"How not to shudder before such a psychotic, at the catastrophe that has unfolded when we see Blanche taken away forever from her 'sanctary' with Stella and Stanley? How not to feel insane ourselves, carried along by this exemplar of the great, mad American destiny--that never fails at the same time to sell us through making us laugh and cry in the face of our own fate, the American Way of Life? America, America!"--Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time vol. 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise.
New civilizations have risen, and old empires have crumbled. Millions have fallen in love, millions more loved and lost. Mountains have crumbled into valleys, and then the valleys were, I don't know, thrown into then ocean or something.
My point is, I've been reading Volume 3 of Technics and Time (subtitled Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise) for a ridiculously long time. Here's a note to aspiring scholars: if it takes you a month to read a 224 paged book, you're doing it wrong. Admittedly, I'm doing better time than I did on volume two, so that's something, at least.
For those whose memories don't span back a month, I did a review of Book 2 here. And because I still had more to say, I continued the epic trek here. I'm hoping this post won't be quite as long, so if you need a refresher on what Stiegler is discussing in this series, refer back to the previous posts.
This book is a notable shift from the first two volumes. This may be a temporal issue--as Stiegler says in the Notice, the original draft of this volume was finished in 1992, along with the other two volumes, but over the following decade, Stiegler kept revising it until it emerged a much different beast. (Side note: between the publication of the French edition in 2001 and now, Stiegler has written 23 books. The man clearly doesn't sleep.) If nothing else, I noticed a sharp reduction in the use of the term "qua." But the difference goes much deeper than that. In volume two, he discussed how new technology has reshaped technics and humanity through simultaneous transmission and changes in that vein, but in volume three, the discussion takes on a more alarmist tone: he truly believes that we are facing a current crisis--a general malaise, to refer back to his subtitle--and that much of this crisis can be traced to the most dominant force in the technoscience stage, the US of A.
But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. Let's take a more leisurely overview. The book can be broadly divided into two parts. The first three chapters describe the consequences of cinematic time, and the last three discuss the general state of malaise, as it relates to education and technology. The division's not quite as neat as that, but it's a useful enough distinction. Chapter 1, "Cinematic Time," unites the technics of the cinema with the three types of memory (primary retention, secondary retention, tertiary retention) that Stiegler laid out near the end of volume 2. A movie functions in a way similar to memory: the director takes a huge amount of footage (the primary retention, if you will), and edits it, cuts it, compresses it to form an abbreviated, supposedly unified end product. The catch is, in Stiegler's view, what's important is not that we've developed this technology that mimicks the way memory works--it's that our consciousness has always been cinematic. The mind automatically creates a continuity between disparate images (the Kuleshov effect). Cinema is thus a particularly powerful tool because it utilizes the same method we are using all the time. It comes back to Stiegler's previous contention that consciousness is not a unified ego, but a constant flux, and the flux of moving images can align itself to this flux--or coerce the flux of consciousness to align itself with cinema--relatively easily.
This view of consciousness depends on the three types of retention being able to affect each other, and Stiegler quickly recaps how previous philosophers--prime example being Husserl--couldn't accept that, as they weren't willing to give full credit to tertiary memory. For movie buffs, he goes into two films in depth to make his point about mixing fluxes. Fellini's Intervista, particularly the scene where an actress from another Fellini film watches footage of herself acting a scene from that film, demonstrates how cinema and consciousness can coincide in a number of reinforcing manners, and Hitchcock's short film "Four O'Clock" demonstrates how the viewer constructs their own interpretation of time in line with the cinematic version played before them.
Stiegler ends the chapter with a quick discussion of television. If we think of photography as the technology that foregrounds the realness of the past, cinema is its extension with the added element of the flux between image and consciousness. Television is then film's extension, adding the elements of real-time viewing, which changes the nature of the event it beholds (think Heisenberg x 10), and mass broadcast, which allows for widespread synchronicity.
Chapter 2, "Cinematic Consciousness," shifts the focus from cinema to consciousness, with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason serving as the main text. He's dealing with two basic strands of theorists here: Adorno and Horkheimer, symbolizing those that decry television for its negative effects on society at large; and Kant and those who try to form a transcendental consciousness without giving tertiary memory its proper dues. A & H (my clever abbreviation) argue that cinema paralyzes imagination, but Stiegler counters that imagination--and by extension, consciousness--has always been cinematic. A & H use Kant's discussion of memory to bolster their arguments, which gives Stiegler an excellent segue into Kant's Critique.
The complicated part of the Critique is that it had two editions, in 1781 and 1787, and the two versions don't always fit well together. In the first, Kant argues that consciousness is a synthesis of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition--apprehension, in that it perceives what's in front of it; reproduction, in that it can mentally reconstruct that event later; and recognition, in that it can apply general structures and recognize them as similar to other encountered structures. Stiegler maps these loosely onto primary, secondary, and tertiary memory, respectively, though he somewhat confusingly refers to technics as a fourth element of the synthesis in a later chapter. The second edition eschews the synthesis in favor of a description of mental figures. Stiegler objects to both versions--the figure version doesn't take into account the tertiary grounding of consciousness, and the three syntheses version doesn't account for the flux of consciousness.
In an almost Derridean analysis of the form of Kant's Critique, Stiegler ends the chapter by bringing it back to A & H. Kant's Critique is a linear, booked model of Kant's own consciousness. It shows interaction with technics, in the way it is inscribed on paper. It shows the process of revision in the two editions. And it shows how consciousness fluctuates with the consciousness of others, in that Kant created the revision as a response to how the original was received by his reading peers. In contrast, the massive tertiary industries of programming technologies, such as television, run the risk of synthesizing all consciousness, thus eliminating the perception of difference and time, and deadening desire, as A & H contend. The problem with their analysis, though, is that they fail to acknowledge how we have always been technically determined.
That brings us to chapter 3, "I and We: The American Politics of Adoption." This chapter brings in the issue of adoption that looms large in the rest of the work, and describes how the synthesis of the consciousness flux works with a larger flux designating a group. It starts by introducing another of the book's deconstructing binaries, practice and theory. Bourdieu's book on television, he argues, is typical of the European theory focus--it treats its subject in a vacuum, and thus misses the point of how it affects individuation. A human being, he argues, is always in a state of flux in terms of their own identity (the I) and the groups they affiliate with (the We). The latter especially is determined by a process of adoption, in which a group has a projection of their joint identity into the future that is fused through its (usually mythical/fictional) past. The I and the We work together--the I functions in the We through the idea of difference, or exception. Without this exception, the We is directionless, creating a mass synthesis of a group that functions without direction. As an immigrant nation, America is the exemplar version of the need for adoption, and the first victim of its failure under the risk of global synchronization. He ends with further segues into the general failing of the education system under this mass industrialization.
