Ideology and Post-structuralism after Bernard Stiegler

Abstract

What is the objective of ideology critique today? A unique answer to this question can be found in the work of Bernard Stiegler: the object of ideology critique is stupidity. Stiegler’s work will be situated with regard to the study of ideology and post-structuralism, reframed as respective versions of a dichotomy between critical and neutral theories, to show how Stiegler’s conception of ideology encompasses both. How he thinks ideology ‘after’ post-structuralism will be explored through his reading of Deleuze and Guattari. First, by seeing how Stiegler capitalizes upon the theoretical developments of Deleuze and Guattari to rethink the notion of ideology. Second, by seeing how this understanding of ideology is folded back on their work in order to discern how post-structuralism can be critiqued by a theory of ideology that utilizes its views. From the perspective of his reading of desire in Deleuze, Guattari and Freud, Stiegler shows how ideology destroys the desire to rethink ideas, and enforces stupidity. Third, after Stiegler’s theoretical labour, we arrive at a notion of ideology dichotomized between the critical and the stupid, tasking critique with the invention of new forms of desire, and the struggle against stupidity.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Iain MacKenzie, the members of the Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent and the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely useful critical remarks on this piece.

Notes

1. Howard Brick, ‘The end of ideology thesis,’ in Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 91–110.

2. Stuart Hall, ‘Signification, representation, ideology: Althusser and the post-structuralist debates,’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 2(2) (1985), pp. 92–93.

3. Iain MacKenzie and Siniša Malešević, ‘Introduction: de Tracy’s legacy,’ in Iain MacKenzie and Siniša Malešević (Eds) Ideology After Post-Structuralism, (London: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 4.

4. For an alternate mapping of the field of ideology, see: Jonathan L. Maynard, ‘A map of the field of ideological analysis,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 18(3) (2013), pp. 299–327.

5. Contrastingly, some have argued that the rejection of ideology by post-structuralism is merely apparent. See: Benoît Dillet, ‘Deleuze’s transformation of the ideology critique project: noology critique,’ in Ceciel Meiborg and Sjoerd van Tuinen (Eds) Deleuze and the Passions (New York: Punctum Books, forthcoming); Robert Porter, ‘From clichés to slogans: towards a Deleuze–Guattarian critique of ideology,’ Social Semiotics, 20(3) (2010), pp. 233–245.

6. Bernard Stiegler, ‘The pharmacology of poststructuralism: an interview with Bernard Stiegler,’ in Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter (Eds) The Edinburgh Companion to Post-Structuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 489–505; Bernard Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National: Suivi du vocabulaire d’Ars Industrialis (Paris: Flammarion, 2013); Bernard Stiegler, States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century, Barnaby Norman (Trans.) (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).

7. For a variety of alternate perspectives on the relationship between ideology and post-structuralism, see: Malešević and Mackenzie, Ideology after Poststructuralism, op. cit., Ref. 4.

8. For example, see: Michael Freeden, ‘Editorial: political ideology at century’s end,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 5(1) (2000), pp. 5–15; John Gerring, ‘Ideology: a definitional analysis,’ Political Research Quarterly, 50(4) (1997), pp. 957–994; Kathleen Knight, ‘Transformations of the concept of ideology in the twentieth century,’ The American Political Science Review, 100(4) (2006), pp. 619–626.

9. On the difficulty of defining post-structuralism and the terms invention by Anglo-American scholars, see: François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, Jeff Fort (Trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Johanne Angermuller, Why There Is No Post-Structuralism in France: The Making of an Intellectual Generation (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

10. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., pp. 167–168; Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 12.

11. Jan Rehmann, Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 190; Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 219–220.

12. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987), p. 189.

13. David McLellan, Ideology (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), pp. 80–82.

14. Karl Marx, ‘The German ideology,’ in David McLellan (Ed.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 180; Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming (Trans.) (London: Verso, 1997); Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, G. M. Goshigaran (Trans.) (London: Verso, 2014).

15. Mark Bevir, ‘Ideology as distorted belief,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 1(2) (1996), pp. 107–122.

