Power, Powerlessness, Thinking, and Future - The Los Angeles Review of Books 18/10/2015, 7:06 AM

Power, Powerlessness, Thinking, and Future by Bernard Stiegler

“TO EXPERIENCE POLITICS is today, for must of us, to experience powerlessness”: this
is one of the opening sentences in the “Manifeste pour une contre-offensive
intellectuelle et politique” published by Geoffroy de Lagasnerie and Edouard Louis in
Le Monde on September 27–28, 2015.

Having been inundated by critiques of power, in particular by Foucault but more

generally by “French theory,” now we must think political powerlessness — which is
obviously not the disappearance of all power, and which is obviously an impotence that
is not just political. To think powerlessness is difficult because it is also and firstly to
think the impotence of thinking itself, its inability to pass from dunamis (power or
potential in Greek) into action (energeia). This also and at the same time necessarily
involves thinking the relations between knowledge and power, or knowledges and
powers, and so on.

The manifesto by de Lagasnerie and Louis raises necessary questions. But in my view
their way of asking them lacks perspective. And it contains some sweeping
statements, perhaps in the hope of striking and mobilizing minds and spirits, but, as is
so often the case, what they achieve proves to be the opposite of the intention — and
such statements therefore seem to me to be not only questionable, but dangerous.
When they write, for example, that the phrase “‘right-wing intellectual’ is based on an
oxymoron, or better: an impossibility,” this is totally unacceptable — and for several
reasons.

In the first place, for any thinking that claims to think powerlessness (and “to say
things other than what is already agreed”), the common noun “intellectual” (“an
intellectual,” “intellectuals”) must not only be the subject of critique, but should be
scrupulously avoided. Intellectual is not a noun but an adjective. The substantive is
already mired in the impotence of political thinking and political action. The figure of
“the intellectual” is an unfortunate invention that unquestioningly internalizes the
opposition between “manual workers” and “intellectuals,” an opposition that clearly
belongs to the “class discourse” of whose existence de Lagasnerie and Louis rightly
wish to remind us.

According to this insidious vocabulary, wallowed in by those who refer to themselves

as “intellectuals,” there would be specialists of the intellect, and therefore of thinking,
and then there would be everyone else, who thus often feel they are being taken for
fools — to speak plainly.

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Behind all this lies proletarianization, which today affects all forms of knowledge, and
firstly as a destruction of knowledge — of how to live, do, and conceptualize. Those
who define themselves as “intellectuals” internalize this situation, oblivious to the fact
that today they themselves have been proletarianized. And here we should recall that
in The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels defined proletarianization not in terms of
poverty but by the loss of knowledge (one consequence of which is pauperization),
which in the end, they say, affects “all layers of the population.”

After its destructive effect on savoir faire, on knowledge of how to do,

proletarianization began to destroy savoir vivre, knowledge of how to live, shared
culture, when consumer capitalism replaced this knowledge with the behavioral
prescriptions produced by marketing. Since the beginning of the 21st century, it is
conceptual knowledge that is finding itself ruined, proletarianizing the “intellectuals,”
who try to hang on to their existence by adopting attitudes and poses rather than by
producing concepts.

I describe in a recent book how Alan Greenspan, appearing before a House Committee
on October 23, 2008, and asked to explain what responsibility he bore for the
breakdown of that year, defended himself by arguing that economic knowledge had
been transferred to machines and automata: he thereby sketched the figure of a new
kind of proletarian, upholding the Marxist analysis according to which
proletarianization is indeed bound to affect “all layers of the population.”

It is here that the issue of powerlessness arises. And it continues when, failing to
understand this, and to understand how it now affects all of us, whoever we may be,
we internalize this fact, and all of a sudden find we are incapable of overcoming it: of
identifying it and struggling against it, and of opposing to it a new rationality. For
proletarianization is also the widespread generalization of entropic behavior, that is,
behavior that leads to the destruction of life. Such is the horizon of the new question of
rationality.

Let us recall that entropy came to prominence in the 19th century, understood as the
unavoidable dissipation of energy — whereas in the 20th century life was defined as
what opposes to this universal tendency a negative entropy, a negentropy
characterized by its ability to organize entropic chaos. When we refer today to the
Anthropocene, we are referring to a process leading to an immense chaotic
disorganization, involving a considerable increase in the rate of entropy, among the
consequences of which is, for example, that systemic mutation we refer to as “climate
change.”

