Third wave continental philosophy of technology - Part II
Chair(s): Pieter Lemmens (Radboud University), Vincent Blok (Wageningen University), Hub Zwart (Erasmus University), Yuk Hui (Erasmus University)
PiSince its first emergence in the late nineteenth century (starting with Marx, Ure, Reuleaux and Kapp and coming of age throughout the twentieth century via a wide variety of authors such as Dessauer, Spengler, Gehlen, Plessner, the Jünger brothers, Heidegger, Bense, Anders, Günther, Simondon, Ellul and Hottois), philosophy of technology has predominantly sought to think ‘Technology with a capital T’ in a more or less ‘metaphysical’ or ‘transcendentalist’ fashion or as part of a philosophical anthropology.
After its establishment as an academic discipline in its own right from the early 1970’s onwards, philosophy of technology divided itself roughly into two different approaches, the so-called ‘engineering’ approach on the one hand and the so-called ‘humanities’ or ‘hermeneutic’ approach on the other (Mitcham 1994).
Within this latter approach, the transcendentalist framework remained most influential until the early 1990’s, when American (Ihde) and Dutch philosophers of technology (Verbeek) initiated the so-called ‘empirical turn’, which basically criticized all macro-scale or high-altitude and more ontological theorizations of technology such as Heidegger’s Enframing and Ellul’s Technological Imperative as inadequate and obsolete and instead proposed an explicit move toward micro-scale and low-altitude, i.e., empirical analyses of specific technical artefacts in concrete use contexts (Achterhuis 2001).
From the 2010’s onwards, this empirical approach has been reproached for obfuscating the broader politico-economic and ontological ambiance. Particularly European philosophers of technology expressed renewed interest in the older continentalist approaches and argued for a rehabilitation of the transcendental or ontological (as well as systemic) question of technology (Zwier, Blok & Lemmens 2016, Zwart 2021), for instance in the sense of the technosphere as planetary technical system responsible for ushering in the Anthropocene or Technocene (Cera 2023), forcing philosophy of technology to think technology big again (Lemmens 2021) and calling not only for a ‘political turn’ (Romele 2021) but also for a ‘terrestrial turn’ in the philosophy of technology (Lemmens, Blok & Zwier 2017).
Under the influence of, among others, Stiegler’s approach to the question of technics (Stiegler 2001), Hui’s concepts of cosmotechnics and technodiversity (Hui 2016) and Blok’s concept of ‘world-constitutive technics’ (Blok 2023), we are currently witnessing the emergence of what may be called a ‘third wave’ in philosophy of technology which intends, in dialectical fashion, to surpass the opposition between transcendental and empirical, and instead engages in combining more fundamental approaches to technology and its transformative, disruptive and world-shaping power with analyses of its more concrete (symptomatic) manifestations.
This symposium aims to open a debate among authors exemplifying this third wave, with a view to the contemporary intimate technological revolution, specifically focusing on the themes technology and human identity, human nature, agency and autonomy, artificial intelligence, robots and social media, and the environment and sustainability.
Presentations of the Symposium
Pharmacology of artificial intelligence: Stiegler’s exotranscendantal philosophy of digital technology
Anne Alombert
Université Paris 8
The aim of this paper is twofold :
I will first show how Bernard Stiegler's philosophy of technology, which he describes as an “exotranscendental” philosophy, enables him to move beyond the alternative between transcendentalism and empiricism (1). I will then show how this exotranscendantal philosophy of technology can help us to think the intimate and political issues at stake with the advent of generative artificial intelligence (2).
1) To begin with, I will show that from Technics and time to his last seminars, Stiegler suggest a way of thinking that goes beyond the opposition between the transcendental and the empirical, asserting a “double recusation of empiricism and transcendentalism” (Technics and time, vol.3). Such a thought implies to consider technical and technological environments as conditioning experience and knowledge, not in a transcendental or a priori way, but in a factic and evolving way. However, this thought is not empirical, because when they condition experience or thinking, technical environments cannot become the object of that experience or of that thought. Hence the allegory of the flying fish, which encourages us to take a temporary leap out of our everyday technological milieu, in order to understand how it affects our psychic capacities and shapes our collective relations.
2) Drawing on this perspective, I will then examine how our current technological, industrial and algorithmic environments affect our psychic capacities and shape our collective relationships. I will show that contemporary so called « generative artificial intelligence » constitutes new kinds of computational automatons which can be described as new « pharmaka » and which imply new risks. From an intimate or psychic point of view, these digital automatons risk leading to a proletarianization of expression and to a new kind of symbolic misery. From a cultural and collective point of view, they risk leading to a standardization of social memory, which tends to become a capital to be exploited by Big Tech companies. In order to face these new dangers, I will suggest to think hermeneutic and deliberative technologies, as well as algorithmic pluralism, which I consider as the current exotranscendantal conditions of possibility of technodiversity and noodiversity.
Response against Reaction: Stiegler’s positive philosophy of technology
Benoit Dillet
University of Bath
Bernard Stiegler is the philosopher of response. The question that could not stop haunting him was: how do we – as psycho-collective individuations – respond to today’s constantly evolving and accelerating present conditioned by our technologies? This disposition in the philosophical field has important consequences for thinking politics, beyond the ethical turn of ‘responsible tech’. For Stiegler, political decisions always arrive too late, they are taken in face of the technological shocks that reconfigure our ways of knowing, feeling, perceiving and working. It is here that he provides an original take on the concept of responsibility, not simply as a duty-first ethic but as the courage to act in response to specific circumstances. This courage to act usually interrupts the normal course of philosophical development (or academic life) and almost takes place as a vocation, as a call to act. It is not responsibility in the sense of having to be accountable to someone for something or to act as a moral agent but to rearrange the order of questions.
Moving away from the critiques of the reification or the essentialisation of technology by the empirical turn in philosophy of technology, I begin this presentation by showing the instrumentalisation of technology for hegemonic projects. In the present conjuncture and the sheer power grab that Big Tech companies have amassed in the last decade, it is no longer relevant to simply debate about which type of technology is worth philosophising, Heidegger’s hammer or Idhe’s cellphone, or providing ethical guidance for the use of emerging technologies. We should consider the current oligarchs of the Big Tech industry and their infrastructural project as proponents of technodeterminism. In response to this situation, I read the work of Bernard Stiegler as having renewed with transcendental perspectives on technology, ‘with a capital T’ (Lemmens 2021; Smith 2015), by integrating a critique of political economy (and ecology). His concept of technosphere in particular can illustrate this move (Stiegler 2019).
Following Stiegler, I understand technology from a relational ontological perspective – technology and the human are co-individuating rather separate spheres. Stiegler has also provided his philosophy with a particular political orientation. We can arrive at some important breakthroughs socially and politically if we examine the political domain from a technological perspective, not as two distinct domains since ‘politics is a technological phenomenon’ (Hui 2024: 3). Politicising technology means to think the orientation of technology historically and collectively. The relationship between technology and the people (or demos) is thus central to establishing principles for a political logic of technology.
Drawing from Stiegler’s first writings as well as his engagement with political and cultural institutions, I aim to unpack Stiegler’s oft-misunderstood ideas about political will. Stiegler’s project has changed over the course of his writings, from a politics of memory in his early work to the creation of the political think tank Ars Industrialis, as well as propositional politics in different domains such as an economy of contribution or a positive pharmacology. I will show that these different political moments in Stiegler form a single positive political vision about technology.
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