Florian believes his generation will be the last, ‘or one of the last, before the end’. Such is the state of Florian’s morale [moral] – and I will return to this in Chapter 8, on the question of what ties ‘thought’ to so-called ‘morale’, which we either ‘have’ or ‘do not have’, which equally ties thinking to melancholy, which is also to say, to madness. Hence we will ask what morale means (from moralis, ‘related to mores, manners’), and, more generally, what there is of morality in the fact of ‘having [good] morale’, and about demoralization. The last generation, or one of the last, before the end: such is the extreme demoralization of Florian and his generation.
In the horizon of becoming [devenir], Florian sees no possible future [avenir] for his generation – which is also to say, for the human species. He formulates in clear, simple and terrifying terms what everyone thinks, but which everyone represses – except a few who hurtle into the Twin Towers by plane, or into mountains, or into Christmas markets, or through the window of a police station after having killed or injured twenty-seven people (we should also mention Columbine, Breivik and many others – and it will be necessary to discuss the Kouachi brothers).
I will return to this repression, and the denial to which it leads, in Chapter 13.
Expressing this in the language of phenomenology, and returning to questions emerging from Martin Heidegger’s existential analytic, we could say that for Florian, no positive collective protention is possible: there is no protention other than the end of all protention, that is, the end of all dreams and any possibility of realizing them. Florian’s vision of the world and of his future is entirely subject to an absolutely negative protention: the complete disappearance of humankind.
We can try to imagine what the complete disappearance of humankind means for Florian. It could be envisaged as the self-extermination of humanity through a total and final world war. It could occur through a series of apocalyptic accidents. It could also be the outcome of climate change and its adverse effects on life in general and human life in particular. The last of these possibilities was the subject of a United Nations conference held in Paris from 30 November to 12 December 2015, which everyone knew would achieve next to nothing.
No doubt all these possibilities get mixed together for members of the younger generations, in various ways and with many other factors and causes for despair, in particular on the economic level, and more so still when this level is found to be massively subject to the disruptive madness of full and generalized automation.1
In 2015, the accumulation of these disasters that have affected men and women since the beginning of the twenty-first century2 became conjoined to the attenuation of every form of will, and the result has been the proliferation of barbaric behaviour – all this gives everyone, and not only Florian’s generation, every reason to believe that the world is on a path to ruin, and in short order.
It is then a question of understanding how it is possible that, at the very moment it becomes apparent to everyone that humanity and life in general are threatened by the madness that currently governs the world in partnership with systemic stupidity (or ‘functional stupidity’3), people find themselves seemingly unable to create the conditions for a radical bifurcation – not the disruptive ‘radical innovation’ of the kind claimed by those startup entrepreneurs who present themselves as ‘new barbarians’,4 but, on the contrary, a bifurcation taking account of the radicality of this disruption from the perspective of a new public power, such that it could once again create an epoch.
It is impossible to live in a society without positive collective protentions, but the latter are the outcome of intergenerational and transgenerational transmission. Such protentions – which belong to what the Greeks in the age of Hesiod called elpis (ἐλπίς), a word that means expectation [attente], both as hope and as fear,5 and which is the condition of attention – are the boundaries and boundary markers of the care that must be taken of the world (κόσμος).
Inhabited by this ‘unsettling’ [inquiétant] being that is the human,6 this κόσμος is always exposed to hubris (ὕβρις), collective protentions of which open up a ‘general economy’ – in Georges Bataille’s sense of this notion,7 conceived in a fundamental relationship to sacrifice – through being inscribed into calendarities and cardinalities, each time specific, of one civilization or another.
These cardinalities and calendarities have been not only upset, but literally overturned by the advent of the culture industry, and yet more by digitalization as the convergence of telecommunications, the audiovisual and computing, a convergence that leads to reticulated, automatic society.
Today, the Christian calendar has been imposed throughout the entire world by all those clocks that synchronize every digital device – billions of devices, a huge number of which can be found in the pockets of terrestrial inhabitants connected by the industry of ‘cloud computing’, data centres, geostationary satellites and the algorithms of intensive computing, together forming what Heidegger called Gestell.
