The Politics of Digital Pharmacology E-Book

Felix Heidenreich

• Herausgeber: transcript Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Edition Politik
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 184

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Digitization is transforming our world economically, culturally, and psychologically. The influx of new forms of communication, networking, and business opportunities, as well as new types of distraction, self-observation, and control into our societies represents an epochal challenge. Following Bernard Stiegler's concept of pharmacology, Felix Heidenreich and Florian Weber-Stein propose to view these new forms as digital pharmaka. Properly dosed, they can enable new self-relationships and forms of sociality; in the case of overdose, however, there is a risk of intoxication.

In this essay, Felix Heidenreich, Florian Weber-Stein, and, in a detailed interview, Bernard Stiegler analyze this complex change in our world and develop new skills to use digital pharmaka.

Leseprobe

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Felix Heidenreich is a philosopher and political scientist teaching at Universität Stuttgart. Among his publications are textbooks on political theory and contributions on Foucault and Blumenberg.Florian Weber-Stein is a professor of political science and political education at Pädagogische Hochschule Ludwigsburg. His research interests include democratic theory and data literacy.

Felix Heidenreich, Florian Weber-Stein

The Politics of Digital Pharmacology

Exploring the Craft of Collective Care

The joint project “KOALA - Building and expanding cooperation in all teaching subjects” is funded by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts as part of the “Teacher Training in Baden- Württemberg” funding program.

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First published in 2022 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld © Felix Heidenreich, Florian Weber-Stein

Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld

Cover illustration: "South Bank Circle", 1991. © Richard Long. Photo: Tate

Proofread: Peter Fenn

Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar

Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-6249-8

PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-6249-2

EPUB-ISBN 978-3-7328-6249-8

https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839462492

ISSN of series: 2702-9050

eISSN of series: 2702-9069

Contents

Foreword

Part I: Towards a Cura Publica

Chapter 1: Introducing Pharmacology

1.1 The digital onslaught: some basic considerations

1.2 Metaphors / analogies / comparisons: approaches to the concept of “pharmacology”

Chapter 2: Pharmacology on the Threshold of Modernity: Rousseau

2.1 Illness as social pathology

2.2 Rousseau and the genesis of modern self-medication

2.3 Homeopathic self-medication: self-education through writing?

2.4 Culture as a homeopathic remedy: civic education through the theater?

2.5 The limits of homeopathy in Rousseau

Chapter 3: Digital Pharmacology: Stiegler

3.1 Going beyond Rousseau with Rousseau

3.2 Digital Grammatization I or: from the ‘reading brain’ to the ‘twitter brain’

3.3 Digital Grammatization II or: friendship in the ‘digital anthill’

3.4 Digital Grammatization III or: the alphabetization of image consciousness

Chapter 4: Exploring the Limits of Pharmacology

4.1 Homeopathic, allopathic, and heteropathic pharmacology

4.2 How to do political pharmacology: ‘liberal’ or ‘republican’

4.3 The toolbox of digital pharmacology

4.4 A community of learning citizens: towards a cura publica

Part II: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler: Elements of Pharmacology

Concept, analogy, metaphor, art

No ontology of pharmaka, but savoir-faire

The subject of pharmacology: auto-therapy

The writing self and the digital self

A school of pharmacology

Bibliography

Works by Bernard Stiegler

Other cited works

Foreword

A few months before Bernard Stiegler came to Stuttgart in January 2020, he agreed to do an interview focusing on the concept of digital pharmacology. We finally met in the early afternoon of January 20th in the lobby of his hotel near the Public Library of Stuttgart, where his key-note lecture was to take place in the evening. We had planned to talk for about an hour at the most, to make sure that he would have the time to concentrate before the evening event. Some three hours later we were still in deep conversation. Having totally lost track of time, we suddenly needed to end our talk and hurry to the library so as not to be late for the event. Even after the public lecture, our conversation was resumed in a nearby restaurant.

Bernard Stiegler’s energy and passion continued to fascinate us when we talked to him via the internet while working on the interview. In the summer of 2020, we had just sent him a transcript of our long conversation when the news of his death arrived. We were shocked. His death came completely unexpectedly, although he had told us he was suffering from a severe illness.

We are thankful that we had the chance to get to know him personally. As we continued to work on this book, his voice echoed in our minds. It is rare to meet a philosopher who is so completely dedicated to his work, so focused on intellectual endeavor and still so friendly, so welcoming and so generous. We were deeply impressed by his personal blend of seriousness and outstanding creativity, a rare combination. We hope that this book will pass on the energy we experienced in Bernard Stiegler. We would also like to thank his daughter Barbara Stiegler for allowing us to publish the interview.

