Boundary 2 Special Issue Bernard Stiegler Amateur Philosophy

Special Issue
Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy
Edited by
Arne De Boever
boundary 2
an international journal
of literature and culture
Volume 44, Number 1
February 2017
Duke University Press

boundary 2
an international journal of literature and culture
Founding EditorsRobert Kroetsch and William V. Spanos
EditorPaul A. Bov
Abigail Lind, Assistant to the Editor
Managing EditorMargaret A. Havran
Editorial Collective
Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh
Anthony Bogues, Brown University and University of Cape Town
Paul A. Bov, University of Pittsburgh
Arne De Boever, California Institute of the Arts
Nergis Ertrk, Pennsylvania State University
Wlad Godzich, University of California, Santa Cruz
David Golumbia, Virginia Commonwealth University
Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University
Michael Hays, Independent Scholar, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
R. A. Judy, University of Pittsburgh
Aamir R. Mufti, University of California, Los Angeles
Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College
Bruce Robbins, Columbia University
Hortense Spillers, Vanderbilt University
Anita Starosta, Pennsylvania State University
Editorial Board
Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania
John Beverley, University of Pittsburgh
Joseph A. Buttigieg, University of Notre Dame
Rey Chow, Duke University
Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt University
Arif Dirlik, Independent Scholar, Eugene, Oregon
Nuruddin Farah, Bard College
Margaret Ferguson, University of California, Davis
Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
Fredric Jameson, Duke University
George Lamming, Barbados
Marcia Landy, University of Pittsburgh
Gayatri Spivak, Columbia University
Wang Hui, Tsinghua University, Beijing
Cornel West, Princeton University
Rob Wilson, University of California, Santa Cruz
Advisory Editors
Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, Shiv Nadar University
Nancy Condee, University of Pittsburgh
Christopher L. Connery, University of California, Santa Cruz
Ruth Y. Y. Hung, Hong Kong Baptist University
Daniel Morgan, University of Chicago
Gavin Steingo, Princeton University
Christian Thorne, Williams College
Q. S. Tong, University of Hong Kong
Henry Veggian, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lindsay Waters, Harvard University Press
Assistant Editors
Tom Eyers, Duquesne University
Leah Feldman, University of Chicago
Annette Damayanti Lienau, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Contents
Arne De Boever/Editors Introduction/1
Bernard Stiegler/The Proletarianization of Sensibility/5
Bernard Stiegler/Kant, Art, and Time/19
Bernard Stiegler/The Quarrel of the Amateurs/35
Stephen Barker/Unwork and the Duchampian Contemporary/53
Benot Dillet/Proletarianization, Deproletarianization, and the Rise of

the Amateur/79
Daniel Ross/Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: BS and BB/107
Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRivire/Compression in

Philosophy/125
Ed Cohen/Dare to Care: Between Stieglers Mystagogy and

Foucaults Aesthetics of Existence/149
Mark B. N. Hansen/Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire?/167
Gerald Moore/On the Origin of Aisthesis by Means of Artificial

Selection; or, The Preservation of Favored Traces in the Struggle
for Existence/191
Claire Colebrook/Impossible, Unprincipled, and Contingent:

Bernard Stieglers Project of Revolution and Redemption/213
Tom Cohen/Arche-Cinema and the Politics of Extinction/239
Contributors/267
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Editors Introduction
Arne De Boever
In the spring of 2011, Kenneth Reinhard, Stephen Barker, and I

invited contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler to deliver three
lectures in Los Angelesat the California Institute of the Arts; the Univer-
sity of California, Los Angeles; and the University of California, Irvine
about aesthetic theory. While the first of these lectures, titled The Prole-
tarianization of Sensibility, was published shortly thereafter in the journal
Lana Turner, the other two lectures have never appeared in print. This spe-
cial issue includes Stieglers three Los Angeles lectures. In addition, it fea-
tures both responses to the lectures as well as more general engagements
with Stieglers work.
One of the most important French philosophers writing today, Stieg-
ler has published more than thirty books in French, several of which have
already been translated into English. While Stiegler is mostly known as a
philosopher of technics, his work encompasses much more than this and
has developed as a sharp analysis of our contemporary situation: the rise
of the digital, the contemporary state of attention, the ethics and politics of
care and the welfare state, the rise of the extreme right in France and in
boundary 2 44:1 (2017)DOI 10.1215/01903659-3725821 2017 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press

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

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De Boever/Editors Introduction3
question of politics is a question of aesthetics and, vice versa, the question

of aesthetics is a question of politics (Stiegler 2014: 1). It is at this cross-
roads and within the particular theoretical history that it evokesrecalling
not only Walter Benjamins famous comments on the issue but also, for
example, Kants third Critique and Aristotles philosophy (the notion of
theos, which Stiegler reads as desire) before thatthat Stieglers Cali-
fornia lectures are also situated.
As a philosopher who has consistently aimed to understand the
present by developing a theoretical, historico- political thought that is
shaped by practical experiments in individual and collective individuation,
Stiegler should be of interest to anyone engaged in the contemporary state
of affairs. In the spirit of Stieglers plea for an interested judgment, this spe-
cial issue collects a number of responses to Stieglers lectures, situating
the lectures in the context of Stieglers work as a whole and using them as
a springboard to reflectafter Stieglerabout what we consider to be the
crucial issues of our time. The aim is not only to understand Stiegler but to
think with himand after himso as to see what new possibilities for psy-
chic and collective individuation his project opens up.
Reference
Stiegler, Bernard. 2014. Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch.
Translated by Barnaby Norman. Cambridge: Polity.

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The Proletarianization of Sensibility
Bernard Stiegler
Translated by Arne De Boever
What happened to Marcel Duchamp between 1912Nude Descend-

ing a Staircaseand 1917Fountain? And why should it matter to us?
Between 1912 and 1917, Duchamp was increasingly concerned with
the question of reproducibility that, starting with photography and chrono-
photography, leads to Frederick Taylorthat is to say, to the readymade.
The readymade is born from the serialized production for mass markets,
which open up a new question of proletarianization in a new age.
In my book Symbolic Misery, I tried to show that at the time of Henry
Ford and Edward Bernays, the development of the culture industries led
to a proletarianization of the sensibility of the consumer through the appa-
ratuses for the canalization and reproduction of perception. Bernays, who
was Sigmund Freuds nephew, invented the basics of marketing by orga-
nizing the captivation of the consumers attention, and thus of the libidinal
energy that marketing must seek to redirect from the consumers primordial
A version of this lecture was previously published in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and
Opinion, no. 4 (2011): 12440.

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objects toward the commodities. This process of proletarianization mirrors

the way in which the industrial machine era made possible the proletarian-
ization of the producers. I use the term proletarianization to refer to a loss
of knowledge (savoir ).
For Bla Bartk, it is this loss of knowledge that is at stake in the
birth of the radio. Like the phonograph, the radio enables one to listen to
music without needing to know how to play music. In an interview that Bar-
tk gave in 1937, he says that one should only be allowed to listen to music
on the radio if one is reading the musical score at the same time. For him,
it is evident that those who do not know how to read or play music cannot
really listen to it.
In 1759, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubires, Count de Caylus, says
in his debate with Denis Diderotand Goethe will say the same at the end
of the eighteenth centurythat it is impossible to talk about a canvas that
one has not copied.
If one looks at the canvases in which, in 1796, Hubert Robert is
painting the Louvrewhich had become a national museum accessible to
all just three years beforeone can see that the visitors, who are most defi-
nitely almost all artists, mostly reproduce paintings there. Paul Czanne will
do the same in the nineteenth century. As he explains in a letter to mile
Bernard, he thinks that one cannot see that which one cannot show by
painting it, for example. One only sees to the extent to which one is capable
of painting what one sees.
One would have to show that what is happening here is a trans-
formation of Jakob von Uexklls sensorimotor loop. From this moment
onward, it starts looping through artificial organs, thus making possible a
noetic expression of sensibility that becomes exclamatory and sensational
as a result.
Throughout the twentieth century, the development of technolo-

giesof what Walter Benjamin calls mechanical reproducibilityled to a
generalized regression of the psychomotive knowledges that were charac-
teristic of art amateurs.
This regression was made possible by a machinic turn of sensibility
that led to a proletarianization of the amateur so that the latter, having lost
his or her knowledges, became a cultural consumerat times even turning
into what Hannah Arendt calls a cultivated philistine.
These questionsand the questions that the an-artist Duchamp

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Stiegler/Proletarianization7
raises about the aim of the artwork in what he characterizes as the time
of the proletarianization of the artists themselvesconfront us today in an
entirely new context that is almost the inverse of the time that Duchamp is
talking about, namely, a time in which a second machinic turn of sensibility
is taking place.
This second turn is made possible by digital technologies, through
which just about anyone can access technologies of captivation, postpro-
duction, indexation, diffusion, and promotiontechnologies that were, until
now, industrial functions that were hegemonically controlled by what I have
called the psychopower of marketing and the culture industries.
This new machinic turn of sensibilitywhich is no longer analog but
digitalleads to a renaissance of the figure of the amateur, that is to say, to
a reconstitution of libidinal energy which, after being systematically canal-
ized and rerouted by consumerist organization, ended up putting in place
an economy of drivesthat is to say, a libidinal diseconomy.
What is an amateur if not a figure of a libidinal economy? The a
mateur
loves (amat, from the Latin verb amare, to love): thats what makes an
amateur an amateur. Art amateurs love works of art. And insofar as they
love them, these artworks work on themthat is to say, the amateur is
trans-formed by them: individuated by them.
These are the questions that I will approach in this text. To do so,
however, I must first turn to Kant.
In order for a work of art, any work of art, to present itself as such,
namely as a work of art, one must believe in it: believe in it as a work, and
as a work of art. The work of art only works as art to the extent that one
believes in it.
In a way, Kant was already saying this: the reflectivity of aesthetic
judgment, as a judgment that cannot be proven, and that could therefore
never be apodictic, is, at least from this point of view, something that pre-
supposes a kind of belief. Its as if each work of art were in a way its own
(deictic) revelation, and could only manifest itself as work by presenting
itself as such a revelation, thereby forming a sort of dogmawhich in some
cases has constituted schools, chapels, churches, and has even led to
schisms.
When I consider a work to be beautiful, I necessarily think that
everyone should find it beautiful, Kant says; however, in the intimacy of my
thoughts I know that this is not the case, and that it will never be the case.

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

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

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pared to objective determinations, that is to say, to objects of determinate

and cognitive judgment.
The cognitive is never mysterious. The reflective, on the other hand,
is the mystery of the extra-ordinary itself, but of an extra-ordinary with-
out transcendence. In this sense, it is the mystery of immanence itself,
the becoming-profane of the world. That is to say: its becoming-ordinary
whence the fact that a reflective judgment is only universal by de-fault (par
dfaut). Its universalitythe fact that I posit that everyone should find
beautiful, and not merely agreeable, what I find beautiful; that everyone
should find extra-ordinary what is also ordinaryis its very mystery, pre-
cisely because of the fact that it only imposes itself by de-faulting itself: one
will never be able to prove this universality. It will forever remain fundamen-
tally doubtful.
The being-by-de-fault of that which is called beautiful, and more
generally the content of every aesthetic judgment, thus joins up with the
intrinsically idiomatic character of language: there is no universal language,
and every idiom comes about through a de-fault of language (through a
fault that is de-faulted, un-worked). In the eyes of those who do not speak
the language, for example, idioms come about through a fault of pronun-
ciation. That is also why a work of art is always idiomatic. Born from the
fault and de-fault of language in general, of the language, a language only
speaks as de-fault, by making faults and de-faults: a language (as opposed
to language in general, to the language) is that which gives speech to a
shibboleth (which is a fault of pronunciation). Its the mysteries of language
and the precarious capacity of poetry that turn such a de-fault into the
very thing thats needed (justement ce quil faut)into a de-fault that is
necessary.
This necessary accident reveals itself in each work of art, as the
jumping out of a singularity that is literally improbable, unprovable, and that
goes much further than a simple, provable universalityprovable as apo-
dictic universality, which can in this respect be subsumed under the con-
cept of a determinate judgment. That such a singularity opens up another
dimension, another plane, means that this dimension, this plane, is that
which spontaneously leaps forth from any desireto the extent that desire
renders its objects infinite as the objects of a singularity.
The plane of consistency to which the mystagogy of art refers is a
layer that exists among other planes of consistency, and without which no
object of any type of workwhether it be the work of science, philosophy,
literature, law, politics, or knowledge in generalcould consist. That is to

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say: could impose itself to existence as that which, even though it cannot
be the object of a calculation, is that without which existence would undo
itself (se dfait). Without it, those who still attempt to exist would be brought
down to the level of subsistencesthat is to say, of the drives.
The reflective judgment by which Kant characterizes aesthetic judg-
ment is thus nothing but a reflective modality of the relation to this other
plane that subtends the entire activity of the spirit and that cant be reduced
to any kind of knowledge, not even apodictic, cognitive, and determinate
knowledge. Apodictic thinkers, or dialecticians, as Plato and Aristotle call
them, are interested in working on the conditions in which one can put
at a distance and contemplate deixisand thus pass from monstration
to de-monstration, from showing to de-monstrating. However, these con-
ditions are themselves monstrativethey are themselves of the order of
showing; they cannot be demonstrated or proven. They are what one calls
axioms. They are the object of so-called esoteric philosophical teachings
that are more like initiations than like education properly speaking
education is exoteric by nature.
If the axiomatic is that which cannot be demonstrated or proven,
while at the same time being the condition of all demonstration, the axiom
is that which is likely but can never be posited as true. Does this mean that
it is an object of belief? To say so would be a mistake. Because this belief
only presents itself as axiom on the basis of a kind of evidence. This means,
however, that it is also the object of a judgment by de-fault.
And it is this kind of evidence by de-fault that founds the reflexivity
of aesthetic judgment. Isnt it evidence itself, then, that constitutes a kind
of mystery ? How to separate the necessary mystagogy that would under-
lie and support the life of the spirit in all its aspectsas the shadow of the
light that this life bringsfrom the workings of all kinds of mystification and
obscurantism, which are the price one has to pay for mystagogy but which
are similar to the fox in the henhouse?
This intrinsic ambiguity of the life of the spirit requires a critique: a
critique of all mystagogies, not in order to denounce them but to discern
within them that which is always at risk of developing into mystification
and which makes possible the cultural philistinism that Arendt analyzes
through the figure of the cultivated philistine. Plato never goes there
even though he invests the authority of Socrates in the mysterious Diotima,
Plato thinks he is free from mystification because he denounces the mys-
teries of art, music, and poetry. It is also this tendency toward mystification,
and the mystification that all mystagogy carries within it (all philosophy,

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all art, all religion), that produces priests who suddenly no longer believe,
while they continue to do their job.
Platos essence, Kants transcendental, the object of Freuds desire:
all these come from such a mystery. All these are the extra-ordinary that
a narrow-minded rationalism thinks it can and must eliminate. The excuse
being that the extra-ordinary is indeed always also (but not only) the reign
of simulators.
I am speaking here of belief insofar as belief refers to an object that

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

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desireconstitutes philia. This is also how love constitutes individua-

tion: it only follows its course on the psychic plane to the extent that it
also inscribes itself on the collective plane. Its through love that the and
of psychic and collective individuation is formed. As the first and prelimi-
nary condition of this individuation, love is that which needs to be main-
tained through care, through those practices of care that make possible the
access to consistencies that exist on the plane of the extra-ordinaryand
that, because they do not exist, are intrinsically doubtful and improbable,
unprovable.
Worksfor example, artworksare such practices of care. But
they themselves need to be taken care of: one must be initiated into these
objects that are themselves initiatory. This is how the magnetic chain and
field that Socrates talks about in Platos Ion are formed.
The question of access to the works is what one has called in the era
of the culture industries, and in the cultural democracies, cultural media-
tiona highly institutionalized way of referring to the question of address
(which I raised earlier on). The question of access, however, is a question of
mystagogy: it is the question of the initiation into a mystery that the artwork
intrinsically is, insofar as it projects those that it affects into another plane, a
plane that is itself improbable and intrinsically mysteriousat least in view
of the planes of ordinary existence and, even more so, of subsistence. The
question of this access is raised in each society, whether it is embodied by
the shaman, the warrior (who enters into the plane of consistency that is
his or her liberty), the official, the master, the artist, or the institution. How-
ever, in modern art this question comes to count in a new way (se pose
selon une nouvelle facture)and following something like a fault line (dans
une fracture).
This is the price one must payand its a high pricefor the death
of God. Its the prize one gets through the death of God, as the trophy for
this chasing out of the sacred (that is to say, of the extra-ordinary insofar as
it is separate). Such a chasing out amounts to a state of disenchantment,
in which modern art constitutes itself as the mystery of the profane, and no
longer as the sacredas the affirmation, within this immanence that the
disenchanted world has become, of a consistency next to existence, as
something from where a new plane is set free. Thats what Charles Baude-
laire says, and he is thinking of Constantin Guys and Manet. Its the plane
of consistency that Gilles Deleuze talks about as belief in the world. Its a
mystagogy of immanence.
To believe in this world, one needs a plane of consistency: exis-
tence will never suffer because of belief. This belief-in-consistency (which

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is not simply the belief-in-existence that makes me believe that there is

something behind every door) is indissociable from reason understood as
motive: in French, the word for reasonraisonalso refers to the motiva-
tion that produces movement. Belief looks for the motive, which is in turn
constituted by belief (this mystagogy is a transductive relation). I can only
desire that in which I believe: the object of my desire becomes immediately
(to the extent that I desire it) the object of my belief (in its infinity). And this
goes both ways: I can only believe in what I desire (infinitely).
Aristotle calls this desire theos. Theos is the impassive and inacces-
sible object of all desires. In this respect, it is non-existent. Everything that
exists is passive, that is to say, corruptible, or sublunary, as Aristotle says.
Theos is the object of the contemplation (theorein) of the noetic souls inso-
far as they desire, the contemplation through which they pass on toand
elevate themselves towardthe plane of the extra-ordinary.
Today, in a time of lovelessness, it often becomes more and more

difficult to say that one loves a work: one finds this or that interesting. Its
interesting: this is the type of postmodern judgmentneither negative
nor positivethat appears to be typical of the cultivated philistine and that
one hears more and more. A mediocre judgmentmediocris in the narrow
sense of the word: as referring to the average judgment of the average per-
son, subjected to the averages of modern mass society.
A work only works on the condition that the curiosity, the interest it
sparks in the first instance trans-forms itself into mystery, and lifts itself onto
a higher plane: As the Goncourt brothers said about a work by Chardin: at
a certain moment, the painting is elevated (Arasse 2006: 18). The work
only works on the condition that simple interest gives wayand possibly
immediately afterwardto sur-prise, to being taken by surprise. It is in sur-
prise and through surprise that a passion of the work happens (advient), so
that the work produces a sort of levitation, that is to say, the sort of miracle
by which all true admiration is triggered.
There is a unity of the history of artistic mystagogy. It manifests itself
when Iexperiencing one of these mysteries that one calls works, or even a
series of such mysteries as they are presented in museums, expositions, or
galleriessuddenly find myself in a state of levitationand in a way that is
unexpected and that I cannot take in (in-comprhensible): I am passing on
to the other planea plane where an over-taking (sur-prhension), a being
over-taken, overcomes or surpasses all com-prehension (com-prhension).

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This can happen through the Black Bull in the caves of Lascaux,
or through Greek marble, a portrait of Rembrandt, and the initiatory path
that is formed and that I traverse discovering the monogrammatic mono-
graphy of a contemporary artist, an artist of my timewho transindivi-
duates the time in which he or she is working. This is a suspension, an
epokhbecause it is epoch-making: it becomes one of my epochs, I am
trans-formed by such a surprise, such an over-taking, and what follows
from it is what Gilbert Simondon calls a quantum leap in individuation. It
can also constitute an epoch in art history, or in the history of an artist: in
what one calls his or her work.
The scandal is itself a sort of social levitation, preceded by a fall
hence the initial meaning of the Greek word skhandalon: trap. At first, and
insofar as it involves a process, the scandal is not psychically and individu-
ally experienced as a levitation. On the contrary, it consists first of all, and
in a way negatively, in a collapse: it is a kind of being over-taken, a kind of
surprise or over-prehension, but this is presented rather as the incapacity
of taking something in than as that by which one is taken overand as that
which goes against all interest as well as all access to the suprasensible
as that which is shocking and slaps public opinion in the face by going
against its interests: as that which is not at all interesting, unworthy of inter-
est, and, in this respect, demoralizing.
It is only in the aftermath of a scandal, and through a work (travail )
of collective individuation (that is to say, of transindividuation) that a sur-
prise, an over-takingwhich is an epoch, that is to say, a suspension, and
an interruption, which lifts us upis produced. This aftermath of the scan-
dal is, in this case as well, a sort of collective levitation, but it only comes
about through something like a work of mourning.
This is why one can never say that the mystagogy that is at work
during the opening of an art show is merely a mystification: contemporary
artwhich proceeds from the scandal through which modern art comes
about and thus reaches its completion through a sort of traprequires an
aftermath to which its scandalous origin gives it a right, an aftermath that
is in a way a priori. This aftermath is that of the trans-formation of psychic
and collective individuation, through which the scandalous mystagogist
the one who brings to light the mystagogical character of art as such
sculpts the social.
All the same, the question is raised of knowing to what extent a
contemporary mystagogy is still possibleif it is true that today the adjec-
tive contemporary means without scandal. There used to be a time of

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the scandal: a time when transgression produced a scandal. But this is no

longer the caseits as if there no longer were any possibilities for trans-
gression, as if one could no longer expect anything from transgression. Or
from a mystery. As if there no longer were a mystery. Our time is a time in
which the mafia and the oligarchies remorselessly chase out the bourgeoi-
siea bourgeoisie that, although it is philistine, is still too cultivated in their
eyes.
Levitation, through which a work appears to me as work, and lifts
itself, can only come about as belief. This belief is a desire where a judg-
ment is formed. To judge a work is to love or not to love it. And this is why
such a judgment is made by an amateur: amateurs have made art history,
and in the most diverse ways.
Now, there are many instances in which one can absolutely no
longer say with respect to contemporary artworks whether one loves them,
or whether one doesnt: in these cases, loving no longer has any meaning.
In this case, one is tempted to give the assessment that I called medio-
cre: its interesting or its not interesting. This is a mediocrity for which,
as philistine as it may be, one should not have any contempt (for who
can, today, completely escape the destiny of the cultivated philistine?): it
develops in time, and as the very suffering that Axel Honneth calls Miss-
achtung (which is translated in French by the word mpris, contempt).
When art becomes transgressionin other words, in the first stage

of a larger becoming-attitudethat with which art works (travaille) is no
longer matter: it is individuation. This requires one to think a hypermatter
rather than something immaterial, and I will need to come back to this.
Art takes advantage in every possible way of the fact that in individua-
tionwhich is a current, a flux, a processforms lose and change form
and are flowing along, and that these forms are always already materi-
alspigments, marble, bronze, photographs, canvas for a painting, paper
for a newspaper, industrial materials, glass, entirely finished objects, rails,
apparatuses, dispositifs: all sorts of instances that can become the object
of individuation, that is to say, of that which can spatialize time. Such is the
role of what I call tertiary retentions: they specify, like traces, the texture of
the and of psychic and collective individuation, which is woven by the reten-
tional devices, apparatuses, and institutions.
Having become trans-gression and then attitude as psychosocial
individuation (which is made up of attitude and is in this sense the hyper-

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matter par excellence), art is a modality of transformation, which is what

individuation is by general principlebut it has become so according to
conditions that change with time: the materials of transgression are all the
more transgressive when, in industrial and then hyperindustrial activity,
they are no longer simply materials with which one can produce forms.
Individuation comes about as a function of dynamic constraints that
are induced by a general organology that results in a genealogy of the sen-
sible. At a time when a scandal turns out to be a technique of social sculpt-
ing (that is to say, a new process of individuation), and after language has
already been turned into letters and become printed, reproducibilitywhich
substitutes the matrix and the apparatus of captivation for the formaffects
not only the audiovisual works of art, such as photography and cinema, but
also, and first and foremost, all our everyday objects, coming from serial-
ized productions. It marks a change in the general regime of reproduction
that constitutes a new (industrial) totality of tertiary retentions, one that
begins with the grammatization of the gestures of the workers (travailleurs)
themselves.
The conditions of individuation are organological: they pass through
the organs of perception, but they endlessly recombine the assemblages
(agencements) of these organs through technical mediations. This can
happen, for example, by (artificially) bringing together the ear and the hand
through the musical instrument (by an organon that is an artifact), or by
bringing together, before art history in the narrow sense of the word, the
eye, the mouth, and the hand of the artist who uses a straw to blow pig-
ments on the wall inside the caves of Lascaux.
Art history is also the history of these assemblages, in the sense
that painters see with their hands, and musicians, after the appearance in
the nineteenth century of the diastematic notation of pitches and rhythms,
hear with their eyes. These assemblages pass through organic defunc-
tionalizations and refunctionalizations of both the sense organs and the
artificial organs and organizations. And all this constitutes itself parallel to
that by which the process of grammatization, through which the continuous
flow is separated, begins, the continuous flow of speech, of gesture, of the
perceived visible and audible, separated into recombinable elements that
can be put together in different ways. In this aspect, the continuous is work-
able; it is a work of art through this very dimension.
The defunctionalizations and refunctionalizations that determine
the rhythm of the organological genealogy of the sensible and of what lies
coiled up therethe intellect and the unity of its reasons, its motivations

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have specific folds that create ruptures that are called epochs and that
accentuate more and more vividly as time moves on the fault lines, the
disadjustments, the incomprehensions, the crises, and critiques. During
the more than thirty thousand years that separate us from the Chauvet
cave (the first musical instruments are said to date from this age as well),
this genealogy (which begins from the start of humanization [hominisation],
more than two million years earlier) amounts through grammatization to an
industrial group of apparatuses of which the machinic turn as well as a turn
of the sensibility of the spirit in its totality are bornwith all their dimensions
having become objects of calculability, that is to say, of determination: of
what Kant calls the determinate judgment.
It is only within such a turn that an event as extra-ordinary as Foun-
tain can come aboutbetween 1917 and 1963, the year when the circuit
of its transindividuation entered it into art history, and as the origin of what
one would call, today, contemporary art. At this stage of its genealogy
which is also the stage of captivation and of the systematic detour of libidi-
nal energy through the audiovisual powers that are organized in the culture
industry as the flow of temporal objects obsessed with attention in the ser-
vice of a nascent consumerist economythe organs of perception end up
becoming elements of organological sets that are industrially reconfigured
and in which the apparatuses come firstas apparatuses of perception of
psychic apparatuses, and as technical apparatuses and social apparatuses
as well. And its in this new setup that transindividuation is at workwhen
it works.
Artists work (travaillent) with all these apparatuses, with this material
producing all sorts of retentional materials: surrealism works (travaille) with
the psychic apparatus which has an unconscious; expressionism with the
mnesic apparatus where phenomena are transformedthe phenomeno-
logical apparatus that Klee describes at the beginning of his On Modern
Art and that continues in Beuyss work; pop art works with the apparatus of
the mass media, et cetera. All this brings us back to the question of a gen-
eral organology, in which the apparatuses of perception are reexamined,
explored, reallocated, and possibly also closed down in a context of experi-
ences that have profoundly changed these apparatuses organological
activity as well as their organological status.
Reference
Arasse, Daniel. 2006. Histoires de peintures. Paris: Folio.

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Kant, Art, and Time
Bernard Stiegler
Translated by Stephen Barker, with Arne De Boever
It is common knowledge that a work of art is at once free of any attach-

ment to its own time (that it is, I will claim using a Husserlian term, omnitem-
poralrather than atemporal), and at the same time formed uniquely in, by,
and out of its age: Giotto and Leonardo, as well as Marcel Duchamp, can
only be seen omni temporally as works of their timeeven if, in Duchamps
case, this was the time of worklessness (dsoeuvrement).1 Giotto can no
more appear in Leonardos time than Duchamp could in our time.
But of what does the omnitemporality of the an-artist Duchamp
consist, if it is impossible to love a work by Duchamp in which he himself
interrogates its work? How does one become an amateur with Duchamp
1. [This provocatively enigmatic term, which literally means out of work or unemployed,
took on new meaning in the work of Maurice Blanchot, for whom literaturewriting in gen-
eralis feasible because writing endows words with their own allusive reality, negating
all individuality and producing a state of radical neutrality. In order to maintain Blanchots
three-part neologism, prefixroot wordsuffix, ds-oeuvre-ment, I have elsewhere used
unworkness; worklessness, however, now seems to be more widely accepted. The
concept is vital to Stieglers complex sense of transductive individuation.Trans.]

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if not of Duchamp himself? The Duchampian amateur loves the an-artistic

psychic individuation that Duchamp has woven into the collective individua-
tion we ourselves shareand of which it is a sedimentary deposit, as our
transindividuated, preindividual foundation. It is the process of a transindi-
viduation that still transindividuates ushistorically, and as the histos of
our age, as what has produced our age, in the same way that Giotto and
Leonardo did, yet entirely otherwise: otherwise than every other age.
An artist is a transductor of individuations, catalyzing and channel-
ing forceslibidinal energiesin a field of collective individuation in which
he designs the circuits of transindividuation typical of that age, which the
artist then performs, fabricating it in saying it as much as in showing
itin interpreting it (and at this point it would be necessary to reopen the
discussion with Marx). The artists performative circuits are thus motifs and
monograms of his time.
Every psychic individual participates in the collective individuation
constituting his age. But through his works (through the traces of their
worklessness), the psychic individual as artistor an-artistin some way
coincides with this collective individuation, and this coincidence is sensa-
tional. From the twentieth century onward, as it has led to the proletarian-
ization of sensibility that I discussed in my previous text, it has become
clear that it is impossible to understand the aesthetic life of the noetic
beings that we are without inscribing it in a genealogy of the sensible that
must be founded on the analysis of the organological becoming of this
form of technical life (i.e., of sensational being: the being who can exclaim
itself out of a noetically expressed sensibility, from the preindividual and
transindividual foundation of which it is the inheritor). This exclamation pre-
supposes an exteriorization of which gesture and speech are the primary
manifestations.
However, this genealogy of the psychosomatic sensible presup-
poses a characterization of the social processes of transindividuation out
of which a work can open forth and that are made possible by the organo-
logical becoming of technical artifacts of which art is the sublimation.
Only in inscribing a work in circuits of transindividuation from which
it emerges, through which it passes (and then only because artifacts facili-
tate its passing), and in which it creates new circuits, motifs, and mono-
grams by inscribing them there artifactually in time and spaceonly in this
way is it possible to respect it as a work. And this always means insofar
as it works beyond its time, but only by working out of its time (that is, also,
in freeing itself from its time, like a sailor who, coming from somewhere, can
go somewhere else).

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Stiegler/Kant21
The omnitemporality of the work emerges from its very temporality.

This is why the work is not atemporal: it is omni temporal in that, starting
from its own time, its own agehistorical, protohistorical, or prehistorical
it resonates in all times and in all works (projecting what Andr Malraux
called the possible of art). But it can perpetually and pervasively work
only if it can find its source and its resources in its own time and, in some
way, the means for leaving it.
Such means are always organological.
What, then, are Duchamps resources; what is the spring from which
he drinks? Essential to it is the machinic turn of sensibility, of which Nude
Descending a Staircase and Fountain are two examples, separated by five
years; two versions and two examples of the question of technical repro-
ducibility engendering, precisely at that point in time, the loss of instrumen-
tal aesthetic knowledge, ruining the trades of workers and the practices of
art-amateurs, such that it will no longer be necessary to know how to read
or play music or copy works. From then on, literature is no longer either a
bildungsroman or an operator of a life-transformation, not an art of living as
culture- or technique-of-the-self but the object and function of consump-
tion: of the organization of consumption of all industrial production through
the seizing of control of the organization of the sensible itself, and of the
cultural consumption of artworks themselves in a time of worklessness.
The proletarianization of the receiver required by the new economic

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

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ment in which the technical, transitional object becomes monstrous and

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

ing a way of individuatingthe amateur is precisely what Kantian analysis
cannot allow to be thought, any more than it can allow the thought of the
historical conditions for critique or the faculty of judgment as a critical fac-
ulty formed through familiarity with works that themselves presuppose a
practice.
In The Proletarianization of Sensibility, I addressed the faculty of
aesthetic judgment, as conceived by Kant, as a judgment taste that is uni-
versal, but only by default. Let us reconsider this analysis. In judging the
beautiful, I am obliged:
1. to posit, in principle, that everyone should judge as I do, since

what can appear as beautiful to me can only do so if it is univer-
sally beautiful (universality is an essential predicate of the per-
ception of beauty); if it does not, I am no longer faced with the
beautiful but with the merely agreeable;
2. to state that, factually, on the one hand, not everyone may agree
with me in my judgment but, on the other hand, and above all,
that I can neither in fact nor in law prove its universality: I am
obliged to state that the aesthetic experience itself constitutes

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Stiegler/Kant23
an irreducible inconsistency (dphasage)and thus a necessary

default (un dfaut quil faut).
Such a judgment can be universal only through this default in which,

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

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But then the Kantian question of aesthetic judgment would in fact

leave critique without a voice: without any form of expression other than
an exclamation, and thus also without argumentnot to mention without
discernment, without critique, and without judgment, if this is truly what
is captured by krinon, in the Greek sense. This transcendental critique of
judgment would render an analytical and empirical critique of works, of the
time of works, and thus of the history of artworks, impossible. We will see
that, in a way, this is what Conrad Fiedler reproaches Kant for at the end of
the nineteenth century.4
In order to move forward through these questions, my thesis will be

a double one:
1. I will propose, on the one hand, that a judgment without argu-

mentation is not a judgment, and thus that what Kant speaks of
is perhaps not yet a judgment but the first moment of a process
requiring a second moment.5
2. I will propose, on the other hand, that an argument is what histori-
cally supports a judgment, and that this support is itself inscribed
in the organological becoming constituting the fabric and the tis-
sue (histos) of the history of art (tekhn), as a projection of motifs
onto this fabric.
In the age of the second mechanical turn in sensibility, which opens

the perspective of a process of deproletarianization, that is, a new age of
care, it would become vital to study the histories of the faculty of judgment
organologically in the aesthetic domain.
In contrast to such a viewpoint, the faculty of judgment, conceived
by Kant as tendentiously universal, is at the same time tendentiously ahis-
4. I owe this reference to Jacqueline Lichtenstein, to whom I offer many thanks. See
Lichtenstein 2008.
5. Georges Didi-Huberman, who does not write within the Kantian tradition, and certainly
not (and even less so) within the neo-Kantian heritage, and who fundamentally influenced
Erwin Panofsky, is equally opposed to this heritage in which, according to Huberman, he
posits a kind of analytic moment (Huberman calls it a knowledge) before what I believe
to be the typical synthetic moment of Kantian judgment. But I believe that however useful
and even admirable this position might be, it presciently neglects the fact that there are
always not just two moments but three, and that this then forms a process of transforma-
tion: individuation.

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Stiegler/Kant25
torical and as a result still part of a highly metaphysical age of aesthetic

philosophya criticism that nevertheless leaves intact the extraordinary
evidence that Kants theory of judgment is reflectively open to the indeter-
minate. What Kant wishes to establish is an ante-historical (transcenden-
tal) form of the faculty of judgment, one that simultaneously neutralizes the
organologico-empirical givens that permit the constitution of a judgment as
its historical support.
In a well-known paragraph of the Analytic of the Sublime, Kant con-
cerns himself directly with theories of art:
If anyone reads me his poem, or brings me to a play, which, all said

and done, fails to commend itself to my taste, then let him adduce
Batteux or Lessing, or still older and more famous critics of taste,
with all the host of rules laid down by them, as a proof of the beauty
of his poem; let certain passages particularly displeasing to me
accord completely with the rules of beauty (as set out by these crit-
ics and universally recognized): I stop my ears: I do not want to hear
any reasons or any arguing about the matter. I would prefer to sup-
pose that those rules of the critics were at fault, or at least have no
application, than to allow my judgment to be determined by a priori
proofs. I take my stand on the ground that my judgment is to be one
of taste, and not one of understanding or reason. (Kant 2008: 33)
The problem posed by this excerpt from the Critique of Judgment, which
reaffirms the impossibility of constituting a science of the beautiful (a sci-
ence being that which allows judgments to be determined by a priori
proofs), and which thus reaffirms the fundamental liberty in which aes-
thetic judgment is exercised, results from the fact that it simultaneously
excludes the possibility that taste could be the product of a formationand,
in fact, of a formation of attention.6
Consequently, it is as if my taste could not change. Or, in other
words, the Kantian subject of the judgment of taste is not trans-formed by
his judgment; he is not individuated by it and, in judging, does not trans-
individuate (himself). But contrary to what the Kantian analysis infers in
rendering the moment of critical analysiswithout which there can be no
true judgmentimpossible, it must precisely be understood as a circuit of
transindividuation, consisting of three moments:
6. The aesthetic whose principles I am outlining here is a particular case of the theory of
attentional forms I put forward in Veux-tu devenir mon ami? (Stiegler forthcoming).

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that of apprehensive synthesis, presenting itself as surprehensive

that of comprehensive analysis (which is also systematized with
the synthesis of reproduction in the Critique of Pure Reason)
and that of intensified resynthesis as sur-prehension, through its
comprehensive and analytic moment, and as the relaunching of
the process by which judgment becomes an individuation (that
is, systematized through the synthesis Kant claims to be that of
recognition)
It would, then, obviously be vital to articulate these three moments, linked

to three syntheses of the imagination, with the question of the schematism
emerging from it in the Critique of Pure Reason.
The argumentthat is: the critique, which can be constituted only

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

judger apprehends the unity of what he is judging, but where this
7. I will specify the sense of this qualifier below.

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Stiegler/Kant27
apprehension is produced as the experience and the test of a

surprise that is the moment of sur-prehension; that is, of the sur-
passing of the one who judges by what he is judging, and that
exceeds him in its very default.
2. The moment of analytic judgment, which necessarily comes after
the synthetic moment and tends to turn sur-prehension, pro-
duced by synthetic apprehension (that is, sur-prehension occur-
ring only when the work works through effects that trans-form
the judger), into an object of comprehension; that is, of analytic
apprehension, and thus of appreciation and therefore of a deter-
mination whose aim is no longer to form the unity of all but, on the
contrary, to break it into parts in order to understand how, why,
and for whom these parts form a unity in the mind of the judger,
and appear to him as a surprising whole and therefore a motive
for exclamations.
3. The moment of return to the work and of its returningof the
increased and differant (diffrante) repetition of the moment of
sur-prehension, and with it of the default that exceeds analysis
but alsoand interminablyreinitiates its necessity: this impos-
sibility of finishing, of putting an end to the circuit, which is the
circuit of transindividuation, and which generally works through
encounters with other amateurs and other works, is at once the
source of the omnitemporality of works and the concretization of
the indetermination of Kantian aesthetic judgment, but here, pre-
cisely, as the process of individuation working through its ana-
lyticthat is, criticalmoment, which is also a moment crisis.
The analytic moment can never exhaust the synthetic moment: the
comprehensive apprehension of the work acts as a support for judgment
but never demonstrates it. These analytic supports for synthetic judgment,
which are also the crutches for the one who, judging a work that has trans-
formed himthat is, that has workedwants to argue to those who are
similar to him, this argumentation being part of the process by which the
work works. These supports can thus never be constituted in demonstra-
tive proofs. It nevertheless remains the case that they constitute the argu-
ments about the work, and about the way in which it creates the conditions
through which a sur-prehension is produced that remains irreducible to
these conditions alone, that then constitutes an experienceof something
that can be experienced without being subject to proof.
There is sur-prehension because in aesthetic experience the one

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who judges by forming the unity of the object of judgment discovers in it

an incommensurable: an incomparable singularity, a pure originality. We
have seen that because the object of aesthetic judgment is structurally
incommensurable and thus incomparable, its critique remains in some
way irreducibly grounded in the act of belief formed in the moment of sur-
prehension: it appears to the judger that his object is not on the same plane
as other objects, that it has become literally extra-ordinary.8
And yet we are not referring to an object of faith here, since this extra-
ordinary object merely comes out of the ordinary, and since the act of belief
through which it detaches itself from this ordinary desires arguments.
If it is true that there is in every analytic enterprise something that
tends toward a determination, in the strict sense this word has in the
case of a determinant judgment (namely, capable of producing demon-
strative statements and apodictic utterances, but also and more generally
capable of subsuming under conceptsunder categories), what the aes-
thetic analysis tends toward is not, properly speaking, a determination even
when, for example, it declares that a given work is part of a particular artis-
tic movement. It tends toward what also constitutes a condition of deter-
mination but does not lead, in this particular case, to such a determina-
tion: it tends toward a comparisonto a commensurabilitythat we seek
to establish among various elements and relations among these elements,
that we seek to describe. These relations are precisely the supports I have
mentioned.
If there is a sur-prehension, it is because what is to be judged is sin-
gular and consequently not subsumable under a concept: that is, as Kant
says, subsumable into an end 9 that would also be a finality constituted
a priori as the possibility of completion. This is why Kant can speak of pur-
posiveness without purpose (i.e., without a rule).
In tending toward its perfection for the subject it impresses as beau-
tiful, the artwork, and generally every object judged as beautiful, thus indi-
cates its own end, which is translated in the subject as a feeling of plea-
sure. But this end is not subsumable into a concept: it is not determinable.
As affect, it is what the subject projects and reflects in and through the
object: it is a reflecting finality without any rule that could be given in a con-
cept. It is the finality of the irregular, irregularity itself: the finality of a default
(of rules), and of a necessary defaultprecisely as finality.
8. [This phenomenon results from the mystery of dsoeuvrement.Trans.]

9. The concept of an object is its end, to the extent that it is also its a priori cause.

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Stiegler/Kant29
Although Kant does not think this singularity as such since he does
not distinguish the singular from the particular, he indicates through the
notion of purposiveness without purpose that at the source of all rules
for art there is an irreducible irregularity that is the singular and the agent
of all sur-prehension. The synthetic moment is that sur- prehension
indeterminable and interminable, thereby constituting a moment of belief.
The analytic moment is that of comprehension and thus of argumenta-
tion, but that is neither a demonstration nor a determination. Rather than
a determination, the analytic moment is a movement of the increase of
indetermination: it is the movement by which the object is in-determined,
the movement of an intensification of singularity through the operations of
comparison and commensuration that finally always turn out to be insuffi-
cient and impossibleoperations at the limit, by which sur-prehension is
delayed around the object that it thus attempts to understand comprehen-
sively and that it in some way puts to the test of its incomparability through
a series of comparisons that reveal and mark it by default.
The analytic moment is the transformation of the exclamation that
sur-prehension provokesas a breakthrough, a hole in the stoppered
horizon that is the ordinary realm of immanencein arguments regard-
ing what supports the synthetic moment. These arguments open up, prop-
erly speaking, the circuit of transindividuation as forces: this circuit makes
sur-prehension circulate through effects on and between amateurs (most
notably through operations of comparison and commensuration).
This circulation, at the core of which what Wolfgang Iser (1980)
describes as an aesthetic effect is formed, is the structuration of a collec-
tive individuation through internal resonance. But such a transformation is
also what, in trans-forming the subject of these operations (and his experi-
ence of sur-prehension) himself, redirects him to the experience of another,
further sur-prehension: a new surprise, a new synthesis, emerging as dif-
ference from its repetitionand as repetition of the unity of the object thus
synthesized.
This synthetic moment, which develops through the differentiation
produced in the course of these frequent visits that are the art-amateurs
practices (which are repetitions), is what could happen to me, and what
could and even must happen to others in historically given conditions, but
it can also not happen to me and to others and in those same historical
conditions. In fact, these conditions are historical only insofar as they
are dynamic (that is, polemical), because they are constituted through a
default (at the origin). That is why they are conditions of crisis. And this is

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because judgment in general (krinon) is essentially a crisis (krisis). This is

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

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Stiegler/Kant31
namely, that this judgment is improbable to the extent that its object is pro-
duced only as infinity, and that this infinity, as incommensurability, is what
opens up the aesthetic subject onto the subliminal plane of what Kant calls
the suprasensible. Such an opening, which is an elevation fromand at the
heart ofimmanence, is sublimation, properly speaking.
The object of desire is very generally and structurally an object that
does not exist: it is an object that is intrinsically infinite. It is on the basis
of this matrix that, at the synthetic moment of aesthetic judgment, we
encounter (as sur-prehension) the consistency of what does not exist and
whose non-being can, for example, be presented and appear as beauty
as presenceitself. In analytic judgment, it is a question of establishing,
comprehensively, that this consistency of what does not exist is nonethe-
less a consistency in immanence: in the comprehensible, and from the
comprehensible, which is also to say from and in what exists. This consis-
tency is not what returns to a transcendence: it is not an object of faith nor
one of piety, but of a belief, and even of a mystery, of a cult. It even consti-
tutes a culture.
Aesthetic judgment, as simultaneously synthetic and analytic, is
therefore intrinsically mystagogic. This means that aesthetic experience,
in which aesthetic judgment is formed on the basis of an exclamation that
leaves the subject staggered, mouth agape, is a sort of initiation into mys-
tery, and into a transformative, aesthetic mystery. The mystery is transfor-
mative for the one to whom it happens by surprise, very improbably. The
analysis is a (second) moment in this initiation, the moment of effective
reflection, as the time of reflection in reflective judgment. But that moment
is redirected to mystery as the surprise that differs in this differance, as a
circuit of transindividuation.
If what is produced with the sur-prehensive synthesis is of the order
of consistency, what comprehensively supports this consistency is, how-
ever, of the order of existence. This existence, which supports consis-
tency only by defaultthis propping up constituted through the rules of art,
through technics, through the mechanisms of the device (dispositif ) or the
materials (including mechanisms of transindividuation in the age of ready-
made materials)is also what participates in the individuation of the his-
tory of artlike the faculty of judgment, thus constituting histories of arts,
their works, and judgments made of them: the histories (critiques) of the
faculty of judgment.
The surprise-within-the-surprise is that in passing through the com-
prehensive analysis, the support that would want to clarify the mystery in

boundary 2
fact reinforces itexcept if the object finally gives way to a negative judg-
ment (or if the critique is badly done).
The more consistency is supported, the more it consists in distin-
guishing itself from its support. Mystery and its supports result from the
dissemination (dhiscence) opened up by technics as becoming and as
experience (experience requires the technical exteriorization that itself
opens the possibility of existence beyond mere substance). But such a
dissemination is possible only because the object of desire is constituted
by technicity: it supports a libidinal economy whose consistencies are the
objects reflectively projected on the plane of the extra-ordinary by ordinary
objects and onto these objects themselves. This economy is essentially
what constitutes the desiring (that is reflecting, suprasensible) subjects
ability to sublimate.
Critique can and must establish the technical support for such a con-
sistency. And this technical support is then what constitutes the amateur,
as the figure of desire par excellence: the one who loves. A critic in his own
right, the amateur is precisely not a consumer: he discerns, he is capable of
movingat least he has the power to do sofrom a state of synthetic sur-
prehension, where objects consist, to a state of analytic comprehension,
where they exist, and where they insist, as difference-in-repetition.
It is out of this possibility that the amateur is able to exchange with
othersprecisely with those with whom he shares a being-together con-
structed by philia, which at the same time opens a public space and time
that are the exact opposite of an audience: this is a critical space and
a critical time, a space and time of individuation (of psychosocial trans-
formation) insofar as it is operated through quantum leaps,10 crises in
which space and time are undetermined and infinite through that very fact.
The epoch during which those whom Hannah Arendt calls cultured
philistines appeared is also the one in which, at the time of Marcel Prousts
Madame Verdurin and when Dadaism was fighting against those philis-
tines, the foundations were provided for a new mystagogical age that would
lead, at the very heart of modern art, to what we today conceive of as con-
temporary art. For Arendt this philistinism, which
simply consisted in being uncultured and commonplace, was very

quickly succeeded by another development in which, on the con-
10. In physics, a quantum leap is the sudden, unforeseeable jump of an electron, atom, et
cetera, from one energy level to another. In general usage, it is a suddensurprising
highly significant advance or breakthrough, and it thus relates Kants purposiveness
without purpose to the unpredictability of dissemination.

