If by intuition we mean a certain ability to predict the future then perhaps we should ask if certain types of intuition are also computational. At  least those types used to predict performance measurement.

Nate Silver has done well since he began applying his baseball wisdom to politics his 538 blog, He got 49 out of 50 states right in 2008m. 538 is the number of electoral votes that a candidate must get a majority thereof to be elected president.

His predictions are based on baseball computations or the manner of combining meta-statitics to predict the outcome of a baseball season based on recruiting players without regard to common baseball sense or as James fallows describes it:

“judging from their experience, their “bones,” their personal instinct, etc that things are going one way (like veteran scouts saying that a prospect “looks like a Big Leaguer”), while data (on-base efficiencies in one case, swing-state polls in another) point in the opposite direction.”

He has a new book on the art of predictions. Basically the evidence seems to indicate that the best predictor of future success is not some amorphous feeling or gut instinct but rather lies in the regime of computation*.

Not surprising when super computing allows us to perform analysis of massive amounts of data and spot emerging patterns of information which hereto would be obscure to the rational mind left performing manual computation. So its no surprise that intuition of outcomes are possibly best accomplished through the “prakriti of calculation.”

At least Silver would have us think so, we will soon see if he makes his case he is picking Big O in this election and as of today had him up 305.3 to 232.7 in the electoral college…….(a.l)

Silvers new book is called: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t

**********

*”The Regime of Computation…, provides a narrative that accounts for the evolution of the universe, life, mind, and mind reflecting on mind by connecting these emergences with computational processes that operate both in human-created simulations and in the universe understood as software running on the “Universal Computer” we call reality. This is the larger context in which code acquires special, indeed universal, significance. In the Regime of Computation, code is understood as the discourse system that mirrors what happens in nature and that generates nature itself.”

Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.”

 

….
They Can’t Both Be Right

by

James Fallows

From: The Atlantic

After the first presidential debate, opinion polls showed what most “analysts” were also saying: that Mitt Romney had done well, Barack Obama had done poorly, and what had seemed an insuperable Obama lead was shrinking by the day.

Since the second debate, and especially in the past three days, Republican commentators have been saying what the polls are not showing: that Romney has “momentum,” that he’s on an unstoppable roll, that their side is getting ready for an inevitable win. Anyone who has watched Fox, been on Republican email lists, or followed even “mainstream” “savvy” commentary has seen this shift. Michael Tomasky talks about this tone taking over the press “narrative” here.

Meanwhile, this is what the most-frequently-cited poll-of-polls, from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, has shown during very same period. Obama’s re-election probability is shown in blue.

The big drop in Obama’s probability-of-win*, from a high of 86% to a low of 61% by Silver’s calculation, came immediately after that first debate. But a week later, that decline stopped — and then reversed, as it has through the subsequent ten days. (Similarly, see Votamatic.org. Eg, “The reality in the states – regardless of how close the national polls may make the election seem – is that Obama is in the lead.”)

They can’t both be right: on the one side, the Republican partisans and political “pros” who say that Romney is on the certain road to victory, and on the other the quants who say No he is not. Of course either side allows for uncertainty about the final outcome: there are still two weeks to go. But about the state and the trend of the race, at this moment, they are in fundamental disagreement. The “pros” tell us that Romney is catching up, the quants say he is falling behind.

In a way this is a perfect test case of the Michael Lewis Moneyball hypothesis. Apart from Silver’s own background as a sports-stats analyst, we have an exceptionally clear instance of people judging from their experience, their “bones,” their personal instinct, etc that things are going one way (like veteran scouts saying that a prospect “looks like a Big Leaguer”), while data (on-base efficiencies in one case, swing-state polls in another) point in the opposite direction.

I don’t know who’s right, but I note this as a moment of unusual clarity about two approaches to politics. Among the many things we’ll learn two weeks from now (and in the assessment afterwards) is which of these approaches to political analysis has revealed a profound flaw.
____
Update an extremely savvy analyst who is resisting the “momentum” theme: our National Journal colleague Charlie Cook, here. And Jonathan Chait says that the “we’re winning!” strategy is a calculated bluff from the Romney side, which is paying off with many journalists. E.g.:

Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy….

Obama’s lead is narrow — narrow enough that the polling might well be wrong and Romney could win. But he is leading, his lead is not declining, and the widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game.

* Note Although this will be obvious to anyone who has visited Silver’s site or understands what he is doing, I should probably re-emphasize this point: Saying that Obama has a 70-30 probability of win is entirely different from saying he has a 40 point (70 minus 30) lead in the polls. A 70% win-probability means that on a large volume of statistical-model runs of the election, the results show an Obama victory 70% of the time. But 30% of the time, they show a Romney win. If we were really talking about a 40-point lead in the polls, then the probability of win would be closer to 99.9%.

Multitasking may harm the social and emotional development of tweenage girls, but face-to-face talks could save the day, say Stanford researchers

by Dan Stober

Stanford University

Too much screen time can be detrimental to girls 8 to 12 years old, but there is a surprisingly straightforward alternative for greater social wellness.

Tweenage girls who spend endless hours watching videos and multitasking with digital devices tend to be less successful with social and emotional development, according to Stanford researchers.

But these unwanted effects might be warded off with something as simple as face-to-face conversations with other people.

The researchers, headed by education professor Roy Pea and Clifford Nass, a professor of communication, surveyed 3,461 girls, ages 8 to 12, about their electronic diversions and their social and emotional lives. “The results were upsetting, disturbing, scary,” Nass said.

The girls, all subscribers to Discovery Girls magazine, took the survey online, detailing the time they spent watching video (television, YouTube, movies,) listening to music, reading, doing homework, emailing, posting to Facebook or MySpace, texting, instant messaging, talking on the phone and video chatting – as well as how often they were doing two or more of those activities simultaneously.

The girls’ answers showed that multitasking and spending many hours watching videos and using online communication were statistically associated with a series of negative experiences: feeling less social success, not feeling normal, having more friends whom parents perceive as bad influences and sleeping less.

The researchers say that while they found a correlation between some media habits and  diminished social and emotional skills, a definite cause-and-effect relationship has yet to be proved.

The research was published this week in a special section of the journal Developmental Psychology.

A time for social development

The survey findings are bad news, given that the 8 to 12 age range is critical for the social and emotional development of girls, and because children are becoming active media consumers at an ever-younger age.

But the survey also asked the girls a different, and very important, question: How much time do you spend participating in face-to-face conversations with other people?

The answers, Nass said, indicate that Mom and Dad should consider reviving the well-worn parental admonishment: “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

Higher levels of face-to-face communication were associated with greater social success, greater feelings of normalcy, more sleep and fewer friends whom parents judged to be bad influences. Children learn the difficult task of interpreting emotions by watching the faces of other people, Pea said. It’s hard work, he added, and is unlikely to be done if everyone at the dinner table is peering at the screens of their smartphones.

Advice for kids

Nass has some advice: “Kids, spend time, when you are with other people, looking at them, listening closely, and see if you can tell their emotions. And if you can’t, that’s OK,  but it means you have some learning to do.

“When we media multitask, we’re not really paying attention to the people around us and we get in a habit of not paying attention, and thus when I’m talking with you, I may be hearing the words but I’m missing all the rich, critical, juicy stuff at the heart of emotional and social life.”

Children’s media choices are changing in a new context of always-on media; neither they nor their parents have ways of self-regulating the extent of their media use and media multitasking, said Pea. “All things in moderation” is his guidance for both children and parents.

The happy-face emotional slant of most Facebook postings doesn’t help, either, he said.  As shown in other Stanford University research, seeing the ubiquitous positive postings of online friends can lead to the erroneous conclusion that “Everyone is happy except me,” Nass said.

The good news

There is good news in the recent survey, however. For the negative effects of online gorging, “There seems to be a pretty powerful cure, a pretty powerful inoculant, and that is face-to-face communication,” Nass said.

“Kids in the 8-to-12-year-old range who communicate face-to-face very frequently, show much better social and emotional development, even if they’re using a great deal of media.”

The research was a follow-up to a 2010 experiment that demonstrated that media multitaskers were not really doing two things at once and were paying a mental price for trying. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” Nass said then. “Everything distracts them.”

Researchers, in addition to Pea and Nass, included Stanford students Lyn Meheula and Aman Kumar, as well as Holden Bamford, Matthew Nass, Aneesh Simha, Benjamin Stillerman, Steven Yang and Michael Zhou.

Hybrid Reality

by Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna

Review by R. Carlson

This book is an uncritical examinations of technology and culture in which the only conclusions the authors seem capable of drawing regards today’s complex global socio-economic reality are that almost all contemporary social and economic problems can be solved by participation in the borderless neo-liberal economy and a shared religious like faith in the technological innovation that it facilitates.

The fact that Ayesha Khanna is an advisor to the Singularity University many of whose faculty of techno-inititates hold an almost millennial belief in a “singularity” or an end of history like event after which it will become possible to digitize and upload human consciousness into “spiritual machines” certainly helps to explain the authors techno-zealotry.

Using the work of Alvin and Heidi Toffler as a jumping off point (one sees in the Khannas’ interpretation of “Future Shock” why the books is also a favorite of Newt Gingrich) the Khannas’ weave a narrative about the what a glorious future is in store for all those who learn to appropriate the new technologies to become aspiring entrepreneurs of the digital age.

The Khannas’ appear to view Asian authoritarian capitalism, such as practiced in China or Singapore, as role models for the Future Societies they envision. Not surprisingly those places are well served by technocratic regimes since the few voices of dissent within can be quickly extinguished through the security apparatus of the all seeing surveillance state that the new digital technologies – for all the good they may do – also enable.

While one expects an optimistic assessment of Technology from any TED talk or book, one has an expectation to at least see an attempt at a critical interrogation -or even a nuanced view- of what may be some other darker sides of the new “hybrid reality”. But, except for a few short paragraphs in which they mention such problems as those associated with the digital divide, or such that some Africans may have to toil to mine hazardous materials that go into electronic devices, that ariel drones may also be used by drug cartels, as well as  things like prenatal testing and gender choice,  this critique is largely absent from the book.

Although the Khannas’ underplay the hybrid-blowback of techno-capitalism, in each instance they encounter it their solution to what violence may have been caused by the colonizing regime of anglo-american free market “techniks” is even “more technology”

Moreover, although the new found glories of India’s participation in the global knowledge economy are duly noted, and they celebrate Bangalore turing from an agricultural city to a technological mecca in one generation, it is surprising for these authors of Indian decent fail to theorize the suicides of over 250,000 farmers in India over the past fifteen years during the tech-boom.  Although this event has in been credibly linked to the genetically modified seed (hybrid seed) industry) that poor farmers must now purchase from global corporations like Monsanto it is is seemingly beyond the scope of their psudo-intellectual model to integrate these harsh physical realities into it.

One in given a glimpse of hybrid reality through an uncritical gaze at no point do the Khannas’ stop to consider whether the increasingly economic disparity or digital gap between the haves and have nots coupled with the depravations of the actual “physical reality” of an increasing number of the world population maybe co-emergent with, or even a consequence of the very economic regimes that they advocate. That is to say they remain blind to the critical dimensions of the technological and socially engineer hybrid reality that they champion.

The authors intention seem to endorse an economic order of techno-capitalism in which the increasing disparity of wealth distribution upward towards a “virtual overclass” is an inevitable consequence.

The Naked and the TED

From: The New Republic 

Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization

By Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna
(TED Books, $2.99)

The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It
By Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan
(TED Books, $2.99)

Smile: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act
By Ron Gutman
(TED Books, $2.99)II.

THE NEW PAMPHLET—it would be too strong, and not only quantitatively, to call it a book—by Parag and Ayesha Khanna, the techno-babbling power couple, gallops through so many esoteric themes and irrelevant factoids (did you know that “fifty-eight percent of millennials would rather give up their sense of smell than their mobile phone”?) that one might forgive the authors for never properly attending to their grandest, most persuasive, and almost certainly inadvertent argument. Only the rare reader would finish this piece of digito-futuristic nonsense unconvinced that technology is—to borrow a term of art from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt—bullshit. No, not technology itself; just much of today’s discourse about technology, of which this little e-book is a succinct and mind-numbing example. At least TED Books—the publishing outlet of the hot and overheated TED Conference, which brought this hidden gem to the wider public—did not kill any trees in the publishing process.

It might seem odd that Parag Khanna would turn his attention to the world of technology. He established his reputation as a wannabe geopolitical theorist, something of a modern-day Kissinger, only wired and cool. For almost a decade he has been writing pompous and alarmist books and articles that herald a new era in international relations. He has also been circling the globe in a tireless effort to warn world leaders that democracy might be incompatible with globalization and capitalism. And that the West needs to be more like China and Singapore. And that America is running on borrowed time. And that a new Middle Ages are about to set in. (“When I look at the 21st century, I reverse the numbers around and I see the 12th century.”) This is probing stuff.

All of these insights are expressed in linguistic constructions of such absurdity and superficiality (“a world of ever-shifting (d)alliances,” “peer-to-peer micromanufacturing marketplace”) that Niall Ferguson’s “Chimerica” looks elegant and illuminating by comparison. Khanna must be a gifted schmoozer, too: the acknowledgments sections of his books are primary documents of contemporary name-dropping. Almost everyone he quotes can expect effusive praise. As I.F. Stone once said about Theodore White, “a writer who can be so universally admiring need never lunch alone.”

Khanna’s contempt for democracy and human rights aside, he is simply an intellectual impostor, emitting such lethal doses of banalities, inanities, and generalizations that his books ought to carry advisory notices. Take this precious piece of advice from his previous book—the modestly titled How to Run the World—which is quite representative of his work: “The world needs very few if any new global organizations. What it needs is far more fresh combinations of existing actors who coordinate better with one another.” How this A-list networking would stop climate change, cyber-crime, or trade in exotic animals is never specified. Khanna does not really care about the details of policy. He is a manufacturer of abstract, meaningless slogans. He is, indeed, the most talented bullshit artist of his generation. And this confers upon him a certain anthropological interest.

The “technological” turn in Khanna’s “thought” is hardly surprising. As he and others have discovered by now, one can continue fooling the public with slick ahistorical jeremiads on geopolitics by serving them with the coarse but tasty sauce that is the Cyber-Whig theory of history. The recipe is simple. Find some peculiar global trend—the more arcane, the better. Draw a straight line connecting it to the world of apps, electric cars, and Bay Area venture capital. Mention robots, Japan, and cyberwar. Use shiny slides that contain incomprehensible but impressive maps and visualizations. Stir well. Serve on multiple platforms. With their never-ending talk of Twitter revolutions and the like, techno-globalists such as Khanna have a bright future ahead of them.

In their TED book, the Khannas boldly declare that “mastery in the leading technology sectors of any era determines who leads in geoeconomics and dominates in geopolitics.” Technology is all, the alpha and the omega. How to Run the World, which appeared last year, already contained strong hints about what would happen once he embraced the shiny world of techno-babble with open arms (and, one presumes, open pockets). There we learned that “cloud computing—not big buildings and bloated bureaucracies—is the future of global governance,” and, my favorite, “everyone who has a BlackBerry—or iPhone or Nexus One—can be their own ambassador.” Of their own country of one, presumably.

Hybrid Reality contains few surprises. Khanna and his wife fashion themselves as successors to Alvin and Heidi Toffler, an earlier fast-talking tech-addled couple who thrived on selling cookie-cutter visions of the future one paperback, slogan, and consulting gig at a time. Today the Tofflers are best-known for inspiring some of Newt Gingrich’s most outlandish ideas as well as for popularizing the term “information overload”—a phenomenon which, as numerous scholars have shown, was hardly specific to 1970 (which is when Alvin Toffler mentioned it in Future Shock) and is probably as old as books themselves. To embrace the Tofflers as intellectual role models is to make a damning admission: that one is far more interested in inventing half-clever buzzwords than in trying to understand the messy reality that those buzzwords purport to describe. In a recent article in Foreign Policy on the Tofflers, the Khannas are unusually candid about what it is they admire about them:

Need we say more [about this prediction]? Even though it was written during the Carter administration, if you remove the dates from the passage above you have a template for most of today’s editorial columns on the aftermath of the current financial meltdown. It’s all here: the identity crisis of corporations, skyrocketing commodity prices, morally bankrupt economists, and currencies in flux and free-fall.

So the Tofflers have much to teach us about the origins or the consequences of the current financial crisis! This of course is laughable. The fact that, three decades later, their glib, abstract, and pretentious writings can still serve as a template for the likes of the Khannas says more about the state of public debate in America today than it does about the accuracy of Toffler-style futurism.

When the Khannas discuss the charms of their newly found profession in Hybrid Reality, the whole enterprise is revealed as a jargon-laden farce: “Futurism is a combination of long-term and long-tail, separating the trends from the trendy and the shocks from the shifts, and combining data, reportage, and scenarios.” It doesn’t sound like a very demanding job: “It helps to travel and be imaginative, but it is even more useful to observe children.” And why all this effort? So that we can better predict the apocalypse. “Avoiding civilizational collapse will require harnessing technologies that help us decipher complexity, overcome decision overload, and produce comprehensive strategies.” The Khannas have come to accomplish nothing less than the rescue of civilization.

 

TOFFLER-WORSHIP and futuristic kitsch aside, what does Hybrid Reality actually argue? There are several disjointed arguments. First, that technology—“technology with a big ‘T,’” as they call it—is supplanting economics and geopolitics as the leading driver of international relations. This means, among other things, that Washington deploys tools such as Flame and Stuxnet simply because it has the better technology—not because of a strategic and military analysis. It is a silly argument, but wrapped in tech-talk it sounds almost plausible.

For the Khannas, technology is an autonomous force with its own logic that does not bend under the wicked pressure of politics or capitalism or tribalism; all that we humans can do is find a way to harness its logic for our own purposes. Technology is the magic wand that lifts nations from poverty, cures diseases, redistributes power, and promises immortality to the human race. Nations, firms, and cities that develop the smartest and most flexible way of doing this are said to possess Technik—a German term with a substantial intellectual pedigree that, in the Khannas’ hands, can mean just about anything—and a high “technology quotient.”

Today, they believe, we are entering a new era, when humans will be so intricately dependent on technology that “human-technology coexistence has become human-technology coevolution.” This is what the Khannas mean by the “Hybrid Age”—a “new sociotechnical era that is unfolding as technologies merge with each other and humans merge with technology.” They proceed to outline its inevitable consequences. Designer babies? Check. Cloned humans? Check. Sex robots that “can be made to look like anyone you want”? Check. A paradise!

Any stretch of time that deserves a name of its own—an age, an era, an epoch—must have at least a few distinct characteristics that make it stand out from the past. The problem is that all the features that the Khannas invoke to emphasize the uniqueness of our era have long been claimed by other commentators for their own unique eras. The Khannas tell us that “technology no longer simply processes our instructions on a one-way street. Instead, it increasingly provides intelligent feedback.” How is that different from Daniel Boorstin’s bombastic pronouncement in 1977 that “the Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world”? And the Khannas’ admonition that “rather than view technology and humanity as two distinct domains, we must increasingly appreciate the dense sociotechnical nexus in which they constantly shape each other”—how is this different from what Ortega y Gasset wrote more eloquently in 1939: “Man without technology … is not man”?

