Cybernetics and the Post-natural According to Lyotard and Stiegler
One approach to a ‘philosophy after nature’ is that which follows the breakdown of the oppositional distinction between nature and a variety of other terms – the human, the cultural, the technical, the artificial – which serve to give the concept ‘nature’ a meaningful consistency. We can see such a breakdown in the theories of cybernetics and systems which developed in the twentieth century, in the ‘general physics’ discussed by Jean-François Lyotard, and in Bernard Stiegler’s ‘general organology’. Despite their differences, each of these approaches shows how new ways of thinking become possible as old distinctions are broken down and connections between areas previously separated are developed. More specifically, each of these approaches proposes to think these possibilities in terms of the way energy moves in systems (thus as an economy). With these displacements, a ‘philosophy after nature’ can no longer appeal to familiar metaphysical hierarchies in order to understand the world and develop principles for acting in it. How, then, are we to think ourselves and the world in terms of energy and systems?
I wish to highlight some of the issues at stake in such considerations by critically contrasting the thought of the two above-mentioned French philosophers. Both Lyotard and Stiegler are concerned with how technology in particular impels us to think beyond the natural/artificial opposition and opens up the possibility of thinking the physiological, the technical and the psychosocial organizations as systems. Moreover, and crucially, both are concerned with how we can think such systems critically in terms of how energy, understood as libidinal (the energy of desire), circulates in such systems. While both philosophers present descriptively comparable analyses, they appear to be prescriptively at odds regarding how we should evaluate the flows of desire in the contemporary information networks. The critical contrast I wish to stage here thus allows a clarification of what is at stake in thinking about a broad range of issues concerning contemporary systems, focused on how we understand desire and – as we will see – with implications for ‘what makes life worth living’. Before moving to this critical comparison, let us examine what has brought about the collapse of the separation between the natural, the technological and the social, and thus what has led to the contemporary situation they both engage.1
The conception of nature as distinct from the artificial and the cultural was progressively displaced in the twentieth century by the new sciences of cybernetics and systems theory. Founded by Norbert Wiener, cybernetics was a paradigm-shifting way of thinking functions of communication and control analogously in both organic and non-organic systems (animal and machine). This model, the result of truly interdisciplinary collaborations, flourished in a wide variety of fields in the mid-twentieth century. While cybernetics, as a research model understood in terms of a particular methodology, did not meet expectations and was superseded by artificial intelligence and cognitive science, as Mohammed-Ali Rahebi argues, this did not prevent it from having a broad ‘ideological’ impact which remains influential.2 Adam Curtis’s 2011 documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace traces the development of just such a cybernetic ideology, giving a clear picture of the origins of dominant and persistent ideas about ecology and economy which have a grounding in cybernetics and systems theory and are united by what he calls ‘the machine paradigm’.
This paradigm views all systems, including animals and machines, ecology, economy and human social systems in general, as self-regulating, naturally inclined towards homeostasis or equilibrium. While the idea of the world as a harmonious, self-regulating system is a very ancient one,3 Curtis argues that what is new in the twentieth century is the claim to establish this scientifically. The basis of this claim is the identification of the mechanism of self-regulation: feedback. What is new in this situation, then, is that our policies in areas like ecological, economic and social management – our ideas about what ought to be the case – come to be based on claims about what is believed to have been scientifically ‘proven’ to be the case. Curtis claims that scientifically, such assumptions have proven false, yet the ideologies they have spawned continue to persist, contributing to a dehumanized, mechanical world in which human individuality is crushed.
