Stiegler’s Rigour: Metaphors for a Critical Continental Philosophy of Technology

ABSTRACT

This essay claims that Stiegler’s sense of metaphor gives his work an overlooked rigour. Part one argues that La Faute d’Epiméthée’s key claim (that technics is philosophy’s “unthought”) opens an excess of potential that threatens to overwhelm Stiegler’s work. Part two looks at two metaphors (the pharmakon and organ). Part three argues that a focus on Stiegler’s technique of metaphor mitigates suspicions that his work is trivial or jargonistic, and allows it to emerge as a counterbalance to a positivistic tendency in contemporary philosophy of technology. This tendency is the legacy of an “empirical turn” in philosophy of technology in the late 1990s; it is problematic, I argue, because it threatens to turn philosophical engagements with technologies into endorsements of Zeitgeist-seizing artifacts (smartphones or social media, for example), to the detriment of what Stiegler’s sense of metaphor allows him to address as the broader “pharmacological” and “organological” implications of technologies for society.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy of technology
• Stiegler
• metaphor
• technics
• critique

1. Introduction

From the publication of the first volume of his landmark La Technique et le temps series in 1994, Bernard Stiegler’s work acted as a crucible for some of the best and worst tendencies in recent continental philosophy. At its best, his work was politically engaged, dramatic, imaginative, and synthetic of diverse canonical thinkers, from Husserl and Heidegger, to Simondon, Derrida and Deleuze, to Freud and Lacan. Moreover, in taking “technics” as a central theme, Stiegler’s work confronted some of the key challenges facing what the sociologist Manuel Castells has termed our contemporary “Information Age.”¹ On the other hand, Stiegler’s work has been subjected to scathing criticisms: that it tends towards technological determinism²; that it is superficial³; that it is reductive and “positivistic” in its treatment of key concepts emerging from Derrida, Stiegler’s mentor⁴; and that it exemplifies a reactionary political attitude, as well as a far too exuberant will to theorise and neologise.⁵

This essay is an attempt to see through some of the critical fog surrounding Stiegler’s work by making sense of one contentious and counterintuitive aspect of it: his use of metaphor. Paradoxically, given a climate in contemporary continental philosophy where approaches like the “speculative realism” of Meillassoux and Brassier, the “Object Oriented Ontology” of Harman, Morton and Bogost, and the “New Materialisms” of Braidotti and Bennett are ascendant, a focus on metaphor may seem both “anti-realist” in an anachronistically “postmodern” sense, and “realist” in a de rigeur sense.⁶ It will appear as the former if it turns out to be committed to a linguistic turn that implies Kantian “correlationist” metaphysical presuppositions.⁷ It will appear as a version of the latter if it takes the tack of what Bogost calls “metaphorism”—that is, of presupposing that “metaphor” describes, not a specifically human form of interaction with the world, but rather a more general form of “vicarious causation” or “poetics” capable of occurring between objects of all types.⁸

Instead of offering a grand metaphysical approach to metaphor, however, this essay seeks to engage Stiegler’s use of metaphors pragmatically. It will not argue, in any caricatural “postmodern” sense, that “everything is metaphor,” or that metaphor is a theme worthy of pursuit on a purely textual level, for its own sake.⁹ Nor will it argue that Stiegler is more fundamentally an “anti-realist” or a “realist” thinker. Instead, the aim is to approach some of Stiegler’s key metaphors precisely as important rhetorical “technai,” and to examine the critical and creative trajectories they open up. The essay will accordingly seek to show how these metaphors lend a rigour and relevance to Stiegler’s work that some of the more excoriating contemporary criticisms surrounding him prohibit us from fully recognising or engaging.¹⁰

Part one aims to disperse some of the critical fog surrounding Stiegler’s work by focusing on how it stands up to the potential of the key claim forwarded at the beginning of the first volume of La technique et le temps (La Faute d’Epiméthée): that technics is the “unthought of philosophy.”¹¹ I argue that this claim produces problems for Stiegler that are internal to the development of his work. Specifically, I argue that the implications of the claim are so far reaching that it tends towards overwhelming the consistency of the (voluminous) body of work that Stiegler subsequently produced before his untimely death in 2020.

Part two argues that Stiegler’s approach to metaphor gives his work a rigour that channels the potential opened up by his key claim. To make this point, I focus on two of Stiegler’s key metaphors: his descriptions of technologies as “pharmaka” and “organs,” The first of these, expanding Derrida’s work on Plato, provokes scrutiny of the relation between technologies and “drugs” or “potions”; the second, scrutiny of the relation between technologies and bodily organs. I argue that it is important to treat these metaphors in the grammatical sense.¹² When viewed in this way, Stiegler’s metaphors provoke us to think critically and creatively about how far we can push the transferences of meaning they involve. To what extent, for example, does it make sense to describe technologies in terms of the general grammar or network of terms surrounding “drugs” and “organs,” in terms of issues like “addiction,” “toxicity,” “therapy,” “placebo effect,” “diet” and “nurturing,” “amputation,” or “extension”?

Part three concludes by situating the approach developed in this essay in relation to the general contemporary reception of Stiegler. Against the temptation to straightforwardly annex Stiegler’s work to ascendant metaphysical views on metaphor, I argue that it is important to consider the pragmatic/grammatical role of metaphor in his work, for three reasons: first, it helps overcome suspicions of triviality; second, it helps overcome suspicions of jargon; third, it allows his work to enter the grammatical context of contemporary philosophy of technology, and to emerge as a critical counterbalance to a positivistic tendency there. This tendency is the product of a “realism” engendered by an “empirical turn” in philosophy of technology in the late 1990s; it is dangerous, I argue, because it threatens to turn philosophical engagements with technologies into endorsements of Zeitgeist-seizing artifacts (for example: smartphones, social media, nanotechnologies and drones), to the detriment of engagement with what Stiegler’s sense of metaphor allows him to address as the broader “pharmacological” and “organological” implications of technologies for society.

