Men assure their own subsistence or avoid suffering, not because these functions themselves lead to a sufficient result, but in order to accede to the insubordinate function of free expenditure.
Georges Bataille1
To pass from the algorithmic state of fact to its state of law is to make neganthropy the value of values – as the criterion of all valuation restoring long-term solvency. The algorithmic state of fact becomes an algorithmic state of law when the automatization of fact is made to serve, in law, the development of the ability to dis-automatize.
‘In law’ has, here, three main dimensions:
As Yann Moulier-Boutang recalls, the law is first and foremost that which requires interpretation (failing which it becomes a rule or a procedure): ‘The judge interprets the law, and without this work of interpretation of the law, which may modify it or alter its meaning, there is no sustainable understanding of the norm.’2 Collective normativity (borrowing the term normativity from Canguilhem) is interiorized to the extent that it is interpreted: it is respected only insofar as it is interiorized and it is interiorized only insofar as by right it can and must be interpreted, which also means individuated. Following Gadamer, we refer to hermeneutic jurisprudence in this sense.3
But such hermeneutics has positive conditions of possibility, which are organo-logical conditions. This is why a right to interpretation presupposes a hermeneutic organology – covering the levels of the psychic individual, the technical individual and collective individuals – and requires a reorganization of public space that would again make positive law possible: law can be positive only on the condition of being positively published.
The hermeneutic organology of ancient Greece, then, consists in skholeion. In algorithmic governmentality, the space of this publication is the world wide web, which makes the internet network accessible to everyone. For a state of law specific to algorithmic governmentality to be constituted, the web must become, through its publishing formats and languages, not just semantic but hermeneutic.
In the transductive relation that Volle describes between brainwork and a ubiquitous programmable automaton, a relationship between the ‘memory […] of the computer’ and ‘intellectual activity’ is possible, writes Moulier-Boutang, only if it contains a ‘margin for interpretation […] [which] is a prime example of pollination’.4 Moulier-Boutang thus introduces the key concepts of what, in L’Abeille et l’Économiste, he calls the pollen economy – which the economy of contribution would require if it is to go beyond a capitalism that has become ‘cognitive’.
So-called ‘cognitive capitalism’ is what results from digital grammatization as an analytical organology that structures contemporary understanding and reshapes the synthetic (hermeneutic) vocation of reason (as kingdom of ends) by making a division between what is calculable (which Moulier-Boutang calls the codifiable digital) and what is not:
From the moment we begin to operate within the framework of a digital cognitive capitalism, which takes over certain tasks performed by the brain by mechanizing them, and by making data objectifiable, infinitely repeatable, calculable by computer, we increasingly see things appear that had remained hidden until the computer separated the codifiable digital from the non-codifiable.5
We see things appear, in other words, that arise from interpretation, that is, from the dis-automatization accomplished by the synthesis of reason as a work, and insofar as it effects a bifurcation and practises an opening, however barely visible it may be, thereby suspending an automatism, however modest it may be. And it always does so beyond the analysis of an understanding that has become fully automatizable and analytically automatic because it is grammatized by the ubiquitous programmable automaton that is the reticulated computer.
Nevertheless, beyond the fact that the border separating the ‘codifiable digital’ from the ‘non-codifiable’ is constantly shifting – composed as it is of regimes of truth themselves conditioned by processes of exteriorization and interiorization, that is, processes of expression and impression, which are formed in the disorganized and reorganized brain through its ‘prostheses’ via the transductive relations between psychic individuals, collective individuals and the intellectual technologies that have failed to become technical individuals in Simondon's sense6 (and insofar as they are ubiquitous programmable automatons) – beyond all this, who actually sees this separation between the codifiable digital and the non-codifiable digital come into appearance? How is this visible? And through what procedures?
