Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2015

Vol. 47, No. 10, 1110–1123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2015.1045819

Bernard Stiegler’s Philosophy of

Technology: Invention, decision, and
education in times of digitization
ANNA KOUPPANOU
Cyprus Pedagogical Institute

Abstract

Bernard Stiegler’s concept of individuation suggests that the human being is co-constituted
with technology. Technology precedes the individual in the respect that the latter is thrown in
a technological world that always already contains externally inscribed memories—what he
calls tertiary memories—that selectively form the individual and the collective space of the
community. Revisiting Husserlian phenomenology, Stiegler renews the critique of culture
industries asserting that imagination and differance have always been technologically
mediated, and echoing the Heideggerian anxiety concerning thinking’s over-determination,
Stiegler offers an intriguing analysis of the specificity of our age’s technologies while exploring
the possibility for political responsibility and educational intervention.

Keywords: invention, decision, grammatization, proletarianization

Introduction
Bernard Stiegler’s thought paves a new way for French philosophy coming to the fore
through laborious scrutiny of significant schools of thought—from metaphysics to
phenomenology, and from existentialism to poststructuralism—and their respective
leading figures such as Plato, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. As Stiegler
(2003) says in an interview entitled Technics of Decision:
As far as I’m concerned, one can only have a dialogue with a philosopher in
so far as one is ‘against this philosopher, right up against him’: you are very
close to him, but to be close to him, you must not be him. Ok. This is what
I mean about Heidegger and the same applies to my relation with Plato,
even with Derrida. (pp. 156–157)
Stiegler’s commentary on his own work will serve here as a signpost for approaching
and situating his theory within the context of French philosophy, poststructuralism,
and critique in general. Characteristic of this project is Stiegler’s reiteration of seminal

Ó 2015 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

 Bernar Stiegler’s Philosophy of Technology 1111

points of western thought while contemplating on the nature of reiteration itself. At

the heart of Stiegler’s thinking is the possibility to imagine difference in the age of
extreme technological determination, and thus, Stiegler’s whole project is in dialog
with differance itself, a notion that I explain later on. In this light, Stiegler’s thought is
an interesting contribution to critique resting in the limits of poststructuralism, and
indeed, one that attempts to answer questions set by Derrida and his interlocutors,
such as Heidegger and Husserl. With this effort, Stiegler puts the human–technology
relation center stage and radicalizes the connections between differance and technol-
ogy. Through a historicization of differance, Stiegler sees the human subject being
conditioned by technology and, in fact, in certain cases, up to total determination;
and at the same time, encumbers this subject with the responsibility to apply its will
and determine its future. This tension affects the philosopher’s political and educa-
tional investigations. In this article, which greatly serves exegetical purposes, I will
attempt to show that this problem, which is at the heart of the philosophical
enterprise after poststructuralism, bites quite hard into Stiegler’s body of work. To
illuminate this, I first explain Stiegler’s deconstructive interpretation of the human–
technology relation. Then, I discuss Stiegler’s reflections on the specificity of digital
apparatuses currently determining our psychic and political individuation and then
frame these reflections in the context of education. Finally, I present my own ideas
about the unexplored potential of Stiegler’s thought and the promises it makes for
future research.

Humanity and Technology: Differance in Stiegler

Leaving aside debates concerning the impossibility of the subject or the existence of
the non-human, Stiegler deconstructs the human–technology binary all together.
Indeed, Stiegler raises the question about the possibility of questioning, and this ques-
tion is, at its core, the question of consciousness and hominization (the process that
brings forth the human species). In the first volume of his Technics and Time series,
entitled The Fault of Epimetheus, Stiegler (1998) describes an evolutionary process
determined more by technology rather than by biology that results in the formation of
the human. Finding recourse to the paleoanthropic evidence provided by André
Leroi-Gourhan (1993, cited in Stiegler, 1998), Stiegler discusses ‘the passage into the
human leading from the Zinjanthropian to the Neanthropian’ with reference to the
use of tools (p. 134). The coupling between hand and stone creates a system that
makes possible the slow emergence of the tool and the tool-using human being whose
mouth is now freed for speech. Ultimately, this twofold technological apparatus,1 that
is, ‘tools for the hand, language for the face’ effect a new cortical organization that
brings forth the human being (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993, p. 20, cited in Stiegler, 1998,
p. 145). Stiegler says:
This ground breaking [frayage], which is that of corticalization, is also
effected in stone, in the course of the slow evolution of techniques of stone-
cutting. An evolution so slow—it still occurs at the rhythm of ‘genetic
1112 Anna Kouppanou

drift’—that one can hardly imagine the human as its operator, that is, as its
inventor; rather, one much more readily imagines the human as what is
invented. (p. 134)
In these terms, Stiegler historicizes hominization as a material process with no origin.
The process rather denotes ‘an originary lack of origin, ‘the de-fault of origin or the
origin as de-fault’ that is supplemented by technology. It is a process ‘binding the
“who” and the “what”’, namely ‘the human, and the technical’ in a complicated
relationship of ongoing co-constitution that questions the role of each one of its terms
(p. 188, 134). Conceptualized in this manner, hominization provokes a series of
deconstructions of binaries such as origin/supplement, human/technical, exterior/
interior, and matter/spirit.
Stiegler’s anti-essentialist reasoning appears to be reiterating Heidegger’s (2000)
attempts to destroy metaphysics and Derrida’s attempt to deconstruct it, but Stiegler
moves one step further with the help of Gilbert Simondon, as I will explain shortly.
To be precise, Stiegler’s analysis radicalizes Heidegger’s existential analytic, since the
latter makes two important distinctions both of which are unfavorable to technology.
Heidegger’s first distinction (2008) is the one between authentic time experienced
through the anticipation of death and inauthentic time produced through the use of
tools. Heidegger’s (1977) second distinction is between ways of relating to the world.
Again with this latter distinction, language is the one being able to truly reveal the
world, whereas technology merely turns everything into a resource. In contrast,
Stiegler (1998) establishes the ‘technological rooting of all relation to time’ and,
through his radical deconstruction of hominization, makes the notion indecipherable
from differance (p. 135). For Stiegler, differance is not the process that conditions the
unfolding of time, and therefore, the human–technology relation, but rather this rela-
tion constitutes the historical manifestation of difference and the givenness of time. In
other words, the transcendental aspects of experience exist because of technology.
This is a radical divergence from Derrida’s notion of differance (see Derrida, 1973,
1997), which describes a structure that enacts the equivocation of the sign by defying
metaphysical opposites. Indeed, for Derrida, difference constitutes the moment of
undecidability, constantly moving between its two meanings of deferral and differ-
entiation, while its own specific difference is instantiated through the technology of
writing. In Of Grammatology (1997), Derrida discusses the term in order to challenge
speech’s supposed priority but also indicate the role of representation in presence.
Differance, then, points to the deferral and differentiation of meaning inherent in all
language. For Derrida, words signify not through their structural correspondence to a
steadfast signified, but through the deferral of other possible meanings and their own
differentiation from other signs. Meaning does not originate from some essence but
rather is constructed through deferral and differentiation. However, whereas Derrida
transcribes the aporia of the origin into quasi-transcendental notions such as arche-
writing and trace, Stiegler remains within the realm of the empirical and locates the
transcendental aspects of differance in the historical invention of the human, and the
technical. In Stiegler’s words (1998):
 Bernar Stiegler’s Philosophy of Technology 1113

Différance is neither the ‘who’ nor the ‘what’, but their co-possibility, the
movement of their mutual coming-to-be, of their coming into convention.
The ‘who’ is nothing without the ‘what’, and conversely. Différance is
below and beyond the ‘who’ and the ‘what’; it poses them together, a
composition engendering the illusion of an opposition. (p. 141)
Hominization and differance become the process of undecidability; there is no point
at which one can decidedly differentiate between the cause and effect of this relation-
ship. The transcendental realm stretches within these undecidable limits, not outside
or prior to them. Delving deeper into the technical nature of this process, Stiegler
borrows Simondon’s (2009) terminology in order to describe the constitution of the
individual, human or technical, as
a relative reality, a certain phase of being that supposes a preindividual real-
ity, and that, even after individuation, does not exist on its own, because
individuation does not exhaust with one stroke the potentials of preindivid-
ual reality. Moreover, that which the individuation makes appear is not only
the individual, but also the pair individual-environment. (p. 5)
Simondon calls this movement ‘transduction’ and the system in which it is unfolding is
characterized as ‘metastable’, that is, neither stable to the point of no possible change,
nor unstable to the point that a structure is lacking all together. This metastability is for
Simondon ‘a condition of life’, and its elimination would suggest the death of the system
(p. 5, 7). Adhering to this reasoning that presupposes not only the historical and
technological grounding of differance, but also the compositional reality of the human–
technological relationship, Stiegler (2010b) points to the fact that there very well might
be a point in time in which differance, transduction or hominization, reaches an impasse
in the sense that the role of the human is effaced. This threat highlights the need to
understand the technologies we use, the kind of humans we become because of these
technologies, and the decisions we need to make about the kind of humans we want to
be. Being, however, part of a relation which is always compositional makes this kind of
deciphering a paradoxical task, putting the human both in the position of the one deter-
mined and the one who needs to determine. This task is for Stiegler (2010a) our
epoch’s urgency and also poststructuralism’s greatest challenge, since he argues that
deconstruction’s most notable failure is to imagine ‘what a critique might be were it no
longer founded on a system of oppositions’ (p. 26). The challenge is then to make decisions
in a reality that is now understood as compositional. In an attempt to illuminate this, I
explain next how technology interacts with the human and the specificity of this
relationship as currently manifested in the digital realm.

The Exteriorization of Thinking and the Challenge of the Digital

Revisiting phenomenological tradition that understood imagination separately from
perception, Stiegler makes the case that imagination has always been part of percep-
tion and indeed exteriorized on technological objects that affect it. In order to do so,
he goes back to Husserl (1991) according to whom, imagination is the faculty
involved in the processing of the not-here of the past and the non-yet of the future,
1114 Anna Kouppanou

whereas perception is responsible for the processing of pure presence. When

deliberating on the perception of temporal objects, that is, objects that according to
Stiegler (2011c), ‘coincide in the time of their passing with the time flow of the
consciousnesses of which they are the objects’ Husserl solidifies this distinction using
the example of a melody (p. 56). Thus, according to Husserl, when listening to a mel-
ody I register the musical note (primary impression) presented to my consciousness,
but this note is also retained (retention) in order to form anticipation of the next note
I am to receive (protention). For Husserl, the memory of the just-elapsed note hangs
on to the present, making perception responsible for its processing. By contrast,
memories of past events (secondary memories) do not belong to perception but are
rather contained in the imagination that is in charge of their recollection. Husserl
makes a further distinction arguing that memories contained in external objects, like
statues and paintings, belong to a third type of memory, namely ‘image-conscious-
ness’ and these, similarly to secondary memories, do not concern perception ‘in which
all “origin” lies’ (p. 43, cited in Stiegler, 1998, p. 248).
Derrida (1989) famously deconstructs this reading arguing that retention is not part
of the present but of the past, and, indeed, that, by making representation available,
imagination allows the perception of the present. Without representation, the present
would have been a series of disconnected now-moments. This, however, means that
the present is not identical to itself and that there is neither an origin of time nor a
point in time that is not indivisible or undifferentiated; the now is impregnated with
difference. For Derrida, representation is precisely the source of difference. Taking
this one step further, Stiegler turns specifically to the materiality of representation and
more importantly to Husserl’s third type of memory. He calls this memory tertiary.
According to Stiegler, it is precisely because memory is technologically inscribed that
it can be repeatedly and differentially accessed. He therefore argues that when listen-
ing to the melody for the second time—precisely because technology makes this possi-
ble—the memory of the first perception, which becomes my secondary memory,
modifies the impression I have when perceiving the melody again. In this way, repro-
duction—and, in consequence, imagination, as the one bringing forth past memories,
is exteriorized and participates in perception making differance possible. No two hear-
ings can be the same, simply because during the second perception ‘I hear from the
position of an expectation formed from everything that has already musically hap-
pened to me—I am responding to the Muses guarding the default-of-origin of my
desire, within me’ (Stiegler, 2011d, p. 19).
Stiegler’s idea of representation’s presence in presencing underlines perception’s
technological nature, since perception is formed by the tertiary memories contained in
the temporal object. These retentions will, in fact, become the selection criteria of
perception. In turn, this fact highlights the role of inheritance, or to put this in
Simondonian terms, the preindividuality, which allows the individual to actualize
potential (memories) latent in the milieu. Because of this precedence of technology,
Stiegler (1998) calls it prosthesis: technology is ‘what is proposed, placed in front,
in advance’ (p. 211). In other words, tertiary memory, that is, memory inscribed
externally precedes primary and secondary memory and becomes the structure of the
alreadyness,2 in which every generation is thrown (Beardsworth, 2013). In this light,
 Bernar Stiegler’s Philosophy of Technology 1115

Stiegler’s point (1998) ceases to be Derridean, since the philosopher admits the
precedence of the empirical constitution of differance, asserting that the ‘[t]he gift of
différance is technological’ (p. 237). This line of thinking breathes new life into
Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2006) analysis, concerning imagination’s industrialization
demonstrating that this phenomenon is possible precisely because imagination’s
associative ability, as originally proposed by Kant (2010), is not transcendental, but
‘always already implicated in the play of tertiary retentions that are projections of the
flux of consciousness beyond it’3 (p. 87). In other words, imagination’s forming
power is always already exteriorized and formed by the technologies we use and the
memories they contain.
It is not, however, the mere content of a technological medium that defines the
formation of imagination but also the specific way the medium spatializes and dis-
cretizes tertiary memory (2011c, p. 75). This process, which Stiegler calls
grammatization,4 takes different forms and allows the emergence of each epoch’s
psychic individual and social environment. Following the Simondonian belief con-
cerning the simultaneous co-constitution of the individual and its environment, Stieg-
ler (2011c) argues that the Greek city emerges as a political entity through the
adoption of alphabetical writing that allows multiple consciousnesses to be synchro-
nized to the written and thus commonly accessible text of the law. This synchrony
permits the appropriation of ‘a common heritage’ whilst enabling the individual to
participate diachronically, that is, through their differentiated interpretation of the
common heritage in the political realm. Stiegler (2003) explains further, that
during the age of alphabetic writing the figure of the citizen appears who is
above all a singular individual [une singularité], the affirmation of singular-
ity in the collective. On the basis of the identical text on which is written
the common law, each citizen has the experience of the strangeness of this
identity which, each time that it is brought into play, produces a difference.
(p. 160)
Relating this to the Derridean conceptualization of pharmakon—the Greek word that
signifies simultaneously poison and cure—Stiegler sees alphabetical writing bringing
out different human and societal organizations and, in fact, producing both poisonous
and curative effects. Indeed, in contrast to Plato, who unilaterally understood alpha-
betical writing as the Sophists’ poisonous instrument for manipulating opinion and
weakening memory, Stiegler (2012) discusses both writing’s poisonous effects, which
contribute to the elimination of idiomaticity, and its curative effects, which allow the
formation of the type of attention that makes the singularity of the citizen and demo-
cratic participation possible.
The historicization of differance, however, clearly suggests that the pharmakon’s
undecidable nature is alterable. Indeed, when Stiegler (1998) turns his gaze upon our
epoch he sees it being defined by a new process of grammatization that displaces the
human being from its role as co-creator of knowledge while the market’s and the cul-
ture industries’ selection criteria, rhythms and desires are being imposed on it. This
takes place, according to Stiegler (1998), through processes of accelerated registration
of events that produce the ‘live’ time of the media and the ‘real’ time of programming
1116 Anna Kouppanou

or computer industries and ‘distort profoundly, if not radically, what could be called
“event-ization” [événementialisation] as such, that is to say, the taking place of time
as much as the taking place of space’ (p. 16). In other words, time is given without
the intervention of the human being and this is now accentuated through the process
of digitization. Indeed, think of the way a social networking site is instantly organizing
a user’s online presence without the user’s own decisions concerning the mode or
even, at times, the content of their selves’ representation. Mark Hansen (2004) com-
ments on this simultaneity that characterizes ‘live’ time:
by rendering registration and broadcasting simultaneous, it threatens simply
to conflate consciousness and the temporal object that otherwise, following
the Husserlian analysis Stiegler appropriates, would allow consciousness to
reflect on itself.
In other words, speed merges the ‘what’ into the ‘who’ creating a singular flow that
allows neither delay, which is necessary for critical reflection, nor undecidability,
which is necessary for free decision-making. Differance is differed. In Echographies of
Television (2002), an interview in which Stiegler discusses the specificity of our times
with Derrida, Stiegler affirms this claim, whereas Derrida moves in the safe space of
quasi-transcendentality that ensures the presence of differance. In several other texts,
Stiegler (2011a) deepens his critique concerning the effacement of the possibility of
critique, arguing that currently it is the consumer and not the producer that is prole-
tarianized. He explains:
just as workers-become-proletarian find themselves deprived of the capacity
to work the world through their work, that is, through their savoir-faire, so
too consumers lose their savoir-vivre insofar as this means their singular way
of being in the world, that is, of existing. It is in this way that the total
proletarian emerges … (2011a, pp. 62–63)
In the case of digitization, this suggests that the user of, let us say, the read/write web
is its reader but not its writer. Knowledge is exteriorized ‘into machines with no other
pseudo-interiorization than that by which the individual “serves” the system’ while
individuals are locked into a recycled temporality (Stiegler, 2010b, p. 127). Digitiza-
tion, indeed, facilitates the surveillance of users and the harnessing of the traces they
leave behind. The data gathered are then translated into metadata and offered to con-
sumers in the guise of personalization. In this way, consumers end up repeating their
past choices that prevent them from envisioning a different individual self or a collec-
tive we. This ultimately leads to political indifference and the decadence of western
democracy (Stiegler, 2011a). Next, I discuss the way Stiegler’s theory addresses this
crisis and also the possibility for political decision and action.

Invention and Decision in Times of Crisis

Like Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger, before him, Stiegler (2011e) addresses the
specificity of our time in terms of a crisis of spirit. The structural nature of this crisis
lies in the disadjustment of the hyperindustrial, digital system that has yet to be
 Bernar Stiegler’s Philosophy of Technology 1117

adopted by the societies we live in. Indeed, this kind of disequilibrium takes place
every time ‘a major technological rupture occurs’ and society needs to politically
adopt this technological system in much the same way that the Greek polis adopted
alphabetical writing. (p. 11). Human beings, however, do not merely adopt changes,
as technical beings do, but adapt ‘by modifying [themselves] through the invention of
new internal structures’ (Simondon, 1992, p. 305). For this reason, Stiegler (2011a)
is turning the moment of crisis into a moment of decision arguing that: ‘It is as a
function of our capacity to will a new epoch of the individuation process—that is, to
invent it, and to thus stimulate a psychic and collective individuation process—that
the critique of decadence may interrupt a process, if it merely takes its course, will
lead to a worldwide degeneration of humanity’ (pp. 30–31).
Stiegler’s powerful quotation appears a welcome but too simple -even too modern-
a solution to our digital postmodern problems, and for this reason, we need to pause
and address it here. Stiegler’s discussion of the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of the human–
technology co-inventive relation has shown this relation’s inherent undecidability and
its constitutive parts’ compositional nature. Indeed, at any moment, it is uncertain
who or what is the cause of, and who or what is affected by, this relation, and yet it is
precisely this undecidability that creates both the urgency and the freedom to decide
about the future. It is because nothing is decided beforehand that there are still deci-
sions to be made. Derrida (1988) has illuminated this aspect of decision-making in
the following terms:
A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable
program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a pro-
grammable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or political
responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable.
(p. 116)
Stiegler’s notion of undecidability is, however, historical, and this means contingent
on the technological manifestations of differance. This move puts, in my opinion, the
human being into a paradoxical position, since the realization of its displacement
coincides with the demand for its re-establishment as the one that willfully determines
the future. This kind of demand suggests that the human being, which is displaced by
technology and by a relation that is no longer compositional, is to reclaim its position
in terms of deciphering what needs to be maintained as human and indeed insert
itself back in the relationship. This, however, presupposes a type of knowledge con-
cerning the way this relationship works and might work in the future that I am not
certain we can pinpoint. Indeed, if we precisely knew how technology and the human
construct each other and were able to control this, would we not have a different
world today?
By situating differance in the empirical realm, Stiegler allows us to imagine the
possibility of the absence of differance as part of our system of differentiation. This
goes to show that if current technologies constitute deconstruction in the flesh as
Landow (1994) has suggested, they can also turn out to be structural projections of
polarized meaning and this we should also be in position to notice. In fact, we should
be in position to detect oppositions and utter critique based on them. Stiegler makes
1118 Anna Kouppanou

this move when at times he sees the technical object determining the human being,
while at others he asserts or rather wishes that the human being is able to appropriate
this relationship. The problem, however, with this analysis is the following: if a
compositional reality has been polarized to the point of complete determination and
stability, and indeed, one of its constitutive parts has been ostracized, how is this part
to decide concerning this relationship and insert itself back in a fully determined and
thus dead system?
This problem is not, however, strictly Stieglerian. Every philosopher who describes
the co-constitution of the human and the technological, and the totalitarian techno-
logical structures at times produced by this relationship, needs to account for the
possibility of critical space within these structures. Martin Heidegger confronted this
problem in different ways throughout his career. Indeed, during his middle period,
Heidegger (1985) decided that sheer human will is in position to put technology into
the service of the human, whereas later, after his resounding and shameful political
escapades, Heidegger (1977) defined technology’s essence as enframing, that is, the
tendency to enframe and turn everything, even human will, into an instrument serving
technology’s hunger for greater expansion. To this situation, Heidegger (1969)
responded with a resignation from human will; instead, he sketched a kind of think-
ing, which he called ‘meditative thinking’, aiming to let things be, rather than control-
ling them. Stiegler, here, is doing the exact opposite, attempting to foreground
human will without accounting for the possibility of this priority. In so doing, he is
risking his own understanding of technology as differance.
Stiegler’s position, however, diverges from the decisionism of middle Heidegger
and from the meditative orientation of later Heidegger, and it does this precisely at
the point where the pharmacological nature of technology comes to the fore. For
Stiegler, even the technologies that now unilaterally present poisonous effects can be
reappropriated in order to release their curative potential. For this reason, he ponders
on the specificities of every technological instance, arguing in favor of ‘a political pro-
gram that would take several specificities [of technologies] fully into account’ (Derrida
& Stiegler, 2002; p. 52). In the same vein, Stiegler (2002) believes in the potential of
the digital image, which, contrary to its analogical counterpart, and because of its dis-
crete nature, may potentially allow the user to intervene and synthesize the image
according to their own criteria and desires, just as writers synthesize meaning with the
letters of the alphabet. Following from this is the conclusion that we have not yet, but
need to find the right uses of digital technologies and thus Stiegler distinguishes
according to Vlieghe (2013) ‘between proper and improper uses of technology’. This
move, does, in my opinion, force Stiegler’s argument, to be tilting toward a quasi-
essentialism concerning, not the actual technologies, but their uses and encourages an
optimism which is not accounted for theoretically. What’s more, the compositional
nature of the human–technology relation is much more complicated than its respec-
tive oppositions (human/technical, poison/cure) come to show. Indeed, intention is
dispersed among the counterparts of these relations, variably in meditated or acciden-
tal ways, and this needs to be taken into consideration. Stiegler thus needs to prob-
lematize the stages of this relation’s unfolding and especially regarding the relative
 Bernar Stiegler’s Philosophy of Technology 1119

autonomy its constitutive parts seem to acquire at certain points. These ruptures do
come up in his discussion of education, and I will address them shortly.

Education and Childhood Reconsidered

Stiegler (1998) repeatedly describes the co-constitution of the human being and tech-
nology in terms of a technologically mediated learning. In fact, Stiegler (1998) calls
this process ‘epiphylogenesis’5 underlining the fact that the memory of the ancestors
is not lost, but exteriorized and retained in technologies that allow its transmission to
future generations (p. 142, emphasis added). In this respect, human history unfolds
through the technologies that retain information forming time in specific ways. Epi-
phylogenesis then, is according to Stiegler, ‘the very ideal of mathésis’, that is, of
learning (p. 140, emphasis added). The passing of the passing of judgment, that new
generations reconstruct as their own, is not in any case the transcendental structure
for which western philosophy, from Plato to Husserl devotedly looked, but a process
of learning that relies on memories inscribed on flints, books, USB keys, social media
and data bases, in order to create circuits in which thought circulates and individuals
individuate themselves. For this reason, he pays attention to the exteriority and
materiality of processes like reading and writing. Therefore for Stiegler, these pro-
cesses can potentially lead to the formation of ‘deep attention’—a term he borrows
from Hayles (2007)—that allows the individual to be preoccupied with the same thing
over long periods of time, as is the case with reading a novel and ultimately attain the
capacity to think critically. This type of attention is contrasted to ‘hyperattention’
which refers to a constant shift of perceptual focus that constrains the individual
within the limits of short-term and immediate temporality (p. 73). The extreme cases
of this attention mode are ADD and ADHD affecting children and Cognitive Over-
flow Syndrome (COS) affecting adults (Stiegler, 2010b, p. 73).
Teaching practices focused on deep attention, at least as was the case in the nine-
teenth century, illuminate according to Stiegler the role of the teacher and the school
that ‘builds circuits regulated by concepts, not normatives, forming a rational, inter-
generational we, as mature attention accessible to the majority of students—through
mandatory public education’ (p. 117). Underlining that the public school is not or
has not been simply an institution for the exercise of the power of domination, as
Foucault had pointed out, but also a system for both scientific knowledge (episte´me´)
and care (epime´leia), Stiegler turns to the analysis of the current media industries
whose ‘highest-priority goal is the massive capture of children’s attention from the
earliest age, provoking widespread organological disorders and the literal destruction
of children’s affective and intellectual capacities’ (p. 56).
The capturing of attention is a certain kind of ‘systematic disapprenticeship (of un-
learning)’ in which the technologies or technical organs, as Stiegler calls them, destroy
attention, consciousness and desire, re-organizing human organs, the brain especially,
and social institutions according to the demands of marketized short-term connections
(Stiegler, 2011a, p. 156). This deformation is interrupting the primary identifications
of children with their parents and disrupting the ‘national/social group unity’ that
establishes long intergenerational circuits (p. 61). In consequence, schooling and par-
1120 Anna Kouppanou

enthood are devoid of their capacity to be systems of care and identification, while
children are devoid of the potential to aspire to transform themselves and their future.
For this reason, Stiegler (2010b) argues in favor of the reinvention of school as ‘a sys-
tem of care’ that makes full use of the curative potential of technology and constricts
its poisonous effects (p. 34).
However, such a system would necessitate a great deal of determination, in fact, of
the kind that puts in danger the essential metastability that, according to Simondon,
allows any system to stay alive. Such an educational endeavor would necessitate the
distinction between poisonous and curative effects. Yet, this is not, in any case, an
easy task. Indeed, in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations Stiegler’s interaction
with Katherine Hayle’s thought produces a divergence concerning the nature and
necessity of hyperattention, since Hayles considers it crucial for some professional
fields, while Stiegler believes that hyperattention does not involve consciousness at all.
This tension goes to show that it is difficult for a philosophy like Stiegler’s, that is, a
philosophy that admits no first principle or essence for the human being, to even
begin to outline its programmatic concerning that which needs to be preserved as
human. Indeed, how is such decision ever to be made? It is precisely at this point,
that Stiegler’s philosophy seems to be challenged inwardly. As Vlieghe (2013) argues:
‘It seems problematic to me to claim simultaneously that our constitution as subjects
is dependent upon contingent technological conditions and that education should
consist in preserving an existing frame of reference across the changing generations.’
When, however, the human being’s technological conditioning is taken into account
childhood presents itself as a process that is always already a process of artifactual
formation that demands decisions. Indeed, Stiegler’s discussion of learning, as the
passive, technologically mediated, but nevertheless constitutive process of human indi-
viduation makes learning constitutive of the human being and the question about
learning an ontological one. The learning Stiegler is describing contradicts con-
ceptualizations of education as growth and cultivation, but shares common ground
with the idea that education is a process of formation or Bildung. Either coming from
the culture and programming industries or from formal schooling, education is some
kind of (de)formation of the child and if, in fact, decisions are not being made, with
the child’s wellbeing in mind, by the culture industries, then educational institutions
ought to make them. However, formal schooling as a social organization is itself
formed by the various technologies and economies that form the individual, while
partnerships are currently being formed between educational institutions and the mar-
ket, and, indeed, often, without any consideration of the way technologies introduced
in schools cure or poison thinking. For this reason, this situation demands the study
of the specificity of the technologies used, the economies that condition their produc-
tion and use and the child’s particularity as the one being formed. Currently, Stieg-
ler’s (2010b) critique of political economy underlines the market’s determinative role
for the formation of our way of life and indicates the need to reveal the economic
mechanisms that affect the human-technology relation. It also asks for an inspection
of the latent potential that may potentially allow for intervention.
Therefore, I believe that Stiegler’s conceptualization of differance causes theoretical
problems when the possibility of its total deferral is considered, but when this deferral
 Bernar Stiegler’s Philosophy of Technology 1121

