Bernard Stiegler’s theoretical and practical Internation Project called for a refoundation of theoretical computer science that would also put the fact of exchange back at the centre of the conceptualization and organization of the economy. This can be interpreted as a call to critique a form of capitalism that has arisen over the past 70 years through an ideology via which ‘information’ conjoins computation and economics into what becomes an absolute market. But another history of exchange unfolds contemporaneously with this (...) ideology: that pursued in responses to Marcel Mauss’s anthropology of the gift, by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Bataille and Maurice Godelier, among others. Stiegler’s ‘neganthropology’ equally responds to and is informed by this other history of the fact of exchange but, by looking at these works more closely, it may be possible to pursue Stiegler’s project in fields such as kinship and sexuality, which were not his direct concern. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler is known as a leading philosopher of technics. He has developed an original interpretation of technics as an externalized epiphylogenetic memory that remembers in the p...

In contemporary societies, the processes of transindividuation by which knowledges are transformed into cycles and rhythms of metastability have been dramatically short-circuited. In turn, this has provoked the spiritual misery and pseudo-fabulations so prevalent all around us, including our educational contexts. For Stiegler, this is nothing short of a noetic reticulation that deprives us from ways of thinking ourselves beyond or outside of our digital experience. But digitality has not only intensified the commodification of knowledges (savoirs), it has also rendered (...) even knowledge production automated, recursive and probabilistic, the uncritical implementation of ChatGPT being a prime example. What this means is that knowledge and knowledge production have been subsumed under the rubric of recursive optimization for predictive performance. To understand this transformation, I discuss the implications of the widespread use of Bayesian statistics in machine learning. My argument is that we need to develop new speculative tools aimed at what is known as priors in Bayesian models, which is to say the probability of an occurrence before the collection of new data. What this means for education is that we need to address not only the effects of automation, but also the very conditions that give rise to these. (shrink)

In this experimental piece of writing I want to think about the pedagogy of contact and the plight of the hikikomori or social recluse in Japan. I am interested in exploring how the hikikomori practices a kind of contactlessness or what I will call a deadly ipseity of desire. What does it mean to resist contact, to be without contact, to be without desire? What does it mean to risk contact, to risk being tactile with the other, to risk affirming (...) one’s desires? I want to generate a discussion about what has happened to desire, to its promise and possibility and why it is so difficult to anticipate or forecast what is to come. For me the BwO of hikikomori is the ruin of desire, the collapse of desire, a disaster of desire. I am pursuing a line of thought which highlights the loss of the possibility of processual schizophrenic breakthrough and in its place the becoming-autistic of the self, the perilous breakdown of the self. (shrink)

My intention is to consider Bernard Stiegler’s concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’. Open Humanities Press, 2020) and to explore how one might rethink the knowledge-creating potentialities of information itself. This has become all the more apparent in the time of lockdowns, physical distancing during the pandemic but the primary purpose of the paper is to look at the distinction between knowledge/information and the role of the teacher in using technology pharmacologically to safeguard the savoirs and to stem the proletarianization of (...) knowledge or stupidity as such. The point is that the pandemic is bringing home the question of the role of the teacher, the role of the school and the necessity of the co-production and co-creation of knowledge. It seems essential to understand the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ in the time of the pandemic as students are left at home without a journey to voyage upon. As such, there is a lack of futurally-bound collective protentions, an absence of any vision projection into the future. What is there in the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ that demonstrates how to use the Internet in bifurcatory ways, to produce what Stiegler calls negentropic knowledge or new forms of knowledge, or what I want to designate as experiments with truth-telling. What does it mean to produce negentropic knowledge without the teacher to guide, curate and care? With the above in mind, and by writing out of the wound of thinking, it is by rethinking the concept of curation in a different way that it is hoped one can contribute to educational research to produce unheard-of bifurcations of knowledge, to invoke Deleuze’s sense of the incomprehensible and Stiegler’s sense of the impossible, the improbable and the incalculable in educational concerns, to pave a path out of the aporia of the present—a present which is without decision and epoch. (shrink)

At first glance a Russian anarchist’s revolutionary address to the youth of his day made in the late 19th century and the address to youth made by a contemporary French philosopher may appear to have little in common as their context and era are ostensibly very different. How would Petr Kropotkin’s address be understood in our time? Are Kropotkin’s concerns the same as those raised by Bernard Stiegler? Could Kropotkin speak of universal concerns, a sense of elevation and sublimation not (...) governed, undermined or circumvented by digital relations, calculation or algorithmic determination? I find a mutual concern with the coming into maturity of youth, but, I am concerned that as we are passing through an epochal and revolutionary transformation driven by digital and cognitive capitalism and in our toxic and crisis-ridden milieu, Kropotkin’s rhetoric would inevitably fall on deaf ears? Is his rhetoric on revolution anachronistic? How would his rhetoric be crafted for a youth seemingly indifferent to the plight of fellow brethren? Is it conceivable that the humanist-inflected prospects of youth so vaunted by Kropotkin have now been devastated by the inhuman and nihilistic tendencies of the so-called miscreant, ‘blank generation’ as described by Stiegler? True, while it is difficult to calibrate the vision of youth affirmed in Kropotkin with the fear of youth in Stiegler, and, despite differences in episteme, tradition and political orientation, both thinkers I think are concerned with the trials and tribulations of youth and both hold out the prospect of the not-yet of youth, of the coming into being of the maturity of youth, of Aufklärung. It is this shared focus I wish to examine further. (shrink)

In thinking the passage from the “all-human cerebrum” to what one might call the contemporary “all-too-human” cerebrum in neo-liberal societies and beyond to the “all-too-transhuman” cerebrum in the cybernetic society, in contrasting Wells’s idea of a new world order with the dystopia of the disordering un-world, in considering the prospects of a “world brain” faced with the realities of the “global mnemotechnical system”, in highlighting the differences between the global and authoritarian instrument of “control” in Wells and the descriptions of (...) the control society by Deleuze, and finally, in critiquing the “unifying of the general intelligence services of the world” in Wells and the capturing of the “general intellect”, this paper maps the contemporary prospects of the “world brain” against the backdrop of the worldweariness of the present. (shrink)