Drew S. Burk
Drew Burk is a philosopher and translator of contemporary Francophone literature and philosophy. He is also the editor of Univocal, a publishing series with University of Minnesota Press. His most recent translation is Feline Cultures: Cats Create their History by Éric Baratay(Athens, University of Georgia Press, July 1, 2024)
This text was originally presented at the 2023 IAMHIST Conference in Montreal: On the Future [of] Archives.
What I’d like to do in this essay is seek to reflect on the Future [of] Archives, on the place of the archive in relation to the future, and the very future of the archival process itself in relation to the production of subjectivity, memory and the process of individuation in the individual and the collective.
Today we are witnessing, and are immersed within, an abundance of archival processes. The very infiltration of mechanisms of archiving into our daily lives has led many to reflect on the ubiquity of vernacular archives. And yet, within this abundance, it also seems that perhaps something essential in the archival process is also in the midst of disappearing. I want to explore what this disappearing process is, or perhaps reflect on the inherent absence[1] in every archive.
I want to triangulate several thinkers who attempted in their late works to tackle the future of archiving and whose thoughts would certainly be welcomed within this international conference: Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever,[2] Vilem Flusser’s mention of “cybernetic memories” in his collection of essays, Post-History,[3] and contemporary Mexican Anthropologist Roger Bartra’s reflections on “artificial consciousness” in his most recent book, Chamanes y Robots.[4]
In some way or another, the future archives or the future of archives is inherently tied to how human socio-cultural symbolic structures, on the one hand, and the future of technical apparatuses on the other, become entangled or enmeshed. This seems like the incontrovertible driving force today and over the past twenty years as we have been subject to the internet age and the various algorithmic media to which we now have become accustomed, and their inherent capital drive toward personalization and the collective ubiquity of the archiving function.
Today, this archiving function, which makes use of the immediacy of real-time, the written, visual, and sound-image, is also, as we know, beholden to strange mechanisms of algorithmic programs and artificial intelligence (predictive simulations and modelling). It has also ushered in a new era of temporal immediacy (following Paul Virliio[5]) and perhaps also a new form of forgetting and something akin to what Flusser called “cybernetic memories” in the early 1980s. Flusser foresaw a future where humans would hand over the very process of memory to computers, off-loading a process that is fundamental to human learning and survival. As Flusser noted, such cybernetic memories would be more efficient if handed over to computers because computers can remember much faster than humans. We no longer, for instance, memorize the phone numbers of our peers and family, leaving this job to a tiny computer we call a cellphone. But archiving and cybernetic memory processes also contain another efficiency over human memory, according to Flusser: not only do computers remember faster, but they also forget much faster. And herein lies part of the drastic shift, both personal and collective, that we can see or sense today within a landscape where processes of cybernetic memories have become omnipresent and commonplace. If the archive was created in part to retain something of memory, to grant memory a material place, what happens to memory when the archival function is also accelerated and turned into an algorithmic process?
To reflect on this question I want to turn to the late 1990s and Jacques Derrida’s strange book about archives—the book Mal d’Archive or Archive Fever. As someone who spent a larger portion of his philosophical career reflecting on the relationship between memory-supports, psychoanalysis, and a form of engagement with origins and interpretations of origins, Derrida’s work turns around at least one thing that is of interest to us today: memory and the future of memory in relation to the machinic immediacy of exchange (in his case the relation between psychoanalysis and email).
And it’s precisely this reflection, now some twenty-five years later, within an era where e-mail and a certain temporal rhythm of immediacy has now become ubiquitous, that I’d like to reflect in part on the future archive in relation not to psychoanalysis proper, but the human psyche or mind in general and the mysterious process we call consciousness.
For some thinkers like Daniel Dennett, consciousness is considered simply as a residual effect. But other scholars, such as the Swiss philosopher, Jean Gebser, understand the mystery of consciousness as a mutational structure of presence in ongoing development in humans for over thousands of years.[6] And yet other contemporary thinkers such as the cultural anthropologist Roger Bartra see consciousness as merely a form of self-awareness that is reliant on a relation to sensation. But can it be posited that consciousness is a human trait that is also inherently tied to archiving or memory support processes?
