Course:MDIA 300

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Important Course Pages

Technics and Time (1998) – Bernard Stiegler

Technology, Memory, and the Formation of the Human

Overview

Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998) by Bernard Stiegler is a highly significant work in modern media theory. Building on the ideas of Martin Heidegger, André Leroi-Gourhan, and Jacques Derrida, Stiegler contends that technology, which he calls technics, is intrinsic to humanity rather than separate from it, and is essential to the human experience. His main argument is that humans are technical beings: our evolution, identity, and memory rely on tools and technologies that externalise thought, knowledge, and experience.

Stiegler challenges the assumption that technology merely supplements human life. Instead, he proposes that the invention of tools marks the beginning of human consciousness itself. Through technics, memory moves beyond biological heredity and becomes collective, cultural, and historical. He refers to this process as epiphylogenesis, the development of knowledge via external, technological assistance. Stiegler’s contributions offer media theory students a link between philosophy, technology, and communication studies, demonstrating how each medium, including writing, film, algorithms, and AI, influences the formation of human temporality and identity.

Core Concepts

Technics

In Stiegler’s usage, technics refers to the entire system of tools, symbols, and machines that make human life possible. It is not merely mechanical but existential. Humans depend on technical objects to remember, communicate, and project themselves into the future. As Daniel Ross notes in his 2021 dialogue with Stiegler, technics is “the condition of being human, the milieu in which thought and care unfold.” Without technics, there is no culture, history, or consciousness.

Epiphylogenesis

This is Stiegler’s term for the third form of memory. Beyond genetic (phylogenetic) and individual (ontogenetic) memory, epiphylogenetic memory exists in the external supports, writing, art, film, and data that store and transmit knowledge across generations. In his reading, the invention of tools represents “the fault of Epimetheus,” a mythological mistake that gave humans no innate qualities except their reliance on technics to survive. As Chris Drain (2022) explains, this positions human evolution as technically driven, dependent on the exteriorization of memory rather than natural adaptation.

Prosthesis

For Stiegler, every technology functions as a prosthesis, an artificial extension that completes but also destabilises the human. Like Landsberg’s prosthetic memory, this concept treats media as both a means of enhancement and a site of transformation. The human being, therefore, is never “whole” but always assembled through prosthetic attachments such as language, writing, and digital systems.

Temporalization

Stiegler links technics to time itself. By externalising memory, humans create continuity between past, present, and future. Recording devices, from cave paintings to cloud archives, allow temporal experience to be shared and replayed. As he writes, technics is “the horizon through which time becomes thinkable.” Every technical object, from calendars to hard drives, structures our perception of duration and mortality.

Pharmakon

Borrowing from Derrida, Stiegler characterises technology as a pharmakon, a double-edged substance that is both poison and cure. While technics enable knowledge and care, they can also produce alienation and disorientation when driven by capitalist automation. This ambivalence is central to his later work on care, where he insists that the survival of humanity depends on learning to use technology therapeutically rather than destructively.

Philosophical Context

Stiegler’s project reinterprets the history of philosophy through the lens of technics.

André Leroi-Gourhan influenced Stiegler’s biological and anthropological view of technology. Leroi-Gourhan’s idea that human evolution depends on tool use provided the foundation for epiphylogenesis.
Martin Heidegger’s question concerning technology, whether it reveals or conceals human beings, frames Stiegler’s effort to think beyond seeing technology as merely instrumental.
Jacques Derrida’s theories of writing and the supplement helped Stiegler articulate technics as an externalisation that both adds to and constitutes the human.
Vygotsky, as discussed in Drain (2022), provides a contrast: where Vygotsky emphasised signs and internalised mediation, Stiegler insists that technical objects are the primary site of human development.

Together, these thinkers situate Technics and Time as a cornerstone for understanding media not as external instruments but as existential structures that shape thought, social life, and temporality itself.

Contemporary Relevance

In the digital era, Stiegler’s ideas feel increasingly prescient. Smartphones, AI assistants, and social networks serve as modern prostheses that externalise our attention, memory, and communication. The cloud becomes the new epiphylogenetic archive, a global repository of experience. Yet this externalisation raises ethical concerns: when memory is stored by machines, who controls access, context, and meaning?

Daniel Ross (2021) emphasises that Stiegler’s later philosophy, especially The Neganthropocene, frames technology as a site of care rather than despair. He warns that industrialised computation risks producing entropy, the loss of meaning and attention, but also opens a path toward neganthropy, the renewal of collective intelligence and creativity.

For media students, Technics and Time invites a critical reflection on how every act of mediation, writing a post, saving a file, scrolling a feed, is also an act of temporal inscription. In Stiegler’s view, to live technologically is to live historically: our tools remember us even when we forget ourselves.

Sources Used:

Bishop, R., & Ross, D. (2021). Technics, time and the internation: Bernard Stiegler’s thought – A dialogue with Daniel Ross. Theory, Culture & Society, 38(4), 111-133. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276421990435^[1]
Sebbah, F., Maruzzella, D., & DePaul University. (2024). Stiegler, philosopher. Philosophy Today (Celina), 68(3), 443-454. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday202472533^[2]

Also

[Prosthesis / Prosthetic Memory (Landsberg, 2004)]
[The Medium Is the Message (McLuhan, 1964)]
[Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway, 1985)]
[Remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999)]

External Links

UBC Library – Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus
Bishop, R. & Ross, D. (2021). Technics and Time and the Internation: Bernard Stiegler’s Thought – A Dialogue with Daniel Ross. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(12).
Drain, C. (2022). Technics and Signs: Stiegler, Leroi-Gourhan, and Vygotsky on the Instrumental Genesis of the Human. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 44(58).

Author: Meha Gupta

For: BMS Media Theory Wiki (UBC, MDIA 300)