'Combinatorial Books - Gathering Flowers', with Janneke Adema and Gabriela Méndez Cota - Part 1; Part 2; Part 3 (blog post)
Open Access
Most of Gary's work is freely available to read and download either here in Media Gifts or in Coventry University's online repositories PURE here, or in Humanities Commons here
Print and downloadable pdf versions will be available soon.
About the book:
Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues, Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In Realist Magic, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality.
The programme for the next series of Open Media seminars has now been posted by Janneke Adema.
Coventry School of Art and Design and the Department of Media invite you to a year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
Podcasts of previous Open Media seminars are available here.
I ended my last post in this series by asking, what if Stiegler is right, and with the web and digital reproducibility we are now living in an era in which subjects are created with a different form of the awareness of time: a ‘radically new stage of the life of the mind, whereby the whole question of knowledge is raised anew’? Does this not raise an issue of fundamental importance concerning the extent to which this episteme and the associated changes in the media ecology that are shaping our memories and consciousness can be understood, analysed, rethought and reinflected by subjectivities that, by and large, continue to live, work and think on the basis of knowledge instruments originating in a very different epistemic environment?
To explore these questions and their implications for radical philosophers and critical thinkers further, let us return to Stiegler’s claim that the task par excellence for philosophy now is the development of a new critique of political economy that is capable of responding to an epistemic environment very different to that known by Marx and Engels. Stiegler has recently been held up by software theorist Alexander R. Galloway as ‘one of the few people writing today’ who approaches Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the control society seriously, both ‘as a political and philosophical problem’ and as a critique of political economy.
But in one respect at least the control society is something Stiegler - in common with the majority of theorists who have alerted us to the power of algorithms - does not take anywhere near seriously enough. For if ‘the what invents the who just as much as it is invented by it’ - if, in Galloway’s words, ‘one must today focus special attention on the way control acts on the realm of the “immaterial”: knowledge work, thought, information and software, networks, technical memory, ideology, the mind’, in order to follow Stiegler in shifting ‘from a philosophy of “what is” [being, ontology] to a philosophy of “what does”’ (what affects, what cares, which is a question of practice, ethics, politics) - then taking Deleuze’s idea seriously as a critique of political economy must surely involve paying careful critical attention to our own modes of production and ways of living, working, acting and thinking as philosophers and theorists. In other words, we need to consider seriously how the economy of control invents us and our own knowledge work, philosophy and minds, as much as we invent it, by virtue of the way it modifies and homogenizes our thought and behaviour through its media technologies.
What is particularly interesting about Deleuze's thesis from this perspective is that it is not just the prison, factory or school of the disciplinary societies that are identified as being handed over to the corporation of the control societies. So is the institution in which many philosophers and theorists actually work and think, namely, the university. To draw on the contemporary UK context, the fundamental transformation in how universities in England are viewed which was proposed by the New Labour government commissioned Browne Report published in 2010, and which has been imposed by the current Conservative/Liberal Democratic coalition (albeit with some modifications designed to generate further competition between institutions, such as the introduction of a free market for students with A level grades of AAB upwards), provides what is only the most recent, high profile evidence of this state of affairs. It entails a shift from perceiving the university as a public good financed mainly from public funds, to treating it as a ‘lightly regulated market’. Consumer demand, in the form of the choices of individual students (no longer seen as constituting a single body) over where and what to study, here reigns supreme when it comes to determining where the funding goes, and thus what is offered by competing ‘service providers (i.e. universities)’, which are required to operate as businesses in order ‘to meet business needs’.