2. Excess

As indicated above, the criticisms surrounding Stiegler are many and varied, and, although disparate, sometimes extremely hostile. This means that they can distract from, and be uncharitable to, the possibility that his work has more productive aspects. This part attempts to see through some of this tumult, in favour of a more focused form of critique that concentrates on one general criticism relating to the legacy of La Faute d’Epiméthée, the first volume of Stiegler’s La technique et le temps series. For shorthand purposes, the criticism I have in mind can be called the “excess” criticism. It holds that Stiegler’s work since La Faute d’Epiméthée has not lived up to the potential of the radical claim asserted there: that technology is the “unthought” of philosophy. I will argue that, for reasons internal to Stiegler’s work, there is a sense in which it cannot, in principle, live up to the potential of this claim.

On the first page of La Faute d’Epiméthée, Stiegler makes the following claim, in a tone which, as Geoffrey Bennington remarks in a by now notorious critique, is so sonorous as to “ … all but close the book before it has got started”¹³:

The object of this work is technics … . Today [this object] informs all types of research, and the enormousness of [its] question summons us all. This calls for a work whose urgency is still hardly grasped despite the high stakes of the issue and the disquiet it arouses – a long and exacting task, as exciting as it will be difficult, stirring a necessary but deaf and dangerous impatience. Here I would like to warn the reader of this difficulty and of its necessity: at its very origin and up until now, philosophy has repressed technics as an object of thought. Technics is the unthought.¹⁴

To claim that technics is the “unthought” of philosophy is not simply to make the prosaic claim that philosophy has not been thinking sufficiently about technology; rather, the emphasis in making sense of Stiegler’s claim has to go on the penultimate statement of this extract—that “philosophy has repressed technics as an object of thought.” To claim that technics is the “unthought” of philosophy, then, in Stiegler’s psychoanalytically-inflected vocabulary, is to say that it is a repressed or denied condition for the possibility of philosophy—a worldly condition or “supplement” that the philosophical tradition has implicitly relied upon while also “forgetting” or “covering over,” in favour of a signature form of philosophical bad faith which privileges the metaphysical abstractions of “theoria.”¹⁵

From La Faute d’Epiméthée, Stiegler’s work unpacked and developed the consequences of this claim. As he elaborates in the series of interviews published in 2004, Philosopher par accident:

In my work I try to show that, since its origin, philosophy has endured [its] technological condition, but as repression and denial and that is the entire difficulty of my undertaking – to show that philosophy begins with the repression of its proper question.¹⁶

What follows from the claim that philosophy begins with the repression of “technics,” its “proper question”? On a literal reading of Bennington’s remark that this claim “all but closes” La Faute d’Epiméthée before it has properly begun, little, it would seem. In another sense, however, the difficulty is precisely the opposite: not that Stiegler’s claim “closes the book,” but that it blows it wide open.

The point is that the potential opened up by Stiegler’s claim may be so excessive as to overwhelm the consistency of his subsequent work. This is because it involves at least three huge demands: 1.) to deconstruct the entire history of philosophy in terms of the technological “supplements” upon which, it is claimed, every philosophical position has “unthinkingly” relied; 2.) to provide an empirical genealogy of technics, to chart how innovations have inaugurated different epochs in the history of human thought; 3.) to provide an up-to-date political focus on existential issues raised by the “repression” of contemporary technologies from our thought.¹⁷

The positive way to view these demands is to see them in terms of what, following Deleuze, Stiegler calls “consistencies”; that is, in terms of “projects,” “ideas,” or “motifs” that guide the production of his work, but which are, in principle, inexhaustible. As Stiegler puts it in the first volume of Mécréance et discrédit:

I will attribute, to this verb, ‘to consist’, a very great importance: that which consists is not that which exists: it is that which gives its sense (its direction and its movement, or its motor force [force motrice]) to that which exists, without reducing itself to that existent. The existent is a fact. But the existent only consists as that which goes beyond its fact.¹⁸

It is, I think, useful to see Stiegler’s own work in these terms: it is an “existent” guided by at least three infinitely demanding “consistencies.” These traverse Stiegler’s work in different ways, and generate different emphases throughout it: while La Faute d’Epiméthée tends more towards a deconstruction of the history of philosophy, other subsequent books, such as Prendre soin and De la Pharmacologie,¹⁹ have a more political leaning, while further books still have more pronounced empirical emphases, such as La Télécratie contre la démocratie and Pour en finir avec la mécroissance.²⁰

These consistencies often interact in Stiegler’s work in terms of the kind of productive aporetic tensions extolled by Derrida.²¹ When they do, they are apt to generate imaginative couplings of themes, such as the links between memory and the industrialisation process, and the links between cinema and Kant’s doctrine of the schematism that are developed in the second and third volumes of La Technique et le temps respectively.²² The problem, however, is that they can also interact to produce breakdowns in the overall consistency of Stiegler’s work, in a sense less in keeping with Derrida’s notion of aporia, and more in keeping with Lyotard’s notion of a “différend” between two incompatible orders of discourse.²³

