Education in a digital era

A ‘gestural’ exploration of the practice of writing

Joris Vlieghe

ECS-Forum, 23/11/2012

• Main concern: meaning of ‘education’ in a digital era, i.e. an age in which digital technologies have come to replace traditional ways of teaching and learning (based on writing and reading texts; direct and face-to- face classroom-instruction)

• Philosophical analysis, based on the work of three rather different authors (Flusser, Stiegler, Agamben), who nevertheless are ‘connected’, because they have developed their theories in critical dialogue with Heidegger – and more precisely with Heidegger’s uncritical execration of technology

• Flusser & Stiegler have explicitely embraced a technology-centered (≠ technology-determinist) view. I argue moreover that it might be possible to develop an Agambenian philosophy of technology

• A technology-centered approach allows for dealing in a new way with concrete practices that take place in schools, i.e. looking at them as materially conditioned and heavily embodied ‘gestures’

• Central in my presentation: the practice of writing (literacy)

Heidegger’s comments on type-writing

The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e. the realm of the word. The word itself turns into something “typed”. […] Mechanical writing deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a means of communication. In addition, mechanical writing provides “this advantage”, that it conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same

- mechanization of writing = writing by default, no real (proper) writing- such an improper use → cultural crisis (standardization of human existence)

Vilém Flusser

• Technocentric perspective: analysis of technology-mediated practices in their material concreteness: what does it mean ‘to put very material letters upon the surface of a very material sheet of paper?’

• Interesting considerations on the use of the typewriter that go in the opposite direction

• ‘The typewriter is a machine for writing lines from left to right and for jumping back to the left side. Thus, the typewriter is, to some extent, a materialization of a cultural program of ours. If we look at the typewriter, we can see materially, to some extent, how one aspect of our mind works.’

A phenomenology of gestures• a more recent and more pronouncedly technological

variation of a certain activity, even if it might at first sight seem to be secondary to (derived from, less authentic than) the most exemplary form of this activity, might disclose it in a way that was unlikely to take place beforehand

• As long as we only knew longhand it was difficult to approach writing ‘as a gesture’, as a material and technologically mediated practice the sense of which cannot be derived from what we spontaneously think and feel, but only when we take the concrete things we do ‘as bodies’ into consideration

• Longwriting is typewriting by default

Flusser on writing-based thought• Ironically, mechanical writing discloses, more than ‘proper’ writing

does, ‘what thinking is’.• Hypothesis: the technique of writing is not merely a means to express

our thoughts, it shapes our thoughts in a particular way. The gesture of writing forms the very precondition for critical thinking to become possible in the first place

• ‘Repression of the natural tendency to think aloud’ (associative and rhizomatic), ‘forcing’ our ideas ‘into specific structures’

Cf. writing = destructive, rather than constructive activity• ‘Writing violates thinking in a way speaking does not’• Thinking of literate beings

= linear, diachronic, one-dimensional, one-directional, historical• This also implies that writing-based thinking is only a contingent

possibility. It has a beginning and probably also an end.

Flusser on writing-based thought• Thinking based on alphabetic writing vs. Thinking based on ideographic writing/numbers• Oral vs. literate culture (Cf. Ong)• Alphabetic writing is different from speaking, but is

nevertheless linked to an acoustic regime (‘it makes sounds visible’, it concerns ‘a musical notation of spoken language’): → one-dimensional and uni-directional (linear) logic

↔ Ideographic/numerical writing (‘a notation of ideas’) is linked to an optical regime → two-dimensional and multi-directional (circular) ‘logic’

Flusser on writing-based thought• Since the invention and proliferation of the alphabet, literal thought

(one-dimensional) has superseded numerical thought (two-dimensional)

• This is also the case in a world that since many centuries has been dominated by a scientific rationality: in academic courses graphs, pictues, tables and formulae are still situated within alphabetic texts

• It is only with the advent and proliferation of digital media that a non-linear logic might become culturally dominant.

• Just like an analysis of typewriting disclosed what the gesture of writing was all about, we need an analysis of the ‘gesture of computing’.

