In what follows I discuss five points, defining what Derrida would have called a “theoretical matrix.” First of all, I outline the deep conceptual meaning of grammatology as well as the opposition between Searle’s and Derrida’s views of speech acts – which is fundamental to understand the true nature of social ontology. Second, I focus on the technological revolution brought about by the Web (I call it “documediality”), which confirms Derrida’s stance on grammatology. Third, I look at the structure of social reality as it is revealed by the recent technological change: I call it “documentality” to underline the constitutive role played by documents in social reality. As a fourth point, in the light of the first three, I defend the importance of thinking of technology as a philosophically fundamental issue concerning as much ontology and epistemology, and then claim that what we are witnessing is a denial not of metaphysics but of technology. Finally, focusing on the notion of exemplarity, I try to outline the program of the “archives of the future,” that is, an active capable of documentality through exemplarity in order to implement a true human nature, a nature that is not given but in constant becoming.
Grammatology
The price Derrida paid for his postmodernism is the famously controversial thesis that “there is nothing besides the text,” a thesis that almost suggests that the whole world is socially constructed. However, the exaggerations of a brilliant man often hide an element of truth. If we change Derrida’s sentence to the weaker claim “there is nothing social outside the text,” we will get the best and most powerful understanding of social ontology ever formulated. The underestimating the importance of recordings, of the fixation of acts, is what Derrida had seenFootnote 1 as the weakness of the theory of speech acts. No speech act can take place without a ritualized form, just like no language can exist without a code. For Derrida, this dependence on recording and iteration does not only refer to the “source” – the formulation of the act – but also to the final outcome: if an act is to continue to be valid (that is, if a social object is to last) it has to be supported by something, even if it is just people’s memory. Hence the importance of bureaucracy and documents in the social world. Indeed, in his response to Derrida,Footnote 2 Searle much underestimates the role of recording and fails to understand the role of iteration in Derrida’s view of speech acts, which he takes as a simple misconception. Derrida’s rejoinder didn’t help to make things clearer and this misapprehension is still a problem in social ontology, twenty years after Searle’s polemic with Derrida.
Searle’s social ontology can be summed up in the rule “X counts as Y in C”Footnote 3: the natural object X (e.g. a human body or a piece of paper, provided that the latter is a natural object and not an artifact) counts as the social object Y (a professor or a banknote) in a context C. This, in fact, is a reformulation of the theory of speech acts, in which social reality is indeed the outcome of a construction operated by a magical property called “collective intentionality.” Apart from technical problems (what is the physical object X corresponding to negative entities like debts?), this perspective reformulates Rousseau’s social contract: people gather and decide to create social objects. This is the postulation of what I propose we call a “Pentecostal meaning,” that is, something heaven-sent, already formed, manifested through the enigmatic collective intentionality. An alternative solution, which can be found by drawing on Derrida’s reflections on speech acts and extending their scope to social ontology, is the following. Social objects require to be fixated in documents, which ensure the lasting duration of objects and the reactivation of intentionality. In most cases, the process is not based on construction but on emergence: i.e. the progressive manifestation of rites, customs, and habits that then produces an intentionality, be it individual or shared. No one ever contemplated a sexual partner and thought “I shall institute marriage”: rather, given the existence of marriage, people can think “why don’t my partner and I get married, like X, Y, and Z did?”
Thus far, I have looked at an exemplary theoretical controversy of the past century. Another extremely important element is that Derrida, back in 1967 – when personal computers and the Internet were still far away – made a very strong claim in his Grammatology: maybe books as an organic and complete totality à la Hegelian encyclopedia will come to an end, but what is about to begin is the boom of writing. He made this claim when McLuhan was prophesizing the end of writing, which – as we can easily see today – was far from the truth. Think of our everyday lives, with our smartphones, tablets, laptops, smart watches. This boom, for reasons I will now clarify, can be best described as a “documedialrevolution”: the medium called to creating documents and, through them, social reality is writing, which is now revealing its full power, bringing to light characteristics of society, technology, and human nature that had so far remained hidden.
