I was really pleased to see that ‘Mattering Press‘ has been formed as a new publishing initiative for STS, committed to the creation and publishing of widely accessible, carefully produced, and intellectually vibrant books in Science and Technology Studies (STS). The first books are due to be published this year (2014). One of the core team leading the initiative is fellow (trans/inter-disciplinary) geographer Sebastian Abrahamsson (Amsterdam, working with Annemarie Mol).
Mattering Press started in early 2010 as a publishing initiative of the Flows, Doings, Edges collective: a peer-support group of early career researchers interested in relational research. Sensitive to the relational and material politics of knowledge production, in early 2012 we began to explore the possibilities of alternative modes of engaging with works we find interesting and important. The term ‘mattering’ comes from Science and Technology Studies, and captures at least three important components of our thinking about Open Access publishing.
The first is materiality, that is, the STS insight that all knowledge comes from particular places and its successful formulation strongly depends on the alignment of all kinds of entities, from buildings through laboratory equipment to physical bodies. Within academic life, texts are not only crucial parts of such alignments, but are also often considered to be their most important outcomes. We believe it is fascinating and increasingly necessary to consider their production as experimental interventions in research practice, rather than its afterlife.
The second is that the way academic texts are produced matters – both analytically and politically. Dominant publishing practices work with assumptions about the conditions of academic knowledge production that rarely reflect what goes on in laboratories, field sites, university offices, libraries, and various workshops and conferences. They tend to deal with almost complete manuscripts and a small number of authors, who are greatly dependent on the politics of the publishing industry. This is particularly true in the social sciences and the humanities, where books have a great importance, not only in academic debates, but also in (early) career development.
The third component is to consider publishing as an ongoing process: mattering suggests that working with authors and manuscripts is an activity that doesn’t necessarily start with almost complete manuscripts and hardly ever ends with the publishing of a book. What constitute book-like texts and how they circulate are questions just as important as those related to their commissioning and editing.
These are the concerns that we hope Mattering Press will be able to hold in focus as part of a growing and ever-changing STS community, and as part of an active initiative to reflect on and innovate around our own knowledge production practices. Informed by these points, Mattering Press is organised around the following three sets of practices, each of which in turn draws on our ongoing thinking about what new relations more careful modes of academic knowledge production might produce.
We care about open access to academic work. This means that all our books will be accessible as digital texts and downloadable e-books for free on our website. We are committed to sharing both academic knowledge, and the very practical knowledge that we are acquiring over the course of setting up this project. In this vein, we are working on a number of collaborative initiatives that will hopefully benefit not just us, but more widely the Open Access community. We also care for printed academic books, and so will sell high quality, professionally designed copies of all Mattering books, partly as a way of generating revenue for the press, and partly because we value the material tactility of books.
Like all academic presses, we care a lot about quality and academic standing of our publications. Unlike most presses, however, we believe that double blind peer review is not always the best way of ensuring academic excellence. Rather, we believe that academic work in the social sciences benefits from open, productive collaboration of authors and reviewers. We are therefore recommend that reviewers provide open, signed peer reviews where possible. We expect this will help to establish a relationship of care between reviewers, authors and editors, and will eventually also benefit the resulting texts. For some texts, we are also experimenting with more sustained collaborative relationships between reviewers and authors which we expect to be particularly beneficial for early career researchers.
Last but not least, care in open access academic publishing means working towards the financial sustainability of the press and to try to pay those who do not have a stake themselves in academic knowledge production (such as typesetters, website programmers, proofreaders, text editors, and designers). This means trying to develop a financially viable model of open access book production in the difficult institutional and industry funding landscape of academic publishing. This also means engaging potential readers in the practical and financial challenges of open access book production, given that we suspect that many will have very little idea of the work that goes into the production of not simply a book, but a self-sustaining academic press. Getting the press up and running has already taken many hundreds of hours of unpaid labor not just from us, but a range of friends and supporters. We are therefore keen to experiment with ways of making this work visible on our website and possibly in our books, as a way of drawing potential readers into the debate about what it really means for academics to take responsibility for the outcomes of their own knowledge production practices.
Our presentation at the CRESC conference reception marks the moment when Mattering Press announced itself to some of its potential publics. Next year, we look forward to an official launch of the Press. Our first batch of books will include a collection of essays provisionally titled Practising Comparison: Revitalising the Comparative Act, edited by Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim and Zuzana Hrdlickova, a collection of essays provisionally titled The Empirical Baroque, edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert, and an English translation of a book by a major STS scholar, which we hope to be able to announce soon. It is expected that our second batch of books, to be released in 2015, will include several texts by promising early career researchers. In the meantime, you can find us at: www.matteringpress.org
Amongst the books to look out for this year are three translations of books by Bernard Stiegler.
