We might, then, also refer to a sort of panic that is on the verge of replacing the assurance we had of being able to conduct our affairs under the sign of freedom and reason.
Robert Musil1
The rise of so-called ‘social’ digital networks brought with it a new kind of economy, based on personal data, cookies, metadata, tags and other tracking technologies through which is established what Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy have called algorithmic governmentality.2 It was this context, too, that saw the rise of ‘big data’ – that is, those technologies connected to what is referred to as high-performance computing3 – which utilizes methods derived from applied mathematics, placing them in the service of automated calculation and forming the core of this algorithmic governmentality.
Digital tracking technologies are the most advanced stage of a process of grammatization that began at the end of the Upper Palaeolithic age, when humanity first learnt to discretize4 and reproduce, in traces of various kinds, the flux and flow running through it and that it generates: mental images (cave paintings), speech (writing), gestures (the automation of production), frequencies of sound and light (analogue recording technology) and now individual behaviour, social relations and transindividuation processes (algorithms of reticular writing).
These traces constitute hypomnesic tertiary retentions.5 Having become digital, they are today generated by interfaces, sensors and other devices, in the form of binary numbers and hence as calculable data, forming the base of an automatic society in which every dimension of life becomes a functional agent for an industrial economy that thereby becomes thoroughly hyper-industrial.
The outlines of the hyper-industrial epoch first appear when the analogue technologies of the mass media set up those modulation processes characteristic of what in 1990 Gilles Deleuze called ‘control societies’.6 But it is only when digital calculation integrates this modulation in the form of algorithmic governmentality7 that hyper-industrial society is fully accomplished as the automatization of existences.
With the conservative revolution and the neoliberal turn, the dissolution of everyday life as described by Henri Lefebvre8 (the analysis of which was taken up again by Guy Debord) leads in the last quarter of the twentieth century to the reign of symbolic misery:9 the analogue, audiovisual apparatus of the mass media is then essentially subjected to strategic marketing via the privatization of radio stations and television channels.
Symbolic misery results from the proletarianization of sensibility that commenced in the early twentieth century. This de-symbolization leads in a structural way to the destruction of desire, that is, to the ruin of libidinal economy. And it ultimately leads to the ruin of all economy whatsoever when, at the beginning of the 1980s, speculative marketing, under direct shareholder control, becomes hegemonic and systematically exploits the drives, which are thereby divested of all attachment.10
Symbolic misery follows from the mechanical turn of sensibility11 that proletarianizes the sensible realm by subjecting symbolic life to the industrial organization of what then becomes ‘communication’ between, on the one hand, professional producers of symbols and, on the other hand, proletarianized and de-symbolized consumers, deprived of their life-knowledge. Individual and collective existences are thereby subjected to the permanent control of the mass media,12 which short-circuits the processes of identification, idealization and transindividuation that would otherwise weave the thread of intergenerational relations and so form the fabric of desire by ‘binding’ the drives.13
Elementary savoir-vivre, elementary life-knowledge, is formed and transmitted through processes of identification, idealization and transindividuation, constituting the attentional forms14 that lie at the basis of any society. These forms metastabilize the psychosocial ability to bind the drives by diverting their goals towards social investments.
As the industrial deformations and diversions of attention that short-circuit these processes, the de-symbolization in which consists the symbolic misery imposed by consumer capitalism inevitably leads to the destruction of all investment, and to the subsequent annihilation of libidinal economy.15
The object in which desire invests is what libido economizes. The object is desired to the point of inverting the goals of the drives that support it16 only because, thus economized, that is, saved and retained, it no longer exists: it consists. And, as such, it is infinitized – that is, it exceeds all calculation.17 This is also the question of excess in the ‘general economy’ of Georges Bataille.
The simultaneous destruction of desire, of investment in its object and of the experience of its consistence results in the liquidation of all attachment and all fidelity – that is, of all confidence, without which no economy is possible – and ultimately of all belief, and therefore of all credit.18
In 1905, Freud's investigation of fetishistic perversion led him to what he would later call the ‘libidinal economy’. Love, as everyone knows, is in the strictest and most immediate sense the experience of artifice: to fetishize the one we love is essential.19 When we cease to love someone we had formerly loved, the artificiality of the amorous situation falls back brutally into everyday ordinariness. Desire, as that which economizes its object, as what takes care of it by idealizing it and transindividuating it (by socializing it, that is, by making it an object of social relations), arises only with the artificialization of life – with what Georges Canguilhem described as technical life. This is why Pandora, the wife of Epimetheus, the ‘first woman’, that is, the first being to become an object of desire, is originally bejewelled.
Two or three million years ago, when life began to pass essentially through non-living artifice (which means that it cannot do without its prostheses, which is the human characteristic, as Rousseau already understood20), there first arose what Aristotle referred to as the noetic soul, which desires and loves, that is, which idealizes – as we are taught by Diotima.
