Boundary 2 Special Issue Bernard Stiegler Amateur Philosophy

Special Issue Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy Edited by Arne De Boever

boundary 2 an international journal of literature and culture Volume 44, Number 1

February 2017

Duke University Press

boundary 2 an international journal of literature and culture Founding Editors Robert Kroetsch and William V. Spanos Editor Paul A. Bové Abigail Lind, Assistant to the Editor Managing Editor Margaret A. Havran Editorial Collective Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh Anthony Bogues, Brown University and University of Cape Town Paul A. Bové, University of Pittsburgh Arne De Boever, California Institute of the Arts Nergis Ertürk, Pennsylvania State University Wlad Godzich, University of California, Santa Cruz David Golumbia, Virginia Commonwealth University Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University Michael Hays, Independent Scholar, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania R. A. Judy, University of Pittsburgh Aamir R. Mufti, University of California, Los Angeles Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College Bruce Robbins, Columbia University Hortense Spillers, Vanderbilt University Anita Starosta, Pennsylvania State University Editorial Board Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania John Beverley, University of Pittsburgh Joseph A. Buttigieg, University of Notre Dame Rey Chow, Duke University Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt University Arif Dirlik, Independent Scholar, Eugene, Oregon Nuruddin Farah, Bard College Margaret Ferguson, University of California, Davis Anthony Grafton, Princeton University Fredric Jameson, Duke University George Lamming, Barbados Marcia Landy, University of Pittsburgh Gayatri Spivak, Columbia University Wang Hui, Tsinghua University, Beijing Cornel West, Princeton University Rob Wilson, University of California, Santa Cruz Advisory Editors Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, Shiv Nadar University Nancy Condee, University of Pittsburgh Christopher L. Connery, University of California, Santa Cruz Ruth Y. Y. Hung, Hong Kong Baptist University Daniel Morgan, University of Chicago Gavin Steingo, Princeton University Christian Thorne, Williams College Q. S. Tong, University of Hong Kong Henry Veggian, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Lindsay Waters, Harvard University Press Assistant Editors Tom Eyers, Duquesne University Leah Feldman, University of Chicago Annette Damayanti Lienau, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Contents Arne De Boever / Editor’s Introduction / 1 Bernard Stiegler / The Proletarianization of Sensibility / 5 Bernard Stiegler / Kant, Art, and Time / 19 Bernard Stiegler / The Quarrel of the Amateurs / 35 Stephen Barker / Unwork and the Duchampian Contemporary / 53 Benoît Dillet / Proletarianization, Deproletarianization, and the Rise of the Amateur / 79 Daniel Ross / Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: BS and BB / 107 Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRivière / Compression in Philosophy / 125 Ed Cohen / Dare to Care: Between Stiegler’s Mystagogy and Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence / 149 Mark B. N. Hansen / Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire? / 167 Gerald Moore / On the Origin of Aisthesis by Means of Artificial Selection; or, The Preservation of Favored Traces in the Struggle for Existence / 191 Claire Colebrook / Impossible, Unprincipled, and Contingent: Bernard Stiegler’s Project of Revolution and Redemption / 213 Tom Cohen / Arche -Cinema and the Politics of Extinction / 239 Contributors / 267

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Editor’s Introduction

Arne De Boever

In the spring of 2011, Kenneth Reinhard, Stephen Barker, and I invited contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler to deliver three lectures in Los Angeles—at the California Institute of the Arts; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of California, Irvine— about aesthetic theory. While the first of these lectures, titled “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” was published shortly thereafter in the journal Lana Turner, the other two lectures have never appeared in print. This special issue includes Stiegler’s three Los Angeles lectures. In addition, it features both responses to the lectures as well as more general engagements with Stiegler’s work. One of the most important French philosophers writing today, Stiegler has published more than thirty books in French, several of which have already been translated into English. While Stiegler is mostly known as a philosopher of technics, hisanalysis work encompasses much more than this has developed as a sharp of our contemporary situation: the and rise of the digital, the contemporary state of attention, the ethics and politics of care and the welfare state, the rise of the extreme right in France and in boundary 2 44

1 (2017) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 3725821 © 2017 by Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press

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Europe in general, the culture industry and “the American way of life,” the destruction of desire and the economy of the drive, the politics of friendship, the future of Marxism, the risks of anticapitalism, et cetera. In coordination with the theoretical issues that his work lays out, Stieglerthat and a few others have also started Industrialis, political group seeks to respond, in practice, to theArs challenges of oura contemporary time. Most recently, Stiegler has founded a school in his hometown, Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, through which he has run both a yearly seminar and a summer session around central themes in his work. A public intellectual who writes regularly for French newspapers and magazines, Stiegler has proved himself to be a formidable philosophical and political figure whose personal history has shaped not just his philosophical career but also the very core of his thought. While aesthetics, understood as the theoretical investigation of sensibility, has arguably been central to Stiegler’s work since the publication of the first volume of Technics and Time in 1994, the 2011 Los Angeles lectures explicitly link Stiegler’s interest in sensibility to aesthetic theory proper and art history. Starting from an aesthetic shift in the work of Marcel Duchamp from Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) to Fountain (1917), Stiegler reads this shift through the lens of his philosophy of technics and its effects on human sensibility. Technics’ proletarianization of sensibility—a key idea in Stiegler’s oeuvre—thus becomes linked to a major art historical shift that is indicative of changes in both psychic and collective individuation (to borrow the terms of one of Stiegler’s main influences, the underrecognized French philosopher Gilbert Simondon). What has become lost in this history of proletarianization, Stiegler argues, is the figure of the amateur, wholoves what he or she does; instead, we have entered into a time of lovelessness, in which everything has become merely “interesting” (Stiegler evokes Hannah Arendt’s figure of the “cultivated philistine”). Through readings in art history and philosophy (Kant’s Critique of Judgment), Stiegler sets out to recover and revitalize the aesthetic figure of the amateur from underneath the ruins of technical history. On the far side of the mediocre judgment, Stiegler mounts a defense for the interested judgment, which would have a strong connection to desire and what he calls “belief.” It is through such belief that desire can be refueled in the decadent industrial democracies in which we live, thus revealing the close connections between Stiegler’s aesthetic and political projects. In the opening paragraph of the recently translated first volume of Symbolic Misery, titled The Hyperindustrial Epoch, Stiegler writes, “The


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De Boever / Editor’s Introduction 3

question of politics is a question of aesthetics and, vice versa, the question of aesthetics is a question of politics” (Stiegler 2014: 1). It is at this crossroads and within the particular theoretical history that it evokes—recalling not only Walter Benjamin’s famous comments on the issue but also, for example,which Kant’s third Critique Aristotle’s (the notion of “theos,” Stiegler reads as and “desire”) beforephilosophy that—that Stiegler’s California lectures are also situated. As a philosopher who has consistently aimed to understand the present by developing a theoretical, historico-political thought that is shaped by practical experiments in individual and collective individuation, Stiegler should be of interest to anyone engaged in the contemporary state of affairs. In the spirit of Stiegler’s plea for an interested judgment, this special issue collects a number of responses to Stiegler’s lectures, situating the lectures in the context of Stiegler’s work as a whole and using them as a springboard to reflect—after Stiegler—about what we consider to be the crucial issues of our time. The aim is not only to understand Stiegler but to think with him—and after him—so as to see what new possibilities for psychic and collective individuation his project opens up. Reference

Stiegler, Bernard. 2014. Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch . Translated by Barnaby Norman. Cambridge: Polity.


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The Proletarianization of Sensibility

Bernard Stiegler Translated by Arne De Boever

What happened to Marcel Duchamp between 1912—Nude Descending a Staircase —and 1917—Fountain ? And why should it matter to us? Between 1912 and 1917, Duchamp was increasingly concerned with the question of reproducibility that, starting with photography and chronophotography, leads to Frederick Taylor—that is to say, to the readymade. The readymade is born from the serialized production for mass markets, which open up a new question of proletarianization in a new age. In my book Symbolic Misery, I tried to show that at the time of Henry Ford and Edward Bernays, the development of the culture industries led to a proletarianization of the sensibility of the consumer through the apparatuses for the canalization and reproduction of perception. Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, invented the basics of marketing by organizing theseek consumers’ attention, thus of the libidinal energythe thatcaptivation marketing of must to redirect from theand consumers’ primordial A version of this lecture was previously published in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion , no. 4 (2011): 124–40. boundary 2 44 1 (2017) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 3725833 © 2017 by Duke University Press


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objects toward the commodities. This process of proletarianization mirrors the way in which the industrial machine era made possible the proletarianization of the producers. I use the term proletarianization to refer to a loss of knowledge (savoir ). it isphonograph, this loss of the knowledge that is one at stake in the birth ofFor theBéla radio.Bartók, Like the radio enables to listen to music without needing to know how to play music. In an interview that Bartók gave in 1937, he says that one should only be allowed to listen to music on the radio if one is reading the musical score at the same time. For him, it is evident that those who do not know how to read or play music cannot really listen to it. In 1759, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, Count de Caylus, says in his debate with Denis Diderot—and Goethe will say the same at the end of the eighteenth century—that it is impossible to talk about a canvas that one has not copied. If one looks at the canvases in which, in 1796, Hubert Robert is painting the Louvre—which had become a national museum accessible to all just three years before—one can see that the visitors, who are most definitely almost all artists, mostly reproduce paintings there. Paul Cézanne will do the same in the nineteenth century. As he explains in a letter to Émile Bernard, he thinks that one cannot see that which one cannot show by painting it, for example. One only sees to the extent to which one is capable of painting what one sees. One would have to show that what is happening here is a transformation of Jakob von Uexküll’s sensorimotor loop. From this moment onward, it starts looping through artificial organs, thus making possible a noetic expression of sensibility that becomes exclamatory and sensational as a result. • • • •

Throughout the twentieth century, the development of technologies—of what Walter Benjamin calls “mechanical reproducibility”—led to a generalized regression of the psychomotive knowledges that were characteristic of art amateurs. This regression was made possible by a machinic turn of sensibility that led to a proletarianization of the amateur so that the latter, having lost his or her knowledges, became a cultural consumer—at times even turning into what Hannah Arendt calls a cultivated philistine. These questions—and the questions that the an-artist Duchamp


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Stiegler / Proletarianization 7

raises about the aim of the artwork in what he characterizes as the time of the proletarianization of the artists themselves—confront us today in an entirely new context that is almost the inverse of the time that Duchamp is talking about, namely, a time in which a second machinic turn of sensibility is taking place. This second turn is made possible by digital technologies, through which just about anyone can access technologies of captivation, postproduction, indexation, diffusion, and promotion—technologies that were, until now, industrial functions that were hegemonically controlled by what I have called the psychopower of marketing and the culture industries. This new machinic turn of sensibility—which is no longer analog but digital—leads to a renaissance of the figure of the amateur, that is to say, to a reconstitution of libidinal energy which, after being systematically canalized and rerouted by consumerist organization, ended up putting in place an economy of drives—that is to say, alibidinal diseconomy. What is an amateur if not a figure of a libidinal economy? Theamat eur “loves” (amat, from the Latin verb amare, “to love”): that’s what makes an amateur an amateur. Art amateurs love works of art. And insofar as they love them, these artworks work on them—that is to say, the amateur is trans-formed by them: individuated by them. These are the questions that I will approach in this text. To do so, however, I must first turn to Kant. • • • •

In order for a work of art, any work of art , to present itself as such, namely as a work of art, one must believe in it : believe in it as a work, and as a work of art. The work of art only works as art to the extent that one

believes in it. In a way, Kant was already saying this: the reflectivity of aesthetic judgment, as a judgment that cannot be proven, and that could therefore never be apodictic, is, at least from this point of view, something that presupposes a kind of belief. It’s as if each work of art were in a way its own (deictic) revelation, and could only manifest itself as work by presenting itself as such a revelation, thereby forming a sort of dogma—which in some cases has constituted schools, chapels, churches, and has even led to schisms. When I consider a work to be beautiful, I necessarily think that everyone should find it beautiful, Kant says; however,in the intimacy of my thoughts I know that this is not the case, and that it will never be the case.


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This is also to say that the work’s beauty will never be recognized, if to recognize means to establish as true, as in “to prove” or “to demonstrate.” Aesthetic judgment will always remain a state of my belief, which could possibly be shared more largely, for example, by my friends, or even by my “age,” as fashion, or as receivedremain idea. The object ofunprovable. aesthetic judgment, however, will always anda literally improbable, Whether it is individual or collective, the aesthetic judgment is always of this order: it’s a reflective judgment, and not a determinate one, which means that it is of the order of a belief, which is also the mode of being of the experience of art in general. In the twentieth century, this belief develops a new but essential link to a sort of scandal, that is to say, to a sort of trap and reversal (skhandalon). This link is formed from the nineteenth century onward, with Olympia—the title of the famous painting by Édouard Manet, and also the name of the animated doll in Ernst Hoffmann’s The Sandman, the story that is of central importance to Freud’s analysis of the uncanny. And the link becomes explicit with Dadaism. This new kind of belief—which one could call reverse belief—expresses itself in competing churches and chapels— some are more dogmatic than others, and a few are schismatic, even—that one can call tastes or movements. However, these tastes or movements are transindividuations of the social, to the extent that one understands the social as the process of a psychic and collective individuation. It seems to be the case, then, that reflective judgment is not only shared but also constructed—that it comes about through various artifices, and that this artifactual formation of judgment and its reflectivity can become a dimension of art itself : not only a dimension but the very form of art’s workings even: it can become a sort of social sculpture. It’s in the same way that art becomes a part of the global development of highly speculative marketing. One can thus see appear marketing techniques like the “buzz,” which is also the modality of psychopower; such marketing techniques exploit the reflective and inevitably autosuggestive dimension of individual as well as collective judgment. The mystagogy of art thus finds itself threatened by that to which, in this case, it comes very close: mystification. All this follows from what one could call a pharmacology of the social sculpture—from a mystagogy that always confronts the risk of mystification, a mystification that this pharmacology turns into its working material. And this confrontation does not start with Joseph Beuys but with Duchamp.


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Stiegler / Proletarianization 9 • • • •

All this raises a question about the instrumental and technical conditions of the noetic act that is called, very generally, a belief. This question needs to be asked anew in a time when contemporary art, like religion, has some followers who are superstitious, as well as some who are bigots, fanatics, Gnostics, and agnostics. The mysteries of art always pass through the instruments of this art—in the same way that there are instruments of a cult. And a specific problem of modern art and contemporary art is the ever-increasing obsolescence of these instruments—I am thinking here not only of techniques, and in particular the techniques practiced by artists, but also of organizations (insofar as they are part of what I call a general organology), that is to say, of institutions. A work only works to the extent that one believes in it. More precisely, a work only works to the extent that it affects us, in the sense that, suddenly, it jumps out at us (elle fait saillance). Such a jumping out only affects us, and gets us hooked, to the extent that it directs us toward a mystery: it reveals next to existence—next to its own existence first and foremost, but also next to that of its author and of its spectator—something other than the plane of existence—if one believes in it. The experience of art is the experience of a work that opens up onto such a plane, and that appears in this way to reveal this other plane. Every work of art has the structure of a revelation. Any sensible subject that is gifted with a suprasensible faculty can have this irreducible and exclusively subjective experience. Kant argues it to be analogous to the moral law in terms of the encounter with the sensible (aesthesis); he calls it an aesthetic judgment. It makes appear in the most ordinary way in the world the extra-ordinary next to this ordinary—and as coming out of this ordinary, but also, and at the same time, as something that can never be proven (prouvé ): instead, it can only be experienced (éprouvé ). Let’s say that the mysterious is a name of the extra-ordinary and that there is a mystagogical performativity of the work, which only works on this condition. Insofar as the mystery of the ordinary goes, the work initiates onea destination. to another plane, and in this way it constitutes address, that is to say, This dimension—which is not that an of existence, even though it does not come from an elsewhere or from a world beyond existence, either—leaps forth (se projette) from immanence and into it. It is this fully immanent projection that forms the basis of the question of reflective judgment, in the sense that such a judgment cannot be reduced or com-


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pared to objective determinations, that is to say, to objects of determinate and cognitive judgment. The cognitive is never mysterious. The reflective, on the other hand, is the mystery of the extra-ordinary itself, but of an extra-ordinary withof immanence itself out becoming-profane transcendence. In ofthis it is the the thesense, world. That is tomystery say: its becoming-ordinary —, whence the fact that a reflective judgment is only universal by de-fault (par défaut ). Its universality—the fact that I posit that everyone should find beautiful, and not merely agreeable, what I find beautiful; that everyone should find extra-ordinary what is also ordinary—is its very mystery, precisely because of the fact that it only imposes itself by de-faulting itself: one will never be able to prove this universality. It will forever remain fundamentally doubtful. The being-by-de-fault of that which is called beautiful, and more

generally the content of every aesthetic judgment, thus joins up with the intrinsically idiomatic character of language: there is no universal language, and every idiom comes about through a de-fault of language (through a fault that is de-faulted, un-worked). In the eyes of those who do not speak the language, for example, idioms come about through a fault of pronunciation. That is also why a work of art is always idiomatic. Born from the fault and de-fault of language in general, of the language, a language only speaks as de-fault, by making faults and de-faults: a language (as opposed to language in general, to the language) is that which gives speech to a shibboleth (which is a fault of pronunciation). It’s the mysteries of language and the precarious capacity of poetry that turn such a de-fault into the very thing that’s needed ( justement ce qu’il faut )—into a de-fault that is necessary. This necessary accident reveals itself in each work of art, as the jumping out of a singularity that is literally improbable, unprovable, and that goes much further than a simple, provable universality—provable as apodictic universality, which can in this respect be subsumed under the concept of a determinate judgment. That such a singularity opens up another dimension, another plane, means that this dimension, this plane, is that which spontaneously leaps forth from any desire—to the extent that desire renders its objects infinite as the objects of a singularity. The plane of consistency to which the mystagogy of art refers is a layer that exists among other planes of consistency, and without which no object of any type of work—whether it be the work of science, philosophy, literature, law, politics, or knowledge in general—could consist. That is to


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say: could impose itself to existence as that which, even though it cannot be the object of a calculation, is that without which existence would undo itself (se défait ). Without it, those who still attempt to exist would be brought down to the level of subsistences—that is to say, of the drives. reflective by which Kant characterizes aesthetic ment isThe thus nothingjudgment but a reflective modality of the relation to this judgother plane that subtends the entire activity of the spirit and that can’t be reduced to any kind of knowledge, not even apodictic, cognitive, and determinate knowledge. Apodictic thinkers, or “dialecticians,” as Plato and Aristotle call them, are interested in working on the conditions in which one can put at a distance and contemplate deixis—and thus pass from monstration to de-monstration, from showing to de-monstrating. However, these conditions are themselves monstrative—they are themselves of the order of showing; they cannot be demonstrated or proven. They are what one calls axioms. They are the object of so-called esoteric philosophical teachings that are more like “initiations” than like “education” properly speaking— education is “exoteric” by nature. If the axiomatic is that which cannot be demonstrated or proven, while at the same time being the condition of all demonstration, the axiom is that which is likely but can never be posited as true. Does this mean that it is an object of belief? To say so would be a mistake. Because this “belief” only presents itself as axiom on the basis of a kind of evidence. This means, however, that it is also the object of a judgment by de-fault. And it is this kind of evidence by de-fault that founds the reflexivity of aesthetic judgment. Isn’t it evidence itself, then, that constitutes a kind of mystery ? How to separate the necessary mystagogy that would underlie and support the life of the spirit in all its aspects—as the shadow of the light that this life brings—from the workings of all kinds of mystification and obscurantism, which are the price one has to pay for mystagogy but which are similar to the fox in the henhouse? This intrinsic ambiguity of the life of the spirit requires a critique: a critique of all mystagogies, not in order to denounce them but to discern within them that which is always at risk of developing into mystification— and which makes possible the cultural philistinism that Arendt analyzes through the figure of the “cultivated philistine.” Plato never goes there— even though he invests the authority of Socrates in the mysterious Diotima, Plato thinks he is free from mystification because he denounces the mysteries of art, music, and poetry. It is also this tendency toward mystification, and the mystification that all mystagogy carries within it (all philosophy,


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all art, all religion), that produces priests who suddenly no longer believe, while they continue to do their job. Plato’s essence, Kant’s transcendental, the object of Freud’s desire: all these come from such a mystery. All these are the extra-ordinary that a narrow-minded rationalism is thinks it can and also must(but eliminate. Thethe excuse being that the extra-ordinary indeed always not only) reign of simulators. • • • •

I am speaking here of belief insofar as belief refers to an object that is not on the plane of existence—because one can also believe that behind this door, there is a corridor; but that is an entirely different kind of belief. The belief I have in mind is therefore not a belief of existence; instead, it irreducibly consists of putting an object on another plane and of believing in this other plane through this very act. It’s the most banal structure there is: its logic is that of desire giving itself an object and elevating it to the status of being the object of this desire, an object that can only be desired to the extent that it is not calculable, and therefore incomparable, unprovable. Seen from this angle, it is not an object that exists—if it is true that only that which is provable and calculable exists. It’s exactly the same when, if I judge something to be beautiful, I include in my judgment that everyone ought to find it beautiful. When I love a being and I desire it, I include in my judgment the presumption that the world lovecase. and Desire, desire this being, even though veryentire well that thisought is nottothe in this case, is not of theI know order of the drive. Desire universalizes its objects; the drive, on the other hand, tends toward the consumption of an object. The latter does not include autouniversalization: desire is to the drive what the beautiful is to that which is merely agreeable. We are living in a time of lovelessness (désamour ): the time of a libidinal economy that is constituted in such a way that, with capitalism having put desire at the center of its energy, this economy has led to the ruin of desire, to the unchaining of its drives, and to the liquidation of philia and more generally of this love that the noetic souls have for each other and for the objects of their world. When they are religious, these souls consider such objects to be the expression of God’s infinite goodness. They are the indicators of this goodness as a sublime source of all love. God thus constitutes the object of all desires. Love—or, to use a less specifically Western and Christian term,


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Stiegler / Proletarianization 13 desire —constitutes philia . This is also how love constitutes individuation : it only follows its course on the psychic plane to the extent that it also inscribes itself on the collective plane. It’s through love that the and of psychic and collective individuation is formed. As the first and prelimilove is that which be mainnary condition of this individuation, tained through care , through those practices of care thatneeds make to possible the

access to consistencies that exist on the plane of the extra-ordinary—and that, because they do not exist, are intrinsically doubtful and improbable, unprovable. Works—for example, artworks—are such practices of care. But they themselves need to be taken care of: one must be initiated into these objects that are themselves initiatory. This is how the magnetic chain and field that Socrates talks about in Plato’s Ion are formed. The question of access to the works is what one has called in the era of the culture industries, and in the “cultural democracies,” cultural mediation—a highly institutionalized way of referring to the question of address (which I raised earlier on). The question of access, however, is a question of mystagogy: it is the question of the initiation into a mystery that the artwork intrinsically is, insofar as it projects those that it affects into another plane, a plane that is itself improbable and intrinsically mysterious—at least in view of the planes of ordinary existence and, even more so, of subsistence. The question of this access is raised in each society, whether it is embodied by the shaman, the warrior (who enters into the plane of consistency that is his or her liberty), the official, the master, the artist, or the institution. However, in modern art this question comes to count in a new way (se pose selon une nouvelle facture)—and following something like a fault line (dans une fracture). This is the price one must pay—and it’s a high price—for the death of God. It’s the prize one gets through the death of God, as the trophy for this chasing out of the sacred (tha t is to say, of the extra-ordinary insofar as it is separate). Such a chasing out amounts to a state of disenchantment, in which modern art constitutes itself as the mystery of the profane, and no longer as the sacred—as the affirmation, within this immanence that the disenchanted world has become, of a consistency next to existence, as something from where a new plane is set free. That’s what Charles Baudelaire says, and he is thinking of Constantin Guys and Manet. It’s the plane of consistency that Gilles Deleuze talks about as belief in the world. It’s a mystagogy of immanence. To “believe in this world,” one needs a plane of consistency: existence will never suffer because of belief. This belief-in-consistency (which


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is not simply the belief-in-existence that makes me believe that there is something behind every door) is indissociable from reason understood as motive: in French, the word for reason—raison—also refers to the “motivation” that produces “movement.” Belief looks for the motive, which is in turn constituted beliefI (this mystagogy is of a transductive relation). I can only desire that inbywhich believe: the object my desire becomes immediately (to the extent that I desire it) the object of my belief (in its infinity). And this goes both ways: I can only believe in what I desire (infinitely). Aristotle calls this desire theos. Theos is the impassive and inaccessible object of all desires. In this respect, it is non-existent. Everything that exists is passive, that is to say, corruptible, or “sublunary,” as Aristotle says. Theos is the object of the contemplation (theorein ) of the noetic souls insofar as they desire, the contemplation through which they pass on to—and elevate themselves toward—the plane of the extra-ordinary. • • • •

Today, in a time of lovelessness, it often becomes more and more difficult to say that one loves a work: one finds this or that “interesting.” “It’s interesting”: this is the type of “postmodern” judgment—neither negative nor positive—that appears to be typical of the cultivated philistine and that one hears more and more. A mediocre judgment—mediocris in the narrow sense of the word: as referring to the average judgment of the average person, subjected to the averages of modern mass society. only works on the condition curiosity, the itself interest sparks Ainwork the first instance trans-forms itself that into the mystery, and lifts ontoit a higher plane: “As the Goncourt brothers said about a work by Chardin: at a certain moment, ‘the painting is elevated’” (Arasse 2006: 18). The work only works on the condition that simple interest gives way—and possibly immediately afterward—to sur-prise, to being taken by surprise. It is in surprise and through surprise that a passion of the work happens (advient ), so that the work produces a sort of levitation, that is to say, the sort of miracle by which all true admiration is triggered. There is a unity of the history of artistic mystagogy. It manifests itself when I—experiencing one of these mysteries that one calls works, or even a series of such mysteries as they are presented in museums, expositions, or galleries—suddenly find myself in a state of levitation—and in a way that is unexpected and that I cannot take in (in-compréhensible): I am passing on to the other plane —a plane where an over-taking (sur-préhension ), a being over-taken, overcomes or surpasses all com-prehension (com-préhension ).


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This can happen through the Black Bull in the caves of Lascaux, or through Greek marble, a portrait of Rembrandt, and the initiatory path that is formed and that I traverse discovering the monogrammatic monography of a contemporary artist, an artist of my time—who transindividuates the time in itwhich he or she is itworking . This suspension, an epokhè —because is epoch-making: becomes oneisofamy epochs, I am trans-formed by such a surprise, such an over-taking, and what follows from it is what Gilbert Simondon calls a quantum leap in individuation. It

can also constitute an epoch in art history, or in the history of an artist: in what one calls his or her work. The scandal is itself a sort of social levitation, preceded by a fall— hence the initial meaning of the Greek word skhandalon: trap. At first, and insofar as it involves a process , the scandal is not psychically and individually experienced as a levitation. On the contrary, it consists first of all, and in a way negatively, in a collapse: it is a kind of being over-taken, a kind of surprise or over-prehension, but this is presented rather as the incapacity of taking something in than as that by which one is taken over—and as that which goes against all interest as well as all access to the suprasensible— as that which is shocking and “slaps” public opinion “in the face” by going against its interests: as that which is not at all interesting , unworthy of interest, and, in this respect, demoralizing. It is only in the aftermath of a scandal, and through a work (travail ) of collective individuation (that is to say, of transindividuation) that a surprise, an over-taking—which is an epoch, that is to say, a suspension, and an interruption, which lifts us up—is produced. This aftermath of the scandal is, in this case as well, a sort of collective levitation, but it only comes about through something like a work of mourning . This is why one can never say that the mystagogy that is at work during the opening of an art show is merely a mystification: contemporary art—which proceeds from the scandal through which modern art comes about and thus reaches its completion through a sort of trap—requires an aftermath to which its scandalous srcin gives it a right, an aftermath that is in a way a priori. This aftermath is that of the trans-formation of psychic and collective individuation, through which the scandalous mystagogist— the one who brings to light the mystagogical character of art as such— sculpts the social. All the same, the question is raised of knowing to what extent a contemporary mystagogy is still possible—if it is true that today the adjective contemporary means “without scandal.” There used to be a time of


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the scandal: a time when transgression produced a scandal. But this is no longer the case—it’s as if there no longer were any possibilities for transgression, as if one could no longer expect anything from transgression. Or from a mystery. As if there no longer were a mystery. Our time is a time in which the mafia andthat, the although oligarchies chase the bourgeoisie—a bourgeoisie it isremorselessly philistine, is still too out cultivated in their eyes. Levitation, through which a work appears to me as work, and “lifts itself,” can only come about as belief. This belief isa desire where a judgment is formed. To judge a work is tolove or not to love it. And this is why such a judgment is made by an amateur : amateurs have made art history, and in the most diverse ways. Now, there are many instances in which one can absolutely no longer say with respect to contemporary artworks whether one loves them, or whether one doesn’t : in these cases, loving no longer has any meaning .

In this case, one is tempted to give the assessment that I called mediocre: “it’s interesting” or “it’s not interesting.” This is a mediocrity for which, as philistine as it may be, one should not have any contempt (for who can, today, completely escape the destiny of the cultivated philistine?): it develops in time, and as the very suffering that Axel Honneth calls Missachtung (which is translated in French by the word mépris, “contempt”). • • • •

Whenbecoming-attitude art becomes transgression—in other the first) stage of a larger —that with which artwords, worksin(travaille is no longer matter: it is individuation. This requires one to think a hypermatter rather than something “immaterial,” and I will need to come back to this. Art takes advantage in every possible way of the fact that in individuation—which is a current, a flux, a process—forms lose and change form and are flowing along, and that these forms are always already materials—pigments, marble, bronze, photographs, canvas for a painting, paper for a newspaper, industrial materials, glass, “entirely finished” objects, rails, apparatuses, dispositifs : all sorts of instances that can become the object of individuation, that is to say, ofthat which can spatialize time. Such is the

role of what I call tertiary retentions: they specify, like traces, the texture of the and of psychic and collective individuation, which is woven by the retentional devices, apparatuses, and institutions. Having become trans-gression and then attitude as psychosocial individuation (which is made up of attitude and is in this sense the hyper-


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matter par excellence), art is a modality of transformation, which is what individuation is by general principle—but it has become so according to conditions that change with time: the materials of transgression are all the more transgressive when, in industrial and then hyperindustrial activity, no longer simply they are which one can produce forms.that Individuation comesmaterials about aswith a function of dynamic constraints are induced by a general organology that results in a genealogy of the sensible. At a time when a scandal turns out to be a technique of social sculpting (that is to say, a new process of individuation), and after language has already been turned into letters and become printed, reproducibility—which substitutes the matrix and the apparatus of captivation for the form—affects not only the audiovisual works of art, such as photography and cinema, but also, and first and foremost, all our everyday objects, coming from serialized productions. It marks a change in the general regime of reproduction

that constitutes a new (industrial) totality of tertiary retentions , one that begins with the grammatization of the gestures of the workers (travailleurs) themselves. The conditions of individuation are organological: they pass through the organs of perception, but they endlessly recombine the assemblages (agencements ) of these organs through technical mediations. This can happen, for example, by (artificially) bringing together the ear and the hand through the musical instrument (by an organon that is an artifact), or by bringing together, before art history in the narrow sense of the word, the eye, the mouth, and the hand of the artist who uses a straw to blow pigments on the wall inside the caves of Lascaux. Art history is also the history of these assemblages, in the sense that painters see with their hands, and musicians, after the appearance in the nineteenth century of the diastematic notation of pitches and rhythms, hear with their eyes. These assemblages pass through organic defunctionalizations and refunctionalizations of both the sense organs and the artificial organs and organizations. And all this constitutes itself parallel to that by which the process of grammatization, through which the continuous flow is separated, begins, the continuous flow of speech, of gesture, of the perceived visible and audible, separated into recombinable elements that can be put together in different ways. In this aspect, the continuous is workable; it is a work of art through this very dimension. The defunctionalizations and refunctionalizations that determine the rhythm of the organological genealogy of the sensible and of what lies coiled up there—the intellect and the unity of its reasons, its motivations—


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have specific folds that create ruptures that are called epochs and that accentuate more and more vividly as time moves on the fault lines, the disadjustments, the incomprehensions, the crises, and critiques. During the more than thirty thousand years that separate us from the Chauvet cavegenealogy (the first musical instruments arestart saidoftohumanization date from this[hominisation age as well), this (which begins from the ], more than two million years earlier) amounts through grammatization to an industrial group of apparatuses of which the machinic turn as well as a turn of the sensibility of the spirit in its totality are born—with all their dimensions having become objects of calculability, that is to say, of determination: of what Kant calls the determinate judgment . It is only within such a turn that an event as extra-ordinary as Fountain can come about—between 1917 and 1963, the year when the circuit of its transindividuation entered it into art history, and as the srcin of what one would call, today, contemporary art. At this stage of its genealogy— which is also the stage of captivation and of the systematic detour of libidinal energy through the audiovisual powers that are organized in the culture industry as the flow of temporal objects obsessed with attention in the service of a nascent consumerist economy—the organs of perception end up becoming elements of organological sets that are industrially reconfigured and in which the apparatuses come first—as apparatuses of perception of psychic apparatuses, and as technical apparatuses and social apparatuses as well. And it’s in this new setup that transindividuation is at work—when it works. Artists work (travaillent) with all these apparatuses, with this material producing all sorts of retentional materials: surrealism works (travaille) with the psychic apparatus which has an unconscious; expressionism with the mnesic apparatus where phenomena are transformed—the phenomenological apparatus that Klee describes at the beginning of his On Modern Art and that continues in Beuys’s work; pop art works with the apparatus of the mass media, et cetera. All this brings us back to the question of a general organology, in which the apparatuses of perception are reexamined, explored, reallocated, and possibly also closed down in a context of experiences that have profoundly changed these apparatuses’ organological activity as well as their organological status. Reference

Arasse, Daniel. 2006. Histoires de peintures. Paris: Folio.


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Kant, Art, and Time

Bernard Stiegler Translated by Stephen Barker, with Arne De Boever

It is common knowledge that a work of art is at once free of any attachment to its own time (that it is, I will claim using a Husserlian term, omnitemporal—rather than atemporal), and at the same time formed uniquely in, by, and out of its age: Giotto and Leonardo, as well as Marcel Duchamp, can only be seen omni temporally as works of their time —even if, in Duchamp’s case, this was the time of worklessness désoeuvrement ( ).¹ Giotto can no more appear in Leonardo’s time than Duchamp could in our time. But of what does the omnitemporality of the “an-artist” Duchamp consist, if it is impossible to love a work by Duchamp in which he himself interrogates its “work”? How does one become an amateur with Duchamp— 1. [This provocatively enigmatic term, which literally means “out of work” or “unemployed,” took on new meaning in the work of Maurice Blanchot, for whom literature—writing in general—is feasible because writing endows words with their own allusive reality, negating all individuality and producing a state of radical neutrality. In order to maintain Blanchot’s three-part neologism, prefix–root word–suffix, “dés-oeuvre-ment,” I have elsewhere used “unworkness”; “worklessness,” however, now seems to be more widely accepted. The concept is vital to Stiegler ’s complex sense of transductive individuation.—Trans.] boundary 2 44 1 (2017)

DOI 10.1215/01903659- 3725845

© 2017 by Duke University Press


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if not of Duchamp himself? The Duchampian amateur loves the an-artistic psychic individuation that Duchamp has woven into the collective individuation we ourselves share—and of which it is a sedimentary deposit, as our transindividuated, preindividual foundation. It is the process of a transindividuation that stillhas transindividuates us—historically, the histos of our age, as what produced our age, in the same and wayas that Giotto and Leonardo did, yet entirely otherwise: otherwise than every other age. An artist is a transductor of individuations, catalyzing and channeling forces—libidinal energies—in a field of collective individuation in which he designs the circuits of transindividuation typical of that age, which the artist then “performs,” fabricating it in “saying” it as much as in “showing” it—in interpreting it (and at this point it would be necessary to reopen the discussion with Marx). The artist’s performative circuits are thus motifs and monograms of his time. Every psychic individual participates in the collective individuation constituting his age. But through his works (through the traces of their worklessness), the psychic individual as artist—or an-artist—in some way coincides with this collective individuation, and this coincidence is sensational. From the twentieth century onward, as it has led to the proletarianization of sensibility that I discussed in my previous text, it has become clear that it is impossible to understand the aesthetic life of the noetic beings that we are without inscribing it in a genealogy of the sensible that must be founded on the analysis of the organological becoming of this form of technical life (i.e., of sensational being: the being who can exclaim itself out of a noetically expressed sensibility, from the preindividual and transindividual foundation of which it is the inheritor). This exclamation presupposes an exteriorization of which gesture and speech are the primary manifestations. However, this genealogy of the psychosomatic sensible presupposes a characterization of the social processes of transindividuation out of which a work can open forth and that are made possible by the organological becoming of technical artifacts of which “art” is the sublimation. Only in inscribing a work in circuits of transindividuation from which it emerges, through which it passes (and then only because artifacts facilitate its passing), and in which it creates new circuits, motifs, and monograms by inscribing them there artifactually in time and space—only in this way is it possible to respect it as a “work.” And this always means insofar as it works beyond its time, but only by working out of its time (that is, also, in freeing itself from its time, like a sailor who, coming from somewhere, can go somewhere else).


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The omnitemporality of the work emerges from its very temporality. This is why the work is not “atemporal”: it is omni temporal in that, starting from its own time, its own age—historical, protohistorical, or prehistorical— it resonates in all times and in all works (projecting what André Malraux called of art”).and Butitsitresources can perpetually andtime pervasively work only if it“the canpossible find its source in its own and, in some way, the means for leaving it. Such “means” are always organological. What, then, are Duchamp’s resources; what is the spring from which he drinks? Essential to it is the machinic turn of sensibility, of which Nude Descending a Staircase and Fountain are two examples, separated by five years; two versions and two examples of the question of technical reproducibility engendering, precisely at that point in time, the loss of instrumental aesthetic knowledge, ruining the trades of workers and the practices of art-amateurs, such that it will no longer be necessary to know how to read or play music or copy works. From then on, literature is no longer either a bildungsroman or an operator of a life-transformation, not an art of living as culture- or technique-of-the-self but the object and function of consumption: of the organization of consumption of all industrial production through the seizing of control of the organization of the sensible itself, and of the cultural consumption of artworks themselves in a time of worklessness. • • • •

The proletarianization of the receiver required thecognitive new economic function of the aesthetic—which is also taking place inbythe field— has resulted in a generalization of what Hannah Arendt describes as cultivated philistinism, which has become typical of our era. It is already what drove Duchamp’s work, and it is what returned with Andy Warhol and in the age of mass media, an age more ripe to receive the lesson of the kind of consumerist experience, initially avoided but subsequently rapidly on its way to becoming global, through the expansion of television (and the Internet) but also through pop culture’s increased distance to and forgetting of Dada. How is individuation possible when all knowledges are transmitted by machines? Is wanting “to be a machine” the ultimate articulation of this limit question?² As for us, living as we do in the age of a new machinic turn of sensibility (the digital turn, which coincides with the end of mass media that are dying in a globally and industrially organized regressive move2. I have attempted to lay out what constitutes such a limit in Stiegler 2013. [It is worth remembering that Andy Warhol wanted “to be a machine” (Swenson 2007).—Trans.]


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ment in which the technical, transitional object becomes monstrous and pathetic), we will encounter a new age of care in which the amateur is the exemplary figure—traversing, as such, the field of contemporary art, producing exhibitions such as Amateurs, organized by Ralph Rugoff at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Enthusiasts , organized Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandoska at or Chelsea College, London, by or the installation by Michel Gondry at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This new epoch opens up a new organological age that requalifies amateurs as practitioners as well as critics . But the practitioner of art is first of all a critic, if it is true that to practice is to discern. This is why we must try to understand, both here and in my third and final text, “The Quarrel of Amateurs,” what the past, present, and future of the amateur actually are — that is, the connection between critique and desire, if it is true that “amateur” derives from “amor,” love. I will begin with this last question, and I will enter into it with Kant— and we will see how and why he necessarily directs us to the second question, of the amateur as lover. • • • •

Insofar as the figure of the amateur is taken seriously—as designating a way of individuating —the amateur is precisely what Kantian analysis cannot allow to be thought, any more than it can allow the thought of the historical conditions for critique or the faculty of judgment as a critical faculty formed through familiarity with works that themselves presuppose a practice. In “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” I addressed the faculty of aesthetic judgment, as conceived by Kant, as a judgment taste that is universal, but only by default. Let us reconsider this analysis. In judging the beautiful, I am obliged: 1. to posit, in principle, that everyone should judge as I do, since what can appear as beautiful to me can only do so if it is universally beautiful (universality is an essential predicate of the perception of beauty); if it does not, I am no longer faced with the beautiful but with the merely agreeable; 2. to state that, factually, on the one hand, not everyone may agree with me in my judgment but, on the other hand, and above all, that I can neither in fact nor in law prove its universality : I am obliged to state that the aesthetic experience itself constitutes


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an irreducible inconsistency (déphasage)—and thus a necessary default (un défaut qu’il faut ). Such a judgment can be universal only through this default in which, as universal law, it is condemned to remain in fact “diversal,”³ so to speak. This means not only that it will never produce universal agreement but also that it will never be able to require it, since it judges from the necessity of such an inconsistency, as the condition of psychic and collective individuation. A more contemporary name for this inconsistency is singularity. If a reflective judgment such as this is not determinant, if ittends to universalization, if it is even in some waypotentially universal without being able to be actually universalized, if this can never be accomplished definitively in the ultimate plenitude of its act, it is because remaining thus,always unachieved and thus to come, it opens onto the promise of a circuit ofinfinite transindividuation (omni temporal precisely because of that—Apollonian measure [mesure] that is simultaneously Dionysian excess démesure [ ]). It is within that incompleteness giving access to such an infinite, and thus as irreducible mystery, that a work is at work : it works and opens up in this way. Thus at the very moment when it instantly and fully gives itself to us, it surpasses us in exceeding itself. This is why Kant can write, “We linger over the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself” (Kant 2008: §12). But we will see that since Kant does not here specify the beautiful as proceeding from what works there as art (“the beautiful” designating nature as art), he can no longer think artistiche judgment as the trans-formation ofinthe one who judges precisely because judges—as “transindividuation” that sense. Even if Kant does not ignore the question of history, art for him does not yet have history: it is not yet the process of individuation that is the history of art, and that Hegel will be able to think only by postulating his dissolving “end of History”—in the blinding prescience of a modernity that, with Charles Baudelaire and his epoch, will reverse this phenomenology of the historic forms of art. The aesthetic judgment thought with Kant is, with regard to art, an exquisite and special sort of belief and, in this case, of belief in a universal (not a sort of knowledge, properly speaking) that is encountered even though it does not in fact exist, if “exist” (as capable of being encountered in space and time) means being the object of a determinant judgment that can be calculated. 3. “Diversality” is a concept that is also used by Patrick Chamoiseau.


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But then the Kantian question of aesthetic judgment would in fact leave critique without a voice : without any form of expression other than an exclamation, and thus also without argument—not to mention without discernment , without critique, and without judgment, if this is truly what is captured by krinon , in Greek sense. This transcendental critique of judgment would render anthe analytical and empirical critique of works, of the time of works, and thus of the history of artworks, impossible. We will see that, in a way, this is what Conrad Fiedler reproaches Kant for at the end of the nineteenth century.⁴ • • • •

In order to move forward through these questions, my thesis will be a double one: 1. I will propose, on the one hand, that a judgment without argumentation is not a judgment , and thus that what Kant speaks of is perhaps not yet a judgment but the first moment of a process requiring a second moment.⁵ 2. I will propose, on the other hand, that an argument is what historically supports a judgment, and that this support is itself inscribed in the organological becoming constituting the fabric and the tissue (histos) of the history of art (tekhnē ), as a projection of motifs onto this fabric. In the ageofofathe second turn in sensibility, the perspective process of mechanical deproletarianization , that is, awhich new opens age of care, it would become vital to study the histories of the faculty of judgment organologically in the aesthetic domain. In contrast to such a viewpoint, the faculty of judgment, conceived by Kant as tendentiously universal, is at the same time tendentiously ahis4. I owe this reference to Jacqueline Lichtenstein, to whom I offer many thanks. See Lichtenstein 2008. 5. Georges Didi-Huberman, who does not write within the Kantian tradition, and certainly not (and even less so) within the neo-Kantian heritage, and who fundamentally influenced Erwin Panofsky, is equally opposed to this heritage in which, according to Huberman, he posits a kind of analytic moment (Huberman calls it a knowledge) before what I believe to be the typical synthetic moment of Kantian judgment. But I believe that however useful and even admirable this position might be, it presciently neglects the fact that there are always not just two moments but three, and that this then forms a process of transformation: individuation.


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torical and as a result still part of a highly metaphysical age of aesthetic philosophy—a criticism that nevertheless leaves intact the extraordinary evidence that Kant’s theory of judgment is reflectively open to the indeterminate. What Kant wishes to establish is an ante -historical (transcendental) form of the faculty ofgivens judgment, one that organologico-empirical that permit thesimultaneously constitution ofneutralizes a judgmentthe as its historical support. In a well-known paragraph of the “Analytic of the Sublime,” Kant concerns himself directly with theories of art: If anyone reads me his poem, or brings me to a play, which, all said and done, fails to commend itself to my taste, then let him adduce Batteux or Lessing, or still older and more famous critics of taste, with all the host of rules laid down by them, as a proof of the beauty of his poem; let certain passages particularly displeasing to me accord completely with the rules of beauty (as set out by these critics and universally recognized): I stop my ears: I do not want to hear any reasons or any arguing about the matter. I would prefer to suppose that those rules of the critics were at fault, or at least have no application, than to allow my judgment to be determined by a priori proofs. I take my stand on the ground that my judgment is to be one of taste, and not one of understanding or reason. (Kant 2008: §33) The problem posed by this excerpt from the Critique of Judgment, which reaffirms the impossibility of constituting a science of the beautiful (a “science” being that which allows judgments to be “determined by a priori proofs”), and which thus reaffirms the fundamental liberty in which aesthetic judgment is exercised, results from the fact that it simultaneously excludes the possibility that taste could be the product of a formation—and, in fact, of a formation of attention .⁶ Consequently, it is as if my taste could not change . Or, in other words, the Kantian subject of the judgment of taste is not transformed by his judgment; he is not individuated by it and, in judging, does not transindividuate (himself). But contrary to what the Kantian analysis infers in rendering the moment of critical analysis—without which there can be no true judgment—impossible, it must precisely be understood as a circuit of transindividuation , consisting of three moments: 6. The aesthetic whose principles I am outlining here is a particular case of the theory of attentional forms I put forward in Veux-tu devenir mon ami? (Stiegler forthcoming).


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• •

that of apprehensive synthesis, presenting itself as surprehensive that of comprehensive analysis (which is also systematized with the synthesis of reproduction in the Critique of Pure Reason) • and that of intensified resynthesis as sur-prehension, through its comprehensive and analytic moment, and an as the relaunching of the process by which judgment becomes individuation (that is, systematized through the synthesis Kant claims to be that of “recognition”)

It would, then, obviously be vital to articulate these three moments, linked to three syntheses of the imagination, with the question of the schematism emerging from it in the Critique of Pure Reason. • • • •

The argument—that is: the critique, which can be constituted only by passing through an analytic moment—finds itself a priori excluded from the Kantian aesthetic judgment. It is this dogmatic position that founds the transcendental definition of the judgment of taste. This is certainly not what Kant says, sensu stricto: he simply states that this judgment cannot be determined by rules, since it is the reflective sense of judgment that leaves its object in its constitutive indetermination. The de facto result is nonetheless that taste, as a faculty that could be the object of a formation, of an education, and that would thus have been connected to the intellect, is excluded from the thinking of the judgment of taste, which is always reflective. Fully achieved⁷ aesthetic judgment is that of the amateur, who is also, like the artist, a distinguished dis-agent of transindividuation. It is the judgment of the one who judges through a frequenting of works, who stays near (séjourne ) works, who returns to them, who lingers there, as Kant says regarding the beautiful, who awaits something of a reiteration and a repetition of their presentation—and who knows, at base and before all else, that a work never returns identically : that it is open, indeterminate, unfinished. That it is the very experience of this inconsistency (déphasage) that is individuation. The amateur’s judgment is a process that always contains three moments: 1. The moment of synthetic judgment, in the course of which the judger apprehends the unity of what he is judging, but where this 7. I will specify the sense of this qualifier below.


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apprehension is produced as the experience and the test of a surprise that is the moment of sur -prehension; that is, of the surpassing of the one who judges by what he is judging, and that exceeds him in its very default. 2. The of moment analytic and judgment, necessarily comes after themoment synthetic tends which to turn sur-prehension, produced by synthetic apprehension (that is, sur-prehension occurring only when the work works through effects that trans-form the judger), into an object of com prehension; that is, of analytic apprehension, and thus of appreciation and therefore of a determination whose aim is no longer to form the unity of all but, on the contrary, to break it into parts in order to understand how, why, and for whom these parts form a unity in the mind of the judger, and appear to him as a surprising whole and therefore a motive for exclamations. 3. The moment of return to the work and of its returning—of the increased and differant (différante) repetition of the moment of sur-prehension, and with it of the default that exceeds analysis but also—and interminably—reinitiates its necessity: this impossibility of finishing, of putting an end to the circuit, which is the circuit of transindividuation, and which generally works through encounters with other amateurs and other works, is at once the source of the omnitemporality of works and the concretization of the indetermination of Kantian aesthetic judgment, but here, precisely, as the process of individuation working through its analytic—that is, critical—moment, which is also a moment crisis. The analytic moment can never exhaust the synthetic moment: the comprehensive apprehension of the work acts as a support for judgment but never demonstrates it. These analytic supports for synthetic judgment, which are also the crutches for the one who, judging a work that has transformed him—that is, that has worked—wants to argue to those who are similar to him, this argumentation being part of the process by which the work works. These supports can thus never be constituted in demonstrative proofs. It nevertheless remains the case that they constitute the arguments about the work, and about the way in which it creates the conditions through which a sur-prehension is produced that remains irreducible to these conditions alone, that then constitutes an experience—of something that can be experienced without being subject to proof. There is sur-prehension because in aesthetic experience the one


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who judges by forming the unity of the object of judgment discovers in it an incommensurable: an incomparable singularity, a pure srcinality. We have seen that because the object of aesthetic judgment is structurally incommensurable and thus incomparable, its critique remains in some way irreducibly grounded in the act that of belief formed in the surprehension: it appears to the judger his object is not on moment the sameofplane as other objects, that it has become literally extra-ordinary.⁸ And yet we are not referring to an object of faith here, since this extraordinary object merely comes out of the ordinary, and since the act of belief through which it detaches itself from this “ordinary” desires arguments. If it is true that there is in every analytic enterprise something that tends toward a determination, in the strict sense this word has in the case of a determinant judgment (namely, capable of producing demonstrative statements and apodictic utterances, but also and more generally capable of subsuming under concepts—under categories), what the aesthetic analysis tends toward is not, properly speaking, a deter mination even when, for example, it declares that a given work is part of a particular artistic movement. It tends toward what also constitutes a condition of determination but does not lead, in this particular case, to such a determination: it tends toward a comparison —to a commensurability—that we seek to establish among various elements and relations among these elements, that we seek to describe. These relations are precisely the supports I have mentioned. If there is a sur-prehension, it is because what is to be judged is singular and consequently not subsumable under a concept: that is, as Kant says, subsumable into an end ⁹ that would also be a finality constituted a priori as the possibility of completion. This is why Kant can speak of “purposiveness without purpose” (i.e., without a rule). In tending toward its perfection for the subject it impresses as beautiful, the artwork, and generally every object judged as beautiful, thus indicates its own end, which is translated in the subject as a feeling of pleasure. But this end is not subsumable into a concept: it is not determinable. As affect, it is what the subject projects and reflects in and through the object : it is a reflecting finality without any rule that could be given in a concept. It is the finality of the irregular, irregularity itself: the finality of a default (of rules), and of a necessary default—precisely as finality. 8. [This phenomenon results from the “mystery” of désoeuvrement .—Trans.] 9. The “concept” of an object is its end, to the extent that it is also its a priori cause.


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Although Kant does not think this singularity as such since he does not distinguish the singular from the particular, he indicates through the notion of “purposiveness without purpose” that at the source of all “rules for art” there is an irreducible irregularity that is the singular and the agent of all sur -prehension. The synthetic moment is that sur-prehension— indeterminable and interminable, thereby constituting a moment of “belief.” The analytic moment is that of comprehension and thus of argumentation, but that is neither a demonstration nor a determination. Rather than a determination, the analytic moment is a movement of the increase of indetermination : it is the movement by which the object is in-determined, the movement of an intensification of singularity through the operations of comparison and commensuration that finally always turn out to be insufficient and impossible—operations at the limit, by which sur-prehension is delayed around the object that it thus attempts to understand comprehensively and that it in some way puts to the test of its incomparability through a series of comparisons that reveal and mark it by default. The analytic moment is the transformation of the exclamation that sur-prehension provokes—as a breakthrough, a hole in the stoppered horizon that is the ordinary realm of immanence—in arguments regarding what supports the synthetic moment. These arguments open up, properly speaking, the circuit of transindividuation as forces: this circuit makes sur-prehension circulate through effects on and between amateurs (most notably through operations of comparison and commensuration). This circulation, at the core of which what Wolfgang Iser (1980) describes as an aesthetic effect is formed, is the structuration of a collective individuation through internal resonance. But such a transformation is also what, in trans-forming the subject of these operations (and his experience of sur-prehension) himself, redirects him to the experience of another, further sur- prehension: a new surprise, a new synthesis, emerging as difference from its repetition—and as repetition of the unity of the object thus synthesized. This synthetic moment, which develops through the differentiation produced in the course of these frequent visits that are the art-amateur’s practices (which are repetitions), is what could happen to me, and what could and even must happen to others in historically given conditions, but it can also not happen to me and to others and in those same historical conditions. In fact, these conditions are “historical” only insofar as they are dynamic (that is, polemical), because they are constituted through a default (at the srcin). That is why they are conditions of crisis. And this is


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because judgment in general (krinon ) is essentially a crisis (krisis ). This is singularly true for the aesthetic judgment, to the extent to which it affectively trans-forms the judger, a transformation that is always a sort of crisisas-affect, as e-motion and thus movement out of crisis: de-cision, through which judgers become what they are.of judgment does not account for this However, the Kantian critique critical dimension of the crisis (as the artistic modality of transindividuation), precisely where it posits a critique of the faculty of judgment: since the Kantian aesthetic subject is not trans-formed , the Critique of (the Faculty of) Judgment does not allow the thought of the faculty of judgment as critique. In this sense, the Kantian aesthetic subject is not yet modern—in the sense in which we speak of modern art. The critique of the Critique of Judgment that must therefore be made must not, however, lose sight of what Kant captures there quite decisively, namely, that there is in the experience of synthesis an experience of the improbable that projects the judger onto the plane of a consistent inexistence in which the object of judgment is always presented as universal by rights and never in fact, that is, as an object that essentially produces default: as the object of desire. In this regard, if we could say that the subject judging aesthetically is a projector of infinity, we must then say that an aesthetic object is a projector of consistencies—the projector of infinity bringing to the projector of consistencies his libidinal energy (as the power to sublimate). The difference between the synthetic and the analytic—and of what is given in this difference itself, that is, precisely insofar as it is a differance—is irreducible; but the gap itself can be reduced. If it cannot be eliminated, it can be diminished—and this with the very paradoxical result that the more one knows about the comprehensible conditions of surprehension, the more this sur-prehension is intensified; the more the gap is reduced, the more the abyss is expanded (including the emotion it evokes, which is the culmination of affect precisely where the analysis seems to temporarily disaffect the subject of the sur-prehension through comprehension) between these two moments of judgment as if, to the extent that the edges approach each other, the bottom of the abyss becomes increasingly immense and incommensurable each time: sublime. Thus, in its essential negativity, the structure of the Kantian sublime already contains the Freudian question of sublimation. The judgment of the beautiful is the experience of an improbable of which the judgment of the sublime reveals a paradoxical economy (as the economy of default),


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namely, that this judgment is improbable to the extent that its object is produced only as infinity, and that this infinity, as incommensurability, is what opens up the aesthetic subject onto the subliminal plane of what Kant calls the suprasensible. Such an opening, which is an elevation from—and at the heart of—immanence, is sublimation, properly speaking. The object of desire is very generally and structurally an object that does not exist: it is an object that is intrinsically infinite. It is on the basis of this matrix that, at the synthetic moment of aesthetic judgment, we encounter (as sur-prehension) the consistency of what does not exist and whose non-being can, for example, be presented and appear as beauty— as presence —itself. In analytic judgment, it is a question of establishing, comprehensively, that this consistency of what does not exist is nonetheless a consistency in immanence: in the comprehensible, and from the comprehensible, which is also to say from and in what exists. This consistency is not what returns to a transcendence: it is not an object of faith nor one of piety, but of a belief, and even of amystery, of a cult. It even constitutes a “culture.” Aesthetic judgment, as simultaneously synthetic and analytic, is therefore intrinsically mystagogic. This means that aesthetic experience, in which aesthetic judgment is formed on the basis of an exclamation that leaves the subject staggered, mouth agape, is a sort of initiation into mystery, and into a transformative, aesthetic mystery. The mystery is transformative for the one to whom it happens by surprise, very improbably. The analysis is a (second) moment in this initiation, the moment of effective reflection, as the time of reflection in reflective judgment. But that moment is redirected to mystery as the surprise that differs in this differance, as a circuit of transindividuation. If what is produced with the sur-prehensive synthesis is of the order of consistency, what comprehensively supports this consistency is, however, of the order of existence. This existence, which supports consistency only by default—this propping up constituted through the rules of art, through technics, through the mechanisms of the device (dispositif ) or the materials (including mechanisms of transindividuation in the age of readymade materials)—is also what participates in the individuation of the history of art—like the faculty of judgment, thus constituting histories of arts, their works, and judgments made of them: the histories (critiques) of the faculty of judgment. The surprise-within-the-surprise is that in passing through the comprehensive analysis, the support that would want to clarify the mystery in


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fact reinforces it—except if the object finally gives way to a negative judgment (or if the critique is badly done). The more consistency is supported, the more it consists in distinguishing itself from its support. Mystery and its supports result from the dissemination (déhiscence ) opened by technics as becoming and as experience (experience requires theuptechnical exteriorization that itself opens the possibility of existence beyond mere substance). But such a dissemination is possible only because the object of desire is constituted by technicity: it supports a libidinal economy whose consistencies are the objects reflectively projected on the plane of the extra-ordinary by ordinary objects and onto these objects themselves. This economy is essentially what constitutes the desiring (that is reflecting , suprasensible) subject’s ability to sublimate. Critique can and must establish the technical support for such a consistency. And this technical support is then what constitutes the amateur, as the figure of desire par excellence: the one who loves. A critic in his own right, the amateur is precisely not a consumer: he discerns, he is capable of moving—at least he has the power to do so—from a state of synthetic surprehension, where objects con sist, to a state of analytic comprehension, where they exist, and where they insist, as difference-in-repetition. It is out of this possibility that the amateur is able to exchange with others—precisely with those with whom he shares a being-together constructed by philia, which at the same time opens a public space and time that are the exact opposite of an audience: this is a critical space and a critical time, a space and time of individuation (of psychosocial transformation) insofar as it is operated through “quantum leaps,”¹⁰ crises in which space and time are undetermined and infinite through that very fact. The epoch during which those whom Hannah Arendt calls “cultured philistines” appeared is also the one in which, at the time of Marcel Proust’s Madame Verdurin and when Dadaism was fighting against those philistines, the foundations were provided for a new mystagogical age that would lead, at the very heart of modern ar t, to what we today conceive of as “contemporary art.” For Arendt this philistinism, which simply consisted in being “uncultured” and commonplace, was very quickly succeeded by another development in which, on the con10. In physics, a quantum leap is the sudden, unforeseeable jump of an electron, atom, et cetera, from one energy level to another. In general usage, it is a sudden—surprising— highly significant advance or breakthrough, and it thus relates Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose” to the unpredictability of dissemination.


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trary, society began to be only too interested in all these so-called cultural values. Society began to monopolize “culture” for its own purposes, such as social position and status. This had much to do with the socially inferior position of Europe’s middle classes, which found themselves—as soon asagainst they acquired the necessary wealth and leisure—in an uphill fight the aristocracy and its contempt for the vulgarity of sheer moneymaking. (Arendt 1968: 202) We should note here in passing that in this long history of social circuits of transindividuation, the opening of the era of philistinism saw a conflict between the “commoner” Denis Diderot and Count AnneClaude-Philippe de Tubières, Count de Caylus, that could be called a “quarrel of amateurs.” Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is the dramatizing of the consequences of this conflict, precisely at the moment when Dada and Duchamp, as well as James Joyce, came on the scene, a little more than a century after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Today, at the beginning of the next century, the current buzz leads to a “Verdurinian” lifestyle and “[recruits] from all classes of the population,” to borrow an expression Marx uses to define his concept of proletarianization (Marx 1988: 62). Contrary to this philistinism, whether it be cultivated or uncultivated, in the exchange it attempts to install at the center of the circles by which it initiates being together (by initiating it into the mysteries of its passion), the amateur, to the extent that he is not mystified (gregariously and regressively) by the mystagogic experience of the object of his desire, and who as a result knows and experiences a crisisthen, (is trans-formed)—the crisis through which a work opens—the amateur, experiences: 1. the impossibility of proving that the work in fact works; 2. the possibility of supporting —against mystifiers of all varieties— what is then a test, and one that must be sustained without ever being able to be proven, and then of making it shared. The destiny of a work is precisely to assemble a public within the very feeling of this necessary default, and to make it a valued part of the organologically overdetermined historical process itself.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1968. “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance.” In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 197–226. New York: Viking.


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Iser, Wolfgang. 1980. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2008. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. 2008. The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age . Translated by Chris Miller. Los Angeles: Getty Center. Marx, Karl. 1988. The Communist Manifesto. Edited by Frederick L. Bender. New York: Norton. Stiegler, Bernard. 2013. “Pharmacology of the Question.” In What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology, translated by Daniel Ross, 99–133. London: Polity. . Forthcoming. Veux-tu devenir mon ami? Aimer, s’aimer, nous aimer: Du 21 avril 2002 au 22 avril 2012 . Flammarion. Swenson, Gene. 2007. “What Is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters, Part 1.” ARTnews, November 1. www.artnews.com/2007/11/01/top-ten-artnews-stories -the-first-word-on-pop/.


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The Quarrel of the Amateurs

Bernard Stiegler

Translated by Robert Hughes

Even if the critical community is analytical, and even if the critic analyzing the work of art is an amateur, this critic can always still lapse to the status of a cultivated philistine. One might think here of Henry James’s Figure in the Carpet (1896), which stages this lapse into critical philistinism and the sinking of the critic into analytical mystification. Critical analysis in such a case is a comprehension without surprehension . The question that then arises is whether it remains possible to reach a surprehension starting from the comprehension that occurs when one finds a contemporary work “interesting.” “Interest” in works that one does not love is an experience that has come to dominate the relation that our time maintains with its art. Is it possible to transform such an “interest,” altogether cerebral and comprehending, into at theallinfinitizing attraction necessary for reflective judgment? possible to transform a simple determinative judgment that may Isbe,it for example, sociological or historical, or, for that matter, economic and corruptly speculative? boundary 2 44 1 (2017) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 3725857 © 2017 by Duke University Press


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This last case concerns a calculation aiming to realize an “investment” that partakes of nothing of the aesthetic, although it is completely mystagogic and fetishistic in the broadest and most ambiguous senses of these words, which in this case bear upon a commodity—as the destiny of the work that become “interesting” for the super-philistines who speculate on the arthas market. In the ascendency of the judgment of one who is “interested” but without love, we see imposed as the norm the figure of the philistine critic, who is more or less cultivated—which is to say more or less uncultivated. This “critic” does not analyze either; he finds precisely nothing else to analyze other than his own “interest.” Nevertheless, the “dispassionate” and “analytical” critic can also (and just as easily) turn back into the figure of the philistine; this is the possibility that James dramatizes at the end of the nineteenth century. Before getting to that point, we shall consider the conflict opposing Denis Diderot (1713–84) to Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, Count de Caylus (1692–1765), on the faculty of judging works. The contemporary critic Jean-Louis Jam has called this conflict “the quarrel of the amateur” (2000: 37). We will examine how this conflict anticipates from the eighteenth century, but in a kind of reversal in advance, the ambiguous fate in which criticism decomposes into philistinism¹—and in which the cultivated philistine comes to be interested and circumspect, and to repeat, with a serious, portentous air, “This is interesting . . . this is interesting.” With Diderot and the Encyclopédie, the Amateur becomes a figure on which there weighs a suspicion that imposes itself first insofar as the amateur represents a privilege typical of the ancien régime. But it also weighs on the amatorat, the bourgeois class of amateurs, as we shall see with Roland Barthes (1977: 149), and precisely as this bourgeois class, as an amatorat that is both philistine and cultivated. 1. The reversal was anticipated insofar as Diderot accuses Caylus of being if not a cultivated philistine—which Caylus precisely is not—at least of being a kind of artisan. Diderot censures, together with Caylus, the whole nobility that claims the right to judge as its privilege. The reversal takes place insofar as the commoner is the ultimate philistine— and, moreover, Diderot himself is the will commoner here and should a protophilistine. This symmetrical inversion be accomplished with thetherefore French be Revolution, which will set the conditions for a new process of transindividuation. [Transindividuation is a term Stiegler develops from the work of Gilbert Simondon. Stiegler’s Ars Industrialis website defines the term as “the trans-formation of the I by the We and of the We by the I ; it is, correspondingly, trans-formation of the techno-symbolic milieu within which the I meets as a We” (Stiegler n.d.).—Trans.]