Documediality
Everybody thinks that the Web was a revolution, but the real question is what it is about and what consequences this entails. In order to understand this, the concept of “documediality” suggests that one should understand the technological revolution as a socio-anthropological revelation. The changes brought about by the Web are many, and they have been widely analyzed over the past few decades. Its greatest merit is to reveal the deep structures of social reality, which were there long before the Web itself. Understanding the Web, therefore, means much more than analyzing our tools of communication. Suffice it to say that globalization does not depend on jets, but on writing – a technique that is older than the pyramids and yet is the only means to transfer not only physical objects but also social ones like money, laws, policies, and identities. And there’s more: writing, as well as recording in general, performs the miracle of constructing social objects (verba volant, scripta manent). Through the Web we can understand the true nature of action and social reality, not by overestimating the gnoseological potential of big data (as often happens), but rather by understanding that society cannot do without inscriptions and recordings, archives and documents, and the arche-technique of writing.
The boom of writing prophesied by Derrida and realized by documediality suggests that the sphere of documents – from economics to war, from bureaucracy to epidemiology – is where Foucault’s “governmentality” lies. It wouldn’t be the first time that a contingent construct reveals the necessary structures of social ontology. Think of capital as it was theorized by Marx, who recognized in an instance of technology (the factory) the fundamental structure of the social dynamic, and then more general aspects of it independent of social contingencies. What the Web does better than capital (which is merely an economic-social phenomenon limited to a part of the world) is to reveal its globalized dimension, which offers resources for a much wider, deeper, and fully postcolonial knowledge that goes way beyond the dimension of homo faber. After all, the revolution proposed by documediality is different from Kant’s Copernican revolution. The latter, in fact, was rather Ptolemaic, as it placed man in the center of the universe. From the perspective of documediality, instead, the answer to the question “what is man?” is to be sought in the question “what is society?” – as many philosophers have noted. Both questions then find their answer in another, fundamental question: “what is techne?” (which is less obvious). If you want to know the human soul you must look at the society man lives in, but if you want to understand the society man lives in you have to look at what technology he can use (even though very often it is technology that uses him). What the Web reveals is not the posthuman, but human essence.
The documedial revolution rests on the following axioms: 1. The Web is mainly recording, not only communication. It doesn’t work only as a TV, a newspaper, or a radio, but also as an archive. 2. The Web is mainly action, not only information. It doesn’t merely archive knowledge, but it defines a space for social acts (promises, commitments, orders). 3. The Web is mainly production, not only transmission. It doesn’t merely transmit what already exists; it constructs new social objects (documents, institutions, transactions). 4. The Web is mainly real, not only virtual. It doesn’t merely provide a virtual extension to social reality; it progressively turns into the general backbone of social reality (marginalizing traditional political and economic institutions). 5. The Web is mainly mobilization, not only emancipation. It doesn’t merely give its users new informative and expressive possibilities; it has turned into the tool to transmit orders and responsibilizations aimed at the performing of actions. 6. The Web is mainly emergence, not only construction. It doesn’t merely realize the technical intentions of its programmers and the collective intentionality of the community it arises in; it develops based on its own autonomous finality that has to be understood. 7. The Web is mainly opacity, not only transparency. It doesn’t merely reveal the structures of social reality; precisely because it reveals them (acting as a transcendental, that is, a condition of possibility) it escapes immediate knowledge.
Documentality
According to this axiomatic, documediality tries to outline the way in which new technologies reveal the deep structure of humans and society and its institutions. This approachFootnote 4 is articulated in three levels: the definition of the structure of social reality as documentality; the recognition of the specific nature of social reality as mobilization; and the analysis of the genesis of society and intentionality as emergence. Documentality, mobilization, and emergence thus constitute the first theoretical elements at the basis of documediality.
Documents as the foundation of social reality.
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the thesis underlying the theory of documentality is that what keeps society together must be sought in the sphere of the fixation of actions and the construction of social objects. In the perspective of documentality these insights are systematized by the constitutive law of social objects Object = Recorded ActFootnote 5: a social object is the result of a social act that takes place between at least two people, or between a person and a delegated machine, and that has the characteristic of being recorded on some surface, including the minds of the social agents. This constitutive law is articulated in four levels.
