Do not like or share this article: Fighting back against technological ‘interruption’

You can take up philosophy anytime. Proof of that is Bernard Stiegler, who started studying the subject while serving a prison sentence for armed robbery between 1978 and 1983.

By the time of his death, in August 2020, he had become a prominent thinker on digital technology and its relationship to humans. Today sees the opening of an international conference, hosted by Technological University Dublin, largely inspired by his work.

Stiegler's philosophy took shape on long days in his prison cell as he reflected on the experiencing of reading and absorbing texts. This led to what one writer described as "perhaps his most crucial insight" – Stiegler's realisation that reading is "an interpretation by the reader of his or her own memory through the interpretation of the text that he or she had read".

Modern technology has created an added layer of complexity. When you scroll across some content on your social-media feed, you are not just reading the text against background memory of the issue at hand. You’re also bound to contemplate the prospect of sharing or liking it against the memory of previously expressed positions on online platforms.

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Stiegler closely examined such dynamics of “computational capitalism”, helping to explain why so many of us are stuck in old ways of thinking, or – as he saw it – drifting towards hopelessness and nihilism. He also suggested an escape route that involved taking greater control over our own thoughts.

To better explain Stiegler's philosophy, Unthinkable has turned to Noel Fitzpatrick, professor of philosophy at TU Dublin and academic lead for European Culture and Technology Lab+, or ECT Lab+, a research institute spanning nine European countries. Its first annual conference takes place today and runs until tomorrow.

Who was Bernard Stiegler and what was his contribution to the study of technology?

Noel Fitzpatrick: “On a personal note, Bernard Stiegler was a friend and colleague, and someone who I worked with closely over the last number of years. On a philosophical level, he was probably one of most influential contemporary French philosophers.

“I would argue his major contribution to philosophy has been the development of a concept he called ‘tertiary retention’. He was able to see that there was something specific happening in the relation between humans (what he called latterly the non-inhuman beings) and the world with the development of industrialised globalised technologies.

“To put this simply, we could take the example of music. When I press a note on the piano, in Husserlian phenomenology we can speak of a ‘primary retention’, which is my perception or apperception of the musical note as it appears to my consciousness and my intention to listen to the note. My ability to remember the note as I press a second key on the piano is the secondary retention.

“In one way, secondary retention is the difference between the two notes, as I remember the first note it enables a distinction with the second note. However, with the invention of recording devices, there is now the possibility of a tertiary retention – the ability to record the primary and secondary retentions in a third memory.

“This third retention for Stiegler has a very particular aspect to it: it is placed outside of me, it is exosomatic, a prosthesis, outside of the body in an exterior device or inscription.

Writing enables me to remember but also enables me to forget

"In Technics and Time volume 1, Stiegler develops a concept of technologies as pharmaka. Here he is building on the work of his mentor Jacques Derrida, [who] puts forward the argument that writing is a pharmakon, both a cure and a poison. Writing enables me to remember but also enables me to forget.

“The move that Stiegler makes is to see that all forms of inscriptions, analogue recording, digital technologies are forms of writing. Digital technologies themselves act as placeholders, act as pharmaka, both cure and poison.

“We can see today that the smartphone functions both as a placeholder for memories but also a means to capture our attention by extracting value from ability to attend. So it is not simply something which enables me to forget telephone numbers because it holds that memory for me.

“It is also highly toxic: there is an addictive aspect of the pharmakon, and this has its limits. There is a point where the insatiable desire to attend reaches a limit and we can no longer give the attention needed.”

Technology has developed a life of its own, and there is a sense that controlling it is now a hopeless cause. Is there a realistic alternative to computational capitalism?

“The alternative modes of technological development [that Stiegler championed] are trying to harness the therapeutic aspects of the pharmakon, the positive pharmacology, to re-establish critique and debate, and deliberation – what I have called digital hermeneutics.

“This is perhaps the alternative to computational capitalism or platform capitalism ... the development of what Stiegler and the collective have been calling contributive economy.

“The difference to the circular economy is that the contributive economy is focusing on the notion of contribution – contribution to the planet, contribution to thought, contribution to the local wellbeing. The contribution needs to be accounted for in new ways where value is understood as more than monetary value.

“Another way that is beginning to emerge is technodiversity. Just as we now all understand that for a healthy ecology we need biodiversity, we can see that there is a need for other forms of computational technologies which are not solely designed to capture our attention or our data.

For Stiegler, political apathy was caused in part computational processes interrupting my relation to myself

“Stiegler, in his last works, was developing the concept of ‘noodiversity’. Alongside the need for biodiversity and technodiverity, there is the need for other forms of ‘noesis’, other forms of thought.

“For Stiegler, the malaise of the younger generation and general political apathy was caused in part by the interrupting of collective modes of individuation [or forming a stable personality], where social media dominates our relations to the other, and where computational processes interrupt my relation to myself. These affect the ability to project into the future, to dream, because thought itself has become confused with calculation and probability.”

What’s the aim of the ECT Lab+?

“Its overall motto is to ‘Think Human First’, to place the human, and I would argue, to place the humane, at the centre of technological innovation, and hence to educate technologically responsible citizens.

“The lab sets out to study technology and technological practices, their history, their organology, their evolution as both positive and negative impacts (their pharmacological nature). These impacts are on a micro scale (ie, use of smart phones and attention) but also on a meso scale (ie, city, territory, nation states and data carbon footprints) and an a macro scale (ie, world, climate change, Anthropocene and fossil fuels).

“In order to face up to the challenges of our epoch of the Anthropocene, we need new technological practices and innovations to allow us transition into what Stiegler called a Neganthropocene. This should not be reduced to discussions of modes of energy usage but must address the need for new modes of political economy.”

Ask a sage

What is the defining feature of the age in which we are living?

Bernard Stiegler replies: “The Anthropocene is an ‘Entropocene’, that is, a period in which entropy is produced on a massive scale, thanks precisely to the fact that what has been liquidated and automated is knowledge.”