Category: philosophy

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Reblog> Klimahaus ~ the world interior of climate (by Martin Mahoney)

Martin Mahoney has written a nice piece reading his visit to the ‘climate museum’ Klimahaus in Bremerhaven through Sloterdijk’s World Interior of Capital.

Here’s some excerpts and then a link to the full post below, it’s worth a read:

The two main strands of Sloterdijk’s argument in the World Interior neatly map onto the two main sections of the Klimahaus. In the first, we follow an ‘explorer’ boldly setting out to discover spaces which do not belong to his own lifeworld. Suitcase in hand, he embodies contemporary residues of the ‘Geography Militant‘ culture which Felix Driver argues can be detected in diverse discourses and media, a long time hence from its Victorian apogee. The presentation of other cultures as situated timelessly within particular spaces and climates, displaying ahistorical ‘customs and traditions’, recalls much earlier modes of knowing and representing the anthropological Other.

…

The ‘Climate Protection’ section offers climate not as an exterior space to be explored, but as part of a modern interior which must be carefully calculated and managed. The symbolic media of this calculation are many and varied: the ice core, the computer model, the ‘personal climate account’. But amid these calculative rationalities uncertainties proliferate, which are domesticated through personal stories from the future offered by characters we met on our first voyage

Klimahaus Bremerhaven: in the world interior of climate

I recently visited the Klimahaus in Bremerhaven, northern Germany along with cultural anthropologist Werner Krauss. Klimahaus is a unique museum dedicated to humanity’s relationship to climate. The main body of the museum leads visitors on a journey along the line of 8-degrees Longitude, following a modern-day explorer as he heads south from Bremerhaven to Switzerland, through Italy and the Sahara, into Cameroon, across the south Atlantic and over Antarctica. From there visitors head across the Pacific, calling in on Samoa and Alaska, before looping back to northern Germany at Hallig Langeness. At each stop, visitors enter an exhibition dedicated to the climate of the location, exploring its role in shaping human life and culture. In a rather old-fashioned anthropological tradition, we are introduced to the ‘customs and traditions’ of the locals, while immersed in the heat or cold, humidity or aridity of their climate.

Read the full blogpost on Topograh blog.

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Reblog> Book Symposium on Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine

On his blog Andrew Iliadis shares an excellent book symposium article published in Philosophy and Technology (paywall), for those interested in the philosophy of technology and in the work of Gilbert Simondon this is a really valuable addition to the scant material in English. It also includes a stellar cast of interlocutors, so kudos to Andrew!

13347I’m happy to announce that our Book Symposium on Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine has just been published online at the journal homepage of Philosophy & Technology. Many thanks to Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Marc J. de Vries, and especially Nathalie Simondon for contributing to the volume.Link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-015-0205-z

PDF: Book Symposium on Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine

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London Materialisms Reading Group

On the Crit-Geog-Forum list, David Chandler has advertised forthcoming meetings of the London Materialisms Reading Group, below. There is also more information about the group on David Chandler’s website.

This looks like an excellent opportunity to engage with some interesting ideas and hopefully meet with and talk to interesting people…

This is a notice of our forthcoming Materialisms Reading Group meetings. They are free for anyone to attend.16. Thursday 23 July 2015, we will be discussing McKenzie Wark’s ‘Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene’ which will be introduced by Paul Rekret (Richmond University). For those interested, here is Zizek’s short review of the book, and Wark’s reply.

17. Thursday 10 September 2015 – Miriam Tedeschi (University IUAV, Venice) will be introducing Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Spinoza: Practical Philosophy’

18. Thursday 8 October 2015 – Elisabetta Brighi (University of Westminster) will be introducing Deborah Cowen’s ‘The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade’

19. Thursday 5 November 2015 – Graham Jones will be introducing John Protevi’s ‘Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic’

20. Thursday 3 December 2015 – Nick Srnicek will be introducing Graham Harman’s ‘Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political’

Meetings are open to all and take place Thursdays 6.30-8.00pm, Westminster Forum, Department of Politics and International Relations, 5th Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London, W1T 3UW (5 minutes from Oxford Circus tube).

Wine and nibbles will be provided, sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and the Centre for Media & Culture Research, London South Bank University.

Suggestions for meetings after Xmas that we have on the table:

    • Michiel van Ingen (University of Westminster) introducing Kate Soper’s ‘What is Nature: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human’.
    • Philip Cunliffe (University of Kent) introducing Alexander Wendt’s ‘Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology’.
    • David Chandler (University of Westminster) introducing Louise Amoore’s ‘The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security beyond Probability’.

If you wish to be added to the Materialisms Reading Group mailing list please contact me.

