The Philosophy of Bernard Stiegler Applied to The Systemised Self – Part 17, Masters Series.

Abstract

Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technics offers a fascinating account of why human subjectivity cannot be separated from the technical systems that retain, transmit, and organise experience. His concepts of originary technicity, epiphylogenesis, tertiary retention, grammatization, proletarianization, psychopower, pharmacology, and the neganthropocene provide a vocabulary for extending the Systemised Self framework. This essay poses that the Systemised Self is not simply a person who uses digital tools. It is a condition in which algorithmic systems (transformer based large language models) increasingly capture tertiary retentions, anticipate protentions, organise attention, and return a model of the person to that person as identity, preference, and decision. Stiegler’s pharmacological approach prevents this argument from becoming technological fatalism: the same technical systems that can produce disindividuation and loss of knowledge can also support care, contribution, education, and collective individuation. The essay connects Stiegler’s theory to the Hollow Absolute, defines a provisional Algorithmic Alienation Index, uses Calhoun’s Universe 25 only as a limited analogy, and separates empirical findings from speculative deductions. It concludes that the central political question is not whether technics can be escaped, but whether technical memory and automation will be organised for contributory individuation or for predictive extraction.

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