Philosopher Bernard Stiegler invoked the concept of the noetic necromass, a concept akin to biological necromass—cell detritus, dead biomass, and organic matter—but reinterpreted it within the histories of intelligence and tekhnē. For Stiegler, this represents a deadening of the cultural and intellectual processes central to individual and collective thought. Literature or at least access to literature is not except from this. In Technics and Time 3, Stiegler describes traditional institutions such as libraries, news agencies, and universities as retentional dispositifs, systems that shaped collective memory (retentions) and future anticipation (protentions). These institutions formed the noetic humus, the history of collective intelligence as such. However, Stiegler warns that digital platforms like Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Alibaba have usurped these roles. These platforms, driven by "functional sovereignty," prioritise algorithmic efficiency over hermeneutic interpretation, exploiting Big Data to influence behavior in ways that extend beyond consumerism into governance and academia. This dominance of algorithmic systems has precipitated a fundamental ‘disruption’, undermining the reflective capacities necessary for individuation—the process of becoming oneself—and noesis, the generative development of thought.

Stiegler’s later work draws on thinkers like Vladimir Vernadsky, Teilhard de Chardin, and Alfred J. Lotka to engage with the concept of the noosphere, a "mindsphere" encompassing life’s terrestrial evolution and its transformation of the biosphere. The noosphere represents humanity's collective intelligence and its potential to resist entropy, a process Stiegler reframes as the neganthropocene—a counterforce to the Anthropocene’s destructive tendencies. He connects this to an "ecology of the spirit," inspired by Paul Valéry, as a positive framework for addressing the existential and psychical crises of the Anthropocene.

Stiegler critiques how platform capitalism and algorithmic governance erode creativity and difference, fostering homogeneity in thought. The global mnemotechnical system, akin to a toxic World Brain, exemplifies this crisis by standardizing knowledge through algorithms while eroding the pedagogical and curative care traditionally offered by the humanities. For Stiegler, without such curation, the result is collective amnesia—a forgetting of the noetic necromass and a crisis of memory (mnemosyne).

The humanities have historically safeguarded the production of knowledge (savoirs). Yet Stiegler emphasizes the urgent need for universities to reclaim their mission of fostering deep attention through digital technologies, transforming the mnemotechnical system from a source of toxicity into a medium for curative and negentropic possibilities. He warns that, left unchecked, the reliance on algorithmic decision-making risks not only a loss of knowledge but the diminishment of the improbable and the "unhoped-for," echoing Heraclitus's fragment of the anelpiston.

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which dystopian speculative novels register how labor, technology and surveillance shape, and are shaped by, the structures of exploitation and value extraction in capitalist modernity. Drawing on Maurizio Lazzarato’s concept of immaterial labor and Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism, this article reads Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Phillips’ Hum as a critique of the ways in which human and non-human female protagonists like Klara and May perform undervalued, yet crucial, work within capitalist economies. In this sense, the dehumanization of May parallels the objectification of Klara: both are exploited for their ability to perform immaterial labor. The shifting of women’s role, particularly as mother figures, in a world that becomes increasingly dominated by technology, I argue, is recurrent in contemporary dystopian speculative fictions. The novels offer a critique of the replacement of human labor with AI, particularly in roles that involve emotional intelligence and caregiving. Ishiguro and Phillips invite their readers to reimagine worlds where technology plays a crucial role in shaping human lives in contemporary capitalist modernity.

Artificial intelligence is redefining all aspects of knowledge dissemination. Human interaction is reduced to formulating prompts for AI inquiries. In the current era, human presence is idealized, or perhaps "idolized," while simultaneously technologizing all possible human interventions. The Fourth Industrial Revolution heralds the integration of scientific algorithms into the processing of text as data. Text mining and data mining are now used interchangeably, further emphasizing the essentialization of text as a database. However, machine reading undermines the original act of human reading. Georges Poulet's ‘Phenomenology of Reading’ highlights the subjective-objective duality inherent in this act. Close reading inherits this crucial aspect of textual engagement, one that cannot be replicated by digital interfaces.

