Abstract
This article begins by examining the concept of the pharmakon that is developed in Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, as it is here that the idea of a medium that is simultaneously poisonous and therapeutic is developed in relation to the discursive effects of writing. The author then goes on to look at Stiegler’s attempt to reconfigure the ‘orthographic economy’ of deconstruction, particularly his account of how the ‘tertiary supports’ of virtual and information technologies have transformed the experience of the real in the regime of global capitalisation. Finally, he argues that the appearance of the pharmakon as a matrix idea in his work, sharpens his account of the aporia of technological society: for the impossibility of human culture being reduced to either the disorientated life industrial populism, or to idealist notions of reflexivity, is what, for Stiegler, offers the chance of a new politics of spirit.
Keywords
What constativity of the who can still be envisaged – and what must be envisaged? (Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2, 2009a:, emphases in original)
The ancient Greek word pharmakon, as Derrida pointed out in his essay Plato’s Pharmacy (see Derrida, 1993), has been passed down as a signifier with a number of contradictory meanings: ‘poison’, ‘drug’, ‘remedy’, ‘potion’, ‘philtre’, etc. Derrida’s reading of Plato in this essay is a sustained interrogation of the relationship between thinking and writing presented in the Phaedrus. He argues that the concept of anamnesis that Plato expounded as the spontaneous movement of thought within its own essential medium, is a fantasy, and that every act of knowing, memory and recognition depends upon the supplementary economy of inscription. The spontaneity of thought can never free itself from the utilitarian economy of the written word; and so its very possibility depends upon the tropes and metaphors through which writing seeks to determine the substance of the real. Thus, for Derrida, Plato’s designation of writing as a pharmakon reveals the fundamental ambiguity that is held within the term; the ‘poison’ of writing is also the ‘remedy’ for its dissemination of difference and dissent, that is, the possibility of unforeseen affects of recognition and community (Derrida, 1993: 95–96). This question of primordial ambiguity is taken up in Barnard Stiegler’s later work, particularly What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology (2013) and For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010). In both of these books he seeks to develop the idea of the pharmakon beyond what he conceives as the ‘orthographic economy’ of Derrida’s concept of the grammè: he attempts to show that the grammatization of the real (its constitution through processes of rupture, deferral and dissemination) has become a function of the virtual and onto-technological programmes through which life, in its entirety, has been encoded. Stiegler’s pharmakon therefore is the totality of the interfaces between the human and the technological; it is the antagonism between the toxic reduction of life to capitalized desire and the expressive forms of cathexis (love, spirit) that have been made possible by the techno-hybridization of human beings.
My intention in what follows is to consider the ‘new critique’ of political economy that emerges from Stiegler’s account of the pharmakon. In the introduction to What Makes Life Worth Living he remarks that: The pharmakon is at once what enables care to be taken and that of which care must be taken – the sense that it is necessary to pay attention: its power is curative to the immeasurable extent … that it is also destructive. (Stiegler, 2013: 4, emphases added)
The question that is addressed in Stiegler’s later work therefore is that of the effectiveness of this pharmacological spirit. Or, to put it slightly differently, how can the unforeseen recuperation of a desire for the infinite (love, cathexis, community) become the basis of a regeneration of social, economic and political life? In For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010: 3–13), Stiegler maintains that the continued existence of the commodity form is dependent upon three related factors: the development of virtual and information technologies, the expansion of the knowledge economy, and the constant transformation and re-encoding of desire. Human individuals, in other words, are differentiated through a system in which their capacity for noesis is reduced to almost nothing; the libidinal structure of the ego is channelled directly into the utilitarian cycle of production–consumption, and the capacity for reflective self-determination is all but lost. In section two, therefore, I will examine the pharmacology of this regime, or what we might call the economy of spirit that is also put into play by the networks of biopolitical capitalism. The transformative potential of this economy is to be found in the strange and provocative conjunction of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud that is sketched in Stiegler’s later writing. And so in the final section of the article, I will show how the expansion of the technological pharmakon has led to a crisis in which the limits of capitalization have been reached, and how the ensuing radicalization of being has transformed the affective freedom of the human soul.
Such an attempt to re-engage with the concept of spirit inevitably provokes certain ‘Marxist’ objections, in which the growing inequality between Third and First Worlds, the emergence of vast underclasses in industrial democracies, and the resurgence of neo-colonial domination, are conceived as repeating the systemic decline that Marx identified as the historical tendency of capitalism (Marx, 1990[1859]: 927–930). These questions are, of course, entirely legitimate for they express a demand to show what Stiegler’s detour into the sublime creativity of spirit might add to our understanding of the political economy of globalization. In what follows, I will show that his later work is, in essence, an attempt to sketch a universal fate that has arisen from what he calls the ‘proletarianization’ of human life (Stiegler, 2010: 14–44, 2013: 15–17). His claim is that the global economy is really the spread of a particular regime of technologically intensified desire, and that consequently we should understand the massive inequalities that are generated by international trade as the outcome of pathologically disordered forms of libido. This desire constantly to consume more, to have more and to be more is not confined to financial speculators or to the ranks of ‘the bourgeoisie’; it has become the constitutive element of global exchange, the constantly recreated potential for thoughtless excess that has taken root in every class and every economy. And so if we are to understand the political implications of globalization, and to retain a certain fidelity to Marx’s critique of capital, we need to grasp the crises of noetic subjectivity (spirit) that biopolitical capitalism has caused in industrial democracies, and the conflicts to which the forced exportation of this regime has given rise. In the sections that follow I will examine Stiegler’s attempt to sketch the chance of a new politics of spirit that has emerged from the global pharmacology of the commodity form.
Culture, Technicity and the ‘Default of Being’
I will begin by looking at the logic of Stiegler’s originary technicity thesis as it is presented in section one of Technics and Time, 1 (1998), ‘The Invention of the Human’. His argument is that if we relinquish the idea of human beings having been brought into existence by a unique act of divine creation, the responsibility of the anthropologist becomes that of accounting for the emergence of Homo sapiens from the evolutionary mechanism of nature. We must begin not with speculations about the original essence of man (à la Rousseau), but with an analytical taxonomy of the species from which human beings are descended (p. 132). Stiegler’s argument, which draws extensively on Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech, is that the evolution of the simians to which Darwin traced the origins of humanity, should be understood in relation to the material adaptations that arose from the use of tools. Over the course of time, the manipulation of sticks and stones in the forepaws of a certain pre-simian species, gave rise to modes of cooperative organization that proved advantageous in the evolutionary struggle. For Stiegler, the crucial effect of such habituated tool manipulation is the skeletal–physiological modifications that emerged in certain species: paws gradually developed into the proto hands and feet that eventually produced the upright carriage of the great apes (pp. 139–145). What is crucial here is the development of the ‘anterior field’, or the specific orientation of simians towards interaction based on gestures, utterances, and facial expressions that arose from their technical coordination of practical activity (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 31–36). It is this simian culture that gave rise to the conflict and cooperation that determined the evolutionary history of the primate family; and so the success of the first hominid species, Zinjanthropus, was the outcome of their ability to utilize the brittle edge of flint stones in the collective organization of work, conflict and exchange.
According to Stiegler, Zinjanthropus is human – despite the fact that it lacked an articulate language. This idea of the inception of the human before language is crucial to Stiegler’s account of originary technicity, and so we need carefully to examine the logic of his argument. The fashioning of tools (as hunting implements, weapons, inscriptive instruments) means that Zinjanthropus’ temporal orientation is qualitatively different from all other species; for the manipulation of primitive instruments gives rise to a form of memory that is directly inscribed in the activity of collective life. The fashioning of flint, in other words, marks the emergence of a culture in which the manipulation of tools places each ‘one’ within a temporal continuum: to use a tool is to remember how it was made, how it has been deployed, and, crucially, how it can be modified (Stiegler, 1998: 150–154). This has certain ‘Heideggerian’ consequences: for, according to Stiegler, the emergence of self-consciousness in relation to the technological support of the tool, is what gives rise to the temporal horizon of finitude that is constitutive of Dasein.
Zinjanthropus is the beginning of human history; it is the species through which culture emerges as a mediation of the sense of mortality that accompanies the instrumental power of the tool. This ‘primal scene’, however, is given no theological or teleological significance in Stiegler’s analysis: it simply raises the question of the relationship between ‘organized inorganic matter’ (nature), the neurological development of the human brain, and the evolution of the tool as mediator between self-consciousness and the plasticity of the world. Stiegler, in a way that recalls Nietzsche’s account of the formation of man in The Genealogy of Morals, maintains that what happens at the beginning of human history opens up certain evolutionary possibilities, each of which gives rise to unforeseen configurations of power, resistance and overcoming. And so his account of the evolution of Zinjanthropus, and of the emergence of Neanthropus as the species in which tool manipulation becomes the condition of cortical development, is presented as a possibility whose realization has come about through innumerable conflicts and adaptations in humanity’s techno-social being (Nietzsche, 1990: 189–230; Stiegler, 1998: 192–196).
