Reading Notes: Stiegler, "Who? What? The Invention of the Human"
So the whole first page is about how "The Invention Of The Human" can be read two ways: "who or what is inventing who or what?" So it could be "humans inventing things" or "humans inventing humans" or "foo inventing humans" and it's ambiguous. OK, um, clever? I mean, the idea of the human being invented is interesting, and he goes on to talk about that, it's just... I can already tell I am going to find the writing style of this paper unnecessarily snooty. You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but no.
He's interested in our relationship to time, in particular to "our most contemporary technology: speed." In week one we read about "fast feminism" as related to speed theory --- I think that was Virilio --- the idea that you should be trying to come up with the next thing, the next step, before you're done with the current one, so that action displaces thought? Maybe? Another thing I'd like to read more of.
Actually this is getting int familiar territory at least for a bit --- you can't look at the beginning of mankind without considering mankind's end, just like birth and death are intertwined. This comes back to the class I took with Bob Crossley: "The end of the world may tell us something about the ends of the world, that is, its purpose." That's not a direct quote but his line is very similar. Stiegler asks "And if we already were no longer humans?" which is a fascinating question. "Radically challenging the border between the animal and the human" I can get behind; words like "grammatology" I'm more skeptical of. (It's actually pretty clear aside from his assuming I know what the hell that is.)
So there's this Derrida's "différance" thing that is apparently a non-anthropocentric way to evaluate anthropocentrism? Buhwha? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance Uhhhh. OK. Sort of. Apparently Stiegler's central question is about the emergence of the gramme, that is, "a history of technics --- which is the invention of the human... Technics as inventive as well as invented." I wonder if this comes back to that whole weird Deleuzian vector reality froofiness from last week? That is, the Ideal of a thing existing outside of its being enacted and people enacting it... apparently there's another Deleuzian concept called "lines of flight" that I was told in class that I might be anticipating.
So he's really excited about this epiphylogenesis thing, "meaning the conservation, accumulation, and sedimentation of successive epigeneses." "Epigenesis must recapitulate itself to take place." So ... we become human as individuals in a parallel of the way that we became human as a species, and in doing so, what we become is different each time? Maybe?
Leroi-Gouhan says the tool invents the human and not vice versa, and language is that tool, not, say, modified rocks. (Otherwise would crows be human?)
There's a section on feet making the human --- that is, walking upright and manipulating objects with hands --- and how humans aren't direct descendants of modern primates, we're a separate evolutionary fork.
"Prostheticity, here a consequence of the freedom of the hand, is a putting outside the self that is also a putting out of range of oneself." mobilization->liberation->exteriorization With exteriorization, the body can only function when it has its tools. Huh, developing tools because man's teeth and hands had become useless as weapons? That veers a little evopsych for me but it's not necessarily wrong.
Spirituality as a "second origin?"
"A prosthesis does not supplement something, does not replace what would have been there before it and would have been lost: it is added. By prosthesis, we understand (1) ... spatialization, and (2) ... temporalization." OH. OH. If I had had this sentence when I was reading that goddamned David Willis piece it would have made SO MUCH MORE SENSE TO ME. And honestly I think pieces of this Stiegler paper are crap but this bit is awesome. Duh. That makes so much more sense. Thank you for explaining to me what all these theorists are talking about!!!
Ethnicity versus specificity (species) as "technico-socio-cultural" versus "genetic." OK, sure.
I should come back to page 158/26 when I have more brain to look at the way memory of stereotype versus genetic memory works. In this section he's breaking down a binary, which generically I like. (Wait, Bataille has opinions on this stuff? I need to finish the Bataille on my shelf. So much theory, so little time.)
Verrry skeptical of theologians in here, wow.
Some of the debate appears to be about whether you can speak if you don't understand death, that is, if you can have access to the symbolic register. Is exteriorization access to the symbolic? Can you speak as soon as you can move your hands? (Someone should just invent a time machine and go figure this out! That would be awesome. Of course, would we even know what speech would look like in our historical selves, let alone in another species? I don't know if we can know if other life forms, human or otherwise, understand things symbolically without shared context.) "there is language only when it is constituted by signs that are not simply signals" makes me wanna go reread Barthes.
