In this contribution to our Reading and Resource Lists series, David Capener introduces a selection of texts by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler.
In the late 1970s Bernard Stiegler was arrested for armed robbery and imprisoned. Whilst on hunger strike he was given his own cell where, in solitude, he began to study philosophy until his release in 1983. By 1993, under the supervision of Jacques Derrida, he completed his PhD, which was published a year later as Volume One of the Technics and Time series. Stiegler went on to become one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century.
In the later part of his career, Stiegler sought to ground his philosophy in the urban realm in a project in the Plaine Commune area of Greater Paris. Plaine Commune is an area where poverty affects one in three households and increased industrial automation has led to high levels of unemployment. While critical of the role that new technologies play such as invasive data gathering, Stiegler firmly believed that the same technologies could and should be implemented for social good, where wealth could be redistributed through what he called a “contributory economy”. He described this as a “borough-wide experimentation with a view to generating and supporting real social innovation opening the way to a new macro-economy where industrialists, financiers, universities, artists, governments and local politicians work in concert, and with the inhabitants… The objective is ultimately to set up an economy based on a “contributory income.”1Clément Morlat, Olivier Landau, Théo Sentis, Franck Cormerais, Anne Alombert, and Michał Krzykawski_,_ “Contributory Economy, Territorial Capacitation Processes and New Accounting Methods,” in Bifurcate: ‘There is no Alternative,’ ed. Bernard Stiegler with the Internation collective (London: Open Humanities Press, 2021), 96. In short, a contributory economy is one where wealth and skills are generated for the good of the local community — a kind of micro-economy facilitated by the very technologies that have helped to create unemployment.
Stiegler tried to make sense of the world by doing philosophy. Like Marx, for Stiegler the world must become philosophical and philosophy must become worldly.
The following reading list is designed to give you an introduction to some of the foundational concepts in Stiegler’s work. This is not an exhaustive list but one that seeks to show how Stiegler’s concepts might help us think through the production of space in our age of contemporary algorithmic technology.
One of Stiegler’s foundational concepts that grounds all of his work in the urban is grammartization. This is a process that Stiegler, following Derrida and Sylvain Auroux, defines as the exteriorization of memory in the form of marks and traces — “the material spatialization of discourse’s temporality.”2Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of the Youth and Generations, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 145. Grammartization roots Stiegler’s thought in the urban because he understands the history of the city as a history of new forms of grammartization. For example, the invention of the alphabet is the condition of the possibility of the Greek city-state in that without the possibility to record, document and distribute the laws of urban life the city could not function.3Philosophising by Accident, Interviews with Elie During, trans and ed. Benoit Dillet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 59. In the same way, much of modern everyday life in the city could not function without forms of grammartization like the codes and algorithms that facilitate many of the technologies like camera phone technology that I give below. For Stiegler these kinds of endosomatic technologies produce new ways of being in the world because they act as forms of tertiary retention — a kind of memory that exists external to the human body but is constitutive of biological memory. For Stiegler this kind of external memory cannot be separated from biological memory. They are not two separate and distinct types of memory — they are memory. The following section introduces the concept of tertiary retention.
The concept of tertiary retention is another of Stiegler’s key concepts that is resolutely spatial. Stiegler is clear, “tertiary retention is … spatial”, and as such it can be argued that the city is both a memory support and is constitutive of memory. This is important in our age of contemporary algorithmic technology when digital technologies mediate our experience of the city and do so in ways that often operate below the threshold of human consciousness. 4Bernard Stiegler, Technics And Time 3 (Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press, 2011) 73.
The example of the smartphone camera, in particular the iPhone 11 and subsequent versions, is useful as it foregrounds the way in which our perception and experience of everyday life is increasingly becoming governed by algorithmic technologies that operate below the threshold of human perception, complicating the relationship between the endo- and exosomatic and mediating our experience of everyday life by producing new supply chains of perception. The iPhone 13 and 13 Mini, iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max, iPad Mini (6th generation) and iPhone SE (3rd generation) all contain Apple’s 64-bit “neural processing unit”, the A15 Bionic chip.5“Apple A15 Bionic Powers iPhone 13 and iPad Mini,” Tom’s Hardware, https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/ipad-iphone-13-a15-bionic. Accessed May 5 2022. The A15 chip is central to what Apple calls “Deep Fusion.”6“Deep Fusion: understanding the technology behind Apple iPhone 11’s new camera capabilities,” 91mobiles, https://www.91mobiles.com/hub/deep-fusion-understanding-the-technology-behind-apple-iphone-11s-new-camera-capabilities/. Accessed May 5, 2022. According to Apple, the chip can process “15.8 trillion operations per second.” For example, on the iPhone 11 (using the A13 Bionic chip) any image is not taken as one image but is rather a burst of nine shots. The nine shots comprise of “four fast exposure photos, four secondary photos and a single long exposure photo.”7“Deep Fusion: understanding the technology behind Apple iPhone 11’s new camera capabilities,” 91mobiles, https://www.91mobiles.com/hub/deep-fusion-understanding-the-technology-behind-apple-iphone-11s-new-camera-capabilities/. Accessed May 5, 2022. Using Deep Fusion the phone combines the images to produce the “best” image — “best” being an aesthetic category determined by Apple. Importantly, this process of real-time editing starts before the shutter button is pressed.
