Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) - Softcover

Stiegler, Bernard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804730148 ISBN 13: 9780804730143

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Disorientation is the first publication in English of the second volume of Technics and Time, in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to technics, such as Heidegger and Simondon.The author's broad intent is to respond to Western philosophy's historical exclusion of technics and techniques from its metaphysical questionings, and in so doing to rescue critical and philosophical thinking. For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls "the industrial temporalization of consciousness." Here, demonstrating that technology―including alphabetical writing―is memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find "cardinal points" to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment.

About this title

About the Author

Bernard Stiegler is Head of the Department of Cultural Development at the Pompidou Center in Paris and co-founder of the political group Ars Industrialis. In the last five years alone, he has authored seventeen books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

TECHNICS AND TIME, 2

DisorientationBy Bernard Stiegler

Stanford University Press

ISBN: 978-0-8047-3014-3

Contents

Translator's Note..............................................ixIntroduction...................................................11 The Orthographic Age.........................................122 The Genesis of Disorientation................................653 The Industrialization of Memory..............................974 Temporal Object and Retentional Finitude.....................188Notes..........................................................245Select Bibliography............................................261

Chapter One

The Orthographic Age

By the public use of one's own reason I understand the use that anyone as a scholar makes of reason before the entire literate world.

—Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"

Orthography, Orthotheses, and Photography

In the final chapter of The Fault of Epimetheus, I asked: "If the already-there is what constitutes temporality in that it opens me out to my historiality, must not this already-there also be constitutive in its positive facticity, both positively constitutive and historially constitutive, in the sense that its material organization in form constitutes historiality itself, prior to and beyond history?" (240). In enumerating the principal elements of a positive response to this question, Heidegger nonetheless excludes one particular hypothesis.

To account correctly for Dasein's historiality would be, first of all, to account for the very possibility of accounting for it, to analyze the conditions through which Dasein is capable of thematizing its own historiality, and that would only be possible when this historial Dasein conquers its historicity and thus enters into the history of being (as forgetting of being): in the following, we shall explore why this history is indissolubly that of the letter and of citizenship. Writing, in its alphabetic specificity, as exact recording, an orthographics, that liberates a new possibility of access to the past, configures properly historical temporality.

The already-there is positively and historially constitutive in its facticity, and the inaugurality of History within historiality occurs along with the techno-logic emergence of an orthography of the already-there. To plumb this hypothesis more deeply is to develop a history of the supplement whose fundamental concepts have yet to be elaborated beyond that bequeathed to us by Of Grammatology.

It is necessary at this point to abandon the primordially phonologic understanding of alphabetic writing in order to privilege its orthographic character. What does orthos, orthotes, mean? What irreducible connection is woven between the integrity of the geometric line and the accuracy of the minutes and records of secular law and politics? Marcel Detienne (1988) sees this emergence of exactitude, so important to Husserl, as preceding the phonology of the new forms of writing that constituted Greco-political debate. Philosophy has always understood orthography as separate from phonology in that it posits rectitude (the rigor of aletheia, the uprightness of all rules "for the soul's direction") within the phone as present to itself; that is, within the who. I suggest that this presence-to-self is no more than the effect of the techno-logic exactitude of the what, a techno-logy also at work in the polishing of forms from which proto-geometric invention (Husserl 1970 [1939]), and thus the possibility of idealities, will emerge.

The essential characteristic of orthographic (called phono-logic) writing is the exactitude of the recording of the voice rather than the exactitude of the recording of the voice: it is a matter of recording rather than voice. Similarly, photography is an exact recording, and this is why I shall here make a case that may appear paradoxical: to revert to the question of writing when speaking of the phenomenology of the photograph as laid out by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. I shall keep the photograph separate from all its "phonocentric" temptations, in order to discover that in addition to orthographic writing, other kinds of quite precise recordings also exist; this grouping I shall call memory's orthothetic substructure [support].

Photo-Graphic Certitude as Conjunction of Past and Reality

[Walter] Benjamin's essay ["A Short History of Photography"] and [Roland] Barthes's last book [Camera Lucida] could well be the two major texts on the question of the Referent in technical modernity.

—Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l'autre (1987)

The phenomenological goal to which Roland Barthes devotes himself in Camera Lucida is to learn at all costs what photography is "in itself, by what essential feature it is to be distinguished from the community of images" (Barthes 1982 [1980], 3), and the thematic of the Referent that Barthes develops initiates a photo-graphic correlation combining "death and the referent in a single system" (Derrida 1987, 291): I can now actually see someone dead; that is, who has not passed away. The past is present in the photograph. The dead live. The photograph "implies 'the return of the dead' in the very structure of the image and in the phenomenon of the image." The photograph's intentionality is the Reference, as certitude, that the photographed object was. "I call 'photographic referent' not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it." And contrary to discourse, which always carries within it the possibility of its being fiction, which is also the possibility of all generalization, "in the photograph I can never deny that the thing was there. A double appears there: reality and the past" (Barthes 1982 [1980], 76). This conjunction is the very principle of photo-graphic certitude. Just such a viewing of the photograph's essence demonstrates the intentionality of photography: photography's noema is "that was."