As the transdividuated individuals that we have become on the network of algorithmic governmentality, dividuals without future – that is, lacking protentions not always already captured and performatively diverted at the speed of light by computational becoming, thereby outstripped, overtaken and ‘dividuated’ in this sense – we do not see this differentiation between the codifiable digital and the non-codifiable digital come into appearance: we and they do not see this differentiation effected by coding itself. It is precisely as such that we and they are dividuated. And this means that:
Such is the automatic accomplishment of nihilism, which is not, however, absolutely automatic for everyone: those who possess the knowledge and can thus modify the algorithms and the conditions of their implementation could see it and should see it. But they do not want to know: they do not want to know that this anthropization of non-inhuman being leads to the entropy of the inhuman and to the unleashing of the inhumanity that is contained within any anthropos – especially when, for these dividuals without future that we have become, the only protention that remains is that of the worst, heralded by the Anthropocene.8
To see, to make and to show this difference, we must be able to practise the subjective principle of differentiation. The performative and automatic generation of protentions on the basis of ‘big data’, however, outstrips those who produce this data of the blind and undifferentiated – at the same time short-circuiting the processes of transindividuation that codify what supposedly cannot be calculated not just by computers but, as Moulier-Boutang says with respect to law, by right and by a judicial apparatus that implements justice hermeneutically: in a way that is neither calculable nor controllable by power.
The necessity that arises, then, consists in the formation of attention to what constitutes this differentiation between the calculable and the incalculable (which may nevertheless be codified) and in protecting against its deformation. The formation and protection of attention should, in a contributory economy, become a constant and free work based on an otium of the people, in turn based on a culture of positive externalities that are derived not, as libertarians of all persuasions from the left to the right would have us believe, from spontaneous generation, but rather from an institution: the institution of law, which forms part of any regime of truth constitutive of circuits of transindividuation for that epoch.
Such an institution of law, differentiating itself from facts (as juridical law, but also as scientific law, jus as well as theoria), has organological conditions, in relation to which it is, precisely, the therapeutics: these conditions are always pharmacological. In the epoch of what Moulier-Boutang calls cognitive capitalism, the stakes of these questions, for him as for us, are firstly and fundamentally economic (inscribed in an epoch where knowledge has become a primary ‘production function’). This is why he emphasizes that ‘the codifiable [in algorithmic form] has little value, since it is repeatable at marginal or zero cost. And since it is always identically repeatable, it loses value, just as in industry: what is mechanized loses value and eventually produces no value.’9
This is also why Marx posits that the general intellect, in the epoch of fully objectified knowledge (and we have now gone well beyond what Marx anticipated), must install another conception of value. Value has become work that is not yet objectified, or even that cannot be objectified, that is, not just codified but codified digitally, encoded in the sense of the crackers or writers of code who are the hackers.
But if wage labourers and employment cease to exist, in what conditions will it be possible to produce such value,10 that is, to transform the value of value into values of all kinds, and by what associated circulations? This is the question of an economy founded on the macroeconomic valorization of positive externalities. Gorz, after reading Vers un capitalisme cognitif,11 wrote in 2003 that the value produced in this new world is generated by positive externalities that, as in the case of free software, produce ‘a collective outcome that transcends the sum of individual contributions’.12 To facilitate understanding of what is at stake in these externalities and their valorization, Moulier-Boutang adopts the metaphor of pollination by bees in the plant world – and, by extension, the question of the viability of living things in totality. Interpretation, which is a fruit of intelligence qua ‘understanding of the environment, […] is akin to pollination by bees’.13 We ourselves conceive contributory income as an income for noetic pollination – pollination practised as the otium of the people, and inasmuch as it is always ‘missing’.14
This metaphor, which can be taken quite far, and which is thus something more than an allegory, makes it possible to think the conditions of a hermeneutic and noetic traceology, because it itself raises the question of an organology of traces: bees, like ants, secrete chemical traces called pheromones, while the algorithmic governmentality of 24/7 capitalism is itself a traceology in which it is the data industry that makes the honey.
It is precisely in this that this algorithmic governmentality of fact – based on a structural legal vacuum imposed by the fact that automatized analytical understanding outstrips the hermeneutic faculty that is reason – is intrinsically toxic, because it fundamentally destroys value: the ‘value of value’ that, on the contrary, treats pollination as precisely not honey.
Honey is ‘monetized’ in the form of exchange value by the beekeeper, who, because of this fact, takes care to maintain the hive. But the value of value is produced by bees themselves above and beyond the market [par-dessus le marché], if we can put it like that – as a quasi-sumptuary surplus, and within this general economy that is the sumptuousness of life, and especially noetic life, as Bataille showed.15
The monetization of traces and of what automated management makes possible as the calculation of their protentions, that is, as the manipulation of these protentions, rapidly sterilizes protentional capacity itself by dividuating psychic individuals, that is, by depleting their libidinal energy, which we now know is noetic energy as such, that is, energeia as the work of trans-formation by which a noetic being can take care of itself – and of others into the bargain [par-dessus le marché].
