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> From: ctheory@lists.uvic.ca
> Date: March 16, 2004 4:08:25 PM EST
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> Subject: [CTHEORY] Article 139 - Technical Machines and Evolution
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> _____________________________________________________________________
> CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 27, NOS 1-2
> *** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
>
> Article 139 04/03/16 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
>
>
> Technical Machines and Evolution
> ==========================================
>
>
> ~Belinda Barnet~
>
>
>
> The reproducibility of the technical machine differs from that
> of living beings, in that it is not based on sequential
> codes perfectly circumscribed in a territorialised genome.[1]
>
> How does one tell the story of a machine? Can we say that technical
> machines have their own genealogies, their own evolutionary dynamic?
> The technical artifact constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or
> a line. At a cursory level, we can see this in the fact that
> technical machines come in generations; they adapt and adopt
> characteristics over time, "one suppressing the other as it becomes
> obsolete." [2] So are we to understand this dynamic from a
> biological, a zoological or a sociological perspective? I want to
> locate a dynamic in technics that stems neither from the soul nor
> from human societies, which grants the technical object its own
> materiality, its own limits and resistances, which allows us to think
> technical objects in their historical differentiations. This calls
> for a new consideration of technicity, and a new consideration of the
> human being in relation to technics. The task will be difficult –
> "at its very origin and up until now, philosophy has repressed
> technics as an object of thought. Technics is the unthought."[3]
>
> This essay will be a collection of notes towards such a perspective;
> it will be a prolegomena to the history of a technical machine, a
> history which is not included here and which has yet to be written.
> In this essay I will be exploring the work of Bernard Stiegler in
> relation to technicity and to human thought, but my task will not be
> to invert the history of philosophy itself, to "imagine the human as
> what is invented" by technics.[4] I do not wish to put forward a
> theory of human evolution. My intention is much narrower, or perhaps
> more jaded; I want to clear a space in which a technical object might
> evolve, and in which I might trace such an evolution.
>
>
> Introduction
> ————-
>
> Niles Eldredge collects things for a living, and there are two great
> collections in his life. The public one is on display at New York's
> Museum of Natural History; its 1000 individual specimens stretch
> floor to ceiling for 30 metres across the Hall of Biodiversity.[5]
> There are beetles, molluscs, rotifers and fungi, spiders, fish and
> birds, all arranged into genealogical groups. The other collection is
> private; it spans an entire wall in his home in rural New Jersey.
> This collection contains over 500 specimens, but of the "musical
> rather than the biological variety."[6] He collects cornets, a type
> of musical instrument. There are silver and gold ones, polished and
> matte, large and small, modern and primitive. Ever the biologist,
> Eldredge has them arranged in taxonomic relationships of shape, style
> and date of manufacture. Much of the variety in cornet design is
> based on the way the pipe is wound.
>
> Late in 2002, Eldredge's curiosity got the better of him. He decided
> to feed these specimens through the phylogenetic computer program he
> uses for his trilobites, to apply the 'scientific method' to
> technical evolution for the first time. As usual, he asked the
> computer to come up with all the possible evolutionary trees and then
> make a 'best guess' based on the existing specimens.[7] The results
> were astounding. Compared to the phylogenetic diagram for trilobites,
> the diagram for a technical machine seemed much more 'retroactive'.
> Eldredge's musical instruments could defy the laws of evolution.
>
> In the world of living things, there are basically only two ways
> creatures can obtain a characteristic: by inheriting it from a
> previous generation, or by evolving it in the present one. This last
> form of evolution is itself the subject of debate; an organism can't
> change its DNA in one lifetime. The only proven exception is found in
> the world of viruses. Biological organisms evolve gradually over
> hundreds of generations, subject to natural selection. If a species
> dies out – biological 'decimation' – its branch dies with it. But
> technical machines are different.
>
> With cultural evolution comes the capacity to co-opt innovations
> at a whim. Time after time, when the cornets on one part of the
> tree acquired a useful innovation, designers from other branches
> simply copied the idea.[8]
>
> Even instruments that were relatively primitive would end up sporting
> this new design, and if it was a particularly good one, then a
> 'burst' of rapid evolutionary activity would appear. The lines in the
> cornet evolutionary tree were thoroughly confused. Instead of a neat
> set of diagonal V-shaped branches, a 'cone of increasing diversity',
> you would see flat lines from which multiple machines appeared.[9]
> Flat lines do not characterise biological phylogenetic diagrams. A
> flat line indicates that the gradual passage of time and generations
> has not preceded the development of a particular characteristic. It
> has happened spontaneously, with no physical precursor. This means
> that the cornet's relationship to time and inheritance is different
> than that of biological organisms.
>
> Most striking of all, outdated or superseded machines could re-appear
> with new designs, as if they were held in memory and only needed a
> certain innovation to burst into activity again. This is what we mean
> by 'retroactivity.' Technical machines can reappear, borrow from each
> other across branches and then rapidly evolve in a single generation.
> In biological evolution, when branches diverge, they diverge
> irrevocably; similarly, when branches die out, they cannot reappear.
> Technical machines are different. There is no biological decimation;
> nothing is irrevocable. Technical machines can operate on the past.
>
> Technical structures, ensembles and channels are static
> combinations in which phenomena of retroactivity appear: by
> using the steam engine, the steel industry produces better
> steel, allowing in turn for the production of more efficient
> machines.[10]
>
> This raises the question of technical 'memory', a topic we will
> explore in the next section. Why can technical machines
> retroactivate? What is the relationship of human thought to this? Is
> it humans that 'remember' previous generations of technical machines
> and transfer their characteristics between branches? If so, how and
> where do they remember them? Memory, and in particular technical
> memory, bridges "not just past and present, but outside and inside,
> machine and organism"[11] The question of time and inheritance –
> of memory – will be the leitmotif of this essay. It will be the
> question we pose to history. It will be the question that marks this
> theory of technical evolution.
>
> Eldredge is also interested in memory and in technical evolution, but
> at this stage, he wants to warn against the indiscriminate use of
> Darwinian metaphors.[12] If innovations are taken from the past and
> spontaneously appear in another branch in which they have no physical
> precursor, this constitutes a break from genetic evolution. There is
> an evolutionary dynamic going on, but its rules of inheritance are
> not based on Mendelian genetics. We need another explanation for
> retroactivity, for transfer and borrowing where there is no physical
> precursor. So I will be thinking the evolution of technical objects
> in terms of lineages and diagrams; but I will also be interested in
> precisely where this is different from biological evolution, where it
> exceeds the biological. Technical machines are ensembles in which
> phenomena of retroactivity appear, where there is a different
> relationship to time and inheritance, where there are different
> material limits and contingencies.
