Negentropy and the Future of Exteriorization (Bernard Stiegler Volume Exposé)

Bryan Norton

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The relation between human embodiment and the Internet has been a question dominated by two opposing trends: a rhetoric of disembodiment on the one hand and a counter-rhetoric of embodiment on the other. This dissertation will begin with a reading of these rhetorics, focusing on their conceptions of the body, the Internet and technology more broadly. It will take issue with their underlying philosophies of technology, arguing that they are informed by two forms of determinism that constitute an 'artifactual' conception of technology. It will be posited that this approach contributes a logic of opposition in which these rhetorics argue via isolated examples and counter-examples that illustrate their given theoretical inclinations. This will be described as an essentialist circle of critique in which each is defined by its opposition to the other; a mutually constitutive question of (dis)embodiment. The dissertation will proceed by attempting to move beyond (dis)embodiment through a reading of the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. It will be argued that Stiegler's conceptions of 'technogenesis' and im/material being correct the limitations of (dis)embodiment, thereby providing the means to undertake an analysis of embodiment in contemporary digital culture. From the basis of this Stieglerian framework, the Internet will be defined as a mass-mnemotechnical-system that extracts personal-data from bodies. This is contributing to an emergent form of personalised-consumption in which individual desire is increasingly exteriorised in technics, contributing to an emergent form of digital-being. The dissertation will conclude by suggesting that this reading offers significant grounds for establishing a new critical position on the debate, leading us beyond (dis)embodiment, towards a politics of exteriorisation.

The significant changes that have dominated the social and the scientific world over the last thirty years have brought about upheavals and critical re-appraisals that have proved quite positive in fostering 21st century thought. This interdisciplinary collection of state-of-the-art essays offers innovative and thought-provoking insights concerning contemporary philosophical and cultural reflection on the nature-culture interaction. Starting from the assumption that the binary opposition between the two terms has been replaced by a continuum of the two, the volume explores both the terms of this new interaction, and its implications. Technology occupies a central place in the shift towards a nature-cultural continuum, but it is not the only factor. The consequences of economic globalization, notably the global spread of digital mediation, also account for this change of perspective. Last but not least the climate change issue and a renewed urgency around the state of the environmental crisis also contribute to bring the ’natural’ much closer to home. Digital mediation has by now become a standard way to live and interact. The electronic frontier has altered dramatically the practice of education and research, especially in the Humanities and social sciences, with direct consequences for the institutional practice and the methodology of these disciplinary fields. This book aims to explore the implications of these complex shifts for the practice of critical thinking.

PRE-PRINT VERSION _ Azimuth 8, 1/2017 This paper analyses the Anthropocene as an epoch of lost confidence in the human-world linkage, where an ‘apocalyptic reason’ is leading humanity towards a general acosmism. Instead of focusing on humanity’s supposed power, or guilt, it is the relations of separation and connection, subtraction and aggregation, expropriation and construction that are brought into view, entangled as they are in the narratives of the Anthropocene, so as to explore the different epochal stratifications enclosed within each of them. Along this cosmological path, the guides will be several conceptual personae, figures and philosophers, through whom the errant condition of what has been called the inhuman, after having overtaken several ‘ends of the world’, may enable the eventual recovery of our lost correspondence – or separation? - with the macroscopic process of world concrescence.

This paper presents the emergence of politically-motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Britain between 1967 and 1972. It introduces an amorphous and now popularly-‘forgotten’ grouping called the ‘Angry Brigade’, which carried out around 26 attacks against high-profile political targets over 1970 and 1971, and claimed responsibility using communiqués sent to the underground press. A large but clumsy police investigation led to police harassment of much of the British counterculture and culminated in the major trial of the ‘Stoke Newington Eight’ in 1972, in which the revolutionary socialism of the British New Left seemed itself charged and judged guilty. It draws on recent archival research to present contrary memories of its political violence, from Stuart Hall’s hostility and John Barker’s disavowal, to the Situationist romanticism of Tom Vague, and the wider ‘silence’ of other Angry Brigade members since. The paper then reflects on the proximity and distance of left-wing political violence from this period. Angry Brigade members have publicly expressed regret over the bombings and drawn attention instead to their trial, but these frames of ‘memory’ and ‘success’ still remain undefined. Drawing on a Spinozan concept of ‘collective desire’ and Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”, it theorises the law-making and law-destroying aspects of the Angry Brigade’s campaign and Stoke Newington Eight trial within its wider political context. Against popular memories of ’68 as a watershed of utopian dreaming, this paper restores attention to a problematic emergence of revolutionary violence in an internationalist, future-facing milieu of student activism and countercultural experimentation.

