Towards a Philosophical Framework for Thinking about Education in a Digital Age.

Agamben and Stiegler on Desubjectification and Profanation

Joris VliegheLaboratory for Education & Society

University of Leuven (Belgium)

• Main concern: meaning of ‘education’ in a digital era, i.e. an age in which digital technologies have come to replace traditional ways of teaching and learning (based on writing and reading texts; direct and face-to- face classroom-instruction)

• Philosophical framework: post-foucaultian authors who take very seriously the idea that the way in which we are constituted as subjects is supported/shaped by the use of (digital and non-digital) technologies – Stiegler & Agamben

• I will first make a detour via two other philosophers: Heidegger, who notoriously execrated (modern) technologies, and Flusser, who has made some very interesting analyses concerning the technology of writing

Heidegger’s comments on type-writing

The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e. the realm of the word. The word itself turns into something “typed”. […] Mechanical writing deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a means of communication. In addition, mechanical writing provides “this advantage”, that it conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same

- mechanization of writing = writing by default, no real (proper) writing- such an improper use → cultural crisis (standardization of human existence

Vilém Flusser• Technocentric perspective (similar to Stiegler): analysis of

technology-mediated practices in their material concreteness: what does it mean ‘to put very material letters upon the surface of a very material sheet of paper?’

• Interesting considerations on the use of the typewriter that go in the opposite direction

• ‘The typewriter is a machine for writing lines from left to right and for jumping back to the left side. Thus, the typewriter is, to some extent, a materialization of a cultural program of ours. If we look at the typewriter, we can see materially, to some extent, how one aspect of our mind works.’

Flusser on writing-based thought• Mechanical writing, more than ‘proper’ writing, discloses

(ironically) what thinking is. Longwriting is typewriting by default• ‘Repression of the “natural” tendency to think aloud’, ‘forcing

thinking into specific structures’ (destructive, rather than constructive activity)

• ‘Writing violates thinking in a way speaking does not’• Thinking of literate beings =

linear, diachronic, one-dimensional, one-directional• Otherwise stated: the practice of writing preconditions the very

possibility of thinking.• This also implies that writing-based thinking is a contingent

possibility. It has a beginning and probably also an end.

Flusser on writing-based thought

• Thinking based on alphabetic writing vs.Thinking based on ideographic writing/numbers

• Alphabetic writing is different from speaking, but is nevertheless linked to an acoustic logic (‘ a musical notation of spoken language’): one-dimensional and uni-directional (linear)

• Ideographic/numerical writing (‘a notation of ideas’) is linked to the ‘logic’ of the eye [to be precise: the structure behind seeing is not ‘logical’ in its etymologicallly appropriate sense of ‘word’]:two-dimensional and multi-directional (circular)

Flusser on writing-based thought• Up till ‘now’, literal thought has superseded numerical

thought (which is also the case in a world that since many centuries has been dominated by a scientific rationality): in academic courses, the graphs and formulae are still situated within alphabetic texts

• It is only with the advent and proliferation of digital media that a two-dimensonal, visual logic might become culturally dominant.

• The very possibility of digital ‘literacy’ therefore discloses something completely unimaginable beforehand

Posthistorical (wo)man• Alphabetic writing is the basis of the very idea that we are

historical beings• In pre-alphabetic times there was only ‘history’ in the sense

that people made monuments (inscriptions, meant to be remembered and considered)

• Alpahbet-based thought produces documents (notations): the writer/reader is forced to jump from one word to the other, and so a sense of historical progress originates for the first time

• Analogously, when alphabetic writing becomes obsolete, we might perhaps for the first time forgo the idea that it is our place in history which should guide us in how we live our lives

Flusser & Stiegler

• Like Flusser Stiegler endorses a (perhaps even more radical) techno-centric point of viewi.e. a non-heideggerian perspective on technology: we cannot decide on the basis of our proper human capabilities how (and if) we should use technologies, it is rather the use of particular technologies that decides what we, as human beings, are

• Contrary to Flusser Stiegler argues that today we should oppose any disconnection between technology and history and that this is the true calling of education.

Stiegler: external memory

• In our own constitution as subjects we are dependent upon the use of historically contingent technologies

• Technologies = concrete objects (pen, mug, shovel) and practices related to them (writing, drinking wine, shoveling coal) are in and of themselves memories: individual people are born and die, but acquired skill and knowledge are stored IN technological objects/practices (‘hypomnemata’) themselves

• Therefore, technologies don’t constitute an internal, phylogenetic memory (DNA of the ‘phylos’ homo sapiens), but an external, epiphylogenetic memory.

Stiegler: (trans)individuation• There are no subjects or individuals, only processes of

individuation (Simondon) or of becoming-subject• We constitute ourselves by using a (particular) technology

that necesarrily has a history: when we learn to master a concrete technology we always continue a line that is already there, that precedes us:individuation = co-individuation (with others) = trans-individuation (with history)

• Conservatism, not for the sake of conservation, but for the sake of the coming into being of the new (Arendt)(trans)individuation = transformation

Stiegler: short- and longcircuiting

• There are fundamentally two ways to relate to one and the same technology that is constitutive for our subject-constitution.

