At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves, with beings formed by nature. This distinction persisted until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of the technical object. This philosophy developed while industrialisation was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of social organisation, which highlighted technology's new place in philosophical enquiry. Bernard Stiegler goes back to the beginning of Western philosophy and revises (...) the Aristotelian assessment, developing a complex argument whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinctive temporality and dynamic of its own. The author engages the ideas of Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela. (shrink)
Cinematic time -- The cinema of consciousness -- I and we : the American politics of adoption -- The malaise of our educational institutions -- Making (the) difference -- Technoscience and reproduction.
These lectures outline the project of a general organology, which is to say an account of life when it is no longer just biological but technical, or when it involves not just organic matter but organized inorganic matter. This organology is also shown to require a modified Simondonian account of the shift from vital individuation to a three-stranded process of psychic, collective and technical individuation. Furthermore, such an approach involves extending the Derridean reading of Socrates's discussion of writing as a (...) pharmakon, so that it becomes a more general account of the pharmacological character of retention and protention. By going back to Leroi-Gourhan, we can recognize that this also means pursuing the history of retentional modifications unfolding in the course of the history of what, with Lotka, can also be called exosomatization. It is thus a question of how exteriorization can, today, in an epoch when it becomes digital, and in an epoch that produces vast amounts of entropy at the thermodynamic, biological and noetic levels, still possibly produce new forms of interiorization, that is, new forms of thought, care and desire, amounting to so many chances to struggle against the planetary-scale pharmacological crisis with which we are currently afflicted. (shrink)
This article addresses the question under what conditions it is still possible to think in today’s era of the Anthropocene, in which the human has become the key factor in the evolution of the biosphere, considering the fact, structurally neglected by philosophy, that thinking is thoroughly conditioned by a technical milieu of retentional dispositives. The Anthropocene results from modern technology’s domination of the earth through industrialization that is currently unfolding as a process of generalized, digital automation, which tends to eliminate (...) reflection and to block any genuine questioning of its own development, producing a state of generalized entropy at all levels—ecological, psychic, social, economic, and, in particular, the noetic or thinking. The radical undermining of the very possibility of thinking and questioning, thought by Martin Heidegger in terms of Enframing, should be understood as a pharmacological situation that calls for a therapeutic reversal of the toxicity of current digital technologies into a remedial instrument for realizing a negentropic turn beyond the Anthropocene and toward the Neganthropocene. This requires that thinking starts to understand itself as caring, i.e., as a taking care of itself by taking care of the technical pharmaka that thoroughly constitute and condition it and that can render human life as noetic life both deeply unlivable and profoundly worthwhile. (shrink)
In this article, I would like to show that, concerning this era of ubiquitous technology and its teleologics, the stakes concern the constitution of a new milieu of psychic and collective individuation, which is at least as radically new as the writing of language was in its time; second, I attempt to show that what is at stake relates to the way technology changes the télos, that is, the rule of ends which shape the social organization of collective desire as (...) a system of care and remedies; and, third, I argue that this era requires a new libidinal economy, if we admit that there can be no télos without desire. I will argue that new ubiquitous digital networks operating as new technical associated milieus have fundamental effects for symbolic and psychical associated milieus, and thus for new ways of being. (shrink)
If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific (...) individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated. (shrink)
Même si Simondon, comme l’a bien relevé Jean-Hugues Barthélémy dans Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, souligne le rôle de stabilisateur du transindividuel dévolu à la technique, il n’analyse pas la dimension intrinsèquement technologique du pré-individuel. C’est pourquoi la religion, que Simondon origine pourtant dans la magie, n’est pas pensée depuis sa constitution profondément technique. Or, cette question revient là où Simondon s’avance du côté de la psychanalyse : la critique simondonienne de cette dernière n’a pas clairement formulé (...) l’objection qu’il faut lui adresser, à savoir qu’elle ne pense pas le rôle de la technique dans l’individuation, c’est-à-dire dans le désir.Even if Simondon, as Jean-Hugues Barthélémy well noted in Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, indeed stresses the stabilization part played by the trans-individual granted as it may be to technique, yet the latter never analyzes the intrinsically technological dimension of the pre-individual. That is why religion, which Simondon originates however amid the magical, is no longer thought since its deeply technical constitution. Now such a question goes back to where Simondon moves towards psychoanalysis : the Simondon criticism of the latter never clearly formulated the objection that should be addressed to it, i.e. never taking into thought the part played by technique in individuation, i.e. within desire. (shrink)
