“Where do you want to go today?” –Microsoft advertisement campaign, 1994.
There has, for a long time, been a sort of silence on the ‘digital studies’ JiscMail list – so I thought it was probably worth trying to do something with it.
Several years ago, a few people met for a semi-regular reading group in Bristol (in the UK) to work through a variety of ideas relating to ‘the digital’, whatever that may be. I somewhat flippantly named the associated email list: ‘digital studies’. In part because I was, and continue to be, greatly influenced by the late philosopher Bernard Stiegler, who, amongst many other things, wrote a call for ‘Digital Studies’ in 2012 (here’s a blogpost by me around the same time).
What would a ‘digital studies’ list and maybe an online reading group(?) mean today, in 2025?
I would argue that in the intervening years, between 2012 and today, there has only grown a greater urgency for studying the things named ‘digital’ and the sorts of work ascribed to them, abstractly and materially, for good and bad. So, in this follow on, and more modest, call for a digital studies (pluralised, provisional and no capital letters) I want to offer an invitation to grasp that urgency to interrogate ‘the digital’.
“Now come, fire!” – The Ister, Hölderlin
Digital technologies, in Stiegler’s terms, are the latest form of writing and access to writings, they are the means by which an industrialisation of knowledge has been taking place. There is, for Stiegler, an accelerating industrial and largely automated form of writing shaped, edited, broadcast and read with the help of forms of automation that take place at speeds tending towards the speed of light. The digital technologies are ‘intellectual technology’, following the work of Jack Goody, in which an automation, industrialisation and performance of speed radically transforms the conditions of the ‘life of the mind’, our collective capacities for creativity and critique – including and across the arts, culture, economy, geopolitics, science.
Writing, in any form, is an ensemble of traces, and rules of combination of those traces. For Stiegler, following the likes of Andre Leroi-Gourhan and Bertrand Gille, all human societies can be described as regimes of traces: the inscription, exteriorisation, and interiorisation of traces are what constitutes the material culture of the human ‘spirit’ and the ‘life of the mind’ (la vie de l‘esprit). The processes of ongoing digitalisation raise, for Stiegler and I argue for us, questions concerning the future of human cerebral organisation, what kinds of lives of the mind (and their material and social supports) we want to flourish.
It is essential to all disciplines in all their dimensions to question the status given to technics in our ongoing becoming as humans, and in the becoming of knowledge by which we come to know ourselves and our world/s. The questions imposed by digitalisation – what kinds of life we (collectively) want to live, according to Stiegler, is posed well before that of digitalisation itself, as if the radical experience of the upheavals provoked by digitalisation renders these questions apparently unavoidable.
What is to be done?
I propose a monthly online meet-up to read and discuss work we feel might be relevant to this broad questioning of ‘the digital’. I cannot run this alone, so It will need, from the outset, people to volunteer time and ideas, but this email list can act as the initial vehicle for organising. People may come and go, of course, and I wouldn’t wish this to be a burden, but rather an opportunity. For many, these may be worrying times, but there is solidarity in coming together to affirm creative and critical reflection.
In his 2012 call, Stiegler argues that:
[D]igital studies should not be limited to the study of digital technologies: their general object would be the study of technics and intellectual technologies in general from the angle of their effects on all knowledge in general. In this sense, rather than digital studies, it would be without a doubt better to talk of knowledge studies (“studies” in plural form denoting a specific relation regarding epistemology which, other than studying scientific knowledge (savoir) and understanding (connaissance), is conceived from the outset as a discourse unified by a pure logos of all technicity).
Hence knowledge studies would propose in principle – and as their common position – that the study of knowledge is not soluble to that of cognition, as all knowledge and understanding supposes, at the same time, being able to transmit and transform a technical artifactuality is essential to what Georges Canguilhem described as the form of technical life.
Now, some of these terms and their phrasing may seem grandiose. Even so, the ethos of a digital studies as an interdisciplinary endeavour with the goal of interrogating the contemporary conditions of our ongoing negotiations of creativity, critical reflection and culture, remain worthy goals to which we might aspire. Albeit, perhaps, in more modest terms. In 2012, for those involved in Stiegler’s circle (The Insitute de Recherche et d’Innovation at the Pompidou Centre and the Ars Industrialis collective) this was located in a conference that led to a website [digital-studies.org]. I would argue it is possible for a modest goal of forming a community of practice to read and explore work, our own and others, by acquiring fairly easily and inexpensively various means and consuming little time, allowing the maintenance of an online forum, beginning with this email list.
I can offer some suggestions for readings, I think a great place to start, though, is with you – what do you want to think about? What do you want to discuss with likeminded peers?
Please contribute ideas and suggestions! Open the conversation. Everyone is welcome.
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