Stiegler Ecology

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Thanks to your pharmacy, my friend.
We do not see the environment that makes us see. The fish in the middle of the water does not see the water that surrounds it1. If the characteristic of the environment is first of all its oblivion2, Bernard Stiegler's work consisted then in giving to see this obviousness which is not seen anymore, that of a technical environment anthropologically constitutive.

His work, which is first and foremost in the philosophy of technology, has nevertheless had a considerable echo in what we will call, for want of a better term, "ecological thought". There is no paradox here for those who know that in France it is first and foremost the philosophy of techniques that nourishes ecological thought. To take two authors with whom Bernard Stiegler was not in dialogue, we need only think of Bruno Latour or Dominique Bourg to understand that the common point of all these ecological thoughts is to start from the technical question, understood here as that which subverts the dualism of nature and culture. But the divergences count here more than the similarities, because fundamentally only Bernard Stiegler has remained a philosopher of techniques until the end.

The following text aims to show that Bernard Stiegler, better than any other contemporary, embodies the French tradition of ecology of techniques. The specificity of this philosophy is to subvert dualisms (of the subject and the object, of nature and culture, of the living and the technical) by proposing an ecology that is not amputated from its technical condition of existence. Bernard Stiegler is one of the rare philosophers to have meditated on this abysmal evidence: the ecological question and the technological question are one and the same.

Bernard Stiegler has this in common with Peter Sloterdijk, for example, that he thinks in the same movement the two meanings of the concept of environment, namely the biological Umwelt and the technological medium. This is why his philosophy does not separate the field of media ecology or the ecology of attention, and the field of environmental ecology proper, the one that is preoccupied, even forced, by the IPCC reports.

Bernard Stiegler's "milieu
Human beings are artificial and technical in the sense that they do not find their being inside themselves but in the middle of the prostheses that they make, that they invent3.
The self is not itself simply in itself, but originally out of itself. The self is in the middle of "itself", that is to say of its objects and prostheses, middle which, of the blow, is not only itself, but its other4.

We know it, the difficulty is to think in the middle, or to begin in the middle without wanting to go back further5. Bernard Stiegler knew it, he who thought the temporality from the human as defect of origin, which is also a defect of beginning. The movement of the origin does not lead from the interior nature to the exterior fall, and that, one could say, because the human-technical is born in the middle of the interior and the exterior.

It is in prison that Bernard Stiegler has subverted the dualism of inside and outside:

"Deprived of the 'external milieu', my 'internal milieu' takes on that immeasurable relief and weight that mystics and more generally ascetics seek. But it is also and just as much in its absence, and in the most intimate and secret hollow of the "interior environment", that the "exterior environment" is constituted as irreducible - and I thus experimented a Husserlian lesson [...] With the passing of the days, I discovered that there is no interior environment, but only, remaining here, in my cell, and in their mnemonic form, in a way in hollow, the remainders, the faults, the artifices in which the world consists, and by which it finds its consistency. I was no longer living in a world, but in the absence of a world, and that presented itself there not only by default, but as what is always lacking, and as a default that is necessary - rather than as a lack. [...]. For finally, the external milieu being suspended and interrupted, being lacking, there was in reality no internal milieu, but its reduction to an external milieu itself totally reduced to the minimum of what remained of it in my memory [...]. For the world in which the external environment consists had not disappeared totally in its very exteriority (otherwise I would have become insane): I reconstituted it, every day, through what, much later, I was to name the tertiary retentions, that is to say the hypomnesic traces. This exteriority was irreducible, which means that I could not do without it (the interior is nothing without the exterior, the difference between the two is an illusion - obviously necessary, and even insurmountable), but it was in my power to reconstitute it. Such were my freedom, my intimacy and my secret. Very quickly, in fact, I had the presence of mind to start reading and writing, secreting around me an intimate hypomnesic environment, and yet already in the process of becoming public, at the same time secret, encrypted, and yet already publishable: I constituted a world that was going to become, over the years, and this well beyond this period of incarceration, my philosophy.6

That the topological ambiguity proper to the concept of milieu is exposed here, in this text where his secret is made public, is highly significant. It is locked up inside a cell that he understood that his inner environment is outside. In the same way that any secret secretes, any memory, however intimate it may be, has technique as its medium. Bernard Stiegler's originality consists in showing the temporal dimension of this "man's environment", originally understood as spatial. The general system of tertiary retentions forms the "historical-technical milieu" of consciousness, and this technical milieu is that by which one adopts a past world that has not been lived7.

