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Technoscience and Reproduction

Bernard Stiegler
Published online: 26 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Bernard Stiegler (2007) Technoscience and Reproduction, Parallax, 13:4, 29-45,
DOI: 10.1080/13534640701682784
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parallax, 2007, vol. 13, no. 4, 2945

Technoscience and Reproduction

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Bernard Stiegler

1. From the real to the possible: the upheaval of technoscience

Tekhnen tukhen esterxe kai tukhen tekhnen.1
With this quotation from Agathon, Aristotle lays down that technics [la technique]
belongs to the field of contingency, to which is opposed the necessity of science. Such a
point of view is obviously incompatible with the very notion of technoscience, whose
name indicates the collusion of technology and science. Technoscience thus operates
an upheaval in the order of things as concerns the relationship between the necessary
and the contingent i.e. also, we shall see, between the real and the possible, and
between being and becoming.
We shall also see how modern thought at the same time deviates from the ancient point
of view and yet maintains this play of oppositions, making purely and simply
impossible a thinking of technoscience, which cannot appear, consequently, except as a
true monstrosity born of the mind [lesprit].
Aristotle describes the contingent using the expression to endekhomenon allos ekhein,
which Pierre Aubenque translates as that which can be otherwise.
To act and produce is in a way to fit into the order of the world so as to
modify it; it is thus to suppose that the latter, since it offers this latitude,
comprises a certain play, a certain indeterminacy, a certain incompletion. The object of action and the object of production thus belong to
the field of that which can be otherwise. However, if the disposition to
produce accompanied by rules is called art (tekhne`), the disposition to act
(praxis) accompanied by rules is called prudence.2
Action of (moral) praxis and production of (technical) poiesis thus concern together the
field of that which can be otherwise: neither the one, praxis, nor the other, tekhne`, can
be sciences. Tekhne`, which Aubenque unfortunately translates, like the entire tradition,
using the word art, but which we want to understand here initially as its name
immediately indicates as technics [technique], and without it being necessary to resort to
any distortions, tekhne`
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always concerns becoming, and to apply oneself to an art [i.e. a tekhne`] is

to consider the way of bringing into being one of these things which can
be or not be and whose principle lies in the producer and not in the
produced thing.
We have already commented on this last point elsewhere,3 or rather its equivalent in
the Physics: it means that there is for Aristotle no dynamics proper to technics, no more than
for any metaphysician nor thus for Kant: such is their common feature.

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Starting from the industrial revolution, technical becoming will on the contrary always
highlight to a greater extent its systematic dimension, which will become in some
measure visible to the naked eye and sensible to the bodies and the hearts ravaged
by the infernal universe of machines. Technical becoming will reveal a specific
evolutionary logic to this dynamic system, the technoscientific epoch highlighting a process of
technical individuation to be strictly accurate, which Simondon will call the process of
concretization, supplementing the theorization of technical tendencies by LeroiGourhan and technical systems by Bertrand Gille. The process of concretization,
which accounts for the morphogenesis of industrial technical objects, does not
control only the becoming of the object: it orders the technical ensembles and finally,
from now on the global mnemotechnic system.4 This is to say, the retentional milieu of
the mind.
The industrial revolution thus reveals a dynamic specific to technical beings and to
what we have called the organized inorganic. This dynamic becomes perceptible only
from this moment for two reasons:
- on the one hand, archaeology and palaeontology start to highlight that the oldest
objects fall under lines where their forms evolve according to rules which can be
compared with the evolutions of living beings observed from fossil skeletons;
- on the other hand and especially, the collusion which takes place in this epoch
between technology and science, and gives birth to industrial technology, opens the
era of permanent innovation within which the evolution of technical objects, which
accelerates suddenly, becomes evident as modernity, precisely raising the problem
of the adoption of the new industrial products.
It is thus the cooperation of technology and science for the benefit of industry which
makes sensible to the bodies and the hearts the inherent dynamic of technology.
This is what is unthinkable for a Greek philosopher. What can be or not be is
contingency, which must be understood not as a region of being, but as a certain
negative property affecting natural processes.5 All of this means that technics is what,
ontologically and thus primordially, is opposed to science as an ignorant know-how to
apodictic knowledge:
Aristotles intention is not to oppose [tekhne`] to a groping and hazardous
empiricism, but on the contrary to science, of which Aristotle has just
recalled that it bears on what cannot be otherwise. [] In a world
perfectly transparent to science, i.e. where it is established that nothing
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30

can be other than it is, there would be no place for art [technics], nor,
generally, for human action.6

