/lit/ - Literature

>For Stiegler, this operation exemplifies the technical exteriorisation of memory: it is only the markings on the sand— a form of techne— that allow the slave to trace the lines of the problem and to ‘remember’ the forgotten truth. As Stiegler notes, geometrical elements such as a point or a line do not really exist, if we understand existence in terms of spatial-temporal presence. When we draw a point or a line in the sand, it is no longer a point, since it is already a surface. The ideality of geometry demands a schematization qua exteriorization as writing:

>Geometry is knowledge of space, and space is a form of intuition. Thinking of space as such an a priori form suppose this capacity of projection that the figure represents. But it is essential here to notice that this projection is an exteriorization not only in that it allows a projection for intuition, but also in the sense that it constitutes a retentional space, that is to say a support of memory which, step by step, backs the reasoning of the temporal flux that is reason, which thinks.

>According to Stiegler’s deconstruction, then, the Platonic concept of truth as recollection is necessarily supplemented with a technical dimension which, however, Plato does not thematise. Stiegler calls this ‘tracing of the line on the sand’ this exteriorised memory, tertiary retention— a term that he adds to the primary and secondary retention explained in Husserl’s Onthe Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. When we listen to a melody, what is retained immediately in memory is the primary retention; if tomorrow I recall the melody, this testifies to a secondary retention. What Stiegler calls tertiary retention, then, would be, for example, the musical score, the gramophone, or any other recording device that externalises the melody in a stable and enduring form outside of consciousness proper.

>Geometry is constituted not only by communication (drawn figures), but is itself the constituent of communication (orthographs), without which the ‘self-evidence’ or apodicticity of geometry would not be retained.

>Technical objects, for Stiegler, constitute an epiphylogenetic memory, a "past that I never lived but that is nevertheless my past, without which I would never have had a past of my own". Epiphylogenetic memory is distinct from both genetic and ontogenetic memory (the memory of the central nervous system); in Stiegler’s words, it is a ‘techno-logical memory’ which resides in languages, the use of tools, the consumption of goods, and ritual practices. We might say then that technics, as the idealisation of geometrical thinking, inscribes time and simultaneously brings into play a new dimension of time— one which, as Stiegler shows, remained under-elaborated in Heidegger’s Being and Time.

"A past that I never lived but that is nevertheless my past, without which I would never have had a past of my own."