Bernard Stiegler
Bernard Stiegler is one of the most inspiring andimportant continental thinkers of today, an heir toNietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida,but also to Simondon and Adorno. He is best knownfor his three volume Technics and Time on technology and memory (in English 1998, 2009, 2010) butalso for his other philosophical and political interventions in contemporary culture such as States ofShock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century(Engl.2015), What Makes Life Worth Living: OnPharmacology (Engl. 2013), For a New Critique of Political Economy (Engl. 2010). With his new seriesAutomatic Society (the English edition of part 1 The Future of Work will be released in the Summer of1. Stiegler systematically explores the socialimplications of digital technologies. Stiegler is theDirector of the Department of Cultural Developmentat the Centre Georges-Pompidou and the founderof Ars Industrialis, a political and cultural group %HUQDUG6WLHJOHUૡadvocating an “industrial economy of spirit” againstthe short-termism of capitalist consumer culture.In 2010 he started his own philosophy school in thesmall French town of Épineuil-le-Fleuriel open forlycée students in the region and doctoral studentsfrom all over France.
Bernard speaks about digital tertiary retention and the need foran epistemological revolution as well as new forms of doctoralstudies and discusses the practice of ‘contributive categorization,’ the ‘organology of transindividuation,’ ‘transindividuationof knowledge’ and individuation as negentropic activity. He callsfor an ‘economy of de-proletarianization’ as an economy of care,compares the impact of the digital on the brain with heroin andexpects the reorganization of the digital from the long-term civilization in the East.
Roberto Simanowski: In his pageant play The Rock (1934) T.S.Eliot writes: “Where is the Life we have lost in living? / Where isthe wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledgewe have lost in information?” These critical questions resonatewith a common thread in many of your texts regarding the evacuation of knowledge (connaissance) and know-how (savoir-faire), and the substitution of savoir vivre by ability to consume. Eliot’s complaint is informed by what Nietzsche called the death of God and Weber termed the disenchantment of the world. The nextlines in the Eliot passage read: “The cycles of Heaven in twentycenturies / Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.“God is no criterion in your writing, dust somehow is. Ratherthan a return to religion you advertise a return to the critiqueof political economy and a re-reading of poststructuralism andits sources, Hegel and Marx. Schools and universities as institutions where knowledge is taught and reason is formed play animportant role in this regard. However, these institutions are atwar with old and new media for attention as you discuss in your ૡ,QWHUYLHZnew English book States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the21st Century. Lets start with a very simple question: If you werethe minister of education, what would be your first instruction?Bernard Stiegler: First I would say, I need to become alsothe minister of science and research. Because first you have tochange the way in which science is produced and the objects ofscience themselves. The problem is what I call tertiary retentionand especially its new form: digital tertiary retention. Digitaltertiary retention is transforming the conditions not only of thetransmission of knowledge, but also of its elaboration and thetradition of scientific objects. All knowledge, including everydaylife knowledge, what in French is called savoir vivre, as well aspractical knowledge, savoir-faire, is now transformed by digitalization. I think that this is an enormous transformation for whicha new organization of academic knowledge is needed. More practically, more precisely, it necessitates the creation of new formsof doctoral schools, new forms of high-level research.
RS: Tertiary retention is your term to describe exteriorization of long-term memory in mnemo-technical systems such as archives,libraries or even oral lore. How do you apply this to the digital?BS: The way in which we create new theories and theoretical objects is conditioned by our instruments. Knowledge, particularly academic knowledge, is always conditioned by what Icall the literal tertiary retention in the case of the knowledgeof the West, for example the alphabet and writing as the condition of the possibility of apodictic geometry in the sense ofHusserl. Today we have objects, biological, mathematical, physical, nanotechno-physical objects. Actually, every kind of object isproduced by digital means that are not means in reality but arein fact the element of knowledge in the sense of Hegel: its newmilieu. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to develop new formsof doctoral studies, which will not only produce new objects ofknowledge but new instruments for producing rational objects.RS: Given the agenda of your book Digital Studies: Organologiedes savoirs et technologies de la connaissance of 2014 I take it that %HUQDUG6WLHJOHUૡyou are not talking about digital technologies as new instrumentsof knowledge production in the sense of Digital Humanities.BS: What I mean is not Digital Humanities which considers digital instruments in a classical way. What I mean is digital studieswhich is very different. The question for people who use digital means for analyzing archives for history for example or archeology does not really changes their views on what is death, what isthe role of linguistics etc. For me, to study digital text is to necessarily completely reconsider what language is - once digitized.It is also questioning what is the relationship between languageand writing, how writing modified the evolution of language,made possible linguistics for example etc. What we need is an epistemological revolution.