The value of value is not monetizable, and this is what constitutes the new transcendence of the market, which is no longer here the god of Beruf16 but the positive externality that makes any economy possible, and does so above all as noetic economy – and not just cognitive:17 as an economy cultivating intermittences as the knowledge and power to dis-automatize in one way or another. This is also what is at stake in life and as that in it which is more than it [en plus], in a surplus value that is no longer a profit [plus-value] but the improbable side of life in its inventive generosity18 – which, formulated in less lyrical terms, means its negentropic character.
It is necessary to refer to neganthropology with respect to what relates to us (us, potentially non-inhuman beings) because it is only by passing through the artefacts that are tertiary retentions in general that we produce the traces enabling a sumptuary economy, which is an economy of otium, that is, of spirit as that which is transmitted from generation to generation, and in letters, above and beyond the market, which here means: as that which never loses its value, thereby constituting the canon for any value.
To put it another way, through the traceology made possible by digital reticulation in the epoch of algorithmic governmentality and 24/7 capitalism, the neganthropos could and should produce great wealth, on the condition of not wanting to submit this wealth to the exchange value levied by shareholders (those McKenzie Wark calls vectorialists), whose infrastructure enables this noetic pollination to deplete individual and collective protentions – sterilizing and disorientating the noetic hymenoptera that we are, just as actual bees are today poisoned by pesticides and other pharmaka of ‘rationalized’ agriculture.19
For Oskar Negt, it is through work that the relation to the adult world opens up, insofar as it is capable of providing for his or her needs: ‘Employment and work essentially determine the horizon of my way of seeing the world.’20 The child who does not yet speak, the infans, enters the world through the play of the transitional object: the play of language is pre-ceded by play with the Thing (das Ding), of which the cuddly toy or the blanket is the ‘vicar’.21 He or she then learns to speak, and so receives an education, firstly from his or her family, then from society, in order to become adult, that is, capable of providing for his or her own needs by contributing to those of society and of his or her eventual offspring.
Through these ‘phases of life’ the child traverses stages of individuation, in each case involving a trans-formational relation to pharmaka. A trans-formational relation to pharmaka is thus in play, and this play is that of an interpretation, a trans-forming noesis, an en-ergeia. It is this play that proletarianization and employment interrupt in an increasingly serious way22 – parents today being themselves proletarianized, that is, dispossessed of the possibility of educating their own children.
Educating their children is what mothers or fathers or relatives do in order to make a happy life – for themselves and for their child. But in our epoch this is what they are less and less able to do: they are prevented by the control that has been taken of protentions, and from the earliest phases of life, through systems that capture the attention of both young and old alike, installing proletarianization, ruining attention and generating immense misery and poverty – affective, symbolic, sexual, intellectual, economic, political and spiritual.
The enjoyment of educating one's children can occur only in a sumptuary and intermittent way. It ‘holds’ for its own sake: this is what Donald Winnicott observed in relation to what he called transitional space.23 All noesis occurs in such space, which lasts well beyond infancy (failing which, it is a sham). When the representatives of Christianity advocate the introduction of a family allowance, that is, of a contributory income remunerating this positive externality that is filial education, they understand on the basis of the sacraments that what is essential, which has no price, is always something that lies above and beyond the market.
Proletarianization reduces everything to a price on the labour market or to commodities and services, including the electronic babysitting of un-education. With the generalized liquidation of noetic energeia in all its forms – of which the transitional form that takes care of the infans is the matrix of all the others – the neganthropology concretized in the organological history of non-inhuman being becomes an entropology brought about by proletarianized employment, which is inhuman, as Friedmann says, and which is ‘false’ work, as Negt adds.
‘True’ work is a poiēsis that responds to ‘the need the individual feels to appropriate the surrounding world, to impress his or her stamp upon it and, by the objective transformations he or she effects upon it, to acquire a sense of him- or herself as an autonomous subject possessing practical freedom’.24 To realize objective transformations is to project into the world – through some process of transindividuation – a diurnal dream whose matrix is the transitional object. Whether nocturnal or diurnal, a dream is a primordial noetic intermittence, itself transitional.