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Amateur urbanism as political praxis, Andy Merrifield & Bernard Stiegler

Following a link posted by my colleague Clive Barnett I discovered the excellent collection of essays Andy Merrifield has collected in his website, which have all(?) been previously published elsewhere. I’ve been working through this treasure trove and was particularly struck by one of these essays.

Earlier in 2015, Merrifield published an ‘intervention’ on the Antipode website entitled “Future Shock“, in which he contemplates the absence of contemporary thinking of radical futures following a collapse of future thinking into a technocratic status quo.

Merrifield relates this to Edward Said’s 1993 BBC Reith Lectures on representations of the intellectual, and the amateur and the professional. Merrifield suggests:

[P]rofessionalism, said Said, can constitute a form of compliant behavior, of making yourself marketable and presentable to the powers that be. None of which denies the need for competence, for being conscientious about what you do, and for having the right skills to do it.

He argues that it is a form of professionalism that has facilitated a particular kind of ethos for corporate urban development, a development that

enables all sorts of ideas [to be] imposed on peoples’ lives from above, all kinds of paradigms that go from professional boardrooms to somebody’s drafty living room, if they’re lucky enough to have a living room.

He lays out an intellectual/ policy lineage from ‘authoritative’ urbanism to authoritarian ‘austerity’. Merrifield begins with Roger Starr, writer of Urban Choices: The City and Its Critics, who criticised the likes of Mumford, Jacobs and Gans as meddling amateurs, who became New York City’s Housing Commissioner and in 1976 masterminded a national program following directly from his earlier representations of urban reality: “Planned Shrinkage”.

Sketching forward to today, Merrifield asks us to consider the historical lineage between Planned Shrinkage and frenzied pursuit for “austerity.” he argues that Planned Shrinkage and austerity have two common characteristics.

First, is an overriding goal to rundown and/or plunder the public sector, to make “unproductive” public services productive for vested unproductive interests–you know, for financial parasites on the make. Second, both policies justify their programs though made up “evidence.” For austerity, just as for Planned Shrinkage, economists are the redoubtable voice of authority.

Thus, the amateur, counter-posed to the ‘professional’ is a political figure. Arguing, earlier in the intervention, through Said, Merrfield argues:

Professionalism means having an expertise to hide behind, an often narrow expertise, an esoteric language that sets you apart, that gains entry into a professional bodies, one strictly off-limits to rank amateurs. Amateurs, by contrast, aren’t moved by profit or pay; they usually care more about ideas and values not tied down to any profession; their vision is often more expansive, more eclectic, not hampered by the conservatism of narrow expertise, preoccupied with defending one’s intellectual turf. To be an amateur is to express the ancient French word: love of, a person who engages on an unpaid basis, a non-specialist, a layperson. Nothing pejorative intended. Amateurs sometimes care for ideas that question professional authority because they express concerns professions don’t consider, don’t see, don’t care about.

This has great resonance with a very similar understanding of the figure of the amateur, equally political, put forward by Bernard Stiegler. In the Ars Industrialis ‘vocabulary’, Stiegler argues that the amateur:

is the name given to one who loves works or who realizes him- or her- self in traversing such works. There are lovers of science and technology, just as one speaks of art lovers. The figure of the amateur extends the figure of taste, as suggested by the Enlightenment, as cognition of the sensible or mediation of the immediate, as the singularity of an educated sentiment. It accompanies, therefore, the question of the formation of a critical public (irreducible to the audience).

Thus, in counterpoising the amateur to the professional both Merrifield (via Said) and Stiegler (sort-of via Weber) argue that the role of amateurism is crucial to producing alternative ways of economic, political and social living.

Merrifield:

For the urban is itself a political object, a very special virtual political object; so is the “right to the city.” Urban rights are ones that need inventing, need inventing offensively; they aren’t established safeguards already there, ones you can invoke defensively…

Since we amateurs don’t have that means or money, we must start concrete and try to scale upwards and outwards, try to realize our abstract renderings, our utopian and futuristic yearnings.

Stiegler:

The figure of the amateur is the ideal type for the economy of contribution because the amateur is the one who builds him- or her- self a sustainable libidinal economy and does not expect industrial society to put it in place.

Both Merrifield and Stiegler offer laudable appeals to amateurism and the ground-up D.I.Y political action that, of course, also resonates with the forms of horizontalist political activism we are becoming used to seeing that operate both against austerity and towards alternative forms of urban life. Nevertheless, one might be left wondering, when reading both accounts, where the space is for collectivity? In both accounts the ‘virtual’ and the ‘transindividual’ are the conceptual footholds from which to forge such questions –it is in the immanent potential of the virtual that we, collectively, are produced and reciprocally produce the future and such a potential is performed within and through the various relations between our ‘selves’:

“The “I”, as a psychic individual, can only be thought in relationship to a “we”, which is a collective individual: the “I” is constituted in adopting a collective tradition, which it inherits, and in which a plurality of “Is” acknowledge each other’s existence.”

