Recognising crisology: A Stieglerian clue

Fast forward to the present, the climate change crisis, together with the looming prospect of a technological singularity disseminated by extropian thinkers,Footnote ⁵ continues to confound the imagination. For the last three or four decades, this prospect has led some climate specialists and policy researchers to believe that the world is beyond its tipping point.

Indeed, the existential prospect for future generations is without expectation (elpis). Crushed by cosmic finitude, many a young person like Florian in Bernard Stiegler’s What Is Called “Panser”? 1. The Immense Regression says we are the last generation (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler and Ross2015). Among the few who are critical of this terrifying image of the future, Stiegler writes committedly to counter such despair. Stiegler is one philosopher who consistently analyses the ‘state of shock’ emergent from the global “proletarianisation of decision” (Reference Stiegler and Ross2013, pp. 37–54). For him, such a state of shock produces an impasse on the capacity of generations to recognise and respond to the crisis of knowledge, desire and taste. Drawing from Hippocrates’s concept of krisis, he identifies a pharmacological opportunity for a crisis to “[respond] to a question arising from a challenge” (Reference Stiegler and Ross2013, p. 126).

We can understand this as follows: in the context of disease, there is a critical moment of decision (krinein) or judgment. When a judgment is made regarding an illness, krisis creates a crucial disturbance, a form of controlled chaos in the course of an unknown predicament. Based on the external chaos produced, a decision is made regarding a medical intervention or treatment. As the concept of krisis may be expanded beyond medical practice, let us here consider the entire planet as a self-enclosed organic system, where every part is interconnected and prone to disorder. Krisis allows us to recognise a sense of danger in terms of our broader existential condition, posed by the climate change crisis, prompted by the overabundance of technical models putting a heavy strain on planetary resources.

In acknowledging a crisis, one is faced, at first glance and for the most part, with the complex question of subjectivity and individuation. To us, this question lies at the core of metacrisology. The question reveals the organological structure of the human condition at present, which can determine whether humanity can still pursue a form of life beyond brute entropic demise which is rich with symbolic-existential implications. The question that looms large: Is humanity still capable of transvaluating in the Nietzschean sense what has become a seemingly irreversible pattern of its failure to keep disorder at bay? What is beyond the prevalent nihilism of the contemporary moment?

By and large, our entropic, accelerant mode of life is brought about by capitalism’s hyperactive relation to technical systems. In recent years, this history has redrawn the terms of the debate, for instance, over the planetary climate crisis, that it is, after all, a crisis of technics (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler and Ross2018, p. 238). As Stiegler argues, under the present circumstances, our ability to transvaluate in the Nietzschean sense, or, to maintain a symbolic existence, has been lost to the production of an “artefact by technoscience” (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler and Norman2014, p. 5). This artefact continues to evolve through the industrial exteriorisation of the aesthetic nature of human experience by a “successive series of dis-adjustments” (Reference Stiegler and Norman2014, p. 5). No less than the body becomes the central focus of this structural procedure. This is the body that is supposed to experience time in itself, the felt experience of time passing, not as an abstract concept or eternal present, but as lived duration. Verily, in terms of today’s digital technology, we are talking about the body-artefact.

What happens when experience is externalised by technoscience into impersonal, autonomous systems? Following Stiegler’s framework, this externalisation operates through the “permanent and daily production of an industrial control,” via what he called “flux industries” [industries dites de fiux] (Reference Stiegler and Norman2014, p. 92), augmented by the modern production and consumption of digital texts and images. Simply put, these are the digital and industrial systems – social media, algorithmic feeds and now generative AI – that control the flow of information and images. As Simondon argues, experience is the constitutive effect of ‘associated milieus’ of progress (Reference Simondon, Malaspina and Rogove2017, p. 79), whose relational nature is also indicative of the symbolic values of objects that co-constitute human undertakings. In this context, flux industries generate symbolic misery by substituting personal, embodied experiences of time with prepackaged, instantaneous consumption. As a result, the unconscious or collective memory of learners is eroded, which impedes the development of slow, critical thinking necessary for effective environmental stewardship.

All these, in turn, generate a temporal default, encompassing all domains of human activity; specifically, a default in the form of symbolic time. In this state of default, the body – the locus of krisis – becomes subordinated to a depersonalised industry that disassociates the body from consciousness. In this sense, the body is dis-positioned from its fundamental groundedness in time as it suffers the cruel consequences of dislocation, isolated and detached from temporality.