• Reveals new possibilities for generating thoughts, viz. zero-dimensional thought

Post-history• Alphabetic writing is the basis of the very idea that we are

historical beings• In pre-alphabetic times there was only ‘history’ in the

sense that people made monuments (inscriptions, meant to be remembered and considered)

• Alphabet-based thought produces documents (notations): the writer/reader is forced to jump from one word to the other, and so a sense of historical progress originates for the first time

• When alphabetic writing becomes obsolete, we might perhaps for the first time forgo the idea that it is our place in history which should guide us in how we live our lives

Post-history

• ‘We no longer imagine that we are in chains (for example chains of causality, or in a bustle of laws and regulations), and that freedom is the effort to break those chains, but rather that we are immersed in an absurd chaos of contingencies, and that freedom is the attempt to give this chaos shape and meaning. (This reshaping of the question “freedom from what” into “freedom for what” is extraordinarily characteristic for the rupture in our thinking.’

• This concerns not so much a transition to a post-historical era, but the coming into being of post-post-historical conditions.

Flusser & Stiegler

• Like Flusser Stiegler endorses a techno-centric point of viewi.e. a non-heideggerian perspective on technology: we cannot decide on the basis of our proper human capabilities how (and if) we should use technologies, it is rather the use of particular technologies that decides what we, as human beings, are

• Contrary to Flusser Stiegler argues that today we should oppose any disconnection between technology and history and, moreover, that this is the true calling of education.

Stiegler: external memory• In our own constitution as subjects we are dependent upon the

use of historically contingent technologies• Technologies = concrete objects (pen, mug, shovel) and practices

related to them (writing, drinking wine, shoveling coal) are in and of themselves memories: individual people are born and die, but acquired skill and knowledge are stored IN technological objects/practices (‘hypomnemata’) themselves

• This technological memory ≠ an internal, phylogenetic memory (DNA of the ‘phylos’ homo sapiens)= an external, epiphylogenetic memory.

• E.g.: memory is not in writings (Homer, the Bible, etc.), writing itself is a memory.

• The human condition is a prosthetic condition

Stiegler: (trans)individuation• Subjectivity is not something that is always already there• There are no subjects or individuals, only processes of individuation

(Simondon) or of becoming-subject• We constitute ourselves by using (particular) technologies that

necesarrily have a history: when we learn to master a concrete technology we always continue a line that precedes our own existence:Individuation = co-individuation (with others/older generation) = trans-individuation (with history)

• Conservatism, not for the sake of conservation, but for the sake of the coming into being of the new (Arendt)(trans-/co-)individuation = transformation

Stiegler: short- and longcircuiting

• There are fundamentally two different ways to relate to one and the same technology that is constitutive for our subject-constitution.

• LONG-CIRCUITING: to appropriate the whole history that lies at the basis of the technology we use, by being co-producers and co-constructors

• SHORT-CIRCUITING: to use the same technology in such a way that the proces of (trans-) individuation comes to a halt (= ‘proletarization’)

Stiegler: short- and longcircuiting

The need to materially draw squares is not a redundant step in acquiring geometrical insight . Neither is the retaking of a whole set of axioms and definitions on the basis of which this insight is constructed.↔ current tendency to just ‘learn’ this theorem to apply it to solve problems

Stiegler: short- and longcircuiting• Analogously, in order to be able to write one necesarilly

has to go through a long, demanding and tedious phase of learning to master calligraphy.

• What then about typewriting (keyboard)?- It is not in itself a short-circuited activity, as long as we first learn to write and then learn to type (which demands also quite some effort)- It only becomes short-circuited when we use this technology without any productive contribution (and without any knowledge of the hardware that makes it possible). Then our ‘writing capacity’ is fully delegated to the machine.

Stiegler: short- and longcircuiting• Similarly, we can only really read because we also can

write: reading is only possible on the condition that we potentially could have written the text we read↔ watching a film: we delegate the reading/decoding to the DVD-player

• Reading can be either long-circuited or short-circuited: ‘when you are reading a book, you individuate yourself by reading this book because reading a book is to be transformed by the book. If you are not transformed by the book, you are not reading the book – you believe that you are reading’

Stiegler: technology as pharmakon• All technologies are pharmaka: one and the same object

(and the practices related to it) can be used as a cure or as a poison, i.e. it might as well contribute to (trans)individuation and transformation (through long-circuiting) as to proletarization (through short-circuiting)

