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ABSTRACT
The control societies analysed by Deleuze are becoming societies of hyper-control, where supercomputing is applied to massive data-sets, with the ultimate goal of controlling behaviour. This control, however, is destroying all forms of knowledge, whether skills, capacities or theories, and undermining all social systems, including the economic foundations of consumerism itself. Although this situation can seem unstoppable, transformations of the technical system always have harmful effects on existing social systems, and thus require the invention of new knowledge and practices. Art has a crucial if not sufficient role to play in creating a new therapeutics for the twenty-first century.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Bernard Stiegler is a philosopher. He is doctor of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, head of the Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation (IRI), which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He is President and co-founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis, the founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, Ecole de Philosophie d’Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, Associate Professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne and teaches at Brown University, Providence, United States and Nanjing University, China. In 1987–88, with Catherine Counot, Stiegler commissioned an exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, entitled Mémoires du futur: bibliothèques et technologies. Stiegler’s work has philosophically explored questions of technology and knowledge approaching this through the lens of the phenomenological tradition, evolutionary biology, political economy and the critique of consumer capitalism. He is a prolific writer whose best-known works are the three part volumes of Technics and Time (1994) and Disbelief and Discredit (2004).
Notes
* Translated by Daniel Ross.
1. On the concept of organology, see: Stiegler (Citation2005).
2. See Sigmund Freud (Citation1962), The Ego and the Id.
3. Beyond what separates love and friendship.
4. See Gilles Clément (Citation2008), Toujours la vie invente.
5. See Deleuze (Citation1992).
6. Stupefaction, which is not merely stupidity but which is in general its cause, is the typical modality of our age, in the epoch of disorientation (in Technics and Time, 2).
7. I argued in What Makes Life Worth Living that Alan Greenspan’s defence system was already based on the argument that in an automated financial economy, it is no longer possible to theorize, and that from this it followed that he had no responsibility to act after the series of economic catastrophes that were caused by the dogmas that he applied during the subprime era, from making Madoff chairman of NASDAQ, the stock exchange for ‘technology stocks’, to the non-rescue of Lehman Brothers.
8. See Plato, Phaedrus.
9. On this topic, cf. Stiegler (Citation2013), Chapter 7.
10. This refers to the possibility of de-proletarianization through the socialization of factors that produce proletarianization, and is the hypothesis that governs the new critique of political economy advocated by Ars Industrialis.
11. French Wikipedia entry on hymenoptera: ‘The order hymenoptera includes herbivores, pollinators, and a wide range of entomophagous insects that play a central role in maintaining natural equilibrium. The entomophagous insects comprise the majority of parasitoids (43% of hymenoptera species that have been described) but also predators. The actual number of hymenoptera is estimated at somewhere between one and three million species, divided into a hundred families. Many species have not yet been described, or even discovered.’
12. The social systems that structure collective individuals are formed on the basis of circuits of transindividuation themselves founded on knowledges and disciplines.
13. See Harrod (Citation2012): ‘As it happens, Anderson’s great-grandfather, Jo Labadie, was one of the founding members of the American Anarchist movement, and Anderson himself was a punk in his twenties. (“We definitely drew lots of circles with As in them,” he says. “I’m not sure we could spell anarchy.”) There’s certainly a libertarian flavour to his conversation, although he doesn't like to be pigeonholed. […] Anderson’s vision is unsparing: it’s a world of perfect competition and pure capitalism. […] “I think infinite competition has made us better,” he says. “We’ve all found ways to add value in a world of infinite competition.” It’s a grandiose vision, too. “I’m motivated primarily by social change, and my preferred tool is business.”’
14. I have proposed an analysis of this calamitous becoming, that runs from the conservative revolution to the events of 2008, in Stiegler (Citation2013). Nevertheless, digital tertiary retention brings into this ultra-liberal against the state, against the public thing, new weapons that are yet to be criticized – and this work is a contribution to such a critique.
15. Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (cited in Freud Citation2001, 72–73).