The idea of hybridity that the Khannas assume to be their sexy and original insight has been with us for a long time—long before social media and biotechnology. While some dismiss such theorists of hybridity as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, who have questioned the epistemological foundations of the modern scientific enterprise, as being on the wrong side of the Science Wars, hybridity is by no means a postmodernist idea. Here is Daniel Callahan—a respected bioethicist who can hardly be accused of PoMo transgressions— writing in 1971: “We have to do away with a false and misleading dualism, one which abstracts man on the one hand and technology on the other, as if the two were quite separate kinds of realities…. Man is by nature a technological animal; to be human is to be technological…. When we speak of technology, this is another way of speaking about man himself in one of his manifestations.”

For modern theorists of technology, hybridity is an ontological—not an emergent—property. They believe, to quote Callahan again, that “to be human is to be technological,” and that it has always been thus. As it turns out, this seemingly innocent assumption about the world can have serious implications for how we think about politics, morality, and law. It inspired Latour’s notion of “distributed agency”—in its crudest form, the idea that neither guns nor people kill people but rather a fleeting, one-off combination of the two. (The entity that shoots is a “gun-man.”) This is not meant to suggest that people no longer have to go to jail for murder. It is only to point out that, if we really want to explain a particular act of shooting, we need to account for factors like the material design of the gun, the marketing considerations of its manufacturers, the severity of anti-gun laws, and so on.

The latest technologies might make us more aware of this hybridity—of the techno-human condition, if you will—but to speak of the Hybrid Age makes as much sense as to speak of the Nature Age: the fact that climate change makes us more aware of the air we breathe or the water we drink does not fundamentally alter the dynamics of our dependence on these resources. To posit that we are moving into the Hybrid Age is to assume that there was once a time—according to the Khannas, it was just a few years ago—when such hybridity was not the case, when man and technology trod their separate paths. It is to believe that human nature changed sometime last year or so. This, of course, is nonsense—even if makes technology companies feel important. As the Dutch philosopher of technology Peter-Paul Verbeek puts it in his fine bookMoralizing Technology, “We are as autonomous with regard to technology as we are with regard to language, oxygen, or gravity.”

But still the Khannas roll dizzily along. “The Hybrid Age is the transition period between the Information Age and the moment of Singularity (when machines surpass human intelligence) that inventor Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, estimates we may reach by 2040 (perhaps sooner). The Hybrid Age is a liminal phase in which we cross the threshold toward a new mode of arranging global society.” These are end times. The Hybrid Age is the preparation for the apotheosis of the Singularity— a Singularity-lite of sorts. (Ayesha Khanna serves as a faculty adviser to Singularity University.) This periodization of history is just a marketing trick. Those who believe in Kurzweil’s ugly and ridiculous thesis, which at TED conferences is probably the majority, have already grudgingly accepted the fact that a few unexciting decades will transpire before it comes to pass—and so the Khannas move in to claim these decades as their own, as their brand, while promising us that all the fun of the Singularity—who doesn’t fancy uploading his soul to the cloud so that it can commingle with the soul of Steve Jobs?—will happen even sooner than we think.

As the Hybrid Age sets in, inaction is not an option. “You may continue to live your life without understanding the implications of the still-distant Singularity, but you should not underestimate how quickly we are accelerating into the Hybrid Age—nor delay in managing this transition yourself.” Sinners, repent! The day of the Lord is nigh! And in case you wonder where you might turn for assistance in “managing this transition,” the Khannas are there to help. They are eschatological consultants. They run a for-profit consulting firm “providing insight into the implications of emerging technologies” that bears the proud name of the Hybrid Reality Institute. So far the firm’s main accomplishment seems to be convincing the TED Conference to print its verbose marketing brochure as a book. But perhaps this is what the Hybrid Age is all about: marketing masquerading as theory, charlatans masquerading as philosophers, a New Age cult masquerading as a university, business masquerading as redemption, slogans masquerading as truths.

 

THIS BOOK is not just useless piffle about technology; it is also an endorsement of some rather noxious political ideas. Those already familiar with Parag Khanna’s earlier celebrations of autocracies in Southeast Asia will not be surprised by some of the most outrageous paragraphs in his TED book. China is one of the Khannas’ role models. They have the guts to write that “a decade from now we will look back at China’s 12th Five-Year Plan as the seminal document of the early 21st century.” Take your pick: 12th Five-Year Plan or Charter 08. Somehow the latter never gets a mention in this book. Perhaps it is not seminal enough, or it is insufficiently driven by technology. And what makes the Five-Year Plan so seminal? “It pledges $1.5 trillion in government support for seven ‘strategic emerging industries,’ including alternative energy, biotechnology, next-gen IT, high-end manufacturing equipment, and advanced materials.” Would it really surprise anyone if in a few years some of that $1.5 trillion were to trickle down to the Hybrid Reality Institute?

The Khannas also heap praise on Singapore, “a seamlessly efficient cosmopolitan world capital of finance and, increasingly, innovation.” Alas, they do not explain how Singapore has become so “seamlessly efficient.” Perhaps this quotation from Lee Kuan Yew, its first long-time ruler—conveniently omitted by the Khannas—may shed some light: “Everytime anybody wants to start anything which will unwind or unravel this orderly, organized, sensible, rational society, and make it irrational and emotional, I put a stop to it without hesitation.” The Khannas approvingly note that Singapore is “the leading role model in city-state Technik for entities from Abu Dhabi to Moscow to Kuala Lumpur.” That all three aforementioned cities are situated in despicable authoritarian regimes—which might explain why they look up to Singapore—does not much trouble the Khannas. They recently announced that they are moving to Singapore. Good. The autocratic city and the apologists for autocracy deserve each other.

It only gets worse, as the Khannas proceed to profess their deep and inherently anti-democratic admiration for technocracy. That they can spit out the following passage without running any risk of being disinvited from respectable dinner parties and television shows is a sign of how well our debate about technology—a seemingly neutral and nonpolitical issue—conceals deeply political (and, in this case, outright authoritarian) tendencies:

Using technology to deliberate on matters of national importance, deliver public services, and incorporate citizen feedback may ultimately be a truer form of direct participation than a system of indirect representation and infrequent elections. Democracy depends on the participation of crowds, but doesn’t guarantee their wisdom. We cannot be afraid of technocracy when the alternative is the futile populism of Argentines, Hungarians, and Thais masquerading as democracy. It is precisely these nonfunctional democracies that are prime candidates to be superseded by better-designed technocracies—likely delivering more benefits to their citizens…. To the extent that China provides guidance for governance that Western democracies don’t, it is in having “technocrats with term limits.”

Things in Hungary are pretty bad, but to suggest that Hungarians would be better off with China-style governance is really reprehensible. And to imply that China’s technocrats have term limits is outright offensive.

In the domestic American context, the Khannas also celebrate the infusion of “experts such as Tim O’Reilly and Craig Newmark [who] … stepped in to advise Washington on Gov 2.0 technologies such as open-data platforms.” “Such citizen-technologists,” we are told, “are crucial … to [improving] government efficiency.” Once again, the technologists—and the technocratic agencies they are enlisted to support—are presented as objective, independent, and free of any ideological leanings. Nowhere do we learn that Tim O’Reilly runs a profitable corporation that might stand to benefit from the government’s embrace of open-data platforms, or that Craig Newmark is a committed cyber-libertarian who used to worship Ayn Rand. Or that Jimmy Wales, who is advising the British government, is so enthralled with Rand and objectivism that he named his daughter after one of the characters in a Rand novel. Nor do the Khannas tell us that the public embrace of “open-data platforms” is often accompanied by an increase in government secrecy or a growing reluctance to fund public journalism. (Why fund the BBC if “citizen-investigators” can now be asked to do all the digging for free?) The pursuit of efficiency alone cannot guide public policy—this is why we have politics; but technocrats rarely want to hear such truths. And the Khannas cannot be trusted to tell them.

 

AS IS TYPICAL of today’s anxiety-peddling futurology, the Khannas’ favorite word is “increasingly,” which is their way of saying that our unstable world is always changing and that only advanced thinkers such as themselves can guide us through this turbulence. In Hybrid Reality, everything is increasingly something else: gadgets are increasingly miraculous, technology is increasingly making its way into the human body, quiet moments are increasingly rare. This is a world in which pundits are increasingly using the word “increasingly” whenever they feel too lazy to look up the actual statistics, which, in the Khannas’ case, increasingly means all the time.

What the Khannas’ project illustrates so well is that the defining feature of today’s techno-aggrandizing is its utter ignorance of all the techno-aggrandizing that has come before it. The fantasy of technology as an autonomous force is a century-old delusion that no serious contemporary theorist of technology would defend. The Khannas have no interest in intellectual history, or in the state of contemporary thought about technology. They prefer to quote, almost at random, the likes of Oswald Spengler and Karl Jaspers instead. This strategy of invoking random Teutonic names and concepts might work on the unsophisticated crowds at Davos and TED, but to imagine that either Spengler or Jaspers have something interesting or original to tell us about cloning, e-books, or asteroid mining is foolish. “A new era requires a new vocabulary,” the Khannas proclaim—only to embrace the terminology that was already in place by the end of the nineteenth century. They may be well-funded, but they are not well-educated.

Their promiscuous use of the word Technik exposes the shaky foundation of their enterprise—as well as of many popular discussions about technology, which inevitably gravitate toward the bullshit zone. To return to Harry Frankfurt, the key distinction between the liar and the bullshitter is that the former conceals “that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality,” whereas the latter conceals that he is not interested in reality at all. The bullshitter “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” To suggest that Parag and Ayesha Khanna—and numerous pundits before them—might be pursuing purposes other than describing—or improving—reality is almost self-evident. (A look at the website of the Hybrid Reality Institute would suffice.) The more interesting question here is why bullshit about technology, unlike other types of bullshit, is so hard to see for what it is.

It is here that the Khannas stand out. Technik, as they use this term, is something so expansive and nebulous that it can denote absolutely anything. Technik is the magic concept that allows the Khannas to make their most meaningless sentences look as if they actually carry some content. They use Technik as a synonym for innovation, design, engineering, science, mastery, capital, the economy, and a dozen other things. It is what fixes cities, reinvigorates social networking, and grants us immortality. Technik is every pundit’s wet dream: a foreign word that confers an air of cosmopolitanism upon its utterer. It can be applied to solve virtually any problem, and it is so abstract that its purveyor can hardly be held accountable for its inaccuracies and inanities.

It is Technik that makes much of the Khannas’ writing circular and simplistic. Take this highly confusing sentence: “Good Technik requires a combination of the attributes that deliver high human development, economic growth, political inclusiveness, and technology preparedness.” Translation: “Good Technik requires Technik.” As for the simplistic part, try this: “Technik unites the scientific and mechanical dimensions of technology (determinism) with a necessary concern for its effect on humans and society (constructivism).” If I read the Khannas correctly—and I cannot be sure, for they seem confused about the terms “determinism” or “constructivism,” at least as those are used in the philosophy of technology—their novel interpretation of the old German term Technik proposes to reveal that technologies are material and technologies have effects. Is this insight so profound that it needed a high German word to explain it?

But the Khannas do not want to abandon the simpler term “technology,” either, so they try to inflate it, too. Remember, “the Hybrid Age is the era when we renew our thinking about technology with a big ‘T.’” Sticking to the notion of “technology with a big ‘T’” yields insights such as this: “From the printing press to penicillin and now Twitter and genomics, technology ceaselessly demonstrates its transformative impact.” The printing press and penicillin and Twitter and genomics do indeed have transformative effects, but to assume that they all matter in the same way—which is the inevitable result of lumping them under the rubric of “Technology,” the one with its own rules, wants, and agendas—is as stupid as it is dangerous.

Perhaps, if one had to give a three-minute TED presentation about penicillin, Twitter, genomics, and the printing press—but why would anyone ever want to give such a talk?—a catch-all term such as “technology” might be of some help. But analytically it is useless, in the way that lumping Warhol, Chardin, hip hop, Chaplin, Haydn, and science fiction under the term “arts” is useless. At such a level of generality every fool can sound brilliant. The unfortunate thing is that, while few people would grant any substance to an argument that identifies a common meaning in Warhol, Chardin, hip hop, Chaplin, Haydn, and science fiction, we easily fall for grand theories that mysteriously connect humans and material artifacts to some grand narrative about the universe, be it the Singularity, Toffler’s Third Wave, or the Hybrid Age. When, fifteen years ago, Leo Marx accused technology of being “a hazardous concept” for leading precisely to this kind of addled thinking, he was too polite. In the hands of skilled hustlers such as the Khannas, technology is itself a counterfeit concept, which does little but make complex ideas look deceptively simple. Much like Glenn Beck’s magic blackboard, it connects everything to everything without saying anything significant about anything.

 

II.

I CAN SURMISE why the Khannas would have wanted to write this book, but it is not immediately obvious why TED Books would have wanted to publish it. I must disclose that I spoke at a TED Global Conference in Oxford in 2009, and I admit that my appearance there certainly helped to expose my argument to a much wider audience, for which I remain grateful. So I take no pleasure in declaring what has been obvious for some time: that TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas “worth spreading.” Instead it has become something ludicrous, and a little sinister.

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.”

The Khannas’ book is not the only piece of literary rubbish carrying the TED brand. Another recently published TED book called The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It—co-authored by Philip Zimbardo, of the Stanford Prison Experiment fame, is an apt example of what transpires when TED ideas happen to good people. One would think that a scholar as distinguished as Zimbardo would not need to set foot in Khanna-land, but, alas, his book brims with almost as many clichés and pseudo-daring pronouncements. Did you know that “in porn, male actors have enormous penises,” and that “porn is not about romance”? The book’s main premise is that the Internet and video games are re-wiring the brains of “guys,” much to the detriment of civilization. Read and be terrified, especially if you are a “guy,” because “[guys’] brains are being catered to by porn on demand and by video games at a flick of the switch or a click of the mouse.” This is almost as good as Allan Bloom’s admonition in The Closing of the American Mind that Walkman headphones lead to parricide. The evidence presented is inconsistent and all over the map. As the science journalist Carl Zimmer has noted, The Demise of Guys gives a Daily Mail column as much credibility as a peer-reviewed paper. And a new TED book on the science of smiling—Smile: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act, by Ron Gutman—contains even more banality than the Khannas’ little masterpiece of TED emptiness—a remarkable feat. There one may read, for example, that “under certain conditions, when men see women smile at them they interpret that as a sign that the women think they are attractive.” This is what passes for advanced thinking.

When they launched their publishing venture, the TED organizers dismissed any concern that their books’ slim size would be dumbing us down. “Actually, we suspect people reading TED Books will be trading up rather than down. They’ll be reading a short, compelling book instead of browsing a magazine or doing crossword puzzles. Our goal is to make ideas accessible in a way that matches modern attention spans.” But surely “modern attention spans” must be resisted, not celebrated. Brevity may be the soul of wit, or of lingerie, but it is not the soul of analysis. The TED ideal of thought is the ideal of the “takeaway”—the shrinkage of thought for people too busy to think. I don’t know if the crossword puzzles are rewiring our brains—I hope TED knows its neuroscience, with all the neuroscientists on its stage—but anyone who is seriously considering reading Hybrid Reality or Smile should also entertain the option of playingAngry Birds or Fruit Ninja.

Parag Khanna’s writings on geopolitics never amounted to much of anything even before his turn to technology, but it is instructive to see how his presentation has changed now that he has embedded himself in the TED firmament. Save for a hackneyed nod to the “world’s chessboard,” he now makes only cursory references to power structures and strategic alliances. Instead he strikes all the right chords to elicit approval from the TED crowd—musing on genetics, neuroscience, synthetic biology—all in order to inform us that “our ability to augment ourselves” is growing by the minute. As is customary in such discourse, no mention is made of the fact that the Human Genome Project, for all the hype it generated a decade ago, has not accomplished much. Likewise, MRI scans are celebrated as if they offered direct and immediate access to truth. (“Harnessing fMRI mental scans, companies … are gathering the ‘unspoken truth.’”) The Khannas’ Japan—as packaged for TED consumption—is the land of cutting-edge technology: you would never know that 59 percent of Japanese homes still have (frequently used!) fax machines.

The Khannas are typical of the TED crowd in that they do not express much doubt about anything. Their pronouncements about political structures are as firm and arrogant as some scientists’ pronouncements about the cognitive structures of the brain. Whatever problems lurk on the horizon are imagined primarily as problems of technology, which, given enough money, brain power, and nutritional supplements, someone in Silicon Valley should be in a position to solve. This is consistent with TED’s adoption of a decidedly non-political attitude, as became apparent in a recent kerfuffle over a short talk on inequality given by a venture capitalist—who else?—which TED refused to release for fear that it might offend too many rich people.

Since any meaningful discussion of politics is off limits at TED, the solutions advocated by TED’s techno-humanitarians cannot go beyond the toolkit available to the scientist, the coder, and the engineer. This leaves Silicon Valley entrepreneurs positioned as TED’s preferred redeemers. In TED world, tech entrepreneurs are in the business of solving the world’s most pressing problems. This is what makes TED stand out from other globalist shindigs, and makes its intellectual performances increasingly irrelevant to genuine thought and serious action.

Another fine example of the TED mentality in the context of global affairs is Abundance, a new book co-written by Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of the Singularity University. He is a TED regular and the person who blurbed Khanna’s book as “an enormously important contribution to our thinking about how to create a better tomorrow.” (Singularity may rid us of death, but it won’t abolish backscratching.) Diamandis delivers an abundant list of pressing global problems accompanied by an equally abundant list of technologies that can fix them. Here, too, politics rarely gets a mention.

Given TED’s disproportionate influence on a certain level of the global debate, it follows that the public at large also becomes more approving of technological solutions to problems that are not technological but political. Problems of climate change become problems of making production more efficient or finding ways to colonize other planets—not of reaching political agreement on how to limit production or consume in a more sustainable fashion. Problems of health care become problems of inadequate self-monitoring and data-sharing. Problems of ensuring one’s privacy—which might otherwise get solved by pushing for new laws—become problems of inadequate tools for defending one’s anonymity online or selling access to one’s own data. (The Khannas are not alone in believing that “individuals [must] gain control over the value of their time, skills, data, and resources. We must be ruthless in earning from those who want our attention.”)

It is in the developing world where the limitations of TED’s techno-humanitarian mentality are most pronounced. In TED world, problems of aid and development are no longer seen as problems of weak and corrupt institutions; they are recast as problems of inadequate connectivity or an insufficiency of gadgets. According to the Khannas, “centuries of colonialism and decades of aid haven’t lifted Africa’s fortunes the way technology can.” Hence the latest urge to bombard Africa with tablets and Kindles—even when an average African kid would find it impossible to repair a damaged Kindle. And the gadgets do drop from the sky—Nicholas Negroponte, having spectacularly failed in his One Laptop Per Child quest, now wants to drop his own tablets from helicopters, which would make it harder for the African savages to say “no” to MIT’s (and TED’s) civilization. This is la mission civilatrice 2.0.

