The horizon of expectation common to psychic individuals who live in the same epoch presents itself to them positively as that which contains their future in potential, insofar as this is something constantly renewed, and as such always new, thereby constituting the future properly speaking inasmuch as it is always unlike the present or the past. As such, the future [avenir] is unpredictable, bearing the improbable and the unknown that Heraclitus called anelpiston – the unexpected, the unhoped-for. And it does not reduce merely to becoming [devenir], which today we understand to be the entropic fate of the universe: anelpiston is the différance of a becoming that is itself entropic,1 that is, a foregone conclusion, where everything will return to dust, and where ‘unto dust shalt thou returne’.2
This horizon of expectation common to an epoch and to a generation is that of which Florian’s generation has been deprived – ‘blank’, as the punks already said, presenting themselves as the ‘blank generation’3 – if we believe Florian. For expectation as the projection of a possible common future is always the expectation of an unexpected. Florian expects nothing: he expects nothing but the ‘end’, that is, the fulfilment of a becoming for which there is, precisely, no longer any future – a negative protention that is the absence of protention within an absence of epoch.
This deprivation of protention comes about from a deprivation of the possibilities of identification and idealization that precede it, and it participates directly in the new kind of barbarism installed by the culture industries. I attempted to analyse this in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations by showing how Canal J, a television network aimed at children, tries to eject parents and grandparents from the adolescent process of becoming adult, by short-circuiting the id that conditions identification, just as the Baby First channel, and television aimed at very young children, destroys transitional space and the processes of primary identification.4
What allows the interiorization of collective secondary retentions are primary and secondary identifications. Although collective secondary retentions are not simply ‘mine’, they are mine in the sense that they are those of my epoch, because I receive them from within my intergenerational ancestry or through the friendship of my peers: friendship is a fundamental vector of secondary identification through which the philia characteristic of an epoch is formed.
The new kind of barbarism heralded by Adorno and Horkheimer is characterized by the liquidation of these possibilities of identification and related possibilities of idealization. The liquidation of primordial narcissism – the liquidation of the I as well as of the we – is possible only on this basis. This deprivation of the possibility of identification and idealization, however, is radicalized by disruption: it is carried to its breaking point [point de rupture].
The radical rupture induced by dis-ruption makes evident that the epoch is missing [fait défaut], that it is merely the absence of epoch: disruption is what, in the geological era of the Anthropocene, and as its very impasse, structurally prevents the formation of collective protentions bearing a future charged with new potential. And it does so at a moment when the imminent possibility of an excessively and definitively fatal ὕβρις is gripping hold of and strangling any projection into the immensity of the improbable, and, in so doing, is sending us mad – mad with sadness, mad with grief, mad with rage.
The liquidation of protentions occurs in a structural way insofar as, as we have already seen,5 psychic and collective protentions are being replaced by purely computational automatic protentions – eliminating the unhoped-for, essentially destroying every expectation of the unexpected, and thereby attenuating every form of desire (if desire, which is not simply drive, is always desire for the singular, that is, for the unexpected but awaited improbable).
The liquidation of protentions equally attenuates every kind of will – that is, all power to bifurcate on the basis of knowledge derived from previous bifurcations, knowledge that becomes collective retention through the processes of transindividuation characteristic of epochs. The outcome of this liquidation is abject aboulia.
Inasmuch as it always calls for an inscription into a more broadly shared protention, protention is always bound to a structure which is that of a promise, and as such to a mutual engagement that infinitely exceeds the psychic individual. This is what Being and Time ultimately fails to take genuinely into account:6 the brilliant analyses it contains never explain how it is that Dasein always projects itself beyond its end,7 and lives its mortality only in the primordial projection of a continuation of the world after its own end: in its beyond.
Disruption – in an age of ultra-libertarian capitalism where it amounts to a completely original form of ideology, and all the more so in that it states a reality that everyone otherwise denies – substitutes a blind becoming for this future desired in common, a future that is as such wanted, in however small a way: wanted by and as this ‘in common’. This is what blinds our fellow men and women today – a blindness wrapped in the highly complex, tortuous and devious ‘storytelling’8 of transhumanism, within which the absence of epoch wallows.