The first to come out, in February, is an interesting collaborative critique of consumer capitalism by members of the Ars Industrialis association, fronted by Stiegler. In The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism, and following the Ars Industrialismanifesto, Stiegler (et al.) argues against the proletarianization of the subject into an unthinking and passive consumer and for the renewal of life skills (savour-vivre) through an ‘industrial populism’.
The second, coming out in April, will be the final volume of the Disbelief and Discredit series, which offers a critique of the effects of the development of industrial technologies on our capacities for rest, considered reflection, leisure, the development of skills and, importantly, care for one another and for society. In the final volume, The Lost Spirit of Capitalism, Stiegler advances his argument for a new ‘industrial spirit’ by fostering a ecology that not only looks after the planet but also renews the exploited energies of human desire. This is another excellent translation by Dan Ross for Polity.
The third, coming out in August, is the first volume of the important series: Symbolic Misery. The Hyperindustrial Epoquewill be the first appearance of Stiegler’s work concerning aesthetics in an extended format and contains some of his critical work concerning cinema. In particular, Stiegler advances his critical articulation of cinema as the industrial temporal object in order to argue that it is the aesthetic experience that can combat the creeping conditioning of experience on its own territory. Again, Dan Ross brings his detailed knowledge of Stiegler’s oeuvre to provide a valuable and timely translation.
Towards the end of last year, Mediapart (a cross between an association for co-learning and an online publisher concerned with digital media) published a blogpost by Bernard Stiegler concerning the role of digital technologies in the ongoing transformation of the university. This line of argument will be familiar to those that follow Stiegler’s work (especially if you read French) and if you have read some of the short pieces by Stiegler that I have previously translated concerning MOOCs and participatory education. What is heartening, especially if you are already in the open education conversation, and are a wee bit cynical about the hyperbole surrounding MOOCs, is that Stiegler argues for a debate around how to foster and open out education, not how to monetize it. As ever, the fundamental (pharmacological) relationship between ‘human’ and ‘technology’ is at the heart of the issue for Stiegler. As he argues in the final paragraph:
The question is not whether or not we should develop MOOCs in France (it is obviously necessary): it is to drive a dynamic for the rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and its media [supports] (of which MOOCs are a possible dimension) with the universities and academic institutions, and which, through research, will redefine their role in this new context.
Again, an argument that thoughtful practitioners of ‘open education’, like Martin Weller, will be very familiar with.
The sharp-eyed reader will pick up something else from this article too. The Institute for Research Innovation (part of the Pomipdou Centre in Paris), directed by Stiegler, are now using their online tools for collaboration ‘in the wild’. So, the vidéolivre that Stiegler points us to, towards the end, is more sophisticated than the embedded YouTube video and is a kind of online mini-course (unfortunately, only in French) hosted on the Digital Studies website (on which you can read the ‘call for Digital Studies‘ in English). Another interesting tool mentioned is Polemic Tweets: a kind of add-on to twitter through the use of basic syntax (much like RT, MT, etc.) in order to amplify, disagree with or question things (see the explanation in English here). For example, you can see the use of these tags in combination with the documentation of a recent conference Entretiens du Nouveau Monde Industriel[#ENMI13] (something like: ‘Investigations into the New Industrial World‘), where there is a recording of the video stream with annotations that temporally synchronise tweets (with the hashtag and ‘polemic’ syntax) in a timeline below – worth a look, here.
This starts to get at some of the pedagogical tools Stiegler and IRI are offering as a means of beginning to think about what it might mean to ‘rethink knowledge and its relationship with its media/supports’ within the domain of (open) education. It is in this context that one might read the article that follows…
As usual, original French and clarifications are in square brackets. I am indebted to Patrick Crogan (former colleague, translator of some of Stiegler’s work, and a speaker at the conference mentioned above) for his proof-reading.
The digital constitutes a new épistémè: it is the very nature of knowledge in all its forms that will be affected. This technology will function for our epoque in the same way that writing did for antiquity (and it is in this way that we can say that it put antiquity into decline). This was suggested thirty years ago in The Computerisation of Society:
“From the moment that Sumerians wrote the first hieroglyphs on wax tablets, they embodied, probably without realising, a decisive mutation of humanity: the appearance of writing. Yet, it was this that changed the world.”
