Speaking truth to power

 

French philosopher who denounced the tyranny of digital technology

According to Jeffries' obituary: 

"He wrote more than 30 books, the last of which, The Lesson of Greta Thunberg, published in January, was devoted to the environmental campaigner, whom he saw as a latter-day Antigone in her rage for justice."

Bernard Stiegler, who has died suddenly aged 68, first robbed a bank in 1976, to pay off his overdraft. At the time, the school dropout and veteran of the May 1968 barricades was running a jazz cafe in Toulouse. “It went really well,” Stiegler recalled of his life of crime. “I got a taste for it and robbed three more.” He always worked alone. “It’s more efficient and we don’t need to share.”

The police caught Stiegler in the act during the fourth robbery and he was sentenced to five years in jail. “It could have been 15 but I had a very good lawyer.” He also had friends on the outside who kept him supplied with books, notably the philosopher Gérard Granel, a fellow jazz buff. But, sharing a prison cell with another inmate interfered with Stiegler’s studies, so he went on hunger strike for three weeks. “I wanted to let myself die.”

From this unpromising position, Stiegler went on to become one of the 21st century’s most bracing thinkers, one who denounced digital technology’s takeover by technocrats whom he called “the new barbarians”.

He wrote more than 30 books, the last of which, The Lesson of Greta Thunberg, published in January, was devoted to the environmental campaigner, whom he saw as a latter-day Antigone in her rage for justice.

While Antigone reckoned death to be inescapable but human souls would survive, he reflected, “Greta belongs to the ‘more than tragic’ world, the one that says everything will disappear, the entire universe.”

Stiegler was of a similar temperament. He came to think, as he put it in The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (2019), that many young people, trapped in an entropic world from which there seems to be no escape, have been left “mad with sadness, mad with grief, mad with rage”. “To put it simply,” he told an interviewer from Libération, “there is a schism between the mobilised young people and the old people who do nothing.”

. . . read more!

Bernard Stiegler speaks of his admiration of Greta Thunberg in an interview with the French magazine Marianne. The magazine is named after the eponymous Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic since the French Revolution, as a personification of liberty, equality, fraternity and reason, and a portrayal of the Goddess of Liberty. These semiotic overlaps, where and when they occur, as for instance between national symbolism and the present reality of Greta Thunberg's voice and presence, need to be charted, mainly to avoid the real issues becoming part of a process of distraction from distraction by distraction.

The lesson of Greta Thunberg . . .

Propos recueillis par Matthieu Giroux Publié le 12/02/2020

Article mis à jourLe 07.08.2020

The philosopher Bernard Stiegler died this Thursday August 6. We interviewed him a few months ago, on the occasion of the release of his penultimate book, "What do we call healing? The lesson of Greta Thunberg". The president of the Research and Innovation Institute (IRI) returned to the ecological emergency.        

In What do we call healing? (The Links that Liberate), Bernard Stiegler asserted that Greta Thunberg jostled and shocked a "dissociety" that had become deeply immoral and irresponsible. He used the young Swede to offer a reflection on the ecological crisis.            

Marianne : Can you explain the link you make between thinking and healing? Is this link already present in Heidegger, whose title you use?

Bernard Stiegler : The first to have established that thought as a way of healing is Heidegger in Being and Time (1927) when he made worry ( die Sorge ) a primordial disposition of Dasein. For Heidegger, to ask the question of being is necessarily to place it in a historical perspective where it is a question of looking after what remains to come from the past. In Time and Being (1962), Heidegger postulates that we must henceforth think of being in the light of modern technique ( Gestell ). The Gestell corresponds to the development of what is today called the technosphere. When asked these questions, Heidegger fifty years ahead, anticipating the ordeal of the Anthropocene, but removes the essential question of entropy theory formulated in the XIX th century which holds that the universe is working by an absolutely irreversible dissipation of energy, that all matter is energy which is doomed to dissipate.

This theory will result in the XX th century through the expansion of a universe that is not stable, and is evidenced by Hubble. Then Schrödinger argues that living things are characterized by their ability to limit entropy by retaining energy, keeping it from dissipating for a certain time. This point is today at the heart of the Anthropocene issue. The transformation of the biosphere into the technosphere considerably accelerates the production of entropy. We must now invent an industrial economy capable of producing negentropy - and of fighting against the growth of entropy.

Marianne : According to you, we are witnessing with Greta Thunberg an unprecedented reversal: it is now the children who are on the side of wisdom and responsibility while adults are on the side of childishness and whim. How do you explain this lack of benevolence on the part of adults towards future generations?

