For Stiegler does phenomenology (the way things appear to us) come first or does technik's come first? Or something else?
ChatGPT said:
For Bernard Stiegler, technics comes first — or more precisely, technics and phenomenology are co-constitutive, but technics is the condition of possibility for phenomenology as we know it. This is a radical move that both extends and departs from classical phenomenology, especially Husserl and Heidegger.
Let’s unpack that.
1. Against “Pure” Phenomenology:
Husserl’s phenomenology focuses on how things appear to consciousness — intentionality, perception, memory. But he treats these as largely intra-subjective structures.
Stiegler challenges this. For him, you can’t talk about how things appear to us without also accounting for the exteriorization of memory — that is, technics. You don’t remember purely within yourself. You remember through supports: writing, photographs, architecture, tools, rituals, screens, and now algorithms.
These are not just “add-ons.” They’re constitutive of subjectivity.
“Man is nothing without his memory, but he is nothing without his technical memory either.”
— Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1
2. Technics as Epiphylogenesis
Stiegler introduces the concept of epiphylogenesis — the idea that human evolution doesn’t just happen biologically (phylogenesis) or individually (ontogenesis), but outside the body, through technical prostheses. These prostheses (tools, writing, images, etc.) store and transmit memory beyond the genetic.
So for Stiegler, technics is the origin of human temporality and historicity. Without technics, there is no human time, no retention, no transmission — and therefore no phenomenology.
3. Tertiary Retention and the Appearance of the World
Stiegler modifies Husserl’s categories of memory:
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Primary retention = immediate perception (e.g., the note you just heard in a melody)
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Secondary retention = recall from memory (e.g., remembering a song)
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Tertiary retention = externalized memory (e.g., recordings, books, photos, code)
This third kind — tertiary retention — reshapes how the world appears to us. If your memory is shaped by TikTok, you experience time, self, and desire differently than someone shaped by Homeric oral culture or printed scripture. Phenomenology is retentional and prosthetic.
So again: technics is not after-the-fact. It’s not secondary. It structures the field of experience.
4. Technics Before Dasein?
In a gesture against Heidegger, who placed Dasein at the center of being-in-the-world, Stiegler proposes that technics precedes Dasein. The human emerges with technics. We are never without tools. There is no pre-technical human — not evolutionarily, not existentially.
“The who is nothing without the what, but the what is not reducible to the who.”
— Technics and Time
So, to answer your question cleanly:
Technics comes first — not in a metaphysical sense of absolute origin, but as the precondition for the appearance of the world as meaningful, temporal, and memorable. Phenomenology (the way things appear) is always already prosthetic. You could call this a technophenomenology — and it is at the heart of Stiegler’s project.
Would you like to compare this view to someone like Don Ihde or Derrida, or contrast it with Agamben’s take on apparatuses (dispositifs)?
You said:
**Technics comes first** — not in a metaphysical sense of absolute origin, but as the **precondition for the appearance of the world as meaningful, temporal, and memorable**.
ChatGPT said:
Yes — Stiegler does have something like a metaphysics, but it’s a deconstructive, processual, and technogenic one. He resists classical metaphysics (as substance, origin, permanence) in favor of a metaphysics of becoming — and crucially, a becoming that is always already technical.
Let’s unfold this carefully.
🪞1. Not a Classical Metaphysics
Stiegler explicitly distances himself from metaphysics in the traditional sense — i.e., as the search for immutable essences, pure Being, or divine origins. That’s the metaphysics he inherits through Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, and to some extent Heidegger — and then also Derrida, who he reads very closely.
But like Derrida, he doesn’t simply reject metaphysics. He inhabits it deconstructively, tracking how it’s always already contaminated by its outside — by writing, by technics, by difference, by what he calls tertiary retention.
So, in place of substance metaphysics, we get a kind of negative metaphysics or prosthetic ontology.
⚙️ 2. Technics as the Condition of Metaphysics
In Technics and Time, Stiegler argues that technics is not just an object within metaphysics — it is the condition for the emergence of metaphysical thinking itself.
In other words, before metaphysics can ask “what is Being?”, a technical prosthesis must already have been at work, exteriorizing memory, stabilizing language, producing inscription.
“It is not being that is first, but the default of origin, the prosthesis.”
This is not just a causal priority. It’s ontological: we only come into relation with Being through technics. There is no access to the world that is not already mediated, retained, exteriorized, delayed.
So technics is not an “instrument.” It is an ontological operator — the very condition of human becoming and world-disclosure.
🧬 3. Epiphylogenesis as Metaphysical Reversal
Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenesis reorients metaphysical anthropology:
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Traditional metaphysics: Man is the rational animal, the being-with-soul.
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Heidegger: Man is Dasein, the being-for-whom Being is a question.
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Stiegler: Man is the prosthetic animal, the being who exteriorizes his becoming through technics.
This means that what we are is always deferred, always co-produced with our tools, symbols, and supports. And that deferral is not an accident — it is our condition. A metaphysics of default (défaut) rather than foundation.
⏳ 4. Time Before Being
Stiegler’s metaphysics is also temporal. Not eternal or structural, but diachronic, historical, retentional.