Of the demand for a deconstruction of the history of philosophy, for example, it can readily be objected that this evades empirical challenges raised by contemporary technologies, in favour of a meta-level history of philosophy, the real motive of which is to re-interpret or “recode” philosophy itself in terms of a transcendentalised “Technics.” Of the demand for an empirical focus, conversely, it can be objected that Stiegler’s use of philosophy is redundant for this purpose, and that he would be better served to conduct a more straightforwardly updated “anthropology” or history of technics, after the fashion of his influences André Leroi-Gourhan and Bertrand Gille. And, of the demand for an engaged political dimension, it can be objected that the urgent political rhetoric informing a great deal of Stiegler’s work is in tension with a philosophical demand for patience.²⁴ As Bennington writes:

[A]ccording to a paradox that just is that of philosophy itself, what is urgent is to hold up against urgency so as to think it, to be patient enough with the emergency to do its urgency justice by not just running with it: the thinking of urgency will, then, also be a thinking of the resistance to urgency.²⁵

Although critical of the “hectoring” tone he finds in Stiegler’s work,²⁶ Bennington is nonetheless charitable to Stiegler’s attempts to negotiate the “paradox of urgency” he outlines here, and it is in this sense that his remark that Stiegler’s opening claim “all but closes” La Faute d’Epiméthée is to be read—as an ironic gibe.²⁷ A less nuanced reader than Bennington may, however, suspect Stiegler’s opening claim of being so broad in its demands and consequences for his subsequent work as to tend towards nonsense, and may therefore wish to shut the book on him in a more literal sense. What such a reader would miss is that is possible to tend towards nonsense in at least two ways: either one is saying nothing at all, or, alternatively, one is grappling to articulate something excessive. Certain contemporary readers may suspect Stiegler’s work of saying nothing at all; others may suspect that trying to say something excessive is logically indistinguishable from saying nothing at all. Against these views, the next part of this essay will argue that Stiegler’s work is involved in an attempt to mediate the excess of potential opened up by his key claim, and that his sense of metaphor demonstrates a rigour at work in his approach to this.

3. Two metaphors

The aim for this part is to focus on two of Stiegler’s key metaphors: the “pharmakon” and the “organ.” I will argue these play an important pragmatic/grammatical role in Stiegler’s work by mediating the excess of his key claim, and by opening up critical and creative trajectories for thinking about the role of technologies in the contemporary world. Throughout, the emphasis will be, not on justifying a “realist” or “anti-realist” metaphysical thesis on why and how metaphor in general is possible, but rather on pragmatically charting how two of Stiegler’s key metaphors operate.

Although the pharmakon only explicitly enters Stiegler’s work with the publication of the third volume of the Mécréance et discrédit series in 2006,²⁸ it is perhaps the single most important of his metaphors for coming to terms with his work as a whole. This is because the paradoxical ambivalence it expresses means it is tailor-made for unpacking the consequences of his (likewise paradoxical) key claim that technics is philosophy’s repressed “unthought.”²⁹

Building on Derrida’s critique of the Platonic account of writing in the Phaedrus, Stiegler’s use of the pharmakon plays on three main senses of this term in ancient Greek, as denoting: 1.) a “poison,” 2.) a “cure,” and 3.) a “sacrifice” or “scapegoat” (“un bouc émissaire”).³⁰ Of these, the first and second senses appear by far the most frequently in Stiegler”s work, and always as a couple. This is because he uses the term to emphasise the ambivalently “healthy” and “poisonous” consequences (whether ethical, aesthetic, ontological or epistemological) of technological artifacts. As he writes of Promethean fire, for example, the “first” technology according to the origin myth recounted in Plato”s Protagoras: “Fire is the pharmakon par excellence. A civiliser, it always risks setting flame to civilisation.”³¹

There are two more ambient trajectories of the pharmakon that follow from its poison/cure ambivalence, and that Stiegler’s work frequently exploited: thinking about technologies in terms of 1.) “toxicity” and “addiction,” and 2.) “therapy.”³² Importantly, however, there remain a host of further critical and creative trajectories that play an implicit role in Stiegler’s work, and that could be developed. This, for example, is the case when Stiegler alludes to technologies in terms of issues surrounding “prescription,” “dosage,” (drug) “dealing,” and the pharmaceutical industry.³³ Consider, further, the “placebo effect.” To what extent do technologies induce something comparable to this? While Stiegler’s work on Donald Winnicott’s notion of the “transitional object” does point in this direction,³⁴ this analysis takes place within an idiomatic context that presupposes prior knowledge of specifically Freudian forms of psychoanalysis. What, we might therefore wonder, would a more accessible analysis of the “placebo effect” in terms of technologies look like? Arguably, it would take us further towards the philosophy of technology implied in Žižek’s remarks on TV sitcoms.³⁵ Žižek’s suggestion is that “canned laughter” in sitcoms functions to relieve viewers of the requirement to laugh for themselves; reframed in terms of the envisaged Stieglerian analysis, canned laughter would be seen to function as a technological supplement that gives viewers the “placebo” of having laughed.

The claim being developed here is that the rigour of Stiegler’s metaphors consists in this process of focusing and testing the transferences of meaning surrounding key terms, such as “the pharmakon.” In some cases (such as those of “toxicity” and “addiction”), Stiegler has carried out this process in an in-depth manner in his work. In other cases (such as those of “prescription” and “dosage”), the links are more suggestive, and form part of what we might call the background “poetics” of his work. In still further cases (such as that of the placebo effect) the links are not so much conceptually or poetically developed, as provoked as candidates for further development by the links that are explicitly made.

Assuming this description captures something of the grammar of how Stiegler’s metaphors operate, how does it work in terms of the link he makes between technologies and “organs”? Here, as a starting point, is how he makes the transition from pharmacology to “organology” in De la pharmacologie:

[T]ransductive relations link three organological levels that it is necessary to distinguish, and which have their own logics and … tendencies, but which cannot be considered in isolation from one another:

• The psychic machine is founded on a system of psychosomatic organs.

