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10 David Baird, ‘Scientific Instrument Making,Epistemology and the Conflict Between Gift andCommodity Economies’, Philosophy and Technology2, 3-4 (1997), pp.25-45. Baird makes a relatedargument regarding scientific instrument makingas a gift economy thriving in a small, collaborativetechno-scientific collective.11 Lewis Hyde cited in Mark Osteen, ‘Introduc-tion’, in The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disci-plines, ed. Mark Osteen (London and New York:Routledge, 2002), pp.28-29. Osteen also suggests

that Foucault’s ‘author-function’ may operate as agift in the same way when an ‘appreciative readerincreases the value of a text by exposing whatwasn’t previously apparent in it’ (p.29).

q 2010 Sandra RobinsonQueen’s University, Kingston, Canada

Individualization and the Play ofMemories

Bernard Stiegler. Acting Out.Trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross andPatrick Crogan.(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008)

What is Husserlian phenomenology today? Hei-degger answered in his 1963 essay, ‘My Way toPhenomenology’, that ‘the age of phenomenolo-gical philosophy seems to be over’.1 One maysuspect that this is Heidegger’s bias, since themaster to whom once he dedicated his Sein und Zeit,refused to continue the friendship since 1933.2 Butfollowing Heidegger’s death, the naturalizingphenomenology movement led by the cognitivescientists in the 1980s, also put an end toHusserlian phenomenology.3 Today there arestill journals dedicated to phenomenology, butthe name Husserl either remains a target ofattack by postmodern thinkers or the source ofhistorical studies of a movement once calledphenomenology.

Bernard Stiegler is probably one of today’s mostinnovative philosophers whose work reinventsHusserl’s theory of memories to demonstrate anurgency of the re-appropriation of technology.Stiegler explores in Husserl the interaction of theprimary retention (impression), secondary reten-tion (recollection), tertiary retention (image) andprotention (anticipation). Stiegler, however, addswith Freudian psychoanalysis another dimension– a thought that Husserl tried to avoid, that is, apsychologized phenomenology, if not psycholo-gism. This contradiction and intimacy (phenom-enology vs. psychology), which haunted Husserluntil his death, is also the boundary which oncestopped his successors from entering. In Stiegler’sinvention this boundary becomes a necessity,which reflects our existence qua reality of thetechnological world. In Acting Out, a small volumeof a collection of two lectures by Stiegler, he

presents to us two Husserls: first, there is thephilosopher of phenomenological epokhe; andsecond, there is the philosopher of memory. ButHusserl nevertheless only appears as a mask in thisbook, a mask shared by two actors who ‘act out’.One is Stiegler himself who demonstrates asuccessful individuation;4 the other is RichardDurn who presents a failure qua the urgency of abattle against a technological hegemony.

The first lecture is the confession of Stiegler’spersonal experience of becoming a philosopher, asecret that belongs to the most intimate memory ofa philosopher. It is a legend of a youngman namedBernard Stiegler who did not even finish secondaryschool, of a one-time member of the FrenchCommunist Party, and of a bank robber who wassentenced to five years in prison, and finally of aworld-known philosopher. How did this happen?When one confesses, how can the audience knowthat the confessor is faithful to his words? Stieglerwas aware of this problem of recollection, as he usesthe term apres-coup, a French translation of Freud’s‘Nachtraglichkeit’. The word has a double meaning.It can be understood as a recursive temporality inwhich the present also conditions the past,especially when Freud refers to trauma; it alsorefers to primal fantasies, the imagination thatnever happened nor is happening.5 To recall howto philosophize in the language of philosophy isprecisely the apres-coup, the recollection of atraumatic memory from the present, which alsodemands a manifestation of a style of narration.

But Stiegler is a philosopher of time, of memory, ormore precisly, of hypomnesis.6 A philosopher oftime has to be faithful to time (otherwise hebecomes a sci-fi writer), in terms of both secondaryretention – his memory of the prison – and histertiary retention – the story told and publishedunder his name. What does it mean to philoso-phize? Modern philosophers philosophize in thesystem of philosophical knowledge inside thedepartment of philosophy, setting up connectionsof thoughts and arguments in academic papers,

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while forgetting that philosophy is not only abouttheories, but also practices, or in Bernard Stiegler’sterm, ‘acts’. Philosophy as a practice or spiritualpractice is Pierre Hadot’s exploration of ancientphilosophy. Ancient philosophers attempted toattain the tranquillity of the mind and theharmony of the self and the universe throughphilosophical practice.7 A philosopher alwaysstarts philosophizing from the basic motif ‘knowthyself’.