This book is a result of a project funded by the Professional School of Education (PSE) in Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg, organized and carried out by the International Center for Cultural and Technological Studies (IZKT) of the University of Stuttgart together with the University of Education in Ludwigsburg. We would like to thank the PSE for the support.

Felix Heidenreich & Florian Weber-Stein, Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg

Part I: Towards a Cura Publica

Chapter 1: Introducing Pharmacology

1.1The digital onslaught: some basic considerations

The influx of digital pharmaka into our societies poses, without any doubt, an epochal challenge. The dystopia of a digital “surveillance capitalism”1 combined with the brutal repression of an authoritarian regime is the most horrific scenario currently being discussed in the open societies. In China it is already in place. But even if this worst-case scenario of a repressive regime can be avoided, the cultural ramifications of digitalization are unsettling. Attention-disorder has become a widespread phenomenon; mental-illness is a growing problem. It is hard to track these causalities, but it must be assumed that these effects are only the tip of the iceberg. The influx of new technologies is fundamentally transforming the way couples, families, communities interact.

We still do not really understand the profound change that modern societies are facing, this “great transformation” our culture is undergoing as these technologies are becoming ubiquitous. However, in the confrontation between different generations the level of transformation sometimes becomes evident: When “digital natives” born after 1995 and those from the elder generation (intellectually socialized with books) meet, it sometimes seems to be an encounter of two different species, different brains, different ways of Being-in-the-world.

This observation does not imply a moral or aesthetic judgement; we should not object to the younger generation’s brains being formatted in a different way. We should, however, take seriously the question of what the obvious technological generation gap actually means, what it implies for the present and the future, and how we can cope with this tectonic shift. “What is going on?” might be the most simple and blunt way of posing this question. The impression that in as short a time as 20 years our way of living and thinking should have changed profoundly, has not, we assume, just arisen by chance. We are witnessing a historical transformation of our mental infrastructure.

The economic, political and cultural ramifications of this transformation are not yet fully clear, although for about 30 years countless books and articles have tried to conceptualize this transformation.2 To what degree is the enormous inequality in wealth caused by the accumulation of capital resulting from scaling-effects in the digital economy?3 To what degree can the new populist and authoritarian movements (and regimes!) be explained by the revolution on the information market caused by the internet?4 Is it the feeling of “not being heard”, inevitably produced in a world in which everybody else is constantly heard — which causes some people to feel excluded? And finally: to what degree is the new wave of mental illness linked to the influx of omnipresent digital media into our “life-world”?

Empirical research is trying to do its best to understand these processes while they are occurring. Hegel claimed that only when night is falling will the owl of Minerva start to fly and examine the ruins of an epoch from an adequate distance: historical formations need to have ended in order to be transparent to our understanding, Hegel thought. Only when the flower is already entering the stage of decomposition, can its essence be conceptualized, he claimed. This seems to be true for the feudal society so well described by Marc Bloch5 long after it ended. Maybe we will only have a complete, i.e. “Hegelian”, picture of the digital age once it begins to morph into something new.

This Hegelian approach, however, does not seem viable in our current situation: we need to understand the storm we are caught in as fast as possible in order to survive it. And this, of course, is what the empirical study of digitalization and its effects is trying to do: to make sense of the fundamental shift in our “being-in-the-world”. We can already see what digitalization can cause and will continue to induce in our societies. In order to assess these effects, it is not sufficient to list advantages and disadvantages, or to call for a “responsible” use of new technologies. It will also take a theoretical and philosophical effort to understand “what is going on”. Empirical research will provide much of what is needed, but not all that is sufficient for this endeavor. In a way, Heidegger’s strange dictum “the essence of technology is not technological”6 still seems to point to a relevant structural problem: in order to understand a Beethoven sonata, it is not sufficient to understand how a piano is constructed or what sound frequencies are produced. The technological set-up of the digital age is just the instrument on which the music is being played. The technological dimension, that is, is not the essence of this new technology. There is something in this technology which “transcends” its technological foundations. The essence of digital pharmaka is thus not actually digital itself.

A theoretical or philosophical contribution to these attempts will consist, of course, first and foremost in providing conceptual tools. These conceptual tools will not only be specific terminologies, but will consist also of analogies, metaphors, and comparisons. This essay will propose and try to apply a conceptual framework which Bernard Stiegler first introduced, and then, partly also in dialogue with us, elaborated on at greater length: we feel that the term “digital pharmacology”, and more generally the concept of the pharmakon, is extremely helpful in attempting to understand human interaction with digital media — and not only with digital media.