In brief, here is the story Curtis tells in episode two, ‘The Abuse of Vegetative Concepts’. The biologist Arthur George Tansley, intrigued by one of his dreams, began reading Freud and was captivated by Freud’s model of the mind as a system regulated by laws similar to the principles of thermodynamics, in which the system maintains its equilibrium by discharging build-ups of energy. Tansley postulated that the ecological system of the natural world should be understood according to this principle, which he called the ‘Great Universal Law of Equilibrium’.4 Jay Wright Forrester, a computer scientist who became a professor of management at MIT, developed a theory called ‘Systems Dynamics’, which generalized the concept of system such that the same basic principles could be applied to both technical systems and complex social systems. Forrester claimed that the mechanism responsible for equilibrium is feedback: an output of the system which is then fed in as a new input, such that the system can regulate itself on the basis of information about itself.5
This idea of feedback was taken up and developed in cybernetics by Norbert Weiner and others.6 The brothers Howard and Eugene Odum then applied cybernetic principles to ecology, in some classic statements of nature as a self-regulating system, as expressed in the well-known term ‘the balance of nature’.7 The idea that cybernetic principles could be applied to human social systems was enthusiastically embraced by anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.8
However, Curtis points out the failure of this cybernetic model of the system which regulates itself in order to reach equilibrium. First, the science in the realm of ecology turns out to be wrong. The ‘system-equilibrium’ model, which reigned unquestioned throughout much of the twentieth century, was effectively falsified by the most ambitious attempt to prove it through the computer modelling of a grassland environment in the 1970s. The data which emerged from this and other studies pointed to the contrary, namely that ecological systems are unstable; they tend towards instabilities and catastrophes, after which the system ‘resets’ itself and changes, rather than returning to its previous state. Thus nature does not preserve itself in equilibrium; it is prone to disasters and the eradication of species.9 Moreover, as alluded to in the title of episode three, Curtis points to the potential of these ideas to be ideologically abused. Tansley’s ideas of nature as system were applied to social systems by Jan Smuts, a governor in South Africa, who argued that in order for the social system to function correctly, natural roles must be respected and whites (naturally) must have the role of superiors. Tansley accused him of ‘the abuse of vegetational concepts’.10
What we learn from following Curtis’s exploration of the emergence of ‘the machine paradigm’ in the twentieth century is that this paradigm placed at its centre the idea of a self-regulating system in a constant state of equilibrium. This paradigm erased differences between natural, technological and social systems, even as it allowed a central understanding of how systems should operate to become dominant. While on the one hand this paradigm seemed to break down traditional metaphysical distinctions, with their hierarchical privileges, in another sense it kept them very much alive: the old idea of a balanced, harmonious nature came to be understood on a technoscientific model, and the combined ideological force of a supposed ‘natural order’ and ‘scientific verification’ was brought to bear on the organization of social systems. In differing ways, Lyotard and Stiegler both accept that after the developments of twentieth-century thought, we must develop a philosophy after nature – that is, without appeal to the supposedly natural order of things – and are critically aware of how the machine paradigm is itself open to such ideological abuses. Both offer alternative evaluative models for thinking systems in terms of the economies of desire operative in them, but with strikingly different conclusions. Let us turn now to the detail of their critical encounters.
Lyotard’s thought reacts to a cybernetic ideology– which he often refers to simply as ‘the system’ or ‘development’ – explicitly and extensively in his later work around the idea of the inhuman11 but also implicitly in his earlier work on libidinal economy.12 His strategy amounts to a critical reconsideration of the values which underlie the drives operative in libidinal economy and, by analogical extension, in cybernetics and the machine paradigm generally. (We have already seen how Freud’s work on psychic economy influenced Tansley’s ecological model which fed into this paradigm.) Lyotard effectively ‘revalues’ the drives by reading Freud through Nietzsche, giving value to the death drive (read as the Dionysian and as a repetition of affects akin to the eternal return) as the motive force for artistic creativity, political transformation and everything which he terms ‘events’. Lyotard emphasizes the deregulating function of the death drive, which would do justice to the existence of instabilities and ‘events’ in systems.