Page 41/173 merits a return as there's a good paragraph in there about the role of anticipation.
Page 45/177 similarly on memory.
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/45965.html.
He's interested in our relationship to time, in particular to "our most contemporary technology: speed." In week one we read about "fast feminism" as related to speed theory --- I think that was Virilio --- the idea that you should be trying to come up with the next thing, the next step, before you're done with the current one, so that action displaces thought? Maybe? Another thing I'd like to read more of.
Actually this is getting int familiar territory at least for a bit --- you can't look at the beginning of mankind without considering mankind's end, just like birth and death are intertwined. This comes back to the class I took with Bob Crossley: "The end of the world may tell us something about the ends of the world, that is, its purpose." That's not a direct quote but his line is very similar. Stiegler asks "And if we already were no longer humans?" which is a fascinating question. "Radically challenging the border between the animal and the human" I can get behind; words like "grammatology" I'm more skeptical of. (It's actually pretty clear aside from his assuming I know what the hell that is.)
So there's this Derrida's "différance" thing that is apparently a non-anthropocentric way to evaluate anthropocentrism? Buhwha? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance Uhhhh. OK. Sort of. Apparently Stiegler's central question is about the emergence of the gramme, that is, "a history of technics --- which is the invention of the human... Technics as inventive as well as invented." I wonder if this comes back to that whole weird Deleuzian vector reality froofiness from last week? That is, the Ideal of a thing existing outside of its being enacted and people enacting it... apparently there's another Deleuzian concept called "lines of flight" that I was told in class that I might be anticipating.
So he's really excited about this epiphylogenesis thing, "meaning the conservation, accumulation, and sedimentation of successive epigeneses." "Epigenesis must recapitulate itself to take place." So ... we become human as individuals in a parallel of the way that we became human as a species, and in doing so, what we become is different each time? Maybe?
Leroi-Gouhan says the tool invents the human and not vice versa, and language is that tool, not, say, modified rocks. (Otherwise would crows be human?)
There's a section on feet making the human --- that is, walking upright and manipulating objects with hands --- and how humans aren't direct descendants of modern primates, we're a separate evolutionary fork.
"Prostheticity, here a consequence of the freedom of the hand, is a putting outside the self that is also a putting out of range of oneself." mobilization->liberation->exteriorization With exteriorization, the body can only function when it has its tools. Huh, developing tools because man's teeth and hands had become useless as weapons? That veers a little evopsych for me but it's not necessarily wrong.
Spirituality as a "second origin?"
"A prosthesis does not supplement something, does not replace what would have been there before it and would have been lost: it is added. By prosthesis, we understand (1) ... spatialization, and (2) ... temporalization." OH. OH. If I had had this sentence when I was reading that goddamned David Willis piece it would have made SO MUCH MORE SENSE TO ME. And honestly I think pieces of this Stiegler paper are crap but this bit is awesome. Duh. That makes so much more sense. Thank you for explaining to me what all these theorists are talking about!!!
Ethnicity versus specificity (species) as "technico-socio-cultural" versus "genetic." OK, sure.
I should come back to page 158/26 when I have more brain to look at the way memory of stereotype versus genetic memory works. In this section he's breaking down a binary, which generically I like. (Wait, Bataille has opinions on this stuff? I need to finish the Bataille on my shelf. So much theory, so little time.)
Verrry skeptical of theologians in here, wow.
Some of the debate appears to be about whether you can speak if you don't understand death, that is, if you can have access to the symbolic register. Is exteriorization access to the symbolic? Can you speak as soon as you can move your hands? (Someone should just invent a time machine and go figure this out! That would be awesome. Of course, would we even know what speech would look like in our historical selves, let alone in another species? I don't know if we can know if other life forms, human or otherwise, understand things symbolically without shared context.) "there is language only when it is constituted by signs that are not simply signals" makes me wanna go reread Barthes.
Page 41/173 merits a return as there's a good paragraph in there about the role of anticipation.
Page 45/177 similarly on memory.
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/45965.html.