Hence it is that this soul projects ‘consistences’, which are sublime objects of desire. In so doing it infinitizes itself by passing through the artefacts that support this libidinal economy – which is the economy of nous. As such, it is a noetic soul. Nous was translated from Greek into Latin as intellectus and spiritus: a noetic soul is intellective and spiritual. This means that it is always and essentially inhabited and possessed by revenances, fantasies, obsessions and apparitions, supported by the artifices in which consist the artificial organs with which the human being is covered (including the jewels of Pandora, but also clothes and shoes, which can become the organs of a shoe fetish – a ‘perversion’ that has been extensively studied).21
Through its artefacts, this soul can generate intellectual technologies via which it accedes to the intellect inasmuch as it is analytical. The spiritual soul can be haunted by spirits (by that which returns and those who return) only because technical life, by augmenting itself prosthetically, by thereby amplifying and intensifying its powers of sublimation, equips itself with a transindividual artificial memory that makes possible what Simondon called psychic and collective individuation. Biological economy is what in Simondon is referred to as vital individuation,22 whereas the noetic life formed by libidinal economy belongs to psychosocial individuation.
Because it does not transindividuate its traces, vital individuation is not yet an economy of drives diverted into social investment: it is an economy of the instincts, which control animal behaviour with the rigour of automatism.23 With the appearance of fetishizable artificial supports, objects of adoration characteristic of the noetic soul insofar as it is dedicated to cults, worship and rituals, the instincts are relatively dis-automatized: they can be displaced, they can change object. They become detachable, as artificial organs that are the supports of fetishization, and as such they are no longer instincts but, precisely, drives.
In this way, vital individuation gives way to psychic and collective individuation, wherein we must constantly contain and retain these drives, which, because they can change object, are called ‘perverse’. They are perverse inasmuch as they are structurally detachable, since they too are artificial organs. This means that they are structurally fetishistic and ‘objectal’. In this libidinal economy that is no longer just biological but thanatological and organological, the detachability of the drives, induced by that of artifices themselves, installs an economy of ambiguity symbolized by that jar which is Pandora's box.
With modernity and capitalism, artifice manifests itself as such – this is Baudelaire – at the heart of what Paul Valéry described as a political economy of spirit, founded on commerce and industrial technology, and leading to what the latter called a fall in ‘spirit value’.
In the current, hyper-industrial epoch, we shall see that this is now an absolutely and totally computational capitalism. And it is so essentially starting from the conservative revolution initiated in the 1980s – this economy having structurally become a libidinal diseconomy, that is, an absolute lack of care for its objects.
In this diseconomy that a dissociety becomes,24 objects can no longer constitute supports of investment: they are no longer infinitizable since they have become fully calculable, that is, totally futile. They become no-things: nihil. Fully computational capitalism is as such the completion of nihilism. The structural effect of full and generalized automatization is that capitalism becomes a computerized nihilism, which seems to be giving rise to a new form of totalitarianism.
It is this threat that we now all feel and perceive, in a more or less muffled way. Such is the great malaise experienced throughout the world – beginning with the ‘net blues’25 that has afflicted ‘hacktivists’ since the appearance of ‘social networking’. The absolutely computational contemporary libidinal diseconomy no longer economizes its objects and so destroys and dissipates its subjects – who destroy themselves by conforming to the automated prescriptions of computational capitalism.
This is so because this libidinal diseconomy has become a computerized industry of traces, traces that had formerly been the condition of possibility of libidinal economy and investment. At the dawn of consumerism, however – in the first half of the twentieth century, when the proletarianization of consumers first commenced – singularities began to be progressively subjected to calculability. As Jonathan Crary stresses, in this period intimate areas still remained that were protected from these calculations, and this was so for a long time.26 But today this is no longer the case.
The economy of traces (or of data) nevertheless claims to be overcoming what, especially since 2008, is increasingly perceived as carelessness and negligence: this claim is what is sometimes called ‘digital utopianism’.27 But for almost ten years Ars Industrialis has argued that digitalization, which made the industry of traces possible, does bear within it a new industrial model constitutive of an economy of contribution – that is, an economy that reconstitutes knowledge of how to live, do and conceptualize, and that thereby forms a new age of care.
The question is therefore the following: if this computational and industrial traceology presents itself today and in fact, through algorithmic governmentality, as the acceleration, crystallization and in a way the precipitation of insolvency, discredit, disindividuation and the generalized entropy that inevitably results from this headlong flight, is it nevertheless possible to effect a reversal, through which the trace could again become an object of social investment? To answer this question, we must begin by analysing how and why the industry of traces conjoins with the psychopower of the mass media.
The conservative revolution, which is the historical reality of financialization, has globalized consumerism and taken it to extreme levels by destroying the processes of binding the drives in which investments in sublime objects of all kinds consist. But if so, the current and very recent hegemony of the industry of traces is what attempts to control these unbound drives through automatisms founded on social networks while at the same time functionalizing them, that is, making them serve a ‘personalized’ stimulation of the consumerist drive, via mimetic mechanisms that, however, only end up making these drives more uncontrollable, contagious and threatening than ever.
