Phone: +31(0)24-3652118 Address: Radboud University Nijmegen
Faculty of Science
Institute for Science in Society
P.O. Box 9010
6500 GL Nijmegen
Room 02.741
Technology has become an integral part of our lives, permeating virtually every dimension of our ... more Technology has become an integral part of our lives, permeating virtually every dimension of our cultural, social and natural worlds. The Technical Condition, an accessible introduction to contemporary philosophy of technology, takes this entanglement of technology, culture and society as the starting point for philosophical and normative reflection. Is biotechnology forcing us to rethink fundamental concepts such as the natural and the artificial? How will governance by algorithms reshape our politics? Are we adapting our home environments to fit our smart appliances and voice assistants? Will a technology-driven Anthropocene presage the end of humanity? How can we evaluate new technologies if technology is also influencing our moral sense? Understanding these entanglements will help us to steer them in beneficial directions.
The Technical Condition convincingly demonstrates how technology, culture, and society affect each other in countless and unexpected ways, providing an impetus for philosophical reflection on one of the most important themes of our times. As such, it will appeal to students in the humanities, social sciences and engineering sciences.
In this volume a select choice of authors reflects on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui... more In this volume a select choice of authors reflects on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West.
Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene.
Wie zijn op dit moment de denkers in Duitsland die we moeten lezen? Welke thema’s staan er op de ... more Wie zijn op dit moment de denkers in Duitsland die we moeten lezen? Welke thema’s staan er op de agenda en welke filosofische vriend- en vijandschappen doorkruisen de debatten bij onze oosterburen? De nieuwe Duitse filosofie geeft het antwoord.
In De nieuwe Duitse filosofie stellen vooraanstaande filosofen uit Nederland en Vlaanderen de meest relevante denkers uit het Duitse taalgebied aan u voor. Behalve met grote namen als Sloterdijk en Habermas biedt dit omvangrijke overzichtswerk een kennismaking met hun minder bekende collega’s. De auteurs beschrijven op toegankelijke wijze leven en werk van iedere filosoof. Ook bevat het boek suggesties tot verder lezen, illustraties en uitgebreide registers.
Steeds meer mensen trekken naar de stad en wonen minder lang op dezelfde plek. Ze wonen ook niet ... more Steeds meer mensen trekken naar de stad en wonen minder lang op dezelfde plek. Ze wonen ook niet meer op de plek waar zij zijn opgegroeid, laat staan op de plek waar hun ouders zijn opgegroeid. Ze kennen de paadjes in het bos achter hun huis niet meer, maar hebben voor hun twintigste al wel grote delen van de wereld gezien. Plekken zelf veranderen ook. Veel mensen herkennen de plek waar zij zijn opgegroeid nauwelijks meer; alles wordt volgebouwd in de strijd om de ruimte. Globalisering zou volgens sommigen onontkoombaar leiden tot vervreemding en ontworteling. Al deze veranderingen voltrekken zich in een rap tempo, en deze dynamiek lijkt het tempo waarin we dergelijke veranderingen aankunnen te overstijgen.
We staan op een kruispunt met aan de ene kant een weg naar een plekloos leven gekenmerkt door flexplekken, websurfers en wereldreizigers. Dit ‘footloose’ bestaan zal leiden tot een mensbeeld waarin identiteit niet langer wordt ontleend aan je geboorteplaats of je woonplaats. Aan de andere kant kunnen we een weg inslaan waarin mensen nieuwe vormen van verbinding zoeken, gekenmerkt door een behoefte aan een thuis, aan ommetjes en contact met de buren. Wat betekenen deze ontwikkelingen voor ons denken over plaatsen? Wat is de betekenis van plaatsen in een permanent veranderende samenleving? Wat is onze eindbestemming en wat zijn de consequenties daarvan op ons mensbeeld en onze relatie met de omgeving?
Dit boek is bedoeld voor een breed scala aan lezers die zich ieder op enigerlei wijze verbonden voelen met een plek of juist het ‘footloose’ bestaan omhelzen. Wetenschappers, politici, wandelaars, ruimtelijke ordenaars, natuur-beschermers en kunstenaars nemen de lezer mee in hun perspectief op plaatsen.
Dit proefschrift is een onderzoek naar de fundamentele relatie tussen het technische en het mense... more Dit proefschrift is een onderzoek naar de fundamentele relatie tussen het technische en het menselijke. Het verdedigt de stelling dat de techniek constitutief is voor de menselijke conditie en laat zien dat dit altijd zo is geweest, vanaf de aanvang van de menselijke evolutie. Mens en techniek zijn van meet af aan zo onlosmakelijk en intiem met elkaar verbonden dat we kunnen stellen dat de menselijke conditie gelijk is aan, ja feitelijk volledig neerkomt op de conditie van techniciteit. De mens is het effect, de biosociale manifestatie van het technisch-worden van het leven, een proces dat ongeveer vier miljoen jaar geleden is aangevangen, toen de eerste Australopithicae gebruik gingen maken van primitieve stenen werktuigen. Het is echter pas met de opkomst van de technowetenschappen sinds de Industriële Revolutie, en in het bijzonder met de verschijning van de informatietechnologieën en de biotechnologieën in onze tijd, dat de ware impact van onze technische conditie zich op pregnante wijze aan ons opdringt. Het is aan de exploratie van de betekenis en de consequenties van dit epochale fenomeen dat dit proefschrift voornamelijk is gewijd.
De alom gedeelde ervaring dat de technologische ontwikkeling steeds sneller gaat en zich steeds sterker opdringt, onze levens steeds nadrukkelijker zowel opeist als vormgeeft – een ervaring die Martin Heidegger in de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw karakteriseerde als die van de ‘aanspraak van de techniek’ – noodzaakt ons om de techniek op een heel andere wijze te leren begrijpen dan traditioneel gebruikelijk. De traditionele, antropocentrisch en instrumentalistisch georiënteerde techniekopvatting – ook wel de humanistische opvatting genoemd – is niet langer plausibel. De techniek kan niet langer worden gedacht als een middel in handen van de mens, die er op soevereine wijze over beschikt en haar onderwerpt aan zijn eigen, autonoom gestelde doelen. Er moet een alternatieve opvatting worden ontwikkeld, die recht doet aan haar claimende en quasi-autonoom evoluerende karakter.
De vier auteurs die in dit proefschrift centraal staan – Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, Gilbert Hottois en Bernard Stiegler – ontwikkelen zo’n alternatieve conceptie. In tegenstelling tot de humanistische visie, waarin mens en techniek als twee onafhankelijke variabelen tegenover elkaar worden geplaatst en de techniek wordt bekritiseerd (of zelfs veroordeeld) op basis van een welbepaalde opvatting van de mens, stellen deze denkers dat mens en techniek onlosmakelijk met elkaar verbonden zijn en dat alles wat het humanisme doorgaans opponeert aan de techniek (bewustzijn, autonomie, (keuze)vrijheid, subjectiviteit, cultuur, menselijke waardigheid, etc.) in feite op een zeer diepgaande wijze geconditioneerd is door de techniek. De techniek is geen middel, het is onze conditie. Speciale aandacht gaat in dit proefschrift uit naar de implicaties van deze nieuwe visie op de techniek voor de manier waarop we recente ontwikkelingen in de biotechnologie moeten beoordelen.
Stiegler understands the Anthropocene as the age in which planetary
enframing engenders an avalan... more Stiegler understands the Anthropocene as the age in which planetary enframing engenders an avalanche of entropization, putting humanity’s survival at risk. To avoid catastrophe, the so-called technosphere should be transformed from an entropic-destructive into a negentropic-constructive assemblage, ushering in the Neganthropocene. Stiegler’s focus is on the noetic dimension, in particular as constituted and conditioned overwhelmingly today by the digital pharmakon. In this article I want to make a case for the importance of an entirely other noetic pharmakon not addressed by Stiegler: the nontechnical pharmakon of psychedelics, which allows for the expansion of humanity’s noetic frontier beyond the digital, providing access to dimensions of experience—and possibly also of reality—that may support the emerging neganthropos to awaken on a postanthropocentric planet in which it is enabled to commune in a noosphere made up by many other, nonhuman intelligences, which may prove essential for the neganthropic transformation to succeed.
In this article, we aim to expose the central tenets of the philosophy of technology which underl... more In this article, we aim to expose the central tenets of the philosophy of technology which underlines the work of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Beginning from his early works and also mapping his philosophical influences, we show how he incidentally started theorising technology while still profoundly engaged with critical theory in the 1980s, but along the 1990s passed through an anthropological turn, which made possible a concept of technology that has its foundations in both Heidegger's existential philosophy and German philosophical anthropology in general, but also emphasising the long biological-evolutionary process of the human species itself. This perspective then enables us to formulate-starting from Sloterdijk's work-a powerful philosophical technoanthropology that deals with the genesis of the human as a sphero-poietic species having evolved into a bio-sphero-poietic geoforce and with the future planetary challenges put in front of us by the Anthropocene. We thereby aim to contribute to current debates in the philosophy of technology, offering a techno-philosophical reading of an (in our view) decisive and yet underexplored author in this field.
In this paper, we carry out a critical analysis of the concept of technology in the current desig... more In this paper, we carry out a critical analysis of the concept of technology in the current design of the bio-based economy (BBE). Looking at the current status of the BBE, we observe a dominant focus on technological innovation as the principal solution to climatic instability. We take a critical stance towards this "ecomodernist" worldview, addressing its fundamental assumptions, and offer an underarticulated explanation as to why a successful transition toward a sustainable BBE-i.e. one that fully operates within the Earth's carrying capacity-has not yet been reached. Bernard Stiegler has developed a philosophical perspective on the concept of economy, broadening it to include the human condition through the notion of desire. This theory can help to obtain a more profound understanding of why ecomodernist strategies are dominant today. Stiegler's theory of the libidinal economy offers an analysis of controlled and exploited human desire as a primary driver behind modern techno-economic structures. Our hypothesis is that a critique of contemporary technofixism as a critique of libidinal economy is a necessary step to take in the discussion around the BBE as a concept, if the BBE is ever to bring about a system that can truly operate within the Earth's carrying capacity.
The Technical Condition. The Entanglement of Technology, Culture, and Society, 2022
Pre-print proof Chapter 7, The Technical Condition. The Entanglement of Technology, Culture, and ... more Pre-print proof Chapter 7, The Technical Condition. The Entanglement of Technology, Culture, and Society. Boom publishers, Amsterdam, 2022.
This is a commentary piece on Marco Pavanini's article ' 'Multistability and Derrida's Différance... more This is a commentary piece on Marco Pavanini's article ' 'Multistability and Derrida's Différance: Investigating the Relations Between Postphenomenology and Stiegler's General Organology' in which I critically extend upon his comparative analysis of postphenomenology''s notion of multistability and Stiegler's conception of organology, focusing in particular on the pharmacological nature of Stiegler's organology and the latter's most recent re-interpretation of it in terms of entropy and negentropy. Among other things I show, and both are more intended as additions than criticisms with respect to Pavanini's very helpful comparison, (1) that the most important concern for Stiegler in theorizing technology is the fact that the transductive relations between the three organ systems distinguished in his pharmaco-organology of technology open up affective or libidinal circuits between these systems, i.e., circuits either of desire or drive depending on the way the pharmakon is adopted or not, and that these circuits are fundamentally noetic circuits vulnerable to denoetization; and (2) that these libidinal-noetic circuits as conditioned by technology should be interpreted in terms of entropy and negentropy. Both insights are lacking in postphenomenology, which generally fails to consider the irreducibly destitutive character of all technology, rightfully emphasized by Pavanini, since it lacks a genuine pharmacological awareness.
In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens explains the discipline
called philosophy of techn... more In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens explains the discipline called philosophy of technology and gives a concise overview of the most important contemporary approaches within this field. He also offers a critical evaluation of what are probably the two most salient characteristics of contemporary philosophy of technology, the so-called “empirical turn” and the “ethical turn,” which are deeply related and partly reflect the discipline’s on-going alignment with the global neoliberal agenda of exclusively profit-driven technological innovation. He also critically reflects on recent developments in the molecular and informational life sciences such as genomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology.
Chinese translation of my in memoriam for Bernard Stiegler (1 April 1952 - 5 August 2020), second... more Chinese translation of my in memoriam for Bernard Stiegler (1 April 1952 - 5 August 2020), second version, translated by Solemn
One of the defining moments in contemporary philosophy of technology was undoubtedly the ‘empiric... more One of the defining moments in contemporary philosophy of technology was undoubtedly the ‘empirical turn’ of the 1990s and 2000s (Achterhuis 2001; Kroes and Meijers 2000; Franssen et al. 2016). Contra older, so-called transcendentalist, essentialist or “macro-level” oriented approaches that had seen technology as an all-encompassing phenomenon or force, the empirical turn inaugurated more “micro-level” oriented analyses of concrete technologies, studied in their specific use contexts. Since a couple of years, however, the empirical turn has increasingly been called into question, with scholars asking whether it has not been pushed too far—certainly given recent technological developments that seem to give technology an all-encompassing or all-penetrating countenance (again): pervasive automation of all domains of society through AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms and (ro)bots, or the engineering grasp on life through nanotechnology, biotechnology and neurotechnology. Also, the ecological urgency characterizing our “Anthropocenic condition” appears to call for more broad-ranging perspectives than the mere analysis of concrete local use contexts. At the same time, nonetheless, the “empirical attitude” keeps demon- strating its usefulness for the philosophical study of technologies on a day-to-day basis… The question has been coming up more and more: Where do we go from here? Quo vadis philosophy of technology?
