Educational Philosophy and Theory

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The problem of now: Bernard Stiegler and the

student as consumer

Kristy Forrest

To cite this article: Kristy Forrest (2020) The problem of now: Bernard Stiegler and
the student as consumer, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52:4, 337-347, DOI:
10.1080/00131857.2019.1654856

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EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
2020, VOL. 52, NO. 4, 337–347
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1654856

The problem of now: Bernard Stiegler and the student

as consumer
Kristy Forrest
Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The student as consumer has emerged as a common motif and point of Received 30 November 2018
contestation in educational philosophy over the past two decades, as Revised 19 June 2019
part of the critique of the neoliberal educational reform agenda that fol- Accepted 28 July 2019
lowed Lyotard’s (1984) mapping of the postmodern condition. In add-
KEYWORDS
ition, the consumer-orientated student has assumed a problematic Bernard Stiegler;
presence in secondary-school classrooms and higher education institu- proletarianisation; student
tions, a fact that has led to the general lament for the dehumanisation as consumer;
of education under a market logic. Expanding upon these narratives of deproletarianisation
‘loss’, Bernard Stiegler’s account of the student as consumer builds
upon the Lyotardian view to reveal the neurological, generational and
psychical implications of what he terms the ‘battle for intelligence’,
which is a result of the proletarianisation of knowledge via the impos-
ition of marketing technologies on the psyche of the youth. This leads
not only to a consumer mind-set co-opting education, but a process of
‘short-circuiting’ disrupting the educative process itself. This article will
consider Stiegler’s apocalyptic vision of youth malaise in comparison to
the previous notion of students as consumers in the classical and
Marxist narratives he revises. It will then outline the new challenges this
poses to contemporary educators, as well as the possibility of translat-
ing his utopian call to action to pedagogical practice, both of which
constitute the ’problem of now’.

The problem of now

In his reflections on Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment essay, Michel Foucault identified the most
‘certain philosophical problem’ as ‘the problem of the present time and what we are at this pre-
sent moment’. Paraphrasing Kant, he advocates a critical inquiry of the present as a means of
understanding ourselves, driven by the questions: What’s happening now? What’s happening to
us? (Foucault, 1982). Writing in the postwar era, the Marxist critic Ernst Bloch saw the problem of
now in a utopian sense, defined by the ontological condition of ‘Not Yet’, or the tensions
between our present that is always latent with potentialities which cannot be realised as the
material conditions do not yet exist (Bloch, 1954).
In our neoliberal context, both Bloch and Foucault’s challenge is taken up by Bernard Stiegler,
who posits a current ‘crisis’ in education (at both the familial and formal level) due to the seduc-
tive and corruptive power of marketing technologies over the psyche of the youth, while simul-
taneously seeking an optimistic means of resistance. Using language laced with dystopian
imagery, Stiegler’s philosophical treatise of adolescence at risk parallels similar fearful accounts

CONTACT Kristy Forrest kforrest@stcatherines.net.au

ß 2019 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
338 K. FORREST

offered by cultural commentators outside of academia in the popular press. In March 2016, TIME
magazine devoted an entire issue to the anxiety and depression of the ‘Modern American
Teenager’ with the by-line ‘the kids are not alright’ (Schrobsdorff 2016). Meanwhile, in The
Atlantic in 2017, psychologist Jean Twenge (2017) asked ‘have smartphones destroyed a gener-
ation?’ before claiming that ‘it is not an exaggeration to describe “igen”’ as being on the brink of
the worst mental health crisis in decades. This again was echoed by cultural guru Simon Simek (2016)
who described ‘an entire generation who has access to an addictive, numbing chemical called dopa-
mine through cell phones and social media’ in a video viewed over 10 million times on YouTube.
Thus, it seems that Stiegler’s warnings are simply joining a popular chorus of despair and
urgency. After all, he shares the common refrain of technology and consumption as spiritually
toxic, while also bemoaning the colossal tasks of educators faced with teaching an entire gener-
ation whose attention has been co-opted by marketing. Yet Stiegler, while mirroring the con-
cerns of his cultural contemporaries, offers a unique diagnosis of modern life as a social and
economic disjuncture from previous eras through a combination of Platonic and Marxist con-
cepts, which challenge educators to both critique and restore. As a point of focus, this article will
consider the figure at the centre of the education debate, the student as consumer. The con-
sumer-orientated student has not only assumed a problematic presence in secondary-school
classrooms and higher education institutions, but also emerged as a common motif and point of
contestation in educational philosophy over the past two decades as part of the critique of the
neoliberal reform agenda that followed Lyotard’s (1984) mapping of the postmodern condition.
Stiegler’s account links the consumer mind-set in education to a general proletarianisation of
knowledge, which leads to a process of ‘short-circuiting’ that disrupts the educative purpose as
part of a general ‘battle for intelligence’ that has neurological, generational and cultural implica-
tions. After outlining Stiegler’s vision of youth malaise in comparison to the Classical and Marxist
concepts of the student as consumer (which he, respectively, sits within and also revises) this art-
icle will finally consider the ‘problem of now’ in relation to Stiegler’s utopianism and current
pedagogical practice.