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This is why tekhnen tukhen esterxe kai tukhen tekhnen: technics loves chance. And as
Aubenque remarks, to understand this progression of thought it is obviously necessary
to free oneself from [a] modern mentality, which tends to see in technics an application of
science. And this is what distinguishes Kant from Aristotle. This modern mentality,
which has become possible since Descartes, makes sense, according to Aubenque,
only because modern science is satisfied to follow in nature multiple causal
series, whose plurality even leaves a share to contingency and thus a field to human
activity.7
To advance such an assertion would, however, be very adventurous if one identified
modern science with contemporary science as hasty minds will be tempted to do. It is
advisable to limit modern science to the time of which Newton is the pivot, which
Galileo and Descartes open, and that Kant, Lavoisier, Volta, Carnot or Lamarck close,
or else this matter would be extremely contestable, in particular if it is admitted that
biology is a science.
What we have called here technology, which is indeed commonly conceived as applied
science by means of technical methods, authorizes a reversed point of view and which we
describe here as an overturning [bouleversant], where it is science which becomes applied
technology, and not technology applied science. Science as ap-plied technology produces
formalized results which become du-plicable, i.e. reproducible, in general by automatisms,
thus implementing a specific universe of automatic reproducibility, while it is no longer obvious
that contemporary science, like technoscience, is satisfied to follow causal series: it uses
them, i.e. diverts them as one exploits the force of a river, by modifying the course of its
flow, its layout, the composition of its waters, which is generally rather quickly used up.
Biology, as we have already underlined elsewhere,8 can create new causal series by
modifying existing causality, even by reforming it on a certain scale of relevance, or
more precisely, by disturbing the play of the definitional laws of certain living beings,
or definitional of the conditions of reproduction of these living beings, of which the principal
characteristic is precisely reproducibility, and it is not by chance that on this point
technoscience proves to be more upsetting [bouleversante]: it is already a matter of
retention, and of an entirely particular kind.
And it is indeed the question of reproduction (i.e. also necessarily of retention), in the most comprehensive
sense of the word, and as the primary condition of industrialization, which governs the logic of what we
call here the upheaval [bouleversement]. We will see in particular that in contrast with ancient
and modern thought, contemporary science can do without this great non-reproduced reproducer that is
God, equally called the supremely real being and source of all possibility.
We have argued that such is specifically the case when the genetic program becomes a
field whose possibilities can be techno-logically explored by the combination of
technologies of sequencing of the genome and the intervention in the sequences by the
instruments of genetic surgery particularly the enzymes of restriction. There is
therefore no doubt that one existing causal series, which the impermeability of the
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genetic (germen) to the epigenetic (soma) conditioned, an impermeability characteristic

of sexed living beings which constituted a causal law of the reproduction and
evolution of the species, is purely and simply suspended by the technoscientific invention of a new
form of life.

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Such is what we call the TECHNOSCIENTIFIC UPHEAVAL. One could certainly

object that biological science is a particular case, and that the delimitation of its
scientificity was never simple. But isnt this true of any science once it is integrated
into a technoscientific instrumentality and interiorizes thereby the criteria of its
efficiency?

2. Orienting oneself in the darkness of technoscientific possibles

The com-position of science and technology in the industrial epoch,9 breaking with
their op-position, then their confusion in current technoscience productive of
technologies, is precisely what is unthinkable for Aristotle, because for a Greek,
science offers a total explanation and cannot therefore develop except by removing
contingency,10 where technoscience opens on the contrary the vastness of a new
decision-making game filled with darkness, which is not that of theorematic lights but of a hypotheticotechnical MAKING, alone suitable to modify processes, and where it is necessary to orient
oneself in the diversity of the rampant possibilities which this SYSTEMATIC EXPLORATION OF
DARKNESS precisely researches.
Such an exploration is already underway when, at the end of the eighteenth century,
the English contractor Boulton meets Watt. Elsewhere11 we contended that their
association inaugurated the industrial revolution defined as the availability of capital,
the latter becoming increasingly more mobile and deterritorialized, and setting forth
on a conquest of opportunities of investment unceasingly more varied than is revealed
by finalized research.
Admittedly, the latter will be really systematically organized only at the beginning of
the twentieth century, in particular with Holst and the Philips Company: it will then be
called development-research. But it is from the very start of mechanization that the
process of permanent innovation sets itself up which we have called here modernity, and that
the investor no longer hesitates to solicit at once through marketing and through the
organization of development-research, systematically exploring the possibles, the real falling into
the background.
Science is then no longer that in which industry invests, but what is financed by industry to
open new possibilities of investments and profits. Because to invest is to anticipate; in
such a situation, reality belongs already to the past. The conjugation of technology, of
science and of the mobility of capital, orders the opening of a future explored
systematically by experimentation. This science become technoscience is less what
describes reality than what it destabilizes radically. Technical science no longer says what
is the case (the law of life): it creates a new reality. It is a science of becoming and, as
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers showed, of the irreversible.12 This is what we shall
now analyse more closely.
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To orient oneself in the darkness of technoscientific possibles systematically investigated by

capital, there are at least two obviously related criteriological possibilities:
1. The first criteriological possibility is that of an efficiency conceived as probability of a benefit,
whose question is to know what bene means:

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- is it Our good, i.e. this event-driven series which integrates ad infinitum the absolutizable future of
this We,
- or is it the good in the sense of the industrial product, a consumer good which discharges a benefit
conceived in terms of profitability with regard to investments which can be amortized
within a reasonable time?
2. The second criteriological possibility is that of making [faire] which we can also interpret in
two ways:
- one is FEASIBILITY [FAISABILITE], i.e. the calculation of costs/advantages, but
which raises the question of what is called cost and of what is called advantage,
- the other is the DIFFERENCE WHICH SHOULD BE MADE, and thus the other sense
of the verb making, and which could not be conditioned by efficiency and profitability,
since this difference, which is a fiction, can only refer to an im-probability and a default of
reason.
However, it could be the default that is here and as such a reason, i.e. at the same time a motive
and a necessity in particular, the motive and the necessity of the incalculable, including
death, as what makes Dasein indeterminate, and which is a GREAT DEFAULT of the
living, but which is precisely also the chance of life as the principle of an immense process of
individuation that one calls evolution.
With this double alternative, which is not necessarily disjunctive (it is what we call
composition, law of adoption, itself law of transmission), we are only here introducing
programmatically a reflection to come on the necessity of the default, on the phantasm of
perfection that would want to eliminate it, on the demons thus engendered by the symbols, and
which will occupy the main parts of the work to come.
3. Practice in critical philosophy
The immense questions that thus become binding on us are completely inconceivable
for ancient and modern philosophy: such is the necessity of a new critique. For
Aristotle, the development of apodictic knowledge should be the basic elimination of
technical knowledge: Thus [technics] does not develop itself in the same direction as
scientific explanation: [it] disappears rather as this one develops.13
It is also true of Kant. There is however a big difference between Aristotle and Kant on
this same point: in Aristotles case, technics comes within the province of contingency
and of an incompletion of nature, while for Kant, it comes within the province of an
incompletion of science:
Now if an empirical engineer tried to disparage general mechanics, or
an artilleryman the mathematical doctrine of ballistics, by saying that
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whereas the theory of it is nicely thought out it is not valid in practice

