Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler

Noel Fitzpatrick, Néill O'Dwyer, Michael O'Hara, Noel Fitzpatrick, Néill O'Dwyer, Michael O'Hara

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501356360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Medios digitales

Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler frames the intertwined relationship between artistic endeavours and scientific fields and their sociopolitical implications. Each chapter is either an explication of, or a critique of, some aspect of Bernard Stiegler's technological philosophy; as it is his technological-political-aesthetical-ethical theorisations which form the philosophical foundation of the volume. Emerging scholars bring critical new reflections to the subject area, while more established academics, researchers and practitioners outline the mutating nature of aesthetics within historical and theoretical frameworks. Not only is interdisciplinarity a prevailing topic at work within this collection, but so too is there a delineation of the mutating, hybrid role inhabited by the arts practitioner – at once engineer, scientist and artist – in the changing landscape of digital cultural production.

Part One

Tertiary Retention

Introduction

Cormac Deane, Néill O’Dwyer and Michael O’Hara

It is difficult to overstate the importance that memory holds in Stiegler’s philosophy. Any experienced event can be held in the mind and recalled in a mode of thinking described by Plato as anamnesis (in The Phaedrus 275–9 and elsewhere) (see Introduction to Part 2). This pure, mindful form of recollection does not rely on technical supports (e.g. notetaking). Once a memory is inscribed in a medium (such as writing or painting), then it becomes an instance of hypomnesis, that is the memory is ‘exosomatic’, or made external to the body. When this happens, the mind is relieved of the need to retain the memory. Plato’s hostility to writing emerges from his apprehension that, in Stiegler’s phrase, it ‘risks contaminating all memory, thereby even destroying it’ (Stiegler 1998: 1, 3), and leads him to conclude that it ultimately distorts truth. However, committing knowledge to concrete form permits its communication across time and space. The transgenerational communicative capacity of humans through non-biological media provides the basis of cultural heritage. Therefore, the exosomaticization of memory produces a spiritual prosthesis, which constitutes a uniquely human experience of the world and defines the essence of humanity. The ‘what’ of the memory prosthesis precedes the ‘who’ of the human (Stiegler 1998: 272).

Stiegler advocates an account of the relationship between technology and time as a way of understanding the evolution of humans, whose consciousness is constituted by spiritual prostheses. Technics (processes of inscription) permit the production of traces, which become increasingly sophisticated in parallel with the development of technologies, ultimately affording the creation of what Edmund Husserl was the first to call ‘temporal objects’ (Husserl 1991). Temporal objects are cultural artefacts that are perceived over time, such as stories, poetry, music and drama. These objects are perceived as a series of (audiovisual, verbal) instances that combine to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts, which makes them analogous to dialogue; however, they have a fixed structure and are repeatable, whereas dialogue is contingent. For Husserl, they afford an understanding of the flux of human consciousness. Stiegler repurposes Husserl’s temporal model of consciousness as a way of cogitating on the relationship between the object and subject: ‘A temporal object … is constituted by the fact that, like our consciousnesses, it flows and disappears as it appears’ (Stiegler 2014b: 18).

Husserl defines temporal consciousness as tripartite in structure: primary retention (present perception), secondary retention (anamnesis) and protention (anticipation). To illustrate this structure, Husserl considers how in a musical melody each note is heard not in isolation, but as part of an extended temporal whole. Notes perceived in the present as a series of discrete sounds constitute primary retentions; notes that remain in consciousness after they have been played comprise secondary retentions. Secondary retentions (memories of the past) afford primary perception to engage with the context of a melody and help us anticipate what notes come next. This anticipation is the protentional aspect of Husserl’s temporal troika. The phenomenology of hearing a note in a melody is conditioned by notes just heard and expectations of imminent ones. By reconsidering Husserl’s model in the context of mechanical recording techniques, Stiegler contributes an original, provocative synthesis, by adding a new, fourth element to the stack: tertiary retentions. These are exosomatic memories, exteriorized using mechanical recording techniques that afford ‘the identical repetition of the same temporal object’ (Stiegler 2014b: 34). Mechanical automata combine with processes of remembering to form the industrialization of memory. Human relations to the world, and to time itself, are thereby fundamentally modified. Whereas Husserl regards inscribed memory as alien to phenomenological consciousness, since it is a pre-existing, non-lived past that is external to lived experience, Stiegler asserts that inscribed memory constitutes the essence of human experience. Temporal objects, now prepared using automated recording techniques, offer a means of memory exteriorization in a similar way that writing did for Plato. However, the process of exteriorization is greatly accelerated by technological advances, such as the alphabet, the tape recorder and the microprocessor.