1. Recording is what allows for social objects – things like promises, bets, assignments, money, which require acts of communication, but must set themselves as recordings, otherwise they would remain empty words. A stock exchange session without price lists, a marriage without registers, a sale without a contract, a trial without a sentence would all be nothing but frivolous exercises, and I doubt you would have bothered reading this chapter if you knew you’d forget everything you read. Indeed, the acts we produce acquire meaning only if inscribed, and once inscribed they are extremely powerful: think of signatures deciding for war or peace, or typos causing stock market crashes. This is why documents are so crucial; this is why we queue to get them and are desperate if we lose them – this is why documentality is an important ingredient of society.
2. There is another sense in which people’s deep motivations and initiatives depend on texts. The role of documentality in the constitution of intentionality also concerns – in the most obvious and elementary sense – the benefits coming from sharing plans in the management of collective intentionality. Acting on the basis of written documents is the secret of military effectiveness, but more extensively it is the foundation of social action, as demonstrated by the importance of bureaucracy in the formation and management of power.
3. More decisively, documentality is the condition for the genesis of individual intentionality. It is not true that first we have intentions that then can be fixated in documents. The opposite is true: the human being becomes such through an education that involves learning a language, rituals, and attitudes – i.e. document apparatuses that precede, not follow, the formation of conscience and moral responsibility.
4. This becomes particularly evident in highly mediatized societies, as evidenced by the documedial revolution, which is the best observatory to grasp the dynamics of documentality. Behaviors and feelings (consider the role of literature, films, and songs in the definition of love) are strongly oriented by documentality.
Man as a mobilized animal.
The result of this omnipresence of documents, and above all of their active value, is the fact that the fundamental nature of humanity is not understanding, but action and mobilization. Imagine we are in the middle of the night from Saturday to Sunday, a night traditionally devoted to rest. In the dead of night, I wake up. I want to see what time it is and I obviously check my cell phone, which tells me that it is three o’clock. At the same time, I notice that someone has sent me an email. I cannot resist the curiosity, or better the anxiety (the mail concerns an issue at work), and that’s it: I read it and reply. I am suddenly working on Saturday night, no matter where I am.
If there is one thing that the documedial revolution has revealed better than any historical event or technical apparatus, it is that we are mobilized animals, submissive and willing to act on command, without understanding why. For us action is the fundamental value (what else, other than a need for action and recognition, might lead us to post contents on social media for free?). This isn’t alienation – the transformation from rational animal into mobilized animal – but a revelation: we thought that in the beginning was thought, but the truth is that in the beginning was action. Pragmatism has understood the nature of the human being as a mobilized animal and the derivation of intentionality from action. James said that one is sad because one is crying and not vice versa. However, beyond pragmatism, the point is to focus on the technological implications of this mobilization of intentionality, and on the crucial role played by recording and archives.
Technology as emergence.
The thesis underlying the hypothesis of emergence is that society derives from technology much more than it is constructed by social actors. The Web (as well as capital, power, etc.) is not something that is constructed, perhaps by some big brother: it emerges, as always happens with technology, following no specific plan or design. Once again, documediality proposes a Copernican revolution in which technology isn’t an extension of man, but rather man is an extension of technology. This is in line with an interpretation that has been widely supported in the twentieth century, even though the perspective of documediality is characterized by a markedly positive view of this determination. For documediality, this is no alienation of human nature but rather a revelation of its innermost truth.
Let’s start from a trivial consideration, namely the fact that technological devices seem to develop in directions that in many cases are not those provided by their inventors. The inventor of gunpowder had fireworks in mind, that of the phone was looking for something like a radio and that of the radio was looking for a phone; and yet, regardless of their inventors, the devices have been following their own logic, which therefore, rather than being programmed and planned, has emerged. Like technology in general, the Web is not an alienation of human nature – something that leads man astray from his supposed true self – but rather a revelation of what a human being really is: a weak and dependent being that is structurally in need of technology to be what it is. So, technology is both what makes up for our failings and what reveals the characteristics of human nature. Technological emergence is thus an anthropological revelation, in the sense that what emerges from technology is a specific feature of the human being. Nobody expected the developments of the wheel, fire, writing, or the Web, but each of these techniques has helped culture to answer the question: what is man? Similarly, those who designed the first personal computers did not foresee in any way that it would transform the life of humanity, and whoever introduced text writing into mobile phones would never have thought that most telephone traffic would take place as writing.