• LONG-CIRCUITING: to appropriate the whole history that lies at the basis of the technology we use, by being co-producers and co-constructors

• SHORT-CIRCUITING: to use the same technology in such a way that the proces of (trans-) individuation comes to a halt (= ‘proletarization’)

Stiegler: short- and longcircuiting

The need to materially draw squares is not a redundant step in acquiring geomterical insight . Neither is the retaking of a whole set of axioms and definitions on the basis of which this insight is constructed.

Stiegler: short- and longcircuiting• Analogously, in order to be able to write one necesarilly

has to go through a long, demanding and tedious phase of learning to master calligraphy.

• What then about typewriting (keyboard)?- is not in itself a short-circuited activity, as long as we first learn to write and then learn to type (which demands also quite some effort)- it only becomes short-circuited when we use this technology without any productive contribution (and without any knowledge of the hardware that makes it possible)

Stiegler: short- and longcircuiting• Similarly, we can only really read when we also can write:

reading is only possible on the condition that we potentially could have written the text we read↔ watching a film: we delegate the reading/decoding to the DVD-player

• Reading can be either long-circuited or short-circuited: ‘when you are reading a book, you individuate yourself by reading this book because reading a book is to be transformed by the book. If you are not transformed by the book, you are not reading the book – you believe that you are reading’

Stiegler: technology as pharmakon

• All technologies are pharmaka: one and the same object (and the practices related to it) can be used as a cure or as a poison, i.e. it might as well contribute to (trans)individuation (through long-circuiting) as to proletarization (through short-circuiting)

• THUS: technocentrism, but no technodeterminism. It is not the technology as such that univocally promotes or distorts our subject-constitutionCf. CARR, The Shallows: internet technologies as such transform and distort our critical-intellectual capacities and make impossible any attentive reading

Stiegler: technology as pharmakon• Because every technology has a pharmakon-character, it can

be abused and exploited, particularly by cultural industries• Therefore every society needs a schooling system, that

embodies the responsibility/care the older generation takes for the younger and that is willing to fight a constant battle against the possible misuse of the technology of writing (in Ancient Greece, the craddle of ‘skholè’), or digital technologies (today)

• The question is not to use or not to use digital technologies, but to prevent the young to become proletarized consumers. Here we should put our faith in the school of the future.

Stiegler vs. Agamben

It is against this background that Stiegler criticizes Agamben when he writes:

‘It would probably not be wrong to define the extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses. […] we could say that today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus. In what way, then, can we confront this situation, what strategy must we follow in our everyday hand-to-hand struggle with apparatuses?’

Stiegler vs. Agamben• Just like Heidegger Agamben appears to be a technophobic, who

doesn’t understand that technologies are pharmaka : ‘then it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it "in the

right way”. Those who continue to promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the media apparatus in which they are captured’.

• Moreover, when Agamben tries to formulate an alternative, he only deals with it negatively:

we shouldn’t use technology differently, nor destroy technological devices, but appeal to that which finally escapes its control, i.e. the ‘un-governable’. The strategy to achieve this consists in ‘profanation’, i.e. ‘to bring it back to a possible common use’ (like the Romans did with the remainders of the flesh of sacrificial animals - captured in a sacralized sphere - after the rite was conducted.)

Agamben vs. Stiegler• I believe that Stiegler’s reading of Agamben is incorrect and that

he doesn’t make the best of an Agambenian philosophy of technology

• Moreover, it might be doubted whether the true Heideggerian is not so much Agamben (because of his so called technophobia), but Stiegler himself:After all, a constant through his argument is that we should deal with technology in a proper way and that we (or better: the school) should prevent improper usesThis proper use is defined as keeping a connection with history (continuing the line). In the end, Stiegler abandons his radical technocentrism in favor of a very traditionalist view on education which decides what are good and bad (uses of) technologies

Agamben vs. Stiegler

“There is no correct use”

• Stiegler interprets this as : for a technophobic like Agamben “there can only be incorrect use”

• But perhaps something else is at stake:the whole idea that we can oppose correct and incorrect (proper and improper) uses presupposes something that no longer has meaning under the present conditions

• In that way it might be said that the proliferation of digital technologies (1) more adequately shows what it means that we, as subjects, are constituted by technologies (Cf. Flusser: typewriting shows more adequately than writing what (text-based) thinking is)(2) And that this condition precisely makes something new possible (Cf. Flusser: the posthistorical)

Agamben vs. Stiegler

• What is this new possibility? Is this only something vague, negative and obscure as Stiegler claims?

• Stiegler’s criticism is based on a very careless reading of Agamben: he never says that we should profante technology. He says that we have to profanate ‘that what has been captured and separated in’ the use of technology.

• XXXX profanation/desubjectification