It has change into virtually unattainable to separate the results of digital applied sciences from our on a regular basis experiences. Actuality is parsed by glowing screens, endless information feeds, biometric suggestions loops, digital protheses and increasing networks that hyperlink our digital selves to satellite tv for pc arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our bodily situation by counting steps and heartbeats. Telephones monitor how we spend our time on-line, map the geographic location of the locations we go to and report our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political potentialities. And huge wi-fi networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘sensible’ weapons – decide how the wars of our period are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital applied sciences.
However for the French thinker Bernard Stiegler, one of many earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to maneuver past the usual view of expertise. Stiegler believed that expertise is not only in regards to the results of digital instruments and the ways in which they influence our lives. It isn’t nearly how gadgets are created and wielded by highly effective organisations, nation-states or people. Our relationship with expertise is about one thing deeper and extra basic. It’s about technics.
In response to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of expertise, within the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our distinctive method of present on the earth, as distinct from different species, is outlined by the experiences and information our instruments make potential, whether or not that could be a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface comparable to Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. However don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ isn’t merely one other phrase for ‘expertise’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Query Regarding Expertise’ (1954), which used the German time period Technik as an alternative of Technologie within the unique title: the ‘essence of expertise is on no account something technological.’ This aligns with the historical past of the phrase: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us again to one thing like the traditional Greek time period for artwork – technē. The essence of expertise, then, isn’t present in a tool, such because the one you’re utilizing to learn this essay. It’s an open-ended inventive course of, a relationship with our instruments and the world.
That is Stiegler’s legacy. All through his life, he took this concept of technics, first explored whereas he was imprisoned for armed theft, additional than anybody else. However his concepts have typically been neglected and misunderstood, even earlier than he died in 2020. At present, they’re extra mandatory than ever. How else can we study to disentangle the results of digital applied sciences from our on a regular basis experiences? How else can we start to know the historical past of our unusual actuality?
Stiegler’s path to changing into the pre-eminent thinker of our digital age was something however simple. He was born in Villebon-sur-Yvette, south of Paris, in 1952, throughout a interval of affluence and rejuvenation in France that adopted the devastation of the Second World Warfare. By the point he was 16, Stiegler participated within the revolutionary wave of 1968 (he would later change into a member of the Communist Get together), when a radical rebellion of scholars and staff compelled the president Charles de Gaulle to hunt non permanent refuge throughout the border in West Germany. Nonetheless, after a brand new election was referred to as and the barricades had been dismantled, Stiegler turned disenchanted with conventional Marxism, in addition to the political traits circulating in France on the time. The Left in France appeared helplessly torn between the postwar existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the anti-humanism of Louis Althusser. Whereas Sartre insisted on people’ inventive capability to form their very own future, Althusser argued that the pervasiveness of ideology in capitalist society had left us helplessly entrenched in techniques of energy past our management. Neither of those choices glad Stiegler as a result of neither may account for the fast rise of a brand new historic drive: digital expertise. By the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s, Stiegler sensed that this new expertise was redefining our relationship to ourselves, to the world, and to one another. To account for these new circumstances, he believed the historical past of philosophy must be rewritten from the bottom up, from the angle of technics. Neither existentialism nor Marxism nor some other faculty of philosophy had come near acknowledging the elemental hyperlink between human existence and the evolutionary historical past of instruments.
Stiegler describes his time in jail as one in every of radical self-exploration and philosophical experimentation
Within the decade after 1968, Stiegler opened a jazz membership in Toulouse that was shut down by the police a couple of years later for unlawful prostitution. Determined to make ends meet, Stiegler turned to robbing banks to repay his money owed and feed his household. In 1978, he was arrested for armed theft and sentenced to 5 years in jail. A high-school dropout who was by no means snug in institutional settings, Stiegler requested his personal cell when he first arrived in jail, and went on a starvation strike till it was granted. After the warden lastly acquiesced, Stiegler started paying attention to how his relationship to the skin world was mediated by studying and writing. This might be a vital realisation. By means of books, paper and pencils, he was in a position to interface with folks and locations past the jail partitions.
