Spatial Machinations
Just a quick note to say that i have updated the bibliography of English translations of Stiegler’s work I have here on the blog.
Some interesting additions are:
Patrick Crogan and I are pleased to announce the publication of a special issue of the journal Culture Machine concerning the various ways we might examine the commodification of attention. This work stems from our engagement with the work of Bernard Stiegler and draws significant influence from his book ‘Taking Care of Youth and the Generations’. The special issue includes a contribution from Stiegler as well as articles from Jonathan Beller and Tiziana Terranova and an interview with Michel Bauwens.
I blogged about this further on the Paying Attention website:
Patrick Crogan and Sam Kinsley, researchers within the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE, have co-edited the just released special issue of the influential Open Humanities Press journal, Culture Machine entitled ‘Paying Attention‘. The issue was drawn from the 2010 conference of the same name, documented on this website, convened by the Digital Cultures Research Centre with funds from the European Science Foundation. With a substantial introduction by the editors, the issue revitalises and updates the critical examination of the workings of the ‘attention economy’ in the context of today’s rapidly emerging realtime, ubiquitous, online digital technoculture. It re-focusses work on this theme of attention in light of the current and emerging technocultural milieu of smart devices, the increasing mediation of experience, and the significant financial speculation in the attention capturing potential of social networking media. The special issue includes an interview with Peer2peer Foundation co-founder, Michel Bauwens; essays by key theorists of attention Jonathan Beller, Bernard Stiegler & Tiziana Terranova; and several papers on topics from Facebook, Free and Open Software, the ecological costs of our attentional technologies, to the problematic role of digital social networking in Istanbul’s recent (2010) European Capital of Culture project. Please visit the Culture Machine website to explore this open access special issue.
PLEASE NOTE: This bibliography has been moved to a permanent page, where it will continue to be updated.
Following Ben Robertson’s lead, and courtesy of Daniel Ross’ Twitter stream (and with his permission), here is a complete list of Bernard Stiegler’s work translated into English. Many of these translations are by Ross (notably Acting Out, For a New Critique of Political Economy, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations and The Decadence of Industrial Democracies). Not included in Dan Ross’ list, apparently, are several unpublished works.
UPDATE 2/08/12: I have appended some pieces I had missed from the list and added some further details for some forthcoming texts.
Continue reading “A bibliography of Stiegler’s work in English”
The purpose of this post, a slightly revised version of an original on the technophilia blog, is to outline an initial reading of ‘digital studies’ in relation to the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler and examine its possible application. On 18th April the Digital Cultures Research Centre hosted a visit by Christian Fauré, a technologist and philosopher, who is a founding member of the Ars Industrialis association. That week also saw Bernard Stiegler, another founding member of Ars Industrialis, deliver a keynote at the World Wide Web international conference, held by the W3C international conference committee, in Lyon (France). In both talks we are introduced to what has been termed “Digital Studies”, by Ars Industrialis in conjunction with the Pompidou Centre’s Institute for Research and Innovation (Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation – IRI) [1].
Continue reading “Digital Studies”
Over on our technophilia blog I recently posted this short introduction and translation of Christian Fauré’s recent commentary on the concept of the virtual:
Last week Christian Fauré, of Ars Industrialis, posted a new blog post concerning what he has called the techno-anthropological virtual. The main substance of his argument, I suggest, is that the conceptualisation of the virtual that we can understand through the work of scholars such as Bergson, Deleuze and Stiegler is founded on technics, as a default of origin for the human. We must therefore understand the virtual in relation to the human as a techno-anthropological issue – it is realised through processes of exteriorisation, as mnemotechnics, and thus intimately bound up with the ways in which human development (becoming) has extended beyond the body-environment relationship and is tied to the creation of organised inorganic matter. The techno-anthoropological virtual is the potentialities that emerge in the associated milieu of trans-individuation, the becoming of assemblages of bodies, technologies and environments, and is concretised in the recording of traces, as language. For humans, then, ‘the virtual’ is the means by which ‘the real’ is articulated and enunciated. Continue reading “The techno-anthropological virtual”
On the 19th of April I contributed to the ‘virtual space‘ event held by Passenger Films, combining short talks and film screenings that addressed the theme of ‘the virtual’. Passenger Films is a series of public events initiated by Amy Cutler, a cultural geographer at Royal Holloway, and supported by UCL UrbanLab, that combine talks and film screenings. I had the privilege of speaking alongside Rob Kitchin, Director of the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis (Republic of Ireland) and co-author of ‘Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life‘.
I am indebted to @furtherfield for posting a link to the blog communication+1, which has a YouTube video of Alexander Galloway giving a talk, at the at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (December 2nd, 2011), on ‘Deleuze and Computers’.
The inimitable Galloway identifies Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” as a highly significant piece of thinking about life in a digitally mediated society. The talk is really interesting and I have reproduced below most of the post from communication+1, including the YouTube video:
Abstract:
Could it be? Could it be that Deleuze’s most lasting legacy will lie in his “Postscript on Control Societies,” a mere 2,300 word essay from 1990? Such a strange little text, it bears not the same Deleuzean voice so familiar from his other writings. Cynics will grumble it falls short of the great books of ’68-’69 or the radical collaborations with Félix Guattari during the 1970s. In the “Postscript” he indicts capitalism by name. He raises his wrath against corporations and television shows. Yet his frame includes the culture at large, not just the mode of production. He talks about snakes and surfers and other features of the dawning millennium. He references such figures as Roberto Rossellini, Paul Virilio, Franz Kafka, and most importantly Michel Foucault. He tells us exactly what is wrong with the business sector, as well as with the prisons, schools, and hospitals. It reads almost like a manifesto, the “Manifesto on Control Societies.” In this talk we will investigate the last few years of Deleuze’s life, a period in which he elaborates, however faintly, an image of what it means to live in the information age.
This talk was made possible by the UMass Graduate School, the University Libraries, UMass Free Culture, and the Department of Communication.
Recorded by JC Sawyer, produced by Zach McDowell
I am slowly but surely working my way through Bernard Stiegler’s writings, and really enjoying doing so. These notes are just a way of distilling some the themes I’ve encountered and I haven’t posted anything for a while on this blog. My understanding of Stiegler’s work, such as it is(!), is in large part thanks to my colleague Patrick Crogan, with whom I have been convening a Stiegler reading group at UWE. We have a blog at: technophilia.wordpress.com – which is worth checking out! Continue reading “Reading Bernard Stiegler”
Clive Barnett recently blogged about an interview with philosopher (and native Tunisian) Mehdi Belhaj Kacem over on lacan.com a website I find nearly impossible to navigate(!). In the interview Kacem is rather damning of Badiou (whom I believe he previously had worked with):
It’s obvious that Badiou and Zizek, who reacted very late to the first positive event of historical and global scope of the twenty-first century, know absolutely nothing about the situation, although, in Badiou’s case, it’s truly spectacular: almost like Sarkozy he manages to talk about the Tunisian revolution as if it were no more than some “riots.” He says: “maybe some interesting utterances will come out of this, let’s wait and see”¦” He’s completely out of it.
The whole interview is an interesting read and I need to reflect on this a little more before passing serious comment but I wanted to point people towards it: http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1046