Of course you can always argue that technology and documents alone do not speak; you need humans to make them talk. The documedial perspective answers: humans alone do not speak either, you need other humans to activate the module of language, and for this to happen there has to be a code, which is ultimately a document (the language must be a public language, which retains its meaning and is shared). The same holds for education, taste, will, and intentionality: the humanization of humanity passes through processes of training, imitation, and motivation that are essentially document-like. The great lesson to be learned in this respect from “deconstruction” consists in the need to recognize immediacy – starting from intentionality and self-consciousness – as an effect and the result of a mediation, rather than a cause.
Documents and mobilizations in turn stem from technology. No transformation could take place without a recording, i.e. without the establishment of a social memory. At first the latter is sedimented in rituales – external media needed to fixate memory in a society without writing. However, something like writing comes to be very soon: for example, take technical acquisitions like flint-working, i.e. a reification of memory in artifacts. With the development of writing, sociality evolves much more rapidly, and the document’s role is strengthened. In fact, as we have seen, they both fixate the actions, taking a prescriptive role, and coordinate them.
Technology
With rare exceptions, technology has generally been underestimated by philosophy, which has merely conceived of it either as a simple vehicle of alienation or as an autonomous power antithetical to the spirit. Technology, though, is what connects ontology (what there is) with epistemology (what we know). It is therefore not technical, but metaphysical. Derrida knew this, not because he had had the time to see mobile phones and the power of emails (which he refused to use), but rather because, ever since his very first steps in phenomenology, he had developed a reflection on technology as what overcomes the distinction between authentic and inauthentic, natural and artificial, technology and anthropology.
Technology and anthropology.
The first act of the naked monkey is not the creation of values or norms, but rather the construction of technical apparatuses, as its most pressing need is to eat, protect itself, and keep warm. The first norms, as derived from technology, will appear much later. The Web is not one of the many alleged alienations leading astray our (almost) perfect humanity: it is the revelation of our true nature, in need of technology, dependent, much less free, and far more subdued than we are willing to admit. And this awareness has taught us to respond, with political action or moral choice, to the imperatives of technology – which are mandatory only for those who think they are (usually for lack of culture). We turn out to be animals in need of technology, all too ready to exchange our imaginary freedom for real security and comfort.
The human dependence on technology, therefore, is not a specific trait of our age as is often claimed. Most of all, the idea that humankind risks being replaced by machines seems meaningless, because the notion of machine can only have a meaning in relation to humankind. Indeed, to what extent can human subjectivity be understood prescinding from technical apparatuses, as suggested by the theories of the extended mind – and as implied by the classical descriptions of the link between identity and memory? Conversely, to formulate an adequate theory of identity and society, one has to think of those not only in relation to humankind, but also by accounting for the technological and documedial system as an integral part of a social ontology and of an individual psychology.
Ontology, epistemology, technology.
It has been rightly noted that technological skill is what allows for the jump from apes to human beings, which therefore doesn’t happen with Homo sapiens (the rational animal) but with Homo abilis (the technological animal) – as genetic research has confirmed. This, though, is not just about the remote origins of man, but also about his highest intellectual achievements, like mathematical reasoning. Euler claimed that the full power of his mathematics was concentrated in the pencil with which he did his calculations.
The denial of the role of technology seems to be the root of all denials, starting from that of the body in relation to the mind – if you think about the importance of pen and paper to the development of thought, it is difficult to underestimate the importance of, say, gender differences. Without technology, there is no human nature. Thus, technology is not the antithesis of the spirit, but its first manifestation: the spirit itself is technology. There is nothing in the brain to justify our difference from nonhuman animals. Instead, there is much outside of the brain. In particular, technology seems to be an excellent candidate to link ontology (what is in the world) and epistemology (our knowledge of the world). In line with an argument that can be found pragmatism, phenomenology, and philosophy of technology, technology plays an essential role, and documediality aims at providing a complete theory of it.