The consequences of handing the university over to the corporation are far from restricted to a transformation in how the university is viewed as an institution, or even to the production of the student as consumer. This process is also having a profound impact on us as academics and scholars (i.e. on that part of what some radical philosophers call the cognitiarian class which actually includes these philosophers themselves). Thanks to the Research Assessment Exercise and its successor, the Research Excellence Framework, many university professors in the UK are now given lighter teaching loads and even sabbaticals to allow them to concentrate on their research and achieve the higher ratings that will lead to increases in research profile and the generation of income for their institutions from government, businesses and external funding agencies. Individuals successful in doing so are then rewarded with even more funding and sabbaticals, which only increases the gap between these professors and those who are asked to carry a greater share of the teaching and administrative load. One result is the development of a transfer market - and even a transfer season as the deadline for the next REF approaches - whereby research stars are enticed to switch institutions by the offer of increased salaries, resources, support and status. At the same time, the emergence of more corporate forms of leadership, with many university managers now being drawn from the world of business rather than the ranks of academe, has resulted in a loss of power and influence on the part of professors over the running of their institutions, for all they may be in demand for their research and publications. A lot of institutions in the UK now require commercial (rather than purely intellectual) leadership from their professoriate, in line with the neoliberal philosophy that society’s future success and prosperity rests on the corporate sector’s ability to commercially apply and exploit the knowledge and innovation developed in universities. ‘They want professors to be knowledge entrepreneurs leveraging income from their intellect through research grants, consultancy fees and patents.’ As one professor has remarked, even sabbaticals are now:
marked by ever more intensive labour. Colleagues must set out a rigorous work schedule, haruspicate discoveries and augur results before the research is done, guarantee high-prestige publication and promise mythic levels of impact. There will be no rest: no time for exploratory play, for the happenstance stirring of an imagination in a lab or library or while naively cultivating our garden, as Voltaire once fondly recommended.
Professors and others in leadership roles are not the only ones affected, however. Most academics today belong to a ‘self-disciplining, self-managed form of labour force’; one that ‘works harder, longer, and often for less [or even no] pay precisely because of its attachment to some degree of personal fulfilment in forms of work engaged in’. Of course this is in part a result of their having to take on greater and intensified teaching and administrative loads, due to severe reductions in government spending on universities combined with an expansion in student numbers, along with the above-mentioned privileging of research ‘stars’. The increase in the number of fixed-term, part-time, hourly-paid, temporary and other forms of contingent positions (instructors, teaching assistants, post-docs, unpaid ‘honorary’ research assistants) as we enter a precarious labour regime is another significant aspect of the changing Higher Education environment. The result is a process of casualisation and proletarianisation Stiegler has described in a broader context as a loosing of knowledge, of savor, of existence, of ‘what takes work beyond mere employment’, and as thus leading to a short-circuiting of individuation.
Yet academics are also working longer and harder as a consequence of the increasing pressure to be constantly connected and prepared for the real-time interaction that is enabled by laptops, tablets, smart phones, apps, email, SMS, Dropbox and Google Docs. Mobile media and the cloud mean scholars can now be found at work, checking their inbox, texting, chatting, blogging, tweeting, taking part in online classes, discussions and forums, not just in their office or even while on campus, but also at home, when walking in the city, travelling by train or waiting at an airport in a completely different time zone from that of their institution. The pressure created by various forms of monitoring and measurement (such as the National Student Survey in the UK) for academics to show they are always on and available by virtue of their prompt responses to contact from colleagues and students only exacerbates this culture of ‘voluntary’ self-surveillance and self-discipline. So does the increasing use of electronic diaries open to scrutiny, together with swipe card readers that provide university management with data on where staff are at any given time. As a result, it is becoming harder and harder for academics to escape from (the time of) work.
It is interesting in respect of this discussion of time that some have seen the occupied spaces of the Occupy movement as creating:
their own form of time: timeless time, a transhistorical form of time, by combining two different types of experience. On the one hand, in the occupied settlements, they live day by day, not knowing when eviction will come, organizing their living as if this could be the alternative society of their dreams, limitless in their time horizon, and free of the chronological constraints of their previous, disciplined daily lives. On the other hand, in their debates and in their projects they refer to an unlimited horizon of possibilities of new forms of life and community emerging from the practice of the movement. They live in the moment in terms of their experience, and they project their time in the future of history-making in terms of their anticipation. In between these two temporal practices, they refuse the subservient clock time imposed by the chronometers of their existence. Since human time only exists in human practice, this dual time is no less real than the measured time of the assembly line worker or the around the clock time of the financial executive. It is an emerging, alternative time, made of a hybrid between the now and the long now.
The online, open access journal of culture, theory and technology, Culture Machine, is pleased to announce the launch of Culture Machine Live. This series of podcasts considers a range of issues including the digital humanities, Internet politics, the future of cultural studies, transparency, open access, cultural theory and philosophy. Interviewees and speakers include Chantal Mouffe, Geert Lovink, Alan Liu, Ted Striphas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Building on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler argues that the relation of the human to technology is one of originary technicity. What this means is that, contrary to the classical Aristotelian view, technology (i.e. that which is organised but inorganic, manufactured, artificial) is not added to the human from the outside and only after the latter’s birth, as an external tool or instrument used to bring about certain ends. The human is rather born out of its relation to technology.