since, when it comes to application, experience yields quite different
results than theory, one would merely laugh at him (for, if the theory of
friction were added to the first and the theory of the resistance of the air
to the second, hence if only still more theory were added, these would
accord very well with experience).14

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Technics is here indeed applied science: it has no opacity in principle; it can remain in
the shadow of reason only in fact because of the incompletion of science. For Kant as for
Aristotle, science is that which states and formalizes reality as that which cannot be otherwise. In this
respect, science is science of being, and it is so of course ostensively.
Moreover, one and the other thinking of technics as a means for a producer who is its end,
neither of them see the systematic dynamic which supports technical evolution, because
properly speaking for such thinkers there is no technical evolution. But for Aristotle, this
would rather be an involution, i.e. what has to be eliminated in principle (if not in fact),
while for Kant the apparently technical evolution is in fact a scientific evolution.
We saw that the evolution proper to technics becomes patent (and starts to be thought
by Marx, who clearly refers to a theory of technical evolution inspired by the one
forged by Darwin for living beings, but still as a means of production) when, science and
technology coming closer together, their confusion leads to technoscience where
technological becoming accelerates suddenly to the point of reversing its sign and
arousing a feeling of threat and destruction.
While the industrial revolution had begun as a new process of adoption under the sign
of a promise of emancipation and progress, the current technosciences, which are
essentially implementations of new processes of retention, of reproducibility and of
transmission, are facing more and more the risk of a rejection of the adoption
perceived as a threat of regression under the effect of grafts undermining any possibility of
unification of a We, and provoking, in the absence of a criterion projectable ad infinitum, i.e.
idealizable, immune defence reactions it is a dimension of what we call discomfort [mal-etre]
as deception.
However, such a criterion remains impossible to find in a non-criticized technoscientific
context where the relations between the real and the possible are reversed, where the
real becomes a modality of the possible, and where, for this very reason, the Kantian division
between theory and practice becomes invalid.
In contrast with Aristotle indeed, knowledge is distributed in Kant in two domains
whose confusion proceeds from metaphysics, and whose three Critiques must secure
reason: the theoretical field and the practical field. This division constitutive of
criticism, and which is always adventurous to call into question, is however what resists
a renewed thinking of technics in the age of technology and of the technosciences i.e.
it constitutes an obstacle to the possibility of a political economy of adoption.
Interrogating causality, Kant neutralizes the one that results, in the theoretical field, from
the phenomena of the will, and turns it into a practical question in his sense, i.e. related
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to the kingdom of ends under the moral law, as if technical actions did not exist, and did not raise
questions in the face of which the possibility of separating the theoretical and the
practical is less evident.

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Technics, being in his eyes in principle homogeneous to theory, does not comprise any
practical dimension: this is the sense of the example of the artilleryman who cannot
oppose his practice to the theory of ballistics except through his ignorance of the theory
of the resistance of the air, and which thus properly speaking does not have any
practice. With Kant, there is practice only if there is freedom realized by a will.
Paragraph 14 of the Transcendental Deduction, examining the relation between a
synthetic representation and its objects, excludes in the same way that the will can
causally produce its object as far as its existence is concerned,15 precisely because it is
not necessary for technical practice to exist: it is only a consequence drawn from the
theory, and whose will is here neither the cause nor the effect, but the middle term.