RS: What does such an epistemological revolution look like?BS: A laptop, a computer, is a device, an apparatus to produce categories or categorization through algorithms. The basis of the theory of knowledge for Aristotle is the question of categorization. What is happening with digitization is an enormous transformation of the basis of knowledge. And I think this needs acomplete reconsideration of what is knowledge as such. I myself practice with my students what I call contributive categorizationexploring what is the process of categorization for Aristotle butalso by practicing the process of categorization with data.
The other important aspect is destruction: Innovation goes much more quickly now and knowledge arrives always too late.Not only in the sense of Hegel saying that Minerva is flying in theevening and that philosophy is always too late. We have today atransformation of technical milieu that goes extremely quicklyand we need to practice the transindividuation of knowledge in anew way. To that end, we have to develop a contributive researchthat is based on the use of those processes of contributive categorization but that are also processes of contributive certification based on hermeneutic communities, realizing in sucha way the method of what Kurt Lewin called “action research”where you can involve many people in a team who are not necessary academics but interested in the team’s object: your own ૡ,QWHUYLHZstudents but also, in PHD programs based on such a contributiveresearch, forming communities of hermeneutic and network edaction research
RS: Transindividuation is a central concept in your writing, onethat is inspired by the philosopher Gilbert Simondon and aims atco-individuation within a preindividuated milieu. Individuationitself is an omnipresent and continuous transformation of theindividual by information, knowledge, and tertiary retention,which is often carried out through the encounter with books, andnowadays increasingly through engagement with digital media.Transindividuation is the basis for all kinds of social transformation and is certainly vital to “action research” and “hermeneutic communities”. Your notion of hermeneutic communitiesand the transindividuation of knowledge reminds me of PierreLévy’s 1994 book L’intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace and other concepts of knowledge productionfrom below on the Internet as a kind of democratization of knowledge. Wikipedia is one example, the quantified self movement isanother one. I also think of your discussion of the transindividuation of memory as a way to overcome the global and quotidian“mercantile production of memory”. What role do you think theInternet and especially Web 2.0 can play in terms of the transindividuation of memory and knowledge?
BS: Knowledge itself is a process of transindividuation as it isbased on controversy, on conflicts of interpretation, on processesof certification by critical means, by peer to peer critique. Thiswas the basis for the Web in the beginning. At the beginning theWeb was based on the process of transindividuation. But the Webwas so successful immediately that the question was how shallwe create data centers for being able to satisfy this traffic. Thisbecame a problem of investment, an industrial question in thesense of economics, industrial economy. This deeply modified thefunctioning of the Web itself. I know this also because I workedwith the WWW Consortium. There was an enormous lobby bySilicon Valley for completely transforming the data format intocomputable formats dedicated to data economy, dedicated to %HUQDUG6WLHJOHUૡcomputation. Today the platforms, the social networks and services like Amazon, Google or Facebook are only dedicated to thecomputation of and on data. This was not the role of the Web atthe beginning. At the beginning the role of the Web was to trackand trace and to make formalized, searchable and then comparable the singularities of the people producing webpages etc. SoI think we need a reinvention of the Web.
RS: On the reinvention of the Web I would like to hear more ina moment. First I want to put knowledge, tertiary retention, andtransindividuation into a broader political context. In your bookFor a New Critique of Political Economy you write: „The consumerist model has reached its limits because it has become systemically short-termist, because it has given rise to a systemic stupidity that structurally prevents the reconstitution of a long-termhorizon.“ Stupidity and the lack of courage or desire to use onesown understanding have been addressed in the Enlightenmentand later by Critical Theory. Famous in this regard is Adorno’sclaim that amusement promises a liberation from thinking asnegation. Your critique of the commodification of culture seemsto return to both Adorno’s severe critique of distraction andthe Enlightenment’s call to emergence from one‘s self-incurredimmaturity. What has changed — since Adorno and after the Web2.0 seems to have fulfilled Brecht’s famous media utopia (withregard to radio) of putting a microphone in each listener’s hand?BS: The question is the pharmacology of the Web. I work a lotwith Adorno and particularly on this question. But my problem with Adorno is that he couldn’t understand that if he wasto address these questions with reference to the Enlightenmenthe must transform the Kantian heritage concerning what Kantcalls schematism and transcendental imagination. I have tried toshow in Technique and Time 3 that it is impossible to continue tofollow Immanuel Kant on this question of precisely the processof categorization of the concepts of the understanding as a transcendental grip. It is not at all a transcendental grip but is produced by tertiary retentions. And this is the reason why we needto completely redefine the theory of categorization for today. ૡ,QWHUYLHZNot only with Aristotle but also with Kant. Moreover we have topass through the theories of symbolic time by Ernst Cassirer andalso by Durkheim explaining that categorization is produced forexample in shamanic society through the totem.