• The technical system relates and links the artificial organs which become the pharmaka of the psychosomatic body and which relate it to other bodies within [au sein de] social systems.

• These social systems are the organisations by which the transindividual metastabilises and unifies the therapeutic regimes which constitute the making of the social body across processes of collective individuation.³⁶

This extract is thick with a jargon that Stiegler borrows from his influences Gilbert Simondon and Bertrand Gille.³⁷ The notable representatives of this are the concepts “transductive relation,” “technical system,” “transindividual” and “collective individuation.” These concepts are no doubt inspirational for Stiegler. The problem, however, is that they arguably serve to obscure a more straightforward metaphorical transference that underpins his concept of “organology”: namely, the transference which asserts that relations between organisms and technologies can be treated as analogous to “organic” relations tout court, on a sliding scale that moves from the micro-level of the body and its cells, to the macro-level of society and the collective.

This metaphor, as exemplified in Stiegler’s description of technologies as “inorganic organised beings,”³⁸ is far from new; it occurs historically throughout vitalist and mechanist philosophies alike, and is to be found in thinkers as diverse as Durkheim, Bergson, Canguilhem, Freud, Mumford, and McLuhan.³⁹ Drawing attention to it is therefore likely to seem passé or clichéd in comparison to the kind of exotic theorising that Stiegler’s appropriation of concepts from Simondon and Gille seems to portend. That said, there is arguably a sense in which reconnecting with the metaphor can be more productive for an understanding and development of what Stiegler calls “organology” than theorising with the concepts. To see why, it is worth revisiting the above extract, not in terms of the concepts that Stiegler borrows from Simondon and Gille, but in terms of three key metaphors it contains.

Consider, first, Stiegler’s reference to social systems as “organisations.” The etymological link between bodily organs and social organisations, going back to the Greek “organon” (for “organ” or “instrument”),⁴⁰ hides in plain sight within both contemporary English and French, in a way that makes a dead metaphor of the term “organisation” in both languages. Stiegler’s treatment of organs and organisations as subject to a general “organological” logic revivifies this link, and thereby provokes critical and creative trajectories for thought. For example: When does a particular organisation become “healthy” or “unhealthy”? In what senses can an organisation be “inoculated” or build “immunity,” and to what? In what ways are organs comparable to “organisations”? In what senses are bodies “bodies politic”?

Consider “metastability.” Organology is meant to be a way of understanding relations between the “organic” and “inorganic” in terms of a broader logic capable of subsuming both. Stiegler’s transference of the term “metastability” from thermodynamics exemplifies such a shift. In statistical analysis, “metastability” describes the extended (but finite) period of time spent by a system in a state “other than its state of least energy”⁴¹; Stiegler’s appropriation of the term is looser in its sense than this, but, insofar as he appropriates it at all, he opens critical and creative trajectories for thought. For example: To what extent do certain technologies act as catalysts for entropy or negentropy in organological relations? How does “metastability” relate to issues of energy conservation? How do these issues relate to issues of waste, “burnout,” “care,” and the ecological crisis?

Consider “au sein de.” This revivifies a dead metaphor in French that is further buried by the usual translation of this expression into English as “within.” Literalised, the expression means “at the breast of” or “within the bosom of,” and implies a process of organic nurturing. The implicit claim, then, is that the body of the individual is “nurtured at the breast of social systems.” Again, this provokes thought: How do the respective “diets” of social systems and individuals sustain one another? How does the individual grow in tandem with social systems? Should individuals be “weaned” from social systems, or does the nurturing relation persist indefinitely?

What we are observing here, I suggest, is that relatively straightforward metaphors often function in Stiegler’s work as conditions for the development of ostensibly more complex conceptual apparatuses. There is no shame in this. On the contrary, there is nothing to stop what seem like relatively straightforward metaphors from being complex and innovative in the critical and creative trajectories they provoke for thought, as I take Stiegler’s work on the “pharmakon” and the “organ” to demonstrate. To recognise that what Stiegler calls “pharmacology” and “organology” may be underpinned by such metaphors is not, therefore, to attempt to simplify or reduce his work, or to find its “essence”; rather, it is an attempt to do justice to the related metaphorical (that is: “technical,” “poetic,” and “rhetorical”) and conceptual dimensions of his thinking.

4. Rigour and relevance: Stiegler’s critical philosophy of technology

So far, we have argued that Stiegler’s work is subject to a problem of excess opened up by the scope of the key claim that has underpinned his work since La Faute d’Epiméthée, and that his use of metaphors is involved in mediating the excess of this claim. But what of the place of metaphor itself in contemporary continental philosophy? In the face of the forms of realism discussed at the beginning of this essay, isn’t metaphor a passé or dangerous theme, tied, at best, to deconstruction, hermeneutics, and a by now superseded “linguistic” or “textual” paradigm for thought?⁴²

The unparalleled critics of metaphor in recent continental philosophy are Deleuze and Guattari. In Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, they famously write:

Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less than all designation. Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word.⁴³

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari further develop the claim made here: that metaphor carries unavoidably conservative, anthropocentric, and idealist/“anti-realist” baggage, and that carving the world up into “proper” and “figurative” senses brings curses of dualism and transcendence. Against metaphor, then, Deleuze and Guattari assert that real creativity and thought take place on a “plane of immanence” that is directly and literally expressive of desire and the real.⁴⁴

Read in the wake of this polemic, metaphor may seem like entirely the wrong “technē” with which to approach Stiegler. On the contrary, the temptation is to think that, when Stiegler writes that a technology is a “pharmakon” or an “organ,” he is in not thinking in terms of metaphor at all; rather, it seems that he is thinking “past” or “through” metaphor, in terms of a form of hyper-literalism which holds that technologies really are “poisons,” “cures” or “organs,” and not simply that technologies have similarities to, and differences from, poisons, cures or organs.

