In Conversation: Daniel Ross and Ryan Bishop on Bernard Stiegler’s Internation
Ryan Bishop
Image: Bernard Stiegler. Source: Ars Industrialis.
The discussion between me and Daniel Ross is entitled ‘Technics, Time and the Internation: Bernard Stiegler’s Thought’ (Open Access), a discussion in which Ross deftly delineates some of the many ways in which Stiegler’s Technics and Time series anticipates, informs and develops ideas addressed in the Internation collaborative and interdisciplinary project. Ross is Stiegler’s longtime collaborator and translator into English, including the years leading up to and including the emergence of the Internation, with Ross playing an important role in that project’s first major statement Bifurquer - Il n’y a pas d’alternative. (France: Editions Les Liens Qui Libèrent, 2020 and forthcoming in English with Open Humanities Press). The discussion concentrates on Stiegler’s conceptualization of ‘protentionality’, hope and care for a world confronted by climate crises, entropy and computational economic reconfigurations of work, economy and imaginations for futural possibilities. All of these ideas had their initial genesis in Stiegler’s early works and developed further in his writings over the decades as well as in his many educational and collaborative endeavours.
By way of introduction to the project, The Internation Collective responds to the UN initiative to address the growing gaps between the goals of the Paris Agreement and actual greenhouse gas emission reductions, gaps resulting from a lack of political and collective will and increasing apathy toward or distrust of large-scale solutions. The Collective and its larger project initiated a multi-scaled and complexly developed set of related strategies and technics to address climate issues. These intend to reconfigure political economies, as well as geopolitical imaginaries, by redefining ‘wealth’ as contributory rather than extractive, especially as wealth pertains to the Anthropocene and the munus (in terms of community, labor, knowledge, technology and the environment). ‘Threatened in totality as it is by the Anthropocene’, Stiegler argues, ‘wealth takes on a new meaning: we can no longer use ‘‘wealth’’ to refer to anything except what will allow us to overcome the strictly eschatological limits of contemporary economic development.’ Internation Collective is comprised of scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, artists, business leaders, designers, activists and doctors, and addresses the demands of climate crises through a macroeconomic model designed to combat entropy at various scales, from the bio-chemical to the planetary.
Further, the discussion with Ross foreshadows the special issue on The Internation project planned by Stiegler and myself for Theory, Culture & Society that will appear in the near future. The issue was intended to build on the Bifurquer volume, follow some of its implications and generate some challenges to ideas posed there. When Stiegler died in August 2020, we had outlined some of the main areas for the issue to address as well as compiling a list of potential contributors to the volume. Scholars who have generously agreed to contribute to the issue include Anne Alombert, Maan Barua, Benjamin Bratton, Michał Krykavski, Giuseppi Longo, Sunil Manghani, Jussi Parikka, Seiche (design collective), AbdouMaliq Simone, Daniel Ross and MayEe Wong.
Daniel Ross obtained his PhD from Monash University in 2002, with a thesis on Heidegger and politics. He has translated 11 books by Bernard Stiegler, most recently ‘Nanjing Lectures 2016–2019’ (Open Humanities Press, 2020). His own books include ‘Violent Democracy’ (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and ‘Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics’ (Open Humanities Press, 2021).
Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, and serves on the Theory, Culture & Society editorial board. His most recent book is ‘Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde’ (co-authored with John Beck, Duke University Press, 2020).