In so doing, the Christian calendar short-circuits every other form of calendarity, while itself becoming completely secularized as the system becomes purely computational – totally secularized, as Max Weber understood, and which Jacques Derrida described as ‘globalatinization’ [mondialatinisation].8
In such a purely computational context, individual as well as collective protentions fade away. Such is our ‘desolate time’.9 And such is the incommensurable tragedy of Florian and his generation. In the time of this generation, which is also that of ‘digital natives’,10 nobody seems capable of producing intergenerational and transgenerational collective protentions, except ones that are purely negative – such a negative teleology thereby reaches its end without purpose (and not that purposiveness without end that provides the motives of Kantian reason).11
As such, Florian and his generation, and us – who are surviving with them, and among them, rather than truly living with them, since to live, for a noetic soul, is to exist by sharing ends, that is, collectively projecting dreams, desires and wills – we all, as and with Florian, we all, insofar as we are, find ourselves thrown into and thrown out by the epoch of the absence of epoch.
In earlier works (and in my first book12), I have tried to understand the meaning of an epoch via what philosophers call the epokhē. This Greek word, ἐποχή, refers to both ‘a period of time, an era, an epoch’, and to an ‘arrest’, an ‘interruption’, a ‘suspension of judgement’, a ‘state of doubt’.
It is as such a suspension of judgement that the epokhē has become an element of philosophical vocabulary – used in particular by the Stoics and the Sceptics. And it was in these terms that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was revived by Edmund Husserl and placed at the centre of phenomenology – as a noetic method, that is, a path of thinking.
In a singular situation and by a path that I will retrace in summary in Chapter 5, in particular in §§28 and following, I came to the point of myself positing that what the philosophers call the epokhē – such that it lies at the origin of a conversion of the gaze, of a change in the way of thinking, and, through that, of a transformation of what Heidegger called ‘the understanding that there-being (Dasein) has of its being’13 (which, as we will see, consists in the individual and collective production of ‘circuits of transindividuation’) – this philosophical and more generally noetic epokhē (produced by a new form of thinking in general) is always the outcome of a techno-logical upheaval, itself derived from what Bertrand Gille described as a change in the technical system.14
A change of technical system always initially entails a disadjustment between this technical system and what Bertrand Gille called the social systems,15 which had hitherto been ‘adjusted’ to the preceding technical system, and which had therein formed, along with it, an ‘epoch’ – but where the technical system as such fades into the background, forgotten as it disappears into everydayness, just as, for a fish, what disappears from view, as its ‘element’, is water.
Heidegger describes this vanishing of the technical element into everydayness (its forgetting) in §§12–18 of Being and Time.16 What he shows is that the facticity of the world and of the epoch in which it presents itself becomes obvious and inevitable when there is an interruption of the technical element. This occurs, for example, when a tool we are using becomes broken: what is thereby revealed is the fragility of the technical element.
Heidegger’s analysis must be carried over to another plane: not that of the tool, but of the technical system, which Heidegger himself thought in terms of a ‘system of reference’ (§17) and as phenomena related to what he calls ‘relevance’ or ‘involvement’ (Bewandtnis), as a complex of tools or a ‘technical ensemble’, as Simondon described it, and which, becoming in the twentieth century entirely globalized (as what Jacques Ellul would describe as the ‘technological system’17), develops into what Heidegger will in 1949 begin to call Gestell.18
When a change of technical system occurs – in Bertrand Gille’s sense – the epoch from which it originated comes to an end: a new epoch emerges, generally at the cost of military, religious, social and political conflicts of all kinds.
But the new epoch emerges only when – on the occasion of these conflicts, and due to the loss of the salience of the preceding epoch’s knowledge and powers of living, doing and conceiving – new ways of thinking, new ways of doing and new ways of living take shape, which are ‘new forms of life’ in Georges Canguilhem’s sense, on the basis of precursors reconfiguring the retentions inherited from the earlier epoch into so many new kinds of protention.
These new kinds of protention are new expressions of will, which we must understand here in the sense of the Greek βουλή (which is both the will of the citizen and that of the city), and constitute new forms of expectation (ἐλπίς) – that is, of desire and of the economy from which it stems: the libidinal economy, from which emerges, then, a new epoch. An epoch is always a specific configuration of the libidinal economy, organized around the ensemble of tertiary retentions (that is, around the technical supports of collective retention) that form, through their arrangement, a new technical system, which is always also a retentional system.
