For a Critique of Noology

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Notes

1 Deleuze, Negotiations, 153–154.

2 Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, 95. See also Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 54.

3 The social media theorist Geert Lovink has recently argued along similar lines: ‘Social networking is much more than just a dominant discourse. We need to go beyond text and images and include its software, interfaces and networks that depend on a technical infrastructure consisting of offices and their consultants and cleaners, cables and data centers, working in close concert with the movements and habits of the connected billions’. Lovink, “On Social Media Ideology,” 4.

4 Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 176.

5 These modes of critique operate from the ruins of critique, see Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”; Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator; Foster, “Post-Critical.”

6 Benoît Dillet, “Deleuze’s Transformation of the Ideology-Critique Project: Noology”; Benoît Dillet and Anaïs Nony, “Introduction: Noology and Technics.”

7 Stiegler, La Pharmacie du Front national, 179; ‘[T]he concept of ideology itself [is] the last and most important conceptual achievement of the enlightenment drive to banish the idols and the superstitions. It is above all in this that deconstruction, for example, is related to Marxism, as cross cousins in some extended kinship system; and that the best way to undertake the comparison would be to begin with an analysis of deconstruction as a form of Ideologiekritik, as they used to call Marxism in Germany now so many years ago’. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 282. This idea of a limited kinship between Marxism and deconstruction is further developed in other parts of the book (for instance, 26–7).

8 This work intends to continue the far-reaching genealogy of ideology presented by George Lichtheim, from the Ideologues to the early Habermas, passing through the increasing influence of positivism on ‘ideology theories’, from socialism to sociology, in Comte and Weber, and later in Lukács and Mannheim. Yet by mostly referring to German authors, the problem of non-translatability of debates on ideology remains, something that is partly overcome by Fredric Jameson and Jan Rehmann as I will explain further down. See Lichtheim, “The Concept of Ideology.”

9 Macherey, “Idéologie, le mot, l’idée, la chose.”

10 Foucault, The Order of Things, 261, translation modified.

11 Macherey, “Idéologie, le mot, l’idée, la chose.”

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 64.

16 Ibid., 66.

17 Laclau, “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology.”

18 Marjoribanks, “Ideology and Morality.”

19 Rehmann, Theories of Ideology.

20 Finlayson, “On Mountains and Molehills.” Finlayson is critical of the confusion between alienation and ideology in political theory and argues that the very question that ideology attempts to answer creates the illusion that ideology is a ‘lower-class problem’ and not ‘our problem too’ (143, emphasis in the original).

21 For a snapshot of the effervescent debates between groups, factions and philosophies, see Balibar, “Althusser and the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’,” xi–xii.

22 For Macherey, ideology is thoroughly a philosophical issue not because it doubles political reality but because it is aporetic: ‘How is one to grasp the concept of an evanescent reality which, in its very nature, is a challenge to conceptualisation?’ Macherey, Le Sujet des normes, 272.

23 Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 226. See also Thompson, “Ideology and the Social Imaginary: An Appraisal of Castoriadis and Lefort.”

24 Ricoeur argues for a movement away from the ideology-science dialectic central to Marxists and Althusserians in the 1970s to the ideology-utopia dialectic, with hermeneutics as a guiding principle of ideology-critique. Due to their non-congruence with reality, utopia and ideology are qualified as ‘cultural imaginations’. See Ricoeur, “Science and Ideology.”

25 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 374.

26 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 219.

27 Macherey, Le Sujet des normes, 229.

28 Barbrook and Cameron, “The Californian Ideology.”

29 Barbrook and Cameron, “The Californian Ideology.” See also Valentine, “Information Technology, Ideology and Governmentality.”

30 Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” 111–13. Deleuze notes that the enthusiasm for attending televised talk shows in their studios ‘[has] nothing to do with beauty or thought, it’s about being in contact with the technology, touching the machinery’. Deleuze, Negotiations, 72.

31 Deleuze, Negotiations, 177–182; Yuk Hui, “Modulation After Control.”

32 Simondon, L’Individuation. See also Lloyd Thomas, “Rendered Plastic by Preparation: Concrete as Constant Material.”

33 Simondon, L’Individuation, 44.

34 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 562.

35 ‘What we can do with Foucault, since he is dead, is to turn him on his head in order to show, for instance, that in algorithmic governmentality, the objective is no longer to make the bodies docile vis-a-vis the norm, but to make the norms docile regarding the body’. Rouvroy and Stiegler, “Le Régime de vérité numérique,” §69.