The channelling of the drives through the application of mathematical algorithms to automatized social control can do nothing but push these drives to a highly dangerous level, by dis-integrating them – and in so doing creating what Félix Guattari called ‘dividuals’.28 With the advent of reticular reading and writing29 via networks made accessible to everyone through the implementation, beginning in 1993, of the technologies of the world wide web, digital technologies have led hyper-industrial societies towards a new stage of proletarianization – through which the hyper-industrial age becomes the era of systemic stupidity, which can also be called functional stupidity.30
Remote-action networks make it possible to massively de-localize production units, to form and remotely control huge markets, to structurally separate industrial capitalism and financial capitalism, and to permanently interconnect electronic financial markets, using applied mathematics to automate the ‘financial industry’ and control these markets in real time. Through the implementation of such mechanisms, processes of automated decision-making become functionally tied to drive-based automatisms, controlling consumer markets through the industry of traces and the economy of personal data.
Such mathematics is applied twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: everyday life is thereby subjected to reticular standards and calculations, while at the same time consumer markets are ‘personalized’. According to Jonathan Crary, this economy of personal data aims ‘to reduce decision-making time [and] to eliminate the useless time of reflection and contemplation’.31 Digital automatons short-circuit the deliberative functions of the mind, and systemic stupidity, which has been installed across the board from consumers to speculators, becomes functionally drive-based as soon as ultra-liberalism begins to privilege speculation and discourage investment, thereby crossing a threshold beyond that described by Mats Alvesson and André Spicer as functional stupidity.32 In recent years (post-2008 and especially since the revelations of Edward Snowden) a state of generalized stupefaction33 has accompanied this functional stupidity, itself boosted by total automatization.
This stupor has been caused by a series of technological shocks that emerged from the digital turn of 1993, which, as their main features and consequences have become manifest, have brought about a state that now verges on stunned paralysis – in particular in the face of the hegemonic power of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.34 The fact that these four companies have been referred to as the ‘four horsemen of the Apocalypse’ reflects that they are literally dis-integrating the industrial societies that emerged from the Aufklärung.
From this state of fact there results a feeling of ‘net blues’, which is spreading among those who believe in the promise of the digital era. The industrial societies that emerged from the Aufklärung are now being disintegrated by hyper-industrial societies, because the latter constitute the third stage of accomplished proletarianization.
After the loss of work-knowledge in the nineteenth century, then of life-knowledge in the twentieth century, there arises in the twenty-first century the age of the loss of theoretical knowledge – as if the cause of our being stunned was an absolutely unthinkable becoming. With the total automatization made possible by digital technology, theories, those most sublime fruits of idealization and identification, are deemed obsolete – and along with them, scientific method itself. We saw in the introduction that this is the conclusion Chris Anderson reaches in ‘The End of Theory’,35 and it is a proposition we will examine in greater detail in the following chapter.
Founded on the self-production of digital traces, and dominated by automatisms that exploit these traces, hyper-industrial societies are undergoing the proletarianization of theoretical knowledge, just as broadcasting analogue traces via television resulted in the proletarianization of life-knowledge, and just as the submission of the body of the labourer to mechanical traces inscribed in machines resulted in the proletarianization of work-knowledge. The decline in ‘spirit value’ thereby reaches its peak: it now strikes all minds and spirits.
This new ill-being [mal-être], which occurs in the context of the stupefaction generated by the doubly epokhal redoubling that occurred in 1993, is not just a case of the ‘blues’: it amplifies what I had described in Technics and Time, 3, that is, the deafness and suffering provoked by the culture industries, not just as a negative Stimmung afflicting the end of the twentieth century like the black bile that struck the end of the nineteenth, from Baudelaire's ‘spleen’ to the Austro-Hungarian empire, but as the experience, recognized and felt by everyone, of the futility of the criteriology of truth in every sphere of ‘what is’ and of the ‘values’ deriving from the history of philosophy as discourse on being – as ontology.
Algorithmic ill-being, which is characteristic of the age of hyper-control, radicalizes this disorientation. All the grand promises of the Enlightenment epoch have been inverted and seem inevitably destined to become poisonous. It is this pharmacological ill-being as absolute devaluation that was foreshadowed by Nietzsche, and this depletion leads us back to the tragic question that constituted Pre-Socratic thought36 as precisely the individual and collective experience of the putting in question of being by becoming – insofar as it is the becoming of the pharmakon through which the experience of the question is opened up as such.37
This renewal constitutes the question of what, in the course conducted for pharmakon.fr and by referring to the Freudian allegory of facilitation [Bahnung], I have described as a return to the tragic sources of the West.38 It leads us to confront the irreducibility of the organological and pharmacological condition, to which the sacrificial practices of the Greeks bore witness by celebrating Persephone as the goddess of intermittence:39 Vernant showed that the mysteries practised by the mystics (which the Greeks are as a whole) primordially refer to the inaugural conflict of every mythic tension, that is, to the tragic tensions arising from the conflict between Zeus the Olympian and Prometheus the Titan.40
The proletarianization of theoretical knowledge is more precisely that of the noetic functions, conceived by Kant as intuition, understanding and reason – and the fall of ‘spirit value’ here reaches its zenith, which means that it strikes all minds and spirits, because it strikes the spirit (that is, revenance) as such. Given that stupidity is always more or less what results from stupor and stupefaction,41 we all become more or less stupid, if not quite beasts.
