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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions.
New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein's critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the 'shock doctrine'. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent 'state of shock' has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities.
Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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For Dominique Bourgon, Jean-Claude Bourgon, Hidetaka Ishida and Kuniko Ishida
First published in language as États de Choc. Betise et savoir au XXIè siecle © Mille et une nuits, department de la Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2012
This English edition © Polity Press, 2015
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6493-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6494-1 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8137-5 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8136-8 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stiegler, Bernard.
[États de choc. English]
States of shock : stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century / Bernard Stiegler.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7456-6493-4 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-6494-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Poststructuralism. 2. Education and globalization. 3. Knowledge, Sociology of–History–21st century. I. Title.
B2430.S7523E8313 2014
194–dc23
2014026157
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Introduction
1 Sovereignty and submission
In 2010 several texts appeared in France and Europe, manifestos, petitions and academic analyses concerning academic and scientific life. Quite a number of newspaper articles about national education and teaching also appeared. And various polls showed that these questions were indeed of major concern to the French people – the number one concern according to one poll, and according to others number two.1
At the same time, Inside Job, Charles Ferguson's 2010 documentary about financialization – an austere subject, perhaps, but one that did not prevent it from finding a record audience (and receiving a prize at Cannes), prior to the explosion of what is now called the problem of ‘sovereign debt’2 – highlighted the role that American universities, and certain academics, have played in the establishment of a literally suicidal financial system.
Furthermore, in 2011 the private ratings agencies downgraded the ‘ratings’ of Ireland, Greece, Spain, the United States, Japan and Italy (as well as certain French banks) – radically challenging the very idea of sovereignty, an idea that lies at the base of those historical movements that emerged from the eighteenth century and shaped the modern world, a world in which, until recently, we more or less believed we still lived (however ‘postmodern’ it may have become).
The movements that arose in the nineteenth century in order to constitute a ‘public thing’, itself forming a sovereign public power – that is, a res publica, and in this sense a republic – led to the widespread introduction of public education, positing in principle and by right that any citizen should have the chance and the duty to receive an education that will grant them access to that autonomy referred to by Kant as Mündigkeit, that is, ‘maturity’ or ‘majority’, through which the foundation would be laid for a public community and a sovereign politics.
In other words, the questions raised by Inside Job in the field of economics were echoed in appeals and articles about the dilapidated state of academic research and public education, and the collapse, and not just in Europe, of the economic and political credibility of the Western world, and of its legacy for the entirety of humanity, all this belonging on the same register. All these questions and the calamities accompanying them (and in particular the protean regression they threaten to bring with them) are generated by the very system that is sending us headlong into a world where political and economic sovereignty are eliminated and the forming of maturity via education is abandoned, a maturity that, as the autonomy obtained by frequently engaging with rational knowledge, was for the Aufklärer the sine qua non of such a sovereignty.
Western universities are in the grip of a deep malaise, and a number of them have found themselves, through some of their faculty, giving consent to – and sometimes considerably compromised by – the implementation of a financial system that, with the establishment of hyper-consumerist, drive-based and ‘addictogenic’ society,3 leads to economic and political ruin on a global scale. If this has occurred, it is because their goals, their organizations and their means have been put entirely at the service of the destruction of sovereignty. That is, they have been placed in the service of the destruction of sovereignty as conceived by the philosophers of what we call the Enlightenment, a sovereignty founded on Mündigkeit, maturity or majority understood as the exit from Unmündigkeit, immaturity or minority, in the Kantian sense of these notions.
Abandoning this obligation – even though we must understand its limits, so that a new political discourse can be elaborated, and a new critique of political economy, capable of projecting an alternative to what has proven to be paving the way for a global political and economic catastrophe – will lead capitalism to be destroyed from the inside, and by itself. Such an outcome does not depend on hateful speech or actions: democracy is being destroyed, not by those who ‘hate democracy’, but by those who have abandoned critique – given that a genuine democracy will constantly critique what, in it, means that it never stops changing. Public space and public time constitute a democratic public thing, a democratic public good, only to the extent that they are always precarious, and those democrats who are so sure of themselves as to doubt nothing (in their democracy) are always democracy's worst enemies.
In the Western industrial world, however, democracy has given way – and has done for quite some time – to consumerism (which is now taking hold in countries that seem to feel little need for democracy). This consumerism is itself based on the liquidation of maturity through the systemic generalization of minority and the industrial dilution of responsibility, or in other words: based on the reign of stupidity [bêtise], and of what so often accompanies it, namely cowardice and viciousness. It is this development that has been internalized by the academic world as simply a fact, with no alternative. And it is the possibility that there is an alternative to this fact, and as a new law, that we wish to assert here.
