In one of his probably lesser-known essays, Stiegler talks about the unprincipled approach of the amateur, which he compared, in terms of the conflict of intelligence,[1] to its antinomial complement, the professional critic who is supposed to be an expert when it comes to resolving a crisis.
The unprincipled label actually came from Claire Colebrook, who defines Stiegler's approach as unprincipled, in the sense that it 'demands a future that is highly principled,' even if the tools we use to diagnose the not-yet 'depends on a lack of principle,' which means, the apparatuses available at present.[2]
I would like here to proceed by situating some of the terms I will use in my talk (such as the amateur, the critic, and the Anthropocene) within the context of an impossible task, noted by readers of Stiegler, which is to reverse a seemingly irreversible trend. All these will unfold later as a challenge to education.
I would like first to begin with the term Anthropocene.
The Question of the Anthropocene
In his article on Stiegler, Yuk Hui discussed the paradox of the metaphysics of the archive, a concept he and Stiegler borrowed from Derrida in terms of the idea of arche-writing.[3] It is important to point out that archival metaphysics is the theoretical consequence of the Derridean undecidability in the face of the metaphysics of presence. The metaphysics of presence is where the fate of human language, and therefore, the destiny of being, are inevitably intertwined. But language and being are not just intertwined in the present as the grammatology of presence, but also already in the future, if we mean the future in the context of the present, delaying the future enough to become impatient with itself.
In this sense, the future is no less the impatience of the present or what Stiegler might correlate with the explosion of difference where, for example, a deconstructionist is always on the lookout to read differance into it, in the sense that no decision can be offered, no positive inference can be made; hence, no future can emerge beyond antinomies.
This implies the necessity of the un-becoming of the future, which is the paradox of archival metaphysics in the sense that the future is already archiving itself in the present. In his essay, before he died in 2020, Stiegler called it the 'long anthropological break,' or posthumanism.[4]Posthumanism is the start of a new process, a process of interiorization, or what he also called the archiving of the future. Here the present interiorizes the future to the extent that it leaves nothing for the free selection of the future.
The ongoing challenge of this metaphysics or the grammatology of the future is rendered more concrete through the technicalization of sensibility and desire in the age of computational capitalism. Grammatology stands for the linguistic side of the evolution of psycho-noetic experience. Stiegler called this process the ex-teriorization of the human, where the economy of language determines experience. But what if, despite Spectres of Marx, grammatology missed the entire question of the digitization or archiving of human experience, coeval to the global financing of libidinal economy, echoing Foucault's notion of biopower concerning language, labor, and sexuality?
For Stiegler, when grammatology became planetary, the question of the future ceased to be the question of how to read differance into the present, but rather, how human experience under capitalism becomes the very "undecidability about which we must nevertheless decide."[5] A glaring example of human experience under capitalism is what Stiegler refers to, echoing the Communist Manifesto, as the proletarianization of sensibilities, which isn't grammatology anymore.
Rather this is the historical interiorization of the Heideggerian concept of ekstasis.
Ekstasis is translated, on the one hand, into the ex-teriorization of grammar, the de-formation of language into being, or more concretely, into bodies and minds deformed by a libidinal economy that builds on maximizing entropy. On the other hand, the process of interiorization takes place in terms of entropy. Entropy is supposed to be the end that is the not-yet. It is in this sense that we are living already the not-yet. We are, as a species, 'not-yet living.' This form of end times living is the actualization of the contemporary idea of progress, all the more recent because it arises from the not-yet, which Stiegler called the Anthropocene.
The Normativity of Expertise
In the second section of my talk, I would like to venture into the next phase of Stiegler's criticism of Derrida, after Of Grammatology, where the concept of the pharmakon calls to examine the deeper issues of the Anthropocene. He called it the Entropocene, which is a kind of economic teleology based on maximizing entropy. Another designation may also suffice to describe this phenomenon. Others call it disaster capitalism.
The Anthropocene, I propose, is an antinomial term, like the Greek pharmakon, a cure, and a poison.
These terms are not contradictory; as antimonials, they are imperfect expressions of an underlying unity. But even this unity is also the beginning of the improbable.
In its Latin expression, the Anthropocene is the scene of Man, where humanity no longer inquires about Being, as in Heidegger, but itself is put into question. Stiegler follows Derrida in this respect.
In Of Spirit, Derrida assumed that the pharmakon, which puts into question the question of being, otherwise 'gives the rule of the game.'[6] The rule of the game is that, paraphrasing Stiegler, memory is forged from the future, or what he calls tertiary retention.[7] In short, every question directed at the origin puts to question the origin itself. Suppose this question is the question of the origin of the Anthropocene.
In employing the sense of the pharmakon, Stiegler goes beyond Derrida's differantiating of Dasein, as the one who inquires about Being, to a presumption that the question itself is superfluous, and therefore, the inquirer himself. Once Dasein becomes redundant, alongside the question it posits, paradoxically, Stiegler argues, it offers a condition of thinking that 'engenders a promise by reviving all the promises already broken.' Again, suppose this promise is that of the Anthropocene reversing the geological outcome of its methodical intervention in planetary dynamics.
In the age of the Entropene or the business of maximizing entropy, Dasein is replaced by the figure of the expert, the professional critic. Stiegler called these types of individuals as determinate individuals compared to 'indeterminate or inconsistent' individuals, which he refers to as the amateurs.[8] Stiegler proposed the image of the critic concerning the tradition left behind by Kant in terms of how cognition deals with the manifold of experience. Kant entrusts the critic, or simply the critical subject, to make a complete inventory of the possessions of reason, which is essential to limit the understanding to the bounds of sense[9] (as Peter Strawson, in his phenomenal study of Kant, would call it). But today, where do these possessions of reason lie?