But, striking the spirit, it can also engender and therefore must also engender a new epoch of the spirit. It can thus strike it as a coin is struck, in a second moment of shock and stupefaction, pioneering the new circuits of transindividuation of the doubly epokhal redoubling. To confront this question, we must return to the genesis of the first shock of the doubly epokhal redoubling at the origin of the hyper-industrial era.
The stunning and stupefying hyper-industrial epoch was already foreshadowed in what Deleuze called ‘control societies’. This is why, concerning the end of the twentieth century, Crary can write: ‘As disciplinary norms […] lost their effectiveness, television was crafted into a machinery of regulation, introducing previously unknown effects of subjection and supervision. This is why television is a crucial and adaptable part of a relatively long transition […], lasting several decades, between a world of older disciplinary institutions and one of 24/7 control.’42 The destructive capture of attention and desire is what occurs with the non-coercive power of modulation exerted on consumers by television. These control societies arise along with the conservative revolution, at the end of the consumerist epoch. It is through them that the transition to the hyper-industrial epoch takes place.
In the automatic society that Deleuze was never to know, but which with Félix Guattari he anticipated, in particular when they referred to dividuals, control passes through the mechanical liquidation of discernment, the liquidation of what Aristotle called to krinon – from krino, a verb that has the same root as krisis, ‘decision’. The discernment that Kant called understanding (Verstand) has been automatized as the analytical power delegated to algorithms executed through sensors and actuators operating according to formalized instructions that lie outside any intuition in the Kantian sense – that is, outside any experience.
We will see later that, in a dialogue with Serge Daney, Deleuze envisaged that the epoch of control societies would give birth to an ‘art of control’ – which would be the quasi-causality forming the second moment of shock and of the doubly epokhal redoubling. Might an ‘art of hyper-control’ be similarly conceived within the economy of traceability – which would necessarily also be an art of the automaton that the pharmakon has become?43
This is the question of total proletarianization and of the total disintegration of the spirit. But what is proletarianization in general? Proletarianization is what constitutes an exteriorization without return, that is, without interiorization in return, without ‘counter-thrust’ [choc en retour],44 and the first to question and problematize the pharmakon in this sense was Socrates.
Just like written traces, in which Socrates already saw the risk of proletarianization contained in any exteriorization of knowledge – the apparent paradox being that knowledge can be constituted only through its exteriorization45 – digital, analogue and mechanical traces are tertiary retentions. The automatic society of hyper-control is a society founded on the industrial, systemic and systematic exploitation of digital tertiary retentions. All aspects of behaviour thereby come to generate traces, and all traces become objects of calculation – from Angela Merkel to the ‘bum on the corner’.46
Almost a decade after the collapse of 2008, it is still not clear how best to characterize this event: as crisis, mutation, metamorphosis? All these terms are metaphors (including the ‘concept’ of crisis, however overused it may be in economics) that are still too little thought, if not unthinkable.
Krisis refers in Hippocrates to a decisive bifurcation or turning point in the course of an illness and is the origin of all critique, of all decision exercised by to krinon as the power to judge on the basis of criteria. Mutation is understood today primarily in relation to biology – even if, in French, to be ‘muté’ generally refers in everyday life to being transferred to another posting. And metamorphosis is a zoological term that comes from the Greek, by way of Ovid.
Almost ten years after this major event, it seems that the proletarianization of minds, and, more precisely, the proletarianization of the noetic faculties of theorization, and, in this sense, of scientific, moral, aesthetic and political deliberation – combined with the proletarianization of sensibility and affect in the twentieth century, and with the proletarianization of the gestures of the worker in the nineteenth century – is both the trigger for and the result of this continuing ‘crisis’. As a result, no decisions are taken, and we fail to arrive at any bifurcation. In the meantime, all of the toxic aspects that lie at the origins of this crisis continue to be consolidated.
When a triggering factor is also an outcome, we find ourselves within a spiral. This can be very fruitful and worthwhile, or it can enclose us – absent new criteria – in a vicious circle that we can then describe as a ‘downward spiral’.
The post-larval state in which the 2008 crisis has been left implies we should refer to it in terms of metamorphosis47 rather than mutation: what is going on here is not biological, even if biology comes into play via biotechnology, and, in certain respects, in an almost ‘proletarianized’ way.48 This does not mean there is no krisis, or that we need not take account of the critical labour for which it calls. It means that this work of critique is precisely what this metamorphosis seems to render impossible, thanks precisely to the fact that it consists above all in the proletarianization of theoretical knowledge – which is critical knowledge.
