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Stiegler, Habermas and the
Technological Condition of ManNathan Van Camp
Published online: 20 May 2009.
To cite this article: Nathan Van Camp (2009) Stiegler, Habermas and the Technological Condition
of Man, Journal for Cultural Research, 13:2, 125-141, DOI: 10.1080/14797580902786473
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797580902786473
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JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 13 NUMBER 2 (APRIL 2009)
ISSN 14797585 print/17401666 online/09/02012517 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14797580902786473
Stiegler, Habermas and the
Techno-logical Condition of Man
Nathan Van CampTaylorandFrancisRCUV_A_378817.sgm10.1080/14797580902786473JournalforCulturalResearch1479-7585 (print)/1740-1666 (online)OriginalA rticle2009Taylor&Francis132000000April 2009NathanVan Campnathan.vancamp@ua.ac.be
In his multi-volume work Technics and Time Bernard Stiegler forges a new andhighly original understanding of the relation between the human and technics.By thinking of technics as organized inorganic matter endowed with a properdynamic and constitutive of temporality, Stiegler considers the evolution oftechnics as mutually constitutive with the evolution of the human. Moreover,Stiegler claims that this notion of originary technicity has been systematicallydisavowed by the philosophical tradition as a result of which it has always tendedto oppose technics to the human. Starting from a discussion of Stieglers criticalengagement with the paleontologist Andr Leroi-Gourhan, this article aims atexpanding its bearing to Jrgen Habermass theory of technics, a possibility atwhich Stiegler himself hints but which he does not pursue. It will be argued thatthe opposition Leroi-Gourhan draws between technical consciousness andsymbolic consciousness reappears in Habermass writings as that between work
and interaction or purposive-rational action and communicative action.
Our Epimethean Destiny
Bernard Stieglers ongoing project La technique et le temps1 constitutes one ofthe most original and promising efforts in contemporary continental philosophy
to rethink the relationship between the human and technics.2 Since the rise of
the Industrial Revolution, one of the most pressing questions has become how
culture, being the proper locus of mankind, could be protected against the perils
of a pervasive technics, a question which today, with the globalization of the
technical system, has not lost any of its significance. Stieglers merit is to have
shown that, contrary to this view, technics is itself a necessary condition for
1. La Faute dEpimthe, the first volume of this series, appeared in 1994, followed by LaDsorientation in 1996, and Le Temps du Cinma et la Question du Mal-tre in 2001. Bernard Stieglerhas planned to write two more volumes in the near future. In this article I will use the English trans-lation of the first named work by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stiegler 1998).2. Richard Beardsworth even goes as far as saying that it is a work the importance and effects ofwhich can be compared, in the continental tradition at least, with Heideggers Being and Time andDerridas Of Grammatology (Beardsworth 1995, p. 2).
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126 VAN CAMP
individual and collective individuation and that it is therefore problematic to
oppose technics to culture since the latter is only made possible by the former
(Stiegler 2004, p. 59). According to Stiegler, the human and technics are exactly
bound up to each other in an originary constitutive relationship whereby anthro-
pogenesis corresponds point by point to a technogenesis (Stiegler 1998, p. 45),a groundbreaking thesis which takes technics into the center of philosophical
concern.
In the first volume ofTechnics and Time, Stiegler sets up his argument aroundthe emblematic figure of Epimetheus, Prometheuss rather slow brother whose
role in the infamous myth, just as that of technics, is usually forgotten by the
philosophical tradition. In Platos version3 of the story, Epimetheus is granted the
task of distributing qualities (dynameis) among the living creatures. Unfortu-nately, he forgets to give the human race (non-aloga) any quality, a first fault
that will compel Prometheus to commit a second fault by stealing the skills in thearts and fire (tekhnai) from the gods to compensate humans for their original lackof qualities. What Stiegler wants to make clear with this story is not the more
traditional explanation, by which technics comes to define humans positively by
want of any fixed biological determination, but that the origin of the human is
fundamentally aporetic or, in his own words, that there is a default of origin.
Hence, technics is not itself at the origin of man, but that which comes only
afterwards, by default, to fill in for an originary lack of origin. As the inheritor
of Epimetheuss fault, mankind is destined to rely on technical prostheses in
order to further its existence.
As its title clearly suggests, Stieglers project to forge a new understanding of
technics results primarily from a dialogue with the work of Martin Heidegger.
Stieglers contention to think technics as constitutive of temporality will lead
him eventually to articulate a fierce critique of the latters existential thinking
ofTechnik which, he believes, is still caught in the oldest metaphysical traditionsince it opposes the primordial temporality disclosed in Sorge (care) to thetechnical constitution of temporality disclosed in besorgen (concern). In Beingand Time, the latter relation to time marks the mode of existence of das Man(the One) whose inauthentic understanding of Being ensues from the uprooting
consequences brought about by modern industrial society. Stiegler, however,argues that technics is exactly the very condition of the experience of time as it
alone makes it possible for Dasein to experience a past that one has not lived andto anticipate the future in the light of this inherited past. Heidegger could have
grasped this fundamental relationship between technics and time himself when
he argued in Being and Time that worldhood is primarily disclosed in the handlingof equipment (das Zeug) that is ready-to-hand (Zuhandensein), but, as RichardBeardsworth has argued recapitulating Stieglers critique, he refrained from
drawing this conclusion in his desire to understand the factuality of the world in
terms ofDaseins self-affection (Beardsworth 1996, p. 152).