>
> So we need to recognise a limit to genealogical metaphors. But the
> question remains: what is the relationship between human thought and
> technics? If there is technical 'remembering', then there must also
> be a mode of transfer and storage, and a place where this occurs.
>
> There is no archive without consignation in an external place
> which assures the possibility of memorisation, of
> repetition, of reproduction, of reimpression.[13]
>
> Is this place inside or outside? If it is inside human memory, then
> how does it exceed our biological death as human beings? If it is
> outside, then where is it located precisely? The relationship between
> human memory and technics constitutes a tension, a tension that marks
> the break from genetic evolution. To explicate this tension, I will
> need to articulate a mode of passage, a logic. Eldredge does not
> provide one; as a scientist, he has simply pointed out that a dynamic
> exists, and that this dynamic is different to biological evolution.
> To articulate this logic, I will be using the innovative thinking of
> Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.
>
> Derrida thinks the relation between humans and technics in terms of
> an 'originary supplementarity': human memory is a prosthesis of the
> inside. It is neither inside nor outside, but constitutes a 'relative
> interiority'. Stiegler's thinking may be seen as a radicalisation of
> this concept. Whereas Derrida is concerned to articulate the tension
> in terms of a 'logic', the logic of difference, Stiegler is concerned
> to articulate this logic in terms of its historical differentiations
> in different technical systems. The logic will only appear in its
> differentiation; the "interiority is nothing outside of its
> exteriorisation."[14] This is why Stiegler will be useful to any
> material genealogy of a technical machine. It will give us
> descriptive purchase on this logic as it is articulated in technical
> objects. We will unpack this concept in more detail presently.
>
> For the moment, let us return to the problem raised by Eldredge;
> technical machines break the laws of genetics. From his perspective,
> this is because they are subject to intelligent design. Part of the
> reason Eldredge created these diagrams in the first place was to
> prove to the Creationists that intelligent design has its own
> dynamic, and this dynamic is radically different to what we find in
> nature. Technical machines are invented; this is what distinguishes
> them from biological organisms. "[N]ot one product of art has the
> source of its own production within itself", as Aristotle put it two
> thousand years ago.[15] Or rather, technics do not have the
> capacity for self-production. Silicon does not automatically rise up
> into a computer. As an object, it must first be thought in the mind
> of a human, and then created.
>
> Created objects and artefacts are what most readily come to mind when
> the word 'technology' is mentioned.[16] The domain of 'technics' is
> even more restricted; in general, it designates "the restricted and
> specified domain of tools, of instruments."[17] These objects are
> not a fact, but the result of human thought. In this sense, technical
> objects might be taken as by definition human fabrications. Humans
> create technics; technics do not pre-exist or constitute the human.
>
> This understanding dominates the contemporary thinking of technics,
> and consequently extant histories of technical machines.[18] It is
> based on an opposition, an opposition as old as metaphysics. We must
> address this before any new theory of technical evolution can be
> discussed.
>
>
> The aporia of origin: thought and technics
> ——————————————
>
> "At the beginning of history", asserts Bernard Stiegler, "philosophy
> separates tekhne from episteme", and to these two regions of beings
> two dynamics are assigned: mechanics and biology.[19] It is in the
> inheritance of this conflict that technical knowledge is devalued as
> mere supplement, and the human affirmed against the process of
> technicisation. Human thought (the philosophical episteme) is pitched
> against the sophistic tekhne (art or craft). At the time, these
> sophistic 'arts' were primarily mnemotechnics and writing –
> techniques of memory. To the ancients, they were a form of
> bastardised anamnesis, a mechanical incursion on thought. Human
> memory was "the noblest region of… personality"[20], an originary
> knowledge for which tekhne served as mere extension. Platonic
> philosophy was constituted on this opposition between human
> knowledge, which is transcendental, and technics, which lacks
> self-production. The reason it is separated is to account for the
> possibility of access to knowledge, or more precisely, an originary
> and purely human knowledge. It is the answer to an ancient aporia.
>
> Aporia comes from the Greek aporos, "meaning, 'without issue', or
> 'without way'…that which thought cannot resolve or untie without
> forgetting the undecidability which structures the aporia."[21] It
> is a limit question, a question which is irreducible, and which will
> consequently reappear in every attempt at an answer. This particular
> aporia, Plato's Meno and the aporia of memory, is crucial to the
> history of philosophy [22] and also crucial to the history of
> technics.
>
> What is human knowledge? Or more precisely, what is purely creative
> human knowledge? This would be the knowledge that humans draw upon to
> create technologies; it would not be inherent to the created object
> or artefact. So in a sense, it could not be acquired by experience,
> as this would accord the object itself knowledge, if not agency. It
> would need to be uncontaminated by technics at the beginning. But
> this presents a problem – a problem encapsulated in an address by
> Meno to Socrates in his discourse on the essence. The problem is that
> such knowledge is impossible. The question is actually formulated in
> response to Socrates' attempt at founding a human value (Virtue) in
> the human, as opposed to something acquired in the outside world of
> objects and experience:
>
> How will you look for something when you don't know in the least
> what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something
> you don't [already] know as the object of your search?[23]
>
> Socrates, in response, rephrases the aporia to highlight the problem:
>
> [A] man cannot try to discover either what he knows or what he
> does not know. He would not seek what he knows, for since he
> knows it there is no need of the inquiry, nor what he does not
> know, for in that case he does not even know what he is to look
> for.[24]
>
> This aporia is taken up and resolved by Socrates through the myth of
> reminiscence.[25] Man has access to an originary knowledge, to an
> originary memory acquired before the fall. Man already knows what he
> does not know – it's just that he has forgotten it. Knowledge is an
> unveiling, a remembering. Human memory is transcendent.
>
> Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has been born many
> times, and has seen all things both here and in the other
> world, has learned everything that is.[26]
>
> Thus, argues Stiegler, the aporia is settled in terms of an
> opposition. Thought has the principle of its creation, of its
> movement (arkhe), within itself, and this transcends the world of
> objects. The human being does not receive its knowledge from the
> outside world, from the finite world of objects, but finds it again
> and again within himself. The myth of reminiscence thus institutes
> metaphysical oppositions between soul and body, thought and technics,
> infinite and finite. For our argument concerning technical objects,
> this myth places the act of creation squarely on the shoulders of
> human beings who have access to an originary knowledge,
> uncontaminated by technics, and consequently by finitude, in the
> beginning. The history of a technical machine would thus be the
> history of pure invention, of human beings who have access to a
> transcendent memory.
