Phantasy, Technology, Critique

On Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmacology of the Imagination

Abstract

Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technology gives a central role to the imagination. Among the philosophers with whom he establishes a critical dialogue (Kant, Simondon, Adorno, Derrida), Husserl’s reflections on memory, imagination and phantasy count as decisive influences on Stiegler’s critique of the industrialized imagination in Technics and Time. This paper begins by briefly introducing Stiegler’s anthropological account of technics, in which technics is understood as an exteriorization of memory (1998). I will reconstruct how Stiegler’s critique of Husserl substantiates the role of technics as memory through the concept of tertiary retention, while his critique of Kant connects technical mediation with the schematic function of imagination. Next, I will examine Stiegler’s critique of the industrialization of the imagination as part of a cultural industry (2011). Although the politicization of the technologized imagination is not entirely new (Marcuse 1968), Stiegler’s account displays original elements. If technical objects and media function as supports for memory and imagination, then the imagination is not merely an internal, unconstrained, and individual faculty, but it is decisively formed in the interplay between subject and milieu with its associated power relations. Thus technology, for Stiegler, stands as a pharmakon – both cure and poison – of memory and imagination. I will argue that for social critique in the contemporary age, Stiegler’s notion of exteriorized imagination highlights the political stakes in the co-constitutive relation between imagination and technical media. Furthermore, the conception of imagination as a partly technical faculty also invites reflections on digital reality and developments in AI (Romele 2020; Wellner 2022a). Ultimately, this perspective provides a standpoint to view imagination as a transformative political faculty, which reflects the structure of desiring subjects in their movement toward the future.