In For a New Critique of Political Economy, Bernard Stiegler repositions the techno-deconstructive philosophy he developed in Technics & Time squarely within the realm of politics and economics. For Stiegler, any critique of political economy, as well any response to the current global economic crisis, must take into consideration the default of humanity, the prehistoric “structural coupling” of humanity and technics that has made it possible to organize an economy around the externalization and exploitation of different forms of human memory. According to Stiegler, public debate about how to solve the economic crisis is misguided on all sides. Both those who advocate stimulating consumption and those who hope to revive “entrepreneurial dynamism” through investment hope to save an economic system that has undermined its conditions for successful reproduction. They refuse to acknowledge that the “consumerist industrial model” of the 20th century is now “obsolete.” It “has reached its limits because it has become systemically short-termist, because it has given rise to a systemic stupidity that structurally prevents the reconstitution of a long-term horizon.” Instead of dreaming of a restoration of this consumerist model to its former heights, we need “to produce a vision and a political will capable of progressively moving away from the economico-political complex of consumption so as to enter into the complex of a new type of investment, which must be a social and political investment or, in other words, an investment in a common desire.” This political project requires the construction of a new critique of political economy, a critique that Stiegler maintains must be founded on an analysis of the processes of grammatization, the techniques through which memory is externalized, made discrete, and opened up to social and economic investment and control. Stiegler attacks his philosophical peers for having totally failed to engage with the changes in the economy. He asserts that recent French philosophers have “nothing whatsoever so say about the contemporary economy”—they have “abandoned the project of a critique of political economy, and this constitutes a disastrous turn.” Ambivalence about critique—which is suspected of harboring metaphysics—has been a major cause of this “philosophical abdication in relation to economics.” Deconstruction played no small part in undermining the status of critique, though, as becomes clear later, Stiegler believes that “deconstruction remains a critique,” and he places deconstruction at the heart of his critique of political economy. In the last decade or two, the definition of work has been heavily debated, with figures such as Jeremy Rifkin predicting the “end of work” as a result of automation, and others (such as post-Autonomia thinkers who promote a basic income) examining the growth of “work time outside of employment.” Stiegler does not fully endorse any of these positions, but he does use their disagreements as a pretext for his own redefinition of the proletariat. He argues that the “proletariat is not the working class,” and proletarianization should not be equated with pauperization. Instead, proletarianization should be associated with grammatization, and the development of the latter dramatically changes the form of the former. Marx’s discussion of proletarianization focused on the “loss of savoir-faire” among industrial workers, whose skills were appropriated by industrial capitalism’s socio-technical systems. Proletarianization in this context involves the “grammatization of gesture,” the expropriation of workers’ bodily know-how. But grammatization is not limited to gesture: “Grammatization is the history of the exteriorization of memory in all its forms: nervous and cerebral memory, corporeal and muscular memory, biogenetic memory.” The proletarianization of the worker in the 19th century was therefore followed by the proletarianization of the consumer in the 20th century. The rise of consumption over the last century was driven by the development of mnemotechnical systems and psychotechnologies that channeled consumers’ libidinal energy toward commodities. At least until the 1970s, this consumerist economy managed to counteract what Marx described as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx’s analysis of consumption failed to recognize the potential of destroying “savoir-vivre with the aim of creating available purchasing power, thereby refining and reinforcing that system which rested on the destruction of savoir-faire with the aim of creating available labor force.” (It was, of course, Guy Debord who first fully addressed this capitalist destruction of the practices of everyday life in favor of controlled consumption, though Stiegler perfunctorily refers to Debord and then dismisses him for his failure to think the question of technics) Today, we are witnessing a “vast process of cognitive and affective proletarianization.” We face the possibility of “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.” In the