In Archive Fever, Derrida focuses his attention on the very shifting mechanism of e-communication in how its immediacy will at once create a new form of archiving but also recall to mind the potential destruction or separation of the archive from the very experience of the event it seeks to archive. Within a certain historical perspective of written history or photography, Derrida reminds us of this simultaneous split between the archive and its situated position between memory and its substitution for memory or the absence of the lived experience. But how does the position of an archive change when it’s now inherently connected with real time?
When Derrida speaks of the violence of the archive and the separation between lived experience and its representation as memory-support, in what manner does an archive serve, in contrast to a mere form of memorial representation, as a trigger of a much more profound form of foundational process of archival ananmesis (as Derrida hints at with the notion of the archi-archivist[7]) or what the philosopher Frédéric Neyrat describes, with insight, in his reading of Walter Benjamin’s conception of an involuntary recollection in contrast to a simple memory? Neyrat explains to us that counter to what we often consider as the function of consciousness—as a way to fully experience reality of the here and now, of the present, that in fact following Benjamin’s analysis, consciousness serves as a kind of “shock absorber” of the present, of any new experience, granting to it a certain relation to representation based off already past experiences, providing ready-made images in some manner.[8]
According to Neyrat, Benjamin describes a relation to memory that oscillates between a dream-state and a waking-state. And moreover, it’s within this register that what we often understand our “lived experience”—to fully be present within the most profound and fundamental experiences of our existence. For Benjamin, such a “lived experience” is what we could call “ambiguously artificial” as it would imply being the subject fully aware of what Is happening to him or her in presence of the event while also simultaneously representing to themselves the very event as it unfolds. But, as Neyrat quickly emphasizes, the very fact that representation comes after presentation implies there is something of the event that has yet to be perceived or imprinted as memory or representation. Neyrat refers to this extra-supplement in Benjamin’s reading as “the being yet to arrive”, but we could perhaps also relate it to Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of the saturation of being[9] or Michel Henry’s concept of l’arrivée de soi.[10] Is the initial archive-function in confrontation with this saturation or plenitude of an event, as it was initially produced by the human biological operator, a protective form or process of survival? The very story-telling of wars and hunts, merely cathartic archival functions of the human to learn and acquire mechanisms for transmitting knowledge in order to survive?
“The more an event is dramatic or important, the more difficult it is to become representable, symbolizable, or comprehensible and therefore there is a gap between what is taking place and what consciousness can actually process and experience.”[11] As Neyrat notes, in extreme cases of novelty or an important event, such a gap between lived experience and its representation by consciousness can provoke what we refer to as trauma.
Here we have then, a rather different understanding of the functioning of consciousness and also its relation to memory. If, as Benjamin points out, consciousness is actually a form of protection, of a kind of shock absorber of self-preservation and is a kind of filter of the shock of the new and incomprehensible part of an event, then how can we understand such a definition in regard to both future archives and also what anthropologist Roger Bartra calls the possibility of A.I. to attain artificial consciousness?
Is such an individual and collective form of consciousness not in part what an archive possibly presents or represents? And is this type of experience—of an involuntary memory of knowledge—whereby a kind of “excess of being that has not yet arrived or is lagging” comes to form a kind of archival anamnesis? A spontaneous form of knowledge perhaps even in the very form of an archive or artificial consciousness that would in some manner turn the tables in making use of the human subject as aide-mémoire and the very shock-absorber for the cybernetic memories and artificial consciousness of the Artificial Intelligence itself? Given that, as Flusser proclaims, cybernetic memories are machinic memories that at once remember faster and forget faster, and Bartra’s claim that perhaps humans could eventually become the very memory-supports or vital components in some kind of machinic artificial consciousness, it perhaps merits reflecting on the way in which humans are the very site of a specific consciousness in how they sense reality, how they experience it, filter it, and even in how their body stores it.[12]
Or rather, is it possible that any future archive, and possibly any cybernetic artificial consciousness, would be simply an exo-cerebral extension (as Bartra posits)[13] whereby the human’s ability to endure the very shock and acceleration of technological advancement manifests itself through the very pleasure derived from the shock absorbers of an artificial consciousness that would in fact, in part, serve as a forgetting machine. Machines also forget faster, as Flusser tells us. Is this perhaps what we see as the side effect of the advent of social media as vernacular archive, for instance?
