Bernard Stiegler obituary

Bernard Stiegler, who has died suddenly aged 68, first robbed a bank in 1976, to pay off his overdraft. At the time, the school dropout and veteran of the May 1968 barricades was running a jazz cafe in Toulouse. “It went really well,” Stiegler recalled of his life of crime. “I got a taste for it and robbed three more.” He always worked alone. “It’s more efficient and we don’t need to share.”

The police caught Stiegler in the act during the fourth robbery and he was sentenced to five years in jail. “It could have been 15 but I had a very good lawyer.” He also had friends on the outside who kept him supplied with books, notably the philosopher Gérard Granel, a fellow jazz buff. But, sharing a prison cell with another inmate interfered with Stiegler’s studies, so he went on hunger strike for three weeks. “I wanted to let myself die.”

From this unpromising position, Stiegler went on to become one of the 21st century’s most bracing thinkers, one who denounced digital technology’s takeover by technocrats whom he called “the new barbarians”. He wrote more than 30 books, the last of which, The Lesson of Greta Thunberg, published in January, was devoted to the environmental campaigner, whom he saw as a latter-day Antigone in her rage for justice. While Antigone reckoned death to be inescapable but human souls would survive, he reflected, “Greta belongs to the ‘more than tragic’ world, the one that says everything will disappear, the entire universe.”

Stiegler was of a similar temperament. He came to think, as he put it in The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (2019), that many young people, trapped in an entropic world from which there seems to be no escape, have been left “mad with sadness, mad with grief, mad with rage”. “To put it simply,” he told an interviewer from Libération, “there is a schism between the mobilised young people and the old people who do nothing.”

Prison was the making of Stiegler. “I was intoxicated. Without the prison, I would have turned out badly.” Once granted a solitary cell, he ended his hunger strike. He compared his experience to that of Malcolm X, who wrote that jail gave him the “gift of time”. Stiegler studied hard. “In the morning I read, after a poem by Mallarmé, Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and, in the evening, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.”

He passed the entrance exam to the University of Toulouse while still in prison and came to realise something important to his developing philosophy, namely that “reading [is] an interpretation by the reader of his or her own memory through the interpretation of the text that he or she had read.” That thought would become key to his notion of “tertiary memory”.

Non-humans have primary memory, namely the genetic information expressed in DNA code, and secondary memory, acquired through a complex nervous system. Humans also have exosomatic or tertiary memory, made possible by prostheses he called “technics” – that is, writing, art, clothing, tools and machines.

In his series of books Technics and Time (in three volumes, 1994-2001), he argued that such technics open possibilities for humans to realise individual and collective hopes. But, in our Anthropocene era, they have been used to close them down. In later life, through various projects, community groups and a website, Ars Industrialis, he sought to reverse that entropic turn and thereby became an intellectual every bit as engaged in the world around him as Jean-Paul Sartre.

On release from prison in 1983, Stiegler flew to Paris with a letter of introduction from Granel to the doyen of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, at the École Normale Supérieure. Derrida was impressed enough with the ex-con’s intellect to allow him to hold a bi-monthly seminar at the newly established International College of Philosophy. There, and later at the Technological University of Compiègne, the Advanced Studies Institute of Nanjing and the Academy of the Arts of Hangzhou, and, back in Paris, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the National Audiovisual Institute, the music technology centre Ircam and the Pompidou Centre, Stiegler developed a critique of what he called “computational thinking”.

His sense was that we have entrusted our rationality to computational technologies that stop us thinking authentically. One of his most astute interpreters, Leonid Bilmes, wrote that Stiegler saw that “the catastrophe of the digital age is that the global economy, powered by computational ‘reason’ and driven by profit, is foreclosing the horizon of independent reflection for the majority of our species, in so far as we remain unaware that our thinking is so often being constricted by lines of code intended to anticipate, and actively shape, consciousness itself.”

Technology, which could have been a liberation, was leading us to extinction. “For a plane to fly, you have to follow a number of laws of gravity and physics,” Stiegler said. “We know how to do it, planes fly very well. But in doing so, we only take into account the short term: if we chose to certify the planes only on condition that they do not eat up all the resources for the next thousand years, they would not be allowed to fly.”

Stiegler’s childhood helps account for how he came to think this way. He was born in Villebon-sur-Yvette, south of Paris, and grew up in Sarcelles, north-west of it, to a TV engineer father and a mother who worked, ironically enough, as a bank employee. He reckoned that, thanks to French public television of the 1960s, which he and his parents watched assiduously, it was possible to be both “poor and educated”.

“General de Gaulle’s television raised me, introducing me to Aeschylus and Greek tragedy when I was 12 years old.” Indeed, his most bitter denunciations were for the French network that, he felt, betrayed its duty to help French workers appreciate culture.

After participation in les événements in Paris in 1968, he started but did not complete studies at the Free Conservatory of French Cinema. In 1973, he was an intern computer programmer before working as a farmer and waiter.

Until 1976 he was a member of the Communist party. His communism doubtless explains a key term in his philosophy: proletarianisation. For Karl Marx, that term meant a threat posed to physical labour, but for Stiegler it signified the threat posed by computational thinking to the human spirit itself.

In The Neganthropocene (2018) he argued that individuals and society at large are increasingly shaped by algorithms and automated systems, driven by economic rather than human interests. A Facebook feed, for instance, was algorithmically devised to keep you inside its digital walls so you can be exploited for profit.

To disrupt this exploitation of humans and the despoliation of the planet during the Anthro- pocene age, he established several interdisciplinary projects, including a group of politicised researchers called Collectif Internation. That group’s book Bifurqer (bifurcation or parting ways), which was published under Stiegler’s direction in the spring, called for an end to “bullshit jobs” and to “de-automate automatisms” so that humans could live in sync with their biosphere.

“Today, bullshit jobs are no longer the preserve of blue-collar workers,” he and the other authors wrote. “All employees, who sell their time spent carrying out useless, meaningless tasks, have them too.” Stiegler was inspired by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who coined the term negentropy, the trait of all life that resists the drift towards disorder.

What was needed was a new negentropy for humans to reverse our drift to oblivion. To that end, he initiated a project in the north of Paris called Plaine Commune, effectively a political laboratory whereby social media and digital platforms are used to invigorate the community of 400,000 people and an experiment in what he called “contributory economy”. By that he meant voluntary work and education and, he hoped, a revival of democratic participation.

Stiegler is survived by his wife, Caroline, a lawyer, and four children.

Bernard Stiegler, philosopher, born 1 April 1952; died 5 August 2020