Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010) Bernard Stiegler
Taking Care of Youth and the Generations continues Stiegler’s critical analysis of technology in our contemporary society. In this text he argues that digital technologies, under the thrall of consumer capitalism, are having a deleterious effect on peoples well-being. This is for Stiegler inhibiting the possibility to derive a new and more sustainable relationship with technology. In fact, Stiegler warns it is affecting the nurturing and education of younger generations and incapacitating our abilities to think critically. It marks the very “battle for intelligence” (Stiegler, 16). This “battle for intelligence” is the crisis of our time.
The text builds on Stiegler’s previous work in the Technics and Time series that argues for the central role technology has and continues to play in world. Technology is not something neutral nor external to the human but occupies the very centre of our humanity. For Stiegler, contemporary capitalism, through media technologies (in particular the psycho-technologies of social media) has hijacked our institutions that support the education of our young. Through their speed and pervasiveness, they distort and commodify our ‘attention’. Stiegler writes, “people, having abdicated their majority [majorité, referring both to maturity and democratic majorities] without being conscious of it, ‘give themselves’ to these industries, or rather, the industries capture them as ‘available brain time.’” (Ibid, 38) This leads tom a form of ‘un-caring’ that is reflected in malaise in politics and emergence of what Stiegler calls “I-don’t-give-a- damners”. (Ibid, 165)
Stiegler focuses on the biopolitics of Foucault and Agamben arguing that both fail to take seriously the emerging role of the technological landscape of media. By critiquing both, he nonetheless tries the salvage the spirit of the Enlightenment embodied in Kant’s call to for an educated and critical form of citizenry.
Although ‘care’ (following Heidegger) is a key feature of Stiegler’s work throughout his appraisal of media technology this book offers little by way of redemption or inculcation of care. The pharmacology (poison/cure) he continually returns throughout his writing is very much saturated in the maleficent nature of contemporary technology and in a way essentialises it. Likewise, his diagnostic analysis of ADHD suffers from broad generalisation and lacks a more nuanced reading of empirical data and research ion the subject. Likewise, he appears to propose a return to the ambitions of a political and social form of education that emerges in post war France. Whether the obvious deficits of representation with regards to 1race, gender, sexuality that were omitted by such programs need be remedied is never reflected upon. In later work (Automatic Society, 2017) such a call to arms seems to focus on regulating large corporations while at the same time proposing forms of care that can be realised in notions of contributory economy, new educational models, and forms of aesthetic practice. (see Symbolic Misery Vol. 1 & 2).
Nonetheless the broader value of Stiegler’s work cannot be underestimated as he steadfastly interrogates the role technology has always played in our evolution. Although his concept of care lacks an appraisal of care articulated by feminist writers and scholars it does privilege an awareness and responsibility to the other that is critically important. As he states “Care, “strictly speaking,” always worked through the care one takes of oneself through the care one takes of others, in that they are constituent elements of that “self” as the transformation of individuation.” (Ibid, 178) Stiegler’s work provides a deep philosophical interrogation of technology, aesthetics and care that offers a critical waypoint in developing ideas around an AoC.
Mick O’Hara
TU Dublin
Stiegler, Bernard Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010