Educative purpose
Stiegler offers an emancipatory narrative of educative purpose, drawing on both Platonic and
Deweyan concepts in its focus on individualization and socialization for the purposes of civic
responsibility and maturation. In States of Shock (2015) and Taking Care of Youth and the
Generations (2010b) he connects the vocation of the education system as a whole to a line of
ancestral descent leading back to Classical and Enlightenment traditions of logos and the
Bildung, or the formation of attention as reason. Employing Freud’s concept of the psyche,
Stiegler explains the need to care for the juvenile psychic apparatus, through a process of trans-
mission of knowledge (as social and disciplinary competency) across generations.
In Freudian terms, knowledge is the formation and encoded accumulation of the reality prin-
ciple in its many forms, knowing how to live, what to do or how to think, or savoir vivre, faire
and theorique. The adult’s responsibility is the transmission of this intergenerational experience,
and thus education is a process of inherited internalization, or transindividuation. Within the edu-
cative relationship, teachers are concerned with the formation of attention that allows a student
to come into being, and orientate themselves in a temporal sense via a connection to the past
containing the sediments of previous generations (tertiary retentions) to the immediate and pre-
sent and past experiences (primary and secondary retentions) which in turn creates the possibil-
ity of a future (protentions). In this relationship, the child is a minor with ‘no access to the reality
principle’, who through a process of transmission with living ancestors (parents and teachers)
comes to interiorise the knowledge of successive generations which constitutes maturity.
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 339

A scholarly education creates what Stiegler calls ‘long circuits’ of transindividuation, where
objects of attention become objects of knowledge through disciplinary instruction and engage-
ment with tertiary retentions, which, preceding primary and secondary retention, constitutes the
world as this world. The student individuates themselves through the creation of new circuits,
which ultimately lead to what Stiegler posits as his utopian ideal: nobility of mind, or the free-
dom to ‘propel oneself beyond what exists … the faculty of projecting the objects of desires as
infinite’. Reason as freedom, to ‘critique, discern, analyse … to reinvent’ (Ars Industrialis, 2010) is
integral to social development, and the power of rational imagination and cultural memory is
mandatory for the projection of ideal objects, or protentions.

