Sound Research WIKINDX

   p. 44  

Writing was initially monopolised

"If it is true that the condition for the constitution of individuation as a diacritic is alphabetic writing—which analyzes, synthesizes and mnemonically reproduces the spoken, just as the audiovisual analyzes, synthesizes and techno-logically reproduces perceptions and sensual fantasies—there are also primary practices of non-reflexive, disindividuating writing: in its first stages of development, writing doesn’t produce any reflexivity. It has at this time essentially an instrumental and controlling accounting function and is reserved for a class of writers who monopolize the knowledge of it—the professionals of the profession at the time were ancestors to the Mandarins, as an inevitable consequence, considering the complexity of writing in ideograms."

  Added by: alexb44  05/10/2026, 05:24

Comments:

In this sense writing was disindividuating - much like some technology today.   Added by: alexb44  05/10/2026, 05:24

Keywords:   Grammatology, Philosophy of technology

   p. 46  

Sophists abused the "time of available brains" - analogy to modern (2009) tech

"As is well known, the Sophists were accused of exploiting psychopower—the power over young souls, constituted by writing—for manipulating the minds of young Athenians. In a way, philosophy then accuses the Sophists of exploiting the “time of available brains” that can be harnessed and converted into a material good thanks to writing (the Sophist appears primarily as a merchant of illusions in Plato). Sophistico-literal psychopower is artisanal: its foundation is a psychotechnique, which means that the reader is also a writer. In the industrial analog psychopower based on psychotechnologies, the functions of broadcasting and reception are separated just like those of production and consumption, and the constitution of networks allows for massification, the exploitation and the commercialization of the time of consciousness, thereby becoming the time of the available brains without consciousness. The analysis of the Sophist period in Greek history, which is also the origin of philosophy—itself born in its combat against the misuse of writing—is key to the understanding of what is happening in the current discretization of analog media. For if there is a possible analogy between the inception of alphabetic writing as a discretization of the flux of utterances and that of digital media as the discretization of audiovisual temporal objects, it is to the extent that the audiovisual object, just like alphabetic writing, is a pharmakon."

  Added by: alexb44  05/10/2026, 05:27

Comments:

Illustrates the psychopower of modern technologies, and this can only be said to have been exacerbated over time. What Stiegler alludes to here is more prominent than ever.   Added by: alexb44  05/10/2026, 05:27

Keywords:   Grammatology, Philosophy of technology

   p. 47  

We techno-logical beings individuate through symbolisation (grammatisation)

"So the techno-logical being that can be affected by grammatization—which is to be precise exactly a techno-logization of all signifying fluxes through which this being makes signs, and thus individuates itself through symbolization—is intrinsically and ineluctably pharmacological. It follows that what is true for writing is true for all mnemonic productions stemming from grammatization. Put differently, every epoch of grammatization—of which YouTube is one of the later cases, as it is contemporary with nanotechnologies and synthetic biology— constitutes a major turn in the cultural hegemony and the poisonous heteronomy imposed by the consumerist industrialization of culture. Thus, a pharmacological analysis is required to elaborate a therapeutic prescription—a system of care, i.e. a social and economic organization deriving from a political decision. But to the contrary, as anticipated by Antonio Gramsci, the cultural hegemony of consumerism consists of imposing heteronomy, while making believe that political decisions are no longer possible—“there is no alternative”—because politics has been absorbed by the market and the economy. This happens precisely through psychopower subordinating the time of available brains to the pure law of merchandise. But Gramsci’s concept is not sufficient for imagining either grammatization or its pharmacological dimension, or the therapeutics of which a new politics should consist."

  Added by: alexb44  05/10/2026, 05:33

Comments:

Essentially we individuate through grammatisation because new technologies alter the way we see the world (Dasein?). 

 

  Added by: alexb44  05/10/2026, 05:33

Keywords:   Grammatology, Philosophy of technology

   p. 55  

Videos eat texts. LLMs eat everything.

"The question is then if the image practice is going to compete with that of texts—and with them, if the deep attention produced in reading will be replaced, according to the analyses by N. Katherine Hayles, with what she calls “hyper attention.” Younger people have a tendency, according to Hayles, “to use YouTube as a search engine, i.e. to view the content of the web only from the video angle, as if the textual contents no longer existed. For them, a large part of their experience of the web ends with the videos they find."

  Added by: alexb44  05/10/2026, 05:35

Comments:

This can be directly transferred to LLMs. Even older people are using LLMs as search engines at this point, and that leads to information that is para-phrased by a technology which fundamentally has no understanding of what it is paraphrasing.   Added by: alexb44  05/10/2026, 05:35

Keywords:   Grammatology, Philosophy of technology

   p. 56  

YouTube as pharmakon

"One must both rejoice and worry about such a state of affairs—in the sense that worrying is what makes one think, which consists in fighting against the reactivity that it can also set off. One should also rejoice because the image practices creating this new attractiveness transform the calamitous state of affairs to that of dissociation. One should, however, worry because this new pharmacology—completely ignored by political thought except when it tries to instrumentalize it “pornopolitically”—which calls for a politics of industrial development on a grand scale, based on new educational, cultural and scientific politics, as well as on the audiovisual media completely at their mercy, can lead to either the destruction of attention and the individuation resulting from this deep attention, which has been cultivated through the text since the beginning of the great civilizations—or to the production of a new kind of deep attention, closely connected to new attentional forms created by the development of hypomnemata resulting from the last stages of grammatization"

  Added by: alexb44  05/10/2026, 05:37

Comments:

In the case of YouTube and other social media, arguably the worst-case outcome happened. Technologies cannot be evaluated on the basis of their ideal use-cases, because that is seldom how they are actually used. Instead they must be viewed and understood by what they generally lend themselves to do (dare I mention affordance?)   Added by: alexb44  05/10/2026, 05:39

Keywords:   Grammatology, Philosophy of technology