In Stiegler’s view a skillful way of applying pharmaka would counterbalance a tendency towards entropy: neg-entropy, the process of ‘bringing together’, of gathering, convening, assembling elements is the appropriate antidote against the destructive effects of the digital onslaught. This art of fighting entropy, of working for neg-entropy finds an esthetic expression in Richard Long’s work. When he creates a circle of stones as on the cover photo we have chosen for this book, an archaic technique of ‘bringing together’ is displayed. Working for neg-entropy seems to connect us with the most ancient practices of structuring a life-world, of bringing order into chaos.

In a rudimentary sense, this is literally an “essay”: we intend to test whether the idea of digital pharmacology will help us to understand more deeply “what is going on”.

Putting the question in such unacademic terms not only expresses a certain disorientation caused by the complexity of the subject. It also allows us to point to the entanglement of the different layers of the problem: there is something “going on” on the level of technology, of culture, of politics, and of “psycho-power” at the same time. Trying to think through the interactions between these different levels, to view them as one thing going on, presupposes not hiding in the corner of a well-defined academic discipline. Using analogies is one way of leaving such corners, of thinking the space in-between the different perspectives, of connecting the dots, as it were.

1.2Metaphors / analogies / comparisons: approaches to the concept of “pharmacology”

Metaphors and analogies, however, are usually considered to be unscientific. The fact that A is, in a specific regard, similar to B, does not tell us anything about the exact qualities of either A or B. On the contrary, it could be argued that analogical thinking is the opposite of logical thinking. In many cases it is a paranoid mode of thinking that sees similarities and connections everywhere. In some cases, these uncontrolled analogies and comparisons have severe consequences: “Metaphors can kill” — this was the pointed diagnosis of cognitive linguist George Lakoff in a critical essay on the military involvement of the Americans in the Gulf region in 1991.7 For Lakoff metaphors are not simply a decorative accessory to figurative speech, but rather shape our way of perceiving the world and our thinking, in making possible the understanding of one conceptual domain in terms of another. Among a variety of metaphors used by the US administration to justify a military intervention, Lakoff puts emphasis on a “common metaphor in which military control by the enemy is seen as a cancer that can spread. In this metaphor, military ‘operations’ by friendly powers are seen as hygienic measures to ‘clean out’ enemy fortifications. Bombing raids are portrayed as ‘surgical strikes’ to ‘take out’ anything that can serve a military purpose. The metaphor is supported by imagery of shiny metallic instruments of war, especially jets”8.

According to Susan Sontag, who has devoted a lengthy essay to the analysis of metaphors of illness, “[t]o describe a phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence. The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and justifies ‘severe’ measures — as well as strongly reinforcing the widespread notion that the disease is necessarily fatal”9. Sontag, who wrote these lines in 1978, was not referring to the political rhetoric of the Bush Snr. administration. Her examples of the violence unleashed by the cancer metaphor are the linguistic characterizations which the Nazis inflicted on the Jews. After the Nazis had portrayed the Jews as an infection of the racial body through ‘tuberculosis’ and ‘syphilis’, they later switched to calling the Jews ‘cancerous’, in order to justify an increasingly harsher politico-medical treatment. The climactic series of metaphors, or so Sonntag’s argument goes, led to a corresponding increase in political antidotes, from persecution to ghettoization and eventually extermination.

Metaphors that portray the political enemy as a disease — be it as a viral infection, as an infestation with parasites or as a cancerous tumor — are as common as they are problematic. And — despite the cautionary example that Nazi rhetoric still provides us with today — its use in political discourse is not diminishing. In 2003, in the run-up to America’s second Gulf War, Lakoff felt compelled to write a follow-up article entitled “Metaphor and War, Again”10.

Another failed analogy in the history of political thought is probably Heidegger’s claim that the extermination of the European Jews, i.e. the Holocaust, and industrial farming are “somehow” rooted in the same mindset and therefore “somehow” similar. When he declared the similarity of industrial genocide and industrial farming, he tried to blur the line between modernity in general and National-Socialist violence in particular: if somehow modernity was nothing but “forgetting being” altogether, his own involvement in National Socialism could suddenly be framed as a meaningful “fate”. Heidegger is a striking example of analogical thinking getting out of control.