It was throughout his time behind bars that Stiegler started to check philosophy extra intently, devouring any books he may get his palms on. In his philosophical memoir Appearing Out (2009), Stiegler describes his time in jail as one in every of radical self-exploration and philosophical experimentation. He learn basic works of Greek philosophy, studied English and memorised fashionable poetry, however the ebook that actually drew his consideration was Plato’s Phaedrus. On this dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, Plato outlines his idea of anamnesis, a principle of studying that states the acquisition of latest information is only a strategy of remembering what we as soon as knew in a earlier life. Caught in an countless cycle of demise and rebirth, we overlook what we all know every time we’re reborn. For Stiegler, this concept of studying as recollection would change into much less religious and extra materials: studying and reminiscence are tied inextricably to technics. By means of the instruments we use – together with books, writing, archives – we will retailer and protect huge quantities of data.
After an preliminary try at writing fiction in jail, Stiegler enrolled in a philosophy programme designed for inmates. Whereas nonetheless serving his sentence, he completed a level in philosophy and corresponded with distinguished intellectuals such because the thinker and translator Gérard Granel, who was a well-connected professor on the College of Toulouse-Le Mirail (later often known as the College of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès). Granel launched Stiegler to a few of the most distinguished figures in philosophy on the time, together with Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. Lyotard would oversee Stiegler’s grasp’s thesis after his eventual launch; Derrida would supervise his doctoral dissertation, accomplished in 1993, which was reworked and printed a 12 months later as the primary quantity in his Technics and Time collection. With the assistance of those philosophers and their novel beliefs, Stiegler started to reshape his earlier political dedication to Marxist materialism, in search of to account for the ways in which new applied sciences form the world.
By the beginning of the Nineteen Seventies, a rising variety of philosophers and political theorists started calling into query the immediacy of our lived expertise. The world round us was now not seen by these thinkers as one thing that was merely given, because it had been for phenomenologists comparable to Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. The world as an alternative offered itself as a constructed atmosphere composed of issues comparable to roads, energy crops and homes, all made potential by political establishments, cultural practices and social norms. And so, actuality additionally seemed to be a building, not a given.
One of many French philosophers who interrogated the immediacy of actuality most carefully was Louis Althusser. In his essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ printed in 1970, years earlier than Stiegler was taught by him, Althusser means that ideology isn’t one thing that a person believes in, however one thing that goes far past the dimensions of a single particular person, or perhaps a group. Simply as we unthinkingly flip round after we hear our identify shouted from behind, ideology has a maintain on us that’s each automated and unconscious – it seeps in from outdoors. Michel Foucault, a former pupil of Althusser on the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, developed a principle of energy that capabilities in an analogous method. In Self-discipline and Punish (1975) and elsewhere, Foucault argues that social and political energy isn’t concentrated in people however is produced by ‘discourses, establishments, architectural varieties, regulatory choices, legal guidelines, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, ethical and philanthropic propositions’. Foucault’s perception was to indicate how energy shapes each side of the world, from classroom interactions between a trainer and pupil to negotiations of a commerce settlement between representatives of two completely different nations. From this angle, energy is constituted in and thru materials practices, somewhat than one thing possessed by particular person topics.
We don’t merely ‘use’ our digital instruments – they enter and pharmacologically change us, like medicinal medicine
These are the foundations on which Stiegler assembled his thought of technics. Although he appreciated the ways in which Foucault and Althusser had tried to account for expertise, he remained dissatisfied by the shortage of consideration to specific varieties of expertise – to not point out the truth that neither thinker had provided any actual alternate options to the types of energy they described. In his book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2008), Stiegler explains that he was in a position to transfer past Foucault with the assistance of his mentor Derrida’s idea of the pharmakon. In his essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1972), Derrida started growing the concept as he explored how our capability to put in writing can create and undermine (‘treatment’ and ‘poison’) a person topic’s sense of identification. For Derrida, the act of writing – itself a form of expertise – has a Janus-faced relationship to particular person reminiscence. Although it permits us to retailer information and expertise throughout huge durations of time, writing disincentivises us from practising our personal psychological capability for recollection. The written phrase short-circuits the speedy connection between lived expertise and inner reminiscence. It ‘cures’ our cognitive limits, but additionally ‘poisons’ our cognition by limiting our talents.
Within the late Twentieth century, Stiegler started making use of this concept to new media applied sciences, comparable to tv, which led to the event of an idea he referred to as pharmacology – an thought that implies we don’t merely ‘use’ our digital instruments. As a substitute, they enter and pharmacologically change us, like medicinal medicine. At present, we will take this analogy even additional. The web presents us with an enormous archive of formatted, readily accessible data. Websites comparable to Wikipedia comprise terabytes of data, accrued and handed down over millennia. On the similar time, this alternate of unprecedented quantities of data allows the dissemination of an unprecedented quantity of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and different dangerous content material. The digital is each a poison and a treatment, as Derrida would say.
