INVESTIGADORES
VACCARI AndrÉs
artículos
Título:
Unweaving the Program: Stiegler and the Hegemony of Technics
Autor/es:
ANDRÉS VACCARI
Revista:
Transformations: Journal of Media & Culture
Editorial:
University of Queensland
Referencias:
Año: 2009 p. 101 - 139
ISSN:
1444-3775
Resumen:
"Technics and Time" has been advertised as a radical breakthrough in the philosophy of technology, a brave attempt to move beyond the boundaries of the metaphysical tradition in which technology has always been conceptualized. My purpose in this paper is to argue that, although Stiegler?s argument is highly valuable and original, it tends to characterize technology in deterministic, reductionist and essentialist ways, offering a restricted ontology of technology that denies its characteristic heterogeneity, its dynamic multiplicity, contingency and materiality.Stiegler?s understanding of technology makes more sense if we consider it as an accomplished metaphysical conceptualization of mnenotechnics, a limited aspect of technology, the elucidation of which (as Stiegler rightly argues) carries a certain political urgency. Stiegler reduces all technology to mnemotechnics in its epiphylogenetic character, subsuming the technical universe to the sign of the text, the gramme and the inscription (with its ?human? correlatives: memory, anticipation and death). This becomes apparent when we consider the general telos of Technics and Time, which remains concerned with writing, photography, cinema, the archive, and the industrialization of consciousness: technological phenomena more amenable to be subsumed under the textual paradigm. I also examine Stiegler´s reliance on concepts of "program" and the radical break he assumes between "life" and "technics", which buttress his views on culture and individuation. I argue that they depart from rather shaky notions of "program" that are being seriously questioned in their respective fields (genetics, molecular biology, anthropology, etc.). This leads Stiegler into an ontology that continues the history of metaphysics that he sets out to challenge.