For the official version of record, see here:

Ross, D. (2023). Too Soon / Too Late: A Pretext for a Recurrence of Bernard Stiegler. Media Theory, 7(2), 01–36. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/588

Too Soon / Too Late: A Pretext for a Recurrence of Bernard Stiegler

DANIEL ROSS

Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Abstract

A slightly modified transcript of the Bernard Stiegler Memorial Lecture given on August 5, 2023, at the invitation of Yuk Hui and the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology, Hong Kong. From a reflection on Engels reflecting on the too-soonness and too-lateness of the French Commune government, via a film by Huillet and Straub to which these words of Engels gave birth, the author begins to reflect on Stiegler’s memorial text for Jacques Derrida. In an effort to reflect on Stiegler’s own position of advance and delay, three philosophical viewpoints on the significance of ChatGPT are offered, as a way into grappling with Stiegler’s most private, idiolectal concept: the idiotext. The recursions of AI are thereby distinguished from the recurrences of idiotextual “protension”, which invokes the question of desire. The latter leads to a little-known text by Stiegler on his time in prison, and on the meaning of prison as a locality of sublimation: a place in which time is in a way freed up, but also a place of sexual deprivation–how to think this conjunction?

Keywords

Bernard Stiegler, Jacques Derrida, Socrates, artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, prison

Too early/Too late

The title I have given this memorial lecture, “Too Soon/Too Late”, echoes the title of a film by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, which was released in 1982, when Bernard Stiegler was still in prison, but which I didn’t happen to see until forty years later, on the 21stof November 2022, that is, on the day after Straub died.

Figure 1: Still from the film Trop tôt / Trop tard (Straub & Huillet, 1982).

Why did they call their movie –which is composed of two parts, the first showing exteriors shot in France, the second showing exteriors shot in Egypt –or from what sources were they drawing when they decided to call their movie Too Early/Too LateI Mainly, they were referring to a letter written by Friedrich Engels, dated 20 February, 1889, or rather, to a review in the form of a letter to Karl Kautsky, Kautsky being the one who said that revolution requires the patience to wait for the right conditions, whereas, in his review of Kautsky, Engels refers to the Paris Commune government in order to complicate this question of “when”: “No one could tell what they wanted until, long after the fall of the Commune, Babeuf gave the thing definite shape. If the Commune, with its aspirations of fraternity, came too soon”……

Figure 2: Still from the film Trop tôt / Trop tard (Straub & Huillet, 1982).

then “Babeuf for his part came too late” (Engels, 1956: 482).

Figure 3: Still from the film Trop tôt / Trop tard (Straub & Huillet, 1982).

Straub and Huillet, for their part, seem to want to show us the rich and fertile, mostly agricultural landscapes in which these shocks that came too soon took place, so that they can juxtapose these locations with the lateness of the written articulation of the significance of those shocks, articulations coming from Engels, Babeuf and, in the Egyptian case, from Mahmoud Hussein. Instead of transformational opportunity being a matter of preparing for the arrival of the right conditions (the filmmakers seem to be saying), it is rather the case that a tangle of leaps and stalls seems always to be playing out, mostly in a tragic key, oscillations of advance and delay where surprising actions arrive far ahead of their comprehension, overshooting the mark of the possible. Knowledge in the sense of “adjustment of actions to ends which is for the good of the species” has “gone awry in the schemes of men”,

Figure 4: A passage from Lotka, 1945, with highlighting by Bernard Stiegler.

as Alfred Lotka put it in discussing what he called “exosomatic evolution”, and “the development of the adjustors has lagged so far behind” (Lotka, 1945: 192) that the potential of these actions has already passed by –but perhaps, the filmmakers seem to be saying, with the possibility of returning once again, even if, most likely, only to trigger another shock itself destined to come too soon.

Already too late

More than echoing this film that comes to us from four decades ago, itself echoing a “letter” by Engels from a century earlier than that (1889), itself reflecting on the too-soon and too-late character of the Paris Commune government of a century before that (1789 to 1795) –more than echoing all of this and all of these dates, my own title, “Too Soon/Too Late”, is intended to evoke Bernard Stiegler’s reflections upon the death of Jacques Derrida in October 2004.

Figure 5: The first page of Stiegler, 2005b.

Stiegler begins in the following way:

The time to learn how to live comes already too late and it is in this lateness that the knowledge of how to live is forged as a fault of living, and as its only question. As a philosophical question, the question of living presents itself as a not-knowing-how-to-live: as a living in non-knowledge, as this living to death that Derrida named life-death and survival, living-on (Stiegler, 2005b: 64).

And of course, it goes without saying that in doing so I am also trying to open a reflection on Stiegler himself: Bernard, who himself left this earth three years ago today, an earth that, one can hardly bare to imagine, must have seemed to him to no longer contain the possibility of glistening green once again (as Friedrich Hölderlin said through the character of Empedocles, whose disappearance into the volcano Hölderlin tried three times to stage, one of the versions of which itself forms the basis of another film by S/H)

Figure 6: Still from the film Der Tod des Empedokles (Straub & Huillet, 1987).

–three years ago today, recollecting as well that Bernard himself felt that we must really listen to Claude Lévi-Strauss when in 2004 he said, on television, that

Figure 7: From page 35 of Stiegler, 2005a.

The human race lives under a regime of a kind that poisons itself from within, and I think about the present and about the world in which my experience is coming to an end: it is not a world that I love (C. Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Stiegler, 2005a: 35).