In Erich Hörl and James Burton (eds), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), pp. 129–50. Lecture originally delivered at Leuphana, June 2014.

This thesis conceptually investigates the relationship between human existence and the technical object, and thereby relates questions faced within the philosophy of technology to the field of philosophical anthropology. This conceptual work will be taken up in a twofold manner. Firstly, I detail how the Western philosophical tradition has tended to distance its own practice and thinking from the technical, and how it, relatedly, has hierarchically subjugated technics from what essentially defines us as human beings. This will involve a genealogical investigation of the figure of the philosopher and the technician, which will detail how and why these figures have been antagonistic and oppositional from the start. The argument being that this relationship constitutes a genuine hindrance for thinking of existence as originarily technical within the confines of traditional philosophical inquiry and its various schools of thought. Secondly, I conceptually investigate and phenomenologically describe the relationship between human existence and technics by way of an engagement with, first and foremost, the early and late thought of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the work of the French palaeoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and the thought of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The thesis sets out to question, in this regard, whether or not tool-user and tool, the human and the technical object are originarily prosthetically coupled, and hence if, so to speak, the inventor is also invented with what it invents. Its argument being, in this connection, that the invention of the human is technics. The central thesis of Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology that the essence of technics is by no means anything technical will thus be called into question.

The ‘French reading’ of Nietzsche crystallized almost 50 years ago at the 1972 con- ference at Cerisy-la-Salle, Nietzsche aujourd’hui.1 Nietzsche’s fortunes have since undergone some dramatic shifts in France, but there are signs that he is once again on the ascendency, in particular the 2016 edited collection Pourquoi nous sommes Nietzschéens (a direct riposte to the 1991 Pourquoi nous ne sommes pas Nietzschéens). Taking a bearing from the French readings, I want to explore the question of what ‘Nietzsche today’ might mean for us today. At Cerisy in 1972, the meaning of Nietzsche was centred on the twin critiques of humanism and capitalism. While these issues persist, several articles in the 2016 collection indicate that they are now inflected through the vast contemporary significance of technology. One of the key debates here is Nietzsche’s significance for transhumanism. For Bernard Stiegler, transhumanism is the culmination of nihilism, understood as the reign of big data and the total quantification of the self. In this regard, he alludes to a ‘hypernihilism’ of the contem- porary era, characterised by the quantifying effects of information technologies, which work in conjunction with capitalism to produce an ultimate ‘averaging’ force. I will argue that Stiegler gives an essential corrective to the largely critical engagements with neonihilism of the Nietzscheans of the previous generation, but that his emphasis on the value of negen- tropy risks reaffirming the logic of the transhumanism he critiques. Nietzscheanism today, I will argue, requires an appreciation of the dual tendencies of nihilism – identified here as neonihilism and hypernihilism – such that we must draw on contributions from both gener- ations of French Nietzscheans in order to think and respond to the problems of our contem- porary era.

Is physical presence an essential aspect of a rich educational experience? Can forms of virtual encounter achieve engaged and sustained education? Technophiles and technophobes might agree that authentic personal engagement is educationally normative. They are more likely to disagree on how authentic engagement is best achieved. This article argues that educational thinking around digital pedagogy unhelpfully reinforces this polarising debate by failing to recognise that digitalisation is, as Stiegler has argued, pharmacological: both a poison and a cure. I suggest that Biesta’s critique of learnification can be applied to online learning, but that any such application does not sufficiently acknowledge the pharmacological nature of modern technology. While Stiegler has something important to contribute on the relation between technology, attention and education, I suggest his account is rather too bound up with critical theories of technology. In the end I turn to philosophers of religion, such as Eliade and Smith to suggest different ways of conceiving the role of attention in education that does set technologies up over/against the formation of attention essential to education.