It is inconceivable that universities and large research organisations do not have at their core of their concerns and the top of their priorities the digital transformation of knowledge: the deployment in all disciplines, as in all dimensions of human existence, of what Clarisse Herrenschmidt has called reticular writing clearly constitutes the major challenge for 21st century knowledge.
As for online university courses, they have become at Harvard small private online courses, which has led Robert Lue to suggest that “we are already in the post-MOOC era“. This statement testifies to the fact that the transformations at the sidelines of education are the visible effects of the mnemotechnical milieu of knowledge, which is in the process of changing its nature, is upsetting [bouleverse] knowledge itself, from research all the way through to the most elementary aspects of education.
Whether we consider these issues from massive open online courses, small private online courses [both in English in original], or the many other already existing or possible models of digital education they all constitute a major issue. But this issue logically comes after research and digital studies–which the Minister, and the National Research Agency under his purview, have furthermore adopted in their agenda under the name of ‘digital studies’ without which this could have remained unnoticed.
It is only possible to implement new forms of education related to the development of digital technologies and to experience them collectively on the condition that they are designed and practiced in a close and explicit relation with a policy for researching the deeper layers of epistemic becoming and the new disciplinary epistemologies required by digitisation. Without such a structured and openly acknowledged connection, the initiatives taken in all areas alongside [established] education can only emerge as superficial fashions and effects, subject as ever to all of the ebbs and flows of media excitement in the contemporary world: they always seem to belong to an age that has already been superceded by the lastest novelty in an area where there is no lack of imagination–sometimes at the risk of lacking reflection, if not knowledge.
The university appeared a little over one thousand years ago, conditioned then by the copying of canonical texts, which led to the interpretation that is engendered in the process of copying, which experienced a second era with the republic of letters created by the printing press, which originated in the university of Berlin, and which lasted until the 20th century.
In 1993 the university entered a new age, with the arrival of the web making reticular writing accessible to all. It is this important, if not massive and amazing, fact that necessitates the development of digital studies. Whatever its form, knowledge is a form of memory shared by a community, according to the rules practised, and sometimes explicated and theorised, by that community: which is thus, in general, a community of peers. These scientific and critical knowledges appeared with alphabetic writing, which, in all its forms, creates a mnemotechnical and techno-logical milieu that conditions [conditionne] the development and transmission of knowledge based in peer review.
Neither for knowledge in general or scholarly institutions in particular, are the written alphabet, the printed word, data, algorithms and digital networks simple mediums of education or research: these are the domains [milieux] of knowledge in which is founded the open and constant criticism of the rules of interpretation in which the knowledge formed by these communities of peers consists.
The digital deeply transforms such forms of knowledge principally because it constitutes a new means of recording [surface d’inscription] and publicly formalising the debate between peers by which all rational disciplines are constituted, through conflicting interpretation and scientific controversy. The characteristics of the digital (automation, speed of calculation, vast planetary access, cooperative networks, new processes of formalisation, new models, visualisations, interactions and simulations etc.) constitute new possibilities for knowledge, for significantly widening accessibility to more diverse audiences, which will redefine the conditions for equal access to knowledge [qui redéfinissent les conditions de la parité], which also involves the requirements for certification as a form of legitimation.
Peer-to-peer, which is increasingly discussed since the advent of software and websites described as P2P, appeared over 27 centuries ago with the first land surveyors [géomètres]. This is why amongst the announcements made by the minister for higher education and research, the most significant was the support for research into the impacts and opportunities of the digital in the development of knowledge as a form of emancipation [comme de telles parités est la plus significative]. The digital mnemotechnical milieu makes possible and requires new heuristics, new hermeneutics, and new epistemologies which must foster teaching and pedagogies in which the purpose is precisely the enrolment of the maximum number of students into these communities of peers.
From the infinitely big (astrophysics) to the infintetly small (nanoscience), physics is reconfigured by digital instrumentation through mathematics and statistics notably in the guise of “big data“. Linguistics is under the effect of what Frédéric Kaplan has called linguistic capitalism. Geography is in the era of geographical information systems and GPS, through which territory becomes functionally and normatively digital. Genetic biology that made possible computerised biostations, etc. No form of knowledge escapes the new demands [nouvelle facture] of the contemporary mnemotechnical milieu configured by the categorisation machines that are networked computers.