There can be no doubt, these possessions have become pre-formatted aprioris run by algorithms, thereby creating a formalized technical manifold, which now determines human experience. The inventory becomes reduced to scanning pre-determined social codes, which Stiegler defines as 'inherited conglomerate' formatted by operating systems.[10]
You might wonder, how does the critical subject position himself in this technical manifold? Stiegler contends that under this setup, the critical subject becomes officially a 'cultivated philistine,' his inventory reduced to 'analytical mystification.' Today, the precise relation of the critical subject to this technical manifold is measured by its relation to technical metrics, where the critical subject is either rewarded or punished according to standardized responses to performance algorithms. But we are already jumping the gun here.
It is actually preceded by a process of exteriorization that became a predominant economic policy behind the neoliberal education of the 1990s.
Education becomes rigidly separated from human experience through the all-controlling principle of profit. In the last twenty years, this exteriorization of education, where universities become commercial brands, is succeeded by a more insidious process of internalization, where this time society is all the more exteriorized from education.
At this point, Stiegler argues, state power "internalizes the opposition between manual workers and intellectuals," hence, as Stiegler asserts, "there would be specialists of the intellect, and therefore of thinking, and then there would be everyone else."[11]Today this translates into the global proletarianization of the greater population of humanity.
The challenge of the Amateur
In this concluding section of my talk, I would like to proceed quickly to the concept of the amateur.
In Stiegler's description, the amateur challenges the consistency of the critical subject by provoking the critic to prove the very consistency of the principle of the subject within a system of individuation offered by the economy of the manifold. The consistency of the subject presupposes that it is free to select the future, supposedly to individuate from the formalized manifold. Nowhere is this struggle more pervasive than in educational institutions. Education can either improve or degrade the social field. Ranciere calls this the distribution of the sensible. This pre-individual domain of knowledge refers to the cognates of the manifold through which we are always already 'known,' but also, 'in knowing,' which enable their plasticity for social enforcement or social resistance.
But, where can we find the amateur? Interestingly, Stiegler followed Walter Benjamin in relocating the amateur, who, together with the worker, had been displaced by the imperatives of the consumerist model of individuation. Here Stiegler developed a correlation between art and labor, how the psycho-noetic life of the worker and the artist have been "grammatized in their motor functions in other ways when they are put in the service of the production system."[12]
Like Benjamin, Stiegler saw the potentials of the amateur and the worker breaking away from the technical manifold that is now overdetermined by capital. The amateur and the worker have a shared history, a world common to them, as Stiegler outlines as follows:
[A] world transformed by the grammatization of the bodily movements of the worker who ... becomes a proletarian ... a world transformed by the grammatization of the gestures of the artist who makes the ordinary extraordinary, but who is expelled from the (re)production of the visible by machines and apparatuses ... a world transformed by the behavior of those who are ... going to become consumers.[13]
Here, the amateur, just as the worker, is not a person, but a force of the pharmakon, capable of deciding against the archive of the future. It's a force fighting dis-attention, against the formal dis-attentional world of the critical subject, reproduced in schools and universities, forming a cult of dis-attention in the otherwise attentional economy.
In contrast to the critic as an expert, the amateur advances truth claims by "supporting a test" without the certainty of "being able to be proven."[14] Instead of proofs, she sustains the non-provable by "making it shared," thereby "[opening] a public space and time that are the exact opposite of an audience." The concept of the audience, or the classroom audience, operates in a setting where the critic, the expert who wields rational authority, imparts knowledge for social consumption.
But the amateur doesn't want an audience. Instead, she wants to revive the public. Once displaced from the reproduction of the visible, she now wants to re-enter the battle of intelligence, to pursue the fight of intelligence, but not as an economic fight, nor the fight of the cult of personality, which only produces the opposite – 'stupidity, the destruction of attention, and degree zero of thinking.' Rather, she wants to re-enter the battle of intelligence to fight against what inheres in intelligence itself, namely, as Stiegler described, with which I now conclude this talk, its bestiality,[15] or more correctly, its inhumanity, its patriarchy, its exploitative relation to nature.
Paper read at the Role of Philosophy of Education in Teacher Training and Teacher Practice Conference, organized by the Ateneo de Manila University, via zoom, August 18 to 20, 2021, https://sites.google.com/view/philoeducation-philippines
Virgilio A. Rivas, Ph.D.
This is the short version of a full-length article published at Educational Philosophy and Theory, https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1897569
[1] Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
[2] Claire Colebrook, "Impossible, Unprincipled, and Contingent," in boundary 2 44,1 (2017): 213-236.
[3] Yuk Hui, Archives of the Future: Remarks on the Concept of Tertiary Protention (Gutenberg: Landsarkivet I Göteborg, 2018).
[4] Bernard Stiegler, "Elements for A General Organology," in Derrida Today 13 1 (2020): 72-94.
[5] Bernard Stiegler, Nanjing Lectures, 2016-2019, ed. and trans. Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020), 78.
[6] Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, ed. and trans. Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), 198.
[7] Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society, vol. 1: The Future of Work, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 31.
[8] Bernard Stiegler, "Quarrel of the Amateurs," trans. Robert Hughes, in boundary 2 44, 1 (2017): 35-52.
[9] Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Routledge, 2006).
[10] Stiegler, Automatic Society, 42.
[11] Stiegler, Neganthropocene, 180-82.
[12] Stiegler, "The Quarrel of the Amateurs," 47.
[13] Bernard Stiegler, "Kant, Art, and Time," trans. Stephen Barker and Arne de Boever, in boundary 2 44, 1(2017): 19-34.
[14] Ibid., 33.
[15] Stiegler, Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations, 31.
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