Lyotard’s philosophy of libidinal economy, developed in the early 1970s, is an extension of the concept Freud uses to describe the movements and transformations of libidinal energy (or desire) in the psyche. For Lyotard, it is a description of social reality which allows him to map its stabilities and instabilities from the perspective of relatively kinetic or quiescent energies.13 Freud indicates two types of desire: wish-desire and libido-desire. Wish-desire is teleological and negative; it aims to possess something that is felt lacking. Libido-desire is a positive force of transformable energy. For Lyotard, libido-desire is itself divided according to two regimes: Eros and the death drive. Eros contributes to the stable functioning and regulation of a system and operates according to Freud’s principle of constancy (energy maintained at a low, stable level). The death drive deregulates the system and works against its unity and stable functioning: It produces intensities at very high or very low levels of energy, which Lyotard characterizes as ‘events’.14
In general, Lyotard applies Nietzschean-inspired values in his libidinal economy by criticizing the quiescence of libidinal energy maintained at low levels in bound wholes and stable systems governed by Eros as a kind of nihilistic depression and privileging the transformative potential of libidinal intensities. The aim of the libidinal economist is to encourage a life-affirmative, creative flow of energy within systems, encouraging them to change and to produce new intensities. He sees the intensities produced by the desublimation of libido as a constructive power which is the source of art, political motivation and the positive, affirmative force which makes life worth living.
As is well known, Lyotard had distanced himself from his libidinal economics by the time he began to pay serious attention to technoscientific development in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the critical categories he developed with the Freudian drives continued to find expression through explicit appeal to the thermodynamic principles which had to some extent inspired Freud, negentropy (Eros) and entropy (the death drive). In this period, Lyotard developed a critical model of ‘the system’ of ‘development’, which he saw as functioning, after the end of metanarratives and the collapse of belief in the perfection of the human subject of history, according to the sole value of negentropy (the establishment and development of order). He suggests that the current complex of technoscientific and capitalist development can be modelled according to a metaphysics of energy, which he explicitly associates with cybernetics and systems theory (and thus links directly with the machine paradigm discussed above).
Lyotard outlines this in the short essay ‘Oikos’.15 He argues that the man/nature opposition belongs to the speculative tradition (Marx/Hegel) and the inside/outside opposition belongs to the tradition of the metaphysics of the subject. But there is another tradition where these distinctions are not relevant: the metaphysics of energy. What counts in this tradition is the opposition between matter and form. Leibniz is an extreme expression of this philosophical tradition, while cybernetics is its more recent form. This tradition suppresses the outside/inside border in favour of different degrees of complexity. Lyotard describes this as a
general physics which stretches from astrophysics to particle physics (electronics, information technology, and cybernetics are only aspects of this general physics) and of course also in economic terms. In this description, the alive or the human appear as particular cases, very interesting cases of complex material systems. This means that, from this perspective, conflict (and ultimately war) does not arise between human and nature; rather, the struggle is between more developed systems and something else that is necessarily less developed and that the physicists know as entropy, the second principle of thermodynamics.16
Crucially for our interests here, then, Lyotard suggests that the shift to a view of reality as a material system of energetic transformations characterized by greater or lesser degrees of complexity results in a view of history no longer as a conflict between man and nature (‘civilization’) but between negentropy (the principle of increasing complexity, or order) and entropy (the principle of decreasing complexity, or increasing disorder).
In essays collected in The Inhuman, Lyotard describes the variations in complexity which affect systems in more detail using Leibnizian and Bergsonian concepts. In Leibniz’s ‘monadology’, reality is described as consisting of monads (simple substances) of varying complexity, ranging from a bare material point which stores virtually no information to God as the ideal monad which contains all the information of the cosmos within itself. Lyotard suggests that the contemporary system of technological development aims towards the great monad (God) as its ideal. Lyotard explains complexity itself as consisting in the capacity of a monad or system to process new input by passing it through retained memories, which operate on and transform it before translating it into output (a process not unlike the feedback loop in cybernetics and systems theory).17 A similar picture is given in Bergson’s redefinition of the relation between matter and mind as one of increasing complexity, where mind emerges from the capacity of matter to memorize past states and compare new states to them in increasingly circuitous paths. The more complex the system, the longer the circuit.18
According to Lyotard, the contemporary system of development is ‘the realization of metaphysics as a general physics under the name of cybernetics’.19 While Lyotard accepts that the scientific developments charted in the previous section above are legitimate, and that we must cease to think in terms of oppositions such as the human/nature and so on, he also critiques the implicit values in the ideological forms of cybernetics, specifically around the supposed equilibrium state of a system which minimizes entropy. His fear is that ‘[f]rom the point of view of development … the Third World is nothing but a source of entropy for the autopoesis [sic] of the great monad’20 – and would be better eliminated so as not to be an inefficient energy drain on the system. Lyotard suggests that his own philosophical work could be characterized as a defence of entropy, understood as that which resists the negentropic programming of the system of development – art, thought, the unconscious, the singularity of the event and so on. Stiegler gets this precisely wrong when he writes that ‘calculation is that which eliminates all negentropy, all singularity, all opacity, as Jean-François Lyotard saw very well’.21 Knowingly or unknowingly, here he is (mis)translating Lyotard’s thought into the terms of his own, to which we now turn.