According to geologists and Earth System scientists, we are now living in the age of the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the most important geoforce, shaping the face of the planet more decisively than all natural forces combined. This brings with it a huge and unprecedented responsibility of humanity for the future of the biosphere. Humanity's impact on the planet has been largely destructive until now, causing a rupture of the Earth System which completely changes the planetary conditions that characterized the Holocene, the generally benign period of the last 11,000 years in which human civilization as we know it has emerged and was able to flourish. In the Anthropocene these conditions can no longer be taken for granted. On the contrary, humanity itself will have to become responsible for the preservation of the biosphere as its ultimate life support system. This means that its influence on the Earth System has to become a constructive one, among other things by inventing a cleaner and more sustainable modus vivendi on the planet. In this article it is claimed that such a transformation presupposes the invention of a global noosphere that allows humanity as a planetary collective to perceive and monitor the Earth System and interact more intelligently and sustainably with it. The response-ability required for taking responsibility for the Earth System presupposes the existence of a global noosphere that can both support a permanent collective awareness of our embedding in and critical dependence on the biosphere and function as a collective action platform. Based on a Stieglerian diagnosis of our current predicament, a case will be made for the huge potentials of digital media for our future task of caring for the earth.

Ekin Erkan's review of Bernard Stiegler's "The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism" (2019), as published in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. To Cite this Essay: Erkan, Ekin. “Societies of Disindividuated Hyper-Control: On the Question of a New Pharmakon.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, no. 35, 2019, doi:10.20415/rhiz/035.r02 Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer's oft-quoted 1944 essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Bernard Stiegler’s The Age of Disruption affirms that the Frankfurt School duo scrupulously envisaged a “new kind of barbarism,” or an inversion of modernity’s Enlightenment project illustrated by our contemporary political semblance. Surveying the critical social fissures that index contemporary Western civil society—from 9/11 to the 2002 Nanterre massacre and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting—Stiegler diagnoses that our epoch is plagued by the “absence of epoch,” whereby computational capitalism and algorithmic governmentality have extirpated the “transcendental imagination” underlying a kind of vital primordial narcissism. In short, these are symptoms a world increasingly “going mad,” in a thousand ways, possible because we are the bearers of "a negative protention of a becoming without future," yet "we prefer not to say so: we do not want to know about it."

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The following is the introduction to the first volume of Bernard Stiegler, La Société automatique, 1. La travail du travail, published by Fayard in 2015. This translation is published with the generous permission of the author.

These lectures outline the project of a general organology, which is to say an account of life when it is no longer just biological but technical, or when it involves not just organic matter but organized inorganic matter. This organology is also shown to require a modified Simondonian account of the shift from vital individuation to a three-stranded process of psychic, collective and technical individuation. Furthermore, such an approach involves extending the Derridean reading of Socrates’s discussion of writing as a pharmakon, so that it becomes a more general account of the pharmacological character of retention and protention. By going back to Leroi-Gourhan, we can recognize that this also means pursuing the history of retentional modifications unfolding in the course of the history of what, with Lotka, can also be called exosomatization. It is thus a question of how exteriorization can, today, in an epoch when it becomes digital, and in an epoch that produces vast amounts of entropy at the thermodynamic, biological and noetic levels, still possibly produce new forms of interiorization, that is, new forms of thought, care and desire, amounting to so many chances to struggle against the planetary- scale pharmacological crisis with which we are currently afflicted. Available at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/drt.2020.0220

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?

