Scenic Technics

For Bernard Stiegler, “technics” is “tertiary retention,” following the “primary retention” (“memory”) of the genetic code (any way in which physical, chemical, or biological reality “preserves” in its functioning the results of past interactions would be included, I suppose), and “secondary retention,” language, is the specifically human preservation of the results of past events—so, “technics” is the inscription of memory in material reality. Language is itself a kind of inscription, whether it be a sound or gesture, but the distinction between such inscription and an object whose lasting materiality would make it available after the one who produced it is gone is clear enough. I also wouldn’t consider language to be a technique, or tool, or technology, because while we could speak of refining and sharpening specific areas of language for specific uses and purposes, language itself can’t be “used”—“primary attentionality” always precedes and constitutes any “use.” The line between language and technics can’t be drawn so clearly, though, as language can be instrumentalized—but this is because language is always produced on a scene, and it is the scene that is the location of technics.

Why develop these new forms of memory, and first of all language (“secondary retention”)? Presumably tertiary retention would actually precede secondary—some object, for some reason, would “record” and organize a social relation and therefore retain the activity that went into producing or even finding that object, which would then be named. But why would any of this happen—primary retention wouldn’t produce it. Of course, the originary hypothesis is my answer for the emergence of secondary retention, but it is helpful to think about tertiary retention as emerging simultaneously with language and as being co-constitutive with it. The “scene” is really an undeveloped concept in Eric Gans’s work—it serves some purposes in aesthetic analysis, where we very literally have “scenes,” but much less in social and historical thought (what kind of scene do we have in liberal democracy, for example) and none at all in discussing the material “shell” humans construct around themselves, in particular technology. But the scenic is very well suited to serve these purposes, as even the most rudimentary scene needs to be constructed. The furniture in a room is a “memory” of the design of the room and the events that have taken place there, and situate the people in ways that recall previous interactions. There’s no scene without some “setting.”

The first scene is the originary scene and subsequent scenes are ritual scenes. The originary scene, I assume, ends with a ritual-like repetition of the originary gesture that created the scene and guided the consumption of the object (the sparagmos). The ritual-like gesture would be the first material “memory” of the scene, as some reminder of the scene (a bone of the “victim,” for example) would be the center of the gesture. In subsequent scenes that gesture would come first, as memory is “front-loaded” so as to guarantee the results of the scene in advance. This is the setting of the ritual scene, and therefore the original “technics”—there is a very urgent reason for inscribing this memory in reality. The very center-margin relation would be the object of this originary scene-setting. The remnant or remainder of the scene that serves as the center of the ritual would be preserved and worked on in ways that accrete iterations of more complex scenes, represent the tension between desire and repulsion, and make the center forbidding and impregnable. This would stimulate the acquisition of “skills” and ‘specializations,” as questions would emerge regarding the materials used in constructing the “altar,” its precise dimensions, its conformity to the need of a ritual increasingly influenced by mythic narrations of the originary event, and so on (how does the central Being want to be housed, how to keep lines of imperative exchange open, etc.). These very skills and specializations would create differentiation among the community, extending scenic construction to the margin, as masks, costumes, implements used in worship, etc., are treated with care as well.

So, technics, as I’ve been arguing over several posts, is scenic design. The development of what we could recognize as genuine “tools” and “weapons”—really just another kind of tool—such as spears, knives, hammering instruments, and so on, would all be directly tied to the ritual scene and service to the center. Large scale technology involves a qualitative transformation, as I’ve argued in Anthropomorphics and in more recent posts on the GA Blog, insofar as the model for “technology” is the mobilization of masses of dispossessed individuals in the ancient empires—the original “mega-machines,” as Lewis Mumford puts it. But these mega-machines are still engaged in scenic design, as they are used to glorify, exalt, commemorate and make immortal the imperial center. So, they are continuous with the originary technics of scenic design. The gradual technical improvements of the European middle ages were possible because the spread of Christianity created a more abstract and shared ritual center that extended across communities, even while the continued existence of communities and traditions and workmen and workmanship ensured that technological development remained on a “human scale.” The development of rapid, “interruptive” technological development that transformed communities and individuals in ways that pre-empted their ability to prepare for those transformations has to wait for the massive dispossessions of the enclosure movement and colonial discovery, which again set masses of people in motion during what Marx called the period of capital “primitive accumulation.”