Now, as far as Derrida is concerned, the association of time with the technology of writing means that this originary relation between technology, time and the human can be understood as a form of writing, or arche-writing (i.e. writing in general, which is ‘invoked by the themes of “the arbitrariness of the sign” and of difference’, as he puts it in Of Grammatology- as opposed to any actual historical system of writing, including that of speech). As Stiegler asserts in an early text, ‘Derrida and Technology’, all media for Derrida, ‘beginning with the most primal traces… and extending as far as the Web and all forms of technical archiving and high-fidelity recording, including those of the biotechnologies… are figures, in their singularity, of the originary default of origin that arche-writing constitutes’. For Stiegler himself, however, such an understanding universalizes arche-writing and underplays the specificity of different media technologies and their relation to time. Instead, he emphasizes the historical and contingent nature of this relation. Put simply, because the human is born out of a relation to technology, and because time is only possible and can only be accessed and experienced as a result of its prior inscription in concrete, technical forms, the nature of subjectivity and consciousness changes over time as media technologies themselves change. Drawing on the argument of the palaeontologist André Leroi-Gourhan, to the effect that the emergence of the human species coincided with the use of tools, Stiegler presents this process as having begun in the Upper Palaeolithic period, its most recent stage being the Web. In ‘The Discrete Image’, another early essay, in this case on the epistemology of digital photography, Stiegler thus stresses that we must distinguish between:
- the reproducibility of the letter, first handwritten and then printed; - analog reproducibility (i.e. photographic and cinematographic), which [Walter] Benjamin studied extensively; - digital reproducibility.
(Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Discrete Image’, in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, Cambridge: Polity, 2002, p. 155)
It is ‘these three great types of reproducibility’, Stiegler insists, that ‘have constituted and overdetermined the great epochs of memory’ in the West, producing eras in which subjects are created with different forms of the awareness of time.
At this point a similar criticism can be made of Stiegler - and by implication of those theorists of new media who have followed him in this respect, such as Mark Hansen and N. Katherine Hayles, whose positions build upon Stiegler’s related use of the concept of technogenesis - as he makes of Derrida. (Hansen writes, for example, that: ‘What the massive acceleration of the evolution of technics makes overwhelmingly clear is that human evolution is necessarily, and has always been, co-evolution with technics. Human evolution is “technogenesis” in the sense that humans have always evolved in recursive correlation with the evolution of technics’.) Just as Derrida, in Stiegler’s reading, sees all media as figures of origin constituted by arche-writing, Stiegler himself argues ‘for a generalised technicity – especially as a condition of temporality’. From a more strictly Derridean viewpoint, then, Stiegler does not do enough ‘to preserve the ontological difference between the technical synthesis of time and différance as the quasi-transcendental condition of possibility for time’. Nevertheless, despite this (and in a sense precisely because of it), Stiegler’s work can still be extremely helpful when it comes to thinking through the role the changing technical environment, and with it the emergence of social media, plays in the production of human subjectivity. This can be demonstrated by turning to his understanding of the cultural industries.
To simplify his argument for the sake of economy, Stiegler presents the cultural industries as subordinating the subject’s consciousness and experience of time to the pre-programmed, standardized, reproducible and controllable patterns of their ‘industrial temporal objects’. The cultural industries, and particularly the program (radio and television) industries within them, achieve this by connecting people and their attention to the same daily radio programmes, live TV broadcasts and so forth on a mass basis. Accordingly, there is too little scope for the event, for singularity - for the ‘welcoming of the new and opening of the undetermined to the improbable’, to play on his ‘idea of value defined as knowledge’ from Technics and Time, 2. Newspapers, for example, are described here as being machines ‘for the production of ready-made ideas, for “clichés”’, motivated by the demands of short-term profit, whose ‘criteria of selection are aspects of marketability’. As a consequence, the cultural and program industries interfere with the ability of each subject to singularly appropriate and transform what Stiegler, following Gilbert Simondon, calls the pre-individual fund, which is the process that results in the psychic individuation of each individual. So much so that in a recent essay Stiegler is able to show how they function to suffocate desire and destroy the individual:
As heritage of the accumulated experience of previous generations, this pre-individual fund exists only to the extent that it is singularly appropriated and thus transformed through the participation of psychic individuals who share this fund in common. However, it is only shared inasmuch as it is each time individuated, and it is individuated to the extent that it is singularised. The social group is constituted as composition of a synchrony inasmuch as it is recognised in a common heritage, and as a diachrony inasmuch as it makes possible and legitimises the singular appropriation of the pre-individual fund by each member of the group.