In the unpublished manuscript of the fourth volume of Technics and Time, for example, Stiegler says about the combination of this statement from the 96-year-old anthropologist and his statement half a century earlier that human beings have done nothing “except blithely break down billions of structures and reduce them to a state in which they are no longer capable of integration” (Lévi-Strauss, 1976: 543), such that anthropology might as well be spelled as “entropology” –in Technics and Time 4 Stiegler says about this combination of Lévi-Straussian statements:

We can only be grateful to Lévi-Strauss for his candour. It is not a matter of rejecting or condemning his discourse, which would be still to practise a denial from which Lévi-Strauss courageously breaks: the denial of entropy and its telluric consequences, and on all forms of thought and care [pensée et pansée]. With this discourse, and as early as 1955, he attempts to break from this denial. But in doing so, he himself perpetuates the denial of exosomatization (Stiegler, 2017: 197).

As you know, it is this latter denial with which Stiegler himself wishes to break. We have become painfully aware that these telluric consequences are manifold and devastating. Tomorrow, for example, is Hiroshima Day. But above all, there are the consequences to come from the fact that, for example, despite every national “commitment”, despite every “target”, despite every “strategy”, world consumption of primary energy rose in 2022 to a record high, fossil fuel consumption in 2022 rose to a record high (and remained steady as a percentage of primary energy consumption: 82%), and carbon dioxide equivalent emissions in 2022 rose to a record high, “39.3 billion tonnes” (Energy Institute, 2023: 4). Denial reigns supreme.

Despite that denial, we can all understand how it is that, even were we to find an exit from denial, the fact remains that we do not know how to live with these facts. Whatever knowledge we now have of how to live with these telluric consequences, which we know will continue to play out for centuries to come, comes already too late: the final warning has passed, and our question becomes how to live in the knowledge of this lateness. Whatever ways we dream up can now only be faulty –that is, more faulty than ever. We face the question of knowing how to live in the down-going, in the entropic slide, how to live in the not-knowing-how-to-live on an Earth that may never glisten again, or as green, in the way it seemed to for those gone too soon. This is the question that Stiegler raises in Technics and Time 4 via Norbert Wiener, as the question of how to live in a quasi-causal way worthy of the fact that, as Wiener already put it, “it is quite conceivable that life belongs to a limited stretch of time”, that “in a very real sense [entropy in and of itself means that] we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet”, and so, we must know that “we shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity”, with “the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization” (Wiener, 1989: 40).

The taunt of the gadfly

Why does Bernard begin his memorial for Derrida in this way, by evoking the lateness of the time at which we learn how to live, such that knowing how to live must be forged out of the fault of its absence? After all, Derrida was not some kind of self-help guru imparting appealing wisdom at a nice price: in Learning to Live Finally, his final interview, he himself says that he is “uneducable when it comes to any kind of wisdom about knowing-how-to-die or, if you prefer, knowing-how-to-live” (Derrida, 2007: 25). Is it a question of a mournful projection of sentimentality onto the master’s philosophy in the wake of his loss? No, it’s not that either.

What Bernard says is not that Derrida was a master; rather, that he was a gadfly. Which is to say that he was a kind of reincarnation of Socrates (and he says as well that Derrida is “tempered” by Socrates, and that he is of the same calibre). Derrida, like Socrates, taunts the city, but where this “city” has become global. What is it that makes Derrida a gadfly? It is what Derrida uncovers, what he re-dis-covers, elementary supplementarity, the fact that, from the outset, there is a complication, that right at the origin there is a complement, and that this complement is a supplement. In other words, all of our knowledge has always come along and gotten going on the basis of a supplementarity that forms its “element”, and that always goes along with it, complicating it, and which therefore implies “an impossibility of all mastery”, and, in that impossibility, “an intractable not-knowing-how-to-live” (Stiegler, 2005b: 64).

Figure 8: A passage from Stiegler, 2005b: 64.

All of Socrates’ versions of the question, “what is…?”, are the taunts of a gadfly who knows that all of the mastery of the sophists is haunted by what taunts it, this intractable not-knowing, for which Socrates is condemned, promising to return. And he does return, Stiegler says, in the desedimentation of the question of “what is…?” that is embodied in Derrida and in his work –as “deconstruction” (Stiegler, 2005b: 65).

And with technology, strike a balance sure

Derrida asks of his own work, “Will there even be any heirs?” (Derrida, 2007: 33), and wonders whether “two weeks or a month after my death there will be nothing left” (34). Nevertheless, Derrida says that he wrote in such a way, or at least intended to write in such a way, that the reader “will learn to read (to ‘live’) something he or she was not accustomed to receiving from anywhere else”, and thus “that he or she will be reborn differently, determined otherwise, as a result” (31) –receiving this dissemination of textual grafts as a kind of in-semination, where it is the one inseminated who, conceiving, finds herself reborn –re-conceiving herself.

So, what about Bernard? Two weeks, a month, three years after his death –what is left of Stiegler? How will we allow him to come back? Are we the ones who have been reborn differently, determined otherwise, as a result of the work with which Stiegler has impregnated us? Or are we the ones who have failed really to receive Stiegler’s dissemination, failed to become those heirs, to adopt that work, and do we await the arrival of the one capable of doing so, who “will learn to read (to ‘live’) something” otherwise from out of Stiegler’s work?

Responding to that question means first answering, or doing our best to answer, the question of what makes that work different, otherwise –and first of all, different from Derrida’s. To what does Stiegler give birth? What, if anything, does the originary default add to the thesis of elementary supplementarity?

There are many ways in to this question –one thing we could say, which Bernard said himself, is that Stiegler adds process back into deconstruction, and this is why what Stiegler cares about is not just différance but the history of différance –but I think that perhaps the most profound way in is through the question of those spirals that Bernard never stopped thinking about –which is to say, through the question of what he called the “idiotext”.

Figure 9: Diagram of the idiotext, taken from Stiegler, 1995: 251.

