1

Journal of the CIPH: In your work with the Ars Industrialis [1]association, as well as in your book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, [2]your main theme is the question of education and the school’s role in particular. You argued for an "ecology of the spirit" because we must be concerned, as you put it, about the nature of the "psychic environments" in which the student, in which people, develop. How do you see this problem today, ten years later?

Bernard Stiegler: Ten years on, I think that the situation has grown much worse in terms of mental ecology and disturbances of the psychic apparatuses and the psychic environment – pupils, students, parents and teachers. Here, an explanation about this "psychic environment" is necessary. Typically, the psychic realm does not refer to the environment – in other words the exterior – but the interior: the individual’s interiority. I am among those who, like many in the Collège international de philosophie, feel that this model of interiority inherited from classical philosophy is unsatisfactory. Whether we say it with Wittgenstein and Jacques Bouveresse, with Jacques Lacan and the signifier, with Jacques Derrida and writing, with Heidegger and Dasein, or with Ludwig Binswanger and Daseinsanalyse, the psychic realm is not in the head, it’s not in the individual: it is between the "heads," and of course between the bodies of these heads – depending on how artifacts link them together, I would add.
The psychic realm comprises "tertiary retentions," i.e. exteriorization produced by the activity of human beings – their everyday, artistic, sports-related, or play objects, or their constructions, which can be manifestly technical objects or verbal artifacts: sentences, phrases, stanzas, discourses, or corpora. This exteriorization, however, takes place in response to an interiorization in a process that must be envisioned on the basis of Freud’s notion of the Abreaktion. Tertiary retentions are those things outside of me that make up my psyche because I interiorize them. Learning and study are specific cases of this kind of interiorization. And the concept of tertiary retention – the phenomenological counterpart of what I have called epiphylogenesis – is the starting point for Technics and Time. [3]
Just before writing Taking Care, I started getting interested in Donald Winnicott and the transitional object. Since then, I have also worked with Marianne Wolf, a neuropsychologist, who has shown that the brain of what we call the psychic individual – the noetic brain – has the ability to immerse itself in the environment, including the technical environment, continually reconfiguring what Stanislas Dehaene has called neuronal recycling, and which constitutes what Alfred Lotka calls exosomatic evolution. Marianne Wolf focuses her studies on the process of learning to read and write texts, but she also discusses digital technologies, and shows that they short-circuit this work of interiorization by the cerebral organ, which only forms the psychic individual through (and on condition of passing through) what must be seen as a threefold individuation: psychic, collective, and technical. [4] We must study Lev Vygotsky more closely.
At the time of Taking Care, Facebook had only just started. In 2004 I had published "The Allegory of the Anthill," a chapter of the first volume of Symbolic Misery [5] that foresaw the imminent emergence of social networks – and their catastrophic effects, which Norbert Wiener had himself foreseen as early as 1948.
Technology is the basis of anthropology: the work of André Leroi-Gourhan highlighted this starting in 1943, at the time when Georges Canguilhem was writing The Normal and the Pathological. In 1945, Lotka published an article that gave Leroi-Gourhan and Canguilhem’s theories an entirely new and fundamental relevance for human biology while incorporating the question of entropy. [6]
Recently there has been a debate on the reform of the baccalauréat and the role of philosophy in this diploma and therefore in high schools, a debate that started with the question of how many hours to dedicate to philosophy, the weight [7] philosophy should have in the diploma, etc. The response to this is not to immediately "defend the subject matter," but to ask oneself first the question of philosophy’s place, not first of all in high schools or in the baccalauréat, but in thinking today, and in society today – concerning its role, and its relations with other academic fields, with their civic, religious, legal and of course technological bodies of knowledge in the early 21^st century, as this period discovers the terrible reality of the so-called Anthropocene era.

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Journal: The knowledge to which you allude presupposes a reassessment of the current form of knowledge. Is there a field that is best suited to take this critical look?

