Consciousness is thus a network of inter-connected and multi-layered circuitry, ranging from the unconscious to the history – the memory – of “culture itself” (what Stiegler calls “tertiary retentions”). But consciousness in this sense is not only dynamic but fundamentally transformative: as circuitry (and Stiegler does not mean this as a metaphor) consciousness “is what inscribes the psychic in the social through technics, it is also . . . how psychic life is immediately seized in a process of sublimation (of trans-formation)” (13). Note the order of things here: consciousness as technics “inscribes” the psychic in the social using the tools of technics, in so doing privileging not the psychic but the technical and its “retentional means”; technics transforms “psychic life” through the sublimation – a process of forgetting – of the fact that what is forgotten is precisely this transformation. Indeed, the leitmotif of Stiegler’s work is this possibility of, this chance for, trans-formation: the forming and re-forming of  consciousness.

 Stephen Barker

https://www.transformationsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Barker_Trans17.pdf