The program industries tend on the contrary to oppose synchrony and diachrony in order to bring about a hyper-synchronisation constituted by the programs, which makes the singular appropriation of the pre-individual fund impossible. The program schedule replaces that which André Leroi-Gourhan called socio-ethnic programs: the schedule is conceived so that my lived past tends to become the same as that of my neighbours, and that our behaviour becomes herd-like.
One of the most important things we learn from Stiegler is that the way to respond responsibly to this ‘industrialization of memory’ and the threat it poses to the intellectual, affective and aesthetic capacities of millions of people today, is not by trying to somehow escape or elude media technologies, or become otherwise autonomous from them. Originary technicity means there is no human without technology, as the ‘who is nothing without the what, since they are in a transductive relation during the process of exteriorization that characterizes life’. Any such response itself therefore needs to involve such technologies. But, by the same token, neither can we proceed in the hope that the mass media of the cultural and program industries are eventually going to disappear or be abolished; or that we can replace them and the alienating affects of their one-to-many broadcasting model with the apparently more personal, participatory, many-to-many (as well as many-to-one, and one-to-one) model associated with the dominant social media. Hence the way a small number of extremely large corporations, including Amazon, Facebook and Google, are currently in the process of supplementing, if not entirely superseding, the ‘old’ cultural and program industries with regard to the subordination of consciousness and attention to pre-programmed patterns of information conceived as merchandise. They are doing so by exposing users to cultural and cognitive persuasion and manipulation (usually but not always in the form of advertising) based on the tracking and aggregation of their freely provided labour, content and public and personal data (age, education, home town, friends, likes). This process is aimed at targeting individual users on a fine-grained, personalised and, with mobile media, even location-sensitive basis.
Stiegler presents such technologies as hypomnémata: i.e. forms of mnemonics (cultural memory), which Plato described as pharmaka, or substances that function, undecidably, as neither simply poisons nor cures. Rather than reject or critique them outright, he suggests we need to explore how some of the tendencies of which our current economy of the pharmakon is composed can be deployed to give these technologies new and different inflections. As he posits in a 2009 book arguing for the development of a new critique of political economy as ‘the task par excellence for philosophy’ today, this ‘economy of the pharmaka is a therapeutic that does not result in a hypostasis opposing poison and remedy: the economy of the pharmakon is a composition of tendencies, and not a dialectical struggle between opposites.’
Yet when it comes to considering the relation between social media and our ways of living, working and thinking as philosophers and theorists, a more intriguing question, I want to suggest, is one that often remains overlooked or otherwise ignored in academic discussions of Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube et al. This question concerns the very medium Stiegler himself most frequently deploys to analyze and critique the specific changes in media technology that are helping to shape subjectivity in the era of digital reproducibility (i.e. that of the grammatological, linearly organised, bound and printed codex text). To what extent is it appropriate for Stiegler to do so as if he himself were in the main living and working in the epoch of writing and the printed letter? Is Stiegler - like Derrida before him, on his account - not in his own way privileging writing, and the associated forms and techniques of presentation, debate, critical attention, observation and intervention, as a means of understanding the specificity of networked digital media technologies and their relation to cultural memory, time and the production of human subjectivity?
Stiegler’s notion of originary technicity, for example, should undermine any Romantic conception of the self as separate from those objects and technologies that provide it with a means of expression: writing, the book, film, photography, the Web, smart phone, tablet and so forth. Yet from the very first volume of Technics and Time (originally published in French in 1994) through to 2011’s Decadence of Industrial Democracies, 1, and beyond, Stiegler to all intents and purposes continues to act as if he genuinely subscribes to the notion of the author as individual creative genius associated with the cultural tradition of European Romanticism. (The ‘construct’ known as ‘Stephen Hawking’ is perhaps the most obvious contemporary example of how this romantic conception of the subject works to separate the author from those objects and technologies that provide it with a means of expression.) Stiegler persists in publishing books, including a number of multi-volume monographs, devoted to the building of long-form ‘arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive’ and, above all, his. So in Acting Out - composed of two relatively short books on how he became a philosopher and narcissism respectively - Stiegler repeatedly uses phrases such as this is what ‘I call’ ‘primordial narcissism…. the “becoming-diabolical”…. a tertiary retention…. hypersynchronization’. Indeed, at least in their compulsive repetition of the traditional, pre-programmed, ready-made methods of composition, accreditation, publication and dissemination, his books very much endeavour to remain the original creation of a stable, centered, indivisible and individualized, humanist, proprietarial subject.