4. Criticism as negation of invention

The problem is that such an analysis does not leave any possibility of giving an account
of what takes place in the case of invention. It is indeed inevitably to a negation of invention
that paragraph 23 of the same Transcendental Deduction leads, which exposes the
uselessness of our concepts without a corresponding sensible intuition. Negation insofar
as we call here invention not simply what we previously designated as a process of interiorization/
exteriorizaton, in the sense of the invention of the Holy Cross, but what constitutes the first
term of what Simondon calls a technical lineage whose genesis is precisely irreducible to a pure
and simple physical explanation, and which belongs to a particular type of
individuation: the process of concretization.
Indeed, if it is admitted that such lineages are not possible except through the invention
of possibles that are not already contained in the real, or to speak like Simondon, if one
does not give oneself in advance the individual to explain individuation, because that is
precisely what is at stake, it is necessary to call into question the distribution of roles
between the two sources of knowledge which are intuition and the understanding. Is it
still possible to say that this further extension of concepts beyond our sensible intuition
does not get us anywhere [original emphasis]16 once imagination as a faculty of
invention, precisely during the technoscientific age, proves likely to make intuitive what did
not exist at the time of its representation and what we can call its conception, and which consisted
first of all of what one today calls dreams, i.e. fictions issued from the speculations of reason?
What happens between the understanding, intuition and imagination and the ideas of
reason when, for example, such chimeras which can become standard technical
productions, become at the same time reproducible, even reproductive and are
marketed and introduced into the process of adoption by the industry of
biotechnologies (from agribusiness to artificial-birth technology) by passing through
the industrial fabrication of living prostheses as transgenic grafts? Or: what is a schema
in the age of simulation generalized as the method of investigation? And what is a
simulation?
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The fact that Kantian thought does not know in principle a rupture between theory
and technical practice, and that for it technics is not, contrary to Aristotles point of
view, only applied science, even when it remains unexplained, this fact is the consequence
of this conception of an understanding locked up in intuition, which denies necessarily the
possibility of invention defined as what opens a new technical lineage: it is the negation of
processes of technical individuation17 where the transductive relations generate morphogeneses
which lead to functional overdeterminations, and where the operating matter [la matie`re qui
fonctionne] cannot be reduced only to the implementation of the laws of physics, but
concerns what we have called the kingdom of the organized inorganic, to which is now added
the disorganized organic [lorganique desorganise].
Simondon, studying the genesis of what he calls the associated milieus, which lead to
an inextricably techno-geographic space, where techno-logical individuation obviously
intervenes in geophysical dynamisms like factors of perturbation, introduced in
technical genesis the necessity of anticipation, the latter having to account for the lessons of
operating matter as a revelation of malfunctions which can invert their signs (such is the case with
the pre-ignition of the Lenoir engine which becomes the principle of the Diesel engine),
and this, as practical experience which precisely cannot be reduced to a pure and
simple application of the physical theory of matter, since the operating matter is never
solely the work of a physical operation, but precisely an organizational complex, while not
being properly speaking organic. This is what the technogeographical milieu means
which obviously includes human geography.
The development of industrial objects is here in itself an experimentation and an
exploration of new possibles, and the daily world is thus a permanent laboratory (we
shall see that this is singularly true of the IP network). However, we have shown
elsewhere18 that the possibility of anticipation is itself conditioned and overdetermined
by the possibilities of tertiary retentions, i.e. by the technical milieu of the mind
[lesprit]. Far from being reducible to physics, technics is thus a milieu which conditions the temporality
of practical reason, i.e. the will, and which is in turn traversed by a practical causality, itself
obviously subject to the constraints of physical causality. But the latter remains an
entirely abstract notion as long as one does not object to it the problem of the
conditions of its localization, i.e. of phenomena of a local and metastable equilibrium, i.e. of a
potential disequilibrium, which have haunted physics since the beginning of this century.
What we call condition, when we say that technics conditions the temporality of the one
who wills, is obviously not a determination, and this is why the technical condition is not a
negation of practical freedom.
But, on the one hand, it is a matter to some extent of a conditional freedom, even though it
is unconditioned compared to mechanism and, on the other, this capacity of technical
anticipation overdetermined by the play of retentional devices, and projected in
possibilities irreducible to the only physical reality of operating matter, makes null and
void the exclusion of causality by means of the will concerning the relation between a
synthetic representation and its object.
Where, in Kant, technics is only applied science because it is only the analytical
development of the concepts of the understanding knowing the data of intuition, we
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maintain that technics is what enables the constitution of schemas, including practical ones. Its
relation to theory, and its place in theory, must thus be overturned [bouleverses]. If the
brick can be shaped by the hand of the moulder, this is because it is guided by a
concept of the clay which could be acquired only through its gestural familiarity: we shall
see in the last volume [of La technique et le temps] that the hylomorphic analysis that underlies
Kants reasoning, after Aristotle and in accordance with him, and which governs the
relation between intuition and understanding, is precisely what Simondon challenges
in his LIndividu et sa Gene`se physico-biologique.
Conversely, the originary technicity of theory as of practice, and the specific question of
technoscientific practice which follows from it, means that the question concerning causal
freedom to which technoscience explicitly alludes today has nothing to do with mastery: on
the one hand because it is a conditional freedom, to the extent that freedom,
unconditioned with regards to mechanical causalities, is conditioned by the possibilities
which the retentional devices offer to constitute the flows of consciousness, and on the
other hand, because the evolutionary dynamisms of technical systems are systematic
data with which the technoscientific practice must compose.
In that, technoscientific modernity is that which gives its leave to philosophical
modernity, whose inaugural and final figures are Descartes and Kant. And Alexis
Philonenko predicted in 1969 the anguish of Kantianism in an age when the fate of
reason [is] from now on tied to the machine in a strict way and where it appears that
Kantianism rests on a science and on an understanding of science which are not
current any more.19 But this caducity of the discourse of mastery is precisely the object of
denial of contemporary powers, which advertise their inclinations all the more noisily such
that they do not cease to encounter the fact of their impotence and we are not only
speaking of the authorities whereas everyone knows deeply that ignorance is henceforth the rule.
This contradiction, which was analyzed in France as a loss of credit of the elite, is a
major factor of aggravation of the discomfort. It is particularly corrosive for the
authority of the teaching staff: the education system, which must make intelligible Our
situation, appears on the contrary as what makes this We properly incomprehensible and
thus illusory: this is the source of the incivility that rustic minds would prefer to limit to
less complex causes, and easier to recover on their account.
For Kant, it is only in the moral domain that freedom [] can go beyond every
proposed boundary [] where human reason shows true causality, and where the
ideas become efficient causes (of actions and their objects).20 Technical ideas are not
efficient causes, but theoretical concepts: in the absence of any practical question
concerning the domain of technics, of technology and of technoscience, in criticism,
THE QUESTION OF THE FUTURE HAS THEREFORE NOT YET SEIZED
THAT OF BECOMING, where it should certainly not stop, but through which it can only PASS
TO MAKE THE DIFFERENCE.
However, we have tried to show that becoming is precisely this practical domain of
technics, as the possibility of artifice, which concerns nature as well as freedom, and where the
question plainly arises as to what (difference) must be made, where one needs the default which
becomes its criterion, and where experience is certainly not what provides the rule:
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For when we consider nature, experience provides the rule and is the source
of truth; but with respect to moral laws, experience is (alas!) the mother of
illusion, and it is most reprehensible to derive the laws concerning what I
ought to do from what is done, or to want to limit it to that.21