36 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3.

37 See the 3rd Plateau “10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?),” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 39–74. Another confirmation of this is found in the “Strata, stratification” entry of the conclusion: ‘Forms and substances, codes and milieus are not really distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation’ (502).

38 Deleuze, Negotiations, 149. ‘By the image of thought I don’t mean a method but something deeper that’s always taken for granted, a system of coordinates, dynamics, orientations, what is means to think, and to “orient oneself in thought”’ (147–8, translation modified).

39 Hui, “Modulation after Control.”

40 ‘Confinements are molds, different moldings, while controls are a modulation like a self-transmuting holding continually changing from one moment to the next’. Deleuze, Negotiations, 178–9.

41 ‘Molding hides or contracts an operation of modulation that is essential to matter-movement’. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 562.

42 ‘[M]odern power is not at all reducible to the classical alternative “repression or ideology” but implies processes of normalization, modulation, modelling and information that bear on language, perception, desire, movement, etc., and which proceed by way of microassemblages’. Ibid., 458.

43 Stiegler, La Société automatique, 151. Hui was hinting at this when he wrote that in Deleuze’s late works, ‘the concept of modulation becomes the paradigm of capitalist production’. Hui, “Modulation after Control,” 77.

44 For Staal and the people of Rajava, the parliament-form is not the only form of democratic assembly possible: ‘Ideology, in other words, has a material reality, which one can understand through morphology’. Staal, “Ideology = Form,” 5.

45 see note 45 (Dean)

46 Dean, “The Anamorphic Politics of Climate Change,” 8.

47 Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse, 288. See also: ‘Generally, we moved from a regulatory [réglementaire] logic in the 1970s (prohibitions, fines) to a logic of “governance” guided by economic science and market tools (taxes, rights to pollute and self-regulation of companies)’ 299.

48 Jameson, The Valences of the Dialectic, 9.

49 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 25–6.

50 Macherey, Le Sujet des normes, 277.

51 Bernard Stiegler mentioned this notion during the workshop at Radboud University, Nijmegen organised by Pieter Lemmens, Yuk Hui, Anaïs Nony and Paul Willemarck in June 2016.

52 ‘To give back to the losers of history is also heuristic since to give meaning to strange arguments demands the reconstruction of the grids of intelligibility that their defeat made invisible’. Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse, 18.

53 Lovink, “On Social Media Ideology,” 4.

54 Rehmann, Theories of Ideology, 312–3.

55 Hui, “Modulation after Control,” 85.

56 See Simon, “The Ideological Effects of Actuarial Practices,” referred in Rouvroy and Berns, “Le Nouveau pouvoir statistique.”

57 Rouvroy and Stiegler, “Le Régime de vérité numérique,” §12.

58 Ibid., §25.

59 Hui, “Modulation after Control,” 82.

60 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 377, see also 380.

61 Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 359.

62 This is a point also made by Yuk Hui, see Hui, “Modulation after Control,” 87.

63 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 378.

64 Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 14, 43–48. Another influential Marxist Boris Groys also continued to use this schema when writing about the condition of art in the digital age: ‘art can be seen as a part of the superstructure or as a part of the material basis. Or, in other words, art can be understood as ideology or as technology’. Groys, “The Truth of Art,” 3.

65 We can of course think of Trump’s use of Twitter and his divisive presence on other social media platforms, but also Beppe Grillo and his 5-Star movement who used digital media to broadcast its populism as well as to fashion its modern attitude have received a lot attention and attracted a large traffic on their blog before becoming the second largest party at the 2013 national elections in Italy. For a detailed analysis of the formation of this techno-populism, see Natale and Ballatore, “The web will kill them all.”

66 Antoinette Rouvroy in a recent interview intelligently suggests asking politicians, judges, lawyers, police agents and other actors to justify their decisions informed by algorithms, to avoid a situation when these actors blame the algorithms for suggesting discriminatory measures. Rouvroy with Fradin and de La Porte, “Au moins.”

67 On ready-made thought or prêt-à-penser, see Châtelet, Les Animaux malades du consensus, 71–74.

68 Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front national, 160.

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Benoît Dillet

Benoît Dillet, PhD, is an Assistant Lecturer in Politics and Sociology at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. He co-authored The Political Space of Art (2016) and co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism (2013) and Technologiques: La Pharmacie de Bernard Stiegler (2013). He is also the translator of Bernard Stiegler’s Philosophising by Accident (forthcoming in 2017). Email: [email protected]