Each of these technologies employs grammatization, a term that Stiegler borrows from Sylvain Auroux (1995). For Auroux, grammatization is the technical, and logical, process of rationalizing language by reducing and discretizing the flux of spoken language into discrete ‘grammes’ (letters and letter combinations). As a process of recording and discretizing continuous articulations, it is the precondition and structural archetype for all written language, and so also for knowledge in general, including science and mathematics, whose units are pixels, bytes, metres, soundwaves and so on. This archetypal processing became intensified, according to Auroux, with the automation of print technologies, ushering in a second technological revolution of grammatization. Stiegler identifies the emergence of a third phase in the modern technologies of audiovisual inscription. Broadening Auroux’s attention to language, Stiegler suggests that grammatization also encompasses gesture. Given the central role of exosomatic thought in the formation of the human as human, grammatization in this way becomes a truly transformational process, ‘by which all the fluxes or flows … through which symbolic (that is, also, existential) acts are linked, can be discretized, formalized and reproduced’ (Stiegler 2011a: 172). In this view, the calendar and the clock are grammatizing technologies that result in the industrialization of time. Grammatization produces, then, an inseparable relation between technics and time, such that ‘it is technē … that gives time’ (Stiegler 1998: 220). Time itself, in other words, is a human construct arising out of grammatization.

Plato’s opposition of anamnesis to hypomnesis had the effect of demonstrating that the passage of time plays a crucial role in how humans comprehend reality. The ambiguous question that animated him was whether the technology of writing entailed a deepening of thought or a curtailment of it. The three contributions to this part of the volume address the same question in relation to electronic modes of inscription, which are analysed here in the light of the founding Stieglerian principle that it is technics that give time.

1

Organology, Grammatization and Exosomatic Memory in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape

Néill O’Dwyer

Introduction

This chapter discusses the technohistoric specificities of Samuel Beckett’s acclaimed 1958 play, Krapp’s Last Tape (KLT), under the concept of technicity, which is ‘technology considered in its efficacy, or operative functioning’ (Hoel and van der Tuin 2013: 187). Technicity is a theoretical concept initiated in twentieth-century scholarship, which permits a way of understanding how technological apparatuses hold an influential ontological force, or performative agency. In KLT this is visible inside and outside the frame of the fiction. This chapter aims to explicate the impact of technicity on the playwright and his character, by re-reading the play through Stiegler’s theoretical lens of temporality. I suggest that not only is KLT charting an experiential terrain that we now, belatedly, have the theoretical tools to engage, but so too is that terrain now very much entangled with contemporary quotidian life. Under Stiegler’s terminology, the play should be understood as distinctively and archetypically organological¹ because it stages the becoming of both man and machine as interdependent organs bound to one another under the principle of individuation. Therefore, the play marks an important development in the history of theatre because it foregrounds the performativity of technology and it represents an original aesthetic idea by re-presenting the machine as a performer.

