Experiments in negentropic knowledge: Bernard Stiegler and the philosophy of education II

First of all, a word or two on the title which pertains to the scientific notion of negentropy, a notion which is used and interpreted idiosyncratically and thought-provokingly in Bernard Stiegler’s late philosophy. I have focused on this concept because I believe its application and interpretation offers a new direction in the field of educational philosophy. The focus on negentropy and the neganthropocene (portmanteau of negentropy and Anthropocene) comes amid the mushrooming of a myriad other ‘-cenes’: the Anthropocene, the Holocene, Moore’s Capitalocene, Haraway’s Chthulucene, Hornborg’s Technocene, Parikka’s Anthrobscene, to name but a few. Stiegler put forward the idea of the neganthropocene along with the ‘ecology of the spirit’ as positive motifs to diagnose the existential and psychical reality of the Anthropocene, which is the time of un-knowing (inscient) consciousness (Stiegler et al., 2020, p. 123). In the Anthropocene era I agree with Stiegler that ‘we have an absolutely incommensurable responsibility’ to counter the entropic tendency of planetary capitalism and the mortal danger of climate change. Stiegler speaks of the gravity of the existential reality facing mankind and for the ‘colossal responsibility’ of the teacher and philosopher in this time: ‘Never before in human history has it been supposed that the world community could see the approach of its own end, through entropy. This assigns a colossal responsibility to everyone, particularly in academia, and even more particularly to the philosopher who must reevaluate everything in relation to that’ (Stiegler et al., 2020, p. 128). It is here that we might think of the notions of entropy and negentropy as enabling us to reflect on Earth and World in the Anthropocene. We can consider the truth of the Anthropocene as the movement of concealing-unconcealing, ‘the coming forth or rising up of a World in which we are at home, its endurance, and finally its decay in its inclination towards the concealment and self-closedness of Earth from which the World arose’ (Blok, 2021, n.p.).

Cosmologically, we can understand entropy as a movement from order to disorder, where energy is consumed and inevitably lost in the process. Although millions and millions of years away, all processes in the universe move in the direction towards heat-death. This process cannot be stopped but can be slowed. As such Stiegler posits the term negentropy building on the theory of negative entropy proffered by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his book What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell of 1944. The abbreviation or portmanteau word—used in thermodynamics, biology and information theory, cybernetics, systems theory and complexity theory—and developed principally by Schrödinger in his theory of quantum mechanics—combines the words negative and entropy.

Influenced by 19th century conceptions of entropy (principally from the 1870s onwards) and Nietzsche’s philosophical response, namely, the anti-entropy of the thought of the eternal return, we can say that Stiegler in Qu’appelle-t-on panser? is close to Deleuze in addressing the eternal return as a kind of ‘Heraklitean fire machine’ as opposed to the steam engine of the industrial revolution. In these terms, the Anthropocene stems from the massive toxicity and entropy produced by the Industrial Revolution, which Stiegler views as a technological and organological revolution, a toxic acceleration of physiological, artificial, and social organs. The Industrial Revolution is a technosphere engendering the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene (Moore).

For Stiegler, and as a direct impact on knowledge production, Big Data disseminates an entropic form of planetary information consumerism (‘adulterated knowledge, transformed and distorted into information’—Stiegler et al., 2020, p. 125) which liquidates all forms of knowledge creation (savoir vivre, savoir faire, savoir conceptualiser). Stiegler understands entropy in thermodynamic, biological and informational or psychosocial terms and at times dissolves the Anthropocene into the entropocene. He considers entropy in all its forms (physical, biological and informational) and looks at hyper-consumption and its disavowal as leading to the exhaustion of desire. To counter this, negentropy is posited as a counter tendency which resists the closure of system dynamics. Bifurcation would be that counter destiny, meaning the redirection of the entropic effects ushered in by the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene becomes the entropocene as it results in not only the degradation of ecological life but also to the toxicity of social and psychical life. And it is here that new educational research can be undertaken to appreciate Stiegler’s pharmakon as a complement to Guattari’s ecosophy (Bradley, 2021).