Consumerism as a disruptor to emancipation: Classical and Marxist criticisms

Philosophers who, like Stiegler, advocate a view of education as transformative practice have
traditionally spoken about the student as consumer in two broad senses. First, pedagogically, as
a passive recipient of knowledge who lacks agency (and thus critical and creative power) and
second, in a mercantile sense, as a paying client who seeks knowledge for instrumental, rather
than emancipatory or humanistic purposes. Plato posits education as a purposeful activity driven
by ontological care for the soul of the student, which is achieved via shared interest and inter-
generational connectivity. His criticism of the Sophists as intellectual mercenaries who ‘hunt the
wealthy’ privately to teach them the art of rhetoric was predicated on a notion of education aim-
ing for a ‘good’ that lay beyond worldly or base desires. An education in rhetoric was mere flat-
tery (as opposed to wisdom) and the Sophist as a paid teacher offered only the ‘semblance of
education’ (Plato, 2018). Plato’s notion of a teacher-merchant as inherently disruptive to the edu-
cative purpose of orientating minds via the elenchus is echoed in Dewey’s relegation of transac-
tive relationships between teachers and students as ‘non-social’. Existing on a ‘machine-like
plane with one another to get desired results’ (Dewey, 2008) they are prevented from the shar-
ing of purposes and communication of interests that is required for genuine social life, and thus
encounter each other in manner that is mis-educative.
Like Plato, Dewey also warns of mis-educative experiences masquerading as education. He is
especially wary of those that offer gratification but in reality promote the formation of a ‘slack
and careless attitude’, which through their disconnection, often generate ‘dispersive, disinte-
grated, centrifugal habits’. (Dewey, 2008). Similarly, for Plato, the paying student of rhetoric lived
a life akin to a gully bird, seeking only temporary pleasures which leaves him infirm and in a
state of discordance. Thus, when education is fragmented and discontinuous, or reduced to the
gratification of desires, it becomes ‘idle to talk of self-control’, and therein lies the danger.
Writing after World War II and its attendant hyper capitalism, poststructuralist and Marxist
criticism vividly describes the negation of educative ideals at the hands of corporate logic and
calculative rationality.
In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard (1984) explains how classical and modern traditions
legitimised themselves via appeals to grand narratives, such as the core tenets of the
Enlightenment. In contrast, the postmodern condition is characterised by its ‘incredulity towards
metanarratives’ and replaced instead by the logic of performativity, or the best ‘input and output
equation’. Under this logic, the acquisition of knowledge is no longer legitimised by reference to
‘the training of minds or even individuals’, and thus principals such as the Bildung are ‘becoming
obsolete’ (p. 4).
Replacing a relationship built on concernment for being is one that assumes the form taken
by producers and consumers of commodities. This exteriorisation of knowledge leads to a shift
in the form of value, as knowledge no longer exists for its own sake, but to be sold, consumed
and exchanged. Under this model, the purpose of higher education is to enable the best per-
formativity of the social system via the didactic teaching of the skills that are most in demand
340 K. FORREST

on the world market. As performativity has delegitimised the emancipation narrative (and dis-
semination of a mode of life) that previously defined the university’s purpose, students now seek
not ideals, but skills. As Lyotard writes, the professionalist student no longer asks ‘is it true?’ but
‘what use is it?’ and ‘is it efficient’? (p. 51)

Stiegler’s critique: Proletarianisation

I. Proletarianisaiton of the worker
Stiegler’s vision of the student as consumer sits comfortably within the traditional lines of criti-
cism outlined above. However, it also differs as Stiegler employs an expanded notion of Marx’s
concept of proletarianisation, tracing it from the worker, to the consumer and then finally to
cognition in general, which produces a doubly deprived student.
Stiegler traces proletarianisation back to Plato, and defines it as the exteriorisation of know-
ledge via technics. Hypomnesis is the process by which this occurs, through the use of memory
substitutes or externalisations (mnemotechnics) such as writing, machines or apparatus. This for-
malisation of individual or collective knowledge results in it ‘escaping’ the worker, so that it is no
longer theirs, and belongs to the apparatus itself. The opposite of this is amanesis, or embodied
knowledge, where one can recollect or remember the ‘truth of being’, which manifests in dia-
logic interaction without a reliance on mnemotechnics. In other words, the knowledge is embod-
ied in the manner of skilled craftsmen, or wise and mature person. For Stiegler, the history of
memory is analogous to the history of human knowledge, particularly the transfer of knowledge
over time and between generations. Grammatisation describes the history of the exteriorisation
of memory, the manner in which the ‘flows and continuities which weave our existence’ are dis-
cretised via technologies (Stiegler, 2015, p. 32). An example is the discretisation of speech in the
form of writing, or the gesture and movements of a producer in a machine or an app.
This first stage of Stiegler’s account of proletarianisation, of the worker, manifests in higher
education as knowledge acquisition being viewed as the means to an economic end. In
‘Fragments on Machines’, Marx (1973) describes how industrialisation, in transferring workers’
knowledge to a machine, reduced the worker’s activity to a ‘mere abstraction’. This, in turn leads
to a feeling of alienation, characterised by a loss of control over one’s working life and the
exploitation of worker’s energy (as pure, productive labour) for profit.
For many in higher education, this concept neatly explains the detachment currently experi-
enced by educators working in corporatised universities, where neoliberalism has resulted in the
commodification of their work and the disassociation from their civic or democratic educative
purpose (Giroux, 2013; McCarthy, Song, & Jayasuriya, 2017). The student consumer aims to pos-
ition themselves and their education within the dominant social order of the logic of the market
(Nordensnvard, 2011), while their mode of consumption is relational in that they regard them-
selves as on the receiving end of the distribution of goods, as ‘purchasers’ of knowledge. Their
‘consumer consciousness’ in this sense, relates to their need for a particular kind of satisfaction.
Ascribing a market value to their education, there is less interest in ‘being’ a learner as opposed
to ‘having’ the degree, as the ontological state is not marketable, unlike the qualification.
As proletariansied workers, academics write with a sense of urgency and distress at the supply
and demand model of higher education. The pressures on teachers and departments to rate
highly on quality measurement scales result in what Ball (2003) labels the ‘terrors of performativ-
ity’, while many lament the loss of the very thing that Lyotard predicted, which is the notion of
education as emancipation. Instead of seeking to learn, students have become empowered by
the rise of their consumer consciousness and use their newly assigned role determiners of edu-
cational quality to make demands concerning how knowledge is best transferred and acquired.
The result is an increased focus on their consumer rights and feeling of satisfaction, rather than
the struggle with theoretical content that characterises genuine education (Williams, 2011). The
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 341