According to Stiegler, the emergence of Homo sapiens marks the point at which the organic structure of the brain is set and human society becomes essentially technological in its trajectory. It is Neanthropean sociality that opens the possibility of this transformation: for the instrumental handling of nature (physis) gives rise to the symbolic mediations of biological necessity, social life and individual experience that are the most basic functions of culture. Thus, the originary technicity of human beings is what underlies the history of inscription through which ‘ethnic community’ is constituted in primitive societies. It is this process that Stiegler (1998: 175–177) refers to as the ‘epiphylogenetic’ origin of memory: the re-transmission of a historical experience of community (cathexis, pathos) within technological programmes of exchange and integration.
This relationship of humanity to the instruments of its evolution is traced in Stiegler’s reading of the myth of Prometheus. According to the myth, Zeus created all animal species as beings without essence, and left the job of distributing powers of speed, intelligence and strength to Prometheus. However, Prometheus was persuaded by his brother Epimetheus to allow him to complete the task of distributing powers to the different species. When Zeus returned, Epimetheus, who lacked his brother’s intelligence, had forgotten to give humanity any defining attributes; and so human beings were thrown into the world naked and without the means of survival. The suffering of this ‘forgotten species’ moved Prometheus to steal the means of making fire from the gods, and to bestow the gift of this technology upon humanity. The fate bestowed by this ‘gift’ however is a tragic one (Hesiod, 2008: 37–40; Plato, 1961: 320–322). Promethean innovation, through which humanity is bound to the unforeseen effects of technology, is the perpetual imminence of disaster: and it is this which gives rise to the basic structure of ‘being with’ (sociality) that Stiegler (1998: 184) calls epimetheia, or the anticipation of catastrophe that is touched with the hope that human spirit may yet be sufficient to save the day. Thus, if there is a distinctively Stieglerian approach to technology, it is to register the ambivalence of its relationship to humanity’s default of essence, that is, the simultaneously toxic and therapeutic supplementation of life which is the milieu of human freedom (Stiegler, 1998: 177–179, 2013: 1–5).
In the second volume of Technics and Time (2009a), Stiegler’s concern with human freedom and community is focused on the fate of reflection (noesis) in the highly commodified information markets that have come to dominate the global economy. In the orthographic regime, whose techniques of inscription predate the virtual encoding of life, individual experience is constituted through a dialectical relationship between intuition, synthesis and cultural memory. Thus, what is threatened in the informatic model of exchange is the end of what Hegel called Bildung, or the reflective aspect of a culture whose means of transmission, the letter, is the support of collective memory. 1 In contemporary informatic societies, this relationship to the past is increasingly threatened. For as events are dispersed through virtual technologies that determine their capital as news, information, risk, or financial opportunity, so the possibility of their being re-cast through dialectical reflection is all but erased. The ‘tertiary supports’ of experience (virtual machines) supply commentaries and images that allow no exegetical work: human beings experience the effects of global informatic exchange (wars, cultural and religious conflicts, social and economic dislocations) as the unfolding of a spontaneous history in which they figure only as complicit bystanders (Stiegler, 2009a: 118–122). Thus, the processes of transindividuation that are characteristic of virtual communications technologies proceed from their radical intensification of biological drives: the operational regime of consumer capital short-circuits the processes of libidinal sublimation that constitute the time of noetic culture, by constantly reducing the period that elapses between the presentation of the object, the solicitation of new desires, and their capitalization in acts of distracted consumption (Stiegler, 2013: 59–62).