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As for us, the hermeneuts of the twenty-first century, all more or less philistinized perhaps, mystagogues, mystifiers, and mystified, no longer believing in either myths or their demystification, we know now that we have come to know a new, quite uncultivated philistinism, though believing itself quite cultivated andown rather worse than that of all those bourgeois: a philistinism proper to, our time, a “bobo” philistinism, getting its honey from the buzz.² • • • •

The question of philistinism that perhaps no one today can altogether escape is a translation of ambiguities that are themselves decomposing and that are rotting the process of transindividuation, at a time when the libidinal economy (whose psychosocial reality is this process) is already on the brink of ruin. The ordeal of philistinism appears as a hallmark of our times and as our lot. It translates the effects of nihilism into aesthetic and “cultural” domains (thereby producing what Michel Deguy calls “the cultural”). It arises against the backdrop of the question of lovelessness (désamour ) and a decline in the figure of amor, that is to say of the amatore—a decline proceeding from an organological mutation. This mutation profoundly perturbs the libidinal economy and its circuits, without which it comes undone. Proceeding from a machinic turn in sensibility starting in the nineteenth century, this mutation is also preceded by the instatement of a new process of transindividuation constitutes a revolution in the of judgment and that invents that the modern figure of the public onconditions precisely this basis. This enormous transformation began with the political emergence of the class of commoners—that is to say, actors of the negotium ³— which will be called the bourgeoisie, once it has assumed economic and political power. To understand this, and to understand the complexity of the libidinal economy which is put in place as its power—an economy vilified, together and separately, by Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara, and one which in 2. [“Bobo” suggests a person to bo urgeois pleasures and hemian creative life. The sense devoted of “buzz”both at the end of thismaterial sentence (and later in to theboessay) suggests the superficial commercial “buzz” that drives interest in the art market.—Trans.] 3. [Negotium , from Latin, concerns the pursuit of daily business, especially this pursuit considered as a value in the conduct of life—the declaration, for example, that the business of life is business.Negotium is contrasted with otium , the practice, arts, and devotions of refined leisure.—Trans.]


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our times is in ruins—one must examine how a celebrated commoner, Diderot, entered the struggle against the Amateur with a capital A, against the delegation of an official power to judge, and against the figure of monarchical libidinal economy. The quarrel of 1759 the Amateur that was setepoch off byofDiderot and that raged during the year is an episode in the grammatization⁴ and protorevolutionary transindividuation in the epoch of what is called the Republic of Letters. It concerns a conflict of theory, embodied by common men of letters such as Diderot, Jean-François Marmontel, and, later in the century, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, against the practice of the Amateur, embodied by persons of noble rank, supposedly endowed with what the ancien régime called the “natural taste” proper to “persons of rank.” In other words, the quarrel of the Amateur contests the legitimacy of this figure of the Amateur as it founds, at the beginning of the Republic of Letters, and at the heart of the Royal Academy of Painting, the circuit of transindividuation forming monarchical taste. The main figure challenged by Diderot is the Count de Caylus. If it is his nobility that authorizes Caylus to claim the status of an Amateur, this status nonetheless also derives from his practice as a copyist, and not merely from the privilege of his rank. Caylus held a high notion of his own ability to judge and thought himself a true amateur, which is to say capable of truly loving works of art. In other words, even if his rank grounds this capacity to judge—“well-born” people are “people of quality”—this grounding is only a potentiality reserved for the nobility. Its realization requires a

practice that is also plainly not an occupation but an otium.⁵ An occupation is practiced by tradespeople (including men of letters [Jam 2000: 34, with reference to Du Bos 1770: 383–84]), who are commoners and, as such, unfit to judge. A tradesman may be a practitioner, but his practice is that of a negotium . For Caylus, his practice of engraving gave warrant for the praise and interpretation he offers for a painting by Raphael, Christ’s Charge to Peter. Since, like many amateurs, Caylus is a copyist, he writes, 4. [Grammatization is a key term in Stiegler’s philosophy of technics and pertains to the exteriorization of memory in its varied forms. More fully, grammatization suggests the array of human efforts for seizing hold of the flux of experience, parceling it out into discrete units, and encoding it in some external, transmissible, manipulable medium— examples in this essay will include the printing press, musical notation, the photographic innovations of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, and software for critically notating film and music.—Trans.] 5. [Otium is described in footnote 3, as contrasted with negotium .—Trans.]


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This puts me in a position to talk about this masterpiece of art and spirit. . . . This position derives not only from my study and the meditation I have made; it develops from the plates that I myself have engraved. For, in incising the furrows and working the copper, I have always been careful to observe chains necessity in the composition and the relation of eachthe part to theofwhole. If I suppressed a part, the result was enlightening, and the finished work revealed the doubt that remained in my mind. In this way, I meditated on the different routes that great men have taken to reach the degree of perfection that we see in their works. (Jam 2000: 27, quoting Caylus 1750: 171–72) At stake here is thus an initiation through copying. And this practice, which does not ultimately aim at artistic creation, is analytic : it allows one to understand what such and such a work is made of, insofar as what is at work in this rendering is a mystery, as Jam emphasizes: “For the Amateur, practice is not the simple deployment of a technique and the acquirement of a know-how to match the artists’, but rather the initiatory path by which, having become aware of his insufficiencies as a practitioner, he can approach the reality of the creative act and, consequently, perceive all its grandeur and mystery” (Jam 2000: 27). And Caylus says that such copying is a form of reading as well as of writing: “However imperfect his study may be, the amateur “thereby learns to read and meditates what he wants to write. In the writing, the traces in his memory become more profound and disgust own imperfect efforts establishes his sense for the subtleties andwith the his beauties of the great masters” (Jam 2000: 27–28, commenting on Caylus 1748: 122). The public of Amateurs, according to Caylus, is a public that reads this γραφειν (graphein) that is the painting. In this respect, he claims the status of aesthetic maturity for the nobility, a kind of maturity avant la lettre of the Aufklärung, which, through Diderot (and through Kant, who extends the gesture), will contest that this right should be the privilege of the nobility. In 1748, when Caylus wrote these lines, the Amatorat was still an official charge conferred by the king upon members of the aristocracy, of whom the most famous was perhaps Roger de Piles, whose title of “conseilleramateur” was conferred in 1699. The Amateurs gathered in the heart of the Royal Academy of Painting, together with the tradespeople who were the artists. The academy was founded in 1648, and in 1663 its rules gave a precise definition to the word amateur : “it henceforth designates ‘persons of rank’ who are invited to contribute to the work of this company along-


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side tradespeople. Placed to the left of the President, the amateurs exercise their activity within the academic system royally instituted to regulate the specific domain of pictorial art” (Jam 2000: 22). Diderot, a commoner, denounced a mystification in this monarchical organization of the circuit of transindividuation, an organization the judgment of taste characteristic of the ancien régime. Throughforming this quarrel, as Jacqueline Lichtenstein (2008) has shown, Diderot opens the way for the aesthetics that culminate in Kant—an aesthetics, as I argue in “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” that in principle excludes the critical as an analytical faculty (and not only as a transcendental principle, not only as an a priori structure of the subject). As the historical and finally revolutionary realization of the stage of grammatization inaugurated with the printing press, passing through the Reformation and the Society of Jesus, the Republic of Letters becomes the Age of the Enlightenment—the Aufklärung that Kant defines precisely, less than forty years later, as a coming of age by and in the presence of “the reading public.”⁶ This “Republic of Letters” led to the establishment of a new circuit of transindividuation, and hence to a new power: that of “men of letters,” which will be characteristic of the “enlightened monarchy.” In 1759, in the name of these “men of letters,” Diderot attacks Caylus’s supposition that the tradespeople he is sitting alongside are less capable of refined judgment, notwithstanding their expertise as practitioners, insofar as they are but commoners, like Diderot himself. We note here, as Hannah Arendt also reminds us, that ancient Greece, which was obviously itself establishing a new circuit of transindividuation, also contested the legitimacy of the judgment of artists by founding the privilege of noble citizens.⁷ Arendt writes, The same men who praised love of the beautiful and the culture of the mind shared the deep ancient distrust of those artists and artisans who actually fabricated the things which then were displayed and admired. The Greeks, though not the Romans, had a word for 6. For Kant’s description of the “reading public” as a condition for coming into maturity, see Kant 1991: 54–60. Certainly, Kant does not deny the privileges of the nobility as such. But maturity cannot be limited to well-born people: this inference is inevitable when he extends the critical capacity—the right to judge—to the general public that reads and writes. We shall see below that, in this way, what is posed here is the question of the constitution of the public as such; we shall also see that the condition of the constitution of a public is organological: it depends on the hypomnesic specifics of γραφεινgraphein ( ). 7. See also Conrad Fiedler’s work on artistic judgment (1957: 7–8, 69–76).


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philistinism, and this word, curiously enough, derives from a word for artists and artisans, βάναυσος banausos [ ]; to be a philistine, a man of banausic spirit, indicated, then as today, an exclusively utilitarian mentality, an inability to think and to judge a thing apart from its functionno ormeans utility. But the artist himself being a of βάναυσος banausos [ on the]conwas by excluded from the reproach philistinism; trary, philistinism was considered to be a vice most likely to occur in those who had mastered a τέχνηtechnè [ ], in fabricators and artists. To Greek understanding, there was no contradiction between praise of φιλοκαλειν philokalein [ ], the love of the beautiful, and contempt for those who actually produced the beautiful. (Arendt 1993: 215) Diderot, who brokers works of art, initiates the struggle for the formation of a new circuit of transindividuation. Mercier continues this struggle against the French Academy. When Mercier writes in 1781 that “the particular taste [of the Academicians] cannot form the general taste” (Mercier 1782: 317, quoted in Jam 2000: 32), there appears the concept of public to which Kant also appealed when he defines it in terms of its potential for coming to its maturity. In other words, “public” designates a new circuit of transindividuation that puts to work a new process of psychic and collective individuation. By the end of the eighteenth century and, indeed, the end of the ancien régime (but this is already the case, writes Jam, with Molière in The Critique of the School for Wives), “to the tradesperson as to the Amateur, is opposed the public, whose judgment on the products of art must prevail ‘because it judges with impartiality, and 1770: because by sentiment’” (Jam 2000: 32, commenting on Du Bos 337).it judges In the view of Caylus, on the contrary, apart from amateur practice, and against public taste, vulgar and false as it is, “the Amateur is granted through his birth this natural taste that is ‘the only part of the art over which he has a decided right, and the only part to which he can lay absolute claim. . . . Natural taste is . . . the first virtue of the Amateur; it is a gift’” (Jam 2000: 26, commenting on Caylus 1748: 121). The culmination of the quarrel, which is reached in 1759, marks the end of an epoch and the arrival of another era, marking a revolution in the public right to judge, aesthetically, as well as in matters of politics and knowledge. Even so, for Caylus, as we have seen, the gift reserved for well-born people is not self-sufficient. And what is true for the noble Amateurs holds true likewise for commoners. This practice, as Jam describes it, is primarily a practical frequentation of artistic works, through which develops the ability to compare works: “Only ‘acquired taste,’ which is to say cultivated natural


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taste, ‘after a greater or lesser degree of study, founds the trustworthiness of one’s criticism or one’s praise.’ . . . The first means for the education of natural taste resides for the true Amateur in the frequentation and the comparison of works” (Jam 2000: 26, commenting on Caylus 1748: 121). Such a capacity comparison is work cultivated organologically: it isreproduction made effective, as we haveforseen, but by the of copying. The manual and technical mastery it requires are conditions for the formation of judgment, and therefore of transindividuation. And the work of copying as the moment of the analytical formation of judgment is the true writing of taste—against which Diderot will extol a superior form of writing: the speculative writing of men of letters, men who are also tradesmen and who claim the status of what will later be called “professionals.” The habits of looking whilst copying would not yet disappear with the nobility and their Amateurs. The paintings of Hubert Robert represent what is now the Louvre Museum, accessible as a matter of priority and during the week to artists, open to all on Sunday and admitting a public composed of intrinsically philistine commoners. Robert’s tableaux show that this public, newly constituted, is made up of copyists who do not look at the canvases with hands in pockets but who instead draw and sometimes paint. To the Louvre will come Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and all the artists for whom the museum is primarily a workplace. But the Louvre is also the site of a public of amateurs who reproduce, re-produce, and repro-duce. These copyists re-produce as Bartleby and as Herman Melville himself will do, as reader of the book which he transposes and copies while doing so. They reproduce like Bouvard and Pécuchet and as Gustave Flaubert himself will also do—Flaubert who, by his own account, devours and recopies in the library three thousand books in order to write his novelistic introduction to the Dictionary of Received Ideas, some years before “Verdurinism”⁸ and Duchamp’s Fountain. At stake in the quarrel of the Amateurs is, in this sense, knowing what writing wants to say—γραφεινgraphein ( ) also signifies to draw in its Greek srcin. It is that which permits the individual both to form a judgment and to individuate himself psychically and to circulate this judgment, make À la recherche 8. [Stiegler refers a number of times in this essay to Marcel Proust’s novel du temps perdu (1913–1927). “Verdurinism” here refers to a salon in the first volume, Swann’s Way; the salon is hosted by Madame Verdurin and typifies within the novel the pretention, petty social ambition, and lack of refinement of middle-class Parisian life. Later appearances of Proust’s novel in this essay include passing reference toSwann’s Way and The Guermantes Way.—Trans.]


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it public, and thus participate in the collective individuation by contributing to the writing of a circuit of transindividuation. Now, it is also as a practical moment of repetition , if not of copying, at least of reading and deciphering, that a great twentieth-century man of letters, Barthes understands theear opening of and the ear , thatby is to formation of the musical ear—an opened formed thesay, waythe a work works, formed by the ear’s own hands, guided by those hands’ eyes. The initiation to listening through reading and instrumental interpretation is essentially corporeal, that is to say, moved and moving, and it must be thought of as a play passing through an ocular reading. Here, to love means to play ⁹ and to play means to read. This love is indispensable to the amatorat; with it, the γραφειν ( graphein), where reading becomes interpretation through playing, becomes manifestly instrumental. However, this education of the ear by the hand playing an instrument while reading is altogether organological and belongs to a new circuit of transindividuation. For the piano, on which Barthes deciphers and interprets the scores of Robert Schumann, is not an instrument of the nobility; its possession and its practice are hallmarks of the bourgeoisie. • • • •

Beyond its properly aesthetic sense, beyond its social sense, beyond these symptoms of the great trans-formation putting in place the revolutionary circuit of transindividuation, at stake in the conflict opposing Diderot and Caylus is the writing apparatus , in the broad sense of .γραφειν (graphein ) that should be mobilized in the formation of public taste As for our own epoch, which after “the slap in the face to public taste” is also one of “buzz,” the question of the apparatus is replayed in an organological context that requires a new tactic: this apparatus, which is also itself a vast writing machine, has became technological and industrial. We are dealing with a γραφειν graphein ( ) that discretizes and reproduces all movements and thus constitutes a stage of grammatization, such that the new mystagogy inaugurated by Duchamp is able to make its appearance. With the industrial apparatus arises the proletarian consumer as well as producer. However, the new technological apparatus that imposes itself at the start of our twenty-first century itself induces a new break—and 9. See also Denis Guénoun’s (1998) consideration of play and playing. And it is from this point of view that “La faculté de jouer,” a seminar hosted by the Institut de recherche et d’innovation (IRI) in 2006/2007, explored the question of a theater without a public.


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it brings back the figure of the amateur: an amateur now equipped (appareillé ) altogether otherwise. If the music lover of the nineteenth century was already instrumentally equipped (appareillé ), and if new musical instruments such as radio and phonograph produce machinic turn of the sensibility that circuits this equipment froma the early twentieth century on (and oneshortthat literally disables [désarme ] amateurs¹⁰), at present, digital equipment grounds the emergence of new practices that restore the long circuits of transindividuation.¹¹ Before getting there, let us look with Barthes into the question of listening to music by way of playing an instrument.¹² Like Caylus, Barthes sees in musica practica, as an instrumental and equipped (appareillée) practice, the only true “frequentation” of loved works. And he deplores its disappearance, and, with it, the disappearance of the musical amateur if not the musician: “The amateur, a role defined much more by a style than by a technical imperfection, is no longer anywhere to be found; the professionals, pure specialists whose training remains entirely esoteric for the public . . . never offer that style of the perfect amateur, the great value of which could still be recognized in a Lipati or a Panzera, touching off in us not satisfaction, but desire, the desire to make this music”¹³ (Bar thes 1977: 150; emphasis added). In this discourse appears a more recent opposition, one typical of the twentieth century: that of the amateur and the professional— linked, as we have seen, to the social and indeed revolutionary revaluation of the “tradesman.” Professionalization no longer opposes theory to prac10. These developments also bring forth new figures of the amateur, from the record collector examined by Antoine Hennion, Sophie Maisonneuve, and Émilie Gomart in Figures de l’amateur (2000) to the practice that Charlie Parker cultivated as a jazz player, which is to say first as an amateur. See also Stiegler 2014. 11. This is the thesis grounding the activities of the IRI at the Centre Pompidou and of the Ars Industrialis association. [These are two of Stiegler’s institutional homes: the IRI with the Centre Pompidou and the Ars Industrialis association that gives shape to many of Stiegler’s political and intellectual activities.—Trans.] 12. Listening to music is profoundly transformed with the advent of listening equipment, first in analog form and then in digital grammatization. This fact was the basis for the formation of the team headed at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) by Nicolas Donin and for Music Labs 2 software, carried out in close coordination with Vincent Maestracci, Inspector General of Music Education at the Ministry of National Education. It is also the subject of a 1966 article in which the pianist Glenn Gould announced a new age of listening in the era of recorded music. See Gould 1984: 331–52. 13. Barthes emphasizes the making of this music.


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tice, but rather almost-perfect technicity (sought in the context of competition between professional musicians) to passion (which defines the whole amatorat and produces the style that defines it “much more” than its technical imperfection).

This itself process then passes through a that phase of bourgeois exhausting in the “petite bourgeoisie” Barthes himself insipidity criticized, and demystified. This change is inscribed in a history such that musica practica has disappeared—with the exception, he writes, of “another public, another repertoire, another instrument”: Initially the province of the idle (aristocratic) class, [musica practica] lapsed into an insipid social rite with the coming of the democracy of the bourgeoisie (the piano, the young lady, the drawing room, the nocturne) and then faded out altogether (who plays the piano today?). To find practical musical in the West, one has now to look to another public, another repertoire, another instrument (the young generation, vocal music, the guitar). Concurrently, passive, receptive music, sound music, has become the music (that of concert, festival, record, radio); playing has ceased to exist. (Barthes 1977: 149) The amatorat has thus migrated. After the Verdurins and other more or less cultivated philistines, after Swann’s Way, after The Guermantes Way, ways whereby the mystagogy that animates and sometimes enflames the amateur can turn into mystification (a major topic in À la recherche du temps perdu ), the amatorat has gone the way of youth and its “counterculture”: exalted, exploited, and finally exhausted, it may be, by marketing and the culture industries. The disappearance of playing from the domain of “music,” but also from all the domains that nourish aesthetic experience in the age of the culture industries, is the result of the turning machinic of sensibility. This turn acts as an organological short circuit in the process of transindividuation. The exclamation that so often agitates Madame Verdurin finds its consistency through this process of transindividuation. For its part, the agitation impedes Madame Verdurin’s capacity to come into her consistency and also makes Swann suffer—thus breaking the process of transindividuation. The development of analog hypomnēmata (and first of all the phonograph) enables the culture industries to annihilate the play of the amateur (this is one condition, among others, for the spread of nihilism) and replace it with a public without hands, a public that no longer knows how to read music. This leads to a short-circuiting of the public itself and its judgment,


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replacing them with “audience ratings.” Mediocre tastes are formed and deformed in this way, and, in consequence, there emerges an audience in place of a public. So it is no longer a matter of quality but of quantity— and of speculation in a sense that no longer has much to do with what had been understood Diderot: we have reign of a market for art that has become uncritical,byonly interested in itsthe own interest. Musica practica, which Barthes describes as a becoming, itself supposes some organological conditions, however, the first of which is the appearance of musical notation accessible to the musical amateur who reads and interprets. A thousand years ago, diastematic notation spatially discretized the continuity of musical time and upset the becoming of music in totality. This notation constitutes a process of grammatization whereby music enters into a real revolution—until techniques of analog recording destroy the public that notation had formed and replace it with “another public, another repertoire, and another instrument” than the piano: namely, the young generation, vocal music, the guitar. But Barthes might equally have talked about young Charlie Parker, studying Lester Young’s solos on his portable phonograph (Russell 1976: 91),¹⁴ in exactly the same year (1937) in which Béla Bartók himself analyzes the music of Transylvania by playing at half speed the phonograph apparatus invented by Thomas Edison—whom, for that very reason, Bartók declared indispensable to the developing science of musical folklore (Bartók 1992: 294). • • • •

An amateur is a psychological individual whose psychological apparatus is augmented by a critical apparatus and who is organologically equipped with practical knowledge, with an instrument, and with a social apparatus supporting the circuit of transindividuation, which is thereby made possible. However, the devices of analog reproducibility,which completely reconfigured the psychic and collective individuation process in the twentieth century, have short-circuited the psychic apparatus and have disabled it by severing it from the technical and social apparatus through which passes the circuit of transindividuation formed by amateurs. For us, at the start of the twenty-first century, we who no longer live in a bourgeois society but rather more of a mafia society (Stiegler 2010: 60–66), we know great organological transformations. Our new century 14. Discussed in more detail in Stiegler 2014.


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configures a new stage of grammatization that opens up unforeseen possibilities in the constitution and equipping of the circuits of transindividuation. The most recent grammatization, actualized by digital networks, forms a technological system of fine filaments that redraws in depth the industrial division ofIt labor and itsthe affiliated social its circuits of transindividuation. challenges opposition of relations, producer/consumer and reverses the situation put in place in the epoch when Duchamp signed a urinal under the pseudonym R. Mutt—which will soon have been a hundred years ago. Duchamp’s Fountain could only appear at the beginning of the twentieth century after the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, completed in 1912—the very year in which the Russian futurists publish A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, while Frederick Winslow Taylor publishesShop Management. According to Duchamp’s own account, the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 inscribed in painting the phase of the organologically visible that had been grammatized by Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, who used chronophotography to show the physiology of the body in motion. Now, this grammatization of the movement of bodies also makes possible the scientific organization of work that Taylor theorizes. This theory of grammatized work will be systematically applied by Henry Ford in the United States in 1913, with the first assembly line that produces the Model T in Michigan. In this way, there is put into place a social organization based not only on the grammatization of the gestures and bodily movements of proletarian producers but also on the proletarianization of consumers, whose skills are themselves slowly liquidated by the consumerism set in motion by marketing—and of which “buzz” is a recent stage, specific to the age of digital networks. At the moment when Duchamp puts his R. Mutt signature on the mass-produced urinal, Edward Bernays presents America with his theory and practice of public relations, based on the research of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, and prefigures the scientific organization of consumption, of which Henry Ford is also a thinker and practitioner—whilst, in Moscow, the Bolsheviks are overthrowing the tsar, and George Grosz and John Heartfield can launch their slogan “Art is dead, long live the new machine art of Tatlin!” (Muguet 1998). With the development of the culture industries, the building of the first production studio in Hollywood in 1911, and during the construction of the Ford plant that housed the first assembly line, marketing forms an industrial psychopower that uses analog devices from the grammatization


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of perception that had appeared in the nineteenth century with photography, phonography, and cinematography—where Marey and Muybridge played their decisive role. Implemented by the psychopower that controls the soul, and in that wayera theof motor comportment of the body, these psychotechnologies open an reproducibility of which Walter Benjamin would analyze the consequences for the notion and the conception of the work of art. These psychotechnologies form an apparatus for capturing attention, an apparatus which they systematically put into play in order to condition the consumer, necessarily provoking short circuits in transindividuation. In the epoch of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, Benjamin saw in these phenomena a political power, above all, and he underestimated—like Freud—the submission of the aesthetic to the economic imperatives of the new consumerist model. In this way, amateurs are disabled d( ésarmés ) or decommissioned (as a ship is decommissioned [désarme ]), and what were once publics become audiences. Moreover, the bodies of consumers, which are also those of the producers, are grammatized in their motor functions in other ways when they are put in the service of the production system. The proletarianized worker becomes the proletarianized consumer, no longer simply renewing his strength for work, but also now his power to purchase, and this in order to participate in a striving for consumption, not just for production. Thus, the productivism of the nineteenth century is succeeded by the consumerism of the twentieth. In 1917, Duchamp is on the frontier of the industrial and capitalist age, where the grammatization of gestures and of bodies that produce has already occurred: it started with Jacques de Vaucanson and Joseph Marie Jacquard in the eighteenth century, was taken on board by Adam Smith in 1776, and theorized by Marx in 1867. This was exactly fifty years before Fountain (1917), so it is not such a long interval that separates Marx from Duchamp—fifty years is about the time that separates us from Of Grammatology, The Order of Things, and Anti-Oedipus. And Fountain appears at the precise moment marking the beginning of the grammatization of consumers through psychotechnologies, a development unthought by Marx (Stiegler 2010: 25) and largely underestimated by Antonio Gramsci, which will lead to the liquidation of the bourgeoisie. These modern times proceed from a turning machinic not only of the sensibility but of all forms of knowledge (to know how to do things, to know how to live well, to know how to theorize), the result of all of which is a loss of generalized participation, a dissociation of the symbolic milieus,


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a de-symbolization such that short circuits in the process of transindividuation constituted by the workplace expel the proletarian from the circuit of transindividuation. Before industrialization, the workplace had been a highly symbolic milieu. a world transformed by becomes the grammatization of the ments In of the worker who thereby a proletarian, in abodily world movetransformed by the grammatization of the gestures of the artist who makes the ordinary extraordinary, but who is expelled from the (re)production of the visible by machines and apparatuses, in a world transformed by the grammatization of the behavior of those who are thereby going to become consumers (stripped of savoir-vivre, a loss of individuation, where the bourgeoisie, to whom Duchamp addresses himself and from which Barthes comes, will finally be swallowed up with the “middle classes”)—in this world of 1917, Fountain can surprise the times by creating a scandal.¹⁵ Today, as cultural marketing exploits the pharmacological character of grammatization and exploits the mystagogy that can still mystify, the grammatization that has consisted since ancient Greece¹⁶ has become secular and ordinary, resulting in the liquidation of critical space and time and the destruction of the public of art and, more generally, the destruction of the public of works of the mind or spirit. The most recent stage of this grammatization is the time of the technologies of transindividuation, also called relational technologies, of which “social networks” are the latest avatar.¹⁷ 15. Evensurprise.” if for Duchamp it isrealized, less a matter of making a noisy scandal thanparadoxical of inventing a “silent Duchamp according to Michel Guérin, that “the contradiction of the twentieth century would be to make a difference with any old thing. . . . From here, he found himself alone of his kind, without drawing the consequences. He was not serious-minded enough to imagine himselfsrcinal and too astute to believe himself a reprobate. He did not transgress. He took a false step only to bounce back when least expected—for example in the readymade, which is not a noisy scandal but something like a mute surprise, even if it is destined long afterward to make the ink flow” (Guérin 2008: 12). 16. In the historical course of this secular becoming, of this becoming public, which is characteristic of historical time, critical epochs of transindividuation are constituted. JeanPierre Vernant has shown how and why grammatization, at the srcin of secular becoming, inaugurates the crisis in which critical thought is formed. Mystery is the separate and in this sense always the sacred; I myself try to show that, in this secular becoming, mystery is buried beneath the figure of the enigma. 17. Intersections of technology and social practice are a continuing object of digital studies research for the IRI at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and for the New Industrial World Forums hosted annually by the IRI.


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However, these “social networks” have precisely the characteristic of being not just “social” but also “technological” and industrially controllable: they constitute the sociotechnologies of a sociopower that connects up with psychopower as the latter connects up with biopower. they automatically formalize social (through what are called As metadata), online social networks formrelations a process of grammatization of social relations as such. They have met with great success, in which there are many causal factors, but the main one is that the short circuits in transindividuation that resulted from the proletarianization of producers as well as of consumers have led to the pure and simple liquidation of social relations as such, and online social networks appear, for the younger generations in particular, as a possible substitute. Social networks where one declares and claims one’s “friends,” who become at the same time metadata in the economic war of indexation (Stiegler, Giffard, and Fauré 2009: 99–104), are computer-assisted forms for the production of ersatz philía. Service technologies are becoming essentially relational, and these relational technologies of transindividuation are deployed right at the moment when so-called relational art develops (Bourriaud 1998: 14–17). Here, these service technologies take charge of the synthetic recomposition (synthetic in the sense of artifactual and industrial) of a social bond ruined by their own development.¹⁸ However, this state of affairs is pharmacological,¹⁹ and this means that, if it is possible to struggle against the becoming-audience of the public, and against the short circuits in transindividuation that are such an enormous price to pay, this struggle passes through an investment in the current stage of grammatization and in so-called social networks and through the formation of new critical spaces, allowing the possibility that circuits of transindividuation can form within amateur circles and constitute critical times.

18. On2006: the destruction of social ties by the service economy, see Stiegler and Ars Industrialis 42–47. 19. A state of fact is pharmacological to the extent that the active ingredient is a poison which allows the reverse, which is to say that the pharmacological can make a cure of the toxin, and vice versa. The cure may always again become toxic—and lead to therapeutic failure.


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Stiegler / Quarrel 51 References

Arendt, Hannah. 1993. “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance.” In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 197–226. New York: Viking. Barthes,lated Roland. 1977. “Musica Practica.” InImage Music Text, edited and transby Stephen Heath, 149–54. London: Fontana. Bartók, Béla. 1992. “Mechanical Music.” InEssays, edited by Benjamin Suchoff, 289–98. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Réel. Caylus, Anne-Claude de Pestels, Comte de. 1750.De la composition. N.p. . 1748. De l’amateur. N.p. Du Bos, l’Abbé [Jean-Baptiste]. 1770. Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, Seconde Partie. 7th ed. Paris: Chez Pissot. Fiedler, Conrad. 1957.On Judging Works of Visual Art. 2nd ed. Translated by Henry Schaefer-Simmern and Fulmer Mood. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gould, Glenn. 1984. “The Prospects of Recording.” InThe Glenn Gould Reader, edited by Tim Page, 331–53. New York: Vintage. Guénoun, Denis. 1998. Le théâtre est-il nécessaire? Paris: Circé. Guérin, Michel. 2008.Marcel Duchamp: Portrait de l’anartiste. Nîmes: Lucie Éditions. Hennion, Antoine, Sophie Maisonneuve, and Émilie Gomart. 2000. Figures de l’amateur: Formes objets et pratiques de l’amour de la musique aujourd’hui . Paris: Documentation Française. Jam, Jean-Louis. 2000. “Caylus, l’amateur crépusculaire.” InLes divertissements utiles: Des amateurs au XVIIIè siècle , edited by Jean-Louis Jam, 21–37. Clermont-Ferrand: BlaisePascal. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. “AnPresses Answer Universitaires to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” In Political Writings, 2nd ed., edited by Hans Reiss, translated by H. B. Nisbet, 54–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. 2008. Séminaire, “Les figures de l’amateurs,” L’Institute de Recherche et d’Innovation, Centre Pompidou. web.iri.centrepompidou.fr /fonds/seminaires/seminaire/detail/1. Mercier, Louis-Sebastien. 1782. Tableau de Paris: Nouvelle édition corrigée et augmentée. Vol. 3. Amsterdam. Muguet, Didier. 1998. “Fusionner l’art et la vie, I: L’intuition du ‘caractère ouvrier’ du travail intellectuel chez les constructivistes russes.”Multitudes . Accessed July 14, 2016. www.multitudes.net/Fusionner-l-art-et-la-vie-I/. Russell, Ross. 1976. Bird Lives! The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie Parker. New York: Quartet. Stiegler, Bernard. 2010. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge, UK: Polity.


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52 boundary 2 / February 2017 . 2014. “Programs of the Improbable, Short Circuits of the Unheard-Of.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 42, no. 1: 70–109. . n.d. “Transindividuation,” Ars Industrialis. Accessed August 30, 2013. arsindustrialis.org/vocabulaire-ars-industrialis/transindividuation. Stiegler, Bernard, and Ars Industrialis. 2006. Réenchanter le monde: La valeur esprit contre le populisme industriel. Paris: Editions Flammarion. Stiegler, Bernard, Alain Giffard, and Christian Fauré. 2009.Pour en finir avec la mécroissance: Quelques réflexions d’Ars Industrialis. Paris: Editions Flammarion.


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Unwork and the Duchampian Contemporary

Stephen Barker

“Then who are the philosophers, Diotima,” I said. . . . “Wisdom is one of the most beautiful things, and Love is a love for the beautiful, so Love must necessarily be a philosopher, and, being a philosopher, he must be between wise and ignorant.” —Plato, The Symposium What is an amateur if not a figure of a libidinal economy? The amat eur “loves” (amat, from the Latin verb amare, “to love”): that’s what makes an amateur an amateur. Art amateurs love works of art. And insofar as they love them, these artworks work on them—that is to say, the amateur is trans-formed by them: individuated by them. —Bernard Stiegler, “Proletarianization” He did not transgress. He took a false step only to bounce back when least expected—for example in the readymade, which is not a noisy scandal but something like a mute surprise, even if it is desBernard Stiegler’s lectures “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” “Kant, Art, and Time,” and “The Quarrel of the Amateurs,” published in this special issue, are cited parenthetically in the text as “Proletarianization,” “Kant,” and “Quarrel,” respectively. boundary 2 44

1 (2017) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 3725869 © 2017 by Duke University Press


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tined long afterward to make the ink flow. —Bernard Stiegler, “Quarrel”; quoting Michel Guérin, Marcel Duchamp: Portrait de l’anartiste Bernard Stiegler frames his discussion of the relationship between the “amateur” and the proletarianization of sensibility, a discussion pervading Stiegler’s work on sensibility since the two volumes of De la misère symbolique (2004–5), with what he sees as the emblematic epistemological shift between Marcel Duchamp’s “wet” artwork, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 of 1912, and the radical complexities—the unwork—of Fountain in 1917. The framing question for Stiegler is, then, what happened in or to the art world between 1912 and 1917, and what does it mean for contemporary art? That is, is it still possible to love art? Stiegler offers a hint: what happened did so in terms of “the question of reproducibility.” But then, in the second of Stiegler’s lectures, “Kant, Art, and Time,” he reframes the question as one not of reproducibility per se but of the eclipse of reproducibility by time; indeed, of the relationship between temporality,omni temporality, and the possibility of being (or rather of becoming) art’s lover, anamateur of art. Duchamp’s framing trajectory provides the scaffold on which Stiegler constructs this investigation, since between 1912 and 1917, according to Stiegler, the possibility of loving a work of art, certainly one “by” Duchamp, enters a profound crisis: it becomes “impossible to love a work by Duchamp in which he himself interrogates its ‘work’” (Stiegler, “Kant,” 19). Duchamp’s interrogation of artwork brings not only the existential force of the artwork but the very possibility of the amateur, the lover of art, into play as well. thisfiguration paradigmatic being thephilia emblem of this Stiegler dilemma,locates the very of an Duchamp epoch of aas“liquidated ,” of désamour, “lovelessness” (Stiegler, “Proletarianization,” 12). During this period (for which Duchamp is significantly responsible, but within which he is no more than a manifestation), Duchamp’s “work” ceases being work at all; the artist as previously understood ceases being an artist, becoming an “anartist” whose work is thus “anart.” This is an interim phase of the first “machinic turn of sensibility” (Stiegler, “Proletarianization,” 6) but a clear adumbration of the second machinic turn: the digital/technological revolution that defines and frames what, in the strictest sense, is “contemporary” art. Duchamp’s “turn,” however, fromwork (Nude, No. 2) to unwork (objets tout faits, “readymades”—and unworkness in general), from the art-“love” of the amateur to désamour, is not merely a machinic turn echoing that of the Industrial Revolution nor merely an adumbration of the second, digital machinic turn: it is a new inscription and a new kind of grammatization of


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Barker / Unwork and the Duchampian Contemporary 55

tertiary retention¹ through which the cultural archive, of which artworks are a central part, shifts from one of the importance of the repository to that of the unimportance of flotsam, from art-work to anart-play—the Duchampian Contemporary. Marcel Duchamp: Portrait de l’anarStiegler Michel Guérin’s tiste (2008: 12)cites to indicate that the readymades present themselves en abîme, in the gap between “srcinal” and “reject”; Guérin remarks that the

readymades are “destined,” though not until a “long time later,” to cause the spilling of “a great deal of ink.” It is important that Stiegler, in citing Guérin, sees Duchamp as “not transgressive.” This essay will explore the implication: Duchamp’s radical neutrality (his pharmacology) as a central figure in what Stiegler refers to as the new setup or game. No doubt, this shift capitalizes on the machinistics of the chaotic first decades of the twentieth century, what Stiegler himself calls “this new setup,” or game, in which “theorgans of perception end up becoming elements of organological sets that are industrially reconfigured and in which the apparatuses come first—as apparatuses of perception of psychic apparatuses, and as technical apparatuses and social apparatuses as well” (Stiegler, “Proletarianization,” 18). For Stiegler and allamateurs, this new game is both greatly stimulatingand a function of the “misère” of the sensible—not merely the “misery” resulting from the loss of “love” in a newly 1. “Grammatization” and “tertiary retention” are key—perhaps the key—Stieglerian terms. The experience of being is a function not only of memory but of “mnemotechnics,” the “technicalnever prostheses” throughdefinition which memory is recorded and transmitted across generations, limited to—by never capable of being limited to—individual minds. This is an entirely différant sense of memory without which, Stiegler claims, the human, “written” through technics, is simply not and never would have been possible. The common notion of “memory,” as deposits of “individual experience” stored in the individual brain as images and impressions, and more specifically of memory expansion, is in Stiegler’s view of it actually folded into a didactic, historical process that only begins (i.e., has always already begun) in memory’s exteriorization, not in the “taking in” or “recording” of experience in the mind. This exteriorization Stiegler calls “tertiary retention,” not just the recording of inner process and sensory/experiential memory but “longterm” memory stretching across generations. Manifestations of tertiary memory include such things as libraries (and archives of all kinds), oral lore, and the various technological means of recording memory, making it available “outside” of any individual. Such “transindividual” information, the realm of technics, occurs through what Stiegler calls “grammatization” (as opposed to grammatology), through which—by any technical means— memory is “out-sourced,” recorded (retained “artificially”) in some form other than its prior one (e.g., music or vocal CDs, video recordings, books, etc.). For a fuller investigation of these and other central Stieglerian terms, see Barker 2009. See also Tinnell 2012.


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mechanized world butmisère as poverty, extending, as Stiegler points out in La misère symbolique, beyond the sensible to the symbolic and ultimately to the very nature of the human. The contemporary artist (contemporary with us) and the public to which the contemporary artist appeals find themselves unablebytowhich avoid contemporaneity playing the new isgame according to new—Duchampian— rules, radically redefined by and within a new relationship with the art/archive, its form and its matter. As Stiegler points out throughout his California talks, the amateur has now become at best an illicit lover, a paramour, at worst an automaton responding to alien stimulation delivered by alienating media. The participatory public that had been generally capable of producing amateurs has now become an “audience,” capable only of what Stiegler calls “mute surprise” in the face of anart. Given Duchamp’s penchant for wordplay as work-at-play, and Stiegler’s focus on Duchamp as the pivot point of the “second machinic turn,” it is important to remember that “mute” devolves from the Latinsurdus, mute or deaf, and that in “surprise” we must always see the element of being overtaken or overwhelmed—“sur-pris ”: “mute surprise” is that tremor in the audience in the face of being absurdly overcome, overcome by (the) nothing. This new phenomenon that “we” have become in the epoch of the “audience,” this new, absurd “we,” is now trapped in an isolating pharmacological space. But what did happen to Duchamp’s work as artist, then anartist, between Nude, No. 2 of 1912 and Fountain of 1917, and what impact might this turn have had, indeed might continue to have up to the present, on the nature of and love for art? In fact, a great deal happened, beginning several years before the succès de scandale of Nude, No. 2. Remembering that for Stiegler in the first decades of the twentieth-century “scandal” was virtually impossible, given that this was already “a time of désoeuvrement,”² Duchamp’s appropriative act manifested in the bilboquet he presented as a gift to his friend Max Bergmann in 1910 foreshadows or even initiates the strategy of the readymade well before “the end of painting,” though the concept of the readymade remains in gestation until 1916.³ It is with the bilboquet that, for Duchamp, the nature of artwork as work begins to shift, 2. See Stiegler, “Kant,” 19n1 (trans. note), where I suggest that a better translation than “worklessness” might be “unworkness.” 3. Duchamp first refers to the “readymade,” in English, in a letter, in French, to his sister Suzanne, dated January 16, 1916. Not only does he not write “readymade”; the flourish of the y of “ready” extends into the m of “made.” For a facsimile of the letter, see Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer /marcel-duchamp-letter-to-suzanne-duchamp-15127 (accessed April 21, 2016).


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to become playful, and to bring into question the nature of work as making, of fabrication, an element essential to Stiegler’s sense of the amateur. With the bilboquet, making becomes what Duchamp will call “assisted” appropriation, but from its inception this is an appropriation that interrogatesofthe ( proprethan ): making something one’s ownbilboquet becomesconthe play the“proper” proper rather its assertion. The playful sists of a wooden ball perched atop a lathed stick or handle; it resembles (or indeed is ) a child’s toy, on which Duchamp inscribed “Bilboquet/Souvenir de Paris/A mon ami/M. Bergmann/Duchamp printemps 1910” (Naumann 1999: 40–41). Duchamp’s “work” consisted of having gathered and assembled the found constituent objects, then signing the result. While in 1910 this was still nothing more than a “curiosity” even for Duchamp (40), as a strategic intervention into the question of the workness of artwork it was a harbinger of the great “turn” to the Duchampian contemporary—or perhaps, with the bilboquet, the turn was already taking (a) place, naively, in the object itself. For Duchamp, the work of interrogating the very nature of art-work begins in 1910 with the advent of Duchamp’s ludic appropriative practice. This ironic playfulness emerges even before Duchamp’s public ascendancy as a revolutionary painter with the explosive reception of Nude, No. 2.⁴ If Nude, No. 2 is seen as marking the conclusion of Duchamp’s focus on the “wet work” of painting, then the already extant, alternative strategy of quasi fabrication evidenced by the bilboquet must disrupt any simple chronology of Duchamp’s development: if in its most radical interpretation the Nude, No. 2 marks an endpoint in Duchamp’s—and thus contemporary art’s—trajectory (the “end of painting”), it hardly does so in an unproblematic way, since Duchamp continues to have a lifelong dialogue with the “wet art” of painting even though he had already embarked on a new kind of conceptual work (whether he conceived of it as such is immaterial) and a new concept of the work—the effort of and in the artwork. Duchamp’s sublimated central question, anticipating Stiegler’s, is thus, what are the work, and the art of the work, of art, in the context of this 4. However famous Nude, No. 2 eventually (and quickly) became, likeFountain it was rejected by the 1912 Salon des Indépendants. Duchamp later wrote that rejection of the piece by the steering committee, which included his brother, was sufficiently traumatic that it “gave him a turn” (see Naumann 1999: 45). The “turn” Duchamp received was a radical perspectival shift in his concept of the work of art-making: by the time the Nude, No. 2 was shown in the Armory Show of 1913, Duchamp had already begun experimenting with his “mechanomorphic” paintings and had produced his first “assisted readymade,” Bicycle Wheel.


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new game? This complex, finally unanswerable question can be at least partially addressed through Duchamp’s experiments with the nature and telos of appropriative inscription , of graphein (γραφειν). It is in the charting of this question’s “graphing” that Duchamp repositions the objet d’anart “beyond actual eye’s the eye” and for the Duchamp literality to its literarity; the outcome of this process is retinal ironically not a-visual but visuo-conceptual. For Duchamp this meant that the readymade, from the first one, the Bilboquet, “should not be looked at” (Girst 2003). Thus Duchamp, in his famous interviews with Pierre Cabanne, initiates his absurd notion of the “post-” or “non-retinal”: “Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral. If I had a chance to take an anti-retinal attitude, it unfortunately hasn’t changed much; our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists,

and still they didn’t go so far!” (Duchamp, quoted in Cabanne 1971: 43).⁵ Duchamp’s comment is doubly strange when one considers the fact that all of Duchamp’s work is distinctly retinal, constructed from the pharmacological collapsing of optical illusion, optical allusion, and glossing text: these are the essential ingredients of Duchampian readymades. Duchamp is typically coy about the resulting enigma: the readymade “ultimately should not be looked at,” Duchamp declares (not in the 1910s but much later, in the 1960s); “it’s not the visual aspect of the Readymade that matters, it’s simply the fact that it exists. . . . It is completely gray matter. It is no longer retinal” (Kuh 1962: 92). Duchamp’s declared effort is to “reduce the number of people looking.” This is indeed a characteristic strategy of the readymade: almost no one, outside of a very small circle of family and friends, looked at or was even aware of the existence of these pieces, which Duchamp conceived of as bibelots, little gifts not intended for nor envisioned as “public art” until much later, when Duchamp strategically reorchestrated his orientation to the “art public,” at which point the readymades, like the rest of Duchamp’s earlier work, were brought to the attention of many “people looking” and were thus transformed into the revolutionary artwork as they appear to us today—and which galleries and museums worldwide present them as being. Bicycle Wheel, incorrectly called the “first readymade,” which was srcinally created for Duchamp’s 5. Pierre Cabanne interviews Duchamp in the latter’s final years, long after he had begun to fabricate (often out of raw materials or whole cloth) the Duchamp persona, perhaps his most powerful and most playful artwork—much more so than Rrose Sélavy or the Marcel Duchamp who “gave up art for chess.”


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own amusement as a kind of mechanical toy, was, astonishingly, not shown publicly until 1951, and even then, typically sotto voce, as a “replica of the lost srcinal,” a wonderfully enigmatic designation for an object that “srcinally” claimed to be anything but (an) srcinal, let alone a work of public art. Duchamp’s were literally invisible in the d’art sense they did their“srcinal” travail inreadymades private, never considered to be oeuvres . that But as importantly in terms of the arc from work to unwork, Duchamp “himself” was famously a shifting “work,” an optical illusion fading between guises and disguises: he desired and fabricated a kind of chimerical invisibility persistently pretending (or at least professing) that “art” was unimportant—literally immaterial—in his life: what was important was . . . love (rrose c’est la vie). His self-narrative included the claim that he “gave up art for chess,” when in fact his self-fabrication(s) made his own body into a kind of readymade. After apparently turning away from art-making, Duchamp continued to work in a number of art genres, such as mechanical drawing, during the entire time of his not-art-ness, “invisibly” conducting myriad experiments with language, linguistics, semiology, cryptology, all of which took a variety of visual forms throughout his so-called postart period. He maintained his apparent silence until he chose, beginning in the 1950s, retrospectively to “become” the founder of contemporary art, creating a narrative that itself was/is a remarkable fiction. Only in the late 1950s was he “discovered” by young artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, eager to escape their capture by abstraction and to reinvigorate the visual arts, bestowing on Duchamp—for the first time—international public recognition. It was not until 1963, six years before his death, that Duchamp had his first retrospective exhibition, at the Pasadena Art Museum, followed in 1966 by the Tate Gallery’s large exhibition of his work, and in quick succession other major institutions, such as the Philadelphia Art Museum and MoMA, followed with large showings of Duchamp’s work, including many of the (universally replicated) readymades—which at that later time were apparently appropriate not only to be “looked at” but to achieve the omnitemporal status of “artwork.”

• • • •

. . . even if, in Duchamp’s case, this was the time of worklessness (désoeuvrement ). (Stiegler, “Kant,” 19) But what “time” is or was the time of worklessness? The chimerical time of the “production” of the anart readymades, beginning in 1910


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with Bilboquet ? Of “the first readymade,” 1913’sBicycle Wheel ?⁶ Of 1914’s largely unknown but pivotal Pharmacie ? Though in his California presentations on art and time Stiegler frames his inquiry into the question of contemporary art within the context of Duchamp’s shift or turn from his “conventional” work as a painter, in 1912, and the radically unconventional epitomized by Fountain in 1917—between retinal ar t, painting, and R. works Mutt’s urinal, (much) later claimed by Duchamp to be one in a string of readymades dating from 1913—this question is a more fundamental one than it initially appears to be and is presented as being (by Duchamp and the conventional art histories). It is in fact a question of what “work” (travail ), and a work (oeuvre), might actually be. This more fundamental question is vital to Stiegler’s inquiry into the nature of art and its work both throughout the twentieth century and into the (digital) twenty-first century. Always keeping in mind the irresolvable tension between the elevated, actually metaphysical, sense of “art” within which Western culture has framed its works beginning in the Renaissance and culminating with the invention of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, on the one hand, and art’s genealogical Greek predecessor, tekhnē—art in the sense of skill—on the other, the centrality of Stiegler’s double sense of work, as object and as process, comes into even higher relief. The relationship between these two senses of “work” is complex: they are of differing orders yet cannot be separated; the work of art (objet d’art ) is to be seen (and later, conceived) as the product or result of effort, of working artfully or skillfully. Duchamp himself based his early career on this very traditional, classical sense of art production, at the very least until 1912. Nude, No. 2 not only shows Duchamp’s citation of cubist angularity; it is also and perhaps more importantly a visual grammatization of Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic studies, including his spectacular multiple image of an egret in flight (Marey ca. 1882),⁷ a time-lapse 6. MoMA, the indexical Museum of Modern Art, frames Bicycle Wheel thus: “Bicycle Wheel is Duchamp’s first readymade, a class of objects he invented to challenge assumptions about what constitutes a work of art. Duchamp combined two mass-produced parts—a bicycle wheel and fork and a kitchen stool—to create a type of nonfunctional machine. By simply selecting prefabricated items and calling them art, he subverted established notions of the artist’s craft and the viewer’s aesthetic experience. The 1913 Bicycle Wheel was lost, but nearly four decades later Duchamp assembled a replacement from newly found prefabricated parts and affirmed that the later version is as valid as the srcinal” (“Marcel Duchamp,” n.d.). Of course, despite appearances, there is nothing “simple” about the readymades, including the fact that for Duchamp they were vehemently not “art” when he “invented” them, only when he re invented them decades later. 7. Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), French scientist and physiologist, played a central


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image much closer to what Duchamp attempts to “capture” in Nude, No. 2 than Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-action images, which behave “like” a filmstrip but are a quite different kind of motion capture from Marey’s incorporation of the dynamics of movement into a single multi-image. Even in Nude, No. 2 Duchamp is demonstrating iconoclastic irony as since, as Dalia Judovitz points out, he “irrevocably establishes his authority a painter through his

signatory work,” while he interrogates traditional forms of art production in favor of new kinds of experiments, portraying the mechanics of bodily movement wedded to the classical subject, the nude, of formal painting and sculpture (Judovitz 1999: 15–16). Judovitz defines this interrogative shift as nuanced and prescient for twentieth-century art, calling attention to the dynamics and contingency of action, pointing out that “[Duchamp] begins to experiment with chance as a way of getting away from the traditional methods of expression generally associated with art” (16). Even in Nude, this play with contingency is at work, though Duchamp has at that point only begun to think through the widest and most radical implications of chance as a function of and impetus for fabrication. Though as Derrida points out in Memoirs of the Blind, the “art gesture” is always fundamentally contingent, the tekhnē employed in Nude, No. 2 demonstrates both the contingency of movement in time and the potential reduction of chance to zero, through technical skill, in static art forms such as painting. Nude, No. 2 is a nascent example of the pharmacological theme of contingency Duchamp has already begun to explore, as early as 1910, though his course after Nude, No. 2 is toward a radical redefinition of the very nature of both No. 2

travail and oeuvre,⁸ of the relationship between the support and its manipulation, the intervention of the artist’s manos onto, into, or through it. For

Duchamp in this newly experimental orientation, such an intervention is no longer manipulative in the usual sense, and this is Duchamp’s genuinely revolutionary gesture—a gesture that, precisely because Duchamp indicates that it is not of interest, one can love. But such love, in “the time of worklessness,” is pharmacological: role in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinematography, and labor photography. Marey was the inventor of “chronophotography”; his “chronophotographic gun,” constructed in 1882, could capture twelve frames a second, all forming a single image. He used the process to study and chronophotograph the movement of many animals and of abstract forms, including, famously, smoke trails. 8. This distinction is vital to Duchamp’s interrogation of theobjet d’art : the lack of work (travail ) with which Duchamp “creates” unworks (désoeuvres ) is key to their influence on contemporary art.


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it is simultaneously, as Stiegler points out, “lovelessness”—“désamour.” Duchamp catalyzes the question as to whether it is possible to love a workless work in a time of lovelessness, particularly if one’s own travail has been significantly responsible for that lovelessness. Is it possible to care for such and Fear(Virilio unwork? Paul Virilio “.frames question in histheArttwentieth” with an epigraph from Camus, . . thisthis pitiless century, 2003: 27), whereby he refers the notion of unwork to the Duchampian un demonstrative—what Virilio calls the “monstrative”—as the critical result of the “silencing” of the retinal that Duchamp (deceptively) claims. This silencing would in turn—were it to be successful—produce what Stiegler has so thoroughly investigated in terms of symbolic misery (i.e., the contemporary poverty, of the symbolic economy).⁹ For Virilio, this “monstrous” poverty results from the haphazard seizing on what Sylvère Lotringer refers to in his conversation with Virilio as “ideas implemented in any material what-

soever,” in a postretinal psychic confusion characterized by “thought wrestling with perception, the mental act presiding over every visual creation of form” (Lotringer and Virilio 2005: 67). In fact, though this strategy is finally anything but postretinal, it “impoverishes” the visual by rendering it merely optical, “the structure of the visual prior to the visual: the science of artwork rather than the experience” (71). In the Duchampian unwork, as the grounding strategy for contemporary art, making is dislodged and displaced by naming and, what’s more, by enigmatic and playfully ironic naming. In Duchamp’s practice, the unworkness of the readymade took some time to gestate. His Bilboquet of 1910, which might be called a “prereadymade,” anticipates the unwork, but only tangentially; Duchamp’s “first” readymade, the “assisted” Bicycle Wheel of 1913, is a better demonstration of the “science” of the incipient unwork than an unwork itself. Though it is true that Duchamp constructed Bicycle Wheel out of found objects, he confessed to being more amused by participating in its kinetics (spinning the wheel) than in interrogating its aesthetics.¹⁰ It is not until Janu9. Paul Virilio, interviewed by Sylvère Lotringer (2005). In the interview, Virilio claims that “art today is thriving because it is entirely beside the point” (30). 10. Dalia Judovitz (1999: 99–101) has very interesting comments to make on the piece; referring to the wheel assemblage as a “non-artisanal” “intervention,” she asserts that the rotating wheel “draws attention to its artistic meaning” as an intellectual metaphor for the circular “shifts in position” that “qualify its potential as work of art or non-art” (99). In fact, Duchamp (anticipating Warhol) liked to spin the wheel, joining it to produce a kinetic mechanical assemblage. When I teach Duchamp, I also point out thatBicycle Wheel can be seen as an ironic twentieth-century (mechanical) avatar of the history of figuration: the


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ary 1914 that the first “genuine readymade,” in its fuller oxymoronic form, is born. Not only is this seminal piece fundamentally pharmacological, it is actually entitled Pharmacie . It consists of a mass-produced poster-sized print of a “winter landscape,” available to painting novices as an example of a composition might attempt and by what Duchamplater decades later would call they an “unknown artist of thesigned worst kind.” Duchamp’s story about Pharmacie thus renders it both a precursor and a simpler inverse of L.H.O.O.Q.: Pharmacie presents itself as a generic, virtually anonymous, commercial art scene with little or no aesthetic merit, while L.H.O.O.Q. presents itself as an “assisted” bad copy of the canonic work of Leonardo da Vinci. Pharmacie is Duchamp’s first readymade “intervention,” even though it is itself assisted, since not only does Duchamp sign the piece (at least three versions exist, signed “Pharmacie /Marcel Duchamp/1914”), but he also adds a tiny dab of red and green paint to the landscape’s far horizon. Are the dabs of paint the traditional red and green bottles in pharmacy windows? Indistinct figures in the distant landscape? Strange lights on the horizon? Nothing but blobs of colored paint, a reminder of the wet art Duchamp has claimed to eschew? The paint dabs mark the elementary pharmacology of the readymade-as-unwork: the wetness of the paint within the icy, badly printed landscape. Pharmacie shows, for the first time in Duchamp’s unwork, the play of distance and neutrality so characteristic of the readymade and of the pharmakon in general. In Pharmacie, Duchamp expresses his indifference—unwork—toward the aesthetic, and his work in expressing it. The readymades that follow Pharmacie result in Duchamp’s retroactive statement about them in his 1961 narrative of his invention of the word readymade, though the actual trajectory of the readymade strategy, begun over a year earlier, is left out: In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote “In Advance of the Broken Arm.” It was around that time that the word “readymade” came to mind to designate this form of manifestation. A point which I want very much to establish is that the choice of these readymades was never dictated by esthetic delectation. The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste . . . in fact a complete anesthesia. (Duchamp 1973: 141) (spinning) “head” and stable, four-legged “body” of the mechanical figure participate in the first robotic craze of the period as well as interrogate the ongoing survivability of the figure in art.


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What began with Pharmacie became, by 1915, what Duchamp says that he saw in the famous snow shovel(s) as “accidental,” objects taking their place somewhere amidst the visual, the optical, and the technical: the snow shovel can be looked at retinally, as a physical object hanging in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, example, nonretinally idea, and/or treated technically as anfor object framedseen by and in a livelyas andanplayful discourse with its caption. The fact that Duchamp signed the snow shovel “après Marcel Duchamp” compounds the space/time disturbance characteristic of the pharmacological nature of the readymade, indeed of all the phenomena Duchamp (later) claimed as readymades. In light of this history of readymade objects and narrative frames, it is surprising to find that perhaps the most famous of the readymades, the infamous Fountain, is also the most misunderstood and misinterpreted as a result of Duchamp’s obfuscation, and at the same time perhaps the most “genuine”—perhaps the only—readymade Duchamp produced. The web of information and misinformation (much of it supplied, in varying forms, by Duchamp decades later) surrounding the “Buddha of the Bathroom,” as Louise Norton calls it in her article in The Blind Man, no. 2, of May (1917, published to mark the close of the Independents exhibition at which the urinal made its appearance. The Buddhistic enigma of Fountain has accompanied the elusive (multiply-lost) piece of porcelain to the present day. In Duchamp’s standard story of Fountain ’s history, told for the first time in the 1960s, the iconoclasm—the inappropriateness—of the piece was too much for the Independents committee and was summarily rejected, causing Duchamp to resign from the committee. Duchamp’s story claims that he placed the “signature” on the urinal, “R. Mutt 1917,” to make the piece “more impersonal”—to demonstrate his indifference to it as an art object. This makes no logical sense even if one accepts that “R. Mutt” is a pseudonym.¹¹ But in fact there are compelling reasons to think that the piece is the ultimate Duchampian readymade—precisely because Duchamp had nothing to do with it. The complexities of the story began to be explored in the latter 1980s by William A. Camfield (1987; 1989), with the suggestion—the “discovery”—that Duchamp “was not responsible” for the piece in anything like the way he had claimed to be. Subsequently, the evidence has been 11. Admittedly “R. Mutt” is a wonderful, plausibly Duchampian pun. If one were attempting to call into question the very “poverty” of this borrowed bathroom object as an artwork, one could hardly do better than to claim its creator to be Armut, German for “poverty.” See note 12 below.


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building that in fact Duchamp’s involvement with Fountain was a strategic fabrication, that he created the narrative of his association with this icon of contemporary art out of very nearly whole cloth. The evidence, mentioned by Camfield then explored further by Glyn Thompson and others, devolves from Marcel’s letter toLes hisIndépendants sister Suzanne of April 11 or 1917: ce détail à la famille: sont ouverts ici 12, avec gros“Raconte succès. Une de mes amies sous un pseudonyme masculin, Richard Mutt, avait envoyé une pissotière en porcelaine comme sculpture; ce n’était pas du tout indécent aucune raison pour la refuser. Le comité a décidé de refuser d’exposer cette chose. J’ai donné ma démission et c’est un potin qui aura sa valeur dans New York.”¹² (Tell this detail to the family: The Independents have opened here with immense success. One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; it was not at all indecent no reason for refusing it. The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation and it will be a bit of gossip that will have some value in New York.) There is simply no reason to suppose that Duchamp is not “telling the truth” in his letter to his sister (which would be entirely uncharacteristic). Not only does Duchamp acknowledge that he has played no role in the arrival of the urinal at the show, but in addition, according to Duchamp during the exhibition, the piece is not a readymade but a “sculpture.” At that point, the object is an art object, an oeuvre d’art, not désoeuvré, with no title whatsoever other than the “R. Mutt 1917” coarsely painted onto it—until someone (Duchamp? Louise Norton? Alfred Stieglitz?) gave it a 12. Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp, April 11 or 12, 1917, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/marcel -duchamp-to-suzanne-777 (accessed April 21, 2016). This letter and others from Duchamp to his sister and his brother-in-law, Jean Crotti, have been published in English translation with commentary by Naumann (1982: 2–19). See Milan Golob, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain,” at www.golob-gm.si/5-marcel-duchamp-as-rectified-readymade/f-marcel-duchamp -fountain.htm#camfield1, and for a remarkable treatment of the piece in context, see Thompson 2012. The “female friend” who had submitted the urinal was undoubtedly Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who sent it from Philadelphia. The baroness, a Dadaist poet, often used the pseudonym “Richard Mutt,” a multiple pun on the German “poverty” (Armut , “RaMutt”). “Richard” is FrenchLouise slang Norton for “moneybags”; Richard Mutt for = filthy rich poor guy, “mutt with moneybags.” would have been in on the baroness’s joke, accounting for her article in Blind Man (1917). The only evidence of Duchamp’s interaction with the urinal, other than his stories much later, is photographic: Stieglitz’s posed one and the photograph of Duchamp’s studio showing the piece hanging in a doorway; the urinal was subsequently, likeall the readymades, “lost.”


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title, Fountain, after it was “rescued” and taken to Duchamp’s studio, where Stieglitz photographed it “aesthetically” as part of an ironic still life. Its title appears for the first time in The Blind Man, no. 2, as “Fountain by R. Mutt.” Only much later, in interviews in which Duchamp for the first time portrays himself as the art, essential figure in “become the revolutionary shift from as modern to contemporary does Fountain his,” appropriated the ultimate “common” object “chosen” to interrogate the nature of the art object it began as being. But this is the very process through which Fountain becomes the seminal readymade and the quintessential exemplary unwork, as well as the pivot point in Stiegler’s sense of the contemporary “turn.” Far from canceling the radical nature of Duchamp’s appropriative gesture regarding Fountain, the alternative history solidifies it. If Duchamp had nothing to do with the appearance of the signed urinal, then his “assistance” in its creation is reduced to zero and his indifference to the piece totalized. In this light, Fountain is indeed, more than any other unwork, the essential moment in the turn to the contemporary, the inception of différance as distance and delay. Fountain becomes désoeuvré not when it appears (as a sculpture) in New York in 1917 but when Duchamp appropriates it as a chronicle of the “imperceptible,” as the gap between an object and its narrated adoption as unwork fifty years later. However much Duchamp, in his later claims, wishes to narrate the demise of retinal art and the movement toward the “nonperceptible” perpetually “delayed” by mimesis, the imperceptible is itself a “still life,” manifested as the mortality of the retinal and the victory of the an- image of thinking—Duchamp’s “retinal shudder.” The readymade, in its indifference, its désamour, presents the epochè not as art form but as hiatus, pause, suspension. This is how, after the epoch of the readymade, Duchamp thought of the “Bachelor Machine” of Large Glass: he instructed that it not be called a “picture” but instead to “use ‘delay’ instead of picture or painting: picture on glass becomes delay in glass [retard en verre ]. . . . ‘delay’/a delay in glass as you would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver” (Duchamp 1973: 42). There is no better example of unwork as “delay” than Fountain; a claim can be made that the urinal instructed Duchamp in the nature of indifference, indeed of strategic différance. Through delay, for Duchamp, the readymades reveal the mechanics of production of the new as redundant at its inception (the central trait of désamour ), in culture in general. Duchamp learned from this instruction, making no changes in the


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appearance of the objects he chose after Fountain, claiming to show that the object’s “cultural valuation” involved a process radically different from and indifferent to that involved in any “artistic” transformation. The separation of a culturally elevated object set apart from the “ordinary” gives rise to what as Duchamp the irresistible temptation to of interpret distinction the ipsosaw factoasreason for the inherent value the art such objectaover the quotidian. Choosing not to transform the object but rather to have no reaction to it, to remain distant from it, both raises and obfuscates the question of the chimerical mechanism producing the “aesthetic.” The power of the readymade, technically, consists in the fact that it is a manifestation of the assertion that numerous valuations of traditional culture, and the quotidian, are simultaneously on display as object and conception—but they never conjoin, nor are they canceled out, nor do they result in nor claim any kind of unity: they are terminally pharmacological. And the readymades are irreconcilable except as signs of the designator’s (the anartist’s) freedom: no definitive criteria by the “art world” of quality, beauty, expressivity, or “authenticity” can apply to it. The readymade is never more nor less than a sign,¹³ constructed such that its interrogation of value can take place without being understood as anything other than an interrogation but also without being clearly distinguishable. • • • •

This new machinic turn of sensibility—which is no longer analog but digital—leads to a renaissance of the figure of theafter amateur, is to say, to a reconstitution of libidinal energy which, being that systematically canalized and rerouted by consumerist organization, ended up putting in place an economy of drives—that is to say, a libidinal diseconomy. (Stiegler, “Proletarianization,” 7)¹⁴ Duchamp’s devil’s bargain with indifference, delay, anddésamour, within the context of Stiegler’s reinscription of the amateur, is a function of what Stiegler calls the disrupted, transformed libidinal economy—the déséconomie libidinale. Indeed, all of Stiegler’s work can be seen as an 13. I mean sign in the most generic sense. Glyn Thompson (2012) explores the more complex esoteric terminology through which Duchamp works. 14. Stiegler’s talks lay out a contemporary panorama for contemporary art framed by Hannah Arendt’s “cultural philistinism,” asocial condition focused on utility. Duchampian unwork frames this discourse.


