After 9/11 and its terrifying aftermath, and fed by the second Iraq war, countless catastrophes have followed, all of which seem in retrospect to amount to a chain reaction of planetary proportions and immeasurable complexity.
In this tragic period for the whole planet, the ‘economic crisis’ that began in 2008 marked a turning point, like the first crack in a sinking ship – for which the Greek people would be the great sacrificial victim whose lament seems to sound the death knell for all of Europe. This totally irrational sacrifice is an exorcism that pretends to ward off evils that have been accumulating for decades – even though it is bound to worsen the effects to the extreme.
Starting in 2014, in the oil zone of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, where since 1990 two wars against an international coalition (in addition to the Iran-Iraq war) led to the total disintegration of the Iraqi state, a group of former partners of Al-Qaeda, having become competitors to this network and emerging from the manipulations of American intelligence services during the Afghanistan war, baptized themselves Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and proclaimed in the so-called Sham region a ‘caliphate’, claiming possession both of what was once ancient Mesopotamia (and which from the end of the First World War until 1932 was occupied by British troops) and the Syrian regions that had engaged in civil war after the impact of the ‘Arab Spring’.
Syria, which had been the subject of a highly contradictory set of discourses in the West, then became a phantasmatic region channelling a ‘radicalization’ through which, in January 2015 in France, barbarism took a new turn.1
According to Ignatius Leverrier’s summary, Abu Bakr Naji, one of the key strategists behind the war led by Daesh, has argued in Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Islamic Nation Will Pass2 for the need to create ‘chaotic territories’:
Provoking an outburst of violence in Muslim countries, jihadists will contribute to the exhaustion of state structures and to establishing a situation of chaos and savagery. People lose trust in their governments, governments which, overwhelmed, will respond to violence only with greater violence. Jihadis must seize the chaotic situation they have caused and gain popular support by imposing themselves as the only alternative. By restoring security, by providing social services, by distributing food and medicine, and by taking over territorial administration, they will manage the chaos, conforming to a Hobbesian schema of state construction. As ‘chaotic territories’ are extended, the regions administered by the jihadis will multiply, forming the kernel of their future caliphate. Convinced or not, the people will accept this Islamic governance.3
This ‘administration of savagery’ can thus be considered disruptive, and it is worth comparing it to the vocabulary of those, such as the founders of The Family, who present themselves as ‘new barbarians’, and who themselves ‘attack’.
The Family, ‘a structure for coaching and financing startups’,4 says that no sector should be spared from disruption. On a website called ‘Les barbares attaquent’, they set out, through a series of texts and recorded lectures, strategies for conquest (that is, if we take them at their word, for overthrowing civilization) in the following sectors:
Agriculture – Insurance – Automotive – Business Services – Consulting – Social Dialogue – CIOs – Publishing – Education – National Education – Employment – Energy – Finance – Financing – Building and Construction – Hollywood – Immigration – Real Estate – Luxury Goods – Media – Family Policy – Employment Policy – Public Environmental Policies – Human Resources – Retail – Health – Telecommunications – Regions – Textiles – Tourism – Transport and Logistics – Public Transport.5
According to L’Obs, the word ‘barbarian’, as taken up by the founders of The Family, was inspired by the reaction of a young startup entrepreneur named Antoine Brachet against a ‘ranking’ by the Institut Choiseul, a ‘liberal think tank’ for those most ‘successful’ in business.6 In opposition to this ‘elitization’, Brachet created another ranking, published on a Facebook page entitled ‘100 Barbarians’, where one can find, notably, Nicolas Colin, co-founder of The Family. It seems safe to assume that Alessandro Baricco’s short work, The Barbarians: An Essay on the Mutation of Culture, also inspired Brachet.7
This list of 100 barbarians, which would therefore purport to be a ranking of the ‘best’, shows that ‘those who succeed […] are the radical innovators’. Here, radicalization, which constitutes the criterion of ‘success’, does not refer to the admirers of Daesh, manipulated by strategists practising the method of chaos, perhaps inspired by the shock doctrine;8 it describes the state of mind of the zealots of disruption, whom we discover to be not the only candidates in the ‘digital business’ ‘success story’.9 There are also scientists who, as Evgeny Morozov puts it, want to ‘hack’ the academy, others who want to ‘hack’ the state, activists who defend the ideas of Pierre Rabhi, and so on.