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If our preceding critical remarks with respect to the negation of invention by criticism
are well-founded, what is said here of illusion relates also to the efficient causality of
reason not only as a moral (and political) domain, but as a technical domain. And this
means that politics must be a politics of technics, i.e. a practical thinking of becoming capable of
providing an idea of it by projecting the future borne by this becoming, where nothing is more
reprehensible than to derive the laws concerning what I ought to do from what is done, which is called
cynicism and renunciation, and which is the discourse of imitation and adaptation that we say is
reprehensible in that it serves as an alibi for the facts against the rights.
A politics of technics should be able to work out practical ideas capable of posing and
regulating the question of what must be done in the practical domain such as it concerns
jointly nature and freedom. But it is then the concept of nature that causes a problem. It is
precisely this concept, as the totality of phenomena, which is entirely conditioned, for
Kant as well as for common thought, by the order which subjects the possibles to the
real of substantiality. However, this arrangement is overthrown by technoscientific
activity. This is why the questions relating to the current practices resulting from
biological theory are problems that are inseparably theoretical and practical. Once we
locate the practical questions at the intersection of the practical and theoretical
domains, i.e. nature and freedom, conferring on technical ideas an efficient causality, it
is the totality of the theoretical domain that enters into crisis.
This question arises particularly in the domain of the living such that, becoming a
material for the industrial biological system, it constitutes a new device of tertiary retentions, in
which the processes of retentions can be controlled through criteria that have nothing
scientific or theoretical about them, and which make it possible to produce in
chimerical series, clones and other transgenic materials.
But the question also arises with the multiplication of new types of associated
technogeographical and commercial milieus, which result from the digital hyperindustrialization and the generalized performativity deployed therein. This hyperindustrialization, as a development of the communications industries, where technologies of
production and mnemotechnics amalgamate, is also a technical hyper-reproducibility which
has in common with biotechnologies to found new conditions of reproduction in all its forms and in
particular, the reproduction of knowledge.
We set ourselves the question of knowing in what a principle of subjective
differentiation in the age of the technosciences would consist. We understand now
that it would consist, as the need of reason which legitimates itself to orient itself in the
darkness of supersensible things, in a faculty of judging the quality of technoscientific fictions. It
is precisely in this question that, in the absence of such a criterion, the need of reason
no longer being able to refer to a supremely real being as the ground of all possibility,
the crisis resides and reveals its vastness as a consequence and stake of the industrial investment
in retentional processes.
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5. What do we want? Actuality of the subjective principle of differentiation

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Kants question is to know how and by what reason can be guided and orient itself in
thought when it cannot have recourse to experience any more. It is the question of God and a
rational faith which is put in the imminence of the death of Frederick the Great, in fear
of a return of censure, and in the context of a conflict between Mendelssohn and Jacobi
which is a true crisis of the Aufklarung. In addition to the fact that we shall return to the
question of faith, of fidelity, of belief and of the Heavenly Father, this Father of all
fathers whom it is necessary, in monotheism, to adopt as any father must adopt in order
to be adopted, what interests us here is the question of a rational thought without possible
current experience, and which is thus obliged to fictionalize.
This question, which is in Kant that of a necessity for theoretical reason and of a duty for
practical reason, interests us at the moment when we lay down that, science having
become technoscience, it proves itself to be just as easily a technoscience-fiction which raises
on an entirely new register the question of the end of all things. This is to say that it is immediately
practical, and not only theoretical: it calls into question the Kantian distinction what
the ethics committees and other citizen councillors so pitifully express.
It is indeed here that it is necessary to locate the extreme novelty of this register, which is,
moreover, completely indissociable from the new retentional devices, and plunges into
distress the education system as an apparatus of transmission and reproduction of
knowledge, to the point of threatening it to collapse, this technoscience-fiction being
itself an absolute revolution of the question of transmission, i.e. reproduction: this
technoscience-fiction is an industry of reproduction as fiction, which some will describe as
fictitious reproduction, i.e. not only of the production of monsters, but the production of
diabolic beings threatening the world like the Devil, or as the vengeance against the
possibility of the Devil. We will evidently return to this immense risk of diabolizations in all
types.
Technoscientific reason would be to some extent constrained to fictionalize, but it
would have to fictionalize rationally: a reason that fictionalizes an end of all things, like
the Kantian reason having to orient itself amidst supersensible things, must fictionalize
rationally an end of nature notably the perfection of God, which is perhaps an
improbable hypothesis, or a promise according to the same structure of ideality in
general: no object adequate to the transcendental idea can ever occur. [] As the
concept of a maximum, nothing congruent to it can ever be given in concreto,22 it is to
some extent always lacking [defaut] while making the difference: to be lacking, this is here to
make the difference.
This fiction, which is essential with regard to supersensible things, meets reasons need.
Reason is this need: it is lacking in something [elle se fait defaut], it is never self-sufficient,
as Valery says: in short, it is only the interminable projection of its unity which does not exist,
and the whole question is that of the relationship between the intended perfection and the
lack it requires in order to be able to intend it, at a time when it is no longer possible to posit a
supremely real being as the standard of all possibles i.e. a parent standard, but parent without
parent, i.e. Heavenly Father and Absolute Past, i.e. first and last reproducer. In short:
Creator.
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In what conditions is a promise of perfection, i.e. a desire for the unity of the We, as
desire for knowledge in particular, possible? Answer: in the condition that the default of
reason is preserved, i.e. its need as a principle of differentiation. Consequently, the question
is to know in what conditions can such a need be preserved, i.e. such a default, which
certainly does not reproduce itself spontaneously every eight hours like a small hollow
in the stomach of a healthy human and it is consequently a question of knowing if it can be
threatened, and in the event of an affirmative answer, by what it can be threatened.

