Pieter Lemmens

Technology has become an integral part of our lives, permeating virtually every dimension of our cultural, social and natural worlds. The Technical Condition, an accessible introduction to contemporary philosophy of technology, takes this entanglement of technology, culture and society as the starting point for philosophical and normative reflection. Is biotechnology forcing us to rethink fundamental concepts such as the natural and the artificial? How will governance by algorithms reshape our politics? Are we adapting our home environments to fit our smart appliances and voice assistants? Will a technology-driven Anthropocene presage the end of humanity? How can we evaluate new technologies if technology is also influencing our moral sense? Understanding these entanglements will help us to steer them in beneficial directions.

The Technical Condition convincingly demonstrates how technology, culture, and society affect each other in countless and unexpected ways, providing an impetus for philosophical reflection on one of the most important themes of our times. As such, it will appeal to students in the humanities, social sciences and engineering sciences.

In this volume a select choice of authors reflects on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West. 

Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene.

Wie zijn op dit moment de denkers in Duitsland die we moeten lezen? Welke thema’s staan er op de agenda en welke filosofische vriend- en vijandschappen doorkruisen de debatten bij onze oosterburen? De nieuwe Duitse filosofie geeft het antwoord.

In De nieuwe Duitse filosofie stellen vooraanstaande filosofen uit Nederland en Vlaanderen de meest relevante denkers uit het Duitse taalgebied aan u voor. Behalve met grote namen als Sloterdijk en Habermas biedt dit omvangrijke overzichtswerk een kennismaking met hun minder bekende collega’s. De auteurs beschrijven op toegankelijke wijze leven en werk van iedere filosoof. Ook bevat het boek suggesties tot verder lezen, illustraties en uitgebreide registers.

Dit proefschrift is een onderzoek naar de fundamentele relatie tussen het technische en het menselijke. Het verdedigt de stelling dat de techniek constitutief is voor de menselijke conditie en laat zien dat dit altijd zo is geweest, vanaf de aanvang van de menselijke evolutie. Mens en techniek zijn van meet af aan zo onlosmakelijk en intiem met elkaar verbonden dat we kunnen stellen dat de menselijke conditie gelijk is aan, ja feitelijk volledig neerkomt op de conditie van techniciteit. De mens is het effect, de biosociale manifestatie van het technisch-worden van het leven, een proces dat ongeveer vier miljoen jaar geleden is aangevangen, toen de eerste Australopithicae gebruik gingen maken van primitieve stenen werktuigen. Het is echter pas met de opkomst van de technowetenschappen sinds de Industriële Revolutie, en in het bijzonder met de verschijning van de informatietechnologieën en de biotechnologieën in onze tijd, dat de ware impact van onze technische conditie zich op pregnante wijze aan ons opdringt. Het is aan de exploratie van de betekenis en de consequenties van dit epochale fenomeen dat dit proefschrift voornamelijk is gewijd.
De alom gedeelde ervaring dat de technologische ontwikkeling steeds sneller gaat en zich steeds sterker opdringt, onze levens steeds nadrukkelijker zowel opeist als vormgeeft – een ervaring die Martin Heidegger in de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw karakteriseerde als die van de ‘aanspraak van de techniek’ – noodzaakt ons om de techniek op een heel andere wijze te leren begrijpen dan traditioneel gebruikelijk. De traditionele, antropocentrisch en instrumentalistisch georiënteerde techniekopvatting – ook wel de humanistische opvatting genoemd – is niet langer plausibel. De techniek kan niet langer worden gedacht als een middel in handen van de mens, die er op soevereine wijze over beschikt en haar onderwerpt aan zijn eigen, autonoom gestelde doelen. Er moet een alternatieve opvatting worden ontwikkeld, die recht doet aan haar claimende en quasi-autonoom evoluerende karakter.
De vier auteurs die in dit proefschrift centraal staan – Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, Gilbert Hottois en Bernard Stiegler – ontwikkelen zo’n alternatieve conceptie. In tegenstelling tot de humanistische visie, waarin mens en techniek als twee onafhankelijke variabelen tegenover elkaar worden geplaatst en de techniek wordt bekritiseerd (of zelfs veroordeeld) op basis van een welbepaalde opvatting van de mens, stellen deze denkers dat mens en techniek onlosmakelijk met elkaar verbonden zijn en dat alles wat het humanisme doorgaans opponeert aan de techniek (bewustzijn, autonomie, (keuze)vrijheid, subjectiviteit, cultuur, menselijke waardigheid, etc.) in feite op een zeer diepgaande wijze geconditioneerd is door de techniek. De techniek is geen middel, het is onze conditie. Speciale aandacht gaat in dit proefschrift uit naar de implicaties van deze nieuwe visie op de techniek voor de manier waarop we recente ontwikkelingen in de biotechnologie moeten beoordelen.

In this paper, we carry out a critical analysis of the concept of technology in the current design of the bio-based economy (BBE). Looking at the current status of the BBE, we observe a dominant focus on technological innovation as the principal solution to climatic instability. We take a critical stance towards this "ecomodernist" worldview, addressing its fundamental assumptions, and offer an underarticulated explanation as to why a successful transition toward a sustainable BBE-i.e. one that fully operates within the Earth's carrying capacity-has not yet been reached. Bernard Stiegler has developed a philosophical perspective on the concept of economy, broadening it to include the human condition through the notion of desire. This theory can help to obtain a more profound understanding of why ecomodernist strategies are dominant today. Stiegler's theory of the libidinal economy offers an analysis of controlled and exploited human desire as a primary driver behind modern techno-economic structures. Our hypothesis is that a critique of contemporary technofixism as a critique of libidinal economy is a necessary step to take in the discussion around the BBE as a concept, if the BBE is ever to bring about a system that can truly operate within the Earth's carrying capacity.

This is a commentary piece on Marco Pavanini's article ' 'Multistability and Derrida's Différance: Investigating the Relations Between Postphenomenology and Stiegler's General Organology' in which I critically extend upon his comparative analysis of postphenomenology''s notion of multistability and Stiegler's conception of organology, focusing in particular on the pharmacological nature of Stiegler's organology and the latter's most recent re-interpretation of it in terms of entropy and negentropy. Among other things I show, and both are more intended as additions than criticisms with respect to Pavanini's very helpful comparison, (1) that the most important concern for Stiegler in theorizing technology is the fact that the transductive relations between the three organ systems distinguished in his pharmaco-organology of technology open up affective or libidinal circuits between these systems, i.e., circuits either of desire or drive depending on the way the pharmakon is adopted or not, and that these circuits are fundamentally noetic circuits vulnerable to denoetization; and (2) that these libidinal-noetic circuits as conditioned by technology should be interpreted in terms of entropy and negentropy. Both insights are lacking in postphenomenology, which generally fails to consider the irreducibly destitutive character of all technology, rightfully emphasized by Pavanini, since it lacks a genuine pharmacological awareness.

In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens explains the discipline
called philosophy of technology and gives a concise overview of the most important contemporary approaches within this field. He also offers a critical evaluation of what are probably the two most salient characteristics of contemporary philosophy of technology, the so-called “empirical turn” and the “ethical turn,” which are deeply related and partly reflect the discipline’s on-going alignment with the global neoliberal agenda of exclusively profit-driven technological innovation. He also critically reflects on recent developments in the molecular and informational life sciences such as genomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology.