This new shock strategy that is disruption, according to Sophie Fay, a journalist at L’Obs, is, for the ‘100 barbarians’, a matter of ‘getting France moving’, confronted with the digital disruption to which it would be necessary to ‘adapt’.10 These ‘radical barbarian innovators’ are above all promoters of new ‘scientific and technical opportunities [who] do not care about the usual conventions’.11 Science and technology are the weapons of the new shock strategy. This is so because, according to Pierre Pezziardi, who is one of their number, ‘innovation is a disturbance of the established order’. Is this indeed the case, and what is being referred to here as order? And what, then, would be its relation to the disorder that comes to disturb it?
Contrary to initial appearances, Bertrand Gille argued from a very different perspective than do the new barbarians: if innovation indeed disturbs an ‘established order’, it is successful only if it establishes a new order, or in other words another metastability12 – that is, new circuits of transindividuation – and not a state of shock and permanent chaos, to be manipulated for their own benefit by strategists advocating permanent and unlimited innovation, as so many perpetual coups d’état, or constant activity designed to ‘exhaust state structures’, as the Daesh ideologue put it.
In the ‘Prolegomema’ to his History of Techniques, Gille shows, by referring to François Perroux, that innovation is a process of convergence towards a new metastable equilibrium not just of the technical system within which it occurs, and from which it stems, but also with the social systems that it initially ‘disadjusts’.13
If such a metastable readjustment failed to occur, the technical system would inevitably destroy these social systems, even though, without such social structures, technical individuation itself could not continue and could no longer be revitalized via social individuation, any more than through psychic individuation – since, the one having been destroyed, the destruction of the other would inevitably follow. It is on this fundamental point that, with respect to innovation, the concepts of Simondon and Gille are incompatible with those of neoliberal libertarians.
What we are witnessing today is precisely the destruction of social systems by the technical system, and this is what is referred to as disruption, which the new barbarians claim to exploit, but at the risk of destroying psychic individuals themselves – that is, of making them both incapable14 and mad, while promoting their replacement by more controllable automatisms.
But this disruption does not produce dramatic upheaval just for the social systems: it has the same effect on the biosphere in all its dimensions, notably in its dimensions as a climatic, geographical, demographic and biological system.
Consumer capitalism – whose effects in the United States were described by Adorno and Horkheimer at the end of the Second World War – has destroyed the libidinal economy and, through that, has installed a ‘new kind of barbarism’. It is now trying to compensate for the extreme disenchantment to which exhaustion of the social systems has given rise by radicalizing itself – by becoming purely, simply and absolutely computational, imposing automated understanding on every kind of activity via the algorithms of social reticulation, which outstrips and overtakes every critique of reason.15 Reason finds itself systemically short-circuited. The reality of disruption is the loss of reason.16
Purely and simply computational capitalism is as such the effective accomplishment and perfect completion of nihilism. Nihilism is the process that solidifies what is now called the Anthropocene. In the epoch of disruption proclaimed by the new barbarians, the Anthropocene is reaching its final stage – what, in an article published in Nature entitled ‘Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere’, twenty-two scientists have called the ‘shift’.17 It is this state of affairs that constitutes Florian’s horizon without expectations.
Doomed to sink into a blind automatism closed in on itself, aiming like the barbarians of Daesh at the ‘exhaustion of state structures’ and all forms of public power (that is, all forms of power exposed to contradictory and rational public debate), this purely, simply and absolutely computational capitalism, this radicalized capitalism, reactively engenders radicalizations of every kind, yet it can produce only an extreme rise of entropy on planet earth, and with it provoke a global despair bearing the seeds of all manner of madness. Disruption, having become a strategy not just of shock but of chaos, is an extraordinary accelerator of the ‘shift’, and is in this way itself literally madness.
Imposing itself as permanent disadjustment, never allowing time for a readjustment of the social systems, installing an unsustainable absence of epoch that is necessarily also an absence of reasons for living, thereby ruining processes of psychic and collective individuation, disruption radicalizes the reversal of all values that is nihilism.
This radicalization can lead only to self-destruction: it exhausts the societies that it exploits, and it necessarily exhausts itself along with them – and at short order. The reversal of all values by nihilism requires their transvaluation via a leap into an economy founded on valuing and promoting negentropy and conceived as a reformulation of the ‘great health’ required by this pharmacology – beyond what Nietzsche called active nihilism.18
Hence the conception by Ars Industrialis of a true economy of contribution – which involves the creation of a contributory income remunerating the creation of negentropic value. For this, knowledge in all its forms (of living, doing and conceptualizing) must be rethought under the banner of a neganthropology, so that we may enter the Neganthropocene.