[Stiegler, Desire & Knowledge]

This is an interesting (to me anyway!) parallel theorisation of the amateur and no doubt there are more… I think the close to Merrifield’s Antipode intervention is particularly effective:

Rights aren’t passive: they become your right by working through danger, by orchestrating effective political action. You make rights your right. Hence the reason why so many people misunderstand what’s meant by right to the city, where the future necessarily stalks the present; horizons open up for the virtual to be glimpsed, for rights to actualize themselves through politics. Virtual theory, as such, isn’t a theory that explains reality, nor even “corresponds” with reality; it’s more a theory that is correct because it enables politics to be correct. It nurtures the correct politics, a robust and possible Left politics: theory here opens up space for a radical politics that hitherto wasn’t there, that as yet has no space. It opens up the vastest and most thrilling futuristic space of all, the noblest of all cloud-cuckoo lands: the continent of hope.

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Translation > Greece at the Heart of Europe (An open letter signed by Balibar, Stiegler & others)

On Politis.fr (the weekly online political magazine) there is an open letter of support to ‘the Greek people’ (published this morning) signed by a long list of notable public/intellectual figures, including Etienne Balibar,  Luc Boltanski, Michael Löwy, Gus Massiah, Jean-Claude Petit and Bernard Stiegler, amongst others.

The content is not (really) surprising, and it broadly reiterates much of the criticism of an austerity that is seen as imposed ‘technocratically’ by an unelected (or at least – not clearly democratically accountable in a way that is meaningful to this form of action) ruling class in a socialisation of debt to the extreme detriment of those worst off in society, and apparently to the benefit of those who instigated the economic/financial crisis in the first place.

What is perhaps mildly surprising is where this has been ‘published’, not in Le Monde for example. I am not entirely sure what can be read into this… the website is seen as a more accessible/ international venue(?), the papers won’t publish such a letter(?) – it is interesting, in any case (and regardless of whether you agree or not), that such critique of austerity rarely finds its way into wider public debates (at least in the UK anyway, and perhaps not in France either).

I offer below a rough translation of the letter (it is fairly short). The footnotes were in the original, although I’ve linked to the English version of the second footnote.

Greece at the heart of Europe

PETITION: The Greek people have not problem with Europe, they and us have a problem with the “European” power which is destroying Europe!

We do not believe that it is the Greek people who are guilty of doubling their public debt in less than ten years [1]. Nor do we believe that they should pay such a debt, which has been artificially inflated with the sacking of their human rights and the wrecking of their democracy.

For years the national and supranational powers that control the European Union have inflicted austerity coupled with “structural reforms” upon the Greeks which is ruining their economy and sinking them into increasing misery.

Today, in a burst of lucidity and dignity the Greek people have given an electoral majority to the radical left, distanced from the corruption and compromises of yesterday, forming a government with a mandate to push back against the dictates of the “Troika” (the IMF, ECB and European Commission) and to enact a policy of breaking with such criminal austerity.

The objective of the European ruling classes is not to force the Greeks to repay a debt that everyone knows cannot be repaid, the only function of which is to drain public funds into the banks, but rather to force the government of Alexis Tsipras and Syriza into capitulation. They do this in order to continue to strangle the Greek people, condemning them to forever begging loans that become only ever more expensive, and to demonstrate in the eyes of all of Europe that it is impossible to tackle the banks, to contest the absolute power of the ruling classes, or to open out an alternative to austerity…

It is unacceptable that those who claim to speak “on behalf of Europe” contrive to breach their most basic commitments in order to break the government appointed by the Greek people. Going so far as to yesterday “ban” implementing even minimal humanitarian measures (housing allowance, food aid, restoration of electricity)! Today the ruling classes require the Greek government to worsen the decline in pensions, to below the poverty threshold, to increase VAT on necessities, and they confirm that they are willing to bankrupt the country and expel them from the Eurozone, and thus eventually the European Union, at the risk of provoking a crisis with unpredictable consequences.

We support the Greek people in their mobilisation and their determination to roll back this despotic and reactionary operation.

The struggle of the Greek people is that of all European democrats and progressives. If there is eventual defeat, all of Europe will pay the price. Should there be a victory, however limited, all of Europe will reap the reward.

This is why it is necessary that the movements which in France and in Europe hope for a renewal of democracy affirmatively respond to the calls of Syriza to construct a European solidarity around Greece and the Greek people. The prospect of a referendum increases the urgency of such solidarity [2].

