RELATED TERMS: Exosomatisation; Remembering: Mnemotechne, Mnemonics and Memory; Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis; Design, Entwurf, Entwerpen; Fiction
“…the pharmakon of writing is good for hypomnesis (re-memoration, recollection, consignation) and not for mneme (living, knowing memory) that Thamus, in the Phaedrus, condemns … as being of little worth.”
Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination. London, UK: Athlone Press, p.91
According to Christopher Johnson (2013), Bernard Stiegler reformulates the governing theme of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which is the question of the repression of writing in Western metaphysics, in terms of the repression of technology.
Incomplete … takes these Derridean and Stieglerian insights seriously. Both Derrida’s ‘writing’ and Stiegler’s ‘technology’ are understood as metaphors for mnemotechne, as forms of material ‘reminders’ in the process of hypomnesis, rememoration.
Thus, whereas it was a question of the repression of writing in Derrida and the repression of technology in Stiegler, Incomplete … reformulates the question in terms of the repression of design. Mnemotechne, Frances Joseph (2010) suggests, may be the oldest name for design.
Design, as pharmakon, that is, both remedy and poison, is good for hypomnesis and, in so acting, alters the character of collective cultural memory and embodied or ‘living’ mneme, the two other forms of ‘memory’ outlined by Stiegler.
The emphasis upon mnemotechne is a means of asserting that memory and thought (remembering and thinking) are fundamentally related to the inorganic through the world’s materiality. Design reminds [and re-minds, re-configures mind].
Design: Hypomnesis, Mnemotechne, Praxis and Cognition
Taking this into account, ‘exosomatism’ can be re-interpreted as the theory of the co-evolution of society and ‘design’ of various orders and complexity; not a socio-technical system but a socio-design system. The diverse aspects of design as practice (pragmata, poiesis and praxis) and as pedagogy (theoria, doxa, gnosis, phronesis, nous, sophia, episteme) come together as mnemotechne. Design as practice and pedagogy thus weave together discourse, technology, thing, medium and environment to constitute economic and ecological spaces and places for ongoing socio-cultural and socio-political practice.
A multiple repression is taking place, giving rise to a hierarchy: episteme, absolute knowledge or pure knowledge, knowledge of absolutes, whether as forms or ideas, was privileged, with speech accepted as giving the most immediate access to such knowledge. Speech is therefore privileged over writing, as Derrida argues, but ‘writing’, if it is not just to be a textual metaphor, takes on various guises, such as ‘technology’ as Stiegler suggests. ‘Writing’ is manifested as scientific knowledge, technical knowledge, art knowledge (aesthetics) and media knowledge, each of which, in different ways, obscures the importance of ‘design’ as practice and as pedagogy. So-called ‘indigenous’ knowledge is equally involved in the ‘writing’ and the ‘re-writing’ of the human through the natural and against the natural, and vice versa, that is to say the ‘designing’ and ‘re-designing’ of the world.
This multiple repression is enacted historically at various points in time, for example, to favour art (ars, aesthetics) [in the Renaissance and 18th century], on the one hand, and technology (techne, science) [in the 19th and 20th centuries], on the other hand, over ‘design’ as a practice of mediation and intervention.
In parallel to this approach, ‘design’ as planning, or more specifically projecting, the future or forward orientation of ‘design’, should be taken into account. One line of thought here, going back beyond Derrida and Stiegler to Heidegger, is opened up by the leeway provided by different translations of entwurf: John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Heidegger, 1962: 185) note that, “The basic meaning of this noun [entwurf] and the cognate verb ‘entwerfen’ is that of ‘throwing’ something ‘off’ or ‘away’ from one; but in ordinary German usage, and often in Heidegger, they take on the sense of ‘designing’ or ‘sketching’ some ‘project’ which is to be carried through…”
Stiegler on Leroi Gourhan and Derrida. Source: Stiegler, B. (2002) Derrida and technology: fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prosthesis of faith.
“Let me quickly recall here that in Husserlian thought three types of memory have to be distinguished, the first two of which pertain to consciousness, the third constituting an external trace, something like an “objective” memory. It is in the work of the French paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan that this problematic of the exteriorization of memory, that is of a non-psychological memory, one that is neither psychological nor biological, is taken up. Thus, just as Leroi-Gourhan will place at the center of his analyses of hominization the concepts of “program” (organizations of memory) and processes of “exteriorization,” so these concepts will to a large extent release the next stage in Derrida’s thought represented by Of Grammatology. Leroi-Gourhan shows:
- that it is impossible to dissociate anthropogenesis from technogenesis,
- that technogenesis pursues the conquest of mobility, that is, of life, by means other than life,
- that, accordingly, the difference between human- and animal-kind is to be rethought,
- that the technical exteriorization of the living marks the origin of humanity,
- that the technical object constitutes as such a memory support (as well as the condition of what Plato calls “hypomnesis”),
- that, for these reasons, language and instrumentality are two aspects of the same phenomenon.