attention to service level agreement has ‘eclipsed the intellectuality of the higher education con-
tract’ (Morley, 2003, p. 233) which leaves both students and professors alienated from their work.
Stielger acknowledges this alienation experienced by the proletariat in addition to the notion of
consumption understood via relations of production. Yet he also identifies limitations in the explana-
tory power of this conception, given the manner in which the question of consumption arises in the
late 20th and early 21st centuries, conditions that Marx could not anticipate. While Marx (and the crit-
ics above) are concerned with how this particular class of people respond politically to their alienation
or how the nature of their work changes, Stiegler focuses on proletarianisation as the loss of know-
ledge, and how this impacts on a society’s ability to culturally sustain itself.
Building on the image of a ‘pauperized’ worker who is no longer master of his craft, Stiegler
posits the proletarianised consumer as the 20th century equivalent. By combining Plato’s con-
cept of exteriorised memory with Marx’s notion of loss of savoir-faire, Stiegler extends on the
Marxist view to account for contemporary conditions. Thus, if the proletarianisation of the indus-
trial era encompassed the muscular system (in the form of pure labour) in a consumer society it
is the nervous system and cognitive capacities of both of the worker and student that are exteri-
orised. This results in multiple loss: of practical know-how, of theoretical and critical practice as
well as the art of living. In this manner, the student as consumer morphs from a demanding
client in a mercantile relationship to an individual deprived of their protentional capacities.

II. Proletarianisation of the consumer and loss of knowledge

Stiegler argues that consumers become deprived of their knowledge by the service industries
who, driven by the aim of creating purchasing power, constitute consumption as the destruction
of savoir-faire. In particular, culture industries have created new forms of hypnometic psycho-
technologies which have entered into competition with the traditional technology and institu-
tions (writing, schools and university) that have preserved the matrix of Western civilisation:
reason and theory. Devices such as television, the internet and smart phones have been har-
nessed by marketeers, and this seeks only to intensify the toxic behavioural models of consumer-
ism. As a result, consumer desires have been captured via the harnessing of their libidinal
energy. Concepts such as conspicuous consumption, self-branding and the relentless barrage of
advertising sell lifestyles and immediate gratification in place of life, and thus savoir-vivre is lost.
Integral to this is the cultivation and stimulation of drives over desires. Where desires (as phi-
lia) is an investment over time, driven by ideals and manifesting in care for oneself and for
others, a drive is impulsive and relates to our immediate needs. Education is traditionally tasked
with transforming the drives of the child into the desires of the adult, via the long-term social
investment of transindividuation. Consumerism captures our attention and thus our capacity to
desire (and thus invest in others or ourselves over time) by turning everything into subsistence,
leaving us living in the immediacy of the present.
This has particularly destructive implications for young people, as the stimulation of drives by
the culture industry through psychotechnical apparatus seeks to deliberately capture the atten-
tion of the youth. In doing so, it seeks to replace the psychic apparatus through which attention
is formed, short-circuiting the process of transindividuation. The result is what Stiegler calls
disindividuation:
The destruction of attention is disindividuation, and this in turn is precisely a deformation: a destruction of
the formation of the individual that education has constructed. The work of forming attention undertaken
by the family, the school, the totality of teaching and cultural institutions, and all the ‘apparatus of “spiritual
value” (beginning with academic apparatuses) is systematically undone in the effort to produce a consumer
stripped of the ability to be autonomous either morally or cognitively’ (Stiegler, 2010b, p. 184).

