Bernard Stiegler's Seminar 2011-2012

A young French doctor, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, tried to teach the Wild Child…. But even after seven years of the most painstaking, systematic, and often inspired pedagogy, the boy never learned to speak, to read, or to write. He never told what he knew. He never told if he knew. 1 Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. 2

Theory, Culture & Society, 2014

This article begins by examining the concept of the pharmakon that is developed in Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, as it is here that the idea of a medium that is simultaneously poisonous and therapeutic is developed in relation to the discursive effects of writing. The author then goes on to look at Stiegler’s attempt to reconfigure the ‘orthographic economy’ of deconstruction, particularly his account of how the ‘tertiary supports’ of virtual and information technologies have transformed the experience of the real in the regime of global capitalisation. Finally, he argues that the appearance of the pharmakon as a matrix idea in his work, sharpens his account of the aporia of technological society: for the impossibility of human culture being reduced to either the disorientated life industrial populism, or to idealist notions of reflexivity, is what, for Stiegler, offers the chance of a new politics of spirit.

Has today's digital society succeeded in becoming mature? If not, how might a new Enlightenment philosophy and practice for the digital age be constructed that could hope to address this situation? Such a philosophy must take into account the irreducibly ambivalent, 'pharmacological' character of all technics and therefore all grammatisation and tertiary retention, and would thus be a philosophy not only of lights but of shadows. Grammatisation is the process whereby fluxes or flows are made discrete; tertiary retention is the result of the spatialisation in which grammatisation consists, a process that began thirty thousand years ago. The relation between minds is co-ordinated via transindividuation, and transindividuation occurs according to conditions that are overdetermined by the characteristics of grammatisation. Whereas for several thousand years this resulted in the constitution of 'reading brains', today the conditions of knowledge and transindividuation result in a passage to the 'digital brain'. For this reason, the attempt to understand the material or hyper-material condition of knowledge must be placed at the heart of a new discipline of 'digital studies'. The pharmacological question raised by the passage from the reading to the digital brain is that of knowing what of the former must be preserved in the latter, and how this could be achieved. This means developing a 'general organology' through which the social, neurological and technical organs, and the way these condition the materialisation of thought, can be understood. Integral to such an organology must be consideration of the way in which neurological automatisms are exploited by technological automatisms, an exploitation that is destructive of what Plato called thinking for oneself. The task of philosophical engineering today should be to prevent this short-circuit of the psychosomatic and social organological layers, a task that implies the need for a thoroughgoing reinvention of social and educational organisations.

Derrida Today, 2020

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. Available at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/drt.2020.0220

2015

Configurations, 2010

Time 3 was about to be released in its first English translation and Stiegler was nearing the completion of Taking Care 2. The primary goal of the interview was to explore what might be called Stiegler's "techno-thanatology," a concept that guides his theoretical work in Technics and Time, just as it inspires his political and pedagogical activities with Ars Industrialis and the Institut de recherche et d'innovation at the Centre Georges Pompidou. The interview touches upon the topics of mnemotechnics, political engagement, cinema and psychoanalysis, economies of contribution, and educational reform, not to mention metadata, geocaching, flash mobs, and Twitter. It is fitting that Stiegler, who is allergic to wheat, currently lives in a converted flour mill, where the interview took place. Our discussion ultimately documents Stiegler's pharmacological approach to the question of techne. Marcel O'GOrMan: The majority of the questions I want to ask today have to do with Technics and Time 3: The Time of Cinema and the Question of Ill-Being, which will soon be released in its English translation. But of course we will also move into your more recent work, including the work you do besides writing-in particular, with Ars Industrialis. First of all, on the way to cinema, let's talk a little about other specific media technologies, beginning with parts 1 and 2 of Technics and Time. In part 1, you draw on the story of Epimetheus and Prometheus to frame an argument about what you call "the in-459

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2019

The article sets out to develop the concept of attention as a key aspect to building the possible therapeutics that Bernard Stiegler's recent works have pointed to (The Automatic Society, 2016, The Neganthropocene, 2018 and Qu'appelle-ton Panser, 2018). The therapeutic aspect of pharmacology takes place through processes that are neganthropic; therefore, which attempt to counteract the entropic nature of digital technologies where there is flattening out to the measurable and the calculable of Big Data. The most obvious examples of this flattening out can be seen in relation to the use of natural language processing technologies for text interpretation and the use of text analytics alongside student analytics. However, the process of exosomatisation of knowledge takes place in forms of hypomnesic tertiary retentions or digital technologies. The loss of knowledge is inherent to these processes of exteriorisation, this loss of knowledge takes place through a process proletarianisation which Marx had pointed to in the Grundisse (1939). The therapeutic gesture is, therefore, an intrinsically educational one, where the loss of knowledge of the pharmacological nature of digital technologies is counteracted by other forms of knowledge construction that can be enabled by digital technologies. Hence, there is a profound educational gesture necessary to enable the re-harnessing of technology to enable the therapeutics. This paper will argue that the positive re-harnessing, the therapeutics, can take place through the development of new forms of neganthropic gestures which can be afforded by the development of specific forms of digital technologies. These also enable a contributive research process whereby the rationalisation of the production of knowledge within the university can be challenged by collaborative, interpretative processes of knowledge production.

Has today's digital society succeeded in becoming mature? If not, how might a new Enlightenment philosophy and practice for the digital age be constructed that could hope to address this situation? Such a philosophy must take into account the irreducibly ambivalent, 'pharmacological' character of all technics and therefore all grammatisation and tertiary retention, and would thus be a philosophy not only of lights but of shadows. Grammatisation is the process whereby fluxes or flows are made discrete; tertiary retention is the result of the spatialisation in which grammatisation consists, a process that began thirty thousand years ago. The relation between minds is co-ordinated via transindividuation, and transindividuation occurs according to conditions that are overdetermined by the characteristics of grammatisation. Whereas for several thousand years this resulted in the constitution of 'reading brains', today the conditions of knowledge and transindividuation result in a passage to the 'digital brain'. For this reason, the attempt to understand the material or hyper-material condition of knowledge must be placed at the heart of a new discipline of 'digital studies'. The pharmacological question raised by the passage from the reading to the digital brain is that of knowing what of the former must be preserved in the latter, and how this could be achieved. This means developing a 'general organology' through which the social, neurological and technical organs, and the way these condition the materialisation of thought, can be understood. Integral to such an organology must be consideration of the way in which neurological automatisms are exploited by technological automatisms, an exploitation that is destructive of what Plato called thinking for oneself. The task of philosophical engineering today should be to prevent this short-circuit of the psychosomatic and social organological layers, a task that implies the need for a thoroughgoing reinvention of social and educational organisations.

Storia della Scienza e Linguistica Computazionale. Sconfinamenti possibili., 2009