Disruption installs as state of fact an automatic society founded on the generalization of those logical automatons that are algorithms, outstripping and overtaking biological, psychic and social automatisms. But this installation is not an establishing [instauration]: in its current stage of immaturity, disruption destroys all social bonds, that is, it destroys what Aristotle called philia, which alone contains madness.
This state of fact cannot last long: it will end either in an exit from disruption as absence of epoch, or in the end of humankind – as non-inhuman kind – by an entropic draining that radicalizes psychosocial disintegration, and that is bound to unleash madness at all levels of disindividuation19 by closing off every possibility of forming critical protentions.
Critical protentions constitute what Kant called ends. The faculty of reason that forms such protentions is what automatic understanding overtakes: it operates between one and four million times more quickly.
The ghost of madness constantly haunts non-inhuman beings as their inevitable ὕβρις: insofar as they constitute what Canguilhem describes as the technical form of life, they contain an instability. The disadjustment to which the appearance of a new pharmakon always gives rise is the historical reflection of this instability, and it is what the knowledge of how to live, do and conceptualize formed within social systems takes care of: these forms of knowledge are always therapies for the ὕβρις contained in the pharmacology of each particular epoch.
The exosomatic genesis of the non-inhuman being becomes organogenesis by generating, on the basis of the new artificial organs emerging from exosomatization, the new psychic organizations and new social organizations characteristic of the epoch. Such geneses are possible only on the basis of the phantasmatic and hallucinatory condition of all protentions, both psychic and collective: the noetic soul hallucinates the plane of consistency, which does not exist, and for which transitional space maintains access for the infans via transitional objects – which are the first instances of the pharmakon in the life of the child.
The madness of ὕβρις always occurs through a confusion of the planes of subsistence, existence and consistence. In barbarism, whether it occurs within or outside civilization, it is the ghost of this madness that possesses the ‘barbarians’ as their ὕβρις, including when it is manifested in the kind of ‘end of an era’ behaviour that accompanies all great collapses.
This is possible only because, in the pharmacological condition, the possibility of madness is the condition of reason, and, so to speak, its reason. Madness, which always remains in the background of reason as its possibility, is both the negentropic and the entropic condition of Neganthropos. The Anthropocene is ὕβρις as the entropic inversion of reason in the sense described by Adorno and Horkheimer – an inversion in the course of which the Aufklärung turns into a ‘new kind of barbarism’.
What this implies is that, if there is a history of madness, as Michel Foucault endeavoured to show, it is fundamentally tied to the history of the pharmakon – or what Jacques Derrida also called the supplement. Chapter 9 will return to these themes, passing through Michaël Foessel reading Blaise Pascal, and by revisiting the debate between Foucault and Derrida concerning the status of madness in Descartes.
Before engaging with this question of madness and its history, we will return to disruption as a radicalization of the pharmacological question, whereby the madness of ὕβρις has been the condition of neganthropogenesis ever since the default of origin – where the default of origin, or the default of identity hallucinating identifications, is a primordial condition of instability and metastability, and where the unstable becomes metastable only via circuits of transindividuation that condition its individuation. Failing which, it becomes mad.
In a short text to which I will return shortly, Alain Juppé spoke of the need for ‘reform’: ‘reform’ is the obsession of politicians who call themselves ‘reformers’. If ‘reform’ is necessary, it is because ‘modernity’ is characterized by constant disadjustment.
Disruption does not burden itself with reform: it dissolves it and replaces it with a state of fact that renders the very notion of law obsolete. Chris Anderson’s proclamations of the ‘end of theory’20 are utterly comparable with the words of the new barbarians: we do not burden ourselves with law or right [droit]. Such is their ‘credo’ – or their miscreant disbelief [mécréance]: they do not believe in the difference of fact and law, that is, the need to make this difference, and to constantly remake it, to take care of it, to cultivate and protect it, however illusory it may seem with respect to facts, however hallucinatory may be the protentions whose sharing makes possible this difference in the making.21
It is a matter, through the ranking of the ‘100 barbarians’, and in their own terms, of ‘spotting the leaders who are truly capable of changing France’.22
This idea of change, which in this case has nothing reformist about it, is exclusively concerned with economic initiative, deliberately and strategically short-circuiting any political deliberation – on the grounds that it is too slow, hence totally ineffective, and better replaced by the calculations of the market.
