/lit/ - Literature

looks interesting, I'll dive into it. what are some of his ideas?

>>11420641
he's a complicated guy and i'll admit i'm not as good at explaining him as some other types. here's some of his stuff i was thinking about the other day:

>If we are to think the Anthropocene as giving rise to the devaluation of all values, then we must think it with Nietzsche: the vital task for all noetic knowledge in the Anthropocene is the transvaluation of all values, in an age when the noetic soul’s calling itself into question occurs as the completion of nihilism. This is the very test and ordeal of our age – and it is the very meaning of the Anthropocene as a name for the age of capitalism’s globalization. In this test, the noetic soul is faced with the imperative of thinking thought inasmuch as it is fundamentally a question of protention, and as the arche-protention of its being called into question by its organological fate – which constitutes it while also ‘destituting’ it without recourse. This is something that in fact began long before either the Anthropocene or capitalism, as the pharmacological condition of thinking itself, but today there is no escape from this ordeal, which is that of nihilism.

>What does this destitution of thinking at the very heart of thinking mean? It means that I think only insofar as there is, in my thinking, a place for what, in that which must still be thought, can and must give space for the unthinkable, that is, for becoming. We must think the transvaluation of becoming into future by reading Nietzsche, and we must read him together with the Marx of 1857, that is, as a thinker of capitalism. Marx and Nietzsche must be read together in the service of a new critique of political economy, in a world where economics has become a key factor, in a way that is localized and yet occurs on a scale that is colossal and indeed cosmic. They must be read, therefore, in the service of an ecology: such a reading should lead to a process of transvaluation, so that the economic values and moral devalorizations to which nihilism gives rise when it becomes unbridled capitalism can be ‘transvaluated’ by a new value of values, which is to say, by negentropy.

>The theory of entropy – deriving from thermodynamics some thirty years after the advent of industrial technology and the beginning of the organological revolution that lies at the origin of the Anthropocene, that is, after the steam engine – redefines the question of value, given that the relation entropy/negentropy is really the question of life par excellence. It is with respect to such perspectives that we must think, organologically and pharmacologically, what we should in fact call the Entropocene and neganthropology.

chapter 9 of this book has a pretty good programme of what he wants and thinks about also. the place to begin with stiegler is probably technics and time 1, but there's a good introduction to his work on libgen also. in some ways he's kind of reversing heidegger without destroying what makes him relevant.

>>11420676
>>11420641
some highlights from chapter 9.

>Capitalism amounts to an epistēmē, materialized by the fixed capital of the reticulated apparatus of production that capital has become. This epistēmē hegemonically reconfigures every instrument of calculation, by functionally integrating them as instruments of statistics, measurement, simulation, modelling, observation, production, logistics, mobility, orientation, bibliometrics, scientometrics, marketing, lifelogging (producing the ‘quantified self’) and so on.

>Information is the ‘allagmatic’ operator of this epistēmē, via computational technology that is perfectly homogenous with capitalism: with a capitalism that submits all those exchanges in which psychic life and social life consist to the calculations of the market. This calculation, through which reticulated artificial intelligence is set in place, is based on taking cognitivism as the general paradigm of all forms of knowledge.

>The Entropocene names the disruptive stage of the Anthropocene as it reaches its vital limits, because reticulated fixed capital, which is a global technical system, functionally short-circuits every social system, and, along with them, all the deliberative processes in which they consist, all the forms of knowledge on which they rest, and all the forms of care they cultivate (justice, law, education, culture, urbanity and so on). In this eschatology of the biosphere-cum-Entropocene, capitalism is confronted with the contradiction and the entropic contraction that its thoroughly computational development contains, and continuously
intensifies, as a chaotic phase – whose various social regressions are felt throughout the world as its symptoms

>A leap beyond this entropic situation is required, beyond this state of fact, a bifurcation from this chaos that would be capable of opening up a new era, upon which we shall bestow the name, ‘Neganthropocene’. To enter the Neganthropocene will require a complete redefinition of the relations between epistēmē and tekhnē on the basis of a pharmacological understanding of the latter, as well as a redefinition of the transformation of tekhnē into industrial technology, which Marx called ‘industrial capitalism’ or ‘large-scale industry’, and which Heidegger called ‘modern technology’ (modernen Technik) and Gestell. With the generalized reticulation of industrial technology via what we will hereafter call ‘digital tertiary retention’, based on the network and data architectures prescribed by the profitability requirements of shareholders, fixed capital has become inherently and purely informational and computational.