This is the first question. The second question is how to dealwith the pharmakon. If you don’t use the pharmakon to producetherapies it will necessarily be a poison. To say we have completely to redefine education and put students not into the grammar school but in front of a computer, is wrong. I am absolutelyopposed to the notion that the digital must become the first priority of education. Children should first be absolutely versed ingrammar and orthography before they deal with computation.Education in school should follow the historical order of alteration of media, i.e. you begin with drawing, continue with writing,you go on to photography, for example, and then you use the computer which would not be before students are 15 or 16.
So the point is not to make all children use a computer but tomake them understand what a computer is, which is completelydifferent. If we don’t create a new education the practice of themarket will rule like the practices of a dealer. In a way the digital is as strong as heroin is for the brain. It has exactly the sameeffect on society as heroin has on the brain. When you use heroin or opium the capacity of your brain to produce endorphinsdecreases and there is a moment when you become completelydependent on its intoxication, and have no other way than usingheroin. Now we are in such a situation with the digital tertiaryretention. The reason is we don’t know how to cap it, this pharmakon. It is prescribed by sellers of services, the dealers of digital technology. I don’t mean to be providing a moral judgmenthere, but a purely pharmacological analysis. The problem is notthat Google or other big Internet-companies have bad intentionsbut that we, the academics, don’t make it our job to produce adigital pharmacology and organology.
RS: Your call to produce a digital organology reminds me of yournotions on how music apparatuses such as the phonograph orradio have created a short-circuit in musical skills. Being able %HUQDUG6WLHJOHUૡto play music should be a precondition for significant skill whenlistening to music. The obvious link to the digital would be thatwe don’t understand the digital if we don’t understand its apparatuses, i.e. operating systems, programs, applications. As youpoint out, before we acquire such understanding we have to beable to master reading and writing. This, however, seems to bejeopardized by the digital apparatuses which undermine theorganology of transindividuation within book culture by compromising lasting attention, deep reading and complex thinking. Inyour book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations you refer tothe neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf who holds that we are not bornto read but have to undergo a cerebral rearrangement in order toachieve the skills of reading and writing, a cerebral rearrangement which is, as Wolf and others hold, nowadays jeopardized bydigital media. In a later text, on Web-Philosophy, you cite Wolf’sconcern as a mother asking herself how the digital brain will beable to grow and withstand digital technologies without negative effects. You conclude: “If bodies like the World Wide WebConsortium do not take on this kind of question, these organizations cannot reach very far.” What is it such institutional bodiescould do but don’t? And how can they help to reinvent the Web?BS: I think they should produce negentropy. Now, the problemof negentropy is always the production of singularity. If you areto manage a huge flux of data through algorithms, that are automatic computations, you need to process a comparison betweensingularities to make them analyzable and understandable, andyou transform this singularities into particularities. A singularity is self defined, and a particularity is defined by a set of whichit is a part. Computation necessarily transforms singularitiesinto particularities of such a set. Using digital technologies, youhave to deal between negentropy and entropy or, to say it withSaussure and structuralism, between diachrony and synchrony.In the theory of systems, diachrony is the dynamic tendency thatmakes dynamic the system, and synchrony is another tendencythat maintains the system meta-stable. I believe that it is todayabsolutely possible and necessary to redefine the architecture of ૡ,QWHUYLHZthe networks creating algorithms and big data dedicated to thetraceability of singularities and to put these singularities intohermeneutic communities for creating dynamic communities ofknowledge -with technologies for annotation, new types of dataanalysis algorithms and new kinds of social networks.
RS: Negentropy, i.e. negative entropy, can be understood as theexport of entropy by a system in order to keep its own entropylow. You consider individuation as a negentropic activity. Howwould the Web achieve this?
BS: The Web is producing entropy not only in the sense of thermodynamics, but in the sense of information theory, cybernetics,theory of complex systems and what I call now neguanthropology. The Web is completely subject to computation and automation based only on computation. Now, through interactions withthe practitioners of the web, helped by algorithms like bots onWikipedia, these practitioners created negentropy - that I callalso noodiversity. This is what is destroyed by the data economy,only based on computation. The question for the future, not onlyfor the Web, but for human kind is to produce negentropy. Theproblem of climate change for example is a problem of increasingentropy. It is possible to create new systems dedicated to reducethe automata of algorithms for giving people the possibilities totrace, confront and co-individuate their differences, their singularities. I am working on a new theory of social networking notbased on the network effect but based on the theory of collectiveindividuation. The problem is not dedicated to a short-termistmarket but based on a long-term economy capable of producinga new type of development based on an economy of negentropy.