middle of this argument about proletarianization and grammatization, Stiegler pulls back to a more philosophical framework, making the claim, which may seem odd at first, that Plato is “the first thinker of the proletariat.” Plato’s discussion of anamnesis (“remembrance of the truth of being”) and hypomnesis (“mnemotechnics,” exteriorized memory) in Phaedrus first addressed the problem of the exteriorization of memory, and set up, as Derrida famously argued, the “pharmacological question, according to which the hypomnesis is a pharmakon: at once poison and remedy.” Socrates’ fear that the “exteriorization of memory is a loss of memory and knowledge” returns in a pressing form today, when we are confronted by a “generalized proletarianization induced by the spread of hypomnesic technologies” that cause “our memories to pass into machines.” Because “the Platonic question of hypomnesis constitutes the first version of a thinking of proletarianization,” “The truth of Plato would . . . be found in Marx.” But, Stiegler argues, since Marx and Plato failed to adequately address the question of technics, both need to be supplemented by Derrida (and, of course, Stiegler’s rereading of Derrida). Although the proletarianization of the consumer managed for much of the 20th century to weaken the class struggle and delay the rate of profit from falling, it has eliminated its own conditions of success by leading “to the destruction of [consumers’] libidinal energy and to its decomposition into drives.” Instead of “long circuits of individuation” (in the infinite sense of individuation proposed by Simondon), the proletarianization of the consumer creates “short-circuits” that produce only “disindividuation.” It reduces desires to drives, and destroys the forms of anticipatory protention needed for investment of all types (libidinal and financial, in particular). As pharmaka, hypomneta don’t need to have this poisonous effect. Hypomneta can either “individuate [the] psyche” or “proletarianize the psyche.” Hypomnesic techniques and grammatization can generate “long circuits, that is accumulate libidinal energy by intensifying individuation, and give objects of desire to the individual that infinitize his or her individuation . . . because these objects can only be given as infinite and incommensurable.” Or they can “provoke short-circuits, that is, disindividuation, and consequently desublimation, that is the commensurable finitization of all things, leading to the destruction of libidinal energy.” Stiegler calls for the creation of a “system of care” that would coordinate three levels of individuation—technical, psychic, and collective—so that “individuation at the pharmacological level (technical individuation) transductively intensifies the individuation of the other two levels (psychic individuation and collective individuation).” Stiegler is optimistic that “a genuine mutation of grammatization has occurred: digital reticulation, whereby cognitive activities are themselves proletarianized, constitutes a rupture through which associated milieus are formed, that is, milieus of individuation running counter to the processes of dissociation and disindividuation in which proletarianization consists.” In Pharmacology of Capital and Economy of Contribution, a separate text that has been appended to this English translation, Stiegler reworks the argument of For a New Critique of Political Economy by drawing more directly on André Leroi-Gourhan (all of Stiegler’s work is almost embarrassingly indebted to Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture & Speech) and examining the co-individuation of psychic, social, and technical systems. Most importantly, he supplements his discussion of consumerism with a greater emphasis on the tendencies of fictitious capital. He argues that the state has historically served to mediate between the social and technical systems, making sure that the latter does not come to directly dominate the former. But when the rate of profit collapsed in the 1970s, neoliberal deregulation removed those state controls, placing the development of the technical system directly under the control of the economic system. That economic system has become dominated by its “financial sub-system,” which, as seen in its disastrous predilection for short-term speculation, has a “tendency to carelessness.” The destruction of long circuits of individuation and desires started by the proletarianization of the consumer is then catastrophically exacerbated by the development of technology under the control of a financialized economic system focused on the short-term. In opposition to the present “conjunction of the drive-based tendency of the psychic system and the speculative tendency of the economic system,” we need to imagine “that tendencies to investment could be combined with sublimatory tendencies.” We need to “open fields of protentional possibilities,” so that “to the TINA ideology, ‘there is no alternative,’ one must oppose the TALOA argument, ‘there are lots of alternatives.’”
