Abstract
Translator’s Introduction
Many works by those who wish to strike a pose as being at the forefront of thinking about theory, culture and society end with a gesture, more or less rhetorical, that consists, in one way or another, in calling for the new – whether in philosophy, or politics, or in some sense that exceeds these old terms altogether. Such a call is incontestably legitimate, because the reasons for it have become obvious to all: all of the old (Western) theoretical, cultural and social systems and understandings seem only to have brought us to a hyper-systemic crisis. By ‘hyper-systemic’ is meant a convergence of crises, where numerous systems seem to be reaching their limits at the same time and in a mutually reinforcing way, and where the way out of this hyper-systemic crisis seems blocked from all sides. Given this crisis of crises, all of our old understandings seem to leave us floundering, if not directly responsible for this crisis, with no sight of any exit. But the problem is that this gesture, this call for the new, should not appear at the end of such a work, but at the beginning: the whole point is to know how to take real steps that can possibly increase our chances at actually happening upon new pathways, not simply to content ourselves with perpetually reiterating its necessity.
In short, if there is such a hyper-crisis, then it requires a hyper-critique – a critique founded in the recognition that what also makes this crisis ‘hyper’ is the fact that there is a crisis in the very possibility of critique itself, and in the possibility for critique to serve its proper end: to make possible judgments and proposals, and, on those bases, actions. It is towards the elaboration of such a hyper-critique, and the proposals that should follow from it, that all of Bernard Stiegler’s work aimed, and this remained the case in one of his final works, ‘Elements of a New Economic Foundation Based on a New Foundation for Theoretical Computer Science’, the first part of which was published as ‘Noodiversity, Technodiversity’ (Stiegler, 2020: 67–80). What distinguishes Stiegler’s work is the depth and clarity with which he sees and describes the fundamental source of our contemporary hyper-crisis, and in what follows we will briefly outline the argument put forward in the first part of this work, the better to elucidate the second part presented here.
Stiegler begins by noting that our lives have in many ways been taken over by computational technology, and that this technology forms what Gilbert Simondon called an ‘associated milieu’, akin to the Guimbal turbine, for which the oceanic milieu forms a key multifunctional element, but where, in the case of global digital network technologies, it is human beings and their data that have become the key ‘element’. From a reading of a discussion between Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben about the Covid-19 pandemic, he draws the conclusion that in this world of computational technology, we find ourselves facing increasing tendencies towards regressive forms of politics, in ways that require us to understand how such tendencies can ‘infect’ thinking that tries to respond to them, and how the whole of politics and discourse tends to become a show, in which battles between political ‘sides’ play out in ways that essentially amount to ‘postures’ that only ever succeed in reproducing the same scenes. Such infections and postures equally affect the thinking of academics, whose work is inevitably entangled with the responsibility to turn problems into questions. If thinking in general, and European and French philosophy in particular, have failed to live up to this responsibility, this is in part because they have abandoned reflection on economics and computer science, at a time when mathematics converges with physics and is applied via computational algorithms to the creation of a ‘data economy’, which aims to eliminate careful thought in general, and thought about the direction and fate of technics in particular.
The idea that we can fundamentally alter this situation, one aspect of which is the way in which the ‘freedom’ of the internet was instrumentalized by herd effects and mimetic desire (in the sense of René Girard), seems increasingly farfetched: highly improbable, if not impossible. But if we therefore have to hope and aim for the improbable, then, Stiegler insists, we must ask what the improbable really means. And he answers: the probable is the entropic tendency, and the improbable is diversity, which also means the counter-tendency giving rise to the unexpected or the unforeseen. What makes the situation we currently face seem so insurmountable is largely the fact that we live within a kind of hegemony of the probable, within systems of calculation that are premised on a conception of information as the elimination of the diverse.
Crucial to Stiegler’s assessment of this situation is the notion of grammatization, which names any process through which temporal flows are spatialized in a way that also renders them discrete, analysable and reproducible, whether these are the temporal flows of speech, grammatized in the form of writing, or the gestural flows of which tool-equipped manual crafts and skills are composed, which are grammatized mechanically in the 19th century, leading to the factories of the industrial revolution. At each stage of the process of grammatization, new forms of knowledge are produced, but knowledge is also destroyed, removed from the minds of speakers or workers, and placed into the artifact and machines on which it henceforth becomes necessary to rely. The loss of knowledge accompanying grammatization leads in the case of mechanical grammatization to a loss of the diversity of knowledge and work, replaced by the two great classes described by Marx, and for this reason Stiegler refers to this loss of knowledge as proletarianization. Yet proletarianization does not end with the grammatization of production in the 19th century, extending into the 20th century and via the culture industry to the proletarianization of ways of life and forms of culture. Today, with computational technology, global networks, social media and smartphones, the proletarianization of life is extended even further: deeper, more intimately and more performatively into public and private life, and disrupting every kind of formal and scientific knowledge as well.