This type of polyvalence led Stiegler to suppose extra intentionally about technics somewhat than expertise. For Stiegler, there are inherent dangers in considering by way of the latter: the extra ubiquitous that digital applied sciences change into in our lives, the simpler it’s to overlook that these instruments are social merchandise which were constructed by our fellow people. How we eat music, the paths we take to get from level A to level B, how we share ourselves with others, all of those features of each day life have been reshaped by new applied sciences and the people that produce them. But we not often cease to mirror on what this implies for us. Stiegler believed this act of forgetting creates a deep disaster for all aspects of human expertise. By forgetting, we lose our all-important capability to think about other ways of residing. The long run seems restricted, even predetermined, by new expertise.
In the English-speaking world, Stiegler is finest identified for his first book Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994). Within the first sentence, he highlights the important hyperlink between our understanding of the applied sciences we use and our capability to think about the longer term. ‘The article of this work is technics,’ he writes, ‘apprehended because the horizon of all chance to return and of all chance of a future.’ He views our relationship with instruments because the figuring out drive for all future potentialities; technics is the defining function of human expertise, one which has been neglected by philosophers from Plato and Aristotle down to the current. Whereas René Descartes, Husserl and different thinkers requested necessary questions on consciousness and lived expertise (phenomenology), and the character of reality (metaphysics) or information (epistemology), they did not account for the ways in which applied sciences assist us discover – or information us towards – solutions to those questions. Within the historical past of philosophy, ‘Technics is the unthought,’ based on Stiegler.
To additional stress the significance of technics, Stiegler turns to the creation fantasy instructed by the Greek poet Hesiod in Works and Days, written round 700 BCE. Throughout the world’s creation, Zeus asks the Titan Epimetheus to distribute particular person skills to every species. Epimetheus offers wings to birds to allow them to fly, and fins to fish to allow them to swim. By the point he will get to people, nevertheless, Epimetheus has no skills left over. Epimetheus, whose identify (based on Stiegler) means the ‘forgetful one’ in Greek, turns to his brother Prometheus for assist. Prometheus then steals fireplace from the gods, presenting it to people rather than a organic expertise. People, as soon as extra, are born out of an act of forgetting, identical to in Plato’s principle of anamnesis. The distinction with Hesiod’s story is that technics right here gives a fabric foundation for human expertise. Bereft of any physiological skills, Homo sapiens should survive by utilizing instruments, starting with fireplace.
Factories, server farms and even psychotropic medicine possess the capability to poison or treatment our world
The pharmacology of technics, for Stiegler, presents alternatives for optimistic or unfavourable relationships with instruments. ‘However the place the hazard lies,’ writes the poet Friedrich Hölderlin in a quote Stiegler typically turned to, ‘additionally grows the saving energy.’ Whereas Derrida focuses on the flexibility of the written phrase to subvert the sovereignty of the person topic, Stiegler widens this understanding of pharmacology to incorporate a wide range of media and applied sciences. Not simply writing, however factories, server farms and even psychotropic medicine possess the pharmacological capability to poison or treatment our world and, crucially, our understanding of it. Technological growth can destroy our sense of ourselves as rational, coherent topics, resulting in widespread struggling and destruction. However instruments also can present us with a brand new sense of what it means to be human, resulting in new modes of expression and cultural practices.
In Symbolic Distress, Quantity 2: The Disaster of the Smart (2015), Stiegler considers the impact that new applied sciences, particularly these accompanying industrialisation, have had on artwork and music. Business, outlined by mass manufacturing and standardisation, is usually considered antithetical to inventive freedom and expression. However Stiegler urges us to take a more in-depth take a look at artwork historical past to see how artists responded to industrialisation. In response to the standardising results of latest equipment, for instance, Marcel Duchamp and different members of the Twentieth-century avant-garde used industrial instruments to invent novel types of inventive expression. Within the painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 (1912), Duchamp employed the brand new temporal views made potential by images and cinema to color a radically completely different form of portrait. Impressed by the digicam’s capability to seize motion, body by body, Duchamp paints a nude mannequin who seems in a number of instants directly, like a collection of time-lapse images superimposed onto one another. The picture turned a right away sensation, an icon of modernity and the ensuing entanglement of artwork and industrial expertise.
