Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy, Technics, and Activism

Stiegler Reading Derrida: The Prosthesis of Deconstruction in Technics

In his massive multi-volume work Technics and Time Bernard Stiegler explores a history of technics as epiphylogenesis—the preservation in technical objects of epigenetic experience. Epiphylogenesis for Stiegler marks a break with genetic evolution (which cannot preserve the lessons of experience), a break which also constitutes the “invention” of the human. As Stiegler puts it in the general in...

Cinema as mnemotechnics: Bernard Stiegler and the “industrialization of memory”

Bernard Stiegler on Agriculture as a Technical System

According to Bernard Stiegler’s theory of techno-evolution, technologies have an intrinsically pharmacological nature. They can be both supportive and destructive for sociotechnical practices based on them. Technological innovations always first disrupt existing sociotechnical practices, but can and should then always be appropriated by the social system to be turned into a new technical system...

Technics, individuation and tertiary memory: Bernard Stiegler's challenge to media theory

Media studies as a field has traditionally been wary of the question of technology. Discussion of technology has often been constrained by concerns about technological determinism. In recent times there has been renewed interest, however, in the technological dimension of media. In part this is doubtless due to rapid changes in media technology, such as the rise of the internet and the digital ...

Enactive individuation: technics, temporality and affect in digital design and fabrication

The nature of creative engagement with computers and software presents a number of challenges to 4E cognition and requires the development of analytical frameworks that can encompass cognitive processes as they extend across material and informational realms. Here I argue that an enactive view of mind allows for better understanding of digital practice by advancing a dynamic, transactional, and...