Would any future archive then, be some kind of shock absorber or rather the opposite, something of a priming catalyst for an involuntary and unanticipated or unexpected excess of being to surge forth from the subject, as a kind of archival anamnesis? Or would it rather, function, as the French title of Derrida’s book also suggests but which is absent from the English title: Mal d’Archive as in Mal au pays: a kind of homesickness or longing for some kind of impossible memory or mourning for what is always already absent within the human condition. In any case, the very entanglement of human and machine in the memory process of immediacy has something of a cybernetic archival anamnesis to it.
For Benjamin, such a form of involuntary recollection is also in relation to a movement from what he refers to as dreaming and waking states. And here, it’s not such a leap to relate Benjamin’s reflections with some of the insights that Gebser was seeking to describe in regard to consciousness. Given Benjamin’s unique interest in both a certain form of temporality, a kind of theological messianism of the present, and his comprehension of what he refers to as involuntary memory, can we not finally begin to see how Flusser’s “cybernetic memories” and Bartra’s reflections on artificial consciousness provide us with a much broader mental image, perhaps even, to follow Gebser’s expression, a larger recognition of a mutation in consciousness,[14] whereby the aperspectival dynamic gives way to both a new form of artificial forgetting or protection of the psyche while simultaneously cybernetically governing how humans remember and form memories in relation to the prosthetic extensions of capture that now frame their daily life. And here we once again arrive to something of the pharmakon nature of the algorithmic world in which we reside today, as a virtual mental landscape of latent temporalities as well as half-memories and artificial lived experience serving to palliate—as Bartra might say in regard to consciousness as a form of pleasure (to protect the organism from pain)—of the very trauma of the immediate.
Archival Anamnesis and Artificial Consciousness
That is, if in fact any future archive would be something beyond the order of real-time, the most common form of archival capture today, and rather something of the order of a predictive algorithmic programming of a future-present whereby the archival function and the archive itself would appear to be experienced in its virtual-becoming-actual then would any future archive itself become something akin to archival anamnesis: as any future archive would function as a strange spontaneous form of recollection of knowledge via one of several parallel possible presents or pasts within a strange entanglement of a virtual future-present that is always underway.
And now we have arrived at the crux of our reflections for this essay: all archives perhaps lead to some crossroads of several paths, like the production of memory itself and the neural networks that are informed and sculpted by it.
Tenet and Memento
We can perhaps grasp something of the paradoxical predicament in which the contemporary archiving function places the human operator today by way of reflecting on two films dealing with memory and the future by the filmmaker Christopher Nolan: Memento and Tenet.
In Memento, we find a protagonist seeking at once to recall the past while simultaneously having no short-term memory, due to a trauma. As the viewers we follow around the protagonist as he constantly seeks to find the killer of his dead wife. But the protagonist in his search for clues will not remember them and must seek to making use of memory-supports in order to puzzle together a timeline that would help to create a narrative for finding the killer. He seeks to taking polaroid photos, material photographic supports, but just as quickly forgets what he has captured. He sorts to tattooing his body with clues, a literal bodily retro-cognitive archival impression, and yet also then immediately forgets their meaning. With every accumulated clue, the puzzle only becomes more embodied and more confused. The protagonist in Memento is exemplary of the predicament of immediacy of the algorithmic social-media memories that perhaps functions on a similar immediacy of impression and a simultaneous forgetting. Or perhaps is more analogous to how A.I. Chatbots archive and “remember.” That is, having no recollection of the past nor present, only operating within a future-present through their algorithmic processing and sorting of datasets.