The Stieglerian "milieu" is thus indissolubly temporal and spatial and signifies at the same time the defect of origin, that is to say the origin that is always already in the middle of the beginning and the end, of the past and the future, and this movement that, starting from the milieu, designates as well the interiorization of the exterior, as the exteriorization of the interior.

It is indeed from this "half-place" or third-term, neither phusis nor tekhnè (like the simondonian techno-geographic milieu), neither inside nor outside (like the Leroi-Gourhanian milieu of exteriorization, or like Lotka's exo-somatization), that Bernard Stiegler works. With Leroi-Gourhan he thinks a process of externalization of Leroi-Gourhan (externalization without preliminary interiority, since that one exists only by this one8), and with Simondon he thinks a process of individuation without preliminary environment, because the individual and the environment (co)birth at the same time9.

Without going into the details of his reading here, let us underline that neither Leroi-Gourhan, nor Simondon would have spoken about "dissociated environment" which is a concept proper to Stiegler10. This idea of a dissociation with the technical environment, already found in Georges Friedmann, which will be exacerbated by Jacques Ellul, will be in a way completed by Stiegler for whom the current hyper-industrial tendency leads inexorably to the dissociation with the environment (by effect of disruption), and thus to madness and death. However, let's not misunderstand him; unlike Ellul, who was not frankly a "pharmacologist", Stiegler believed that the marriage of industry and ecology was possible. From this point of view, if Bernard Stiegler is singular in the field of political ecology, it is because he participates as well in its technophile tendency, as in its techno-critical tendency, to subvert the one and the other by reconciling them. The concept of "technical environment" was forged in 1945, not only by André Leroi-Gourhan, but also, and independently, by Georges Friedmann11. Although the latter is not cited by Stiegler, it is indeed his reflection that he extended, but from the point of view of cultural industries rather than Fordist and Taylorian industries12. Friedmann thinks the worker's environment in the industrial society, Stiegler thinks the consumer's environment in the hyper-industrial society, and both criticize the idea of adaptation at the origin of the bad comprehension of the relationship of the man to his technical environment13.

If Ellul was the one who renounced Friedmann's "technical milieu" in order to dramatize the autonomy of the "technical system", we can say of Stiegler that he was in a way the one who, aware of the structural entropy of the technical system, tried to preserve the technique as a milieu, under the name of contributive economy14.

From the point of view of the philosophy of biology, and as Canguilhem had seen it well, the concept of milieu comes to accompany the critique of the scheme of adaptation or adaptationism. The Stieglerian distinctions between adaptation/adoption, skills/knowledge, use/practice, but also employment/work all relate in some way to the critique of this scheme. The critique of technological solutionism is only an avatar of it; and this critique is obvious for who knows that all technique is pharmacological.

The two ecologies. Situating Bernard Stiegler
Twenty years ago, Bernard Stiegler was identified as a digital thinker. Today, he is identified as a thinker of the ecological crisis; and this should not surprise us, for he embodies what we might call a philosophy for the technocene. When we wrote the vocabulary of Ars Industrialis15 with him, Bernard Stiegler was not yet using the vocabulary of entropy and the entropocene16 ; we were talking about the "industrial ecology of the mind". Ars Industrialis had not yet become the Association of Friends of the Thunberg Generation, although the theme of intergenerational care was already at the heart of its thinking17.

