Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler 1501356372, 9781501356377

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Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler

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Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler Edited by Noel Fitzpatrick, Néill O’Dwyer & Michael O’Hara

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © Noel Fitzpatrick, Néill O’Dwyer and Michael O’Hara, 2021 Each chapter © of Contributors For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xiii–xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image: Jeanette Doyle, Ansaldo Waterpainting I, 2011, Treated Digital Print on treated watercolour paper, 210 mm x 297mm © Jeanette Doyle All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fitzpatrick, Noel, 1967 December 27- editor. | O’Dwyer, Néill, 1979- editor. | O’Hara, Mick (Michael), editor.  Title: Aesthetics, digital studies and Bernard Stiegler / edited by Noel Fitzpatrick, Néill O’Dwyer and Mick O’Hara.  Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021007995 (print) | LCCN 2021007996 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501356353 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501356360 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501356377 (pdf)  Subjects: LCSH: Digital media–Philosophy. | Technology–Philosophy. | Stiegler, Bernard–Influence. | Aesthetics. Classification: LCC B54 .A34 2021 (print) | LCC B54 (ebook) | DDC 302.23/101–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007995 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007996 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5635-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5637-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-5636-0 Typeset by Integra Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In memory of Bernard Stiegler

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Contents List of Platesix Editorsxi Acknowledgementsxiii Digital Studies and Aesthetics: Neganthropologyxv Introduction: ‘Prolegomenon to a Digital Studies Manifesto’  Gerald Moore Part 1  Tertiary Retention Introduction  Cormac Deane, Néill O’Dwyer and Michael O’Hara 1 2 3

Organology, Grammatization and Exosomatic Memory in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape  Néill O’Dwyer A Therapeutics of the Image  Michael O’Hara The Control Room Imaginary and the Production of Sovereignty  Cormac Deane

Part 2  On Pharmacology Introduction  Aidan Delaney and Jeanette Doyle 4 5

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Film Studies between Ekphrasis and Quotation  Aidan Delaney Thirty Years: An Analysis of the Exhibition Art Post-Internet through the Work of Bernard Stiegler with Reference to Jean-François Lyotard’s Exhibition Les Immatériaux  Jeanette Doyle Pokémon UNÉSGO: Grammatization, Gamification and Listification in Contemporary Culture  Connell Vaughan

Part 3  The Neganthropocene Introduction  Noel Fitzpatrick 7

Pregnant Pause: Technological Disruption and the Neganthropic Aesthetics of Landscape in Ireland’s Borderland  EL Putnam

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19 37 55

73 75

89 105

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Mischievous Hermes: Digital Hermeneutics and Stiegler’s Therapeutics  Noel Fitzpatrick

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‘Je suis philosophe’: A Personal Note to Bernard Stiegler163 Notes on Contributors167 Bibliography169 Index186

List of Plates Plate 1  Ronan McCrea, Metallography (Grain Structures, ‘I think in Shapes: Henry Moore’, with soundtrack after Delia Derbyshire), 2018. Image: Installation view MAC International 2018, The MAC, Belfast. Photograph: Simon Mills. Courtesy of the artist and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin. Plate 2  Ronan McCrea, Twelve by Twelve by Two, 2019. Image: Installation View, Ronan McCrea Efference Copy Mechanism, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2019. Photograph: Kasia Kaminska. Courtesy of the artist and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin. Plate 3  Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File, 2013. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin. Plate 4  Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File, 2013. Image: CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin. Plate 5  The hearing chamber of the Saville Inquiry in the Guildhall, Derry. Source: AP. Plate 6a & 6b  Screenshots of the touchscreen virtual-reality depiction of Derry used in the Saville Tribunal. Users could toggle between the two views of the same place at different historical moments. Source: Northern Ireland Centre for Learning Resources. Plate 7a & 7b  Details of photographic evidence report submitted to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry (Butler 1999, 1–2). Plate 8  Graphic representation of the reorganising of space in Aitor Gametxo’s Variation on the Sunbeam, 2011. Plate 9  Screen capture from Aitor Gametxo’s Variation on the Sunbeam, 2011. Source: Vimeo.

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Plate 10  Screen capture from Aitor Gametxo’s Variation on the Sunbeam, 2011. Source: Vimeo. Plate 11  Screen capture from Aitor Gametxo’s Variation on the Sunbeam, 2011. Source: Vimeo. Plate 12  Installation Shot Art Post-Internet, 2013. Courtesy of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Plate 13  Petra Cortright, Ily, 2015. Installation view, Foxy Production, New York. Photo: Mark Woods. Courtesy of the artist and Foxy Production, New York. Plate 14  Petra Cortright, VVEBCAM, 2007. Still from webcam video, 1 minute 43 seconds © Petra Cortright. Plate 15  Petra Cortright, True Life: I’m a Selfie – (Fake True’s Negativity Remix), 2013. Still from webcam video, 1 minute 39 seconds © Petra Cortright. Plate 16  Installation Shot of Les Immatériaux. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Jean-Claude Planchet. Plate 17  Willie Doherty, The Other Side, 1988. Courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. Plate 18  To the Border / A Fork in the Road, 1986–2012 © Willie Doherty. Courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. Plate 19  EL Putnam, image still from Quickening, 2018. Plate 20  EL Putnam (eight months pregnant) interacting with Quickening, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Editors Noel Fitzpatrick (doc ès lettres, Paris VII) is Professor of Philosophy and is Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) at the Technological University Dublin. He is also Academic Lead of the European Culture and Technology Laboratory at the European University of Technology. Professor Fitzpatrick is a Marie-Curie Senior Research fellow. He teaches philosophy and aesthetics, and supervises Post-Doc, PhD, MPhil and MA students at the Technological University Dublin. He also gives doctoral seminars on phenomenology, hermeneutics and philosophy of technology at the Graduate School. He is a member of Friends of the Greta Thunberg Generation (previously Ars Industrialis, founded by Bernard Stiegler) and is a founding member of the Digital Studies Network at the l’Institut de recherche et innovation (IRI) at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He has presented and published widely in the fields of contemporary philosophy, philosophy of art, theatre studies and philosophy of technology. He has also co-curated exhibitions at the Research Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017, 2019) and is Lead Principal Investigator on European research projects with the Digital Studies Network (realsms.eu NesT and EthiCo). Néill O’Dwyer is Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow based in the V-SENSE project, in the Department of Computer Science, at Trinity College Dublin. He is Adjunct Lecturer and Research Fellow of the School of Creative Arts, where he teaches Performance and Technology. He is an awardee of the prestigious Irish Research Council (IRC) Government of Ireland Research Fellowship (2017–19). He is the sole author of Digital Scenography: 30 Years of Experimentation and Innovation in Performance and Interactive Media (forthcoming in 2021) and a coeditor of The Performing Subject in the Space of Technology: Through the Virtual, Towards the Real (2015). He is Adjunct Research Fellow of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM), at the Technological University of Dublin, and worked under Bernard Stiegler at l’Institut de recherche et innovation (IRI), at the Pompidou Centre, Paris. Néill specializes in practice-based research in the field of scenography and design-led performance with a specific focus on digital media, computer vision, human–computer interaction, prosthesis, symbiosis, agency, performativity and the impact of technology on artistic processes.

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Michael O’Hara is an artist and Lecturer in Fine Art and Visual Culture at Technological University Dublin. He has been an active researcher with both the Aesthetics Seminar Group and Digital Studies Group for the past seven years at the Graduate School of Creative Art and Media (GradCAM). He has published work on such subjects as the philosophy of technology, the aesthetics of the postdigital and the aesthetics of football. His recent research examines the role of computation in contemporary technology and its materialization in computer programming ontologies.

Acknowledgements This book originated from a seminar series entitled ‘Digital Studies’, which was convened by the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) in 2018 and supported by the College of Arts and Tourism of then the Dublin Institute of Technology (now Technological University Dublin). The Digital Studies seminar in GradCAM was a node of wider grouping of the Digital Studies Network which also has held seminars at Durham University and at the l’Institut de recherche et innovation at the Centre Pompidou. The seminar series in Dublin became a way for us to test out in public ideas as they were being developed, where Bernard Stiegler presented some of his work in progress in relation to the Neganthropocene and neganthropology. The format of the seminar was also inspired by the way that Bernard Stiegler ran his seminars in Paris with the active participation of young early career researchers. The collective seminar which ran for over four years was the basis for this book. It is hoped now that we can continue this mode of labour to turn to questions of Digital Studies and epistemology and then to Digital Studies and ethics. We would like to thank GradCAM for enabling the seminar to take place and to thank the College of Arts and Tourism for the funding that encouraged the seminar series at the beginning. We would like to thank Dean John O’Connor for his support which is in terms of both resources and the moral support for the development of philosophy, philosophy of technology and new emerging disciplines, such as Digital Studies. We also would like to acknowledge the support of the College for the creation of a Digital Studies PhD scholarship which has enabled one PhD to complete over the time of the preparation of the book. And we would like to thank the Irish Research Council (IRC) for providing Néill O’Dwyer with the competitive Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (grant number GOIPD/2017/902), which was awarded in collaboration with GradCAM. The award was a direct burgeoning of the seminar and enabled crucial research time to be dedicated to the administration, editing and completion of this book. We would like to thank the team at l’Institut de recherche et d’innovation (IRI) at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, in particular a special thanks to Vincent

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Puig, Olivier, Giacomo and Anne. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the support of our dear colleague and friend Bernard Stiegler who has been hugely generous with his time and his guidance for this publication. We would also like to thank the other members of the Digital Studies Network, especially Sara Baranzoni, Paolo Vignola and Dan Ross who have all helped bring this book to print. Finally, we would like to thank our families; Noel thanks Geraldine who has ‘supported’ (put up with) sometimes the long days and long trips and a special word of thanks to Nina who continues to grow up with each project and Oshinn who remains our man in Paris. I would also like to thank John and Kevin. Néill would like to thank all his colleagues and friends in GradCAM and the broader Digital Studies Network. He would like to thank his beautiful, patient wife and children who continually suffer him during these large academic projects and to whom he is eternally indebted for their love and emotional and moral support. Néill also thanks his mother and siblings and would like to acknowledge his much adored father who passed away during the closing stages of this book project, but whose memory continues to represent a tower of integrity in his life. Michael would like to thank his friends and colleagues in GradCAM. He would like to thank his family and say a special thanks to his wife Fiona who has continually supported his work and research with her patience and advice. He also sincerely thanks his two co-editors who were instrumental in getting this publication off the ground. It has been a pleasure. We would also like to sincerely thank all of our contributors for the enduring patience they have shown over the process of publishing this work.

Digital Studies and Aesthetics: Neganthropology Noel Fitzpatrick interview with Bernard Stiegler Part One The interview took place at La Maison des Sciences de L’homme, in Plaine Commune in March 2018. Noel Fitzpatrick (NF): The framework for what we are doing in the Doctoral School in Durham in April (2018) is part of the Real Smart Cities project. What we are doing in Durham is looking at the construction of a methodology around ‘Digital Studies’ with the objective of putting together a toolkit for Digital Studies. Perhaps the first question I could ask you is, what is Digital Studies and what are the aims of Digital Studies? Bernard Stiegler (BS): First of all, I would like to say that digital means ‘digits’, fingers. What is this (gesturing to hand)? Fingers are part of an organ that is the hand and it is on fingers that we count. Now, of course, when we talk about what we call Digital Studies, it is part of digital technology and we consider that it is extremely important to create a doctoral school of Digital Studies, higher education in Digital Studies, research in Digital Studies, in all kinds of disciplines because the digital is changing everything in knowledge, in all kinds of knowledge, not only academic knowledge but everyday life knowledge. The idea is that there are epistemological statements behind this tradition but before these epistemological statements we also must describe the context. As you know, for the past ten or fifteen years digital humanities were increasing in universities, for example in France the ‘Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales’ (EHESS) and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) created manifestos for digital humanities, but this is also the case for many other universities in countries like Germany, Switzerland and the UK in Europe and in America and Japan. Now we consider in the Digital Studies Network that this paradigm of digital humanities is necessary and very important but not sufficient. We consider that the question is not only to understand and to develop tools for the analysis of data in history and literature. This is extremely

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important of course; however, it is not only a question of tools, but a question of schematization. When I say schematization, I mean that it is a question of Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason that we have to reopen. Before developing this point, I would like to add that the context of increasing digital technology in the university, in science, in everyday life etc. is completely upsetting or disrupting mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology – everything, absolutely everything! So, I agree when Clarisse Herrenschmid (Les trois écritures: Langue, nombre, code, Paris: Gallimard, 2007) says that the digital is a new form of writing, what she called a reticulated form of writing. We can debate whether this is reticulated writing but, yes, let’s say the digital is a new kind of writing. Now, what is writing? It is what I call a tertiary retention. Tertiary retention is, for example, an artificial object; it is the beginning of exosomatization, that is the production of artificial organs. This is an organ (pointing to scarf) for protecting my neck. I am not an animal, I need to protect my neck in winter, I need a table etc. We are living in such an exosomatic milieu and it is a case for all kinds of human beings. But now we are discovering that it is also that this exosomatic milieu produces what I call hypomnesic tertiary retentions. I use the term ‘hypomnesic’ in the sense in which Derrida used it after Socrates, quoting Socrates about what is writing after the pharmakon; it is a hypomnesic pharmakon. Now these hypomnesic tertiary retentions have become the core of industry. NF: And would you say that this is what is particular about the numeric? This particular capacity? BS: Yes. NF: So, when we talk about digital or digits, our fingers etc., is there something very specific about this digital form of tertiary retention? BS: Yes, yes, exactly, and here we have to first analyse the new political economy and what is the status of these tertiary retentions, digital hypomnesic tertiary retentions, in contemporary society. It is the topic we have been discussing at the symposium for three days. We have to address this question, in fact completely revisit the question of epistemē, of epistemology from this point of view, and I think through Derrida. We have to reopen the question of the Critique of Pure Reason. When I say that, I mean that if we are to overcome what is called by Marx, for example, German Idealism and what is called by Heidegger and Derrida metaphysics, we have to reopen a question that was opened by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, a Marxist philosopher from the Frankfurt School, who claimed

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that we have to continue what was opened by Marx when he said that we must struggle against German Idealism, we must show that, for example, metaphysics is a relationship of social reports (relations), of social domination etc. He said that philosophers were the people representing the nobles of Greek society and exploiting the slaves etc. And he said that the process of digitization, not in the sense of digital technologies today, but the development of arithmetic etc. was dedicated to the exploitation of slaves and the creation of money. This happened in the two centuries before Athens with the Kings of Lydia. Sohn-Rethel explains that it was because of this social technology that was money, currency, that mathematics became the core of social organization for the Greeks. I partly disagree with this. It is not easy to simply understand that it was the creation of currency that made possible an exploitation of social relationships and social domination etc. It is the role of tertiary retention in the constitution of knowledge and here we have to go back to Kant. Personally, I tried to show in the third volume of Technics and Time that there is a problem in the Critique of Pure Reason. First this problem was addressed by Heidegger in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics when he said that between the first edition 1782 and second edition of 1787, there was a transformation. Particularly in the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason there was a suppression of the question of ‘transcendental imagination’ that was replaced by ‘understanding’. Here, I follow almost everything that Heidegger states on this question on Kant. Heidegger is particularly strong in this interpretation on this problem of the coherence of the thought of Kant but nevertheless I say we must go beyond because the question of what I called previously tertiary retention was avoided by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), in particular at the end of Sein und Zeit. Heidegger hesitates in paragraphs 75 and 76 – ‘should we include Geschichtliche (Welt-geschichtliche, par. 391) (World History) into the originary time?’ At the end he says, no. So, he had a kind of a hypothesis, for two paragraphs, that it might be possible to go beyond Husserl. But this question of retention, primary and secondary retentions, he never addresses or uses these terms, but it is what is behind what he is saying in Sein und Zeit because the year before publishing Sein und Zeit, he published The Lessons of Phenomenology of Consciousness of Time with Edith Stein in German. So, he was completely into this question of time by Husserl and I’m convinced that Sein und Zeit is a kind of reply to Husserl’s relations of time, his phenomenology of time. Now he rejected himself what I call tertiary retention and I tried to show that Husserl addressed the question himself in the Origin of Geometry ten years after

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Sein und Zeit. I will not try to develop this here, but I just want to say that if we try to go beyond what is said by Heidegger; Heidegger showed that three syntheses of imagination in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason – apprehension, reproduction and recognition – are the forms of primary retention, secondary retention and protention. He does not say this exactly in these terms, but it is what he shows, and it is extremely clear and convincing. For me, there is a tertiary retention, not only primary, secondary retentions and protentions but tertiary retention and here I try to show that if we don’t address this question, we cannot understand what the question of schematization in Kant is. Here I try to show that when Immanuel Kant said, for example, when you produce a concept of ‘five’, you can of course use the image of 5 or cinq, cinco, fünf etc. in different languages; they are empirical images but the concept is transcendental. Kant continues by claiming that it is the same with 1,000 but it is completely wrong because we cannot have an apprehension of 1,000 like 5. It is extremely difficult to apprehend 1,000, to understand what it is. The question is here the constitution of what the concept of understanding is based on, what I call tertiary retention that are systems of numeration. I won’t develop this here, but I say this because it is the basis of what I call Digital Studies. Digital Studies tried to address these questions with Kant, with Hegel; these questions are extremely important in Hegel because Hegel was the first thinker of the process of exteriorization. Geist is a process of exteriorization. It is the reason that Marx is a reader of Hegel. And after that Marx himself states that the process of exteriorization is not simply a moment of the spirit, Geist, but it is a process production of means of production. This opens up the question of what I call exosomatization. Now these questions are completely readdressed by digital technology – big data, artificial intelligence, digital humanities etc. Everything is changed. Why? Because what is called by Kant the low faculties – intuition, understanding, imagination and reason – are upset by the evolution of contemporary digital tertiary retentions. If we cannot revisit these questions of epistemology and epistemē … and I use epistemology in the sense of Bachelard. Bachelard opened the question of what he called phenomenal technology, or phenomenal technics. I use also episteme in the sense of Foucault because Foucault opens up some questions in relation to archives etc. We address this by reading not only Kant but Descartes and this is something I tried to show in my book The Age of Disruption (2019). For example, in the Regulae (1963), Descartes says in rules sixteen and seventeen that science is first; reading and writing are second. So, if we don’t address the question of writing we cannot

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understand what the questions of reason are. It is incredible because I tried to show this in the controversy between Foucault and Derrida concerning the status of madness in Descartes. They never address this question in relation to Descartes because they are not capable of understanding that Descartes was already addressing this question of writing. I think this is extremely important and it was a question which Leibniz had an interest in, for example in Chinese writing as a basis of his characteristica universalis. Now I consider that we have to go to the origin of philosophy; that is to Socrates and the question of the pharmakon. If I say this because, for me, Digital Studies is a contemporary field of what I call organology and pharmacology. Now I know you wanted me to address methodology … NF: Yes … BS: … I will try to address this question of methodology, by this question of organology and pharmacology. Here is a question for Gerald Moore, on Derrida and deconstruction, maybe we can also try to address this question. What I have called (with Ars Industrialis) for almost fifteen years, a general organology, is a methodology. Of course, there are positive statements, in particular we claim that the human being is organological, that is exosomatic. It is the same question here. When I say that it is not a positive philosophical statement, it is only a point of departure, similar to the case of Marx and Engels in German ideology from which you reinterpret everything. Now I add Alfred Lotka, whom I read three years ago, and who is for me an extremely important biologist, who addresses this question of exosommatization as such from the point of view of a biologist, but I will not develop that now. When I say that general organology is a methodology, it is in the sense where I claim that a philosopher has nothing positive to claim about general organology, but it is instead the question of methodology. When I say methodology, it is also in the sense of ‘method’ as it is addressed by Heidegger, and by Descartes, but especially Heidegger where Heidegger says methodos, that is ‘to walk’. In French we say cheminer, walking in a path, creating a path by walking in a path – it is philosophy. I completely agree with Heidegger with this definition of what is philosophy. It is methodos, that is walking on a path. Now such a methodos is based on the idea that if you want to address scientifically, rationally, politically questions concerning human beings – I prefer to say noetic souls as I don’t like to refer to the human – you must account for and pay attention to first the endosomatic organs that are necessary for making possible the phenomenon you

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are studying. Second, the exosomatic organs and the system in which they are included because an exosomatic organ is never alone. It is always in a relation with many other exosomatic organs and social organizations in which there are prescriptions produced concerning the practice of those exosomatic organs by those endosomatic organs, your brain, your hands etc. If we address these three levels, we can address the question of tertiary retention and we can do that not as a philosopher but with biologists, with mathematicians, with historians of technology etc. So, it is a kind of contract between the partnership created by knowledge, an episteme because an episteme is a kind of partnership between diverse kinds of knowledge – theoretical knowledge, academic knowledge but also everyday knowledge or spiritual knowledge etc. The other question is pharmacology. What is specific, what makes the difference between endosomatic organs and exosomatic organs is that endosomatic organs are necessarily and spontaneously negentropic. Sometimes they produce entropy in the case when there is a dysfunction, when there is a disease, an illness etc. NF: Can I ask about, because we have spoken about it a lot over the past two days, but it might be worthwhile to make a distinction between entropy and negentropy. BS: Yes, because it is a very complex question, a very polemical question because there is no overall agreement on this question. For example, between physicists in thermodynamics, biologists and computer scientists, also what is called a theory of complexity, theory of dissipative structures and many other theories in this field, there is incredible disagreement! For example, when it was shown by Mathieu Triclot (Le moment cybernétique: La constitution de la notion d’information), a French philosopher who is a specialist on these questions. He showed very clearly that Shannon used negentropy, which is a contrary understanding to Weiner. It is extremely difficult to use these terms because they are many quiproquos (misunderstandings). One of these quiproquos comes from the fact that in the theory of information what justifies the use of the concept of entropy and negentropy is the formalism of probabilities. Hartley’s constant is the same as Boltzmann’s constant. Boltzmann’s constant is in the field of physics while Hartley’s is in the field of information. The definition of entropy is produced by the constant by the mathematization of probabilities. I don’t define that in this way. I think we have to distinguish between four types of entropy. The first is thermodynamics which is the dissipation of heat, of energy, discovered in the

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nineteenth century. The second is the process of destruction of biodiversity because the question of entropy in biology was introduced by Schrödinger, who was a physicist, but who tried to understand ‘What Is Life’, which is the title of the lectures he gave in Dublin in 1944. His definition of entropy is the object against which life is struggling, that is disorganization. With Schrödinger entropy becomes disorganization so not only dissipation of energy. Disorganization is dissipation of energy, but it is not only dissipation of energy, but it is destruction of life. The third definition is entropy in information, that is the destruction of the value of information, the capacity, the potentiality of information because information is only the potentiality of information. Now I add a fourth definition, anthropy with an ‘a’ and ‘h’, and this is what is addressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their report in 2014 when they say there are anthropogenic forcings and those anthropogenic forcings are destroying the biosphere. This is the action of the human that destroys the biosphere. This is the fourth definition of entropy and it is written with ‘a’ and ‘h’. This is the reason that I say, from my point of view, that Digital Studies necessarily leads to a neganthropology. Now the question of neganthropy is the main question for humankind, but not only humankind also life and the biosphere in the next fifty years. If we are not capable of solving these problems in the next fifty years, life will disappear, maybe not all forms of life but high forms of life will disappear. This is what is said by almost all scientists today. So, this is the stake for Digital Studies. Why? Because what is digital technology? It is a pharmakon and, as a pharmakon like every exosomatic organ, it can produce an increase in neganthropy. For example, Newton is an increase in neganthropy, Jesus Christ is an increase in neganthropy, Socrates, Henry Ford etc. they are also an increase in anthropy. Knowledge in such a view is what I call a therapeia, that is a capacity to transform the potential for producing anthropy into a potential to produce a neganthropy. What is such a neganthropy? It is a bifurcation. And what is a bifurcation? It is knowledge. This is my reason why I refer to Whitehead because Whitehead is not really a neo-Kantian philosopher, but he refers always to two philosophers in the tradition who are Plato and Kant. I consider what he does with Kant as very important because he tries to reinterpret this philosophy from the point of view of what he calls concrescence and processuality. Here he addresses the question of entropy, that is not only a question of the dissipation of energy but of the processual evolution of the universe. This is the reason for which he addresses the speculative cosmology. Here I think Sara Branzoni would have many things to say.

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NF: It came up in discussion today when you used the expression that ‘work produces negentropy’. I wonder if you could explain that relationship between work and negentropy particularly within the context we are in here at Plaine Commune. BS: Work is not work in the sense of the physicist when they say that the steam machine works – no, the steam machine doesn’t work at all. The steam machine produces an energy, a force. This force was produced before by labourers, so it is called work, but it is not work, properly speaking. It is force, a physical force. Now what I call work is not employment, it is not labour. Work is oeuvre, it is a possibility to open something that tends to become closed. A worker is the one who is always reopening something that tends to become closed. A worker can be anybody who is producing something new in the world as a footballer, as a mother, as a priest, as a Picasso, as an Einstein, as a manual worker who is not a proletarian. This is a problem I insist here because in the UK I have many problems with English Marxists on this. When I said it is a not a question of proletarian or proletariat but going beyond labourers and readdressing the very question of work they couldn’t understand this question because when you say that, you say that the powerful of the negative is not the question. So, we must abandon the materialist dialectic and it is very difficult to make this clear for people coming from a Marxist tradition, especially in England. Now I think that we must completely redefine what work is today because work is what creates bifurcations. Opening is always creating new bifurcations even if it is only a very small one, for example a new play of a footballer that is completely new in the history of football. This is what makes a champion. It is the case for everything. Educating a child, for example, is always to produce something new. All children are different, and you always have to deal with singularity, which is irreducible to generality, to universality etc. This is the reason why desire is extremely important. Now my definition of work is the capacity to produce bifurcations in every kind of human activity. Now generally we call that knowledge. I recall that for Marx proletarianization was a loss of knowledge and today because of robotization, automatization, most of proletarianized jobs will be replaced by robots in the next twenty years. We must revaluate what work is. The question is not now what labour is because labour is now machinism. The question is what work is and how could we reorganize an industrial society around this question and this is the stake of the Anthropocene. It is now also the question of Digital Studies because if we go back to the status of big data or artificial intelligence, it is extremely important

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to show that these technologies are extremely powerful, magnificent, extremely interesting. I love technology myself, really, but they are pharmaka. If we are not capable to reinscribe the question, for example, of big data into the question of the law faculty of understanding that was conceived by Kant and revisiting that with the concept of what I call tertiary retention as a condition of the evolution of that, we will necessarily end up producing a negative pharmacology. So, the aim of Digital Studies is to produce therapeutics, for example, in smart cities. We can reject smart cities because they are automatic cities that destroy completely citizenship or urban development. But we must not reject it; we must appropriate it. We must adopt it for producing new models of socialization of these technologies, not one of the smart cities that IBM promote. It is absolutely possible, and is the sake of the project of Plaine Commune. NF: One last question because it came up in what you said a moment ago in relation to knowledge and work. Could I ask you to make a distinction between competencies and knowledge? BS: As is said, knowledge is always a process of individuation. When you know something, when you operate your knowledge, when you activate your knowledge, you transform your knowledge and you transform yourself via knowledge and the knowledge in itself and the world in which this knowledge takes place etc. Competence is different. You need competence to activate knowledge, but it is completely different, it is procedural. So, if you have a procedure you must apply it automatically. For example, learning how to read, how to write, it is automatic. You must automatize yourself. It is also like, for example, learning a language. If you cannot automatize … for example, in America when you meet a friend you say, ‘It is good to see you.’ But for me, in French, I try to translate it in French, you say ‘C’est bon de te voir.’ It is stupid to say that in French. I needed ten years in America to realize to say ‘Yes, it is good to see you.’ It became an automatism not a conscious linguistic behaviour. This is a competence. Now to have a knowledge of English or American English, it is not the same. You must create something with English. For example, this is the case of Benjamin Lee Whorf and his linguistical anthropology where he said I tried to grammatize Hopi language because I tried to show that the sentence in Hopi has no time, like, for example, in Latin etc. I produced a model of that, a grammar of Hopi and when I tried to show that to the Hopi people they laughed and said it was completely stupid. It is impossible, language is produced by spirits. It processes you and when you speak it is not you who speaks, its spirits. So, what

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you say is impossible. Benjamin Lee Whorf could not create anything in Hopi, with the Hopis, because if you want to create anything in Hopi language you must appropriate this understanding of Hopi language. This is possible of course because an anthropologist can become fluent, speaking Hopi and producer of new kinds of Hopi etc. So, today we have to revaluate what is knowledge and what are the competencies that we need for this knowledge. But the competencies are means and means are necessarily automatic. Now the question today is disautomatization because this is what is made possible by bifurcations, by knowledge etc. We have to completely redefine, the function of universities, of schools, of education because they are functions of course. I said at the beginning of this symposium that I now have a neo-functionalist position and I consider that we must revendicate that, we have to claim that. If you understand what human life is from the point of view of exosomatization, necessarily you have a new functionalist definition of everything. This is what I said when I said that knowledge is what gives you the possibility to take care of the pharmakon to produce not anthropy but neganthropy. This is also the reason I refer to Whitehead because when he said reason is a function, this is what I try to say too. NF: Ok that’s great. Merci. BS: On va s’arrêter là, merci à toi. Part Two The interview took place by Visio-conference on the 20th of March 2020. NF: One of the concepts which has come to the fore in your publications since 2017 is the notion of neganthropy and in particular, I am curious about how you see the relationship between aesthetics and the concept of neganthropy. Perhaps you could develop or say a little more about what you mean by neganthropy. BS: Of course, if we had time I would develop and elaborate something more about Leroi-Gourhan and the process of what he calls exteriorization. As you know, what I call neganthropy or neganthropology (with an a and an h) is a suggestion of artefactual organogenesis, ex-organogenesis or exosomatic evolution. The question here is what makes groups capable of maintaining their unity and this is the question addressed by Leroi-Gourhan in Gesture and Speech Vol. 2. He doesn’t address the question of the species but thinks with Bergson about vital individuation; if we speak with Simondon, that is for plants and animals, the group is the species. But in the case of humans the ‘group’ is

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ethnos or ethnic group or tribe etc. This is what we call generally society. And here Leroi-Gourhan states that the condition of the constitution of the group is the aesthetic condition that is transforming the artefactuality or artificiality of the exosomatic organs into a necessity, a kind of second nature, what I call myself naturation. Of course, this is first part of my answer to your question but of course there is another one because we could say that this works in, let’s say, what we call traditional societies. But it doesn’t work in modern societies and it is not sufficient to answer such statements. Here the question becomes, what is art? It is not only art as religion as magic etc. which is not art being conscious of being art. What is art or what we call today modern art that is art for art and not art for religions or rituals. Here the question is not only a question of neganthropy or neganthropology but anti-entropy. I am not certain if I addressed this previously in the last interview but since then I have been working on this concept of anti-entropy developed by (Francis) Bailly and (Giuseppe) Longo. Twelve years ago Bailly and Longo stated that through this concept of anti-entropy, we must distinguish entropy and negentropy, in the sense of creating an order or differentiating a space, being, for example, a dissipative structure in the sense of Ilya Prigogine or a living body, that is an organism, that is organized. So, in order to specify what is organic and not only ordered, like, for example, a dissipative structure, they propose to address the question of what they call anti-entropy. And anti-entropy is a difficult concept, but it makes possible, for example, asking what the relationship is between the diachronic and synchronic, for example, in Saussurian linguistics. You know that an idiom is synchronic, as defined by Saussure. It is synchronized by rules etc. Those who speak Irish, for example, are respecting rules and those who don’t know how to speak Irish don’t know the rules and those rules are also vocabularies etc. and it is synchronic. Now this synchronicity constitutes an order and we can call this order a negentropy, but speaking is always to produce disorder to trouble the synchronic. This is a question, of course, from James Joyce, how what I would like to call the ‘idiotic as such’ appears, the poet, for example, who changes the rules. This is a question of art, not only art of course, but art particularly. Why? Because if you are not a poet but a mathematician you can change the rules of geometry by modifying the axioms of Euclid, for example, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky etc. And it is necessity to change necessity. But in the case of art it is a necessity to change the contingencies because art is working with contingencies, artefacts, accidents, idioms etc. Poetry, for example, transforms language you don’t like because you find it’s not really language, and

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then suddenly you discover a poet who is speaking this language, for example, Flemish. I say that because many people in France think Flemish is awful, but they are not capable of listening to such a language. But if they discover a poet or poetry in Flemish, this changes. This is our experience in all the foreign languages. It is a kind of Unheimlichkeit question behind this. I say this because I believe that the artist and the question of aesthetic in modern societies and not in traditional societies becomes the question of the artist as he or she is capable of modifying completely the relationship to contingency of everything and particularly now to technology. This is a huge question between art and the Anthropocene, art and technology. This is also a question we have tried to answer together, and I think it is a very specific question today that opens the question of anti-entropy. Now if we want to visit this question, we must go back to read Rainer Maria Rilke, and the Sonnets to Orpheus where he is addressing the question of mechanics. He says now it is the machine that becomes the master and we have to revisit what is risk, what is openness, and for me it is a question of anthropy, neganthropy and what I call neganthropology. Of course, today we are confronted with a very specific question that is occurring, appearing, only now and in the context of the crisis of the Anthropocene. It is a question of the artist and arts, that they are capable of producing bifurcations into an entropic becoming – an art that is not, for example, a French art, an Irish art, a Chinese art etc. It becomes art at the level of biosphere itself becoming technosphere. Here we are confronted with an extremely dangerous and extremely difficult issue that is a question of going back to locality. I myself consider that we must go back to the question of locality because you know that we consider, for example, with Maël Montévil, Longo and all those people, that Schrödinger is right, and life is possible only by maintaining an order at the local level. But it is the new situation of the technosphere that we must address this question that is not reactionary but that is action, action in the sense that Hannah Arendt considers, where Arendt tries to think what action is. I think here we must address a completely new situation in which it is necessary to create with art and through art links between localities. This is the reason what we have tried to do together, for example, between Ireland, Galapagos, now Corsica and Croatia is really interesting. Now we can address these questions from the perspective of scientists, engineers, economists with artists addressing this new relationship. Before I finish, I want to add one thing. For three years I gave a seminar in China about this topic and I started from Rudolf Arnheim who wrote an interesting book about entropy and art. This topic about entropy and art was addressed also

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by Umberto Eco in Opera Aperta (The Open Work) which although interesting is, for me, completely wrong. He tries to address this relationship through a theory of information, and it doesn’t work at all. We believe with Longo, Montévil, Soto, Sonnenschein etc. that negentropy is not at all information and negentropic forms of life are not at all informational. This reference to information is bad. I say that because it is not a new question, it was addressed by Arnheim and Eco etc. but we have to reopen it in a new way and here I think it is important to go through Rilke and also Heidegger’s interpretation of Rilke. I disagree with Heidegger, but I think it is very important to read that interpretation. In preparation for this interview I read my seminar and now think I will publish this seminar because it goes deeper into these questions and it is what is at stake at the moment and in the future.

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‘Prolegomenon to a Digital Studies Manifesto’ Gerald Moore

The meaning of Digital Studies ‘General organology constitutes a paradigm for the humanities in the era of the digital humanities, positing, theorizing and experimenting across disciplines with questions of therapeutic knowledge, capable of identifying both the toxicity and curative potential of pharmaka.’ L’organologie générale constitue un paradigme des humanités à l’époque des digital humanities posant, théorisant et expérimentant transdisciplinairement la question des savoirs thérapeutiques capables de spécifier aussi bien la toxicité que la curativité des pharmaka. (Stiegler 2012: 277 [§63])

Another way of saying this is that Digital Studies, understood as an experimental, interdisciplinary approach that studies both the promise and danger of technologies, and the way that technologies have reinvented society across history and the planet, holds the key to the future of cultural analysis. This sounds like a grand claim for what has so far enjoyed a relatively niche existence. The field was only formally established in 2012, with the foundation of the international Digital Studies Network by Bernard Stiegler and his colleagues at the Entretiens du Nouveau Monde Industriel (New Industrial World Forum), held annually in Paris’s Centre Pompidou. Since then, it has gone on to develop nodes in Leuphana (Berlin), Berkeley (USA), Guangzhou and Nanjing (China), TU Dublin (Ireland), Durham University (UK), Uartes, Guayaquil (Ecuador), Todai, the University of Tokyo (Japan) and Salski University (Poland), to name only the first places that come to mind. There are also a proliferating number of projects and seminars scattered across the globe but accessible online. Taken separately, or as parts of a whole, these multiple

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nodes constitute what, following Stiegler, we might come to call an openaccess ‘economy of contribution’, which is to say, one governed by principles of contribution, free-sharing and mutual aid, rather than strictly held intellectual copyright and competition between rival researchers. The Digital Studies Network is, in this sense, also something of a precursor to the coming semantic web, or Web 3.0, which names a collaborative movement seeking to institute a common language through which to bring together the numerous codes underpinning the internet. As a name for technology studies, Digital Studies constitutes an attempt to create a cohesive dialogue from work that transects a whole host of disciplines: philosophy, both continental and analytic, classics and literary criticism, critical social theory and social psychology, cultural anthropology and media studies, socio- and co-evolutionary biology, ecology and ‘post-Darwinist’ neuroscience, among others. Some of these disciplines are long-established, while others are only more recently taking hold in the interstices of the university, from where Digital Studies emerges as an instance of the much-anticipated ‘third culture’ between the arts and the sciences. Over and above a new disciplinary cartography or interdisciplinary lingua franca, Digital Studies is perhaps, more than anything, a paradigm for the reinvention of the humanities, corresponding to what Foucault would have called the new episteme of the digital (Foucault 1966: 13–15), a fold in our knowledge that comes after the age of the book in which our social institutions, including the university, and even our concept of the human, remain rooted. This paradigm is also that of what Bernard Stiegler terms ‘general organology’, meaning the study of the relationship between our anatomical architecture (‘endosomatic organs’) and the artificial (‘exosomatic’) organs, or technical prostheses, through which we supplement it. As the opening quotation indicates, these prostheses can be both beneficial and harmful to our functioning. Technologies are both toxic and curative, and usually simultaneously, depending on the ways in which they close down or open up the possibilities of human experience (Stiegler 2005a: 216–18). A good illustration of this comes from anthropology, which tells us that sacrificial blades were (therapeutically) used to communicate with the gods, but only insofar as their toxic potential was kept in check, preventing the heady power they offered from spilling over into murder (Detienne and Svenbro 1979: 233–7). Similarly, from Roger Bacon to Kepler, Vermeer and Henri Cartier Bresson, lenses have helped us to see, but their intensity can also (quite literally) blind us. Over the course of human history, their artificial selection has often been suggested to have induced a genetic weakening of eyesight. A smartphone

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eliminates space and time, but it also renders us vulnerable, unused to silence and forgetful of numbers, appointments and directions, hence overly dependent on this new object of addiction. The ease and risk of intoxication is why the use of technical objects has always been regulated, or organized, by rules enshrined in culture, whose rhythms and rituals set out the conditions for their adoption. Digital Studies is thus also cultural criticism: the study of the production of humans and their social institutions through technics, and of the kinds of humans that different technics cultivate.

Organological revolution At least in the first instance, the digital in Digital Studies is occasioned by the Digital Revolution, the dawn of the Information Age. Following the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions of the Neolithic and Enlightenment periods, this constitutes the so-called third great cultural shift of human history (Rifkin 2013), or even of a broadly construed Anthropocene, which some suggest began with the Quaternary extinction event, when for the first time, humans’ artificial selection – of the Pleistocene megafauna, in that instance – likely served as a tipping point in environmental collapse (Doughty et al. 2010: 1). But deriving from digitus, or finger, the organ through which we manipulate tools, Digital Studies, moreover, pertains to the study of technical objects in general, and their mutually constitutive relationship with the humans who use them; to the tools and technical environments that we inherit through culture, and whose adoption opens up horizons of thought and possibility through which we carve ourselves out a future. The great cultural revolutions are also, in this respect, organological revolutions, which is to say, transformations of human civilization around evolutions in our artificial organs and their cultural organization, which, by reorganizing the human body and sensory cortex, bring about profound – and traumatic – changes in the life of the mind. Stone Age tools for farming, building and food-storage paved the way for the domestication of nature and the ensuing development of trade. But the Agricultural Revolution has been described as ‘history’s biggest fraud’, because it brought about longer life expectancy at the cost of more back-breaking work and poorer nutrition than hunter-gatherer societies had previously had to deal with (Harari 2014: 79). It may have alleviated the anxiety of death, but the partial liberation from mortality also necessitated a division of labour. Increased social interdependence created

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new anxieties for Stone Age settlers, whose developing capacity for ‘economic’ thinking made them vulnerable to the pursuit of self-interest, which they sought to curb through rituals of reciprocity and gift-exchange (see, for example, Sahlins 1972: 201–4). Another organological revolution would be that of the book, which is deeply intertwined with the history of mental interiority. Recent debates over social media and data collation have brought the ‘right to privacy’ to the fore, but privacy is a predominantly modern invention – an exception to a long history of communal living, characterized by shared family beds and the very public nature of oral poetry and the theatre. The readers of ancient Greece and Rome are widely thought to have read aloud, as part of a shared, inherently social, activity and where the occasional person able to read silently was deemed decidedly rude. Silent reading only really began with the introduction of punctuation and spaces between words, in the Middle Ages, and appears to have become common only with the changes in printing technology of the early modern period (Chartier 1989: 111–12; Parkes 1993). By the nineteenth century, techniques of mass production combined with capitalism to afford cheap printed reading material – and the prospect of private, unsurveillable aesthetic experience – to the urban proletariat. The result, to which readers of Madame Bovary and Le Rouge et le noir can testify, was an awakening of imagination that went hand-in-hand with widespread anxieties over public access to the democratic dreams of upheaval that novels would bring. Analogously, after the initial euphoria of the internet and globalization, with their promise of unlimited information and the power to overturn distance, we are now dealing with a range of digitally occasioned traumas, including not just the aforementioned collapse of privacy and the print media, but fears over a dramatic rise in intolerance, linked to the resurgence of far-right politics. Easy-access pornography risks generations of men inured to, and turned on by, sexual violence (Dines 2010; Zimbardo and Coulombe 2015: 27–31), while the anonymity of social media has provided a breeding ground for misogyny and the polarization of political views (Marchal et al. 2018). If the World Wide Web has in many respects increased our ability to participate, our newfound access to data has contributed to a dilution of confidence in our existing institutions. The press and markets are exposed to the speed of news and panic, while search engines enable us to call into question the ‘expertise’ of the medical and scientific establishments, through the flattening effect of what Bruno Latour terms ‘straight-talking Double Click’. We gain access to any number of opinions, informed or otherwise, just by clicking through links. The presentation

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of truth is experienced as no more factual than the most spurious conjectures; all knowledge is reduced to equivalence (Latour 2012: 15, 136–43). Despite the popular taxonomy of the ‘third industrial revolution’, there have been other organological phase shifts of no lesser importance than the births of agriculture and industry, and which entailed similar periods of instability and disadjustment, bursts of creativity and spiritual malaise. The uptake of alphabetized writing over the course of fifth-century Athens, for example, directly fed into both the birth of modern (Platonic) philosophy and the collapse of democracy, played out via an intergenerational conflict that lends itself readily to comparison with the media revolution of the last half-century. Typified by May ’68, Occupy and the Snowden fallout, recent reactions against the heavy-handed control of information find a distant echo in the youth rebellions of Alcibiades and Critias, the students of Socrates who grew weary of the restrictions of oral culture, exemplified by the vague and unwritten rules of direct democracy, which produced litigiousness, filibustering, a constant changing of minds – and ultimately voter apathy (Waterfield 2009: 62, 140–1). If Socrates, in the words of his accusers, ‘corrupted the young’, it is, as Eric Havelock has shown, because he devised new methods of education appropriate for a literate culture: in place of rigid customs committed to memory through the rote-learning of oral poetry, he taught dialectical conversation as ‘a prosaic instrument for breaking the spell of the poetic tradition, substituting in its place a conceptual vocabulary and syntax’ that challenged the hierarchical family structures underpinning the social conventions of orality (Havelock 1986: 5). Although his trial represents a backlash against the trauma unleashed by literacy, the Athenian demos was ultimately saved by the codification of laws in writing: the reorganization of society around the very technology that had threatened to destroy it. Inscribed in stone for public viewing, the letter of the law became binding, because it ‘seemed objective, impersonal, infinitely repeatable, not arbitrary’ (Waterfield 2009: 136). The advent of this new writing, which in The Phaedrus (1997) Plato described as a pharmakon, both poison and cure (1997: 275a), would also bring about more long-standing changes in Western culture. Even the ‘concept of selfhood’, Havelock suggests, owes its invention to the permanence and abstraction of formalized, written grammar, which allowed the speaker to exist apart from their language. Plato’s universal, absolute ideas were an extension of this (Havelock 1986: 113–15). Just as ancient Athens had to reorganize itself around a shift in its technical culture, so, too, must we recreate educational and political institutions that are

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adequate to the technological transformations of the present epoch. The advent of digital technology has exacerbated a loss of faith in politics, which has been reduced to the demagogic populism of images, soundbites and thraldom to the superficialities of social networking. And the social organs through which we could address this loss have similarly been undone, as schools and universities, already under the cosh of austerity, have struggled to respond to the implications for learning of nascent debates on cognitive saturation, screen addiction and the effect of real-time technologies on the formation of attention, all of which are bringing home the extent to which humans are, and always have been, constituted through technics (Stiegler 1994: 163–4). Questions over the nature of digital selfhood are further raised by the ease with which we have ceded our most intimate details to proprietary platforms like Facebook and Google. Elsewhere the transformation of the once-sacrosanct concept of private property is brought to the fore not only by streaming and harvesting of content, but also by major online newspapers that profit from using unpaid bloggers to feed their machines for clickbaiting, as well as virtual learning environments whose claims to ownership over uploaded teaching materials could enable universities to replace tenured staff with unqualified temps (Donoghue 2008: 109–10). Symptomatic of the growth of the ‘precariat’, these practices beset both the online press and the virtual university courses, or ‘MOOCs’, that have emerged to threaten the viability of their non-virtual counterparts. What we are seeing, in other words, is a recasting of the foundational categories of social organization in light of the digital revolution, including not just the spheres of politics, the media and education, but also the labour market, commerce, individual rights and freedoms, even desire, sex and the family (from consumerism and Grindr to reproductive biotechnologies … ). Encompassing all of these is a transformation of the concept of the human, a category that, however internally inconsistent, has grown isomorphically to accommodate the changes of the present era, precisely because it is a product of that era.