It is a matter, in other words, of radicalizing the conservative revolution – which was itself a radical critique of social-democratic reformism and the ‘Fordist-Keynesian compromise’. It is equally a matter of submitting all material, formal and final causes to the efficient cause that would be disruption in its self-sufficiency, that is, without any other purpose than efficiency itself. It is a matter of outstripping and overtaking the law and its ends through the efficiency of facts.
This reign of the state of fact leads to the liquidation of public power: what the barbarians attack is the legitimacy of the public thing – inasmuch as it is in principle not appropriable by private initiatives. The attack of the barbarians is a claim, if not of pure illegality, at least of the vanity of law, against which disruption enables ‘unblocking France’ by multiplying legal vacuums – and thereby creating chaos. It is in this way that accomplished nihilism realizes the ‘new kind of barbarism’.
It is a matter of standing outside the law by situating oneself as being prior to it, of creating a situation in which it always arrives too late, if not of going ‘outside the law’ in the usual sense. Disruption amounts to nothing other than the ultra-liberal, so-called ‘libertarian’ programme, which claims to absorb the social and the political into the technological and economic by crushing them: when technology is computational, it makes it possible to algorithmically dissolve the social, to reduce it to the calculable in an economy that has itself become purely, simply and absolutely computational.
What follows from this state of fact is the dissolution of the state of law itself: this is the real programme of the new barbarians, and it is why they present themselves as barbarians. In the name of the purely computational economy, disruption continues to extend in fact the domains of lawlessness [non-droit], creating legal vacuums by the very speed at which ‘radical innovation’ operates. This is, indeed, a radicalization of the way the real is placed outside the law, operating through the creation of a competition of speed.
What the new barbarians denounce in the state of law is something unreal, a juridical fiction that they claim to be illegitimate, an illusion and an economic aberration that invalidates the technologies of reputation – which, in the form of the data economy, and by consolidating the protentions automatically extracted from the digital retentions of us all, produces a purely computational ‘general will’. On this basis, they declare that the ‘social pact’ formalized in law is now obsolete.
What they ignore is that the illusion and the juridical fiction are necessary, in the sense that, obviously, injustice reigns in the reality of facts. The law is indeed an illusion, and this illusion makes it possible, through those hallucinatory collective protentions that are also called principles, to potentially load reality with neganthropic possibilities to come, against the facts, that is, against entropy – to charge it up with what, within entropic becoming, comes to constitute itself in a negentropic way against every expectation reducible to a calculation.
It is as this state of fact – the fact of permanent and ever more rapid techno-economic evolution installing a state of lawlessness that is also a generalized state of exception, wherein surveillance and repression (including drones and lethal weapons that organologically transform the administration of death23) constantly proliferate – that disruption concretizes the ‘new kind of barbarism’ foreshadowed in 1944, and it does so by radicalizing it, that is, by taking it to the extreme.
Does this mean that computational and reticular technology, which the new ‘barbarians’ claim embodies everything that is best about ‘hacking’ public power, is structurally opposed to the constitution of a new res publica, that is, to the birth of a new era of civilization and law?
The conviction of Ars Industrialis is, on the contrary, that the digital pharmakon – which, through the speed at which it functions, makes it possible for calculation to destroy the improbable, that is, desire, affection, attachment, identification, singularity, individuation and the feeling of existing psychically and thus collectively, which are the conditions of any neganthropy, that is, the conditions of any positively protentional hallucination – this digital pharmakon, destroyer of neganthropy, is also the bearer of a new epoch of psychic and collective individuation, that is, of a new neganthropy, constituting and harbouring a new form of epokhality.
From this second stage of the disruptive doubly epokhal redoubling, there must emerge a new condition of doubly epokhal redoubling. This requires a complete reconsideration of what is involved in the concept of the ‘public’ inasmuch as it is woven through processes of transindividuation. A new public thing is required to open up a new age of deliberation, by drawing on the sources of reticulated digital mēkhanē, which is first and foremost an organ of publication.
This organ of collective capacitation, that is, of the formation and sharing of protentions characteristic of what we call the public good, must, through a contributory economy, cultivate the knowledge of life, work and conceptualization. And it must cultivate these as knowledge and power that produce a bifurcation beyond the disruptive chaos.
This requires that we effect a great bifurcation in the Anthropocene, leaping into the Neganthropocene, and saving the history of life from irreversibly crushing itself. Life forms that have evolved must not be allowed just to turn into dust, which is what looms in the epoch of the new mass extinction of species – the sixth, according to scientists from ‘Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley, among others’, an event that, according to Gerardo Ceballos of the Autonomous University of Mexico, has every chance of leading to the disappearance of the human species itself.24
Such would be the outcome of the kind of barbarism that the new barbarians, who would like to dissolve neganthropic law into the entropy of computational facts, embody as its contemporary realization.