The temptation to annex Stiegler to the ascendant forms of contemporary realism discussed at the beginning of this essay compounds the temptation to read him “hyper-literally.” This is because a view such as Bogost’s “metaphorism,” however contrary its positive estimation of metaphor may prima facie seem to Deleuze and Guattari’s negative estimation, also results in hyper-literalism insofar as it (like the Deleuzo-Guattarian view) approaches metaphor in highly general, metaphysical terms.⁴⁵ Crudely put, whereas all relations are metaphorical for Bogost, it seems that no relation is ever truly “metaphorical” for Deleuze and Guattari; the result, however, is the same either way: an undoing of the grammar of the concept of metaphor as figurative transference, in favour of flat ontology or the “plane of immanence.”⁴⁶

Contrary to these temptations, I want to hold fast to the claim that it is important to recognise Stiegler’s metaphors in pragmatic/grammatical terms. This has nothing to do with a desire to return to a conservative, passé or “anti-realist” philosophical paradigm, and everything to do with tactics. Put simply, even supposing that Deleuze and Guattari’s polemic on metaphor is correct, and even supposing that important realist developments are underway in contemporary continental philosophy, there are, I claim, at least three good reasons for supposing that these provide the wrong kinds of frameworks for getting the most out of Stiegler’s work for thinking about the place of technologies in the contemporary world.

First, approaching Stiegler’s work in “hyper-literalist” terms has the capacity to turn it into something overwhelmingly trivial. Take the cases of “pharmacology” and “organology.” It is, on one level, entirely trivial to note that technologies, like drugs, can have ambivalently “good” and “bad” effects, and that, like organs, they can extend human capacities. Nevertheless, these are precisely the sort of “pharmacological” and “organological” conclusions at which an overly literal reading of Stiegler might cause us to stop short. This is because such a reading involves not privileging certain senses of a concept over others, and, thereby, of dissolving the network of “figurative” connections that surround terms like “drug” and “organ”; where this collapses, however, we lose sight, first, of why and how it can be illuminating to connect technologies to certain privileged issues (those concerning “prescription,” “dosage,” “placebo effect,” “amputation” or “extension,” for example), and, second, of the points at which it may simply be misleading to think of technologies “pharmacologically” or “organologically” (that is, the points at which it might be better to think of them in terms of other metaphors or logics, whether, for example, economic, ecological, political or sociological). In other words, seeing technologies as drugs or organs in a hyper-literal sense may be profitable for stressing certain important similarities between these terms, but not the differences. In contrast, seeing their relations in a pragmatic/grammatical sense of metaphor may have the capacity to preserve vigilance on both the similarities and the differences, to precisely the extent that it is more circumspect in its metaphysical assertions.

Second, approaching Stiegler’s work “hyper-literally” has the capacity to exacerbate a tendency towards jargon. The accusation of “jargon” is often levelled against thinkers in the continental tradition since Husserl.⁴⁷ It is arguable, however, that Stiegler’s work is especially susceptible to it. This is not just because of the wide range of thinkers and themes it incorporates, nor simply because of the range of concepts it borrows and attempts to extend (concepts such as “transductive relation” and “technical system,” as we saw above). It is especially the case because, as we saw at the outset of this essay, Stiegler’s thinking is focused on a central theme, “technics,” which, since the very first words of La Faute d’Epiméthée, he has consistently attempted to communicate as something “urgent.” This commits him, on some level, to expressing himself perspicuously, and means that, wherever he tends towards jargon (as, I would argue, his appropriations of concepts like “transductive relation” often do), he is susceptible to betraying the putative urgency of his central theme. The way out of this dilemma, I suggest, does not consist in reading Stiegler in terms of an axiomatically accepted hyper-literalism, but nor does it consist in simply jettisoning apparently jargonistic concepts from his work; rather, it consists in diffusing the suspicion of jargon by admitting that these concepts are often underpinned by apparently straightforward metaphors which are nevertheless capable of being extremely provocative for critical and creative trajectories of thought. In other words, there is a rich and rigorous sense of metaphor in Stiegler’s work, and it may be worth returning to it wherever his work appears too conceptually baroque.

Third, approaching Stiegler’s work “hyper-literally” has the capacity to exacerbate an ongoing disconnect between it and the field of contemporary philosophy of technology. On the one hand, this disconnect is odd—although “technics” is Stiegler’s central theme, his work does not permeate contemporary philosophy of technology as thoroughly as it arguably should.⁴⁸ On the other hand, this is perhaps to be expected: as we have seen, Stiegler’s work is primed for reception in idiomatically “continental” philosophical contexts,⁴⁹ and these are to some extent alien to much of contemporary philosophy of technology. To be sure, this field does draw on continental influences, as occurs in the “postphenomenological” approaches of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek, which draw heavily on Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault,⁵⁰ and in the “critical theory of technology” of Andrew Feenberg, which draws heavily on Marx and Marcuse.⁵¹ Stiegler’s work shares these influences. What separates it from the approaches of Ihde, Verbeek and Feenberg, however, are the norms guiding how it engages with them.

