Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/02632764221141804
Ryan Bishop
This article serves as the introduction to the Annual Review special section entitled ‘Bernard Stiegler and the Internation Project: Computational Practices and Circumscribed Futures’. As such, it introduces the collective undertaking of the Internation Project in relation to Stiegler’s long career as a thinker, educator and community organizer. The introduction pursues a number of themes addressed in the section’s contributions, including pharmacological logic, transindividuation, computational practices, bifurcation and negentropy (means of slowing entropic processes at individual and collective levels). All of these themes pertain to the climate crises the world collectively faces and posit means by which futures can be conceived in less detrimental and destructive economic, social, technological and intellectual ways. The Internation Collective as represented and furthered in this special section responds to the demands of climate crises through a macroeconomic model designed to combat entropy at various scales, from the bio-chemical to the biosphere.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/02632764221141823
S. Manghani
This commentary introduces a section of the journal titled ‘Notes on Structuralism’. It centres around two interviews. The first, from 1987, is with the structural anthropologist Mary Douglas (who speaks on various aspects of her work, including on Purity and Danger). The second is an interview with Roland Barthes, who, speaking in 1965, was at the height of his structuralist phase. The interview focuses upon the structural analysis of narrative and prefigures the well-known volume of Communications on the subject. The interviews are supplemented with introductions and: a commentary on Barthes’ interview by Jonathan Culler, who contextualizes the development of Barthes’ thinking around narrative (as it leads to the publication of S/Z), The article concludes with reflections on structuralism with regards to contemporary practices of big data, AI and large language models.
这篇评论介绍了该杂志题为“结构主义笔记”的部分。它围绕着两个采访展开。第一次是1987年，是和结构人类学家玛丽·道格拉斯(Mary Douglas)(她谈到了她工作的各个方面，包括《纯洁与危险》(Purity and Danger))。第二个是对罗兰·巴特(Roland Barthes)的采访，他在1965年发表讲话，当时正处于结构主义的巅峰阶段。访谈的重点是对叙事的结构分析，预示着著名的《传播》一书将就此主题展开讨论。访谈中还补充了乔纳森·卡勒(Jonathan Culler)的介绍和对巴特采访的评论，他将巴特围绕叙事的思想的发展(因为它导致了S/Z的出版)语境化。文章最后对结构主义对当代大数据、人工智能和大型语言模型的实践进行了反思。
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Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/02632764221141811
B. Stiegler
Many works by those who wish to strike a pose as being at the forefront of thinking about theory, culture and society end with a gesture, more or less rhetorical, that consists, in one way or another, in calling for the new – whether in philosophy, or politics, or in some sense that exceeds these old terms altogether. Such a call is incontestably legitimate, because the reasons for it have become obvious to all: all of the old (Western) theoretical, cultural and social systems and understandings seem only to have brought us to a hypersystemic crisis. By ‘hyper-systemic’ is meant a convergence of crises, where numerous systems seem to be reaching their limits at the same time and in a mutually reinforcing way, and where the way out of this hyper-systemic crisis seems blocked from all sides. Given this crisis of crises, all of our old understandings seem to leave us floundering, if not directly responsible for this crisis, with no sight of any exit. But the problem is that this gesture, this call for the new, should not appear at the end of such a work, but at the beginning: the whole point is to know how to take real steps that can possibly increase our chances at actually happening upon new pathways, not simply to content ourselves with perpetually reiterating its necessity. In short, if there is such a hyper-crisis, then it requires a hyper-critique – a critique founded in the recognition that what also makes this crisis ‘hyper’ is the fact that there is a crisis in the very possibility of critique itself, and in the possibility for critique to serve its proper end: to make possible judgments and proposals, and, on those bases, actions. It is towards the elaboration of such a hyper-critique, and the proposals that should follow from it, that all of Bernard Stiegler’s work aimed, and this remained the case in one of his final works, ‘Elements of a New Economic Foundation Based on a New Foundation for Theoretical Computer Science’, the first part of which was published as ‘Noodiversity, Technodiversity’ (Stiegler, 2020: 67–80). What distinguishes Stiegler’s work is the depth and clarity with which he sees and describes the fundamental source of our contemporary hyper-crisis, and in what follows we will briefly outline the argument put forward in the first part of this work, the better to elucidate the second part presented here.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/02632764221141819
P. Fabbri, M. Sassatelli, S. Manghani
This article presents a dialogue between Roland Barthes and Paolo Fabbri, which took place on 18 December 1965 in Florence, Italy. Barthes offers an engaging account of his structuralist approach to narrative, as was later published in essay form, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, included in a special issue of Communications (Issue 8, 1966). In a cordial exchange with Fabbri, Barthes provides a more candid presentation of method than found in print, along with critical reflection of the underlying importance of the structuralist approach, as perceived at the time. The interview took place as part of a small conference on narrativity. Participants included Algirdas Julien Greimas, Claude Bremond, Umberto Eco, Jules Gritti, Violette Morin, Christian Metz, and Tzvetan Todorov. Subsequently, a number of these participants contributed articles to the same issue of Communications, on the structural analysis of narrative.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/02632764221141088
Gabriel O. Apata