Stiegler finally extends his image of the youth psyche co-opted by consumerism to a general
state whereby it is the labour power of the nervous system that has been proletariarised. In this
342 K. FORREST

case, the knowledge they are deprived of is savoir theorique, or the higher cognitive functions
that enable a life of the spirit: critical, rational, authority. Under marketing culture, cognitive
labour is proletarianized through the fact it has been reduced to calculability: logos has become
ratio. The protention of not only consumers, but all thinkers is thus geared towards the ‘reaching
out’ towards industrial products (Ars Industrialis, 2010).
The result is a new kind of student as consumer, in higher education and in the senior end of
schooling who is deprived of cultural memory as well as the capacity to pay attention to the
world around them. Lacking retentions and thus ancestral knowledge, the imagination of the
deprived student is confined to a future determined by marketing. In addition, their relation to
objects is not driven by desire but rather become drive-based ‘frustrations’, where the normal
relation transforms into disposability as everything (including knowledge, and even people) is
merchandise. In this sense, they resemble the Platonic ‘gully bird’ and Deweyan ‘slackness’.
Stiegler speaks in broad terms, and we are right to be wary of a generalisation of an entire
generation as entitled and distracted, using a common ‘ruinous’ narrative of schooling. Yet, the
term ‘crisis’ does not seem appropriate given the testimonies of academics and teachers, who
offer insight into the way a cultural phenomenon such as proletarianisation plays out in lived
experience in ‘toxic’ universities that are unrecognisable due to the distortion of their educative
purpose under neoliberalism. Caught between a demanding ‘client’ as student while simultan-
eously unable to hold their attention, teachers live a life characterised by alienation from work
coupled with a terror and anxiety about work, making their task ‘impossible’ (Giroux, 2013;
Stiegler, 2010b). The impact of market logic on the consciousness and conscience of educators
and students alike is a pressing concern, as what The Guardian recently labelled ‘the academic
Hunger Games’ (2018) is ‘changing what it means to be a teacher’ (Ball, 2003 p. 217)

Addressing the problem of now: Deproletarianisation as utopianism

Yet, in the face of this nihilistic vision or ‘battle for intelligence’ lies the utopian possibility of
redemption via the very technologies that exteriorise knowledge in the first place. Thus, rather
than take refuge in nostalgic humanism, Stiegler advocates a process of restoration from disasso-
ciative to associative milieus, via ‘individuating with the specific possibilities of the epoch … in
accordance with digital technologies’.
This requires an understanding of Stiegler’s view on the relationship between technics and
the constitution of the human alongside capital. For Stiegler, it is through the deployment of
tools that our cognitive-noetic capacities develop, and thus we ‘become’ human via technics, not
independent of them. Stiegler regards technology as pharmacological, in that it contains both
corruptive and restorative aspects. As he writes: ‘the pharmakon is once what enables care to be
taken and that of which care must be taken- the sense that it is necessary to pay attention: its
power is curative to the immeasurable extent that it is also destructive’ (Stiegler, 2013, p. 4).
Thus, we must look to technics as a way of achieving a vision of schooling and higher educa-
tion that focuses on Stiegler’s values of knowledge, thought and care (Featherstone, 2017).
Speaking of society in general, Stiegler insists we work towards an ‘economy of contribution’,
whereby labour is no longer defined by the logic of the market (in terms of ration and calculabil-
ity) but is rather an ‘otium of the people’ (2010a, p. 65). Otium (or labour of the spirit) requires
us to understand credit as social investment, as an economy of protentions that demands the
possibility of a future that is not driven by short-termism and drives. By ‘spirit’ Stiegler means
the capacity in us capable of imagining and concretising alternatives, which in our dissociative
contemporary milieu is nullified by performative logic.
Yet Stiegler is careful not to reduce protentional possibilities to a clear process, instead
employing a philosophy of hope to drive his utopian vision of transformative educational practi-
ces. (Bradley & Kennedy, 2019, p. 8). In the face of the cynicism Stiegler identifies as
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 343

characterising the decadence of contemporary culture, Stiegler advocates hope, marked by a

