Bernard Stiegler

Teleologics of the Snail The Errant Self Wired to a WiMax Network

In this article, I would like to show that, concerning this era of ubiquitous technology and its teleologics, the stakes concern the constitution of a new milieu of psychic and collective individuation (in Simondons sense of these terms), which is at least as radically new as the writing of language was in its time; second, I attempt to show that what is at stake relates to the way technology changes the télos, that is, the rule of ends which shape the social organization of collective desire as a system of care and remedies; and, third, I argue that this era requires a new libidinal economy, if we admit that there can be no télos without desire. I will argue that new ubiquitous digital networks operating as new technical associated milieus have fundamental effects for symbolic and psychical associated milieus, and thus for new ways of being.

Technics of decision an interview

Born in 1952, Bernard Stiegler teaches philosophy at the Université de Compiègne, where in 1992 he founded the research unit Connaissances, Organisations et Systèmes Techniques (COSTECH). He was the director of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) from 1996 to 1999 and is currently the director of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). Asked at a conference in April 2003 how he became a philosopher, Stiegler revealed that he became one while serving a five-year prison sentence (1978–83) for a series of bank robberies. In a short autobiographical work, Passer à l’acte (2003), he describes how, encouraged by the late Gérard Granel, he spent most of these years intensively reading philosophy. Granel also suggested that he write to Derrida. After leaving prison, Stiegler studied with Derrida, received his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and began teaching at the Collège International de Philosophie. Stiegler is preoccupied with the questions of technics and time. He is in the midst of writing a remarkable project that has an almost Proustian scale: three volumes of La Technique et le temps have so far been published: I La Faute d’Épiméthée (1994); II La Désorientation (1996); III Le Temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être (2001), and two more are promised (IV Symboles et diaboles ou la guerre des esprits; V Le Défaut qu’il faut). Stiegler has also published Échographies de la télévision (1996), a “live” recording of an interview with Derrida. Stiegler concludes Échographies with an essay on Barthes’ analysis of the “this-has-been” [“ça-a-été”] in photography in relation to new digital technology. A short work, Aimer, s’aimer, nous aimer, dealing with the question of self-esteem and the recent case of Richard Durn (who in 2002 shot and killed several people in Nanterre), is due out later this year. For Stiegler, the technical is more than the tool, more than the machine: it involves the invention of the human. Life is always already reliant on technics. Technics make the transmission of the past and the anticipation of the future possible. Without technics there can be no memory, no heritage, no adoption, no invention. Technics give us time. Underlying Stiegler’s re-examination of technics is an original fault, default, or lack of origin (le défaut bernard stiegler

Telecracy Against Democracy

The text we publish here is the first chapter of Bernard Stiegler’s La Telecratie contre la Democratie . The broad argument of Stiegler’s book (and of this introductory chapter) is that what he terms “telecracy” is ruining democracy by short-circuiting the normal mechanisms of politics and destroying the foundations of citizenship, as understood since the Greeks. As a result, television and the wider “televisual” program industries have become the central political issue within our societies.

DOING AND SAYING STUPID THINGS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: bêtise and animality in deleuze and derrida

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derridas misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latters account is founded on Simondons theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated.

The Proletarianization of Sensibility

What happened to Marcel Duchamp between 1912—Nude Descending a Staircase—and 1917—Fountain? And why should it matter to us? Between 1912 and 1917, Duchamp was increasingly concerned with the question of reproducibility that, starting with photography and chronophotography, leads to Frederick Taylor—that is to say, to the readymade. The readymade is born from the serialized production for mass markets, which open up a new question of proletarianization in a new age. In my book Symbolic Misery, I tried to show that at the time of Henry Ford and Edward Bernays, the development of the culture industries led to a proletarianization of the sensibility of the consumer through the apparatuses for the canalization and reproduction of perception. Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, invented the basics of marketing by organizing the captivation of the consumers’ attention, and thus of the libidinal energy that marketing must seek to redirect from the consumers’ primordial

Ars and Organological Inventions in Societies of Hyper-Control

The control societies analysed by Deleuze are becoming societies of hyper-control, where supercomputing is applied to massive data sets, with the ultimate goal of controlling behavior. This control, however, is destroying all forms of knowledge—whether skills, capacities or theories—and undermining all social systems, including the economic foundations of consumerism itself. Although this situation can seem unstoppable, transformations of the technical system always have harmful effects on existing social systems, and thus require the invention of new knowledge and practices. Art has a crucial if not sufficient role to play in creating a new therapeutics for the 21st century. Having shown in 1990 that the disciplinary societies analysed by Michel Foucault have become societies of control and modulation—of a control and modulation exerted by the mass media, and especially television—Gilles Deleuze, in a dialogue with Serge Daney, hypothesized about the possibility of an “art of control.” Given that digital technologies, in particular after the exposure of the immense problems posed by “big data,” constitute an age of hyper-control—in societies that have become hyper-industrial (rather than post-industrial)—is an art of hyper-control either conceivable or desirable? * Leonardo Just Accepted MS.