This apparent impossibility is what must be fought against – and therein lies the limit of the allegory of metamorphosis: the latter may suggest the completion of a natural, relentless and predetermined process, to which it would be a matter of submitting and ‘adapting oneself’. What is at stake, however, involves organological multidimensionality, or play between the somatopsychic organs, artificial organs and social organizations, which ideology – that is, that narrative which justifies the established order – conceals in order to legitimate the proletarianizing tendency that leads to the ‘end of theory’.
This tendency is the pharmacological expression of a process of grammatization of which digital technology is the most advanced stage. Grammatization, as noted above, is itself a technical tendency49 that goes back to at least the end of the Upper Palaeolithic, consisting in the duplication and discretization of mental experiences (that is, temporal experiences) in the form of hypomnesic tertiary retentions.
After Socrates, we know that hypomnesic tertiary retention, of which alphabetic writing is a case, tends always to replace what it ‘amplifies’ by substituting itself.50 This amplification opens new possibilities of individuation and de-proletarianization, constituting a therapy or therapeutics in the second moment of the doubly epokhal redoubling, of which technological shock is the first moment. All this results from the technical exteriorization that lies at the origin of hominization, of human evolution, which was conceived as an organological becoming for the first time in The German Ideology.51
In Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue,52 I argued that in the industrial stage of grammatization and proletarianization, which capital tends always to take advantage of, ideology tends to treat the technical system (which is the organological level wherein the artificial organs form a system) as a second nature that duplicates, absorbs, replaces and short-circuits the social systems between which and within which psychic individuals form and connect the circuits of transindividuation through which and within which they form collective individuals.
As full and generalized automatization, the current stage of grammatization systematizes, on a global scale, this absorption, these short-circuits and the resulting disintegration, which constitutes algorithmic governmentality. The unprecedented critical effort that must now be undertaken consists in conceiving the specific rational criteria of digital tertiary retention – which is today conjoining with the biological retentions that are physiological automatisms: this is what neuroeconomics strives to impose.53 It is on the basis of these new criteria that new social rules can reconfigure a noetic arrangement – that is, a negentropic arrangement – between psychic individuals, technical individuals and collective individuations.
In the current stage of metamorphosis, which would be that of the chrysalis (with the appearance of new forms and a new organization), the stupefying and narcotizing state of fact in which the present experience of automatic society consists sets up a new mental context – stupefaction – within which systemic stupidity proliferates. The result is a significant increase in functional stupidity, drive-based capitalism and industrial populism.
But this extreme planetary disturbance can also be considered in terms of a new concern – which, if it does not turn into a panic, and can instead become a fertile skepsis, could become the origin of a new intelligence or understanding of the situation, in fact generating new criteria, that is, new categories: this is the question of what I will call, in the second volume of this work, categorial invention.
This new understanding would be that which, inverting the toxic logic of the pharmakon, would give rise to a new hyper-industrial age constituting an automatic society founded on de-proletarianization54 – and which would provide an exit from the chrysalis of noetic hymenoptera.55 In the following chapters, therefore, I will continue to pursue this allegory of metamorphosis by introducing a noetic bifurcation: the latter is what, through critique, intervenes in the metamorphic process that is life so that it is de-naturalized and dis-automatized, and, through that, neganthropized.
The proletarianization of the gestures of work (of producing works) amounts to the proletarianization of the conditions of the worker's subsistence.
The proletarianization of sensibility and the affects and, through that, the proletarianization of the social relation56 – which is thus being replaced by conditioning – amounts to the proletarianization of the conditions of the citizen's existence.
The proletarianization of minds and spirits, that is, of the noetic faculties enabling theorization and deliberation, is the proletarianization of the conditions of consistence of the life of the rational spirit in general, and of scientific life in particular (including the human and social sciences) – through which rationality becomes what Weber, Adorno and Horkheimer described as rationalization. It is the final culmination of nihilism.
In the hyper-industrial stage, hyper-control is established through a process of generalized automatization. This represents a step beyond the control-through-modulation discovered and analysed by Deleuze (we will return to this question in chapter 3 by commenting on Crary's commentary on the Deleuzian thesis on control societies). In the hyper-industrial stage, the noetic faculties of theorization and deliberation are short-circuited by the current operator of proletarianization, which is digital tertiary retention – just as analogue tertiary retention was in the twentieth century the operator of the proletarianization of life-knowledge, and just as mechanical tertiary retention was in the nineteenth century the operator of the proletarianization of work-knowledge.
Tertiary retention, whatever its form or material may be, artificially retains something through the material and spatial copying of a mnesic and temporal element, and thereby modifies – in a general way, that is, for all human experience – the relations between the psychic retentions of perception that Husserl referred to as primary retentions, and the psychic retentions of memory that he called secondary retentions.57
As consequences of the evolution of tertiary retention, these changes in the play between primary retentions and secondary retentions, and therefore between memory and perception, that is, between imagination and reality, produce processes of transindividuation that are each time different, that is, specific epochs of what Simondon called the transindividual.