According to Heidegger, technological modernity reveals a weakness of humanity for thoughtless repetition; for even the events of ‘Nietzschean’ excess that supposedly threaten the substance of ethical life reveal themselves as expressions of a desire that has been unable to penetrate to the origins of its egoity (Heidegger, 1991: 150–158). In his account of the industrialization of memory, Stiegler reconfigures this Heideggerian approach to the constitution of egoistic desire: his theory of the externalizing power of representative technologies points towards a displacement of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and of the essentialist constructions (of ‘man’, ‘spirit’ and ‘community’) to which it has given rise. Thus, the virtual-informatic solicitation of Dasein that Stiegler expounds in Technics and Time, 2 (2009a) marks a transformation of the historical problematic of capitalism: for the intensification of desire through which humanity is capitalized, gives rise to a trajectory in which the creative powers of individual human beings are discharged in the mass intensification of their biological drives. The ‘consumerist response’ to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in commodity-producing societies therefore has determined its own crisis: the psychical energy that is available in the human species is not unlimited, and its dissipation in the systems of informatic capitalism is what, for Stiegler, has produced the toxic conjunction of economic speculation, noetic disorientation and political indifference that precipitated the current crisis (Stiegler, 2010: 23–28, 2011: 1–35). As we will see in the following sections, Stiegler’s latest work on the pharmakon maintains that the chance of there being a reflective presence within the networks of prosthetic desire (a presence that would maintain something of the openness of Dasein to the conditions of its own existence), is sustained by the very technologies that have pushed the global economy to the brink of destruction (Stiegler, 2010: 116–117, 2013: 109–110).
Before moving on to examine Stiegler’s later work, however, it is worth reflecting on the regime of philosophical kenosis through which he has inherited both the Heideggerian concept of Dasein and Gilbert Simondon’s account of technological evolution. In his article ‘The theatre of individuation’ (2009b), Stiegler acknowledges a debt to Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technological Objects (1980): for it is here that the concept of psychical individuation is first brought into proximity with the technological systems through which memory, sensation and reflection are supplemented and intensified. For Simondon, technological objects are characterized by an inherent tendency towards concretization; their dynamic functionality originates new forms of synergy and internal coherence whose telos is the progressive reduction of systemic contingencies (pp. 11–17). Thus, the evolution of technological systems determines a potential for ‘transindividuation’ (the precipitation of the self beyond the hylomorphic mythologies of the social order) that is given in the organizational perfectibility of machines. Despite the acknowledgement of his debt to Simondon’s account of technicity, however, Stiegler (2009b: 49) maintains that the speculative gesture of his thought (which anticipates a totality whose technoaesthetic regime is the form of individual self-creation) fails to grasp the originally aporetic relationship between technology and human self-consciousness.
According to Stiegler, the internal bifurcation of the organic and technological systems through which Simondon expounds the possibility of bridging the gap between the spiritual, aesthetic and technological organization of life, constitutes a mode of ‘pre-individuation’ which gives a certain redemptive trajectory to the evolution of technological society (p. 51). Heidegger’s account of Dasein as mortally susceptible to the technological solicitations of the ‘they’, which can be traced from Being and Time (Heidegger, 1983) to The Question Concerning Technology (see Heidegger, 1996), is the counterpoint to this Simondonian history; it marks the possibility of a leap beyond the repetitions of public life that is given in the original experience of being thrown into the world. Heidegger, in other words, registers the inevitable intrusion of the ‘they’, as a mode of thoughtless Mittsein, upon the ‘free’ differentiations of techno-utilitarian society. Yet in the end, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is also inadequate to the task of thinking the relationship between technology and transindividuation. For Stiegler, Dasein is originally technological; the experience of care, anxiety and responsibility which characterizes its being in the world arises from orthographic inscriptions through which memory, sensibility and noetic recognition are formed. And so the chance of a ‘leap’, or ‘phase-shift’, into a new mode of experience beyond the technological mediations of the ‘they’, cannot arise from the pure ipseity of Heidegger’s Dasein. If there is to be a new politics of spirit, and if this is to avoid the complicities of Simondon’s technoaesthetics and Heidegger’s search for authentic expressions of collective life, then the ‘spirit’ that comes must be provoked by the virtual networks through which social life is performed, intensified, and betrayed (Stiegler, 2009b: 55).
The originality of Stiegler’s project therefore lies in his reformulation of the experience of indeterminacy that is the essence of Dasein. His philosophical kenosis, which leaves him with the aporetic fate of Promethean humanity, takes him to a particular understanding of spirit that is without pre-individuation or transcendence. In the following sections I will examine Stiegler’s account of how the technological pharmakon configures the chance of a ‘phase shift’ beyond the economy of entropic consumption, and of a noetic culture through which the energy of this shift might be sustained.