Upon hearing Patrick Magee’s readings of his (earlier) radio plays, Beckett was so ‘impressed and moved by the distinctive cracked quality of [his] voice, which seemed to capture a sense of deep world-weariness, sadness, ruination and regret’ (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 81), that he was inspired to write a monologue for a weary old man with a wheezy and croaky voice. Magee would play the part. The regrettably coarse name of Krapp, conferred upon the character, evokes disagreeable ‘excremental associations’ (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 81) that consistently steer the tone back to one of obnoxious, rotting bodily matter and the deteriorating visceral demands of decrepitude, which, as the playbacks reveal, Krapp has struggled with all his life. KLT is a poignantly nostalgic monologue that, at first glance, interrogates the slow, protracted tragedy of ageing and the recollection of a life once lived, which seems to the protagonist almost otherworldly, or other-bodily. However, the idea most at stake in this play is not the obvious theme of representing an old man abandoning himself to ‘morbid reflections on his former glories or regretting his past failures’ (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 83); conversely, it is a foregrounding of how technology – by furnishing the discretization, logging, archiving and playback of Krapp’s life – affects the human subject, reorganizing him mentally and physically, by re-imposing exosomatic² memories upon him.

Related work

Various analyses of KLT have offered some intriguing insights into Beckett’s deployment of the tape recorder as a catalyst for self-referential conflict on stage. Adalaide Morris’s edited collection, Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (1997) provides two such readings by Michael Davidson and Katherine Hayles. The former posits that the tape recorder represents ‘an ultimate agent of mind control, a machine capable of replacing human communication with a prerecorded script’ (Davidson 1997: 99), while Hayles argues that the play represents a temporal trajectory that oscillates between the duality of presence, whereby Krapp’s disembodied voice is gradually transferred to the surrogate body of the machine (Hayles 1997: 74–96). More recently again, in Beckett, Technology and the Body (2009), Ulrika Maude contributes to the discourse by suggesting that the tape recorder serves as prosthetic memory. It is precisely on foot of this analytical differentiation – tape recorder as prosthesis and tape recorder as a separate body, or agent – that I propose KLT be understood as (in consideration of Stiegler’s theoretical advances on the principle of individuation) an organological intervention of the performative machine.

With respect to his radio plays,³ Maude maintains, in agreement with many early critics, that Beckett combined his writing with the radiophonic medium ‘because it offered him the most effective means of portraying a character’s mind, which humanist critics have considered the author’s prime objective’ (Maude 2009: 47). KLT was not originally, expressly written for radio; however, what cannot be denied is that by deploying the tape recorder on the live stage Beckett circumvents the traditional theatrical means of communicating the interiorized world of consciousness – the monologue or soliloquy⁴ – thereby creating ‘a directness of confrontation between a man’s various selves that produces an effect radically different from earlier’ analogous self-referential or self-reflexive dramas (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 83). In KLT, there is a gradual revealing of Krapp’s psyche from articulation, through phonetic inscription, to playback. Krapp deposits traces of his mind onto magnetic tape, thereby turning vocalizations into empirical, archivable and, therefore, sentimental objects. This privileging of interiority is explored by Hayles and Knowlson, who both draw on Roy Walker’s insistence that the intention was to use the tape recorder as:

[A] solution to ‘a problem that baffled the experimental playwrights between the wars,’ namely how to represent the internal monologue that constitutes consciousness, with all of its ephemerality, multivocality, and obsessive repetitions. Perhaps, he muses, ‘the epiphenomena of consciousness could be revealed by bringing the recorder on stage. Krapp’s Last Tape transforms a playback into a play’. (Walker cited in Hayles 1997: 81)

Walker’s reflection attests to the fact that mechanical technologies of audiovisual inscription offer new possibilities for delving into, revealing and laying bare the intrapersonal spaces of the human mind, by discretizing and archiving them. However, it should be noted that ‘any monologue is in dialogue [tout monologue est en dialogue]’ (Fitzpatrick 2005: 26) because as soon as a speaker [Locuteur] declares themself they establish an other (an addressee [Allocutaire]). In KLT, the definition of the monologue becomes further challenged because Krapp’s articulations are part announced to the audience and part to the machine. The latter manifests as an agent to the audience but also, crucially, as an interlocutor (a conversational other) to Krapp, which confers a performativity upon the tape recorder.