as indicated, these excerpts are from the above pdf but pic rel is worth checking out also. again, i find him particularly interesting as a guy to read after having been completely rinsed out by land/acceleration. technics > capitalism? kind of an interesting thought.

so if you're into acceleration, as i am, you might find these kinds of things thought-provoking. for land corporate formalism is not only a brake on entropy but is the best conduit for directing negentropy, but stiegler doesn't have land's politics: it's actually kind of hard to tell what they are (and i kind of like that). he spends a lot of time talking about memory also, the originally technical nature of man in this anthropological sense.

anyways here's some other things i scraped up. enjoy.

http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Stiegler%20glossary.pdf
https://www.academia.edu/20136235/A_Summary_of_Bernard_Stiegler_Technics_and_Time_1
https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia27/Parrhesia27_Colony.pdf
https://www.onlineopen.org/download.php?id=377

>>11420732
hey it's landposter. sup. feel free to think out loud itt i always enjoy your posting. been getting into some deleuze. gonna kick back with a beer and read shortly

>>11420742
sup. i don't have too much to think out lout about atm as i'm still just sort of enjoying soaking in a new continental theory guy, but i'm sure i'll find something to schizo-ramble about eventually. enjoy deterritorializing with uncle gilles in the meantime.

Stiegler worries me because he doesn't have sufficient pessimism to realize that he's writing in a medium that exists for nobody. I read some of Time & Technics and some other works, and I 100% agree with his characterization of technics + desire + capitalism, but I kept thinking, who the fuck are you writing for? Who is this reaching? What does it mean that "being right" in this era reaches nobody? Then I read his 2000s manifesto for the foundation of a new piece of shit think tank for ADVISING POLICY and I was completely blown away. He really does think that THINK TANKS for worthless piece of shit corrupted intellectuals who wear suit jackets over turtlenecks, and TALKING TO NEOLIBERALS, is a viable strategy.

I still like his shit but I wish he were more of a chicken little Baudrillard type working disastrously with some unstable cabal of Sam Hyde-esque weirdos to actually speak to a new generation of people who are capable of giving a fuck. Anything other than "Maybe another think tank will help."

this contemporary philosophy thing is just getting pathetic...

>>11421005
good post.

i think mostly the idea is about a kind of secession from what is both a generalized hysteria or weaponized stupidity, but also the condition of an age. i like stiegler for being so straightforward about it: this is an epoch and not a phase. as the meme about 'late capitalism' goes: why call this late when it's only just beginning?

you're right that think tanks probably won't help in the absence of actually functional humans. entropy makes us all comfortably stupid and primed for technological replacement in that sense. it's not what we want, but we all become so narcotized by spectacle that we just get passively absorbed into being fascinated with what in the end spits us out again like pic rel.

i don't even know how much faith stiegler has in these institutions anyways, he basically castigates his own listeners/readers in one of the essays for their 'no doubt intermittent attention.' he gets what's going on.

>>11421044
just think of it as all being part of the cosmic drama.

>These were once unfashionable thoughts in a world that measured itself by the empty ticking time of progress. Under the compressive impulse of recent modernity, however, the distinctively open future of the Enlightenment seems to be coming to a close. What is characteristic of this “cyberpunk” age is the collapse of the boundaries not just between the future and the present—a “future so close it connects”—but also the past: for progressives as much as conservatives, the future comes to be constituted by the recovery of historical projects prematurely foreclosed. The liberal understanding of Catholicism is ill-suited to this new context, in which “progress” is no longer linear and consensus reality itself seems to be disintegrating. The Church itself, however, has all the resources it needs to adapt. Beyond the dilemmas of Protestant modernity, the postmodern metropolis with its Gothic darkness and its neon lights, its complex and unbearably persistent ethical disparities, points towards a potential rediscovery of the profundity of the human soul—the outlines of a new Baroque. In the twenty-first century, the horror, splendor, and love of Catholicism will have their role to play once more.

https://jacobitemag.com/2018/07/05/catholicism-and-the-gravity-of-horror/

>>11421044
It is indeed. "This is why I call it Neganthropocene." - Bernard FuckingIdiot Stiegler