Transformation as an Ontological Imperative: The [Human] Future According to Bernard Stiegler

Abstract

Bernard Stiegler’s consistent interrogations respond to both the confused obfuscation and the positive drive of technics and transformation, as central concepts underlying all of Stiegler’s thought and writing from Technics and Time 1 (1994/1998) through his most recent analyses of education, “telecracy,” democracy, industry, etc., whether he is addressing the question of technics directly or tangentially. What is being “profoundly transformed,” according to Stiegler, is nothing less that the nature of “the human” itself, by which Stiegler does not mean some safe, traditional notion of “human nature,” since for Stiegler technics and technology are temporally prior to “the human” and obviously, therefore, to any humanism; our need to attempt an understanding of the process of technical evolution is a vitally important ontological (and existential) imperative, an “anthropological technics” transforming both customary human/animal anthropology and “man the tool-maker.” Stiegler asserts that the human is the product, not the cause, of technical evolution, an evolution whose grounding concept is “technics.” In this sense, “the technical,” “techniques,” and “technology” all manifest aspects and modes of operation of technics. For Stiegler, the world is not “to hand,” as it is in Heidegger; rather, “the hand learns from the tool”: “technical” or “technological” innovation is thus a matter of trying to catch up with technics and technologies. This becomes more challenging when we consider that speaking and writing are technical structures – as is language (and the nature of language) itself. “The human” is a result, a subset, of technics. Stiegler erases the magical thinking of a non-technical pre-human, thus transforming the nature of what is “proper to the human.” Ranging across a number of Stiegler’s works and concepts, the essay lays out their radical transformativity.