3. In the dialogue with the same name, it is the sophist Protagoras who tells the story ofEpimetheus and Prometheus to Socrates.
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TECHNO-LOGICAL CONDITION OF MAN 127
However, notwithstanding the predominance of references to Heideggers
thought throughout The Fault of Epimetheus, there are also strong indicationsthat Stiegler envisages a critical assessment of yet another thinkers insights into
technics, but the elaboration of these reflections is noticeably missing: Jrgen
Habermass theory of technics, the major outlines of which were developed inhis seminal essay Technology and Science as Ideology (1971), is briefly
mentioned and criticized by Stiegler in the introduction of the book, but it is very
soon abandoned for Heideggerian themes (Stiegler 1998, pp. 1013). This is all
the more curious since Stiegler explicitly states that the major themes from the
existential analytic will be interpreted and submitted to a critique that I
sketched out above as much in response to Habermas as to Heidegger (Stiegler
1998, pp. 1617). Although Stiegler does indeed indicate that both thinkers share
a similar bleak diagnosis of the state of culture in the embrace of pervasive
technics by saying that Habermas and Heidegger appear to agree in consideringthe technicization of language as a perversion (Stiegler 1998, p. 13), his above
briefly outlined critique of Heidegger cannot be simply transposed to Habermass
work. Obviously, existential ontology and Critical Theory are not really kindred
spirits. This essay therefore aims at developing a Stieglerian reading of
Habermass writings on technics in which shall be argued that the opposition the
latter draws between technics and language, and which appears under such
different terms as work/interaction or purposive-rational action/communicative
action, stems from his failure to confront what Stiegler calls the techno-logical
condition of man (Stiegler 2004, p. 15).
In order to set up this argument, I will first comment on Stieglers reading of
the paleontologist Andr Leroi-Gourhan in which he shows that in spite of his
highly original attempt to think the origin of man in relation to technics, he
ultimately reinstalls an opposition between the technical and the symbolic and
argues that only the latter property characterizes man as a cultural being.
Stiegler reads this as a contradictory statement to Leroi-Gourhans own exteri-
orization thesis, and argues that the passage from nature to culture must be
thought as a new relationship between man and inorganic matter which, orga-
nized as technical object, comes to determine what it means to be human.
Subsequently, I will show that Habermass view of technics as an instrument inthe service of the human leads him to reaffirm the boundaries between the
spheres of technics and language. It will however become clear that his argument
that technical action and communicative action are transcendental interest
structures that emerged through contingent evolutionary processes ends up in
paradoxes.
Everything Begins with the Feet: The Paleontology ofAndr Leroi-Gourhan
Leroi-Gourhans paleontological research into the origin of man starts from a
brief analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseaus anthropology which he criticizes for
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entertaining a transcendental cerebralist theory.4 In the Discourse on theOrigin of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau had set himself the task to show thatin the state of nature there was equality among men and for this purpose he
first wants to distinguish properly between what is original and what is artifi-
cial in the actual nature of man (Rousseau 1952, p. 329). His quite traditionalsolution to this question of simply adding a free will to an animal body man as
animal rationale and hence prioritizing spiritual advancement in the processof hominization is exactly what is put into question by Leroi-Gourhans exterior-
ization thesis. By describing hominization as a process by which the various
modes of living memory (genetic and epigenetic) are grafted onto the non-living
(matter), Leroi-Gourhan is able to describe the transition from nature to
culture in a more consistent way than Rousseau did. Whereas Rousseaus tran-
scendental account of the origin of man implies that the man of nature came
into being in one stroke as it is today but without technics by holding that manhas always walked on two legs and made use of his hands as we do (Rousseau
1952, p. 334), Stiegler agrees with Leroi-Gourhan that cerebral development is
only a secondary criterion in the process of hominization (Leroi-Gourhan 1993,
p. 26). On the contrary what was decisive was the erect posture and the new
functional organization of the body that ensued from this novelty in the history
of life:
The freeing of the hand during locomotion is also that of the face from itsgrasping functions. The hand will necessarily call for tools, movable organs; the
tools of the hand will necessarily call for the language of the face. The brainobviously plays a role, but it is no longer directive: it is but a partial element ofa total apparatus, even if the evolution of the apparatus tends towards thedeployment of the cerebral cortex. (Stiegler 1998, p. 145)
The erect posture brought about the gradual suspension of genetic constraints as
a result of which a certain degree of latitude became available. The direct result
was the appearance of both the tool and language to fill in for this lack of genetic
programmability. This does not only mean that hominization can only be thought
in its intimate connection with technical evolution, but also that, as they
descend from the same anatomical rupture, technics and language prove to betwo interdependent features.
