Category: Stiegler

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Compositional thinking, or ‘deconstruction as composition’

I’ve been re-reading Dan Ross’ excellent chapter in the edited collection Stiegler and Technics entitled “Pharmacology and Critique after Deconstruction” and wanted to post an excerpt because it seems to me one of the clearest interpretations of one of the foundations of Bernard Stiegler’s thought: “composition”. This is a brief excerpt but I thoroughly recommend reading Dan’s chapter, and indeed the whole book – which is really good!

 

Stiegler inherits more from Derrida than from any other thinker: ‘deconstructive’ thinking is translated in Stieglerian terms into ‘compositional’ thinking:

Deconstruction is a thinking of composition in the sense that composition is ‘older’ than opposition (what Simondon would have called a ‘transductive relation’: that is, a relation that constitutes its terms, the terms not existing outside the relation). It is a relation that is the vehicle of a process (that of différance), one very close, I would argue, to what Simondon elaborates in terms of a ‘process of individuation’ (Stiegler 2001: 249-250).

Deconstruction, pursuing the complex genesis of oppositional pairs, amounts to the elaboration of s process of becoming. It is therefore more consistent than first appearances might indicate with the theories of Gilbert Simondon, for whom the key was not to begin with terms or individuals and then think their ‘relation’; rather, it is the process itself that ‘has the status of being’ (Simondon 1992: 306).

[…]

To this relation of differance to individuation should be added the influence of Nitetzsche, for whom existence must be understood as a play of forces, or, better, of tendencies. The formation of oppositions from prior compositions is an expression of this play of tendencies…

And it may turn out that where compositional thought is superior to deconstructive thought is in making it possible to think de-composition […] Deconstruction thus tends, perhaps, to perceive less clearly the pharmacological dangers of the deconstruction of ‘oppositions’, and the possibility that distinctions may on occasion be precisely what need to be preserved, that is, saved.

Ross, D 2015 “Pharmacology and Critiques after Deconstruction”, in  Howells, C and Moore, G eds. Stiegler and Technics, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 245-246.

Other references:

Simondon, G. 1992 [1964] “The genesis of the individual”, in Crary, J. and Kwinter, S. Eds. Incorporations, Zone, New York.

Stiegler, B. 2001 “Deconstruction and technology: Fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prosthesis of faith”, trans. Beardsworth, R,, in Cohen, T. Ed. Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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In Disruption – new book by Bernard Stiegler

Yet another new book by Bernard Stiegler has been published in French recently: Dans la Disruption – Comment ne pas devenir fou?

One might translate this as: “In Disruption – How do we not go mad?”

Here’s the front and back covers, and I offer a quick translation of the back cover blurb…


For the lords of economic war disruption is “a phenomenon of the acceleration of innovation (…) which is going to happen more quickly in societies that allow them to impose programmes that destroy social structures and render public power impotent. This is a kind of strategy of tetanising one’s adversary”.

Facing the disruption thus imposed, social systems always arrive too late to seize technological evolution, now thundering ahead in the digital revolution. Faced with this state of affairs, which requires countless legal and theoretical loopholes establishing a lawlessness which is a kind of techonlogical Wild-West, individuals and groups are totally lost, often to the point of going mad, individually or collectively, and therefore becoming dangerous. The concretisation of what Nietzsche described as a growing desert of nihilism leaves 21st Century humans with no other perspective than facing the next of the limits of the Anthropocene.

What can be done with such madness, in such madness? It is by starting with this question, that Bernard Stiegler rereads Michel Foucault (Madness and civilisation: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason) and Jacques Derrida (Cogito and the History of Madness) while confronting Peter Sloterdijk and Jean-Baptise Fressoz’s analyses of capitalism as above all a process of disinhibition.

The author conducts these readings or re-readings starting from the forms of madness which reflects his own course, opening out the question of a new moral philosophy – in an age without age [l’époque sans époque], which he calls the “Strauss-Kahn generation”, that is a “lack of age” [“absence d’époque”], which imposes a general demoralisation that cannot last.