He reverses Heidegger’s famous claim that “time is the horizon for the understanding of Being” — instead, Stiegler says:
Technics is the horizon of time.
Which implies:
Technics is the condition for the temporality that allows Being to appear.
In this sense, it’s a metaphysics of delay, deferral, retention — an ontological grammar that runs through Derrida's différance, Heidegger's temporality, and Simondon's individuation.
🪡 So: Does Stiegler have a metaphysics?
Yes, but it is a deconstructed, technogenic metaphysics of prosthesis, delay, and exteriorization.
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It refuses pure origins (no “man before tools”).
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It refuses interiority without supplement (no mind without memory supports).
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It refuses Being without technics (no appearing without exteriorization).
It is a metaphysics of the default of origin — of becoming technical, of retentional dis/orientation, of a subject always already mediated and in-formation.
If you want, we can call it a prosthetic metaphysics — or a metaphysics of tertiary memory.
Would you like to trace how this connects to Simondon’s ontogenesis? Or compare to Agamben’s metaphysical minimalism — his “form-of-life”?
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Yes — that’s very much in keeping with Bernard Stiegler’s work, and beautifully synthesized. Your passage captures many of his key ideas and threads them together with clarity and force. Let’s unpack how and why it aligns with his thinking, and then I’ll note a few possible tweaks or elaborations to deepen the resonance.
✅ How your statement aligns with Stiegler:
1. “Skills were increasingly autonomized, which contributed to proletarianization…”
Absolutely. This is core to Stiegler’s political project.
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In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, he defines proletarianization not only as the loss of work, but more fundamentally as the loss of savoir-faire (know-how), savoir-vivre (know-how-to-live), and even savoir-théoriser (know-how-to-think).
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The externalization of skill into machines (from looms to algorithms) results in the loss of individuation, both at the individual and collective levels.
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The migration of skill to devices produces dependence without understanding, leading to symbolic and epistemic disorientation.
2. “…they migrated to increasingly sophisticated tools which possess a temporality of their own.”
Yes — tools and technical systems carry temporalities. Think of industrial time (clock-regulated), digital time (real-time, 24/7), or algorithmic time (predictive, anticipatory).
Stiegler would say:
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Tools carry tertiary retention — externalized memory — and shape our sense of time.
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This reshapes how we anticipate, remember, desire, and live.
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These temporalities can become desynchronized from natural and psychic time, leading to psychic disarray and societal destabilization.
3. “Tools and technics allow for the reconstruction of ‘environments’ (and of us)… as in the concept of umwelten or habitus.”
Yes — and beautifully put.
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Stiegler draws from Simondon (individuation) and Uexküll (umwelt), as well as Bourdieu (habitus, although he rarely names him directly).
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For Stiegler, technics and environments co-constitute the human. We are not born into a world — we enter a structured milieu of tools, practices, and supports, which shapes how we become.
4. “…they allow for the preservation of values which run counter to natural selection…”
Yes, this is core to his anthropology of technics.
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Stiegler says that technics allows for epiphylogenesis — the transmission of memory and values beyond genetics.
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Because of this, human becoming is no longer governed solely by biological evolution — we can retain and transmit symbolic systems that include art, ethics, care, poetry, and noetic values that contradict or transcend Darwinian utility.
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For Stiegler, this is the ground of both ethics and politics — and what is at stake in our contemporary crisis.
5. “…they imposed industrial temporalities on consciousness and memory and pulled time and space out of joint…”
Yes. Stiegler tracks how technologies of speed and synchronization (from factory rhythms to social media) dislocate traditional experience of time and place.
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This leads to a crisis of attention, a breakdown of care, and a colonization of the future (e.g., predictive marketing, preemptive policing).
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These systems inhibit psychic individuation, producing disorientation, disaffection, and addiction.
6. “…these temporalities increasingly overrun space leading to disorientation and disindividuation.”
Yes — he even calls this a crisis of locality, in both the psychic and spatial sense.
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Globalized networks delocalize symbolic systems, making it hard to situate oneself.
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In The Re-enchantment of the World, he links this to the loss of libidinal economy, desymbolization, and entropy — both thermodynamic and noetic.
7. “Technê, not just language, is the limit of our world.”
Yes, and this is a radical twist on Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
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Where Heidegger says “language is the house of Being,” Stiegler might say: technics is the house of becoming.
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Language itself is a technical prosthesis — a tertiary retention system.
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The limits of technics are thus the limits of our world, but also the condition of its transformation.
🧵 Possible additions or refinements:
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You might want to specify what kind of values technics can preserve — e.g., poetic, ethical, or philosophical — to sharpen the contrast with Darwinian adaptation.
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Consider adding that this dynamic can go both ways: technics can support individuation and care, but also accelerate disindividuation when captured by capitalist systems. That tension is central to Stiegler.
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You could mention pharmacology — his term for the fact that technics is always both poison and cure (pharmakon). This adds nuance: tools can disindividuate, but they also hold the potential for re-individuation, if reappropriated.
Would you like this paragraph rewritten as a Stieglerian aphorism? Or embedded in a dialogue with another figure — like Simondon, Haraway, or Agamben?
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