A crucial event for the development of Leroi-Gourhans theory was the discov-
ery of the remains of the Zinjanthropian in 1959, the first humanoid to have
benefited from exteriorization. Since with the Zinjanthropian the weakening of
genetic programmability is accompanied by an evolution in tool fabrication,
Leroi-Gourhan introduces the hypothesis that they must have been equipped
with a technical consciousness. However, as the slowness of this evolution also
suggests that in this period of thousands of years the main determinant in
this process was still the rhythm of cortical development, itself propelled by
4. For Stieglers own reading of Rousseau, see Stiegler (1998, pp. 83133). For an excellentcommentary on Stieglers reading of Rousseau, see Roberts (2006).
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TECHNO-LOGICAL CONDITION OF MAN 129
genetic selection, Leroi-Gourhan also maintains that they did not yet possess a
fully-fledged symbolic consciousness, something that will only emerge with
the dawn of the Neanderthalian. Stiegler argues that this amounts to reinstalling
a qualitative gap between the technical and the symbolic and consequently
reproaches Leroi-Gourhan for refusing to confront the radical conclusions thatfollow from his basic assumption (Stiegler 1998, p. 168). His strategy therefore
consists of showing that in his efforts to explain the provenance of this symbolic
or reflexive intelligence, Leroi-Gourhan will contradict his own exteriorization
thesis on several crucial points.
As soon as exteriorization makes its entrance into evolution, then also the
capacity for anticipation as the latter entails the realization of a possibility that
is not determined by a biological program (Stiegler 1998, p. 151). The evolution
of tools is therefore intrinsically connected with a gradual increase in anticipa-
tory capacities: at first there was only one technical gesture performed in thehandling of a pebble, but gradually a combination of gestures which implied a
good deal offoresight on the part of the individual performing the sequence oftechnical operations (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, p. 97; emphasis added). Since with
the dawn of the Neanderthalian there seemed to be an extraordinary increase in
anticipatory capacities together with a stabilization of the evolution of mans
neuro-equipment, he contends that from then on technical evolution started to
take place outside genetic evolution. It is this novelty in evolution that prompts
him to speak of an enigmatic second rupture as a result of which man gets access
to a symbolic intelligence. This means that he situates the decisive break with
nature with the emergence of the faculty of symbolization, implying that initial
technical exteriorization was after all still a purely zoological process: the
genuine birth of man only occurs with the manifestation of a spirit that has
freed itself from the instinct of conservation. Stiegler reminds us that this comes
down to restoring Rousseaus transcendental cerebralist theory, something
which Leroi-Gourhan himself resolutely wanted to drive out with his empirically-
founded exteriorization thesis (Stiegler 1998, p. 162). This is something that
Stiegler cannot accept:
There is no such [second] origin because technical differentiation presupposesfull-fledged anticipation, at once operative and dynamic, from the Australan-thropian onwards, and such anticipation can only be a relation to death, whichmeans that symbolic intellectuality must equally be already there. Reflectiveintellectuality is not added to technical intelligence. It was already its ground.(Stiegler 1998, p. 163)
Leroi-Gourhan contends that the real rupture with nature was fulfilled the
moment that there was a significant increase in anticipatory capacities. But, as
Stiegler remarks, the fact that there is an increase in anticipatory capacities,
no matter how large it may be, does not imply that a qualitative threshold has
been crossed, but only that there was a significant increase in the efficiency of
anticipation. He therefore lays the following alternative in front of Leroi-
Gourhan:
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Either the Zinjanthropian is nothing but a prehominid who cannot anticipate,that is, who is not in time and who in no case accomplishes its future since it hasnone, no more than does the man of pure nature; or else the human is humanfrom the Zinjanthropian onwards, in which case there is technico-intellectual
intelligence as such in a single stroke. (Stiegler 1998, p. 160)
In the end Leroi-Gourhan indeed ends up saying that these archaic humans will
not have been human at all, basing this distinction upon a rather traditional
opposition between technics and intellect. According to Stiegler, this is an odd
metaphysical move, all the more because it seems to imply that the passage from
the almost-human to the fully human is essentially linked to cortical devel-
opment, something that Leroi-Gourhan himself had ruled out earlier by claiming
that the brain only played a minor role in the exteriorization process.
Stiegler also senses a similar problem with regard to Leroi-Gourhans theory on
the origin of language. For, having installed an unbridgeable gap between tech-nical intelligence on the one side and symbolic intelligence on the other, yet
having also asserted that the ability of speech is a direct consequence of exteri-
orization, Leroi-Gourhan sees no other possibility than to conclude that there
must have been a technical language just as there was technical intelligence
and a technical consciousness. This implies that he allows for the existence of
technical language symbols, composing a language that could only express
concrete situations. But, as Stiegler notices, all language, being essentially a
combination of a finite ensemble of signs accounting for an in principal indefinite
reality, necessarily implies the implementation of a process of abstraction and
generalization (Stiegler 1998, p. 166). All language is always already fullysymbolic and it makes no sense to speak about technical language symbols
without at the same time also conceding that a fully-fledged symbolical intelli-
gence must have been there from the very beginning. To speak of a technical
language that is attached to the concreteness of situations is equally contradic-
tory as saying that technical evolution was initially completely determined by
genetic programming. The former comes down to admitting the existence of a
mute language, the latter to the existence of tools that would be put to no use.