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inquiry into the libidinal diseconomy. Stiegler points out that this economy is grounded in the pharmacological nature of the principles of life and death.¹⁵ Jean-François Lyotard, in hisLibidinal Economy, structures these principles in terms of the “Life principle,” Eros, through which the “amateur” engages in the dangerous (deadly) game of attempting the false duplicity of life/death, a duality whose elements cannottobeavoid separated, never balanced (Lyotard 1993: 29). Eros, c’est la vie, indeed, but Eros is not only “life”; as différance, it is also, simultaneously, the ambiguity of the un-selfsame. That is, for Duchamp life and death are intensities before they are concepts. Becoming concepts, they cease to be what they are—and are thus unworked. This means that the parallel discourse of concept/affect, like their order and disorder, their priorities and framing mechanisms, which have lain “beneath” contemporary art since Duchamp and the delay of the readymade, is itself a delay, an avoidance and suppression, if not a re pression, of the pharmacological nature of what should be (mis-)designated as “lifedeath.” Duchamp’s déséconomie, through the readymades and chiefly through the appropriated Fountain, nominally libidinal, is as Lyotard points out “a disorder of machines” (30): the eye, the brain, language, concept, value/valuation/revaluation, consumption. Indeed, as Lyotard shows, given that the readymade is a thought exercise, “thought is itself libidinal, because what counts is its force (its intensity) and because it is this that it is necessary to overlook in words, this interminable worry, this incandescent duplicity. It is therefore necessary that what one thinks can always be assignable to a theoretical ensemble (semantic, formal, it matters little), and shown equally to despair of such an assignation” (31). The stakes engaged in the readymade, according to Lyotard, are enormous, if culture cannot or does not “alter the course of the destiny that pushes thought towards the concept,” the retinal towards the intellectual; failure to understand this risk can result in “a libidinal economy which will resemble a trivial political economy, an ideology with a pretension to order” (31). Economy in this larger sense is the instauration of value and the nature of exchange. The libidinal is nothing less than an ontology of events. Duchamp’s designating the readymade as an “accident” places such an event in a particular relation to the “pretension of order” such that no single interpretation can account for it, particularly when the event is a function of distance, delay, différance. The readymade always exceeds 15. Lotringer and Virilio tell us that there is no understanding the twentieth century without the death drive (2005: 19).


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interpretation such that in presenting itself as flotsam from the quotidian it is always “left over,” a remnant of its own delay. In systematically rendering systems of interpretation unusable, Duchamp transmutes these enigmatic objects into what Lyotard calls dissimulated “libidinal intensities”: opening each time andthe reopening the possibility establishing itstability meaning for object (naming it) and thoroughlyofdestabilizing throughofpuns and the disruption of any gesture of denotation. Lyotard makes this connection to Stiegler’s grammatization himself. In his “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy,” given at the IRCAM conference titled “New Technologies and the Mutation of Knowledge,” organized by Stiegler in October 1986, Lyotard starts out “from the basic hypothesis of Stiegler’s work, namely that all technology is an ‘objectification’— i.e. a spatialization—of meaning, whose model is writing itself” (1991: 47). Here Lyotard pinpoints the strategy of the readymades: that their radical

objectification is simultaneously an exercise in différance, relative to “the human” itself. Lyotard’s framing of Duchamp is entirely pharmacological: he says Duchamp is indicating that humans must not consider themselves as “srcin or result but as a transformer ensuring . . . a supplement of complexity in the universe” (46). In this sense, Duchamp’s work after the readymades is informed by the same theme: the Large Glass, Lyotard says, “holds back” or “delays” within the glass itself the event that has yet to occur, portraying the anachronism of the gaze as already and/or not yet : as in the readymade, in the Large Glass the time needed to “consume” the work is perpetually deferred. The Glass mirrors the readymades in that it is enigmatically “the search for apparition itself” (79). For Duchamp, “apparition” marks the event of and as something other, and just as the readymade is otherness objectified, the later works such as the Large Glass echo the readymade strategy of acting as a brisure, or hinge, between impassioned memory and anticipation.¹⁶ But this hinge is always loose and always swinging, so that no terms of exchange can be reached or agreed upon. Starting with the readymade, the libidinal economy of “art,” manifesting itself into the present, is transformed into déséconomie.

16. Lyotard says that “anyone who looks at theGlass is waiting for Godot” (1993: 79); the Beckett/Duchamp connection much richer even than Endgame, though appropriate for a discussion of désoeuvrement , will have to . . . wait.


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70 boundary 2 / February 2017 • • • •

All this follows from what one could call a pharmacology of the social sculpture—from a mystagogy that always confronts the risk of mystification, a mystification that this pharmacology turns into its working material. And this confrontation does not start with Joseph Beuys but with Duchamp. (Stiegler, “Proletarianization,” 8)¹⁷ Différance is omnitemporality, the lamination of “never” and “always.”

In stressing the relationality between time and cultural texture—what Derrida calls “writing,” what Stiegler calls “grammatization”—Duchamp sets the stage for what Stiegler defines as the second great technical turn in contemporary culture: “contemporary art” in the digital age. In De la misère symbolique 2: La catastrophè du sensible (Symbolic Misery 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible) (2005), Stiegler excavates the relations among technicity, passion, and desire. is preciselyitsthe context in whichinform Duchampian désoeuvrement and itsThis lovelessness, work and unwork, and invade the contemporary in general and contemporary art in particular. Duchamp has (indifferently) invented something new, a critical anart, in the readymades, an inscribing of Armut that defines the misère symbolique for innovators to follow, figures such as Andy Warhol and Beuys, but also Christian Boltanski, Gerhard Richter, Sherrie Levine, Robert Gober, Thomas Hirschhorn, and many others. Duchamp is the avatar of what Jean-Luc Nancy, citing Maurice Blanchot, calls the “inoperative community,” which describes the condition of unwork and lovelessness characteristic of the Duchampian epoch. It is an epoch, and a community, constructed from encounters with “interruption, fragmentation, suspension. Community is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension that singular beings are. Community is not the work of singular beings, nor can it claim them as its works, just as communication is not a work or even an operation of singular beings, for community is simply their being—their being suspended upon its limit. Communication is the unwork of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional” (Nancy 1991: 31). Yet, uncannily, what Duchampian unwork demonstrates is that the inoperative community of “interruption, fragmentation, suspension” is 17. Stiegler’s text “Proletarianization” in this special issue marks the turn in which “mystagogy,” the elevation of art’s “performativity,” is “menaced” by the tactical mystifications embedded within it. Mystification is at work when “love,” the incalculable andimprobable in art, transmutes to désamour, when all aesthetic experience is “agreeable” (i.e., without desire).


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Barker / Unwork and the Duchampian Contemporary 71 epochal, the defining characteristic of a contemporary general organology that presents itself as intrinsically a déphasage (phase shift) through which

there must be “a relationship between any artwork and a ‘public’ constituting a transductive relation, . . . but worked through différance” (Stiegler 2005: 39). Contemporary art,unwork. anart, has had to learn to “live” in a new way in the wake of the advent of What is to be learned from the Duchampian unwork is “srcinlessness” and nonparticipation—“that the human being is ‘evolutive,’ as Beuys says, and that learning to live means learning to happen in becoming [à advenir dans le devenir]” (144). In La misère symbolique Stiegler is very clear about this process of becoming: “This question of explicitly exposed apprenticeship is also what distinguishes art after the death of God, and what becomes what is at stake, precisely within the context of the loss of participation and of symbolic poverty. . . . And this is finally what first occurs in Marcel Duchamp” (144). In light of the forging of effortless appropriation with Fountain, it is not surprising to find Stiegler framing his explication of symbolic poverty by utilizing a Joycean metaphor of forgery to describe Duchamp’s new paradigm: “we must ‘find new arms,’” Stiegler says, “in the struggle to re-make aesthetics; that is, to forge them, and these arms, which are quite frayed, are all the more difficult and dangerous to handle” (17).¹⁸ This is not the forgery of Hephaestus but of Epimetheus; now, it is no longer possible to follow any traditional didactic “art practice,” since now “learning to live” means “simultaneously to think and to work,” involving perpetually exposed, ex-plicit self-transformation: to make out of oneself, as Duchamp does later

in life, “the theatre of the struggle as well as the forge” (18). The symbolic poverty from which “we” suffer, our “loss of participation” in contemporary art, engenders psychological and libidinal poverty, most clearly manifested in Warhol’s uncanny artwork, ranging from his use of the merely unhuman (unnatural color schemes, multiples) to the mechanical (assembly-line production, fragmentation), and in Beuys’s work’s lamentation for lost community. Both Warhol and Beuys echo Duchamp in challenging the retinal: War18. Joyce concludes his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (published in 1916, the year before Fountain) with Stephen Dedalus’s “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (Joyce 1992: 196). Perhaps the last of the romantics, Stephen next appears as a Ulysses. bored schoolteacher, a perceiver of “disappointed bridges,” at the beginning of Duchamp is perhaps the quintessential forger of becomings, the “uncreated conscience” of the race having become inoperable.


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hol through the multiples and their “bad” production values, Beuys through the synesthesia of waxy smell (pitch) and muffled sound (felt). • • • •

Duchamp makes misinterpretation and misreading part of his meaning. (De Duve 1991: 312) Thierry de Duve amplifies the disruptive role the grammatized self plays in Duchamp’s pseudocreative strategy. At the core of “the Duchampian,” de Duve says, is “history modification as a strategy” (312). History modification indeed: self-reformation is the central mode of production for Duchamp, for whom “faulty memory becomes a philosophical position” (312). In this regard—and it is vital to an understanding of contemporary art—Duchamp inaugurates what Stiegler calls a “vast writing machine [that] has became technological and industrial. We are dealing with a γραφειν (graphein) that discretizes and reproduces all movements and thus constitutes a stage of grammatization, such that the new mystagogy . . . is able to make its appearance” (Stiegler, “Quarrel,” 43).¹⁹ This is theturn at which Duchampian unwork informs contemporary art, its practice and its framing. If Stiegler’s question regarding Duchamp is “What happened between 1912 and 1917?,” Hal Foster’s equivalent is “What happens when the avantgarde is faced with a state of emergency, whether real (when the rule of law is actually suspended) or imagined (when it only seems to be)?” (Foster 2011: 28).

The “law” to which Foster refers is both literal and figurative; figuratively, it refers to the Duchampian legacy, of which Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s work is a significant part. Hirschhorn describes his work as precarious , perpetually in a state of uncertainty resultant from misreadings and misinterpretations compounded by “the state of exception,” beginning in Duchamp that has now extended from Carl Schmitt through Walter Benjamin, to . . . everything; as Foster says, the exception has “become the rule” (28). Duchamp is the initiator of what Foster, after Hirschhorn, calls the “precariat.” Hirschhorn’s mixed media work, such as that shown at the Venice Biennale in 2011, is “hazardous, contradictory” (29). Such precarity has prompted contemporary culture’s obsession with “heightened security,” which has in turn disrupted the narrative of contemporary art, as Foster points out: “much [contemporary] art has attempted to mani19. This new mystagogic writing machine produces consumers, proletarianized producers, and audiences (Stiegler 2005: 21).


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fest, even to exacerbate,” this condition of uncertainty (Foster 2009: n.p.). Contemporary art manifests the instability it has learned from Duchamp; it “foregrounds its own schismatic condition, its own lack of shared meanings, methods, or motivations” (n.p.). As T. J. Clark points out, this new art constantly attempts to “capture consistent meanings in the culture—to capturethe thelack lackofand make it and overrepeatable into form” (quoted in Foster 2009: n.p.), for example, in the direct Duchampian references through which Gober echoes the readymade in what he calls his “orderly presentation of handmade readymades” (n.p.) constructed from beeswax, quoting and compounding the precarity by citing Beuys’s play with the material of the senses. In contemporary art, “history modification” takes the ubiquitous form of archival “heaping.” The lesson of the readymades, co-opted from the quotidian to do double duty as unwork, is retold. A few examples: • Jon Kessler’s 2005 archival gathering of a huge compilation of small found items that he combined with various screens, cables, and other objects, then mixed with “automatons” surveilled by cameras he installed. The heap of objects Kessler assembled, objects of no importance that could not be narrated, mixed with remnants of a technological explosion that was then subjected to meaningless scrutiny at a distance. The archive had no need of the human and in fact seemed to mark its extinction. • Mark Wallinger’s archival heap, “State Britain” of 2007, consisted of over six objects. hundredThe weathered photographs, postcards, and other found sheer volume of this material precluded its having any impact other than its weight, as though that was the weight of history itself. • Isa Genzken (2006) fabricated a group of assemblages of plastic flowers, old dolls, and other toys that she placed outdoors in Münster, Germany, with the intention that they gradually disintegrate in the course of time as a “natural” effect of weather. Once again, the human “hand” was required only at the point of selection; everything else was delay. • More famously, Christian Boltanski’s compilations of photos, old tin boxes, vitrines, and clothing (à la Ann Hamilton), gesture toward an untold or perpetually “misread” history over great stretches of time. The objects Boltanski selects, such as photographs, are “chosen” at random in thrift shops, then copied and


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recopied until they become hazily indistinct. What can be taken for a history lesson never becomes one; when Boltanski is asked whether his photo images refer to the Holocaust, he generally asks “which one?” This precarious ambiguity, which is neither pharmakon ambivalence dialectic, isanart the new through the specter ofnor Duchampian informs contemporary art.which

Perhaps as a direct result of the advent of Duchampian unwork, and counterintuitively, contemporary art’s form, let alone its “content,” has been dramatically un responsive to the déphasage ²⁰ in the work invested in “art” that is inaugurated by the arrival of the second machinic turn, the digital. In this regard, contemporary art practice is treating digital technology as its own readymade, appropriating it for other purposes. As Claire Bishop (2012) explains, most contemporary artists now use digital technology, but few think through or with it. The “new media” perpetually reinventing itself seems to be running parallel to the world of art production in general. In fact, surprisingly, the World Wide Web has seen very little artwork that has actually responded directly to the apparent possibilities of new languages, new semiotic regimes: performance art, the art of “social practice,” sculpture, painting on canvas, even archiving, analog film, and architectural design have all either rejected the digital and the virtual, passed beyond them, or failed to engage with them. Nonetheless, all these forms unavoidably operate within the orbit of and in discourse with the technologico-digital turn. It is, in fact, possible to see “the digital” as the superstructure within which contemporary art isDuchamp”: operating even seems totheignore, or reject it. This is “good thesewhen formsit contest digitalavoid, influence even while operating within its orbit. Bishop calls this contemporary art’s “repressed relationship with the digital” (n.p.). This too is a function of the Duchampian heritage: the face-to-face but distant nature of nondigital contemporary art, like the readymades, as opposed to digital anonymity, the “coldness” of the computer screen. As Stiegler points out, this has meant the opposite of progress: now, what the “converser” with contem20. “Déphasage ,” which is commonly translated in a technical sense as “phase shift” and employed extensively in the work of Gilbert Simondon, is used here in the sense in which Gilles Deleuze appropriates it from Simondon, as “dissymmetry”; referring to déphasage , Deleuze says, “What Simondon elaborates here is a whole ontology, according to which Being is never One. As pre-individual, being is more than one—metastable, superimposed, simultaneous with itself. As individuated, it is still multiple, because it is ‘multiphased,’ ‘a phase of becoming that will lead to new processes’” (Deleuze 2004: 115–18). Thus the “dis” of “dissymmetry,” its strategy of disruption, is vital to Duchamp’s sense of it.


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porary (digital) art learns to do is to manipulate screen codes. The aesthetic object is thus radically altered: the very way in which it is an “object” is changed (now it is a “virtual relationship,” if that is not too much of an oxymoron). It is Guy Debord who early on points to the “stultifying effect of media art” aspect (Debord §24) butart thehas increasingly digital nature of this of 1994: contemporary “returned” ubiquitous it to Duchamp, in the sense that much contemporary art has become increasingly obsessed with “repurposing”—which was formerly (in a world parallel to Duchamp’s) first called “plagiarism,” then “appropriation.” This aspect of contemporary art has mandated yet again, in this new context, a critical reconsideration of “authorship” and “srcinality” (e.g., by and in the work of Damien Hirst, after Duchamp and proceeding through Levine, Richard Prince, Roy Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Boltanski, etc.). Repurposing, emanating from the misrepresentation of Duchampian unwork, is now “like” re- or transcoding :

extant “files” of “information” are reintegrated, reshuffled, reframed, modulated, modified, then becoming a matter of choice, of appropriation (making others’ work one’s own), of the reframing or rearticulating of extant objects through juxtapositions that either concur (Francis Bacon) or disrupt (Robert Longo). This all follows from the strategy of the readymade, through which the contemporary art paradigm has shifted from a model of srcinality to one of archivization that has come “out the other side” of Duchamp’s unwork: now it does not attempt any narrative through-line or overarching thematic unity. Rather, it requires the critical response of the interpreter to make sense of it, and ironically, since in the web world the interpreter is anonymous, the critical faculty, which operates at a “second” distance from the inherent distance of the digital art object, becomes increasingly inarticulate. The symbolic poverty Stiegler critiques is now the post-televisual digital, resulting from net surfing, which resembles channel switching but amplifies it manifold, creating a digi-world of seeming disjunction and coincidence unimaginable before the web. Of course, we now know that this apparent precarity is increasingly literally not true: each time we choose (click), the next choice instantly becomes less free, as the web tracks and records our choices/clicks and echoes them back to us in the form of popups and suggested site visits. So undoubtedly, contemporary art thus finds itself immersed, and simultaneously uninterested, in the digital. But as Stiegler points out, this frame, the digital epoch, predetermines that any and all art, as communicative derivative, and phalanx, of its culture, is overtly or covertly part of


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the techno-digital system. And it is a system, insofar as it has become the ground of contemporary culture, (pre-)determining the making and doing of art worlds. This has had an enormous impact on our relationship with the image, the experiential nature of which has shifted with the second machinic the turn.nonhuman Once seductive concrete, the digitized image is imperceptible: world and of code in precisely the way in which all other languages are code; it must be perceived as written , linguistic, rather than semiotic in the larger sense. Rather than symbolic, it is metaphorical ; rather then spatial, it is temporal. This means that the digital quasi image is actually a-temporal, the very opposite of omnitemporal: it consists of nanogranules, multiplying ciphers translated into sound and sight. This is why so much contemporary art apparently rejects the digital: fear of the genuinely alien, the antihuman. Thus digital art, learning from Duchamp, is the very mark of the nonhuman: sense without sensation; it cannot be loved. Originality cannot exist; only the “new.” If twentieth-century art began with Duchamp’s turn to appropriation and to irony, by the 1960s it had become once again oriented toward authorship and its authority, at which point Duchamp reinvented himself and his unwork, through an authority that is perpetually and unabashedly forged, stolen. As participants in this legacy of the contemporary, we in the inoperative community are suspended between the analog and the digital, interrogating the fundamental nature of art-work and, indeed, of the human, in the face of pharmacological digitalization through code-based logics. On the one hand, the digital culture opens out new “utopian” vistas of postauthorship. On the other, its pervasive, free-floating irony calls the human, human community and culture, and the value of art, into question, as a new pharmakon, the Duchampian legacy of unwork. References

Barker, Stephen. 2009. “Transformation as an Ontological Imperative: The [Human] Future According to Bernard Stiegler.”Transformations 17. www.transforma tionsjournal.org/issues/17/article_01.shtml. Bishop, Claire. 2012. “Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media.” Artforum, September. www.corner-college.com/udb/cproob2RNIDigital_Divide.pdf. Cabanne, Pierre. 1971. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Camfield, William A. 1987. “Marcel Duchamp’sFountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917.”Dada/Surrealism 16: 64–94.


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Barker / Unwork and the Duchampian Contemporary 77 . 1989. Marcel Duchamp: Fountain . Menhil Collection. Houston: Houston Fine Arts Press. Debord, Guy. 1994.Society of the Spectacle . New York: Zone Books. De Duve, Thierry, ed. 1991. The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. “On Gilbert Simondon.” InDesert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, translated by Michael Taormina, edited by David Lapoujade, 86–89. New York: Semiotext(e). Originally published as “Gilbert Simondon, ‘L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique,’” in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 156, nos. 1–3 (1966): 115–18. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Translated by Michael Nass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duchamp, Marcel. 1973. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp . Edited by Michel Panouille and Elmer Peterson. New York: Da Capo. Foster, Hal. 2009. “Precarious,” Mutual Art, December. mutualart.com/OpenArticle . /Precarious/D501E50ED64C6AE0. 2011. “Crossing Over: The Precarious Practice of Thomas Hirschhorn.”Berlin Journal, no. 20: 28–30. Girst, Thomas. 2003. “(Ab)Using Marcel Duchamp: The Concept of the Readymade in Post-War and Contemporary American Art.”tout-fait 2, no. 5. toutfait.com /issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/girst2/girst1.html. Guérin, Michel. 2008. Marcel Duchamp: Portrait de l’anartiste. Paris: Lucie Éditions. Joyce, James. 1992. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions. Judovitz, Dalia. 1999. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit . Berkeley: University of California Press. Kuh, Katherine. 1962. The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists . New York: Harper and Row. Lotringer, Sylvère, and Paul Virilio. 2005.The Accident of Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Semiotext(e). Lyotard, Jean-François. 1991. “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy.” InThe Inhuman, translated by Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, 47–57. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 1993. Libidinal Economy. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Originally published asEconomie Libidinale. 1974. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. “Marcelwww.moma.org/collection/object.php?object Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, New York, 1951.” MoMA. Accessed April 21, 2016. _id=81631. Marey, Étienne-Jules. ca. 1882. Photo of flying pelican, Wikipedia. Accessed April 21, 2016. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marey_-_birds.jpg. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


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78 boundary 2 / February 2017 Naumann, Francis M. 1982. “Affectueusement, Marcel: Ten Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti.”Archives of American Art Journal 22, no. 4: 2–19. . 1999. The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction . New York: Abrams. Norton, Louise. 1917. “Buddha of the Bathroom.”Blind Man 2: 71–72. Stiegler, Bernard. 2005. De la misère symbolique 2: La catastrophe du sensible . Paris: Galilée. Thompson, Glyn. 2012. “Jemandem ein R Mutt’s zeugnis ausstellen Monsieur Goldfinch.” Offramp Gallery. offrampgallery.com/thompson_glynn_jermandem .pdf. Tinnell, John. 2012. “Originary Technicity and Grammatization: Twin Pillars of Stiegler’s Project,” Grammatological Investigations, June. jtinnell.blogspot.com /2012/06/srcinary- technicity-and-grammatization.html. Virilio, Paul. 2003. Art and Fear. New York: Continuum.


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Proletarianization, Deproletarianization, and the Rise of the Amateur

Benoît Dillet

The proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population. —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1967) But I quote Marx without saying so, without quotation marks, and because people are incapable of recognizing Marx’s texts I am thought to be someone who doesn’t quote Marx. When a physicist writes a work of physics, does he feel it necessary to quote Newton and Einstein? He uses them, but he doesn’t need the quotation marks, the footnote and the eulogistic comment to prove how completely he is being faithful to the master’s thought. And because other physicists know what Einstein did, what he discovered and proved, they can recognize him in what the physicist writes. —Michel Foucault (1988) We do need not have image of the simply to beanconscious of.¹ proletarian anymore that we would —Gilles Deleuze (1995; translation modified) 1. My translation. The srcinal reads: “Nous ne disposons plus d’une image du prolétaire auquel il suffirait de prendre conscience.” boundary 2 44 1 (2017) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 3725881 © 2017 by Duke University Press


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In the hyperindustrial world, in which life is spent more in front of the computer than in the factory, the notion of the proletariat seems obsolete. However, following the statement made in the 1970s by Michel Foucault in the second epigraph to this article, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels arguably defined axiomsfor to political understand society and economic relations that continue to be relevant philosophy today, even after the financialization of the economy and the economic crisis. While Marx and Engels presented in some ways the laws of political economy, to do a new critique of political economy would mean, according to Bernard Stiegler, to combat capitalism’s proletarianizing tendency to turn all things into a hypercalculable environment in which singularities and desire disappear. Stiegler’s philosophy thus clearly inherits the Marxist framework and axioms, while also displacing the notion of the proletariat into a larger notion: proletarianization. By this, Stiegler refers, first of all, to a condition rather than a specific class (the workers); second, the term is not defined by the absence of ownership over the means of production but by a loss of knowledge. In this essay, I present the three forms of proletarianization found in Stiegler’s work: the proletarianization of the producer, the proletarianization of the consumer, and generalized proletarianization. In the lectures included in this issue, Stiegler refers to the proletarianization of sensibility, which belongs to this last form of proletarianization. My essay is an attempt to contextualize this new work in relation to Stiegler’s past work on political economy, as well as some of his political positions about capitalism as a social organization. Following Stiegler, I will call the underlying political project of deproletarianization that he has developed “protentional politics.” Finally, I also explain why Stiegler’s turn to the figure of the amateur, especially in the third lecture in this issue, is strategic in thinking of deproletarianizing practices. However, it is hardly straightforward, since the role of the amateur has evolved dramatically throughout the last three hundred years. In this sense, the amateur is the enacting, and even the acting out, of protentional politics. Stiegler attempts to bring a new, positive meaning to the “amateur” by going back to the etymology of the word (amator, the person who loves) for political purposes; the amateur is the new “image of the proletarian,” as an emancipatory and not negative figure. What Is Proletarianization?

Proletarianization is not a new theme in Stiegler’s work. While it arguably begins with his interpretation of Gilbert Simondon’s “mecanology”


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Dillet / Proletarianization, Deproletarianization, and the Amateur 81

in Technics and Time 1, its actual first appearance is in Technics and Time 2 in the discussion of the loss of individuation in Simondon’s reading of Marx (Stiegler 2009: 75). While Simondon does not always refer to Marx’s texts, in Of Modes of Existence of Technical Objects (1958) he developed an srcinal readingforofthe Marx’s arguments about the consequences of the use of machinery worker in the mode of production.² For Simondon, alienation is not identity- or class-based but conditioned by the human-machine relation. This means that the wealthy are also alienated from the point of view of the technical object (Combes 1999: 116–20). Stiegler extends Simondon’s argument, however, by referring in this context to the loss of knowledge in general. While Simondon was thus concerned about the relation of the individual with the world through the technical object, Stiegler’s interest is larger and serves as a basis for his new critique of political economy. Simondon argued that progress cannot be reduced to the economic realm but should be rethought ontologically from the point of view of technical objects: “It is not because a civilization loves money that it is attached to efficiency, but because it is first a civilization of efficiency that it becomes a civilization of money. . . . In spite of the civil liberties, [this civilization of money] is burdensome for individuals” (Simondon, quoted in Chabot 2003: 50). There is a passion for the efficiency and progress of technical objects that surpasses the economic and capitalist framework. Two interpretations can follow from this short passage. First of all, as an idealism that forgets that in a capitalist mode of production, exchange-value overdetermines use-value, and it is difficult to imagine the production of the technical object outside capitalism. Second, Simondon’s theory is prophetic in thinking the invention of technical objects beyond the logic of employment (understood as remunerated work), organized by capitalism. The latter interpretation calls for a more radical reading of Simondon, which resonates with Stiegler’s conception of deproletarianization and André Gorz’s philosophy of work, both of which I discuss at the end of this essay. In reading Marx’s Grundrisse , especially his “Fragments on Machines,” Simondon argued that with the machine-tool, the worker was 2. See Andrea Bardin’s excellent essay “De l’homme à la matière: pour une ‘ontologie difficile’” (2013), in which he argues, in his project of establishing a materialist political philosophy from Simondon’s work, that human work organized the “easy ontology [ontologie facile ]” of determinism that opposes matter/form, necessity/liberty. Simondon’s categories are of considerable help to propose a “difficult ontology” that is needed for a materialist social theory (40).


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deprived from his know-how (savoir-faire) and was reduced to a mere technical organ of the machine. He called this condition “a loss of individuation” (Stiegler 2004: 90–91). This understanding of the loss of individuation was introduced in Stiegler’s own terms as disorientation and as ill-being (mal-être),most in Technics andtransformation Time, 2 and Technics and Time, 3. However, Stiegler’s systematic and definition of proletarianization is developed in the second part of his work, starting with the Symbolic Misery and Disbelief and Discredit series, until his most recent book Pharmacology of the National Front. Throughout his work, Stiegler develops a systematic understanding of proletarianization, making this concept extremely relevant to diagnose and analyze the elements of contemporary capitalism (financialization, the role of debt, the end of the welfare state, the restrictions of the right to strike and protest, mass unemployment, ecological problems, and the privatization of all forms of life), but I will also point out where Stiegler blurs the precision of the concept. The first dimension of proletarianization that must be considered is the proletarianization of the producer. This draws directly from Marx’s “Fragments on Machines”: Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it. . . . The worker’sand activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined regulated to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. (Marx 1973: 692–93)³ The worker’s knowledge has been inscribed in the machine, and he is reduced to an activity of monitoring and assisting the machine rather than working with raw materials. By relying on the machine, the knowledge of the worker is transferred into the machine. Stiegler calls this process proletarianization: through this loss of knowledge, the worker is proletarianized. What interests Stiegler is less the reification of labor into the machine or the theory of abstract labor and how these play out within Marxist philosophy from Georg Lukács onward but how to reconfigure the social in accounting for the loss of knowledge. In this sense, when a worker is proletarianized, 3. See Stiegler’s commentary of these fragments in Stiegler 2012 (214–42).


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he is deprived of his capacity to elevate himself above his condition and to individuate with others (through the process of co-individuation) and with technical objects—for Stiegler, there is no distinction between work and individuation in this sense. Roman law, Marx used thethe term proletariat in referenceAs to athereader Latin of term, proletarianus , denoting person who has no property or no wealth. In Latin, proles means offspring, which seems to imply that the proletarian is a child, a descendant of the owner or the state. The displacement operated by Stiegler with his notion of proletarianization is faithful to this Latin etymology: a person without wealth—if we understand wealth in the sense Gorz and Dominique Méda have given to this term. For Gorz and Méda, wealth is not reducible to accumulated capital but refers to being in a position to cultivate and work at one’s individual and social patrimony (Méda 1999; Gorz 2003).⁴ Stiegler’s task is to diagnose

historically the symptoms of proletarianization rather than holding on to the proletarians as a class in charge of its own history. While in this essay I intend to show the power and the operability of proletarianization as “a new image of the proletariat,” it is worth noting, first of all, that the absence of discussions on the theme of alienation in Marxist literature in Stiegler’s texts makes the new category of proletarianization significantly more difficult to appreciate. Where does alienation end and proletarianization begin? Marx inherited the theme of alienation from Hegel, who uses it to refer to the separation of the human spirit from nature. Alienation is overcome when spirit is fully developed and finds itself at home in the world. For Marx, however, alienation is related to work (“alienated work,” in the words of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts ), referring to a psychological and physical separation of the worker from his nature and the world; however, it is also historically determined and constitutes a necessary stage to self-realization. In this latter sense, it is accepted as a stage of human development. The individual is transformed into “commodity-man.” Dialectically, however, this negativity is also the condition for a higher stage of human civilization (Fromm 2003: 37–48; Sayers 2011).⁵ 4. This notion is also close to Amartya Sen’s concept of capability that Stiegler often refers to. 5. The fact that Sayers does not refer to the category of the proletariat in his book, apart from arguing that this category should be defined in global rather than national terms (2011: 61), confirms the problem that I outlined about the lack of dialogue between the tradition studying alienation, on the one hand, and proletarianization, on the other.


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This indicative picture of Marx’s dialectical movement does not correspond exactly to Stiegler’s pharmacology, even though Stiegler finds pharmacological elements in some of Marx’s texts (especially his analyses of machinery and the means of production). One of the differences, for example, between and Stiegler is diminution that while alienation is primarily concerned with theMarx repression and the of psychological and physiological capacities, Stiegler’s notion of proletarianization is used to diagnose the level of both theoretical and practical knowledges in society. The theme of alienation is often linked to the first and second stages of capitalism, from the first industrial revolution and the birth of the factory to the rise of Fordism. However, as such, it gives a necessary historical basis to describe the new forms of proletarianization that appeared with post-Fordism, the third phase of capitalism. The different stages of capitalism are fundamental to portray the move from the proletarianization of the producer to the proletarianization of the consumer, but they are also technically determined, through what Stiegler calls stages of grammatization. Grammatization is best defined as a technical history of memory: the material and therefore spatial existence (or engraming) of a temporal flow (Petit 2013: 400–401). The process of grammatization explains how technical objects come to be, not only as the support of knowledge (logos) but as its inscription, its discretion and therefore its modification. Techno-logy is thus not the discourse about technics but the formalization and the transformation of knowledge; the technical tool grammatizes gestures, speeches, sensibilities, and knowledges in general.⁶ Grammatization is more general than proletarianization, which only accounts for the loss of knowledge. In this sense, we can say that grammatization conditions proletarianization. Both grammatization and proletarianization are historically determined. Stiegler refers in this context to three industrial revolutions: The first, which was at the center of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the invention of the steam engine and mechanized production but also the first railway networks. The second is the development of Taylorism-Fordism as a new form of capitalism based primarily on oil, the car industry, and consumption. The third is the financialization of society and debt, the rise of the information economy, and what some call “cognitive capitalism.” 6. The first example Sylvain Auroux gives of this process of grammatization is the alphabet analyzed as “a becoming-letter of the sound of speech” (Stiegler 2013a: 87; emphasis in srcinal).


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In the second industrial revolution, the rise of the consumer was organized by giving workers higher wages and better social conditions. This also coincided with the birth of the welfare state, which systematically stimulated consumption by taking care of the population with health and unemployment benefits. Bruno demonstrates the what correlation between Keynesian measures and theTrentin development of Fordism, Stiegler calls the “Fordist compromise” (Stiegler 2013b: 325). Trentin argued in 1997 that the Left did not see the mutation of these industrial models after 1970: “We should in fact situate the beginning of this crisis during the phase that coincided with the exhaustion of the first thirty years of almost continuous growth of production and revenues in industrialized countries (what the French call Les Trentes Glorieuses) and with the emergence of limits to the Fordist model and the Taylorist forms of labor organization, at the moment of the arrival of new flexible technologies of information and the accelerated process of the globalized markets” (Trentin 2012: 43). The third industrial revolution is portrayed as the passage “from the motorway network to the digital network” (Stiegler, Giffard, and Fauré 2009: 27–32), the information economy, and the rise of new technologies. This transition, as Trentin demonstrates, is what the Left did not think and continues to refuse to think when it is calling for “more purchasing power” instead of struggling against proletarianization itself (Stiegler 2012: 231). For Stiegler, the slogan of “increasing people’s purchasing power” belongs to the populist discourse that comforts the second industrial model, no longer relevant in a service-based economy and “cultural capitalism,” since this old model is in fact already overcome. Politicians should be calling instead for an increase of “purchasing knowledge” (Stiegler 2013b: 331). In pointing out the “Fordist compromise,” Stiegler does not target the welfare state as such since it has been continuously under attack from the 1970s onward. Instead, he attempts to reformulate the political question in terms of consumerism and even “hyperconsumption.” “The consumer is the new proletarian figure, and the proletariat, very far from disappearing, has become a condition—proletarianization—from which it has become nearly impossible to escape” (Stiegler 2011a: 35; translation modified). Demanding more purchasing power implies for Stiegler to demand, instead of reconsidering the value of work and work as value, more proletarianization and the impoverishment of the consumer, an impoverishment of both her savoir-faire (know-how) and savoir-vivre (knowing-how-to-live).⁷ With 7. John Hutnyk’s Marxist deterministic proposition entirely misinterprets Stiegler’s precise notion of proletarianization: “There is the possibility of going further here, to prole-


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hyperconsumption, individuals have become addicted to consumption.⁸ Capitalism has ceased to be a “destructive creation,” as Joseph Schumpeter famously argued, but has been turned into a “destructive destruction” (Stiegler 2013b: 347–51), and this is due to the acceleration of technical novelty. Technical novelty has the required social readjustment as Gille demonstrated, but today threata of the obsolescence of Bertrand forms of life has increased with such extreme intensity that it is philosophy’s role to slow down technical life and diagnose the threats and the hopes of these obsolescences. Today, these forms of life (the family structure, social institutions such as universities or schools but also associations and organizations) do not simply become obsolete but are interrupted, short-circuited, and evermore shuffled. The obsolescence of technologies is not organized technically but planned economically—hence the expression “planned obsolescence.” This is what Stiegler means by the proletarianization of savoir-vivre: In the most general way [hyperconsumption] deprives consumers of their savoir-vivre, forcing them to constantly try to keep up with the obsolescence of things. This is so because the milieu has become fundamentally unfaithful, but according to a rhythm that no longer permits the production of new forms of fidelity, or of pathos producer of philia, or of trust, and it is the result of a much larger process tarianize it all, and taking up Marx’s nuanced consideration of proletarianization in a wider sense, suggesting that what is called incivility and delinquency are indeed the opposition, or at least part of, and beginning of, an organised resistance to that which would reduce all of life to marketing controls. . . . A Marxist interpretation of the present crisis should not stop with a diagnosis of ruin. The recognition and incivility are not enough, and we may need rather more delinquents, and considerable civil unrest, before a revolutionary call to attention gains ground.” Paradoxically, Hutnyk’s Marxism falls back to the status quo and the same social-democrat policies of prescribing more consumption and proletarianization. He also points out how Stiegler does not see the possible “multiple and non-linear time” that an exposure to television produces and the deep attention it can solicit; he asks, “why not grant the possibility that these forms have a role in progressive political transformation as well?” (149). But this is precisely what Stiegler does and has been doing in his philosophical project and outside the walls of philosophy since the 1980s! Hutnyk 2012. Having written thistoessay 2014, I read Vesco’s (2015) aSee year later. While we seem to refer similaringrounds, her Shawna goal is other: sheessay does not make the notion of proletarianization dialogue with debates in political economy but wants instead to demonstrate the link via Maurice Blanchot’s thought of disaster between Stiegler’s first philosophy (from the Technics and Time series) and his more recent work. 8. On hyperconsumption as being addictive and toxic, see Stiegler 2006b (122–23).


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that, as “absolute pharmakon,” thereby deprives political leaders of the very possibility of making decisions and deprives scientists of the capacity to theorize their practice, that is, to form long circuits. (Stiegler 2013c: 53) This planned obsolescence leads to a situation in which computers or mobile phones are meant to last two years, fridges five years, and so on, to stimulate consumption. It is partly this constant change in pharmaka that leads to a situation of generalized frustration, not only with the production of new needs and the destruction of desire but by the economic demands to adapt constantly to new pharmaka, and to render impossible the processes of adoption. The distinction between adaptation and adoption has been at the heart of Stiegler’s political philosophy since Technics and Time, 3: The Time of Cinema. The capitalist system demands constant adaptation to a changing environment, not by having its subjects participate in this change but by having them passively (and tacitly) adapt to it. Adaptation is one of the primary targets of Stiegler’s new Ideologiekritik , and it is combated by inventing wild and creative forms of adoptions—and not merely by resisting the adaptive prerogatives (Moore 2013: esp. 24–33). This shift from the proletarianization of the producer as Marx diagnosed it in Grundrisse to the proletarianization of the consumer, as first described and critiqued by Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard in 1967–70, has an evident consequence (Debord [1967] 1995; Baudrillard [1970] 1998). Consumption in a hyperindustrial and service-based economy has replaced production: consumption themeans continuation of production(mobile, by otherthe means. With the development of is new of communication Internet) and new technologies (robots and automata of all kinds), the time of the consumer is increasingly spent on performing tasks that workers used to do: self-checkouts, cashpoints, and online ticket reservations are the best examples of this paradigm. While the victim of the first form of proletarianization was the producer, especially the industrial worker, the second form of proletarianization mainly has affected the consumer, especially those members of the middle class who had access to more and more retail areas (the department store and the supermarket, then the shopping center and the online retailer). Generalized proletarianization, the third form of proletarianization, is then logically defined by its mass propagation. It can be associated with the third industrial revolution (post-Fordism), even though there is no radical break; rather, there are hybrid forms of proletarianization during the


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second half of the twentieth century, with generalized proletarianization being the intensification of the previous two forms of proletarianization (of the producer and the consumer) (Stiegler 2011a: 62–63). As I noted earlier, the consumer is the new proletarian, but when Stiegler this statement, is careful to point out that this is a condition noadvances one can escape. In this he sense, the proletarianization of the sumer is always already a generalized proletarianization, but the distinction is nonetheless significant in understanding the degrees in the intensification of proletarianization. What Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer diagnosed in 1944 as the “culture industry” anticipated in this respect the generalization of proletarianization. With the culture industry, “sustained thought is out of the question”: it “leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience.” Instead, spectators are expected to “react automatically” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 126–27; also see Stiegler 2011b: 35–40). Adorno and Horkheimer anticipated this since they theorized the film industry as having a totalizing power over the real life of individuals. With new communication networks, using both analog and digital technologies, information has become a commodity that is transferrable via cables and satellites to organize systematically the synchronization of consciousnesses. Generalized proletarianization for Stiegler is defined by the combined loss of savoir-faire, savoir-vivre, and savoir-théoriser (theoretical knowledge), reducing the consumer’s existence to a subsistence by liquidating her singularities (Stiegler 2011a: 63, 87; Stiegler 2006c: 236–37). It is only from there that it will be become clear why Stiegler considers the amateur—that is, everyone—to be a revolutionary agent. Due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, marketing has been used increasingly to compensate for the lack of use-value of new commodities, by stimulating the drives of the consumers and by first targeting the vulnerability of children who have not fully developed their capacity to transform their drives into desires.⁹ Marketing strategies are operated through social media, mass media, and Hollywood, and these knowledge and information industries have turned consciousnesses into “raw materials” (Stiegler 2013a: 36). While in the second industrial revolution, goods were exchanged and consumed—they were “circulating capital,” as defined by Marx—in the third industrial revolution what is sold has no intrinsic value and the targets are not individuals but consciousnesses (“consciousnesses 9. This is argued in Stiegler 2010b.


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are markets” [36]). This leads Stiegler to define the present economic system as a drive-based capitalism that exploits all forms of attention to fabricate, reproduce, diversify, and segment the needs of consumers (24; Stiegler 2013c: 79–134). The financialization of the economy based on the development and private debt has createdand a speculative economy that is based of onpublic the frenetic satisfaction of drives on short-term thinking. As Stiegler notes in his lectures on the proletarianization of sensibility, even (or especially) in the art world, it is no longer a matter of taste and judgment: speculating on the art market has become the rule. Hyperconsumption ultimately leads to a destruction (consummation ) of all objects and relations rather than to the creation of objects of desire through libidinal and financial investments. It is in this context that the power of the notion of proletarianization aims at providing an alternative to workers’ struggles and demands. In États de choc (States of Shock ), Stiegler extends his argument about generalized proletarianization with the controversial claim that “systemic stupidity” is the central feature of our contemporary times.¹⁰ While proletarianization is minimally defined by the loss of knowledge (this knowledge can be lost over generations, yet it is increasingly experienced during a single lifetime), stupidity is the pharmacological condition of all knowledge. Stiegler’s analysis of stupidity is based on the already mentioned Adorno and Horkheimer, but most centrally on Gilles Deleuze’s commentary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s saying that the task of philosophy is to harm stupidity.¹¹ For Deleuze, stupidity should not be confused with errors; it is not the negation or the destruction of thought but “a base way of thinking” (Deleuze 2006: 105), hence the relation between knowledge/thinking and stupidity is not oppositional but one of process or continuum. This analysis of stupidity is then read through the prism of Stiegler’s interpretation of the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus, developed in the first volume of the Technics and Time series.¹² The problem here, related to my discussion of 10. This notion of “systemic stupidity” was briefly introduced in Stiegler 2013c (22–23, 131). 11. Deleuze always referred to this as the mission of philosophy. In Abécédaire (filmed in 1988–89), he notes,but “People pretenddidthat is afterimagine all onlythe good forofafterdinner conversations, if philosophy notphilosophy exist, we cannot level stupidity. . . .The same goes if there were no art, we cannot imagine the vulgarity of people. The world would not be what it presently is if there were no art, people would no longer care [les gens ne se tiendraient plus ]” (Deleuze 2004: n.p.). 12. See Stiegler 2013b, chap. 10, “Epimetheus’s Stupidity” (218–39).


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the difference between alienation and proletarianization earlier on, is the risk of conflating proletarianization with stupidity, and in this way dehistoricizing specific cases of proletarianization. The true srcinality of Stiegler’s argument about proletarianization is to allow for a new image of the proletariat,This which not reducible to the working but encompasses everyone. newis image of the proletariat givesclass a potentiality to everyone and does not simply assign to a certain group the heavy burden of leading the emancipatory process. Everyone is an amateur—that is, a curator, an artist, a philosopher, or a critic potentially—but also: no one escapes the conditions of stupidity and proletarianization. However, this generalization that Stiegler adopts also muddles the concept itself. There is a tendency or a temptation in Stiegler’s work to generalize proletarianization to too many instances, to raise the notion of proletarianization as a universal category. This is particularly evident when he refers to Plato as “the first thinker of proletarianization” (Stiegler n.d., n.p.; Stiegler 2010a: 29–36).¹³ The specific form of proletarianization that Plato diagnosed in Phaedrus regarding writing informs a general theory of proletarianization, but one cannot but wonder if all processes of proletarianization, from 5 BC until today in 2014, can really be equated or be reduced to a single symptom. Specific technical objects and systems operate different forms of attention and care to which correspond specific and incommensurable instances of disindividuation and proletarianization. For instance, the case of forgetting how to spell words because of the use of word processors when writing creates problems that cannot be compared with Alan Greenspan’s avowal of his loss of knowledge in the workings of the financial economy (47). The obvious disadvantage of this generalization is that it potentially discourages action if too many things are going wrong. There is thus a need for more specific, spatiotemporally situated diagnoses. There are different instances of proletarianization that are produced but these cannot be confused with stupidity as a transcendental structure of thought (as Deleuze defines it). On the contrary, proletarianization needs to be analyzed historically, in relation to the stages of grammatization, instead of raising it as an eternal condition that has existed since Plato. Stiegler is right to argue that Plato (and Socrates) condemns some forms of writing in Phaedrus since this process of exteriorizing one’s memory implies a forget13. Stiegler writes, “What Socrates describes in Phaedrus , namely that the exteriorization of memory is a loss of memory and knowledge, has today become our everyday experience in all aspects of our existence, and more and more often, in the feeling of our powerlessness [impuissance ]” (2010a, 29; translation modified).


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ting and a first discussion of the loss of knowledge. However, his argument is most powerful when it diagnoses new forms of proletarianization that Plato could not have envisaged, when it calls for contemporary empirical studies in anthropology, sociology, and political science. Taking Care of Capitalism?

Stiegler’s position on capitalism and the role of the state is founded on his project of conducting a general organology to study the relations and the transductive relations between biological, technical, and social organs.¹⁴ For Stiegler, radical politics should be focused on individuating with the present capitalist organization since a brutal interruption of capitalism as a social organization could be more detrimental to these other organs than the current situation: “Capitalism must go to the end of its process, and we remain utterly ignorant about the way this will turn out. On the other hand, we can describe this process and what, in it, threatens to brutally interrupt it. This process is the expression of becoming insofar as it is always duplicitous, that is, tragic—and what I here call combat is less the class struggle than it is the struggle between tendencies ” (Stiegler 2011a: 57). Stiegler wants to save becoming and individuation from the double tendency of the current form of capitalism to hypersynchronize or hyperdiachronize (Stiegler 2004: 105–6). The hypersynchronization is organized through television and advertisement, producing on an industrial scale similar behaviors and modes of living (the same fast foods, the same television programs or music, the same working hours, the same teaching curricula), opposing all forms of diachrony or differences. Hyperdiachronization is the speculation of singularities to oppose all forms of synchrony, usually by creating intimate societies and associations (this is especially valid for the arts, but the principle can be extended to all forms of work), whose very principle of existence rests on an immunization and an exclusion of others, leading to pathologies such as anomie (a-nomos) or scapegoating (pharmakos ). The Internet permits these hyperdiachronic groups to develop and emerge in unprecedented ways, and they are speculative and have self-referential practices, often having no reference to reality. Traders speculating all day long on financial markets can also be said to foster a tendency of hyperdia14. The notion of transductive relations comes from Simondon: a relationship which constitutes the elements themselves; they could not exist without each other. In the case of Stiegler, the technical object (the “what”) is co-constitutive of the subject (the “who”): “the what invents the who as much as it is invented by it” (Stiegler 1998: 177).


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chronization; this is why the punk slogan “no future” has paradoxically been taken seriously by bankers and has been implemented (Berardi 2012).¹⁵ In États de choc, Stiegler demonstrates the limits of poststructuralism and its paradoxical complicity with the neoliberalization of society: poststructuralism for resistance proposing ofalternatives. French speculativecalled philosophy allowed forwithout the development the speculative economy. His philosophical project is to propose a new model and enunciate its axioms, against a certain melancholic Left that has resigned into communist nostalgia or Marxist idealism. Hyperdiachrony and hypersychrony are overcome in Stiegler’s project by laying out how a new industrial model, organized by a new public power, should take place. In investing massively, this new public power should aim to explore and redefine the role of new technologies and their possibilities in the social, elaborating therapeutic practices to (constantly) fight the toxicity of the pharmakon and liberate new processes of individuation and transindividuation. His “pharmacology of capitalism” requires first an analysis of the symptoms not of society but of the flows and processes of psycho-collective individuations. This is one of the distinctive aspects of his reading of capitalism that he shares with Simondon as well as Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Stiegler does 15. In this text, Franco “Bifo” Berardi makes the interesting parallel between poetry and finance: the experimental forms of twentieth-century poetry and writing anticipated, according to him, the dereferentialization of speculative economy: “The experience of French and Russian symbolism broke the referential-denotative link between the word and the world. . . . This magic of post-referential language anticipated the general process of dereferentialization that occurred when the economy became a semio-economy. The financialization of the capitalist economy implies a growing abstraction of work from its useful function, and of communication from its bodily dimension. As symbolism experimented with the separation of the linguistic signifier from its denotational and referential function, so financial capitalism, after internalizing potencies, has separated the monetary signifier from its function of denotation and reference to physical goods” (Berardi 2012: 18–19). But Berardi also believes in the power of poetry and that it will start the process of “reactivating the emotional body, . . . social solidarity, . . . [and] the desiring force of enunciation” (20). This comparison of two forms of hyperdiachronization is very interesting because, on the one hand, Berardi presents financial speculation as a practice that has a tendency to reduce everything to calculation (through the destruction of the time of decision by using robots that trade on markets in nanoseconds) and, on the other, self-referential sentences that break from grammar and whose reading requires an extreme attention and reduces all things to belief (or even meditation). Both of these are opposed either to belief or to calculation, but following Stiegler, “it should not be a matter of opposing calculation to belief” (Stiegler 2011a: 47; translation modified).


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not focus on national economies but on the flows and processes that individuals as psycho-collective individuals create. These psycho-collective individuations are in turn constituted and conditioned by technical tools, and these tools also individuate, by changing their functions through new assemblages. Stiegler through understands capitalism as the global of these assemblages capitalism’s retentional circuits.configuration By turning trust and credit into objects of possible calculation, the (hyper)industrialists have participated in the liquidation of “belief as experience of the indeterminacy of the future” (Stiegler 2011a: 16): “It is not a matter of opposing the capitalist process but, on the contrary, of enabling it to see out its term, that is, of avoiding its self-destruction, and hence permitting its transformation, and perhaps thereby engendering, some day, a wholly other organization of individuation” (40–41; translation modified). For Stiegler, we do not know the end of capitalism because we only live in an associated milieu and cannot see past our current organization of individuation. More importantly even, this associated milieu has become dissociated, and singularities that “bear witness” to the indeterminacy of the future have been endangered when they should have been protected. There can be no evolution or revolution of capitalism without these singularities and the therapeutic struggles to “take care of the new commerce” (Stiegler 2010a: 50).¹⁶ Therefore, Stiegler’s question can be formulated this way: How can we imagine what postcapitalism could look like if we cannot even see beyond the short-term satisfaction of drives? He denounces certain forms of anticapitalism as being oppositional and therefore idealist, while he argues that we need to cultivate a compositional politics that would allow for tendencies and singularities to be articulated and produce a new dynamism: “combating a tendency within a process means, first of all, thinking this process as the articulating of a dual [double] tendency, which is what makes it dynamic” (Stiegler 2011a: 37).¹⁷ It is not a matter of opposing anticapitalism as such but of reconstituting alternatives by a dynamic composition that will allow for the individuation, and perhaps the transfiguration, of capitalism itself. He writes, “The belief that the capitalist 16. It should be noted that Stiegler makes a distinction between commerce and market from volume 1 of the Disbelief and Discredit series; his argument is that the market has destroyed commerce. “Commerce is always an exchange of savoir-faire and savoirvivre. . . . On the other hand, however, the consumerist market presupposes the liquidation of both savoir-faire and savoir-vivre ” (2010a: 16). 17. See also the excellent article by Daniel Ross, “Politics and Aesthetics, or, Transformations of Aristotle in Bernard Stiegler” (2007).


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process needs is at its core an-economic” (46). This “an-economic” is the domain of life that cannot be reduced to basic necessities: subsistence. However, the problem raised here by Stiegler’s project of deproletarianization is its compatibility with the existing form of capitalism. Stiegler hesi-

tates on this question, will especially since is related to copyright laws and the problem of access—I return to this itlater. However, Stiegler’s position on capitalism derives from his philosophical project of general organology. General organology is the larger project in which pharmacology (together with critique) functions as the methodological device to diagnose the toxicity and the curability of the pharmaka.¹⁸ General organology is always already political since it proposes to rethink the relations between biological organs, technical organs, and social organization and their co-individuation in the socius. General organology draws from the srcinal practice of organology in musicology, which is the study of the history of musical instruments, their practices, and their social roles in all civilizations and historical periods. Yet general organology is not limited to the study of musical instruments but takes into account all technical instruments and their effects on biological and social organs. The Internet is today the most complex pharmakon due to the increasing role that it plays in our lives (especially in the last six or seven years, with smartphones and tablets), and it should be the subject of a pharmacology that maps out the short circuits it creates as well as the long circuits of transindividuation it produces in its assemblages with other pharmaka. General organology in this sense is a politics of “protentions,”¹⁹ projecting new assemblages and practices for transindividuations to come. 18. An interesting variation on pharmacology is Paolo Vignola’s project of symptomatology that attempts to diagnose the symptoms that erode societies: “It is only once symptoms are individuated and analyzed at the heart of society that it is possible for Stiegler to practice a pharmacology to act in a therapeutic manner on a malaise, and to eventually reverse it into a chance to learn, much like what happened to Epimetheus, the Titan that experienced, through his defaults, his own stupidity” (Vignola 2013: 414–15). 19. Protention is defined in Edmund Husserl’s philosophy, and borrowed by Stiegler, to designate the capacity to project oneself and the collective toward the future, whereas retention is the action of “retaining”—that is, memory. The whole of Stiegler’s philosophy is based on the conceptual distinction between three kinds of memory: primary retention (personal recollections), secondary retention (collective memory, like history or a language), and a third retention (technological memory, developed from Derrida’s concept of “trace”). While retention refers to the past (but a past that is not static but dynamic and therefore can individuate), protention means here the future (projects) and the capacity to individuate these projections, and possible realities (expectations). It is this capacity


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All technical tools for Stiegler are supports of memory and spirit, hence his expression “technology of spirit.” If technical tools indeed bear spirit (bear both the noetic and the spiritual, as in esprit in French and Geist in German), a general organology diagnoses the way these technical tools function withthat biological and social organs, electing prescribing the assemblages produce long (even infinitely long) and processes of transindividuation. In his work, Simondon increasingly conceded an agency to technical objects; for Stiegler, this agent functions due to the spirit and thoughts that these objects bear. Technical tools do not have only one role or one function but can be used in a multiplicity of ways. Conferring one role to a designated technical object is to fall back to metaphysics. The general organology, on the contrary, deconstructs the metaphysics of technical objects, accounting for the polyphony of practices that are inscribed within the assemblages of organs. The project of general organology diagnoses, presents, and produces the protentions that are contained in the stages of grammatization. In this sense, we can say that it is always already an altergrammatization, since it attempts to alter-grammatize our existences with singularities, or with what Stiegler refers to as “consistences.” Protentional Politics and the Question of “Tertiary Protentions”

Before analyzing some of Stiegler’s propositions for a deproletarianization, it is crucial to envisage deproletarianization as a politics of protention, in the same way Stiegler refers to other politics of protention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: What took place during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the organization of the capitalist “protentionalization” of the world, which consisted firstly in the disenchantment of the legitimating powers and the secularization of beliefs: not in their destruction, but in their transformation into calculable beliefs, including through the harnessing of scientific beliefs by the production apparatus in order to devise ways of transforming matter, nature, technique, human beings, and behavior. This transformation of belief was able to accomplish enormous gains in production throughout the nineteenth century, enabling new forms of memberof projection (to project oneself) in the long term that defines the (psycho-social) investment in the objects of desire.


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ship and social cohesion within the social project, carried out by the bourgeoisie through the development of schools, through the engagement it made possible with national history, etc. In the twentieth century, the mobilization of libidinal energies took place through the capturing and aharnessing protentions[tendre via channeling of attention. It was thus matter of of elaborating ] an industrial protention . . . and thus of overcoming the contradiction in which consists in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In the course of the recent crisis, this protentional system collapsed, after having run out of control as it was driven toward an ever-more extreme short- termism, reaching the limit of its selfannihilation . (Stiegler 2010a: 67–69; emphasis in srcinal; translation modified) Deproletarianization requires conducting a general organology, but this general organology has to diagnose the protentions in the co-individuations of biological, technical, and social organs, that is, the organizations of the powers “to project” and to “expect.”²⁰ Protentional politics is the capacity to “throw” thoughts; it is a certain becoming-projectile of politics by placing desire at its heart. The question of protention differs from deproletarianization. While deproletarianization is the conquest of knowledge, protention is construction of the future through primary, secondary, and tertiary mediums. The relation between retentions and protentions is not that of a simple correspondence. It is, rather, analogic or reticulary. It is, indeed, through an ecology of spirit Bateson), that relations between primary, secondary, and (after tertiaryGregory retentions and primary, secondary, and tertiary protentions can be established. However, the question of these protentions remains underdeveloped in Stiegler’s work. Collective secondary protentions are defined as “a process that constitutes horizons of expectation” (Stiegler 2011a: 112) and are determined in the same way as singular primary protentions by tertiary retentions (that are technical objects).²¹ To my knowledge, Stiegler hardly ever mentions “tertiary protentions.” The only example of tertiary retention that he pro20. “This is what the Greek word, elpis, means: expectation (that is, protention), at once hope and fear” (Stiegler 2011a: 45). 21. Stiegler also notes that for him these collective secondary protentions are related to what he calls “consistences”; this notion comes from Husserl’s idealities. They make up the “pre-individual fund” (he uses here Simondon’s vocabulary). See also Stiegler 2011a (92, 111–16); and Stiegler 2013c (19).


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vides is money (as coins or banknotes).²² This is surprising since, following Stiegler, tertiary protentions will be the materialization of attention and expectations, for he often defines protentions as “objects of desire” (Stiegler 2013b: 29). The dollar bill famously bears the inscription “In God we trust,” recalling Benjamin thatinscribed “time is on money” and “credit is money” (Stiegler 2011a:Franklin’s 66–67). sermon This trust the banknote is the transformation of belief into a calculable trust that is credit. According to Stiegler, this process has led with hyperconsumption to the “destruction of belief through the calculation of trust” and to the exhaustion of trust and credit (what he calls “discredit”), bringing capitalism on the verge of selfdestruction (71; see also 85–89). But one could think of many more objects of desire than money. For instance, when Fredric Jameson argues in Archaeologies of Utopia that utopias are desires “with a textual existence in the present,” this is compatible with Stiegler’s notion of tertiary retention and the speculative and the mysterious (or even mystagogic) notion of tertiary protention.²³ Traditionally, utopias are first and foremost texts that have a materiality—they are archives of desires—and intend to produce universal expectations as well as material ones (constituting a political party, quitting one’s job, etc.). This is probably not the case for other literary genres. While secondary protentions are shared collectively, tertiary retentions—and through them certain mysterious tertiary protentions—overdetermine both primary (psychic) and secondary (collective) protentions. We could possibly think of other forms of tertiary protentions, such as constitutions or even religious books (or objects); Jameson refers to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s projects of con22. The term tertiary protention is used in Stiegler 2012 (235). It is also implied in the section “Economy of Protentions” in Stiegler 2010a (66–70). 23. Jameson defines utopias as being not only a text but also a desire, what he calls a “Utopian impulse” (2007: xiv) or a “standing reserve of personal and political energy” (7); it is both form and content. For Jameson, utopian writing is a practice of an “absolute formalism in which the new content emerges itself from the form and is a projection of it” (212); it is a window to the improbable projections of the future, and in this sense “form becomes content” (212). The formal aspects of utopia are not only reflected in the style of writing but in its projects that require a certain form; it is about totalized spaces, cities, and buildings. “The presumption is that Utopia, whose business is the future, or not-being, exists only in the present, where it leads the relatively feeble life of desire and fantasy. . . . The aporia of the trace is to belong to past and present all at once, and thus to constitute a mixture of being and not-being quite different from the traditional category of Becoming and thereby mildly scandalous for analytical Reason. Utopia, which combines the not-yet-being of the future with a textual existence in the present is no less worthy of the archaeological paradoxes we are willing to grant to the trace” (xv–xvi).


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stitution writing as utopias. Constitutions construct the spirit of the laws as well as envisage foreseeable historical events (sometimes to prevent them) (Jameson 2007: 18, 36). Hannah Arendt comments on Woodrow Wilson, who criticized Americans for their “blind and undiscriminating” worof the “Perhaps US Constitution; she finds worship people a positivity and aship strength: the political geniuswithin of thethis American . . . consisted precisely in this blindness, or, to put it another way, consisted in the extraordinary capacity to look upon yesterday with the eyes of centuries to come” (Arendt 1973: 198). Arendt is clear that while we usually consider the US Constitution to be a “written document,” it is, for the American people, “the remembrance of the event itself—a people deliberately founding a new body politic” (204), but this can be extended to the hopes and the promises that this “worshiped” text contains for the American people. This speculative excursion on the possible forms tertiary protention would probably have to turn to objects as supports of cults and faiths, and would have to be historically and anthropologically studied, since they are specific to the forms of belief of the community or the social organization.²⁴ As noted earlier, these examples of tertiary protentions overdetermine primary and secondary protentions; in the same way, tertiary retentions support both primary and secondary retentions for Stiegler. From this short section on protentions and retentions, it is clear why Stiegler’s affirmative politics—economy of contribution and the processes of deproletarianization²⁵—is a project of taking control of retentional and protentional apparatuses or dispositifs . This can be accomplished through an ideology critique—that is, a critique of the ways in which apparatuses are used: “An ideology has less to do with disseminating [diffuser ] or infusing [infuser ] ideas than to take control of retentional and protentional apparatuses [dispositifs ] of technologies of transindividuation—and at the time of Mussolini, then Hitler, these technologies are radio and cinema” (Stiegler 2013b: 216). A new critique of ideology needs not only to know the functioning networks of information technology but also to take control of them, and to participate in their making and unmaking, to individuate the most sophisti24. The Bible, the Torah, and the Koran, when studied as the “only book,” will be the first examples that come to mind, but the most significant example is probably the practices of “Guru Granth Sahib” in Sikhism that personify their scriptures as a living guru. 25. Stiegler also uses the term re-capacitation in reference to Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach (Stiegler 2013b: 326–44).


