Bernard Stiegler and the necessity of education is the hammer broken and so what?

Abstract

There has been an excellent series of formative articles centring on Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) as an inspiration to pedagogical thought; this is a summative article written from the perspective of after his death. Stiegler argued that education is ontologically crucial to human development, wherein technics or the ‘not-experienced-condition(s)-necessary-for-experience’ are crucial to humanity’s ability to create its own existence. Technics make possible the technologies underpinning contemporary Anthropocentric existence. While entropy poses the cosmological threat of death to life, technics supports negentropy or the collecting and marshalling of energy opposed to entropy. Education is a crucial means of social negentropy, however all human agency is characterized by the pharmakon of more entropy or increased negentropy. The tension is inevitable in the pharmakon between on the one side, care and cure; and on the other, poison and death. In this article, we ask: ‘Given his suicide, what sort of pharmakon was Stiegler for himself and for us?’¹ The authorial “I,” ‘Bernard Stiegler’ is no longer a living critic of social entropy or of proletarization and ‘technoscience’; what do we now make of his oeuvre for education? We will point to his inversions and purposeful mis-interpretations of Heidegger and Derrida as crucial to his oeuvre. Stiegler’s phenomenal being has ended; what technics have been strengthened and specifically: ‘What now of education?’

Keywords:

• Bernard Stiegler
• technics
• technology
• entropy/negentropy
• pharmakon
• proletarization
• philosophy of education

Notes

1 His suicide is ‘public knowledge’ as his death was so announced in the local newspaper.

2 A Steigler neologism meaning ‘a new relation between the human organism and its environment, wherein technics and the human are constitutive of each other’.

3 Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) is the father of contemporary French thought about technics, technology and individuation; see Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the mode of existence of technical objects) (1958) Paris: Aubier.

4 TINA: ‘there is no alternative’ a slogan of neo-liberalism associated with Margret Thatcher.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hugo Letiche

Hugo Letiche is Adjunct Professor at Institut Mines: Telecom Business School Evry/Paris (FR) and Professorial researcher at Nyenrode Business University (NL). He is emeritus Professor from the Universiteit voor Humanistiek, Utrecht where he was director of the professional PhD program. His current research focuses on the ethnography of accountability and the translation of contemporary post-phenomenological philosophy to practice. His work is inspired by French critical philosophical and social thought. Recent books include: The Magic of Organization (2020) and L’art du sens (2019). He has published in AAAJ, Culture & Organization, JOCM, Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy, Organization, Organization Studies, TATE: Teacher and Teaching Education, et cetera.

Geoff Lightfoot

Geoff Lightfoot is emeritus Reader at the Universiteit voor Humanistiek where he co-tutored the PhD professional program. He taught at Leicester and Keele Universities. He has published in Critical Perspectives on Accounting, ephemera, the Journal of Urban Affairs, Management and Organizational History, Organization, Prometheus, SSRN

Simon Lilley

Simon Lilley is Professorial Director of Research at Lincoln University UK where he is Professor of Organization & Management. He was Professor and Head of Department at Leicester University and has taught at Keele University. He has published in Academy of Management Learning and Education, Culture & Organization, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, ephemera, Organization, et cetera.