Greetings and welcome to episode 16: Reflections on Bernard Stiegler. If you haven’t done so already, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

On 5 August 2020 we lost the French media theorist Bernard Stiegler. For this episode we wanted to introduce a few themes from Stiegler’s work and reflect on his continuing value today. We read the essays “Suffocated Desire, or How the Cultural Industry Destroys the Individual: A Contribution to a Theory of Mass Consumption” and "On the Future of Our Incorporations: Nietzsche, Media, Events." Later in the episode we reference this New York Times article on spiritual consultants.

Stiegler is most notable for his series of books Technics and Time. The first volume is subtitled “The Fault of Epimetheus.” Epimetheus was the brother to Prometheus. We all know the legend of Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, such that man might challenge the power of the gods. Prometheus was a visionary and is enshrined within our culture as an emblem of a striving, inventive, and entrepreneurial spirit. Foresight is his domain. His brother Epimetheus has not fared as well in our cultural memory, but for Stiegler it is the lesser known myth that has shaped our contemporary moment. 

Epimetheus’s name means “afterthought” or “hindsight.” For Stiegler, Epimetheus represents the work of the media today. Media operate with two functions: storage and transmission. What is stored is in the past, and therefore our experience with media is always a process of looking backward or behind us. Stiegler’s observation that media technology are not about looking forward, but are actually about looking backward sparked his life’s work. Understanding media is not the domain of visionaries and entrepreneurs, it is the domain of critical thinkers, for whom the owl of minerva flies at dusk. How does our understanding of culture and media look when not written under the gaze of a visionary titan like Prometheus? The consequences of this observation are drawn out in Technics and Time, 1. We’ll save our thoughts on this book for a future episode. 

Stiegler is also notable because he was a felon. He was incarcerated after committing two armed robberies. He was a political revolutionary from 1968, but what inspired his robberies were his debts. It was during his time in prison that he fully committed himself to a life of the mind and to becoming a contributor to the world of thought.  Stiegler often writes about debt, finance, and melancholy. Unlike some of his intellectual peers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Stiegler had an acute understanding of the pressures of late 20th century finance and global capital. His philosophical work intimately understands what it means to become incorporated, or what forms of subjectivity emerge when the educated youth are called to join a corporate workforce. In this sense one can read his work within a long tradition of philosophy—from enlightenment thinkers like David Hume or John Locke and onward—that seeks to frame philosophical inquiry within the mode of middle-class life. The feeling that we get when reading Stiegler today is extremely contemporary. The timelines is all the more refreshing because of his engagement with phenomenological thinkers like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. 

From this lengthy introduction, we try to tease out how Stiegler’s insight into media and subjectivity can help us frame our own thoughts about the media today. Our wide-ranging discussion considers cultural practices like exercise, mass marketing and modern consumption practices, and an examination of the literary canon—or as Stiegler calls it, the “pre-individual fund.” In the second half of the episode we explore Stiegler’s complex defense and critique of the enlightenment. Similar to last week’s episode on nature, we want to establish both the critique of the concept as well as the critique of the critique in order to establish a better foundation for explaining the virtues of enlightenment thinking. 

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