Bernard Stiegler and the Philosophy of Education

Joff P.N. Bradley, David Kennedy, Joff P.N. Bradley, David Kennedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000353310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This book is the first of its kind to critically examine the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler from the perspective of the philosophy of education.

The editors of this book firmly believe that in the coming years Stiegler's philosophy will assume increasing importance and influence in both digital studies and the philosophy of education as his thought is a prism through which to understand how we live and work, and a means to anticipate what the future may hold for us all in the time of the Anthropocene. They are of the view that Stiegler's work will have a permanent impact on the intellectual terrain of the twenty-first century as his majestic conceptual architectonic will shape political, social and pedagogical debates in the coming decades. With this in mind, the contributors of this book take up his gauntlet to understand the risks and opportunities of the digital pharmakon and its impact on the educational milieu.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Part I

Retentions

The problem of now: Bernard Stiegler and the student as consumer

Kristy Forrest

ABSTRACT

The student as consumer has emerged as a common motif and point of contestation in educational philosophy over the past two decades, as part of the critique of the neoliberal educational reform agenda that followed Lyotard’s (1984) mapping of the postmodern condition. In addition, the consumer-orientated student has assumed a problematic presence in secondary-school classrooms and higher education institutions, a fact that has led to the general lament for the dehumanisation of education under a market logic. Expanding upon these narratives of ‘loss’, Bernard Stiegler’s account of the student as consumer builds upon the Lyotardian view to reveal the neurological, generational and psychical implications of what he terms the ‘battle for intelligence’, which is a result of the proletarianisation of knowledge via the imposition of marketing technologies on the psyche of the youth. This leads not only to a consumer mind-set co-opting education, but a process of ‘short-circuiting’ disrupting the educative process itself. This article will consider Stiegler’s apocalyptic vision of youth malaise in comparison to the previous notion of students as consumers in the classical and Marxist narratives he revises. It will then outline the new challenges this poses to contemporary educators, as well as the possibility of translating his utopian call to action to pedagogical practice, both of which constitute the 'problem of now'.

The problem of now

In his reflections on Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment essay, Michel Foucault identified the most ‘certain philosophical problem’ as ‘the problem of the present time and what we are at this present moment’. Paraphrasing Kant, he advocates a critical inquiry of the present as a means of understanding ourselves, driven by the questions: What’s happening now? What’s happening to us? (Foucault, 1982). Writing in the postwar era, the Marxist critic Ernst Bloch saw the problem of now in a utopian sense, defined by the ontological condition of ‘Not Yet’, or the tensions between our present that is always latent with potentialities which cannot be realised as the material conditions do not yet exist (Bloch, 1954).

In our neoliberal context, both Bloch and Foucault’s challenge is taken up by Bernard Stiegler, who posits a current ‘crisis’ in education (at both the familial and formal level) due to the seductive and corruptive power of marketing technologies over the psyche of the youth, while simultaneously seeking an optimistic means of resistance. Using language laced with dystopian imagery, Stiegler’s philosophical treatise of adolescence at risk parallels similar fearful accounts offered by cultural commentators outside of academia in the popular press. In March 2016,TIME magazine devoted an entire issue to the anxiety and depression of the ‘Modern American Teenager’ with the by-line ‘the kids are not alright’ (Schrobsdorff2016). Meanwhile, in The Atlantic in 2017, psychologist Jean Twenge (2017) asked ‘have smartphones destroyed a generation?’ before claiming that ‘it is not an exaggeration to describe “igen”’ as being on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades. This again was echoed by cultural guru Simon Simek (2016) who described ‘an entire generation who has access to an addictive, numbing chemical called dopamine through cell phones and social media’ in a video viewed over 10 million times on YouTube.

Thus, it seems that Stiegler’s warnings are simply joining a popular chorus of despair and urgency. After all, he shares the common refrain of technology and consumption as spiritually toxic, while also bemoaning the colossal tasks of educators faced with teaching an entire generation whose attention has been co-opted by marketing. Yet Stiegler, while mirroring the concerns of his cultural contemporaries, offers a unique diagnosis of modern life as a social and economic disjuncture from previous eras through a combination of Platonic and Marxist concepts, which challenge educators to both critique and restore. As a point of focus, this article will consider the figure at the centre of the education debate, the student as consumer. The consumer-orientated student has not only assumed a problematic presence in secondary-school classrooms and higher education institutions, but also emerged as a common motif and point of contestation in educational philosophy over the past two decades as part of the critique of the neoliberal reform agenda that followed Lyotard’s (1984) mapping of the postmodern condition. Stiegler’s account links the consumer mind-set in education to a general proletarianisation of knowledge, which leads to a process of ‘short-circuiting’ that disrupts the educative purpose as part of a general ‘battle for intelligence’ that has neurological, generational and cultural implications. After outlining Stiegler’s vision of youth malaise in comparison to the Classical and Marxist concepts of the student as consumer (which he, respectively, sits within and also revises) this article will finally consider the ‘problem of now’ in relation to Stiegler’s utopianism and current pedagogical practice.