>
> This is precisely the divide that Stiegler, and also Derrida,
> problematise. Derrida argues that memory is always already
> contaminated by technics. The prosthetic already-there: this is what
> the myth of reminiscence 'forgets'. Stiegler argues that the
> prosthetic already-there constitutes a break with genetic evolution;
> and not only this, it is a break which constitutes the human. Both
> philosophers put the idea of pure human memory into crisis, and
> consequently the idea of any access to a realm of thought
> uncontaminated by technics.
>
> To return to our original question: how does one write the genealogy
> of a machine, and where would human beings figure in this diagram? It
> is impossible to deny the role of human thought in the creation of
> technical artefacts. But where does the knowledge required to create
> these artefacts come from? Plato maintained that creative knowledge
> is transcendent, that it is uncontaminated by the world of experience
> (and by extension, the technical object itself). Creative knowledge
> doesn't come from the world of objects. To deny a transcendent human
> memory is to reinstate the ancient aporia: purely human knowledge
> becomes impossible.
>
> So for now, we should rephrase our question.
>
> It is impossible to deny the participation of human thought in
> the essence of machinism. But up to what point can this
> thought still be described as human?[27]
>
> This, then, will be the subject of the next section. But we will
> approach it from a different angle, in order to question the relation
> of memory to technics, and also to question where these memories come
> from. Is it humans that remember previous generations of machines,
> and where are these memories stored? We will approach it from the
> perspective of evolution.
>
>
> Epiphylogenesis and the aporia of memory
> —————————————-
>
> Humans die, but their histories remain. This is what
> distinguishes them from animals.[28]
>
> Death is the radical effacement of memory. It is the erasure of our
> personal experience, our personal histories – and it is an
> inevitability that we are aware of. We cannot take death away from
> each other, any more than we can take upon ourselves someone else's
> death. Death cannot be transferred, nor can we deliver ourselves from
> it. It is our "first and last responsibility" [29], and it is this
> question and this awareness which mark us as human. We are finite
> beings.
>
> Our awareness of death is what drives us to create archives,
> technologies of retention and storage. We leave traces of ourselves
> and our experience in other people's memories, in the memories of our
> children; but also in the nonliving – in writing, in objects and
> artefacts, on cave walls, in woven rugs and on computer screens, in
> language and culture. We leave traces of our experience outside
> ourselves as individuals, traces that will not be lost when we die,
> but will remain.
>
> Among these traces most have in fact not been produced with a
> view to transmitting memories: a piece of pottery or a tool were
> not made to transmit memories, but they do so nevertheless,
> spontaneously. Which is why archaeologists are looking for them.
> Other traces are specifically devoted to the transmission of
> memory: for example, writing [and] photography.[30]
>
> Bernard Stiegler argues that these inscriptions comprise a structure
> of inheritance and transmission, a structure that accumulates with
> each successive generation. It is a structure which exists outside
> our own genetic limitations, outside the finite lifetime of the
> individual, but which nonetheless carries in it our collective
> wisdom: the ideas and experiences that we have had, the techniques
> that we have learned, the tools and artefacts that we have created.
> For Eldredge, this is what we mean by the word 'culture'. Culture is
> but a series of memorials. In fact, it is a gift to others – the
> gift of death.[31]
>
> Importantly, this structure of inheritance and transmission, the
> material it contains, is not inherent to us. We are not born with it;
> it is not a genetic memory. It is inscribed and transmitted outside
> our genetic programs. In other words, we are born into it, we acquire
> it through experience. In is in this sense that Stiegler calls the
> structure epigenetic – it exists outside and in addition to the
> genetic, like a surrounding layer. This is a word in use by the
> scientific community as well, to designate "those characteristics
> inherited outside of genetic encoding and transmission."[32] We will
> be using it in the same sense, to designate that which is not coded
> for in our genes, but which we acquire.
>
> To acquire something outside our genetic programming, then, this
> thing must exceed the biological. The epigenetic structure must
> pre-exist us; it must exist beyond our short lives to be subject to
> inheritance and transmission. We are born into it; it was here before
> us and it will continue after us. This is what Heidegger calls the
> already there, this "past that I never lived but that is nevertheless
> my past, without which I would never have had a past of my own." [33]
> Language is a perfect example. It is not genetic; it is
> acquired, and yet it has its own history, its own genealogy, its own
> memory that exceeds the individual. In entering into language, it
> creates a past for us, and we acquire this past, which we continue as
> our own. We might call this acquisition an 'event'. It becomes the
> interface through which we enter into relation with the world. So
> when we are born, we acquire something that we have not individually
> created but which, nevertheless, shapes our experience of the world.
> And unlike the plant and animal kingdom, this acquisition, this
> epigenetic event, is not lost when we die. In the case at hand,
> observes Stiegler, life conserves and accumulates these events.[34]
> There is history, there is culture, and there are the artefacts which
> carry them beyond our death – technics.
>
> Consequently, Stiegler demarcates a third structure, the structure
> which stores and accumulates our individual epigeneses, which exists
> beyond our own central nervous systems, beyond our individual genetic
> and epigenetic memories. This contains what we are for the moment
> calling culture (past epigenetic events, lessons of experience), but
> also what we are calling technical artefacts. The structure is at
> once our own and also transcendental: it is larger than ourselves. It
> is a store, an accumulation, a sedimentation of successive
> epigeneses, a thing which evolves, which has its own historicity and
> dynamic. [35] Far from being lost when the individual human dies, it
> conserves and sediments itself. Stiegler calls this the
> epi-phylo-genetic structure, implying by that terminology a material
> genealogy proper to it.
>
> So he distinguishes here between three types of memories out of which
> the human develops:
>
> Genetic memory; memory of the central nervous system (epigenetic
> memory); and techno-logical memory [epiphylogenetic memory].[36]
>
> Stiegler locates or amalgamates 'language', 'technics', 'technique'
> and 'technology' within this third type of memory, epiphylogenesis.
> Not because they are of an essence, but because they are all forms of
> memory support; they are forms of inscription, transmission and
> ultimately, transcendence. They are larger than ourselves; they
> exceed our death as human beings. Technics, however is afforded a
> special place here; although in common parlance it designates tools
> and instruments, Stiegler also uses the term in the Greek sense
> (tekhne). In other words, it designates skill, art and craft.
> Technical objects are the result of the transmission of these
> operational chains, which are transformed in time as artefacts.
> Language itself is also a technique, a skill, a mode of transmission
> – and thus it is a form of technics.[37] Technics, for Stiegler,
> are always memory aids – whether they have been created explicitly
> so (for example, language or photography, which are mnemotechnics) or
> not (pottery and rugs). This is what he means by epiphylogenesis.
