skandalon

Do you admit to this certainty: that we are at a turning point?
―If it is a certainty, then it is not a turning point. The fact of being part of the moments in which an epochal change (if there is one) comes about also takes hold of the certain knowledge that would whish to determine this change, making certainty as inappropriate as uncertainty. We are never less able to circumvent ourselves then at such a moment: the discreet force of the turning point is first and foremost that.

✖ Via Maurice Blanchot, quoted as the epigraph for Bernard Stiegler’s first volume of his trilogy Technics and Time, tr. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins, Standford University Press, [1994]1998, p. 1 [Amazon]

Here’s the French version:

— Admettez-vous cette certitude : que nous sommes à un tournant?
— Si c’est une certitude, ce n’est pas un tournant. Le fait d’appartenir à ce moment où s’accomplit un changement d’époque (s’il y en a), s’empare aussi du savoir certain qui voudrait le déterminer, rendant inappropriée la certitude comme l’incertitude. Nous ne pouvons jamais moins nous contourner qu’en un tel moment : c’est cela d’abord, la force discrète du tournant.

• Mar 16, 2010 link notes tagged: communication lost space critic crisis history modernity author time Blanchot Stiegler

The critical question of the relationship between technics and time is assuming its place on the public stage, daily, superficially, but in a more and more evident way. Each day brings its technical novelty, as well as the demise of things obsolescent and out of date. Innovation is inevitably accompanied by the obsolescence of existing technologies that have been superseded and the out-of-dateness of social situations that these technologies made possible―men, domains of activity, professions, forms of knowledge, heritage of all kinds that must either adapt or disappear.

✖ Via Technics and Time 1, The Fault of Epimetheus, tr. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins, Standford University Press, [1994]1998, p. 4 [Amazon, Google Books]

About this book:

“What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.” (more)

About Bernard Stiegler:

“Professor Stiegler has a long term engagement with the relation between technology and philosophy, not only in a theoretical sense, but also situating them in industry and society as practices. He is one of the founders of the political group Ars Industrialis based in Paris, which calls for an industrial politics of spirit, by exploring the possibilities of the technology of spirit, to bring forth a new “life of the mind”. He published extensively on the problem of individuation in consumer capitalism, and he is working on the new possibility of an economy of contribution.” (more)

Stiegler came to philosophy while being incarcerated for armed bank robbery (five years at the Prison Saint-Michel). He wrote about it in his book Acting Out.

• Mar 14, 2010 link notes tagged: technology communication author book philosophy evolution innovation obsolescence time Stiegler

An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves. The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition. “The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.” Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.

✖ Via Wired Science: “Your Computer Really Is a Part of You” by Brandon Keim, March 9, 2010

The study “A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand” by Dobromir G. Dotov, Lin Nie, Anthony Chemero is available online (PDF).

The “fondamental concept” to which Chemero is referring is the concept of “readiness-to-hand”. Heidegger explains this concept in section 15 of his book Being and Time : “The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment” (see Google Books). To understand this concept, one can get help from Wikipedia, from an online Glossary of Terms in Being and Time (edited by Roderick Munday, last updated in March 2009) and from Dean Heckles’ blog (Heckle “is a social–cognitive scientist and a PhD student at Stanford” and he specifically chose to name his blog… “Ready-to-hand” : great introduction to the concept if you’re into technology or communication or media studies).

For a good overview of what’s at stakes today when it comes to our relationship to technology, one should read the “General Introduction” of the first book of the Technics and Time trilogy by Bernard Stiegler. The book has been translated from French by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. The “General Introduction” which run from page 1 to 18 is available via Google Books.

Previously on Skandalon: cognition and media ecology.

• Mar 10, 2010 link notes reblogged from chrbutler [via] tagged: technology communication medium media philosophy cognition Heidegger theory Stiegler author book ecology