2 The war of reason against reason
The Aufklärung, writes Kant, is Mündigkeit, that is, maturity, that reason that is formed only through ‘humanity's emergence from its […] Unmündigkeit, its minority. [That is, from] the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.’4 The passage from immaturity to maturity, from minority to majority, is a conquest, according to Kant, and this conquest is referred to as the Aufklärung: the Aufklärung is an historical movement. What was gained with the Enlightenment, and thanks to it, is, however, what is at present being lost: it is literally being squandered in the course of a war of reason, and in this war, as we shall see, reason stands on both sides of the conflict, as if reason were at war with itself.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer posited in 1944, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, that this historical movement leads to a reversal and eventually to an inversion of the goals of this Enlightenment, and that reason as a political, economic and social stake thereby decomposes into what Weber and Habermas called rationalization – where reason comes to serve what the Frankfurt School called reification.
These questions – sovereignty, minority, majority, reason and even history – no longer seem to be posed in these terms, as if what is referred to as ‘postmodernity’5 had emptied them of content. For this reason, at the very moment when we are discovering that some of the greatest universities participated in the implementation of a system conceived by the ‘conservative revolution’ – a system lying at the origin of financialization6 and installing an economy of carelessness [économie de l'incurie] on a global scale, founded on a systemic extension of stupidity, which is also to say one of submission, infantilization and regression to minority – it also seems that the legacy of twentieth-century thought is simply to leave the human beings of the twenty-first century totally defenceless and unarmed in the face of a situation that appears hopeless.
This is also why I believe we must reopen the question of what links academic research, public education, politics and economics. It is a question that must be revisited in a profound way. We must, on the basis of the questions raised by not only Adorno and Horkheimer but also Karl Polanyi,7 re-read both:
the texts of so-called ‘poststructuralist’ thought; and
the corpus that dominated the Parisian intellectual scene prior to the appearance of this so-called ‘French thought’ – that is, the dialectical philosophies of Hegel and Marx.
As for the texts or initiatives that have recently emerged from the academic world, triggered by the crisis of the university and the school, I refer in particular to five:
a call to the political responsibility of academics launched in Italy with the title
After the End of the University
, confronting the catastrophic policy pursued in that country by Silvio Berlusconi (
http://th-rough.eu/writers/bifo-eng/after-end-university
);
a legal challenge undertaken in Portugal by three economists at the University of Coimbra and an economist at the University of Lisbon, against the ratings agencies responsible for downgrading Portugal's sovereign debt rating;
a petition launched in France in favour of ‘slow science’ (slowscience.fr);
a call for the organization of a civil society seminar on the stakes of research (
sciencescitoyennes.org
);
a manifesto launched in Paris calling for the development of digital humanities in French universities, signed by researchers from the EHESS, the laboratories of CNRS, and some thirty French universities.
This final text did indeed clear my vision, which was essential in order to comprehend the crisis of the university, a crisis that stems from the radical transformation of the modern world brought about by the appearance of analogue technologies in the twentieth century and the development of digital technologies in the twenty-first century.
I will attempt to show that the disarming and rearming of thought are essentially tied to the possibility of theorizing and practising these hypomnēmata – I will try to show this by offering a commentary on The Postmodern Condition (1979), in the context of the advent of public access to the internet via the world wide web, which occurred on 30 April 1993, fourteen years after Jean-François Lyotard published his book.
3 Shocks, therapies, pharmacology
As for the poll that showed (in the context of the then upcoming 2012 French presidential election) that education and teaching are the premier concern of the French public, it echoes an article that appeared in Le Figaro on 29 July 2011, on which I will offer a detailed commentary in the next chapter.8
The crisis in education – education, which was conceived on the basis of writing in order to form a ‘public that reads’, as Kant said – is nothing new. In Part II, I argue:
that the reason this has become of such concern to the French public is that the situation has reached a point of no return, directly related above all to the deployment of analogue technologies during the 1960s (leading to the hegemonic rule of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the culture industry), and then, beginning in the 1990s, of digital technologies;
that this question involves the entire academic project, and that it amounts to the question of what, with Ars Industrialis, I refer to as ‘technologies of the spirit’.
9
This analysis leads me to propose in the second part of this work that, in all universities and in all disciplines, ‘digital studies’ programs should be developed (of which so-called ‘digital humanities’ would be a specific element).
In the course of these inquiries I will relate the crises of education and the university to Naomi Klein's analysis, in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,10 of the way in which this shock strategy was applied in the United States to complete the destruction of public education in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The current economic catastrophe is no doubt the subject of similar strategies, referred to as ‘shock therapies’. And Europe is now massively confronted with just such strategies.
Faced with this situation, universities – that is, academics, lecturers and students – must assume their responsibilities at a time when this strategy, which is a ‘market’ strategy, is, in Europe, attacking the very structures of political sovereignty.