As we saw in part one of this essay, Stiegler’s key claim that technics is the “unthought” of philosophy committed him to an excessive project tending in at least three infinitely demanding directions (towards a metahistory of philosophy, an anthropology of technics, and a political engagement with existential issues raised by contemporary technologies). In contrast, Ihde, Verbeek and Feenberg are inheritors of an “empirical turn” which took place in philosophy of technology in the 1990s, and which requires them to be more measured in applying continental philosophical influences to empirical case studies of the conditions and consequences of specific technological artifacts in action.⁵² Judged by the grammar of this turn, Stiegler’s core claim that technics is philosophy’s “unthought” is liable to appear as either grandiose jargon or a naïve form of technological determinism which posits that a reified force, “Technology,” is the straightforward cause of all developments in human thought and culture; that is, either like a form of what Ihde calls “generic continental philosophy,”⁵³ or a form of what Ihde and Verbeek refer to as “classical” or “transcendental” (as opposed to “empirical”) philosophy of technology.⁵⁴

But what happens if we find a way to see through this appearance, in favour of reinvigorating and opening up the grammar of contemporary philosophy of technology itself? That such a reinvigoration is required may be one of the unforeseen consequences of the empirical turn: while it has provided an important corrective to tendencies in the so-called “classical” philosophies of technology of thinkers like Heidegger and Ellul,⁵⁵ its estimation of the empirical case study harbours an opposite danger—a tendency towards a narrow form of positivism that is uncritically enthralled by whatever Zeitgeist-seizing technologies best succeed in expressing and capturing the desires of capital, industry, and consumers.

5. Concluding remarks

The concluding suggestion of this essay is that approaching Stiegler’s work in terms of metaphor provides a way of seeing through the appearance of jargon and technological determinism, and, thereby, of overcoming the pragmatic and grammatical disconnect that separates it from much contemporary philosophy of technology. Such a move has the capacity to be invigorating both for Stiegler’s work (because it breaks it out of idiomatically “continental” philosophical debates) and for contemporary philosophy of technology (because it challenges the grammar and norms of its “empirical turn”).

This move involves viewing metaphor, not as a passé trope, but as provocative and destabilising force for thinking; that is, rather like Derrida viewed it in De la Mythologie blanche.⁵⁶ Once we see through to the straightforward but provocative metaphors underpinning Stiegler’s concepts of “pharmacology” and “organology,” for example, we find a key technai giving his work its background rigour and (much-maligned) sense of “urgency,” and also find that Stiegler aims at something altogether bigger, wilder and more excitingly political than the grammar and norms inherited from philosophy of technology’s “empirical turn” are currently capable of either producing or recognising.

It is arguable that no one within mainstream contemporary philosophy of technology has forwarded an approach as dramatic, lyrical, suggestive and exciting as that of Stiegler in the past twenty years. It is also arguable, however, that no one has forwarded an approach that can appear as excessive, superficial, or simply inconsistent. One way through this fog, I suggest, consists of recognising and developing the rigorous role that metaphor plays in Stiegler’s thinking about technology.

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Dominic Smith

Dominic Smith is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee, where he researches philosophy of technology/media. Dominic is particularly interested in bringing the continental tradition in philosophy (e.g. phenomenology, critical theory, poststructuralism, new forms of realism and materialism) to bear on philosophy of technology and media. Dominic’s latest book is Exceptional Technologies: A Continental Philosophy of Technology. His current project involves thinking about how philosophy of technology can be broadened to speak to issues in philosophy of education, design, and creativity, with a focus on the work of Walter Benjamin. He is a founding member of the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy at Dundee (http://scot-cont-phil.org/).

Notes

1. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society.

2. Cf. Beardsworth, “Technology and Politics: A Response to Bernard Stiegler”; Ekman, “Of Transductive Speed—Stiegler,” 51; Hansen, “Realtime Synthesis and the Différance of the Body: Technocultural Studies in the Wake of Deconstruction.”

3. Cf. Gratton, Review of Taking Care of Youth and the Generations and review of Stiegler and Technics; Ekman, “Of Transductive Speed—Stiegler,” 55.

4. Bennington, Interrupting Derrida.

5. Gratton, Review of Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010); Gratton, Review of Stiegler and Technics (2014); Rogers, The Attention Complex: Media, Archaeology, Method.

6. Cf. Meillassoux, Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence; Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction; Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things and Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures; Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing; Braidotti, The Posthuman; and Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.

7. Such presuppositions, the approaches just mentioned claim, imply a form of anthropocentric exceptionalism that turns human consciousness into the measure of all things, and that turns metaphors into the fixed and pernicious lenses through which consciousness mediates its experience of the world. Cf. Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton”; Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology. On the link between such presuppositions and “postmodernism,” consider the following pronouncement from Morton: “The globalising sureness with which … ‘everything is metaphor’ [is] spoken in postmodernism means that postmodernism is nothing like what it takes itself to be, and is indeed just another version of the (white, Western, male) historical project. The ultimate goal of this project, it seems, was to set up a weird transit lounge outside of history in which the characters and technologies and ideas of the ages mill around in a state of mild, semiblissful confusion.” (Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 4). This passage deems postmodernism doubly anachronistic: first, by caricaturing it as a passé movement in the history of ideas; second, by indexing it to a broader such movement (“the (white, Western, male) historical project”). Insofar as Morton takes this broader project to aim at a form of exceptionalism for consciousness/ the subject (“a weird transit lounge outside of history”), it is “anti-realist.”

8. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, 65–67. Cf. also Harman (2010a). Bogost writes, for example: “Objects float in a sensual ether. When they interact through vicarious causation, they do so by the means they know internally but in relation to the qualities in which they ‘bathe’. In a move he is completely serious about, Harman equates such interaction with metaphor.” (Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, 66).