It is hardly surprising that the Khannas’ deep admiration of Singapore’s technocratic authoritarianism is well-received by the TEDdies—after all, they prefer to fix broken countries as if they are broken start-ups. That solving any of their favorite global problems would require political solutions—if only to ensure that nobody’s rights and interests are violated or overlooked in the process— is not something that the TED elite, with its aversion to conventional instruments of power and its inebriated can-do attitude, likes to hear. Politics slows things down; but technology speeds things up. TED’s techno-humanitarians—that brigade of what the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole has dubbed “The White Savior Industrial Complex”—would defer to China’s “technocrats with term limits” and have them bulldoze entire villages in order to build another Foxconn plant rather than bother with the slow progress of political reform. The Khannas are on to something when they write that “the Hybrid Age … might also become a Pax Technologica,” but there are pitifully few reasons to believe that a Pax Technologica would do much good for the world. Techno-humanitarianism is much more techno than humanitarian.

Machines, Intelligence, Consciousness

Marcel Kvassay

What is consciousness? Can machines have it? Research community is deeply divided when it comes to such questions. In order to demonstrate “an astonishing lack of consensus” among researchers, Sloman and Chrisley (2003) compiled a collection of putative definitions. While some researchers thought consciousness could be “located in specific regions or processes in brains,” others asserted that any “talk about a location for consciousness is a ‘category mistake’.” Some said it was missing when we sleep; others claimed it was present when we dream, and so on. This “Babel of views” signals that our preliminary notions of “consciousness” often do not amount to more than an inchoate pre-theoretical concept.

This article offers an informal comparison of two candidate frameworks for the study of consciousness: “virtual machine functionalism” formulated by Sloman and Chrisley (2003), and “nonreductive functionalism” proposed by David Chalmers (1995, 1997).

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The study presented below was born of a lucky coincidence and an overlap between my personal and professional interests. I have recently joined a sub-field of applied computer science called “Intelligent and Knowledge-based Technologies” (IKT). In order to acclimatize myself to the new context, I started to explore its links with Artificial Intelligence (AI). My primary focus was the concept of “intelligence” and whether both of the fields defined it in the same way. Among the papers I found on the web, one had an intriguing title: “Virtual Machines and Consciousness” (Sloman & Chrisley 2003). It set off in a no less intriguing vein:

The study of consciousness, a long-established part of philosophy of mind and of metaphysics, was banished from science for many years, but has recently re-entered (some would say by a back door that should have been kept locked). Most AI researchers ignore the topic, though people discussing the scope and limits of AI do not. We claim that much of the discussion of consciousness is confused because what is being referred to is not clear. That is partly because “consciousness” is a cluster concept. (Sloman & Chrisley 2003, p. 3)

A cluster concept, the authors clarify,

is worse than merely being a vague concept (e.g. “large”, “yellow”), for which a boundary cannot be precisely specified along some continuum. It is also worse than being a mongrel concept (Block 1995), which merely confuses a collection of concepts that are individually supposed to be well-defined (e.g., “phenomenal consciousness” and “access consciousness”). It is true that even in the case of vague, mongrel, and even well-behaved concepts, people often disagree on whether or how the concept is to be applied in a particular case. But what is particularly problematic about the concept “consciousness” is that such disagreement is not merely empirical, but (also) deeply conceptual, since it is often the case that disputants cannot even agree on what sorts of evidence would settle the question. (Sloman & Chrisley 2003, pp. 4-5)

These passages struck a chord: the question of consciousness had fascinated me since high school. At a time when most of my classmates had scarcely heard of it, an unexpected encounter with yoga shattered my incipient world-view. That world-view, to be frank, hardly went beyond the usual stuff pumped into the young brains in the then still intact Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. Quite naturally, I started veering towards Indian spirituality and soon embraced it fully. At first I was ignorant of the fact that yoga and spirituality could also be used for brainwashing and domination. During Communism yoga was watched with suspicion and only some of its varieties (notably hathayoga and rajayoga) were tolerated. They were typically presented as methods for improving physical health and mental capacities. On rare occasions it might be hinted – or just cautiously whispered in the ear – that they could also activate deeper and more potent layers of consciousness. Overall, this approach gave the impression of an open-ended repertoire of techniques that individuals might use on their own – of course, after a proper training by a competent instructor, just as we attend a driving course in order to get a driving licence. After the fall of Communism, however, a different picture of yoga began to emerge. Regardless of whether or not such a liberal approach was feasible, it was definitely not the way yoga was traditionally practised in India. And if I was not scared away at this point, it was only because I chose a system that in this respect (for me all-important) departed from the established tradition.

Eventually my seeking brought me to India, where I stayed for several years. The trip was useful and stimulating, but ultimately ended up in disillusionment. For my present purpose it would be irrelevant to inquire to what extent this is to be attributed to my own imperfections rather than to those of the community in which I stayed, for both in fact contributed. Suffice it to say that although my enthusiasm for spiritual communities has waned, I still consider spirituality important, but now I prefer to view it as a sort of individual psychological discipline. The aspect that I consider the most relevant is the idea of layers of consciousness, which include but do not stop at our surface mental awareness. I tried briefly to sketch these in the context of the system I knew in the opening section of (Kvassay 2011), and I employ the same sort of perspective here.

It goes without saying that people with spiritual inclinations tend to dismiss any talk about “machine consciousness” as hopelessly reductive. I too felt the same about Sloman and Chrisley’s paper on my first, superficial reading. I had the impression as if they were claiming that if a calculator could manipulate numbers, then it had to be in some sense “conscious” of them. As I re-read and cross-checked their paper with others, I gradually realised I had missed several subtle but important points, which led to my misreading of their real thesis. I shall now try to elucidate them, as well as explain why I think it is wrong to dismiss reductive approaches off-hand. To this end, I will compare Sloman and Chrisley’s approach with a “minimalist” non-reductive alternative proposed by David Chalmers (1995).

* * *

The opening sections of Sloman and Chrisley’s paper deal with conflicting views on the nature of consciousness. In order to demonstrate “an astonishing lack of consensus” in the research community, they compile an illustrative collection of putative definitions and present it in a two-column table. Each row stands for a particular “bone of contention,” such as localizability of consciousness, while the two columns provide clashing views in that respect. Thus, for example, some researchers think that consciousness can be “located in specific regions or processes in brains,” while others assert that any “talk about a location for consciousness is a ‘category mistake’.” Some say it is missing when we sleep; others claim it is present when we dream, and so on. This “Babel of views” signals that our preliminary notions of “consciousness” often do not amount to more than an inchoate pre-theoretical concept.

Sloman and Chrisley propose a biologically inspired and architecture-based approach that they believe would help us supplant these vague notions with more precise and empirically tractable ones. They “start with the tentative hypothesis that although the word ‘consciousness’ has no well-defined meaning, it is used to refer to aspects of human and animal information-processing.” Their basic working assumption is:

The phenomena labelled “conscious” involve no magic; they result from the operation of very complex biological information-processing machines which we do not yet understand. (Sloman & Chrisley 2003, p. 9)

They admit that while the first part of their assumption is “uncontentious to anyone of a naturalist bent,” the second half is “notoriously controversial.” The rest of their paper is essentially a defence of this thesis.

Since the authors try to explain consciousness as a biological phenomenon, they first need to examine the existing “biological information-processing architectures.” They start with reactive architectures, the oldest and simplest group. A reactive mechanism, they write, “is one that produces outputs or makes internal changes … without … explicitly representing and comparing alternatives.” It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate reactive architectures. They can adapt and learn (e.g. through weight changes in neural nets), and give rise to some of the most robust and successful biological communities:

Some purely reactive species have a social architecture enabling large numbers of purely reactive individuals to give the appearance of considerable intelligence, e.g. termites building “cathedrals”. The main feature of reactive systems is that they lack the core ability of deliberative systems … namely, the ability to represent and reason about nonexistent or unperceived phenomena (e.g., future possible actions or hidden objects). (Sloman & Chrisley 2003, p. 22)

“In principle,” the authors note, “a reactive system can produce any external behaviour that more sophisticated systems can produce. However, to do so in practice it might require a larger memory for pre-stored reactive behaviours than could fit into the whole universe.”

Next come deliberative architectures: these can “represent possibilities (e.g. possible actions, possible explanations for what is perceived) in some explicit form, enabling alternative possibilities to be compared and one selected.” Examples of man-made deliberative systems include “theorem provers, planners, programs for playing board games, natural language systems, and expert systems of various sorts.” Here I got an indirect answer to my original query: it is mainly deliberative algorithms that tend to get picked by other fields, such as the “Intelligent and Knowledge-based Technologies” (IKT), and employed there for special purposes.

In the early phase of Artificial Intelligence it seemed that deliberative algorithms were the key to human-like intelligence. Ultimately, however, human “common sense” turned out to be too elusive for deliberative approaches. It was a big surprise – and a great disappointment – that ordinary common sense should be so much more difficult to implement than automated theorem-proving, for example. It took the researchers some time to digest, and even today people unacquainted with AI tend to regard the latter as more difficult. AI research has made it clear, however, that this is due to an error of perspective: the complexity of the brain-processes by which we interpret our physical surroundings and perform even trivial actions simply eludes us.

The root problem regarding the early AI systems, the authors explain, was their tendency to “get stuck in loops or repeat the same unsuccessful attempt to solve a sub-problem.” A more recent trend in tackling this difficulty “is to have a parallel subsystem monitoring and evaluating the deliberative processes. If it detects something bad happening, then it may be able to interrupt and re-direct the processing.” The authors call this monitoring function meta-management.

Architectures with meta-management (i.e. with reflective and self-reflective mechanisms) form the highest rung in the biological hierarchy. “The richest versions of this evolved very recently, and may be restricted to humans,” the authors remark, “though there are certain kinds of self-awareness in other primates (Hauser 2001).” They believe architectures with meta-management are sufficient for the construction of robots with human-like common sense, and present their own candidate: a “human-like architecture for cognition and affect” ( “H-CogAff”).

The authors ultimately zero in on the aspect widely considered the chief obstacle to replicating consciousness in a machine: the privacy and ineffability of our conscious experience, the problem of qualia. They go about it in a rather roundabout way, and for good reason. In fact, quite early in the article they drop a hint though I suspect that most readers (just like me) would miss the implications on their first reading:

Specifically, we hope to explain how an interest in questions about consciousness in general and qualia in particular arises naturally in intelligent machines with a certain sort of architecture that includes a certain sort of “meta-management” layer. Explaining the possibility (or near-inevitability) of such developments illustrates the notion of “architecture-driven” concepts (concepts likely to be generated within an architecture) and gives insightful new explanations of human philosophical questions, and confusions, about consciousness. (Sloman & Chrisley 2003, pp.3-4)

Such claims typically signal extremely reductive views on the nature of consciousness. I will try to show that this does not necessarily apply to the framework proposed by Sloman and Chrisley, at least in the sense that it can fit in with less reductive approaches as well. With that end in view, I will now introduce a minimalist non-reductive alternative proposed by David Chalmers (1995).

* * *

While Aaron Sloman is a recognised old-timer in the field of Artificial Intelligence (and originally a philosopher), David Chalmers entered the field of philosophy of mind relatively recently (in 1990s) and is originally a mathematician. Their “nearly inverted” professional trajectories help explain, I believe, the curious complementariness that I find in their views. Although one is predominantly reductive and the other non-reductive, there is plenty of common ground. The first similarity is actually not even surprising. Given the overwhelming variety of approaches to the study of consciousness, it is but natural that Chalmers in his seminal article too starts by acknowledging the inherent ambiguity of the task:

There is not just one problem of consciousness. “Consciousness” is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into “hard” and “easy” problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. (Chalmers 1995)

The problems Chalmers tags as “easy” include the ability of a cognitive system to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli, to integrate information coming from different sensory channels, to access its own internal states, and to control its behaviour through deliberation. “There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically,” he writes. By tagging them as “easy,” however, he does not mean they are trivial: “Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.” The problem he considers “really hard” is the problem of experience:

When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. (Chalmers 1995)

“The hard problem is hard,” he continues, “precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions”:

Even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open. (Chalmers 1995)

For Chalmers, this is the key question regarding consciousness: “Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on ‘in the dark,’ free of any inner feel?”

We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere. (Chalmers 1995)

Chalmers admits that “a remarkable number of phenomena have turned out to be explicable wholly in terms of entities simpler than themselves,” but points out that this is not universal. He likens the situation to earlier developments in physics, where “it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental.” Such entities

are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world. For example, in the nineteenth century it turned out that electromagnetic processes could not be explained in terms of the wholly mechanical processes that previous physical theories appealed to, so Maxwell and others introduced electromagnetic charge and electromagnetic forces as new fundamental components of a physical theory. To explain electromagnetism, the ontology of physics had to be expanded. New basic properties and basic laws were needed to give a satisfactory account of the phenomena. (Chalmers 1995)

The fact that we do not try to explain entities like mass, charge and space-time in terms of anything simpler, Chalmers argues,

does not rule out the possibility of a theory of mass or of space-time. There is an intricate theory of how these features interrelate, and of the basic laws they enter into. These basic principles are used to explain many familiar phenomena concerning mass, space, and time at a higher level. (Chalmers 1995)

Chalmers proposes to accept experience as a fundamental concept. “We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology,” he maintains,

as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience. (Chalmers 1995)

“A nonreductive theory of experience,” he clarifies,

will add new principles to the furniture of the basic laws of nature. These basic principles will ultimately carry the explanatory burden in a theory of consciousness. Just as we explain familiar high-level phenomena involving mass in terms of more basic principles involving mass and other entities, we might explain familiar phenomena involving experience in terms of more basic principles involving experience and other entities. (Chalmers 1995)

Chalmers terms these new principles “psychophysical,” since their role is to bridge the “explanatory gap” between the functions and experience. This implies that they should not interfere with the laws of physics, “as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory.” Chalmers concedes that this position “qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics.” “But it is an innocent version of dualism,” he maintains, “entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world”:

Nothing in this approach contradicts anything in physical theory; we simply need to add further bridging principles to explain how experience arises from physical processes. There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory—its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws. If the position is to have a name, a good choice might be naturalistic dualism. (Chalmers 1995)

Chalmers’ 1995 paper elicited a number of responses, which he analysed and answered in (Chalmers 1997). In the analysis he first confronted reductive (or “deflationary”) critiques and distinguished two types of materialism:

The type-A materialist denies that there is a “hard problem” distinct from the “easy” problems; the type-B materialist accepts (explicitly or implicitly) that there is a distinct problem, but argues that it can be accommodated within a materialist framework all the same. (Chalmers 1997)

“Type-A materialism,” Chalmers explains,

is not merely the view that consciousness is identical to some function, or that it plays a functional role, or that explaining the functions will help us explain consciousness. It is the much stronger view that there is not even a distinct question of consciousness: once we know about the functions that a system performs, we thereby know everything interesting there is to know. (Chalmers 1997)

“This is an extremely counterintuitive position,” he remarks.

At first glance, it seems to simply deny a manifest fact about us. But it deserves to be taken seriously: after all, counterintuitive theories are not unknown in science and philosophy. On the other hand, to establish a counterintuitive position, strong arguments are needed. And to establish this position – that there is really nothing else to explain – one might think that extraordinarily strong arguments are needed. So what arguments do its proponents provide? (Chalmers 1997)

“Perhaps the most common strategy for a type-A materialist,” he observes,

is to deflate the “hard problem” by using analogies to other domains, where talk of such a problem would be misguided. Thus Dennett imagines a vitalist arguing about the hard problem of “life”, or a neuroscientist arguing about the hard problem of “perception”. Similarly, Paul Churchland (1996) imagines a nineteenth century philosopher worrying about the hard problem of “light”, and Patricia Churchland brings up an analogy involving “heat”. In all these cases, we are to suppose, someone might once have thought that more needed explaining than structure and function; but in each case, science has proved them wrong. So perhaps the argument about consciousness is no better. (Chalmers 1997)

For Chalmers, such arguments do not carry much weight. “There is a disanalogy between the problem of consciousness and problems in other domains,” he says, since in the latter case “it is more or less obvious that structure and function are what need explaining, at least once any experiential aspects are left aside.”

When it comes to the problem of life, for example, it is just obvious that what needs explaining is structure and function: How does a living system self-organize? How does it adapt to its environment? How does it reproduce? Even the vitalists recognized this central point: their driving question was always “How could a mere physical system perform these complex functions?”, not “Why are these functions accompanied by life?” It is no accident that Dennett’s version of a vitalist is “imaginary”. There is no distinct “hard problem” of life, and there never was one, even for vitalists. (Chalmers 1997)

In the case of consciousness, however, “the manifest phenomena that need explaining” include not only structure and functions, but also subjective experience. So, for Chalmers, “this analogy does not even get off the ground.” The same line of reasoning applies to “any phenomenon that we observe in the external world”:

When we observe external objects, we observe their structure and function; that’s all. Such observations give no reason to postulate any new class of properties, except insofar as they explain structure and function; so there can be no analog of a “hard problem” here. Even if further properties of these objects existed, we could have no access to them, as our external access is physically mediated: such properties would lie on the other side of an unbridgeable epistemic divide. Consciousness uniquely escapes these arguments by lying at the center of our epistemic universe, rather than at a distance. In this case alone, we can have access to something other than structure and function. (Chalmers 1997)

“To have any chance of making the case,” Chalmers concludes, “a type-A materialist needs to argue that for consciousness, as for life, the functions are all that need explaining.”

Often, a proponent will simply assert that functions are all that need explaining, or will argue in a way that subtly assumes this position at some point. But that is clearly unsatisfactory. Prima facie, there is very good reason to believe that the phenomena a theory of consciousness must account for include not just discrimination, integration, report, and such functions, but also experience, and prima facie, there is good reason to believe that the question of explaining experience is distinct from the questions about explaining the various functions. Such prima facie intuitions can be overturned, but to do so requires very solid and substantial argument. (Chalmers 1997)

“Such arguments,” Chalmers observes, “are surprisingly hard to find.” Among the contributors to the symposium, he notes, Daniel Dennett seems to be the only one openly endorsing the view that “in the case of consciousness, the functions are all that need explaining.” The key to Dennett’s position, Chalmers suggests,

lies in what Dennett has elsewhere described as the foundation of his philosophy: “third-person absolutism”. If one takes the third-person perspective on oneself – viewing oneself from the outside, so to speak – these reactions and abilities are no doubt the main focus of what one sees. But the hard problem is about explaining the view from the first-person perspective. So to shift perspectives like this – even to shift to a third-person perspective on one’s first-person perspective, which is one of Dennett’s favorite moves – is again to assume that what needs explaining are such functional matters as reactions and reports, and so is again to argue in a circle. (Chalmers 1997)

Chalmers is not flustered by the Dennett’s argument, “subtract the functions and nothing is left”:

An analogy suggested by Gregg Rosenberg is useful here. Color has properties of hue, saturation, and brightness. It is plausible that if one “subtracts” hue from a color, nothing phenomenologically significant is left, but this certainly doesn’t imply that color is nothing but hue. So even if Dennett could argue that function was somehow required for experience (in the same way that hue is required for color), this would fall a long way short of showing that function is all that has to be explained. (Chalmers 1997)

When challenged “to provide ‘independent’ evidence … for the ‘postulation’ of experience,” Chalmers replies: “But this is to miss the point: conscious experience is not ‘postulated’ to explain other phenomena in turn; rather, it is a phenomenon to be explained in its own right.” And he quips:

I would be interested to see Dennett’s version of the “independent” evidence that leads physicists to “introduce” the fundamental categories of space and time. It seems to me that the relevant evidence is spatiotemporal through and through, just as the evidence for experience is experiential through and through. (Chalmers 1997)

Proponents of type-A materialism “sometimes like to suggest that their view is supported by the results of modern science,” Chalmers remarks, “but all the science that I know is quite neutral here: I have never seen any experimental result that implies that functions are all that need to be explained.”