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But this need or necessity [besoin] of theoretical reason, which is a duty of practical reason,
for which we are no longer constrained to assume the existence of God not if we
want to judge but because we must judge, means that the question of this criterion
necessarily arises, in the age of technoscience, as the conjugation of a need and a duty, i.e. as
concerning the domain of the will. The question that technoscience expressly intimates
to us, which it expressly intimates such that we intend as the possibility and necessity of
a We so as to project ourselves as an I, is: what do we want?
Technoscience expressly intimates to us the question of knowing what we want because
the fiction that reason would today be forced to project, as technoscience, becomes the
fiction of a science that no longer betokens the real, but that which INVENTS the possible. It is still
and always the question of invention (and this is why the technosciences from now on
are more interested in patents than discoveries), and of the possibility of its adoption. This
fiction requires criteria of us: such is the condition of adoption. It asks us what we want
vis-a`-vis the vast possibilities it irresistibly opens. That is what frightens current
knowledge, completely disoriented: the required criteria are lacking [defaut], and we must
acknowledge that we dont know what we want, whereas, as Nietzsche understood it so well,
we cannot not will. This is what such discomfort and ontological indifference signifies.
We can make progress in such questions only on condition of attempting a critique of
technoscience, i.e. an understanding of the upheaval of which it consists. Far from
expressing the possible modalities of the real, technoscience explores possibilities whose
reality is only a transitory concretization, a temporary stasis in a process, and which
does not cease to become so as to trans-form itself. This is what we meant when we said
that, during the Classical Age, stability was the rule and change the exception, today,
in the age of permanent innovation, stability has become the exception, and
change the rule. One of the innumerable consequences is that the living being
appears to the biotechnological industry as a possible state of affairs at one moment of
evolution, a state that nothing prohibits to modify for the continuation of evolution by new
means, those which are precisely given by the control of the retentional devices, genetic material
included.

6. From the possible to the real: the performativity of technoscience-fiction

Technology is simultaneously the epoch of technics and the epoch of science: the epoch
of technoscience where technics and science tie a new relationship. Technology
indicates at once a new mode of being of science and a new mode of being of technics
whose result is called technology. Technoscience is science put at the service of the development of
technology, but at the same time reversed in its concept.
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We call technology a technics that functionally integrates into itself scientific knowledge,
which is no longer in conflict with it. Science and technics had been initially defined, in
the ancient tradition, by their opposition. Modern times reduced technics to the
application of science. Technoscience is the composition of science and of technology,
which is to say that science is subjected to the constraints of the becoming of
technology that the systematic conditions of its evolution form.
The traditional opposition of science and technology rests on an ontological postulate
where science describes reality in its stability, which is to say being, which also means
physis then natura. Science describes nature as the ground of the stability of reality, or as
the ideal identity of the real: as essence. For this reason, its goal is discovery which
constitutes an ideal of pure verifiability [constativite]. This is to say: of pure description of
reality.23 Descartes defines this essential describability as objectivity.
Technics is, on the contrary, the inscription in being of a possible. This possible is not
scientific as long as it is not subjected to the laws of being (made compatible with being
qua stability). It remains an accident. Kant calls this accident an ignorance of science:
technics is for him only applied science, which means that the possible is only a
modality of the real. In Aristotle, this accident is the indication of a contingency. But
this contingency has to be reduced by episteme`.
From the nineteenth century, while change becomes the rule and stability becomes
dubious, it appears possible that technology, issued from technics associated with
science, proves itself to be incompatible with being. As a possibility of becoming, it can
become monstrous on the ontological level, and consequently assume a diabolic
character: this is what the Faustian myth expresses, but more generally, and much
more anciently, any denunciation of hubris, which is none other than the confusion of
the accident with the essence, and whose feeling will end up being generalized in the
twentieth century.
This possibility of being is contradictory with the law of being: it is a nonbeing in being, a
nothingness, an illusory power of annihilation which will always end up proving itself
impotent that of the sorcerers apprentice who, like Epimetheus, observes [constate],
but always too late, the performative and uncontrollable consequences of his actions.
Contrary to the ideal of pure verifiability [constativite] of classical science, the essence of
technology which technoscience produces, whose goal is invention, is indeed always
performative. Far from describing what is, which is to say the real, technoscientific
invention, whose adoption is called innovation, insofar as it exhibits something new
which transforms being, is the inscription of a possible which stands in excess of being, i.e. of
the description of the reality of being: it is heteronomous compared to ontology this is
why it can be apprehended as pure accidentality.
Reality interests technoscience only secondarily, like a springboard to reach new
possibilities.
As long as science remains classical, it apprehends technical heteronomy as a provisional
appearance of the transformation of being. For classical science, this alteration is
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illusory, and maintains itself as such as long as science did not enrich the description of
the permanence of being, so as to integrate the technical possible as a simple modality
of being, erasing in this way its novelty, bringing it back within conformity to the ideal
identity of reality of which the scientific discourse of being speaks by separating the
essential from the accidental. Here it is then established that the apparently new
possible, revealed by technical invention, was actually already contained in reality. This is
Kants previously mentioned discourse.