‘will’ that embraces as position of ‘indeterminacy, of openness to a future irreducible to calcula-
tion’ (Stiegler, 2017, p. 11).
This notion of the future existing as flow of possibilities links to idea of ‘Not Yet’ identified by
Bloch in The Principle of Hope. Like Stiegler, Bloch understands the ‘now’ as problematic as the
present is always latent with potentialities which are impeded by the status quo. (Bloch, 1954).
In addition, they both reject a teleological notion of utopia, as the exact parameters of what is
possible is not predesignated but rather generated through what Bloch describes as ‘work and
concretely mediated action’, an autopoietic process he labelled as ‘militant optimism’ (Bloch,
1954, p. 199). Under this notion, one is led by an anticipatory consciousness which manifests as
protentional possibilities, that look to harness the curative possibilities of technology and usurp
the mandating desires of marketing. In this manner, Stiegler’s project fulfils the two functions of
utopia (the critical and the imaginary) described by Letonturier (2013).
In schools and universities, it is not only about reconstituting labour, but in restoring the long
circuits of transindividuation and savoir-vivre and theorique required for reason in order to recon-
stitute the spirit. This is possible, Stiegler believes, because there is not ‘a tendency without a
counter-tendency’ (2010b, p. 75). He argues that the Bildung needs to be reformed ‘in the face
of psychotechnologies of globalised psychopower’, and most importantly, to insist that is noth-
ing inevitable requiring the time and attention of young people be monopolised by marketing
(2010b, p. 35).
Instead, the task is to transform the student as consumer into the new figure of the amateur,
who desires to be individuated, to know. Stiegler declares the scope of this task as significant, as
it would mean ‘providing the entire educational community with a genealogical intelligence that
is aware of its hypnomesic base, in the form of the analysis of grammatisation processes’. In add-
ition to this genealogy, Stiegler advocates for a return to the older forms of attention construc-
tion as the formation of long circuits (2010b, p. 70).
As Stiegler demands systemic (rather than simply localised) change, the concept of deprole-
tarianisation can appear daunting, especially given Stiegler’s insistence on technics as the pri-
mary means by which associative milieus can be reconstituted. Not knowing what individuation
via digital technology ‘looks like’ as an ideal, requires an openness to potential that is difficult to
imagine in the current high-stakes, calculative environment of performance outcomes. What
Stiegler asks of teachers is to locate what Deleuze called ‘weapons’ or ‘lines of flight’. They are
‘bolts of pent up energy that break through the cracks in a system of control … the light of their
passage revealing the open spaces beyond the limits of what exists’ (Rayner, 2013). Yet, as Bloch
describes, as one only recognises this possibility in retrospect, the utopian pedagogue must
work essentially without blueprint, seeking through a pursuit of the ‘counter-tendency’ the thera-
peutic capacity of technics in education.

Stiegler’s utopianism as pedagogical practice

This article will now turn to considering his diagnosis for the restoration of disrupted ‘long cir-
cuits’ and compare it to current pedagogical trends established in response to the disruptive
imposition of technology in the lives of youth, as well as potential avenues of practice.
Attempting to tie down the extreme openness of Stiegler’s utopian vision to actual practices
may appear antagonistic to the courageous indeterminacy that underpins his project. However,
as Webb (2017) has argued, ‘utopian pedagogy cannot limit itself to merely … creating space-
s … it is fundamentally concerned with what takes place within those spaces … (which) has to be
something more than a series of radically open, always unfinished exploratory encounters’
(Webb, 2017, p. 562). In other words, to truly address the tension in the problem of now, we
need to examine the material conditions into which the ‘hope’ projects itself.
344 K. FORREST