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Stiegler/Kant33
trary, society began to be only too interested in all these so-called

cultural values. Society began to monopolize culture for its own
purposes, such as social position and status. This had much to do
with the socially inferior position of Europes middle classes, which
found themselvesas soon as they acquired the necessary wealth
and leisurein an uphill fight against the aristocracy and its con-
tempt for the vulgarity of sheer moneymaking. (Arendt 1968: 202)
We should note here in passing that in this long history of social cir-
cuits of transindividuation, the opening of the era of philistinism saw a conflict
between the commoner Denis Diderot and Count Anne-Claude-Philippe
de Tubires, Count de Caylus, that could be called a quarrel of amateurs.
Prousts In Search of Lost Time is the dramatizing of the conse-
quences of this conflict, precisely at the moment when Dada and Duchamp,
as well as James Joyce, came on the scene, a little more than a century
after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Today, at the beginning of
the next century, the current buzz leads to a Verdurinian lifestyle and
[recruits] from all classes of the population, to borrow an expression Marx
uses to define his concept of proletarianization (Marx 1988: 62).
Contrary to this philistinism, whether it be cultivated or uncultivated,
in the exchange it attempts to install at the center of the circles by which
it initiates being together (by initiating it into the mysteries of its passion),
the amateur, to the extent that he is not mystified (gregariously and regres-
sively) by the mystagogic experience of the object of his desire, and who
as a result knows and experiences a crisis (is trans-formed)the crisis
through which a work opensthe amateur, then, experiences:
1.
the impossibility of proving that the work in fact works;
2.
the possibility of supportingagainst mystifiers of all varieties
what is then a test, and one that must be sustained without ever
being able to be proven, and then of making it shared.
The destiny of a work is precisely to assemble a public within the

very feeling of this necessary default, and to make it a valued part of the
organologically overdetermined historical process itself.
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1968. The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Signifi-
cance. In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought,
197226. New York: Viking.

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Iser, Wolfgang. 1980. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 2008. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer.
Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. 2008. The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between
Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age. Translated by Chris Miller. Los
Angeles: Getty Center.
Marx, Karl. 1988. The Communist Manifesto. Edited by Frederick L. Bender. New
York: Norton.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2013. Pharmacology of the Question. In What Makes Life Worth
Living: On Pharmacology, translated by Daniel Ross, 99133. London: Polity.
. Forthcoming. Veux-tu devenir mon ami? Aimer, saimer, nous aimer: Du 21
avril 2002 au 22 avril 2012. Flammarion.
Swenson, Gene. 2007. What Is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters, Part 1. ART-
news, November 1. www.artnews.com/2007/11/01/top-ten-artnews-stories
-the-first-word-on-pop/.

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The Quarrel of the Amateurs
Bernard Stiegler
Translated by Robert Hughes
Even if the critical community is analytical, and even if the critic ana-
lyzing the work of art is an amateur, this critic can always still lapse to the
status of a cultivated philistine. One might think here of Henry Jamess
Figure in the Carpet (1896), which stages this lapse into critical philistinism
and the sinking of the critic into analytical mystification.
Critical analysis in such a case is a comprehension without
surprehension. The question that then arises is whether it remains pos-
sible to reach a surprehension starting from the comprehension that occurs
when one finds a contemporary work interesting.
Interest in works that one does not love is an experience that has
come to dominate the relation that our time maintains with its art. Is it pos-
sible to transform such an interest, altogether cerebral and comprehend-
ing, into the infinitizing attraction necessary for reflective judgment? Is it
possible at all to transform a simple determinative judgment that may be,
for example, sociological or historical, or, for that matter, economic and cor-
ruptly speculative?

boundary 2
This last case concerns a calculation aiming to realize an invest-

ment that partakes of nothing of the aesthetic, although it is completely
mystagogic and fetishistic in the broadest and most ambiguous senses of
these words, which in this case bear upon a commodityas the destiny of
the work that has become interesting for the super-philistines who specu-
late on the art market.
In the ascendency of the judgment of one who is interested but
without love, we see imposed as the norm the figure of the philistine critic,
who is more or less cultivatedwhich is to say more or less uncultivated.
This critic does not analyze either; he finds precisely nothing else to ana-
lyze other than his own interest. Nevertheless, the dispassionate and
analytical critic can also (and just as easily) turn back into the figure of
the philistine; this is the possibility that James dramatizes at the end of the
nineteenth century.
Before getting to that point, we shall consider the conflict opposing
Denis Diderot (171384) to Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubires, Count de
Caylus (16921765), on the faculty of judging works. The contemporary
critic Jean-Louis Jam has called this conflict the quarrel of the amateur
(2000: 37). We will examine how this conflict anticipates from the eigh-
teenth century, but in a kind of reversal in advance, the ambiguous fate in
which criticism decomposes into philistinism1and in which the cultivated
philistine comes to be interested and circumspect, and to repeat, with a
serious, portentous air, This is interesting . . . this is interesting.
With Diderot and the Encyclopdie, the Amateur becomes a figure
on which there weighs a suspicion that imposes itself first insofar as the
amateur represents a privilege typical of the ancien rgime. But it also
weighs on the amatorat, the bourgeois class of amateurs, as we shall see
with Roland Barthes (1977: 149), and precisely as this bourgeois class, as
an amatorat that is both philistine and cultivated.
1. The reversal was anticipated insofar as Diderot accuses Caylus of being if not a culti-
vated philistinewhich Caylus precisely is notat least of being a kind of artisan. Dide-
rot censures, together with Caylus, the whole nobility that claims the right to judge as its
privilege. The reversal takes place insofar as the commoner is the ultimate philistine
and, moreover, Diderot himself is the commoner here and should therefore be a proto-
philistine. This symmetrical inversion will be accomplished with the French Revolution,
which will set the conditions for a new process of transindividuation. [Transindividuation
is a term Stiegler develops from the work of Gilbert Simondon. Stieglers Ars Industrialis
website defines the term as the trans-formation of the I by the We and of the We by
the I; it is, correspondingly, trans-formation of the techno-symbolic milieu within which the
I meets as a We (Stiegler n.d.).Trans.]

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Stiegler/Quarrel37
As for us, the hermeneuts of the twenty-first century, all more or less
philistinized perhaps, mystagogues, mystifiers, and mystified, no longer
believing in either myths or their demystification, we know now that we
have come to know a new, quite uncultivated philistinism, though believing
itself quite cultivated, and rather worse than that of all those bourgeois: a
philistinism proper to our own time, a bobo philistinism, getting its honey
from the buzz.2
The question of philistinism that perhaps no one today can altogether

escape is a translation of ambiguities that are themselves decomposing
and that are rotting the process of transindividuation, at a time when the
libidinal economy (whose psychosocial reality is this process) is already on
the brink of ruin.
The ordeal of philistinism appears as a hallmark of our times and
as our lot. It translates the effects of nihilism into aesthetic and cultural
domains (thereby producing what Michel Deguy calls the cultural). It
arises against the backdrop of the question of lovelessness (dsamour )
and a decline in the figure of amor, that is to say of the amatorea decline
proceeding from an organological mutation. This mutation profoundly per-
turbs the libidinal economy and its circuits, without which it comes undone.
Proceeding from a machinic turn in sensibility starting in the nine-
teenth century, this mutation is also preceded by the instatement of a new
process of transindividuation that constitutes a revolution in the conditions
of judgment and that invents the modern figure of the public on precisely
this basis. This enormous transformation began with the political emer-
gence of the class of commonersthat is to say, actors of the negotium3
which will be called the bourgeoisie, once it has assumed economic and
political power.
To understand this, and to understand the complexity of the libidinal
economy which is put in place as its poweran economy vilified, together
and separately, by Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara, and one which in
2. [Bobo suggests a person devoted both to bourgeois material pleasures and to bohe-
mian creative life. The sense of buzz at the end of this sentence (and later in the essay)
suggests the superficial commercial buzz that drives interest in the art market.Trans.]
3. [Negotium, from Latin, concerns the pursuit of daily business, especially this pursuit
considered as a value in the conduct of lifethe declaration, for example, that the busi-
ness of life is business. Negotium is contrasted with otium, the practice, arts, and devo-
tions of refined leisure.Trans.]

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our times is in ruinsone must examine how a celebrated commoner,

Diderot, entered the struggle against the Amateur with a capital A, against
the delegation of an official power to judge, and against the figure of monar-
chical libidinal economy.
The quarrel of the Amateur that was set off by Diderot and that
raged during the year 1759 is an episode in the epoch of grammatization4
and protorevolutionary transindividuation in the epoch of what is called the
Republic of Letters. It concerns a conflict of theory, embodied by common
men of letters such as Diderot, Jean-Franois Marmontel, and, later in
the century, Louis-Sbastien Mercier, against the practice of the Amateur,
embodied by persons of noble rank, supposedly endowed with what the
ancien rgime called the natural taste proper to persons of rank.
In other words, the quarrel of the Amateur contests the legitimacy
of this figure of the Amateur as it founds, at the beginning of the Republic
of Letters, and at the heart of the Royal Academy of Painting, the circuit of
transindividuation forming monarchical taste.
The main figure challenged by Diderot is the Count de Caylus. If
it is his nobility that authorizes Caylus to claim the status of an Amateur,
this status nonetheless also derives from his practice as a copyist, and not
merely from the privilege of his rank. Caylus held a high notion of his own
ability to judge and thought himself a true amateur, which is to say capable
of truly loving works of art. In other words, even if his rank grounds this
capacity to judgewell-born people are people of qualitythis ground-
ing is only a potentiality reserved for the nobility. Its realization requires a
practice that is also plainly not an occupation but an otium.5 An occupation
is practiced by tradespeople (including men of letters [Jam 2000: 34, with
reference to Du Bos 1770: 38384]), who are commoners and, as such,
unfit to judge. A tradesman may be a practitioner, but his practice is that of
a negotium.
For Caylus, his practice of engraving gave warrant for the praise and
interpretation he offers for a painting by Raphael, Christs Charge to Peter.
Since, like many amateurs, Caylus is a copyist, he writes,
4. [Grammatization is a key term in Stieglers philosophy of technics and pertains to

the exteriorization of memory in its varied forms. More fully, grammatization suggests
the array of human efforts for seizing hold of the flux of experience, parceling it out into
discrete units, and encoding it in some external, transmissible, manipulable medium
examples in this essay will include the printing press, musical notation, the photographic
innovations of tienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, and software for critically
notating film and music.Trans.]
5. [Otium is described in footnote 3, as contrasted with negotium.Trans.]

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Stiegler/Quarrel39
This puts me in a position to talk about this masterpiece of art and

spirit. . . . This position derives not only from my study and the medi-
tation I have made; it develops from the plates that I myself have
engraved. For, in incising the furrows and working the copper, I have
always been careful to observe the chains of necessity in the com-
position and the relation of each part to the whole. If I suppressed
a part, the result was enlightening, and the finished work revealed
the doubt that remained in my mind. In this way, I meditated on the
different routes that great men have taken to reach the degree of
perfection that we see in their works. (Jam 2000: 27, quoting Caylus
1750: 17172)
At stake here is thus an initiation through copying. And this practice, which
does not ultimately aim at artistic creation, is analytic: it allows one to
understand what such and such a work is made of, insofar as what is at
work in this rendering is a mystery, as Jam emphasizes: For the Ama-
teur, practice is not the simple deployment of a technique and the acquire-
ment of a know-how to match the artists, but rather the initiatory path by
which, having become aware of his insufficiencies as a practitioner, he can
approach the reality of the creative act and, consequently, perceive all its
grandeur and mystery (Jam 2000: 27). And Caylus says that such copying
is a form of reading as well as of writing: However imperfect his study may
be, the amateur thereby learns to read and meditates what he wants to
write. In the writing, the traces in his memory become more profound and
disgust with his own imperfect efforts establishes his sense for the subtle-
ties and the beauties of the great masters (Jam 2000: 2728, comment-
ing on Caylus 1748: 122). The public of Amateurs, according to Caylus, is a
public that reads this (graphein) that is the painting. In this respect,
he claims the status of aesthetic maturity for the nobility, a kind of maturity
avant la lettre of the Aufklrung, which, through Diderot (and through Kant,
who extends the gesture), will contest that this right should be the privilege
of the nobility.
In 1748, when Caylus wrote these lines, the Amatorat was still an offi-
cial charge conferred by the king upon members of the aristocracy, of whom
the most famous was perhaps Roger de Piles, whose title of conseiller-
amateur was conferred in 1699. The Amateurs gathered in the heart of
the Royal Academy of Painting, together with the tradespeople who were
the artists. The academy was founded in 1648, and in 1663 its rules gave a
precise definition to the word amateur: it henceforth designates persons
of rank who are invited to contribute to the work of this company along-

boundary 2
side tradespeople. Placed to the left of the President, the amateurs exer-
cise their activity within the academic system royally instituted to regulate
the specific domain of pictorial art (Jam 2000: 22). Diderot, a commoner,
denounced a mystification in this monarchical organization of the circuit of
transindividuation, an organization forming the judgment of taste character-
istic of the ancien rgime. Through this quarrel, as Jacqueline Lichtenstein
(2008) has shown, Diderot opens the way for the aesthetics that culminate
in Kantan aesthetics, as I argue in The Proletarianization of Sensibility,
that in principle excludes the critical as an analytical faculty (and not only as
a transcendental principle, not only as an a priori structure of the subject).
As the historical and finally revolutionary realization of the stage of
grammatization inaugurated with the printing press, passing through the
Reformation and the Society of Jesus, the Republic of Letters becomes the
Age of the Enlightenmentthe Aufklrung that Kant defines precisely, less
than forty years later, as a coming of age by and in the presence of the
reading public.6
This Republic of Letters led to the establishment of a new circuit
of transindividuation, and hence to a new power: that of men of letters,
which will be characteristic of the enlightened monarchy. In 1759, in the
name of these men of letters, Diderot attacks Cayluss supposition that
the tradespeople he is sitting alongside are less capable of refined judg-
ment, notwithstanding their expertise as practitioners, insofar as they are
but commoners, like Diderot himself.
We note here, as Hannah Arendt also reminds us, that ancient
Greece, which was obviously itself establishing a new circuit of transindivi-
duation, also contested the legitimacy of the judgment of artists by found-
ing the privilege of noble citizens.7 Arendt writes,
The same men who praised love of the beautiful and the culture of
the mind shared the deep ancient distrust of those artists and arti-
sans who actually fabricated the things which then were displayed
and admired. The Greeks, though not the Romans, had a word for
6. For Kants description of the reading public as a condition for coming into maturity,
see Kant 1991: 5460. Certainly, Kant does not deny the privileges of the nobility as such.
But maturity cannot be limited to well-born people: this inference is inevitable when he
extends the critical capacitythe right to judgeto the general public that reads and
writes. We shall see below that, in this way, what is posed here is the question of the con-
stitution of the public as such; we shall also see that the condition of the constitution of
a public is organological: it depends on the hypomnesic specifics of (graphein).
7. See also Conrad Fiedlers work on artistic judgment (1957: 78, 6976).

boundary 2
Stiegler/Quarrel41
philistinism, and this word, curiously enough, derives from a word for
artists and artisans, [banausos]; to be a philistine, a man
of banausic spirit, indicated, then as today, an exclusively utilitarian
mentality, an inability to think and to judge a thing apart from its func-
tion or utility. But the artist himself being a [banausos] was
by no means excluded from the reproach of philistinism; on the con-
trary, philistinism was considered to be a vice most likely to occur in
those who had mastered a [techn], in fabricators and artists.
To Greek understanding, there was no contradiction between praise
of [philokalein], the love of the beautiful, and contempt for
those who actually produced the beautiful. (Arendt 1993: 215)
Diderot, who brokers works of art, initiates the struggle for the formation of
a new circuit of transindividuation. Mercier continues this struggle against
the French Academy. When Mercier writes in 1781 that the particular taste
[of the Academicians] cannot form the general taste (Mercier 1782: 317,
quoted in Jam 2000: 32), there appears the concept of public to which Kant
also appealed when he defines it in terms of its potential for coming to its
maturity. In other words, public designates a new circuit of transindividua-
tion that puts to work a new process of psychic and collective individuation.
By the end of the eighteenth century and, indeed, the end of the
ancien rgime (but this is already the case, writes Jam, with Molire in The
Critique of the School for Wives), to the tradesperson as to the Amateur,
is opposed the public, whose judgment on the products of art must prevail
because it judges with impartiality, and because it judges by sentiment
(Jam 2000: 32, commenting on Du Bos 1770: 337). In the view of Caylus,
on the contrary, apart from amateur practice, and against public taste, vul-
gar and false as it is, the Amateur is granted through his birth this natural
taste that is the only part of the art over which he has a decided right, and
the only part to which he can lay absolute claim. . . . Natural taste is . . .
the first virtue of the Amateur; it is a gift (Jam 2000: 26, commenting on
Caylus 1748: 121). The culmination of the quarrel, which is reached in 1759,
marks the end of an epoch and the arrival of another era, marking a revo-
lution in the public right to judge, aesthetically, as well as in matters of poli-
tics and knowledge.
Even so, for Caylus, as we have seen, the gift reserved for well-born
people is not self-sufficient. And what is true for the noble Amateurs holds
true likewise for commoners. This practice, as Jam describes it, is primarily
a practical frequentation of artistic works, through which develops the ability
to compare works: Only acquired taste, which is to say cultivated natural

boundary 2
taste, after a greater or lesser degree of study, founds the trustworthiness

of ones criticism or ones praise. . . . The first means for the education of
natural taste resides for the true Amateur in the frequentation and the com-
parison of works (Jam 2000: 26, commenting on Caylus 1748: 121). Such
a capacity for comparison is cultivated organologically: it is made effective,
as we have seen, but by the work of copying. The manual reproduction and
technical mastery it requires are conditions for the formation of judgment,
and therefore of transindividuation. And the work of copying as the moment
of the analytical formation of judgment is the true writing of tasteagainst
which Diderot will extol a superior form of writing: the speculative writing of
men of letters, men who are also tradesmen and who claim the status of
what will later be called professionals.
The habits of looking whilst copying would not yet disappear with the
nobility and their Amateurs. The paintings of Hubert Robert represent what
is now the Louvre Museum, accessible as a matter of priority and during the
week to artists, open to all on Sunday and admitting a public composed of
intrinsically philistine commoners. Roberts tableaux show that this public,
newly constituted, is made up of copyists who do not look at the canvases
with hands in pockets but who instead draw and sometimes paint. To the
Louvre will come Edgar Degas, Paul Czanne, and all the artists for whom
the museum is primarily a workplace. But the Louvre is also the site of a
public of amateurs who reproduce, re-produce, and repro-duce.
These copyists re-produce as Bartleby and as Herman Melville him-
self will do, as reader of the book which he transposes and copies while
doing so. They reproduce like Bouvard and Pcuchet and as Gustave Flau-
bert himself will also doFlaubert who, by his own account, devours and
recopies in the library three thousand books in order to write his novel-
istic introduction to the Dictionary of Received Ideas, some years before
Verdurinism8 and Duchamps Fountain.
At stake in the quarrel of the Amateurs is, in this sense, knowing
what writing wants to say (graphein) also signifies to draw in its
Greek origin. It is that which permits the individual both to form a judgment
and to individuate himself psychically and to circulate this judgment, make
8. [Stiegler refers a number of times in this essay to Marcel Prousts novel la r echerche
du temps perdu (19131927). Verdurinism here refers to a salon in the first volume,
Swanns Way; the salon is hosted by Madame Verdurin and typifies within the novel
the pretention, petty social ambition, and lack of refinement of middle-class Parisian life.
Later appearances of Prousts novel in this essay include passing reference to Swanns
Way and The Guermantes Way.Trans.]

boundary 2
Stiegler/Quarrel43
it public, and thus participate in the collective individuation by contributing

to the writing of a circuit of transindividuation.
Now, it is also as a practical moment of repetition, if not of copying,
at least of reading and deciphering, that a great twentieth-century man
of letters, Barthes understands the opening of the ear, that is to say, the
formation of the musical earan ear opened and formed by the way a
work works, formed by the ears own hands, guided by those hands eyes.
The initiation to listening through reading and instrumental interpretation
is essentially corporeal, that is to say, moved and moving, and it must be
thought of as a play passing through an ocular reading.
Here, to love means to play 9 and to play means to read. This love is
indispensable to the amatorat; with it, the (graphein), where read-
ing becomes interpretation through playing, becomes manifestly instru-
mental. However, this education of the ear by the hand playing an instru-
ment while reading is altogether organological and belongs to a new circuit
of transindividuation. For the piano, on which Barthes deciphers and inter-
prets the scores of Robert Schumann, is not an instrument of the nobility;
its possession and its practice are hallmarks of the bourgeoisie.
Beyond its properly aesthetic sense, beyond its social sense,

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

boundary 2
it brings back the figure of the amateur: an amateur now equipped (appa-
reill) altogether otherwise.
If the music lover of the nineteenth century was already instrumen-
tally equipped (appareill), and if new musical instruments such as radio
and phonograph produce a machinic turn of the sensibility that short-
circuits this equipment from the early twentieth century on (and one that
literally disables [dsarme] amateurs10), at present, digital equipment
grounds the emergence of new practices that restore the long circuits of
transindividuation.11
Before getting there, let us look with Barthes into the question of
listening to music by way of playing an instrument.12 Like Caylus, Barthes
sees in musica practica, as an instrumental and equipped (appareille)
practice, the only true frequentation of loved works. And he deplores its
disappearance, and, with it, the disappearance of the musical amateur if
not the musician: The amateur, a role defined much more by a style than
by a technical imperfection, is no longer anywhere to be found; the profes-
sionals, pure specialists whose training remains entirely esoteric for the
public . . . never offer that style of the perfect amateur, the great value of
which could still be recognized in a Lipati or a Panzera, touching off in us not
satisfaction, but desire, the desire to make this music13 (Barthes 1977: 150;
emphasis added). In this discourse appears a more recent opposition, one
typical of the twentieth century: that of the amateur and the professional
linked, as we have seen, to the social and indeed revolutionary revaluation
of the tradesman. Professionalization no longer opposes theory to prac-
10. These developments also bring forth new figures of the amateur, from the record col-
lector examined by Antoine Hennion, Sophie Maisonneuve, and milie Gomart in Figures
de lamateur (2000) to the practice that Charlie Parker cultivated as a jazz player, which
is to say first as an amateur. See also Stiegler 2014.
11. This is the thesis grounding the activities of the IRI at the Centre Pompidou and of the
Ars Industrialis association. [These are two of Stieglers institutional homes: the IRI with
the Centre Pompidou and the Ars Industrialis association that gives shape to many of
Stieglers political and intellectual activities.Trans.]
12. Listening to music is profoundly transformed with the advent of listening equipment,
first in analog form and then in digital grammatization. This fact was the basis for the for-
mation of the team headed at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique
(IRCAM) by Nicolas Donin and for Music Labs 2 software, carried out in close coordi-
nation with Vincent Maestracci, Inspector General of Music Education at the Ministry of
National Education. It is also the subject of a 1966 article in which the pianist Glenn Gould
announced a new age of listening in the era of recorded music. See Gould 1984: 33152.
13. Barthes emphasizes the making of this music.

boundary 2
Stiegler/Quarrel45
tice, but rather almost-perfect technicity (sought in the context of competi-

tion between professional musicians) to passion (which defines the whole
amatorat and produces the style that defines it much more than its tech-
nical imperfection).
This process then passes through a phase of bourgeois insipidity,
exhausting itself in the petite bourgeoisie that Barthes himself criticized
and demystified. This change is inscribed in a history such that musica
practica has disappearedwith the exception, he writes, of another pub-
lic, another repertoire, another instrument:
Initially the province of the idle (aristocratic) class, [musica practica]

lapsed into an insipid social rite with the coming of the democracy
of the bourgeoisie (the piano, the young lady, the drawing room,
the nocturne) and then faded out altogether (who plays the piano
today?). To find practical musical in the West, one has now to look
to another public, another repertoire, another instrument (the young
generation, vocal music, the guitar). Concurrently, passive, receptive
music, sound music, has become the music (that of concert, festi-
val, record, radio); playing has ceased to exist. (Barthes 1977: 149)
The amatorat has thus migrated. After the Verdurins and other more or less
cultivated philistines, after Swanns Way, after The Guermantes Way, ways
whereby the mystagogy that animates and sometimes enflames the ama-
teur can turn into mystification (a major topic in la recherche du temps
perdu), the amatorat has gone the way of youth and its counterculture:
exalted, exploited, and finally exhausted, it may be, by marketing and the
culture industries.
The disappearance of playing from the domain of music, but also
from all the domains that nourish aesthetic experience in the age of the cul-
ture industries, is the result of the turning machinic of sensibility. This turn
acts as an organological short circuit in the process of transindividuation.
The exclamation that so often agitates Madame Verdurin finds its consis-
tency through this process of transindividuation. For its part, the agitation
impedes Madame Verdurins capacity to come into her consistency and
also makes Swann sufferthus breaking the process of transindividuation.
The development of analog hypomnmata (and first of all the phono-
graph) enables the culture industries to annihilate the play of the amateur
(this is one condition, among others, for the spread of nihilism) and replace
it with a public without hands, a public that no longer knows how to read
music. This leads to a short-circuiting of the public itself and its judgment,

boundary 2
replacing them with audience ratings. Mediocre tastes are formed and
deformed in this way, and, in consequence, there emerges an audience
in place of a public. So it is no longer a matter of quality but of quantity
and of speculation in a sense that no longer has much to do with what had
been understood by Diderot: we have the reign of a market for art that has
become uncritical, only interested in its own interest.
Musica practica, which Barthes describes as a becoming, itself sup-
poses some organological conditions, however, the first of which is the
appearance of musical notation accessible to the musical amateur who
reads and interprets. A thousand years ago, diastematic notation spatially
discretized the continuity of musical time and upset the becoming of music
in totality. This notation constitutes a process of grammatization whereby
music enters into a real revolutionuntil techniques of analog recording
destroy the public that notation had formed and replace it with another
public, another repertoire, and another instrument than the piano: namely,
the young generation, vocal music, the guitar.
But Barthes might equally have talked about young Charlie Parker,
studying Lester Youngs solos on his portable phonograph (Russell 1976:
91),14 in exactly the same year (1937) in which Bla Bartk himself ana-
lyzes the music of Transylvania by playing at half speed the phonograph
apparatus invented by Thomas Edisonwhom, for that very reason, Bar-
tk declared indispensable to the developing science of musical folklore
(Bartk 1992: 294).
An amateur is a psychological individual whose psychological appa-

ratus is augmented by a critical apparatus and who is organologically
equipped with practical knowledge, with an instrument, and with a social
apparatus supporting the circuit of transindividuation, which is thereby
made possible. However, the devices of analog reproducibility, which com-
pletely reconfigured the psychic and collective individuation process in the
twentieth century, have short-circuited the psychic apparatus and have
disabled it by severing it from the technical and social apparatus through
which passes the circuit of transindividuation formed by amateurs.
For us, at the start of the twenty-first century, we who no longer live
in a bourgeois society but rather more of a mafia society (Stiegler 2010:
6066), we know great organological transformations. Our new century
14. Discussed in more detail in Stiegler 2014.

boundary 2
Stiegler/Quarrel47
configures a new stage of grammatization that opens up unforeseen pos-

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

boundary 2
of perception that had appeared in the nineteenth century with photog-

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

boundary 2
Stiegler/Quarrel49
a de-symbolization such that short circuits in the process of transindivi-

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

boundary 2
However, these social networks have precisely the characteristic

of being not just social but also technological and industrially control-
lable: they constitute the sociotechnologies of a sociopower that connects
up with psychopower as the latter connects up with biopower.
As they automatically formalize social relations (through what are
called metadata), online social networks form a process of grammatiza-
tion of social relations as such. They have met with great success, in which
there are many causal factors, but the main one is that the short circuits in
transindividuation that resulted from the proletarianization of producers as
well as of consumers have led to the pure and simple liquidation of social
relations as such, and online social networks appear, for the younger gen-
erations in particular, as a possible substitute.
Social networks where one declares and claims ones friends,
who become at the same time metadata in the economic war of indexation
(Stiegler, Giffard, and Faur 2009: 99104), are computer-assisted forms for
the production of ersatz phila. Service technologies are becoming essen-
tially relational, and these relational technologies of transindividuation are
deployed right at the moment when so-called relational art develops (Bour-
riaud 1998: 1417). Here, these service technologies take charge of the
synthetic recomposition (synthetic in the sense of artifactual and industrial)
of a social bond ruined by their own development.18
However, this state of affairs is pharmacological,19 and this means
that, if it is possible to struggle against the becoming-audience of the
public, and against the short circuits in transindividuation that are such
an enormous price to pay, this struggle passes through an investment in
the current stage of grammatization and in so-called social networks and
through the formation of new critical spaces, allowing the possibility that
circuits of transindividuation can form within amateur circles and constitute
critical times.
18. On the destruction of social ties by the service economy, see Stiegler and Ars Indus-
trialis 2006: 4247.
19. A state of fact is pharmacological to the extent that the active ingredient is a poison
which allows the reverse, which is to say that the pharmacological can make a cure of
the toxin, and vice versa. The cure may always again become toxicand lead to thera-
peutic failure.

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Stiegler/Quarrel51
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. n.d. Transindividuation, Ars Industrialis. Accessed August 30, 2013.
arsindustrialis.org/vocabulaire-ars-industrialis/transindividuation.
Stiegler, Bernard, and Ars Industrialis. 2006. Renchanter le monde: La valeur
esprit contre le populisme industriel. Paris: Editions Flammarion.
Stiegler, Bernard, Alain Giffard, and Christian Faur. 2009. Pour en finir avec la
mcroissance: Quelques rflexions dArs Industrialis. Paris: Editions
Flammarion.

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Unwork and the Duchampian Contemporary
Stephen Barker
Then who are the philosophers, Diotima, I said. . . . Wisdom is one

of the most beautiful things, and Love is a love for the beautiful, so
Love must necessarily be a philosopher, and, being a philosopher,
he must be between wise and ignorant.Plato, The Symposium
What is an amateur if not a figure of a libidinal economy? The

amateur loves (amat, from the Latin verb amare, to love): thats
what makes an amateur an amateur. Art amateurs love works of art.
And insofar as they love them, these artworks work on themthat is
to say, the amateur is trans-formed by them: individuated by them.
Bernard Stiegler, Proletarianization
He did not transgress. He took a false step only to bounce back

when least expectedfor example in the readymade, which is not
a noisy scandal but something like a mute surprise, even if it is des-
Bernard Stieglers lectures The Proletarianization of Sensibility, Kant, Art, and Time,
and The Quarrel of the Amateurs, published in this special issue, are cited parentheti-
cally in the text as Proletarianization, Kant, and Quarrel, respectively.

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tined long afterward to make the ink flow.Bernard Stiegler, Quar-

rel; quoting Michel Gurin, Marcel Duchamp: Portrait de lanartiste
Bernard Stiegler frames his discussion of the relationship between

the amateur and the proletarianization of sensibility, a discussion pervad-
ing Stieglers work on sensibility since the two volumes of De la misre sym-
bolique (20045), with what he sees as the emblematic epistemological
shift between Marcel Duchamps wet artwork, Nude Descending a Stair-
case, No. 2 of 1912, and the radical complexitiesthe unworkof Fountain
in 1917. The framing question for Stiegler is, then, what happened in or to
the art world between 1912 and 1917, and what does it mean for contem-
porary art? That is, is it still possible to love art? Stiegler offers a hint: what
happened did so in terms of the question of reproducibility. But then, in the
second of Stieglers lectures, Kant, Art, and Time, he reframes the ques-
tion as one not of reproducibility per se but of the eclipse of reproducibility
by time; indeed, of the relationship between temporality, omni temporality,
and the possibility of being (or rather of becoming) arts lover, an amateur
of art. Duchamps framing trajectory provides the scaffold on which Stieg-
ler constructs this investigation, since between 1912 and 1917, according to
Stiegler, the possibility of loving a work of art, certainly one by Duchamp,
enters a profound crisis: it becomes impossible to love a work by Duchamp
in which he himself interrogates its work (Stiegler, Kant, 19). Duchamps
interrogation of artwork brings not only the existential force of the artwork
but the very possibility of the amateur, the lover of art, into play as well.
Stiegler locates this paradigmatic Duchamp as being the emblem
of this dilemma, the very figuration of an epoch of a liquidated philia, of
dsamour, lovelessness (Stiegler, Proletarianization, 12). During this
period (for which Duchamp is significantly responsible, but within which he
is no more than a manifestation), Duchamps work ceases being work at
all; the artist as previously understood ceases being an artist, becoming an
anartist whose work is thus anart. This is an interim phase of the first
machinic turn of sensibility (Stiegler, Proletarianization, 6) but a clear
adumbration of the second machinic turn: the digital/technological revolu-
tion that defines and frames what, in the strictest sense, is contemporary
art. Duchamps turn, however, from work (Nude, No. 2) to unwork (objets
tout faits, readymadesand unworkness in general), from the art-love
of the amateur to dsamour, is not merely a machinic turn echoing that of
the Industrial Revolution nor merely an adumbration of the second, digital
machinic turn: it is a new inscription and a new kind of grammatization of

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Barker/Unwork and the Duchampian Contemporary55
tertiary retention1 through which the cultural archive, of which artworks are
a central part, shifts from one of the importance of the repository to that of
the unimportance of flotsam, from art-work to anart-playthe Duchampian
Contemporary.
Stiegler cites Michel Gurins Marcel Duchamp: Portrait de lanar-
tiste (2008: 12) to indicate that the readymades present themselves en
abme, in the gap between original and reject; Gurin remarks that the
readymades are destined, though not until a long time later, to cause the
spilling of a great deal of ink. It is important that Stiegler, in citing Gurin,
sees Duchamp as not transgressive. This essay will explore the implica-
tion: Duchamps radical neutrality (his pharmacology) as a central figure in
what Stiegler refers to as the new setup or game.
No doubt, this shift capitalizes on the machinistics of the chaotic
first decades of the twentieth century, what Stiegler himself calls this new
setup, or game, in which the organs of perception end up becoming ele-
ments of organological sets that are industrially reconfigured and in which
the apparatuses come firstas apparatuses of perception of psychic appa-
ratuses, and as technical apparatuses and social apparatuses as well
(Stiegler, Proletarianization, 18). For Stiegler and all amateurs, this new
game is both greatly stimulating and a function of the misre of the sen-
siblenot merely the misery resulting from the loss of love in a newly
1. Grammatization and tertiary retention are keyperhaps the keyStieglerian

terms. The experience of being is a function not only of memory but of mnemotechnics,
the technical prostheses through which memory is recorded and transmitted across
generations, never limited toby definition never capable of being limited toindividual
minds. This is an entirely diffrant sense of memory without which, Stiegler claims, the
human, written through technics, is simply not and never would have been possible.
The common notion of memory, as deposits of individual experience stored in the
individual brain as images and impressions, and more specifically of memory expan-
sion, is in Stieglers view of it actually folded into a didactic, historical process that only
begins (i.e., has always already begun) in memorys exteriorization, not in the taking in
or recording of experience in the mind. This exteriorization Stiegler calls tertiary reten-
tion, not just the recording of inner process and sensory/experiential memory but long-
term memory stretching across generations. Manifestations of tertiary memory include
such things as libraries (and archives of all kinds), oral lore, and the various technological
means of recording memory, making it available outside of any individual. Such trans-
individual information, the realm of technics, occurs through what Stiegler calls gram-
matization (as opposed to grammatology), through whichby any technical means
memory is out-sourced, recorded (retained artificially) in some form other than its
prior one (e.g., music or vocal CDs, video recordings, books, etc.). For a fuller investiga-
tion of these and other central Stieglerian terms, see Barker 2009. See also Tinnell 2012.

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mechanized world but misre as poverty, extending, as Stiegler points out in

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

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to become playful, and to bring into question the nature of work as making,
of fabrication, an element essential to Stieglers sense of the amateur.
With the bilboquet, making becomes what Duchamp will call assisted
appropriation, but from its inception this is an appropriation that interro-
gates the proper (propre): making something ones own becomes the
play of the proper rather than its assertion. The playful bilboquet con-
sists of a wooden ball perched atop a lathed stick or handle; it resembles
(or indeed is) a childs toy, on which Duchamp inscribed Bilboquet/Sou-
venir de Paris/A mon ami/M. Bergmann/Duchamp printemps 1910 (Nau-
mann 1999: 4041). Duchamps work consisted of having gathered and
assembled the found constituent objects, then signing the result. While in
1910 this was still nothing more than a curiosity even for Duchamp (40),
as a strategic intervention into the question of the workness of artwork it
was a harbinger of the great turn to the Duchampian contemporaryor
perhaps, with the bilboquet, the turn was already taking (a) place, naively,
in the object itself. For Duchamp, the work of interrogating the very nature
of art-work begins in 1910 with the advent of Duchamps ludic appropriative
practice. This ironic playfulness emerges even before Duchamps public
ascendancy as a revolutionary painter with the explosive reception of Nude,
No. 2.4 If Nude, No. 2 is seen as marking the conclusion of Duchamps
focus on the wet work of painting, then the already extant, alternative
strategy of quasi fabrication evidenced by the bilboquet must disrupt any
simple chronology of Duchamps development: if in its most radical inter-
pretation the Nude, No. 2 marks an endpoint in Duchampsand thus con-
temporary artstrajectory (the end of painting), it hardly does so in an
unproblematic way, since Duchamp continues to have a lifelong dialogue
with the wet art of painting even though he had already embarked on a
new kind of conceptual work (whether he conceived of it as such is imma-
terial) and a new concept of the workthe effort of and in the artwork.
Duchamps sublimated central question, anticipating Stieglers, is
thus, what are the work, and the art of the work, of art, in the context of this
4. However famous Nude, No. 2 eventually (and quickly) became, like Fountain it was
rejected by the 1912 Salon des Indpendants. Duchamp later wrote that rejection of the
piece by the steering committee, which included his brother, was sufficiently traumatic
that it gave him a turn (see Naumann 1999: 45). The turn Duchamp received was a
radical perspectival shift in his concept of the work of art-making: by the time the Nude,
No. 2 was shown in the Armory Show of 1913, Duchamp had already begun experiment-
ing with his mechanomorphic paintings and had produced his first assisted ready-
made, Bicycle Wheel.

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new game? This complex, finally unanswerable question can be at least par-
tially addressed through Duchamps experiments with the nature and telos
of appropriative inscription, of graphein (). It is in the charting of this
questions graphing that Duchamp repositions the objet danart beyond
the eye and the actual eyes retinal literality to its literarity; the outcome of
this process for Duchamp is ironically not a-visual but visuo-conceptual.
For Duchamp this meant that the readymade, from the first one, the Bilbo-
quet, should not be looked at (Girst 2003). Thus Duchamp, in his famous
interviews with Pierre Cabanne, initiates his absurd notion of the post- or
non-retinal: Since Courbet, its been believed that painting is addressed
to the retina. That was everyones error. The retinal shudder! Before, paint-
ing had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral. If I had
a chance to take an anti-retinal attitude, it unfortunately hasnt changed
much; our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists,
and still they didnt go so far! (Duchamp, quoted in Cabanne 1971: 43).5
Duchamps comment is doubly strange when one considers the
fact that all of Duchamps work is distinctly retinal, constructed from the
pharmacological collapsing of optical illusion, optical allusion, and gloss-
ing text: these are the essential ingredients of Duchampian readymades.
Duchamp is typically coy about the resulting enigma: the readymade ulti-
mately should not be looked at, Duchamp declares (not in the 1910s but
much later, in the 1960s); its not the visual aspect of the Readymade
that matters, its simply the fact that it exists. . . . It is completely gray mat-
ter. It is no longer retinal (Kuh 1962: 92). Duchamps declared effort is
to reduce the number of people looking. This is indeed a characteristic
strategy of the readymade: almost no one, outside of a very small circle of
family and friends, looked at or was even aware of the existence of these
pieces, which Duchamp conceived of as bibelots, little gifts not intended
for nor envisioned as public art until much later, when Duchamp stra-
tegically reorchestrated his orientation to the art public, at which point
the readymades, like the rest of Duchamps earlier work, were brought to
the attention of many people looking and were thus transformed into the
revolutionary artwork as they appear to us todayand which galleries and
museums worldwide present them as being. Bicycle Wheel, incorrectly
called the first readymade, which was originally created for Duchamps
5. Pierre Cabanne interviews Duchamp in the latters final years, long after he had begun
to fabricate (often out of raw materials or whole cloth) the Duchamp persona, perhaps his
most powerful and most playful artworkmuch more so than Rrose Slavy or the Marcel
Duchamp who gave up art for chess.

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own amusement as a kind of mechanical toy, was, astonishingly, not shown

publicly until 1951, and even then, typically sotto voce, as a replica of the
lost original, a wonderfully enigmatic designation for an object that origi-
nally claimed to be anything but (an) original, let alone a work of public art.
Duchamps original readymades were literally invisible in the sense that
they did their travail in private, never considered to be oeuvres dart.
But as importantly in terms of the arc from work to unwork, Duchamp
himself was famously a shifting work, an optical illusion fading between
guises and disguises: he desired and fabricated a kind of chimerical invisi-
bility persistently pretending (or at least professing) that art was unimpor-
tantliterally immaterialin his life: what was important was . . . love (rrose
cest la vie). His self-narrative included the claim that he gave up art for
chess, when in fact his self-fabrication(s) made his own body into a kind of
readymade. After apparently turning away from art-making, Duchamp con-
tinued to work in a number of art genres, such as mechanical drawing, dur-
ing the entire time of his not-art-ness, invisibly conducting myriad experi-
ments with language, linguistics, semiology, cryptology, all of which took a
variety of visual forms throughout his so-called postart period. He main-
tained his apparent silence until he chose, beginning in the 1950s, retro-
spectively to become the founder of contemporary art, creating a narra-
tive that itself was/is a remarkable fiction. Only in the late 1950s was he
discovered by young artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper
Johns, eager to escape their capture by abstraction and to reinvigorate the
visual arts, bestowing on Duchampfor the first timeinternational public
recognition. It was not until 1963, six years before his death, that Duchamp
had his first retrospective exhibition, at the Pasadena Art Museum, followed
in 1966 by the Tate Gallerys large exhibition of his work, and in quick suc-
cession other major institutions, such as the Philadelphia Art Museum and
MoMA, followed with large showings of Duchamps work, including many
of the (universally replicated) readymadeswhich at that later time were
apparently appropriate not only to be looked at but to achieve the omni-
temporal status of artwork.
. . . even if, in Duchamps case, this was the time of worklessness

(dsoeuvrement ). (Stiegler, Kant, 19)
But what time is or was the time of worklessness? The chimeri-

cal time of the production of the anart readymades, beginning in 1910

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with Bilboquet? Of the first readymade, 1913s Bicycle Wheel?6 Of 1914s

largely unknown but pivotal Pharmacie? Though in his California presen-
tations on art and time Stiegler frames his inquiry into the question of con-
temporary art within the context of Duchamps shift or turn from his con-
ventional work as a painter, in 1912, and the radically unconventional works
epitomized by Fountain in 1917between retinal art, painting, and R. Mutts
urinal, (much) later claimed by Duchamp to be one in a string of ready-
mades dating from 1913this question is a more fundamental one than it
initially appears to be and is presented as being (by Duchamp and the con-
ventional art histories). It is in fact a question of what work (travail ), and
a work (oeuvre), might actually be. This more fundamental question is vital
to Stieglers inquiry into the nature of art and its work both throughout the
twentieth century and into the (digital) twenty-first century. Always keeping
in mind the irresolvable tension between the elevated, actually metaphysi-
cal, sense of art within which Western culture has framed its works begin-
ning in the Renaissance and culminating with the invention of aesthetics
in the eighteenth century, on the one hand, and arts genealogical Greek
predecessor, tekhnart in the sense of skillon the other, the centrality
of Stieglers double sense of work, as object and as process, comes into
even higher relief. The relationship between these two senses of work is
complex: they are of differing orders yet cannot be separated; the work of
art (objet dart) is to be seen (and later, conceived) as the product or result
of effort, of working artfully or skillfully. Duchamp himself based his early
career on this very traditional, classical sense of art production, at the very
least until 1912. Nude, No. 2 not only shows Duchamps citation of cubist
angularity; it is also and perhaps more importantly a visual grammatization
of tienne-Jules Mareys chronophotographic studies, including his spec-
tacular multiple image of an egret in flight (Marey ca. 1882),7 a time-lapse
6. MoMA, the indexical Museum of Modern Art, frames Bicycle Wheel thus: Bicycle
Wheel is Duchamps first readymade, a class of objects he invented to challenge assump-
tions about what constitutes a work of art. Duchamp combined two mass-produced
partsa bicycle wheel and fork and a kitchen stoolto create a type of nonfunctional
machine. By simply selecting prefabricated items and calling them art, he subverted
established notions of the artists craft and the viewers aesthetic experience. The 1913
Bicycle Wheel was lost, but nearly four decades later Duchamp assembled a replace-
ment from newly found prefabricated parts and affirmed that the later version is as valid
as the original (Marcel Duchamp, n.d.). Of course, despite appearances, there is noth-
ing simple about the readymades, including the fact that for Duchamp they were vehe-
mently not art when he invented them, only when he reinvented them decades later.
7. tienne-Jules Marey (18301904), French scientist and physiologist, played a central

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image much closer to what Duchamp attempts to capture in Nude, No. 2

than Eadweard Muybridges stop-action images, which behave like a film-
strip but are a quite different kind of motion capture from Mareys incorpora-
tion of the dynamics of movement into a single multi-image. Even in Nude,
No. 2 Duchamp is demonstrating iconoclastic irony since, as Dalia Judovitz
points out, he irrevocably establishes his authority as a painter through his
signatory work, while he interrogates traditional forms of art production
in favor of new kinds of experiments, portraying the mechanics of bodily
movement wedded to the classical subject, the nude, of formal painting and
sculpture (Judovitz 1999: 1516). Judovitz defines this interrogative shift as
nuanced and prescient for twentieth-century art, calling attention to the
dynamics and contingency of action, pointing out that [Duchamp] begins
to experiment with chance as a way of getting away from the traditional
methods of expression generally associated with art (16). Even in Nude,
No. 2 this play with contingency is at work, though Duchamp has at that
point only begun to think through the widest and most radical implications
of chance as a function of and impetus for fabrication. Though as Derrida
points out in Memoirs of the Blind, the art gesture is always fundamen-
tally contingent, the tekhn employed in Nude, No. 2 demonstrates both
the contingency of movement in time and the potential reduction of chance
to zero, through technical skill, in static art forms such as painting. Nude,
No. 2 is a nascent example of the pharmacological theme of contingency
Duchamp has already begun to explore, as early as 1910, though his course
after Nude, No. 2 is toward a radical redefinition of the very nature of both
travail and oeuvre,8 of the relationship between the support and its manipu-
lation, the intervention of the artists manos onto, into, or through it. For
Duchamp in this newly experimental orientation, such an intervention is no
longer manipulative in the usual sense, and this is Duchamps genuinely
revolutionary gesturea gesture that, precisely because Duchamp indi-
cates that it is not of interest, one can love.
But such love, in the time of worklessness, is pharmacological:
role in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinematography,

and labor photography. Marey was the inventor of chronophotography; his chrono-
photographic gun, constructed in 1882, could capture twelve frames a second, all form-
ing a single image. He used the process to study and chronophotograph the movement
of many animals and of abstract forms, including, famously, smoke trails.
8. This distinction is vital to Duchamps interrogation of the objet dart: the lack of work
(travail) with which Duchamp creates unworks (dsoeuvres) is key to their influence on
contemporary art.

