Super-Critical Technics
- Super-Critical Technics
I. Theory into Technology
Although a substantial contribution to Nietzsche scholarship, Viroid Life is centrally interested in how technology—or technics—“gets into” (human) life, and how (human) life “gets into” technology. It represents one of the first English language accounts to bring recent theories of corporeality, time, differences and becoming into association with machines in order to engage with the mutable symbiosis of living and non-living that constitutes the technical. This review concentrates on these aspects of the work rather than those concerning the interpretation of Nietzsche’s texts.1
Rather than bring a priori notions of the human to technology, or reducing technology to a question of essence that is it itself not technological, interesting theories of technics try to reconfigure the tensions and separations between the technical and the non-technical. Viroid Life evaluatively asks: what mode of life has recourse to a relentless and intensely symbiotic association with machines? Such an evaluation can be undertaken only if the terms “life” and “machines” are subjected to refreshed scrutiny. Under the mantle of these terms, anthropomorphic illusions of finality and purpose slip back into debates about the trajectories of contemporary technology.
In Viroid Life, Nietzsche’s genealogical articulations of the artificial entwining of life and death in the invention of the human are extensively renovated and upgraded by frameworks drawn from Deleuze, Guattari and a miscellany of recent scientific perspectives found in evolutionary biology and complexity theory. Its distinctive contribution is to stage the debate over contemporary technics in the terrain of life and evolution, a terrain that becomes more politically and culturally sensitive with each biotechnological breakthrough.
Contemporary contexts
In this active multidisciplinary field, others have made the now obvious move of linking the end of the human to technology, but they have done so in different directions and guided by different logics.
Amongst recent French work on technology, Bertrand Stiegler’s LaTechnique et LeTemps [Stiegler, 1994,1996] and Echographies (with J. Derrida [Derrida & Stiegler, 1996]) sets out from broadly deconstructionist shores. Presumably, such work exemplifies what Ansell Pearson describes as “a new negotiation with technology” which recognizes “that from its ‘origins’ the human has been constituted by technical evolution”[4]. Stiegler understands human historicity as originary supplementation by technics; or as a lack of origin which triggers constant recourse to prosthetisation, a process that has been at work for millions of years of humanity’s unnatural evolution. He ‘grammatologically’ approaches questions of tool use, machines, media, image, memory and genetic inheritance, drawing on some of the sources directly and indirectly taken up in Viroid Life such as [Leroi-Gourhan, 1993] and [Simondon, 1989]. Having mentioned this approach, Ansell Pearson quickly moves on to deprecate “easy celebrations of the arrival of the posthuman” as “far too unreflective about their historical conditioning and genealogical (in-)formation.”[5] The question of why Stiegler’s approach to technics as “supplement of origin” is less productive than a Deleuzian-Nietzschean machinism tack receives no further direct attention.
A second point of reference for Viroid Life would be recent German work that has taken the genealogical conditioning of the human-technics question seriously. Most famously, Friedrich Kittler’s genealogies of media technics such as Discourse Networks 1800/1900 [Kittler, 1992], and more idiosyncratically, Dracula’s Vermèchtnis: Technische Schriften, [Kittler, 1993] or Siegfried Zielinski’s Audiovisuellen have pushed the “ends of man” thesis through the labyrinthine paths of technical-discursive shifts in inscriptive and mediatic processes. The “new German technopoetics”, as it has been called, ([Lovink, 1997]) has elaborated genealogies of the audiovisual effraction of figures of the human. It stands as an important contribution to the task of getting serious about the technical becomings of the body since it concentrates on the complicated questions of the relation between technologies and languages. If, as Ansell Pearson writes, “the aim is to get serious about lost origins in order to recover them for a new invention,” [49] at least the general import of such works in relation to language and image need to be confronted.
A third point of...