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cated technical tools that make the associated milieu. “What I cannot build, I cannot understand,” the physician Richard Feynman writes.²⁶ However, this does not mean that revolutionaries should all become computer scientists or technical engineers—in the same way that in the 1930s–60s the Marxist revolution did not need intellectuals to become factory workers, and therefore proletarianized. But there should be a renewed dialogue or even relations between philosophy and technics: technics should inform philosophy, and vice versa. Following Simondon and others, Stiegler’s project is techno-logical: creating a new logos (rationality, or reason) of techne (both art and science). Deproletarianization, Economy of Contribution, and the Rise of the Amateur

“A revolutionary process is taking place. It is both technological and economic, but not yet political” (Stiegler 2012: 230). The proletarianization of decision making is for Stiegler responsible for the disinvestment of the state and the rise of public debt. Public debts are not the cause of the weakening and the withering of the state but their symptoms. Dogmatic Marxists resigned in the fight against proletarianization since, for them, communism is the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hence, the deproletarianization of the proletariat is not an issue for Marxists: they affirm that “there is nothing beyond proletarianization” (223).²⁷ They are not interested in the production of new knowledges. The new digital technologies have allowed for new forms of political movements and rallies (the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring), but the new territorialization with the digital reticularity has led to the destruction of the long-term temporality specific to politics and the media. Significant events or movements can last a very short period (a day or even a few hours) before being erased from the collective consciousness by a new video from a politician or the publication of a new opinion poll, and so on. In this sense, deproletarianization has to produce new knowledges when the time of the media has been entirely reconfigured.²⁸ André Gorz and Maurizio Lazzarato are the two main sources of inspiration for Stiegler to develop his alternative politics of deproletariani26. This quotation is an epigraph in Damasio 2010. 27. I tried to show earlier that Stiegler risks discouraging all struggles against proletarianization when he conflates it with stupidity, making it a transcendental condition. 28. On these questions concerning the reconfigured time of the media, see Tom Vandeputte (2013: 393–412).


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zation: the “economy of contribution.” Gorz has developed an srcinal philosophy of work that considers the ontological distinction between work and employment: employment is a rationalized version of work, or, in Stieglerian terms, employment blocks the processes of individuation and is reduced to a proletarianized form of work. Yet work should not be opposed. By referring to Lazzarato andemployment his study of and the model of remuneration of artists in France (under the regime of intermittents du spectacle), Stiegler understands that the main problem is the tendency in recent public policies to increase the role of employment in one’s life and to forget about other forms of work.²⁹ Employment is a set of rational tasks that are organized in a “megamachine,” and individuals are reduced to being servants to this megamachine with which they do not agree and in which they do not believe. As Stiegler often acknowledges, Gorz argued in The Immaterial that open source software has the potential to free work from employment constraints since it has a high production cost (in terms of labor) but can also be reproduced almost unlimitedly at a negligible cost (Gorz 2003: 44). The circulation of such software and the continuous possibility of transformation that it permits lay the foundations for an economy of contribution, as imagined by Stiegler and his political organization, Ars Industrialis. The mode of production and circulation of free software is paradigmatic for Gorz and Stiegler of the transformation of capitalism and the possibilities to come. In theoretical terms, this allows us to take seriously “the question of work time outside of employment” (Stiegler 2010a: 22; emphasis removed). Gorz raises the problem in terms of applied knowledges or skills (connaissances) and knowledge (savoir ) and also sees the process of proletarianization, but he expresses it in different terms: “the great majority has the knowledge [connaît ] of more and more things but knows [sait ] and understands [comprend ] less and less” (Gorz 2003: 111). The problem with the so-called knowledge economy, according to Gorz, is that we are led to believe that all forms of knowledge are formalizable or codifiable. The proximity of Gorz’s theses on knowledge and Stiegler’s account of proletarianization is striking. Yet there are also disagreements between Stiegler and Gorz. The first one is that Gorz thinks of the new forms of production as “immaterial,” whereas Stiegler insists they are “hypermaterial.” To claim that new technologies (software or the Internet) operate at the immaterial level is to retreat into idealism and to dismiss the material inscription of information 29. “The question of time spent working cannot be reduced, in other words, to the question of time in employment” (Stiegler 2010a: 51–52). See Corsani and Lazzarato 2008.


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and energy. The notion of hypermaterial, on the other hand, allows us to think the increasing industrialization and materialization of life. The second disagreement, which is probably more fundamental, concerns the end of capitalism and the mutation to new forms of postcapitalist social relations (Stiegler 127). Stiegler Gorz’s understanding of the nonrationalized work2008: as producing valueshares when he chooses to reinstate figure of the amateur, the revolutionary figure par excellence. He also agrees with Gorz’s propositions for a guaranteed basic income (a form of “negative income tax”). The death of capitalism for Gorz is not the project of collectivizing all properties (including intellectual property) but the liberation from employment, when nonrationalized forms of work can become once again an integral part of one’s life: The task for the left, if the left can continue to exist, is to transform this liberation of time into a new freedom, and into new rights: the right for everyone to earn one’s life by working, but by working less and less, better and better, while receiving one’s own share of the socially produced wealth. The right to also work non-continuously or intermittently without losing the full revenue during the intermittences—in order to open new spaces for activities without an economic goal and to recognize a dignity and an inherent value for individuals as well as for society as a whole, to activities that do not hold remuneration as the only goal. (Gorz 1990: 23) What is surprising in Stiegler’s undecidability—he admits “not [being] completely clear on” open source software and “of not knowing” whether capitalism will be replaced by socialism³⁰—is the incompatibility of his stated rejection of Gorz’s and Lazzarato’s political positions while adhering to their economic analyses to feed his arguments about a contributive economy. A “new form of value” should be cultivated that comes from a work outside the rationalized form of employment. Stiegler recognizes the imperative to take care of this new form of value, which he calls 30. “I myself am not completely clear regarding what I think of the idea of ‘radical free software,’ ‘creative commons,’ ‘open source,’ the difference between them and their different modalities; I haven’t yet formed a solid view because I think that in order to have a concerted viewpoint one must spend a great deal of time studying carefully the organisational models and questions, which are also the primary questions particularly regarding property and industrial property. . . . [My] position is not that of knowing whether capitalism will be replaced by socialism, communism or who knows what. I think that no one could respond to that question today; a tremendous amount of work needs to be done theoretically and practically as well, and this work does not yet exist” (Stiegler et al. 2012: 183).


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“spirit value” (Stiegler 2006a; Stiegler 2013c: 9–26). For him, the taking care of new modes of transindividuation happens in this new form of value insofar as it is not reducible to the exchange-value or even to the use-value. The excess of consumption has liquidated institutions and belief in general, and creating based on andamateur discredittorather thanwhat on care love.economies Stiegler reinstates thesuspicion figure of the imagine forms this contributive work could take. His understanding of contributive work comes close to Gorz’s own notion of “socially produced wealth” based on existential phenomenology. Although not named as such, the practice of amateurs was already conceptualized in certain Autonomia writings, or even in Guattari’s notion of the postmedia.³¹ Free radios, for instance, first operated with pirate means before slowly prospering within a legal framework, until they became, a few years later, increasingly standardized and colonized by advertisements. In Mystagogies, Stiegler develops this notion of the amateur by going back to its Latin etymology: amator means “the lover,” “the person who loves” (Stiegler forthcoming). The history of amateurs and their place in the history of grammatization is evocative of their potential but also of the hurdles and challenges that await them. In early eighteenth-century France, the term amateur referred to the aristocratic figure who advised artists. The amateur was also a mediator, a writer, and a curator. “Honorary amateur” was a status for those lovers of art who had developed an acute knowledge and appreciation of art. Denis Diderot criticized them for favoring pleasure over instruction, taste over judgement. With the French Revolution, the term took on an unflattering and discrediting meaning: “during the Revolution, the amateur is driven away by the aristocratic values which he last incarnated” (Jam 2000: 11). With digital networks, the formation of “taste communities,” which were first made possible in the last two centuries in small and privileged urban environments of Vienna and Paris (Guichard 2012),³² is generalized to all social classes. For Stiegler, the amateur is a revolutionary agent, since in the age of generalized prole31. In 1985, Guattari calls for a “concerted reappropriation of communication technologies and computers” (2008: 133). 32. In her excellent article “Taste Communities,” Guichard (2012) recounts the role of the amateurs during the French monarchy, in sustaining and producing a French school of painting by keeping art criticism at bay. These closed societies were first directed by the monarchy against the rise of the artistic public sphere, and they participated in the production of knowledge, creating taxonomies from their taste and their choice in collecting. Erudition and pleasure come together in the amateur’s work and its reliance on taste (rather than judgment).


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tarianization and surplus population, and far from representing the public at large or the consumer in the “sharing economy,” the amateur is an active participant in social circles, a producer of new practices, new discourses, and artifacts. Although the eighteenth-century amateurs were used by the monarchic regime, by creating a wealth knowledgesin(erudite treatises, taxonomies, etc.), they were also activeofparticipants the social life of art. As in the exemplary case of Claude-Henri Watelet’s Rymbranesques, whose copies of Rembrandt’s paintings contributed in the reassessment of Rembrandt in the artistic canon one century after the death of the Dutch painter, amateurs learned about paintings and other artworks by copying, not to imitate or falsify the traits but on the contrary to learn with them and to understand how the artistic gesture and particular works of art “function” (as the verb œuvrer ): “in the culture of amateurs, knowledge was a praxis, not a theory” (539). In reinstating this term, Stiegler wants to move away from the derogatory meaning of the term amateur (especially when referred to as “amateurism”), as being opposed to “professional.” For after all, in the digital age, the amateur is the noble figure who contributes to the production and the prosperity of singularities against the atrophy and the entropy generated by the capitalist system. References

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 1997.Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. Arendt, Hannah. 1973. On Revolution. London: Penguin. Bardin, Andrea. 2013. “De l’homme à la matière: Pour une ‘ontologie difficile’; Marx avec Simondon.” In Cahiers Simondon, Numéro 5, edited by Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, 25–43. Paris: L’Harmattan. Baudrillard, Jean. (1970) 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures . Translated by Chris Turner. London: Sage. Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance . Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Chabot, Pascal. 2003. La Philosophie de Simondon . Paris: Vrin. Combes, Muriel. 1999. Simondon: La philosophie du transindividuel . Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Corsani, Antonella, and Maurizio Lazzarato. 2008. Intermittents et précaires. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. Damasio, Antonio. 2010. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain . New York: Random House. Debord, Guy. (1967) 1995. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. New York: Zone Books.


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104 boundary 2 / February 2017 Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. . 2006. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, with Claire Parnet. 2004. “R as Resistance.” Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, DVD. Directed by Pierre-André Boutang. Éditions Montparnasse. Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Prison Talk.” InPower/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (1972–1977), edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Random House. Fromm, Erich. 2003. Marx’s Concept of Man. London: Continuum. Gorz, André. 1990. “Pourquoi la société salariale a besoin de nouveaux valets.” Le Monde diplomatique. www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1990/06/GORZ/42679. . 2003. L’immatériel: Connaissance, valeur et capital . Paris: Galilée. Guattari, Félix. 2008. “Du postmoderne au postmédia.” Multitudes 34: 128–33. Guichard, Charlotte. 2012. “Taste Communities: The Rise of the Amateur in Paris.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 4: 519–47. Hutnyk,Eighteenth-Century John. 2012. “Proletarianisation.” New Formations 77: 127–49. Jam, Jean-Louis, ed. 2000. Les divertissements utiles: Des amateurs au XVIIIe siècle. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. Jameson, Fredric. 2007.Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Random House. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1967. The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin. Méda, Dominique. 1999. Qu’est-ce que la richesse? Paris: Flammarion. Moore, Gerald. 2013. “Adapt and Smile or Die! Stiegler among the Darwinists.” In Stiegler and Technics, edited by Christina Howells and Gerald Moore, 17–33. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Petit, Victor. 2013. “Vocabulaire d’Ars Industrialis.” InPharmacologie du Front National, by Bernard Stiegler, 369–441. Paris: Flammarion. Ross, Daniel. 2007. “Politics and Aesthetics, or, Transformations of Aristotle in Bernard Stiegler.” Transformations 17. www.transformationsjournal.org/issues /17/article_04.shtml. Sayers, Sean. 2011. Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes . Basingstoke: Palgrave. Simondon, Gilbert. 2016. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects . Translated by Cecile Malaspina. Minneapolis: Univocal. Stiegler,byBernard, Technicsand andGeorge Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus . Translated Richard1998. Beardsworth Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2004. Philosopher par accident. Paris: Galilée. . 2006a. Réenchanter le monde: La valeur esprit contre le populisme industriel. Paris: Flammarion.


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Dillet / Proletarianization, Deproletarianization, and the Amateur 105 . 2006b. Les sociétés incontrôlables d’individus désaffectés . Vol. 2 of Mécréance et Discrédit. Paris: Galilée. . 2006c. La télécratie contre démocratie. Paris: Flammarion. . 2008. Économie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir: Entretiens avec Philippe Petit et Vincent Bontemps. Paris: Mille et Une Nuits. . 2009. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation . Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2010a. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity. . 2010b. Taking Care of Youth and Generations. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2011a. The Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Vol. 1 of Disbelief and Discredit. Translated by Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold. Cambridge: Polity. . 2011b. Technics and Time, 3: The Time of Cinema . Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. .Nuits. 2012. États de choc: Bêtise et savoir au XXIème siècle. Paris: Mille et Une . 2013a. De la misère symbolique. Paris: Flammarion. . 2013b. Pharmacologie du Front National. Paris: Flammarion. . 2013c. What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology. Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity Press. . n.d. “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: Plato as the First Thinker of Proletarianisation.” Ars Industrialis. Accessed November 18, 2013. arsindustrialis.org /anamnesis-and-hypomnesis. . Forthcoming. Mystagogies. De l’art contemporain, de la littérature et du cinéma. Stiegler, Bernard, Alain Giffard, and Christian Fauré. 2009. Pour en finir avec la mécroissance: Quelques réflexions d’Ars Industrialis. Paris: Flammarion. Stiegler, Bernard, Ben Roberts, Jeremy Gilbert, and Mark Hayward. 2012. “A Rational Theory of Miracles: On Pharmacology and ‘Transindividuation’: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler.” New Formations 77: 164–84. Trentin, Bruno. 2012. La Cité du travail: Le fordisme et la gauche . Translated by Jérôme Nicolas. Paris: Fayard. Vandeputte, Tom. 2013. “La Fabrique du présent: Stiegler et le temps de l’actualité.” In Technologiques: La Pharmacie de Bernard Stiegler, edited by Benoît Dillet and Alain Jugnon, 393–412. Nantes: Cécile Defaut. Vesco, Shawna. 2015. “Collective Disindividuation and/or Barbarism: Technics and Proletarianization.” boundary 2 42, no. 2: 85–104. Vignola, Paolo. 2013. “Devenir dignes du pharmakon : Entre symptomatologie et pharmacologie.” In Technologiques: La Pharmacie de Bernard Stiegler, edited by Benoît Dillet and Alain Jugnon, 413–28. Nantes: Cécile Defaut.


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Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: BS and BB

Daniel Ross

Walter Benjamin famously linked the process of proletarianization to the formation of masses and understood fascism as the attempt to construct an aesthetic and technological apparatus that “gives expression” to the masses while in fact forcing them to adapt to their proletarianized condition rather than adopt a new form of life. That is, the “logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life,” the culmination of which can only be, according to Benjamin, war and the nihilistic contemplation of annihilation as aesthetic pleasure (Benjamin 2003: 269). This aestheticizing of politics, the counterpart of an “unnatural use” of technological means, could be countered, he argued, in only one way: “Communism replies by politicizing art” (270). If one cannot quite conclude from this line of thought that art has a political “function,” then it is at least to be hoped (possibly against hope, possibly not for us) that it contains political potential , that it can possess collective therapeutic value. whenattention Bernard to Stiegler opens the volume of his Symbolic Misery by But drawing the reciprocity of first the political question and the aesthetic question, he intends to say not just that art is political but also that what politics today must question is aesthetboundary 2 44 1 (2017)

DOI 10.1215/01903659-3725893 © 2017 by Duke University Press


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ics, that there must be a politics of the aesthetic, that politics itself is challenged, is placed into question, by contemporary aesthetic developments, and finally that the failure of political though t to have adequately addressed the question of art and aesthetics has been catastrophic (Stiegler 2014: 1). Today, however, theeconomic war that is thethat logical and culmination of this catastrophe is that war goesoutcome by the name of globalization and that operates according to the rules, or rather the absence of rules, of what is called neoliberalism—even if there is every reason to believe that this economic war can very well lead to other wars, on any scale, and moreover that it has already done just that. Linking the political and the aesthetic questions, Stiegler immediately adds that when he uses the term aesthetics , he necessarily does so in a very broad sense, such that it indicates the whole field of sensation, of feeling, and of sensibility in general. It is within such a wide understanding of aesthetics that politics must be understood as addressing the question of the relation to the other via some kind of collective feeling (à la Aristotle’s philia), a being-together and living-together of singularities that goes beyond their conflicts of interest. Politics, he says, is the “art of securing the unity of the city in its desire for a common fu ture,” and he adds that this desire “assumes a common aesthetic ground. . . . A political community is, therefore, a community of feeling” (2; translation modified). What connects politics and aesthetics, ultimately, is desire, and, specifically, collective desire. A crucial source of Stiegler’s understanding of hominization in general and aesthetics in particular is the work of André Leroi-Gourhan. For Leroi-Gourhan in 1965, as for Stiegler forty years later, the point of understanding the aesthetic question is very much to grasp something about the chances for the future of that being which is called human: We should not be too quick to assert that machines will never appreciate beauty and goodness. They can already reduce truth to sets of unassailable data, and will probably soon be able, not perhaps to tell whether representational painting is preferable to abstract painting, but to set out the statistical relationships between the respective contents of the two. . . . The electronic apocalypse for its part is entirely made up of numbers whose demystifying power is immeasurable. There may be some interest in going over the long story of evolution yet again, not in order to ask whether evolution has a meaning . . . but whether we still have a meaning other than as creators of superhuman machines. (Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 270–71)


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In Gesture and Speech, as in Stiegler’s work, “the term ‘aesthetics’ is employed here in a rather wide sense”: Leroi-Gourhan argues that aesthetics connects together “the twin poles of the zoological and the social” (271). In other words, the paleontological basis for an understanding of aesthetics lies in the(or passage that derives from biological In rhythms and ends in social rhythms descends into asocial arrhythmia). short, aesthetics belongs within the most general human fact, which for Leroi-Gourhan is that of exteriorization, that process of putting oneself outside oneself via the technical gestures of the hand and the linguistic techniques of the tongue, jaw, and larynx, a process that commenced some two million years ago. For Leroi-Gourhan, the first question of aesthetics is that of its relation to the other dimensions of exteriorization: were language and technics forms of exteriorization critical for the subsistence of the human species, the advent of which broke a path for the later arrival of figurative and symbolic representation, for an aesthetics that would come to operate as a kind of enrichment of human existence? Or, on the contrary, and this is the perspective that Leroi-Gourhan himself tends to favor, is aesthetics but a third aspect of exteriorization, in addition to technics and language? Rather than a staged evolution in which at some point after the advent of technics and language there arises an aesthetic sense, “obliging us to find out where that sense fits into the mechanism of our brain” (275), it would instead be a matter of identifying the manifold stages and dimensions of a single process of exteriorization: Stages in aesthetic evolution comparable thetotransition from the mythogram to writing and from the handtotool the automatic machine would have to be found in historic times—an “artisanal” or “preindustrial” period in aesthetics in which the arts and social and technical aesthetics had reached their peak at the individual level, followed by a specialization stage in which the disproportion between the producers of aesthetic material and the increasingly large mass of consumers of prefabricated or “prethought” art became accentuated. (275) For Leroi-Gourhan, then, aesthetics is probably best understood as one of three dimensions of exteriorization, connecting the biological and the social aspects of hominization. The opening up of exteriority via the word and the artifact is matched by an exteriority of sensation, of rhythm, and of aesthetic form. This thought is crucial to Stiegler’s own understanding of exterioriza-


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tion and specifically of its aesthetic dimension, which in The Decadence of Industrial Democracies he explains in terms of what he calls ex-clamation, the fact that sensory experience is, for an “exclamatory soul,” a noetic experience. Such a being, for whom experience is not only sensory but sensational, “enlarges itsterm sense by exclaiming it symbolically” 2011: 133). This use of the symbolic thus fits with the sense of(Stiegler a gap or break that srcinally referred to an artifact, such as a ring or a piece of pottery, broken in two, which could then be fitted and rejoined, for instance in recognition of a friendship and hence of a community of feeling. As Martin Heidegger highlights, the symbol, in so doing and as such, refers through something sensuous to something nonsensuous, and, as Jean-Luc Nancy highlights, this nonsensuous thing, the friendship, this feeling, is what is “real,” but real only in its representation, its image, which, in Stiegler’s terms, is less its reality than its “consistence” and the possibility of the “enlargement” of the beings so joined (Heidegger 1996: 16; Nancy 2000: 57–58).¹ In other words, the advent of the symbolic opens not just the possibility of abstraction but the dimension of idealization, that is, of the infinite, giving access to what does not exist but consists. But in Stiegler’s case, a full understanding of what this means requires that it be placed in relation not just to Leroi-Gourhan’s account of aesthetico-technico-linguistic exteriorization but to Gilbert Simondon’s account of psychic and collective individuation. If aesthetic exteriorization in Leroi-Gourhan’s sense is the articulation of two kinds of rhythms— biological and social—then this is possible only because whereas for animal species the group, such as the herd, is the true “individual,” for the anthropic species individuality is distributed between its singular members and the collective composed of these singular—that is, incommensurably differentiated—individuals. In other words, if the consequence of the unfolding of the exteriorization process is the addition of a third form of memory to that of genetic inscription and neuronal memory, that is, the addition of technical memory, then what this also implies is the loosening of the genetic program, both in terms of the latitudes of individual behavior and in terms of the level at which the group is differentiated, which ceases to be that of the species and becomes, in Leroi-Gourhan’s terms, the ethnic, or, in Stiegler’s more general terms, the idiomatic. The Simondonian aspect of this lies in the fact that for this phi1. Stiegler turns to this connection between the symbolic and friendship on the very last page of Symbolic Misery, in relation not quite to fascism or Nazism but to those who share the ideas of, or are willing to vote for, the National Front (2014: 98).


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losopher of becoming it is crucial to know the level at which processes of becoming unfold. The effect of the advent of a third memory, that memory that is aesthetico-technico-linguistic exteriorization, is to disarticulate individual and collective behavior from the genetic program, and thereby to inaugurate becoming, occurring the level of the species but new of theprocesses individual of and of the collective. Theatprocess of not becoming that is vital individuation, in other words, bifurcates as a result of the advent of exteriorization and inaugurates two more processes of individuation than had hitherto occurred: the individuation that takes place at the level of the individual, which Simondon called psychic individuation, and the individuation taking place at the level of the group, which he called collective individuation. For Stiegler, at least three aspects of psychic and collective individuation must be noted: •

Firstly, the I of psychic individuation can be thought only in relation to a we of collective individuation (my individuation occurs only insofar as it occurs in you ); conversely, the we can be thought only in terms of a collectivity of distinct I s for whom such a we consists (my individuation occurs through the individuation of a group to which I belong, but to which I cannot be reduced). As these are individuation processes, the I and the we are always inevitably incomplete, on the way to being a completed I or we that never arrives (corresponding to the mortality of individuals

•

in the Heideggerian sense and of civilizations in the Valérian sense).² Secondly, what mediates, connects, and binds the I and the we is technics, and specifically technics insofar as all technics is in some way retentional, an inscription into matter through which an

2. Stiegler argues in Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998) that Heidegger’s account of the mortality of Dasein, that is, of the certain but indeterminate knowledge that Dasein has of its end, that is, of the incompletion of its psychic individuation, is made possible by Heidegger’s (1992) analysis of the clock, which he conducts in 1924 in The Concept of Time , but that Heidegger represses the technical basis of this knowledge by the time he writes Being and Time. Similarly, Paul Valéry opened his 1919 “Crisis of the Mind” with the declaration that civilizations have, after the First World War, discovered that they are mortal, in The Outlook for Intelligence (1962: 23). For Stiegler, this discovery corresponds at the level of collective individuation to the knowledge that Dasein has of its own mortality, and he adds that today this knowledge of the possibility of self-destruction has turned into a widespread feeling of the possibility of impending apocalypse. See Stiegler 2013b (119); and Stiegler 2013c (9).


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•

encounter is staged between the I and the we: technics, Stiegler says, is the “and” of psychic and collective individuation. Finally, technics is itself a process of individuation, and just as psychic individuation occurs through collective individuation and vice versa, too both psychic collective individuation through thesoindividuation of theand technical system. Psychicoccur and collective individuation inevitably entail technical individuation, even if for the majority of the history of hominization this occurred at a rate that was imperceptibly slow.

Leroi-Gourhan’s paleontological perspective, according to which the aesthetic must be understood as belonging to a general process of exteriorization that unfolds as the two-million-year history of hominization, is thus rooted by Stiegler in his own account, based on Simondon, of the threefold process of psychic, collective, and technical individuation. One consequence of this is to up root the account of exteriorization from its “scientific” basis in order to displace it onto more “philosophical” terrain. Such a characterization of Stiegler’s operation is undoubtedly too stark, insofar as it presumes science and philosophy to form an opposition, a presumption that would run counter to Stiegler’s own “compositional” philosophy (Ross 2013a: 245–46). Nevertheless, the starting point of Simondon’s thought is the rejection of the presupposition that there would be some “principle” of individuation underlying the process itself that it would then be a matter of uncovering: to do so would be to locate the individuality of thethat principle to the individuation itself, whereas is the Furtherprocess itself must as beprior considered primordial (Simondon 1992:it 298). more, if the only way to “know” individuation is to pursue this individuation, then not only must we say that this knowledge always remains incomplete, but we must also conclude that understanding individuation, as itself an individuation process, necessarily and essentially involves the individuation of an I who pursues this individuation of knowledge: there must be a “who” of the process, a who always itself incomplete (Stiegler 2009: 6). If, as Simondon argues, the thought of individuation leads to the possibility of a “reform” of fundamental philosophical notions (Simondon 1992: 316), then it does so from within this context of understanding philosophy as the pursuit of individuation by an individuating who. This is why philosophical knowledge is always also a nonknowledge. And, finally, it is the fact that this knowledge is a nonknowledge that also means that the future is not the inevitability of the unfolding of a process that we would somehow


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already know : it is for this reason that Stiegler argues that the future cannot be reduced to becoming, and that scientism, if not science, is what we must struggle against (Stiegler 2009: 43); and it is also for this reason that the basis of philia is the modesty or reserve that stems from the Promethean and2014: Epimethean nonknowledge of the fragility of human prostheticity (Stiegler 12). With this gap between becoming and future, we are, therefore, returned to politics as the art that aims toward the unity of the polis in the desire for a common future, a desire grounded in a shared aesthetic fund and that amounts to a community of feeling. Desire, here, is explicitly understood to be that which is not reducible to the drives, the latter being capable of supplying only the finite satisfactions of the needs of subsistence. Rather, it is the transformation of the drives into the motives of existence, where these motives are directed, precisely, to what does not exist, to what Heidegger would call the nonsensuous, to that which one might not be able to find but on which it is also not possible to give up. Desire, so conceived, is directed, therefore, to what does not exist but consists—at infinity. It is an infinite process, directed to infinity. Desire is the différance of the drives, just as the future is the différance of becoming, just as the aesthetics of the exclamatory soul is the différance of the sensory apprehension of the animal soul. The significance of this reference to différance lies, before anything else, in indicating the connection between these distinctions and the grammatological character of technics, that is, the fact that the inscriptive character of all technics amounts to the spatialization of time. Stiegler in fact both generalizes and narrows Jacques Derrida’s account of the trace: for Derrida, the inscriptive character of the supplement is thought essentially in relation to writing, or rather arche-writing, whereas for Stiegler it is crucial that all technics involves a form of difference and deferral. But Stiegler narrows Derrida’s understanding insofar as Derrida assimilates the technical trace to the several-billion-year history of the living trace, which for Stiegler amounts to confounding what it is crucial to distinguish: the inscriptive character of the technical supplement, as the opening of a third regime of memory, thus of a new regime ofdifférance, effects a break with the living that is the condition of the distinctions that it then becomes possible to make between desire and drive, individual and collective, becoming and future, and the advent of the aesthetic in the exclamatory sense.³ 3. On Stiegler’s critique of Derrida on différance, see Ross 2013a (246–49).


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But if this sounds like an account of the srcin of the exclamatory soul in the advent of technics, it is equally true that technics finds its srcin in the exteriorization of what, eventually, will be thought of as the ideas, but which, long before the idea of the idea, are the dreams, that is, the desiring imagination, the imagining of what, does notin(yet) Theofadvent of the imaginative capacity, of phantasia may lie the exist. actuality the material history of technical exteriorization, but the possibility of technical development itself lies in the projective and anticipatory possibilities of the noetic soul: for the noetic soul, the dream is the condition of technics, but technics is also the condition of the dream. Cinema is an exemplary case of this coimplication of technics and dream, not just because cinema had to be imagined to be invented but because the possibility of imagining and thus inventing cinema lies in cinema’s resemblance to and exploitation of the fundamental conditions of perception itself. From the Husserlian analysis of the phenomenology and temporality of present perception, Stiegler draws the lesson that all human perception—even apparently direct, living perception—involves montage and projection, that is, the selective editing of perceptual contents and the anticipation of the immediate future to which the present is projectively conjoined. But for Stiegler this projective aspect of cinema is not just a matter of the strict Husserlian perceptual description, the way in which perception of present contents retains just past contents and anticipates the immediately following contents, forming a continuum: it is a question of the projection of desire, and it is a question of the way in which the projective character of desire can be harnessed technologically in order to be exploited economically. These two aspects of cinema are captured perfectly in two quotations transplanted into film by Jean-Luc Godard in Contempt ([1963] 2009). In that great film about film, the opening sequence shows us the cinematic apparatus itself, a movie camera: this sequence ends with a quotation mistakenly attributed to André Bazin: “cinema replaces our gaze with a world that conforms to our desires.” Later in the film, Fritz Lang, portraying a film director named Fritz Lang, cites Bertolt Brecht (or BB, as he says, which amounts to Godard playing with the audience’s awareness that in this film their gaze and their desire falls on Brigitte Bardot): “Each morning, to earn my bread, I go to the market where lies are sold, and, full of hope, I line up alongside the other vendors.” These are the lines of a poem entitled “Hollywood,” written by Brecht during his exile from National Socialism in the United States, the same journey Fritz Lang had been forced to undertake


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several years earlier, resulting in their collaboration as writer and director, respectively, on the Nazi-themed film noir Hangmen Also Die! (1943). And it was, of course, a similar journey that Benjamin failed to undertake, in his attempt to join Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in exile, who themselves These ended two up inquotations, Los Angeles in the early from “AB” and1940s. “BB,” thought conjointly, might be grasped as conforming perfectly well to Adorno’s analysis of cinema, as expressed, for example, in “The Schema of Mass Culture,” where he writes, “The dream industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people” (Adorno 1991: 80). Aesthetics is reduced to the sheen of advertising; images are seized but not contemplated; the secret doctrine that is communicated cinematically is that of capital; the presentation of a strikingly beautiful woman (such as BB) contains the injunction to be like her. Is Godard not agreeing with Adorno’s critique when he brings the filmmaker as purveyor of lies together with the invention of desire (yet another quotation contained in Contempt is by the cinematic inventor Louis Lumière: “cinema is an invention without a future”)? And when Jack Palance’s film producer says, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I bring out my checkbook,” and Fritz Lang notes that he is paraphrasing the Nazis and substituting checkbook for pistol (the srcinal line comes from a play by the Nazi poet and playwright Hanns Johst, even though it is often mistakenly attributed to Hermann Göring or Heinrich Himmler or Joseph Goebbels), is Godard not agreeing with Adorno that “participation in mass culture itself stands under the sign of terror” (82) and that this “ultimate lesson of the fascist era” is “already harboured within the very medium of technological communication” (83)? Adorno concludes in an apocalyptic tone: If indeed the advances of technology largely determine the fate of society, then the technicized forms of modern consciousness are also heralds of that fate. They transform culture into a total lie, but this untruth confesses the truth about the socio-economic base with which it has now become identical. . . . It depends upon human beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and awake from a nightmare which only threatens to become actual as long as men believe in it. (83) This is the view that cinema and technicized forms of consciousness and communication generally are processes that operate via the apparatus of the radio or the dream factory, and that the outcome of such processes can


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be only the mass cultures of fascism or consumer society: it is the view that they are, in Simondonian terms, processes of disindividuation. But for all Stiegler’s attention to the way in which such technologies are utilized to destroy attention and divert and reduce desire toward the consumerism, this not hisand viewHorkheimer of cinema, nor immediate is it his viewsatisfactions of Contemptof: “Cinema is seen byisAdorno as a functional element of a system whose aim is to disseminate an ideology and stimulate consumer behaviour. This view of cinema is not fundamentally different from that of the Nouvelle Vague, except that the latter saw cinema as a pharmakon, and not just as a poison (this pharmacology, for example, forms the background of Godard’s Contempt, 1963)” (Stiegler 2013a: n.p.). For Adorno and Horkheimer, the schema of mass culture is harbored in the technological medium itself, which projects and edits together a consumerist dream or fascist nightmare that replaces the preexisting perceptual schema. But if their account intends to supply weapons for a critical theory, it fails inasmuch as it never learned the lesson that Stiegler would draw from his reconsideration of Edmund Husserl: all primary retention, all perception, is a projection and a montage, the criteria for which can only be past perception, that is, memory, secondary retention, but these secondary retentions have themselves always been mediated, reinforced, or interrupted by tertiary retentions, that is, by all the technologies of communication and consciousness through which experience is recorded and transmitted, from rupestral painting to Facebook. For the noetic and exclamatory soul, in other words, there is no schema that is not always already technological. And just as Plato observed that writing is a pharmakon, that is, potentially both toxic and curative, so too is every technology of consciousness and communication, precisely because it is a technology. It is because cinema is a technology that, for Godard, it is pharmacological: the positive possibilities that the Nouvelle Vague saw in the cinema lay precisely in the hope of getting hold of the camera itself, making use of it in new ways. “Now, we see that whereas the philosopher wants to leave the cave, the film-lover, the amateur de cinéma, would like to get behind the camera or into the screen: what the cinephile loves is the pharmakon and the pharmacological condition itself insofar as it is also the condition of desire ” (Stiegler 2013a: n.p.). Human history is the history of this overdetermination of primary and secondary retention by tertiary retention. No film has better illustrated the positivity of this overdetermination than Contempt : the first words we hear are a voice-over that states, “Based on the novel by Alberto Moravia.”


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As already mentioned, a quotation is read that is mistakenly attributed to Bazin. Another is correctly attributed to Brecht; the film itself concerns the attempt to make another film, itself an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. At the same time, the film quotes from Hollywood history (in particular, Some Came Running [1958]) and Lang quotes a Hollywood producer (Sammotto). Goldwyn’s Goldwynism, “include me out,” a kind of antidisindividuationist There is constant debate between all the protagonists (director, writer, producer, assistant) about the relation between the Homeric world and the modern world, about the place of the individual in the Greek world compared to ours, and about the consequent question of whether this world can be understood “psychologically” (and many of these debates reverse the positions held by the various parties in Moravia’s novel). The result is that the central narrative—which concerns the breakdown of a marriage and the failed quest by the writer to locate the source of his wife’s contempt—is constantly reinterpreted by the viewer, as layer upon layer of tertiary retention both complicates and explicates the tragic disorders of desire that play out between the couple through passionate utterances that are anything but performative.⁴ Two other quotations are even more notable. Lang, the German (or rather German-Jewish) film director, discusses Friedrich Hölderlin, that is, the quintessential poet of the Greco-German relation, and specifically analyzes the correction Hölderlin makes to his poem on poetry itself, that is, on art, entitled “The Poet’s Calling.” In other words, Hölderlin comes back to his poem, just as Kant came back to the schemas of Critique of Pure Reason, and this return of the written text demands alteration from the author, because Hölderlin (like Kant) has, in the meantime, individuated himself. And in the Hölderlinian case, and as Lang points out, this correction marks the moment when it is no longer God’s presence but his absence that proves to be therapeutic. This correction might be interpreted as the point at which the modern world differentiates itself from the ancient world, when the Gods no longer control the fate of mortals. As Benjamin puts it, “humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself” (Benjamin 2003: 270). Or it might conversely, and perhaps more convincingly, be interpreted as the moment when Hölderlin himself returns, Homerically, from a Christian conception 4. On the concept of passionate utterance, see Cavell 2005 (155–91); and see Ross 2006.


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of divine benevolence to a Greek conception of tragic ambivalence in relation to the divine. It is for this reason that Lang refers to the fight of the individual, of Prometheus and Odysseus, against his circumstances, against the gods. And it is this latter interpretation that is suggested, for example, by Giorgio Agamben’s reading ofatheology,” Hölderlin’s the correction, marks the date of birth of “poetic “point atwhich which he theargues divine and the human alike are ruined, at which poetry opens onto a region that is uncertain and devoid of a subject, flattened on the transcendental, and which can be defined only by the Hölderlinian euphemism ‘betrayal of the sacred’” (Agamben 1999: 90–91). The other quotation is from Dante, and specifically from the Canto of Ulysses. Lang recites an edited version: “Brothers, who through a hundred thousand perils have made your way to reach the West . . . do not deny yourself experience of what there is beyond, behind the sun, in the world they call unpeopled. . . . Consider what you came from. . . . You were not born to live like mindless brutes but to follow paths of excellence and knowledge.” And Michel Piccoli continues the citation, and does his own editing: “The night already had surveyed the stars. . . . Our celebrations soon turned into grief. . . . And then the sea was closed again, above us.” It is impossible to hear these lines from Inferno in Contempt, both those read by Lang that concern the need to remember the paths along which civilization has come and the paths along which it should continue, and those read by Piccoli that seem to evoke the tragic character of knowledge and enlightenment, without recalling that it was just these passages that Primo Levi found so important to try to bring back into his memory in 1944 (the very year that saw the publication of Dialektik der Aufklärung ) and that he later recalled and recorded in his Auschwitz memoir, If This Is a Man (first published in 1958, that is, the year in which Some Came Running was released and precisely midway between the publication of Moravia’s novel and the release of Godard’s cinematic adaptation). When Levi, imparting to the Alsatian Jean (not the Piccoli but the Pikolo of the Lager) his knowledge of Dante’s text, recites these lines that proclaim the noetic soul as intended to be dedicated to paths of knowledge rather than brutishness and stupidity (or in Stiegler’s and Deleuze’s French, bêtise), it was “as if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God” (Levi 1979: 119). Going back and hearing it again as if for the first time, Levi describes his own individuation. But what mattered most, or at least seemed to matter most, was to individuate himself in the other, in Jean: “It is vitally necessary and urgent that he lis-


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ten . . . tomorrow he or I might be dead. . . . I must tell him, I must explain to him . . . something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today” (121). And then the reality and the nightmare of the camp soup line returns, “and” (even though would have given the day’s soup, is, blood, to beseas able to recall and he interpret Dante’s verses) “over our that heads the hollow closed up” (121). And forty years after publishing If This Is a Man, when Levi returns to that chapter, and returns again to the Canto of Ulysses, he still perceives the great value at that time of being able to “save from nothingness those memories which today with the sure support of printed paper I can refresh gratis whenever I wish, and which therefore seem of little value” (Levi 1989: 112). The pharmacological possibilities of the printed word have never been expressed more totally, tenderly, or tragically. But it is indeed, then, this question of civilization, of Kultur, of reestablishing “a link with the past, saving it from oblivion and reinforcing my identity” (112), that is put into doubt by the processes that accompany the most recent technologies of communication and consciousness. At stake is the capacity to project the unity of an I, however fictional, however incomplete, and hence for these I s to form an equally incomplete and fictional we such as what we call civilization. The problem, however, is not the technologization of sound and image that comes with the cinematic age so much as their industrialization, that is, the way in which they have been deployed to systematically condition experience in the service of a global war that depends on continuously increasing consumption. For the symbolic to function, it is necessary for existence to be capable of aiming at consistences. Aristotle’s philia is an example of such a consistence, a feeling that is total (that is, infinite), tender (that is, caring), and tragic (that is, refers to something nonexistent), on the basis of which the political we becomes possible. In a world where the symbolic ceases to function, nightmares reign as a brute “reality” devoid of symbolic consistence, the political nightmare of fears, terrors, and panics, and the nightmares of war and the aesthetic pleasure of annihilation. Stiegler sees this nightmare aesthetic at work today, within and beyond cinema (Stiegler 2014: 83–84), an aesthetic that J. Hoberman refers to as the “new realness” (Hoberman 2012: 17–26; and see Ross 2013b). Does this mean the images projected today project no future, no hope, that they are in fact not projective at all? To understand the answer to this question, we must complicate our understanding of the projective character of cinema. For an image to affect


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us, it must reach us. But to reach us, to be capable of affecting us, we must recognize it as such: in that sense, it must be familiar, that is, expected. And yet to affect us, that is, so that we are individuated by the image, it must not only be familiar, must not be entirely expected. The cinematic experience is unexpected, this combination of the familiar and Stiegler the unfamiliar image, expected and the composition of what also calls the stereotypical and the traumatypical (Ross 2007: 230–46). In other words, it projects itself into us only insofar as we project ourselves into the image, and for that reason images are not individuating or disindividuating, stereotypical or traumatypical, in themselves (Stiegler 2014: 85–86). In fact, there is no image in itself at all, but only the coproduction of the image, a coproduction between the film that is edited and projected and the experience of that image that is equally edited and projected. The industrialization of the image is what occurs when there is a systematic attempt to control that process, and the means of that control is by synchronizing masses of consciousnesses (for example, through television) and by reinforcing particular images, that is, by making them ever more familiar. The combined effect of these two mechanisms is to make the image fade: there is no différance of the image, nothing traumatypical, nothing capable of provoking individuation. And to the extent that such a process reaches its logical outcome, cinema proves to be an invention without a future, that is, without an indeterminate or incalculable future. Today, the future of the image is a question of cinema in the widest sense: it is a question of all the technologies of consciousness and communication through which sound, image, and text are recorded and transmitted. What is the future of film after film, as J. Hoberman asks? Stiegler’s way into this question is via another film that explicitly connects our world and the ancient world of the Greeks: Bertrand Bonello’s Tiresia (2003). In that film, it is a question of blindness and oracles, that is, of the capacity or otherwise to perceive symbols, to perceive something other than the “new realness” of brute “reality,” a possibility symbolized in Homer in the figure of Tiresias. But in this film, which begins with the primordiality of lava, in which it is stated very early on that the copy is better than the srcinal, fake rose thorns better than real ones, and in which it is suggested that the transsexual (that is, the ambiguity of the sexual) is better than sex, the blind figure who receives the help of a young girl also recalls Oedipus, “who will become the very figure of Freudian desire” (Stiegler 2014: 92). In this way, desire is brought into conjunction with technics, with the biochemical and medical technics that make possible the transsexual body,


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and the technicity of the cinematic image itself. And this relation of technicity and desire has two meanings for cinema. In terms of the synchronizing of desire that is also disindividuating and therefore destructive of desire itself, the cinematic contains the possibility of the televisual. In terms of the relation desire and Stanley drives, cinema essentially the possibility ofbetween the pornographic: Cavell already sawcontains in Godard’s use of color during Bardot’s nude scene in Contempt a commentary on the “pornographization” of desire.⁵ This conjunction of synchronization with the reduction of desire to drive is performative in J. L. Austin’s sense: in this way television is prophetic—it is a pre-vision (92–93). The possibility of film after film, of a cinema beyond the death of celluloid, lies in the way in which this struggle is played out between cinema and these two inescapable and therefore tragic threats of the televisual and the pornographic. The premier battleground of this struggle today is the World Wide Web, and the weapons with which it is being fought are digital. If this battle is usually understood as a question of the future of a global economy premised on the incessant growth of consumer desire, it should not be forgotten that this is a question of the future of sexual desire as well: in terms of the latter struggle, it is less a question of the sexual body being lost in some virtual world of pornographic representation than it is a matter of the proletarianization of sexuality itself, that is, the loss of sexual knowledge and the reduction of sexual desire to the calculable particularities of finite bodily desires. This asocial sexual arrhythmia is of course just one more aspect of the consumerization of every part of life that is being played out on Facebook and all those related technologies of consciousness and communication that proletarianize the sexuality of young people today. The logical outcome of this sexual aesthetics, however, threatens to leave these younger generations, and ultimately all of us, incapable of loving totally, tenderly, or tragically, imprisoned instead in the solitude and inexpressibility of televisual and pornographic contempt, imprisoned, that is, in a kind of sexual fascism. How, today, we might wish to ask Benjamin, does communism reply to that?

5. “In the passage in Contempt during which Brigitte Bardot turns her bright body in bed as part of a questioning of her lover, she is flooded in changing centerfold or calendar hues. Godard perceives here not merely our taste for mild pornography, but that our tastes and convictions in love have become pornographized, which above all means publicized, externalized ” (Cavell 1979: 95; emphasis added).


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References Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. “The Schema of Mass Culture.” InThe Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , 53–84. London: Routledge. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics . Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2003. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” translated by Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott. In Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 251–83. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Cavell, Stanley. 1979.The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film . Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . 2005. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Godard, Jean-Luc, et al. 2009. Le Mépris (Contempt ). Blu-ray. Paris: Studio Canal. Heidegger, Martin. 1992. The Concept of Time. Translated by William McNeill. Oxford: Blackwell. . 1996. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hoberman, J. 2012. Film After Film; or, What Became of Twenty-First-Century Cinema? New York: Verso. Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1993. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levi, Primo. 1979. If This Is a Man and The Truce. Translated by Stuart Woolf. London: Penguin. . 1989. “The Intellectual in Auschwitz.” In The Drowned and the Saved , translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 102–20. London: Abacus. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ross, Daniel. 2006. “Review of Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow.” Screening the Past 19. www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12/philosophy-the -day-after-tomorrow/. . 2007. “Politics, Terror, and Traumatypical Imagery.” InTrauma, History, Philosophy, edited by Matthew Sharpe, Murray Noonan, and Jason Freddi, 230–46. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars. . 2013a. “Pharmacology and Critique after Deconstruction.” In Stiegler and Technics, edited by Christina Howells and Gerald Moore, 243–58. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. . 2013b. “Review of J. Hoberman, Film after Film.” Screening the Past 36. www .screeningthepast.com/2013/05/film- after- film- or- what- became- of- 21st -century-cinema/. Simondon, Gilbert. 1992. “The Genesis of the Individual,” translated by Mark Cohen


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and Sanford Kwinter. In Incorporations , edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, 297–319. New York: Zone. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2009. Acting Out . Translated by David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2011. The Decadence of Industrial Democracies . Vol. 1 of Disbelief and Discredit. Translated by Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold. Cambridge: Polity. . 2013a. “The Organology of Dreams and Arche-Cinema.” Translated by Daniel Ross. Screening the Past 36. www.screeningthepast.com/2013/06 /the-organology-of-dreams-and-arche-cinema/. . 2013b. Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals . Vol. 2 of Disbelief and Discredit. Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity. . 2013c. What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology. Cambridge: Polity. . 2014. Symbolic Misery, Vol. 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch. Translated by Barnaby Norman. Cambridge: Polity. Valéry, Paul. 1962. The Outlook for Intelligence. Translated by Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


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Compression in Philosophy

Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRivière

“A general history of compression”—such is the prize of Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format, a book devoted to the philosophy and science of making sound smaller (Sterne 2012: 5; emphasis removed). Indeed, the theme of compression has begun to appear more and more within aesthetics, cultural theory, and media theory. In recent years, Hito Steyerl has written in praise of the compressed or “poor” image, while Luciana Parisi has meditated on the incompressible (Steyerl 2013; Parisi 2013). Online privacy activists seek new technologies for encryption and obfuscation, just as hacker groups configure their own identities around anonymity and collectivity (see esp. Coleman 2012). To be sure, the theme has dominated theories of media and aesthetics for some time already, particularly around issues of resolution, definition, and fidelity. Marshall McLuhan’s hot and cool media hinge on the way in which media mayrequiring contain less either copious helpings of information (minimally compressed, participation) or meager helpings (highly Bernard Stiegler’s lecture “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” published in this special issue, is cited parenthetically. boundary 2 44 1 (2017) DOI 10.1215/01903659-3725905



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compressed, requiring more participation). And media historians have long examined aesthetic artifacts along a continuum from expansion to compression, whether it be a question of minimalism and abstraction, codes and shorthand, redundancy and ornamentation, or any number of other qualities techniques that “lossy either delete or proliferate aesthetic material. In and engineering jargon, compression” describes any technique in which information is lost or deleted as a consequence of compression, while “lossless compression” indicates that no information is deleted. Conventional wisdom suggests lossless compression is superior, given that it reduces file sizes without sacrificing the integrity of the contents. Yet lossy compression finds its own respectable uses, particularly when excess information is unnecessary or disruptive to the sensorium of the viewer or listener. In certain cases, such as audio transmitted via telephone, lossy compression is superior. The conversation around compression has also rebounded in continental philosophy. Friedrich Kittler has written on how literature arrests the sounds of speech into a compressed system of twenty-six letters (1999: 3).¹ Alain Badiou addresses the topic too, albeit in a different way, when he proposes his theory of the subject rooted in the operation of fidelity (compression’s putative nemesis). Functioning as a kind of Platonic yardstick, fidelity measures the subject’s ongoing commitment to an ideal, what Badiou calls a “point,” or event.² And Bernard Stiegler uses the term grammatization, incorporated from the work of both Jacques Derrida and Sylvain Auroux, to indicate how human experience is compressed into discrete units of mediation.³ Yet Sterne seeks something slightly different in his book on digital compression. For Sterne, the most urgent question for media and culture today is not that of an ever-increasing fidelity, in which subjects adhere ever 1. Kittler goes on to note that “all data flows, provided they really were streams of data, had to pass through the bottleneck of the signifier. Alphabetic monopoly, grammatology” (1999: 4). 2. For more on fidelity, points, and events, see Badiou 2005 and 2009. 3. For Derrida’s use of the term, see Derrida 1976. Stiegler also cites the important influence of Sylvain Auroux’sLa Révolution technologique de la grammatisation (1994) in his development of the concept. When understood in the most general sense as the process of describing and formalizing human behavior into letters, words, writing, and code so that it can be reproduced, grammatization is usefully paired with other concepts from social and cultural theory, including Max Weber’s concept of rationalization and Philip Agre’s capture. See Weber 1930; and Agre 2003. For an analysis of Stieglerian grammatization vis-à-vis contemporary media ecology, see Kemper and Zylinska 2012 (165–67).


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more closely to a representational ideal, but that of compression, in which subjects slowly delete and disencumber themselves of the representational contract altogether: This is not to say I simply want to replace a grand narrative of everincreasing fidelity with a grand narrative of ever-increasing compression. I am merely proposing compression as one possible basis for inquiry into the history of communication technology—in the same sense that representation has served. We need to describe and debate long-term histories, as most of the currently available longterm histories of communication . . . have not taken on board the insights of recent decades, especially those drawn from work on globalization as well as postcolonial and poststructuralist thought. Such new histories would not need to function as teleology, nor need to approach universality, but ambition and breadth certainly seem appropriate in our moment. (Sterne 2012: 250n20) What would it mean to have such ambitions? What would it mean if compression replaced representation as the core axis of inquiry in media and aesthetic theory? The Abstract Compression of Nature

Taking up Sterne’s challenge, we wish to reexamine representation within the Western philosophical tradition, particularly the way in which metaphysics recasts philosophy as a kind of media theory in which certain things (ideas, minds, forms, essences, nature, mathematical concepts) may or may not be represented in the form of other things (phenomena, qualities, bodies, environments, worlds). Using compression as an analytical framework, and Stiegler as a sparring partner, we wish to call attention to two different ways of defining representation. The first, abstract compression, is a philosophical position within theories of representation in which compression is an undesirable by-product of the metaphysical contract. The second, generic compression, is a slightly different position in which compression is a positive tactic of material indifference. Both kinds of compression describe the deletion of something, be it formal, material, auric, or essential. Yet they assign such deletion to different registers. Abstract compression assumes that real phenomena appear as selective deletions of a superlative nature, while generic compression reveals the basic insufficiency and indistinction of the


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real phenomena of everyday life. But these are only provisional definitions, and it will be necessary to offer more lengthy explanations for both kinds of compression, beginning first with abstract compression. The abstract compression of nature appears in Stiegler’s work under aprocesses. number of Indifferent terminological schemas, all used to describe similar his recent California lectures (published in this special issue), and also in For a New Critique of Political Economy, Stiegler refers to “the proletarianization of sensibility,” a process that has intensified during the development of the cultural industries of the twentieth century (Stiegler, “Proletarianization”; also 2010a). A historical evolution taking place over many years, the proletarianization of sensibility results from the grammatization or making-discrete of the flux of experience. “By grammatization,” Stiegler explains, “I mean the process whereby the currents and continuities shaping our lives become discrete elements. The history of human memory is the history of this process. Writing, as the breaking into discrete elements of the flux of speech (let us invent the word discretization for this possibility), is an example of a stage in the process of grammatization” (Stiegler 2010b: 70). During the Industrial Revolution, “the process of grammatization suddenly surpassed the sphere of language, of logos, and came to invest the sphere of bodies” (70). Grammatization describes the “synthesizing processes that Marx thought as processes of exteriorization, and called ‘alienation,’ but which in reality are the processes of the reality of industrialization” (Stiegler 2012b: 11). In a similar way, Stiegler’s overarching argument about the materialization of memory as exteriorized technics in the guise of “tertiary retentions,” expressed in a number of his works but stated most extensively in his Technics and Time series, is a claim about the compressive power of grammatization to turn the theoretically infinite layers of experience into discrete, manageable, and archivable units (Stiegler 1998, 2009, 2010c). Logos, culture, technology—all arise from the coevolution of nature and technics through what Stiegler calls epiphylogenesis: the evolution of the living through nonliving means (Stiegler 2010c: 50). Yet in Stiegler’s account, technology is not simply the compression of nature, because nature and technology exist in a state of mutual compression and decompression. “It is in this way that logos is constituted,” writes Stiegler, “as the discretization of the continuous flow of language which, spatialized, can then be considered analytically, which then enters into its diacritical era, and this is the point from which, fundamentally and specifically, logic proceeds” (Stiegler 2010a: 10). As Ben Roberts notes, Stiegler “sees that the


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relationship between the human and technology is fundamentally one of aporia or transduction, where both terms are constituted in their relation” (Roberts 2012: 19).⁴ Stiegler thus merges both humanity and its technical prostheses by showing that the artifice of technology is always already part of the very being. compression puts an emphasis on the relaThis structure version ofofabstract tionship between memory and technology. Stiegler describes the outward transfer from internal memory retention—what he calls, following Plato, anamnesis—into spatialized hypomnesis, that is, the grammatization of memory into mnemotechnics, which includes everything from Paleolithic tally sticks to our contemporary digital computers (Stiegler 2010a: 29). The exteriorization of memory compresses the saturated flux of “secondary retentions” (“all those memorial contents [souvenirs] which together form the woven threads of our memory [mémoire]” [9]) into discrete technical units. This sheds additional light on the concept of grammatization: “The process of grammatization is the technical history of memory, in which hypomnesic memory continually reintroduces the constitution of tension within anamnesic memory. This anamnesic tension is exteriorized in the forms of the mind [or of the spirit, esprit ] through which epochs of psychosocial individuation and disindividuation are pharmacologically configured” (31). Such “tension” names the subsequent decompression of consciousness through engagement with mnemotechnical devices. Expansion via psychic individuation occurs, only to be reexteriorized, grammatized, and disindividuated again. With Stiegler as guide, the first tradition of abstract compression begins to appear more clearly. In this tradition, the real is synonymous with the uncompressed, whereas the everyday experiences of society and culture—the abstractions of the mind, the alphabet, language, images, and technologies—are synonymous with compression. The metaphysical real is virtual and superlative, while lived experience is compressed and reduced. Engineers refer to this as “round off.” Round off indicates the way in which analog values are rounded to discrete numbers. Thus the minute precision of, say, a floating-point number will be rounded to whatever integer is closest. Ironically this reintroduces precision, only in a new way. Digital machines will “iterate in an always identical manner,” writes Giuseppe 4. “Stiegler’s aporetic understanding of the relationship between technology and society fundamentally means neither term is privileged, nor is the former dissolved in the latter” (Roberts 2012: 20).


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Longo, because, given the rounded precision of both inputs and commands, a digital machine will execute commands with identical repetition (Longo 2013: 14). Contrary to analog machines, digital machines shed themselves of all the small inconsistencies that, when executed, multiply into legibly different outcomes. is a are precision of abstraction; analog precision, a precisionDigital of theprecision real. Yet they not immune from corruption: just as the digital and the analog each have their own forms of precision, each also illustrates unique forms of disruption and failure. Steyerl, for one, has helped dismantle the common misconception that digital machines are immune from glitches, noise, or other forms of technical collapse. In fact, abstract precision often ironically promotes such aesthetic inconsistencies (Steyerl 2013).⁵ Abstraction, compression, and digitality are all alike in one important way: they all “forget the details” by selectively deleting certain small bits of information. Longo explicitly links engineering and philosophy on this point, showing how the invariance of the transcendental (its ability to remain unchanging in the face of change) is a consequence of reduction or abstraction. “Forgetfulness is constitutive of invariance and, therefore, of conceptual abstraction,” writes Longo, “because in this way, we can forget the details, that which are ‘unimportant’” (Longo 2013: 18).⁶ We might say that transcendental abstraction is “low bandwidth” or “world poor” because it selectively removes information in order to persist as such. Marx’s critique of the commodity form hinges on this very issue, for the commodity obfuscates the history of its own making and thus embodies a lossy compression of the conditions of production. Indeed, such ideological processes are essentially coterminous with understanding and consciousness in the first place. As an abstraction of the world, understanding is compression. “A theory, an explanation, is only successful to the extent to which it compresses the number of bits in the facts into a much smaller number of bits of theory,” writes mathematician Gregory Chaitin. “Understanding is compression, comprehension is compression!” (Chaitin 2007: 35). 5. For more on the digital’s putative lossyness, see Manovich 2001 (50–55). See also Krapp 2011; and Nunes 2011. 6. A useful connection could be made to Stiegler’s treatment of Prometheus and Epimetheus, or what he calls the Promethean advance and the Epimethean withdrawal. “Humans are the forgotten ones. Humans only occur through their being forgotten; they only appear in disappearing. Fruit of a double fault—an act of forgetting, then of theft . . . . [T]here will have been nothing at the srcin but the fault, a fault that is nothing but the de-fault of srcin or the srcin as default” (1998: 188).


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These relatively neutral modalities of compression and decompression take a decidedly negative turn, however, in Stiegler’s recent work on digital networks and late capitalism. Here Stiegler describes how capitalism, especially in its current “cognitive” or “informatic” iteration, has compressed life is itself in a way is extremely lossy. is lost, according to Stiegler, precisely thethat knowledge of how to What live. He writes, “Commerce is always an exchange of savoir-faire [knowledge of how to make or do] and savoir-vivre [knowledge of how to live]” (Stiegler 2010a: 16). But increasingly, given the mutations of capitalist exchange over the past few decades and the attendant processes of grammatization, both savoir-faire and savoir-vivre are being lo st like so much compressed data in “a vast process of cognitive and affective proletarianization ” (30). As a form of psychic and collective disindividuation, proletarianization is destructive. In the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, Stiegler’s main influence on this theme, individuation is an uncompressed process of becoming. The virtualization of such potentiality makes for a boundless uncompressibility. Indeed, “Simondon shows that individuation is structurally unachievable and in this sense infinite” (42). The technologies of capitalism, from the assembly line to Facebook, have created processes of “disindividuation,” which work to “short-circuit” the productive becoming of individuation, resulting in “desublimation, that is, the commensurable finitization of all things” (42). The infinite potential of becoming is compressed into the finite gestures of capitalist proletarianization. This has become all the more prevalent in the twenty-first century, as more and more human experiences are exteriorized onto digital platforms: The grammatization of gesture, which was the basis of what Marx described as proletarianization, that is, as loss of savoir-faire, is then pursued with the development of electronic and digital devices to the point that all forms of knowledge become grammatized via cognitive and cultural mnemotechnologies. This will include the way in which linguistic knowledge becomes the technologies and industries of automated language processing, but it will also include savoir-vivre, that is, behavior in general, from user profiling to the grammatization of affects—all of which will lead toward the “cognitive” and “cultural” capitalism of the hyperindustrial service economies. (33) Such is the story of modernity. Grumbling beneath the iron cage of modern experience lies a superlative nature full of life and energy. Beyond mankind exists a vital or virtual real, a natural wellspring of energy wait-


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ing to be unleashed. Step by step, the advancement of modernity crushes nature through a kind of cataclysmic compression of everyday life. The vital flows are subdued, the wellspring is capped, the natural energies are abstracted into a second reality dubbed culture or society. The bifurcation of nature complete. In isother words—and here we exaggerate the consequences to underscore the point—the first tradition of abstract compression entails two corollaries: first, a romantic or poetic ontology of matter, and second, a developmental technology of nature. To be sure, these two corollaries are quite common during the modern period, and in fact they help to define the very concept of modernity.⁷ The first, evident most vividly in the romanticism of the nineteenth century, assumes a superlative nature that exists beyond all attempts to compress it. The uncompressed natural real thus exceeds and suspends the mere experiences of everyday life, which themselves strive to comprehend its full majesty (of extension, of feeling, of aesthetic abundance, and so on). The second, a developmental technology of nature, stems directly from the first by superimposing the decompression of nature along global lines of developmental difference. Hence nature is an unknowable space of excess, quite literally a heart of darkness, and its energies must be released, harnessed, and developed according to the rules of the machine, the factory, the firm, or the metropolis. Whether such technologies are more like fifteenth-century Portuguese carracks or twentiethcentury Deleuzian desiring machines matters much less than the underlying narrative that fuels them: nature is unknowable, infinite, bottomless, and uncompressible; technology is the discoverer, developer, exploiter, and harnesser of nature. In short, technology is nature’s compressor.⁸ 7. For work representative of this line of argument, see Misa, Brey, and Feenberg 2003. See also Feenberg 2010. 8. In one of the few pieces of critical writing to consider compression as a quantitative and qualitative process of rounding off, Robert Kerr echoes this dystopian account of compression. Compression “is the entire system of law,” Kerr writes. “Compression condenses dynamic cultures by assimilating them in the name of globalization, where everyone is screaming yet no one person is heard. It is the squeezer of small businesses in niche communities who have no choice, through the force of globalization, to adapt to the VOLUME of global industry, losing all identity, losing their own unique singularities, and becoming an extension of the greater. . . . Compression is the theft of dynamic knowledge long lost to those who misunderstood and perverted the mysteries of the universe because they couldn’t handle the fact that the mystery was just that, and thus had to make the fluid unknown become a concrete static truth to squeeze down every opposition


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As Stiegler shows, a number of compensatory therapies emerge when faced with the cataclysmic compression of modern life. Indeed, phenomenology emerges as a recuperative or compensatory strategy vis-àvis modern life. Likewise, Deleuzianism is a form of compensatory therapy real is understood terms of an uncompressed vital milieu, in which which the expression supersedesin compression. But also consider Marxism and the New Left. Marxist critique is rooted in a decompression (viz., demystification) of the commodity form, while the New Left’s politics of visibility is understood in terms of an unpacking, expansion, or liberation from the compression of everyday life—“take back the streets” or “come out of the closet.” Stiegler wishes to participate in such a politics of decompression, broadening it to include larger issues in social life. His recent work on aesthetics is especially relevant here because artistic modes of living aim to rekindle the object with some of the knowledge and experience deleted from it by grammatization and codification. “These objects,” Stiegler says, “have a history that always passes, in some way or the other, by way of artists and their ancestors, those men from an age when there was no artist because everyone lived his or her world artistically—as with the seal hunter who sculpted the harpoon that we may see now at the ethnographic museum” (Stiegler 2011: 228). How, then, might one return to such a relationship with cultural objects? Art and love furnish some hope. In “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” Stiegler describes how “[t]hroughout the twentieth century, the development of technologies—of what Walter Benjamin calls ‘mechanical reproducibility’—led to a generalized regression of the pyschomotive knowledges that were characteristic of art amateurs” (6). The know-how of these art amateurs remained uncompressed, having not yet succumbed to proletarianization via the processes of grammatization. The amateur had an intimate relationship to life and art, persisting through care and indeed love. In fact, this is precisely what constitutes the figure of the amateur: “The amat eur ‘loves’ (amat, from the Latin verb amare, ‘to love’): that’s what makes an amateur an amateur. Art amateurs love works of art. And insofar as they love them, these artworks work on them—that is to say, the amateur is trans-formed by them: individuated by them” (7). The lover of art in the name of reason” (2013, n.p.). Kerr’s description is a good example of what we are calling here abstract compression.