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it is simultaneously, as Stiegler points out, lovelessnessdsamour.

Duchamp catalyzes the question as to whether it is possible to love a work-
less work in a time of lovelessness, particularly if ones own travail has been
significantly responsible for that lovelessness. Is it possible to care for such
unwork? Paul Virilio frames this question in his Art and Fear with an epi-
graph from Camus, . . . this pitiless century, the twentieth (Virilio 2003:
27), whereby he refers the notion of unwork to the Duchampian undemon-
strativewhat Virilio calls the monstrativeas the critical result of the
silencing of the retinal that Duchamp (deceptively) claims. This silenc-
ing would in turnwere it to be successfulproduce what Stiegler has so
thoroughly investigated in terms of symbolic misery (i.e., the contemporary
poverty, of the symbolic economy).9 For Virilio, this monstrous poverty
results from the haphazard seizing on what Sylvre Lotringer refers to in
his conversation with Virilio as ideas implemented in any material what-
soever, in a postretinal psychic confusion characterized by thought wres-
tling with perception, the mental act presiding over every visual creation of
form (Lotringer and Virilio 2005: 67). In fact, though this strategy is finally
anything but postretinal, it impoverishes the visual by rendering it merely
optical, the structure of the visual prior to the visual: the science of art-
work rather than the experience (71). In the Duchampian unwork, as the
grounding strategy for contemporary art, making is dislodged and displaced
by naming and, whats more, by enigmatic and playfully ironic naming.
In Duchamps practice, the unworkness of the readymade took
some time to gestate. His Bilboquet of 1910, which might be called a pre-
readymade, anticipates the unwork, but only tangentially; Duchamps
first readymade, the assisted Bicycle Wheel of 1913, is a better dem-
onstration of the science of the incipient unwork than an unwork itself.
Though it is true that Duchamp constructed Bicycle Wheel out of found
objects, he confessed to being more amused by participating in its kinetics
(spinning the wheel) than in interrogating its aesthetics.10 It is not until Janu-
9. Paul Virilio, interviewed by Sylvre Lotringer (2005). In the interview, Virilio claims that
art today is thriving because it is entirely beside the point (30).
10. Dalia Judovitz (1999: 99101) has very interesting comments to make on the piece;
referring to the wheel assemblage as a non-artisanal intervention, she asserts that
the rotating wheel draws attention to its artistic meaning as an intellectual metaphor for
the circular shifts in position that qualify its potential as work of art or non-art (99). In
fact, Duchamp (anticipating Warhol) liked to spin the wheel, joining it to produce a kinetic
mechanical assemblage. When I teach Duchamp, I also point out that Bicycle Wheel can
be seen as an ironic twentieth-century (mechanical) avatar of the history of figuration: the

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ary 1914 that the first genuine readymade, in its fuller oxymoronic form,
is born. Not only is this seminal piece fundamentally pharmacological, it is
actually entitled Pharmacie. It consists of a mass-produced poster-sized
print of a winter landscape, available to painting novices as an example of
a composition they might attempt and signed by what Duchamp decades
later would call an unknown artist of the worst kind. Duchamps later story
about Pharmacie thus renders it both a precursor and a simpler inverse of
L.H.O.O.Q.: Pharmacie presents itself as a generic, virtually anonymous,
commercial art scene with little or no aesthetic merit, while L.H.O.O.Q.
presents itself as an assisted bad copy of the canonic work of Leonardo
da Vinci. Pharmacie is Duchamps first readymade intervention, even
though it is itself assisted, since not only does Duchamp sign the piece
(at least three versions exist, signed Pharmacie/Marcel Duchamp/1914),
but he also adds a tiny dab of red and green paint to the landscapes far
horizon. Are the dabs of paint the traditional red and green bottles in phar-
macy windows? Indistinct figures in the distant landscape? Strange lights
on the horizon? Nothing but blobs of colored paint, a reminder of the wet
art Duchamp has claimed to eschew? The paint dabs mark the elementary
pharmacology of the readymade-as-unwork: the wetness of the paint within
the icy, badly printed landscape. Pharmacie shows, for the first time in
Duchamps unwork, the play of distance and neutrality so characteristic of
the readymade and of the pharmakon in general. In Pharmacie, Duchamp
expresses his indifferenceunworktoward the aesthetic, and his work in
expressing it. The readymades that follow Pharmacie result in Duchamps
retroactive statement about them in his 1961 narrative of his invention of the
word readymade, though the actual trajectory of the readymade strategy,
begun over a year earlier, is left out:
In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel

on which I wrote In Advance of the Broken Arm. It was around
that time that the word readymade came to mind to designate this
form of manifestation. A point which I want very much to establish is
that the choice of these readymades was never dictated by esthetic
delectation. The choice was based on a reaction of visual indiffer-
ence with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste . . .
in fact a complete anesthesia. (Duchamp 1973: 141)
(spinning) head and stable, four-legged body of the mechanical figure participate in
the first robotic craze of the period as well as interrogate the ongoing survivability of the
figure in art.

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What began with Pharmacie became, by 1915, what Duchamp says

that he saw in the famous snow shovel(s) as accidental, objects taking
their place somewhere amidst the visual, the optical, and the technical:
the snow shovel can be looked at retinally, as a physical object hanging in
the Centre Pompidou in Paris, for example, seen nonretinally as an idea,
and/or treated technically as an object framed by and in a lively and playful
discourse with its caption. The fact that Duchamp signed the snow shovel
aprs Marcel Duchamp compounds the space/time disturbance charac-
teristic of the pharmacological nature of the readymade, indeed of all the
phenomena Duchamp (later) claimed as readymades.
In light of this history of readymade objects and narrative frames, it
is surprising to find that perhaps the most famous of the readymades, the
infamous Fountain, is also the most misunderstood and misinterpreted as
a result of Duchamps obfuscation, and at the same time perhaps the most
genuineperhaps the onlyreadymade Duchamp produced. The web
of information and misinformation (much of it supplied, in varying forms,
by Duchamp decades later) surrounding the Buddha of the Bathroom, as
Louise Norton calls it in her article in The Blind Man, no. 2, of May (1917,
published to mark the close of the Independents exhibition at which the uri-
nal made its appearance. The Buddhistic enigma of Fountain has accom-
panied the elusive (multiply-lost) piece of porcelain to the present day. In
Duchamps standard story of Fountains history, told for the first time in
the 1960s, the iconoclasmthe inappropriatenessof the piece was too
much for the Independents committee and was summarily rejected, caus-
ing Duchamp to resign from the committee. Duchamps story claims that he
placed the signature on the urinal, R. Mutt 1917, to make the piece more
impersonalto demonstrate his indifference to it as an art object. This
makes no logical sense even if one accepts that R. Mutt is a pseudonym.11
But in fact there are compelling reasons to think that the piece is the
ultimate Duchampian readymadeprecisely because Duchamp had noth-
ing to do with it. The complexities of the story began to be explored in the
latter 1980s by William A. Camfield (1987; 1989), with the suggestionthe
discoverythat Duchamp was not responsible for the piece in anything
like the way he had claimed to be. Subsequently, the evidence has been
11. Admittedly R. Mutt is a wonderful, plausibly Duchampian pun. If one were attempting
to call into question the very poverty of this borrowed bathroom object as an artwork,
one could hardly do better than to claim its creator to be Armut, German for poverty.
See note 12 below.

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building that in fact Duchamps involvement with Fountain was a strategic

fabrication, that he created the narrative of his association with this icon of
contemporary art out of very nearly whole cloth. The evidence, mentioned
by Camfield then explored further by Glyn Thompson and others, devolves
from Marcels letter to his sister Suzanne of April 11 or 12, 1917: Raconte
ce dtail la famille: Les Indpendants sont ouverts ici avec gros succs.
Une de mes amies sous un pseudonyme masculin, Richard Mutt, avait
envoy une pissotire en porcelaine comme sculpture; ce ntait pas du
tout indcent aucune raison pour la refuser. Le comit a dcid de refuser
dexposer cette chose. Jai donn ma dmission et cest un potin qui aura
sa valeur dans New York.12 (Tell this detail to the family: The Indepen-
dents have opened here with immense success.One of my female friends
under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a
sculpture; it was not at all indecent no reason for refusing it. The committee
has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation
and it will be a bit of gossip that will have some value in New York.)
There is simply no reason to suppose that Duchamp is not telling
the truth in his letter to his sister (which would be entirely uncharacteris-
tic). Not only does Duchamp acknowledge that he has played no role in
the arrival of the urinal at the show, but in addition, according to Duchamp
during the exhibition, the piece is not a readymade but a sculpture. At
that point, the object is an art object, an oeuvre dart, not dsoeuvr, with
no title whatsoever other than the R. Mutt 1917 coarsely painted onto
ituntil someone (Duchamp? Louise Norton? Alfred Stieglitz?) gave it a
12. Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp, April 11 or 12, 1917, Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/marcel
-duchamp-to-suzanne-777 (accessed April 21, 2016). This letter and others from Duchamp
to his sister and his brother-in-law, Jean Crotti, have been published in English translation
with commentary by Naumann (1982: 219). See Milan Golob, Marcel Duchamps Foun-
tain, at www.golob-gm.si/5-marcel-duchamp-as-rectified-readymade/f-marcel-duchamp
-fountain.htm#camfield1, and for a remarkable treatment of the piece in context, see
Thompson 2012. The female friend who had submitted the urinal was undoubtedly
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who sent it from Philadelphia. The baroness,
a Dadaist poet, often used the pseudonym Richard Mutt, a multiple pun on the Ger-
man for poverty (Armut, R Mutt). Richard is French slang for moneybags; Richard
Mutt = filthy rich poor guy, a mutt with moneybags. Louise Norton would have been in
on the baronesss joke, accounting for her article in Blind Man (1917). The only evidence of
Duchamps interaction with the urinal, other than his stories much later, is photographic:
Stieglitzs posed one and the photograph of Duchamps studio showing the piece hanging
in a doorway; the urinal was subsequently, like all the readymades, lost.

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

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appearance of the objects he chose after Fountain, claiming to show that

the objects cultural valuation involved a process radically different from
and indifferent to that involved in any artistic transformation. The separa-
tion of a culturally elevated object set apart from the ordinary gives rise
to what Duchamp saw as the irresistible temptation to interpret such a dis-
tinction as the ipso facto reason for the inherent value of the art object over
the quotidian. Choosing not to transform the object but rather to have no
reaction to it, to remain distant from it, both raises and obfuscates the ques-
tion of the chimerical mechanism producing the aesthetic. The power of
the readymade, technically, consists in the fact that it is a manifestation of
the assertion that numerous valuations of traditional culture, and the quo-
tidian, are simultaneously on display as object and conceptionbut they
never conjoin, nor are they canceled out, nor do they result in nor claim any
kind of unity: they are terminally pharmacological. And the readymades are
irreconcilable except as signs of the designators (the anartists) freedom:
no definitive criteria by the art world of quality, beauty, expressivity, or
authenticity can apply to it. The readymade is never more nor less than a
sign,13 constructed such that its interrogation of value can take place with-
out being understood as anything other than an interrogation but also with-
out being clearly distinguishable.
This new machinic turn of sensibilitywhich is no longer analog but

digitalleads to a renaissance of the figure of the amateur, that is to
say, to a reconstitution of libidinal energy which, after being system-
atically canalized and rerouted by consumerist organization, ended
up putting in place an economy of drivesthat is to say, a libidinal
diseconomy. (Stiegler, Proletarianization, 7)14
Duchamps devils bargain with indifference, delay, and dsamour,

within the context of Stieglers reinscription of the amateur, is a function
of what Stiegler calls the disrupted, transformed libidinal economythe
dsconomie libidinale. Indeed, all of Stieglers work can be seen as an
13. I mean sign in the most generic sense. Glyn Thompson (2012) explores the more com-
plex esoteric terminology through which Duchamp works.
14. Stieglers talks lay out a contemporary panorama for contemporary art framed by
Hannah Arendts cultural philistinism, a social condition focused on utility. Duchampian
unwork frames this discourse.

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inquiry into the libidinal diseconomy. Stiegler points out that this economy is
grounded in the pharmacological nature of the principles of life and death.15
Jean-Franois Lyotard, in his Libidinal Economy, structures these principles
in terms of the Life principle, Eros, through which the amateur engages
in the dangerous (deadly) game of attempting to avoid the false duplicity
of life/death, a duality whose elements cannot be separated, never bal-
anced (Lyotard 1993: 29). Eros, cest la vie, indeed, but Eros is not only
life; as diffrance, it is also, simultaneously, the ambiguity of the un-self-
same. That is, for Duchamp life and death are intensities before they are
concepts. Becoming concepts, they cease to be what they areand are
thus unworked. This means that the parallel discourse of concept/affect,
like their order and disorder, their priorities and framing mechanisms, which
have lain beneath contemporary art since Duchamp and the delay of the
readymade, is itself a delay, an avoidance and suppression, if not a repres-
sion, of the pharmacological nature of what should be (mis-)designated
as lifedeath. Duchamps dsconomie, through the readymades and
chiefly through the appropriated Fountain, nominally libidinal, is as Lyotard
points out a disorder of machines (30): the eye, the brain, language, con-
cept, value/valuation/revaluation, consumption. Indeed, as Lyotard shows,
given that the readymade is a thought exercise, thought is itself libidinal,
because what counts is its force (its intensity) and because it is this that it
is necessary to overlook in words, this interminable worry, this incandes-
cent duplicity. It is therefore necessary that what one thinks can always be
assignable to a theoretical ensemble (semantic, formal, it matters little),
and shown equally to despair of such an assignation (31).
The stakes engaged in the readymade, according to Lyotard, are
enormous, if culture cannot or does not alter the course of the destiny
that pushes thought towards the concept, the retinal towards the intel-
lectual; failure to understand this risk can result in a libidinal economy
which will resemble a trivial political economy, an ideology with a preten-
sion to order (31). Economy in this larger sense is the instauration of value
and the nature of exchange. The libidinal is nothing less than an ontology
of events. Duchamps designating the readymade as an accident places
such an event in a particular relation to the pretension of order such that
no single interpretation can account for it, particularly when the event is
a function of distance, delay, diffrance. The readymade always exceeds
15. Lotringer and Virilio tell us that there is no understanding the twentieth century with-
out the death drive (2005: 19).

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interpretation such that in presenting itself as flotsam from the quotidian it

is always left over, a remnant of its own delay. In systematically rendering
systems of interpretation unusable, Duchamp transmutes these enigmatic
objects into what Lyotard calls dissimulated libidinal intensities: opening
and reopening each time the possibility of establishing stability of meaning
for the object (naming it) and thoroughly destabilizing it through puns and
the disruption of any gesture of denotation.
Lyotard makes this connection to Stieglers grammatization him-
self. In his Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy, given at the IRCAM confer-
ence titled New Technologies and the Mutation of Knowledge, organized
by Stiegler in October 1986, Lyotard starts out from the basic hypothe-
sis of Stieglers work, namely that all technology is an objectification
i.e. a spatializationof meaning, whose model is writing itself (1991: 47).
Here Lyotard pinpoints the strategy of the readymades: that their radical
objectification is simultaneously an exercise in diffrance, relative to the
human itself. Lyotards framing of Duchamp is entirely pharmacological:
he says Duchamp is indicating that humans must not consider themselves
as origin or result but as a transformer ensuring . . . a supplement of com-
plexity in the universe (46). In this sense, Duchamps work after the ready-
mades is informed by the same theme: the Large Glass, Lyotard says,
holds back or delays within the glass itself the event that has yet to
occur, portraying the anachronism of the gaze as already and/or not yet:
as in the readymade, in the Large Glass the time needed to consume the
work is perpetually deferred. The Glass mirrors the readymades in that it is
enigmatically the search for apparition itself (79). For Duchamp, appa-
rition marks the event of and as something other, and just as the ready-
made is otherness objectified, the later works such as the Large Glass
echo the readymade strategy of acting as a brisure, or hinge, between
impassioned memory and anticipation.16 But this hinge is always loose and
always swinging, so that no terms of exchange can be reached or agreed
upon. Starting with the readymade, the libidinal economy of art, manifest-
ing itself into the present, is transformed into dsconomie.
16. Lyotard says that anyone who looks at the Glass is waiting for Godot (1993: 79); the
Beckett/Duchamp connection much richer even than Endgame, though appropriate for a
discussion of dsoeuvrement, will have to . . . wait.

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

In stressing the relationality between time and cultural texturewhat Der-
rida calls writing, what Stiegler calls grammatizationDuchamp sets
the stage for what Stiegler defines as the second great technical turn in
contemporary culture: contemporary art in the digital age. In De la misre
symbolique 2: La catastroph du sensible (Symbolic Misery 2: The Catas-
trophe of the Sensible) (2005), Stiegler excavates the relations among tech-
nicity, passion, and desire. This is precisely the context in which Ducham-
pian dsoeuvrement and its lovelessness, its work and unwork, inform and
invade the contemporary in general and contemporary art in particular.
Duchamp has (indifferently) invented something new, a critical anart, in
the readymades, an inscribing of Armut that defines the misre symbo
lique for innovators to follow, figures such as Andy Warhol and Beuys, but
also Christian Boltanski, Gerhard Richter, Sherrie Levine, Robert Gober,
Thomas Hirschhorn, and many others. Duchamp is the avatar of what
Jean-Luc Nancy, citing Maurice Blanchot, calls the inoperative commu-
nity, which describes the condition of unwork and lovelessness charac-
teristic of the Duchampian epoch. It is an epoch, and a community, con-
structed from encounters with interruption, fragmentation, suspension.
Community is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension
that singular beings are. Community is not the work of singular beings, nor
can it claim them as its works, just as communication is not a work or even
an operation of singular beings, for community is simply their beingtheir
being suspended upon its limit. Communication is the unwork of work that
is social, economic, technical, and institutional (Nancy 1991: 31).
Yet, uncannily, what Duchampian unwork demonstrates is that
the inoperative community of interruption, fragmentation, suspension is
17. Stieglers text Proletarianization in this special issue marks the turn in which mysta-
gogy, the elevation of arts performativity, is menaced by the tactical mystifications
embedded within it. Mystification is at work when love, the incalculable and improbable
in art, transmutes to dsamour, when all aesthetic experience is agreeable (i.e., with-
out desire).

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epochal, the defining characteristic of a contemporary general organology

that presents itself as intrinsically a dphasage (phase shift) through which
there must be a relationship between any artwork and a public consti-
tuting a transductive relation, . . . but worked through diffrance (Stiegler
2005: 39). Contemporary art, anart, has had to learn to live in a new way
in the wake of the advent of unwork.
What is to be learned from the Duchampian unwork is originless-
ness and nonparticipationthat the human being is evolutive, as Beuys
says, and that learning to live means learning to happen in becoming
[ advenir dans le devenir] (144). In La misre symbolique Stiegler is very
clear about this process of becoming: This question of explicitly exposed
apprenticeship is also what distinguishes art after the death of God, and
what becomes what is at stake, precisely within the context of the loss of
participation and of symbolic poverty. . . . And this is finally what first occurs
in Marcel Duchamp (144).
In light of the forging of effortless appropriation with Fountain, it is
not surprising to find Stiegler framing his explication of symbolic poverty by
utilizing a Joycean metaphor of forgery to describe Duchamps new para-
digm: we must find new arms, Stiegler says, in the struggle to re-make
aesthetics; that is, to forge them, and these arms, which are quite frayed,
are all the more difficult and dangerous to handle (17).18 This is not the
forgery of Hephaestus but of Epimetheus; now, it is no longer possible to
follow any traditional didactic art practice, since now learning to live
means simultaneously to think and to work, involving perpetually exposed,
ex-plicit self-transformation: to make out of oneself, as Duchamp does later
in life, the theatre of the struggle as well as the forge (18). The symbolic
poverty from which we suffer, our loss of participation in contemporary
art, engenders psychological and libidinal poverty, most clearly manifested
in Warhols uncanny artwork, ranging from his use of the merely unhuman
(unnatural color schemes, multiples) to the mechanical (assembly-line pro-
duction, fragmentation), and in Beuyss works lamentation for lost commu-
nity. Both Warhol and Beuys echo Duchamp in challenging the retinal: War-
18. Joyce concludes his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (published in 1916, the
year before Fountain) with Stephen Dedaluss I go to encounter for the millionth time the
reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of
my race (Joyce 1992: 196). Perhaps the last of the romantics, Stephen next appears as a
bored schoolteacher, a perceiver of disappointed bridges, at the beginning of Ulysses.
Duchamp is perhaps the quintessential forger of becomings, the uncreated conscience
of the race having become inoperable.

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hol through the multiples and their bad production values, Beuys through
the synesthesia of waxy smell (pitch) and muffled sound (felt).
Duchamp makes misinterpretation and misreading part of his mean-

ing. (De Duve 1991: 312)
Thierry de Duve amplifies the disruptive role the grammatized self

plays in Duchamps pseudocreative strategy. At the core of the Ducham-
pian, de Duve says, is history modification as a strategy (312). History
modification indeed: self-reformation is the central mode of production for
Duchamp, for whom faulty memory becomes a philosophical position
(312). In this regardand it is vital to an understanding of contemporary
artDuchamp inaugurates what Stiegler calls a vast writing machine [that]
has became technological and industrial. We are dealing with a
(graphein) that discretizes and reproduces all movements and thus consti-
tutes a stage of grammatization, such that the new mystagogy . . . is able
to make its appearance (Stiegler, Quarrel, 43).19 This is the turn at which
Duchampian unwork informs contemporary art, its practice and its framing.
If Stieglers question regarding Duchamp is What happened between 1912
and 1917?, Hal Fosters equivalent is What happens when the avant-garde
is faced with a state of emergency, whether real (when the rule of law is actu-
ally suspended) or imagined (when it only seems to be)? (Foster 2011: 28).
The law to which Foster refers is both literal and figurative; figu-
ratively, it refers to the Duchampian legacy, of which Swiss artist Thomas
Hirschhorns work is a significant part. Hirschhorn describes his work as
precarious, perpetually in a state of uncertainty resultant from misread-
ings and misinterpretations compounded by the state of exception, begin-
ning in Duchamp that has now extended from Carl Schmitt through Walter
Benjamin, to . . . everything; as Foster says, the exception has become
the rule (28). Duchamp is the initiator of what Foster, after Hirschhorn,
calls the precariat. Hirschhorns mixed media work, such as that shown at
the Venice Biennale in 2011, is hazardous, contradictory (29). Such pre-
carity has prompted contemporary cultures obsession with heightened
security, which has in turn disrupted the narrative of contemporary art,
as Foster points out: much [contemporary] art has attempted to mani-
19. This new mystagogic writing machine produces consumers, proletarianized pro-
ducers, and audiences (Stiegler 2005: 21).

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fest, even to exacerbate, this condition of uncertainty (Foster 2009: n.p.).

Contemporary art manifests the instability it has learned from Duchamp;
it foregrounds its own schismatic condition, its own lack of shared mean-
ings, methods, or motivations (n.p.). As T. J. Clark points out, this new
art constantly attempts to capture the lack of consistent and repeatable
meanings in the cultureto capture the lack and make it over into form
(quoted in Foster 2009: n.p.), for example, in the direct Duchampian refer-
ences through which Gober echoes the readymade in what he calls his
orderly presentation of handmade readymades (n.p.) constructed from
beeswax, quoting and compounding the precarity by citing Beuyss play
with the material of the senses. In contemporary art, history modification
takes the ubiquitous form of archival heaping. The lesson of the ready-
mades, co-opted from the quotidian to do double duty as unwork, is retold.
A few examples:
Jon Kesslers 2005 archival gathering of a huge compilation of

small found items that he combined with various screens, cables,
and other objects, then mixed with automatons surveilled by
cameras he installed. The heap of objects Kessler assembled,
objects of no importance that could not be narrated, mixed with
remnants of a technological explosion that was then subjected to
meaningless scrutiny at a distance. The archive had no need of
the human and in fact seemed to mark its extinction.
Mark Wallingers archival heap, State Britain of 2007, consisted
of over six hundred weathered photographs, postcards, and
other found objects. The sheer volume of this material precluded
its having any impact other than its weight, as though that was
the weight of history itself.
Isa Genzken (2006) fabricated a group of assemblages of plas-
tic flowers, old dolls, and other toys that she placed outdoors in
Mnster, Germany, with the intention that they gradually disinte-
grate in the course of time as a natural effect of weather. Once
again, the human hand was required only at the point of selec-
tion; everything else was delay.
More famously, Christian Boltanskis compilations of photos,
old tin boxes, vitrines, and clothing ( la Ann Hamilton), ges-
ture toward an untold or perpetually misread history over great
stretches of time. The objects Boltanski selects, such as photo-
graphs, are chosen at random in thrift shops, then copied and

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recopied until they become hazily indistinct. What can be taken

for a history lesson never becomes one; when Boltanski is asked
whether his photo images refer to the Holocaust, he generally
asks which one? This precarious ambiguity, which is neither
ambivalence nor dialectic, is the new pharmakon through which
the specter of Duchampian anart informs contemporary art.
Perhaps as a direct result of the advent of Duchampian unwork, and

counterintuitively, contemporary arts form, let alone its content, has been
dramatically unresponsive to the dphasage 20 in the work invested in art
that is inaugurated by the arrival of the second machinic turn, the digital.
In this regard, contemporary art practice is treating digital technology as
its own readymade, appropriating it for other purposes. As Claire Bishop
(2012) explains, most contemporary artists now use digital technology, but
few think through or with it. The new media perpetually reinventing itself
seems to be running parallel to the world of art production in general. In
fact, surprisingly, the World Wide Web has seen very little artwork that
has actually responded directly to the apparent possibilities of new lan-
guages, new semiotic regimes: performance art, the art of social practice,
sculpture, painting on canvas, even archiving, analog film, and architectural
design have all either rejected the digital and the virtual, passed beyond
them, or failed to engage with them. Nonetheless, all these forms unavoid-
ably operate within the orbit of and in discourse with the technologico-digital
turn. It is, in fact, possible to see the digital as the superstructure within
which contemporary art is operating even when it seems to ignore, avoid,
or reject it. This is good Duchamp: these forms contest the digital influ-
ence even while operating within its orbit. Bishop calls this contemporary
arts repressed relationship with the digital (n.p.). This too is a function of
the Duchampian heritage: the face-to-face but distant nature of nondigital
contemporary art, like the readymades, as opposed to digital anonymity,
the coldness of the computer screen. As Stiegler points out, this has
meant the opposite of progress: now, what the converser with contem-
20. Dphasage, which is commonly translated in a technical sense as phase shift and
employed extensively in the work of Gilbert Simondon, is used here in the sense in which
Gilles Deleuze appropriates it from Simondon, as dissymmetry; referring to dphasage,
Deleuze says, What Simondon elaborates here is a whole ontology, according to which
Being is never One. As pre-individual, being is more than onemetastable, superim-
posed, simultaneous with itself. As individuated, it is still multiple, because it is multi-
phased, a phase of becoming that will lead to new processes (Deleuze 2004: 11518).
Thus the dis of dissymmetry, its strategy of disruption, is vital to Duchamps sense of it.

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porary (digital) art learns to do is to manipulate screen codes. The aes-

thetic object is thus radically altered: the very way in which it is an object
is changed (now it is a virtual relationship, if that is not too much of an
oxymoron). It is Guy Debord who early on points to the stultifying effect
of media art (Debord 1994: 24) but the increasingly ubiquitous digital
nature of this aspect of contemporary art has returned it to Duchamp, in
the sense that much contemporary art has become increasingly obsessed
with repurposingwhich was formerly (in a world parallel to Duchamps)
first called plagiarism, then appropriation. This aspect of contemporary
art has mandated yet again, in this new context, a critical reconsideration of
authorship and originality (e.g., by and in the work of Damien Hirst, after
Duchamp and proceeding through Levine, Richard Prince, Roy Lichten-
stein, Rauschenberg, Boltanski, etc.). Repurposing, emanating from the
misrepresentation of Duchampian unwork, is now like re- or transcod-
ing: extant files of information are reintegrated, reshuffled, reframed,
modulated, modified, then becoming a matter of choice, of appropriation
(making others work ones own), of the reframing or rearticulating of extant
objects through juxtapositions that either concur (Francis Bacon) or dis-
rupt (Robert Longo). This all follows from the strategy of the readymade,
through which the contemporary art paradigm has shifted from a model
of originality to one of archivization that has come out the other side of
Duchamps unwork: now it does not attempt any narrative through-line or
overarching thematic unity. Rather, it requires the critical response of the
interpreter to make sense of it, and ironically, since in the web world the
interpreter is anonymous, the critical faculty, which operates at a sec-
ond distance from the inherent distance of the digital art object, becomes
increasingly inarticulate.
The symbolic poverty Stiegler critiques is now the post-televisual
digital, resulting from net surfing, which resembles channel switching but
amplifies it manifold, creating a digi- world of seeming disjunction and
coincidence unimaginable before the web. Of course, we now know that
this apparent precarity is increasingly literally not true: each time we choose
(click), the next choice instantly becomes less free, as the web tracks and
records our choices/clicks and echoes them back to us in the form of pop-
ups and suggested site visits.
So undoubtedly, contemporary art thus finds itself immersed, and
simultaneously uninterested, in the digital. But as Stiegler points out, this
frame, the digital epoch, predetermines that any and all art, as commu-
nicative derivative, and phalanx, of its culture, is overtly or covertly part of

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the techno-digital system. And it is a system, insofar as it has become the

ground of contemporary culture, (pre-)determining the making and doing
of art worlds. This has had an enormous impact on our relationship with
the image, the experiential nature of which has shifted with the second
machinic turn. Once seductive and concrete, the digitized image is imper-
ceptible: the nonhuman world of code in precisely the way in which all
other languages are code; it must be perceived as written, linguistic, rather
than semiotic in the larger sense. Rather than symbolic, it is metaphorical;
rather then spatial, it is temporal. This means that the digital quasi image is
actually a-temporal, the very opposite of omnitemporal: it consists of nano-
granules, multiplying ciphers translated into sound and sight. This is why
so much contemporary art apparently rejects the digital: fear of the genu-
inely alien, the antihuman. Thus digital art, learning from Duchamp, is the
very mark of the nonhuman: sense without sensation; it cannot be loved.
Originality cannot exist; only the new. If twentieth-century art began with
Duchamps turn to appropriation and to irony, by the 1960s it had become
once again oriented toward authorship and its authority, at which point
Duchamp reinvented himself and his unwork, through an authority that is
perpetually and unabashedly forged, stolen.
As participants in this legacy of the contemporary, we in the inopera-
tive community are suspended between the analog and the digital, interro-
gating the fundamental nature of art-work and, indeed, of the human, in the
face of pharmacological digitalization through code-based logics. On the
one hand, the digital culture opens out new utopian vistas of postauthor-
ship. On the other, its pervasive, free-floating irony calls the human, human
community and culture, and the value of art, into question, as a new phar-
makon, the Duchampian legacy of unwork.
References
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Future According to Bernard Stiegler. Transformations 17. www.transforma
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Cabanne, Pierre. 1971. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo
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Camfield, William A. 1987. Marcel Duchamps Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics
in the Context of 1917. Dada/Surrealism 16: 6494.

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. 1989. Marcel Duchamp: Fountain. Menhil Collection. Houston: Houston

Fine Arts Press.
Debord, Guy. 1994. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.
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Proletarianization, Deproletarianization,
and the Rise of the Amateur
Benot Dillet
The proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1967)
But I quote Marx without saying so, without quotation marks, and
because people are incapable of recognizing Marxs texts I am
thought to be someone who doesnt quote Marx. When a physi-
cist writes a work of physics, does he feel it necessary to quote
Newton and Einstein? He uses them, but he doesnt need the quo-
tation marks, the footnote and the eulogistic comment to prove how
completely he is being faithful to the masters thought. And because
other physicists know what Einstein did, what he discovered and
proved, they can recognize him in what the physicist writes.
Michel Foucault (1988)
We do not have an image of the proletarian anymore that we would

simply need to be conscious of.1
Gilles Deleuze (1995; translation modified)
1. My translation. The original reads: Nous ne disposons plus dune image du proltaire
auquel il suffirait de prendre conscience.

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In the hyperindustrial world, in which life is spent more in front of the

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

arguably begins with his interpretation of Gilbert Simondons mecanology

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Dillet/Proletarianization, Deproletarianization, and the Amateur81
in Technics and Time 1, its actual first appearance is in Technics and Time 2
in the discussion of the loss of individuation in Simondons reading of Marx
(Stiegler 2009: 75). While Simondon does not always refer to Marxs texts,
in Of Modes of Existence of Technical Objects (1958) he developed an origi-
nal reading of Marxs arguments about the consequences of the use of
machinery for the worker in the mode of production.2 For Simondon, alien-
ation is not identity- or class-based but conditioned by the human-machine
relation. This means that the wealthy are also alienated from the point
of view of the technical object (Combes 1999: 11620). Stiegler extends
Simondons argument, however, by referring in this context to the loss of
knowledge in general. While Simondon was thus concerned about the rela-
tion of the individual with the world through the technical object, Stieg-
lers interest is larger and serves as a basis for his new critique of political
economy. Simondon argued that progress cannot be reduced to the eco-
nomic realm but should be rethought ontologically from the point of view
of technical objects: It is not because a civilization loves money that it is
attached to efficiency, but because it is first a civilization of efficiency that
it becomes a civilization of money. . . . In spite of the civil liberties, [this
civilization of money] is burdensome for individuals (Simondon, quoted in
Chabot 2003: 50).
There is a passion for the efficiency and progress of technical objects
that surpasses the economic and capitalist framework. Two interpretations
can follow from this short passage. First of all, as an idealism that forgets
that in a capitalist mode of production, exchange-value overdetermines
use-value, and it is difficult to imagine the production of the technical object
outside capitalism. Second, Simondons theory is prophetic in thinking the
invention of technical objects beyond the logic of employment (understood
as remunerated work), organized by capitalism. The latter interpretation
calls for a more radical reading of Simondon, which resonates with Stieg-
lers conception of deproletarianization and Andr Gorzs philosophy of
work, both of which I discuss at the end of this essay.
In reading Marxs Grundrisse, especially his Fragments on
Machines, Simondon argued that with the machine-tool, the worker was
2. See Andrea Bardins excellent essay De lhomme la matire: pour une ontolo-
gie difficile (2013), in which he argues, in his project of establishing a materialist politi-
cal philosophy from Simondons work, that human work organized the easy ontology
[ontologie facile] of determinism that opposes matter/form, necessity/liberty. Simon-
dons categories are of considerable help to propose a difficult ontology that is needed
for a materialist social theory (40).

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deprived from his know-how (savoir-faire) and was reduced to a mere tech-
nical organ of the machine. He called this condition a loss of individua-
tion (Stiegler 2004: 9091). This understanding of the loss of individuation
was introduced in Stieglers own terms as disorientation and as ill-being
(mal-tre), in Technics and Time, 2 and Technics and Time, 3. However,
Stieglers most systematic transformation and definition of proletarianiza-
tion is developed in the second part of his work, starting with the Symbolic
Misery and Disbelief and Discredit series, until his most recent book Phar-
macology of the National Front. Throughout his work, Stiegler develops
a systematic understanding of proletarianization, making this concept
extremely relevant to diagnose and analyze the elements of contemporary
capitalism (financialization, the role of debt, the end of the welfare state, the
restrictions of the right to strike and protest, mass unemployment, ecologi-
cal problems, and the privatization of all forms of life), but I will also point
out where Stiegler blurs the precision of the concept.
The first dimension of proletarianization that must be considered
is the proletarianization of the producer. This draws directly from Marxs
Fragments on Machines:
Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes
into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling there-
fore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which pos-
sesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso,
with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it. . . .
The workers activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is
determined and regulated to a mere abstraction of activity, is deter-
mined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery,
and not the opposite. (Marx 1973: 69293)3
The workers knowledge has been inscribed in the machine, and he

is reduced to an activity of monitoring and assisting the machine rather than
working with raw materials. By relying on the machine, the knowledge of
the worker is transferred into the machine. Stiegler calls this process prole-
tarianization: through this loss of knowledge, the worker is proletarianized.
What interests Stiegler is less the reification of labor into the machine or the
theory of abstract labor and how these play out within Marxist philosophy
from Georg Lukcs onward but how to reconfigure the social in accounting
for the loss of knowledge. In this sense, when a worker is proletarianized,
3. See Stieglers commentary of these fragments in Stiegler 2012 (21442).

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he is deprived of his capacity to elevate himself above his condition and to

individuate with others (through the process of co-individuation) and with
technical objectsfor Stiegler, there is no distinction between work and
individuation in this sense.
As a reader of Roman law, Marx used the term proletariat in ref-
erence to the Latin term, proletarianus, denoting the person who has no
property or no wealth. In Latin, proles means offspring, which seems to
imply that the proletarian is a child, a descendant of the owner or the state.
The displacement operated by Stiegler with his notion of proletarianization
is faithful to this Latin etymology: a person without wealthif we under-
stand wealth in the sense Gorz and Dominique Mda have given to this
term. For Gorz and Mda, wealth is not reducible to accumulated capital
but refers to being in a position to cultivate and work at ones individual and
social patrimony (Mda 1999; Gorz 2003).4 Stieglers task is to diagnose
historically the symptoms of proletarianization rather than holding on to the
proletarians as a class in charge of its own history.
While in this essay I intend to show the power and the operability
of proletarianization as a new image of the proletariat, it is worth noting,
first of all, that the absence of discussions on the theme of alienation in
Marxist literature in Stieglers texts makes the new category of proletari-
anization significantly more difficult to appreciate. Where does alienation
end and proletarianization begin? Marx inherited the theme of alienation
from Hegel, who uses it to refer to the separation of the human spirit from
nature. Alienation is overcome when spirit is fully developed and finds
itself at home in the world. For Marx, however, alienation is related to work
(alienated work, in the words of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts), referring to a psychological and physical separation of the
worker from his nature and the world; however, it is also historically deter-
mined and constitutes a necessary stage to self-realization. In this latter
sense, it is accepted as a stage of human development. The individual is
transformed into commodity-man. Dialectically, however, this negativity
is also the condition for a higher stage of human civilization (Fromm 2003:
3748; Sayers 2011).5
4. This notion is also close to Amartya Sens concept of capability that Stiegler often
refers to.
5. The fact that Sayers does not refer to the category of the proletariat in his book, apart
from arguing that this category should be defined in global rather than national terms
(2011: 61), confirms the problem that I outlined about the lack of dialogue between the tra-
dition studying alienation, on the one hand, and proletarianization, on the other.

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This indicative picture of Marxs dialectical movement does not cor-

respond exactly to Stieglers pharmacology, even though Stiegler finds
pharmacological elements in some of Marxs texts (especially his analyses
of machinery and the means of production). One of the differences, for
example, between Marx and Stiegler is that while alienation is primarily
concerned with the repression and the diminution of psychological and
physiological capacities, Stieglers notion of proletarianization is used to
diagnose the level of both theoretical and practical knowledges in society.
The theme of alienation is often linked to the first and second stages
of capitalism, from the first industrial revolution and the birth of the fac-
tory to the rise of Fordism. However, as such, it gives a necessary histori-
cal basis to describe the new forms of proletarianization that appeared
with post-Fordism, the third phase of capitalism. The different stages of
capitalism are fundamental to portray the move from the proletarianiza-
tion of the producer to the proletarianization of the consumer, but they are
also technically determined, through what Stiegler calls stages of gram-
matization. Grammatization is best defined as a technical history of mem-
ory: the material and therefore spatial existence (or engraming) of a tem-
poral flow (Petit 2013: 400401). The process of grammatization explains
how technical objects come to be, not only as the support of knowledge
(logos) but as its inscription, its discretion and therefore its modification.
Techno-logy is thus not the discourse about technics but the formalization
and the transformation of knowledge; the technical tool grammatizes ges-
tures, speeches, sensibilities, and knowledges in general.6 Grammatization
is more general than proletarianization, which only accounts for the loss of
knowledge. In this sense, we can say that grammatization conditions pro-
letarianization. Both grammatization and proletarianization are historically
determined.
Stiegler refers in this context to three industrial revolutions: The first,
which was at the center of Marxs analysis of capitalism, took place in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the invention of the steam engine
and mechanized production but also the first railway networks. The second
is the development of Taylorism-Fordism as a new form of capitalism based
primarily on oil, the car industry, and consumption. The third is the finan-
cialization of society and debt, the rise of the information economy, and
what some call cognitive capitalism.
6. The first example Sylvain Auroux gives of this process of grammatization is the alpha-
bet analyzed as a becoming-letter of the sound of speech (Stiegler 2013a: 87; empha-
sis in original).

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In the second industrial revolution, the rise of the consumer was

organized by giving workers higher wages and better social conditions.
This also coincided with the birth of the welfare state, which systemati-
cally stimulated consumption by taking care of the population with health
and unemployment benefits. Bruno Trentin demonstrates the correlation
between Keynesian measures and the development of Fordism, what Stieg-
ler calls the Fordist compromise (Stiegler 2013b: 325). Trentin argued in
1997 that the Left did not see the mutation of these industrial models after
1970: We should in fact situate the beginning of this crisis during the phase
that coincided with the exhaustion of the first thirty years of almost continu-
ous growth of production and revenues in industrialized countries (what the
French call Les Trentes Glorieuses) and with the emergence of limits to the
Fordist model and the Taylorist forms of labor organization, at the moment
of the arrival of new flexible technologies of information and the acceler-
ated process of the globalized markets (Trentin 2012: 43).
The third industrial revolution is portrayed as the passage from the
motorway network to the digital network (Stiegler, Giffard, and Faur 2009:
2732), the information economy, and the rise of new technologies. This
transition, as Trentin demonstrates, is what the Left did not think and con-
tinues to refuse to think when it is calling for more purchasing power
instead of struggling against proletarianization itself (Stiegler 2012: 231).
For Stiegler, the slogan of increasing peoples purchasing power belongs
to the populist discourse that comforts the second industrial model, no
longer relevant in a service-based economy and cultural capitalism, since
this old model is in fact already overcome. Politicians should be calling
instead for an increase of purchasing knowledge (Stiegler 2013b: 331).
In pointing out the Fordist compromise, Stiegler does not target the
welfare state as such since it has been continuously under attack from the
1970s onward. Instead, he attempts to reformulate the political question in
terms of consumerism and even hyperconsumption. The consumer is
the new proletarian figure, and the proletariat, very far from disappearing,
has become a conditionproletarianizationfrom which it has become
nearly impossible to escape (Stiegler 2011a: 35; translation modified).
Demanding more purchasing power implies for Stiegler to demand, instead
of reconsidering the value of work and work as value, more proletarianiza-
tion and the impoverishment of the consumer, an impoverishment of both
her savoir-faire (know-how) and savoir-vivre (knowing-how-to-live).7 With
7. John Hutnyks Marxist deterministic proposition entirely misinterprets Stieglers pre-

cise notion of proletarianization: There is the possibility of going further here, to prole-

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hyperconsumption, individuals have become addicted to consumption.8

Capitalism has ceased to be a destructive creation, as Joseph Schum-
peter famously argued, but has been turned into a destructive destruction
(Stiegler 2013b: 34751), and this is due to the acceleration of technical
novelty. Technical novelty has required a social readjustment as Bertrand
Gille demonstrated, but today the threat of the obsolescence of forms of
life has increased with such extreme intensity that it is philosophys role to
slow down technical life and diagnose the threats and the hopes of these
obsolescences.
Today, these forms of life (the family structure, social institutions
such as universities or schools but also associations and organizations) do
not simply become obsolete but are interrupted, short-circuited, and ever-
more shuffled. The obsolescence of technologies is not organized techni-
cally but planned economicallyhence the expression planned obsoles-
cence. This is what Stiegler means by the proletarianization of savoir-vivre:
In the most general way [hyperconsumption] deprives consumers of

their savoir-vivre, forcing them to constantly try to keep up with the
obsolescence of things. This is so because the milieu has become
fundamentally unfaithful, but according to a rhythm that no longer
permits the production of new forms of fidelity, or of pathos producer
of philia, or of trust, and it is the result of a much larger process
tarianize it all, and taking up Marxs nuanced consideration of proletarianization in a wider

sense, suggesting that what is called incivility and delinquency are indeed the opposition,
or at least part of, and beginning of, an organised resistance to that which would reduce
all of life to marketing controls. . . . A Marxist interpretation of the present crisis should
not stop with a diagnosis of ruin. The recognition and incivility are not enough, and we
may need rather more delinquents, and considerable civil unrest, before a revolutionary
call to attention gains ground. Paradoxically, Hutnyks Marxism falls back to the status
quo and the same social-democrat policies of prescribing more consumption and pro-
letarianization. He also points out how Stiegler does not see the possible multiple and
non-linear time that an exposure to television produces and the deep attention it can
solicit; he asks, why not grant the possibility that these forms have a role in progres-
sive political transformation as well? (149). But this is precisely what Stiegler does and
has been doing in his philosophical project and outside the walls of philosophy since the
1980s! See Hutnyk 2012. Having written this essay in 2014, I read Shawna Vescos essay
(2015) a year later. While we seem to refer to similar grounds, her goal is other: she does
not make the notion of proletarianization dialogue with debates in political economy but
wants instead to demonstrate the link via Maurice Blanchots thought of disaster between
Stieglers first philosophy (from the Technics and Time series) and his more recent work.
8. On hyperconsumption as being addictive and toxic, see Stiegler 2006b (12223).

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that, as absolute pharmakon, thereby deprives political leaders of

the very possibility of making decisions and deprives scientists of
the capacity to theorize their practice, that is, to form long circuits.
(Stiegler 2013c: 53)
This planned obsolescence leads to a situation in which computers

or mobile phones are meant to last two years, fridges five years, and so on,
to stimulate consumption. It is partly this constant change in pharmaka that
leads to a situation of generalized frustration, not only with the production
of new needs and the destruction of desire but by the economic demands to
adapt constantly to new pharmaka, and to render impossible the processes
of adoption. The distinction between adaptation and adoption has been at
the heart of Stieglers political philosophy since Technics and Time, 3: The
Time of Cinema. The capitalist system demands constant adaptation to a
changing environment, not by having its subjects participate in this change
but by having them passively (and tacitly) adapt to it. Adaptation is one of
the primary targets of Stieglers new Ideologiekritik, and it is combated by
inventing wild and creative forms of adoptionsand not merely by resisting
the adaptive prerogatives (Moore 2013: esp. 2433).
This shift from the proletarianization of the producer as Marx diag-
nosed it in Grundrisse to the proletarianization of the consumer, as first
described and critiqued by Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard in 196770,
has an evident consequence (Debord [1967] 1995; Baudrillard [1970] 1998).
Consumption in a hyperindustrial and service-based economy has replaced
production: consumption is the continuation of production by other means.
With the development of new means of communication (mobile, the Inter-
net) and new technologies (robots and automata of all kinds), the time of
the consumer is increasingly spent on performing tasks that workers used
to do: self-checkouts, cashpoints, and online ticket reservations are the
best examples of this paradigm.
While the victim of the first form of proletarianization was the pro-
ducer, especially the industrial worker, the second form of proletarianiza-
tion mainly has affected the consumer, especially those members of the
middle class who had access to more and more retail areas (the depart-
ment store and the supermarket, then the shopping center and the online
retailer). Generalized proletarianization, the third form of proletarianization,
is then logically defined by its mass propagation. It can be associated with
the third industrial revolution (post-Fordism), even though there is no radi-
cal break; rather, there are hybrid forms of proletarianization during the

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second half of the twentieth century, with generalized proletarianization

being the intensification of the previous two forms of proletarianization (of
the producer and the consumer) (Stiegler 2011a: 6263).
As I noted earlier, the consumer is the new proletarian, but when
Stiegler advances this statement, he is careful to point out that this is a con-
dition no one can escape. In this sense, the proletarianization of the con-
sumer is always already a generalized proletarianization, but the distinction
is nonetheless significant in understanding the degrees in the intensifi-
cation of proletarianization. What Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
diagnosed in 1944 as the culture industry anticipated in this respect the
generalization of proletarianization. With the culture industry, sustained
thought is out of the question: it leaves no room for imagination or reflec-
tion on the part of the audience. Instead, spectators are expected to react
automatically (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 12627; also see Stiegler
2011b: 3540). Adorno and Horkheimer anticipated this since they theo-
rized the film industry as having a totalizing power over the real life of indi-
viduals. With new communication networks, using both analog and digital
technologies, information has become a commodity that is transferrable via
cables and satellites to organize systematically the synchronization of con-
sciousnesses. Generalized proletarianization for Stiegler is defined by the
combined loss of savoir-faire, savoir-vivre, and savoir-thoriser (theoretical
knowledge), reducing the consumers existence to a subsistence by liqui-
dating her singularities (Stiegler 2011a: 63, 87; Stiegler 2006c: 23637). It
is only from there that it will be become clear why Stiegler considers the
amateurthat is, everyoneto be a revolutionary agent.
Due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, marketing has been
used increasingly to compensate for the lack of use-value of new com-
modities, by stimulating the drives of the consumers and by first target-
ing the vulnerability of children who have not fully developed their capacity
to transform their drives into desires.9 Marketing strategies are operated
through social media, mass media, and Hollywood, and these knowledge
and information industries have turned consciousnesses into raw materi-
als (Stiegler 2013a: 36). While in the second industrial revolution, goods
were exchanged and consumedthey were circulating capital, as defined
by Marxin the third industrial revolution what is sold has no intrinsic value
and the targets are not individuals but consciousnesses (consciousnesses
9. This is argued in Stiegler 2010b.

