The human being is both socialised and individualised by history. We are socialised in that we feel that we are more than a certain number of animals in a herd or a colony, and in that the justifications we produce for why we think this—as culture, overlapping and frequently shared phenomenal frames—matter more than whether or not the feeling is justified. We are individualised in the specific sense that the technologies of communication we have access to, which includes the telephone, the development of speech, and the opposable thumb, allows us to articulate ourselves as identities and makes the generic animals of the herd or colony impossible. Leroi-Gourhan describes a general pattern of differentiation—an “interposed membrane” or an “artificial envelope”—that produces this trans-individual human being. If the human being is a product of both her animal part and the socio-technological apparati that augment this body, then it follows that the specific pattern of technology that obtains in a given place or time period alters human nature itself.
The mostly French cultural critics of the 20th century in whom we are likely to find illustrations of the specific material and cultural instantiations of this effect (Barthes, Gagneux, Stiegler etc.) are liable to emphasise two revolutionary moments in particular as the fronts for their cultural analysis. The industrial revolution (the birth of the commodity form as the ideal object) and the postwar consumer revolution (the birth of mass culture and mass media) are both very much in line with the general ambiance of the discipline of continental philosophy. Both represent fascinating points of departure in the qualitative transformation of the organism / tool dialectic, where “tool” here can refer to anything from a hammer to a telephone to an abstract philosophy of literary theory. Leroi-Gourhan predicts in his 1960s writing that we would see a further and more profound externalisation of memory, but even he (even he?) greatly underestimates the extent that such a transformation would take place in the internet, which is both radically amnesiac and obsessed with the preservation of ephemera.
The analyses of these critics, though in some cases such as in Barthes they are of profound literary value, seem rather quaint in the post-apocalyptic present; in which the internet has turned us into alien snails. Our eyes are now on stalks—along with our ears, our fingers, our memories, our lobes and cortexes and junctions—and those stalks do not bob around in space but weave through an incomprehensibly high dimensional manifold of portals, hyperlinks, anachronisms, and ironies. This is the quality of the curtain of objects that now articulates our grand human organism. Our humanity is not only augmented by this dislocated vale of organs and memories, to some extent it is described by it.
Commodity exchange, as the paradigm of our present social fabric, has done more to articulate and amplify the historical processes of individualisation and socialisation than many realise. Our society really doesn’t depend on the relationships that most people have with any particular phenomena, but on the entangled limit of social relationships in their totality. Most people on Earth do not have much of an interest in the internet beyond using it as a partial replacement for TV or the telephone, but the extremities of such a communicating-machine, as in the case of the nerve endings of bodily extremities like fingers and lips, are extraordinarily highly connected. And, as in the case of frostbite, these extremities are made vulnerable by their alienation from the bodily core.
Imagine if, in the space of one traumatic week, everyone on Earth who knew how electricity worked disappeared. Such a hypothetical is ahistorical because a rupture of this kind could never be caused by the continuous productive unravelling of history as class struggles against class, but if there is such a discrete object as the imagination then it is the one thing in existence that does not belong to the surface of continuity. It is a folding machine which creates symbols that are differentiated only by semantic (or perhaps chromatic) attributes, which means there is no possibility of space and anything describable is superimposed on a singularity of form on a layer of its own. An idea is a contextless moment that violates the topology of time. It is a one dimensional puncture-hole of narrative convenience made in an n dimensional fabric, where n is arbitrary and signals only that there is such a thing as extensity.
When palaeontologists assert that spoken language emerged roughly 150,000 years ago, they do so because this is the time when human technology—the development of systematically chipped stones to create chopping tools—first required the ability to imagine a future state and then take the necessary steps to actualise that world state. The requisite intellectual capability for the figuration and abstraction that writing requires emerged thousands of years ago alongside a certain capacity for technical prowess that derives from mental modelling.
Language emerges concurrently with a kind of technical symmetry; a symmetry in time that is the result of an intellect folding the future into the present and a symmetry in material as one stone collides with another to form an edge. Conscious spatialisation of language is obviously as old as writing (since in a sense this is all writing is) but it is, in a sense, as old as language itself: indeed, language is the mechanism by which difference, orientation, and direction can first exist at all. Structure exists in nature, but nature does not parse this structure itself, since it exists in its totality everywhere and everywhen at once. Language is the creative destruction of this monism: if we are allowed to beg the question here, then in a phenomenological sense space and time both emerge at the moment they can be parsed as plastic facets of reality. We should then emphasise that this is not a moment, but a process of becoming taking place over thousands of years: the gestation period of difference itself.
When we think through the thought experiment that everyone on Earth who knows how electricity works vanishes, we are suggesting a science fiction story in which humanity's intelligentsia disappear and the masses must rebuild its superstructure on the ruins of bricked appliances and severed connections. When it is employed in this context, the exteriorisation metaphor described by Leroi-Gourhan means that the science fiction premise can instead be visualised as an amputation. Humanity is a social organism, and the stalks of its eyeballs are snipped as the externalised organ complex that was magic is suddenly gone.
The Absurdity of a Net
The Historicity of Valley of the Shadows
Tug of War: Digital Timestretching