In Nolan’s other film, Tenet, the main character is introduced into a new temporal order where the future is sending material back into the present [the future’s past], and where he uncovers an archive from the very future itself, in the form of detritus and debris. We learn along with the hero of our story that he can only interact with this futural archive through a process of “recollection” through sensation or “feeling”, one of the characters explains to him “don’t try to understand it but feel it”: another example of a kind of retro-cognitive bodily performativity.[15] Of course, retro-cognitive performativity may be understood as the very earliest form of collective memory archives through various artistic collective practices of memory and catharsis such as in Greek theatre.
The Present as Arriving Memory.
How can we begin to make sense then of this seemingly new vernacular archival process at work in the process of psychic and collective individuation within our current society of digital apparatuses and cybernetic-memory platforms? In what manner are we already subjected to virtual temporalities of various futures and perhaps even engaging in retro-cognitive bodily performativities or amnesic impressions or interior socio-cultural and biological dynamics rendered partially visible through a real-time archive filtering a strange post-medium residue for a predictive algorithmic collective nervous system that has been externalized and simultaneously internalized as something of a collective endo-colonization of cybernetic memory? In what manner has the human operator somehow begun to serve as a memory-support for a much more complex cybernetic artificial consciousness now taking the form of mimetic generative large language models?
In Tenet, the future reveals itself through objects that function by way of an inverted entropy traveling backwards, whereby one must in effect act in such a way toward an object so as to grasp a viewpoint that would therefore enable the inverted entropic force to become entangled with the observer.
Later, in a discussion, the protagonist references another character in the film claiming: “he can communicate with the future.” And the other character replies, “We all do, don’t we? Emails, credit cards, texts: anything that enters into the records speaks directly to the future. The question is: can the future speak back?” [Priya in Tenet]
If we are remembering [for] the future and the archive is itself always already perhaps a way of remembering as well as a protective form of bodily knowledge that we already retain, what then, can we ask of the future, and our entanglement with it, other than the words Priya calls to mind.
And yet, there are other more ancient cultures, tens of thousands of years old who have learned to perform their own liberatory rituals of survival and creative and cathartic release in a sacred energetic ritual of dynamic feedback between a virtual landscape and the real, connecting a primordial energetic relation with nature and the environment with modes of futural survival. The Australian aboriginal cultures and their conception of spacetime serve as perhaps a founding and hopeful or liberatory way of conceiving of how contemporary relations to technological advances can be observed and also understood.[16]
Quantum Consciousness and Artificial Consciousness
Let us consider briefly the often-forgotten reflections on consciousness posited by Gilbert Simondon in light of our discussion on Bartra’s intimation that one could possibly entertain the idea of “artificial consciousness” in the development of artificial intelligence, whereby A.I. would have a sort of “artificial consciousness” akin to an “artificial heart”. As has been seen in the past over and over again: humanity often seeks to create or uncover a separate knowledge or intelligence within technology only to in actuality merely project their own knowledge of self into the technological apparatus.[17] That is, even the evolution of the production of human consciousness could be considered as inherently connected to the technology it creates serving as externalized extensions of its self-understanding. Bartra indicates as much when he claims that human “consciousness includes a type of symbolic-prosthesis.”[18] That is, as an externalized symbolic support structure allowing for the production of knowledge of self within the larger community of humans. Again, following Locke’s idea that consciousness is a shared social form of knowledge, then it’s perhaps not presumptuous to understand in what manner Simondon’s work regarding individuation of the individual and the collective also resonates as a study on consciousness and the future of artificially networked archives, and also as a quasi-phenomenological study on how humanity evolves with its technology. But let us simply turn to a very intriguing passage in Simondon’s major work, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and information. For as we arrive into the era of quantum-computing, Simondon, in the late 1950s, already studying early computer networks, had posited a theory of quantum consciousness.
