http://eveningredness.net/2012/01/16/bibliography-of-bernard-stieglers-work-in-english-to-date-thanks-to-daniel-ross/

As to the ‘immaterial’, I don’t believe in it: it does not exist. It is an easy word that is used even by people of the highest quality, like André Gorz [L'Immaterial. Connaissance, valeur et capital, 2003], where it names what are in fact evanescent states of matter which remain, nonetheless, states of matter. there is nothing which is not a state of matter. And, to produce these evanescent states, a great deal of matter is required: lots of apparatuses. Thus we live in an economy and epoch rather of ‘hypermatter’ as well a ‘hypermaterial’ one.

I call hypermatter a complex of energy and information where it is no longer possible to distinguish its matter from its form — what first appears with quantum mechanics, necessitating the abandonment of what Simondon called the hylemorphic scheme. This is the manner of thinking according to a pairing of concepts, form (morphè) and matter (hylè), that are thought as opposed to each other. I call hypermaterial a process where information — which is presented as a form — is in reality a sequence of states of matter produced by materials and apparatuses, by techno-logical dispositifs in which the separation of form and matter is also totally devoid of meaning. (p.109-110).

The commentary then characterises the speed race of this conversion of everything into information, of the rush to nano-second and nano-scale informationalisation via the digital dispositifs, how the IP version 6 addressing protocol is able to come up with a separate address coding for more than the individual atoms on earth, etc. A quasi-permanent extension of the accessible states of matter able to be rendered informationally. So the ‘dematerialisation’ of the economy is a hypermaterialisation: the infinitely small and the infinitely short. Matter becomes invisible, not immaterial.

Bernard Stiegler gave a monumental keynote on the first evening. And during the day, major film theorist Tom Gunning (of ‘The cinema of attractions’ fame) delivered a paper engaging in Stiegler’s Technics and Time 1 argument about technology as co-constitutive element of human being, via its function as form of exterior memory. In particular, he drew on Stiegler’s use of Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s account of the orgins of human being which insists on technics as the exteriorisation and modification of the evolutionary dynamic, and on L-G’s analysis of the speech and writing as technics in this fashion.

Which was great for me as I am preparing to deliver my paper on Stiegler’s account of cinema as the key mnemo-technical (ie. memory technology) form of the 20th c in the later Technics and Time 3. I thought you would be heartened to know that this material is in the spotlight in this major film theoretical conference.

I’ve been tentatively circling phenomenology for a while now; as an approach to grasping embodied experience in everyday technoculture. There are lots of very productive resources, from film theory (Laura Marks, Vivian Sobchack) and from HCI (Paul Dourish, Lucy Suchman), and back to Heidegger, and forward through Stiegler… However the film and HCI phenomenology, whilst sensitive to the reality of technics, seems fixed in a humanist frame. It is human bodies and sensoria that experience, sense, and locate themselves in relation to screen images and technologies, not vice versa. I’m writing a paper on virtual gravity that will, amongst other things, address the proprioceptive faculties of accelerometer-equipped devices such as wii-motes and iPhones. Is there anything in Stiegler (or beyond) that might help?

L-G’s work tended to fall short of thinking the implications of the industrial revolution for his model of technical development as ethnically mediated variations on a universal technical tendency. The industrial challenges the ethnic via its rapid and global transformation of production that tends to make ethnic political, etc systems fall into line. (Still, and the late L-G seemed to get this, this is in keeping with the idea of universal technical tendency; only it is its exacerbation. So it is less for Stiegler (like L-G) a quesiton of a western cultural ‘superiority’ imposing itself than of a radical boost in the dynamic of technical development to ‘cut across’ ethnic, cultural, geographical, limits and filters.