This digital categorisation totally redefines the conditions of production of the rules of categorisation, which form the foundation for what is ultimately knowledge produced through peer review: this is a fundamental point that it is not possible for me to develop here, and it is for this reason that the reader can consult a short interactive video [vidéolivre] which has been prepared to complete this article, and which focuses more extensively on these concerns in order to illustrate how the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI), which I run, designs and practices investigations of these issues.
This interactive video–designed to become a social book [in English in original], by which I mean a support for a network of readers constituted as a community of plural interpretations-is one example amongst many (such as polemic tweets, also developed IRI and implemented by Mediapart in the recently organised debate about the rise of the National Front), which are all new forms of editorial media that have emerged since the arrival of the web.
These digital media will become new apparatuses [dispositifs] of public debate which always come from university learning, and with which it is essential to enrol and involve the students as much as possible. For over a thousand years, universities and research activities as well as the teaching thereby developed were made possible originally by manuscripts and then by printed books. Which is why a thesis, regardless of the discipline in which it is submitted, is always presented as a book. This situation will fundamentally change in the course of the coming years. This does not signal the disappearance of the book: it means that, like the knowledge they carry, they will transform.
New conditions of publication, disputation [confrontation], certification and editorialisation of knowledge are coming into place. They correspond to new regulations and new methods for heuristics, interpretation, teaching and pedagogy, which are arising, forming and capturing the 21st century épistémè. This is taking place through a dynamic process that the public authorities should strongly encourage, pushing academic institutions, industry and the markets to cooperate in the production of a long-term vision–which must be a vision of the role of France in Europe in the 21st century.
The question is not whether or not we should develop MOOCs in France (it is obviously necessary): it is to drive a dynamic for the rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and its media [supports] (of which MOOCs are a possible dimension) with the universities and academic institutions, and which, through research, will redefine their role in this new context. This is a good question for which it is not only healthy but essential that a public debate is held–providing that the grounds for that debate are not the claim that everything should be left to the market nor the denial of the very need for such a debate.
Bernard Stiegler recently gave a talk at the Institute for Digital Media Culture and Aesthetics (ICAM) at Leuphana furthering his exploration of the idea of Digital Studies. Stiegler provides some really nice discussion of his reading of phenomenology, in particular his advancement of Husserl’s scheme of retention/protention. He moves on to (broadly) reiterate some of the key parts of his argument in Taking Care.
In the introduction to Stiegler’s talk, Goetz Bachmann offers some interesting observations and context to Stiegler’s work, which is nice. Bachmann was one of the members of the Goldsmiths Cultural Studies team that has hosted annual Stiegler’s Professorial seminars there.
Over on critical-theory.com they have posted this excellent video of Simon Critchley providing a very accessible introduction to Nietzsche’s philosophy of nihilism and what he meant by ‘God is dead… and we have killed him’ in The Gay Science.
Scott Rodgers has posted the welcome news that the video from the Conditions of Mediation conference earlier this year is now available. The video comprises the keynote presentations.
After much behind-the-scenes fidgeting and arranging, I’m happy to say we can finally make available an edited video recording of the two keynote symposiums from Conditions of Mediation, the ICA preconference I co-organized with Tim Markham, held at Birkbeck on 17 June 2013. The two keynote symposiums kicked off the intense one-day event. The first group of speakers include Graham Harman, Lisa Parks and Paddy Scannell and the second group include Shaun Moores, Nick Couldry and David Berry. Not only are each speakers’ contributions interesting, but so too were the debates and discussions which followed (between the speakers and audience). Looking back, it certainly was a unique cross-section of phenomenological perspectives as they relate or might relate to thinking about media, technology and communication.
See Scott’s post for more information about the video.
Over on the technophilia blog, my former colleague and friend Patrick Crogan has written a really insightful piece in response to the general reading of Stiegler I offer in my recent paper The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies. Following on from my rather quick explanation of Stiegler’s use of the concept of technicity, Patrick brings a nuanced gloss on Stiegler’s reading of Heidegger in Technics and Time 1 – please read on below.
I would like to note, as I did in the acknowledgements of the article, that my own engagement with Stiegler’s work and the broader (post)phenomenological understandings of the human-technology relation comes from sustained, very rewarding, discussions with Patrick, whose own insightful work, expertise and translations have been invaluable.