In fact, to describe and explain what Stiegler means by the idiotext would take more time than we have here today, but I would like to give some indications that will suggest what is really at stake in that question. And we can introduce those stakes by first of all asking a question about how we should understand so-called artificial intelligence, which as we all know has become a highly fashionable topic of discussion in the wake of ChatGPT.

Figure 10: Solicitation to OpenAI’s “ChatGPT”, and response.

How should we understand the step taken in computing with phenomena such as machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, AI and so on? Does this step represent a leap beyond the mechanical following of set instructions pre-programmed into a calculating machine, or is ChatGPT merely an example of the verisimilitude that is possible when the complexity of those instructions reaches another order of magnitude, together with the magnitude of the data to which those instructions are applied, and of the speed with which they are carried out? Let us very briefly mention three viewpoints.

First, we have the view of Catherine Malabou, who in a recent discussion says that she has changed her mind because the plasticity she formerly ascribed only to brains now seems possible for computers too.

Figure 11: A passage from Catherine Malabou, in Labaye & Malabou, 2023.

Malabou therefore now considers that it is “necessary to engage in a new relationship between the natural brain and the artificial brain that is not based on a simple opposition between, on the one hand, nature and, on the other hand, artifice”, because today, with “unsupervised machine learning, yes, I think there is a creative dimension”, improvising new ways of making moves in a game of go, for example (Malabou, in Labaye & Malabou, 2023). And after mentioning the Spike Jonze movie Her,

Figure 12: Still from the film Her (Jonze, 2013).

she also notes that, “in Japan, you can marry your sexual avatar”: Malabou asks, “Is it really a loss?”

Figure 13: A passage from Catherine Malabou, in Labaye & Malabou, 2023.

I’ll try and come back to that question later.

On the other hand, we have the view of Anne Alombert and Giuseppe Longo, who say that these are, still, just machines, which “do not learn or invent”. However powerful they may be, computers are not actually capable of “the production of novelty”, which means the ability to “branch out into new horizons” and to “imagine new configurations of meaning” (Alombert & Longo, 2023).

Figure 14: A passage from Alombert & Longo, 2023.

If one asks an algorithmic machine like ChatGPT to carry out the same request twice, it will return two different results (two different texts summarizing the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler in the style of William Shakespeare, say), but why will it do so, and how are these two texts different? In fact, this difference is the product of the deliberate inclusion of a randomizer into the programming: without this deliberately programmed element of chance, an identical instruction given to an unchanged dataset will produce an identical result, however complex the computational path to get to that result may be. The spell of creativity would thus be broken, and what, for Alombert and Longo, amounts to an ideology according to which machines have become or soon will become capable of deep learning, would be exposed. For us, exosomatic beings, and for life in general, learning is always something that is done, and that is possible, only in relation to meanings that arise from the aims and functions of life, whether these aims and functions are biological (negentropic, for endosomatic life) or more-than-biological (neganthropic, as Stiegler calls it, for exosomatic life) –and what algorithmic machines do bears no relation whatsoever to this kind of learning.

Finally, we have the view of Yuk Hui, whom I would like to thank for his generous invitation, which made it possible for me to speak with you today. Yuk argues that in act a threshold has been crossed, that what ChatGPT does is “more than just pattern matching” (Hui, 2023: 2). Like Malabou, he believes that it is a question of overcoming an opposition between “mechanism and organism”: the feedback loops of these new computational machines have reached a point such that we must no longer think of them as “linear machines” executing a set of instructions. Instead, with the “introduction of nonlinear causality” that makes it possible for “machines to deal with contingency”,these artificial intelligence programs should be understood as “recursive machines”, which, through the hyper-complexity of recursive operations, achieve a kind of reflective thinking, because “the learning machine improves its model of decision-making” (5). Unlike Malabou, but like Anne and Giuseppe, Yuk raises the question of ideology in a way that echoes Stiegler: “access to truth has always depended on the invention and use of tools”, but the invisibility of this fact has meant that “the conflict between machine evolution and human existence” has seemed “to originate from an ideology deeply rooted in culture” (6). Perhaps, though, we have to say that the critique of this ideology goes in different directions in Yuk Hui’s work than in that of Alombert and Longo.

I don’t want to ask a hypothetical “what would Stiegler have thought…?” type of question here, because after all I am, if anything, only the child of Bernard, or the amanuensis. But still, it is undoubtedly worth our while reflecting on what Stiegler’s work has to tell us about how we can think about the significance of these kinds of technological developments. So let’s do so in a kind of roundabout way, by going back to the beginnings of his thought, and, as I said, to his notion of the idiotext.

Figure 15: Diagram of the idiotext, taken from Stiegler, 1995: 248.

A memory that is written at the same time that it is read

While positing that “the question of support is irreducible”, with the notion of the idiotext what Stiegler wants to theorize, so he says, is “elementary supplementarity for itself, before any particular support” (Stiegler, 1995: 277), that is, that very elementary supplementarity which was Derrida’s great re-dis-covery.

Figure 16: A passage from Stiegler, 1995: 277.

And already, in Technics and Time, 1, Stiegler had said that it is a question of knowing how technicity is “to be constituted in terms of technological phenomenology”, which becomes, he says, a matter of knowing how “temporality itself” is “constituted in terms of technicity”, and where:

Nothing can be said of temporalization that does not relate to the epiphylogenetic structure put in place each time, and each time in an original way, by the already-there, in other words by the memory supports that organize successive epochs of humanity: that is, technics –the supplement is elementary, or rather elementary supplementarity is(the relation to) time (différance) (Stiegler, 1998: 183).