Dreams of the human Back in 1689, John Locke augured the modern doctrine of the self-owning individual with the claim that ‘every man has a “property” in his own “person.” This nobody has any right to, but himself ’ (1988: 287). The premise underwrote the Lockean justification of private property, which was seen to stem from the

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mixing of one’s labour with the soil. We might, with hindsight tilted in the direction of the slave trade, wonder whether it wasn’t the other way around, with private property giving rise to the fantasy of self-ownership. Either way, ideas have moved on, without necessarily being wholly abandoned. Translating theory into practice, the information capture debates of the Digital Age have done more to unground the proprietary subject than Freud and Deleuze ever did, and multiple, self-contradictory, new versions of the human are now holding sway. The discourse of properties lives on, to some extent, in medicalized folk biology, according to which we are genetically hardwired, hapless victims of inherited fallibility and innate sex drives. Elsewhere, the desire for privacy is merely a nostalgia that runs up against our evolved status as instinctive sharers and networkers. And if we are assumed to tolerate the violation of privacy, withstand the high rate of technological and social change, it is because we are technologically enhanced superhumans, built onto ‘adaptable’, ‘plastic’ and ‘liquid’ animals, programmable and pourable to fit any mould, though supposedly hard enough to tolerate futureshock (Bauman 2005; Boltanski and Chiapello 1999: 300–303, 345; Malabou 2011: 109–20). For Stiegler, this is the new ideological metanarrative of adaptation, which evaluates humans through their ability to withstand changes (Stiegler 2005b: 60). It makes the world of work a test of character and fitness, recasts universities as preservers and enhancers of our natural flexibility to bow and not break, and has been invoked to legitimate inertia on the matter of climate change: we’ll adapt to the future, so why make changes now? As if adaptation were a passively bestowed by-product of time, arriving without effort on our part (see, for example, Lawson 2008: 39–46). For a rising tide of critics, which includes Stiegler and the growing membership of Ars Industrialis, this animal adaptability is precisely what is now being exploited by practices that leave our ‘intermittent’ capacity for humanity, or self-invention through technics, ever harder to come by. Preciado puts it similarly, via the claim that we have been reduced to ‘pharmacopornographic’ subjects, rendered helpless by the mining of our libidinal energy and sale of narcotic pleasure, which serves as the blueprint for digital capitalism (Preciado 2008: 38). At stake in the prevailing accounts of who and what we are is a categorization pertaining to the relationship between technical culture and the ideas of the human to which it gives rise, and there is much at stake in the struggle to interpret this and other categories that organize culture. It goes without saying that different visions of the human either legitimate or contest a range of ethical and political

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practices, including our treatment in the workplace, our vulnerability to forces like advertising and the kinds of therapies that get prescribed for our ills. The way in which our understanding of concepts gets appropriated and reinforced – for instance, by Google, whose page-ranking system ensures the consolidation of dominant modes of thought (Kaplan 2014: 151) – is a key question of the humanities reconceived as Digital Studies, and the subject of ongoing research into categorization in Paris, at Stiegler, and Vincent Puig’s Institut de recherche et d’innovation and also Latour’s AIME project (iri.centrepompidou.fr; modesofexistence.org). The emphasis placed by both on contribution highlights that it is not enough simply to interpret the new categories of digital culture: we must also create them. On that level, Digital Studies is not simply a descriptive field of knowledge. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it is a battleground for the future – if there is to be one, in which academics become tasked with the duty of forging new arms; of moving from a critical discourse on technology to the development of technics to reawaken what, extending an idea of Derrida, one might call the intermittently glimpsed promise of the human: the human conceived not as an existing entity, but as a horizon of desire and possibility, a dream that is projected when we employ our tools to construct an agency that is anything but given by the passivifying, behaviour-automating technologies of consumerism.

Mind change for (avoiding) climate change The concept of ‘urgency’ is monstrously abused by a great many academics, who are wont to describe pretty much anything trite and insignificant as ‘urgent’, from filling a gap in a dead playwright’s voluminous correspondence, to publishing another book of minutiae to be read by next to no-one. Caveats aside, the preservation of this promise of the human genuinely is urgent. The British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has recently written on the impact of a ‘mind change’ that is potentially as dramatic as climate change, referring to the ‘unprecedented’ effect of ‘the cyber world of the twenty-first century’ on the formation of our highly malleable brains (Greenfield 2014: 13). In an argument that recalls ecological concerns over the loss of biodiversity, she outlines her alarm at the loss of what we might call noodiversity (Moore 2020; Stiegler 2018: 78–81), related to the increasingly homogenous forms of screen-based stimulation activating the reward systems of the brain. If consciousness is an

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emergent property of our complex neural networks, she warns, then it increases in proportion to the complexity, or variety, of its stimuli. And we effectively become less conscious, undergoing a kind of neurological dulling of the senses, if this variety decreases – which can happen through continual exposure to machines that hook us into intense and enduring habits (2014: 79, 108, 271). This kind of desensitized passivification and loss of attentiveness is precisely what we cannot afford when, according to predictions, we really only had until 2017 to prevent the worst-case climate-change scenario of a planetary temperature rise of more than 2°C (Klein 2014: 23). The shortness of the deadline reinforces Stiegler’s insistence that attempts to combat climate change will amount to nothing unless we first address the underlying causes of our demotivation through an ‘ecology of spirit’, or therapies for our insufficient care for the self, where selfhood must be understood as inseparable from its milieus (Stiegler 2006a: 116). Others, most notably the Gaia-theorist, James Lovelock, have argued that it is already too late for us to act; that we may as well just enjoy what time we are left with. Irrespective of whether he is right or wrong, this kind of response risks being symptomatic of the carefree enjoyment that is at the root of our plight. It moreover leaves unanswered the crucial question: too late for what, exactly? For though it may be too late to save the climate required for current parameters of existence, there may still be time to salvage the structural conditions of our own artificial future, by ensuring that we can still access the collective cultural memory that we inherit in the process of becoming human. Unless we manage the decreasingly probable feat of creating a new ecology of spirit, of breeding new kinds of not-inhuman animals with a hitherto unseen capacity for collective salvation, current estimates suggest that the Digital Age will be the last of the great organological revolutions before we go the way of the Neanderthals. The latter, it now seems, succumbed to what we might, borrowing from Stiegler, call epiphylogenetic collapse: a breakdown in the process of cultural evolution through which the acquired experience of our ancestors is passed on to generations to come, sedimented in the tools whose adoption marks our cultural point of departure. Anticipating the future that Lovelock has diagnosed for overspecialized and insufficiently ‘generalist’ Homo sapiens, our last hominin ancestors are now thought to have died out when increasingly fragmented, isolated populations proved unable to sustain the division of specialized labour, or tool use, characteristic of Neanderthal social structures. The philosopher of biology, Kim Sterelny, describes a dramatic erosion of the ‘accumulation, preservation and intergenerational transmission of cognitive

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capital’, where the imperative of survival meant that young Neanderthals were called upon to use tools for which they were not adequately trained. Unable to access the accumulated cultural knowledge locked up in their inherited technical objects, they were unable to modify them in the face of new environmental challenges and succumbed to extinction (Sterelny 2012: 65–8). When the floods come and the power fails, this will likely be what awaits us. To quote from Lovelock: Imagine the survivors of a failed civilisation. Imagine them trying to cope with a cholera epidemic using knowledge gathered from a tattered book on alternative medicine. […] The discovery that bacteria and viruses caused infectious diseases is relatively recent; imagine the consequences if such knowledge was lost, on account of being stored on some inaccessible magnetic or optical medium. (Lovelock 2006: 202–3)

Imagine the consequences, in other words, of our being locked out from the tools on which civilization depends, unable to inherit some 200,000 years’ worth of techniques for survival and enculturation. This fate would spell a magnification of the consumer lock-in that has seen us reduced to hyperspecialist and broadly passive consumers of the technologies at our disposal. And as such it might be mitigated by a concerted effort to expand the horizons opened up by our contemporary tool use. This, again, will be the task of Digital Studies, construed as both a paradigm of the humanities, the study of culture and its relation, through tools, to redemption; and as a prescriptive call for the reinvention of tool-led, humanizing agency.

Renewed institutions for new kinds of humans One further detail marks the constellar relation between the organological revolutions of the alphabet and the internet, ancient Greece and the Age of Excess, and that is the scapegoating of the humanities as an obstacle to progress. In his elaboration of a professionalized educational programme that, according to Havelock, ‘marks the introduction of the university system into the west’ (Havelock 1963: 15), Plato’s Socrates counsels that the guardians of the Republic should not be taught poetry (1997: 607b). Poets should furthermore be driven beyond the walls of the ideal city, lest the seductive corruptions of fiction and imitation threaten the harmony – the division of labour – that separates out the

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guardians from the philosopher-kings (1997: 394c–395a, 412e). It was not until Havelock, for whom the exile of the poets marks the jettisoning of the old order of oral education, that Plato was read at his word. In periods when the value of culture was perhaps less constantly subject to interrogation, or when irony and parody were among the foremost preoccupations of criticism, the notion of banishing poets was rarely taken at face value (Havelock 1986: 6). But it chimes a plausible peal at our own present conjuncture of technological disadjustment, not to mention austerity, when playfulness has given way to the grim seriousness of taking things literally; when the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ has been replaced by a more general suspicion of less vocational, utilitarian subject areas, supposedly maladapted to a world (an economy) based on science and technology. Now, as then, it has been all too easy to dismiss the arts as wedded to an outdated vision of humanity; to imagine the anthropotechnics required for the breeding of future humans as being wholly unrelated to the poetic rituals of classical tragedy and the humanism of the book – and to infer from that (however nostalgically) that the humanities retain only vestigial, archival interest (Sloterdijk 2009: 14–15). The interpretation of human behaviour is now increasingly devolved to evolutionary psychology. By extension, the Promethean task of creating future humans is being arrogated by messianic technoscience and bioengineering that treat toxic humans as a problem to be solved rather than as a promise to be cultivated – to the extent that these future humans are being created at all, in an economic context where automation is coming ever closer to rendering us ‘obsolete’ (Gray 2015: 108–9). There is perhaps nonetheless something of the eternal punishment of Prometheus in the recurrent crises of the troublesome humanities, which see us forcibly held back from what we do best, namely getting ahead of ourselves. Projected from the past into the future like Benjamin’s analysis of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (Benjamin 1999: 249), the virtue of cultural criticism is precisely its foresight, its focus on imagining the horizons of possibility opened up by the inheritance of tools. We predict and analyse imaginary worlds, both yet to come and long since past, by reconstructing the experience made possible by the empirico-transcendental structures of technics. Unencumbered by the slowness of laboratory measurement, we draw on anecdote to hazard intoxicating, critical and hence frequently unpopular hypotheses, riding the accusations of hysteria and deficient rigour occasioned by our distaste for quantification. That is fine – the slower, more measured sciences can come along and prove us wrong without invalidating the value of

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intellectual reconnaissance and pre-emptive diagnosis. The damage occurs when quantification becomes the only legitimate form of interpretation, as part of an economic drive towards academic monoculture, which pushes our noodiversity to ever greater precariousness. Flying with clipped wings and forced to abandon the tools of the trade amidst a battering from the chaos of the market, the Angelus Novus becomes Baudelaire’s disenchanted angel without a halo. In responding to the risk of our deviation, Plato’s philosopher-kings overreacted in the same way as the financier-legislators who are presently seeking to rein in the toxic side of the pharmacological humanities, with little care for their therapeutic potential. It goes without saying that poetry alone will not suffice in the quest to build the kinds of humans we want (and need) to be, instead of the kind of anaesthetized automata presently churned out by the prevailing organization of the markets. It goes without saying, too, that we cannot just ignore the revolutions of genetics, metadata and quantification. The issue is less with the opposition of heuristic humanities and the ‘exact’ sciences, construed as neat and delimitable entities, than with the systematic division of labour that sustains the separation of the arts and sciences into ‘two cultures’, spurred into competition with one another by a winner-takes-all economy. As noted above, concerns over the divisiveness of this split are traceable back to the Neolithic era, long before becoming part of the work of Marx and Foucault, who described its proletarianizing vitiation of meaningful endeavour and enforcement of individual responsibility through collective surveillance. Plato’s fantastic vision of specialized workers converging in organic unity has since metastasized into the very opposite of responsibility, namely a machine for the production of vulnerable hyperspecialists equipped only to produce and consume more things we neither want nor strictly need. Across the board from scarcely read academic articles to entertainment devices enjoyed to the point of abuse, the manufactured demand that underwrites their supply only fuels the chronic overproduction that has set us on a collision course with disaster. What we need, then, is a broader, more encompassing, concept of the humanities – one that does away with the division of labour by teaching both the interpretation of tools and their reinvention of biological bodies. In the first instance, this would consist in the study not just of culture, or cultures of tool use and the humans to which they give rise, but also of the disadjustments, the time lags, between technical evolution and the expansion of concepts of the human to accommodate and withstand new traumas. Disadjustment, in this respect, would describe the moment of waning optimism after the initial thrill of organological

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revolution, when the toxicities of new pharmaka come to the fore, and before we learn to reinvent them so as to gain a modicum of control over the ways in which we are invented by them. It is therefore aggravated by (capitalistic) economic interests that hijack the dopamine system, exploiting the very biological plasticity that enables us to construct agency. With this in mind, the mission of the humanities in general reconceived as Digital Studies would be to facilitate participation in the technical symbolic order, by preventing what Stiegler terms the regression to automation, the proletarianized consumption without production that locks us in to passivity. To achieve this, it needs to be reasserted that humans are, and always have been, the projection of multiple kinds of writing: not just DNA and epigenetics, but the rewriting of the body and brain through technics. The challenge of the Digital Studies must thus be to show that we do not simply adapt to and acquiesce in environments not of our making. By rising to it, the writing of humanity and its future might still be commandeered, however belatedly. Even as the ice caps melt and the floodwaters rise, artificial selection might still swim against the tides of genetic drift.

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Part One

Tertiary Retention Introduction Cormac Deane, Néill O’Dwyer and Michael O’Hara

It is difficult to overstate the importance that memory holds in Stiegler’s philosophy. Any experienced event can be held in the mind and recalled in a mode of thinking described by Plato as anamnesis (in The Phaedrus 275–9 and elsewhere) (see Introduction to Part 2). This pure, mindful form of recollection does not rely on technical supports (e.g. notetaking). Once a memory is inscribed in a medium (such as writing or painting), then it becomes an instance of hypomnesis, that is the memory is ‘exosomatic’, or made external to the body. When this happens, the mind is relieved of the need to retain the memory. Plato’s hostility to writing emerges from his apprehension that, in Stiegler’s phrase, it ‘risks contaminating all memory, thereby even destroying it’ (Stiegler 1998: 1, 3), and leads him to conclude that it ultimately distorts truth. However, committing knowledge to concrete form permits its communication across time and space. The transgenerational communicative capacity of humans through non-biological media provides the basis of cultural heritage. Therefore, the exosomaticization of memory produces a spiritual prosthesis, which constitutes a uniquely human experience of the world and defines the essence of humanity. The ‘what’ of the memory prosthesis precedes the ‘who’ of the human (Stiegler 1998: 272). Stiegler advocates an account of the relationship between technology and time as a way of understanding the evolution of humans, whose consciousness is constituted by spiritual prostheses. Technics (processes of inscription) permit the production of traces, which become increasingly sophisticated in parallel with the development of technologies, ultimately affording the creation of what Edmund Husserl was the first to call ‘temporal objects’ (Husserl 1991). Temporal objects are

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cultural artefacts that are perceived over time, such as stories, poetry, music and drama. These objects are perceived as a series of (audiovisual, verbal) instances that combine to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts, which makes them analogous to dialogue; however, they have a fixed structure and are repeatable, whereas dialogue is contingent. For Husserl, they afford an understanding of the flux of human consciousness. Stiegler repurposes Husserl’s temporal model of consciousness as a way of cogitating on the relationship between the object and subject: ‘A temporal object … is constituted by the fact that, like our consciousnesses, it flows and disappears as it appears’ (Stiegler 2014b: 18). Husserl defines temporal consciousness as tripartite in structure: primary retention (present perception), secondary retention (anamnesis) and protention (anticipation). To illustrate this structure, Husserl considers how in a musical melody each note is heard not in isolation, but as part of an extended temporal whole. Notes perceived in the present as a series of discrete sounds constitute primary retentions; notes that remain in consciousness after they have been played comprise secondary retentions. Secondary retentions (memories of the past) afford primary perception to engage with the context of a melody and help us anticipate what notes come next. This anticipation is the protentional aspect of Husserl’s temporal troika. The phenomenology of hearing a note in a melody is conditioned by notes just heard and expectations of imminent ones. By reconsidering Husserl’s model in the context of mechanical recording techniques, Stiegler contributes an original, provocative synthesis, by adding a new, fourth element to the stack: tertiary retentions. These are exosomatic memories, exteriorized using mechanical recording techniques that afford ‘the identical repetition of the same temporal object’ (Stiegler 2014b: 34). Mechanical automata combine with processes of remembering to form the industrialization of memory. Human relations to the world, and to time itself, are thereby fundamentally modified. Whereas Husserl regards inscribed memory as alien to phenomenological consciousness, since it is a pre-existing, non-lived past that is external to lived experience, Stiegler asserts that inscribed memory constitutes the essence of human experience. Temporal objects, now prepared using automated recording techniques, offer a means of memory exteriorization in a similar way that writing did for Plato. However, the process of exteriorization is greatly accelerated by technological advances, such as the alphabet, the tape recorder and the microprocessor. Each of these technologies employs grammatization, a term that Stiegler borrows from Sylvain Auroux (1995). For Auroux, grammatization is the technical, and logical, process of rationalizing language by reducing and discretizing the

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flux of spoken language into discrete ‘grammes’ (letters and letter combinations). As a process of recording and discretizing continuous articulations, it is the precondition and structural archetype for all written language, and so also for knowledge in general, including science and mathematics, whose units are pixels, bytes, metres, soundwaves and so on. This archetypal processing became intensified, according to Auroux, with the automation of print technologies, ushering in a second technological revolution of grammatization. Stiegler identifies the emergence of a third phase in the modern technologies of audiovisual inscription. Broadening Auroux’s attention to language, Stiegler suggests that grammatization also encompasses gesture. Given the central role of exosomatic thought in the formation of the human as human, grammatization in this way becomes a truly transformational process, ‘by which all the fluxes or flows … through which symbolic (that is, also, existential) acts are linked, can be discretized, formalized and reproduced’ (Stiegler 2011a: 172). In this view, the calendar and the clock are grammatizing technologies that result in the industrialization of time. Grammatization produces, then, an inseparable relation between technics and time, such that ‘it is technē … that gives time’ (Stiegler 1998: 220). Time itself, in other words, is a human construct arising out of grammatization. Plato’s opposition of anamnesis to hypomnesis had the effect of demonstrating that the passage of time plays a crucial role in how humans comprehend reality. The ambiguous question that animated him was whether the technology of writing entailed a deepening of thought or a curtailment of it. The three contributions to this part of the volume address the same question in relation to electronic modes of inscription, which are analysed here in the light of the founding Stieglerian principle that it is technics that give time.

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1

Organology, Grammatization and Exosomatic Memory in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape Néill O’Dwyer

Introduction This chapter discusses the technohistoric specificities of Samuel Beckett’s acclaimed 1958 play, Krapp’s Last Tape (KLT), under the concept of technicity, which is ‘technology considered in its efficacy, or operative functioning’ (Hoel and van der Tuin 2013: 187). Technicity is a theoretical concept initiated in twentiethcentury scholarship, which permits a way of understanding how technological apparatuses hold an influential ontological force, or performative agency. In KLT this is visible inside and outside the frame of the fiction. This chapter aims to explicate the impact of technicity on the playwright and his character, by rereading the play through Stiegler’s theoretical lens of temporality. I suggest that not only is KLT charting an experiential terrain that we now, belatedly, have the theoretical tools to engage, but so too is that terrain now very much entangled with contemporary quotidian life. Under Stiegler’s terminology, the play should be understood as distinctively and archetypically organological1 because it stages the becoming of both man and machine as interdependent organs bound to one another under the principle of individuation. Therefore, the play marks an important development in the history of theatre because it foregrounds the performativity of technology and it represents an original aesthetic idea by representing the machine as a performer. Upon hearing Patrick Magee’s readings of his (earlier) radio plays, Beckett was so ‘impressed and moved by the distinctive cracked quality of [his] voice, which seemed to capture a sense of deep world-weariness, sadness, ruination and regret’ (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 81), that he was inspired to write a monologue for a weary old man with a wheezy and croaky voice. Magee would play the part.

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The regrettably coarse name of Krapp, conferred upon the character, evokes disagreeable ‘excremental associations’ (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 81) that consistently steer the tone back to one of obnoxious, rotting bodily matter and the deteriorating visceral demands of decrepitude, which, as the playbacks reveal, Krapp has struggled with all his life. KLT is a poignantly nostalgic monologue that, at first glance, interrogates the slow, protracted tragedy of ageing and the recollection of a life once lived, which seems to the protagonist almost otherworldly, or other-bodily. However, the idea most at stake in this play is not the obvious theme of representing an old man abandoning himself to ‘morbid reflections on his former glories or regretting his past failures’ (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 83); conversely, it is a foregrounding of how technology – by furnishing the discretization, logging, archiving and playback of Krapp’s life – affects the human subject, reorganizing him mentally and physically, by reimposing exosomatic2 memories upon him.

Related work Various analyses of KLT have offered some intriguing insights into Beckett’s deployment of the tape recorder as a catalyst for self-referential conflict on stage. Adalaide Morris’s edited collection, Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (1997) provides two such readings by Michael Davidson and Katherine Hayles. The former posits that the tape recorder represents ‘an ultimate agent of mind control, a machine capable of replacing human communication with a prerecorded script’ (Davidson 1997: 99), while Hayles argues that the play represents a temporal trajectory that oscillates between the duality of presence, whereby Krapp’s disembodied voice is gradually transferred to the surrogate body of the machine (Hayles 1997: 74–96). More recently again, in Beckett, Technology and the Body (2009), Ulrika Maude contributes to the discourse by suggesting that the tape recorder serves as prosthetic memory. It is precisely on foot of this analytical differentiation – tape recorder as prosthesis and tape recorder as a separate body, or agent – that I propose KLT be understood as (in consideration of Stiegler’s theoretical advances on the principle of individuation) an organological intervention of the performative machine. With respect to his radio plays,3 Maude maintains, in agreement with many early critics, that Beckett combined his writing with the radiophonic medium ‘because it offered him the most effective means of portraying a character’s mind,

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which humanist critics have considered the author’s prime objective’ (Maude 2009: 47). KLT was not originally, expressly written for radio; however, what cannot be denied is that by deploying the tape recorder on the live stage Beckett circumvents the traditional theatrical means of communicating the interiorized world of consciousness – the monologue or soliloquy4 – thereby creating ‘a directness of confrontation between a man’s various selves that produces an effect radically different from earlier’ analogous self-referential or self-reflexive dramas (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 83). In KLT, there is a gradual revealing of Krapp’s psyche from articulation, through phonetic inscription, to playback. Krapp deposits traces of his mind onto magnetic tape, thereby turning vocalizations into empirical, archivable and, therefore, sentimental objects. This privileging of interiority is explored by Hayles and Knowlson, who both draw on Roy Walker’s insistence that the intention was to use the tape recorder as: [A] solution to ‘a problem that baffled the experimental playwrights between the wars,’ namely how to represent the internal monologue that constitutes consciousness, with all of its ephemerality, multivocality, and obsessive repetitions. Perhaps, he muses, ‘the epiphenomena of consciousness could be revealed by bringing the recorder on stage. Krapp’s Last Tape transforms a playback into a play’. (Walker cited in Hayles 1997: 81)

Walker’s reflection attests to the fact that mechanical technologies of audiovisual inscription offer new possibilities for delving into, revealing and laying bare the intrapersonal spaces of the human mind, by discretizing and archiving them. However, it should be noted that ‘any monologue is in dialogue [tout monologue est en dialogue]’ (Fitzpatrick 2005: 26) because as soon as a speaker [Locuteur] declares themself they establish an other (an addressee [Allocutaire]). In KLT, the definition of the monologue becomes further challenged because Krapp’s articulations are part announced to the audience and part to the machine. The latter manifests as an agent to the audience but also, crucially, as an interlocutor (a conversational other) to Krapp, which confers a performativity upon the tape recorder.

Grammatization, inscription and technologies of the mind As explained in the section introduction, grammatization (according to Stiegler and Auroux before him) describes the process of rationalizing spoken language into alphabets, underpinned by symbols, letters and letter

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combinations. It is not only the basis of written language, its logic is also the precursor of mathematics and science (see Introduction to Part 1). Stiegler’s thesis on technology, as articulated in Technics and Time 1 (1994 [1998]), is based on a palaeoanthropological–deconstructionist argument that conceives technology as a prosthesis of the mind, which is fundamentally reducible to acts of inscription. This is neatly articulated in a reconsideration of Plato’s anecdote of the Pharmakon, in which he dualistically opposes writing to oration (see Introduction to Part 2). Contrary to Plato, Stiegler frequently reiterates that writing, as the originary technology of the mind, is the essence of deep reflection because it facilitates recursive considerations. This provides the basis of his argument that the modern technologies of inscription (mnemo-technologies) constitute artificial or ‘exosomatic’ memory – a prosthesis of the mind – which is continuously evolving and wholly answerable to the technohistoric juncture of human development. If, as Auroux suggests, automated printing technologies bring about the second technological revolution of grammatization (see Introduction to Part 1), Stiegler hypothesizes that a third phase has emerged out of the generalization of audiovisual and informational technologies (Stiegler 2014b: 54). Because of their ability to capture embodied experiences, process the data and represent them as the symbolic order, this new phase comes loaded with new implications for the body and gesture. Stiegler declares: ‘today bodies as well, with the temporal sequences of gestures (including the voice)5 and movements … are subject to grammatisation through sound and image’ (Stiegler 2014b: 54), henceforth, extending the theory beyond language into the phenomenological field of embodied gesture. The physiological actions that constitute tasks or expressions are executed through a temporal succession of moments and those moments are recordable, discretizable and archivable using electromechanical technologies. The new technologies of inscription help elucidate how human exosomatic articulations can be made subject to, and modifiable by, a machinic temporality. KLT demonstrates these phenomena through the playbacks of fragments of Krapp’s life and goes much further than this. By staging the emotional impact the recordings have on the human subject, Beckett reveals the efficacy of grammatization and mnemo-techniques generally. It is a presentation of grammatization as drama: ‘a grammaturgy’ (O’Dwyer 2015: 53). The mise-en-scène of tape recording technology generally interrogates the developmental tendencies of technocratic society, where the recording of traces increasingly becomes a socio-economic linchpin. KLT is a comment on the duality of memory, consisting in pure recollection

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versus the possibility to concretize them using inscriptive techniques. What becomes foregrounded then is the fungal spread of amnesia, not necessarily symptomatic of ageing but, conversely, one coerced by the domestication and mass-dissemination of mnemo-technologies since the post-war period.

Industrial temporal objects, tertiary retentions and trauma in Krapp’s Last Tape The epoch of mechanical reproducibility does not simply refer to the ability to reproduce tangible objects; reproduction was already taking place for centuries.6 More significantly, for Benjamin, is the ability to, via recording, reproduce a live event, which enables the new-world artform that would be the logical development of theatre: film.7 Before mechanical recording technology it was impossible to listen to the same sonic event twice. Benjamin takes the (widely supported) position that mechanically reproduced artefacts/events maintain the power to alter ‘the manner in which human sense perception is organized’ (Benjamin 1999: 216). Gilles Deleuze follows this thread of thought by positing that the brain is a ‘spatio-temporal volume’ in which cinema can establish new ‘cerebral circuits’ (Deleuze 2005: 60–1). For Stiegler – who is ambivalently linked to the thought of Deleuze (and Simondon) – these circuits are always subject to the question of temporality. All theorists agree that, firstly, the mediated artefact is completed in the interiorized space of the spectator’s consciousness through processes of interpretation and meaning-making and, secondly, it affects the experience of the interlocutor, indelibly and irreversibly. The technologies of mechanical reproduction permit the remapping, reconfiguration and revision of the time of speech and action, within the present space of lived perception; experiences, now placed in a state that Martin Heidegger would describe as ‘standing-reserve [Bestand]’,8 can be recalled, replayed and reworked on demand. Stiegler applies this thought to Husserl’s concept of temporal objects (see introduction to Part 1), thereby synthesizing the theoretical advancement of ‘industrial temporal objects’ (Stiegler 2014b: 17). Industrial temporal objects are mechanical recordings of temporal objects; they are composed of a succession of instances, which flow into one another creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts, for example a recorded song or cinematic film. As Maude points out, the tape-recorded sound object exploits ‘both the spatially and temporally transgressive qualities of sound’ (Maude

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2009: 62); its permanence and mutability complete its self-fulfilling prophecy as ‘the antithesis of “unmediated presence”’ (Maude 2009: 62). Mechanically recorded artefacts have the same structure as an embodied dialogist; when one listens to it, one is affected and influenced by it. Like an interlocutor, industrial temporal objects are efficacious; they come to modify the temporality of a listener’s consciousness, which ‘is to say, the totality of consciousness, which is nothing but temporality, being process through and through, and not a stable structure’ (Stiegler 2014b: 21). The listening subject is modifiable, in flux, ‘that is to say disappearing so as to appear – each person differently and each in a singular relationship to their particular past, and their particular passing, and also, therefore, to their future’ (Stiegler 2014b: 17–18). It is a transformation of the protagonist’s time of consciousness to a status of ‘standing-reserve’ (Heidegger 2003: 288) that Beckett so ingeniously stages. By doing so, he lays bare the ontological efficacy of inscriptive technologies; that is, he exposes their ability to impact on the psyche (the being) of the individual. In KLT, industrial temporal objects (the protagonist’s recorded memories) are represented through a pre-industrial temporal object, theatre. One is dependent on the reproducibility of analogue mechanical recording techniques; the other is dependent on the indeterminism of liveness and the recalling-tomind of the playwright’s text. There are two different types of temporality at work here, which is to say two different types of memory: the exact reproduction of phonetically inscribed memories by the machine (hypomnesis) versus the contingent recollection of the actor (anamnesis). For Stiegler, temporality is something that we all share in common; it binds us. We empathize with Krapp through the unique and powerful bond of our common temporality but this becomes more fragmented, fragile and challenged, under the pressure of mechanical technology. Maude notes: ‘The play hence stages the process of remembering, but it simultaneously enacts a curious re-membering, a piecing together of the sediments and fragments of Krapp’s life’ (Maude 2009: 64). The play seizes on the particular effects produced by the recording and playback of fragments of memory and exalts them by making them its central subject. The stack of cassettes functions as a metaphor for the sedimentation of a lifetime of concretized memories, palatalized and inscribed to tape. The magnetic tapes signify space temporalized, demonstrated by Krapp’s embodied life-experiences transcribed to the linear temporal format; analogously, Krapp’s existence, as a succession of temporal events, is spatialized and sedimented into the voluminous metallic memory deposits. This is the production of what Stiegler

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calls tertiary retentions (Stiegler 2014b: 34),9 which are exosomatized memories produced by memory support apparatuses and mnemo-techniques that afford the recording of traces – tape recorders. The tertiary retentions inscribed to tape represent the desire to repeat, to relive, to ‘be again’ (Beckett 2006: 223). Krapp’s mnemo-inscriptions are an exteriorization, compartmentalization and, therefore, fragmentation, of his memory and identity into discrete parts. Opposing the fixed, stable tertiary retentions, housed in the tins, to the unstable, fluid primary retentions (perception) and secondary retentions (mental recollection) reveals the organizational powers of tertiary retentions. Just like splitting an atom, the fragmentation of consciousness leads to its volatility. For Krapp, the mechanical precision of tertiary retentions inscribed thirty years ago has been relived once too often. The stack of mechanized memories is more like the plugged dome of a volcano than a sedimented ocean floor, hence the violence with which he ‘wrenches off ’ the tape and ‘throws it away’ (Beckett 2006: 223). The stress of the re-inhabitation of Krapp’s mind by the younger man is too much to take: as if ‘once wasn’t enough for [him]’ (Beckett 2006: 223). KLT highlights the human compulsion to create hypomnemata (physical commentaries), originally executed through symbolic gestural techniques, like writing, and then evolving into ‘analogico-digital’10 techniques (Derrida and Stiegler 2002: 148). These now function as a placeholder for memory, similar to the way that writing did for Plato. In this respect, recording techniques are pharmaka. While they afford the documentation of knowledge with increasing efficiency, thereby contributing to a massive, expanding global repertoire ‘extending the knowledge of mankind and its power’ (Stiegler 2006b), they simultaneously occasion a loss of individual knowledge because we increasingly ‘confide a greater and greater part of our memory [ … to] these cognitive technologies’ (Stiegler 2006b). For Stiegler, memory is fundamentally linked to knowledge, which, in broader sociological terms, is linked with processes of individuation, or becoming.

Individuation, a general organology and the emergence of a machine performer The theory of individuation is a theoretical concept that can be traced back to Aristotle, who uses it as a way of understanding that things of the same taxonomy can be understood as individual and differentiated from each other. The concept is particularly useful when thinking about organic species,

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for example humans or herds of animals. Aristotle’s theory is based on Substantialism, which is a largely anthropocentric perspective that understands everything as having a predetermined, fixed quality. Gilbert Simondon engages the subject of individuation but critiques the Substantialist perspective, insisting that the Anthropos is not a fixed entity. He holds that the principle of individuation, which undergirds the becoming of the individual, is a constantly developing process – always in flux. Furthermore, he maintains it is not just other humans that affect the becoming of the individual; there are historical– material factors, which he calls the pre-individual milieu, that have as much influence on the development of individuals as other humans. In L’individuation psychique et collective (1989), Simondon ‘shows how the individual and the group co-constitute each other through the intergenerational transmission (synchrony) of the pre-individual [knowledge] fund and its individual adoption (diachrony)’ (Stiegler and Rossouw 2011a: 53). Stiegler agrees with Simondon’s contra-Substantialist view; however, he disagrees with Simondon’s perspective that technology (or the material domain) cannot itself individuate. Stiegler’s inclusion of the technical milieu in the principle of individuation is distinctly different from Simondon’s perspective because Stiegler conceives it as a dynamic, ‘three-way, interdependent process involving the psychosomatic (individual), the social (organisation) and technical (organs)’ (O’Dwyer and Johnson 2019: 9), which all reciprocally affect each other. Whereas Simondon says that only living beings can individuate, Stiegler argues that technologies, as ‘inorganic organized beings’ (Stiegler 1998: 17), can and do individuate. This characteristic of technology is brought into stark view by the pervasiveness of automata in the analogue–digital stage of technological evolution. Acknowledging the phylogenetic11 characteristics of techno-evolution, Stiegler calls this three-way nature of individuation a general organology. ‘Under this conception, technologies are neither straightforward means for conducting tasks nor prostheses of the body; rather, they are artificial organs that are relationally linked to both the biological organs and collective organisations’ (O’Dwyer and Johnson 2019: 9). In relation to KLT, Beckett demonstrates an awareness of our increasing dependence on information inscribed to mnemo-technologies for processes of psychic and collective individuation. He also highlights the mutability of technology and the reorganizational power it exerts over the human subject. However, he could never have known the magnitude of these phenomena in the digital era. The ‘soft’ technology, embodied by Krapp’s tape recordings and

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logbook, represents a precursor of the file-away, find and replace system, which constitutes archival methods linking the palimpsest to the digital database. Krapp’s audio archive not only undergoes systematic, sequential mutations, reorderings and reorganizations by the human interactor, but it also feeds back into, and reorganizes, the psyche of the individual. KLT is charting a territory where not only is the becoming of human identity increasingly determined by the technological domain, but so too is the becoming of the technology at stake. Beckett states: ‘“[The] audiotapes … function as an opportune trope for identity”; their simultaneously permanent and mutable nature epitomize both the stative and active aspects of subjectivity’ (Beckett cited in Maude 2009: 65). In addition to foregrounding how processes of individuation are mediated through and affected by technology, the play also shows how the technological apparatus, as an exosomatic manifestation of Krapp’s memory, is individuating. It is continually rewritten, evolving its own unique identity under the subjective influence of the human, which in turn feeds back into the becoming of the protagonist. Not only does the technology provide ‘a means of escape from the confines of constricting identity, but more importantly identity, like Krapp’s tapes, is perpetually written anew’ (Maude 2009: 65). A brief recourse to Marshall McLuhan’s famously overused statement, ‘the medium is the message’ (McLuhan and Gordon 2003: 25), is useful here because it positions the performing apparatus – Krapp’s tape recorder and its ghostly vocalizations – as the core ontological and aesthetic force in Beckett’s play. The idiosyncratic and technologically particular nature of KLT’s stage directions delineates a genre of theatre that is difficult to separate from its historical-material context, establishing impediments to restaging Beckett’s works. These become increasingly challenging in direct relation to their receding (mid-twentieth-century) origin, disinterring the need for practitioners to thread the fine line between fidelity to his original vision and the urge to innovatively experiment with his works (Johnson and Heron 2020; O’Dwyer et al. 2020). The stage directions are organological in the way they specify the kinaesthetic relations between the actor and the apparatus: ‘He raises his head, broods, bends over machine, switches on and assumes listening posture, i.e. leaning forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear towards machine, face front’ (Beckett 2006: 217). Beckett foregrounds the performativity of machines through the mise-enscène of the tape-recording technology – the humming, static, clicking cogs, clunky controls and tinny playbacks of a conceited voice recorded thirty years previously – and the operational gestures it imposes on the actor’s body; he

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brings the technicity of the machine into view. Technicity refers to the efficacy of technology, in terms of how it performs on the stage and how it determines the dramaturgy and choreography. KLT is a staging of technicity; it signals the becoming of the machine performer. Martin Heidegger is often accredited with shifting dominant techno-philosophical attitudes from the means–ends view, towards a non-anthropocentric perspective that understands technology as the essence of what it means to be human. His antithesis provides the basis for the conceptualization of technicity, which describes the efficacious force of the technical milieu that compels humans to make and re-make the world and is central to Stiegler’s synthesis on technology and time.

Facticity, (in)determinism, love and death in Krapp Heidegger proposes the term Dasein in order to explicate that human existence (Being-in-the-world)12 should be understood as a temporal phenomenon, constituted by a flux of events in relation to an inherited past (historiality), which itself harbours possibilities that may not be inherited as possibilities (facticity), on an overall trajectory towards self-understanding. Human existence extends itself between birth and (the inevitability of) death and is therefore always essentially anticipating its own end; it is organized by our Being-towards-death. ‘Any activity on Dasein’s part is always essentially ordered by anticipation of the end that is “the most extreme possibility” and that constitutes the originary temporality of existence’ (Stiegler 1998: 5). Anticipation is the key word here because it describes an anxiety that attempts to predict and, thus, impose certainty on a subject that is undetermined. Heidegger describes the essence of this anxiety as concern and asserts that the material manifestation of this concern is equipment: ‘We shall call those entities which we encounter in concern “equipment”’ (Heidegger 1962: 97). Stiegler extends this thought by declaring that ‘the horizon of anticipation … is the technical world – the technicity of the world is what reveals the world “firstly” and most frequently in its facticity’ (Stiegler 1998: 5). Our Being (as a trajectory towards self-understanding) is constantly in flux, individuating through indeterminate modulations between exterior personable and/or technical forces (which may be false) and our interior reconciliations of them. Krapp concretizes his lived experiences on the 1950s’ tape recording mnemo-technology, which he re-consults regularly. His engagement with the tape recordings implies his struggle to remove possibility from his essentially

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indeterminate existence, by using the concrete determinacy of technical inscription. Despite the apparent fixedness of the tertiary retentions, they are, in fact, underpinned by unstable subjective human interpretations of unreliable external influences. This is the implicit message formulating the metaphorical foundation of the play. Considering Krapp was attempting to be a creative writer, it is uncertain whether all of the mechanical vocalizations represent real experiences or the creative utterances of a prospective fiction. When replaying the recordings relating to the love affair, the language steps up a notch in terms of lyricism, beauty and melancholia, which could indicate a hyperbolic embellishment of a lived experience: We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. (Beckett 2006: 221)

Is this a real memory, or is it rewritten, over-written and reworked to the point that the old man does not remember the difference, his pathos amplified by the exact organizational power of the mnemo-technology? The facticity of his past is salient; that is, the possibilities of his past may not be adopted as possibilities, but as fact. KLT demonstrates the ‘authority that objectivized retentions … have assumed’ (Stiegler 2014b: 35). The uncertainty of existence, including the intersubjective indeterminism surrounding love (Eros) and death (Thanatos),13 offers us an appropriate way of thinking through Krapp’s misery. Everything meaningful in his world is condensed into the deposit of tertiary retentions; he has invested everything in it, including amorous memories. By assigning love to the concrete determinism of tertiary retentions he is fixing it; he is paradoxically doing the same to death.14 Thus, the mechanical reproducibility of the tape recorder is a pharmakon: on the one hand, it offers the young man a creative means for expressing and reconciling amorous embodied experience, on the other hand, it produces recursive, mechanically persistent memories that, when replayed for the older man, occasion the onset of a (self-)destructive melancholia – ill-being [‘malaise’].15 The relations between equipment, truth, (in)determinism, love and death are not the limit of the source of Krapp’s sociopathology.

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Krapp’s solipsism, disindividuation and symbolic misery It has been established that Krapp is individuating, as are his tapes, but with whom? Where is the collective? Krapp leads a solipsistic existence; with the tape recordings of his own life experience, he indulges in a narcissistic process of selfindividuation. Knowlson suggests that he is all but cut off from the outside world, the tape recorder is his only companion: With the words they contain, they represent the only form of contact that Krapp can achieve in a depleted, almost totally isolated existence that, ambiguously, he has sought out and yet dreads (‘Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited’). (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 83)

This is a statement by the younger Krapp on the tape recorder, not the present Krapp. The conceited, ‘rather pompous’ (Beckett 2006: 217) younger man’s recorded voice audibly rejoices in the fact that ‘not a soul’ (Beckett 2006: 217) was present to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday and takes comfort in returning to his den, away from the world. He also refers to his tapes in the third person, as if they were a group with whom he could share experience. Stiegler warns that a short-circuiting of processes of individuation results in what he calls Symbolic Misery (2014). This is a condition of ‘dis-individuation’, where individuals are excluded from contributing to sociocultural dialogue, primarily through creative, expressive means. Participating in cultural discourse allows individuals to experience affirmation and self-worth. ‘Symbolic misery, as a loss of aesthetic participation, leads in turn to psychological and libidinal misery’ (Stiegler 2015d: 23). Beckett apparently agrees that a sociopathology arises when individuation is short-circuited and Krapp’s predicament represents a satirical staging of it. In excluding one of the three interdependent elements of organology (the collective), Krapp turns his attention to conversing with a technological apparatus, thereby inducing a miserable condition of solipsistic narcissism and this occasions an endemic malaise, a sociopathology that ultimately leads to suicide. Considering the triangular movement of organology, it is ironic that Krapp’s trajectory towards self-understanding comprises, and is compromised by, a dialogue with his own memories. The temporality of Krapp’s present consciousness is continually affected by the facticity of his own past consciousness. Maude suggests that ‘the tapes in the play become saturated with memories Krapp has “got by heart”’ (Maude 2009: 64). However, I maintain the opposite: his present self becomes increasingly saturated by the memories

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inscribed to tape. By reliving the same memories, he homogenizes his more recent past. His mind is caught in a paradigm of diminishing returns, resulting in an ever more inward-looking gaze, like a spiral returning to its origin. This is the source of his endemic malaise. Furthermore, Krapp’s obsessive returns to the same memories and his difficulty in vocalizing new ones connotes the onset of stupefaction – a notion supported by his need to look up previously invoked complex words (‘viduity’) in the dictionary. This demonstrates the paradox of hypomnesic inscription that Plato so cautiously apprehended: the  tape recorder, originally ventriloquized by the man, now ventriloquizes the elder man with the cognizant retentions of ‘that stupid bastard [ … he took himself] for thirty years ago’ (Beckett 2006: 222). However, through its arrogant concretized retentions, this machinic bastard rescues the jaded old man from complete ignominy; it assuages his decrepitude by uploading his youthful, noble articulations to the temporality of the audience’s consciousness.