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are markets [36]). This leads Stiegler to define the present economic sys-
tem as a drive-based capitalism that exploits all forms of attention to fab-
ricate, reproduce, diversify, and segment the needs of consumers (24;
Stiegler 2013c: 79134). The financialization of the economy based on the
development of public and private debt has created a speculative economy
that is based on the frenetic satisfaction of drives and on short-term think-
ing. As Stiegler notes in his lectures on the proletarianization of sensibility,
even (or especially) in the art world, it is no longer a matter of taste and
judgment: speculating on the art market has become the rule. Hypercon-
sumption ultimately leads to a destruction (consummation) of all objects
and relations rather than to the creation of objects of desire through libidinal
and financial investments. It is in this context that the power of the notion
of proletarianization aims at providing an alternative to workers struggles
and demands.
In tats de choc (States of Shock), Stiegler extends his argument
about generalized proletarianization with the controversial claim that sys-
temic stupidity is the central feature of our contemporary times.10 While
proletarianization is minimally defined by the loss of knowledge (this knowl-
edge can be lost over generations, yet it is increasingly experienced during
a single lifetime), stupidity is the pharmacological condition of all knowl-
edge. Stieglers analysis of stupidity is based on the already mentioned
Adorno and Horkheimer, but most centrally on Gilles Deleuzes commen-
tary of Friedrich Nietzsches saying that the task of philosophy is to harm
stupidity.11 For Deleuze, stupidity should not be confused with errors; it is
not the negation or the destruction of thought but a base way of thinking
(Deleuze 2006: 105), hence the relation between knowledge/thinking and
stupidity is not oppositional but one of process or continuum. This analysis
of stupidity is then read through the prism of Stieglers interpretation of the
myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus, developed in the first volume of the
Technics and Time series.12 The problem here, related to my discussion of
10. This notion of systemic stupidity was briefly introduced in Stiegler 2013c (2223,
131).
11. Deleuze always referred to this as the mission of philosophy. In Abcdaire (filmed
in 198889), he notes, People pretend that philosophy is after all only good for after-
dinner conversations, but if philosophy did not exist, we cannot imagine the level of stu-
pidity. . . .The same goes if there were no art, we cannot imagine the vulgarity of people.
The world would not be what it presently is if there were no art, people would no longer
care [les gens ne se tiendraient plus] (Deleuze 2004: n.p.).
12. See Stiegler 2013b, chap. 10, Epimetheuss Stupidity (21839).

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the difference between alienation and proletarianization earlier on, is the

risk of conflating proletarianization with stupidity, and in this way dehistori-
cizing specific cases of proletarianization. The true originality of Stieglers
argument about proletarianization is to allow for a new image of the prole-
tariat, which is not reducible to the working class but encompasses every-
one. This new image of the proletariat gives a potentiality to everyone and
does not simply assign to a certain group the heavy burden of leading the
emancipatory process. Everyone is an amateurthat is, a curator, an art-
ist, a philosopher, or a critic potentiallybut also: no one escapes the con-
ditions of stupidity and proletarianization. However, this generalization that
Stiegler adopts also muddles the concept itself.
There is a tendency or a temptation in Stieglers work to general-
ize proletarianization to too many instances, to raise the notion of prole-
tarianization as a universal category. This is particularly evident when he
refers to Plato as the first thinker of proletarianization (Stiegler n.d., n.p.;
Stiegler 2010a: 2936).13 The specific form of proletarianization that Plato
diagnosed in Phaedrus regarding writing informs a general theory of prole-
tarianization, but one cannot but wonder if all processes of proletarianiza-
tion, from 5 BC until today in 2014, can really be equated or be reduced to
a single symptom. Specific technical objects and systems operate different
forms of attention and care to which correspond specific and incommen-
surable instances of disindividuation and proletarianization. For instance,
the case of forgetting how to spell words because of the use of word pro-
cessors when writing creates problems that cannot be compared with Alan
Greenspans avowal of his loss of knowledge in the workings of the finan-
cial economy (47). The obvious disadvantage of this generalization is that it
potentially discourages action if too many things are going wrong. There is
thus a need for more specific, spatiotemporally situated diagnoses.
There are different instances of proletarianization that are produced
but these cannot be confused with stupidity as a transcendental structure of
thought (as Deleuze defines it). On the contrary, proletarianization needs to
be analyzed historically, in relation to the stages of grammatization, instead
of raising it as an eternal condition that has existed since Plato. Stiegler is
right to argue that Plato (and Socrates) condemns some forms of writing in
Phaedrus since this process of exteriorizing ones memory implies a forget-
13. Stiegler writes, What Socrates describes in Phaedrus, namely that the exteriorization
of memory is a loss of memory and knowledge, has today become our everyday experi-
ence in all aspects of our existence, and more and more often, in the feeling of our power-
lessness [impuissance] (2010a, 29; translation modified).

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

on his project of conducting a general organology to study the relations and
the transductive relations between biological, technical, and social organs.14
For Stiegler, radical politics should be focused on individuating with the
present capitalist organization since a brutal interruption of capitalism as a
social organization could be more detrimental to these other organs than
the current situation: Capitalism must go to the end of its process, and we
remain utterly ignorant about the way this will turn out. On the other hand,
we can describe this process and what, in it, threatens to brutally interrupt
it. This process is the expression of becoming insofar as it is always duplici-
tous, that is, tragicand what I here call combat is less the class struggle
than it is the struggle between tendencies (Stiegler 2011a: 57).
Stiegler wants to save becoming and individuation from the double
tendency of the current form of capitalism to hypersynchronize or hyper-
diachronize (Stiegler 2004: 1056). The hypersynchronization is organized
through television and advertisement, producing on an industrial scale simi-
lar behaviors and modes of living (the same fast foods, the same television
programs or music, the same working hours, the same teaching curricula),
opposing all forms of diachrony or differences. Hyperdiachronization is the
speculation of singularities to oppose all forms of synchrony, usually by cre-
ating intimate societies and associations (this is especially valid for the arts,
but the principle can be extended to all forms of work), whose very principle
of existence rests on an immunization and an exclusion of others, leading
to pathologies such as anomie (a-nomos) or scapegoating (pharmakos).
The Internet permits these hyperdiachronic groups to develop and emerge
in unprecedented ways, and they are speculative and have self-referential
practices, often having no reference to reality. Traders speculating all day
long on financial markets can also be said to foster a tendency of hyperdia-
14. The notion of transductive relations comes from Simondon: a relationship which con-
stitutes the elements themselves; they could not exist without each other. In the case of
Stiegler, the technical object (the what) is co-constitutive of the subject (the who): the
what invents the who as much as it is invented by it (Stiegler 1998: 177).

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chronization; this is why the punk slogan no future has paradoxically been
taken seriously by bankers and has been implemented (Berardi 2012).15
In tats de choc, Stiegler demonstrates the limits of poststructural-
ism and its paradoxical complicity with the neoliberalization of society:
poststructuralism called for resistance without proposing alternatives.
French speculative philosophy allowed for the development of the specu-
lative economy. His philosophical project is to propose a new model and
enunciate its axioms, against a certain melancholic Left that has resigned
into communist nostalgia or Marxist idealism. Hyperdiachrony and hyper-
sychrony are overcome in Stieglers project by laying out how a new indus-
trial model, organized by a new public power, should take place. In invest-
ing massively, this new public power should aim to explore and redefine
the role of new technologies and their possibilities in the social, elaborating
therapeutic practices to (constantly) fight the toxicity of the pharmakon and
liberate new processes of individuation and transindividuation. His phar-
macology of capitalism requires first an analysis of the symptoms not of
society but of the flows and processes of psycho-collective individuations.
This is one of the distinctive aspects of his reading of capitalism that he
shares with Simondon as well as Deleuze and Flix Guattari: Stiegler does
15. In this text, Franco Bifo Berardi makes the interesting parallel between poetry and
finance: the experimental forms of twentieth- century poetry and writing anticipated,
according to him, the dereferentialization of speculative economy: The experience of
French and Russian symbolism broke the referential-denotative link between the word
and the world. . . . This magic of post-referential language anticipated the general pro-
cess of dereferentialization that occurred when the economy became a semio-economy.
The financialization of the capitalist economy implies a growing abstraction of work from
its useful function, and of communication from its bodily dimension. As symbolism experi-
mented with the separation of the linguistic signifier from its denotational and referential
function, so financial capitalism, after internalizing potencies, has separated the mone-
tary signifier from its function of denotation and reference to physical goods (Berardi
2012: 1819).
But Berardi also believes in the power of poetry and that it will start the process of
reactivating the emotional body, . . . social solidarity, . . . [and] the desiring force of
enunciation (20). This comparison of two forms of hyperdiachronization is very interest-
ing because, on the one hand, Berardi presents financial speculation as a practice that
has a tendency to reduce everything to calculation (through the destruction of the time
of decision by using robots that trade on markets in nanoseconds) and, on the other,
self-
referential sentences that break from grammar and whose reading requires an
extreme attention and reduces all things to belief (or even meditation). Both of these are
opposed either to belief or to calculation, but following Stiegler, it should not be a matter
of opposing calculation to belief (Stiegler 2011a: 47; translation modified).

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not focus on national economies but on the flows and processes that indi-
viduals as psycho-collective individuals create. These psycho- collective
individuations are in turn constituted and conditioned by technical tools,
and these tools also individuate, by changing their functions through new
assemblages. Stiegler understands capitalism as the global configuration
of these assemblages through capitalisms retentional circuits.
By turning trust and credit into objects of possible calculation, the
(hyper)industrialists have participated in the liquidation of belief as experi-
ence of the indeterminacy of the future (Stiegler 2011a: 16): It is not a
matter of opposing the capitalist process but, on the contrary, of enabling it
to see out its term, that is, of avoiding its self-destruction, and hence per-
mitting its transformation, and perhaps thereby engendering, some day,
a wholly other organization of individuation (4041; translation modified).
For Stiegler, we do not know the end of capitalism because we only
live in an associated milieu and cannot see past our current organization
of individuation. More importantly even, this associated milieu has become
dissociated, and singularities that bear witness to the indeterminacy of
the future have been endangered when they should have been protected.
There can be no evolution or revolution of capitalism without these singu-
larities and the therapeutic struggles to take care of the new commerce
(Stiegler 2010a: 50).16 Therefore, Stieglers question can be formulated this
way: How can we imagine what postcapitalism could look like if we can-
not even see beyond the short-term satisfaction of drives? He denounces
certain forms of anticapitalism as being oppositional and therefore ideal-
ist, while he argues that we need to cultivate a compositional politics that
would allow for tendencies and singularities to be articulated and produce
a new dynamism: combating a tendency within a process means, first of
all, thinking this process as the articulating of a dual [double] tendency,
which is what makes it dynamic (Stiegler 2011a: 37).17 It is not a matter
of opposing anticapitalism as such but of reconstituting alternatives by a
dynamic composition that will allow for the individuation, and perhaps the
transfiguration, of capitalism itself. He writes, The belief that the capitalist
16. It should be noted that Stiegler makes a distinction between commerce and mar-
ket from volume 1 of the Disbelief and Discredit series; his argument is that the market
has destroyed commerce. Commerce is always an exchange of savoir-faire and savoir-
vivre. . . . On the other hand, however, the consumerist market presupposes the liquida-
tion of both savoir-faire and savoir-vivre (2010a: 16).
17. See also the excellent article by Daniel Ross, Politics and Aesthetics, or, Transforma-
tions of Aristotle in Bernard Stiegler (2007).

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process needs is at its core an-economic (46). This an-economic is the

domain of life that cannot be reduced to basic necessities: subsistence.
However, the problem raised here by Stieglers project of deproletariani-
zation is its compatibility with the existing form of capitalism. Stiegler hesi-
tates on this question, especially since it is related to copyright laws and the
problem of accessI will return to this later.
However, Stieglers position on capitalism derives from his philo
sophical project of general organology. General organology is the larger proj
ect in which pharmacology (together with critique) functions as the method-
ological device to diagnose the toxicity and the curability of the pharmaka.18
General organology is always already political since it proposes to rethink
the relations between biological organs, technical organs, and social orga-
nization and their co-individuation in the socius. General organology draws
from the original practice of organology in musicology, which is the study
of the history of musical instruments, their practices, and their social roles
in all civilizations and historical periods. Yet general organology is not lim-
ited to the study of musical instruments but takes into account all technical
instruments and their effects on biological and social organs. The Internet is
today the most complex pharmakon due to the increasing role that it plays
in our lives (especially in the last six or seven years, with smartphones and
tablets), and it should be the subject of a pharmacology that maps out the
short circuits it creates as well as the long circuits of transindividuation it
produces in its assemblages with other pharmaka. General organology in
this sense is a politics of protentions,19 projecting new assemblages and
practices for transindividuations to come.
18. An interesting variation on pharmacology is Paolo Vignolas project of symptoma-

tology that attempts to diagnose the symptoms that erode societies: It is only once
symptoms are individuated and analyzed at the heart of society that it is possible for
Stiegler to practice a pharmacology to act in a therapeutic manner on a malaise, and to
eventually reverse it into a chance to learn, much like what happened to Epimetheus, the
Titan that experienced, through his defaults, his own stupidity (Vignola 2013: 41415).
19. Protention is defined in Edmund Husserls philosophy, and borrowed by Stiegler, to
designate the capacity to project oneself and the collective toward the future, whereas
retention is the action of retainingthat is, memory. The whole of Stieglers philosophy
is based on the conceptual distinction between three kinds of memory: primary retention
(personal recollections), secondary retention (collective memory, like history or a lan-
guage), and a third retention (technological memory, developed from Derridas concept of
trace). While retention refers to the past (but a past that is not static but dynamic and
therefore can individuate), protention means here the future (projects) and the capacity
to individuate these projections, and possible realities (expectations). It is this capacity

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

Question of Tertiary Protentions
Before analyzing some of Stieglers propositions for a deproletar-

ianization, it is crucial to envisage deproletarianization as a politics of pro-
tention, in the same way Stiegler refers to other politics of protention in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
What took place during the course of the nineteenth and twenti-
eth centuries was the organization of the capitalist protentionali-
zation of the world, which consisted firstly in the disenchantment
of the legitimating powers and the secularization of beliefs: not in
their destruction, but in their transformation into calculable beliefs,
including through the harnessing of scientific beliefs by the pro-
duction apparatus in order to devise ways of transforming matter,
nature, technique, human beings, and behavior. This transforma-
tion of belief was able to accomplish enormous gains in production
throughout the nineteenth century, enabling new forms of member-
of projection (to project oneself) in the long term that defines the (psycho-social) invest-
ment in the objects of desire.

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ship and social cohesion within the social project, carried out by
the bourgeoisie through the development of schools, through the
engagement it made possible with national history, etc.
In the twentieth century, the mobilization of libidinal energies took
place through the capturing and harnessing of protentions via chan-
neling of attention. It was thus a matter of elaborating [tendre] an
industrial protention . . . and thus of overcoming the contradiction in
which consists in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
In the course of the recent crisis, this protentional system col-
lapsed, after having run out of control as it was driven toward an
ever-more extreme short- termism, reaching the limit of its self-
annihilation. (Stiegler 2010a: 6769; emphasis in original; transla-
tion modified)
Deproletarianization requires conducting a general organology,

but this general organology has to diagnose the protentions in the
co-individuations of biological, technical, and social organs, that is, the
organizations of the powers to project and to expect.20
Protentional politics is the capacity to throw thoughts; it is a certain
becoming-projectile of politics by placing desire at its heart. The question
of protention differs from deproletarianization. While deproletarianization is
the conquest of knowledge, protention is construction of the future through
primary, secondary, and tertiary mediums. The relation between retentions
and protentions is not that of a simple correspondence. It is, rather, ana-
logic or reticulary. It is, indeed, through an ecology of spirit (after Gregory
Bateson), that relations between primary, secondary, and tertiary reten-
tions and primary, secondary, and tertiary protentions can be established.
However, the question of these protentions remains underdeveloped in
Stieglers work.
Collective secondary protentions are defined as a process that con-
stitutes horizons of expectation (Stiegler 2011a: 112) and are determined
in the same way as singular primary protentions by tertiary retentions (that
are technical objects).21 To my knowledge, Stiegler hardly ever mentions
tertiary protentions. The only example of tertiary retention that he pro-
20. This is what the Greek word, elpis, means: expectation (that is, protention), at once
hope and fear (Stiegler 2011a: 45).
21. Stiegler also notes that for him these collective secondary protentions are related to
what he calls consistences; this notion comes from Husserls idealities. They make up
the pre-individual fund (he uses here Simondons vocabulary). See also Stiegler 2011a
(92, 11116); and Stiegler 2013c (19).

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vides is money (as coins or banknotes).22 This is surprising since, follow-

ing Stiegler, tertiary protentions will be the materialization of attention and
expectations, for he often defines protentions as objects of desire (Stieg-
ler 2013b: 29). The dollar bill famously bears the inscription In God we
trust, recalling Benjamin Franklins sermon that time is money and credit
is money (Stiegler 2011a: 6667). This trust inscribed on the banknote is
the transformation of belief into a calculable trust that is credit. According
to Stiegler, this process has led with hyperconsumption to the destruction
of belief through the calculation of trust and to the exhaustion of trust and
credit (what he calls discredit), bringing capitalism on the verge of self-
destruction (71; see also 8589).
But one could think of many more objects of desire than money. For
instance, when Fredric Jameson argues in Archaeologies of Utopia that
utopias are desires with a textual existence in the present, this is compat-
ible with Stieglers notion of tertiary retention and the speculative and the
mysterious (or even mystagogic) notion of tertiary protention.23 Tradition-
ally, utopias are first and foremost texts that have a materialitythey are
archives of desiresand intend to produce universal expectations as well
as material ones (constituting a political party, quitting ones job, etc.). This
is probably not the case for other literary genres. While secondary proten-
tions are shared collectively, tertiary retentionsand through them cer-
tain mysterious tertiary protentionsoverdetermine both primary (psychic)
and secondary (collective) protentions. We could possibly think of other
forms of tertiary protentions, such as constitutions or even religious books
(or objects); Jameson refers to Jean-Jacques Rousseaus projects of con-
22. The term tertiary protention is used in Stiegler 2012 (235). It is also implied in the sec-
tion Economy of Protentions in Stiegler 2010a (6670).
23. Jameson defines utopias as being not only a text but also a desire, what he calls a
Utopian impulse (2007: xiv) or a standing reserve of personal and political energy
(7); it is both form and content. For Jameson, utopian writing is a practice of an abso-
lute formalism in which the new content emerges itself from the form and is a projection
of it (212); it is a window to the improbable projections of the future, and in this sense
form becomes content (212). The formal aspects of utopia are not only reflected in the
style of writing but in its projects that require a certain form; it is about totalized spaces,
cities, and buildings. The presumption is that Utopia, whose business is the future, or
not-being, exists only in the present, where it leads the relatively feeble life of desire and
fantasy. . . . The aporia of the trace is to belong to past and present all at once, and thus to
constitute a mixture of being and not-being quite different from the traditional category of
Becoming and thereby mildly scandalous for analytical Reason. Utopia, which combines
the not-yet-being of the future with a textual existence in the present is no less worthy of
the archaeological paradoxes we are willing to grant to the trace (xvxvi).

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stitution writing as utopias. Constitutions construct the spirit of the laws

as well as envisage foreseeable historical events (sometimes to prevent
them) (Jameson 2007: 18, 36). Hannah Arendt comments on Woodrow Wil-
son, who criticized Americans for their blind and undiscriminating wor-
ship of the US Constitution; she finds within this worship a positivity and
a strength: Perhaps the political genius of the American people . . . con-
sisted precisely in this blindness, or, to put it another way, consisted in the
extraordinary capacity to look upon yesterday with the eyes of centuries to
come (Arendt 1973: 198).
Arendt is clear that while we usually consider the US Constitution
to be a written document, it is, for the American people, the remem-
brance of the event itselfa people deliberately founding a new body poli-
tic (204), but this can be extended to the hopes and the promises that
this worshiped text contains for the American people. This speculative
excursion on the possible forms tertiary protention would probably have to
turn to objects as supports of cults and faiths, and would have to be histori-
cally and anthropologically studied, since they are specific to the forms of
belief of the community or the social organization.24 As noted earlier, these
examples of tertiary protentions overdetermine primary and secondary pro-
tentions; in the same way, tertiary retentions support both primary and sec-
ondary retentions for Stiegler.
From this short section on protentions and retentions, it is clear why
Stieglers affirmative politicseconomy of contribution and the processes
of deproletarianization25is a project of taking control of retentional and
protentional apparatuses or dispositifs. This can be accomplished through
an ideology critiquethat is, a critique of the ways in which apparatuses
are used: An ideology has less to do with disseminating [diffuser] or infus-
ing [infuser] ideas than to take control of retentional and protentional appa-
ratuses [dispositifs] of technologies of transindividuationand at the time
of Mussolini, then Hitler, these technologies are radio and cinema (Stieg-
ler 2013b: 216).
A new critique of ideology needs not only to know the functioning
networks of information technology but also to take control of them, and to
participate in their making and unmaking, to individuate the most sophisti-
24. The Bible, the Torah, and the Koran, when studied as the only book, will be the first
examples that come to mind, but the most significant example is probably the practices of
Guru Granth Sahib in Sikhism that personify their scriptures as a living guru.
25. Stiegler also uses the term re-capacitation in reference to Amartya Sens capabilities
approach (Stiegler 2013b: 32644).

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cated technical tools that make the associated milieu. What I cannot build,
I cannot understand, the physician Richard Feynman writes.26 However,
this does not mean that revolutionaries should all become computer scien-
tists or technical engineersin the same way that in the 1930s60s the
Marxist revolution did not need intellectuals to become factory workers, and
therefore proletarianized. But there should be a renewed dialogue or even
relations between philosophy and technics: technics should inform philoso-
phy, and vice versa. Following Simondon and others, Stieglers project is
techno-logical: creating a new logos (rationality, or reason) of techne (both
art and science).
Deproletarianization, Economy of Contribution,

and the Rise of the Amateur
A revolutionary process is taking place. It is both technological and

economic, but not yet political (Stiegler 2012: 230). The proletarianization
of decision making is for Stiegler responsible for the disinvestment of the
state and the rise of public debt. Public debts are not the cause of the weak-
ening and the withering of the state but their symptoms. Dogmatic Marxists
resigned in the fight against proletarianization since, for them, communism
is the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hence, the deproletarianization of the
proletariat is not an issue for Marxists: they affirm that there is nothing
beyond proletarianization (223).27 They are not interested in the produc-
tion of new knowledges. The new digital technologies have allowed for new
forms of political movements and rallies (the Occupy movement, the Arab
Spring), but the new territorialization with the digital reticularity has led
to the destruction of the long-term temporality specific to politics and the
media. Significant events or movements can last a very short period (a day
or even a few hours) before being erased from the collective consciousness
by a new video from a politician or the publication of a new opinion poll, and
so on. In this sense, deproletarianization has to produce new knowledges
when the time of the media has been entirely reconfigured.28
Andr Gorz and Maurizio Lazzarato are the two main sources of
inspiration for Stiegler to develop his alternative politics of deproletariani-
26. This quotation is an epigraph in Damasio 2010.

27. I tried to show earlier that Stiegler risks discouraging all struggles against proletarian-
ization when he conflates it with stupidity, making it a transcendental condition.
28. On these questions concerning the reconfigured time of the media, see Tom Vande-
putte (2013: 393412).

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zation: the economy of contribution. Gorz has developed an original phi-

losophy of work that considers the ontological distinction between work and
employment: employment is a rationalized version of work, or, in Stieglerian
terms, employment blocks the processes of individuation and is reduced
to a proletarianized form of work. Yet employment and work should not be
opposed. By referring to Lazzarato and his study of the model of remunera-
tion of artists in France (under the regime of intermittents du spectacle),
Stiegler understands that the main problem is the tendency in recent public
policies to increase the role of employment in ones life and to forget about
other forms of work.29 Employment is a set of rational tasks that are orga-
nized in a megamachine, and individuals are reduced to being servants
to this megamachine with which they do not agree and in which they do not
believe. As Stiegler often acknowledges, Gorz argued in The Immaterial
that open source software has the potential to free work from employment
constraints since it has a high production cost (in terms of labor) but can
also be reproduced almost unlimitedly at a negligible cost (Gorz 2003: 44).
The circulation of such software and the continuous possibility of trans-
formation that it permits lay the foundations for an economy of contribu-
tion, as imagined by Stiegler and his political organization, Ars Industrialis.
The mode of production and circulation of free software is paradigmatic for
Gorz and Stiegler of the transformation of capitalism and the possibilities to
come. In theoretical terms, this allows us to take seriously the question of
work time outside of employment (Stiegler 2010a: 22; emphasis removed).
Gorz raises the problem in terms of applied knowledges or skills
(connaissances) and knowledge (savoir) and also sees the process of pro-
letarianization, but he expresses it in different terms: the great majority
has the knowledge [connat ] of more and more things but knows [sait ] and
understands [comprend ] less and less (Gorz 2003: 111). The problem with
the so-called knowledge economy, according to Gorz, is that we are led to
believe that all forms of knowledge are formalizable or codifiable. The prox-
imity of Gorzs theses on knowledge and Stieglers account of proletarian-
ization is striking.
Yet there are also disagreements between Stiegler and Gorz. The
first one is that Gorz thinks of the new forms of production as immaterial,
whereas Stiegler insists they are hypermaterial. To claim that new tech-
nologies (software or the Internet) operate at the immaterial level is to
retreat into idealism and to dismiss the material inscription of information
29. The question of time spent working cannot be reduced, in other words, to the ques-
tion of time in employment (Stiegler 2010a: 5152). See Corsani and Lazzarato 2008.

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and energy. The notion of hypermaterial, on the other hand, allows us to

think the increasing industrialization and materialization of life. The second
disagreement, which is probably more fundamental, concerns the end of
capitalism and the mutation to new forms of postcapitalist social relations
(Stiegler 2008: 127). Stiegler shares Gorzs understanding of nonrational-
ized work as producing value when he chooses to reinstate the figure of
the amateur, the revolutionary figure par excellence. He also agrees with
Gorzs propositions for a guaranteed basic income (a form of negative
income tax). The death of capitalism for Gorz is not the project of collec-
tivizing all properties (including intellectual property) but the liberation from
employment, when nonrationalized forms of work can become once again
an integral part of ones life:
The task for the left, if the left can continue to exist, is to transform
this liberation of time into a new freedom, and into new rights: the
right for everyone to earn ones life by working, but by working less
and less, better and better, while receiving ones own share of the
socially produced wealth. The right to also work non-continuously
or intermittently without losing the full revenue during the intermit-
tencesin order to open new spaces for activities without an eco-
nomic goal and to recognize a dignity and an inherent value for indi-
viduals as well as for society as a whole, to activities that do not hold
remuneration as the only goal. (Gorz 1990: 23)
What is surprising in Stieglers undecidabilityhe admits not

[being] completely clear on open source software and of not knowing
whether capitalism will be replaced by socialism30is the incompatibility
of his stated rejection of Gorzs and Lazzaratos political positions while
adhering to their economic analyses to feed his arguments about a con-
tributive economy. A new form of value should be cultivated that comes
from a work outside the rationalized form of employment. Stiegler recog-
nizes the imperative to take care of this new form of value, which he calls
30. I myself am not completely clear regarding what I think of the idea of radical free soft-
ware, creative commons, open source, the difference between them and their different
modalities; I havent yet formed a solid view because I think that in order to have a con-
certed viewpoint one must spend a great deal of time studying carefully the organisational
models and questions, which are also the primary questions particularly regarding prop-
erty and industrial property. . . . [My] position is not that of knowing whether capitalism
will be replaced by socialism, communism or who knows what. I think that no one could
respond to that question today; a tremendous amount of work needs to be done theoreti-
cally and practically as well, and this work does not yet exist (Stiegler et al. 2012: 183).

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spirit value (Stiegler 2006a; Stiegler 2013c: 926). For him, the taking
care of new modes of transindividuation happens in this new form of value
insofar as it is not reducible to the exchange-value or even to the use-value.
The excess of consumption has liquidated institutions and belief in gen-
eral, creating economies based on suspicion and discredit rather than on
care and love. Stiegler reinstates the figure of the amateur to imagine what
forms this contributive work could take. His understanding of contributive
work comes close to Gorzs own notion of socially produced wealth based
on existential phenomenology.
Although not named as such, the practice of amateurs was already
conceptualized in certain Autonomia writings, or even in Guattaris notion of
the postmedia.31 Free radios, for instance, first operated with pirate means
before slowly prospering within a legal framework, until they became, a few
years later, increasingly standardized and colonized by advertisements.
In Mystagogies, Stiegler develops this notion of the amateur by
going back to its Latin etymology: amator means the lover, the person
who loves (Stiegler forthcoming). The history of amateurs and their place
in the history of grammatization is evocative of their potential but also of
the hurdles and challenges that await them. In early eighteenth-century
France, the term amateur referred to the aristocratic figure who advised
artists. The amateur was also a mediator, a writer, and a curator. Honor-
ary amateur was a status for those lovers of art who had developed an
acute knowledge and appreciation of art. Denis Diderot criticized them for
favoring pleasure over instruction, taste over judgement. With the French
Revolution, the term took on an unflattering and discrediting meaning: dur-
ing the Revolution, the amateur is driven away by the aristocratic values
which he last incarnated (Jam 2000: 11). With digital networks, the for-
mation of taste communities, which were first made possible in the last
two centuries in small and privileged urban environments of Vienna and
Paris (Guichard 2012),32 is generalized to all social classes. For Stiegler,
the amateur is a revolutionary agent, since in the age of generalized prole-
31. In 1985, Guattari calls for a concerted reappropriation of communication technologies

and computers (2008: 133).
32. In her excellent article Taste Communities, Guichard (2012) recounts the role of the
amateurs during the French monarchy, in sustaining and producing a French school of
painting by keeping art criticism at bay. These closed societies were first directed by the
monarchy against the rise of the artistic public sphere, and they participated in the pro-
duction of knowledge, creating taxonomies from their taste and their choice in collecting.
Erudition and pleasure come together in the amateurs work and its reliance on taste
(rather than judgment).

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

to the formation of masses and understood fascism as the attempt to con-
struct an aesthetic and technological apparatus that gives expression to
the masses while in fact forcing them to adapt to their proletarianized con-
dition rather than adopt a new form of life. That is, the logical outcome of
fascism is an aestheticizing of political life, the culmination of which can
only be, according to Benjamin, war and the nihilistic contemplation of anni-
hilation as aesthetic pleasure (Benjamin 2003: 269). This aestheticizing of
politics, the counterpart of an unnatural use of technological means, could
be countered, he argued, in only one way: Communism replies by politi-
cizing art (270). If one cannot quite conclude from this line of thought that
art has a political function, then it is at least to be hoped (possibly against
hope, possibly not for us) that it contains political potential, that it can pos-
sess collective therapeutic value. But when Bernard Stiegler opens the first
volume of his Symbolic Misery by drawing attention to the reciprocity of the
political question and the aesthetic question, he intends to say not just that
art is political but also that what politics today must question is aesthet-

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ics, that there must be a politics of the aesthetic, that politics itself is chal-
lenged, is placed into question, by contemporary aesthetic developments,
and finally that the failure of political thought to have adequately addressed
the question of art and aesthetics has been catastrophic (Stiegler 2014: 1).
Today, however, the war that is the logical outcome and culmination of this
catastrophe is that economic war that goes by the name of globalization
and that operates according to the rules, or rather the absence of rules, of
what is called neoliberalismeven if there is every reason to believe that
this economic war can very well lead to other wars, on any scale, and more-
over that it has already done just that.
Linking the political and the aesthetic questions, Stiegler immedi-
ately adds that when he uses the term aesthetics, he necessarily does so
in a very broad sense, such that it indicates the whole field of sensation, of
feeling, and of sensibility in general. It is within such a wide understanding
of aesthetics that politics must be understood as addressing the question
of the relation to the other via some kind of collective feeling ( la Aris-
totles philia), a being-together and living-together of singularities that goes
beyond their conflicts of interest. Politics, he says, is the art of securing
the unity of the city in its desire for a common future, and he adds that this
desire assumes a common aesthetic ground. . . . A political community
is, therefore, a community of feeling (2; translation modified). What con-
nects politics and aesthetics, ultimately, is desire, and, specifically, collec-
tive desire.
A crucial source of Stieglers understanding of hominization in gen-
eral and aesthetics in particular is the work of Andr Leroi-Gourhan. For
Leroi-Gourhan in 1965, as for Stiegler forty years later, the point of under-
standing the aesthetic question is very much to grasp something about the
chances for the future of that being which is called human:
We should not be too quick to assert that machines will never appre-
ciate beauty and goodness. They can already reduce truth to sets
of unassailable data, and will probably soon be able, not perhaps to
tell whether representational painting is preferable to abstract paint-
ing, but to set out the statistical relationships between the respec-
tive contents of the two. . . . The electronic apocalypse for its part is
entirely made up of numbers whose demystifying power is immea-
surable. There may be some interest in going over the long story
of evolution yet again, not in order to ask whether evolution has a
meaning . . . but whether we still have a meaning other than as cre-
ators of superhuman machines. (Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 27071)

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Ross/Totally, Tenderly, Tragically109
In Gesture and Speech, as in Stieglers work, the term aesthetics is

employed here in a rather wide sense: Leroi-Gourhan argues that aesthet-
ics connects together the twin poles of the zoological and the social (271).
In other words, the paleontological basis for an understanding of aesthetics
lies in the passage that derives from biological rhythms and ends in social
rhythms (or descends into asocial arrhythmia). In short, aesthetics belongs
within the most general human fact, which for Leroi-Gourhan is that of
exteriorization, that process of putting oneself outside oneself via the tech-
nical gestures of the hand and the linguistic techniques of the tongue, jaw,
and larynx, a process that commenced some two million years ago.
For Leroi-Gourhan, the first question of aesthetics is that of its rela-
tion to the other dimensions of exteriorization: were language and technics
forms of exteriorization critical for the subsistence of the human species,
the advent of which broke a path for the later arrival of figurative and sym-
bolic representation, for an aesthetics that would come to operate as a kind
of enrichment of human existence? Or, on the contrary, and this is the per-
spective that Leroi-Gourhan himself tends to favor, is aesthetics but a third
aspect of exteriorization, in addition to technics and language? Rather than
a staged evolution in which at some point after the advent of technics and
language there arises an aesthetic sense, obliging us to find out where
that sense fits into the mechanism of our brain (275), it would instead be
a matter of identifying the manifold stages and dimensions of a single pro-
cess of exteriorization:
Stages in aesthetic evolution comparable to the transition from

the mythogram to writing and from the hand tool to the automatic
machine would have to be found in historic timesan artisanal
or preindustrial period in aesthetics in which the arts and social
and technical aesthetics had reached their peak at the individual
level, followed by a specialization stage in which the dispropor-
tion between the producers of aesthetic material and the increas-
ingly large mass of consumers of prefabricated or prethought art
became accentuated. (275)
For Leroi-Gourhan, then, aesthetics is probably best understood as one

of three dimensions of exteriorization, connecting the biological and the
social aspects of hominization. The opening up of exteriority via the word
and the artifact is matched by an exteriority of sensation, of rhythm, and of
aesthetic form.
This thought is crucial to Stieglers own understanding of exterioriza-

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tion and specifically of its aesthetic dimension, which in The Decadence of

Industrial Democracies he explains in terms of what he calls ex-clamation,
the fact that sensory experience is, for an exclamatory soul, a noetic
experience. Such a being, for whom experience is not only sensory but
sensational, enlarges its sense by exclaiming it symbolically (Stiegler
2011: 133). This use of the term symbolic thus fits with the sense of a gap or
break that originally referred to an artifact, such as a ring or a piece of pot-
tery, broken in two, which could then be fitted and rejoined, for instance in
recognition of a friendship and hence of a community of feeling. As Martin
Heidegger highlights, the symbol, in so doing and as such, refers through
something sensuous to something nonsensuous, and, as Jean-Luc Nancy
highlights, this nonsensuous thing, the friendship, this feeling, is what is
real, but real only in its representation, its image, which, in Stieglers
terms, is less its reality than its consistence and the possibility of the
enlargement of the beings so joined (Heidegger 1996: 16; Nancy 2000:
5758).1 In other words, the advent of the symbolic opens not just the pos-
sibility of abstraction but the dimension of idealization, that is, of the infinite,
giving access to what does not exist but consists.
But in Stieglers case, a full understanding of what this means
requires that it be placed in relation not just to Leroi-Gourhans account
of aesthetico-technico-linguistic exteriorization but to Gilbert Simondons
account of psychic and collective individuation. If aesthetic exterioriza-
tion in Leroi-Gourhans sense is the articulation of two kinds of rhythms
biological and socialthen this is possible only because whereas for ani-
mal species the group, such as the herd, is the true individual, for the
anthropic species individuality is distributed between its singular members
and the collective composed of these singularthat is, incommensurably
differentiatedindividuals. In other words, if the consequence of the unfold-
ing of the exteriorization process is the addition of a third form of memory
to that of genetic inscription and neuronal memory, that is, the addition
of technical memory, then what this also implies is the loosening of the
genetic program, both in terms of the latitudes of individual behavior and in
terms of the level at which the group is differentiated, which ceases to be
that of the species and becomes, in Leroi-Gourhans terms, the ethnic, or,
in Stieglers more general terms, the idiomatic.
The Simondonian aspect of this lies in the fact that for this phi-
1. Stiegler turns to this connection between the symbolic and friendship on the very last
page of Symbolic Misery, in relation not quite to fascism or Nazism but to those who
share the ideas of, or are willing to vote for, the National Front (2014: 98).

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losopher of becoming it is crucial to know the level at which processes of

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

tion to a we of collective individuation (my individuation occurs
only insofar as it occurs in you); conversely, the we can be
thought only in terms of a collectivity of distinct Is for whom such
a we consists (my individuation occurs through the individuation
of a group to which I belong, but to which I cannot be reduced).
As these are individuation processes, the I and the we are always
inevitably incomplete, on the way to being a completed I or we
that never arrives (corresponding to the mortality of individuals
in the Heideggerian sense and of civilizations in the Valrian
sense).2
Secondly, what mediates, connects, and binds the I and the we
is technics, and specifically technics insofar as all technics is in
some way retentional, an inscription into matter through which an
2. Stiegler argues in Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998) that Heideg-
gers account of the mortality of Dasein, that is, of the certain but indeterminate knowl-
edge that Dasein has of its end, that is, of the incompletion of its psychic individuation, is
made possible by Heideggers (1992) analysis of the clock, which he conducts in 1924 in
The Concept of Time, but that Heidegger represses the technical basis of this knowledge
by the time he writes Being and Time. Similarly, Paul Valry opened his 1919 Crisis of the
Mind with the declaration that civilizations have, after the First World War, discovered
that they are mortal, in The Outlook for Intelligence (1962: 23). For Stiegler, this discovery
corresponds at the level of collective individuation to the knowledge that Dasein has of its
own mortality, and he adds that today this knowledge of the possibility of self-destruction
has turned into a widespread feeling of the possibility of impending apocalypse. See
Stiegler 2013b (119); and Stiegler 2013c (9).

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encounter is staged between the I and the we: technics, Stiegler

says, is the and of psychic and collective individuation.
Finally, technics is itself a process of individuation, and just as
psychic individuation occurs through collective individuation and
vice versa, so too both psychic and collective individuation occur
through the individuation of the technical system. Psychic and
collective individuation inevitably entail technical individuation,
even if for the majority of the history of hominization this occurred
at a rate that was imperceptibly slow.
Leroi-Gourhans paleontological perspective, according to which the aes-

thetic must be understood as belonging to a general process of exteriori-
zation that unfolds as the two-million-year history of hominization, is thus
rooted by Stiegler in his own account, based on Simondon, of the three-
fold process of psychic, collective, and technical individuation. One conse-
quence of this is to uproot the account of exteriorization from its scientific
basis in order to displace it onto more philosophical terrain.
Such a characterization of Stieglers operation is undoubtedly too
stark, insofar as it presumes science and philosophy to form an opposition,
a presumption that would run counter to Stieglers own compositional phi-
losophy (Ross 2013a: 24546). Nevertheless, the starting point of Simon-
dons thought is the rejection of the presupposition that there would be
some principle of individuation underlying the process itself that it would
then be a matter of uncovering: to do so would be to locate the individuality
of the principle as prior to the individuation itself, whereas it is the process
itself that must be considered primordial (Simondon 1992: 298). Further-
more, if the only way to know individuation is to pursue this individuation,
then not only must we say that this knowledge always remains incomplete,
but we must also conclude that understanding individuation, as itself an
individuation process, necessarily and essentially involves the individua-
tion of an I who pursues this individuation of knowledge: there must be a
who of the process, a who always itself incomplete (Stiegler 2009: 6).
If, as Simondon argues, the thought of individuation leads to the possi-
bility of a reform of fundamental philosophical notions (Simondon 1992:
316), then it does so from within this context of understanding philosophy
as the pursuit of individuation by an individuating who. This is why philo-
sophical knowledge is always also a nonknowledge. And, finally, it is the
fact that this knowledge is a nonknowledge that also means that the future
is not the inevitability of the unfolding of a process that we would somehow

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already know: it is for this reason that Stiegler argues that the future can-
not be reduced to becoming, and that scientism, if not science, is what we
must struggle against (Stiegler 2009: 43); and it is also for this reason that
the basis of philia is the modesty or reserve that stems from the Prome-
thean and Epimethean nonknowledge of the fragility of human prostheticity
(Stiegler 2014: 12).
With this gap between becoming and future, we are, therefore,
returned to politics as the art that aims toward the unity of the polis in
the desire for a common future, a desire grounded in a shared aesthetic
fund and that amounts to a community of feeling. Desire, here, is explicitly
understood to be that which is not reducible to the drives, the latter being
capable of supplying only the finite satisfactions of the needs of subsis-
tence. Rather, it is the transformation of the drives into the motives of exis-
tence, where these motives are directed, precisely, to what does not exist,
to what Heidegger would call the nonsensuous, to that which one might
not be able to find but on which it is also not possible to give up. Desire, so
conceived, is directed, therefore, to what does not exist but consistsat
infinity. It is an infinite process, directed to infinity. Desire is the diffrance of
the drives, just as the future is the diffrance of becoming, just as the aes-
thetics of the exclamatory soul is the diffrance of the sensory apprehen-
sion of the animal soul.
The significance of this reference to diffrance lies, before anything
else, in indicating the connection between these distinctions and the gram-
matological character of technics, that is, the fact that the inscriptive char-
acter of all technics amounts to the spatialization of time. Stiegler in fact
both generalizes and narrows Jacques Derridas account of the trace: for
Derrida, the inscriptive character of the supplement is thought essentially in
relation to writing, or rather arche-writing, whereas for Stiegler it is crucial
that all technics involves a form of difference and deferral. But Stiegler nar-
rows Derridas understanding insofar as Derrida assimilates the technical
trace to the several-billion-year history of the living trace, which for Stieg-
ler amounts to confounding what it is crucial to distinguish: the inscriptive
character of the technical supplement, as the opening of a third regime of
memory, thus of a new regime of diffrance, effects a break with the living
that is the condition of the distinctions that it then becomes possible to
make between desire and drive, individual and collective, becoming and
future, and the advent of the aesthetic in the exclamatory sense.3
3. On Stieglers critique of Derrida on diffrance, see Ross 2013a (24649).

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But if this sounds like an account of the origin of the exclamatory

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

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several years earlier, resulting in their collaboration as writer and director,

respectively, on the Nazi-themed film noir Hangmen Also Die! (1943). And
it was, of course, a similar journey that Benjamin failed to undertake, in his
attempt to join Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in exile, who them-
selves ended up in Los Angeles in the early 1940s.
These two quotations, from AB and BB, thought conjointly, might
be grasped as conforming perfectly well to Adornos analysis of cinema,
as expressed, for example, in The Schema of Mass Culture, where he
writes, The dream industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the
customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people
(Adorno 1991: 80). Aesthetics is reduced to the sheen of advertising;
images are seized but not contemplated; the secret doctrine that is com-
municated cinematically is that of capital; the presentation of a strikingly
beautiful woman (such as BB) contains the injunction to be like her. Is
Godard not agreeing with Adornos critique when he brings the filmmaker
as purveyor of lies together with the invention of desire (yet another quo-
tation contained in Contempt is by the cinematic inventor Louis Lumire:
cinema is an invention without a future)? And when Jack Palances film
producer says, Whenever I hear the word culture I bring out my check-
book, and Fritz Lang notes that he is paraphrasing the Nazis and sub-
stituting checkbook for pistol (the original line comes from a play by the
Nazi poet and playwright Hanns Johst, even though it is often mistakenly
attributed to Hermann Gring or Heinrich Himmler or Joseph Goebbels), is
Godard not agreeing with Adorno that participation in mass culture itself
stands under the sign of terror (82) and that this ultimate lesson of the
fascist era is already harboured within the very medium of technological
communication (83)? Adorno concludes in an apocalyptic tone:
If indeed the advances of technology largely determine the fate of

society, then the technicized forms of modern consciousness are
also heralds of that fate. They transform culture into a total lie, but
this untruth confesses the truth about the socio-economic base with
which it has now become identical. . . . It depends upon human
beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and
awake from a nightmare which only threatens to become actual as
long as men believe in it. (83)
This is the view that cinema and technicized forms of consciousness and
communication generally are processes that operate via the apparatus of
the radio or the dream factory, and that the outcome of such processes can

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

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As already mentioned, a quotation is read that is mistakenly attributed to

Bazin. Another is correctly attributed to Brecht; the film itself concerns the
attempt to make another film, itself an adaptation of Homers Odyssey. At
the same time, the film quotes from Hollywood history (in particular, Some
Came Running [1958]) and Lang quotes a Hollywood producer (Sam Gold-
wyns Goldwynism, include me out, a kind of antidisindividuationist motto).
There is constant debate between all the protagonists (director, writer, pro-
ducer, assistant) about the relation between the Homeric world and the
modern world, about the place of the individual in the Greek world com-
pared to ours, and about the consequent question of whether this world can
be understood psychologically (and many of these debates reverse the
positions held by the various parties in Moravias novel). The result is that
the central narrativewhich concerns the breakdown of a marriage and
the failed quest by the writer to locate the source of his wifes contemptis
constantly reinterpreted by the viewer, as layer upon layer of tertiary reten-
tion both complicates and explicates the tragic disorders of desire that play
out between the couple through passionate utterances that are anything
but performative.4
Two other quotations are even more notable. Lang, the German (or
rather German-Jewish) film director, discusses Friedrich Hlderlin, that is,
the quintessential poet of the Greco-German relation, and specifically ana-
lyzes the correction Hlderlin makes to his poem on poetry itself, that is,
on art, entitled The Poets Calling. In other words, Hlderlin comes back
to his poem, just as Kant came back to the schemas of Critique of Pure
Reason, and this return of the written text demands alteration from the
author, because Hlderlin (like Kant) has, in the meantime, individuated
himself. And in the Hlderlinian case, and as Lang points out, this cor-
rection marks the moment when it is no longer Gods presence but his
absence that proves to be therapeutic.
This correction might be interpreted as the point at which the mod-
ern world differentiates itself from the ancient world, when the Gods no
longer control the fate of mortals. As Benjamin puts it, humankind, which
once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods,
has now become one for itself (Benjamin 2003: 270). Or it might con-
versely, and perhaps more convincingly, be interpreted as the moment
when Hlderlin himself returns, Homerically, from a Christian conception
4. On the concept of passionate utterance, see Cavell 2005 (15591); and see Ross
2006.

