I have been meaning to write a quick post about this for a while, so this is a ‘late’ announcement”¦
A few months ago I wrote about having two articles concerning digital geographies that I had coming out, the second of which was an article for Progress in Human Geography concerning the matter (both the issue and the materiality) of what have been called ‘virtual’ geographies. I am pleased to be able to say that this article is now available online on the Progress web pages. Unfortunately this requires a subscription for access. However, I am happy to share pre-print copies of this paper, please contact me if you’re interested.
“The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies” revisits the articulation of ‘virtual’ geographies and reviews recent discussion within geography of digitally mediated activity. The aim of the article is to argue for a greater attention to the material conditions of ‘the digital’. This is achieved by articulating a theory of ‘technics’–the co-constitutive relation between the human and the technical,–and ‘transduction’–the iterative modulating and translation of a sociotechnical milieu from one state to another–through the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. This article expands on existing work in geography, such as Kitchin & Dodge’s excellent ‘Code/space‘, that is pushing for more sophisticated understandings of software, code, and the plethora of increasingly sophisticated systems and devices with which we mediate ourselves and our (spatial) experience of everyday life.
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.
The website Inriality has published a brief interview, in French, with Bernard Stiegler on the theme of the digital requiring us to, collectively – as a society, rethink education. In particular, Stiegler addresses the idea and implementation of MOOCs, with the charge that current uses of the technology are insufficient–being primarily concerned with distribution–and do not play to the strengths of networked technologies as a medium: namely interaction. Stiegler’s contention is that the digital is principally a means, or ‘affordance’, of research behaviour and in this way challenges us to rethink education as a more inquisitive and discursive endeavour, in which we encourage one another as peers (in the sense that, for example, the ‘gold standard’ of knowledge production and dissemination is ‘peer review’). He seems to suggest a fairly institutional approach, with the research-intensive university as its model.
Please find below a translation of the interview. I have followed usual conventions of adding clarifications or original French terms in square brackets. I have retained the links included in the original interview, which largely point to French language websites, with the exception of having changed the link to the French wikipedia article on Stiegler to the article in English.
Bernard Stiegler: “The digital obliges us to rethink education”
To introduce our series devoted to the theme of “how the digital changes education”, we asked the philosopher Bernard Stiegler* to reposition the debate in a broader context, that of our societies and their future…
Education must change because knowledge has changed. This profound change is visible in the sciences such as mathematics, astrophysics and nanoscience to name but a few… It is also true in the realm of language as in knowledge, insofar as Google is upsetting the traditional structures [of language] as shown notably by Frederic Kaplan.
And it’s not just academic knowledge that is changed in this way: our know-how [savoir-faire] is being revised, by the ecosystem of fablabs for example, and this is equally so with our life skills [savoir-vivre], they are both simultaneously destroyed by social networks and rebuilt on those new foundations…
In passing, I note that my position concerning all technics is that it must be considered as both good and bad [–a pharmakon]. A technique cannot be good when it has not been cultivated, it requires a purpose, a technique is wrong if we are not educated in it. We are therefore obliged to rethink education, because the digital changes all forms of knowledge, including family education.
Why should familial education be rethought?
Quite simply because it is difficult for parents to educate their children in the digital age! So this area is worth giving thought to because it is actually a very big problem, which risks being poisoned by massive anti-digital reactions that the Snowden case, and others, seem to attract. There is a fear, I think, that the positivity that surrounded Internet until recently will be compromised in the near future.
What can we expect from the MOOC platforms for delivering open courses over the Internet?
I am actively interested in MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses], particularly in the key group [cadre] that includes Plan FUN (France Universités Numérique ~ France Digital Universities) – having myself experienced this type of platform for over three years (see www.pharmakon.fr).
On the theme of MOOCs, I have noticed that the [pedagogical] problem is often taken the wrong way round. The process is this: we have [existing] courses and use the digital domain for their distribution. This is indeed necessary but not sufficient, because digital technology is primarily a research tool – which includes even philosophy.