Technology as competence without understanding.
The third important aspect is that the true nature of technology is competence (action, know-how) without understanding. This circumstance, far from placing it in a subordinate position, makes of technology an essential heuristic device: we act before thinking, and so we end up finding new truths. Instead, understanding is related to analytical reasoning within the sphere of established knowledge. In other words, technology looks like the real presupposition of a priori synthetic judgments, which Kant only formulated analytically precisely because he did not take technology into account. Culture is deferred nature, nature is different culture, and the link between them is given by technology (this is the great lesson to be learned from pragmatism). What has been said against “instrumental rationality” seems to forget that reason as such is a tool. Technology can achieve a superior and surprising synthesis – a synthetic synthesis, rather than an analytic one. As unreflected competence, it is what underlies both the emergence of the fundamental structures of social ontology and the human psyche, and the development of knowledge.
In the beginning was technology: action comes before understanding, and inscription comes before intention. In the theory of expression we find forms of inscription (marks, drawings, traces) that take an expressive value then associated with a meaning. In the theory of man, first of all we encounter techniques revealing otherwise unexpressed human characteristics – from the will to power to the love of theory. In the theory of society, we encounter organizational forms rooted in our animal past, which are then formalized and perfected into customs, rules, and documents – which later give rise to collective intentionality. This may seem an abstract theoretical statement, but it gets supporting evidence from the investigations promoted by “documediality”: observing the technological revolution – according to the reasoning that consists in going from the empirical condition to the transcendental structures that determine it – we can reach the a priori forms of human nature and social reality.
Exemplarity
There is still one question to be answered: to what extent can archives (that seem intrinsically related to the past) address the future? To put it differently, how can the expression “archives of the future” not be taken as an oxymoron? The fundamental concept to answer this question is that of exemplarity, to be understood as the principle of a transformation that, through a single case, allows for the formation of a virtual class, a series of new possibilities – which is the basis of the concept of “archive of the future.” This, in an emergent perspective, means: without free actions there would be no freedom, without imprinted letters there would be no spirit, without repetition there would be no creativity. Culture – the archives of the future – is indeed the sphere in which this exemplarity programmatically unfolds, benefiting greatly from the boom of writing and the documedial revolution.
Exemplarity is not a return to the old canons, but the creation of something new that perhaps is not yet understood, and that will become exemplary. So the point is to ask ourselves questions such as: what are the good examples (exemplary actions, good practices) that can guide the formulation of a practical reason for the Web, that is, a not purely passive reception of what emerges from technology? In something dominated by the public dimension like the Web, in which (especially in social networks) seeing and being seen are fundamental actions, a concrete, accessible normativity, made of concrete examples, is certainly more dominant if compared to a system of general and abstract principles. Good examples, exemplary actions, the stories of exemplary individuals (who are still individuals, like us and like everyone else) are paradigms because they show a model (be it ethical, juridical, or otherwise). This leads to three considerations.
Memory and technology.
The first concerns the link between memory and technology. Every technology, as we have seen, is a form of memory (iteration); and each iteration, even if taking place in an organic space (such as thinking, speaking, or normed acting) results in a form of memory. This link between memory and technology is what explains the Copernican revolution of documediality, which consists in overturning the traditional view and understanding intentionality (the spirit, the mind, the will, and purpose) as derived rather than founding, compared to the forms of fixation (the letter, the expression, the rule).
The thesis that documents alone do not speak but need people to make them talk is a variation of “the automaton alone cannot act; it needs a soul.” Now, if there is a distinctive feature of the automaton, for example the thermostat, it is that it takes action automatically, that is, without external intervention. If we insist that acting automatically is different from acting autonomously, I would note that it is highly doubtful that humans act autonomously – Kant himself assumed this presupposition as a hypothesis rather than a demonstrable fact. Anyhow, humans alone do not act either: at most they react to stimuli, just like a photometer or a thermometer. Therefore, the question that often arises before the specter of some artificial intelligence, “will the machines control our destiny?” is an absurd and rhetorical question, though often asked in good faith. Indeed, has humankind ever, in any place and any time, controlled its own destiny?