In this reply I further defend my claim that the transcendental should always remain a primary co... more In this reply I further defend my claim that the transcendental should always remain a primary concern for philosophy of technology as a philosophical enterprise, contra the empirical turn's rejection of it. Yet, instead of emphasizing the non-technological conditions of technology, as 'classic' thinkers of technology such as Heidegger did, it should recognize technology itself as the transcendental operator par excellence. Starting from Heidegger's ontological understanding of transcendence I show that while technical arti-facts may indeed always conform to a certain horizon of understanding, they also constitute this horizon in specific ways. Following Stiegler I show that concrete technologies (technology with a small 't') are not just empirical effects of an overarching movement of transcendence (Technology with a capital 'T') but are originally constitutive of it. In response to Romele's critique that the social, language, images, imaginaries, symbols, etc. are also transcendentals, I argue that all these phenomena are always already conditioned by technical milieus. As for Besmer's contention that I offer a reductive interpretation of postphenomenology's notion of multistability, I argue that there are decisive systemic and organological limits to multistability offered by technical artefacts and that all variation in use and implementation is always constrained by inherent technical tendencies and processes of concretization. Agreeing with Besmer that the transcendental and the empirical should be understood not oppositional but compositional I argue that technology may be that which constantly 'mediates' between the two. Keywords Transcendental · Transcendence · Empirical turn · Postphenomenology · Heidegger · Stiegler First of all, I would like to thank both Kirk Besmer and Alberto Romele for their thoughtful and useful comments on my article, which were very much appreciated. In what follows I will try to further clarify the core intention of that article by responding to the remarks they've put forward, Besmer being somewhat more critical than Romele, who is mostly in agreement with the views I present and starts off admitting this straightforwardly yet then This reply refers to the comment available online at https:// doi.
This article has two general aims. It first of all critically reconsiders the empirical turn's di... more This article has two general aims. It first of all critically reconsiders the empirical turn's dismissal of transcendentalism in the philosophy of technology, in particular through the work of Ihde and Verbeek, and defends the continuing relevance of the notion of the tran-scencental in thinking about technology today, illustrating this mainly through a reading of Stiegler's understanding of the human condition as a technical condition and his view of human (noetic) evolution as proceeding from a process of technical exteriorization. The crucial issue that is missed by postphenomenology and the empirical turn is that technology itself in its empiricity occupies the (periodically changing) place of the transcenden-tal. It thus fails to consider the transcendental operativity of technical artifacts within its own empiricist stance. Secondly, it argues for the continuing importance and usefulness of the idea of Technology with a capital T, equally discarded by the representatives of the empirical turn, in particular against the emerging backdrop of the Anthropocene as the age of decisive anthropogenic forcing of the planet and the growing dominance of what has recently been called the technosphere in Earth system science. With Stiegler I show that a proper, inherent dynamic of technology must be acknowledged historically, anthropologi-cally, techno-evolutionarily as well as (techno)phenomenologically. I conclude by demonstrating that our time of planetary crisis summons us to redirect our attention to technology from the empirical to the transcendental, and from the micro-level to the macro-level again.
This article critically reflects on Stiegler’s re-interpretation of Heidegger’s views on the rela... more This article critically reflects on Stiegler’s re-interpretation of Heidegger’s views on the relationships between existential temporality, the understanding of being and technology within the context of the latter’s notion of enframing, reconceptualized as an explicitly planetary phenomenon: the technosphere. Stiegler replaces Heidegger’s ontological conception with an organological one, arguing that the latter fails to understand these phenomena from the crucial perspective of thermodynamics, i.e., of the question of entropy and negentropy, which has never been addressed by Heidegger. What I particularly aim to show is that Stiegler’s organological re-intepretation of enframing as the technosphere and of existential temporality in terms of ‘quasi-causality’ (per Deleuze) may profit from being put in the broader, geothermodynamic context of Earth System Science, and considered from the perspective of Schneider & Sagan’s ‘gradient theory’, as being driven by what may be called the planetary ‘thermodynamic imperative’ with Jeffrey Wicken.
In Memoriam voor Bernard Stiegler (1 april 1952–6 augustus 2020)
Online Symposium ‘Memory for the... more In Memoriam voor Bernard Stiegler (1 april 1952–6 augustus 2020) Online Symposium ‘Memory for the Future: Thinking with Bernard Stiegler’, georganiseerd door het Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) en het Institute for Science in Society (ISiS), Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Technology has become an integral part of our lives, permeating virtually every dimension of our ... more Technology has become an integral part of our lives, permeating virtually every dimension of our cultural, social and natural worlds. The Technical Condition, an accessible introduction to contemporary philosophy of technology, takes this entanglement of technology, culture and society as the starting point for philosophical and normative reflection. Is biotechnology forcing us to rethink fundamental concepts such as the natural and the artificial? How will governance by algorithms reshape our politics? Are we adapting our home environments to fit our smart appliances and voice assistants? Will a technology-driven Anthropocene presage the end of humanity? How can we evaluate new technologies if technology is also influencing our moral sense? Understanding these entanglements will help us to steer them in beneficial directions.
The Technical Condition convincingly demonstrates how technology, culture, and society affect each other in countless and unexpected ways, providing an impetus for philosophical reflection on one of the most important themes of our times. As such, it will appeal to students in the humanities, social sciences and engineering sciences.
In this volume a select choice of authors reflects on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui... more In this volume a select choice of authors reflects on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West.
Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene.
Wie zijn op dit moment de denkers in Duitsland die we moeten lezen? Welke thema’s staan er op de ... more Wie zijn op dit moment de denkers in Duitsland die we moeten lezen? Welke thema’s staan er op de agenda en welke filosofische vriend- en vijandschappen doorkruisen de debatten bij onze oosterburen? De nieuwe Duitse filosofie geeft het antwoord.
In De nieuwe Duitse filosofie stellen vooraanstaande filosofen uit Nederland en Vlaanderen de meest relevante denkers uit het Duitse taalgebied aan u voor. Behalve met grote namen als Sloterdijk en Habermas biedt dit omvangrijke overzichtswerk een kennismaking met hun minder bekende collega’s. De auteurs beschrijven op toegankelijke wijze leven en werk van iedere filosoof. Ook bevat het boek suggesties tot verder lezen, illustraties en uitgebreide registers.
Steeds meer mensen trekken naar de stad en wonen minder lang op dezelfde plek. Ze wonen ook niet ... more Steeds meer mensen trekken naar de stad en wonen minder lang op dezelfde plek. Ze wonen ook niet meer op de plek waar zij zijn opgegroeid, laat staan op de plek waar hun ouders zijn opgegroeid. Ze kennen de paadjes in het bos achter hun huis niet meer, maar hebben voor hun twintigste al wel grote delen van de wereld gezien. Plekken zelf veranderen ook. Veel mensen herkennen de plek waar zij zijn opgegroeid nauwelijks meer; alles wordt volgebouwd in de strijd om de ruimte. Globalisering zou volgens sommigen onontkoombaar leiden tot vervreemding en ontworteling. Al deze veranderingen voltrekken zich in een rap tempo, en deze dynamiek lijkt het tempo waarin we dergelijke veranderingen aankunnen te overstijgen.
We staan op een kruispunt met aan de ene kant een weg naar een plekloos leven gekenmerkt door flexplekken, websurfers en wereldreizigers. Dit ‘footloose’ bestaan zal leiden tot een mensbeeld waarin identiteit niet langer wordt ontleend aan je geboorteplaats of je woonplaats. Aan de andere kant kunnen we een weg inslaan waarin mensen nieuwe vormen van verbinding zoeken, gekenmerkt door een behoefte aan een thuis, aan ommetjes en contact met de buren. Wat betekenen deze ontwikkelingen voor ons denken over plaatsen? Wat is de betekenis van plaatsen in een permanent veranderende samenleving? Wat is onze eindbestemming en wat zijn de consequenties daarvan op ons mensbeeld en onze relatie met de omgeving?
Dit boek is bedoeld voor een breed scala aan lezers die zich ieder op enigerlei wijze verbonden voelen met een plek of juist het ‘footloose’ bestaan omhelzen. Wetenschappers, politici, wandelaars, ruimtelijke ordenaars, natuur-beschermers en kunstenaars nemen de lezer mee in hun perspectief op plaatsen.
Dit proefschrift is een onderzoek naar de fundamentele relatie tussen het technische en het mense... more Dit proefschrift is een onderzoek naar de fundamentele relatie tussen het technische en het menselijke. Het verdedigt de stelling dat de techniek constitutief is voor de menselijke conditie en laat zien dat dit altijd zo is geweest, vanaf de aanvang van de menselijke evolutie. Mens en techniek zijn van meet af aan zo onlosmakelijk en intiem met elkaar verbonden dat we kunnen stellen dat de menselijke conditie gelijk is aan, ja feitelijk volledig neerkomt op de conditie van techniciteit. De mens is het effect, de biosociale manifestatie van het technisch-worden van het leven, een proces dat ongeveer vier miljoen jaar geleden is aangevangen, toen de eerste Australopithicae gebruik gingen maken van primitieve stenen werktuigen. Het is echter pas met de opkomst van de technowetenschappen sinds de Industriële Revolutie, en in het bijzonder met de verschijning van de informatietechnologieën en de biotechnologieën in onze tijd, dat de ware impact van onze technische conditie zich op pregnante wijze aan ons opdringt. Het is aan de exploratie van de betekenis en de consequenties van dit epochale fenomeen dat dit proefschrift voornamelijk is gewijd.
De alom gedeelde ervaring dat de technologische ontwikkeling steeds sneller gaat en zich steeds sterker opdringt, onze levens steeds nadrukkelijker zowel opeist als vormgeeft – een ervaring die Martin Heidegger in de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw karakteriseerde als die van de ‘aanspraak van de techniek’ – noodzaakt ons om de techniek op een heel andere wijze te leren begrijpen dan traditioneel gebruikelijk. De traditionele, antropocentrisch en instrumentalistisch georiënteerde techniekopvatting – ook wel de humanistische opvatting genoemd – is niet langer plausibel. De techniek kan niet langer worden gedacht als een middel in handen van de mens, die er op soevereine wijze over beschikt en haar onderwerpt aan zijn eigen, autonoom gestelde doelen. Er moet een alternatieve opvatting worden ontwikkeld, die recht doet aan haar claimende en quasi-autonoom evoluerende karakter.
De vier auteurs die in dit proefschrift centraal staan – Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, Gilbert Hottois en Bernard Stiegler – ontwikkelen zo’n alternatieve conceptie. In tegenstelling tot de humanistische visie, waarin mens en techniek als twee onafhankelijke variabelen tegenover elkaar worden geplaatst en de techniek wordt bekritiseerd (of zelfs veroordeeld) op basis van een welbepaalde opvatting van de mens, stellen deze denkers dat mens en techniek onlosmakelijk met elkaar verbonden zijn en dat alles wat het humanisme doorgaans opponeert aan de techniek (bewustzijn, autonomie, (keuze)vrijheid, subjectiviteit, cultuur, menselijke waardigheid, etc.) in feite op een zeer diepgaande wijze geconditioneerd is door de techniek. De techniek is geen middel, het is onze conditie. Speciale aandacht gaat in dit proefschrift uit naar de implicaties van deze nieuwe visie op de techniek voor de manier waarop we recente ontwikkelingen in de biotechnologie moeten beoordelen.
Stiegler understands the Anthropocene as the age in which planetary
enframing engenders an avalan... more Stiegler understands the Anthropocene as the age in which planetary enframing engenders an avalanche of entropization, putting humanity’s survival at risk. To avoid catastrophe, the so-called technosphere should be transformed from an entropic-destructive into a negentropic-constructive assemblage, ushering in the Neganthropocene. Stiegler’s focus is on the noetic dimension, in particular as constituted and conditioned overwhelmingly today by the digital pharmakon. In this article I want to make a case for the importance of an entirely other noetic pharmakon not addressed by Stiegler: the nontechnical pharmakon of psychedelics, which allows for the expansion of humanity’s noetic frontier beyond the digital, providing access to dimensions of experience—and possibly also of reality—that may support the emerging neganthropos to awaken on a postanthropocentric planet in which it is enabled to commune in a noosphere made up by many other, nonhuman intelligences, which may prove essential for the neganthropic transformation to succeed.