Grammatization, inscription and technologies of the mind

As explained in the section introduction, grammatization (according to Stiegler and Auroux before him) describes the process of rationalizing spoken language into alphabets, underpinned by symbols, letters and letter combinations. It is not only the basis of written language, its logic is also the precursor of mathematics and science (see Introduction to Part 1). Stiegler’s thesis on technology, as articulated in Technics and Time 1 (1994 [1998]), is based on a palaeoanthropological–deconstructionist argument that conceives technology as a prosthesis of the mind, which is fundamentally reducible to acts of inscription. This is neatly articulated in a reconsideration of Plato’s anecdote of the Pharmakon, in which he dualistically opposes writing to oration (see Introduction to Part 2). Contrary to Plato, Stiegler frequently reiterates that writing, as the originary technology of the mind, is the essence of deep reflection because it facilitates recursive considerations. This provides the basis of his argument that the modern technologies of inscription (mnemo-technologies) constitute artificial or ‘exosomatic’ memory – a prosthesis of the mind – which is continuously evolving and wholly answerable to the technohistoric juncture of human development. If, as Auroux suggests, automated printing technologies bring about the second technological revolution of grammatization (see Introduction to Part 1), Stiegler hypothesizes that a third phase has emerged out of the generalization of audiovisual and informational technologies (Stiegler 2014b: 54). Because of their ability to capture embodied experiences, process the data and represent them as the symbolic order, this new phase comes loaded with new implications for the body and gesture. Stiegler declares: ‘today bodies as well, with the temporal sequences of gestures (including the voice)⁵ and movements … are subject to grammatisation through sound and image’ (Stiegler 2014b: 54), henceforth, extending the theory beyond language into the phenomenological field of embodied gesture. The physiological actions that constitute tasks or expressions are executed through a temporal succession of moments and those moments are recordable, discretizable and archivable using electromechanical technologies. The new technologies of inscription help elucidate how human exosomatic articulations can be made subject to, and modifiable by, a machinic temporality. KLT demonstrates these phenomena through the playbacks of fragments of Krapp’s life and goes much further than this. By staging the emotional impact the recordings have on the human subject, Beckett reveals the efficacy of grammatization and mnemo-techniques generally. It is a presentation of grammatization as drama: ‘a grammaturgy’ (O’Dwyer 2015: 53). The mise-en-scène of tape recording technology generally interrogates the developmental tendencies of technocratic society, where the recording of traces increasingly becomes a socio-economic linchpin. KLT is a comment on the duality of memory, consisting in pure recollection versus the possibility to concretize them using inscriptive techniques. What becomes foregrounded then is the fungal spread of amnesia, not necessarily symptomatic of ageing but, conversely, one coerced by the domestication and mass-dissemination of mnemo-technologies since the post-war period.

Industrial temporal objects, tertiary retentions and trauma in Krapp’s Last Tape

The epoch of mechanical reproducibility does not simply refer to the ability to reproduce tangible objects; reproduction was already taking place for centuries.⁶ More significantly, for Benjamin, is the ability to, via recording, reproduce a live event, which enables the new-world artform that would be the logical development of theatre: film.⁷ Before mechanical recording technology it was impossible to listen to the same sonic event twice. Benjamin takes the (widely supported) position that mechanical...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Plates
• Editors
• Acknowledgements
• Digital Studies and Aesthetics: Neganthropology
• Introduction: ‘Prolegomenon to a Digital Studies Manifesto’
• Part 1: Tertiary Retention
• Part 2: On Pharmacology
• Part 3: The Neganthropocene
• ‘Je suis philosophe’: A Personal Note to Bernard Stiegler
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint