Date: TBA
Thanks to my counterpart in University of Winchester, UK, and Teikyo University, Japan
Experiments in Negentropic Knowledge: Bernard Stiegler’s contribution to the philosophy of education
Professor Joff P.N. Bradley
Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan
Emile Bojesen
University of Winchester, UK
Virgilio A. Rivas, Ph.D.
Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Philippines
Professor Ruth Irwin
Formerly Aberdeen University, UK
Panel proposal
Experiments in Negentropic Knowledge: Bernard Stiegler’s contribution to the philosophy of
education
This panel will apply Bernard Stiegler’s concepts to the philosophy of education. As locality or ethos is the site of ethical life, and as ethical life can only be conserved in a local open system, the premise of this panel is to consider new forms of negentropic bifurcation or thinking, new forms of invention, and new ways to reorganise education: it is to understand the open system as such. The ideal behind the panel is to realign thought in the time of the ascendency of technological and cybernetic modes of thinking, in the time of the automaticity of thought and control. Panelists will consider the question of the reopening of knowledge, the return to the base of knowledge, the epoché of established modes of thought. But as technological forms of thinking also afford us the opportunity to think about the possibility of the nature of planetary thinking (noosphere or world brain) as such, and as planetary thinking in its turn helps us to consider the possibility that technology may well allow for the radical redistribution of wealth, which is to say, the redistribution of knowledge wealth, that is wealth understood not solely in monetary terms but also in educational terms, we are invoking a utopian principle, that is posing the question of the communal and universal redistribution of the wealth of knowledge. We are thus concerned with the reclaiming of technology in the name of the radical redistribution of wealth and asking for hybrid, local experiments in the transformation of knowledge. This is to conceive of the possibility that education can be radically reformed to allow all to participate. This is a Stieglerian battle cry of sorts: to understand the pharmacology and the promise of technology. We are asking for the opening of thought to allow for the unanticipated to emerge.
On the curation of negentropic forms of knowledge
Joff P.N Bradley
My intention is to consider Bernard Stiegler’s concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ (Stiegler, Nanjing lectures (2016–2019). Open Humanities Press, 2020) and to explore how one might rethink the knowledge-creating potentialities of information itself. This has become all the more apparent in the time of lockdowns, physical distancing during the pandemic but the primary purpose of the paper is to look at the distinction between knowledge/information and the role of the teacher in using technology pharmacologically to safeguard the savoirs and to stem the proletarianization of knowledge or stupidity as such. The point is that the pandemic is bringing home the question of the role of the teacher, the role of the school and the necessity of the co-production and co-creation of knowledge. It seems essential to understand the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ in the time of the pandemic as students are left at home without a journey to voyage upon. As such, there is a lack of futurally-bound collective protentions, an absence of any vision projection into the future. What is there in the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ that demonstrates how to use the Internet in bifurcatory ways, to produce what Stiegler calls negentropic knowledge or new forms of knowledge, or what I want to designate as experiments with truth-telling. What does it mean to produce negentropic knowledge without the teacher to guide, curate and care? With the above in mind, and by writing out of the wound of thinking, it is by rethinking the concept of curation in a different way that it is hoped one can contribute to educational research to produce unheard-of bifurcations of knowledge, to invoke Deleuze’s sense of the incomprehensible and Stiegler’s sense of the impossible, the improbable and the incalculable in educational concerns, to pave a path out of the aporia of the present—a present which is without decision and epoch.
Stiegler and the task of tertiary retention: on the amateur as an educational subject
Virgilio A. Rivas
The paper attempts to examine what is by all accounts a self-styled approach to contemporary existence, borrowing from Claire Colebrook’s 2017 essay on Bernard Stiegler’s so-called ‘curious problem of range’. Subsequently, we tackle Yuk Hui’s interpretive reading of Stiegler’s analysis of retentional digitality. Hui promotes the idea of archival metaphysics to overlay Stiegler’s concept of tertiary retention with tertiary protention. However, Stiegler’s reformulation of Kant’s aesthetics already addresses these concerns: the problem of range that his works continually provoke and the self-inscriptive conditions of writing that limit the examination of this range to the paradox of différance. Stiegler assigns the task of unraveling this range in question to the amateur, vis-a-vis the critic’s typical role in the conduct of critical reason. For Stiegler, the amateur is the full achievement of aesthetic judgment, essential to education and culture formation.
Negentropy for the Anthropocene; Stiegler, Maori and Exosomatic Memory
Ruth Irwin
Stiegler extends the concept of exosomatic memory, as a crucial phase in the evolution of humanity. Exosomatic memory is the attribution of knowledge to objects, such as art or writing, which allows epistemology to be transmitted beyond the individual to subsequent generations of people. Exosomatic memory is the key to the transmission of culture and knowledge, beyond the individual who learns exclusively from personal experience. This places technologies such as writing and art in a key position for the education of culture and knowledge. Stiegler takes these ideas, following Leroi-Gourhan (1945) and Martin Heidegger (orig. 1927, 1962), from the Palaeolithic to the contemporary. Maori use of natural objects as exosomatic transmission of intergenerational learning exceeds the technological enframing of modernity outlined by Heidegger. Exosomatic memory is cultural, technological and ecological. Stiegler argues that the impact of cybernetics on knowledge production is accelerating the technological enframing of knowledge (2018). Consequently, information technologies are leaving the human mind behind, in passive receptivity rather than dynamic creativity. The prefrontal cortex is slower than the internet, exacerbating a widening lag in active understanding, in favour of passive absorption. Alienation and epistemological entropy are trapping us in climate change and the anthropocentric Capitalocene. Maori insight may cut the Gordian knot and sidestep the alienation and determinism of technological modernity.
Educational resistance
Emile Bojesen
Educational resistance is, here, examined in two of its possible inflections. First, as resistance to educational imposition. Second, as a form of resistance which might itself be educational. Jean-François Lyotard’s reflections on ‘anamnesic resistance’ are developed in the context of educational thought, and then read up against proposals for philosophically informed educational reform by Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler’s approach, based in part on a critique of Lyotard, is called in to question, both in terms of its reading of Lyotard and the impositional educational logic it follows. Additionally, this article incorporates a novel application of a practice-as research methodology, in aid of illuminating and exemplifying the central dimensions of its argument, utilising sound as a means of philosophical research and ‘anamnesic resistance’.
Notes on contributors
Joff P. N. Bradley
Joff P. N. Bradley is Professor of English in the Faculty of Language Studies at Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan. Bradley is a visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, India, and a visiting research fellow at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea. He is currently writing two volumes on animation and philosophy and schizoanalysis and postmedia.
Emile Bojesen
Reader in Education, Faculty Head of Research & Knowledge Exchange
Faculty of Education, University of Winchester, U.K.
Virgilio A. Rivas
Virgilio A. Rivas holds a Ph.D. on F.W.J. Schelling and the broader relation of German Idealism to current Anthropocene debate, and extinction and collapse theory. His research interests intersect with Deleuze Studies, posthumanist and assemblage theory and theoretical sociology. He teaches philosophy at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.
Ruth Irwin
Ruth Irwin has been Professor of Education at the Universities of Fiji and Aberdeen. She writes on climate change and philosophy, including the monograph, Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, (2008). She is currently working on a new book called Economic Futures, Climate Change, Time, and Society.
'Being is the scandal of Nature waiting for a new host' 