In attempting to bridge the gap between various theories of consciousness understood as a unity and also as a plurality, between for instance, the various states [or atmospheres, our emphasis] of the individual and the collective, Simondon sees something at work similar to Bartra’s theory in that Simondon claims “consciousness is neither pure interiority or pure exteriority”, rather, he claims, “the psyche is an ongoing differentiation and integration” of self according to what he refers to as the process of transduction.[19]
Such a process implies that the state of a human psyche, for Simondon, and the individual’s individuation takes place through a process (what he refers to as transduction) that is more fundamental than causality and finality whereby the individual perceives or acts, or constructs something that enhances the connection between the individual and the world.[20] For Simondon, and this is useful in consideration with Bégout’s reflection on ambiance and our own understanding of “atmospheres of being”, the most emblematic form of this process of transductive form of the psyche and the production of consciousness resides within affectivity and emotivity: serving as the intermediary between “clear consciousness and subconsciousness”. Simondon goes on to explain that what the psychoanalyst or in this case Jung uncovers in his conception of archetypal myths are moreso the very “affective-emotif themes underlying myths.”
And for Simondon, if the individual and the collective are to partake in a shared form of knowledge, or more specifically a form of consciousness, then it resides not entirely within the symbolic-cultural structures or objects of a given community, but rather, in his view, first and foremost within such shared “affectivo-emotif regimes”.
As much as Simondon’s conception of consciousness and the transductive process that it gives rise to is an interesting attempt at explaining consciousness and the process of individuation, it would perhaps be too simple to simply claim that archetypal examples are merely some kind of envelope for affective-emotive regimes. After all, as Giorgio Agamben proclaims in his short work, Adventure and something that Bartra in his own manner will also explain, “what is at stake in the acquisition of knowledge is this very movement, the very journey or adventure whereby the senses are set to work, and quite possibly in simple contrast to the lone journey of the “hero” in European archetypal forms of knowledge transmission, there is the much more ancient practice of the shaman, who must, as Bartra reminds us, embark on a psychic journey in order to seek out the lost soul of the sick in order to return it to the body.[21] All these descriptions of action, perception, and construction put forth by Simondon to describe the process of individuation and consciousness, are embodied in other non-European cultural practices that we should not take for granted in which the symbolic content is the prime motor for concentrating the image-forces to at times balance such primordial affective-emotive forces. For, as we should recall to mind, another manner in which to understand consciousness as well as the practices performed by shamans and psychoanalysts alike, is an attempt to restore what can also be referred to as homeostasis, or a harmonious balance. It’s such an equilibrium that we could say is also at stake in the production of beauty and, for our research, conceptions of atmosphere(s) of being.
And yet for Simondon, individuation as a process cannot be merely understood in terms of the individuated being, that is, the individual, which he claims is only a part of the process itself of individuation, rather, individuation in his view is seen as merely an “amplification process of becoming, but becoming insofar as the becoming is the being’s becoming. Individuation cannot be suitably known if it is related to its result, i.e. the constituted individual”.[22] Rather what allows for a grasping the very definition itself of individuation since the individual is only one aspect, is to take the individual along with the milieu. That is, as a couple, individual-milieu, moving from that which was once the milieu toward the individual-milieu that the individual has now become. In other words, to grasp something of this process of individuation, is to also grasp something of the individual-milieu couple that has taken place within a process of resolution of a crisis or event that serves as genesis for the very process of individuation itself.
Program, Prediction, and the Industrialization of Memory
However, we must follow this reasoning a bit further. If human consciousness has been considered as extended out into the environment and the symbolic-cultural technologies we create as we have discussed above, what can the predictive nature of A.I. systems such as ChatGPT explain to us about our own brain’s predictive mechanisms? Indeed, two processes come to mind: firstly the work of Andy Clark, who has suggested that in fact our brains and consciousness function as endlessly reiterated and updated predictive modeling of our activities and surroundings.[23] In this manner, the very program of our sensory experience perhaps is well-mirrored in A.I., perhaps already arriving to the phantom-effect of consciousness speculated upon by certain thinkers such as Dennett. But we should delve a bit deeper and ask to what extent such A.I. programs partake in what Bernard Stieger has called the industrialization of memory.