In the course of processes of transindividuation, founded on the successive epochs of tertiary retention,58 meanings [significations] form that are shared by psychic individuals, thereby constituting collective individuals themselves forming societies. Shared by psychic individuals within collective individuals of all kinds, the meanings formed in the course of transindividuation processes constitute the transindividual as an ensemble of collective secondary retentions within which collective protentions form – which are the expectations typical of an epoch.
If, according to the Chris Anderson article to which we previously referred, ‘big data’ heralds the ‘end of theory’ – big data technology designating what is also called ‘high-performance computing’ carried out on massive data sets,59 whereby the treatment of data in the form of digital tertiary retentions occurs in real time (at the speed of light), on a global scale and at the level of billions of gigabytes of data, operating through data-capture systems that are located everywhere around the planet and in almost every relational system that constitutes a society60 – it is because digital tertiary retention and the algorithms that allow it to be both produced and exploited thereby also enable reason as a synthetic faculty to be short-circuited thanks to the extremely high speeds at which this automated analytical faculty of understanding is capable of operating.61
This proletarianization is a state of fact. Is it inevitable and unavoidable? Anderson claims it is (like Nicholas Carr, who less gleefully suggests that the destruction of attention is fatal).62 I argue the contrary: the fact of proletarianization is caused by the digital, which, like every new form of tertiary retention, constitutes a new age of the pharmakon. It is inevitable that this pharmakon will have toxic effects, as long as new therapies or therapeutics are not prescribed – that is, as long as we do not take up our responsibilities.
The therapeutic prescription of pharmaka for an epoch constitutes knowledge in general as rules for taking care of the world. This is, indeed, the responsibility of the scientific world, the artistic world, the legal world, the world of the life of the spirit in general, and of citizens, whoever they may be – and, in the first place, of those who claim to represent them. Much courage is required: it is a struggle that must confront countless interests, including those who in part suffer from this toxicity and in part feed off it. It is this period of suffering that is akin to the stage of the chrysalis in the allegory of metamorphosis.
Any tertiary retention is a pharmakon in that, rather than creating new transindividual arrangements between psychic and collective primary retentions and secondary retentions, and therefore between retentions and protentions – which constitute the expectations through which objects of attention appear, objects that are as such the sources of desire63 – rather than creating new attentional forms by spawning new circuits of transindividuation, new meanings and new projective capabilities bearing those horizons of meaning that are consistences, this pharmakon may on the contrary substitute itself for psychic and collective retentions.
Psychic and collective retentions, however, can produce meaning and sense (that is, desire and hope) only as long as they are individuated by all and hence shared by all on the basis of processes of psychic individuation that form, from out of relations of co-individuation,64 social processes of transindividuation, creating relationships of solidarity that are the basis for sustainable (and intergenerational) social systems.65
As tertiary retention, the pharmakon is the condition of the production and metastabilization of those circuits of transindividuation that enable psychic individuals to ex-press themselves to each other, via their psychic retentions and with this pharmakon, thereby forming collective individuals founded on these traces and facilitations, that is, on the collective retentions and protentions emerging from this pharmacology. But when a new pharmakon appears, it may always short-circuit, and always begin by short-circuiting, the established circuit of transindividuation that had issued from a prior tertiary retention, pharmacology and organology. Hence there is in this sense nothing unusual about the situation we see unfolding today with the digital.
Nevertheless, when psychic and collective individuation is short-circuited by digital processes of automatized transindividuation, founded on automation in real time, it becomes a process of transdividuation – the extent of which is immeasurable. This poses absolutely unprecedented problems and therefore requires highly specific analyses capable of taking account of the remarkable novelty of the digital pharmakon. It is to this that the present chapter and the following two chapters are dedicated.
The destructive effects of these digital forms of automatized and reticulated tertiary retention call for a complete social reorganization, the main features of which will be outlined in the final two chapters of this work on the basis of an attempt to reconceptualize the conditions of right and law and the character and content of work (chapters 4–7) with respect to the ‘challenge of the century’ that is the Anthropocene, as a conflict between entropy and negentropy produced by the anthropized milieu, which nowadays extends across the planet.
Rethinking work and right in this context, in which digital tertiary retention constitutes a new form of grammatization, presupposes the elaboration of a new epistemology, a new philosophy and a new organology, in turn elaborating a reconceptualization and a transformation of the digital as such and on another basis than that of the computational ideology that took hold after the Second World War. This will be the subject of The Future of Knowledge, the second volume of Automatic Society.
In order to achieve socialization, that is, a collective individuation, any new pharmakon – in this case, a new form of tertiary retention – always requires the formation of new knowledge, which means new therapies or therapeutics for this new pharmakon, through which are constituted new ways of doing things and reasons to do things, of living and thinking, that is, of projecting consistences, which constitute at the same time new forms of existence and, ultimately, new conditions of subsistence.
