Technics, individuation and tertiary memory: Bernard Stiegler's challenge to media theory

Media studies as a field has traditionally been wary of the question of technology. Discussion of technology has often been constrained by concerns about technological determinism. In recent times there has been renewed interest, however, in the technological dimension of media. In part this is doubtless due to rapid changes in media technology, such as the rise of the internet and the digital convergence of media technologies. But there are also an increasing number of writers who seem to believe that media theory, and more widely social science and the humanities, needs to rethink the question of technology and its relationship to society, culture and cultural production. In some ways this move might reinvigorate debate about the ways in which technology has been understood in the humanities. Andrew Feenberg has characterized the two most dominant positions as, on the one hand, the social constructivist or ‘technology studies’ approach to technology, and, on the other, the ‘substantivist’ theory of technology. The first of these, the social constructivist approach, aims to show how the development of technology is shaped not by technical and scientific progress but by contingent social, cultural and economic forces. A well known example of this is given in Pinch and Bijker’s discussion of the evolution of the bicycle. Pinch and Bijker resist the idea that the early evolution of the bicycle represented a linear progression driven by technological innovation. From the perspective of a linear