Abstract
Branching off in the Anthropocene era
The current health crisis has in no way diminished – quite the opposite, in fact – the urgent need for social scientists to engage with the grand challenges we are facing, including climate change, the future of industry and education. The theoretical proposals emanating from such reflections may be pragmatic or more radical in nature, in the sense that the solutions they envisage stray further from received wisdom and convention. Residing firmly in the latter category are the proposals championed by philosopher Bernard Stiegler. His death at the age of 68 in the summer of 2020 marked the end of a series of notable contributions over the past decade, tackling the great economic and social, technological and political challenges of our age. 1 The thirty or so works which make up his bibliography constitute a dense corpus of thought which has nonetheless attracted sustained interest from the international academic community, not least in the field of organization studies (Deslandes & Paltrinieri, 2017; Linstead, 2018; Reedy, King, & Coupland, 2016).
Bifurquer, “there is no alternative” (2020) is the final collection edited by Stiegler, published just a few weeks before his death, and serves as both a summary of his previous work – stretching back several decades – and a final revision to some of his major concepts, as well as a testament to his resolutely collaborative approach to the production of academic and scientific knowledge. Indeed, his reputation in the international philosophical landscape has always hinged upon the fact that, by his own design, his thought is inseparable from a broader project to transform industrial society, founded upon dialogue between stakeholders. It was this vision which inspired Stiegler to found the association Ars Industrialis in 2005, a heterogeneous collective bringing together lawyers, doctors, managers, economists and artists alongside engineers and researchers, seeking to contribute to the Anthropocene era and fostering new connections between culture, technology and industry.
An open letter to Antonio Guterres
Bifurquer may thus be legitimately regarded as the culmination of a significant philosophical œuvre, but also as the fruit of a transdisciplinary working method founded upon constant dialogue with civil society. In this respect, the book takes the form of an original work edited by the philosopher, with extensive input from the Internation committee – founded in 2018 as an offshoot of Ars Industrialis – along with Nobel Prize-winning author Jean-Marie Le Clezio, who provides the preface. But this bustling 424-page volume is presented first and foremost, in a particularly original move, as a transdisciplinary analysis addressed directly to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “in the hope of launching an international debate” on the ecological emergency (p. 14), although it was initially intended to be presented to representatives of the Youth for Climate movement founded by Greta Thunberg.
The book contains ten chapters co-authored by various members of Internation, six of which bear Bernard Stiegler’s name, alongside a number of philosophers with whom he had previously collaborated under the aegis of Ars Industrialis. They represent new permutations of the principal conceptual categories put forward by Stiegler since 2009, running like guiding threads throughout the ten chapters: the proletarianization of the elites (chapter 1), exosomatization (chapter 2), the challenges of the Anthropocene era (chapters 3, 9 and 10), contributive economics and research at the local level (chapters 4 and 5), sovereignty and institutional entropy (chapters 6 and 7) and the ethos of the technosphere (chapter 8). These chapters embody the overall ambition of this book, which is not to propose a possible ‘alternative’ to our hyperindustrial societies founded upon automation and algorithm-driven consumerism. It seeks instead to demonstrate that the only true possibility is to ‘branch off’ (bifurquer) from this model, ironically repurposing the Thatcherite slogan that ‘there is no alternative’ capable of staving off the catastrophic scenario predicted by the scientists of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
A ‘pharmacological’ analysis of proletarianization
This shift in perspective is operated across these ten chapters, which I propose to sum up here with reference to three major arguments which run through the book. The first consists of a diagnosis of the influence of information technologies on our ways of life, and an acknowledgement of the central role played by the artificial organs, particularly the technical objects, which accompany our day-to-day actions, especially at work (chapters 7 and 8). To such an extent, in fact, that the acceleration in the production of these exosomatic organs – whose development is external to our bodies, and increasingly rapid – is profoundly altering our biological organisms to create exorganisms (e.g. eyes with glasses) which transcend the traditional human–machine dichotomy (chapter 3).
The authors also propose a ‘pharmacological’ interpretation of the ambivalence of these developments: technical advances can constitute modes both of domination and of liberation. They cite the example of big data, a forecasting tool which may be highly efficient yet still incapable of foreseeing an actual ‘event,’ unpredictable by its very nature. Or algorithmic intelligence, which has usefully augmented our calculation capacities in many sectors, but in doing so has restricted our scope for autonomous judgement, since processed data supposedly ‘speaks for itself’. On the one hand we have the forces of entropy, including the over-exploitation of natural resources and our reliance on tools to access knowledge which we ourselves no longer possess. On the other hand, in response to this toxicity, negentropic trends – i.e. as local tendencies opposed to the global process of disorganization of physical systems – connected with the adaptation and learning capacities of our social structures are giving rise to new ways of living and doing, new forms of know-how.
