CfP: In Bernard Stiegler’s apothecary
Chantelle Gray
Call for Abstracts
In Bernard Stiegler’s apothecary:
Rewilding technologies through creative practices of care
19-21 November 2026
Hosted by the University of Johannesburg
The philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, spent much of his academic career analysing our digital condition and the profound impacts of new technologies on society, politics and thought. In his work he describes automation, 24/7 work culture and uninterrupted online connectivity as having provoked a generalised proletarianisation (Stiegler, 2013) – a widespread loss of pragmatic and conceptual intelligence and intuition. This is not to say that contemporary technologies such as digital communications and machine learning have made no positive contributions to society. The problem, for Stiegler, lies rather in the unrestrained development and deployment of these technologies, which now present us with unprecedented challenges in terms of knowledge and power asymmetries while posing serious ecological risks. What Stiegler calls ‘noetic reticulation’, or the short-circuiting of thought as such, has also seen the widespread disruption of forms of critical reflection, attention and genuine knowledge production that operate outside of the prefabricated conditions of algorithmic governmentality – a probabilistic, data-driven form of social governance – which in turn has profound consequences for the welfare of humans, polities and societies (Crawford, 2021; Guattari, 2000; Rouvroy, 2011, 2025; Zuboff, 2019).
Moreover, a generalised denoetisation – the loss of the ability to dream or imagine an alternative to the present – is fostered by the digitalisation or discretisation of temporality, i.e., the separation, organisation and flow of time and meaning into discrete units. Stiegler is well aware that such discretely organised tertiary retentions or externalised memory – reflected in writing, printmaking, toolmaking and artefacts, for instance – is the very condition for collective being. This is precisely what he describes as the epiphylogenetic memory “that constitutes the possibility of what we today call culture, and which is the unthought ground” of “the science of spirit” or 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 technologies of recursive optimisation and predictive performance (see Lovink, 2016).
The dilemma, it would seem, is how to reach the outside of thought and escape the coordinates of what Dan McQuillan (2019), riffing on Mark Fisher’s notion of “capitalist realism”, calls “AI realism” – a failure to think otherwise or beyond the limits of algorithmically curated thought structures and the capitalist organisation of time. It is, as Stiegler would say, a question of noetisation, or learning to dream again, a process that is irreducible to the brain or mind and concerns instead the broader pharmacological condition of our technical becoming as “itself a process of individuation that both supports and threatens psychic and collective individuation” (Stiegler, 2020: 227–228). The question, in other words, is how the pharmakon can become the condition for negentropy, which Stiegler understands as the creative processes of knowledge and life against mindless and entropic consumption.
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 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 (e.g., Soulé and Reed Noss, 1998; Jepson and Blythe, 2020), 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 (Stiegler, 2018; 2020) – a counter-tendency to the accelerated entropic effects of the Anthropocene and the techno-capitalist apparatus.
Themes and provocations include, but are not limited, to the following:
- 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 – 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 issues pertaining to 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
Submissions
Please submit a 500-word abstract to pharma...@gmail.com by Monday, 6 July 2026. Abstracts will be double-blind refereed and acceptance letters will be sent to all applicants by Monday, 10 August 2026.
*** Venue details and conference fees will be communicated in the second call for papers.
References
Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Guattari, F. (2000). The Three Ecologies. London: The Athlone Press.
Jepson, P., & Blythe, C. (2020) Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery. Cambridge, UK: Icon Books Ltd.
Lovink, G. (2016). Digital Objects and Metadata Schemes. e-flux Journal, 78, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/78/82706/digital-objects-and-metadata-schemes
McQuillan, D. (2019). AI Realism and Structural Alternatives. danmcquillan.org, 7 June, https://danmcquillan.org/ai_realism.html.
McQuillan, D. (2022). Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
McQuillan, D. (2025). Decomputing as Restistance. danmcquillan.org, 16 July, https://www.danmcquillan.org/decomputing_as_resistance.html.
Rouvroy, A. (2011). Technology, Virtuality and Utopia: Governmentality in an Age of Autonomic Computing. In Law, Human Agency, and Autonomic Computing: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, 1–32. Edited by Mireille Hildebrandt and Antoinette Rouvroy. New York: Routledge.
Rouvroy, A. (2025). Algorithmic Realism: An Eclipse of the Common (draft), https://www.academia.edu/143208868/Algorithmic_Realism_An_Eclipse_of_the_Common_Draft.
Soulé, M., & Noss, R. (1998). Rewilding and biodiversity: Complementary goals for continental conservation. Wild Earth, 8, 18–28.
Stiegler, B. (2013). What Makes Life Worth Living? On Pharmacology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Stiegler, B. (2018). The Neganthropocene. London: Open Humanities Press.
Stiegler, B. (2020). Nanjing Lectures. London: Open Humanities Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. A Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs.
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