Perhaps there are ultimately two ways to be an ecologist: to care for the Earth we leave to our children, or to care for the children we leave to our Earth.18

Bernard Stiegler's writings adopt the second way.

We have tried to show that ecology is divided into two schools: that of nature and that of technology, and even more fundamentally, that of the environment and that of the milieu.19 However, it is by inheriting this school of thought that we are able to make a difference. Now, it is by inheriting Bernard Stiegler that this distinction seemed obvious to us. The ecological tradition in which Stiegler is rooted is not an ecology of nature but an ecology of technique (and thus of mind and culture); it is not an ecology of the environment but of the milieu of the mind, both internal and external. It is thus an ecology of the technical environment.

It is indeed the new understanding of the technical milieu, which we have just outlined, which leads Stiegler to an ecology of the mind (which is not directly inspired by Bateson, without separating itself from him, and which echoes the ecology of the media, without referring to it directly, however)20. To use the title of one of his articles, the movement of his thought is indeed the one that leads from libidinal economy to the ecology of the mind21. As we can read very clearly in the entry "ecology of the mind" in the Ars Industrialis Vocabulary, for Bernard Stiegler, it was above all a question of making people understand that the ecology of nature, or rather that of the environment, is only one of the dimensions of a general ecology of environments (natural, technical, institutional, symbolic, etc.). From this point of view, he was the direct heir of the "three ecologies" of Félix Guattari, as Anne Alombert22 has very well seen.

The ecology of the spirit indeed conditions the resolution of the problems of natural ecology [...] [This is why] the real question of ecology is not that of the energy of subsistence (depletion of fossil resources), but that of the energy of existence (depletion of libidinal energy)23.
Let us summarize. Like Guattari, Stiegler defends an ecology of the subject rather than of the environment, and is part of what Eric Hörl has called the new ecological paradigm24 (after Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon and Friedmann) and, on the other hand, political ecology proper (that of Felix Guattari, who detached ecology from environmentalism, and that of Georgescu-Roegen, who put entropy back at the heart of the economy).

Bernard Stiegler, who nonetheless inherits Guattari's ecosophy in many respects25 , opposes precisely his abstract conception of the machine (or non-simondonian conception) which, according to him, has "the same shortcomings as the abstract machine of the cognitivists26 ". If the dialogue with Guattari's ecosophy was done, if the dialogue with Nancy's ecotechnics was implicit, although Stiegler did not choose the phenomenological path27 , it remains that situating Stiegler in the field of political ecology is not easy28. His silence on André Gorz - to whom he reproached the title of one of his last books (L'immatériel, 2003) on the pretext that the knowledge economy is not immaterial - is surprising, since it was Gorz who was the first to systematically associate ecological struggles with those of free software.

Why does Stiegler refuse to take the path of degrowth that was that of André Gorz, whom he does not quote, as well as that of Georgescu-Roegen, whom he mobilizes extensively? In our view, the concept of "mechroissance" or "anti-entropic growth" is not clear in its opposition to "degrowth "29. Not only is the enemy the same, but the methods converge: André Gorz, too, was fighting against the dissociation of producer and consumer by working on open technologies.

The ecology of Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler's ecology does not distinguish ecology from economy. For Stiegler, the economy (of contribution) and ecology (of individuation) finally participate in the same milieu - milieu of a thought also understood as "technique of the self".

Drawing on a concept dear to Yuk Hui, we can summarize his oecology as follows: the only way to fight against entropy (and thus against the destruction of biodiversity) is to work towards more technodiversity. Here, the ecological fight and the fight for free software or for the reappropriation of the natural and/or technical commons come together. If Bernard Stiegler has been so important, well beyond the philosophical academic framework, it is precisely because he has been an actor of this convergence of struggles under the name of contributive economy. It is not by chance that Michel Bauwens and so many other essential actors of the ecological and digital transition have collaborated with Bernard Stiegler. It is no coincidence that contributory models have resonated with commons activists, such as Maïa Dereva, from whom we borrow the illustration above.