In other words, the deterioration of our ‘habitat’, particularly at work, operates on three levels: environmental, cognitive and social. The authors painfully demonstrate that fighting back against the deterioration of our ‘habitat’ is about standing up to oppose the disintegration of our shared life skills, and the outright destruction of all forms of knowledge (to be replaced by computer memories). These forms of knowledge encompass different types of practical know-how, for example culinary skills (p. 62), but they also extend to the ‘social know-how of everyday life – hospitality, shared meals, relationships with neighbours, festivities, rules for life which add up to social mores’ (p. 35). 2
For the authors – and herein lies the second key argument which runs through the book – the result is a phenomenon of cultural and cognitive ‘proletarianization’ (chapter 1) which renders us incapable of formulating desires for the future, as we remain trapped within the immediate, universal realm of impulse, denied all possibility of sublimation. Being proletarianized does not necessarily make you poor, it means that you have been de-individuated, that you are no longer capable of producing the conditions of your own existence, and no longer capable of paying attention. The proletarianized individual is stripped of her/his own knowledge and the capacity to update and re-evaluate it, the necessary conditions for attention. What is most striking in this phenomenon of widespread proletarianization is that it affects every hierarchical level of organizations and institutions, and is best understood through concepts borrowed from the study of addictions: by nurturing phenomena of dependency, capitalism is in fact digging its own grave, constantly wearing down the libidinal energy necessary for its renewal. Such dependencies, the authors note, are responsible for the damage caused to the planet itself by our over-consumption (cf. ‘planetary rehab’ in chapter 9), creating an attitude which relentlessly champions the new over the old, ensuring that objects have no hope of achieving any kind of durability.
Faced with this situation, the authors proceed to outline what we might describe as a mnemotechnical therapy, an attempt to ensure that the outsourcing of knowledge to machines provides an opportunity for users to think for themselves once more. But this therapeutic innovation is not possible without a thorough renewal of our understanding of work (chapter 3), making room for a moment of noetic elevation, a concept defined as our longing for individual and collective elevation on both the spiritual and intellectual planes. This elevation being not dictated by market forces, but with a heightened appreciation of the new approaches to locality and sovereignty imposed by the realities of the Anthropocene (chapters 5 and 6).
What the authors propose here is, ultimately, a deconstruction of the notions of employment – where automation continues to extend its domain – and work – understood as the ‘transmission, sharing and transformation of knowledge by living individuals’ (p. 13). Work in this context refers to the production and mastery of knowledge, along the lines of the intermittents du spectacle employment status developed in France, which enables artists and technicians to access their full social rights, including unemployment pay, as long as they complete the required minimum number of working days. They then receive a contributive income, in the form of a conditional income paid when justifying their social rights, but also during the time they devote to developing new skills and knowledge.
For a general organology
This is a book teeming with original conceptual propositions, albeit presented in a manner which is far from didactic. One of the most pressing among them is the need to challenge the dominance of calculability (Pérezts, Andersson, & Lindebaum, 2021), making room for a ‘measured understanding’ missing from our contemporary modes of governance. We might also find common cause with the authors in their principled opposition to entropic disruption, and their call for a noetic, contributive alternative. Faced with the protean challenges of the Anthropocene, organizations and the individuals behind them must now confront the urgent necessity of rebuilding the ‘we’, the collective consciousness we currently lack. We are rapidly running out of steam, and the only alternative – the authors of this book assure us – is to ‘branch off’. And while this collection is somewhat less convincing in its discussion of the predominance of automation and the gradual replacement of workers by robots, to which Fleming’s concept of bounded automation provides a necessary counter-argument (2019), it nevertheless succeeds in highlighting the urgent need for a new general organology, and thus a new vision of management, founded upon stronger connections between living organisms, social organisms and technical objects.
Indeed, it is organizations which constantly marshal and combine organisms and technical objects, shaping the environment within which we can choose to either celebrate or push back against the functional stupidity described above. This collection leaves much work to be done by us as readers and organizational scholars, in order to clarify and criticize its theses, and create the conditions for effective reticulation within the scientific community. Hence the efforts made in recent months by several of Stiegler’s philosophical supporters, 3 under the aegis of two partner universities, to set up ‘contributive reading workshops’ dedicated to this book, the online discussion format proving to be particularly timely in light of the current restrictions. Indeed, in an interview published by Le Monde 4 in the middle of the first lockdown, Stiegler described this act of confining as a source of social pathology, but also discussed its ‘salutary potential for branching off’, capable of giving rise to a new normativity and new ways of living. He also added that
‘this lockdown [. . .] should give us an opportunity to reappraise the value of silence, of the rhythms we set for ourselves rather than the ones that are imposed upon us, of a highly parsimonious and reasoned engagement with the media and all of those things which, coming from outside, distract us from the business of being people’.
