Can you explain grammatization?
ChatGPT said:
Yes — grammatization is one of the central concepts in Bernard Stiegler’s thought. It's dense, but once it clicks, it opens up a powerful way to think about how technics, time, bodies, and thought get inscribed, captured, and transmitted.
Let’s take it step by step, starting from the origin and unfolding toward what Stiegler does with it.
🧱 Origin of the Concept: From Derrida to Stiegler
The term grammatization comes originally from Jacques Derrida, especially in Of Grammatology, where he explores how writing (grammē) isn’t just a system for recording speech, but is primary — part of the structure of thought, difference, and memory.
Stiegler radicalizes and technologizes this idea. For him, grammatization is not only about signs or texts — it is about any process that breaks human experience down into discrete, reproducible, and technical elements.
🛠️ Stiegler’s Definition (simplified)
Grammatization is the process by which human gestures, speech, memory, thought, and life are broken down into units that can be recorded, reproduced, and circulated via technical means.
It is how flux becomes trace — how living processes (like a spoken word, a movement, or a feeling) get discretized into something storable and repeatable: a sound file, a script, an image, a data point.
📚 Examples through Time:
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Alphabet → grammatization of speech
(breaking spoken language into letters and rules) -
Writing systems → grammatization of memory
(inscribing thoughts into external memory, beyond the brain) -
Printing press → grammatization of discourse
(making writing widely reproducible, public, transmissible) -
Photography and film → grammatization of the image and movement
(decomposing gestures and scenes into frames) -
Digital code → grammatization of everything
(sound, image, gesture, thought, location — all become data) -
Neurotechnologies → grammatization of attention, emotion, affect
(tracking eye movements, emotions, decision-making)
Each new level of grammatization affects how we think, relate, remember, desire, and even how we perceive time.
🧪 Why it Matters (to Stiegler)
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Grammatization is pharmacological: it can be liberating (external memory frees up inner memory) or enslaving (automated memory displaces inner life).
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It enables transindividuation — sharing across generations — but also proletarianization — the loss of know-how and memory when control over these processes is lost.
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When corporations control grammatization (e.g., platforms, algorithms), they capture attention, predict behavior, and automate desire.
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The stakes are existential: who controls the memory of the world? What kind of future becomes possible — or impossible?
🧬 A Poetic Metaphor
Imagine life as a river. Grammatization is like the moment when someone starts carving channels, mapping the current, diverting flow into irrigated fields or factory pipelines. That process might allow you to store water, grow crops, survive drought — or it might dam the river, flood villages, and dry out the land downstream.
The question is always: who does the carving, and for what ends?
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