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Stiegler: Stop the uberisation of society!

Posted below is a translation of a piece co-authored by Bernard Stiegler with Ariel Kyrou (journo),  Yann Moulier-Boutang (writer) and Bruno Teboul (Director of innovation at Keyrus) and published in Libération on the 10th April.

I suppose it doesn’t really propose anything especially novel, if you’re familiar with others involved in debates around “postcapitalism”, automation, worklessness and universal income (e.g. Srnicek and Williams, or Mason). What is perhaps novel is an application of the ideas in a distinctly European flavour, with examples in France and in the context of a much more robust unionised response to Uber (and the task/gig economy).

Anyway, it’s an interesting read I think…

The piece is rather conversational in tone and uses idioms I have only been able to infer (not being a fluent and native speaker) so it was quite difficult to translate, and so I’m pretty sure there are errors. As usual clarifications or original French are in [square brackets].

Stop the uberisation of society!

Libération, 10th April

The war by taxi companies against an Uber society cannot be reduced to the storyline of a film depicting an ancient evil battling benevolent forces of modernity. If on the one hand the participatory economy threatens our social structures, it can also, on the other, make possible a society with greater solidarity.

Since the first moves towards the draft Thévenoud law in June 2014[1], the urban transport soap opera has generated multiple variations on the theme of the standard storyline. On one side are the taxi federations, which have been labelled a horde of grumpy medieval malthusians by Uber, who in the opening of the second act of the performance of the trial of the 11th February demanded a whopping €100m in damages from Uber, on the other the ‘white knight’ of the new economic order, the high-tech Robin Hood of its pleb users whose UberPop service enables simple fellows in search of employment the opportunity to offer at cut-price their talents for automotive locomotion, between February 2014 and July 2015. This tale of jokers against modernisers is more attractive than the G7, queen of opaque rentier sorcery, who could not turn themselves with the wave of a magic wand into the cinderella of Parisian Transport.

Except that the movie script of the ancient evil against the benevolent ‘disruptors’ rings as hollow as any Hollywood blockbuster: seen quickly, soon forgotten. It works in the short-term, like the groan of the indefinite vigil for a taxi at 3 o’clock in the morning in the banlieue, but it hardly takes us any distance towards solving the questions about the future of our society and the search for sustainable solutions to the crisis we are experiencing.

Let’s not misunderstand this scenario: the agonism presented by this contemporary drama [série du moment] is neither the ardent need to pit global start-ups against French corporatism [corporatismes franchouillards] nor its exact opposite, namely the obligation to defend the capitalism of tired old barons against the hyper-capitalism of the rulers of the digital future. No, the issue that should be obvious to everyone with a stake in the debate is the urgent need to think about the society we want, and then act in order to build it.

For why should we anoint an ‘uberisation of the economy’ without interrogating its ideology and long-term deleterious effects? Uber, which declares only a fraction of its profits in France thanks to a complex form of tax evasion through the Netherlands, Bermuda and Delaware, is participating in the liquidation of our social structures. It embodies a short circuit that threatens the fragile economic balance between taxation, social law, transport policy, infrastructure investment at the local level and the pensions system. Worse still: its social and economic logic foreshadows the advent of a futuristic no-man’s land in which the a priori ideal of liberty becomes monetised against an a posteriori generalised casualisation throughout society. Indeed, the rictus predatory behaviour of platforms like Uber, Lyft and others such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is founded upon a low intensity of capital, little infrastructure, a minimum of salaried employees with more independent or self-employed workers.

