Culture Industry Redux: Stiegler and Derrida on Technics and Cultural Politics By Robert Sinnerbrink

Issue No. 17 2009 — Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics

Culture Industry Redux: Stiegler and Derrida on Technics and Cultural Politics
By Robert Sinnerbrink

In the conclusion to his landmark 1996 study, Derrida and the Political, Richard Beardsworth outlines “two possible futures” for Derridean deconstruction. The first he describes as a “left-wing Derrideanism,” which would foreground “Derrida’s analysis of originary technicity,” and develop the supplementary logic of the trace “in terms of the mediations between [the] human and the technical” (Derrida and the Political 156). Such a future has been powerfully realised in the work of Bernard Stiegler, notably in his massive multi-volume work Technics and Time (1994-2001), of which only volumes one and two have so far been translated into English. [2] The second possible future for deconstruction, what Beardsworth dubs “right-wing Derrideanism,” is perhaps more familiar. The latter, Beardsworth suggests, would pursue “Derrida’s untying of the aporia of time from both logic and technics,” and argue that it is the gift of time that remains to be thought; such a path would enact a messianic promise that requires a Derridean mobilization of religious discourse, and a “passive” orientation towards the advent of the future, of the incalculable “to-come” (Derrida and the Political 156). [3] Although Beardsworth then immediately qualifies this apparent opposition, stating that there is here, in fact, “no answer and no choice” (156), that what we have, rather, is an aporetic dynamic between the one and the other, there is nonetheless a clear sense in which his book – one that carefully situates Derrida’s thought within the history of philosophical reflection on the political from Kant and Hegel to Marx and Heidegger – affirms the “Left-Derridean” path while critically questioning its “Right-Derridean” counterpart.

Beardsworth’s gesture is symptomatic of a certain “hesitancy,” as he remarks, regarding Derrida’s thinking of the nexus between the historical, the political, and the technical. One might have expected a more explicit acknowledgement, for example, of Derrida’s own speculative remarks concerning the history of Hegelianism, whose endlessly doubled, two-track rhythm – from Right to Left and back again, without closure or resolution, a performative undoing of the claims of totalising dialectic – is indicative of the movement of différance, as Derrida might say, within Hegelian metaphysics. Hegel is, after all, for Derrida, both the last metaphysician of the book and the first thinker of writing; Hegelian dialectic is both the culmination of the metaphysics of presence and the moment of its nascent self-deconstruction (Derrida, Of Grammatology 24-26; Positions 77-79). This Hegelian dynamic is broken only by Marx; indeed, modern thought, as so many exorcisms of Hegelian Geist, remains haunted by Marx’s uncanny spectre (Derrida Spectres of Marx). This, I suggest, is the underlying motif of the apparent opposition Beardsworth proposes and then disavows between a “Left-” and “Right-Derrideanism”: how far one acknowledges the spirit, the uncanny spectral power, of Marxist thought in relation to the task or promise of deconstruction in respect of politics, time, and technics.

Given Stiegler’s remarkable outpouring of books since 2001, and his prominent internet and institutional activism (see the website for Ars Industrialis, of which Stiegler was a co-founder), it is striking that the English-language critical reception of his work has only recently begun to gather momentum. [4] The following essay thus seeks to further the critical reception of Stiegler’s philosophy of technology by situating his work within the legacy of critical theory (broadly understood) and deconstruction (broadly understood). To this end, I shall reflect on what Beardsworth described as the twinned futures of deconstruction, focussing, in particular, on the “Left-Derrideanism” developed in Stiegler’s radical re-thinking of the problem of technics, and on his related call for a “politics of memory” as a critical response to debilitating effects of global techno-capitalism. In doing so, I want to develop and extend Beardsworth’s helpful insight by suggesting that Stiegler’s transformation of Heidegger and Derrida retrieves and renews the interrupted Frankfurt school tradition of culture industry critique. Stiegler’s “Left-Derrideanism,” I argue, reinvigorates the project of a “cultural politics” that would take place in the intersection between culture, technics, and politics. In this respect, Stiegler’s critical thinking on the problem of technics – what we might call his culture industry redux – points to a number of important practical cultural responses to the debilitating malaise that increasingly afflicts politics in liberal capitalist democracies.