Given the overall tenor of Chalmers’ argument, his concluding words rather surprised me:

This is not to say that type-A materialism cannot be argued for at all. There are a few sophisticated arguments for such a position in the literature (for example, Shoemaker 1975 and White 1986), but even these ultimately come down to “consider the alternatives”, isolating the difficulties that one gets into if one accepts that there is a further phenomenon that needs explaining. There is no doubt that these difficulties (both ontological and epistemological) are considerable; life would be a lot easier if the hard problem did not exist. But I think these difficulties are solvable; and in any case, to deny the problem because of the difficulties has the flavor of solution by decree. (Chalmers 1997)

Chalmers does not think the results achieved by type-A materialists are worthless, or that type-A materialism is going to disappear any time soon:

We will probably just have to get used to the fact that there is a basic division in the field: that between those who think the “easy” problems are the only problems, and those who think that subjective experience needs to be explained as well. We can therefore expect two quite distinct sorts of theories of consciousness: those which explain the functions and then say “that’s all”, and those which take on an extra burden. In the end, the most progress will probably come from internal advances in the respective research programs, rather [than] from the endless battle between the two. So beyond a certain point in the argument, theorists in these camps might just agree to disagree and get on with their respective projects. This way, everyone can move forward. (Chalmers 1997)

Chalmers then proceeds with equally illuminating analyses of type-B materialism and nonreductive critiques, which I will take up later.

* * *

Overall, it is quite obvious that Sloman and Chrisley’s views are close to Dennett’s. After all, Sloman himself admits that much in a note on Dennett’s book The Intentional Stance (Sloman 1988), even as he argues that the “intentional stance” is not enough: a “design stance” alone, in his opinion, can provide “real insight into the nature of intelligence.” This was in fact the main reason why Sloman shifted from academic philosophy to artificial intelligence. I will now briefly review some of the results and implications of this approach.

Sloman and Chrisley’s “design stance” is based on “a new kind of functionalist analysis of mental concepts” that they have developed. They call it “virtual machine functionalism” (VMF), and claim it to be immune from “a number of standard objections” to functionalism among philosophers. “Most philosophers and cognitive scientists,” they remark, “write as if ‘functionalism’ were a well-defined, generally understood concept.” As an example, they quote (Block 1996):

According to functionalism, the nature of a mental state is just like the nature of an automaton state: constituted by its relations to other states and to inputs and outputs. All there is to [a mental state] S1 is that being in it and getting a [certain] input results in such and such, etc. According to functionalism, all there is to being in pain is that it disposes you to say ‘ouch’, wonder whether you are ill, it distracts you, etc. (Block 1996)

Block’s summary, according to Sloman and Chrisley, “has (at least) two different interpretations.” The first, in which “an entity can have only one, indivisible, mental state at a time,” they propose to call “atomic state functionalism” and dismiss on the grounds that such indivisible mental states “could not be states like human hunger, thirst, puzzlement or anger, since these can coexist and start and stop independently.”

In the second interpretation, an entity can have “several coexisting, independently varying, interacting mental states” at the same time:

It is possible that Block did not realise that his examples, as ordinarily understood, were of this kind: for instance, the same pain can both make you wonder whether you are ill and distract you from a task, so that having a pain, wondering whether you are ill, having the desire or intention to do the task, and being distracted from it are four coexisting states which need not start and end at the same time. If the pain subsides, you may continue to wonder whether you are ill, and while working on the task (e.g. digging the garden) you might form a new intention to see a doctor later. Coexistence of interacting sub-states is a feature of how people normally view mental states, for instance when they talk about conflicting desires or attitudes. (Sloman & Chrisley 2003, p. 16)

It is this “parallelized” version of functionalism that the authors call “virtual machine functionalism” (VMF). They distinguish between two forms: restricted VMF, which “requires that every sub-state be causally connected, possibly indirectly, to inputs and outputs of the whole system,” and unrestricted VMF, which is free from this constraint. The distinction is important. It is generally accepted that the space of design options for intelligent systems is so wide as to be practically unmanageable. Consequently, we need meaningful criteria to constrain it. Biologically inspired approaches often invoke the notion of evolution to do the filtering: ideally, no new feature should be introduced in the design until it has been plausibly demonstrated how it could have helped structurally similar organisms survive or gain evolutionary advantage. Since VMF is biologically inspired, it needs to prove itself in this respect too. While restricted VMF fares well on that score, unrestricted VMF is a bit problematic. I will skip the details and rather focus on why the authors put effort into legitimizing unrestricted VMF. The reason is simple: it turns out it can elegantly explain certain elusive features of human psychology, such as the problem of qualia. The authors demonstrate this through a graded series of examples:

Unrestricted VMF allows that some sub-state S or continuing sub-process is constantly altered by other sub-states that are connected with the environment even though none of the changes that occur in S affect anything that can affect the environment. An example in a computer might be some process that records statistics about events occurring in other processes, but does not transmit any of its records to any other part of the system, and no other part can access them. Unrestricted VMF even allows sub-systems that beaver away indefinitely without getting any inputs from other parts of the system. For instance, a sub-system might be forever playing games of chess with itself, or forever searching for proofs of Goldbach’s conjecture. (Sloman & Chrisley 2003, p.18)

These initial examples are not terribly impressive. While the statistics may have a value for the end-users of the system, most system administrators are likely to kill any run-away process the moment they spot one. And in most cases it is indeed the right thing to do, except for autonomously evolving systems, where each process may need the freedom to disconnect and reconnect back on its own.

We get a first glimpse of what the authors are up to a bit later, as they pass on to an interesting case of a semi-detached process,

that causally interacts with other processes, e.g. by sending them instructions or answers to questions, but whose internal details do not influence other processes, e.g. if conclusions of reasoning are transmitted, but none of the reasons justifying those conclusions. Then other parts of the system may know what was inferred, but be totally unable to find out why. (Sloman & Chrisley 2003, pp. 18-19)

This category includes an important special case of a semi-detached process in the meta-management layer that monitors and evaluates other processes:

This internal self-observation process might have no causal links to external motors, so that its information cannot be externally reported. If it also modifies the processes it observes … then it may have external effects. However it could be the case that the internal monitoring states are too complex and change too rapidly to be fully reflected in any externally detectable behaviour: a bandwidth limitation. For such a system experience might be partly ineffable. (Sloman & Chrisley 2003, p.19)

The authors seem to imply that partial ineffability at meta-management level amounts to a kind of proto-qualia, or perhaps even a sort of qualia instantiated in a machine. They buttress up their argument through an elaborate discussion of concept formation in self-organising systems, which, as they show, provide scope for more advanced forms of qualia. The discussion is rather technical, so I won’t go into details. Suffice it to say that they managed to convince me that intelligent machines can indeed possess various sorts of qualia (more precisely, I felt we should rather speak of proto-qualia, structural and functional preconditions that may lead to full-blown qualia in the presence of consciousness). Henceforth, I would hesitate to accept the mere existence of qualia in humans as an insuperable objection against machine consciousness. Given that till now I have been a staunch opponent of the very idea of machine consciousness, it is quite a feat. It may still turn out there are kinds of qualia that only humans can have, but that is a different story. And the proponents of machine consciousness are certainly entitled to ask: “Could you be more specific as to what kinds of qualia are those, and what makes you think intelligent machines should forever be incapable of them?” I admit I could not give a fitting reply to such a question yet.

At the same time, I had reservations about Sloman and Chrisley’s argument, mainly because they try to pull it off the Dennettian way, that is, without bringing in “consciousness” in the non-reductive sense of the word. And without it I could not see how the proto-qualia they so ingeniously devised could bring about something that non-reductionists too would accept as full-blown qualia. Presumably, the authors are of the opinion that no such non-reductive full-blown qualia exist, and that that is precisely the error of non-reductionists, as evidenced by the amusing collection of inchoate “pre-theoretical” notions of consciousness that they started with. Grant that as yet there is no agreed nonreductive definition of the term, and that most people indeed use it incoherently. I do not see how this entails the non-existence of consciousness in the nonreductive sense, when it may simply be (due to its unique properties) just exceedingly difficult to capture in a consistent intellectual framework.

The moral of the story goes along with Chalmers’ earlier suggestion: wherever we seem to be dealing with something persistently eluding conceptualization due to principled reasons, there is legitimate scope for those who believe in its reality and want to continue trying, as well as for those who doubt its reality and prefer to do without it. In the case of consciousness it is evident that both directions yield interesting insights and spur each other to more intense efforts towards a solution. And this, in my opinion, would hold even if it came to pass that neither could provide a definitive conceptual framework for dealing with the problem.

* * *

When I first read Chalmers’ 1995 article, I took his naturalistic dualism to imply that consciousness cannot be instantiated in a machine even in principle – an exact opposite of Sloman and Chrisley’s position. You can imagine my consternation when I later discovered that the Wikipedia entry on Artificial Consciousness credited Chalmers for “one of the most explicit arguments for the plausibility of artificial consciousness”! How come? Wikipedia referred to Chalmers’ article “A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition” (Chalmers 2011), which was based on an early unpublished draft of 1993. As I read through it, I had the impression of an almost exact match of Chalmers’ ideas with those of Sloman and Chrisley. “Hm. Looks like he wrote this while he was a type-B materialist,” I thought. This interpretation seemed to be supported e.g. by “Mind and Consciousness: Five Questions” (Chalmers 2009), where he says that while working on his 1996 book he became “convinced … contrary to my initial inclination, that a materialist approach to consciousness cannot succeed.” And later he adds:

I don’t think that a successful science of consciousness can be a wholly reductive science of consciousness, cast in terms of neuroscience or computation alone. Rather, I think it will be a nonreductive science, one that does not try to reduce consciousness to a physical process, but rather studies consciousness in its own right and tries to find connections to brain, behavior, and other cognitive processes. (Chalmers 2009)

At the same time, in his recent introductory note to his 1993 draft (Chalmers 2011) he says he is “still largely sympathetic with the views expressed here, in broad outline if not in every detail.” “So, is he a computationalist or not?” I muttered to myself as I hurriedly scanned his articles for any clue. Eventually I realised I had made a similar mistake as with Sloman and Chrisley earlier. The clues, in this case, were as follows. First, although in his 1995 article Chalmers mentions he is no longer a materialist, he still keeps the “dancing qualia” argument in favour of the thesis of computability of mind. This was in fact my primary source of confusion: while I took computationalism to imply both functionalism and reductionism (i.e. at most type-B materialism), Chalmers explicitly rejected reductionism in that very same article!

The second clue was Chalmers’ opening words from the section dealing with non-reductive critiques in (Chalmers 1997), where he remarks that in his 1995 article he seems to have “staked out some middle ground”:

The intermediate nature of my position may stem from an inclination toward simplicity and toward science. Reductive materialism yields a compellingly simple view of the world in many ways, and even if it does not work in the case of consciousness, I have at least tried to preserve as many of its benefits as possible. (Chalmers 1997)

The third and final clue was the fact that consciousness has two aspects: phenomenal (roughly, what it is or how it feels to be something) and functional (what consciousness does, exemplified by its participation in the mental processes like verbal reporting, discrimination, categorization, deliberation, etc.). The first is usually termed “phenomenal consciousness,” the second “access consciousness.” Chalmers proposes a slightly different terminology, calling the first “consciousness” and the second “awareness.”

Because I missed the import of the third clue, I wrongly believed that abandoning reductionism implies abandoning computationalism altogether. In fact it is possible to make a half-step only, and abandon computationalism with respect to one aspect of consciousness while still keeping it with regard to the other. This, then, seems to be Chalmers’ real position, and it might be summed up in the motto: “We cannot compute what consciousness is, but we can still compute what it does.” The first half ensures the view is nonreductive, while the second keeps it within the ambit of functionalism, broadly conceived. Chalmers himself calls his position “nonreductive functionalism.”

Is such a position philosophically feasible? Chalmers believes it is and puts forward a candidate framework inspired by Russellian monism. This view builds on the fact that

physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their causes and effects, and leaves their intrinsic nature unspecified. For everything that physics tells us about a particle, for example, it might as well just be a bundle of causal dispositions; we know nothing of the entity that carries those dispositions. The same goes for fundamental properties, such as mass and charge: ultimately, these are complex dispositional properties (to have mass is to resist acceleration in a certain way, and so on). But whenever one has a causal disposition, one can ask about the categorical basis of that disposition: that is, what is the entity that is doing the causing? (Chalmers 1997)

If we dodge this question by stipulating that the world consists only of dispositions, Chalmers observes, we are left with

a vast amount of causation and no entities for all this causation to relate! It seems to make the fundamental properties and particles into empty placeholders … and thus seems to free the world of any substance at all. (Chalmers 1997)

“The idea of a world of ‘pure structure’ or of ‘pure causation’ has a certain attraction,” he admits, “but it is not at all clear that it is coherent.” This naturally leads to two questions:

(1) what are the intrinsic properties underlying physical reality?; and (2) where do the intrinsic properties of experience fit into the natural order? Russell’s insight, developed by Maxwell and Lockwood, is that these two questions fit with each other remarkably well. Perhaps the intrinsic properties underlying physical dispositions are themselves experiential properties, or perhaps they are some sort of proto-experiential properties that together constitute conscious experience. This way, we locate experience inside the causal network that physics describes, rather than outside it as a dangler; and we locate it in a role that one might argue urgently needed to be filled. And importantly, we do this without violating the causal closure of the physical. The causal network itself has the same shape as ever; we have just colored in its nodes. (Chalmers 1997)

An interesting exposition of why the intrinsic properties of the physical should have anything to do with consciousness is given in (Rosenberg 1999). A closely related question is whether Russellian monism, by embracing the causal closure of the physical, does or does not lead to epiphenomenalism (the view that consciousness has no effect on the physical world). In this respect, Chalmers maintains that by placing experience inside the causal network we give it a causal role:

Indeed, fundamental experiences or proto-experiences will be the basis of causation at the lowest levels, and high-level experiences such as ours will presumably inherit causal relevance from the (proto)-experiences from which they are constituted. So we will have a much more integrated picture of the place of consciousness in the natural order. (Chalmers 1997)

Of course, Russellian monism has its own problems. Chalmers mentions, among others, “the threat of panpsychism” and “the problem of how fundamental experiential or proto-experiential properties at the microscopic level somehow together constitute the sort of complex, unified experience that we possess.” In addition, many nonreductive researchers criticized Chalmers for remaining too close to functionalism. In order to illustrate their concerns, I will briefly review (Lowe 1995).

Lowe commends Chalmers for “challenging the complacent assumptions of reductive physicalism” but fears that Chalmers’ approach “plays into the hands of physicalists by suggesting that the only problem with functionalism is its apparent inability to say anything about ‘qualia’.” He finds “Chalmers’ notions of experience and consciousness … seriously inadequate,” particularly in missing how deeply and inextricably is “the intentional content of a perceptual experience … grounded in its phenomenal character.” He also objects to Chalmers’ reliance on the Shannonian notion of information (which he considers “wholly inappropriate for characterizing [human] cognitive states”), as well as to his “terminological proposal regarding the use of the words ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’”:

In Chalmers’ proposed sense of ‘awareness’, it seems fair to say, there could be nothing in principle wrong in speaking of a computer, or even a thermostat, as being ‘aware’ — but then to suggest that human beings are only ‘aware’ in this attenuated sense is completely to misrepresent the capacities involved in our being ‘aware’ of our selves and of our own thoughts and experiences. (Lowe 1995)

Lowe’s main charge goes against Chalmers’ view of “human thought and cognition in general [as] just a matter of ‘information-processing’ … which could in principle go on in a mindless computer.” This, according to Lowe, might lead to the idea

that all that is really distinctive about consciousness is its qualitative or phenomenal aspects (the ‘what it is like’, or ‘inner feel’). And then it begins to look like a strange mystery or quirk of evolution that creatures like us should possess this sort of consciousness in addition to all our capacities for thought and understanding — these capacities being, for Chalmers, simply capacities for certain sorts of information-processing and storage. (Lowe 1995)

Lowe’s answer to this “strange mystery” is

that consciousness has only been put in this queer position by Chalmers (and, to be fair, by many others) because he has mistakenly denied it any role in his account of the nature of human thought and understanding. In short, it is the reductive, and wholly inadequate, information-processing conception of human cognition which is responsible for the misperception that ‘consciousness’ (in the form of ‘qualia’ and the like) occupies what threatens to be a merely epiphenomenal role as a peculiar additional feature of human mentation that is in no way essential to our basic intellectual capacities. (Lowe 1995)

Answering Lowe’s criticism, Chalmers clarifies that in his 1995 article he did not intend to claim that humans were “aware” only in the same (attenuated) sense as machines. He also did not intend to address “the exact relationship between consciousness and ‘intentional’ (or semantic) mental states” as this raised “deep and subtle questions” that were beyond the scope of that paper. “I am torn on the question of intentionality,” Chalmers writes,

being impressed on one hand by its phenomenological aspects, and on the other hand being struck by the potential for functional analyses of specific intentional contents…. Over time I am becoming more sympathetic with the [idea] … that consciousness is the primary source of meaning, so that intentional content may be grounded in phenomenal content, as Lowe puts it. (Chalmers 1997)

This reply, given fifteen years back, seemed to hint at a possibility of modification of his computationalist view of “awareness” (functional side of consciousness). Of course, his recent comment that he is “still largely sympathetic with the views expressed” in his 1993 draft (Chalmers 2011) rules out any substantial change. Further details are unlikely to transpire before the ongoing discussion of his draft in the Journal of Cognitive Science concludes with the publication of his final response and analysis.

Let me wrap up on a personal note. I am not in a position to pass authoritative judgements on these debates, but I found it deeply rewarding to formulate my own hypotheses and then watch how they would fare with respect to the debated points (often not too well, as you could see). Being a person with spiritual inclinations, it should not come as a surprise that Lowe’s views resonated with me the most. At the same time I found Chalmers’ “nonreductive functionalism” invaluable as the “minimalist” version of non-reductionism, and perhaps even an ideal communication point for the flow of research results between the reductionist and the non-reductionist camps.