Philosophy and sociology appear to belong to separate spheres of thought, which might explain why they exist as separate academic disciplines. But in what way, if any, are philosophy and sociology different from, or related to, each other? In these series of lectures delivered at Frankfurt University in 1960, Adorno examines the relationship between philosophy and sociology and concludes that the subjects do not belong to separate spheres of thought. But Adorno has a bigger aim in mind. His attempt to reconcile philosophy and sociology takes the form of a wholesale attack on positivistic sociology, followed by a critique of philosophical idealism. There is, however, a debate as to whether the origins of Adorno’s critical sociology lie in Marx’s critique of political economy or philosophical idealism. These lectures throw further light on this question as they show the development of Adorno’s social philosophy and the critical theory.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/02632764221141820
J. Culler
This commentary reflects upon an interview with Roland Barthes from 1965 in which he discusses the structural analysis of narrative. The presentation prefigures the publication of Barthes’ well-known essay, ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’, which appeared shortly after in Communications, No. 8, in 1966. A close reading of both interview and essay shows that the interview differs from the published essay, notably in following more explicitly the steps of Saussure’s attempts to work out the units of the linguistic system, using a criterion called commutation. Consideration is also given to the next phase of Barthes’ work on narrative in S/Z (published in 1970), raising the question of what might have transpired had Barthes chosen to remain with an exploration of the actantial and narrational levels identified in his early interview.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/02632764221141684
Anne Alombert
This paper aims to connect Stiegler’s reflections on theoretical computer science with his practical propositions for the design of digital technologies. Indeed, Stiegler’s theory of exosomatization implies a new conception of artificial intelligence, which is not based on an analogical paradigm (which compares organisms and machines, as in cybernetics, or which compares thought and computing, as in cognitivism) but on an organological paradigm, which studies the co-evolution of living organisms (individuals), artificial organs (tools), and social organizations (institutions). Such a perspective does not compare human capacities to machine performances but studies the way in which the evolution of material and technical supports affects and transforms psychological, cognitive or noetic faculties (intuition, memory, understanding, imagination, sensibility, reason, etc.), as well as the constitution of different kinds of knowledge. This new theoretical paradigm implies a new ‘design’ for digital technologies, which considers their social role and their impact on psychological, cognitive or noetic faculties.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01Epub Date: 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1177/02632764221076430
Dominique P Béhague
Drawing on a historical ethnography of how Brazil's post-dictatorial psychiatric reforms have shaped young people's lives, this paper builds on Eve Sedgwick's analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion to show that narrow applications of Foucault's biopower concept nurture forms of resistance to bio-reductionism centred primarily on epistemic deconstruction. To unsettle this hermeneutic, I put young people's theories of power into conversation with Georges Canguilhem's concept of the milieu and with feminist scholars' work on prefigurative politics. I introduce the concepts of threading and unthreading to consider how one subject of biopower, the child-like biobehavioural figure, was continuously being threaded within a specific milieu and in relation to another key figure: the elite angst-ridden 'storm-and-stress' adolescent. Young people's subsequent unthreading and reweaving politics, flourishing in co-construction with what I call the politicizing clinic, illustrate how decolonial pedagogies can incrementally change the patterning of social life.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-21DOI: 10.1177/02632764221126305
Carla Ibled
This article argues that cruelty, as a willingness to see or orchestrate the suffering of others, is not an unfortunate side-effect of neoliberal theories put into practice but is constitutive of the neoliberal project from its theoretical inception. Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s concept of ‘optimistic cruelty’ and treating the canonical texts of neoliberal economic theory as literary artefacts, the article develops this argument through a close reading of one of the central architects of the neoliberal project, the philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek. The first part of the article examines how Hayek attempts to justify the brutality of the market order he imagines – the catallaxy – by arguing that this brutality is the natural consequence of the spontaneous evolutionary processes that move civilisation forward. The second part brings to the fore the eugenicist undertones that suffuse this vision, despite Hayek’s apparent rejection of Social Darwinism. I analyse how Hayek’s market order operates through a series of disciplinary and biopolitical technologies that use pain, frustration, punishment and stigmatisation to eliminate bad habits, practices and subjectivities. These cruel mechanisms enable the catallaxy to sort between productive and unproductive lives to ensure that available resources are directed towards the former – even if it means that the others might be left to die. As such, cruelty is an affective atmosphere that permeates the catallaxy.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-19DOI: 10.1177/02632764221113732
Margaret Morganroth Gullette
Distinguished gerontologists, ‘guardians of later life’ who had long kept age and ageism at the heart of their work, were asked by the author why the turn to ageism had not been able to raise age consciousness more effectively in the media or the public. Their frank responses constitute a valuable archive of reflections about how intersectional concepts and activist passions develop in an emerging and contentious multi-disciplinary field. The essay further situates their learned critiques in the history of age studies over the last 30 years. Among the sorrowful and galvanizing revelations provoked by the Eldercide of the COVID-19 era is this: ‘ageism’ has become widely recognized as a keyword not only good to think with but necessary to act on.
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