Friday, November 19, 2010
Bernard Stiegler: For a New Critique of Political Economy
In For a New Critique of Political Economy, Bernard Stiegler repositions the techno-deconstructive philosophy he developed in Technics & Time squarely within the realm of politics and economics. For Stiegler, any critique of political economy, as well any response to the current global economic crisis, must take into consideration the default of humanity, the prehistoric “structural coupling” of humanity and technics that has made it possible to organize an economy around the externalization and exploitation of different forms of human memory. According to Stiegler, public debate about how to solve the economic crisis is misguided on all sides. Both those who advocate stimulating consumption and those who hope to revive “entrepreneurial dynamism” through investment hope to save an economic system that has undermined its conditions for successful reproduction. They refuse to acknowledge that the “consumerist industrial model” of the 20th century is now “obsolete.” It “has reached its limits because it has become systemically short-termist, because it has given rise to a systemic stupidity that structurally prevents the reconstitution of a long-term horizon.” Instead of dreaming of a restoration of this consumerist model to its former heights, we need “to produce a vision and a political will capable of progressively moving away from the economico-political complex of consumption so as to enter into the complex of a new type of investment, which must be a social and political investment or, in other words, an investment in a common desire.” This political project requires the construction of a new critique of political economy, a critique that Stiegler maintains must be founded on an analysis of the processes of grammatization, the techniques through which memory is externalized, made discrete, and opened up to social and economic investment and control. Stiegler attacks his philosophical peers for having totally failed to engage with the changes in the economy. He asserts that recent French philosophers have “nothing whatsoever so say about the contemporary economy”—they have “abandoned the project of a critique of political economy, and this constitutes a disastrous turn.” Ambivalence about critique—which is suspected of harboring metaphysics—has been a major cause of this “philosophical abdication in relation to economics.” Deconstruction played no small part in undermining the status of critique, though, as becomes clear later, Stiegler believes that “deconstruction remains a critique,” and he places deconstruction at the heart of his critique of political economy. In the last decade or two, the definition of work has been heavily debated, with figures such as Jeremy Rifkin predicting the “end of work” as a result of automation, and others (such as post-Autonomia thinkers who promote a basic income) examining the growth of “work time outside of employment.” Stiegler does not fully endorse any of these positions, but he does use their disagreements as a pretext for his own redefinition of the proletariat. He argues that the “proletariat is not the working class,” and proletarianization should not be equated with pauperization. Instead, proletarianization should be associated with grammatization, and the development of the latter dramatically changes the form of the former. Marx’s discussion of proletarianization focused on the “loss of savoir-faire” among industrial workers, whose skills were appropriated by industrial capitalism’s socio-technical systems. Proletarianization in this context involves the “grammatization of gesture,” the expropriation of workers’ bodily know-how. But grammatization is not limited to gesture: “Grammatization is the history of the exteriorization of memory in all its forms: nervous and cerebral memory, corporeal and muscular memory, biogenetic memory.” The proletarianization of the worker in the 19th century was therefore followed by the proletarianization of the consumer in the 20th century. The rise of consumption over the last century was driven by the development of mnemotechnical systems and psychotechnologies that channeled consumers’ libidinal energy toward commodities. At least until the 1970s, this consumerist economy managed to counteract what Marx described as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx’s analysis of consumption failed to recognize the potential of destroying “savoir-vivre with the aim of creating available purchasing power, thereby refining and reinforcing that system which rested on the destruction of savoir-faire with the aim of creating available labor force.” (It was, of course, Guy Debord who first fully addressed this capitalist destruction of the practices of everyday life in favor of controlled consumption, though Stiegler perfunctorily refers to Debord and then dismisses him for his failure to think the question of technics) Today, we are witnessing a “vast process of cognitive and affective proletarianization.” We face the possibility of “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.” In the middle of this argument about proletarianization and grammatization, Stiegler