Technologies of control reduce the singularities, of which processes of individuation are constituent, into calculabilities, to such an extent that they overdetermine the horizon of reality and can no longer be recognised as such. But to what extent is the human already technologically predisposed - to what extent is the human calculable in relation to itself and therefore predisposed to its technological overcoming?
A philosophical anthropology might maintain the relation between Anamnesis and Hyponomnesesis, showing that human life is constituted by tertiary retentions that are always-already technical determinations - a ‘default of origin’, as Bernard Stiegler puts it. Because of this (de)fault, Stiegler argues for a ‘pharmakology of spirit’, whereby technologies of control might themselves be turned into technologies of individuation. This position, when analysed according to the contemporary technological context, becomes a pharmakology of light-time because the screen has become the paradigmatic pharmakological space and the digital the form of informational light that is be brought to focus by the gaze of consciousness in this space. Examinations of the possibilities of pharmakological processes that operate at this interface would therefore constitute Stieglerian ‘new weapons’.
Acknowledging that these processes operate at the ‘end of philosophy’, Stiegler’s position can be problematised by returning to Heidegger: ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’. Heidegger argues that the ‘light’ which aletheia reveals is in fact the ‘lightness’ of a ‘clearing’ - lichtung. The onto-theological tradition comes to its end in a contemporary technics that controls Lux and lumen, but it misses the ‘possible radiance’ of lichtung. Is Stiegler’s post-deconstructionist position (at the end of tradition) in fact origin-less, because it is still determined by this tradition and unable to dwell at the threshold of the openness of possibility itself.
This question is developed in relation to ‘Platos Pharmacy’ (Derrida) in terms of the relation of the ‘light’ of the tradition, which it deconstructs, and the enigma of a possible radiance that remains outside of its grasp. Pharmakological techniques (of ‘standing-in’, ‘substitution’ and so on) are demiurguc mediations, but they are always-already thresholds of unconceilment, always that of which the clearing is cleared (mediation as conceptuality such). The absolute metaphor of light pervades and evades language (as pharmakon) but if the pharmakon itself is that which may be cleared, is this why lichtung remains unthought in philosophy?
Practices that subject pharmakology itself to a clearing inherently only occur outside tradition. Outside history, they are occult. Can such practices be said to be individuating and what is their relation to technological apparatus? Such practices, which evade philosophical writing, can be unearthed through an archeology of meditative praxis. Such an archeology reveals examples of a performative, perceptual clearing that is achieved through a yoga of light, which considers embodiment as the spectral interface. Such techniques, which are theurgic arts, manipulate demiurgic instruments of control in their dual capacity as optic-dimensional and geometric. Here, pharmakological suspension is achieved through a perceptual interfacing where consciousness as such is opened to itself. Both technical-perceptual apparatus (prosthetic instrumentation) and apparition are already apprehended here - natural light already corresponds to that possible radiance revealed in the psycho-physicality of the practitioner.
The interface that concerns us, then, is that instrument by which instrumentation itself is suspended, performed in the light of the uniqueness of the extension of the body in space-time as the pivot of the world. Psycho-physical embodiment is the horizon of the clearing of self-concealment - it is the loci of potentiality for individuation in the sense of a messianic break which, following Benjamin, we can now read in terms of a crystallisation of light-time applied to our technological age - the empty aeon in which the ‘default of origin, becomes the ‘origin is now’.