From my point of view, Chalmers’ most significant result in the articles I dealt with might be summed up as a theorem: “Even if we grant that the functional aspects of human consciousness can be subsumed by machine-level information-processing, yet consciousness in its phenomenal aspect remains irreducible to structure and function.” Viewed from this perspective, his “selling out to functionalism,” for which he was criticized by Lowe and others, becomes in fact his greatest asset. As in mathematics, where the theorem with the weakest assumptions is the strongest and the most generally applicable, I find Chalmers’ result extremely potent with regard to those who find themselves near the borderline between the reductive and the nonreductive camps.

Last but not least, I consider Sloman and Chrisley’s architectural ideas regarding intelligent systems very inspiring and, paradoxically, these might be the ones that I end up using in my work in the field of IKT. Although Sloman and Chrisley lean towards Dennett, my initial impression of their thesis – that e.g. calculators, simply by virtue of their capability to manipulate numbers, must be in some way conscious of them – was plain wrong. They stake this claim on behalf of highly intelligent machines with sophisticated meta-management layer that can reflectively turn upon itself and inspect and deliberate about its own functioning. The fact that non-reductionists disagree with this does not diminish the practical value of such designs. If we are going to have robots with human-like intelligence around in the foreseeable future (and I for one believe that we are), then it seems to me their design is more than likely to draw on the results achieved by Sloman and his colleagues since the late 1970s. Lowe’s contention (shared by other nonreductive contributors) that this is not how human cognition actually works, does not impair, in my opinion, the utility of these ideas for building intelligent machines. Besides, I have seen several intriguing and noteworthy defences of functionalism even with respect to human cognition, so the dispute is far from settled.

Even more important is the fact that Sloman and Chrisley’s architectural ideas can be straightforwardly “co-opted” onto the nonreductive Russellian framework and so (perhaps) avail themselves of the minimal element of subjective experience (or proto-experience) required for their functional proto-qualia to turn into genuine qualia. This makes a compelling case for the plausibility of artificial consciousness – an idea I was unwilling to entertain before. Now I find it almost past dispute. Its practical realisation, however, is not going to be easy. It won’t do simply to say, “Well, you see, here is a robot pretty close to humans in terms of intelligence, and since it is agreed now that the intrinsic properties of the physical do provide for an element of subjective experience, isn’t it about time to accept that robots like this are conscious?” This won’t wash because there is no guarantee that, as we go on constructing more and more intelligent machines, the intrinsic proto-experiential properties of their material components follow suit. They may not do so at all, in which case we just end up with intelligent machines without consciousness or, more precisely, with only so much diffused proto-consciousness as Russellian monism concedes to any lump of amorphous material. For me, the question of consciousness is distinct from that of intelligence, and I am not entirely convinced by Chalmers’ “dancing qualia” argument, because it makes the functional specification of the system fully determinative of its subjective experience. My uneasiness stems from the fact that functional specifications are expressed in formal (extrinsic) terms, while the intrinsic properties are supposed to be richer and carry the extrinsic ones, so it is far from certain that functional specifications suffice for consciousness (as opposed to intelligence). Chalmers is well aware of these problems and admits that experiential composition is not likely to follow the rules of physical composition, though he still hopes it might follow those of informational composition. These are complicated issues, which I can’t take up now, so let me just stick to the main point: while the road to artificial consciousness is at present unclear, Russellian monism clearly admits of such a possibility, at least in principle.

The upshot of it all is that while Chalmers’ ideas make a compelling case for non-reductionism, their side-effect – an equally compelling case for artificial consciousness – is something that most non-reductionists shy away from. There is here an element of surprise for both camps, which I take for a sign that genuine and substantial progress has been made.

Let me conclude by reiterating my starting point: this article was conceived as a preliminary and informal exploration of a fascinating area lying at the intersection of my personal and professional interests. As far as possible, I tried to rely on open-access sources and provide a web link for each article in the reference section. As for the responses to (Chalmers 1995), these were originally published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which (unfortunately), is not open-access, but (Lowe 1995), for example, has been subsequently reprinted in Antimatters and can be downloaded from there. Some other responses are available online as well; links to them are given in (Chalmers 1997). I look forward to studying the much more that has happened in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and philosophy of mind since these debates took place. I am sure pondering over all the new material will be no less rewarding than over the ideas presented here.

References:

Block, N. (1996). What is functionalism?
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/functionalism.html
(Originally in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement, Macmillan, 1996)

Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness.
http://consc.net/papers/facing.html
(Originally in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 2:200-19)

Chalmers, D. J. (1997). Moving forward on the problem of consciousness.
http://consc.net/papers/moving.html
(Originally in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 4:3-46)

Chalmers, D. J. (2009). Mind and Consciousness: Five Questions.
http://consc.net/papers/five.pdf
(Originally in Patrick Grim, ed. Mind and Consciousness: Five Questions. Automatic Press, 2009.)

Chalmers, D. J. (2011). A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition.
http://consc.net/papers/computation.html
(Originally in the Journal of Cognitive Science 12:323-57.)

Kvassay, M. (2011). Psychological Foundations of Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy and His Approach to the Problem of Evil.
http://marcelkvassay.net/article.php?id=psychological

Lowe, E. J. (1995). There are no easy problems of consciousness.
http://anti-matters.org/articles/46/public/46-41-1-PB.pdf
(Originally in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 2:266-71.)

Rosenberg, G. H. (1999). On the Intrinsic Nature of the Physical.
http://cognet.mit.edu/posters/TUCSON3/Rosenberg.html
(Originally in Toward a Science of Consciousness III, The Third Tucson Discussions and Debates, 1999.)

Sloman, A. (1988). Why Philosophers Should be Designers.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/sloman-dennett-bbs-1987.pdf
(Commentary submitted to The Behavioral and Brain Sciences Journal.)

Sloman, A. & Chrisley, R. (2003). Virtual Machines and Consciousness.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/sloman-chrisley-jcs.pdf
(Originally in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10:113–172)

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Marcel Kvassay, a graduate of Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, worked for Oxford University Press and Alcatel as a consultant, trainer and software development methodologist. He spent several years in India and currently works as a researcher in applied computer science.

Mark Hansen

Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time (published in three volumes over the period from 1994-2001, with two further volumes promised) marks an important chance for deconstruction – a chance for it to (re)enter the terrain marked out by cultural studies. More exactly, Stiegler’s work marks the chance for deconstruction (understood, for the moment at least, as a thinking of the aporia of the origin) to put forth its rightful claim to be the necessary – and now explicitly necessary – ’ground’ for cultural studies.

In analyses ranging over mythology and paleontology, contemporary technoscience and phenomenology, Stiegler has developed a highly original philosophy of technology, the central premise of which is that the human has always been technological. Drawing on the perspective of French paleontologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan, who argues for the coincidence of tool use and the appearance of the human, Stiegler claims that the human can be specified as that being who evolves through means other than life, through a coupling with the independent ’exterior’ evolution of technological objects. This insistence on the correlation of the human subject (the ’who’) and the technical object (‘the what’) informs Stiegler’s rereading of Heidegger in volume 1 of Technics and Time as well as his divergences from Derrida’s retooling of Heidegger in Of Spirit and related works. Resurrecting Heidegger’s analysis in an early lecture from 1924 on time (‘The Concept of Time’), Stiegler shows that the emphasis Heidegger places on the opposition between ecstatic,transcendental temporality and mundane temporality is misplaced, since there can be no access to time, indeed no experience of time whatsoever, without the prior inscription of time in worldly form. Thus Daseinis irreducibly dependent on the technical giving of time. This analysis furnishes an alternative to Derrida’s own deconstruction of Heidegger and, as we shall see, a variant path toward thinking the possibility of the future. Whereas Derrida undoes the Heideggerian opposition only to rediscover and reemphasize the radical alterity of time (which forms the basis for the ’promise’ in his more recent ethico-religious perspective), Stiegler refuses to bracket the technical. As we will see, this difference ultimately concerns the role respectively accorded the empirical-transcendental divide by the two philosophers.

For the moment, however, what needs to be stressed is the promise Stiegler’s insistence on the irreducibility of the technical holds for (re)discovering deconstruction within cultural studies. This promise concerns the privilege he accords the empirical manifestation of différance. If time is only given through concrete technical inscriptions, as Stiegler maintains, then technics would necessarily possess a determining agency over the materialization of différance at this or that specific historical moment. There would furthermore necessarily be a history of différance, and this history would be inseparable from – indeed, nothing other than – the history of the supplement.

Despite garnering accusations from certain (Derridian) detractors that his position positivizes différance,1 it is in fact precisely because it runs the risk of positivism that Stiegler’s work can aid us in(re)discovering deconstruction within cultural studies. Stiegler’s work, as I see it, forges a much needed position between positivism and abstraction – between the various strategies for positivizing différance that one finds in contemporary cultural studies (for example, in the ’radical empiricism’ of audience research studies (Ang, 1996: 251) and more generally in the ubiquitious call for explorations of heterogeneity as a’positive’, that is, concrete phenomenon)2 and the retreat to a pretechnical, precultural quasi-politics of the promise that Derrida has recently articulated. What distinguishes Stiegler from the former is precisely his appreciation for the aporia of the origin: for if the origin is never (simply) given, then what conditions experience at any concrete moment cannot be situated exclusively at the level of the empirical. On the flip side, what distinguishes Stiegler from Derrida is the manner in which he conceptualizes the aporia: for Stiegler, the aporia is not a logical principle whose sway is exercised prior to and independently of the empirical, but rather the rigorous consequence of the givenness of time (différance) through concrete technical objects. The dependence of the human on the technical object marks an excess over the empirical that, however, remains inseparable from the empirical – that, as he will say, only appears as its ’après-coup’.

The ultimate consequence of Stiegler’s correlation of the human and the technical is the claim – a claim for which I shall argue in what follows – that the (re)discovery of deconstruction within cultural studies has the consequence of transforming cultural studies into technocultural studies. While it evinces much resonance with contemporary cultural studies of media and technology, Stiegler’s work can thus be understood to call into question some of the fundamental principles of cultural studies as such. In the first place, it questions the very privilege of culture itself from a post-Marxist perspective aligned with the techno-economic conditions of globalization.3 Its distinctive merit here is the specificity it introduces into such questioning: in a world where culture (understood by Stiegler, perhaps too narrowly, as the ’adoption’ or reproduction of the tradition) is made possible by technics (the various archival technologies from phonography up to today’s teletechnologies), the effort to examine how technics simultaneously enables and constrains cultural production takes precedence, and indeed becomes the condition for, cultural studies proper. As one important consequence of this questioning of the cultural, Stiegler’s perspective presents a vastly different model for understanding the subject’s relation with the transnational media system. To put it schematically, whereas cultural studies’ approach to the media, from Stuart Hall’s ’decoder-encoder’model to the audience research studies of Ien Ang and Janice Radway, positions the viewer and media technology as extrinsic in relation to one another, Stiegler’s work conceptualizes the correlation of the two as intrinsic. Thus, where cultural studies speaks (a variously inflected) rhetoric of viewer empowerment, Stiegler’s work begins from a premise that enjoins him from investing in any simple politics of subjective agency. For if consciousness is constituted through technics, and if the conditions for such constitution today (what Stiegler calls the ’real time’ ’technical synthesis’) function to industrialize consciousness (i.e.make it a ’product’ of the global televisual system), then it makes little sense to seek emancipation in counter-hegemonic reception practices.4 Rather, in keeping with the ’originary prostheticity’ of consciousness,emancipation can only come from technics itself, from a technical intervention that can change the reception situation – from, for example, the possibilities for (a very different) decoding and encoding offered by the digital discretization of the continuous, ’real time’ image. What this means, ultimately, is that emancipation can only come through technogenesis, that is, through an ’evolution’ of consciousness itself via its intrinsic correlation with technics. On this understanding, emancipation would never be from a dominant ideology disseminated by the media, but on the contrary, could only ever be the effect of a new configuration of the subjective and technical syntheses.

At the most general level, what brings Stiegler’s work into affinity with cultural studies is a common effort to anchor theoretical analysis in the concrete. In the end, however, Stiegler’s commitment to the technical specificity of différance yields a very different concept of the empirical than that championed by practitioners of cultural studies (e.g. Ang’s call for a ’radical empiricism’ in the face of a ’transnational media system [that] is an irreversible process that cannot be structurally transcended, only negotiated in concrete cultural contexts’ (1995: 251)). Rather than the locus for a cultural specification of a technoeconomic reality, Stiegler’s empirical is the technical condition for the appearance of différance, for the gift of time, in the world today. As such, it is always in excess of itself, shot through with the contingency that, far from ratifying a media system by configuring it in a ’local’ perspective, serves to open the possibility of the future. In the end, Stiegler’s concept of the empirical marks the privileging of the technical over the cultural, a fact that can be seen, for example, in his analysis of the suspension of the ethnic (in favor of technics itself) as the agent of collective individuation. It would be hard to imagine a position more at odds with an agenda (like that of Ang) that embraces ethnography as one of its fundamental tools.

What Stiegler’s work affords, then, is an opportunity to transform cultural studies into technocultural practice. My effort to perform this transformation here will unfold in two sections. In the first, I propose to rehearse Stiegler’s transformative appropriation of Derrida’s early conceptualization of différance, the trace, and archi-writing with the purpose primarily of laying bare the salient differences between their respective philosophies, and specificially, their divergent embrace of technics. This analysis will culminate in the question regarding today’s realtime global media system where the stakes of their differences are(in my opinion) most consequential. By exploring the conceptual différend informing their 1993 televised debate concerning media, I shall restage the discussion, as it were, in terms of the crucial difference between their respective negotiations of the empirical-transcendental divide. Not only will we thus see how their quite divergent appreciation for the threat that realtime media poses to différance stems from more basic philosophical commitments, but we will find ourselves in a position to assess this threat itself and its implications for technocultural studies today.

In the second, I shall perform my own transformative appropriation of Stiegler’s work. I shall argue, specifically, that his insight into the eclipse of différance enacted by the technical synthesis of realtime media calls for a reevaluation of his privileging of the technical over the anthropological. For it is precisely at the moment when the materialization of différance in inscription technologies no longer supports phenomenological experience that the correlation of différance with human embodiment must be (re)affirmed, that its irreducible correlation with the time of the body will appear most originary. Put somewhat differently, the realtime condition lays bare what, with philosopher Gilbert Simondon, we will theorize as the pre-anthropological source out of which the transduction of the human and technics arises. Accordingly,I will posit a further consequence of the (re)discovery of deconstruction within cultural studies: the rehabilitation of bodily time as the medium for sustaining différance in the face of the perpetual present of realtime media.

(I) From the Genealogy of Matter to the Realtime Synthesis

Let me begin by simply describing the nature of Stiegler’s intervention into Derrida’s original grammatological project. Stiegler’s conception of the ’originary prostheticity’ of the human, of its co-emergence with tool use, performs a certain displacement of deconstruction that has the effect of specifying, against Derrida’s own conception, the constitutive technicity of arche-writing. By differentiating arche-writing (or writing in general) from any historical system of writing (including speech), Derrida inaugurates the thinking of deconstruction as a thinking of an aporia of the origin that is prior to technics. That is the reason he can say, as he does in Of Grammatology, that ’a certain sort of question about the meaning and origin of writing precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of technics.That is why the notion of technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing’ (Derrida, 1974: 8). For Stiegler, this thinking must be amended in such a way that the aporia can be preserved but in a form that is not separable from its givenness in a concrete technical inscription system. Thus he contends:

If arche-writing and the logic of the supplement are to be distinguished from the history of empirical supplements, it is primarily because an absolute past constitutes the impossibility of approaching the trace in terms of a mark, the impossibility of folding arche-writing back upon its irreducible empiricity. . . The tertiary trace refers to the arche-trace, older than any empirical or meta-empirical trace; it refers to the absolute past. But the absolute past only constitutes itself ’as such’ through this referral. It is why a logic of the supplement, without ever simply being such a history, must also be a history of the supplement and its epochs, epochs that are each time singular and must each time form the object of a technical history constantly renewed. (Stiegler, 2001a: 255, 263)

The ultimate payoff of this difference, as I have already suggested, concerns the conceptualization of the transcendental-empirical divide: whereas for Derrida transcendence is given by the aporia of the origin,for Stiegler it is constituted through technics as the support for the inscription of memory. Technics, or ’organized inorganic matter’, forms the condition for the givenness of time in any concrete situation, and thus(since time is, following Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, the basis for transcendence) the concrete condition for the transcendental gesture that is constitutive of the human. As the being of ’originary prostheticity’, the human suspends (or transcends) its genetic program by exteriorizing its memory into matter, thereby pursuing life through means other than life. The correlation of différance and organized inanimate matter (the technical object) involves a crucial aporia that is, interestingly and significantly, different from Derrida’s aporia of time: simply put, the technical object is both the condition for transcendence and the mark of its impossibility. It both makes consciousness possible as such by opening up the dimension of exteriorization (of the pursuit of life by extragenetic means) and levels transcendence through its absolute resistance to transcendental reduction. Thus, whereas Derrida retreats into an aporia between time and its empirical appearance as technicity or calculability, Stiegler dwells within the paradox created by the primacy of inscription itself, the fact that time must be technically inscribed for it to exist.5

This analysis calls on us to foreground what we might call the responsibility of deconstruction to technics: deconstruction must accept the consequences of its necessary – and constitutive – encounter with technics. Most fundamentally, this means that arche-writing must, in every instance, be correlated with a concrete technical inscription system that does not so much give its condition of possibility, as generate itaprès coup. Arche-writing and inscription appear in a single configuration, through a movement of co-constitution that Stiegler, following the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, calls transduction (defined as a relation between terms neither of which precedes or exists outside the relation). Yet as a result of this transductive correlation with specific technical systems of inscription, arche-writing cannot appear outside of the history of technical differentiations which define what Stiegler calls a ’genealogy of matter’.