>
> Epiphylogenesis, then, designates a new relation between the human
> organism and its environment. It is technics, as the support of the
> inscription of memory, which is constitutive of transcendence. The
> biological human, with its genetic and epigenetic memory, dies. This
> is the paradox of Man: "a living being characterised in its forms of
> life by the nonliving" [38], by its relation to death. In other
> words, epiphylogenesis gives human beings access to transcendence,
> and thus to time. It is finitude, our constitutive finitude as
> biological humans (which the myth of reminiscence 'forgets') that
> propels man to invent himself within this structure. But at the same
> time, this structure transforms the human as much as it is
> transformed by it. In Stiegler's terms, the 'what' (technics) invents
> the 'who' (humans) at the same time that it is invented. Neither term
> holds the 'secret' of the other – neither term is originary. In this
> way, Stiegler develops Meno's aporia into an inextricable relation;
> it is our inscriptions in the nonliving, in what is dead (technics)
> which constitutes transcendence.
>
> I will retain several of these concepts in my nascent theory of
> technical evolution. Firstly, the concept that technics is a memory
> aid – and that, unlike pottery or woven rugs, there are certain
> forms of information storage, communication and display that are also
> mnemotechnical systems: like the internet, or writing. That this
> memory aid is in itself nonliving, that it exceeds the biological,
> will also mean that its description must be of a different order to
> the biological. There will be a limit to Darwinian metaphors, as
> Eldredge put it. Technics constitutes its own domain, it has its own
> relationship to time and inheritance, its own dynamic radically
> different to what we find in nature.
>
> Consequently, any genealogy of a technical machine will need to
> recognise that the 'intellectual capital' of the societies in which
> particular technologies evolve belongs properly to this dynamic. The
> discourses surrounding the evolution of specialised techniques and
> procedures (for example, computer engineering), form a part of this
> system; they are not 'purely' human, as they exceed the biological.
> They are systems which humans enter into and take on as their own,
> which are transformed in time as technical artefacts. Together,
> technics, technique and language constitute a third layer. This is
> what Stiegler means by epiphylogenesis.
>
> Next, we need to ask how the passage to this 'third layer' is
> effected. What is the process of 'liberation' that memory pursues?
> And in an even more practical sense, how do particular elements of a
> technical system retroactivate or transfer themselves to other
> systems within this structure?
>
> This emphasis on transfer and retroactivity will distinguish my
> theory of technical evolution from Stiegler's; Stiegler recognises
> these two phenomena, but subsumes them back into the logic of
> epiphylogenesis, the preservation in technical objects of epigenetic
> experience. I wish to draw them out as the dynamic which
> distinguishes technical phylogenesis. According to the phylogenetic
> diagrams we explored in the first section, the phenomena of transfer
> and retroactivity must be the basis of any theory of technical
> evolution, if we wish to capture the difference between technics and
> biology. In the following section I will look at how Leroi-Gourhan,
> Guattari, Simondon, Gille and also Stiegler approach this dynamic.
>
>
> The dynamics of technical evolution: tendencies and systems
> ———————————————————–
>
> To account for the passage from the genetic to the non-genetic,
> Stiegler draws on the work of French anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan. In
> his book <i>Gesture & Speech</i>, Leroi-Gourhan proposes that the
> evolution of man is characterised by a 'freeing of memory' – the
> exteriorisation of human capacities and genetic traits (what he calls
> 'organs') into technics. For Leroi-Gourhan, this process silently
> propels our evolution as a species.
>
> The whole of our evolution has been oriented toward placing
> outside ourselves what in the rest of the animal world is
> achieved inside by species adaptation. The most striking
> material fact is certainly the "freeing" of tools, but the
> fundamental fact is really the freeing of the word and our
> unique ability to transfer our memory to a social organism
> outside ourselves.[39]
>
> From the appearance of Homo Sapiens, the constitution of this
> external social memory dominates all problems of human evolution.[40]
> Technology has, in this sense, created the human as a species;
> humanity is nothing but a process of 'exteriorisation', a process in
> which our access to time and culture is accomplished through external
> supports which transfer our memories. Tools are 'exuded' by humans in
> the course of their evolution; they spring, literally, from the nails
> and teeth of primates, and in turn give us an non-genetic advantage
> over other species, who are condemned to hunt without weapons, to
> feel the cold against their skin without clothes. As a species, we
> are characterised by our physical and mental non-adaptation. Our
> memory is transferred to books, our "strength multiplied in the ox,
> our fist improved in the hammer."[41] For Leroi-Gourhan, we can trace
> all contemporary technologies back to this process of
> exteriorisation. Tool and gesture are now embodied in the machine;
> operational memory (technique) now embodied in automatic devices; the
> capacity to correlate recollections in the punched-card index.[42]
>
> Consequently, Leroi-Gourhan understands technological evolution as a
> relation of the human to matter, where the human exteriorises
> technical forms. Further to this, he contends that technics is itself
> in perpetual transformation; it evolves in its organisation. It is at
> once its own milieu, separate from that of the human animal. This
> evolution is parallel to the evolution of the human, but it also
> organises itself. We can see here the inspiration behind Stiegler's
> concept of epiphylogenesis; there is a systematicity to the evolution
> of technics, a kind of techno-logic which is not entirely human. For
> Leroi-Gourhan, there is an inherent dynamism to technics, itself
> productive of new lineages and machines. When we look at particular
> machines in retrospect, it would appear that they were inevitable in
> some sense; as if they were guided by 'archetypes'.
>
> Everything seems to happen as if an ideal prototype of fish or
> of knapped flint developed long preconceivable lines…from the
> fish to the amphibian, to the mammal, or to the bird, from
> form-undifferentiated flint to the knapped tool, to the brass
> knife, to the steel sword.[43]
>
> Everything seems to point to a universal technical 'tendency'. This
> tendency is the essence of technics; there is a necessity proper to
> it as a milieu. Consequently, the evolution of technics will have its
> own phylogenetic limits; as in the evolution of biological animals,
> there are only a given number of possibilities. Differentiation, the
> creation and development of new machines, artefacts and tools, is
> silently propelled by technical tendencies down certain lines. For
> Leroi-Gourhan, the human inventor is always guided by archetypes. He
> is but a combinatory genius [44], selecting from and giving
> culturally specific embodiment to these archetypes. Technical
> continuity, its evolution as a milieu, is transcendent. This
> continuity, and its presence as archetypes, excludes "pure invention,
> ex nihilo." [45] So the human has a particular relationship to
> technics – that of exteriorisation – but at the same time, the
> technical milieu has its own dynamic which guides the process of
> invention itself, which exists beyond and before the inventor. The
> inventor is moved by technical tendencies.
>
> The concept of allocating technics its own tendency is not new.