Negt's definition of work is very close to that of the noetic soul. Today, ‘real, existing “work” […] is predetermined in its procedures and aims, specialized and de-materialized [and] is not “true” but “false” work’.25 In 1991, Gorz concluded that it is now a matter of undertaking the economico-political struggle to reverse this state of fact:26 ‘Now, there is no social space in which “true work” – which, depending upon the circumstances, I prefer to call “work-for-oneself” or “autonomous activity” – can deploy itself in such a way as to produce society and set its stamp upon it. It is this space we have to create.’27
This space for the production of society (a production that is also for Godelier28 what characterizes the human) is transitional space, that is, opened by consistences, and it is the space of the otium of the people. Installing and instituting this as a new state of law requires:
What we call work – which, before becoming a pure force of labour, was par excellence this participation in collective individuation (which Durkheim tried to describe), long divided between manual and intellectual, and distributed into activities of all kinds and then unified by the market – is what arranges, according to modalities that are constantly being recomposed, the irreducible dimensions of subsistence, existence and consistence.
‘True’ work always, in some way or another, contributes to these three dimensions. And these are the three dimensions explicitly arranged in the work of those hackers who are adherents of free software, dimensions that Linus Torvalds, in his preface to Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic, called ‘ “survival”, “social life”, and “entertainment” ’.29 We must distinguish between these three dimensions that combine in any ‘true’ work as:
There are varying degrees of mixing between these different layers: until the great rise of proletarianization, there were but few situations limited only to the work of subsistence. And there were no situations concerned only with the work of consistence: such would be the work of God alone. This is what both Socrates and Aristotle are telling us through their quotation of Simonides – and this, in turn, is connected to Kant's discussion of work with respect to a popular philosophy.31
It is through the intermittent work of consistences – which do not exist, which are idealized and as such dreamed because they are intrinsically improbable – that neganthropy is possible as the realization of dreams, that is, as the realization of possibilities arising from intermittence qua noetic energeia that cultivates the value of value by taking care of it.
Today, humanity is confronted with the toxicity of its own development – to the point that we now have a term, the ‘Anthropocene’, to designate an age of the biosphere in which ‘human activities have become the dominant strain above all other geological and natural forces that have hitherto prevailed: the action of the human species has become a true geophysical force acting on the planet’.32
It is as a figure or motif silhouetted against this horizon that we must defend the model of intermittence, where it is no longer a matter of ‘making one's life into a work of art’ but of making organological life into a neganthropic work – through the reinvention of work, restoring a global solvency differing from and deferring cosmic entropy.33
Work, as energeia, is the moment par excellence wherein psychic, technical and social individuations are arranged as the play of traces and the agent of transindividuation. This play operates through the adjustment and disadjustment of the technical system and social systems, the psychic apparatus of the worker being the operator of these adjustments and disadjustments, and the agent of a generalized phase shift through which a preindividual potential is individuated.
The Anthropocene is indeed the epoch of the globalization of the technical system and of the destruction of social systems through a deterritorialization of uncaring, negligent financial capital, producing a vast irrationality, totally devoid of care, as evidenced by countless negative externalities. To this transduction between the technical system and the social systems, however, we must add the cosmological dimensions that are the geophysical system and the biological systems, which have been co-implicated in this transductivity to such an extent that ‘human activities have become the dominant strain above all other geological and natural forces that have hitherto prevailed’.
With industrialization, the relationship between the technical system and the social systems has had a massive and uniform retroactive impact, on a global scale, on biological systems in all their forms and on the geographical system in its totality.