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of divine benevolence to a Greek conception of tragic ambivalence in rela-

tion to the divine. It is for this reason that Lang refers to the fight of the indi-
vidual, of Prometheus and Odysseus, against his circumstances, against
the gods. And it is this latter interpretation that is suggested, for example,
by Giorgio Agambens reading of Hlderlins correction, which he argues
marks the date of birth of poetic atheology, the point at which the divine
and the human alike are ruined, at which poetry opens onto a region that
is uncertain and devoid of a subject, flattened on the transcendental, and
which can be defined only by the Hlderlinian euphemism betrayal of the
sacred (Agamben 1999: 9091).
The other quotation is from Dante, and specifically from the Canto
of Ulysses. Lang recites an edited version: Brothers, who through a hun-
dred thousand perils have made your way to reach the West . . . do not
deny yourself experience of what there is beyond, behind the sun, in the
world they call unpeopled. . . . Consider what you came from. . . . You were
not born to live like mindless brutes but to follow paths of excellence and
knowledge. And Michel Piccoli continues the citation, and does his own
editing: The night already had surveyed the stars. . . . Our celebrations
soon turned into grief. . . . And then the sea was closed again, above us. It
is impossible to hear these lines from Inferno in Contempt, both those read
by Lang that concern the need to remember the paths along which civiliza-
tion has come and the paths along which it should continue, and those read
by Piccoli that seem to evoke the tragic character of knowledge and enlight-
enment, without recalling that it was just these passages that Primo Levi
found so important to try to bring back into his memory in 1944 (the very
year that saw the publication of Dialektik der Aufklrung) and that he later
recalled and recorded in his Auschwitz memoir, If This Is a Man (first pub-
lished in 1958, that is, the year in which Some Came Running was released
and precisely midway between the publication of Moravias novel and the
release of Godards cinematic adaptation).
When Levi, imparting to the Alsatian Jean (not the Piccoli but the
Pikolo of the Lager) his knowledge of Dantes text, recites these lines that
proclaim the noetic soul as intended to be dedicated to paths of knowledge
rather than brutishness and stupidity (or in Stieglers and Deleuzes French,
btise), it was as if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of
a trumpet, like the voice of God (Levi 1979: 119). Going back and hear-
ing it again as if for the first time, Levi describes his own individuation. But
what mattered most, or at least seemed to matter most, was to individuate
himself in the other, in Jean: It is vitally necessary and urgent that he lis-

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ten . . . tomorrow he or I might be dead. . . . I must tell him, I must explain

to him . . . something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash
of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today (121).
And then the reality and the nightmare of the camp soup line returns, and
(even though he would have given the days soup, that is, blood, to be able
to recall and interpret Dantes verses) over our heads the hollow seas
closed up (121). And forty years after publishing If This Is a Man, when Levi
returns to that chapter, and returns again to the Canto of Ulysses, he still
perceives the great value at that time of being able to save from nothing-
ness those memories which today with the sure support of printed paper I
can refresh gratis whenever I wish, and which therefore seem of little value
(Levi 1989: 112). The pharmacological possibilities of the printed word have
never been expressed more totally, tenderly, or tragically.
But it is indeed, then, this question of civilization, of Kultur, of reestab-
lishing a link with the past, saving it from oblivion and reinforcing my iden-
tity (112), that is put into doubt by the processes that accompany the most
recent technologies of communication and consciousness. At stake is the
capacity to project the unity of an I, however fictional, however incomplete,
and hence for these Is to form an equally incomplete and fictional we such
as what we call civilization. The problem, however, is not the technologi-
zation of sound and image that comes with the cinematic age so much as
their industrialization, that is, the way in which they have been deployed
to systematically condition experience in the service of a global war that
depends on continuously increasing consumption.
For the symbolic to function, it is necessary for existence to be
capable of aiming at consistences. Aristotles philia is an example of such a
consistence, a feeling that is total (that is, infinite), tender (that is, caring),
and tragic (that is, refers to something nonexistent), on the basis of which
the political we becomes possible. In a world where the symbolic ceases
to function, nightmares reign as a brute reality devoid of symbolic consis-
tence, the political nightmare of fears, terrors, and panics, and the night-
mares of war and the aesthetic pleasure of annihilation. Stiegler sees this
nightmare aesthetic at work today, within and beyond cinema (Stiegler
2014: 8384), an aesthetic that J. Hoberman refers to as the new real-
ness (Hoberman 2012: 1726; and see Ross 2013b). Does this mean the
images projected today project no future, no hope, that they are in fact not
projective at all?
To understand the answer to this question, we must complicate our
understanding of the projective character of cinema. For an image to affect

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us, it must reach us. But to reach us, to be capable of affecting us, we must
recognize it as such: in that sense, it must be familiar, that is, expected.
And yet to affect us, that is, so that we are individuated by the image, it
must not only be familiar, must not be entirely expected. The cinematic
experience is this combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar image,
expected and unexpected, the composition of what Stiegler also calls the
stereotypical and the traumatypical (Ross 2007: 23046). In other words,
it projects itself into us only insofar as we project ourselves into the image,
and for that reason images are not individuating or disindividuating, stereo-
typical or traumatypical, in themselves (Stiegler 2014: 8586). In fact, there
is no image in itself at all, but only the coproduction of the image, a copro-
duction between the film that is edited and projected and the experience of
that image that is equally edited and projected.
The industrialization of the image is what occurs when there is a
systematic attempt to control that process, and the means of that con-
trol is by synchronizing masses of consciousnesses (for example, through
television) and by reinforcing particular images, that is, by making them
ever more familiar. The combined effect of these two mechanisms is to
make the image fade: there is no diffrance of the image, nothing trauma-
typical, nothing capable of provoking individuation. And to the extent that
such a process reaches its logical outcome, cinema proves to be an inven-
tion without a future, that is, without an indeterminate or incalculable future.
Today, the future of the image is a question of cinema in the widest
sense: it is a question of all the technologies of consciousness and com-
munication through which sound, image, and text are recorded and trans-
mitted. What is the future of film after film, as J. Hoberman asks? Stieglers
way into this question is via another film that explicitly connects our world
and the ancient world of the Greeks: Bertrand Bonellos Tiresia (2003). In
that film, it is a question of blindness and oracles, that is, of the capacity or
otherwise to perceive symbols, to perceive something other than the new
realness of brute reality, a possibility symbolized in Homer in the figure of
Tiresias. But in this film, which begins with the primordiality of lava, in which
it is stated very early on that the copy is better than the original, fake rose
thorns better than real ones, and in which it is suggested that the trans-
sexual (that is, the ambiguity of the sexual) is better than sex, the blind
figure who receives the help of a young girl also recalls Oedipus, who will
become the very figure of Freudian desire (Stiegler 2014: 92).
In this way, desire is brought into conjunction with technics, with the
biochemical and medical technics that make possible the transsexual body,

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and the technicity of the cinematic image itself. And this relation of tech-
nicity and desire has two meanings for cinema. In terms of the synchroniz-
ing of desire that is also disindividuating and therefore destructive of desire
itself, the cinematic contains the possibility of the televisual. In terms of the
relation between desire and drives, cinema essentially contains the pos-
sibility of the pornographic: Stanley Cavell already saw in Godards use
of color during Bardots nude scene in Contempt a commentary on the
pornographization of desire.5 This conjunction of synchronization with the
reduction of desire to drive is performative in J. L. Austins sense: in this
way television is propheticit is a pre-vision (9293). The possibility of
film after film, of a cinema beyond the death of celluloid, lies in the way in
which this struggle is played out between cinema and these two inescap-
able and therefore tragic threats of the televisual and the pornographic.
The premier battleground of this struggle today is the World Wide Web,
and the weapons with which it is being fought are digital. If this battle is
usually understood as a question of the future of a global economy prem-
ised on the incessant growth of consumer desire, it should not be forgotten
that this is a question of the future of sexual desire as well: in terms of the
latter struggle, it is less a question of the sexual body being lost in some
virtual world of pornographic representation than it is a matter of the pro-
letarianization of sexuality itself, that is, the loss of sexual knowledge and
the reduction of sexual desire to the calculable particularities of finite bodily
desires. This asocial sexual arrhythmia is of course just one more aspect of
the consumerization of every part of life that is being played out on Face-
book and all those related technologies of consciousness and communica-
tion that proletarianize the sexuality of young people today. The logical out-
come of this sexual aesthetics, however, threatens to leave these younger
generations, and ultimately all of us, incapable of loving totally, tenderly,
or tragically, imprisoned instead in the solitude and inexpressibility of tele-
visual and pornographic contempt, imprisoned, that is, in a kind of sexual
fascism. How, today, we might wish to ask Benjamin, does communism
reply to that?
5. In the passage in Contempt during which Brigitte Bardot turns her bright body in
bed as part of a questioning of her lover, she is flooded in changing centerfold or calen-
dar hues. Godard perceives here not merely our taste for mild pornography, but that our
tastes and convictions in love have become pornographized, which above all means pub-
licized, externalized (Cavell 1979: 95; emphasis added).

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References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. The Schema of Mass Culture. In The Culture Industry:
Selected Essays on Mass Culture, 5384. London: Routledge.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics. Translated by
Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2003. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro-
ducibility: Third Version, translated by Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott.
In Selected Writings, Volume 4: 19381940, edited by Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings, 25183. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Rev.
ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
. 2005. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Godard, Jean-Luc, et al. 2009. Le Mpris (Contempt). Blu-ray. Paris: Studio Canal.
Heidegger, Martin. 1992. The Concept of Time. Translated by William McNeill.
Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1996. Hlderlins Hymn The Ister. Translated by William McNeill and Julia
Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hoberman, J. 2012. Film After Film; or, What Became of Twenty- First-
Century
Cinema? New York: Verso.
Leroi-Gourhan, Andr. 1993. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock
Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levi, Primo. 1979. If This Is a Man and The Truce. Translated by Stuart Woolf. Lon-
don: Penguin.
. 1989. The Intellectual in Auschwitz. In The Drowned and the Saved, trans-
lated by Raymond Rosenthal, 10220. London: Abacus.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson
and Anne E. OByrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ross, Daniel. 2006. Review of Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow.
Screening the Past 19. www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12/philosophy-the
-day-after-tomorrow/.
. 2007. Politics, Terror, and Traumatypical Imagery. In Trauma, History, Phi-
losophy, edited by Matthew Sharpe, Murray Noonan, and Jason Freddi,
23046. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars.
. 2013a. Pharmacology and Critique after Deconstruction. In Stiegler and
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. 2013b. Review of J. Hoberman, Film after Film. Screening the Past 36. www
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and Sanford Kwinter. In Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and San-

ford Kwinter, 297319. New York: Zone.
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. 2009. Acting Out. Translated by David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick
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Compression in Philosophy
Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRivire
A general history of compressionsuch is the prize of Jonathan

Sternes MP3: The Meaning of a Format, a book devoted to the philosophy
and science of making sound smaller (Sterne 2012: 5; emphasis removed).
Indeed, the theme of compression has begun to appear more and more
within aesthetics, cultural theory, and media theory. In recent years, Hito
Steyerl has written in praise of the compressed or poor image, while
Luciana Parisi has meditated on the incompressible (Steyerl 2013; Parisi
2013). Online privacy activists seek new technologies for encryption and
obfuscation, just as hacker groups configure their own identities around
anonymity and collectivity (see esp. Coleman 2012).
To be sure, the theme has dominated theories of media and aesthet-
ics for some time already, particularly around issues of resolution, defini-
tion, and fidelity. Marshall McLuhans hot and cool media hinge on the way
in which media may contain either copious helpings of information (mini-
mally compressed, requiring less participation) or meager helpings (highly
Bernard Stieglers lecture The Proletarianization of Sensibility, published in this special

issue, is cited parenthetically.

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compressed, requiring more participation). And media historians have long

examined aesthetic artifacts along a continuum from expansion to com-
pression, whether it be a question of minimalism and abstraction, codes
and shorthand, redundancy and ornamentation, or any number of other
qualities and techniques that either delete or proliferate aesthetic material.
In engineering jargon, lossy compression describes any technique
in which information is lost or deleted as a consequence of compression,
while lossless compression indicates that no information is deleted. Con-
ventional wisdom suggests lossless compression is superior, given that it
reduces file sizes without sacrificing the integrity of the contents. Yet lossy
compression finds its own respectable uses, particularly when excess
information is unnecessary or disruptive to the sensorium of the viewer or
listener. In certain cases, such as audio transmitted via telephone, lossy
compression is superior.
The conversation around compression has also rebounded in conti-
nental philosophy. Friedrich Kittler has written on how literature arrests the
sounds of speech into a compressed system of twenty-six letters (1999: 3).1
Alain Badiou addresses the topic too, albeit in a different way, when he pro-
poses his theory of the subject rooted in the operation of fidelity (compres-
sions putative nemesis). Functioning as a kind of Platonic yardstick, fidelity
measures the subjects ongoing commitment to an ideal, what Badiou calls
a point, or event.2 And Bernard Stiegler uses the term grammatization,
incorporated from the work of both Jacques Derrida and Sylvain Auroux,
to indicate how human experience is compressed into discrete units of
mediation.3
Yet Sterne seeks something slightly different in his book on digital
compression. For Sterne, the most urgent question for media and culture
today is not that of an ever-increasing fidelity, in which subjects adhere ever
1. Kittler goes on to note that all data flows, provided they really were streams of data,
had to pass through the bottleneck of the signifier. Alphabetic monopoly, grammatology
(1999: 4).
2. For more on fidelity, points, and events, see Badiou 2005 and 2009.
3. For Derridas use of the term, see Derrida 1976. Stiegler also cites the important influ-
ence of Sylvain Aurouxs La Rvolution technologique de la grammatisation (1994) in his
development of the concept. When understood in the most general sense as the pro-
cess of describing and formalizing human behavior into letters, words, writing, and code
so that it can be reproduced, grammatization is usefully paired with other concepts from
social and cultural theory, including Max Webers concept of rationalization and Philip
Agres capture. See Weber 1930; and Agre 2003. For an analysis of Stieglerian grammati-
zation vis--vis contemporary media ecology, see Kemper and Zylinska 2012 (16567).

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Galloway and LaRivire/Compression in Philosophy127
more closely to a representational ideal, but that of compression, in which

subjects slowly delete and disencumber themselves of the representational
contract altogether:
This is not to say I simply want to replace a grand narrative of ever-

increasing fidelity with a grand narrative of ever-increasing compres-
sion. I am merely proposing compression as one possible basis for
inquiry into the history of communication technologyin the same
sense that representation has served. We need to describe and
debate long-term histories, as most of the currently available long-
term histories of communication . . . have not taken on board the
insights of recent decades, especially those drawn from work on
globalization as well as postcolonial and poststructuralist thought.
Such new histories would not need to function as teleology, nor need
to approach universality, but ambition and breadth certainly seem
appropriate in our moment. (Sterne 2012: 250n20)
What would it mean to have such ambitions? What would it mean if

compression replaced representation as the core axis of inquiry in media
and aesthetic theory?
The Abstract Compression of Nature
Taking up Sternes challenge, we wish to reexamine representa-

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

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

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relationship between the human and technology is fundamentally one of

aporia or transduction, where both terms are constituted in their relation
(Roberts 2012: 19).4 Stiegler thus merges both humanity and its technical
prostheses by showing that the artifice of technology is always already part
of the very structure of being.
This version of abstract compression puts an emphasis on the rela-
tionship between memory and technology. Stiegler describes the outward
transfer from internal memory retentionwhat he calls, following Plato,
anamnesisinto spatialized hypomnesis, that is, the grammatization of
memory into mnemotechnics, which includes everything from Paleolithic
tally sticks to our contemporary digital computers (Stiegler 2010a: 29).
The exteriorization of memory compresses the saturated flux of second-
ary retentions (all those memorial contents [souvenirs] which together
form the woven threads of our memory [mmoire] [9]) into discrete tech-
nical units. This sheds additional light on the concept of grammatization:
The process of grammatization is the technical history of memory, in which
hypomnesic memory continually reintroduces the constitution of tension
within anamnesic memory. This anamnesic tension is exteriorized in the
forms of the mind [or of the spirit, esprit ] through which epochs of psycho-
social individuation and disindividuation are pharmacologically configured
(31). Such tension names the subsequent decompression of conscious-
ness through engagement with mnemotechnical devices. Expansion via
psychic individuation occurs, only to be reexteriorized, grammatized, and
disindividuated again.
With Stiegler as guide, the first tradition of abstract compression
begins to appear more clearly. In this tradition, the real is synonymous with
the uncompressed, whereas the everyday experiences of society and cul-
turethe abstractions of the mind, the alphabet, language, images, and
technologiesare synonymous with compression. The metaphysical real is
virtual and superlative, while lived experience is compressed and reduced.
Engineers refer to this as round off. Round off indicates the way
in which analog values are rounded to discrete numbers. Thus the minute
precision of, say, a floating-point number will be rounded to whatever inte-
ger is closest. Ironically this reintroduces precision, only in a new way. Digi-
tal machines will iterate in an always identical manner, writes Giuseppe
4. Stieglers aporetic understanding of the relationship between technology and society

fundamentally means neither term is privileged, nor is the former dissolved in the latter
(Roberts 2012: 20).

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Longo, because, given the rounded precision of both inputs and commands,
a digital machine will execute commands with identical repetition (Longo
2013: 14). Contrary to analog machines, digital machines shed themselves
of all the small inconsistencies that, when executed, multiply into legibly
different outcomes. Digital precision is a precision of abstraction; analog
precision, a precision of the real. Yet they are not immune from corruption:
just as the digital and the analog each have their own forms of precision,
each also illustrates unique forms of disruption and failure. Steyerl, for one,
has helped dismantle the common misconception that digital machines are
immune from glitches, noise, or other forms of technical collapse. In fact,
abstract precision often ironically promotes such aesthetic inconsistencies
(Steyerl 2013).5
Abstraction, compression, and digitality are all alike in one impor-
tant way: they all forget the details by selectively deleting certain small
bits of information. Longo explicitly links engineering and philosophy on
this point, showing how the invariance of the transcendental (its ability to
remain unchanging in the face of change) is a consequence of reduction
or abstraction. Forgetfulness is constitutive of invariance and, therefore, of
conceptual abstraction, writes Longo, because in this way, we can forget
the details, that which are unimportant (Longo 2013: 18).6 We might say
that transcendental abstraction is low bandwidth or world poor because
it selectively removes information in order to persist as such. Marxs critique
of the commodity form hinges on this very issue, for the commodity obfus-
cates the history of its own making and thus embodies a lossy compres-
sion of the conditions of production. Indeed, such ideological processes
are essentially coterminous with understanding and consciousness in the
first place. As an abstraction of the world, understanding is compression.
A theory, an explanation, is only successful to the extent to which it com-
presses the number of bits in the facts into a much smaller number of bits
of theory, writes mathematician Gregory Chaitin. Understanding is com-
pression, comprehension is compression! (Chaitin 2007: 35).
5. For more on the digitals putative lossyness, see Manovich 2001 (5055). See also
Krapp 2011; and Nunes 2011.
6. A useful connection could be made to Stieglers treatment of Prometheus and Epi-
metheus, or what he calls the Promethean advance and the Epimethean withdrawal.
Humans are the forgotten ones. Humans only occur through their being forgotten; they
only appear in disappearing. Fruit of a double faultan act of forgetting, then of theft . . . .
[T]here will have been nothing at the origin but the fault, a fault that is nothing but the
de-fault of origin or the origin as de-fault (1998: 188).

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These relatively neutral modalities of compression and decompres-

sion take a decidedly negative turn, however, in Stieglers recent work on
digital networks and late capitalism. Here Stiegler describes how capital-
ism, especially in its current cognitive or informatic iteration, has com-
pressed life itself in a way that is extremely lossy. What is lost, according
to Stiegler, is precisely the knowledge of how to live. He writes, Com-
merce is always an exchange of savoir-faire [knowledge of how to make
or do] and savoir-vivre [knowledge of how to live] (Stiegler 2010a: 16). But
increasingly, given the mutations of capitalist exchange over the past few
decades and the attendant processes of grammatization, both savoir-faire
and savoir-vivre are being lost like so much compressed data in a vast pro-
cess of cognitive and affective proletarianization (30).
As a form of psychic and collective disindividuation, proletarian-
ization is destructive. In the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, Stieglers
main influence on this theme, individuation is an uncompressed process
of becoming. The virtualization of such potentiality makes for a boundless
uncompressibility. Indeed, Simondon shows that individuation is structur-
ally unachievable and in this sense infinite (42). The technologies of capi-
talism, from the assembly line to Facebook, have created processes of
disindividuation, which work to short-circuit the productive becoming of
individuation, resulting in desublimation, that is, the commensurable finiti-
zation of all things (42). The infinite potential of becoming is compressed
into the finite gestures of capitalist proletarianization. This has become all
the more prevalent in the twenty-first century, as more and more human
experiences are exteriorized onto digital platforms:
The grammatization of gesture, which was the basis of what Marx

described as proletarianization, that is, as loss of savoir-faire, is then
pursued with the development of electronic and digital devices to the
point that all forms of knowledge become grammatized via cognitive
and cultural mnemotechnologies. This will include the way in which
linguistic knowledge becomes the technologies and industries of
automated language processing, but it will also include savoir-vivre,
that is, behavior in general, from user profiling to the grammatization
of affectsall of which will lead toward the cognitive and cultural
capitalism of the hyperindustrial service economies. (33)
Such is the story of modernity. Grumbling beneath the iron cage of

modern experience lies a superlative nature full of life and energy. Beyond
mankind exists a vital or virtual real, a natural wellspring of energy wait-

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ing to be unleashed. Step by step, the advancement of modernity crushes

nature through a kind of cataclysmic compression of everyday life. The
vital flows are subdued, the wellspring is capped, the natural energies are
abstracted into a second reality dubbed culture or society. The bifurcation
of nature is complete.
In other wordsand here we exaggerate the consequences to
underscore the pointthe first tradition of abstract compression entails
two corollaries: first, a romantic or poetic ontology of matter, and second, a
developmental technology of nature. To be sure, these two corollaries are
quite common during the modern period, and in fact they help to define the
very concept of modernity.7 The first, evident most vividly in the romanti-
cism of the nineteenth century, assumes a superlative nature that exists
beyond all attempts to compress it. The uncompressed natural real thus
exceeds and suspends the mere experiences of everyday life, which them-
selves strive to comprehend its full majesty (of extension, of feeling, of aes-
thetic abundance, and so on). The second, a developmental technology of
nature, stems directly from the first by superimposing the decompression
of nature along global lines of developmental difference. Hence nature is an
unknowable space of excess, quite literally a heart of darkness, and its ener-
gies must be released, harnessed, and developed according to the rules
of the machine, the factory, the firm, or the metropolis. Whether such tech-
nologies are more like fifteenth-century Portuguese carracks or twentieth-
century Deleuzian desiring machines matters much less than the under-
lying narrative that fuels them: nature is unknowable, infinite, bottomless,
and uncompressible; technology is the discoverer, developer, exploiter, and
harnesser of nature. In short, technology is natures compressor.8
7. For work representative of this line of argument, see Misa, Brey, and Feenberg 2003.
See also Feenberg 2010.
8. In one of the few pieces of critical writing to consider compression as a quantitative
and qualitative process of rounding off, Robert Kerr echoes this dystopian account of
compression. Compression is the entire system of law, Kerr writes. Compression con-
denses dynamic cultures by assimilating them in the name of globalization, where every-
one is screaming yet no one person is heard. It is the squeezer of small businesses in
niche communities who have no choice, through the force of globalization, to adapt to the
VOLUME of global industry, losing all identity, losing their own unique singularities, and
becoming an extension of the greater. . . . Compression is the theft of dynamic knowl-
edge long lost to those who misunderstood and perverted the mysteries of the universe
because they couldnt handle the fact that the mystery was just that, and thus had to
make the fluid unknown become a concrete static truth to squeeze down every opposition

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As Stiegler shows, a number of compensatory therapies emerge

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

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is addressed to the mystagogical performativities of art (9). The lover is

called to the mediation of planes of existence, a mediation that is unveiled
by a solicitous work of art:
A work only works to the extent that it affects us, in the sense that,
suddenly, it jumps out at us (elle fait saillance). Such a jumping out
only affects us, and gets us hooked, to the extent that it directs us
toward a mystery: it reveals next to existencenext to its own exis-
tence first and foremost, but also next to that of its author and of
its spectatorsomething other than the plane of existenceif one
believes in it. The experience of art is the experience of a work that
opens up onto such a plane, and that appears in this way to reveal
this other plane. Every work of art has the structure of a revela-
tion. (9)
The structure of belief is crucial. Only by believing in art will art affect
us. Yet such belief has been liquidated throughout the twentieth century by
the compressive power of the culture industries and marketing techniques.
A return to a mode of life more attentive to philia would require a
cultivation of the noetic organs. Most of the time we are only potentially
noetic, and actually sensitive, Stiegler observes, for example, when we
behave like pigs or sheep or wolves or slugs, and, in some cases, when
we remain in our unsurpassable stratum of vegetivity9 (Stiegler 2011: 223).
The task is then to invent new ways to make the obfuscated and com-
pressed visible to the noetic, libidinized eye: We have been destroyed and
blindedall of us, for what we areby this becoming-regressive of our ever
narrowing gaze [regard ]. We must learn to see againthat is, to show
the singular that is never yet seen (229). A phenomenological belief in the
value of revealing nature thus provides Stiegler an avenue of escape from
the compressions of daily life.
To summarize, the first tradition of abstract compression assumes
that the various phenomena of existencefrom concepts and thoughts, to
technology and cultureare reductions of a more or less uncompressible
natural real. Actuality is compressed, while virtuality is uncompressed. We
also noted, albeit briefly, that such a position leads to two corollary posi-
tions that may or may not be desirable: a poetic or romantic ontology, and
an exploitational or developmental technology. Stiegler solves these prob-
lems not by destroying the terms but by merging them, by putting them
9. For more on animal stupidity (btise), see Stiegler 2013.

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into a relationship of transduction. There is no bifurcation of nature, for

Stiegler, quite simply because there is no fundamental difference between
nature and technology. Yet at the same time, by not altering the terms of
the debate, Stiegler retains an effigy of the dogma of abstract compres-
sion, leading to a sometimes moralizing and romanticist discourse. Only by
destroying the effigy in its entirety will we hope to discover an alternative
form in which the tiresome decompressions of reality are dissolved by a
stubbornly compressed lived experience.
From Abstract Compression to Generic Compression
An alternate tradition thus emerges not entirely opposed to the first

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

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

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by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be

on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its
own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand ] (17).
Heideggers enframing and Agambens anthropological machine
both resemble Stieglers proletarianization of sensibility and the short cir-
cuits of disindividuation. All are examples of the dogma of abstract com-
pression. Unemployed negativity bears greater resemblance to generic
compression. The irrecuperable indifference of a figure like Bartleby is com-
pression in a finite and determined form; no superlative nature undergirds
this refusal. Agamben positions the vast potential of the resources of the
standing-reserve against the impotentiality not to engage in the process of
ordering the real, as described by Heidegger (19). For Agamben, impo-
tentiality is the very origin of potentiality itself. This is an essential point:
What appears for the first time as such in deactivation (in the Brach-
liegen) of possibility, then, is the very origin of potentialityand with
it, of Dasein, that is, the being which exists in the form of potentiality-
for-being [poter-essere]. But precisely for this reason, this poten-
tiality or originary possibilitization constitutively has the form of a
potential-not-to [potenza-di-no], of an impotentiality, insofar as it is
able to [pu] only in beginning from a being able not to [poter non],
that is, from the deactivation of single, specific, factical possibilities.
(Agamben 2004: 67; emphasis in original)
Bartlebys opaque indifference to work and his refusal to order the

real make him an ideal model for withdrawal from the representational con-
tract. Through a kind of productive unworking, Bartleby gestures toward
new forms of life and revitalized potentials for living in community.
Bartlebys peculiar affect of opacity thus links him in our minds to
various projects interested in forcing a compression of the subject toward
the generic. Here one might cite recent critical efforts to de-predicate the
subject, removing various kinds of data points that could potentially track
and enframe the individual (e.g., Hardt and Negri 2005; Papadopoulos,
Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008; Magnet 2011; Shell 2012; Blas 2013). In his
book Opacity and the Closet, Nicholas de Villiers examines the queer tac-
tics of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Andy Warhol, all queer fig-
ures who suspended the binary logic of the closet through rhetorical tactics
of opacity and obfuscation. Efforts to cultivate a generic compression of the
subject have much to learn from the turn in queer theory toward a thinking
around opacity and the theorization of various queer tactics of paradigm

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neutralization. And it is precisely a thinking around that is crucial here

around the surfaces, around the edges of opacity.
De Villiers emphasizes the importance of opaque or matte sur-
faces. With such surfaces he resists the protocols of what Eve Sedgwick
calls paranoid reading, which always attempts to uncover the subsurface
meaning of a text (Sedgwick 2003). Instead, de Villiers insists, we must
dwell on the surfaces of figures like Melvilles Bartleby, with whom he opens
the book, rather than replicate the depth model of humanist understand-
ing. The paranoid reading looks for psychological depth, motives, and
personal history, and it ceaselessly performs a hermeneutic operation of
making transparent the resistances it encounters, argues de Villiers. But
at moments it is frustrated, aggravated, unmanned in Melvilles terms, by
a passive resistance that appears as opacity (de Villiers 2012: x). In other
words, Bartlebyalong with queer opacity generallyrefuses to be trans-
coded according to the logics of productive transparency. A lossy depoten-
tialization and bedimming of life takes on a seductive valence.
Warhol is one of the great artists of surface, yet de Villiers is more
interested in the evasive discourse that Warhol deploys in genres of truth
telling, such as diaries and interviews, rather than his artworks as such.
Still, if we return momentarily to the artwork, it is clear how distant War-
hol is from a more romantic metaphysical style. For instance, certain
salient differences emerge in Warhols Diamond Dust Shoes that speak
to the reorientation in critical perspective being proposed here, particu-
larly when contrasted with Van Goghs 1885 painting of peasants shoes,
so famously celebrated by Heidegger (2008). Fredric Jameson compares
these two works at the beginning of his Postmodernism essay, noting
that the first and most evident [difference] is the emergence of a new kind
of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal
sense (Jameson 1991: 9).The peasant shoes are imbued with the depth of
history, while the diamond dust shoes are superficial and flat like a maga-
zine advertisement. An aesthetic of bland, matte surface takes precedence
in Warhol, deviating from the historical avant-gardes yen for transgres-
sion, which itself strived to abandon the tradition that Van Goghs shoes
represented.
Indeed, there is no longer anything transgressive about transgres-
sion. As Steven Shaviro recently observed, The only thing that remains
transgressive today is capital itself, which devours everything without
regard for boundaries, distinctions, or degrees of legitimacy (Shaviro 2010:

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31).12 Rather than the promiscuous aesthetics of transgression, it would

seem that a prophylactic aesthetics of Warholian opacity are in order.13 Not
pornography but seduction. Not normative attraction but insufficient com-
munization. Not expression but compression.14
The generative nature of unworkability, opacity, and compression
animates a line of critical theory that runs from Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy,
and Maurice Blanchot, to others such as Roberto Esposito and (more
recently) Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (Agamben 1993; Nancy 1991; Blanchot 1988;
12. Stiegler expresses a similar sentiment in The Proletarianization of Sensibility: There

used to be a time of the scandal: a time when transgression produced a scandal. But this
is no longer the caseits as if there no longer were any possibilities for transgression,
as if one could no longer expect anything from transgression. Or from a mystery (1516).
13. As de Villiers demonstrates, opacity is not incompatible with identity politics, theories
of difference, or what Badiou calls the post-Cartesian theories of the subject. Indeed, in
addition to queer theory, opacity has also played a role in the intersectional field of criti-
cal race theory. The theory of difference is invaluable, acknowledges the Martinican
philosopher and poet douard Glissant. This theory has made it possible to take in, per-
haps, not their existence but at least their rightful entitlement to recognition of the minori-
ties swarming throughout the world and the defense of their status. Yet within theories of
difference, Glissant identifies an adherence to the contract of mandated representability:
difference itself can still contrive to reduce things to the transparent. A right to differ-
ence is important, he admits, but so too is the generic or opaque. The right to opacity is
not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy, Glissant argues, but subsistence within
an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics (1997:
189, 190).
14. Tim Griffin examines compression as a model and metaphor for contemporary art
production and cites Cory Arcangel as one artist who has embraced the lossy potenti-
ality of algorithmic aesthetics: Media is no longer a one-way street, [Arcangel] argues.
People just make things. And so I dont know whether its so necessary to reveal any-
thing anymore. Instead, Arcangel says of his own practice, the artist is apt merely to
reframe such mediaputting forward artwork that might look totally unremarkable and
yet subtly implicate the unseen networks responsible for its production and circulation.
As he conjectures of his recent work with Photoshop, for which he merely prints out a
color gradient, without manipulating the readymade image at all: Why do people always
use technology in a particular way? . . . What might happen if you overused technology,
or underused it? There are always holes opening at either end of the spectrum. Arc-
angel introduces a gap, in other words, that leaves the information of the image up for
grabsimmediately recognizable to anyone who knows Photoshop, but dislodged from
and emptied of any of the cultural narrative typically defined by its specific use (Griffin
2011: 16). By putting a conceptual frame around the readymade processes of digital pro-
duction so prevalent today, by simply leaving be, Arcangel is able to effectively represent
the informatic milieu of post-Internet art, rendering a critical intervention into contempo-
rary modes of productioncritical in its very withdrawal from expression.

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Esposito 2010; Kacem 2006). These thinkers all provide the grounds for a
generic compression of the subject that bears directly on the material con-
ditions of life rather than a metaphysical essence corrupted by enframing.
Rather than a kind of Heideggerian romanticism, we see in generic com-
pression a rigorous attempt to compress the real, using opacity and obfus-
cation as weapons against compulsory transparency.
Yet beyond those already named, Franois Laruelle is the thinker
who has done the most to compress philosophy into generic thought. For
Laruelle, the discipline of philosophy is far too expressive, too obsessed
with metaphysical revealing and philosophical reflection of all that exists.
As he explains,
In Nietzsche, you have this idea that philosophy is always exces-

sivethe will to power to philosophize is to dominate. Thus it is
motivated by excess, by overpowering. . . . So in Nietzsche there is
already a kind of internal contradiction that I felt very strongly. I was
very Nietzschean in the first four or five books. And then I realized
that I had to work in a doubled way: to use Nietzsche, but against
philosophy itself. (Laruelle 2012a: 5; emphasis removed)
Laruelle decided at an early moment in his philosophical develop-

ment to reject the excessively expressive in favor of the compressive: then
was forged the idea to write a new book, which gave rise to The Minority
Principle, and most importantly Biography of the Ordinary Man. It is here
that I started to invert the movement. That is to say, to find a more pre-
cise and stronger way of working with science in the interior of philoso-
phyinside philosophy, not as an object of philosophy, but on the inside
of it (5). In these and other books, Laruelle describes a form of compres-
sive genericness. What he calls minority or ordinary are indexes into an
opacity that pervades both world and individual.
From a position alongside philosophy, Laruelles nonphilosophy
adopts a different kind of signal processing. Opacity becomes a general
condition of the cosmos itself. As he says in one of his more experimental
texts, The Universe is an opaque and solitary thought, which has already
leapt through mans shut eyes as the space of a dream without dreaming
(Laruelle 2013: 103). Unlike Stiegler, who strives to reveal an enchanted,
natural world through the development of the noetic organs, Laruelle
remains encrypted within the radical immanence of generic being. All super-
fluous philosophical data has been deleted. He describes the relationship
between nonphilosophy (generic compression) and philosophy (abstract

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compression) with recourse to a photographic metaphor: We believe that

reality is horizon and light, aperture and flash, whereas it resembles more
the posture of an opaque non-relation (to) light. When exploring the uni-
versal dimension of the cosmic, we remain prisoners of cosmo-logical dif-
ference. Our philosophers are children who are afraid of the dark (109).
For Laruelle, Stiegler would be one such philosopher, forever fleeing the
dark and rushing toward the open aperture of transcendence.15
But Laruelle is intent on remaining within a compressed, immanent,
and finite opacitya thoroughly black opacity. What does the opaque indi-
cate? Merely that there is nothing in light or outside of light to manifest it or
obscure it; that light exists only in things already illuminated and obscurity
in things already obscured (Laruelle 2012b: 413).
A Lossy Manifesto
By way of conclusion, let us return to Sterne and the debates sur-

rounding compressive media. Such debates usually entail a number of
claims: (1) media abstract, reduce, and encode a complex and heteroge-
neous world, and (2) once encoded, media files may be compressed and
expanded using lossless algorithms that preserve the integrity of data, or
alternately (3) media files may be compressed using lossy algorithms that
necessarily delete data. Given the above discussion, we are in a better
position to amplify and evaluate these various positions.
Regarding the first point, we conclude that encoding is synony-
mous with the above-labeled abstract compression. Encoding is thus syn-
onymous with the metaphysical tradition itself, in which existence appears
as a specific encoding of matter. The abstractions of this life (language,
15. Although Stiegler has not extensively engaged with Laruelles nonphilosophy in his
own texts, he does acknowledge his indebtedness to Laruelle in his introduction to the
reprinted edition of Simondons Individuation psychique et collective (Stiegler 2007).
Stiegler also recounts the crucial role that Laruelle played in introducing him to Simon-
dons work in a recent interview: When I left prison, Derrida asked me to lead a semi-
nar. It was at the College of Philosophy. Among the faculty there was Franois Laruelle, a
French philosopher. And one day he said to me Tell me about what you are doing in your
seminar. Lets go have a drink. Stiegler proceeded to outline the broad strokes of his
philosophical project to Laruelle, emphasizing how processes constitute themselves,
culminating in a theory of singularity that is not a theory of the subject. But thats not
your theory, Laruelle informed him, thats Simondons. So I discovered that I had a
competitor, Stiegler realized, one who had been around much longer than I. See Stieg-
ler 2012a (16566). For Laruelles commentary on Simondon, see Laruelle 1994.

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mind, technology, and so on) are thus a kind of encoding of the funda-
mental substrate of nature, whether it be Deleuzes plane of immanence,
Platos essential forms, or Aristotles substance. The abstractions of this
life are thus also instances of data loss, given that any particular formation
will exclude or delete the multiplicity of alternate virtualities that lie within
the fundamental substrate of nature. The actually existing transcendentals
forget the details of the absolute by remaining invariant and consistent
across time and space. In this way, all media and indeed all philosophy are
digital in that they encode nature via processes of distinction and data loss.
Once encoded, the world may be compressed still further via loss-
less or lossy algorithms. Yet given that no data is actually deleted during
lossless compression, lossless compressiontouted most visibly in aes-
thetic concepts like fidelityis essentially a misnomer, and in fact not a
mode of compression at all. Rather, lossless compression is merely a syn-
onym for technical transcoding. Lossless compression simply converts one
mode of philosophical encoding into another mode and back again. Loss-
less compression is the normal science of the world and thus acts to
repeat and propagate formations of self-similarity. In this sense, lossless
compression entails a certain amount of philosophical cynicism, in that it
assumes nothing will ever alter the basic encoding of the world, even as the
surface effects of encoded objects shift from one shape to another.
In sum, the tradition of abstract compression in media and philoso-
phy relies on a basic two-part mechanic: first encode nature via data loss,
then transcode nature via lossless compression. Given this mechanic,
compensatory strategies often appear under the guise of decompression:
Marxs demystification of the compressed commodity, Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattaris liberation of the repressed desiring machines, or any num-
ber of other strategies. Indeed, in the latter twentieth century, expression
emerged as a key virtue of the good life. Contra representation, expression
allows subjects to realize themselves without the fetters of repression and
without recourse to any kind of metaphysical essence. As actualization or
territorialization, expression toggles between a normatively good compen-
satory alternative to metaphysical compression, and a normatively bad
albeit often necessarydeletion of the alternate potentialities of the vir-
tual. In fact, much of the most interesting work being done in theory today
hinges precisely on the reality of abstraction, as the Marxists put it, or the
actuality of the virtual, as the Deleuzians put it.16
16. For the former, see Toscano 2013. For the latter, see Parisi 2013. In Parisi, the incom-
pressible (the virtual) already exists within the actuality of the real. Yet in deviating from

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Yet, as we have hoped to show here, both of these alternatives rely

on a specific concept of compression, the tradition of abstract compression.
Our proposal is that an alternate approach to compression also exists. This
alternate approach is rooted in lossy rather than lossless compression. In
contrast to its lossless cousin, lossy compression moves in the direction
of a generic or prophylactic ontology. Lossy compression has an unusual
relationship to philosophy and theories of mediation: it extends the logic of
philosophy and media (data loss), but deploys itself against the spirit of phi-
losophy and media (expression, distinction, representation).
Lossy compression thus is imperative today for theories of media
and mediation, because lossy compression is the best way to upcast
toward the generic. Lossy compression accomplishes this via an impover-
ishment or impotentialization of existence. (Recall how philosophical meta-
physics claims something quite different, that existence is a reduction from
essence.) For these reasons, we ally ourselves with an alternate tradition
in which the world tends toward its own encryption, in which being shrinks
rather than emerges, in which data tends to vanish and disappear rather
than find its most visible expression. Compression is on the side of cryptog-
raphy. And in order to survive this life, we need a kind of theoretical project
that is more and more cryptographic with each passing day.
Compression is not some mere epiphenomenon that must be
reduced or avoided. Compression is not merely the unwelcome identity
of philosophy. Rather, we contend that the best response to philosophy is
to compress it further. We need more compression in philosophy, not less.
And through the compression of philosophythe deletion of data via pro-
cesses of immanence, opacity, obfuscation, and encryptionwill arrive the
new techniques of the generic.
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Dare to Care: Between Stieglers Mystagogy

and Foucaults Aesthetics of Existence
Ed Cohen
Philosophy is, for me, before anything else, to learn to repeat repe-
titions that are good. To learn ways that the pharmakon, which is
always that which repeats, does not destroy me or render me indif-
ferent by its repetitions, but rather takes care of me (me soigne). That
is to say, individuates me, distinguishes me, differentiates me, . . .
in order to permit me to discern in myselfto distinguishalterity,
difference [differance?], . . . the future. Philosophy is undertaken in
order that these repetitions make a difference.
Bernard Stiegler (2014a)
Philosophy takes care of me. It provides a therapeutic practice of the

self, a repetition with a difference that opens me to the differance that hap-
pens as I defer toward a future that differs in and from me. But how does
such taking care happen? Thats where the mystery comes in.
For a number of years, in his courses, seminars, lectures, and
Bernard Stieglers lecture The Proletarianization of Sensibility, published in this special

issue, is cited parenthetically in the text as Proletarianization.

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books, Bernard Stiegler has alerted us to the consequences of a trans-

formation that took place in Western thought when, in Book VII of The
Republic, Platos doctrine of the truth (to recall Heideggers famous for-
mula [1998]) decisively privileged exactitude as philosophys raison dtre.
In making philosophy doctrinaire, Plato refused the tragic horizon within
which Socrates and the pre-Socratic thinkers lived, and thereby deprived
philosophy of its mystery, a mystery that Socrates (who participated in the
Eleusian Mysteries) certainly did not abjure. Challenging the long legacy of
this Platonic refusal, Stiegler admonishes us to attend to the extraordinary
within the ordinary, or, even better, to let it surprise us. Yet, to appreciate
the mystery, to let the mystery surprise us, we have need of a mystagogy,
whose initiations help lead us toward the mystery because our eyes are too
often shut to it (as its Greek etymon muein [] might suggest).1 Over the
last several years, and especially since Taking Care of Youth and the Gen-
erations, Stiegler has tantalizingly (albeit elliptically) invoked what he refers
to in the essays published in this special issue as the necessary mysta-
gogy that would underlie and support the life of the spirit in all its aspects,
even while rigorously cautioning against the mystifications to which all such
mystagogy so easily succumbs (Stiegler, Proletarianization, 11).
Needless to say, mystagogy does not appear very often in the pan-
theon of contemporary theoretical conceptsnor for that matter does the
life of the spirit that it underlies and supports. In order to approach the
former, we might first consider the latter. The phrase life of the spirit sig-
nals Stieglers admiration for the work of Paul Valry. In a 1939 essay entitled
La Libert et lEsprit, (to which Stiegler regularly returns), Valry offers a
brief characterization of the entanglement of human life and spirit:
Intellectual lifes creation and organized existence find themselves

in the most complex, but strictest and most certain, relation with life
as such, with human life. No one has ever explained how we make
sense ( quoi nous rimions), we humans, with our strangeness
1. The OED gives the following etymology: Classical Latin mystrium secret, (plural)
secret rites, in post-classical Latin also mystical or religious truth (Vetus Latina), (plu-
ral) Christian rites (late 2nd cent. in Tertullian), the Eucharist, the elements used in the
Eucharist (4th cent.) < ancient Greek mystery, secret, (plural) secret rites,
implements used in such rites, in Hellenistic Greek also secret revealed by God, mystical
truth, Christian rite, sacrament, in Byzantine Greek also the elements used in the Eucha-
rist (4th cent.), probably (compare also mystes n.) < the base of to close (the
lips or eyes), probably of imitative origin + -, suffix forming nouns (Oxford English
Dictionary online, s.v. mystery).

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Cohen/Dare to Care151
(bizarrerie) which is spirit (esprit). This spirit is a power in us that has

engaged us in an extraordinary adventure; our species has been
estranged from (sest eloigne) all its initial and normal conditions of
life. We have invented a world for our spiritand would like to live
in this world. The spirit wants to live in its oeuvre. (Valry 1945: 194)
The extraordinary adventure that constitutes human lifeor not-

inhuman life as Stiegler prefers2arises out of and diverges from the ini-
tial and normal conditions of life. Our extraordinariness as spirit (which
Valry also calls our bizarrerie) estranges us from the ordinary life to
which we must nevertheless maintain the strictest and most certain rela-
tion. To live a life of the spirit, then, is both to live and to put oneself at a
distance from life as such. Combining the rhetorics of Gilbert Simondon
and Andr Leroi-Gourhan (both of whom Stiegler embraces as precursors),
we might translate Valrys text by saying: the life of the spirit emerges from
a transductive relation between life/spirit (i.e., it emerges from a preceding
complex not governed by the law of noncontradiction in which life and spirit
do not yet oppose and therefore suppose each other) that only appears in
the course of hominization, when exteriorization through technology opens
the possibility for interiorizing an individuation that is at once psychic and
collective. Indeed, as Stiegler underscores, The and of this expression
(psychic and collective) can then perhaps be understood as that which
designates the spirit (Stiegler 2014b).
If the life of the spirit evokes a transductive relation, life/spirit, which
in turn provokes the transduction psychic/collective, then perhaps the mys-
tery to which mystagogy conducts us bespeaks the inextricability of the very
terms that such transduction makes appear. Perhaps it gestures toward
that which, by exceeding it, allows this appearance to appear as such in the
first place. Simondon suggests as much when he defines spirituality as
the meaning (signification) of the relation between the individuated

being and the collective and thus, as a consequence, also the foun-
dation of this relation, that is to say the fact that the individuated
being is not entirely individuated but still contains a certain charge
2. In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010), Stiegler explains this formula-
tion: The noetic mind, the one capable of taking spiritual action intermittently, and in
this sense profanely, thus becoming diachronic and individuating, is less human (and as
a result too human) than non-inhuman. We, because we are pharmacological, are less
human than not-inhuman, always a little too human in always being a little too close to
taking ourselves for gods (170).

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of non-individuated reality, pre-individual, and preserves it, respects

it, and lives with the consciousness of its existence, instead of being
shut up in a substantial individuality, a false aseity. It is the respect
for this relation of the individual and the pre-individual that is spiritu-
ality. (Simondon 1989: 1056)
Spirituality, according to Simondon, values the entangled relation of

individual/pre-individual and psychic/collective. This value has nothing to
do with what we knowor can knowbut concerns what we appreciate,
what we respect, what we admire, and, for Stiegler, what we desire.3 In
other words, the entanglement that gives rise to the life of the spirit as psy-
chic and collective individuation, as not in-human life, has meaning even if
we do not know what that meaning might be. Moreover, even if it exceeds
our ability to know its significance as spirit, as spirituality, we can live with
the consciousness of its existence (i.e., we can sense it and make sense
of it). The excessiveness of spirit with respect to knowledge turns us toward
mystery insofar as mystery reveals to useven as it conceals from usan
otherness that persists within the sameness that we take to be our own.
As Stiegler puts it, [Mystery] reveals next to existence . . . something other
than the plane of existenceif one believes in it (Stiegler, Proletarianiza-
tion, 9). Conversely, he declares, The cognitive is never mysterious (10).
The work of mystagogy entails creating contexts, milieus, practices,
gestures, rituals, and technologies so that that which confounds our cog-
nition does not stop our thinking. Mystagogy cultivates that which helps
us to contain those surprises that exceed our understanding and thereby
enables us to expand or even raise it.4 In other words, mystagogy encour-
ages us to appreciate that which exceeds our comprehension: suddenly [I]
find myself in a state of levitationand in a way that is unexpected and that
I cannot take in (in-comprhensible): I am passing on to the other plane
a plane where an over-taking (sur-prhension), a being over-taken, over-
comes or surpasses all com-prehension (com-prhension) (14). Alas, sur-
prise in and of itself does not elevate; it can just as easily induce a state of
3. Desire, for Stiegler, refers to the infinitization of the object of desire, and as such
opens the plane of consistence. For a brief explanation, see Stiegler 2014b.
4. Stiegler frequently uses tropes of raisingand loweringto designate the movement
from the plane of subsistence, to the plane of existence, to the plane of consistence, or,
following Aristotle, from the vegetative, to the sensitive, to the noetic. I have some hesi-
tation about the ways that the verticality of the metaphor suggests moving between a
lower and a higher plane, which seems to rub up against Stieglers notion that all
these terms are immanent.

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shock. Surprise can paralyze. In order for a surprise that exceeds our com-
prehension to stretch us beyond what we have heretofore accepted as our
limits or our necessities, rather than stunning us into passivity or indiffer-
ence, we need to take care of it and of ourselves at the same time. Through
mystagogy, we must therefore discover how to take care of ourselves in
the presence of mystery, and to care for the mystery that is in the life of
the spirit, such that the mystery that exceeds our comprehension does not
destroy our consistence, and instead helps us to create ourselves anew
psychically and collectively.
Since the way of caring for the life of the spirit that mystagogy intro-
duces overcomes or surpasses comprehension, it cannot unfold by way
of teaching. Insofar as teaching entails the communication of knowledge,
the conveyance of skill, the endowing [of] any subject whomsoever with a
series of abilities defined in advance (in Michel Foucaults definition [2005:
407]), it requires a demonstrative practice, a step-wise instruction that, if
not always apodictic, at least enables an inductive repetition, a learned
iteration, of the teaching process by the student.5 Hence, teaching is exo-
teric by nature (Stiegler 2010: 108). Mystagogy, on the other hand, pro-
ceeds by way of initiation; it cannot be known, only experienced. The test or
the proof of mystagogy is (in) its experience. It can be lived but not known.
As its etymology suggests, mystagogy directs us toward the mystery: it
leads, it drives, it conducts (from the Greek ). More than teach-
ing us a determinate something, its iterations always leave room for differ-
ance. Even when mystagogy leads us toward mystery, it cannot make us
think. Thus, the conduct that mystagogy proposes acts upon our actions to
induce us to act carefully toward and with mystery.6 In caring for the life of
the spirit, mystagogy addresses itself to the spirit in life as lived experience,
as immanence, as a life (to recruit Deleuzes [2001] notion).
In promoting a careful conduct, mystagogy partakes of the practices
that Foucault describes as government (i.e., as a set of actions upon
5. Understanding must be teachable, or else it is not understanding. And teaching can

only transmit understandingeven if it is often accompanied by an education and in that
assumes the transmission of life knowledge. This is where understanding breaks with
mystagogy: rational knowledge is no longer the fruits of an initiation but an instruction
(Stiegler 2010: 108).
6. Indeed, as the OED informs us, classical Latin ct-, past participial stem of agere to
drive, to come, go, to cause to move, to push, to set in motion, stir up, to emit, to make,
construct, produce, to lead, bring, shares the same Indo-European base as ancient
Greek to lead, bring, drive, Sanskrit aj- to drive (Oxford English Dictionary online,
s.v. act).

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other actions [Foucault 1982: 220]). Although Foucault does not mention
mystagogy per se, he does consider its close cousin, psychagogy, or the
government of souls (Foucault 2010: 306).7 Like mystagogy, psychagogy
has a venerable lineage, following from Empedoclean if not Pythagorean
contexts. Psychagogy, or the conduct of souls, concerns itself with the
philosophical task of transforming the subject, with modulating what the
subject is, not what it knows: we can, I think call psychagogical the trans-
mission of a truth whose function is not to endow any subject whomsoever
with abilities, etcetera, but whose function is to modify the mode of being
of the subject to whom we address ourselves (Foucault 2005: 407). More-
over, Foucault avers, psychagogy involves the immediate, direct effect
which is brought about not just on the soul of the person to whom the dis-
course is addressed, but also of the person giving the discourse (Foucault
2010: 335). Psychagogy (in contrast to its confrere, pedagogy) constitutes
a distinct mode of interaction that works on both the subject to whom a
discourse addresses itself and on the subject giving the discourse itself.
It provokes in the subject what Foucault elsewhere terms the rebound
effect on himself of the truth he knows, and which passes through, perme-
ates, and t ransfigures his being (an effect which for Foucault characterizes
spirituality) (Foucault 2005: 18).8 Psychagogy therefore does not convey
knowledge or skill (tekhn) but constitutes a transformational relation, a
transitional practice. Translating this Foucauldian notion into the Simon-
donian rhetoric that Stiegler prefers, we might say: the internal reso-
nance that reverberates within the psychagogical experience modulates,
changes, and sometimes elevates the individuations and transindividua-
tions that take place within it.9
Foucault focuses his consideration of psychagogy through an inter-
pretation of Platos Phaedrus, not coincidentally foregrounding the same
section of the dialogue that supports Jacques Derridas famous reading
of the pharmakon, on which Stieglers work, in turn, leans (Derrida 1981).
However, Foucault offers a competing insight into the Platonic diremption
7. Foucault first introduces psychagogy explicitly in the previous years lectures, The Her-
meneutics of the Subject (2005). On Foucaults engagement with and as psychagogy,
see Cohen 2014.
8. On the distinction between philosophy and spirituality and the modern privileging
of the former over the latter in the wake of the Cartesian moment, see Foucault 2005
(1418).
9. For examples of Simondons use of internal resonance, see Simondon 1989 (17, 67,
238).

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of rhetoric and philosophy. Instead of underscoring the undecidability of the

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

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of all obscurantist) practices and behaviors (2010: 36). Moreover, such

epimeleia lies at the heart of a conundrum that lives within philo-sophy
as the love of wisdomprecisely insofar as they serve as the counterpoint
to philosophical dissemination through knowledge (gnosis): The predica-
mentthe aporiaof philosophical teaching is, then, to mark the differ-
ence between the teaching of what would be philosophy and the object that
can never be the telos of straightforward teaching (the simple interiorization
of retentional operations), but that must become an experiment, indeed a
way of life: an asceticism, a care, an epimeleia of a specific type (of which
all Foucaults techniques of the self are instances) (109).
Alluding to what Foucault names the paradox of Platonism, or what
Derrida terms Western Metaphysics, Stiegler locates a tension, an apo-
ria, in the history of philosophy between the modes of propagation on which
it depends. Stretched between apodictic demonstration, the straightfor-
ward teaching (the simple interiorization of retentional operations), and
experiment, indeed a way of life: an asceticism, a care, an epimeleia,
philosophy folds back upon itself.10 Its metaphysical destination is prefig-
ured by the supposition that straightforward teaching can replace epimeleia
and thus that knowledge can displace experience and care as philosophys
proper domain.11 The neglect of this philosophical pharmakon, its reduction
to a knowledge practice tout court, follows from Platos rectification of phi-
losophy as the exclusion of mystery. The only way through this impasse,
10. Stiegler continues: But this impasse, which puts philosophy perpetually in default, at
the instant it opposes itself to mystagogy, becomes excessively mysterious (opening it to
all kinds of reproach by even the very best intentioned), as a predicament, is at its origin
a pharmakon: pharmacological being is originally mystagogic in that the pharmakon, by
its very nature, endlessly returns to what Greek tragedy calls enigma. Enigma was for the
Greeks a profane figure of mystery in a society in which divinities had withdrawn, and in
which all the most elevated objects of attention had been desacralized (this is my thesis)
through grammatization. Mystagogy is at the very core of nonrational pharmacology, of
which magic is only the most common form (common to all preliterate societies) (2010:
10910).
11. In Hermeneutics, Foucault describes the paradox of Platonism as the tension
between knowledge and spirituality to similar ends: Platonism was the constant cli-
mate in which a movement of knowledge (connaissance) developed, a movement of pure
knowledge without any condition of spirituality, precisely because the distinctive feature
of Platonism is to show how the work of the self on itself, the care one must have for one-
self if one wants access to the truth, consists in knowing oneself, that is to say in knowing
the truth. To that extent, knowledge of the self and knowledge of the truth (the activity of
knowledge, the movement and method of knowledge in general), as it were, reabsorbs
the requirements of spirituality (2005: 77).

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Stiegler implies, lies through the defiles of mystagogy, which require the
kind of care for the life of the spirit that epimeleia provides.
While Stieglers understanding of epimeleia and the work that it
performs does not follow Foucaults entirely (indeed, Taking Care offers a
strong critique of Foucault to which I return below), Stieglers reliance on
the concept no doubt owes much to Foucault. Throughout the last three
years of his lectures at the Collge de France, Foucault reflects on how
epimeleia functioned in classical Greek and Hellenistic culture as prac-
tices or exercises of care: Caring for someone, looking after a flock, taking
care of ones family, or, as is often found with regard to physicians caring
for a patient, are all called epimeleisthai, positive practices of care (Fou-
cault 2011: 110). These careful practices first come to the fore in Foucaults
The Hermeneutics of the Subject when he takes up the relation between
two archaic Greek precepts: epimeleia heatou (care of the self) and gnthi
seauton (know yourself). Considering both of these within the penumbra of
the tekhn tou biou (literally, in the Greek, the art or the technique of life),
Foucault seeks to understand how in the history of the West the notion of
self-knowledge came to dominate the practices of self-care, or, as he tell-
ingly puts it, how there occurred a forced takeover by the gnthi seauton
in the space opened up by the care of the self (Foucault 2005: 68). This
takeover, Foucault suggests, reaches its modern apotheosis in the Carte-
sian moment when the gnthi seauton played a major part in discrediting
the principle of care of the self and in excluding it from the field of modern
philosophical thought (14). Following Foucault, we might say that epime-
leia falls into arrears as a residual formation whose occlusion conceals the
(philosophical) limitations of knowledge practices.
Foucault defines epimeleia heatou as simultaneously an attitude
towards the self, others, and the world and as a certain form of atten-
tion, of looking . . . a number of actions exercised on the self by the self,
actions by which one changes, purifies, transforms, and transfigures one-
self (1011). The concept derives from the sense of epimeleia as formative
practices or exercises.12 Furthermore, the practicality of epimeleia refers to
12. Foucault again: This canonical and fundamental expression, epimeleisthai heautou
(to take care of oneself, to be concerned about oneself, to care for the self) which . . .
is found from Platos Alcibiades up to Gregory of Nyssa, has a meaning that must be
stressed: epimeleisthai does not designate a mental attitude, a certain form of atten-
tion, a way of not forgetting something. Its etymology refers to a series of words such as
meletan, melet, meletai, etc. Meletan, often coupled and employed with the verb gum-
nazein, means to practice and train. The meletai are exercises, gymnastics, and military

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their constant repetition as a process of bodily patterning or (in)forming.13

Hence, the care manifest through epimeleia heautou concerns those self-
forming activities that unremittingly modulate the regulation and regulari-
zation of not in-human lives. As a careful act, epimeleia requires attention
to the plasticity of human existence, to the capacity for both psyche and
soma to stretch (as the Latin root of attention, tendere, to stretch, indi-
cates). Such movements of the self beyond the self while remaining self at
the same timewhich is after all what we do when we stretchdisclose
the selfs capacity to exceed itself that constitutes the self as self. Indeed,
this is what we must do in order to take care, since to take care also
means to receive careto take care into ourselves. In taking care of our-
selves, we experience ourselves (and our selves) as both subjects and
objects of care, as careful subjects and as cared-for objects. Self-care, in
Foucaults usage, proposes care as a way of attending that extends the self
beyond itself. It does not recuperate or rectify what the self might have
been heretofore; it opens the possibility for living otherwise, for incorpo-
rating what he will call in his last volume of lectures an other life (vie autre)
(Foucault 2011: 184, 244).14 The epimeleia heautou incorporates practices
of self-care and therefore denotes not just a therapeutics but moreover a
transformation of the self, or even a transformation through which the self
as suchas subjectforms itself anew (Foucault 2005: 44748).
On the surface, Stiegler seems to share Foucaults interest in epi-
exercises, military training. Epimeleisthai refers to a form of vigilant, continuous, applied,

regular, etcetera, activity much more than mental activity. . . . The series of words, mele-
tan, melet, epimelesthai, epimeleia, etcetera, thus designates a series of practices
(2005: 84). Foucault briefly returns to the etymology of epimeleia in his last lectures,
where he reports his conversation with Paul Veyne on the question. The conversation
turns around the origin of the Indo-European root mel- (as in melody) that at first Veyne
rejects as an etymon but then reconsiders. As a result of this exchange, Foucault con-
cludes: There would be something like a musical secret, a secret of the musical appeal
in this notion of care (2011: 119). Extrapolating from this conjecture, we might perhaps link
the notion of care supposed in epimeleia with Simondons notion of internal resonance
which Stiegler invokes (cf. Simondon 1989: 17, 67, 238).
13. Victor Goldschmidt made a similar point about Platos dialogues, saying that they
were more forming than informing (1947: 3).
14. Foucault uses the phrase penser autrement, thinking otherwise, in the preface to
LUsage des Plaisirs (1984) in order to convey his own sense of why his work constitutes
a philosophical exercise: The stakes [enjeu] were to know to what degree the effort to
think its own history could free thought from what it silently thinks and permit it to think
otherwise [penser autrement] (15).

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meleia, invoking Foucaults use explicitly and repeatedly throughout Taking

Care of Youth and the Generations: The anamnesis through which phi-
losophy tests the need for a mind that understands how to transform itself
through its understanding is thus a form of epimeleia and of attention
revealed as taking care of what is not oneself, what will later be called an
object. As Foucault shows, philosophy (and what has become its academic
system as a body of disciplines) has forgotten that understanding itself is
also and above all a system of care, an epimeleia (Stiegler 2010: 111).
Moreover, he frames his own project using epimeleia as a critical
articulation:
My thesis is that it is a psychic, collective, technical, and scientific

process of individuation forming a system of care through the materi-
alization of various streams or flows, leading directly to todays sur-
render to machines and to a short-circuiting of psychosocial trans-
individuationof the generations as well as the social classes and
territory: this grammatization has produced, and even more impor-
tant, transformed into a hyperpharmacological archive. . . . A con-
junction such as this can only exist as a group, despite its many
internal tensions, through a common epimeleia. (152)
Stiegler then goes on to express his strongest concurrence with Fou-

caults focus on hypomnmata in general and correspondence in particu-
lar (for example, in Senecas Letters to Lucillius) as epimeleia, where they
form a material basis (which Stiegler describes as tertiary retentions) for
a practice and care of the self. Like Foucault, Stiegler regards these prac-
tices as conjoint formations of an I and a we, demonstrating that the
care for the self always implies a care for the other and thereby constitutes
psychic and collective individuation. In light of this shared insight, Stieg-
ler affirms and recasts Foucaults position in his own (Simondonian) idiom:
But what is most important is that this subjectivation, here strictly psychic,
also presents itself as the individuation of a we, not just an I: through the I,
as what one could understand and read, which was not mine and was thus
preindividual, then being individuated and becoming transindividual, that
is, we. In this process, the ego [moi ] becomes a self that is always already
supraegoic, spiritual (155).
Yet, despite this affinity with Foucaults position, Stiegler also finds
fault with it: In the end, Foucault does not ask the question of pharmacol-
ogya question that is nonetheless essential to all therapeutics, all medi-
calization, and all questions of care and epimeleia: no medicine without

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pharmacopeia, which is perhaps, in the final analysis the true question of

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

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While not an unfair characterization of Foucaults project in Discipline and

Punish (and similar to many other complaints that the book normalizes the
subjects enmeshment by power), Stieglers analysis nevertheless neglects
Foucaults emphasis on the productivity of power relations in the mono-
graph that immediately follows Discipline and Punish, the famous introduc-
tory volume of the History of Sexuality. Moreover, it does not seem entirely
clear why Stiegler pursues his line of criticism by moving backward in Fou-
caults oeuvre to make his case, when Foucaults subsequent work, espe-
cially the lectures at the Collge de France, substantially complicates the
picture.17
If, instead of pursuing Foucaults thought on what Stiegler denomi-
nates the self and care in general by returning to texts Foucault wrote in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, we follow the development of Foucaults
thought in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we discern a somewhat different
trajectory. In particular, if we consider the last lectures Foucault gave at the
Collge de France, The Courage of Truth, we find that far from neglecting
the possibility that subjectification might entail a creative development of
the self, Foucault proposed what he names the aesthetics of existence as
this very possibility. Moving beyond his earlier readings of Platos Alcibia-
des as the locus classicus for the collapse of the care of the self into knowl-
edge of the self (on which Stieglers interpretation of Foucault hinges), in
these last lectures Foucault turns to the Laches as a counterpoint to the
former concerning the question of education as care of the self. In the Alci-
biades, as Foucault reads it, the dialogue addresses the form that the care
of the self that a wealthy young man who aspires to a role of importance
in the City should have. As Socrates enjoins Alcibiades to concern himself
with his soul if he wishes to govern himself in order to govern others, Plato
adumbrates what Foucault frames as the future site of a metaphysical dis-
course, which will have to speak to man of his being and what in the way of
ethics and rules of conduct follows from this ontological foundation of his
sense (that is, as the control and subjection of individuals), would only be one pole faced
with another pole: the field of disciplines structuring knowledgeand as its discursive
relations based on techniques of the selfis not simply a bias but an incoherence within
its own methodology and its results (2010: 121).
17. In writing Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Stiegler seems not to have con-
sulted the lectures published as Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Government of the
Self and Others, and The Courage of Truth. They do not appear in his bibliography, and
his citations refer only to the earlier monographs and to the texts collected in Dits et crits
(Foucault 1994).

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being (Foucault 2011: 160).18 In the Laches, however, Foucault discerns a

different undertaking. Rather than pursuing care of the self as care of the
soul, the Laches directly addresses the question of teaching as care: The
theme is: we must take care of young people, teaching them to take care
of themselves. . . . As the dialogue progresses, what is designated as the
object one must take care of is not the soul, it is life (bios), that is to say
the way of living. What constitutes the fundamental object of epimeleia is
this modality, this practice of existence (12627). For Foucault, the Laches
opens a second aspect of philosophical activity, of philosophical practice
in the West beyond what the knowledge of the soul precipitates as an
ontology of the self. It proposes a philosophy as a test of life, of bios, which
is the ethical material and object of an art of oneself (127).
The art of oneself, Foucault argues, does not follow from the chain
of rationality, as in technical teaching, nor [from] the souls ontological
mode of being, but [from] the style of life, the way of living, the very form
that one gives to life (144). This aesthetics of existencewhich Foucault
elsewhere describes as this elaboration of ones own life as a personal
work of art (Foucault 1996: 451)returns us to Stieglers description of (or
prescription for?) a mystagogy of art with a new, and possibly surprising,
perspective:
The experience of art is the experience of a work that opens up onto

such a plane [something other than the plane of existence], and that
appears in this way to reveal this other plane. Every work of art has
the structure of a revelation. . . . It makes appear in the most ordi-
nary way in the world the extra-ordinary next to this ordinaryand
as coming out of this ordinary, but also, and at the same time, as
something that can never be proven (prouv): instead it can only be
experienced (prouv). (Stiegler, Proletarianization, 9)
18. Foucault succinctly outlines his reading of the Alcibiades as follows: [T]he Alcibia-
des, starting from the principle of the need to give an account of oneself, proceeds to the
discovery and establishment of oneself as a reality ontologically distinct from the body.
And this reality ontologically distinct from the body is explicitly designated as the soul
(psukh). . . . This establishment of the psukh, as the reality ontologically distinct from
the body that has to be looked after, was correlative with a mode of knowledge of the self
which had the form of the souls contemplation of itself and its recognition of its mode of
being. . . . Thus, the establishment of oneself as a reality ontologically distinct from the
body, in the form of the psukh which possesses the possibility and ethical duty of con-
templating itself, gives rise to a mode of truth-telling, of veridiction, the role and end of
which is to lead the soul back to its mode of being and its world (2011: 15960).

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Stieglers notion of the work of art as a technical externalization that

begets an interiority that is at once psychic and collective depends on his
reading of Leroi-Gourhan. However, in order to understand how the work
of art makes the extraordinary appear in the ordinary, we must reflect on
what makes the ordinary ordinary and that would seem to be the inter-
mittently noetic, not-inhuman life in which it appears.19 Life circumscribes
the horizon of ordinariness from which something like the extraordinary can
leap forth and thereby reveal not-inhuman life. It incorporates (incarnates?)
an experience that testifies to the revelation that the work of art exposes.
Hence, Foucaults notion of a life as a work of art suggests another kind of
mystagogical opportunity for self creation (i.e., another opportunity for sur-
prise and revelation).20 If we take bios as an aesthetic object, as an object
of aesthetic elaboration and perception: bios as a beautiful work (Foucault
2011: 162), then we explicitly make psychic and collective individuationthe
regard for which Simondon posited as spiritualityour locus of care and
concern.21 For Foucault, the aesthetics of existence exposes within this life,
this bios, the possibility for another life, an other life.
Juxtaposing the other life to the other world, which Platonism
affirms as the domain of the true life, Foucault traces a displacement imma-
nent to life that makes it possible to live truly. Socrates and Diogenes the
Cynic after him exemplify this possibility insofar as their way of life makes
a caesura appear within ordinary life so that another possible lifean
extraordinary life (?)can emerge: It could be said that with Platonism,
and through Platonism, Greek philosophy since Socrates basically posed
the question of the other world (lautre monde). But, starting with Socra-
tes, or from the Socratic model to which Cynicism referred, it also posed
another question. Not the question of the other world but that of an other
life (vie autre) (245).22 The other life lives within this life; it is the same life
19. As noted above (n4), Stiegler repeatedly invokes Aristotles triad of vegetative, sen-
sitive, and noetic souls and Aristotles observation that only the Gods are entirely noetic,
whereas humans are only intermittently noetic. For an explication, see the section The
Law of Regression: Being Only Intermittently, in Stieglers The Decadence of Industrial
Democracies (2011: 13237).
20. Moreover, Foucaults extension of aesthetics to a style of life more directly addresses
the problems of consumerist lifestyles and the globalization of the American way of life
that so often worries Stiegler.
21. Foucault also sees this as a spiritual possibility, insofar as he takes spirituality to
involve the subjects attainment of a certain mode of being and the transformations that
the subject must carry out on itself to attain this mode of being (1996: 443).
22. Pierre Hadot makes a similar point about Socrates as the one who makes the other

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reiterated with a difference. The other life divulges the uncommon within
the common by taking the common to its limit. At the limit of ordinary life
lives the extraordinary life, the life of the spirit that we approach only by
caring about it:
[T]he care of the self does not lead to the question of what this being
I must care for is in its reality and truth, but to the question of what
this care must be and what a life must be that claims to care about
the self. And what this sets off is not a movement towards the other
world, but the questioning of what, in relation to all other forms of life,
precisely that form of life which takes care of itself must and can be
in truth. (246)
The non-metaphysical question of care, then, reframes the way the

self-difference of the self appears as such. Unfolding from an ordinary,
immanent, and vital locus of concern, self-difference does not bifurcate into
psukh/soma, body/mind, life/death. Instead, self-difference, that is to
say, [what] individuates me, distinguishes me, differentiates me, . . . in order
to permit me to discern in myselfto distinguishalterity, difference [differ-
ance?], . . . the future (as Stiegler affirms in the epigraph to this essay),
appears as I take care of myself.23 To take care of myself, I must appreciate
within myself the possibility that I am different from myself and that from this
differance a potential for an other life within this life arises.
Caring for the life of the spirit that is oneself, that is the self, means
both attending to and desiring it. In What Makes Life Worth Living, Stieg-
ler writes of the necessity for inventing a way of life that constitutes a new
way of taking care of the world, a new way of paying attention to it, through
the invention of therapeutics (2013: 88). While Stieglers project locates
this careful practice at the level of noopolitics, or industrial technologies
of the spirit, he does not, to my knowledge, refer to mystagogy at this level
of generality. Perhaps this is because mystery is not subject to grammati-
zation, to repetition by being made discrete, since mystery unveils the para-
doxical entanglement of preindividual/individual or, to invoke Donald Winni-
cotts text, which Stiegler places at the center of What Makes Life Worth
the extraordinaryappear within the ordinary life: Thus, Socrates is simultaneously in

the world and outside it. He transcends both people and things by his moral demands
and the engagement they require; yet he is involved with people and with things because
the only true philosophy lies in the everyday (2002: 38).
23. I insert differance, since the audiorecording from which this is transcribed allows for
both possibilities.

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Living, of continuous/contiguous.24 In order to think mystagogy as what,

following Winnicott, we might consider as a transformational practice, we
might need to expand Stieglers pharmacological ambit to foreground the
life that lives a careful life a bit more clearly. While Stiegler professes a
general organology that addresses the biological, technological, psycho-
logical, political, economic, and social simultaneously, his attention rarely
focuses on lived experience as the context within which any organology
necessarily transpires. Instead, he privileges the technological aspects of
organology and often relegates vitality to subsistence as distinguished from
the play between existence and consistence that for him define the non
in-human per se. However, if we supplement Stieglers unnecessarily lim-
ited reading of Foucault with one that includes Foucaults later works and
embrace the aesthetic of existence as that which can make bios a work of
art, an oeuvre in which the spirit lives (to paraphrase Valry), then perhaps
the vitality of art as a mystagogical initiation can reveal to us new ways of
taking care. Not surprisingly, both Stiegler and Foucault ask us to rethink
Kants motto for the Enlightenment, Sapere Aude, Dare to Know. Perhaps
between mystagogy and the aesthetics of the existence we can find a new
motto: Curare Aude, Dare to Care.
References
Auroux, Sylvain. 1993. La Rvolution technologique de la grammatization. Lige:
Mardaga.
Cohen, Ed. 2014. Live Thinking, or, The Psychagogy of Michel Foucault. Differ-
ences 25, no. 2: 125.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2001. Immanence: A Life. In Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life,
translated by Anne Boyman, 2534. New York: Zone.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Platos Pharmacy. In Dissemination, translated by Barbara
Johnson, 61171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Subject and Power. In Michel Foucault: Beyond Struc-
turalism and Hermeneutics, edited by Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
20826. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1984. Preface to LUsage des Plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard.
. 1994. Dits et crits. Edited by Daniel Defert and Franois Ewald. 4 vols.
Paris: Gallimard.
24. In What Makes Life Worth Living (2013), Stiegler reads closely Winnicotts Playing and
Reality (1971) in order to consider technology in light of Winnicotts notion of the transi-
tional object.

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. 1996. An Aesthetics of Existence. In Foucault Live: Collected Interviews

19611984, edited by Sylvre Lotringer, 15054. New York: Semiotext(e).
. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collge de France
19811982. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador.
. 2010. The Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the Collge de
France 19821983. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador.
. 2011. The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collge de France 19831984.
Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Goldschmidt, Victor. 1947. Les Dialogues de platon: Structure et mthode dialec-
tique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Hadot, Pierre. 2002. What Is Ancient Philosophy? Translated by Michael Chase.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1998. Platos Doctrine of the Truth. In Pathmarks, edited by
William McNeill, 155182. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Simondon, Gilbert. 1989. Lindividuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2010. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Translated by
Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 2011. The Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Translated by Daniel Ross
and Suzanne Arnold. London: Polity.
. 2013. What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology. Translated by
Daniel Ross. London: Polity.
. 2014a. Cours de Epineuil- de-Fleuriel. Pharmakon.fr, January 4 (video).
pharmakon.fr/wordpress/annee-20132014-cours-n%C2%B03-4-janvier-2014/.
. 2014b. Esprit, Glossaire de Ars Industrialis. Accessed August 11, 2016.
arsindustrialis.org/vocabulaire-esprit.
. 2014c. Vocabulaire, Ars Industrialis. Accessed August 11, 2016.
arsindustrialis.org/vocabulaire.
Valry, Paul. 1945. La Libert de lEsprit. In Regards sur le Monde Actuel, 17497.
Paris: ditions Gallimard.
Winnicott, Donald W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.

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Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire?
Mark B. N. Hansen
I have been a reader of French philosopher Bernard Stieglers work

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

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The focus of my initial interest in Stieglers work was his inspired

refunctionalization of the great Husserlian project of developing a phenome-
nology of time consciousness, and specifically his updated theorization
of the temporal object as a crucial concept for understanding the impact
of technical culture on human experience. By supplementing Edmund
Husserls analysis of time consciousness with a third, and properly tech-
nical form of memorywhat Stiegler dubbed tertiary retention (meaning,
essentially, recorded memories, e.g., films, sound recordings, photographs,
etc.)and by insisting on the foundational role of tertiary retention for the
entire Husserlian account of time consciousness, Stieglers work introduced
technics into the very heart of the intimate operation of time conscious-
ness. In this way, Stiegler transformed the Husserlian temporal object from
a mental object operating within the immanent domain of time conscious-
ness into a properly technical object existing in the objective world, and thus
outside time consciousness, but nonetheless central toindeed, contami-
nating ofthe very intimate core of subjectivity that is time consciousness.
The fundamental payoff of Stieglers contamination of time con-
sciousness and his correlative objectification of the temporal object is the
idea that technical recording lays bare the structure of time consciousness
and, indeed, that it is only in the era of technical recording that we can
properly excavate the structure of time consciousness. Technical record-
ing makes it possible for the same temporal object (be it a music record-
ing, a film, or a digital video) to be experienced more than one time, which
in turn makes it possible for time consciousness to compare its distinct
experiences of the same temporal object and to assess how its memory
(Husserls recollection, which Stiegler calls secondary retention) of its
first experience (primary retention) selectively impacts its second experi-
ence (primary retention), and so on, with each new experience of the
same temporal object. By demonstrating in this way that time conscious-
ness depends on its interactions with technical temporal objectsor more
precisely, that it includes technical memories as crucial elements of its very
operationalityStiegler develops the theoretical basis for a broad under-
standing of technics as the very condition for culture.
This broad understanding has remained the focus of Stieglers work
as it has progressed from its initial concern with the excavation and cri-
tique of the philosophical repression of technics (primarily in the three pub-
lished volumes of Technics and Time) to a focus on the critique of the libidi-
nal economy of contemporary capitalism (Symbolic Misery series, Disbelief
and Discredit series) and, increasingly, an engaged commitment to devel-

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Hansen/Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire?169
oping the theoretical and practical resources for a new critique of political
economy along with the correlative creation of a new spirit of economic
life, if not indeed of capitalism itself (For a New Critique of Political Econ-
omy, Reenchantment of the World ).1
Throughout all of Stieglers various engagements, the focus on the
human and the predicament of human life remains paramount. This focus
is, at least in part, the product of Stieglers understanding of the correla-
tion between technics and culture: as he develops it in the first volume of
Technics and Time, appropriately subtitled The Fault of Epimetheus, the
conjunction of the human with the technical is accidental, but is nonethe-
lessor indeed, is as suchspecies-defining. Stiegler deploys the myth
of Prometheus and Epimetheus to make this point: focusing on Epime-
theuss fault, his forgetting to reserve some defining characteristic for
human beings in his allotment of powers to the mortal creatures, Stieg-
ler emphasizes how human skills in the arts and in using fire, skills in the
area of techn given to humans by Prometheuss theft, are correlated with
humans status as forgotten, incomplete beings. Human beings are origi-
narily lacking an origin or essence. By emphasizing the Epimethean side
of the myth, Stiegler thus underscores the correlation with technics as the
vehicle for humans to become human: humans are constituted contingently
through their species-defining coupling with technics.
As a consequence of their essential default, humans evolve, they
become human, both through genetic inheritance and through the trans-
mission of culture. Stiegler dubs this latter form of evolution epiphylogene-
sis, meaning the evolution of the living by means other than life. The Tech-
nics and Time project as a whole, and much of Stieglers subsequent work,
can be understood as a working-through of this fundamental insight: for if
humans evolve through the transmission of culture and if this transmission
is dependent on technics, then it follows that technics is, as Stiegler puts it,
the condition of culture (2004b: 59).
At the same time as it comprises what, in my opinion, is most fruit-
ful and urgent about Stieglers philosophy, the way Stiegler theorizes this
1. I believe that it is absolutely possible to say that the consumerist industrial model
is absolutely exhausted and that consumerist desire is exhausted: that it is possible to
bring about a new model. I believe this completely. It is developing in all sorts of frame-
works at this moment and I work not only with free software but also with farmers, with
energy scientists of all kinds, with business, etc., and I think that there is something that
is truly being re-constituted that itself is in the process of creating a new spiritperhaps
not of capitalismbut in any case of the economy and of economic activity, capitalist or
not (Stiegler 2012: 184).

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fundamental correlation of human becoming with technics commits him

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

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the capture of available brain time? Or is it rather more of a throwback to a

moment of cultural history (and of the theorization of culture) that has now
been superseded, in large part, because of technical advance?
Technics and Technology
The writings of the mid-2000s, which for purposes of convenience

I shall refer to as Phase 2 of Stieglers career, bring the resources of his
philosophical deconstruction of philosophys repression of technics to bear
on the contemporary situation, both globally and in Europe in particular. In
these writings, Stiegler addresses what he calls the technological epoch
of technics, often by way of topical reference to current events. While it
resembles Martin Heideggers analysis of the technological epoch of Being,
Stieglers conceptualization inverts the tenor of Heideggers famous postu-
lation that the essence of technology is nothing technological (Heidegger
1977: 35): for Stiegler, technology is through and through technical in the
sense that it is a particular epoch in the history of the human-technics cou-
pling. While culture is conditioned by technics, as we observed above, the
modern epoch of technics is technical in a more precise senseit is the
technical epoch of technology:
One must carefully distinguish technics as a milieu of epiphylo-

genetic memory in general from what must be called mnemotech-
nics in the proper sense. Man is a cultural being precisely to the
extent that he is also essentially a technical being: it is because he
is surrounded by this third technical memory that he can accumulate
the intergenerational experience often called culture; and it is also
why it is absurd to oppose technics to culture: technics is the condi-
tion of culture insofar as it permits transmission. By contrast, there
is an epoch of technics, called technology; it is our epoch, when cul-
ture enters into crisis, precisely because it becomes industrial and,
as such, finds itself submitted to imperatives of market calculation.
(Stiegler 2004b: 5960)
While Stieglers analysis of the epoch of technology is rooted in his analysis

of technics as epiphylogenetic memory, it focuses on mnemotechnics, and,
more precisely, on mnemotechnologies, meaning technologies specifi-
cally intended to exteriorize human memory. (To illustrate the specificity of
mnemotechnics/ mnemotechnology, Stiegler compares the flint tool of the
Neolithic with the recording technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth

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centuries: although the former is not designed as a storage mechanism, it

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

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Stiegler defines symbolic misery as the loss of individuation that

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

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The proximate focus of Stieglers scaled-up commitment to Simon-

don is the latters analysis of proletarianization. In his On the Mode of
Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon demonstrates how industrializa-
tionthe advent of the machine toolleads to a loss of individuation on the
part of the industrial worker: as the latter increasingly becomes removed
from the process of manufacture and relegated to the role of supervising
machines, the value of skill is diminished along with the capacity to differen-
tiate skilled work from unskilled work. What results is a general proletari-
anization of the worker. In his effort to update Simondons account for an
analysis of mnemotechnological capitalism, Stiegler substitutes the con-
sumer for the worker, and argues that the asymmetry between producer
and consumer leads to a general proletarianization of the consumer:
Simondon demonstrated that the appearance of the machine tool

provoked what he called a loss of individuation of the worker, who
was deprived of his knowledge and reduced to the condition of pure
servant of the machine. Insofar as it exteriorized this knowledge, the
machine becomes the technical individual itself, in the place of the
worker. . . . With analog technologies of temporal objects, a new loss
of individuation is produced: a loss that deprives consciousnesses of
their diachronicity, which is to say, of their singularity. (90 91)
Stieglers updating of Simondons account centers on the new loss of indi-

viduation that results in the proletarianization of consciousness itself in the
era of mnemotechnologies. The vehicle for this proletarianization is gram-
matization, or, more precisely, digital grammatization, which functions
to transform embodied gestures into discrete operations and, ultimately,
into categorical attractors (Stiegler 2004a: 139). It should be noted that
Stieglers conceptualization of grammatization, itself beholden to Jacques
Derridas work as well as to the work of Sylvain Auroux, first emerges in
the Technics and Time project as a way of understanding the specificity of
tertiary memory. In its conjunction with the proletarianization of the con-
sumer, grammatization continues to play this role but in a slightly different,
expanded context: it now explains how the process of psychic and collec-
tive individuation gets interrupted or short-circuited by the standardization
of the preindividual milieu.
By compromising the source for the openness of individuation, the
grammatization of the preindividual domain occasions a reduction of sin-
gularization into particularization: the individuals constitutive diachro-
nicity and excess over itself (excess of its individuation as process over its

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achieved individual state at any moment) get transformed into a constitu-

tion of the individual as a set of attributes. In the process, individuation is
effectively reduced to user profiling. More significant than the grim diagno-
sis this account sharesor seems to sharewith the earlier analysis of the
industrialization of time consciousness is the new context in which gram-
matization now operatesas a standardization of the modes of access to
the preindividual milieu that precedes and conditions psychic and collec-
tive individuation insofar as they are two faces of one and the same pro-
cess (139).
This account draws on Stieglers earlier reading of the Simondonian
preindividual as the domain of tertiary memory, which is to say, of the sedi-
mented discretizations of experience that are preserved technically and
thereby available for future adoption (Stiegler 1993). But by linking the pre-
individual specifically to digital grammatization, Stiegler now seems to posi-
tion the preindividual qua repository of tertiary memory in an entirely nega-
tive light: the digital grammatization of all the movements of individuation
destroys the potential of the preindividual (i.e., tertiary memory) to support
singularization, which is to say, authentic individuation. The effort to redis-
cover possibilities for restoring singularization will come to occupy Stieg-
lers attention from Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, onward.
What is central to such efforts is already present, albeit only implicitly,
in the treatment of Simondon in Symbolic Misery, 1. For at the same time
that he denounces the grammatization of the preindividual, Stiegler criti-
cizes Simondon precisely for having failed to correlate his account of psy-
chic and collective individuation with his account of technical concretiza-
tion. What Simondon thereby overlooks is how the technical systemwhat
Stiegler will develop as a third form of individuationis inseparable from
the psychic and collective individuation with which it forms a single com-
plex. What this means is that the purely negative picture of digital gram-
matization cannot be understood as an operation that exclusively concerns
the preindividual domain of tertiary memory; grammatization is not simply
technical but comprises a perversion of the entire complex of individua-
tion, a complex encompassing all three strands of psychic, collective, and
technical individuation. This development will prove to be crucial, as we
shall see shortly, for it means that grammatization is always a function of
the entire organological system, which becomes increasingly governed
by social organization. Thus, rather than impacting individuation in a top-
down fashion, as a simple force of domination, grammatization is part of its
operation and, as such, always potentially modifiable.