1. From Culture Industry to Global Teletechnologies

Stiegler notes in the first volume of Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998) that there is an important history of attempts to think the relationship between technics, time, and experience. Heidegger, for Stiegler, is the most important thinker to have explored the question of technics, while the anthropological, historical, ethnographical, and psychological dimensions of the relationship between technicity and humanity have been extensively elaborated in the work of Bertrand Gille, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, and Gilbert Simondon (T&T1 2). What do we make, then, of the relationship between culture and technology? Here we need to consider the important Marxist/critical theory perspective on technics and modernity, stretching from Walter Benjamin’s reflections on art and technical reproducibility, Adorno and Horkheimer’s stark analyses of the culture industry, to Herbert Marcuse’s “Heideggerian” theorisation of the dialectic between techno-scientific rationality and political domination (T&T1 1). These analyses, in turn, shape Jürgen Habermas’s influential 1968 text “Technics and Science as ‘Ideology’,” which examines the dichotomy between “purposive-rational activity” and “symbolically mediated interaction,” and proposes a critique of the pernicious dominance of purposive-rational activity over communicative action (T&T1 11). I shall begin, then, by sketching a brief genealogy of recent critical thinking on technics, culture, and politics, focusing on Heidegger’s and Habermas’s respective approaches, before turning to Stiegler’s critical diagnosis of the maladies afflicting our technocultural age. I conclude by suggesting, very briefly, what a Stieglerian “cultural politics of memory” might entail.

In their classic text, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer developed a powerful, if frequently misunderstood, critique of the commodification of culture in modernity. Their central thesis concerning the relationship between culture and technics is to be found in their famous chapter on the “Culture Industry.” Under conditions of generalised commodity exchange, Adorno and Horkheimer claim, all aspects of cultural practice, technique, and meaning-making – whether high or low, elite or popular – become subsumed within the industrial system of production, exchange, and consumption. This commodification of culture results in a general homogenisation of cultural artefacts, an instrumentalisation of autonomous art, and the penetration of processes of reification to the very roots of our psychic and social formation as individuated subjects. With the intersection of the commodity form, instrumental rationality, and processes of reification, individuals increasingly experience themselves as exchangeable “things” within a social arena dominated by principles of market exchange. On the side of consumption, moreover, the loss of autonomous art through commodification, and increasing convergence of art, advertising, and marketing, results in a condition of universal spectacle and narcissistic consumerism that increasingly precipitates regressive forms of failure to achieve ego independence. Autonomous subjectivity, in short, is dissolved and replaced by commodified forms of “pseudo-individuality.” Adorno and Horkheimer locate the source of this dissolution of the individual in the dominance of abstract forms of instrumental rationality in modernity. According to their bleak diagnosis, the only “saving power,” so to speak, against total reification is to be found within the threatened sphere of autonomous art, whose “negative presentation” of freedom, albeit at the level of aesthetic form, is the only glimmer of an autonomy that remains foreclosed in social reality.

For all of their focus on the pernicious effects of the culture industry, one can argue that Adorno and Horkheimer fall foul of Heidegger’s critique of the ontologically reductive, instrumentalist-anthropological account of technics. According to Heidegger, the subject-object model of instrumental reason cannot think the essence of technics; that is, of modernity as an epoch of technological en-framing, the disclosure of beings (including human beings) as a totality of calculable resources (“Question Concerning Technology”). For technics, Heidegger claims, names the way that Being and beings are ontologically revealed or disclosed in modernity. Human existence [Dasein] is destinally thrown into the contingent historical clearing of Being within which, in the epoch of global technics, beings increasingly show up as nothing more than calculable resources. This technological revealing of Being, however, also opens up the possibility of an experience of what Heidegger later called das Ereignis or the “event of appropriation”: the historically singular event of mutual appropriation between human beings, beings, and Being that enables a meaningful world to open up. It is precisely this inherent ambivalence of technics – encompassing both the threat of a total reduction of beings to calculable resources, and the “saving power” of a more poetic, world-gathering mode of dwelling – that leaves open the possibility of alternative (non-totalising) forms of world-disclosure, notably through art and novel forms of cultural practice (cf. Stiegler, T&T1 6-9).