Technical improvements are by no means with out political and social implications for Stiegler. The phonograph, for instance, could have standardised classical musical performances after its invention within the late 1800s, however it additionally contributed to the event of jazz, a style that was in style amongst musicians who had been barred from accessing the elite world of classical music. Because of the gramophone, Black musicians such because the pianist and composer Duke Ellington had been in a position to study their devices by ear, with out first studying to learn musical notation. The phonograph’s industrialisation of musical efficiency paradoxically led to the free-flowing improvisation of jazz performers.
Technics attracts our consideration to the world-making capabilities of our instruments, whereas reminding us of the constructed nature of our technological actuality. Stiegler’s capacious understanding of technics, encompassing every part from early agricultural instruments to the tv set, doesn’t disregard new improvements, both. In 2006, Stiegler based the Institute for Analysis and Innovation, an organisation on the Centre Pompidou in Paris dedicated to exploring the influence digital expertise has on up to date society. Stiegler’s perception within the energy of expertise to form the world round us has typically led to the cost that he’s a techno-determinist who believes the whole course of historical past is formed by instruments and machines. It’s true that Stiegler thinks expertise defines who we’re as people, however this course of doesn’t at all times lock us into predetermined outcomes. As a substitute, it concurrently gives us with a fabric horizon of potential expertise. Stiegler’s principle of technics urges us to rethink the historical past of philosophy, artwork and politics so that we’d higher perceive how our world has been formed by expertise. And by buying this historic consciousness, he hopes that we are going to in the end design higher instruments, utilizing expertise to enhance our world in significant methods.
This doesn’t imply Stiegler is a techno-optimist, both, who blindly sees digital expertise as a panacea for our issues. One specific concern he expresses about digital expertise is its capability to standardise the world we inhabit. Large information, for Stiegler, threatens to restrict our sense of what’s potential, somewhat than broadening our horizons and opening new alternatives for inventive expression. Simply as Hollywood movies within the Twentieth century manufactured and distributed the ideology of shopper capitalism to the remainder of the globe, Stiegler means that tech corporations comparable to Google and Apple typically disseminate values which are hidden from view. A potent instance of this may be discovered within the first totally AI-judged magnificence pageant. As mentioned by the sociologist Ruha Benjamin in her book Race After Expertise (2019), the builders of Magnificence.AI marketed the competition as a chance for magnificence to be judged in a method that was freed from prejudice. What they discovered, nevertheless, was that the instrument that they had designed exhibited an amazing choice for white contestants.
The digital financial system doesn’t at all times provide fascinating alternate options as former methods of working and residing are destroyed
In Computerized Society, Quantity 1: The Way forward for Work (2016), Stiegler shows how large information can standardise our world by reorganising work and employment. Digital instruments had been first seen as a disruptive drive that might break the monotonous rhythms of enormous trade, however the rise of versatile types of employment within the gig financial system has created an enormous underclass. A brand new proletariat of Uber drivers and different precarious staff now labour beneath extraordinarily unstable circumstances. They’re denied even the standard protections of working-class employment. The digital financial system doesn’t at all times provide fascinating alternate options as former methods of working and residing are destroyed.
A very urgent concern Stiegler took up earlier than his premature demise in 2020 is the capability of digital instruments to surveil us. The rise of massive tech corporations comparable to Google and Amazon has meant the intrusion of surveillance instruments into each side of our lives. Sensible properties have round the clock video feeds, and advertising corporations spend billions amassing information about every part we do on-line. In his final two books printed in English, The Neganthropocene (2018) and The Age of Disruption: Expertise and Insanity in Computational Capitalism (2019), Stiegler means that the expansion of widespread surveillance instruments is at odds with the pharmacological promise of latest expertise. Although monitoring instruments might be helpful by, for instance, limiting the unfold of dangerous illnesses, they’re additionally used to disclaim us worlds of potential expertise.
Expertise, for higher or worse, impacts each side of our lives. Our very sense of who we’re is formed and reshaped by the instruments we now have at our disposal. The issue, for Stiegler, is that after we pay an excessive amount of consideration to our instruments, somewhat than how they’re developed and deployed, we fail to grasp our actuality. We change into trapped, merely describing the technological world by itself phrases and making it even tougher to untangle the results of digital applied sciences and our on a regular basis experiences. By encouraging us to pay nearer consideration to this world-making capability, with its potential to hurt and heal, Stiegler is exhibiting us what else is feasible. There are different methods of residing, of being, of evolving. It’s technics, not expertise, that can give the longer term its new face.