At first, the natural tendency for many educators in enacting Stiegler’s call to action would be
to revert to techno-conservative concepts and strategies, as a means of mitigating the neuro-
logical and attentional damage of psychotechnology. This could take the form of initiatives such
as device-bans, or ‘technology free’ spaces or events, or an insistence on practices associated
with technological minimalism, such as deep work or close-reading (Newport, 2016) which
emphasises distraction-free environments as well as denigrating digital material as lacking the
status of knowledge. This pessimistic view, while aligning with Stiegler’s dystopian criticism, does
not, in its neglect of the possibilities of technology, fulfil the requirements for his optimism.
Other approaches commonly adopted by progressive educators to negate the seductive
power of marketing technology often (profitably) rely on humanist principles such as critical
agency and student autonomy. Borrowing from Freire’s critical pedagogy, teachers employ a crit-
ical lexicon to decipher, understand and unravel the psycho-technologies of power and attention
and then explicitly teach them (Giroux, 2013). This way, students will learn that the herd-like sub-
ject that is constituted through marketing is an assault on their cognitive freedom, the unpack-
ing of which can allow for more protentional possibilities, or different futures beyond what is
marketed. In the classroom, the language of thinking (Ritchhart, 2015) can be leveraged as a cul-
tural force to reorientate the student towards a critical stance that will enable them to develop
both savoir vivre and savoir theorique, by learning to ask critical questions and developing a cul-
ture where they are compelled to actively respond, rather than passively consume.
These pedagogical practices clearly fulfil Stiegler’s call ‘before anything else’ for a ‘Kantian cri-
tique’ of how the new forms of technology work to instrumentalise and exteriorise knowledge
(Stiegler, 2017, p. 21) They are also beneficial in that they lay the essential conceptual and com-
municational toolkit students require to engage in a radical critique of their consumer-driven
present and then subsequent imagination of an alternative future (Bojesen and Suissa, 2019,
p. 289).
Yet, they fall short of realising his full project in several ways. First, similarly to a conservative
standpoint, humanists look for the solution to the problem of technology in a means outside of
technics, rather than seeking its therapeutic potential. They adhere to Stieglerian values in a
broad sense, but ignore the challenge of the problem of ‘now’, as they idealistically look to an
enlightenment past which privileges the agency of the sole individual, rather than the commu-
nal, technical process of individuation. In this way, their strategies are not sufficient for the
imaginative leap via technics that Stiegler insists is the means by which deproletarianisation can
be realised. Instead, Stiegler’s view requires that students become more (rather than less)
machinic in seeking individuation. This involves dismissing the conservative view of technology
as dehumanising, which is where Stiegler’s use of the notion of ‘investment’ is central in teach-
er’s framing their practice and redesigning the spatiotemporal element of their teaching and
assessments. Rather than seeing the digital as the antithesis of education, they must recognise it
as a new form of thought, and through critique followed by generative work, reverse its control-
ling, disassociative logic to make it associative, as this is the only milieu in which the ‘life of the
spirit can blossom’ (2017, p. 21).
This entails a shift in pedagogical mindset regarding what constitutes a ‘spiritual life’ in the
digital age. Arguing against the idea that the general shift of youth away from the printed word
is a sign of spiritual deficiency, Stiegler insists that despite the short-circuiting that has occurred
in adolescent brains, a ‘life of the spirit’ still exists, albeit in the new ‘spiritual elements’ of digital
instruments. (2017, p. 21) Thus, in the same way that the book and letter became the backbone
of industrial democracies (and their attendant politics of the spirit) there must be the same
investment in digital letters, of reimagining the possibilities of realms such as ‘library’ from a
physical space to something digital but with the same spiritual potential for know-
ledge formation.
For a teacher, this means finding ways to integrate learning within a network of digital letters,
imagining a new form of knowledge formation based around digital literacy and hyper-reading
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 345

