Theories of Technological Development

The late Bernard Stiegler’s most widely-read series, Technics and Time, begins with the claim that technical development should be conceptualized as the “pursuit of life by means other than life.” Stiegler, a philosopher of technology, is certainly not the first to productively conflate biological and machinic processes: indeed, as French philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem demonstrates, mechanical processes have been used to explain organic processes (and vice-versa) for centuries.

Rather, what characterizes the specificity of Stiegler’s work is his total commitment to articulating this problem of technological development—caught as it is between biology and technicity, the organic and the inorganic—as a real problem of time (or anachronism). What Stiegler’s aptly titled series demonstrates is that technological development does not only or mostly occasion the perpetual meeting and conflation of “life” and “technicity” as an explanatory problem — in fact, which framework (organic? machinic?) best explains the other is a question wholly sublated by his work. Rather, Stiegler brings together a lineage of thinkers (Henri Bergson; André Leroi-Gourhan; Gilbert Simondon; Yuk Hui) whose work is gathered around a paradox that no one belonging to this lineage had explicitly stated: the real problem of priority between the human and machine.

“Theories of Technological Development” is therefore not a survey course on the various positions that one could take to describe technological development. It both departs from and is organized around the principle that a systematic theory of technological development must be grounded in the anachronistic mode of encounter in which these conceptual dyads — human/machine, organic/inorganic, life/technicity — first gain their sense and importance.