Bernard Stiegler’s works have contributed to a ‘philosophy after nature’ since the publication of his seminal thesis, in Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus,22 that the human is fundamentally constituted by the relation to technics. Stiegler posits an ‘originary technicity’ in which the human’s relation to technics is effectively that of a supplement understood in the Derridean sense: technics are prosthetics insofar as they are something exterior to humans, added on, but this exteriorization is also internalized in a process through which humans are constituted by something which nevertheless remains other to them.
Stiegler’s work has drawn heavily on, though also modified, Gilbert Simondon’s, and he has developed a ‘general organology’ which deploys the Simondonian notion of individuation (the process through which things take on consistency and are organized in relation to their milieu) as it takes place at three principal levels: the physiological, the technical and the social.23 This general organology cuts through old oppositions such as the artificial and the natural, the individual and society, and allows a theorization of the links between minds, bodies, social organizations and technologies. It also allows a thinking of values in terms of more or less successful processes of individuation. Despite Stiegler’s thesis of originary technicity – and in a precise way because of it – he is highly critical of the effects of contemporary technologies on the processes of psychic and collective individuation as they function in consumer capitalism. In various ways, he has argued that the contemporary developed world is a deeply nihilistic epoch affected by a generalized loss of individuation.
Since the first volume of his Disbelief and Discredit series,24 Stiegler has trained his critical focus on the libidinal economy operative in general organological systems. Desire, he explains, inscribes itself in ‘grammatizations’.25 Grammatization is a type of formalization which consists in the division of continuous processes into discrete units (‘grammes’), ‘the finite number of components forming a system’.26 For Stiegler, the generalization of information technologies constitutes a decisive revolution in the history of grammatization, after the alphabet and the printing press. Grammatization affects the way that symbolic systems, and therefore cultural meanings, operate and circulate, and in this way it affects desire. A libidinal economy operates in symbolic systems, conditioned by the grammatizations of information and communication technologies. Libidinal economy is thus a way for Stiegler to think the problems of existence in the contemporary information society in terms of how we value things – or, significantly, fail to do so – according to our libidinal attachments and investments. Stiegler has increasingly focused on the nature of technics as a pharmakon, both poison and cure, and for him these are the two tendencies of libidinal economy, Eros and the death drive. As he phrases it, these tendencies may be understood as two circuits of desire operating in all organized systems, both caused by the pharmakon of technics: ‘on the one hand it produces long circuits through which it becomes care, entering into the service of the libido orientated through sublimation, that is, the binding of the drives. Long circuits connect or bind the drives that are disconnected or unbound by short-circuits’.27
Drawing heavily on the work of Donald Winnicott,28 Stiegler associates the work of Eros in the construction of ‘bound wholes’ or consistent objects with the capacities of humans to become psychically individuated in a healthy sense by shifting attachments from the mother to reality through transitional objects at an early age, a process responsible for instilling the feeling that life is worth living. Stiegler associates the establishment of ‘long circuits’ of desire with motivation and the capacity to set long-term goals and the ‘short-circuiting’ of desire with the erosion of motivation and attention span produced by consumer culture with its insistence on immediate short-term satisfaction, facilitated by the speed of information and communication technologies. According to him, the grammatization effected by information technologies allows unprecedented control over symbolic meanings, which have been co-opted by marketing. This results in the short-circuiting of desire by channelling it into immediate, fleeting consumer satisfactions, undermining processes of healthy individuation.