This work aims to supply conceptual, that is, peaceful, weapons, and to open up prospects for action founded on rational, that is, political,11 argument, in order positively to oppose proposals for, or impositions of, ‘shock therapies’. These should be opposed in France, in Europe and throughout the industrial world, a world fortunate enough still to possess public education and research systems, but also in those countries that once had such systems but have since lost them – for example, Chile, where 2011 was marked by a battle by students for the right to public higher education, and against the catastrophic degradation of teaching and research that occurred after privatization, a situation orchestrated by Augusto Pinochet, by Milton Friedman and by the latter's so-called ‘Chicago School’ of economics.
Working here from a pharmacological perspective that I have already put forward elsewhere,12 I develop an analysis of the question of therapies in general, given that technological shocks, which have constituted the basis of capitalism ever since the implementation of what Joseph Schumpeter called ‘Creative Destruction’ (the capital letters are his),13 must in our time be rethought.
A ‘social therapeutics’ for the shocks caused by technological pharmaka is what politics must prescribe. For a lengthy period of time this did in fact take place, from the moment politics became, in the industrial ages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a political economy that required an overall industrial policy. But this is no longer the case, specifically since the ‘conservative revolution’.14 I argue here that it is therefore a matter of completely rethinking industrial political economy in the hyper-industrial epoch of the twenty-first century. This is why I propose a re-reading of Hegel in chapter 5 and of Marx in chapter 6.
The shock therapies implemented by neoliberalism – under the guidance of Milton Friedman, whose methods were put to the test in Chile after the assassination of Salvador Allende – may have proven their ‘efficacity’ in the short term (while nevertheless leading in the medium to long term to the contemporary catastrophe wherein this suicidal doctrine proves to have installed an economy of carelessness and neglect). But if this has been possible, it is only because the university, as a project of modernity fundamentally proceeding from the Enlightenment and the Kantian discourse on The Conflict of the Faculties (I will return to this in chapter 8), has been incapable of thinking shock in general, and the shock that technics always is, insofar as it is irreducibly pharmacological, this being even more true when technics becomes technology.
Universities may not have managed to know or do anything about this, but this is less because they have been prevented from doing so, or because they have been bought off (even if this has also happened), than because their development has been based on something that has remained unthinkable, even repressed:15 the repression of the role of technics in the constitution of the ‘noetic soul’ in general,16 and in the formation17 of every form of knowledge. And the repression in particular of the role of technics in theoretical knowledge: the mnemotechnics that is writing is the condition of possibility of reason (of logos and of its logic) as theorematic faculty. Analogue and digital mnemotechnologies, however, represent a new stage of the process of grammatization, a process through which alphabetic writing led to the foundation of the polis.
Digital technology is a new stage of writing (and thus also of reading),18 an industrial system founded on the production and activation of traces, of ‘grammes’ and ‘graphemes’19 that discretize, affect, reproduce and transform every flux and flow (well beyond just language). This writing is produced and written in silicon with new codes, tools, instruments and devices of publication, and the story must be told from this perspective, from clay and papyrus to today's micro-electronic structures (and tomorrow's nano-electronic, if not bionic) that encode in silicon the industrial standards we refer to as ASCII, XML, and so on, that ‘scan’ the algorithms of search engines that automate reading and writing, and that index, ‘tag’ and categorize the new metalanguages which all of this presupposes – the totality of which results in generalized traceability and trackability.
The massive and brutal eruption of these new kinds of hypomnēmata radically changes the very conditions of education and research, as well as the relations between educational institutions and universities on the one hand, and what lies outside them on the other hand. This protean ‘outside’ is now permanently ‘inside’, thanks to computers and mobile phones, but also to those ‘reforms’ intended to dictate to the Academy in its totality the non-academic imperatives to which it is now required to submit. These imperatives arise from a technological shock strategy, the result of which is that the conditions of autonomy and heteronomy of academic institutions in a broad sense (in a sense whereby education and research together form the academic world, the matrix for which takes shape in Athens in the fourth century BCE) find themselves radically changed.
With Pierre Macherey, to whom I shall refer later in this work,20 I question the validity of a discourse – which I find fantastical – premised on the necessity and possibility of ‘resisting’ by maintaining the illusion of a ‘university without condition’. I do indeed support the need to assert the autonomy of the university, but as a dependent autonomy, and in a way as a conditional freedom21 – as a pharmacology of autonomy under retentional conditions. Such conditions constitute the condition (always precarious, never assured for anyone) of responsibility, a recurring theme in the writings that Jacques Derrida devoted to the university. It is clearly Derrida's thinking that makes possible my own discourse here, which is therefore not an ‘anti-Derridian’ discourse, but which, if I may put it like this, envisages the possibility of a deconstruction of deconstruction.22
4 Responsibilities
Technical traces – the existence of which is the condition of formation of what Freud called mnesic traces for the human psyche, that is, of the ‘soul’ (in Aristotle's sense) constituted by a libidinal economy – are the milieu of that cerebral plasticity on the basis of which the psychic apparatus is formed, or what Simondon called the psychic individual. These technical traces, which constitute ‘tertiary retentions’,23 are now being placed under the control of a global industry, even though the university is yet to understand fully their role in the noetic activity through which are formed and trained not only the psychic apparatus, but the social apparatus, and knowledge itself, under the auspices of what is called ‘reason’. This fact, which inscribes the economy of the libido sciendi within the irreducible horizon of an industrial political economy, demands that we think libidinal economy in the industrial epoch.