One of the defining moments in contemporary philosophy of technology was undoubtedly the ‘empirical turn’ of the 1990s and 2000s (Achterhuis 2001; Kroes and Meijers 2000; Franssen et al. 2016). Contra older, so-called transcendentalist, essentialist or “macro-level” oriented approaches that had seen technology as an all-encompassing phenomenon or force, the empirical turn inaugurated more “micro-level” oriented analyses of concrete technologies, studied in their specific use contexts. Since a couple of years, however, the empirical turn has increasingly been called into question, with scholars asking whether it
has not been pushed too far—certainly given recent technological developments that seem to give technology an all-encompassing or all-penetrating countenance (again): pervasive automation of all domains of society through AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms and (ro)bots, or the engineering grasp on life through nanotechnology, biotechnology and neurotechnology. Also, the ecological urgency characterizing our “Anthropocenic condition” appears to call for more broad-ranging perspectives than the mere analysis of concrete local use contexts. At the same time, nonetheless, the “empirical attitude” keeps demon-
strating its usefulness for the philosophical study of technologies on a day-to-day basis… The question has been coming up more and more: Where do we go from here? Quo vadis philosophy of technology?

In this reply I further defend my claim that the transcendental should always remain a primary concern for philosophy of technology as a philosophical enterprise, contra the empirical turn's rejection of it. Yet, instead of emphasizing the non-technological conditions of technology, as 'classic' thinkers of technology such as Heidegger did, it should recognize technology itself as the transcendental operator par excellence. Starting from Heidegger's ontological understanding of transcendence I show that while technical arti-facts may indeed always conform to a certain horizon of understanding, they also constitute this horizon in specific ways. Following Stiegler I show that concrete technologies (technology with a small 't') are not just empirical effects of an overarching movement of transcendence (Technology with a capital 'T') but are originally constitutive of it. In response to Romele's critique that the social, language, images, imaginaries, symbols, etc. are also transcendentals, I argue that all these phenomena are always already conditioned by technical milieus. As for Besmer's contention that I offer a reductive interpretation of postphenomenology's notion of multistability, I argue that there are decisive systemic and organological limits to multistability offered by technical artefacts and that all variation in use and implementation is always constrained by inherent technical tendencies and processes of concretization. Agreeing with Besmer that the transcendental and the empirical should be understood not oppositional but compositional I argue that technology may be that which constantly 'mediates' between the two. Keywords Transcendental · Transcendence · Empirical turn · Postphenomenology · Heidegger · Stiegler First of all, I would like to thank both Kirk Besmer and Alberto Romele for their thoughtful and useful comments on my article, which were very much appreciated. In what follows I will try to further clarify the core intention of that article by responding to the remarks they've put forward, Besmer being somewhat more critical than Romele, who is mostly in agreement with the views I present and starts off admitting this straightforwardly yet then This reply refers to the comment available online at https:// doi.

This article has two general aims. It first of all critically reconsiders the empirical turn's dismissal of transcendentalism in the philosophy of technology, in particular through the work of Ihde and Verbeek, and defends the continuing relevance of the notion of the tran-scencental in thinking about technology today, illustrating this mainly through a reading of Stiegler's understanding of the human condition as a technical condition and his view of human (noetic) evolution as proceeding from a process of technical exteriorization. The crucial issue that is missed by postphenomenology and the empirical turn is that technology itself in its empiricity occupies the (periodically changing) place of the transcenden-tal. It thus fails to consider the transcendental operativity of technical artifacts within its own empiricist stance. Secondly, it argues for the continuing importance and usefulness of the idea of Technology with a capital T, equally discarded by the representatives of the empirical turn, in particular against the emerging backdrop of the Anthropocene as the age of decisive anthropogenic forcing of the planet and the growing dominance of what has recently been called the technosphere in Earth system science. With Stiegler I show that a proper, inherent dynamic of technology must be acknowledged historically, anthropologi-cally, techno-evolutionarily as well as (techno)phenomenologically. I conclude by demonstrating that our time of planetary crisis summons us to redirect our attention to technology from the empirical to the transcendental, and from the micro-level to the macro-level again.

This article critically reflects on Stiegler’s re-interpretation of Heidegger’s views on the relationships between existential temporality, the understanding of being and technology within the context of the latter’s notion of enframing, reconceptualized as an explicitly planetary phenomenon: the technosphere. Stiegler replaces Heidegger’s ontological conception with an organological one, arguing that the latter fails to understand these phenomena from the crucial perspective of thermodynamics, i.e., of the question of entropy and negentropy, which has never been addressed by Heidegger. What I particularly aim to show is that Stiegler’s organological re-intepretation of enframing as the technosphere and of existential temporality in terms of ‘quasi-causality’ (per Deleuze) may profit from being put in the broader, geothermodynamic context of Earth System Science, and considered from the perspective of Schneider & Sagan’s ‘gradient theory’, as being driven by what may be called the planetary ‘thermodynamic imperative’ with Jeffrey Wicken.

In Memoriam voor Bernard Stiegler (1 april 1952–6 augustus 2020)
Online Symposium ‘Memory for the Future: Thinking with Bernard Stiegler’, georganiseerd door het Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) en het Institute for Science in Society (ISiS), Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

3-4 december 2020

Pieter Lemmens

This article is an attempt to interpret Yuk Hui’s ambitious and promising project of cosmotechnics and technodiversity as a kind of “critical synthesis” of the philosophies of technology of Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler, arguably his most important interlocutors besides Gilbert Simondon, whose crucial influence will have to remain undiscussed here unfortunately. It argues that the cosmotechnics–technodiversity project – motivated foremost by the concern for the relentless destruction of planetary diversity in all its forms (biological, ecological, ethnic, psychological, sociological, cultural, etc.) engendered by a globalized “mono-technological” technosphere originating from Western technology – criticizes but also aims to do justice to both Heidegger’s ontological or onto-historical understanding of technology as a singular yet universalizing imperative or claim driving the development of concrete technologies [Gestell or enframing], and Stiegler’s organological understanding of technology as an evolutionary process of technical exteriorization or exosomatization fundamentally conditioning any ontological and cosmological opening of anthropos, i.e., of what Heidegger called Dasein. Hui’s plural cosmotechnics critically acknowledges yet pluralizes both perspectives, thus teaching a pluri-ontological and pluri-cosmological conditioning of technology as well as a pluri-technological conditioning of the ontological and the cosmological. Using terms derived from Peter Sloterdijk’s interpretation of Heidegger’s “ontokinetics,” it is shown that it thus gives due to both a “vertical,” Heideggerian or “spiritual” dimension and a “horizontal,” Stieglerian or “materialist” dimension to the question concerning technology. This new and original, cosmotechnical perspective on these two fundamental views on the question concerning technology allows Hui to engage philosophy of technology in the overdue debate with contemporary anthropology’s so-called ontological turn, increasingly urgent in today’s age of the Anthropocene.

According to geologists and Earth System scientists, we are now living in the age of the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the most important geoforce, shaping the face of the planet more decisively than all natural forces combined. This brings with it a huge and unprecedented responsibility of humanity for the future of the biosphere. Humanity's impact on the planet has been largely destructive until now, causing a rupture of the Earth System which completely changes the planetary conditions that characterized the Holocene, the generally benign period of the last 11,000 years in which human civilization as we know it has emerged and was able to flourish. In the Anthropocene these conditions can no longer be taken for granted. On the contrary, humanity itself will have to become responsible for the preservation of the biosphere as its ultimate life support system. This means that its influence on the Earth System has to become a constructive one, among other things by inventing a cleaner and more sustainable modus vivendi on the planet. In this article it is claimed that such a transformation presupposes the invention of a global noosphere that allows humanity as a planetary collective to perceive and monitor the Earth System and interact more intelligently and sustainably with it. The response-ability required for taking responsibility for the Earth System presupposes the existence of a global noosphere that can both support a permanent collective awareness of our embedding in and critical dependence on the biosphere and function as a collective action platform. Based on a Stieglerian diagnosis of our current predicament, a case will be made for the huge potentials of digital media for our future task of caring for the earth.