This is what Kant (Reference Kant, Guyer and Wood1998) had already identified as the loss of the sensible form of temporal intuition. Flux industries deal with large-scale, impersonal processes controlling the flow of materials, information and goods; industries that circulate them, not only in terms of their ubiquitous presence in our daily lives but also of their symbolic values. What is called the transcendental aesthetic – the aesthetic intuition of time and space – allows us to experience these two forms of intuition before we ever formally think of them; hence, they are the conditions of possibility of perception. Accordingly, the control exerted by flux industries over our intuitive capabilities leads to a significant loss of our power of transcendental aesthetic, eroding our capacity for embodied experience of time and replacing it with industrial and technical memory.

It is not surprising that this form of time has become exploitable under the subsumption of modern algorithms, and most recently, by large language models (LLMs) with emphasis on attention protocols (Vashwani et al., Reference Vashwani, Shazeer, Parmar, Uszkoreit, Jones, Gomez, Łukasz and Illia2017), exploiting the absence of context, and thus, of meaning and shared memory. With a deterritorialised space, the time of technology knows no interruption or pause, making the “real disappear” (Han, Reference Han and Butler2015, p. 43), if we mean by the Real as the space of symbolic unconscious, or, social language or memory. Memory exceeds individual awareness, but which sets the condition for care, critical thinking and open dialogue – the reason delay or interruption in decision making and judgement is crucial for a society to grow.

Yet, the real is brute forced to become conscious in the sense that we can now possess language, rather than being possessed by it, which, by all means, signifies its death (language) and the unconscious as well (the Real) that we commonly share. The death of language in today’s language industries portends a society that is losing a collective memory, becoming more susceptible to viewing the ‘other’ through a distorted prism. Indeed, no social phenomenon could better explain the intensified resurgence of global populism and neofascism, concerning issues of race, gender and ethnic diversity, than the advent of language industries that give us a glimpse of tomorrow’s AGI (artificial general intelligence), if it is not already upon us.

Pedagogy of the unexpected: Anelpiston in practice

We have used anelpiston – Heraclitus’s word for the unexpected – as a key idea in metacrisology. But what does teaching based on the unexpected really involve? In the same vein, how can this teaching resonate with environmental educators’ task to help students cultivate openness to new possibilities when most stories vacillate between optimism in technology and fear of disaster?

Perhaps, the crux of the matter is that even critical thinking, which enframes the direction of contemporary environmental education, often assumes we are always already cognisant of the systems of oppression and freedom. This is the opposite of metacrisis thinking which rejects the way of expecting things within a binary frame.

Recall the childhood story at the start of this paper. Although, the teacher’s sudden talk about the end of the universe was awkward and even upsetting, it did something rather important: it interrupted the familiar way of thinking about the future. The boy’s world – sun, family, dog – suddenly seemed limited, fragile and new. This is what anelpiston is about: Making things feel strange and defamiliarised to open up new ways of thinking and conceiving imaginaries beyond binarised expectations.

Thus, we suggest that a pedagogy oriented toward the unexpected must operate through four interrelated aspects:

1. 1. Environmental education cannot work well in a time shaped by flux industries. It needs what Stiegler (Reference Stiegler and Ross2018) calls a delay, a pause that allows for care and deep thinking, or thoughtful activities that push back against the rush. In short, this requires breaking away from the accelerating pace of modernity. Educands should be taught to be mindful of today’s techno-industries, which force them to correlate life to technology, mostly, via systems that control their attention.

2. 2. Environmental education can expand a new experience of beauty. Following Han (whose ideas we will expand more in the latter discussions), we say that experiencing beauty can stop people from getting lost in the endless rush of technical temporality. Beauty is a way to slow down time, and, therefore, possesses a power to keep us grounded, not swayed by the flux industries.

3. 3. Teaching for the unexpected means stubbornly facing the possible collapse of society. This is not about sharing trauma. Rather, it is about telling the truth as parrhesiasts in a way that, as Foucault argued (Reference Foucault, Burchell and Gros2005), is fraught with danger, while also holding the capacity to transform both the speaker and the listener, thereby opening up new political possibilities. This means readiness for what Deleuze (Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Tomlinson and Burchell1994) calls the people to come – new communities that can respond to new situations.

4. 4. Lastly, we might rethink Jan Patočka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Reference Patočka and Kohák1996), in which the Czech philosopher argues that philosophy begins precisely after catastrophe. For this Czech philosopher, the creation of the “new” emerges in the wake of historical catastrophe and, as such, preserves the fundamental dimension of the care of the soul. Philosophy here faces the reality of the human night, the experience of historical rupture, loss and meaninglessness. This is to share what Patočka called the solidarity of the shaken. Those who are “shaken” are without metaphysical guarantee and as such are forced to confront finitude, responsibility and freedom without illusion. For us, this is to think beyond lived personal experience toward a community of souls, a common world, a κoινὸς κόσμoς (koinos kosmos).