In his reflections on the industrialization of memory, Bernard Stiegler also recalls to mind the shift from the transcendental subject at the heart of the phenomenological project and the transformation to a larger reflection on knowledge as emergent shared informational exchange, unpredictable and also understood as a kind of collective non-anthropocentric viewpoint not based on a specific program or subject, but rather, on what he referred to as an informational emergent model of social cognition. Stiegler contends that in the case of such an informational model of collective social emergent cognition what is of import, as we have mentioned elsewhere, is the production and repetition of habit. Stiegler provides us with a poignant insight into a transformation of a collective form of knowledge through the emergent structure of an anthill whereby we are provided with a significant example of our engagement into the relation between consciousness and landscape. In the case of how ants function within the multi-agent system of an anthill, there are agents which he refers to as “cognitive agents”—those who are aware of their behaviors and past behavioral experience and “reactive agents”—having no memory and who respond to a stimulus-response schema.[24]
Stiegler’s assessment of knowledge and its externalization into cultural instruments or tools as well as beyond the brain in relation to what he conceives of as the very questioning of an inter-related interrogation of not just how knowledge as such attains its genesis but also is inherently tied to various forms of memory and even the industrialization of memory through writing all the way to contemporary modes of memory-supports, that in effect drastically transform how time functions and more importantly the human individual and collective’s relation to time, how we experience time and also, how we retain a memory trace of such a lived experience. If to understand knowledge, as Stiegler suggests, is to produce it, to perform it as labour[25], how can we reflect on knowledge transmission within the very regime of “cognitive” and “reactive” agents of such memory-labour as knowledge and as memory? For the latter, such knowledge would be mere repetition without memory or knowledge, and for the former, such labour would be, as has been described by a number of recent theorists such as Berardi, as semio-capital of immaterial labour that would have to be produced or “read”—interpreted and deciphered so as to render back both knowledge and memory its very in-determined or underdetermined nature. In other words the “cognitive” agents within a contemporary temporal landscape constructed on forgetting and a new relation to real time would be those who constantly sought to give the future and temporality back to itself, grant back its very excess as dilation, so as to in fact regain the very process of individuation that was of the utmost importance to Stiegler’s research as well as that of Simodon, to whose work he was beholden.
Following the Platonic notion of anamnesis, the paradoxical precondition of all knowledge is memory. And for Stiegler, such a precondition implies or has come to imply for humans a relation to prosthetics or extracerebral tools. Knowledge is both a technics and also a labour and yet, as Stiegler also carefully notes, “it is not at all certain the producer precedes the product” constructed through this generational and cultural transmission of knowledge.[26]
We are slowly arriving to this necessary crossroads where knowledge and consciousness intersect between a science and philosophical practice that attempts to seek at once its own origin or memory as well as the very genesis itself of invention that would be the source of itself that would somehow function, it would seem, retrocausally. Or to return to Stiegler’s vital preoccupation and question between knowledge production and future temporal or memory prosthetics and invention: who produces what? Who programs what?[27]
It is not clear, from Stiegler’s careful reading of technical memory supports and cultural production, just how we are to understand this interconnected relation and maieutics between the “who” and “what”. And this lack of clarity or determination is precisely the importance here for Stiegler. He returns to Heidegger briefly to speak of humanity’s “thrownness” into the world, or into the being-toward-death, or finitude. Only when the ready-at-hand is precisely not at-hand do we begin to question and seek out invention. Only when there is a failure and rupture do we seek out that “who” or “what” which is lacking. And for Stiegler, “the complex of who and what endlessly modifies the conditions of temporalization.”[28]
To return briefly to the concepts of “cognitive agents” and “reactive agents” within an open system, the difference between them, it would seem, would be one of consciousness as techné—that is, as Stiegler reminds us in citing Heidegger’s essay on Technology, having the dual meaning in ancient Greek of episteme while also co-producing its own event as knowing and as a craft of invention. And within such a proclamation, resides a finitude and a necessity of memory—of storage. “Building haystacks and woodpiles, storage practices since the Neolithic, is only a particular case of memorization, of reserve, of anticipation, giving rise to the appearance of techniques of memorization and counting as such.”[29]
What Stiegler appears to grasp in his reflections on the increasing externalization of memory into programs and processes (even the very programs and processes of academia) also must be reflected upon with an eye toward understanding in what manner we lose something of the “reassuring naturalness that preserved the collectivity as it was established on common grounds” (Stiegler, 185) Today, on a vast entanglement of networks, processes, and programs functioning outside any notion of natural inscription or embodiment knowledge as techné—two beings are pitted not against each other but as a replicated form that has henceforth been entirely externalized through the programming and processing which returns Stiegler to the very same question: what programs who?
