost no concern for the demise of others or for one’s own somatic well-being. It is this primordial vitality that is ruined by the advent of medicine, which Rousseau depicts as the ‘paradigm of human artifice’; what emerges from this technics of the body is an irreducible relationship between civilization and the degradation of vitality (Stiegler, 1998: 117). For Stiegler, of course, this co-implication of the body and the technical regime of medicine has always been part of the economy of human existence; the artificial promotion of health and the curing of sickness is something which is present in the most primitive phases of human society, and which has evolved into the core of biopolitical capitalization.

There is, to paraphrase Nietzsche, nothing behind the economy of power and capitalization that constitutes the domain of biopower. In the Genealogy of Morals, he asked: ‘How does one create a memory for the human animal?’ His answer is to suggest that memory was created by a regime of devices conceived to inflict physical pain on those who would otherwise have gone on living the unreflective life of animals. Memory, in other words, arises from the stricture of technologies used to discipline the somatic functions of the body, and to render it fit for service to those noble souls who have freed themselves from subjection to nature (Nietzsche, 1990: 192–194).

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