This new knowledge is the result of what I call the second moment of the epokhal redoubling emerging from the technological shock that is always provoked whenever there appears a new form of tertiary retention.66 If Anderson claims that the contemporary fact of proletarianization is insurmountable, which is to claim that there is therefore no way to bring about its second moment, the reason he does so lies in another fact: he himself happens to be a businessman who defends an ultra-liberal, ultra-libertarian perspective67 that amounts to the ideology of our age – an ideology faithful to the ultra-liberalism implemented in all industrial democracies after the conservative revolution implemented at the beginning of the 1980s.
The problem with this, for Anderson, as for us, and as for the global economy, is that the becoming that leads to this stage of proletarianization is inherently entropic: it depletes the resources that it exploits – resources that in this case are psychic individuals and collective individuals: in the strict sense of the term, it leads to the stage of their dis-integration.
The dis-integration of psychic individuals and collective individuals begins with the exploitation of the drives, when, the consumerist libidinal economy having destroyed the processes of idealization and identification by submitting all singularities to calculability (these are the stakes of what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the becoming dividual of individuals), marketing was forced to directly solicit and exploit the drives – being incapable of capturing desires that no longer exist because, all their objects having been turned into ready-made commodities, they no longer consist.
Automatic society is now attempting to channel, control and exploit these dangerous automatisms that are the drives, by subordinating them to new retentional systems that are themselves automatic, which capture drive-based automatisms by outstripping and overtaking them: formalized by applied mathematics, concretized by algorithms designed to capture and exploit the traces generated by individual and collective behaviour, reticular interactive automatisms are systems for capturing behavioural expressions.
A behavioural expression is prompted by a field of primary retentions that, having been perceived in a present become past, are internalized in the form of memories, thereby becoming bound secondary retentions. The personality of a psychic individual is composed exclusively68 of such primary retentions that have become secondary, that is, bound to the secondary retentions that preceded them.69
In the course of this becoming secondary of primary retentions, protentions form – that is, expectations and attentions that more or less de-phase (and affect) the psychic individual, in relation to itself and in relation to others: behavioural expressions are the protean exteriorizations (attitudes, gestures, speech, actions) of these expectations, and these exteriorizations are produced when favourable circumstances arise.
Since at least the Upper Palaeolithic age, the noetic souls that are psychic individuals have expressed their expectations by tertiarizing them, that is, by projecting their retentions and their protentions outside themselves, between themselves and other psychic individuals, and in the form of traces through which they spatialize what they are living through or have lived through temporally (temporally meaning psychically, in the past, present or future). These traces are the hypomnesic tertiary retentions with which and through which these psychic individuals transindividuate themselves according to specific modalities – modalities specified by the characteristics of the tertiary retentions thereby engendered.
These expressive behaviours (like the much older production of tools, organologically augmenting and amplifying the organic capabilities of noetic bodies70) are transformations of the sensorimotor loops that Jacob von Uexküll described in living beings equipped with a nervous system – including the famous tick71 – and they belong to the cycle of images analysed by Simondon in Imagination et invention.72
These transformations cause bifurcations and withholdings, that is, différances (from processes of temporalization that are at the same time processes of spatialization – which allows the putting in reserve that Derrida called différance): they are put in reserve and therefore withheld from reacting, whereby the ‘response’ of the animal's nervous systems to a stimulus instead becomes the action of the psychic individual, and through which the process of individuation undergoes bifurcations, that is, singular and strictly incommensurable differentiations of a kind not found in vital différance.73
This psychic individual, who is thus no longer the vital individual74 who is subject to Uexküll's sensorimotor loop, participates in collective individuation75 by exteriorizing him- or herself in the world formed by this collective individuation. In so doing, he or she trans-forms this world by forming him- or herself, which means that his or her expressions participate in the formation of the transindividual by which this world holds – holds up, holds its own, and holds those who form it: by which this world ‘holds on’ (confronted with the successive technological shocks from which it comes), and through which life is worth the pain and effort (that is, the coup76) of being lived.
In automatic society, those digital networks referred to as ‘social’ channel these expressions by subordinating them to mandatory protocols, to which psychic individuals bend because they are drawn to do so through what is referred to as the network effect,77 which, with the addition of social networking, becomes an automated herd effect, that is, one that is highly mimetic. It therefore amounts to a new form of artificial crowd, in the sense Freud gave to this expression.78
The constitution of groups or crowds and the conditions in which they can pass into action were subjects analysed by Gustave Le Bon, cited at length by Freud:
The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd (in German: Masse) is the following. Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings that do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.79
On the basis of Le Bon's analyses,80 Freud showed that there are also ‘artificial’ crowds, which he analyses through the examples of the Church and the Army.