Survivalism or hope?

Returning to Stiegler: inventing a people – the question of general subjectivity – requires an “intergenerational social contract,” or what he calls a careful “arrangement of technical [pharmacological] narratives” (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler and Ross2015, p. 256). Peoples are invented through these contracts, emerging from individual and collective circuits of individuation (Simondon, Reference Simondon and Flanders2009, p. 8) that, by their hold on memory, leave a “material and artefactual” trace (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2009, p. 33).

Unfortunately, today, this trace is deterritorialised into automated processes of individuation in a system of capture that subordinates them to attention systems, harvesting digital footprints to convert them to synthetic retentionality; hence, the automatism of memory. In simpler terms, flux industries capture these digital traces to convert them into artificial records of who we are. We are no longer capable of differentiating ourselves from synthetic memory. The algorithms replace human reflexivity to differentiate themselves from its past, which is now handled by automatic systems, and thus, they lose self-awareness.

In relation to flux industries, this allows cloud computing to replace what Simondon would define as the ‘preindividual nature’ of individuation (Simondon, Reference Simondon and Adkins2020, p. 8) with the presentism of attentional consciousness, whereby time loses its singularity, replaced by the instantaneity of a mouse click. Instantaneous time renders memory accessible, reduced to the immediacy of attention. In this regard, social symbolic memory loses its soft ‘transcendent’ power over the present. Synthetic memory can build a stable “source for future metastable states from which new individuations can emerge” (Simondon, Reference Simondon and Flanders2009, p. 8). Time is replaced by the singularity of artificial intelligence. This process, therefore, reveals what could occur at the end of a deterritorialised space of memory now overseen by algorithms. We are looking at the unfortunate condition of social memory or language: a crutch without a foundational memory.

From here on, we are looking at a sense of crisis more expansive than Deleuze’s concept; a metacrisis inhering in the prosthetic default of time, remaining impersonally metastable across various forms and degrees of intentions, modulations, and techniques of birthing, all the more crucial at this point in that interrupting the flux instituted by emancipated time is out of the question. The arrow of time does not move backward.

Thus, for Stiegler, this is more than an existential-ontological question that exceeds the general question of subjectivity. His criticism of Heidegger’s later appeal to ‘a god’ that can save the human condition is meant to show how this form of crisology, a Heideggerian metacrisology, exacerbates the cost of the “[unthinkability] both politically and apolitically” of the “question of the loss of individuation” (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2009, p. 54). Stiegler locates the heart of the crisis in the symbolic space where individuation is either present or erased, which is the challenge that faced both of his intellectual influences, namely, Heidegger and Simondon.

On the one hand, Heidegger ignored the prosthetic structure of the history of being, though he initially discovered its fundamental problem in the question of technology, but as a discourse of mastery, Gestell, in which a universal principle is believed to be behind technical domination. On the other hand, Simondon identified the human agent or controller as essential for redirecting the cybernetic question of feedback toward a dynamic concept of individuation. This perspective reflects Simondon’s partial inheritance of Bergson’s emphasis on the lived, and, overall, the classical metaphysics of subjectivity at the expense of the nonlived, the unregulated, the absent.

Stiegler’s alternative is to shift the focus from the master discourse to the possibility of the rebirth of the symbolic as shared memory, which varies from one generational contract to another. This temporal transmission supports what he calls mystagogical institutions by virtue of their propagations of symbolic life, and their preservation of “transformative, aesthetic mystery” (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2017, p. 31), such as schools and cultural productions, against the dominance of algorithms and above all, the Deleuzianism of the crisis of time and individuation. However, its possibility in the face of an all-embracing technicalisation of drives under societies of control, along with the ongoing crisis of climate change, foreshadows widespread fatigue than hope.

What this implies is disheartening for those supportive, like us, of Stiegler’s suggestible optimism. His pharmacological narrative appears to be deliberately confined to surviving a postapocalypse (Featherstone, Reference Featherstone2020, p. 416). This is the survival of the symbolic in terms of our individual capacity to forge pharmacological narratives with others, especially in the context of ecological collapse.

Futural colour beyond metacrisis

Contra Deleuze, especially in regard to the function of the Hegelian negative that he criticised in favour of the multiple and the ‘event of the phantasm’ that refuses identity and essence, Han sought to restore the Hegelian negative in service of an open interpretation of the dialectic, no longer as the power of difference bound to the aporetic circle of being and nonbeing, or being and its appropriated other (nonbeing), but rather to a notion of the Other as unmediated by the dialectic, beyond the power of difference. Han is opening Hegel to an interpretation other than the necessary demand of the dialectic borne by the master–slave relation; a notion of the Other deflective of the power of the dialectic to condense it into a project – an existential venture of power (between two opposing subjectivities) by maintaining a threshold or boundary of self-projection that the logic of difference sustains.