A paper published in "Parallax", 2017, Vol. 23, No. 2, 184–201, Nootechnics

What do we do with media technologies, and what do they in turn do to us? These questions underlie much of the philosophy of media and technology, and they provide the context in which this project wishes to situate itself. I aim to investigate the construction of human-media relationships in the biopolitical arrangements of postindustrial capitalism, in which the management of the somatic individual and the regulations of its various intimacies play a prominent role. I argue that contemporary media addictions, such as Internet and gaming addiction, exist as paradigmatic formulations of the way in which biopolitical subjects engage with media; more than that, media addictions are pivotal in sustaining the production and maintenance of a media-infused ‗politics of life itself‘ (In Nikolas Rose‘s formulation). In order to support this argument, I will investigate some possibilities to reformulate the ontological basis of media-human relationships so as to re-read media addiction as a self-affirming and fruitful intimacy with the in/nonhuman, i.e. media technologies, based on desire, pleasure and drive towards alternative relationalities. This project can be distilled into three main theoretical strands: the exploration of the biopoliticization of the phenomenon of media addiction one the one hand, a potential refiguration of media use as a form of intimacy with the in- and non-human on the other, and finally an investigation into the place of gender and materiality within media philosophy. The crux of the project is the proposition that the ontology of media, in the context of Western metaphysics, is in a perpetual oscillation between the poles of humanity and nonhumanity. Because of this unstable process, media technology is positioned as a threatening figuration that destabilizes the privilege accorded to the category of the human, while at the same time redrawing its boundaries. Contemporary Western biopolitics, the ‗politics of life itself‘, relies precisely on the uncertain status of media in order to codify the character of the media addict as a paradigmatic figure of the contemporary climate, as a techno-somatic individual. The goal of the work is to understand the role of media within contemporary Western biopolitics, and to survey the dynamics between the various ontological states attributed to media in political and academic discourse, and the human users who engage with them.

Book review, Richard Grusin, ed., Anthropocene Feminism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. The Anthropocene marks who it is that feels under threat of extinction in this moment; who feels despair at the litany of stories about the end of the world and ecological apocalypse. For many of the largely absent interlocutors, whole lifeworlds and ecosystems have been unravelling around them for generations. As it appears in the contributions to this volume, feminism in the Anthropocene is an ethical concern – a question of seeing and feeling differently. What is missing in this volume is an articulation of a feminist praxis for struggling within ecological crisis, one that foregrounds the conditions of exposure to the slow violence of the Anthropocene vis-à-vis the conditions of womanhood and gender relations.

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.

This dissertation studies selected works by artists Jane Jin Kaisen (DK/KR, 1980), Mark Leckey (GB, 1964), Henrik Olesen (DK, 1967) and Tabita Rezaire (FR/DK/GF, 1989) with a focus on how these practices - each in their way - interrogate, look into, articulate, reconstruct, and negotiate possible and potential actualizations of the individual and collective alike. The research is informed by theorizations of individuation through technical forms of memory as well as ideas of the contemporaneity of contemporary art. It has been conducted as part of the research project The Contemporary Condition, Aarhus University.

Based on his analysis and correction of Adorno and Horkheimer in Vol. 3 of Technics and Time, B. Stiegler illustrates the impact the New Barbarism, from the Nanterre Massacre to the rise of populism

The ongoing explosion of pervasive digital technologies and ubiquitous computing is leading to radical changes in human experience. The pressure exerted on and by the acceleration of technical mediation is creating a milieu where, as Félix Guattari argued in the late 1980s, ‘the contents of subjectivity have become increasingly dependent on a multitude of machinic systems’.1 Now integrated into cybernetic processes, bionic circuits, sensorial environments, and digital social networks, classical subjectivities and modes of individuation seem both preceded and surpassed to the extent that a complex entanglement of the human and the technological is emerging, where cognitive processes increasingly take place beyond what has always been conceived as the monadic sphere of the subject. With new smart technologies, individuals find themselves plunged into hyperconnected environments and wrapped in a cloud of data, where intelligence, cognition, and noetic processes seem to be distributed among diverse vectors that could therefore be defined as ‘environmental’

Mark Coté's "Technics and the Human Sensorium: Rethinking Media Theory through the Body" explores an equally provocative indexical displacement: Rather than sustaining the conventional assertion that media and technology are supplements to the human, Coté affirms that "sensory perception is only ever calibrated in relation to technics" and that human life has always been indistinct from technological and mediatic modes of existence. The fundamental assumption that governs much political thought – that there is a distinctly human body and that that body is distinct because of its capacity to use technics – is put under pressure by Coté through his insistence that the internal/external binary implicit in this view of technics is unsustainable. Rather, he concludes, humans are always-already transductively related to technics; this is the lesson of technogenesis that makes us face up to the fact that despite the ambitions of our most enthusiastic political imaginings, we have never been simply human, but have always been human somethings.

