Savoir-faire
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 AI Story
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 explicit knowledge, but what distinguished her from a junior was savoir-faire — the ability to feel a codebase the way a physician feels a pulse, the intuition that detects something wrong before articulation catches up, the judgment built through thousands of productive failures. This is what the market has repriced as irrelevant.
The generational dimension is severe. Savoir-faire can be lost in a single generation because it requires the practice conditions under which it is built. Once the practice conditions are gone, the savoir-faire can no longer be renewed — only inherited from those who built it before the conditions disappeared. The transitional generation carries savoir-faire the next generation will not be able to build, and whose transmission requires precisely the kind of extended, friction-rich mentorship that the automated milieu eliminates.
The response is not nostalgia but institutional care. Which forms of savoir-faire must be preserved is a pharmacological judgment — some will ascend to higher floors, some will be economically retired without great loss, and some are load-bearing for forms of individuation that cannot be replaced. Distinguishing among the three is itself an exercise of savoir-faire.
Origin
Stiegler developed the concept across his critiques of cognitive capitalism, drawing on Simondon's theory of technical objects and on the French philosophical tradition's distinctions among forms of knowledge.
Connects to Michael Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension (1966) and Hubert Dreyfus's critique of computationalism.
Key Ideas
Embodied and tacit. Savoir-faire lives in the body and intuition, not primarily in articulate knowledge or codified procedure.
Built through practice. The only path to savoir-faire is sustained engagement with the specific material that resists and instructs.
Cannot be transmitted directly. Transmission requires apprenticeship, mentorship, long-circuit exposure — not reading or instruction alone.
First casualty of proletarianization. When technical systems perform the function, savoir-faire is the form of knowledge most vulnerable to atrophy.
Debates & Critiques
AI proponents argue that the concept is vague and that much of what practitioners call savoir-faire is actually tacit rule-following that systems can eventually capture. Stieglerians respond that this claim itself relies on the vanishing of practice conditions that would test the claim — we cannot know what savoir-faire contains until we try to do without it, by which point it is too late.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010)
- Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1966)
- Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949)