Stiegler’s project, then, may be understood as an effort to take seriously Derrida’s claim (in Of Grammatology) that différance is technics. If this effort forms the covert agenda of The Fault of Epimetheus (volume 1 of Technics and Time), it comes to the fore in volume 2, La Désorientation, and particularly in volume 3, Le Temps du cinéma, where Stiegler is concerned with assessing the specificity of contemporary technics, which range from global media and digitization to genetic engineering and which can be grouped under the rubric ’teletechnologies’. It is in the analyses of contemporary technics that the claim informing the ’General Introduction’ to the project takes concrete form. There, Stiegler puts forth the suggestion that time and space, far from determining (and placing some absolute limit on) speed, are in fact determined by it. Asking what it would mean (following Maurice Blanchot) to conceive our age as one in the process of breaking the ’time barrier’, Stiegler invokes the concept of shock:

What would be the breaking of a time barrier if this meant going faster than time? What shock would be provoked by a device going quicker than its ’own time’? Such a shock would in fact mean that speed is older than time. For either time, with space, determines speed, and there could be no question of breaking the time barrier in this sense, or else time, like space, is only thinkable in terms of speed (which remains unthought). (Stiegler, 1998: 15)

Older than time and space, speed is older than différance, or perhaps more precisely, speed is différance, the condition for all deferral and delay.6

Yet speed can hardly be a general condition for différance, since its impact refers to a particular state of technics. The above reflection on speed, Stiegler is quick to point out, is generated not by ’the development of technics in general’, but by ’certain effects of technical development, . . . namely, those that in computing one calls ”real time” and in the media ”live” – effects that distort profoundly, if not radically, what could be called ”event-ization” [événementalisation] as such, that is to say, the taking place of time as much as the taking place of space’ (Stiegler, 1998: 16). When we turn to volume 2, we learn that the technical specificity attached to the concept of speed harbors a threat to différance as such. This is what Stiegler conceptualizes as the industrialization of time called ’real time’, in which speed itself appropriates on the side of the technical ’what’ the operation of delay formerly reserved for the human ’who’:

The contemporary what has often been specified by its speed. If speed, as the in advance [comme avance], has always been an attribute proper to technics, in the epoch of the letter it facilitated the experience of delay as deferred time. Today, the speed of technics takes this delay upon itself. . .. As if technics integrated in itself the delay which seemed until now to constitute the who on theside [àl'écart] of the what, according it thereby its consistency. This displacement is what we refer to as real time. (Stiegler, 1996: 77)

It is absolutely crucial that we grasp just what Stiegler is arguing here, just what claim he is making on behalf of real time. Is he suggesting that real time eliminates delay as such, as we might be given to understand from his claim (on the page following the above citation) that ’real time is not time’ but is rather the ’detemporalization of time, or its occultation’? (78). Or is his argument rather (as the above passage would seem to suggest) that real time effaces the gap upon which the phenomenalization of time depends, the gap between the who and the what, consciousness and the technical inscription of time? In short: does real time mark an objective eclipse of différance, an absolute acceleration, or does it rather mark a transition across (or beneath) the temporal threshold of consciousness, a passage to a technical inscription of différance that would simply not give itself to or in phenomenal experience? Since this is precisely the question at issue in the Stiegler-Derrida debate, let us reserve further discussion until we have laid out Stiegler’s investment in cinema as the paradigm for contemporary time consciousness.

In his essay ’The Time of Cinema’, and more expansively in volume 3 of Technics and Time (Le temps du cinéma), Stiegler seeks to substantiate his argument for the necessity of specifying différance by turning to the cinema as a form of inscription fundamentally distinct from (alphabetic) writing. Thus Stiegler characterizes cinema as a ’writing of life’ that is in the process of displacing the epoch of linguistic grammatization:

. . .one must not place language and cinema on the same plane. . . . I place speech and life on the same plane, I place life (de anima) in the position of speech, and say that cinema is the writing of life. Just as, . . .through reproduction of speech there was the invention of language and grammar which transformed this speech, there is today cinema as the writing of the movement of life – and what is interesting is seeing why and how it transforms life. (Stiegler, 1998a: 94)

Yet it is what differentiates cinema from writing that is most significant: cinematic grammatization arises on the basis of a specific technical instantiation of archi-writing or différance. This is why, when Stiegler speaks about ’cinema’ – and, specifically, when he claims cinema to be the exemplary contemporary technical object or form of the what, what he really seeks to foreground is the inscription of a double tendency of technics: on one hand, to collapse the delay between the who and the what, consciousness and the technical object, in opening up the black hole of the ’live’; and on the other, to inaugurate a new form of grammatization (and not simply a new epoch of grammatology or archiwriting) informed by the potential digitization affords to discretize the continuous realtime cinematic flux. As a successor to the grammatological epoch, what the ’cinematic’ epoch would designate is less the specific apparatus we know as cinema than the entire era of technical recording that began with the invention of phonography and photography and that is still in full swing today.7 We might better call it the audiovisual epoch, as Stiegler himself does when he grants digitization a certain priority as the technical accomplishment that discretizes technical recording, and thus accords it its proper specificity as the grammatization of life: the ’grammatical operator [of the audiovisual revolution] is . . . technology itself: the discretization of the ”continuity” of the image-object is going to be carried out in relation to technoscientific opportunity (the discovery of this or that algorithm of form recognition, for example), and not on the basis of a decision made by a”grammarian”‘ (Stiegler, 2002: 161).

Yet if this epochal understanding is right, how are we to make sense of Stiegler’s undeniable investment in the cinema as a concrete apparatus and in ’cinema’ as the name for our technically-specified epoch? Or,to put it another, simpler way, what can Stiegler possibly get from his investment in cinema? What he gets is the paradigm for the experience of the self, for self-consciousness, for what philosophers call ’self-affection’ (Kant) or ’internal time-consciousness’ (Husserl), as it takes shape in the world today. More than any other technology (and certainly more than literature), it is cinema in its contemporary form as global television that frames time for us and gives us a surrogate temporal object in whose reflection we become privy to the flux of our own consciousness. At the same time, by opening consciousness onto the past,onto the non-lived of tradition or historicality, onto otherness of that which does not belong to the experience of consciousness, cinema qua temporal object captures the contemporary manifestation of the interdependence of the who and the what, of the human subject and the technical other. Put bluntly, we become who we are by inheriting a past destined to us through . . . cinema!8

Let us pause to remark on the significance of Stiegler’s investment in cinema with respect to contemporary technocultural studies. In stark contrast to the position of German ’media scientist’ Friedrich Kittler, who triumphantly announces the obsolescence of the human in the face of contemporary digital convergence, Stiegler’s consideration of cinema, precisely because it foregrounds the irreducible coupling of technics with the human, serves to insure the continued centrality of the correlation of consciousness and technical temporal object as we move into an era of digitization (or the digital phase of our audiovisual era) that would seem to threaten its effacement. For this reason, as we shall see, Stiegler’s work obtains a crucial ethical dimension: specifically, it will allow us to retain a human perspective even when the time of the human seems to be radically eclipsed by realtime computing and live media. (And, importantly, it will do so without any recourse to a transcendental or quasi-transcendental principle.) Indeed, as a corollary of his insistence on the irreducible coupling of the human and technics, this ethical dimension drives a wedge between these two manifestations of digitization – realtime computing and live media – that,unfortunately, remain undifferentiated in Stiegler’s work,9 and that are, in fact, conflated in Kittler’s.10 The former operates at a timescale that is, in principle, beyond the threshold of human perception, and thus represents an acceleration that is properly inhuman (without however being absolute): realtime computing - what Stiegler (following Virilio) calls ’light time’ - comprises a technical materialization of différance at the microphysical level. So-called live or realtime media, by contrast, operate at a timescale entirely compatible with consciousness; it is only for purely contingent reasons (e.g. the identity of registration and broadcasting in contemporary media) that the différance constitutive of the time of the human would seem to be eliminated. While this is a powerful effect of our contemporary realtime televisual system that, as Stiegler articulates at length in Le temps du cinéma, leads to the industrialization of consciousness on a global scale and the global domination of the ’American way of life’, the very fact that it operates at the same time scale as the human preserves its openness to critical intervention, to a politics of deceleration and discretization itself made possible by digital technologies.11

It is precisely because Stiegler insists on the correlation of the who and the what, of consciousness and the (technical) temporal object, that the ’real time’ synthesis poses a problem: by rendering registration and broadcasting simultaneous, it threatens simply to conflate consciousness and the temporal object that otherwise, following the Husserlian analysis Stiegler appropriates,12 would allow consciousness to reflect on itself. Without this temporal difference between consciousness and temporal object, there can be no foothold for différance in the empirical, which is to say that it cannot then emerge as the après coup of the technical inscription of time (as Stiegler insists it must). Now this is precisely the scenario Stiegler presents when he describes the shortcircuiting of the past, of memory, in contemporary realtime media:

. . . the two coincidences proper to the televisual epoch of cinema (direct transmission and live production of images) engenders a temporal object of a new kind, such that what occurs is immediately formatted photographically and registered as a ’just past’ ’it has been’, that is, as a primary retention collectively and massively retained via this tertiary retention which the telediffused program indubitably and immediately already is. In these temporal objects which news programs are, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the primary memory ’just past’ and image consciousness, since what occurs occurs immediately by the image consciousness. The lived experience of this news is a temporal object which is irreducibly an image consciousness. The present tends to present itself in no other form than that of the temporal object. (Stiegler, 1998a: 106, emphasis added)

This conflation of consciousness and temporal object, this coincidence of tertiary memory and primary retention (the ’just past’ ’it has been’), is precisely what, for Stiegler, specifies the ’live’, and also what differentiates it from real time computing or ’light-time’.

Clearly, then, to return to the questions posed above concerning ’real time’, Stiegler does not see ’real time’ as it appears in ’cinema’ (again, as distinct from real time computing) as an objective eclipse ofdifférance, an absolute acceleration. Rather, like Derrida, he understands it to be an ’artifactuality’, a contingent technical calculation of time that is so rapid it evades the scope of phenomenological consciousness.13 Accordingly, the focus of their debate in Echographies of Television (2002) is not whether real time is artifactual but, rather, what its implications are for the possibility of maintaining an ’outside’of the empirical. Because he thinks that différance simply is more originary than technics, Derrida can take for granted the possibility for a critical relationship to teletechnologies, albeit one that (in today’s real time scenario) is necessarily deferred to the future. For Stiegler, on the other hand, there can be no such transcendental solution, since the possibility for transcendence is itself transductively correlated with technics. That is why Echographies, as Beardsworth has astutely noted, witnesses Stiegler repeatedly returning to the question of specificity only to be given the same answer by Derrida: real time teletechnologies are and are not specific; they demarcate a new epoch of writing that is, however, made possible by the movement of (a singular) différance.14 From Stiegler’s perspective, Derrida will thus always already have reduced the threat of the live, of real time, by encompassing teletechnologies within archi-writing.15

To get a concrete sense of just how differently Derrida and Stiegler understand the stakes of the artifactuality of real time, let us turn to their respective efforts to think together the contingency of the technical inscription of time and its phenomenological effacement. For Derrida, the contingency of technical inscription (what Stiegler describes as a great opportunity, une grande chance)16 becomes the basis for an argument against originary technicity. Specifically, the contingency of the technical underscores the irreducibility of temporalization (the spacing of time) to its concrete technical inscription, and thus opens what Richard Beardsworth has called the ’aporia of time’, the originarity of time and the ’promise’ in Derrida’s work since 1994 (Beardsworth, 1996). This is why Derrida conceives the possibility for a critical reflection on today’s teletechnologies in terms of an ethical injunction: the injunction to preserve the ontological difference between the technical synthesis of time and différance as the quasi-transcendental condition of possibility for time at the precise moment when that difference is effaced phenomenologically. For Derrida, in other words, the unbridgeable gap between technicization and temporalization insures that a critical relation to teletechnologies is in principle always possible, even though, in the face of the artifactuality of real time, it must be referred to a future moment.17

That such a quasi-politics of the promise remains far too formal for Stiegler’s taste can be discerned in his sustained call, in response to Derrida’s articulations, for a ’politics of memory’ that would directly contest the stranglehold imposed on the technical inscription of time by short-term economic interest. At the core of this politics of memory is an experimental program for deploying digital discretization in order to interrupt the identity of registration and broadcast (the realtime technical synthesis ) informing the contemporary industrialization of consciousness. That is why Stiegler contends in ’The Discrete Image’ (2002), that the digital image holds forth the promise of a ’more knowing belief,’ of new forms of ’objective analysis’ and of ’subjective synthesis’ of the visible precisely because it allows us unprecedented flexibility to intervene in the technical synthesis. With its capacity to interrupt the machinic flow of the realtime broadcast, digital technology promises to expose the determining role of the technical synthesis, and, more importantly still, to open it up to unprecedented forms of experimentation. By discretizing image flows that seem to us to be continuous, digitization will allow us ’to submit the this was to a decomposing analysis’and to add to the synthetic dimension of ’the spectator’s relation to the image . . . an analytic relation’ (Stiegler, 2002: 157-8). Digitization will thus alter the conditions under which the spectator ’intentionalizes thespectrum [of the image] as having been’, by bringing her own agency in selection to the fore at the expense of the automaticity of the realtime televisual apparatus. As a means of intervening in the technical synthesis, digitization thus constitutes the technical opportunity (or contingency) upon which a politics of memory can be erected. In stark contrast to Derrida, this technical opportunity is precisely what holds forth the possibility of (re)discovering a critical relation to contemporary teletechnologies, of (re)discovering différance within the artifactuality of real time, and – crucially – of finding the possibility of the future in the present, that is, within the contemporary technical inscription of time itself.

In his review of Echographies, Richard Beardsworth (1998) has underscored the failure of the two philosophers to engage at the level of their consequential philosophical differences. For my purposes, what is most important about the fundamental philosophical différend haunting the debate is that it gives rise to vastly divergent conceptualizations of the technical synthesis. For Stiegler, who draws directly on Roland Barthes’s analysis of photography in Camera Lucida, the technical synthesis holds a clear priority over the spectatorial synthesis in today’s real time, televisual cinema: because it inscribes time and makes it available to consciousness, the technical synthesis literally dictates the terms for the subjective synthesis, and it does so in a way that contaminates the latter, that renders it irreducibly technical. For Derrida, by contrast, the technical synthesis simply has no bearing on différance, only on its empirical manifestation; by restricting the impact of technics to the artifactuality of time (the technical synthesis), Derrida is able in principle to preserve an outside of the empirical and, with it, the purity of différance.

If we hope to move the analysis of real time media beyond the impasse of the Derrida-Stiegler debate, we must grasp clearly how these evaluations of the technical synthesis are both wrong yet nevertheless reflect the logic of each philosopher’s position. They are both wrong in being too extreme: Stiegler overvalues the technical synthesis at the expense of the agency of the human; Derrida undervalues it in order to preserve the abstract openness of the future. Neither can do otherwise, however, and for reasons of the most fundamental philosophical import: faced with the eclipse of the phenomenological experience of difference, and enjoined (by his fundamental philosophical commitments) from localizing différance in relation to any technical inscription of time, Derrida can only retreat to a quasi-transcendental conception of the ’aporia of time’; faced with the same eclipse, and enjoined (by his fundamental philosophical commitments) from invoking any transcendence of the technical, Stiegler can only localize différance as the transductive correlate of a technical possibility inherent in digital technology underlying the realtime technical synthesis. By way of anticipating my argument in the next section, let me suggest that both positions enact a massive impoverishment of the resources of embodied human agency, for in both cases it is the conviction that the phenomenological experience of différance has been effaced that motivates the respective valuations of the technical synthesis. Yet if différance can be maintained through what I shall call the differential of the body, then the technical need not pose the threat it appears to pose equally,though differently, to Stiegler and Derrida. To counter their common impoverishment of embodiment, we would thus do well to play their respective positions off of one another. Let me then close this section by proposing the following reckoning: that Stiegler is right about the need for technical specificity but that he errs in granting too much agency to the technical synthesis; and that Derrida is right to view différance as marking a certain separation of the human from the technical but wrong to accord this separation ontological significance.

II Technics and Continuity

Jean-Michel Salanskis concludes his enthusiastic and thoughtful review of the first two volumes of Stiegler’s project by raising an important objection. According to Salanskis, Stiegler privileges the discrete over the continuous. Because of his (misguided) allegiance to the ’postHeideggerian doxa‘, Stiegler, despite his efforts to bring together the two main strands in post-war French thinking, the epistemological-scientific and the phenomenological, ends by subordinating the former to the latter. More specifically, he falls victim to the confusion, both ’philosophical’ and ’axiological’, between a Hegelian conception of the continuous as self-identical and a ’mathematico-substantive’ conception of the continuous as differential and thus constitutive of the discontinuous.18 According to Salanskis, only the latter can yield a thinking of the discontinuous (the heterogeneous), for the discrete will have always already excluded the discontinuous in opposing itself to the continuous or in incorporating the continuous as the self-identical. Thus Salanskis asks a crucial question: doesn’t Stiegler’s effort to found time in technical inscription make the error of ’committing us to the order of the discrete, an order that is insufficient for thinking the heterogeneous and the dynamic, precisely what was his project at the beginning?’ (Salanskis, 2000: 277).

For Salanskis, the most important and immediate consequence of this privileging is that it compels Stiegler to misrecognize the fundamental function of the retention of the just-past in Husserl’s analysis, namely’to prescribe [prescrire] the constitution of a continuous time’ (275). According to Salanskis, this function is, first and foremost, mathematical: Husserl’s emphasis is on the ’continua of retentions’ and his analysis is supported by a ’geometric figuration referring . . . to mathematical continuity’ (275). Attending to the mathematical basis of Husserl’s concept has significant consequences for our understanding of retention:

Everything indicates that retention is a sort of infinitesimal operator capable of giving us, by the path of a dynamic production, the linear continuum. As such, retention is a paradoxical concept,because the referential form of retention would seem to express [dire] the discrete polarity of a retaining and a retained [d'un retenir et d'un retenu], while it is a question of qualifying, not the intentional content [la visée] of a past that is discrete from the present, but that of an adherent past. Otherwise put, the concept of retention reintegrates into itself [reprend Ã son comte] the paradoxicality which could have been that of the Leibnizian infinitessimal dx. (Salanskis, 2000: 275)

Before it comes to refer to the content of a just passing present (if indeed it ever does), retention is the operation that holds or ’glues’ the past together: the intentional content [la visée] of an adherent past.Accordingly, it is fundamentally nondiscrete and almost certainly nonconscious (beneath the threshold of what can be experienced phenomenologically).

For our purposes, the crucial implication of Salanskis’s criticism is that Stiegler’s (radicalization of Derrida’s) deconstruction of Husserl’s conceptualization of time-consciousness simply does not have any bearing on primary retention, or perhaps more exactly, on the primary function of primary retention (to give the linear continuum). In his argument for the priority of tertiary memory over secondary memory and primary retention, what Stiegler forgets is that primary retention is not simply constituted by but is also constitutive of time: it is simultaneously constituted and constituting.19 It is this constituted-constituting distinction that stands behind Salanskis’s differentiation of a referential and an adherent form of primary retention, for once constituted, retention (like secondary memory) belongs to the realm of the discrete.That is why, in the place of Husserl’s opposition of impression and imagination which forms the focus of Derrida’s (and, by implication, Stiegler’s) deconstruction, Salanskis proposes to differentiate primary retention (proper) from secondary memory by way of the distinction between the continuous and the discrete: ’what permits the Husserlian conception of time, notably in the distinction it proposes and institutes between primary memory and secondary memory, is the heterogeneous thematization of the continuous and the discrete: if retention is the infinitessimal operator that produces the continuous, secondary memory is the second modality that takes piecemeal [prélève] and manipulates the phases each of which becomes discrete in relation to others, and thereby repeatable’ (276). Such an understanding furnishes precisely the phenomenological distinction Derrida calls for, since it allows (indeed requires) primary retention to be differential, that is, open to the absence at the heart of presence, while still managing to differentiate it categorically from secondary memory.