Considered in more general terms, if the process of grammatization unfolds in stages, then it tends to form epochs, and these epochs amount to what Michel Foucault called epistēmēs, ‘regimes of truth’ in which certain ways of formulating understandings, knowledge and reason become dominant, characteristic of that epoch. If this is the case, Stiegler argues, then capitalism can indeed be considered as an episteme, one that is materialized by what in the Grundrisse Karl Marx called ‘fixed capital’, referring precisely to those factories of machines programmed to operate with what had hitherto been the gestures of workers. Yet if capitalism is an episteme, it is of a very peculiar type: on the one hand, yes, it amounts to a new regime of truth in which information is the operative element, tending to ‘universally’ rationalize all knowledge by making it calculable (machines and computers cannot deal with what cannot be calculated); on the other hand, the unfolding of this episteme can further itself only at the cost of producing ever more proletarianization (loss of knowledge), so that this episteme can in fact more accurately be considered an anti-episteme.
For Stiegler, a critique of this situation requires an account of the way in which this generalized proletarianization characteristic of the capitalist anti-episteme necessarily entails a regression of reason. And this is indeed a critique of reason in a Kantian sense, provided that we first recognize that the conditions of this reason can no longer be grasped as transcendental, but must rather be understood as inseparably tied to the stage of grammatization in which they are produced. What is programmed into machines and computers corresponds to what Kant called the understanding, or in other words the analytical function: a temporal flow must be made discrete, in order that it can become the subject of analysis, which is to say, in mechanical grammatization, of calculation. But the effect is the ‘hypertrophy’ of the understanding and the progressive destruction of the possibilities of reason as that synthesis involved in the faculty of decision that produces judgment.
Reason is thus a singular and incalculable process, and computers can never truly decide because they cannot produce such a singular synthetic process. But if the human world always requires singular processes of reason made possible by particular epochs and epistemes of knowledge and understanding, nevertheless it is possible to in fact create a world in which these processes are eliminated, as there unfolds a vicious circle consisting in the progressive elimination of the incalculable by computation and the corresponding increase of proletarianization, leading to an ever greater delegation of decision-making to computational processes that only reinforce the regressive aspects of this downward spiral. In this way, it is the conditions of possibility of politics as a virtuous collectivization of judgment that are progressively eliminated. Stiegler points to both Friedrich Hayek and Herbert Simon as defenders of ‘democracy’ as a space for free information, but where freedom is conceived in terms of market processes (which means: calculable processes), ultimately leading to the elimination of the conditions of knowledge and reason without which democracy becomes a performatively predetermined control machine, yet one that increasingly finds itself falling prey to regressive tendencies that send it flying out of control. But if democracy means that the demos must be the possessors of kratos, of the ability to govern themselves, this cannot be understood as the necessity of protecting a majority, or even a minority: what democracy ought in principle to protect is diversity, and this is why its conditions are those of knowledge and reason.
With this thought, Stiegler turns to the question of what has come to be called ‘technodiversity’, especially in the wake of the work of Yuk Hui entitled The Question Concerning Technology in China (Hui, 2016). If the globalization of computational capitalism has brought the hegemony of calculation and the regression of reason to every part of the planet, this ‘universalization’ of ‘Western rationality’ nevertheless also affects the very idea of ‘universality’ itself, because it effectively reduces the universal to what is computationally calculable. For Hui, this raises the question of the possibility of another technics, other than that which has been built and globalized through this universalization of Western tendencies. This ‘cosmotechnical’ question bears many similarities with Stiegler’s work, but, Stiegler asks, does this entirely understandable call for technodiversity actually make it possible for us to either say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to those ‘universal’ ‘Western’ tendencies? What would it really mean to say no? Surely not a refusal of Newtonian physics or mathematical calculability themselves. Would saying yes to universality mean trying to reorient platforms in the direction of social justice, as so-called ‘left accelerationists’ seemed for a while to believe? If, on the other hand, technological ‘diversity’ needs to be fostered to counter looming crises, surely this involves more than just introducing ‘idiomatic’ variability into software of the kind claimed to be necessary for stock market programs so as to prevent mutually reinforcing negative feedback loops.