Sociopolitical metaphors of Krapp KLT does more than ‘transform a playback into a play’ (Hayles 1997: 81); by reducing mnemo-technology to its essence, Beckett foregrounds the psycho-physical agency that it impinges on the human subject. Despite the analogue medium, there are digital operations at work in Krapp, not just through its binaries of past and present, or recorded versus live, but also in the numerical system that Krapp uses to archive his life – Krapp 29, Krapp 39, Krapp 69. This biographical discretization constitutes a conceptual charting of an existential terrain that we now have the theoretical tools to engage and decode. It foregrounds KLT as an uncanny harbinger of the contemporary quotidian existential paradigm, where tertiary retentions constitute most of the information processed and passed between individual, collective and technological organs which constitute a general organology. This existential terrain encompasses the spheres of work and leisure; through its standardization of information processing, the recording, gathering and reassembly of exosomaticized fragments of the interior are organized towards identity politics in the exteriorized realms of the collective.16 Vast sums of world citizens are preoccupied with processes of self-documentation and validation, not dissimilar to Krapp, albeit using more modernized, digital processes for the production and archiving of tertiary retentions.17 The numerical formalization of Krapp’s

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life – its archival formatting and representation as quantitative, rather than qualitative, elements – characterizes contemporary social media culture where ‘individuals have become “dividuals”’ (Deleuze 1992: 5), whose fragmented, mutable identities are completed at the confluence of temporal, quantifiable data dispersed across reticulated databases and memory banks. This paradigm lays the foundation for a consumerist model based on appropriating the time of consciousness (attention), in which individual and collective psyches are both shaped by and contribute to the formation of the technical milieu. Krapp’s den is a microcosm of a world in which exosomatic thought constitutes the foundation of all knowledge. Under the auspices of Stiegler’s recent theorizations, it is reasonable to claim that Beckett’s drama is a prescient aesthetic comment on a condition that increasingly plagues contemporary society: technically determined solipsistic narcissism. This is undoubtedly linked to the escalating tendency towards mediated intersubjectivity and self-documentation, through various digital media tools and dissemination platforms. People are put to work in the service of their own memories, obsessively grooming their identities for disembodied, dematerialized intersubjectivity. When this model becomes global, it triggers a homogenization of lived experience and a decline in consumer intelligence and responsibility, ultimately leading to a general proletarianization.18 Stiegler writes: ‘In the consumerist model it is not only the know-how (savoirfaire) of workers that becomes obsolete, but also the knowledge of how to live (savoir-vivre)19 of citizens, who thus become as such mere consumers’ (Stiegler 2010a: 11). Based on the premise that the hyper-industrial economy is fuelled by the exosomaticized thoughts, traces and tertiary retentions of billions of distributed users (Stiegler 2016: 19–20), the gradual transferral of Krapp’s consciousness to the remote, magnetic tape can be interpreted as a metaphor for society’s continuing relinquishment of knowledge to machinery. For Stiegler, there is an immanent relationship between technological advancement and a proletarianization of the self that can only lead to a loss of knowledge: ‘While this process of proletarianization may produce a kind of pragmatic intelligence … a shrewdness or a cunning through which everyone seems to have become “cleverer,” it in fact leads to a generalized stupidity’ (Stiegler and Ross 2013: 161). The allocation of ‘know-how’ to automata implies a loss of knowledge on the part of the human, creating a situation where advancements in modern science coerce a decline in intelligence; put simply, we are more likely to say and do stupid things. Krapp’s unawareness of how-to-live-well is evinced by a lonely existence with his

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mediatized memories; however, the greatest misgiving exposed by Beckett relates to who is individuating against whom, or what. A central theme of this chapter is the disastrous consequence of shortcircuiting processes of individuation, as a result of solitary confinement. Beckett’s play furnishes an admonition for the catastrophic existential effects of technically precipitated introversion, at the expense of interactions between psychic individuals and collective organizations. The value that people attach to, and the huge amount of time invested in, assembling digital identities within technical systems rises in inverse proportion to a decline in embodied human contact. Mediated interaction is not problematic, but when the humanity of the interlocutor is questionable it is. The moral lesson of Narcissus’ preference for navel-gazing over shared, embodied sexual relations with Echo is still valuable. Ultimately, if individuation is increasingly performed through technical systems, how can we ensure that a fundamental humanity is maintained at the root of the process, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of which Krapp falls so tragically foul?

Conclusion Unlocking the metaphors in KLT and expanding the discussion to consider their contemporary significance permit the assertion that Beckett’s play is a veritable deconstruction of mnemo-techniques and exosomaticization. He exposes the efficacy of mnemo-technologies and lays bare how exosomatics increasingly constitute the basis of identity and quotidian experience in contemporary culture. Beckett executes an avant-garde gesture because, by creating an innovative hybrid performance that elicits the specificities of a cutting-edge technology, he demonstrates cultural inventivity and opens audiences’ imaginations to an uncharted ontological territory. KLT signalled new epistemic possibilities for engaging with machines in live performance, destabilizing tradition and creating a new theatrical genre in which scenographic automata afford nonhuman entities the quasi-anthropomorphic role of performer. The inventive mise-en-scène of the tape recorder represents a technological–aesthetic shock; that is, the scenographic innovation ‘breaks with constituted automatisms’ and occasions the potential for the emergence of either new knowledge, or ‘socialized automatisms … (stupidity)’ (Stiegler, 2016: 12). The repercussions of its staging are still being reconciled more than half a century later.

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Under the concept of technicity – that is, technology considered in its efficacy – the tape recorder asserts its ability to produce a desired outcome. It brings to the stage (and to the text) its own peculiarities that advocate the idea that the machine, as an ‘inorganic organized being’ (Stiegler 1998: 17), is performing. As such, KLT supports ‘an ontology of emergence that gives ontological priority to “technicity”’ (Hoel and van der Tuin 2013); that is, the play, substantiates and validates – both within (metaphorically) and without (historically) the fiction – Stiegler’s insistence on the existence of a technological milieu; that is, on the one hand, inseparable from our Being-in-the-world and, on the other, co-emerging as a sort of contiguous, parallel entity.

Notes 1

2

3

4

The concept of organology is explained later in this chapter but, for now, it can be cursorily explained as an advancement of the principle of individuation that gives credence to the ontological becoming of technology. The term exosomatic refers to perceptual phenomena occurring outside the body. It was originally coined by Alfred J. Lotka, in Elements of Mathematical Biology (1924) and then later taken up by Robert E. Innis, in Technics and the Bias of Perception (1984), to describe ‘organ projection’, or prosthesis, e.g. the way that telescopes extend vision and sonar augments hearing. Stiegler engages the concept to describe the making external of cognitive operations (such as ideas, thoughts and memories) through speech, symbolic mark-making, writing, mechanical recording and so on. The works that Beckett expressly wrote for the broadcast medium were All That Fall, Embers, Words and Music, Cascando and Rough for Radio. He also adapted two novels, From an Abandoned Work, which was written as a first-person narrative, and selected passages from Part 1 of Molloy that concern the central character’s inner musings. It is erroneous to completely conflate the monologue and soliloquy because they generally refer to different types of theatre. The soliloquy refers to a convention of classical theatre (often used to progress plot or build suspense) where characters reveal their internal thoughts on a moral situation (often a dilemma) by articulating them to the audience, whereas ‘the monologue of contemporary theater corresponds to a specific form of theater that emerged after the appearance of the romantic form of “Stream of Consciousness” [le monologue du théâtre contemporain correspond à une forme spécifique de théâtre qui vit le jour après l’apparition de la forme romanesque du « Stream of Consciousness »]’ (Fitzpatrick,

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n.d.: 1–2). The modern monologue is characterized by fragments of text that partially reveal the psychology of the individual. It may not have a plot related purpose, beyond providing characterization, and may not necessarily be directed at the audience. 5 Following Leroi-Gourhan’s thesis, Speech and Gesture (1964), Stiegler holds that vocalizations are fundamentally a derivative of ‘neuromotor organisation [ … of] the muscles of expression’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 112–13): the larynx, mandible, tongue and lips. In this sense, all exteriorizations of epiphenomena are reducible to biophysiological gesticulations. 6 Walter Benjamin rightly points out that certain types of artefacts were reproducible even in ancient Greece: ‘The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only artworks which they could produce in quantity’ (Benjamin 1999: 212). 7 Benjamin opposes film to theatre. Philip Auslander furthers this notion in his book, Liveness (2008), by pointing out that in the 1930s film actually mimicked theatre. 8 In The Question Concerning Technology (1949), Heidegger coins this term to explain a quality of objects produced under the ‘challenging-forth’ (Heidegger 2003: 287) mode of production, characteristic of modernity. By ‘standing-reserve [Bestand]’ (Heidegger 2003: 288), he means that things are made disposable, in the sense that, firstly, they are easily (technologically) accessible and, secondly, they are cheapened and, therefore, throwaway. Michael Wheeler clarifies that it is a term for ‘resources to be exploited as means to ends’ (Wheeler 2011), and Heidegger is clear that ‘resources’ includes all types of ‘things’, including human beings and the repertoire of information and knowledge that they embody. 9 This neologism is an advancement of Husserl’s concepts of primary and secondary retention (see Introduction to Part 1). 10 Stiegler’s argument is focused on vision technologies, but the same genealogy can be traced through the evolution of sound technologies. 11 Phylgenesis refers to the evolutionary development and diversification of a species or group of organisms, or of a particular feature of an organism. 12 Dasein (Being) is a German word for existence that literally translates as beingthere. It is ‘Heidegger’s term for the distinctive kind of entity that human beings as such are’ (Wheeler 2014). It refers neither to the biological human nor to the person; rather, it conjures ‘a way of life shared by the members of some community’ (Wheeler 2014), e.g. the way language exists as an entity. 13 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud establishes a dialogical opposition between Eros, which constitutes the basis of love, survival, propagation and creativity, and the death drive (later referred to as Thanatos in post-Freudian theory).

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14 Krapp singing Now the Day is Over connotes his intention to end his own life. Beckett later felt that this inclusion was too obvious. 15 Stiegler uses the term ‘malaise’ to describe the sociopathological condition brought about by the misuse of the technologies of grammatization. 16 In ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’ (1992), Deleuze problematizes the conflation of work and leisure, venturing that the walls of institutions disintegrate in such a way that their disciplinary logic is not ineffectualized, but is, instead, generalized in fluid forms across the social field. Clear-cut institutional spaces of disciplinary societies give way to smooth, modulating spaces of control societies. Stiegler extends this argument by synthesizing it with his theories on the time of consciousness, i.e. we are controlled through the requisition of attention over digital media systems. 17 According to http://www.statista.com, in the second quarter of 2009, there were c. 242 million Facebook users, in quarter two of 2019 that figure has risen to c. 2.4 billion. 18 Stiegler uses this term in the context of Karl Marx’s theorizations, in the epoch of mechanical reproduction. Proletarianization refers to a loss of knowledge [savoir], caused by human subservience to machines. In ‘The Fragment on Machines’ Marx describes how the worker becomes a ‘conscious linkage’ connecting the ‘numerous mechanical and intellectual organs’ of the machine, which co-opts the worker’s ‘skill and strength’, ultimately leaving them disenfranchized and easily replaceable (Marx 1993: 614–15). Stiegler points out that masses currently relinquish intellectual and emotional knowledge through time spent interacting via social media platforms, leading to what he describes as a ‘proletarianization of sensibility’ (Stiegler 2017b). 19 This is clarified as ‘how-to-live-well’ in later translations.

2

A Therapeutics of the Image Michael O’Hara

Introduction Among one of the inherited understandings of the photographic image is its relationship to time, which opened a new form of visual grammar that could intimately link the past to the present. The circulation and transmission of photographic images through different media marks what Bernard Stiegler terms the industrial time of cinema or new forms of tertiary retentions that are both informative and transformative of our way of being (see Introduction to Part 1). The digitization of the image marks a further shift in the flow of temporal experience, where images are produced, reproduced and circulated freely through a variety of digital devices. Through ubiquitous computing and development of digital cameras and phones, users become the labour and the resource of a form of digital visuality – its makers, its disseminators and its medium. This algorithmic regime, as defined by Berns and Rouvroy (2013), codifies and harvests a deluge of everyday experiences producing a new aesthetic sensorium. In Stiegler’s terms, such sensorial entanglement in such a regime cultivates forms of misery that are not merely economic but noetic, in that they choke off invention and new ways of questioning and understanding. For Stiegler, this is symptomatic of the neoliberal data economy that leads to ‘symbolic misery’, or a mode of aesthetic conditioning that impoverishes the senses restricting the adoption of new creative paradigms.1 However, this is but one side of the Stieglerean diagnosis and this chapter proposes that we, as image makers, recode visual perceptions, constituting new forms of distributed images that, although predicated on the interaction between different nodes of user profiles, personal data and algorithms, remain retractable and repurposable to intervention. In this sense, this chapter argues

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that digital images remain anchored to their analogue forbearers, indicating and transmitting through a multitude of indexical registers. By analysing the work of artist Ronan McCrea, I underscore the affective nature of the analogue image and the productive capacity of its materiality – a critical feature of the image genus. In concurrence with its digital offspring, the analogue image represents what Stiegler terms a new form of visuality. Additionally, the chapter turns to the writings and artwork of Hito Steyerl, arguing that through the digital image we become, in a sense, world-makers by the production and transmission of such digital images. I explore Steyerl’s claim that we should reject the idea of the digital image as mere visual information. Instead, we should invoke our roles as makers and interpreters of images and by doing so contest the politics of representation inherent within the digital base itself. Such artistic practices are aligned with a therapeutics, as espoused by Stiegler that marks his pharmacological diagnosis of technology, through which we can redeem ‘the absence of the question’ that so troubled Heidegger’s critique of technology. The chapter proposes to frame these therapeutics of care through a consideration of the image, conceived within the nexus of Stiegler’s concept of arche-cinema. According to Stiegler such a concept represents montages of our retentional system that constitute our temporal and spatial becoming.2 To this end, the analysis focuses on the relationship between the analogue and digital image, highlighting its pharmacological nature and their intimate and constitutive relation to time. As it will be argued, it is through these relations and processes of ‘taking care’ of the image that new aesthetic paradigms are made possible.

The indexical image For Stiegler, the advent of the phonograph and camera in the nineteenth century marks the first appearance of mechanical mnemo-technologies in the audiovisual field. Mnemo-technologies, such as the phonograph and the camera, are the industrial products that represent the advent of a new audiovisual milieu. Such technologies are no longer the externalization and materialization of memory through orthographic practices or the articulation of technical artefacts. These technologies ‘constitute two immense turns in the organological history of the power(s) to dream’ (Stiegler 2018: 157).3 The camera and the cinema bring with them the power of discretization (or the breaking up of movement into discrete frames)4 that represent, following Barthes, the capturing of the ‘this was’ of time.5

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In ‘The Discrete Image’ (2002), Stiegler gives an evocative account of the potency of the photo-image or a technologized form of the ‘image-object’. Such an ‘image-object’ represents a mode of inscription that captures the passing of time. Noeme of the photo is what in phenomenology would be called its intentionality. It is what I see always already, in advance, in every (analog) photo: that what is captured on the paper really was. This is an essential attribute of the analog photo. (Stiegler 2002: 150)

The appearance of the analogue image marks a further unfolding and materialization of the retentional chain. Retention in this sense operates as a mode of recollection. It provides the sensible order that is revealed through representation. The image-object is the materialization of recollection – a past that was. The photo-image, the marking of light on a substrate can be seen as a mode of inscription in the Derridean sense, a memory trace that is essential to the spatialization of time. But no longer is such inscription circumscribed by the gesture of the body for it is the disembodied mechanical eye that now captures the passing of time. As examined below, Stiegler identifies the time of the image as a mode of grammatization extended through technical objects (see Introduction to Part 1). Intrinsic to the analogue photo is its insistent materiality – its celluloid nature  – that through its exposure to light presupposes the existence of that which was photographed. Invoking Barthes’s phenomenological description of the photo, Stiegler traces the very ‘real materiality of the process’ that relies on the passing of light through the camera lens, the touching and exposure of it on photosensitive substrate that captures the very death of the moment, ‘the night of the past that I didn’t live’ (2002: 152). This is something that can be transposed to the photographic image as the indexical exemplar, animating the past through the affective capture of the luminance of light. This relationship between indexicality and the image has its origins in Peircian semiotics and represents the photo-image’s designation as an indexical that represents or points to that which was.6 Indexicality corresponds to the semiotic function of the signs that indicate or point towards their object. Indices ground our representations in concrete terms denoting a world of meaning and significance. On these terms, the image or analogue photo, as an indexical, is tied to that which it represents. It can point to no other, other than itself. Additionally, it is beholden to the material nature of film that reacts to the touching of light in a moment in time.

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It is precisely this materiality of the analogue image and celluloid film that artist Ronan McCrea interrogates through his artwork. The raw material of 16mm film and 35-mm slide, alongside the mechanical projection technologies, are the primary materials and tools of his recent work. Referencing and playing with the canon of structural/materialist filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s McCrea foregrounds the formal and material structures of this medium that has, with the advent of the digital image, slowly ebbed into technological redundancy. The appropriation of images, the re-editing of found films and reformatting of exhibition space are strategies deployed to denarrativize, decontextualize and recontextualize content implicit in these assemblages of images and film. Furthermore, McCrea tests the boundaries between instructional and experimental film and their inherent self-conscious ambition of transforming the viewing subject. The privileging of surface, form and structure and the implicit affective labour of the artist are the signature motifs of the work. In two recent exhibitions Material(s) (2016) and Efference Copy Mechanism (2019) these strategies explore the tensions inherent amongst the materiality, reproduction and indexicality of the image. One of the starting points for his piece, Metallography (Grain Structures, ‘I Think in Shapes: Henry Moore with soundtrack after Delia Derbyshire’) (see Plate 1) from the exhibition Material(s), was the selection of found 16-mm footage of instructional films for mechanical engineering produced by the BBC in the early 1970s. Through the arduous process of cutting and splicing, McCrea deconstructs and reconstitutes a montage of images that not only gesture to the tropes of structural film, but re-stage the question of labour, craft and materiality of the medium and its apparatus. The apparatus of projection, projectors and looping mechanisms are key components of the work forming sculptural interstices that punctuate the exhibition space. The projectors as technical devices clank and clatter, looping these assorted montages of flashing and flaring images, emphasizing the physical nature of the material and its analogue machinery. In ‘Metallography … ’ this is echoed through glimpses of engineering techniques of cutting and casting of steel, the threading of bolts and nuts which are punctuated by images of Henry Moore bronze sculptures. A micro-photography and graphic renderings of metal at a microscopic level further interrupt the time sequence.7 The reference to Henry Moore works at multiple levels acknowledging not only Moore’s use of lost-wax casting, one of the first modes of mechanical reproduction, but also as one of the most famous sculptors of high modernism. McCrea claims that in this way Moore’s sculptures operate as ‘screens’ where meaning could be projected.8 One is immediately aware of the technical nature of such craft presented within

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the films, resonating with the automated labour of the projector and the techne of the artist. In more recent work Twelve by Twelve by Two (2019) (see Plate 2), from the exhibition Efference Copy Mechanism, McCrea presents a projected 35-mm slide work consisting of twelve sets of twenty-four images that superimpose and cascade in two-minute durations. Images of hand gestures, photography equipment, uninhabited zoo environments, scenes of petrified buildings, projection lamps animate a montage that while at first appearing arbitrary and random coalesce like a musical score. McCrea comments that many of the image sets that feature in the work are what he calls ‘ready-made’ images that present designed objects such as glassware or designed environments such as zoo enclosures. As such they become for him ‘things-as-image’.9 Although the artist once again signals to the canon of structural film and minimalism, the piece is tinged with an autobiographic impression that speaks of the care and due diligence of archiving, while navigating the practice, responsibility and questioning of artmaking itself. It is precisely this notion of care that will be returned to below to consider the image and its distribution through digital formats, yet it is ever present in McCrea’s work. The title of the exhibition Efference Copy Mechanism is, according to the artist, a reference to the motor signal that is transmitted through the central nervous system to the periphery of the body. A copy of this signal, an efference copy, enables the ciphering of sensory input signals from kinaesthetic motor signals and actions of the body. Although McCrea underscores the metaphoric function of the exhibition title, one is struck by its proximity to Stiegler’s own reflection of the difference between the mental image and the image-object. For Stiegler, such a difference is asserted through the ephemerality of the mental image as it dissolves in time, while the image-object persists through the objectivity of the lens and exposed film. Stiegler notes that such a difference can never efface the other, for the differences between both are parasitic upon each other. The mental image is always the return of some image-object, its remanence  – both as retinal persistence and as the hallucinatory haunting or coming-back [revenance] of the phantasm – an effect of its permanence. (Stiegler 2002: 148)

McCrea claims that many of the images that were used in this work were ‘mental-images’ he carried around with him over several years. Mental images in this sense are latent images awaiting to be realized. Their materialization through practice transforms them into ‘performed-images’ when re-staged and

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projected  in the gallery space. Perhaps then the efference copy that McCrea speaks of and articulates through the medium of his practice – the analogue image – contests this difference also, indicating the tension in difference between the copy and its register in a medium tied intimately to the effervescence and touch of time through the finite nature of image and archive. At the same time this carrying the image around, circulating or looping through his psyche, his archive and studio trigger a set of potential protentions that feed forward. In this sense they act as a catharsis for the artist and likewise for the viewer when presented and performed in the gallery space. This is something McCrea further outlines through his concept of ‘celluloid materiality’ which defines the social and historical consequences of the materiality of analogue image and film on visual culture, evidenced most explicitly in its reflexive use in artistic practice. For McCrea, artists have continuously worked with the camera and projected image since its emergence throughout the twentieth century. Such artistic practices are cognizant of the rich history of the image and more importantly the radical effect it had on modern culture. With the advent of digital technology, the analogue image faces obsolescence, yet artists remain drawn to it, something McCrea attributes to its nascent materiality and associated phenomenological modes of experience. These capacities are intrinsic in McCrea’s own work as he negotiates the form, materiality and technology of the analogue image and its rich history in artistic practice. What McCrea’s work shares more explicitly with Stiegler’s thesis is the claim made by Stiegler that the analogue image, like the digital image, was always-already discrete.10 Through the charge of indexicality, the ‘this-was’ of its modality, the analogue image contains the capacity to be framed, edited, inserted, reconstituted and crucially interruptive of the temporal flux of experience. In this way the analogue image operates as a grammatized indexical. The concept of grammatization, developed from the work of Sylvain Auroux (1995), denotes the breaking down of speech into alphabetical writing. As examined below, the process of grammatization is materialized most explicitly in the image genus with the advent of the digital image.

The image discrete Stiegler highlights how the digital image radicalizes the process of discretization through its binary make-up and algorithmic processing. Here the image, all bits and bytes, is liberated from its analogue register. No longer do we have

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the remanence or return of a retinal presence, a haunting or phantasm of Barthesian luminance, the ‘this-was’ of time, evocations of death and punctum. With the digital image, the privileging of the photographic lens and its indexical relationship to reality is shattered by the ubiquity of the mobile phone, digital camera and other screen-based devices that flood the atmosphere with hyperreal representations of the sublime and the ridiculous, the banal and the grotesque. These images are no longer touched by light but are instead a facsimile of discrete code, mathematical data that are disassembled and reassembled through subterranean networks and invisible protocols that underpin this digital base. As Stiegler notes, ‘Photons become pixels that are in turn reduced to zeroes and ones on which discrete calculations can be performed’ (Stiegler 2002: 154). The image now becomes the exemplar of the grammatized indexical, synthesized and distributed across multiple recursive registers. This has led to a proliferation of image making that wraps itself around online avatars and profiles of shared images and relations. These images are harvested through a form of what Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns call algorithmic governmentality which they claim mark the very process of ‘de-subjectification’ (Berns and Rouvroy 2013: XVI). Such governmentality operates as soft power, managing expectations and desires through the algorithm’s apparent objectivity and neutrality. This leads to a form of passive management of the senses that inoculates against what Stiegler, following Simondon, asserts as processes of individuation.11 For Rouvroy, such an algorithmic governmentality represents a distorted materialization of Deleuzian rhizomatics, where the subject is fragmented across multiple planes, yet profiled and managed through the harvesting of data and protentional expectations and desires.12 What we get is a new sensorium composed of disjointed semiotic combinations and sequences that create a paradox of de-territorialized forces that are managed by an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, promoting surface over substance, intensity rather than reflection. However, Stiegler insists upon a pharmacological reading of the digital image that opens up rather than closes down the possibilities inherent within its materiality. The digital image represents processes of discretization par excellence but as noted, this is also a feature of the analogue image. Stiegler highlights that this discretization affects the digital image only to a point. ‘The chain of memorial light is not absolutely broken, it is rather knotted in a different way – otherwise, there wouldn’t even be a photograph anymore; we wouldn’t be able to speak of digital photography’ (Stiegler 2002: 154). He points out how the digital image

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made up of binary code enabling modes of annotation ‘opens the possibility of new knowledges of the image – artistic as well as theoretical and scientific’ (Stiegler 2002: 157). The discrete nature of the digital image is evidenced in its nascent materiality and the ability to extract metadata from it, revealing an extensive amount of information relating to each image. Embedded in its metadata scheme are a variety of digital object attributes that contain the time and date, device it was taken on, geolocation, author, time of upload etc. On social media platforms images are tagged and shared evolving from their base architecture to form a nexus of relations that remain open and repurposable.13 Considering this, I propose that the transmission and dissemination of digital images opens a new productive synthesis that can dial into the artefactual capacities of the image-object. One artist who embodies the potential within digital images is Hito Steyerl, who, through both her work and writings, poses critical questions around the digital image – its agency, its power relations and its affective capacities. For Steyerl, the generation of images produced through mobile devices and the sharing of such images across social networks generate a ‘displacement of perspective [that] creates a disembodied and remote-controlled gaze, outsourced to machines and other objects’ (Steyerl 2015b: 25). This has, for Steyerl, recalibrated the field of vision, most notably through the dismantling of linear perspective. Linear perspective, the abstraction of space, privileges the single eye of the subject, the subject as the arranger and spectator of the world. But the advent of the remotecontrolled digital gaze has unleashed a multitude of perspectives that obliterate the privileged view of the subject. The tyranny of the photographic lens, cursed by the promise of its indexical relation to reality, has given way to hyperreal representations – not of space as it is, but of space as we can make it – for better or worse. (Steyerl 2015a: 26)

In her artwork, How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File (2013) (see Plates 3 and 4), Steyerl interrogates the scopic regime of the digital base, the disembodied eye of the drone and the satellite. In the fourteen-minute single channel projection, an automated voice instructs the viewer about our digital sensorium and the associated hyper-visibility it generates. Steyerl invents five humorous acts or lessons of resistance that individuals can adopt to become invisible to the constant gaze of digital technology. In the first three acts, Steyerl appears facing the camera responding to the propositions from the automated voice, for example, camouflaging herself in green paint to disappear into the

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green screen behind her. In another act, it is suggested that one should shrink to the size of a pixel thus disappearing within the materiality of the digital itself. Mixing a satirical take on instructional films and an old Monty Python sketch, Steyerl questions the pervasive nature of the regime of the digital lens as it captures and collates every aspect of our lives. It also speaks of the desire to resist and disappear. As Michael O’Connor notes, for Steyerl, this desire to retreat from constant view remains ambivalent and fraught. Steyerl’s video makes explicit reference to this dark side of disappearance, suggesting that those who are disappeared in the digital age end up as 3D ghosts in the background of architectural renderings. Such renderings are often generated by those who wield political power; it seems apt that they would be haunted by such ghosts. (O’Connor 2013)

It is no longer the haunting of the ‘this-was’ of time, but a digital phantasm that is striated with power relations and biases of its coded make-up. In her work Steyerl maintains a mastery of her craft, harnessing a deftness of technique and ability to harness and reconstitute a library of images to form a critical analysis of power and technology. This is also evidenced in her critical writings, including her key text ‘In Defence of the Poor Image’ (2015a). In this text Steyerl speculates on the ubiquity of the digital image and its poverty and its potency. In such a regime of visibility the aura of the image dissipates, and the image becomes a kind of residue of a digital uncertainty. Such uncertainty manifests itself often through the content of images which often display the neurosis, paranoia and fear, as well as frivolous distractions that are endemic to such content. In this way the potency of the image is diluted or, as Steyerl notes, riven with doubt. She labels such images as ‘poor images’ and states: The poor image tends toward abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming. The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its file names are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology. (Steyerl 2015a: 32)

Even through its liberation, availability and accessibility the political agency of the image is often sealed in by the very technology that enables it. However, following Steyerl, it is precisely its degradation and its pervasiveness that grant it an exceptional status. On the one hand, it is folded into a new kind of subjectivity that is managed through technological surveillance and yet the digital image

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circulates through networks which are platforms that contain the potential to resist and exploit the terms and conditions of commercial and corporate interests. As Steyerl notes: The poor image is no longer about the real thing – the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. In short: it is about reality. (Steyerl 2015a: 44)

Concurrently for Stiegler, the ability of the digital image to be transmitted at the speed of light fractures the temporal chain of cognition, investing it with the potential for radical political agency. Thus, the digital image is a pharmakon (see Introduction Part 2) representing the mobilization and appropriation of the tools of the digital base itself (e.g. through application and support of opensource software etc.). Thus, digital images, as pharmaka, are forms of knowledge that are constituted through technical retentions, yet their porosity makes them susceptible to intervention and iteration.

Grammatization and arche-cinema – the time of the image In Technics and Time 3, Stiegler (2011c) argues that technical retentions are re-articulated through the moving image and specifically the cinematic and televisual apparatuses of modern consumer capitalism (see Delaney in this volume).  Such technology that inculcates the proliferation of images and information is diagnosed by Stiegler as a malaise that infects protentional possibilities leading to the destruction of desire which is now in the service of the drives.14 In his seminal text on technology, Heidegger claims that the highest danger of technology consists in the privileging of our contemporary technical and instrumental mode of revealing. The danger resides in the fact that the rationality of technology exploits and enframes the world as standing-reserve (Bestand). As a consequence, ‘does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within this standing-reserve’ (Heidegger 1993: 323). In this sense the highest danger threatens to liquidate ontological freedom – the ability to question the meaning of being itself. For Heidegger, and echoing Stiegler’s later pharmacology, solace can be sought in Hölderlin’s refrain, ‘But where danger is, grows the saving power also.’ The

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‘saving power’ can itself be sought in the bringing into the light the danger of such technology itself.15 It is through a reflection upon this danger that art is implicated as art itself was borne out of techne, as a mode of revealing. However, for Stiegler, Gestell as enframing and domination of resources has now become: The globalization of ‘the comprehension that being-there has of its being’,  … Heidegger does not see the direction of this evolution; he is blinded by his inattention to retentional processes and his inability to think through the process of adoption. (Stiegler 2011c: 164)

For Stiegler, this unthought of Heidegger’s is also a forgetting of Husserl’s model of internal time consciousness and its potential ability to account for experience of temporal objects, such as the melody or in this case, moving image.16 Additionally, for Stiegler, adoption is an organological process that marks the human being’s constant evolution of psychic, social and technical organs. Adoption is the necessary condition of the human who is threatened by the adaptation to symbolic misery. Such misery is a by-product of consumer capitalism, which he contends synchronizes the temporal flux and is now enframed and beholden to pervasive computation and data harvesting.17 Stiegler notes that such a process is a ‘de-symbolisation’ which leads to a deformation of attention, where attention marks the interlacing of retentions and protentions. Two key concepts emerge that are integral to the productive power of the image in this epoch of de-symbolization – grammatization and pharmacology. Grammatization becomes, for Stiegler, a powerful diagnostic tool that interrogates the discrete nature of computational and digital media. Conceptually it runs deeper, articulating the very nature of the image itself and its welding to retentional traces of memory, image and artefact. It represents a reworking and materialization of grammatology (Derrida, 2016) articulated through technical retentions and through processes of grammatization which delineate the making of images extending backward in time to the cave paintings in Chauvet. The cinematic image, or arche-cinema, which precedes writing, initiated in the cave paintings of Chauvet, scaffold the noetic senses through their pictorial traces.18 They are the melding of memory and fantasy, actioned in the firelight of caves, they are calling forth of retentions and inscription of dreams onto the very walls of the cave, representing ‘the capacity to project mental, temporal contents into spatial forms’ (Stiegler 2018: 160). They are the cinematic phantasms of the firelight in Plato’s cave, the written text hidden by Phaedrus, the signifier God Theuth that Derrida invokes right

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through to Stiegler’s notion of digital tertiary retention or the ‘cinema without film’ (Stiegler 2018: 161). For Stiegler, the invention of the phonograph and later cinematic image enables the identical repetition of the same temporal object.19 For Stiegler, the spatialization of time is also determined through imagination. The projection of mental content is the activation of secondary protentions that become either stereotypical or traumatypical. As activated stereotypes, protentions become automatic such as habits and desires, while traumatypes are repressed surfacing through the acting-out of fantasies. These additions to the temporal mode of being are a re-routing of Husserl’s time consciousness through Freud’s dream analysis. Stiegler contends that it is only through a collective past not lived by the individual that the very possibility of Husserlian mode of primary and secondary retention is possible in the first place.20 This means that all perception and knowledge arise out of the processes of the current ‘mnemo-technical’ epoch, which condition and compose retention in temporal perception.21 Husserl’s primary retention actually needs tertiary memory because it is only through repeatable experiences, made possible through technical recordings, that ultimately reveal contamination of primary retention by representation. By this qualification, artefacts and technical objects involve the transmission of knowledge through cultural retention. As seen in the work of both McCrea and Stereyl, such repetition made available through the camera, cinema projector and digital image, iterate new temporal experiences of the same temporal event. But it also signifies a breaking of a linear temporal register, as traumatypes interrupt, shatter and break the flow of time. The medium of the moving image epitomizes this through its materiality, its ability to be edited, post-produced and re-inserted into a new timeline. This is further exemplified by the advent of digital technology and post-production software. However, this also marks the latency of the image that lies unprocessed in film or saved and stored as a jpeg, an image in stasis. Recalling McCrea’s latent image, it also gestures to the mental image and the image as archive, nonperforming but lying-in wait as a modality of the arche-cinematic, as a potential trauma-type, waiting to surface and retell, to disrupt and portend once more. For Stiegler, the arche-cinematic is constitutive of consciousness and the ability to dream, leading to new attentional forms. It constitutes an admixture of retentions that stretch back to the ‘retentional systems projecting and spatialising movement in prehistoric caves (on the walls of these caves). This leads, eventually, to movie theatres and movie screens as we know them today’

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(Stiegler 2018: 160). This is the cinematic image stretching backward and forward along the flow of time from the discrete gestures contained within the production of artefacts and making of images right up to the discrete binary nature of digital images.22 The arche-cinematic through technical devices, such as the camera and the gramophone, marks the breaking up of time into discrete moments that are captured visually and sonically. For Stiegler, the invention of such devices represents new organologies that constitute new forms of attention radically altering the visual and auditory field. Although hugely critical of the stupefaction that contemporary digital technology cultivates though the poisoning of attentional modes, Stiegler always frames his diagnosis through the recall of the saving power, the pharmacology implicit within such technology.

Conclusion: A therapeutics of the image In a similar way we can read Steyerl’s claims through a pharmacological analysis. By divesting the image of its aura, its referent, the ‘this-was’, the digital image is always in a state of flux through its dispersion and transmission. As Steyerl claims: By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the ‘original’, but on the transience of the copy. (Steyerl 2015a: 46)

I propose that its disposability, its poverty is always (as is the analogue image) subject to the spirituality of the technology it reflects and is built upon. The image, which is downloaded, uploaded, shared, re-edited, ranked and valued, liberated from the dominance of the camera-eye now becomes fragmented. It is precisely through the production and the economy of such images, their availability to post-processing, re-editing and endless transmission that liberate the image, creating new participatory forms and collectives of image makers than ever before. As Steyerl notes: The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect. (Steyerl 2015a: 43)

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There is then an agency provoked by the pervasiveness and porosity of the image which canvasses the potential for a reopening of the question concerning digital technology and its associated power structures. In this sense we return to Heidegger and his concept of care (Sorge) which Stiegler has reconfigured as a mode of therapia, or therapeutics that can generate new modes of transindividuation, transformative modes of knowledge manifest in education and culture more broadly. Care, for Heidegger, is the very ontological structure of Being, care as our authentic being-in-the-world which surfaces through our existential anxiety as a being-towards-death, the affirmation of our finitude. For Heidegger, Dasein’s temporality is structured and established through the relationship of care or concern human beings have with the world and others. For Stiegler, such an ontological condition is manifest through the pharmaka and in fact is an ontic condition. It is precisely through these practices of care, realized through tertiary retentions that, for Stiegler, open-up the ontological difference in the first place. Thus, on Stiegler’s terms, the pharmaka can be considered a modality of care. In ‘What Is Called Caring?’ (2018) Stiegler emphasizes the threat posed to such process or therapeutics of care. This is manifest in, for example, the harvesting of the digital image which poses a critical challenge to the artistic and intellectual communities in terms of the development, distribution and the politics embedded within the image. However, the digital image is, like the analogue image before it, a tertiary retention that as a pharmakon ‘puts in question the possibility of questioning itself ’ (Stiegler 2018: 198). The digital image can be considered a mode of the arche-cinematic or as Steyerl claims, following Juan García Espinosa, an imperfect cinema that is one that strives to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author. It insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic. (Steyerl 2015a: 39)

I promote this notion of a therapeutics aligning with the critical agency inherent within the image as articulated by both McCrae and Steyerl. Furthermore, such therapeutics recalls Stiegler’s own invocation of the amateur as one who loves what they do, ‘the amateur de cinema, [who] would like to get behind the camera or into the screen’ (Stiegler 2018: 160). The ready availability of the post-processing tools marks the potential for a ‘re-arming of amateurs’ that can lead to the ‘to the reconstitution of forms of knowledge held by audiences and publics. There

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thus comes to be formed a new avant-garde: one that constitutes new publics’ (Stiegler 2010a: 18).23 In this sense, from the emergence of the digital image the return of the figure of the amateur is instantiated (see Delaney in this volume). New modes of individuation become possible that rehabilitate desire. This compels us to take ownership of our roles as producers of data and interpreters of images, demanding that we are alive to the fact that as image makers we need to interrogate and reconfigure a new sensorium of the digital. To produce and participate in image making means to participate in the politics of its agency.

Notes 1 2 3

See Stiegler (2016: 19–40). See Stiegler (2018: 154–72). Stiegler proposes a general organology, an analytical framework to rethink the relations between biological, technical and social organs noting how these relations constitute the very conditions of individuation. Technical organs mediate and transform sense organs and their associated linkages to social organizations (see Stiegler 2016: 131–7). For a more in-depth analysis of the concept of organology, see O’Dwyer in this volume, pp. 25–8. 4 Discretization represents a stage of grammatization, for example writing, as the breaking up of the flow of speech into written words. See the Introduction of Part 1 for a more detailed explanation of these terms. 5 See Roland Barthes’ seminal text Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981) and his invocation of punctum and studium; its interlacing with memory, time, imagination and the indexical link through the medium of photograph. 6 Much has been written against Peirce’s labelling of the image as a mere indexical that is beyond the scope of this chapter. According to Martin Lefebvre (2007) such a reading represents a misreading of Peirce and the contextual vectors that are built into his semiotic analysis (see Lefebvre 2007: 220–43). 7 In conversation with artist Ronan McCrea. http://www.ronanmccrea.com/. 8 In addition, the indexical is played out in McCrea’s work through a soundtrack whereby the bronze statute is struck to form the sonic basis for the composition. I thank the artist for his time and input here. 9 In conversation with the artist. 10 See also McCrea’s artwork Projection (Baton Charge 1913) (2013) which focuses upon the iconography of the 1913 Dublin Lockout. McCrea skilfully interrogates the providence of the image as historical document while also exposing the inherent

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11

12

13

14

15 16 17

18

19

Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler tension between the materiality of the analogue image and its digital counterpart. http://www.ronanmccrea.com/2013/projection-baton-charge-1913/. Stiegler extends Simondon’s concept to include technical individuation into the process of both psychic and social individuation. For an overview of differences between Stiegler and Simondon’s account, see Roberts, Ben et al. (2012). ‘In the age of Big Data and algorithmic governmentality the rhizome metaphor seems to have taken on a purely descriptive or diagnostic status: we are currently faced with the “material” actualization, so to speak, of the rhizome’ (Berns and Rouvroy 2013: XXVII). Tagging is the assigning of a keyword to a piece of information or the digital object, such as a digital image. Tagging was first introduced by IBM with the development of GML or Generalized Markup Language in 1969 and was a precursor to HTML, the mark-up language of the web. This destruction of desire marks the process of symbolic misery, the ‘loss of symbolic participation’ (Stiegler 2014b: 8). Such a loss of symbolic participation represents a loss of aesthetic participation. For a critical analysis of symbolic misery and different artistic practices that cultivate collaboration as a means to ameliorate such a loss, see Fitzpatrick (2014: 114–28). ‘Thus, the essential unfolding of technology harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power’ (Heidegger 1993: 337). See Introduction to Part 1 for more on Stiegler’s reworking of Husserl’s temporal model. Symbolic misery represents ‘the prolertarianisation of sensibility’, the loss of know-how or savoir-faire which is the result of the captivation of attention through advertising and commodification of objects (see Stiegler 2016: 20–1). Néill O’Dwyer (2017) convincingly argues that the drawings on the Chauvet caves represent one of the earliest examples of grammatization through symbolic mark-making. ‘In anthropological terms, drawing is a mode of expression that is dependent on the phenomenological human ability to use tools for creating traces. Forming the fundamental basis of symbolism – and henceforth alphabets and numerals – it pre-dates alphanumeric expression by thousands of years’ (O’Dwyer 2017: 70). As Stiegler explains: ‘When the same temporal object occurs twice in a row it produces two different temporal phenomena, meaning that primary retentions vary from one phenomenon to the next: the retentions from the time of listening play, when they have become secondary, a selective role for the primary retentions of the second time of listening. This is true in general, but the phonogram, as tertiary retention, makes it clear; repetition produces difference’ (Stiegler 2014b: 34).

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20 ‘[T]he difference between primary and secondary retention is not a radical difference insofar as primary retention is unceasingly composed with secondary retention, that is to say, insofar as perception is always projected by, upon and in imagination – contrary to what Husserl thinks, and Brentano as well. But it is no less the case that the difference remains and constitutes a distinction that is not an op-position, but precisely what I have called a com-position’ (Stiegler 2009a: 105). 21 For Stiegler, mnemo-technics describes the externalization of our memory into matter. 22 As Daniel Ross explains: ‘Through this extension, he is able to push the origin of the grammatization process backwards in time to the “arche-cinematic” reproductions of Upper Palaeolithic cave painting, and to extend this process forwards, not just to the grammatization of visual and auditory perception that occurred with radio and cinema, but, prior to that, to the grammatization of the manual gestures of the worker or the craftsman that are spatialized in being programmed into the machinery of the industrial revolution, and finally to what is unfolding right now: the grammatization of “everything” made possible by the inscription of binary code into central processing units composed of silicon’ (Ross 2018: 20). 23 For a critique of Stiegler’s mobilization of the avant-garde, see The Aesthetics Group (2015).

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3

The Control Room Imaginary and the Production of Sovereignty Cormac Deane

Introduction When an event is recorded, a media object is created. The event becomes arranged according to the capacities of the media technology that is used. When the media object is played back, a moment which is a new event, two phenomena arrive to perception: a mediated version of the original event and the media object itself. These different modes of time, or temporalities, give form to the consciousness that in turn experiences new perceptual phenomena, which incessantly arrive (from the future, as it were) and require our attention. For Bernard Stiegler, consciousness itself comes into being in this complicated process of clashing temporalities. Media technologies are a central concern for him because the experience of a recorded past event deeply influences our present and, in the process, our very consciousness. In particular, the coming of what he calls ‘industrial temporal objects’ (Stiegler 2009b: 240–3), i.e. the products of reproducible mass media, results in all forms of retained memories coming into alignment (Stiegler 2014b: 60), a process that intensifies considerably in the age of non-stop media consumption. This chapter is concerned with the way that the official narrative of an historical event was developed with a heavy reliance on industrial temporal objects. The search for political accord that was the driving force behind the Saville Inquiry (1998–2010) into the Bloody Sunday killings of 1972 in Derry, in the north of Ireland, was conducted with a striking emphasis on media technologies as a means of aligning incompatible political memories. This chapter proceeds from the key Stieglerian insight that the making-technical

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of memory must be regarded as political, given that any subject or collectivity becomes itself by means of the external memory supports, in a process that he calls epiphylogenesis (Stiegler 1998: 178, 210; Stiegler 2011c: 131ff). The Saville Inquiry made prominent use of technologies, which included interactive screens, virtual and augmented reality, soundwave analysis, data visualization, remote testimony, image enhancement, live transcripts and searchable databases. The resulting Saville Report, running across 5,000 pages, produced a realignment that aimed (with some success) not only to integrate conflicting memories but also to help establish a new status quo, a new political dispensation, that would be the shared ground for future political events. First in Derry and then in London, the Saville hearings took place in a judicial chamber where it was possible to re-visualize, re-examine and re-listen to records of past events. Of course, the technologies of the courtroom and the law more generally, e.g. the witness stand, personal testimony, rules of evidence and so on, have developed over many centuries for precisely the purpose of managing memories and rendering them visible and audible. But the assemblage of technical objects at Saville was so prominent that the hearing chamber is perhaps better understood as a kind of control room. This observation is in keeping with a broader transformation of courtrooms more generally in the twenty-first century due to increased use of audiovisual technology. The Saville case is of interest here because of the relation between memory management and its political aspects, as I explain below, but also because its hearing took place at a transitional point, i.e. the early years of the twenty-first century, in the introduction of audiovisual technologies to judicial contexts (Barnett 2004; Sherwin 2011). The Saville Tribunal and its technical dispositifs capture in a very explicit way the grammatizing procedures that Stiegler identifies as the transformative processes (e.g. the organization of large data sets and image enhancement) whereby machines imprint their own forms upon key concepts that underpin law, politics and the condition of being human, e.g. evidence, tradition, history, memory.

