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In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard observes that “technological transformations can be expected to have a considerable impact on knowledge,” including “a thorough exteriorization of knowledge with respect to the ‘knower’ at whatever point he or she may occupy in the knowledge process.” Lyotard’s observation anticipates new materialist elaborations on the entanglement of matter and meaning in practices of knowing, particularly Karen Barad’s understanding of knowing as a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement. Using Mark Hansen’s media archaeological insights into the role of technology in “expansions of the sensible” beyond the human sensorium, I show how the shift towards the operationality of the system’s performance (its performativity) with regard to the legitimization of knowledge, as observed by Lyotard, and the shift towards performative alternatives to representationalism theorized by Barad are two different aspects of what Jon McKenzie describes as “the becoming performative of knowledge itself.”

The article considers the notion of the Anthropocene in the light of several philosophical tools that we can draw from Jean-François Lyotard. At first, I consider Lyotard’s analysis on postmodern condition, in particular in respect of the process of legitimation and the crisis of grand narration. Then, I ask if the Anthropocene is itself a new grand narrative or if, on the contrary, another understanding of the Anthropocene can be proposed starting from Lyotard’s reflexions on paganism. After an analysis of some elements of Lyotard’s paganism, I search for the traits of a “pagan Anthropocene”, using several examples from the contemporary ecological studies. At the end, I argue that the notion of pagus proposed by Lyotard can work together with the idea of compost proposed by Donna Haraway, going in this way beyond the postmodern towards a shared dwelling with non-human entities in a terrestrial condition.

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.

Most philosophical Lacanians instinctively take Lacan’s engagement with Descartes – not to mention his explicit formulations about not only the identity of the psychoanalytic and Cartesian methods but also, moreover, that of the subject of psychoanalysis and the cogito – as comprising a crucial and unequivocal philosophical repère. Nonetheless, there is a line of thought in Lacan’s oeuvre that this orientation leaves completely unaccounted for: Lacan’s decisive point regarding knowledge as accumulation. In his recently published twelfth Seminar (Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse) from February of this year, Lacan argues that the cogito is a hinge between knowledge “in its pre-accumulative state,” to the extent that it is capable of being doubted, and knowledge as a “mode of production” which predates and even motivates capitalist accumulation. It is on this basis that we can comprehend Lacan’s seemingly conflictual or even contradictory claims that, on the one hand, Descartes inaugurates modern science by leaving the eternal truths to God (Seminar XI) and, on the other hand, that modern science forecloses truth (“Science and Truth”).

This paper argues that a modern technological society devoted to socially determined ends is impossible. This “Grimdark Thesis” assumes a posthumanist “New Substantivist” theory of technology whose upshot is that modernity renders technical entities abstract and highly repeatable. Abstract technology is functionally indeterminate and counter-final, lacking either intrinsic or extrinsic teleology. In particular, I argue that extrinsic teleology – e.g., socially determined ends – is foreclosed by modelling a technological society as a Hyperagent – a maximally mutable being capable of arbitrary changes to its technical or material substrate. Finally, I consider whether this technological “Outside” can be reintegrated into the normative space of reasons as lack or negation, along the lines explored in contemporary Hegelian/Lacanian theories of the Subject. I argue that there are no grounds for assuming that the barred subject assumed by Hegelians/Lacanians is a transcendental invariant, implying the Technological Outside is a subtracted but not a constitutive lack.

Technology has a long history of influencing humanity. While this statement seems monolithic and perhaps deterministic, this essay intends first to illustrate, in small part, the impacts of technology, and second, to discuss a possible way forward amid the technological change. I will follow the impact of electric light on Japanese aesthetics, particularly from the perspective of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and his essay, In Praise of Shadows. Then, I will extend the conception of electric light into digital technologies in general, the goal being to connect the loss of beauty in Tanizaki’s view to the broader detriment of humanity via the digital environment. As electric light redefined beauty for Tanizaki’s Japan, so, too, have digital technologies redefined what we consider human interaction and information. Lastly, in a call for awareness and human solidarity, I will suggest that resistance is not futile. Indeed, it is imperative if we intend to free ourselves from the matrix we have fashioned and enabled. 

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.

In this review of Bill Ross’s Order and the Virtual I draw attention to his careful reflection on Deleuze’s provocative critique of the second law of thermodynamics, which Ross examines and ultimately aligns with using resources from cosmology and quantum physics. Most notably, Ross draws on the physicist David Bohm’s distinction between explicate and implicate orders and argues that these bear strong similarities to Deleuze’s actual and virtual respectively. To lay the groundwork for an exploration of this claim I turn to Ross’s defence of the infinite creative potential of the quantum dynamisms that give rise to the spatiotemporal order – what Deleuze would describe as non-exhaustive intensive differences that are only apparently cancelled out in extensity. Here, with reference to Deleuze’s distinction between the divine and human games and their respective distributions of chance, Ross proposes that whereas the emergent regularities of the macroscopic world are inexorably bound to the arrow of time and thus to the law of entropy, this is not the case for the divine game that takes place within the quantum foam and that it is here that the Eventum tantum takes place in which all of chance – including said laws – are continuously redistributed. Turning to the continuous nature of this evental dynamism, I close by considering Ross’s eschewal of chaos and dynamic systems theory in favour of quantum-theoretic resources and suggest that perhaps both can be usefully employed in order to pursue the fascinating lines of flight he has opened up within both Deleuze and Guattari studies and the philosophy of cosmology.

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.