The next chapter, "The Malaise of Our Education Institutions," continues on this track. It begins with a distinction between technics in general, and mnemotechnics, tools that act primarily as memory supports. He argues that mnenmotechnics remained rather static--through written word, and the book--and separate from the evolution of the other technics. But now, the two have been fused together. This fusion especially damages the education system, which depended on stable mnemotechnics. And this brings us to another pair of terms: cardinality, which indicates ways of measuring space, and calendarity, ways of measuring time. The education system, he claims, was in many ways a system for interiorizing the technics of both. It was a system for contracting existing knowledge and providing an orientation through it. And now, our relation to them is changing so rapidly, instability has become the new common state, resulting in a general malaise. A proper critique of the education system and this malaise, then, requires a critique of these retentional devices, and a more general examination of how Kant and Heidegger regarded orientation.
And that's the subject of chapter 5, "Making the Difference." This chapter goes back to Kant and Heidegger in a big way. What I knew about Kant and Heidegger before this point can be summed up by an issue of Action Philosophers, so take everything I say about this chapter with a grain of salt. Heidegger criticized Kant for failing to recognize how object and subject interact (in Heidegger's case, he felt they interacted through Dasein, I think), but Stiegler says that Heidegger is guilty of the same for his own failure to give proper credit to technics. The philosophers' respective views on orientation relate back to their views on differentiation, on what basis reason can differentiate. Kant felt that there were real objects, and subjectivity was overlayed on it. Heidegger felt that the real was always filtered through Daisen, or some version of subjectivity. For Kant, reason exists because consciousness needs it to exist, because it required the ability to practically differentiate. In other words, reason is second to practicality. But, as the final chapter describes, the theory/practice split has also been erased.
And that brings us, philosophically kicking and screaming, to chapter six, "Technoscience and Reproduction." To refer back to a previous argument, going back to Aristotle, there's been a history of a split between practice and theory. Science is theory, and refers to the way reality works, the elements that couldn't be thought of as anything other than the way they are. Technology is all about the contingent--changing something to make it better suit the present moment. Technics has always disrupted this relation, but the current state of technoscience has merged them very thoroughly. Science has been subordinated as a sort of machine that creates new venues for industry. Americans are the "least metaphysical people," whatever that means, but they are also the best set up industrially for being at the source of the current situation.
Stiegler then launches into his final example of the new state of retention: reproduction. Cinema and technics have always had an element of reproduction to them--any recording is in a way a reproduction. And by the same token, any reproduction is also a transformation. But the hyper-reproduction we have now is both a combination of the reproductive powers of the digital (copy without degeneration) and the effects of mass production. We can now make reproductions without ever actually having an original product. This new definition of reproduction affects the biological and the technological. And it doesn't help that malaise thing, you know? Stiegler ends the book with an indication that the next topic will be an examination of subjectivity and printing, but considering that he went on to write 23 other books instead of volume 4, I don't think we can expect that next topic any time soon.
As to the first part of the book, it's hard to shake the feeling that Stiegler is being a little anachronistic, if nothing else, by saying our mode of consciousness has always been cinematic. He mitigates the problem slightly by framing it in terms of story--it might be a little hard to accept that consciousness has always been governed by cinematic principles, but I think it's easier to accept that it has always been governed by overlying narratives. I can't help but wonder if he's also succumbing a little to what he complained about the computer scientists in volume 2. He said that when they argued that the human mind is like a computer, the establishing of the parallel blinded them to how the human mind is affected by the computer, and vice versa. I wonder if there's something similar happening if we say our consciousness functions like cinema.
In regards to the second half, it does feel a little turn-of-the-century alarmist. More to the point, it feels like an alarm without its own "projection to the future." Again and again, Stiegler says the first step is to perform a critique of the present system, a critique that acknowledges technics' proper role, but he doesn't really go any further as to what that critique would consist of--just that it needs to happen. I suspect it's an issue that arises in other books he's written, but there's no real solution, or even a hint of a solution, provided here. And despite its rather large swerve from the previous volumes, the book often feels rather repetitive. Time and again, it turns out that the major failure of Kant, or Husserl, or Heidegger, or someone else, is there failure to recognize the significance of technics.
That said, there was a lot I liked about the book. I thought the discussion of cinematic time was very interesting, and that his comparison between Kant's consciousness and his writing touched on something very significant in a very subtle manner. I wish that he touched more directly on video games--there is a grand total of one mention in the entirety of the three volumes, and that's to state that the video games are potentially what Horkheimer and Adorno mean when they refer to cinema's ability to disrupt its spectator's sense of reality and fiction. I really feel like there's more to discuss on that subject--I don't suppose anyone knows if Stiegler returns to it later? Maybe in one of the other 23 books?
Sigh. Well, time to teach myself to read French, then.
Later Days.
Showing posts with label bernard stiegler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bernard stiegler. Show all posts
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Book Review: Technics and Time vol. 2 by Bernard Stiegler (part 2)
Last time, I gave a general outline of the Stiegler argument, as it sits at the beginning of Book 2. Admittedly, I left out some of the finer details: the Epimethean/Promethean allegory Stiegler uses for his basis, his long focus on Rosseau's Origin of Language, and a really long discussion of anthropology ala André Leroi-Gourhan. But the essentials are there.
Volume 2 opens with a brief introduction. It summarizes his primary points: human being is a technics-oriented being. We've entered a new stage of industrial activity that has altered our memory and individuation. Heidegger's Tool-Being opens the way for a discussion of technics, but he goes too far on emphasizing present-being over past and future. Then Steigler briefly outlines the book, and the intro ends. (He does skip the last chapter in this outline--it's interesting, because even while I was reading it, the fourth chapter of the book felt like a different discussion than what came before.)
In the first chapter, The Orthographic Age, Steigler sets up the contrast between numeric and analogic devices and the written word, with more of an emphasis on the latter. It starts, however, with a thorough investigation of the nature of photography, as outlined by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. Barthes argued that the camera offers a new accessibility to the present moment, to the real of what's going on right now. And a photo viewed in the present is a direct line to the "now" depicted in the photo. For Stiegler, then, the camera and photograph are an exemplary form of the power of technics: it's a tool that directly connects tertiary memory with perception, in a way that alters human experience. He briefly mentions a few other themes--camera's connection to the immediacy of film ala Walter Benjamin, Lacan's mirror stage and orthopedic (right-thinking) self-obsession, the certainty of the photo, and the deferral between the spectator's grasp of a photo and the moment it's taken and transcribed.
Then we're shifting into writing, and it's a whole new ball game. If photos offer a direct line between past and present, writing offers an access that always has a built-in gap--it pretends to be certain of what it speaks of, but there's always an uncertainty because that gap is always there. Our original concept of citizenship comes from writing--when we write what it means to be a citizen into law, we're not just formalizing citizenship that already exists, we're bringing it into existence. The key here is that writing is about a repetition--it preserves knowledge so that it can be repeated. But this repetition is never exact; there's always some break between the meaning that the writer intended and the meaning that the reader interprets. Stiegler uses three theorists to bolster these ideas. Derrida's différance (something that both constitutes a difference and defers exact formulation) explains the slippage between writing and reading. Husserl enters to offer the connection between scientific thinking and writing--Stiegler agrees, but wants a greater emphasis on the role of tertiary memory. That's where Jean Bottéro comes in; Bottéro argues that writing shifts clearly from something that aids memory (in terms of making lists) to becoming memory, but Steigler argues that no such shifting moment can be found. He closes the chapter with a question that segues to the next topic: if we understand writing as a memory that is always delayed from the original event, and we accept that writing forms the backbone of modern civilization, how do new technologies and their emphasis on speed change humanity's technics?