Inorganic organized beings Stiegler’s analysis is extremely useful for understanding what happened during the Saville Inquiry because it suggests that the technical objects in the hearing chamber may have operated according to a logic beyond human control. Technical objects, which he characterizes as ‘inorganic organised beings’, ‘have

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their own dynamic when compared with that of either physical or biological beings’ (Stiegler 1998: 17). He gives a detailed sketch of just this kind of dynamic in the introduction to the third volume of Technics and Time: [The convergence of] industrial logistics (informatics), transmission (telecommunications), and the symbolic (audiovisuals) … integrates the functions of technological, industrial and capitalistic mnemotechnical systems into the technical systems producing material goods …, in turn facilitating the transmutation of the industrial world into the hyperindustrial, and subordinating the entire worlds of culture, knowledge, and the mind, along with artistic creation and advanced research and instruction, to the imperatives and development of the market. (Stiegler 2011c: 2)

This scenario is also a kind of description of the intertwined capacities that characterize the control room as a place that is subject to non-human temporality (Steigler 2014b: 60–2). I have argued elsewhere (Deane 2013) that the control room is a place that explicitly and implicitly exerts power by means of the management of information, time and memory. These observations are the basis from which this chapter aims to show that the Saville Inquiry came under the sway of the control room’s ‘own dynamic’ of permanent crisis-readiness, which leads to the suspension of the normal rule of law and procedure, and ultimately to a permanent state of exception. In a state of exception, the law is suspended and, in the process, re-founded. This means that a mix of temporalities is at play, in that the law’s permanence is destroyed by the temporal agency of the sovereign, which in turn establishes pro tem a new regime of law, which is then the basis for new permanent law. Unsurprisingly, it is the moment of effecting an emergency situation that attracts the attention of commentaries (by, for example, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Alexander Somek and Wendy Brown) because it marks the start of an entirely new temporality. In this light, we ought to regard the control room as the place where temporality is most clearly fungible. Consider, for instance, how a city’s traffic control room is experienced as live, offering access to events that are going on now, as we watch and listen. Rendered as data, these events are assigned to constantly expanding archives of the past. Ultimately, however, the control room combines analysis of the past and the present to make (non-human) predictions about future events, to act on them pre-emptively and possibly to influence them (see Hayles 2016: 35ff). This future-orientation helps us see how the control room encapsulates a

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risk logic, in the sense that the present is an interface between known data (the past) and our calculations of the probability of various futures. Thus, the control room offers the capacity to prevent accidents and gridlock in transportation systems, to maximize efficiency (i.e. future gain) in industrial production, to centralize and rationalize decision-making to prevent breakdowns in complex systems, to predict natural phenomena, to forecast financial indices, to predict the paths of moving targets and so on. The capacity of the control room to preserve the past, capture the present and show us the future is of course a fantasy, a stirring aesthetic and perceptual experience. As an element of the biopolitical complex, real and imagined, the control room is prominent in our perception of crime detection, security services, surveillance society and military technology. Literal, technical and sociological readings of the control room can be enhanced if they are connected to an analysis of the symbolic range of the idea of the control room in the social imagination. This integrated view posits a control room imaginary, taking the definition of the imaginary established by Cornelius Castoriadis as that which gives a specific orientation to every institutional system [ … and … ] is the creation of each historical period, its singular manner of living, of seeing and of conducting its own existence, its world, and its relations with this world, … the source of that which presents itself in every instance of indisputable and undisputed meaning, the basis for articulating what does matter and what does not. (Castoriadis 1987: 145)

In the control room imaginary, society sees itself, individually and collectively, as the subject and the object of the control room apparatus. This imaginary is constitutive of a worldview that is rational and rationalizing, while at the same time it operates at the levels of affect, narrative and fantasy. Throughout chapter 4 of Automatic Society (2016) Stiegler describes how this is manifest in algorithmic governmentality, as described by Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy, where ‘the new regime of digital truth is embodied in a multitude of new automated systems’ (Berns and Rouvroy 2013: 165). Among the fantasies indulged by the control room imaginary is the notion that there is secret content behind all data which can be brought to light using the quasi-magical capacities of computation, data management and data visualization (Deane 2012). As we shall see, in the case of the Saville Inquiry’s attempt to (re)establish the legitimacy of British rule in the north of Ireland by means of a highly technologized control room cum judicial chamber, the informational complex of the control room

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imaginary shapes our conception of how sovereignty operates. As we know from Foucault (1980, 2003), control, power and authority are always expressed through systems of knowledge that are embedded in historical and technical contexts. For this reason, the altered technicity of power/knowledge in the era of the control room imaginary is linked to the forms that sovereignty takes. Governmentality underwent a transformation in the post–Second World War period due to emerging technologies in engineering (e.g. control rooms), communications (e.g. satellites) and the military (e.g. nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, computerized air defence). What arose was a permanent conflict-readiness, an always-on machinic stratum of ‘inorganic organised beings’ in the political hierarchy, which has had the political consequence of installing an ongoing state of war, even during periods of ostensible peace (Virilio 1994: 197–206). We are effectively, if not always explicitly, immersed in a permanent state of emergency, as the affordances of our technologies make it impossible not to imagine our political systems as technical management systems operated from control rooms that are in a state of constant alert. These legal– political consequences come bundled with control room technologies; the control room implements a state of emergency to everything it controls.

The legal–political context The apparent capacity of the control room to reveal the past in order to manage the future was exploited by the British state through the Saville Inquiry into the killing of unarmed marchers by British soldiers on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 30 January 1972. The Saville Inquiry showcased use of digital technology which, when applied to evidence from three decades before, held out the promise that insights about the event that had remained hidden for all those years could be revealed. However, this deployment of a control room imaginary is remarkable more for its affective qualities than for its capacity to unearth new evidence. In fact, as we shall see, the Saville Inquiry is best described as an attempt to enact a corrective, reparative act of justice, which in turn made it possible for the British state to adopt a new official narrative of the Bloody Sunday events (see Monks 2013). The need to do this was driven by the demands of the delicate, ongoing political settlement (the ‘Peace Process’) in the north of Ireland whose effective function was to establish a new legal–political arrangement for the future. The

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computational power of the control room was not so much used in any practical or technological sense, as invoked for affective purposes. This new arrangement established a degree of British legitimacy in Derry for the first time since, arguably, the beginning of the twentieth century. It also established a new political dispensation that allowed just enough room for a subaltern sovereignty to coexist with, and to oppose, British rule. This is both more and less than the various kinds of devolved sovereignty granted to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales during the Tony Blair years. Rather, it is a subaltern sovereignty that stands in opposition to the sovereign that tolerates its existence. This is contrary to how thinkers from Jean Bodin to Carl Schmitt to Jean-Luc Nancy conceptualize sovereignty, for whom it cannot be hybrid if it is to be truly itself. As Schmitt made clear, the state of exception is the starting point for any state, the moment when law is established by the very act of undermining the preexisting law. Under normal circumstances, the liberal democratic state disavows the state of exception that is its true kernel and point of origin. The Saville Inquiry was in part an attempt to establish just such normal circumstances by making a decisive, finalizing judgement about a contested event. But, as Stiegler makes clear throughout his work, there is an unavoidable transpenetration of human consciousness with the memory prostheses that make it possible. This co-evolution of mind and matter, what he calls organology means that neither element fully controls the other (see O’Dwyer in this volume). So, the Saville Inquiry, by so fully co-opting the industrial technical objects of the hearing chamber into its very being, in the process gave up the capacity to deliver any judgement that could call itself decisive or finalizing. The point here extends well beyond the Saville Inquiry as law’s necessary basis in some mnemo-technical medium, so delicately balanced in the pre-digital era (Dayan 2011; Vismann 2008), is so seriously knocked out of kilter in the digital era (Amoore and Raley 2017; Rouvroy and Stiegler 2016; Sherwin 2011). ‘Bloody Sunday’ was a landmark event in the Troubles, the period of political violence from 1969 to c. 1996 over the status of Northern Ireland. The conflict was between, on the one hand, Irish separatist and human-rights-focused organizations and, on the other, British security forces and parts of the Britishidentified unionist/loyalist population, devoted to maintaining the sovereignty of London in this corner of the UK. Bloody Sunday became the cause célèbre for the argument that the rule of law was applied unequally in Northern Ireland, with the British forces of law and order operating effectively with impunity since the foundation of the state in the early 1920s. The Good Friday Agreement of

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1998, which established a power-sharing system still in place over two decades later, emphasizes on its very first page that ‘the tragedies of the past have left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy of suffering’ (Good Friday Agreement 1998: 1). The document does not mention specific examples of suffering, but any informed reader understands that Bloody Sunday was the most prominent of these. Whereas in 1972 the British state, in the form of the Widgery Tribunal, the first inquiry into Bloody Sunday, protected its own soldiers who had shot unarmed, peaceful marchers, by the early 2000s it was in the interest of Whitehall, as part of the Peace Process effort, to acknowledge the wrong done by those soldiers, or at the very least the innocence of the victims. This was a difficult transformation to achieve while preserving the dignity of the military, judicial and governmental elements of the British state, but it was an act of necessary political expiation if the Peace Process was to succeed (Powell 2009: 45–6). The rewriting of the history of Bloody Sunday by the Saville Inquiry was performed in a forensic control room that rendered the city of Derry as a virtual entity comprehensible as a set of data points and that attempted, using this enhanced memory prosthesis, to transform a miscarriage of justice in the memory of citizens. In this way, the substantial political achievement of the final Inquiry report of 2010 was to establish legitimacy for British rule of law in Ireland, which had been so badly damaged by the 1972 killings. Recourse to a control room imaginary in this Inquiry helped to obscure that political goal by attributing vastly improved sight and insight to audiovisual technologies. The Saville Inquiry was set up under the 1921 Tribunals of Inquiry Act, which stipulates that a tribunal ‘enjoys all of the powers, rights and privileges of the High Court … in respect of compelling witnesses to attend and submit to examination, compelling the production of documents and the examination of witnesses abroad’ (Tribunals 1921: 1–2; Walsh 1997: 296). Among the judicial positions occupied by Mark Saville in the years before this tribunal were High Court judge, Lord Justice of Appeal and member of the Privy Council. While it was not a court seeking to determine guilt or innocence, the Saville Tribunal was undoubtedly judicial in nature and characteristics. As Cornelia Vismann points out, ‘Tribunals occur when the extant justice system is not appropriate; during transitional periods, after a change in government, and so on’ (Vismann 2003: 16). Its location in the grey zone between judiciary and government means that it provides a good insight into the political character of the law, an often-disavowed aspect that is particularly scrutinized by the Critical Legal Studies approach. This

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approach also pays attention to the aesthetics of the law and to its performative aspects in such a way as to reveal how legal procedures and instruments are not seats of judgement for static legal regimes, but are centres of calculation for contingent, situational decisions that create new political spaces – in this case, both Northern Ireland/Derry and the UK itself (on the same dynamic in relation to other British colonies, see Hussain 2003). This approach also helps us understand how this contingent aspect of law must be disavowed in order that law emanates a convincing degree of legal affect. That affect draws much of its power from the control room imaginary, and gives us a context for understanding why, as Herron and Lynch point out, the Saville Inquiry was unusual in the British and Irish legal traditions for the level of visibility of its procedures (Herron and Lynch 2007: 61).

The technology of the Saville Inquiry In large part, the screens displayed the TrialPro Evidence Display System and LiveNote live transcription service, both technologies that were only just at this period becoming commonly adopted in British courts (Barnett 2004; Sherwin 2011) (see Plate 5). These multi-window interfaces display live video of a given witness, the item of evidence under discussion and a stenographer’s live transcript of the testimony. The large screens suspended from the ceiling were visible from the public gallery, one of them displaying the current speaker and the other the evidence under discussion. When the trial moved to London, the content of all these screens was displayed simultaneously at several venues in Derry (Saville et al. 2010: vol x: 21–2, section A1.1.84 ff.). The scope and scale of the Inquiry to a certain extent accounts for the prominence of screens in the hearing chamber. The Saville Inquiry needed to demonstrate that it was exhaustive, comprehensive and detailed, open to all kinds of evidence from all kinds of parties, in marked contrast to the Widgery Tribunal. Two thousand and five hundred witness statements were submitted to Saville, 922 of them in person, while the ten-volume final report took twelve years to produce. But the screens were also used for the visualization of the events of Bloody Sunday itself, which happened in a complex urban setting with thousands of witnesses and participants. The solution chosen is described in the final report: The Inquiry arranged for the creation of a virtual reality model of the relevant part of the city. This electronic model contained a photographic panorama of

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the Bogside [in Derry] as it was in the late 1990s. However, the user could switch to another version in which artists’ impressions of the buildings that had been present in 1972 had been superimposed on the modern panorama. The virtual reality model was used to assist many witnesses. (Saville et al. 2010: vol x: 22–3, section A1.1.90)

We may ask whether there is a problem of insufficient indexicality in the use of this virtual (or semi-virtual, or augmented reality) version of Derry (see Plate 6). It is certainly a problem that has come up before in forensic settings, where judges have on various occasions rejected non-indexical material, i.e. documents that are not original or have an unacceptably distant temporal or spatial relation to the original or have struggled with the application of the law to virtual entities (Sherwin 2011; Tranter 2011; Vismann 2008 passim for the longue durée of this problem). But the trend is certainly against these kinds of judgements, and the dozen years of the Saville Inquiry saw an increasing acceptance of simulations in various contexts. Even before the advent of imaging technology, the technical gaze was believed to be imbued with a truth that could rise above the distractions of society and humans, a truth that could uncover an underlying ‘reality’ about the body (Foucault 1975: 45). The greater the technical mediation, therefore, the closer the more immediate reality seems. As Mark J. P. Wolf suggests, ‘As a simulation is constructed, and the data set becomes larger and more comprehensive, its indexical link to the physical world becomes stronger, until the simulation is thought to be sufficiently representative of some portion or aspect of the physical world’ (Wolf 1999: 280). This simulation-reality logic is not confined to legal regimes; it has spillover effects. TV shows such as CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) – first broadcast in the same year that the Saville hearings started – create what is known as the ‘CSI effect’ (Cole and Dioso-Villa 2009), whereby the general public develops an unreasonable expectation of the capacities of forensic science, of imaging techniques, and the capacities of computers to perceive evidence that does not exist, to sift relevant information from enormous data sets, and the capacity to produce coherent, probable results every time. In its search for what Prime Minister Tony Blair in his announcement setting up the Inquiry termed ‘new material’ (T. Blair 1998: 501), forensic consultant R. J. Butler was engaged to examine film and photographs of the event. In Butler’s written report, two things are notable: first, that he was tasked with enhancing ‘anything that may assist in determining the nature of items held or being carried

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by persons in the photographs’ (Butler 1999: 1). Second, the enhancement of photographs produced no new evidence: ‘There are objects that cannot be identified or said to be recognizable as anything specific … the image does not contain sufficient detail … very difficult to interpret’ (Butler 1999: 2). The Inquiry’s review of the technical evidence found: ‘There was simply not enough information available in the photographs’ (De Forest et al. 2000: 15) (see Plate 7). The question of whether any civilian was carrying a weapon was crucial to understanding and interpreting Bloody Sunday. The soldiers claimed that they were under fire from armed civilians, and this justified their actions. However, no such evidence had ever been produced, and so the issue was a central one for the Inquiry. The issue was not that these photographs and films were previously unknown; rather they had not been formally subjected to forensic enhancement techniques. Was there a desire to make evidence appear where it did not appear before? To say that there was would be to suggest a certain naivety and credulity on the part of Saville and the lawyers. To enhance is to heighten, intensify, exaggerate or magnify; did any of the participants have a reasonable expectation that any of these processes could be performed on thirty-year-old photographs? This is unlikely, as the evidence had been sifted through on many other occasions by other parties in the intervening years, most notably the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign, British Irish Rights Watch, Don Mullan (1997), Dermot P. J. Walsh (1997) and the Irish government (1997). Some new ballistics and medical evidence had been brought to light by some of these actors, but the most significant new evidence that had come to light, in fact, was evidence of a 1972 memo by the Lord Chancellor arranging for the suppression of evidence for the Widgery Tribunal (see Walsh 1997: 289).

Processing data, processing law A more reasonable explanation of the attempt to enhance the existing photographic evidence is that it was a necessary gestural action that would become part of a narrative of comprehensiveness. The control room imaginary was invoked as part of this, not with the aim of producing new evidence, but with the aim of producing a desired legal–political affect. The explicit processing of data was best displayed in a control room setting, which carried with it connotations of scientific authority, perspicacity and security. Indeed, the transmigration of the meanings of ‘process’ is at the heart of the matter. ‘Process’ means trial, but it is

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also used to describe negotiated political procedures, as in the Peace Process. But its pre-eminent meaning now is computational. Evidence is, as they frequently say in CSI, ‘processed’. That is, it is put through a grammatizing computational filter and transformed into something actionable. The control room becomes a processor of law. We are no longer in the courtroom that is based on the ecclesiastical/ theatrical model of the courtroom, whereby the performance of speaking bodies, live sworn testimony and physical evidence are necessary for the revelation of hidden truth. Instead, this is an environment where evidence can be rendered virtually, where data is computationally enhanced and where remote ‘presence’ is possible, so that previously latent truth can be drawn from reality (Sherwin 2011). Law, justice, power and authority always express themselves through particular visual, architectural and epistemic traditions, and these traditions in turn shape the modalities of law, justice, power and authority. When the hearing chamber becomes a kind of control room, then there are consequences for the judgements that flow from it. This chimes with the Stieglerian intuition that any assemblage of media objects runs according to its own logic and not necessarily according to what the human subjects associated with it intend, or think they intend by deploying it. We can discern the influence here of Derrida, Stiegler’s collaborator and research supervisor, in the sense that it offers a vision of cultural artefacts producing meanings and operating according to logics that their creators have little intentional control over. Stiegler’s innovation in this respect is to apply the deconstructionist lens not only to the text, but also to the machine, and to the texts that machines produce and consume. Hence, the development of technologies of detection, surveillance and data management provides a new ontological ground of forensics and judgement-making. A highly visible place where this is taking place is contemporary forensic screen fiction, where computers process samples within seconds and locate matches from enormous databases. Such an algorithmic, computational aesthetic offers instaneity and perfect accuracy, liberating us from messy reality and the recalcitrant presence of bodies, mediators, eyes and brains. It elides questions of incomplete evidence, partial point of view and error. And it also elides the factor of judgement, calculus (Rouvroy and Stiegler 2016: 19), decisionism, opinion and politics. In the Latourian analysis (Latour 1999: 183–5), black-boxing invites us to forget the contingency of the methodology, in other words, to forget the algorithm. Black-boxing can be said to occur as long as a process works properly; the moment we notice a process as process, then it is no longer black-boxed. In

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the enhancement of the photographs performed by the forensic consultant in the Saville Inquiry, the failure to produce conclusive evidence is attributed to the raw data, and not to the computational process. Perhaps this is fair enough; the forensic expert Butler’s peer reviewers point out that in crucial instances he was working from photographic prints and that the negatives were lost, so there was insufficient data for him to work on. But why should they criticize the data and not the method used to investigate it? Why is it that the methodology adopted by the Saville Inquiry has effectively been black-boxed? The primary reason is that the Saville Tribunal, as with so many instances of law, is preoccupied with the assertion of its own authority and competence. Rhetorically, these are asserted by employing the control room imaginary, which renders the problem of justice in relation to Bloody Sunday as a technoscientific challenge. The truth was always there, we just could not access it until now – so a second Inquiry is needed, and this time it is fully equipped with all the technology it needs. As during Widgery, the law sets the terms for the revelation of convenient truths. The thing that reveals the new truths is black-boxed, disavowed, just as the foundational instance of the law itself must be black-boxed. The Saville Tribunal replaces one repressed content – that of the Widgery Tribunal – with its own. Thus, we can see that the shortcomings and truths of the earlier tribunal aligned with the political dispensation of 1972 just as the shortcomings and truths of the Saville Inquiry align with that of 1998. Any liberal democracy, such as the UK, must maintain the legal–political fiction that the state is governed by the rule of law, not by arbitrary political decisions. This fiction is almost always true and is shown to be false only when a political decision is required to resolve a difficult or contested case. As Schmitt observes, ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. Only this definition can do justice to a borderline concept’ (Schmitt 2005: 5). The decisionistic moment was taken by the Tony Blair government when it used the mechanism of a tribunal, not a criminal trial, to resolve the issue of Bloody Sunday; tribunals do not decide guilt or innocence, so the decision meant from the outset that the soldiers who killed civilians that day would be granted impunity. The soldiers were operating, in other words, in a state of exception, protected from treatment not as individual subjects but in an aggregated way, in a mode typical of governmentality, whether before or after the algorithmic period (Stiegler 2016: 108–14). For the arbitrary nature of sovereignty and for the state of exception to be successfully disavowed,

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the control room’s array of technological/forensic paraphernalia was needed to earn legitimacy. The law must be endowed with positive affect if it is to function properly (see Douzinas 1999). In Northern Ireland, it became especially difficult to assert that there was an absolute obligation to obey the law when it had to be enforced against the will of much of the population. As the Troubles proceeded, Northern Ireland would become the most militarized region in Europe, a testing ground for surveillance techniques that would later become widespread in the UK, which by some measurements, such as CCTV coverage or online privacy, is the most heavily surveilled part of Europe (P. Blair 2014: 95). The control over urban space that has been made possible by control room technologies was not possible in the early 1970s, but it was the failure to control these urban spaces that led to the normalization of these technologies in the intervening decades. The seemingly remote kind of control that the control room offers is politically attractive because it enables the sovereign to hold the object of its power at a certain remove. The sovereign ought not to get its hands dirty in the business of running its state; rather this work is done by a centralized network of managers and bureaucrats (Agamben 2011). Government is thus rendered a logistical problem with logistical solutions, such as risk analysis, data management and visualization, situational awareness, resource management, decision theory and so on. The mechanism of government allows the sovereign to recede into the background, unconcerned with minutiae and timelessly uninvolved in human affairs. So understood, we can see that application of the control room imaginary to Bloody Sunday was a way of turning the problem of law-sovereignty into one of the management of memories. The political purpose that the Saville Inquiry performed in this respect was to listen to and catalogue the hitherto ignored witnesses’ testimonies. Rather akin to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-Apartheid South Africa, which also did not have the power to judge guilt or innocence, the Saville Inquiry was an exercise in restorative justice, which focuses on crimes against people and communities rather than on violations of law. Here the meaning of ‘process’ reaches its ultimate, most fully depoliticized, destination, and takes on the part-religious, part-psychiatric sense of ‘processing’ as ‘getting over’ and ‘accepting’, as in ‘the grieving process’ or ‘to process one’s emotions’. The historiographical scholarship on contested memory describes this kind of processing process:

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Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler Competing discourses and forms of representation are understood to mediate popular memory according to their various conventions, constituting a diverse range of memory texts. These are opened to investigation by methods of formal textual interpretation to establish how they structure the significance of the pastpresent relation, and construct a subjective position of intelligibility from which sense can be made of the ‘past’ by readers, viewers and participants. (Dawson 2007: 47)

The ‘dominant memory’ (Popular Memory Group 1982) that emerged in 2010 was the Saville Report which aimed to assign the ‘diverse range of memory texts’ to the database of history. The Tribunal largely succeeded in its political mission of giving a convincing performance of recording witness accounts, being painstakingly thorough, and ultimately uttering broad truths about the events of 30 January 1972. The delivery of the findings in 2010 was accompanied by an acknowledgement of wrongdoing by the British prime minister, David Cameron. The event was welcomed by an emotional crowd watching events live on a large screen in Derry’s Guildhall, where some of the Saville hearings had taken place.

Memory and the prosthesis of technoscience Many of the surviving witnesses to Bloody Sunday, with their immediate, personal memories, still inhabit the streets, as do the following generations who have absorbed the event as an important touchstone for community identity. Their lived memories, constituted by anamnesis, posed an ongoing political problem because they are and were traumatic and, as such, have required frequent, repeated and therefore politically vexatious narrativization. Saville attempts to provide a hypomnesis, a mnemo-technical replacement, which would replace the previous fund of memory (Stiegler 2011c: 57). The shift away from anamnesis is an attempted political recalibration to take the trauma out of the political identity of Derry Catholics and to arrive, via process, at an agreed, quasi-judicial, political, final conclusion. What is to be remembered from now on, supposedly, is the digitized fund of material stored by the Inquiry’s Report. At the same time, the processes of remembrance on the part of the local population have been moving for decades towards a different type of hypomnesis, such as street art, commemoration plaques, public narration and in the form of tour guides and the Museum of Free Derry,1 which is ‘in the middle of what was the Bloody Sunday killing zone’, according to its website. These memory

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prostheses (Stiegler 2010b) are full of powerful affect, even to the point that the identity of the city is in some ways dominated by the Bloody Sunday event and its aftermaths. There are differences of opinion among the Derry population between those who broadly accept the Saville Report, and those who argue that it did not satisfactorily exonerate the victims or blame the security forces. The majority take the former view, in line with the Peace Process policies of the political parties that dominate nationalism. It is difficult to assess, then, the effectiveness of the Saville Inquiry in making it possible for Bloody Sunday to remain as a database of the past, and thereby to enable the Peace Process to thrive. A control room imaginary was mobilized by the Inquiry in the way that it attributed vastly improved sight and insight to digital visual technology, data management techniques, and to digital memory prostheses in general. As a result, new and politically expedient findings were produced that reinterpreted the relation of Derry to the British state as a resistant yet occupied city. The legal–political system that survives in Derry, far from being stable and grounded in some kind of Grundnorm, is in fact in a state of perpetual, contingent, situational self-reestablishment; in other words, it throws the nature of law in the democratic state into relief. The turn towards computation as a tool for operating any legal–political system is understandable because it helps distract from these uncomfortable truths about legality and legitimacy and attempts to render the problems of society as administrative, technoscientific challenges. Tracing the way that the Industrial Revolution re-fashioned the new tool of science into the even newer tool of technoscience, Stiegler pinpoints the origin of the resulting ontological crisis: ‘As science has become technoscience it describes the real less and less, and is instead what increasingly radically destabilizes it’ (Stiegler 2011c: 191). In the realm of the law, concerned as it is with the discovery of truth and enactment of justice, technoscientific assemblages such as those used by Saville and in more common use in all legal contexts would seem to lead us away from the real and the truth. The techniques of computation ought to be handled carefully when all human activity is rendered as information, as Seb Franklin points out: These processes of filtering, averaging, and excluding, which are inherent to the digitization of continuous phenomena, appear innocuous enough when applied to telephone or television signals but become fatal when the computer is idealized and deployed as a model for socioeconomic management. (Franklin 2015: xx)

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It is difficult to assess, then, to what extent Stiegler’s warning about technical objects having ‘their own dynamic’ helps us understand what Saville did and continues to do. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that we know that exceptional legal circumstances can come into being without the causal or catalysing input of industrial technical objects. The problem may lie with the law, in other words, not with the discursive system that it operates through. We know that sovereignty’s contingent basis must always be disavowed in order for law to call itself law. So, when that basis erupts uncontrollably into view in the present context, the reasons seem to lie in the legal and political dispensation of the British constitution. This is even more starkly the case in the years since the Brexit referendum of 2016, a period of deep confusion about the nature and location of British sovereignty. But we also know that the discourse of law and the law itself cannot be meaningfully separated, and so we cannot regard technical objects of any kind, from a handwritten brief to a computer screen, as being extrinsic to the workings of judicial deliberation. We know this above all from Stiegler himself, whose philosophical outlook is based on the notion that external memory supports are the ‘what’ of technics that precede the ‘who’ of being human (Stiegler 1998: 177). I have argued in several parts of this chapter that the technical assemblage that was deployed in the Saville Inquiry served purposes other than merely finding the truth. Rather, it played an affective role so as to achieve a more distant political purpose. There is no way of saying whether or to what extent this was done knowingly by any of the parties, from Blair to Saville to the many participants in the Peace Process. But, considering how technology was used and described during the hearings and in the report, it is clear that there was a degree of magical thinking about what it was capable of. The framing of Bloody Sunday as a technological problem meant that any technological solution was guaranteed to be regarded as successful. The technoscience of the Inquiry, to paraphrase Stiegler above, does not so much describe the reality of Bloody Sunday as radically destabilize it. This has been politically desirable in the short and medium term of preserving the Peace Process, because Bloody Sunday had ossified into an irresolvable political problem. But the turn to technoscience let loose the ‘own dynamic’ of technical objects that Stiegler describes in the first volume of Technics and Time (1998). The long-term problem may well be that the turn to technoscience abandons not just the real, but the aim of achieving it at all. The Saville Inquiry has served to bolster the Peace Process, which has made possible an almost total end to political killings. But the political dispensation remains extremely fragile at the

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time of writing (late 2020), especially because of Brexit. Now that Soldier ‘F’, one of the Bloody Sunday paratroopers, awaits criminal trial for his actions, one side of the political divide complains that the other troops have been let off, while the other exploits Soldier ‘F’ as the symbol for its own status as the losing victim in the conflict with republican violence. The problem has slipped from being an irresolvable political problem to an irresolvable real problem, permanently open to re-examination and without a finally agreeable truth. It comes as no surprise that the political entity of Northern Ireland remains in permanent crisis, albeit relatively non-violent for the moment, and that the clamour for investigation of other mass killings (e.g. Ballymurphy 1971, Loughinisland 1994) still courses through the veins of people living under the aegis of the Peace Process. The colonial problem has not yet been processed away.

Note 1

See Museum of Free Derry, http://www.museumoffreederry.org/content/museum.

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Part Two

On Pharmacology Introduction Aidan Delaney and Jeanette Doyle

Stiegler’s critique of the hyperindustrial era is composed of a constant rearticulation of core themes which re-emerge in his work: the pharmakon, pharmacology, organology, individuation, originary technicity and tertiary retention. Stiegler’s use of the pharmakon is mobilized while addressing mnemotechnics in Technics and Time 1 (1998). This follows Jacques Derrida’s project in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ centred on dissecting the boundary between speech and writing. Derrida’s dismantling of the term pharmakon points out the inherent problem of translation; in Greek it simultaneously means both poison and cure. ‘All translations into languages that are the heirs and depositaries of Western metaphysics thus produce on the pharmakon an effect of analysis that violently destroys it’ (Derrida 1981: 99). The pharmakon illustrates the problem of exteriorized memory: writing is both poisonous and curative to memory. The pharmakon aids hypomnesis but by doing so it damages the mneme, living memory itself. Stiegler deconstructs, through technics, Derrida’s deconstruction of Plato’s account of hypomnesis in the Phaedrus. Stiegler, breaking with Derrida, explores the concept of therapeutics, emphasizing the beneficent aspects of technology, which can also be read as a positive pharmacology. Stiegler stipulates that therapeutic implementations of the pharmakon lead to ‘beneficial disruptions (that is, to disruptions that would be effectively negentropic, disruptions capable of leading to the production of new metastabilities)’ (Stiegler 2010b: 104). The pharmacological nature of technology leads Stiegler to propose: The pharmakon is at once what enables care to be taken and that of which care must be taken – in the sense that it is necessary to pay attention: its power is

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For Stiegler, the negative pharmakon gives rise to a proletarianization of knowledge, which constitutes a lack of savoir faire and savoir vivre, indicating the loss of transgenerational knowledge and the erosion of the pre-individual fund. This loss of knowledge of how to be and how to live well is the toxic aspect of mnemotechnics. While Stiegler’s overarching project based on originary technicity leads to a critique of the hyperindustrial epoch, rather than taking mnemo-technics as inherently detrimental to the human condition, he views technics as co-originary with the very meaning of human. Stiegler seeks therapeutic ways to engage with technology. The therapeutic programme of pharmacology is ‘to reconstitute a process of individuation of the technical milieu through the individuation of a new type of interior milieu’ (Stiegler 2010b: 117). Stiegler has placed Gilbert Simondon’s concept of individuation at the heart of his project. Simondon considers the individual as a product of individuation where the human subject has a transductive relationship with the technical object. Stiegler points out that this relationship constitutes the becoming of the human which can be pharmacologically negative: Simondon has shown that the arrival of the tool-machine produced a loss of individuation of the worker, as he called it – the worker is deprived of his knowledge and reduced to the condition of being a servant to the machine that externalised his knowledge. The tool-machine becomes the ‘technical individual’ taking the worker’s place. (Stiegler 2017a: 75)

This loss of individuation can lead to the loss of desire in a hyper consumerist economy. Desire can, however, be stimulated through a more altruistic economy, the economy of contribution, which is ‘the stimulation of desire through the reconstitution of systems of care founded on contemporary pharmaka and constituting a new commerce of subsistences in the service of a new existence’ (Stiegler 2010b: 121b). The economy of contribution leads to a de-proletarianization of sensibility achieved through civic engagement and contributory work, thus fostering civic care within society. The following two chapters in this part of the book consider the pre- and postdigital as pharmacological with reference to art practices and audiovisual work.

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Film Studies between Ekphrasis and Quotation Aidan Delaney

Introduction The age of the cinematic image marks the advent of what Stiegler calls ‘hyperindustrialisation’ and with it a new phase of ‘general organology’.1 The film object, which is also an externalized memory object, once produced by a photochemical process, is now supplanted by digitization. To say that the ontological nature of film is transformed by digital technology is an axiom: its indexicality to the profilmic event has been displaced in its capture, post-production, manipulation and exhibition. Importantly, albeit less documented, film studies, as a discipline, has been equally impacted by such transformations, not least resulting in new ways of carrying out scholarship. Digital technologies have facilitated textual analysis of screen media, ranging from the simple manipulation of playback that Laura Mulvey (2006: 8) describes as ‘delayed cinema’, to computer-automated analytic systems that emerged in the last two decades, as documented by Anderson and O’Connor (2009), Ferguson (2015) and Heftberger (2019). The intervention in, or manipulation of, the audiovisual text has increasingly become more democratic through domestic hardware and the availability of media content for home consumption. It can be said that the amateur now has unfettered access to materials and tools from which to perform close textual analysis, going so far as to rework audiovisual texts in ways that produce new types of knowledge and thinking. One such method of scholarship increasingly used in film and television studies, commonly referred to as the ‘video essay’, uses remix as a methodology and is primarily invested in analytical reflection on the source text it samples. Simply put, the remixed video essay affords a new means of writing – multimedia writing – through digital technology.

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The type of video essay analysed in this chapter uses remix as a strategy and is primarily interested in critiquing the sampled material. This field of study has been referred to as ‘videographic scholarship’ (Grant 2014; Keathley 2014; Keathley and Mittell 2019; Lee 2017). Recently, video essay works employed to do film studies through remix have been referred to as ‘videographic essays’ (Keathley and Mittell 2016) or ‘audiovisual essays’ (Álvarez López and Martin 2014b; Grant 2016) to demark the specificity of this practice. The ‘audiovisual essay’ addressed throughout this chapter is as an essayistic practice that structurally resembles written exposition in the study of cinema texts, as evidenced in works such as Drew Morton’s From the Panel to the Frame: Style and Scott Pilgrim (2013) and Cormac Donnelly’s Pan Scan Venkman (2019). It may also utilize the medium to do the work of film criticism as exemplified in Matthew Cheney’s The Face of (2012) and Mark Rappaport’s The Empty Screen (2017). Such work is also an aesthetic practice that uses montage as a building block towards a decoupage et collage of cinematic temporal objects. These objects are reworked to become new aesthetic objects, reflecting a judgement or documentation of experience, further evidenced in works such as Cristina Álvarez López’s Games (2009), Aitor Gametxo’s Variation on the Sunbeam (2011) and Richard Misek and Martine Beugnet’s In Praise of Blur (2017). The line of thought within this chapter is developed by way of considering the relationship between multimodal forms of writing and written exposition, through the lens of Digital Studies. The relationship between these two forms is uncovered through contemplating the interplay between quotation and description, each of which is always a form of inscription, an exteriorized memory, or what Stiegler calls tertiary retentions (see Introduction to Part 1 and O’Hara in this volume). A contemporary notion of quotation in a digital context might be equated to the act of sampling – the process of taking a fragment (or more), a sample, from a previous text and incorporating it into a new text. The audiovisual essay thus offers a scholar the ability to quote the object of study, a long-standing absence in film analysis for much of its history, as documented by Bellour (1975). This chapter discusses the potential of new knowledge afforded by the audiovisual essay and takes sight of Bernard Stiegler’s understanding of cinematic time and consciousness. It also considers written description’s potential and takes a pharmacological approach to thinking through both the toxic and remedial aspects of videographic scholarship as a methodology in screen media analysis.

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Between quotation and description The position set out here is that videographic scholarship produces new knowledge about its object of study, when that object of study is audiovisually constructed. The process of editing can produce new thinking and insights about a film that are not attainable through watching or writing alone. Catherine Grant, reflecting on her audiovisual praxis, explains that through direct quotation the audiovisual essay can enhance film inquiry or inspire more creative and performative approaches to moving image research (Grant 2014: 42). Re-editing existing film material might produce new associations between scenes or films, or reveal things that only become apparent through the manipulation of the source texts (Álvarez López and Martin 2014a). This is exemplified in Aitor Gametxo’s Variation on the Sunbeam (2011), an audiovisual essay that analyses the spatiotemporal arrangement of D. W. Griffith’s The Sunbeam (1912). Gametxo’s rearrangement of its source text deconstructs Griffith’s practice of continuity editing. Continuity editing shows simultaneous action across two spaces in succession rather than synchronously. In contrast, Gametxo’s remix presents simultaneous action simultaneously. Griffith’s original film is set in a tenement building using five camera setups, each one capturing a room within the building: a dying woman’s upstairs room, an upstairs landing, a downstairs hallway, a bachelor’s room downstairs and a spinster’s room downstairs. Gametxo creates a grid with two rows and three columns, fixing each room to a specific point on the screen and reserving the top right pane for intertitles (see Plate 8). Gametxo’s arrangement creates a dollhouse-like view of the five spaces, allowing simultaneous actions in separate spaces to be shown together (see Plates 9 and 10). This is a unique approach to early cinema analysis and reveals something that is not immediately transparent in the source material. Its spatiotemporal rearrangement alters the original and illustrates particular aspects of Griffith’s filmmaking – notably his ‘planimetric style’ with a fixed camera in a straight line focused on the back wall.2 Gametxo takes a film that is 14 minutes and 48 seconds and edits all instances of parallel action to be shown simultaneously rather than sequentially, thus producing a work that is only 10 minutes and 22 seconds. Gametxo’s audiovisual essay is effective because of the near-seamless transitions from one space to the next through match-onaction cuts, and its movement from one space to the next evades the hegemony of continuity editing’s single viewing pane (see Plate 11). The spatiotemporal arrangement offers analytical potential and, as such, is a notable example of

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new knowledge afforded by the audiovisual essay. The work opens up new and interesting ways to interrogate Griffith’s filmmaking methods, thus illustrating how audiovisual analysis can gain insight into general filmmaking techniques. The new observations capable of being produced by videographic scholarship – its ability to quote its object of study – might suggest superiority over written description within critical film analyses. Anyone who has waded through several pages of lengthy film analysis describing the mise-en-scène and other cinematic aspects through detailed written exposition has surely longed to see and hear what is being described and to experience the cinematic moment for themselves. Written description, however, can be more than the depiction of moving images and might allow us to experience the film through the critic’s eyes. Andrew Klevan (2011: 71) argues that through careful choices, ‘description is not merely a necessary step on the way to the meat of analysis, it contains the analysis’. Adrian Martin (2011: 57) echoes this sentiment, affirming that ‘description does not have to play only a supporting role in the hierarchy of aesthetic experience. For its effect can be alchemical, transformative [ … and … ] magical’. Martin suggests ‘good written criticism can become a creative practice, something that comes close to art, it is an ekphrastic endeavour’ (2011: 57). Ekphrasis is the ‘verbal representation of a visual representation’ (Heffernan 2004: 3). It is a practice from Greek antiquity used to refer to a specific exercise in rhetoric, first found in the Progymnasmata. Its meaning has evolved and, over the course of modernity, it has come to be seen as ‘a text or textual fragment that engages with the visual arts’ in critical discourse (Webb 2013: 1). Laura M. Sager Eidt (2008) provides an insightful and expansive etymology of ekphrasis, showing its grammaticalization through history, from ancient Greece, through the Middle Ages, to contemporary usages. She highlights the definition of Leo Spitzer (1955: 207) who, in the 1950s, declared it as the ‘poetic description’ of the visual arts; and Margaret Persin’s (1997: 19) more recent broadening of its meaning includes, what she calls, ‘uncanonical art forms’, including television, photography and cinematography. The diverse history of ekphrasis indicates the strong desire to describe visual objects in an attempt to invoke the act of visualization in the reader – the attempt to recreate something, or someone, ‘before your very eyes’ (Lanham 2012: 64). Descriptive transformations might also offer the film critic her own creative practice and artistic outlet (Martin 2011: 57). In this context, ekphrasis is particularly relevant for screening media criticism; it comprises a shift towards the creative aspects of textual analysis. Ekphrasis is also a useful concept for considering the relation between written

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language and audiovisual language, in terms of how the critic expresses herself. There is an inherent asymmetry between what happens on screen and how it is described with words, what W. J. T. Mitchell (1995: 152) calls ‘ekphrastic indifference’, which is the perception that ekphrasis can never make us see the image. It is the separation of two mediums, two semiotic systems, two languages. However, it can also be insightful and produce new ways of seeing, going beyond giving an overview of what happened to convey ‘the drama of viewing’ and experience the film through the critic’s eyes (Klevan 2011: 75). This might be compared to Mitchell’s notion of ‘ekphrasitic hope’, when the ‘impossibility of ekphrasis is overcome in imagination’ to make the reader see (Mitchell 1995: 152). Klevan explains that good description is never simply a matter of making things clear; for him, it ‘relates simultaneously what we have seen and what we have yet to see, thus challenging our sense of the obvious’ (2011: 83). With this in mind, if there is any schism between audiovisual quotation and written description, it is to be found in spatiotemporal flux with respect to consciousness, considered in the following section.

Constituting a cinematic consciousness What becomes evident when placing Klevan’s insights against videographic scholarship is that the written word, through ekphrasis, has the potential to isolate a moment of drama, or something within the frame, to analyse it, and thus reveal how the critic sees that moment. The choice of what to analyse is always loaded and only represents a minuscule proportion of the literary possibilities contained within the film frame (Martin 2011: 71). Furthermore, the experience of watching is different for each critic and also different for each subsequent viewing. What becomes a point of importance for one viewer may go unnoticed by another. What goes unnoticed on the first viewing might come to the fore in consecutive viewings. By making a record of the viewing through written description the details of the experience are fixed. This recording of experience is only possible through technics, specifically through the mnemotechnical domain. What makes a viewer attentive to some aspects of the film and not others? This can be explained by what Stiegler (2011c) calls the cinematic constitution of consciousness – a theory based on Husserl’s understanding of internal time consciousness. Although time consciousness and tertiary retention are dealt with extensively in the introduction to Part 1 of this book (and O’Hara’s

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chapter), it is necessary, at this point, to recap the three orders of retention in order to address the specificity of cinematic consciousness and how it correlates to the relation between ekphrastic description and audiovisual quotation. Primary retention is the just past remaining in the present now, or an extension of the present moment within consciousness of a temporal object. The temporal object Husserl uses to illustrate the phenomenon is a melody. However, in Technics and Time 3 (2011) Stiegler employs the Kuleshov effect as a specific example of cinematic time consciousness. The Kuleshov effect illustrates the transformative effect of editing and how cinematic meaning is created through the ordering and combination of shots.3 Stiegler (2011c: 15) contends that the fundamental principle of cinema is its ability to generate a particular consciousness that creates meaning through the unification of discrete frames into a single temporal flux, in other words the Kuleshov effect. For example, a close-up of a man’s neutral expression intercut with a naked woman might combine to show desire when the frame returns to the same image of the man’s neutral face. Within primary retention, it is the broadening of the now that allows consciousness to constitute a temporal object. Secondary retention is the recall of an experience from before: a film, seen yesterday. It is the reproduction of the past via the imagination where memories are recalled to consciousness. The role secondary retention plays in primary retention has become all the more evident since the advent of recorded temporal media, what Stiegler calls industrial temporal objects. We can now experience the same temporal object repeatedly. Therefore, beyond primary and secondary retentions, ‘there must be tertiary retentions, technical traces constructing this artificial past that is not “one’s own” but that must become one’s own, must be “inherited” as one’s own history’ (Stiegler 2011c: 36–7). This is to say, experience is always conditioned by technics: the archive of mnemotechnical recordings shapes the social and individual spheres of human becoming. My internal time consciousness of a film formulated through primary retentions is influenced by the recall of films I have seen before, as much as the films made before, and shapes the cultural domain I have inherited. Therefore, primary retention is a selection process conditioned by selections from secondary and tertiary retentions. As Stiegler (2009b: 190) puts it, ‘tertiary memory contaminates retention’, meaning that technics condition our experience, both of the past and by extension our anticipation of the future. For Stiegler, cinema is a particular type of industrial temporal object due to its power of persuasion. It produces a coincidence between the film’s flux and the spectator’s consciousness, resulting in the spectator adopting the film’s time

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as if it were her own (Stiegler 2011c: 87). Stiegler goes so far as to suggest that consciousness is structured like cinematic montage; consciousness is already cinematographic in its principles of selection for primary memories, a selection that relies on criteria furnished by the play of secondary memory and associated tertiary elements. This combination forms a montage through which a unified flux is constructed (as ‘stream of consciousness’), but which is identical in form to the cinematic flux of an actual film, as a temporal object and as the result of a constructed montage (Stiegler 2011c: 17–18). The unification of flux is what makes cinema so seductive, allowing its viewers to become lost in the flow of images, capturing their attention. The viewer’s time couples with that of film and, as it passes, it does so ‘outside’ of the viewer’s ‘real life’, but ‘within’ the appearances of lives and events on screen, where such appearances are adopted as though happening directly to the viewer (Stiegler 2011c: 10). The viewer’s desire and potential for adoption is what is at stake, and the economic mobilization of cinema has led to the formation of what Stiegler calls a ‘consciousness market’ capable of altering the ‘conditions of adoption’ on a global scale (Stiegler 2011c: 74). Simply put, cinema’s industrial standardization of experience has been put to use in creating a hegemony of viewing, conditioned by hyperindustrial capitalism. For Stiegler, this impels a condition of malaise, resulting from a liquidation of our libidinal energies through the culture industry’s enslavement of our desire, by channelling it towards consumption (Stiegler 2011c: 76). Over the course of hyper-industrialization, mass media have been co-opted by the marketing industry and utilized towards capturing our attention, consequently leading to a drive-based and destructive model of consumerism (Stiegler 2010b: 14). Cinema’s power lies in its ability to create synthetic experiences in the living present that constitute themselves as memories in the viewer (Crogan 2013: 110). The significance of our cinematic consciousness is that industrial temporal objects have the potential to transform us in significant ways: Understanding the singular way in which temporal objects affect consciousness means beginning to understand what gives cinema its specificity, its force, and its means of transforming life leading, for example, to the global adoption of ‘the American way of life’. (Stiegler 2011c: 17)

Stiegler suggests that Hollywood’s domination of cinema has abetted the drivebased destructive consumerism of our epoch. Consequently, if ekphrasis enables the description of the audiovisual industrial temporal object, the audiovisual

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essay must be subjected to the same spatiotemporal organization of cinematic flux. Cinema’s ability to turn drives into desires for the purpose of consumption, thus leading to the loss of what Stiegler calls individuation, is a potential of all audiovisual temporal objects.4 In light of this, it is important to consider the audiovisual essay alongside writing with respect to the concept of cinematic consciousness and examine their benefits and shortcomings.