B. Stiegler: In fact, every academic field is critical in this respect: an academy should develop and safeguard these critical spaces, and philosophy must lead the critical debate given that this debate always spreads into other disciplines. To grasp its relevance in the un-knowing (inscient) consciousness of the Anthropocene era, I insist that we must study what I have called "doubly epokhal redoubling," which constitutes the dynamic of epiphylogenesis and the tertiary retentions that result from it through the process of exosomatization.
To confront these issues today, we have to revisit the history of the production of knowledge based on the founding principles of Greek philosophy, and before that the ideas of the pre-Socratics insofar as they generated the organization of the politeia, and after that, of theology, which profoundly reconfigured the Greco-Roman heritage. In 1158, 70 years after its founding, the university of Bologna began to form the matrix that would emancipate itself and the clerics from papal domination, through the independence guaranteed to them by the Authentica habita that emperor Frederick Barbarossa promulgated the same year. This matrix would engender – alongside Oxford firstly, then the Sorbonne – the model that Kant would later critique in The Conflict of the Faculties. With the University of Berlin, which created the department of philosophy in the wake of Kant’s text, as with the École normale supérieure created by the National Convention during the Revolution, then with the Grandes écoles founded by Napoleon, then through the educational and scientific policies of Jules Ferry, the university was to serve the interests of industrial modernization, and therefore of the economy (what the Romans, devising the concept of the otium, called the negotium), but always under state control.
Ever since the hegemonic entrenchment first of neoliberal, then ultraliberal, and now libertarian thinking – which combines the ultraliberalism of the "conservative revolution" with the disruptive technologies that proletarize the state itself, literally disintegrating the connective tissue that education in the skholeion maintained with politics from Ancient Greece to the present (see Henri-Irénée Marrou) – the university is well on the way toward privatization, i.e. also toward defunctionalization and refunctionalization (redefinition of its functions). Both abroad and in France, more or less pitiful attempts to conform to this model fail regularly, leading to the collapse of an academic culture that was a model for centuries, and which has literally been demolished. This is the result of the tide that Jean-François Lyotard saw coming 40 years ago in The Postmodern Condition.
I believe, however, that the herd instinct in this matter has been disastrous, for France and more generally for Europe: to a large extent because Europe has not understood that it is not Europe anymore – it has become a colony on the road to underdevelopment, and the question many ask is whether it will remain within the American sphere (with or without NATO) or whether China will finally seize it for itself. But I am still hoping that Europe will "wake up," and this is also what drives the work of the Institut de recherche et d’innovation, [8]pharmakon.fr, [9] and the Internation/Genève 2020 collective. [10]
We must try to think (penser) these questions through, care-fully think (panser) [11] them through. Before anything this means trying to reconsider what is happening to knowledge in the 21^st century, concerning both its "production" (i.e. scientific institutions – in the broad sense of the word science, irreducible to the computational and narrow-minded mechanicism that is currently ultra-dominant) and its transmission, at a time when knowledge is required (cf. Greta Thunberg) in order to "save humanity" from what its adulterated knowledge, transformed and distorted into information (i.e. models of calculability), has brought about, as even the value of this knowledge is put into question (this is what we call post-truth).
An absolutely disastrous ideology – but one that is perfectly in sync with the short-sighted objectives of the negotium of high finance – has finally managed to impose on the more or less muddled state of French public opinion (from the "elites" to the "bottom of the pecking order") the doxa according to which complete calculability is the condition of science and, more generally, of any form of knowledge. But on the contrary, its openness to what always exceeds any calculation is what makes a domain of knowledge know, and also what makes it make, allowing it to fight against entropy. This is what Alfred North Whitehead called the function of reason. [12]
What burst forth from the 18^th century, from the Enlightenment in Europe and America, was at once a product of humanism, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Academies – with their origins in the Republic of Letters – that led to printing, the successive proliferation of libraries, and the emergence of gazettes. The Académie de Dijon, in whose competition Rousseau participated, is one example. Why has digital reticulation not instigated a renewal of the academic system descended from Plato’s academy by way of those in Dijon and elsewhere, and by way of the universities and faculties as they have transformed themselves over the last millennium? Because exosomatization "abhors a vacuum," and because philosophy has made that vacuum possible. The time has come to wake up. [13]