As far as Stiegler is concerned, the question that lies behind these questions is how best to understand André Leroi-Gourhan’s account of what he calls ‘universal technical tendencies’. For Leroi-Gourhan, the technical tendency must be distinguished from the technical fact, which is the particular form in which a particular ‘ethnic cell’ realizes and materializes the manifold possibilities contained in the tendency, where it is precisely because a tendency contains this manifold potentiality that it can be described as ‘universal’: The tendency, which, by its universal nature, is charged with all of the possibilities that are expressible in general laws, traverses the interior milieu [which is to say, the past of the group, shared in artifacts and forming its culture], bathed in the mental traditions of each human group; it thus acquires particular properties, just as a beam of light acquires various properties in passing through different bodies; it encounters the exterior milieu [the world outside the group, incorporating its geography, climate and ecosystem], which offers to these acquired properties an irregular penetration, and, at the point of contact between the interior milieu and the exterior milieu, materializes that film of objects that constitutes the furniture of human beings. (Leroi-Gourhan, 1973: 339)
In the terms of Alfred J. Lotka, the process described by Leroi-Gourhan here corresponds to that of ‘exosomatic evolution’ (Lotka, 1945: 167–94). What Stiegler adds is that technical evolution in general (exosomatic exorganogenesis) must be distinguished from the evolution of retentional or memory technologies in particular (exomnesic exorganogenesis), and that the latter, which corresponds to the history of grammatization, and therefore to the unfolding of epistemic epochs, forms the conditions of the expression (in technical facts) of universal technical tendencies. While exosomatic and exomnesic evolution are entwined, they are not identical and unfold together according to a dynamic rhythm, with the particularities of their relationship profoundly influencing the technical forms that are in fact realized and materialized by the exosomatic evolution of particular human groups.
Exosomatization thus occurs through the play between tendencies, or between tendencies and counter-tendencies, and it is in this play that it generates a genuine diversity and opens to the new. What also fuels this generative capacity is the fact that the technical milieu does not stop at the borders of the group (the interior milieu), but rather goes beyond it, penetrating the exterior milieu and leading to interactions with other groups – that is, to a ‘resonance’ of interior milieus across the exterior milieu, which is both what they share and what separates them. It is not, therefore, a question of the homogeneity or the diversity of a milieu: instead, the interior, the exterior and the technical milieus all ‘mutually diffract’ one another – there are only ever milieus – and it is through the effect of such diffractions that a diversity of knowledge is produced not just between milieus but within each milieu.
Hence there is no necessary incompatibility between the ‘universality’ of universal technical tendencies and the ‘diversity’ that is fostered by (1) the relationship between exosomatic evolution and exomnesic evolution, and (2) the diffractive relationship between the interior, the exterior and the technical. In the contemporary reality of globalized digital network technologies, exploited by a financialized, speculative and disruptive world economy, the conditions for the generation of diversity are undermined, because, as Stiegler argues, both of these relationships have been transformed in unprecedented ways.
First, the fact that the whole of exosomatic evolution is now driven by computational technology means that the latter (an exomnesic technology) is fully integrated with the former, and what was hitherto a play of tendency and counter-tendency tends to be replaced by the (arti)factual character of this situation, rigidified in those standardized computational technical facts that have proliferated worldwide over the past couple of decades. Given that this ‘factuality’ consists in the elimination of the incalculable and the hegemony of calculation, this amounts to the elimination of the conditions of play between tendency and counter-tendency. Second, the global character of the contemporary technosphere means that there is no longer any exterior milieu ‘outside’ interior milieus. The ever more concrete fact that there is now only one technical milieu extending everywhere across the planet, with barely any exterior milieu separating human groups, tends to homogenize the latter and thereby to exhaust the potential for diversity on which interior milieus have always previously relied in order to find the resources making it possible to adjust to changes and crises (which are mostly crises brought by changes in the technical system).
In summary, the automation of analysis, reduced to computational calculation, and the extension of this hegemony across the globe, in a situation where the whole of technical innovation is driven by a single cognitivist and computationalist paradigm, exploited by a single economic model dominated by the subjection of all decision-making to the ‘law’ of the (probabilistic) market, leads inexorably to the elimination of (incalculable) reason and to the proletarianization of knowledge, the diversity of which constitutes the wealth on which (improbable, singular) reason depends.
Exomnesic exorganogenesis involves a meeting of three layers – the ‘physiological’ layer involving both somatic and technical organs, the ‘nervous’ layer, involving both individual minds and the social and cultural rules, spirits and formations that arrange them, and the ‘logical’ layer, which in Greece was grasped as logos but which today is dominated by those logical machines that are computers. The symbolic frameworks through which human groupings at all times and at all scales are formed and maintained are fabrics woven across the second and third of these layers. When Stiegler calls for a new theoretical computer science (théorique informatique), and at the same time for a new economic foundation, he is arguing not for a specific plan or vision of the global economic and technological future. Instead, he is calling for a practical re-organization of these two key spheres under a new sign: that of diversity, understood as that which is produced by an interaction of always singular and therefore incalculable processes, generating a ‘noodiversity’ of knowledge that alone can give resilience to any future incarnation of the biosphere-cum-technosphere, just as ecosystems cannot survive without the flourishing of biodiversity. That this noodiversity depends on overcoming our current reliance on a ‘computational mono-machine’, on recollecting the Greek distinction between noesis and metis, and on fostering the former through what he calls ‘contributory research’ conducted through a multiplicity of social experiments, is what he explains in the second part of this text, published here. Like the first part, the second ends with the promise of a continuation, but, as far as this reader knows, Stiegler ran out of time before delivering the third part: it is thus a task bequeathed to us by Bernard, under the names of the concepts that defined the task he set himself, from beginning to end – knowledge, diversity, care.