On the curation of negentropic forms of knowledge

Abstract

My intention is to consider Bernard Stiegler’s concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ (Stiegler, Nanjing lectures (2016–2019). Open Humanities Press, 2020) and to explore how one might rethink the knowledge-creating potentialities of information itself. This has become all the more apparent in the time of lockdowns, physical distancing during the pandemic but the primary purpose of the paper is to look at the distinction between knowledge/information and the role of the teacher in using technology pharmacologically to safeguard the savoirs and to stem the proletarianization of knowledge or stupidity as such. The point is that the pandemic is bringing home the question of the role of the teacher, the role of the school and the necessity of the co-production and co-creation of knowledge. It seems essential to understand the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ in the time of the pandemic as students are left at home without a journey to voyage upon. As such, there is a lack of futurally-bound collective protentions, an absence of any vision projection into the future. What is there in the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ that demonstrates how to use the Internet in bifurcatory ways, to produce what Stiegler calls negentropic knowledge or new forms of knowledge, or what I want to designate as experiments with truth-telling. What does it mean to produce negentropic knowledge without the teacher to guide, curate and care? With the above in mind, and by writing out of the wound of thinking, it is by rethinking the concept of curation in a different way that it is hoped one can contribute to educational research to produce unheard-of bifurcations of knowledge, to invoke Deleuze’s sense of the incomprehensible and Stiegler’s sense of the impossible, the improbable and the incalculable in educational concerns, to pave a path out of the aporia of the present—a present which is without decision and epoch.

Keywords:

• Stiegler
• deleuze
• digital
• pandemic
• corruption

Notes

1 Lignes de temps or "Timelines" is an open access editing software developed by l'Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation (IRI), which was set up in 2006 by the Center Pompidou under the leadership of Stiegler. The Lignes de temps software allows video and audio content to be indexed, categorized, edited and annotated by multiple students or users who can make notes, compare points of view, add images or web links, associate text and descriptions, keywords, quotations etc. in order to define sequences within the recorded data. Stiegler claims the software is a technology supporting the subjective point of view of the amateur or student. Its creators claim the software provides new navigation possibilities—a cartography of the temporal object—to compensate for the specific drawbacks of continuous and passive audiovisual streams. The software—a so-called “technology of the mind”—allows audiovisual content to be considered in a more analytical and critical manner which may lead to a more precise and better equipped practice of reading, and a new way to explore subjective narrative construction and thematic journeys through films, lectures, which ultimately can connect with other arts such photography and painting.

See http://arsindustrialis.org/lignesdetemps

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joff P. N. Bradley

Joff P. N. Bradley is Professor of English in the Faculty of Language Studies at Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan. Bradley is a visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, India, and a visiting research fellow at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea. He is currently writing two volumes on animation and philosophy and schizoanalysis and postmedia.