A libidinal economy is an economy of desire insofar as it is always both individual and collective. Desire is structured by a field of protentions that one inherits and then projects in a singular way, on the basis of collective retentions transmitted by the intergenerational play that is regulated by models of education at the different stages of life.
When tertiary retentions have adjusted to social systems, they tend always to be forgotten, just as water is forgotten by the fish. Nevertheless, in intergenerational processes of transmission, tertiary retentions radically condition the relationships between psychic individuals, and, through them, between collective individuals – between the mother and the infans, between the child and his or her siblings as well as other children, between the adolescent and the social milieu, between adults, between adults and new generations, and hence between generations, and, through the generations, between social groups, and so on.
In the contemporary epoch of the absence of epoch, the role of digital tertiary retentions in the intergenerational (non)relationship, and in the (non)formation of collective retentions and protentions, is both perfectly obvious and totally escapes comprehension – because there is no longer any adjustment between the new technical system and the social systems. Far from adjusting the social systems by reshaping them to suit a ‘new epoch’, the technical system short-circuits them and, ultimately, destroys them.
When a technical system engenders a new epoch, the emergence of new forms of thinking is translated into religious, spiritual, artistic, scientific and political movements, manners and styles, new institutions and new social organizations, changes in education, in law, in forms of power, and, of course, changes in the very foundations of knowledge – whether this is conceptual knowledge or work-knowledge [savoir-faire] or life-knowledge [savoir-vivre]. But this happens only in a second stage, that is, after the techno-logical epokhē has taken place.
This is why an epoch always occurs through a doubly epokhal redoubling:
The disruption that is the digital technical system is one such epokhē: disruption is one such suspension of all previous ways of thinking, which were elaborated by appropriating previous changes of technical systems (and of the mnemotechnical and hypomnesic systems20 that must be understood as processes of grammatization, which I will not discuss here21). But this epokhē is disruptive precisely in that it gives absolutely no place to the second moment, nor therefore to any thinking: it gives rise only to an absolute emptiness of thought, to a kenosis so radical that Hegel himself would not have been able to anticipate it.22 It is, however, what Nietzsche would later see coming ‘on doves’ feet’ – as the ordeal of nihilism.
The grotesque dimension of so-called ‘intellectual debate’, in France especially, which the French media discussed in autumn 2015, is a pathetic symptom of this fact.
In the midst of disruption, the second stage of the doubly epokhal redoubling fails to occur: there is no transindividuation. And hence there arises no new form of thinking capable of being translated into new organizations, new institutions, new behaviours and so on – through which an epoch properly speaking could be constituted. Behaviours, as ways of living, are being replaced by automatisms and addictions. At the same time, intergenerational and transgenerational relations are unravelling: transmission of knowledge has been prevented, and there are no protentions of desires that would be capable of bringing about a growth of transgenerational experience – of which ritual, religious or civil calendarities were hitherto the frameworks.
The age of disruption23 is the epoch of the absence of epoch, announced and foreshadowed not just by Adorno and Horkheimer as the ‘new kind of barbarism’, but by Heidegger as the ‘end of philosophy’, by Maurice Blanchot as the advent of ‘impersonal forces’, by Jacques Derrida as ‘monstrosity’, and, before all of these, by Nietzsche as nihilism.24 From around 1990, Deleuze broached this question, along with Guattari, in terms of the question of control societies and the ‘dividuation’ of individuals. Simondon didn’t see it at all.
An epoch is what enables collective protentions to be established through the constitution of new circuits of transindividuation. Forms of thinking and forms of life are thereby metastabilized,25 transindividuated by the psychic individuals of the epoch, through which new processes of collective individuation form, and thus new social groups and social systems, new social organizations and so on.26 Circuits emerge through affective relations of various kinds – transitional, filial, friendship, familial, cooperative, recreational, religious, relations of power or knowledge – forging dreams, goals, objectives and common horizons, for which close friends and family play an indispensable role.
