Mind the gap: infilling Stiegler’s philosophico-educational approach to social innovation

Abstract

According to Bernard Stiegler, social innovations in the educational field are an antidotical cure for social pathologies wrought by the digitalisation of society. This article explores how Stiegler’s social pharmacology links to the human-technical co-constitution thesis that he first expounded in Technics and Time, 1. Not only do we identify in the Stieglerian corpus a lack of conceptual clarity about social innovation, but also problems in the anthropo-philosophy on which this latter work rests. Tying up the loose threads of Stiegler’s philosophical tapestry is accomplished in three steps. In the first, we retrofit Stiegler with an enactivist view of cognition. The second involves precisely defining social innovation, and then pinpointing open education as a ‘pure’ social innovation situated on the socially curative side of Stiegler’s digital ledger. The third closes the loop by identifying complementarity between enactivism and socio-educational innovation in an age of mass empowerment by means of networked computers.

Keywords:

• Stiegler
• social innovation
• open education
• enactivism
• anthropo-philosophy

Notes

1. For a critique of this reading of Simondon, see Combes (2013, pp. 67–68).

2. We employ Roe’s (2004) periodisation; academic opinion differs as to whether there is a distinguishable Middle Palaeolithic Period (roughly 300,000–40,000 years B.C.). The Upper Palaeolithic ran from 40,000 B.C. until 10,000 B.C. (Sinclair, 2004).

3. Stiegler (2015, p. 253, n. 45) discloses that he derives the ‘grammatisation’ concept from the linguist Sylvain Auroux but applies it well beyond language.

4. Following the new archaeo-anthropological convention, we use the term ‘hominin’, which is restricted to human species including extinct ones, in preference to ‘hominid’, which refers to all past and present Great Apes, including chimpanzees and gorillas (see Australianmuseum.net.au). For the details of the Olduvai Gorge finds, see: olduvaiproject.org.

5. For a summary of the evidence on each of these matters, see the Smithsonian Museum site: humanorigins.si.edu.

6. The word ‘flint’ should not be taken literally. According to Johnson (2013, p. 51), lost in the translation from French is the sense of ‘flint’ as a metonymic stand-in for a host of materials, including other types of stone.

7. To clarify: Malafouris (2013) mentions Stiegler at just one point, specifically in connection with prosthetics. Our subsequent use of Malafouris’s review of the archaeo-anthropological evidence in combination with Hutto and Myin (2013), to produce an enactivist retrofit of Stiegler, is entirely on our own.

8. We acknowledge there are different interpretations of Stiegler. For one that stresses historical continuities in memory’s dependency on exteriorisation, see Vlieghe (2014).

9. For an overview of the critical literature on the Internet and politics, see Peters and Reveley (2015).