“There is program. The natural memory of the epiphylogenetic being who is not always already “artificial” does not exist, having been produced by programs that are largely memory’s prostheses. There is only that. And the who, in its indetermination, programs itself. Who programs what? What programs who? Does the who program the what through self-programming? Is the reader, spectator, or listener being auto-programmed prosthetically when reading a book, watching a film or listening to a CD, DVD, or Ipod? Or does the receiver process the data stored in the particular medium through a program or programs that is the human being? Or do these programs consisting of mnemo-technical data permit the “processing” of data in the receiver’s “own” memory, which then program their execution? What is the organ (instrument) activated by a CD: the CD player? The listener’s sense of hearing? Both? Something entirely different? Is a book a translation (and production) interface between reader and Literature, as a vast collective memory? Does “software” function in the same way?[30]
Stiegler’s critique of our relation to contemporary mnemo-technics as programs suggests what we have discussed earlier through the concept of time-forms. In this case, memory has been externalized to such an extent within networks that the very “storage” of temporality or finitude—of time’s excess as energy—whereby programs must be viewed as having, for Stiegler, overcome the phenomenological analysis of time. Media and its programs now function as both anticipating life and does so to such an extent that it would appears as if life were in fact narrated or produced retrocausally. The media programs therefore anticipate and also give form to and produce or are processed into a time-form that we would now understand as the injection of interfaces into the very “intimate life of one’s consciousness of time”[31] “The techno-logical medium thus appears in its development like a vast polyphony, a returning of the spirit to matter, a reversal in which the spirit is not reified and has no more existence than a glove that removed, reveals a hand, a hand (not) always having been its glove, tool, outfit, habitat, techno-logical practice (habit, habitat, habitude techno-logique).”
It should be interesting to note two items in how Stiegler concludes his second volume on Technics and Time. Firstly, he recognizes that time is consciousness, and that knowledge is time. Or rather that memory is in fact knowledge and even a kind of anticipatory storage (“storage practices since the Neolithic, is only a particular case of memorization, of reserve, of anticipation, giving rise to the appearance of techniques of memorization and counting as such”), or i.e. for Plato, it is anamnesis but also any temporality by its very coming into being, (citing Derrida) implies a historicity, a tradition. Such tradition as memory would imply some kind of collective common ground of shared lived experience that would be the very retention of this tradition—in all its evolutions or variations and mutations—all its performative and processual transmissions and prosthetic adaptations. And secondly, in his critique of phenomenology and phenomenology’s very task as seeking to grasp the very episteme of lived experience and the internal temporality of human life (what Stiegler calls a memory-flux or idiotext), what we had once understood as intersubjectivity must now be understood as both a (re) construction of place, “an already-there” prosthetically supported and synthesized as “transdividuation.”[32]
To conclude, can we foresee a future where such processes of individuation within a cybernetic milieu of A.I. archival architecture on the one hand, and human quantum consciousness on the other, generates a cybernetic memory of an individual-milieu in various quantum archival states whereby future archives would in essence retain something of an “artificial consciousness” and whereby the humans would serve as memory-support, providing the sensory inputs necessary for the extended A.I. consciousness to allow for the navigation of endlessly emergent temporalities that would come in and out of existence through the human-machine interface?