Throughout the epochs of the ‘historial’ form of life – inasmuch as we can, more or less badly, more or less well, know or deduce it from the documents, relics, monuments and stories received since the Upper Palaeolithic and up until the most recent data from the historiography of the Anthropocene – positive protentional horizons have existed. These horizons were shared as collective protentions across the most varied ways of life – via ritualizations capturing and forming the attention in which retentions and protentions are woven according to the conditions of retentional and protentional systems of all kinds: from Magic to Progress, via messianisms, redemptions, salvations and emancipations to come. Although these have been received from all cultures, those of the tragic Greeks, like kleos (κλέος), deserve particular attention.
As attentional formations, these retentional and protentional systems amounted to epochs of care [soin], souci [Sorge], as solicitude for the world, always exposed to the ὕβρις that facticity contains – which is an ὕβρις that can only be contained by this facticity, which can itself be factical only by always containing ὕβρις within it, which is also expectation, that is, elpis (ἐλπίς), and as such curiosity: this is the meaning of the jar of Pandora, woman-becoming-woman through her being adorned in jewels.
With disruption, such systems can no longer be elaborated: on the contrary, the barbarism specific to the absence of epoch consists in always outstripping and overtaking such systems, so that they seem always already futile, vain, the ruined remnants of what would have been only pure vanity, where care and attention arrive always too late – in vain. (Here we should obviously linger on the vanities that accompany protentions starting from the Baroque age, especially in Flemish painting.)
It is this vanity that haunts nihilism, weaving a dangerous form of contemporary melancholy that particularly strikes the younger generation, who do not deny (but who are confronted with the denials of those belonging to other generations) the radicalization of their discredit (and their ‘disbelief’9) compared to the previous generation – taking this discredit and disbelief to a breaking point, a point of rupture that is the explosive counterpart of ‘disruption’.
Hence arises Florian’s terribly quiet desperation, which in truth affects and disaffects all of us,10 including and firstly in the mode of denial, which here becomes a modality of cowardice. It afflicts all of us so long as we are still capable – in the abject aboulia that is this disaffection and this withdrawal [désaffectation] – of wanting a future that could wear away and pierce through the iron wall of becoming and cross the threshold that leads beyond the Anthropocene, in thus becoming the Neganthropocene.11
Only the prospect of a Neganthropocene – where one finds no virgins, it being neither the paradise of the desperate nor the brothel of Dominique Strauss-Kahn – can give to life its reasons for living at a moment when, on all sides, scientific reports produced by the international scholarly community make clear the irreversible character of the destructive process that began two centuries ago and that has significantly accelerated with the spread of consumerist capitalism across the whole planet.12
This ‘planetarization’ – which is the concretization of the Anthropocene (of human activity having become a geological factor) heading towards its limit, of which the IPCC report and the 2050 deadline now accepted as a tipping point are aspects – began with the culture industries that bore within them this new kind of barbarism.
Primary and secondary retentions are psychic realities – the first belonging to the present time of perception and the second to the past time of memory. Tertiary retentions are artificial retentions, not psychic but technical, such as archives, recordings and technical reproductions in general.
Richard Durn lived in the ‘epoch’ of industrial temporal objects produced by the industry of cultural goods, which, in spreading the quotidian interiorization of analogue tertiary retentions to the whole world, effected a major transformation of the way retentions and protentions are organized in that ‘epoch’ – at the cost of the disappearance of the very notion of the epoch as sharing, as heritage, as belonging and so on.
One of the main aspects of this epokhal transformation lies in the way that analogue broadcasting makes it possible to synchronize consciousnesses. With ‘broadcast analogue tertiary retention’,13 the industrial-temporal-object-consciousness adheres to its object, and is at the same time synchronized with other consciousnesses, who adhere to it from their side14 – frequently in the millions, sometimes in the tens or hundreds of millions.
