Friendship in the Age of Technics

Abstract

The study presents a thesis on the constitutive role of technics in the formation of social bonds between human beings, with special consideration given to the question of friendship. The concept of technics is analysed through the work of the French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler (b. 1952 - ), who shows that technics has been systematically excluded from the Western philosophical discourse since its Platonic inception and as such has been insufficiently thought in the Western philosophical tradition. Stiegler extends his theory of technics to formulate what he calls a general organology that analyses technical organs in a pharmacological relation to social and bodily organs. This pharmacological analysis of technics allows for a revaluation and critique of the dominant political and economic modes of organisation grounded in the Western philosophical discourse to reconsider the problematics underlying the social and psychic health of citizens in the contemporary world. Through the development of his concept of epiphylogenesis , Stiegler demonstrates that humanity and technics are mutually constitutive of each other through the intergenerational transfer of memory and can therefore not be thought separately. It is shown that technics consists of practices that relate to the technical object which mediates the storage and transfer of memory and in this sense affects the social and cultural practices that constitute the formation of social bonds. From this perspective the social bond, denoted by the concept of philia espoused in the Western philosophical tradition, is reconsidered in relation to technics and is juxtaposed to friendship as the particular instance of a relation with others through which the social bond (philia) can be altered. The analysis of technics is explored further through a genealogy that traces the epochal shifts of the technical object as medium of transmission and storage (orality, literacy, electricity and digitalisation), as well as the transformation that takes place through the industrialisation of the technical object. The result is that philia can be reconceptualised in relation to technical transformations and its identifiable tendencies which affect the social bond in order to develop a preliminary outline for an approach towards the constitution of social and cultural practices capable of responding to technological change. It is in the midst of the epochal shift towards digitalisation that the relation between philia and technics must be thought historically, as that which has manifested in the political economy of the global mnemotechnical system, and in the real-time of the global inter-connectivity of the Internet. From this perspective it is then considered that the question of friendship in the digital epoch does not appeal to an individual desire but instead calls for the adoption of a relation towards collectively defined objects of desire.