Stiegler’s response to the contemporary nihilism of the libidinal economy involves an invocation of what he calls a ‘negentropology’.29 As this term suggests, Stiegler frequently characterizes the problem of nihilism – the failure of processes of individuation – as entropic and successful individuations as negentropic. Technics are pharmacological for him because they both contribute to the entropic effects of consumer society and also have the potential for contributing to new modes of negentropic individuation. Stiegler’s call to arms is inventive or constructive, in opposition to what he sees as the reactive and nihilistic quality of the old form of politics as ‘resistance’.30 He calls for a new politics which will take care of libidinal economy in the structures of general organology by promoting the processes of individuation he sees as necessary to produce the feeling that life is worth living.
Both Lyotard and Stiegler engage with the ‘post-natural’ conception of the world as a generalized system, through which movements of energy flow, and both develop critical approaches by focusing on the transformations of the energy of desire in this system. But we can immediately see an apparent conflict between their positions with respect to the values accorded to the major principles of the movements of desire and energy in the system in general: Eros/negentropy and Thanatos/entropy. In contrast to Stiegler’s alarm at the increase of entropic processes and defence of negentropic individuations, which we have just seen, Lyotard’s critique is trained on the negentropic tendencies of the system, and he defends the value of entropic processes. For him, the more complex, the more negentropic the system, and the longer the circuit through which ‘input’ is processed (in Stiegler’s terms, the more one is ‘individuated’), the less likely something is to strike us with the singular force of an event or to allow a libidinal intensity which will deregulate the system and open it up to dynamic change. What Stiegler calls the ‘short-circuits’ of desire, and castigates as consumerist decadence, seem close to what Lyotard privileges in his version of libidinal economy as ‘sterile consumptions’, singular intensities consisting of jouissance for its own sake, rather than contributing in utilitarian fashion to a productive libidinal or capitalist economy.31
Despite the apparently stark contrast between their views, however, both Lyotard and Stiegler in fact acknowledge the necessity of both negentropy and entropy, Eros and the death drive, in the healthy functioning of systems. This is evident in what is arguably the central principle of Lyotard’s libidinal economy, dissimulation: the necessary mutual co-implication of Eros and the death drive.32 While Lyotard emphasizes intensive singularities and transformative effects on structures, he insists that there are no libidinal energies free from structuration, no death drive except in operation as the deregulation of structures governed by Eros. Moreover, the outcomes of such deregulating forces are always the reinscriptions of energies into new bound wholes, new structures.33
Stiegler, for his part, at points acknowledges the importance of both entropic and negentropic tendencies in the process of individuation: Both tendencies are seen as essential to the metastability which properly characterizes this process.34 In ‘To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us’, we read the following:
Life is a crystal that does not reach crystallization, caught in a process of metastable equilibrium.35
[…]
It is a metastable process precisely in that it is not stable: if it was, it would be a totally ossified crystal, without future or temporality; if it was totally unstable, it would lead to an explosion of the group – atomization, pulverization, entropy, absolute disequilibrium. A group is always between equilibrium and disequilibrium, neither in equilibrium nor in disequilibrium, but rather always at the border of both: at the border of pure equilibrium, which is called pure synchrony, the crystal being purely synchronic; and of disequilibrium, that is, of pure diachrony, total atomization, completed diabelein. Disequilibrium exists in groups, and it is called madness. Madness is at the heart of the process of individuation, but it is an energy that must be, precisely, calendarized and cardinalized to be channeled and to form something that creates movement without leading to disintegration. Metastability produces movement. Pure disequilibrium is the collapse of movement. Pure equilibrium is immobility preceding movement. Between these two is fragile metastability.36
Similarly, in a passage of Symbolic Misery Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch, he acknowledges the necessary value of both Eros and Thanatos in processes of individuation, processes undermined by hyperindustrial consumer capitalism:
the consumer, consumed by what he consumes, is vampirized, and this development is that of an (almost) perfect control leading to the annulment of Eros and Thanatos. Their annulment, that is, as tendencies which – in the tension between them, in the play of effective repetitions – together composed the dynamic of individuation (of difference).37
What Stiegler fears, and believes is the threat of what he calls our ‘hyperindustrial epoch’, is precisely an excess of madness, leading to the breakdown of the metastable process through excess of entropic disequilibrium. By contrast, Lyotard (and others of his ‘poststructuralist’ generation), while also effectively acknowledging the necessity of both entropy and negentropy, privileged entropy because he saw it as what was in danger of being eradicated by the hegemonic system of development obsessed with equilibrium. What is at issue is not only a possibly different emphasis regarding values but also primarily the question of how the complex contemporary sociopolitical situation is to be interpreted.