The awareness of death is a central motivating force behind human activity. Their capacities for abstract and symbolic reasoning give human beings a unique foresight of their finite lifetime and forthcoming demise. Because of the overwhelming nature of this realization, we try to cope with the ensuing anxieties by means of various cognitive and existential strategies. One such strategy is to create a meaningful legacy during one's lifetime that will outlive the single individual. Whole-brain emulation (WBE) is another approach, but is unusual because of its literal promise to abolish death. Starting from the premise that WBE is feasible and will advance to such a level that we can speak of uploaded minds, we explore the implications of an allegedly immortal existence in a computational substrate: for our embodiment in the first place, and for death anxiety in the second. We argue that uploading would change the nature of, but could ultimately never abolish, embodiment. Instead, the defining characteristic of all brains are their vital links to the bodies that contain them and their interactions with the environment that are mediated by the body. In this light, we discuss the limits of WBE's potential to mitigate death anxieties: limits related to the (objective) probability of ceasing to exist, but also those that stem from the perception of the body as a proxy for death.

In zijn werk Das Prinzip Verantwortung problematiseert filosoof Hans Jonas de enorme toename van macht die de mens dankzij de moderne techniek heeft verkregen. Deze machtsontwikkeling vraagt om een heel nieuwe ethiek waarin de verantwoordelijkheid van de mens moet worden uitgebreid naar de natuur. Filosoof en bioloog Pieter Lemmens (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen), belicht de groeiende betekenis van Jonas' werk voor onze tijd. Daarbij kijkt hij kritisch naar zowel zijn techniekopvatting als zijn utopiekritiek.

This article attempts to provide a Stieglerian organological and pharmacological critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s thesis, mainly developed in their Empire trilogy, that today’s cognitive capitalism is a prefiguration of communism, that is, that the current ‘knowledge economy’ based on immaterial production intrinsically generates the conditions or prerequisites for a transformation towards communism. Cognitive capitalism, according to Hardt and Negri, in fact represents a perverse ‘communism of capital’ that will eventually evolve, due to its inherent contradictions, into a genuine ‘communism of the multitude’. Basing myself primarily on the work of Bernard Stiegler but also on Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s recent analyses of semiocapitalism and the cognitariat, I criticise the three basic (and deeply interrelated) arguments that Hardt and Negri provide to back up this thesis: the growing autonomy of the multitude, the withering away of the process of proletarianisation in immaterial labour and the (bio)politicisation of immaterial labour. I focus on the first two arguments, showing them to be unconvincing in the light of recent developments in cognitive capitalism. The presentation of contemporary cognitive capitalism as a proto-communist configuration, I suggest, is not realistic. Principally, Hardt and Negri’s diagnosis fails to adequately address the technological and libidinal conditions for the creation of a communist society; it fails to acknowledge, and even explicitly denies, the deeply proletarianising nature of cognitive capitalism, because it remains blind to the organological and pharmacological impact – in Stiegler’s terminology – of the digital networks on immaterial labour. In conclusion, I argue that a communism of the multitude first of all presupposes a struggle against the processes of cognitive and affective proletarianisation that are the prime characteristic of cognitive capitalism’s subsumption of the mind under capital.

‘The art of living with ICTs (information and communication technologies)’ today not only means finding new ways to cope, interact and create new lifestyles on the basis of the new digital (network) technologies individually, as ‘consumer-citizens’. It also means inventing new modes of living, producing and, not in the least place, struggling collectively, as workers and producers. As the so-called digital revolution unfolds in the context of a neoliberal cognitive and consumerist capitalism, its ‘innovations’ are predominantly employed to modulate and control both production processes and consumer behavior in view of the overall goal of extracting surplus value. Today, the digital networks overwhelmingly destroy social autonomy, instead engendering increasing social heteronomy and proletarianization. Yet it is these very networks themselves, as technical pharmaka in the sense of French ‘technophilosopher’ Bernard Stiegler, that can be employed as no other to struggle against this tendency. This paper briefly explores this possibility by reflecting upon current diagnoses of our ‘technological situation’ by some examplary post-operaist Marxists from a Stieglerian, pharmacological perspective.

In this reply I try to show that, contrary to Milberry’s apparent assertion, the general intellect of the multitude does not have the explanatory robustness she accredits to it (following both Virno and the Hardt and Negri of the Empire trilogy). Digital  network technologies are currently overwhelmingly effective in proletarianizing and disempowering the cognitariat and only an active technopolitics of deproletarianization could reverse this hegemonic situation. In my response to Verbeek, I attempt to correct his misinterpretation (shared by Milberry) of the Stieglerian approach as being dialectical in nature and show that, far from reinstating the humanist dichotomy between human beings and technologies, my analysis assumes their original, albeit fundamentally ambiguous and even ‘uncanny’ [unheimlich] interconnection. I conclude with pointing out some implications of this view for a ‘really realistic’ political theory of technology.

This article focuses on cognitive enhancement technologies (CET) and their possible anthropological implications, and argues for a reconsideration of the human-technology relation so as to be able to better understand and assess these implications. Current debates on cognitive enhancement (CE) consistently disregard the intimate intertwinement of humans and technology as well as the fundamentally technogenic nature of anthropogenesis. Yet, an adequate assessment of CET requires an in-depth and up-to-date re-conceptualization of both. Employing insights from the work of Bernard Stiegler, this article proposes an organology and pharmacology of CE. What is typical about new CET is their interiorizing nature, which can be expected to fundamentally reshape organological configurations. Starting from the premise that CE is a phenomenon that predominantly unfolds within the current conjuncture of cognitive capitalism, I will present the issue of cognitive proletarianization as being of crucial importance for considering CE. I conclude by providing some methodological guidelines for the development of a positive pharmacology of CET and by suggesting that CET should be considered as technologies of the self sensu Michel Foucault.

According to Bernard Stiegler’s theory of techno-evolution, technologies have an intrinsically pharmacological nature. This means that they are simultaneously supportive and destructive for sociotechnical practices based on them. Technological innovations always first disrupt existing sociotechnical practices, but can and should then always be appropriated by the social system to be turned into a new technical system upon which new sociotechnical practices are based. As constituted and conditioned by a technical system, agriculture is necessarily a system of care. Current deployment of transgenic technologies under capitalist conditions induce processes of proletarianization in agriculture, which has led to their widespread rejection. However, they can and should become the basis of a new system of care, but only under the condition that they are wrought from corporate control and redeployed to initiate a process of deproletarianization.

In this paper we inquire into the fundamental assumptions that underpin the ideal of the Bio-Based Economy (BBE) as it is currently developed. By interpreting the BBE from the philosophical perspective on economy developed by Georges Bataille, we demonstrate how the BBEis fully premised on a thinking of scarcity. As a result, the BBE exclusively frames economic problems in terms of efficient production, endeavoring to exclude a thinking of abundance and wastefulness. Our hypothesis is that this not only entails a number of internal tensions and inconsistencies with regard to the ideal of BBE, but ultimately undermines the ideal itself, by pushing purported regenerativity into a cataclysmic and terminal discharge. We here point to the strategies that the BBE employs in this exclusion, the fundamental assumptions regarding the relation between energy and economy that underpin this endeavor, as well as to the resulting
inconsistencies and their catastrophic consequences. We finally argue for the introduction of the presently excluded question of abundance and wastefulness and explore the implications of such a question for the ideal of a zero-waste humanity.