Educative purpose

Stiegler offers an emancipatory narrative of educative purpose, drawing on both Platonic and Deweyan concepts in its focus on individualization and socialization for the purposes of civic responsibility and maturation. In States of Shock (2015) and Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010b) he connects the vocation of the education system as a whole to a line of ancestral descent leading back to Classical and Enlightenment traditions of logos and the Bildung, or the formation of attention as reason. Employing Freud’s concept of the psyche, Stiegler explains the need to care for the juvenile psychic apparatus, through a process of transmission of knowledge (as social and disciplinary competency) across generations.

In Freudian terms, knowledge is the formation and encoded accumulation of the reality principle in its many forms, knowing how to live, what to do or how to think, or savoir vivre, faire and theorique. The adult’s responsibility is the transmission of this intergenerational experience, and thus education is a process of inherited internalization, or transindividuation. Within the educative relationship, teachers are concerned with the formation of attention that allows a student to come into being, and orientate themselves in a temporal sense via a connection to the past containing the sediments of previous generations (tertiary retentions) to the immediate and present and past experiences (primary and secondary retentions) which in turn creates the possibility of a future (protentions). In this relationship, the child is a minor with ‘no access to the reality principle’, who through a process of transmission with living ancestors (parents and teachers) comes to interiorise the knowledge of successive generations which constitutes maturity.

A scholarly education creates what Stiegler calls ‘long circuits’ of transindividuation, where objects of attention become objects of knowledge through disciplinary instruction and engagement with tertiary retentions, which, preceding primary and secondary retention, constitutes the world as this world. The student individuates themselves through the creation of new circuits, which ultimately lead to what Stiegler posits as his utopian ideal: nobility of mind, or the freedom to ‘propel oneself beyond what exists…the faculty of projecting the objects of desires as infinite’. Reason as freedom, to ‘critique, discern, analyse…to reinvent’ (Ars Industrialis, 2010) is integral to social development, and the power of rational imagination and cultural memory is mandatory for the projection of ideal objects, or protentions.

Consumerism as a disruptor to emancipation: Classical and Marxist criticisms

Philosophers who, like Stiegler, advocate a view of education as transformative practice have traditionally spoken about the student as consumer in two broad senses. First, pedagogically, as a passive recipient of knowledge who lacks agency (and thus critical and creative power) and second, in a mercantile sense, as a paying client who seeks knowledge for instrumental, rather than emancipatory or humanistic purposes. Plato posits education as a purposeful activity driven by ontological care for the soul of the student, which is achieved via shared interest and intergenerational connectivity. His criticism of the Sophists as intellectual mercenaries who ‘hunt the wealthy’ privately to teach them the art of rhetoric was predicated on a notion of education aiming for a ‘good’ that lay beyond worldly or base desires. An education in rhetoric was mere flattery (as opposed to wisdom) and the Sophist as a paid teacher offered only the ‘semblance of education’ (Plato, 2018). Plato’s notion of a teacher-merchant as inherently disruptive to the educative purpose of orientating minds via the elenchus is echoed in Dewey’s relegation of transactive relationships between teachers and students as ‘non-social’. Existing on a ‘machine-like plane with one another to get desired results’ (Dewey, 2008) they are prevented from the sharing of purposes and communication of interests that is required for genuine social life, and thus encounter each other in manner that is mis-educative.

Like Plato, Dewey also warns of mis-educative experiences masquerading as education. He is especially wary of those that offer gratification but in reality promote the formation of a ‘slack and careless attitude’, which through their disconnection, often generate ‘dispersive, disintegrated, centrifugal habits’. (Dewey, 2008). Similarly, for Plato, the paying student of rhetoric lived a life akin to a gully bird, seeking only temporary pleasures which leaves him infirm and in a state of discordance. Thus, when education is fragmented and discontinuous, or reduced to the gratification of desires, it becomes ‘idle to talk of self-control’, and therein lies the danger.