We shall treat the concept of negentropy as signifying on the one hand the negation of entropy (entropy as measure of disorder), and on the other, more metaphorically, the struggle against the chaos of information in the time of social networks. From information theory, Stiegler borrows the abbreviation negentropy but rethinks it precisely in the time of the Anthropocene and climate change and the toxicity of the World Wide Web in its current iteration. More specifically, one can say in the time of the profound crisis of education, if information is entropic in its current form, knowledge can be negentropic. Stiegler takes the concept from Schrödinger to explain the idea that the organization of living beings is locally and temporarily opposed to the law of the inevitable increase of entropy and heat death in the universe. Schrödinger considers negentropy as the distinctive trait of all life because when cells and organisms form they build potential. In this way the organisation of life itself is negentropic. This is understood as order that resists the entropic drift towards its opposite. Despite the contemporary moment being one of profound crisis for education, and while information is entropic in its current form, knowledge has the potential to be negentropic. Simply, life in all its myriad forms brings into the world technologies which slow disintegration and keep death and disorder at bay. At the local level, there is a struggle against or the slowing down of the entropic tendency of the universe. The living being struggles against the dissipation of energy and consequent disorganization. Negentropy is understood as a process of différance, bifurcation and singularisation.

Interested in how ‘organized inorganic matter’ opens the possibility of difference, Stiegler searches for the incalculable (im)possibility, which he believes possesses negentropic potential to brings forth that which cannot be predicted or anticipated from closed, entropic forms of calculation. In his Nanjing Lectures, Stiegler writes: ‘Negentropy is an object of belief because it is the improbable possibility of a bifurcation—improbable because not calculable’ (2000, p. 35). Simply, negentropy is resistance to collapse. In Stiegler’s argot, invention resists entropy or the closing off of possibility itself. Stiegler invokes what he names a negentropic principle to counter the rise of stupidity or baseness or in his terms proletarianization (the loss of knowledge [life skills, (savoir vivre], know how (savoir faire), and theoretical knowledge (savoir théoriser]). Stiegler’s point is that unpredictable negentropic bifurcations can enrich knowledge, rendering it more complex. The negentropic principle is thus a strategy of differentiation and diversity as it affirms the reconstruction of the faculty of reason which, according to Stiegler, has been blighted by the effects of Big Data’s infrastructure and operations. Systems of computation are structurally entropic and toxic and Stiegler understands life itself and technics (organology) as such as negentropic inversions or bifurcations that do not oppose entropy per se but divert and defer it. In the wake of the reality of climate change and the Anthropocene, Stiegler still envisages a future (avenir) within the irreversible law of entropic becoming (devenir). We might say that the improbable is hope itself. Hope would be that negentropic inclination in life because life itself is improbable and indeed miraculous. And it is here than Stiegler takes from Russian geochemist and mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky the sense that the noosphere—the planetary ‘sphere of reason’ ushered in by life itself through the organisation of knowledge—is negentropic in principle. Consequently, negentropy is interpreted as opposing the tendency in educational, economic, geological systems to deteriorate and lose knowledge. Knowledge systems lose information because physical systems gain entropy. In this sense, negentropy opposes the process of proletarianization. In Stiegler’s system, and for our purposes, the applied usage and application of the term negentropy is thus tied to the invention or creation of forms of negentropic potential. Deproletarianization would then be the reconstruction of knowledge, or the slowing down of the process of entropy or indifferentiation.

All the while cognizant of the difficulties and risks of translating a scientific concept into mere metaphor (Scruton, 2019; Sokal & Bricmont, 2003), I asked philosophers of education who are familiar with Stiegler’s work to apply his concepts to their own respective milieu, to explore their locality as the primordial condition of negentropy. They have taken to the task of re-constructing Stiegler’s concepts in their own milieu, whether their locality be Australia, the Philippines, India, Japan, in Europe or England. Put another way, as locality or ethos is the site of ethical life, and as ethical life can only be conserved in a local open system, the premise of our project has been to develop new forms of negentropic bifurcation, that is, new forms of invention and ways to reorganise education. This must be done. We have an ethical imperative before us to respond to the chaos of planetary capitalism. In this context, Stiegler invokes the neganthropos, a new organological configuration, a new global society and political economy, a new way of life. My goal was to understand the dynamics of the open system as such, to think the nature of fragmentary, roaming, non-totalising thought, to think the concepts of rhizomatic thought and rhizomatic knowledge, to understand the pharmakon precisely as an open-ended system, and to hold out for the prospects of what Stiegler calls ‘the great negentropic bifurcation’.