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is addressed to the “mystagogical performativities” of art (9). The lover is called to the mediation of planes of existence, a mediation that is unveiled by a solicitous work of art: A work only works to the extent that it affects us, in the sense that, suddenly, it jumps out at us (elle fait saillance ). Such a jumping out only affects us, and gets us hooked, to the extent that it directs us toward a mystery: it reveals next to existence—next to its own existence first and foremost, but also next to that of its author and of its spectator—something other than the plane of existence—if one believes in it. The experience of art is the experience of a work that opens up onto such a plane, and that appears in this way to reveal this other plane. Every work of art has the structure of a revelation. (9) The structure of belief is crucial. Only by believing in art will art affect us. Yet such belief has been liquidated throughout the twentieth century by the compressive power of the culture industries and marketing techniques. A return to a mode of life more attentive to philia would require a cultivation of the “noetic organs.” “Most of the time we are only potentially noetic, and actually sensitive,” Stiegler observes, “for example, when we behave like pigs or sheep or wolves or slugs, and, in some cases, when we remain in our unsurpassable stratum of vegetivity”⁹ (Stiegler 2011: 223). The task is then to invent new ways to make the obfuscated and compressed visible to the noetic, libidinized eye: “We have been destroyed and blinded—all of us, for what we are—by this becoming-regressive of our ever narrowing gaze [regard ]. We must learn to see again—that is, to show— the singular that is never yet seen” (229). A phenomenological belief in the value of revealing nature thus provides Stiegler an avenue of escape from the compressions of daily life. To summarize, the first tradition of abstract compression assumes that the various phenomena of existence—from concepts and thoughts, to technology and culture—are reductions of a more or less uncompressible natural real. Actuality is compressed, while virtuality is uncompressed. We also noted, albeit briefly, that such a position leads to two corollary positions that may or may not be desirable: a poetic or romantic ontology, and an exploitational or developmental technology. Stiegler “solves” these problems not by destroying the terms but by merging them, by putting them 9. For more on animal stupidity (bêtise), see Stiegler 2013.


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into a relationship of transduction. There is no bifurcation of nature, for Stiegler, quite simply because there is no fundamental difference between nature and technology. Yet at the same time, by not altering the terms of the debate, Stiegler retains an effigy of the dogma of abstract compression, leading a sometimes moralizing andhope romanticist discourse. Only by destroying thetoeffigy in its entirety will we to discover an alternative form in which the tiresome decompressions of reality are dissolved by a stubbornly compressed lived experience. From Abstract Compression to Generic Compression

An alternate tradition thus emerges not entirely opposed to the first tradition, but nevertheless absent or withdrawn from the dominion of a compressed transcendental. In this second tradition, compression is not an epiphenomenon of metaphysical difference but rather a positive tactic of physical indifference. We label this the tradition of generic compression in which data deletion happens at the level of real material life, not at the level of mind, language, spirit, essence, or totality. A number of writers and thinkers have taken Herman Melville’s Bartleby as a model for this kind of compression. Melville’s scrivener has proven to be one of the great enigmatic characters of American literature, eliciting readings from a number of prominent Continental figures including Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, and Giorgio Agamben, all in some way seeking to parse Bartleby’s infamous refrain, “I would prefer not to” (Deleuze 1997; Rancière 2004; Agamben 1999). Likewise Bartleby has become something of a tactical inspiration in the “No Demands!” age of global Occupy movements (Melville 1985).¹⁰ Bartleby’s stance may be read through the conceptual lens of désoeuvrement, which we might translate as “unworkability” or “inoperativity.” Bartleby’s statement then becomes a generic refusal of work that points toward an alternative tradition of compression irreducible to the metaphysical contract. Agamben provides a useful introduction to the concept of désoeuvrement in his book The Open: Man and Animal. With his signature philological style, Agamben describes a possible strategy of resistance that responds to the deleterious effects of the disenchantment of the world. The condition of being “poor in world,” however, is not reduced to merely economic poverty. Rather, Agamben addresses spiritual, ethical, and aes10. On the strategic logic of “no demands,” see Millner-Larsen 2013.


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thetic poverty. This kind of world-bound poverty forms part of the meaning of désoeuvrement. Agamben has developed this concept over a number of his works, and the French word appears as the title of the penultimate chapter in The Open. The term comes largely from Georges Bataille, a specterinvoked presiding whole of opening the text and as aclosing kind ofofpatron antisaint, though byover namethe only in the the book. Agamben begins by recounting the debate between Bataille and Alexandre Kojève following Kojève’s famous lectures on Hegel at the École des Hautes Études in the late 1930s. The debate concerned which features of humanity would survive the end of history, with Bataille unable to “accept at any cost” that “‘art, love, play,’ as well as laughter, ecstasy, luxury . . . ceased to be superhuman, negative, and sacred, in order to be given back to animal praxis” (Agamben 2004: 6). Bataille was willing to wager his argument for the continuation of these ludic expressions on “the idea of a ‘negativity with no use’ [negatività senza impiego; also ‘unemployed negativity’], that is, of a negativity that somehow survives the end of history and for which he can provide no proof other than his own life” (7). Such negativity with no use, such unemployed negativity so valorized by Bataille, can sabotage what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine.” The best tactic to render the anthropological machine inoperative is to assume an irrecuperable indifference. Capitalism has become extremely adept at subsuming nearly all criticisms of its machinations into the logic of capital itself.¹¹ But what remains irrecuperable is the “absolute indifference” of unemployed negativity (66). Agamben speaks of this potentially emancipatory refusal, this lying inactive (brachliegende), in the terms of a Heideggerian pastoral: “The verb brachliegen . . . comes from the language of agriculture. . . . Brachliegen means ‘to leave fallow,’ that is, inactive, uncultivated” (66). Like his former teacher, Agamben valorizes the uncultivated, the held-in-suspense. Indeed, this act of leaving fallow is precisely what is withheld during what Heidegger calls “enframing” (Ge-stell ). In this process, everything is made available as “standing-reserve” through the “monstrous” challenging-forth of modern technology: “That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched over ever anew” (Heidegger 1977: 16). Nothing is allowed to be uncultivated in this enframing. “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand 11. For a provocative account of this dialectic, see Fraser 2013.


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by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand ]” (17). Heidegger’s enframing and Agamben’s anthropological machine both resemble Stiegler’s All proletarianization of the sensibility the shortcomcircuits of disindividuation. are examples of dogmaand of abstract pression. Unemployed negativity bears greater resemblance to generic compression. The irrecuperable indifference of a figure like Bartleby is compression in a finite and determined form; no superlative nature undergirds this refusal. Agamben positions the vast potential of the resources of the standing-reserve against the im potentiality not to engage in the process of “ordering the real,” as described by Heidegger (19). For Agamben, im potentiality is the very srcin of potentiality itself. This is an essential point: What appears for the first time as such in deactivation (in the Brachliegen ) of possibility, then, is thevery srcin of potentiality —and with it, of Dasein, that is, the being which exists in the form of potentialityfor-being [ poter-essere]. But precisely for this reason, this potentiality or srcinary possibilitization constitutively has the form of a potential-not-to [ potenza-di-no], of an impotentiality, insofar as it is able to [ può ] only in beginning from a being able not to [ poter non], that is, from the deactivation of single, specific, factical possibilities. (Agamben 2004: 67; emphasis in srcinal) Bartleby’s opaque indifference to work and his refusal to order the real make him an ideal model for withdrawal from the representational contract. Through a kind of productive unworking, Bartleby gestures toward new forms of life and revitalized potentials for living in community. Bartleby’s peculiar affect of opacity thus links him in our minds to various projects interested in forcing a compression of the subject toward the generic. Here one might cite recent critical efforts to de-predicate the subject, removing various kinds of data points that could potentially track and “enframe” the individual (e.g., Hardt and Negri 2005; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008; Magnet 2011; Shell 2012; Blas 2013). In his book Opacity and the Closet, Nicholas de Villiers examines the “queer tactics” of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Andy Warhol, all queer figures who suspended the binary logic of the closet through rhetorical tactics of opacity and obfuscation. Efforts to cultivate a generic compression of the subject have much to learn from the turn in queer theory toward a thinking around opacity and the theorization of various queer tactics of paradigm


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neutralization. And it is precisely a thinking around that is crucial here— around the surfaces, around the edges of opacity. De Villiers emphasizes the importance of opaque or matte surfaces. With such surfaces he resists the protocols of what Eve Sedgwick calls “paranoid reading,” which2003). alwaysInstead, attemptsdetoVilliers uncoverinsists, the subsurface meaning of a text (Sedgwick we must dwell on the surfaces of figures like Melville’s Bartleby, with whom he opens the book, rather than replicate the depth model of humanist understanding. The paranoid reading “looks for psychological depth, motives, and personal history, and it ceaselessly performs a hermeneutic operation of making transparent the resistances it encounters,” argues de Villiers. “But at moments it is frustrated, aggravated, ‘unmanned’ in Melville’s terms, by a passive resistance that appears as opacity” (de Villiers 2012: x). In other words, Bartleby—along with queer opacity generally—refuses to be transcoded according to the logics of productive transparency. A lossy depotentialization and bedimming of life takes on a seductive valence. Warhol is one of the great artists of surface, yet de Villiers is more interested in the evasive discourse that Warhol deploys in genres of truth telling, such as diaries and interviews, rather than his artworks as such. Still, if we return momentarily to the artwork, it is clear how distant Warhol is from a more romantic metaphysical style. For instance, certain salient differences emerge in Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes that speak to the reorientation in critical perspective being proposed here, particularly when contrasted with Van Gogh’s 1885 painting of peasant’s shoes, so famously celebrated by Heidegger (2008). Fredric Jameson compares these two works at the beginning of his “Postmodernism” essay, noting that the “first and most evident [difference] is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense” (Jameson 1991: 9).The peasant shoes are imbued with the depth of history, while the diamond dust shoes are superficial and flat like a magazine advertisement. An aesthetic of bland, matte surface takes precedence in Warhol, deviating from the historical avant-garde’s yen for transgression, which itself strived to abandon the tradition that Van Gogh’s shoes represented. Indeed, there is no longer anything transgressive about transgression. As Steven Shaviro recently observed, “The only thing that remains ‘transgressive’ today is capital itself, which devours everything without regard for boundaries, distinctions, or degrees of legitimacy” (Shaviro 2010:


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31).¹² Rather than the promiscuous aesthetics of transgression, it would seem that a prophylactic aesthetics of Warholian opacity are in order.¹³ Not pornography but seduction. Not normative attraction but insufficient communization. Not expression but compression.¹⁴ Thea line generative nature unworkability, opacity, and compression animates of critical theoryofthat runs from Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Blanchot, to others such as Roberto Esposito and (more recently) Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (Agamben 1993; Nancy 1991; Blanchot 1988; 12. Stiegler expresses a similar sentiment in “The Proletarianization of Sensibility”: “There used to be a time of the scandal: a time when transgression produced a scandal. But this is no longer the case—it’s as if there no longer were any possibilities for transgression, as if one could no longer expect anything from transgression. Or from a mystery” (15–16). 13. As de Villiers demonstrates, opacity is not incompatible with identity politics, theories of difference, or what Badiou calls the post-Cartesian theories of the subject. Indeed, in addition queer “The theory, opacity also played a role in the intersectionalthe fieldMartinican of critical race totheory. theory of has difference is invaluable,” acknowledges philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant. “This theory has made it possible to take in, perhaps, not their existence but at least their rightful entitlement to recognition of the minorities swarming throughout the world and the defense of their status.” Yet within theories of difference, Glissant identifies an adherence to the contract of mandated representability: “difference itself can still contrive to reduce things to the transparent.” A right to difference is important, he admits, but so too is the generic or opaque. The right to opacity “is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy,” Glissant argues, “but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics” (1997: 189, 190). 14. Tim Griffin examines compression as a “model and metaphor for contemporary art production” and cites Cory Arcangel as one artist who has embraced the lossy potentiality of algorithmic aesthetics: “‘Media is no longer a one-way street,’ [Arcangel] argues. ‘People just make things. And so I don’t know whether it’s so necessary to “reveal” anything anymore.’ Instead, Arcangel says of his own practice, the artist is apt merely to reframe such media—putting forward artwork that might look totally unremarkable and yet subtly implicate the unseen networks responsible for its production and circulation. As he conjectures of his recent work with Photoshop, for which he merely prints out a color gradient, without manipulating the readymade image at all: ‘Why do people always use technology in a particular way? . . . What might happen if you overused technology, or underused it? There are always holes opening at either end of the spectrum.’ Arcangel introduces a gap, in other words, that leaves the information of the image up for grabs—immediately recognizable anyone typically who knows Photoshop, but dislodged from and emptied of any of the culturaltonarrative defined by its specific use” (Griffin 2011: 16). By putting a conceptual frame around the readymade processes of digital production so prevalent today, by simplyleaving be, Arcangel is able to effectively represent the informatic milieu of post-Internet art, rendering a critical intervention into contemporary modes of production—critical in its very withdrawal from expression.


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Esposito 2010; Kacem 2006). These thinkers all provide the grounds for a generic compression of the subject that bears directly on the material conditions of life rather than a metaphysical essence corrupted by enframing. Rather than a kind of Heideggerian romanticism, we see in generic compression rigorous against attemptcompulsory to compresstransparency. the real, using opacity and obfuscation as aweapons Yet beyond those already named, François Laruelle is the thinker who has done the most to compress philosophy into generic thought. For Laruelle, the discipline of philosophy is far too expressive, too obsessed with metaphysical revealing and philosophical reflection of all that exists. As he explains, In Nietzsche, you have this idea that philosophy is always excessive—the will to power to philosophize is to dominate. Thus it is motivated by excess, by overpowering. . . . So in Nietzsche there is already a kind of internal contradiction that I felt very strongly. I was very Nietzschean in the first four or five books. And then I realized that I had to work in a “doubled” way: to use Nietzsche, but against philosophy itself. (Laruelle 2012a: 5; emphasis removed) Laruelle decided at an early moment in his philosophical development to reject the excessively expressive in favor of the compressive: “then was forged the idea to write a new book, which gave rise to The Minority Principle, and most importantly Biography of the Ordinary Man . It is here that I started to invert the movement. That is to say, to find a more precise and stronger way of working with science in the interior of philosophy—inside philosophy, not as an object of philosophy, but on the inside of it” (5). In these and other books, Laruelle describes a form of compressive genericness. What he calls “minority” or “ordinary” are indexes into an opacity that pervades both world and individual. From a position alongside philosophy, Laruelle’s nonphilosophy adopts a different kind of signal processing. Opacity becomes a general condition of the cosmos itself. As he says in one of his more experimental texts, “The Universe is an opaque and solitary thought, which has already leapt through man’s shut eyes as the space of a dream without dreaming” (Laruelle 2013: 103). Unlike Stiegler, who strives to reveal an enchanted, natural world through the development of the noetic organs, Laruelle remains encrypted within the radical immanence of generic being. All superfluous philosophical data has been deleted. He describes the relationship between nonphilosophy (generic compression) and philosophy (abstract


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compression) with recourse to a photographic metaphor: “We believe that reality is horizon and light, aperture and flash, whereas it resembles more the posture of an opaque non-relation (to) light. When exploring the universal dimension of the cosmic, we remain prisoners of cosmo-logical difference. Our philosophers who are afraid forever of the dark” (109). For Laruelle, Stiegler wouldare bechildren one such philosopher, fleeing the dark and rushing toward the open aperture of transcendence.¹⁵ But Laruelle is intent on remaining within a compressed, immanent, and finite opacity—a thoroughly black opacity. What does the opaque indicate? Merely that “there is nothing in light or outside of light to manifest it or obscure it; that light exists only in things already illuminated and obscurity in things already obscured” (Laruelle 2012b: 413). A Lossy Manifesto

By way of conclusion, let us return to Sterne and the debates surrounding compressive media. Such debates usually entail a number of claims: (1) media abstract, reduce, and encode a complex and heterogeneous world, and (2) once encoded, media files may be compressed and expanded using lossless algorithms that preserve the integrity of data, or alternately (3) media files may be compressed using lossy algorithms that necessarily delete data. Given the above discussion, we are in a better position to amplify and evaluate these various positions. Regarding the first point, we conclude that encoding is synonymous with the above-labeled abstract compression. Encoding is thus synonymous with the metaphysical tradition itself, in which existence appears as a specific encoding of matter. The abstractions of this life (language, 15. Although Stiegler has not extensively engaged with Laruelle’s nonphilosophy in his own texts, he does acknowledge his indebtedness to Laruelle in his introduction to the reprinted edition of Simondon’s Individuation psychique et collective (Stiegler 2007). Stiegler also recounts the crucial role that Laruelle played in introducing him to Simondon’s work in a recent interview: “When I left prison, Derrida asked me to lead a seminar. It was at the College of Philosophy. Among the faculty there was François Laruelle, a French philosopher. And one day he said to me ‘Tell me about what you are doing in your seminar. Let’s go have a drink.’” Stiegler proceeded to outline the broad strokes of his philosophical project to Laruelle, emphasizing how “processes constitute themselves,” culminating in “a theory of singularity that is not a theory of the subject.” “But that’s not your theory,” Laruelle informed him, “that’s Simondon’s.” “So I discovered that I had a competitor,” Stiegler realized, one “who had been around much longer than I.” See Stiegler 2012a (165–66). For Laruelle’s commentary on Simondon, see Laruelle 1994.


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mind, technology, and so on) are thus a kind of encoding of the fundamental substrate of nature, whether it be Deleuze’s plane of immanence, Plato’s essential forms, or Aristotle’s substance. The abstractions of this life are thus also instances of data loss, given that any particular formation will fundamental exclude or delete the multiplicity of alternate that lie within the substrate of nature. The actually virtualities existing transcendentals “forget the details” of the absolute by remaining invariant and consistent across time and space. In this way, all media and indeed all philosophy are digital in that they encode nature via processes of distinction and data loss. Once encoded, the world may be compressed still further via lossless or lossy algorithms. Yet given that no data is actually deleted during lossless compression, lossless compression—touted most visibly in aesthetic concepts like fidelity—is essentially a misnomer, and in fact not a mode of compression at all. Rather, lossless compression is merely a synonym for technical transcoding . Lossless compression simply converts one

mode of philosophical encoding into another mode and back again. Lossless compression is the “normal science” of the world and thus acts to repeat and propagate formations of self-similarity. In this sense, lossless compression entails a certain amount of philosophical cynicism, in that it assumes nothing will ever alter the basic encoding of the world, even as the surface effects of encoded objects shift from one shape to another. In sum, the tradition of abstract compression in media and philosophy relies on a basic two-part mechanic: first encode nature via data loss, then transcode nature via lossless compression. Given this mechanic, compensatory strategies often appear under the guise of decompression: Marx’s demystification of the “compressed” commodity, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s liberation of the repressed desiring machines, or any number of other strategies. Indeed, in the latter twentieth century, expression emerged as a key virtue of the good life. Contra representation, expression allows subjects to realize themselves without the fetters of repression and without recourse to any kind of metaphysical essence. As actualization or territorialization, expression toggles between a normatively good compensatory alternative to metaphysical compression, and a normatively bad— albeit often necessary—deletion of the alternate potentialities of the virtual. In fact, much of the most interesting work being done in theory today hinges precisely on “the reality of abstraction,” as the Marxists put it, or “the actuality of the virtual,” as the Deleuzians put it.¹⁶ 16. For the former, see Toscano 2013. For the latter, see Parisi 2013. In Parisi, the incompressible (the virtual) already exists within the actuality of the real. Yet in deviating from


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Yet, as we have hoped to show here, both of these alternatives rely on a specific concept of compression, the tradition of abstract compression. Our proposal is that an alternate approach to compression also exists. This alternate approach is rooted in lossy rather than lossless compression. In contrast to itsorlossless cousin, lossy compression moves has in the of a generic prophylactic ontology. Lossy compression andirection unusual relationship to philosophy and theories of mediation: it extends the logic of philosophy and media (data loss), but deploys itself against the spirit of philosophy and media (expression, distinction, representation). Lossy compression thus is imperative today for theories of media and mediation, because lossy compression is the best way to upcast toward the generic. Lossy compression accomplishes this via an impoverishment or impotentialization of existence. (Recall how philosophical metaphysics claims something quite different, that existence is a reduction from essence.) For these reasons, we ally ourselves with an alternate tradition in which the world tends toward its own encryption, in which being shrinks rather than emerges, in which data tends to vanish and disappear rather than find its most visible expression. Compression is on the side of cryptography. And in order to survive this life, we need a kind of theoretical project that is more and more cryptographic with each passing day. Compression is not some mere epiphenomenon that must be reduced or avoided. Compression is not merely the unwelcome identity of philosophy. Rather, we contend that the best response to philosophy is to compress it further. We need more compression in philosophy, not less. And through the compression of philosophy—the deletion of data via processes of immanence, opacity, obfuscation, and encryption—will arrive the new techniques of the generic. References

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144 boundary 2 / February 2017 Agre, Philip E. 2003. “Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy.” In The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, 737–60. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Auroux, Sylvain. 1994. La Révolution technologique de la grammatisation. Liège: Mardaga. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum. . 2009. Logics of Worlds. Vol. 2 of Being and Event. Translated by Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum. Blanchot, Maurice. 1988. The Unavowable Community. Translated by Pierre Joris. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill. Blas, Zach. 2013. “Escaping the Face: Biometric Facial Recognition and theFacial Weaponization Suite,” Media-N 9, no. 2. http://median.newmediacaucus.org /caa-conference- edition-2013/escaping- the-face-biometric- facial-recogni tion-and-the-facial-weaponization-suite/. Chaitin,Collapse Gregory.1:2007. 27–51.“Epistemology as Information Theory: From Leibniz to Ω.” Coleman, E. Gabriella. 2012.Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. “Bartleby; or, The Formula.” InEssays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A Greco, 68–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976.Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. De Villiers, Nicholas. 2012. Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Esposito, Roberto. 2010.Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Feenberg, Andrew. 2010. Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fraser, Nancy. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism: From Women’s Work to Identity Politics to Anti-Capitalism. New York: Verso. Glissant, Édouard. 1997.Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Griffin, Tim. 2011. “Compression.”October 135: 3–20. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Perennial. . 2008. “On the Origin of the Work of Art.” In Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 143–212. New York: HarperCollins. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.


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Galloway and LaRivière / Compression in Philosophy 145 Kacem, Mehdi Belhaj. 2006. La psychose française—Les banlieues: Le ban de la République. Paris: Gallimard. Kemper, Sarah, and Joanna Zylinska. 2012.Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kerr, Robert. 2013. “Compression and Oppression.” CTheory, March 28. www .ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=719. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Krapp, Peter. 2011. Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Laruelle, François. 1994. “Le concept d’une ‘technologie première.’” InGilbert Simondon: Une pensée de l’individuation et de la technique, edited by Gilles Châtelet, 206–19. Paris: Albin Michel. . 2012a. “Introduction: Laruelle Undivided.” InFrom Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-Standard Thought, edited by Robin Mackay, 1–32. FalUrbanomic. . mouth, 2012b.UK: “What the One Sees in the One.” InFrom Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-standard Thought, edited by Robin Mackay, 409–22. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic. . 2013. “On the Black Universe: In the Human Foundations of Color.” InDark Nights of the Universe, edited by Eugene Thacker, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Aaron Metté, François Laruelle, Nicola Masciandaro, and Alexander R. Galloway, 102–10. Miami: NAME Publications. Longo, Giuseppe. 2013. “Critique of Computational Reason in the Natural Sciences.” www.di.ens.fr/users/longo/files/PhilosophyAndCognition/CritiqComp Reason-engl.pdf. Also published in Fundamental Concepts in Computer Science, edited by Erol Gelenbe and Jean-Pierre Kahane, 43–70. London:

Imperial College Press, 2009. Magnet, Shoshana Amielle. 2011. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Melville, Herman. 1985. “Bartleby the Scrivener.” InBilly Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories, edited by Harold Beaver. London: Penguin. Millner-Larsen, Nadja. 2013. “Demandless Times.”WSQ 41: 113–30. Misa, Thomas J., Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, eds. 2003.Modernity and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The Inoperative Community. Translated by Peter Connor, Nancy, Lisa Jean-Luc. 1991. Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nunes, Mark, ed. 2011. Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures. New York: Continuum. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos. 2008.Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century. London: Pluto.


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146 boundary 2 / February 2017 Parisi, Luciana. 2013. Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. “Deleuze, Bartleby, and the Literary Formula.” InThe Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Roberts, Ben. 2012. “Technics, Individuation, and Tertiary Memory: Bernard Stiegler’s Challenge to Media Theory.”New Formations 77: 8–20. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shaviro, Steven. 2010. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester, UK: Zero. Shell, Hanna Rose. 2012.Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance. New York: Zone. Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Steyerl, Hito. 2013. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated Stiegler,byBernard. Richard 1998. Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2007. Introduction to Individuation psychique et collective, by Gilbert Simondon. Paris: Aubier. . 2009. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2010a. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity. . 2010b. “Memory.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, 64–87. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press. . 2010c. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise . Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2011. “The Tongue of the Eye: What ‘Art History’ Means,” translated by Thangam Ravindranathan, with Bernard Geoghegan. In Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, edited by Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, 222–35. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2012a. “Bernard Stiegler: A Rational Theory of Miracles; On Pharmacology and Transindividuation.” Interview by Ben Roberts, Jeremy Gilbert, and Mark Hayward, translated by Ben Roberts.New Formations 77: 164–84. . Translated 2012b. “Interview: From Libidinal Economy to the Ecology of the Spirit.” by Arne De Boever. Parrhesia 14: 9–15. . 2013. “Doing and Saying Stupid Things in the Twentieth Century: Bêtise and Animality in Deleuze and Derrida.” Translated by Daniel Ross.Angelaki 18, no. 1: 159–74. Toscano, Alberto. 2013. “Real Abstraction Revisited: Of Coins, Commodities, and


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Galloway and LaRivière / Compression in Philosophy 147 Cognitive Capitalism.” Accessed December 29. www2.le.ac.uk/depart ments/management/research/documents/research/research- units/cppe /seminar-pdfs/2005/toscano.pdf. Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Unwin Hyman.


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Dare to Care: Between Stiegler’s Mystagogy and Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence

Ed Cohen

Philosophy is, for me, before anything else, to learn to repeat repetitions that are good. To learn ways that the pharmakon, which is always that which repeats, does not destroy me or render me indifferent by its repetitions, but rather takes care of me (me soigne). That is to say, individuates me, distinguishes me, differentiates me, . . . in order to permit me to discern in myself—to distinguish—alterity, difference [differa nce?], . . . the future. Philosophy is undertaken in order that these repetitions make a difference. —Bernard Stiegler (2014a) Philosophy takes care of me. It provides a therapeutic practice of the self, a repetition with a difference that opens me to the differa nce that happens as I defer toward a future that differs in and from me. But how does such taking care happen? That’s where the mystery comes in. For a number of years, in his courses, seminars, lectures, and Bernard Stiegler’s lecture “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” published in this special issue, is cited parenthetically in the text as “Proletarianization.” boundary 2 44

1 (2017) DOI 10.1215/01903659-3725917 © 2017 by Duke University Press


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books, Bernard Stiegler has alerted us to the consequences of a transformation that took place in Western thought when, in Book VII of The Republic, Plato’s “doctrine of the truth” (to recall Heidegger’s famous formula [1998]) decisively privileged exactitude as philosophy’s raison d’être. In making philosophy doctrinaire, Plato refused the and tragic horizon within which Socrates and the pre-Socratic thinkers lived, thereby deprived philosophy of its mystery, a mystery that Socrates (who participated in the Eleusian Mysteries) certainly did not abjure. Challenging the long legacy of this Platonic refusal, Stiegler admonishes us to attend to the extraordinary within the ordinary, or, even better, to let it surprise us. Yet, to appreciate the mystery, to let the mystery surprise us, we have need of a mystagogy, whose initiations help lead us toward the mystery because our eyes are too often shut to it (as its Greek etymon muein [μύειν] might sugge st).¹ Over the last several years, and especially since Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Stiegler has tantalizingly (albeit elliptically) invoked what he refers

to in the essays published in this special issue as “the necessary mystagogy that would underlie and support the life of the spirit in all its aspects,” even while rigorously cautioning against the mystifications to which all such mystagogy so easily succumbs (Stiegler, “Proletarianization,” 11). Needless to say, mystagogy does not appear very often in the pantheon of contemporary theoretical concepts—nor for that matter does “the life of the spirit” that it underlies and supports. In order to approach the former, we might first consider the latter. The phrase “life of the spirit” signals Stiegler’s admiration for the work of Paul Valéry. In a 1939 essay entitled “La Liberté et l’Esprit,” (to which Stiegler regularly returns), Valéry offers a brief characterization of the entanglement of “human life” and “spirit”: Intellectual life’s creation and organized existence find themselves in the most complex, but strictest and most certain, relation with life as such, with human life. No one has ever explained how we make sense (à quoi nous rimions), we humans, with our strangeness 1. The OED gives the following etymology: “Classical Latin mystērium secret, (plural) secret rites, in post-classical Latin also mystical or religious truth (Vetus Latina), (plural) Christian rites (late 2nd cent. in Tertullian), the Eucharist, the elements used in the Eucharist (4th cent.) < ancient Greek μυστήριον mystery, secret, (plural) secret rites, implements used in such rites, in Hellenistic Greek also secret revealed by God, mystical truth, Christian rite, sacrament, in Byzantine Greek also the elements used in the Eucharist (4th cent.), probably (compare also μύστης mystes n.) < the base of μύειν to close (the lips or eyes), probably of imitative srcin + -τήριον, suffix forming nouns” (Oxford English Dictionary online, s.v. “mystery”).


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Cohen / Dare to Care 151

(bizarrerie) which is spirit (esprit ). This spirit is a power in us that has engaged us in an extraordinary adventure; our species has been estranged from (s’est eloignée) all its initial and normal conditions of life. We have invented a world for our spirit—and would like to live in this world. The spirit wants to live in its oeuvre. (Valéry 1945: 194) The “extraordinary adventure” that constitutes human life—or “notin human” life as Stiegler prefers²—arises out of and diverges from the “initial and normal conditions of life.” Our extraordinariness as spirit (which Valéry also calls our “bizarrerie”) estranges us from the ordinary life to which we must nevertheless maintain “the strictest and most certain relation.” To live a life of the spirit, then, is both to live and to put oneself at a distance from “life as such.” Combining the rhetorics of Gilbert Simondon and André Leroi-Gourhan (both of whom Stiegler embraces as precursors), we might translate Valéry’s text by saying: the life of the spirit emerges from a transductive relation between life/spirit (i.e., it emerges from a preceding complex not governed by the law of noncontradiction in which life and spirit do not yet oppose and therefore suppose each other) that only appears in the course of hominization, when exteriorization through technology opens the possibility for interiorizing an individuation that is at once psychic and collective. Indeed, as Stiegler underscores, “The ‘and’ of this expression (‘psychic and collective’) can then perhaps be understood as that which designates the spirit” (Stiegler 2014b). If the life of the spirit evokes a transductive relation, life/spirit, which in turn provokes the transduction then perhapsofthe tery to which mystagogy conductspsychic/collective, us bespeaks the inextricability themysvery terms that such transduction makes appear. Perhaps it gestures toward that which, by exceeding it, allows this appearance to appear as such in the first place. Simondon suggests as much when he defines “spirituality” as the meaning (signification ) of the relation between the individuated being and the collective and thus, as a consequence, also the foundation of this relation, that is to say the fact that the individuated being is not entirely individuated but still contains a certain charge 2. In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations(2010), Stiegler explains this formulation: “The noetic mind, the one capable of taking spiritual action ‘intermittently,’ and in this sense profanely, thus becoming diachronic and individuating, is less ‘human’ (and as a result too human) than non-inhuman . We, because we are pharmacological, are less human than not-inhuman , always a little too human in always being a little too close to taking ourselves for gods” (170).


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of non-individuated reality, pre-individual, and preserves it, respects it, and lives with the consciousness of its existence, instead of being shut up in a substantial individuality, a false aseity. It is the respect for this relation of the individual and the pre-individual that is spirituality. (Simondon 1989: 105–6) Spirituality, according to Simondon, values the entangled relation of individual/pre-individual and psychic/collective. This value has nothing to do with what we know—or can know—but concerns what we appreciate, what we respect, what we admire, and, for Stiegler, what we desire.³ In other words, the entanglement that gives rise to the life of the spirit as psychic and collective individuation, as not in-human life, has meaning even if we do not know what that meaning might be. Moreover, even if it exceeds our ability to know its significance as spirit, as spirituality, we can “live with the consciousness of its existence” (i.e., we can sense it and make sense of it). The excessiveness of spirit with respect to knowledge turns us toward mystery insofar as mystery reveals to us—even as it conceals from us—an otherness that persists within the sameness that we take to be our own. As Stiegler puts it, “[Mystery] reveals next to existence . . . something other than the plane of existence—if one believes in it” (Stiegler, “Proletarianization,” 9). Conversely, he declares, “The cognitive is never mysterious” (10). The work of mystagogy entails creating contexts, milieus, practices, gestures, rituals, and technologies so that that which confounds our cognition does not stop our thinking. Mystagogy cultivates that which helps us to contain exceed understanding and thereby enables us to those expandsurprises or even that “raise” it.⁴ In our other words, mystagogy encourages us to appreciate that which exceeds our comprehension: “suddenly [I] find myself in a state of levitation—and in a way that is unexpected and that I cannot take in (in-compréhensible): I am passing on to the other plane— a plane where an over-taking (sur-préhension ), a being over-taken, overcomes or surpasses all com-prehension (com-préhension )” (14). Alas, surprise in and of itself does not elevate; it can just as easily induce a state of 3. Desire, for Stiegler, refers to the infinitization of the object of desire, and as such opens the plane of consistence. For a brief explanation, see Stiegler 2014b. 4. Stiegler frequently uses tropes of raising—and lowering—to designate the movement from the plane of subsistence, to the plane of existence, to the plane of consistence, or, following Aristotle, from the vegetative, to the sensitive, to the noetic. I have some hesitation about the ways that the verticality of the metaphor suggests moving between a “lower” and a “higher” plane, which seems to rub up against Stiegler’s notion that all these terms are immanent.


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shock. Surprise can paralyze. In order for a surprise that exceeds our comprehension to stretch us beyond what we have heretofore accepted as our limits or our necessities, rather than stunning us into passivity or indifference, we need to take care of it and of ourselves at the same time. Through mystagogy, therefore to take that careisofinourselves the presencewe of must mystery, and todiscover care for how the mystery the life of in the spirit, such that the mystery that exceeds our comprehension does not destroy our consistence, and instead helps us to create ourselves anew— psychically and collectively. Since the way of caring for the life of the spirit that mystagogy introduces overcomes or surpasses comprehension, it cannot unfold by way of teaching. Insofar as teaching entails the communication of knowledge, the conveyance of skill, the “endowing [of] any subject whomsoever with a series of abilities defined in advance” (in Michel Foucault’s definition [2005: 407]), it requires a demonstrative practice, a step-wise instruction that, if not always apodictic, at least enables an inductive repetition, a learned iteration, of the teaching process by the student.⁵ Hence, teaching is “‘exoteric’ by nature” (Stiegler 2010: 108). Mystagogy, on the other hand, proceeds by way of initiation; it cannot be known, only experienced. The test or the proof of mystagogy is (in) its experience. It can be lived but not known. As its etymology suggests, mystagogy directs us toward the mystery: it leads, it drives, it conducts (from the Greek ἀγωγός). More than teaching us a determinate something, its iterations always leave room for differa nce. Even when mystagogy leads us toward mystery, it cannot make us think. Thus, the conduct that mystagogy proposes acts upon our actions to induce us to act carefully toward and with mystery.⁶ In caring for the life of the spirit, mystagogy addresses itself to the spirit in life as lived experience, as immanence, as “a life” (to recruit Deleuze’s [2001] notion). In promoting a careful conduct, mystagogy partakes of the practices that Foucault describes as “government” (i.e., as “a set of actions upon 5. “Understanding must be teachable, or else it is not understanding. And teaching can only transmit understanding—even if it is often accompanied by an education and in that assumes the transmission of life knowledge. This is where understanding breaks with mystagogy: rational knowledge is no longer the fruits of an initiation but an instruction” (Stiegler 2010: 108). 6. Indeed, as the OED informs us, “classical Latin āct -, past participial stem of agere to drive, to come, go, to cause to move, to push, to set in motion, stir up, to emit, to make, construct, produce, to lead, bring,” shares “the same Indo-European base as ancient Greek ἄγειν to lead, bring, drive, Sanskrit aj - to drive” (Oxford English Dictionary online, s.v. “act”).


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other actions” [Foucault 1982: 220]). Although Foucault does not mention mystagogy per se, he does consider its close cousin, “psychagogy,” or “the government of souls” (Foucault 2010: 306).⁷ Like mystagogy, psychagogy has a venerable lineage, following from Empedoclean if not Pythagorean contexts. Psychagogy, or the conduct of souls,with concerns itself what with the philosophical task of transforming the subject, modulating subject is, not what it knows: “we can, I think call ‘psychagogical’ the transmission of a truth whose function is not to endow any subject whomsoever with abilities, etcetera, but whose function is to modify the mode of being of the subject to whom we address ourselves” (Foucault 2005: 407). Moreover, Foucault avers, psychagogy involves “the immediate, direct effect which is brought about not just on the soul of the person to whom the discourse is addressed, but also of the person giving the discourse” (Foucault 2010: 335). Psychagogy (in contrast to its confrere, pedagogy) constitutes a distinct mode of interaction that works on both the subject to whom a discourse addresses itself and on the subject giving the discourse itself. It provokes in the subject what Foucault elsewhere terms “the ‘rebound effect’ on himself of the truth he knows, and which passes through, permeates, and transfigures his being” (an effect which for Foucault characterizes “spirituality”) (Foucault 2005: 18).⁸ Psychagogy therefore does not convey knowledge or skill (tekhnē ) but constitutes a transformational relation, a transitional practice. Translating this Foucauldian notion into the Simondonian rhetoric that Stiegler prefers, we might say: the “internal resonance” that reverberates within the psychagogical experience modulates, changes, and sometimes elevates the individuations and transindividuations that take place within it.⁹ Foucault focuses his consideration of psychagogy through an interpretation of Plato’s Phaedrus , not coincidentally foregrounding the same section of the dialogue that supports Jacques Derrida’s famous reading of the pharmakon, on which Stiegler’s work, in turn, leans (Derrida 1981). However, Foucault offers a competing insight into the Platonic diremption The Her7. Foucault first introduces psychagogy explicitly in the previous year’s lectures, meneutics of the Subject (2005). On Foucault’s engagement with and as psychagogy, see Cohen 2014. 8. On the distinction between “philosophy” and “spirituality” and the modern privileging of the former over the latter in the wake of the “Cartesian moment,” see Foucault 2005 (14–18). 9. For examples of Simondon’s use of “internal resonance,” see Simondon 1989 (17, 67, 238).


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of rhetoric and philosophy. Instead of underscoring the undecidability of the pharmakon as remedy and poison, as Derrida does in his reading of Plato’s famous myth of Theuth, Foucault holds that the force of Plato’s discourse directs our attention to the disjunction between good and bad forms of truth telling (parrhesia ). For Foucault, theofPhaedrus does hence not disclose the necessarily pharmacological character writing—and the irreducible tension between anamnesis and hypomnesis that Stiegler assiduously foregrounds—but rather posits certain critical questions: “How can we tell good speech, written or oral, from bad? That is to say: What is the quality of speech itself? Is it written or spoken well or badly? How should a distinction be made? The division is not therefore between written and oral. How is the division made between good or bad speaking or writing?” (Foucault 2010: 330; emphasis added). Eschewing the Derridian opposition oral/written, Foucault suggests that Plato’s concern lies with the discourse’s relation to the truth: “Discourse, the etumos art, the genuine art of speaking, will only be a true art on the condition that truth is a permanent function of the discourse.” However, this concern immediately provokes another question: “How can this necessary and continuous relationship of discourse to the truth be assured so that, in this perpetual relation to the truth, the speaker will possess and put to work the etumos tekhnē (the genuine tekhnē )?” Here Foucault suggests that Plato’s Socrates affirms that a good discourse (i.e., a non-Sophistic discourse) requires a psychogogy linked to the truth through the dialectic. In the Socratic lineage, Foucault argues, philosophy becomes philosophy through “the double requirement of a dialectic and a psychagogy, of a tekhnē dialektikē and a knowledge of psychagogy (psychagōgia)” (334). Thus, he concludes, “The tekhnē peculiar to true discourse is characterized by knowledge of the truth and practice of the soul, the fundamental, essential, inseparable connection of dialectic and psychagogy, and it is in being both a dialectician and a psychagogue that the philosopher will really be the parrhesiast” (336). What mystagogy and psychagogy have in common, insofar as they both involve actions upon other actions, is practice. Mystagogy and psychagogy must both be exercised or experienced in order to transform. In this regard, they both involve epimeleia, a concept familiar to both Stiegler and Foucault. In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Stiegler explains, “What the Greeks called epimeleia, self-care, [are] all either individual or collective techniques for channeling, and frequently for capturing attention. Such techniques resulted not only in the Enlightenment thinkers; they are also, and perhaps most frequently, the basis of mystagogic (if not


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of all obscurantist) practices and behaviors” (2010: 36). Moreover, such epimeleia lies at the heart of a conundrum that lives within philo-sophy— as the love of wisdom—precisely insofar as they serve as the counterpoint to philosophical dissemination through knowledge (gnosis ): “The predicament—the aporia—of philosophical teaching is, then, to the difference between the teaching of what would be philosophy andmark the object that can never be the telos of straightforward teaching (the simple interiorization of retentional operations), but that must become an experiment, indeed a way of life: an asceticism, a care, an epimeleia of a specific type (of which all Foucault’s techniques of the ‘self’ are instances)” (109). Alluding to what Foucault names the “paradox of Platonism,” or what Derrida terms “Western Metaphysics,” Stiegler locates a tension, an aporia, in the history of philosophy between the modes of propagation on which it depends. Stretched between apodictic demonstration, the “straightforward teaching (the simple interiorization of retentional operations),” and “experiment, indeed a way of life: an asceticism, a care, an epimeleia,” philosophy folds back upon itself.¹⁰ Its metaphysical destination is prefigured by the supposition that straightforward teaching can replace epimeleia and thus that knowledge can displace experience and care as philosophy’s proper domain.¹¹ The neglect of this philosophical pharmakon, its reduction to a knowledge practice tout court , follows from Plato’s rectification of philosophy as the exclusion of mystery. The only way through this impasse, 10. Stiegler continues: “But this impasse, which puts philosophy perpetually in default, at the instant it opposesbyitself mystagogy, becomes excessively mysterious (opening all kinds of reproach eventothe very best intentioned), as a predicament, is at its srcinit to a pharmakon : pharmacological being is srcinally mystagogic in that the pharmakon , by its very nature, endlessly returns to what Greek tragedy calls enigma . Enigma was for the Greeks a profane figure of mystery in a society in which divinities had withdrawn, and in which all the most elevated objects of attention had been desacralized (this is my thesis) through grammatization. Mystagogy is at the very core of nonrational pharmacology, of which magic is only the most common form (common to all preliterate societies)” (2010: 109–10). 11. In Hermeneutics , Foucault describes the “paradox of Platonism” as the tension between “knowledge” and “spirituality” to similar ends: “Platonism was the constant climate in which a movement of knowledge c( onnaissance) developed, a movement of pure knowledge without any condition of spirituality, precisely because the distinctive feature of Platonism is to show how the work of the self on itself, the care one must have for oneself if one wants access to the truth, consists in knowing oneself, that is to say in knowing the truth. To that extent, knowledge of the self and knowledge of the truth (the activity of knowledge, the movement and method of knowledge in general), as it were, reabsorbs the requirements of spirituality” (2005: 77).


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Stiegler implies, lies through the defiles of mystagogy, which require the kind of care for the life of the spirit that epimeleia provides. While Stiegler’s understanding of epimeleia and the work that it performs does not follow Foucault’s entirely (indeed, Taking Care offers a strong critique Foucault whichtoI Foucault. return below), Stiegler’s on the concept noofdoubt owestomuch Throughout thereliance last three years of his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault reflects on how epimeleia functioned in classical Greek and Hellenistic culture as practices or exercises of care: “Caring for someone, looking after a flock, taking care of one’s family, or, as is often found with regard to physicians caring for a patient, are all called ‘epimeleisthai,’ positive practices of care” (Foucault 2011: 110). These careful practices first come to the fore in Foucault’s The Hermeneutics of the Subject when he takes up the relation between two archaic Greek precepts: epimeleia heatou (care of the self) and gnōthi seauton (know yourself). Considering both of these within the penumbra of the tekhnē tou biou (literally, in the Greek, the art or the technique of life),

Foucault seeks to understand how in the history of the West the notion of self-knowledge came to dominate the practices of self-care, or, as he tellingly puts it, how there occurred a “forced takeover by the gnōthi seauton in the space opened up by the care of the self” (Foucault 2005: 68). This takeover, Foucault suggests, reaches its modern apotheosis in the “Cartesian moment” when the gnōthi seauton “played a major part in discrediting the principle of care of the self and in excluding it from the field of modern philosophical thought” (14). Following Foucault, we might say that epimeleia falls into arrears as a residual formation whose occlusion conceals the

(philosophical) limitations of knowledge practices. Foucault defines epimeleia heatou as simultaneously an “attitude towards the self, others, and the world” and as a “certain form of attention, of looking . . . a number of actions exercised on the self by the self, actions by which one changes, purifies, transforms, and transfigures oneself” (10–11). The concept derives from the sense of epimeleia as formative practices or exercises.¹² Furthermore, the practicality of epimeleia refers to

12. Foucault again: “This canonical and fundamental expression, ‘epimeleisthai heautou ’ (to take care of oneself, to be concerned about oneself, to care for the self) which . . . is found from Plato’s Alcibiades up to Gregory of Nyssa, has a meaning that must be stressed: epimeleisthai does not designate a mental attitude, a certain form of attention, a way of not forgetting something. Its etymology refers to a series of words such as meletan, meletē, meletai, etc. Meletan, often coupled and employed with the verbgumnazein, means to practice and train. Themeletai are exercises, gymnastics, and military


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their constant repetition as a process of bodily patterning or (in)forming.¹³ Hence, the care manifest through epimeleia heautou concerns those selfforming activities that unremittingly modulate the regulation and regularization of not in-human lives. As a careful act, epimeleia requires attention to the to plasticity existence, the capacity for psyche indiand soma stretchof(ashuman the Latin root oftoattention, tende ̆re,both to stretch, cates). Such movements of the self beyond the self while remaining self at the same time—which is after all what we do when we stretch—disclose the self’s capacity to exceed itself that constitutes the self as self. Indeed, this is what we must do in order to take care, since to “take care” also means to receive care—to take care into ourselves. In taking care of ourselves, we experience ourselves (and our “selves”) as both subjects and objects of care, as careful subjects and as cared-for objects. Self-care, in Foucault’s usage, proposes care as a way of attending that extends the self beyond itself. It does not recuperate or rectify what “the self” might have been heretofore; it opens the possibility for living otherwise, for incorporating what he will call in his last volume of lectures “an other life (vie autre)” (Foucault 2011: 184, 244).¹⁴ The epimeleia heautou incorporates practices of self-care and therefore denotes not just a therapeutics but moreover a transformation of the self, or even a transformation through which the self as such—as subject—forms itself anew (Foucault 2005: 447–48). On the surface, Stiegler seems to share Foucault’s interest in epiexercises, military training. Epimeleisthai refers to a form of vigilant, continuous, applied, meleregular, etcetera, activity much more than mental activity. . . . The series of words, tan, meletē, epimelesthai , epimeleia , etcetera, thus designates a series of practices” (2005: 84). Foucault briefly returns to the etymology of epimeleia in his last lectures, where he reports his conversation with Paul Veyne on the question. The conversation turns around the srcin of the Indo- European root mel - (as in melody) that at first Veyne rejects as an etymon but then reconsiders. As a result of this exchange, Foucault concludes: “There would be something like a musical secret, a secret of the musical appeal in this notion of care” (2011: 119). Extrapolating from this conjecture, we might perhaps link the notion of care supposed in epimeleia with Simondon’s notion of “internal resonance” which Stiegler invokes (cf. Simondon 1989: 17, 67, 238). 13. Victor Goldschmidt made a similar point about Plato’s dialogues, saying that they were more forming thanphrase informing (1947: 3). autrement 14. Foucault uses the “penser ,” “thinking otherwise,” in the preface to L’Usage des Plaisirs (1984) in order to convey his own sense of why his work constitutes a “philosophical exercise”: “The stakes [enjeu ] were to know to what degree the effort to think its own history could free thought from what it silently thinks and permit it to think otherwise [ penser autrement ]” (15).


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Cohen / Dare to Care 159 meleia, invoking Foucault’s use explicitly and repeatedly throughout Taking Care of Youth and the Generations: “The anamnesis through which phi-

losophy tests the need for a mind that understands how to transform itself through its understanding is thus a form of epimeleia and of attention revealedAsasFoucault taking care of what is not oneself, what later its be academic called an ‘object.’ shows, philosophy (and what has will become system as a body of disciplines) has forgotten that understanding itself is also and above all a system of care, an epimeleia ” (Stiegler 2010: 111). Moreover, he frames his own project using epimeleia as a critical articulation: My thesis is that it is a psychic, collective, technical, and scientific process of individuation forming a system of care through the materialization of various streams or flows, leading directly to today’s surrender to machines and to a short-circuiting of psychosocial transindividuation—of the generations as well as the social classes and territory: this grammatization has produced, and even more important, transformed into a hyperpharmacological archive. . . . A conjunction such as this can only exist as a group, despite its many internal tensions, through a common epimeleia. (152) Stiegler then goes on to express his strongest concurrence with Foucault’s focus on hypomnēmata in general and correspondence in particular (for example, in Seneca’s Letters to Lucillius ) as epimeleia, where they form a material basis (which Stiegler describes as “tertiary retentions”) for a practice and care of the self. Like Foucault, Stiegler regards these practices as conjoint formations of an “I” and a “we,” demonstrating that the care for the self always implies a care for the other and thereby constitutes psychic and collective individuation. In light of this shared insight, Stiegler affirms and recasts Foucault’s position in his own (Simondonian) idiom: “But what is most important is that this subjectivation, here strictly psychic, also presents itself as the individuation of a we, not just an I : through the I, as what one could understand and read, which was not mine and was thus preindividual, then being individuated and becoming transindividual, that is, we. In this process, the ego [moi ] becomes a self that is always already supraegoic, ‘spiritual’” (155). Yet, despite this affinity with Foucault’s position, Stiegler also finds fault with it: “In the end, Foucault does not ask the question of pharmacology—a question that is nonetheless essential to all therapeutics, all medicalization, and all questions of care and epimeleia: no medicine without


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pharmacopeia, which is perhaps, in the final analysis the true question of power” (125). Stiegler’s objection to Foucault seems to lie in the belief that Foucault fails to consider the pharmacological effects of collective epimeleia disseminated through and and other technologies subtending what Stiegler terms hypomnemata “the literate mind” more recently “the digital mind.” Since Stiegler takes great pains to foreground the generalization of writing in the Greek polis and of printing in early modern Europe, as well as of more recent analog and digital technologies, he not surprisingly believes Foucault fails to appreciate these technologies sufficiently. Thus, he suggests that Foucault’s interest in general grammar that appeared in the course of his meditations on life, labor, and language, in The Order of Things, does not encompass the more expansive sense of grammar, conveyed by Sylvain Auroux’s notion of “grammatization,” as making the (temporally) continuous discrete (Auroux 1993).¹⁵ As a result, Stiegler believes that Foucault tends to devalue the positive or therapeutic potential of the disciplinary practices that underlie and underwrite literacy, and education more generally. To make this claim, he returns to Foucault’s earlier texts, The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish, and reads them as limited and limiting: “But what Foucault completely neglects here is the role of the master/teacher who, through a discipline that is not subjugation but in tegration into transindividuation, builds circuits regulated by concepts, not normatives, forming a rational, intergenerational we, as mature attention accessible to the majority of students—though mandatory public education” (Stiegler 2010: 117). For Stiegler, Foucault’s emphasis on the effects of disciplinary practices as forms of subjectification fails to consider the ways that they also inculcate capabilities that (potentially) exceed such subjectification and thereby open new possibilities for individuation and transindividuation. Therefore, Stiegler claims that the “Foucauldian inattention” to “what, within the context of this standardization (and thanks to it), could be produced as extraordinary, as excess,” skews Foucault’s depictions toward disciplinary education that acts primarily in the service of normalization.¹⁶ 15. For a quick explanation of grammatization, which is one of Stiegler’s key concepts and on which he relies extensively, see Stigler 2014c. 16. A bit later Stiegler reiterates his critique: “But the fact that nowhere in Foucault does he question the possibility that what he describes, as he lays out the social consequences of grammatization, is a tendency of the pharmacological field opened up by technologies of power (and technologies of knowledge) in which the disciplinary fields, in Foucault’s


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While not an unfair characterization of Foucault’s project in Discipline and Punish (and similar to many other complaints that the book normalizes the subject’s enmeshment by power), Stiegler’s analysis nevertheless neglects Foucault’s emphasis on the “productivity” of power relations in the monoDiscipline and Punish graph that immediately follows , the not famous tory volume of the History of Sexuality . Moreover, it does seemintroducentirely clear why Stiegler pursues his line of criticism by moving backward in Foucault’s oeuvre to make his case, when Foucault’s subsequent work, especially the lectures at the Collège de France, substantially complicates the picture.¹⁷ If, instead of pursuing Foucault’s thought on what Stiegler denominates “the self and care in general” by returning to texts Foucault wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we follow the development of Foucault’s thought in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we discern a somewhat different

trajectory. In particular, if we consider the last lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France, The Courage of Truth, we find that far from neglecting the possibility that subjectification might entail a creative development of the self, Foucault proposed what he names “the aesthetics of existence” as this very possibility. Moving beyond his earlier readings of Plato’s Alcibiades as the locus classicus for the collapse of the care of the self into knowledge of the self (on which Stiegler’s interpretation of Foucault hinges), in these last lectures Foucault turns to the Laches as a counterpoint to the former concerning the question of education as care of the self. In the Alcibiades, as Foucault reads it, the dialogue addresses the form that the care of the self that a wealthy young man who aspires to a role of importance in the City should have. As Socrates enjoins Alcibiades to concern himself with his soul if he wishes to govern himself in order to govern others, Plato adumbrates what Foucault frames as “the future site of a metaphysical discourse, which will have to speak to man of his being and what in the way of ethics and rules of conduct follows from this ontological foundation of his sense (that is, as the control and subjection of individuals), would only be one pole faced with another pole: the field of disciplines structuring knowledge—and as its discursive relations based on techniques of the self—is not simply a bias but an incoherence within its own methodology and its results” (2010: 121). 17. In writing Taking Care of Youth and the Generations , Stiegler seems not to have consulted the lectures published as Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Government of the Self and Others , and The Courage of Truth. They do not appear in his bibliography, and his citations refer only to the earlier monographs and to the texts collected in Dits et écrits (Foucault 1994).


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being” (Foucault 2011: 160).¹⁸ In theLaches, however, Foucault discerns a different undertaking. Rather than pursuing care of the self as care of the soul, the Laches directly addresses the question of teaching as care: “The theme is: we must take care of young people, teaching them to take care of themselves. . As care the dialogue designated the object one must. .take of is not progresses, the soul, it iswhat life is (bios ), that is as to say the way of living. What constitutes the fundamental object of epimeleia is this modality, this practice of existence” (126–27). For Foucault, the Laches opens a second aspect of “philosophical activity, of philosophical practice in the West” beyond what the knowledge of the soul precipitates as an ontology of the self. It proposes “a philosophy as a test of life, of bios, which is the ethical material and object of an art of oneself” (127). The art of oneself, Foucault argues, does not follow from “the chain of rationality, as in technical teaching, nor [from] the soul’s ontological mode of being, but [from] the style of life, the way of living, the very form that one gives to life” (144). This “aesthetics of existence”—which Foucault elsewhere describes as “this elaboration of one’s own life as a personal work of art” (Foucault 1996: 451)—returns us to Stiegler’s description of (or prescription for?) a mystagogy of art with a new, and possibly surprising, perspective: The experience of art is the experience of a work that opens up onto such a plane [something other than the plane of existence], and that appears in this way to reveal this other plane. Every work of art has in ordinary—and the most ordithe of aworld revelation. . . -ordinary . It makesnext appear narystructure way in the the extra to this as coming out of this ordinary, but also, and at the same time, as something that can never be proven (prouvé): instead it can only be experienced (éprouvé). (Stiegler, “Proletarianization,” 9)

18. Foucault succinctly outlines his reading of the Alcibiades as follows: “[T]he Alcibiades , starting from the principle of the need to give an account of oneself, proceeds to the discovery and establishment of oneself as a reality ontologically distinct from the body. And this reality ontologically distinct from the body is explicitly designated as the soul (psukhē ). . . . This establishment of the psukhē, as the reality ontologically distinct from the body that has to be looked after, was correlative with a mode of knowledge of the self which had the form of the soul’s contemplation of itself and its recognition of its mode of being. . . . Thus, the establishment of oneself as a reality ontologically distinct from the body, in the form of the psukhē which possesses the possibility and ethical duty of contemplating itself, gives rise to a mode of truth-telling, of veridiction, the role and end of which is to lead the soul back to its mode of being and its world” (2011: 159–60).


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Stiegler’s notion of the work of art as a technical externalization that begets an interiority that is at once psychic and collective depends on his reading of Leroi-Gourhan. However, in order to understand how the work of art makes the extraordinary appear in the ordinary, we must reflect on what makes the not-inhuman ordinary “ordinary” and that would seem be the intermittently noetic, life in which it appears.¹⁹ Lifetocircumscribes the horizon of ordinariness from which something like the extraordinary can leap forth and thereby reveal not-inhuman life. It incorporates (incarnates?) an experience that testifies to the revelation that the work of art exposes. Hence, Foucault’s notion of a life as a work of art suggests another kind of mystagogical opportunity for self creation (i.e., another opportunity for surprise and revelation).²⁰ If we take bios “as an aesthetic object, as an object of aesthetic elaboration and perception: bios as a beautiful work” (Foucault 2011: 162), then we explicitly make psychic and collective individuation—the regard for which Simondon posited as spirituality—our locus of care and concern.²¹ For Foucault, the aesthetics of existence exposes within this life, this bios, the possibility for another life, “an other life.” Juxtaposing the “other life” to the “other world,” which Platonism affirms as the domain of the true life, Foucault traces a displacement immanent to life that makes it possible to live truly. Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic after him exemplify this possibility insofar as their way of life makes a caesura appear within ordinary life so that another possible life—an extraordinary life (?)—can emerge: “It could be said that with Platonism, and through Platonism, Greek philosophy since Socrates basically posed the question of the other world (l’autre monde). But, starting with Socrates, or from the Socratic model to which Cynicism referred, it also posed another question. Not the question of the other world but that of an other life (vie autre)” (245).²² The other life lives within this life; it is the same life 19. As noted above (n4), Stiegler repeatedly invokes Aristotle’s triad of vegetative, sensitive, and noetic souls and Aristotle’s observation that only the Gods are entirely noetic, whereas humans are only intermittently noetic. For an explication, see the section “The Law of Regression: Being Only Intermittently,” in Stiegler’sThe Decadence of Industrial Democracies (2011: 132–37). 20. Moreover, Foucault’s extension of aesthetics to a “style of life” more directly addresses the problems of consumerist lifestyles and the globalization of the “American way of life” that so often worries Stiegler. 21. Foucault also sees this as a spiritual possibility, insofar as he takes spirituality to involve “the subject’s attainment of a certain mode of being and the transformations that the subject must carry out on itself to attain this mode of being” (1996: 443). 22. Pierre Hadot makes a similar point about Socrates as the one who makes the other—


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reiterated with a difference. The other life divulges the uncommon within the common by taking the common to its limit. At the limit of ordinary life lives the extraordinary life, the life of the spirit that we approach only by caring about it: [T]he care of the self does not lead to the question of what this being I must care for is in its reality and truth, but to the question of what this care must be and what a life must be that claims to care about the self. And what this sets off is not a movement towards the other world, but the questioning of what, in relation to all other forms of life, precisely that form of life which takes care of itself must and can be in truth. (246) The non-metaphysical question of care, then, reframes the way the self-difference of the self appears as such. Unfolding from an ordinary, immanent, and vital locus of concern, self-difference does not bifurcate into psukhē/soma, body/mind, life/death. Instead, self-difference, “that is to say, [what] individuates me, distinguishes me, differentiates me, . . . in order to permit me to discern in myself—to distinguish—alterity, difference [differa nce?], . . . the future” (as Stiegler affirms in the epigraph to this essay), appears as I take care of myself.²³ To take care of myself, I must appreciate within myself the possibility that I am different from myself and that from this differa nce a potential for an other life within this life arises. Caring for the life of the spirit that is oneself, that is “the self,” means both attending to and desiring it. In What Makes Life Worth Living, Stiegler writes of the necessity for “inventing a way of life that constitutes a new way of taking care of the world, a new way of paying attention to it, through the invention of therapeutics” (2013: 88). While Stiegler’s project locates this careful practice at the level of “noopolitics,” or “industrial technologies of the spirit,” he does not, to my knowledge, refer to mystagogy at this level of generality. Perhaps this is because mystery is not subject to grammatization, to repetition by being made discrete, since mystery unveils the paradoxical entanglement of preindividual/individual or, to invoke Donald Winnicott’s text, which Stiegler places at the center of What Makes Life Worth the extraordinary—appear within the ordinary life: “Thus, Socrates is simultaneously in the world and outside it. He transcends both people and things by his moral demands and the engagement they require; yet he is involved with people and with things because the only true philosophy lies in the everyday” (2002: 38). 23. I insert “differa nce,” since the audiorecording from which this is transcribed allows for both possibilities.


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Cohen / Dare to Care 165 Living ,

of “continuous/contiguous.”²⁴ In order to think mystagogy as what, following Winnicott, we might consider as a “transformational practice,” we might need to expand Stiegler’s pharmacological ambit to foreground the life that lives a careful life a bit more clearly. While Stiegler professes a “generalpolitical, organology” that addresses biological, technological, psychological, economic, and socialthe simultaneously, his attention rarely focuses on lived experience as the context within which any organology necessarily transpires. Instead, he privileges the technological aspects of organology and often relegates vitality to subsistence as distinguished from the play between existence and consistence that for him define the “non in-human” per se. However, if we supplement Stiegler’s unnecessarily limited reading of Foucault with one that includes Foucault’s later works and embrace the “aesthetic of existence” as that which can make bios a work of art, an oeuvre in which the spirit lives (to paraphrase Valéry), then perhaps the vitality of art as a mystagogical initiation can reveal to us new ways of taking care. Not surprisingly, both Stiegler and Foucault ask us to rethink Kant’s motto for the Enlightenment, Sapere Aude, Dare to Know. Perhaps between mystagogy and the aesthetics of the existence we can find a new motto: Curare Aude, Dare to Care. References

Auroux, Sylvain. 1993. La Révolution technologique de la grammatization. Liège: Mardaga. Cohen, Ed. 2014. “Live Thinking, or, The Psychagogy of Michel Foucault.”Differences 25, no. 2: 1–25. Deleuze, Gilles. 2001. “Immanence: A Life.” InPure Immanence: Essays on a Life, translated by Anne Boyman, 25–34. New York: Zone. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination , translated by Barbara Johnson, 61–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 208–26. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1984. Preface to L’Usage des Plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard. . 1994. Dits et écrits. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard. 24. In What Makes Life Worth Living (2013), Stiegler reads closely Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (1971) in order to consider technology in light of Winnicott’s notion of the “transitional object.”


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166 boundary 2 / February 2017 . 1996. “An Aesthetics of Existence.” InFoucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961–1984, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 150–54. New York: Semiotext(e). . 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. . 2010. The Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983 . Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. . 2011. The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984 . Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Goldschmidt, Victor. 1947. Les Dialogues de platon: Structure et méthode dialectique . Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hadot, Pierre. 2002. What Is Ancient Philosophy? Translated by Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1998. “Plato’s Doctrine of the Truth.” InPathmarks, edited by William McNeill, 155–182. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simondon, Gilbert. 1989. L’individuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier. Care of Youth and the Generations Stiegler,Stephen Bernard.Barker. 2010. Taking Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . Translated by . 2011. The Decadence of Industrial Democracies . Translated by Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold. London: Polity. . 2013. What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology. Translated by Daniel Ross. London: Polity. . 2014a. Cours de Epineuil-de-Fleuriel. Pharmakon.fr, January 4 (video). pharmakon.fr/wordpress/annee-20132014-cours-n%C2%B03-4-janvier-2014/.

