Stiegler and Marx for a Question Concerning Technology

Abstract

In this paper I elaborate on the conceptual framework shared by Marx and Stiegler. Stiegler criticizes Marx for failing to conceive technology as anything other than means and for not assessing the role of technology in the formation of psyche. However, a non-essentialist reading of Marx demonstrates that Marx has distinguished objectification of the human through material production of the world (i.e. exteriorization) from the historical fact of alienation. Moreover, for Marx, the human has always been constituted through the activity of production that is at once technological, social, and transformative. In order to counter the neo-liberal mystification of technology that manifests itself as both technophilia and technophobia, we need to resort to a Marxist understanding of technology as pharmakon, or as Stiegler writes, “at one and the same time human power (puissance) and as the power of the self-destruction of humanity” (Technics 85).