Being and Space
Sam Kinsley, former colleague and technophilia, now at Exeter Uni, recently published ‘The Matter of “Virtual” Geography’ in Progress in Human Geography. It gives a comprehensive overview of the history of formulations of virtual spaces and realities since the heady days of the 1990s articulations of cyberspace, up to recent approaches to ideas of coded and networked spatialities. Sam perceptively mobilises Stiegler’s work including his use of Simondon and Heidegger to propose a way of describing and analysing digitally enabled spatial and temporal refigurations of contemporary existence and sociality.
I wanted to add a gloss on this mobilisation of Stiegler’s notion of technicity, as a point that seemed to me to touch on an important element in Stiegler’s critical adoption of Heidegger’s Being and Time – hence the ‘Being and Space’ title. Sam has this to say about Stiegler’s positioning of humans as always already preceded by technics in a way:
“Culture”, he writes, “can accordingly be thought of as metastable systems of retention, of exteriorized thought: ‘A new born child arrives into a world in which tertiary retention [data, images, writing and so on] both precedes and awaits it, and which, precisely, constitutes the world as world’ (Stiegler, 2010a: 9, original emphasis). The ongoing creation of shared knowledge, and thus a shared memory and history, is in large part mediated by technology (with the notable exceptions of practices of oral history and storytelling).”
Absolutely, and here Stiegler’s take on and taking from Heidegger’ notion of Dasein’s ‘throwness’ is evident. Dasein, the being for whom its being is a question, ‘falls’ into time, and encounters a facticity already there. This paradoxical futurity of what precedes Dasein in a sense programmes (though this word is evocative much more of Stiegler’s Heidegger than Heidegger) the questioning of being that characterises Dasein, along with the tension between an intratemporal business with everyday things seeking to avoid the question and an authentic encounter with it via (in Heidegger) an assuming of the heritage of the collective past as pro-genitor and horizon of Dasein’s future possibilities.
In the latter part of Technics and Time 1 Stiegler ‘deals with’ Heidegger, identifying this notion of a throwness into an already existent facticity as his major insight, while also identifying quite precisely the point in Being and Time (at a certain moment in the famous chapter on historicality and temporality) where Heidegger turns away from the implications of this constitutive factical technicity of Dasein and towards the more problematic notion of a history of being as expressed in the community of the volk – the community – thought separately as a spiritual continuity, somehow transcendent from a facticity now relegated to the status of intratemporal covering over of the former. For Stiegler, as Sam’s account indicates, technics is an irreducible dimension of individual and collective being and any ‘authentic’ reflection or encounter with the question of one’s being, or of being in general (in philosophy, religion, politics etc) develops on the basis of and out of conditions that are factical, that pre-exist s/he reflecting, and that also make possible the transmission and communication of that reflecting to others to come after.
One more note: the oral history and storytelling that is part of the the “ongoing creation of shared knowledge” Sam describes is also mediated technically, if not ‘technologically’ (but perhaps today few instances of mediation passes completely to one side of the pervasive electronic media milieu). Oral transmission is always part of a linguistic technicity; it is always undertaken in conjunction with certain rituals and gestures associated with the cultural event of story recital; and often these will include the production of graphics of various kinds, rupestral, sand-painting, bodily inscription and so forth. That minds retain these forms and conventions and rites testifies to the profound interdependence of organic and non-organic spatial memory supports in the maintenance and evolution of individual and cultural identity.
Bernard Stiegler has recorded a set of two pieces concerning the ‘digital revolution’ for Le Monde: for their Laws of the Networks[Lois des réseaux] blog, convened by the journalist Dominique Lacroix.
In the first of the two pieces, Stiegler articulates the ‘pharmacological’ nature of the internet, the ways in which our use of the digital both opens up new ways of living and, at the same time, constitutes great risks to our collective and, importantly, mental individuation. In particular, Stiegler focuses on understandings of the public and the private, in the wake of the revelations made possible by Edward Snowden’s ‘leaks’, and the ways in which the digital unsettles and unbalances what we can understand to be private or ‘secret’.
I have translated this first instalment, below. As usual clarifications or questions over the translation of a particular word are in square brackets and all emphasis is in the original text. The notes at the end are also from the original piece.
The Net blues [le blues du Net]
The philosopher Bernard Stiegler defines the digital revolution through the idea of publication and its social significance. The internet and the web bring incredible and unprecedented potential. However this process has become a target for the big American corporations which represent a risk for our societies. Bernard Stiegler brings together the Greek Myths and the work of historian of Greek myths Jean-Pierre Bernant, to clarify the issues of the Snowden affair.