[1] Is the absence contained within every archive at once the experience of the present of the past and the future in which this lacking presence will be experienced? And if so, is the archive not in some sense always in a temporal lag?
[2] Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive (Paris: Galilée, 1995)
[3] Vilém Flusser, Post-History, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013)
[4] Roger Bartra, Chamanes y Robots, (Anagramma Editorial, 2017)
[5] Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant: Stop Eject
[6] Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstard and Algis Mickunas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986)
[7] Derrida speaks of the initial archivist as being in a position of discovering or archiving and thus organizing a material that the archi-archivist can’t possibly comprehend and in archiving it, that is organizing it, the archvists must also take on a position of authority and organizing principal whereby “they do not understand what they are speaking about”. It’s this strange temporal lag and relation between humans and that which they attempt to archive of the event beyond their grasp of of knowledge which is of interest to us. For it’s possible that what one doesn’t understand of the even is nevertheless stored somatically as a bodily retro-cognition.
[8] Frédéric Neyrat, Le Cosmos de Walter Benjamin (Paris: Kime, 2022) pp. 54-57.
[9] See Jean-Luc Marion, In The Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. JeffreyL. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
[10] See Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh trans. Karl Hefty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015)
[11] Frédéric Neyrat, Le Cosmos de Walter Benjamin, (Paris: Kime, 2022) p. 56, My translation.
[12] Roger Batrta, Chamanes y Robots, (Anagramma Editorial, 2017)
[13] Roger Bartra, Chamanes y Robots, (Anagramma Editorial, 2017).
[14] See Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1985)
[15] It would be useful here to understand the notion of retro-cognitive bodily memory with Gilbert Simondon’s understanding of how the individual’s psychical individuation is generated within the present by way of the memory of the past as well as an imagination of the future. As he states in Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Individuation trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), pp. 322-323: “Psychically, the individual continues its individuation by means of memory and imagination, the function of the past and the function of the future. Indeed, it is only after the fact that one can speak of past and future for memory and imagination: memory is what creates the past for the being, in the same way that the imagination creates the future.” […] “the distant future and the past that has become distant past are realities that tend toward the somatic; the past is incorporated as well as the future into the form of anticipation. By distancing the present, the past becomes a state against the ego and is available for the ego but is not directly related to the ego and is not adherent to the ego. The future projected is all the more distanced from actualization as it is broadly pushed back into the future, but progressive becoming evokes it and renders it imminent, little by little gives it a status that is closer to the status of the present, i.e. more directly symbolic relative to the actual present.
According to this manner of envisioning the reality of the individuated being, it could be said that the body plays a double role with respect to consciousness, the body is the milieu and not individuated reality; it is the real virtual, i.e. a source of reality that can become symbolic with respect to the present: this reality splits into present and future as though into individual and milieu.”
[16] See Barbara Glowczewski’s groundbreaking essay, Les tribus de rêve cybernétique and Desert Dreamers, (Minneapolis, Univocal, 2014)
[17] The author Jill Lepore jokes in her book, IF Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (New York: Liveright Publications, 2020), that the early scientists working on artificial intelligence were actually merely working on “their own intelligence—a fantasy of their own intelligence—which they grated onto a machine.” p. 5
[18] Roger Bartra, Chamanes y Robots, (Anagramma Editorial, 2019)
[19] Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2020) p. 272
[20] Ibid., 272.
[21] Cf. Roger Bartra, Chamanes y Robots (Anagramma Editorial, 2019)
[22] Gillbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Forms and Information trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2020) 367.
[23] Andy Clark, Experience Machine: How Our Minds Experience and Shape Reality (Pantheon, 2023)
[24] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 167.
[25] Stiegler, 171.
[26] Stiegler, 170.
[27] Stiegler, 177.
[28] Stiegler, 176.
[29] Stiegler, 184.
[30] Stiegler, 186.
[31] Stiegler, 186.
[32] Stiegler, 243.
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 