Contrary to their claims, these new barbarians are in no way radical innovators. They want to subject European civilization to a disruption conceived and driven outside France and Europe, largely according to the interests and business models of the Big Four, and by entering into a world dominated by what management theory refers to as ecosystems.
All these global-scale companies cultivate such ecosystems, which are conceived according to a form of social Darwinism, where the selection is accomplished through economic competition, itself understood as a struggle for life that eliminates the weak. This perspective – which is not that of Darwin but rather of his cousin, Francis Galton – takes no account of what Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen called exosomatization, inasmuch as the latter radically changes the conditions of life, and does so long before there is any possibility of the kind of ‘enhancement’ conceived by the transhumanists.
In the exosomatization characteristic of neganthropological evolution, organogenesis is expressed in the constant reorganization of the psychosomatic organs of psychic individuals, which is demanded by the appearance of the new artificial organs in which this exosomatization consists. Psychic individuals are compelled to undergo long apprenticeships during which they interiorize collective secondary retentions, that is, knowledge.
On the basis of this knowledge, which they inherit but then transform, individuals and the groups they form produce protentions that are each time new – resulting in collective retentions and protentions via the formation of social organizations. It is this knowledge and the artificial organs that put it to work that here become decisive for the future [avenir] insofar as the latter is not reducible to becoming [devenir]. This is why the struggle for life, which is the condition of what Schrödinger called negative entropy, or negentropy, can no longer be the criterion for the formation of the societies that constitute neganthropic evolution.
In the technical form of life, the struggle against entropy becomes neganthropic precisely in that it suspends the pressure of natural selection. The latter is replaced by selection criteria operating between retentions and protentions and in the service of a struggle for existence and consistences via knowledge, that is, for the metastabilization of a neganthropological order that is also a relative – that is, metastable – disorder.
Knowledge, here, means the power to produce bifurcations that do not destroy access to those previous bifurcations that are the collective secondary retentions whose accumulation forms knowledge. Preserved and reproduced through the transmission of knowledge, these earlier bifurcations, which grant meaning to bifurcations to come, constitute the ultimate meaning of what, in Meno, Socrates called anamnesis.25
The radicalization of innovation claimed by the new barbarians on the contrary brings to completion the process of proletarianization that in the nineteenth century became the condition of the Anthropocene – that is, of industrial capitalism – and that at the beginning of the twenty-first century has been extended to all human activities through full and general algorithmic automation. The latter is absorbing and eliminating all forms of knowledge, sterilizing them, and thereby dissipating the neganthropic potentials accumulated by civilizations and destroying the ends around which the latter were constituted, leaving non-inhuman beings in despair.
Non-inhuman beings tend then to become inhuman. Ruining the neganthropic dynamic, what the new barbarians claim to be a radicalization of innovation is in fact a continuation of a process that began with the conservative revolution in the early 1980s, a process that aimed to liquidate the regulation of disadjustment by public power.
With digital disruption, this ultra-liberal and now libertarian enterprise fundamentally impoverishes economies and cultures (in particular in Europe) by destroying social structures, and knowledge along with them. This in turn leads to the disintegration of the psychic apparatus and to the unleashing of the ravaging and furious drive-based behaviours of barbarism and destructive madness.
Were we to submit to the injunctions of the ‘digital Attilas’ who would like to be our barbarians,26 we would be condemned to accept that, with the radicalization of innovation imposed by disruption, terrorist radicalization can only progress – a barbarian ‘submission’ (that of the volunteers for jihad, most of whom have no Muslim culture27) opposing another ‘submission’ just as barbarous (which in no way represents Western culture: it is on the contrary and precisely its destruction, and it claims to be such).
Faced with this, Europe – along with the rest of the world, and with what, in this world, forms the internation28 – must reinvent the technology it has let drift away from it, as Valéry said.29 Europe has forgotten its meaning and its stakes: it must, with the rest of the world and the internation that forms therein, reinvent a state of law that is also a new age of knowledge and of the organology it presupposes and that it engenders.
If, in the violence that has been proliferating and self-generating since the beginning of the twenty-first century, what is at work everywhere is disruption, then this is what we must begin to think – and to think care-fully [panser]30 – not in order to ‘conquer the world’, but to save it.