Bernard Stiegler

“Electronicas” are defined as electronic music and the cultures involved, and more broadly as music's not-so-distant cousins, the electronic arts. Electronicas require us to rethink many “givens” in mainstream ideas about contemporary culture and technology. Yet, despite the obvious series of connections between electronicas and the more workaday applications of new media in general, and despite the recent increase in analysis of electronicas themselves,there has been little attempt to think through new media from the “point of view” of electronicas. This paper outlines some theoretical bases - drawn primarily from the work of Bernard Stiegler - for an exploration of electronicas. It does so in the twin contexts of their innovative and longstanding engagement with technology, and their more recent attempts to put the digital back into the world. It gives a brief account of the contrasting natures of an electronic understanding of culture and technology and some more mainstream views. These contrasts lead to a general theoretical consideration of digital media as differential media. This term implies media based upon the technics, philosophies and cultures of intensive difference rather than the stabilisation of differences into the “unity” of “communication”

"Bernard Stiegler argues in Technics and Time that the notion of technicity and its relation to the agency of the human has for centuries been repressed and distorted by the philosophical tradition from Plato to Heidegger, suffering an Epimethean fate of falling into hostile oblivion and distrust. What the philosophers – and by consequence, painters and writers – have ignored is technology’s supplemental role in the cognitive structure of the human subject as its prosthetic prerequisite. The technophobic paradigm of the subject, with all its ideological implications, such as the illusory nature of its autonomy, has featured widely in the 19th and 29th century art and literature, sometimes more overtly, as in the pastoralist mode with its insistence on the opposition between technology as a threat to possessive individualism and nature as its redemptive refuge, and sometimes more covertly, as in the futurist topoi of machinic power and dynamic movement. As noted by Jacques Rancière, the modernist fascination with technical potency is but a side of the Janus-faced cultural regime of the sensible, the underside of which hides the truth about the economic usurpation of the autonomous status of art.
That the issues of subjectivation (Foucault) are always set into occlusion with the problematic of technics (Zummer) is a major, if not the main theme in the literary work of David Foster Wallace. On the one hand, as a writer preoccupied with the enduring influence of TV and other visual media on the ways in which we perceive and represent our experience of reality, or rather, with the extent to which our sense of selfhood is underwritten by the intercessionary technology of the televisual apparatus, Wallace symptomatizes the traditionally technophobic nostalgia for authenticity and subjective autonomy. On the other hand, however, he also finds ways to deconstruct the technophobic position from within. The paper inspects Wallace’s deployment of various technological attributes of visual media as his aesthetic strategies and shows how they disclose the ideological wiring of the apparatus that generates the postmodern subject.
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The paper examines Huizinga's influential thesis concerning the play element in/of culture and its future, using Stiegler's critical mobilization of Gilbert Simondon's account of transindividuation to assess the pertinence of Huizinga's work today. 3 experimental video game related art projects -- of Joseph De Lappe, Langlands & Bell, and Julian Oliver -- are examined to explore the potential of video game technicity to redouble mainstream digital technoculture differently.

"This paper discusses the Nintendo wii—understood here as a significant innovation in gaming systems on the basis both of its commercial success and the way its differences from (and influence on) existing console/pc gaming developmental pathways both revivify and inflect a general technocultural program that could be termed “analogico-digital virtualisation”. from a Heideggerian perspective, the Nintendo wii system would only be further confirmation of the instrumental mobilisation of the human user in the operational, calculative activity of contemporary commerce and communications. It would design and deliver an engagement in the everyday that further prompts the withdrawal of the possibility of other modes of attentive encounter with other beings.

I will consider how the Wii system alters the analogical solicitation of the player via the hand-held controller’s ability to enable larger bodily gestures than those of the more digital-centric interfaces of computer and its existing game console competition (although the wii’s success has been due to a significant degree to its opening up of new markets for gaming entertainment). It is here that a different kind of play-room is generated, one which reanimates in a particular way larger technocultural programmings (in VR and HCI discourses) of a passage toward everyday virtuality, a functional, transparent superimposition of virtual interactive worlds in real space where a more “immediate” gestural control can be exercised. This immediacy can certainly be read as symptomatic, in the tradition of Heideggerian critique, of a further derealizing (Virilio) of human space-time, or as entrenching the hypermediacy of real-time (Stiegler), further eroding the coordinates of cultural and political becoming. The incorporation of the participant in the analogico-digital virtuality is, however, as Stiegler argues of technical milieus in general, only made possible by the prosthetic condition of human being ab initio. This means that technical becoming is always already the very means of human becoming. The re-forming of the player’s engagement in the wii through his/her hand is a rethinking of the player, a re-analogizing of the player, drawing on but also restaging the prospective 1990s discourses of a VR existence to come. The mind-body modelling borne in those future visions is rebuilt in the commercial technical program of the wii. What body-mind configuration is conditioned here, along with what possibilities for its alternative re-doublings?
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"Understanding the military logics that created and continue to inform computer games


From flight simulators and first-person shooters to MMPOG and innovative strategy games like 2008’s Spore, computer games owe their development to computer simulation and imaging produced by and for the military during the Cold War. To understand their place in contemporary culture, Patrick Crogan argues, we must first understand the military logics that created and continue to inform them. Gameplay Mode situates computer games and gaming within the contemporary technocultural moment, connecting them to developments in the conceptualization of pure war since the Second World War and the evolution of simulation as both a technological achievement and a sociopolitical tool.