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When science is no longer classical, its claims to maintain itself in an ideal of pure
verifiability are reduced: as technoscience, it becomes performative. The possible is no
longer a modality of the real. It is the real that becomes a provisional (actual) point of
view on the possible. Here, the possible breaks with the real. Science explores all the
possibles without burdening itself with the ideality of being. This is what Nietzsche
describes as the nihilist stage of the will to power, Husserl as the crises of the sciences,
and Heidegger as Zeit des Weltbildes, epoch of the images of the world and Gestell,
enframing [arraisonnement] or, more literally, frame [dispositif].
It is also this possible which occupies the Valeryan man that the Spirit [lEsprit] inhabits
and which puts this spirit in crisis.
The subjection of the possible to the real is a constant of metaphysical thought, i.e. of
the oppositional relation it establishes between being and becoming, and which
characterizes it. This metaphysical opposition has for correlate a subjection of the
possible to the authority of the supremely real being. It is what, for example, the
current position of the Vatican illustrates on artificial birth technology.
This is also why, in Kant, the possible is a modality of the real. This is what Heidegger
questions, but we explore here why he cannot go to the end of his questioning. It is also
what Nietzsche questions, with the concepts of the will to power and the creation of
values. From all this the following conclusion becomes necessary: to take account of
what transpires in what we are calling technoscience requires the critique of the
metaphysical determination of the possible i.e. the critical analysis of the mechanisms of projection and
of its retentional conditions.
We have explored elsewhere the case of the biotechnological synthesis of retentional
finitude, where, when a geneticist intervenes today on a molecular sequence in order to
discover the operation of the living being, he provides himself with the means to affect
this operation by reproducing it otherwise, to invent another possible operation, and to
claim ownership of a patent.
However, there is a considerable paradox where the difference between descriptive verifiability and
inscriptive performativity is erased. If, indeed, it is the theoretical assets of molecular biology
which have made it possible to develop the techniques of sequencing and of the
manipulation of the genome, the realization of these techniques is also the most
radical contestation of this theory, provided it is true that Francois Jacob was right to
write that the discovery of the DNA structure made it possible definitively to establish
Darwinism against Lamarckism, by showing that the genetic program does not receive
lessons from experience in other words, that the law of life of higher beings is none
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other than the basic imperviousness between germen and soma, between the genetic
memory of the species, and the nervous and cultural memory of individuals.24
However, the geneticist manipulating a genetic sequence creates a new type of biological
event, where the somatic memory of a higher living being penetrates the germinal
memory. In this respect, in comparison with the law of life of higher living beings, it is
an outlaw. Outside-the-law-of-being: in a possible without breaks whose ontology can
only predict that it announces only one series of accidents.
And that also means that the discovery of reality has become an invention which invalidates
this reality. Because this geneticist no longer describes the reality of the living being: it
inscribes in it a new possible, a possible which was not contained there before and
which is therefore not a modality of the real.
Unless we say that this possible was already there in the guise of the human technician. But then, this
technical possible imposes on the theory of the living that technics intervenes in life as a
non-living instance participating in a vital phenomenon and is formalized as such. This
is to say, as an epiphylogenetic support of tertiary retentions which make possible discoveries and
inventions.
The analysis of the critical situation of technoscience, the establishment of a
criteriology to judge the quality of its fictions, the development of the question of
knowing what we want, all that requires a recovery of what the life of technics (i.e.
inventive and fabricating) itself is which, at least since the appearance of the first lithic
tools, four million years ago, has always already shaken the ontological postulate: this is
what we tried to expose in the first two volumes of Technics and Time.
With the process of exteriorization, a new form of memory is set up, which can no
longer fall under the neo-Darwinian division. The living animal is a capacity of
reproduction through the articulation of two memories which do not communicate: genetic
memory, the program of the species, and the individual nervous memory. If there is
no heredity of acquired characteristics, it is because when the individual animal dies, its
individual memory is erased at the moment when it is extinct. It is not preserved, nor
transmitted, nor accumulated. However, technics opens the possibility of transmission
of individual experience beyond the life of the individual: it supports a third level of
memory, precisely the one which we have studied here under the name of devices of
tertiary retentions. To inherit a tool and to adopt it is to inherit a part of the experience
of the one who bequeathed it; it is to adopt this experience: it is to make the latter
ones past, even though it was not lived, if not, to some extent, by retroactive
delegation.
The tool is already a projection screen, because the adoption of such a past is
immediately a capacity of projection of a future. This adoption is an interiorization at
the same time as an exteriorization, which requires training and practice, through
which is forged an inventive (non-adaptive) coherence of psychic as well as collective
individuation. We called this third memory epiphylogenetic. That memory preserves
itself beyond bodies through the organization of the inorganic, because a tool, a script, a
technical trace is none other than an inorganic and yet organized being, until the
actual disorganization and reorganization of the organic occurs, by passing through breeding
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which emerges during the Neolithic period and accentuates the transformation of the
conditions of the pressure of selection this is already the suspension of the axiomatic of
molecular biology. To start working on the question of the possible would be thus initially
to revalue the originary technicity of human life and beyond.

