January session - Stiegler

Our meeting in January will start with a look at Bernard Stiegler, French philosopher of technology and media, and how his ideas might fit with some of the ones we are groping towards. We will be helped in this by Patrick Crogan who is editing a special issue of Cultural Politics on the work of Stiegler.

I went to hear Stiegler talk recently at Goldsmiths, and there were a few key things (as far as I understood!) that resonated with some of our group thoughts from our first sesion.
- we all generate metadata unwittingly, and that this should be made a more conscious act. This fits with our thoughts from the first session, where we discussed how to make explicit the hidden algorithms in the software that surrounds us.
- something he said about the relationship between the individual and the collective, and transindividuation, and what takes place when describing the self as "I" , that echoed our brief discussion on the shifting boundaries between public/private and our sense of the private self.

So hopefully after our session in January I will understand it all somewhat better. The experience of listening to Stiegler without knowing his work was that like grasping at thin threads in the wind that I knew I sort of got but then they disappeared in my brain, hopefully to reappear at some point in the future. I have gone back over the notes I scribbled but they make little coherent sense - my task over xmas is to rewrite them and see if that helps. The other speakers were interesting too, and the final keynote was by artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, talking on his "Antimonuments and Subsculptures". Brilliant.