Here, though, developments are decentering as well as centering, as a kind of cooperative competition over control of the process between the (decreasingly) absolute monarchs and the emergent capitalist class drives events. I see a dialectic of initiative and sabotage at work here, unlike the exclusive emphasis on sabotage insisted upon by Capital as Power, simply because I know of no instance, and can think of no hypothetical reconstruction, of the development of technology (that ultimately includes energy exploitation, communication across vast distances, and automation) outside of the spurring of capital (which, even on Bichler and Nitzan’s account, often sabotages other uses of technology precisely in order to maximize the profitability of its own investment). As the more efficient form of power, the logic of capital comes to pervade the logic of the state, as the emergence of liberalism is a way for various factions of capital to more peacefully work out their differences (and try to get the state machinery on their side). This also means that the pulverization of individuals situated within the technological juggernaut is more thoroughgoing, as they submit to the imperative to discount their present property (however meager) and capacities against future earnings (and call this “freedom”). This is a transformation in “subjectivity” that the ancient empires could never have imagined.

Capitalism and liberalism are both anti-scenic, and therefore pose challenging scenic design problems, which as a result come to be focused on technology’s resistance to capitalism and liberalism. Technology is the only site where scenic design can be imagined to have free play, which is why virtually all modern utopias, left and right, include some version of a liberated technology. Scenes comprised of individual sites of technological operation, like factories, offices, or even laboratories, are squalid and uninspiring, so the technological imagination constructs a scene that projects beyond any actual contemporary operations, which are resistant to any design beyond the needs of intimidation and demoralization. Such technological imaginaries are the only alternative to liberal capitalist narratives, which always repeat the fantasy of the future earnings that have been discounted for actually arriving as expected, even if in the form of some kind of moral compensation. These are scenes designed to scurry around on, not find a place within.

The notion of a life filled with “meaning” has been a therapeutic cliché for a long time, but I continue to insist on the notion of “meaning” because it retains its moral power if constrained by its stricter linguistic meaning, which is really being able to “say something” that remains the “same” across time and media—that is, across scenes, and the disruptions of events. So, I see no problem with saying that what humans ultimately need is meaning, in this sense. If I describe myself and my world in ways belied by what I do and how others see me then my life is in disarray, subjected to no discipline or “program.” It’s always possible to increase the consistency across scenes of what one says, but the form of social order will limit possibilities here. Someone can want to be “courageous,” but if the only form this takes is getting gunned down by a cop in a pointless confrontation, “courage” gets sunk in irony and its meaning is reversed. So, to have “meaning,” one must have, be in, build, a place governed by scenic design practices that allow for consistency of utterances or “samples” as they travel across scenes. This in turn means the scenicity itself is to be maximized, and technology should generate more scenes, upon which practices are possible, and the tendency of the technological imagination to insert individual activities as “functions” within a “system” must be resisted. Only a powerful central authority would make this possible.