Analogue tertiary retentions possess this synchronizing power to such an extent that they end up profoundly modifying the secondary retentions constituting psychic individuals – who are nothing other than their own secondary retentions inasmuch as they singularly project secondary protentions. Viewers, who are synchronized with each other by repeatedly watching the same programmes as one another, tend thereby to find their secondary retentions homogenized. In this way, they tend to lose the singularity of the criteria by which they select the primary retentions that they see in the programmes that they interiorize,15 their protentions being transformed little by little into behavioural stereotypes concretely expressed in the form of purchasing behaviour.
The more viewers see the same thing, the less the criteria with which they are selecting what they retain in what they see varies from those who, together with them, compose the ‘audience’, that is, the mass of viewers.16 In 1997, there were one billion televisions in the world, and such industrial tertiary retentions were being interiorized by almost all inhabitants of planet earth, including by Richard Durn.
In this way, it became possible to massify behaviour and to short-circuit the collective protentions constitutive of an epoch – because this retentional interiorization leads to processes (triggered by marketing) of ‘identification’ with the behaviours, brands and labels that typify this absence of epoch, in so doing ruining processes of psychic and collective individuation.
By massively modifying the processes by which collective secondary retentions are interiorized, where the latter are themselves methodically and industrially produced according to the dictates of the behavioural models conceived by marketing, the industry of cultural goods itself became the prescriber of the circuits of transindividuation constituting the ‘second epokhal moment’ of the techno-logical epokhē produced by the technical system based on analogue tertiary retention.
This prescription of circuits of transindividuation was functionally subject to the media economy, itself subject to the consumerist economy of which it was only a secular function – and was so at the cost of a structural de-symbolization of the mediatized masses, who thereby found themselves subjected to true symbolic poverty. With the analogue ‘second epokhal moment’, therefore, collective protentions had already been largely ruined, because social systems had been short-circuited along with the relations of primary and secondary identification that condition processes of psychic and collective individuation. And so it is that primordial narcissism suffered and regressed.
And so it is that Richard Durn – deprived of the ‘feeling of existing’ by the industrial synchronization and standardization of the attentional modes of the psychic secondary retentions that were his own, as well as the collective secondary retentions that bore protentions typical of an epoch – went mad and became homicidal.
Since the publication of ‘To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us: From September 11 to April 21’, I have described17 the countless regressive processes that have been brought about by the massive interiorization of industrial analogue retentions, which has amounted to the destruction of attention by capturing it in the form of audiences subject to the criteriology of ratings. This is what has since come to be known as the attention economy, now ‘refined’ and radicalized by the data economy, which, as Frédéric Kaplan has shown, is an economy of expression made possible by digital tertiary retention.18
I have also argued in the Symbolic Misery series and the Disbelief and Discredit series that:
This last point was developed collectively and systematically when I, along with George Collins, Marc Crépon, Catherine Perret and Caroline Stiegler, founded Ars Industrialis, positing in principle, in a manifesto published in 2005,20 that digital tertiary retention is, like analogue tertiary retention, a pharmakon that must be socialized in Europe (which lay at the origin of the web) through a transformation of those institutions that emerged from literate (lettered) tertiary retention, and that this must be done within a broad European policy of the industrial technologies of the spirit, and so as to constitute a new form of public power.
In this lies the future of Europe, we said. And we made clear that unless measures are taken, we should fear the worst. After the crisis of 2008, in 2010 we published a new manifesto that scrutinized this slide towards the worst.21
On the basis of the analyses of, on the one hand, Jonathan Crary, and, on the other hand, Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy, I have endeavoured in the first volume of Automatic Society to describe the way in which this ‘worst’ currently underway produces not only, as with analogue tertiary retention, a standardization of psychic secondary retentions and a loss of the primordial narcissism of the Is and the wes that television aims to tele-vise,22 but the elimination of individual and collective protentions. These are replaced by automatic protentions derived from the automatic analysis of the retentions self-produced by internet users, and decomposed through a process of the automated ‘dividuation’23 of the digital traces produced by everyone. Hence it is that the data economy comes to replace the industry of cultural goods.
This replacement, which is a disruption of what was already disruptive, but by something much more rapid and violent, is demanded by those who, through a programme eloquently entitled ‘Les barbares attaquent’,24 intend to promote, in France, something that does indeed present itself as the radicalization of a ‘new kind of barbarism’.