This preliminary sketch of an encounter between Lyotard and Stiegler38 suggests a method of reading in which each can be used as a corrective to the other. Lyotard tends to treat processes of individuation, the formation of systems, as processes which will take care of themselves, and Stiegler’s concern that we need to seriously think about and take care of these processes, because they are under threat, is essential. Stiegler’s concerns with such individuation processes, however, seem to ignore the dangers of privileging negentropy that Lyotard saw, as well as to significantly undervalue the entropic processes which he nevertheless acknowledges as essential to individuation itself.
This kind of conclusion – a ‘balanced’ one – can seem disappointing, for reasons Stiegler notes when he suggests that any discourse of the ‘golden mean’ seems to be a discourse of ‘reformism and adaptation’ which ‘systematically ignores radical questions’.39 Yet Stiegler insists that there is nothing more radical than thinking in terms of complex tendencies rather than simple oppositions. A philosophy which attempts a political and cultural critique must do more than simply adopt scientific principles such as entropy and negentropy as avatars of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – this is precisely the lesson of the misplaced faith in the negentropic equilibrium of systems Curtis charts and Lyotard critiques. Rather, such evaluative categories can only be provisional concepts used in the service of sensitive judgements regarding complex interactions of tendencies in an increasingly complex world system. In contributing different perspectives on how to evaluate the circulations of desire in the networks of our information society, Lyotard and Stiegler both aid our capacity to reflect on the complexity of such tendencies and illuminate important aspects of what is at stake in formulating a ‘philosophy after nature’.
NOTES
1A critical comparison of the thoughts of Lyotard and Stiegler deserves much more attention than I am able to afford it in the limited space available here. Lyotard was evidently the first philosopher to engage with Stiegler’s thought in print, in several essays collected in The Inhuman (1988). These papers were originally presented at conferences where Stiegler also presented in the 1980s, well before the publication of any of his major works (starting with the first volume of Technics and Time in 1991). Stiegler, for his part, has increasingly engaged with Lyotard, notably in For a New Critique of Political Economy and in chapter 4 of States of Shock. What I hope to achieve here is therefore only a prolegomenon to more extensive analysis, which would be valuable in illuminating the timely issues they both engage.
2Mohammed-Ali Rahebi, ‘The Cybernetic Organon and the Obsolescence of the Subject of Knowledge’. Unpublished.
3John Kricher finds versions of it in the Ionian pre-Socratic philosophers. See The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 33.
4See Arthur George Tansley, Elements of Plant Biology (Lenox, MA: HardPress, 2012 [1922]).
5Forrester explains that ‘[a] feedback system, which is sometimes called a “closed” system, is influenced by its own past behaviour. A feedback system has a closed loop structure that brings results from past action of the system back to control future action’. Principles of Systems (Sheffield: Pegasus Communications, 1968), 1–5 [chapter one, page 5, following the pagination used in the text].
6Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968 [1948]).
7Eugene Odum and Howard T. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, 2nd edition. (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1959).
8Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1999).
9According to one study written in the 1960s, there was already ample evidence that this thesis was false. See P.R. Ehrlich and L.C. Birch, ‘The “Balance of Nature” and “Population Control”’, The American Naturalist , 101.918 (1967): 97–107. For a recent popular overview of the issue, see John Kricher’s The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth. Kricher presents the discrediting of the ‘myth’ of the balance of nature in ecology less dramatically than Curtis, as the result of a gradual accumulation of data from a broad range of studies.