According to Bernard Stiegler’s theory of techno-evolution, technologies have an intrinsically pharmacological nature. They can be both supportive and destructive for sociotechnical practices based on them. Technological innovations always first disrupt existing sociotechnical practices, but can and should then always be appropriated by the social system to be turned into a new technical system upon which new sociotechnical practices are based. As constituted and conditioned by a technical system, agriculture is necessarily a system of care. Current deployment of transgenic technologies under capitalist conditions leads to processes of proletarianization in agriculture, which has led to their widespread rejection. However, they can and should become the basis of a new system of care, but only under the condition that they are wrought from corporate control and redeployed to initiate a process of deproletarianization

Om te concurreren met robots zal de mens zich tot cyborg moeten ontwikkelen, zei ondernemer Elon Musk op 14/2 in Dubai. Ofwel: laat onze hersenen samensmelten met chips. Musk kennen we van Tesla. Ondertussen werkt hij met SpaceX aan kolonisering van Mars. Hij voorziet een versnelling in robotisering en automatisering. Eén waar de AH-zelfscankassa een voorproefje van is. Amazon, 220.000 werknemers, bouwt bijvoorbeeld aan distributiecentra waar geen mens meer aan te pas komt. Zelfs de pakketbezorging wordt overgenomen door drones. De vrees dat technologie de mens overbodig maakt, is een constante in het denken van ' transhumanisten'. Zij zijn ervan overtuigd dat kunstmatige intelligentie ooit die van de mens zal overtreffen en vervolgens in rap tempo verder zal evolueren. Technologische singulariteit, noemen ze deze fase, een begrip dat in 1993 gemunt werd door schrijver Vernor Vinge. De singulariteit is nabij , stelde uitvinder Raymond Kurzweil in 2005. Zijn gelijknamige boek wordt beschouwd als de bijbel van de transhumanistische beweging. In 2030 zou het moment daar zijn. En als directeur engineering bij Google heeft hij daarop niet de minste invloed. Toch zal het zo'n vaart niet lopen, denkt hersenwetenschapper Peter Hagoort. We zouden nog onvoldoende kennis hebben over onze hersenen om samensmelting met chips te realiseren. Wel is het al mogelijk kevers van een neuro-implantaat te voorzien, zodat je ze als We zeggen het maar even voor de zekerheid: printen is alleen toegestaan voor persoonlijk gebruik. Het is niet supersympathiek om dit artikel te verspreiden. Sterker nog: het is verboden. Gelukkig is het heel eenvoudig om anderen een Blendle-linkje te sturen. Delen kan dus altijd!

With a title obviously alluding to Gilbert Simondon's famous 1958 book Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (only recently translated in English) this exceptionally original and superbly masterful treatise by Yuk Hui provides a thorough and in-depth philosophical analysis of the existence of digital technical objects, which had already appeared in the time Simondon wrote his book of course but were not explicitly investigated by him, one of the reasons probably being that they were anything but ubiquitous at the time. Hui, living in a time awash with digital objects that literally pervade the most intimate aspects of our lives now, is actually the first one to conduct such an investigation. Although there is evidently no shortage today of philosophical studies of digital media, as noted in the introduction, their focus is almost exclusively on the digital and informational aspects of these media, never on their nature or way of being as objects or things, i.e., on their objectivity or thinghood. It is this 'ontological' and that is to say most specifically philosophical approach that is pursued in this book, and in a constant dialogue, that is, with the whole of the philosophical tradition from Aristotle via Duns Scotus, Thomas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Husserl to Heidegger and Simondon, who are Hui's most important informants and interlocutors in this book and who also inspire its 'political agenda' (5). Even more so, the book directly relates this philosophical analysis to the computational or engineering approaches of digital objects within the computer sciences, engaging in both philosophical and technical debates with computer scientists such as Brian Cantwell Smith, Tim Berners-Lee, David Alan Grier and Alan Turing. In passing, it provides clear introductions in the thoughts of Husserl, Heidegger and Simondon. And although the general backdrop and 'spirit' of the book leans heavily towards 'continental philosophy', it also features discussions with key analytic thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Quine and Putnam. On top of that, it is also informed at times by insights from the social sciences and the humanities. A digital object for Hui is anything that appears on a digital screen or forms part of a computer program and is composed of data and metadata regulated by structures or schemes (1), e.g. a document file containing personal data of a user or an HTML webpage. They are new kinds of industrially produced technical objects utterly familiar to everyone yet still unthought by both philosophy and computer science. Hui's goal in this book is to develop an understanding of the digital object, i.e., its object-nature, by reciprocally examining both the philosophical tradition's theories of natural and technical objects and the so-called ontology theories from computer science. Most basically, he aims to understand digital objects in terms of relations, thereby employing a notion of relation inspired first of all by Bachelard but more specifically adapted from Simondon as well as from Heidegger, who is explicitly interpreted by Hui as a philosopher of relations, in stark contrast to the object-oriented reading of Heidegger by Graham Harman, to whom he briefly positions himself. Bachelard and Simondon also provide him with his basic methodology, which is that of the so-called orders of magnitude, which means an approach of objects from different physical, technical or operational levels (from that of electrons and bits via coding languages and data to whole digital networks) pursued through different instruments. The spectrum of orders of magnitude chosen in this study is that of data, since data form the intermediary between the level of pure computation and that of human experience (32). The ultimate

That the Anthropocene will inevitably be a Techno-Anthropocene seems obvious and that the re-design of our technological modus vivendi on the planet will primarily be a techno-scientific affair is also very likely. As earth system scientists have claimed, it is the so-called technosphere – the global technological infrastructure that has emerged since the Industrial Revolution as a geosphere in its own right on a par and increasingly fused with the other, natural geospheres – that will crucially determine the future, and the future habitability, of the planet. The principal difference between the vanishing Holocene and the emerging Anthropocene Earth consists of the fact that what used to be called the natural environment is gradually (and possibly abruptly) changing from an inactive and relatively benign backdrop into a much more active and much less human-friendly frontstage. This fundamental change in the ultimate life support system of humanity calls for a radical transformation of our technological relation to what we once called nature and now reveals itself as a precarious biosphere, of which only the near surface part or the so-called ‘critical zone’, is able to sustain life.
In our talk we will focus on the way in which the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whose sphero-techno-immunological re-interpretation of the human condition has been called the first anthropocenic discipline by Bruno Latour, conceives of the complete re-orientation of the  human technological endeavour that the Anthropocene calls for, and that is in terms of (1) a so-called homeotechnological turn of co-operation with the modi operandi of nature so as to replace the traditional allotechnological mode of going against nature, and (2) a change from technological extension and expansion to a kind of technological immunization that he refers to with notions such as transplantation, implantation and atmospheric design, by which he means the creation of technological interiors or envelopes in the sense of artificial life support systems allowing for intensely or even fully technologized modes of being-in-the-world on an earth that increasingly fails to supply sufficient life support functionality. We will in particular look at how these two technological ‘strategies’ relate to each other and how they might converge in what we could call techno-bio-spheric life design.