This book was written after the economic crisis brought about by the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, as well as the insurance company AIG.24 It builds on more general analyses of the consequences of this economic crisis,25 and strives to deepen the lessons to be learned in terms of the responsibility of academics in general in relation to the epistemic, economic, social, psychic, aesthetic and political aspects of the crisis – and more particularly for philosophy and for the industrial economy, the crisis of which is that it is a libidinal diseconomy.
The thesis of this work is that the question of knowledge, of its irreducibly instrumental dimension – that is, its ambiguous, because pharmacological, dimension – and, given this condition, of its place in industrial society, lies at the heart of all these questions. This is why it is also and at the same time a matter of investigating the future role of universities in the re-elaboration of the educational project in the context of the development of new digital technologies,26 as well as their role in the invention of a new global society, founded on a new industrial model in which knowledge would be fundamentally re-valorized, rather than compromised and discredited, as has been the case in recent decades, as a result of the difficult relationship it has maintained with its economic, social and political environment. It is, then, a matter of struggling against what Paul Valéry long ago described as the lowering of ‘spirit value’, the lowering of the value of spirit.27
This work thus attempts to continue the discussion I began in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations: a reading of French thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. That book concentrated in particular on certain aspects of the work of Michel Foucault. Here, in dialogue with texts by Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, I return to the intergenerational question that I introduced in the first chapter of Taking Care.
This earlier debate focused on the question of discipline in Foucault,28 and the evolution of its meaning, that is, on his relation to discipline understood successively in terms of epistēmē, epimēleia, melētē, tekhnē, and so on,29 and on what seemed to me to be unresolved contradictions in this evolution,30 that is, ultimately, in the thinking of writing, and the links between the thinking of discipline and the thinking (and non-thinking) of writing. Continuing this debate, this book will in a certain sense be a critical and contextualized introduction to poststructuralist thought, to its legacy, and to the necessity of continuing it, but of doing so in a renewed way.
The question that will arise is indeed that of the role that poststructuralism could play, but that it does not play, in a situation where, for the first time in human history, the entire world seems threatened by ‘impersonal forces’ that it has itself unleashed. These forces are both rational, in that they are the outcome of conscious and reflective human activity, and irrational, in that they are removing any control we might have, and not only are they conditioning consciousness ‘behind its back’,31 but they are doing the same to the unconscious.
On the basis of these analyses, I try to pose anew the question of responsibility in general, in regard to the past, present and future responsibilities of the university after Fukushima. This nuclear catastrophe of unprecedented global magnitude, with incalculable consequences in a thousand spheres, occurred at a time when financialization has managed to annihilate political legitimacy and every form of sovereignty. It has crystallized, and taken to a new level, the questions thrown up by a set of technological disasters, and by the discovery of toxicities of all kinds, that have marked the first decade of the twenty-first century, after that inaugural shock that took place on 11 September 2001 – from Benfluorex (or Mediator) in France and elsewhere, to attention deficit disorder throughout the world, and passing through the systemic dilution of responsibility in and by the ‘financial industry’, not to mention all the disruptions of the biosphere.
What we learn from Inside Job is that American economics professors played an important role in the so-called ‘financial industry’, and were sometimes able to amass small fortunes – the financial sector being willing to spend an enormous amount in order to influence the public sphere in general:
Between 1998 and 2008, the financial industry spent over 5 billion dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions. And since the crisis, they're spending even more money. The financial industry also exerts its influence in a more subtle way; one that most Americans don't know about. It has corrupted the study of economics itself.32
George Soros himself confirms this analysis in the clearest possible terms:
Deregulation had tremendous financial and intellectual support. […] The economics profession was the main source of that illusion.33
And the narrator adds:
Since the 1980s, academic economists have been major advocates of deregulation, and played powerful roles in shaping U.S. government policy. Very few of these economic experts warned about the crisis. And even after the crisis, many of them opposed reform.
Interviews then follow with Martin Feldstein, economics professor at Harvard, Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Business School, and Frederic Mishkin, professor at the same university in New York.34 The film also mentions the positions of Laura Tyson at Berkeley, Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, and Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary under Clinton and president of Harvard University.
