A European condition

Patrick Jones

permapoesis

2011

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Slow Text

What follows is a translated transcript of Bernard Stiegler speaking in the film The Ister. This text,the result of documentation by filmmakers David Barison and Daniel Ross (who have come to

Stiegler’s home to ask questions concerning his book Technics and Time), is a fundamental work ofphilosophy that historicises why there exists today a monumental ‘crisis of reason’, to cite ValPlumwood; why European man, and those under his technical spell, have become increasingly

insane.

I have transcribed Stiegler’s thoughts – the line breaks corresponding to his pauses for more oxygen– centred them on the page and subjected them to a ‘slow text’ procedure. A slow text occurs whenindividual letters on a page begin to mimic more typical diversities found in life, attending to themonological nature of standard printed text. This particular slow text has been formed using the

surname ‘Stiegler’, taking each of the seven individual letters that make up the eight-lettered word –s, t, i, e, g, l, r – and giving each a specific font character. The ‘s’ is therefore superscripted. The ‘t’is subscripted. The ‘i’ is italicised. The ‘e’ is bolded. The ‘g’ is small capitalised. The ‘l’ is made

14-point type. And the ‘r’ is made 10-point type.

The logic behind a slow text is to use chance, not design, to attend to the speeding, imposing, forgettingeye. In using technical applications to produce a slow text ‘print’ of Stiegler’s spoken account, I aim to

fuse the biophysical breath that forms Stiegler’s utterances with the nonhuman entities of letters andpages, while at the same time show how technics can work to attend to the ‘problem of divorce;’ of

separation. This offers, or encourages, a slower reading and thus potentially an awareness of anenvironment that’s not strictly human, but rather one where many entities exist. What Stiegler identifiesin the following pages is man’s difference – technics, but he knows this difference has not always made

us separate.

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“One day Zues said to Prometheus,

‘the time has come for you,

‘for us Gods, to brinG intothe day the non-immortals.’

The non-immortals

beinG animals and men.

Prometheus, who is putin charGe of this task,

has a twin brothernamed Epimetheus.

Epimetheus resembles Prometheus;he is his double.

But in fact Epimetheus

is his brother’s opposite.

Epimetheus is the Godof the fault of forGettinG.

Prometheus is

a fiGure of knowledGe,

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of absolute mastery,

total memory.

Prometheus forGets nothinG,

Epimetheus forGets everythinG.

Epimetheus says to his brother:

‘Zues has Given you this task– I want to do it!

‘Me me me!I’ll take care of it.’

Epimetheus is a rathersimple-minded brother

and Prometheus is fond of him.

He dares not refuse and says,‘OK, you take care of it.’

So Epimetheus distributes the qualities.

He will Give the Gazelleit

s speed, for example.

Gazelles run very fast.

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To the lion he Gives

force and endurance.

To the turtle the shell, etc.

He distributes the qualities

in equilibrium.

Epimetheus’ distribution of the qualities

describes the ecoloGical balanceof nature.

The lion chases and eats the Gazelle,

but Gazelles run fast,

so some escape and reproduce.

And all the species

Are in equilibrium.

Now as Epimetheus is

distributinG the qualities,

he suddenly notices somethinG…

He looks in his basket…

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‘There are no qualities left!

‘I forGot to save a quality for man!’

The basket is empty.‘I s

till have to brinG mankind,mortals, into the day.’

There was still this species

to brinG into the day,

but there are no qualities

left to Give him a form.

So Prometheus Goes to theWorkshop of the God Hephaes

tus,

to steal fire.

Fire, which is obviouslythe symbol of technics,

but which is also the symbolof the power of God.

Zues.

Man and technics

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are indissociable.

The phenomenon of hominization

is the phenomenon of thetechnication of the livinG.

Man is nothinG other

than technical life.

But for thousands and evenmillions of years,

man did not sensethis technical dimension,

which constitutes

his life and existence,

which makes hima sinGular and oriGinal livinG beinG

in the kinGdom of livinG beinGs.

Over a very lonG period of time,man has not felt this difference,

inasmuch as technics

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has evolved with man,

more or less

in harmony with him.

Until the industrial revolution

at the start of the 19t

h century,

man lives in a technical milieuwhich is normally s

table,

but which is transformedfrom time to time.

The historian Bertrand Gille calls these

periods of ‘technoloGical rupture.’

There have been technoloGical ruptures

since the beGinninG of humanity.

Initially they are very far apart.

Many hundreds of thousands

of years apart, I think, in prehistory.

Then in the proto-historic epoch,

from the Neolithic period onwards,

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the Gap between technoloGicalruptures is thousands of years,

and from the Greeks onwards

the Gap is in the hundreds of years.

Then, startinG from the classical period,

the Gaps become dozens of years.

The Great industrial revolution

of the steam enGine beGins in 1780.