In so doing, the ‘disappointment’ described by André Comte-Sponville in 1984 has long since given way to despair – and to the extreme violence that is its inevitable accompaniment when it becomes a major social and historical agent.25 It is in this desperate context that the absence of epoch seems condemned to rush headlong to its end, not as the beginning of a new epoch but as the ‘last generation’.
Whereas the industrial production of analogue tertiary retentions ‘massified’ [massifiait] psychic secondary retentions by replacing them with standardized collective secondary retentions, thereby eliminating the dia-chronic play that primary retentions make possible (a play that amounts to primary selections and as such to an interpretation that is each time singular26), psychic individuals themselves are the producers of digital tertiary retentions.
Psychic individuals therefore find themselves in the position of producing and expressing what amounts to the preindividual funds shared on the web and platforms. Reticulated digital tertiary retention, then, gives the appearance of being essentially participatory, collaborative and contributory. This is why, with Ars Industrialis, we posit that reticulated digital tertiary retention is a techno-logical epokhē that amounts to a new organological and pharmacological state of fact on the basis of which it is crucial to form a new macroeconomic and epokhal framework constituting a general economy of contribution.
Europe has failed – politically, economically, scientifically, artistically and socially – to develop an alternative model to the disruption promoted by the Californian model. It thereby utterly submits to this disruptive doctrine, and finds itself overrun by the pharmacological toxicity of digital tertiary retention.
Digital retention may indeed bring with it new and unprecedented protentional opportunities because it de-massifies the production of traces. Nevertheless, the disruption systematically explored and exploited by the new reticulation industry has in fact created a new, subtler stage of massification – that is, of the absence of epoch, giving rise to a new kind of barbarism, and doing so by creating a point of rupture, a breaking point.
What is massified today is no longer the criteriology by which primary retentions are selected, which was achieved by standardizing secondary retentions: it is the formation of circuits between secondary retentions via intensive computing, capable of treating gigabytes of data simultaneously, so as to extract statistical and entropic patterns that short-circuit all genuine circuits of transindividuation – where the latter would always be negentropic, that is, singular, and as such incalculable: intractable.27
It was in 2005 that Florian expressed the statement that in 2006 became the epigraph of L’Effondrement du temps.28 At that stage of the absenting of the epoch, social networks did not yet exist. Since then, we have witnessed the unfolding of countless disasters, including the 2008 crisis, and everything that has led to what is now described as a state of barbarism whose origin, so we are led to believe, is Islam – a description that amounts to a typical causal inversion, as is always typical of any ideology.29
Islam does not lie at the origin of the state of barbarism within which we are ever more obviously living. Rather, it is the spread of a ‘new kind of barbarism’ that has occurred with the rationalization of the Aufklärung – inverting its sense throughout the entire world, in so doing discrediting all Western culture, and at the same time the project of modernity, as well as the affirmation of secular principles, the right to education, economic rights and the protection of fundamental political freedoms – it is all this that has generated reactions that are themselves, indeed, ever more barbaric, especially in the Near East and the Middle East, where for decades the West has perpetuated a policy that is completely irresponsible.
This new kind of barbarism as generalized consumerism and venality no longer takes any care of the world in which consumers and speculators must nevertheless live. It is this blind stupidity leading to the madness of those it strips of the feeling of existing – that is, of being themselves worthy of respect, and of understanding themselves as such – it is this that has provoked the explosion of barbarism amongst those who do not respect life, including those who present themselves as ‘Islamists’ and who now channel the movement that has proclaimed a caliphate in the Sham region, to which Yassin Salhi, the ‘psychiatric case’ who beheaded his employer in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier in June 2015, claimed allegiance.
Before beginning the next chapter, we should try to think, if it is possible to do so (and I posit in principle that it is possible30), what is happening everywhere as so many abominable confirmations of the words spoken by Florian. For this, we must pursue a deeper understanding of what occurs in a general way with the destruction of psychic and collective retentions and protentions – and, along with this destruction, the destruction of all diachronies, all singularities, all desires inasmuch as they constitute the negentropic capabilities of non-inhuman being qua Neganthropos. In losing these negentropic capabilities, non-inhuman being loses reason insofar as reason is, precisely, always and uniquely that which must not be lost in order to live, noetically, the consistence of existence.