In this article, we aim to expose the central tenets of the philosophy of technology which underl... more In this article, we aim to expose the central tenets of the philosophy of technology which underlines the work of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Beginning from his early works and also mapping his philosophical influences, we show how he incidentally started theorising technology while still profoundly engaged with critical theory in the 1980s, but along the 1990s passed through an anthropological turn, which made possible a concept of technology that has its foundations in both Heidegger's existential philosophy and German philosophical anthropology in general, but also emphasising the long biological-evolutionary process of the human species itself. This perspective then enables us to formulate-starting from Sloterdijk's work-a powerful philosophical technoanthropology that deals with the genesis of the human as a sphero-poietic species having evolved into a bio-sphero-poietic geoforce and with the future planetary challenges put in front of us by the Anthropocene. We thereby aim to contribute to current debates in the philosophy of technology, offering a techno-philosophical reading of an (in our view) decisive and yet underexplored author in this field.
In this paper, we carry out a critical analysis of the concept of technology in the current desig... more In this paper, we carry out a critical analysis of the concept of technology in the current design of the bio-based economy (BBE). Looking at the current status of the BBE, we observe a dominant focus on technological innovation as the principal solution to climatic instability. We take a critical stance towards this "ecomodernist" worldview, addressing its fundamental assumptions, and offer an underarticulated explanation as to why a successful transition toward a sustainable BBE-i.e. one that fully operates within the Earth's carrying capacity-has not yet been reached. Bernard Stiegler has developed a philosophical perspective on the concept of economy, broadening it to include the human condition through the notion of desire. This theory can help to obtain a more profound understanding of why ecomodernist strategies are dominant today. Stiegler's theory of the libidinal economy offers an analysis of controlled and exploited human desire as a primary driver behind modern techno-economic structures. Our hypothesis is that a critique of contemporary technofixism as a critique of libidinal economy is a necessary step to take in the discussion around the BBE as a concept, if the BBE is ever to bring about a system that can truly operate within the Earth's carrying capacity.
The Technical Condition. The Entanglement of Technology, Culture, and Society, 2022
Pre-print proof Chapter 7, The Technical Condition. The Entanglement of Technology, Culture, and ... more Pre-print proof Chapter 7, The Technical Condition. The Entanglement of Technology, Culture, and Society. Boom publishers, Amsterdam, 2022.
This is a commentary piece on Marco Pavanini's article ' 'Multistability and Derrida's Différance... more This is a commentary piece on Marco Pavanini's article ' 'Multistability and Derrida's Différance: Investigating the Relations Between Postphenomenology and Stiegler's General Organology' in which I critically extend upon his comparative analysis of postphenomenology''s notion of multistability and Stiegler's conception of organology, focusing in particular on the pharmacological nature of Stiegler's organology and the latter's most recent re-interpretation of it in terms of entropy and negentropy. Among other things I show, and both are more intended as additions than criticisms with respect to Pavanini's very helpful comparison, (1) that the most important concern for Stiegler in theorizing technology is the fact that the transductive relations between the three organ systems distinguished in his pharmaco-organology of technology open up affective or libidinal circuits between these systems, i.e., circuits either of desire or drive depending on the way the pharmakon is adopted or not, and that these circuits are fundamentally noetic circuits vulnerable to denoetization; and (2) that these libidinal-noetic circuits as conditioned by technology should be interpreted in terms of entropy and negentropy. Both insights are lacking in postphenomenology, which generally fails to consider the irreducibly destitutive character of all technology, rightfully emphasized by Pavanini, since it lacks a genuine pharmacological awareness.
In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens explains the discipline
called philosophy of techn... more In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens explains the discipline called philosophy of technology and gives a concise overview of the most important contemporary approaches within this field. He also offers a critical evaluation of what are probably the two most salient characteristics of contemporary philosophy of technology, the so-called “empirical turn” and the “ethical turn,” which are deeply related and partly reflect the discipline’s on-going alignment with the global neoliberal agenda of exclusively profit-driven technological innovation. He also critically reflects on recent developments in the molecular and informational life sciences such as genomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology.
Chinese translation of my in memoriam for Bernard Stiegler (1 April 1952 - 5 August 2020), second... more Chinese translation of my in memoriam for Bernard Stiegler (1 April 1952 - 5 August 2020), second version, translated by Solemn
One of the defining moments in contemporary philosophy of technology was undoubtedly the ‘empiric... more One of the defining moments in contemporary philosophy of technology was undoubtedly the ‘empirical turn’ of the 1990s and 2000s (Achterhuis 2001; Kroes and Meijers 2000; Franssen et al. 2016). Contra older, so-called transcendentalist, essentialist or “macro-level” oriented approaches that had seen technology as an all-encompassing phenomenon or force, the empirical turn inaugurated more “micro-level” oriented analyses of concrete technologies, studied in their specific use contexts. Since a couple of years, however, the empirical turn has increasingly been called into question, with scholars asking whether it has not been pushed too far—certainly given recent technological developments that seem to give technology an all-encompassing or all-penetrating countenance (again): pervasive automation of all domains of society through AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms and (ro)bots, or the engineering grasp on life through nanotechnology, biotechnology and neurotechnology. Also, the ecological urgency characterizing our “Anthropocenic condition” appears to call for more broad-ranging perspectives than the mere analysis of concrete local use contexts. At the same time, nonetheless, the “empirical attitude” keeps demon- strating its usefulness for the philosophical study of technologies on a day-to-day basis… The question has been coming up more and more: Where do we go from here? Quo vadis philosophy of technology?
In this reply I further defend my claim that the transcendental should always remain a primary co... more In this reply I further defend my claim that the transcendental should always remain a primary concern for philosophy of technology as a philosophical enterprise, contra the empirical turn's rejection of it. Yet, instead of emphasizing the non-technological conditions of technology, as 'classic' thinkers of technology such as Heidegger did, it should recognize technology itself as the transcendental operator par excellence. Starting from Heidegger's ontological understanding of transcendence I show that while technical arti-facts may indeed always conform to a certain horizon of understanding, they also constitute this horizon in specific ways. Following Stiegler I show that concrete technologies (technology with a small 't') are not just empirical effects of an overarching movement of transcendence (Technology with a capital 'T') but are originally constitutive of it. In response to Romele's critique that the social, language, images, imaginaries, symbols, etc. are also transcendentals, I argue that all these phenomena are always already conditioned by technical milieus. As for Besmer's contention that I offer a reductive interpretation of postphenomenology's notion of multistability, I argue that there are decisive systemic and organological limits to multistability offered by technical artefacts and that all variation in use and implementation is always constrained by inherent technical tendencies and processes of concretization. Agreeing with Besmer that the transcendental and the empirical should be understood not oppositional but compositional I argue that technology may be that which constantly 'mediates' between the two. Keywords Transcendental · Transcendence · Empirical turn · Postphenomenology · Heidegger · Stiegler First of all, I would like to thank both Kirk Besmer and Alberto Romele for their thoughtful and useful comments on my article, which were very much appreciated. In what follows I will try to further clarify the core intention of that article by responding to the remarks they've put forward, Besmer being somewhat more critical than Romele, who is mostly in agreement with the views I present and starts off admitting this straightforwardly yet then This reply refers to the comment available online at https:// doi.
This article has two general aims. It first of all critically reconsiders the empirical turn's di... more This article has two general aims. It first of all critically reconsiders the empirical turn's dismissal of transcendentalism in the philosophy of technology, in particular through the work of Ihde and Verbeek, and defends the continuing relevance of the notion of the tran-scencental in thinking about technology today, illustrating this mainly through a reading of Stiegler's understanding of the human condition as a technical condition and his view of human (noetic) evolution as proceeding from a process of technical exteriorization. The crucial issue that is missed by postphenomenology and the empirical turn is that technology itself in its empiricity occupies the (periodically changing) place of the transcenden-tal. It thus fails to consider the transcendental operativity of technical artifacts within its own empiricist stance. Secondly, it argues for the continuing importance and usefulness of the idea of Technology with a capital T, equally discarded by the representatives of the empirical turn, in particular against the emerging backdrop of the Anthropocene as the age of decisive anthropogenic forcing of the planet and the growing dominance of what has recently been called the technosphere in Earth system science. With Stiegler I show that a proper, inherent dynamic of technology must be acknowledged historically, anthropologi-cally, techno-evolutionarily as well as (techno)phenomenologically. I conclude by demonstrating that our time of planetary crisis summons us to redirect our attention to technology from the empirical to the transcendental, and from the micro-level to the macro-level again.
This article critically reflects on Stiegler’s re-interpretation of Heidegger’s views on the rela... more This article critically reflects on Stiegler’s re-interpretation of Heidegger’s views on the relationships between existential temporality, the understanding of being and technology within the context of the latter’s notion of enframing, reconceptualized as an explicitly planetary phenomenon: the technosphere. Stiegler replaces Heidegger’s ontological conception with an organological one, arguing that the latter fails to understand these phenomena from the crucial perspective of thermodynamics, i.e., of the question of entropy and negentropy, which has never been addressed by Heidegger. What I particularly aim to show is that Stiegler’s organological re-intepretation of enframing as the technosphere and of existential temporality in terms of ‘quasi-causality’ (per Deleuze) may profit from being put in the broader, geothermodynamic context of Earth System Science, and considered from the perspective of Schneider & Sagan’s ‘gradient theory’, as being driven by what may be called the planetary ‘thermodynamic imperative’ with Jeffrey Wicken.
In Memoriam voor Bernard Stiegler (1 april 1952–6 augustus 2020)
Online Symposium ‘Memory for the... more In Memoriam voor Bernard Stiegler (1 april 1952–6 augustus 2020) Online Symposium ‘Memory for the Future: Thinking with Bernard Stiegler’, georganiseerd door het Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) en het Institute for Science in Society (ISiS), Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2020
This article is an attempt to interpret Yuk Hui’s ambitious and promising project of cosmotechnic... more This article is an attempt to interpret Yuk Hui’s ambitious and promising project of cosmotechnics and technodiversity as a kind of “critical synthesis” of the philosophies of technology of Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler, arguably his most important interlocutors besides Gilbert Simondon, whose crucial influence will have to remain undiscussed here unfortunately. It argues that the cosmotechnics–technodiversity project – motivated foremost by the concern for the relentless destruction of planetary diversity in all its forms (biological, ecological, ethnic, psychological, sociological, cultural, etc.) engendered by a globalized “mono-technological” technosphere originating from Western technology – criticizes but also aims to do justice to both Heidegger’s ontological or onto-historical understanding of technology as a singular yet universalizing imperative or claim driving the development of concrete technologies [Gestell or enframing], and Stiegler’s organological understanding of technology as an evolutionary process of technical exteriorization or exosomatization fundamentally conditioning any ontological and cosmological opening of anthropos, i.e., of what Heidegger called Dasein. Hui’s plural cosmotechnics critically acknowledges yet pluralizes both perspectives, thus teaching a pluri-ontological and pluri-cosmological conditioning of technology as well as a pluri-technological conditioning of the ontological and the cosmological. Using terms derived from Peter Sloterdijk’s interpretation of Heidegger’s “ontokinetics,” it is shown that it thus gives due to both a “vertical,” Heideggerian or “spiritual” dimension and a “horizontal,” Stieglerian or “materialist” dimension to the question concerning technology. This new and original, cosmotechnical perspective on these two fundamental views on the question concerning technology allows Hui to engage philosophy of technology in the overdue debate with contemporary anthropology’s so-called ontological turn, increasingly urgent in today’s age of the Anthropocene.
Lezing over de filosofische aspecten van ayahuasca voor Radboud Reflects Nijmegen, dinsdag 14 mei... more Lezing over de filosofische aspecten van ayahuasca voor Radboud Reflects Nijmegen, dinsdag 14 mei 2019 P
Om te concurreren met robots zal de mens zich tot cyborg moeten ontwikkelen, zei ondernemer Elon ... more Om te concurreren met robots zal de mens zich tot cyborg moeten ontwikkelen, zei ondernemer Elon Musk op 14/2 in Dubai. Ofwel: laat onze hersenen samensmelten met chips. Musk kennen we van Tesla. Ondertussen werkt hij met SpaceX aan kolonisering van Mars. Hij voorziet een versnelling in robotisering en automatisering. Eén waar de AH-zelfscankassa een voorproefje van is. Amazon, 220.000 werknemers, bouwt bijvoorbeeld aan distributiecentra waar geen mens meer aan te pas komt. Zelfs de pakketbezorging wordt overgenomen door drones. De vrees dat technologie de mens overbodig maakt, is een constante in het denken van ' transhumanisten'. Zij zijn ervan overtuigd dat kunstmatige intelligentie ooit die van de mens zal overtreffen en vervolgens in rap tempo verder zal evolueren. Technologische singulariteit, noemen ze deze fase, een begrip dat in 1993 gemunt werd door schrijver Vernor Vinge. De singulariteit is nabij , stelde uitvinder Raymond Kurzweil in 2005. Zijn gelijknamige boek wordt beschouwd als de bijbel van de transhumanistische beweging. In 2030 zou het moment daar zijn. En als directeur engineering bij Google heeft hij daarop niet de minste invloed. Toch zal het zo'n vaart niet lopen, denkt hersenwetenschapper Peter Hagoort. We zouden nog onvoldoende kennis hebben over onze hersenen om samensmelting met chips te realiseren. Wel is het al mogelijk kevers van een neuro-implantaat te voorzien, zodat je ze als We zeggen het maar even voor de zekerheid: printen is alleen toegestaan voor persoonlijk gebruik. Het is niet supersympathiek om dit artikel te verspreiden. Sterker nog: het is verboden. Gelukkig is het heel eenvoudig om anderen een Blendle-linkje te sturen. Delen kan dus altijd!
