Kathleen Kerr-Koch (Bio)

Différance and Techno-logic in Philosophical Discourse

In 1966 at the John Hopkins Humanities Centre in Baltimore, an international symposium entitled “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” was convened. The purpose was to discuss the structuralist phenomenon across, between and among disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and to identify certain common problems in various fields. As Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato note in their Preface to the publication based on this symposium, these problems included “the status of the subject, the general theory of signs and language systems, the use and abuse of models, homologies and transformations as analytical techniques, synchronic (vs) diachronic descriptions, the question of “mediations” between objective and subjective judgements, and the possible relationship between microcosmic social or symbolic dimensions”. The prominence and centrality of these problems was radically questioned by Jacques Derrida in his “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” which he delivered at the symposium. At issue for Derrida was the entire history of Western philosophy: whereas philosophy’s desire historically has always been to fix meaning, Derrida argues that meaning is always deferred, unstable and lacking a fixed origin. After that, what was to have been a consolidation of structuralist thinking at the symposium became the inaugural moment of deconstruction and post-structuralism.

But with the emergence of the internet and AI it would seem that the structuralist question has been revived and reinvented, albeit in a radically altered context: Benjamin Bratton, Alexander Galloway, Slavoj Žižek, for example, all return to rethinking structuralist linguistics in the context of AI. In relation to the evolution of our tools and our shifting relationship with technology. Bernard Stiegler, for whom Derrida was a mentor, in critiquing digital capitalism has relied on structural concepts, particularly the idea of grammatization -- the process by which human behaviour patterns, expressions and thoughts are broken down into discrete, structural elements (data points) so they can be reproduced by machines and automated by AI. He has built upon this perspective by showing that Derrida’s understanding of human thought as fundamentally written must be extended to show that this writing is an ongoing shifting relationship with technology -- one in which - in the era of algorithmic automation - carries with it a crisis of human agency. For Stiegler, the digital age introduces a hyper-accelerated form of technology that doesn’t just store our memories- it actively anticipates and automates our desires. For him, when you strip away the resistance, delays, and unpredictability of human interaction, you lose what he calls communicative friction. The structural by product of this frictionless, automated existence is a profound psychological and cultural state often described as algorithmic melancholy whereby consciousness has become absolutely standardised, leaving no opening for the new. This process of standardisation leads ultimately to what has been called a silent apocalypse.

In this paper I will look at the manner in which philosophy has addressed the question of technology at various moments in Western history from Plato forward to modern philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man, Georgio Agamben and finally Jacques Derrida and Barnard Stiegler. I shall argue (in line with Stiegler) that philosophy has always been threatened by technology and that forms of deconstructive critical reading developed in the twentieth century provide strategies that might help prevent a collapse into algorithmic melancholy.