. 2014b. “Esprit,” Glossaire de Ars Industrialis. Accessed August 11, 2016. arsindustrialis.org/vocabulaire-esprit. . 2014c. Vocabulaire, Ars Industrialis. Accessed August 11, 2016. arsindustrialis.org/vocabulaire. Valéry, Paul. 1945. “La Liberté de l’Esprit.” InRegards sur le Monde Actuel, 174–97. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Winnicott, Donald W. 1971.Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.


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Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire?

Mark B. N. Hansen

I have been a reader of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s work since shortly after the publication, in 1998, of the English translation of his first major philosophical text, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998). As I have recounted elsewhere, my discovery of Stiegler’s work had a profound impact on me, opening an opportunity for me to suture my training in Continental philosophy and deconstruction with my newer interests in media art and culture (Hansen 2012). With his conviction that Derridean “différance” required technical specification, as well as his attention to the great analog recording technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Stiegler’s work forged a concrete connection between the phenomenological and postphenomenological tradition and the “media science” of German critic Friedrich Kittler and his disciples. And, in a more general sense, Stiegler’s impassioned plea for a reversal of Western philosophy’s repression of technics made of of thishow tradition relevant, indeed excitingly so,the for resources the analysis digital immediately media was then (and is still) revolutionizing the ways we live, work, think, and sense. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

boundary 2 44 1 (2017) DOI 10.1215/01903659-3725929 © 2017 by Duke University Press


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The focus of my initial interest in Stiegler’s work was his inspired refunctionalization of the great Husserlian project of developing a phenomenology of time consciousness, and specifically his updated theorization of the temporal object as a crucial concept for understanding the impact of technical cultureof on human experience. supplementing Edmund Husserl’s analysis time consciousness withBy a third, and properly technical form of memory—what Stiegler dubbed “tertiary retention” (meaning, essentially, recorded memories, e.g., films, sound recordings, photographs, etc.)—and by insisting on the “foundational role” of tertiary retention for the entire Husserlian account of time consciousness, Stiegler’s work introduced technics into the very heart of the intimate operation of time consciousness. In this way, Stiegler transformed the Husserlian temporal object from a mental object operating within the immanent domain of time consciousness into a properly technical object existing in the objective world, and thus outside time consciousness, but nonetheless central to—indeed, contaminating of—the very intimate core of subjectivity that is time consciousness. The fundamental payoff of Stiegler’s contamination of time consciousness and his correlative objectification of the temporal object is the idea that technical recording lays bare the structure of time consciousness and, indeed, that it is only in the era of technical recording that we can properly excavate the structure of time consciousness. Technical recording makes it possible for the same temporal object (be it a music recording, a film, or a digital video) to be experienced more than one time, which in turn makes it possible for time consciousness to compare its distinct experiences of the same temporal object and to assess how its memory (Husserl’s “recollection,” which Stiegler calls “secondary retention”) of its first experience (“primary retention”) selectively impacts its second experience (“primary retention”), and so on, with each new experience of the same temporal object. By demonstrating in this way that time consciousness depends on its interactions with technical temporal objects—or more precisely, that it includes technical memories as crucial elements of its very operationality—Stiegler develops the theoretical basis for a broad understanding of technics as the very condition for culture. This broad understanding has remained the focus of Stiegler’s work as it has progressed from its initial concern with the excavation and critique of the philosophical repression of technics (primarily in the three published volumes of Technics and Time) to a focus on the critique of the libidinal economy of contemporary capitalism (Symbolic Misery series, Disbelief and Discredit series) and, increasingly, an engaged commitment to devel-


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oping the theoretical and practical resources for a “new critique of political economy” along with the correlative creation of a “new spirit” of economic life, if not indeed of capitalism itself (For a New Critique of Political Economy, Reenchantment of the World ).¹ all of Stiegler’s various the focus the humanThroughout and the predicament of human life engagements, remains paramount. Thison focus is, at least in part, the product of Stiegler’s understanding of the correlation between technics and culture: as he develops it in the first volume of Technics and Time, appropriately subtitled The Fault of Epimetheus, the conjunction of the human with the technical is accidental, but is nonetheless—or indeed, is as such—species-defining. Stiegler deploys the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus to make this point: focusing on Epimetheus’s “fault,” his forgetting to reserve some defining characteristic for human beings in his allotment of powers to the mortal creatures, Stiegler emphasizes how human skills in the arts and in using fire, skills in the area of technē given to humans by Prometheus’s theft, are correlated with humans’ status as forgotten, incomplete beings. Human beings are srcinarily lacking an srcin or essence. By emphasizing the Epimethean side of the myth, Stiegler thus underscores the correlation with technics as the vehicle for humans to become human: humans are constituted contingently through their species-defining coupling with technics. As a consequence of their essential default, humans evolve, they become human, both through genetic inheritance and through the transmission of culture. Stiegler dubs this latter form of evolution “epiphylogenesis,” meaning the evolution of the living by means other than life. The Technics and Time project as a whole, and much of Stiegler ’s subsequent work, can be understood as a working-through of this fundamental insight: for if humans evolve through the transmission of culture and if this transmission is dependent on technics, then it follows that technics is, as Stiegler puts it, “the condition of culture” (2004b: 59). At the same time as it comprises what, in my opinion, is most fruitful and urgent about Stiegler’s philosophy, the way Stiegler theorizes this 1. “I believe that it is absolutely possible to say that the consumerist industrial model is absolutely exhausted and that consumerist desire is exhausted: that it is possible to bring about a new model. I believe this completely. It is developing in all sorts of frameworks at this moment and I work not only with free software but also with farmers, with energy scientists of all kinds, with business, etc., and I think that there is something that is truly being re-constituted that itself is in the process of creating a new spirit—perhaps not of capitalism—but in any case of the economy and of economic activity, capitalist or not” (Stiegler 2012: 184).


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fundamental correlation of human becoming with technics commits him to a certain anthropocentrism in his account of technics that, I will suggest, compromises his ability to theorize the becoming-environmental of the human currently being wrought by ubiquitous sensing technologies. In an account published elsewhere, I have made a related argument about Stiegler’s fundamental philosophical commitment to Husserl’s account of time consciousness and, specifically, his decision to theorize the technical contamination of the latter exclusively in terms of memory, which is to say, in the form of a content that could have been lived (even if it was not in fact lived) by human consciousness (Hansen 2012). I won’t repeat this argument here or say much more about the Technics and Time project but will instead turn to Stiegler’s theorization of “general organology” and “libidinal economy” in the two series (Symbolic Misery, Disbelief and Discredit ) from the mid-2000s. Before I do that, however, let me repeat my view of the crucial contribution Stiegler’s perspective makes for contemporary media theory and the political economy of a massively mediated world: in contrast to recent trends (including various strands of media theory, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology) that have stressed the operation of nonhuman actors with little concern for how they are deeply imbricated with humans (and indeed, in most cases, with no small amount of glee at their alleged autonomy), Stiegler’s approach begins with the idea that technical media are “ab-srcinally” correlated with the human, that their operation both conditions human becoming and culture and poses dangers to humans first and foremost. For Stiegler, in short, it makes little sense to address media and technics without simultaneously addressing the human, and on this fundamental point I wholeheartedly agree. What I shall be questioning as I excavate Stiegler’s post- Technics and Time writings is thus not whether his basic approach is correct, promising, or indeed imperative but rather whether the terms on which he theorizes the human-technics coupling are adequate for engaging with the contemporary operation of technics. My excavation will focus in particular on the concept and operation of desire, which comes to the fore in Stiegler’s writings from the mid-2000s (the two series mentioned above), as (together with memory) the fundamental characteristic of human becoming. As we explore the concept/operation of desire and the theorization of technics in terms of the libidinal economy that it undergirds, the fundamental issue will be the following: Does the endorsement of desire and libidinal economy provide a viable remedy for what Stiegler has astutely diagnosed as


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the capture of available brain time? Or is it rather more of a throwback to a moment of cultural history (and of the theorization of culture) that has now been superseded, in large part, because of technical advance?

Technics and Technology The writings of the mid-2000s, which for purposes of convenience I shall refer to as “Phase 2” of Stiegler’s career, bring the resources of his philosophical deconstruction of philosophy’s repression of technics to bear on the contemporary situation, both globally and in Europe in particular. In these writings, Stiegler addresses what he calls the technological epoch of technics, often by way of topical reference to current events. While it resembles Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the technological epoch of Being, Stiegler’s conceptualization inverts the tenor of Heidegger’s famous postulation that “the essence of technology is nothing technological” (Heidegger 1977: 35): for Stiegler, technology is through and through technical in the sense that it is a particular epoch in the history of the human-technics coupling. While culture is conditioned by technics, as we observed above, the modern epoch of technics is technical in a more precise sense—it is the technical epoch of technology: One must carefully distinguish technics as a milieu of epiphylogenetic memory in general from what must be called mnemotechnics in the proper sense. Man is a cultural being precisely to the extent that he by is also essentially a technical being: is because he is surrounded this third technical memory that he itcan accumulate the intergenerational experience often called culture; and it is also why it is absurd to oppose technics to culture: technics is the condition of culture insofar as it permits transmission. By contrast, there is an epoch of technics, called technology ; it is our epoch, when culture enters into crisis, precisely because it becomes industrial and, as such, finds itself submitted to imperatives of market calculation. (Stiegler 2004b: 59–60) While Stiegler’s analysis of the epoch of technology is rooted in his analysis of technics as epiphylogenetic memory, it focuses on mnemotechnics, and, more precisely, on mnemotechnologies, meaning technologies specifically intended to exteriorize human memory. (To illustrate the specificity of mnemotechnics/ mnemotechnology, Stiegler compares the flint tool of the Neolithic with the recording technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth


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centuries: although the former is not designed as a storage mechanism, it materializes cultural knowledge in a form that can be passed on; the latter, by contrast, are designed precisely to store and transmit human memory.) Stiegler’s analysis of mnemotechnics/mnemotechnology, for instance in the of first chapter of Symbolic his Misery Volume 1, draws on but earlier account tertiary memory as the basis for, time consciousness, he moves it in a slightly different direction. The earlier account culminated, in Technics and Time, 3 , with a criticism of the Kantian schematism that forms the basis for Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s blistering indictment of the culture industry; Stiegler’s focus there was on the hyperindustrialization of consciousness wrought by contemporary media industries. In his more recent writings, by contrast, Stiegler focuses on the proliferation of “symbolic misery” that results from the “proletarianization” of the consumer; here it is not simply temporal disaffection but symbolic destitution that becomes the problem. This difference marks a shift in emphasis that is not without significance for Stiegler’s recent turn to various forms of political engagement: in the writing from Phase 2, Stiegler accords the subject a depth and complexity, albeit largely as the subject of proletarianization, that was almost wholly absent in the earlier work. Thus, in the place of the purely passive subject of the culture industry’s schematism, which submitted countless indistinct consciousnesses to the same hypersynchronization, Stiegler now conceptualizes the subject as suffering a destitution of its symbolic dimension and, on the flip side, as holding the potential to restore this dimension, or at least to participate in such restoration. This shift is entirely fitting— and I would add, quite fruitful—given Stiegler’s career-long commitment to affirming the ab-srcinal operation of technics in conditioning human becoming and culture. Not only does this commitment differentiate Stiegler’s position from that of Adorno and Horkheimer (since technics, for Stiegler, does not— cannot—dehumanize the human), but it also makes clear that whatever solution might be found for the symbolic destitution Stiegler discovers in contemporary mnemotechnological culture cannot be a solution that simply turns against or away from technics. Rather, any viable solution must seek to deploy technics (that is, the mnemotechnologies of our technological epoch) differently, toward alternate ends. This insight provides the core of Stiegler’s conceptualization of the pharmakon and his development of a pharmacology of technics, the mantra of which is that only mnemotechnologies can solve the woes they themselves have wrought.


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Stiegler defines symbolic misery as “the loss of individuation that results from the loss of participation in the production of symbols ” (2004a: 33). In an analysis that exemplifies the just- mentioned shift in his treatment of the subject, Stiegler attributes this loss of individuation to the asymmetry introduced by capitalism in the age of analog technologies. In contrast to textual technologies that facilitate therecording “reversibility of the positions of reader and writer” and promote “communitization [communautisation ],” analog mnemotechnologies drive a wedge between producer and consumer: “The sudden asymmetry introduced by analog mnemotechnologies breaks this horizon of literal tertiary retentions that carry the promise of a communitization by substituting for the isonomy among citizens (their equality before the law, the juridical and political name for the said communitization) an inequality between producers and consumers that stems from the new division of labor and of social roles enacted by the deployment of machinism. This symbolic inequality is at least as serious as the economic inequality that it complements: it rips individuals away from their time, which is to say, from themselves” (Stiegler 2004b: 90). Stiegler’s analysis of this inequality marks his scaled-up commitment to the project of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, whose account of individuation at a host of levels—biological, psychic, collective, and technical—forms the theoretical basis for Phase 2 of Stiegler’s diagnosis of the coevolution of the human and technics in the industrial, which is to say, mnemotechnological, age.² Together with the Freudian account of libidinal economy (of which more below), Simondon’s complex notion of individuation comes to displace (though only partially, as we’ll see) the Husserlian account of time consciousness as the philosophical investment central to this second phase of Stiegler’s career trajectory. Whereas Husserl’s account correlates with a passive subject suffering from industrial hypersynchronization, Simondon’s account offers a comprehensive excavation of the always ongoing process of individuation that, once correlated with its technical condition (what Stiegler will call “technical individuation”), furnishes a rich ground on which to theorize the phenomenon of symbolic misery. 2. It should be noted that Simondon figures prominently in Technics and Time, 1, where Stiegler develops the concept of epiphylogenesis, the notion of the ab-srcinarity of the human, and the coupling of human becoming and technics. The scaling up I am speaking about here marks the introduction of Simondon’s interpretation of the Industrial Revolution into Stiegler’s work and (as we shall see) Stiegler’s expansion of Simondon’s individuation into a “general organology.”


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The proximate focus of Stiegler’s scaled-up commitment to Simondon is the latter’s analysis of “proletarianization.” In his On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon demonstrates how industrialization—the advent of the machine tool—leads to a loss of individuation on the part industrial worker: as the latter increasingly removed from of thethe process of manufacture and relegated to the becomes role of supervising machines, the value of skill is diminished along with the capacity to differentiate skilled work from unskilled work. What results is a general “proletarianization” of the worker. In his effort to update Simondon’s account for an analysis of mnemotechnological capitalism, Stiegler substitutes the consumer for the worker, and argues that the asymmetry between producer and consumer leads to a general “proletarianization” of the consumer: Simondon demonstrated that the appearance of the machine tool provoked what he called a loss of individuation of the worker, who was deprived of his knowledge and reduced to the condition of pure servant of the machine. Insofar as it exteriorized this knowledge, the machine becomes the “technical individual” itself, in the place of the worker. . . . With analog technologies of temporal objects, a new loss of individuation is produced: a loss that deprives consciousnesses of their diachronicity, which is to say, of their singularity. (90– 91) Stiegler’s updating of Simondon’s account centers on the new loss of individuation that results in the proletarianization of consciousness itself in the era of mnemotechnologies. The vehicle for this proletarianization is grammatization, or, more precisely, “digital grammatization,” which functions to transform embodied gestures into discrete operations and, ultimately, into “categorical attractors” (Stiegler 2004a: 139). It should be noted that Stiegler’s conceptualization of grammatization, itself beholden to Jacques Derrida’s work as well as to the work of Sylvain Auroux, first emerges in the Technics and Time project as a way of understanding the specificity of tertiary memory. In its conjunction with the proletarianization of the consumer, grammatization continues to play this role but in a slightly different, expanded context: it now explains how the process of psychic and collective individuation gets interrupted or short-circuited by the standardization of the preindividual milieu. By compromising the source for the openness of individuation, the grammatization of the preindividual domain occasions a reduction of “singularization into particularization ”: the individual’s constitutive diachronicity and excess over itself (excess of its individuation as process over its


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achieved individual state at any moment) get transformed into a constitution of the individual as a set of attributes. In the process, individuation is effectively reduced to user profiling. More significant than the grim diagnosis this account shares—or seems to share—with the earlier analysis of the industrialization of time consciousness is the new context in which grammatization now operates—as a “standardization of the modes of access to the preindividual milieu that precedes and conditions psychic and collective individuation insofar as they are two faces of one and the same process” (139). This account draws on Stiegler’s earlier reading of the Simondonian preindividual as the domain of tertiary memory, which is to say, of the sedimented discretizations of experience that are preserved technically and thereby available for future adoption (Stiegler 1993). But by linking the preindividual specifically to digital grammatization, Stiegler now seems to position the preindividual qua repository of tertiary memory in an entirely negative light: the digital grammatization of all the movements of individuation destroys the potential of the preindividual (i.e., tertiary memory) to support singularization, which is to say, authentic individuation. The effort to rediscover possibilities for restoring singularization will come to occupy Stiegler’s attention from Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, onward. What is central to such efforts is already present, albeit only implicitly, in the treatment of Simondon in Symbolic Misery, 1. For at the same time that he denounces the grammatization of the preindividual, Stiegler criticizes Simondon precisely for having failed to correlate his account of psychic and collective individuation with his account of technical concretization. What Simondon thereby overlooks is how the technical system—what Stiegler will develop as a third form of individuation—is inseparable from the psychic and collective individuation with which it forms a single complex. What this means is that the purely negative picture of digital grammatization cannot be understood as an operation that exclusively concerns the preindividual domain of tertiary memory; grammatization is not simply technical but comprises a perversion of the entire complex of individuation, a complex encompassing all three strands of psychic, collective, and technical individuation. This development will prove to be crucial, as we shall see shortly, for it means that grammatization is always a function of the entire organological system, which becomes increasingly governed by social organization. Thus, rather than impacting individuation in a topdown fashion, as a simple force of domination, grammatization is part of its operation and, as such, always potentially modifiable.


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That is why Stiegler speaks, in the passage just cited, of the standardization of the modes of access to the preindividual: “The loss of individuation today is a stage of grammatization where the three indi-

viduations—psychic, collective and techno-machinic—generalize the forto performative These arelevel, effects malization of calculation of (non)sense that affect, leading consciousnesses at theeffects. most profound in their most intimate affects—as retentional/protentional aggregates that are unconscious, which is to say, engraved entés [ ] on their pulsional depths such that it constitutes the most profound preindividual reality of transindividuation” (2004a: 142). In attempting to parse this complex and somewhat vague passage, we must emphasize two interrelated elements. First, the passage, and the analysis it culminates, marks a shift in the locus of the capture of the time of consciousness from the philosophical domain of time consciousness to the psychoanalytic terrain of the unconscious. This shift marks a significant development in Stiegler’s project and is the ultimate source, as we shall see, for the critique and recuperation of political economy that comprises Stiegler’s most recent theoretical investment. Second, the direct correlation of this shift with the triple-stranded complex of individuation (psychic, collective, and techno-machinic) anticipates the “general organology” that Stiegler will develop, in Symbolic Misery, 2, in part at least as a remedy to the very impasse with which his analysis of grammatization leaves him. In order to discover a way around this impasse—a way to overcome what he will call “stereotypical secondary retentions” that are rooted in grammatological standardization and that operate as a repetition compulsion—Stiegler will be led to embed the triple-stranded individuation complex in a larger complex rooted in biological individuation. Such an embedding comprises the core of Stiegler’s recuperation of the Freudian thematic of libidinal economy. Both this recuperation and Stiegler’s increasing emphasis on the pharmacology of attention are responses to the impasse in which he finds himself on account of his analysis of symbolic misery as the product of digital grammatization. Even if he already understands grammatization to be an operation affecting all three strands of individuation (as just mentioned), at this point Stiegler lacks any means to do for digital grammatization what he does, in Technics and Time, 2, for orthographic grammatization: namely, construe it as the technical condition for the singularization of the reader. To get out of this impasse, Stiegler must discover modes of singularization that do not reject the grammatization of the preindividual and its impact on


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the triple-stranded individuation complex but that take this grammatization, and the mnemotechnologies that bring it into operation, as their very basis.

General Organology and Libidinal Economy Let us now turn to Stiegler’s recuperation of the Freudian conception of desire and its link to the general organology of the sensible that forms the theoretical core of Symbolic Misery, 2. Perhaps the first thing to remark is simply the shift Stiegler makes to the domain of the sensible, and to the aesthetic as the product of a general organology. It is a question, he says, of “thinking aesthetic technologies from the point of view of a general organology, where living organs, artificial organs, and social organizations constitute the complete aesthetic fact by tying together what Gilbert Simondon names transductive relations (relations that constitute their terms)” (Stiegler 2005: 29). The trajectory of Stiegler’s analysis in this volume leads him to embed the triple-stranded individuation complex that defines human becoming within the, in some sense more general, individuation of the living. What results from this embedding is a new focus on sensibility, and on the techno-aesthetic enlargement of sensibility, which informs a rejuvenated account of the resingularization of human individuation. What was the object of loss in Symbolic Misery, 1, namely participation, gets connected to the aesthetic, and hence to the “constant enlargement of sensibility in which consists the singularity of what happens to sense [sens ] as its adventure, . . . to the endless novelty of the sensible” (41). Participation will be rethought as aesthetic participation, meaning participation in the enlargement of sensibility itself, and it will be linked tothe Freudian analysis of sublimation and libidinal desire in which the argument of the volume concludes. With respect to our analysis of Symbolic Misery, 1, the crucial move informing Stiegler’s advance is an embedding of the operation of repetition—precisely what digital grammatization makes possible—within a libidinal economy. This embedding is also, as the following passage makes clear, the crux of Stiegler’s conception of pharmacology: The repetitivity of symbolic machines, . . . which constitute the proletarianization of the consumer through loss of participation, of savoirvivre, and thus of individuation, are also potential apparatuses for a new epoch of repetition as production of difference—and as différance: as experience of the sensible and of the interminability of the incalculable. . . . The realization of this new stage is however pos-


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sible only if it is itself inscribed in a history of the conditions of repetition—and in a libidinal economy where repetition is equally compulsive death drive and return of life reborn as the always refreshing adventure of its future. (43) If this passage expresses a certain subordination of tertiary memory, the product of digital grammatization, to a libidinal economy that engages repetition both as death (i.e., as tertiary memory) and as life, catalyst for new primary and secondary retentions, it is the role of social organization that emerges as paramount in this new pharmacological phase of Stiegler’s analysis of symbolic misery. “Grammatization,” Stiegler goes on to specify, “does not determine any libidinal organization”; and if it is the case that tertiary retentions “overdetermine the conditions” for the production of primary and secondary retentions, “the conditions in which tertiary retentions come into play themselves depend on social organizations ” (187; emphasis added). Relating this claim back to Stiegler’s embedding, in Symbolic Misery, 1, of grammatization within the triple-stranded individuation complex, we can discern a new and more specific emphasis on the role played by collective individuation. The social, or collective, individuation is what “concretizes the transductive relation between the dead and the living”; as such, it is “the retentional dispositive of apprenticeship (and of the production of a superego) that permits, via the constitution of collective secondary retentions, the acquisition of new know-how [savoirs] that expands through cortical connections operating as interiorizations collectiveStiegsecondary retentions” (231). What this claim amounts of to, these if I understand ler correctly, is simply that collective individuation is what brings technical individuation (i.e., grammatization as repetition of dead, tertiary memory) into relation with psychic individuation, the production of new living, primary retentions (i.e., new experiences on the part of consciousness): it is through technical repetition that collective secondary memories are constituted, and it is through collective secondary memories that new primary retentions are generated. Stiegler’s new focus on the social, on the operation of collective individuation, thus contributes something crucial to the general investment in the subject—as participant in its own resingularization—that seems to differentiate his Phase 2 work from the Technics and Time p roject: specifically, it furnishes a mechanism capable of explaining how the grammatization of all aspects of experience, and its artifactualization in today’s mnemotech-


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as a source for participation in the continuous expansion of the sensible that characterizes human becoming qua psychic-collective-technical complex. nologies, can be lived by the subject

Stiegler’s renewed investment in psychic individuation, and in the operation of collective to mediate technical repetition forthe it, calls for thinking “a new individuation stage of general organology,” one that recurs to advent of hominization and focuses on the appearance of the “noetic soul” that results from the articulation of the three forms of retention in a single complex. “This articulation,” Stiegler emphasizes, “constitutes the kernel around which the process of psychic and collective individuation arises as the organological genealogy of the sensible” (188). Itself the fruit of Stiegler’s embedding of grammatization in the entire individuation complex, this new stage of general organology, and the noetic soul that is its crux, centers on a new engagement with a form of individuation hitherto absent from Stiegler’s appropriation of Simondon: the individuation of the living. “What I call general organology,” explains Stiegler, is “the equivalent of Simondon’s mechanology, with the difference that the living is itself included in the set of transductive relations that link the different types of artificial and living organs, including the brain, to social organizations in which they evolve and are transformed.” This inclusion of the living does not simply add one further strand to the individuation complex but rather submits it and the three strands it comprises to a new source, and force, of individuation: “this process of triple individuation is in its turn inscribed in a vital individuation, the focus of L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique [The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis ], which must be grasped by general organology as co-individuation of living organs, artificial organs, and the organizations that link them—grasped in such a way that vital organs are defunctionalized relative to vital individuation” (222). If I understand the logic of Stiegler’s complex argument correctly, the living individuation that comes to drive the interplay of the triple-stranded individuation complex is the motor of the libidinal economy he develops on the basis of Sigmund Freud’s theory of sublimation and the de- and refunctionalization of living energy (libido) it involves. Know-how and knowledge, the basic elements of human culture that are the accomplishments of the triple-stranded individuation complex, find their ultimate root in living individuation: “the question of know-how [savoir ] in general, in all its forms, of which knowledge [connaissance ] is a specific instance that only appears with grammatization, is the question of sublimation insofar as it presupposes a defunctionalization and a refunctionalization of the organic living


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being, itself induced by the appearance of the dead organs that are composed of technical objects” (221). By embedding the three-stranded individuation complex in the individuation of the living as conceptualized by Freud, Stiegler gains access to a new source of energy—libido or unconscious desire—that, through social organization engineering (i.e., the production of certain kinds of collective secondaryor memories as selections of tertiary memories), will furnish the psychic individual with a counterforce to the standardizing sway of grammatization. Before he can avail himself of this new source of energy, however, Stiegler must submit Freud’s account to criticism, for Freud, not surprisingly, and in concert with the entire philosophical tradition, is guilty of having repressed technics. As Stiegler sees it, the operation of nonliving or technical memory forms a “skin” of technical objects linking the interior (brain) and the exterior (the socio-ethnic). As such, technics is the unthought condition on which Freud’s entire theory is premised: The appearance of this non-living memory is also what opens the Freudian question of the appearance of desire as defunctionalization of natural organs and “organic repression” linked to the achievement of erect posture, and which . . . poses a question of the relation between interior and exterior in which Freud gets bogged down on account of having failed to think the living organ that is the human brain in its srcinal relation with dead organs: in the Freudian thinking of the constitution of this desire that comprises the heart of the noetic, the question metaphysics. (228) of technics has been repressed, as it has in Despite his failure to think the technical condition for defunctionalization and refunctionalization, Freud did manage, Stiegler emphasizes, to grasp the fact that the physiological organology of the human body “does not cease to transform itself following the thread of the genealogy of libidinal economy whose point of departure is the achievement of erect posture” (229). Freud is thus the thinker par excellence of defunctionalization and refunctionalization, which comprise the kernel of Stiegler’s general organology, and this is the important point here. What Freud gets right is that the human undergoes constant transformation, ongoing becoming, and that the human brain, like the human hand, the human foot, and the human nose, is “in perpetual functional redefinition” (229). Where Freud comes up short is in his understanding of what drives this perpetual transformation:


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though he pinpoints the achievement of erect posture (i.e., the moment the human hand is liberated for technical application) as the srcin of this organological genealogy of the human, Freud, lacking an understanding of technical exteriorization, can only attribute this transformation to the activityFor of the psyche to thethe brain itself). Stiegler, by(i.e., contrast, achievement of erect posture “puts in place a process of functional transformation of the brain that is no longer commanded by the characteristics of the brain itself . . . , but instead by the articulation of the brain qua living memory with the technical prostheses qua dead memories” (230). If the human body- brain continues to transform itself/be transformed following its organic evolution, it is precisely because it de- and refunctionalizes its living energy (libido) in relation to prostheses that are selected by social organization: the body’s organs “economize the libido” differently in relation to different organological complexes. Or, in Stiegler’s metaphorical characterization: the foot of the bushman who runs in the savanna and the foot of the modern man who pushes the accelerator “do not dance . . . in the same manner” (227). The account of the evolution of Stiegler’s project that I have been developing here is recapitulated, in concentrated form, in the encounter of Freud with Husserl that culminates Stiegler’s theorization of libidinal economy as organology. Despite being presented as yet another iteration of Stiegler’s criticism of Freud for failing to think technics, the encounter actually serves to introduce the unconscious, and the operation of repression in particular, into the very heart of the primary retention—secondary memory complex. It is, in other words, a crucial development in Stiegler’s theoretically mediated political project, the project he refers to as the “politics of memory.” What results from the encounter of Freud and Husserl is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of the organological complex initially developed on the basis of Husserl’s account of time consciousness. Where Husserl’s complex excavation of the structure of time consciousness lays bare the mechanism of memory’s bidirectional traffic with sensibility, Freud’s work introduces an exteriority to this memory circuit and, with it, a source for potential resingularization of individual and collective subjectivity. Thus, even if Stiegler’s invocation of the structure of Husserlian time consciousness does serve to correct for Freud’s failure to think primary retention and to expose the genesis of the unconscious as a temporal structure, the true payoff of the encounter is a more complex understanding of the role and power of secondary memory and a correlative shift in


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the “economy” of the organological complex. Far from Husserl doing Freud one better, it is a case of Freud introducing into the Husserlian schema precisely what it lacks: an account of how secondary memory (i.e., collective individuation qua social organization) harbors within itself a power, albeit a repressed inlevel virtueofofpsychic which it can select tertiary that will yield novelty one, at the interiorization (i.e., inmemories the production of new primary retentions). This possibility, to recall the main argument I’m seeking to make, is precisely a possibility for the subject to participate in its own resingularization. The crux of the encounter of Freud with Husserl concerns the way that primary retentions become secondary memories as well as the way that secondary memories are modified by their own selections during the process of primary retention. In Husserl’s account, this is not an issue, since primary retentions simply become secondary memories once they are no longer “live” or “sensuous,” and since secondary memories bear on new primary retentions simply by providing context for their production. The introduction of Freud complicates this picture by supplementing this simple mode of relation between primary and secondary retention, a relation Stiegler dubs “stereotypical,” with another mode that he dubs “traumatypical.” The first case concerns situations where primary retentions insert themselves into and reinforce the system of secondary memories and where secondary memories bear selectionally on primary retentions in ways that reinforce the stereotyping of expectations. The second, by contrast, yields what Stiegler calls a “retentional upheaval”: a situation in which primary retentions disrupt the organization of secondary retention and secondary memories that, seeking to integrate these traumatypical primary retentions, find themselves opened to “a potential of individuation . . . that has been hitherto repressed” (Stiegler 2005: 235). In actual fact, the situation is even more complicated, and for two reasons. First, because the normal or stereotypical operation of secondary retention, the operation described by Husserl’s account, already includes a Freudian supplement: namely, it includes traumatypical retentions, but only under repression. Second, because the traumatypical upheaval is in fact simply the actualization of a potentiality that is always already in the system of secondary retention. What is at stake, then, is a single system of secondary retention seeking to integrate two types of primary retentions: it easily succeeds in the case of stereotypical primary retentions, and in the case of traumatypical ones, it either succeeds by transforming (i.e., repressing) them or it fails and undergoes upheaval.


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The payoff of this transformational appropriation of Freud comes when Stiegler likens the “retentional upheaval” to Freud’s account, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of the psyche faced with exterior stimuli that break through the protective barrier and cause trauma to the psychic system. Not surprisingly, ory reenters the picture: this is the moment when the role of tertiary mem-

All that, which is to say the traumatism that appears to come from the exterior as well as the means of defense, which would be on the interior, can only be constituted by tertiary retentional dispositifs. The traumatism of the exterior is nothing but the support for the projection of a traumatype that is conserved in the interior, but buried in it, and that is prevented from being made conscious by stereotypes, except when pre-textuality, occasioning primary retentional processes, allows the process of projection suddenly to be liberated. (239; emphasis added) Here, finally, we have the explanation for how the subject can participate— or better, can be made to participate—in its own resingularization, and also a clarification of how technics, in the age of mnemotechnological grammatization, can furnish the basis for such resingularization. Today’s mnemotechnologies make available a host of grammatized tertiary retentions that can be selected by secondary memory—or rather, by social organization operating on and through secondary memory—with the aim of generating traumatypical primary retentions that will disrupt the entire organological complex. As a result, the organological complex that supports the individuation of the individual will open the latter to what Stiegler calls “surprehension,” the “experience of the other in the same,” the experience of “the singularity of the sensible” (237). Exemplified for Stiegler by the operation of art as the social organization of the technical, such surprehension of the unexpected—such traumatypical upheaval of the organology of the human—disrupts grammatological capitalism’s capture of the libido and refunctionalizes the libido, and the living energy it comprises, in the service of a new organological complex capable of living the singularity of sensibility in the age of its “machinic turn.”

Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire? Let me now back away from the minutiae of Stiegler’s refunctionalization of his own project through the encounter with Freud in order to ask


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what this refunctionalization accomplishes. Clearly, and as I have been suggesting all along, the encounter with Freud marks an important and fruitful complexification in Stiegler’s understanding of how technics, and in particular contemporary grammatological mnemotechnologies, informs and facilitates triple-stranded operation of human individuation. By shifting the locus the at which grammatization operates—from the narrow domain of technical individuation to the entire organological complex of individuation— Stiegler’s investment in the Freudian thematic of libidinal economy allows him to eschew his earlier pessimism regarding the hyperindustrialization of consciousness and to discover the potential for the individual to participate in her own resingularization. At the very core of this advance is a new and more nuanced understanding of individuation as an organological economy in which what Stiegler calls “social organization” comes to the fore as the hinge between the technical system of grammatized behavioral traces and the operation of psychic individuation. Whereas in his earlier configuration, technics qua tertiary memory seemed to be driving the train, now the operation of social and collective individuation holds the power to selectively configure mnemotechnological traces in order to effectuate the production of new experiences, new primary retentions yielding new psychic individuation, that will resingularize the individual precisely by bringing her into contact with her own diachronicity, a diachronicity that is simultaneously that of sensibility itself. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a very important development and that it represents a crucial gain for those of us working in the area of media studies and political economy of the media who endeavor to retain the constitutive correlation of human becoming and technics as the very basis for conceptualizing media and its impact. As concerns Stiegler’s account of technics qua contemporary mnemo technologies, however, I find myself unable to say anything similar and indeed find Stiegler’s mobilization of Freud to evince the very same technophobia that I diagnosed in my earlier criticism of the inadequacy of his account of Husserl (Hansen 2012). In that case, Stiegler’s restriction of technics to tertiary memory undermined his own (and any) effort to think the operation of contemporary technics independently of its processing through human memory. Confined to the form of tertiary memory, technics is effectively equated to a recorded memory (or set of such memories) that either was lived by consciousness, was not but could have been lived by consciousness, or could never be lived by consciousness but, as a formed content that can be adopted by consciousness, nonetheless takes


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the form of the lived. It was, and still is, my conviction that the large share of the operation of today’s computational technologies—which, for me, simply cannot be identified as mnemo technologies—have only an indirect, though certainly still crucial, relation with human experience and memory. In this respect, and despite Stiegler’s own claim thatofhisinterior critique of Freud’s repression of technics undoes Freud’s opposition and exterior,³ I am struck by the fact that the mobilization of the Freudian theory of trauma, insofar as it comprises an account of how technics conditions individuation, valorizes the very same operation as does his earlier mobilization of Husserlian time consciousness: the operation of interiorization. This common valorization appears clearly in Stiegler’s characterization of technics, “the traumatism of the exterior,” as (in a phrase I earlier highlighted) “nothing but the support for the projection of a traumatype that is conserved in the interior ” (Stiegler 2005: 239; emphasis added). With this characterization, the fundamental motivation, as well as the fundamental conservatism, of Stiegler’s philosophy is laid bare: despite taking technics as his theme (and despite the undeniable contribution this itself makes), Stiegler ultimately engages technics—and all the ontic technologies that artifactualize technics—exclusively as a support for human becoming and, indeed (or more precisely), as a support for an account of human becoming that does not put the human itself into question (or, at least, does not do so in radical enough terms). It was to this conclusion that I was pointing when, at the beginning of this essay, I asked whether Stiegler’s investment in desire and libidinal economy was anything more than a throwback to a moment in cultural history that has been superseded in par t at least because of technical advance. On this score, I must admit that Stiegler is a masterful and quite srcinal synthesizer of the vast archive of critical theory, both contemporary and historical, and that his appropriations produce a philosophy that is as compelling and urgent as it is dense and difficult. And yet, I cannot help but be struck by the fact that his philosophy, despite its clear and, in my opinion, 3. “We must rethink in its totality the question of projection as well as eschew the opposition between interior and exterior. Freud, who opposes the perception-consciousness system to the rest of the psychic system, situates it, in effect, between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior,’ and as the surface of the system. . . . However, the organism can only be affected by an exterior traumatism to the extent that it expects it, to the extent that, insofar as it is protentionally charged . . . it can be affected by this exterior traumatism that it already contains potentially, as Aristotle would say, and which is therefore not totally exterior to it” (Stiegler 2005: 243).


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absolutely imperative interest in the human, seeks to expose the dependence of human becoming on technics without rethinking the process of human becoming itself. Stiegler states emphatically that humans, “through their relations to prostheses,” enjoythe a constant perpetualenlargement functional redefinition in Stiegler a process that is synonymous with of sensibility attributes to human idiomaticity. I would endorse this claim enthusiastically but for the fact that it unduly restricts technics to prosthesis. Even though Stiegler’s understanding of prosthetics as pharmacology marks a significant advance over more traditional accounts of technology’s prosthetic operationality (for example, Heidegger’s account of Zuhandenheit, or “readiness-to-hand”), it nonetheless makes common cause with such accounts at a more general level, namely, in restricting technics to a human-centered operationality. For this reason, and despite his reconceptualization of prosthetics through the Derridian concept of the supplement (a reconceptualization that importantly shifts emphasis from extension to interiorization), Stiegler ends up by complexifying the organology of the human rather than following the more radical technical trajectory as it moves beyond any imaginable organologic whatsoever. As the theoretical kernel of Stiegler’s general organology, the supplement describes the operation by which means the organism is broken up and reconfigured through an allegedly postorganismic, though resolutely not postorganic, organizational logic. Like the evolution of the prehensile hand that forms its model, the “general supplement” informing Stiegler’s general organology couples the interiorization of the technical exterior, from primitive flint tools all the way up to today’s computational processes, to distinct liberations of the human organism.⁴ Despite their significance for the evolutionary technogenesis of the human, however, these liberations do not so much overcome the organic logic of human know-how and practice as simply expand its scope and sway. The problem arises when this souped-up logic of prosthetics is made synonymous with the enlargement of sensibility that Stiegler attributes to the operation of contemporary technics. What results is nothing less than a stranglehold on the scope of sensibility’s expansion: this expansion is limited to those elements of sensibility that can be accessed through the operation of the supplement. It is limited, that is, to precisely those elements of sensibility opened up by the successive refunctionalizations of the 4. I owe this nuanced understanding of Stiegler’s intervention into the discourse on prosthetics to one of the anonymous readers of my article.


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human organism that feature centrally, if not indeed exclusively, in Stiegler’s historical narrative of human technogenesis. Against such a limited thematization of technology’s impact on what I have called “worldly sensibility,” we must question the adequacy of Stiegler’s theoretical commitments, and specifically, his lingeringInembrace of interiorization as the crux of technology’s supplementarity. a world that is undergoing what Stiegler dubs the “machinic turn in sensibility,” by which I understand something like the genesis and modulation of sensibility through the operations of machines (in my own recent work, I myself focus on how the production of data yields an increase of sensibility [Hansen 2015]), isn’t it massively reductive to restrict the operation of technics, the machinic production of sensibility, to prosthetic functions, which is to say, to extensions of human sense organs? And isn’t this the case even if these technical, prosthetic functions extend the scope of the human organism not directly, as the canonical account from Plato to McLuhan would have it, but indirectly, by way of a technical facility that arises in conjunction with, though not as a direct substitute or recompense for, an organic adjustment? It is certainly the case that Stiegler theorizes the prosthetic operation of technics in the most interesting and complex way, treating technologies as organs that cooperate with living organs and social organizations in the triple-stranded individuation complex that he names “general organology.” Yet, in order to assume this organic function, don’t technologies first need to be modeled on living organs (i.e., the very organs they would extend or supplement)? And if they do, doesn’t this entail simply bracketing out whatever share of technical operations happen to fall outside the prosthetic circuit, now reconceptualized as a circuit of interiorizing supplementation? Perhaps what is required to grasp the full potential of contemporary technics for transforming human becoming, and specifically for putting the human into contact with the sensible environment beyond the restricted channel of organs, is an “individuation without organs.” Though I don’t have the space here to develop them fully, let me briefly sketch three critical engagements, all of which repudiate the operation of interiorization (or better, of interiorizing supplementation) so central to Stiegler’s account of libidinal economy, and all of which point, beyond the limits of the latter, toward such an individuation without organs. In her work on neural and cultural plasticity and specifically in her rereading of Freud alongside contemporary neuroscience, French philosopher (and like Stiegler, a student of Derrida) Catherine Malabou argues that the sexual unconscious promoted by Freud must be displaced in favor


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of a “cerebral unconscious.” The crux of this claim concerns precisely the locus of the traumatic stimulus: faced with the scientific evidence of brain injury and cerebral decomposition, Malabou concludes that the Freudian move to treat exogenous traumatic stimuli as if they were endogenous— the very powerless kernel of the interiorization by Stiegler— remains andoperation must giveofway to a picturepromoted of the psyche radically subjected to the force of the outside. With her concept of the “cerebral unconscious,” Malabou effectively depicts the brain as a radical exteriority, a kind of alien being or unsublatable environmental element, that is paradoxically lodged within the psyche: The nature of cerebral auto-affection is different than the autoaffection of the subject as the philosophers have defined it. The elementary reflection that constitutes the cerebral psyche as such does not reflect upon itself. It does not redouble its specularity to the point of endowing it with the form of consciousness. No one can feel his or

her own brain; nor can he or she speak of it, hear it speak, nor hear himself or herself speak within it. Cerebral auto-affection is necessarily and paradoxically accompanied by a blindness, an inability of the subject to feel anything as far as it is concerned. If the subject can “touch” itself, it is indeed thanks to the brain: the first contact with oneself constituted by homeostasis renders such auto-interpellation possible. At the same time, however, this originary solicitation hides itself within the very thing that makes it possible. Within my inner self, never The accessible brain absents itself as very site ofmy its brain presence to appears. self. It is only by means of the cerebral imaging technology. And there is no possible subjectification of this type of objectification. (Malabou 2012: 42–43) Because it remains open to the radical or destructive, and radically exterior, accident, the cerebral unconscious makes the brain into an access point onto an exteriority whose operation cannot be captured by subjectivity. As a radical blind spot from the standpoint of subjectivity, the cerebral unconscious comprises a seat for the environmental outside “within” the psychic system. In this function, might not the cerebral unconscious furnish a more capacious figure of the brain that remains radically open to the force of media’s impact on environmental sensibility and welcoming of its potential to transform human becoming in ways not reducible to any organology? With his concept of imitation, nineteenth-century sociologistphilosopher Gabriel Tarde—the subject of a wide-ranging recent renais-


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sance of interest—furnishes an alternate mechanism capable of accounting for the operation through which the traumatic force of technologies can enter psychic individuation without requiring any form of interiorization. Human becoming is, on Tarde’s account, essentially imitative, and imitation is tothat social what heredity is to organic life:and “the being,plays in the degree he life is social, is essentially imitative, . .social . imitation a role in societies analogous to that of heredity in organic life or to that of vibration among inorganic bodies” (Tarde 1903: 11). Imitation, for Tarde, is predominately micrological, involuntary, and unconscious, and operates as a form of repetition-with-a-difference where the driving force of repetition is not an internal compulsion (i.e., a repetition compulsion) but the permeability of the brain (to speak like Malabou) to social and, one might add, technical forces that remain in a crucial sense external. Stiegler invokes Tarde for his exposition of the “mimetic source of the living,” adding that such an account requires the conceptualization of “a new power of repetition: a repetition that produces differences in other conditions than the living, in idiomatic differences” (Stiegler 2005: 198–99). But we must wonder whether imitative repetition, far from being narrowly positioned as a concept for the technical repetition that grammatization makes possible, might in fact furnish the very motor mechanism for the entire individuation complex and might in this way make a crucial contribution toward situating individuation beyond organology. Finally, with respect to the expansion of sensibility that Stiegler identifies with the evolution of human becoming, might we not conceptualize technical systems for gathering data about the world—of which, incidentally, the brain imaging technologies Malabou mentions would be a prominent example—as themselves components in an individuation without organs? For, as I have sought to make clear in my own recent work, these technical systems operate in domains of sensibility that, despite their immediate relevance for human experience, remain operationally opaque to human subjectivity—to the experience of perceptual consciousness— and that can only impact the latter indirectly, by being “fed-forward” as data about sensibility into consciousness so that it can be experienced by consciousness after the fact. What such an account puts forth is a resolutely nonprosthetic account of technics, where technics functions quasiautonomously from any organological function, but nonetheless as a component in a larger system of individuation that includes human operations. The key point of difference with Stiegler here is that, on the picture I am sketching, the operation of technical systems need not be modeled on


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the functioning of organs. That is why, as I argue at length in Feed-Forward, today’s data-gathering and data-sensing technologies, along with the computational media built upon them, are capable of putting human becoming into relation with a “worldly sensibility” to which humans have no direct, sense-perceptual access. The question thereby opened is thebeyond really crucial one: How might such contact transform human becoming any organological readjustment ? To address this question, we must follow Stiegler beyond the bounds of his own theoretical frame of reference—into a properly postorganological world of radically exterior technics where individual and collective subjective individuations arise and can only arise as elements within larger, thoroughly technical, environmental processes.

References Hansen, Mark B. N. 2012. “Technics beyond the Temporal Object.”New Formations 77: 44–62. . 2015. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The Question Concerning Technology.” InThe Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 3–35. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Malabou, Catherine. 2012. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Translated by S. Miller. New York: Fordham University Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 1993. “Temps et individuation technique, psychique, et collective dans l’oeuvre de Simondon.” Futur Antérieur 19–20/5–6. www.multitudes .net/Temps-et-individuation-technique/. . 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus . Translated by R. Beardsworth and G. Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2004a. De la misère symbolique 1: L’époque hyperindustrielle. Paris: Galilée. . 2004b. Philosopher par accident: Entretiens avec Élie During . Paris: Galilée. . 2005. De la misère symbolique 2: La catastrophè du sensible. Paris: Galilée. . 2012. “A Rational Theory of Miracles: On Pharmacology and Transindividuation, an Interview with Bernard Stiegler.” Conducted by Ben Roberts, Jeremy Gilbert, and Mark Hayward. New Formations 77: 164–84. Tarde, Gabriel. 1903. The Holt.

Laws of Imitation. Translated by E. W. Clews. New York:


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On the Origin of Aisthesis by Means of Artificial Selection; or, The Preservation of Favored Traces in the Struggle for Existence

Gerald Moore

But if variations useful to any organic being ever do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance, these will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called . . . Natural Selection. —Charles Darwin (2008) The passage of life from the struggle for the satisfaction of need, or subsistence, to life as existence, revolving around objects of worship, is made possible above all by the fact that with the process of externalization, “selection pressure” is refocused around the capacities of the genus Homo to invent or make use of artificial organs . . . and for that reason we can no longer strictly speak of “natural selection”: it is a matter of artificial selection in which art, which is to say technics, and arts and crafts in the broadest sense, come to the fore. —Bernard Stiegler (2008a) Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French are my own. boundary 2 44 1 (2017) DOI 10.1215/01903659-3725941 © 2017 by Duke University Press


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Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance captures the way in which the meaning of a sign or trace is constitutively open to being rewritten in the future, when subsequent interpretations retroactively transform our understanding of its earlier instances. Several critics, perhaps most prominently Slavoj Žižek,variation have suggested the logicwhere of différance is thus also that of the random in naturalthat selection, a mutation in genetic replication amounts to a repetition of difference that will retroactively be interpreted as “fit” or “maladaptive” (Žižek 2000: 23; see also Johnson 1993: 164–67). Bernard Stiegler has gone further still, differentiating between two regimes of evolutionary différance, pertaining to natural and artificial selection, respectively. When a foot mutates into—or is iterated, repeated as—a hand, it is retroactively reinterpreted as a proto-organ for grasping that adapted its bearer for survival. And when a tool is added to a hand, the hand, too, is reinterpreted, in what André Leroi-Gourhan will call a “liberation” and Bernard Stiegler a “reinvention” through technics. The tool that supplements the hand also reinvents it, with the organ for grasping reemerging as an organ for hammering, carving, or writing. The transformation of the field of experience means that subjectivity is also reinvented. In being taught to use a tool, we are also taught to experience, by internalizing a new horizon of possibilities that it opens up: “feeling [le sentir ] is tekhnē from the outset” (Stiegler 2015: 31; 2005: 62), as Stiegler puts it.¹ This is the différance of artificial selection, where the who and the what, the subject and the tool, continually retrace one another; where the tool, in other words, produces a subject through the process of creating its objects. In the second volume of De la misère symbolique (Symbolic Misery, 2005), this is theorized in terms of the effect of the tool on the brain: “It is therefore in its relations to prostheses that the human brain, like the human hand and every other human organ, is perpetually undergoing functional redefinition” (SM2, 141/229). The claim is reformulated in Stiegler’s more recent work: “the hand writes directly into the brain,”² or, our prostheses reorganize the sensory cortex. The notion of functional redefinition, of the “refunctionalization and defunctionalization” of organs by technics, serves to make sense of Stiegler’s assertion that technical evolution, meaning the reorganization of the 1. Hereafter, these works are cited together as SM2, with page references given for both the English (2015) and French (2005) editions. The English pages are given for reference only: translations into English are the author’s own. 2. See, for example, the Pharmakon.fr seminar of May 31, 2012. Accessed July 4, 2014. pharmakon.fr/wordpress/seminaire-20112012-seance-n%C2%B0-5-31-mai-2012/.


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Moore / On the Origin of Aisthesis 193

living by the dead, organized, inorganic matter of technics, amounts to a “new organization of différance, a différance of différance” (1998: 178; 1994: 186).³ Already a product of the différance, or variation, of natural selection, liable to further mutations that might see it interpreted differently in the future, organ isinto opened onto a second kind of brings différance in whichthe itsphysiological function is deferred the prosthesis. The deferral with, it a corresponding differentiation of experience, with feeling and, moreover, meaning and aesthetic value produced when physical sensation enters into a circuit with the technical objects that supplement the body, when the use of a tool “confers its sense on that which is sensed [confère son sens au senti ] by inscribing aisthesis within semiosis, within a symbolic and logical horizon” (SM2, 31/62). It is this technical inscription of aesthetics that gives rise to the life of the mind, or spirit, the “noetic soul” whose existence consists, over and above survival of the fittest, in the transgression of biological patterns of behavior. Like the physiological organ, the technical organ is susceptible to future change, but unlike the naked hand, whose mutation in genetic replication is always unforeseen, the hand refunctionalized by the tool can anticipate its future forms and actively bring them into existence. Through artificial selection, we cease to be mere products of our genetic history and become the architects of our own future, inventing an agency that is wrested away from genetics. It is in this sense, Stiegler claims, that technical evolution marks a break with evolution by natural selection. The history of humanity will thus be a “history of the supplement” (Stiegler 2011: 142; 2004: 188), meaning the history of our externalization, or deferral, into the technical prostheses through which we repeatedly invent ourselves. This history is also a “genealogy of the sensible” (SM2, 43/79), of the transformation, or “sublimation,” of sensory stimulus (“l’âme sensitive”) into shared and socially regulated meaning (“le sensible”), via the construction of a technical-symbolic, aesthetic, social order (36, 120–21/70, 198). In line with what he calls “general organology,” meaning not just the physiological but the technical organs and social organizations in which human life consists, Stiegler undertakes to analyze how different (physiological, technical) organs across human and prehuman history have generated the srcinating conditions of different modes of experience (113/188). This genealogy is split into two overlapping parts, corresponding to two kinds of techni3. Hereafter, these works are cited together as TT1, with page references given for both the English (1998) and French (1994) editions.


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cal evolution in Stiegler’s work, only the second of which fully captures his interest in the term. The first of these, developed in his early works on Leroi-Gourhan, pertains to the “paleo- and archaeo-analysis of hominization” (113/188), or the corticalization of the so-called anatomically modern human, which results from the coevolution of physiological brain and tool.organs The second kind of technical evolution explains how our are continually de- and refunctionalized by the accumulated technical organs and symbolic order of culture, which organize subjectivity via the synaptic circuitry of the brain, without the effects ever passing into our gene pool and phenotype. The regulatory social system of culture thus consists in a kind of externalized memory or technical unconscious that conditions what and how we experience—and which therefore lies at the heart of both our prevailing aesthetic codes and their very opposite, namely, the antistereotypical, frequently traumatic, encounter that we find in art. Function-shift and “General Organology”

One of the most powerful early criticisms leveled at Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was the question of what St. George Jackson Mivart, in On the Genesis of Species (1871), termed “the incompetency of natural selection” (26). The phrase alludes to an issue over the seemingly dubious adaptive function of proto-organs, or the question of how notionally unfinished organs could ever evolve to the point where they would serve a purpose. If, as Darwin claimed, adaptive traits were the result of cumulative series of minor and moreover contingent changes, then every minor mutation on the way to, say, the gradual evolution of a wing would also, by that logic, have to confer an adaptive advantage. But, as Stephen Jay Gould would later pose the problem, what kind of advantage is to be found in just “2 per cent of a wing” (2007b: 157), which would by no means suffice for flight? Darwin himself anticipated this problem, noting that “in considering transitions of organs, it is so important to bear in mind the probability of conversion from one function to another” (2008: 143). So, too, did Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously observed that an organ’s “function” is hit upon only retroactively, once interpretation has revealed the uses to which it can be put. “The whole history of a ‘thing,’ an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves” (1994: 51–52).The answer, in other words, is that the function of an earlier stage of an evolving organ need not be con-


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tinuous with its subsequent forms; nor need it have served any purpose at all. The protean wing was not initially a diminished, imperfect organ of flight (a glider, or stabilizer) but a mechanism for thermoregulation, the maintenance of body temperature. The traditional evolutionary term for this kind of “function-shift” is “preadaptation,” meaning adaptation that lends itself to being refunctionalized as something else.anSince preadaptation carries connotations of both Lamarckian teleology and the neo-Darwinist (“adaptationist”) idea that all variation in nature must bear some evolutionary advantage, Gould suggests the alternative and “more inclusive term ‘exaptation’—for any organ not evolved under natural selection for its current use—either because it performed a different function in ancestors (classical preadaptation) or because it represented a non-functional part available for later co-optation” (2007b: 148; see also Gould 1991). Bernard Stiegler does not himself refer to exaptation, nor to preadaptation for that matter, but the function-shift of physiological—and social—organs is central to his concerns, particularly insofar, he argues, as function-shifts can be induced by technics. He writes of “a defunctionalization and refunctionalization of the living organism, brought about by the advent of the dead organs that are technical objects,” a de- and refunctionalization of physiological organs by our technical prostheses (SM2, 135/221). The process of de- and refunctionalization becomes crucial to his assertion of a rupture between the evolution by natural selection of man as animal and the artificial, technical selection that characterizes the technical evolution of human mind, or spirit. In Symbolic Misery, 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible, the back half of the work on aesthetics that bridges the first three volumes of Technics and Time and the Disbelief and Discredit series, Stiegler expands his earlier formulation of technical evolution as “the pursuit of life by means other than life” (TT1, 17/31). Borrowing from a well-known formulation of French inheritance law, also cited by Marx in the preface to Capital, he argues that technical evolution pertains to the ways in which “the dead takes hold of the living,” le mort saisit le vif (SM2, 192n42/218n1; see also Marx 1990: 91). The phrase refers, in this instance, to the cooptation, or reinterpretation, of biological organs by the “organized, inorganic matter” of technics. Stiegler christens the study of these interactions “general organology,” meaning a logic that encompasses not just our vital, sensory organs but the nonliving technical organs that transform their function, and also the social organizations that determine which refunctionalizing technical objects we adopt: “organology as the co-individuation of living organs, artificial organs and the organizations


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that link them together, in such a way that vital organs are defunctionalized in relation to the individuation of life” (SM2, 136/222). The “general,” here, is taken from the early work of Derrida, who frequently deploys the qualification “en général” to designate being “prior to the distinction between mannon-living” and animal, and even the distinction between the167; living and the (Derrida 2001:before 247; 1967b: 294; 1997: 65, 130, 1967a: 95, 190, 238). Stiegler reprises it in his own early work, referring to “life in general” and “the history of life in general,” both of which are given as names for the operation of différance, in which the prosthesis retraces and thereby reinvents the (“specific,” or species-related, “zoological”) body that it supplements (TT1, 136–39/148–51). General organology thus captures the idea that the organs of human life are not restricted to the physiological organs of Homo sapiens sapiens as a biological species. They also encompass the external, technical organs and social organizations whose internalization gives rise to the life of the mind, or spirit: “General organology has the vocation of studying . . . the physiological organs of the body in relation to artifactual organs and the organizations that make up the body of society, and the characteristics of these organs insofar as they set to work the retentional apparatuses that operate [artificial] selection. . . . General organology is therefore the study of the dead and the living” (SM2, 132–33/216–18). Where a specific, or species-based, organology would study only biological forms of negentropy, general organology takes as its object the technical organs of human society. These “artifactual” organs serve as the bases of the artificial, as opposed to natural, selection in which human life consists. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the quasi-cause, from Logic of Sense, Stiegler describes artifactual organs as being “quasi-causal,” constituting “a way out of ‘material’ causality, in the common sense of the term” (Stiegler 2013: 290; see also Deleuze 2004: 9–10, 108–9; 1969: 15, 18, 115–16). This clearly does not mean that technical objects are not material and should rather be taken as a claim about the way in which they create horizons of expectation from which our actions will be suspended. By enabling us to break with the retroactively conferred “fitness” of adaptation, by enabling us to overcome maladaptation through the transformation of our environment, tool use enables us to create—and desire—our own future. It lifts us out of the mere imperative to survive and elevates life into “a struggle for existence,” which is to say, a struggle that goes beyond the mere “subsistence” of resisting death (Stiegler 2008: 22; see also Stiegler


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2011: 89–90; 2004: 125). Existence, in this respect, consists in the way that tools take us out (ex-) of our inhesion in biology and open us onto alternative possibilities of being. We ex-ist because we con-sist in technics, suspended between our bodies and our tools, between our technical heritage and the visions of a world that this heritage enables us to project. Coevolution and Epiphylogenesis

Writing in the postwar period, Leroi-Gourhan argued that humans’ evolutionary niche consists in our ability continually to reinvent ourselves through technics, and thereby overcome our absence of anatomical specialization (Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 117; 1964a: 168).⁴ For Leroi-Gourhan, technics marks a continuation of evolution by other means, with different techniques amounting to mutations external to the biological organism, for whose deficiencies they substitute. He suggested that society is made possible by the externalization of movement, displaced into animals and machines that we operate through the organs that would once themselves have done the moving. “The hand-tool could be seen as the instrument of liberation from the genetic constraints by which an animal’s organic implements are tied to the zoological species” (GS2, 227/21). Through technics, we free up our organs for alternative uses. Yet technology is only a continuation, or a different variety, of the liberations already found throughout the history of evolution. Our ability to reinvent ourselves through tool use presupposes a series of “successive ‘liberations’” of anatomy that paved the way for bodies to be interpreted differently (GS1, 117/167), evolutionary mutations that made possible the technical transformation of our ancestors’ limbs and sensory organs. Leroi-Gourhan undertook a painstaking comparison of the gradual anatomical changes that would (contingently) culminate in the liberated skeletal motricity of humans, beginning with the flattening of the foot and upright walking, which coincide with the liberation of the hand and of a skull that was hitherto restricted to limited movements at the top of the vertebral column (117/167). Bipedalism means that the hand is defunctionalized from its previous task of locomotion and refunctionalized for “prehension” (GS2, 4. Gesture and Speech, the English translation of Leroi-Gourhan’s Le geste et la parole , includes the second volume, Le geste et la parole 2: La mémoire et les rythmes. Hereafter, these works are cited together as GS1 or GS2, with page references given for both the English edition (1993) and either the first or the second volume of the French (1964a or 1964b).


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240–42/41). The new uses for which it is freed include not just reaching for food and, ultimately, the manipulation of tools but also the grooming and interpersonal contact that will prove vital to human socialization (239/38). The “liberation of the forehead” comprises the disappearance of the brow ridge and flattening of 75/102, the face108). through of the hand chin, now jawbone, and the teeth (GS1, 71, Andthe withthinning the grasping preferred to the outstretched neck, the jaw, tongue, and lips—still accompanied by hand gestures—are liberated for speech (112–14/161–62). These preadaptations of the hand and mouth for technics and speech, respectively, would, in time, give rise to further adaptations, including “special adaptations for cross-generational learning,” such as genes that allow flint knapping to be learned reliably and at low risk of injury to the learner (Sterelny 2012: 26, 33). In this respect, anatomy is honed for purpose by what Stiegler, following Leroi-Gourhan, terms the “co-evolution” of tool and brain. Evolutionary theory more generally calls this “gene-culture coevolution,” and it describes situations where a built cultural environment facilitates the survival and selection of some genes over others, for example, by affording protection to individuals who may otherwise have fallen foul of the survival of the fittest, or by conferring selective advantage on those members of society better preadapted to adopt its toolsets. For Stiegler, coevolution already marks a shift away from natural selection. Humans’ ability to transform their environments through technics results in “relaxing the effects of selection pressure and in suspending natural selection as the law of the struggle for life, and even suspending the biological evolution of the human species, . . . displacing the evolutionary process into artificial organs” (Stiegler 2008a: 22). Our constitution through artificial organs nonetheless goes far beyond interfering in the process of natural selection. Gene-culture coevolution prevailed as genetic adaptations for tool use were selected and passed on to subsequent generations, until the point where Homo sapiens sapiens became the only remaining extant form of the genus Homo. At this point, though still ongoing over the decelerating course of evolutionary time, coevolution recedes into the background, and a second type of technical evolution comes to the fore (SM2, 141/229–30). This is the evolution of technical and social systems that Stiegler labels epiphylogenesis, meaning the transmission of acquired experience from generation to generation via the cultural practices that become sedimented in and around technical objects. By adopting a culture’s tools and immersing ourselves in


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the experience and possibilities to which they give access, we inherit our ancestors’ knowledge without it having had to pass into the “phylogeny,” or genetic history, of the species (hence the prefix epi indicating “outside” or “in addition to” the species line). And in inheriting their acquired experience, we alsothus inherit theirnot way of to interpreting the world. The “genealogy of the sensible” refers only the evolutionarybiological architecture of our sensory organs but also to the refunctionalization of these organs by technics that reinvent the field of experience. Irrespective of their anatomical and broad genetic identity, as Stiegler puts it, “a foot that presses down on an accelerator pedal and essentially rotates along these lines is no longer, organologically speaking, which is to say, insofar as it is an organ inscribed within the circuit of a desire, the same foot as that of a bushman who runs in the savannah,” for the simple reason that “such organs no longer economize libido in the same manner” (139/227). Anatomically, the body has remained the same from the Middle Paleolithic, through the Neolithic Revolution in agriculture, the protowriting systems of the Bronze Age, and the advent of industrial machinery, up until our present, so-called Digital Age. But this period encompasses entire histories of the multiform ways in which human bodies have been de- and refunctionalized by technics, their energies differently harnessed and (“libidinally”) invested in the construction of societies. From the slower, more patient expectations of cultures in which letter writing and low-intensity farming predominate to our contemporary obsession with the immediate gratification offered by high-yield instant returns and constant availability, different tools give rise to radically different experiences of time, desire, and attention, by standing us in varying affective relation to the possible futures onto which we are opened up through their adoption. The root of these differences, Stiegler suggests, is to be found in the effect of technics on the neurally plastic brain, whose circuitry is continually reorganized by the prosthetic conditioning of the body. The brain occupies a privileged place in the theory of general organology, albeit one that is underdeveloped at present.⁵ In a line of thinking developed in the forthcoming Technics and Time, 4 (Symboles et diaboles, previewed in the 2012–13 filmed seminar series on Stiegler’s website Pharmakon.fr), the closing chapters of The Catastrophe of the Sensible propose that the principal organ of the central nervous system “must be thought as the organ of relations between the dead and the living” (SM2, 133/218), as the nexus through which the body undergoes its de- and refunctionalization 5. On this point, see James 2013 (69–84).