There are collective protentions only to the extent that there are collective retentions. The latter constitute forms of knowledge. They are transmitted collectively through educational organizations, and acquired over the course of life in its various stages – as elementary motor and language retentions, then as sayings, representations, formulas, rules, skills, doctrines, dogmas, narratives, ideas and theories. All these are what provide those capabilities by which the past can be interpreted, and it is from such interpretations that psychic and collective projections of the future can arise.
Heidegger transformed Husserlian phenomenology into an existential analytic (presenting itself as a development of phenomenology, one that takes the fundamental axioms of the Husserlian epokhē into account, while at the same time reforming them) when he explicitly and absolutely articulated psychic retentions (the mnesic elements forming the psychē of this or that individual, the individual being here what Heidegger called Dasein) and collective retentions.
Heidegger thus showed the following:
This knowledge is, in other words, the knowledge of a default, and a default of knowledge. It is a knowledge by default.
On the basis of these considerations, which emerged from a reading of Being and Time and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, I have tried to extend the Husserlian concepts of retention and protention, and at the same time the Heideggerian concepts of the already there, epoch, historiality and spatiality, by forming the concept of tertiary retention – and, more recently, and in discussion with the work of Yuk Hui, of tertiary protention.33
Tertiary retention is, as we shall see, what compensates for the default of retention – which is also to say, the loss of both memory and knowledge. But it is also what accentuates this loss (this default): it is a pharmakon.34
Tertiary retentions and protentions allow us to understand what Heidegger investigated under the names of ‘datability’ and ‘utility’.35 Fields of collective retentions and protentions are thus shaped by the retentional systems of calendarity and cardinality36 that underpin the epochs and, usually, traverse epokhalities – hence many epochs can belong to a single era, such as, for example, the epochs of the Christian era.37
Dasein can receive the retentions that it inherits from an already-there past as its own retentions (by adopting them38) only because the latter are inscribed in the factical and technical space of the world (including as language), thereby constituting what, at the end of Being and Time, Heidegger called Dasein’s ‘world-historiality’ (Weltgeschichtlichkeit), that is, the fact that temporality (and its historiality, Geschichtlichkeit) is already there before it in the world, as relics, monuments, stories, as its past that it nevertheless did not live.
This is what Heidegger shows in §76 of Being and Time in order to account for the possibility of historiography. But this is, before anything else, what conditions what he describes in §6, namely, that ‘the past of Dasein always already precedes it’. This is possible, however, only because:
Dasein’s psychic retentions are made possible by tertiary retentions that are collective thanks to the very fact that they are exteriorized and spatialized. Dasein is thus able to share, with other psychic individuals, collective tertiary retentions that it apprehends as its own retentions, and which belong to the same epoch (and to the same ‘culture’) as those with whom this Dasein shares these retentions. From this it follows, too, that individuals of the same epoch and the same culture have, if not quite the same expectations, at least a common horizon of the convergence of their expectations, forming at infinity the common protention of a common future – the undetermined unity of a horizon of expectation – which is also ultimately the future of humankind, that is, of noesis as worthy of being lived in a non-inhuman way.
We have seen, then, that such sharing constitutes the background or the funds [fonds] of an epoch (and more precisely what Simondon called its preindividual funds). Digital tertiary retention, however, which constitutes the digital technical system, is disruptive because it takes control of this sharing. This is what I have called, in pursuing the reflections of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, societies of hyper-control.
These societies, however, are no longer quite societies, if it is true that a society is constituted only within an epoch: they are aggregations of individuals who are increasingly disindividuated (disintegrated). More and more, this is leading to the rise of that new kind of barbarism glimpsed in 1944, the contemporary realization of which is what we are here calling disruption.
The reconstitution of a true automatic society can occur only by establishing a true economy of sharing – whereas what the current disruption produces is, on the contrary, a diseconomy of sharing, that is, a destruction of those who share by the means of what they share.
Along with Ars Industrialis, I call this true sharing economy the economy of contribution, which is the subject of the two volumes of Automatic Society, where what is absolutely shared is knowledge as negentropic potentiality. And it is shared as work, in the sense that the father Schaeffer said to his son, Pierre:
Work at your instrument.41