Bernard Stiegler: Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Disbelief and Discredit, vol. 1 (2004/2011)

“Bernard Stiegler is one of the most original philosophers writing today about new technologies and their implications for social, political and personal life. Drawing on sources ranging from Plato and Marx to Freud, Heidegger and Derrida, he develops a highly original account of technology as grammatology, as a technics of writing that constitutes our experience of time, memory and desire, even of life itself. Society and our place within it are shaped by technical reproduction which can both expand and restrict the horizons and possibilities of human agency and experience.

In the three volumes of Disbelief and Discredit Stiegler argues that this process of technical reproduction has become dangerously divorced from its role in the constitution of human experience. Radically challenging the optimistic view of new technologies as facilitators of learning and progress, he argues new marketing techniques short-circuit thought and disenfranchise consumers, programming them to seek short-term gratification. These practices of ‘libidinal economics’ have profound consequences for nature of human desire and they underpin the social and psychological malaise of contemporary industrial society.

In this opening volume Stiegler argues that the industrial model implemented since the beginning of the twentieth century has become obsolete, leading capitalist democracies to an impasse. A sign of this impasse and of the decadence to which it leads is the banalization of consumers who become ensnared in a perpetual cycle of consumption. This is the new proletarianization of the technologically infused, hyper-industrial capitalism of today. It produces a society cut off from its past and its future, stultifying human development and turning democracy into a farce in which disbelief and discredit inevitably arise.”

First published in French as Mécréance et Discrédit: Tome 1, La décadence des démocraties industrielles, Galilée, 2004.

Translated by Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold
Publisher Polity, 2011
ISBN 0745648096, 9780745648095
200 pages

Review: Tom Bunyard (Radical Philosophy, 2012).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-8-7)

D Caboret, P Garrone: Avant-garde and Mission: Tiqqunery (1999) [French/English]

A critical study guide for readers of Tiqqun magazine.

“Addressed in 1999 to a small group of persons, the following text was intended to describe in general the philosophical and religious affiliations that the members of the magazine Tiqqun associated themselves with either explicitly or implicitly.” (from the introduction)

Publisher Friends of LHOOQ, Paris
Second edition, 2002

authors

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PDF [English]
View online (HTML) [English]

Hito Steyerl: The Wretched of the Screen (2012–) [EN, ES]

“In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl’s landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.

Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.”

With Introduction by Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Publisher Sternberg Press, Berlin, September 2012
e-flux journal series
ISBN 9781934105825, 1934105821
200 pages

Reviews: Tony Wood (New Left Review, 2013), Maria Walsh (Art Monthly, 2013), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015), Fracesca Da Rimini (ArtLink, 2015).
Exh. reviews: Holland Cotter (NY Times, 2012), Zoe Larkins (Art in America, 2012).

Editors
Publisher (EN)
Publisher (ES)
WorldCat (EN)

The Wretched of the Screen (English, 2012)
Los condenados de la pantalla (Spanish, trans. Marcelo Expósito, 2014, added on 2015-12-14)