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Returning to the question of the “right-wing intellectual,” a phrase that according to de

Lagasnerie and Louis amounts to an oxymoron, let us consider instead “right-wing
thinking.” I believe there are countless great thinkers of the right, among them
Sigmund Freud, who the “leftist intellectual” Michel Onfray would consign to oblivion,
himself being among those who, if I correctly understand the manifesto in question
here, would be in the course of betraying the left. Among the thinkers of the right one
can also find Heidegger, Luhmann, Blanchot for a time, and many others it would be
too tedious to name.

Instead of producing sweeping statements that are merely a smokescreen (through

which we cast our impotence upon others), is the point not rather to know what “right”
and “left” mean, and to understand how they relate to what this word “intellectual”
supposedly designates, and which it is not difficult to believe is something that
requires thinking? But to think this, we must remember that there was thinking before
the right and before the left, and there will be thinking after — inshallah.

The current crisis of thinking derives from an immense transformation unfolding not
only in the political spheres (French, European, Western, and throughout the entire
world), not only in economic and financial organizations (and therefore in the relations
between capital and work, and between work and jobs), but indeed in anthropogenesis
as such.

Marx and Engels showed at the beginning of The German Ideology (1845) that
humanity consists above all in a process of exosomatization that pursues evolution no
longer through somatic but through artificial organs (which was already glimpsed by
Herder 70 years prior to these two early theorists of the role of technology in the
formation of social relations and knowledge). But humankind has discovered to its
stupefaction that this exosomatization is now directly and deliberately produced by the
market — and, with respect to the immense transformations to which it gives rise,
without offering any choice other than, in the best case, the profitability of investment,
or, in the worst case, the pure speculation involved in the increasingly tight connection
between the casino economy, marketing and R&D conceived according to inherently
short-term, and therefore speculative, models of disruption.

Technology is disruptive because the pace of its evolution and its transfer to society
(so-called “innovation”) has become extremely rapid, causing what Bertrand Gille
called the social systems (law, education, political organization, forms of knowledge,
and so on) to always arrive too late. Now, it might be objected that, as Hegel said, the
owl of Minerva flies only at dusk — and hence that philosophy has since long ago

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always arrived too late. Certainly. But I believe that today, in this disruption, this
lateness is unsustainable and irrational, and that it must be in advance overthrown, not
by rejecting technology, that is, exosomatization, which could only be purely illusory,
but by elaborating a new politics (evoked in July 2014 by Evgeny Morozov in a
remarkable article in The Guardian).

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie and Edouard Louis deplore the absence of intellectual debate.
For my part I deplore that, like Manuel Valls, they have apparently never heard either of
Pharmacologie du Front National or of States of Shock — in which I argue that so-
called “post-structuralism” has significantly contributed, in France and elsewhere, to
the legitimation first of neoliberal discourse and then libertarian discourse, the
libertarians being those who are the practitioners of disruption.

This is occurring not only because “intellectuals” yield to the drive-based ideology of
the extreme right as it continues to gain ground. It is because there is no thought of
the present age worthy of the name — and here, where I am resolutely “on the left,” I
would never say that such a thought “worthy of the name” would necessarily be on the
left.

The “intellectuals,” whether of the “left” or the “right,” are stuck in an antiquated
opposition between “intellectual” and “manual” that refers in a more profound way to
the opposition between logos and tekhne against which Marx fought, and which he
posited as the basis of the ideology that was then called “bourgeois.” This has largely
been forgotten, in particular by the heirs of Althusser and firstly by Alain Badiou. For
the consequence lies in the fact that, contrary to what Badiou’s hero, Plato, wants to
prove, knowledge is always constituted by technics, which in so doing always
constitutes a social relation.

It is by starting out again from these questions that the relationship between right and
left must be rethought. This is profoundly tied to industrial history. If the distinction
between “left” and “right” occurs during the French Revolution, this is because the
latter was the effect of a transformation of society by the bourgeoisie, and where the
divide that organizes social dynamics and historical blockages ceases to be the
opposition between “nobles” and “peasants” but becomes instead that between
capital and labor.

The left defends labor and the right defends capital. Freed from the constraints of the
Ancien Régime, the bourgeoisie were able to constitute industrial society, which was
the major achievement of the First French Empire, and in which two completely

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different dynamic contradictions co-existed: on the one hand, the Ancien Régime and
Revolution, which endured long after the French Revolution — as evidenced by the
Restoration and the Counter-Revolution — and on the other hand, right and left, which
are different categories again, describing the new division arising when the Ancien
Régime was truly gone — a transitional world lasting until Napoleon III, which was
described, notably, by Balzac and Flaubert.