Succeeding the Holocene, a period of 11,500 years marked by a rare climatic stability […] a period of blossoming agricultures, cities and civilizations, the swing into the Anthropocene represents a new age of the Earth. As Paul Crutzen and Will Steffen have emphasized, under the sway of human action, ‘Earth is currently operating in a no-analogue state.’34
This new geological reality is political: ‘Besides being a geological event, the Anthropocene is at the same time a political event […], the entire functioning of the Earth becomes a matter of human political choices.’35
As neganthropology, taking responsibility for the question of the Anthropocene must constitute a new age of care that will also be a new age of economics, where economizing will mean taking care and where the economy will again become economical. To think and act in such an epoch necessitates a reading of Whitehead that:
It is as the specific challenge of the Anthropocene that we must conceive and install the otium of the people, where the value of value is, as neganthropy, that which is cultivated and remunerated through leisure – the leisure that Friedmann himself tried to think as an otium of the people, which risks, as he said at the time (that is, in the 1960s), becoming an opium of the people. After observing ‘the multiplication of courses taken outside work’ as a result of the reduction of working time, he then asks: ‘These courses, are they “leisure”?’38 And at this point he develops, with an impressive prescience, the terms with which to frame an alternative to the situation we find ourselves urgently confronting some fifty years later:
If leisure continues to follow the direction it is heading in today, is the risk not […] of it becoming a new ‘opium of the people’? Is this risk not intensified by the plethora of information provided by the mass media, which develops in the masses the taste for superficial conversation about all kinds of subjects, that is, a substitute for action in all domains?39
Everything we have described of the ‘symbolic misery’ engendered by the culture industries of consumerism serves to confirm Friedmann's fears. But what Crary, Berns and Rouvroy describe as 24/7 capitalism and algorithmic governmentality goes even further than Friedmann feared: 24/7 capitalism channels and deforms an age much more alienated than that of wage labour and of the ‘leisures’ shaped by the culture industries. This is why it cannot simply be a question of providing ‘free time’.
Without a political economy of noetic intermittence, the end of wage labour becomes the automatized employment of ‘free’ time. Without an otium of the people40 founded on a generalization of intermittence and on a reconfiguration of knowledge, and of the conditions of its production and transmission, ‘liberated time’ is bound to become a time of consumption and unpaid work – through a functional integration of ‘free time’ into the market in the form of psychosocial disintegration.
Gorz quotes the 1987 declaration by Peter Glotz that German social democracy must ‘create a situation in which the time each person may dispose of for their own search for meaning is greater than the time they need for their work, their recreation and their rest. You say the left no longer has a goal? Then here is a goal for it.’41 But meaning is what is felt during the process of transindividuation when we feel the passing, occurring, happening and trans-forming of meanings in force – generating new, temporarily metastabilized significations, such that former meanings are no longer felt: they lose their meaning. Meaning, understood in this way, inhabits all ‘true’ work, however minor it may be, and does so as the play of traces.
In March 1993 Gorz proposed the establishment of a dual income:
Since the economic apparatus produces more and better with less and less work, income levels can no longer depend on the evolution of the amount of work provided by each. […] The redistribution of productivity gains […] requires a comprehensive politics, appropriate for the time. This necessarily involves the introduction of a binomial income: income from work, on the one hand, which may decrease with the duration of work; and social income, on the other hand.42
This ‘binomial income’ presupposes a ‘comprehensive politics’.
We ourselves take up this proposal, but it must be reversed, and Gorz's recommendation of a comprehensive politics requires new determinations that it lacked at the time. For since this was written, one month before the opening of the web, great transformations have taken place, which in 2003 were partially integrated by Gorz himself into The Immaterial,43 in terms of the valorization of positive externalities. But this integration must now be completed in his absence, in order to specify the critical elements of such a politics in the context of reticular writing, generalized automatization and the disintegration that occurs as a result, via the industry of traces controlled by a capitalism that has become totally computational and purely nihilistic.
Today, ‘big changes are coming to the labor market that people and governments aren't prepared for’, as Bill Gates put it in a speech given in Washington on 13 March 2014.44 If the founder of Microsoft is now raising this topic, along with many other ‘observers’,45 it is firstly because this issue has become highly relevant, and because it heavily involves his own company. But it is also because he himself intends to prescribe the use of this pharmakon that is software automation, enabling software substitution, the result of which should be, according to Gates himself, competition between automatons and employees.
Obviously he does not present it in these terms, but rather as a recommendation, at the American Enterprise Institute, addressed to governments ‘around the world’ by an unparalleled expert who embodies the ‘leading fortune’ of this world to whom he addresses himself and dispenses counsel, which a journalist from Business Insider, Julie Bort, summarized as follows:
Gates believes that the tax codes are going to need to change to encourage companies to hire employees, including, perhaps, eliminating income and payroll taxes altogether. He's also not a fan of raising the minimum wage, fearing that it will discourage employers from hiring workers in the very categories of jobs that are most threatened by automation.
He explained: ‘When people say we should raise the minimum wage, I worry about what that does to job creation…potentially damping demand in the part of the labor spectrum that I'm most worried about.’46
Such ‘solutions’ amount to the macroeconomic absurdity that consists in impoverishing employees still further, that is, in further reducing social solvency in favour of an even greater siphoning off of the new capital gains made possible by the algorithmic automaton. These solutions consist not only in failing to redistribute the immense new productivity gains made possible by software substitution, but in further diminishing the redistribution processes derived from the old model.
