Technics and Time

Overview

Technics and Time (La technique et le temps, 1994-2001) is Bernard Stiegler's magnum opus, a three-volume work that aims to do for the question of technology what Heidegger's Being and Time did for the question of being: to show that the technical is not an addendum to human existence but its very condition. The first volume, The Fault of Epimetheus (1994; English 1998), establishes the philosophical foundations; the second, Disorientation (1996; English 2009), extends the analysis to culture and history; the third, Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (2001; English 2011), brings the argument to the industrialized time of cinema, television, and the media.

The work's guiding thesis is that "the human invents himself in technics, by inventing the tool — by becoming, through the tool, technical." There is no pre-technical human who then picks up tools; the human and the technical are co-constituted. Stiegler develops this thesis through a reading of the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, a critical engagement with the anthropology of André Leroi-Gourhan, and a rigorous dialogue with the philosophies of Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida.

Core Ideas

The Fault of Epimetheus

Stiegler's starting point is the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus. When Epimetheus was charged with distributing qualities to the animals, he gave everything away before the humans were created — so Prometheus stole fire and the arts (techne) to give to the humans. Stiegler's reading: the human is the being that was forgotten, the being whose "essence" is precisely the absence of an essence, the animal without qualities that must invent itself through technique. The "fault" of Epimetheus is the originary default — the lack, the forgetting — that opens the space in which the human becomes what it is: a being defined by its prostheses, its tools, its technics. Humanity, on this account, is not a given but a task, accomplished always through the technical.

The Who and the What

Stiegler articulates the co-constitution of the human and the technical through the pair "who" and "what." The "who" is the human subject, the "what" is the technical object — but the two cannot be separated: the "who" only becomes who it is through the "what," and the "what" only has meaning through the "who." There is no "who" before the "what," and no "what" without a "who." This means that the question of technology is not a question about one domain of life among others but the question of the origin of the human itself. The history of the human is the history of its prostheses, and to ask what we are becoming is to ask what we are making.

Epiphylogenesis and the Already-There

Stiegler's most original concept is epiphylogenesis: the recording of experience outside the body. Biological evolution is phylogenesis, inscribed in genes; individual learning is ontogenesis, dying with the organism; but there is a third register — the "epiphylogenetic" memory of tools, marks, and texts — that accumulates across generations and makes cumulative culture possible. The technical object is an "already-there": a deposit of past experience that precedes every new beginning and conditions every possibility of thought. This is why the question of technics is inseparable from the question of time: human time is constituted by this exteriorized, sedimented memory, and the "prosthesis" is not a supplement to the mind but the very structure of its temporality.

Disorientation and the Industrialization of Memory

The later volumes extend the analysis to the industrialization of time and memory. Stiegler develops the concept of grammatization — the discretization and inscription of flows, from writing to the phonograph to cinema — and analyzes the "industrial temporal object": the broadcast, the film, the stream that runs in real time and synchronizes the consciousness of millions. In the age of mass media, and even more in the digital age, the industrial production of memory short-circuits the process of individual and collective psychic development: the "who" is captured, its desire is channeled, and "disorientation" — the loss of the ability to project a future — becomes the condition of the age. The "question of malaise" is the question of what happens to a humanity whose memory is produced for it, industrially.

The Politics of Memory

Stiegler's account of industrialized memory is also a political theory. If the temporal objects that structure consciousness — broadcasts, streams, feeds — are produced industrially and commercially, then the formation of psychic and collective life is no longer a human affair but a corporate one. The "politics of memory" is the struggle over who controls the industrialized time of experience: whether the rhythms of attention, desire, and care will be determined by the profit-driven logic of the attention economy or reclaimed by communities, institutions, and publics. This is why Stiegler insisted that education, research, and culture are the primary political sites of the digital age: they are where the capacity to attend, to remember, and to project a future is either formed or destroyed. The question of technics, he concludes, is finally the question of who we are able to become.

Historical Context

Technics and Time appeared in the 1990s, at the dawn of the digital revolution, and it belongs to the French philosophical tradition of thinking technology from the inside of the human sciences: it engages Heidegger's critique of technology, Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, and Leroi-Gourhan's anthropology of the tool. Stiegler wrote as a former student of Derrida who had spent years in prison studying philosophy by correspondence, and the work's ambition — to give continental philosophy a theory of technics as originary — was unprecedented in scale. It appeared just as the internet and multimedia were transforming culture, giving its account of industrialized memory an extraordinary prescience.

Legacy

Technics and Time is the most systematic philosophy of technics in the continental tradition and a foundational text of the contemporary philosophy of technology. Its concepts — epiphylogenesis, the already-there, grammatization, the industrial temporal object — have become standard tools in media theory, cultural theory, and critical digital studies, and its account of the industrialization of memory anticipates the entire debate about attention, social media, and algorithmic culture.

Critics have found the work's length and density forbidding, and some philosophers have questioned whether its claims about the origin of the human are empirical or metaphysical. But the work's core thesis — that the human and the technical are co-constituted, and that the question of technology is the question of time itself — has proved enormously productive. As the digital age has industrialized not only memory but perception, attention, and desire, Technics and Time remains the indispensable reference for thinking about what is happening to us, and what we might yet become.

Stiegler's work has become the reference point for continental thinking about the digital, and its concepts — epiphylogenesis, grammatization, the industrial temporal object — are now tools of a whole field. Its deepest claim, that the question of technics is the question of who we are able to become, has only grown more urgent as the machines have grown more intimate.

Sources

• Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
• Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
• Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.
• Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.