It is tempting to conclude that if everything has gone so badly, this must be due, in terms of academic responsibility, to economists. It must be due, that is, to the fact that this discipline has given up its theoretical dimension, its discipline in the sense of its rigour, its rationality. And it has done so in order to become econometrics, that is, a technology of indicators, and a mathematization of anticipation that is ever-more self-fulfilling, that is, as Derrida and Lyotard put it, performative, a technology of models and simulations that is turning into a technology of dissimulation, the eventual result of which is the development of financial software that can only ruin the economy. Many economists themselves have reached such conclusions, those who belong to currents of the discipline that are for this reason known as ‘heterodox economics’: they attack neoliberalism for basing itself on a concept of rationality that has been corrupted by its abandonment of all criticism of its own status as scientific – the capacity for critique being the basis of all reason – and that therefore leads to the spread of practices whose result is profound economic irrationality.
It is indeed tempting to think this way – it is all the fault, in terms of universities, of economists who are either corrupt or simply inadequately equipped with critical sense, that is, rational sense – and it would be comfortable to be able to leave it at that. But this would be a grave error, in the first place because, especially as concerns philosophy, it has itself, since 1968, very generally abandoned the economic field and the critique of political economy, and this abandonment was even greater after the collapse of the Communist bloc. Having attempted to outline the theoretical stakes of this situation in For a New Critique of Political Economy, here I shall continue and deepen this analysis by attempting to show that the abandonment of economic questions and of the critique of political economy rests on much more general theoretical misunderstandings – and is founded on a repression lying at the very origin of philosophy.
Before clarifying these points, it is necessary to reiterate here35 that the fundamental issue in this global crisis is not essentially financial. If the financial industry has become violently toxic since the ‘conservative revolution’, accelerating and intensifying the destructive effects of contemporary capitalism, the more fundamental question relates to the obsolescence of the consumerist industrial model, a model that arose at the beginning of the twentieth century with Fordism and was consolidated with the American New Deal of 1933, before expanding to Europe with the Marshall Plan and eventually to the entire world with the ‘conservative revolution’ that began in the late 1970s.
As I have already tried to show, contemporary philosophy, as a general rule, and with the exception of the Frankfurt School, has largely ignored the toxic, addictive and self-destructive becoming of consumerism. Hence philosophy has allowed the arguments of Herbert Marcuse and Guy Debord on this subject to fall into oblivion, but also those of many others (such as Henri Lefebvre) – and contemporary writers who have addressed this subject (such as André Gorz), too, have been neglected.
As Marx understood in 1857,36 just as Schumpeter made it the new leitmotiv of American capitalism under the name of ‘innovation’, and just as it is now expressly thematized with the advent of digital networks and the ‘information society’, knowledge has become the crucial issue in the economic war currently destroying the world. ‘Poststructuralist’ thought has at times been able to teach us things about this situation, and in some ways to fight against it, as we shall see. But it has done so on the basis of two misconceptions themselves grounded in the original repression of the technical question by nascent philosophy – a repression that, strangely, ‘poststructuralist’ philosophy has itself in some ways exposed, while nevertheless perpetuating it.37
The two misunderstandings that such a repression reinforces concern:
the meaning of what Marx referred to as the ‘proletariat’; and
the status of the drives in Freudian theory.
These points will be argued at length in chapter 6, which concludes the first part of this work. The second part will attempt to draw some theoretical and practical consequences from these re-readings of the philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – re-readings conducted in the aftermath of 2008 – by advancing a series of proposals that together constitute a call to the international academic community to constitute what in 1920 Marcel Mauss called an ‘internation’.
The first part was written after the second: it outlines the conceptual underpinnings. Therefore the reader who prefers to begin with the positive proposals I put forth in the second part may do so without much problem. For a thorough understanding of these proposals, however, it is necessary to read the first part. The first part is composed of six chapters, of which the fifth is the most difficult. Readers may also skip this chapter, and turn from the fourth directly to the sixth chapter, returning to the fifth at a later time if possible.38
Notes
1
See Claude Lelièvre, ‘L'éducation, sujet majeur des présidentielles?’,
Mediapart
, 18 July 2011, available at
http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/claude-lelievre/180711/leducation-sujet-majeur-des-presidentielles
.
And see Denis Kambouchner, Philippe Meirieu, Bernard Stiegler, Julien Gautier and Guillaume Vergne,
L'École, le numérique et la société qui vient
(Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2012).
2
As if the true problem is debt, and not the major discredit through which the capitalist economy, which has systematically cultivated debt while privatizing everything, has established a generalized insolvency, beginning with the banks.
3
The expression ‘addictogenic society’ was used by Jean-Pierre Couteron, president of the Association nationale des intervenants en toxicomanie et addictologie (ANITEA).
4
Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?” ’,
Political Writings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 54, translation modified.
