#Bernard Steigler

[humanperson105]

Mnemotechnics as Anthropology, and Memory as Inscription In Nietzsche and Stiegler. Pt 2.

(Continued) For Kant, freedom and responsibility are one and the same as something or someone who is unaccountable for or not in control of the things they do, cannot be said to be free, as only an action or decision that is freely chosen is an action or decision that someone can be held responsible to, just as we discussed before how the senses can not be deemed right or wrong as they are not judgments. Nietzsche's characterization of the "animal who makes promises", is Neitzsche's somewhat polemical (but insightful) summation of liberal Kantian humanism and his view of modern man as a beast who suffers under what he calls the "tools of civilization". These tools of civilization will be the instruments that man's memory will be inscribed with:

"How is a memory to be made for the man-animal? [. . .] As one may imagine, this primeval problem was not solved by exactly gentle answers and gentle means; perhaps there is nothing more awful and more sinister in the early history of man than his system of mnemonics. "Something is burnt in so as to remain in his memory: only that which never stops hurting remains in his memory." When man thinks it necessary to make for himself a memory, he never accomplishes it without blood, tortures, and sacrifice [. . .] all these things originate from that instinct which found in pain its most potent mnemonic." (Ibid pg. 66)

Man as an animal with memory comes to be able to make equivalencies and calculations learned in the contractual relationship between creditor and ower. When Nietzsche describes the pre-modern configuration of creditor and ower, it is merely the anger responding to an injury, "an anger which vents itself mechanically on the author of the injury—but this anger is kept in bounds and modified through the idea that every injury has somewhere or other its equivalent price, and can really be paid off, even though it be by means of pain to the author." (Ibid Pg. 70) Man's ability to assess value and equivocate by inscription is for Nietzsche the most basic and primal form of social organization and personal relation. At first, memory's capacity for equivalency and calculation is offset by the countervailing force of forgetting. Forgetting is "a form of robust health" that allows man to clear space in his memory to make new things possible and conceive of the future. It is only with the advent of "Bad conscience" (Abrahamic monotheism) that memory will take on an opposition-power "that it is by no means a mere passive inability to get rid of a once indented impression, not merely the indigestion occasioned by a once pledged word, which one cannot dispose of, but an active refusal to get rid of it, a continuing and a wish to continue what has once been willed, an actual memory of the will [. . .] ." (Ibid pg. 62) Guilt or Bad conscience is the result of the violence and force directed into the outside world being turned inward. The fear of eternal punishment in the afterlife so familiar to Christendom is merely man's ability to calculate punishments and debts equal to an injury being used to calculate an infinite debt to Christ that can never be paid back or forgotten. If "only that which never stops hurting remains in the memory of man", then the infinite debt that characterizes guilt is an equally infinite pain. Unlike Kant or Husserl for whom memory is the reproductive imagination of primary retention, memory for Nietzsche is a scar or inscription. A wound, pain as a unit of value in an economy of violence. Nietzsche's anti-rationalism is a return not only to philology but to physiology and vitalism. The will to power as life/nature undermines the "freely chosen" act of the rational Kantian subject by asserting that the responsibility of the subject to the understanding is not a choice at all and is in fact unconsciously driven and coerced by the impersonal force of will to power as the essence of life. Our submission to the authority of the will to power appears to us as a promise or choice we have made freely. The memory of this choice and the continued commitment to it is nothing but the lingering pain of the wound left by the will to power. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant's third antinomy of pure reason consists of the antithesis position, in which everything that exists is immanent to the causation of nature, and the thesis position, in which human reason is exempt from determination by cause. By accounting for human agency by way of the will as irrational natural cause, Nietzsche takes the anthesis position of the third antinomy and denies free will. (Continued in part 3)

[modalities-of-care]

Long Circuit

" It can be a short-circuit if you believe you are reading a book and you don’t in fact read it. It is a long circuit if you individuate yourself by reading the book, if you are in the process of individuating yourself. Now the theory of Wolfgang Iser—the theorist of the school of Konstanz—is that a book is a process of individuation, a book doesn’t exist as such. What exists as a book is the community of the reader. And this is extremely interesting. Because it says in fact that a book is a power of individuation, but not individuation as such. It is the circuit created, the long circuit created by the readers, which is the individuation of the book. And it is not only the case for the book. It is the case for every artwork or other forms of creative work in the humanities. Now, when you are individuating yourself with somebody—for example, we are now in discussion and in speaking, I am individuating myself. But in listening to me, you are individuating yourself through my discourse. You can individuate through my discourse by adherence with my discourse, but it’s also equally possible to individuate oneself by its contradiction, its negation."

– Bernard Steigler

[ivehadanapophany]

Omg dead man by teddy hyde would be such a banger in a chapter by chapter playlist of Bernard Steigler's Neganthropocene aaaaaaand post.

[humanperson105]

Mnemotechnics as Anthropology, and Memory as Inscription In Nietzsche and Stiegler. Pt 3.