The uberisation process forms the first wave in the tsunami of automation. Its primary consequence will be a net loss of five million jobs in industrialised countries by 2020, according to a report published on the 18th of January by the oracles of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the shameless apostles of the “fourth industrial revolution”. This deeply unappealing assertion has been amplified by several studies in the last three years (by Oxford, MIT, the Breugel Institute and Roland Berger) which predict around 47% fewer people in employment by 2025. This slow but inexorable extinction of of the salaried world effects not only warehouse workers, supermarket cashiers and lorry drivers but also barristers, solicitors, journalists, those working in medicine, and so on. Why should it remain necessary to use human beings for tasks that are reducible to systematic procedures? Which in our data economy robots and algorithms will soon perform much more efficiently. The combination of robotics and ‘big data’, algorithms and network effects, is already transforming us into the involuntary gravediggers for salaried employment. Welcome to a world that is ultimately ‘flexible’, boosted by robotic automation [robotisation] and work on the meter. A world where users and customers constantly account for themselves, where each becomes their own big brother and where most of the activity in every market, like with car insurance, will increasingly play out more in an automated big data-driven fashion than according to laws or to forms of trust that are not based in calculation.

Nevertheless we should beware skewed perspectives: such a world is not inevitable. The digital gives us an opportunity to reconsider work not only in terms of jobs doomed to become ever more precarious, provoking anxiety about self-exploitation, but also as a part of a project for a contributory society in which salaried employment would be one means amongst many, rather than an end in itself. A company like TaskRabbit certainly creates use value through its platform of small on-demand jobs, but it keeps for itself and its shareholders the [accompanying] exchange value in the form of profit. In contrast, Loconomics is a co-operative owned by those who use it to advertise their services. Against the platforms of the so-called sharing economy (which it is in name only) Trebor Scholz endorses a ‘platform cooperativism’ [2] to build a society of commons that operates beyond solely economic and financial dimensions.

This shambles needs to be urgently addressed. Thinking in the long-term, this is political in the principal sense of the word. To buckle down to the future of work equally concerns: expertise in data to use and liberate ourselves from algorithms and a care for people without the need for machines; to classify work in a way that is both protective of our ways of life and much less administrative than today; to examine the establishment of an adequate basic income, structurally justified by massive unemployment due to automation and the coming slow death of employment; to experiment with the extension of the regime of casual work in the context of a true society of contribution, with the acquisition and sharing of knowledge by and between everyone; to study tax reform based upon the principles of a financial transactions tax [la taxe pollen], beginning with the establishment of a European tax on the flows of High Frequency Trading, to finance a universal income.

Rather than the two opposing and yet complimentary nightmares that are the integral uberisation of society and the sovereignist protection of the capitalism of yesteryear we prefer the realisation of a dream: to imagine, to experiment, to build, step by step, a freer society with greater solidarity; preferring disagreement to the brainwashing that has played out, historically, through the carrot and the stick, or, in our high-tech times, through a blind obedience to shiny artificial devices [l’obéissance aveugle à de rutilantes mécaniques artificielles et augmentées].

1. For more information on the Thévenoud law see this article – Sam.

2. See this article on Medium by Scholz.

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‘Vulgar’ cultural geographies and technology (new article online) and other ‘provocations for cultural geography today’

I have a short article/commentary recently published online in Social & Cultural Geography:

Vulgar geographies? Popular cultural geographies and technology

The article is one of several from a forthcoming theme issue that is the result of the OU Open Space Centre’s 2014 Doreen Massey annual event themed on ‘provocations of the present’. The theme issue Provocations for Cultural Geography Today has some great papers in it, including:

I strongly encourage having a read of these articles!

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A summary of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time 1 by Dan Ross

I’ve mentioned this here before but Dan Ross wrote an excellent and accessible summary or guide to Stiegler’s first and perhaps most extraordinary volume of the series at the heart of his project Technics and Time, which was the Wikipedia page for that book. Unfortunately this has been open to some questionable editing and so it is great that Dan has uploaded his version to Academia.edu as a free-to-access PDF. I recommend this as a support to a reading of T&T 1. Dan’s knowledge and interpretation of Steigler’s work is brilliant.