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

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the triple-stranded individuation complex but that take this grammatization,

and the mnemotechnologies that bring it into operation, as their very basis.
General Organology and Libidinal Economy
Let us now turn to Stieglers recuperation of the Freudian conception

of desire and its link to the general organology of the sensible that forms
the theoretical core of Symbolic Misery, 2. Perhaps the first thing to remark
is simply the shift Stiegler makes to the domain of the sensible, and to the
aesthetic as the product of a general organology. It is a question, he says,
of thinking aesthetic technologies from the point of view of a general orga-
nology, where living organs, artificial organs, and social organizations con-
stitute the complete aesthetic fact by tying together what Gilbert Simondon
names transductive relations (relations that constitute their terms) (Stieg-
ler 2005: 29). The trajectory of Stieglers analysis in this volume leads him
to embed the triple- stranded individuation complex that defines human
becoming within the, in some sense more general, individuation of the
living. What results from this embedding is a new focus on sensibility, and
on the techno-aesthetic enlargement of sensibility, which informs a rejuve-
nated account of the resingularization of human individuation. What was the
object of loss in Symbolic Misery, 1, namely participation, gets connected
to the aesthetic, and hence to the constant enlargement of sensibility in
which consists the singularity of what happens to sense [sens] as its adven-
ture, . . . to the endless novelty of the sensible (41). Participation will be
rethought as aesthetic participation, meaning participation in the enlarge-
ment of sensibility itself, and it will be linked to the Freudian analysis of subli-
mation and libidinal desire in which the argument of the volume concludes.
With respect to our analysis of Symbolic Misery, 1, the crucial move
informing Stieglers advance is an embedding of the operation of repeti-
tionprecisely what digital grammatization makes possiblewithin a
libidinal economy. This embedding is also, as the following passage makes
clear, the crux of Stieglers conception of pharmacology:
The repetitivity of symbolic machines, . . . which constitute the prole-

tarianization of the consumer through loss of participation, of savoir-
vivre, and thus of individuation, are also potential apparatuses for
a new epoch of repetition as production of differenceand as dif-
france: as experience of the sensible and of the interminability of
the incalculable. . . . The realization of this new stage is however pos-

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sible only if it is itself inscribed in a history of the conditions of repe-

titionand in a libidinal economy where repetition is equally com-
pulsive death drive and return of life reborn as the always refreshing
adventure of its future. (43)
If this passage expresses a certain subordination of tertiary memory, the

product of digital grammatization, to a libidinal economy that engages repe-
tition both as death (i.e., as tertiary memory) and as life, catalyst for new
primary and secondary retentions, it is the role of social organization that
emerges as paramount in this new pharmacological phase of Stieglers
analysis of symbolic misery. Grammatization, Stiegler goes on to spec-
ify, does not determine any libidinal organization; and if it is the case that
tertiary retentions overdetermine the conditions for the production of pri-
mary and secondary retentions, the conditions in which tertiary retentions
come into play themselves depend on social organizations (187; empha-
sis added).
Relating this claim back to Stieglers embedding, in Symbolic
Misery, 1, of grammatization within the triple-stranded individuation com-
plex, we can discern a new and more specific emphasis on the role played
by collective individuation. The social, or collective, individuation is what
concretizes the transductive relation between the dead and the living; as
such, it is the retentional dispositive of apprenticeship (and of the produc-
tion of a superego) that permits, via the constitution of collective secondary
retentions, the acquisition of new know-how [savoirs] that expands through
cortical connections operating as interiorizations of these collective sec-
ondary retentions (231). What this claim amounts to, if I understand Stieg-
ler correctly, is simply that collective individuation is what brings technical
individuation (i.e., grammatization as repetition of dead, tertiary memory)
into relation with psychic individuation, the production of new living, pri-
mary retentions (i.e., new experiences on the part of consciousness): it is
through technical repetition that collective secondary memories are con-
stituted, and it is through collective secondary memories that new primary
retentions are generated.
Stieglers new focus on the social, on the operation of collective indi-
viduation, thus contributes something crucial to the general investment in
the subjectas participant in its own resingularizationthat seems to dif-
ferentiate his Phase 2 work from the Technics and Time project: specifically,
it furnishes a mechanism capable of explaining how the grammatization of
all aspects of experience, and its artifactualization in todays mnemotech-

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nologies, can be lived by the subject as a source for participation in the

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

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being, itself induced by the appearance of the dead organs that are com-
posed of technical objects (221). By embedding the three-stranded indi-
viduation complex in the individuation of the living as conceptualized by
Freud, Stiegler gains access to a new source of energylibido or uncon-
scious desirethat, through social organization or engineering (i.e., the
production of certain kinds of collective secondary memories as selections
of tertiary memories), will furnish the psychic individual with a counterforce
to the standardizing sway of grammatization.
Before he can avail himself of this new source of energy, however,
Stiegler must submit Freuds account to criticism, for Freud, not surpris-
ingly, and in concert with the entire philosophical tradition, is guilty of having
repressed technics. As Stiegler sees it, the operation of nonliving or tech-
nical memory forms a skin of technical objects linking the interior (brain)
and the exterior (the socio-ethnic). As such, technics is the unthought con-
dition on which Freuds entire theory is premised:
The appearance of this non-living memory is also what opens the

Freudian question of the appearance of desire as defunctionaliza-
tion of natural organs and organic repression linked to the achieve-
ment of erect posture, and which . . . poses a question of the relation
between interior and exterior in which Freud gets bogged down on
account of having failed to think the living organ that is the human
brain in its original relation with dead organs: in the Freudian think-
ing of the constitution of this desire that comprises the heart of the
noetic, the question of technics has been repressed, as it has in
metaphysics. (228)
Despite his failure to think the technical condition for defunctionalization

and refunctionalization, Freud did manage, Stiegler emphasizes, to grasp
the fact that the physiological organology of the human body does not
cease to transform itself following the thread of the genealogy of libidi-
nal economy whose point of departure is the achievement of erect pos-
ture (229).
Freud is thus the thinker par excellence of defunctionalization and
refunctionalization, which comprise the kernel of Stieglers general orga-
nology, and this is the important point here. What Freud gets right is that
the human undergoes constant transformation, ongoing becoming, and
that the human brain, like the human hand, the human foot, and the human
nose, is in perpetual functional redefinition (229). Where Freud comes up
short is in his understanding of what drives this perpetual transformation:

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though he pinpoints the achievement of erect posture (i.e., the moment

the human hand is liberated for technical application) as the origin of this
organological genealogy of the human, Freud, lacking an understanding
of technical exteriorization, can only attribute this transformation to the
activity of the psyche (i.e., to the brain itself).
For Stiegler, by contrast, the achievement of erect posture puts in
place a process of functional transformation of the brain that is no longer
commanded by the characteristics of the brain itself . . . , but instead by the
articulation of the brain qua living memory with the technical prostheses
qua dead memories (230). If the human body-brain continues to transform
itself/be transformed following its organic evolution, it is precisely because
it de- and refunctionalizes its living energy (libido) in relation to prosthe-
ses that are selected by social organization: the bodys organs economize
the libido differently in relation to different organological complexes. Or, in
Stieglers metaphorical characterization: the foot of the bushman who runs
in the savanna and the foot of the modern man who pushes the accelerator
do not dance . . . in the same manner (227).
The account of the evolution of Stieglers project that I have been
developing here is recapitulated, in concentrated form, in the encounter of
Freud with Husserl that culminates Stieglers theorization of libidinal econ-
omy as organology. Despite being presented as yet another iteration of
Stieglers criticism of Freud for failing to think technics, the encounter actu-
ally serves to introduce the unconscious, and the operation of repression in
particular, into the very heart of the primary retentionsecondary memory
complex. It is, in other words, a crucial development in Stieglers theoreti-
cally mediated political project, the project he refers to as the politics of
memory. What results from the encounter of Freud and Husserl is noth-
ing less than a fundamental reorientation of the organological complex ini-
tially developed on the basis of Husserls account of time consciousness.
Where Husserls complex excavation of the structure of time conscious-
ness lays bare the mechanism of memorys bidirectional traffic with sen-
sibility, Freuds work introduces an exteriority to this memory circuit and,
with it, a source for potential resingularization of individual and collective
subjectivity.
Thus, even if Stieglers invocation of the structure of Husserlian
time consciousness does serve to correct for Freuds failure to think pri-
mary retention and to expose the genesis of the unconscious as a temporal
structure, the true payoff of the encounter is a more complex understand-
ing of the role and power of secondary memory and a correlative shift in

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

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The payoff of this transformational appropriation of Freud comes

when Stiegler likens the retentional upheaval to Freuds account, in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of the psyche faced with exterior stimuli
that break through the protective barrier and cause trauma to the psychic
system. Not surprisingly, this is the moment when the role of tertiary mem-
ory reenters the picture:
All that, which is to say the traumatism that appears to come from
the exterior as well as the means of defense, which would be on the
interior, can only be constituted by tertiary retentional dispositifs.
The traumatism of the exterior is nothing but the support for the pro-
jection of a traumatype that is conserved in the interior, but buried
in it, and that is prevented from being made conscious by stereo-
types, except when pre-textuality, occasioning primary retentional
processes, allows the process of projection suddenly to be liberated.
(239; emphasis added)
Here, finally, we have the explanation for how the subject can participate
or better, can be made to participatein its own resingularization, and also
a clarification of how technics, in the age of mnemotechnological grammati-
zation, can furnish the basis for such resingularization. Todays mnemo-
technologies make available a host of grammatized tertiary retentions that
can be selected by secondary memoryor rather, by social organization
operating on and through secondary memorywith the aim of generating
traumatypical primary retentions that will disrupt the entire organological
complex. As a result, the organological complex that supports the indi-
viduation of the individual will open the latter to what Stiegler calls sur-
prehension, the experience of the other in the same, the experience of
the singularity of the sensible (237). Exemplified for Stiegler by the opera-
tion of art as the social organization of the technical, such surprehension
of the unexpectedsuch traumatypical upheaval of the organology of the
humandisrupts grammatological capitalisms capture of the libido and
refunctionalizes the libido, and the living energy it comprises, in the service
of a new organological complex capable of living the singularity of sensi-
bility in the age of its machinic turn.
Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire?
Let me now back away from the minutiae of Stieglers refunctional-

ization of his own project through the encounter with Freud in order to ask

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what this refunctionalization accomplishes. Clearly, and as I have been sug-

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

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

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absolutely imperative interest in the human, seeks to expose the depen-

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

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human organism that feature centrally, if not indeed exclusively, in Stieg-

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

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of a cerebral unconscious. The crux of this claim concerns precisely the

locus of the traumatic stimulus: faced with the scientific evidence of brain
injury and cerebral decomposition, Malabou concludes that the Freudian
move to treat exogenous traumatic stimuli as if they were endogenous
the very kernel of the operation of interiorization promoted by Stiegler
remains powerless and must give way to a picture of the psyche radically
subjected to the force of the outside. With her concept of the cerebral
unconscious, Malabou effectively depicts the brain as a radical exteriority,
a kind of alien being or unsublatable environmental element, that is para-
doxically lodged within the psyche:
The nature of cerebral auto- affection is different than the auto-

affection of the subject as the philosophers have defined it. The ele-
mentary reflection that constitutes the cerebral psyche as such does
not reflect upon itself. It does not redouble its specularity to the point
of endowing it with the form of consciousness. No one can feel his or
her own brain; nor can he or she speak of it, hear it speak, nor hear
himself or herself speak within it. Cerebral auto-affection is neces-
sarily and paradoxically accompanied by a blindness, an inability of
the subject to feel anything as far as it is concerned. If the subject
can touch itself, it is indeed thanks to the brain: the first contact with
oneself constituted by homeostasis renders such auto-interpellation
possible. At the same time, however, this originary solicitation hides
itself within the very thing that makes it possible. Within my inner
self, my brain never appears. The brain absents itself as the very
site of its presence to self. It is only accessible by means of cerebral
imaging technology. And there is no possible subjectification of this
type of objectification. (Malabou 2012: 4243)
Because it remains open to the radical or destructive, and radically exterior,

accident, the cerebral unconscious makes the brain into an access point
onto an exteriority whose operation cannot be captured by subjectivity. As
a radical blind spot from the standpoint of subjectivity, the cerebral uncon-
scious comprises a seat for the environmental outside within the psychic
system. In this function, might not the cerebral unconscious furnish a more
capacious figure of the brain that remains radically open to the force of
medias impact on environmental sensibility and welcoming of its potential
to transform human becoming in ways not reducible to any organology?
With his concept of imitation, nineteenth- century sociologist-
philosopher Gabriel Tardethe subject of a wide-ranging recent renais-

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sance of interestfurnishes an alternate mechanism capable of account-

ing for the operation through which the traumatic force of technologies can
enter psychic individuation without requiring any form of interiorization.
Human becoming is, on Tardes account, essentially imitative, and imita-
tion is to social life what heredity is to organic life: the social being, in the
degree that he is social, is essentially imitative, and . . . imitation plays a
role in societies analogous to that of heredity in organic life or to that of
vibration among inorganic bodies (Tarde 1903: 11). Imitation, for Tarde, is
predominately micrological, involuntary, and unconscious, and operates as
a form of repetition-with-a-difference where the driving force of repetition
is not an internal compulsion (i.e., a repetition compulsion) but the perme-
ability of the brain (to speak like Malabou) to social and, one might add,
technical forces that remain in a crucial sense external. Stiegler invokes
Tarde for his exposition of the mimetic source of the living, adding that
such an account requires the conceptualization of a new power of repe-
tition: a repetition that produces differences in other conditions than the
living, in idiomatic differences (Stiegler 2005: 19899). But we must won-
der whether imitative repetition, far from being narrowly positioned as a
concept for the technical repetition that grammatization makes possible,
might in fact furnish the very motor mechanism for the entire individuation
complex and might in this way make a crucial contribution toward situating
individuation beyond organology.
Finally, with respect to the expansion of sensibility that Stiegler
identifies with the evolution of human becoming, might we not conceptu-
alize technical systems for gathering data about the worldof which, inci-
dentally, the brain imaging technologies Malabou mentions would be a
prominent exampleas themselves components in an individuation with-
out organs? For, as I have sought to make clear in my own recent work,
these technical systems operate in domains of sensibility that, despite their
immediate relevance for human experience, remain operationally opaque
to human subjectivityto the experience of perceptual consciousness
and that can only impact the latter indirectly, by being fed-forward as
data about sensibility into consciousness so that it can be experienced by
consciousness after the fact. What such an account puts forth is a reso-
lutely nonprosthetic account of technics, where technics functions quasi-
autonomously from any organological function, but nonetheless as a com-
ponent in a larger system of individuation that includes human operations.
The key point of difference with Stiegler here is that, on the picture I
am sketching, the operation of technical systems need not be modeled on

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the functioning of organs. That is why, as I argue at length in Feed-Forward,

todays data-gathering and data-sensing technologies, along with the com-
putational media built upon them, are capable of putting human becoming
into relation with a worldly sensibility to which humans have no direct,
sense-perceptual access. The question thereby opened is the really cru-
cial one: How might such contact transform human becoming beyond any
organological readjustment?
To address this question, we must follow Stiegler beyond the bounds
of his own theoretical frame of referenceinto a properly postorganologi-
cal world of radically exterior technics where individual and collective sub-
jective individuations arise and can only arise as elements within larger,
thoroughly technical, environmental processes.
References
Hansen, Mark B. N. 2012. Technics beyond the Temporal Object. New Formations
77: 4462.
. 2015. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. In The Ques-
tion Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 335. New York: Harper
Torchbooks.
Malabou, Catherine. 2012. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage.
Translated by S. Miller. New York: Fordham University Press.
Stiegler, Bernard. 1993. Temps et individuation technique, psychique, et collective
dans loeuvre de Simondon. Futur Antrieur 1920/56. www.multitudes
.net/Temps-et-individuation-technique/.
. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by
R. Beardsworth and G. Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 2004a. De la misre symbolique 1: Lpoque hyperindustrielle. Paris: Galile.
. 2004b. Philosopher par accident: Entretiens avec lie During. Paris: Galile.
. 2005. De la misre symbolique 2: La catastroph du sensible. Paris: Galile.
. 2012. A Rational Theory of Miracles: On Pharmacology and Transindividua-
tion, an Interview with Bernard Stiegler. Conducted by Ben Roberts, Jeremy
Gilbert, and Mark Hayward. New Formations 77: 16484.
Tarde, Gabriel. 1903. The Laws of Imitation. Translated by E. W. Clews. New York:
Holt.

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On the Origin of Aisthesis by Means of Artificial Selection; or,

The Preservation of Favored Traces in the Struggle for Existence
Gerald Moore
But if variations useful to any organic being ever do occur, assuredly

individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being pre-
served in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheri-
tance, these will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized.
This principle of preservation, I have called . . . Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin (2008)
The passage of life from the struggle for the satisfaction of need, or
subsistence, to life as existence, revolving around objects of wor-
ship, is made possible above all by the fact that with the process of
externalization, selection pressure is refocused around the capaci-
ties of the genus Homo to invent or make use of artificial organs . . .
and for that reason we can no longer strictly speak of natural selec-
tion: it is a matter of artificial selection in which art, which is to say
technics, and arts and crafts in the broadest sense, come to the fore.
Bernard Stiegler (2008a)
Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French are my own.

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Jacques Derridas concept of diffrance captures the way in which

the meaning of a sign or trace is constitutively open to being rewritten in the
future, when subsequent interpretations retroactively transform our under-
standing of its earlier instances. Several critics, perhaps most prominently
Slavoj iek, have suggested that the logic of diffrance is thus also that of
the random variation in natural selection, where a mutation in genetic rep-
lication amounts to a repetition of difference that will retroactively be inter-
preted as fit or maladaptive (iek 2000: 23; see also Johnson 1993:
16467). Bernard Stiegler has gone further still, differentiating between
two regimes of evolutionary diffrance, pertaining to natural and artificial
selection, respectively. When a foot mutates intoor is iterated, repeated
asa hand, it is retroactively reinterpreted as a proto-organ for grasping
that adapted its bearer for survival. And when a tool is added to a hand,
the hand, too, is reinterpreted, in what Andr Leroi-Gourhan will call a lib-
eration and Bernard Stiegler a reinvention through technics. The tool
that supplements the hand also reinvents it, with the organ for grasping
reemerging as an organ for hammering, carving, or writing. The transfor-
mation of the field of experience means that subjectivity is also reinvented.
In being taught to use a tool, we are also taught to experience, by inter-
nalizing a new horizon of possibilities that it opens up: feeling [le sentir] is
tekhn from the outset (Stiegler 2015: 31; 2005: 62), as Stiegler puts it.1
This is the diffrance of artificial selection, where the who and the what,
the subject and the tool, continually retrace one another; where the tool, in
other words, produces a subject through the process of creating its objects.
In the second volume of De la misre symbolique (Symbolic Misery, 2005),
this is theorized in terms of the effect of the tool on the brain: It is therefore
in its relations to prostheses that the human brain, like the human hand and
every other human organ, is perpetually undergoing functional redefinition
(SM2, 141/229). The claim is reformulated in Stieglers more recent work:
the hand writes directly into the brain,2 or, our prostheses reorganize the
sensory cortex.
The notion of functional redefinition, of the refunctionalization and
defunctionalization of organs by technics, serves to make sense of Stieg-
lers assertion that technical evolution, meaning the reorganization of the
1. Hereafter, these works are cited together as SM2, with page references given for both
the English (2015) and French (2005) editions. The English pages are given for reference
only: translations into English are the authors own.
2. See, for example, the Pharmakon.fr seminar of May 31, 2012. Accessed July 4, 2014.
pharmakon.fr/wordpress/seminaire-20112012-seance-n%C2%B0-5-31-mai-2012/.

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Moore/On the Origin of Aisthesis193
living by the dead, organized, inorganic matter of technics, amounts to a

new organization of diffrance, a diffrance of diffrance (1998: 178; 1994:
186).3 Already a product of the diffrance, or variation, of natural selection,
liable to further mutations that might see it interpreted differently in the
future, the physiological organ is opened onto a second kind of diffrance,
in which its function is deferred into the prosthesis. The deferral brings with
it a corresponding differentiation of experience, with feeling and, moreover,
meaning and aesthetic value produced when physical sensation enters into
a circuit with the technical objects that supplement the body, when the use
of a tool confers its sense on that which is sensed [confre son sens au
senti ] by inscribing aisthesis within semiosis, within a symbolic and logical
horizon (SM2, 31/62). It is this technical inscription of aesthetics that gives
rise to the life of the mind, or spirit, the noetic soul whose existence con-
sists, over and above survival of the fittest, in the transgression of biological
patterns of behavior.
Like the physiological organ, the technical organ is susceptible to
future change, but unlike the naked hand, whose mutation in genetic rep-
lication is always unforeseen, the hand refunctionalized by the tool can
anticipate its future forms and actively bring them into existence. Through
artificial selection, we cease to be mere products of our genetic history
and become the architects of our own future, inventing an agency that is
wrested away from genetics. It is in this sense, Stiegler claims, that techni-
cal evolution marks a break with evolution by natural selection. The history
of humanity will thus be a history of the supplement (Stiegler 2011: 142;
2004: 188), meaning the history of our externalization, or deferral, into the
technical prostheses through which we repeatedly invent ourselves. This
history is also a genealogy of the sensible (SM2, 43/79), of the trans-
formation, or sublimation, of sensory stimulus (lme sensitive) into
shared and socially regulated meaning (le sensible), via the construction
of a technical-symbolic, aesthetic, social order (36, 12021/70, 198). In line
with what he calls general organology, meaning not just the physiological
but the technical organs and social organizations in which human life con-
sists, Stiegler undertakes to analyze how different (physiological, technical)
organs across human and prehuman history have generated the originat-
ing conditions of different modes of experience (113/188). This genealogy
is split into two overlapping parts, corresponding to two kinds of techni-
3. Hereafter, these works are cited together as TT1, with page references given for both
the English (1998) and French (1994) editions.

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

theory of natural selection was the question of what St. George Jackson
Mivart, in On the Genesis of Species (1871), termed the incompetency of
natural selection (26). The phrase alludes to an issue over the seemingly
dubious adaptive function of proto-organs, or the question of how notionally
unfinished organs could ever evolve to the point where they would serve a
purpose. If, as Darwin claimed, adaptive traits were the result of cumulative
series of minor and moreover contingent changes, then every minor muta-
tion on the way to, say, the gradual evolution of a wing would also, by that
logic, have to confer an adaptive advantage. But, as Stephen Jay Gould
would later pose the problem, what kind of advantage is to be found in just
2 per cent of a wing (2007b: 157), which would by no means suffice for
flight? Darwin himself anticipated this problem, noting that in considering
transitions of organs, it is so important to bear in mind the probability of
conversion from one function to another (2008: 143). So, too, did Fried-
rich Nietzsche, who famously observed that an organs function is hit
upon only retroactively, once interpretation has revealed the uses to which
it can be put. The whole history of a thing, an organ, a tradition can to
this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new inter-
pretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected
even amongst themselves (1994: 5152).The answer, in other words, is
that the function of an earlier stage of an evolving organ need not be con-

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

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that link them together, in such a way that vital organs are defunctionalized
in relation to the individuation of life (SM2, 136/222). The general, here,
is taken from the early work of Derrida, who frequently deploys the quali-
fication en gnral to designate being prior to the distinction between
man and animal, and even before the distinction between the living and
the non-living (Derrida 2001: 247; 1967b: 294; 1997: 65, 130, 167; 1967a:
95, 190, 238). Stiegler reprises it in his own early work, referring to life
in general and the history of life in general, both of which are given as
names for the operation of diffrance, in which the prosthesis retraces and
thereby reinvents the (specific, or species-related, zoological) body that
it supplements (TT1, 13639/14851). General organology thus captures
the idea that the organs of human life are not restricted to the physiological
organs of Homo sapiens sapiens as a biological species. They also encom-
pass the external, technical organs and social organizations whose inter-
nalization gives rise to the life of the mind, or spirit: General organology
has the vocation of studying . . . the physiological organs of the body in
relation to artifactual organs and the organizations that make up the body
of society, and the characteristics of these organs insofar as they set to
work the retentional apparatuses that operate [artificial] selection. . . . Gen-
eral organology is therefore the study of the dead and the living (SM2,
13233/21618).
Where a specific, or species-based, organology would study only
biological forms of negentropy, general organology takes as its object the
technical organs of human society. These artifactual organs serve as the
bases of the artificial, as opposed to natural, selection in which human life
consists.
Drawing on Gilles Deleuzes concept of the quasi-cause, from Logic
of Sense, Stiegler describes artifactual organs as being quasi-causal,
constituting a way out of material causality, in the common sense of
the term (Stiegler 2013: 290; see also Deleuze 2004: 910, 1089; 1969:
15, 18, 11516). This clearly does not mean that technical objects are not
material and should rather be taken as a claim about the way in which they
create horizons of expectation from which our actions will be suspended.
By enabling us to break with the retroactively conferred fitness of adapta-
tion, by enabling us to overcome maladaptation through the transformation
of our environment, tool use enables us to createand desireour own
future. It lifts us out of the mere imperative to survive and elevates life into
a struggle for existence, which is to say, a struggle that goes beyond the
mere subsistence of resisting death (Stiegler 2008: 22; see also Stiegler

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2011: 8990; 2004: 125). Existence, in this respect, consists in the way that
tools take us out (ex-) of our inhesion in biology and open us onto alterna-
tive possibilities of being. We ex-ist because we con-sist in technics, sus-
pended between our bodies and our tools, between our technical heritage
and the visions of a world that this heritage enables us to project.
Coevolution and Epiphylogenesis
Writing in the post-war period, Leroi-Gourhan argued that humans

evolutionary niche consists in our ability continually to reinvent ourselves
through technics, and thereby overcome our absence of anatomical special-
ization (Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 117; 1964a: 168).4 For Leroi-Gourhan, technics
marks a continuation of evolution by other means, with different techniques
amounting to mutations external to the biological organism, for whose defi-
ciencies they substitute. He suggested that society is made possible by
the externalization of movement, displaced into animals and machines that
we operate through the organs that would once themselves have done the
moving. The hand-tool could be seen as the instrument of liberation from
the genetic constraints by which an animals organic implements are tied
to the zoological species (GS2, 227/21). Through technics, we free up our
organs for alternative uses.
Yet technology is only a continuation, or a different variety, of the
liberations already found throughout the history of evolution. Our ability
to reinvent ourselves through tool use presupposes a series of succes-
sive liberations of anatomy that paved the way for bodies to be inter-
preted differently (GS1, 117/167), evolutionary mutations that made possible
the technical transformation of our ancestors limbs and sensory organs.
Leroi-Gourhan undertook a painstaking comparison of the gradual ana-
tomical changes that would (contingently) culminate in the liberated skele-
tal motricity of humans, beginning with the flattening of the foot and upright
walking, which coincide with the liberation of the hand and of a skull that
was hitherto restricted to limited movements at the top of the vertebral col-
umn (117/167). Bipedalism means that the hand is defunctionalized from
its previous task of locomotion and refunctionalized for prehension (GS2,
4. Gesture and Speech, the English translation of Leroi-Gourhans Le geste et la parole,

includes the second volume, Le geste et la parole 2: La mmoire et les rythmes. Here-
after, these works are cited together as GS1 or GS2, with page references given for both
the English edition (1993) and either the first or the second volume of the French (1964a
or 1964b).

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24042/41). The new uses for which it is freed include not just reaching for
food and, ultimately, the manipulation of tools but also the grooming and
interpersonal contact that will prove vital to human socialization (239/38).
The liberation of the forehead comprises the disappearance of the brow
ridge and the flattening of the face through the thinning of the chin, jaw-
bone, and teeth (GS1, 71, 75/102, 108). And with the grasping hand now
preferred to the outstretched neck, the jaw, tongue, and lipsstill accom-
panied by hand gesturesare liberated for speech (11214/16162).
These preadaptations of the hand and mouth for technics and
speech, respectively, would, in time, give rise to further adaptations, includ-
ing special adaptations for cross-generational learning, such as genes
that allow flint knapping to be learned reliably and at low risk of injury to the
learner (Sterelny 2012: 26, 33).
In this respect, anatomy is honed for purpose by what Stiegler, fol-
lowing Leroi-Gourhan, terms the co-evolution of tool and brain. Evolu-
tionary theory more generally calls this gene-culture coevolution, and it
describes situations where a built cultural environment facilitates the sur-
vival and selection of some genes over others, for example, by affording
protection to individuals who may otherwise have fallen foul of the sur-
vival of the fittest, or by conferring selective advantage on those mem-
bers of society better preadapted to adopt its toolsets. For Stiegler, coevo-
lution already marks a shift away from natural selection. Humans ability
to transform their environments through technics results in relaxing the
effects of selection pressure and in suspending natural selection as the
law of the struggle for life, and even suspending the biological evolution of
the human species, . . . displacing the evolutionary process into artificial
organs (Stiegler 2008a: 22).
Our constitution through artificial organs nonetheless goes far
beyond interfering in the process of natural selection. Gene-culture coevo-
lution prevailed as genetic adaptations for tool use were selected and
passed on to subsequent generations, until the point where Homo sapi-
ens sapiens became the only remaining extant form of the genus Homo.
At this point, though still ongoing over the decelerating course of evolution-
ary time, coevolution recedes into the background, and a second type of
technical evolution comes to the fore (SM2, 141/22930). This is the evo-
lution of technical and social systems that Stiegler labels epiphylogenesis,
meaning the transmission of acquired experience from generation to gen-
eration via the cultural practices that become sedimented in and around
technical objects. By adopting a cultures tools and immersing ourselves in

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the experience and possibilities to which they give access, we inherit our
ancestors knowledge without it having had to pass into the phylogeny,
or genetic history, of the species (hence the prefix epi indicating outside
or in addition to the species line). And in inheriting their acquired experi-
ence, we also inherit their way of interpreting the world. The genealogy of
the sensible thus refers not only to the evolutionary-biological architecture
of our sensory organs but also to the refunctionalization of these organs
by technics that reinvent the field of experience. Irrespective of their ana-
tomical and broad genetic identity, as Stiegler puts it, a foot that presses
down on an accelerator pedal and essentially rotates along these lines is
no longer, organologically speaking, which is to say, insofar as it is an organ
inscribed within the circuit of a desire, the same foot as that of a bushman
who runs in the savannah, for the simple reason that such organs no
longer economize libido in the same manner (139/227). Anatomically, the
body has remained the same from the Middle Paleolithic, through the Neo-
lithic Revolution in agriculture, the protowriting systems of the Bronze Age,
and the advent of industrial machinery, up until our present, so-called Digital
Age. But this period encompasses entire histories of the multiform ways in
which human bodies have been de- and refunctionalized by technics, their
energies differently harnessed and (libidinally) invested in the construc-
tion of societies. From the slower, more patient expectations of cultures
in which letter writing and low-intensity farming predominate to our con-
temporary obsession with the immediate gratification offered by high-yield
instant returns and constant availability, different tools give rise to radically
different experiences of time, desire, and attention, by standing us in vary-
ing affective relation to the possible futures onto which we are opened up
through their adoption. The root of these differences, Stiegler suggests, is
to be found in the effect of technics on the neurally plastic brain, whose cir-
cuitry is continually reorganized by the prosthetic conditioning of the body.
The brain occupies a privileged place in the theory of general orga-
nology, albeit one that is underdeveloped at present.5 In a line of thinking
developed in the forthcoming Technics and Time, 4 (Symboles et diaboles,
previewed in the 201213 filmed seminar series on Stieglers website Phar-
makon.fr), the closing chapters of The Catastrophe of the Sensible propose
that the principal organ of the central nervous system must be thought as
the organ of relations between the dead and the living (SM2, 133/218), as
the nexus through which the body undergoes its de- and refunctionalization
5. On this point, see James 2013 (6984).

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through technics (141/229). The idea that subjectivity consists in an inter-

nalization of our externalization in technics has been central to Stieglers
concerns since Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, and his
current interests lie in an explicit return to this opening theme. The earlier
work articulates the process of simultaneous externalization and internal-
ization as the movement of diffrance (or, rather, of the diffrance of dif-
france), in which the who and the what repeatedly retrace one another,
with the subject producing the technical object, which then reinvents the
subject, and so on (TT1, 17678/18486). The recent Pharmacologie du
Front National (2013) clarifies what is at stake in this reinvention, as Stieg-
ler draws on the neuroscientists Maryanne Wolf and Stanislas Dehaene to
argue that reading consists in the recycling (or exaptation) of neural cir-
cuitry that originally evolved for something else, and that the ways in which
the brain is refunctionalized by technics vary across time and space. The
transition from oral to written culture coinciding with the invention of the
alphabet, for instance, was translated by a reorganization of the cortex,
which is to say, by the establishment of synaptogenetic processes that lit-
erally inscribed the letter into the cerebral organ: our prostheses write
directly into the brain (Stiegler 2013: 12627; see also Wolf 2008; Dehaene
2009). His current projects further develop this claim via Joseph LeDouxs
work on synaptic selfhood and the sense in which our plastic neural
structures are modifiable by experience (LeDoux 2002: 8), and on the
work of psychologist Merlin Donald, who has supplemented evolution-
ary biology with an account of how culture restructures the fundamental
neurological organization of the brain, literally reconfiguring the sensory
cortex (Donald 1991: 1314).
This neuroscientific turn might suggest that Stieglers work is con-
verging with that of another major figure in contemporary French philoso-
phy, namely Catherine Malabou, who engages with neural plasticity as
part of a broader program of reconciling psychoanalysis with contempo-
rary neurology. Focusing specifically on the relation of cerebral function to
the experience of trauma, Malabou argues that the experience of traumatic
shock consists in a disorganization of affect, an emotional disengagement
that can be traced to the destruction of the neural synaptic networks in
which our conditioned behaviors are embedded (Malabou 2012: 157; 2007:
26162). In Stieglerian terms, that would seem to equate trauma with a
kind of extreme culture shock, in which our internalization of the cultural
memory externalized in technics breaks down. The undoing of the exter-
nal symbolic coordinates of identity would thus coincide with the loss of the

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affective experience that these coordinates organize. In Stieglers account,

however, trauma pertains less to a loss of affect than to a reawakening
thereof, and it needs to be understood in the context of a theory of general
organology that traces the origins of the unconscious to technics. By posit-
ing the unconscious as an organ produced through the de- and refunction-
alization of the body through technicsa result of artificial and not natu-
ral selectionhe moreover shows it to be deeply bound up with aesthetic
experience.
The Artifactual Organization of the Sensible
Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of
modification.Charles Darwin (2008)
Perhaps the most dramatic example Stiegler gives of an epiphylo-

genetic refunctionalization of the body is found in his account of the uncon-
scious, which is theorized not as a product of biological evolution but rather
as technical in origin, pertaining to the ways in which experience is condi-
tioned by the prostheses through which the world is made sensible to us.
His theory of the technical unconscious reworks the unconscious mind as
a repository of culturally inculcated patterns of experience passed down
through the generations, with trauma amounting to exposure to forms of
experience to which our bodies have not been habituated. In saying this,
Stiegler provides an alternative to the much-criticized Freudian view, in
which the traumas of our ancestors appear to be inherited and endured in the
present through a process of biological transmission (Freud 1990b: 343).6
To locate the origin of the unconscious, Stiegler takes us back
to the advent of bipedalism and suggests that there was more going on
than just the liberation of the hand for tool use. Upright walking coincided
with another function-shift in our hominid ancestors sensory organs, an
organic repression at the origin of repression in general (SM2, 121/200).
In the penultimate chapter of Symbolic Misery, entitled The Repression of
Freud, Stiegler recounts the details of an early letter from Freud to his men-
tor, Wilhelm Fliess, in November 1897, in which the psychoanalysts obser-
vation of his bottom-sniffing dog leads him to hypothesize a refunctionaliza-
tion of the sensory organs as an additional consequence of humans shift
to bipedalism: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same
time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth
6. The go-to criticism for this aspect of Freud is Gould 2007a (46779).

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become repulsive (Freud 1985: 279). When the nose had been level with
the anus, Freud muses, anal-olfactory stimulationwith its capacity for dis-
ease detectionwould have been a notable indicator of sexual attraction.
The shift to upright walking entailed a libidinal decathexis, or defunction-
alization, of both the nose and the anus on which it was hitherto trained,
with the brunt of detecting attraction thenceforth falling on the eyes, which
are accordingly refunctionalized. This idea is carried over into a footnote
in Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud further speculates that the
previously eroticized odors of excreta and female menstruation become an
object of taboo and organic repression. The genitals, too, now give rise to
shame and so are covered up with clothing (Freud 1990a: 28889n1; see
also SM2, 12123/200203).
Stiegler reads this as the defunctionalization of the sense of smell
and moreover as a defunctionalization of the sexual . . . such as it is
formed in animality (SM2, 121, 126/200, 2067). But while crediting Freud
for recognizing the significance of organological function-shift, he is none-
theless critical of the psychoanalysts failure to link the ensuing refunction-
alization of the eye to a technicization of sexuality, hence also to a process
that inaugurates a new epoch of aesthetics in the long history of the sen-
sibility of the sexually differentiated animal (124/205). His contention, in
other words, is that aesthetics begins when artifactual organs are offered
up to sight, when the odors of animal sexuality give way to the artifac-
tualization of the beautiful (128/210). As Stiegler shows by turning to Dar-
win via Leroi-Gourhan, the beautiful, technical artifacts in question are the
clothes and other stylings through which humans differentiate themselves
from one another.
In Freuds account of human nature, the constitutive role of technics
in the invention of the human has been repressed, just as it has through-
out the history of Western metaphysics (140/228). Perhaps surprisingly, the
same cannot so easily be said of Darwin. Endorsing the idea that clothes
were first made for ornament and not for warmth (Darwin 2004: 640),
the closing chapters of The Descent of Man (1871) document the various
ways in which humans, irrespective of tribe and ethnicity, use prostheses
as supplementary secondary sexual characteristics. Darwin describes how
sexual selection, meaning the struggle to procure a mate for the purposes
of reproduction, becomes inseparable from artificial selection. In On the
Origin of Species, this phrase was employed to denote the selective breed-
ing of domesticated animals, but it has since acquired the sense of using
artificial means like hair sculpting, bodily adornment, modification, and

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mutilation to heighten attractiveness (2004: 641, 649; 2008: 84). Stiegler

reads Darwin as recognizing that desire is a product of culture (the differ-
ent races of man differ in their taste for the beautiful [Darwin 2008: 648]),
and as open to the prospect that criteria determining what we desire are
transmitted across generations by a process other than natural selection.
The first move in this direction is made, once again, by Leroi-Gourhan,
who writes, in the second volume of the monumental Gesture and Speech
(1964b), that the aesthetics of clothing and adornment, despite its wholly
artificial character, is one of the biological traits of the human species most
profoundly linked to the zoological world (GS2, 351/189). In an insight that
proves central to Stiegler, he traces the emergence of aesthetic sensi-
bility from forms and behaviors found in nature through to the shared sym-
bolic codes around which human communities are organized. Anticipating
the theory of de- and refunctionalization, Lroi-Gourhan suggests that aes-
thetics originates in biological properties common to all living organisms
but attains its fullest sense in the extension of biology into technical objects
that condition bodily rhythms and establish norms for the distribution of
bodies within a given society (27172/8283). The wing markings of a
butterfly function as signifiers of both natural and sexual selection, warding
off predators and attracting mates, and thus belong to the uncertain world
of style even if, in Darwinian terms, they perform a protective function for a
certain length of time in the history of the species. Human decorationby
contrastonly confirms the general rule of substitution of the ethnic group
for the species; the same phenomena can be observed in the persistence
of marks expressing the personality of a group (300/122).
The artificial selections of human communities may facilitate sur-
vival, but they also, crucially, give rise to traditions that bind members of a
society together and thus furnish the rules of their transgenerational belong-
ing. The prosthetic style of an ethnic group serves to establish its collective
identity by laying out values and rhythms of the community (278/93). It
also, and moreover, communicates the hierarchy and internal differences of
the group, via significations of rank or wealth that persist through the ages.
Be they educational, military, religious, or economic, the social organs of
society participate in the organization of the sensible (SM2, 113/188),
constructing a body politic schooled in interpreting the aesthetic, symbolic
codes of social order. In re- and defunctionalizing the bodies of its mem-
bers, by teaching them to read and write, for example, the organizations of
this technical-symbolic order train us to decipher selected aesthetic codes
(3639/12930). Every technical object and institutionalized body of knowl-

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edge is a trace of societys acquired experience, an externalized memory

support incorporating the generations of accumulated skill that went into
their construction.
Aesthetic Awakening
Social organization consists in selecting from among these traces

that which should be internalized by the body in the construction of a social
body [dans le faire-corps social ] (SM2, 14243/232). This, Stiegler con-
tends, is the origin of what Freud called the superego, the moral conscience
that comes from the internalization of authority. He links it to the effect on
the brain of the ongoing functional redefinition of physiological organs by
technics (141/229): As the seat of the unconscious . . . the brain relates to
other organs and partial zones of the body in general through the mediation
of technical objects that are external to the body. What is more, this relation
to technical objects is subject to, or rather inscribed in, a relation of social
organizations . . . in which are inscribed the rules of a superego that the
brain can only internalize (138/225).
When we adopt the institutions and prostheses of a culture as our
own, they take hold of the body in a way that opens us up to new pos-
sibilities of feeling (le sentir), while also repressing others (11617/193).
Through the accumulated knowledge sedimented in technics, we internal-
ize a past that we never actually lived. Some of these artificial selections
become engrained as second nature, to the point where, like Nietzsches
coin of truth, they lose their sensuous power of transformation (Nietzsche
1976: 47). Their repeated circulation nonetheless conditions stereotypical
patterns of social behavior, serving to reinscribe a horizon of expectation
that governs how and what a society knowingly or unconsciously experi-
ences. These stereotypical elements of technico-cultural memory, whose
adoption and internalization reinforces the habitual organization of experi-
ence, are to be differentiated from those that overwhelm this organiza-
tion (SM2, 145/235). Stiegler terms the latter traumatypes and suggests
that even trauma pertains to this kind of de- and refunctionalization of our
brain and sensory organs. As with all noetic, sensible, as opposed to
merely sensory, experience, it results from the conditioning of our ana-
tomical apparatus. We have to be sensitized into experiencing an event as
traumatic. The return of the repressed consists in a reactivation of for-
gotten circuits of signification, where an anxiety endured by ancestors, and
transmitted through history via the organization of culture, is unconsciously

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inherited in the present. Whether a brush with death or a terrifying intellec-

tual encounter, we experience trauma as traumatic to the extent that an
event provokes a resurfacing of previously internalized traumatypes, buried
deep within us and prevented from becoming conscious by the masking
effect of our established patterns of thought. The violence of the awakening
shakes us out of our prevailing stereotypes (14548/23539).
Yet trauma, according to Stiegler, is not purely negative. Recalling
the language of Leroi-Gourhan, he describes the overturning of an exist-
ing organization of the sensible in terms of liberation: The liberation
of the unexpected is therefore the liberation of a repressed expectation
(146/236). The traumatic breaking with stereotype is moreover identified
with philosophyand also with the work of art, both of which are recon-
ceived around the idea of the anamnesis, or recollection, which Stieg-
ler takes to be at the heart of philosophys repressed and unthought
encounter with technics (TT1, ix/11). Balanced on the sublime precipice
between ordeal and wonder, philosophy and art consist in the unsettling
revelation of an unknown past that haunts us, in the ghostly return of a cul-
tural memory one never consciously lived but which is retraced in the open-
ing up of new possibilities of experience. The epiphany is less an exhaus-
tive moment of recognition than a surprised seizing upon of that which
exceeds our grasp:
Comprehension is reduction to the same, and surprehension is the

experience of the other in the samewhich is to say, the experience
of the singularity of the sensible.
This is the experience of meaning [signifiance], where that which
is experienced . . . suddenly comes to explode the expectations
settled upon by stereotypical secondary retentions, and . . . like all
spiritual works opens a way for the traumatypical power of repressed
secondary retentions to return to the surface, thereby constituting
what one might call a Proust-like moment of anamnesis: the return
of an ancient traumatype, coming back [revenant ] like a phantom, a
spirit, or a punchline [un mot desprit ]. . . .
Yet this resurfacing of a traumatype, which always arises simul-
taneously from preindividual depths [un fonds pre-individuel ] proper
to and lived by ones self (secondary retentions and protentions),
from a preindividual fund [un fonds pre-individuel ] inherited from
ones ancestors but which one never lived oneself (proto-protentions
and proto-retentions), and from a fund common to though never fully
lived by all desiring (human) creatures, . . . a traumatypical resurfac-

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ing of this kind is only ever produced under conditions constituted by

the historical state of . . . the de- and refunctionalization that tertiary
memory presupposes and enables. (Stiegler 2005: 23738)
The passage is shot through with the language of Husserlian phe-

nomenology, in which secondary retentionas distinct from the primary
retention of a moment that has just passedrefers to consciously repro-
ducible memories. These memories structure our internal consciousness of
time, including not just the past that we retain but also the future expecta-
tions, or protentions, that they habituate us into projecting (Husserl 1991:
4749).7 Stieglers contention is that secondary retentions are embedded
in the external (tertiary) memory supports of technics, with unconscious
memories of an unlived past inscribed in the body over the course of cul-
tural conditioning, through the refunctionalization of the sensory cortex by
the inherited technical objects that we adopt as our own. In the experience
of anamnesis, the body enters into relation with prostheses that tap into
our artifactual history, firing neurons along synapses hitherto pushed to
the back of the mind, stimulating parts of the cortex weakened by disuse. If
we encounter the return of the repressed in the work of art, it is because it
disorganizes our habitual rhythms of thought and experience, relaxing the
protensions that structure our expectations and that would otherwise reign
in our ability to envisage futures that differ from the present.
The description of this kind of awakening as traumatic risks seem-
ing somewhat romantic alongside Malabous characterization of trauma as
affective barrenness (Malabou 2012: 157; 2007: 262), and there is surely
more to be done to develop Stieglers theory of general organology along-
side the neuroscience of aesthetic experience. From his writing to date, it
is not yet clear, for example, how the prosthetic organization of our synap-
tic circuits fits with the neurobiology of affect and the de- and refunction-
alization of the pleasure center of the brain. We can find some pointers,
though, in recent experimental evidence, according to which the making
and breaking of neuronal connections stimulates the expression of neuro-
transmitters strongly associated with pleasure in ways that no doubt affect
aesthetic experiences (Armstrong 2013: 50).8 Research suggests that the
release of dopamine coincides with the recollection of sensory stimuli tied
to the experience of pleasure, causing us to crave their return. As the fre-
quency of this return sees exception give way to stereotypical rule, toler-
7. For a discussion of how this is taken up by Stiegler, see Ross 2013.

8. In making this claim, Armstrong cautiously refers to Linden 2012 (1520).

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ance to the hormone increases and the pleasure felt diminishes. And when
the affective returns on these stereotypes become minimal (say, with symp-
toms of addiction), the transgression of our acquired habits provides a dif-
ferent kind of redemption. We move from the comfortable gratification of
prevailing cultural tastes to the unsettling, complex, and potentially intoler-
able, traumatypical, experience of liberation that Roland Barthes identifies
with the destruction of that culture (Barthes 1975: 14; 1973: 2526). For
Barthes, the work of art consists in the balancing of these two kinds of plea-
sure, with the familiar, identifiable plaisir offsetting the traumatic excesses
of jouissance. This anticipates what neuroscience describes as the (cultur-
ally variable) play of harmony and dissonance (Armstrong 2013: 1415)
and perhaps also what, through Stiegler, we might conceive as a subli-
mation, or deferral, of trauma, a diffrance of the past we inherit through
technics.
Stieglers Post-Darwinism
Work in the nascent field of evolutionary aesthetics tends to sub-

ordinate ideas of the cultural conditioning of aesthetic experience to an
emphasis on the evolved biological role of beauty in both natural and sexual
selection. Insofar as technical objects have been noticed, interest in them
is geared less toward their role in the transformation of their users and their
users environments than toward their status as fitness signals, mean-
ing markers of highly adaptive skill sets valued by potential mates for their
contribution to the survival of future progeny (Dutton 2009: 14647). The
role of the work of art, in other words, is deemed subordinate to what it
tells us about the adaptive fitness of its maker. Other notable ideas in evo-
lutionary aesthetics emphasize the function of narrative in communicating
valuable Darwinian lessons, identifying stories and art, not to mention the
pleasure they occasion, as ways of internalizing the acquired experience
of our ancestors, through whose recalled adventures we can vicariously
rehearse strategies of mating and survival (Tooby and Cosmides 2001).
This line of thought clearly accords some significance to the inheritance of
cultural memory, though its focus remains on gene-culture coevolution and
a narrowly construed facilitation of the preservation of life. Other theories
of aesthetic experience create more of an opening for Stieglers account
of epiphylogenesis and the genealogy of the sensible, the re- and defunc-
tionalization of our biological sensory architecture by technics, and the
continued reinvention of the field of experience that this entails. Stephen

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Pinker reads the affective encounter with art in terms of a non-adaptive

exploitation of adaptive sources of pleasure (Carrol 1998; see also Pinker
1997: 525, 534), in which the artwork exapts, or refunctionalizes, biological
processes that originally evolved for something else, the pleasure circuitry
related to sex, for instance. It is nonetheless acknowledged within the field
that evolutionary psychology has so far found little to tell us about the differ-
ent kinds of pleasure linked to aesthetics (Dutton 2002: 703)which per-
haps also explains why Stieglers interest in neuroscience has yet to inform
his largely psychoanalytical account of the libidinal economy of desire.
Evolutionary biologists are routinely criticized for reducing aesthet-
ics to biology (e.g., Armstrong 2013: preface), and, in a similar vein, it has
been suggested that Stiegler collapses aesthetics into technics, reducing
the critique of taste to a discourse on prosthetics that fails to deal with
questions of the criteria for the judgment of beauty (Trottein 2013: 93). But
that is surely to miss his key insight, namely, that the artifactual organs that
recalibrate sensory experience also furnish the bases of aesthetic prefer-
ence. Our internalization of the artificial codes of society means that we are
no longer confined to an appreciation of the adaptive traits formed by natu-
ral and sexual selection. Artificial selection creates criteria for judgment
other than fitness, and accumulated cultural memory functions as a system
of rules for interpretation, its organization of symbolic order providing the
schematismthe stereo- and traumatypesfor the ways in which we read
experience and adopt the tools that we inherit.
Elizabeth Grosz has made the case for aesthetics as an extension
of sexual selection, a general economy of creativity that serves to enhance
the animal body and its surroundings (2011: 132). Building on Darwin and
later Jakob von Uexkll, she also argues that the biological architectures of
different species preclude a homogeneous, anthropocentric conception of
aesthetics and technics (2223). The elaborate nests of the bowerbird and
the twig-enhanced antlers of the red deer, far more than the flower-painting
elephants of the Thai tourist trade, would be illustrative of this, pointing
to the existence of artificial selection among nonhuman animals. But they
also, and pace Grosz, reveal a logic of technics that falls short of epiphylo-
genesis, if only by degree. Nonhuman bodies can be de- and refunctional-
ized by technics, but that is not to say they participate in the construction
of an aesthetic, symbolic order. Primatologists broadly accept, for example,
that the tools of even our closest nonhuman relatives are reinvented from
scratch with each generation. The termite-fishing rods of the bonobo are

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not adopted as the products of cumulative and coordinated cultural learn-

ing in which the favored traces of the past are bequeathed to posterity;
nor is their use characterized by the pedagogy, intergenerational trans-
mission, and social organization of enforced cultural norms found among
members of the genus Homo (Tomasello 2014: 8084; see also Donald
1991: 12526). They are thus not the bearers of an unconscious, ances-
tral history whose inheritance allows the envisioning of sublime and trau-
matic alternatives to strictly biological horizons of sensation. Our culturally
acquired ability to project new futures opens up the prospect of liberation
from our inhumanity. Cumulative technical culture, in other words, enables
us to be not-inhuman (see esp. Stiegler 2010: 170; also 2008b: 3034)a
term that Stiegler employs in distinction to humanity, and which captures
the memory of tragic histories that cannot simply be explained away by ani-
mality. If the human, or not-inhuman, exists, it does so only intermittently,
consisting in a promise we glimpse in the mirror of art.
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Impossible, Unprincipled, and Contingent:

Bernard Stieglers Project of Revolution and Redemption
Claire Colebrook
One of the enabling forces of Bernard Stieglers work lies in a curi-

ous problem of range. He is at once focused on the inscriptive conditions
that allow something like philosophy to come into being, and would in this
respect be located in a Derridean orientation of thinking of the West as an
epoch beyond which we cannot think, because we would always be doing so
from within the very writing that we would seek to delimit. At the same time,
there seems to be something exceptional and catastrophic about Stieglers
present and its intensification of a grammatization that now takes the form
of digital media, mass marketing, global homogeneity, and the destruction
of complex libidinal circuits. Stieglers questions are epochal in the grand
sense, insofar as any local problem requires a thought of the very genesis
of the capacity to problematize (and the technologies of temporal distanc-
ing that those questions require); at the same time, they are singular and
contingent. In order for there to be thought or life in its human mode, there
must be something like writing or tertiary retention, and yet this transcen-
dental and inescapable condition isnow, todayexceptionally destruc-
tive in its intensity. The observation of this destructive intensity generates

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

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Colebrook/Stieglers Project of Revolution and Redemption215
thatto use terms from Deleuzes Difference and Repetitionaccounts

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

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tional mode is Leibnizian as well: each problem posed (such as the relation
between traumatype and stereotype in cinema, or drive versus libido) is not
another version or term for thinking about writing but is a different techn
and different epoch: a different way in which time opens to the infinite.
One could contrast Stieglers local raids and skirmishes that read
the whole from the tendencies of the parts withdespite all Derridas
claimsthe method of deconstruction (Derrida 1985; Royle 2000). (Indeed,
the insistence on deconstruction not being a method lies in its refusal of
any given rule of reading precisely because it remains committed to read-
ing each inscription on its own self-deconstructing terms. So, perhaps it is
better to say that it is a hypomethod, a refusal of any given method in its
following of the guardrail of the texts intention [Derrida 1976: 158].) What
makes deconstruction purely formal is that terms like writing do not refer to
writing in an extensive manner but are concepts created to indicate some-
thing like an Idea, a pure possibility that is only ever given in some deter-
mination. This then means that deconstruction can be principled and can
claim to be justice precisely because it does not judge the actuality of writ-
ing, nor pose distinct epochs of writing, but always asks the question of writ-
ing in general and law in general (Derrida 1992).1
There have always been unprincipled thinkerslike Deleuze and
Stieglerwho keep adding in more terms and observations, branching out
and then retracing and erasing steps. You have to read the entire corpus
several times, and each time you do, you have to reread the sections you
thought you had grasped. If you are a teacher, you cannot set one exem-
plary text that allows you to give a sense of the whole. There is no clas-
1. If deconstruction is justice, it is because it is the refusal of any determined figure or

arrival of justice, insisting on justice as entirely futural. By contrast, we might note some-
thing invasive and monstrous about Stieglers analysis of dike. Humans begin by form-
ing images of divine gods who allow for the belief in a future, but this future opened by
the gods is combative and requires techn and know-how, a seizing hold of the forces
of the world. It is also essentially urbanenot so much an idea that opens purely from
the force of the concept and intentionality but something that requires an industry or
academy that thinks and writes intensively: aido and dike, feelings that guarantee the
safety of the gathering of mortals, are the very feelings of . . . mortality itself ensuing from
this de-fault, from their technicity. This gathering, which means here for Plato the city
(polis), implies decision, and decision implies anticipation: promtheia, advance, whose
truth is the return after the event, the delay, pimtheia; and insofar as it constitutes in
one stroke (ris) the possibility of the city and the possibility of its destruction (its impos-
sibility), promtheia as advance presupposes hermeneutics (related itself to the technics
of writing), which lies at the basis of temporality (Stiegler 1998: 202).