With a title obviously alluding to Gilbert Simondon's famous 1958 book Du mode d'existence des ob... more With a title obviously alluding to Gilbert Simondon's famous 1958 book Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (only recently translated in English) this exceptionally original and superbly masterful treatise by Yuk Hui provides a thorough and in-depth philosophical analysis of the existence of digital technical objects, which had already appeared in the time Simondon wrote his book of course but were not explicitly investigated by him, one of the reasons probably being that they were anything but ubiquitous at the time. Hui, living in a time awash with digital objects that literally pervade the most intimate aspects of our lives now, is actually the first one to conduct such an investigation. Although there is evidently no shortage today of philosophical studies of digital media, as noted in the introduction, their focus is almost exclusively on the digital and informational aspects of these media, never on their nature or way of being as objects or things, i.e., on their objectivity or thinghood. It is this 'ontological' and that is to say most specifically philosophical approach that is pursued in this book, and in a constant dialogue, that is, with the whole of the philosophical tradition from Aristotle via Duns Scotus, Thomas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Husserl to Heidegger and Simondon, who are Hui's most important informants and interlocutors in this book and who also inspire its 'political agenda' (5). Even more so, the book directly relates this philosophical analysis to the computational or engineering approaches of digital objects within the computer sciences, engaging in both philosophical and technical debates with computer scientists such as Brian Cantwell Smith, Tim Berners-Lee, David Alan Grier and Alan Turing. In passing, it provides clear introductions in the thoughts of Husserl, Heidegger and Simondon. And although the general backdrop and 'spirit' of the book leans heavily towards 'continental philosophy', it also features discussions with key analytic thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Quine and Putnam. On top of that, it is also informed at times by insights from the social sciences and the humanities. A digital object for Hui is anything that appears on a digital screen or forms part of a computer program and is composed of data and metadata regulated by structures or schemes (1), e.g. a document file containing personal data of a user or an HTML webpage. They are new kinds of industrially produced technical objects utterly familiar to everyone yet still unthought by both philosophy and computer science. Hui's goal in this book is to develop an understanding of the digital object, i.e., its object-nature, by reciprocally examining both the philosophical tradition's theories of natural and technical objects and the so-called ontology theories from computer science. Most basically, he aims to understand digital objects in terms of relations, thereby employing a notion of relation inspired first of all by Bachelard but more specifically adapted from Simondon as well as from Heidegger, who is explicitly interpreted by Hui as a philosopher of relations, in stark contrast to the object-oriented reading of Heidegger by Graham Harman, to whom he briefly positions himself. Bachelard and Simondon also provide him with his basic methodology, which is that of the so-called orders of magnitude, which means an approach of objects from different physical, technical or operational levels (from that of electrons and bits via coding languages and data to whole digital networks) pursued through different instruments. The spectrum of orders of magnitude chosen in this study is that of data, since data form the intermediary between the level of pure computation and that of human experience (32). The ultimate
It has now been four years since Bernard Stiegler passed away, a few months into the so-called CO... more It has now been four years since Bernard Stiegler passed away, a few months into the so-called COVID-19 crisis, which in the meantime has changed the world – and a fortiori our view of the world – in an unprecedented manner. COVID-19, for those paying attention, has proven to be no less than a revelation of how things actually stand on this planet – indeed in the form of an immense disillusionment. It has unveiled nothing less than the systemically corrupt, tyrannical and malicious nature of the power structures behind our political, economic, cultural and medical institutions, including, above all, the media. Indeed, the scales have fallen from people’s eyes and a truth has manifested which can be characterized as that of a grand déconfiture (bankruptcy). The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation and the escalation of the war between Israel and Palestine have only aggravated this gigantic démasqué (unmasking) and accelerated the disbanding and downfall of the so-called “civilized West.” This lecture by Pieter Lemmens will explore the intellectual, ethical, political and cultural disaster that has been unfolding before our eyes in the last four years from the pharmako-organological, noetico-libidinal perspective on technology of Stiegler, who like no other thinker understood the gravity of our planetary anthropic crisis. Stiegler might not have been prepared though, or so it will be suggested, for the darkness that is manifesting since his passing, a darkness however that might prove to be highly illuminating for those willing to see.
That the Anthropocene will inevitably be a Techno-Anthropocene seems obvious and that the re-desi... more That the Anthropocene will inevitably be a Techno-Anthropocene seems obvious and that the re-design of our technological modus vivendi on the planet will primarily be a techno-scientific affair is also very likely. As earth system scientists have claimed, it is the so-called technosphere – the global technological infrastructure that has emerged since the Industrial Revolution as a geosphere in its own right on a par and increasingly fused with the other, natural geospheres – that will crucially determine the future, and the future habitability, of the planet. The principal difference between the vanishing Holocene and the emerging Anthropocene Earth consists of the fact that what used to be called the natural environment is gradually (and possibly abruptly) changing from an inactive and relatively benign backdrop into a much more active and much less human-friendly frontstage. This fundamental change in the ultimate life support system of humanity calls for a radical transformation of our technological relation to what we once called nature and now reveals itself as a precarious biosphere, of which only the near surface part or the so-called ‘critical zone’, is able to sustain life. In our talk we will focus on the way in which the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whose sphero-techno-immunological re-interpretation of the human condition has been called the first anthropocenic discipline by Bruno Latour, conceives of the complete re-orientation of the human technological endeavour that the Anthropocene calls for, and that is in terms of (1) a so-called homeotechnological turn of co-operation with the modi operandi of nature so as to replace the traditional allotechnological mode of going against nature, and (2) a change from technological extension and expansion to a kind of technological immunization that he refers to with notions such as transplantation, implantation and atmospheric design, by which he means the creation of technological interiors or envelopes in the sense of artificial life support systems allowing for intensely or even fully technologized modes of being-in-the-world on an earth that increasingly fails to supply sufficient life support functionality. We will in particular look at how these two technological ‘strategies’ relate to each other and how they might converge in what we could call techno-bio-spheric life design.
While the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (1947) is most generally known today as a theorist ... more While the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (1947) is most generally known today as a theorist of culture, history and politics approached from an anthropological perspective, less attention has been given to the fact that his anthropology is decidedly informed by the premise that the anthropos as a cultural, historical and political being is fundamentally and irreversibly a technical creature. The grand sphero-logical and immuno-logical narrative of the evolution and history of humanity and of the human condition in general that he develops in particular in his Spheres trilogy is in fact a tale of progressive technical isolation, immunization, distancing and mediation of the human species vis-à-vis the natural environment. As such, the human species increasingly expands the artificial ‘interior spaces’ or immuno-spheres in which it gestates as an intelligent and cunning, highly improbable yet utterly successful creature, but also progressively enlarges its dependence on it, which today in the so-called Anthropocene has reached the point of putting the very survivability of the human species in question. In our talk we will zoom in on the (in our view) decisive yet somewhat underdeveloped technological dimension of Sloterdijk’s spherological and immunological understanding of the human endeavour, presenting him explicitly as a philosopher of technology and of technical mediation. We will elaborate on his technogenic conception of hominization as well as on his anthropotechnical theory of humanization, discussing the influence of both Heidegger’s and Gotthard Günther’s theories of technology as well as that of theorists of the German tradition of philosophical anthropology, especially Arnold Gehlen. We will also address the shortcomings of Sloterdijk’s understanding of the relation between humans and technology and his current stance vis-à-vis the Anthropocene as they result from what Bernard Stiegler, whose tragic view on the human-technology relation is nonetheless close to that of the Nietzschean Sloterdijk, has diagnosed as the lack of a pharmacological perspective and thus of the failure by the latter to acknowledge the eminently tragic, entropic-negentropic ambiguity of all technologization and by implication all hominization and humanization.
One of the more interesting concepts that have emerged within the debate on the Anthropocene is t... more One of the more interesting concepts that have emerged within the debate on the Anthropocene is that of the technosphere, an attempt to think technology as a planetary phenomenon, decisive for its future as a life support system. Mainstream philosophy of technology so far has hardly taken notice of this powerful and fertile concept. Having abandoned interest in ‘large scale’ and ‘high altitude’ conceptualizations of technology since the so-called ‘empirical turn’, it has failed to address the profound planetary impact of technology and engage with the technosphere concept. Starting from the assumption that the technosphere represents the concretion of what Heidegger called enframing, I will offer a Stieglerian critique of the naturalist of not physicalist technosphere concept in Earth system science by showing that it does not understand, somewhat surprisingly, the proper nature and implications of the human-technology relationship as it is constitutive of the technosphere. Consequently it fails to properly address what is truly specific about this artificial geosphere, and that is its ‘noetic’ as well as its ‘libidinal’ character. The latter constitutes what Clive Hamilton calls humanity’s ‘world-making’ capacity, which seems to be collapsing in the Anthropocene, indeed together with the collapse of ‘nature’. It is only by focusing on the Earth-systemic impact and specificity of precisely these noetic and libidinal dimensions of the technosphere or rather techno-noosphere that we can properly start to think about how to reconstruct it from a destructive and careless into a constructive and caring constituent of the anthropized Earth system, as I will try to show with Stiegler and in dialogue with the so-called ‘gradient theory’ of Schneider & Sagan.
Adopting a basically Heideggerian perspective on human existence, the German philosopher Peter Tr... more Adopting a basically Heideggerian perspective on human existence, the German philosopher Peter Trawny has argued that whilst today’s media-saturated world, as an expression of what he calls the universal reign of the medium as the hidden ‘essence’ of all media, may offer us plenty of opportunities for emancipation, empowerment and enjoyment, it also locks us, ever more, into a state of subjective indifference and normalization, in which any possibility of genuine – i.e., revolutionary – change is not only neutralized but ultimately eliminated. Media, in their alleged essential complicity with capital and technology, constitute an enclosing universal system – the ‘TCM universal’ – that totally absorbs our ontological freedom, thereby practically annulling it. Only an apocalyptic event coming from the ‘outside’, e.g. a global ecological disaster, could dismantle this system. In my talk I want to confront this rather fatalistic yet not implausible assessment of the current ‘human condition’ with a similar diagnosis of ‘total nihilism’, that of Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler, though, recognizes the possibility, as well as the necessity, of a systemic revolution by locating it in the very process of technical mediation itself and by emphasizing the essentially organological and pharmacological nature of media, which are thus understood not in a quasi-Heideggerian, onto-historical sense as simple ‘emanations’ of a more fundamental essence, ‘the medium’, but as concretely constituting the latter. This opens up a wholly different perspective on the current state of mediated paralysis and allows for the invention of strategies to overcome it, as I will demonstrate.
Bernard Stiegler’s unexpected passing away in August 2020 left many things unfinished. His philos... more Bernard Stiegler’s unexpected passing away in August 2020 left many things unfinished. His philosophical work, that had started by a seminal theory of technics as memory and evolved towards an interrogation of the automatic society, now examined from the perspective of anthropic and neganthropic tendencies of the world marked by pervasive AI, ultraliberalism and climate catastrophe. His influence went also beyond philosophy to many practical engagements.
In order to commemorate the span of this multifaceted work, but above all in order to probe its future, the Leiden University Center for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) and the Institute for Science in Society of the Radboud University of Nijmegen summon a meeting of both academics and actors from civil society. The meeting will surely summarize his philosophical legacy, but above all it will explore possible futures in the spirit of Bernard Stiegler's philosophical project, both practically and theoretically. How should we take care of the world marked by ubiquitous digitalization, global ecological destruction and increasing economical turmoil? How should we face this reality in thinking? What should philosophy consist of when digitalization has entered the domain of knowledge production and cultural reflection? Is philosophy mainly a matter of concept production or also an engagement with reality? What is philosophizing for Stiegler, and how should we philosophize with Stiegler and after him?
Due to Covid restrictions the symposium will take place online. More than anybody else, Bernard Stiegler led us to interrogate both the misery and the emancipative potential of this media, so let this also be an occasion for putting this element of his thinking in practice.