pulls back to a more philosophical framework, making the claim, which may seem odd at first, that Plato is “the first thinker of the proletariat.” Plato’s discussion of anamnesis (“remembrance of the truth of being”) and hypomnesis (“mnemotechnics,” exteriorized memory) in Phaedrus first addressed the problem of the exteriorization of memory, and set up, as Derrida famously argued, the “pharmacological question, according to which the hypomnesis is a pharmakon: at once poison and remedy.” Socrates’ fear that the “exteriorization of memory is a loss of memory and knowledge” returns in a pressing form today, when we are confronted by a “generalized proletarianization induced by the spread of hypomnesic technologies” that cause “our memories to pass into machines.” Because “the Platonic question of hypomnesis constitutes the first version of a thinking of proletarianization,” “The truth of Plato would . . . be found in Marx.” But, Stiegler argues, since Marx and Plato failed to adequately address the question of technics, both need to be supplemented by Derrida (and, of course, Stiegler’s rereading of Derrida). Although the proletarianization of the consumer managed for much of the 20th century to weaken the class struggle and delay the rate of profit from falling, it has eliminated its own conditions of success by leading “to the destruction of [consumers’] libidinal energy and to its decomposition into drives.” Instead of “long circuits of individuation” (in the infinite sense of individuation proposed by Simondon), the proletarianization of the consumer creates “short-circuits” that produce only “disindividuation.” It reduces desires to drives, and destroys the forms of anticipatory protention needed for investment of all types (libidinal and financial, in particular). As pharmaka, hypomneta don’t need to have this poisonous effect. Hypomneta can either “individuate [the] psyche” or “proletarianize the psyche.” Hypomnesic techniques and grammatization can generate “long circuits, that is accumulate libidinal energy by intensifying individuation, and give objects of desire to the individual that infinitize his or her individuation . . . because these objects can only be given as infinite and incommensurable.” Or they can “provoke short-circuits, that is, disindividuation, and consequently desublimation, that is the commensurable finitization of all things, leading to the destruction of libidinal energy.” Stiegler calls for the creation of a “system of care” that would coordinate three levels of individuation—technical, psychic, and collective—so that “individuation at the pharmacological level (technical individuation) transductively intensifies the individuation of the other two levels (psychic individuation and collective individuation).” Stiegler is optimistic that “a genuine mutation of grammatization has occurred: digital reticulation, whereby cognitive activities are themselves proletarianized, constitutes a rupture through which associated milieus are formed, that is, milieus of individuation running counter to the processes of dissociation and disindividuation in which proletarianization consists.” In Pharmacology of Capital and Economy of Contribution, a separate text that has been appended to this English translation, Stiegler reworks the argument of For a New Critique of Political Economy by drawing more directly on André Leroi-Gourhan (all of Stiegler’s work is almost embarrassingly indebted to Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture & Speech) and examining the co-individuation of psychic, social, and technical systems. Most importantly, he supplements his discussion of consumerism with a greater emphasis on the tendencies of fictitious capital. He argues that the state has historically served to mediate between the social and technical systems, making sure that the latter does not come to directly dominate the former. But when the rate of profit collapsed in the 1970s, neoliberal deregulation removed those state controls, placing the development of the technical system directly under the control of the economic system. That economic system has become dominated by its “financial sub-system,” which, as seen in its disastrous predilection for short-term speculation, has a “tendency to carelessness.” The destruction of long circuits of individuation and desires started by the proletarianization of the consumer is then catastrophically exacerbated by the development of technology under the control of a financialized economic system focused on the short-term. In opposition to the present “conjunction of the drive-based tendency of the psychic system and the speculative tendency of the economic system,” we need to imagine “that tendencies to investment could be combined with sublimatory tendencies.” We need to “open fields of protentional possibilities,” so that “to the TINA ideology, ‘there is no alternative,’ one must oppose the TALOA argument, ‘there are lots of alternatives.’”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I very much appreciated your explanation of Stiegler's text. I have read most of his books and admire the way he has entered into the fight for our culture.
Post a Comment