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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 [email protected]

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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128 VAN CAMP

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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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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130 VAN CAMP

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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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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132 VAN CAMP

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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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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136 VAN CAMP

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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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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138 VAN CAMP

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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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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140 VAN CAMP

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.

References

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Armand, L. (eds.) Technicity, Litteraria Pragensia, Prague, pp. 78100.Derrida, J. (2004) Platos Pharmacy, in Dissemination, trans. Johnson, B., Continuum,

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Marcuse, H. (1955) Eros and Civilization, Beacon Press, Boston.Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man, Beacon Press, Boston.McCarthy, T. (1981) The Critical Theory of Jrgen Habermas, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.Roberts, B. (2005) Stiegler Reading Derrida: The Prosthesis of Deconstruction in

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