We experience the meaning of Schrödinger’s negentropy31 when in a sunbeam we suddenly see, for the first time since the previous year, the explosion of the colours of spring – the fertility of everything that is renewed again in the light and heat that we had forgotten. As the release from the colourlessness of winter, spring is the ordinary experience of resurrection.
When we travel, we re-energize ourselves through the diversity of ways of life and the singularity of those cultures – that is, epochs – that constitute what we call the world by cultivating it. In this way, travel can provide a clear and immediate perception of that in which negentropy consists, which charms us, becoming what it is now a matter of thinking (that is, of thinking care-fully, panser32) with the name ‘neganthropy’, and through a neganthropology both philosophical33 and positive.34
When we feel uneasy in front of a wasteland, a room in disarray, a depressed economic zone, what grips hold of us is anthropy. But it is a neganthropic promise that we feel when, crossing the threshold to enter a home, we encounter traces of everydayness unlike any other – which Italo Calvino described as the ‘things’ of his Reader in If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller.35
A library (including that of the Reader) is a collection of neganthropic potentialities awaiting their reading so as to be actualized, noetically singularizing life as the neganthropy constituted by the anamnesis of pre-ceding neganthropies.
When we pay attention to them, and when we experience them, negentropy in general and the neganthropy that bifurcates from it organologically provide us with access to the extra-ordinary, which means not only that we, as Gilles Clément said, always invent life36 – life that is within what we call ‘nature’ just as it is within what we call ‘culture’, which stems from what Georges Canguilhem described as a technical form of life – but also that we discover a plane of consistences through which the future is projected by noetically differing from and deferring [différant noétiquement] becoming, whether entropic or negentropic (that is, vital, qua natural selection).
Neganthropological différance, in other words, cannot be reduced to the plane of subsistence that governs life in ‘nature’. In technical life – which is Dasein’s existence – another kind of bifurcation occurs that is not just vital but, as Simondon said, psychosocial, and such that the différance in which the vital process of differentiation consists becomes not just anthropic but neganthropic.
In this way, ‘culture’ is something more than negentropy (in Schrödinger’s sense): through exosomatization and the organogenesis in which it fundamentally consists, this neganthropy bears within it the ὕβρις of facticity, that is, a colossal acceleration of both the negentropic and entropic possibilities of so-called nature, of which the degraded anthropized milieus that abound in the Anthropocene are as traces left on the landscape.
In their attempts to integrate Schrödinger’s ideas, Shannon and Wiener, biologists, and complex systems theorists such as Henri Atlan and Edgar Morin, all end up running into paradoxes. Combined with problems posed by Prigogine’s dissipative structures, these paradoxes have led to confusion concerning what opportunities there are for thinking the future by incorporating the notions of entropy and negentropy, a confusion that is broadly reflected in the theoretical models of bioeconomics.
Because it is primordially exosomatic, organological and pharmacological, Neganthropos bears within it the possibility of the inhuman (which Heraclitus called injustice, Ἀδικία) as the condition of its being non-inhuman – the condition, in this sense, of its surpassing. To conceive surpassing as transhumanist ‘enhancement’ or ‘augmentation’ has nothing to do with neganthropology. Like both negentropy and neganthropy, the extra-ordinary belongs to the consistence towards which noetic existences project themselves and through which they raise themselves above their subsistence.
For many centuries (at least three hundred, at least since the Upper Palaeolithic, and until almost the beginning of the twentieth century), the way to access this plane of consistence offering hospitality to the extra-ordinary, which occurs also in artistic experience (and which is its condition), was via experiences that were either magical, mystagogical, spiritual or religious. Art was able to become detached from these experiences only with the advent of modernity. But once that occurred, it was not long before art was appropriated as ‘aesthetic experience’ by the industry of cultural goods, as a function of the capture of attention, and by the speculative market of venal collectors and hyper-philistines:37 hence begins what in the eyes of Adorno and Horkheimer amounted to a ‘new kind of barbarism’ (of which ‘postmodernity’ is one name).