On pharmacology Earlier, in the introduction to Part 2 of this book, we have seen the formation of the pharmakon as it emerged in The Phaedrus, called to attention by Derrida and reconsidered by Stiegler to become pharmacology. In this light, the pharmacological aspect of all types of mnemo-technical inscription needs to be considered. In The Phaedrus, verbal representation is compared to visual representation and a scapegoat made of both: ‘there’s something odd about writing […] which makes it exactly like painting. The offspring of painting stands there as if alive, but if you ask them a question they maintain an aloof silence’ (Plato 2002: 70). Plato subordinates exteriorized memory (hypomnesis) to organic, living memory (anamnesis). However, as Noel Fitzpatrick explains: The traditional interpretation of Plato rejecting writing is revisited to show that writing as a pharmakon enables thought, that hypomnesis enables anamnesis. For Bernard Stiegler if writing is to be truly pharmacologic[al], the ‘cure’ has to be acknowledged, writing has to contain, along with its toxic aspects highlighted by Jacques Derrida, a therapeutic aspect. Therefore, within the history of philosophy the relationship between painting and writing is present from the Greeks onwards – they both signify the same thing forever. (Fitzpatrick 2013: 2)

Each mnemo-technical form of inscription is simultaneously both poisonous and curative. If writing can produce forgetfulness, it is also possible that hypomnesis enables anamnesis and facilitates thought. As chronicled in the last section, the economic mobilization of cinema on an industrial scale can result in the loss of individuation, so the task is to direct it towards a beneficent pharmacology and consider how audiovisual media might foster a ‘therapeutics’.5 To return to the question of film studies and the audiovisual essay, at this point it is fruitful to ask, ‘what is the audiovisual essay’s potential as a tool for film criticism?’ The absent object of film studies (the film text itself) – what Raymond Bellour (1975)

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calls ‘the unattainable text’ – is something that videographic scholarship seeks to make present. The unattainable text can now be sampled – put in audiovisual quotation marks – and an analysis of it can be performed in the same medium without relying on description. This is a benefit that digital technology affords the screen studies scholar. However, it is overreaching to think that videographic scholarship will undermine written analysis through the use of direct quotation. Consequently, it is also fruitful to ask, What role does ekphrastic description still play in doing film studies? Description through enargia can reveal something that montage cannot: an isolated moment, a shot or a scene, described so that the writer’s implicit choices become something other than the experience of audiovisual temporality. Writing here is the spatialization of temporality. This description does not unfold in cinematic time; it does not conform to the flux of temporal objects. When audiovisual content is transposed to written description, something is absent (the audiovisual images), but something else emerges. In the case of cinema, as Klevan (2011: 71) illustrates, ‘[A] film may be experienced differently’ through lively adroit description. This difference works on two levels: it is a different viewing of the film (the critic’s viewing and not the reader’s viewing), and it is the experience of viewing described in a different medium. Unlike written text, the audiovisual essay is experienced as temporal flux, where the flow of images is organized similarly to the passage of consciousness. If the work is replayed it is open to alternative selections on each subsequent viewing, further constituted by primary, secondary and tertiary retentions. Like writing, there is always an act of prior-selection present in a remix – the remixer has selected sounds and images for further consideration – but because of their audiovisual spatiotemporal flux, the reception of such selections is different to that of reading. Although a remix makes blatant that these particular frames quoted from the film are important in the analysis, audiovisual quotation is subjected to the sampled content’s spatiotemporal trappings found in the image’s depth of field, movement, sonic and visual textures and its temporal flows. Written description need only select what is relevant within the frame to be attentive to, and does so in a different medium, thus offering it an ‘ekphrastic hope’ (Mitchell 1995: 163). Although description contends with all five channels or ‘matters’ of expression, identified by Christian Metz (1974, 90) (phonetic sounds, musical sounds, noises, written titles and moving photographic image), it elides what is irrelevant to the argument. A written description can leave out what is extraneous to the discussion, such as characters, backgrounds,

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dialogue or anything else within the mise-en-scène, to make certain points more effectively. This is an underlying difference between audiovisual quotation and ekphrastic description and an important distinction to make in moving towards a pharmacology of both ekphrasis and quotation, in the next section.

Towards therapeutic care As already established, what Stiegler calls pharmacology relates to the ambiguous potential of all technē, as forms of pharmaka; technology is at once both poisonous and beneficent. According to him, technology may be put to negative practice, resulting in a destructive alienation and unlearning which he terms proletarianization, or it may be used in a positive (therapeutic) way, taking care of the forms of attention through which constructive modes of individual and collective existence may be sustained. He clarifies that the pharmakon can give us the feeling that ‘life is worth living’, but it can also engage toxic projections and become an addiction or a destructive drive and create ‘dangerous states […] when the feeling that life is worth living has been lost’ (Stiegler 2013: 3–4). This is to say that all pharmaka have an ambiguous potential and care needs to be taken to foster a positive pharmacology. Therefore, the task of a pharmacological critique should not be to make a scapegoat of new technologies and deride their effects, but to pay close attention and ask: What type of pharmacology we are going to practice? Stiegler explains that a pharmacological critique has two dimensions: (i) producing philosophical or theoretical concepts and (ii) developing regulations for behaviour, or ways that people are supposed to live in the current epoch (Stiegler interviewed in Roberts, Gilbert and Hayward 2012: 172). It is the latter that concerns videographic scholarship and offers a potential way forward. This begins with amateur production and allows the consumers of cinema to become producers of cinema, thus leading to an ‘economy of contribution’. For Stiegler, an economy of contribution is ‘a system of care’ (Stiegler 2010a: 70). It is a new economic arrangement that takes place alongside the market and gift economies, and is composed of contributors who participate in activities to create social value and are invested in selflessness (Stiegler, ‘Economie de La Contribution’ n.d.). The development of open source software is one such example. Videographic scholarship might also be seen in the same light, where audiovisual essayists, as lovers of the cinema, share the products of their labour with an online community

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of cinephiles. The film scholar today can make her own audiovisual critiques of the works of cinema. Such critiques can come from a place of love and care and, thus, from a place of individuation. In Adrian Heathfield’s film Technologies of Spirit: A Conversation with Bernard Stiegler (2015), Stiegler speaks at length of the importance of amateur participation, stipulating that new stages of technology can create new relationships to art practised by amateurs. In the case of the audiovisual essay, the critic becomes a creator through the technological possibility of digital media. Within that interview Stiegler further states: For me the history of arts is a history of amateurs, not of artists. Artists are only the best amateurs. But you have artists who are not amateurs and they are very bad artists: sometimes very well-known with a lot of money – today that is often the case. But they are not amateurs, they are professionals, and a professional is a bad artist. An artist is never a professional. He can have a professional situation as an artist, but as an artist as such he is not a professional, he is an amateur. That is somebody who can distinguish, who can critique [emphasis added] precisely something which is at stake in the transformation of sensibility. (Stiegler interviewed in Heathfield 2015)

We need to view the artist and the critic as formulated by the same motivation, a love that compels one to contribute and who can critique what is stake in the transformation of sensibility. The promise here is for the amateur, the lover of cinema, to recreate from the substance of cinematic texts in the formation of a new aesthetic object and offer a commentary on the products of the film industry. However, to foster therapeutic care, the amateur needs to go beyond simply remixing cinema texts. The audiovisual essayist needs to become an amateur who questions reception of cinematic texts by intervening in their flux through remix strategies to produce a deeper critique of cinema. This critique is formulated through praxis, which is also an exteriorization of the essayist’s consciousness, through what can be called montage thinking.

Conclusion: The promise of amateur production The intention of this chapter has been to position ekphrasis (as written description) alongside audiovisual quotation in doing the work of film criticism. It is worth for a brief moment to return to the etymology of ekphrasis in moving towards a conclusion. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989, ecphrasis entry)

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quotes Kersey’s 1715 definition of ekphrasis [ecphrasis] as ‘a plain declaration or interpretation of a thing’, and it is this meaning that proves most useful to the issue at hand. As a rhetorical device, ekphrasis can also be defined in terms of its effect on an audience (Eidt 2008: 11). Just as writing, as a pharmakon, has been a substitute for anamnesis (biological memory), today audiovisual quotation, as a pharmakon, might substitute ekphrastic description of an audiovisual temporal object. If the skill of ekphrasis is to recreate something or someone, to make one see, to place the object of study before a reader’s eyes, then audiovisual quotation is a grammatization of this practice, that is, an automatization of making one see. Notwithstanding, if the audiovisual essay is to be mobilized towards a therapeutic of care, it must seek to go beyond merely quoting its object of study and avoid performing the same types of critiques we have always had. The true curative potential of the audiovisual essay is in the practice of technical adoption by amateurs. If we can speak today of a practice of audiovisual ekphrasis, as an interpretation of a thing in the field of Digital Studies, it should be directed towards a critique of industrial temporal objects to foster an economy of contribution and amateur participation. In his review of Stiegler’s work, Patrick Crogan proposes that ‘getting “behind the camera” represents an effective way to unmask the synchronising techniques of mainstream cinema (and the industrial experiential media that have succeeded it)’ (2013: 118). As exemplified through the Kuleshov effect, editing is as significant in the construction of cinema as the camera, and this call to get behind the camera must also be extended to getting in front of the editing console. It is here that the audiovisual essayist has the potential to unmask cinematic conditioning. Crogan, following Steigler, argues that there is potential for amateur production within the industrial and technical character of cinema. Paraphrasing Stiegler’s unpublished paper ‘Faire du cinéma’, he states: In ‘Faire du cinema’ Stiegler appeals to the critical value and necessity of working with as well as on – and not against – the technics for fabricating […] compelling experiences. This will enable ‘us’ to better understand the nature and necessity of ‘our’ cinematic consciousness. It is in this way that a better adoption of the (post-) cinema’s systemic, industrial mediation of experience can be opened up in and as a way to remake a credible future. (Crogan 2013: 118)

It is in this context of technical adoption that a positive pharmacology might lead to a break with passive consumption and counter the short-circuiting of individuation, brought to bear by the culture industry. The move from

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consumption to contribution is one possible answer to the malaise addressed in Technics and Time 3. This effort is the reconstitution of desire towards ‘a renaissance of the symbolic, grounded in a reconstruction of bidirectional social relations’ (Stiegler 2010b: 14), where those relations are composed of an ‘I’ and a ‘We’ and the symbolic is produced by an economy of contribution. It is for this reason that the amateur is significant and might lead to a reversal of proletarianization, what Stiegler calls ‘de-proletarianisation’, or the recovery of all kinds of knowledge (Stiegler 2010b: 11). To take up the tools in the production of audiovisual media is to formulate new relations to technology, and it is for this reason that the audiovisual essay, if it is of any remedial use, must be utilized with care towards an understanding of our cinematic consciousness.

Notes 1

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Hyper-industrialization is briefly defined as symptomatic of (or a condition of) our current epoch. Rather than becoming post-industrial, for Stiegler, we have yet to leave modernity and are now experiencing an intensification of capitalistic industrialization (Stiegler 2014b: 47). This is enabled by the convergence of industrial logistics, audiovisual transmissions and mnemo-technical systems, moving us towards the numeration of all information and complete digitization. For expanded explanations of a ‘general organology in this volume’, see: interview with Stiegler, p. xx; Moore, pp. 1–2; and O’Dwyer, pp. 25–8. In short, general organology is the study of the relationships, or co-individuation, between human organs, technical organs and social organs, to account for technical instrumentation and its effect on the physiological and social domains. Russell Merritt explains that Griffith’s planimetric style always featured the camera ‘aimed straight on into the back wall with at least one side of the room aligned to the margin of the frame’, a feature that ‘had become as much a Biograph signature as the last-minute rescue, the fade-out, parallel editing, and the stock company of actors […] In The Sunbeam, the familiar hallway and one-room apartments turn into something resembling a row of a child’s wooden blocks or the rooms in a child’s dollhouse …’ (2001: 196). The experiment featured found footage of the Czarist film star Ivan Mozhukin in a static close-up with an expressionless face. The same shot of the actor was combined with three other shots to create different combinations. Shots of a bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin and a young girl playing were spliced with Mozhukin’s face, and each combination appeared to alter his expression. For example, when

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Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler juxtaposed with the soup Mozhukin looked hungry, when spliced with the corpse he looked mournful. Norman N. Holland (1989: 79–106) provides an insightful summary of this experiment, comparing Kuleshov’s own account of the experiment with Vsevolod Pudvokin’s version. Pudvokin collaborated with Kuleshov in the Kuleshov Workshop and it is his version that the above examples are taken from. Holland’s summary provides commentary on the accuracy of each filmmaker’s account and also on the historical background to the experiment. Stiegler (2008a: 3–4) highlights the importance of ‘the relation of the I and the we’ with respect to the concept of psychic and collective individuation, as fashioned by Gilbert Simondon. He clarifies that both individuals and society are in a continuous process of becoming, ‘the group, and the individual in that group, never cease to seek out their path’ whereby the ‘process of individuation is structurally incapable of completion’ (2008a: 3–4). In this relation the individual and the group co-constitute each other. Simply put, individuation is a process, to individuate is to differentiate one’s self from another, but it is always done so in a relation to the group. Stiegler warns that a short-circuiting of individuation leads to the loss of individuation, or disindividuation, which results from ‘the loss of participation in the production of symbols’ (Stiegler 2014b: 10). The latter sections of this chapter employ Stiegler’s use of individuation, becoming and short-circuiting, topics which are further expanded in other chapters. For more on the concept of individuation, see Interview with Bernard Stiegler, pp. xxiv–xxv, and O’Dwyer, pp. 25–8. Within Stiegler’s oeuvre, ‘therapeutics’ is a loaded concept that is ingrained in the act of taking care: taking care of our attentional and libidinal economies. For example, Stiegler explains that our current hyperindustrial way of life leads not only to the toxification of our minds and libido, but also the natural world. He suggests that this ‘can only be overcome on the condition of inventing a way of life that constitutes a new way of taking care of the world, a new way of paying attention to it, through the invention of therapeutics’ (Stiegler 2013: 88). Therapeutics are techniques, technologies, apparatuses or processes that are ‘neganthropic’ or negative/inversed entropy (for more on neganthropy, see Introduction to Part 3, ‘The Neganthropocene’) and are involved in new formations of attention. As Fitzpatrick (2019: 348) explains, the therapeutic gesture is always an educational one because what is at stake is the loss of all knowledge types. Consequently, the toxic nature of digital technologies needs to be ‘counteracted by other forms of knowledge construction that can be enabled by digital technologies’ (2019: 348). In short, to foster a positive pharmacology is to take care.

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Thirty Years: An Analysis of the Exhibition Art Post-Internet through the Work of Bernard Stiegler with Reference to Jean-François Lyotard’s Exhibition Les Immatériaux Jeanette Doyle

Introduction This chapter interrogates relationships between the exhibitions Art Post-Internet (2014) and Les Immatériaux (1985). It establishes a lineage of digital art practices within the context of conventional arts practices, which pre- and post-date digital technology as a cultural norm. The chapter revisits Les Immatériaux, curated by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput, at Centre Pompidou, Paris, through Art Post-Internet, curated by Karen Archey and Robin Peckham, at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Art Post-Internet and Les Immatériaux are separated by three decades, which witnessed the burgeoning and the subsequent widespread usage of the internet. The internet, in a museological context, has until recently been predominantly conceived as a platform for the reproduction and dissemination of digitized material or moving image artworks, rather than a curatorial platform in its own right. This chapter provides a map of exhibitions that have, historically, critically engaged with the internet. The two exhibitions critiqued in this chapter take the internet as their primary focus. Les Immatériaux pre-dates the internet as a common tool and Art PostInternet post-dates it. Both exhibitions are concerned with a state of ‘post-ness’. Les Immatériaux post-dates The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard 1979), a text that infuses the show with its refusal of metanarratives and predictions of the rise of the digital. Les Immatériaux, according to Bernard Stiegler, formed a ‘discourse figure’ about matter, and thus materialism, and a ‘discourse figure’

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that was perceived as a veritable ‘postmodern manifesto’ (Stiegler 2015c: 148). Here Stiegler is referencing Lyotard’s text, titled Discourse Figure (1971), which pays particular attention to the figuration of image by text. Discourse Figure pre-dates Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. ‘Post’ is in the very title of Art Post-Internet, which outside of Beijing has only been seen as a supplementary catalogue representing the space of the exhibition itself. The prefix ‘post’ is roundly disputed within this catalogue and will be treated in this chapter. The material for both exhibitions demonstrates an awareness of their legacy before the exhibitions opened. Lyotard gave a paper a year before the opening of Les Immatériaux titled ‘After Six Months of Work … ’ (Lyotard 1984), which is significant in terms of his prescience of the exhibition’s importance. Art PostInternet solicited responses for the exhibition’s catalogue from the most active practitioners in the field of post-internet art and sought to position itself at the forefront of the conversation regarding post-internet practices. Both exhibitions are, to a large degree, located in their documentation – a state of excess that mirrors the hyper-availability of documentation on the internet. Since 1985, after the initial mounting of Les Immatériaux, digital works have progressively been absorbed into white cube and museological contexts, including exhibitions such as BitStreams (Whitney 2001), Automatic Update (MoMA 2007) and You Tube Play (Guggenheim 2010). This has often entailed flawed technological apparatuses disseminating these works in galleries or museums because the institutions presenting the works were not fully equipped to display them. Of the thirty years that stretch between these two exhibitions, the latter twenty are defined by the development of digital technologies. Both exhibitions are concerned with the digital, which Stiegler has described as a pharmakon. Like writing, and according to Plato’s word, the digital is a pharmakon, that is, at once a poison, a remedy and a scapegoat. Only the digital itself, insofar as it can be a remedy, enables an effective struggle against the poison which it also is, and this is without doubt a key to the 21st century. (Stiegler 2010a: 19)

For Stiegler all tools are pharmacological, both a poison and a cure, from the pen to the paint brush. The digital, like other technologies, is coextensive of the human; however, only the digital facilitates both consumption and production, as is shown in relation to the work of Petra Cortright, as discussed later in this chapter. The digital, more than any other technology, is pharmacological. For Stiegler, digital technologies can cause individuation or disindividuation; if technology is not employed with care, the disindividuated subject cannot

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fully participate in society. A positive engagement with technology allows the possibility of transindividuation. The transgenerational persistence of the exteriorized memory to which all technics amounts is what opens up the tertiary retentional control that makes possible the transgenerational conservation and transformation of accumulated experience, and the metastabilization of these processes of transindividuation makes possible all that we call culture, education and knowledge (as practices of care). (Ross 2018: 24)

In Technics and Time 3, while, critiquing Simondon, Stiegler describes technical exteriorization and tertiary retention in terms of a bifurcation of technical systems and the history of what according to Simondon is ‘psychic and collective individuation’ (Ross 2018: 18). With social networks the question of attentional technologies becomes manifestly and explicitly the question of the technologies of transindividuation.1 The latter is henceforth formalized by the technologies of psychical individuation, originally conceived in view of ending up with a collective individuation. It is a matter of technologies of indexation, annotation, tags and modelized traces (M-traces), wiki technologies and collaborative technologies in general (Stiegler, ‘Within the Limits of Capitalism, Economizing Means Taking Care’ n.d.). Stiegler here is referring to a hyper-consumerist economy that precludes individuation, eroding the ‘pre-individual fund’. The pre-individual fund is a resource of the accumulated experience of previous generations and it is constituted by the capacity of the technical human to pass on experience as communal heritage. The replacement of productive knowledge by knowledge of nothing but how to consume leads to a disintegration of communal heritage, and to the destruction of desire, aesthetic experience and, ultimately, ‘disindividuation’ (Stiegler 2014b: 10). This is pharmacologically toxic. The curative element of the pharmakon is aesthetic experience. However, the apparatuses of art in tandem with aesthetic experience include the production of a reputational economy, which can be monetized, or which generates cultural capital. A reification of these concerns will be the subject of the next section.

Art Post-Internet Art Post-Internet featured nearly forty artists. As opposed to Les Immatériaux, which was dramatically staged, Art Post-Internet maintained the conventions of the modernist white cube (see Plate 12). It is an exhibition made prominent in

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parallel with the premise of its online presence. Documentation of the exhibition has been distributed as a downloadable catalogue. Each download contains information about the receivers’ geographical position, the time of day and the temperature at the receivers’ location. There is no commercial transaction, but the curators state: ‘Your attention is our payment’ (Archey and Peckham 2014: 6). This gesture could be seen as utopic, because it functions along the economic paradigm of gift–return. In an email interview, Archey expounds his views on the distinction between attention and reception: I would underscore the fact that this statement wasn’t uttered with the distinction between attention and reception that you have in mind. It was written to underscore the fact that the publication is free, and thus more than monetary value we considered the lack of payment for information to be a political act, in line with the idea that information should be free. (Archey, email to author, 7 June 2019)

For Archey, artworks are primarily experienced in the exhibition and secondarily through the publication Art Post-Internet, although the catalogue ‘tries to actually undo the idea that this [hierarchy] is necessarily so’ (Archey 2019), and since 2014 the catalogue has not been available online. Many of the works associated with post-internet art attempt to decentralize the primary experience of art within the exhibition space and argue that ‘the internet could also be considered a locus of primary experience’ (Archey 2019). In the catalogue, the curators of Art PostInternet do not distinguish between attention and reception. The former can be understood as equivalent parallel experiences, where the self gives attention to external disindividuating data. On the other hand, reception can be seen as singular and potentially transformative. Aesthetic reception is individuation allowing for a direct response to stimulus, as opposed to an experience as part of a corralled passive network. The catalogue for Art Post-Internet interrogates the erosion of desire and direct aesthetic experience. Archey and Peckham state: ‘Distinct from a conventional exhibition catalogue, this publication is intended as the primary point of experience for our exhibition “Art Post-Internet” in the West’ (Archey and Peckham 2014: 6). The documentation of Art Post-Internet took the form of a linear PDF rather than a rhizomatic, networked and immaterial state. Art Post-Internet is an exhibition in the form of a book. In relation to the publication, Archey states: The relationship of the PDF publication Art Post-Internet: INFORMATION/ DATA to the exhibition is much like any other exhibition catalogue: it was

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envisioned as a way to textually clarify the works in the exhibition, and further to give a life to the exhibition beyond China. […] I think the most unique aspect of the publication is that it’s a freely downloadable PDF, and thus to some extent intended to reflect the power of the internet in influencing the reception of artworks, which is one of the themes of the exhibition. (Archey 2019)

The work in the catalogue is divided into six categories – Language, Posthuman Body, Radical Identification, Branding and Corporate Aesthetics, Painting and Gesture, and Infrastructure – although the curators say that much of the work could slip between sections. The section on Infrastructure claims that postinternet art focuses on object-hood and ‘tangible and institutional infrastructures’ (Archey and Peckham 2014: 12) as opposed to the ‘immateriality’ of early net.art Editorial director of www.artfcity.com, Paddy Johnson, comments that for an exhibition attempting to deal with a movement and practice that is predicated on the constant flux of networks, ‘the catalogue and exhibition do a good job of cementing a post-internet timeline’ (Johnson 2014). In a further email interview (2019) Johnson states: I’m not convinced Post Internet is a meaningful term to most, largely due to its chameleon-like nature. That evolution, though, produces a kind of historical snake-trail making the term particularly useful to academics. For example, when Marisa Olson used the term in 2006 to describe an artistic process that involved working online, and then moving offline to produce an object, there was much confusion about how the Internet impacted artmaking. Virtually any creative process online was described as art due to the Internet’s efficiency at removing context. How artistic practice actually worked needed some explanation. (Paddy Johnson, email to author, 7 June 2019)

Marisa Olson is credited with coining the term ‘postinternet art’ in 2006. There has been energetic dispute in the ‘blogosphere’ regarding the term’s etymology, as is acknowledged by the curators in the endnote of the catalogue. Johnson draws attention to the fugitive nature of the term and, by extension, the remit of the exhibition. It will be shown in the next section that we are not in a situation which is ‘post’-internet.

‘Postness’ Although both exhibitions Les Immatériaux and Art Post-Internet have in common a connection to the word ‘Post’ there is a refutation of the temporal

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connotations of this word. Lyotard has stated: ‘A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (Lyotard 1979: 79). In the Art Post-Internet catalogue Christiane Paul claims: ‘The most misleading aspect of the suffix “post” is that it describes a temporal condition but we are by no means after the internet (or the digital)’ (Paul 2014: 96). Paul later expands her position on ‘post-Internet’, saying that while she has ‘issues’ with it ‘it still captures a very real and important condition, a fusion of the material and immaterial that is different from anything we have seen before’ (Paul 2014). In an interview Karen Archey states: I don’t think that ‘post-internet’ was ever a term that was or will be adopted into mainstream usage; rather it’s only a moniker for a very specific moment in art history that is defined by a set of interests shared by a socially connected group of artists, writers and curators. (Archey 2019)

In Art Post-Internet, the ‘post’ implies an acceptance of, rather than the demise of, the internet. Artists, curators and writers contest the term post-internet art in the forum at the back of the catalogue. The catalogue for Art Post-Internet controls the reception of the work and the use of the prefix ‘Post’ in relation to internet art. The term ‘post’ in relation to art practices has historically been a useful, albeit elusive, term. In Lyotard’s construction, postmodernity is implicit in the very burgeoning of Modernism and is not a state which postdates it. The word ‘post’ therefore merits some unpacking. In his 1991 text, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’, Kwame Anthony Appiah states: For the post- in postcolonial, like the post- in postmodern, is the post- of the space-clearing gesture I characterized earlier, and many areas of contemporary African cultural life – what has come to be theorized as popular culture, in particular are not in this way concerned with transcending, with going beyond, coloniality. (Appiah 1991: 348)

For Appiah, African societies are not postcolonial but have been transfigured through colonialism. This stance is extended in relation to postsocialism in 2012 by Shu-mei Shih’s text, ‘Is the Post- in Postsocialism the Post- in Posthumanism?’, where Shih further develops Appiah’s position by applying it to another sociopolitical and cultural context: If we understand the ‘post’ in postsocialism in its polysemous implications not only of ‘after,’ ‘against,’ and ‘in reaction to’ but also of ‘ineluctably connected to’

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and ‘as a consequence of ’, we approach a generally inclusive understanding of the postsocialist human. (Shih 2012: 42)

For Stiegler, the post-modern, like the post-industrial, is a ‘chimera’ because we live in a society which has not superseded industrialization but has, in fact, become hyper-industrial and hyper-modern (Stiegler 2014b: 46). Thus, the exhibitions Les Immatériaux and Art Post-Internet have exceeded their relationship to the word ‘post’ and the temporality associated with the word. Resistance to the phrase ‘post-internet art’ is a subject of the next section.

Petra Cortright, the amateur and tertiary retention Brian Droitcour resists the phrase ‘postinternet art’ in the Art Post-Internet catalogue: ‘I really don’t like the term and I don’t like the art that’s presented under its banner.’ Droitcour expands upon this in the article, ‘The Perils of Postinternet Art’, published in Art in America (2014). Post-Internet art is about creating objects that look good online: photographed under bright lights in the gallery’s purifying white cube (a double for the white field of the browser window that supports the documentation), filtered for high contrast and colors that pop. (Droitcour 2014)

Petra Cortright challenges Droitcour’s position on post-internet artworks being produced specifically to photograph well in a gallery context with her 2015 exhibition ily at Foxy Production, New York (see Plate 13). The works were constructed as printed layers on a mirrored substrate, a deliberate strategy to make real-life experience of the work difficult to reproduce online. Cortright’s earlier work shown in Art Post-Internet ‘VVEBCAM’ (2007) (see Plate 14) is a portrait of Cortright’s face and shoulders presented to camera while she subtly avoids looking directly into the lens. Cortright’s face remains impassive while the screen becomes scattered with digital stickies, two-dimensional images of ice cream cones, pizza slices, a tennis ball or a love heart. So, there is the three-dimensional space of the portrait and the flatness of the stickies mirroring the flatness of the screen. Cortright seems to be viewing what she produces and producing her own consumption utilizing the tools of the amateur. Using the tools of the amateur, for Stiegler, can lead to deproletarianization or a re-engagement with the capacity for savoir faire and saviour vivre, which is the knowledge of how to act and live well. For Stiegler, proletarianization involves the externalization of work and the self in

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the service of technology, without there being any corresponding internalization of knowledge of work or self on the part of the user. The fate of the proletarianized consumer is the passivity of consumption without production, while being put to unpaid work through the act of consuming. For Stiegler, the domain of the amateur is a redemptive milieu dissociated from work, with the capacity to be productive in terms of what is consumed and loved: ‘Amateur’ is the name given to one who loves works or who realizes him- or herself in traversing such works. There are lovers of science and technology, just as one speaks of art lovers. The figure of the amateur extends the figure of taste, as suggested by the Enlightenment, as cognition of the sensible or mediation of the immediate, as the singularity of an educated sentiment. It accompanies, therefore, the question of the formation of a critical public (irreducible to the audience). (Stiegler, ‘Amateur’ n.d.)

Digital technology puts the tools of production in the hands of the amateur, so it is possible to be both consumer and producer, thus allowing agency through the disautomization of the otherwise-passive consumer. For Stiegler, agency has to be created through processes of this disautomation. Automation in certain tasks liberates us to focus our efforts elsewhere, freeing us up for more opportunities to productively experiment. Art can disautomate because it shocks us out of routine stereotypical behaviours. Experimenting with new media can also refunctionalize or reinvent bodily experiences. ‘True Life: I’m a Selfie’ (2013) is a recording of Cortright, again to camera. However, she only glancingly acknowledges the camera; her interlocutory activity is focused on her cell phone as she takes selfies, which we can see on the phone screen that is directed to us in a seeming parody of self-love (see Plate 15). Self-love, or narcissism, may actually provide a route to individuation. According to Stiegler, ‘It is only possible to love oneself starting from the intimate knowledge of one’s own singularity’ (Stiegler 2014b: 6). For Stiegler, we generate ‘primordial narcissism’ (Stiegler 2014b: 6), our starting sense of self-worth, through seeing ourselves create ourselves, through the act of self-invention that consists in externalizing ourselves in technology. The externalization does not simply comprise translating something into media that was already there; it is the process of creating our very interiority through the internalization of knowledge and affect. The act of creation entails the creation of an alternative future. Encapsulated within Cortright’s work are forms of memory including primary, secondary and tertiary retention, as defined by Stiegler and presaged by

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Lyotard. Technical devices, for both Stiegler and Lyotard, are inextricably linked to memory. This will be analysed in the following paragraphs. Lyotard states, in The Postmodern Condition, that ‘technical devices originated as prosthetic aids for the human organs or as physiological systems whose function it is to receive data or condition the context’ (Lyotard 1979: 44). For Stiegler, the human only exists through the coupling of ideology and technology, where the former is reinvented by the latter. There are points of convergence and departures between the two philosophers. For instance, Lyotard’s mobilization of ‘scanning’ (habit), ‘breaching’ (remembering) and ‘passing’ (anamnesis) corresponds with Stiegler’s ‘primary’ (experience), ‘secondary’ (memory) and ‘tertiary’ (memory held in external devices) retentions. Stiegler considers digital objects to be prosthetics or objects which reside outside the body, and with which the human does not pre-exist but has a transductive relationship. These objects are place holders for memory or, what he calls, digital or tertiary retention (see Introduction to Part 1). Yuk Hui develops this thematic in 30 Years after Les Immateriaux: For Stiegler, technics constitutes a crucial role in the concept of anamnesis, for anamnesis is not possible without a support that is outside the noetic soul. Stiegler hence proposes a retentional system that characterises the processes of anamnesis through a reading of Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness: primary retention (impression, association), secondary retention (memory, recognition) and tertiary retention (exteriorised memory). Within this system, the retentions constitute a cycle of mutual determination, meaning that the tertiary retentions condition the selection of the primary retention, which in turn conditions the recognition of the secondary retention, and so on. (Hui 2015: 184)

Stiegler places significant import on memory and the fact that, in contemporary society, memory resides in external devices which are transductive of the human. Lyotard’s theorization of anamnesis refers to, but is not dependant on, Freud’s concept of anamnesis as a ‘working through’ (Lyotard 1991: 24–35). Both Lyotard and Stiegler refer to three types of memory effects. For Lyotard, there is habitual quotidian reality, which he calls ‘breaching’, followed by remembering these habitual or primary events, which he calls ‘scanning’, and then there is the working through, or ‘passing’, of these memories. For Stiegler, following Husserl, there is our experience of something as it occurs (primary retention), our memory of this experience (secondary retention) and, distinctly for Stiegler, the repository of these memories in devices which are separate from the body, but which are ready to hand (tertiary retentions). Lyotard’s explication of three types

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of memory-effects presages Stiegler’s concepts of primary, secondary and tertiary retention. Lyotard states: I shall be doing this in a terminology that could be called materialist, and therefore metaphysical. […] I distinguish, then, without claiming that this is exhaustive, three sorts of memory-effects of technological inscription in general: breaching [frayage], scanning and passing, which coincide more or less with three very different sorts of temporal synthesis linked to inscription: habit, remembering [rémémemoration] and anamnesis. (Lyotard 1991: 48)

For Stiegler, the third type of memory-effect or tertiary retention resides outside the human but has a symbiotic relationship with the species; whereas, for Lyotard, it is a passing and a working-through which is never ending. Stiegler relates tertiary retention to the repository of memory in external digital devices, which had been presaged by the use of digital technologies in Les Immatériaux. This is encapsulated by Cortright’s representation of her experience of the moment, her self-memorializing of it and the final digitized object. These three registers happen almost simultaneously reflecting the temporality, encoding of memory and endless possibilities of reproduction inherent in the digital. ‘VVEBCAM’, which like much of Cortright’s work, has a life online, in Art Post-Internet it was displayed on a monitor. This is in keeping the remit of the exhibition, which brought the digital and transient into the physical and substantial.

Related exhibitions The recent development exemplified by Art Post-Internet represents a move to ‘materialise’ digital technology. Other more recent examples are Im/material: Painting in the Digital Age (2017), a reflection on the production of painting in a post-internet age where the digital is omnipresent and is primarily accessed and consumed through personal devices, and I Was Raised on the Internet, at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018), which focuses on new types of gaming, entertainment and the rise of social media since 1998. There is a conventionalization of exhibitions dealing with what has been described as ‘post-Internet art’. For some, this is a welcoming acceptance of the digital into the institutional framework of museums and galleries, whereas, for others, it is a return to the commodification of the object. In the 1990s, with the early developments of net.art, artists had control over production and dissemination in a similar manner

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to early dematerialized practices, which used such strategies as mail art (adopting the postcard) and the fax as legitimate mediums. As Johnson states: Most context shifts have the effect of neutering activist artworks, so it’s not much of a surprise that any historicization or display of early 90s’ net art dulls its intended effect. In the late 1990s, discovering a Jodi website filled with broken code bomb-making instructions artwork would have been terrifying. Browsing it on a console within the institution, by definition, means it’s not a threat. Some contexts simply can’t be reproduced. (Johnson 2019)

From the early 1990s net.art practices, including JODI and Bunting, took control of the means of distribution, demonstrating an autonomy from the institutions of art. Digital practices have subsequently been absorbed by institutions partially through their reification into objects, which is a feature of the works represented by the exhibition Art Post-Internet. The mid-2000s saw the development of ‘surf clubs’, such as Nasty Nets, where friends and colleagues posted and shared images, small video clips and animations. This spirit was extended to the Art Post-Internet catalogue. In Archey and Peckham’s catalog, a group of art professionals was invited to cite artistic precedents, myself amongst them. In that section, I cited the kinship of communal working across disciplines of quilters as analogous to the networks formed online. Quilters were particularly active during wartime, producing blankets out of scrap materials, felts, and even old flour bags. Now, as we enter a time of renewed world instability, that comparison seems more relevant than ever. (Johnson 2019)

Net.art practices and the community, gathered around the Art Post-Internet catalogue, reflected a struggle to harness the internet as a medium of artistic social exchange. There was also an energy around social change. Art Post-Internet represented a culmination of arts practices mostly in New York in the mid-2000s, which addressed the prevalence of a digitized networked society. There was a certain utopianism about this moment, which embraced community and peerto-peer exchange made possible by the digital. Art Post-Internet was made on the cusp of the all-pervasiveness of digital technologies in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Les Immatériaux also represented a pioneering sensibility. It was made at a time when the threat of fascism had passed and could be reflected upon within the confines of exhibition making. The construction of Les Immatériaux is the subject of the next section.

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Les Immatériaux Les Immatériaux took place in the Pompidou Centre in 1985 nearly thirty years before Art Post-Internet (2014) and was the first seminal exhibition to foreground digital technologies, including the use of early Minitel systems. The exhibition ran from March to July and featured over fifty artists. Les Immatériaux was displayed over an entire floor of the Pompidou Centre in a darkened labyrinthine space. It dealt with networks, systems and relationships before mass adoption of the internet, whereas Art Post-Internet dealt with the materiality of objects in its wake. Les Immatériaux seemed to pivot, undecided, between a ‘sensibility’ looking backwards, so to speak, to an origin that never was – embodied by the Egyptian low-relief sculpture and the pseudo-etymology of the exhibition’s title – as well as beyond, to a techno-scientific future always almost-here, that is, to a postmodernism always in need of experimentation and hence infinitely deferred. (Hudek 2009)

‘The pseudo-etymology of the exhibition’s title’ (Hudek 2009) is a reference to Lyotard’s construction of the term ‘immateriality’ in relation to the exhibition. This usage of the term ‘immateriality’ was fugitive and elastic. Les Immatériaux was composed of material objects which were subsumed under the curators’ metavision, alongside digital exchanges on early Minitel systems. The material objects included the Egyptian low relief sculpture, which was Lyotard’s own selection. There was also a focus on the digital within the exhibition that was expected by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, a text which anticipated the pharmacology of computation as both a cure and a poison. On the one hand, there was an emancipatory potential of the digital and, on the other, the order of the National Socialist death camps facilitated by technology. Les Immatériaux featured works representing the Holocaust and was drenched in a sadness for what had preceded in recent decades, and this was manifest in works of the exhibition. Chapbut had previously curated a number of exhibitions at the Pompidou including Sous le soleil autrement, Centre de Création Industriel, C.C.I. in 1978. He been working on Les Immatériaux since 1981, two years before Lyotard’s involvement in 1983; however, the latter’s eminence caused him to be the foregrounded figure. The exhibition had previously been called La Matière dans tous ses états, this was later modified to Les Immatériaux with the root ‘mat’ being central to the exhibition. ‘As early as spring 1984, Lyotard had suggested the conflation of five French words deriving from the Indo-European root “mât”

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(to make by hand, to measure, to build)’ (Hudek 2009). There were five different strands to the exhibition each with ‘mat’ at its core: What it proposed, […] was an epistemological short-circuit between heterogeneous discourses, the one poetic, the other scientific, to establish the following equivalences: matériau = support (medium), matériel = destinataire (to whom the message is addressed), maternité = destinateur (the message’s emitter), matière = référent (the referent), and matrice = code (the code). (Hudek 2009)

These were the names of the five pathways of Les Immatériaux and the works in the exhibition were subsumed under each pathway’s headings. On entry to Les Immatériaux, five routes were open and it was possible for each entrant to make connections that were not available to another by taking a route as the result of chance encounters predicated by preference. The pathways through these routes were accompanied by an obligatory Phillips headset. The exhibition was also challenging. Grey walls were dramatically lit, and works were supported by suspended wire meshes. The headset, which the visitor was compelled to wear, aurally indicated which path the visitor was taking. The audio track changed as the visitor moved between pathways. This was the only indication that the visitor had switched from one pathway to another. The headsets had to be paid for, often broke down and are an indicator of the control which the curators’ exerted over the visitors’ experience. A publication was also dispensed to the visitor, in a dimly lit room upon entry, and data was then fed back by the visitors in relation to their experience. The control over the visitor’s consumption of Les Immatériaux commenced before the opening, with Lyotard’s complication of the word ‘immaterial’ in relation to the exhibition. The expectation of digital practices signalled by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition subsequently became an important element of Les Immatériaux, through the use of early computational devices. Les Immatériaux foregrounded digital communication through strategies which pre-date what is now called email. In 1985 the World Wide Web had not yet developed, and the exchanges within Les Immatériaux were a very early example of digital communication and unprecedented within the space of an exhibition. Philosophers and writers, including Bruno Latour and Jacques Derrida, communicated via digital text on Minitel systems, reflecting on fifty key words relating to the exhibition. Les Immatériaux, by making these exchanges manifest, anticipated the use of the term ‘immaterial’ in relation to digital technologies (see Plate 16).

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However, in his essay ‘Shadow of the Sublime’ in 30 Years after Les Immatériaux (2015c), Stiegler refuses Lyotard’s mobilization of ‘immateriality’ in the exhibition’s title, and he describes Les Immatériaux as ‘very material’ (2015c: 152). This materiality, for Stiegler, was that of the language machines, namely computational systems devised specifically for personal use. Stiegler claims that Lyotard saw the ‘digital’ or ‘computational condition’ coming (2015c: 149). What was heard over the headphones worn by visitors to the exhibition ‘is a strikingly clear noetico-sensory anticipation of the everyday digital realities of the twentyfirst century’ (2015c). However, in ‘Shadow of the Sublime’, Stiegler claims that grammatization is a ‘pharmacological default that must be’, and that Lyotard ‘is incapable of problematizing this pharmacological necessity’ (2015c: 151). For Stiegler, grammatization comprises small parcels of knowledge or gramme. These parcels of knowledge can be linguistic, (crucially) technical and reside outside the body, as forms of memory, but are coextensive with the human. Stiegler, whilst being uncritical of the works in the exhibition Les Immatériaux, is critical of the exhibition itself: ‘Les Immatériaux did set the scene for digital tertiary retention, but what it lacked was a hyper-materialist conception – a conception not postmodern, but ultramodern’ (2015c). For Stiegler, there is a distinction between postmodern and ultramodern, where the ultramodern is modernity accelerating at an exponential rate due to technological evolution. In a 2016 interview between Bruno Latour and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Latour does not dispute the immateriality of Les Immatériaux. However, he describes Lyotard’s construction of immateriality as a ‘folly’ because the exhibition’s flexible mobilization of the term ‘immaterial’ overshadows the works it displayed (Obrist 2016). In contrast, the exhibition Art Post-Internet demonstrated a materialization of digital arts practices.

The relationship of Les Immatériaux and Art Post-Internet to the book form Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann claim, in 30 Years after Les Immatériaux, that the ‘exhibition arose from an attempt to move the concept of the postmodern out of books and to find its support in other objects, such as scientific, industrial and art objects’ (Broeckmann and Hui 2015: 12). Hui and Broeckmann substantiate the fact that objects and not immateriality were the central component of Les Immatériaux. These objects were, however, diminished through the curatorial control which Lyotard exerted over the

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exhibition. The catalogue for Art Post-Internet was digital, but in effect retained the conventions of a material object. Les Immatériaux, by contrast, could be described as a book in the form of an exhibition (with associated experimental catalogues). Les Immatériaux produced a publication which displayed: The results of an interactive experiment between a number of scholars (mainly philosophers) who had been invited to discuss themes provided by Lyotard and his co-curator, Thierry Chaput, with the help of something so new that it was difficult to describe or even name at the time: what today we would call email. (Heinich 2009)

The exhibition itself was made at a time when the conception of curation was transitioning from that of custodian to author. Verbal text via the aforementioned headphones was a crucial component of the visitor’s experience and informed the visitor’s trajectory through the exhibition. Lyotard later reflected on the relationship of Les Immatériaux to the book form and becoming ‘the philosopher who decides that his job is to give us something to look at [ … which] is something very simple and not even particularly original’ (Blistène 1985). Thus, Lyotard’s experience of making an exhibition, as opposed to a book, was pharmacological, entailing the freedom to experiment but also the burden of this experimentation. Lyotard has described Les Immatériaux as having ‘mastered us much more than we mastered it’ (Heinich 2009) referring to the complications of producing an exhibition as opposed to a text. Post-internet art can be described as pharmacological. It represents the communicative networks made possible by the internet, both social and formal. ‘A political community is, therefore, a community of feeling. If we are unable to love things together (landscapes, towns, objects, works languages, etc.) then we cannot love ourselves’ (Stiegler 2014b: 2). Post-internet art also represents the passing of a certain utopian sensibility associated with pioneering net artists and a return to the mainstream. Art Post-Internet represents a state of familiarity with the internet and a return to the production of objects as opposed to the cognizance of networks implicit in a nascent state in Les Immatériaux. The negative pharmacology of Les Immatériaux could be represented by Lyotard’s suffering in relation to the production of the exhibition. The sadness of the previous decades, since the beginning of the Second World War, informed its construction and was articulated in its subject matter. The beneficent pharmacology is implicit in the network technologies mobilized, which are inherent in the exhibition’s format. The consumers of the exhibition were also

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charged with producing their own subjectivity in relation to it, by responding, via text-based digital documents, to their experience of the exhibition.