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through technics (141/229). The idea that subjectivity consists in an internalization of our externalization in technics has been central to Stiegler’s concerns since Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, and his current interests lie in an explicit return to this opening theme. The earlier work articulates the process of simultaneous externalization and internalization as the movement of différance (or, rather, of the “différance of différance ”), in which the who and the what repeatedly retrace one another, with the subject producing the technical object, which then reinvents the subject, and so on (TT1, 176–78/184–86). The recent Pharmacologie du Front National (2013) clarifies what is at stake in this reinvention, as Stiegler draws on the neuroscientists Maryanne Wolf and Stanislas Dehaene to argue that reading consists in the recycling (or “exaptation”) of neural circuitry that originally evolved for something else, and that the ways in which the brain is refunctionalized by technics vary across time and space. The transition from oral to written culture coinciding with the invention of the alphabet, for instance, “was translated by a reorganization of the cortex, which is to say, by the establishment of synaptogenetic processes that literally inscribed the letter into the cerebral organ”: our prostheses write directly into the brain (Stiegler 2013: 126–27; see also Wolf 2008; Dehaene 2009). His current projects further develop this claim via Joseph LeDoux’s work on “synaptic selfhood” and the sense in which our “plastic” neural structures are “modifiable by experience” (LeDoux 2002: 8), and on the work of psychologist Merlin Donald, who has supplemented evolutionary biology with an account of how culture restructures the “fundamental neurological organization” of the brain, “literally reconfiguring the sensory cortex” (Donald 1991: 13–14). This neuroscientific turn might suggest that Stiegler’s work is converging with that of another major figure in contemporary French philosophy, namely Catherine Malabou, who engages with neural plasticity as part of a broader program of reconciling psychoanalysis with contemporary neurology. Focusing specifically on the relation of cerebral function to the experience of trauma, Malabou argues that the experience of traumatic shock consists in a disorganization of affect, an emotional disengagement that can be traced to the destruction of the neural synaptic networks in which our conditioned behaviors are embedded (Malabou 2012: 157; 2007: 261–62). In Stieglerian terms, that would seem to equate trauma with a kind of extreme culture shock, in which our internalization of the cultural memory externalized in technics breaks down. The undoing of the external symbolic coordinates of identity would thus coincide with the loss of the


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affective experience that these coordinates organize. In Stiegler’s account, however, trauma pertains less to a loss of affect than to a reawakening thereof, and it needs to be understood in the context of a theory of general organology that traces the srcins of the unconscious to technics. By positing the unconscious an organ produced result through de- and alization of the bodyas through technics—a of the artificial andrefunctionnot natural selection—he moreover shows it to be deeply bound up with aesthetic experience. The Artifactual “Organization of the Sensible”

Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification. —Charles Darwin (2008) Perhaps the most dramatic example Stiegler gives of an epiphylogenetic refunctionalization of the body is found in his account of the unconscious, which is theorized not as a product of biological evolution but rather as technical in srcin, pertaining to the ways in which experience is conditioned by the prostheses through which the world is made sensible to us. His theory of the technical unconscious reworks the unconscious mind as a repository of culturally inculcated patterns of experience passed down through the generations, with trauma amounting to exposure to forms of experience to which our bodies have not been habituated. In saying this, Stiegler provides an alternative to the much-criticized Freudian view, in which thethrough traumas our ancestors appear to be inherited and1990b: endured in the present a of process of biological transmission (Freud 343).⁶ To locate the srcin of the unconscious, Stiegler takes us back to the advent of bipedalism and suggests that there was more going on than just the liberation of the hand for tool use. Upright walking coincided with another function-shift in our hominid ancestors’ sensory organs, “an organic repression at the srcin of repression in general” ( SM2, 121/200). In the penultimate chapter of Symbolic Misery, entitled “The Repression of Freud,” Stiegler recounts the details of an early letter from Freud to his mentor, Wilhelm Fliess, in November 1897, in which the psychoanalyst’s observation of his bottom-sniffing dog leads him to hypothesize a refunctionalization of the sensory organs as an additional consequence of humans’ shift to bipedalism: “upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth 6. The go-to criticism for this aspect of Freud is Gould 2007a (467–79).


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become repulsive” (Freud 1985: 279). When the nose had been level with the anus, Freud muses, anal-olfactory stimulation—with its capacity for disease detection—would have been a notable indicator of sexual attraction. The shift to upright walking entailed a libidinal decathexis, or defunctionalization, of both the nose attraction and the anus on which it was with the brunt of detecting thenceforth falling on hitherto the eyes,trained, which are accordingly refunctionalized. This idea is carried over into a footnote in Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud further speculates that the previously eroticized odors of excreta and female menstruation become an object of taboo and “organic repression.” The genitals, too, now give rise to shame and so are covered up with clothing (Freud 1990a: 288–89n1; see also SM2, 121–23/200–203). Stiegler reads this as the “defunctionalization of the sense of smell” and moreover as “a defunctionalization of the sexual . . . such as it is formed in animality ” (SM2, 121, 126/200, 206–7). But while crediting Freud for recognizing the significance of organological function-shift, he is nonetheless critical of the psychoanalyst’s failure to link the ensuing refunctionalization of the eye to a technicization of sexuality, hence also to a process that inaugurates “a new epoch of aesthetics in the long history of the sensibility of the sexually differentiated animal ” (124/205). His contention, in other words, is that aesthetics begins when artifactual organs are offered up to sight, when the odors of animal sexuality give way to the “artifactualization of the beautiful” (128/210). As Stiegler shows by turning to Darwin via Leroi-Gourhan, the beautiful, technical artifacts in question are the clothes and other stylings through which humans differentiate themselves from one another. In Freud’s account of human nature, the constitutive role of technics in the invention of the human “has been repressed,” just as it has throughout the history of Western metaphysics (140/228). Perhaps surprisingly, the same cannot so easily be said of Darwin. Endorsing the idea that “clothes were first made for ornament and not for warmth” (Darwin 2004: 640), the closing chapters of The Descent of Man (1871) document the various ways in which humans, irrespective of tribe and ethnicity, use prostheses as supplementary secondary sexual characteristics. Darwin describes how sexual selection, meaning the struggle to procure a mate for the purposes of reproduction, becomes inseparable from “artificial selection.” In On the Origin of Species, this phrase was employed to denote the selective breeding of domesticated animals, but it has since acquired the sense of using “artificial means” like hair sculpting, bodily adornment, modification, and


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mutilation to heighten attractiveness (2004: 641, 649; 2008: 84). Stiegler reads Darwin as recognizing that desire is a product of culture (“the different races of man differ in their taste for the beautiful” [Darwin 2008: 648]), and as open to the prospect that criteria determining what we desire are transmitted across generations by aisprocess otheragain, than natural selection. The first move in this direction made, once by Leroi-Gourhan, who writes, in the second volume of the monumental Gesture and Speech (1964b), that “the aesthetics of clothing and adornment, despite its wholly artificial character, is one of the biological traits of the human species most profoundly linked to the zoological world” (GS2, 351/189). In an insight that proves central to Stiegler, he traces the emergence of “aesthetic sensibility” from forms and behaviors found in nature through to the shared symbolic codes around which human communities are organized. Anticipating the theory of de- and refunctionalization, Léroi-Gourhan suggests that aesthetics srcinates in “biological properties common to all living organisms” but attains its fullest sense in the extension of biology into technical objects that condition bodily rhythms and establish norms for the distribution of bodies within a given society (271–72/82–83). The wing markings of a butterfly function as signifiers of both natural and sexual selection, warding off predators and attracting mates, and thus “belong to the uncertain world of style even if, in Darwinian terms, they perform a protective function for a certain length of time in the history of the species. Human decoration—by contrast—only confirms the general rule of substitution of the ethnic group for the species; the same phenomena can be observed in the persistence of marks expressing the personality of a group” (300/122). The artificial selections of human communities may facilitate survival, but they also, crucially, give rise to traditions that bind members of a society together and thus furnish the rules of their transgenerational belonging. The prosthetic style of an ethnic group serves to establish its collective identity by laying out “values and rhythms” of the community (278/93). It also, and moreover, communicates the hierarchy and internal differences of the group, via significations of rank or wealth that persist through the ages. Be they educational, military, religious, or economic, the social organs of society participate in the “organization of the sensible” (SM2, 113/188), constructing a body politic schooled in interpreting the aesthetic, symbolic codes of social order. In re- and defunctionalizing the bodies of its members, by teaching them to read and write, for example, the organizations of this technical-symbolic order train us to decipher selected aesthetic codes (36–39/129–30). Every technical object and institutionalized body of knowl-


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edge is a “trace” of society’s acquired experience, an externalized memory support incorporating the generations of accumulated skill that went into their construction. Aesthetic Awakening

Social organization consists in “selecting from among these traces that which should be internalized by the body in the construction of a social body [dans le faire-corps social ]” (SM2, 142–43/232). This, Stiegler contends, is the srcin of what Freud called the superego, the moral conscience that comes from the internalization of authority. He links it to the effect on the brain of the ongoing functional redefinition of physiological organs by technics (141/229): “As the seat of the unconscious . . . the brain relates to other organs and partial zones of the body in general through the mediation of technical objects that are external to the body. What is more, this relation to technical objects is subject to, or rather inscribed in, a relation of social organizations . . . in which are inscribed the rules of a superego that the brain can only internalize” (138/225). When we adopt the institutions and prostheses of a culture as our own, they take hold of the body in a way that opens us up to new possibilities of feeling (le sentir ), while also repressing others (116–17/193). Through the accumulated knowledge sedimented in technics, we internalize a past that we never actually lived. Some of these artificial selections become engrained as second nature, to the point where, like Nietzsche’s coin of truth, they lose their “sensuous power” of transformation (Nietzsche 1976: 47). Their repeated circulation nonetheless conditions stereotypical patterns of social behavior, serving to reinscribe a horizon of expectation that governs how and what a society knowingly or unconsciously experiences. These “stereotypical” elements of technico-cultural memory, whose adoption and internalization reinforces the habitual organization of experience, are to be differentiated from those that “overwhelm this organization” (SM2, 145/235). Stiegler terms the latter “traumatypes” and suggests that even trauma pertains to this kind of de- and refunctionalization of our brain and sensory organs. As with all “noetic,” “sensible,” as opposed to merely “sensory,” experience, it results from the conditioning of our anatomical apparatus. We have to be sensitized into experiencing an event as traumatic. The “return of the repressed” consists in a reactivation of forgotten circuits of signification, where an anxiety endured by ancestors, and transmitted through history via the organization of culture, is unconsciously


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inherited in the present. Whether a brush with death or a terrifying intellectual encounter, we experience trauma as traumatic to the extent that an event provokes a resurfacing of previously internalized traumatypes, buried deep within us and prevented from becoming conscious by the masking effect ofus ourout established patternsstereotypes of thought.(145–48/235–39). The violence of the awakening shakes of our prevailing Yet trauma, according to Stiegler, is not purely negative. Recalling the language of Leroi-Gourhan, he describes the overturning of an existing organization of the sensible in terms of “liberation”: “The liberation of the unexpected is therefore the liberation of a repressed expectation” (146/236). The traumatic breaking with stereotype is moreover identified with philosophy—and also with the work of art, both of which are reconceived around the idea of the “anamnesis,” or recollection, which Stiegler takes to be at the heart of philosophy’s “repressed” and “unthought” encounter with technics (TT1, ix/11). Balanced on the sublime precipice between ordeal and wonder, philosophy and art consist in the unsettling revelation of an unknown past that haunts us, in the ghostly return of a cultural memory one never consciously lived but which is retraced in the opening up of new possibilities of experience. The epiphany is less an exhaustive moment of recognition than a surprised seizing upon of that which exceeds our grasp: Comprehension is reduction to the same, and surprehension is the experience of the other in the same—which is to say, the experience of This the singularity of the sensible. is the experience of meaning [signifiance ], where that which is experienced . . . suddenly comes to explode the expectations settled upon by stereotypical secondary retentions, and . . . like all spiritual works opens a way for the traumatypical power of repressed secondary retentions to return to the surface, thereby constituting what one might call a Proust-like moment of anamnesis: the return of an ancient traumatype, coming back [revenant ] like a phantom, a spirit, or a punchline [un mot d’esprit ]. . . . Yet this “resurfacing” of a traumatype, which always arises simultaneously from preindividual depths [un fonds pre-individuel ] proper to and lived by one’s self (secondary retentions and protentions), from a preindividual fund [un fonds pre-individuel ] inherited from one’s ancestors but which one never lived oneself (proto-protentions and proto-retentions), and from a fund common to though never fully lived by all desiring (human) creatures, . . . a traumatypical resurfac-


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ing of this kind is only ever produced under conditions constituted by the historical state of . . . the de- and refunctionalization that tertiary memory presupposes and enables. (Stiegler 2005: 237–38) The passage is shot through with the language of Husserlian phenomenology, in which “secondary retention”—as distinct from the “primary retention” of a moment that has just passed—refers to consciously reproducible memories. These memories structure our internal consciousness of time, including not just the past that we retain but also the future expectations, or “protentions,” that they habituate us into projecting (Husserl 1991: 47–49).⁷ Stiegler’s contention is that secondary retentions are embedded in the external (“tertiary”) memory supports of technics, with unconscious memories of an unlived past inscribed in the body over the course of cultural conditioning, through the refunctionalization of the sensory cortex by the inherited technical objects that we adopt as our own. In the experience of anamnesis, the body enters into relation with prostheses that tap into our artifactual history, firing neurons along synapses hitherto pushed to the back of the mind, stimulating parts of the cortex weakened by disuse. If we encounter the return of the repressed in the work of art, it is because it disorganizes our habitual rhythms of thought and experience, relaxing the protensions that structure our expectations and that would otherwise reign in our ability to envisage futures that differ from the present. The description of this kind of awakening as traumatic risks seeming somewhat romantic alongside Malabou’s characterization of trauma as “affective ” (Malabou 2012: theory 157; 2007: 262), and there is alongsurely more to bebarrenness done to develop Stiegler’s of general organology side the neuroscience of aesthetic experience. From his writing to date, it is not yet clear, for example, how the prosthetic organization of our synaptic circuits fits with the neurobiology of affect and the de- and refunctionalization of the pleasure center of the brain. We can find some pointers, though, in recent experimental evidence, according to which “the making and breaking of neuronal connections stimulates the expression of neurotransmitters strongly associated with pleasure in ways that no doubt affect aesthetic experiences” (Armstrong 2013: 50).⁸ Research suggests that the release of dopamine coincides with the recollection of sensory stimuli tied to the experience of pleasure, causing us to crave their return. As the frequency of this return sees exception give way to stereotypical rule, toler7. For a discussion of how this is taken up by Stiegler, see Ross 2013. 8. In making this claim, Armstrong cautiously refers to Linden 2012 (15–20).


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ance to the hormone increases and the pleasure felt diminishes. And when the affective returns on these stereotypes become minimal (say, with symptoms of addiction), the transgression of our acquired habits provides a different kind of redemption. We move from the comfortable gratification of prevailing cultural tastes to the unsettling, complex, and potentially intolerable, traumatypical, experience of liberation that Roland Barthes identifies with “the destruction of that culture” (Barthes 1975: 14; 1973: 25–26). For Barthes, the work of art consists in the balancing of these two kinds of pleasure, with the familiar, identifiable plaisir offsetting the traumatic excesses of jouissance. This anticipates what neuroscience describes as the (culturally variable) play of harmony and dissonance (Armstrong 2013: 14–15)— and perhaps also what, through Stiegler, we might conceive as a sublimation, or deferral, of trauma, a différance of the past we inherit through technics. Stiegler’s Post-Darwinism

Work in the nascent field of evolutionary aesthetics tends to subordinate ideas of the cultural conditioning of aesthetic experience to an emphasis on the evolved biological role of beauty in both natural and sexual selection. Insofar as technical objects have been noticed, interest in them is geared less toward their role in the transformation of their users and their users’ environments than toward their status as “fitness signals,” meaning markers of highly adaptive skill sets valued by potential mates for their contribution to the survival of future progeny (Dutton 2009: 146–47). The role of the work of art, in other words, is deemed subordinate to what it tells us about the adaptive fitness of its maker. Other notable ideas in evolutionary aesthetics emphasize the function of narrative in communicating valuable Darwinian lessons, identifying stories and art, not to mention the pleasure they occasion, as ways of internalizing the acquired experience of our ancestors, through whose recalled adventures we can vicariously rehearse strategies of mating and survival (Tooby and Cosmides 2001). This line of thought clearly accords some significance to the inheritance of cultural memory, though its focus remains on gene-culture coevolution and a narrowly construed facilitation of the preservation of life. Other theories of aesthetic experience create more of an opening for Stiegler’s account of epiphylogenesis and the genealogy of the sensible, the re- and defunctionalization of our biological sensory architecture by technics, and the continued reinvention of the field of experience that this entails. Stephen


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Pinker reads the affective encounter with art in terms of a “non-adaptive exploitation of adaptive sources of pleasure” (Carrol 1998; see also Pinker 1997: 525, 534), in which the artwork exapts, or refunctionalizes, biological processes that srcinally evolved for something else, the pleasure circuitry related to sex, forpsychology instance. Ithas is nonetheless withinthe thedifferfield that evolutionary so far found acknowledged little to tell us about ent kinds of pleasure linked to aesthetics (Dutton 2002: 703)—which perhaps also explains why Stiegler’s interest in neuroscience has yet to inform his largely psychoanalytical account of the libidinal economy of desire. Evolutionary biologists are routinely criticized for reducing aesthetics to biology (e.g., Armstrong 2013: preface), and, in a similar vein, it has been suggested that Stiegler collapses aesthetics into technics, reducing the “critique of taste” to a discourse on prosthetics that fails to deal with questions of the criteria for the judgment of beauty (Trottein 2013: 93). But that is surely to miss his key insight, namely, that the artifactual organs that recalibrate sensory experience also furnish the bases of aesthetic preference. Our internalization of the artificial codes of society means that we are no longer confined to an appreciation of the adaptive traits formed by natural and sexual selection. Artificial selection creates criteria for judgment other than fitness, and accumulated cultural memory functions as a system of rules for interpretation, its organization of symbolic order providing the schematism—the stereo- and traumatypes—for the ways in which we read experience and adopt the tools that we inherit. Elizabeth Grosz has made the case for aesthetics as an extension of sexual selection, a general economy of creativity that serves to “enhance the animal body and its surroundings” (2011: 132). Building on Darwin and later Jakob von Uexküll, she also argues that the biological architectures of different species preclude a homogeneous, anthropocentric conception of aesthetics and technics (22–23). The elaborate nests of the bowerbird and the twig-enhanced antlers of the red deer, far more than the flower-painting elephants of the Thai tourist trade, would be illustrative of this, pointing to the existence of artificial selection among nonhuman animals. But they also, and pace Grosz, reveal a logic of technics that falls short of epiphylogenesis, if only by degree. Nonhuman bodies can be de- and refunctionalized by technics, but that is not to say they participate in the construction of an aesthetic, symbolic order. Primatologists broadly accept, for example, that the tools of even our closest nonhuman relatives are reinvented from scratch with each generation. The termite-fishing rods of the bonobo are


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not adopted as the products of cumulative and coordinated cultural learning in which the favored traces of the past are bequeathed to posterity; nor is their use characterized by the pedagogy, intergenerational transmission, and social organization of enforced cultural norms found among members of theThey genus (Tomasello 2014: see also Donald 1991: 125–26). areHomo thus not the bearers of 80–84; an unconscious, ancestral history whose inheritance allows the envisioning of sublime and traumatic alternatives to strictly biological horizons of sensation. Our culturally acquired ability to project new futures opens up the prospect of liberation from our inhumanity. Cumulative technical culture, in other words, enables us to be “not-inhuman” (see esp. Stiegler 2010: 170; also 2008b: 303–4)—a term that Stiegler employs in distinction to humanity, and which captures the memory of tragic histories that cannot simply be explained away by animality. If the human, or not-inhuman, exists, it does so only “intermittently,” consisting in a promise we glimpse in the mirror of art. References

Armstrong, Paul B. 2013. How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1973. Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil. . 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Carrol, Joseph. 1998. “Steven Pinker’s Cheesecake for the Mind,” Philosophy and Literature 22: 478–85. Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex . Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. . 2008. On the Origin of Species . Edited by Gillian Beer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dehaene, Stanislas. 2009. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. London: Penguin. Deleuze, Gilles. 1969. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit. . 2004. Logic of Sense. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester, and Charles Stivale. London: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 1967a. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit. . 1967b. L’Écriture et la difference . Paris: Seuil. . 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. . 2001, “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 246–91. London: Routledge.


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210 boundary 2 / February 2017 Donald, Merlin. 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dutton, Dennis. 2002. “Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold Levinson, 693–705. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 2009. The Art Instinct . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1985.The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press. . 1990a. “Civilization and Its Discontents.” In Civilization, Society, and Religion, translated and edited by James Strachey. Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, 245–340. Harmondsworth: Penguin. . 1990b. “Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays.” In The Origins of Religion, translated and edited by James Strachey. Penguin Freud Library, vol. 13, 239–386. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gould, Stephen Jay. of 1991. “Exaptation: Crucial Tool for an Evolutionary Psychology.”Journal Social Issues 47,Ano. 3: 43–65. . 2007a. “Freud’s Evolutionary Fantasy.” InThe Richness of Life, 467–79. London: Virago. . 2007b. “Not Necessarily a Wing.” In The Richness of Life, 143–54. London: Virago. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1991. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Translated by John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer. James, Ian. 2013. “Technics and Cerebrality.” InStiegler and Technics, edited by Christina Howells and Gerald Moore, 69–84. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Johnson, Christopher. 1993. System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LeDoux, Joseph. 2002. The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Became Who We Are . Harmondsworth: Penguin. Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1964a. Le Geste et la parole 1: Technique et langage. Paris: Albin Michel. . 1964b. Le Geste et la parole 2: La mémoire et les rythmes . Paris: Albin Michel. .MA: 1993. Gesture MIT Press.and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, Linden, David J. 2012. The Compass of Pleasure. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Malabou, Catherine. 2007. Les nouveaux blessés: De Freud à la neurologie, penser les traumatismes contemporains. Paris: Bayard.


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Moore / On the Origin of Aisthesis 211 . 2012. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Translated by Steven Miller. New York: Fordham University Press. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mivart, St. George Jackson. 1871. On the Genesis of Species . London: MacMillan. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1976. “Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” InThe Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, 42–47. Penguin: Harmondsworth. . 1994. The Genealogy of Morality. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinker, Stephen. 1997.How the Mind Works . Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ross, Daniel. 2013. “Pharmacology and Critique after Deconstruction.” In Stiegler and Technics, edited by Christina Howells and Gerald Moore, 243–58. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sterelny, Kim. 2012.The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique . MA: MIT Press. et le temps, 1: La Faute d’Épiméthée. Paris: Stiegler,Cambridge, Bernard. 1994. La Technique Galilée. . 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2004. Mécréance et discredit, 1: La Décadence des démocraties industrielles. Paris: Galilée. . 2005. De la misère symbolique, 2: La catastrophè du sensible . Paris: Galilée. . 2008a. “L’Être soigneux.” In L’avenir du passé: Modernité de l’archéologie, edited by Jean-Paul Demoule and Bernard Stiegler, 15–25. Paris: La Découverte. . 2008b. Prendre soin: De la jeunesse et des generations . Paris: Flammarion. . 2010. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2011. The Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Vol. 1. ofDisbelief and Discredit. Translated by Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold. Cambridge: Polity. . 2013. Pharmacologie du Front National. Paris: Flammarion. . 2015. Symbolic Misery, Volume 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible . Translated by Barnaby Norman. Cambridge: Polity. Tomasello, Michael. 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA: University Press. Tooby, Harvard John, and Leda Cosmides. 2001. “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts.” SubStance 94–95: 6–27. Trottein, Serge. 2013. “Technics, or The Fading Away of Aesthetics.” InStiegler and


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212 boundary 2 / February 2017 Technics, edited by Christina Howells and Gerald Moore, 87–101. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wolf, Maryanne. 2008. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. London: Icon. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. “Lacan between Cultural Studies and Cognitivism.” Umbr(a): Science and Truth 1: 9–32.


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Impossible, Unprincipled, and Contingent: Bernard Stiegler’s Project of Revolution and Redemption

Claire Colebrook

One of the enabling forces of Bernard Stiegler’s work lies in a curious problem of range. He is at once focused on the inscriptive conditions that allow something like philosophy to come into being, and would in this respect be located in a Derridean orientation of thinking of the West as an epoch beyond which we cannot think, because we would always be doing so from within the very writing that we would seek to delimit. At the same time, there seems to be something exceptional and catastrophic about Stiegler’s present and its intensification of a grammatization that now takes the form of digital media, mass marketing, global homogeneity, and the destruction of complex libidinal circuits. Stiegler’s questions are epochal in the grand sense, insofar as any local problem requires a thought of the very genesis of the capacity to problematize (and the technologies of temporal distancing that those questions require); at the same time, they are singular and contingent. In order like for there to or betertiary thoughtretention, or life in its human mode, there must be something writing and yet this transcendental and inescapable condition is—now, today—exceptionally destructive in its intensity. The observation of this destructive intensity generates boundary 2 44 1 (2017)

DOI 10.1215/01903659-3725953 © 2017 by Duke University Press


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an imperative to break with the present, to find some other epoch, and yet this break would not (and could not) situate itself outside technics, and especially technics in its inscriptive, archival, mystagogic, and aristocratic mode. (By mystagogy Stiegler refers to an event of belief and futural projection: readand a corpus is to orient oneself toward a sense that was inscribed in thetopast will remain into the future. But this mystagogy that opens time, and the self, toward other selves and other times relies on grammatization: for a text to offer itself to be read through time, it must be articulated, differentiated, and inscribed in a system of repeatable marks and traces.) Although Stiegler laments a form of capitalism that is destructively alienating, insofar as it produces the images and figures through which we dream and (now) cease to believe, his is not a project that would seek to find life and vitality outside the tendencies of capital. Rather, the grammatization— or creation of formal, circulating, and inscriptive systems—that generates the culture industries today is also what enables the complexity and collectivity of a transindividual archive. Stiegler therefore operates with two personae: one that pays a deconstructive attention to necessary contamination and impurity beyond good and evil (undertaking philosophy in the grand style), and a localized, committed, and rebellious refusal of grammatization in its current form. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari already drew a distinction between royal science (of grand systems) and nomad science (of local forays and skirmishes) (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 412), and in a similar manner Isaiah Berlin contrasted foxes and hedgehogs, depending on whether the world is viewed through a single lens or is understood by building up a whole from a series of complicated fragments (Berlin 1953). A Thousand Plateaus suggests a whole series of ways of thinking about opposed orientations (molar/ molecular; smooth/striated; chess/go; man/becoming-), but its authors also insist that the binaries they compose are marks along the way that create a path that constantly needs to be recharted. In his most recent work, Stiegler has come up with some oppositions of his own: traumatype and stereotype, individuation and disindividuation, desire and drive, and sublimation and desublimation. In a similar, but not identical, manner to Deleuze and Guattari, Stiegler’s oppositions are heuristic or working distinctions, and are ways of thinking about a more general process of differentiation with opposing tendencies. Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (influenced by Gilbert Simondon and transduction, or the ways in which relatively stable terms are composed as a consequence of relations among forces) is driven by a prehuman, prebiotic, or abstract machine


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that—to use terms from Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition—accounts for the actual differences of this world by way of some virtual differentiating force (Deleuze 1994). Perhaps this is best described as a “fractal” ontology (which means, also, that the notion of ontology still has purchase but has to shift from being the science of what ultimately to become to an account of how something comes to appear to beisand then becloser otherwise). Stiegler’s proliferating distinctions are driven less by an ontological project than they are by a diagnosis and prognosis. A good post-Derridean, he sees metaphysics as an occlusion of what is ultimately a horizon of combat and forces with warring tendencies. There is no substance or “being” that we might ultimately grasp as either good or foundational, only so many composed forces always tending toward their own decomposition or counterthrust. For all those general observations, though, I would like to suggest that what unites Stiegler with a thinker like Deleuze is a primarily unprincipled orientation. A Thousand Plateaus takes hold of a series of problems ranging from modes of warfare, the distinction between tales and novellas, what it is to be an animal, what counts as a refrain, the composition of the earth’s strata, metallurgy, sign systems, and epigenesis. Read closely, every plateau provides a possible system or conceptual apparatus for reading not only every other plateau but also any further problems we might want to compose. It is as though each distinct section of the book offers a unified theory of all other plateaus, with the foundation now being bodily life, or territorialization, or desire, and so on. One might say that everything begins with the refrain: in the beginning is something like a pulsation, rhythm, or patterning from which stable bodies, languages, and systems might emerge. But one might just as justifiably say that everything begins with a territory, a grouping, and assemblage from which relations are composed. Or, alternatively: “becoming-woman” is the key to all becomings, precisely because all that exists can be conceived in terms of sexual difference, an encounter between two forces that recomposes the initial tendencies that come into relation. There are plenty of foundational terms and grand distinctions, and each makes sense in its own right. A Thousand Plateaus appears to be performatively Leibnizian, rather than Kantian: every perception of the whole opens to the infinite but composes its infinity relatively clearly depending on its locus and range. Despite appearances and the manifest closeness to a deconstruction that would find inscription to be the condition for the possibility of systematicity as such, I would suggest that Stiegler’s composi-


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tional mode is Leibnizian as well: each problem posed (such as the relation between traumatype and stereotype in cinema, or drive versus libido) is not another version or term for thinking about writing but is a different technè and different epoch: a different way in which time opens to the infinite. One from couldthe contrast Stiegler’s local raidswith—despite and skirmishes read the whole tendencies of the parts all that Derrida’s claims—the method of deconstruction (Derrida 1985; Royle 2000). (Indeed, the insistence on deconstruction not being a method lies in its refusal of any given rule of reading precisely because it remains committed to reading each inscription on its own self-deconstructing terms. So, perhaps it is better to say that it is a hypomethod, a refusal of any given method in its following of the guardrail of the text’s intention [Derrida 1976: 158].) What makes deconstruction purely formal is that terms like writing do not refer to writing in an extensive manner but are concepts created to indicate something like an Idea, a pure possibility that is only ever given in some determination. This then means that deconstruction can be principled and can claim to be justice precisely because it does not judge the actuality of writing, nor pose distinct epochs of writing, but always asks the question of writing in general and law in general (Derrida 1992).¹ There have always been unprincipled thinkers—like Deleuze and Stiegler—who keep adding in more terms and observations, branching out and then retracing and erasing steps. You have to read the entire corpus several times, and each time you do, you have to reread the sections you thought you had grasped. If you are a teacher, you cannot set one exemplary text that allows you to give a sense of the whole. There is no clas1. If deconstruction is justice, it is because it is the refusal of any determined figure or arrival of justice, insisting on justice as entirely futural. By contrast, we might note something invasive and monstrous about Stiegler’s analysis of dike. Humans begin by forming images of divine gods who allow for the belief in a future, but this future opened by the gods is combative and requires technè and know-how, a seizing hold of the forces of the world. It is also essentially urbane—not so much an idea that opens purely from the force of the concept and intentionality but something that requires an industry or academy that thinks and writes intensively: “aido and dike, feelings that guarantee the safety of the gathering of mortals, are the very feelings of . . . mortality itself ensuing from this de-fault, from their technicity. This gathering, which means here for Plato the city (polis ), implies decision, and decision implies anticipation: promētheia , advance, whose truth is the return after the event, the delay, ēpimētheia ; and insofar as it constitutes in one stroke (ēris ) the possibility of the city and the possibility of its destruction (its impossibility), promētheia as advance presupposes hermeneutics (related itself to the technics of writing), which lies at the basis of temporality” (Stiegler 1998: 202).


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sic programmatic essay, and when you go back to your first copy of the text, you might find yourself underlining or remarking upon the sentences that on first reading seemed to be of lesser importance. By contrast, every one of Derrida’s essays inWriting and Difference works in such a way that one couldorread that essay alone, carefully andappears thoroughly, grasp the principle orientation of deconstruction: what to beand foundational, proximate, srcinal, and pure is the effect of the seemingly secondary and parasitic term that one hopes to expel or subordinate. I make this contrast between principled and unprincipled orientations in thinking not for the sake of journalistic observation but precisely because it takes us to the heart of the impossibility of Stiegler’s project. Written at a time of contracting possibility, when the future, hope, thinking, and transformation seem to be (at best) improbable, Stiegler’s work is insistently redemptive, and it is so only because it is just as insistently unprincipled. Before clarifying exactly what I mean by this, I want to make another, related, distinction between orientations of thinking: there are some philosophers who provide particularly apt figures, or ways of thinking about thinking. George Berkeley’s idealism, René Descartes’s dualism, Ernst Mach’s positivism, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic, John Rawls’s antifoundational liberalism, Quentin Meillassoux’s anticorrelationism. There might be a dispute regarding just what counts as Cartesianism, dialectic, or object-oriented ontology after these thinkers have staked their ground, but we need them in order to map our own conceptual terrain. We need these figures when we write and move forward: where would “corporeal feminism” be if it did not have social-construction feminism as its opponent (and forebear)? For all his srcinality, I would suggest that if Jürgen Habermas did not exist, we would have to invent him: there had to be someone who would argue for the pragmatic ideal of consensus, and it was Habermas’s art to have done so with such decisive and principled clarity. Stiegler, perhaps more than any other thinker at the moment, seems to preclude figuration and discipleship, not just because he quotes in a manner that is fast and furious but because his project is impossible. Accordingly, I want to add one more way of considering Stiegler’s orientation: rather than a single lens, there are a series of maneuvers, like guerrilla operations, and these never really allow us to grasp something like a basic conceptual apparatus that would help us to apply Stiegler’s method to our own problems. Added to these two features of being unprincipled and impersonal (or without distinct persona), Stiegler’s corpus is impossible.


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What he sets out to do—diagnose the present on the basis of a history of technics, where technics is not simply parasitic—seems to be oriented more and more toward prognosis, a demand for a future that is highly principled, even if the tools of the diagnosis rely on a rigorous lack of principle. In order to make this clear, and despite all I have said regarding the proliferating, multiply voiced, dispersed, and disjunctive nature of Stiegler’s style, I want to break this down into something that looks like a syllogism: •

First proposition: technics, or the pharmakon, precludes anything like purity of principle or innocence. • Second proposition: technics is not added on to life but is entailed by life’s non-self-sufficiency. Any individual is what it is only by encountering other forces, which compose relatively stable points. • Third proposition: time is “srcinally” technical; or, there is always tertiary retention. • Fourth proposition: the present is marked by disindividuation, desublimation, and an absence of epochal redoubling, and these events need to be combated. • Conclusion: what we know, live, and represent as life is given as a continuous or synthesized unity only because it occurs in time, and time is given as continuous by way of technè. Human life is therefore, as a temporal whole, dependent upon a history of technical objects (ranging from cave drawings to writing to cinema). The very threatens to decompose and human lifething and that preclude its epochal redoubling is disindividuate also the only means of its survival: technè. Technology is not just a necessary evil, something we unfortunately depend upon. If there is a “we” at all, it is because “we” are technè. We cannot try, then, to diminish, eliminate, or ameliorate technè ; to do so would be suicidal. This is why Stiegler insists that life—human life—is tragic, for it can survive or live on only by means of that which renders it dependent or alienated from itself. There is a tendency toward proletarianization, or a gap between life and the technical means of its own existence. For Stiegler, the gap is widening, and it is in his lament regarding this gap that we find the problem of principle.

Propositions 1 to 4 follow on from each other: the key maneuver of Stiegler’s work is to tie technics and phenomenology together. Unlike


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“pure” Derridean deconstruction, Stiegler refers to spirit and mystagogy, or the ways in which each individual psyche is oriented beyond itself to other psyches. This accounts for his interest in arche -cinema, or the ways in which images are viewed as if they offered collective memory. At the same time, such collective orientation, or thinking that has antranscends object beyond is possible only by way of a system of inscription that anyitself, individual life or spirit. This is why “proletarianization of the senses” is possible: we see and think by means of a system of inscriptions that is not our own. But it is also why art and cinema are so important, because it will be the lover of cinema who wants to take up the apparatus of inscription and make it his own. If we ask what it is for a being to think or live, then it must think of something and be related to something that is not itself. This is standard phenomenology, to which Derrida added the requirement of the trace: the relation between any two individuals or persons is preceded and made possible by a prior system of inscriptions (such as language). For Stiegler, these processes of intentionality and inscription are transindividual and require both a system or archive and a history of other individuals who have also become living individuals through the archive. Technics and time: discontinuous inscription and tracing are what make possible an individual who can live as if already with a world of others. The condition for a living being, insofar as it lives, is that it must go through time. Because lived time is the time that encounters what is other than the living being, it follows that life and time are “essentially” in relation, or essentially inessential. One cannot, therefore, regard the mind that allows itself to be captivated by the screen as something evil, alien, or eliminable. Stiegler is quite clear, especially in Technics and Time, that without an archive and without consumption of the archive there cannot be the formation of a self or a “we” that takes on a certain consistency. It is the complexity of technical systems, figures, images, and inscriptions (and therefore their externalization or hypomnemata) that allows for the individuation of a self and the imagination—by way of hope and reason—for a future. The greater the difference of the archive, the more complex the encounters among individuals with the past and each other, and therefore the more expansive will be the possibilities of disputation for the future. So much is a matter of principle. That is, once one examines the conditions for the possibility of thinking, reading, viewing, deciding, saying “I,” or thinking of oneself as part of a “we,” then there can be no question of purifying consciousness of technè; to do so would be to rob it of its very means of life. More specifically, and insofar as it is part of the trajectory


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of technics, capitalism at once has a global or planetary expansiveness that relies upon individuals being oriented beyond themselves to desire more, and yet its commodification and grammatization of that tendency is destructive of the very future it seeks to master. LikeofDerrida before Stiegler remains committed to the necessary force some trace or him, inscription that allows consciousness to appear to itself. For Derrida, one cannot draw a principled distinction between actual writing systems (writing in the narrow sense of actual technologies) and the temporal processes by which consciousness sustains itself: all the features that mark writing in the narrow sense (such as delay or deferral) already mark consciousness. For Stiegler, this impossibility of drawing a principled or essential distinction between the phenomenology of internal time consciousness and the actual dependence of consciousness on inscriptive technologies is a limit of Derrida’s work. Derrida can acknowledge the first blow or gap between consciousness and itself, but not the second historical proliferation of industries that install themselves in this split: Although he thus shows that the pharmakon of writing, and thus hypomnesis, is the condition of anamnesis, that is, of the critique of the pharmakon and its epokhal redoubling, Derrida himself never sought the possibility of a second moment, that is, of a secondary suspension which, as après-coup, constitutes new circuits of transindividuation from out of the short-circuits provoked by proletarianization. Why not? . . . [I]ndustrial pharmacology constitutes a completely newcan configuration possibility of secondary redoubling be thought for onlywhich as thethe object of an economicopolitical struggle in regard to the relation to instruments of negotium , and such that it can become the vector of a new libidinal economy, of unprecendented processes of sublimation, and of the invention of a new age of otium —an otium of the people. (Stiegler 2013c: 49) Consciousness as such in its living present can only be present to itself by way of an object that allows for synthesis; consciousness becomes what it is, or takes on identity by way of orienting itself toward something about which it cares, and for this reason consciousness is able to say “I” only because of things that are already other than itself, and that are also social, technical, and never given fully. The composition of a self as continuous in time relies at the very least on some tertiary object. But whereas Derrida remains at the level of principle, and therefore must rule out any supposed pretechnical foundation that would allow for an adjudication of technè,


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Stiegler confronts the unprincipled terrain that Derrida had always left open. To say that consciousness is never fully present to itself, as Derrida does, is to enable a quite rigorous critical procedure of ruling out any appeal to propriety: one is always within inscription, tracing, and synthesis. What we takethat to be justice, the good, or the human is always already up with which haslife, a rogue or unjust and inhuman potentiality forbound difference and deferral that we cannot master. That is to say: if what we take to be the self, the proper, the lived, and thinking life can only be itself by way of a series of machinic or technical invasions, then we cannot have an ethics that grounds technè or subordinates technè to some reflective life, and so we could not have a horizon of reflection that might evaluate degrees of technical alienation based on the furtherance or restriction of conscious life, nor on the basis of some proximity to consciousness proper. We could not say, for example, that conversations were once faceto-face but have now fallen into the technological distance of social media or text messaging; conversations are always already technically mediated by language. However, if one accepts Stiegler’s claim regarding the difference between primary/secondary and tertiary retention (where tertiary retention allows for ongoing individuation by relating to external objects), then consciousness is not only alien to itself but is alien to itself by way of a system of evolving, mass-produced, historical, and (today) digitally and globally circulating technical objects: “Derrida, in Speech and Phenomena, while contesting with good reason the opposition of primary and secondary retention, ends up practically abolishing the difference between primary retention and secondary retention, rather than analyzing the play of their composition, something that prevents him as well from thematizing tertiary retention” (54). Accepting this to be the case, we might not simply rule out the notion of a conscious and self-present life (celebrating a deconstruction that is not a method and that “is not”); we would be able to diagnose the systems of production and collective individuation according to the technical and communicative systems that connect bodies, psyches, and markets (including cultural industries). We would not simply place consciousness under erasure or think about a concept’s capacity to open a future to come. Now we would have junk and detritus to deal with: now we are confronted with a history of archival, monumental, distributed, and inscribed objects that compose who “we” are. Derrida had argued in his early critique of Edmund Husserl that any event of meaning or experience presupposes a silent but never given “we”: to say that x is true or that x exists is to posit that it would be there for any


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subject whatever (a humanity to come). By contrast, for Stiegler, the “we” is not a silent and ungraspable presupposition but must exist; to be a self is to have a way of thinking about oneself by way of technical systems, and those technical systems are also read, viewed, desired, and lived by others. Icase—then—that am who I am because what I have who read may and consumed, butand it iscapitalist also the there of will be others use technical production to seize hold of all those images, figures, and inscriptions that enable self-mediation (which is always collective mediation). If we can call Stiegler an exponent of deconstruction, then we might say that whereas deconstruction in its pure form is quite rightly insistent on referring to itself as democracy, justice, or a radical hospitality, then deconstruction in its Stieglerian mode is radical hostility, a refusal of the offerings of the contemporary culture industries on grounds of taste. This taste needs to be thought in the Freudian sense of judgment, where the later complex modes of judgment (and the self) emerge from an srcinal “I take this in, I spit this out” (Freud 1961: 235). One would no longer be deconstructing oppositions that structure texts. Rather, one would need— as Stiegler does—to wage a war on the terrain of technical complexity itself, and if there were any criteria at all, they would need to be immanent to technological-human life, perhaps yielding something like a principle of unprincipled combat: If there is a singular combat that today must be taken up, then taking up this combat requires the preliminary proposition that the necessity of combat bedecay permanent: that which struggle againstwould its own . . . and existence society willisalways have must been that which fights its necessarily base part—“necessarily,” since it consists in a tendency which, when it composes with its countertendency, is also the source of the dynamism of society. In other words, the process of individuation is a state of permanent war, but a war contained and transformed through psycho-social competition . . . , which the Greeks called eris —the elevation towards an always possible best, ariston . (Stiegler 2011: 50) Derrida could argue for an ethics of hospitality by way of accepting the necessary risk of an opening toward “the other,” which would always be marked by a degree of violence and appropriation; but openness as such despite (or because of) its impossibility would be the ethic of deconstruction. If full presence never arrives, and if any decision proceeds from undecidability, then we must never allow any single definition of justice,


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democracy, or hospitality to reach final or closed determination. For Stiegler, openness or otherness must be negotiated on a terrain of war, for the other is not simply an other but someone/something whose technicity may invade and decompose (by way of capitalizing upon) my very being. Precisely therewould is no ground or founding presence, the only legitimate guide because for reflection be whether our technologicalhuman existence tends toward the maximization or minimization of its potential. Nothing guarantees individuation; if it takes place, it does so not because it eliminates the techno-scientific homogeneity that threatens the complexity that is its milieu but rather because it is constantly at war with its own countertendency within that milieu. Whereas for Derrida the “pharmakon ” operates in any enabling system to produce stability by way of repetition, and also destabilizes because any repetition occurs as different, Stiegler’s conception of the “pharmacological condition” has to do with the living being’s spirit. An individual becomes capable of saying “I” because there is a world for which she cares, and that cared-for world is possible only in relation to others who also care. It is that very expansive and spiritual condition, however, that exposes an individual to disindividuation. If the orientation toward images were to be stereotypical—always the same images, without any requirement for belief or disturbance—the circuits of memory and care would not eventuate. There is neither guarantee nor transcendent legitimation for taking the side of combat that fights for the maximization rather than abandonment of individuation; Stiegler has broken free from the claim for proper potentiality by arguing that the very means of reason are pharmacological: the condition for the possibility of thinking and living (our coevolution and collective individuation through technics) is the same event of dependence that destroys living. This is why, for Stiegler, the battle for the future involves a struggle with arche -cinema: the individual becomes complex and capable of care for the world through images that are archived, repeated, and constitutive of long circuits of memory. If the same images are recirculated and produced by a single industry only concerned with the efficiency of production and consumption, then we are left with stereotypes and a waning of the power to establish individuating circuits. This “proletarianization of the senses,” where bodies have no capacity to produce the memory circuits that constitute their being, can only be overcome bya revolution of amateurs: the cinema that captivates and that currently offers only the same dull round of images must be seized upon, such that the technologies that enable transindividuation are taken hold of and deployed to create traumatypes:


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That cinema is an industry means that its model and means of production have rested on an opposition between production and consumption: this opposition, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, expresses itself as a teratological exteriorisation of the transcendental imagination. But what they fail to seebegun, is thatbut therather problem is not exteriorisation , which has always already the shortcircuit that inevitably results from the hegemony of de-symbolising, disindividuating and imagination-destroying cultural consumerism, because it reinforces stereotypes and represses traumatypes. (Stiegler 2013a) To put it simply, we might contrast the Kantian antifoundational “I can, therefore I ought” with Stiegler’s mode of “There can be a ‘we’ and an ‘I,’ and therefore we must fight for it (and against it).” For Kant, the burden of deciding for oneself follows from the fact that the self is ungrounded; the subject is given nothing other than its own capacity to decide in the absence of any foundation. Or, in Derridean terms, it is because the grounds of any decision are undecidable that one must decide. For Stiegler, more attention needs to be paid to the subject’s ungrounding or lack of foundation. There is no pure autonomy, no absolute undecidability, but a default or dependence that grafts the psyche to technical and transitional objects. Kantian ethics, for all its problems, can be principled: because the subject cannot know or be proximate to any ground, he must decide in the absence of all grounds, as if he were to give a law to himself. Again, for all its difficulty, the same applies ethics: absence of anyaware grounding presence,each one can act to asDerridean if there might beinathe justice to come, that because decision limits an absolute undecidability, there can never be a full presence or fulfillment of justice. But Stiegler’s project begins precisely where Kantian and Derridean arguments stipulate that there can be no legitimate judgment. We cannot ground our decisions on any proper, prior, present, or natural condition, and so all decisions must be either those that would proceed as if they could be universally lawful (Kant) or those that would always recognize that the decision proceeds from undecidability and must therefore only be a promise of justice to come, never justice as such. By contrast, and herein lies the audacity of Stiegler’s project, the pharmakon functions less as a means for achieving a pure antifoundationalism and more as a way of achieving a genealogy and nosology of spirit. The question “what makes life worth living?” is implicitly preceded by a question of how life in its human form, bound up with the objects through which it has


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come into being, has become less worthy or dispirited than it might be: this constitutes Stiegler’s nosology. Consider two ways in which one might think about the impurity of spirit. The first would be purely deconstructive: any attempt to grasp spirit itself, mind itself, or life orittime itself must part Any in the very history of inscriptions and framings would seek to take theorize. moment prior to inscription would itself be an event of inscription. For Derrida, then, there can be no proper, and no way in which one is given any leverage for a decision outside of the absolute responsibility of the decision. What follows is a discourse of justice, futurity, responsibility, decision, and radical hospitality; any attempt to ground ethical decisions by reference to some prior condition is itself already an ungrounded decision. If one were to read Nietzsche’s history of spirit in this deconstructive manner, then any positing of a life or spirit before the morality of philosophy would itself be a rhetorical gesture; the positing of terms like life would be a performance or combative gesture of creating the srcin that will yield one’s present (de Man 1972). But there is another way of reading Nietzsche, far less concerned with analyzing Nietzsche rhetorically and far more devoted to becoming-Nietzsche, writing in a grand style of lament and diagnosis, all the while aware (and all the while stipulating) the necessary tendency toward thought’s own baseness and stupidity. Stiegler, after all, lays out the impossibility of finding any position of purity outside technics and yet for all that takes the risk of impugning a certain configuration of technics. At its extreme, and it will become a war of extremes, Derrida will insist that philosophically one cannot speak (especially when speaking of the great concepts of justice) in terms of more or less: insofar as one is speaking, one is already deploying concepts, one is already therefore committed to a sense that transcends the present and must mean what it means regardless of who or what speaks (Derrida 1977: 22). One is always already within the law that one can solicit only from within; the very meaning of law is that it can never be reducible to any instant or singular present, for it operates as law only by exceeding any actual instance. This is at once the law’s justice and the law’s violence. Stiegler, too, remains committed to the irreducibility of meaning to context or the present: signs, images, figures, gestures, words, and things all take experience beyond itself to the infinite. To experience this thing here and now is to experience it for others; “I” am a relation of care toward the things of this world, and those things (including books and computer screens) are there for others. To say that


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experience is cinematic is not just to say that it organizes images by editing, synthesizing, composing, and focusing in and out; it is also to say that the images are drawn from a collective archive and that this archive is drawn from the world (all the books and images that make up literal archives of museums, libraries, and galleries) but alsoand notthat of the world (all unconscious images that compose our dreams comprise ourthe hoped-for future). The archive or trace for Stiegler is not a formal condition that rules out a judgment or diagnosis of spirit. Because the history of spirit is a history of the collectively produced objects and figures through which we compose ourselves, our desires, and our future, we can observe the junk, detritus, and masterpieces that circulate as who we are. Put more simply, we might say that part of the labor of early deconstruction would have been to insist upon broadening what we mean by “writing”: when we say that there is “nothing outside the text,” we are not saying that there is no experience that is not linguistically or socially constructed. We are saying that the supposedly pure experience of the lived present has to retain a past and anticipate a future, has to synthesize and compose itself, or relate to itself, and is therefore never fully self-present. All the features that we deploy to talk about writing therefore already invade the prescriptural; consciousness is always already a text, figuratively speaking (although how one might refer to consciousness literally is hard to say). Once we accept that there is no pure present that precedes the dispersal of synthesis, then any term that we would like to take as a proper ground—such as “life”—is itself already the effect of movements that themselves can never be lived. However, if that process of primary and secondary retention or consciousness’s production of itself by way of differing from itself is also necessarily accompanied by tertiary retention, then the movement and history of consciousness is also a movement of things: The transindividual can only metastabilise itself because it is supported by tertiary retentions, i.e., technical supports of various kinds. Technical objects in general are themselves such supports, and they form what Leroi-Gourhan described as the third memory of technical and noetic life, appearing two million years ago: beyond the common genetic memory of the human species and the epigenetic memory belonging to each individual human, there is an epiphylogenetic memory constituting the various forms of inherited and transmitted human knowledge, and through which the transindividual is metastabilised. (Stiegler 2013a)


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Each body is, therefore, a multiple composite: in addition to the genes that unfold as the organic body, there is also the trajectory that a body makes through the world and—more importantly—the way every body’s life trajectory interacts with an already composed, inherited, and constantly recomposed This isindividuals epiphylogenesis, in forging concept ler is atarchive. once locating back inand a deep time ofthis evolving lifeStiegwhile arguing that the specific technical objects of each epoch effect and enable individual lives. It is perhaps illegitimate for one to posit something like life or consciousness as such, or nature as such, for one only knows these events under erasure, or as already lost. But if one accepts that the srcin is one of composition, and that the human cannot be privileged as especially unknowable, then one could not posit “the subject” or even justice or the future as radically unknowable or incalculable. One could not appeal to any proper or pure nature of the srcin, but one might want to study the modes of composition, relation, decomposition, and the speeds and syntheses of writing. Perhaps, then, what looks at first impossible in Stiegler’s project is not only possible but laudable. If one were to be a pure Derridean, one might say that one could not undertake a history of writing: any history is already caught up in text, trace, and inscription and cannot step outside the traces it would seek to explain. This is so if history is genetic, and only if one seeks to find some pure moment prior to the play of inscription. Derrida did claim that this is what Foucault was trying to do by writing a history of madness, trying to find some pure alterity outside reason’s reduction of force by way of recognition and incarceration (Derrida 1978). There could not be a historical moment before writing, but this does not mean that one cannot— within writing—compose a genealogy of its differences. And if one accepts Stiegler’s claim regarding tertiary retention, and accepts that consciousness’s own movements of self-composition are bound up with the time and space of objects, then a history of spirit would not need to be a history of that which falls into, is contaminated by, or is nothing more than an effect of material inscription. There would be no problem, in principle, with a genealogy of spirit or consciousness precisely because spirit and consciousness would not be posited as preinscriptive effects of an inscriptive system. We might say that one could, today, write a genealogy of nature only because there is no longer any “nature” as some foundational, atemporal horizon for culture (Morton 2007; Clark 2005). Once one accepts the contamination and multiplicity of the srcin, then the srcin ceases to be a negatively posited x that one must see as effected by the system while being imagined as the system’s outside or ground. Indeed, Stiegler makes this quite clear:


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there is—insofar as we speak, live, reason, hope, read, or think—always something like an x that recedes and is never given as such. This is what, in the tradition of phenomenology, renders any living present always other than itself, always directed toward a horizon of nongivenness or futurity that promises fulfillment andactual that never arrives. But forand Stiegler, this formal condition is bound up with histories, practices, institutions of mystagogy: in order to read or perceive, one posits a present that will unfold into the future, but as soon as these protentions are oriented to inscriptions, then the relation to the future is a relation to an archive and its relative stability and instability. It is here, too, that we can start marking out differences of principle, possibility, the unprincipled, and impossibility. If one begins from the Kantian premise of antifoundationalism, then no knowledge claim about life can act as a principle for ethics: this is the principle of ethics that marks both liberalism and deconstruction, but in different ways. For liberalism, it is the absence of any knowable ground that precludes me from exempting myself from communicative and reasoned deliberation; I cannot claim to know what is best for others (or for myself). Any decision regarding social justice must be what I would regard as reasonable for any subject whatever. A fair society is one in which any individual would in principle agree to the overall conditions (Rawls 1972). Such a position (which follows from an absence of knowledge regarding the ultimate good) must therefore privilege reflection, deliberation, collectively attuned decision making, and an open-ended conception of fairness. Deconstruction differs from antifoundational liberalism in one key respect: there can be no pure formalism, for the milieu in which deliberation, reflection, and decision occurs is not one’s own. There is always something in the time and process of decision that is technical or radically material (by which I mean mindlessly material, despite all the attempts lately to invigorate matter with sense²). Thought in terms of consequences, this means that one accepts liberalism’s antifoundationalism, and acknowledges that any decision proceeds from undecidability, but then supplements this with the problem of the technical dispersal and senselessness or lifelessness of the decision. Perhaps now more than ever it is this aspect of deconstruction—the 2. In opposition to contemporary claims for vibrant matter, I would suggest that deconstruction poses the radical thought of a matter that is not exhausted by sense, life, and relations. One would need to read current work, such as Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), as directly at odds with what Paul de Man referred to as materiality, which resists animation, synthesis, and life (de Man 1986: 51).


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emphasis on technicity, inscription, and materiality rather than the futurity, justice, and democracy that it shares with liberalism—that needs to be thought. Faced with the catastrophic and suicidal tendencies of the present, we need to ask why the enabling tendencies of technicity are not being realized. In principle, ofifcourse, cannot distinguish between enablingproor disabling technicity; identity one and presence are effected by differential cesses, then there is no ground that might adjudicate composition. Justice would only be a critical concept that would open any closed or determined illusion of the proper. But there is another way of conceiving justice that abandons principle: there is, as David Hume pointed out, no reason to prefer the destruction of the world rather than a scratch on my little finger (Hume 1978: 207). But there are passions that attach us to objects that are not those of our own life; here, justice is not just openness or futurity as such but a desire for this thing, and a desire that is intense enough that it would allow me to prefer this thing over my own life: “The Freudian questions of the super-ego, identification, sublimation, the pleasure principle, the reality principle, the drives, and generational conflict and confusion can be correctly posed, especially in the epoch of biotechnologies and reproductive technologies, only on the condition of considering the function of tekhnè in the constitution of this specific form of life called ‘existence,’ and which is configured through generations, cultures and civilizations, in a succession of libidinal economies ” (Stiegler 2013b: 43). This takes us to the heart of Stiegler’s unprincipled prognosis. Like deconstruction, he precludes the thought of the purity or propriety of the srcin: in the beginning is a relation to what is not one’s own, and toward which consciousness tends but always in a milieu of figures, inscriptions, and traces that have been previously given. Experience is cinematic because it is inherently parasitic, allusive, paratactic, fantasmatic, and part of a group drive that is captivated by a desire beyond one’s own time. If this is so, then one cannot lament the corruption of experience per se by machinic and inscriptive technologies. One certainly cannot appeal to “life” as some prima facie good or innocence that ought to regulate individual or policy decisions. Nor could one appeal to the individual, reason, reflection, or deliberation as transcendental or formal principles that would allow one to step back from (or bracket) empirical questions in order to focus on ethical procedures. What has come to be known as biopolitics, where expertise intervenes directly in ethics, would be strictly illegitimate: there could be no legitimate domain of law, policy, or moral managerialism that short-circuited the realm of deliberation in order to decide directly what might be good or


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necessary for individuals or states. There would always be an unbridgeable gap or impossible split between the life that we know through a whole series of inscriptive procedures and practices and the decisions we make regarding how we live. This is why Derridean deconstruction claims not to have a method and insists democracy of “saying srcin is always already splitupon and the nonidentical, then all one anything”: is left with ifisthe a principle of ongoing and tireless deconstruction—not to accept any figure, term, or limit as the privileged ground for a decision, and not to accept any decision as having arrived at the good once and for all. We cannot override others by some claim to expertise regarding the good or health of life (and we could even less ground our ethics on the basis of an appeal to life’s vibrancy or the thing’s special way of being in the world). Not only can we not know “life as such” due to the limits of knowing, but life as such or being as such could always, strictly and necessarily, be otherwise. We can either abandon any claim to speak for life itself, acknowledging only the minimal commitment that something is and that it may just as well not be, or we can intensify the focus on the purely formal and abstract ways in which we negotiate the real, abandoning all the poeticizing identifications that we once thought were philosophical. Any redemptive turn to the thing or life would need to be tempered by the technical and dispersed milieu in which such approaches are made. This, however, is precisely not Stiegler’s project. We can, and indeed we must, start to adjudicate and negotiate the technical and living milieu from which we emerge; if we do not think about, reflect upon, and make decisions about our life (our technical life), then we risk being overtaken by the decomposing tendencies that are at once necessarily part of our being and yet also precisely what we need to combat. We cannot and indeed must not remain at the level of philosophical critique and accept that all reason is contaminated by a technicity or material that is not its own; one needs to reason about the composition of reason, and one can do so because even if there is no proper reason or no proper composition, there is something that we must avoid: decomposition, disindividuation, and desublimation. And here we arrive at the question of the unprincipled: why must we decide upon composition rather than decomposition, or—more broadly—on complexity over herdish stupidity? In terms of Stiegler’s own argument, there are two possible answers. The first would be—following the notion of necessary war, adversity, and combat—that one does not take up a side and fight but that one fights, and that this agonistic positioning constitutes identity. One would fight, as Stiegler does, against disindividuation and against


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the abandonment of combat. (But herein lies a problem, for one does not want to eliminate the enemy, and one would therefore need to be at war with those who have abandoned the fight, who have decided not to decide.) Such a war would be without principle, for principles would be what are at stake, and decision to go to war is a decision to fight over principles: whether onethe chooses a life of individuation over disindividuation. The second way of thinking about what Stiegler presents so often as an imperative is to take on a principle based on what one knows about life and technics. We might claim, insofar as there is a “we,” that our own being has always relied upon transindividuation, and that to abandon the relations toward things that have given us our being would be suicidal. “We” could remark—from within composition—that there may be other modes of constituting a “we,” but epochal shifts and recompositions are approaching, in a moment that, for Stiegler, is unprecedented. We are now confronting the loss of any form of “we” or epochal redoubling: because we are reduced to consuming the easily circulated stereotypes of cultural industries, with no sense of their composition, we lack any relation of care to the historical archive that is the condition of our becoming. Reason may simply lose itself, extinguish itself, not just sacrificing the bookish and private mode that coincides with the era of industrialization but reason in all its modes. The trajectory that begins at least as far back as the arche -cinema of cave painting and that remains in any effort today to seize hold of the images from which we are composed may be halted, short-circuited in a simple abandonment and surrender to the drive. There would no longer be connection to deferred and collective things of a long duration but rather a stupid and herdish acceptance of immediacy. “We” cannot let this happen; to say that “we” do not care is for the “we” to speak about accepting its own nonbeing. One cannot will an absence of all willing—not because it is a contradiction to do so but because we would be impoverished. And why would we want to maintain a “we,” especially if what is central to our genealogy is that epochs come and go? Within Stiegler’s work, there is at once a recognition of war, combat, adversarial forces, countertendencies, and—overwhelmingly—a technicity that has a force that is not reducible to any health or good of the organism; the technè that extends and allows for the composition of transindividual circuits can operate as a force for decomposition, for short circuits, and captivation rather than a hopeful and reasonable opening to infinity. That is the tragedy of life, and it is for just this reason that technicity precludes any moralism that would aim to retrieve a purer and uncorrupted life.