Given that statement about the history of memory supports, or of the already-there, it is interesting to see, with respect to elementary supplementarity, that in 1995 Stiegler chooses to write the particular phrase we just quoted: “for itself, before any particular support”. And this is even more interesting, given that his critique of Simondon’s approach to information is founded, really, on the rejection of Simondon’s attempt to conceive information “independently of its supports”. It would seem to be a question, then, of a difference between Simondon’s “independently” and Stiegler’s “before”, whether we are talking about elementary supplementarity, individuation or information (which are not the same thing, but where this is all just one question).

However, that stands, here we will just try to say a bit about what Bernard means by the idiotext, and the reason we will do so is because we want to understand what kindof recursivity is involved with the spiralling of the idiotext –or as Stiegler calls it, recurrence. The idiotext, Stiegler says, is a memory:

Figure 17: A passage from Stiegler, 1995: 247–248.

The idiotext is a memory that is a process of individuation: a memory that is written at the same time that it is read, of which the writing is also the reading, and vice versa. This reading always takes place through the intermediary of pre-texts (events that happen to the idiotext, perceptions, speech that it hears or speaks, and so on), which are operators of the modification in which idiotextual individuation consists, and during which the textuality of this memory is woven (Stiegler, 1995: 247–248).

“A memory that is written at the same time that it is read, of which the writing is also the reading”. In the encounter with an event (a “pretext”) that activates the reading of that memory that the idiotext is, the experience of that activation is a writing of that experience, which always also means an interpretation of that memory, which is to say, as well, a rewriting of that memory.

Figure 18: Diagram of the idiotext, taken from Stiegler, 1995: 262.

Stiegler often tries to explain what this means by invoking Husserl’s account of time consciousness, that is, in the course of giving his (Stiegler’s) account of the technicity of temporality itself. What the invention of sound recording showed for the first time is that what seems to be the same “data input” (as when I listen to an LP or a CD twice) in fact leads to two different experiences, from which Stiegler draws the conclusion that perception involves a process of selection, and that the criteria for this selection must be furnished by the accumulated experience of the individual, forming its memory –or in Husserl’s language, these selections find their criteria on the basis of the sedimentation of primary retentions that have become secondary. And as you undoubtedly know already, what he will always add is that this accumulation of secondary retentions is always able to be conditioned by what Stiegler himself calls tertiary retentions, memories externalized in artifacts, a conditioning that can either open up new possibilities or undermine the capacity for remembering and knowing, either “cultivate what’s truly rare” or “strip our souls of their own command” –this being the reason that in Phaedrus Socrates refers to writing as a pharmakon.

Figure 19: Diagram of the idiotext, taken from Stiegler, 1995: 271.

You, then, are an idiotext, and I am an idiotext, and the occasion of me speaking to you now is what Stiegler calls a pretext, an event that happens to you, the listener, leading to a modification of your idiotextuality, another turn of the spiralling of your individuation, in the encounter you are having with the idiotext that I am via the milieu of this encounter, which is language, here itself mediated via the digital network milieu opened up to us by Zoom and, more generally, the protocols of the World Wide Web and the technical system that has evolved around it. To say that your memory is a process that writes and reads at the same time, and that reading its memory is simultaneously writing its memory, is to say that, in the pretextual encounter, what you the idiotext make of that encounter is precisely that–something you make, something you produce. And it is to say that you do so on the basis of reading the memory that you are (which is why what you hear in what I say is not what someone else hears in what I say, and is not what I hear in what I say, which is to say, it is not what I say). And it is to say that this reading of the memory that you are is also a re-reading of that memory, and in that way an interpretation of that memory in the process of its eliciting selections from that pretext, and, ultimately, that it is a re-writing of that memory, or as Stiegler sometimes says, a rearrangement of that memory –of the retentions and protentions that the idiotext is.

At the same time, Stiegler wants to say that when two idiotextual spirals meet in such a pretextual encounter, the support or the medium through which they meet, and without which they could not meet, is itself an idiotext. Like the idiotext that you are and that I am, language is an idiotext in the sense that it is a perpetually incomplete process of spiralling through becoming, whose inscriptivity is in this case composed of all the speech acts of all the speakers of that language, with the result that languages evolve even though there is no conscious intention motivating this evolution. The language “itself” does not exist, but we speak as if we were all believers in the consistency of this thing, the English language, which is why we might consult, for example, Fowler’s Modern English Usage. A language, however, is nothing more than the sum of these acts and these beliefs, which is to say, all of these acts made in fidelity to what does not exist, but consists (from the beginning, then, Stiegler was referring to “consistence” in this very particular way). So when the idiotext that you are re-reads its memory on the occasion of a linguistic pretext (there are also, of course, all kinds of other pretexts, involving milieus other than the linguistic, but all of which are, in one way or another, idioms, which means, both localized and, in some way, grammatizable), this re-reading of one’s own memory is also a re-reading of the idiolectal character of one’s own particular way of using that language, which is to say that that language is a kind of spiral within the idiotext that you are,

Figure 20: Diagram of the idiotext, taken from Stiegler, 1995: 264.

as well as being a spiral between all of us, and which we share through our utterances: depending on one’s viewpoint on this situation, then, one and the same idiotext can be viewed as being on a scale that is larger than the idiotext that you are or on a scale that is smaller than you, “within” you, forming all of the various yous whom you aim to synthesize as the you that you hope to be, but where this you, “you”, does not exist, any more than does language. Yet you consist.

Recurrence at the meeting point of two already-theres

As I said, the reason why I want to introduce this notion of the idiotext, and the way it involves encompassed idiotexts and encompassing idiotexts, is so that I might be able to say something to you about how I understand what Stiegler means by “recurrence”. To that end, let us ask: what makes it possible for the idiotext that you are to write your memory at the same time that you read your memory? We could say that this self-re-interpretation is a question of the actualization of potentials it contains, further resources for further selections not yet activated until that particular pretextual occasion liberated those potentials. But what does “potential” mean, and where does it come from?

The actualization of a potential means, here, that something that has been retained comes back from out of the sedimented inscription of memory that forms that idiotext, and this coming back occurs as the release of an expectation contained in what has been retained, where an expectation means the re-interpretive possibility of a rearrangement of retentions and protentions in the direction of some new promise of consistence. As Stiegler says in somewhat Heideggerian language, this involves:

Figure 21: A passage from Stiegler, 1995: 267–268.

the meeting of two already-theres, namely, that which is already there for the encompassed idiotext as what has happened to it and has been sedimented as its memory, and that which is already there for it in the encompassing idiotext (as collective memory), and which has been sedimented long before it began its individuation, the writing of its memory (Stiegler, 1995: 267–268).

What occurs in a pretextual encounter is the meeting up of these two already-theres, the one you have lived as your past and the one you have not lived but which forms our past, waiting for us, a meeting of the turns of two spirals, where this meeting must somehow suit both of these spirals, rearranging their idiolectal “grammars” according to this suitable coming-together, and in such a way that it involves the potential rearrangement of the grammar of the idiomatic milieu, too, through which and on which this encounter must always be staged. This rearrangement can also, when it is particularly suitable(faithful to the promise of a particularly insistent consistence), propagate across the various scales that it involves, and this propagation is a kind of resonance, a resonance that in turn relies on a tension of the idiotext (because the waves of resonance depend for their possibility on such a tension).

What is this tension that allows a resonance to arise from out of the initial ripples of a pretextual encounter? For Stiegler, it arises from the originary default of origin, the unfolding history of advance and delay, too-soonness and too-lateness that perpetually recapitulates our originary being-out-of-phase in ways that are each time singular. It is this unfolding of soonness and lateness that means that the idiotext, that is, the retentional fabric that the idiotext is, is held out to the possibility of something that it expects, but expects in the mode of the unexpected: this is what potential means. What recursis what is expected, but expected as the unexpected improbable, about which the idiotext is therefore expectant in a performative or quasi-causal way… as if it awaited only this –or so it seems after the fact. In this way, the idiotext involves not just a protention, but a tensionalizing protention –Stiegler will later say, a protension –with an “s” rather than a “t”.

Figure 22: A passage from Stiegler, 2017: 76.

This metastable system, which is always both in ex-cess and in default of what always already (as traces, retentions) dies or yields on the basis of this default (of being, as in-completeness), harbours this tension that always expresses and extends a tendency towards and a protension for what is non-probabilistic in a radical sense, that is, improbable in the most improbable sense (Stiegler, 2017: 76).

In recurrence, there is (or es gibt, as Heidegger would say) a return of meaning from out of what has long faded into insignificance, an arising of significance that is always in some way a re-arising, where what is significant is what prompts new idiotextual arrangements, and where this recurrence is bound once again to slip back into familiarity, stereotypicality, and therefore into insignificance –perhaps to return once again, otherwise, in some other, future pretextual encounter.

The significance of recurrence

What relationship does this recurrence have to the recursivity of so-called machine-learning artificial intelligence? I would suggest: very little, if not nothing. It is the originary default of origin, propagated across the history of all of these idiotextual spirals, an initial being-out-of-phase of these idiotexts, which is to say, an originary, inaccessibly lost past of retention that, in the unfolding of this absent presence, sets up the protensionalizing performativity of idiotextual inscription –it is all of this, as a history of advance and delay, that means that the idiotext can be kept open to significant reinterpretations leading to rearrangements of an open system –one that always threatens to close, entropically. If receiving the same “data inputs” twice does not produce two identical experiences for the receiving idiotext, it is not because of any randomizing element, but because this “receiving” is not justa passive reception. Rather, it is an active going to meet what is being received, a listening that is already saying what is being heard.

If what is being received is significant, if it elicits a potential for a rearrangement of the memory and expectations of that idiotext, then it turns out to be both unexpected and yet expected, expected in the sense of eliciting a recurrence of a buried expectation, which is therefore experienced otherwise, as a surprise of meaning, or what Stiegler calls a traumatypy –a meeting-up of the turns of one spiral and another spiral in such a way that, as a diffraction or a disparation, a dimension is opened upthat was never hitherto available. (This would be analogous to the way in which the brain conjoins the viewpoints of two ocular perspectives, left and right, in order to produce anotherviewpoint, one that opens up, through stereoscopy, the sense of another dimension, that of depth, but where this “third viewpoint” precisely does not exist for either eye, yet consists for the mind that produces it…and believes in it.)

This has very much, if not everything to do with the claim of Alombert and Longo that learning cannot be separated from the meanings that arise from the aims of life. In the case of neganthropic, exosomatic life, composed of idiotextual spirals within spirals such as is the case for you and I, those meanings and the aims with which they are associated must be differentiated from the meanings and aims of endosomatic or biological life: in our case, these meanings and aims are not pregiven, but arise from pretextual events in which a turn of my spiralling comes to meet a turn of yours, across an idiotextual support, and where these three intertwined processes of individuation thereby have the chance to elicit an expectation with the potential to become significant, which they can do only because what comes to me, I produce, or, in cinematic terms, because I post-produce it in the moment of receiving it –“in camera”, so to speak. And the meaningfulness of this event can also include a rewriting of the characterof the aims of life themselves, potentially resonating across a large idiotextual locality.