The contributory economy, which is the nodal point of her work, is also what needs to be extended and clarified30. From our point of view, the connivance between the contributive economy and the economy of the commons, as defended for example by the economist Gaël Giraud, is very great. Just as one should not separate the natural commons from the cultural commons, the material commons from the immaterial commons,31 so Bernard Stiegler never separated the care of objects from the care of subjects. For Stiegler, knowledge is practiced and the different types of knowledge constitute ways for subjects to take care of their environments. The practices of knowledge are always practices of care of the common (technical) environment.

It was Bernard Stiegler who popularized contributive research and who tried to territorialize digital studies. Any ecological thought must be anchored somewhere, at the risk of dying of its own accord, because no off-the-ground thought can claim to be ecological. Bernard Stiegler understood this well, as he failed, but resolutely tried to transform the territory of Plaine Commune (where he did not live), into a "Contributing Learning Territory".
This last concept, like so many other Stieglerian tools, is now part of the ecological culture.

Conclusion

Bernard Stiegler's general ecology is the other name of his general organology, which is the heart of his philosophy. It goes without saying that these lines have not sought to summarize it but rather to situate it. Its immense merit is to be general, and therefore allergic to "environmentalism".

If it is general, it is because it deploys political technology in all its dimensions, including its scholastic dimension - for it is indeed to the new generation that he was thinking when he left it. It goes without saying that the preceding lines have not sought to summarize Bernard Stiegler's ecology, but rather to situate it. We will leave the final word to another friend, Maël Montévil, who expresses in this same issue the resolutely tragic sense of Bernard Stiegler's ecology, which, as we have understood, is anything but a plea for green tech, but rather a never-ending quest, an experimental and situated quest, for common tech and/or contributive knowledge.

For Stiegler, fighting entropy does not mean minimizing the production of entropy on earth, and even less defeating entropy, as this is impossible because of the second principle: this struggle can only be a tragic one, as opposed to physical optimization and the computational utopias inspired by it in economics.32

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footnote:

1 As Aristotle already noted, On the Soul, 423ab.
2 For Bernard Stiegler, the (hypomnesic) environment is what gives rise to anamnesis. And if this technical milieu is forgotten, it is first of all because it is the very condition of memory, and more generally of temporality.
3 Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher par accident, Paris, Galilée, 2004, p. 45.
4 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, 3. La question du cinéma et la question du mal être, Paris, Galilée, 2001, p. 84.
5 We echo here this quotation from Wittgenstein: "It is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not to try to go further back" (Wittgenstein, De la certitude, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, translated by Jacques Fauve, § 471, p. 114).
6 Bernard Stiegler, Passer à l'acte, Paris, Galilée, 2009, pp. 38-42.
7 "Thinking as I try to do from the concepts of epiphylogenesis, where consciousness is a form of life, i.e. of movement as decision, and of tertiary retention, where memory is thus always already hypnometically constituted, and, with it, not only the consciousness of which it is the memory, but also the unconscious, is to try to think the consciousness in so far as it is essentially constituted by the time of the consciousness itself, constituted by the tertiary retentions in so far as they form each time a world that is also a historico-technical milieu of the mind", Philosopher par accident, Paris, Galilée, 2004, p. 115. 115
8 "The essential fact, it is this exteriorization, which does not precede any interiority - but which on the other hand, gives immediately place to an interiorization, that is to say which is always at the same time interiorization and exteriorization", Philosopher by accident, Paris, Galilée, 2004, p. 54.
9 The Stieglerian environment is inherited from its crossed reading of the tendency (technique) of Leroi-Gourhan and the concretization (technique) of Simondon. Cf. La technique et le temps, 1. La faute d'Épiméthée, Paris, Galilée, 1994, First part, chapter I, notably, p. 73 and p. 77 for the confrontation of the Leroi-Gourhanian milieu and the Simondonian milieu.
10 If the "associated medium" is a concept borrowed from Gilbert Simondon, the "dissociated medium" was forged by Bernard Stiegler. But according to us and strictly speaking, a dissociated environment does not exist, or else it is called "environment". Moreover, to see everywhere beings dissociated from their environments and thus from their desires (this supposed absence of epoch by which, he characterized our epoch), it is to minimize all the concrete actions of struggles and reappropriations of this one.
11 On the concept of "technical environment" one will consult Seven studies on the man and the technique, Paris, Gonthier, 1966.
12 Georges Friedmann wrote: "The detailed physiological and psychotechnical analysis of the work to the chain (taken as example) shows in this one first of all a technical fact, through the technical fact a psychological fact, through the psychological fact, a social fact" (Georges Friedmann, Human problems of the industrial machinism, Paris, Gallimard, 1946, p. 357). In the same way, any technical fact is for Stiegler a psycho-social fact.
13 On the critique of adaptation, which transforms the singular into the particular, cf. for example, Constituting Europe, 2. Le motif européen, Paris, Galilée, 2005, p. 71 ff.
14 To be an ecologist in the manner of Bernard Stiegler is, on the one hand, to take note of the (bio-psycho-social) toxicity of techniques, and on the other hand, to admit that this toxicity is avoidable, because techniques or pharmaka can be reinvested with a knowledge that fights against their addictive automation.
15 Victor Petit, "Vocabulary of Ars Industrialis," in Bernard Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, Paris, Flammarion, 2013, pp. 369-441.
16 At the end of his life, Bernard Stiegler was essentially driven by one concept, that of entropy, to which he gave a general meaning that went beyond thermodynamics. He was inspired both by the mathematician Alfred Lotka, who showed that the production of knowledge is the very condition of the struggle against entropy for this technical form of life that is human life, and by the economist Goergescu-Roegen, who adopted the same point of view by maintaining that it is the economy (the bio-economy) that has the function of limiting entropy, by valuing the knowledge of the living. His goal was to put an end to the economic war by revalorizing effective knowledge that fights against entropy in all its forms (as well as knowledge that fights against screen addiction as those that fight against excessive concreting and energy-consuming urbanism).