It is because Stiegler makes no such differentiation – and indeed, destroys the very possibility of making any such differentiation – that he finds himself able (perhaps even compelled) to hang everything on the technical synthesis. For without the time-constituting function of retention (retention as productive of the linear continuum), where else can he turn to account for the giving of time but to the technical inscription of time? Bluntly put, Stiegler’s overvaluation of the technical synthesis correlates directly with his forgetting of the time-constituting function of retention. What happens, however, when we restore the primary function of primary retention to produce the continuum of time? Can and how can we do so while continuing to maintain, with Stiegler, the originary technicity of time?

These questions return us to the point we reached at the end of Section I. Inserted into the final reckoning we offered there, Salanskis’s critique gives us the conceptual distinction we need to maintain a separation of the human and the technical (following Derrida’s injunction) – and thus to ward off the assimilation of the spectatorial into the technical synthesis – while nonetheless embracing the necessity for specificity or the technical contamination of différance and the ensuing eclipse of the phenomenological (following Stiegler). From the perspective opened by Salanskis’s distinction, in short, the phenomenological indistinction of technically-inscribed and spectatorial time constitutive of the artifactuality of real time (precisely what is responsible both for the industrialization of consciousness and the eclipse of phenomenology), has no impact whatsoever on the nonconscious and nondiscrete operation of primary retention (the production of the continuum of time). What this means, of course, is that primary retentionwould continue to function differentially even when its operation is constrained by the contemporary technical specification of différance (the realtime synthesis).

With the determination of primary retention as an infinitesimal operation, we arrive at a solution to the impasse underlying the Derrida-Stiegler debate: for we can now see that the effacement of the phenomenological actually designates the fact that différance no longer appears as discrete.20 Yet because retention, as an infinitesimal operation, is something that cannot be effaced, it must operate, as we have already said it does, beneath the threshold of phenomenological consciousness. And because it operates beneath the threshold of the discrete, in the continuous, primary retention becomes all the more central in its function in a culture, like that of our audiovisual or ’cinematic’ epoch, that institutionalizes the discrete. In this sense, the threatened collapse of the distinction between human and technical syntheses turns out to be a red herring, the forestalling of which does not require a quasi-transcendental leap into the aporia of time or even an experimental program of digital discretization. Instead, the non-identification of these syntheses is guaranteed by the infinitesimal operation of primary retention – an operation which, in addition to being non-discrete and non-conscious, is grounded in the differential of the body, in a kind of ’transcendental sensibility’, to invoke Deleuze’s important and difficult concept, that would mark the very impossibility of transcendence (Deleuze, 1994).

By way of unpacking this understanding of primary retention as the differential of the body, I want now to offer an alternative conception of the transduction of the who and the what, consciousness and technics,that would find its source in the continuous, which is to say, there where technics enters into – and can be seen to be co-constititive of – the infinitesimal operation of bodily temporalizing. In the context of my topic here, this conception will allow me to specify more precisely how the confrontation with deconstruction transforms cultural studies into technocultural studies, for it will show how culture is produced through the transduction of technics and embodiment that is constitutive of time.

Let us return to the topic of the specificity of our ’cinematic’ epoch and recall what, on Stiegler’s analysis, differentiates it qualitatively, categorically, from the linguistic epoch: namely, the capacity to inscribe the movement of life, the movement constitutive of life, indeed, life itself. While this capacity informs the entirety of the phenomenon of technical recording from photography and phonography onward, it is in today’s digital teletechnologies that it comes to full fruition. Because they permit the technical discretization of movement, digital technologies inscribe it in a way that can be analyzed and technically manipulated. At the same time, however, digital technologies fundamentally transform the relation between bodily life and its technical inscription: for whereas analog technical recording inscribed an actual impression of the body itself, digital technologies convert bodily movement into digital code. Technical inscription no longer constitutes a ’carnal medium’, as Barthes characterized photography in Camera Lucida; there, remember, he famously claimed that ’the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. For from a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here. . . . A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed’ (Barthes, 1981: 80-81). Yet even as it suspends this carnal link with the referent, digital recording of movement brings to the fore the more complex correlation of bodily activity and technical object that was, in effect, repressed so long as the apparatus of technical recording functioned to enframe the image.21 Thus, at the same time as it gives the possibility to analyze movement, digital discretization also brings into relief the bodily basis of the synthesis of movement, that is, precisely what makes the bodily experience of (recorded) movement qualitatively different from discretization. This irreducibility of bodily synthesis to discrete analysis finds corroboration in the difficulties facing the establishment of a ’science of gesturology’.

As the philosopher José Gil has pointed out in his important study Metamorphoses of the Body, the failure of all efforts to grammatize gesture should convince us of the irreducible and indispensible bodily basis of the experience of movement: ’every gesture can have multiple meanings by itself. . .. In other words, each unit, each ’gesteme’ brings into play each time all the gestemes of the langue as well as language itself as the unit of all the units (the body). This is reason enough for it to be prevented from taking on the role of linguistic model for any future ”gesturology”‘ (Gil, 1998: 114-115). The problem, to put it bluntly, is that no gestural unity can be isolated, and the comparison of a potential ’gesturology’ with linguistics suggests at least three reasons why: first, the gestural continuum, unlike that of sound in the case of articulated language, ’presupposes articulation of heterogeneous elements, some imbricated in each other: phalanges, fingers, forearms, arms, and so on’; second, the ’natural language’ of the body defines ’a polysemic space’; and third, one can only separate signifier from signified, in the case of signs of the body, ’at the price of gathering up and ordering these signs in a determined language, a corporeal language like that of dance or mime’ (113). What gets reduced as a consequence – which is equally to say, what remains outside the grasp of any possible gesturology – are precisely the body’s own system of signs, the ’signifier units [of the body] which in themselves remain nonsignifying’ (113). That is why, ultimately, any notational system whatsoever, including those ’advanced notation systems’ that have been so useful in ethnological descriptions of gesture, involve a ’strange paradox: setting out to translate all the movements of the body through a determinate code’ (112). The effort to reduce the range of gesture to any specific notational system (as in dance or mime) necessarily overlooks what Gil calls the ’infralinguistic’ capacity of the body to translate among various codes or notational systems in relation to which it is ’more originary’ (113).

If Gil is right that there can be no ’corporeal language’, no grammatization of movement, because the body is itself an infralanguage, a crossroads of multiple codings, then the technical capacity afforded by digital technology to analyze movement into discrete units supports an experimental program significantly different from the one proposed by Stiegler: rather than transforming the spectatorial synthesis by means of a conscious knowledge of its technical conditions, the digital inscription of movement must be understood to be a vehicle for the expanded agency of the body, for the becoming-creative of the bodily synthesis of movement. Can it be fortuitous that Stiegler himself seems to acknowledge as much when he considers how the process of digital analysis reenters the bodily synthesis of movement?

. . . because synthesis is double, the gain in new analytic capacities is also a gain in new synthetic capacities. . . . new image-objects are going to engender new mental images, as well as another intelligence of movement, for it is essentially a question of animated images. The intelligence I’m talking about here is not the intelligence of what I called the new knowledges of the image. It designates techno-intuitive knowledges – intentions in the Barthesian sense – of a new kind. . .. (Stiegler, 2002: 159, 162)

This differentiation of analytic and synthetic capacities highlights precisely the non-coincidence of the technical inscription that analyses movement into discrete components and the subjective synthesis that operates at the level of the continuity characteristic of bodily life. With this redirection of the experimental program facilitated by digitization, we are thus returned once again to Derrida’s ethical insistence on maintaining a distinction between technical conditions and phenomenological experience, only now through an infraempirical, rather than transcendental, path. Here, what prevents the subjective synthesis from collapsing into the technical synthesis is its basis in a temporal continuum that is produced by the spatializing and temporalizing of the body as an infinitesimal operation. Accordingly, whatever creative potential discretization may in fact hold simply cannot be separated from the distinct process of bodily synthesis that functions to actualize it, to bring it to bear on experience.

Now, as I see it, this infraempirical distinction between technical and spectatorial synthesis opens up a distinction between two levels at which technics impacts on the constitution of time: the level of memory and that of embodiment. Putting it quite schematically, we might say that the former is characterized by a priority of the technical, whereas the latter displays a priority of the spectatorial (or better, of the bodily). Thus we can see that this distinction crosscuts Stiegler’s work in the sense that the former, mnemotechnical constitution of time correlates with cinematic continuity (and finds its exemplary instance in the realtime synthesis), whereas the latter, corporo-technical constitution of time aligns (following our suggested transformations) with digital discretization. In the former instance, the synthesis of consciousness is passive and finds its content dictated by the industrialized technical flux, whereas in the latter, the bodily synthesis of movement is catalyzed and potentially expanded by the technical capacity for analysis.

It cannot come as a total surprise, then, that Stiegler introduces something vaguely akin to the distinction between the memorial and the embodied impact of technics in the very center of his analysis, in Le temps du cinéma, of ’the American politics of adoption’:

The question to which the force of America bears witness and that Europe doesn’t know how to pose is the question concerning what links adoption and technics [technique] – a link that America has always known how to make, that is to say, to exploit. What makes the force of the United States is displayed by the fact that it has a true politics of mnemotechnical development that is its politics of adoption insofar as it has served for decades a culture of commerce in all its forms. . .. Adoption yields [donne] invention because the necessity of adopting a past that has not been lived is indissociable from the necessity of adopting technologies [techniques]. (Stiegler, 2001: 179-180, last emphasis added)

At this point in his argument, Stiegler appears to be coupling his concept of tertiary memory (and all that goes along with it under the name of ’epiphylogenesis’) with a quite different concept of adoption: one that, at least potentially, would foreground the impact of technology at the level of embodied life. Here (in contrast to the account given in ’The Time of the Cinema’) the force of the American way of life is explained not simply by its monopoly over the global realtime cinema system, but by its capacity to control the dissemination of technics itself. However, whatever potential this distinction might have to open Stiegler’s analysis of technics to a corporeal axiomatic will have always already been compromised by his general assimilation, manifest in the passage just cited, of technics to mnemotechnics.22 As we will see,from the moment that this assimilation comes into play, technics can only impact time as discrete, which is to say, in the form of tertiary memory, of a content whose adoption functions to ground (but also to reduce) the operation of primary retention. We will further see how this constitutes a massive impoverishment of the function of technics and, thus, of the technogenesis of the human.

Stiegler’s critics have criticized this priority accorded mnemotechnics as a fundamental reduction of Heidegger’s concept of Zuhandenheit ['readiness-to-hand']. Geoffrey Bennington, for example, accuses Stiegler of employing ’too restrictive a definition of what Heidegger calls equipment: even taking it to mean primarily tools, it is clear that a tool is not just a sort of memory’ (Bennington, 1996: 212, n.34).23 It is,however, to Husserl that we must return in order to properly differentiate these two models of technical impact. This is because the salient distinction at issue is precisely that between the continuous and the discrete and thus between the two types of retention categorically distinguished by Salanskis: the impact of technics on embodied life can only take place within primary retention understood as an infinitesimal operation, whereas its impact on memory involves a ’referential form’ of retention that introduces a ’discrete polarity’ between a retaining and a retained. Whether we understand this latter as a form of retention proper (Salanskis, for his part, considers it part of the ’paradoxical concept’ of retention), it is clear that it shares with secondary memory the form of the discrete. On this understanding, then, Stiegler’s mnemotechnical reduction can be specified as the assimilation of the continuous into the discrete.

Indeed, it is precisely this assimilation that Stiegler’s concept of tertiary memory carries out: insofar as tertiary memory (the recording of traces never lived by present consciousness) gives access to the tradition or the past, it not only impacts on the selection constitutive of primary retention, but constitutes the very possibility of discovering that primary retention is selective, which is to say (following Stiegler), essentially cinematographic. From Stiegler’s perspective, this means that Derrida’s deconstruction of primary retention actually requires the concept of tertiary memory: for it is only the experience of hearing (or viewing)the same melody (or scene) more than once – an experience made possible by technical recording (tertiary memory) – that reveals the contamination of primary retention by secondary memory. For our purposes, what is most interesting about this argument is how it transforms primary retention into something essentially discrete:

I listen for the first time to a melody recorded on a phonographic, analog or digital support. I listen again to the same melody, later, on the same record. To all intents and purposes, in the new audition, the tone just now past, in so far as it constitutes a primary retention to which other primary retentions are tacked on, in so far as it passes, no longer passes and no longer occurs in exactly the same way as in the course of the first audition. Otherwise, I would hear nothing other than what I heard during the first audition. The tone just now past, attached to other tones just past before it, and this time that passes differently than the first, owes something, in its very passage, to the previous passage, apparently effaced, of the previous audition: its modification (passing, the retention is modified and thereby becomes past: retention qua passage is essentially modification of itself) is rooted in the secondary memory of the first audition. What I hear in the course of the second audition proceeds in act from what I have already heard, in the past. (Stiegler, 1998a: 72)

By conceiving primary retention as a process of selection, Stiegler conflates the experience of the flux of time-consciousness itself with the temporal object that (within the Husserlian model) comprises its necessary supplement. Recalling our above discussion, we can now see that this theoretical conflation underlies and perhaps overdetermines the conflation of consciousness and temporal object constitutive of the artifactuality of real time. And since the temporal object (more precisely: the difference between temporal objects, between a first and subsequent auditions of a melody) can only be understood to be the result of selection, he thereby effectively determines primary retention as discrete. Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, this is to ignore the double intentionality of primary retention: its simultaneous existence as the consciousness of the temporal object and of the temporal flux itself (Hansen, 2004a). Mobilizing Salanskis’s articulation of the paradox of retention, I can now be more precise about this: Stiegler’s position ignores the difference between retention as referential and as adherent, which is to say, between retention as a discrete intentional act of consciousness and retention as a nonconscious, bodily production of the continuous. If consciousness is cinematographic in the former case, this is only possible on the basis of the infinitesimal operation of the bodily differential.

What ultimately informs Stiegler’s mnemotechnical reduction of primary retention to selection is his general overvaluation of technics, his desire to ground time exclusively in technical inscription or registration.Having rejected Derrida’s recourse to the quasi-transcendental in favor of a genealogy of matter, Stiegler nonetheless finds himself swayed by Derrida’s insistence on thinking the origin as aporetic, as never simply given. This is why he finds himself compelled, most centrally in The Fault of Epimetheus, to criticize the anthropological commitments of Leroi-Gourhan’s and Simondon’s work:in both cases the fundamental correlation of anticipation with the human risks compromising the concept of ’originary prostheticity’ (the concept that would replace the quasi-transcendental). This criticism appears most decisively in the concluding lines of Part I of The Fault of Epimetheus, where Stiegler cites Simondon’s foregrounding of the irreducible role of human intelligence in creating a ’technogeographic milieu’ between humanity and nature. This creation, argues Simondon, ’demands the use of an inventive function of anticipation found neither in nature nor in already constituted technical objects’ (Simondon, 1958: 57). In his comment on the passage, Stiegler goes on to credit Simondon with opening ’the question at the heart of our treatise’, though in a purely negative sense: ’We shall seek to show here that this capacity of anticipation [that Simondon would reserve for the "human qua efficient cause of the technical object"] itself supposes the technical object, and no more precedes it than does form matter’ (Stiegler, 1998: 81).

Viewed from the perspective presented above, the opposition Stiegler institutes between the anthropological and the technical simply dissolves. This is because the infinitesimal operation of primary retention can only ever produce infraempirical difference (bodily excess) through its actual concrete correlation with technical objects at a given moment in the coevolution of the human and technics. The necessity here simply is not (and cannot be) of the order of the transcendental or quasi-transcendental. That is why, at a more general level, the infraempirical conception of the differential of the body requires us to distinguish the technical from the anthropological at the same time as it recognizes their essential correlation in a transduction that is constitutive of time.

Precisely such a differentiation and co-functioning of the anthropological and the technical lies at the core of the concept of ’organized inorganic matter’, which Stiegler introduces (as a gloss on Simondon’s understanding of technology) to account for the autonomy of the ’what’. We must insist on the specificity of this concept of technics: organized inorganic matter forms a third category of being in-between the animate and the inanimate and is distinguished by a quasi-biological tendency toward concreteness: ’the concrete technical object . . . converges with the mode of existence of natural objects; it tends toward internal coherence, toward the closure of the system of causes and effects which functions circularly on the inside of its borders [àl'interieur de son enceinte], and moreover, it incorporates a part of the natural world which intervenes as a condition of its functioning. . .. This object, in evolving, loses its artificial character’ (Simondon, 1958: 46), which is to say, its dependence on the intervention of human beings to preserve its existence and protect it from the natural world. While maintaining a distinction from living beings, which are always given as concrete individuals even as they continue to be individuated, the technical object operates through self-conditioning, which in its case, is necessary to prevent it from falling victim to the tendency to hypertelia and disadaptation.24 Simondon calls the mechanism for such self-conditioning’adaptation-concretization’, defined as a process that conditions the birth of a milieu rather than being conditioned by an already given milieu:

The evolution of technical objects can only become progressive in so far as they are free in their evolution and not bound by necessity in the sense of a fatal hypertelia. For this to be possible, the evolution of technical objects must be constructive, which is to say, it must lead to the creation of this third techno-geographic milieu, each modification of which is self-conditioned. It is not, in effect,a question of a progression conceived as a march in a direction fixed in advanced; nor is it a question of a humanization of nature. This process could just as easily appear as a naturalization of the human; between the human and nature, a techno-geographic milieu is in effect created that is only possible through human intelligence: the self-conditioning of a schema by the result of its functioning requires an inventive function of anticipation which can be found neither in nature nor in already constituted technical objects. It is a work of life to make such a jump above given reality and its actual system toward new forms that preserve themselves only because they exist all together as a constituted system. When a new organ appears in an evolutionary series, it preserves itself only if it achieves a systematic and plurifunctional convergence. The organ is the condition of itself. It is in a similar manner that the geographic world and the world of already existent technical objects are put into relation [rapport] in a concretization that is organic and is defined by its relational function. (1958: 56)

Now, contra Stiegler, what is at issue here is not a subordination of technics to the ’human qua efficient force’, but rather, as Simondon says, a ’naturalization of the human’ via its exteriorization in the ’techno-geographic milieu’. Whatever ’possibility of anticipation’ originally informed the evolution of technical objects has therefore passed into the technical system itself; this, quite simply, is the condition of possiblity for the system to become ’organic’, that is, generative of a new milieu and of technical objects that are not already constituted. Not insignificantly, it is also the condition of possibility for the techno-geographic milieu to evolve, as Stiegler suggests it has with today’s real time technologies, by encompassing ’human geography’.25 Which is to say, at the limit, to evolve beyond the ethnic, beyond culture.