A psychic individual encounters the necessity of the extra-ordinary in and through its very default (in its radical absence, or what theologians call dereliction, which struck Christ himself on the cross), which creates the negative experience of the extra-ordinary, or what we also call despair. It is inevitable and therefore necessary (if not very reassuring) that this psychic individual, struck thus by the feeling of abandonment, would be tempted to turn firstly to what humanity has for centuries and millennia proclaimed to be the condition of a conversion of the gaze.
In this search for a plane of consistence by overturning a way of life that suddenly seems absolutely vain and futile,38 the candidate for conversion affirms the necessity of the extra-ordinary by seeking to gain access to it – the extra-ordinary inasmuch as it escapes the ordinary, such as the supernatural, the religious and all forms of spirituality that amount to so many eras in the succession of epochs throughout which collective protentions are formed as the condition of psychic protentions.
After the 7 July 2005 attacks by four ‘suicide bombers’ in London that left fifty-six dead and 700 wounded, I tried in Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals to show that adolescent youth has a highly specific relationship to the super-ego, of which the tragedy of Antigone is the first formulation, and as a kind of ideal type – where the psychic individual in the course of becoming adult, who is thus said to be adolescent, turns upon his or her ancestors in order to reproach them for their infidelity with respect to the prescriptions that they claim to be transmitting to the next generation.39
In such periods, adolescence, which is often a time in which one experiences despair, can also be one of acting out [passer à l’acte] in myriad ways – and in particular by practising what I have called negative sublimation. In the epoch of the absence of epoch that is Florian’s – it was in 2005 that he declared what Foucault might have called his parrhēsia (παρρησία)40 – such possibilities are literally exasperated, and they are bound to proliferate, unless there is a genuine address to the new generations, and through them to us, responding to the parrhēsia of Florian with a discourse itself elaborated on the basis of this parrhēsia as such, that is, recognizing it as such.
Social groups struck by collective disindividuation are, and will increasingly be, prone to losing every reason for living, hence to losing the very notion of reason qua convergence of protentions – and to losing the notion of the value of life itself, especially when this noetic life, which is thoroughly organological and pharmacological, reveals itself to be such.
This loss of the reason for living, of the ‘meaning of life’, and therefore of its value, this form of madness, because it is the loss of the reason to live, is expressed above all by suicide. Hence we should not be surprised if the number of deaths by suicide in France soon exceeds the number of car accident fatalities, striking especially young people (10,000 ‘successful’ suicides per year, and 200,000 ‘attempts’, survivors of despair).
These social groups and forms of solidarity are woven, in highly variable ways, through the affective relations in which they consist. Processes that transmit the knowledge accumulated by the generations consolidate the reasons individuals have for living by inscribing these reasons within the horizon of the collective protentions that they engender and that they maintain by cultivating them – it is precisely this that we call ‘culture’. Social ‘cults’ maintain neganthropy by cultivating its extra-ordinary variety.
With ‘social engineering’, or ‘social networking’, social groups are, as never before, struck by collective disindividuation – the social is being dis-integrated at its very root, that is, starting from psychic secondary retentions, which themselves lie at the origin of collective secondary retentions. They do so by depriving them in advance of any opportunity to form psychic and singular protentions, which is also to say of any projective capacity within identification processes that would in turn open onto idealization processes.
Just as the I is founded on a primordial narcissism that must be maintained and protected, and firstly against the pathological forms of ‘secondary narcissism’, so too there is a narcissism of the we that is formed through processes of collective individuation, stemming from collective protentions without which no psychic protentions could be cultivated. Weakening processes of collective individuation to the point of exhaustion can only have tragic consequences.
The fear of such consequences is what, in 2003, I expressed at the end of ‘To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us: From September 11 to April 21’.
When the narcissism of the we is brutally harmed, one can expect only the worst. Like the narcissism of the I, it is always possible for the primordial narcissism of the we to become pathological, and to generate collective ‘neurotic’ or ‘psychotic’ forms of regression or disintegration – of which the ressentiment of the average man is often a harbinger. Yet this narcissism of the we remains indispensable. Dangerously indispensable, given that, in its collective forms (these too being extraordinarily varied), narcissism is eminently pharmacological.
