I’ll attempt – once again - to take up some of these extremely intelligent, albeit rather difficult questions that my classmates introduce in their posts. Thus, here’s David on Kittler:

Ultimately, can we suggest that media are the a priori of our thinking?

I specifically want to think about how Bernard Stiegler would have answered this question. First, some important vocabulary distinctions. Stiegler seems less preoccupied with “media” and far more concerned with “technology” or “technics.” He’s treating technology as something much older than we usually think of it. For Stiegler, we’ve been using technology ever since bipedalism freed up our hands (even flint, as used by Neanderthals, was a form of technology). Dealing with the term “a priori” is a little more complex. Stiegler doesn’t bring up this concept directly, but there’s some suggestion that even the term “a priori,” that is, that which comes before experience, is problematic. Man, he contends, is essentially determined by his experience, by his environment, what is external to him: “The interior and the exterior are the same thing, the inside is the outside, since man (the interior) is essentially defined by the tool (the exterior)” (142). There’s an inherent reflexivity between external/internal, body/brain, technical /genetic evolution; the binaries become impossible to disentangle, it becomes messy and even futile to figure out which came first: “Neither one precedes the other, neither is the origin of the other, the origin being then the coming into adequacy of the simultaneous arrival of the two” (152). This does not by any means negate Stiegler’s concern with time, which he also names as “anticipation” or “differance/deferral.” It may be helpful to think about Stiegler’s overview of Heidegger in the introduction here. As Heidegger posits, being is time; our Dasein (that is, our awareness of our own being) is inherently rooted in the past while simultaneously being “thrown” into the future. In addition, we encounter technology (what Heidegger calls “equipment”) as always being “ready-to-hand,” that is, in its most natural state, as ready to be used for the purpose it’s intended for. This would suggest our relationship to technology/tools is normal/pre-given/part of our very “world.” But there’s a brief moment in Being in Time (and Kelly Polasek may remember this as well) when Heidegger mentions the rising use of radio technology. This particular technological device seems completely unnatural for Heidegger, as it collapses normal dimensions of time/space. As Stiegler mentions, this is an idea Heidegger expands upon in his “Technology” essay; technics, which “appears to be a power in the service of humanity, becomes autonomous from the instance it empowers – technics ought to be an act on the part of humanity – as a result of which is does a disservice to active humanity” (13).

So I’ll end with a few questions of my own: what is a “normal” idea of time/space for Heidegger? At what point does technology become “autonomous”? And can we, temporally speaking, “catch up to” or “anticipate” technology when it becomes autonomous?