(It is interesting to compare this attitude to that of Hélène Cixous, toward her early texts especially:
I’m speaking here about those first texts that were demoniacal, that I had great trouble bringing myself to sign, of which I said that ‘It wasn’t me who wrote them.’ Even this was a sentence I couldn’t use because I couldn’t say ‘me’, it was much too complicated. They were texts written through me, unrecognizable to me, that were illegal, clandestine, not to say mad. And then that thing, that feeling of absolute non-legitimacy, got decanted. I no longer feel this almost shame at robbing myself in my absence – literally this was what I would think when I was writing my first texts: I’m robbing myself.
(Hélène Cixous, in Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Encounters: Conversations on Life and Writing, Cambridge: Polity, 2012, p. 11) )
It is not only Stiegler who acts out what it means to be a radical philosopher or critical theorist by writing and publishing in this fashion, of course. Much the same can be said of Virilio, Rancière, Žižek, Laruelle, Malabou, Meillassoux – in fact most thinkers of contemporary society, culture and media today. This point even applies to those theorists of digital media who know how to produce code and experimental e-literature, such as Wendy H. K. Chun, Alexander R. Galloway and N. Katherine Hayles. How can it be otherwise when academics in the humanities often need at least one monograph published with a reputable print press to secure that all important first position, promotion, tenure (and that’s after having produced a 60,000-80,000 word PhD thesis consisting of ‘original’ work, of which they have to officially declare themselves the sole ‘author’)? Don’t we all acquire much of our authority as scholars by acting romantically as if we were still living in the epoch of writing and print? (Anyone who doubts the power with which such discourses are enforced should listen to ‘On Tenterhooks, On the Tenure Track'.) Would we have heard of Stiegler or attach quite the importance to his work we do, would we even consider him to be a serious thinker and philosopher, if he had not (single-) authored so many print books and operated instead merely as part of the Ars Industrialis association of cultural activists he formed in 2005 (or any of those other centres and institutions he has worked at and with, such as the INA, IRCAM and IRI [Innovation and Research Institute] at the Georges Pompidou Center)?
the new dynamics of knowledge needs henceforth that Web issues be questioned, practiced, theorized and critically problematized (I here take the word ‘critical’ as Immanuel Kant used it). … [A]s with the Bologna University during the 11th century, then with the Renaissance era, then with the Enlightment and Kant’s question in Le conflit des facultés, we are living a significant organological change – knowledge instruments are changing and these instruments are not just means but rather shape an epistemic environment, an episteme, as Michel Foucault used to say.
But what if Stiegler is right, and with the web and digital reproducibility we are now living in an era in which subjects are created with a different form of the awareness of time: a ‘radically new stage of the life of the mind, whereby the whole question of knowledge is raised anew’?. Does this not raise an issue of fundamental importance concerning the extent to which this episteme and the associated changes in the media ecology that are shaping our memories and consciousness can be understood, analysed, rethought and reinflected by subjectivities that, by and large, continue to live, work and think on the basis of knowledge instruments originating in a very different epistemic environment?
Updated on 8 November, 2024.
Media Gifts is 'raw in its focus on content', having been constructed according to some of the principles of Brutalist Web Design set out by David Bryant Copeland.
Except where otherwise indicated, content on Media Gifts can be distributed, reproduced, transmitted, translated, modified, remixed, built upon, used and 'pirated' in any medium, even without indication of origin. (This does not affect any rights others may have in it or in how it is used.)
Given the lack of a licence that is consistent with the (inhumanist) approach to copyright that is articulated and enacted on Media Gifts - although the cc4r licence (https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/unbound/cc4r) comes closer than most - this statement is provided to acknowledge yet deny the copyrighting that is performed by default by a public domain CC-O licence or when all rights are otherwise waived.
Friday, February 15, 2013 at 11:12AM 