We stand shoulder to shoulder with the Greek people, for their fight is ours.
PRIMARY SIGNATORIES

Antoine Artous, Etienne Balibar, Sophie Bessis, Jacques Bidet, Luc Boltanski, Gilles Bounoure, Marie-Pierre Bourcier, Claude Calame, Patrick Chamoiseau, Patrice Cohen Seat, Jean-Numa Ducange, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Michel Husson, Michael Löwy, Marie-José Malis, Jean-Louis Martinelli, Gus Massiah, Jean-Claude Petit, Philippe Pignarre, Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Pierre Salama, Denis Sieffert, Patrick Silberstein, Francis Sitel, Bernard Stiegler, Hervé Télémaque, Jacques Testart, Eleni Varikas, Pierre Zarka…

Notes.
1. See: An Appeal for Support for Greek resistance and their Trust Commission on Public Debt: http://cadtm.org/Appel-pour-soutenir-la-Grece-qui

2. http://www.altersummit.eu/accueil/article/no-to-austerity-yes-to-democracy

ADDENDUM: Of course, having said that the argument contra austerity rarely appears in ‘mainstream’ media outlets there are some exceptions, not least economist Paul Krugman’s repeated denouncing of austerity through op-ed articles in left-leaning newspapers, such as in The Guardian (29/04/2015) and The New York Times (29/06/2015).

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Running towards publication – Jonathan Sterne on the pace of publishing

Over on the group blog Culture Digitally, Jonathan Sterne has written about the competing paces of publication, audiences and the lifespan of our examples:

The recent Culture Digitally posts by Jeff Pooley and C.W. Anderson suggest that one of the main broken areas of new media scholarship has to do with publication and speed. Our examples are out of date before our articles appear in the journals to which we submitted them. Our books suffer even worse fates. Both authors suggest the problem is the speed with which our objects of study–digital media–change. Both also point to the dilemmas faced by academic authors and presses as the world of academic publishing changes. . . slowly. And both suggest that iterated versions and new digital platforms would be one set of solutions to this problem.

Sterne makes the point that the texts to which we continue to return, and with which we teach, are those that do not solely rely on the examples. While examples are ‘examples of themselves’ (see Dewsbury et al. 2002), they are also (hopefully) illustrative of a broader theory about the world:

Scholars have developed a number of strategies for dealing with the different temporalities of scholarship and life, and that in fact is important for our students to learn about. Take four canonical examples that still frequently appear on media studies syllabi (do a search for these and “media studies syllabus” if you don’t believe me): Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding,” Raymond Williams’ Television; Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style; and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. All of these were originally published in the 1970s and reference social worlds vastly different from the ones our student inhabit. Two of them refer to the UK, one to the US, and one to France, which means students everywhere else need to make some adjustments. Why are these texts still being taught if they are so out of date? The answer is simple: the ideas in them transcend the examples, and even where the conclusions no longer obtain, the questions they ask might be useful for students to ask today. To be sure, treating them as timeless social science theories would be a disservice: Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model is tied to the inaccessibility of television production in the 1970s; an account of the same politics around news today would have to think very differently about production.

…

Dated examples in readings are not a problem. They are unavoidable when the reference is popular culture, current events or new media. They can be used to teach students about the specificity of their (and our) own moment; and they provide an opportunity to teach students that intellectual work is an ongoing process and conversation of which our students can be a part.

Sterne goes on to make a plea against ‘keeping up’ with the acceleration, against ‘keeping [old work] up-to-date’ and that

we must also let scholars walk away from their projects. More than that, we should encourage it. Abandoning work has probably done more to advance scholarly conversation than any other single act by academic writers.

It’s worth reading the whole thing. I would briefly note that it is possible to argue that there is a healthy academic tradition of ‘abandonment’. In philosophy, there have been a number of writers/thinkers that have unapologetically changed their minds or simply shifted the terms of their projects – for example Francois Laruelle has made it a feature of his work as such, and one might argue that Foucault did so too.

Likewise, there have been arguments made for a more contemplative pace of work. For example, Bernard Stiegler has argued that we need to (re)constitute what the Romans called Otium the techniques of the self, of our care for ourselves and for knowledge, such that we allow space and time for attentive thought.