5
There is great confusion about the meaning of this word, which, especially in the way it is understood in the United States, tends to paint Lyotard, Derrida and Deleuze, Baudrillard and Virilio, and even Barthes and Lacan, and others, all with the same brush. An example of this confusion can be found in Jeremy Rifkin,
The Age of Access
(New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2000). Be that as it may, Jean-François Lyotard claimed that during this so-called ‘postmodern’ period, which he himself attempted to describe in detail – and I will return to this in
chapter 4
– we must
stop telling stories
, namely, those speculative and emancipatory stories that would be the ‘grand narratives’ of Hegel and Marx. It should be remembered, however, that Plato too, condemned the ‘storytellers’ that in his eyes the Presocratics, and then the poets in general, were, in particular in the
Sophist
and the
Republic
.
6
On this point, see Bernard Stiegler,
For a New Critique of Political Economy
(Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
7
Karl Polanyi,
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(Boston: Beacon, 2001).
8
François Hauter, ‘L'école fabrique des élites, pas des équipes’ [‘French schools produce elites, not teams’],
Le Figaro
, 29 July 2011, as part of the series ‘Le Bonheur d'être français’.
9
See the ‘Manifesto’ of Ars Industrialis, available at:
http://arsindustrialis.org/node/1472
.
And see Bernard Stiegler,
The Re-Enchantment of the World
(London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 13.
10
Naomi Klein,
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
11
I will return to the link between reason (or
logos
) and politics (or the
polis
). It is this link whose cultivation the French political class has to a large extent abandoned, and for quite some time. I do not, however, consider political representatives – politicians and the political class, ‘politicals’ – solely responsible. I attempt on the contrary to show that academics – so-called ‘intellectuals’ – share a large portion of the responsibility for this disastrous situation. And I will also try to show
why
: this is not a matter of pronouncing guilt (blaming people is always a dead end, even when there are people who are indeed guilty) but one of describing the processes through which responsibilities change or are displaced, and in relation to which it is a matter of inventing a new sense of responsibility.
12
Bernard Stiegler,
What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology
(Cambridge: Polity, 2013).
13
Joseph A. Schumpeter,
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1976).
14
I have developed this perspective in detail in
What Makes Life Worth Living
.
15
I have developed this question in greater detail in
Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
16
See Bernard Stiegler,
De la misère symbolique 2: La
catastrophè
du sensible
(Paris: Galilée, 2005), pp. 61ff.
17
Translator's note:
‘
formation
’ in French also means ‘training’.
18
See Alain Giffard, ‘Des lectures industrielles’, in Bernard Stiegler, Alain Giffard and Christian Fauré,
Pour en finir avec la mécroissance
(Paris: Flammarion, 2009), pp. 117ff.
19
See Jacques Derrida,
Of Grammatology
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
20
See pp. 127–8 and 170.
21
Translator's note:
‘
liberté conditionelle
’ is the French term for conditional release, that is, parole.
22
More than fifty years after its appearance, deconstruction, the outlines of which were sketched in the ‘Introduction’ to Edmund Husserl's ‘Origin of Geometry’, has become a construction, less through Derrida than through his many epigones, brilliant or mediocre, and sometimes through the effect they have had on his own work, and on the reception of his work by himself, so to speak. The ‘language’ of deconstruction is thus made to function as the language of metaphysics, and by masquerading in the fascinating garb of
opposing
metaphysics – not, like the latter, through a play of oppositions (the necessity for deconstruction rests precisely on putting in question the oppositional pairs constitutive of ‘metaphysics’), but through a dilution of differences and a general liquefaction of differ
a
nce.
The germ of this risk was contained in
Speech and Phenomena
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). I have attempted to show why this is so in ‘The Magic Skin; or, The Franco-European Accident of Philosophy after Jacques Derrida’,
Qui Parle
18 (2009), pp. 97–110. I will say here in advance, to the epigones, that these remarks are in no way a ‘betrayal’ of this man, whom I visited when, thanks to him, to Gérard Granel and to some others I cannot mention here, I was released on parole [
liberté conditionnelle
]. Continuing, therefore, a debate that began very early on (that I have tried to argue while being consistently astounded by the attention, thoughtfulness and kindness to which this wonderful man always testified, constantly worrying about saying something stupid) is precisely, for me, a matter of being faithful to my friend Jacques Derrida, that is: always taking deconstruction to its limits – which is limited just as everything is, that is, all that which, destined to become, is destined also to return, precisely in and through the experience of its limits.
23
See ‘Attention, Rétention, Protention’, in Victor Petit,
Vocabulaire d'Ars Industrialis
,
in Bernard Stiegler,
Pharmacologie du Front national
(Paris: Flammarion, 2013), pp. 380–2.
24
See pp. 224–5, note 34, for why it is important to make this additional specification.
25
See Stiegler et al.,
Pour en finir avec la mécroissance
,
Stiegler,
For a New Critique of Political Economy
,
Stiegler,
What Makes Life Worth Living
, and the updated 2010 ‘Manifesto’ of Ars Industrialis.