This is where Stiegler turns to Simondon as a better thinker of the industrial process of technological development. Individuation is key here, as a thought of composed, ‘tranductive’ reciprocally implied becoming between elements in an ensemble. for Simondon this is a kind of quasi-evolutionary process that explains technical development of complex industrial systems. The ‘technical individual’ is however a becoming and not like the biological individual, a concrete, ‘realised’ entity. For Simondon’s ‘mechanology’, the task is to better understand this individuation process, the better to learn how the human relates to it, can compose themselves with it, and learn to live in the ‘associated milieu’ industrial technics composes/reinvents out of the natural milieu and its own environment-making complexity.

some important elements discussed here: a definition of the machine (p69): as something that synthesizes a function: in two senses: in incorporates a function (this is the process of concretisation of particular machines in Simondon), and it reproduces it in the place of its earlier concretisation. Stiegler; reproduction is the engine of differentiation.

p69-70. Concretisation is the history of the development of specific objects conceived from the perspective on function, on procedure. this is more relevant, and less anthropological than thinking of and classifying objects in terms of human use (eg. sword, pistol, club as weapons covers over the procedural differences between a sword and a club and a pistol; whereas the functional resemblance between the machine gun and the proto-cinematic devices of Marey, Muybridge has been noted by another simondon-influenced thinker, Virilio; the function of intermittent drive travelled and cross-pollinated different domains of technical objects. the dynamic of ‘chaotic’ and systemic interchanges in technical development is more determining of the quasi-genetic becoming of technical ensembles than human inventors thinking up ideas for new tools.

Indetermination is key: and of course digital computer technology is the system of maximal indetermination and potential possible lines of concretisations. Here Stiegler reprises and ‘concludes’ the thematic of technological determinism vs cutural/human agency conducted thoughout the chapter. in simondon the human becomes more the ‘operator’ than the origin/destination of technical development. But as Stiegler shows toward the end of the chapter this is not nothing. in fact, the human is essential supplement to technical development which has no ‘agency’ or motive (desire) without the human operator, even if Simondon’s project has been to turn the tables on the human-centred conception of technology as a series of forms expressing human ideas/ideals/desires.

Human anticipation is identified as the key element of this engine of technical becoming (in a quote from Simondon, p81). Stiegler indicates his way ahead by saying that if that is the case, then it is necessary to show how this anticipation has always already been conditioned by, composed with and out of, a relation to technics. Human technicity–human as technically supplemented– is irreducible, originary. A (better, more critical, politically less naive) mechanology would have to think this through carefully.

We will post a date for our ‘back to school’ meeting soon.

Patrick and Sam

This is a rough translation from a brief but powerful description of culture that Stiegler offers in response to the commodification of culture (and implicitly, its acceptance by a certain mode of cultural criticism and analysis):

pp 51-52 from Economie de l’hypermatériel et psychopourvoir: Entretiens avec Phillippe Petit et Vincent Bontems (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2008)

P.P. [Phillippe Petit]:

We are living in an epoch of terrible doubt, about works of art, scientific discoveries, religious feelings… These doubts are expressed across a cultural recycling that is so swollen that its precise form escapes us. Cults and disciplines of all kind seem to spread out in a terrible indistinction.

B.S. [Bernard Stiegler]:

You could also talk here about political and economic workings. It is happening like this because belief must make an object of a care or service, a cult (religious or secular), of a culture and of a training in the sense that the Greeks spoke of gumnasia (of which the German teaching institutions have preserved this usage). There isn’t any religion without rituals because religious belief must be trained, just like all forms of belief. But this is true of all forms of otium and of all the knowledges of the forms of otium.* Personally, I read and write every morning, and I practice this like a cult—and as a battle against myself, against what is a kind of ‘minority’ within me, caused by what Kant would call my laziness and passivity.** Today we dare not call this culture, identifying it with what Moses Mendelssohn has taught us belongs (as Kultur) to Bildung [education], that is, to a formation of the mind/spirit [l’esprit], and in this sense, to a cult. We dare not speak of it in this way anymore because the word ‘culture’ has been so folded into the consumerist and behavioural modes through which it is constituted in the culture industry—what Michel Deguy rightly calls ‘the cultural’—that in the end we have forgotten this necessity.

* otium is an Ancient Greek word that Stiegler takes up, following Foucault’s analysis of ‘care’ and the techniques of the self (of self-development and improvement) that are opposed to the necessary activities of working to survive—negotium—as what what can be done to make life more ‘existing’ than merely ‘subsisting’. See eg. Stiegler, Taking Care.

** The reference here is to Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ essay, and the opposition of minority (immaturity, dependence, passivity) to majority (maturity, independence, responsibility and agency).

http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Stiegler%20glossary.pdf

there’s also an mp3 of a talk by Galloway on Stiegler.