While the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (1947) is most generally known today as a theorist of culture, history and politics approached from an anthropological perspective, less attention has been given to the fact that his anthropology is decidedly informed by the premise that the anthropos as a cultural, historical and political being is fundamentally and irreversibly a technical creature. The grand sphero-logical and immuno-logical narrative of the evolution and history of humanity and of the human condition in general that he develops in particular in his Spheres trilogy is in fact a tale of progressive technical isolation, immunization, distancing and mediation of the human species vis-à-vis the natural environment. As such, the human species increasingly expands the artificial ‘interior spaces’ or immuno-spheres in which it gestates as an intelligent and cunning, highly improbable yet utterly successful creature, but also progressively enlarges its dependence on it, which today in the so-called Anthropocene has reached the point of putting the very survivability of the human species in question.
In our talk we will zoom in on the (in our view) decisive yet somewhat underdeveloped technological dimension of Sloterdijk’s spherological and immunological understanding of the human endeavour, presenting him explicitly as a philosopher of technology and of technical mediation. We will elaborate on his technogenic conception of hominization as well as on his anthropotechnical theory of humanization, discussing the influence of both Heidegger’s and Gotthard Günther’s theories of technology as well as that of theorists of the German tradition of philosophical anthropology, especially Arnold Gehlen. We will also address the shortcomings of Sloterdijk’s understanding of the relation between humans and technology and his current stance vis-à-vis the Anthropocene as they result from what Bernard Stiegler, whose tragic view on the human-technology relation is nonetheless close to that of the Nietzschean Sloterdijk, has diagnosed as the lack of a pharmacological perspective and thus of the failure by the latter to acknowledge the eminently tragic, entropic-negentropic ambiguity of all technologization and by implication all hominization and humanization.

One of the more interesting concepts that have emerged within the debate on the Anthropocene is that of the technosphere, an attempt to think technology as a planetary phenomenon, decisive for its future as a life support system. Mainstream philosophy of technology so far has hardly taken notice of this powerful and fertile concept. Having abandoned interest in ‘large scale’ and ‘high altitude’ conceptualizations of technology since the so-called ‘empirical turn’, it has failed to address the profound planetary impact of technology and engage with the technosphere concept.
Starting from the assumption that the technosphere represents the concretion of what Heidegger called enframing, I will offer a Stieglerian critique of the naturalist of not physicalist technosphere concept in Earth system science by showing that it does not understand, somewhat surprisingly, the proper nature and implications of the human-technology relationship as it is constitutive of the technosphere. Consequently it fails to properly address what is truly specific about this artificial geosphere, and that is its ‘noetic’ as well as its ‘libidinal’ character. The latter constitutes what Clive Hamilton calls humanity’s ‘world-making’ capacity, which seems to be collapsing in the Anthropocene, indeed together with the collapse of ‘nature’.
It is only by focusing on the Earth-systemic impact and specificity of precisely these noetic and libidinal dimensions of the technosphere or rather techno-noosphere that we can properly start to think about how to reconstruct it from a destructive and careless into a constructive and caring constituent of the anthropized Earth system, as I will try to show with Stiegler and in dialogue with the so-called ‘gradient theory’ of Schneider & Sagan.

Adopting a basically Heideggerian perspective on human existence, the German philosopher Peter Trawny has argued that whilst today’s media-saturated world, as an expression of what he calls the universal reign of the medium as the hidden ‘essence’ of all media, may offer us plenty of opportunities for emancipation, empowerment and enjoyment, it also locks us, ever more, into a state of subjective indifference and normalization, in which any possibility of genuine – i.e., revolutionary – change is not only neutralized but ultimately eliminated. Media, in their alleged essential complicity with capital and technology, constitute an enclosing universal system – the ‘TCM universal’ – that totally absorbs our ontological freedom, thereby practically annulling it. Only an apocalyptic event coming from the ‘outside’, e.g. a global ecological disaster, could dismantle this system.
In my talk I want to confront this rather fatalistic yet not implausible assessment of the current ‘human condition’ with a similar diagnosis of ‘total nihilism’, that of Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler, though, recognizes the possibility, as well as the necessity, of a systemic revolution by locating it in the very process of technical mediation itself and by emphasizing the essentially organological and pharmacological nature of media, which are thus understood not in a quasi-Heideggerian, onto-historical sense as simple ‘emanations’ of a more fundamental essence, ‘the medium’, but as concretely constituting the latter. This opens up a wholly different perspective on the current state of mediated paralysis and allows for the invention of strategies to overcome it, as I will demonstrate.

In current debates about the Anthropocene, the geological era in which humans have become the prime geological (f)actor, one can most generally distinguish two different discourses that perceive it in a seemingly contradictory way. One the one hand there is a group that tends to emphasize the increasing power of humans to affect the earth-system and possibly even to take it under its control, e.g. through geo-engineering. This group consists of many environmental and earth-system scientists but is most explicitly represented by the so-called eco-modernists or eco-pragmatists such as Erle Ellis, Mark Lynas and Stewart Brand. These authors stress what is called the increasing anthroposization of the earth and advocate the creation of a human-induced ‘good Anthropocene’. On the other hand there is a group of thinkers, among them many philosophers like Michel Serres, Clive Hamilton, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton, who emphasize the growing instability and thus uncontrollability of the earth system and recognize its increasingly apparent agency – through what Stengers has poignantly called ‘the intrusion of Gaia’ –, thereby pointing towards the need for humanity to reckon with the planet and invent a more careful and caring modus vivendi. This debate calls for a fundamental reconsideration of human agency vis-à-vis the agency of the earth system, or better of the combined geological and ecological agencies that collectively constitute the earth system.
It is clear, however, that human agency cannot be thought independently of the agency of the technical systems through which humans interact with nature and each other. It is only recently, though, that discussions about human versus ‘Gaian’ agency in the context of the Anthropocene have started to address this question of technology, for instance by appealing to the notions of the technosphere and the noosphere. As a result of this the traditional question of the autonomy of technology versus human autonomy, largely dismissed since the so-called ‘empirical turn’ in contemporary philosophy of technology, has resurfaced again. It is obvious that this question has become increasingly urgent today, and not just because of the planetary impact of technology, but also because of the ever more pervasive implementation of artificial intelligence, digital automation, bots and big data within the technosphere through what is called Web 3.0, a development that profoundly changes and complicates the question of technological agency vis-à-vis human agency and of their relation to the ‘Gaian’ agencies that constitute the natural ‘World-Wide-Web of life’.
In this talk I will explore the philosophical import as well as the implications for philosophy of technology and media theory of this emerging anthropocenic horizon, in which the domains of geological, anthropic and technological agency are becoming increasingly entangled and co-dependent, thereby focusing in particular on the relation between the noetic and the energetic dimensions (in the broadest sense of these terms), in dialogue principally with Peter Haff’s recent theorizations of the planetary technosphere but also by recourse to Vernadsky’s and Teilhard de Chardin’s thoughts on the noosphere. After showing that these views on the techno- and noosphere are all unsatisfying or at least in need of substantial revision (since they are either too naturalistic, idealistic or neglecting crucial aspects), I will try to develop a more profound understandig of the emerging techno-noosphere by addressing it from a Heideggerian (enframing, danger and the principle of reason), a Stieglerian (organo-pharmacological) and a Simondonian (transductive, ontogenetic and technical individuation) (techno)philosophical perspective

Although it can be argued that there is no experience more philosophical, at least potentially, than a psychedelic trip, in general philosophy has never systematically engaged in studying the psychedelic experience and the epistemological and ontological conundrums it undeniably presents, although certain exceptions do exist. Whereas psychology, anthropology, neurology, ethnobotany, theology and sociology demonstrate a sustained and even increasing interest in psychedelics, philosophy has consistently ignored the psychedelic experience, apparently deeming it unworthy of reflection and considering it inconsequential for the philosophical enterprise. Whereas the psychedelic experience seems eminently philosophical, philosophy has never ‘turned on’ (let alone ‘tuned in’), although recently things have slowly started to change of course. 
In my talk I will first bring up the question, which forms a central motive of a book project on philosophy and psychedelics that I have initiated together with some fellow philosopher-psychonauts and that I want to present to the audience, as to why this is the case. What are the reasons behind the lack of rapprochement between philosophy and psychedelia? Why is the psychedelic experience virtually absent in philosophical thought? What are the motives for this lack of interest, despite the fact that the psychedelic experience is arguably an epistemological and ontological treasure trove for philosophy?
Then I will focus specifically on the epistemological potentials of psychedelics or on what I would like to call the question of ‘pharmako-gnosis’, borrowing a term from Dale Pendell. One of the consistent claims made by psychonauts is that psychedelics can convey knowledge, i.e., deep insights into the true nature not only of the psyche or consciousness or nature but of the cosmos, the universe and indeed the very nature of being itself. Psychedelics are consistently experienced as sources of gnosis and seen as teachers that convey knowledge, or ‘information’ as James Kent has it, but knowledge and information of a particular nature, indeed: psychedelic knowledge, which seems in our culture to be a ‘forbidden knowledge’ as Pendell writes yet is also unmistakably a ‘knowledge with the power to heal’.
How should we understand the nature of such pharmako-gnostic knowledge claims philosophically and might it be possible to develop something like a ‘critique of psychedelic reason’ and with it a ‘critique of psychedelic judgement’ in a quasi-Kantian sense to evaluate these claims? Applying the ideas of the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler on the originally pharmacological nature of all knowledge to psychedelics understood as epistemological (as well as psycho-spiritual) tools, I will try to develop some building blocks for such a critique.