Thus Chapter 2: The Genesis of Disorientation. All that stuff on writing is, essentially, there to demonstrate how different our current age is from what came before. It returns to Stiegler's anthropological focus, somewhat, and relies heavily on Leroi-Gourhan. Dasein, or Being (Dasein doesn't exactly translate into being, but I don't want to get bogged down in an exact definition for the moment) is not about the individualized being, but about the group. For much of human history, an important level of memory was the ethnic memory, the shared memory of a culture. While the technic always played some role in this type of memory, new use of technics threatens ethnic tradition more than ever before. At the same time, it's also altering the individual, in that thanks to industrialization, personal style is more customizable than ever--you can form a locality, but not a territory. In other words, you can mentally orient yourself in an area (the whole "think globally, act locally" slogan comes out of this), but being able to identify yourself as part of an ethnic territorial group isn't an option like it used to be. Essentially, this chapter is what connects Steigler's previous discussion (on how the evolution of human to something that walks upright is an evolution also of technics) to the current moment of industrialization, which is the subject for Chapter 3.
And thus, Chapter 3, The Industrialization of Memory. Weighing in at a whopping 90 pages, it's pretty clearly the main focus of the book. After a brief overview, Steigler starts with Simon Nora and Alain Minc's report on technology, which coined the term "informatics" to describe how modern technology links information with electricity and commerce--Stiegler adds biotech as well, to remind us that these technics are always a part of the human. Controlling force of such technics has slipped from state to industry, and knowledge turns into what can be calculable, into information, and the subsequent rupture with normality makes the future seem monstrous. (His verdict, not necessarily mine.)
Unlike knowledge, information functions on value and speed--once it's not immediate, its value is gone. No one cares about yesterday's news. New media technology has created real-time (see Paul Virilio if you really want a discussion on the subject), by eliminating delay between an event, the input from it, and the reception of that input to the global audience. Historically, writing has always preserved a split between the event and the report between the event; real-time broadcast eliminates that distance, to the point where the event is indistinguishable from the reporting of the event. In fact, the event is defined by its reporting--if no one reports on something, it's like it never happened. Think about how politics has been shaped by an endless focus on how every word a politician says will be received and broadcast. Stiegler doesn't want to focus on the new media/writing split (and in fact probably would never use the phrase "new media" himself), but he does want to focus on the change in humanity that results in the new acceleration.
In terms of the human, new science focuses extend our concept of the human, and Stiegler uses a brief biological shift to bring in cognitive science. Since it's all about explaining human thought via machines, it may seem like a natural fit with phenomenological technics, but Stiegler complains that it's fundamentally flawed. He uses Alan Turing as the example: Turing considered how the process of humans thinking could be explained in terms of the process of computers processing, but such a parallel dismisses how computers have changed the way humans think--because they're thinking about how computers and humans run in parallel, cognitive scientists fail to recognize where humans and computers intersect. Multiple-agent theory works better, as it's based on animal group-minds, but such an analysis fails to account for individual experience. Stiegler closes the chapter with a summary of industrial memory and the program: we've always been programmed by our technics, but now that technics has created a sense of ubiquity and a lack of control. Who and what is being programmed?
The final chapter, Temporal Object and Retentional Finitude, is largely about how we go from perception into the other stages of memory, and vice versa. Stiegler labors greatly to build a segue here from the previous chapter, in comparing Husserl to cognitive science, but really, it's a vastly different subject from what's come previously. The chapter doesn't fit well with the rest of the book, but it does work in terms of the larger discussion of technics. Essentially, what Stiegler wants to do is distinguish Husserl's account of memory--perception, primary memory, and secondary memory, with clearly defined demarcations between them--with his own version, which focuses on their permeability with other, and with technics. His primary theoretical allies for this task is Derrida, who has been known to comment on Husserl in some depth, and Paul Ricœur, another French philosopher who focused on phenomenology and hermeneutics (hermeneutics = interpretation. It doesn't really, but again, it's a useful starting lie).
I've already discussed how these types of memory are distinguished; again, where Stiegler differs from Husserl is that he insists on the permeability between the types, and the involvement of technics. I'll admit, my comprehension here has some large gaps--I simply haven't read the Husserl texts Stiegler is referring to here, and thus lack the understanding to grasp his finer points. In addition to the memory distinction, he also rejects Husserl's description of memory processes in terms of the tone of the melody; his dismissal of the comparison is actually one of the book's more memorable quotations: "To apprehend isolated tones in a melody or phonemes in a language, as an artifact, is just as useless as trying to understand the crackling sound of a fire through the study of wood" (207). He also rejects the spatial metaphor Husserl uses to discuss the limits of temporal retention, for two reasons. First, he prefers to think of the limits of memory (especially secondary memory) in terms not of spatial receding, but of forgetting, so that every repetition of memory is a selection that is not entirely identical to the one before it. And second, the emphasis on spatial limits lends itself to compartmentalization of perception and the individual, both things Stiegler is against. He would rather think of memory--all types, and perception as well--as fluxes that operate within fluxes, with our memory and our perception and our tools constantly changing each other with collections and recollections.
The chapter and book close with a return to industrialization. Steigler repeats that our new speeds encourage simultaneous broadcast and real-time events, resulting in a decontextualization that removes the concept of territory while merging the human further with technics, and memory with perception and image consciousness. End of, as Gene Hunt would say.
That's the book. I do, I admit, have a few problems with it. The frustrating thing is that I think the writing suggests the solutions to said problems, but just doesn't bother to address them. First is the repetition. Not so much in terms of the material (although that gets rather repetitive too), but in terms of word choice. Actually, in terms of the use of just one word. Good God, how many times can one person use "qua" in a book? I'd suggest you do a drinking game wherein you take a shot every time "qua" appears, but most people would be dead by alcohol poisoning before they got half way through. Of course, the repetition solves itself--that is, after all, what technics is all about.
Stiegler's sharp division between humans and animals. It only comes up sporadically in this book, but it was a much bigger element in the first volume. Essentially, Stiegler feels that while animals may use tools, they can't form the memories that allow them to use said tools in such a way that the method is repeatable--not so much on an individual level, but on a species level. They just don't have any way of transmitting the knowledge--no tertiary memory. The annoying thing is that most of the animal/human difference comes out of the Epimetheus myth that Stiegler uses as an allegory in the first book to explain how technics works. So it's a little muddy on how much of this is his own "official" stance and how much is because of the metaphor he wants to use to explain it (a common problem, as we'll see). Part of the animal/human split also comes from how he wants to give some legitimacy to the term epiphylogenesis--how humans evolved via tool use--by contrasting it with regular, run-of-the-mill evolution. But since part of his point in the discussion of human evolution is that you can't point to the moment where human began, the distinction seems to muddle itself.
