On the organology of utopia: Stiegler's contribution to the philosophy of education

Abstract

We are living in and beyond two massive changes in the world, both of which must be addressed by education, the caretaker of memory. First is the geological era of the Anthropocene—a crisis of nature and mankind, a fundamental geo-trauma. While climate change is a reality which we are belatedly just beginning to understand as we increasingly experience its changing weather patterns, the Anthropocene remains unknown or invisible for many. As a concrete case in point, the 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the Tōhoku region of Japan remains an ongoing but largely invisible crisis. Indeed, there is a sense of collective disavowal regarding what we must do in its wake, for it is a crisis which effects not only the contemporary but future generations. The second is equally momentous. The advent of mass access to the Internet in the 1990s and its effects on learning, knowledge, societal relations and psychical life are also just beginning to be understood. For Bernard Stiegler the ecological crisis and the technological question go hand in hand. To explain this position we are naming Stiegler not only a utopian thinker in the classical sense but also a utopian thinker who offers practical ‘negentropic’ weapons to contest entropic becoming in the digital world. We are arguing Stiegler’s oeuvre and pharmacological method has much to give to the philosophy of education as it seeks to account for the crisis in education.