In The Ego and the Id, Freud showed that to produce a process of sublimation – itself founded on a process of identification and capable of spreading to all objects of the world the process of idealization that first and foremost characterizes the constitution of the sexuated love object (this idealization being already a form of desexualization of its object) – it is necessary for the ego to become its own object of love, and for this to establish what I call primordial narcissism:
[The question arises] whether all sublimation does not take place through the mediation of the ego, which begins by changing sexual object-libido into narcissistic libido and then, perhaps, goes on to give it another aim.41
This ‘other aim’ is one that sublimates its objects – and there are such sublimation and idealization processes operating between cultures, that is, between social narcissisms, of which the Western anthropology that arose in the nineteenth century is one case.
Even if it is a factor producing the detestable ‘narcissism of minor differences’42 that feeds parochialism and chauvinism, nevertheless only the narcissism of the we is capable of providing the feeling of the grandeur of a culture by projecting itself into other cultures, conferring their capacity for mutual admiration that is also the case for a healthy psychic narcissism constituted in the service of recognition.
Mutual admiration, which is indispensable to civilization, is always founded on this ability to recognize other cultures – which forms the conditions of ‘peaceful co-existence’ much more profoundly than does the balance of power.
Because it always threatens to turn pathologically into its opposite, the primordial narcissism of the we – which never stops transforming – can and even must be disturbing, if not frightening. Yet if we take Simondon seriously when he states that the psychic individual (the I) can individuate itself effectively only by participating in collective individuation (the we), then it is indeed necessary for there to be collective individuation, which can constitute itself only by distinguishing itself from other collective individuations, that is, through this collective identification that a we forms. Such collective individuations, however, never achieve completion: they are always metastable, and therefore amount not to an identity but above all to this alterity to itself that constitutes its future as that which remains to come, and that is promised to it in the collective protentions it cultivates.
It becomes a question, therefore, of understanding why it is that social networks have not given rise to other forms of the we, or other epochs of the we. It is precisely this possibility that we at Ars Industrialis posit as a first principle, when we say that an industrial politics of technologies of the spirit must constitute a new form of public power, which we further relate to the question of what Marcel Mauss called the ‘internation’.43
But to reason in this way is precisely not to submit to the disruption promoted by Californian ‘digital business’. For there is such a submission, not yet to come, as the poisonous fantasies distilled by a culture and a business of fear would have it, but rather right now, as resignation in the face of the diktat of ‘radical innovation’ in the service of the ‘ecosystem’ centred on Californian ‘digital business’.
Clearly, a collective individuation constitutes itself (and can only do so) by exceeding the directly closest collective individuation of the psychic individual who is individuating: I can individuate myself psychically only by participating in a collective individuation that is dreamed beyond the immediate collectivity closest to me – that into which I was born, my ‘family’, my ‘fraternity’, my ‘community’, my ‘country’ (in the sense where the country [pays] is, for the peasant [paysan], the place he knows and where he lives to the extent he is capable of moving), and so on.
The arrangement of tribal relationships in Baruya society, studied by Maurice Godelier, is an example of the way such horizons of psychosocial individuation are embedded.44
It is, however, by starting from this original proximity of my maternal (or paternal) facticity, of which language is the most remarkable mark, it is starting from this original proximity of my local culture, giving rise to the idiom that I embody not only by speaking but in everything, by ek-sisting, and that I try to be as an improbable singularity, it is only by starting from this proximity that I can begin to encounter this strange and therefore ‘foreign’ alterity, where I find the other in myself – what I have in the past referred to as myself-an-other [moi-l’autre] (beyond myself [moi-même]).45
To start this way is to traverse the idiom that I embody, and to be traversed by it, which accommodates and enables the encounter with other, just as improbably singular idioms, provided that care has been taken in neganthropology – this care, that is, this culture, never being merely a conservation but always an individuation, in particular under the effect of the epokhal redoubling, irrespective of the pace of its being effected.46
It is from this tension between what is closest to me and what is contained there already as the most distant (in the experience of what Walter Benjamin called the ‘aura’), it is through that which is most idios (ἴδιος) in my idiom, that is, most neganthropic, and that I encounter in the idiomaticity of other idioms or other idiosyncrasies, responding in their idiolect47 to what is already contained in my idiom, and as the closest (and which is its default48), it is only thus that psychic individuation is possible.
