Spatial Machinations
19 February 2026 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Umberto Eco. I only heard Eco speak once, at a book reading in October 1995 for The …
Umberto Eco, Philosophers, Mythologists and Linguists
Interesting reflections from Stuart Elden
Graham Harman with a tribute to Alphonso Lingis, who died a few days ago. Thanks also to dmf for a comment on a post with a link to a book about …
Alphonso Lingis, in memoriam
Stuart Elden with some links to tributes to Lingis, who sadly passed away.
Lawrence Grossberg, On the Way to Theory – Duke University Press, October 2024 Thanks to Foucault News for the link. Introduction available open …
Lawrence Grossberg, On the Way to Theory – Duke University Press, October 2024
Stuart Elden links to this book which looks really interesting. Clive Barnett and I often talked about the various routes into theory, how we go about the doing of it in ordinary ways.
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).
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.
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.
I have a new journal article out, as part of a theme issue in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space. This forms the first peer-reviewed publication that stems from work I began around 2016 concerning automation (this is one of the earliest posts on this blog about it, with a talk I did at the SW Futures meet-up group). This took an impetus from the work of Bernard Stiegler around automation and my initial thinking with and through his ideas was influenced by many conversations around that time with my friend and former colleague Patrick Crogan, who has also written on automation (more than me!), e.g. here.
What the does ‘automative’ mean? You might be asking yourself. Well, I coined a neologism because I couldn’t find a word that fit what I wanted to say. In the paper I put it this way:
The ‘automative imagination’, in the context of this article, is a heuristic that enables two things: (i) a critique of the spatial politics scale pregnant within debates around the opportunities and threats brought by automation; (ii) an interrogation of the normative character of different habits of considering and discussing automation. I am not using the neologism ‘automative’ to assert any kind of authority but rather as a pragmatic tool. Other words do not quite fit—to speak of an ‘automated’ or ‘automatic’ imagination does not describe the characteristics of automation but suggests the imagining is itself automated, which is not the argument I am seeking to make. My aim is not to validate/invalidate particular narratives of automation. A ‘technologically determinist’ reading of the automative imagination might see what is imagined as goals towards which companies are specifically working, largely driven by economic imperative.
In the final sentence of the article I argue:
Using the automative imagination as a lens for inquiry asks for what kinds of ‘problem’ automation is situated as a ‘solution’, by whom and how they do so; and thereby how they are or may be contested.
For lots of personal reasons, this work has taken a long time to make it into print. Even so, I think the argument I make in the paper is at least interesting and has something to contribute in the current maelstrom of debate/s around automation. You can read the article for free, it is open access, courtesy of ESRC/UKRI funding. Here’s the abstract:
This article argues that the ways automation is imagined illustrate a wider problematisation of labour. The concept of an ‘automative imagination’ is proposed to articulate these different habits of considering and discussing automation. In these forms of imagination, I argue labour is discursively reconfigured as a logistical infrastructure. The concrete value of labour, the labouring body and the place of work as such are abstracted into an opaque logistical infrastructure in the narratives of an automative imagination. The impetus for this analysis comes from press releases and reports concerning automation and COVID-19 focused on the UK economy, creating a vanguard of abstracting ‘labour’ into infrastructure. The work of automation can usefully be understood as a relation, both in its implementation and in its imagining—a relation that geographers can, and should, interrogate. The automative imagination powerfully articulates the normative force of the performative abstraction and devaluation of work.
I hope you find it of interest.
I have been on an extended period of leave [if you read my last post you can surmise why] and so have not written for some time. Whilst on leave I heard some sad news. I found out a little while ago, and shared on twitter, that the philosopher Bernard Stiegler passed away on the 5th August. In spite of and perhaps superseding any criticism I have shared of Stiegler’s more recent work I think it is essential to note the importance of his work and his activities as a scholar and activist.
Technics and Time (especially volumes 1 & 2) is a profound work of philosophy that not only helps us to understand our relationship with (our) technology but also—perhaps more so—it teaches us something valuable about what it is to be human. In part this is about how we understand memory, memorialisation and remembering but it is also about sharing ideas, the nature of ‘culture’ and how we are always and already re-making and remembering what is to be human precisely through our mnemotechnical supports. There is no ‘human’ without technics.
From this insight comes all of the subsequent work around; the politics of disenfranchisement and the centrality of media to those issues; the ethics of intergenerational care and (especially) education/learning; the crisis of the ‘anthropocene’ and how we must urgently address it.
It would be easy, if perhaps tedious, to list off the concepts and ideas that are important here and how we might apply them. In some sense I think that would be simply to use the occasion of the death of a scholar to advance one’s own work through theirs. Rather I want to offer a recollection with the aid of my memory supports.
In 2010, very soon after submitting and defending my PhD thesis, I helped to facilitate a European Science Foundation- funded conference on the theme of attention, convened by my friend, and then colleague, Patrick Crogan. It is perhaps the best conference I have ever attended or participated in. We were holed up on the outskirts of Linköping in a hotel for a week, giving papers, listening and sharing ideas. There was time for discussion; time to get to know one another and time to engage with the ideas we explored together. We were very fortunate to have keynote papers from Tiziana Terranova, Michel Bauwens and Bernard Stiegler.
As many passengers on European airlines can attest, the French air traffic controllers can be rather militant in their strike action and it happened that a strike coincided with our conference. Thus we all arrived in Linköping at the start of the week, except Bernard Stiegler. Through emails and text messages with both Prof. Stiegler and his wife we ascertained that he had managed to get a seat on a plane after waiting in Paris airport for most of a night and he arrived, slightly dishevelled but in good humour late in the evening on our second day. Prof. Stiegler, Patrick and I polished off a bottle of house red and went to bed.
