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Crogan, P. (2010). Bernard stiegler: Philosophy, technics, and activism. Cultural Politics, 6(2), 133–156.  
Added by: alexb44  25/09/2026, 04:00   Last edited by: alexb44  25/09/2026, 04:24
Resource type: Journal Article
Published
DOI: 10.2752/175174310X12672016548162
ID no. (ISBN etc.): 1743-2197
BibTeX citation key: Crogan2010
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Categories: General
Keywords: Memory, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Technics
Creators: Crogan
Collection: Cultural Politics
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Abstract
This essay characterizes the principal theoretical coordinates of Stiegler's philosophy of technology and assesses its relevance for critical explorations between culture and the political. The focus is on Stiegler's major philosophical series, Technics and Time, and how he articulates therein his contribution to the philosophical consideration of technics in relation to key influences such as Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gourhan, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Immanuel Kant. It then examines the activist dimension of Stiegler's later writing projects in the context of his work at the Pompidou Centre's Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation of which he is the founding director, and with Ars Industrialis, the association he co-founded to promote a renewed public sphere engagement with key questions of contemporary technocultural becoming. A review of the critical reception of Stiegler's work in Anglophone contexts ensues
Added by: alexb44  Last edited by: alexb44
Notes
Summary: 

 

Implications for my research:

 

My thoughts: 

 

Key concepts:

Epiphylogenesis: The exteriorization of memory into technical objects through tertiary retention (From Hüsserl)


Added by: alexb44  Last edited by: alexb44
Quotes
   pp. 136–137  
There's a memorial aspect to every tool

"For Stiegler, Heidegger fails to follow his own analysis to the realization that technical objects are indispensable to the human experience of time. If as Heidegger argues Dasein is time, as temporality, that is, as remembering and anticipating from an always “enchained” present moment, then this is on the basis of its technically conditioned encounter with the world. The tool, the technique – and in this view both language and material objects are co-implied, composed in human being – are always memories whose deployment is always in anticipation of an outcome [my emphasis]. The knapped flint or the hammer preserves the memory of the gestures which produced it. As a medium or milieu of human existence, temporality is constituted out of this anticipatory projection from a past recollected on the basis of technical facticity. The development of tools and techniques specifically dedicated to support memory, which Stiegler calls “mnemotechnics,” from imaging to storytelling to writing to the digital database, are a specialization of the memorial aspect of every tool."

  Added by: alexb44  25/09/2026, 04:07

Comments:
LLMs capacity for producing text that feed directly into our collective memory - the internet as our primary means of getting information through tertiary retention - make them particularly powerful in altering this collective memory. I'd say for the worse.   Added by: alexb44  25/09/2026, 04:22

Keywords:   Memory, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Technics
   p. 137  
Relational Ontology - Co-constitution between humans and technics

"Without subscribing to a technological determinist position – for him there is no value in trying to oppose cultural or technological factors to each other in searching for some original condition of human–technical becoming – he will propose that the constitutive condition of human cultural development is one that is always already dis-adjusted, moving toward a metastabilization that is always conditional. It is a core claim of Stiegler’s work that the “who” and the “what” must not be thought in oppositional terms (Stiegler 1998: 177–8). Human and technics compose together a dynamic of mutual becoming."

  Added by: alexb44  25/09/2026, 04:21

Comments:
It seems to me Stiegler shares fundamentally the same ontological view of the co-constitution between human and technics - postphenomenology (Don Ihde) calls it relational ontology - and so the difference is more so the angle. Stiegler seems more macro, looking at technics as a fundamental conditions for the human becoming, while PP seems more micro focused, like looking at how an ultrasound machine alters the perception of a fetus, or how a navigation system might change spatial awareness.

Metastability comes from Simondon - the idea that both humans and technics are always in a state of 'push' and 'pull' based on its conditions. So both humans and technics push and pull each other, and thus they're always changing.

  Added by: alexb44  25/09/2026, 04:21

Keywords:   Memory, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Technics
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