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Article accepted: Vulgar Geographies? Popular Cultural Geographies and Technology

Some time ago (in 2014), I participated in the Open University’s annual ‘Doreen Massey event’, which had the title Provocations of the Present: What culture for what geography?, and I presented a provocation concerning culture, technology and what is meant by ‘popular’ culture when it’s studied by people like me (broadly – cultural geographers).

I was invited, a few months later, to write this provocation up for a theme section of Social & Cultural Geography. This has finally come to fruition, after some helpful comments by two anonymous reviewers and some very kind help from Nadia Bartolini, Parvati Raghuram & George Revill at the OU and S&CG editor Mary Gilmartin.

I am pleased therefore to share the accepted manuscript as a PDF.

So it’s:

Kinsley, S 2015 “Vulgar Geographies? Popular Cultural Geographies and Technology“, Social & Cultural Geography in press.

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Projecting a genuine future for the living? On Latour & Stiegler comments after the Paris attacks

I was quite surprised at how quickly the translation of the short interview with Bernard Stiegler in le Monde spread on twitter, which is not usual for my posts…

Anyway, I have been struck by a similarity in ethos between the comments made by Bernard Stiegler in his interview and the commentary provided by Bruno Latour in an op-ed (translated by Jane Kuntz) for Reporterre, entitled “The Other State of Urgency” [via Installing (Social) Order].

It is an ethos of calling for the casting-off of a short-termism or ‘death-wish’ (pace Latour) focussed on (inadequately mitigating) destruction–destruction of states, of peoples and of our planet–towards affirming what Stiegler calls a ‘genuine’ future and what Latour sees as a taking of fate into our our hands. One might see it as a loosely vitalist ethos: an affirmation of life and its pluri-potency.

It seems to me significant that both Latour and Stiegler frame the issue in relation to the anthropocene and the COP21 talks being held in Paris. For both of them, the affirmation of a ‘genuine’ future entails combining stances towards ecological, economic, political and scientific atmospheres. Such an affirmation of a sustainable path towards a future of the living is set in contra-distinction to a rhetoric of war, which both thinkers reject in their own ways. To submit to war, in the manner of the French government, is to submit to a short-term imperative to (re)act, but to act for whom and to what ends is a question both Latour and Stiegler find troubling. It is analogous to government via catastrophism – such forms of reaction are already presumed in the mode of ‘normal’ operation: the ‘everywhere war’ and ‘state of exception’ is the new ‘normal’.

Who could argue against an affirmation of hope? I certainly would not. Yet, while there is plenty of diagnosis of the ‘state of urgency’, we are left to ponder: what is to be done?

I don’t think I buy Stiegler’s eurocentric call for policy, it is too easy to see how–even with the best of intentions–this would slip into the kind of technocratic malaise that has buggered up the Mediterranean EU countries. Yet, at least Stiegler attempts to offer strategies – and I think the wider outlining of a political-economics of contribution and of a kind of ‘neganthropy‘, while somewhat grandiloquent, remain inspiring. I would be very curious to see what Latour would suggest in order to “invent demonstrations more innovative than yet another march from Place de la République to Place de la Nation.”

It is, of course, excruciatingly hard to offer strategies for action – as Zizek likes to quip: we can see why it has been suggested that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to the ideological milieu of capitalism. Working for a ‘genuine’ future hurts, but as both Latour and Stiegler demonstrate: it remains the task at hand.

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Stiegler on Daesh and ‘the age of disruption”

I offer a here a quick translation of an interview for Le Monde published past week with Bernard Stiegler, following the attacks in Paris in which he addresses Daesh/ISIS within the context of his conceptualisation of ‘disruption’, which is the context of his forthcoming book [Dans la Dusruption ~ “In the Age of Disruption”].

Only by planning a genuine future can we fight Daesh

The philosopher Bernard Stiegler develops this thesis in his forthcoming book: “In the Age of Disruption”.

Interview by Margherita Nasi.

For the philosopher Bernard Stiegler “war is economic”. The collapose of employment egenders a dispair that in turn leads to violence. “There is no future without a fundamental reversal of economic value”, he explains.

