/lit/ - Literature

>If Stiegler was able to retrieve from his reading of Plato and his deconstruction of Heidegger a concept of time as technics in Western philosophy, it seems that a similar enterprise would not be possible for ancient Chinese philosophy. We have to admit that to say that technology inscribes time is to make an ontological and a universal claim. Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropology of technology had already shown that technics should be understood as a form of the exteriorisation of memory as well as the liberation of organs, and hence that the invention and use of technical apparatuses is also a process of hominisation.

>Tool-use and the liberation of the hands, and the invention of writing and the liberation of the brain, are corresponding activities that transform and define the human as a species. In other words, Leroi-Gourhan offers an evolutionary theory of human from the perspective of the invention and usage of technical objects. However, the experience of technics is related to and partially conditioned by cosmology— and it is precisely in this sense that we insist on the importance of a cosmotechnics. Technical apparatuses function somatically as extensions of organs— and, as prostheses, are somatically and functionally universal, and yet they are not necessarily cosmologically universal. That is to say, in so far as technics is both driven by and constrained by cosmological thinking, it acquires different meanings, beyond its somatic functionalities alone. For example, different cultures may have similar calendars (e.g. with 365 days in a year), yet this doesn’t mean that they have the same concept or the same experience of time.

>After the example of Plato’s suppression of the spatial supplement involved in the slave-boy’s anamnesis, technics as inscription, and hence as a support of time, has been the unconsciousness of the modern. That is to say, it has never been thematised as such within modernity, and yet it acts in such a way as to constitute the very conception and perception of the modern. Now, unconsciousness only exists in relation to consciousness; we might even call it the negation of consciousness. When consciousness recognises something unconscious, even though it may not be able to know exactly what it is, it will attempt to integrate it and render it functional, Technological unconsciousness is the most invisible, yet the most visible being; as Heidegger says, we don’t see what is nearest to us. And it was this technological unconsciousness that granted the cogito the will and the self-assurance to exploit the world, without perceiving the limits of this exploitation. The later discourse on progress and development that fuelled and justified the European colonial project continues with the same logic, up until the moment when crises are imminent: industrial catastrophes, the extinction of species, the endangering of biodiversity....