• THUS: technocentrism, but no technodeterminism. It is not the technology as such that univocally promotes or distorts the possibilty for individual and collective transformation↔ CARR, The Shallows: internet technologies as such transform and distort our critical-intellectual capacities and make impossible any attentive reading

Stiegler: technology as pharmakon• Because every technology has a pharmakon-character, it can be

abused and exploited, particularly by cultural industries (programming industries)

• Therefore every society needs an educational system (programming instution), that embodies the responsibility/care the older generation takes for the younger and that is willing to fight a constant battle against the possible misuse of technologies

• This was the case in Ancient Greece, the craddle of the school ….The institution called ‘skholè’ was not in the first place invented as an organized way to access the knowledge of writing, but precisely as a system of ‘therapy’, i.e. a system that took care for the young generation and that fought a constant battle against the possible misuse of the technology of writing (Kambouchner, Meirieu, Stiegler, 2012, pp. 20-21)

‘The school of the future’• And this still holds true today in relation to digital

technologies • The very technologies that make collaborative, democratic

and emancipatory production processes possible, like search engines, video-sharing websites, on-line encyclopedia, but also wireless connectivity and GPS-locating systems, are used in such a way that they become the means of our own subordination to the laws of a consumerist economy

• The question is not to use or not to use digital technologies, but to prevent the young to become proletarized consumers. Here we should put our faith in the school of the future.

‘The school of the future’• We should learn to use these technologies in such a way that

the new generation gets the opportunity to continue the process of transindividuation

• Plea for digital literacy: learn to use, keyboards and touchscreens, but also wordprocessors and search engines, just like we have learned to write properly (i.e. within long circuits of transindividuation)→ ‘writing’ is a paradigm for understanding the role of education

• The young generation should master the grammar of the digital – literally. The ‘gramma’ is a ‘line drawn’, which is always the continuation of a line that already exists. The task of the future school is therefore a fully historical one

Stiegler vs. AgambenAnyhow, there is no point in taking a Luddite attitude towards digital technologies and therefore Stiegler criticizes Agamben when he writes:

‘It would probably not be wrong to define the extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses. […] we could say that today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus. In what way, then, can we confront this situation, what strategy must we follow in our everyday hand-to-hand struggle with apparatuses?’

Stiegler vs. Agamben• Just like Heidegger Agamben appears to be a

technophobic, who doesn’t understand that technologies are pharmaka :‘then it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it "in the right way”. Those who continue to promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the media apparatus in which they are captured’.

• Agamben thus seems to believe that we should emancipate ourselves from digital technologies, rather than seek for emancipation within digital conditions. Only when we escape this captivation, we will become free again and live an authentic life.

Agamben vs. Stiegler• I believe that Stiegler’s reading of Agamben is completely

incorrect and that he doesn’t make the best of an Agambenian philosophy of technology

• Moreover, it might be doubted whether the true Heideggerian is not so much Agamben (because of his so called technophobia), but Stiegler himself:After all, central to his argument is that we should deal with technology in a proper way and that we (or better: the school) should prevent improper usesThis proper use is defined as keeping a connection with history (continuing the line). In the end, Stiegler abandons his radical technocentrist perspective in favor of a very traditionalist view on education which decides what are good and bad (uses of) technologies

Agamben vs. Stiegler

“There is no correct use”

• Stiegler interprets this as : for a technophobics like Agamben “there can only be incorrect use”

• But perhaps something else is at stake: the whole idea that we can oppose correct and incorrect (proper and improper) uses presupposes something that no longer has meaning under present conditions, viz. the idea that we have to relate to history in order to guide our individual and communal existence= Flusser’s post-post-historical condition

Agamben/Flusser vs. Stiegler

• Instead of looking at what an incorrect use of the digital does no longer allow for and ask the school to take preventive measures to guarantee correct use (Stiegler) ,

• we might equally look affirmatively to what the use as such of zero-dimensional technologies does imply

• … even if the implication is that it leads to a disconnection from history and to a form of existence that elbows out established notions of subjectivity

Agamben/Flusser vs. Stiegler

• Analogous to the way in which an analysis of mechanical writing disclosed something about text-based thought,

• a phenomenology of digital gestures might grant the possibility to come to terms with a new and previously unimaginable form-of-life, which is entirely post-post-historical.

• Only then will it be possible to ‘to bring [technologies] back to a possible common use’, to use Agamben’s affirmative phraseology.