This paper considers how players of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) limited draft turn their acquired gameplay style or disposition (their MTG “gamer habitus”), with respect to drafting, into an object of knowledge. This is done in order to then consciously rework it, to respond to new formats and to the changing metagame. I will focus on a particular case study: how streamer Chord_O_Calls' instructional video shows his own re-evaluation of certain cards. Evidently, it is a process requiring reflexivity, although I (...) aim to be specific with regard to the particular “form of reflexivity” involved. I distribute this outward to the MTG “habit assemblage” (an ensemble of techniques, things, relations) and argue that any individual player's instantiation of this reflexivity involves a practice-based synthesis of paratexts from the MTG habit assemblage that is not codified but is shaped by the assemblage. This leads to a consideration of the “intelligence” and limits of not only particular habits but that of the MTG “habit assemblage” itself. I argue that the broader socio-technical significance of the form of reflexivity that is being proliferated here is one which is defined by its flexibility, by an attentional style of delayed and shifting categorization. (shrink)

Through a re-articulation of Derridean différance, Bernard Stiegler claims that the human is defined by an originary default that displaces all psychic and social life onto technical supplements. His philosophy of technics re-articulates the logic of the supplement as concerning both human reflexivity and its supports, and the history of the différance of life itself. This has been criticised for reducing Derrida's work to a metaphysics of presence, and for instituting a humanism of the relation to the inorganic. By refuting (...) these claims, this article will show that Stiegler's doubling of différance enables him to articulate the human as constituted by both the individuation characteristic of ‘life’, and that of a technical, psychic, and collective individuation. Putting forward a reading of the logic of the trace in life, and emphasising the aspects of Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon, and Canguilhem that Stiegler uses in his reading of Derrida, I will demonstrate that the political stakes of adaption and adoption in his Noopolitics require this re-articulation of différance. Technics shapes the human future, arising from this differential mutation; marking the invention of the human as the site of the political. (shrink)

This article argues that we can understand Jean Epstein's theory of photogénie as an instance of technics. Starting from a reading of Epstein's final fictional film Le Tempestaire, we can see that Epstein collapses the distinction between human and technological. This insight leads to a discussion of Epstein's theory of photogénie more generally, and one that highlights the term's relationship to temporality. This temporal dimension recalls Bernard Stiegler's discussion of technics in Technics and Time. As the series evolves, Stiegler increasingly (...) foregrounds cinema as technics, and the essay ends with a discussion of the ways that Epstein's understanding of photogénie can press on Stiegler's claims. (shrink)