> Numerous theorists have explored technology from this perspective;
> among them, Guattari (1995), and even earlier, Simondon (1958), whose
> concept of a the progressive 'concretization' of technics is
> important for the development of Stiegler's argument. For Simondon,
> the technical artefact constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or
> a line; at a cursory level, we can see this by the fact that machines
> appear across generations. At the origin of the lineage is a
> synthetic act of invention, constitutive of a technical essence.[46]
> This essence is recognised by the fact that it remains stable
> throughout the evolutional lineage, and not only stable, but
> productive of new structures and functions by progressive saturation.
> Machines speak to machines before they speak to man, as Guattari puts
> it [47], and the language is not human.
>
> But Leroi-Gourhan's technical tendency is universal; it is
> transcendent. And if there is a universal logic driving the evolution
> of technics as a system, how can we explain technical diversity?
> Evolution is all about diversity; it is in fact only in the process
> of differentiation that the logic of evolution is discovered.
> Similarly, Stiegler maintains that it is only in technical
> differentiation that the logic of epiphylogenesis can be discovered.
> For Stiegler, there is no 'ghost' in the machine, no platonic essence
> we are striving towards. "The organizing principle of the technical
> object is in this object qua tendency, aim and end."[48]
>
> Confronted with diversity, Leroi-Gourhan posits two other dynamics at
> work at the lower, "ethnic" level, which diffract or instantiate the
> technical tendency: invention and borrowing. Invention, of course,
> does not occur in a vacuum; it is guided by technical archetypes. The
> inventor is really just combining the best technical forms for its
> realisation. Similarly, borrowing – from other cultures, from
> existing technical forms – is guided by archetypes. In fact, as
> Stiegler points out,
>
> Whether this evolution occurs by invention or by borrowing is of
> minor importance, since this….in no way contradicts [the]
> systemic determinism in its essence.[49]
>
> What is important for Leroi-Gourhan is whether or not the invention
> is acceptable and necessary to that group of people. Human societies
> have a "characteristic capacity" to "accumulate and preserve
> technical innovations" [50], and also to discard or forget them.
> This is connected with his concept of the social memory. To put it
> simply, technical objects are either stored or they are forgotten. In
> a sense (and here I am diverging from Leroi-Gourhan's thesis) society
> constitutes an 'adaptive pressure' on the technical lineage. An
> invention is either taken up or it dies.
>
> But how far can we take this essentially zoological analogy? For at
> base, technical evolution marks a break with genetic evolution. At
> some level, and at some point, the analogy must stop. For Eldredge,
> as we have seen, it stops at intelligent design. So how are we to
> understand this dynamic - from a biological, a zoological or a social
> perspective? For Leroi-Gourhan, the dynamic is essentially
> zoological.
>
> Stiegler wants to abandon the zoological metaphor altogether. He
> wants develop a theory of technological evolution which is not the
> 'partner' of animals, of society or of human beings. It is not the
> partner of any other system. For Stiegler, the technical object lays
> down its own laws; its logic is entirely and radically its own, and
> it is to be discovered only in its historical differentiations. The
> inventor, for Stiegler, is not even a 'combinatory' genius; if he
> exists at all, he is but a passive observer, reading a message that
> already exists in the technical object. But before we come to
> Stiegler's thesis, I would like to conclude this section by briefly
> exploring the work of Bertrand Gille.
>
> Gille's work describes the transfer of technical functions between
> technical systems, and also the transfer of technical knowledge
> between human beings. It has a pragmatic aspect to it, and although
> it does not mobilise this 'tension' which exists between human beings
> and their memory supports as a productive logic, it is useful on a
> diagrammatic level. Like Leroi-Gourhan, he accords technics its own
> dynamic, yet he articulates this dynamic in relation to those 'other'
> systems – social, economic, industrial, cultural and political. For
> Gille, these other systems are not mere afterthoughts, they do more
> than locally diffract a universal technical tendency. They at once
> shape, and are shaped by, the technical system itself. In fact, these
> 'other systems' belong properly to it.
>
> The notion of a 'technical system' belongs to Gille – it exists in
> various forms in other authors' work, but it is not used
> explicitly.[51] So far in this essay, I have been using the term to
> refer to a lineage of technical artefacts. For Gille, however, a
> technical system does not end at the physical boundaries of a
> particular technology; it includes a number of interdependencies,
> related systems which have stabilised in a particular historical
> epoch, solidified around this technology. These include its related
> social, industrial and economic systems, and also a system of
> associated 'techniques' – means for the practical application of
> knowledge.[52] Techniques are what is transferred between technical
> systems. The technical system is a constellation of interdependent
> systems, and these move towards a progressive solidarity. The concept
> gives us descriptive purchase on the dialogue taking place between
> constitutive systems in any given historical epoch.
>
> Integral to this concept of the system is that it will have its own
> limits. The limits of the system order its dynamism. Limits will take
> a variety of forms, and it should be possible to develop an
> historical schema to determine these. They can be detected in "the
> problem of increasing quantities, or in the impossibility of reducing
> production costs, on in yet another impossibility, that of
> diversifying production."[53] Such limits in turn can be either
> endogenous or exogenous to the system itself; exogenous limits can
> come in the form of government policy or taxation law, for example,
> and endogenous limits in the form of technical obsolescence within
> its component parts.
>
> For Gille, technical progress consists in a successive displacement
> of these limits. When there are enough limits to a system, the entire
> system becomes 'blocked' and a major crisis ensues. A decision to
> evolve takes place, to move to a new technical system. "There are two
> essential poles of 'technical progress': the technological lineage on
> the one hand, and technical blockages on the other." [54] New
> technical systems are born from the limits of preceding systems, and
> hence progress is essentially (and brutally) discontinuous. Systemic
> shifts mean the rapid loss, and also the creation, of entire
> political and socio-economic structures. The technical system moves
> faster than the other systems, and a period of 'adjustment' ensues,
> which progressively stabilises. Stiegler has a problem with this last
> point; for him, the contemporary technical system does not appear to
> be stabilising. Are we not living through a period of permanent
> adjustment, he asks? This is the nature of modern teletechnologies.
>
> For now, we have one last point to address: the way in which transfer
> and retroactivity take place within and between these technical
> systems. For both Gille and Leroi-Gourhan, this is the role of human
> thought, this is the role of the inventor. The inventor is not a
> divinely inspired genius, however; he or she is a 'combinatory'
> genius, selecting the best technical forms effected along limited
> combinatory possibilities, to embody a technical tendency. For Gille
> these possibilities are even further limited by economic and social
> systems: "the inventor has less importance than the entrepreneur who
> decides and establishes the junctions between families of
> innovations."[55] But regardless, the combinatory act itself
> requires a unique perspective on the part of the inventor; the
> ability to see the technical phylum from a more global level. It
> requires a degree of foresight, an awareness of what exists and what
> does not exist, of what is possible at this point in time. This is
> what we mean by the word, 'anticipation.' The inventor anticipates
> new technical forms from limited possibilities within a particular
> technical system and a particular historical epoch.
