Stiegler and the task of tertiary retention: On the amateur as an educational subject

Abstract

The paper attempts to examine what is by all accounts a self-styled approach to contemporary existence, borrowing from Claire Colebrook’s 2017 essay on Bernard Stiegler’s so-called ‘curious problem of range’. Subsequently, we tackle Yuk Hui's interpretive reading of Stiegler's analysis of retentional digitality. Hui promotes the idea of archival metaphysics to overlay Stiegler’s concept of tertiary retention with tertiary protention. However, Stiegler's reformulation of Kant's aesthetics already addresses these concerns: the problem of range that his works continually provoke and the self-inscriptive conditions of writing that limit the examination of this range to the paradox of différance. Stiegler assigns the task of unraveling this range in question to the amateur, vis-a-vis the critic's typical role in the conduct of critical reason. For Stiegler, the amateur is the full achievement of aesthetic judgment, essential to education and culture formation.

Keywords:

• Amateur
• archival metaphysics
• différance
• tertiary protention
• tertiary retention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Stiegler associates provention with two important terms: provenance and tekhnē or origin and invention. In the Nanjing Lectures, Stiegler argues that the ‘question of provenance as question of invention … is confounded with the fiction that tekhnē, in all its forms (logography, poetry, theatre and so on), will always generate, and where, for Plato, fiction is literally the opposite of truth’ (2020b, p. 149). Provention is the defaulting of origin, which, originally in Plato’s (1997) Theaetetus and Meno (Burnyeat, 1990), amounts to ‘justified true belief’. That invention is the opposite of truth implies, epistemically speaking, that truth is ‘truth by default, not by fact’ (Stiegler, 2017, p. 30) , that is to say, based on its original lack (default), which invention fills in by creating it and by first founding it in memory, through assorted mnemonic media, hence, the ‘mnemo-technical’ nature of provention. Its rhetorical affinity to the concept of ‘double epochal redoubling’ suggests that the generation of knowledge through memory results from redoubling the default, the lack, across time and periods, which serve as the ‘base of knowledge’.

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Virgilio A. Rivas

Virgilio A. Rivas holds a Ph.D. on F.W.J. Schelling and the broader relation of German Idealism to current Anthropocene debate, and extinction and collapse theory. His research interests intersect with Deleuze Studies, posthumanist and assemblage theory and theoretical sociology. He teaches philosophy at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.