Bernard Stiegler : I had shown in Take care (2008) and in Telecommunications against democracy (2006) that the development of marketing, especially after the Second World War, rests on a structural infantilization of the masses and their "representatives". Marketing takes the place of parents, bypassing them and infantilizing them. However, one becomes an adult by taking care of children, for example by raising them, by becoming responsible for the younger generations. The entire consumerist economy, since the development of cultural industries (radio, television, cinema), is based on the infantilization and irresponsibility of parents. So much so that some, like the president of the association of friends of the Palais de Tokyo, called for the murder of Greta Thunberg on social networks. It is an extremely serious offense. It is an indication of absolute irresponsibility on the part of a person who has occupied very important functions, as banker then chief sponsor of contemporary art.
            
In my eyes, Greta Thunberg reformulates, on a totally different register, what Antigone expresses in Sophocles' famous play. Antigone defends the divine law against the law written by men who do not see that there are rules that cannot be transgressed - and which are said to be divine in this. I understand that Greta Thunberg can shock. Her uncompromising and therefore rigid attitude can give the impression that she is stubborn. On the contrary, I believe that she has principles and I thank her for being intractable, because by not letting herself be impressed by the media system which infantilized her ancestors, she has succeeded in mobilizing millions of young people, who recognize themselves in it. I think she is telling the truth in the way of what the Greeks called parrhesia. She is out of step with a system which, as everyone knows, is going into the wall. She is accused of all the evils because in reality it challenges us all by this position of absolute radicalism which forces us to take our place - not in front of it, but in terms of our responsibilities in the Anthropocene.

Marianne : You make a link between Kant's "sapere aude" ("Dare to know!"), The Enlightenment motto, and "How dare you?" by Greta Thunberg. The Kantian imperative is therefore replaced by a question which is in reality an indictment. To what extent does Greta Thunberg invite us to think in order to heal the world?

Bernard Stiegler : Kant posited that the spirit of the Enlightenment was to allow and encourage everyone to cultivate their reason. However, the Enlightenment is the prerequisite leading to industrialization and modernization: it is the integration of mathematics and physics in economic production, which will generate the Anthropocene. The "How dare you?" by Greta Thunberg is a questioning of the Enlightenment. I am not an anti-modern, but I am not a modernist either. This questioning is the symptom of a very great crisis of knowledge. The question that organizes my book is: does science heal? Today, most citizens consider that science is no longer at our service, but at the service of shareholders' profit. This trend can be seen in the scientific policies of universities and large scientific establishments (CNRS, INSERM, etc.). As a scientist, you are judged today based on your ability to serve industrial groups in economic warfare. I admire the achievements of the industry, I work with engineers and industrialists, but they should not be in the driver's seat on these always short-term questions. Science and infinitely long-termist - radical, if you will.

Marianne : From a media point of view, Greta Thunberg was the subject in France of an "unworthy" and "ignominious" campaign, you say. How do you explain the attitude towards her of a Luc Ferry, a Laurent Alexandre or even a Michel Onfray? Knowing that Greta Thunberg is only saying one thing: listen to the scientists at the IPCC.

Bernard Stiegler : Usually, the commercial press is used to doing Hollywood, featuring good guys and bad guys. The roles then become more and more caricatured. We reduce Greta Thunberg to a caricature and we oppose him other caricatures who wallow shamefully in this show. The extraordinary aggressiveness towards her is proportional to the gravity of the accusation she launches. Some people feel deeply affected in their certainties and their way of life. Luc Ferry, who was able to write more or less worthy things in the past, is no more than a pitiful chronicler. Laurent Alexandre is a very ambiguous businessman, an expert in story-telling, who tries to penetrate transhumanist ideas in France, and he tries to kill Greta Thunberg, to feed on her - like the vultures eating Polinyce's body.

Marianne : More generally, what do you think of the theses of the "cornucopians", those who believe that technology will allow man to provide for his material needs eternally?

Bernard Stiegler : This theory is based on the views of Extropians, a movement founded by Max More, who believe that one can increase man indefinitely. They are named so because they claim that man is capable of eliminating entropy, which is totally unscientific. These people can make this talk because the entropy theory, which is essential, is still not taught in high school and college, which is scandalous. Why ? Because the current economy is based on the exploitation of entropy. Many people build on these questions a story-telling, a very high level marketing, such as Elon Musk who claimed a few years ago to set out to conquer the solar system and who is today in depression (without "ground segment" there is no interplanetary travel possible). Entropy is insurmountable, as is mortality. The biosphere imposes limits.