From this Heideggerian perspective, the Frankfurt school analysis of the “culture industry” remains caught within the prevailing instrumental-anthropological understanding of technology. In focusing on the question of means and ends, this approach obscures, indeed forgets, the question concerning the essence of technics in modernity (which Heidegger will reflect upon and analyse as en-framing [Ge-stell], the forcible revealing of beings solely as resources). This anthropological approach to technology, which stretches from Aristotle to Habermas, presupposes the technical revealing of world. It does not address, however, how such a revealing of world as resource makes possible precisely the instrumentalisation of reason, the processes of societal and cultural rationalisation, indeed of psychological and social “reification” so powerfully analysed within the Frankfurt school tradition of critical theory.

Such an approach, moreover, fails to think how technics and subjectivity have not only an external relationship (one of instrumental means to attain a chosen end) but rather an internal or intrinsic one. Fully-formed autonomous subjectivity does not just confront technology as a readymade set of instruments. Rather, technology itself participates in the formation and individuation of the human, in the development of diverse historical and cultural forms of humanisation, or what Stiegler calls, in Technics and Time, 1, the process of “epiphylogenesis” (175-179): the co-evolution of the human and the technical whereby the human is able to evolve “through means other than life.” The adventure of the human begins once we become dependent upon the “organised inorganic matter” (namely technics) that makes possible, so Stiegler will argue, our historical experience of time, memory, and consciousness.

From the critical theory perspective, Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of the ideological dimensions of scientific rationalisation, and the dialectic between technological development and socio-political domination, nonetheless represents an important (Marxist) “offshoot” of the philosophical genealogy of technics (T&T1 10). Habermas follows Marcuse’s theses on technology and power; namely that what originally emerged in modernity as a power to liberate humankind from its debilitating dependence upon nature is now inverted into a means of social and political domination (T&T1 10). As Weber famously theorised, technology is the fruit of processes of rationalisation, which have extended the principles of calculation, planning, and rational decision-making across all levels of society and culture (T&T1 11). Habermas transforms this thesis on rationalisation into a massive extension of “purposive-rational activity,” which is linked, by way of justification, to “the institutionalisation of technical and scientific progress” (T&T1 11). Rationality in the form of purposive-rational activity, Habermas argues, becomes increasingly dominant over reason understood as “communicative action,” which must nonetheless be presupposed as a condition of any kind of linguistic exchange and social interaction. The forms of political domination that emerge from the extension of purposive-rational activity, moreover, are legitimated by means of the principle of scientific and technical progress. Hence they do not even appear to be forms of domination at all. The promise of Enlightenment emancipation through reason, in short, has been inverted into the threat of social and political domination by techno-scientific means.

As Stiegler points out, Habermas goes on to reject Marcuse’s allegedly “Heideggerian” thesis concerning the need for a science that would be “in dialogue with nature,” arguing that such a conception remains “utopian” (T&T1 11). The history of technics, rather, represents an extension of forms of purposive-rational activity that have become “objectified” through the development of complex technical systems. Habermas’s well-known alternative is to contrast “symbolically mediated interaction” – that is, communicative action based upon intersubjectively acknowledged social norms – to “purposive-rational activity,” whose empirically grounded technical rules are embodied in rationalised forms of work and technical systems. Indeed, for Habermas, human historical and social development can be tracked according to the dialectic between purposive-rational activity and communicative action (T&T1 11). Whereas so-called “traditional” societies maintain the authority of communicative action (whether through religious, mythical, or metaphysico-political means), modern societies elevate techno-scientific rationality to the primary legitimating discourse, one that now threatens to “colonise” the shared normativity of social-cultural lifeworld and thus undermine the basis and legitimacy of communicative rationality. Modern technocracy, Habermas maintains, is born of the coalescing of the sciences and technics, which leads to the increasing dominance of techno-scientific over communicative forms of rationality (T&T1 12). Indeed, the modern technocratic state is no longer concerned with communicative action or critical reflection upon purposive-rational activity; it is concerned instead with administering the most efficient, instrumentally rational, and technical solutions to social, economic, and political problems. Communicative action is thus superseded by purposive-rational activity, which means that intersubjective forms of communication – and so processes of individuation, socialisation, and politicisation – begin to be distorted or even damaged. Hence Habermas’s critical argument that we must emancipate communicative reason from its instrumentalisation; we must liberate “communication from its technicisation,” which, as Stiegler notes, is a repetition of a traditional and decidedly “metaphysical” theme – namely the antagonism between logos and techne (T&T1 12).