is seen at a more ‘regional’ level, for example, the educational or digital level, things
appear different. To be more precise, at the educational level the absence of
differance can be challenged through the consideration of other forces (social organi-
zation, childhood, care, discreteness) that maintain possibilities for difference. The
child seen through the Simondonian perspective is a metastable system, and for this
reason, we need to study childhood in its interaction with grander systems (education,
market, media industries) which are dominated by adult modes of psychic and
collective individuation. In any case, childhood’s own main exteriorization is perhaps
the responsibility for care it imposes on these systems and this needs to be studied
more carefully.
In this light, the pharmakon’s ambivalence is always already challenged by educa-
tional policies and practices that constantly demand decisions. Care needs to allow
for differance, but at the same time, care cannot not be decisive. Adults make and
need to make decisions if they care about children and these decisions are indeed of
ethical and political nature. This I believe shows that Stiegler’s theory is working
simultaneously on the ontological, ethical, and political level, and the latter two seem
to take precedence even before some ontological tensions are resolved. It also suggests
that there are clarifications to be made with regard to Stiegler’s conceptualization of
differance and his understanding of the technology/human relation, that is, a relation
that is itself conditioned by its constitutive parts’ further interactions with the individ-
ual/collective, adult/child binaries and the compositional realities they share with
them.

Conclusions
For Stiegler, differance can be at times in danger but his descriptions of the specificity
of our times are not identical to Heidegger’s (1977). In contrast to Heidegger, Stiegler
does not present a world dominated by a single technological essence but differential
technological instances. This on the one hand, frees his critique which attempts to
examine our times’ technological specificity, but on the other hand, opens up the
possibility to throw this analysis in an endless pursuit of technology’s potential or pre-
vent it from recognizing the differential appropriation of technology if or when it takes
place, or even acknowledging the much dreaded total regulation of the human being.
Currently, Stiegler tackles this possibility as follows: ‘Even if technics is constitutive of
anthropology, and, in that sense, man is a prosthetic life form, he is nevertheless not
only technical’ (p. 72). Human re-invention then is possible through resistance,
negotiation, and decision and through vigilance concerning the pre-individual milieu,
if and only if the human being is not already merely technical, and this of course is
again a matter of deciphering oppositions, thus a point in the process of decision-
making that could be both necessary and impossible. This might very well be
Stiegler’s challenge and the challenge to thinking after poststructuralism.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
1122 Anna Kouppanou

Notes
1. Stiegler is in accord with Leroi-Gourhan’s take on the nature and relationship that binds
together language and technology. Indeed, for him, and contrary to Heidegger, technology
and language are manifestations of the same apparatus.
2. The term alreadyness which is used repeatedly by Stiegler is Heideggerian. In Being and
Time, Heidegger (2008) says that the tool functions as the ‘ready-to-hand’, already unprob-
lematically used, already inherited. This creates largely the structure of signification in which
the human being is thrown. The term itself is according to Stiegler (2009) very close to
Simondon’s notion of preindividual reality.
3. Proof of imagination’s exteriorization, spatialization and figuration, Stiegler (2011d) argues,
can be found even in the thought of the most fervent supporter of schematization’s a priori
nature as hinted by the following quotation taken from Kant’s (2010) The Critique of Pure
Reason: We cannot cogitate a geometrical line without drawing it in thought, nor a circle with-
out describing it, nor represent the three dimensions of space without drawing three lines
from the same point perpendicular to one another. We cannot even cogitate time, unless, in
drawing a straight line (which is to serve as the external figurative representation of time), we
fix our attention on the act of the synthesis of the manifold, whereby we determine succes-
sively the internal sense, and thus attend also to the succession of this determination (p. 107).
4. French philosopher Sylvain Auroux first uses the term to denote the logic of grammar that is
applied on writing after writing’s accidental and historical production (Stiegler, n.d.).
5. Contrary, to genesis which refers to the interior memory inscribed in every member of a
species, and epigenesis which refers to the memory an individual member of a species pro-
duces during its life and is subsequently lost with the being’s death- epiphylogenesis refers to
exterior memory which can be passed down.

Notes on contributor
Anna Kouppanou works at the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute and is a Scientific Collaborator at
the European University of Cyprus. In 2014, she received her PhD (Philosophy of Education)
from IOE, University of London. Her PhD thesis was an investigation of Heidegger’s philoso-
phy of technology in relation to digital media, imagination, and education. Her research ranges
across various aspects of educational practice and draws on different philosophical traditions.
She has published articles on digital technologies of nearness, hermeneutics, imagination, con-
ceptual metaphor, and Bildung in the digital age. Anna is a novelist and poet, with five chil-
dren’s books and a collection of verse published, including most recently The Incredible
Revelation of Sebastian Montefiore, (Athens: Kedros). Email: kouppanou.a@cyearn.pi.ac.cy

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