Writing after World War II and its attendant hyper capitalism, poststructuralist and Marxist criticism vividly describes the negation of educative ideals at the hands of corporate logic and calculative rationality.

In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard (1984) explains how classical and modern traditions legitimised themselves via appeals to grand narratives, such as the core tenets of the Enlightenment. In contrast, the postmodern condition is characterised by its ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ and replaced instead by the logic of performativity, or the best ‘input and output equation’. Under this logic, the acquisition of knowledge is no longer legitimised by reference to ‘the training of minds or even individuals’, and thus principals such as the Bildung are ‘becoming obsolete’ (p. 4).

Replacing a relationship built on concernment for being is one that assumes the form taken by producers and consumers of commodities. This exteriorisation of knowledge leads to a shift in the form of value, as knowledge no longer exists for its own sake, but to be sold, consumed and exchanged. Under this model, the purpose of higher education is to enable the best performativity of the social system via the didactic teaching of the skills that are most in demand on the world market. As performativity has delegitimised the emancipation narrative (and dissemination of a mode of life) that previously defined the university’s purpose, students now seek not ideals, but skills. As Lyotard writes, the professionalist student no longer asks ‘is it true?’ but ‘what use is it?’ and ‘is it efficient’? (p. 51)

Stiegler’s critique: Proletarianisation

I. Proletarianisaiton of the worker

Stiegler’s vision of the student as consumer sits comfortably within the traditional lines of criticism outlined above. However, it also differs as Stiegler employs an expanded notion of Marx’s concept of proletarianisation, tracing it from the worker, to the consumer and then finally to cognition in general, which produces a doubly deprived student.

Stiegler traces proletarianisation back to Plato, and defines it as the exteriorisation of knowledge via technics. Hypomnesis is the process by which this occurs, through the use of memory substitutes or externalisations (mnemotechnics) such as writing, machines or apparatus. This formalisation of individual or collective knowledge results in it ‘escaping’ the worker, so that it is no longer theirs, and belongs to the apparatus itself. The opposite of this is amanesis, or embodied knowledge, where one can recollect or remember the ‘truth of being’, which manifests in dialogic interaction without a reliance on mnemotechnics. In other words, the knowledge is embodied in the manner of skilled craftsmen, or wise and mature person. For Stiegler, the history of memory is analogous to the history of human knowledge, particularly the transfer of knowledge over time and between generations. Grammatisation describes the history of the exteriorisation of memory, the manner in which the ‘flows and continuities which weave our existence’ are discretised via technologies (Stiegler, 2015, p. 32). An example is the discretisation of speech in the form of writing, or the gesture and movements of a producer in a machine or an app.

This first stage of Stiegler’s account of proletarianisation, of the worker, manifests in higher education as knowledge acquisition being viewed as the means to an economic end. In ‘Fragments on Machines’, Marx (1973) describes how industrialisation, in transferring workers’ knowledge to a machine, reduced the worker’s activity to a ‘mere abstraction’. This, in turn leads to a feeling of alienation, characterised by a loss of control over one’s working life and the exploitation of worker’s energy (as pure, productive labour) for profit.

For many in higher education, this concept neatly explains the detachment currently experienced by educators working in corporatised universities, where neoliberalism has resulted in the commodification of their work and the disassociation from their civic or democratic educative purpose (Giroux, 2013; McCarthy, Song, & Jayasuriya, 2017). The student consumer aims to position themselves and their education within the dominant social order of the logic of the market (Nordensnvard, 2011), while their mode of consumption is relational in that they regard themselves as on the receiving end of the distribution of goods, as ‘purchasers’ of knowledge. Their ‘consumer consciousness’ in this sense, relates to their need for a particular kind of satisfaction. Ascribing a market value to their education, there is less interest in ‘being’ a learner as opposed to ‘having’ the degree, as the ontological state is not marketable, unlike the qualification.

As proletariansied workers, academics write with a sense of urgency and distress at the supply and demand model of higher education. The pressures on teachers and departments to rate highly on quality measurement scales result in what Ball (2003) labels the ‘terrors of performativity’, while many lament the loss of the very thing that Lyotard predicted, which is the notion of education as emancipation. Instead of seeking to learn, students have become empowered by the rise of their consumer consciousness and use their newly assigned role determiners of educational quality to make demands concerning how knowledge is best transferred and acquired. The result is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Obituary: Bernard Stiegler, philosopher of reorientation
• Introduction: Stiegler as philosopher of education
• Part I: Retentions
• Part II: Protentions
• Afterword: From ‘Dare to Think!’ to ‘How Dare You!’ and back again
• Index