16. Clifford Geertz, ‘Ideology as cultural system,’ in D. Apter (Ed.) Ideology and Discontent (New York: The Free Press, 1964), pp. 47–76; M. Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008); Michael Freeden, ‘Ideologies and conceptual history,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 2(1) (1997), pp. 3–11; Bo Stråth, ‘Ideology and history,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(1) (2006), pp. 23–42; Teun A. van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (London: Sage Publications, 1998).

17. Göran Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: Verso, 1980).

18. Two examples include: Gilles Deleuze, ‘Desire and pleasure,’ in David Lapoujade (Ed.) Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, Ames Hodges and Michael Taormina (Trans.) (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 122; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, A. M. Sheridan Smith (Trans.) (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 41–42. Contrastingly, Porter situates Deleuze within the ‘critical’ side of this divide. See: Robert Porter, Ideology: Contemporary Social, Political and Cultural Theory (Cardiff: University of Cardiff Press, 2006), pp. 86–116.

19. Ernesto Laclau, ‘The death and resurrection of the theory of ideology,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 1(3) (1996), pp. 201–220; Slavoj Žižek, ‘The spectre of ideology,’ in Slavoj Žižek (Ed.) Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 1–33; Jason Glynos, ‘The grip of ideology: a Lacanian approach to the theory of ideology,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 6(2) (2001), pp. 191–214; Aletta Norval, ‘Poststructuralist conceptions of ideology,’ in Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 156–170.

20. For general and critical summaries of Stiegler’s work, see: Christina Howells and Gerald Moore (Eds), Stiegler and Technics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Stephen Barker, ‘Transformation as an ontological imperative: the [human] future according to Bernard Stiegler,’ Transformations, 17 (2009); Richard Beardsworth, ‘From a genealogy of matter to a politics of memory: Stiegler’s thinking of technics,’ Tekhnema, 2 (1995); Arthur Bradley, Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida (New York: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 120–141; Patrick Crogan, ‘Bernard Stiegler: philosophy, technics, and activism,’ Cultural Politics, 6(2) (2010), pp. 133–156.

21. Patrick Crogan, ‘Thinking cinema(tically) and the industrial temporal object: schemes and technics of experience in Bernard Stiegler’s technics and time series,’ Scan, 4(2) (2007); Patrick Crogan, ‘Editing (and) individuation,’ New Formations, 77 (2012), pp. 97–10; Mark N. Hansen, ‘Technics beyond the temporal object,’ New Formations, 77 (2012), pp. 44–62; Ian James, ‘Bernard Stiegler and the time of technics,’ Cultural Politics, 6(2) (2010), pp. 207–227; Ben Roberts, ‘Cinema as mnemotechnics: Bernard Stiegler and the ‘industrialization of memory,’’ Angelaki, 11(1) (2006), pp. 55–63; Judith Wambacq and Bart Buseyne, ‘The reality of real time,’ New Formations, 77 (2012), pp. 63–75.

22. Beardsworth, ‘From a genealogy of matter,’ op. cit., Ref. 21; Tracy Colony, ‘A matter of time: Stiegler on Heidegger and being technological,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 41(2) (2010), pp. 117–131.

23. Richard Beardsworth, ‘Towards a critical culture of the image,’ Tekhnema, 4 (1998); Tracy Colony, ‘Epimetheus bound: Stiegler on Derrida, life, and the technological condition,’ Research in Phenomenology, 41(1) (2011), pp. 72–89; Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Emergencies,’ The Oxford Literary Review, 18 (1996), pp. 175–216; Ben Roberts, ‘Stiegler reading Derrida: the prosthesis of deconstruction in technics,’ Postmodern Culture, 16(1) (2005); Daniel Ross, ‘Pharmacology and critique after deconstruction,’ in Howells and Moore (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 21., pp. 243–258; Ben Turner, ‘Life and the technical transformation of Différance: Stiegler and the noopolitics of becoming non-inhuman,’ Derrida Today, 9(2) (2016), pp. 177–198.

24. Christopher Johnson, ‘The prehistory of technology: on the contribution of Leroi-Gourhan,’ in Howells and Moore (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 21., pp. 34–52; Michael Lewis, ‘Of a mythical philosophical anthropology: the transcendental and the empirical in technics and time,’ in Howells and Moore (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 21., pp. 53–68.

25. Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, ‘Individuation and knowledge: the “refutation of idealism” in Simondon’s heritage in France,’ Mark Hayward and Arne De Boever (Trans.), SubStance, 41(3) (2012), pp. 60–75.

26. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Richard Beardsworth (Trans.) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 94.

27. Ibid., p. 135.

28. Ibid., pp. 141–142.

29. Ibid., p. 123.

30. Ibid., p. 136.

31. Ibid., p. 269; Bernard Stiegler, ‘Five hundred million friends: the pharmacology of friendship,’ Daniel Ross (Trans.), Umbr(a), 17 (2012), pp. 59–75.

32. Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, Daniel Ross (Trans.) (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), p. 34.

33. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 419.

34. Gilbert Simondon, ‘The position of the problem of ontogenesis,’ Parrhesia, 7 (2009), p. 12. For an exemplary summary of transduction in the context of a general overview of Simondon’s work, see: Andrea Bardin, Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, London: Springer, 2015).

35. Bernard Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology, Daniel Ross (Trans.) (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 66.

36. Ibid., p. 68.

37. Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s pharmacy,’ in Dissemination, Barbara Johnson (Trans.) (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), pp. 61–172; Plato, ‘Phaedrus,’ in John M. Cooper and G. M. A. Grube (Ed.), Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Trans.) Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), pp. 506–556.

38. Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living, op. cit., Ref. 36., p. 19.

39. Ibid., p. 23.

40. Ibid., p. 33.

41. Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 126. For discussions of Stiegler’s relationship to Marx and his notion of proletarianization, see, respectively: Irmak Ertuna, ‘Stiegler and Marx for a question concerning technology,’ Transformations, 17 (2009); John Hutnyk, ‘Proletarianisation,’ New Formations, 77 (2012), pp. 127–149.

42. Karl Marx, ‘Grundrisse,’ in McLellan (Ed.), op. cit., Ref. 15., p. 408.

43. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1989), p. 15.

44. Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 101.

45. Ibid., p. 138.

46. Stiegler identifies three forms of knowledge: savoir-faire (knowledge of how to do, know-how), savoir-vivre (knowledge of how to live) and conceptual or theoretical knowledge (knowledge of how to think at an abstract level). See: Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., pp. 53, 84, 196–197.

47. Stiegler, For a New Critique, op. cit., Ref. 33., pp. 29–36.

48. For a discussion of whether ideology is a modern concept, see: Michael Freeden, ‘The “beginning of ideology” thesis,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 4(1) (1999), pp. 5–11.

49. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 432.

50. Bernard Stiegler, Disbelief and Discredit Vol. 2: Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals, Daniel Ross (Trans.) (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 19.

51. Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 33.

52. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (Trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 94.

53. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 289.

54. Stiegler, ibid., p. 290.

55. Bernard Stiegler, Disbelief and Discredit Vol. 1: The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold (Trans.) (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 160.

56. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 295.

57. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Hugh Tomlinson (Trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 105.

58. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Paul Patton (Trans.) (London: Continuum, 1994), p. 152, 159.

59. Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 47.

60. Ibid., p. 61.

61. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 261.

62. Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 139.

63. Deleuze, ‘Desire and pleasure,’ op cit., Ref. 19., p. 122.

64. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 105.

65. Ibid., p. 29.

66. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi (Trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 4.

67. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 187.

68. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Mary Higgins and M. Raphael (Ed.), Vincent R. Carfagno (Trans.) (New York: Harper Collins, 1970), p. 14.

69. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, op. cit., Ref. 65., p. 26.

70. Ibid., p. 176.

71. Ibid., p. 344.

72. Ibid., p. 29.

73. Ibid. Translation modified.

74. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 192.

75. Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 51, 60; Jacques Lacan, ‘The mirror stage as formative of the I function as revealed in psychoanalytic experience,’ in Écrits, Bruce Fink (Trans.) (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), p. 77.

76. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., Ref. 67., p. 165.