In the twentieth century, and starting in the 1920s, the audiovisual programme industries, too, also form, every single day, and specifically through the mass broadcast of programmes, such ‘artificial crowds’. The latter become, as masses (and Freud refers precisely to Massenpsychologie), the permanent, everyday mode of life in the industrial democracies, which are at the same time what I call industrial tele-cracies.81
Unlike Walter Benjamin in 1935, in 1921 Freud was unable to see the possibility – which would be systematically exploited via the radio by Goebbels and Mussolini – of constituting artificial crowds through the use of relational technologies: radio stations expanded widely in Europe starting from 1923, and the first radio station was created in the United States by RCA in 1920 (which in 1929 became RCA Victor, acquiring a catalogue of gramophone discs that would transform the musical destiny of humankind). And Freud would never know television, which makes powerful use of the scopic drive by combining it with the regressive power of artificial crowds.
As for us, what we find is that an automatized mimetism, based on the network effect and the feedback loops produced in real time by ‘big data’, lies at the core of reticulated artificial crowds. Generated by digital tertiary retention, connected artificial crowds constitute the economy of ‘crowdsourcing’, which should be understood in multiple senses82 – dimensions of which include the so-called ‘cognitariat’83 and digital labour.84 To a large degree, ‘big data’ is utilized by technologies that exploit the potential of crowdsourcing in its many forms, engineered by social networking and data science.
Through the network effect, through the artificial crowds that it creates (more than a billion psychic individuals on Facebook), and through the crowdsourcing that it can exploit through ‘big data’, it is possible:
Self-produced in the form of personal data, transformed automatically and in real time into circuits of transindividuation, these digital tertiary retentions short-circuit every process of noetic différance, that is, every process of collective individuation conforming to relational, intergenerational and transgenerational knowledge of all kinds.86
As such, these digital tertiary retentions dis-integrate these psychic secondary retentions of social reality insofar as the latter constitutes an associated milieu, that is, a milieu individuated through those who live within this milieu by transindividuating themselves. And, as such, they annihilate the protentions borne by these psychic as well as collective secondary retentions.87
In addition to those occasions when the concept of associated milieu is used by Simondon to refer to the memory of the psychic individual insofar as it is constantly associated with this individual and as such constitutes his or her psychic milieu,88 he uses this concept to describe a technical milieu of a highly specific kind: a natural milieu (called a techno-geographical milieu) is referred to as ‘associated’ when the technical object of which it is the environment structurally and functionally ‘associates’ with the energies and elements of which this natural milieu is composed, in such a way that nature becomes functional for the technical system. This is the case for the Guimbal turbine, which, in tidal power plants, assigns to seawater, that is, to this natural element, a threefold technical function: providing the energy, cooling the turbine and, through water pressure, sealing the bearings.
With digital tertiary retention, techno-geographical milieus of a new kind arise, where it is the human element of geography that is associated with the becoming (that is, the individuation) of the technical milieu, so that this element itself acquires a technical function: such is the specificity of the internet network when it becomes ‘navigable’ via the technologies of the world wide web. And it is for this reason that the ‘web’ makes possible the contributory economy typified by free software.
More generally, the internet is indeed a technical milieu in which the receivers are in principle placed in the position of being senders, which forms the basis of the contributory economy that to a large extent is at work in, and supports, the business models of the data economy. The economy of contribution requires, in other words, a pharmacological critique of contribution, that is, a critique of the digital economy: today, the contributory is concretized above all as a new stage of proletarianization, even if the free software model amounts, on the contrary, to an industrial economy founded on de-proletarianization.
Even before the appearance of the web, the internet, which is its infrastructural framework, was already a contributory and dialogical associated milieu, because it enabled the development of a new industrial model of algorithmic software production, wherein the ‘users’ of programs are in principle and by right (if not in fact) its practitioners, in that they contribute to the individuation of the software: it is their practices – which are therefore no longer simply usages – that bring about the evolution of the software itself.
Hence the economy of free software, like the technical milieu constituted by the IP standard that makes all digital networks compatible and through which can form the network of networks called the internet, constitutes a factor giving rise to the contributory economy and providing the concepts for a new industrial model. But the internet is a pharmakon that is obviously capable of doing just the opposite, of becoming a technics of hyper-control, that is, of dissociation, of dis-integration and of the proletarianization of the social itself.
Since the appearance of ‘social engineering’, the automated treatment of personal data mined from social networks has short-circuited all singularity that could form at the level of the collective individual – a collective singularity that constitutes idiomatic differentiation, which is the condition of any meaning and any significance – and has transformed individual singularities into individual particularities: unlike the singular, which is incomparable, the particular is calculable, that is, manipulable, and soluble into these manipulations.89
Without a new politics of individuation, that is, without a formation of attention geared towards the specific tertiary retentions that make possible the new technical milieu,90 digital and reticulated tertiary retention will inevitably become an agent of dissociation through which contribution will become the operator of hyper-proletarianization. For this reason, today we must elaborate a new critique of political economy that must also be a pharmacology of contribution, calling for therapies and therapeutics, that is, for new knowledge, where the challenge is to totally reshape the academic sphere in the epoch of digital tertiary retention. Such is the object of what we call ‘digital studies’.91