In this talk I will focus on the idea of ‘collective cognitive enhancement’ through digital network technologies with the aim of exploring how these technologies can be recruited to call into being and maintain not only the global eco-logical, eco-political and eco-ethical consciousnes that is a precondition for collectively confronting the global multicrisis descending upon humanity, but also to construct the power and the possibilities for collective ecological action in the age of the anthropocene. What is more, I will argue for the necessity of conceiving of ‘collective cognitive enhancement’ through digital network technologies homeotechnologically in the sense of Peter Sloterdijk and homeotelically in the sense of Edward Goldsmith, i.e., as designing them so as to be co-operative and co-telic with the earthly ecosystem. In the anthropocene, long term ‘digital well-being’ cannot be considered in abstraction from the ‘well-being’ of the planetary ecosystem.

In contrast with post-phenomenology, which understands the relation between humans, society and technology in terms of mediation, the techno-phenomenology of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler conceives of technical objects as originally constituting and conditioning human beings and their social organizations. His so-called general organology, an elaboration and expansion of Gilbert Simondon’s mechanological understanding of technical ensembles, thinks humans, social organizations and technologies as processes of co-individuation that dynamically relate to each other in a transductive way, as taking shape only within their constantly changing relationships. Most importantly, general organology considers the libidinal energy flows (drives and desires) within the circuits of psychosocial individuation as conditioned by technologies and theorizes these technologies as pharmaka that simultaneously support and undermine psychic and social individuation processes. According to Stiegler, the new digital pharmaka currently engender a generalized malaise or ‘unwell-being’ [mal-être] in today’s societies because they totally disrupt the existing (literary and analog) technical milieus upon which psychic and social individuation was based over the last century. On the other hand, however, the new digital pharmaka carry the promise of a new age of reason, culture, knowledge and spirit, i.e., a ‘digital enlightenment’, if only their hegemonic ‘toxic’ functioning in the current capitalist conjuncture can be transformed  into a ‘curative’ one to inaugurate new modes of individual and collective existence. In my talk I will discuss some of the specific ‘empowering’ characteristics of digital pharmaka allowing for such a turn to a new age of ‘well-being’, specifically focusing on new possibilities for collective production as well as creative resistance they offer for countering the massive ‘disempowerment’ and ‘impossibilization’afflicted upon individuals and the social within the current hypercapitalist era (think of big data, algorithmic governance, neuromarketing and generalized robotization).

There seems to be general agreement that emerging human enhancement technologies have the capacity to fundamentally reshape the human. It is not sure, however, whether the notion of the posthuman captures what is at stake here. If posthumanism is the recognition of a profound interwoveness of the human and technology, then we could argue that we have always been posthuman. Following Bernard Stiegler, we can state that the human is a technical form of life in the sense of being based on an extra-biological, technical inheritance system that incessantly forces it to negotiate with and (re-)configure itself with respect to a process of technical exteriorization that periodically puts the being of this being into question. As such is is characterized by ‘original technicity’. The novelty presented by genetic enhancement technologies, however, is the fact that they deviate from the age-old path of technical exteriorization and open instead a process of technical interiorization. This new situation puts the being of humanity in question in a totally unprecedented way. I will explore how technical interiorization might affect our ‘original technicity’ in new ways by looking at some genetic enhancement technologies that can indeed be understood as interiorizations, thereby explicitly considering them pharmaco-logically, following Stiegler’s contention that technologies should be conceived as pharmaka: as being simultaneously poisoning and remedying with respect to the functions they support and/or replace. My ultimate aim is to develop a pharmacological view of enhancement technologies that can function as a frame of reference for ethical deliberation.

As the French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler has remarked, whereas the co-evolution of human and technology until now has consisted in processes of technical exteriorization, the new human enhancement technologies (HET) initiate an inverse process of technical interiorization. This is surely unprecedented and constitutes a fundamental mutation in the process of techno-evolution that has yielded the entity that we call the human. To claim that this mutation inaugurates the posthuman, however, is inaccurate and premature. Not only because the becoming of the human has always proceeded from a process of techno-evolution or the technicisation of the living but also, as Stiegler argues, because in a very fundamental way there never was such a thing as the human, since the human is precisely that which has always been lacking and is always to-come. The human ‘is’ only in being constantly and from the very beginning challenged and put into question by a process of technical becoming that permanently traverses it and conditions its very being. This process represents a dynamic of heteronomization that continuously threatens human autonomy but is also always the condition for the constitution of every (new) form of autonomy.
Although transhumanists and technoprogressives more generally embrace the so-called NBIC revolution for the possibilities it opens to drastically transform the human and endow him with capacities and abilities that will enable him eventually to transcend his nature and become trans- or posthuman, if we look at the actual way in which most of the so-called HET develop nowadays, there is no denial that the overall horizon in which they arise and can be expected to proliferate most extensively is that of the adaptation of the human to the technical milieu that supports his existence. This holds especially true for the area of cognitive enhancement, for instance with the development of nootropics and brain-computer interfaces, through which man’s cognitive apparatus can be compatibilized with the increasingly automatized functioning of the technical milieu. The problem that is posed with the emergence of the new HET understood as the interiorization of technical automatisms in the human body and brain itself is, in this regard, not that of the emergence of the posthuman, but of the threat of the loss of autonomy due to this adaptive internalization of technical automatons.
In the final analysis, Stiegler argues, technical interiorization confronts us with the – not just theoretical but in his view very real - possibility of what he calls a state of total automatization, in which human autonomy would be completely absorbed in technical heteronomy – the smooth functioning of technical automatons - and every being-put-into-question and questioning of the human would be rendered  virtually impossible. This possibility of a state of total automatization seems to be analogous in many ways to what the late Heidegger described as the supreme danger of technology, where man would risk the loss of his ontological freedom - i.e., his very openness to being - and become fixed [fest-gestellt] in his current essence as the animal laborans by being as enframing [Ge-stell]. The so-called posthuman condition would then in a certain way be the (unrecognized) concretization of the danger inherent in the essence of technology.
In my presentation,  I will explore this hypothesis from both a Heideggerian and a Stieglerian perspective, taking account of their different interpretations of the essence of technology in its relation to the essence of man. The crucial difference between Heidegger and Stiegler is that the former does not think of technology as being constitutive for man’s openness to Being, whereas the latter does. Whereas for Heidegger man derives his essence from being and claims this essence is essentially imperishable, Stiegler associates man’s essence with his fundamental technicity, which is grounded in man’s original lack of origin, thereby showing that it is thoroughly accidental. For Heidegger, modern technology (or its essence) closes man of from his questioning nature and openness to Being, but it is nevertheless also somehow the condition for re-opening him towards it, precisely by endangering it. For Stiegler, in a quite different way, technology (in an ontic sense) precisely opens - but can simultaneously also close of - this questioning (ontologically). This is due to what Stiegler calls the pharmacological nature of technology, being both poisoning-heteronomizing and curing-autonomizing at the same time, the former conditioning the latter. This, again, is similar to Heidegger’s thesis about the saving power inherent in the very danger of technology, which seems to bespeak a pharmako-logic as well.
Through a comparison of Stiegler’s and Heidegger’s similar yet conflicting interpretations of this - I assume: shared - pharmako-logic, my presentation will explore the critical potential of their respective views for what is erroneously perceived today as the posthuman condition.

