[feel free to distribute]<br><br>"Attention, technics, and the digital: Bernard Stiegler’s Post-Grammatology"<br>a talk by Patrick Crogan, Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of West England<br><br>School of the Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences<br>
University of New South Wales<br>
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Date: Wednesday, July 4<br>
Time: 4-5:30pm<br>
Venue: Webster Theatre A, Robert Webster Building, UNSW, Kensington Campus<br>Maps here:<br><a href="http://www.facilities.unsw.edu.au/Maps/maps.html" target="_blank">http://www.facilities.unsw.edu.au/Maps/maps.html</a><br>
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All welcome.<br>
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"Attention, technics, and the digital: Bernard Stiegler’s Post-Grammatology"<br><br>
<p style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif" class="MsoNormal"><font>This paper will situate Stiegler’s critical diagnosis of
digital media technoculture in relation to his post-Derridean philosophy of
technology. Elaborated in recent works as a ‘pharmacological’ account of the
emergence of the prevailing digital technoculture, this diagnosis identifies
the threat posed by the increasing ‘grammatisation’ of experience produced by
the ‘short termism’ of commercial design and marketing logics dedicated to the
coordination of consumption with the needs of industrial production.
Contributing to the critique of the ‘attention economy’ and ‘experience design’
notions popular in the promotion of e-commerce and digital media marketing,
Stiegler identifies the channelling and impoverishment of forms of ‘attention’
as a central topos for the waging of a ‘battle for criticality’ to rescue a
properly cultural and intersubjective notion of attention as a taught and
learnt technique of individual calibration with the collective.</font></p>
<p style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif" class="MsoNormal"><font> </font></p>
<p style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif" class="MsoNormal"><font>Stiegler recalls that Derrida offered his account of the
deconstruction of the ‘logos’ in a context in which a cybernetic
‘deconstruction’ of language was already well in train. Derrida proposed his
‘grammatology’ in an ironic but serious, strategically hypothetical gesture to
cite and respond to the ambition of a ‘science’ of the logic and function of
communication operating across the history of Western metaphysics as much as in
its culmination, as Heidegger said, in something like cybernetics. Stiegler,
for his part, develops an account of the material history of grammatisations in
order to better apprehend the digital transformation of the media milieu. The
cybernetic procedures of information flow and realtime communications, and the
audiovisual forms of cinema, the phonogram and their derivatives combine in the
digital. The mediated milieu is, he says, the ‘and’ in the phrase ‘individual
and collective’.</font></p>
<p style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif" class="MsoNormal"><font> </font></p>
<font style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif" size="2">Drawing on Gilbert
Simondon’s notion of individuation—something which Stiegler argues is a telling
absence from Derrida’s project—Stiegler argues that human individual and
collective becoming is always mediated, always co-constituted with and in
technical milieux, and is always contingent, or ‘metastable’ (somewhat stable,
but also therefore somewhat unstable). ‘Anthropogenesis’ is always composed
with a ‘technogenesis’. Or, at least, it <i>has</i>
always been. The political stakes and motivations of Stiegler’s philosophical
response to Derrida’s gesture toward a grammatology become apparent from this
perspective. The pharmacological account of the digital milieu’s conditions is
an attempt to think its potential (as much as its threat) to a continuing
becoming-human, or becoming-not-inhuman (as Stiegler would have it), something
whose nature, legitimacy, or value have absolutely no essential basis or
inevitable future. If any particular articulation of what ‘human being’ states
or projects is deconstructible, then for Stiegler this articulation and this
deconstruction are technically, and historically conditioned, and open up the
question of their political ramifications.<span>
</span>
</font><br>
<br>
Bio<br>
<br>Patrick Crogan teaches film and media at the University of the West of
England, Bristol. His book, Gameplay Mode: Between War, Simulation and
Technoculture (University of Minessota Press, 2011) explores the complex
technocultural legacy of military technoscientific research and
development readable in the exemplary entertainment form of computer
culture, videogames. He is working on a project with Routledge whose
provisional title is ‘Post-cinematic media’. He guest edited the special
issue of Cultural Politics on Bernard Stiegler. He has published on
film, animation, video games and digital media forms.<br>
<br clear="all"><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><br>"A traveller, who has lost his way, should not ask, Where am I? What he really wants to know is, Where are the other places" - Alfred North Whitehead<br><br>Andrew Murphie - Associate Professor<br>
School of the Arts and Media, <br>University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2052<br><br><span style="font-family:"Arial","sans-serif""><span>UNSW is CRICOS</span> Provider code number 00098G</span><br>
<br>Editor - The Fibreculture Journal <a href="http://fibreculturejournal.org/" target="_blank">http://fibreculturejournal.org/</a>><br>web: <a href="http://www.andrewmurphie.org/" target="_blank">http://www.andrewmurphie.org/</a> <a href="http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/" target="_blank"></a><br>
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