Ben Turner

Returning to Judgment provides the first extensive treatment of political judgment in the work of Bernard Stiegler and the first account of his significance for contemporary continental political thought. Ben Turner argues that Stiegler breaks with his predecessors in continental philosophy by advocating for, rather than retreating from, the task of proposing totalizing judgments on political problems that extend beyond the local and the particular. He shows that the reconciliation of judgment with continental political thought's commitment to anti-totalization structures the entirety of Stiegler's philosophy and demonstrates that this theory of the political decision highlights the difficulties that contemporary political ontology faces when addressing global and large-scale political problems. The book provides an overview of Stiegler's philosophy useful for those unfamiliar with his thought, shows how he draws on key influences including Deleuze, Derrida, Freud, and Simondon to develop his conception of judgment, and considers the challenges and consequences of his embrace of totalizing political decisions.

What is the objective of ideology critique today? A unique answer to this question can be found in the work of Bernard Stiegler: the object of ideology critique is stupidity. Stiegler’s work will be situated with regard to the study of ideology and post-structuralism, reframed as respective versions of a dichotomy between critical and neutral theories, to show how Stiegler’s conception of ideology encompasses both. How he thinks ideology 'after' post-structuralism will be explored through his reading of Deleuze and Guattari. First, by seeing how Stiegler capitalises upon the theoretical developments of Deleuze and Guattari to rethink the notion of ideology. Second, by seeing how this understanding of ideology is folded back on their work, in order to discern how post-structuralism can be critiqued by a theory of ideology that utilises its views. From the perspective of his reading of desire in Deleuze, Guattari, and Freud, Stiegler shows how ideology destroys the desire to rethink ideas, and enforces stupidity. Third, after Stiegler’s theoretical labour, we arrive at a notion of ideology dichotomised between the critical and the stupid, tasking critique with the invention of new forms of desire, and the struggle against stupidity.

Through a re-articulation of Derridean différance, Bernard Stiegler claims that the human is defined by an originary default that displaces all psychic and social life onto technical supplements. His philosophy of technics re-articulates the logic of the supplement as concerning both human reflexivity and its supports, and the history of the différance of life itself. This has been criticised for reducing Derrida’s work to a metaphysics of presence, and for instituting a humanism of the relation to the inorganic. By refuting these claims, this article will show that Stiegler’s doubling of différance enables him to articulate the human as constituted by both the individuation characteristic of ‘life’, and that of a technical, psychic and collective individuation. Putting forward a reading of the logic of the trace in life, and emphasising the aspects of Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon, and Canguilhem that Stiegler uses in his reading of Derrida, I will demonstrate that the political stakes of adaption and adoption in Noo-Politics require this re-articulation of différance. Technics shapes the human future, arising from this differential mutation; marking the invention of the human as the site of the political.

The potential harms of algorithmic management in the workplace are a significant concern within recent political theory of work. This article provides a critical account of the intuition that workplace democracy might ameliorate these harms. It develops an epistemic case for workplace democratisation presupposed by these claims and situates it within a non-ideal account of algorithmic management. Whilst participatory solutions to algorithmic management’s harms are appealing, I argue that the epistemic agency which is a condition of their success is undermined by algorithmic management. Through an account of what I call the ‘epistemic degradation’ problem, I show that two feasibility constraints undermine the epistemic agency that is a condition of transition from hierarchical to democratic firms: the information asymmetry constraint and the value deskilling constraint. Two conclusions follow. First, ideal arguments for workplace democratisation must justify the habituation required for participatory work, particularly under non-ideal conditions like labour processes in which algorithmic management is deployed. Second, this non-ideal account of algorithmic management justifies democratic control over its possible deployment due to its epistemic harms.

Political theorists have developed and refined the concept of culture through much critical discussion with anthropology. This article will deepen this engagement by claiming that political theory has glossed over a crucial aspect of the role of the concept of culture, rather than defined it incorrectly. It will be argued that culture represents one way of accounting for the variety of human groups by drawing on the recent ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology. This rests on an understanding of ontology as a system of classifying entities anterior to social relations rather than a philosophical position. The article will argue against culture’s status as a neutral and universal method of understanding human diversity by situating it within a pluralist approach to ontology, that posits multiple ontological schemas which form different social systems, each with their own understanding of human difference. Through an investigation of the implicit ontological commitments of multiculturalism it will be claimed that all political positions rest on a set of ontological presuppositions, and that these classifications place restrictions on the politics that they can express. Thus, political theorists should be vigilant of implicit ontological biases, represented here by culture, if they are to positively accommodate human difference.

What is the objective of ideology critique today? A unique answer to this question can be found in the work of Bernard Stiegler: the object of ideology critique is stupidity. Stiegler’s work will be situated with regard to the study of ideology and post-structuralism, reframed as respective versions of a dichotomy between critical and neutral theories, to show how Stiegler’s conception of ideology encompasses both. How he thinks ideology 'after' post-structuralism will be explored through his reading of Deleuze and Guattari. First, by seeing how Stiegler capitalises upon the theoretical developments of Deleuze and Guattari to rethink the notion of ideology. Second, by seeing how this understanding of ideology is folded back on their work, in order to discern how post-structuralism can be critiqued by a theory of ideology that utilises its views. From the perspective of his reading of desire in Deleuze, Guattari, and Freud, Stiegler shows how ideology destroys the desire to rethink ideas, and enforces stupidity. Third, after Stiegler’s theoretical labour, we arrive at a notion of ideology dichotomised between the critical and the stupid, tasking critique with the invention of new forms of desire, and the struggle against stupidity.

How should we conceptualise the turn to attention as a means of producing surplus value? Claudio Celis Bueno answers this question through a consideration of the attention economy in the context of a rethinking of Marxist political economy. Bueno accounts for the development of the economisation of attention through the concepts of value, labour and time, but also investigates how the shift to attention requires us to rethink the basis of these terms. Using the attention economy as an example, he develops a method of immanent critique which rejects a-historical understandings of labour, in order to show how the core concepts of Marxist political economy transform across different economic systems. Despite the clarity of this argument, Bueno opens an interesting but unanswered question as to how one transitions from this insight to a positive political project that may not be compatible with immanent critique.

In Bernard Stiegler’s Automatic Society Volume 1: The Future of Work, ‘the impossible’ and ‘the improbable’ appear as explicit parts of his political project. In his philosophy of technology, the impossible highlights the structural incompleteness that technics imparts to human existence. This article will trace how Stiegler draws on the work of Maurice Blanchot to produce this conjunction between technics and indetermination, and explore its political ramifications. This will show that rather than being a recent aspect of Stiegler’s work, the political use of the impossible brings Blanchot’s subterranean influence to the fore. After briefly reconstructing Blanchot’s understanding of language, impersonality, and writing, it will be shown that Stiegler shifts Blanchot’s emphasis from the impossible to technical practices of the improbable. Stiegler follows an anthropological line where the experience of the impossible becomes a more general understanding of the experience of improbability through technical structures. Stiegler’s reading of Blanchot is central in his break with the place of the impossible in the politics of resistance advocated by post-structuralism, allowing him to support a politics of invention which makes space for the improbable within a large-scale politics of technicity, rather than privileging indeterminacy itself.