Downwards pressure on wages inevitably leads to a fall in demand. And we know that the way this issue was resolved by the conservative revolution was through the introduction of subprime mortgages and credit default swaps, enabling the formation of an ultra-speculative and automatized financial market, which was then bound to leave both banks and states fundamentally insolvent. It seems that the lesson drawn by Greenspan in October 2008 has not been learned by Gates: the latter's proposal could lead only to a repetition of this madness – or worse.
Financialization, which was the disastrous response of the conservative revolution to the limits of Fordist-Keynesianism, still feeds into the derelict reasoning of Bill Gates, who fails to see that if it fails to value work, including outside wage labour, capital will be incapable of prospering.47 On this point, we radically disagree with the analyses of Yann Moulier-Boutang.48
Moulier-Boutang rejects the opposition between the real and the virtual, and with reason:49 the opposition between a ‘good’ economy, which would stick to ‘real’ production, and a ‘bad’ economy, which would speculate on the future by deviating from the real present, is superficial. Since the Neolithic, the economy has always been what ‘speculates’ on a surplus of production to come, and the economy is in this sense speculative in a way that is very elementary and necessary. Thinking in general is itself speculative, and in the twentieth century Whitehead conceived a speculative (processual) cosmology.50 In general, to speculate is to conjecture about the possible on the basis of observation.
In Kantian philosophy, speculative (that is, theoretical) pure reason is nevertheless constrained by experience and understanding: only by building upon these can it take flight (that is, speculate). This philosophy is called critical in the sense that speculative reason finds itself limited by itself insofar as it is self-observing, and speculative primarily in this sense: self-observing critical reason fundamentally distinguishes the spheres of speculation and experience without opposing them. Pure theoretical (that is, speculative) reason can do nothing without experience, nor without the understanding. The understanding should have no power without reason, nor reason without the understanding, with which it constitutes the faculty of knowledge, which is a speculative faculty.
In fact, however, what we find is that the automatized understanding can do many things without reason. But we also see that such a power devoid of knowledge, that is, devoid of law, having become purely automatic, is entropic, that is, self-destructive. Kant did not himself foresee this possibility of a pure automatization of the understanding because he believed he could identify a transcendental schematism that precedes any empiricity.
It is the transcendental imagination that governs the relationships between the data of experience and the concepts of the understanding. I argued in the third volume of Technics and Time51 that the three syntheses of the transcendental imagination, from which are deduced the pure (a priori) concepts of the understanding, presuppose a fourth, which is the condition of what Kant called the schematism and also of what he called the synthesis of recognition. This fourth synthesis is that carried out via tertiary retention,52 and therefore it cannot, strictly speaking, be called transcendental.53
That tertiary retention conditions the three syntheses of the imagination and the schematism of the understanding means that there is an organology and a pharmacology of the speculation in which the faculty of knowing always consists (which already for Augustine was a ‘critique’ as libido sciendi), which is a faculty of looking (specto), of observer and conjecturer (speculor) on the basis of an artefact that is always a speculum.
The speculator who is the philosopher cannot take flight without the organological discretization in which grammatization consists, which supports the analytical categorization of the understanding that encounters intuition, and that enables apodictic reasoning that can ‘examine at leisure’ – that is, observe and speculate – as Leibniz understands:
This is the principal aim of this great science that I have become accustomed to calling Characteristics, of which what we call algebra, or analysis, is only one small branch; for it is this science that gives words to languages, letters to speech, numbers to arithmetic, notes to music, and that teaches us the secret of fixing reasoning, and compelling it to leave a small volume of visible traces on paper to be examined at leisure; and it makes us reason at little cost, by putting written characters in place of things in order to disencumber the imagination.54
This fragment by Leibniz received extensive commentary and analysis by Derrida in Of Grammatology, introduced into his grammatological project through the interpretation of a correspondence between Descartes and Mersenne.55 But it seems to me that the organological and pharmacological consequences for grammatology were never drawn, in particular where Leibniz considers the possibility ‘of fixing reasoning, and compelling it to leave a small volume of visible traces on paper to be examined at leisure’.