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The time has come to take account of the new situation made with science and
knowledge which the expression technoscience indicates, as a radical calling into
question of the ontological postulate according to which the possible is a modality of
the real. If a moratorium of principle as regards biological research must be devoted
to making a trial of such a questioning, it has a sense. If, on the contrary, it consists, as
it is manifestly the case, in postponing this question, it is all the more harmful that it is
impossible to make it respect it and that it thus constitutes a lure, a political lie and a
bad movie for the young minds [consciences] which only require to understand and to
question themselves.
The manner in which the debate is currently stifled taking into account the industrial
interests of the very short term, i.e. very badly understood inclines one to think that
everything is made to bury this question which is all the more urgent as it relates not
only to molecular biology, nor even only science. Society as a whole entered the era of
a generalized performativity which affects the structure of all types of events, as we have largely
explored it through our analyses of the becoming of cultural industries25 and, with
them, of consciousness [la conscience] itself. This question having been neglected is what
pollutes any educational activity, which appears at the same time vain, decadent and a
source of incivility.
Technoscience is not applied science, and even less explicated science: it is implicated
science. At once implicated because financed, and implicated [mise en cause] and
indicted owing to its implication which appears as a complicity.
Scientists would do well to think twice before annihilating the anguish caused by the
contemporary unthought, as obviously the most mediatized tend to do with much
arrogance. We do not want to say that the scientists should return to a classical and
explicative science which would obviously not be possible or interesting, while
technoscience is largely as interesting as science nor of course that they are guilty of
anything. We maintain that the occultation of the novelty of the situation must
imperatively cease, however difficult, delicate, austere and long such an explication
may seem. Difficult, delicate, austere and long, such a project is also exciting at least
as much as science and technoscience are in themselves.

Notes
This is a translation of Bernard Stiegler, Technoscience et reproduction, in La technique et le temps 3. Le
temps du cinema et la question du mal-etre (Paris: Galilee,
2001), sections 16, pp. 277303.
1
Translators Note: Art has a love for chance, and
chance for art, Agathon quoted in Aristotle, Ethics,
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44

rev. edn, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London, Penguin:

1976), VI.iv.1140a19-20.
2
Pierre Aubenque, La prudence chez Aristote (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), p. 66.
3
Translators Note: See Bernard Stiegler, Technics
and Time 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard

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Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1998).
4
Translators Note: See Bernard Stiegler, Our
Ailing Educational Institutions, trans. Stefan
Herbrechter, Culture Machine, 5 (2003): the e-Issue.
5
Pierre Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote, p. 66.
6
Pierre Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote, p. 68.
7
Pierre Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote, p. 69.
8
Translators Note: Bernard Stiegler, La technique et
le temps 2. La desorientation (Paris: Galilee, 1996).
9
Bernard Stiegler, The Fault of Epimetheus, chapt.1.
10
Pierre Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote, p. 69.
11
Translators Note: Bernard Stiegler, The Fault of
Epimetheus.
12
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle
Alliance (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
13
Pierre Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote, p. 69.
14
Immanuel Kant, On the common saying: that
may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in
practice, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
pp. 273310 (p. 277).
15
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul
Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), B125/A93.
16
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B149.
17
We have examined them in the Fault of
Epimetheus, and will return to them in the last
volume of La technique et le temps.

18

Translators Note: Bernard Stiegler, The Fault of

Epimetheus and La desorientation.
19
Alexis Philonenko, LOeuvre de Kant (Paris: Vrin,
1977), p. 336. Jean-Hugues Barthelemy quotes this
passage in his work which brilliantly promises an
authentic renewal of the philosophy of the sciences.
See LIdee de la relativite philosophique chez Simondon
(Saint-Etienne: Presses de lUniversite de SaintEtienne, 2002).
20
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A318/
B374.
21
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A319/
B376.
22
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A328/
B348.
23
When it becomes experimental, it provides itself
with instruments which perhaps, already, come to
compromise its purity, but it is then not aware of it.
24
I developed this point of view at greater length in
La desorientation, p. 176 sq.
25
La desorientation already began the examination of
this question. On this subject, one will read with
great profit Sylvie Lindeperg, Clio de 5 a` 7, Les
Actualites filmees de la Liberation: archives du future (Paris:
CNRS Editions, 2000).

Translated by Rafael Winkler

Bernard Stiegler is Director of the Department of Cultural Development at the

Centre Pompidou. He is the author of a three-volume work on technics, La technique et le
temps 1. La faute dEpimethee (1994); 2. La desorientation (1996); 3. Le temps du cinema et la
question du mal-etre (2001). His other publications include: (with Jacques Derrida)
Echographies de la television: entretiens filmes (1996); Passer a` lacte (2003); Philosopher par accident
(2004); Aimer, saimer, nous aimer: Du 11 septembre au 21 avril (2004); De la mise`re symbolique:
1. Lepoque hyperindustrielle (2004); 2. La catastrophe du sensible (2005); Mecreance et discredit: 1.
La decadence des democraties industrielles (2004); 2. Les societes incontrolables dindividus desaffectes
(2006); and 3. Lesprit perdu du capitalisme (2006). Translations of his major works include:
Technics and Time: 1. The Fault of Epimetheus (1998) and (with Jacques Derrida)
Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (2002).

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