The program will be updated on the symposium website, see below. People interested in the symposium should register with the conference secretary Donovan Stewart: donovanstewart@protonmail.com
Timothy Morton is one of the most innovative and thought-provoking thinkers of our time. Coming f... more Timothy Morton is one of the most innovative and thought-provoking thinkers of our time. Coming from ecocriticism and queer theory, he has been developing a radically new approach to ecological thinking in the last decade, in particular with reference to the Anthropocene, which is the new geological era in which the human has become an Earth-shaping force while the Earth itself as humanity’s one and only life support system is becoming increasingly instable and less human-friendly. Important publications are The Ecological Thought (2010), Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013) and Dark Ecology. For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016). In this expert workshop, organized by the Institute of Science in Society (ISiS) from the Faculty of Science of Radboud University Nijmegen, we discuss Morton’s thinking in dialogue with four researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium who will respond to his presentation on the topic of holism.
Anthropos-Anthropotechnics-Anthropocene
Encounter between Peter Sloterdijk and Bernard Stiegler a... more Anthropos-Anthropotechnics-Anthropocene Encounter between Peter Sloterdijk and Bernard Stiegler at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 27-28 June 2016.
On the 27th and 28th of June 2016, the Radboud University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) will organize, in cooperation with the Nootechnics Collective, an encounter between German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. This two-day encounter will consist of a public debate between these two thinkers, to be held in De Vereeniging in the city of Nijmegen during the evening of Monday the 27th of June, flanked by two expert seminars, one on Monday the 27th in the morning and the afternoon and one on Tuesday the 28th, also morning and afternoon, on the campus of the Radboud University (in these two seminars, some time will also be reserved for interventions from students of the Faculty ofPhilosophy, Theology and Religious Studies as well as master students who have followed an honours course on the work of both thinkers especially related to the theme of the encounter). The title of the encounter is ‘Anthropos-Anthropotechnics-Anthropocene’ and this means that it will be thematically devoted to the relation between humanity, technolog yand ecology in the work of both Sloterdijk and Stiegler and more specifically to an exploration of the changing relations between the human and technology within the emerging context of the anthropocene – i.e., the new geological epoch proposed recently by geologists and earth systems scientists in which ‘the human’ has supposedly become the most important geological (f)actor. The emergence of the anthropocene as an event of a truly anthropological magnitude, possibly representing the first genuine anthropological crisis and signaling the necessity of humanity to become fully mature and assume responsibility for its own fragile oikos, thereby establishing an ethical imperative with an absolute and universal appeal, as Sloterdijk claimed in You must change your life. As he wrote in a recent essay: ‘The coining of the term “Anthropocene” thus inevitably obeys an apocalyptic logic: it indicates the end of any peace of mind in the cosmos, on which historical forms of human being-in-the-world rested’. Stiegler also stresses the gravity of the ‘anthropocenic event’ (Bonneuil & Fressoz) and considers it to represent ‘a state of extreme urgency’. He points toward the duty of philosophy to live up to the urgency and gravity of this event by trying to think it and propose a strategy for exiting or overcoming the anthropocene and inaugurate what he calls the ‘neganthropocene’, which would consist in a global organological revolution. As he wrote in a recent lecture on the anthropocene given in 2014 in Canterbury: ‘The singularity of the Anthropocene as an organological epoch lies in the fact it has generated the organological question […] bringing with it something new: its negative protention and the necessity of overcoming itself’. Given the many remarkable parallels but also salient divergences in their respective, i.e., ‘sphero-immunological’ and ‘pharmaco-organological’ philosophical conceptualizations of the anthropos, its technogenic evolution and thoroughly technical condition as well as their estimations of our current global ecological predicament, we believe this encounter will most surely provoke many interesting and urgent philosophical questions and can provide crucial insights for the new self-understanding of the anthropos and its totally novel anthropotechnic situation emerging from the context of the anthropocene and thus for the question of how to deal, technologically but also culturally and politically, with our current situation and future destiny in view of the emerging anthropocenic condition.
Call for Papers: Lyotard and the 21st Century
DECEMBER 13, 2023
Lyotard and the 21st Century
Spe... more Call for Papers: Lyotard and the 21st Century DECEMBER 13, 2023 Lyotard and the 21st Century
Special Issue of Technophany dedicated to the Centenary of Jean-François Lyotard
Editors: Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens
2024 marks the 100th anniversary of Jean-François Lyotard (10th August, 1924, Versailles–21st April, 1998). Lyotard was the thinker who endeavoured to open a new epoch, most influentially reflected in his discourse on the postmodern. His characterizations of the postmodern, such as “the incredulity toward metanarratives,” “the decline of universalist discourses,” “the reign of the performativity principle” and the age of the “hegemony of the techno-economic system,” not only remain actual but also deserve a deeper engagement within our current technological condition. His articulation of the postmodern is not only limited to the books containing the word “postmodern” in their title—The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), The Postmodern Explained (1988) and Postmodern Fables (1993)—but can be found in his reflection on science and technology throughout present since Discours, Figure (1971), where one could find consistent motives concerning disturbances and resistances against a totalizing discursive system. With his magnum opus, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983)—“my philosophy book,” as he himself called it—Lyotard became one of the most prominent representatives of the so-called “linguistic turn,” which dominated continental philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s.
Lyotard was a very influential author in the late twentieth century, not only in philosophy but also in aesthetics, art and media theory, political theory, sociology, pedagogy, linguistics and cultural studies. He was one of the major voices in the dispute between the modernists and postmodernists at the time, alongside Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Fredric Jameson and Richard Rorty. After his death in 1998, and with the gradual closure of the postmodern interlude, the name Lyotard appeared less frequently; however, in recent years, it has regained attention, in particular as regards his views on politics and technology, the latter being Lyotard’s main theoretical and political focus since the mid-1980s, expressed in books such as The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1988), Readings in Infancy (1991) and Postmodern Fables (1993).
Technophany wants to commemorate this anniversary with a special issue dedicated to the question of the continuing relevance of the work of Lyotard for the 21st century, which, on the one hand, appears to develop along the lines set out in Lyotard’s highly prophetic book on The Postmodern Condition, with the ongoing consolidation of the global techno-economic system embodying the most updated logic of capitalism and with the ever-increasing subordination of societies on a global scale to the performativity criterium through digital networks, AI algorithms and the transhumanist ideology propagated by the global oligarchy; on the other hand, the 21st century seems to have unfolded into a series of crises that Lyotard himself did not fully anticipate, for example, the apocalyptic urgency of the global ecological crisis and the enframing of the Earth into what Earth system scientists have called the Anthropocene, a new geological and geo-technological condition.
Lyotard’s thinking, apart from its celebrated postmodern birthmarks, offers plenty of resources for thinking through our current geo-historical moment and reflecting on the many material and intellectual developments currently at stake. His rich thinking has opened different incomplete paths to confront the challenges and crises humanity faces in the disorienting 21st century of crisis-ridden planetarization and ongoing technologization. We invite authors to reflect on the legacy of Lyotard’s multifaceted oeuvre for the 21st century against the backdrop of contemporary intellectual debates, reflecting on the continued relevance and futurity of notions such as the postmodern, the differend, narrativity, the un(re)presentable, the sublime, the libidinal, the inhuman, the system, resistance, the event, performativity, paralogy and many others.
Heidegger's essay of 1949, Die Frage nach der Technik, has been enormously influential in its con... more Heidegger's essay of 1949, Die Frage nach der Technik, has been enormously influential in its conceptualisation of the essence of modern technology as being less that of the originary classical Greek notion of technē than of what he calls enframing [Gestell]. While this image and critique of modern technology has been widely if critically accepted in the West, what has often been missed in those criticisms of its detail or trajectory is its applicability ? when dealing with non-Western developments in technology, both historically and projectively, for if these are not reducible to either technē or modern technology in the Western sense, how can we articulate their unfolding and what this question of technology prior to the Heideggarian formulation could contribute to the current debate on the Anthropocene and ecological mutations? One way forward is a reappraisal of the idea of nature. For example, anthropologists such as Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro have proposed an unravelling of the concept of nature to show that beneath nature as it is experienced in non-European cultures cannot be reduced to a naturalism, a product of modernity, characterized by an opposition between culture and nature. There is indeed a multi-naturalism, for example, beyond naturalism, there are other ontologies such as animism, analogism and totemism. In addition, this return to the non-modern can be seen as an attempt to reconceptualise the relation between human and the nonhuman, and hence to go beyond the nature and culture dichotomy that so restricts vision to a parochial Western worldview. It is in the same spirit, but as a more pragmatically realist and political gesture, that we wish to raise a parallel question for technology, which is whether it is possible to conceive multiple cosmotechnics and if so what form would this take? Because the efficacy of a return to nature should be questioned, rather it is more urgent to rethink the question of technology and its possibilities. The concept of cosmotechnics was initially raised by Yuk Hui in The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics, a study which carries a preliminary definition as the unification between the moral order and cosmic order through technical activities. In this understanding, all technics are fundamentally cosmological and all cosmologies are fundamentally technical. This emphasis on multiple cosmotechnics has to be distinguished from the so-called multiculturalism which is fundamentally a politics of identity. The multiplicity of cosmotechnics implies multiple epistemologies and epistems which can contribute to the reflection on the development of technologies, hence also allows a discourse on a technodiversity to overcome the homogenisation and planetarisation of the Gestell actualized in the Anthropocene. Hui uses China as example to demonstrate that it is not only possible but also necessary to elaborate on histories of cosmotechnics, and see how these different understandings can be reconsidered and reevaluated so as to re-perspectivize current technological globalization and the complete
Although both ignorance and denialism still persist in some quarters, it can hardly bedoubted any... more Although both ignorance and denialism still persist in some quarters, it can hardly bedoubted anymore for anyone with the slightest awareness of the Zeitgeist, that humanity is about to enter a phase in its history which will be characterized by massive changes in the earth's biosphere, i.e., in the global ecological system that has up until now silently and robustly supported its cultural-historical projects ( Greer 2008, Martenson 2011, Crutzen & Schwägerl 2011, Barnosky et al 2012). Humanity's largely destructive influence on its unique planetary life support system has gained such a momentum lately that geologists and Earth System scientists have suggested for some time now that we have entered a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, in which the human has become the most influential geological (f)actor, trumping the natural ones in every respect (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000, Steffen et al. 2011, Latour 2014, Schwägerl 2014, Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016). The prime significance of the anthropocene, which presents us with a biosphere that is fundamentally different from that of its microbial and metazoan stages due to the technosphere produced by human techno-cultural evolution (Williams et al. 2015), is that it sets a different trajectory for the planet or what is called the Earth system nowadays (Waters et al. 2014, Hamilton 2015, Davies 2016). Whilst the anthropocene attests to the enormous if not uncanny power of a techno-scientifically potentialized humanity (a power Dominique Janicaud has called a ‘hyperpower’) to radically disrupt the earthly ecosystem upon which it fundamentally depends for its very survival, it simultaneously, and even more crucially, brings to light the ultimate impotence of that power (Janicaud 1994). However that may be, what is clear, as the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler points out, is that the anthropocene reveals the toxic and entropic character of the process of capitalist industrialization and that the big challenge it imposes on us is how to exit from it and invent a negentropic, curative and attentive technological modus vivendi (Stiegler 2014, 2016), if possible (Blok 2015). And since we are massively unprepared for this unprecedented challenge, we might do well to start ‘thinking the unthinkable’, as the American philosopher of technology Langdon Winner has stated using a famous phrase by cold war nuclear conflict theorist/futurist Herman Kahn (Winner 2013). In this track, we aim to explore the question how philosophy of technology should respond to this challenge, i.e., to this new and unprecedented ‘human condition’ that is bound to seriously disrupt the agendas of philosophical and social inquiry in the decades to come and that we would like to characterize as the anthropocenic condition. In particular, we aim to explore what it would mean for philosophy of technology to engage with the earth system and its principles of composition, to consider different technical modalities of fostering and maintaining them, and to adopt an explicitly planetary orientation (Lemmens & Hui 2016, Lemmens 2017). Possible questions and themes to be explored include: • What exactly does the anthropocene – sometimes also referred to as the technocene – as a new and unprecedented planetary condition mean for the philosophy of technology? What are its implications for this discipline? Should it be the cause for a renewed reflection on its aims, goals, focus, methodologies, paradigms, presuppositions, organizational structure, educational guidelines, ‘engagement’, etc.? • What would a planetary orientation, assuming humanity as a ‘geological agency’ (Chakrabarty 2009), imply for philosophy of technology? What should ‘taking care of the earth’ (Steffen et al. 2011) or a ‘reconnection with the biosphere’ (Folke 2011) mean technologically? How should we attune our technologies, for instance the global digital network technologies, the NBIC technologies or the technosphere and noorspehere more generally, to this new situation? What would it mean technologically to heed the ‘planetary boundaries’ crucial for the ‘operating space of humanity’ (Rockström 2015). • What kind of new technologies and social institutions should be invented to deal with the impending energy crisis and climate catastrophes and what kind of changes in our technological thinking are needed for this new age of the anthropocene? • What kinds of technopolitics and ecopolitics are needed and what can we already see emerging on the horizon? How should we include nascent technopolitical movements such as open source, peer-to-peer and commons into an ecological perspective on techno-evolution? • What should we think of proposed solutions like geo-engineering, ecotechnics and atmo-design, and what of new technological paradigms like homeotechnology, biomimicry (Blok & Gremmen 2015) and the biobased economy (Zwier et al 2015)?