That Derrida contested Husserl's opposition between primary retention and secondary retention in fact led him to simply ignore tertiary retention,56 that is, the artefact as organological condition of universal Characteristics as envisaged here by Leibniz.
The stakes of these questions were shown by Canguilhem in Knowledge of Life, where the faculty of knowledge as knowledge of life by life is both conditioned by and required by the organological and pharmacological being that we are: knowledge of life is vital for this form of life that constantly trans-forms life because it belongs to the technical form of life, where ‘knowledge […] is one of the ways by which humanity seeks to assume its destiny and to transform its being into a duty’.57 It is because noetic life is this technical form of life that in biology ‘knowledge and technique are indissolubly linked’.58
I will again take up these considerations on the basis of Leibniz and Canguilhem in the second volume of Automatic Society. For now, they allow us to introduce the question of economic knowledge as critique of economic technology and finally as critique of political economy understood as an organology, a pharmacology and a therapeutics of the fiduciary question. In this political economy, economics and law are tied together by the question of belief and trust inasmuch as it assumes an organological investment in the monetary artefact, while law always implies, and as a preliminary condition, the fiduciary question in the broadest sense.59
Money is a tertiary retention with the power to control protentional possibilities and to make calculations about them that we also call speculations. Such possibilities must be made the object of a pharmacological critique inasmuch as they can provoke impossibilities, that is, discredit. Jean-Michel Rey's analysis of the bankruptcy of John Law in Le Temps du crédit is of key importance here.60 What is obvious is that monetary regimes, regimes of money qua numismatic tertiary retention and protentional support, modify the risks and toxicity of speculation insofar as these pharmaka acquire specific characteristics in the computational age of reason.
Speculation in general can become beneficial, do good, and be a common good, only if it is cultivated by the disciplines, which constitute technics of the self and others as otium – and which thereby sometimes constitute what we call knowledge, the sciences, but also and more generally work-knowledge and life-knowledge, the knowledge of how to do and live. Such forms of knowledge have a vocation for pharmacologically discerning their own limits, that is, the organological limits that they set up and put to work – this discernment can operate without explicit awareness of its organological and pharmacological character.
The project of digital studies is to develop knowledge that possesses an explicit awareness of its organological and pharmacological status in this Anthropocene era that is wholly shaped by computational power (into the distorted form of an absence of epoch), which today unavoidably raises the speculative question from a therapeutic perspective – digital tertiary retention having set up a state of crisis from which a new krinein must arise as the epoch of a new critique bearing a new organology.
It is in this register that we must situate the lessons to be learned from Alan Greenspan. What Greenspan teaches us is not only the fact that a hyper-entropic automatization of finance that lacks the power to dis-automatize is a global public danger. This fact, factum, is also a fatum, a law, jus: what we learn from Greenspan is also that we need science, that is, otium, inasmuch as it is not soluble into negotium.
Otium is this power of the self-limitation of speculation through the dis-automatization of the drive in which it fundamentally consists (and this is why the libido sciendi of Augustine can be reinterpreted through Freud's libidinal economy). It must be widely distributed between the knowledge of how to live, how to do and how to formally conceptualize.
These observations today involve research policies, and in particular the problem of financial incentives for innovation-driven research. The latter proceeds from fundamental research, which is always conceived in intermittences dedicated to the ‘pure life of the mind’. This purity is obviously an ideality, since the life of the mind and spirit is conditioned by organological and pharmacological impurity. It is, however, by being projected onto the plane of consistences to which the organological can grant access – for example, in the way Leibniz sees in leisure the possibility of examining and speculating – that spirit noetizes in its effects.
So-called ‘breakthrough’ innovations are possible only on the condition of allowing such improbable occurrences to occur, and by letting them occur after these non-programmable intermittences – even if the most favourable conditions for such an emergence, without which they would remain the hidden face of the improbable, can and should be maintained and cultivated. In industrial capitalism, which has from the beginning rearranged otium and negotium, scientific research that generates innovation, thereby installing ‘technoscience’, has always involved organological transformations that themselves generate positive but also negative pharmacological consequences.
A reorganization of science from a neganthropological perspective is indispensable today, in this current stage of the new speculative organology in which digital tertiary retention consists – and which enables the best and the worst speculative pharmacologies. To investigate this question, by way of a conclusion that in turn prepares the way for the second volume of Automatic Society, we are obliged to return to Yann Moulier-Boutang's allegory.