Technophany, A Journal for Philosophy and Technology

In an interview in 1978, Lyotard was asked if he believed a “communication volontaire” is possible. The difficulty of translating this phrase—“self-directed” or “voluntary” communication?—is enhanced by the fact that such a notion seems oddly out of
time. Lyotard’s reply invokes aspects of the strange and strained relationship between his most philosophical book, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, and his most popular, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in particular the shift from
Wittgensteinian ideas of “language games” to that of phrase regimen and its attending critique of anthropocentrism. Is there, in this shift, a move that echoes current aspects of ecocriticism and into which it might, in turn, feed? The possibility of a “communication
volontaire” will be considered through the inter-relationship of both texts, Lyotard’s own response in relation to his teachings at the university of Vincennes, and through artworks which perform aspects of this voluntary process.

Despite being one of the key figures in the philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century, Jean-François Lyotard’s ideas have not yet been properly explored. This article will start from some of the main misunderstandings surrounding his thought on history and technology in order to propose a broad reflection on the interest that Lyotard’s ideas still have for our present. To this end, some of the accelerationist interpretations of his work will be questioned.

This paper takes a retrospective look at Lyotard’s analysis of “the postmodern condition,” a century after his birth, and nearly a half-century since his highly influential book. Lyotard’s pessimistic view was that after the end of metanarratives, there is now no alternative to the liberal democratic capitalist “System,” which is governed by a technological-economic principle of “performativity.” Considering Lyotard’s thesis in the light of his own methodology of “signs of history,” I argue that it is no longer possible to hold this view. A number of key historical events point to massive fault-lines that have appeared in this System. Nevertheless, much of what Lyotard wrote in The Postmodern Condition about the growing influence of technology on social and political life has only been confirmed. The hypothesis this paper proposes is that the signs of system failure might at least open paths of resistance to technological hegemony.

This article critically assesses Lyotard’s notions of development and infancy. In The Inhuman, Lyotard opposes development as the name for contemporary capitalism and infancy as source of resistance. However, after Lyotard, Bernard Stiegler diagnoses our contemporary situation as infantilized. This implies that infancy is no longer opposed to development, but its accomplice. Stiegler therefore calls for a new maturity, which he primarily understands as responsibility and critical thinking. I argue that this remains one-sided, because Stiegler’s inspiration—Kant’s essay on Enlightenment—leads him to a primarily negative notion of infancy. Stiegler’s call for maturity is valuable but must be supplemented with Lyotard’s notion of infancy: infancy as potentiality and affectivity. Especially Lyotard’s understanding of affectivity allows for thinking the source of those practices such as art and philosophy that do not immediately serve an external end, be it development’s end of increasing performativity or Stiegler’s end of maturity.

This article provides a reading of Jean-François Lyotard’s “A Postmodern Fable.” It explores the speculative narrative on the fate of human consciousness as the Sun dies in conjunction with a reading of contemporary artificial intelligence and the hypothesis of a mathematical universe. The analysis draws upon Lyotard’s layered concept of the ‘inhuman’, alongside accounts from engineer James Lovelock and physicist Max Tegmark, to interrogate the futures of intelligence and consciousness beyond anthropocentric frameworks. In conclusion, Lyotard’s Fable, benefiting from updated accounts of what he refers to as “all the research in progress” in contemporary science and technology, retains valuable insights; pre-inscribing an inevitable disinheritance of the Human, and/or the Brain’s mathematical array. Lyotard’s Fable potentially reveals itself an expression of an already existing mathematical function.

This article examines the intersection of philosophy and cybernetics, proposing Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory as a crucial foundation for renewed cybernetics in the twenty- first century. By revisiting Norbert Wiener’s foundational insights and reinterpreting key cybernetic principles, it explores how Luhmann’s second-order observation and the concept of meaning challenge the traditional distinctions between human consciousness and technology. The paper argues that Luhmann’s approach not only addresses concerns of dehumanization in a technologically advanced society but also offers a dynamic framework for rethinking human self-perception and social organization without denying it cybernetic foundations. This exploration highlights the potential of systems theory to redefine the philosophical significance of cybernetics, providing tools for understanding the evolving interactions among humans, machines, and society in modernity.

Our article aims to analyse the significance of dialectics for philosophical reflection on technology. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel, this article first of all reconstructs the progressive artefactualisation of thought and action, by indicating the transition from labour through tool use to the emergence of intelligent machines in the field of practice, secondly, by indicating the importance of dialectical thinking for the media theory, and thirdly, by pointing out that dialectics delivers both a conceptual and a practical understanding of the possibilities of emergence for cognitive technologies we encounter today (AI and the noosphere). Dialectics captures these dynamics in a non-linear manner, offering a conceptual grounding for addressing developments that are both universal and concrete, offering Hegelian dialectics as a dynamical method of thinking about technological progress without falling into schematism and simplifications.

Book review of Aden Evens’s The Digital and its Discontents.

Audrone Žukauskaitė’s book is a concise analysis of the place and role of the organism, or perhaps organic thinking, within the tradition of continental philosophy. In particular, it is interested in how the legacy of post-war French thought intersects with how we think biological systems today and suggests that this thinking should be renewed in order to address some of the more massive political deadlocks of the present namely the status of biopolitics and what to do with the concept of the anthropocene.

A book review of Andrew Feenberg's The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse's Philosophy of Praxis that emphasizes how Feenberg develops a critical philosophy of technology from Marcuse's work.