We must ask ourselves these questions at a time when the place and the role of fields of knowledge and their institutions – the family is one such institution – are at the heart of vital issues that dominate the Anthropocene era. What can the academy, the university and their collective knowledge do in this era? And what do they know about this era? It is therefore incumbent on us to envision the future of what we must see as the academic system – in the sense that, since the 19^th century, it is impossible to separate the disciplinary, didactic and pedagogical training of primary and secondary school teachers from research and coursework in the university.
The academic system, such as it became established in France at the end of the 19^th century (and in a more or less similar fashion throughout the world), must first be considered as what constitutes the institutional reality of what I have called the "doubly epokhal redoubling," the second period of this double redoubling to be precise, as the first was one of a technological shock brought about by exosomatization.
I will briefly summarize the argument underlying this concept. Every human society is firmly based upon a technical system that transforms itself regularly. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, this transformation has been systemically underpinned by the economic war in which the industrial and national capitalisms are engaged. Every time the technical system is transformed on that systemic scale (in Bertrand Gille’s sense of the technical system) the adjustments that had previously been established between it and the social systems (in the sense of Gille and Niklas Luhmann) are put into question, triggering a noetic reconstitution that appropriates the new technical system while creating new circuits of transindividuation, i.e. new knowledge – in academia as well as in the empirical practices that characterize what consequently forms an epistēmē.
On the other hand, we should bear in mind that this whole system, which was first developed out of the fundamentals of Western philosophy – first Greco-Roman, then Christian – and later from modern philosophy and what Marx called German idealism, is as a result based upon a repression of the question of technics – German ideology, however, asserts that this is its starting point.
With the arrival of industrial society, the academic system had to train producers who were capable of playing various roles in production, from the proletarian to the engineer and the banker, up to the head of the firm: it had to train a "national elite." And what was true of production was equally true of the army, the legal and medical systems, the arts, etc., who had to deal with constant technological change. This responsibility to train producers, which was assigned to the academic system, had at one time belonged to craftsmen’s guilds.
In addition, a trained citizenry was then required to guarantee national unity, above and beyond the borders of European France. This was a crucial issue for Jules Ferry, a colonial and colonialist issue: not only did the unity of the colonial empire have to be produced, but there had to be unity among the regions of the national territory and fewer "particularities," with the "universal" as the operator of what, however, laid the groundwork for the homogenization of the marketplace.
Concerning all of these new arrangements and the way they came to be, which deserves closer study, I would like to outline an overall perspective on their consequences in the Anthropocene era, emphasizing first of all that the academic system has been, in a clearly un-knowing way, the primary operator. The result is that in today’s "post-truth" context, what prevails is a feeling, if not of uselessness, at least of inefficiency and of disrepute: a fundamental sense of unease in the academic system, whether in primary, secondary and high schools or in the universities.
In various texts, [14] I have tried to demonstrate that this unease has been engendered by a situation in which the programming industries (both audiovisual and algorithmic) are now competing with the programming institutions that form the academic system. This means, on the one hand, that children no longer have the necessary attention span to be ready to listen, and on the other – but this is less widely admitted and obviously hard to say and to accept – the teachers are themselves massively affected by this competition. This is just as true of the parents, who don’t always tolerate being told that: and many of us are parents as well.
The result is that attention, and consequently the sense of responsibility, grows ever weaker – and this is also what Greta Thunberg says to her elders, i.e. to us. In fact, the whole problem is what is going on in the academic field in the broadest sense. When the name of the TV show Star Academy [15] is more or less the symptom of a functional disintegration of knowledge (academic or otherwise), effectively, at the end of the Anthropocene era, all that has therefore become illegitimate. The legitimacy of the academy has crumbled under the influence of analogic and numeric technologies whose implementation is entirely beholden to the programming industries, while we ask the programming institutions to adapt more and more to these industries and their informational and communicational models.