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Clive Barnett on Foucault and Problematisation

On his blog Pop Theory my colleague Clive Barnett highlights a new paper he has out with nonsite.org entitled On Problematization: Elaborations on a theme in “late Foucault”. It’s worth (of course!) taking a look – A funny coincidence is that this appears at the same time as I am revisiting Rabinow’s Anthropos Today which is one of the sources through which Clive reflects on Foucault’s conceptualisation of ‘problematisation’ (not least in The Order of Things [Les Mots et les Choses])…

Clive suggests his article is ‘an experiment in seeing how much mileage along the path of developing useable social science concepts you can get out of a few passing remarks from a master-thinker’. In this case, Foucault’s suggestion of problematisation as ‘an interruption of the normal, naturalized, settled flow of events’, which Clive argues, by putting Foucault in conversation with Dewey (as does Rabinow, but to different ends), that:

The notion of problematization might, in short, point towards a mode of descriptive analysis that helps to draw into view the significance of the difficulties and concerns that already animate people’s actions. Rather than underwriting a model of critique in which it is presumed that people’s subjectivities are readily available for re-making under the force of the revelatory exposure of contingency, elaborations of Foucault’s notion of problematization invite us to give more credence to how aspects of people’s subjectivity come to matter so strongly to them, and in turn to ask what price would have to be paid in the pursuit of transformation.

An interesting paper, well worth exploring (for free!), on nonsite.org.

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New resource for readers of Stiegler

Philosopher Daniel Ross, translator of many of Bernard Stiegler’s books published in English with Polity, has uploaded quite a few his translations of lectures and articles by Stiegler to his academia.edu page.

If you’re interested in Steigler’s more recent work, concerning automation and the anthropocene this is a valuable resource.

See, in particular:

So – a public big THANK YOU (from me) to Dan for sharing!!

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To Save the World… Preface by Bernard Stiegler for Michel Bauwens’ new book

Michel Bauwens, peer-to-peer activist and founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, has a new book out, in French, entitled Saving the World: Towards a post-capitialist society with peer-to-peer. In the book Michel, with his collaborator Jean Lievens, argues that a new distributed and de-centralised economic model is necessary to shake up the world and  drive us towards a post-capitalist society. In a wide-ranging, impassioned and ambitious, perhaps idealistic, diagramming of a new mode of living and working Bauwens reaches for a different way of performing economics and the political.

The book has a preface by Bernard Stiegler that has been shared on the Peer-to-Peer Foundation website and so I have translated it. I have offered this to the foundation and I would be pleased if it is of use to them or to anyone else. The copyright of the text remains under the license attributed to the original book.

Preface by Bernard Stiegler

To Bauwens, M. and Lievens, J. 2015. Sauver le monde. Vers une société post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer, Editions Les Liens Qui Libèrent. [Saving the World: Towards a post-capitalist society with peer-to-peer]

Over the course of the next twenty years, automation will instigate the decline of a society founded on salaried jobs: 49% of jobs will disappear in the United States, 43% in Great Britain, 50% in Belgium, 56% in Italy and Poland[1]. This huge transformation, resulting from the integration of digital automation, constitutes the horizon for the argument put forward here by Michel Bauwens. He has studied and promoted the new model of production made possible by digital technologies and founded in peer-to-peer relations, which thereby surpasses the proletarianisation that has hitherto been the basis for industrial capitalism – here, proletarianisation principally signifies the loss of knowledge.

Like Ars Industrialis and the Institute for Research and Innovation, the P2P Foundation sets out the principle that digital reticulation is no longer a model based on the functional opposition between production and consumption. Rather it is based on the constitution of communities of knowledge developed through relations between peers – that is to say, on the reconstitution of knowledge (of life skills [savoir vivre], know how [savoir faire], and theoretical knowledge [savoir théoriser]) which have been systematically dismantled over the last 250 years. This discourse affirms the possibility of salvation: it attempts to save the world. Such claims will no doubt be scoffed at by sceptics of all persuasions – they are deniers, who, like climate sceptics, are still trying to ‘convince the Marquise that everything is fine’ [2]… against all available evidence.

The evidence is the profound collapse of social cohesion in every industrial society on Earth and the devastating effects on those societies on the margins of industrialisation. Nothing is being done in the short period of time we have available in the near-future to address these issues, and this damage will only cascade like an uncontrollable chain reaction. This situation arises through what we have called, since the beginning of the 21st Century, the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene constitutes an unsustainable acceleration of entropic becoming–to the extent to which it perturbs the meteorological, oceanographic, atmospheric, hydrological and demographic equilibriums while depleting fuel as well as social, psychic and physical or cultural energies–which threatens a world which it should, in fact, be saving.

A real salvation implies a radical change in the organization of work, of social and economic relations, which take into account the changes already accomplished by digitisation beginning with the emergence of the World Wide Web and which goes beyond the state of affairs that these relations have installed, to understand the global domination of the increasingly sprawling reticular industries, stemming from the California model of Silicon Valley, so well described by Evgeny Morozov in “the rise of data and the death of politics” [3].