Net blues
The digital revolution truly began a little over twenty years ago, when the United States enabled the internet to be accessible through the web. They appropriated a vision, formed by the European Tim Berners-Lee, and made it an apparatus of neo-colonialism. It was a deliberate strategy for at least five years and which has significantly transformed the face of the world. We have not fully understood, by the way, and I’m not certain we will ever truly comprehend, this extremely complex (always) ongoing process that has a global spread.
The digital is above all a process of generalised formalisation. This process, which resides in the protocols that enable interoperability, makes a range of diverse and varied techniques. This is a process of unification through binary code of norms and procedures that today allow the formalisation of almost everything: traveling in my car with a GPS system, I am connected through a digitised triangulation process that formalises my relationship with the maps through which I navigate and that transform my relationship with territory. My relationships with space, mobility and my vehicle are totally transformed. My inter-individual, social, familial, scholarly, national, commercial and scientific relationships are all literally unsettled by the technologies of social engineering. It is at once money and many other things – in particular all scientific practices and the diverse forms of pulbic life.
This has become what I have called – taking an expression of Sylvain Auroux – the process of “grammatisation”. Drawing on recent work, I ask if this process – as André Leroi-Gourhan has already suggested – triggered the Upper Paleolithic, then suddenly intensified in the event of the neolithic, resulted in ideogrammatic writing. This has been rendered more complex, and enriched, via the automata of Vaucanson; then through the automation of factories, and thus the operation of machinery: and finally to the present situation, which is digital.
Le canard digérateur, one of the most sophisticated automatons by Jacques Vaucanson, French engineer (1709-1782). source Wikipedia
The word “grammatisation” coming from τα γÏάμματα (ta grammata, Ed.), which can be called “the letters” in greek. This makes possible the ‘discretisation” of the flow of the temporal continuum, in the form of words, and this discretisation is effectuated through a spatialisation that is also a graphical reproduction, in other words a visualisation.
Today, the digital permits the discretisation not only of the movements of the mouth and tongue, which provide words, but rather all movements, both human and non-human – for example the movement of beef carcases that cross the Atlantic on cargo ships from Argentina to feed Europeans, which carry RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags, and which create what today we call traceability. Other examples include: how we follow the movements of animals and insects to attempt to understand the transformative processes of life, of the earth, and of other ecosystems extraordinarily perturbed by human and industrial activity, which we call the “anthropization” of the world. Yet the digital equally facilitates user profiling–and thus from this facilitates a control of behaviour through social mimesis–to track all human actions and gestures and to apply mathematical correlations with feedback loops to institute what Antoinette Rouvray and Thomas Berns [1] describe as “algorithmic governmentality”, which represents an automated forecasting of both private and public life. Or, again, the discretisation of the movements in the brain, such as brain imaging and the use of such descritisation processes to aid neuromarketing, based in an analysis of the brain that tends to directly solicit automated drives that short-circuit social development [apprentissages].
All of this opens, at the same time, tremendous new and extremely promising opportunities in social relations, in forms of knowledge, in cooperation in all forms, in communities of peer contributors, in the economy of contribution, in new tools for research, in education and creativity and finally in a new age of the life of the spirit. This speaks to a process underwritten with huge contrast and contradictions. I believe that there is a lot less time left than human society, and in particular European society, realises. Unfortunately, in Europe, this realisation was exceedingly late.
The case of Snowden, considered as a whistleblower in Europe and a traiter in the US, has revealed the practices of NSA (National Security Agency) with the collusion of Facebook, Google and other American organisations, informing the US intelligence agencies of all of our activities, through a generalised traceability. Faced with these developments, but also with the growing feeling that it is is less and less tolerable that there is a hegemony of commercial objectives that have no political or social regulation and which are almost exclusively conducted in California, by hackers, the militant developers of the web, the internet and computing and digital technologies in all sectors–which I have been personally using for over 30 years- a large number of proselytisers of the “digital revolution” have been hit by what I have called, during a public talk for Ars Industrialis at the Théatre du Rond Pont: the “Net blues” [2].