Both language and technics always already require an immeasurable degree of
anticipation from the side of the human.These contradictions arise from the fact that Leroi-Gourhan does not fully
consider all the possible implications of his argument that, up to the Neander-
thalian, tools were still, to a large extent, a direct emanation of speciesbehavior (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, p. 93; emphasis added). According to Stiegler,
Leroi-Gourhan seems to have forgotten to explore the alternative explanation
that is hidden in this argument, namely that it is also possible to argue that
cortical evolution might well itself be codetermined by exteriorization, by the
nongenetic character of the tool (Stiegler 1998, p. 155). Whereas paleontolog-
ical findings suggest that technical evolution is partly influenced by the transfor-
mations in genetic memory, the exteriorization thesis indeed implies that the
reverse must be equally possible. The main question then becomes where the
memory of these transformations in technics are stored in order for them to
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TECHNO-LOGICAL CONDITION OF MAN 131
become a permanent acquisition of the human. Stiegler sees no other possibility
than in the material trace of the stereotype in which the preexisting tool itself
consists, repeated, duplicated by its maker and guiding the latter much more
than being guided by him or her (Stiegler 1998, p. 158), suggesting that, besides
genetic and experiential memory, there must also exist something which onecould call technical or epiphylogenetic memory:
[This] epiphylogenetic structure makes the already-there and its appropriationpossible, a reappropriated expropriation, a maieutics of expropriation: flint,the object of work and of the project of anticipation, is also what will keep thememory of this experience, of this epigenesistime being the process of modifi-cation of the industrial stereotype, the repetitive anticipation of the stereotypebeing only the arche-form of this temporality, a form certainly embryonic andprivative of anticipation, but nonetheless the only form in which anticipation is
effected. (Stiegler [1998], p. 159)
The issue at stake here, according to Stiegler, is the question of time as it is
first of all in the capacity to experience a past that one has not lived that access
to temporality can be gained, something which is only made possible by the
material supports (hypomnemata) in which the memories of these experiencesare inscribed. In non-technical life, all epigenetic memory individual memory
that is stored in the central nervous system is lost with the death of the indi-
vidual that was its support. In technical life, however, this epigenetic memory is
exteriorized in artificial supports from flint tools to digital storing devices
which allow for its conservation. Thanks to these technical objects, subsequentgenerations can profit from past experiences and add something to them in turn.
Therefore, Stiegler holds that with exteriorization a new kind of memory is set
up, one that is neither genetic, nor epigenetic, but rather techno-logical and
which in turn conditions the other layers of memory. This is a bold and far-reach-
ing conclusion. It means that with the appearance of technics a new program of
artificial selection is created, one that is comparable to that of genetic selection
and that accounts for the initiation of the history of that what we tentatively call
human culture:
Epiphylogenesis, a recapitulating, dynamic and morphogenetic (phylogenetic)accumulation of individual experience (epi), which designates the appearance ofa new relation between the organism and its environment, which is also a newstate of matter. If the individual is organic organized matter, then its relation toits environment, when it is a question of a who, is mediated by the organized butinorganic matter of the organon, the tool with its instructive role, the what. It isin this sense that the what invents the who just as much as it is invented by it.(Stiegler 1998, p. 177)
Thinking the technical object as inorganic organized matter discloses an orig-
inary co-implication of the human and matter. This insight defies the traditional
opposition between idealism and materialism and hence enables thought to avoid
running into the antinomies that inescapably follow from the idea that either
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matter or mind must be at the origin of the other. It means that human transcen-
dence, the capacity for anticipation and memorization, is only made possible by
technics as the interface between the human and matter. It therefore makes no
sense to oppose the technical to the symbolic, or technics to culture, since the
who (experiential memory) and the what (epiphylogenetic memory) inventeach other in a mutually constitutive dynamic. Contrary to Rousseau and Leroi-
Gourhan then, Stiegler does not answer the question concerning the origin of
man by pointing out some essence in man itself, be it of a strictly transcendental
nature such as spirit or speech, or of a strictly empirical nature such as the level
of cortical development, but by describing how hominization is essentially bound
up with the evolution of organized inorganic matter.