10Arthur G. Tansley, ‘The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Terms and Concepts’, Ecology , 16.3 (1935): 284–307.
11Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
12Lyotard, Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Athlone, 1993).
13A concise outline of Lyotard’s conception of a social system as a libidinal economy can be found in the section ‘The System and the Event’ in his essay ‘March 23’, collected in Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings. Trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
14The locus classicus of Freud’s concepts of Eros and the death drive is of course the paper in which he first proposes the latter, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , Vol ume 18 (New York: Vintage, 2001). Lyotard gives a concise outline of his heterodox reading of these drives in ‘Painting as Libidinal Set-up’ in The Lyotard Reader and Guide, Eds. Keith Crome and James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).
15In Lyotard, Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings. Trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
16Lyotard, ‘Oikos’, in Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings , 98–99.
17See Lyotard, ‘Time Today’, in The Inhuman.
18Lyotard, ‘Matter and Time’, in The Inhuman.
19Lyotard, ‘Oikos’, 101.
20Lyotard, ‘Oikos’, 99.
21Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies: Disbelief and Discredit 1. Trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 86: italics added.
22Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. George Collins and Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
23Stiegler writes, ‘The programmatologies through which physiological, technical, and social programmes are arranged together, programmes that are established and implemented by physiological, technical and social systems of organs and organizations, constitute a complex and multi-dimensional organological milieu. This mileu is woven by transductive relations knitted together on all three organological levels through the play of the tendencies and counter-tendencies they harbor. And they thus metastabilize, through a horizon of meaning, that ‘understanding that being-there has of its being’ that constitutes what Simondon named the transindividual’. What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology. Trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 119.
24Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies: Disbelief and Discredit 1. Trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
25Stiegler with Frédéric Neyrat, ‘Interview: From Libidinal Economy to the Ecology of the Spirit’. Trans. Arne De Boever, Parrhesia , 14 (2012), 3.
26Stiegler, Symbolic Misery Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch. Trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 54. Stiegler adopts the concept of grammatization from Sylvain Auroux. See his La Révolution technologique de la grammatization (Brussels: Mardaga, 1993).
27Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living, 25.
28See Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
29This was developed in Stiegler’s presentation, titled ‘Anthropocene and Negentropology’, at a recent conference devoted to his work, ‘General Organology: The Co-individuation of Minds, Bodies, Social Organisations and Techne’ at the University of Kent, 20–22 November 2014.
30He writes, ‘an obsolete idea of politics, that is, one founded on the discourse of “resistance”: holding on to such a politics could only mean becoming ensnared in one more delusion. One must struggle against this tendency by inventing rather than by resisting. Resistance can only ever be reactive and, as such, it belongs to nihilism – in the Nietzschean sense of these words’. The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, 37.
31See Lyotard, ‘Acinema’ in The Lyotard Reader, Ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
32James Williams argues this in Lyotard and the Political (London: Routledge, 2000).
33Lyotard writes, for example, ‘Let us be content to recognize in dissimulation all that we have been seeking, difference within identity, the chance event within the foresight of composition, passion within reason – between each, so absolutely foreign to each other, the strictest unity: dissimulation’. Libidinal Economy, 52.
34Metastability, like entropy and negentropy, is another term adopted from thermodynamics and is developed by Gilbert Simondon as an integral aspect of his theory of individuation. Jean-Hugues Barthélémy explains that ‘it is a state that transcends the classical opposition between stability and instability, and that is charged with potentials for a becoming’. For Simondon, ‘[t]he difference between the physical individual and the living individual is […] that the second entertains within it a metastability, whereas the first has become stable and has exhausted its potentials’. ‘Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon’, in Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, Ed. Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 217.
35Stiegler, Acting Out, 78.
36Stiegler, Acting Out, 79–80.
37Stiegler, Symbolic Misery Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch, 64.
38See note 1.
39Stiegler, Acting Out, 74.
Auroux, Sylvain. La Révolution technologique de la grammatization. Brussels: Mardaga, 1993.
Barthélémy, Jean-Hugues. ‘Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon’. In Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Edited by Arne De Boever, AlexMurray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward, 203–231. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999.
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