As the conjunction of the past and of reality, the photograph's referent only appears in its predication—an effect in which "a little spark of chance, of the here and now" (Benjamin 1977, 200) can be left in reserve. This predication is the miracle of identical repetition of what took place only once. Photo-graphed, a singular instant has disappeared forever, which at the same time will remain forever and return endlessly in the repetition of the radically paradoxical contingent, as improbable and a priori as impossible as the return of the dead. An instant, an instant that as such would not be able to return.

As repetition, this "as such" signifies an objectivity: that of the photographic lens. Within the realm of photographic objectivity, the referent "adheres" to its recording. The result is that stylization is excluded from the photograph, as is generalization. This mechanical relationality of adherence (of exactitude) is what identifies the very instant of the Real as such.

Conjunction as Photographic That-has-been

The traditional photographic device activates numerous techniques, in two complementary operations: the optical and mechanical system of lens and shutter, and the chemical support system by which the lens's object is revealed. The spectrum, as revelation of the chemical reaction on photosensitive film, is the interface between these two technical systems, and of two separate viewings: those of the photographer and of the spectator.

The spectrum only appears by delayed action, après-coup: the rapport between the instant of capturing the object and the effect of that objectively captured instant on the spectator—the spectrum—occurs as a deferral [diffèrement] of the instant of which it is the inconceivable repetition; the chemical revelation of the object "will touch me like the delayed rays of a star" (Barthes 1982 [1980], 81). Photographic that-has-been is constituted in this delay, and "was possible only on the day when a scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object" (80). "Directly," that is to say without delay, the speed of light balanced against the time of the chemical reaction—a connection producing the time of the posing, or the shutter speed, whose timing must be carefully calculated.

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being will touch me like the delayed beams of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed. (80–81)

The thing of the past, by its immediate radiations (its luminances), has really touched the surface which in its turn my gaze will touch. (81)

The photographic vision is a re-vision. Its delay is originary. The past returns completely as that present that it was, without loss and yet only as a remainder: a spirit, phantom. Returns as a past present for me even though it can never be a question of my past: it can only be a question of a past that I have not lived. Astral, emerging from the night of an infinitely distanced past, photo-graphed light links my present to a past I have not known, yet which is as familiar as a temporal maternity. Light is a carnal medium in the night of time in which an instant to be re-born in my present is conceived, and that then makes possible a temporal identification of the instant of the posed object with the instant of capture that constitutes the pose—an adjustment between shutter speed and the reaction time of the silver salts that produce, albeit as delay, the reversal of the past instant and the present of the gaze; its transfer, which is to say its passing:

What founds the nature of Photography is the pose. The length of this pose is unimportant; even if it is a millionth of a second ..., there has always been a pose, since the pose is here not the sitter's attitude, nor a technique of the camera operator, but the length of an "intention" of reading: in looking at a photograph, I fatally include in my gaze the thought of that instant, however brief it may be, in which a real thing appears, immobile, before the eye. I transfer the present photo's immobility onto the captured past, and it is this that constitutes the pose. (78)

The instant of the capture coincides with the instant of that which is captured. This co-incidence of two instants grounds the possibility of the conjunction of the past and of reality, in which the spectator's presence coincides in its turn with the appearance of the spectrum. This conjunction wrenches the viewer out of the real and into an ineluctably lost past, a wrenching that is also an emanation perceived "like the delayed beams from a star": in the photographic, the past is presented (this is the meaning of "real," here a predicate of a time before that of the living being)—but it can only be presented as late. The vision is only a re-vision. But it is not only a re-vision: it is also an adieu.

History and Narcissism

The spectrum is the phenomenon itself, and not just the photo-graphic device's support—though they cannot rightly be distinguished. It is at once the specter, the return of the dead, the spectacle, and specularity. Barthes is here engaging with a particular historical thematic: the question of photographic narcissism. The photo-graphic spectrum is a mirror placed at the far end of a history of gazes, mirages, and surfaces in which the spectator is reflected. In this mirror, it is History itself, as mirror, that will be broken.

And what mirrors constitute history? What is the history of gazes, what are their stages, what is the first mirror? What happens to the gaze when it is gazed at in the photograph? These questions must be confronted in the name of the image of the self, as the constituting of the imago across those reflections comprising the techniques of imagery: paintings, songs, narratives, writings, photographs, cinematography, videography, television, numeric and analogo-numeric images—and to guide the modalities of identification and dissociation of these gazes' "subject." With the photograph, a new dissociation-identification is initiated: an other experience of death.

Some appearances exist, as instrumental concretizations of the mirror stage, whose clarification is always essentially deferred, and in which the self (re-)sees itself; these constitute, "for us," the "in-self and for-self." To see myself in a photograph is to (re-)see myself in a de-severing (Entfernung) and extension (Erstreckung) that open a space between here and there, past and future, thus rendering possible both the passage of time and a way of approaching the self without which I could never see myself. This always-already retarded specularity allows me to see myself, here, in my photogram, death. The subject of the photograph, captured by the lens, is mortified, deadened: objectified, "thinged." It becomes phantomic. In the exemplary experience of the subject's (re-)seeing him- or herself photo-graphed, in the pose's wake, late, too late, death comes into view.