The ‘Who’ and the ‘What’ of the Information Society
Let me begin with a conjecture that Stiegler presents in Technics and Time, 2 (2009a: 152–153) as part of his exposition of the industrialization of memory. The conjecture is Marvin Minsky’s, and is set out in his article ‘The future merging of science, art, and psychology’ (1993). Minsky’s idea is that the development of cybernetics, information technology and neuroscience has opened up a singular possibility: that in the near future it will be possible for the human brain to transmit its intentions outside of its organic milieu (the body), and to have them translated into actions performed in virtual environments or by robotic devices in the ‘real world’. The relationship described here is fundamentally transgressive: for as the activity of the brain is channelled directly into media that process, interpret and transmit its intentionality, so the will, desire and affective satisfactions of the human organism are transformed by the artificial assemblage through which it acts (pp. 93–95). As the informatic power of the assemblage is increased, so the relationship between mind and machine, the ‘who’ and the ‘what’, becomes fluid; the machine anticipates ‘organic’ desire and disseminates it across networks in which relations of domination and servitude never fully crystallize. Thus, the very nature of human intelligence is transformed: it is taken up in a technological system that is without organic restriction, and which gives rise to innovations that constantly transform humanity’s experience of being in the world.
Minsky’s conjecture was made in 1993, and it is now the case that the connection between the human and the technological has evolved in the direction he predicted. Information-processing technologies are capable of connecting directly with neurological centres of intention: for example, interfaces have been developed that allow human beings to steer robotic vehicles, and to act in virtual environments, through remote acts of will (Leeb et al., 2012). For Stiegler, the significance of these developments lies in the fact that the orthographic supplementation of self-consciousness, which had supported the constitution of culture as a place of symbolic recognition, is fundamentally altered. As we have seen, the account of industrialized memory presented in Technics and Time, 2 (2009a), attempts to show that self-reflection is forestalled by the encoding performed by media whose influence on the constitution of ‘free will’ becomes practically instantaneous. The technologies through which events are staged ‘for us’, in other words, are invisible; they have become a global interface that has all but erased its presence as the condition of memory and subjectivity. However, what saves Stiegler’s account of information technology from lapsing into the involution of Baudrillard’s hyperreality thesis – where the information network comes to ‘think us’ 2 – is his engagement with Heidegger’s account of the experience of technological enframing.
The hope contained in Stiegler’s work lies, I believe, close to Minsky’s idea of prosthesis, in which humanity is responsible for emergent possibilities of freedom and community that arise from the experience of technological transformation. This hope is articulated through a particular reading of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, in which the experience of being in the world is conceived as originally prosthetic. The anxiety that for Heidegger constitutes Dasein’s ontological difference – the apprehension of its impending death – is conceived by Stiegler as the outcome of a reflexive awareness that is originally related to the practical supplementation of human life. The existential care that defines the experience of Dasein is a technological affect: humanity is thrown into a world in which its conflicts, responsibilities and desires are simultaneous with the disorientation that technology brings to the symbolic milieu of culture. Thus, in Stiegler’s account of the industrialization of memory, the chance of human freedom is sustained within the networks of the information economy; the responsibilities of this freedom emerge from spheres of necessity, risk and domination that arise from the scientific perfectibility of life. So, to return to the Marxist problematic that is implicit in Stiegler’s thought: how are we to think the effect of this freedom on the total capitalization of the world?
According to Stiegler (2009a: 154), life, for human beings, has become responsibility to the affects of their technological fate; and so they must seek something ‘constative’ in the remorseless technological transformation of their culture and individual being. This, of course, has a Heideggerian ring to it, and Stiegler’s reading of The Question Concerning Technology is marked by a degree of sympathy for Heidegger’s account of the techno-scientific enframing of Dasein. Despite this, the report on human freedom given in Technics and Time, 2 (2009a) is a rejection of Heidegger’s gesture towards the revitalization of poïesis that occurs through the regime of Gestell. In the end, Stiegler shares Derrida’s suspicions about the economy of spirit that such a gesture is part of – an economy that solicits the violent return of essence (Volk, Heimat, Kultur) to the life of the nation. And yet there is a crucial difference between Derrida and Stiegler’s readings of Heidegger; a difference that is constitutive of their respective positions on the exercise of political freedom within the networks of global capital.