See also Paul Jorion,
Le Capitalisme à l'agonie
(Paris: Fayard, 2011).
26
It is for this reason that this book appeared simultaneously with
L'École, le numérique et la société qui vient
, which I co-authored with Kambouchner, Meirieu, Gautier and Vergne.
27
Paul Valéry, ‘Freedom of the Mind’,
The Outlook for Intelligence
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 190, translation modified.
28
Bernard Stiegler,
Taking Care of Youth and the Generations
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 112ff.
29
Ibid., p. 115.
30
This leads him in particular to ignore profoundly the question of marketing and the emergence of consumerism in the twentieth century. See ibid., pp. 128–35.
31
Translator's note:
the reference here is to G. W. F. Hegel,
Phenomenology of Spirit
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §87.
32
The transcript of the screenplay of
Inside Job
is available at
http://www.sonyclassics.com/awards-information/insidejob_screenplay.pdf
.
33
My emphasis.
34
Here are extracts from these interviews, conducted by filmmaker Charles Ferguson:
AIG is the insurance group that provided cover for a large proportion of the credit default swaps that lay behind the crisis of 2008, a mechanism for diluting responsibility that remains in force today, and in particular to enable the consequences of speculation to fall upon ‘sovereign’ countries, which are then downgraded by ratings agencies. Another interview, this time with Glenn Hubbard:
35
As I have done elsewhere, for instance in Bernard Stiegler, ‘Du temps-carbone au temps-lumière’, in Stiegler et al.,
Pour en finir avec la mécroissance
, pp. 13–43, and see the 2010 version of the Ars Industrialis manifesto.
36
See Karl Marx,
Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft)
(London: Penguin, 1973).
37
This includes Jacques Derrida, who, in positing that the trace, the supplement, archi-writing, and so on constitute a ‘quasi-transcendental’ question, would keep in extreme ambiguity the question of the technical constitutivity of différance acceding to the ‘as such’, or in other words the question of the history of différance, or rather of what we ought refer to as its genealogy: the trace, through the very fact of its irreducible technical empiricity in becoming noetic différance, is the foundation of its irreducibly pharmacological character. It should therefore not be thought under this category of the ‘quasi-transcendental’, even if this ‘quasi’ seems to accord easily with this thought. I am not ignoring the fact that Derrida wanted to show that there is in this materiality something that exceeds it, and that the play of différance that it supports exceeds the empirical. But that this ‘exceeding’ is constituted through this very technicity insofar as it engenders and conditions the libidinal economy without which there is no
noēsis
, that is, no protention capable of promising – this is what I believe the pseudo-concept of the ‘quasi-transcendental’ absolutely prevents us from thinking.I have tried to show in ‘The Magic Skin’ that these problems begin very early on – from the moment that Derrida, in contesting the opposition between primary and secondary retention in Husserl, ignores the question of their difference, and at the same stroke ignores the question of tertiary retention, and of how in differentiating itself it nevertheless over-determines this difference between primary and secondary retention, and over-determines their play
as différance
, and as différance
in its noetic stage
.
A similar difficulty (the repetition of the original repression of technicity) occurs in Gilles Deleuze, for instance in his analysis of Foucault's work via the concept of the diagram. See Gilles Deleuze,
Foucault
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 43–4,
and my commentary on Deleuze in Bernard Stiegler,
The Decadence of Industrial Democracies: Disbelief and Discredit, 1
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 177, n. 60.
Finally, we shall see how Lyotard's position in 1986 is ultimately quite close to that of Heidegger (see p. 96), which, as I tried to show in
Technics and Time, 1
, again essentially consists in a repetition of this repression – to the point of inverting, however, the entire question of
Abbau
that I argue is concentrated on this question, that is, on the status of what I call tertiary retention.
38
This book derives on the one hand from a lecture on the university of the future that I delivered in June 2011 at the University of Cambridge, in closing a research programme of the CRASSH programme, and at the invitation of Martin Crowley, Mary Jacobus and Andrew Webber. I also presented a version of this lecture to the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, at the invitation of Martine Meskel and Jean-François Nordmann, and in the company of Marc Crépon. It derives on the other hand from work I began in collaboration with Julien Gauthier, Philippe Meirieu, Denis Kambouchner and Guillaume Vergne, in the framework of a partnership between Ars Industrialis and Skhole.fr, and that also led to the publication of
L'École, le numérique et la société qui vient
.
Part IPharmacology of Stupidity: Introduction to the Poststructuralist Epoch
1Unreason
Humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer1
5 ‘A torrent of events is pouring down on mankind’: madness and regression
The impression that humanity has fallen under the domination of unreason or madness [déraison] overwhelms our spirit, confronted as we are with systemic collapses, major technological accidents, medical or pharmaceutical scandals, shocking revelations, the unleashing of the drives, and acts of madness of every kind and in every social milieu – not to mention the extreme misery and poverty that now afflict citizens and neighbours both near and far.