9. Stated differently, this essay seeks to avoid falling into the trap of what contemporary philosopher of technology Don Ihde calls “generic continental philosophy” (“Technoscience and the ‘Other’ Continental Philosophy,” 60; Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context, 1–8), or the trap of what Badiou calls “linguistic idealism” (Théorie du sujet).

10. In this sense, the essay takes inspiration less from “realist” positions on metaphor like that of Bogost and Harman, and more from the rhetorical spirit of the approach deployed in David Wills’ 2006 article on Stiegler, “Techneology or the Discourse of Speed.” Wills writes, for example: “ … perhaps language has not yet begun to be analysed as a technology in the terms that Stiegler’s work invites. Is it possible that he ignores a properly technological conception of language in his otherwise comprehensive analysis of technology, in spite of repeated references to it and in spite of his frequent recourse to its unrevealed technological resources?” (242). This point seems to be tending in the direction of an “Object Oriented” approach insofar as it invites a view of language as “technological.” Unlike such an approach, however, Wills resists the tendency to assert the metaphysical priority of “technology” over “language”; rather, I take his comments, not to be assertive of a metaphysics, but provocative for a project of tracing how language operates, situatedly, in Stiegler’s work.

11. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, ix and 276).

12. That is, as “[F]igure[s] of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable; an instance of this, a metaphorical expression.” (OED, “metaphor, n.”). The aim of this part is to conduct what Wittgenstein would call a “grammatical investigation” of the creative and critical trajectories opened by some of Stiegler’s key metaphors (Pour en finir avec la mécroissance, 47; cf. also McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, 13).

13. Bennington, Interrupting Derrida, 164.

14. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, ix.

15. As Stiegler elaborates in 2012ʹs États de choc: “Philosophy rests on a repression and a process of denial

which affects … technics in general: philosophy, from its birth, only wants to hear talk of the technicity of the

logos in a pejorative sense, notably as rhetoric; all the while practicing just such a rhetoric. (258. My

translation).

16. Stiegler, Philosopher par Accident: Entretiens avec Élie During, 14–15. (Original emphasis).

17. There is, I think, a sense in which Stiegler’s work is haunted by a problem opened up by its own overwhelming desire for sublimity or profundity. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has summed up this problem solely for the contemporary situation of new media in the following eloquent terms: “Debates over new media resonate with the parable of the six blind men and the elephant. Each man seizes a portion of the animal and offers a different analogy: the elephant is like a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a palm, a rope. Refusing to back down from their positions since they are based on personal experience, the wise men engage in an unending dispute … . It is perhaps irreverent to compare a poem on the incomprehensibility of the divine to arguments over new media, but the invisibility, ubiquity, and alleged power of new media (and technology more generally) lend themselves to this analogy. It seems impossible to know the extent, content, and effects of new media. Who can touch the entire contents of the World Wide Web or know the real size of the Internet or of mobile networks? Who can read and examine all time-based online interactions? Who can expertly move from analysing social networking sites to Japanese cell phone novels to hardware algorithms to databases? Is a global picture of new media possible?” (Programmed Visions, 1).

18. Stiegler, Mécréance et discrédit (1), 70. Original emphasis. (My translation).

19. Stiegler, Prendre soin; Stiegler, Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue: de la pharmacologie.

20. Stiegler, La Télécratie contre la démocratie; Stiegler et al., Pour en finir avec la mécroissance.

21. Cf. Derrida, Aporias.

22. Cf. Stiegler, La Technique et le temps, 2: La désorientation; Stiegler, La Technique et le temps, 3: Le temps du cinéma et la question du mal être.

23. Cf. Lyotard, Le Différend.

24. Crogan argues that Stiegler”s work has undergone a turn towards activism since roughly 2006 (Bernard Stiegler, 23–24). This means that, if anything, it has become more “urgent” over time

25. Bennington, Interrupting Derrida, 165. Bennington wrote these words in 1996, and credited Stiegler with exploring the paradox of urgency in a productive sense. Of urgency, interestingly, Derrida writes: “The thinking of différance is … also a thinking of urgency, of what I can neither evade nor appropriate because it is other. The event, the singularity of the event, that’s what différance is all about.” (Ecographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, 10).

26. Bennington, Interrupting Derrida, 164.

27. Bennington identifies the core “strength” of La Faute d’Epiméthée to reside in its capacity to chart this “paradox of urgency”: “The strength of Stiegler’s work will be the consistency with which it maintains itself in this paradoxical movement: the urgency it wants to communicate will thus depend in part on its patience, on its taking its time (10 years’ work or more three volumes expected, pushing 1000 pages [for La Technique et le temps alone]), and its patience will consist in the rigour with which it can establish that the urgency indexed by technics is of the order of the always already: it is urgent for ‘us’ … to think the urgency of technics because that urgency has always already begun, and indeed is the condition for our thinking anything at all.” (Ibid., 165–166).

28. Stiegler, Mécréance et discrédit (3); cf. also Prendre soin, 74.

29. Just as psychoanalysis posits that it can be both therapeutic and addictive/toxic (in terms of the “narcissism” complex, for example) for an individual to explore what is repressed or “unthought,” Stiegler posits that it is “pharmacological” for philosophical thinking to explore its repressed technological conditions of possibility. Cf. Stiegler, Mécréance et discrédit (1), 28–34.

30. Stiegler, Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue, 39–40.

31. Stiegler, Ibid., 47; Plato, Protagoras, 320d-322a.

32. As Stiegler writes in États de choc: “This is the pharmacological destiny: as the pursuit of a process of hominisation by exteriorisation, it can always deindividuate … . This state of affairs, which constitutes the pharmacological condition in general, does however open the possibility of a ‘state of right’ across [à traverse] diverse therapeutics … . This passage from the pharmacological fact to the therapeutic right … should be the object of a positive pharmacology.” (262. Original emphasis. My translation).