In other words, to deal adequately with Stiegler’s work necessarily means dealing with the question he raises of a technological phenomenology: his account of the way in which what is received in the flow of becoming is not data in the sense of preformatted information, where the latter must conform to pre-set requirements of what counts as data input. Instead, the “data” involved with these idiotexts is the given that I am held out in openness to meet, and which, if it has the possibility of surprising me, does so because it brings back out from me a potential for producing otherwise a significance that has fallen into insignificance. This recurrence has, I would hazard, absolutely nothing to do with the recursivity of computational operations, no matter how complicated those operations may be, because what any kind of currently conceivable AI does consists first of all in receiving data that is structured for it in informational ways that it has been programmed to operate with. This bears no relation, as far as I can see, to the circuit of primary, secondary and tertiary retention of which the tensed, expectant systems of idiotextual processes are composed –open spiral turns whose mutual entanglement has the capacity to generate all kinds of problems and difficulties, squabbles, conflicts and wars, but also a contest bringing forth new interpretations, which may sometimes turn out to be widely suitable, and in this way resonate in such a fashion that the very aims of neganthropic life find themselves transformed.

To refer to the aims of neganthropic life is to refer, beyond instinct, to the capacity for the drives to be transformed into desires. It is for this reason that Stiegler argues that today we must return to the question of the four causes, because what is in the process of being eliminated is final causality, that is, those ultimate aims that are the value of values of neganthropic life. And what is sweeping final causes away is the computational reign of efficient causality, but where this efficiency isefficient precisely through the preformatting of what “counts” for it as “data”. This is why, for Stiegler, this question of renewing final causality must be understood as a new contest of the faculties and functions (that is, aims) of neganthropic life, and of the faculties in both senses:

• first, in the sense of the contest between the academic faculties, where the faculties of computer science and so on are challenging the very ways in which knowledge is categorized (which is the question of formal causality, but where these categorizations can be decided only on the basis of those values of values that are final causes);

• second, in the sense of the “cognitive” (and “affective”) faculties through which the idiotext that you are writes what it reads and does so in a way that is always also open to the possibility of movement, of being moved, individuated, and where this consists in the possibility of rewriting all of its “grammars” –and where, at the scale of the idiomatic milieu, grammars are always formalizations, but where such formalizations are not always reducible to calculation, even if computation always aims to reduce every formalization to a calculation.

On jail time

It would be possible to leave things there. Instead, with your permission I would like to spend a little bit longer on this question of desire, which, again, is too large a question to really digest properly here. Nevertheless, if it is impossible to deal adequately with Stiegler’s work without taking into account its relationship to Husserlian phenomenology, it is equally impossible to do so without reflecting on the way in which he thinks about desire, which one might well say is what that work is really all about. For Stiegler, the question of desire is the question of the process of the sublimation of the drives, which means the cultivation of the postponement of their fulfilment, in such a way that they can change their aims. It is, in other words, a question of initiation into the possibility of education –a process that has conditions. One could well argue that the whole question of Stiegler’s work is to identify the conditions of sublimation, to understand that these conditions are always exosomatic and always local, and to ask in what way it is both necessary and possible for these conditions to be renewed.

All we will have time to do today is offer a few quotations from a text which I have only recently read, and for which I would like here to thank Jean-Marc Cerino, who very generously gave me the chance to read it. It is the transcript of a lecture given in 2005, and published as “Le temps de la prison” –“Jail Time” –as part of a project by Cerino concerned with life in French prisons (Stiegler, 2006).

Figure 23: The front cover of Cerino, 2006.

Bernard’s lecture is more specifically about the question of whether, and in what way, culture is or should be introduced into prison, and his reflections on prison life and his own experience of it make it a very worthwhile addendum to Passer à l’acte. As I’ve said, here we will only have a chance to look at a few passages, but, in truth, all of what I have said up till now is largely just a pretext for me to offer you the following recurrence of some of Stiegler’s words, with which most of you will not have had the chance to become familiar.

As with the earlier text (Acting Out), “Jail Time” is about the way in which prison can be a chance. It can offer a chance for prisoners to transform their lives, but, as I said above, such a possibility has conditions –specifically, that the prisoner is able to turn the fault of their jailtime into a virtue. Prison, Stiegler reminds us, is a place where the prisoner is deprived: deprived for example of the symbolic, of that capacity for symbolization that is the very possibility of socialization, throughthe ways we express ourselves symbolically by our choice of clothing, the way we furnish our home, and so on. If prison can be a chance, it is a matter of experiencing this “deprivation of the symbolic”, but of experiencing it in such a way that it can become –in the time freed from the question of subsistence that, hopefully, is available for the prisoner –not a deprivation but “an excess of the symbolic”.

Figure 24: A passage from Stiegler, 2006.

This is what Bernard himself experienced as a prisoner: a flood of meaningfulness, where everything became significant, to a large extent through the access he had to culture in a situation of the deprivation of culture. And here, we can find a clue to the first and most important meaning of the notion of entropy in Stiegler’s work: the fact that there is no stable state, there are only ever dynamic processes unfolding, and, even more than that, the fact that this means that to remain in a stable state is in fact to go backwards, to be on the way to succumbing to entropy. Without using the word “entropy” here, in 2005, Stiegler nevertheless writes:

Figure 25: A passage from Stiegler, 2006.

And it was a great discovery for me in prison when I realized that, ultimately, you either go backwards, that is, you fall, or you advance forwards, which is to say that you raise yourself up. And there is nothing in between. You never just stay in the same state. To stay in the same state is always to go backwards: this is what I learned in prison, and it is also true in the world. In prison, this is something you can perceive because you are alone with yourself, whereas in the world you get dizzy and distracted.

The question of this rise, of this raising, this raising up, against the overwhelming contemporary tendency to slide back into regression and distraction, is the question of sublimation –Stiegler’s real theme and his real distinction. But what’s interesting about “Jail Time” compared with Acting Out is that he considers this question in terms of another dimension of the problem of prison life, one that did not feature (except perhaps between the lines) in his earlier “confession”. In “Jail Time”, he says, introducing the question of sublimation:

Figure 26: Two pages from Stiegler, 2006.