Since the attacks of the 13th of November the President of the Republic insists” “We are at war”, do you recognise yourself in such a war?

No. What is this “we”? They are at war, not me. War is economic, it is theirs and it creates casualties, including me, who cannot sleep at night, not because of terrorists but because of a lack of future for my children. This is not a war against Daesh, as they suggest, but a global economic war, which takes us into civil war if we do not combat it.

Employment will collapse, especially amongst young people, and dispair breeds violence. We no longer produce reasons for hope today. The attacks of the 13th of November were suicide attacks, which is not insignificant – suicide is developing around the world, especially amongst those young people who know they will not work for a long time.

Both Sarkozy and Hollande failed to provide any kind of prospects for these young people. It is against this stupidity, this madness, that I am at war. A war within myself as well: we are all subject to this tendency to find scapegoats, not to think and not to care. This is barbarism, and that is exactly what Daesh wants: to create civil war. There will be more attacks if we do not change our politics. This is the context of my next book ” In the Age of Disruption”.

What do you mean by disruption?

Disruption is a phenomenon of accelerating inovation which is the foundation of a strategy developed in Silicon Valley: it is a drive to go faster than societies in order to impose upon them models for the destruction of social structures, rendering public powers powerless It is a strategy that tetanises the opponent. In my book, I analyse a text signed by Abu Bakr Al-Naji, as summarised by Ignance Leverrier [former diplomat and journalist], that defines a collective, including former officers of Saddam Hussein that became Islamists. It is a sort of Daesh manual, in the image of corporate bibles that detail the rules to set up a franchise. This book explains how Daesh actors should seize power. One must create chaos and thus exploit the need for some kind of authority.

I compare this strategy with that of the website “Les Barbares attaquent” [The barbarians are coming], founded by Nicolas Colin, a former tax inspector known for his report on the tax system and the digital economy, in which hie highlighted the inadequacy of the tax system for dealing with digital companies, which he describes as the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’, in this case GAFA [acronym for: Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple]. He has since moved to the other side, from public service into the economy which he described as so damaging, to create an investment fund that raises money to practice disruption on the French. Yet, repeating the strategy of GAFA, he can only extend their ecosystem and intensify the colonisation of Europe, wrecking transport, housing, education–all sectors–through new models such as Uber. However, such disruptive practices destroy the social balance, what [German Philosopher] Theodor W. Adorno anticipated by speaking in 1944 of a “new form of barbarism” in relation to the cultural industries.

It is not by declaring war on Daesh that this takes place. This declaration is one way of absolving oneself of one’s own responsibilities by scapegoating people that have become extremely dangerous and who we have co-produced with Daesh.

This radicalisation is thus built on the ruins of ultraliberalism?

Yes. We turn radicalism into a question of religion, and this is outrageous, Most recruits of radical Islam have no religious culture. It is not religion in question but despair. Richard Dur, the murderer of eight members of the Nanterre Council in March 2002, prefigures his actions by speaking about his feelings not existing: he wanted to become somebody by these actions.

In 2012 you launched a call for a global economic peace treaty, is this still a possible contemporary solution for eradicating barbarism?

We need to open out a debate in Europe, take things head-on, since the birth of the web we have all been losing. Exploited by the kinds of disruption practised by GAFA, digital technologies have accentuated the environmental toxicity that has been growing since the beginning of the anthropocene – an era in which humans have become the major geological factor – in terms of the climate, the atmosphere and in mental terms.

There is no future without a fundamental reversal of economic value: only the transition to an economy producing sustainable forms of value will overcome the challenges that are the subject of the COP21 next week.

We must launch a new European policy rather than aligning ourselves with the American model that is disruptive and suicidal/ We must invent a new Web in the service of viable marcoeconomic model, rather than developing a completely ruinous economy of data. These are the themes of the “Conversations about a new industrial world”, orgainsed at the Pompidou Centre on the 14th and 15th of December. Only by planning [projetant] a genuine [véritable] future for the planet can we combat Daesh, in other words to combat despair.