33. Cf. Stiegler and Ars Industrialis, Manifeste 2010.

34. Stiegler, Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue.

35. Žižek, “Will you Laugh for Me, Please?”

36. Stiegler, Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue, 185. (My translation).

37. Cf. Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques; Gille, Histoire des techniques: Technique et civilisations, technique et sciences.

38. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 17.

39. Cf. Durkheim, De la Division du travail social; Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice; Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique; Freud, Civilization and its Discontents; Mumford, Technics and Civilization; and McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

40. OED, “organon, n.”

41. Debenedetti, Metastable Liquids: Concepts and Principles.

42. The stakes of this issue emerge, not just from criticisms made by “realist” voices such as Morton and Harman, but also from positive estimations of metaphor from established hermeneutical voices. Consider, for example, the following, outlining Clive Cazeaux’s (Ricoeurian) perspective on metaphor: “An original, freshly minted [metaphorical] trope … is an instance of creative … language yet, far from producing nonsense, a new metaphor offers insight on its subject and, as such, could be said to be objective or to contain an objective component. If the world is in some sense determined by the order and distribution of … concepts, then metaphor, as the creation of new combinations of concepts, would appear to be a mode of thinking in which … creativity constructs an objective world … . [T]o confront metaphor is to confront one of the central themes of Kant’s epistemology and the linguistically inclined humanities.” (Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: From Kant to Derrida, 1–2). Insofar as it emphasises “Kant’s epistemology” and “the linguistically inclined humanities,” this view seems only to confirm certain of the fears of metaphor’s implicit “correlationism,” as harboured by new forms of realism.

43. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, 22.

44. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus; Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 42.

45. This estimation may seem unfair to Deleuze and Guattari insofar as it overlooks the contexts in which they conduct their polemics on metaphor (namely, an engagement with Kafka (Towards a Minor Literature), and a critique of Freudianism (Anti-Oedipus)). The point, however, is that this forgetfulness is the tendency of much of the broader literature on Deleuze and Guattari, insofar as it positions them as “anti-metaphorical” thinkers, for highly general metaphysical reasons (cf. Hughes, Philosophy after Deleuze).

46. There exists a further temptation to annex Stiegler to a different kind of turn in contemporary philosophy; namely, the turn towards the “material” and the political that Ian James astutely detects in recent French philosophers such as Badiou, Marion, Malabou, Rancière and Stiegler (James, The New French Philosophy). To the extent that James sees these thinkers as involved in a common attempt to move beyond a “textual” or “linguistic” paradigm privileged by their poststructuralist forebears (Ibid., 4), his diagnosis may appear to be opposed to the view of metaphor developed in this essay. In fact, however, the positions are compatible. This is because neither position is committed to the metaphysical view that “everything is metaphor” or, alternatively, that “nothing is metaphor.” On the contrary, my claim is that metaphor is one important tool or technē for Stiegler’s work among others. This is compatible with James’ position insofar as there is nothing, on either view, to stop metaphor from serving the timely material/political impetus that James detects in Stiegler’s work.

47. Cf. Kenny (Wittgenstein, xiv-xv).

48. For exceptions, see Lemmens, “Interview with Bernard Stiegler,” and Vlieghe, “Education in an Age of Digital Technologies: Flusser, Stiegler, and Agamben on the Idea of the Posthistorical.”. The following discussion does not take into account the (generally positive and rich) reception of Stiegler’s work that has occurred in the fields of art and media and media studies (see Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, 50–60); Roberts, “Technics, Individuation and Tertiary Memory: Bernard Stiegler’s Challenge to Media Theory”.

49. Such as those concerning the debate over the legacy of Derrideanism (Bennington, Interrupting Derrida), Crogan, “Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy, Technics and Activism”; or, as we saw above, putative forms of “realist” and “materialist” turns underway in contemporary continental philosophy (James, The New French Philosophy).

50. Cf. Ihde, Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context; Ihde, Introduction: Postphenomenological Research; Idhe, Experimental phenomenology: Multistabilities; Verbeek, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things; Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design.

51. Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity. Other influential approaches in contemporary philosophy of technology include, for example, the social constructivism of Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; and Callon, Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy; and the analytic approaches of Bunge, Treatise on Basic Philosophy, vol. 7; and Floridi, The Philosophy of Information. For an overview of contemporary philosophy of technology, see Berg Olsen, Selinger and Riis, New Waves in the Philosophy of Technology.

52. Cf. Achterhuis, American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn.

53. Ihde, “Technoscience and the ‘other’ continental philosophy,” 60; Idhe, Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context, 1–8).

54. Cf. Ihde, “Technoscience and the ‘other’ continental philosophy,” 66; Idhe, “Introduction: Postphenomenological research,” 2; Verbeek, What Things Do, 7–8.

55. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays; Ellul, The Technological System.

56. Derrida writes: “Metaphor remains, in all its essential traits … a metaphysical concept. It is therefore rooted in the field that a general metaphorology of philosophy would like to master. It issues from a network of [basic philosophical concepts] which themselves correspond to tropes or figures … . This stratum of ‘instituting’ tropes, this layer of ‘first’ [concepts] … . cannot master itself … . If one wanted to conceive and class all the metaphorical possibilities of philosophy, one metaphor, at least, would always remain excluded, outside of the system.” (Marges de la philosophie, 261. My translation). I read these words, not in the negative sense of writing metaphor off as a pejoratively “metaphysical” theme, but in the positive sense of metaphor as a critical and creative force of différance (“one metaphor, at least, would always remain excluded, outside of the system”).