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All we can do is to fight for individuation and complexity of composition in a mode that is agonistic and unprincipled. It is surprising, then, that with the same force with which the tragedy, technicity, and adversarial are asserted, Stiegler demands that we must act in a manner that seems to be justified by life itself. The “we” sometimes for Stiegler composed: something to which “we”is are parochially attachedcontingently and which emerges from an archive that is also contingent and fragile. At other times the “we” seems to present an imperative, with a force that is almost that of an executive order: we must act now, in this way, to maintain what is left of individuation. There seems to be less attention paid to the form of the imperative and more to what must be saved. So let us return to Stiegler’s basic principles that—I would argue— yield an unprincipled, impossible, and contingent project. (Here, I would contrast Stiegler with Derrida’s “necessary and impossible project,” where we cannot avoid the infinite sense of concepts such as justice and democracy, even if a fulfillment of that sense is impossible.) Stiegler’s genealogy of human technicity allows us to think of the present, precisely in the moment of its precarious decline, as exceptional. That is, one would not regard disindividuation, desublimation, or a capitalism of drives as some external disaster that is inflicted upon the proper, normal, or even living present. All those tendencies that Stiegler demands that we must save are not only contingent (having emerged by way of a war upon stupidity); they are, by Stiegler’s own admission, impossible. The long circuits of reading, individuation, transmission, and complexity that today we regard as good and properly human, yet threatened with extinction, are—Stiegler argues— the result of an initial appropriation and proletarianization. The space of leisure, inscription, and possibly even arche -cinema (whereby the drive is delayed in its immediate release and captivated by an object or sign of things to come) relies upon the volatility, violence, and mere animality of work occurring elsewhere. In the beginning is neither scarcity nor the gift but appropriation (and a belief system that will legitimate this theft): The hypomnesis that for Plato orthographic writing constitutes is a particular type of tertiary retention . This particular type arises out of mnemo-techniques that appear in the wake of Neolithic sedentarization, sedentarization leading to the accumulation of surpluses, surpluses of which it was necessary to keep count, and this inaugurates the process of grammatization through which the first forms of writing emerge. Grammatization is in general the production of tertiary


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retentions permitting symbolic fluxes and flows to be discretized and deposited, that is, permitting the spatialization of their temporality, notably in orthothetic forms, that is, permitting the re-accessing of engrammed fluxes without loss of content, and constituting a surety and of the the archive, thatprinciple is, also, of a belief in the archive, thensecurity supports arkhè, that hypomnesic practicewhich that aims at maintenance and care and, as such, the cult. . . . . . . [H]ypomnesis is already a power, a power that has not been claimed and has even been occluded by all that thinking which constitutes itself as philosophical, and which is in truth a stage and a significant modality of Western individuation: it is essential to it. (Stiegler 2011: 75, 77) Grammatization, but also philosophy, citizenship, urbanity, and justice rely on appropriation and surplus. Here, Stiegler’s organology is strangely close to the work of Tim Mulgan, for whom modern conceptions of justice, fairness, and deliberation rely upon “favorable conditions” that are unique to a historically and geographically isolated age of affluence (Mulgan 2014: esp. 71). Or, to draw on a similar insight from Dipesh Chakrabarty, we might say that Stiegler’s exceptional epoch of human sublimation (the era of writing from Plato to the present)—where a “we” is formed by deferring the drive and constituting collective desires for a hoped-for future—relied for centuries upon labor extracted from humans not similarly connected to this liberating archive (Chakrabarty 2009). That is, only by a division of labor could society of leisured inscription emerge that would the divine object afrom a society of priests and allow for a discursive andfree disseminated archive. Only with the development of planet-destroying industrial technoscience could individuals be relatively freed from intense labor and contingency, so that we might say that the condition for the possibility of individuation and the archive was (once upon a time) the exploitation of other humans but has increasingly become dependent on the exploitation of the earth. Therefore, we might say that what Stiegler is calling for— individuation for all in the face of the catastrophic threat of mass proletarianization—would require an unprecedented and impossible amount of inhuman energy. A basic principle of Marxism is that as technology and industry develop, it becomes possible to shift from a world in which an elite few store and own surplus at the expense and proletarianization of others to the possibility of a distributed surplus and an expansion of leisure and


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critique for all. Technology will be the means by which, with the due redistribution of techno-science’s benefits, we will all be able to become fishermen by day and critics in the evening. For Stiegler, technology is not an extension of the organism, for the organism “itself”—the brain, the hand, the eye, and the systems by an which it remembers and also The allows itself to fail to remember by forming archive—is technological. alienation, distance, and return that Marxism narrated about technology had a departure point and a proper home; we could criticize the distance and lifelessness of technology not for being intrinsically evil but for veering away from their proper life-extending purpose. As Stiegler both celebrates and laments, philosophy and cultural production are not distinct practices that might assess technology from without but are themselves technological— dependent upon repeatable systems—and aligned with, but not reducible to, grammatization. Herein lies the problem, again, of contingency and impossibility: the creation of the archive that enabled complex circuits of individuation posits (initially) a divine deferred presence, but with writing and circulating inscription, this opening to the infinite can become immanent, and become the object or thing of collective investment, and part of a collectively read and disseminated idea. With increasing formalization and eventually digitalization, the archive at once becomes widely available, widely authored, but also homogenized, commodified, and short-circuited precisely because the images and figures that make up our collective imaginary are always already packaged, assimilable, and not at all objects of disturbance. This mass proletarianization by late capitalism is destructive of the planet and of sublimation. If one decides to oppose this destruction, one can do so—I would suggest—only by some unprincipled decision of war. One could, as Stiegler does (for the most part), oppose the desublimation and a grammatization that has reached such a degree of global equivalence and stereotypicality that “we” are reduced to drives; it is in this spirit that Stiegler calls for a new industrial, creative, caring, and future-oriented ethics of collective transindividuation. The imperative is not based on any proper notion of life but only—contingently—on the circuits that have formed, and to which we are parochially, and precariously, attached. If such an ethic is not achieved, then “we” face disaster and catastrophe; what we need to war against is mass proletarianization. The symbolic circuits through which the human spirit has (in a period of exceptional and contingent self-formation) hoped, reasoned, believed, and desired are now operating with a form of machinic immediacy that precludes any genuine engagement. To save ourselves


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requires both combat and risk: nothing guarantees what or who will be saved, and we cannot yet know the means or form by which such survival will take place. Would such a survival be possible? There is a suggestion, within Stiegler’s own work, that the answer is no, and thislabor is because otiumtoday always relied upon a disproportionate of extorted and would only be relieved of that burden ofamount violent extraction with radically new technologies that might cost the earth. Yet it is precisely this misery or abandonment of hope that Stiegler so steadfastly refuses: the time of otium emerges not only with technè but also with localized proletarianization. There must have been some division of labor and even priestly seduction (mystagogy) that enabled the formation of the Platonic academy, which operated by creating belief and mystery. The leisured time of the archive, reflection, and deferred desire emerges from and negates a disastrous life of mere subsistence. But this disastrous life not only haunts the archive; it is its very condition. The leisure of critique, from Plato to Paul Valéry, relies upon what Rawls referred to as favorable conditions, where the conditions of existence allow for a minimal degree of fairness and relatively equal distribution of resources. The trajectory of industrial capitalism might (perhaps contingently) have been one of a greater and greater distributed otium , with the dissemination and immanence of belief allowing for an ever more inclusive production of spirit. What has occurred, however, is the hegemony of destructive forces. Digital and mass media are dominated by the immediacy of drives and the simplicity of stereotypes, with the reduction of delay and long circuits. Stiegler’s present, which he at once declares to be an epoch in which hope must be expressed, is, however, one of resource depletion at the planetary level. For his new industrial ethic to be possible, something impossible would need to occur, and this could only happen with the advent of radical and utter contingency. The archive in its current mode of production and distribution, based as it is on the disastrous subjection to mere subsistence, would need to be transformed beyond recognition. If the archive and otium to date have been dependent upon a mass of unpaid labor and intense exploitation of inhuman energy (in a manner that is now becoming evident to all humans, even those who are not reaping the time of leisure such appropriation affords many others), then transindividuation in its current epochal mode will not be possible.


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References Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlin, Isaiah. 1953. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. New York: Simon and Schuster. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222. Clark, Nigel. 2005. “Exorbitant Globality.” Theory, Culture, and Society 22, no. 5: 165–85. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum. De Man, Paul. 1972. “Genesis and Genealogy in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.” Diacritics 2, no. 4: 44–53. . 1986. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. . 1977. Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel Weber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. . 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge. . 1985. “Letter to a Japanese Friend (Prof. Izutsu).” In Derrida and Differance, edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, 1–5. Warwick: Parousia. . 1992. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice , edited by Drucilla Cornell and Michel Rosenfeld, 3–67. New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. “Negation.” In “The Ego and the Id” and Other Works . Vol. 19 of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth. Hume, David. 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature . Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Mulgan, Tim. 2014. “III—Ethics for Possible Futures.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114, no. 1: 57–73. Rawls, John. 1972. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Clarendon. Royle, Nicholas. 2000. “What Is Deconstruction?” In Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, 1–14. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus . Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.


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. 2011. The Decadence of Industrial Democracies . Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity. . 2013a. “The Organology of Dreams and Arche-Cinema,” translated by Daniel Ross. Screening the Past 36. www.screeningthepast.com/2013/06 /the-organology-of-dreams-and-arche-cinema/. . 2013b. Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals. Vol. 2 of Disbelief and Discredit. Cambridge: Polity. . 2013c. What Makes Life Worth Living? Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity.


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Arche -Cinema

and the Politics of Extinction

Tom Cohen

The defunctionalizations and refunctionalizations that determine the rhythm of the organological genealogy of the sensible and of what lies coiled up there—the intellect and the unity of its reasons, its motivations—have specific folds that create ruptures that are called epochs and that accentuate more and more vividly as time moves on the fault lines, the disadjustments, the incomprehensions, the crises, and critiques. —Bernard Stiegler, “Proletarianization” Few progressives have turned around to face the future; and one can see why, for the progressive who turns around can no longer be a progressive. In the Anthropocene, in addition to the past we seek to escape, now we have a future we want to avoid; so we are squeezed from both ends. . . . The most striking fact about the human response to climate change is the determination not to reflect, to carry on blindly as if nothing is happening. —Clive Hamilton (2012) Stiegler’s lecture, “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” published in this special issue, is cited parenthetically in the text as “Proletarianization.” boundary 2 44 1 (2017)

DOI 10.1215/01903659-3725965



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There is arche -cinema to the extent that for any noetic act—for example, in an act of perception—consciousness projects its object. —Bernard Stiegler (2013)

“2016: The Movie”? Somewhere in movie heaven it is written: that shall only be real which has been put into film. I ask you to consider, for a moment, a Hollywood script proposal: we’ll call it “2016: The Movie.” It is a bit clichéd, and I don’t know what to make of it (you decide). It starts with a premise: a hyperindustrial civilization receives numerous alarming reports that it has passed tipping points of toxic global warming—and that it has now entered a prolonged period of mass extinction events (including this species’ own). Yet citizens appear unmoved, distracted, or in open denial, as in a spell. To continue. Extreme weather events escalate (megadroughts, polar vortices), resource wars advance, nominal democracies pop across the globe, reports of tipping points passed proliferate—and utopic progressivism is in disarray. Even our utopist critics are reduced to amazement at this spell—if we define utopist criticism, in Fredric Jameson’s accommodating downgrade, not as those who believe in the arrival of a redemptive utopia but those, merely, who struggle for social justice and progressivism (2005). It is a symptom of the embattled disorientation of today’s American Left that Henry Giroux in his analysis recurs to inert metaphors like zombiism, or descriptions of trances: “The organized culture of forgetting, with its immense disimagination machines, has ushered in a permanent revolution marked by a massive project of distributing wealth upward, the militarization of the entire social order and an ongoing depoliticization of agency and politics itself” (Giroux 2013; see also Giroux 2011). Revolution has been permanently inverted. This description references the effects of media, telemarketing, television, cinema particularly (“immense disimagination machines”). It recalls what Bernard Stiegler identifies as a “proletarianization of the senses ” themselves.¹ 1. See Stiegler, “Proletarianization.” I use “senses” in preference to “sensibility,” which in English may not carry fully the French term’s neural and organological implications. This phrase marks both Stiegler’s thorough reprioritization of “the aesthetic,” the latter’s nonorganic technogenesis of perceptual “consciousness” and its ill, contaminations, default, or vulnerability to capture—and not just by the NSA or databots. The “organs”


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It may seem odd to bring what’s left of the American Left in contact with Stiegler’s writing of a “general organology.” The former seeks orientation in a muted American political-scape, often appealing still to a democracy that might be taken back. The latter writes from a postdemocratic, hyperindustrial escarpment thatasrequires thought simultaneously in contact with prehistorical technics well as a the capture of digital culture. Yet when Giroux describes the dismemberment of American sentience and the “politics of disposability,” there are echoes of, and rhymes with, what Stiegler diagnoses when he depicts the miseries of a loss of “spirit” (of Capitalism), the “proletarianization of the senses” (preferable, in English, to “sensibility”), or regimes of “disindividuation.” Stiegler uses Gilbert Simondon to mobilize against “disindividuation” and the theft of “knowledge of life” by the outsourcing of memory. He thus draws any contemporary malaise not into a narrative of social struggle within a co-opted democracy but into a politics of mnemotechnics and its epochal digital mutation, as well as the capture of perception—or the senses. If in Giroux’s case this points to “a new form of hybrid global financial authoritarianism,” for Stiegler, even this is wired to forms of “short-circuiting” that enforce the psychotechnic disruption of attention and care. If in the first a “politics” seeks its own image somewhere, in the latter, that has now migrated into neural paths, sensory programs, grammatization.² I will return, in a moment, to why the terms of Stiegler’s project—specifically, his reading of arche -cinema and the “proletarianization of the senses”—help situate a particular American have always in advance been systemically hacked. The “proletarianization of the senses” deploys a “short-circuiting” which today is allied for Stiegler with the collapse of care and attention, mass “disindividuation,” and the accelerations of mafia cultures and ecocide. In “The Organology of Dreams and Arche -Cinema,” he elaborates: “It is the primary and secondary identification processes, which constitute the condition of formation of the psychic apparatus, and therefore the condition of production of libidinal energy, that are effectively short-circuited.” Yet the phrase is not just a hyperindustrial automatism of digital, last-man culture gone hyperbolic. This “short-circuiting” would arrive with the advent of tertiary retention, any technological support—it is a negative condition of the evolution of technical objects that seek to mark, negate, and exceed their own most recent form. In a way, when tertiary retention hits the mirror stage and takes a selfie, short-circuiting is triggered. The term anthropocene operates in this way, which accounts for its surge of popularity—as a short-circuiting selfie with a missing face. 2. I read Stiegler from the perspective of the era of climate change and as a postanthropocene writing project. This has become explicit in Stiegler’s counter to the “anthropocene” totalization, locating an “escape” in the activation of a neganthropology and negentropic war (the “anthropocene” naming a dismal entropy). See Stiegler 2015.


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(US) spell within histories of technics that far precede its “constitution” (by about 35,700 years, give or take). It is likely the date “2016” will serve as a marker or referent for future archivists sorting the mayhem and spells when tipping points were implicitly acknowledged passed—if in aParis three-card fashion yet to be digested. That is, the as year date of the climatemonte accords, which officially took public possession, on the one hand, of global responsibility for averting irreversibly accelerating climate catastrophics and, on the other, covertly abandoned any conception of doing so: as if the global elite had other plans all along, as if it were understood as too late (or undesirable), while projecting for the tele-masses a narrative of suspense, and control, going forward—until, at century’s end, all narratives stop. This double narrative of “aspiring” numbers has not taken long to unravel in local political battles, corporate guidance, and the acceleration of the very emissions the political shuffling anticipates profiting from as geo-engineering projects. Two discrete events inform the world of “2016,” thescript mentioned above. It would be remembered, looking back from the future, as a watershed date. The first event: the dust finally settled following the “2008 financial crisis” to disclose a massive wealth transference engineered globally— instantly creating a sort of global two-class system, or new “proletariat” or “precariat.” The financial commentator Catherine Austin Fitts speaks of this as a “breakaway civilization,” the engineered separation of the “super elite” or fabled “.001%” (Fitts 2012). At the same time, a second event quietly occurs. Western countries discreetly back off their carbon-cutting commitments, purportedly due to economic pressures—implicitly acknowledging the irreversibility of catastrophic global warming and coming mass extinction events. The rhetoric will have discreetly changed from mitigation or even sustainability to something else: the new meme is that we will have to adapt and, moreover, that geoengineering will aid everyone (a prospect bringing immense corporate profit). These two markers—massively engineered wealth transference; acknowledgement that irreversible tipping points have passed—link up in this script. That is, they appear coordinated even as “climate change denialism” itself rises in the Anglo (or Murdoch news) nations. We can now see why, and it is rather bad Hollywood, but perhaps that is the point. It should be noted that this new “proletariat” is no longer oppressed labor (it’s not needed), no longer a dialectical force, more a species than a global “class” split, enforced neuro-mnemonically in advance (with loss of savoir


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faire and savoir vivre, loss of “care,” loss of attention; “disindividuated,” its “senses” captured). Moving into an era of managerial robotics, there would be no great need for “labor”; there is, in fact, less employment. Moreover, as this shift to a situation in which eighty-five individuals own the wealth equivalent of thebeen bottom global 50 percent of global population occurred, resources have sequestered by the few and won’t be returning to any commons. What the cinematically spellbound populace is unaware of, since it is their “senses” that have been proletarianized , is what is, literally, before their eyes daily.³ It is obvious, here, that despite the streams of corporate media and climate change denial, a certain corporate and financial “super elite” knew and planned accordingly. This is confirmed by a CIA report from 2003, a UK defense industry report from 2007, and innumerable reports on the state of carbon emissions, arctic melt-off, oceanic dead zones, “air”- pocalypses, and resource collapse (ICPP, NASA, etc.). One could perhaps now reread what “Copenhagen” actually signaled. That is when all the world leaders got together on this and seemed to walk away, squabbling. Looking back, it was not just squabbling. It would have been an implicit decision. These “elites” could not make a radical turn in carbon reductions without losing their own political regimes, financial mafias, and so on. Instead of pulling back, they would rather astonishingly accelerate all carbon consumption and hence emissions. The decision had simply been other than expected: if one could not preserve a future with resources for the many, a few would consolidate them and form the survivor class. They would, in short, take a hit for the species, submit to the sacrifice of evolving beyond this impasse for the rest of the overpopulated and no doubt genetically messy and wasteful remainders. They would be aided by new hypertechnologies and genetic engineering, which would be privatized. They would anticipate what the CIA report called “population culling” or a mid-century die-off, after all. Clearly, there would be no need to inform the population, since there was nothing they could do. In the film script, the new “proletariat” is no longer 3. What would be advanced, here, is how the eye, as prosthetic “organ,” is artefacted differently within different cinematic regimes—and what sort of lens breaks with a “general proletarianization,” how the heritage of the traditions of “light” have consolidated these, how hermeneutic programming and consumer identifications produce an “organ” that is not in itself “human” one way or another. One would want, as well, to calibrate this eye not as a passive witness of the world’s data streams, or as a reader-hunter, but as a predatory mechanism by its constitution and technologies.


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Marx’s dialectical and revolutionary force: it is marked, rather, as a disposable population. In the best- case scenario, it could continue to be harvested for metadata and wealth extraction (or, occasionally, body organs). If you want a better Hollywood script out of this—have we seen this movie?—one mightdown, add formarkets flavor that “breakaway civilization” or economy (employment up)this amounts not only to a self-chosen survivor class. Inevitably, at a time of exponential advance in genetic engineering and nanoscience, it implies a financially engineered species split (as the fantasy of a “singularity” echoes).⁴ It turns out that the eugenicist imaginary of the twentieth century was merely deferred, transferred from the province of Volk to a more inclusive desideratum: kleptocratic and mafia-tized global superwealth.⁵ Any “proletarianization” of perceptual and mnemonic orders may not be, today, subject to any reverse “deproletarianization,” any more than the trope of “inequality” can be addressed as some old imaginary cycle to be, potentially, rebalanced (as if there had been an equality to return to): it is, rather, the endgame plays before the logics of climate change, population “culls,” and the disposability of the peripheries looking forward (with the current imaginary of an escape to terra-formed Mars or exo-planets dangled as Plan B by deep state and corporate strategists).⁶ 4. This mise-en-scène, in fact, is pretty much verbatim implied by Chris Hedges, the great American activist and journalist. It brings home the dilemma of utopist politics, whose time—like democracy or Enlightenment memes—appears to be closing and recedes before resource wars, megadrought, agricultural collapse, and the sixth mass extinction event under way. Here is Hedges: “Corporations are, theologically speaking, institutions of death. They commodify everything—the natural world, human beings—that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse. They know no limits. There are no impediments now to corporations. None. And what they want is for us to give up. They want us to become passive. They want us to become tacitly complicit in our own destruction” (Barsamian 2011). And again: “I think they know it’s going to be toast. And I think they think that they’re going to retreat into their, you know, gated compounds and survive it. And they may survive it longer than the rest of us, but in the end, climate change alone is going to get us. . . . [They], if left unchecked, will ensure the extinction of the human species. It may already be too late, of course” (Jay 2013: n.p.). 5. Who would have guessed this refined return of a fully weaponized and “democratized” eugenicism back in 1945, when a certain war seemed to decide against that decisively. By then, Walter Benjamin, who did anticipate it in 1939 but named the enforcer of proletarianization historicism , was already dead. 6. I explore this acceleration of techno-eugenicism and the species split now under way— part of any twenty-first-century politics of extinction unfolding—around the topic and rhetoric of “overpopulation” in Cohen 2016: 127–48.


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Stereotypal Cinema and the Politics of Extinction Such a structure produces much stupidity: through the use of collective retentions in order to keep a rein over individual and collective traumatypes, it generates stereotypes. By constantly reinforcing these stereotypes, and by taking them to the extreme, the consumerist capitalist economy, which is initially cinematic and then becomes televisual, in the end destroys the libido, which decomposes into the drives. This proves deadly for the power of cinema to dream: aside from some very remarkable exceptions, cinematic dreams become drive-based nightmares, i.e., horror movies. —Bernard Stiegler (2013) For Stiegler, there are two poles of film practice, and between them they negotiate a sort of war: the stereotype (which includes Hollywood, in which cinema confirms familiar categories of identification and reference) and the traumatype (which puts cinema itself into question materially, defacing the former ). The first accords with his update of Adorno’s “culture industry” into the “consciousness industry” of today, in which image programs, telemarketing, and the implantation of memory is practiced. While this polarity seems at first slight (a binary for cinema?), its two terms name polarities between which “negotiation” occurs. The trenchancy of this divide reflects, however, the forms that arche -cinema generates—the arche -cinematic template that, for Stiegler, antecedes Jacques Derrida’s arche -writing as a full-spectrum organization of the inorganic, of the eye and movement, millennia in advance of any script or pictograms.⁷ It is initialized for Stiegler with the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave paintings in the Ardèche and echoes in today’s megaplexes that, nostalgically, cite twentieth-century movie houses still: the actual era of mechanical cinema as we know it was only an episode, an exteriorization and acceleration, of an organizational template to which the daily production of “consciousness” was turned over—trade secrets long passed to interested telemarketers and state propagandists.⁸ Yet arche -cinema not only platforms “consciousness” but 7. Stiegler’s choreography in “preceding” Derrida’s arche -writing is more than a sleight of hand: if, today, there appear two nodes of the spectrum that Derrida avoided, symptomatically, they would be cinema and climate change—as if, for linked but antipodal reasons, each would put the framing of deconstruction at risk. For a tentative discussion of these occlusions, and the role they play in the inertness of “deconstruction” today, see Cohen 2012. 8. I draw on Stiegler’s recent return to and articulation of arche -cinema in “The Orga-


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melds with the lightless zone of the dream or hallucination: technically, it precedes mimesis, contracts of identification, “proletarianization,” even the modes of animation (“life”) it already engendered. In figural terms it precedes any coalescence of face—in what is still the projected cast of marks and shadow. Ititself precedes affect, the programming of the eye or movement in oneprosopopoeia, or another individuated regime or grammatized epoch. Thus what Stiegler names stereotype correlates to the “proletarianization of the senses,” citing and reiterating “commonplaces” for recognition (and communal engineering). The other polarity, so-called traumatype, would deface the stereotype or short-circuiting—but is wholly aware of its own technical and mnemotechnic production and puts into question its faux management of visibility as well as the spectral projection (“man”?) whose perpetual selfies occupy its screen (Alfred Hitchcock dismissed movies as “pictures of people talking”). The trauma is not, in the Freudian lexicon, this or that violation from the world (such as war), but the ill and trauma of this srcinary installation of “the cave”—what could properly be called the cin -anthropocene epoch, particularly given that the era of modern cinema is to be regarded merely as an episode: that of the machinal exteriorization of the cinematic apparatus, given that it coincides with the era of oil (artefacted “light”), given that its arc coincides with that hyperconsumptive acceleration leading to mass extinction events, ecocide, and an emerging politics of (managed) extinction. It may seem reductive at first to present cinematic pulsions in a merely binary fashion—as two polarities. These antipodal modes or vectors negotiate between their intensities: “some of these secondary protentions, which become practically automatic, constitute stereotypes, i.e., habits and volitions; while others constitute traumatypes—which are either repressed, or expressed by default in symptoms and fantasies” (Stiegler 2013, n.p.). If these two types have hyperindustrial patronage systems (“Hollywood”), the “impoverishment” or proletarianization of stereotypal cinema must be understood as present from the inception of arche -cinema, a perpetual apparatus used to communalize, program, repeat, cite, or consolidate (political propaganda, media campaigns, priests, telemarketing). In the case of the stereotype, it implements itself by enforcing referential regimes: the installation of mimesis (the lines on the wall are the antelope I chase, carried back into nology of Dreams,” yet the transformational and defining work that places arche -cinema at a center within Stiegler’s numerous divagations is Stiegler 2010.


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the world), identification with face, literalizations of the image (indexing), naturalization of “facts” by repetition, and so on, coalesce as managed investments (empiricist, nationalist, pragmatist, realist). Inversely, however, traumatype cannot only be defined as what is “repressed, or expressed by default in symptoms and fantasies.” does not lie unexpressed, the suppressed other The of a “trauma” public stereotype, butininsomething the organizational violence of the stereotype itself and the reflexive intensification and self-marking of arche -cinematic technics—that which, fully alert to its own machinality, places itself and its perpetual product “man” in question (“man” would be the stereotype most enforced by his ceaseless inclusion at the center of images—a compulsive cameo). Its “trauma” is not this or that repression but what Hitchcock perhaps called “knowing too much,” to the point that cinema implicitly turns against itself, shoots itself, to pose the question of its (nonexistent) “outside.” In this way, traumatype brings itself to the question of cinemacide—relevant to the moment in which cinema’s own death is announced by Stiegler at the hands of digital transformations yet also irrelevant if “cinema” were never alive but the premise of animation. The cinematic cave dissolves into the screens of a digital organology, of which it cannot yet be confirmed that its traumatype openings for “disindividuation” have been retained before the totalization of targeted bots and data purging, mnemonic implants, cyberwars, and industrialized identity theft. Inspecting, in this way, the status of stereotypal and traumatypal cinema in the era of climate change, or rather, the era of ecocide, implies querying how it functions, or not, within the emergent twenty-firstcentury politics of extinction. If a disavowed climate change unconscious is streamed, shaped, and neutralized by Hollywood inundations that confirm generic futures and heroes (as it itself cancels these), it partakes of a vaster spell, or anaestheticization. That is not unrelated to a proletarianization of the senses, and particularly the “eye,” which confirmed itself in marking lines of disposability going forward. This in turn gives the traumatype work a heightened epistemo-political role, which it can only fail at for destroying the entire mimetic illusion of the screen, in effect suiciding “the cave” of cinema. Is a cinema that marks extinction, including its own— which is to say, a cinema of the cin -anthropocene itself—possible, from the position of cinematic technics irreducible to any “human” eye or referential regimes, since it would precisely not return to repressed trauma expressing itself in more affect, more mourning, more identification, and more on-screen zombie worship (literally, a by-product meme)? Rather, it turns against the “human,” as defined by the latter’s on-screen representa-


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tives: like geological processes indifferent to human projects, pathos, and self-aggrandizements, which always imply the “anthropocene” will not be missed, cinema marks its agency and lens as a site where affect, mourning, identification, and the entire rack of affective addictions the stereotypal screen encourages enforces renews “apparatus” are broken were with, in contractually disavowed, or and shot—as if theand cinematic rebellion against what it spawned, more or less mass-disindividuated Hollywood man, the spellbound and ecocidal last man. At this point, perhaps, cinema marks itself as a lethal spellbinding apparatus at the service of (on the one hand) homogenizing powers and (on the other) the antithesis, traumatype, which takes the Dionysian position over the Apollonian form of its other. Thus, the word trauma refers to and is in contact with the encompassing default set in motion by technogenesis, the pharmakon of pharmaka, what in Stiegler is perpetually in play—for life forms as for archival regimes—in the wedge term epiphylogenesis, whereby genetic life is narrated as if by incorporating the nonliving, technics, which in turn advances and defines it (Stiegler 1998).⁹ When Stiegler says that cinema is “life,” he does not only mean the schism by which our consciousness of being alive, like that of “perception,” occurs through what is not living—being entirely technogenetic, in default. Moreover, the machinal cinematic culture of the hydrocarbon and industrial eras was just an episode, an exteriorization of agency in a 36,000-year parenthesis—one ending with the digital transformation that dissolves the analogic or celluloid inscriptions placed before the electric bulb into digital algorithms and neural interfaces. The traumatype knows all this, marks and puts itself (and the hominid in the frame produced with and by it) into question, battles with the stereotype (“Hollywood”), and is acutely aware of its technicity and destructive prowess. How do these “types” resonate when applied to the cinema of “climate change” and ecocide—since today, despite all the denialism and rationalization and disinformation, it would be safe to say that everyone knows, that every organism knows and is migrating, extincting, or mutating along with it (just look at the bodies in any airport lounge)? And since what is suppressed in turn creates an “unconscious,” even in public space, one would note that the entertainment-industrial complex (McKenzie Wark’s 9. “Such is epiphylogenesis—a new relation of organism to environment, and a new state of matter. It is in this way that the ‘what’ invents the ‘who’ as much as the converse” (Stiegler 1998: 175).


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term) would need to manage “climate” anxiety, “climate” info-debris, “climate” awareness, as you like. Since we are considering whether the script proposed above should angle more to stereotype (Hollywood remuneration!) or traumatype, the question of applying Stiegler, even in this kitsch register, to the or politics made its returns motif, theme, pitch. of extinction that the proposed script itself As regards a cinema of the anthropocene, or a cinema of the era of climate change—well, perhaps there was never any other kind. Even so, the first category seems today marked, no matter how refined the product, by several traits: the disaster film cannot not be exploitative, since it plays apocalyptic or postapocalyptic cards—a residue of Christological thought in which something happens in a flash that suggests revelation or disclosure or even judgment (a particularly guilty pleasure). More important: someone always survives to narrate, to renew the world, and to be identified with by the viewer. The problem is, however, that there is nothing apocalyptic about catastrophic climate change—it is slow or sudden, reverses polarities, subtracting as it goes, is itself meaningless (it has seen this movie before, many times). It has no survivor or renewal, since it wipes out the condition of regimes of animation (“life”) as we knew them. The kitsch film 2012 is a Hollywood blockbuster condensing climate catastrophe to a single day—from which escape would only be had on a Chinese-built Noah’s Ark at the price of a billion dollars per ticket. The plebs would not be told in advance of the planetary purge to avoid panic, since nothing could be done anyway for them. In contrast, we might speak of “2016: The Non-Movie,” because it is rendered irreal by its cinematic tone. The recent film Noah seems to invert that scenario a bit by returning a biblical fable to the comic superhero genre that was its initial form (what is called “the Bible” being the first pop cultural anthology and product). In it, an already absent Creator apparently delights in flushing mankind away altogether. That is: in its hedged way,cinema turns against “us”—but it has an out. Of course, humans appear to survive, to breed again, and renew the species (and yes, since the episode mimes the “present,” they will mess up again, need a rinse-and-repeat erasure, and so on). And this may be the problem with climate change films—with Hollywood cinema in the anthropocene, when it channels this immense dread of being already in the afterlife, beyond tipping points. First of all, it favors disaster effects even if these fail to shock, and it favors apocalyptic memes to do so—that is, the Christological model of the sudden flash of revelation in disappearance (like nuclear blasts). Then there can be a post-postapocalypse, where


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someone survives and revives, with some couple left in place to organically procreate. Someone or other has to be there to tell the story and repeople a future. Even in the film of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in which a nameless father and son roam a dead earth after agirl cataclysm is unnamed, the boy is taken in by a family with a young (there is that a future, maybe, depending, or at least a sequel). Even the postapocalyptic get one last next chance. One could add to this list diverse variations, including the Pixar or Disney animation products, like the Ice Age franchise (in which funny mammoths make jokes about their own extinction) or WALL-E, in which a garbage robot on a future wasteland Earth brings life (and humans) back to the poisoned planet. Even Avatar falls into this camp, with its cynical deployment of a Native American romanticism and Gaia-esque setting—the misreading of romantic organicism itself that propelled us into the hyperindustrial era of utility and extraction (of what was called then “nature”). The “consciousness industry” is obviously working overtime on this one. It suggests another open secret today, what can be called a climate change unconscious—if an “unconscious” is created by occlusion or suppression, by decreed invisibility. Ignore all the “climate debate” stuff, the denialist programming, and so on: everyone knows, because every living organism knows and is part of the accelerating mutation and mass extinction event—microorganisms, amphibians, ocean life, virals, bioclimatic “weirding” and erasures, humans on various peripheries, and the technohumans techno-engineering various species splits (designer babies) or entertaining ex-terra colonization as eventual escape Plan B. But of course, extinction has no remainder, there will be no renewal, and there is no ultimate survivor (unless, as Stephen Hawking concludes, we colonize space rocks and spread the joy). That is, there is no cinema, or there is only cinema . This makes the stereotype film echo something of utopist critical strategies—with apocalypse and utopian time both linked to still Christological memes. And the more it wills to repeat these redemptive futures, the more the acceleration of extinction logics surges—even when guided by the new version of Walter Benjamin’s stupid angel, or its hyperindustrialized front today, the Corporation. Headless, the Corporation is the head; while it is incorporeal, the US Supreme Court still insists it is a legal “person” (Citizens United ); fictional, nonexistent technically, it nonetheless drives and in effect decides the real. But this does not give full credit, so to speak, to the corporate phantom—what Chris Hedges calls “institutions of death” merely. They have been upgraded not just to “personhood” but


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to having feelings, being religious and antiabortion, thus favoring human spawn (the “Hobby Lobby” ruling): they are now thoroughly embedded, pushing out their organic fellow “persons” to become algorithms to their role as deciders. Hedges and company might want to rethink playing chess with a hypercomputer, since accelerating the brillianceecocide—of here is almost comic. yes, it is time to lighten up about course it isAnd irreversible, but it always was going to be—and appreciate the climate comedy about us now that “we” are here. Two very quick ironies, in that mode: if AI exceeded all human intelligence exponentially and stopped seeing the relevance of the wasteful avaricious organisms that were, in effect, their hominid petri dish, that risk (significant, according to insiders like Elon Musk or Bill Gates) would not be as in a Terminator-style film, with humans battling robots. It will not be due to the rebellion of Rosita the cleaning robot. They will look back on the corporations as their stalking horses, supraorganisms that took over governments and laws and personhood in advance—rather as Vladimir Putin softened up eastern Ukraine. The other irony is that the ready acceptance of this in the public’s imaginary is because the “corporation” seems the pure form, and technic, of what had been constructed, and “experienced,” as the perpetually artificed “we” (and the deference it incurs). “Corporations” R Us—or, rather, nonexistent, like the “we,” they distill the concealed technical automata out of which, all along, the latter had been produced. It would then be entirely plausible to expect all the attention given the term anthropocene to be brushed aside, in retrospect from a future narrative. “Climate change” cinema of the Hollywood variety participates in the politics of extinction, or the managed extinctions which the “breakaway” civilization must oversee going forward.

Traumatype and the Cin -Anthropocene In terms of the animated image, we have yet to leave the prehistoric age. —Bernard Stiegler (2013) The films I have been discussing all have a reassuring effect. They allow the public (let’s call it) to get used to these ideas while, at the same time, derealizing them. How, after all, do you depict something that does not happen at once but over scores of years and more—or, how do you represent species extinction, without a survivor to tell the story or regenerate another chapter (or imaginary future)? Moreover, how does cinema itself do that, separate itself from the human, take a picture of the anthropocene while marking its closure? And how might it do so at a time when the death


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of cinema is already accomplished at the hands of digital transformations of memory? One problem with the term anthropocene is that, while it announces human mastery over earth and nature, it also marks its disappearance. One can only confirm suchanother categories afterifthey pass another’s reading perspective (including species’ there are from no humans around). Cinema of the “traumatype” puts this all into question: it turns against Hollywood man in his cin -anthropocene episode—from the cave painting 36,000 years ago to the hyperindustrial die-off that “he” confronts irreversibly. There is a relationship between photography itself and ecocide. Whatever the lens captures (or targets) is incorporated for use in the archive (is marked as dead, undead, or in its afterlife). In order for cinema to mark or explore what ecocide and extinction entail, it must perform a kind of cinema-cide—particularly of the Hollywood model. Cinematic and image capture is a mode of targeting without survivors (starting with the megafauna). It does not try to evade, deny, or forestall a “catastrophe” to come. It recognizes that “we” are the catastrophe—say, for all other life systems on earth, the sixth mass extinction event—and that we are in the middle of its unfolding; moreover, for it, catastrophe is not catastrophic but normative. It breaks with the conventional attachments of the screen: identification with characters or faces, the projection of affect, the renewal or marriage that Hollywood drains human cognition with. Does the machinal era of cinema not overlap too perfectly with that of accelerated ecocide, not to mention hyperindustrial appropriative optics, to appear incidental, so much so that the term cin-anthropocene more accurately applies? Does not cinema itself know this, “know too much,” guarantee it, while providing the mortuary archive as itself? I will consider one counterexample in which the closure of human life is performed without remainder. Moreover, it won’t be a disaster film at all but starts as a social soap opera about a nervous bride who is a depressive, a melancholiac—I am alluding, of course, to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. The title also names a small planet hidden by the sun that, by chance, circles out from behind the sun to impact Earth, randomly, obliterating all life. Kirsten Dunst’s Justine withdraws from the entire social order, which she judges as evil, identifying rather with what is outside it—what is outside of man, and outside of cinema itself. The film is scored alone with Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which channels not only high romanticism (the work that Charles Baudelaire called the acme of Western art, itself the essence of kitsch) but implicates it fully in the carnage itself—


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or, more precisely, it channels an aesthetic misreading of romanticism (such as produced the Potemkin trope of “nature”). Moreover, it requires turning against a human mise-en-scène which it itself has both featured and coproduced—it is relieved of the necessity of a narrative of survival, renewal, self-witnessing. Here,on thecue Wagner score is kitsch, showing ourselvesand projecting and mourning to a tune—lured into the compact of projections that cinema solicits and rejects. It can turn on and take down the very trope of the “anthropocene” as a mystified placeholder and 2016 ideologeme, as has become apparent. Melancholia names, in addition to a black or lightless cognitive gaze depleted of affect, a minidouble of Earth, mocking the spherical and circular imaginary, the random and indifferent irreversibility of obliterations from the perspective of galactic logics and visuals. Melancholia, coming from a blackness and preceding “light,” also names the film itself, its material, allohuman trajectory as well as this film’s intervention and performance. We see this mimed, for instance, on the estate lawn before the wedding. The sky lanterns rise like fragile suns or tropes for cinematic construction that humans cast skyward, at night, the “cave” now encompassing the heavens. Tracked by Justine’s eye and telescope, the entire tropology suddenly drops away; the screen is taken over by monstrous galactic formations that assault the eye. The human game is momentarily obliterated to the status of a molecule, as it will be by the impact. The cinematic lanterns with writing on them (like a movie screen) dissolve, at the limit of the lens, into gargantuan and gorgeous galaxies that obliterate anthropocentered pretense. The small planet comes from “behind the sun,” which is to say from before “light” itself (the sun, too, is a technology). Irreversibility, the discarding of mimesis and affect, leaves nowhere to run or hide (it’s the whole planet, the encompassing apparatus). The two orbs approach impact like the circles of a projector or two wheels or eyes, imploding. Cinema turns against any human affect projected onto it. The cin -anthropocene parenthesis indifferently coincides with the ecocide its logics imply in advance—then experienced as justice. The cin-anthropocene parenthesis encompasses the cave designs through the era of hyperextraction, accelerating extinction events and biospheric mutation. It coproduced the latter’s screen star, anthropos, which it separates itself from. With this we need to remind ourselves what cinema is and has been, how it has been blended into what we see and don’t see, into memory programming, into the prosthesis of “visibility,” into the imaginary of the circular and mastered “globe,” into technogenocides and weapon advance-


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ment (drones), nuclear fission, and the “population culling” to come. Arche -cinema, before writing, tracks the organization of perception and consciousness in the projection, by artefactual light, of marks and inscriptions onto the wall of a perceptual commons. That wall would become the “screen” that usurps space andbody finds (supplanting itself now on smartphones and gadgets become partpublic of the human its memory functions). The era of modern cinema was a machinal flowering of a template of memory and cognition (Stiegler will note, it is “life”). It is one we still barely inhabit, 36,000 years later—at the “death of cinema” before digital transformations that dissolve the “screen” into neural interfaces and memory implants. The template of the cave-like enclosure that will allow the artifice to generate the illusion of the “home” or eco itself is canonized in Plato’s allegory of the cave (again, a cinematic model), as it would be industrially manifested in the “consciousness industry” of Hollywood and telemarketing. From such a perspective, we can speak of a cin -anthropocene parenthesis, which, however, would also bind cinematic processes to the archiving, capture, and consumption of Earth’s life forms. Benjamin made the photographic image a cipher of our suspect practices of mourning. In a distinct way,Justine breaks with mourning and affirms ecocide . Thus the stunning scene where the nude Kirsten Dunst is viewed waiting for “Melancholia,” this gorgeous giant sphere that annihilates, to arrive like a lover—no man will do—in the pose of a pre-Raphaelite aesthetic. The film builds an array of citations dragging in the totems of high Western culture, such as Wagner himself, whose mourning score bewitches us into the same kitsch push-button affect that the incoming space thing, outside all “anthropisms,” bars and deflects. The work ascribes this annihilation or extinction event to the public’s practices of identification, of mimesis and of mourning, which stereotypal cinema seduces or solicits. Melancholia also cites the one work in the cinematic canon that engages fully with a revolt of arche -cinema—Hitchcock’s The Birds. Swarms of flying black lines and marks attack the construction of visibility in Bodega Bay itself and the humans’ eyes. Arche -cinema erupts to claim and retire an entire doomed perceptual economy—which Hollywood consolidated as globalizing “dream machine.” This citation occurs as the two sisters pick and collect blackberries silently: there are many little black pellets gathered, like so many tiny black suns, but these many become the one of a single black bird crossing the white sky—before ash-like flakes fall from the sky instead. This cites the famous tracking shot from Hitchcock as his blond character, Melanie (again, the black named “blond” that defines the


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rupture of melancholia), waits outside the schoolhouse as birds gather on the jungle gym to attack. We can call each “bird” in Stiegler’s redeployment of Plato a hypermnematic slash, that which, like archiolithic lines on a stone wall, precedes the surface’s coalescence into inscription, presumed image, to say nothing of alphabetic writing or pictograph. The Birds is post-anthropocene—or rather, it discards the term’s totalization as spellbound Bodega Bay. But then, arche -cinema always was pre- and post-anthropocene, since it accompanied and projected the latter from inscriptions that precede memory, “perceptual” regimes, or their capture by superorganisms like corporations (or “the consciousness industry”). The birds’ appearance as a form of animation is reversed. The “organization of the inorganic” (Stiegler), which occurs at the nonsite of hypomnemata and epiphylogenesis, passes to a faux primordial disorganization. Technemes, arche -cinematic points that are digitalized in advance (Mitch: “What’s the point ?”), these avian traces identify against the humans and their blindly proletarianized senses (sight, eyes), since the “humans” were themselves also cinematic products, become “homo Hollywood.” They attack for no cause, accelerate, and win—driving the B-film actors off the screen, out of the house, an exodus in a cinematic car that refuses all narrative. These birds, marks out of which any mnemotechnic regime and reference coalesce, attack a diseased totality, a spellbound community—“the anthropocene,” say. It is not accidental that these birds are linked directly by Hitchcock to oil, to what is called “stored sunlight.” Without oil there would be no age of cinema, no industrialized electric light—black, subterranean, the residue of organic “life” and the liquefaction of all possible inscriptions exhumed to the surface as the black gift of massive “cheap” energy. Yet oil does not itself refract light at all, is itself black—and coresponsible for hyperindustrial autoextinction. It derives from such birds’ prehistorical forebears (dinosaurs) yet fuels trains, cars, speed, the transport promised by cinema (today funneled into data streams), and the screen, simply, as such: as itself the new placeless “public space” of the global tele- polis. In the bird attack at the fuel station before the Tides’ restaurant, in which the humans cower around plates of fried chicken, the fuel station is named on a swinging sign. It is called Capitol Oil, drawing in not only “capital” but the head (eyes, sight, cognition). “Animation” belongs to arche-cinema— genetic engineering assumes this literally—and Hitchcock’s birds testify, like Melancholia, to a blackness or technic which precedes “light,” “Enlightenment” tropes, the flickering screen, one which nonetheless cannot be called blackness properly since it has no other and itself, pure technic, arti-


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fices “light.” We find here the deconstruction of Sigmund Freud’s attempt to pivot mourning against melancholia as a binary formation—since the latter, in fact, had never been a binary other than as supplemented by what is called mourning , a weak messianic trope that sustains the contract of mimesis. The link of “Capitol” acephalous and to the(fuel), fireballs burning out machines of transport thattodepend uponoil, it for motion marks the back loop by which energy, black fossil waste (“ stored sunlight”), is industrially channeled to cinema’s consolidation, as much as to global transport itself: no oil, no cinema (or photography). The latter marks and precedes its technogenesis in this back loop, dispossessing the frame and the “home” (eco) of its imaginary inhabitants. Melancholia works by closing out the cin -anthropocene itself. The opposite of any disaster film, it takes place solely on an allegorical superestate at once of Euro-nobility and American pop media stars (24 ’s Kiefer Sutherland or Spiderman’s Kirsten Dunst). Unlike postapocalyptic fare that partakes of the new politics of extinction by derealizing their fantasies and restoring mimetic contracts with redemption narratives, Melancholia shocks the illusion of “shock.” It inscribes cinematics as the agent of the annihilation, x-raying last-man hyperindustrial culture at its acme, as Justine does, as a criminal disaster and withdrawing from its aesthetic contracts. When Justine marvels at electromagnetic streams rising vertically from her fingertips as from pole wires, the screen records and revels in the drawing off of all aura—from the screen itself, energy, and “life.” It mimes, according to the Liebestod logic, a dying of cinema that could, as easily, be its initialization. Wagner’s romanticism as kitsch displays us as stupidly inscribed, projecting pathos and mourning (which is always self-mourning) onto the screen just when it purges any affect through Justine. There is no escape—no arguments—and Justine assuages the futureless boy that his (now suicided) father, Kiefer Sutherland, forgot “the magic cave.” This bare figure of the cinematic structure humans conjure and dwell in (i.e., film itself) is a bunch of branches like a tee-pee (Native American cipher), but it also cites the bare structure of the jungle gym Hitchcock’s birds assemble on. That is: lines, converging parallels, a “magic” nothing but the structure itself. The megadisaster, nothing more than billiard balls colliding, erases the screen, closes out the cin -anthropocene—which Justine authoritatively says would not be mourned or missed.¹⁰ 10. I would differ from Tim Morton who, in his recent Wellek Lecture series on “Dark Ecology” at UC Irvine, reads Justine for polemical purposes as an analog of “speculative


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Melancholia is without exit—irreversible, as the planet in the film’s name, what Benjamin called a “one-way street.” This is dramatized when Claire runs around the grounds in a panic carrying her son, as if there were somewhere to go. Its ruthless logic coincides with the emergence today of a positioning, to the “anthropocene” (or, recognizing China ascritical the key civilization linked in Earth’s history and determinant player today, the Sin(o)-Anthropocene ? Or a Corporatocracene ?). This position abandons utopist thought as circumscribed by a moment that is now closing, which is inadvertently linked to accelerated extinction itself: first, by crafting history as human on human social actors, a matter of otherness, power, and progressive justice, they occlude the vast allohuman primacy that now destroys this spell; second, as the last echo of Christian redemptive time, it mimes the apocalyptic DNA that goes into the Hollywood blockbusters, projecting a survival and renewed narrative. More: hoisted with its own historicizing petard, only this time indexed to geomorphic time, it would seem not only that the progressive liberal imaginary of late twentieth-century academic culture was the product of a half century of economic stability and affluence garnered by the postwar imperium—now revoked, together with the “middle class” that buoyed it. It is a disconnect enhanced for “Enlightenment” templates and epistemes, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, which would be indexed to the parenthesis of stability following the little ice age: the canard of intentionality would be sculpted, here, to further anchor this parenthesis (Chakrabarty 2009). Our film “2016” might have begun two years earlier in North America with a phenomenon called the polar vortex, in which climate tectonics reversed (cold and hot), with New York City dropping fifty degrees in temperature within hours. If there is something intriguing about climate tectonics assuming the behavior of a trope (chiasmus), that itself is doubled in relation to industrial civilization’s own momentary hiatus and disconnect— since the export (and in turn return) of “disindividuation” from human quarters effects the disorganization of the inorganic that climate change, technically, is (knocked off its “Holocene” balancing act), which in turn advances ecocidal pressures and geopolitical war. So, what we note as a year of materialist horror,” as if that were a variant of what he elsewhere hammers delightfully as beautiful soulism (Morton 2014: n.p.). What applies to today’s speculative materialist, sipping lattes of affect, has nothing to do with Justine as a cipher—who withdraws from affect, as itself a faux cinematic implant, a trained appropriation, and draws close to the position of cinematic technics itself—indifferently watching as the human it created is disbanded.


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polar vortices has a certain resonance, doubly chiasmic, interfacing the inorganic and the “anthropic” orders in increasingly ingenious back loops. The affirmation of ecocide and its critique of “utopist thought” is unthinkable, though, without cinema’s turning against we “humans” (I exempt myself this we which it had always quietly been platformingfrom cognition, it),has never been anything other thandoing—since, sheer technics. If the era of climate change was that of cinema, the cin -anthropocene, it is because the lens has always been predatory of what it shoots. If zombies have become normative, and corporations “persons,” that correlates with where consciousness or “life” experiences itself as a circuit of preinscribed memes neither themselves organic nor technically “alive.” What arche cinema knows, and which comprises “knowing too much” (Hitchcock), is Hamletian by structure: it “knows” that the entire phenomenal world, and its mastery, is organized if not projected from mnemotechnic bands, inscription, hypomnemata, themselves neither accessible in phenomenal form (they give rise to it) nor strictly existent yet, irreducibly, inorganic. The shift marked here has other implications, since it hypothesizes the moment without “human” presence, which was always the lens’ or screen’s or cinematic apparatus’s—aware of itself and separated out. The totalized “proletarianization” proposed above ups the ante, as Hedges apostrophizes, to an emergent politics of (one might add, managed) extinction.¹¹ The American Left has found it difficult to address “climate change,” as Naomi Klein’s recent magisterial attempt strangely enough confirms (Klein 2014).¹² After all, nothing interrupts progressivist imaginaries like 11. Stephenson, in “From Occupy to Climate Justice,” notes, “It’s an odd thing, really. In certain precincts of the left, especially across a broad spectrum of what could be called the economic left, our (by which I mean humanity’s) accelerating trajectory toward the climate cliff is little more popular as a topic than it is on the right. In fact, possibly less so. (Plenty of right-wingers love to talk about climate change, if only to deny its grim and urgent scientific reality. On the left, to say nothing of the center, denial takes different forms)” (Stephenson 2014). 12. Naomi Klein’s title, This Changes Everything: Capitalism v. the Climate , nonetheless includes and implies its antithesis, that it changes nothing. Thus the distillation of any future response returns to a call for a ’70s people movement and a victory dance of the resistance to Capitalism (I told you so). As Left icons go on this front, Chomsky gets it and goes so far as to concede he could accept fascism if it meant species survival, and Hedges blows the whistle totally—apprehending that the game is up, and reconfiguring before a now totalized system that must be stepped out of. Yet Klein seems to confirm the entire washout of strategy—back to indigenous folk, back to ’70s movements (civil rights), embrace Avatar. One often has the feeling that, between giving up one’s epis-


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extinction. But worse, one risks disclosing where the “weak messianic” strain of twentieth-century critical preoccupations, and the codification of Marx as teleological (and Christological) itself fuels the ecocidal acceleration. Similarly, the Simondonian machinery Stiegler so stunningly appropriates and deploys appears, too, outrun here. One“we,” cannot confirm the arrival of a “transindividuated” community or adoptive “new technologies of the spirit” able to rearchitect care or attention, since the we itself will have been hacked in advance. Stiegler, however, has a fallback option if these front lines are momentarily overrun; he can go nuclear, turn to the fuel rods that are the premise of archive and animation—what he terms hypomnemata, or inscriptions. Without phenomenality yet programming “perception,” identified at once with any technology of memory and by Plato with the letteral outlines copied by children, one might predict that the war that Stiegler’s work exists within and solely for, its pharmacological intervention and counterpoison within a broader malaise (that now includes ecocide), turns into a war over the inscriptions themselves—as plans for direct memory implants to come suggests. What, however, is a war over inscriptions like, how chthonic, how cinematic, if at all?¹³ temologies and saving future generations, a rather sweaty and slow extinction, the first wins every time. 13. In a Stieglerian spirit, one may nonetheless want to diverge with Stiegler when he tries to rally the prospect of “deproletarianization” in the “2016” mise-en-scène. “Proletarianization” can no longer be addressed within a perpetual struggle (or with an other, “deproletarianization”). This, particularly as applied to the artefaction of perception—that software in which a perpetual amnesia (or “delete after completion”) occurs in which technics is suppressed or effaced and the stereotype reborn: which mimes the speaking psyche itself. This totalization limits the prospects of a Simondonian escape, “transindividuation,” and the hypothesis of an adoptive “we” that rearchitects care, attention, and the long term (for starters). If this position has been overrun, if the “we” itself is hacked—and if the attempts to do so run into the critique by and of advancing ecocide— then one must turn to what Stiegler terms the underlying fuel rods of all these apparatuses: hypomnemata, or inscriptions, which too would be the next target (and last) of corporate totalization (Hedges). If the war, as Stiegler calls it, over the “senses” is lost, what is this war over inscriptions themselves that appears to be the Alamo of the spirit before an advancing tsunami of bots and agencies? This question underlies what Stiegler now calls an “organology of the digital.” But with hypomnemata or inscription, we turn from the light of Simondonian hope toward polar vortices and breakaway logics. Stiegler allows hypomnemata to roam in sense from the most bare technic (the outline of letters to be copied by children, in Plato’s Protagoras ) to any contemporary mechanism of tertiary retention (mnemotechnic or recording technologies—from lithic scratches to smartphone apps). I would argue elsewhere, perhaps under the aegis of a “literary structure


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Disorganizations of the Inorganic The cinematic pharmakon as art is what makes it possible to struggle against the cinema as toxic pharmakon, i.e., against that which enables the play of the traumatypical secondary retentions and protentions of psychic individuals to be short-circuited by reinforcing their stereotypical secondary retentions and protentions. —Bernard Stiegler (2013) So, a small thesis: that in displaying certain Hollywood variations of these logics—from 2012 or The Day After through the zombie apocalypses and postapocalyptic tourist films, in which we somehow are still there to prevail and witness our, usually, cannibalization and reemergence—there is a peculiar co-optation of the “climate change unconscious.” One does not find an expression of cultural anxieties diverted and marketed into mass fantasy. And one does not simply find, sometimes, as in Melancholia, cinematic logics turned against the human, the viewer-consumer who wants to identify with the face on the screen still. Moreover, the disaster movie is not only used to familiarize the public imaginary with these logics, so that they seem normal when they arrive (they’ve seen it in the movies already), or because “shock” is now normative. One might deduce that the Hollywood blockbuster or its affiliates (Avatar, or again even The Road ) ensures that these logics are not dwelt on , since they will have been stored as managed possibilities. It is, after all, like a magical warding off—and one can turn to another channel somewhere. Only one cannot.¹⁴ of climate change,” something overlooked today, that Stiegler’s turn to inscription makes contact with Paul de Man’s treatments of inscription in his last essays—de Man’s writing, too, appears a post-anthropocene writing today (an argument differently pursued in Cohen 2012). This would bring the role of arche -cinematic logics, which precedes any one regime of representation, as a projector does the screen, in accord with what de Man calls “literariness,” or Benjamin “pure language” (as asemantic, differential sound- or marking-scapes in advance of relational sense and grammatization). Since inscriptions arise in a zone that precedes the artifice (or projection) of “light,” and hence the binarization of dark and light, black and white, and so on, it accords with a field of defacement in which the totality Hedges indicts is historically put into parenthesis and suspense, something precessionary to any black enlightenment. It places what de Man called “aesthetic ideology” at the core of the perceptual misprision out of which ecocidal hermeneutical “man” consolidated—who appears “himself” mimed and exceeded by the algorithms of today’s corporate imaginary. 14. Claire Colebrook argues, “Put more concretely: the ‘end of the world’ that is being pre-emptively mourned in post-apocalyptic culture is a highly specific world of hyper-


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But there is the exception—what Stiegler calls cinema as “traumatype.” The transposition of Nietzsche’s cinematic poles, ascribed to Apollo and a certain Dionysus, or between description (mimesis) and inscription, lingers in the negotiation between “stereotype” and “traumatype” for the to emerge as above—but “traumatype,” the translation of the earlylatter Nietzsche’s “primordial dissonance” as technogenesis, can technically unread any Hollywood, propagandist, “stereotype,” telemarketing, or mnemotechnic program: it is the pharmakon of cinema as cure of the deeper addiction, poison, and spell of the disindividuating hacking of the senses and “short-circuiting” acceleration of ecocide—until it is not.¹⁵ Melancholia pulls the rip cord on this cinematic contract altogether, performing at once a sort of death of cinema and a closure of “animation” without remainder—a suicide of and by what might be named the cin -anthropocene (a feat only cinema can do). It is an act which, like The Birds, drains the viewer’s programmatic projection of affect, aura, and even artistic wonder onto the screen. A planetary body will impact Earth with the randomness of a billiard ball; no one will miss us (or, more importantly, read us afterwards). There is nothing apocalyptic or postapocalyptic about this. There is no survivor, no rebeginning, no archive: it is the closure, with the screen, of the anthropocene tout court —which fulfills the import of naming something, the “anthropocene,” which can only be confirmed by its disappearance. But that has been implied since there was arche-cinema, since mimesis and identification were contractionally confirmed on a cave wall. The “cave” constituted or projected the oikos, with its faux interiority, and rendered ecocide its inevitable program, the condition of its initiation. The birds win: they drive the human stars off the screen, out of the house (oikos, eco), into blank exile—but what is asserted is not nature winning but the technical premises of visibility disowning our “we.” consuming, personalized, liberal and narrowly post-human ‘man.’ It is only possible to say that ‘we’ are easily imagining the end of the world when what is presented as the end—in films such as Children of Men (2006) or Elysium (2013)—is the end of Western affluence and white privilege” (Colebrook 2016: 22). 15. This is why Avatar’s romanticization of the Native American– styled Na’vi, rooted in a natural world that itself James trope), that is less regressive than cynical, sincelives it is organically ultimately a(like critique of Lovelock’s the kind of Gaia organicism feeds the common imaginary’s appetite for romantic organic metaphors of a return to systemic wholes. It is the fantasy of the military—a critique which the notion of the avatar, the legless film viewer inhabiting the athletic body of the hero soldier’s projection into the Na’vi world, leaves open.


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If the utopist critical imaginary shares with stereotypal cinema the necessity of an ameliorative projection, the traumatype bears analogy, today, to what can be called, affirmatively, the ecocidal thought—what displaces, after a decade or two run, the “ecological” thought. The ecocidal thought cognitiveofimport of irreversible, accelerated ecocide incorporates, and the importnow, andthe algorithms extinction and the disruption not only of the biosphere (“climate change”) but the entire trajectory of philosophy’s complicity, the Enlightenment’s complicity, the dialectical materialist’s complicity, and the absence of this factoid from twentieth-century projects, wars, and preoccupations (always with its “past”). Both the utopist imaginary, as Clive Hamilton points out, and the ecological thought inadvertently fuel the acceleration (environmentalism, sustainability, mitigation, organicism of every variety, “post-humanisms” that reinvent a position of mastery—anthropocene metamemes all) (Hamilton 2012). The malaise lies deeper, a grand mal d’archive that provokes, today, what must be called climate comedy on all fronts. Technically, the animemes or technemes of Hitchcock’s screen are not dark figures themselves—rather, they precede the artefaction of “light.” They open the space for a new assemblage of inscriptions, a reset of arche-cinematic settings, projections of referents, mimetic conventions, perceptual regimes without “interiority” or home. Now, I leave it to you what this has to do with that other movie that we mentioned—the hypothetical and very bad Hollywood script “2016: The Non-Movie.” That is, what is given to us as a bad script. It is only catastrophic from the perspective of “life,” or should we say animation, as we know or knew it. The timing of the catastrophic has always been up for manipulation: it is coming, we can avoid it; it is coming, we can sidestep it or adapt; it was already here, it has no one time, it was there from the start, and we survived it (even as zombies), and so on. But Melancholia has a different point of view: we are in the middle of the catastrophe, and it has been long irreversible—as we glide past tipping points (as numerous official reports now advise us, boringly and to no response). In strict Oedipal fashion, “we” are the catastrophe—as viewed from the perspective of any terrestrial life form, or for that matter the galactic neighborhood. This is why Melancholia ’s paper lanterns, reminders of the vanity of cinema’s votive offerings of shimmering screens, dissolve as the telescopic view is reversed and the gigantism of billions of stars obliterates “us.” And it is also why, at the close, they huddle in what is called in the film the “magic cave,” which is the tracings and inscriptions of arche -cinematic culture, the same representational conventions that led us into this exitless place, this


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atopos, which is no longer an “earth,” and which is in mutation (like us). That is, the one we find ourselves starring in today: “2016: The Non-Movie.” Personally, I would turn down the script as clichéd. But then, that is where we are: disowning the real because it feels (and is) Hollywoodish. per script . Instreamed any case,denialist who would beor cynical enough to believe “theyAs knew,” as they media, that oneself were now— from the perspective of climate change—disposable? One may, however, be arche-cynecist enough to shrug it off as unremarkable. This would not be to argue for a new more stringent cynicism than has yet been conceived, and which we are all shy of because it discredits the “we”—particularly the one endlessly reproposed to arrive soon. We may not credit Diogenes properly, who carried about an oil lamp in the day, marking the artifice of “light” against the self-evident paternity of the sun, looking for a “man,” an honest man, a “human,” let’s say, in this double-black light—and not finding one, particularly not the guys he’d run into (Plato, whom he accused of faking his “Socrates,” Aristotle, even Alexander). Rather, he was present at one of those epochal initiation rites, here of “the West,” even of its imperial application (Alexander), and perhaps seeing its DNA and apprehending its trajectory (ecocide), dissociated with the artifice of that we, and went back to his earthen jar. He practiced affirmative defacement, after all, as the inscriptive infrastructure of the cin -anthropocene was consolidated (with the Aristotelian anthropos itself)—leaving the trace of an anti-Plato, what the latter called a “Socrates gone mad.” The dilemma may lie, however, not in genetic life supplementing itself with technical supports, and being taken over by them, which may still be a hopeful scenario in its way—one might, still, deproletarianize. The problem is the predictable inversion: that humans were parasited by technics for the latter to evolve itself, that it required bodies and the artifice of humans to gestate—that “we” were not just a host, but that the pretext of being a host was part of the theater. If “corporations” as supraorganisms are now persons and usurp the latter’s religious and moral appearance when taking over the reins of governance itself—well, it is at least good to know that humans are not the only supposed organism with a sense of comedy. It goes further: if cinema is “life,” and if mnemotechnics is indissociable from language, and neither are living nor organic as such, then whatever calls itself the human when it speaks, thinks, reflects on its diseases or property, shuffles through incorporeal “we’s” to position itself, signs its contracts, dissembles—that itself, call it “consciousness,” was always in the position of artificial intelligence. It may not be that the “disaffected” of hyperindustrial societies can be rerouted to


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a newly artefacted “care” and attention—but rather that, first, the charades by which we stage “affect” or propose new “we’s” be shed. Stiegler’s arche -cinema ups the stakes on the address of cinema until and as they spill into an “anthropocene epoch,” one without epochality. The latterwith termthe today encircles“global” the retrofitting American agenda together increasingly vortex of of any spells that theLeft early pressures of rapidly unraveling ecosystems present. It is not accidental that arche -cinematic reading expands for Stiegler as a tool or practice to deploy against the totalization we call the “anthropocene”—and which encircles the disorientation of an American (or other) Left pretending to a political program that is not, primarily, a mnemopolitical and mnemotechnic transformation. The “anthropocene” for Stiegler names an epoch without epochality, a trap stepped into which we must “escape” from at once. That is, before the inertia of an automated society, neural implants, species splits (my addition), and entropism prove irreversible—or, for that matter, after they have, as the condition for that war (Stiegler 2015). Arche -cinematics passes directly into being a tool of neganthropocenic or negentropic resistance. Stiegler presents us with the only full turn arising out of techno-philosophic writing against the politics of managed extinction unfolding once tipping points have passed. It is interesting that in advancing, he proves also to be the sole relay of the Derridean legacy that claims contemporary relevance and, so to speak, an inescapable future.

References Barsamian, David. 2011. “An Interview with Chris Hedges.” Progressive, June 14. www.progressive.org/chris_hedges_interview.html. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222. Cohen, Tom. 2012. “Polemos: ‘I Am at War with Myself,’ or, Deconstruction™ in the Anthropocene?” Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2: 239–57. . 2016. “Escape Velocity: Hyperpopulation, Species Splits, and the CounterMalthusian Trap (After ‘Tipping Points’ Pass).”Oxford Literary Review 38, no. 1: 127–48. Cohen, Tom, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller. 2012.Theory and the Disappearing Future. London: Routledge. . 2016. Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols. London: Open Humanities Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2016. “The Play of the World: The End, the Great Outdoors, the Outside, Alterity and the Real.” Derrida Today 9, no. 1: 21–35. Fitts, Catherine Austin. 2012. “The Breakaway Civilization with Dr. Joseph Farrell,”


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The Solari Report, September 6. solari.com/blog/the-breakaway-civilization -with-joseph- farrell/. Giroux, Henry A. 2011. Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism . New York: Lang. . 2013. “Hope in the Age of Looming Authoritarianism.” Truthout, December 2. www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20307-hope-in-the-age-of-looming -authoritarianism. Hamilton, Clive. 2012. “Utopias in the Anthropocene.” Plenary Session of the American Sociological Association, Denver, CO, August 17. mahb.stanford.edu /wp-content/uploads/2012/08/2012-Clive-Hamilton-Denver-ASA-Talk.pdf. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fiction. New York: Verso. Jay, Paul. 2013. “The Pathology of the Rich—Chris Hedges on Reality Asserts Itself (1/2).” The Real News, December 5. video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6un S2JF8TA. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism v. the Climate. New York: Simon and Shuster. Morton, Timothy. 2014. “Dark Ecology for a Logic of Future Coexistence.” The Wellek Lectures 3, University of California, Irvine, May 23, audio recording. archive.org/details/03DarkEcologyForALogicOfFutureCoexistenceThe WellekLectures3. Stephenson, Wen. 2014. “From Occupy to Climate Justice.” Nation , February 6. www.thenation.com/article/178242/occupy-climate-justice. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2010. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise . Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2013. “The Organology of Dreams and Arche -Cinema.” Screening the Past 38. www.screeningthepast.com/2013/06/the- organology- of-dreams- and -arche-cinema/. . 2015. “Escaping the Anthropocene.” Translated by Daniel Ross. www .academia.edu/12692287/Bernard _Stiegler _Escaping _the _ Anthropocene _2015_.


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Boundary 2 Special Issue Bernard Stiegler Amateur Philosophy

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