What Simondon depicts then is a co-evolution between two independently-evolving domains, the technical and the human, each of which possesses its own proper capacity for anticipation. If this co-evolution facilitates an exteriorization of the human, its evolution by means other than life (following Stiegler’s important concept of ’epiphylogenesis’), it does so in a manner fundamentally different from Stiegler’s conception of tertiary memory. For technical objects are not simply ’mediations’ that are ’detachable from the individual who produces and thinks them’. Rather, they form the very medium for a ’convertibility of the human and nature’ (Simondon, 1958: 245). Technical objects put individuals in relation to the ’preindividual’ dimension of nature that is associated with them. In this way, they make possible the constitution of what Simondon calls ’transindividuation’, a form of collective individuation that draws precisely on the constitutive incompleteness of the individual, the very source of anticipation and of the creation of the new:

. . .the technical world offers an indefinite availability [disponibilité] of groupings and connections. For it is the result of a liberation of human reality crystallized in the technical object. To construct a technical object is to prepare an availability. . . . beyond the interindividual relation which is not maintained through an operational activity, a mental and practical universe of technicity is instituted,in which human beings communicate through what they invent. The technical object understood according to its essence – the technical object such that it has been invented, conceived and desired,and taken up by a human subject – becomes the support and the symbol of that relation we want to call transindividual. . . . By the intermediary of the technical object, an interhuman relation is thus created that forms the very model of transindividuality. What is meant by this is a relation that does not place individuals into relation by means of their already constituted individuality. . ., nor by means of what is identical in every human subject, . . . but by means of the charge of preindividual reality, of this charge of nature that is conserved with the individual being and that contains potentials and virtuality. (1958: 246-248)

Far from constituting a prosthetic exteriorization of the human, the technical object forms something like a depositary for the preindividual. That is why it offers a means for the human individual to draw on the very source of its own ongoing individuation. The crucial point here is that the collective individuation which results from the human experience of its own impropriety or excess – transindividuation – is fundamentally inseparable from technics. Accordingly, the capacity for anticipation that Stiegler would have Simondon reserve for the human operator can now be seen to be rooted in a correlation with technics that is pre-anthropological: ’The object yielded by technical invention carries with it some part of the being who produced it, expresses what in this being is least attached to a hic et nunc; one could say that there is human nature in the technical being in the sense that the word nature can be employed to designate that which remains from the original, anterior even to the humanity constituted in the human. The human invents by putting to work its own natural support, this apeiron which remains attached to each individual being’ (248, emphasis added). Technics is the invention of the human, as Stiegler says, but in a far more fundamental sense than he recognizes: for technics is the means for the human to draw on its preindividual, natural support, which is to say, to persist as an ongoing individuation and to participate in collective transindividuation. Technics thus brokers the experience of the aporia of the origin as a continuous, infraempirical interaction with the ’potentials and virtuality’ of being itself.

That transindividuation marks a technical expansion of the infraempirical differential of the body can be seen by way of contrast with Stiegler’s interpretation of the ’preindividual’ in Le temps du cinéma. There,not surprisingly, he defines the preindividual as tertiary memory: ’This ”charge of preindividual reality” is a potential for adoption. The process of individuation results from an irreducible inadequation at the heart of the individual, in so far as it is unfinished [inachevé], but also as a play of ”preindividual forces” in the individual, that is to say, of interiorized and interpretable tertiary retentions that are equally at play in social individuation. . .. The preindividual thus interpreted (which does not conform to Simondon’s interpretation) is what we have called the already-there. . .’ (Stiegler, 2001: 148-149).26 When he likens the preindividual to the already-there or tertiary memory, Stiegler effectively transforms something fundamentally continuous into something discrete, preindividual ’forces’ or ’potentials’ into constituted contents. In so doing, he severs the ’convertibility’ of the human and nature that, on Simondon’s account, marks the pre-anthropological correlation of the human and technics.

As I see it, this pre-anthropological correlation is precisely what makes Simondon’s work valuable for the (techno)cultural theorist: for what it ultimately posits is a cofunctioning of the embodied human and technics in the production of the temporal continuum that forms the basis for life as such, from the biological to the cultural. Here technics is nothing other than the human experience of the differential origin of life as such. On this account, transindividuation would be the basis for culture, that is, for a culture that does not institute itself by opposing the human and the technical, but that, following Simondon’s concept of’mechanology’, emerges from their transduction. If such a transindividual culture is characterized by a technical expansion of the infinitesimal operation of primary retention, its primary function cannot be to transmit the past on the basis of tertiary memory, but rather to create the new, the future, by drawing on that dimension of being which is prior to the human and to technics. In the wake of this thinking, the task of the (techno)cultural theorist must be, first and foremost, to find ways to participate in transindividuation, to become together with technics, to engage in mediations by and with technical objects that place the human in relation to the inhuman, the improper, the preindividual. . .

Coda

Let me close by simply enumerating two fundamental consequences of my transformation of Stiegler’s work for the analysis of media culture.

First, analysis will have to move beyond the ethnic and/or ethnographic and culture will have to be rethought as a product of technics, with all the attendent modifications to its conceptualization. The collective individuation Simondon calls ’transindividuation’ operates through the technical mobilization of that in us which is impersonal, which exceeds the human and the forms of life that we might think of as ethnic or cultural. This is one of the crucial conclusions at stake in Stiegler’s reading of Leroi-Gourhan:

We can ask whether today the technical groups still belong to the ethnic group, or if they may not extend well beyond it, to the point of calling its unity into question. . .. It is as if the technical groups tended to become autonomous with respect to the ethnic groups, owing to the very fact that techno-industrial units have become worldwide. . . . the technical group then gains an advance with respect to the ethnic group to the extent that, as is the case today – with technical evolution accelerating and becoming too fast for the possibilities of appropriation by the ’other systems’ – one must wonder if we might not be in the presence of a separation and progressive opposition between, on the one hand, cultures, or an ensemble of interior milieus, and on the other hand technologies, which are no longer only a subgroup of the technical milieu but the external milieu become worldwide technology: the dilution of the interior milieu into the exterior milieu has become essentially technical, firstly as an environment totally mediated by telecommunications, by modes of transportation as well as by television and radio, computer networks, and so on, whereby distances are annuled, but secondly as a system of planet-scale industrial production. (Stiegler, 1998: 62)

This perspective opens up a fundamentally new task for the analyst of the ’transnational media system’: for once media technology has usurped the role formerly held by culture of providing the common, the global media system can no longer be localized and specified through its cultural configuration or use. Rather, it can form the very ground for new, to-be-invented forms of collective life precisely because of its resistance to the kinds of empirical specification championed by today’s cultural studies practitioners.

Second and more generally, analysis will have to become performance, a creative experimentation with the possibilities for our future technogenesis. For if the adoption of technologies and the technical expansion of primary retention becomes central, then technologies cannot be restricted to the status of things that we deploy or even to that of a repository for tradition (tertiary memory). Rather, insofar as they directly expand our embodied capacities to act on ourselves, on others, and on the world, technologies can only be adequately ’understood’ in their very exercise as transductive correlates of human becoming.What this means, however, is that cultural studies must become embodied experimentation.

Endnotes

1 Most prominently from Geoffrey Bennington:

Stiegler differs from Derrida in that he thinks that technics is the proper name for the newness already there at the origin (for the emergency) – as we shall see, this leads him to a principled and argued difference of opinion with Derrida which, however, commits Stiegler . . . to a positivism (about techno-science) and a humanism (about ’us’) which loses the very urgency it urges, and loses it through the very fact of urging it on a totalised ’us’ as the totalisation of urgency itself. (Bennington, 1996: 182)

According to Beardsworth, there are moments when Stiegler’s work seems to fall into positivism, but these are more lapses in rigor than conceptual entailments of his work (Beardsworth, 1995).

2 See Hansen (2000), Introduction, for a critique of the positivization of deconstruction in cultural studies.

3 While it would be a mistake to oversimplify the role of Marxism for cultural studies, it can be affirmed, I think, that cultural studies operates a certain inversion of the priority of the economic over the cultural in Marx. While this would seem to be true for cultural studies in general (a blanket term now embracing many different projects), it appears most clearly when cultural studies practitioners address the topic of Marxism directly. Thus Stuart Hall:

. . .the encounter between British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem – not a theory, not even a problematic. It begins, and develops through the critique of a certain reductionism and economism, which I think is not extrinsic but intrinsic to Marxism; a contestation with the model of base and superstructure, through which sophisticated and vulgar Marxism alike had tried to think the relationships between society, economy, and culture. (Hall, 1992: 279)

4 As, for example, Ang does: ’What a critical ethnography of media audiences needs to ferret out, then, is the unrecognized, unconscious and contradictory effectivity of the hegemonic within the popular, the relations of power that are inscribed within the texture of reception practices’ (Ang, 1996: 245).

5 For discussion of this paradox, see Beardsworth (1995: 4). Beardsworth’s paper focuses on the first volume of Stiegler’s project and should be consulted for readers interested in his appropriations of Leroi-Gourhan and Rousseau and, more generally, in the philosophical infrastructure of his project. My analysis here treats the material from volume one only insofar as it bears on the problematic of realtime media.

6 Stiegler makes this equation explicit later in his analysis: ’It would be necessary, moreover, to analyze the relation of différance to speed: différance is itself also a conjunction of space and time more originary than their separation. It is in this sense, then, that différance will, perhaps, have to be though as speed’ (1998: 146).

7 While this becomes clear from the range of Stiegler’s analysis, it is unfortunately belied by the often narrow focus on cinema as a concrete apparatus.

8 Stiegler’s argument here is complex and involves a crucial transformation of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness. Extending Derrida’s own deconstruction of Husserl’s distinction between primary retention and recollection (or secondary retention), Stiegler introduces a distinction between these two interdependent memories and what he calls ’tertiary memory’ (a gloss on Husserl’s ’image-consciousness’): just as Derrida undermines the opposition between perception and imagination in Husserl’s conception, and with it, the opposition of presence to absence, Stiegler undermines the opposition between that which has been lived by a subject and that which has not. As he sees it, tertiary memories – meaning, basically, all experience that has been recorded and is reproducible – represent our means of inheriting the past, the prosthetic already-there, and, for this reason, actually condition the other two forms of memory. Stiegler emphasizes the technical specificity of tertiary memory, for it is only once consciousness has the capacity to experience the exact same recorded experience more than once that we can appreciate how secondary retention (the memory of the first or earlier experience(s)) influences a subsequent primary retention.In the context of Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness, the philosophical payoff of Stiegler’s analysis is thus to level any absolute distinctions between primary retention, secondary memory, and tertiary memory and in fact to invert the hierarchy proposed by Husserl such that it istertiary memory that introduces secondary memory into primary retention. This move involves two specific critical ’corrections’ of Husserl’s analysis, which are themselves conjugated together in Stiegler’s analysis of contemporary media technology. (Here Stiegler follows and, as we shall see, extends in a crucial manner, Derrida’s analysis in Speech and Phenomenon). On the one hand, Stiegler contests the fundamental opposition of perception and imagination on which Husserl’s important differentiation of primary retention from secondary memory (or recollection) is rooted. On the other hand, Stiegler contests Husserl’s blanket exclusion of ’image-consciousness’ (tertiary memory) from time-consciousness. (Here, Stiegler follows Derrida’s analysis in Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, which to an extent – but only to an extent – converges with the evolution of Husserl’s own thinking.) In both cases, Stiegler’s criticisms involve a questioning of the primacy accorded the category of the lived [vecu] in Husserl’s analysis. Moreover, the two corrections are, not surprisingly, themselves intrinsically correlated, since it is precisely in virtue of the absolute distinction between perception and imagination that Husserl is able to exclude image-consciousness from the phenomenon of time-consciousness.

9 Jean-Michel Salanskis makes this point in his generous review of Stiegler’s project:

I wonder if the analysis of light-time and of its effects would not have gained from being differentiated according to its contexts: there is an impact of light-time on the financial sector or on nuclear disuasion that is not the same as its impact on communication, on the television, telephone and informatics. A part of the picture that Stiegler proposes rings false to my ears because he transposes to the world of communicational exchange, a world largely hierarchized but free and concerned with the freedom of the Who?, a vision that is forged in relation to the financial economy and war,those vast and complex functions that are fundamentally not concerned with us. (Salanskis, 2000: 274)

Failure to recognize this difference has resulted in misunderstandings (understandable given Stiegler’s own failure to mark the difference) concerning the sense of ’realtime’. See Wills (unpublished).

10 For a critique of Kittler’s technodeterminism, see Hansen (2002).

11 On Kittler’s account, by contrast, everything is subsumed into realtime computing with the result that human sense perception, human consciousness, and subjectivity become a ’dependent variable’ of digital information processing, mere epiphenomena or ’eyewash’ attesting to the continued economic viability of entertainment rather than to any fundamental correlation of the human and technics (Kittler, 1999:Introduction). The comparison with Kittler helps specify the crucial correlation Stiegler introduces between storage media and memory. Whereas Kittler views technical media reductively as mere storage vehicles for information, Stiegler interweaves the history of storage media (of the what) with the evolution of consciousness (the who). Rather than achieving the kind of autonomy projected in Hollywood fantasies like The Matrix, storage media co-evolve with the human precisely because they represent the means of access to the tradition, the very vehicle for the human to evolve through means other than life, which is to say, for the human to become human.

12 On the Husserlian model, time-consciousness, that is, consciousness of the self existing in time, can only occur indirectly, through the mediation of a special kind of technical object, what Husserl calls a temporal object. A temporal object – Husserl’s preferred example is a melody – is an object that does not simply exist in time but that is constituted from time itself. By updating Husserl’s analysis and transposing its focus from a melody heard by a single consciousness in private to a cinematic flux experienced by a local or global collectivity, Stiegler gives it a geopolitical inflection, one that correlates with his argument for the technical specificity of the ’cinematic’ era.

13 In the course of his debate with Stiegler, Derrida links artifactuality to the nature of time itself, which can only (and ever) be differential:

. . .there is never an absolutely real time. What we call real time . . . is in fact never pure. What we call real time is simply an extremely reduced ’différance,’ but there is no purely real time because temporalization itself is structured by a play of retention or of protention and, consequently, of traces: the condition of possibility of the living, absolutely real present is already memory, anticipation,in other words, a play of traces. The real-time effect is itself a particular effect of différance’. (Derrida & Stiegler, 2002: 129)

14 Here is a typical passage, indeed one where Derrida formulates his aporetic thinking concerning specificity:

This specificity, whatever it may be, does not all of a sudden substitute the prosthesis, teletechnology, etc., for immediate or natural speech. These machines have always been there, they are always there, even when we wrote by hand, even during so-called live conversation. And yet, the greatest compatibility, the greatest coordination, the most vivid of possible affinities seems to be asserting itself, today, between what appears to be most alive, most live [in English in the original], and the différance or delay, the time it takes to exploit, broadcast or distribute it. (Derrida &Stiegler, 2002: 38)

15 On this point, I am in full agreement with Stiegler. Defined so broadly and abstractly, writing forms an empirical correlate to différance that paradoxically preserves the latter’s quasi-transcendentality, and not insignificantly, guards it against technical contamination: since only its empirical proxy, writing, is infected by technicity, différance can remain pure. For my critique of this abstract, singular conception of différance, see Hansen (2000), Chapter 4.

16 In a passage where he finds it necessary to supplement Derrida’s insistence that real time marks the ’possibility of a quasi-infinite yet finite delay’ with a crucial (phenomenological) corollary:

in another and almost opposite respect, real time nullifies delays. Everything happens as if there were both an extraordinary opening of delay – and one would tend to think that this is an extraordinary opportunity [une grande chance] – and at the same time, a telescoping of all delay, an annulment, which gives the general sense, from which it seems to me that no one can escape,that the very possibility of reflexivity is compromised. (Derrida & Stiegler, 2002: 90)

17 This becomes explicit when Derrida, in response to a question about the politics of the ’cultural exception,’ invokes the ’categorical imperative . . . to let the future have a future, to let or make it come, or in any case, to leave the possibility of the future open’ (Derrida & Stiegler, 2002: 85).

18 Marking this distinction is the particular contribution of Gilles Deleuze, whose work clearly stands behind Salanskis’s analysis here and, in a less direct way, behind the appropriation-correction of Stiegler that I shall go on to offer here. See Deleuze (1994), Chapter 2.

19 This, incidentally, marks a fundamental difference between Stiegler’s retooling of Husserl’s temporal object and Derrida’s deconstruction of time consciousness in Speech and Phenomena: for Derrida, the salient point is that Husserl’s distinction of perception [impression] and imagination [memory] cannot hold up to scrutiny, since the living present is shot through with absence, i.e., retentions and protentions.Unlike Stiegler’s more radical criticism, Derrida’s does not challenge or displace the priority of primary retention as the operator of the spacing of time; it simply complicates the operation – or, put another way,renders it coherent – by opening it to the absence without which time could not continue to flow. Evidence for this difference can be found in Derrida’s insistence that, despite the deconstruction of the perception-memory divide, there is still an important phenomenological difference between primary and secondary retention. (On this point see Hansen (2004a).)

20 This, incidentally, is precisely what Salanskis means when he asks whether ’one can, in effect, correctly interpret the phenomena of speed without reference to the continuous?’ (2000: 277). If, to return to our above discussion, speed is différance today, that is because it has taken us beyond the threshold of the discrete.

21 This difference lies at the heart of my argument in New Philosophy for New Media (Hansen, 2004).

22 In the chapter immediately following in Le temps du cinéma, he makes this point explicitly:

. . .this independence of mnemotechnics from the technical system of production no longer exists today: in becoming planetary, the technical system is now also, and even foremost, a global mnemotechnical system. In a sense, a fusion between the technical system, the mnemotechnical system and globalisation has occurred. . . . If history can, and must, essentially be analysed as the relation between the evolution of technical systems and that of other social systems, what constitutes the problem of adjustment is that the analysis of mnemotechnics shows that the latter always overdetermines the conditions of this adjustment: namely, the process of adoption. . . . The global technical system has basically become a mnemotechnical system for the industrial production of tertiary retentions, and thus for criteria of retentional selection, of the flux of consciousness inscribed into the processes of adoption. (Stiegler, 2003: non-pag.)

23 This reduction is particularly paradoxical given that Zuhandenheit is the privileged Heideggerian category for Stiegler, as Beardsworth has pointed out:

Completely underestimated by Heidegger in his desire to understand the ’there’ in terms of Dasein’s self-affection, the ’ready-to-hand’ actually forms the originary relation between the human and the nonhuman prior to all metaphysical oppositions between the human and the technical (including that of Being and Time). It also articulates the ’facticity’ and ’nullity’ of Dasein in terms of originary prostheticity. In other words, for Stiegler, the ’there’ to which Dasein is ’called back’ should be articulated in terms of the originary relation between the human and the technical.(Beardsworth, 1996: 152)

24 Simondon understands the autonomy of technics in this sense: the margin of indetermination that is necessary to allow a given technology to enter into different ensembles and thus continue to evolve.

25 ’This ecological phenomenon [of the coupling of technical object and milieu] may be observed in the informational dimension of present-day technics, where it allows for the development of a generalized performativity (for example in the apparatuses of live transmission and of data processing in real time. . .) – but it is then essentially the human milieu, that is, human geography, and not physical geography,that is found to be incorporated into a process of concretization that should no longer be thought on the scale of the object, but also not on the scale of the system’ (Stiegler, 1998: 80).

26 Stiegler’s interpretation is developed more extensively in Stiegler (1998b).

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