I am a philosopher – that is my job – and on a day-to-day basis [au quotidien] I work on many textual sources: the digital has completely changed the way I work. I produce further texts, and not at all in the same way. I share them on networks with many people that I frequently have never [physically] encountered. Intellectual objects themselves are profoundly changed…
As a consequence, in the case of MOOCs and within the framework of higher education, it should be understood that MOOCs can only be properly developed through research activity. I have therefore undertaken to petition the Ministry [of Education?] to support those research activities – in large numbers and in all disciplines – specifically devoted to the digital in a given discipline. In all disciplines, it is no longer possible to conduct research as in the past.
In summary, it is necessary to conduct research on digital technology at the very same time it transforms knowledge itself, and precisely because it is an instrument to conduct research and communicate about it. I think we need to mount institutional responses to these issues.
What support mechanisms are best suited to these developments?
We need to create rapid [knowledge/technology] transfer processes [processus de transfert rapide], of an entirely new kind(1). I work at the Compiègne University of Technology, which has had a [knowledge/technology] transfer centre since its establishment – for about 40 years. We believe that this is a basic function of a university. But it also requires new models, such as the one we offer here at the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI) at the Georges Pompidou Centre, on the theme of contributive research.
This framework for research and action also reaches beyond the academic sphere, with the ability to involve teachers and pupils, for example. So there may be transfer across the scholarly world, which has great need of the digital…
What do you think about digital technologies in schools?
The introduction of digital technologies [du numérique] into schools is certainly a good thing… but the reality is that what goes into schools today with digital technologies is the market! Digital knowledge [la savoir numérique] comes from the universities and not the market. But as universities themselves do not produce it, there is a gap that the market comes to fill.
It is therefore necessary to create action-research processes [processus de recherche-action] that would produce very quick [knowledge/technology] transfer and acculturation [l’acculturation]. Support processes that bring together parents, teachers, elected officials…
More generally, most of the value of this contributory approach rests outside the field of education, in particular economically, with vocational training etc.
What relationship do you establish between education and the economy?
I recently spoke about this at the ministry [of education?]: knowledge and education, more generally rational knowledge, only works if it is exposed to critique that enables Reason. This applies to many areas where the logical argument is central, and which range from political debate, art criticism to [legal] justice… This practice of argumentation is formalized with the advent of a technics of publishing – writing – that made the comparison of points of view possible. Everyone knows that the printing press proliferated this phenomenon and its influence on science, economics and modern democracy was crucial. Thus the digital as a new space for publishing enables radically new capabilities.
One can, for example, create a television channel – which I have done with my wife, without technical difficulties and without any investment. In the online school that I have created more than 17,000 people are interested in courses, seminars and summer schools, thousands of people have regularly visited the collection of courses since its creation, and a hundred researchers from fifteen different countries have participated in the online seminars and the summer school… This is possible precisely because the digital opens out public debate. And I emphasize that science is primarily a public debate – between peers.
It seems necessary to me to open today a new organology of knowledge [organologie des savoirs]. This is because the digital tools used in this field are designed and owned by major economic players, such as Google, YouTube, Facebook … I use them but of course they are insufficient. For example, they do not allow you to organize and trace the confrontation of ideas – even though the processes of categorisation that are fundamental to science are based in such disputation, and the computer is primarily a technology for categorisation. Search engines that are capable of mapping, creating historiographies and organising responses [to research] that could nurture debate constitute the future of the web and should become the basic tools of a digital university.
It seems very likely to me that the reinvention of digital tools from an educational perspective will lead to a reinvention of the web itself. Because it is the debate – of ideas, knowledge , businesses , etc. – Which is the source of dynamism and progress. That’s why I think Europe should aim to support a new industrial politics based on digital a new politics of education.
Translation notes
1. I am not familiar with the term ‘transfert’ but the use of ‘transfert de technologie’ seems to map on to what is called technology transfer in the anglophone academy, thus I have made the assumption that ‘transfert’ gestures towards something like knowledge or technology transfer. I use this translation throughout.
In a recent issue of the journal Dialogues in Human Geography there is a fascinating edited transcript of a panel session (from the 2010 AAG conference) with a fairly stellar group of speakers offering their reflections on the theorisation of space and spatiality. The contributions are from Gunnar Olsson, Eric Sheppard, Nigel Thrift and Yi-Fu Tuan. The article and the conference session from which it originates were put together by Martin Jones and Peter Merriman, from Aberystwyth. This is something like compulsory reading for students of geography, at all stages of career! I’ve copied below the abstract. Unfortunately the article requires a subscription to be accessed.