The finality that we perceive actually emerges from documentality. Freud’s grandson used to play with a reel that had a piece of string tied around it: he would toss the reel away from him to where it could no longer be seen (Fort!), before pulling it back into view and hailing its reappearance with a cheerful “Da!” Freud attributed the whole thing to compulsion and the bond between the drive to repetition and death. But let us not forget that one could also see this game as the Schillerian emblem of freedom: the boy is playing; no one is forcing him to. In playing, he manifests the technical mastery of a repetitive practice, Fort / Da, and this gives him pleasure. No one forces him to act as he does, unless one chooses to invoke the profound ancestral grounds that Freud refers to. Why should one see the game as the submission to a drive rather than an alteration by which from the drive one achieves freedom? And why not recognize the deep complicity that unites technology to liberty and justice, the letter to the spirit, the automaton to the soul? As in Pascal’s wager, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Gesture and mimesis.
The second point concerns the relationship between gesture and imitation. As a tool, the document always recalls the function of the gesture. We have seen how technology consists of competence without understanding, that is, an expert action that does not know the principles, and often not even the reasons, of its own operation. These features are typically those of the gesture: driving a car, whisking eggs, standing up without falling, that is, respecting the laws of physics, are gestures that exemplify the idea of competence without understanding. Some of these are more or less innate (standing up) but others – including language, morality, conscience, politics – are learned. This learning doesn’t take place by some transfer of meaning, but through imitation. As we know, imitation is an essential characteristic of the human being, one that Derrida has focused on ever since his early work.
This doesn’t make intentionality, responsibility, and freedom any less authentic: it simply acknowledges their origin in technology, recording, and mediation. Consider a passage that was very important to the later Derrida, Hamlet’s “time is out of joint”: injustice manifests itself as a technical flaw. And justice, the remedy that Hamlet is called upon to bring, also appears as a technical operation, a repair (“to set it right”). One could say that it was just a figure of speech, that righting a wrong is not the same as fixing a broken chair, but how can we know? When presuming that the spiritual soul is opposed to the inert mechanism, isn’t one biased by the prejudice of authenticity versus inauthenticity and immediacy versus mediation?
The given and the trace.
The third element regards the distinction between the given, as an inert element, and the trace, as that which is not merely deposited, but produces a horizon. Here too you have to overturn the view that, in the twentieth century, has solidified in the criticism of the “myth of the given.” The argument that data as such are never given, because they are determined by theories, must be overturned: data are there, regardless of our theories. Some of these, with a random development dominated by contingency (which is characteristic of an emergentist philosophy) may give rise to science and art, thus shaping themselves (again to resume an enigmatic expression dear to Derrida) as the traces of the future.
Precisely because there is no human in-itself, but only an interaction between humanity and technology, the humanities are not the opposite of the latter, but its most eminent realization. The human comes into being through an education that involves learning a language, rituals, attitudes, i.e. document apparatuses that precede, not follow, the formation of conscience and moral responsibility. The spontaneity and creativity that we feel within us, the fact that we have mental contents and ideas, and refer to something in the world, do not contradict in any way the fact that the origin of all this is to be found in recordings and inscriptions.
There is a single thread that from recording leads to responsibility and then to teleology, or purpose. There hasn’t been a single time in history when human beings sat at a table and created a social world. Rather, there has been a very slow process begun with animal sociality; think of termites, who didn’t use to be social animals but have become so through evolutionarily successful genetic modifications, ending up by creating superorganisms (extremely cohesive societies). Humans, like some other animals (few, according to zoologists) have developed a form of eu-sociality, that is, of social cooperation. However, human cooperation is not even remotely as cohesive as that of termites, which indeed seem to have a collective intentionality. And yet it appears meaningless to speak of intentionality in this case. So, if shared intentionality is not the reason, what explains the copresence of social cooperation and conflict, and the evolution from elementary sociality to complex social realities like ours? The answer, as always, lies in archives, which for this very reason are the archives of the future.
