Sound Research WIKINDX

"For Stiegler, Heidegger fails to follow his own analysis to the realization that technical objects are indispensable to the human experience of time. If as Heidegger argues Dasein is time, as temporality, that is, as remembering and anticipating from an always “enchained” present moment, then this is on the basis of its technically conditioned encounter with the world. The tool, the technique – and in this view both language and material objects are co-implied, composed in human being – are always memories whose deployment is always in anticipation of an outcome [my emphasis]. The knapped flint or the hammer preserves the memory of the gestures which produced it. As a medium or milieu of human existence, temporality is constituted out of this anticipatory projection from a past recollected on the basis of technical facticity. The development of tools and techniques specifically dedicated to support memory, which Stiegler calls “mnemotechnics,” from imaging to storytelling to writing to the digital database, are a specialization of the memorial aspect of every tool."

"Without subscribing to a technological determinist position – for him there is no value in trying to oppose cultural or technological factors to each other in searching for some original condition of human–technical becoming – he will propose that the constitutive condition of human cultural development is one that is always already dis-adjusted, moving toward a metastabilization that is always conditional. It is a core claim of Stiegler’s work that the “who” and the “what” must not be thought in oppositional terms (Stiegler 1998: 177–8). Human and technics compose together a dynamic of mutual becoming."