Ben Turner

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.

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.

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 his Noopolitics 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.

This article develops a comparative and recursive approach to political ontology by drawing on the ontological turn in anthropology. It claims that if ontological commitments define reality, then the use of ontology by recent pluralist political theorists must undercut pluralism. By charting contemporary anthropology’s rereading of structuralism as part of a plural understanding of ontology, it will be shown that any political ontology places limits on the political, and thus cannot exhaust political experience. This position will be established through an analysis of the role of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and a comparison with the political ontology represented by perspectivism and potential affinity. Anthropology’s lesson for political theory is that ontology cannot simply be revised and treated in the singular, but that political ontologies must be analysed comparatively to reveal the shortcomings of, and recursively alter, one’s own political frame of reference.

Assessments of the impact of automation often emphasize the need to “denaturalize” work. To what extent is denaturalization successful in separating proposals regarding the future of work from existing assumptions about its value? This article will explore this question by reading Bernard Stiegler’s politics of work in the context of his understanding of the family. It will demonstrate that while he denaturalizes work he also naturalizes background assumptions regarding its relationship to social reproductive labor by claiming that the latter is “above and beyond the market.” This gesture reproduces gendered assumptions about the nature of work and fails to provide a critical account of the changing relationship between work, the family, and economic responsibility under neoliberalism. It will be concluded that Stiegler’s conservative approach to the relationship between work and the family shows that avoiding the unwitting naturalization of existing assumptions regarding work is a central problem for post-work critics.

For Husserl, the phenomenological epoché is primarily methodological, allowing access to the structures of transcendental consciousness by way of suspending worldly influence. This chapter will demonstrate how this methodological principle is rethought as political in the work of Bernard Stiegler. For Stiegler the epokhé is both the suspension of existing social systems, and a moment of critical redoubling, where the source of disruption is integrated into a new ‘epoch’. In particular it will be shown how Stiegler develops this double understanding of the epokhé through his reading of retentionality as found in the lectures On the Consciousness of Internal Time to develop an understanding of the epochal framing of temporality by technics. By drawing connections between this version of retentionality and the pharmacological character of technics, as simultaneously poisonous and curative, the political stakes of the epokhé lie in the need to fight the poisonous aspects of epochal suspension.