This article is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on ‘Space and Spatiality in Theory’ which was held at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC, April 2010. In the article, the panel map out some of the challenges for thinking, writing and performing spaces in the 21st century, reflecting upon the emergence of new ways of theorizing space and spatiality, the relationship between writing, action and spacing, and the emergence of distinctive spatialized ontologies (e.g. ‘movement-space’) which appear to reflect epistemological and technological shifts in how our worlds are thought, produced and inhabited. The panellists stress the importance of recognizing the partial nature of Anglophone theoretical approaches, and they argue for more situated and modest theories. They also reflect upon the importance of a wide range of disciplinary knowledges and practices to their thinking on the spatialities of the world, from philosophy and the natural sciences to art and poetry.
Walking can be a really helpful and valuable exercise not only for health reasons (in the broadest sense) but also for thinking and discussing.
As a postgraduate student at Bristol I helped with the ‘walking the city’ exercise for the first year students that asked them to walk a ‘transect’ of the city centre, paying attention not only to those indicators of the historical and social origins of the city landscape and the contemporary political economic actors in play but also, drawing on John Wylie’s work, to pay attention to how walking through the landscape of the city feels. In fact, the inimitable Keith Bassett published an interesting paper articulating a field trip exercise drawing on this method–the paper is called “Walking as an Aesthetic Practice and a Critical Tool: Some Psychogeographic Experiments“.
Some of the most provocative conversations I had as a PhD student, challenging my perceptions of my own research and how it fitted within broader discourses, took place on foot–particularly to and from pubs.
In my current role, at the DCRC, we organised two ‘walkshops’ with Do Projects‘ Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim, which invited participants to think about the ways in which networked technologies collect, display and act upon data collected within the city landscape.
The motivation for this post though is that I was interested to find out that Annemarie Mol hosts a monthly ‘walking seminar‘, during which the participants ‘talk-walk about various issues concerning academic work’. The rationale is that ‘talking-while-walking enhances thinking in ways not attainable behind a desk or in a seminar sitting down’. The associated website is well worth a look.
I have been looking at the reception of some of Bernard Stiegler’s more activist-oriented work, while considering the themes of care and the economy of contribution, and thought it would be worth quickly posting links to some of the reviews of Stiegler’s Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. The book, Taking Care, is the locus of Stiegler’s attempt to tackle the subject of attention and pedagogy, and formed the impetus for the conference ‘Paying Attention‘ organised by my colleagues Patrick Crogan and Jonathan Dovey, which I helped coordinate.
First, it is worth noting that the essay/lecture on Stiegler by Alexander Galloway in his excellent French Theory Today(available as a PDF) draws significantly from Taking Care and is worth reading.
The two ‘published’ reviews that I have seen are by Galloway in the journal Radical Philosophy (PDF) and by Richard Iveson in the journal Parallax(an earlier draft is available online at New Cross Review of Books).Iveson’s review is fairly substantial and focuses on what he calls Stiegler’s ‘re-schooling’ of Foucault. Galloway’s shorter, and perhaps pithier, piece addresses what he sees as Stiegler’s formulation of a moral philosophy.
In the ‘electronic journal’ Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Peter Gratton provides an interesting, quite early, review of the English translation of Taking Care. He raises issues with the way Stiegler considers (or perhaps doesn’t) representative democracy and what he considers to be Stiegler’s Euro-centric appeal towards rehabilitation of a bourgeois sensibility for culture.
Amongst the several online reviews you can find with Google, I would highlight the write-up by Brian Rajski on his blog Voice Imitator.
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.
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.
The stories told about innovation by those in technology development, their managers, and the broad range of commentators can constitute a form of mythology for a company, a sector or an industry. These are complex entities in and of themselves but the states of affairs to which they purported to represent are perhaps more nuanced and, of course, are complicated by such stories. I have been interested in one particular story, and the research project with which it is associated, from HP: ‘CoolTown’. I have conducted interviews with many of those involved in the research team for CoolTown and I have a paper in outline, which I hope to prepare for submission this summer. Continue reading “Creating mythologies of innovation – HP’s CoolTown”
