Bernard Stiegler
(Institute for Research and Innovation)
Abstract:
The meaning of work has been interpreted in misleading ways ever since the co-birth of philosophy (in ancient Greece, as denial of the technicity of noesis) and monotheism (in ancient Judea, as the original sin of knowledge), then again under the influence of Newtonian and ‘Wattian’ physics, and yet again after Marx’s disastrous misinterpretation of Hegel’s Herr/Knecht dialectic. This lecture will try to show why the time has come to go beyond these metaphysico-theological ideologemes. In the Anthropocene, ‘to work’ rediscovers its meaning, namely: to struggle against entropy, as well as against what we will call anthropy, and to do so from the perspective of a neganthropology. Today, bio-logical, psycho-logical, socio-logical and techno-logical automatisms have all combined, thanks to their algorithmic treatment and exploitation by ‘platform capitalism’, giving rise to a generalized entropy and anthropy bearing the worst, just as clouds bear the storm. We shall see that only the redefinition of work as distinct from labour or employment gives us any hope of overcoming the Anthropocene era – and of opening the Neganthropocene era, as the power and knowledge to dis-automatize.
Bernard Stiegler is a director of IRI at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmith College in London and a professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne where he teaches philosophy. Before taking up the post at the Pompidou Center, he was program director at the International College of Philosophy, Deputy Director General of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, then Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). Bernard Stiegler has published widely on philosophy, technology, digitization, capitalism, and consumer culture. Among his writings, his three volumes of La Technique et Le Temps (English Translation: Technics and Time), Acting out, translated by David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan, Stanford University Press, 2009, two volumes of De La Misère Symbolique, three volumes of Mécréance et Discrédit and two volumes Constituer l’Europe are particularly well known. Professor Stiegler has a long term engagement with the relation between technology and philosophy, not only in a theoretical sense, but also situating them in industry and society as practices. He is one of the founders of the political group Ars Industrialis based in Paris, which calls for an industrial politics of spirit, by exploring the possibilities of the technology of spirit, to bring forth a new “life of the mind”. He published extensively on the problem of individuation in consumer capitalism, and he is working on the new possibility of an economy of contribution.