This provokes Great transformations

in manufacturinG activity.

Indeed this transformationcons

titutes the industrial revolution.

Now, two thinGs happenedin the indus

trial revolution.

First, the duration of technical sys

tems

becomes shorter and shorter.

They become so contractedthat there is almos

t no stability

in technical systems.

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Until the 18th century.

Science on the one hand,which includes philosophy,

and technics on the other

are two worlds

which barely communicate.

It is necessary to wait forthe end of the 18t

h century

and the beGinninG of the 19th century,

for the arrival of industry

before a new relation betweenscience and technics is cons

tituted,

a relation which completelyupset

s the philosophical order

established since

Plato and Socrates.

Greek science, Greek philosophy

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say fundamentally

that technics has no ontoloGical depth,no ontoloGical meaninG.

Technics is nothinG other

than artifactuality,

makinG it necessary to distinGuish

artifice from ontoloGy, from beinG.

Appearance must be

separated from essence.

BecominG must be

separated from beinG.

From then on, science and technics

are fundamentally separate.

At the end of the 18th century

this relation will chanGe.

And what was a relation of oppositionbetween science and technics

becomes a relation of composition.

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The result is a new dynamism in technics.

Which leads to what I call‘permanent innovation,’

whereby technics tends totransform it

self continually.

And where, moreover,in the indus

trial realm,

competition will arisebetween enterprises.

This competition will lead

to a process of Globalisation,

with the development

of railways and shippinG

openinG up enormous new markets.

Thus we leave the national sphere.

We pass quickly into aprocess of competition

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fouGht essentiallythrouGh technical innovation,

that is, throuGh optimisationof machine productivity.

And this economic war

will translate intotechno-scientific war.

Now this poses

a problem of divorce

between social orGanisation,

spiritual orGanisation,

linGuistic,

political,

economic,

reliGious,

epistemic, or epis

temoloGical,

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leGal,

metaphorical,

bioloGical even.

All these spheres

are systems.

And in one fell swoopthey are s

truck, overturned, exploded,

by the technical system

throuGh the dynamism ofelectronics and the internet.

This process beGanin the 19t

h century.

But now we experience it withan extraordinary, brutal force.

It beGan in the 19th century

because at that time

there arose a new process,

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whereby industry,

in its economic s

truGGle,

needed to createnew object

s every day,

to open new markets for new object

s.

All sorts of object

s.

The car.

Mineral water.

Plastic.

Toys for babies.

Electricity.

Always new, new, new, new.

And this is an enormous chanGefor society.

Enormous because until the18t

h and 19th centuries,

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for most people,

the world remained always the same.

Always stable.

Most people thouGht the world had

always been the way it was in their time,

and that it will always

remain the same.

They didn’t understand

that they lived in historic time.

Before HeGel there was nohis

torical consciousness.

A consciousness believed it was livinG

in a world identical to itself.

A stable world,

the world of beinG.

And for this consciousness,‘becominG’ is exceptional and mons

trous.

All western philosophy

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until the 19th century

thouGht that stability

was the essence of reality.

ChanGe, revolution, was quite accidental.Absolutely accidental.

In the 19th century,

suddenly one says no:

actually stability is the exception.

It is chanGe that is normal.

This is Marx.

It is Marx via industry,

via technics.

Nietzsche says, inHuman, All To Human:

‘Man still has

no historical consciousness.’

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‘The philosopher still has

no historical consciousness.’

‘He thinks the mindhas always been what it is…’

He speaks here ofRousseau and Kant.

But, Nietzsche says,

we now discover prehistoric men,

fossils,

and we realise man has

not always been what he is,

and that the process of becominG

is fundamentally what must be thouGht.

Reality is becominG,says Nietzsche.

But if Nietzsche can say that,

it’s because he is at theend of the 19t

h century,

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and he is witnessinGbefore his eyes

the Growth of technoloGy,and already he unders

tands

that man will be carried awayby this technoloGical Growth.

At the same time,

somethinG is in the process

of developinG around the world,

throuGh archaeoloGy,throuGh palaeontoloGy,

throuGh all these sciences

which study traces, fossils.

And what is discovered by sciencein the Wes

t and then Globally,

is that technics has evolved over time,as have animals and plant

s,

and thus technics is cauGht up

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in the evolutionary process.

Which leads Marx to sayin Das Kapital

that we must elaborate a

theory of technical evolution,

just as Darwin elaborated a theory

of the evolution of livinG beinGs.

This takes me back to whatI was sayinG at the s

tart.

Earlier I said that man is anessentially technical livinG beinG,

and that the becominG of man and technics

are the same thinG.

It’s true.

But at the same time

between manand human production (technics)

there’s a perpetual risk of divorce.

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Because technics forms a system,

and this system has it

s own dynamic,

which leads us

to say today:

‘We must do away with jobs

so that technoloGy can develop.’