According to many climate and environmentalist scientists, we are about to enter a phase in human... more According to many climate and environmentalist scientists, we are about to enter a phase in human history which will be characterized by huge changes in the earth's atmosphere and biosphere, global warming of course being the most pressing issue. Humanity's largely destructive influence on its unique planetary life support system has gained such a momentum lately that geologists have declared that we have entered a new geological era, the so-called anthropocene, in which the human (anthropos) has become the most influential geological (f)actor, trumping the natural ones in every respect. Whilst the anthropocene attests to the enormous if not uncanny power of a techno-scientifically potentialized humanity to radically disrupt the earthly ecosystem upon which it fundamentally depends for its very survival, it simultaneously reveals that utter dependence and summons us to radically rethink our residence upon the planet as thinkers like Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Peter Sloterdijk and Isabelle Stengers have explicated each in their own way. And as French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has pointed out, the anthropocene first of all signals the toxic and entropic character of the process of capitalist industrialization and the big challenge it imposes on us is how to exit from it and invent an alternative negentropic, curative and more attentive technological modus vivendi. As such, it presents us with a new and unconditional imperative of global extension: to radically alter our modes of life in this planet in order to prevent our own self-destruction and possibly that of the whole biosphere as well. This special issue for Techne aims to explore the question of how philosophy of technology should respond to the anthropocenic challenge. Possible questions to be addressed may include: • What kind of world lays ahead of us given the truth of the new anthropocenic condition? • How should we attune our technologies, for instance the global digital network technologies or the NBIC technologies more generally, to this new situation? • What kind of new technologies and social institutions should be invented to deal with the impending energy crisis and climate catastrophes and what kind of changes in our technological thinking are needed for this new age? • What kinds of technopolitics and ecopolitics are needed and what can we already see emerging on the horizon? • Should philosophy of technology assume a more ecological or even ecocentric focus, instead of focusing on technical artefacts or (socio)technical systems only? • What should we think of proposed solutions like geo-engineering, ecotechnics and atmo-design, and what of new technological paradigms like homeotechnology, biomimicry and the biobased economy? Contributors are invited to reflect on these and other issues from various perspectives (e.g. ontology, epistemology, ethics, philosophical anthropology) and in particular to ponder the question of what philosophy of technology should become or should focus on in the age of the anthropocene
Het lijkt onbekend terrein, maar we zitten er al jaren middenin: het Antropoceen. Het is een tijd... more Het lijkt onbekend terrein, maar we zitten er al jaren middenin: het Antropoceen. Het is een tijdperk waar veel op het spel staat voor de mens (antropos) en de aarde. De invloed van de mensheid op deze unieke planeet is gigantisch en niet zonder gevolgen. Het blijkt dat 'onze' claim van beheersbaarheid, duurzaamheid en controleerbaar-heid volslagen misplaatst is.
Klimatologische, ecologische en sociale beproevingen staan voor de deur. Corona heeft als voorbode al aangeklopt.
Wetenschappelijke data laten zien dat techniek, hoe gesofisticeerd dan ook, nooit in staat zal zijn om de natuurkrachten op aarde naar mensenmaat te plooien. ‘We zijn er geweest...’ is een ontdekkingsreis door een bizar landschap met gerenommeerde filosofische reisleiders zoals Martin Heidegger, Timothy Morton, Peter Sloterdijk, Bernard Stiegler en Clive Hamilton. De perspectieven en vergezichten die getoond worden, kunnen ons helpen bij het beantwoorden van de vragen wie of wat de mens nu eigenlijk is en in welke wereld wij straks willen leven.
Nogmaals, het Antropoceen lijkt onbekend terrein, maar we zijn er al geweest: fysiek en/of mentaal. Het is voor mij niet zomaar een vage veralgemenisering, of een kapstok, waaraan planetaire fenomenen (klimaatverandering, opwarming, etc.) kunnen worden gehangen. Het is als concept/metafoor net zo reëel als de Amazone, het kapitalisme, de sociale ongelijkheid in de wereld, het zorgstelsel, internet en de MacDonalds. De term expliciteert, maakt urgent, de verregaande en onlosmakelijke relatie tussen de mens en zijn woonstede Aarde. Doordat het een geologische term is, wordt duidelijk dat de centrale rol van de mens, zijn idee van superioriteit en almacht, in vraag gesteld en geproblematiseerd wordt.
Bovendien wordt de mens opgenomen in een geologische geschiedenis; d.w.z. behalve zijn eigen korte geschiedenis – zowel als mensheid en als individu – komt nu ook de geschiedenis van de aarde en haar eindigheid in het hier en nu terecht. Voor het eerst worden er signalen van de aarde - of, om een andere metafoor te gebruiken: van Gaia - ontvangen die blijk geven van haar kwetsbaarheid en eindigheid. Kwetsbaar en eindig in antropomorfe zin, want de aarde zal niet ten onder gaan aan de mens. Als levensvoorzienende planeet zal ze nog minstens 1,5 miljard jaar rondjes om de zon draaien. Hoelang ze de mens nog als organische diersoort kan behouden, is een vraag die – en dat is uniek – alleen de mens zelf kan beantwoorden.
Het is precies dit wat het Antropoceen als term/metafoor mogelijk maakt: de bewustwording van het feit dat wat wij als natuur en normaal zagen, voorbij is. De natuur bestaat niet, we zijn het zelf. Natuur staat niet los van ons, is geen onaantastbare achtergrond, geen decorstuk voor het menselijk toneelstukje, geen gereedschap om het construct van een (illusoire) mensenwereld mee te vormen. Dat hebben we nu allemaal wel gezien, we zijn er geweest, en we moeten nu verder op een andere manier, naar een ander normaal, naar een ander wereldbeeld. Dat wordt geen normaal van maakbaarheid, beheersing, verzekering, exploitatie en kapitaalaccumulatie. De mens zal moeten leren leven met de (vooralsnog) abnormale - a-normale, maar unieke -levensvoorwaarde die Aarde heet en van zich laat horen.
Al eeuwen doet de Aarde (of Gaia) van zich spreken. In het Antropoceen worden haar signalen langzaam maar zeker ontrafeld en begrepen: de mens is slechts een onderdeel van het totale aardsysteem en zal moeten leren om vreedzaam, zorgzaam om te gaan met de sferen van de planeet die zijn bestaan überhaupt mogelijk maken. Deze signalen zijn eeuwen geleden ook wel door enkele wetenschappers en filosofen opgepikt en uitgewerkt, maar hun bevindingen vonden niet genoeg ‘oren’(Nietzsche) en werden als zweverig, doemdenken, charlatanerie afgedaan.
De afgelopen 5 decennia is de mens in staat om de berichten van de apocalyptische discipelen van Gaia serieus te nemen. Dankzij de wetenschappelijke en technologische ontwikkeling in combinatie met de computertechniek krijgen we steeds meer inzicht in de onpeilbare dieptes van het aardsysteem. Met de komst van internet wordt het ook voor de ‘gewone burger’ mogelijk om in te zien dat de idee van een onuitputtelijke, onaantastbare, beheersbare en passieve Aarde op geen enkele wijze meer te verdedigen is. Sterker nog: hoe meer wetenschappelijke data door de aardsysteemwetenschappen vergaard worden, hoe duidelijker de beperktheid en ontoereikendheid van het menselijke kennen en kunnen, wordt. Dat is voor velen beangstigend; het geeft een gevoel van onbehagen en graag klampen we ons vast aan schijnoplossingen en vage politieke beloftes. Dit alles gretig gevoed door de media en gulzig geconsumeerd door de massa.
Dit is het ‘normaal’ waar we het mee moeten doen; de rest is geschiedenis. In het Antropoceen kunnen we zien dat dingen te groot voor ons zijn en ter principale onoplosbaar.
Drs. ing. Bert Herps (1952) is filosoof en heeft o.a. milieutechnologie en natuurkunde gedoceerd aan diverse beroepsopleidingen.
Uploads
The Technical Condition convincingly demonstrates how technology, culture, and society affect each other in countless and unexpected ways, providing an impetus for philosophical reflection on one of the most important themes of our times. As such, it will appeal to students in the humanities, social sciences and engineering sciences.
Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene.
In De nieuwe Duitse filosofie stellen vooraanstaande filosofen uit Nederland en Vlaanderen de meest relevante denkers uit het Duitse taalgebied aan u voor. Behalve met grote namen als Sloterdijk en Habermas biedt dit omvangrijke overzichtswerk een kennismaking met hun minder bekende collega’s. De auteurs beschrijven op toegankelijke wijze leven en werk van iedere filosoof. Ook bevat het boek suggesties tot verder lezen, illustraties en uitgebreide registers.
We staan op een kruispunt met aan de ene kant een weg naar een plekloos leven gekenmerkt door flexplekken, websurfers en wereldreizigers. Dit ‘footloose’ bestaan zal leiden tot een mensbeeld waarin identiteit niet langer wordt ontleend aan je geboorteplaats of je woonplaats. Aan de andere kant kunnen we een weg inslaan waarin mensen nieuwe vormen van verbinding zoeken, gekenmerkt door een behoefte aan een thuis, aan ommetjes en contact met de buren. Wat betekenen deze ontwikkelingen voor ons denken over plaatsen? Wat is de betekenis van plaatsen in een permanent veranderende samenleving? Wat is onze eindbestemming en wat zijn de consequenties daarvan op ons mensbeeld en onze relatie met de omgeving?
Dit boek is bedoeld voor een breed scala aan lezers die zich ieder op enigerlei wijze verbonden voelen met een plek of juist het ‘footloose’ bestaan omhelzen. Wetenschappers, politici, wandelaars, ruimtelijke ordenaars, natuur-beschermers en kunstenaars nemen de lezer mee in hun perspectief op plaatsen.
De alom gedeelde ervaring dat de technologische ontwikkeling steeds sneller gaat en zich steeds sterker opdringt, onze levens steeds nadrukkelijker zowel opeist als vormgeeft – een ervaring die Martin Heidegger in de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw karakteriseerde als die van de ‘aanspraak van de techniek’ – noodzaakt ons om de techniek op een heel andere wijze te leren begrijpen dan traditioneel gebruikelijk. De traditionele, antropocentrisch en instrumentalistisch georiënteerde techniekopvatting – ook wel de humanistische opvatting genoemd – is niet langer plausibel. De techniek kan niet langer worden gedacht als een middel in handen van de mens, die er op soevereine wijze over beschikt en haar onderwerpt aan zijn eigen, autonoom gestelde doelen. Er moet een alternatieve opvatting worden ontwikkeld, die recht doet aan haar claimende en quasi-autonoom evoluerende karakter.
De vier auteurs die in dit proefschrift centraal staan – Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, Gilbert Hottois en Bernard Stiegler – ontwikkelen zo’n alternatieve conceptie. In tegenstelling tot de humanistische visie, waarin mens en techniek als twee onafhankelijke variabelen tegenover elkaar worden geplaatst en de techniek wordt bekritiseerd (of zelfs veroordeeld) op basis van een welbepaalde opvatting van de mens, stellen deze denkers dat mens en techniek onlosmakelijk met elkaar verbonden zijn en dat alles wat het humanisme doorgaans opponeert aan de techniek (bewustzijn, autonomie, (keuze)vrijheid, subjectiviteit, cultuur, menselijke waardigheid, etc.) in feite op een zeer diepgaande wijze geconditioneerd is door de techniek. De techniek is geen middel, het is onze conditie. Speciale aandacht gaat in dit proefschrift uit naar de implicaties van deze nieuwe visie op de techniek voor de manier waarop we recente ontwikkelingen in de biotechnologie moeten beoordelen.
enframing engenders an avalanche of entropization, putting humanity’s survival at risk. To avoid catastrophe, the so-called technosphere should be transformed from an entropic-destructive into a negentropic-constructive assemblage, ushering in the Neganthropocene. Stiegler’s focus is on the noetic dimension, in particular as constituted and conditioned overwhelmingly today by the digital pharmakon. In this article
I want to make a case for the importance of an entirely other noetic pharmakon not addressed by Stiegler: the nontechnical pharmakon of psychedelics, which allows for the expansion of humanity’s noetic frontier beyond the digital, providing access to dimensions of experience—and possibly also of reality—that may support the emerging neganthropos to awaken on a postanthropocentric planet in which it is enabled to commune in a noosphere made up by many other, nonhuman intelligences, which may prove essential for the neganthropic transformation to succeed.
called philosophy of technology and gives a concise overview of the most important contemporary approaches within this field. He also offers a critical evaluation of what are probably the two most salient characteristics of contemporary philosophy of technology, the so-called “empirical turn” and the “ethical turn,” which are deeply related and partly reflect the discipline’s on-going alignment with the global neoliberal agenda of exclusively profit-driven technological innovation. He also critically reflects on recent developments in the molecular and informational life sciences such as genomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology.
https://www.yuque.com/stiegler/edoi80/lg6xb9
has not been pushed too far—certainly given recent technological developments that seem to give technology an all-encompassing or all-penetrating countenance (again): pervasive automation of all domains of society through AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms and (ro)bots, or the engineering grasp on life through nanotechnology, biotechnology and neurotechnology. Also, the ecological urgency characterizing our “Anthropocenic condition” appears to call for more broad-ranging perspectives than the mere analysis of concrete local use contexts. At the same time, nonetheless, the “empirical attitude” keeps demon-
strating its usefulness for the philosophical study of technologies on a day-to-day basis… The question has been coming up more and more: Where do we go from here? Quo vadis philosophy of technology?