Conclusion Les Immatériaux is a landmark exhibition which provides a foil for Art PostInternet. Both exhibitions are concerned with ‘post-ness’, a state which is simultaneously denied by their producers. These exhibitions take the internet as central subject matter, before and after the internet’s prevalence. Les Immatériaux expected a digital networked society, Art Post-Internet situates digital networking as a norm that has been re-materialized as commodity. Both exhibitions are inextricably linked to the book form and evince primary, secondary and tertiary retentions, as defined by Stiegler. In Les Immatériaux, tertiary retention resides in the headsets and data consoles. In Art Post-Internet, this form of retention resides in the digital catalogue and ancillary representations of the included artists’ works. Art Post-Internet and Les Immatériaux have a pharmacological engagement with digital technologies. Les Immatériaux foresaw the internet as a common tool encompassing both freedom and frustration. In Art Post-Internet the digital is taken for granted as an omnipresent tool; however, a tool which has been partially integrated into a return to real life with the production of material and, ultimately, commodifiable objects.

Note 1

The Aesthetics Group have written, in relation to the work of Stiegler, that the beneficent dimension of the digital pharmakon ‘wrests attentional territory from a dis-individuated aesthetic experience in the service of the cultural industry and hyper-consumerism’ (The Aesthetics Group 2015: 80).

6

Pokémon UNÉSGO: Grammatization, Gamification and Listification in Contemporary Culture* Connell Vaughan

Introduction Comprehensive accumulation is today best exemplified by the Japanese franchise Pokémon and its command ‘Gotta catch ’em all!’ Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise of all time with retail sales of over US $45 billion across film, cards, video game, manga and television. Central to the medium’s appeal is the endless world building that fosters and preys on completionist tendencies. Inspired by creator Satoshi Tajiri’s childhood collecting of insects, players are encouraged to accumulate, trade and compare an endless catalogue of ‘pocket monsters’ (i.e. Pokémon). This franchise is exemplary of a broader cultural trend that uses list format as a central component of the gamification of the world. To critically understand this process, I consider the concept of ‘grammatisation’ as employed by Bernard Stiegler (see Introduction to Part 1). Developed from Sylvain Auroux (1995), where it refers to the process that enabled speech to be parsed into discrete elements of alphabetical writing, ‘grammatisation’, for Stiegler, extends to the analytical process where perception is made discrete and reproducible as ‘the very materialization of discourse’ (1995: 145). This process describes and formally converts human behaviour and activity into writing, numeration, gestures and bodily techniques so that it can be reproduced. It is, in short, a process of becoming human through inscription. Today, forms of abstraction and automation, including listification, gamification, computation and digitization are parts of this process.

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Central to grammatization is not the exteriorization of specific memories, but the discretization and abstraction of the flow of memory in general, insofar as it enables repeatable and reproducible methods of memory retention (mnemo-technics). Perhaps nowhere is the usefulness of specifically discretized information more visible than in the elementally simplified list. Lists are core (retentional) infrastructure, aesthetic technologies of culture and a fundamental format of recording memories outside the body – exosomatization. Though lists need not necessarily be abstractions governed by rules or representation, they present minimal representations of their contents that can, particularly when approached in digital form be operated as abstract indices. The algorithmic index is characterized by measurability, abstract quantification and predication productive of the Stieglerean alienation: ‘symbolic misery’ (i.e. the impoverished aesthetic sensibility of the contemporary isolated and surveilled individual). Lists are a form of exteriorization that Stiegler would identify as ‘tertiary retention’ (see Introduction to Part 1). As an indexical apparatus, lists are technological means sine qua non of the digital recording, representation and manipulation of memory. Lists when deployed in the service of algorithmic governmentality reveal a reverse ‘grammatisation’, whereby human behaviour is the reproduction of an always-already written code. Three stages of algorithmic governmentality have been identified (Berns and Rouvroy 2013): the collection of big data and the constitution of data warehouses, data processing and knowledge production, and action on behaviours. Where (the organology of) a global grammatization once took the form of Diderot’s encyclopaedic listing, today it ranges from the prescribed UNESCO list to the algorithmic governance of Pokémon Go.

Confusing the menu with the meal: Listification and complete access Since 2006 Quintessence Editions Ltd. has published outsourced ‘bucket lists’.1 The increasingly unavoidable series currently boasts twenty-nine books from 1001 Movies You Must See to 1001 Beers You Must Try. The arbitrary number is sufficiently small enough to suggest completion, yet ultimately unrealizable by any right-thinking mind. Important here is the command ‘You Must … ’. Unlike wish lists to Santa these lists do the heavy lifting of imagination in an attempt to extract the maximum amount of culture before death and suggest an early twenty-firstcentury fear of missing out (#FOMO) as central to contemporary culture.2

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The latest gimmick in publishing sees lists deployed in more achievable terms. In 2010, the BBC and British Museum produced a radio series and accompanying book, A History of the World in 100 Objects. The series’ popularity attracted many imitators across all cultural domains. This fear of not being up to date with culture is undoubtedly fuelled by the access afforded by digital technologies. In lists, language becomes a standard indexed form, a self-destructive flattened out calculability. Not captured in lists is the incalculable, non-existent, non-quantifiable. For Stiegler, however, listification, despite its emphasis on order (an imaginary order of conferred equality), is entropic insofar as each new list inscribes evermore lists. No contemporary cultural domain encapsulates the infinite accumulation of the past two decades like music. Suddenly, in the late 1990s one could easily download the entirety of recorded music.3 Bill Drummond’s (2008) tongue-in-cheek attempts to deploy lists as his guide are revealing of strategic responses to the aesthetics of infinite accumulation. Faced with the vast ocean of all recorded music, a nauseating fear like the fear of endless emails, Drummond at first tried to ‘only listen to music written, recorded or released in the previous 12 months by composers, soloists or ensembles who have never released music in any format at any time previous to the last 12 months’ (2008: 15). Unfazed by the failure of this task he embarked on an even greater doomed project: to listen to all the music in his library in alphabetical order (2008: 18–19).4 What these examples amount to is the reality that working through lists for the sake of the list, as opposed to its contents (be they of songs, artworks, sites, movies etc.) is a central form of appreciation in contemporary culture. In this context, Sharon Macdonald reveals a truth often overlooked: ‘Everything listed is somehow meant to be visited; this becomes part of its raison d’être’ (2008: 59). This truth uses the idea of list and menu interchangeability. Here is the technological and aesthetic heart of the matter. The category error that confuses world and representation is not a new insight. In semantics, Alfred Korzybski famously wrote, ‘A map is not the territory it represents, but, […] it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness’ (1933: 58). Such usefulness is the prima facie purpose of list technology, but it has other consequences. Lists successfully function as aidemémoires, but also make greater claims and function in deeper ways. Lists evoke and illustrate three ‘techno-aesthetic’ aspects:5 the list as invitation, as global collection and as icon. These are appetizing aspects of lists and demonstrate the appeals of lists to a status more than mere banal collections. The icon can be understood in terms of instant recognition. A figure (person, building artwork etc.) is iconic if it is recognizable by its silhouette. A song is

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iconic if recognized from the first chord. An icon, however, is also traditionally understood as an image (such as the Virgin of Tenderness), or an object (such as relics) elevated beyond aesthetic appreciation insofar as it demands and commands devotion. It invites the thought that it is truly animated, acting on us and not vice versa. This status affords the devoted to animate their presence and action in the world. Lists as icons are clear in this sense, as they invite completion, and their formal structure (numerical, alphabetical etc.) is instantly recognizable. Lists invite engagement, play, collection, consumption and ultimately, completion.6 Where lists invite, algorithms, like icons, command. In so doing, the conversion of lists to icons encapsulates the increasing algorithmization of cultural consumption. Alan Watts provides a helpful reworking of Korzybski’s dictum when he writes of the effects of intellectualization and abstraction: ‘You think about things so much that you get into the state where you are eating the menu instead of the dinner, where you value money more than wealth, and are generally confusing the map with the territory’ (2006: 115). In short, ‘the menu is not the meal,’ the icon is not real. Just as you cannot smoke Magritte’s pipe (within reason),7 one cannot taste the list. Though true in a literal sense, every person who has deliberated, anticipated, questioned and regretted their choice in a restaurant knows, the menu is where you begin to define the tasting experience. The treachery of lists is the treachery of menus.8 Drawing on Korzybski’s distinction of territory and map, Jorge Luis Borges (1946) employed the ridiculous image of a map exactly the same size as the territory being mapped to mock the supposed ‘exactitude of science’. Borges’s story is an analogy for the inevitable failure of big data to represent the world (Fitzpatrick and Kelleher 2018). Later (1952) Borges produced a paradoxical list of animals of impossible propinquity. His ‘Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’ is a fictitious encyclopaedic fourteen category taxonomy of all animals from ‘(a) belonging to the Emperor,’ to ‘(n) that from a long way off look like flies’ was famously deployed by Michel Foucault ([1966]1994) to illustrate how the borders of thought (limits of sensation) are enforced. The list prima facie illustrates an obsession with ordering, efficiency and control. Borges’s taxonomy is illustrative of the power of listing and, by extension, collecting in imperial projects. Deprived of the narrative links connecting the discrete entries, this list, at its most dangerous, hides its rationale and meaning from its user.

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The symbolic misery of list-fixation and its ever-increasing aesthetic conditioning of the world foreclose the possibilities of aesthetic experience. To work through lists for list’s sake is akin to what Stiegler identifies as the lamest form of cultural engagement, whereby memory as cultural content is reduced to its barest. The appeal of lists is thus an appeal to aid with the labour of life.9 To fall victim to this trap is to confuse menu and meal. It is to privilege the suggestive and invitational components of lists at the expense of their significant qualities, namely the pointing to something beyond themselves which ought to usually be the object of attention.

The enlisting of the world and its fans Copious pre-modern attempts to catalogue the world exist, from the Bible to Aristotle’s De Anima. Modern attempts to scientifically capture the world can be best seen in the international Enlightenment project of the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751, 1772). As a grammatization of knowledge into discrete segments and a fragmentation of labour in the service of efficiency, it sought to change our understanding of the world.10 The political and epistemological significance of global listing behoves a consideration of the aesthetics of what I call the ‘infinite accumulation’ of these ecumenical lists. This comprehensive tasting can be regarded as a passion for both the meal and the menu. Lists seek to keep things in place. Their scripted code strives to order the world. Debrett’s peerage, for example, continues to affirm aristocratic power and manner Britain by listing birth credentials and style guidelines. List making as the articulation of rules is foundational to the grammatization that enabled the nineteenth-century codification of sport. The rulebook grounds the practice of any codified sport, by converting play into writing so that it can be reproduced. This writing becomes a reproducible mnemo-technic repository of memories for player and spectator alike. The bleeding of the menu and the meal, the game and its description, is exemplified by the punter’s and pundit’s valorization of statistics, rankings and records over the subtle nuances of the game. When deployed in the service of algorithmic governmentality, this data reveals a reverse ‘grammatisation’, whereby play is but the reproduction of a highly predictable code.

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The aesthetic history of lists has swung ‘between the poetics of “everything included” and the poetics of the “etcetera”’ (Eco 2009: 7). A poetics of infinite accumulation fuelled by vague, yet desirable, criteria can be added here. Vague criteria ensure inconsistent, incongruous and unfinished lists that offer momentary satisfaction and enduring frustration. Following Umberto Eco, Liam Cole Young’s ‘media materialism’ sees the list (as the earliest form of writing) as both the origin of culture and a defining feature of the logistics of modernity. The list and its ‘orientation’ are, for Cole Young, a device that imposes control on users. Lists narrate administration. The fan following lists at the expense of the game is what the American Birding Association calls a ‘lister’. Jonathan Franzen, reflecting on his birdwatching, considers a ‘lister’ someone caught between the authentic experience and the compulsion to follow lists. To my shame, I am what people in the world of birding call a lister. It’s not that I don’t love birds for their own sake. I go birding to experience their beauty and diversity, learn more about their behaviour and the ecosystems they belong to, and take long, attentive walks in new places. But I also keep way too many lists. I count not only the bird species I’ve seen worldwide but the ones I’ve seen in every country and every US state I’ve birded in, also at various smaller sites, including my back yard, and in every calendar year since 2003. I can rationalise my compulsive counting as an extra little game I play within the context of my passion. But I really am compulsive. This makes me morally inferior to birders who bird exclusively for the joy of it. (Franzen 2017)

This is the treacherous confusion between map and territory, menu and meal, from the beholder’s perspective. Faced with the awesomeness of the globe and its endless libraries and archives, lists offer comforting totems to comprehend the vastness (totems to which we can become overly attached). This experience is not limited to sport; it is potentially present in all cultural domains. In the context of the contemporary art museum, it has claimed that ‘we collect experiences rather than engage in them’ (Findlay 2017: 1). Similarly, Blake Gopnik has noted that ‘the museum as library, where you choose what and how you will see, is being replaced by the museum as amusement park, with visitors strapped into the rides’ (2013). The equation of a player’s count to their social credit score generates a deeper confusion encouraging the player to regard arbitrary collecting as the measure of one’s worth. If, as has been argued, the purpose of a collection is to ‘fulfil a particular social and psychic role’ (Pearce 1999: 33), the prescribed list and the accompanying collecting-by-design reveal an increasing digital capturing of the world.

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A prescribed grammatization of world heritage There is a modern list like no other, a living list that claims, ‘outstanding universal value’ and attracts insatiable desire on a global scale; the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. What makes this list special is its combination of scale, rigour and claims of excellence that seek to capture both the natural and manufactured. Deriving from UNESCO’s 1972 Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, the major international instrument for safeguarding the world’s heritage, it is necessarily caught between the promotion of narratives of cultural nationalism and the encyclopaedic and museological project of cultural internationalism (Weiss and Connelly 2017: 28). At its worst, this list is a romanticized and top-down approach to culture that seeks to collect the world (Press 2019); at its best, it is a tool of conservation, recognition and intellectual discovery. It can both encourage further exploration and prepare an environment where the beholder becomes fixated on the list itself (the menu) and the harvesting of numbers, at the expense of qualitative engagement. Since 1978, the number of World Heritage Sites and Monuments (‘properties’ in the jargon of UNESCO) has steadily risen, at a rate of just under 28 annually, to, as of 2019, 1121. The tangible results of listing include increased media exposure, tourist attention and direct UNESCO funding. Like any encyclopaedic listing, investing global significance in any site can only ever be an inexact practice. Nonetheless, the process of listing a property is ordered by a methodical format. Its stages include identification, nomination, description, assessment using criteria, judgement and valorization through listing. Criteria exist to ensure distinction and avoid the creation of an abhorrent hotchpotch. They are wielded not by the laity but experts. Criteria include ‘represent a masterpiece of human creative genius’ and ‘contain superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance’ (UNESCO 2020). Each is fruitfully ambiguous to permit a wide variety of interpretation, while maintaining the appearance of rigour. Discourses concerning the nature of a site, authenticity, the value of heritage etc., remain live and open questions as a result. By deploying situated terms such as ‘genius’ and ‘beauty’, the list claims the position of global heritage and curatorial authority from a classical perspective. Such contestable criteria ensure a particular list becomes, not an encyclopaedia, not a ‘best of ’, not a catalogue, but a canon. As canon, the list commands with a power that surpasses the ‘1001 book series’. If the advent of digital technology heralds an automatic

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grammatization of the aesthetic, as Stiegler notes, then the UNESCO list marks a state-prescribed ‘grammatisation of heritage’. In an apparent marriage of quality and quantity, this list is precisely produced for the reification of sites and imposition of order. It is not a random catalogue. Though often controversial, the listing process is a simultaneously ordered and incoherent consensus-based enumeration. Consensus, especially institutional consensus, is often groupthink. UNESCO’s methodology is grounded in the politics of compromise and is institutionally prescribed. Nominations considered annually by the World Heritage Committee, have been subject to ‘increasing and overt politicization’ (Meskell 2013: 484) in recent years.11 The inevitable effect has been that enlisting comes to validate a single version of world heritage. Here the list is complicit in ‘enshrining’ and ‘incorporating episodes of illegal occupation, atrocities, war crimes, and even genocide, while the victims are left to relive the trauma. This is the dark side of heritage branding’ (Meskell 2018: 170). The list, when read as canon, reveals an ever-growing notion of heritage, which traditionally privileged monumentally grand public and religious sites that fit a narrow account of heritage (a Big Cathedral Syndrome, where obvious Eurocentric candidates are privileged). The evolving politics has, since 1992, also seen the natural/cultural divide challenged, with some sites re-inscribed as ‘cultural landscapes’. Such deconstruction of the canon is to be welcomed, yet can also be seen as the expansion of what MacDonald has called ‘Museum Europe’ (2008), namely the idea that the European continent is a site bursting and obsessed with memory, witnessed in the growth of museums and the heritage sector, while the rest of the world fosters what could be called a globalized ‘tourist gaze’.12 Thus, heritage is subsumed under a single overarching narrative, i.e. the list. In this economy it is unsurprising that ‘references to the heritage of a people are the mainstay of many promotional campaigns designed to attract both domestic and international tourists’ (Palmer and Tivers 2018: 5). UNESCO listing is the most explicit aspect of these campaigns that seek to frame heritage for tourism. Unsurprisingly, the politics of enlisted representation and global heritage commodification has produced a growing discourse questioning the politics of the heritage industry. Central to this literature has been the identification of a Eurocentric bias, and accompanying aesthetic assumptions, in a supposedly global project (Cleere 2001; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004; Labadi 2012; Pocock 1997). Laurajane Smith (2006), for example, describes an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, which is an ‘inherently political and discordant’ performance that serves to both legitimize and de-legitimize. ‘Although the definitions […] are

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broadly drafted, […], the process of compiling the World Heritage List has proceeded within a more restricted perception, deriving from largely European aesthetic notions relating to monumental cultures’ (Cleere 2001: 26). UNESCO listing has come to function as a gold standard within the industry, and is the exemplary case where sites are literally enlisted into this aesthetic politics. As a creation of the international community, the list identifies and promotes socalled World Heritage as a privileged category and, as such, it fosters a growing cultural experience that regards the atelic list as something to be completed, or at the least attempted. The insatiable desire for a complete and global collection is akin to what Shannon Mattern (2013) (following Janesick 1994; Morozov 2013) calls a data fetishism and ‘methodolatry’, where the aesthetics of data display is idolized. The growth in self-tracking practices reduces experience to the quantifiable at the expense of the non-quantifiable (Sharon and Zandbergen 2017). A list to be ticked off presents both a neat and teasing solution for how to approach a concept as nebulous as ‘world heritage’ and an artefact that commands its own appreciation. Like maps, charts, knolling etc., the list is another genre or instrument of data arrangement, visualization and interaction. However, in the case of the UNESCO list, it is wielded with institutional power. As an instance of grammatological governance, it presents an aesthetic flattening of the world to data.

Gamification: The algorithmic governance of the culture list Digital lists are special beasts. They exemplify contemporary toxic short-termism and a dumbed-down media landscape (Stiegler 2013). Their substance is arranged and filtered in terms of a reinforcing hierarchal popularity. From Google results to the iTunes App Store, they privilege the most clicked, not veracity. Discretion, discernment and judgement are evacuated when the algorithm decides. ‘Dopamining’ (Moore 2018) is the modern digital technique of extracting dopamine, which fosters pathological, shameless and fanatical forms of consumption. This process of delegation and abdication to the algorithm is a sophisticated way of following the list. A central component of this sophistication is gamification. The game format has an addictive appeal that enables it to achieve economies of action. Apps and platforms are increasingly designed to promote addiction (Alter 2017). To be addicted comes from the Latin addicere, ‘to give voice over to’. The addict is voiceless. When addicted to the list, it becomes your voice. The addict remains a

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silent beholder in a form of slavery. The effect here is a succumbing to what Alice Twemlow (2006), considering PowerPoint and the ‘omnipresent list fever’ of the twenty-first century, calls ‘listspeak’, where thinking is parsed in shallow bulletpoints. Equally, Stiegler recognizes the use of gaming ‘at attracting and retaining attention, in order to produce retentions’ (Stiegler 2010c: 36). A key techno-aesthetic element of lists is their operation as invitations. Lists are the basic structure that permits games to occur. It is useful here to approach the idea of gamification, namely the use of features of game-design in non-game contexts. Where literature on gamification has tended to focus on the positive outcomes of turning work into play, there is another (pharmacological) outcome to gamification, turning play into work. Ian Bogost (2011) renames the practice ‘Exploitationware’ to describe the way in which these practices extract players’ data without recompense.13 This alienation is akin to the ‘symbolic misery’ diagnosed by Stiegler as a scenario where desires are formed by industry and technology with negative outcomes for collective individuation. The difference between collecting and engaging is analogous to the difference between work and play. The age of ‘algorithmic governmentality’, according to Stiegler, is one where these differences are supressed using digital means and where ‘discernment [has been] automatized’ (Stiegler 2016: 27). To appreciate the power and potency of digital lists is to recognize them as a basis for the incomprehensible algorithms that guide contemporary grammatological governance in daily life. In delivering statistical calculations, the algorithm presents sets of rules to be followed. The former need only contain entries connected consecutively. For example, who, or what, curated the last playlist you encountered? The list is a surface interface that masks a process of indexing. Use is reduced to the reproduction of an ‘always already’ written code. The algorithms guiding recommendation systems, for example, harvest past choices for their recommendations. Lists unbound to nefarious algorithmic tailoring (Cardon 2013; Reigeluth 2017) remain an apparatus, a means of shortcutting rules of behaviour. For Bogost, ‘The simplest approach to … recording is the list, a group of items loosely joined not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of the comma. Ontography is an aesthetic set theory, in which a particular configuration is celebrated merely on the basis of its existence’ (2012: 38). UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list is no blind or incoherent ontography; its relational coherence is supposedly guaranteed by its explication, criteria and categorization. Possessing no discernible hierarchy, save perhaps chronology, it remains suggestive of a global narrative and a lesson in the clarity of aesthetic status. In the age of the

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shallow listicle, it stands apart. What is ostensibly at stake in this list is not simply a personal aesthetic preference, a bucket list, but rather the cataloguing of civilization itself. It is both practical and poetic. In addition to its referential function, its amendments render it potentially infinite. The challenge of list selection is to conquer the daunting excess of potential entries that meet the description of, what UNESCO calls, ‘outstanding universal value’. This vague expression combined with the politics of selection fosters a practice of infinite and global accumulation. Stiegler warns us about the age of algorithmic governmentality. ‘This contemporary Leviathan is global’ (2016: 139). The ancients may have only had seven entries in their list wonders, but the new list targets a planetary comprehensiveness in its mapping. Like all forms of mapping, ‘The instrument embodies a mode of observation that conditions how one engages with the landscape and what data one collects’ (Mattern 2013). The aesthetic implications of this global scale to heritage governmentality are clear. The aesthetic of lists may aspire to quality, yet it turns beholders into quantity surveyors, collecting driven by desires of list completion, valorization and idolization at the service not of curiosity but the list creator. As aesthetic artefact and domain lists are better conceived as ‘paratext’, a source among the complementary documents to texts. This space is a conventional ‘threshold’ to the text that ‘exists to be crossed’ (Genette 1997: 409). In this list, the co-nourishing orbits of the paratext and inscribed sites are asymmetrical. Beyond the sites’ destruction and decay this paratextual list will persist in a state of infinite accumulation as authenticity is not bound to the site but rather the claims of its criteria. The list bestows a form to ‘world heritage’ and as a list of sites it gives this idea a territory while demanding a dual beholding: you are to be impressed by its manageable and its overwhelming nature. The list is a departure lounge. Just as thresholds are ultimately to be crossed, the list implicitly invites its completion. The practical impossibility of visiting all sites hasn’t stopped people from trying. Collecting can be entertaining, educational and productive but the idea of collecting all ‘properties’ is ludicrous, if not megalomaniacal. The experience, however, is one that demands more than a shallow box-ticking exercise. It enforces pilgrimage and its intoxicating anticipations, struggles, compromises, herding, complicities, silences, revelations, judgements and disappointments.

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‘Quantification of quality’: Collecting the world to death It is not unusual to regard the collector as a thief. After all, they are in a competitive game of ‘bagging’. The modern collector is a variation on the criminal and pirate. Walter Benjamin (1982) and Jean Baudrillard (1968) have written about the jealousy and infidelity of the pre-digital collector, willing to destroy the collection of others. Objects (think of the coin collector), unlike the bagging of ‘experiences’, are caught in a zero-sum game. Sites, unlike objects, are sublimated experiences. The collector’s calculation is decidedly different here. Where the pre-digital collector was inclined to shield their collection (Baudrillard), the contemporary collector is encouraged to broadcast their ever-growing immaterial collection of experiences. The collector’s cultural expertise is not grounded in objects but in their climbing and broadcasting of the experience ladder. Diana Taylor distinguishes between the archive (texts, documents, buildings, bones etc.) and repertoire (spoken language, sport, dance, ritual etc.). Where an archive sustains power over time and space, repertoire is performance that is ‘transmitted through a nonarchival system of transfer’ (2003: 18). Given that performance can never be fully represented, performing lists, as collectors do, is an attempt to perform what has already been represented. The digital performance of lists is thus primarily a facsimile of the archive. Yet, ‘digital cultural memory’ differs radically from print-era archiving (De Kosnik 2016). Where archiving was historically institutionally centred, in the digital age archivists and collectors are self-designated. This apparent democratization of cultural memory only serves, in the case of UNESCO’s list to further valorize institutionalized culture. In Stiegler’s terms, this exteriorization of memory (exosomatization) in lists, and their completion, is productive of material and immaterial tertiary retention. This digitally performed collecting is central to modern tourism. The list transforms the tourist pilgrimage from a journey to the most authentic site(s), to an infinite accumulation of all the sites! And the heritage site is increasingly enlisted for the prestige of states and the tourist revenue. UNESCO’s list has become ‘a tourist information leaflet for the world’ (The Guardian 2010). Marco D’Eramo goes so far as to call the negative impacts of listing, specifically the invitation of over-tourism, ‘UNECSOCIDE’.14 The maleficent effect of the list is to invite such attention. It should not surprise us then that this list has begot a vibrant online community of collectors15 where members tally, update and debate their lists.

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Equipped with a World Heritage Site smartphone (that tangible ‘pocket monster’) app, followers of UNESCO’s list become that morally inferior ‘lister’, influenced by ‘hotspots’.16 Here, the list and not its signified is the end in itself. In Stieglerean terms, the figure of lister ought to be seen as akin to the figure of the mindless narcissistic consumer following established ‘routines of site-seeing’ (Rojek 1997: 70). This figure contrasts with the figure of the ‘amateur’ whose taste generates the percept by which it is constituted and is thus individuated in a contributive economy. The amateur in this context would be a list maker, not the list taker. Just as stamp collectors refine their collection targets to specific series as the volume of stamps grow beyond comprehension, so do heritage site ‘baggers’ in an eternal dialectic of longlisting and shortlisting. For lists, as collectors know, beget more lists and gradations of collecting. Dealing with the messy reality means that there will always be edge cases for the collector: what Irish comedian Harry Smith calls ‘Collinsing’ (after astronaut Michael Collins who flew to the moon on Apollo 11 without landing). This competitive counting can be fun, but it is worth recalling the sixth technique of myth identified by Roland Barthes. Anticipating ‘data fetishism’, he described ‘Quantification of quality’ as the treating of differences in kind as differences in degree. ‘By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply’ (1957: 153). Akin to Franzen’s experience, we can detect in the listing activity a capitalist mode of appreciation. This is a collector’s appreciation, a shallow form of aesthetic appreciation, the fevered, alienated appreciation of the ‘lister’. In Derrida (2002), Amy Kofman referring to Jacques Derrida’s personal library enquires of the philosopher: ‘Have you read all the books in here?’ Derrida responds ‘No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.’ Derrida had earlier identified dual principles in the ‘primariness’ of the archive and its centrality to the actualization of the law.17 The fever he detailed is ‘a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’ (Derrida 1996: 57). This is a ‘list fever’ that desires a list to begin with and have as a crutch to life’s completion. In time the world is primarily experienced through lists. Derrida explains: The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. (Derrida 1996: 17)

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Ergo, archiving technology determines ‘the very institution of the archivable event [or site]’ (Derrida 1996: 18). Digital pocket monsters today privilege the selfie as the primary evidence in the collection of ones’ heritage list ticking.

UNÉSGO ICONS: The Pokémon pharmakon John Acorn described the ‘The Pokémon Paradox’ where the game is simultaneously ‘the antithesis of natural history education, and an inspiration to budding naturalists. It comes from the urban world of video games and corporate mind control, but it also comes from the childhood memories of an amateur entomologist’ (2009: 63). It is precisely the infinite list aesthetic of the game that maintains this paradox. For it is the pharmakon of the list that provides structure, limiting experience and promoting curiosity and understanding (see Introduction to Part 2). Capitalism is increasingly gamified and consumers are endlessly nudged to play along. Pokémon Go, a location-based augmented reality game using smartphone devices, was released in July 2016. Using smartphone’s GPS to locate, capture, battle and train virtual Pokémon, which appear on the screen as if they were at the same real-world location as the player, the hugely successful game was praised for encouraging players to engage in the outdoors and simultaneously criticized for promoting a shallow and pointless engagement. Pokémon Go illustrates how digital gaming is not a cloistered experience but colonizes the everyday. Much like the Pokémon paradox, listing has both beneficent and maleficent outcomes. Even before Pokémon Go, UNESCO had effectively turned the world into an ‘Instagram playground’ (Capps et al. 2017). Though initially referring to the concerted design efforts of galleries and cities to visually ‘pop’ on social media, it is clear that this choreography can be extended to the entire earth. What I call ‘UNÉSGO’ is a game about broadcasting your souvenir collection as much as it is about finishing your collection. The reality of heritage is only experienced in terms of its later articulation and the anticipation thereof. Engagement is measured in selfies. The list can be complicit in subjugation and the reinforcing of inequality, yet it can also potentially be a platform for epistemological and aesthetic performance, and recognition. Lists, in short, are a political sphere and the first step in surveillance. It is clear that UNESCO’s list and Pokémon Go, to different extents, achieve all three stages of algorithmic governmentality. Aligned with the critique of algorithmic governance is Shoshana Zuboff ’s account of ‘Surveillance Capitalism’.

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Under ‘Surveillance Capitalism’, the mining of personal data is subject to new forms of instrumentalism and grammatization: monitoring, automation, personalization and continual experiments on its user-consumers in a parasitic attempt to modify behaviour. As ‘a movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty’ (2019: 8), it is understandably willing to foster the listification of the world, in fact, this is its target. Pokémon Go was designed for that very purpose; the ‘aim was the development of “parallel reality” games that would track and herd people through the very territories that Street View had so audaciously claimed for [Google’s] maps’ (2019: 293–4). This digital control has been called ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2017) and it has been argued that Pokémon Go was effectively strategic, a Google trialling of entertainment ‘technologies of social organization’ (Bown 2017), insofar as it placed desirable collectables in urban locations to maximize profit. ‘At its zenith in the summer of 2016, Pokémon Go was a surveillance capitalist’s dream come true, fusing scale, scope, and actuation; yielding continuous sources of behavioral surplus; and providing fresh data to elaborate the mapping of interior, exterior, public, and private spaces’ (Bown 2017: 294). As a game it held its players attention for a time, but it cannot not be said to have fully occupied them. Where the UNESCO list represents a political discretization and exosomatization of memory, these recent digital developments fit into what Stiegler recognizes as automatic processes of discretization in the ‘industrial exteriorization of memory’ (2006b) in the service of tourist economy. Grammatization as the process of an abstraction or discretization of a continuum, in this case the flow of heritage, is evermore enacted via algorithmic governance.

Anti-canonical archiving/resistance lists A necessary condition of this list compulsion is that it cannot be completed. Heritage lists, as examples of tertiary retention, are better approached in terms of exosomatic memory and its messy negotiation, not games and their completion. Stiegler, approaching contemporary politics, highlights that the process of ‘exosomatization is now directly and deliberately produced by the market’ (2015b). No longer can the external recording of memory be simply considered as surrogate prosthetic tool, it ‘has passed completely into the hands of the most speculative, irresponsible, and self-destructive capitalism’ (2015b). The challenge identified by Stiegler is to understand and resist these market-driven technologies.

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In response to the excesses of surveillance capitalism, Zuboff proposes moderation and regulation. There is, however, in the formal icon of the list the possibility of an aesthetics of resistance. This is only possible when considering what is listed, how it is listed and where collections are broadcast. Such a resistance list is currently exemplified by Banu Cennetoğlu’s The List. In collaboration with UNITED for Intercultural Action, an Amsterdam-based network in support of migrants and refugees, The List documents immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees who have lost their lives on their way to, or at the border of, the European Union since 1993.18 It has been presented in multiple forms, including posters, billboards, newspaper supplements and public screens. As of 1 April 2019, it includes 36,570 deaths of ‘Fortress Europe’. Cennetoğlu does not consider the project ‘an art piece’; she does not edition it, sell it or sign it. A 2018 edition was distributed as an insert in Tagesspiegel Berlin edition. Like the World Heritage Site list, Cennetoğlu’s work productively draws attention to the world, but it does so without recourse to gamification. The List formally presents a togetherness akin to Mia Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. It is silent,19 accusatory even and touchable. In its silence, there is an invitation to speak. The names are listed not in hierarchy or alphabetical order, but by date of death. This form of listing is essential to the design as it better presents the narrative history of ‘Fortress Europe’. Each name thus serves to memorialize the deceased individual, contribute to the total and illustrate the overall sequence. Such counter listing is a timely reminder against succumbing to the idea of technological determinism in the capitalist and algorithmic listification of the entire earth. This is an anti-listing with critical potential. Likewise, the UNESCO World Heritage Site list can be employed in the service of political and even industrial resistance, insofar as it can be a mechanism for minority groups to further their claims within or against the state (Lixinski 2015). In conclusion, it is only by such resistance that we can think beyond the internal logic of lists, the ‘always already’ written code the algorithm, and the game. Participation as Pokémon Go demonstrates is not a sufficient response to prescribed lists; instead, lists when continually rewritten, replaced and represented can resist the codes of ‘grammatisation’ of algorithmic governmentality and surveillance capitalism. In short, lists when considered as a retentional technology in the Stieglerean sense reveal scope (pharmacologically) for alienation and resistance in an era of increasing algorithmic governmentality.

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Notes *

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

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12

13

14

Sections of this chapter were presented at ‘The Icon as Cultural Model: Past, Present and Future’ Conference, Open University of the Netherlands, January 2018, and an invited talk at University of Western Australia, August 2018. It is dedicated to the memory of Sarah Monahan. At the same time the expression ‘bucket list’, deriving from the expression ‘kick the buck’, was popularized by the film The Bucket List (2007). This aesthetic mission is also visible in the Scratch Map® by Luckies of London (2009) and Apps like Been. Goodman (2017) details how this access has changed the sound of popular music. This he later structured as a score, ‘320. CHOOSE’. ‘The word evokes. The illustration presents’ (Miller 1992: 67). Significantly, the list is not a direct invitation but an implied one. This implication Gass (1996) regards as a ‘feigned passivity and politeness’ that commands behaviour. René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929. This disconnect is pronounced when faced with picture menus. Here the list comes to serve as illustration. The list as evocation and/or illustration is a text derivative of its signified. An extreme case of this is Gorosh’s (2017) attempt to see as much art as he possibly could across London’s galleries and museums in one day. In the twentieth century, this enlightenment accountancy was updated in the Whole Earth Catalogue (1968) with its global perspective and Wilson’s ‘Biophilia Hypothesis’ (1984), which claimed that we have an innate desire to but understand the world through a catalogue. The list may claim a global position but, in practice, it remains tied to the competition of international horse-trading. For a detailed analysis of UNESCO’s complicated process of adjudication, see Labadi (2012). The ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry and Larson 2011) claims that tourist experience entails a particular way of seeing mediated by specific representations and technologies such as guidebooks, souvenirs, travel documentaries, but no doubt also heritage lists. Recent developments in gamification go beyond leisure time to work and sleep time. Amazon, for example, have gamified warehouses in the name of efficiency (Bensinger 2019). Pokémon have announced the launch of an app that rewards players with new Pokémon for time slept, released in 2020. A noteworthy recent artistic response (http://www.unes-co.cz/) has even seen families incentivized to inhabit as ‘normal’ residents, not as tourists, the Czech World Heritage Site Český Krumlov.

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15 http://worldheritagesite.org/. 16 Defined as a ‘Cluster of at least 4 WHS within reach for a return day trip from a center’ (ibid.). 17 The archive as constitutive of authority is something he saw reproduced in Freudian psychoanalysis. 18 http://www.list-e.info/. 19 For the significance of silence in the aesthetics of mourning, see Ben-Ze’ev et al. (2010).

Part Three

The Neganthropocene Introduction Noel Fitzpatrick

The Neganthropocene is a term which has appeared recently in the work of Bernard Stiegler. He sets out a first definition of the term in the introduction to La Société automatique: l’avenir du travail in 2015. Firstly, he establishes the conditions of possibility for a new politics of technology, and this will be done through the development of what he calls neganthropic work and a neganthropy of knowledge. For the neganthropy of knowledge new digital architectures of the internet and a new digital hermeneutics are needed, and for the neganthropic future of work a new economic basis is needed based upon the notion of intermittence. However, it is with the publication of The Neganthropocene in 2018 that the term has come to prominence within his overall philosophical project. The Neganthropocene can be simply understood as the courage to initiate technological developments which will bring humanity beyond the current epoch of the Anthropocene. Indeed, it could be argued that the conceptualization of the Neganthropocene is fundamentally linked to Stiegler’s earlier development of a positive pharmacology and to his understanding of a hermeneutic web. The current phase, the Neganthropic phase, of Stiegler’s philosophy starts out with the question of the future of work but leads to fundamental questions of the relation between the Anthropocene and question of political economy (www. internation.world). Stiegler references the work Nicolas Georgescu Rogen and Alfred J. Lotka who both point to the anti-entropic nature of economic development and the evolutionary processes of exsomatization (outside of the body) and of technological evolution. Nicolas Georgescu Rogen (1970, 1971) points to the entropy of functioning economic systems which is akin to a closed system. The

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automatization of labour and the grammatization of labour have been enabled by the advent of exosomatic organs and totalizing calculation. The Neganthropocene is the activity through which we can get beyond the Anthropocene, or the ‘urge’ to go beyond (Whitehead 1929), and this is a profoundly ethical and political question. The Neganthropocene is also developed by Stiegler with reference to the concept of entropy, taking three strands of entropy: firstly, Schrödinger’s concept of entropy (1945) and negative entropy (that which keeps me from becoming dead matter); secondly, the concept of entropy within the information theory and Claude Shannon’s conceptualization of entropy as the calculation of the usefulness of information; and thirdly, the use of the term ‘counter-entropy’ in biology as it is developed more recently by Longo and Montevil (2019). There have also been recent developments in relation to anti-entropic potential (AEP) which point to the potentiality of anti-entropic energies (Melnyk 2020). For Stiegler, the advent of the Anthropocene is inherently linked to the development of entropic processes stemming from entropy and the industrial revolution. If we could consider the Anthropocene to be the entropocene, the advent of entropic industrialization of labour and attention has led to the Anthropocence, then the negative entropy, anti-entropy, or counter entropic process would be the possible means to get beyond the Anthropocene. The term ‘counter-entropy’ points to the process rather than to a simple reversal of entropy, a counter activity to fight against the dissipation of energy of the second law of thermodynamics. There are two main features of Stiegler’s conceptualization of the Neganthropocene. Firstly, there is the recognition that everything cannot be captured, that there are modes of mediation in the world which lie outside measurability and calculation, what Alfred Whitehead refers to as the Art of life (see The Function of Reason, 1929). These include the aesthetic – here aesthetic is understood as the sharing of the sensible, as polis, but also that which cannot be calculated or measured. The loss of the sensible, the proletarianization of the sensible, needs to be counteracted by neganthropic aesthetic gestures. Here it is not simply a question of probability but a question of idiomatization. Secondly, the reharnessing of technologies is to enable reflection, deliberation, conflict and reason. The reharnessing of reason as a hermeneutic process, as a digital hermeneutics which gives controversies and interpretations their neganthropic value, counteracting or reversing the entropy of the grammatization of reason through computational optimization. The two chapters in this part of the book have as a premise the aesthetic question of the Neganthropocene. Within the term we find contestation or

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conflicts of interpretation both in relation to the term ‘Anthropocene’ and its negation in the term ‘negentropic’. The aesthetic will be here understood as neganthropic, to counteract the optimization of reason and labour through computational techno-scientific means.

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Pregnant Pause: Technological Disruption and the Neganthropic Aesthetics of Landscape in Ireland’s Borderland EL Putnam

Introduction In June 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union. This event triggered years of political chaos whereby Prime Minister Theresa May (replaced by Boris Johnson in 2019), the British Parliament and the European Union attempted to negotiate the nation’s withdrawal. One issue that was not addressed during the campaign leading up to the vote, which has become a key concern in negotiations, is the UK’s land border in Ireland. In this chapter, I consider this border in technological terms as a prosthesis for the demarcation of territory, differing from the lived space of the borderland that it creates, using Bernard Stiegler’s (2013) definition of tertiary retention as the externalization of memory through technology (see Introduction to Part 1). I explore the consequences of the border in aesthetic terms through the landscape photographs of Willie Doherty, which function as tertiary retentions as image-objects (see O’Hara in this volume). At the same time, these photographs offer alternative means of engaging with the border through what physicist and cultural theorist Karen Barad (2007) defines as diffractions. Barad uses the metaphor of diffraction as an alternative to reflection and representation. She argues that while the reflexivity of representation emphasizes sameness, diffraction draws attention to difference. Treating these photographs as diffractions of memory and experience, they become instigators for what Stiegler defines as neganthropic gestures, or the therapeutic means of resisting destruction in the Anthropocene.

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In addition, speculations of a ‘Smart Border’ as part of the Brexit negotiations’ ‘technological solution’ for the border function as what Bernard Stiegler (2019b) refers to as disruption, or extreme rationalization through computation. My artistic research project Quickening (2018) was created in response to these events as an alternative, digital-native landscape from an ‘outsider’s’ perspective.1 As an aesthetic diffraction of the borderland, Quickening highlights the nuance and complexities of the region through poiēsis, which, according to Martin Heidegger (1977), is a mode of revealing that brings something forth into being, as opposed to the challenging forth of Gestell, or enframing, that makes the world into standing reserve. Stiegler points to the Anthropocene as being a period where Gestell is brought to an extreme, as ‘calculation prevails over every other criteria of decisionmaking’ (Stiegler 2016: 8). As an alternative, he proposes the Neganthropocene as the exit to the Anthropocene (see Introduction to Part 3). The discussed artworks invite aesthetic experiences that function as neganthropic gestures, challenging the extreme rationalism of computation affiliated with disruption.

Kinks and wiggles2 The border in Ireland constitutes more than just a cartographic line down a map. The only land border of the UK, it has been a contested site since its origin in 1921. Throughout the twentieth century, the border has gone through phases of regulation, fortification and integration that have impacted various facets of life across the island of Ireland. The physical form of the border is complex, created from county lines developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Ferriter 2019). Much of the land surrounding the border is rural, consisting of farming communities and over 200 road crossings, in addition to cutting across fields, bogs and, in some instances, houses. The border was initially fortified as a customs barrier in 1923, though not an immigration barrier as there has been free movement of Irish and UK citizens between the two nations due to the Common Travel Area (CTA), also established in 1923 (Nash, Graham and Reid 2016). National governments not only use technologies to implement and control their borders, but the border is inherently a technology that transforms the milieu of the region. It is a cartographic technology that separates nations, but it is also a tertiary retention as it externalizes the demarcation of territories. Stiegler describes how tertiary retentions are:

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Mnemotechnical forms of the exteriorization of psychic life constituting traces organized through retentional devices and systems … and attention is conditioned by these retentional systems – which characterize systems of care, as therapeutic systems of which retentional systems are the pharmacological basis. (Stiegler 2013: 87)

That is, as memories are externalized as tertiary retentions, by means of technology that includes devices and systems, our relationship to these memories are altered through attention. Such processes are pharmacological (see Introduction to Part 2) or capable of being both poison and cure – harmful and therapeutic. The memories externalized through the border as tertiary retentions include the limits of national territory, as well as the history of Britain’s relationship to Ireland and the political process that gave rise to this border (see Ferriter 2019; Nash, Graham and Reid 2016). Moreover, the border as a tertiary retention mediates the relationship between perceptions (primary retentions) and memories (secondary retentions) of this demarcation (Stiegler 2013), which in this case has political, economic, social and cultural implications for local, national and international relations. The border, as the prosthesis of nations, may have been implemented as a means of ordering territory, but what has developed over the past century has been the cultivation of an ambiguous third space between Ireland and the UK. There is disconnect between the border as a national barrier and as a lived geographic space. Irish writer Garrett Carr, who gained notoriety for walking the border in 2016, describes this as follows: ‘The border did not divide Ireland into two but in three – the north, the south and the borderland’ (2017: 153). Carr calls for a shift in attitude from treating the border as a line to be crossed to understanding it as a culturally diverse, pluralist, inhabited ‘two-chambered heartland’ (2017: 132). Gloria Anzaldúa encapsulates this complex relationship between border and the borderland when she states: ‘A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’ (2012: 25, italics added). While the border functions as a technology of division meant to create order, it introduces entropy, or disorder, manifest in acts of violence that continue to haunt Northern Ireland and the borderland (see McKay 2008). The border in Ireland informed the development of communities living in the region during the twentieth century, as it became increasingly fortified and inhabitants sought out ways to cope with restrictions. The border created a partition in Ireland and the borderland became a site of political activities and antagonistic violence,

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which worsened with the onset of the Troubles in 1969. The Troubles refers to the three decades of armed military and paramilitary conflict in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1998 (see Deane in this volume). Reece Jones (2017) argues that borders are not just instigators of visible violence and acts of force, which have been presented in the Irish borderland through the actions of paramilitaries and the British military, but are also sites of structural violence as demarcations of national territory. During the 1990s attempts to cultivate peace in Northern Ireland gained traction. In 1994 the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire that facilitated peace talks, leading to the signing of the Good Friday (or Belfast) Agreement in 1998. From this time and up through the twenty-first century, the borderland has undergone vast campaigns of de-fortification, including the removal of military checkpoints and surveillance posts, with re-integration initiatives having strong financial support from the European Union (see McCall and O’Dowd 2008; Wright 2018). Despite the current dearth of material signifiers of the border as a barrier between nations – such as watchtowers, customs posts and signs – the borderland continues to exist as a tangible, experiential space. Economic integration and cooperation have been strong with the introduction of the EU common market, but differences persist between politics, administration and constitution of the two nations (Coakley and O’Dowd 2007). As a result, the border in the early twenty-first century has a minimal physical presence, though still exists as a tertiary retention of Ireland’s two-chambered heartland, preserving the past in the present. Moreover, the border is more than a cartographic feature, a national boundary preventing or enabling movement, but consists of externalized memories as a mapping technology. There have been various activities at local, national and international levels to facilitate a process of peace. Although some scholars, including Greg McLaughlin and Stephen Baker (2010), have argued that such a process takes on the qualities of propaganda in hasty attempts to invigorate the Northern Irish economy, there remain lingering impacts of trauma from decades of conflict. Art historian Declan Long argues that ‘many facts about the painful past remain undiscovered or undeclared’ (2017: 3). These spectres are manifest in the work of Northern Irish artists, including Willie Doherty, cultivating what Long refers to as an aesthetic of a ‘ghost-haunted land’ that is caught in the anxious present, between a troubled past and an uncertain future, positioned between difficulties and identities determined by local conditions and the pressures and possibilities of increasingly evident global forces’ resulting in art that ‘is not sure of its place in the world’. (Long 2017: 5)

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Such artworks invite aesthetic experiences that function as what Stiegler (2018) refers to as neganthropic gestures, which are a means of countering the entropy of the border.