Crogan begins by locating the origins of computer games in the development of cybernetic weapons systems in the 1940s, the U.S. Air Force’s attempt to use computer simulation to protect the country against nuclear attack, and the U.S. military’s development of the SIMNET simulated battlefield network in the late 1980s. He then examines specific game modes and genres in detail, from the creation of virtual space in fight simulation games and the co-option of narrative forms in gameplay to the continuities between online gaming sociality and real-world communities and the potential of experimental or artgame projects like September 12th: A Toy World and Painstation, to critique conventional computer games.

Drawing on critical theoretical perspectives on computer-based technoculture, Crogan reveals the profound extent to which today’s computer games—and the wider culture they increasingly influence—are informed by the technoscientific program they inherited from the military-industrial complex. But, Crogan concludes, games can play with, as well as play out, their underlying logic, offering the potential for computer gaming to anticipate a different, more peaceful and hopeful future."

How does one tell the story of a machine? Can we say that technical artefacts have their own genealogies, their own evolutionary dynamic? Bernard Stiegler feels this question is an urgent one, and calls for more research into technical evolution in his book, Technics and Time. “Today we need to understand the process of technical evolution, given that we are experiencing the deep opacity of technics” (21). In the following essay, we will be answering Stiegler’s call. Firstly, we will be reviewing the work of several key theorists from different disciplines who have attempted to understand technical evolution, many of whom Stiegler uses in his own work; in order of appearance, paleontologist Niles Eldredge, the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Manuel DeLanda, and archeologist André Leroi-Gourhan. We will then lift some ideas and problems from each of them in an effort to construct a prolegomena to the history of a technical machine, from the standpoint of DeLanda's future "robot historian". In this we want to enquire into the conditions of possibility of the future (or present?) appearance of a hypothetical "machinic agency" with its own autonomy and "vital" force.

"This article critically examines the reading of Rousseau by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. In the first volume of Stiegler's influential multi-volume work La technique et le temps (Technics and Time) he argues that the origin of the human is inseparable from that of technical prosthesis (what he calls organised inorganic matter or ‘technics’). Stiegler takes up this question initially in relation to the problem of anthropology. The immediate starting point for this discussion of anthropology is Rousseau who is, as Stiegler puts it, ‘. . . the pivot between the anthropological question promoted to philosophical rank and the beginning of scientific anthropological theory’. Stiegler’s discussion is focused on the conjectural history provided by the Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men and especially Rousseau's claim that originally man has no need for tools.
This article outlines Stiegler's reading of Rousseau and offers some criticism of Stiegler's argument about the aporetic origin of the human."

This paper argues for a sceptical approach to the political promise of Web 2.0. In particular it examines critically the claims made about participation and the ‘network public sphere’ in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. Moreover it argues that the work of Bernard Stiegler and that of others in the Ars Industrialis group cofounded by Stiegler can help inform a more nuanced account of the relationship between politics, participation and technics. It looks specifically at the arguments in Marc Crépon and Bernard Stiegler’s recent book De la démocratie participative, written during the recent French presidential campaign, and examines how the idea of participation articulates with key themes in Stiegler’s philosophy of technics. Finally it suggests some ways in which this debate on participation might be moved on.

This paper examines the relationship between Derrida’s work and that of Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler’s thinking can be seen as radicalisation of the idea of the supplement in Derrida. Stiegler differentiates his thinking of technics from Derrida's thinking around the supplement by arguing that, whereas Derrida is interested in a logic of supplementarity, he is interested in the historical differentiations of the technical supplement. Having established the basic terrain of Stiegler’s argument in the first volume of Technics and Time the paper moves on to discuss its relationship to Derrida’s work. Here it exposes various problems concerning Stiegler’s use of what he seems fairly determined to regard as the concept of différance. Stiegler himself sees a problem between his analysis of technics and Derrida’s thinking in that the latter doesn't have an account of the emergence of the human as the point at which the ‘living articulates itself upon the non-living’. Here the paper elucidates this difference with reference to Derrida’s own responses to Stiegler in the interviews between the two published as Echographies of Television.