(a machinic form of reading) and seeking opportunities for contribution and collaboration
between producers (Hayles, 2010) across both audio-visual and hypertextual platforms. Similarly,
it means teachers selecting content that open up critical discussion regarding the impact of mar-
keting apparatus on our libidinal lives, relationships and formation of knowledge. This is a con-
crete possibility, albeit one that challenges the current educational paradigm which values the
efficient consumption ad reproduction of information via standardised testing.
In addition, to enable protential capacity, the use of technics must allow for a future-orien-
tated outlook that goes beyond quantifiable outcomes, which again, is frustrated by current
obsessions with measurable, short-term outcomes. Thus, teachers must find a way to lift both
their own and student’s gaze beyond the immediate present, into the realm of ‘not-yet’.
Practically speaking, an astute pedagogue will need to seeks ways to meet the competing
demands of the problem of now through the creation of dual-purpose assessment, that meets
the requirements of performativity as well as protentional capacity. One can imagine such tasks
as fitting into a humanities curriculum that looks to the future as much as it does to the past.1
Yet what of the digital materials already in the classroom? Many e-learning initiatives that
make an ostensible claim to Stiegler’s utopian project by borrowing the progressive language of
transformation. For this purpose, the article will briefly consider the role of ‘edtech’, which
Stiegler does not spend considerable time discussing, but has significant implications for his uto-
pianism. In Re-Enchantment (2017), he makes brief mention of the ‘regressive’ efforts from the
educational publishing industry in creating digital materials which seek merely to ‘control’ the
market rather than contribute to a spiritual economy. A recent example of this is the rollout of
Facebook’s Summit Learning Platform in a number of US Schools in 2018, which enabled a
‘personalised learning’ experience for students as they engaged with online content at their own
pace, claiming it ‘is a way for students to unlock the power within themselves to live fulfilled
and successful lives’ (2019). This is an example of program-driven learning where the machine
synchronises with the needs of the students. Yet, six months later, several protests led by stu-
dents demanded their school districts abandon the program, on the basis that it left them
‘staring at screens for hours’, ‘disengaged from their peers’ who they no longer discussed con-
tent with, as well as concerned about the tracking and collection of their private data (including
academic results) that was then made available to ‘19 other corporations’ (Tate, 2018).
This example illustrates the difficulty of reconstructing knowledge formation within a peda-
gogical space where not only marketing, but educational technology is automatically in service
to goals that are antagonistic to Stiegler’s ‘contribution’ economy, such as ranking, efficiency and
transparency. The vigilance and ‘know how’ that Stiegler requires of the utopian teacher, to find
a space to value production as spiritual contribution while a student is seduced by constant app
notifications of their grade point average, is a monumental task of spiritual reconstitution. Again,
we are reminded of Bloch’s problem of now, as ‘Not Yet’, as the utopian possibility exists as part
of the real makeup of the world, but is frustrated as both the material and philosophical condi-
tions for its realisation are not yet completed.
Yet, while the seismic change that Stiegler demands does at times seem impossible, in line
with his optimism, we can perhaps feel inspired by a real life example of what he yearns for.
Almost a year after their cover devoted to the modern, depressed adolescent, the February
2018 cover of TIME magazine featured the survivors of the Florida Parkdale school shooting, and
was called ‘Enough’. In acts that were clearly undetermined, emerging entirely from the urgency
of now, the students employed technics in a protentional protest against the consumerist vio-
lence of their present. Calling their campaign to end gun violence #NeverAgain, the students
built a ‘movement with the skills they learned in high school’ (Alter, 2018). The student who
organised 100 students via Facebook to travel to Tallahassee to lobby the state legislature did a
‘50 page term paper on gun control last year’. Emma Gonzalez, the charismatic spokesperson for
the group, used her skills honed in drama and an AP lesson on special interest groups delivered
a viral speech on NRA influence. Using Twitter, they mobilised the most participants for an
346 K. FORREST

anti-gun protest in US history. These students, who are ‘digital natives’, could nonetheless con-
ceive of a future beyond gun violence (possibly the most abhorrent form of consumption) and
did so as the products of transinviduation, of a strong, critical, disciplinary education that
Stiegler advocates for, and indeed, does not seem out of the realm of possibility.

Note
1. A humble example of this is the current study design for VCE Philosophy, where students must study the
primary texts of Plato, Aristotle and Nietsche through the lens of contemporary technological development.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Kristy Forrest is a secondary school English and Philosophy teacher and instructional coach at St Catherine’s
School and a graduate student of the University of Melbourne. Her academic work focuses primarily on the inter-
play between philosophy of technology and educational philosophy, as well as how to build teacher expertise
through the use of pedagogical frameworks focused on thinking.

ORCID
Kristy Forrest http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5558-7249

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