For Barthes, the singularity of the photographic rapture of time is distilled in the portrait of Lewis Payne [Powell]:

In 1865, the young Lewis Payne attempted to assassinate the American Secretary of State, W. H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell; he was waiting to be hung. The photograph is beautiful, the young man as well: this is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read simultaneously: that will be and that was: I observe with horror a future anterior in which the stakes are death. In giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist),5 the photograph speaks to me of future death. This points me to the discovery of this equivalence. Before the photograph of my mother as a child, I say to myself: she is going to die: I tremble, like Winnicott's psychotic, from a catastrophe that has already taken place. Whether the subject is already dead or not, all photography is this catastrophe. (96)

All photos are this catastrophe, all narcissism is a thanatology, but photographic narcissism is unique: it inaugurates an other(ed) connection to the end, an other(ed) time.

Manifesting a unique connection between myself and my end, photographic deferral gives me a particular temporalization: photographic being-for-the-end is unique.

Visual Clocks, Delaying Mirrors, and Objective Melancholy

The camera is a vision- (or rather re-vision-) clock, producing images that are also mirrors. These media, interfaces, and surfaces of my imago are the spectra beaming out in deferring, delayed-action mirrors.

As in Heidegger, the clock (the what, the technical device for measuring time) throws us elsewhere (finally to the who). But here, technical equipment—the camera—is not an accident: the phenomenon itself—time— is constituted here. Or rather, the temporal exists only to the degree to which there is the accidental; time is constituted in or as technicity, which is originary accidentality. Barthes's reading gives us a glimpse into the ways in which the technological conditions for access to the already-there may condition the very possibilities of our anticipation. Tekhne produces time. So we can easily comprehend phono-logic writing, as orthographic tekhne, by going in a direction running parallel with this analysis but reframing it according to its characteristic technological specifics.

The photograph contains an objective melancholy binding time and technique together; yet throughout the entire history of visuality, time and technique have been constituted solely through the refraction of their instrumental and technical surfaces: différance as a single movement of spacing and temporalization.

The Unnameable

The punctum is measured by a particular attraction for certain photographs, an affect essential to the photographic experience, yet difficult to predict and thus to analyze. Barthes calls this difficulty "adventure." "Certain photographs produce it in me, certain others not," and when it occurs, it causes a reaction. Emotion, motivation, the mobility of a double movement, of two movements crossing each other, "a certain photo suddenly attracts me; it brings me to life and I bring it to life." Only such an attraction, such a double movement and only regarding this or that photograph, creates the possibility of a phenomenology manifesting photography's very essence. This movement has a double origin; it is a mirror movement: the spectator's toward the spectrum, which is the studium (as culture); and that of the spectrum toward the spectator, which is the punctum (as release or liberation [dessaisie], and as noema). "It is not I who seek [the punctum] out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me" (26). This adventure is a return that will fracture the studium; "a photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)" (27), while the studium is programmed by my cultural codes. The punctum is as unpredictable and undeterminable as the end in being-for-the-end. It is "intractable," it insists, resists; it cannot be resisted and it returns ceaselessly. It is incessant, necessary. The particular detail through which it is basically never given but foreseen is a detour for the return of the interminable: "we say 'to develop a photograph'; but what the chemical action develops is undevelopable, an essence (of a wound), what cannot be transformed but only be repeated under the instances of insistence (of the insistent gaze)" (49). The punctum is irresistible—and unnameable. This impossibility marks its true disorder, the sole truly moving one: "the studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is not.... What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.... Despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact" (51, 53). The après-coup of chemical revelation is doubled by another after-effect. The punctum is indescribable; in fact, it is not only indescribable—its description is indefinitely deferred: it is always immanent, never there—like the indetermination of the end. It is for this reason that it essentially reveals itself (as the incessant) in delay, in lateness, in its absence (often in the absence of the spectrum), and as a wound in the spectator. The punctum works: it works as différance. As photography's essential phenomenon, the punctum is a work of mourning. This phenomenology of the photograph is also the act of mourning for Roland Barthes's mother. The Winter Garden Photograph is not itself pivotal. Only out of—after—it [elle] (the photograph, the mother, the photograph of the mother), does the photo's essence reveal itself as a question of time. Through all the rooms he visits in Camera Lucida ("And so I went, alone, through the apartment where she died ..."), Barthes carries the photograph along as he speaks of his mother and his mourning, mourning and its work, the work of time as punctum of mourning. The work of time that erases nothing, but rather differs (within the photograph, the punctum cannot be reduced further). Mourning is ineffable, just as the punctum is unnameable, an enigmatic phenomenon that only ever appears because it always returns.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from TECHNICS AND TIME, 2by Bernard Stiegler Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804730148
• ISBN 13: 9780804730143
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 286