Marianne : You take a long look at an article by Jean-Baptiste Malet in Le Monde diplomatique which calls into question the reality of the Anthropocene era to prefer the thesis of the Capitalocene age. What is it that you find fault with this approach, which is largely based on the work of Jason Moore?

Bernard Stiegler : Jason Moore's Capitalocene thesis is very interesting, but I think it is irresponsibly exploited by Jean-Baptiste Malet when he concludes his article by saying that another collapse is possible, that of capitalism. We must listen to scientists, as Greta Thunberg says: 95% of the world scientific community recognizes itself in the work of the IPCC. What does the IPCC say? That a change of trajectory is necessary to avoid the shift , that is to say the moment when a chaotic fork appears and where we lose control. The scientific consensus estimates that the shift is around 2050, and that the condition to avoid it is to act immediately . That's what Thunberg says, and she's right.

What exactly do we mean by Anthropocene? A period in which man becomes a major disruptive power and therefore alone has the capacity to modify the major balances of the biosphere. To position oneself on this question, it is in my opinion essential to have studied the work of the biologist and mathematician Alfred Lotka who maintains since 1945 that man is a singular being in that he produces "exosomatic" organs. that is to say, artificial organs, and with these, it is disrupting the natural order.

To argue, as Malet does, that we are in the Capitalocene age and that it is enough to overthrow capitalism for things to improve, is to make a serious mistake. It's urgent. The fall of capitalism will not take place within the imposed timescales. And if the drop results in diets like the XXth century has known, it is not worth it! In reality, behind the Anthropocene, it is a fundamental questioning of the epistemology of all sciences that is being asked.

Capitalocene NOT Anthropocene - Jason W. Moore explains

This video was first posted on the Re:LODE Radio post:  

There can be no return to normal in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH" . . .

Marianne - the "Enlightenment" is NOT a sleepover! 

This book review by Leonid Bilmes of Bernard Stiegler's "The Age of Disruption" articulates just how relevant his work is to framing action now and in the near future in the context of the present climate crisis. 

Daring to Hope for the Improbable . . .

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

WHY IS POLITICAL HOPE becoming defunct in so many young people today? This is the question Bernard Stiegler poses in his new book, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Early on, he quotes the words of a teenager whose nihilistic outlook, he claims, is representative of the zeitgeist of contemporary youth:

When I talk to young people of my generation […] they all say the same thing: we no longer have the dream of starting a family, of having children, or a trade, or ideals. […] All that is over and done with, because we’re sure that we will be the last generation, or one of the last, before the end.

These despairing words serve as a leitmotif to Stiegler’s fervent deconstruction of economic, political, and spiritual malaise. He dauntingly refers to the present’s “absence of epoch” — i.e., today’s lack of any significant political ethos. This “absence of epoch,” during a time of critical ecological changes, is why so many have been left disaffected, fast becoming (in Stiegler’s heavily italicized prose) “mad with sadness, mad with grief, mad with rage.”

Stiegler’s voice is by turns imperious, inveighing, confessional, and compassionate. His philosophical analysis — when the rhetorical wind in its sails slackens a bit — is intricate and brilliant, although grasping it requires some knowledge of the rhizomatic conceptual network that supports his argument, its tendrils often recognizable precisely by their italicization.

Stiegler’s origins as a philosopher perhaps explain his sense of urgency. In 1976, he tried to hold up a bank in Toulouse — his fourth bank robbery — only to be arrested, tried, and (thanks to a good lawyer) given a five­-year prison sentence. It was during this incarceration that the erstwhile-jazz-café-owner-turned-bank-robber discovered philosophy, subjecting himself to a strict daily regimen of reading and writing (some of his notes from that period continue to feed into his books to this day). Following his release from prison, Stiegler, with the support of Jacques Derrida, began to teach philosophy. Thus was launched the improbable career of one of the most influential European philosophers of the 21st century.

Stiegler recounted his prison experience in his 2009 book Acting Out, and in Age of Disruption he extensively revisits this conversion narrative: an upward climb from physical and intellectual imprisonment toward liberation. Quoting a beautiful phrase from a letter by Malcolm X (who had a similar conversion experience), Stiegler observes that prison gave him the “gift of Time.” He describes a typical day of study in his cell: “In the morning I read, after a poem by Mallarmé, Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and, in the evening, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.” The following morning, “after a cup of Ricoré chicory coffee and a Gauloises cigarette,” he would “prepare a synthesis” of what he’d read the day before. It was this monastic, autodidactic program that enabled Stiegler to reach perhaps his most crucial insight — the discovery that “reading [is] an interpretation by the reader of his or her own memory through the interpretation of the text that he or she had read.”