Border diffractions Willie Doherty has created many artworks in relation to the border in Ireland and borderland using lens-based media. Starting in the 1980s, not only his practice recasts physical borders in novel perspectives, but he plays with the political, social, cultural and ideological borders that fuelled the antagonisms of the Troubles. His 1988 photograph The Other Side (see Plate 17) explicitly engages with the generalized, bifurcated nature of the Troubles’ conflict, which had been perpetuated by the media and state institutions (Linehan 1999). Specifically, North is divided from South, Loyalist divided from Nationalist and Protestant divided from Catholic. Such generalizations eradicate the nuances of the lived experiences of the Troubles. The photograph, which appears to be a sloping barren hill juxtaposed to a settled urban area, features a shot of the river Foyle that divides the Northern Irish city Derry. The text ‘WEST IS SOUTH’ overlays the portion of the image conveying urban development to the left, while the text ‘EAST IS NORTH’ overlays the land to the right. The phrase ‘THE OTHER SIDE’ is placed at the bottom of the image. The directional specifications refer to how the west bank of the Foyle is primarily inhabited by Catholics while the east bank is primarily inhabited by Protestants. What at first appears to be a clear description of Derry geography is complicated by the use of the term ‘other’. Presented in the centre of the image, it is not evident what side is being referred to as ‘other’, indicating that its reference is to be determined by the viewer. Once this quality is acknowledged, the viewer’s subject position is destabilized. More than just a landscape image, this photograph is a tertiary retention. As a photograph, it is a material image-object that captures and conveys a scene in a specific moment. It also mediates the relationship between perception and retention, impacting how people engage with and understand Derry. Not only is it a borderland city, but its urban environment is demarcated through further borders between sections inhabited by Catholics and Protestants. Through the slippage of subject position where geography is correlated with political and social affiliation, Doherty points to the limits of the border as a means of division, highlighting the complexity and ambiguity of the borderland that it creates. The

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slippage of subject position challenges the bifurcated nature of the Troubles as a conflict simply between Nationalists and Loyalists, which was perpetuated by mass media discourse and government propaganda (Fisher 2013; Linehan 1999). The interpretative frame of Doherty’s work has shifted after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Current ‘post-Conflict’ political discourse tends to ignore the traumatic implications of prolonged violence, meaning that these traumas have not been resolved. Doherty’s photographs remind us of its persistence. As Declan Long (2017) explores in detail, Doherty’s practice has changed since that time as the artist accounts for the nuanced ways trauma infiltrates the present, but even photographs that he created during the time of regular violence have shifted in meaning. In 2012 Doherty presented the exhibition ‘LAPSE’ at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, which included black and white photographs shot between 1985 and 1993 that had not previously been exhibited. The photograph TO THE BORDER A Fork in the Road (1986) (see Plate 18) features a site near the border between Derry and Donegal. According to the Kerlin Gallery website, this site was near where the Real IRA executed and left member Ciaran Doherty in 2010 after he was suspected of being an informant. The photograph gains new significance through these future events, while also pointing to how dissident sectarian activity continues in the region even after the ceasefire and Good Friday Agreement. The photograph is the externalization of memory through technics, functioning as a flashback to the Troubles. As a tertiary retention, it invites critical engagement as it mediates perceptions and understandings of this period in the context of ‘post-Conflict’ Northern Ireland where violence persists. Moreover, many of Doherty’s images instigate a dynamic play of positionality and meaning. Long (2017) describes how Doherty undermines a single-point of seeing and, instead, his works encompass a phenomenological quality that forces the viewer to select a position by negotiating entangled, simultaneous and often-contradictory mixed messages. The result is a particular aesthetic experience in relation to the borderland that alludes to its political, economic, social and cultural complexities, pointing to the limits of representation. Aesthetic in this context is used, following Stiegler, ‘in its widest sense, where aisthēsis means sensory perception, and where the question of aesthetics is, therefore, that of feeling and sensibility in general’ (2014b: 1). As such, aesthetic sensations are entwined with political questions, as one of ‘feeling-together or sym-pathy’ (Stiegler 2014b: 1), with Doherty creating space for multiple, even contradictory, positionalities. The aesthetic experiences that Doherty’s photographs invite are

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neganthropic gestures, countering the entropic violence of the border, as they invite new ways of engaging with the borderland. As noted previously, Stiegler proposes the Neganthropocene as a means of exiting the ‘Anthropocene’, with the Anthropocene constituting an era of human-produced geological change as ‘Gestell is taken to its limits, where calculation becomes so hegemonic as to threaten the possibility of thinking itself ’ (Ross 2018: 14). The term ‘Anthropocene’, which was coined in 2000 by atmospheric chemist and Noble Prize winner Paul Crutzen (2002), encompasses more than just a description of the Earth’s geological state. As Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2017) elaborate, the influence of human activities on the Earth, traced by Crutzen to the patenting of the steam engine in 1784, incorporates technological, economic, political and philosophical implications as industrial development, massive urbanization, military conflict, population growth and consumer behaviours have involved unprecedented use of energy and resources. They state: ‘The traces of our urban, industrial, consumerist, chemical and nuclear age will remain for thousands or even millions of years in the geological archive of the planet’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017: 21). These processes are transforming the planet, making it uninhabitable for humans and other species while increasing the potential for conflict as resources become scarce. Stiegler responds to Bonneuil and Fressoz’s analysis of the Anthropocene, arguing that they are merely concluding that we must adapt to this current state in order to survive. He states that ‘the Anthropocene is intolerable, and that it is imperative that it be overcome – in order to lead to what we call the Neganthropocene’ (Stiegler 2019b: 99). The Neganthropocene encompasses more than surviving in a present state of conflict, but a shift in political thinking, working towards a habitable future. For instance, The Other Side, created in the midst of the Troubles’ violent conflict, invites opportunities for such a shift through the destabilization of subject position. As Doherty breaks down the bifurcated generalization of the conflict through the ambiguity of the term ‘other’, there is a cleavage in political certainties that perpetuated the Troubles’ violence, inviting a possibility of thinking differently. Doherty’s photographs do not adapt to conflict, but through his work he cultivates an aesthetic experience that involves alternative means of relating to others. This experience is neganthropic – alluding to a future beyond the immediate conflict. The neganthropic, according to Stiegler, is the means of countering disorder: ‘When we feel uneasy in front of a wasteland, a room in disarray, a depressed economic zone, what grips hold of us is anthropy. But it is a neganthropic promise that we feel when … we encounter traces of everydayness unlike any other’ (Stiegler 2019b: 27). Thus, the aesthetic experience evoked via

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Doherty’s photographs encompasses such neganthropic promises, in contrast to the seemingly insurmountable violent divides of the Troubles. Such aesthetic experiences result not from images as representations or reflections, but from what Karen Barad describes as diffractions. These diffractions are performative – constitutive of material phenomena that form patterns of difference as a result of interference (Barad 2007). That is, through the intervention of apparatuses, certain phenomena are included or excluded, meaning that these apparatuses are involved in dynamic processes of relationality that iteratively produce boundaries, as meaning is made through ‘entangled material practices of knowing and becoming’ (Barad 2007: 56). Therefore, art functions as a kind of diffraction apparatus that intervenes, as opposed to represents, while constituting particular phenomena, which, in the case of the aesthetic experiences evoked by Doherty’s photographs, are neganthropic. Doherty uses photography as a diffraction apparatus, inviting what Stiegler (2019b) describes as dreaming, or neganthropic gestures that enable a new condition of politics. In contrast to the entropy of the border, Doherty invites engagement with the complexity of the borderland in a neganthropic manner, introducing new systems of rationality and potential for political processes both during the Troubles and after. Doherty’s neganthropic diffractions of the Irish borderland emphasize its ambiguity as a geographic and imagined space. This imagined space constitutes what Richard Kearney (1997) calls the Fifth Province, which is a metaphor he developed with Mark Patrick Hederman that refers to an ancient myth of Ireland as a means of rethinking social and cultural pluralism connected with the Irish diaspora. Proposed as a complement to Ireland’s four provinces, the Fifth Province is not a physical location, but a position. Kearney states: ‘The fifth province can be imagined and reimagined; but it cannot be occupied. In the fifth province, it is always a question of thinking otherwise’ (1997: 100). Instead of treating the border as a site of irreconcilable, clear-cut binary distinctions, Doherty’s photographic works present the borderland as an imagined space of slippage – a fifth province at the national and geographic limits within the island that offers a different disposition for rethinking Ireland. The aesthetics of Doherty’s work, like Kearney’s fifth province, involves the co-existence of multiple perspectives and positionalities through this imagined space.

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‘Subjugated, yes, and obedient’3 As noted, the presence of the border in Ireland has changed since the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the borderland was demilitarized as part of the peace process. Even though at the time of the Brexit referendum vote, the activities of surveillance and violence that dominated this region for a good part of the twentieth century were not noticeable, the collective memories of such experiences remain, as Doherty’s work makes evident through the exhibition LAPSE. Despite the subtlety of its presence in the physical landscape, it still functions as a border between two nations. Thus, the regulation of the border in terms of trade and travel after the UK leaves the EU became a pertinent topic after the 2016 referendum vote. Digital technology has been posited as a way of facilitating interaction on the border, or what is referred to as the ‘smart border’ or ‘technological solution’. The technological solution draws upon existing forms of national border regulations, such as the borders between Sweden and Norway, Canada and the United States, and Australia and New Zealand (Karlsson 2017). However, none of the practices and tools in use are sufficient for the geographic, historic and political complexities that the Irish borderland encompasses. The logic behind the technological solution is to create a border without checkpoints in order to bypass concerns of what reinstating such barriers in Ireland would entail (based on its history), while also resolving its geographic particularities, such as the over 200 public crossings. For instance, Lars Karlsson, President of KGH Border Services, reports in a 2017 EU-sponsored study that a ‘Smart Border 2.0’ can be implemented by utilizing similar technological devices to the Swedish–Norway border for which he is responsible. He proposes using a range of electronic and digital technologies to facilitate this ‘smart’ border, including ePassports and enhanced driver’s licenses with biometric data, Automatic Plate Number Recognition, Smartphone apps and ‘non-intrusive inspection technologies’ in order to minimize stopping and requiring people to leave vehicles (Karlsson 2017: 25). This proposed solution is based on the presumption that non-visible means non-invasive. However, as Zuboff (2019) exhibits in her analysis and critique of surveillance capitalism, many of the recent digital technologies used to track and control user behaviour are non-visible, though have questionable ethical implications due to the severe undermining of user agency and freedom, including the erosion of data privacy. Instead of being non-invasive, these

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technologies function as disruption, or what Stiegler (2019b) describes as the loss of reason due to extreme computational rationalization, and in this case, the loss of political processes. Stiegler’s considerations of disruption critically engage with the celebration of the term by certain economic schools of thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. For instance, Milton Friedman (2002) and his Chicago School of Economics emphasize how the disruption of crisis can be an opportunity to implement extremist free market principles, constituting economic shock therapy (Klein 2007). Disruption is also used to describe scenarios of what Joseph Schumpeter (2006) referred to as ‘creative destruction’, or when innovation destabilizes sectors of the economy and society. The voids affiliated with these disruptions are treated as opportunities for short-term investment, especially from libertarian economic factions, hence the popularity of the term in marketing and entrepreneurial circles. Stiegler asserts the use of the term ‘disruption’, popularized by marketing, as ‘the very thing that has given rise to the systemic infidelity characteristic of consumer capitalism and to its consequent immense problems’ (2018: 64). The outcome of such disruptions may have increased profits for certain entrepreneurs, but they have also increased social instability and precarity for many others (see Berardi 2011; Wark 2019). The massive accumulation of short-term profits emerges from moving ‘“disrupted” sectors outside the law’ through the ‘creation of legal and theoretical vacuums’ (Stiegler 2018: 105). Zuboff (2019) describes how corporations such as Google and Facebook take advantage of the legal ambiguities surrounding their disruptive products and services, testing the limits of public acceptance until such discretions become normalized. Through this manipulation of legal uncertainty, disruptive innovations leverage the mechanisms of social order, restructuring these systems for maximum financial gain. Thus, it is becoming more apparent that the perceived opportunities associated with disruption are encompassing nefarious consequences. Political and economic systems are replaced by algorithmic infrastructures that monitor, predict and control behaviours at a totalizing scale, or what Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns (2013) refer to as algorithmic governmentality. Berns and Rouvroy use the phrase ‘algorithmic governmentality’ to ‘refer very broadly to a certain type of (a)normative or (a)political rationality founded on the automated collection, aggregation and analysis of big data so as to model, anticipate and pre-emptively affect possible behaviours’ (Berns and Rouvroy 2013: 10). In short, algorithmic governmentality is governance by computation.

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In terms of international borders, like the proposed technological solution in Ireland, algorithms are used as a means of regulating access and exclusion. Berns and Rouvroy emphasize how algorithmic governmentality, which governs based on relations and correlations between profiles developed through massive, realtime data collection in order to predict and modify actions, works through anticipation as it measures, constructs and replaces reality through computation. Data are stripped of meaning and used to inform a digital grasp of power that works through assigned profiles, as opposed to engaging with individual subjects, emphasizing objectivity. In turn, algorithmic governmentality means a suspension of politics. Such an approach to governance may have its appeal, particularly in contested zones such as the Irish borderland where social, cultural and political differences have fuelled violent conflict, and the replacement of human evaluation with algorithms could curtail entrenched prejudices that have thwarted peaceful engagement. However, Berns and Rouvroy (2013) question the democratic normativity that emerges through algorithmic governmentality, since these norms are developed through correlations that emerge from processing data, lacking subjectivity and ethos. At the same time, there is an asymmetry of knowledge and power. As Stiegler (2018) points out, through automation we become incapable of thinking political and economic processes. Individuals do not have access to the profiles that are being used to inform and modify their behaviours, which poses a danger to these individuals, as power works through assigned profiles. Berns and Rouvroy note there is a ‘possible decline of subjectifying reflexivity, and the reduction of opportunities to challenge forms of “knowledge” production based on datamining and profiling’ (2013: 10). As governmentality works towards a perfect mode of operation, opportunities for reflection and critique are curtailed as optimization is prioritized above all else. Stiegler (2019b) defines this process as extreme rationalization, short-circuiting political deliberation that is deemed sluggish and ineffective in favour of market calculations, meaning economic initiative gains precedence. As law is dissolved, vacuums are created, with ‘radical innovation’ rapidly filling these voids, which, according to Stiegler, cultivates new barbarianism. In addition, Stiegler argues that through computational systems, such as those that enable algorithmic governmentality, there is a cutting of inter- and transgenerational transmissions of knowledge. This lapse in transmissions of knowledge between generations functions as an amnesia for the past through the ‘absolute emptiness of thought’ (Stiegler 2019b: 15) that perpetuates post-

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political engagement. Chantal Mouffe (2005) defines the post-political as the denial of political difference and the replacement of it with universal ‘consensus’. Such ‘consensus’, for Mouffe, is fraught, since ‘instead of creating the conditions for a reconciled society’, antagonisms emerge and result in conflicts that lack the appropriate forms of expression that political differences enable (Mouffe 2005: 4). Within a context of extreme rationalization that the ‘technological solution’ encompasses, there is no possibility of thinking otherwise as Kearney (1997) proposes, foreclosing the possibility of the borderland being the imagined space of the Fifth Province, and no potential for dreaming (Stiegler 2019b). Stiegler argues that the liquidation of protention, affiliated with increased reliance on computational systems, is ‘eliminating the unhoped-for, essentially destroying every expectation of the unexpected, and thereby attenuating every form of desire’ (2019b: 20). Disruption is the algorithmic dissolution of social and political systems, which in turn make individuals and groups ‘both incapable and mad, while promoting their replacement by more controllable automatisms’ (Stiegler 2019b: 38), causing nihilistic outcomes that lead to selfdestruction. Individuals and groups lose possibilities of existence and reasons for living through algorithmic ordering and determination. The ‘technological solution’ for the border in Ireland provides the illusion that it can simply be resolved with the appropriate technology. However, the border in Ireland provokes political questions, and as Chantal Mouffe states, ‘Political questions are not mere technical issues to be solved by experts’ (2013: 3). Thus, using technology to resolve management of the border in Ireland cannot be considered a solution, since the border encompasses more than a passage point of goods and people; it is a borderland that exists as a geographic milieu at the cusp of two nations. Even though digital technology may minimize the presence of a border, making it appear non-invasive, it is still the introduction of a barrier that short-circuits political processes. One distinction between this proposed border and the military fortified border of the past is that the burden of implementation is shifted away from humans to algorithms. What in the past were recognizable figures of surveillance and control, such as the members of the British military in watchtowers, are now deferred to algorithmic interpretation and determination. Rendering the technology unnoticeable to users does not mean it is not a form of intervention. Instead the intervention takes place through the manipulation of behaviours that diffuses, not eradicates, mechanisms of control. Stiegler describes how digital tertiary retentions are disruptive in that the digital technical system takes control of sharing these retentions, extending what Gilles Deleuze

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and Félix Guattari refer to as ‘societies of control’ to ‘societies of hyper control’, though appearing to be ‘participatory, collaborative and contributory’ (Stiegler 2019b: 15, 33). Such a state provides illusions of stability as social cohesion is undermined through invasive ordering.

Quickening: The perspective of a ‘blow-in’ In 2017 I moved to Rassan in County Louth, Ireland, which is right next to the border with Armagh, Northern Ireland. During the Troubles, South Armagh earned a reputation for ‘rebelliousness and lawlessness’, captured in its nickname ‘bandit country’. In turn, this region came under heavy surveillance by British military forces, with the Troubles being ‘manifested especially viciously in South Armagh and, on occasion, in North Louth’ (Nash, Graham and Reid 2016: 78). Shortly after moving there, I began photographing the region as a means of developing a familiarity with our new home. In most of the images, it is difficult to differentiate between North and South in the composition of the landscape. I was also aware of another, non-cartographic border; my family and I were ‘blow-ins’ as we only recently arrived at the borderland. As a non-local and non-Irish person, I am removed to a degree from the history of the region and the Troubles. The resulting project, Quickening, includes over 200 photographs accompanied by a soundtrack composed of field recordings from the region by composer and sound artist David Stalling (see Plates 19 and 20). These are cycled through a Processing sketch, which is connected to an ultrasonic motion sensor that ‘glitches’ the images and soundtrack in response to movement. This sensor is a common tool for surveillance and security systems, repurposed as an interactive component in the installation. Depending on where a person or object is in relation to the motion sensor, the cycling of images stops, with pixels moving and transforming into visual and sonic noise. In the project’s installation, the sensor was placed in a location where it was not immediately noticeable to the viewer, but as the person attempted to negotiate a prime viewing position, their bodily presence interrupted and influenced the visual and sonic playback. The term ‘quickening’ in the title of the work refers to the movements of the foetus in early pregnancy (OED online n.d.). These sensations can only be experienced in the physical state of pregnancy; they are internal, haptic and phenomenological, making the pregnant person the communicator of experience. However, Iris Marion Young (2005) describes how, with the rise of antenatal

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technologies such as foetal Doppler and ultrasound, the pregnant person’s experience of quickening has been surpassed for technological communicators considered more authoritative. What is bypassed in this scenario is the maternal body in order to access the foetus. Quickening, in contrast, relies on the woman as the source of knowledge in regard to the pregnancy. Hence, quickening functions as an excellent metaphor for the borderland, which encompasses a phenomenological quality that is experienced affectively and cannot be simply reduced to a line on a map. As politicians negotiate the terms of Brexit, there has been little attention paid to the borderland by British politicians, with the border being considered only in terms of trade and national division (see Ferriter 2019). Brexit is felt through a quickening that is tied to remnants of the border’s past (erasure of military presence), the outcome of which has yet to manifest – like the early stages of pregnancy.4 There are various instances of the metaphor of pregnancy being used in relation to the border in Ireland and Brexit. For instance, in his recent book on the subject, Diarmaid Ferriter (2019) titles the chapter on the initial formation of the border ‘The Long Gestation’. In the article ‘Dreaming the Magic: Belfast, Brexit, Bordering and Beyond’, Daniel Jewesbury describes conservative parties’ accelerationist rush to push Brexit through as follows: ‘It is the right who today are impatient with History, anxious to bring forward their tryst with destiny, even if it must be from its mother’s womb untimely ripped (nobody expects the poor mother to survive)’ (2018: 737). In both instances, emphasis is placed on the outcome of the metaphoric pregnancy. In contrast, Quickening introduces a pregnant pause – a chance to dwell within the state of uncertainty as an aesthetic experience. My aim in Quickening is to explore a place while pointing to the limitations of familiarization through image and sonic distortion, constituting an imagined space of the borderland as Kearney’s Fifth Province, while engaging with my experiences of being an American in Ireland as opposed to the Irish diaspora. This Fifth Province becomes a space for dreaming. As noted, Stiegler (2019b) argues dreaming is essential for countering the nihilistic madness of disruption, which in this case is the proposed disruption of the technological solution for the border. Art enables dreaming through poiēsis – poetic logic that sits beyond computational ordering and extreme rationalization. Philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes how poetry is the ‘excess of the field of signification’ (2018: 9). Here poetry is not restricted to the literary genre but encompasses art generally, as created through poiēsis. In Zuboff ’s (2019) analysis of surveillance capitalism, the standing-reserve of Gestell encompasses our behavioural surplus, meaning

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that our bodies, labour and future actions are subject to control. In contrast, poiēsis exceeds such entrapment, and for Berardi, it is our means of escape through its ambiguousness, where ‘excessiveness is the condition of revelation, of emancipation from established meaning and of the disclosure of an unseen horizon of signification: the possible’ (2018: 20). Through poiēsis, artworks enable aesthetic experiences that function as neganthropic gestures, countering the disarray of the border. That is, through aesthetics, art and knowledge enable a novel means of taking care of the collective milieu of the borderland emerging from a shared past and present towards an uncertain future. The cultivation of neganthropy means that uncertainty does not need to be a continuation of the current trajectory of anthropic madness.

Conclusion While disruption destroys the faculty of dreaming, which Stiegler argues is leading to madness, art as poiēsis reintroduces it through its excessiveness, ambiguity and nuance. In particular, art can break the habits of mind and behaviour that have formed and are informed through the extreme rationalization of disruption, such as algorithmic governmentality. While the border in Ireland was devised as a tertiary retention to order territory, it introduced entropy. The political, social and cultural history of the Irish borderland encompasses complex relations of antagonism and co-becoming that are both part of and distinctive from broader Anglo-Irish entanglements. Willie Doherty’s photographs invite aesthetic engagement with these complexities, destabilizing presumptions through his poetic logic. His diffractions broke from the propagated simplistic binary antagonism perpetuated during the Troubles, while also cracking the veneer of the post-Conflict peace. My project Quickening is situated in the angst of the Brexit referendum vote as an exploration of the borderland from a foreign perspective, where digital technologies of surveillance are repurposed in order to interrupt the seamless presentation of its image. These artworks invite aesthetic experiences that function as neganthropic gestures. What are proposed are not political solutions, but possibilities to engage critically with political processes that are rendered inaccessible through disruption and algorithmic governmentality, offering a potential future beyond the madness of the Anthropocene.

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Notes 1 2

3

4

Specifically, my perspective as an American (non-Irish, non-British and non-EU citizen) who immigrated to Ireland in 2013 and moved to the borderland in 2017. This phrase is in reference to Margaret Thatcher’s description of border, as reported by her private Secretary Sir Charles Powell: ‘she thought that if we had a straight line border, not one with all those kinks and wiggles in it, it would be easier to defend’ (as quoted in Ferriter 2019: 92). This line refers to Seamus Heaney’s poem, ‘From the Frontier of Writing’, which is about crossing a military border checkpoint, originally published in 1987 (Heaney 2010). In addition, the reference to pregnancy also acknowledges my embodied state when creating the work, as I was pregnant with my second child.

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Mischievous Hermes: Digital Hermeneutics and Stiegler’s Therapeutics Noel Fitzpatrick

Introduction This chapter sets out to define the concept of digital hermeneutics; it will do so first, by building on the understanding of hermeneutics as primarily the interpretation of the self (Paul Ricoeur) and second, by building on hermeneutics as a process of deliberation or conflict of interpretation (Bernard Stiegler). It is the combination of interpretation of the self and the conflict of interpretation which underpins digital hermeneutics. For Ricoeur, hermeneutics will be considered within his overall philosophical anthropology, where he has argued that it is through the detour of signs and symbols that we come to understand ourselves. For Stiegler, hermeneutics will be part of the necessary deliberative process needed for reasoning to take place. For him, hermeneutics is part of the therapeutics which are what he calls neganthropic – the fourth interpretation of entropy (see the interview in this volume, p. xxii). In this sense, this chapter could be conceived of as a philosophical workshop if we understand philosophy after Deleuze to be the construction of concepts; digital hermeneutics is pointing to a problem through the concept. In addition, it could be argued that, although hermeneutics is a reflexive process of self-understanding (Heidegger’s Dasein) and understanding of the other (Derrida’s deconstruction), it can also be ethical (late Paul Ricoeur). This chapter will also argue that hermeneutics can be understood

This book chapter is based on the research undertaken in the project, Real Smart Cities, a MSCA RISE grant number 777707.

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as a technology, as a form of revelation of the structure, thereby unsettling meaning and enabling conflicts of interpretation. Hermeneutics as technology can be dated back as far as Schleiermacher, but with the development of forms of revelation of structure through digital technologies a new form of hermeneutics is required: digital hermeneutics. The premise of this technical mediation is organological, it is psychic, collective and technical; digital hermeneutics includes these three aspects. The concept of digital hermeneutics that we are endeavouring to expose here is distinct from that of other forms of digital hermeneutics, such as of Alberto Romero (2019), where the pharmacological aspects of the digital technologies are not taken into account. In our case digital hermeneutics will include the technological processes through which there can be a multiplication of meanings and, therefore, an unsettling of meaning. It will be argued that it is through the unsettling of meaning that critique and reason can take place. Digital hermeneutics will be, therefore, unsettling more in line with Hermes the mischievous lovable rogue of the pre-homeric tradition, rather than the Hermes of decipherment of meaning – the winged messenger of Zeus to the mortals from Homer. The forging of the concept of digital hermeneutics will, therefore, build on the analysis of interpretation given by Paul Ricoeur and on the role of deliberation given to the hermeneutics of the web in the work of Bernard Stiegler.

Aesthetics and traditional hermeneutics Traditionally, hermeneutics has been associated with textual interpretation and the field of aesthetics has been absent, to a large extent, from the approach to hermeneutics as a form of exegesis or theory of interpretation. The traditional conceptualization of hermeneutics has been solely related to the interpretation of texts, and texts are here understood to be placeholders of intentionality of the writer. The history of hermeneutics has been long associated with the German romantic tradition of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, where the essentialization of the subject as the holder of meaning is very predominant. This is, of course, particularly the case in relation to Schleiermacher where hermeneutics becomes the act of unveiling intentionality of the author, ‘to understand an author as well as and even better than he understood himself ’ (Schleiermacher 1959: 56). As Paul Ricoeur argues, this romantic understanding of hermeneutics within the neo-Kantian frame is also accompanied by a critical aspect. This critical

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aspect of hermeneutics is present within Schleiermacher’s analysis; the critic is present within his famous expression that ‘there is hermeneutics where there is misunderstanding’.1 The ability to struggle against misunderstanding is the critical aspect to hermeneutics. Hermeneutics for Schleiermacher is both romantic and critical, the discernment of sense of hermeneutics has become a highly important aspect in contemporary society where sense and nonsense are difficult to determine in an area where post-truth reigns. However, there is another aspect to Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics which is often left out in appraisals of his understanding of hermeneutics and one which, it could be argued, is present in the very notion of digital hermeneutics, which is that of technology. The romantic or psychological aspect of hermeneutics is linked to a further distinction in understanding culture, that of grammatical interpretation and technical interpretation. The grammatical is related to culture and the technical interpretation is related to singularity, the genius of the individual writer. Singularity, it could be argued, is extended to other forms of aesthetic gesture or what Bernard Stiegler has called the neganthropic (gesture);2 aesthetics is that which can resist the anthropic. The tension, therefore, present between the moments of interpretation for Schleiermacher, the tension between the grammatical or the generalizable and the technical or singularity, remains within Stiegler’s analysis. As Schleiermacher points out, we cannot carry out both interpretations at once: to consider the commonality and the singular at the same time. The second mode of interpretation is, according to Schleiermacher, the proper of hermeneutics. As Paul Ricoeur points out: The second interpretation is called ‘technical’, undoubtedly due to the very project of a Kunstlehre, a ‘technology’. The proper task of hermeneutics is accomplished in this second interpretation. (Ricoeur 1981: 47)

However, it is with the advent of what is sometimes referred to as the French Theory and forms of misreading of the deconstruction that the text begins to take a central role. The conceptualization of the text as a placeholder of intentionality of the author is radically undermined and called into question. Nonetheless, this is an oversimplification of the textual turn or the linguistic turn of the 1960s. Within the work of Derrida, Stiegler and (it could be argued) Ricoeur, the problematic of aesthetics is posed through the concept of the pharmakon from its very origin. Aesthetics here is understood as both an expanded understanding of aesthesis, the sharing of the sensible

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as the process of becoming human, as forms of exosomatic inscriptions in the world. The overlap is, hence, between the understanding of a cultural philosophical anthropology and the question of the trace, the supplement as inscription. The shift from the early phenomenological enquiries of Husserl to the hermeneutic phenomenology of the later Heidegger and Ricoeur occurs as a consequence of the failure of the phenomenological endeavour. For Ricoeur, in particular, his work can be understood as a philosophical anthropology where the signs, symbols and texts of mankind call upon us to interpret, and to interpret them is to interpret ourselves. For Ricoeur, hermeneutics is primarily a reflective process; to think is to think about oneself in relation to the other (Ricoeur 1992). These signs, symbols and texts are the processes of becoming human, the forms of inscription in or on the world. Hermeneutics, therefore, is generalizable as a form of cultural anthropology where the aesthetic gesture is taken as a form of inscription/ tertiary retention and it is to this question of inscription or tertiary retention which is kernel to aesthetics and by extension to hermeneutics. However, it is important to point out what is at stake; for Stiegler, the concern is to give tertiary retention its polysemantic thickness, its hypomnesic reflections and protensions. If it is a question of re-establishing a genuine process of transindividuation with reticulated digital tertiary retentions, and of establishing a digital age of psychic and collective individuation, then the challenge is to generate tertiary retentions with all the polysemic and plurivocal thickness of which the hypomnesic trace is capable, reflecting the hermeneutic play of the improbable and of singularity that pertains to the protentions woven between psychic and collective retentions. (Stiegler 2016: 141)

It is, on the one hand, the thickness which is lost through digital technologies and, on the other, the spiritual and collective projections into the future which are curtailed. The polysemantic thickness is akin to the plurality of possible meanings or, more precisely, the possibility of generating new meanings. The condition of the possibility of new meaning (see H. P. Grice)3 is the grounds of interlocution and new meaning-making: the creation of new idioms, new idiosyncrasies. In order to recover the polysemantic thickness, new forms of mechanisms are required, new frameworks of individual and collective interpretation are needed. This is what Bernard Stiegler refers to as the ‘Hermeneutic Web’, but which I am referring to as ‘Digital Hermeneutics’– a

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concept grounded in the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. However, in order to do this, it is first necessary to revisit the question of the trace or the inscription. The pharmacological aspect of the trace, of the inscription, is present in the Phaedrus, where inscription, trace and grapheme refer to both image and text. It is not necessary here to rehearse the Derridean analysis of the trace, suffice it to say that the major philosophical advancement by Bernard Stiegler is to point to the trace as a form of tertiary retention. The ability of the pharmakon to function is linked to its ability to act as placeholder; once one says placeholder, memory is invoked (see Introduction to Part 1). Hence, the distinction that Stiegler makes between forms of secondary retention and tertiary retention is accentuated by the development of specific forms of technologies which act as place holders of memory. Digital technologies which are the basis for advanced twenty-firstcentury societies are built on grounded upon forms of tertiary retentions. The toxic aspect of the pharmakon comes to the fore primarily through modes of extraction of desire and of value (see Introduction to Part 2). The monetization of the trace or of the inscription has led to the development of the largest concentration of wealth and of the biggest companies on the globe which are Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. The industrialization of the inscription has promoted the trace to a new level, where any type of trace (intentional or unintended) – GPS, mobile phone, internet search, social media, shopping etc. – has a monetary value. It is this monetization of inscription which has resulted in the impoverishment of interpretation, a hermeneutic poverty which is akin to what Bernard Stiegler has called ‘Symbolic Misery’. It is with the publication of Memory, History, Forgetting in 2002 that Paul Ricoeur returns to the question of inscription and poses the question whether history itself should be understood as a pharmakon. In Ricoeur’s analysis of history as pharmakon, he points out that once we pass from the imprint, the metaphor of the wax imprint as the placeholder of memory, it is not surprising that inscription (in the narrative about the birth of writing in the Phaedrus) refers to both painting and writing. Imprinting and writing are various forms of inscription. Nevertheless, what is of import in Ricoeur’s analysis, apart from the question of whether history itself is a form of pharmakon, is the question of inscription in general. As Ricoeur states: The narrative continues: writing is compared to painting (zōgraphia) whose works present themselves ‘as if they were alive [hōs zōnta]’. We ought not to be

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surprised by this comparison. It imposed itself during our discussion about the imprint on the wax. In effect, we passed from the metaphor of imprinting to that of writing, another variety of inscription. Therefore it is really inscription in the generality of its significance that is at issue. But it remains that the kinship with painting is perceived as disturbing (deinon strange). (Ricoeur 2009: 142)

The issue of generality of inscription is, indeed, as Ricoeur points out of great significance. It is by posing all forms of inscription within the framework of tertiary retention that we are capable of including all data, data such as the quantification of the self through the development of measurability and calculation built on the traces, the crumbs, left across the internet. The difficulty is the distance between the statistical double, which is used for normative predictive modelling, and the ethical practice of the self (Fitzpatrick 2021). The new forms of inscription have led to the ability to abstract from the individual, to calculate the profile of the individual and for that to be bought and sold as a product. This short-circuiting of the individual by means of their traces has ethical and epistemological consequences. The ethical issues of the origins of traces are epistemological, what can be known about me and how I come to know myself through the very traces themselves which are generated, enticed from me by my opting into the services they provide. The ability to opt in or to opt out as a matter of choice is certainly an issue which is becoming an ethical one, as there is no longer any real option to opt out.

Stiegler and hermeneutics The question of definition of terms, definitions of meaning and debates over interpretation is at the heart of any discussion of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics as process of revelation of meaning and structure requires being radically updated as the technologies of mediating and understanding the world and the self change rapidly. Part of the development of Stiegler’s philosophy has been a focus on the organological and pharmacological analysis of the impacts of technologies on our reasoning and understanding. It could be argued that the questions of interpretation and reason have changed with the development of forms of reticular technologies, which impact on the way in which thinking is articulated through processes of inscription in the world. Digital technologies enable new forms of inscription and new forms of attention (Yves Citton 2017). Indeed, the question of attention and deliberative processes are central to Stiegler’s conceptualization of

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therapeutics, therapeutics as a positive pharmacological potential of technology and, more radically recently, his conceptualization of negentropy or neganthropy (Fitzpatrick 2019). From physics, biology and information theory entropy has a long history of conflicts of interpretation and Stiegler argues, through the work of Maël Montévil and Giuseppe Longo, that, instead of using the term ‘negentropy’, it is more correct to use the term ‘anti-entropy’. Then, by extension, entropy which is particular to human (Anthropos) activity could be translated into the idiom of Anthropic, and hence negative neganthropic (see the interview with Bernard Stiegler in this volume). Indeed, there is a relation between aesthetics (here understood as aesthetics objects in the world) and entropy; the aesthetic object is the place where the entropic processes can be counteracted, which, for example, by contingency. In his more recent work, there is more developed articulation of the question of exosomatization (through the work of Alfred Lotka and Leroi-Gourhan), these artefactual objects are also forms of exosomatization and as aesthetic objects they come into being as modes of mediation in the world. However, aesthetic objects are not the same; it could be argued that by referring to exosomatic objects that all objects are the same, a flattening out of the aesthetic. For example, every object is designed, and every object has an organology, but not all objects are the same form, there is an inherent distinction between religious iconography and modern art (Art for Arts sake). In the work of Bernard Stiegler, the question of defining hermeneutics is given very little attention; indeed, it could be argued that within his work hermeneutics is never fully explicated. What is meant by hermeneutics is often implied, it is portrayed as a mode of self-reflexivity and as a means of multiplication of meaning. To quote Stiegler, hermeneutics recovers the ‘polysemantic and plurivocal thinkness’ (2016: 141) of language as a trace. Even though Stiegler has referred explicitly to the hermeneutic web (Stiegler 2016: 262), what is meant by hermeneutics is never fully explained. We can infer, for Stiegler, that hermeneutics is understood as the possibility of creating new meanings, new bifurcations (after his reading of Whitehead). For Stiegler, bifurcations also enable the development of knowledge, for example, when referring to the software developed by l’Institut de recherche et innovation: Ligne de Temps. He states: Such a scheme has the object of tracibility of the noetic processes revealing both the consensus and the dissensus, which are the place of controversies and bifurcations enabling the transformation and evolution of knowledge.4 (Stiegler et al. 2020: xx)

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These bifurcations can counteract the short circuiting of processes of becoming human, or individuating, that take place through tertiary retention and digital devices. Hermeneutics and therapeutics, as positive pharmacological processes (see Introduction to Part 2), are closely aligned within Stiegler’s philosophical system. Stiegler refers to hermeneutics of the web (2016: 262) as a positive pharmacology, a possible remedy to some of the noxious effects of the pharmakon. The reason for not expounding explicitly on definitions of hermeneutics, it could be argued, is because what is at stake for Bernard Stiegler is something far more fundamental than a debate about hermeneutics as a methodology of interpretation or a theory of interpretation; what is at stake is the very function of reason itself. In contrast to the work of Paul Ricoeur where the question of hermeneutics is kernel to his understanding of what it means to be human, hermeneutics is the cornerstone of Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology. In Ricoeur’s work, which spans sixty years, the question of hermeneutics remains central (Fitzpatrick 2020b). For Stiegler, hermeneutics of the web is the space where reflection can be re-built and where the Anthropocence can be overcome; the Anthropocene is here understood as the essentially human activity which has destroyed the planet and our ability to reason, our ability to attend. Digital hermeneutics becomes the means to counter the Anthropocene, it is the site of the condition of possibility of what he has termed the Neganthropocene. Hence, the question of hermeneutics is no longer a question of textual interpretation or deciphering authorial intention. For digital hermeneutics, the question is: How can reflection take place, reflection about the world and about the self, when digital devices have interrupted the very process of reflection itself? This necessitates a shift away from what has been called the semantic web towards the hermeneutic web (digital hermeneutics). The semantic web, inasmuch as it enables the automated pretreatment of the informational hyper-material that digital tertiary retentions constitute, cannot in any case produce knowledge. Knowledge is always bifurcating knowledge. (Stiegler 2016: 147)

The questions shift towards how this reduction of reason to calculation can be counteracted and how reason and critique can be restored in the age of algorithmic domination. In the introduction to the Automatic Society (2016), Stiegler links the question of digital hermeneutics to the very architecture of the web itself. Digital hermeneutics could be a means to create deliberation and disputes, this could

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in turn contribute to the neganthropic possibilities of new types of work. Digital hermeneutics will enable new types of work, through possibilities of reason and reflection which lie beyond the automated processes. The following quotation demonstrates how Stiegler links the question of work to reason and to digital hermeneutics: We fully share this analysis: the goal of this work is to contribute to establishing the conditions of such a politics through its two volumes on the neganthropic future of work and of knowledge as the conditions of entry into the Neganthropocene – where this is also a matter of redesigning the digital architecture and in particular, the digital architecture of the web, with the goal of creating a digital hermeneutics that gives to controversies and conflicts of interpretation their negentropic value, and constitutes on this basis an economy of work and knowledge founded on intermittence, for which the model must be the French system designed to support those occasional workers in the entertainments industry called ‘intermittents du spectacle’. (Stiegler 2016: 16)

The goal, therefore, of digital hermeneutics is to give controversy and conflicts of interpretation a value, a counter entropic value. This is also reminiscent of Paul Ricoeur’s The Conflict of Interpretation: Essay in Hermeneutics (1974), in which he portrays interpretation as a series of conflicts, conflicts with a hermeneutics of suspicion – with psychoanalysis, structuralism and Marxism – a never-ending open-ended process. Elsewhere, for example, in the Neganthropocene (2018) Stiegler calls for a re-evaluation of the hermeneutic question in a reticulated society: Such are the stakes of the Anthropocene, and hence of ecology as an organology of reason and a pharmacology of spirit, calling for an urgent re-evaluation of the hermeneutic question in reticular society – a re-evaluation in the service of what I call the Neganthropocene, understood from the perspective of a neganthropology. (Stiegler 2018: 75)

However, the difficulty is to determine how this re-evaluation would take place and through what means the entropic, anthropic processes of the Anthropocene can be counteracted concretely through digital hermeneutics. For Stiegler, optimistically, the renewing of interpretation can take place through a renewal of commentary, disputation and a critical space as a dynamic of individuation. This reflects an optimism, on Stiegler’s behalf, to reconnect with what was the Republic of Letters and with the critical space that writing enables: But, on the other hand, the becoming-screen of writing also constitutes a chance, an opportunity to renew commentary, to reconnect with the ‘gloss’, through

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a completely rethought hermeneutics, a chance to renew and reconnect with that which, in the past, made the Republic of Letters possible, and that could therefore constitute a new critical space, by making disputation the dynamic principle of its individuation. (Stiegler 2018: 173)

What is at stake is quite radical: the reharnessing of digital devices for a new hermeneutic epoch (Stiegler 2018: 174). For Stiegler, this question dates back to an exhibition he co-curated with Paul Virilo in the Centre Pompidou in 1987 where the screen and writing were portrayed as a promise of new-meaning generation, a promise of a new hermeneutics. The promise of computer technologies to generate new thought processes reflected the optimism associated with early web technologies (see, for example, Les Immatériaux by Jean-François Lyotard analysed by Doyle in this volume). We (Ars Industrialis) argue that, in order to live with decency and dignity among screens today, to live a good life, a vita activa, or indeed to live by suffering through screens what is produced by ‘algorithmic governmentality’, requires holding on to the promise of a new hermeneutic epoch borne by these screens, which operate on a network, and which have become the unavoidable interfaces of the data economy, but which, for the moment, are more agents of entropy than elements of a hermeneutics – that is, of what I earlier spelled, dysorthographically, as neganthropy. (Stiegler 2018: 174)

For digital hermeneutics, the digital devices need to move beyond dysorthography to become hermeneutic devices, devices which enable the critical space of reflection and self-reflection. Indeed, there have been a number of recent interventions with the research group IRI at the Centre Pompidou to develop such technologies of annotation and collaborative categorization.5 The issue is that the digital devices (search engines, smart phones, social media) themselves have built in layers of interpretation and presuppositions, for example language itself is conceived of as something which can be simulated. These have become automatized with the help of computational machine learning algorithms. The presuppositions are embedded within the technologies themselves, from binary machine coding to protocols and programming languages. The challenge is, therefore, to dis-automatize these automated modes (Stiegler 2018: 178); this will be achieved through the hermeneutic web, which we shall return to later. However, within the work of Bernard Stiegler, the deliberative processes are unsettling meaning and unveiling the presuppositions; there is a mischievous rogue Hermes needed here.