This interview is articulated around the following theses: capitalism must first be understood as a « libidinal economy » ; this libidinal economy is exhausted by the hyper-industrialization of contemporary capitalism : industrially treated desire leads to the destruction of desire ; whence the necessity of inventing a new form of public authority which can reactive, stimulate desire. Ecological damage is indeed the consequence of a symbolic poverty, a poverty of the forms of life and practices. The only response to (...) such damage is to propose a genuine ecology of mind. (shrink)
If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific (...) individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated. (shrink)
Ours is an age of general automation. The factory that produced proletarians now extends to the biosphere; consequently, disautomatization is needed, which is the real meaning of autonomy. Autonomy and automatism must be reconceived as a composition rather than an opposition. Knowledge depends on hypomnesic automatisms that open up the possibility of what Socrates called “thinking for oneself”; digitalization thus requires a new epistemology that entails questions of political and libidinal economy. Today, automatization serves the autonomization of technics more than (...) noetic autonomy, but reconceiving the latter necessarily involves reconsidering the meaning and character of desire. Greta Thunberg’s diagnosis of the irresponsibility of the generation before hers exposes the fact that the knowledge necessary to combat the consequences of contemporary technological development has been destroyed. The only possible counter to this irresponsibility lies in the reconstitution of knowledge, understood as the means by which humans struggle against entropy and anthropy. (shrink)
In this brief essay Stiegler synthesizes his critical approach to Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. He states his debt toward Simondon’s concept of a systemic indeterminacy in the processes of transindividual individuation, and focusses on his underdeveloped intuition concerning the role played by technics in anthropogenic processes. Situating himself in the phenomenological lineage of Husserl through Derrida, Stiegler explains his own “pharmacological” understanding of “technical individuation” as, at the same time, the intrinsic condition of individuation and the inevitable risk of disindividuation (...) defining the political as such. On this basis he critically extends Simondon’s understanding of religion and psychanalysis. This allows him to move beyond the political optimism implicit in Simondon’s “theoretical indecision” concerning the binding power of technical individuation yet relying on his very study of the question of individuation, which “is political through and through.”. (shrink)
Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...
In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions. New theories (...) and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein’s critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the ‘shock doctrine’. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent ‘state of shock’ has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities. Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available. (shrink)
Bernard Stiegler works systematically through the current crisis in education and family relations resulting from the mesmerizing power of marketing technologies. He contends that the greatest threat to social and cultural development is the destruction of young people's ability to pay critical attention to the world around them. This phenomenon, prevalent throughout the first world, is the calculated result of technical industries and their need to capture the attention of the young, making them into a target audience and reversing the (...) relationship between adults and children. _Taking Care_ exposes the carelessness of these industries and urges the reader to re-enter the "battle for intelligence" against the drive-oriented culture of short-term attention characteristic of the negative aspects of the new technologies. Long-term attention, Stiegler shows, produces retentions of cultural memory mandatory for social development—and for the counteracting of ADD and ADHD. Examining the history of education from Plato to the current quagmires in France and the United States, he tracks the notion of critical thinking from its Enlightenment apotheosis to its current eradication. Stiegler is unique in combining the most radical of theoretical constructs—such as "grammatization"—with quite traditional values, values he proposes we re-address in our not-so-brave new world. (shrink)
