P.25 – the Heideggerian understanding of time, understood on two levels: existential structure of dasein; destiny of the occidental history of being, through the ‘metaphysical’ history of philosophy where being is presence ‘comprehended’ from the now of intratemporality determined by calculation and instruments for measuring time. The task of thinking is then to ‘deconstruct’ the history of metaphysics […].

[from Dan Ross overview: Thinking about time begins with thinking about the clock. The clock refers to a cyclical system, to which is added a calendrical system presupposing datability. All this requires the entire setup of mnemotechnics, and it is inscribed in the movement of the planets and the system of the seasons. The clock is the “durable fixing” of the now. But what is the now? Heidegger asks: “Am I the now?” And would that mean the “what” is constitutive of the “who”? Or does it just provide the occasion for access to a “who” determined before all clocks, before any “what”? Is the alternation between day and night itself a “what”? Could it then be considered a cosmological program, a program today covered over by the program industries responsible for what Paul Virilio calls “false light”? Does this not suggest a “proxying” of the clock before all “natural” programmatic systems, a proxying always already calling forth a historial programmability? What relation to technics enables Heidegger to say that Dasein is time?

[…]

“To fix” does not mean to determine but to establish. In other words, fixing also establishes the possibility of the indetermination of multiple determinations. Heidegger mistakenly identifies fixing and determination in relation to the clock. For Heidegger, the fundamental phenomenon of time is the future, whereas measuring time is attempting to determine the indeterminate, hence a form of evading the end. But, Stiegler asks, is measuring the only thing a clock does, or that fixing does? Writing in general was firstly a site of measurement, so could one not say that writing is a clock? For Heidegger, concealment lies in wanting to calculate the incalculable, or to prove the improbable, rather than experiencing these. But if writing is both technical and a clock (an objective memory) through which différance opens, then the Heideggerian themes of authenticity and falling make sense only from a non-metaphysical understanding of technics that Heidegger never finally achieves.

[…]

Heidegger justifies his disengagement of the “who” from any “what” through his critique of horological instrumentality, but this instrumentality is thought exclusively in terms of its end – exactitude. Exactitude, as the telos of instrumentality, is the attempt to determine the undetermined. Now, it is indeed true that Dasein reckons with time before any particular measuring instrument, but not before any instrument: equipmentality is constitutive of being-in-the-world. There must be a “what” for there to be an account of time, and this relation to time presupposes the hand articulating the “who” with the “what.” Calendarity is the general form of the inscribability of the “who” (qua temporal) in the “what” (and this is the basis of the time of the One and the public). The “who” is structured through calendrical and temporally programmatic publicity. The ortho-thetic form is not just an exactitude of measure, but a matter of recording and access.]

T&T

[38] Technics as constitutive of time & space. ‘This work seeks only to establish that organised inorganic beings [so technics] are originary, and characterised by a default of the origin, from which there is time, constitutive (in the strong phenomenological sense) of temporality and spatiality. 

[49] At the end of the first chapter, we will have gone through the question of technical evolution, which is to say: technics in time. But here arises the possibility that technics, far from being simply in time, actually constitute time. 

[53] Systems. The evolution of technical systems tends towards complexity and the interdependence of combined elements […] It is the globalisation of these dependencies – their universalisation and in this sense the deterritorialisation of technology – that leads to what Heidegger names enframing: a planetary industrial technics, systematically and globally exploiting resources, and implying an economic, political, cultural, social and military global interdependence. 

[64] On the coordination of the technical system with the other systems of the world.

[83] Interior and exterior milieus. By the concept of exterior milieu: ‘We in the first place grasp everything materially surrounding man: geographic, climatic, animal vegetable. […] By interior milieu: ‘ we grasp what, at each moment of time, in a defined mass of humanity, constitutes the intellectual capital of this mass. […] The interior milieu is social memory, the common past, what we call ‘culture’.

[84] For Leroi-Gourhan, a tendency is a movement in the interior milieu of the progressive appropriation of the exterior milieu. 

[NB. we find a role here for technics in the appropriation of the external milieu. Still thinking about radical title in Schmitt, and the way in which this founds a community, the social body. Now technics appears as the mode of this appropriation. See here for further thoughts on this with respect to Derrida’s reading of Husserl.]

[91] What happens when, in a certain sense, physical geography, saturated by human infiltrations, or technics, there is no longer an exterior milieu [what we have been calling full disclosure, BN], the principle relations between the interior and exterior milieu being mediated by a technical system that leaves no ‘natural’ remainder? One can ask if, in this case, the globalised technical system doesn’t form a sphere in which the distinction between interior milieu and exterior milieu, having totally modified their relations, has become highly problematic – and if the technical group doesn’t find itself completely freed from the ethnic group, with this becoming an archaic leftover.