I believe the ideal behind our joint project is Stieglerian in spirit. The task it seems is an essential one: to invoke original, elevating, unanticipated thought in the time of the ascendency of alienating technological and cybernetic modes of thinking. This is not just offering resistance but a form of invention in the time of automatic thought and control. Writers were asked to consider the root and branch reopening of knowledge, the return to the base of knowledge, to perform an epoché of established images of thought. I am acutely aware this perhaps is a foolhardy task but nevertheless I believe one must persevere to think and create and invent the pedagogy-to-come.

As technological forms of thinking afford us the opportunity to think about the possibility of the nature of planetary thinking as such, and as planetary thinking in its turn helps us to consider the possibility that technology may well allow for the radical redistribution of wealth, which is to say, the redistribution of knowledge wealth, that is wealth understood not solely in monetary but also in educational terms, I hoped the writers would invoke or invent a utopian principle, that is they would pose the question of the communal and universal redistribution of the wealth of knowledge to all—to insist all belongs to all. As Stiegler says: ‘[R]eal wealth is always constituted by negentropic knowledge, knowledge about how to generate and retain energy’ (Dunker, 2021, p. 116).

I am of the view that the project fulfils its task with respect to reclaiming technology in the name of the radical redistribution of intellectual wealth and engaging with hybrid, local experiments in the transformation of knowledge. Resolutely, I continue to believe that we can conceive of the possibility that education can be radically reformed to allow all to participate and all to contribute.

I believe this is a Stieglerian battle cry of sorts: to understand the pharmacology and the promise of technology. As such, I ask readers to join us in the opening of thought to allow for the unanticipated to emerge. Schools, colleges, universities and all educational institutions need a pedagogical and philosophical glasnost, a new form of informational openness and new form of knowledge. We need to resist the status quo and the capitalist axiomatic of profit for any absurd purpose.

The writers of this volume have made significant effort to contribute to the architectonique of negentropic knowledge in Stiegler’s oeuvre because Stiegler leaves us with a vast array of concepts in need of explication and application. Moreover, his work is not simply a systematization of theoretical knowledge but pertains precisely to re-construction. He provides an architectonique of unreason in the time of nihilism as well as an architectonique of loneliness and mental implosion. In this way it is also an architectonique of a new ethics of contribution, creation and co-construction.

The architectonique of Stiegler is directed toward the reconstruction of society, to the harmony of a society riven with nonrelation and at times the unfettered expression of the drives. His philosophy pertains to construction and the constructive and his ethics is akin to that of the architect’s imagination; it is one of direction and control, a relation to artifice and technique.

But here we begin to quickly slide into Stieglereeze and the convenience of repeating the master’s argot, perhaps even producing another jargon of authenticity. My idea behind this project was to begin to think about an accessible pedagogical method which borrows from Stiegler’s lexicon but also develops other idioms and vernaculars from other traditions such as educational philosophy and thus to work in tandem with them—to make and propose elevated and sublime metamodels of change and transformation. This is why I have aspired to apply Stiegler’s work to the philosophy of education. Simply, we must experiment with his thought but always with the tenet to think and create and invent beyond it. As Stiegler says: ‘The challenge is to give a good diagnosis of the situation we are in, and then to find an effective cure. I think both are necessary and possible’ (Dunker, 2021, p. 117).

Writers from Asia and Oceania—Japan, Korea, India, the Philippines, and Australia—together with colleagues from Serbia, France and England have demonstrated the widespread interest in Stiegler’s thought. I am proud of what they wrote and humbled by their generosity of spirit.

The writers took to their respective tasks in the following ways.

Joff P. N. Bradley considers Stiegler’s concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ and explores how one might rethink the knowledge-creating potentialities of information itself. Bradley explores how the teacher can create knowledge in the time of digital technologies and makes the case that the teacher still has a role to play in safeguarding the savoirs and curating the student toward knowledge. He asks the reader to ruminate on the question of whether knowledge production is possible without the teacher to guide, curate and care.