The Origin as a Requisite of our Thought: Jrgen HabermassQuasi-transcendentalism
Jrgen Habermass Technology and Science as Ideology was written as a
reaction to Herbert Marcuses One-Dimensional Man (1964), itself the fruit of amajor discussion that was already initiated during the first half of the twentieth
century and which found its most pregnant expression in Adornos and Horkhe-
imers Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972). In earlier works, such as Eros and Civi-lization (1955), Marcuse had tempered their bleak vision of the fate of society inthe embrace of technical reason by pointing out that the increasing automation
of the labor-process could create a realm of freedom in which more life-enhanc-
ing activities could thrive. In One-Dimensional Man, however, this initial opti-mism concerning the workings of the existing technical system makes way for
radical critique and blatant utopian hopes. Technics and science appear here as
the media through which the dominant political ideology exercises its ruling
power. Now he no longer thinks that the technical system can be considered as
a neutral means, as classical Marxism had always maintained, because its
propensity to dominate nature and man is reproduced on the political level
where its rationality comes to serve as the source of legitimation for forms of
social control. In other words, what Marcuse argues is that although the technicalsystem is structurally repressive, the population does not recognize this as such
because it legitimizes itself by the comforts of life that it produces. Therefore,
the current technical system can no longer serve as the material basis of a liber-
ated society, but must itself be liberated for such a society to be possible in the
first place. Hence Marcuses curious call for a New Technology which would
treat nature no longer as inert matter to be dominated at will, but as a subject
in its own right, and a corresponding New Science, which would arrive at
essentially different concepts of nature and establish essentially different facts
(Marcuse 1964, pp. 166167).
In Technology and Science as Ideology, Habermas takes up Marcuses thesis
of the ideologization of science and technics, but in addition he introduces a
distinction between the institutional framework and the subsystems of
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TECHNO-LOGICAL CONDITION OF MAN 133
purposive-rational action, of which the latter include science and technics.
Both societal structures are subjected to the advancing process of rationaliza-
tion, but where the institutional framework finds its source of legitimation in
communicative processes from mythological explanations to appeals to human
rights progress in the subsystems of purposive-rational action is measured bythe degree in which its practices prove to be successful or not. With this distinc-
tion Habermas wants to explain the phenomenon that Marcuse and the other
members of the Frankfurter Schle described either as the dialectic of enlight-
enment, the eclipse of reason or one-dimensionality, while denying that straight-
forward pessimism or a utopian call for a New Technology are the only options
left. Habermass strategy consists of showing that there is nothing wrong with
the increasing rationalization of the subsystems of purposive-rational action as
such, but that in modern society their logic has also penetrated into the institu-
tional framework as a result of which issues that ought to be decided upon bycitizens following communicatively guided norms are being increasingly treated
as mere technical ones. Hence, the trouble for Habermas is not modern science
and technicsper se, but the fact that the reified models of the sciences migrateinto the sociocultural life-world and gain objective power over the latters self-
understanding (Habermas 1971, p. 113), so that the solution must rather be
sought in removing the restrictions on communication (Habermas 1971, p. 118)
by keeping both spheres rigidly separated. Now it also becomes clear why
Habermas thinks that the aim of Marcuses New Technology the liberation of
nature is utopian:
the achievements of technology, which are indispensable as such, could surelynot be substituted for by an awakened nature. The alternative to existing tech-nology, the project of nature as an opposing partner instead of object, refers toan alternative structure of action: to symbolic interaction in distinction to purpo-sive-rational action. (Habermas 1971, p. 88)
In other words, while Habermas thinks that modern society went astray by
applying the logic of instrumentaltechnical action to the symbolic driven
sphere of culture, he accuses Marcuse of pushing towards the exact opposite,
namely applying concepts that only make sense in the realm of intersubjectivity(domination, liberation, opposing partner, etc.) to the realm of nature where
they make no sense at all.
After a brief exposition of these views, Stiegler remarks that since Habermas
considers the technicization of the sphere of communication as a denaturalization,
as it were a question of one instance proper to humanity perverting another
instance proper to humanity (Stiegler 1998, p. 13), his analyses are still haunted
by the founding positions of philosophy. According to him, in the Greece of the
fifth century BC it was the increasing power of the sophists who used artificial
memory supports (hypomn[emacr] mata) in the service ofpithanon persuasion throughfalse beliefs that provoked Platos repudiation of the technique of writing as a
structural loss of eidetic memory, something of which also Jacques Derrida (2004)
will make much in his reading of the Phaedrus. Hence, we encounter here at the
e
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heart of contemporary Critical Theory a reintroduction of Platos lament that the
technicization of language is something that does harm to individuation:
The new ideology consequently violates an interest grounded in one of the two
fundamental conditions of our cultural existence: in language, or more precisely,in the form of socialization and individuation determined by communication inordinary language. (Habermas 1971, p. 113)
According to Stiegler, it is no coincidence that this age-old discussion should crop
up again since Habermass essay was written in a period in which one was still
trying to come to terms with the new crisis concerning the structure of memory
that appeared in the wake of the Industrial Revolution when the technical system
suddenly outgrows the sphere of language which is also to say the logos and
takes over that of material bodies (Stiegler 2006, p. 20). This can be described
as a new stage in the process of exteriorization in which the memory of livingbodies is inscribed in machines, in the sense that the the memory of the prole-
tarian has been absorbed by a machine reproducing gestures that he no longer
needs to know how to make, and which he must now simply serve, because he
has reverted to the status of a serf (Stiegler 2006, p. 21). In the industrial stage
of exteriorization, new powers are bestowed upon the human, but also new
threats. After all, there has always been the danger of the technical system
becoming autonomous, a possibility that has inspired the critique of reification
from Marx onwards. Habermas implicitly mentions this process in his attempt to
counter Marcuses plea for a New Technology. While Marcuse argues that thecurrent organization of the technical system could be historically surpassed,
Habermas argues that this is impossible given that technics is a project of the
human species as a whole:
In any case technological development lends itself to being interpreted as thoughthe human species had taken the elementary components of the behavioralsystem of purposive-rational action, which is primarily rooted in the humanorganism, and projected them one after another onto the plane of technicalinstruments, thereby unburdening itself of the corresponding functions. At firstthe functions of the motor apparatus (hands and legs) were augmented andreplaced, followed by energy production (of the human body), the functions ofthe sensory apparatus (eyes, ears, and skin), and finally by the functions of thegoverning center (the brain).5 (Habermas 1971, p. 87)
Habermas describes technical evolution as a process of exteriorization, but not
in Stieglers sense of a mutually constitutive relationship between the human and
technics whereby the one requires the other to be itself in the first place, but as
