call for papers

The philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, spent much of his academic career analysing the digital condition and the profound impacts of new technologies on society, politics and thought. In his work, he describes automation, the 24/7 working culture and uninterrupted online connectivity as having provoked a generalised proletarianisation, or the widespread loss of pragmatic and conceptual intelligence and intuition. This is not to say that machine learning technologies have made no positive contributions to society. The problem, for Stiegler, lies rather in the unrestrained development and deployments of digital technologies, which now present us with unprecedented challenges in terms of knowledge and power asymmetries, as well as posing serious risks to the long-term sustainability of the natural environment. Noetic reticulation, or the short-circuiting of thought as such, has also seen the widespread disruption of critical reflection, attention and genuine knowledge production outside the prefabricated conditions of algorithmic governmentality - a probabilistic data-driven form of social governance - which is having profound consequences on the welfare of societies, human psychology and political institutions.

A generalised denoetisation is, moreover, a problem of temporality, specifically the ways in which the spatialisation of temporal processes have become digital or discrete. This is already evident when punctuation is introduced into writing systems, now acting as a discretising spatial marker for the separation, organisation and flow of time and meaning into discrete units like letters and sentences. Stiegler is well aware that such discretely organised tertiary retentions or externalised memory - whether through writing, printmaking, toolmaking or artefacts - is the very condition for collective being. It is precisely epiphylogenetic memory 'that constitutes the possibility of what we today call culture, and which is the unthought ground' of 'the science of spirit', or then, libidinal economy (Stiegler, 2020: 48). What is at stake, in the era of Big Data and cognitive infrastructures, is the subsumption of our investments of desire into the automated syntheses of what Yuk Hui calls 'tertiary protentions', which have become amplified by recursive optimisation and predictive performance.

The dilemma, it would seem, is how to reach the outside of thought, how to have thought from outside the coordinates of what Dan McQuillan calls 'AI realism', riffing on Mark Fisher's notion of 'capitalist realism' - a failure to think otherwise, or beyond the limits of capitalist thought structures. It is, to put it in Stiegler's terms, a question of noetisation, which is irreducible to the brain, or even the mind, concerning instead the pharmacological condition of our technical becoming as 'itself a process of individuation that both supports and threatens psychic and collective individuation' - the veritable binding of the drives. Given this, how can the pharmakon be safeguarded from retuning the noetic soul to temporal and spatial entropy? How can it instead become the condition for negentropy, which here implies both a temporal deferment and a spatial differentiation of entropy?

With these threads in mind, we ask contributors to think about Stiegler's notion of pharmacology in relation to theories and practices of rewilding, which we understand as radically contrasted to the pervasive extractivist logic of the digital condition and its associated practices of data harvesting, resource consumption, technocratic control, algorithmic modulation and a generalised denoetisation. Originally used in wildlife and botanical conservation contexts to describe the restoration of habitats and the creation of corridors between preserved lands for the rebounding of declining animal and vegetal populations, we transpose the notion of rewilding to philosophy to provoke imaginative and riotous dreamscapes for the restoration of our mental, social, technical and environmental ecologies. In particular, we are interested in papers that conceptualise pharmacology and rewilding in terms capable of moving against the shallow attention of artificially encoded forms of industrialised memory and proletarianised human desire that destroy the very potential for a pharmacology of mind and the production of negentropic knowledge - a counter-tendency to the accelerated entropic effects of the Anthropocene and the techno-capitalist apparatus.

Potential themes and provocations

• How pharmacology and rewilding can curb or interrupt the algorithmic curation of political interests and the intensification of certain beliefs about the world.
• How being very online affects our abilities to pharmacologically care for and sustain the natural environment.
• Links between pharmacology, rewilding and what Yuk Hui calls cosmotechnics, or a 'politics to come.'
• Pharmacological rewilding as anti-fascism - in the vein of, for example, Dan McQuillan's arguments in Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence (2022).
• Pharmacological rewilding as a movement towards 'degrowth', decomputing and de-automatisation.
• The effects on our capacities for deep attention when every thought process is mined for rapid subsumption into regimes of knowledge extractivism.
• The consequences of pervasive disaffection - or the reduced ability to experience pleasure other than the low affective dopamine hits provided by endless scrolling - on future generations.
• What ensues when we pay attention to and take care of - or then rewild - our digitally inflected pharmacological ecologies.
• How we can use the concepts of rewilding and pharmacology to produce Global South specific conceptual frameworks and tools for grappling with contamination and care.
• The ways in which rewilding and pharmacology could ameliorate existential dread through collective meaning-making.
• Pharmacology and rewilding as medicinal ingredients of Stiegler's apothecary for noesis, individuation and transindividuation.
• The role of creative practices for thinking about and demonstrating the rewilding of technologies.