As Stiegler observes, there is a striking parallel here between Heidegger and Habermas on the question of technics. They both recognise that technics, “which appears to be a power in the service of humanity, becomes autonomous from the instance it empowers” (T&T1 13). Although technics ought to be “an act on the part of humanity,” it ends up undermining the very autonomy of human communication, decision-making, individuation, and rational action that it was supposed to enhance and extend. At the same time, Habermas and Heidegger differ sharply on the nature of this paradoxical character of modern technology, analysing it in profoundly different ways. For Stiegler it is important to note both this convergence and divergence in their respective approaches to technics (T&T1 13). The convergence consists in their both regarding “the technicisation of language as a denaturation” (T&T1 13). Human beings are both bearers of speech (the speech of being) and bearers of tools (whose equipmental nexus defines the shared meaningfulness of the world in which we exist); yet these two aspects are difficult to reconcile, at least in the modern world, without one instance “proper” to our nature seemingly usurping the other.

Thus Heidegger, for example, moves away from his earlier analysis (in Being and Time) of the way “technical” comportment towards beings remains our primary mode of access to the world, advocating in his later work a poetic saying of Being and a reflective withdrawal from the “danger” posed by technological en-framing. Habermas, for his part, insists upon the contrast between instrumental purposive-rational activity, articulated in technical systems, and non-instrumental communicative action, which must be liberated from its inappropriate “technicisation.”

The divergence consists in Habermas’s endorsement of what Heidegger, in “The Question Concerning Technology,” described as the “instrumental-anthropological” interpretation of technics (317). It is not enough, Heidegger maintains, to consider technology as a “means” requiring greater communicative action or intersubjective agreement as to its deployment, or greater public discourse concerning its legitimate and illegitimate uses (for example, in biogenetics). Rather, the very question of the relationship between the human and the technical needs to be rethought, since even Habermas agrees that technology is no longer entirely under human rational or social control. Hence, Stiegler argues, we need to “forge another relationship to technics”; one that would enable us to rethink “the bond originally formed by, and between, humanity, technics, and language” (T&T1 13).

Nonetheless, even though Habermas and Heidegger agree on considering the “technicisation of language” as a perversion of our nature (whether as communicatively rational agents or as poetic shepherds of Being), there is nonetheless a radicality in Heidegger’s thinking of technology that moves beyond the “ends-means” account of technics characterising the Frankfurt school culture industry critique. For Heidegger’s confrontation with the relationship between Being and technics opens up what is for Stiegler the more pressing question of technics and time. This questions opens up a number of related themes: the acceleration of time and of technical development; the decoupling of technical from cultural development; the impact of such temporal dislocation upon forms of intersubjective communication; the correlated threat to processes of psychic (subjective) and collective (socio-cultural) individuation, the intertwined processes by which we become individuated beings embedded within a shared form of life; the transformation of our very experience of the “taking place” of time and of space; their dematerialisation and virtualisation thanks to “real-time” media technologies, and the pervasive audiovisual mediation of individual and collective forms of experience – all of these developments are essential manifestations, for Stiegler, of the fundamental question of technics and time.

How does Stiegler confront this question? The difficulty with both Heideggerian and Habermasian approaches to technics, he argues, is that they both fail to think the essential co-emergence and co-dependency of technics and the human. To do so more adequately, Stiegler proceeds to confront the Heideggerian analytic of existence with the Greek myths of Epimetheus and Prometheus, which, he argues, both express in striking fashion the fundamental interdependency between the human and the technical. They are myths of the de-fault of origin, of the essential lack defining the human, whose originary incompletion is such that our existence is always already supplemented by technical prosthesis; they express what Stiegler calls the “originary technicity” that constitutes, he claims, the only way to adequately think through the question of technics, the human, and time. Heidegger and Habermas, by contrast, remain committed to the essential distinction and even opposition between the human and the technical. They consequently separate communication or language from technicity, and hence share a common fault, one that defines philosophical reflection on technics from Plato to Heidegger and Habermas: namely, a forgetting of our originary “prosthetic” nature as human beings; an ignorance of the way technicity opens up, rather than simply threatens, the adventure of human individuation and collective co-existence.