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The presuppositions need to be unveiled. To do so we need a Hermes who disturbs and disrupts the status of presuppositions and interpretation, to revisit or to unveil the presuppositions, presumptions of the sedimented understandings (Fitzpatrick and Kelleher 2018). Digital hermeneutics, therefore, needs to recognize the macroscopic possibilities of corpus linguistics and natural language processing but also that the locality of the idiom is necessary. The microscopic reading of the individual instance of the idiom is essential for the generation of new meanings, new bifurcations. However, at a micro-level, the most obvious examples of this possible therapeutics can be seen in relation to the use of natural language processing technologies for text interpretation and the use of text analytics along text generation technologies.6 The process of deliberation and annotation coming to prominence in modes of interaction with the text enables forms of reflection, producing bifurcations outside the standardization or optimization of language through computational means. Digital hermeneutics, therefore, through the disruption of sedimentation of meaning, enables new possible meaning generation, which is beyond the computational and algorithmic processes. It is in the introduction to The Automatic Society (2015) that Stiegler sets out clearly what is at stake in terms of a digital hermeneutics. As noted, he states that the goal of a digital hermeneutics will be a neganthropic (see Introduction to Part 3) future of knowledge, enabling controversies, deliberations, conflicts of interpretation. (Stiegler 2015a: 18). The proposition in the next section is, therefore, within the framework of Digital Studies, to propose digital hermeneutics as building on or updating the work of Paul Ricoeur and the work of Bernard Stiegler.7 Digital hermeneutics upholds fundamental characteristics of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology by firstly, being reflexive, a rejection of Husserlian idealism, secondly, as a detour through the ‘signs, texts and symbols’ of man and, thirdly, as an elaboration of a theory of text. In addition, digital hermeneutics, it could be argued, functions as a locality (Stiegler and Vignola 2020b), and by so doing will offer the condition of possibility of openness, new bifurcations, which can be considered as neganthropic. Therefore, digital hermeneutics enables a positive pharmacology.

Digital Studies and digital hermeneutics Digital hermeneutics, therefore, refers to the ability of digital technologies to enable a layering of multiplicity of interpretation, allowing for new readings

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to  emerge through different digital layering and, by doing so, unsettling sedimented or presupposed meanings. Within contemporary digital humanities there have been some interesting developments using machine learning technologies, in terms of technology-assisted interpretation; for example, micro and macro–readings (Moretti 2013) have become prominent with the advent of more computational methods of analysis of text as quantifiable data. Whilst these approaches could be considered part of the automated processes of digital textual interpretation, it could be argued that, in order for there to be a hermeneutic process, they need to be supplemented by human interventions, human interpretation, not simply putting the human back in the loop but foregrounding the human process of reason. For Stiegler, whilst the automatization of certain aspects of interpretation is, indeed, something to be taken on board, it is not in itself sufficient. And it always does so beyond the analysis of an understanding that has become fully automatizable and analytically automatic because it is grammatized by the ubiquitous programmable automaton that is the reticulated computer. (Stiegler 2016: 210)

The question of digital hermeneutics does not solely relate to the interpretation of literary texts by the use of automated processes, such as data mining and large corpi, it also relates to the development of all forms of interpretation aided by computational digital technologies. Each discipline, from nuclear physics to archaeology, is undergoing an epistemic shift because of these interpretative technologies; the question of digital hermeneutics, therefore, relates to all disciplines. The Digital Studies Network (DSN) is an initiative founded by Bernard Stiegler and a group of scholars in 2012. It sets out to give a theoretical framework to conceptualize the effects of digital technologies (both positive and negative) on questions of epistemology and aesthetics. Digital Studies, therefore, recognizes that every discipline has been affected by the development of digital technologies and the pharmacological aspect of digital technologies needs to be researched in relation to disciplinary knowledge construction; this is a new episteme. Today every academic discipline is affected by digital technologies, but we do not possess sufficient theoretical models to study how they influence knowledge, on an epistemological level (in the sense of Gaston Bachelard). We believe that this issue should be analyzed across all academic disciplines, each of which should maintain their differences whilst also recognizing

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common appointments, and hence the consequences of this at an epistemic level (in the sense of Michel Foucault). This idea is the basis of what we call ‘digital studies’. (digital-studies.org)

The objective of the DSN as distinct from digital humanities is the ambition to undertake a study and critique of the impact of digital technologies on epistemology (the construction of knowledge within disciplines) and on aesthetics (cultural production) (Fitzpatrick 2019). Digital Studies, therefore, is relevant to all disciplines and relevant to how disciplines themselves construct their epistemologies. The process of knowledge construction is for Stiegler (influenced by the work of Gilbert Simondon), the process of intergenerational collective individuation, and this process has been short-circuited by the advent of forms of tertiary retention. In Simondonian language the passage from psychic individuation to collective individuation has been affected by technical individuation. Digital Studies commences with the development of an organology (see O’Dwyer in this volume) of technological development and evolution and sets out to investigate how the psychic, collective and technological individuations have taken place. Secondly, the underpinning pharmacological conditions of the tertiary retention need to be explored; thirdly, a symptomatology (Vignola 2017) is required. The symptomatology allows the consideration of all kinds of social phenomena as symptoms (loss of individuation) reflecting states of force of digital technologies (p. 187). Taking the medical analogy further, Digital Studies diagnoses the symptoms, the disease affecting critical thinking, identifies their causes and sets out to remedy them by the invention of new modes of knowledge production. The invention of new modes of knowledge production emphasizes the positive pharmacological aspect, the therapeutic aspect which is underpinning the conceptualization of the positive aspects of digital hermeneutics. It is from this pharmacological perspective that Digital Studies sets out to understand and critique the impact of digital technologies on construction of knowledge within traditional disciplines such as literary studies, archaeology and urban design. The impact on cultural production can be seen through the growth of new forms of artistic production which incorporate technics and technologies from computer science, for example the use of data analysis, data mining and deep learning. The premise of technical mediation is organological, it is psychic, collective and technical. Therefore, to develop a critique of digital technology requires an attempt to give an organological

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account of the technology itself, or a symptomology of how it affects psychic individuation, collective individuation and technical individuation. Within this perspective the becoming human is based on the development of specific forms of mediation in the world through and by technical objects. Within this overarching analysis of Digital Studies in general, the process of interpretation is fundamental and requires the development of new modes of hermeneutics, new modes of interpretative frameworks (Stiegler 2015a). Digital hermeneutics concentrates on the impact of digital technologies on the exploration of modes of deliberation and interpretation which are text based. As Stiegler sets out in the introduction to The Automatic Society: Where this is also a matter of designing the digital architecture and in particular the digital architecture of the web, with the goal of creating a digital hermeneutics that gives to controversies and conflicts of interpretation their negentropic value. (Stiegler 2016: 18)

Digital hermeneutics enables a negentropic value, it enables a Hermes to unsettle meanings and to act as a disruption to the settlement of meaning. Hermeneutics is here understood as the deciphering of messages between messengers but proceeds through sedimented meaning which can be unsettled. In this sense that Hermes becomes a rogue (Caputo 2018), hermeneutics does not abolish all interpretation but enables a multiplication of meanings (Caputo 2018: 17). It could be argued that digital technologies have enabled an explosion of multiplication of meanings or interpretations through multiple levels, including the relation between text and image and text and speech. Digital hermeneutics, therefore, explores the use of interpretation at multiple levels. At the most basic level, the development of the internet and http protocols has seen an explosion of language exchanges; computational language models have been widely adopted across multiple layers of the hyper-computing age. The development of the computer and its modes of analysis have been accompanied at the most profound levels by the development of specific forms of language analysis and language technologies. These technologies have now become omnipresent, ubiquitous. At the same time, the development of modes of interpretation, enabled by specific language technologies, has led to the development of a form of linguistic capitalism (Kaplan 2014: 150), where words and sentences have become a currency of economic models. Kaplan refers to the economic value not of attention but of expression and it is this added value of human expression which Google can exploit economically by developing a

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subset of language which is more regular than natural language and, therefore, more easily exploitable economically (Kaplan 2014: 150). Words themselves are now modes of economic development and modes of exploitation. The human interaction with digital technologies is predominately language based, whether this be through word processing, emails, blogs, social media etc. The question of language is central to understanding how the psyche, collective and technical mediation (individuation) takes place. The relation between human expression and non-human expression becomes more complex when one considers that the artificial language generation is based upon models of language which are human-generated, what Kaplan refers to as primary and secondary resources, respectively (Kaplan 2014: 153). More recently, this phenomenon has become accentuated, like when there was a roll back on Google’s auto completion software, the concern being about how the auto-completion of text was effecting the search queries and, more importantly, where the influence of automatic text generation was seen to be effecting spelling (Kaplan 2014). Digital hermeneutics, therefore, critiques the limitations of the language models which underpin the majority of language technologies, which are widespread at the moment. The hermeneutic gesture of unveiling the presuppositions of interpretation is here extended to the unconcealment of the very inbuilt presuppositions of how natural language is conceived of computationally. The computational model of language can be dated back as far as the work of Alan Turing in the 1930s; however, it was after the Second World War that the development of specific forms of language model – which are no longer representations of the world but producers of worlds. Nonetheless, it is in the 1960s with the development of the promise of a universal language model (Chomsky) that the first computational models of language began to be developed, language as a finite system which can produce an infinite number of meanings. Therefore, firstly, the task of digital hermeneutics is to unveil the presuppositions and interpretations of the computational model of language that is based upon a lexical subset of language and ignores the socio-linguistic idiomatic possibility of language. To do this, systems must be built and implemented that are dedicated to the individual and collective interpretation of traces including by using automated systems that enable analytical transformations to be optimized, and by supplying new materials for synthetic activity. (Stiegler 2016: 141)

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The second, possible therapeutics, is the development of new modes of large corpus analysis, where the ability to detect specific patterns is made possible by the ability to analyse large data sets using recent developments in data science, neural networks and deep learning. However, in order to conceptualize what is meant by digital hermeneutics within the context of Digital Studies it is necessary to remind ourselves of a key aspect of Stiegler’s work which is at the foundation of digital hermeneutics: the question of memory or retention, what Stiegler refers to as tertiary retention.8 The forms of retention that are considered to be tertiary include writing; nonetheless, the generalized question of inscription is what it at stake. Inscription is taken as re-reading of the Derrida’s question of trace (Derrida 1981), inscription is taken for Ricoeur as all forms of ‘signs, texts and symbols’. The extension of digital tertiary retentions is to all forms of data traces, to the development of the data self or shadow self, or to any form of trace left on the internet through interactions with computational devices. However, as Stiegler points out, the risk is always the development of the toxic, addictive, negative aspects of the pharmakon and it is only through a process of knowledge creation that the negative aspects can be counteracted. The development of knowledge, critique and understanding are all characteristics of a more traditional historical conceptualization of hermeneutics. This will be developed in the concluding section of this chapter. However, before doing so, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the process of exsommatization of knowledge (which extends on the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Leroi-Gourhan), which according to Stiegler is an exteriorization or exsommatization of knowledge, also takes place in forms of hypomnesic tertiary retentions or digital technologies. With the process of proletarianization there is a loss of knowledge which is inherent to these processes of exteriorization. Another aspect to the loss of knowledge (theoretical, know-how and knowing how to live) is the advent of the Anthropocene, the link between the development of industrial capitalism and the development of tertiary hypomnesic retentions and the resulting crisis of the planet which is now beyond question. The therapeutic gesture is, therefore, an intrinsically educational one, where the loss of knowledge of the pharmacological nature of digital technologies is counteracted by other forms of knowledge construction that can be enabled by digital technologies. Digital hermeneutics sets out to offer new forms of interpretation which are beyond the premises of the predominant language models present in current machine

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learning technologies and natural language processing, and it attempts to offer alternative layering of interpretation. Hence, there is a profound educational gesture to enable the re-harnessing of technology, to enable the therapeutics. The positive re-harnessing, the therapeutics this chapter argues for, can take place through the development of layering of interpretation which can be afforded by the development of specific forms of digital technologies. These also enable a contributory research process whereby the rationalization of the production of knowledge within the university can be challenged by collaborative, interpretative processes of knowledge production.

Conclusion This chapter gives a brief overview of the history of hermeneutics, moving from traditional perspectives on hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, where the interpretation as technology is first mentioned, and turns to key elements of the hermeneutic phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur and then, finally, to scope out how the positive pharmacology could be enabled by the use of contemporary digital technologies as a form of digital hermeneutics. The role of the conflict of interpretation in the works of both Paul Ricoeur and Bernard Stiegler is predominant in their conceptualization of hermeneutics. Whilst there are clear differences between the philosophical anthropology of Paul Ricoeur, where the question of technology is surprisingly underdeveloped, and the neganthropology that Stiegler, in his most recent publication, has started to develop, there is a clear point of juncture. Derrida as a student of Ricoeur and Stiegler as a student of Derrida might be one way of envisaging the predominance of the question of trace, inscription and supplement. Indeed, the third volume of Que appelle-t-on Penser is subtitled Deconstruction and Destructiona and here Stiegler plans to deconstruct deconstruction. However, in conclusion, the other point of conjunction between Stiegler’s hermeneutics and Ricœur’s is the role given to conflict or, in Stiegler’s terms, deliberation. The digital hermeneutic is one where the role of human reason is brought back to centre stage, where the deliberative process is to be promoted and built into the technologies themselves. The role of conflict for Ricoeur can be considered at a macro-level between what he termed the hermeneutics of affirmation and the hermeneutics of suspicion – the hermeneutics of suspicion

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held the premise that the immediate surface meaning was to be suspected of concealing the secondary, whether that be in psychoanalysis, Structuralism or Marxism. At a micro-level it can be seen in terms of a theory of the text as the open-ended nature of interpretation. For Ricoeur, the process of interpretation is open-through the inevitable conflicts. The other point of convergence is in relation to the idiom and the metaphor; for both, the ability of language to create new meaning is a fundamental. Stiegler has also envisaged a new volume of Technics and Time (Vol 7) which will focus specifically on the question of the idiom. In this resurgence of the question of the idiom, idiolecte is also current to research in relation to locality (as the condition of possibility of openness). This is where the question of aesthetics comes to the fore; the poet is able to create the new idiom and it is through the localized idiom that the neganthropic can reveal itself. The artist, the poet, can create new art through contingencies, but which lie outside the standardization of language to competence-based computational models (see the interview with Stiegler in this volume). The pharmacological nature of digital tertiary retentional or protentional technologies is reflected in the move for automatization to disautomatization. It is the ability to reason which characterizes what cannot be automatized and, hence, calculated. The neganthropic within Stiegler’s thinking is an expansion of this insight into what the therapeutics could become as a digital hermeneutics, or a hermeneutics of the possible.

Notes 1 2

3 4

Cited in Ricoeur, ‘The task of hermeneutics’, in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p. 46. See the interview in this volume where Stiegler sets out his understanding of the fourth element of entropy, which he calls anthropy, and hence the negentropic and the neganthropic as that resists the anthropic. See Fitzpatrick (2020c), ‘Idiom, Data City and Locality’, in ‘Ethics and Politics’, special issue The Real Smart City. ‘Un tel dispositif a pour but de générer une traçabilité des processus noétiques en révélant à la fois des consensus et des dissensus, qui sont le lieu des controverses et des bifurcations permettant la transformation et l’évolution d’un savoir’ (trans. by the author) (Stiegler et al. 2020: 249–50).

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5 See Public Functionality Report on Digital Hermeneutics from the Real Smart Cities Project. www.realsms.eu. 6 The term digital hermeneutics refers to the ability of digital technologies to enable a layering of multiplicity of interpretation allowing for new readings to emerge through the different digital layering. Digital hermeneutics recognizes the macroscopic possibilities of corpus linguistics and natural language processing but recognizes the locality of the idiom as also necessary, the microscopic reading of the individual instance of the idiom. Hermeneutics in this sense would include the more mischievous sense of Hermes, which is different to the story of Hermes of the Homeric tradition that sees Hermes as guardian of the God of messages and messenger, but Hermes who disturbs and disrupts the status of interpretation, to revisit or to unveil the presuppositions and presumptions of the sedimented understandings. 7 Digital Studies, as distinguished from digital humanities, refers to the impact of digital technologies, reticular technologies on all disciplines and not just the humanities disciplines. 8 See Introduction to Part 1, and O’Dwyer and O’Hara in this volume.

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‘Je suis philosophe’1: A Personal Note to Bernard Stiegler I first came across the work of Bernard Stiegler in 2009 thanks to my son Oshinn who was studying at the Université Technologique de Compiègne. I was fascinated to come across an engineering school in France which had both philosophy and sociology as central pillars on all its programmes. In one way it was like discovering a burst of fresh air and a new way of philosophizing – philosophy as a public engagement with societal issues that included questions of technology and technology transfer to society. At the time in the Dublin Institute of Technology, I had been struggling to find a way of thinking through questions of aesthetics and technology. Bernard Stiegler was the first contemporary philosopher I came across who brought those aspects together. The expansion of an understanding of technics and technology to processes of becoming human, of becoming thinking beings (noetic souls), was and still is highly original. Bernard Stiegler was bringing to the fore questions of attention and memory and the impact of digital technologies. I was literally blown away by pharmakon.fr, his online school open to the public. It was an extraordinary teaching tool, but also a way of opening philosophy to the problematics of today – the problematics of attention, aesthetics and technologies. The questions of addiction and technology were beginning to come to the fore, and there was a need for the technophobia of the time to be tempered. I began to follow the Pharmakon seminars online and to appreciate Bernard as a teacher; he had a clear ability to capture people’s attention and to explicate complex issues clearly. The annual summer school in his country village of Épineuil also became legendary at this time: 2011, 2012 and 2013. In 2011 we started a new journal in critical theory in the Dublin School of Creative Arts Im|print and in the height of the banking crisis we had asked could we translate a section from Mécréance et Discrédit into English. The text itself was arduous but hugely stimulating in relation to the political and he wrote back to me promptly stating that he thought it was already being translated. In the meantime, I had become the Dean of GradCAM and was given a platform for the exploration of artistic research. As GradCAM was running a series of lecturers, I offered Bernard an open invitation, which we managed to arrange about a year later in December 2013.

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I met Bernard for the first time in December 2013 when he came to give a lecture for GradCAM on ‘image, text and language’ to a packed lecture theatre in Mountjoy Square. The week of the 18th December 2013 Ireland exited the banking bailout, two days before Bernard arrived in Dublin, and it was truly symbolic that he came to speak that week. I went to collect him at the airport, and as it was near Christmas time; there was the usual fuss at Dublin airport, with a range of choral singers welcoming mostly recent emigrants back home for the festivities. As we met, he smiled and asked if I had organized this singing welcome committee for him with a wry smile. We spent the afternoon together with some of the GradCAM PhD students. He was very generous with his time and the discussion was lively. He agreed to be interviewed by them and later the interview was published in the Im|print review. Afterwards as we took the short walk from the College to the Gresham hotel, he asked me what I was working on at the moment and I said: ‘him’. He thought that was amusing. We discussed Ricoeur, Derrida and pharmacology as we searched for a pharmacy to buy him ear plugs; he said that he had difficulty sleeping. I had mentioned to him a passage where Ricoeur also gives an analysis of the pharmakon and so our collaboration and friendship began. We discussed aesthetics and artistic research. At one point he touched me on the shoulder and said ‘je pense qu’on va faire des choses ensemble’ (I think we are going to do things together) and indeed we did. At the dinner later which had been organized with the French Embassy through the cultural attaché Hadrien LaRoche, we discovered that all three us had attended Jacques Derrida’s seminars in the early 1990s. Over the years I became a regular speaker at the annual conference Entretiens pour un Nouveau Monde Industriel at the Pompidou, and Bernard participated in the GradCAM events in Dublin: 2015 Digital Studies Seminar, 2018 EARN conference in Dublin, the biennale in Venice in 2017 and in 2019 The Archipelagic Thinking Conference in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He always made a point to mention GradCAM as a doctoral school when he introduced me at the various conferences and seminars. The question of aesthetics and Art was always at the centre of our discussions. Over the last three years the questions focused on how artistic research could also be considered as a form of contributory research and how we could reinvent Beuys’s project of social sculpture. In the collective project inter|nation the fact that it started out in the artistic context of the Work Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery in London was important, not just symbolically but gave an artistic context for what we were doing. This project then became the inter|nation which brought

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us to the United Nations on the 10th of January 2020. The event in Geneva was extraordinary from a number of perspectives: The group itself included Extinction Rebellion, Youth for Climate activists and a press conference itself. The overall reception to the memorandum of understanding was very positive. This in turn led to the development of the book which is also a collective miracle. The collective book Bifurquer: Il n’y pas d’alternative was published in July 2020, and is already published in Italian, Polish and forthcoming in English. We had recently returned to the question of Aesthetics and Digital Studies in an interview in May 2020. This was to compliment an interview we did in March 2018 and is to be published shortly in Digital Studies, Aesthetics and Bernard Stiegler. We had spoken about a volume of Technics and Time that would focus on the idiom and the Neganthropocene, and perhaps this is the direction I will take now to try to stand on my own two feet as a philosopher. We also worked together on the development of Digital Studies as on overarching project and within which we were successful in obtaining Marie-Curie funding. The Real Smart Cities (realsms.eu) project enabled us to explore the impact of digital technologies on the city (urban) and then later to expand the questions to include what we are now calling Ecologically Smart Territories. I was particularly pleased with our success in funding (PhD students and Staff) and my last conversation with him a week before he left us was about giving talks in Croatia and Arles at the end of August 2020. In relation to the latest Marie-Curie application (Networking Ecologically Smart Territories), he was anxious to know when we would find out if the project was funded. This project had been a struggle to pull together. Sara Baranzoni, Paolo Vignola, Vincent Puig and I had been working on the proposal for months and it was deeply embedded in the collective work of inter|nation and the Bifurquer book, but Bernard wanted to change tack two weeks before the final deadline and as a group we had to pull together and get it over the line. The NesT MSCA RISE was awarded funding at the beginning of September 2020 and we now have a new research platform to enable us to continue working together as a group. As part of our final conversation he was very keen to continue to work on doctoral education and wanted us to build further the international doctoral school that we had spoken about on numerous occasions, and this will be the next research project. I learnt about his untimely death in a technological muddle that he would have appreciated. I had been walking in the Black Valley in the mountains of

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County Kerry where there are black spots of phone and internet coverage. We had just completed a very long walk of about 20km and in the evening there was no phone or internet coverage in the house we were staying in. The next morning, I switched on my phone and walked to place where I could find a signal and my phone began to ping, WhatsApp, missed calls and text messages of condolences coming through, my mind could not quite match up what was happening. A moment of confusion, where the technological means of communication had run far ahead of my own ability to process what was happening. A moment later the phone rang, and it was Vincent Puig, the director of IRI, who told me that Bernard had passed away. Bernard Stiegler always encouraged me to stand on my own two feet and to say ‘Je suis philosophe’, whilst struggling to hold my balance as I stand on the shoulders of giants. It is in a certain sense more acceptable to say ‘Je suis philosophe’ where philosophy is understood not simply as something taught but also as a form of doing, engaging in the contemporary. Philosophy always arrives too late but does not negate responsibility of the present. ‘Ceci n’est pas un secte’ (this is not a sect) he told me on one occasion and that is the mark of a true mentor, enabling others, bringing others to fruition. Allowing for ‘controverse’ and disagreements but holding the course. The brilliance of his ideas (concepts) and his generosity of spirit are what he leaves for us to build on. Professor of Philosophy Noel Fitzpatrick Dublin, Ireland March 2021

Note 1

I would like to thank Michał Krzykawski who also pointed out to me that Bernard Stiegler enabled him to say ‘Je suis philosophe’.

Notes on Contributors Dr Cormac Deane is Lecturer in Culture and Media Studies at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin. He received his PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London, where he was a member of the London Consortium. He is the translator of the final work of Christian Metz, L’énonciation impersonnelle (Columbia University Press, 2015). Other recent and forthcoming articles may be found in Science, Technology and Human Values (2015), Television Aesthetics and Style (Bloomsbury 2013) and The Journal of Sonic Studies (2012). He was a recipient of the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in 2013–14. Dr Aidan Delaney is Technical Tutor in Sound in the School of Media and Performing Arts, at Middlesex University. He holds an MPhil in Film Theory and completed a PhD in Digital Arts and Humanities at the Arts Technology Research Lab, Trinity College Dublin, in 2016. His current research interests are in remix, film studies and digital theory, and his most recent work has focused on the audiovisual essay as tool in textual analysis and criticism. Jeanette Doyle is a visual artist. Her studio work encompasses a multitude of disciplines including painting, drawing, print, sculpture, video, animation, performance and text. Her wider practice embraces curation and critique. Doyle is currently a PhD researcher with the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) at the Technological University Dublin (TUDublin). The title of her project is ‘Relationships between the “immaterial” and “dematerial” in Contemporary Art practice with particular emphasis on Digital Art’. Dr Gerald Moore is an Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University and is Associate Director in the Centre for Cultural Ecologies. His main research interests include the philosophy of politics, and French philosophy and technology, with a particular focus on the impact of technical evolution on politics, anthropology and evolutionary biology. He is a frequent collaborator with French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, with whom he

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has collaborated with since 2008. He serves on the Conseil d’Adminstration of Stiegler’s think tank and lobby group, Ars Industrialis, and is an active member of the Digital Studies Network, based at the Centre Pompidou’s Institut de recherche et d’innovation in Paris. Book publications include Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy in the Age of Industrial Technology (forthcoming); Thinking with Stiegler: Organology, Proletarianization, and Technical Life (2018); and Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism (2011). Dr EL (Emily Lauren) Putnam is a visual artist, scholar and writer whose research focuses on continental aesthetic philosophy, performance studies, Digital Studies, feminist theory and examining the influence of neoliberalism on artistic production. She has published articles in Big Red & Shiny, ARTPULSE, Seismopolite: Journal of Art and Politics, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Sage Reference, and other arts and philosophy publications available in print and online, including ‘Polyphonic Resonance: Sound Art in Ireland’ in Dr Áine Philips’s recent book Performance Art in Ireland: A History (Intellect Press and Live Art Development Agency, 2015). She is currently working on the research monograph Venice Biennale: Freedom Under Erasure (with Atropos Press). In addition, EL has actively been presenting artworks and performances in the United States and Europe for the past decade and has been a member of the Mobius Alternative Artists Group since 2009. She currently lectures at University College Galway (UCG). Dr Connell Vaughan, Technological University Dublin (TUDublin) Graduate School of Creative Art and Media (GradCAM), is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Aesthetics at TU Dublin, who earned his PhD in Aesthetics from University College Dublin (UCD) in 2010. His primary areas of research include contemporary curatorial practice, Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics and the philosophy of education. He is a Research Fellow with at GradCAM and a member of the European Society for Aesthetics.

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Artists & Filmography Álvarez López, Cristina. 2009. Games. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/7395571 Cheney, Matthew. 2012. The Face Of. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/39218023 Cortright, Petra. Foxy Production, NY. http://www.foxyproduction.com/ exhibitions/1539 (Accessed 6 January 2020). Cortright, Petra. VVEBCAM 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k50Mj8ZY-xY (Accessed 6 January 2020). Cortright, Petra. True Life: I’m a Selfie – (Fake True’s Negativity Remix). https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=CH2kgof7aYc (Accessed 6 January 2020). Donnelly, Cormac. 2019. Pan Scan Venkman. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/320854561 Gametxo, Aitor. 2012. Variation on the Sunbeam. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/22696362 Griffith, D. W. 1912. The Sunbeam. Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/ TheSunbeam_201507 Heathfield, Adrian. 2015. Technologies of Spirit: A Conversation with Bernard Stiegler. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/technologiesofspirit/125022017 https://monoskop.org/File:Les_Immateriaux_Album_et_Inventaire_catalogue.pdf (Accessed 6 January 2020). Im/material: Painting in the Digital Age. https://sophiacontemporary.com/ exhibitions/16/overview/ (Accessed 6 January 2020). I Was Raised on the Internet. https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2018/I-Was-RaisedOn-The-Internet (Accessed 6 January 2020). Misek, Richard & Martine Beugnet. 2017. In Praise of Blur. Vimeo. https://vimeo. com/220428480 Morton, Drew. 2013. From the Panel to the Frame: Style and Scott Pilgrim. Vimeo. https:// vimeo.com/59355775 Rappaport, Mark. 2017. The Empty Screen. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=azMhCL9-VtA

Index addiction 3, 6, 84, 113 aesthetic experiences Beckett’s play 27, 30, 32–3 cinematic texts 85 conventional exhibition 92–3 cultural engagement 106–10 hermeneutics 144–6, 149 landscape photographs 127–8, 130–4 listification 110, 114–15, 117–18, 120 neganthropic gestures 124, 141 photographic image 37–8, 41 traditional hermeneutics 144–8 algorithmic governance 106, 113–15, 118–19 Anthropocene 123–5, 127–8, 133, 141, 150–1, 158 anti-canonical archiving 119–20 arche-cinema concept 38 grammatization 46–9 mode 50, 53 n.22 Archey, Karen 89, 92–4, 99 Aristotle 25–6, 109 Ars Industrialis 7, 152, 163 Art Post-Internet (Archey, Karen and Peckham, Robin) catalogue 99 digital art practices 102 materiality of objects 100 modernist white cube conventions 91–2 postness 93–5 publication 92–3, 102–3 recent development 98 technological apparatuses 89–90 audiovisual technology 22, 38, 49, 56–7, 61, 74–87. See also ekphrasis notion of quotation 76–7, 79–80, 83–6 Auroux, Sylvain 17, 21–2, 42, 105. See also grammatization

Barthes, Roland 38–9, 43, 51 n.5, 117 Beckett, Samuel (Krapp’s Last Tape) individuation 25–8 inscriptive techniques 21–3 nostalgic monologue 19–21 sociopolitical metaphors 31–3 solipsistic narcissism 30–1 tape recorder 20–2, 26–7, 29–30 uncertainty of existence 28–9 Benjamin, Walter 23, 35 nn.6–7, 57, 116 Beugnet, Martine 76 big data 106, 108, 136 Bloody Sunday killings 55, 59–62, 64, 66, 68–71. See also Saville Inquiry Borges, Jorge Louis 108 Brexit 70–1, 128, 135, 140–1 Chaput, Thierry 89, 103 cinematic consciousness amateur production 84–6 concept 82 hyper-industrialization 81, 87 n.1 industrial temporal objects 81–4 retention orders 79–82 control room imaginary, Bloody Sunday killings law and data processing 64–8 legal-political context 59–62 memory prostheses 68–71 Saville Inquiry, use of technology 62–4 Cortright, Petra 90, 95–6, 98 Crutzen, Paul 133 Deane, Cormac 15, 55, 57–8, 130 Delaney, Aidan 46, 51, 73, 75 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 23, 32, 36 n.16, 138, 143 Derrida, Jacques 8, 25, 47, 57, 65, 73, 82, 101, 117–18, 143, 145, 158–9 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ 73 digital hermeneutics 123–4, 143–6, 150–60

Index concept 143–7, 155, 158–9 romantic or psychological aspect 145–7 digital image 38, 40, 42 arche-cinematic mode 50 discretization process 42–6, 49 temporal experiences 48 digital revolution 3, 6 Digital Studies 153, 155. See also digital hermeneutics audiovisual ekphrasis 86 digital hermeneutics and 153–9 humanities mission 13 meaning 1–3 multimodal forms of writing 76 research categorization 8, 10 Digital Studies Network 1–2, 154–5, 163 new categories of digital culture 8 objectives 155 organological revolution 3–7 third culture, arts and science 2–3 division of labour 3, 10, 12 Doherty, Willie 127, 130–5, 141 Donnelly, Cormac 76 dopamining 113 Doyle, Jeanette 73, 89, 152 economy of contribution 2, 74, 84, 86–7 ekphrasis audiovisual technology 78–9, 81, 84–6 concept 78–9 uncanonical art forms 78 written versus audio visual language 78–9 entropy. See also Neganthropocene of the border 129, 131, 141 concept 124 economic systems 123 information theory 124, 149–50 loss of biodiversity 8 thermodynamics 124 types 149 exhibitions. See Art Post-Internet (Archey, Karen and Peckham, Robin); Les Immatériaux (Lyotard, JeanFrancois and Chaput, Thierry) exosommatization

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aesthetic objects versus 149 central role 17 in contemporary politics 119, 124 existential terrain 31 hermeneutic phenomenology 146 of knowledge 158 memories 15–16, 20, 22 organs 2 exteriorization 16, 25, 85, 91, 106, 116, 119, 129, 158 Facebook 6, 36 n.17, 136, 147 fear of missing out (#FOMO) 106 Fitzpatrick, Noel 21, 82, 109, 148–50, 153, 155 Foucault, Michel 2, 12, 59, 63, 108, 155 Freud, Sigmund 7 concept of anamnesis 97 dream analysis 48 Gametxo, Aitor 77 gamification 105, 113–14, 120, 121 n.13 globalization 4, 47 Google 6, 8, 113, 119, 136, 147, 156–7 grammatization algorithmic governance 106, 109, 113–14, 120, 152 analytical process 105, 154 of arche-cinema 46–7 audiovisual technologies 56, 86 in Beckett’s drama 21–3 central component 113–14 computational evidence 65 concept 42, 105 digital hermeneutics 145 ekphrasis etymology 78 entropy 124 gamification 119 as pharmacological default 102 of photographic images 37, 39, 42–3 second technological revolution 17 of world heritage 111–13 Greenfield, Susan 8 Griffith, D.W. 77–8 Havelock, Eric 5, 10–11 Hayles, N. Katherine 20–1, 31, 57

188 Heathfield, Adrian 85 Heidegger, Martin 128, 143, 146 concept of care 50 on danger of technology 38, 46 human existence (Being-in-the-world) 28, 35 n.8 standing-reserve (Bestand) 24 techno-philosophical attitude 28 A History of the World in 100 Objects (radio series) 107 human adaptation to changes 7–8 dreams 6–8 mind change 8–10 renewed institutions 10–13 tool-led agency 10 humanities concept 12 cultural criticism 11 digital 1 heuristic 12 pharmacological 12 reinvention 2, 8 study of culture through tools 10, 12 Husserl, Edmund on internal time consciousness 47–8, 79, 97 phenomenological enquiry 146, 153 on temporal object 16, 23, 47, 80 idiom 149, 153, 160 image analogue 38–40, 42–3, 49–50, 52 n.10 digitization of 37–8 indexical 38–44, 63, 75, 106 mnemo-technologies 38–43 photographic 37, 39–41, 43–4 individuation act of creation 96 collective 26, 88 n.4, 91, 114, 146, 155–6 concept 25–6 digital technologies 90–1 general organology 25–7, 34 n.1 loss of 74, 82 negative 114 new modes 50–1 psychic 26, 33, 52 n.11, 88 n.4, 91, 146, 155–6

Index theoretical advances 16, 20 industrial revolution 3, 5, 53 n.22, 69, 124 industrial temporal objects audiovisual ekphrasis 86 cinematic consciousness 81 historical-material context 23–5 media technology 55, 80 portrayal in KLT 24 theoretical advancement 23 Internet 2, 4 as artistic medium 99 digital architectures 123 http protocols 156 museological context 89 organological revolutions 10 Irish borderland aesthetic diffraction 127–8 cartographic feature 128, 130 Good Friday Agreement 61, 132 tertiary retentions 127–9, 131–2, 138, 141 Troubles, The 60, 67, 130–4, 139, 141 Johnson, Paddy 26–7, 93, 99, 127 Keathley, Christian 76 Klein, Naomi 9, 136 knowledge construction 154–5, 158 Korzybski, Alfred 107–8 Latour, Bruno 4–5, 8, 65, 101–2 Les Immatériaux (Lyotard, Jean-Francois and Chaput, Thierry) central components 102–4 digital communication strategies 101–2 five pathways 101 materiality of objects 100 negative pharmacology 103 postness 93–5 publication 102–4 technological apparatuses 89–91, 98, 152 tertiary retention 104 listing aesthetic elements 109–10, 114–15 exosomatization 116 as icons 108–9 importance 106

Index latest gimmick 107 negative impacts 116 scripted code 109 tertiary retention 119–20 Locke, John 6 Lopez, Alvarez 76–7 Lovelock, James 10 Gaia-theory 9 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 89–90, 94, 97–8, 100–3, 152 Marx, Karl 12, 36 n.18, 151, 160 Matthew, Cheney 76 Maude, Ulrika 20, 23–4, 27, 30 May, Theresa 127 McCrea, Ronan 38, 40–2, 48, 51 n.8, 51 n.10 celluloid materiality, concept 42 memory analogue image 39, 47 banks 32 cognitive technologies 25 epiphylogenesis 56 exosomaticization of 15, 22, 27 mnemo-technology 28–9 orthographic practices 38 prosthesis of technoscience 68–71 remembering process 16 tape recorder’s 20, 24–5 tertiary retentions 24–5, 48 types of 24 mind change 8–10 Misek, Richard 76 mnemo-technics 73–4 MOOCs 6 Moore, Gerald 1, 8, 113 Moore, Henry 40 Morris, Adalaide 20 Morton, Drew 76 Neganthropocene 123–5 anthropocene versus 127–8, 133, 141, 145 border entropy 131, 133–4, 141 concept 149 digital hermeneutics 143, 150–3, 160 negative 124, 149 noodiversity 8, 12

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O’Dwyer, Néill 15, 19, 22, 26–7, 60, 155 O’Hara, Michael 15, 37, 76, 79–80 organological revolution 3–6, 9–10, 13 organology co-evolution of mind and matter 60 digital hermeneutics 149, 151 digital humanities 1, 155 film studies 75 global grammatization 106 historical-material context 30–1 hyper industrialization 75 meaning 60 pharmakon themes 73 sociopolitical metaphors 31 technical prostheses 2 theory of individuation 25, 27 triangular movement 30 Peckham, Robin 92–3, 99 pharmacology 46–7, 49, 73–4, 86, 88, 100, 103, 123, 150–1, 153, 159 cinematic consciousness 82–4 negative 74, 103 positive 73, 86, 88 n.5, 123, 149–50, 153, 155, 159 pharmaka 1, 13, 25, 46, 50, 74, 84 pharmakon digital image as 46 negative aspects 74, 158 The Phaedrus, emergence of 82 Plato’s description 5, 22 Stiegler’s use of 73–4 tape recorder’s reproducibility 29 tertiary retention 50 Western metaphysics on 73 Plato 47, 90 exteriorized memory 82 hostility to writing 15–17, 25 hypomnesic inscription 31, 73 Pharmakon, anecdote 22 on philosopher-kings 12 Socrates counsels 10 Pokemon 105 algorithmic governance 106 UNESCO’s list and 118–19 pre-individual fund, erosion of 26, 74, 91 primary retention 16, 25, 48, 80, 83, 97–8, 104, 129

190 printing technology 4, 22 privacy 4, 7, 67, 135 proletarianization 32, 36 n.18, 74, 84, 87, 95, 124, 158 Putnam, EL 127 Rappaport, Mark. 76 Ricoeur, Paul 143–8, 150–1, 153, 158–60 Saville Inquiry. See also control room imaginary, Bloody Sunday killings Bloody Sunday killings of 1972 55, 59–62, 64, 66, 68–71 legal-political fiction 66 Peace Process 59, 61, 64–5, 69–71, 135 Soldier ‘F’ 71 Tribunals of Inquiry Act 61 use of technologies 56–8, 62–4, 70 Saville Report. See Saville Inquiry Schleiermacher, Friedrich 144–5, 159 screen-based devices 8, 43 secondary retention 16, 25, 48, 80, 83, 97–8, 104, 129, 147 self-ownership 6–7 Simondon, Gilbert 23, 26 on technical individuation 43, 52 n.11, 74, 91, 155 social media 4, 32, 44, 98, 118, 147, 152, 157 Socrates 5, 10 sovereignty 59–60, 66–7, 70 Steyerl, Hito 38, 44–5 ‘In Defence of the Poor Image’ 45 Stiegler, Bernard arche-cinema, concept 38, 46–9 attempts to combat climate change 9 on cinematic constitution of consciousness 75–6, 79–82, 84–7 digital hermeneutics 143–60 digital technology and power structures 37–44, 46–51 epiphylogenesis 56 on gamification 105–9, 112–20 on human adaptation 7 hyperindustrial era criticisms 32, 57, 73–5, 81, 88 n.5 individuation principles 25–8, 30, 96, 114, 146, 155–6

Index inorganic organized being 26, 34, 56–60 on Kuleshov effect 80, 86 on memory effects 89–92, 95–8, 102–4 Neganthropocene, notion of 123–4, 127–34, 136, 139–41 on positive and negative pharmakon 73–4 technological aspects of therapeutics 73–4 technology and time, relationship 15, 28 on temporal object 16, 23–4, 47–8 warning about technical objects 55–8, 60, 62, 65–6, 68–70 technicity concept 19, 28, 34 historical-material context 19, 26, 34 in Krapp’s Last Tape (KLT) 19, 28, 34 pharmakon theme 73–4 of power/knowledge 59 technoscience 68–71 temporal objects cultural artefacts 16 Husserl’s concept 23, 47 identical repetition 48 industrial 23–4 tertiary retention aesthetic gesture 146 algorithmic governmentality 141 audiovisual description 83 definition 127 demarcation of territories 128–30 digital hermeneutics 158 digital objects 97–8, 102, 138, 150 exteriorization forms 15–16, 106 heritage lists 119 image 37, 48, 50 Internet’s prevalence 104 in KLT 23–5, 29, 31–2 material and immaterial 116 mechanical automata 16 pharmacological nature 160 pharmacological process 129 pharmakon theme 76 photographic image 37, 48, 50 technical individuation 155 technical system 91 time consciousness and 79–80

Index therapeutics beneficent aspects of technology 73 cinematic consciousness 84–6 concept 73 digital hermeneutics 143, 149–50, 153, 158–60 of the image 49–51 pharmacological aspects 38, 82 positive 84, 89 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 67

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UNESCO 111–20 World Heritage Committee 112–13, 120 UNÉSGO ICONS. See Pokemon Vaughan, Connell 105 video essay 75–6 Widgery Tribunal 61–2, 64, 66 World Wide Web 4, 101

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Plate 1  Ronan McCrea, Metallography (Grain Structures, ‘I think in Shapes: Henry Moore’, with soundtrack after Delia Derbyshire), 2018. 16mm found film, asynchronous sound, film projector, sound file and mp3 player, customized looping mechanism, screen. Image track: 3 minutes: 31 seconds/25.8 metres, projected 16 frames per second, continuous loop. Soundtrack: 3 minutes: 35 seconds continuous loop. Soundtrack in collaboration with Eva Richardson McCrea. Image: Installation view MAC International 2018, The MAC, Belfast. Photograph: Simon Mills. Courtesy of the artist and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin.

Plate 2  Ronan McCrea, Twelve by Twelve by Two, 2019. Projected 35mm slide sequence. (288 images). Duration: 29 minutes: 30 seconds continuous loop. Image: Installation View, Ronan McCrea Efference Copy Mechanism, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2019. Photograph: Kasia Kaminska. Courtesy of the artist and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin.

Plate 3  Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File, 2013. HD video, single screen in architectural environment. Duration: 15 minutes, 52 seconds. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin.

Plate 4  Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File, 2013. HD video, single screen in architectural environment. Duration: 15 minutes, 52 seconds. Image: CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Image courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin.

Plate 5  The hearing chamber of the Saville Inquiry in the Guildhall, Derry. Source: AP.

Plate 6a & 6b  Screenshots of the touchscreen virtual-reality depiction of Derry used in the Saville Tribunal. Users could toggle between the two views of the same place at different historical moments. Source: Northern Ireland Centre for Learning Resources.

Plate 7a & 7b  Details of photographic evidence report submitted to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry (Butler 1999, 1–2). References to ‘enhancement’ have been highlighted for the present article.

Plate 8  Graphic representation of the reorganizing of space in Aitor Gametxo’s Variation on the Sunbeam, 2011. Each location or camera setup gets its own tile within the frame, allowing all locations to be seen at once.

Plate 9  Screen capture from Aitor Gametxo’s Variation on the Sunbeam, 2011. Source: Vimeo. The arrangement of screen space allows parallel action be shown simultaneously.

Plate 10  Screen capture from Aitor Gametxo’s Variation on the Sunbeam, 2011. Source: Vimeo.

Plate 11  Screen capture from Aitor Gametxo’s Variation on the Sunbeam, 2011. Source: Vimeo. The screen capture has been cropped to a close-up of two of the six panes, showing movement from one pane to the next. This illustrates how Gametxo reworks continuity editing into a spatial arrangement that shows both shots simultaneously. The spinster moves from the hallway to her room.

Plate 12  Installation Shot Art Post-Internet, 2013. Courtesy of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

Plate 13  Petra Cortright, Ily, 2015. Installation view, Foxy Production, New York. Photo: Mark Woods. Courtesy of the artist and Foxy Production, New York.

Plate 14  Petra Cortright, VVEBCAM, 2007. Still from webcam video, 1 minute 43 seconds © Petra Cortright.

Plate 15  Petra Cortright, True Life: I’m a Selfie – (Fake True’s Negativity Remix), 2013. Still from webcam video, 1 minute 39 seconds © Petra Cortright.

Plate 16  Installation Shot of Les Immatériaux. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Jean-Claude Planchet.

Plate 17  Willie Doherty, The Other Side, 1988. Black and white photograph with text. 61 × 152 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

Plate 18  To the Border / A Fork in the Road, 1986–2012 © Willie Doherty. The place where Ciaran Doherty was executed in February 2010, accused of being a British informer, he was abducted two hours before his body was dumped at the side of the road. Black and white fibre photograph mounted on aluminum. Edition of 3 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in Courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

Plate 19  EL Putnam, image still from Quickening, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 20  EL Putnam (eight months pregnant) interacting with Quickening, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.