(I'm also less than fond of his binary between the written and new media, but considering that my own dissertation is kind of big on that split as well, I've decided that the glass-dweller won't be providing projectiles.)
My other big peeve is the way he fully embraces Barthes' original concept of photography--namely, that it offers direct access to the Real. The photographed moment, to me, seems just as perception-based as any other moment. The idea that the real is captured in a photo just seems like a cultural conception of photography that we're just not at any more. (Oh, another problem, one that comes up reasonably often in such broad scope discussions--even acknowledging the argument concerning the effacing of the ethnic, Stiegler fails to properly recognize his tendency towards universalizing in his discussions.) Again, it's hard to tell how much of this is actually Stiegler's stance, though, and how much comes out of the camera's metaphoric use as a contrast with the delayed access to an interpretative past offered by writing.
The other problem here is that, while I have read Barthes' commentary on the image, I haven't read Camera Lucida. So add that along with the works of Heidegger and Husserl that I really need to read if I'm going to follow these arguments to their full length.
These complaints are all very secondary, though. I like Steigler's general theory immensely. And it will be immensely useful in my studies: how video games work as tools, how memories form in video games (which basically function on repetition), how objects in video games work in tools, and how the writing/media distinction applies to video games. It's been enormously helpful in expanding my knowledge into a new area--and, by extension, expanding me into a new area.
Of course, anyone who's been watching my eating habits while reading this book knows how it's been expanding me into new areas.
...Yep, ending on a fat joke. Gotta keep it classy.
Later Days.
Volume 2 opens with a brief introduction. It summarizes his primary points: human being is a technics-oriented being. We've entered a new stage of industrial activity that has altered our memory and individuation. Heidegger's Tool-Being opens the way for a discussion of technics, but he goes too far on emphasizing present-being over past and future. Then Steigler briefly outlines the book, and the intro ends. (He does skip the last chapter in this outline--it's interesting, because even while I was reading it, the fourth chapter of the book felt like a different discussion than what came before.)
In the first chapter, The Orthographic Age, Steigler sets up the contrast between numeric and analogic devices and the written word, with more of an emphasis on the latter. It starts, however, with a thorough investigation of the nature of photography, as outlined by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. Barthes argued that the camera offers a new accessibility to the present moment, to the real of what's going on right now. And a photo viewed in the present is a direct line to the "now" depicted in the photo. For Stiegler, then, the camera and photograph are an exemplary form of the power of technics: it's a tool that directly connects tertiary memory with perception, in a way that alters human experience. He briefly mentions a few other themes--camera's connection to the immediacy of film ala Walter Benjamin, Lacan's mirror stage and orthopedic (right-thinking) self-obsession, the certainty of the photo, and the deferral between the spectator's grasp of a photo and the moment it's taken and transcribed.
Then we're shifting into writing, and it's a whole new ball game. If photos offer a direct line between past and present, writing offers an access that always has a built-in gap--it pretends to be certain of what it speaks of, but there's always an uncertainty because that gap is always there. Our original concept of citizenship comes from writing--when we write what it means to be a citizen into law, we're not just formalizing citizenship that already exists, we're bringing it into existence. The key here is that writing is about a repetition--it preserves knowledge so that it can be repeated. But this repetition is never exact; there's always some break between the meaning that the writer intended and the meaning that the reader interprets. Stiegler uses three theorists to bolster these ideas. Derrida's différance (something that both constitutes a difference and defers exact formulation) explains the slippage between writing and reading. Husserl enters to offer the connection between scientific thinking and writing--Stiegler agrees, but wants a greater emphasis on the role of tertiary memory. That's where Jean Bottéro comes in; Bottéro argues that writing shifts clearly from something that aids memory (in terms of making lists) to becoming memory, but Steigler argues that no such shifting moment can be found. He closes the chapter with a question that segues to the next topic: if we understand writing as a memory that is always delayed from the original event, and we accept that writing forms the backbone of modern civilization, how do new technologies and their emphasis on speed change humanity's technics?
Thus Chapter 2: The Genesis of Disorientation. All that stuff on writing is, essentially, there to demonstrate how different our current age is from what came before. It returns to Stiegler's anthropological focus, somewhat, and relies heavily on Leroi-Gourhan. Dasein, or Being (Dasein doesn't exactly translate into being, but I don't want to get bogged down in an exact definition for the moment) is not about the individualized being, but about the group. For much of human history, an important level of memory was the ethnic memory, the shared memory of a culture. While the technic always played some role in this type of memory, new use of technics threatens ethnic tradition more than ever before. At the same time, it's also altering the individual, in that thanks to industrialization, personal style is more customizable than ever--you can form a locality, but not a territory. In other words, you can mentally orient yourself in an area (the whole "think globally, act locally" slogan comes out of this), but being able to identify yourself as part of an ethnic territorial group isn't an option like it used to be. Essentially, this chapter is what connects Steigler's previous discussion (on how the evolution of human to something that walks upright is an evolution also of technics) to the current moment of industrialization, which is the subject for Chapter 3.
And thus, Chapter 3, The Industrialization of Memory. Weighing in at a whopping 90 pages, it's pretty clearly the main focus of the book. After a brief overview, Steigler starts with Simon Nora and Alain Minc's report on technology, which coined the term "informatics" to describe how modern technology links information with electricity and commerce--Stiegler adds biotech as well, to remind us that these technics are always a part of the human. Controlling force of such technics has slipped from state to industry, and knowledge turns into what can be calculable, into information, and the subsequent rupture with normality makes the future seem monstrous. (His verdict, not necessarily mine.)
Unlike knowledge, information functions on value and speed--once it's not immediate, its value is gone. No one cares about yesterday's news. New media technology has created real-time (see Paul Virilio if you really want a discussion on the subject), by eliminating delay between an event, the input from it, and the reception of that input to the global audience. Historically, writing has always preserved a split between the event and the report between the event; real-time broadcast eliminates that distance, to the point where the event is indistinguishable from the reporting of the event. In fact, the event is defined by its reporting--if no one reports on something, it's like it never happened. Think about how politics has been shaped by an endless focus on how every word a politician says will be received and broadcast. Stiegler doesn't want to focus on the new media/writing split (and in fact probably would never use the phrase "new media" himself), but he does want to focus on the change in humanity that results in the new acceleration.
In terms of the human, new science focuses extend our concept of the human, and Stiegler uses a brief biological shift to bring in cognitive science. Since it's all about explaining human thought via machines, it may seem like a natural fit with phenomenological technics, but Stiegler complains that it's fundamentally flawed. He uses Alan Turing as the example: Turing considered how the process of humans thinking could be explained in terms of the process of computers processing, but such a parallel dismisses how computers have changed the way humans think--because they're thinking about how computers and humans run in parallel, cognitive scientists fail to recognize where humans and computers intersect. Multiple-agent theory works better, as it's based on animal group-minds, but such an analysis fails to account for individual experience. Stiegler closes the chapter with a summary of industrial memory and the program: we've always been programmed by our technics, but now that technics has created a sense of ubiquity and a lack of control. Who and what is being programmed?
