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Acknowledgement
The author would like to express sincere thanks to Daniel Ross for his careful assistance in rendering this article into English.
Notes
1 Guattari, “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects,” 95.
2 See Hörl, “Le nouveau paradigme écologique,” 70.
3 The wish for such an epoch, characterized by a re-appropriation and re-singularization of the use of media, was developed by Guattari throughout the latter part of his career.
4 See Guattari, Chaosmosis, 98. Clearly, ‘aesthetics’ does not refer here just to the arts, or to artists as privileged actors in the renovation of subjectivity, even though Guattari placed greater stock in the arts than in other expressive languages that in his view were more constrained by the normalization and serialization imposed by capitalism and its media.
5 Ibid., 101.
6 ‘The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.”’ Deleuze, “Postscript,” 5.
7 For an overview of this research, see Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies.”
8 Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, vols. 1 and 2.
9 For a reading of Stiegler in terms of symptomatology, see Vignola, “Devenir dignes du Pharmakon.”; Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks, 131. For counter-examples, see Luciana Parisi (“Instrumental Reason”) and Tiziana Terranova (“Attention, Economy and the Brain”).
10 For a deeper analysis of this pharmacological approach, see Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living.
11 This assertion, which was inspired by the French paleo-anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, is discussed at length in his first book: see Stiegler, Technics and Time 1.
12 Ibid.
13 This concept, sketched by Stiegler in the two volumes of Symbolic Misery, is one of his most powerful methodological tools.
14 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 5.
15 Ibid.
16 Bates, “Unity, Plasticity, Cathastrophe,” 32.
17 Texeira Pinto, “The Pigeon in the Machine,” 30.
18 While many Simondonian scholars have pointed to the specificity of Simondon’s concept of the cybernetic, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy has gone further in arguing that Simondon developed a ‘Cybernétique Universelle’ (Universal Cybernetics) grounded in a profound reflection on the question of ‘information’. See Barthélémy, Simondon, and Hui, “Simondon et la question de l’information.”
19 The question of ecology is already linked to individuation in Guattari (see Chaosmosis, 8), and this is also the direction in which Erich Hörl tries to push Simondon. See Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies” and “The Technological Condition.”
20 Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, and L’individuation. For summaries of Simondon’s vocabulary, see also Barthélémy, “Glossary.”
21 Barthélémy and Bontems, “Philosophie de la nature et artefact.” 4.
22 For a critique of this ‘fault’ of Simondon, see Stiegler, “Temps et individuation.”
23 Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 139–140.
24 For Stiegler, the inheritance from which life is composed is not only biological (philogenetic), but also mnemo-technical (epigenetic): that is, realized through technical supports that create the conditions of culture in as much as they permit its transmission.
25 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 129.
26 Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 2.
27 Berry, “The Computational Turn.”
28 Stiegler, Automatic Society, 27.
29 As shown in Stiegler, Technics and Time 3, the exteriorization and thus spatialization of memory is precisely what inaugurates the very process of individuation that constitutes consciousness. Such an analysis was already undertaken in Baranzoni, “Algorithmic and Machinic An-Aestheticism,” and some of the thoughts expressed here are anticipated in that essay.
30 On this topic, an article published by Wired Magazine Chief Editor Chris Anderson has been widely discussed. Anderson states: ‘This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool … every theory of human behaviour, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves’. Anderson, “The End of Theory.”
31 Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique.”
32 This Foucauldian notion (see Foucault, On the Government of the Living) has been taken by Antoinette Rouvroy to describe the ‘truth constriction’ of the new modes of behaviour to which ‘algorithmic governmentality’ seems to refer. See Rouvroy and Stiegler, “Le régime de vérité numérique.”
33 Hansen, Feed Forward.
34 Ibid., 64.
35 Ibid. ‘What accounts for the singularity of contemporary media is not simply that their data-driven operations bypass the scope of consciousness, but that they impact experience on a much broader basis than consciousness’. Hansen, “The Operational Present of Sensibility,” 39.
36 Hansen, “The Operational Present of Sensibility,” 41.
37 Hansen, Feed Forward, 116–117.
38 Hansen, “The Operational Present of Sensibility,” 41.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 44–45.
41 Ibid., 50. ‘Put schematically, we could say that media pharmacology loses its prosthetic basis since the loss of our agency over our own behavioural data is recompensed by something that has no direct correlation with it, namely, the affordances of social media’, even if it is a false compensation. Ibid., 44.
42 Ibid., 50. My emphasis.
43 Ibid., 52.
44 Ibid., 45.
45 Ibid., 50.
46 Rouvroy and Berns, “Gouvernementalité algorithmique.”
47 Stiegler, Automatic Society.
48 Hansen, “The Operational Present of Sensibility,” 45.
49 Stiegler, Symbolic Misery 2, 4.
50 Stiegler, Technics and Time 3.
51 Stiegler adds to the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ retentions described by Husserl (where the former is the kind of perception that we can have of a temporal object, and the latter the way in which memory remembers it) a ‘tertiary’ retention, which is any support whatsoever for the prosthetic exteriorisation of memory, that is, the spatialized form of a temporal object. See Stiegler, Technics and Time 3.
52 Rouvroy analyzes how this kind of forecasting responds to the wish to capture the real in its entirety and totality, in Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique.”
53 In addition to the Marxian concept, which describes the expropriation of the means of production as a damaging loss of knowledge for workers, Stiegler analyzes the ‘proletarianization of sensibility’ in terms of establishing an opposition between consumer and producer, causing for the former a loss of the knowledge of how to live, leading them to become incapable of rendering sensible, of expressing, what they perceive. See Stiegler, Symbolic Misery tome 1 and 2.
54 Stiegler, Symbolic Misery 2, 26.
55 Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità.
56 Stiegler, Technics and Time 3.
57 Berry, “Against Remediation,” 33.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., 35.
60 Lev Manovich talks for instance of ‘info-aesthetics’, referring to those cultural practices that try to respond to the new priorities of ‘information society’: ‘Making sense of information, working with information, producing knowledge from information’. Manovich, “The Shape of Information,” 2.
61 Berry, “Against Remediation.”
62 Berry, Critical Theory, 157.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., 159.
65 Ibid.
66 Berry, “Against Remediation,” 34.
67 Guattari, Chaosmosis.
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Sara Baranzoni
Sara Baranzoni, PhD, was Research Fellow at the University of Bologna, Italy. She is currently Prometeo Researcher at UArtes, Guayaquil, for the Secretary of Education, Science, Innovation and Technology of Ecuador. She collaborates with IRI/Paris and Digital Studies Network. She is co-founder of La Deleuziana (Online Journal of Philosophy). She has published several articles and translations on French Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology, Media Studies and the Arts, and is editor of many collective publications (books and journals). Email: [email protected]