77. That Foucault dubbed Anti-Oedipus with the alternate title of ‘an Introduction to the non-Fascist life’ perhaps challenges this designation. What is at stake for Stiegler is that Deleuze and Guattari cannot conceptualize how desire and ideology are linked on a methodological and philosophical level, which means that a non-fascist politics cannot identify how desire is destroyed by fascism. See: Michel Foucault, ‘Preface,’ in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 65., p. xv.

78. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., pp. 193–194.

79. Ibid., pp. 25–29.

80. Thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention to this citation. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., Ref. 67., p. 399.

81. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 203; Stiegler, ‘The pharmacology of poststructuralism,’ op. cit., Ref. 7., pp. 495–496; Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 139.

82. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 24, James Strachey (Trans.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), p. 62.

83. Freud, ibid., pp. 34–35.

84. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, A. Bass (Trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 400.

85. Stiegler, ‘The pharmacology of poststructuralism,’ op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 496.

86. Stiegler, Disbelief and Discredit Vol. 2, op. cit., Ref. 51., p. 18.

87. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller (Ed.), Alan Sheridan (Trans.) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 49.

88. Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 254, n. 61.

89. Stiegler, La société automatique vol.1: l’Avenir du travail, (Paris: Fayard, 2015), pp. 47–48.

90. Ibid., p. 61.

91. On the role of desire in relation to keeping the future open, see: Robert Hughes, ‘Bernard Stiegler, philosophical amateur, or, from individuation to Eros to Philia,’ Diacritics, 21(1) (2014), pp. 49–50.

92. Bernard Stiegler, ‘Persephone, Oedipus, Epimetheus,’ Richard Beardsworth (Trans.), Tekhnema, 3 (1996), p. 108.

93. Bernard Stiegler, ‘A rational theory of miracles: on pharmacology and transindividuation,’ New Formations, 77(1) (2012), p. 177.

94. Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem and taboo,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 13, James Strachey (Trans.) (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 158.

95. Sigmund Freud, ‘Moses and monotheism,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 23, James Strachey (Trans.) (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 99.

96. Ibid., p. 101.

97. While there is no room to consider Stiegler’s reading of Freud fully here, for critical accounts, see: Richard Beardsworth, ‘Technology and politics: a response to Bernard Stiegler,’ Cultural Politics, 6(2) (2010), pp. 191–196; Oliver Davis, ‘Desublimation in education for democracy,’ in Howells and Moore (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 21., pp. 165–178; Miguel de Beistegui, ‘The new critique of political economy,’ in Howells and Moore (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 21., pp. 188–191.

98. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its discontents,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 21, James Strachey (Trans.) (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 99, n. 1.

99. Ibid., p. 104.

100. Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery Vol 2: The Katastrophē of the Sensible, Barnaby Norman (Trans.) (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), p. 124.

101. Ibid., pp. 120–121.

102. Erich Hörl, ‘Prostheses of desire: on Bernard Stiegler’s new critique of projection,’ Parrhesia, 20 (2014), p. 7.

103. Ibid., p. 6.

104. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 205–206.

105. Ibid., p. 207.

106. Ibid., pp. 222–223.

107. Ibid., pp. 181–182.

108. Stiegler, La société automatique, op. cit., Ref. 90., p. 67.

109. Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front National, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 52, 115–118.

110. Ibid., p. 338.

111. Ibid., p. 221.

112. Christina Howells, ‘“Le Défaut d’origine”: the prosthetic condition of love and desire,’ in Howells and Moore (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 21., p. 149.

113. Recently, Stiegler has drawn upon the late work of Foucault regarding regimes of truth and parrhesia to make this point. See: Bernard Stiegler, Dans le disruption: comment ne pas devenir fous? (Paris: Éditions les liens liberènt, 2016), p. 56, 159.

114. Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living, op. cit., Ref. 36., p. 43.

115. Stiegler, States of Shock, op. cit., Ref. 7., p. 213.

116. Iain MacKenzie, ‘Ideology, ideologies and ideologues,’ in David Bates, Iain MacKenzie and Sean Sayers (Eds) Marxism, Religion and Ideology: Themes from David McLellan (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 148.

117. On the relation between critique and invention in Stiegler, see: Daniel Ross, ‘Pharmacology and critique after deconstruction,’ in Howells and Moore (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 21., pp. 255–258.