The first eight shots take place before the shutter is pressed. Once the shutter is pressed the iPhone takes one single long exposure shot (somewhere below 1/2 or 1/6th of a second). In the time it takes between the opening of the camera application and the final long exposure shot being taken the A13 chip has analysed 24 million pixels selecting the “best” individual pixels from each of the nine shots to produce a single image. The whole process takes about one second. The A13 chip uses its predictive algorithm to sort through each individual pixel to produce an image that has the “best contrast, level of sharpness, fidelity, dynamic range, colour accuracy, white balance, brightness … higher dynamic range, incredibly high levels of intricate details, excellent low light imaging, low levels of noise and … accuracy of colours.”8“Deep Fusion: understanding the technology behind Apple iPhone 11’s new camera capabilities,” 91mobiles, https://www.91mobiles.com/hub/deep-fusion-understanding-the-technology-behind-apple-iphone-11s-new-camera-capabilities/. Accessed May 5, 2022.
The iPhone camera is a kind of tertiary retention through which everyday life is mediated. It is a form of memory storage that is external to but constitutive of human memory. Other examples would be the iCal app on the iPhone, a Facebook timeline, or a Twitter feed. This third kind of memory that is exterior to the human body, and as such is spatial, aids the recall of specific memories — I no longer need to remember the meeting I have tomorrow because my calendar will remind me. What is important for Stiegler is that tertiary retention is constitutive of primary retention. Using the example of a turntable, Stiegler writes: “You only have to listen twice to the same melody to see that between the two auditions, consciousness (the ear, here) never hears the same thing … because the ear of the second audition has been affected by the first.”9Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: 3. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 3.
That I can perceive the same melody twice (or look repeatedly at the same image on Instagram), but at each audition experience something different, means that my perception of the melody (or the image) is not constituted by primary retention but is in fact constituted by tertiary retention.10See Ben Roberts, “Cinema as Mnemotechnics: Bernard Stiegler and the Industrialization of Memory”, Angelaki 11, no.1 (2006): 55–63. That tertiary retention devices are spatial and digital is of great significance for spatial production in our age of contemporary digital technology for it means that the possibility exists for their manipulation.11Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: 3. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 73. The speed at which digital tertiary retention devices operate, the access they have on our immediate experiences — where we go, what we buy, what we think, what we like — and, their ability to record, remember and process events in real-time, changes our modes of being in everyday life. The selection process operating between secondary retentions and tertiary retentions is short-circuited.12Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: 2. Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 116. It is important to note that Stiegler does not consider these forms of exterior memory as simply totems of memory that are used as memory aids, but rather as themselves constitutive of memory.
The digital exteriorization of memory is not new, but our contemporary technological condition has pushed it to a new stage.13Yuk Hui, “On the Synthesis of Social Memories,” in Memory in Motion Archives, Technology, and the Social, ed. Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo, and Eivind Røssaak (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 315. “Spatiotemporal distance between those recalling and what is recalled is collapsed, and a memory is iteratively reterritorialized in the moments of its recollection, over-determining it with the metadata of capture, storage and retrieval.” This is the automatic-everyday where we are sold the myth that our digital prostheses are opening out a world of possibilities when in fact, according to a specific and ever-changing grid of algorithmic governance, they are closing it down. The automatic everyday is a process that simultaneously operates at multiple scales from the planetary to the urban to the neurological. At the scale of the urban the city has become the veil of secrecy that digital capitalism needs in order to survive, and the currency of this new city is attention.14Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data. A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014) 3.
All of Stiegler’s work is based on the foundational concept that the human is an invention of technology. The human does not just invent technology, but the human is itself an invention of technology — “the invention of the human is technics.”15Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 137. Bernard Stiegler, Philosophising by Accident, Interviews with Elie During, trans. and ed. Benoit Dillet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 59. This again is a resolutely spatial idea, for technology (that which is external to the human and is therefore spatial) is co-constitutive with the human —without technology there could be no evolution of the human. This idea leads Stiegler to conclude that when we think about human bodies we must not only think about biological organs, but we must also consider technical organs. The human does not exist apart from both biological and technical organs. Thus, for Stiegler the human is a biological and a technical invention. and “technics is the condition of culture,” and culture shapes technics.16Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 137. Bernard Stiegler, Philosophising by Accident, Interviews with Elie During, trans. and ed. Benoit Dillet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 59. The co-constitutive biological and technical organs of human evolution must always be thought in the context of society.
Technology can be both the poison and the cure, however. For Stiegler, the technological object must not be thought apart from the social, biological and psychic context in which it emerges, is used and is produced. To do so would be to go against the fundamental basis of his philosophy: the co-constitutive nature of the human and technology. The human is an invention. The human does not just invent technology — “the invention of the human is technics;” “technics is the condition of culture.”17Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 137. Bernard Stiegler, Philosophising by Accident, Interviews with Elie During, trans. and ed. Benoit Dillet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 59. Thus, when we think about the evolution of human bodies we must not only think about biological organs, but we must also consider technical organs. The human does not exist apart from both biological and technical organs and to think through the implications of technology is to consider both organs. These concepts come together in a way that more fully captures the processes at work in our age of algorithmic technology in the term infrasomatic, which is a way of thinking through how the body becomes a constitutive infrastructure as part of a wider network of technological networks. So, the concept of pharmakon cannot be thought apart from the endosomatic, exosomatic and now the infrasomatic and the multiple scales of the biological, social and psychic organs of society across which the toxicity of our technological age works. This kind of multi-scalar thinking Stiegler calls organological in that it is a way of thinking technological processes across three fundamental organs of society. Stiegler himself is clear that “pharmacology” and “general organology” are the two concepts through which he tries to think technics.18Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9. To think technics pharmacologically is to think both the toxic and curative potential of technology. To do so organologically is to understand that one must not think the technical object in isolation from a multitude of other scales across which toxicity operates and to which a cure must be prescribed.