Prolegomena to a Future Robot History: Stiegler, Epiphylogenesis and Technical Evolution

ANDRÉS VACCARI & BELINDA BARNET

Transformations: Journal of Media and Culture

University of Queensland

Año: 2009 p. 80 - 100

1444-3775

How does one tell the story of a machine? Can we say that technical artefacts have their own genealogies, their own evolutionary dynamic? Bernard Stiegler feels this question is an urgent one, and calls for more research into technical evolution in his book, Technics and Time. ?Today we need to understand the process of technical evolution, given that we are experiencing the deep opacity of technics? (21). In the following essay, we will be answering Stiegler?s call. Firstly, we will be reviewing the work of several key theorists from different disciplines who have attempted to understand technical evolution, many of whom Stiegler uses in his own work; in order of appearance, paleontologist Niles Eldredge, the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Manuel DeLanda, and archeologist André Leroi-Gourhan. We will then lift some ideas and problems from each of them in an effort to construct a prolegomena to the history of a technical machine, from the standpoint of DeLanda´s future "robot historian". In this we want to enquire into the conditions of possibility of the future (or present?) appearance of a hypothetical "machinic agency" with its own autonomy and "vital" force.