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Does critical geography need a shock to thought? On Purcell’s ‘joyful geography’

Over on his blog Path to the Possible Mark Purcell has written a thoughtful and interesting piece diagnosing a slip into a kind of cynicism, or perhaps a rut in ‘critical’ thinking in geography, that the predominant disposition of criticality in ‘critical geography’ is of being against– :  “against colonialism, against capitalism, against racism, etc.”.

Purcell argues that a negative consensus of what constitutes ‘criticality’ has developed that has created an orthodoxy of negation:

“I worry that we have become inordinately attached to singing in this key, that we have become unable to do anything other than cancel what we oppose.”

Indeed, this echoes a criticism of the over-coding of the various readings of what one might mean by ‘neo-liberalism’ by James Ferguson in Antipode that, as Clive Barnett summarises: “identifies a standard style of critique as denunciation of exploitation, inequality and oppression” but that can also be rather limited.

In this way we might understand such an orthodoxy of a perpetuation of an adaption to the contemporary milieu, in the form of a negation of its conditions (such as, for example, labelling everything ‘neoliberalism’) rather than an adoption and then rethinking the practices/processes of the conditions that produce it [I’m riffing on Stiegler’s distinction between adaption (as a tendency towards dis-individuation) and adoption (as a tendency towards co-individuation)]. This ‘orthodoxy of negation’ (as I have chosen to call it) can be characterised as a kind of entropy, a slip from proactive thought into what might be a kind of un-thinking or ‘unreason’  and ‘stupidity’ (as Stiegler has it in States of Shock). Stupidity is a necessary tendency for all of us insofar as it is the precondition for knowledge, but we need a shock to thought in order to reinvigorate our capacities for knowledge. Of course, we are overburdened by shocks (as Naomi Klein outlines in The Shock Doctrine) that appear to arrive with increasing frequency. Rather than submit to simply adapting to the onslaught of ever-more-frequent shocks, following Stiegler’s analysis, we need to engender a therapeutic form of ‘shock’ to our thinking that doesn’t simply confirm a status quo of the orthodoxy of negation.

Reading this together with the argument presented by James Ferguson, who argues:

“what if politics is really not about expressing indignation or denouncing the powerful? What if it is, instead, about getting what you want? … Denunciatory analyses often treat government as the simple expression of power or domination–the implication apparently being that it is politically objectionable that people should be governed at all. But any realistic sort of progressive politics that would seek a serious answer to the question “what do we want?” will have to involve an exploration of the contemporary possibilities for developing genuinely progressive arts of government.”

Thus the habitual ruts of critique that Ferguson calls the “antis” (anti-globalisation, anti-neo-liberalism, anti-privatisation, etc.) in which any exercise of power is considered in some way dubious are, perhaps analogous to the forms of ‘stupidity’ (of entropy) that Stiegler argues against. I am not offering a simple and pejorative sweeping dismissal of any of those so-called “anti–” positions, neither am I making a glib appeal to Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that a more affirmative attitude might be necessary and that we all need to be aware of our own ‘stupidity’ (otherwise there’s simply no hope for individuation!).

I welcome a call for ‘joyfulness’ in research and in ‘critique’, a more affirmative attitude towards the exercise of power in the face of the orthodoxy of negation and all of this reminded me of Clive’s excellent reading of James Ferguson’s paper, upon which some of this post has been based. So, for me (and for what its worth) I guess I would advocate a kind of practical joyfulness – one that aspires to the same precepts of communing, of mutual aid, of solidarity that Purcell discusses in his blogpost and begins from the everydayness of doing geography (as an academic, as a teacher, as an activist and so on).

I’ve hardly slept due to a poorly child but I do think it’s worth reading all of these things I’ve linked here together to formulate a way of moving forward… just my grain de sel”Ž 🙂