/lit/ - Literature

>Each day brings its technical novelty, as well as the demise of things obsolescent and out of date. Innovation is inevitably accompanied by the obsolescence of existing technologies that have been superseded and the out-of-dateness of social situations that these technologies made possible—men, domains of activity, professions, forms of knowledge, heritage of all kinds that must either adapt or disappear.

>It is as if time has leapt outside itself: not only because the process of decision making and anticipation (in the domain of what Heidegger refers to as "concern") has irresistibly moved over to the side of the "machine" or technical complex, but because, in a certain sense, and as Blanchot wrote recalling a title of Ernst Jünger, our age is in the process of breaking the "time barrier." Following the analogy with the breaking of the sound barrier, to break the time barrier would be to go faster than time. A supersonic device, quicker than its own sound, provokes at the breaking of the barrier a violent sonic boom, a sound shock. What would be the breaking of a time barrier if this meant going faster than time? What shock would be provoked by a device going quicker than its "own time"? Such a shock would in fact mean that speed is older than time. For either time, with space, determines speed, and there could be no question of breaking the time barrier in this sense, or else time, like space, is only thinkable in terms of speed (which remains unthought).

>There is today a conjunction between the question of technics and the question of time, one made evident by the speed of technical evolution, by the ruptures in temporalization (event-ization) that this evolution provokes, and by the processes of deterritorialization accompanying it. It is a conjunction that calls for a new consideration of technicity.

>Our attempt will be to conjugate the question of technics with the question of time. We will take up this conjugation in the first place as the question of technics in time, and this first section will treat the history of techniques from the point of view of this history's concepts.