This paper explores the contextualization of texts within the fluid space of reality. Textual reading leverages the reader's capacity to observe, evaluate, and interpret. Thus, text becomes a unique space accessible only through the reader's active participation. Close reading emerges as the ideal form of reading at this juncture, as it suspends all realities external to the text itself. The paper further examines how modernity, with its emphasis on technology, defines text as simply another entity, akin to a machine. While concerns may arise regarding the modernization of text, the inherent uniqueness of text is thereby universally reinforced. Finally, the study investigates modern interventions in close reading through major intellectual movements, including Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. It reasserts the necessity of close reading for textualizing reality in our technology-driven world.

À partir d’une lecture critique, commentée et comparée des romans, pratiquement contemporains l’un de l’autre, Les Liens artificiels du philosophe et écrivain Nathan Devers et Les tout-puissants du musicien, compositeur, chanteur et producteur français Mirwais Ahmadzai Les Tout-puissants, il s’agira, dans cette proposition de communication, de dégager, tout en faisant converger, la fiction et la réflexion que deux romans véhiculent sur la technologie, ses ambivalences et ses dangers. Si, pour Nathan Devers, la fiction interroge la manière dont les technologies, et en particulier les mondes virtuels comme le Metavers, redéfinissent nos interactions et nos liens sociaux en les rendant définitivement « artificiels », chez Mirwais Ahmadzai, artiste français d’origine afghane, produit une violente critique de la société mercantile qu’il décrit asphyxié par le soupçon généralisé et l’omniprésence technologique. Dans les deux cas, nous avons affaire à des fictions (utopiques et / ou dystopiques) dont les auteurs ne sont pas, au départ, « écrivains », mais respectivement philosophe et musicien, ce qui pointe un souci transdisciplinaire et intermédial. Par ailleurs, les deux auteurs se sont signalés par un discours paratextuel réflexif sur la technologie, et plus spécifiquement sur l’intelligence artificielle et ses apories.

Nous entendons mettre en perspective et comparer ces approches, tant fictionnelles que réflexives, en en dégageant des convergences de vues et des interrogations sur l’ambivalence de nos rapports personnels et collectifs à la technologie dans ses différentes manifestations et conséquences.

Il apparaîtra que toute une mouvance de la fiction française contemporaine, et certains de ses auteurs, ont non seulement pris conscience des enjeux de l’impact d’une généralisation de l’emprise technologique sur l’existence et le social, mais y ont également et parallèlement réfléchi au point de s’interroger sur les conséquences de l’intelligence artificielle sur le processus créatif d’écriture littéraire.

This paper tries to show the cross cultural reception between Bengali Baul Geet and the Blues Music. The Blues became a way for these people to express their emotions. It was not until the emergence of Blues Rock that we see much heavy instruments. In Blues Rock the residual seems to be the generic markers like the melancholy while because of the dominance of the upcoming new instruments, the emergent was the Blues songs while with hard metal musics. While the Bauls were primarily influenced by two things which are Bhakti and Sufism. The Bhati was seen to be emerging during the time of Chaitanya while Sufi came in contact with this as Islam started to spread. During the 13th century we see the presence of Baktiyar Khalji conquering the western and northern part of bengal. One of the most important features of Blues music is that they don’t necessarily tell stories but rather express emotions (mainly of sadness because of oppression or love). The lyrics of one of the earliest recorded blues showed different struggles of life. While on the other hand Baul also showed a very same nature of living in which they brought up topics like caste and class which kept people oppressed and away as the “other”. The idea of hope and its loss through love or any other act is quite common in Baul as well. I will try to read through the music in both these style of two different culture and language systems as well. I will show a cultural traction in these two. The transaction happens in the contemporary modern singers who are seen to have been influenced by the Baul and the blues.