17 Throughout his work, the question of memory and its politics, of education and thus of intergenerational care is omnipresent. This is why his association for a policy of the mind (or a responsible industrial policy commensurate with the crisis of attention that we are experiencing) has become the Association of Friends of the Thunberg Generation (or a responsible industrial policy commensurate with the generalized ecological crisis that we are experiencing).
18 "When the citizen-ecologist claims to ask the most disturbing question by asking: What kind of world are we going to leave to our children, he avoids asking this other, really disturbing question: to which children are we going to leave the world?" Jaime Semprun, The Abyss is Repopulating, 1997.
19 On these distinctions, cf. V. Petit, B. Guillaume, "We have never been wild. Towards an ecology of technical milieu", in B. Bensaude-Vincent, X. Guchet, S. Loeve (eds.), French Philosophy of Technology, Springer, 2018, pp. 81-100; V. Petit, "Eco-design. Design de l'environnement ou design du milieu?", Sciences du Design, n°2, PUF, 2015, pp. 31-39.
20 "Let us call ecology of the spirit a rigorous thought of the medium of the spirits and as associated medium where occur processes of psychic and collective individuation in intrinsic relation to the technical system, itself individuating and configuring the conditions of access to the pre-individual funds of all individuation. 
Such an ecology of the mind is a thought that posits that the mind, as a process of individuation, has a milieu, that this milieu evolves, and that it is originally technical - from the carved flint to the silicon of the computers, passing by the biblical of the Holy Spirit. The spirit needs a support, a "medium". This "medium", which has a history, is called the mass media system when, through communication technologies, it becomes the instrument of an industrial activity whose lineaments emerge at the end of the 19th century, while an informational machinism of the mind develops in the 20th century, where software, expert systems, search engines, networks and real-time computing devices form the information technology system. The "convergence" in progress is the integration of these two systems (mass media and digital computing technologies).
There is no spirit without medium (without intermediary), and this one is what preserves the memory as organization of the inorganic matter" (Bernard Stiegler, Constituting Europe, 2, The European motive, Paris, Galilée, 2005, pp.103-104).
21 Bernard Stiegler, "From the libidinal economy to the ecology of the mind. Interview with Frédéric Neyrat ", Multitudes, Multitudes 2006/1 (n° 24) pp. 85-95.
22 Alombert, Anne. "What energy transitions for the three ecologies? Entropies, écologies, économies dans l'ère Entropocène ", 17 June 2021, Cahiers COSTECH number 4.
23 https://arsindustrialis.org/vocabulaire-ecologie-de-l-esprit
24 E. Hörl and G. Plas, "The new ecological paradigm. Pour une écologie générale des médias et des techniques", Multitudes, 2012/4 (n° 51), pp. 74-85]. Bernard Stiegler thus belongs to a tradition that crosses on the one hand the philosophy of the technical milieu and/or technical culture On the link between "technical milieu" and "technical culture", see V. Beaubois, V. Petit, "Design as opening technology. Perspectives on "design" in France (1951-1984)", in B. Bensaude-Vincent, X. Guchet, S. Loeve (eds.), French Philosophy of Technology, Springer, 2018, pp. 345-358.
25 "Beyond interpersonal relationships, there are also relationships with the technological environment. Subjectivity is not only human. It is also machinic. For me, there is no border between man, society, technè, the appropriation of the environment, the constitution of existential territories" (Guattari, F. What is Ecosophy?, Paris, Éditions Lignes 2013 [1992], p. 332). 
"I would qualify the political object as ecosophical. [It is] an object with four dimensions: the traditional material, economic flows, the machines or ecosystems that concern them, the universes of values (political, moral) and the existential territories. [...]. The properly intellectual task is to think the old problem of technique" (ibid., pp. 337-338).
26 "Interview with Bernard Stiegler," Rue Descartes, vol. 91 (n°1), 2017, pp. 119-140, here p. 122.

27 On ecotechnie, cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, Paris, Métailié, 2000. For Derrida, this ecotechnie constitutes the singularity of Nancy, "the taking into account of the technique and the technical exappropriation from the "phenomenological" threshold of the proper body" Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris, Galilée, 2000, p. 70).
28 It is difficult to delimit the field of the ecology of the techniques, which oscillates between an "ecological history and economy" (Jouvenel), "ecological techniques" (Gorz), and a "machinic ecology" (Guattari). Each author gives birth to a different and still relevant thought: Jouvenel would lead us to the "circular economy", Gorz to the makers and their "open technology", and Guattari to the "ecology of the media" and accelerationism.
29 On degrowth and its politics, see Timothy Parrique. The political economy of degrowth. Economics and Finance. Stockholms universitet, 2019.
30 Contributive economy is found in my vocabulary as well as in Anne Alombert's (here and here). Originally, the contributory economy was inspired by the system of intermittent workers in the entertainment industry and the free software model. It is based on the valuation and remuneration of anti-entropic activities, also called "contributory" or "enabling" activities. The latest conceptualization efforts are those of the capacitation devices (see Bifurquer : il n' y a pas d'alternative, Paris, Les liens qui libèrent, 2020, chapter 3 " Économie contributive, processus territoriaux de capacitation et nouvelles modalités comptables "). The concept has not evolved much, but it has become more precise. Of course, the implementation of a "contributory income" is still an idea, but the "empowerment devices" seem to have passed the stage of experimentation.
31 https://www.april.org/faire-atterrir-les-communs-numeriques-lionel-maurel-cerisy.
32 Montévil, Maël. "Science and the Entropocene. Around "Qu'appelle-t-on panser?" by Bernard Stiegler," March 10, 2021, Cahiers COSTECH number 4.