a structural emptying-out of the human behavior system the functions of which
are progressively projected into technical objects. Hence, Habermas defines
technical objects as mere material extensions of biological functions that
increase mankinds power over its external environment. It is this instrumental
5. See also Habermas (1972, p. 48).
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conception of technics that prompts Habermas to criticize the technicization of
the institutional framework in modern society: instead of fulfilling its proper
function as a means at the disposal of mankind, man himself has now reverted to
the status of raw material for the technical system:
For the first time man can not only, as homo faber, completely objectify himselfand confront the achievements that have taken on independent life in hisproducts; he can in addition, as homo fabricatus, be integrated into his technicalapparatus if the structure of purposive-rational action can be successfullyreproduced on the level of social systems. (Habermas 1971, p. 106)
Since for Habermas individuation is achieved through the socializing medium
of thick linguistic communication (Habermas 2003, p. 54) only, in his view, the
technocratization of society signifies a corruption of this essential human prop-
erty. The whole question for Stiegler is, however, whether such an evaluativedistribution according to which technics remains only on one side (of an oppo-
sition), itself not constitutive of individuation in fact remains metaphysical
(Stiegler 1998, p. 14). Indeed, as according to Stiegler the capacity for memori-
zation and anticipation, the possibility for transcendence as such, is only made
possible by the instructive role of inorganic organized matter, individuation, the
becoming of the who, is as much conditioned by technics as it is by language.
Leroi-Gourhan disposed of the conceptual tools to think what Stiegler calls the
techno-logical constitution of man, but he ultimately reinstalled a rift between
the technical and the symbolic, only the latter distinguishing him as a cultural
being. Although we will see that, contrary to Leroi-Gourhan, Habermas does not
assign a temporal priority to the evolutional emergence of one of these two
properties, he nevertheless repeats the latters mistake on another level and will
find himself stuck in an equally striking contradiction.
In order to get to the root of this issue, we have to turn to Habermass seminal
Knowledge and Human Interests (1972) in which the theoretical basis for hiscritique of Marcuse was formulated. In this early work, Habermas distinguishes
between two fundamental modes of human action, work and interaction, which
correspond with the division between the subsystems of purposive-rational action
and the institutional framework in the earlier mentioned essay.6 These are in turnboth linked to a particular human interest that serves as the basis of a specific
form of knowledge. On the one hand, work or instrumental action is linked
to the technical interest in the mastery of nature. This interest is necessary for
the reproduction of the species and at the same time provides the empirical
analytical knowledge produced by the natural sciences. Interaction or symbolic
action on the other hand, is linked to the equally fundamental interest in main-
taining distortion-free communication. This interest is necessary for the smooth
reproduction of our cultural existence and provides the historicalhermeneutic
6. Habermas also speaks of the emancipatory interest in knowledge. But since this third interest isnot grounded in deep-rooted anthropological structures, he thinks it has a derivative status. See forexample Habermas (1973, p. 176).