That’s a simple enough idea on the surface, but it conceals depths of implications. To understand why, we need to consider Stiegler’s theorization of technics. In his ongoing project Technics and Time (1994–), Stiegler lays the foundations for all the philosophical books he has produced. He posits that technics (technology conceived in the broadest terms, encompassing writing, art, clothing, tools, and machines) is co-originary with Homo sapiens: what distinguishes our species from other life forms is our reliance on constructed prostheses for survival. Drawing on the work of paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and historian of technology Bertrand Gille, Stiegler argues that tools are the material embodiments of past experience. Building on this insight, and incorporating the perspectives of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, as well as the views of influential but little-known French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, Stiegler claims that technics plays a constitutive role in the formation of subjectivity, opening up — and, if badly used, also closing down — horizons of possibility for individual and collective realization.

The role of technics in human life is cemented by what Stiegler calls “tertiary” memory. Here we return to the intimate kinship between the interpretation of a text and an interpretation of one’s own memory, Stiegler’s major insight from his time in prison. Technics, which makes these forms of interpretation possible in the first place, acts as a “third” memory for human beings because it encodes the past experience of others, and thus always remains external to the subject. Nonhuman life-forms have access to two kinds of memories: “primary memory,” or genetic information inscribed in the DNA code, and “secondary memory,” which is the acquired memory of an organism with a sufficiently complex nervous system. While secondary memory accumulates over an organism’s lifespan, it disappears with the death of the individual. Human beings, uniquely among higher life-forms, are prosthetic organisms that pass on their accumulated experience by means of exosomatic or “tertiary” memory, in the form of tools (especially written language).

So how does all of this relate to our present politico-economic malaise? Stiegler believes that digital technology, in the hands of technocrats whom he calls “the new barbarians,” now threatens to dominate our tertiary memory, leading to a historically unprecedented “proletarianization” of the human mind. For Stiegler, the stakes today are much higher than they were for Marx, from whom this term is derived: proletarianization is no longer a threat posed to physical labor but to the human spirit itself. This threat is realized as a collective loss of hope.

A key text for Stiegler is, predictably, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which has long remained the flagship of critical theory. Adorno and Horkheimer anticipated a rise in cultural “barbarism,” spearheaded by Hollywood cinema and the so-called “culture industry.” Today, billions of people are reliant on information technology that reduces culture to bite-sized chunks (the thought-span of a Tweet), and which is used primarily for marketing purposes by a monopoly of tech giants. Stiegler believes that such a situation threatens to dissolve the social bonds that embed individuals in collective forms of life. Most worrying of all, social networks are becoming the main source of cultural memory for many people today; Facebook’s “Post a Memory” feature, for instance, is one superficial manifestation of the deeper long-term impact on subjectivity and identity.

The Age of Disruption attempts to unearth the historical and philosophical roots of the current politico-economic sickness. Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s In the World Interior of Capital (2013), Stiegler argues that the risk-taking ethos of modern capitalism has created a generalized spirit of “disinhibition” that is a threat to law, morality, and governance. It is, in essence, a secular nihilism that Sloterdijk found powerfully expressed in the “rational madness” of Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, who is willing to sacrifice others in the pursuit of his own greatness. Closer to home, we can glimpse the same overweening sociopathy in the likes of Bernie Madoff, Jordan Belfort, and the crews of speculators who gave us the 2008 global market meltdown. This nihilistic disinhibition is exacerbated by a second form of secular madness Stiegler traces: the conviction that rationality essentially consists of mathematical calculation. Ever since Descartes and Leibniz, European civilization has been driven by a dream of a mathesis universalis, the achievement of a hypothetical system of thought and language modeled solely on mathematics. If this dream sounds like ripe material for dystopian fiction, it is, for Stiegler, our very own present.

The above summary cannot do full justice to Stiegler’s painstaking deconstruction of the roots of “computational capitalism” — a phrase he uses to join these two interrelated forms of rationalized madness. Stiegler firmly believes that a distinction must always be upheld between “authentic thinking” and “computational cognitivism” and that today’s crisis lies in confusing the latter for the former: we have entrusted our rationality to computational technologies that now dominate everyday life, which is increasingly dependent on glowing screens driven by algorithmic anticipations of their users’ preferences and even writing habits (e.g., the repugnantly named “predictive text” feature that awaits typed-in characters to regurgitate stock phrases). Stiegler insists, however, that authentic thinking and calculative thinking are not mutually exclusive; indeed, mathematical rationality is one of our major prosthetic extensions. But the catastrophe of the digital age is that the global economy, powered by computational “reason” and driven by profit, is foreclosing the horizon of independent reflection for the majority of our species, in so far as we remain unaware that our thinking is so often being constricted by lines of code intended to anticipate, and actively shape, consciousness itself. As Stiegler’s translator, the philosopher and filmmaker Daniel Ross, puts it, our so-called “post-truth” age is one “where calculation becomes so hegemonic as to threaten the possibility of thinking itself.” [1]