The final chapter, Temporal Object and Retentional Finitude, is largely about how we go from perception into the other stages of memory, and vice versa. Stiegler labors greatly to build a segue here from the previous chapter, in comparing Husserl to cognitive science, but really, it's a vastly different subject from what's come previously. The chapter doesn't fit well with the rest of the book, but it does work in terms of the larger discussion of technics. Essentially, what Stiegler wants to do is distinguish Husserl's account of memory--perception, primary memory, and secondary memory, with clearly defined demarcations between them--with his own version, which focuses on their permeability with other, and with technics. His primary theoretical allies for this task is Derrida, who has been known to comment on Husserl in some depth, and Paul Ricœur, another French philosopher who focused on phenomenology and hermeneutics (hermeneutics = interpretation. It doesn't really, but again, it's a useful starting lie).
I've already discussed how these types of memory are distinguished; again, where Stiegler differs from Husserl is that he insists on the permeability between the types, and the involvement of technics. I'll admit, my comprehension here has some large gaps--I simply haven't read the Husserl texts Stiegler is referring to here, and thus lack the understanding to grasp his finer points. In addition to the memory distinction, he also rejects Husserl's description of memory processes in terms of the tone of the melody; his dismissal of the comparison is actually one of the book's more memorable quotations: "To apprehend isolated tones in a melody or phonemes in a language, as an artifact, is just as useless as trying to understand the crackling sound of a fire through the study of wood" (207). He also rejects the spatial metaphor Husserl uses to discuss the limits of temporal retention, for two reasons. First, he prefers to think of the limits of memory (especially secondary memory) in terms not of spatial receding, but of forgetting, so that every repetition of memory is a selection that is not entirely identical to the one before it. And second, the emphasis on spatial limits lends itself to compartmentalization of perception and the individual, both things Stiegler is against. He would rather think of memory--all types, and perception as well--as fluxes that operate within fluxes, with our memory and our perception and our tools constantly changing each other with collections and recollections.
The chapter and book close with a return to industrialization. Steigler repeats that our new speeds encourage simultaneous broadcast and real-time events, resulting in a decontextualization that removes the concept of territory while merging the human further with technics, and memory with perception and image consciousness. End of, as Gene Hunt would say.
That's the book. I do, I admit, have a few problems with it. The frustrating thing is that I think the writing suggests the solutions to said problems, but just doesn't bother to address them. First is the repetition. Not so much in terms of the material (although that gets rather repetitive too), but in terms of word choice. Actually, in terms of the use of just one word. Good God, how many times can one person use "qua" in a book? I'd suggest you do a drinking game wherein you take a shot every time "qua" appears, but most people would be dead by alcohol poisoning before they got half way through. Of course, the repetition solves itself--that is, after all, what technics is all about.
Stiegler's sharp division between humans and animals. It only comes up sporadically in this book, but it was a much bigger element in the first volume. Essentially, Stiegler feels that while animals may use tools, they can't form the memories that allow them to use said tools in such a way that the method is repeatable--not so much on an individual level, but on a species level. They just don't have any way of transmitting the knowledge--no tertiary memory. The annoying thing is that most of the animal/human difference comes out of the Epimetheus myth that Stiegler uses as an allegory in the first book to explain how technics works. So it's a little muddy on how much of this is his own "official" stance and how much is because of the metaphor he wants to use to explain it (a common problem, as we'll see). Part of the animal/human split also comes from how he wants to give some legitimacy to the term epiphylogenesis--how humans evolved via tool use--by contrasting it with regular, run-of-the-mill evolution. But since part of his point in the discussion of human evolution is that you can't point to the moment where human began, the distinction seems to muddle itself.
(I'm also less than fond of his binary between the written and new media, but considering that my own dissertation is kind of big on that split as well, I've decided that the glass-dweller won't be providing projectiles.)
My other big peeve is the way he fully embraces Barthes' original concept of photography--namely, that it offers direct access to the Real. The photographed moment, to me, seems just as perception-based as any other moment. The idea that the real is captured in a photo just seems like a cultural conception of photography that we're just not at any more. (Oh, another problem, one that comes up reasonably often in such broad scope discussions--even acknowledging the argument concerning the effacing of the ethnic, Stiegler fails to properly recognize his tendency towards universalizing in his discussions.) Again, it's hard to tell how much of this is actually Stiegler's stance, though, and how much comes out of the camera's metaphoric use as a contrast with the delayed access to an interpretative past offered by writing.
The other problem here is that, while I have read Barthes' commentary on the image, I haven't read Camera Lucida. So add that along with the works of Heidegger and Husserl that I really need to read if I'm going to follow these arguments to their full length.
These complaints are all very secondary, though. I like Steigler's general theory immensely. And it will be immensely useful in my studies: how video games work as tools, how memories form in video games (which basically function on repetition), how objects in video games work in tools, and how the writing/media distinction applies to video games. It's been enormously helpful in expanding my knowledge into a new area--and, by extension, expanding me into a new area.
Of course, anyone who's been watching my eating habits while reading this book knows how it's been expanding me into new areas.
...Yep, ending on a fat joke. Gotta keep it classy.
Later Days.
Book Review: Technics and Time vol. 2 by Bernard Stiegler (part 1)
"Only God doesn’t forget. But he has nothing to memorize."
--Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation
It's been a long time since I've done a book review of an explicitly scholarly work. And with no offense meant to Mr. Zielinski, Bernard Stiegler is writing a whole different kind of book. This isn't going to be the usual type review--this isn't about whether the book is well-written or not; rather, my main consideration here is going to be trying to understand what's going on, and what can be profitably extracted for video game analysis in particular. So: I'm going to describe Stiegler's general theory, give a brief overview of the book itself (chapter by chapter), and then discuss what bugged me about his approach, what use I can make of it, and who I should brush up on as a result.
Before we jump in, I do want to do one element of the traditional PoC book review: a brief explanation of my personal connection to the source material. I've chosen the Technics and Time trilogy to be the last set of books I read before jumping full steam into the dissertation. To be honest, they're proving to be a far more difficult read than I've anticipated. Part of the problem is my general unfamiliarity with French theory and philosophy; a much bigger part of my problem is my unfamiliarity with phenomenology. (If you are similarly unaware of phenomenology, the simplest explanation I've come across is that it's the investigation of the difference between your perception of a thing and that actual thing. In truth, phenomenology isn't really anything like that, but it's a useful lie to get started.)