The present model of voluntary or involuntary contribution imposed by the data economy exploited by the “Big Four”, and by those prospering within their ecosystem, is not only unjust but also bankrupt and hyper-proletarianising: Far from deproletarianising individuals it remotely controls them, as they increasingly rely on mimetic technologies driven by an intensive calculation through algorithms, processing massive data sources in real-time, which form a new kind of “crowds”, in the sense that Freud discusses the crowd psychology of Gustave Le Bon [4].

This is possible because bottom-up networks capture value and hyper-standardise behaviour (they hyper-proleterianise in this sense) storing and monopolising them through top-down processing of data produced by the crowds, mobs and other reticulated masses sublimated by intensive computing. I believe, like Gert Lovinck, that in this respect the emergence of social networks in the first decade of the 21st century constitutes a dangerous turn as the dynamics of peer to peer submit to statistical models that perpetuate herding behaviour through user profiling and our many algorithmic doubles.

The transition to a true peer-to-peer economy, however, is, in time, inevitable for four reasons:

1. In the current system based upon wage labour, stemming from Fordism and regulated by the Keynsian belief in the redistribution of purchasing power through employment (despite neoliberalism first weakening the system by reducing wage redistribution and now through speculative devices) a massive process of automation will engender a systematic insolvency and lead to a collapse of consumer capitalism.

2. On top of the destructive effects of the macroeconomic system, the anthropocene will itself generate telluric toxic effects that may only be countered by the promotion and maintenance of new forms of negentropic potential.

3. Thales, “the first geometrician”, initiated the canon of rational thought (logos) in the peer to peer model, which Socrates furthered through dialogic practices, and as the principle of development for the Greek city, as a process of collective individuation based on the maximum expression of the possibilities of psychic individuation for every citizen – this installing knowledge and the culture of knoweldge at the heart of collective being, exactly the opposite of the decomposition of knowledge that is today pushing towards what some have called the functional stupidity [5] of cognitive capitalism.

4. Only knowledge has the capacity to produce new negentropic potential, and only social organisations based on systemic enhancement and culture made possible through reticular parity will enable a move beyond the anthropocene, to “save the world”, and enter into what would therefore be called the “neganthropocene”.

At Ars Industrialis and IRI, we think that this requires a new model for the redistribution of the extraordinary gains in production made possible by a full and widespread automation, which must be taken as a template for new ways of organising work amongst peers.

This is why we advocate a [citizens’] contributory income, granted to everyone, in order to cultivate their abilities (as suggested by Amartya Sen) and provided that they regularly use those abilities in contributory projects, themselves supported by mutual credit granted by contributory banks, and within the most diverse forms of socialisation: associations, public services and businesses. The modalities of realising such approaches should be experimented within the areas which will make the choice [of which economic system to pursue], in particular in order to maximally expose their younger generations to the consequences of automation, and the possibility of producing capacities to exceed it.

Automation, with the failure to appropriate free time in order to increase knowledge in all its forms (life skills [savoir vivre], know how [savoir faire], and theoretical knowledge [savoir théoriser]), can only drive through a mortifying acceleration of entropy. By contrast, deproletarianisation is a reconstruction of knowledges, which are individual and collective capacities and which transform any time saved through negentropic possibilities.

This is why, for us, it seems essential to confirm and realise the opportunities created by Michel Bauwens through his extraordinary practical and theoretical knowledge of the dynamics of peer to peer, and respond to the “Web We Want” initiative [6] launched by Tim Berners-Lee in March 2014, by proposing a new model of architecture based on the valorisation of interpretable and incalculable singularities – calculation being the entropic reduction of the singular into the particular.

Notes.
1. These figures have been suggested by Jeremy Bowles (Bruegel Institute), as a part of a study conducted by the Oxford Martin School by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, and featured in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir on 19th July 2014: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

2. I am fairly sure this refers to a comical jazz song, “Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise“, recorded in 1936 by Ray Ventura’s band The Collegiate Five, in which the Marquise is told over the phone by various servants that everything is fine at home, excepts for a series of disasters. It has been suggested the song is a metaphor for France’s lack of concern for the approach of WWII –Trans.

3. Evgeny Morozov, “The rise of data and the death of politics”, The Observer, 20th July 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/20/rise-of-data-death-of-politics-evgeny-morozov-algorithmic-regulation

4. This has been demonstrated by Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy in “Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation: le disparate comme condition d’individuation par la relation?” [Algorthimic governmentality and perspectives on emancipation: disparity as a condition of individuation by relation?] Reseaux v.31 n.177: pp. 163-196 (2013) [ http://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/47/ ]. I am developing, myself, this analysis in The Automatic Society, to be published by Fayard.

5. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer “A stupidity-based theory of organizations”, Journal of Management Studies v.49 n.7: pp. 1194-1220 (2014) [ http://jourhavandesociolog.se/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/joms1072.pdf ].