Google, inscribing all its projects into the context of transhumanism, which is ὕβρις par excellence, takes the statistical and probabilistic calculation of averages as its standard, and thereby in fact eliminates idiomatic linguistic difference, that is, diachronic and idiosyncratic variability. The digital reticulation of all noetic life hence becomes the new programme of artificial intelligence whose goal is to eliminate all (de)faults – starting with the (de)faults of language, that is, of speakers.
This project is mad precisely in that it claims to eliminate the (de)fault that is necessary for desire to occur – not only as sexual differentiation and libidinal attachment to the sexual object, but as detachment of the libido from this sexual object, which instead becomes an object of admiration. One who admires becomes capable of spreading his or her admiration to the entire world, which is ultimately the sole protection against despair – against that loss of that reason for hope in which reason always consists.
It is through its intimate, native inscription in these collective individuation processes that are idioms that the psychic individual can participate in collective individuations of every kind, always renewing and individuating themselves – exceeding, altering and othering themselves, even if they need to cultivate the feeling of existing in the other by identifying with that same which bears this primordial narcissism that also opens onto the myself-other.
Were there no primordial narcissism of the we, there would be no process of identification. Primary identification, for example, presupposes the ego ideal of the parent, which itself presupposes the super-ego – which itself orders and metastabilizes processes of transindividuation. It is identification, thereby necessitating the we – in the varied affective relations within which it is woven through so many relays – that makes individuation possible: the primordial narcissism of the we enables individuation to occur because it conceals within it, in the most ambiguous way possible, the principle of admiration.
When I admire another’s culture – the beauty of a city, of a landscape, of a country where I go to live, or that I visit, resonant with the specific accents of the idiom that has taken shape through an organogenesis and an exosomatization whose most immediately visible marker is its architecture – something else also takes place. There is an admiration that, within myself, and as myself-other, the idiom within which I am myself transitionally individuated has made necessary, and has done so as the encounter with the desire of the other (of my mother, of my father, of my parent – the one who takes care of me, who in so doing adopts me).
Any adult, mature admiration involves the resurfacing of this child’s play [enfance de l’art] that was the first access to the consistent,49 to this other plane that arises from what Winnicott called transitional space, from whence return, anamnesically and constantly, phantoms and spirits, or what Freud also called phantasms, dressed in inexhaustibly new attire, like Proteus, and as the genius of distance.
No desire for other lands and no possibility of being there (which is not always desire, and is sometimes surprising) would be possible were it not thus. This is what one can feel by reading Jean-Christophe Bailly’s Le Dépaysement. Voyages en France:
Whatever it may be, including when it is only furtive, the link an artist or a writer has to a land or a city maintains itself in a mysterious way: even though, and this is particularly clear for writers, the link may often be the result of chance, something incurred more than it was chosen, nevertheless something remains, flowing through the air.50
In Ion, Plato has Socrates say that the rhapsodist is like a current who magnetizes the audience like the stone of Heraclea51 – also called a magnetic stone. This magnetism is that of transitional spaces that are first and foremost idioms, whose echoes reverberate step by step – each idiom being the echo chamber of those closest, and, step by step, of the most distant, which is the originary default of origin.52
A culture in fact cultivates its future only provided that it is inhabited by reflections that do not forget the primordial idiomatic spirit formed in mutual admiration – mirrors reflecting each other through identifications that cross borders. Hence Jean Renoir’s La Grande illusion, where one feels borders and identifications everywhere, culminating in those between Boëldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim).53
Through the friends one makes, it is possible to exit from the primordial idiom so as to extend transitional possibilities beyond childhood, raised in and by the proximity of one’s relatives: going above the primordial narcissisms of the I and the we into the beyond that is every consistence – which does not exist, but which, precisely as such, consists.54