Texts as Technologies of Community Building: The Contributive Research Approach

The concept of ‘contributive research’ was introduced by Bernard Stiegler for the multiple, bifurcating ways communities of care are created and cultivated through the production of knowledge, as opposed to the consumption of information. From this perspective, participation in a community constitutes a transformative experience of trans-individuation, oriented toward the re-appropriation of technological artefacts as an ethico-political response to the global challenges of the Anthropocene. The concept shares many qualities with other strands of interventionist research such as collaborative, dialogical, action, practice and participatory research. In this virtual salon we intend to investigate the relevance of the ‘contributive research’ approach for the field of theoretical psychology, suggesting an open, experimental and hermeneutic process of trans-individuation where communities are built through the reflection on and discussion of scientific, aesthetic and other textual representations. According to this approach, and following Stiegler’s theory of grammatization, texts are technological artefacts which constitute communities by rendering knowledge technically reproducible and simultaneously subject to differentiation and bifurcation. We do not aim to present cases of the ‘application’ of contributive research as a ‘method’. Rather, we conceptualize 4 cases of the interaction of emergent communal care and agency with research and with other forms of representation.