In Europe this is often said.

So we’re forcedto put people on the dole.

The historian Bertrand Gille names

this phenomenon ‘disjointedness.’

Which relates to what Shakespeare called…

‘Time out of joint.’

Disjointedness.

Sometimes time comes off its hinGes.

Fundamentally because of a

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process of technical becominG.

This is the Great difficultyfor thouGht:

man is fundamentallya technical beinG,

and yet technics is always unsettlinG man,

who like all other beinGs seeks to conserve himself as he is.

Life is fundamentally conservative,yet it is also neGentropic.

In other words:transformation, becominG, alteration.

In so far as man is a technical beinG

who in order to survive,

must fabricate protheses

artifical apparatuses

of defence and attack

an apparatus of prostheses,

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first the flint,

then the arrow

then finally the car, the rocket,the computer, whatever you like.

All this forms a system,

because this appliance, the computer,

can’t exist without this accessory,

and this socket, which feeds the computer,relies on a transformer,

linked to a network,

linked to turbines.

And it is necessary to alter

the flow of water

and stop the river

in order to Generate electricity.

All this forms a system,

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a system that upset

s nature,which transforms nature,

and which leads us to ask today:‘Well, what is nature?’

Does nature exist?

Physis.

Natura. What is that?

Maybe it doesn’t exist.

Maybe it’s a phantasm.

Be that as it may,prehis

toric man develops prostheses

which lead to systems,

to an enormous Global industrial sys

tem.

Globalisationis the Globalisation of technics.

But what is essentialabout this process

is that technics,

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as it develops

Gives rise to a third kind of memoryfor livinG beinGs.

When a prehistoric man

cuts a flint,

to cut meat,to use aGains

t predators,

to trap preyor to use aGains

t other men,

obviously he doesn’t cut

the flint to preserve his memory.

But the act of cuttinG the flint

preserves in the stone

the Gesture of cuttinG,

permittinG the inscriptionof his Ges

tures on the flint

and in fact constitutes a

new memory-support

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for the livinG beinG, man.

Until man, life rests on the combination

of two systems of memory:

Genetic memory, DNA,

and on the other hand,the memory of the individual,

in the nervous system,

the brain, etc.

These two memories,

which exist in all superior,

sexed, vertebrate beinGs

endowed with a nervous system…

these two memories do notcommunicate with each other.

They are completely autonomous,

and consequently when an animalacquires an individual experience,

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somethinG vital to it,

this experience can’t betransmitted to the next Generation,

because the memoryof the nervous sys

tem

has no way of communicatinGwith Genetic memory.

In other words

when the livinG beinG dies,

all the experience it has

accumulated individually

are lost by the species.

In contrast,

after technics appears,

very limited transmissionis made possible,

of vital acts,

of tool fabrication.

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And then increasinGly vast

dimensions of memory devlop,

dimensions of memorywhich throuGh technics

become transmissible fromGeneration to Generation.

And that camerawhich is recordinG me now

is a system of memorisation:

the latest development, the lates

t avatar

of a system which beGins

with the first carved flint,

and which allows life to preserve thetrace of it

s individual experience,

and to transmit that tracebetween Generations.

This is the appearanceof what we call culture.

And obviously this is also the

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beGinninG of the possibility

of conservinG the past of a social Group,

throuGh ‘supports,’

supports of all kinds.

This Glass is a support.

It’s not made to preserve memories,it’s made to drink water.

And you have not had a drink.

But this Glass, which is

made for drinkinG water,

will for an archaeoloGist

in 1000 years be a trace of civilisation,

which will permit him tounders

tand how people lived

at the beGinninGof the 21s

t century.

So it will become a memory-support.

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ArchaeoloGy makes use oftools, of everyday object

s,

which were not intendedto aid memory,

in order to reconstitute

the past of a society.

In essence:technics is memory-support.

And this means

technics is the condition

of the constitution

of the relation to the past.

So, Prometheus will steal fire,

in other words technics,

and also the intelliGence of Athena.

And man will bea mortal livinG beinG

condemned to fabricate prostheses.

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In other words he has no qualities.

He is obliGed

to endlessly equip himself

with new artifices for survival.

And since they have noquality defined in advance

men enter into conflict

with one another,

to decide on their quality,on their future.

Some say‘we should do this,’

others say‘no, we should do that.’

The animal, the zebra,

the Gazelle of which I spoke amoment aGo, the cow, the lion,

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they have no question to pose

concerninG ‘who are we?’

Who are we? Is not a question for an animal.

But for man, it’s an eternal question.

Who are we?

Should we develop computers?

Should we land on the moon?

Raze that forest?

Build that damon Hölderlin’s river?

Should we do that?

Technics is the question.

As soon as I am technical,I am ques

tioninG