>
> Manuel De Landa has a similar conception of the human inventor: the
> inventor is not a divinely inspired genius, he or she is "influenced
> by certain machinic paradigms that [are] prevalent at the time."[56]
> Such paradigms are analogous to Gille and Leroi-Gourhan's technical
> tendencies, though these tendencies are not transcendent as they are
> for Leroi-Gourhan. The machinic paradigms are immanent to the objects
> themselves, a concept we shall explore in the next section. They have
> an element of reality to them nonetheless, and the inventor literally
> "tracks" the machinic phylum to detect critical points which indicate
> potential bifurcations.
>
> [A] robot historian would see processes in which order emerges
> out of chaos as its own trueancestors, with human artisans
> playing the role of historically necessary 'channelers' for the
> machinic phylum's 'creativity.'[57]
>
> So the human inventor has been sidelined, and technics itself has
> taken on its own dynamic. Human thought merely selects the best
> possible forms for the realisation of technical tendencies: he
> 'channels' them in the manner of a medium (De Landa) or "combines" in
> the manner of a bricoleur (Gille and Leroi-Gourhan). He anticipates
> technical forms.
>
> Between humanity and nature a techno-geographical milieu is
> created which only becomes possible with the help of human
> intelligence…an inventive function of anticipation found
> neither in nature nor in already constituted technical
> objects.[58]
>
> To return to our original diagram, and the break from genetic
> evolution – retroactivity and transfer are processes that take place
> within human thought and human thought alone. They also take place
> from a privileged perspective, a perspective which is closer to the
> machine, which has a more 'global' view of the combinatory
> possibilities and the technological lineage. The engineer or the
> scientist, for example, is closer to the machine; they have a
> privileged perspective on the lineage in this sense.
>
>
> Anticipation and the technical object
> ————————————-
>
> But does this capacity of anticipation not itself presuppose the
> technical object, asks Stiegler? [59] Think of the discourses
> describing and explaining specialised techniques and procedures
> (engineering discourse, for example) – do these not presuppose the
> technical object?
>
> In fact, they not only presuppose the object itself; they presuppose
> its past, its current state, its limits and its possibilities.
> Technical objects belonging to different 'branches' of the
> evolutionary tree and 'dreamed-of' technical objects are part of the
> same evolutionary structure. The privileged perspective, in this
> sense, is not purely human. Anticipation is itself a technology,
> acquired like any other. As Guattari puts it, technico-scientific
> thought, the process of invention, presupposes a "certain type of
> mental or semiotic mechanism" [60], and this mechanism has its own
> limits and trajectories. For example, the invention of the first
> third-generation (3GL) computer language presupposed not only the
> computer itself, but an extant machine language, an extant assembly
> language, an extant 'natural' language, the limits and the logic for
> combining these, and also the technical necessity for combining
> them.[61] Technics constitutes its own law.
>
> This is the thrust of Stiegler's argument: if it is explicitly as
> technical consciousness that man invents himself, and it is within
> this consciousness that anticipation of the technical object occurs,
> then the technical object is anticipated by none other than itself.
> This is what he means by epiphylogenesis. The epiphylogenetic
> structure is not engendered by the human subject in the course of its
> evolution, as it is for Leroi-Gourhan, it is "engendered by the
> object in the course of its evolution."[62] Technics has engendered
> its own milieu, and this milieu both describes its past and
> circumscribes its future.
>
> To return to our argument from the last section: retroactivity and
> transfer appear as none other than anticipation itself, the process
> of invention within circumscribed trajectories. They are not a
> 'problem' for technical evolution; they are its mode of inheritance,
> a techno-logical maieutic. Stiegler, then, is pushing this concept
> further; the ability to anticipate presupposes the technical object
> in that anticipation is itself a discourse, an acquired technology.
> This calls for a new definition of technology; technology is:
>
> …therefore the discourse describing and explaining the
> evolution of specialized procedures and techniques, arts and
> trades – either the discourse of certain types of procedures
> and techniques, or that of the totality of techniques inasmuch
> as they form a system: technology is in this case the discourse
> of the evolution of that system.[63]
>
> The definition necessitates, in my hypothetical genealogy of a
> technical object, an appreciation that the discourses describing and
> explaining specialised techniques and procedures (engineering
> discourse, for example) both anticipate and mark a limit to the
> technical object. It also necessitates an awareness of what has
> already come to pass, and how this past circumscribes any future
> object. In our theory, we will keep the inventor's role, but it will
> be qua an actor listening to cues from the object itself, "reading
> from the text of matter." [64] The inventor will be situated between
> heterogeneous Gillean systems: economic and political discourse,
> industrial discourse; but most importantly, the inventor will be
> situated within the evolution of technology itself.
>
> De Landa has a similar project: to explore the history of intelligent
> machines from the perspective of the machines themselves, to trace
> the externalisation of mental or semiotic processes which are
> themselves already techno-logical. This transfer will take place
> within an extant technical system. He posits the figure of a 'robot
> historian' tracking the machinic phylum for 'bifurcation' points:
>
> [the robot historian] would, for example, recognise that the
> logical structures of computerhardware were once incarnated
> in the human body in the form of empirical problem-solving
> recipes….these may then be captured into a general-purpose,
> 'infallible' recipe (known asan 'algorithm'). When this
> happens we may say that logical structures have
> 'migrated'from the human body to the rules that make up a
> logical notation (the syllogism, the class calculus) and from
> there to electromechanical switches and circuits.[65]
>
> This concept of a 'traceable' migration path from humans to technical
> objects is quite similar to Leroi-Gourhan's concept of
> exteriorisation, the freeing of memory. Yet De Landa does not offer a
> logic for the human drive to invent ourselves in the technical; nor
> does he offer a specific explanation of how technical phyla are
> different from biological phyla. It is precisely these differences
> which will be of interest to us, and it is precisely these
> differences which have in fact given us the logic of technical
> remembering (epiphylogenesis).
>
> So we have established a logic to articulate the evolution of a
> technical object. But one question remains – what is a technical
> object?
>
>
> Defining the technical object: form, function and operational process
> ———————————————————————
>
> Niles Eldredge demarcates lineages for his trilobites on the basis of
> shell shape. Certain shapes emerge at certain points in time, and
> these shapes diverge irrevocably into different branches of the
> phylogenetic diagram. This technique is called comparative anatomy,
> and it works under the assumption that similar morphological
> structures in different organisms have a common evolutionary origin.