"There seems to be general agreement that the new and emerging human enhancement technologies – being transformational technologies in the sense of having the capacity to intervene into the most basic, i.e., biomolecular and neurological mechanisms underlying human existence and evolution - have the capacity to fundamentally reshape the human, implying that nothing less than ‘human nature’ as such is at stake in the coming human enhancement revolution. Many authors claim that this revolution – exemplified by the so-called NBIC-convergence – somehow announces the end of humanity as we know it and inaugurates the posthuman condition.
It is not sure, however, whether this notion of the posthuman captures what is really at stake in the current technological mutation. If posthumanism is the recognition of a profound interwoveness of the human and technology, then we could argue that we have always been posthuman. The human is a being that owes - and has always owed – its very being to technology because it has come into being as a result of a process of techno-evolution. As the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has shown, the human is a technical form of life in the sense of being based on an extra-biological, i.e., technical inheritance system that incessantly forces it to negotiate with and (re-)configure itself with respect to a process of technical exteriorization that periodically puts the being of this being into question. What is at stake in the current technological transformation, according to Stiegler, is not so much the transcendence of ‘the human’ - through its technicization - as a wholly new way of being put into question – by the new transformational technologies - of the human - and more fundamental even of this being’s very ability of being put into question, which is the privilege of this being that we are ourselves and that Heidegger called ‘Dasein’, characterized by its ability of questioning its own being.
Using a largely forgotten term from the Marxist tradition, Stiegler proposes that the question posed by today’s technological situation is not that of a supposed posthuman condition but instead the threat of an age of hyperproletarianization. Proletarianization, in Stiegler’s view, essentially consists in the loss of knowledge and know-how and the erosion of autonomy and agency in humans resulting from a short-circuiting of processes of subjectivation by technical dispositives. Human evolution and history, according to Stiegler, should be understood organologically in the sense of a three-tiered process of co-individuation involving psychic, social and technical organs which continuously co-constitute each other. Proletarianization, which inextricably belongs to techno-evolution as such and therefore needs to be countered continuously by deproletarianization, occurs when technical organs replace psychic and social organs (i.e., organizations) without being interiorized and appropriated. This leads to psychic and social disindividuation.
The novelty presented by the transformational technologies of human enhancement is the fact that they deviate, for the first time in the history of the human species, from the age-old path of technical exteriorization and open instead a process of technical interiorization. This new situation gives the issue of proletarianization a radically new twist and makes it more pregnant than ever. For Stiegler, this not only implies a putting-into-question of the human that is totally unprecedented, it also endangers – especially in the current situation of market-led innovation - our very ability of questioning ourselves, which is rooted ultimately in our original technicity or accidentality understood as our original default of origin. The new transformational technologies, or so it seems, could somehow close off the openness – and criticality - of human existence grounded in this originary default.
In my paper I want to explore and question this rather apocalyptic view by investigating how technical interiorization might affect our technical condition sensu Stiegler but also by looking at some of the possible human enhancement technologies that can indeed be understood as technical interiorizations, like genetic engineering, brain implants, neuroprostheses, deep brain stimulation, nootropics, artificial senses and limbs, but also brain-computer interfaces - thereby explicitly considering them pharmaco-logically, following Stiegler’s contention that technical organs should be conceived as pharmaka in the sense of being simultaneously poisoning and remedying with respect to the functions they support and/or replace. The ultimate aim of this exercise will be to develop an organological and pharmacological view of human enhancement technologies.
"

Bernard Stiegler’s unexpected passing away in August 2020 left many things unfinished. His philosophical work, that had started by a seminal theory of technics as memory and evolved towards an interrogation of the automatic society, now examined from the perspective of anthropic and neganthropic tendencies of the world marked by pervasive AI, ultraliberalism and climate catastrophe. His influence went also beyond philosophy to many practical engagements.


In order to commemorate the span of this multifaceted work, but above all in order to probe its future, the Leiden University Center for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) and the Institute for Science in Society of the Radboud University of Nijmegen summon a meeting of both academics and actors from civil society. The meeting will surely summarize his philosophical legacy, but above all it will explore possible futures in the spirit of Bernard Stiegler's philosophical  project, both practically and  theoretically. How should we take care of the world marked by ubiquitous digitalization, global ecological destruction and increasing economical turmoil? How should we face this reality in thinking? What should philosophy consist of when digitalization has entered the domain of knowledge production and cultural reflection? Is philosophy mainly a matter of concept production or also an engagement with reality? What is philosophizing for Stiegler, and how should we philosophize with Stiegler and after him?


Due to Covid restrictions the symposium will take place online. More than anybody else, Bernard Stiegler led us to interrogate both the misery and the emancipative potential of this media, so let this also be an occasion for putting this element of his thinking in practice.


The program will be updated on the symposium website, see below. People interested in the symposium should register with the conference secretary Donovan Stewart: donovanstewart@protonmail.com

Timothy Morton is one of the most innovative and thought-provoking thinkers of our time. Coming from ecocriticism and queer theory, he has been developing a radically new approach to ecological thinking in the last decade, in particular with reference to the Anthropocene, which is the new geological era in which the human has become an Earth-shaping force while the Earth itself as humanity’s one and only life support system is becoming increasingly instable and less human-friendly. Important publications are The Ecological Thought (2010), Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013) and Dark Ecology. For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016). In this expert workshop, organized by the Institute of Science in Society (ISiS) from the Faculty of Science of Radboud University Nijmegen, we discuss Morton’s thinking in dialogue with four researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium who will respond to his presentation on the topic of holism.

Call for Papers: Lyotard and the 21st Century
DECEMBER 13, 2023
Lyotard and the 21st Century

Special Issue of Technophany dedicated to the Centenary of Jean-François Lyotard

Editors: Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens



2024 marks the 100th anniversary of Jean-François Lyotard (10th August, 1924, Versailles–21st April, 1998). Lyotard was the thinker who endeavoured to open a new epoch, most influentially reflected in his discourse on the postmodern. His characterizations of the postmodern, such as “the incredulity toward metanarratives,” “the decline of universalist discourses,” “the reign of the performativity principle” and the age of the “hegemony of the techno-economic system,” not only remain actual but also deserve a deeper engagement within our current technological condition. His articulation of the postmodern is not only limited to the books containing the word “postmodern” in their title—The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), The Postmodern Explained (1988) and Postmodern Fables (1993)—but can be found in his reflection on science and technology throughout present since Discours, Figure (1971), where one could find consistent motives concerning disturbances and resistances against a totalizing discursive system. With his magnum opus, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983)—“my philosophy book,” as he himself called it—Lyotard became one of the most prominent representatives of the so-called “linguistic turn,” which dominated continental philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s.

