课程地点

南京大学哲学系314会议室

课程时间

Bernard Stiegler: 

 Nanjing University Seminar 2018

With the introduction of civilian radio, then with the advent of television, and now with social networking, the advertising industry has had a significant impact on the collective individuation processes organizing everyday life,. This collective individuation process is materialized through processes of transindividuation. Language is such a process of collective individuation operated through processes of transindividuation.

What Gilbert Simondon called the transindividual is another name for meaning, and it is what results from the co-individuation of psychic individuals who thus form collective individuals, social groups through which social systems metastabilize themselves, the same social system being common to numerous groups – hence, the fact that a language may be spoken differently by different groups. Metastabilization is a process of stabilization at the limit of instability, that is, the formation of a structure that is in movement but which maintains its form as it deforms – like a vortex or a tornado.

Processes of co-individuation are co-ordinated processes of psychic individuation (such as the socratic dialogues), these dialogical relations causing language to evolve – by giving, for example, a new definition to a word, and therefore a new use. This new feature – which is at first local, as for instance when two speakers agree on something, for instance Socrates and Meno – can then be disseminated through time and to other speakers along various vectors, such as through books, Plato’s academy, the trial of Socrates, and so on. This dissemination constitutes the process of transindividuation.

Now, it is possible to influence the transindividuation process in a rational ande systematic way via vectors such as these, which are always constituted on the basis of what we will call tertiary retentions – from writing to analog recordings of cultural industry and algorithms of platform capitalism and social networking : such are the objects of this course.

Sessions:

Seminar 1. Language and transindividuation in the age of platform capitalism. Saussure, Kaplan

Seminar 2. Around neuromarketing. Brain, writing and attention. Carr, Wolf, Ong,

Seminar 3. Biological memory and technical memory. About neurocience and an ‘anthropological rupture’. Canguilhem

Seminar 4. Instincts, drives, automatisms, addiction.  Joseph LeDoux, Malabou, Freud, Vygotsky

Seminar 5. About education

Seminar 6. On automatisms, life, repetition and des-automatization, Sein und Zeit, Difference and repetition

Seminar 7. Hermeneutics, heuristics and paideia in the digital epistémè

Seminar 8. Conclusions 

Texts we should read:

1.Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale

2.Nicholas Carr, The Shallows. Is Internet making us stupid ?

3.Frederic Kaplan, On linguistic capitalism

4.Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid

5.Georges Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique

6.Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit

7.Gilles Deleuze, Difference and repetition

8.Sigmund Freud, The Es and the Id

9.Plato, Phraedrus

10.Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self

11.Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language

Bernard Stiegler

贝尔纳·斯蒂格勒(1952—)： 斯蒂格勒教授是法国著名现代技术哲学家，解构主义大师德里达的得意门生。1992年于法国社会科学高级研究院获博士学位，其博士论文《技术与时间》亦同时出版。他于2006年开始担任蓬皮杜中心文化发展部主任。他的研究领域广泛，主要集中在技术、时间、个体化、消费主义、技术趋同、数码化、政治与人类的未来等。其代表作有《技术与时间》、《象征的苦难》、《不名誉的异教》、《构建欧洲》等。 其代表作《技术与时间》三卷本被引介到国内以后引起了极大的反响，被认为是“20世纪末法国哲学界最有影响力的著作之一”。