3

Journal: Through your association and your work as a philosopher, you acknowledge what François Châtelet called the splintering of knowledge as a form. Today, philosophy knows that it can no longer work in isolation if it wishes to keep producing concepts.

B. Stiegler: Yes, and I actually discussed this with François Châtelet: shortly before his death, I had interviewed him about these questions that were omnipresent in Le Rapport bleu (The Blue Report), which he wrote with Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Faye and Dominique Lecourt and which led to the creation of the Collège international de philosophie.
Today we must try to act on this splintering, as you put it, and like Châtelet said, but we must then deal with the consequences of that act. That act calls for another one: a legal act, transforming a de facto situation, and in a very unusual context – the Anthropocene era – where we have an absolutely incommensurable responsibility. 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, both before and after the fact, if I can put it that way. Incidentally, what I’m saying is drawn from an initiative that we are launching with Ars industrialis, the IRI [16] and the Internation/Geneva2020 collective.
In this terminal phase of the Anthropocene era – which will either be overcome or will truly put an end to this "human adventure," as Arnold Toynbee had foreseen the possibility – knowledge, its nature, its evolution and the conditions of that evolution, i.e. its opening but also its closing, all of this has undergone profound mutations, especially over the last thirty years. This had been manifest for quite some time, particularly through a process of acceleration that is another defining aspect of the Anthropocene era: in view of this, Jason Moore prefers to call it the Capitalocene era. This is why we should now perform an epistemological critique of the Anthropocene era [17] – preferably a hypercritique, to the extent that it should detect the epistemological repressions of the conditions of any critique by unearthing those repressions.
The economic war for the control and exploitation of innovation has led to what we now call disruption insofar as it overtakes everyone, in other words everything that makes a world, from the parents and the helpless teachers to the most advanced laboratories of scientific research. All of them can only follow what the disruptors do, constantly stumbling through "trajectory corrections" of processes that they set in motion without precisely knowing what they will bring about (such people used to be called sorcerers’ apprentices). Consequently, the doubly epokhal redoubling no longer leads to the noetic phase, which is overtaken. This is what I have called the absence of epoch.
This situation, characterized by feedback hyperloops and metaloops being produced at a "lightning pace rising constantly" (an expression whose ridiculousness is at the very heart of the matter – though fiber-optic communication is twice as fact as lightning) poses the problem of a reconsideration of recursivity in an open exosomatic system. We have been discussing this with Yuk Hui. [18]
This situation, which arose with the creation of the World Wide Web, and which has been perceived and problematized only recently – within the last ten years – means that in an ever-growing number of areas, it has become nearly impossible for teachers in a middle or high school to put into practice the prescriptions taught to them in their academic training. Today’s realities simply did not exist at the time they themselves were students, and these realities now make up the bulk of the process of transformation underway, affecting children and parents as well as teachers. All three groups are helpless in the face of this process, as are the President of the Republic, the Secretary-General of the UN and the board of Google.
Such is the cost of what had been described in Technics and Time 2 as a "primordial disorientation" that – and here we cross a threshold – it requires unprecedented measures never before conceived [impensées], making the situation appear untreatable [impansable]. While those in charge of Google cannot control what is produced there, they do however co-pilot it – and this is why people will have to go back to studying, yet again, the "French theory" [19] that inspired my analysis, [20] particularly everything taking form within that theory (without managing to completely establish itself inside of it) concerning what I call pharmacology, based upon the organology that studies exosomatization.

4

Journal: In Antiquity, education – as learning, as exercise – consisted in taking care, care of oneself: of one’s body, of one’s soul. The training technique for this self-care first manifests itself in the form of schooling, which is always dominated by the written word. Does the question of care remain an open one for you today?

B. Stiegler: More than ever, as a question of self-care, but also as an economy, both political and libidinal ("government of oneself and of others"). Foucault asked that question while introducing new considerations into it, precisely as examples of technê. I am currently trying to reread all of that in the light of Whitehead who, in one of his few relatively accessible books, speaks of the art of living. [21] In Greek, that is called technê tou biou. According to Whitehead, reason serves this art of living, which is a technê. What does "technê" mean? And what, then, is life? What is living when this means noetic life, insofar as it is technical, i.e. exosomatic? Living means knowing how to live, and learning to live. The text by Lotka that I have already mentioned says this in a particularly powerful and dramatic way (here we should discuss Learning to Live Finally, an interview Derrida gave shortly before he died, but we don’t have time.)
All of this points back to Canguilhem: positing that the human is that being who has "the power and the temptation to fall sick," and to do so through technics, he wonders why we have to study biology. Answer: because we have to take care of the pharmakon. He doesn’t use the word "pharmakon," but he says that we, the noetic souls (as opposed to fainthearted and vegetative souls) need biology, i.e. knowledge, noesis in all its forms (from cooking to art, taking in philosophy, mathematics, sports, etc.). Biology concerns the knowledge that a technical life has of itself (see the beginning of Knowledge of Life). If you were to ask me today to write a text, like the Greph [22] did at one time, with Derrida – this was exactly how the Collège international de philosophie was created – against the Haby reform, [23] saying what philosophy’s place is, I would suggest that philosophy’s place is always in the time of the process in which the biosphere finds itself. For philosophy today, maintaining its position and measuring up to its own ethos – both in high schools and universities – first means rethinking the teaching of technology, not in order to say that philosophers are the ones who should be teaching it, nor to say what it should consist of, but in order to problematize it in the Anthropocene era, and to make a case for the conditions under which it would be advisable to promote the creation of an agrégation [24] in technology or something similar, perhaps something better than an agrégation. To be able to do that, there would have to be the development of what we at the IRI call "Digital Studies." [25]

5

Journal: This is what you mean when you talk about deproletarianizing schools in your fascinating book L’École, le numérique et la société qui vient [26](The School, the Numeric and the Coming Society), where you associate the therapeutic role of school structures with a deproletarianization of schools…