In Bernard Stiegler's rendering of memory, memory is inseparable from techne: or the technical objects, techniques, and technical knowledge that constitute it. For Stiegler, all forms of techne are mnemotechnics. This stems from Stiegler's marriage of Gilbert Simondon's account of onto-genesis and transindividuation and Jacques Derrida's notion of the trace. Simondon's ontology of individuation (an explicit point of reference for Deleuze as well as Stiegler) is a rejection of hylomorphism and form in favor of an account of individuation as an ongoing "meta-stable" process in which a pre-individual field provides the raw material for the creation of an individual haecceity, or the "thisness" of any individual thing, that maintains an annexed associated-milieu of the primary pre-individual field that fuels its meta-stable individuation that only ends when the remainder of the associated-milieu is fully spent. Simondon distinguished between three levels of individuation, physical, vital/biological, and psychic/social transindividuation. The individuation of any member of society is the result of the successful resonance of the three levels of individuation. Transindividuation is the collective individuation of a collective transindividual milieu that allows for the transmission of information (or affect) between the subsets (individual nodes) of the set (transindividual milieu).

Derrida's trace (or differance) inverts the usual order of reference between the "model"/original and its copy, so that the model/original comes after its "copy" and refers to its own representation rather than vice versa, thus inverting Plato's model of the simulacra (much like Nietzsche and Deleuze). This trace not only inverts the referential relation of model/copy but also is in a constant state of slippage in which signs and symbols never take on any fixed or stable relations or referents, and as a result, their semantic content "slides" and continually undermines itself. In other words, the signifier precedes its signified and the signifier never takes on any stable identity. For Stiegler, memory is a trace insofar as he inverts Husserl's (and by association Kant's) relationship between tertiary memory and primary and secondary retentions. In Husserl's account, there is a hard divide between primary and secondary, whereas for Stigler, if the new primary retention is something I have previously experienced, then it is not purely a perception (primary retention) anymore and involves a reproductive imagination. Returning back to Figure 1, For Stigler B' is just a memory of A', and not a memory of B. For Stiegler, when a primary retention (A) becomes a secondary retention (A'), the secondary retention (A') now takes the place of the new primary retention (B) when encountered again (For the sake of the example, assume A and B are the same thing at different moments. A = X at 6 pm, B = X at 6:01 pm, etc.). This is because, for Stiegler, primary and secondary retentions are both forms of tertiary memory, and more importantly, all memories are tertiary memories; all memories are tertiary memories due to memory now understood as a trace overturning the relationship between original and copy. For Steigler, there are no unique immediate experiences, as experience is always already mediated by the traces that make up memory and language. Any memory of something is a trace of a trace. Stiegler distinguishes between three forms of memory: phylogenetic memory or (unconscious) germinal memories passed from each generation to the next through DNA, epigenetic or somatic (bodily) memories that are not passed on to the next generation and dies with their host, and epihphylogenetic or cultural/social memories that live on as artifacts of external memory.

"The tool [external memory] refers in principle to an already-there, to a fore-having of something that the who has not itself necessarily lived, but which comes under it in its concern. This is the meaning of epiphylogenesis. A tool functions first as image-consciousness. This constitutivity of "tertiary memory" grounds the irreducible neutrality of the who [. . .] ." (Technics and Time Vol.1 pg. 254-255)

[humanperson105]

I don't really like radiohead. I don't dislike them either; I've just always been disappointed by the distance between how people talk about radiohead and how they actually sound to me. People always associate radiohead and ok computer with some vague sense of the uneasiness and loneliness at the dawn of the 21st century. The only radiohead song I've ever thought actually embodied that sense of millenarian anxiety was airbag. A song about surviving a car crash somehow expresses the strange relationship with technology befitting of an album called "ok computer". A car wreck brings you to the brink of death and back in a way that leaves you completely vulnerable to the whims of a mechanistic process you can only be a passive witness to. Realizing your mortality in a steel cage indifferent to the weakness of your flesh.

"I'm amazed that I survived/ an airbag saved my life."

J.G. Ballard was drawn to this same uncanny relationship with technology that's so emblematic of post-war post-industrial capitalist societies.

"For Ballard, it seems, the built environment externalizes our anatomical poises and desires, but such externalization in turn reprograms us from the inside out. He thus augurs that any society attaining suitable informatic density and media massification experiences severe chronotopic leakage. As explored above, when enough of our environment is captured by and entangled within intentional and artefactual systems, the distinction between 'artifice’ and ‘nature’ progressively collapses. Civilization grows an ectopic unconscious—an outpouching of drive-mechanism and erotic-cathexes, extracranially exported. . ." (Thomas Moynihan - Spinal Catastrophism)

The massive developments in technology and the "artificial" world humanity has built is an extension of our physical bodies, but also an extension of our conscious and unconscious patterns of thought rendered as physical, material things in the world. Freud in Civilization and its Discontents expresses this strange sense of feeling lost and disoriented by this process of externalization that Bernard Steigler calls epiphylogenesis. “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.” Our relationship with technology and mass production has fundamentally changed what it means to be human to the degree that we no longer know what it means to be human, or if that label applies anymore. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's potentially liberatory even. But our paralysis in the face of this awareness leaves us with only the worst possible outcomes and a sense of dread at what comes next.

I've always liked airbag, but at the same time been disappointed radiohead was unable to capture this feeling in their other work. The feeling of disorientation and directionlessness that has come with the end of history offers no way forward at the same time as it makes it impossible to even imagine going back. This seems to be more and more a commonplace realization and yet it still seems so difficult and elusive to express.