It is in this context that the notion of “Progress” arises, and consequently the notion of
the “Enlightenment”: the discourse of the left is a conception of what is rational in an
industrial society, that is, such that it can be characterized as “Progress.”
“Progressive” then means “left-wing.” The discourse of the right is another conception
of what is rational in this respect, often consisting in wanting to limit “Progress” — but
not always. There have been, rarely, right-wing discourses that would intensify
“Progress,” but that question whether the priority of “Progress” is the reduction of
social inequalities.

Today, the promoters of what is now called “innovation” rather than “Progress” are
frequently “right-wing.” And those who criticize it, and sometimes oppose it, are often
“left-wing.” All this has gone through many stages. As for Marx and Engels, what they
admired in the bourgeoisie was its ability to concretize this “Progress,” and what they
denounced was the social injustices to which it gave rise (all this can be found in the
opening of The Communist Manifesto — 1848).

Rarely have these evolutions been analyzed and consequences drawn — Morozov’s
analysis of what he calls technological solutionism is one of the few examples. Jean-
François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, too, represents a moment in which
these changes were analyzed, but I have tried to show why this analysis is no longer
sufficient, and the disastrous (for the left) ambiguities contained in this work, which
also open up a thousand fundamental questions.

The context of these questions is disruption. In this disruption, society is literally

disintegrated by innovation, in turn driven exclusively by the market, itself in the hands
of shareholders. This can lead only to what Nietzsche (rather an opponent of “left-
wing” thinking, if not himself “on the right”) called ressentiment. And Nietzsche
distrusted those who were called not yet “leftist intellectuals” but “democrats” and
“socialists,” because they seemed to him figures of ressentiment.

The great question of our time is that of becoming in the Anthropocene, in the course
of which exosomatization, of which Marx and Engels were the first thinkers, has

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passed completely into the hands of the most speculative, irresponsible, and self-
destructive capitalism. And here the question of surrogate motherhood, which has
stirred “social debate” in France (thereby diverting attention from social, political,
intellectual, and economic poverty), would merit a debate on some basis other than
the indigent logorrhoea incited by this “social issue.”

Surrogacy, along with genetically modified organisms and other technologies of life,
constitutes a new age of exosomatization. It is as such that these issues must be
addressed, and it is as disruptive technologies that the market promotes them.
“Progressive” or “conservative” attitudes are nothing more than two ways of denying
this new state of fact, which remains to be thought — that is, to be transformed into a
state of law, rather than exploited in order to distract attention from the fundamental
issues, of which these technologies of life are cases.

Immense unrest has seized hold of the world. The risk is that this unrest will turn into
something more than just disquiet, and more even than anguish: into terror. This
danger is obvious to anyone who is not too afraid to look at what is taking place, and it
is fundamentally connected to the becoming of the Anthropocene: the direction in
which this geological age is unfolding is increasingly seen by humankind as an
inexorably fatal form of becoming.

All of us more or less think that this eventuality — the fatal becoming of the
Anthropocene — is the most likely outcome. Why do we not ourselves say so?
According to Hegel it is by starting from unrest that we begin to think. If we do not
think with unrest, the latter engenders fear, then regression, then terror. Ought we not
engage ourselves in thinking what everything suggests is the context and the horizon
of what de Lagasnerie and Louis call the experience of powerlessness, and undertake
an experiment of thought by posing the enormous question of disruption that is the
current stage of the Anthropocene?

I write here in my capacity as president of Ars Industrialis, which is engaged in

debating these questions in the European context. We argue that to combat the
protean regression afflicting our age, we need to look clear-sightedly at the world, in
order to propose a new macro-economic organization. The latter must be based on the
systemic and systematic valorization of negentropy — which requires a redefinition of
the theory of value, as Marx called it in his “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse,
a text ignored in France (except by Lyotard).

Entropy is becoming, devenir. Negentropy is what inscribes within it a future, avenir.

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Becoming and future have until today been confused. It is this confusion that makes us
powerless, and it is what the impasse of the Anthropocene reveals. Such a perspective
is also an immense building site for intellectual construction — open to all those who
still have the ability to think for themselves, rather than vainly repeat received ideas.
This implies in principle the need to constitute a neganthropology by reopening the
questions raised by the theories of entropy and negentropy in the second half of the
20th century, in France and elsewhere.

Providing these specific proposals is also a way of offering a salute to Edgar Morin.

Bernard Stiegler is a French philosopher of technology and consumerism and the

president of Ars Industrialis.

print

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