At any rate, it's taken me a month or so to read the first two volumes. And I neared the tail end of the second earlier this week, I was really starting to wonder if there was any point. The style was so dense, the work was so impenetrable that I was really worried I may just be wasting my time. Then two things happened: first, I started reading another phenomenology book (more on that later, perhaps), and realized that I understood and recognized the basic concepts the author was talking about. And second, I had a long talk with some fellow grads on phenomenology, and discovered I could hold my own. In other words, both experiences taught me that I had learned something from these readings, something that I could extrapolate to other work--as long as I could articulate what that something may be.
And thus we have this post.
(I'll mention for the record that this is all my interpretation, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Followed by a salt lick. And probably some more salt.)
While my focus here is book 2, it's book 1 that really sets up Stiegler's argument. In a nutshell, he's taking key elements from phenomenology as outlined by previous phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, as well as hefty amounts of deconstructionism from French philosopher Jacques Derrida. (Here's a picture of him giving his sexy eyes.) This is all in very layman's terms, but Stiegler's basic argument is that humans are defined by our tools, or technics, as he calls it. The irreducible element, the species-distinguishing trait of the human race is the ability to recognize that objects can be used as tools, and that once we use an object in this manner, we can do so again (This repetition factor is hugely important.). And Stiegler's definition of "tool" is pretty broad. A screwdriver is a tool, but so is a television. A book is a tool. Other people are tools. Your body is a tool.
You'd better believe I'm a tool.
But if tool use is the fundamental trait of the human, two facts follow:
1) A human being without tools is not a human being at all.
2) Our lives are shaped by our tools. You change the nature of a tool, then you change the nature of a human.
Once you accept language as a tool, the consequences of 1) don't seem so worrisome. If language is a tool, then words are tools, and if thoughts are composed of words, then thoughts are tools as well--as long as a person can think, they're never without some sort of tools. To Stiegler, any tool that extends a human's reach to affect something more than his immediate being is a prosthesis--in fact, it extends the human's being. Where does the human end and the prosthesis begin? It doesn't, and that's Stiegler's point: we are always our prostheses. (Simple example: say another car hits your vehicle. If you're outside that vehicle, you'll probably say "you hit my car!" But if you're inside it, you'll say "You hit me!" We extend ourselves into our tools.)
The second point, that changing the tool changes the person, gets to Stiegler's main thesis: because of the rapid progression of new media technologies, the nature of the human being has been irreversibly altered to a scale never seen before. A part of this alteration is explained by Stiegler's other main point on technics: we store our memories in our tools. That's where repetition comes in--it's not just that we know how to use tools, but we can remember how to use them, and shape our lives around those memories.
This wasn't an entirely new idea for me. Back way back, Don Norman talked about something very similar in his discussion of design affordance. This is a lot more complicated--in part because it's being applied in a more in-depth manner, in part because it comes out a theoretic tradition that's much more complicated, and in part because Stiegler uses multiple triads of memory. Memory-out-of-tool is always referred to as tertiary memory, but what constitutes the number 1 and number 2 slot slips a little. He takes the original divisions of memory from Husserl, whom we'll see more of later. For current purposes, Husserl distinguished three different types of thought in regards to time: there's immediate perception; there's primary memory, which is short term collections of perceptions; and there is secondary memory, which involves later recollections of the primary stuff. To this list, Stiegler makes a few changes (again, we'll discuss them later), and adds memory stored in tools, or tertiary memory.
The other triad of memory that arises is in terms of types of being: on a level of the single person, you have the individual memory. On the level of the group, you have ethnic memory. And on the level of tools, you have technics or tertiary memory. Stiegler's theory on the current level of industrial synthesis, as he calls it, is that our new ubiquitous tools have eroded ethnic memory into nonexistence, and the individual becomes the transindividual (I'd explain that term, but it doesn't come up much in the second book, and we've still got a lot of other ground to cover.). That we store memory in tools is easy enough to grasp, depending on the tool, at least. Obviously, humanity has been storing memory in writing for centuries; that's essentially what a book is. And now, we store parts of ourselves in media devices all the time: our Ipods have our playlists, our Iphones have our conversations, our credit cards have our banking history. What's a little more shocking to grasp is that we don't just store information about ourselves in tools; we store the information, the use, of the tools in ourselves.
I offer myself as an example. I'm a lifelong student; I have taken dozens of lecture-based classes. And in those classes, I've learned to take notes. The process has been ingrained in me; you sit in the classroom, someone talks in front of you, you write it down, and knowledge is transferred. (Actually, Stiegler distinguishes sharply between knowledge and information, but never mind.) What I've discovered, though, is that saying this method is ingrained in me is not just a fancy figure of speech. The process of note-taking has been repeated on me so many times that if you take away my pencil and paper and force me to just listen, I can't do it. I mean, I can, but if you want my full attention, you'll have to give me some looseleaf. It doesn't even matter if I read what I've written down ever again. Put me in a schoolroom setting, and my secondary and primary memories require a pencil and paper to properly function. My tools determine the way I think.
Now, extrapolate that to a generation of children that have laptops instead of paper. Iphone messaging instead of landlines. Video games instead of books.
Then you begin to see why Stiegler might be of interest to a person researching text and image in video games.
Now, this is just a bare bones view of the theory. In actuality, it's much more complicated, much more nuanced, and generally much more French and phenomenological and dense. But with the overview above, we're ready to get into the actual book.
...Or at least, we're ready to do it tomorrow. My tertiary memory in the form of the automatic disk scan my computer performs at 3:00 am is reminding me it's time to go to sleep.
Later Days.
--Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation
It's been a long time since I've done a book review of an explicitly scholarly work. And with no offense meant to Mr. Zielinski, Bernard Stiegler is writing a whole different kind of book. This isn't going to be the usual type review--this isn't about whether the book is well-written or not; rather, my main consideration here is going to be trying to understand what's going on, and what can be profitably extracted for video game analysis in particular. So: I'm going to describe Stiegler's general theory, give a brief overview of the book itself (chapter by chapter), and then discuss what bugged me about his approach, what use I can make of it, and who I should brush up on as a result.
Before we jump in, I do want to do one element of the traditional PoC book review: a brief explanation of my personal connection to the source material. I've chosen the Technics and Time trilogy to be the last set of books I read before jumping full steam into the dissertation. To be honest, they're proving to be a far more difficult read than I've anticipated. Part of the problem is my general unfamiliarity with French theory and philosophy; a much bigger part of my problem is my unfamiliarity with phenomenology. (If you are similarly unaware of phenomenology, the simplest explanation I've come across is that it's the investigation of the difference between your perception of a thing and that actual thing. In truth, phenomenology isn't really anything like that, but it's a useful lie to get started.)
At any rate, it's taken me a month or so to read the first two volumes. And I neared the tail end of the second earlier this week, I was really starting to wonder if there was any point. The style was so dense, the work was so impenetrable that I was really worried I may just be wasting my time. Then two things happened: first, I started reading another phenomenology book (more on that later, perhaps), and realized that I understood and recognized the basic concepts the author was talking about. And second, I had a long talk with some fellow grads on phenomenology, and discovered I could hold my own. In other words, both experiences taught me that I had learned something from these readings, something that I could extrapolate to other work--as long as I could articulate what that something may be.