The paper attempts to read Antoinette Rouvroy's concept of algorithmic governmentality as the main subject of what Bernard Stiegler called computational nihilism. Taking one of the giants of the Web, Amazon.com, as a symptom of such a nihilism whose process has been empowered by neo-liberalism, the paper tries to elaborate a new kind of relationship between technology, environment and social ties alternative to the accelerationist perspective. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's anthropological work provides some key elements in order to elaborate this kind of new political ecology based on Amazonian perspectivism. Starting from this consideration, political ecology could be presented as a kind of nomadology, while the latter could be understood in its turn as a way of placing Nietzsche's perspectivism in the Amazon.

In Ladson Hinton and Hessel Willemsen (eds), Temporality and Shame: Perspectives from Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (London and New York: Rutledge, 2018), pp. 158–85.

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This chapter calls for critical reflection on the onto-political relations between mathematics, technics, and cultures in the context of the ecological and technological crises of modern Western civilization. The relations between a culture's mathematic, technical practices, and metaphysical worldview are intertwined elements within different civilizational complexes, comprising the geo-cosmo-politics of the modern world order. Reflected in the posthuman and post-anthropocentric turns in the sciences and humanities, a variety of alternative ontologies of existence are emerging. As an intellectual field, the posthuman ontological turn is a bifurcated shift in the fundamental concepts and assumptions underlying the modern knowledge disciplines. The ontological turn has unsettled Western metaphysical concepts of nature and culture, calling the relations between mathematics and nature into question within an emerging historical problematic identified as the technoecological condition. I am exploring ways of overcoming the singular world ontology of modernity with a pluriversal ontological politics of knowledge and education. Ontological diversity is dependent upon technodiversity, while technodiversity is dependent upon renewed cosmological relations between technics and cultures. Mathematical knowledge practices are centrally about intervening in environments as well as providing metaphysical grounds for establishing truth. The technoecological condition involves the replacement of subject centered sense making with the environmentalization of sense, i.e., smart cities, ubiquitous computing and global media. Grounded in the mathematic of Western modernity, the process of cybernetization has concretized in world-wide systems of technological mediation that operate within sensory and intelligent environments. Biodiversity and technodiversity are being lost in an expanding mono-cultural technological civilizational complex. Underlying the production and consumption of cybernetic technologies are particular kinds of mathematics (i.e., symbolic, experimental, technological, computational), participating in multiple fields of knowledge, embedded in cultural-historical events, processes, concepts and presuppositions about the world. This modern metaphysical paradigm shift involves a change in the ontological relations between mathematics and technology, reflected in the hybrid reformations of computational mathematics and STEM education, i.e., biotechnology, artificial intelligence. An historical ontology of cultures and mathematics brings matter and meaning together, focusing on the material/ideological relations between mathematics, technics, cultures, and environments. Cosmotechnics is proposed to the knowledge disciplines to balance the cosmological relations between cultures, technics, and natures. We can learn to live within the limits of the earth system. From this recognition of the cosmo-ontological relations between the modern Western mathematic and modern technology, ethnomathematics contributes to a project of producing technodiversity in a world propelled towards technological singularity. A multiple ontologies perspective, associated with the ontological turns in anthropology, sociology, geography, decoloniality, and philosophy of technology and media, contributes towards a pluriversal project of overcoming technological modernity that is neither fascist, nationalist, nor technocapitalist.

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Negentropy and the Future of Exteriorization (Bernard Stiegler Volume Exposé)