These activities and these communities suddenly [tout à coup] discovered that the internet has extremely toxic aspects. For example, because we have seen what Snowdon revealed we have discovered the very possibility of secrecy seems to have disappeared with the digitisation of everyday life. This dissolution of secrecy is very serious. On a psychical level, it is perhaps the destruction of the possibility of a psyche endowed with intimacy and of singular individuation, if it is the case that the unconscious is what remains hidden and secret to oneself. And at the level of diplomacy, the publication of the diplomatic data and cables by Wikileaks – through a channeling [pompage] of data that made the internet possible – which has been presented as a positive thing, is also literally the destruction of the conditions for classic diplomacy, which is to say [de ce qui sert parfois à éviter la guerre]. For me, the publication of the diplomatic cables without doubt includes a positive dimension, but it is absolutely necessary not to elide that it is also a dangerous shift.
That secrets are necessary for international life is obvious. However, for example, is banking secrecy necessary? This is another topic for which we do not have time to discuss, but many believe (including myself) that the automated transfer of information to prevent bank secrecy should be mandatory.
Be that as it may, the secrecy of intimate life is essential and forms the possibility of attaining a dignity of existence–a dignity defined for humanity by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The traceablity of personal data creates a kind of digital nudity which is an indignity for the human [l’homme]. Initimacy is the possibility and the necessity of having a secret life that I compose for myself. This is the primary lesson from Freud. I do not truly know for myself what is extremely intimate to me because that is what we call the unconscious. In the guise of self-expression, the whole of human history is in some way a “keeping of secrets” without making them public and without ever totally having access to them ourselves.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myths and thinking with the Greeks
From the advent of the politeia this becomes a fundamental aspect of social organsiation. The Greeks played an extremely important role in the precise, delineated and institutionalised differentation between the public and the private, for we cannot have a public sphere without a private sphere. To understand this, one must read the text that Jean-Pierre Vernant dedicated to the relation between the couple Hermes and Hestia, Hestia is the figure of the home, privacy, secrecy and the care given to the fire that always comprises a sacred and divine dimension. Hermes is the figure of movement, communication and public space. Vernant shows that there is not one without the other: if we destroy what is secret, we also destroy public space, and vice versa.
As for us, the men and women of the 21st century, we are experiencing a publishing revolution: the digital space constitutes, above all, a process of publishing. We publish ourselves, voluntarily or not. We do it unintentionally when we are tracked by cookies: everything that we do is parsed, storable and analysable through so-called big data, which are new ways of implementing applied mathematics through algorithms which can capture and process the hundreds and billions of [units of] data, which, through feedback loops, performatively change the dynamics of the behaviour of those whose data are analysed in real-time, and which constantly formulate adjustments to trajectories which are in reality a kind of autopilot for behaviour.
Be that as it may, through these publishing systems, we are all capable of publishing and so distributing our ideas, our propositions, our analyses, our points of view, our critiques, and so on – and through this, we become able to take part in a new form of public life, for example by creating [web] sites, like that of Ars Industrialis, and thereby constituting the new possiblities, which Gilbert Simondon called pyschic and collective individuation. I use the word “individuation” to explicate the “pharmacological” character of the internet: the internet is double-edged, it offers new and absolutely extraordinary opportunities for individation but also, at the same time, it threatens the fundamentals of individuation.
The internet is a “φάÏμακον” (pharmakon Ed.), in the sense that Plato described writing, and we are discovering this double-edged nature [cette double face]. The actual system of the web is dangerous for secrets, for psychic individuation, for collective individuation, because we cannot and we should not submit to forms of calculability. Such a capitulation [soumission] can only engender a “voluntary servitude” which could rapidly become involuntary and inescapable [insurmontable]. In contrast, the digital allows the intensification of the incalculable in the same way that writing in Ancient Greece had huge effects on individuation through an enriched social diversity – especially by making citizenship possible, which formed the birth of a new process of psychic and collective individuation.
The promulgation of writing has certainly engendered a loss of idiomatic differences, that is to say, local individuations. All kinds of idioms began to disappear. At the same time, it was a growth in individuation through citizenship, tragedy, philosophy, etc. – All on the basis of public law [rights? droit public].
The question for us is whether the switch to digital is creating a phenomenon of this kind or, conversely, a process of widespread “disindividuation.”
Bernard Stiegler’s office, Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, 28 juillet 2013, taken by Dom Lecroix.
Notes
1. Cf. Réseaux, février 2013, La Découverte.
2. Cf. http://www.arsindustrialis.org/
3. I speak here of performativity in the sense of John Austin, for whom a performative utterance is a self-declaration such as that which I say, by the fact that I am saying it, creates a situation, and this “fact” is something in the situation that is prior to the creation of the situation. Cf. John Austin, Quand dire, c’est faire, éditions Seuil.