6. For information on the Web We Want initiative see: https://webwewant.org/ –Trans.

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Bernard Stiegler – Digital shadows and (en)light(enment)

The translation below is the second half of the “Net Blues” interview with Bernard Stiegler conducted by the Le Monde blog “Lois des réseaux” [Laws of the networks].

In this second-half of the interview Stiegler discusses how the web should evolve developing the trope of ‘enlightenment’ (which he has significantly discussed in Taking care of youth and the generations), drawing out the play on words between light and shadow and ‘the Enlightenment’. Highlighting the web as the latest stage in publishing technologies (which have historically been central to political movements), Stiegler argues a new industrial politics must be developed, by Europe, as the ‘curative’ counter to the ‘toxic’ trend towards automation and homogeneity brought about by computation. This is the ‘pharmacological’ character of the internet Stiegler discusses in the ‘Net Blues‘. The new industrial politics Stiegler argues for has universities and the production of knowledge at its heart.

As usual clarifications or questions over the translation of a particular word are in square brackets and all emphasis is in the original text.

Digital shadows and (en)light(enment)

What do you think needs to be happen for the web to evolve?

Bernard Stiegler: I think that the web today is an entropic system. It first appeared, for most of us, not least for myself, as a negentropic opportunity, that is, as a new capacity for diversification, especially because it has allowed people to begin to differentiate between different kinds and uses of media [parce qu’il a permis de démassifier les médias]. Today, major newspapers, such as Le Monde and many others, allow all kinds of actors to convene around the newspaper, collecting together a very diverse range of views. This is an opportunity and it has given the sense of a kind of renaissance, following the development of an extreme consumerism within the mass media and the culture industries becoming an undifferentiated mass [qui avait été une sorte de laminoir] – especially in the last twenty years. Media such as television deteriorated terribly. All of which was related to an economic and industrial model that is now in decline.

Nevertheless, the web initially appeared as an opportunity for negentropy, that is to say of diversification. However, what we’ve discovered in recent years, in particular since we began to speak of the ‘Big Four‘, is the extraordinary hegemony of global giants who have gained an unprecedented prescriptive power over behaviour.

Only the United States takes full advantage of this economy of data. The data economy, which is destroying European national taxation and increasingly deprives public authorities of their capabilities to act, is based on a generalized calculability which is at odds with the negentropic promise of the web. This calculability tends towards the reintroduction of the law of the audience ratings. The page ranking performed by Google’s algorithm is a very specific, surgical form of audience rating, which is very efficient and very refined, but like television audience rating leads to the transformation of singularities into peculiarities, i.e. computable items, because it homogenises and de-singularises. Unlike the individual, the singular is incalculable. In this case, we have a new entropy process that we feel threatens languages. This is how I interpret Frederic Kaplan’s analysis of what he calls “linguistic capitalism.”

However, this predicament is not legislated, and it could be entirely different: the web in the service of an intensification of “individuation”, in other words singularities, is the future–and it is the future of Europe. Given the present circumstances, the web would totally horizontalise and level out information, because it requires processes of computation based on the removal of any lack of transparency.

As I said earlier, the web and the internet are publishing techonologies. Publishing technologies are the origin of what Plato calls πολιτεία (Politeia, Ed.) that we translate as res publica in Latin. Why do we translate it as res publica? Because Politeia constitutes a “public good”, as we discussed earlier. And the establishment of public goods requires publication technologies, which for the Greeks was writing. Marcel Detienne has shown that the Athenian city is like a vast typewriter that has wrote into the marbel of the walls of the city. After each decision of the Βουλή (boulè [parliament], Ed.) the publishers of the law wield the hammer and chisel to carve the decision in stone. This process of publication created the public right of citizens to criticise the law. One enters the politeia, citizenship, and [so] paves the way to democracy. Today, with digital computation, a whole new publication system is in place.