B. Stiegler: Instead of producing good employees who can adapt themselves to a task predefined by a massively automated system of production, the school of tomorrow has to produce critics: workers who are capable of critiquing the economy in order to induce it to produce better, i.e. more economically. In the Anthropocene era, "more economically" means reducing entropy, increasing the negentropy, which is the function of all knowledge.
At the moment when disruption got underway (in the early 1990s), the IPCC’s [27] reports were starting to reveal the extremely serious situation in the biosphere, and the immense responsibility that the economic world had concerning the transformation of that state of affairs. From now on, the question is to act so that the economic world can increase its ability to fight against entropy and to correspondingly reduce its production of thermodynamic, biological and informational entropies.
The issue is to improve the standing of fields of knowledge and to undertake a vast process of deproletarianization – here, "proletarianization" first means the loss of knowledge, which now affects all human activity, including the sciences, a situation that was already the focus of The Postmodern Condition, calling it the "exteriorization of knowledge with respect to the ’knower’." Schools have to learn how to retrain producers who are knowing and learned [sachants et savants], in other words endowed with knowledge and not only skills, who as a result know how to fight against entropy collectively, by transforming the industrial models tied to proletarianization.
How can primary, secondary and high schools, as well as universities and the major scientific establishments be prepared to fight against entropy? That is the question. The first condition is to give added emphasis to technics in teaching, to perform an in-depth reconsideration of its place in primary, secondary and high schools, in every discipline, first in history and geography, through which we will need to reassess the role of technics in the constitution of the biosphere that is becoming a technosphere. We will have to train the new generations and their teachers in the concepts of Vladimir Vernadsky, as well as in prehistory and archeology as seen by Leroi-Gourhan, in Lotka’s biology in the life sciences, in thermodynamics in physics and chemistry, in the mathematics of dynamic systems, etc. In addition, we will have to profoundly modify the teaching of philosophy so that it incorporates these questions in its reconstitution and its teaching of the history of philosophy – by including for example Lev Vygotsky, Ignace Meyerson, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (concerning Ancient Greece for these last).
This also means the need to enhance the teaching of technology, to develop a real program for studying and teaching technology – which therefore means appropriate examinations. The teachers of technology will need to have studied technics very carefully as well as its curative and toxic dynamics from the perspectives of prehistory, ethnology, ethnography, history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, law, economics and critical philosophy. They should also have practical skills, and the practices of craftsmanship should be reevaluated in a sense that needs to take its inspiration from the work that Richard Sennett has been carrying out for more than ten years – in reference to Hannah Arendt.
Furthermore, philosophy should be taught over three years, as it used to be in Italy where they started by teaching the history of philosophy as early as la seconde [28] – while maintaining close contact with the study of technology as well as the human and social sciences. These sciences, such as they appeared in the second half of the 19^th century with Emile Durkheim, have not been incorporated into secondary education at all, which is all the more damaging given that they allow for a rational consideration of the specific features of contemporary societies.
These changes should be introduced not by decrees or new laws, but by initiating experimental approaches that should function both through what we at the IRI call contributive learning territories (territoires apprenants contributifs) on the one hand, and on the other, by calling on the teacher training schools (ESPE) [29] with whom we have started to introduce – in middle and high schools, and in territories for experimentation – the previously mentioned recommendations. This means that there would also be, on the local level, universities who apply as candidates for training teachers in these different domains – technology, history, geography, human and social sciences and philosophy, reimagined in accordance with these matters, as well as secondary establishments that present their candidacies alongside universities in order to put these frameworks in place.
To that end, there would need to be an implementation of the contributive research method described in the fifth section of the Conseil national du numérique’s [30] "Jules Ferry 3.0" report published in 2014, which proposed a call for applications with a view to awarding grants for dissertations under the following conditions:

• That the candidates work on what the numeric technology of "binary digits" [31] is doing to their discipline and what their discipline can contribute to a scientific, epistemological and epistemic study of knowledge at this time where this technology is massively entrenched in every academic discipline, as it is in every social and individual practice, whether daily or occasional;
• That they carry out this work within transdisciplinary teams;
• That they work in the field, enlisting the inhabitants of that field (who could be the students in a middle school, the workers in a company, the students in a teacher training school, the inhabitants of a neighborhood, an association, etc.);
• And that they publish and share the results of this work with the members of the transdisciplinary team and the inhabitants over the course of the research.

This method is currently being put into practice by what is now called the contributive clinic, within the framework of the contributive learning territory that was launched two and a half years ago in the Seine-Saint-Denis département to the northeast of Paris. There, parents and children who have been seriously intoxicated by the smartphone can receive treatment. The work – which is carried out under the supervision of Dr. Marie-Claude Bossière, child psychiatrist – bases its initial methodology on the work of Donald Winnicott, François Tosquelles and Gregory Bateson. Here, unfortunately, we can easily see to what extent the psychic environments are literally ruined by disruption in that it nullifies the intergenerational exchanges without which any future cannot come into being.