Against this background, it is not astounding that the distrust of analogies should have a long tradition. Plato’s famous attack on rhetoric, his attempt to establish a more controlled and proper way of discussing things, the dialektiké techné, can be understood as an effort to overcome a way of thinking that progresses by stating similarities without really getting to the bottom of things. The phrase that “somehow” everything is like water (pánta rhei), for example, was an analogical statement that marked the insufficient intellectual tools of his predecessors, Plato claimed. Therefore, overcoming confusion for Plato is the same as overcoming false or uncontrolled analogies. Leaving the cave is leaving behind the delusions that wrong analogies produce in our mind. The philosophical paideia has to lead us from analogies to logic.

The ironic structure of this paideia is obvious, however: the path from analogical to logical thinking is presented in a paradeigma, an analogy, the myth of the cave. We can conclude that for Plato the real challenge was not to overcome analogies in general, but to control them, to use them in a skillful, elegant and productive way. This is why Plato himself became the grandmaster of philosophical mythmaking, of analogies and metaphors that are still, after more than 2.000 years, a shared heritage of our culture. We overcome the unskilled way of using analogies by using other analogies skillfully.

With regard to metaphors of (political) illness, Susan Sontag shows that these are among the oldest and most powerful political metaphors of all. This has to do with the fact that the political community or the state, long before a second, technical interpretation gained plausibility with the paradigm of a mechanism, was understood as an organism, as a body — a ‘body politic’. Three dimensions of meaning make this organicist metaphor suitable for thinking about politics: firstly, the ‘body politic’ denotes a complex unity of plurality that can be differentiated into body parts and organs, but can only become effective in interaction; secondly, the body parts are in more or less hierarchical relationships of superiority and subordination11; and thirdly, in the light of this interplay, it is possible to distinguish between ordered and disordered, ‘healthy’ and ‘sick’ states of the body.12 This third dimension opens up a further field of metaphors relating to the task of the politician, who through his actions is charged with the task of maintaining the order of the body as a hierarchically structured whole. In addition to the image of the helmsman, that of the doctor or medic is one of the oldest characterizations of the politician13. The metaphorization of the politician as a doctor is used by Plato himself and is a recurring image throughout the history of political ideas. It serves Machiavelli in emphasizing his point that it is not moral integrity but “the ability to recognize diseases that are difficult to diagnose”14 that constitutes the most important virtue of the politician.

A skillful and productive use of metaphors can be found in Heidegger as well. A word like “Gestell” can be helpful since it allows us to imagine a totality of imperatives. To be “gestellt” means to be stopped in one’s tracks or cornered (for instance, by a fierce dog), while a “Gestell” is a structure or frame of connected imperatives, the totality of obligations and mandatory conditions surrounding us in modern society. The fact that Heidegger’s use of analogies (oscillating between conceptual and metaphorical use) turns out to be fatal in some cases and helpful in others, shows the ambivalence of analogical thinking.

Metaphors and analogies therefore should not be considered as mere anomalies of thought, as signs of “wild thinking” or as mere rhetorical tricks. We could also frame them as tools which allow us to open a space of thought, to explore a field of possible, though not necessary, similarities. It is helpful, it seems, to remember what Hans Blumenberg wrote about “controlled ambiguity”: it is exactly the non-binary, non-propositional, multi-valent character of the analogy which allows it to operate as an eye-opener. Not everything such “opened eyes” perceive will turn out to be true; but new aspects, new connections, new ideas are generated when unexpected comparisons are proposed.

Bernard Stiegler’s term “digital pharmacology”, we take it, is exactly such an explorative analogy. It opens a field of possible and supposedly fruitful comparisons. Stiegler introduces the term “digital pharmacology” in the context of his larger research project on the general concept of pharmacology.

The most striking and important aspect of this new way of looking at the interaction of the human mind and its exogenic organs is the implication that the “tools” we use are actually a lot more than tools: they enter our body and mind, they restructure our brains and our thought.

For Bernard Stiegler the importance of writing (and handwriting) and reading is the most evident and empirically explored example. The practice of reading and writing “format” our being, they change the way the human being thinks, lives, and feels. Foucault’s text about “Writing the Self”15 was crucial to Stiegler, but what makes Stiegler so outstanding as a philosopher is his deep interest in contemporary empirical research. Notably Maryanne Wolf16, with her “science of the reading brain”, allowed him to underscore his point: the human being thinks not only with the brain, but also with books, with pens, with all the pharmaka he or she uses. It is important to emphasize that for Stiegler, the term pharmakon was not just an analogy or a metaphor: the pharmakon of the book actually, literally, impacts our brains, it is not like a pharmakon, but it actually is a pharmakon.

The real sense in which digital media can become pharmaka