Joel White addresses the suitability of the concept of anti-entropy itself, suggesting Zoran Rant’s concept of exergy investment or destruction as an alternative. For White, anti-entropy fails to capture the reality of expenditure and investment because it is only the displacement of entropy to an external system. In terms of education, exergy is heuristic when it posed alongside Derrida’s notion of différance and effective in exploring the transcendental problem of signification. It offers a way to rethink traditional significations in education. White offers the example of the banning of anti-capitalist literature in the UK as an example of his theory.

The architect and theorist Santosh Thorat examines Stiegler’s understanding of human evolution in terms of technical evolution. Through the genesis of technics, Thorat explores vectors of the individuation process applicable to education and to architecture. He provides us with a sketch of the history of architecture and its applicability in the Indian context and draws our attention to the guild model of collective architectural learning, and the Hephaestusian (Tekton) and Daedalic (Architekton) traditions as well as the ramifications of new forms of digital democratic space for architects.

In this original, thought-provoking piece, Benjamin Herm-Morris addresses the issue of social media and the so-called Dislike Economy. He picks up on the effects of filter bubbles generative of algorithms which learners can neither see nor control. He points the reader to the role educational institutions are playing in countering the loss of knowledge and is critical of the trend of algorithmic governance which accelerates ‘proletarianisation’. His solution is not to reject digital platforms wholesale but to ensure that new technologies are controlled by users in community-building processes.

Sunji Lee reflects on the connections between of animation, attention and distraction in Bernard Stiegler and Walter Benjamin’s respective philosophies. He addresses the problematic and impact of the destruction of attention on intergenerational relationships. He focuses on the attentional needs of the ‘Generation M.’ and juxtaposes Benjamin’s arguments regarding distraction as a way to rethink the political possibilities of attention deficit. For Lee, animation bridges the gap between Stiegler’s and Benjamin’s respective arguments. To show this, he provides an overview of the Japanese critique of animation to argue that Generation M. are not mere cyborgs, but ethical cyborgs who relate to intergenerational relationships in a new way.

Virgilio A. Rivas considers Stiegler’s concept of tertiary retention and tertiary protention. He analyses Yuk Hui’s sense of retentional digitality to shed light on the idea of archival metaphysics and then to Stiegler’s sense of tertiary retention and tertiary protention before turning to Kant’s aesthetics and the role of the amateur in carrying out the role of critical reasoning. And then returns to Stiegler to suggest that the amateur is the full achievement of aesthetic judgment which is essential to education and culture formation.

For Ruth Irwin it is Stiegler who expounds upon the concept of exosomatic memory to understand the evolution of humanity. Irwin suggests exosomatic memory is essential for the transmission of culture and knowledge and turns to not only Stiegler but Heidegger, Leroi-Gourhan and Derrida to explore the passage from the Palaeolithic to the contemporary. In a striking way, she isolates the Maori use of natural objects as an example of the exosomatic transmission of intergenerational learning and a counter tendency to the technological enframing of modernity in Heidegger. She argues brilliantly that the Maori use of natural objects is a form of exosomatic memory that is cultural, technological and importantly ecological.

Through a hermeneutic and autoethnographic approach Greta Goetz outlines the problem of the short-circuiting of knowledge in the time of the Anthropocene. She undertakes this by considering Stiegler’s Heideggerian reformulation of the being-for-life that cares for the creation of knowledge. She explores the hermeneutic difficulty of remaining open to creation and the practical possibility of dis-automatizing education through the use of free software in local, online classrooms. The co-individuating, innovative potential of care-fully chosen tools is also explored through a review of Stiegler’s hermeneutic web and Guattari’s affirmation of free radio. Goetz argues that free software offers an open space for neganthropic, mythopoetic and organological dreaming that is ultimately expressed as a co-creative knowledge act.

Kristy Forrest explores the ecological problems facing the East Coast of Australia and looks to the philosophy of Stiegler to explain the problem of entropy. She invites readers to consider how best to harness the technological capacity with an ethos and ecstasy of care. In relation to the Australian context, she considers the possibilities inhering in Stiegler’s utopian call for environmental action. And she looks to schools and universities as institutions which can reconceptualise the sharing of knowledge and rethink the very purpose of education itself.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.