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knowledge produced by the cultural sciences. With this solution of equiprimor-
dial knowledge-constitutive interests, Habermas both retains important
elements from Marcuses critique of instrumental reason and criticizes its most
problematic claims. That is, while agreeing with Marcuse that instrumental action
is not a neutral practice by indicating that it serves a particular human interest,he nevertheless rejects the possibility of an alternative science and technics by
specifying that this interest is not that of a particular social group but an anthro-
pological structure of the species as a whole. As this fundamental mode of action
is built into the very biological structure of the species itself, man can only
perceive nature as a possible object of technical control. In other words:
They have a transcendental function but arise from actual structures of humanlife: from structures of a species that reproduces its life both through learningprocesses of socially organized labor and processes of mutual understanding in
interactions mediated in ordinary language. These basic conditions of life havean interest structure. The meaning of the validity of statements derivable withinthe quasi-transcendental systems of reference of processes of inquiry in thenatural and cultural sciences is determined in relation to this structure.(Habermas 1972, p. 194195; emphasis added)
It should be immediately clear that this formulation contains a curious mixture
of both naturalistic and transcendental arguments. Before we take a closer look
at their intersection, I will first briefly examine them separately. As Habermas
wants to block the way to any relativistic conclusions that might follow from
Marcuses arguments, he first wants to argue that the interests are grounded indeep-seated anthropological structures. For this purpose, he finds to a certain
extent an ally in Marx who, as opposed to Hegels philosophy of spirit, holds that
nature not only seems external to a consciousness that finds itself within
nature but refers instead to the immediacy of a substratum on which the mind
contingently depends (Habermas 1972, p. 26). Whereas in Hegel nature appears
as a self-created presupposition ofGeist, Marx asserts that it on the contrarymust be understood as an autonomous process that gradually gave rise to both
the human species and his external environment. Accordingly, Habermas argues
that the fundamental modes of human action and their corresponding knowl-
edge-constitutive interests have emerged through basic evolutionary processes.Habermas assigns a pivotal role in this process to a rupture in bodily organization,
the appearance of the tool being its immediate consequence:
Without the particular physical equipment of the hominids, the process ofmaterial exchange could never have assumed the form of labor at the humanlevel. Men begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they beginto produce their means of subsistence, a step that is conditioned by their bodilyorganization. The absolute ego of social production is founded in a history ofnature that brings about the tool-making animal as its result. (Habermas 1972,p. 41)
As in Leroi-Gourhan, hominization is described as a process that is inherently
linked to the evolution of tools, a crucial insight that leads Habermas to the
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TECHNO-LOGICAL CONDITION OF MAN 137
conclusion that it is impossible to determine the origin of man in either biological
or transcendental terms:
In contrast to the fleeting aspects of individual performances, productions, and
gratifications, labor processes give rise to something general that accumulates inthe productive forces. In their turn these enduring productions, or stored upforces of production, transform the world within which subjects relate to theirobjects. Therefore the species can have no fixed essence, either as a transcen-dental form of life or in the empirical form of a biologically conditioned basicpattern of culture. (Habermas 1972, p. 3031; emphasis added)
Technics, or the productive forces, as Habermas calls it in a Marxist
parlance, contains the accumulated materialized experiences of previous gener-
ations that constitute what Stiegler, after Heidegger, calls the prosthetic
already-there.7
What is transmitted through time is an ensemble of technicalobjects which gives man time after time access to a different, but always already
meaningful world.
However close this seems to bring Habermas to the idea that technics is a funda-
mental condition of culture, there is yet another theoretical issue he wants to
address and which leads him in a different direction. The reason why Habermas
describes work at the same time as a transcendental structure after all is that in
Knowledge and Human Interests he is mainly concerned with countering theblatant scientism of the positivists who hold the objectivist illusion that science
investigates reality as such. By arguing that the reality that science takes as its
subject is not an ontologically independent realm of facts, but that part of realitythat is transcendentally constituted by our fundamental interest to master
nature, Habermas is able to show that although science has an interest structure
and is hence not value-neutral, it is nevertheless valid when applied within its
own realm.
Ingenious as this theoretical construction may be, allowing him both to dispel
positivistic accounts of science and discredit his intellectual predecessors long-
ing for a New technology, the combination of both naturalistic and transcen-
dental arguments leads to contradictory implications. After all, Habermas tries
to give an explanation of the genesis of these interests, while at the same timehe wants to hold on to their transcendental character. Knowledge of the
phenomenomenal world is necessarily the product of our transcendental interest
in the mastery of nature. However, as he also argues that this interest is itself
the product of contingent evolutionary processes, he has to assume the existence
of a very problematic pre-human nature in itself that, as it logically precedes the
transcendentally constituted nature for us, comes to serve as an absolute origin
in his theory:
7. See for example Stiegler (1998, p. 183): Nothing can be said of temporalization that does notrelate to the epiphylogenetic structure put in place each time, and each time in an original way, bythe already-there, in other words by the memory supports that organize successive epochs ofhumanity.
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While epistemologically we must presuppose nature as existing in itself, weourselves have access to nature only within the historical dimension disclosed bylabor processes. Here nature in human form mediates itself with objectivenature, the ground and environment of the human world. Nature in itself is
therefore an abstraction, which is a requisite of our thought. (Habermas 1972,p. 34; emphasis added)
Obviously, there is a striking circularity at work here, for how is knowledge of
this latter kind of nature possible given that in his theory knowledge is always
constituted through the fundamental interests?8 As Thomas McCarthy puts it:
In Habermass terms, the categories and methods of empirical-analytical sciencewould both be explained (transcendentally) by reference to structures of humanaction and be employed to explain (empirically?) these structures It seems tofollow that nature is the ground of subjectivity. And this is, on the face of it,
flatly incompatible with its status as a constituted objectivity. (McCarthy 1981,pp. 111112)
According to Habermas, all facts point in the direction of the purely transcen-
dental nature of our interest structures: we can only perceive the world as an
object of possible technical control. And yet, there is this fundamental intuition
that tells us that nature is something that predates us as a species and that some-
how retains its independence. By acknowledging both at the same time,
however, he seems to be saying that the knowledge-constitutive interests are
both constitutive of and constituted by nature. This problem has of course
haunted philosophy ever since Kants Copernican revolution, but whereas Kant
keeps the phenomenal realm and the noumenal realm rigidly separated, Haber-
mas thinks he can counter this problem by expanding Kants concept of passive
synthesis with Marxs understanding that it also contains an active side, what the
latter in the Theses on Feuerbach calls human sensuous activity. According toHabermas, nature in itself is positively knowable, but only in its quality as an
object of possible technical control for a species that is compelled to reproduce
its life through purposive-rational action. The ultimate touchstone of this scheme
is therefore the obstinacy of the material reality to which our behavior and
consequently also our beliefs have to adapt:
We do reckon with the existence of a reality that is independent of men who canact instrumentally and arrive at a consensus about statements. But what thepredication of properties catches of this reality is a matter of fact that isconstituted only in the perspective of possible technical control. (Habermas1972, pp. 130)