I stumbled across a piece, in French, in the CahiersSimondon byBaptiste Mozirot in which he offers an interesting analysis about the locus of the limit between the internal and the external in processes of individuation–something that Bernard Stiegler situates as an aporia of origin in relation to technics–which he interrogates through Gilbert Simondon’s concept of the membrane. I thought the following passage was of particular interest because, for me, it resonates with Deleuze’s understanding of singularities as the fold between the actual and the virtual, constituting a present in the folding together of the potentialities of past and future. It is perhaps interesting to think about this in relation to Stiegler’s interpretation of trans-individuation…
As usual, clarifications or explanations are in square brackets.
“The chance constraint as a modality of individuation”.
From p. 28:
Experience constitutes – in the active and processual sense of the word – a coding which is neither abstract nor neutral, which is not the ordering of the thematic arrangement according to a homogeneous and conventional order, but a vital configuration that integrates the experiences of the present in the interpretive codings of future experience. This coding is operated precisely by the membrane as defined by Simondon: the membrane is the generic organ which interfaces the interior with the exterior, the past and the future, in the dual mode of the qualification / interpretation of the future by the past and the future integration of past codings. It is through this perspective that we can apply the model of the membrane to think the integration of singularities in individual structurings, where a posteriori becomes a priori. The membrane is the the topological locus in which are knitted together the playing out of memory and compatability in the process of the constitution of individual structures that are individuation.
We can therefore make explicit the horizon affected by this theorectical development: it consists in applying nodal formulae, which Simondon implements in MEOT [Du Mode de l’Existence des Objet Techniques] to think living memory, to the theory of individuation. The first of these theses is formulated as follows: “the living is that in which the a posteriori becomes a priori“. This formula precisely describes the modality of individuation in which the structures of individuation are the product of chance encounters (which are unfinished), which organise future aleatory encounters by selectivity and compatability. The result is that a chance intervention into individuation is always something of a chance constraint, objectively by the content of the milieu of individuation, subjectively through the compatability of the individual in relation to the encounters to come; a compatability developed historically according to the structurings induced by prior encounters.
Original:
L’expérience constitue – au sens actif et processuel de ce verbe – un codage qui n’est ni abstrait ni neutre, qui n’est pas l’ordre du rangement thématique selon un ordre homogène et conventionel, mais une configuration vitale qui intègre les expériences présentes dans le code d’interprétation des expériences futures. L’operateur de ce codage, c’est précisément la membrane telle qu’elle est définie par Simondon: la membrane est l’organe générique qui fait communiquer l’intérieur avec l’extérieur, le passé et le futur sur le double mode de la qualification / interprétation du futur par le passé et de l’intégration du futur au codage passé. C’est dans cette perspective que l’on peut appliquer le modèle de la membrane pour penser l’intégration des singularités dans le structuration individuelle, où l’a posteriori devient a priori. La membrane est le lieu topologique où se noue le jeu de la rencontre et de la compatibilité dans le processus de constitution des structures individuelles qu’est l’individuation.
On peut dès maintenant explicitier l’horizon atteint par cette élaboration théoretique: il consiste à appliquer à la théorie de l’individuation les formules nodales que Simondon met en place pour penser la mémoire vivante dans MEOT. La première de ces thèses se formule ainsi: «le vivant est ce en quoi l’a posteriori devient a priori.» Cette formule qualifie avec précision la modalité de l’individuation suivant laquelle les structures d’individuation sont des produits de rencontres de hasard (non finalisées), qui vont /organiser/ par selectivité et compatabilité les rencontres aléatoires futures. De sorte que l’intervention du hasard dans l’individuation est toujours celle d’un hasard /contraint/, objectivement par le contenu du milieu d’individuation, subjectivement par la /compatibilité/ de l’individu à l’égard des rencontres à venir, compatabilité élaborée historiquement suivant les structurations induites par les rencontres antérieures.
From:
Morizot, B. 2012 «Le hasard contraint comme modalité de l’individuation» in Barthelemy, J-H. ed. Cahiers Simondon 4, Edition L’Harmattan, pp. 9-32.
Over on the website Figure/Ground, Andrew Iliadis has conducted an interesting interview with philosopher Graham Harman about his philosophical project and its special relationship with the work of Burno Latour, some short, and pithy, definitions of some of the key terms related to his work (object-oriented ontology, vicarious causation, weird realism), his dislike of scientism, and his contention that ” Latour is probably the most important living philosopher”. Worth a read.