Lyotard was a very influential author in the late twentieth century, not only in philosophy but also in aesthetics, art and media theory, political theory, sociology, pedagogy, linguistics and cultural studies. He was one of the major voices in the dispute between the modernists and postmodernists at the time, alongside Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Fredric Jameson and Richard Rorty. After his death in 1998, and with the gradual closure of the postmodern interlude, the name Lyotard appeared less frequently; however, in recent years, it has regained attention, in particular as regards his views on politics and technology, the latter being Lyotard’s main theoretical and political focus since the mid-1980s, expressed in books such as The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1988), Readings in Infancy (1991) and Postmodern Fables (1993).

Technophany wants to commemorate this anniversary with a special issue dedicated to the question of the continuing relevance of the work of Lyotard for the 21st century, which, on the one hand, appears to develop along the lines set out in Lyotard’s highly prophetic book on The Postmodern Condition, with the ongoing consolidation of the global techno-economic system embodying the most updated logic of capitalism and with the ever-increasing subordination of societies on a global scale to the performativity criterium through digital networks, AI algorithms and the transhumanist ideology propagated by the global oligarchy; on the other hand, the 21st century seems to have unfolded into a series of crises that Lyotard himself did not fully anticipate, for example, the apocalyptic urgency of the global ecological crisis and the enframing of the Earth into what Earth system scientists have called the Anthropocene, a new geological and geo-technological condition.

Lyotard’s thinking, apart from its celebrated postmodern birthmarks, offers plenty of resources for thinking through our current geo-historical moment and reflecting on the many material and intellectual developments currently at stake. His rich thinking has opened different incomplete paths to confront the challenges and crises humanity faces in the disorienting 21st century of crisis-ridden planetarization and ongoing technologization. We invite authors to reflect on the legacy of Lyotard’s multifaceted oeuvre for the 21st century against the backdrop of contemporary intellectual debates, reflecting on the continued relevance and futurity of notions such as the postmodern, the differend, narrativity, the un(re)presentable, the sublime, the libidinal, the inhuman, the system, resistance, the event, performativity, paralogy and many others.



Key Dates:

10th April: Deadline of abstracts (500 words to be sent to lyotardcentenary@gmail.com);

30th April: Announcement of acceptance of abstracts;

15th September: Complete articles due;

Publication: Late November/December, 2024.

Het lijkt onbekend terrein, maar we zitten er al jaren middenin: het Antropoceen. Het is een tijdperk waar veel op het spel staat voor de mens (antropos) en de aarde. De invloed van de mensheid op deze unieke planeet is gigantisch en niet zonder gevolgen. Het blijkt dat 'onze' claim van beheersbaarheid, duurzaamheid en controleerbaar-heid volslagen misplaatst is.

Klimatologische, ecologische en sociale beproevingen staan voor de deur. Corona heeft als voorbode al aangeklopt.

Wetenschappelijke data laten zien dat techniek, hoe gesofisticeerd dan ook, nooit in staat zal zijn om de natuurkrachten op aarde naar mensenmaat te plooien.
‘We zijn er geweest...’ is een ontdekkingsreis door een bizar landschap met gerenommeerde filosofische reisleiders zoals Martin Heidegger, Timothy Morton, Peter Sloterdijk, Bernard Stiegler en Clive Hamilton. De perspectieven en vergezichten die getoond worden, kunnen ons helpen bij het beantwoorden van de vragen wie of wat de mens nu eigenlijk is en in welke wereld wij straks willen leven.

Nogmaals, het Antropoceen lijkt onbekend terrein, maar we zijn er al geweest: fysiek en/of mentaal. Het is voor mij niet zomaar een vage veralgemenisering, of een kapstok, waaraan planetaire fenomenen (klimaatverandering, opwarming, etc.) kunnen worden gehangen. Het is als concept/metafoor net zo reëel als de Amazone, het kapitalisme, de sociale ongelijkheid in de wereld, het zorgstelsel, internet en de MacDonalds. De term expliciteert, maakt urgent, de verregaande en onlosmakelijke relatie tussen de mens en zijn woonstede Aarde. Doordat het een geologische term is, wordt duidelijk dat de centrale rol van de mens, zijn idee van superioriteit en almacht, in vraag gesteld en geproblematiseerd wordt.

Bovendien wordt de mens opgenomen in een geologische geschiedenis; d.w.z. behalve zijn eigen korte geschiedenis – zowel als mensheid en als individu – komt nu ook de geschiedenis van de aarde en haar eindigheid in het hier en nu terecht. Voor het eerst worden er signalen van de aarde - of, om een andere metafoor te gebruiken: van Gaia - ontvangen die blijk geven van haar kwetsbaarheid en eindigheid. Kwetsbaar en eindig in antropomorfe zin, want de aarde zal niet ten onder gaan aan de mens. Als levensvoorzienende planeet zal ze nog minstens 1,5 miljard jaar rondjes om de zon draaien. Hoelang ze de mens nog als organische diersoort kan behouden, is een vraag die – en dat is uniek – alleen de mens zelf kan beantwoorden.

Het is precies dit wat het Antropoceen als term/metafoor mogelijk maakt: de bewustwording van het feit dat wat wij als natuur en normaal zagen, voorbij is. De natuur bestaat niet, we zijn het zelf. Natuur staat niet los van ons, is geen onaantastbare achtergrond, geen decorstuk voor het menselijk toneelstukje, geen gereedschap om het construct van een (illusoire) mensenwereld mee te vormen. Dat hebben we nu allemaal wel gezien, we zijn er geweest, en we moeten nu verder op een andere manier, naar een ander normaal, naar een ander wereldbeeld. Dat wordt geen normaal van maakbaarheid, beheersing, verzekering, exploitatie en kapitaalaccumulatie. De mens zal moeten leren leven met de (vooralsnog) abnormale - a-normale, maar unieke -levensvoorwaarde die Aarde heet en van zich laat horen.

Al eeuwen doet de Aarde (of Gaia) van zich spreken. In het Antropoceen worden haar signalen langzaam maar zeker ontrafeld en begrepen: de mens is slechts een onderdeel van het totale aardsysteem en zal moeten leren om vreedzaam, zorgzaam om te gaan met de sferen van de planeet die zijn bestaan überhaupt mogelijk maken.
Deze signalen zijn eeuwen geleden ook wel door enkele wetenschappers en filosofen opgepikt en uitgewerkt, maar hun bevindingen vonden niet genoeg ‘oren’(Nietzsche) en werden als zweverig, doemdenken, charlatanerie afgedaan.

De afgelopen 5 decennia is de mens in staat om de berichten van de apocalyptische discipelen van Gaia serieus te nemen. Dankzij de wetenschappelijke en technologische ontwikkeling in combinatie met de computertechniek krijgen we steeds meer inzicht in de onpeilbare dieptes van het aardsysteem. Met de komst van internet wordt het ook voor de ‘gewone burger’ mogelijk om in te zien dat de idee van een onuitputtelijke, onaantastbare, beheersbare en passieve Aarde op geen enkele wijze meer te verdedigen is. Sterker nog: hoe meer wetenschappelijke data door de aardsysteemwetenschappen vergaard worden, hoe duidelijker de beperktheid en ontoereikendheid van het menselijke kennen en kunnen, wordt. Dat is voor velen beangstigend; het geeft een gevoel van onbehagen en graag klampen we ons vast aan schijnoplossingen en vage politieke beloftes. Dit alles gretig gevoed door de media en gulzig geconsumeerd door de massa.

Dit is het ‘normaal’ waar we het mee moeten doen; de rest is geschiedenis. In het Antropoceen kunnen we zien dat dingen te groot voor ons zijn en ter principale onoplosbaar.


Drs. ing. Bert Herps (1952) is filosoof en heeft o.a. milieutechnologie en natuurkunde gedoceerd aan diverse beroepsopleidingen.


Het boek is hier te bestellen: https://www.spehr.nl/boek-reizen-door-het-antropoceen