Covid-19: Philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s Insight

from the Angle of Memory

Bernard Stiegler

10 April 2020

Remembering the health crisis

The memory of the great epidemics is not so present in our representations. Human beings
have an unfortunate tendency to forget disasters, despite their ambition to make everything
secure. If we still remember the 1918 Spanish flu (50 million dead!), who remembers the
Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1969?

This crisis contains a lot of striking things. We will be talking for years about this pandemic
situation and the associated global confinement. This experience of confinement could
indeed trigger some very interesting experiences of remembrance, although it could also
do the opposite, depending on the circumstances.

What distinguishes this viral crisis from the Hong Kong flu or the Spanish flu is the speed
at which it is progressing, as well as the increasingly rapid repetition of such crises in milder
versions, going on for at least the past twenty years – and in a context of reductions in
public health investment, which we can see have the potential to ruin the global economy
for a long time to come.

In addition to the fact that the virus circulates extremely quickly and massively throughout
the world, it is also highly contagious, and this could generate panic in a ‘post-truth’ world
where no one trusts anyone anymore.

Our current economic model is centred on physical and symbolic hyper-communication

between almost every place throughout the world, and this considerably increases the
danger. This model, which is also that of the ‘data economy’, is very dangerous because it
eliminates diversity, which is the condition for resilience.

1
In wanting to optimize everything through the use of algorithms, we decrease resilience,
while at the same time living on a just-in-time basis – and we see the effects of this in
various shortages. We have, in an unprecedented way, made human society as a whole
vulnerable. This irresponsibility must stop.

Confinement can revive the memory and meaning of past ways of life

I am currently working on social territories, on an experimental and contributory project,

with teams of caregivers, involving parents and children exposed to smartphones. We have
decided to maintain our connection despite the crisis, and we are working on the question,
‘what is it to live confined at this moment?’.

In confinement, there are many possible situations, but what is obvious in all cases is that
a number of things are interrupted, and this moment can make it possible to create
opportunities for reflection, both individually and collectively, if this is accompanied a little.

This can lead to a return to the memory and meaning of things we used to do in the past,
including family practices that have been lost, which are also educational practices – in the
kitchen for example. Starting from such questions, we can reflect on what it means to do
something together – and on the dangers that smartphones present for young and old alike:
the danger of making us forget.

From there, we can then come to ask ourselves, individually and collectively, why if we
shouldn’t reconnect to these earlier ways of life, without for all that reliving what we did in
the twentieth century. Confinement can thus, sometimes, lead us to reflect on our ways of
living.

We should then draw more general lessons – and I would point out that we are working
on these questions, but also on a new way of conceiving the city and its inhabitants that
could be possible thanks to digital technology, on cooking and urban agriculture, on energy,
on mobility, in the experimental context of a contributory economy based on the
revaluation of knowledge and locality in close relationship with the inhabitants.

2
Our experiences and our psychic memories should not be submitted to machinic memories

Today’s economy is based on information, which replaces knowledge and is itself fully
calculable – turning us into calculated, mimetic and remote-controlled beings.

We need to develop a new model of information theory that values what is not calculable
while nevertheless using calculation to do so – as is the case in music, for example: on the
one hand, music is based on calculation, while on the other hand, it is based on exceeding
it.

We need to rethink information technology and computing, stop relying on algorithms and
re-establish deliberative mechanisms between doctors, between bankers, between
inhabitants of territories in general, by valuing the diversity of localities, and so on. The
current system fully relies on automated averages that tend to eliminate the incalculable.
Confronted with what remains incalculable, systems threaten to enter into crisis.

On the current issue of mask shortages, the risks have been underestimated. It has been
forgotten that risks are never discovered by calculation of averages.

There is no doubt, for me, that what we are experiencing now amounts to a terrible warning to humanity,
and that it is on this terrain of the revaluation of knowledge, localities, diversity and deliberation that the
key questions lie – which condition all the others.

We have not learned the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis. The big question is whether
humanity is finally going to learn something from this Covid-19 crisis.

Learning means questioning oneself. If we have to do it in the midst of an emergency,

which is less than ideal for reflection, let us nevertheless take advantage of confinement in
order to reflect, work, and figure out what to do next.

Translated by Daniel Ross.