> Aside from comparative anatomy, there are several other ways to
> determine evolutionary relationships: comparative embryology,
> molecular, behavioural, physiological, chemical and fossil data are
> also used. A particularly popular technique involves DNA sequencing,
> which compares the precise sequence of nucleotides in two samples of
> DNA.
>
> This is how biology builds the concept of a species. It locates
> certain recurrent and inherited characteristics that distinguish it
> from other species. For example, human beings have 46 chromosomes, we
> have an upright posture and a pronounced temporal cortex. This
> distinguishes us from chimpanzees, who have 48 chromosomes and a
> smaller brain. For certain biologists (Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould
> in particular) you can hence call the resulting species an 'entity'
> – a large-scale system. The individual is nothing outside of its
> history and its inherited characteristics.
>
> What we're saying is that species are entities. They have
> histories, they have origins, they have terminations, and they
> may or may not give rise to descendent species. They are
> individuals in the sense that human beings are individuals,
> albeit very different kinds of individuals. They're large-scale
> systems that have an element of reality to them, and that's a
> big departure in evolutionary biology.[66]
>
> But to regard a species as a large-scale system, biologists must
> necessarily assume that particular morphological or genetic
> characteristics constitute its unity. These characteristics are
> inherited by each generation, they become 'entrenched', they
> constitute a lineage or a line.
>
> The analogy cannot be so easily transferred to technical machines,
> however. If we define technical lineages by their form (as Eldredge
> has done by collecting a particular kind of musical instrument based
> on the way the pipe is wound) then the lines become tangled. The form
> is simply not maintained in any sensible fashion over time – it
> jumps around and changes depending on the technical innovations
> available to it. The bell jumps from right to left, the bell jumps
> across to the right, the pipe changes from silver to brass, the
> valves disappear. It becomes difficult to "rank them in any sensible
> order of ancestors and descendents." [67] The same applies to
> computing, for example. If we define a computer by its form – an
> electronic machine conveying information encoded as binary logic
> across silicon circuits, then the analogue computers from the late
> 30's and early 40's seem completely unrelated. They used neither
> silicon nor binary logic, and were based on brass gears, wheels and
> shafts that had more in common with Eldredge's cornets.
>
> If we define a technical lineage based on function, the problem
> recurs. Let's return to computing as an example. At the end of the
> nineteenth century, the word 'computer' meant a human operating a
> calculator. Early in the twentieth century, these 'computers' became
> large group of mostly female humans performing mathematical
> calculations by hand or on slide rules, housed in large
> warehouses.[68] At the time, these groups were organised for one
> express purpose: to perform calculation-intensive operations for the
> military, primarily ballistic analysis and the creation of artillery
> ranging tables. The 'function' of a computer was to produce
> mathematical data for the military. This changed radically over the
> next 50 years, going through several stages we will explore in more
> detail through the course of this manuscript. The result today is
> that a computer has a multitude of different functions – the very
> least of which is the production of artillery ranging tables. For a
> start, computers are personal devices that manage and create our
> everyday working environment. They are nodes in a greater network –
> the internet. They are the engines of a new form of capitalism, and
> arguably, a new social order. The list goes on, but the fact remains:
> the function of the 'computer' has changed beyond recognition since
> the turn of the twentieth century. To trace a phylogenesis based on
> human function would result in a greater mess than Eldredge's
> retroactive cornets.
>
> So if we can't trace a lineage based on form or function, how can we
> distinguish one technical system from another? As Eldredge himself
> discovered by applying the scientific method to technical evolution
> for the first time, there is an undeniable evolutionary dynamic going
> on. Technical machines come in generations, they transform themselves
> in time, they adapt and adopt characteristics. We have established
> that this dynamic is not genetic, that its mode of transfer in fact
> constitutes a break from genetic evolution. We have established that
> this break revolves around transfer and retroactivity. We have
> demarcated a 'third milieu' to which both the technical artefact and
> techno-logical memory belong, based on Stiegler's concept of
> epiphylogenesis. But the problem remains: which entity, or which
> group of 'characteristics' are we tracing here?
>
> For Gilbert Simondon, we need to understand the genesis of technical
> objects independently of the human functionings which establish use
> behaviour. For if one seeks to establish a lineage based on use "no
> set structure corresponds to a defined use." [69] The object will
> invent itself independently of any fabricating intention. For
> example, Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML to organise the text documents
> of a single corporation – CERN. It is now the lingua franca of a
> global mnemotechnical system, the Internet, and its uses have
> proliferated beyond Berners-Lee's wildest dreams. It has adapted and
> evolved, and it has both incorporated and engendered new functions
> and new material technologies in the process.
>
> The uses and functions of a technical object can never be known,
> these will only be realised in the evolution of the object itself.
> The technical object is not concrete, it is not determined in its
> uses. This is why the influence of 'working prototypes' on the
> engineering community is so important; the fabricating intention has
> little relationship to the object itself, and it is the object as a
> working prototype that will engender new structures and functions.
> Technical machines, maintains Simondon, evolve by a process of
> functional overdetermination. After they have been given a
> materiality, after the "synthetic act of invention" has taken place,
>
> each component in the concrete object is no longer one whose
> essence is to correspond to the accomplishment of a function
> intended by the constructor, but a part of a system in which a
> multitude of forces operate and produce effects independently of
> the fabricating intention.[70]
>
> Subsequent evolution is accomplished by a process of
> 'concretization,' the condensation of various functions in a single
> structure oriented toward efficiency: the base of a light bulb must
> seal it for operation within a certain range of temperatures and
> pressures while also fitting in standard sockets [71] But we are
> still left with a problem: how do we identify the lineage of machines
> themselves? How do we identify their family resemblance?
>
> In evolving, the technical object constitutes a series of objects, a
> lineage or a line. This lineage, of which the synthetic act of
> invention is the ancestor, cannot be identified by a particular
> material form or human use. For Simondon, it can only be identified
> by a group of procedures or processes that remain stable throughout
> the evolutional lineage. It is these procedures, implemented in the
> most diverse domains of use, that constitute the unity of the
> lineage. This is why there is more real analogy between "a spring
> engine and a crossbow than between the latter and a steam
> engine."[72] Both are implementations of procedures to work with
> tensile forces, both are the externalisation of an originary
> heuristic. There will be a variety of such procedures embodied in any
> given object – it is not a matter of locating one. Nevertheless,
> that which resides in machines is certainly only "human reality, the
> human gesture set and crystallised into functioning structures." [73]
> To demarcate a technical object or family of objects, one must first
> locate these procedures and processes.