However, we always claim that the state of political rights, and the accompanying reason, is what the Greeks called λόγος (logos, Ed.). However, this assumes that such processes of publication enables disagreement, the publication of contradictory arguments, which we call public debate, and which is a fundamental rule of all rational knowledge. The promise of the web was to revive public, political, scientific or aesthetic debate. But this promise has not been kept. From the moment Google, Amazon and such companies had to make a profit from all of this, they became totally interested in equalising and levelling out data in order to exploit it with algorithms, crushing disagreement rather than enabling traceability and widespread intelligibility. I do not think this situation can last. The basis of knowledge, in all its forms – I’m not just talking about theoretical knowledge, its also true of ‘know how’ [savoir-faire] and life skills [savoir-vivre] – is grounded in a fundamental diversification, which when [knowledge] ceases, leaves behind dead knowledge – like dead languages and towns transformed into museums [villes muséifiées]. If the sciences and knowledge are founded on publication processes, the development of the digital is a radical transformation of knowledge, and in particular of academic knowledge. The power of Europe and the West is founded on power over knowledge. The emperor Frederic Barberousse, who, in opposition to the Pope, granted freedom to the University of Bologna in the 13th Century, initiated a process followed by Oxford, the Sorbonne and Cambridge. It is not the Conquistadors and the caravels that are the primary origin of the centuries-long global domination of the West: it is the reliance upon universities. This clearly evolves in new directions with the appearance of new devices for printing – and the cognitive as well as spiritual revolution brought about by Luther is clearly a consequence of such publishing technologies, by which Luther makes reading the scriptures for oneself the heart of his struggle. Along with the Counter Reformation, this leads to the foundation of the Jesuit Schools and the Jesuits evangelising around the world through their missions, which constitutes a fundamental aspect of the Enlightenment project, and this, with Condorcet[1] and the French Revolution, leads to Jules Ferry[2] via Guizot[3].

Obviously, the web, and the digital more generally, totally reconfigures these maps from top to bottom – not only the maps for teaching but the conditions of scientific research and the life of the mind in all its forms. Europe should not fear this, even less so since it is the origin of the concepts of the web and HTML, in which, in France, CNET [The National Centre for Telecommunication Studies] (which has been destroyed by irresponsible policies) played an important role in the design of the ATM and GSM networks. Europe has played an extremely important role in the configuration of all technical systems, but has failed to make this common knowledge [? elle n’a pas su le socialiser] because European political and economic actors are often blind to such issues. Thus, when researchers and scientists are daring and inventive they have found themselves confined to an imitation of the ‘American model’, which is a disaster for a Europe that is totally devoid of an industrial strategy, and condemned to a ‘downgrading’, at the height of the challenges of our times.

What we call the Enlightenment emerged in Europe, and it was produced by the republic of letters resulting from the printing press. We are no longer in the era of pure Enlightenment: we have entered an era of Shadow and Enlightenment [the word “Lumières” here is used as a play on words between light and enlightenment]. It is an era of a pharmacological consciousness of what pushes the speed of technology, the speed of light, also causes the shadows of the ‘toxicity’ of the digital, which necessarily accompany their own ‘cure’ [sa «curativité»]. A new industrial politics should be supported by Europe and must be based on a curative politics and economics of the digital, deliberatively and rationally battling against its toxicity. After Edward Snowden’s revelations [discussed in more detail in ‘the Net Blues‘] every citizen is aware of this huge problem that puts the future gravely at risk [un immense problème qui hypothèque très gravement l’avenir].

Europe should unite around a project for a new Enlightenment that is at once scientific, philosophical, industrial, and economic; which fully seizes the immense challenges brought by computation [la numérique]. Such a politics should be based upon an unprecedented use of universities and research organisations. The very nature of knowledge is destabilised by the digital. For example, to work in the nanosciences today means working with digital artifacts to produce nanoscale phenomena, that is to say, at the quantum level. These are not actually digital phenomena, i.e. objects of intuition, but what Kant called the “noumena”, that is to say the objects of understanding and reason. However, these are objects that are, at the same time, completely constituted in nanophysics, and are the objects of scientific experiments, by being simulated and mathematically modelled using computers. Genetic biology is made possible today by biostations, that is: by informational calculations made on very large amounts of data. The digital alters the practices of mathematicians, but Frederic Kaplan has shown it also modifies the development of languages. [Furthermore] geography has become fundamentally linked to geographical information systems, as the GPS standard has been socialised within our everyday lives. The structures of digitisation are transforming all knowledge, including know-how [les savoir faires] and life skills [les savoir vivre].

Faced with such a universal upheaval it is essential to reconfigure all academic research and to organise new links between universities and school curriculums [les pratiques scolaires] so that the digital enters schools on a rational basis, not through the stories told [storytelling] by economic actors advocating a legitimation of their own models [of the digital]. This model [of working] should be analysed, critiqued and continuously improved, for that is [the practice of] reason. Taking such a critique to the global level, Europe could reconstruct a digital industry which is currently tragically lacking. It is not only children but also parents, and elected officials, that need to be acculturated [to such changes] through schools, so that European society can be deeply reconfigured, and take with it a new model of the web.

Notes

1. In the 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet developed a voting tally system to select the candidate who would beat each of the other candidates in a run-off election.

2. Jules Ferry was a 19th century republican who promoted laicism and French colonial expansion.

3. François Guizot was a prominent 19th century statesman who significantly promoted education.