One should not be misled into thinking that Stiegler is a philosophical Luddite who seeks to do away with digital technology. Far from it: the digital, like any technology, is double-edged, and is useful so long as it remains merely a tool. While his book does not propose practical solutions (Stiegler promises to address some of these in a future work), it does seek to inspire a collective realization of the extent to which future memory is currently being shaped by algorithmically determined and profit-driven information flow. Stiegler asks us to consider how much of our lives we wish to delegate to market-tailored computational rationality.

Atypically for a writer of contemporary philosophy, Stiegler does not shirk from sharing his personal struggles: obsessions with death, suicidal impulses, fears of madness. In this regard, his style closely resembles the heavily italicized prose of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. The following passage is from the opening of Bernhard’s 1982 novel, Wittgenstein’s Nephew (trans. David McLintock):

In 1967, one of the indefatigable nursing sisters in the Hermann Pavilion on the Baumgartnerhöhe placed on my bed a copy of my newly published book Gargoyles […] but I had not the strength to pick it up, having just come round from a general anesthesia lasting several hours, during which the doctors had cut open my neck and removed a fist-sized tumor from my thorax. […] I developed a moonlike face, just as the doctors had intended. During the ward round they would comment on my moon face in their witty fashion, which made even me laugh, although they had told me themselves that I had only weeks, or at best months, to live.

And the following is one of several confessional admissions grafted onto the rhizomatic network of Stiegler’s philosophical argument:

At the beginning of August [2014], finding myself increasingly obsessed by death, that is, by what I projected as being my death, and by the latter as my deliverance, waking up every night haunted by this suicidal urge, I called, somewhat at random, this clinic where I had received treatment. I asked for urgent help, seeming, so I thought, to be suffering from some kind of early dementia …

Although the Bernhard passage comes from a novel, albeit an autobiographical one, the comparison is suggestive. Stiegler confesses to having tried and failed to write fiction during the first months of his incarceration, producing “countless pages now lost, to tell a story that never took any form other than the same fruitless effort to write.” A sentence like this would be right at home in a Bernhard novel, and had Stiegler been successful as a novelist, he might well have written the sort of tortured monologue of obsessive phrases and motifs at which Bernhard excelled. Indeed, Stiegler is drawn toward this kind of frantic repetitiveness even in his philosophical exposition: the Arabic invocation, “Inshallah,” is used several times, and words and phrases such as “absence of epoch,” “madness,” “barbarians,” et cetera, recur almost like chants. But this comparison also signals a key difference in intention: while both writers often turn to thoughts of death and endings, Stiegler, despite his proclivity for portentous clauses in italics, remains committed to emerging out of (in his words) “the mortiferous energy of despair that we are accumulating everywhere.” The same cannot be said of Bernhard, whose outlook was willfully mortiferous, as he might have put it.

Despite his urgent talk of apocalypse, chaos, and epochal endings, despite the rampant italics of philosophical admonishment, his arguments are enunciated by a humane and compassionate voice. As he confesses, he often dictates his thoughts while cycling in the countryside, and his wife, Caroline Stiegler, subsequently transcribes the recordings (I can only assume all those italics are audible). Stiegler’s traversal of the philosophical genealogies of Western rationality and madness, and his urge to rethink their metastable composition in an all-too-rational digital world devoted to the algorithmic reduction of all aspects of existence, allows the presently unhoped-for to at least become thinkable. What Stiegler hopes for most of all is to get his readers to “dream again” — to become politically hopeful (without the scare quotes). The last words may be left to Heraclitus: “One who does not hope for the un-hoped for will not find it: it is undiscoverable so long as it is inaccessible.”

[1] Ross has translated several of Stiegler’s more recent books, and his introduction to an earlier collection of essays, The Neganthropocene (2018), is outstandingly lucid and highly recommended for readers wishing to get a firmer grasp of the context and philosophical lineage of Stiegler’s thought. It is freely available through the Open Humanities Press. His engrossing documentary, The Ister (2004), co-directed with David Barison, features extensive interviews with Stiegler introducing his key philosophical ideas.