No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
I sense that we shall not come home to the fact of our unhousedness, of our eviction from a central humanity in the face of the tidal provocations of political barbarism and technocratic servitude, if we do not redefine, if we do not re-experience, the life of meaning in the text, in music, in art. We must come to recognize, and the stress is on re-cognition, a meaningfulness which is that of a freedom of giving and of reception beyond the constraints of immanence. (George Steiner in Sanders 1995: 49)This is not Bernard Stiegler, but George Steiner, writing in Real Presences and quoted in Barry Sanders's A is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age, a book which in many ways parallels Stiegler's, though it does so within a rather different cultural frame.Stiegler would not identify in every particular with Steiner's goals. For one thing, he would argue that Steiner, like Foucault, has not grasped the import of the neoliberal turn and that the barbarism of the market now outweighs state barbarism in its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manifestations (it is precisely as a result of this that the dominant form of power is no longer, for Stiegler, biopower, but psychopower).1 And he would wish to translate Steiner's therapeutic prescription into a different, but not wholly alien, technical idiom. But he would recognize the desire for an individuating and transindividuating process of Bildung, for the formation of a capacity for “deep attention” that provides a foundation for the development of (individual and collective) mature adulthood, the critical Enlightenment ideal enunciated by Kant.It is with these themes from Kant that Stiegler opens his book, before segueing smoothly into the consideration of an advertisement for the French children's TV channel, Canal Jimmy. Kant's “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” speaks of humanity's aspiration to mature adulthood (Mündigkeit, la majorité): Canal Jimmy's advertisers attempt to subvert this through a slogan which, in undermining parental and grand-parental authority, short-circuits the intergenerational play that underlies any possible system of care (soin, Sorge). Stiegler presents this as emblematic of the “total mobilization” of the industries de programmes (the term is not so exotic in French) against the con scious-nesses of twenty-first century human beings, now targeted/constituted as consumers and, as such, marked out for a diminished destiny in an outer darkness below the threshold of meaningfulness and maturity:The implementation of psychotechnologies by the psychopower of marketing constitutes a colossal historic regression, which en genders the irresponsibility and infantilization of adults on a massive scale through the liquidation of the circuits of primary identification with their forebears and the confusion of generations, demanded by the constant increase in consumption that is calamitous on all environmental levels, and destructive of all the metastable equilibria of the human ecosystem – from the infantile psychical apparatus to the meteorological system, the two being intimately linked and connected by the pharmaka of all kinds that make up the human world. (Stiegler 2008a: 83)Though Stiegler implies here a range of concerns running from hyper-activity to global warming, the unifying focus of his book is l'éducation/ l'enseignement – that is to say, informal education/upbringing within the (now heavily “wired”) home and formal education/teaching in the (sadly corrupted) milieu of the school. In eleven chapters ranging over the nature of the Enlightenment ideal, the science of attention formation in infants (“the synaptogenesis of the destruction of attention”), the cultivation of deep attention as antidote to contemporary capitalism's need to produce consumers, and the origins of Western educational ideals in Plato's transmission of the Socratic dialectic (the chapter is hyperbolically entitled “What is philosophy?”), he produces a paean to that “care” that is effected by the activities of attention formation and teaching within the institutions of family, school, and public sphere. The therapeutic response to the ravages outlined in the lengthy passage quoted above is to be found in a counterbalancing by “les institutions de programmes” (in his seminars at the Collège International de Philosophie, Stiegler promises some interesting developments on the notion of institutions), not least of them l'école laïque et républicaine – “l'école de Jules Ferry” – which has long been seen as one of the privileged crucibles of French citizenship. The “battle of intelligence” – a key phrase for Stiegler – is a duel between (good) program institutions (family, school, etc.) and (bad) program industries (TV, new media, the advertising industry, etc.).This much will be familiar to those who have up to this point followed the activities of Stiegler and the Ars Industrialis association. More striking, perhaps, will be Stiegler's critical engagement with Foucault's later work in chapters 7 to 9. Tugging, so to speak, on two of the threads of that work – the well-known article on Kant and Enlightenment (Foucault 1984) and the 1983 article “L'écriture de soi” (Foucault 1997), a text he regards as unduly neglected, Stiegler violently unravels the Foucauldian fabric.2 On the one hand, he exposes a contradiction between the attention to writing as pharmakon in “L'écriture de soi” and Foucault's neglect elsewhere not simply of such developments as the printing press and its relation to the rise of Protestantism and capitalism, but, more fundamentally, of the “grammatization” that stands at the origin of Western rationality in both its positive and negative (“pharmacological”) implications (Stiegler 2008a: 270). On the other, he argues that Foucault's stance in respect of the Enlightenment ought to have led him to appreciate the institution of the school and the specific politics of knowledge (“noopolitics”) of Jules Ferry, the spiritual father of France's school system, in a more rounded and positive way, pausing en route to castigate the May ‘68 generation in general for its one-sided view of institutions as merely repressive.3One is reminded here of the article in which Richard Rorty dismissed Foucault's anarchism as “self-indulgent radical chic” (Rorty 1986: 47). In that same piece Rorty criticizes French academic philosophy – perhaps a little peevishly – asa system which forbids you just to settle for being clever enough to have found interesting new descriptions to replace boring old ones. Instead, it commands you to exhibit your discovery of such unities as the application of a rigorous method, an illustration of a general theory, the result of having adopted the right starting point. (Rorty 1986: 43)Stiegler is, on this view, a very French philosopher, and a very interesting one at that: he can certainly lay claim to a new starting point (in the repression of technique at philosophy's very beginnings) and his general theory is rigorous and markedly ambitious in its architectonic scope.He is also very much a French philosopher in the apocalyptic tone he employs to specify our present ills – at least in this particular book. This, I think, detracts somewhat from his case. I am skeptical, for example, of the existence of anything quite so extreme as a “global attention deficit disorder”, and the attempt (in chapter 5) to redescribe Katharine Hayles's notion of “hyper-attention” as “dissipated” attention seems to ensue not so much from the evidence as from a politico-philosophical agenda. Evidence for the deleterious effects of television on young children's minds is strong, but to credit that technology with a power of “destruction” or even “liquidation” of attention and consciousness seems hyperbolic. Stiegler may attract applause for denouncing Game Boys or the other “filth [saletés] polluting the planet and destroying your children's minds” when he is addressing Les Amis de l'Humanité (Stiegler 2008c), but we know that orators in Jules Ferry's day inveighed to equal acclaim against the reading of novels. Periods of rapid technological change generate profound anxieties: it often turns out that the picture is more mixed and the poor old angel of history with its faced turned towards the past has seen worse.4If I too may grasp a marginal textual strand and tug on it, the repeated emphasis on the “école de Jules Ferry” as antidote to the toxic onslaught of psychopower also gives one pause. It is not simply that Ferry the individual was a racist and colonialist, who believed in France's mission to bring light to les races inférieures (among other places, in Vietnam), but the appeal to “noopolitical” traditions rooted in very Cartesian and intellectualist, “Third Republic”-style institutions is surely freighted in other ways with a problematical heritage.5 There is, at the very least, here, a hint of “the intellectuals [or at least les fonctionnaires] on the road to class power.” But then, there are few other cultures in which one could write so confidently of “La bataille de l'intelligence, en quoi consiste l'histoire de l'humanité …” (Stiegler 2008a: 58).
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.