“The “logic of the supplement” – as a logic of prosthesis that shows
the “truth” of the “inside” to be (in) the outside in which it exteriorizes itself – makes the opposition inside/outside redundant. Leroi-Gourhan can only speak of “exteriorization” to the extent that what exteriorizes itself (the “interior,”“life becoming conscious of itself”) is constituted by its very exteriorization. This is something that the reading of Plato’s Phaedrus also elaborates in terms of the logic of hypomnesis and is already made explicit in “Freud and the scene of writing” as the indissolubility of memory and technics.”
Translator’s note in Stiegler chapter, p.264:
“For Plato, there are two kinds of memory: mneme and hypomnesis. The first is within the psyche, is active, and alive, and characterizes the type of questioning and reflecting that, for Plato, marks proper knowing; the second is a type of rememoration dependent on external supports and supplements (a clay- or wax-board, a scroll, a blackboard, a computer, or a handkerchief) that characterizes the type of knowing that is secondary and technical and, ultimately, haunted by death. For Plato, this opposition is eminently an ethical one between two types of responsibility, the one active and autonomous, the other passive and heteronomous: for Derrida, this opposition is the very institution of metaphysical philosophizing and constitutes the site of a violent desire to remove from the structure of the psyche the trace of supplementarity. Hence the importance of this text for understanding the reach of Derrida’s philosophy and the interest of Stiegler’s intense focus on this instituting moment.” – Trans. note.
Design, Disegno, Drawing
Furthermore, a cluster of concepts may need to be considered around disegno and drawing, to open up the relationship between ‘writing’ and ‘design’ through the relation between writing and drawing or writing and carving, inscription and engraving; the play around the notion of drawing out as sketching, as poiesis (making as creating, perhaps even as inventing) and as abstraction, as well as the notion of drawing up a plan or a project.
Design, Fingere, Fiction
A further cluster of concepts may also need to be examined, around the etymology of fiction. Design as fictum, derived from fingere, meaning to shape, fashion, form, mould, devise or feign is in this sense a fashioning and shaping of events (Shields, 2010, section 20), but which also opens to the possibility of the feigning of events and to deception, connotations which remain attached to the notion of design as ‘artificial’.
Design, Entwurf, Entwerpen
There is a yet further cluster of concepts around the German terms Entwurf and Entwerpen, as they are used in Heidegger and subsequent writers. This concerns the conception of design as a process of ‘throwing open’; of ‘throwing-ahead’ or projecting; and of ‘un-throwing’ or ‘throwing off’ what has already been thrown’. There is also the question of design’s prolonging of the state or condition of thrownness through its semiotic materiality. In other words, design may over-throw and/or re-throw, through interpretation and re-making. Design is a process of projective (re-)making and (re-)turning.
Notes
“In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, one finds an elucidation of this state of affairs in the belief that technical and externalized memory, in this case alphabetic writing, in its function as an aide to memory – as a material “reminder” (hypomnēsis) – exerts a negative influence upon us by propagating and enforcing a captivation with sensuous things; with what constitutes, on this view, the mere copies of more original immaterial forms (274d-77a). By not, in other words, channelling our attention inwards and towards the ideal – by not activating the living memory of “the word which is written with intelligence in the mind of the learner”, but merely presenting us with the dead and “external characters” of what is invisible and primordial (276a, 275a) – everyday occupational chains of operations – like the work of a builder, and the material tools employed in such practice, like hammers and nails – were, in extension of this, not merely grasped as a position opposed to a more originary point of view, but was seen as constituting a genuine hindrances for its attainment. For Plato, as Stiegler writes; “Hypomnēsis [being reminded] is technics in general. It is as opposed to anamnēsis [recollecting] as body is to the soul” (2007: 24).” (Nielsen, 2017)
References
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. p.185, footnote
Johnson, C. (2013) The Prehistory of technology: on the contribution of Leroi-Gourhan, in Howell, C. and Moore, G. (eds) Stiegler and Technics. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 34–52.
Nielsen, M. A. (2017) What makes us who we are? On the relationship between human existence and technics, thinking and technology, and the philosopher and the technician [MPhil thesis]. Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo.
Shields, D. (2011) Reality hunger: a manifesto. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Stiegler, B. (2002) Derrida and technology: fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prosthesis of faith. In Cohen, T. (ed.) (2002) Jacques Derrida and the humanities: a critical reader. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp.238-270.
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