Habermas argues here that nature in itself is an independent reality that
somehow functions as the unchanging material ground of our experiences. But did
he not say earlier, as I have stressed, that technical objects always transform
8. For a similar critique, see for example Whitebook (1979) and McCarthy (1981, pp. 110125).
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TECHNO-LOGICAL CONDITION OF MAN 139
the world within which subjects relate to their objects (Habermas 1971, p. 29)?
Firstly, does this initial statement not mean that there is not just one way of
relating to the world as a possible object of technical control but that there
are many such ways depending on the stage that technical evolution might have
reached? This is for example in a way also Heideggers position after his so-calledturning. What Habermas considers as a transcendental way of relating to the
world appears in Heideggers later work as something specific to modern society
in which everything, including man himself, is disclosed as a standing reserve of
energy (Bestand) that can be stockpiled and used to serve the will to power.Secondly, does his initial view not also imply that there is not one unchanging
reality, but that every time a new stage in technical evolution is reached, also
a new world is created? A hypothetical visitor from the seventeenth century
would indeed no longer recognize our contemporary world with all its technical
objects as his world. This seems to be self-evident, but it seems not to be thecase for Habermas who, in the context of the discussion that arose in the wake
of the publication of Thomas Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,maintains that it is always the experience of identical objects of our world
which is being interpreted differently according to the state of scientific progress
we happen to have reached (Habermas 1973, p. 171), thus neglecting the
constitutive role of technical evolution.
Steven Vogel has suggested that this problem of a nature in itself in
Habermass theory of knowledge constitutive interests results from an act of bad
faith insofar as Habermas defines these interests as species-related and not
socially constructed because he desperately wants to avoid any Lysenkoist
implications to follow from his views (Vogel 1996, p. 122). This is a revealing
hypothesis, but I want to argue that it also follows from his disavowal of the
techno-logical constitution of man. By arguing that the technical interest of
mastering nature is natural in the sense that it is vital for the reproduction of
the species, Habermas may be able to avoid the danger of relativism that is
present in Marcuses writings, but the result is that he ends up saying that tech-
nics merely serves the instinct for survival. Habermas would certainly deny that
his theory includes the idea that instrumental action is propelled by a purely
zoological drive because he has explicitly written that the human interests thathave emerged in mans natural history derive both from nature and from the
cultural break with nature (1972, p. 312), but in fact this argument is not open
to him because he almost immediately adds that what raises us out of nature is
the only thing whose nature we can know: language (1972, p. 314). We meet
once again with Leroi-Gourhans concern to avoid the conclusion that what is
specifically human is its technicity. But whereas the paleontologist ends up
installing an enigmatic gap between a technical prehumanity and a symbolic
humanity, in Habermas this gap reappears on the societal level due to his concern
to safeguard the sphere of symbolic interaction from a presumed pervasive
technics.
Some commentators have, however, suggested that Stieglers analyses contain
themselves a residual form of anthropocentrism (Beardsworth 1998; Bradley
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2006; Roberts 2005). Arthur Bradley, for example, argues that thinking technics
exclusively in its relation with anthropogenesis leads, on the one hand, to a
naturalization of all other biological life prior to, or in its difference from the
emergence of the human and, on the other hand, to a complete humanization of
technics (2006, pp. 9495). In this view, Stiegler simply repeats Leroi-Gourhansand Habermass gestures of introducing a dualism with the intention of delineat-
ing the properly human. But in Stiegler, his critics indicate, the opposition being
installed is not between a symbolic humanity and technical pre-humanity or
between the societal levels of interaction and work, but between technical
(human) life and pure (animal) life. I would like to suggest, however, that
Stieglers philosophy does not so much continue this form of anthropocentrism
than counter its classical theoretical formulation by which an insurmountable
gap is installed between the animal and the human, or between nature and
culture, on the basis of some transcendental property such as a soul, a spirit, ora consciousness. It is these kinds of strategies he has in mind when he says that
the human is not a spiritual miracle that would suddenly belong to an already
given body, in which the mental would be grafted onto the animal (Stiegler
1998, p. 144). In this respect Stieglers refutation of the miracle thesis, that
is, the positing of some form of spirituality without an understanding of its
provenance, is exactly a fierce attempt to eradicate the anthropocentrism that
haunt all metaphysical systems. Whether this means, however, that his theory
runs the risk of redrawing the dividing line between humanity and animality on
the basis of a too narrowly-defined notion of originary technicity remains a
question that is still open to discussion.
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