And thus we have this post.
(I'll mention for the record that this is all my interpretation, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Followed by a salt lick. And probably some more salt.)
While my focus here is book 2, it's book 1 that really sets up Stiegler's argument. In a nutshell, he's taking key elements from phenomenology as outlined by previous phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, as well as hefty amounts of deconstructionism from French philosopher Jacques Derrida. (Here's a picture of him giving his sexy eyes.) This is all in very layman's terms, but Stiegler's basic argument is that humans are defined by our tools, or technics, as he calls it. The irreducible element, the species-distinguishing trait of the human race is the ability to recognize that objects can be used as tools, and that once we use an object in this manner, we can do so again (This repetition factor is hugely important.). And Stiegler's definition of "tool" is pretty broad. A screwdriver is a tool, but so is a television. A book is a tool. Other people are tools. Your body is a tool.
You'd better believe I'm a tool.
But if tool use is the fundamental trait of the human, two facts follow:
1) A human being without tools is not a human being at all.
2) Our lives are shaped by our tools. You change the nature of a tool, then you change the nature of a human.
Once you accept language as a tool, the consequences of 1) don't seem so worrisome. If language is a tool, then words are tools, and if thoughts are composed of words, then thoughts are tools as well--as long as a person can think, they're never without some sort of tools. To Stiegler, any tool that extends a human's reach to affect something more than his immediate being is a prosthesis--in fact, it extends the human's being. Where does the human end and the prosthesis begin? It doesn't, and that's Stiegler's point: we are always our prostheses. (Simple example: say another car hits your vehicle. If you're outside that vehicle, you'll probably say "you hit my car!" But if you're inside it, you'll say "You hit me!" We extend ourselves into our tools.)
The second point, that changing the tool changes the person, gets to Stiegler's main thesis: because of the rapid progression of new media technologies, the nature of the human being has been irreversibly altered to a scale never seen before. A part of this alteration is explained by Stiegler's other main point on technics: we store our memories in our tools. That's where repetition comes in--it's not just that we know how to use tools, but we can remember how to use them, and shape our lives around those memories.
This wasn't an entirely new idea for me. Back way back, Don Norman talked about something very similar in his discussion of design affordance. This is a lot more complicated--in part because it's being applied in a more in-depth manner, in part because it comes out a theoretic tradition that's much more complicated, and in part because Stiegler uses multiple triads of memory. Memory-out-of-tool is always referred to as tertiary memory, but what constitutes the number 1 and number 2 slot slips a little. He takes the original divisions of memory from Husserl, whom we'll see more of later. For current purposes, Husserl distinguished three different types of thought in regards to time: there's immediate perception; there's primary memory, which is short term collections of perceptions; and there is secondary memory, which involves later recollections of the primary stuff. To this list, Stiegler makes a few changes (again, we'll discuss them later), and adds memory stored in tools, or tertiary memory.
The other triad of memory that arises is in terms of types of being: on a level of the single person, you have the individual memory. On the level of the group, you have ethnic memory. And on the level of tools, you have technics or tertiary memory. Stiegler's theory on the current level of industrial synthesis, as he calls it, is that our new ubiquitous tools have eroded ethnic memory into nonexistence, and the individual becomes the transindividual (I'd explain that term, but it doesn't come up much in the second book, and we've still got a lot of other ground to cover.). That we store memory in tools is easy enough to grasp, depending on the tool, at least. Obviously, humanity has been storing memory in writing for centuries; that's essentially what a book is. And now, we store parts of ourselves in media devices all the time: our Ipods have our playlists, our Iphones have our conversations, our credit cards have our banking history. What's a little more shocking to grasp is that we don't just store information about ourselves in tools; we store the information, the use, of the tools in ourselves.
I offer myself as an example. I'm a lifelong student; I have taken dozens of lecture-based classes. And in those classes, I've learned to take notes. The process has been ingrained in me; you sit in the classroom, someone talks in front of you, you write it down, and knowledge is transferred. (Actually, Stiegler distinguishes sharply between knowledge and information, but never mind.) What I've discovered, though, is that saying this method is ingrained in me is not just a fancy figure of speech. The process of note-taking has been repeated on me so many times that if you take away my pencil and paper and force me to just listen, I can't do it. I mean, I can, but if you want my full attention, you'll have to give me some looseleaf. It doesn't even matter if I read what I've written down ever again. Put me in a schoolroom setting, and my secondary and primary memories require a pencil and paper to properly function. My tools determine the way I think.
Now, extrapolate that to a generation of children that have laptops instead of paper. Iphone messaging instead of landlines. Video games instead of books.
Then you begin to see why Stiegler might be of interest to a person researching text and image in video games.
Now, this is just a bare bones view of the theory. In actuality, it's much more complicated, much more nuanced, and generally much more French and phenomenological and dense. But with the overview above, we're ready to get into the actual book.
...Or at least, we're ready to do it tomorrow. My tertiary memory in the form of the automatic disk scan my computer performs at 3:00 am is reminding me it's time to go to sleep.
Later Days.
Friday, March 25, 2011
A Statement of Intent: Bleary Edition
An intent simple in statement, if not execution: I will not go to bed until I finish reading Volume 2 of Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time, and post a full, ludicrously full, review on this blog.
I assume physical exhaustion of staying up will play well off the mental exhaustion of reading.
Stay tuned.
7:48 pm: 30 pages of notes so far. 15 pages of Stiegler's text left to annotate.
8:42 pm: Nearly an hour later. 31 pages of notes, and 5 pages left of text. End in sight, etc. Only two subheadings to go!
9:27 pm: Done the notes. Now, to write up a chapter summary.
10:16 pm. Done the chapter summary. God, how did that take an hour? I mean, it is two single spaced pages long, but... never mind, answered my own question. I'm going to see if there's still a bus home; I'll do the blog post next, but after "supper."
Later Days.
I assume physical exhaustion of staying up will play well off the mental exhaustion of reading.
Stay tuned.
7:48 pm: 30 pages of notes so far. 15 pages of Stiegler's text left to annotate.
8:42 pm: Nearly an hour later. 31 pages of notes, and 5 pages left of text. End in sight, etc. Only two subheadings to go!
9:27 pm: Done the notes. Now, to write up a chapter summary.
10:16 pm. Done the chapter summary. God, how did that take an hour? I mean, it is two single spaced pages long, but... never mind, answered my own question. I'm going to see if there's still a bus home; I'll do the blog post next, but after "supper."
Later Days.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Head-ache
From Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time vol. 2: Disorientation:
"Conjoining the effect of the real (of presence) in image capture, in which event and input of the event coincide in time, with the real-time or the live aspect of transmission, in which the captured event and reception of this input coincide equally and simultaneously, analogic and numeric technologies inaugurate a new collective as well as individual experience of time as a departure from historicity, if it is true that historicity relies on an idea of time that is essentially time deferred; that is, on a constitutive opposition posited in principle (illusorily--but this illusion has very real effects) between a story line and what it reports" (115).