Five years of incarceration gave Stiegler aparticular milieu in which the external milieuwas suspended, while the internal milieu wasreduced to the secondary retention of the worldbefore his incarceration. Stiegler acts by readingand writing. He read Mallarme every morning assoon as he awoke ‘to avoid those uncontrollableprotentions that would occur as the wakingreveries of the morning’.8 He read Plato, butdeveloped his own concept of ‘by default’, which‘against Plato’s phantasm of pure liberty, opposedto all alienation and all default, to all default posedas alienation’.9 It is through reading and writingthat Stiegler philosophized as well as survivedin prison. He recalls, ‘if this had not happenedI would have become insane or totally asocial’.10

The suspension of the world also allowed Stieglerto discover the phenomenological epokhe long beforehe encountered the work of Husserl.11 It means tosuspend the natural attitude of seeing the world asit is, and to attain an apodictic understandingthrough reduction. This reduction not only workson the objects of observation, but also on thesubject, by suspending his world, which is in thiscase the experience in prison. He tried to love thisfreedom. The occasional visits from friends (whichhe calls micro-interruptions12) remind him notonly of the world of which he is suspended from,but also of the freedom and peace granted by theprison that was shattered from time to time bythese visits.

But the freedom in the prison is after all not dieFreiheit (freedom), but a fragile eigentliche Existenz(authentic existence), a Heideggerian approach tothe transcendental reduction in which the They(das Man) are excluded in the reduction.13 ButStiegler is sceptical of this authenticity, renouncingit at the end of the book by saying ‘six years afterhaving announced the danger of das Man he worethe swastika’.14

How does one, excited by discovering the‘phenomenological epokhe’ in practice, finallyreject the authentic self, which is such a logical

consequence? This break between Stiegler andHeidegger is fundamental in that he ceased to callhimself a Heideggerian. Heidegger finds thedefault of being-with (Mitsein), but he could notthink from the default, he took the default as afault. A fault has to be corrected, but a default hasto be transformed in favour of becoming. A defaultmay have to be understood in a double sense:firstly, default as a beginning in the sense that anorigin is unthinkable; and secondly, default as amethod to affirm the necessity of the already-thereas the possibility of all discourse.

The default is the pre-individual milieu of GilbertSimondon, who Stiegler encountered later.To philosophize is to singularize with the defaultof the milieu, to identify the significance of theworld by transforming with the world. This isprecisely Simondon’s idea of psychic and collectiveindividuation, the asymptotic relation between theI and the We. The ‘phenomenological epokhe’ isnot the end, but the end of the beginning.The authenticity of the self is not outside thedefault, but always within the default, the defaultis always a necessity, a necessity of philia (love).

Compared with Stiegler, Richard Durn is the onewho failed to singularize himself. Durn, the localactivist from the city of Nanterre in France, whostormed the city’s town hall, shooting and killingeight people before he committed suicide. Accord-ing to Stiegler, this ‘act’ suffered from the problemof primordial narcissism. When one does not loveoneself, one is not able to love the world, there is no‘we’ but they, or what Nietzsche calls the herd.The destruction of the primordial narcissism is thepharmacological effect of modern technology.This is another break from Heidegger; the moderntechnology is not a fault but a default as Platonicpharmakon, which is at the same time good andbad. The calendarity and cardinality are systems,which basically facilitate the becoming of the ‘we’by opening up the commonality of philia, love anddesire.15 But the problem we face today is thecontrol of calendarity and cardinality bycapitalism.

In his investigation of the TV industry, Stieglershowed from a research on the relation betweenthe public and their media an interestingphenomenon. In this study, the publics’ responseto TV was ‘I don’t believe it anymore. I watch itbut I hate it’. This reaction is the loss of libido,where one is not able to signify from watching TV,that is to say, there is no desire, but only drives, or,in Stiegler’s term, an ‘ill-being’. How did thishappen? Stiegler demonstrates a new order of the

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play of the Husserlian primary, secondary andtertiary attentions. Stiegler identified that inHusserl’s 1905 lectures on the ‘Phenomenology ofInternal Time-Consciousness’ he is not able tofully explore the relation between these threememories, since to Husserl the temporal object, forexample, a melody, is nothing but a homogeneousflow of consciousness.16 In his later work, ‘On theOrigin of Geometry’, Husserl took a differentapproach to ideality, which is concretized inwriting, drawing or, generally, making. It grants anew status to technics in phenomenology since theeidetic of objective knowledge is now not in thespeculation of the mind (e.g. the phenomenologi-cal reduction) but in making, while at the sametime these two do not coherently connect witheach other. Stiegler radicalizes the play ofretentions by saying that the tertiary memoryactually conditions the primary and secondarymemory, hence protention. These memories arealways in a circuit. Stiegler’s critique of Husserlcoincides with the critique of Paul Ricœur thatHusserl’s inner time-consciousness did not explorethe dynamics of the circuit, as well as the critiquefrom Michel Henry that the given is taken forgranted in Husserl, which can be said in general:the object is always indifferent to the subject.17