However, Han is not predisposed to repeat the mistake of Heidegger by invoking what lies beyond this difference, which Heidegger took to be of the essence of the ontological, hence, beyond the ontological difference that makes no room for individuation. Rather, he seeks the beyond that emerges from out of the split of the ontological difference from itself, from the collapse of the self-projection of the other under the totalising weight of the modern world.

This falling to pieces is the outcome of the agony of subjectivity, which, according to Han, in a “technical-symbolic-existential world … [debilitates] rather than [fortifies] and [sustains] the human subject … prevents the encounter with the Other… and [reduces] the human subject to empty forms of paroxysmal destruction” (Knepper et al., Reference Knepper, Stoneman and Wyllie2024, p. 91). For Han, this unhappy subject may still be open to the prospect of individuation in terms of its non-optional, de rigueur encounter with the outside: “[F]or without an Against one falls hard on oneself” (Han, Reference Han and Steuer2018a, p. 43).

This happens in terms of the singular encounter with what Han calls “disastrous events, events of emptiness that empty the ego, de-subjectify it and take it away from its inwardness, thus making it happy” (Reference Han and Steuer2018a, p. 42). Han is here talking about the encounter with beauty and the sublime, “in which time is… in a stand-still” (Reference Han and Steuer2018a, p. 68). Beauty or the sublime fortifies the subject from becoming fully deterritorialised into a Deleuzian flow of time.

Such slow contemplation of beauty lays oneself open to injuries during the subject’s exposure to the acceleration of technical time. Consequently, this internal conflict takes a toll on the subject, both physically and psycho-noetically, as it grapples with the oscillation of the tempo, either speeding up or slowing down. However, beauty does more than that – it suspends the subject’s disappearance into the “future without end” (Han, Reference Han and Butler2017, p. 16).

Han’s thought, therefore, demands a reflection on Hegel’s image of the Owl of Minerva. This is the idea that philosophy is incapable of capturing what is to come. Philosophy always looks back in what was the past, engaging in “grey on grey,” which Han describes as, “the colour of beingness” (Reference Han and Steuer2023, np). Philosophy reflects but does not look forward. It cannot be prospective, only retrospective. The idea of hope remains tied to the possibility of that which is “not yet,” but Han talks of the Owl of Minerva, blind to “the dawning radiance of the new” (Reference Han and Steuer2023, np), a radiance that can somehow escape the logic of essence.

In this respect, metacrisis suggests the absence of colour, a time which demands one think in the dark. This is why our position is at odds with Han’s, because we believe we can and must think in the dark. Here, Han’s position is thus: Dasein in the dark is condemned to be without unprecedented possibilities of being. In the context of the metacrisis, this reflects a collectively anxious Dasein. L’avenir is closed off from anxiety-cripped being-in-the-world. Dasein is ill-at-ease. Dasein is marked by mal-être, ill being (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler and Barker2011). Because of this our argument is that we must respond to it politically. As Deleuze says, without dreams, or to be pulverised by the dreams of others whose self-attention becomes contagious, humanity broods over the demise of things but dare not dream. We have become without elpis (expectation) and have only the damaged mnemosyne (memory) as our companion. In short, we are doomed – “Méfiez-vous du rêve de l’autre, parce que si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre, vous êtes foutus” – (Deleuze, Reference Deleuze and Lapoujade2003).

Fetishising the wound

Unfortunately, humans overemphasise damaged life by fixating on their scars and wounds, naively producing a logical counterpart. Faced with this damage, the experience evolves into secular faith in salvation – a techno-theology. This once led to extropianism and today has advanced into the transhumanist direction, inspired by the wealth and power of Silicon Valley.

What has changed since the last couple of decades is a dramatic shift in humanity’s existential orientation, from a failure to acknowledge a crisis (since climate science started to become aggressive in its global campaign, around the late 80s, warning world governments about carbon emissions) to a sort of hyper-acknowledgement of its inevitable consummation. This dramatic change coincides with the intensified perversion of the symbolic space in the global turn to neoliberal capitalism, which began with Thatcher in the UK, and perfected in the US by the Reaganite approach to economics and its geopolitical defaulting of a new form of capitalist hegemony.