Online Symposium ‘Memory for the Future: Thinking with Bernard Stiegler’, georganiseerd door het Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) en het Institute for Science in Society (ISiS), Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
3-4 december 2020
Pieter Lemmens
The Technical Condition convincingly demonstrates how technology, culture, and society affect each other in countless and unexpected ways, providing an impetus for philosophical reflection on one of the most important themes of our times. As such, it will appeal to students in the humanities, social sciences and engineering sciences.
Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene.
In De nieuwe Duitse filosofie stellen vooraanstaande filosofen uit Nederland en Vlaanderen de meest relevante denkers uit het Duitse taalgebied aan u voor. Behalve met grote namen als Sloterdijk en Habermas biedt dit omvangrijke overzichtswerk een kennismaking met hun minder bekende collega’s. De auteurs beschrijven op toegankelijke wijze leven en werk van iedere filosoof. Ook bevat het boek suggesties tot verder lezen, illustraties en uitgebreide registers.
We staan op een kruispunt met aan de ene kant een weg naar een plekloos leven gekenmerkt door flexplekken, websurfers en wereldreizigers. Dit ‘footloose’ bestaan zal leiden tot een mensbeeld waarin identiteit niet langer wordt ontleend aan je geboorteplaats of je woonplaats. Aan de andere kant kunnen we een weg inslaan waarin mensen nieuwe vormen van verbinding zoeken, gekenmerkt door een behoefte aan een thuis, aan ommetjes en contact met de buren. Wat betekenen deze ontwikkelingen voor ons denken over plaatsen? Wat is de betekenis van plaatsen in een permanent veranderende samenleving? Wat is onze eindbestemming en wat zijn de consequenties daarvan op ons mensbeeld en onze relatie met de omgeving?
Dit boek is bedoeld voor een breed scala aan lezers die zich ieder op enigerlei wijze verbonden voelen met een plek of juist het ‘footloose’ bestaan omhelzen. Wetenschappers, politici, wandelaars, ruimtelijke ordenaars, natuur-beschermers en kunstenaars nemen de lezer mee in hun perspectief op plaatsen.
De alom gedeelde ervaring dat de technologische ontwikkeling steeds sneller gaat en zich steeds sterker opdringt, onze levens steeds nadrukkelijker zowel opeist als vormgeeft – een ervaring die Martin Heidegger in de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw karakteriseerde als die van de ‘aanspraak van de techniek’ – noodzaakt ons om de techniek op een heel andere wijze te leren begrijpen dan traditioneel gebruikelijk. De traditionele, antropocentrisch en instrumentalistisch georiënteerde techniekopvatting – ook wel de humanistische opvatting genoemd – is niet langer plausibel. De techniek kan niet langer worden gedacht als een middel in handen van de mens, die er op soevereine wijze over beschikt en haar onderwerpt aan zijn eigen, autonoom gestelde doelen. Er moet een alternatieve opvatting worden ontwikkeld, die recht doet aan haar claimende en quasi-autonoom evoluerende karakter.
De vier auteurs die in dit proefschrift centraal staan – Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, Gilbert Hottois en Bernard Stiegler – ontwikkelen zo’n alternatieve conceptie. In tegenstelling tot de humanistische visie, waarin mens en techniek als twee onafhankelijke variabelen tegenover elkaar worden geplaatst en de techniek wordt bekritiseerd (of zelfs veroordeeld) op basis van een welbepaalde opvatting van de mens, stellen deze denkers dat mens en techniek onlosmakelijk met elkaar verbonden zijn en dat alles wat het humanisme doorgaans opponeert aan de techniek (bewustzijn, autonomie, (keuze)vrijheid, subjectiviteit, cultuur, menselijke waardigheid, etc.) in feite op een zeer diepgaande wijze geconditioneerd is door de techniek. De techniek is geen middel, het is onze conditie. Speciale aandacht gaat in dit proefschrift uit naar de implicaties van deze nieuwe visie op de techniek voor de manier waarop we recente ontwikkelingen in de biotechnologie moeten beoordelen.
enframing engenders an avalanche of entropization, putting humanity’s survival at risk. To avoid catastrophe, the so-called technosphere should be transformed from an entropic-destructive into a negentropic-constructive assemblage, ushering in the Neganthropocene. Stiegler’s focus is on the noetic dimension, in particular as constituted and conditioned overwhelmingly today by the digital pharmakon. In this article
I want to make a case for the importance of an entirely other noetic pharmakon not addressed by Stiegler: the nontechnical pharmakon of psychedelics, which allows for the expansion of humanity’s noetic frontier beyond the digital, providing access to dimensions of experience—and possibly also of reality—that may support the emerging neganthropos to awaken on a postanthropocentric planet in which it is enabled to commune in a noosphere made up by many other, nonhuman intelligences, which may prove essential for the neganthropic transformation to succeed.
called philosophy of technology and gives a concise overview of the most important contemporary approaches within this field. He also offers a critical evaluation of what are probably the two most salient characteristics of contemporary philosophy of technology, the so-called “empirical turn” and the “ethical turn,” which are deeply related and partly reflect the discipline’s on-going alignment with the global neoliberal agenda of exclusively profit-driven technological innovation. He also critically reflects on recent developments in the molecular and informational life sciences such as genomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology.
https://www.yuque.com/stiegler/edoi80/lg6xb9
has not been pushed too far—certainly given recent technological developments that seem to give technology an all-encompassing or all-penetrating countenance (again): pervasive automation of all domains of society through AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms and (ro)bots, or the engineering grasp on life through nanotechnology, biotechnology and neurotechnology. Also, the ecological urgency characterizing our “Anthropocenic condition” appears to call for more broad-ranging perspectives than the mere analysis of concrete local use contexts. At the same time, nonetheless, the “empirical attitude” keeps demon-
strating its usefulness for the philosophical study of technologies on a day-to-day basis… The question has been coming up more and more: Where do we go from here? Quo vadis philosophy of technology?
Online Symposium ‘Memory for the Future: Thinking with Bernard Stiegler’, georganiseerd door het Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) en het Institute for Science in Society (ISiS), Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
3-4 december 2020
Pieter Lemmens
In our talk we will focus on the way in which the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whose sphero-techno-immunological re-interpretation of the human condition has been called the first anthropocenic discipline by Bruno Latour, conceives of the complete re-orientation of the human technological endeavour that the Anthropocene calls for, and that is in terms of (1) a so-called homeotechnological turn of co-operation with the modi operandi of nature so as to replace the traditional allotechnological mode of going against nature, and (2) a change from technological extension and expansion to a kind of technological immunization that he refers to with notions such as transplantation, implantation and atmospheric design, by which he means the creation of technological interiors or envelopes in the sense of artificial life support systems allowing for intensely or even fully technologized modes of being-in-the-world on an earth that increasingly fails to supply sufficient life support functionality. We will in particular look at how these two technological ‘strategies’ relate to each other and how they might converge in what we could call techno-bio-spheric life design.
In our talk we will zoom in on the (in our view) decisive yet somewhat underdeveloped technological dimension of Sloterdijk’s spherological and immunological understanding of the human endeavour, presenting him explicitly as a philosopher of technology and of technical mediation. We will elaborate on his technogenic conception of hominization as well as on his anthropotechnical theory of humanization, discussing the influence of both Heidegger’s and Gotthard Günther’s theories of technology as well as that of theorists of the German tradition of philosophical anthropology, especially Arnold Gehlen. We will also address the shortcomings of Sloterdijk’s understanding of the relation between humans and technology and his current stance vis-à-vis the Anthropocene as they result from what Bernard Stiegler, whose tragic view on the human-technology relation is nonetheless close to that of the Nietzschean Sloterdijk, has diagnosed as the lack of a pharmacological perspective and thus of the failure by the latter to acknowledge the eminently tragic, entropic-negentropic ambiguity of all technologization and by implication all hominization and humanization.
Starting from the assumption that the technosphere represents the concretion of what Heidegger called enframing, I will offer a Stieglerian critique of the naturalist of not physicalist technosphere concept in Earth system science by showing that it does not understand, somewhat surprisingly, the proper nature and implications of the human-technology relationship as it is constitutive of the technosphere. Consequently it fails to properly address what is truly specific about this artificial geosphere, and that is its ‘noetic’ as well as its ‘libidinal’ character. The latter constitutes what Clive Hamilton calls humanity’s ‘world-making’ capacity, which seems to be collapsing in the Anthropocene, indeed together with the collapse of ‘nature’.
It is only by focusing on the Earth-systemic impact and specificity of precisely these noetic and libidinal dimensions of the technosphere or rather techno-noosphere that we can properly start to think about how to reconstruct it from a destructive and careless into a constructive and caring constituent of the anthropized Earth system, as I will try to show with Stiegler and in dialogue with the so-called ‘gradient theory’ of Schneider & Sagan.
In my talk I want to confront this rather fatalistic yet not implausible assessment of the current ‘human condition’ with a similar diagnosis of ‘total nihilism’, that of Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler, though, recognizes the possibility, as well as the necessity, of a systemic revolution by locating it in the very process of technical mediation itself and by emphasizing the essentially organological and pharmacological nature of media, which are thus understood not in a quasi-Heideggerian, onto-historical sense as simple ‘emanations’ of a more fundamental essence, ‘the medium’, but as concretely constituting the latter. This opens up a wholly different perspective on the current state of mediated paralysis and allows for the invention of strategies to overcome it, as I will demonstrate.
In order to commemorate the span of this multifaceted work, but above all in order to probe its future, the Leiden University Center for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) and the Institute for Science in Society of the Radboud University of Nijmegen summon a meeting of both academics and actors from civil society. The meeting will surely summarize his philosophical legacy, but above all it will explore possible futures in the spirit of Bernard Stiegler's philosophical project, both practically and theoretically. How should we take care of the world marked by ubiquitous digitalization, global ecological destruction and increasing economical turmoil? How should we face this reality in thinking? What should philosophy consist of when digitalization has entered the domain of knowledge production and cultural reflection? Is philosophy mainly a matter of concept production or also an engagement with reality? What is philosophizing for Stiegler, and how should we philosophize with Stiegler and after him?
Due to Covid restrictions the symposium will take place online. More than anybody else, Bernard Stiegler led us to interrogate both the misery and the emancipative potential of this media, so let this also be an occasion for putting this element of his thinking in practice.
The program will be updated on the symposium website, see below. People interested in the symposium should register with the conference secretary Donovan Stewart: donovanstewart@protonmail.com
Encounter between Peter Sloterdijk and Bernard Stiegler at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 27-28 June 2016.
On the 27th and 28th of June 2016, the Radboud University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) will organize, in cooperation with the Nootechnics Collective, an encounter between German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. This two-day encounter will consist of a public debate between these two thinkers, to be held in De Vereeniging in the city of Nijmegen during the evening of Monday the 27th of June, flanked by two expert seminars, one on Monday the 27th in the morning and the afternoon and one on Tuesday the 28th, also morning and afternoon, on the campus of the Radboud University (in these two seminars, some time will also be reserved for interventions from students of the Faculty ofPhilosophy, Theology and Religious Studies as well as master students who have followed an honours course on the work of both thinkers especially related to the theme of the encounter). The title of the encounter is ‘Anthropos-Anthropotechnics-Anthropocene’ and this means that it will be thematically devoted to the relation between humanity, technolog yand ecology in the work of both Sloterdijk and Stiegler and more specifically to an exploration of the changing relations between the human and technology within the emerging context of the anthropocene – i.e., the new geological epoch proposed recently by geologists and earth systems scientists in which ‘the human’ has supposedly become the most important geological (f)actor.