Note that this is all one sentence. One sentence. For the most part, I've reconciled myself over the past three years to the writing style of academia, especially that special sort that comes from the French philosophizers. I'm pretty sure I even understand what Stiegler means in that sentence above. But every now and then, it just strikes me that I'm spending hours and hours reading and trying to understand work presented in a writing that, if it was presented in an undergraduate paper, I would attempt to murder via drowning in red ink. And then I get sad, and my hand itches for the red pen that isn't there.
Later Days.
"Conjoining the effect of the real (of presence) in image capture, in which event and input of the event coincide in time, with the real-time or the live aspect of transmission, in which the captured event and reception of this input coincide equally and simultaneously, analogic and numeric technologies inaugurate a new collective as well as individual experience of time as a departure from historicity, if it is true that historicity relies on an idea of time that is essentially time deferred; that is, on a constitutive opposition posited in principle (illusorily--but this illusion has very real effects) between a story line and what it reports" (115).
Note that this is all one sentence. One sentence. For the most part, I've reconciled myself over the past three years to the writing style of academia, especially that special sort that comes from the French philosophizers. I'm pretty sure I even understand what Stiegler means in that sentence above. But every now and then, it just strikes me that I'm spending hours and hours reading and trying to understand work presented in a writing that, if it was presented in an undergraduate paper, I would attempt to murder via drowning in red ink. And then I get sad, and my hand itches for the red pen that isn't there.
Later Days.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Late Night Edition
I thought I'd try to get a proper start to this week by going to bed early on a Sunday. Now it's 2:00 am, and I'm in one of those familiar states where I'm all but exhausted, but can't for the life of me sleep. Thank goodness for the life of a graduate student, where I can get away with working strange hours--well, until my Wednesday and Friday classes, at any rate.
A new plan, then: I'll pursue various courses, capriciously, as the mood takes me, until I taken, or rather, overtaken, further, by slumber. (All right, that was cumbersome. But I'm trying.) What will I do? Well, I shall alternate between:
1) Playing Dragon Age: Origins. I'm doing a quick run-through of the game in preparation for a playthrough of the sequel. I've placed the difficult on the lowest setting; this is a session built on exploring the gameworld, rather than challenging myself with the gameplay.
2) Reading bits and snips from A Song for Arbonne, by Guy Gavriel Kay. And that's why a sort of poetic vein is creeping into my writing here; my writing style has always been subject to osmosis, and once must admit that if I had to choose someone to imitate, I could certainly do a lot worse.
3) Reading old, archived posts of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It was introduced to me as one of the best journalist discussions of gaming on the Net, and it's certainly kept me informed and entertained in good order. I've been reading it backwards from its start, so I am currently immersed in discussions of PC games from 2007. The cake is a lie!
4) Watching the various spiders crawl around the basement. This is, frankly, a full time occupation; without straining myself, I can immediately identify six different spiders in operation here. I used to wonder what that many spiders could find to eat down here, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer is "each other."
5) Transcribing some notes and choice passages from Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time vol. 2: Disorientation. While this chapter, focusing on anthropology and technics (as many of them do) didn't really pick up for me until the discussion of style near the end, I'm starting to get an inkling as to how this can be profitably applied to my own research. And it's good that it's finally becoming clear; you don't want to read five hundred pages or so of hardcore French theory and come out at the end without any other sentiment than "well, that was fun."
I think I'd best be about my work, then.
Later Days.
A new plan, then: I'll pursue various courses, capriciously, as the mood takes me, until I taken, or rather, overtaken, further, by slumber. (All right, that was cumbersome. But I'm trying.) What will I do? Well, I shall alternate between:
1) Playing Dragon Age: Origins. I'm doing a quick run-through of the game in preparation for a playthrough of the sequel. I've placed the difficult on the lowest setting; this is a session built on exploring the gameworld, rather than challenging myself with the gameplay.
2) Reading bits and snips from A Song for Arbonne, by Guy Gavriel Kay. And that's why a sort of poetic vein is creeping into my writing here; my writing style has always been subject to osmosis, and once must admit that if I had to choose someone to imitate, I could certainly do a lot worse.
3) Reading old, archived posts of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It was introduced to me as one of the best journalist discussions of gaming on the Net, and it's certainly kept me informed and entertained in good order. I've been reading it backwards from its start, so I am currently immersed in discussions of PC games from 2007. The cake is a lie!
4) Watching the various spiders crawl around the basement. This is, frankly, a full time occupation; without straining myself, I can immediately identify six different spiders in operation here. I used to wonder what that many spiders could find to eat down here, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer is "each other."
5) Transcribing some notes and choice passages from Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time vol. 2: Disorientation. While this chapter, focusing on anthropology and technics (as many of them do) didn't really pick up for me until the discussion of style near the end, I'm starting to get an inkling as to how this can be profitably applied to my own research. And it's good that it's finally becoming clear; you don't want to read five hundred pages or so of hardcore French theory and come out at the end without any other sentiment than "well, that was fun."
I think I'd best be about my work, then.
Later Days.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Friday Quotations: I Swear, I'll Finish This Book Some Day
"And if the ‘now’ that I can be is indeed invented in the now, in the clock, in the what, is not the what truly constructive of this who in the possibility of now as now? Or rather does the clock only give the occasion for access to a who constituted elswhere as now, before all clocks, before any determined what, in the very gap of what?" --Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time vol. 1.
"If Derrida and Heidegger conceived a child, and then gave that child philosophy steroids and several years in prison to do nothing but think, you would have Bernard Stiegler." --comment by a fellow graduate student. Not me, but I kind of wish it was.
To be fair to Stiegler, the who/what/clock/now discussion is a lot clearer in context. But not that clear.
Later Days.
"If Derrida and Heidegger conceived a child, and then gave that child philosophy steroids and several years in prison to do nothing but think, you would have Bernard Stiegler." --comment by a fellow graduate student. Not me, but I kind of wish it was.
To be fair to Stiegler, the who/what/clock/now discussion is a lot clearer in context. But not that clear.
Later Days.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Quotation Friday: I remember the time when I thought French philosophy was the hardest thing ever.
"If the technical product does not carry the principle of movement within itself but draws from another--often allowing for the judgement that such and such a product is the means of which another product is the end--nevertheless, insofar as it effects a passage from a concealed state to a nonconcealed state, one of disclosure, this bringing-forth that is particular to technics constitutes a mode of truth. This means that the final cause is not the efficient operator but being as growth and unfolding: phusis and being are synonyms, the unconcealing of phusis is the truth of being as growth and bringing-forth (poeisis). Tekhne qua poiesis is thus submitted to the final cause that phusis, working through the efficient cause, constitutes, without the efficient cause being in any way confused with the final cause."
--Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time vol. 1.
The scary thing is, I think I might understand this stuff.
Later Days.
--Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time vol. 1.
The scary thing is, I think I might understand this stuff.
Later Days.
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