Under neoliberalism, the absorption of surplus values has transformed the body-artefact into a pliable hive mind that has internalised its own repression, at the same time that it has lost the facility for aesthetic intuition. But this is only because the intensity and extent of repression were no longer immediately felt. Rather, repression is appropriated by and integrated into abstract systems of temporal consumption – the consumption of automatised (digital) values or content that appeal more to immediate life concerns than would the fear of real existential dangers. These systems pander to the human desire for immediate gratifications that feel more urgent than any long-term concerns. We have ceased investing our time in things of genuine, and lasting value. Our desire for instant, low-value digital stimulation has become an existential norm. Complementing this situation is the overdetermination of surpluses of unfulfilled knowledge, reshaping the educational path of humanity in the way of incentivising stupidity, mediocrity, carelessness and impatience in the face of difference, or the other viewed as a menace – also, the other as death-in-itself. These dynamics of capital create a unified entropic direction – mass global poverty, the proletarianisation of peoples, and the risk of an irreversible collapse.

Within the global network run by algorithms, this direction has penetrated our sensible perception of what kind of change has occurred, corrupting human recognition and comprehension of the crisis we help exacerbate. We have made things worse via a default belief that it is beyond our control at a time when the idea of a unitary species has never been closer to realisation with the invention of the internet. Yet, in the pharmacological sense, this has also led to the inversion of social language, the Real, which has shaped the nature of the krisis that we face as a species of nature and culture, life and technics.

In the age of language industries, we have lost the Real when language becomes available to be possessed. We are told we can now possess the overwhelming force of language that no longer needs a fallible speaker, an erroneous idiom, or a syntactical anomaly that gave us poetry, literature, theatre, music, philosophy and science, and above all, the wisdom of the ages. With the algorithmic saturation of what used to be the human experience of the internet as a space of the commons, the Real has lost the usual affordances of its ambiguity through the fallibility and hesitation of the speaker to reify itself in a productive way. Action presupposes the ambiguity of the Real, whose nature suggests that its proneness to value orientations hints at the co-constitutedness of reality between bare life and technics.

For environmental educators, this explains why climate science often fails to resonate. Timothy Morton’s (Reference Morton2013) concept of the hyperobject – things “massively distributed in time and space” whose “local manifestation” is never “directly the hyperobject” – illustrates the almost hysterical interference of the Real we have lost contact with. Morton argues hyperobjects “vividly demonstrate how things do not coincide with their appearance” (Reference Morton2013, p. 174). From a Deleuzian perspective, we become unwitting spectators in a theatre of appearances, caught in the self-differentiation of an inhospitable Other, and who knows if it is merely its dream!

This is only one example of how naming a scar or a lesion can lead to fetishising its inevitability, the irrevocability of its emergence as an event. Not that we can actually reverse the tide of time. But, with a fetish, inevitability gets a free pass to determine the future; a future tied to a sentimentalised memory trapped in a dead space – a rose-pink scrap of collagen fibres that turns into a keloid, numb to sensation, a muted space on the skin. This desensitisation prevents the cellular memory of an original design that covered a once-living skin. However, without fetishisation, the scar serves its function in the organism. It marks urgency, crisis, trauma, creating a boundary between past and present, injury and ongoing vitality, serving its purpose for time to mark off its edge, interval and duration.

Because it is an undead time, a fetish lacks a capacity for pharmacological narratives. It cannot escape its internal stasis. Instead, entropy acts on it from the outside, accelerating its movement without internal resistance – the kind of resistance that is supposed to be the function of the pharmakon that operates only within living systems. Entropy metastasises its stubborn stillness into multiple undead forms. More so, since it knows no outside, no life beyond bare life, no ontogenesis, the fetish cannot die. It will remain immortal in its singularity.

Such is the fate of humanity when we fetishise the singularity of the technological future as inevitable, matched only by the irresolution that has engrossed humanity’s hope in preventing a runaway climate change. Both, however, are no more than tales told without a speaker, pure speech concealing a code switch that masks their true textual structures and vitality.

Such is the pure speech of (LLMs): it hides what language actually is. For Stiegler, language is fundamentally an “idiotextual complex, the idiom always being a memory, and this memory, a text” (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler and Ross2018, p. 56), This is what creates both thinking subjects and language as a technical object. But LLMs mask this process. Like ontological saboteurs they mask their real ecological structure – what Guattari called the three ecologies (Guattari, Reference Guattari, Pindar and Sutton2000, pp. 27–34) – behind the abstract label artificial intelligence. Here, we should take into account the organological milieu that enables a technological regime – the infrastructure, the intellectual and manual labour necessary to extract components of nature to produce microchips, cable wires, etc. and above all, the amount of energy required to power the myriad facilities of a technical behemoth to generate social knowledge and goods. This is the organology of capital that pure speech conceals.