CONCEPT
Savoir-faire
The French term — central to Stiegler's proletarianization thesis — for the embodied knowing-how built through practice and irreducible to explicit instruction.
Savoir-faire, literally 'knowing-how-to-do,' names the practical, embodied, largely tacit form of knowledge that lives in the hands, the ear, the intuition — the knowledge built through years of engaged practice and accessible only through such practice. Alongside it, Stiegler identified savoir-vivre (knowing-how-to-live) and savoir-théoriser (knowing-how-to-theorize) as parallel forms of knowing. Proletarianization is, in its deepest sense, the loss of savoir-faire — the hollowing of embodied understanding when the function it enabled is performed by a technical system without requiring the understanding.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept connects to a long philosophical tradition — Aristotle's techne, Polanyi's tacit knowledge, Ryle's 'knowing how' versus 'knowing that' — but Stiegler gives it specifically pharmacological grounding. Savoir-faire is not merely a type of knowledge alongside others; it is the form of knowledge most vulnerable to technical proletarianization, because its embodied character makes it hardest to defend when market logic no longer rewards its maintenance.
Segal's senior engineer is the canonical case. Her eight years of backend expertise included formal training and