One sees two tendencies in post-liberal thinking. One participates in the technological imaginary I’ve been describing above, which sees engineering or Veblen’s “industry” as an autonomous form of social development that would replace capitalist ‘discounting” with a form of planning integral to science and technology as we go about automating everything. On the other side, we have strong sympathy for resistance to technology, and a retrieval of pre-industrial, highly wrought and communally embedded forms of workmanship. This latter proposal seems especially utopian, but Curtis Yarvin makes a powerful argument for in in his latest “Grey Mirror” essay, in terms of a “disutilitarian” ethic in opposition to liberal utilitarianism. To the argument that making clothes and toys, building houses, growing food, etc., under prescribed conditions recalling the pre-modern would be an unsustainable, artificial throwback or “theme park,” Yarvin’s answer seems to be the pragmatic one that, given what we see of mass production, we might actually have much better things this way. Yarvin’s argument draws upon anthropological assumptions regarding what is good for humans, on both an individual and communal level, as one rarely sees such assumptions advanced, much less defended, on the “technocratic” side, which wants to retain control of the questions asked.

The question is, what kind of center are we serving in either case. The reason engineers have not engineered a social order in which all problems can be turned into engineering ones is that the center they tacitly serve is what I have been calling the “iterative center,” which displaces (sacrificial) ritual and narrative in the name of the hypothesis/practice nexus. On these terms, no single “Big Scene,” upon which “equal” distribution is organized, can be imagined. The individual or collective practitioner cannot demand his/their “share,” since an integrated system cannot separate “fair” distribution from participation in a system where “inputs” and “outputs” can’t be quantified. What the practitioner “wants” is for surrounding practices to be made “interoperable” with his/their own. But there’s no broader “social engineering” practice because the only ways of reducing humans to engineering logic are brutal ones which violate the ethical sensibilities of the engineer (but which also make engineers vulnerable to recruitment to the engineering of brutal political projects). So, the iterative center predicates the primacy of engineering and “industry” but without providing a place for the engineer qua engineer as the occupant of the center. The engineer is always designing from the margin, providing for a center irreducible to distributary (tributary) logics. As to why any center is necessary, and why an autonomous system of engineering can’t gradually and imperceptibly replace the existing system of liberal capitalism, the simplest answer is that engineering does not produce practices that defend the engineer against exploitation and sabotage, and there will always be agents who consider the latter to be in their interests. But this is also to say that there will always be mimetic rivalry, which can only be controlled through a center.

Sci/tech will continue to pulverize so as to rearticulate, and in doing so will always displace those situated on existing scenes, real and imaginary, such as they are. This makes scenic design practices irreducible to science and technology necessary. But not really irreducible to science and technology, because for such complementary scenic design practices to be designed, a specifically human science, dedicated to human meaning and place, is necessary. It’s evident enough what my candidate for such a science is. What makes GA, or more specifically “anthropomorphics” scientific here is that it posits, demonstrates and draws the conclusions from the inexorable centeredness of all human being. Any utterance, or sign, or “sample” (as I will increasingly be saying) is a hypothesis regarding the ordering of agents on a scene around a possible center—this means people in a position to say things—to name things, issue commands and requests, formulate questions, make statements, construct a discourse that keeps the ostensive, imperative and interrogative active within the declarative. To say something is to propose a populating of the world in accord with delegated charges to everyone on every scene. Precisely because there is no “Big Scene” there are scenes delegated to oversee and infiltrate other scenes to assess them as meaning productive or “extractive.” Language serves as the test here, while the examination of language is part of the practice. A given problem, posed in engineering terms, will lend itself to various solutions (the process of automation can never itself be completely automated), including some explicitly limiting the reach of that solution. We can pose the question as follows: will a particular contribution to scene setting (a new form of production, a new social media app, a new form of birth control, etc., will all generate scenic possibilities regarding which we can hypothesis which, indeed, already contain scenic hypotheses) help increase or diminish the likelihood that words like “trust,” “love,” “violence,” “honesty,” “courage” and so on will be “sampled” consistently across the various scenes (of course, there may be words found to be inconsistent with the ones most  important to preserve and enrich, whose meanings might be revised or restricted; and vocabularies can be transformed, but without effacing the distinctions between words that “mean what they say” and those that don’t)? Bringing the fullest expansion of scenic design capacities into conformity with the richest enhancement of our linguistic being will be the central problem of post-liberal governance.