I would like to begin by positing that prison is obviously –as everyone knows, even if we don’t talk about it very much, because despite everything it remains taboo, or embarrassing or intimidating –a place where people are deprived of sexual life. It isfirst of all in this way that the deprivation of existence that is the prison sentence manifests itself.

What he seems to claim here, in 2005, which he did not say in Acting Out, is that it is this deprivation in particular that opens the possibility for prison to become this chance, the chance afforded by opening new processes of sublimation. Whereas on many occasions Stiegler discusses the postponement of the drives as the process of sublimation giving rise to desire, he almost always seems to want to say that these drives should notsimply be equated with the sexual drives. Yet here, it is precisely the latter that seem to be key, that seem to be the driver of the drives, so to speak. He says:

It is this deprivation that constitutes the great misery of the prisoner, until he turns it into a power, which is, as a general rule, the very power of civilization. This is what Freud taught us: civilization consists in bridling sexual life, and it is starting from there that it rises towards something that is a worship [culte]. It is here that culture as such is constituted, and, as a general rule, it is this that constitutes desire itself.

Figure 27: A passage from Stiegler, 2006.

Desire is not about satisfying your sexual needs: that’s the boar mounting the sow. We, men, don’t just leap upon our wives like boars upon sows, we at least court them, and we want them to esteem us, to love us, that is, to admire us not just for our sexual performance but for our ability to cultivate another plane, whatever it may be, sport or any ordinary social activity whatsoever, which is never simply ordinary.

It is because, Stiegler says, the prisoner serving a lengthy sentence “realizes after some time that his body is suffering from the perspective of this sexual misery”, it is because of this realization that he decides to sublimate, recognizing “that the only serious way out of it is to bring this body to life through an ex-perience other than a sexual one”.

Figure 28: A passage from Stiegler, 2006.

The “strength of prison”, he tells us, playing on Lacan, is that “there are no sexual relations in prison”, and it is precisely this that can mean that, “suddenly, incredible, extra-ordinary things become possible”.

Is it not at least a bit surprising, for those who know his work, to read Stiegler agreeing with Freud that it is specifically the bridling of sexual life that makes civilization possible, and that it is specifically the absence of sexual relations that makes prison a privileged site for accessing the extra-ordinary –that gives prison its strength? We might even wonder: is this a particularly masculine viewpoint on the question of desire and drives? I don’t know. Perhaps if Bernard were to magically returnto us, he would want to qualify these statements, or to say that the fact that the drive he is discussing here is the sexual one does not give it a greater fundamental importance than other drives, which, too, can be bridled, sublimated, postponed in their satisfaction in a process of transforming them and cultivating desire, where what culture is is the cultivation of the incalculable –which alone makes it possible for the ordinary to become extraordinary.

We should here acknowledge that in the manuscript of Technics and Time 4 there is an evocative footnote, which we will not have time to read,

Figure 29: A footnote from Stiegler, 2017: 97, n. 4.

concerning an “organology of maternity” involving the “thanatological and erotological” différance involved with the division of the sexes. And this might also bring back into our memory that Socrates was not only a gadfly, as Stiegler recalls in mourning Derrida, but also famously saw himself as a midwife, making possible a maternity of wisdom in others, so to speak, and precisely in the sense that the idiotextual midwife that I am makes possible what is happening right now: the idiotextual listener that you are is giving birth at this very moment to the very words that I am saying to you, because (like me) you are hearing these words (language being this “support” that is a memory common to us and from which recurrences are reborn in our encounters) in your way, but through my midwifery (Stiegler, 2014: 90–91).

But what we imagine Stiegler might say if confronted with these questions today is, perhaps, not what’s most important or most interesting to think about here. What is interesting, at least to me, is the acknowledgment by Stiegler that the question of desire and sublimation does have something specific to do with the sexuality of exosomatic beings. It is interesting because it is something he does not usually say, and it is even more interesting because it poses a question to us, if we are willing to let ourselves hear it, which is to say, say it: what do we think about this statement from Stiegler, what do we think about the idea that the very possibility for prison to be a chance, its “strength”, comes from the fact that sexuality is absent, that it exists only in absentia?

Playing a bit on what is almost but not quite a false friend,

Figure 30: A passage from Stiegler, 2006.

we might want to draw attention, here, to the fact that, when he writes in this text, “It is the very absence of the thing that in some way constitutes its presence or its importance, insistence and existence”, the word I have just translated into English as “importance” is in fact “prégnance”: it is the very absence of sexuality that here makes possible and makes apparent its “pregnancy”. Is there not still something to be thought here, in terms of the necessity of opening the possibility of new pregnancies, of new capacities for pre-births still to come, assisted by midwives still to come, without which there can never be those re-births that are the results of, for example, that mixing up and mixing around –that recycling –of idiotextual remnants that in philosophy we call “critique” (Stiegler, 2017: 205)?

Prisons and sublimations

What does it mean for life outside of prison today, a life that Stiegler sees mostly as a cultural desert in which we are all suffering, an immense regression characterized by the unbridling of the drives? Would this imply that what we require today is a re-bridling of the sexual drives, or, if we don’t wish to say quite that, then what do we want to say about how Stiegler’s account of drive and desire bears upon the question of contemporary sexuality, or the other way around? Might it even be that sexuality, and all of the gifts and exchanges in which it consists, is in some way its own idiotextual milieu? If so, then in what ways would it be idiomatic and what would be its grammar? Given that the conditions of sublimation are the conditions of education, and therefore the condition of continuing the contest of the faculties and functions with which Stiegler is above all occupied, given that these conditions start from the conditions of reproduction in the most primordial sense, and given that agriculture, which as Stiegler says is the beginning of culture, itself begins with the selection and planting of the seed of which it is necessary to take care –given all of this, then shouldn’t we want to say something about this complicity of questions? And yet, we might wonder, who has?

