Bernard Stiegler on the Trace-ability of our Times

The contours of our contemporary horizon are composed of an infinite marking, tracing and erasing - the apparatus of technological prosthesis has become more than cathartic but compulsive, cthonic even. 


The edges of the current spiraling dance of crisis are not clearly identifiable but definitively multiple - this state burdens the subject - breeds heavy spirits - born free but everywhere enchained to a spirit of gravity. 


It would be not only ill-conceived but impossible to try and prevent the tracing of the times - the constant recording of the self and others in everyday contact. 


The true question remains: How can we cultivate techniques adequate to a time entangled in the trace? 


How can we reckon with the excess of the trace over the task but not over the tale?

Bernard Stiegler speaks to the trace-ability of our times. 


Marcel O'Gorman of the University of Waterloo published a conversation he had with Stiegler in Volume 18 Issue 3 of the Journal Configurations entitled: "Bernard Stiegler's Pharmacy."  



 Here's an excerpt:

Yes, this is a very important issue. I would like to say one thing about it. There is this question of the traces that we produce. When I called you earlier today, I produced traces; every time I do a search on Google, I produce traces. But I do not believe anything that consists in saying we must prevent the development of trace-ability. We are now in an industrial society that rests on the recording of traces. And it is not worthwhile trying to make us believe that we should prevent it—it's just wrong. That's what I personally believe. The question is not how to prevent the recording of traces; the question is to create a consciousness of the recording of traces, a politics of the recording of traces.

Here in France, along with some students, in particular at l'Université de Compiègne, we're developing work on how to become conscious of traceability, and how to open up debates about traceability, how to create new systems of traceability, for example, and how to create laws so that this traceability is actually individuated by what it is tracing. This does not mean that the conscious mind will be able to master all of this—I do not believe in mastery—because behind the trace there is always the unconscious, and the unconscious is multi-layered, which is what I was saying earlier. And so the question is: How do we reorganize the conscious and the unconscious? And I say that this is a question of technology—that which is able to link the conscious and the unconscious is always a technique. And, by the way, Freud speaks of the psychoanalytic technique. Psychoanalysis is a technique. But such a technique must be able to think through today's industrial technics, and, sadly, psychoanalysis does not know how to do this (467-468, Configurations 18.3, 2010) 

Eternally Amusing

Rumi or Sue Me

The nafs is a sea of calm until it roars. The nafs is a Hell that radiates little heat. The nafs is an ankle-deep river you drown in. Better to be ignorant of worldly concerns, better to be mad and flee from self-interest, better to drink poison and spill the water of life, better to revile those who praise you, and lend both the capital and the interest to the poor, forgo safety and make a home in danger. Sacrifice your reputation and become notorious. I have tried caution and forethought; from now on I will make myself mad.

-Rumi


The nafs is to be understood in a similar light as Cartesian ego cogito, the transcendental subject of reason,  or the immature, bounded subject of the Enlightenment. For Rumi the uncanny contradictions of faith in concepts rendered mythical breeds a forgotten and forlorn mood; externalizing self-reflexivity onto the certainty of identity of the self with its conceptual apparatus deflates and depletes being of its creative capacity for poesis.

Yet, the situation isn't completely overdetermined by the drudges of despair; one may always flee from the imposed order of an alien selfhood, take a topsy-turvy turn, deciding without judgment between madness disclosed as melancholy or the mayhem delivered as a melody. A melody completely unknown to the Athenian flute player of Aristotelian teleology, or the Corp of Drums when the sun refused to set on the British Empire and composed of barely beyond boyhood drummers, learning and giving the orders of warfare, where comprehension of the threshold of play, when the drum beat's dance between wooden member and raw hide head ceases to play but becomes an unthought extension of a heart stuck in the violent oscillations of a warrior resonance.

Affective Energetics

Memories of conversations and good laughter pour out of the woodwork of this porch. Each creek and bend in its beams puts a bounce in my step. Each timber teems with a trajectory of what has been and what is promised to come. There are knots that have fallen out, they hold the secret to lost objects, forgotten once and for all. I’m seduced by what may lie beneath this rigid frame. When in times of wind, I care for these columns as if they were my only hope. This porch makes possible the oscillations of my swing. Each movement enchants me, amidst its uncertainty a subtle rhythm emerges, grabs hold of me, and takes flight. An iridescent light of reverence spills out upon me, an entire reservoir overflows the dams of memory’s clogged pores. In a single moment of intensity of the everyday, I finally become free to resonate with the multiple me’s.