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Bernard Stiegler is Assistant Director of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, Paris.

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TECHNICS AND TIME, 1

Stanford University Press

Contents

Translators Note..................................................xvGeneral Introduction..............................................1Introduction......................................................21§1 Theories of Technical Evolution...........................29§2 Technology and Anthropology...............................82§3 Who? What? The Invention of the Human.....................134Introduction......................................................183§1 Prometheus's Liver........................................185§2 Already There.............................................204§3 The Disengagement of the What.............................239Notes.............................................................279Bibliography......................................................291

Chapter One

General History and the History of Techniques

The general concept of a technical system is elaborated by Bertrand Gille from the perspective of a historical science. Strictly speaking, in Gille's work there is no one technical system but a succession of technical systems. In the course of a historical period, a system is constituted as a stabilization of technical evolution around previous acquisitions and structural tendencies determined by a play of interdependencies and inventions complementing one another, in relation to other dimensions characteristic of a particular historical period.

This is a proposal in historical method not only for the history of techniques but for general history: it is a question of elaborating "a history bound, so to speak, by the material world" (Gille 1978, ix), a history that can account for the everyday material world throughout history, initiate a dialogue with the specialists of other systems (economic, linguistic, sociological, epistemological, educational, political, military, and so forth) on the question of the site of technics [la technique] in the global coherence of the "human system," and determine the periods of technical development.

Beyond this, what is in question is an apprehension of the possibilities of passage from one technical system to another. From the vantage of a synchronic principle, Gille proposes to describe and explain the diachrony of ruptures, mutations, revolutions, of what in general is called "progress" in the specifically technical sense of the term: "What may appear, in scientific progress, not so much simple as clear and rigorously ordered, appears infinitely less so in technical progress" (1978, x). How does invention take place? Through a process unlike scientific progress: "if there is a certain logic to technical progress, this logic is not perfectly autonomous. Firstly, a certain coherence is necessary in that an isolated technique does not exist without reference to attendant techniques" (x): the logic of this progress for a particular technique is primarily determined by the technical system to which it belongs.

Lucien Febvre called attention to the necessity and the lack of an actual history of techniques within general history, to the necessity of a concept founding its method: the history of techniques is "one of these numerous disciplines that are entirely, or almost entirely, to be created" (Febvre 1935,16). This necessity appeared notably in the thesis of Lefébvre des Noettes, which assigned to technical innovation—to the harnessing and saddling of the horse—a determining role in the disappearance of slavery, and highlighted the problem of the role of technics in human development and of a technical determinism in history.

The stakes are high. The incorporation of the history of techniques into general history is particularly difficult.

There is first of all the problem, intrinsic to the object "technics" [la technique], of not falling into a specialized, parceled history of techniques: technics is the object of a history of techniques, beyond techniques. At present, history knows only techniques, because technics is essentially specialization. Technics is not a fact but a result. The history of techniques, then, needs this result to become organized into a history of technics.

There is on the other hand a problem in establishing the actual connections with other historical aspects; this places the preceding problem at a more general level. There are economic, political, demographic facts, and so forth. But it is the unity of the historical fact that gathers this diversity into a general history. Here again, the result must provide the unity of the operation from which the result results.

The concept of a technical system aims at the solution of these problems. Such a result returns after the event [après coup] as the possibility of a new, more stable beginning.

The Technical System

As in linguistics, here the point of view creates the object, and the concepts will have to order reality according to the static and dynamic aspects of the general system that reality forms. As in linguistics, here the system is the major concept.

Technical structures, ensembles, and channels are static combinations in which phenomena of retroaction appear: by using the steam engine, the steel industry produces better steel, allowing in turn for the production of more efficient machines. Here, then, the necessity of a concept of technical system becomes urgent. The various levels of combinations are statically and dynamically interdependent, and imply laws of operation and processes of transformation. Each level is integrated into a superior level dependent upon it, right up to the global coherence that the system forms.

A technical system constitutes a temporal unity. It is a stabilization of technical evolution around a point of equilibrium concretized by a particular technology: "The establishment of these connections can only take place, can only become efficient, once the common level of the ensemble of techniques is realized, even if, marginally, the level of some of the techniques, more independent than others, has remained below or above the general level" (Gille 1978,19). A sort of technical mean is thus established around the point of equilibrium.

The evolution of technical systems moves toward the complexity and progressive solidarity of the combined elements. "The internal connections that assure the life of these technical systems are more and more numerous as we advance in time, as techniques become more and more complex." This globalization [mondialisation] of such dependencies—their universalization and, in this sense, the deterritorialization of technics—leads to what Heidegger calls Gestell: planetary industrial technics—the systematic and global exploitation of resources, which implies a worldwide economic, political, cultural, social, and military interdependence.

The Technical System in Its Relation to Economic and Social Systems

The question posed to history is that of the relation between the technical system and what we shall call the "other systems." In the first place, it is obvious that links exist between the technical and economic systems: there is no work without technics, no economic theory that is not a theory of work, of surplus profit, of means of...