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

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What he sets out to dodiagnose the present on the basis of a history

of technics, where technics is not simply parasiticseems to be oriented
more and more toward prognosis, a demand for a future that is highly prin-
cipled, even if the tools of the diagnosis rely on a rigorous lack of principle.
In order to make this clear, and despite all I have said regarding the prolifer-
ating, multiply voiced, dispersed, and disjunctive nature of Stieglers style, I
want to break this down into something that looks like a syllogism:
First proposition: technics, or the pharmakon, precludes anything

like purity of principle or innocence.
Second proposition: technics is not added on to life but is entailed
by lifes non- self-
sufficiency. Any individual is what it is only
by encountering other forces, which compose relatively stable
points.
Third proposition: time is originally technical; or, there is always
tertiary retention.
Fourth proposition: the present is marked by disindividuation,
desublimation, and an absence of epochal redoubling, and these
events need to be combated.
Conclusion: what we know, live, and represent as life is given as
a continuous or synthesized unity only because it occurs in time,
and time is given as continuous by way of techn. Human life is
therefore, as a temporal whole, dependent upon a history of tech-
nical objects (ranging from cave drawings to writing to cinema).
The very thing that threatens to decompose and disindividuate
human life and preclude its epochal redoubling is also the only
means of its survival: techn. Technology is not just a neces-
sary evil, something we unfortunately depend upon. If there is a
we at all, it is because we are techn. We cannot try, then, to
diminish, eliminate, or ameliorate techn; to do so would be sui-
cidal. This is why Stiegler insists that lifehuman lifeis tragic,
for it can survive or live on only by means of that which ren-
ders it dependent or alienated from itself. There is a tendency
toward proletarianization, or a gap between life and the technical
means of its own existence. For Stiegler, the gap is widening, and
it is in his lament regarding this gap that we find the problem of
principle.
Propositions 1 to 4 follow on from each other: the key maneuver

of Stieglers work is to tie technics and phenomenology together. Unlike

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pure Derridean deconstruction, Stiegler refers to spirit and mystagogy, or

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

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of technics, capitalism at once has a global or planetary expansiveness

that relies upon individuals being oriented beyond themselves to desire
more, and yet its commodification and grammatization of that tendency is
destructive of the very future it seeks to master.
Like Derrida before him, Stiegler remains committed to the neces-
sary force of some trace or inscription that allows consciousness to appear
to itself. For Derrida, one cannot draw a principled distinction between actual
writing systems (writing in the narrow sense of actual technologies) and the
temporal processes by which consciousness sustains itself: all the features
that mark writing in the narrow sense (such as delay or deferral) already
mark consciousness. For Stiegler, this impossibility of drawing a principled
or essential distinction between the phenomenology of internal time con-
sciousness and the actual dependence of consciousness on inscriptive
technologies is a limit of Derridas work. Derrida can acknowledge the first
blow or gap between consciousness and itself, but not the second historical
proliferation of industries that install themselves in this split:
Although he thus shows that the pharmakon of writing, and thus

hypomnesis, is the condition of anamnesis, that is, of the critique
of the pharmakon and its epokhal redoubling, Derrida himself never
sought the possibility of a second moment, that is, of a second-
ary suspension which, as aprs-coup, constitutes new circuits of
transindividuation from out of the short-circuits provoked by prole-
tarianization. Why not? . . . [I]ndustrial pharmacology constitutes a
completely new configuration for which the possibility of second-
ary redoubling can be thought only as the object of an economico-
political struggle in regard to the relation to instruments of negotium,
and such that it can become the vector of a new libidinal economy,
of unprecendented processes of sublimation, and of the invention
of a new age of otiuman otium of the people. (Stiegler 2013c: 49)
Consciousness as such in its living present can only be present to itself by

way of an object that allows for synthesis; consciousness becomes what
it is, or takes on identity by way of orienting itself toward something about
which it cares, and for this reason consciousness is able to say I only
because of things that are already other than itself, and that are also social,
technical, and never given fully. The composition of a self as continuous in
time relies at the very least on some tertiary object. But whereas Derrida
remains at the level of principle, and therefore must rule out any supposed
pretechnical foundation that would allow for an adjudication of techn,

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

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subject whatever (a humanity to come). By contrast, for Stiegler, the we

is not a silent and ungraspable presupposition but must exist; to be a self
is to have a way of thinking about oneself by way of technical systems, and
those technical systems are also read, viewed, desired, and lived by others.
I am who I am because of what I have read and consumed, but it is also the
casethenthat there will be others who may use technical and capitalist
production to seize hold of all those images, figures, and inscriptions that
enable self-mediation (which is always collective mediation).
If we can call Stiegler an exponent of deconstruction, then we might
say that whereas deconstruction in its pure form is quite rightly insistent
on referring to itself as democracy, justice, or a radical hospitality, then
deconstruction in its Stieglerian mode is radical hostility, a refusal of the
offerings of the contemporary culture industries on grounds of taste. This
taste needs to be thought in the Freudian sense of judgment, where the
later complex modes of judgment (and the self) emerge from an original
I take this in, I spit this out (Freud 1961: 235). One would no longer be
deconstructing oppositions that structure texts. Rather, one would need
as Stiegler doesto wage a war on the terrain of technical complexity itself,
and if there were any criteria at all, they would need to be immanent to
technological-human life, perhaps yielding something like a principle of
unprincipled combat:
If there is a singular combat that today must be taken up, then taking
up this combat requires the preliminary proposition that the neces-
sity of combat would be permanent: existence is that which must
struggle against its own decay . . . and society will always have been
that which fights its necessarily base partnecessarily, since it
consists in a tendency which, when it composes with its counter-
tendency, is also the source of the dynamism of society. In other
words, the process of individuation is a state of permanent war, but
a war contained and transformed through psycho-social competi-
tion . . . , which the Greeks called eristhe elevation towards an
always possible best, ariston. (Stiegler 2011: 50)
Derrida could argue for an ethics of hospitality by way of accepting the

necessary risk of an opening toward the other, which would always
be marked by a degree of violence and appropriation; but openness as
such despite (or because of) its impossibility would be the ethic of decon-
struction. If full presence never arrives, and if any decision proceeds from
undecidability, then we must never allow any single definition of justice,

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democracy, or hospitality to reach final or closed determination. For Stieg-

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

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That cinema is an industry means that its model and means of pro-
duction have rested on an opposition between production and con-
sumption: this opposition, according to Adorno and Horkheimer,
expresses itself as a teratological exteriorisation of the transcenden-
tal imagination. But what they fail to see is that the problem is not
exteriorisation, which has always already begun, but rather the short-
circuit that inevitably results from the hegemony of de-symbolising,
disindividuating and imagination- destroying cultural consumer-
ism, because it reinforces stereotypes and represses traumatypes.
(Stiegler 2013a)
To put it simply, we might contrast the Kantian antifoundational I can, there-

fore I ought with Stieglers mode of There can be a we and an I, and
therefore we must fight for it (and against it). For Kant, the burden of decid-
ing for oneself follows from the fact that the self is ungrounded; the sub-
ject is given nothing other than its own capacity to decide in the absence
of any foundation. Or, in Derridean terms, it is because the grounds of any
decision are undecidable that one must decide. For Stiegler, more attention
needs to be paid to the subjects ungrounding or lack of foundation. There is
no pure autonomy, no absolute undecidability, but a default or dependence
that grafts the psyche to technical and transitional objects. Kantian ethics,
for all its problems, can be principled: because the subject cannot know or
be proximate to any ground, he must decide in the absence of all grounds,
as if he were to give a law to himself. Again, for all its difficulty, the same
applies to Derridean ethics: in the absence of any grounding presence, one
can act as if there might be a justice to come, aware that because each
decision limits an absolute undecidability, there can never be a full pres-
ence or fulfillment of justice. But Stieglers project begins precisely where
Kantian and Derridean arguments stipulate that there can be no legitimate
judgment. We cannot ground our decisions on any proper, prior, present,
or natural condition, and so all decisions must be either those that would
proceed as if they could be universally lawful (Kant) or those that would
always recognize that the decision proceeds from undecidability and must
therefore only be a promise of justice to come, never justice as such. By
contrast, and herein lies the audacity of Stieglers project, the pharmakon
functions less as a means for achieving a pure antifoundationalism and
more as a way of achieving a genealogy and nosology of spirit. The ques-
tion what makes life worth living? is implicitly preceded by a question of
how life in its human form, bound up with the objects through which it has

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

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experience is cinematic is not just to say that it organizes images by editing,

synthesizing, composing, and focusing in and out; it is also to say that the
images are drawn from a collective archive and that this archive is drawn
from the world (all the books and images that make up literal archives of
museums, libraries, and galleries) but also not of the world (all the uncon-
scious images that compose our dreams and that comprise our hoped-for
future). The archive or trace for Stiegler is not a formal condition that rules
out a judgment or diagnosis of spirit. Because the history of spirit is a his-
tory of the collectively produced objects and figures through which we com-
pose ourselves, our desires, and our future, we can observe the junk, detri-
tus, and masterpieces that circulate as who we are. Put more simply, we
might say that part of the labor of early deconstruction would have been to
insist upon broadening what we mean by writing: when we say that there
is nothing outside the text, we are not saying that there is no experience
that is not linguistically or socially constructed. We are saying that the sup-
posedly pure experience of the lived present has to retain a past and antici-
pate a future, has to synthesize and compose itself, or relate to itself, and
is therefore never fully self-present. All the features that we deploy to talk
about writing therefore already invade the prescriptural; consciousness is
always already a text, figuratively speaking (although how one might refer
to consciousness literally is hard to say). Once we accept that there is no
pure present that precedes the dispersal of synthesis, then any term that
we would like to take as a proper groundsuch as lifeis itself already
the effect of movements that themselves can never be lived. However, if
that process of primary and secondary retention or consciousnesss pro-
duction of itself by way of differing from itself is also necessarily accompa-
nied by tertiary retention, then the movement and history of consciousness
is also a movement of things:
The transindividual can only metastabilise itself because it is sup-

ported by tertiary retentions, i.e., technical supports of various kinds.
Technical objects in general are themselves such supports, and they
form what Leroi-Gourhan described as the third memory of technical
and noetic life, appearing two million years ago: beyond the common
genetic memory of the human species and the epigenetic memory
belonging to each individual human, there is an epiphylogenetic
memory constituting the various forms of inherited and transmitted
human knowledge, and through which the transindividual is meta-
stabilised. (Stiegler 2013a)

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

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there isinsofar as we speak, live, reason, hope, read, or thinkalways

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

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emphasis on technicity, inscription, and materiality rather than the futurity,

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

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necessary for individuals or states. There would always be an unbridge-

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

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

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All we can do is to fight for individuation and complexity of compo-

sition in a mode that is agonistic and unprincipled. It is surprising, then,
that with the same force with which the tragedy, technicity, and adversarial
are asserted, Stiegler demands that we must act in a manner that seems
to be justified by life itself. The we is sometimes for Stiegler contingently
composed: something to which we are parochially attached and which
emerges from an archive that is also contingent and fragile. At other times
the we seems to present an imperative, with a force that is almost that
of an executive order: we must act now, in this way, to maintain what is left
of individuation. There seems to be less attention paid to the form of the
imperative and more to what must be saved.
So let us return to Stieglers basic principles thatI would argue
yield an unprincipled, impossible, and contingent project. (Here, I would
contrast Stiegler with Derridas necessary and impossible project, where
we cannot avoid the infinite sense of concepts such as justice and democ-
racy, even if a fulfillment of that sense is impossible.) Stieglers geneal-
ogy of human technicity allows us to think of the present, precisely in the
moment of its precarious decline, as exceptional. That is, one would not
regard disindividuation, desublimation, or a capitalism of drives as some
external disaster that is inflicted upon the proper, normal, or even living
present. All those tendencies that Stiegler demands that we must save are
not only contingent (having emerged by way of a war upon stupidity); they
are, by Stieglers own admission, impossible. The long circuits of reading,
individuation, transmission, and complexity that today we regard as good
and properly human, yet threatened with extinction, areStiegler argues
the result of an initial appropriation and proletarianization. The space of
leisure, inscription, and possibly even arche-cinema (whereby the drive is
delayed in its immediate release and captivated by an object or sign of
things to come) relies upon the volatility, violence, and mere animality of
work occurring elsewhere. In the beginning is neither scarcity nor the gift
but appropriation (and a belief system that will legitimate this theft):
The hypomnesis that for Plato orthographic writing constitutes is a

particular type of tertiary retention. This particular type arises out of
mnemo-techniques that appear in the wake of Neolithic sedentariza-
tion, sedentarization leading to the accumulation of surpluses, sur-
pluses of which it was necessary to keep count, and this inaugurates
the process of grammatization through which the first forms of writ-
ing emerge. Grammatization is in general the production of tertiary

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retentions permitting symbolic fluxes and flows to be discretized and

deposited, that is, permitting the spatialization of their temporality,
notably in orthothetic forms, that is, permitting the re-accessing of
engrammed fluxes without loss of content, and constituting a surety
and security of the archive, that is, also, a belief in the archive, which
then supports the arkh, that principle of hypomnesic practice that
aims at maintenance and care and, as such, the cult. . . .
. . . [H]ypomnesis is already a power, a power that has not been
claimed and has even been occluded by all that thinking which con-
stitutes itself as philosophical, and which is in truth a stage and a
significant modality of Western individuation: it is essential to it.
(Stiegler 2011: 75, 77)
Grammatization, but also philosophy, citizenship, urbanity, and justice rely

on appropriation and surplus. Here, Stieglers organology is strangely close
to the work of Tim Mulgan, for whom modern conceptions of justice, fair-
ness, and deliberation rely upon favorable conditions that are unique to a
historically and geographically isolated age of affluence (Mulgan 2014: esp.
71). Or, to draw on a similar insight from Dipesh Chakrabarty, we might say
that Stieglers exceptional epoch of human sublimation (the era of writing
from Plato to the present)where a we is formed by deferring the drive
and constituting collective desires for a hoped-for futurerelied for cen-
turies upon labor extracted from humans not similarly connected to this
liberating archive (Chakrabarty 2009). That is, only by a division of labor
could a society of leisured inscription emerge that would free the divine
object from a society of priests and allow for a discursive and disseminated
archive. Only with the development of planet-destroying industrial techno-
science could individuals be relatively freed from intense labor and con-
tingency, so that we might say that the condition for the possibility of indi-
viduation and the archive was (once upon a time) the exploitation of other
humans but has increasingly become dependent on the exploitation of the
earth.
Therefore, we might say that what Stiegler is calling for
individuation for all in the face of the catastrophic threat of mass prole-
tarianizationwould require an unprecedented and impossible amount of
inhuman energy. A basic principle of Marxism is that as technology and
industry develop, it becomes possible to shift from a world in which an elite
few store and own surplus at the expense and proletarianization of others
to the possibility of a distributed surplus and an expansion of leisure and

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

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

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Arche-Cinema and the Politics of Extinction
Tom Cohen
The defunctionalizations and refunctionalizations that determine the

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

cited parenthetically in the text as Proletarianization.

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There is arche-cinema to the extent that for any noetic actfor

example, in an act of perceptionconsciousness projects its object.
Bernard Stiegler (2013)
2016: The Movie?
Somewhere in movie heaven it is written: that shall only be real

which has been put into film.
I ask you to consider, for a moment, a Hollywood script proposal:
well call it 2016: The Movie. It is a bit clichd, and I dont know what to
make of it (you decide). It starts with a premise: a hyperindustrial civiliza-
tion receives numerous alarming reports that it has passed tipping points
of toxic global warmingand that it has now entered a prolonged period
of mass extinction events (including this species own). Yet citizens appear
unmoved, distracted, or in open denial, as in a spell.
To continue. Extreme weather events escalate (megadroughts, polar
vortices), resource wars advance, nominal democracies pop across the
globe, reports of tipping points passed proliferateand utopic progressiv-
ism is in disarray. Even our utopist critics are reduced to amazement at
this spellif we define utopist criticism, in Fredric Jamesons accommo-
dating downgrade, not as those who believe in the arrival of a redemptive
utopia but those, merely, who struggle for social justice and progressivism
(2005). It is a symptom of the embattled disorientation of todays Ameri-
can Left that Henry Giroux in his analysis recurs to inert metaphors like
zombiism, or descriptions of trances: The organized culture of forgetting,
with its immense disimagination machines, has ushered in a permanent
revolution marked by a massive project of distributing wealth upward, the
militarization of the entire social order and an ongoing depoliticization of
agency and politics itself (Giroux 2013; see also Giroux 2011). Revolution
has been permanently inverted. This description references the effects of
media, telemarketing, television, cinema particularly (immense disimagi-
nation machines). It recalls what Bernard Stiegler identifies as a proletari-
anization of the senses themselves.1
1. See Stiegler, Proletarianization. I use senses in preference to sensibility, which

in English may not carry fully the French terms neural and organological implications.
This phrase marks both Stieglers thorough reprioritization of the aesthetic, the latters
nonorganic technogenesis of perceptual consciousness and its ill, contaminations,
default, or vulnerability to captureand not just by the NSA or databots. The organs

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Cohen/Arche-Cinema and the Politics of Extinction241
It may seem odd to bring whats left of the American Left in contact
with Stieglers writing of a general organology. The former seeks orienta-
tion in a muted American political-scape, often appealing still to a democ-
racy that might be taken back. The latter writes from a postdemocratic,
hyperindustrial escarpment that requires a thought simultaneously in con-
tact with prehistorical technics as well as the capture of digital culture. Yet
when Giroux describes the dismemberment of American sentience and the
politics of disposability, there are echoes of, and rhymes with, what Stieg-
ler diagnoses when he depicts the miseries of a loss of spirit (of Capital-
ism), the proletarianization of the senses (preferable, in English, to sen-
sibility), or regimes of disindividuation. Stiegler uses Gilbert Simondon
to mobilize against disindividuation and the theft of knowledge of life
by the outsourcing of memory. He thus draws any contemporary malaise
not into a narrative of social struggle within a co-opted democracy but into
a politics of mnemotechnics and its epochal digital mutation, as well as
the capture of perceptionor the senses. If in Girouxs case this points to
a new form of hybrid global financial authoritarianism, for Stiegler, even
this is wired to forms of short-circuiting that enforce the psychotechnic
disruption of attention and care. If in the first a politics seeks its own
image somewhere, in the latter, that has now migrated into neural paths,
sensory programs, grammatization.2 I will return, in a moment, to why the
terms of Stieglers projectspecifically, his reading of arche-cinema and
the proletarianization of the senseshelp situate a particular American
have always in advance been systemically hacked. The proletarianization of the senses
deploys a short-circuiting which today is allied for Stiegler with the collapse of care and
attention, mass disindividuation, and the accelerations of mafia cultures and ecocide.
In The Organology of Dreams and Arche-Cinema, he elaborates: It is the primary and
secondary identification processes, which constitute the condition of formation of the
psychic apparatus, and therefore the condition of production of libidinal energy, that are
effectively short-circuited. Yet the phrase is not just a hyperindustrial automatism of digi-
tal, last-man culture gone hyperbolic. This short-circuiting would arrive with the advent
of tertiary retention, any technological supportit is a negative condition of the evolution
of technical objects that seek to mark, negate, and exceed their own most recent form.
In a way, when tertiary retention hits the mirror stage and takes a selfie, short-circuiting
is triggered. The term anthropocene operates in this way, which accounts for its surge of
popularityas a short-circuiting selfie with a missing face.
2. I read Stiegler from the perspective of the era of climate change and as a post-
anthropocene writing project. This has become explicit in Stieglers counter to the
anthropocene totalization, locating an escape in the activation of a neganthropology
and negentropic war (the anthropocene naming a dismal entropy). See Stiegler 2015.

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

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

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Marxs dialectical and revolutionary force: it is marked, rather, as a dis-

posable population. In the best-case scenario, it could continue to be har-
vested for metadata and wealth extraction (or, occasionally, body organs).
If you want a better Hollywood script out of thishave we seen this
movie?one might add for flavor that this breakaway civilization or econ-
omy (employment down, markets up) amounts not only to a self-chosen
survivor class. Inevitably, at a time of exponential advance in genetic engi-
neering and nanoscience, it implies a financially engineered species split
(as the fantasy of a singularity echoes).4 It turns out that the eugeni-
cist imaginary of the twentieth century was merely deferred, transferred
from the province of Volk to a more inclusive desideratum: kleptocratic and
mafia-tized global superwealth.5 Any proletarianization of perceptual and
mnemonic orders may not be, today, subject to any reverse deproletar-
ianization, any more than the trope of inequality can be addressed as
some old imaginary cycle to be, potentially, rebalanced (as if there had
been an equality to return to): it is, rather, the endgame plays before the
logics of climate change, population culls, and the disposability of the
peripheries looking forward (with the current imaginary of an escape to
terra-formed Mars or exo-planets dangled as Plan B by deep state and cor-
porate strategists).6
4. This mise-en-scne, in fact, is pretty much verbatim implied by Chris Hedges, the great
American activist and journalist. It brings home the dilemma of utopist politics, whose
timelike democracy or Enlightenment memesappears to be closing and recedes
before resource wars, megadrought, agricultural collapse, and the sixth mass extinction
event under way. Here is Hedges: Corporations are, theologically speaking, institutions
of death. They commodify everythingthe natural world, human beingsthat they exploit
until exhaustion or collapse. They know no limits. There are no impediments now to cor-
porations. None. And what they want is for us to give up. They want us to become pas-
sive. They want us to become tacitly complicit in our own destruction (Barsamian 2011).
And again: I think they know its going to be toast. And I think they think that theyre going
to retreat into their, you know, gated compounds and survive it. And they may survive it
longer than the rest of us, but in the end, climate change alone is going to get us. . . .
[They], if left unchecked, will ensure the extinction of the human species. It may already
be too late, of course (Jay 2013: n.p.).
5. Who would have guessed this refined return of a fully weaponized and democratized
eugenicism back in 1945, when a certain war seemed to decide against that decisively.
By then, Walter Benjamin, who did anticipate it in 1939 but named the enforcer of prole-
tarianization historicism, was already dead.
6. I explore this acceleration of techno-eugenicism and the species split now under way
part of any twenty-first-century politics of extinction unfoldingaround the topic and
rhetoric of overpopulation in Cohen 2016: 12748.

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Stereotypal Cinema and the Politics of Extinction
Such a structure produces much stupidity: through the use of col-

lective retentions in order to keep a rein over individual and collec-
tive traumatypes, it generates stereotypes. By constantly reinforcing
these stereotypes, and by taking them to the extreme, the consumer-
ist capitalist economy, which is initially cinematic and then becomes
televisual, in the end destroys the libido, which decomposes into the
drives. This proves deadly for the power of cinema to dream: aside
from some very remarkable exceptions, cinematic dreams become
drive-based nightmares, i.e., horror movies.
For Stiegler, there are two poles of film practice, and between them
they negotiate a sort of war: the stereotype (which includes Hollywood,
in which cinema confirms familiar categories of identification and refer-
ence) and the traumatype (which puts cinema itself into question materi-
ally, defacing the former). The first accords with his update of Adornos cul-
ture industry into the consciousness industry of today, in which image
programs, telemarketing, and the implantation of memory is practiced.
While this polarity seems at first slight (a binary for cinema?), its two terms
name polarities between which negotiation occurs. The trenchancy of
this divide reflects, however, the forms that arche-cinema generatesthe
arche-cinematic template that, for Stiegler, antecedes Jacques Derridas
arche-writing as a full-spectrum organization of the inorganic, of the eye
and movement, millennia in advance of any script or pictograms.7 It is initial-
ized for Stiegler with the Chauvet-Pont-dArc cave paintings in the Ardche
and echoes in todays megaplexes that, nostalgically, cite twentieth-century
movie houses still: the actual era of mechanical cinema as we know it was
only an episode, an exteriorization and acceleration, of an organizational
template to which the daily production of consciousness was turned
overtrade secrets long passed to interested telemarketers and state
propagandists.8 Yet arche-cinema not only platforms consciousness but
7. Stieglers choreography in preceding Derridas arche-writing is more than a sleight

of hand: if, today, there appear two nodes of the spectrum that Derrida avoided, symp-
tomatically, they would be cinema and climate changeas if, for linked but antipodal
reasons, each would put the framing of deconstruction at risk. For a tentative discussion
of these occlusions, and the role they play in the inertness of deconstruction today, see
Cohen 2012.
8. I draw on Stieglers recent return to and articulation of arche-cinema in The Orga-

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melds with the lightless zone of the dream or hallucination: technically, it

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

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the world), identification with face, literalizations of the image (indexing),

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

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tives: like geological processes indifferent to human projects, pathos, and

self-aggrandizements, which always imply the anthropocene will not be
missed, cinema marks its agency and lens as a site where affect, mourn-
ing, identification, and the entire rack of affective addictions the stereotypal
screen encourages and enforces and renews are broken with, contrac-
tually disavowed, or shotas if the cinematic apparatus were in rebel-
lion against what it spawned, more or less mass-disindividuated Hollywood
man, the spellbound and ecocidal last man.
At this point, perhaps, cinema marks itself as a lethal spellbinding
apparatus at the service of (on the one hand) homogenizing powers and
(on the other) the antithesis, traumatype, which takes the Dionysian posi-
tion over the Apollonian form of its other. Thus, the word trauma refers to
and is in contact with the encompassing default set in motion by techno-
genesis, the pharmakon of pharmaka, what in Stiegler is perpetually in
playfor life forms as for archival regimesin the wedge term epiphylo-
genesis, whereby genetic life is narrated as if by incorporating the nonliv-
ing, technics, which in turn advances and defines it (Stiegler 1998).9 When
Stiegler says that cinema is life, he does not only mean the schism by
which our consciousness of being alive, like that of perception, occurs
through what is not livingbeing entirely technogenetic, in default. More-
over, the machinal cinematic culture of the hydrocarbon and industrial eras
was just an episode, an exteriorization of agency in a 36,000-year paren-
thesisone ending with the digital transformation that dissolves the ana-
logic or celluloid inscriptions placed before the electric bulb into digital algo-
rithms and neural interfaces. The traumatype knows all this, marks and
puts itself (and the hominid in the frame produced with and by it) into ques-
tion, battles with the stereotype (Hollywood), and is acutely aware of its
technicity and destructive prowess.
How do these types resonate when applied to the cinema of cli-
mate change and ecocidesince today, despite all the denialism and
rationalization and disinformation, it would be safe to say that everyone
knows, that every organism knows and is migrating, extincting, or mutating
along with it (just look at the bodies in any airport lounge)? And since what
is suppressed in turn creates an unconscious, even in public space, one
would note that the entertainment-industrial complex (McKenzie Warks
9. Such is epiphylogenesisa new relation of organism to environment, and a new

state of matter. It is in this way that the what invents the who as much as the converse
(Stiegler 1998: 175).

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term) would need to manage climate anxiety, climate info-debris, cli-

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

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

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to having feelings, being religious and antiabortion, thus favoring human

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

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

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of cinema is already accomplished at the hands of digital transformations

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

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or, more precisely, it channels an aesthetic misreading of romanticism

(such as produced the Potemkin trope of nature). Moreover, it requires
turning against a human mise-en-scne which it itself has both featured
and coproducedit is relieved of the necessity of a narrative of survival,
renewal, and self-witnessing. Here, the Wagner score is kitsch, showing
ourselves projecting and mourning on cue to a tunelured into the com-
pact of projections that cinema solicits and rejects. It can turn on and take
down the very trope of the anthropocene as a mystified placeholder and
2016 ideologeme, as has become apparent. Melancholia names, in addi-
tion to a black or lightless cognitive gaze depleted of affect, a minidouble of
Earth, mocking the spherical and circular imaginary, the random and indif-
ferent irreversibility of obliterations from the perspective of galactic logics
and visuals. Melancholia, coming from a blackness and preceding light,
also names the film itself, its material, allohuman trajectory as well as this
films intervention and performance. We see this mimed, for instance, on
the estate lawn before the wedding. The sky lanterns rise like fragile suns
or tropes for cinematic construction that humans cast skyward, at night,
the cave now encompassing the heavens. Tracked by Justines eye and
telescope, the entire tropology suddenly drops away; the screen is taken
over by monstrous galactic formations that assault the eye. The human
game is momentarily obliterated to the status of a molecule, as it will be
by the impact. The cinematic lanterns with writing on them (like a movie
screen) dissolve, at the limit of the lens, into gargantuan and gorgeous gal-
axies that obliterate anthropocentered pretense. The small planet comes
from behind the sun, which is to say from before light itself (the sun,
too, is a technology). Irreversibility, the discarding of mimesis and affect,
leaves nowhere to run or hide (its the whole planet, the encompassing
apparatus). The two orbs approach impact like the circles of a projector
or two wheels or eyes, imploding. Cinema turns against any human affect
projected onto it. The cin-anthropocene parenthesis indifferently coincides
with the ecocide its logics imply in advancethen experienced as justice.
The cin-anthropocene parenthesis encompasses the cave designs through
the era of hyperextraction, accelerating extinction events and biospheric
mutation. It coproduced the latters screen star, anthropos, which it sepa-
rates itself from.
With this we need to remind ourselves what cinema is and has been,
how it has been blended into what we see and dont see, into memory pro-
gramming, into the prosthesis of visibility, into the imaginary of the cir-
cular and mastered globe, into technogenocides and weapon advance-

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ment (drones), nuclear fission, and the population culling to come.

Arche-cinema, before writing, tracks the organization of perception and
consciousness in the projection, by artefactual light, of marks and inscrip-
tions onto the wall of a perceptual commons. That wall would become the
screen that usurps public space and finds itself now on smartphones and
gadgets become part of the human body (supplanting its memory func-
tions). The era of modern cinema was a machinal flowering of a template of
memory and cognition (Stiegler will note, it is life). It is one we still barely
inhabit, 36,000 years laterat the death of cinema before digital trans-
formations that dissolve the screen into neural interfaces and memory
implants. The template of the cave-like enclosure that will allow the artifice
to generate the illusion of the home or eco itself is canonized in Platos
allegory of the cave (again, a cinematic model), as it would be industrially
manifested in the consciousness industry of Hollywood and telemarket-
ing. From such a perspective, we can speak of a cin-anthropocene paren-
thesis, which, however, would also bind cinematic processes to the archiv-
ing, capture, and consumption of Earths life forms. Benjamin made the
photographic image a cipher of our suspect practices of mourning. In a dis-
tinct way, Justine breaks with mourning and affirms ecocide. Thus the stun-
ning scene where the nude Kirsten Dunst is viewed waiting for Melancho-
lia, this gorgeous giant sphere that annihilates, to arrive like a loverno
man will doin the pose of a pre-Raphaelite aesthetic. The film builds an
array of citations dragging in the totems of high Western culture, such as
Wagner himself, whose mourning score bewitches us into the same kitsch
push-button affect that the incoming space thing, outside all anthropisms,
bars and deflects. The work ascribes this annihilation or extinction event to
the publics practices of identification, of mimesis and of mourning, which
stereotypal cinema seduces or solicits.
Melancholia also cites the one work in the cinematic canon that
engages fully with a revolt of arche-cinemaHitchcocks The Birds.
Swarms of flying black lines and marks attack the construction of visibility
in Bodega Bay itself and the humans eyes. Arche-cinema erupts to claim
and retire an entire doomed perceptual economywhich Hollywood con-
solidated as globalizing dream machine. This citation occurs as the two
sisters pick and collect blackberries silently: there are many little black pel-
lets gathered, like so many tiny black suns, but these many become the one
of a single black bird crossing the white skybefore ash-like flakes fall from
the sky instead. This cites the famous tracking shot from Hitchcock as his
blond character, Melanie (again, the black named blond that defines the

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rupture of melancholia), waits outside the schoolhouse as birds gather on

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

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fices light. We find here the deconstruction of Sigmund Freuds attempt

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

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Melancholia is without exitirreversible, as the planet in the films

name, what Benjamin called a one-way street. This is dramatized when
Claire runs around the grounds in a panic carrying her son, as if there were
somewhere to go. Its ruthless logic coincides with the emergence today of
a critical positioning, linked to the anthropocene (or, recognizing China
as the key civilization in Earths history and determinant player today, the
Sin(o)-Anthropocene? Or a Corporatocracene?). This position abandons
utopist thought as circumscribed by a moment that is now closing, which is
inadvertently linked to accelerated extinction itself: first, by crafting history
as human on human social actors, a matter of otherness, power, and pro-
gressive justice, they occlude the vast allohuman primacy that now destroys
this spell; second, as the last echo of Christian redemptive time, it mimes
the apocalyptic DNA that goes into the Hollywood blockbusters, projecting
a survival and renewed narrative. More: hoisted with its own historicizing
petard, only this time indexed to geomorphic time, it would seem not only
that the progressive liberal imaginary of late twentieth-century academic
culture was the product of a half century of economic stability and afflu-
ence garnered by the postwar imperiumnow revoked, together with the
middle class that buoyed it. It is a disconnect enhanced for Enlighten-
ment templates and epistemes, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, which
would be indexed to the parenthesis of stability following the little ice age:
the canard of intentionality would be sculpted, here, to further anchor this
parenthesis (Chakrabarty 2009).
Our film 2016 might have begun two years earlier in North America
with a phenomenon called the polar vortex, in which climate tectonics
reversed (cold and hot), with New York City dropping fifty degrees in tem-
perature within hours. If there is something intriguing about climate tec-
tonics assuming the behavior of a trope (chiasmus), that itself is doubled in
relation to industrial civilizations own momentary hiatus and disconnect
since the export (and in turn return) of disindividuation from human quar-
ters effects the disorganization of the inorganic that climate change, techni-
cally, is (knocked off its Holocene balancing act), which in turn advances
ecocidal pressures and geopolitical war. So, what we note as a year of
materialist horror, as if that were a variant of what he elsewhere hammers delightfully

as beautiful soulism (Morton 2014: n.p.). What applies to todays speculative materialist,
sipping lattes of affect, has nothing to do with Justine as a cipherwho withdraws from
affect, as itself a faux cinematic implant, a trained appropriation, and draws close to the
position of cinematic technics itselfindifferently watching as the human it created is
disbanded.

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polar vortices has a certain resonance, doubly chiasmic, interfacing the

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

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

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Disorganizations of the Inorganic
The cinematic pharmakon as art is what makes it possible to struggle

against the cinema as toxic pharmakon, i.e., against that which
enables the play of the traumatypical secondary retentions and pro-
tentions of psychic individuals to be short-circuited by reinforcing
their stereotypical secondary retentions and protentions.
So, a small thesis: that in displaying certain Hollywood variations of

these logicsfrom 2012 or The Day After through the zombie apocalypses
and postapocalyptic tourist films, in which we somehow are still there to
prevail and witness our, usually, cannibalization and reemergencethere
is a peculiar co-optation of the climate change unconscious. One does not
find an expression of cultural anxieties diverted and marketed into mass
fantasy. And one does not simply find, sometimes, as in Melancholia, cine-
matic logics turned against the human, the viewer-consumer who wants to
identify with the face on the screen still. Moreover, the disaster movie is not
only used to familiarize the public imaginary with these logics, so that they
seem normal when they arrive (theyve seen it in the movies already), or
because shock is now normative. One might deduce that the Hollywood
blockbuster or its affiliates (Avatar, or again even The Road ) ensures that
these logics are not dwelt on, since they will have been stored as managed
possibilities. It is, after all, like a magical warding offand one can turn to
another channel somewhere. Only one cannot.14
of climate change, something overlooked today, that Stieglers turn to inscription makes
contact with Paul de Mans treatments of inscription in his last essaysde Mans writ-
ing, too, appears a post-anthropocene writing today (an argument differently pursued in
Cohen 2012). This would bring the role of arche-cinematic logics, which precedes any
one regime of representation, as a projector does the screen, in accord with what de
Man calls literariness, or Benjamin pure language (as asemantic, differential sound- or
marking-scapes in advance of relational sense and grammatization). Since inscriptions
arise in a zone that precedes the artifice (or projection) of light, and hence the binariza-
tion of dark and light, black and white, and so on, it accords with a field of defacement in
which the totality Hedges indicts is historically put into parenthesis and suspense, some-
thing precessionary to any black enlightenment. It places what de Man called aesthetic
ideology at the core of the perceptual misprision out of which ecocidal hermeneutical
man consolidatedwho appears himself mimed and exceeded by the algorithms of
todays corporate imaginary.
14. Claire Colebrook argues, Put more concretely: the end of the world that is being
pre-emptively mourned in post-apocalyptic culture is a highly specific world of hyper-

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But there is the exceptionwhat Stiegler calls cinema as trauma-

type. The transposition of Nietzsches cinematic poles, ascribed to Apollo
and a certain Dionysus, or between description (mimesis) and inscrip-
tion, lingers in the negotiation between stereotype and traumatype for
the latter to emerge as abovebut traumatype, the translation of the
early Nietzsches primordial dissonance as technogenesis, can techni-
cally unread any Hollywood, propagandist, stereotype, telemarketing,
or mnemotechnic program: it is the pharmakon of cinema as cure of the
deeper addiction, poison, and spell of the disindividuating hacking of the
senses and short-circuiting acceleration of ecocideuntil it is not.15 Mel-
ancholia pulls the rip cord on this cinematic contract altogether, perform-
ing at once a sort of death of cinema and a closure of animation without
remaindera suicide of and by what might be named the cin-anthropocene
(a feat only cinema can do). It is an act which, like The Birds, drains the
viewers programmatic projection of affect, aura, and even artistic wonder
onto the screen. A planetary body will impact Earth with the randomness of
a billiard ball; no one will miss us (or, more importantly, read us afterwards).
There is nothing apocalyptic or postapocalyptic about this. There is no sur-
vivor, no rebeginning, no archive: it is the closure, with the screen, of the
anthropocene tout courtwhich fulfills the import of naming something,
the anthropocene, which can only be confirmed by its disappearance.
But that has been implied since there was arche-cinema, since mimesis
and identification were contractionally confirmed on a cave wall. The cave
constituted or projected the oikos, with its faux interiority, and rendered
ecocide its inevitable program, the condition of its initiation. The birds win:
they drive the human stars off the screen, out of the house (oikos, eco), into
blank exilebut what is asserted is not nature winning but the technical
premises of visibility disowning our we.
consuming, personalized, liberal and narrowly post-human man. It is only possible to say
that we are easily imagining the end of the world when what is presented as the endin
films such as Children of Men (2006) or Elysium (2013)is the end of Western affluence
and white privilege (Colebrook 2016: 22).
15. This is why Avatars romanticization of the Native Americanstyled Navi, rooted in a
natural world that itself lives organically (like James Lovelocks Gaia trope), is less regres-
sive than cynical, since it is ultimately a critique of the kind of organicism that feeds the
common imaginarys appetite for romantic organic metaphors of a return to systemic
wholes. It is the fantasy of the militarya critique which the notion of the avatar, the leg-
less film viewer inhabiting the athletic body of the hero soldiers projection into the Navi
world, leaves open.

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If the utopist critical imaginary shares with stereotypal cinema the

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

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atopos, which is no longer an earth, and which is in mutation (like us).

That is, the one we find ourselves starring in today: 2016: The Non-Movie.
Personally, I would turn down the script as clichd. But then, that
is where we are: disowning the real because it feels (and is) Hollywood-
ish. As per script. In any case, who would be cynical enough to believe
they knew, as they streamed denialist media, or that oneself were now
from the perspective of climate changedisposable? One may, however,
be arche-cynecist enough to shrug it off as unremarkable. This would not
be to argue for a new more stringent cynicism than has yet been conceived,
and which we are all shy of because it discredits the weparticularly
the one endlessly reproposed to arrive soon. We may not credit Diogenes
properly, who carried about an oil lamp in the day, marking the artifice of
light against the self-evident paternity of the sun, looking for a man, an
honest man, a human, lets say, in this double-black lightand not find-
ing one, particularly not the guys hed run into (Plato, whom he accused of
faking his Socrates, Aristotle, even Alexander). Rather, he was present at
one of those epochal initiation rites, here of the West, even of its imperial
application (Alexander), and perhaps seeing its DNA and apprehending its
trajectory (ecocide), dissociated with the artifice of that we, and went back
to his earthen jar. He practiced affirmative defacement, after all, as the
inscriptive infrastructure of the cin-anthropocene was consolidated (with
the Aristotelian anthropos itself)leaving the trace of an anti-Plato, what
the latter called a Socrates gone mad. The dilemma may lie, however,
not in genetic life supplementing itself with technical supports, and being
taken over by them, which may still be a hopeful scenario in its wayone
might, still, deproletarianize. The problem is the predictable inversion: that
humans were parasited by technics for the latter to evolve itself, that it
required bodies and the artifice of humans to gestatethat we were not
just a host, but that the pretext of being a host was part of the theater. If
corporations as supraorganisms are now persons and usurp the latters
religious and moral appearance when taking over the reins of governance
itselfwell, it is at least good to know that humans are not the only sup-
posed organism with a sense of comedy. It goes further: if cinema is life,
and if mnemotechnics is indissociable from language, and neither are living
nor organic as such, then whatever calls itself the human when it speaks,
thinks, reflects on its diseases or property, shuffles through incorporeal
wes to position itself, signs its contracts, dissemblesthat itself, call it
consciousness, was always in the position of artificial intelligence. It may
not be that the disaffected of hyperindustrial societies can be rerouted to

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a newly artefacted care and attentionbut rather that, first, the charades
by which we stage affect or propose new wes be shed.
Stieglers arche-cinema ups the stakes on the address of cinema
until and as they spill into an anthropocene epoch, one without epochality.
The latter term today encircles the retrofitting of any American Left agenda
together with the increasingly global vortex of spells that the early pres-
sures of rapidly unraveling ecosystems present. It is not accidental that
arche-cinematic reading expands for Stiegler as a tool or practice to deploy
against the totalization we call the anthropoceneand which encircles
the disorientation of an American (or other) Left pretending to a political pro-
gram that is not, primarily, a mnemopolitical and mnemotechnic transforma-
tion. The anthropocene for Stiegler names an epoch without epochality, a
trap stepped into which we must escape from at once. That is, before the
inertia of an automated society, neural implants, species splits (my addi-
tion), and entropism prove irreversibleor, for that matter, after they have,
as the condition for that war (Stiegler 2015). Arche-cinematics passes
directly into being a tool of neganthropocenic or negentropic resistance.
Stiegler presents us with the only full turn arising out of techno-philosophic
writing against the politics of managed extinction unfolding once tipping
points have passed. It is interesting that in advancing, he proves also to be
the sole relay of the Derridean legacy that claims contemporary relevance
and, so to speak, an inescapable future.
References
Barsamian, David. 2011. An Interview with Chris Hedges. Progressive, June 14.
www.progressive.org/chris_hedges_interview.html.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry
35: 197222.
Cohen, Tom. 2012. Polemos: I Am at War with Myself, or, Deconstruction in the
Anthropocene? Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2: 23957.
. 2016. Escape Velocity: Hyperpopulation, Species Splits, and the Counter-
Malthusian Trap (After Tipping Points Pass). Oxford Literary Review 38,
no. 1: 12748.
Cohen, Tom, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller. 2012. Theory and the Disappear-
ing Future. London: Routledge.
. 2016. Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols. London: Open Humanities Press.
Colebrook, Claire. 2016. The Play of the World: The End, the Great Outdoors, the
Outside, Alterity and the Real. Derrida Today 9, no. 1: 2135.
Fitts, Catherine Austin. 2012. The Breakaway Civilization with Dr. Joseph Farrell,

boundary 2
The Solari Report, September 6. solari.com/blog/the-breakaway-civilization

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

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Special Issue

Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy

of literature and culture

Volume 44, Number 1

Duke University Press

Founding EditorsRobert Kroetsch and William V. Spanos

Managing EditorMargaret A. Havran

Arne De Boever/Editors Introduction/1

Bernard Stiegler/The Proletarianization of Sensibility/5

Bernard Stiegler/Kant, Art, and Time/19

Bernard Stiegler/The Quarrel of the Amateurs/35

Stephen Barker/Unwork and the Duchampian Contemporary/53

Benot Dillet/Proletarianization, Deproletarianization, and the Rise of

Daniel Ross/Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: BS and BB/107

Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRivire/Compression in

Ed Cohen/Dare to Care: Between Stieglers Mystagogy and

Mark B. N. Hansen/Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire?/167

Gerald Moore/On the Origin of Aisthesis by Means of Artificial

Claire Colebrook/Impossible, Unprincipled, and Contingent:

Tom Cohen/Arche-Cinema and the Politics of Extinction/239

In the spring of 2011, Kenneth Reinhard, Stephen Barker, and I

boundary 2 44:1 (2017)DOI 10.1215/01903659-3725821 2017 by Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press

2boundary 2/February 2017

Published by Duke University Press

question of politics is a question of aesthetics and, vice versa, the question

Published by Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press

The Proletarianization of Sensibility

What happened to Marcel Duchamp between 1912Nude Descend-

boundary 2 44:1 (2017)DOI 10.1215/01903659-3725833 2017 by Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press

6boundary 2/February 2017

objects toward the commodities. This process of proletarianization mirrors

Throughout the twentieth century, the development of technolo-

Published by Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press

8boundary 2/February 2017

Published by Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press

10boundary 2/February 2017

pared to objective determinations, that is to say, to objects of determinate

Published by Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press

12boundary 2/February 2017

I am speaking here of belief insofar as belief refers to an object that

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desireconstitutes philia. This is also how love constitutes individua-

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14boundary 2/February 2017

is not simply the belief-in-existence that makes me believe that there is

Today, in a time of lovelessness, it often becomes more and more

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Published by Duke University Press

16boundary 2/February 2017

the scandal: a time when transgression produced a scandal. But this is no

When art becomes transgressionin other words, in the first stage

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matter par excellence), art is a modality of transformation, which is what

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18boundary 2/February 2017

Published by Duke University Press

Kant, Art, and Time

It is common knowledge that a work of art is at once free of any attach-