Stiegler’s move is to bring Freudian psycho-analysis into the circuit. This is an innovativemove, at the same time as being a de-phenomen-olization or psychoanalyzation of Husserl’s phil-osophy. Stiegler suggests that thehypersychronization of TV programs constitutesa homogenous secondary retention.18 For ex-ample, watching the same commercial broadcastof the World Cup finals – this synchronization oftime – synchronizes not only a common time(consciousness of time), but also the time ofconsciousness (Zeitbewusstsein).19 The secondaryretention conditions the primary retention asselection criteria, they then together condition theprotention, which is also imagination. Thesynchronization leads to the loss of diachrony,which is differance or singularity. Because of thishypersynchronization, one is not able to signifyanymore, which is thus similar to what RichardDurn wrote in his diary that ‘everything seemsinsignificant to him, and he himself cannotsignify’20 – in the words of a psychoanalyticallanguage: the loss of libido, of philia.

Stiegler attempts to demonstrate that technologyactually conditions our consciousness, hence thepsychical power to singularize, and once thishypersynchronization is at work, it destroys thediachrony as well as the primordial narcissism and

leads to the disaster of asignification. If this logic istrue, there are still some important questions thatremain unexplored. First at issue is what kind oftechnology shall we have at the age of globaliza-tion when the calendarity not only conditions acommon time, but also a common retention andprotention? Is the analysis only applicable totemporal objects or further? Does the move fromTV to video sharing websites, or further to socialnetworking websites in general make any differ-ence? Second, if this logic is true, it is not the libidothat conditions consciousness, but the reversedorder. Then what kind of consciousness will beable to activate the libido if it is already lost?Third, if technology is the source of hypersyn-chronization, where are the places for othertechnics like customs, idioms intrinsic to specificethnicity or class? Are they not able to makedifference in the process of individuation?

These are questions that perhaps cannot becovered in a book of this length. However, Stieglerraises questions that point to the problem of theself, the necessity of taking care of oneself. Takingcare is not simply a personal practice, but is alsoa strategy against the hegemony of the industrialcontrol of memory, that is, the evil. Stieglersuggests that the future does not lay in thenegation of the evil, but the transformation of theevil, since the evil (the technology) is alsopharmacological. The affirmation of the contingencyof modern technology is another break fromHeidegger, who proposed a retreat to poeticthinking or Gelassenheit, or living in a hut in theBlack Forest, while for Stiegler it is a battle, or ashe puts it at the end of his text, ‘[w]hat is evil is thewe, disquieted about the future of the we, thatrenounces critique and invention or, in other words,combat’.

Notes

1 Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being [1969],trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York and London:Harper & Row, 1972), p.82.2 See the interview with Martin Heidegger byMaria Alter and John D. Caputo conducted on23 September 1966 and published in Der Spiegel on31 May 1976 under the title ‘Nur noch ein Gottkann uns retten’.3 See Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contem-porary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed.Jean Petitot et al. (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1999).4 Individuation and individualization are twodifferent concepts. For Simondon and Stiegler,

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individualization is the product or end result,while individuation is always a process orbecoming in which the subject tends to achievethe in-divisibility of the self which could never berealized.5 For the concept of apres-coup, see Jean Laplancheand Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language ofPsychoanalysis [1967], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1988. pp.111-14.6 For the concept of hyponemesis and its relationto technology, see Bernard Stiegler, Technics andTime 1: The Fault of Epimetheus [1994], trans.Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stan-ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).7 See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life:Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault [1981], ed.and intr. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. MichaelChase (Malden: Blackwell, 1995).8 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.20.9 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.24.10 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.19.11 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.22.12 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.19.13 See Martin Heidegger, ‘Das Problem derBezeugung einer eigentlichen existenziellenMoglichkeit’, §54, in Sein und Zeit (Tubingen:Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006), pp.267-70.14 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.80.

15 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.49.16 For a detailed critique on Husserl’s phenom-enology of Time-Consiousness, please see Stiegler’schapter ‘Temporal Object and RetentionalFinitude’ in his Technics and Time 2: Disorientation[1996], trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 2009), pp.188-243.17 Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology [1990],trans. Scott Davidson (New York: FordhamUniversity Press, 2008).18 Following Stiegler, synchronization alsoimplies diachronization, which is to say differance,but hypersynchronization means synchronizationwithout diachrony.19 According to Husserl, these are two differentconcepts; the former is the subject of psychology,and the latter is the subject of phenomenology. SeeEdmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of InternalTime-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidgegger, trans.James S. Churchill (Bloomington and London:Indiana University Press, 1964).20 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.56.

q 2010 Yuk HuiGoldsmiths, University of London

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