I was extremely nervous the following day – of ensuring that I hosted our esteemed key note speakers and of not looking a fool in front of a philosopher whose work I had only recently encountered but found captivating. I need not have worried. In contrast to stories other junior academics have related about the bad behaviour of senior and highly-regarded colleagues, Stiegler was kind, patient and generous. I remain impressed with the way he really listened and the way in which he did not presume people’s knowledge (of philosophy or his work), didn’t show off or try to belittle people but rather tried to meet them half-way (all in a second language – English). Over lunch I plucked up the courage to ask some (on reflection – naive) questions about how he theorised difference (and différance) that he patiently answered.
It is one of a few, perhaps too-few, occasions that I was shown a way of being a ‘good’ academic AND a good person. It has stuck with me and I have tried my best to emulate that spirit. In my limited experience, this is an ethos also embodied by participants in Ars Industrialis – the activist organisation that Stiegler was important in setting up.
Especially, but not only, in difficult times like the present, it seems to me, we can and should take inspiration from Stiegler’s message of taking care of each other, of ideas and of ‘culture’ and – I think – of hope for a world that can be otherwise.
There are a couple of other memorials of/to Stiegler online from those who actually knew him that are worth reading, linked here:
Yuk Hui – The Wind Rises: In memory of Bernard
Scott Lash – Technics of Memory & Life
A fascinating new book from an excellent and rather prolific scholar John Danaher – presenter of a fantastic podcast. Definitely worth a look – I’ll certainly be ordering a copy. You can get a copy here: [Amazon.com] [Amazon.co.uk] [Book Depository] [Harvard UP] [Indiebound] [Google Play]
Here’s an excerpt from John’s blogpost celebrating the publication:
The book tries to present a rigorous case for techno-utopianism and a post-work future. I wrote it partly as a result of my own frustration with techno-futurist non-fiction. I like books that present provocative ideas about the future, but I often feel underwhelmed by the strength of the arguments they use to support these ideas. I don’t know if you are like me, but if you are then you don’t just want to be told what someone thinks about the future; you want to be shown why (and how) they think about the future and be able to critically assess their reasoning. If I got it right, then Automation and Utopia will allow you to do this. You may not agree with what I have to say in the end, but you should at least be able to figure out where I have gone wrong.
The book defends four propositions:
There is now a ‘review forum‘ in Political Geography around Clive’s The Priority of Injustice featuring some excellent reflections by Jack Layton, Juliet Davis, Jane Wills, David Featherstone and Cristina Temenos – with concluding reflections from Clive himself. I hope you may take the time to read these thoughtful reflections and perhaps consider reading Clive’s excellent book.
In my introduction I suggest:
The Priority of Injustice is an articulation of theory-in-practice, not the reified practice of theory as mastery but an ‘ordinary’ practice of scepticism and puzzling out. Barnett articulates the book as a form of “prolegomena for democratic inquiry”, as a means of rigorously laying the groundwork for asking questions about how democracy and politics actually play out. To respond to Barnett’s provocation might provoke another question: is this a clarion for ‘radical’ geographical theory? In The Priority of Injustice Barnett is doing theory, which is (differently) radical – insofar as it has perhaps become common for critical/radical geographers to (very ably) ‘evaluate’, ‘translate’ or ‘use’ of theory, for example by applying theoretical ideas to empirical case studies. The invitation of The Priority of Injustice is to put theory in action as a part of ‘ordinary’ democratic practice. The principle of ‘charitable interpretation’, with the aim of “maximising understanding”, invoked by Barnett throughout the book, should, I think, be a tenet to which we all aspire.
Hope that encourages you to read on. If you do not have access please do get in touch.
Via John Armitage.
There is an issue of the journal Cultural Politics remembering the philosopher Paul Virilio now online. There is a (newly?) translated piece by Virilio too: ‘A Cockpit in the City’. I do not actually have access to this journal but wanted to share anyway…
Via Museu d’Art Conptemporani de Barcelona.
On the Ràdio Web Macba website there is a podcast interview with philosopher Bernard Stiegler as part of a series to ‘Reimagine Europe’. It covers many of the major themes that have preoccupied Stiegler for the last ten years (if not longer). You can download the pod as an mp3 for free. Please find the blurb below and a link.
In his books and lectures, Stiegler presents a broad philosophical approach in which technology becomes the starting point for thinking about living together and individual fulfilment. All technology has the power to increase entropy in the world, and also to reduce it: it is potentially a poison or cure, depending on our ability to distil beneficial, non-toxic effects through its use. Based on this premise, Stiegler proposes a new model of knowledge and a large-scale contributive economy to coordinate an alliance between social agents such as academia, politics, business, and banks. The goal, he says, is to create a collective intelligence capable of reversing the planet’s self-destructive course, and to develop a plan – within an urgent ten-year time-frame – with solutions to the challenges of the Anthropocene, robotics, and the increasing quantification of life.
In this podcast Bernard Stiegler talks about education and smartphones, translations and linguists, about economic war, climate change, and political stupidity. We also chat about pharmacology and organology, about the erosion of biodiversity, the vital importance of error, and the Neganthropocene as a desirable goal to work towards, ready to be constructed.
Timeline
00:00 Contributory economy: work vs proletarianization
05:21 Our main organs are outside of our body
07:45 Reading and writing compose the republic
12:49 Refounding Knowledge
15:03 Digital pharmakon
18:28 Contributory research. Neganthropy, biodiversity and diversification
24:02 The need of an economic peace
27:24 The limits of micropolitics
29:32 Macroeconomics and Neganthropic bifurcation
36:55 Libido is fidelity
42:33 A pharmacological critique of acceleration
46:35 Degrowth is the wrong question