The emergence of the anthropocene as an event of a truly anthropological magnitude, possibly representing the first genuine anthropological crisis and signaling the necessity of humanity to become fully mature and assume responsibility for its own fragile oikos, thereby establishing an ethical imperative with an absolute and universal appeal, as Sloterdijk claimed in You must change your life. As he wrote in a recent essay: ‘The coining of the term “Anthropocene” thus inevitably obeys an apocalyptic logic: it indicates the end of any peace of mind in the cosmos, on which historical forms of human being-in-the-world rested’. Stiegler also stresses the gravity of the ‘anthropocenic event’ (Bonneuil & Fressoz) and considers it to represent ‘a state of extreme urgency’. He points toward the duty of philosophy to live up to the urgency and gravity of this event by trying to think it and propose a strategy for exiting or overcoming the anthropocene and inaugurate what he calls the ‘neganthropocene’, which would consist in a global organological revolution. As he wrote in a recent lecture on the anthropocene given in 2014 in Canterbury: ‘The singularity of the Anthropocene as an organological epoch lies in the fact it has generated the organological question […] bringing with it something new: its negative protention and the necessity of overcoming itself’.
Given the many remarkable parallels but also salient divergences in their respective, i.e., ‘sphero-immunological’ and ‘pharmaco-organological’ philosophical conceptualizations of the anthropos, its technogenic evolution and thoroughly technical condition as well as their estimations of our current global ecological predicament, we believe this encounter will most surely provoke many interesting and urgent philosophical questions and can provide crucial insights for the new self-understanding of the anthropos and its totally novel anthropotechnic situation emerging from the context of the anthropocene and thus for the question of how to deal, technologically but also culturally and politically, with our current situation and future destiny in view of the emerging anthropocenic condition.
DECEMBER 13, 2023
Lyotard and the 21st Century
Special Issue of Technophany dedicated to the Centenary of Jean-François Lyotard
Editors: Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens
2024 marks the 100th anniversary of Jean-François Lyotard (10th August, 1924, Versailles–21st April, 1998). Lyotard was the thinker who endeavoured to open a new epoch, most influentially reflected in his discourse on the postmodern. His characterizations of the postmodern, such as “the incredulity toward metanarratives,” “the decline of universalist discourses,” “the reign of the performativity principle” and the age of the “hegemony of the techno-economic system,” not only remain actual but also deserve a deeper engagement within our current technological condition. His articulation of the postmodern is not only limited to the books containing the word “postmodern” in their title—The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), The Postmodern Explained (1988) and Postmodern Fables (1993)—but can be found in his reflection on science and technology throughout present since Discours, Figure (1971), where one could find consistent motives concerning disturbances and resistances against a totalizing discursive system. With his magnum opus, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983)—“my philosophy book,” as he himself called it—Lyotard became one of the most prominent representatives of the so-called “linguistic turn,” which dominated continental philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s.
Lyotard was a very influential author in the late twentieth century, not only in philosophy but also in aesthetics, art and media theory, political theory, sociology, pedagogy, linguistics and cultural studies. He was one of the major voices in the dispute between the modernists and postmodernists at the time, alongside Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Fredric Jameson and Richard Rorty. After his death in 1998, and with the gradual closure of the postmodern interlude, the name Lyotard appeared less frequently; however, in recent years, it has regained attention, in particular as regards his views on politics and technology, the latter being Lyotard’s main theoretical and political focus since the mid-1980s, expressed in books such as The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1988), Readings in Infancy (1991) and Postmodern Fables (1993).
Technophany wants to commemorate this anniversary with a special issue dedicated to the question of the continuing relevance of the work of Lyotard for the 21st century, which, on the one hand, appears to develop along the lines set out in Lyotard’s highly prophetic book on The Postmodern Condition, with the ongoing consolidation of the global techno-economic system embodying the most updated logic of capitalism and with the ever-increasing subordination of societies on a global scale to the performativity criterium through digital networks, AI algorithms and the transhumanist ideology propagated by the global oligarchy; on the other hand, the 21st century seems to have unfolded into a series of crises that Lyotard himself did not fully anticipate, for example, the apocalyptic urgency of the global ecological crisis and the enframing of the Earth into what Earth system scientists have called the Anthropocene, a new geological and geo-technological condition.
Lyotard’s thinking, apart from its celebrated postmodern birthmarks, offers plenty of resources for thinking through our current geo-historical moment and reflecting on the many material and intellectual developments currently at stake. His rich thinking has opened different incomplete paths to confront the challenges and crises humanity faces in the disorienting 21st century of crisis-ridden planetarization and ongoing technologization. We invite authors to reflect on the legacy of Lyotard’s multifaceted oeuvre for the 21st century against the backdrop of contemporary intellectual debates, reflecting on the continued relevance and futurity of notions such as the postmodern, the differend, narrativity, the un(re)presentable, the sublime, the libidinal, the inhuman, the system, resistance, the event, performativity, paralogy and many others.
Key Dates:
10th April: Deadline of abstracts (500 words to be sent to lyotardcentenary@gmail.com);
30th April: Announcement of acceptance of abstracts;
15th September: Complete articles due;
Publication: Late November/December, 2024.
Whilst the anthropocene attests to the enormous if not uncanny power of a techno-scientifically potentialized humanity (a power Dominique Janicaud has called a ‘hyperpower’) to radically disrupt the earthly ecosystem upon which it fundamentally depends for its very survival, it simultaneously, and even more crucially, brings to light the ultimate impotence of that power (Janicaud 1994). However that may be, what is clear, as the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler points out, is that the anthropocene reveals the toxic and entropic character of the process of capitalist industrialization and that the big challenge it imposes on us is how to exit from it and invent a negentropic, curative and attentive technological modus vivendi (Stiegler 2014, 2016), if possible (Blok 2015). And since we are massively unprepared for this unprecedented challenge, we might do well to start ‘thinking the unthinkable’, as the American philosopher of technology Langdon Winner has stated using a famous phrase by cold war nuclear conflict theorist/futurist Herman Kahn (Winner 2013).
In this track, we aim to explore the question how philosophy of technology should respond to this challenge, i.e., to this new and unprecedented ‘human condition’ that is bound to seriously disrupt the agendas of philosophical and social inquiry in the decades to come and that we would like to characterize as the anthropocenic condition. In particular,
we aim to explore what it would mean for philosophy of technology to engage with the earth system and its principles of composition, to consider different technical modalities of fostering and maintaining them, and to adopt an explicitly planetary orientation (Lemmens & Hui 2016, Lemmens 2017).
Possible questions and themes to be explored include:
• What exactly does the anthropocene – sometimes also referred to as the technocene – as a new and unprecedented planetary condition mean for the philosophy of technology? What are its implications for this discipline? Should it be the cause for a renewed reflection on its aims, goals, focus, methodologies, paradigms, presuppositions, organizational structure, educational guidelines, ‘engagement’, etc.?
• What would a planetary orientation, assuming humanity as a ‘geological agency’ (Chakrabarty 2009), imply for philosophy of technology? What should ‘taking care of the earth’ (Steffen et al. 2011) or a ‘reconnection with the biosphere’ (Folke 2011) mean technologically? How should we attune our technologies, for instance the global digital network technologies, the NBIC technologies or the technosphere and noorspehere more generally, to this new situation? What would it mean technologically to heed the ‘planetary boundaries’ crucial for the ‘operating space of humanity’ (Rockström 2015).
• What kind of new technologies and social institutions should be invented to deal with the impending energy crisis and climate catastrophes and what kind of changes in our technological thinking are needed for this new age of the anthropocene?
• What kinds of technopolitics and ecopolitics are needed and what can we already see emerging on the horizon? How should we include nascent technopolitical movements such as open source, peer-to-peer and commons into an ecological perspective on techno-evolution?
• What should we think of proposed solutions like geo-engineering, ecotechnics and atmo-design, and what of new technological paradigms like homeotechnology, biomimicry (Blok & Gremmen 2015) and the biobased economy (Zwier et al 2015)?
Klimatologische, ecologische en sociale beproevingen staan voor de deur. Corona heeft als voorbode al aangeklopt.
Wetenschappelijke data laten zien dat techniek, hoe gesofisticeerd dan ook, nooit in staat zal zijn om de natuurkrachten op aarde naar mensenmaat te plooien.
‘We zijn er geweest...’ is een ontdekkingsreis door een bizar landschap met gerenommeerde filosofische reisleiders zoals Martin Heidegger, Timothy Morton, Peter Sloterdijk, Bernard Stiegler en Clive Hamilton. De perspectieven en vergezichten die getoond worden, kunnen ons helpen bij het beantwoorden van de vragen wie of wat de mens nu eigenlijk is en in welke wereld wij straks willen leven.
Nogmaals, het Antropoceen lijkt onbekend terrein, maar we zijn er al geweest: fysiek en/of mentaal. Het is voor mij niet zomaar een vage veralgemenisering, of een kapstok, waaraan planetaire fenomenen (klimaatverandering, opwarming, etc.) kunnen worden gehangen. Het is als concept/metafoor net zo reëel als de Amazone, het kapitalisme, de sociale ongelijkheid in de wereld, het zorgstelsel, internet en de MacDonalds. De term expliciteert, maakt urgent, de verregaande en onlosmakelijke relatie tussen de mens en zijn woonstede Aarde. Doordat het een geologische term is, wordt duidelijk dat de centrale rol van de mens, zijn idee van superioriteit en almacht, in vraag gesteld en geproblematiseerd wordt.
Bovendien wordt de mens opgenomen in een geologische geschiedenis; d.w.z. behalve zijn eigen korte geschiedenis – zowel als mensheid en als individu – komt nu ook de geschiedenis van de aarde en haar eindigheid in het hier en nu terecht. Voor het eerst worden er signalen van de aarde - of, om een andere metafoor te gebruiken: van Gaia - ontvangen die blijk geven van haar kwetsbaarheid en eindigheid. Kwetsbaar en eindig in antropomorfe zin, want de aarde zal niet ten onder gaan aan de mens. Als levensvoorzienende planeet zal ze nog minstens 1,5 miljard jaar rondjes om de zon draaien. Hoelang ze de mens nog als organische diersoort kan behouden, is een vraag die – en dat is uniek – alleen de mens zelf kan beantwoorden.
Het is precies dit wat het Antropoceen als term/metafoor mogelijk maakt: de bewustwording van het feit dat wat wij als natuur en normaal zagen, voorbij is. De natuur bestaat niet, we zijn het zelf. Natuur staat niet los van ons, is geen onaantastbare achtergrond, geen decorstuk voor het menselijk toneelstukje, geen gereedschap om het construct van een (illusoire) mensenwereld mee te vormen. Dat hebben we nu allemaal wel gezien, we zijn er geweest, en we moeten nu verder op een andere manier, naar een ander normaal, naar een ander wereldbeeld. Dat wordt geen normaal van maakbaarheid, beheersing, verzekering, exploitatie en kapitaalaccumulatie. De mens zal moeten leren leven met de (vooralsnog) abnormale - a-normale, maar unieke -levensvoorwaarde die Aarde heet en van zich laat horen.
Al eeuwen doet de Aarde (of Gaia) van zich spreken. In het Antropoceen worden haar signalen langzaam maar zeker ontrafeld en begrepen: de mens is slechts een onderdeel van het totale aardsysteem en zal moeten leren om vreedzaam, zorgzaam om te gaan met de sferen van de planeet die zijn bestaan überhaupt mogelijk maken.
Deze signalen zijn eeuwen geleden ook wel door enkele wetenschappers en filosofen opgepikt en uitgewerkt, maar hun bevindingen vonden niet genoeg ‘oren’(Nietzsche) en werden als zweverig, doemdenken, charlatanerie afgedaan.
De afgelopen 5 decennia is de mens in staat om de berichten van de apocalyptische discipelen van Gaia serieus te nemen. Dankzij de wetenschappelijke en technologische ontwikkeling in combinatie met de computertechniek krijgen we steeds meer inzicht in de onpeilbare dieptes van het aardsysteem. Met de komst van internet wordt het ook voor de ‘gewone burger’ mogelijk om in te zien dat de idee van een onuitputtelijke, onaantastbare, beheersbare en passieve Aarde op geen enkele wijze meer te verdedigen is. Sterker nog: hoe meer wetenschappelijke data door de aardsysteemwetenschappen vergaard worden, hoe duidelijker de beperktheid en ontoereikendheid van het menselijke kennen en kunnen, wordt. Dat is voor velen beangstigend; het geeft een gevoel van onbehagen en graag klampen we ons vast aan schijnoplossingen en vage politieke beloftes. Dit alles gretig gevoed door de media en gulzig geconsumeerd door de massa.
Dit is het ‘normaal’ waar we het mee moeten doen; de rest is geschiedenis. In het Antropoceen kunnen we zien dat dingen te groot voor ons zijn en ter principale onoplosbaar.
Drs. ing. Bert Herps (1952) is filosoof en heeft o.a. milieutechnologie en natuurkunde gedoceerd aan diverse beroepsopleidingen.
Het boek is hier te bestellen: https://www.spehr.nl/boek-reizen-door-het-antropoceen