This is where the originality of Stiegler’s project of thinking the relationship between technics, culture, and politics becomes apparent. Even Heidegger does not really think the essence of technics, according to Stiegler, because Heidegger maintains that technics, even as horizon of world-disclosure, ultimately remains opposed to time, to (authentic) temporalisation. For the phenomenological experience of authentic temporality, at least according to Heidegger’s Being and Time, requires a radical withdrawal from, or breakdown of, our habitual immersion in the everyday world of practical comportments within a shared equipmental whole. For Stiegler, however, everyday equipment or ready-to-hand beings available for use should be understood, rather, as the enabling condition – rather than ontic obstruction – of our phenomenological experience of temporality, above all our authentic appropriation of finitude or comportment towards death (T&T1 4-10; “Technics of Decision” 154-166).

In this sense, Stiegler transforms Heidegger’s thesis in Being and Time, infusing it with elements from his later thought: our temporal comportment towards the finitude of our existence, what Heidegger calls our being-toward-death, is made possible precisely through technical supplements, exteriorised forms of memory, and prosthetic forms of meaning (including language). For it is precisely through these “mnemotechnical supplements” that we can at all gain access to the “having-been” [das Gewesene], that is, the historically disclosed possibilities of past forms of life that must be taken over and appropriated anew by each generation. Indeed, technical artefacts, material supplements, and inherited forms of technique, meaning, and practice (culture and language) are precisely what enable us to experience a “past we have never lived.” For the world into which we are thrown, whose possibilities we both inherit and must somehow appropriate, is not of our own making. The language I speak, the gestures and norms that I learn, the technique that shapes my thought, action, and bodily comportment; all of these elements enable me to inherit a world in which I can individuate myself as part of a community that also individuates itself in time and history. And for this to be possible we must recognise the central role of technics in making possible the inheritance and transmission of meaning – language, technique, culture – across generations inhabiting distinct, even temporally and spatially distant, social-historical worlds.

As Stiegler remarks, if Life is the conquest of mobility, then technics, as a “process of externalisation,” can be defined as the “pursuit of life by means other than life” (T&T1 17). Drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon, in particular his analysis of psychic and collective individuation – the processes by which an individuated “I” emerges in relation to a collective, which in turn is individuated and transformed by the various individuals of which it is composed – Stiegler aims to show how the concept of “trans-duction” enables us to think the “originarily techno-logical” constitution of temporality, that is, the co-dependent emergence of the human and the technical (T&T1 18). Technics, for Stiegler, therefore does not represent the reduction or destruction of temporality but rather its originary condition of possibility. It is what makes possible the shared inheritance of past possibilities – through language, technique, and culture – that we reactivate through futural projection in order to individuate ourselves in relation to our shared community.

At the same time, Stiegler argues that the question of technics today encompasses not only the dangers to psychic individuation posed by the “culture industries,” but also the threat posed to the possibility of alternative forms of technologically mediated, collective individuation. The simultaneous synchronisation of consciousnesses across the globe via media teletechnologies increases the tendency towards the “massification” and homogenisation of cultural forms of meaning. The tendency towards homogenisation threatens to damage or destroy the available possibilities for the original and transformative exercise of our intellectual, affective, and aesthetic capacities, thus resulting in a progressive loss of our shared human capacity for psychic (subjective) and collective (socio-cultural) individuation (“Le désir asphyxié, ou comment l’industrie culturelle détruit l’individu”). Given this threat to the possibility of successful psychic and collective individuation, Stiegler argues – much as Adorno and Heidegger before him – that we need a new cultural politics of memory: practices of art, communication, creation and resistance that would keep open and promote, both individually and collectively, the ethical and political desire for a meaningful future.

see rest of article at Transformations