In short, Stiegler’s work contains rich veins of thought yet to be dug up and recycled. There are encounters that remain to be staged. For that, lectures, even lectures by me, cannot be any kind of substitute for reading the work, reading the books, and reading them carefully. There are plenty of them, and this is what the idiotext that you are should do.

As I’ve just said, Stiegler was attentive to suffering; he felt it, in himself, in others, in this mostly boiling hot yet freezing cold Anthropocenic universe. “All noetic life”, he said in Technics and Time 4, “suffers from this ill-going”, draining life of its energy in all its dimensions, Stiegler himself referring to “amorous life, family life, neighbourhood life, local life, friendship, professional life, religious life, scientific life, artistic life and so on” (Stiegler, 2017: 136). Did Bernard Stiegler come too late? Are we too late in coming to him? Or are we the ones who come too soon for him to become our midwives? Which might also mean that his work is still pregnant.

One thing I have often felt is that there are yet more forms of suffering to which he did not give explicit attention, in the sense of theoretical attention. While “amorous life” appears first in the list from “Jail Time” I just recited, we can still ask: is there not a need for a specific critique of the proletarianization of kinship, courtship, seduction, maternity, and of sexual life in general, such that today we have a philosopher wondering if anything is really lost if men marry “sexual avatars” instead of actual women –is this not enough to make it necessary to undertake a specific exorganological account of the formation of exosomatic sexual life, which is to say, noetic and neganthropic sexual life? Could it be that the great deprivation of sexual life in prison somehow came too soon into the life that we are today memorializing, in such a way that Bernard might not quite have known how to approach this question in the prisons we inhabit outside of prison? But how far has anyone got in learning how to inhabit these prisons?¹

If I refer to the prisons outside of prison, this is not to forget that these prisons, too, may be a chance, if we know how to turn their faults into a necessity. Perhaps. Is it a question of learning, and always learning too late, how to live in these prisons, or how to invent and construct liveable prisons to keep ourselves protected, within the unliveable ones within which we subsist, barely, so that we may re-conceive ourselves, so that we may become pregnant with possible rebirths, open to being “reborn differently”? I’ll leave you with the words with which Bernard, who left us much too soon, and much too soon precisely because he still had so much more to tell us about how to try and continue to raise ourselves towards possible rebirths in this increasingly regressive world that “kills in the egg” just about every possibility, wearying us in advance – I’ll leave you with the words with which he ended his 2005 lecture on the life of prisoners who face a long sentence, those who, like us, have to endure a lot of jail time:

Figure 31: A passage from Stiegler, 2006.

Whatever the field of worship, a prisoner who devotes himself to something in prison, as I myself did with philosophy, is capable of giving ten times more energy per day than someone who is not in prison, with a superhuman capacity for concentration and investment thanks to what Freud called sublimation. Prison is the experience of what is sublime: it may be, it could be, it should be.

References

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Cerino, J.-M. (2006) Dépositions III, no publication information, no page numbers.Derrida, J. (2007) Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview(trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas). Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Energy Institute (2023)

Statistical Review of World Energy 2023, 72 ndedition, available at https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review, accessed 19 August, 2023.

Engels, F. (1956) ‘Engels to K. Kautsky, February 20, 1889’, in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, pp. 481–486.

Hui, Y. (2023) ‘ChatGPT, or the Eschatology of Machines’, e-flux137: 1–8, available at https://www.e-flux.com/journal/137/544816/chatgpt-or-the-eschatology-of-machines/, accessed 19 August, 2023.

Jonze, S. (2013) Her. Warner Bros. Pictures. Film.

Labaye, É. & C. Malabou (2023) ‘Que faire de nos cerveaux face à l’lIA? Dialogue entre Éric Labaye et Catherine Malabou’, Philonomist, available at https://www.philonomist.com/fr/dialogue/que-faire-de-nos-cerveaux-face-lia, accessed 19 August, 2023.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1976) Tristes Tropiques(trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman). Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

Lotka, A. (1945) ‘The Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle’, Human Biology17(3): 167–194.Stiegler, B. (1995) ‘Ce qui fait défaut’, Césure8: 231–278.

Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus(trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Stiegler, B. (2005a) Constituer l’Europe 1. Dans un monde sans vergogne. Paris: Galilée.

Stiegler, B. (2005b) ‘Nous entrons dans le revenir de Jacques Derrida’, Corpus48: 64–66.

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Notes

¹One exemplary figure might be Lars von Trier, who made a very unusual movie called The Five Obstructions(2003), and who said in a very interesting interview in November 2005, which is to say almost simultaneously with “Jail Time”: “I look for boundaries which restrict my range of activity and aesthetic freedom. Then I can concentrate all my energy in this small space. It’s very simple: when you’re in a prison, you’re in a better position to think about freedom.” He goes on, a bit later: “The desire for dominance and submission is part of our system of drives. I don’t believe you can ignore these drive structures if you are looking for a suitable way for people to live together. And you shouldn’t forget the people in political power are sexual beings too, even if we tend to strictly separate these two levels” (von Trier, 2005). I am grateful to Ouyang Man for drawing my attention to this interview.

Daniel Ross obtained his doctorate from Monash University in 2002 with a thesis on Martin Heidegger. He is the author of Violent Democracy(Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics (Open Humanities Press, 2021). He has translated a dozen books by Bernard Stiegler, most recently Nanjing Lectures 2016–2019 (Open Humanities Press, 2020), and the collective work composed and edited by Stiegler and the Internation Collective, entitled Bifurcate: There Is No Alternative (Open Humanities Press, 2021). He is also the co-director of the prize-winning film The Ister (2004).

Email: djrossmail@gmail.com