NOODIVERSITY, TECHNODIVERSITY

Abstract

Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We can no longer avoid integrating this question with that of entropy, but also with the specific question of anthropic entropy, and the way this has accompanied the rise of computation: it thus demands a new approach to theoretical computer science. While digital and network technologies initially seemed to offer new hopes for the reorganization of work (exemplified by the free software movement), the subsequent rise of smartphones and social networks seems to have turned these hopes into lost illusions: network effects and algorithmic platforms are hegemonic, and the changes brought by neoliberalism are being progressively intensified. Unless something utterly improbable happens, this dystopian tendency seems destined to continue.

Could the pandemic bring the necessary break? Before asking this question, we should reflect on the meaning of the probable, the improbable and the unforeseen. Capitalism can be described as an epistēmē, whose operator is information, but also as an anti-epistēmē, because it installs generalized proletarianization. In other words, knowledge is destroyed and diversity systemically eliminated, and a new theoretical computer science must learn how to take the need for diversity functionally into account. Yuk Hui raises these questions through the notion of technodiversity, as a way of challenging the hegemony of a universal calculability prescribing arrangements between the technical system and the social and biological systems. Today, the computer is a cellular element in a global megamachine, and, from Hui’s perspective, it imposes this cosmotechnical question firstly because China cannot be reduced to the West.

Already in the twentieth century, the culture industries tended to reduce reason to rationalization, raising the question of whether modernity is the generalization of the universal or its elimination. What lies behind this question is Leroi-Gourhan’s notion of universal technical tendencies. For Leroi-Gourhan, this question involves three kinds of milieus – interior, exterior and technical – and these are mutually diffracting, which means: there is never a milieu, but only milieus. We must further distinguish the production of technical organs (exosomatic exorganogenesis) from the production of those specifically concerned with memory (exomnesic exorganogenesis). The conditions of the expression of universal technical tendencies vary according to advances in exomemorization.

Tendencies play out in an irreducible way with counter-tendencies, forming open dynamic systems. Today, platforms tend to eliminate this play, and this is why today’s state of fact inherently calls for the question of diversity. The challenge is to introduce new conditions for variability, reconstituting noodiversity. The exosomatic technical milieu is in excess over the interior milieu, connecting interior milieus together by traversing the common exterior milieu. Today, this traversal of the technical saturates the exterior milieu. Exomnesic exorganogenesis involves a meeting of three layers – the physiological, the nervous and the logical – where the second and third of these are what must be woven in new ways by a new theoretical computer science opening up new forms of différance between the understanding and reason.

Keywords:

• cosmotechnics
• Yuk Hui
• André Leroi-Gourhan
• computer science
• information theory

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Including (and even usually) by denying it, by default, this denial and this default being symptoms of the extreme urgency of the question.

2 This is what was studied in Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front national, which unfortunately has not been translated into English.

3 This remark is a response to a question from Paolo Vignola.

4 It would be at once indispensable, long, very difficult and no doubt sometimes very painful to delineate this “near” and this “far” in their countless nuances within this very compromise, whose sense here is not moral but epistemic. This question, which I outlined in Stiegler, States of Shock, and took up in the works that followed, fundamentally involves a reinterpretation of both what Marx posited at the beginning of The German Ideology and in the Grundrisse, and the question of Gestell in Heidegger – a question about which Derrida, as far as I know, always remained strangely silent.

5 In Richard Dawkins’s sense.

6 In the sense in which Peter Thiel appropriated this notion put forward by René Girard.

7 Not without problems.

8 The Nasdaq is both an index and the organization of an automated market, whose president from 1990 to 1993 was Bernie Madoff, later sentenced to 150 years in prison, and one of the founders – as early as 1971 – of automated trading quotes.

9 Recurrence is the dynamic principle of what I call the idiotext. On the general notion of recurrence, see Stiegler (Technics and Time, 3 144), and, on the idiotext, see Stiegler (Technics and Time, 2 64, 243; “Postface” 862–68).

10 A relativity from which it can deviate locally and temporarily, as, for example, a probability constituted by an order or an organization.

11 In the sense of function integration described by Simondon: the process of concretization inasmuch as it leads to what he also calls associated techno-geographical milieus. On the recent evolution of the latter, which Simondon did not have the opportunity to analyse, see Stiegler, The Re-enchantment of the World; Automatic Society; The Age of Disruption; and Au-delà de l’Entropocène.

12 In the sense developed on the basis of the example of Alan Greenspan in the first chapter of Stiegler, Automatic Society.

13 And cf. the response by Kevin Kelly, and my commentary in Automatic Society.

14 On the relationship between ideology and marketing, see Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front national 11.

15 An earlier version of this text is available in English: see Stiegler, “The New Conflict of the Faculties and Functions.”

16 I owe to David Bates, then to David Berry, this connection with Popper.

17 It is one of the great merits of Derrida’s Of Grammatology that it is attentive to this issue – and to this escape that was then called “logocentrism” and “ethnocentrism.” Yuk Hui and I have long hoped to be able to organize a symposium on these questions in China – which could be entitled Characteristica Universalis, Theoretical Computer Science and Games of Writing.

18 This is how we refer to the set of digital technologies that constitute a new cognitive function in what we describe as an exosomatic organogenesis of the faculties and functions of reason (see Stiegler, “Le nouveau conflit des facultés et des fonctions”).

19 Those discussed by Adorno and Horkheimer, after Benjamin, and without having completely grasped the stakes of what the latter called reproducibility (which is a repro-ducibility: see Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3).

20 Spiritual technologies are implemented by Ignace de Loyola and his missions to serve spiritual exercises in response to the Lutheran dissemination of spiritual technologies, firstly through the Bible translated as a book for everyone, faith or fidelity being redefined in this way as a reading practice. Benjamin Franklin will redefine this programme through Calvin by guiding it towards the account-keeping books in which ratios will appear, fidelity being thus redefined as calculation.

21 And here, it would be necessary to clarify the position put forward in The Question Concerning Technology in China on the process of concretization as Simondon describes it with respect to machinic becoming, a point that is all the more crucial since with this concept Simondon responds to Wiener, and to his consideration of the feedback between machines and organisms, that is, with respect to the recursivity that is the subject of Yuk Hui’s most recent book, Recursivity and Contingency.

22 In this way constituting the course of this exosomatization of exosimples and exocomplexes. On this point, see Giacomo Gilmozzi et al., “Localities, Territories and Urbanities in the Age of Platforms and Faced With the Challenges of the Anthropocene Era,” in Stiegler and the Internation Collective, ch. 2, and Stiegler, Qu’appelle-t-on panser? 3.