>
> So where does this leave us in our prolegomena to the history of a
> machine? We have established that technical objects transform
> themselves in time, they engage in transfer and retroactivity. We
> have established that this dynamic constitutes a break from genetic
> evolution, and that this break in turn constitutes its own milieu. We
> have defined the technical object based on a group of techniques or
> processes that have remained stable throughout its evolutional
> lineage. And after Leroi-Gourhan and De Landa, we have suggested that
> these techniques originate in human processes, human processes which
> are themselves already technological. The family resemblance will
> only be seen in the workings of the technical object itself, and not
> its intended human function. However, any technique, once
> externalised into technical artifact, will engender new structures
> and new techniques. If a technique may be defined as itself a
> technical being, then its incarnation qua material artefact may be
> seen as "the being passing out of step with itself" [74], a becoming
> individualised.
>
> What remains to be created is a practical example of this theory, the
> story or the diagram of a particular technical machine. This story
> has yet to be written.
>
>
> Notes:
> ——
>
> [1] Guattari, Felix. _Chaosmosis: an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm_,
> trans. P. Bains & J. Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications, 1995, p.
> 42.
>
> [2] Guattari 1995, p. 40.
>
> [3] Stiegler, Bernard. _Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of
> Epimetheus_, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
> 1998, p. ix.
>
> [4] Stiegler 1998, p. 134.
>
> [5] Walker, Gabrielle. "The Collector," ~New Scientist~, 26 July
> 2003, p. 38.
>
> [6] Walker, p. 38.
>
> [7] Walker, p. 38.
>
> [8] Walker, p. 40.
>
> [9] Walker, p. 41.
>
> [10] Stiegler 1998, p. 31.
>
> [11] Sutton, John. _Philosophy and Memory Traces_, Cambridge:
> Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 4.
>
> [12] Eldredge, cited in Walker, p. 41.
>
> [13] Derrida, Jacques. _Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression_,
> trans. E. Prenowitz, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996,
> p. 11.
>
> [14] Stiegler 1998, p. 152.
>
> [15] Cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 1.
>
> [16] Mitcham, Carl. _Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between
> Engineering and Philosoph_, Chicago: The University of Chicago
> Press, 1994. p. 161.
>
> [17] Stiegler 1998, p. 93.
>
> [18] Stiegler 1998, p. 14.
>
> [19] Stiegler 1998, p. 2.
>
> [20] Plato, cited in Darren Tofts Tofts, _Memory: Trade, a
> Prehistory of Cyberculture_, Singapore: Stamford Press, 1998, p.
> 58.
>
> [21] Beardsworth, Richard. "Towards a Critical Culture of the Image
> – J. Derrida and B. Stiegler, Echographies de la
> television," in ~Tekhnema 4~, 1988. Available online at:
> http://tekhnema.free.fr/4Beardsworth.html.
>
> [22] Stiegler 1998, p. 98.
>
> [23] Meno to Socrates, cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 97.
>
> [24] Socrates, cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 98.
>
> [25] Beardsworth.
>
> [26] Socrates, cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 99.
>
> [27] Guattari 1995, 36.
>
> [28] Stiegler, Bernard. "Our Ailing Educational Institutions" in
> ~Culture Machine 5,~ 2000. Available online at:
> http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk.
>
> [29] Derrida, Jacques. _The Gift of Death_, Chicago: University
> of Chicago Press, 1995. p. 44.
>
> [30] Stiegler 2000.
>
> [31] Derrida 1995.
>
> [32] Cohen, Philip, "You Are What Your Mother Ate," ~New
> Scientist~, Issue 04, August 2003, p. 14.
>
> [33] Stiegler 1998, p. 140.
>
> [34] Stiegler 1998, p. 177.
>
> [35] Stiegler 1998, p. 140.
>
> [36] Stiegler 1998, p. 177.
>
> [37] Stiegler 1998, p. 94.
>
> [38] Stiegler 1998, p. 50.
>
> [39] Leroi-Gourhan, _Gesture and Speech_, trans. A. Bostock
> Berger, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. p. 236.
>
> [40] Leroi-Gourhan,, p. 229.
>
> [41] Leroi-Gourhan, p. 246.
>
> [42] Leroi-Gourhan, p. 264.
>
> [43] Leroi-Gourhan, cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 45.
>
> [44] Stiegler 1998, p. 36.
>
> [45] Leroi-Gourhan, cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 61.
>
> [46] Stiegler, 1998, p. 77.
>
> [47] Guattari, p. 40.
>
> [48] Stiegler 1998, p. 79.
>
> [49] Stiegler 1998, p. 52.
>
> [50] Leroi-Gourhan, p. 10.
>
> [51] Stiegler 1998, p. 26.
>
> [52] Mitcham, p. 235.
>
> [53] Gille, cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 32.
>
> [54] Gille, Bertrand, _History of Techniques_. New York : Gordon
> and Breach Science Publishers, 1986, p. 30.
>
> [55] Gille, p. 70.
>
> [56] De Landa, Manuel, _War in the Age of Intelligent Machines_,
> New York: Zone Books, 1994, p. 3.
>
> [57] De Landa, p. 8.
>
> [58] Simondon, cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 81.
>
> [59] Stiegler 1998, p. 81.
>
> [60] Guattari, p. 36.
>
> [61] Ceruzzi, Paul E. _A History of Modern Computing_, Cambridge:
> MIT Press, 1998, p. 90.
>
> [62] Stiegler 1998, p. 78, my emphasis.
>
> [63] Stiegler 1998, p. 94.
>
> [64] Stiegler 1998, p. 75
>
> [65] De Landa, p. 4.
>
> [66] Eldredge, Niles, "A Battle of Words" in _The Third
> Culture_, ed., Brockman, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 121.
>
> [67] Eldredge, cited in Walker. p. 41.
>
> [68] Ceruzzi, p. 2.
>
> [69] Simondon, cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 69.
>
> [70] Simondon, cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 75.
>
> [71] Feenberg, Andrew, "Heidegger, Habermas, and the Essence of
> Technology," talk given at the International Institute for Advanced
> Study, Kyoto, 1996. Available online at:
> http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/kyoto.html
>
> [72] Simondon, cited in Stiegler 1998, p. 70.
>
> [73] Simondon, cited in Stiegler 1998, 67.
>
> [74] Simondon, Gilbert. "The Genesis of the Individual" in eds.,
> Crary & Kwinter, _Incorporations_, New York: Zone Books, 1992,
> p. 314.
>
>
> ——————–
>
> Belinda Barnet is Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne
> University of Technology, Melbourne. She has published widely on new
> media theory and culture and