Teaching Philosophy

My scholarship into the work of Bernard Stiegler directly ties into how I treat the classroom and run courses. For Stiegler, technics direct and indvididuate us, shaping our very consciousnesses. His critique that philosophy ignores technics brings the question of technology to the forefront of his work. As discussed in research, I frame Stiegler as a theorist of Public Relations and media, drawing on how the culture industries or as he calls it ‘program industries’ and digital culture shape our interior worlds.

The tension there is the two sides of Stiegler’s work that I engage in daily: his critique of the culture industry, or PR more generally, is the subject I teach. Critical work, to me, is more enlightening and useful, but the antidote he suggests underscores the value of education. I take this a step further by engaging with his ideas of adaptation and adoption. Most of the time we adapt to scenarios, or new technologies (like AI). They arrive, we must change to orient ourselves around them. Stiegler rejects this view arguing we must adopt, or take time to seriously think about usage, orientation, labor, and care with these tools. His conceptualization of proletarianization (de-skilling, essentially) adds a political economy lens, stating that techncis act as a prosthesis or extension of our faculties.

While this sounds very McLuhan-esque, Stiegler’s commitment to de-proletarianization (education ,more plainly) organizes his theoretical contribution to creating individual selves who can think and act in the world. McLuhan’s theory often is entirely compatible with consumer culture, while Stiegler and his concern for the proliferation of non-knowledge or stupidity (a term he takes pains to differentiate from our common usage of) are central political questions.

In my own practice, I wrestle with these question of adaptation and adoption. In University life, there are courses that need to be taught, assignments and flows of a course that students expect, and a pedagogy addressing these questions directly head-on fails to accomplish this mission. However, a purely skills-based, technocratic orientation to learning also leaves students bereft of the really important question and ideas they will face in an increasingly difficult world. Adoption becomes key, if we return to the AI question, of how and what to decide to use. A new tool is invented, how do we use it, when, and for what reasons? How does this tool proletarianize us, and stop the process of becoming ourselves? Adoption forces us to ask difficult questions about who we are and who we want to be, where our inspirations come from and what futures we want to see.

Obviously, teaching in a PR program I am investing students to go be arbiters of consumer culture on a daily basis. Rather than a paradox, I don’t see hypocrisy in engaging in consumer culture once someone is trained and has the resources to handle the daily stream of information and suggestion leveled at them. There is no separate ‘pure’ world of literature or the arts from which to retreat to, rather we are in the midst of consumer culture and cannot avoid it. Rather than dismiss it, we should understand it more directly so that we may participate in a way we choose, by manners of adoption rather than constantly chasing the next thing.

On a resume, I train the next generation of Public Relations, Social Media, and Professional Writers how to get jobs and succeed–that part is relatively straightforward. How can we also use these skills to become people who can think, make difficult choices, and not lose their minds in the iterative cycle of failure and learning that comprises adult life in the 21st century.