The notion that the rationalization characteristic of industrial societies leads to a regression into unreason is far from new. In 1944, in Dialektik der Aufklärung, translated into French by Éliane Kaufholz under the title La Dialectique de la Raison, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer characterized this inversion of reason as a regression (Rückschritt) ‘which is taking place everywhere today’.2 And they warned their contemporaries that ‘if enlightenment does not undertake work that reflects on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate’.3
If we then read the analyses of Karl Polanyi, also published in 1944, on the effects of the ‘self-regulating market’ and the ‘de-socialization of the economy’4 (which begins in the epoch of the Aufklärung), we are bound to wonder, almost seventy years later, about the degree to which ‘reason-formed-in-the-epoch-of-the-Enlightenment’ (I am attempting here to translate what Adorno and Horkheimer called the Aufklärung) has or has not undertaken this work of reflection:
A self-adjusting market […] could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. […] Nothing could seem more inept than […] to argue the inevitable self-destruction of civilization on account of some technical quality of its economic organization. […] Yet it is this we are undertaking. […] As if the forces of change had been pent up for a century, a torrent of events is pouring down on mankind. A social transformation of planetary range is being topped by wars of an entirely new type in which a score of states have crashed.5
6 Still and always acting out: madness, irresponsibility, baseness
The Aufklärung, which the French translator of Dialektik der Aufklärung chose to translate as ‘la Raison’, dressed up with a magisterial capital letter, this Aufklärung that will fail to undertake this work of reflection (and that will largely ignore the analyses of Polanyi) is not an impersonal power: it is a noetic possibility within each of us, and as such it constitutes, as a potential shared by everyone but one that must be actualized, a responsibility that is always both individual and collective. We are all reason-able in potential – if not in actuality.
The question is that of the passage to the act – reasonable or unreasonable [déraisonnable].
The passage to the noetic act, that is, to the reasonable act, is what the Aufklärung embodied by Kant conceived as an historical conquest: there is a history of reason here firstly in this sense (as passage to the historical act of reason – or of unreason). And this history is a social history – translating Aufklärung as Reason unfortunately effaces this historical and social dimension. It was on the basis of this Enlightenment legacy – of which Kant is the tutelary figure enjoining the reader to take their responsibility by daring to know (sapere aude!) and by passing from minority to majority – that Adorno and Horkheimer authored their Dialektik der Aufklärung.
To pass into the act of reason, which Aristotle called noēsis, is precisely and above all to struggle against that unreason [déraison] that manifests itself in many forms – between stupidity [bêtise] and madness [folie] and prospering on the terrain of ignorance, fantasy and, nowadays, the industrial exploitation of the drives,6 that is, as the planetary-wide extension and universalization of what Gilles Deleuze described as baseness.7
If reason forms itself (in passing through a Bildung), this is also and above all because it de-forms itself. It is a state that, both mental and social, is essentially precarious – and it is perhaps this that we, the latecomers of the twenty-first century, are the ones to have discovered: this ‘conquest’ we make remains always radically to be re-made and defended. What Adorno and Horkheimer added to the Kantian definition of the Aufklärung as conquest is that it must always be defended against itself, since it constantly tends, in becoming rationalization (that is, reification),8 to turn against itself as knowledge becomes stupidity – this dialecticization of the Aufklärung occurring after Weber's discovery that rationalization is characteristic of capitalist becoming.
Presenting itself in this way in the garb of rationalization, reason cannot avoid engendering the temptation of irrationality.
What perhaps we today have also discovered, and what we experience so painfully and anxiously, is that reason presupposes retentional conditions9 for its Bildung (I have described these elsewhere,10 and I will return to them in detail in the following). These conditions form and support individual and collective memory, which depend on hypomnesic techniques (on hypomnēmata) that have today been industrialized, and which, with the development of rationalization, are no longer in the control of any public or noetic powers: they have passed into the hands of what Polanyi called the ‘self-regulating market’.11
Hence what is occurring, on a scale and in conditions that were hitherto inconceivable, is the effect of what Gramsci described as a cultural hegemony that de-forms reason12 – reason understood in Enlightenment terms as that historical and social conquest that now seems to decompose so rapidly into rationalization. Hence the reign of stupidity, baseness (vulgarity) and madness that, disturbing us greatly but preventing us from transforming this inquietude into thinking, instead gives rise to fear, which is a bad counsellor.13
We have perhaps failed to reflect on Adorno and Horkheimer's thinking in relation to what they referred to as the Aufklärung, conceived in the eighteenth century as the conquest of maturity and the struggle against minority. Perhaps this failure has consisted in continuing to ignore the need for an analysis of the hypomnesic conditions of this conquest that is the formation of reason, in particular