The position Derrida sets out in Of Spirit (1991) is that Heidegger inherits the idea of Geist that emerges in his later writings, from the tragic determination of history presented in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1967a). For Derrida, the Hegelian condensation of violence and death into the ethical life of the nation state takes place within an economy of orthographic culture: it brings with it the possibility of a mediation of life in which mutual recognition can defer the violence of essentialist cultures of race, nation, or religion. And so despite Derrida’s originary critiques of Hegel’s Euro and phallocentrism, his account of Heidegger’s writing on the technological fate of modernity implies that Hegelian spirit is marked by a certain reserve in relation to redemptive essentialisms of the kind to which Heidegger ultimately has recourse. For Derrida, in other words, there is a hesitation in the recuperative movement of Hegelian spirit, a hesitation that is marked by a play of différance that always returns to the crystallization of abstract freedom into determinate forms of justice, sexuality, nature and the law (Derrida, 1990a: 251–277, 1990b: 235). It is Derrida’s contention that, in Heidegger’s later work, the grammè, whose differentiating contingency his early thought had radicalized, is thrown into an ontology that precipitates the question of freedom beyond the noetic culture of ethical life (Derrida, 1991: 99–113). It is here that Stiegler (1998: 198–202) identifies a ‘Hegelian’ residue in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger; for his moral economy of différance assumes the persistence of an orthographic culture whose recuperative powers have been dispersed into the ontic programmes of the technological pharmakon (gene technologies, biomedical systems, virtual realities).
So, where does this leave us in terms of the possibility of freedom, ethics and community in the time of prosthetic memory? How are we to conceive this possibility after the appropriation of Dasein by the networks of biopolitical capitalism? For Stiegler, the economy of différance which opens the chance of politics and ethics should be understood as having been formed within specific technological programmes: the question of how I ought to respond to those who share my subjection to the regime of accelerated exchange arises directly from that subjection as a form of technologically supplemented life. For Stiegler, the question of technological society should be approached through the experience of disorientation it produces: it is the question of a cultural mediation of time that returns through the dispersal and re-formation of ‘prosthetic’ human beings. Richard Beardsworth (1998: 81–84), in his article ‘Thinking Technicity’, maintains that the concept of spirit that is implicit in Stiegler’s Technics and Time (1998, 2009a), should be conceived in terms of a Nietzschean economy in which body, mind and psyche are radically intensified through techno-scientific disseminations of energy. The ‘culture of spirit’ he takes to be the ethical horizon of Stiegler’s thought, in other words, has a remorselessly transformative orientation, which, for me, is at odds with the concept of epiphylogenetic memory developed throughout Stiegler’s work on technics. Thus, if there is to be a politics of spirit that is effective within the networks of biopolitical production, this must come through recurrent, technologically transformed traces of orthographic memory – for without such noetic reflection, the future is nothing more than the terminal velocity of mass desire (Stiegler, 2009a: 118–126; Virilio, 2006: 149–167).
Conclusion: Stiegler’s Pharmacology
We have seen that the operative demand of information society is constantly to increase the speed at which social and economic exchange takes place. The application of this principle threatens the end of free reflection, as self-conscious human beings are taken into a system of techno-economic decadence in which individual desire is without memory or psychical connection (Stiegler, 2011: 1–13). It is this logic that transforms the being of Dasein, which is the improbable possibility of freedom that is distributed across the global networks of informatic exchange. Dasein’s default of essence, in other words, is the chance of a certain concept of spirit, which lies close to the idea of transformative reflection that Derrida expounds in his readings of Heidegger and Marx. In Technics and Time, Stiegler elaborates this idea through the impossibility of pure informatic materialism: for the fact that the technological integration of Dasein can never be accomplished without psychical disorientation means that the experience of spirit, as noesis, always returns to the systemic organization of social life.
So, what kind of ethico-political agency could such a determination of spirit make possible within the systems of network society? It is this question that Stiegler addresses in his latest work, particularly What Makes Life Living: On Pharmacology (2013) and For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010). The first of these begins with a reconfiguration of the originary technicity thesis, which presents the supplementation of human beings as having a dual aspect in which their lack of essence is made good by a technological regime that is both toxic and therapeutic (Stiegler, 2013: 19–20). Stiegler, recalling Derrida’s argument in Plato’s Pharmacy, maintains that pure self-reflection of the soul (anamnesis) is impossible, as such reflection is always the outcome of techniques of transmission (writing, orthography) that constitute the grammatological economy of thinking (Derrida, 1993: 95–117). His version of Derrida’s argument however, extends its scope beyond the technical affects of writing: for the virtual machines that have transformed both the objective structure and subjective experience of the real, have radically altered the temporality of reflection and desire through which the experience of the social is constituted. The soul of the individual is penetrated by a pharmacological regime in which its drives are remorselessly intensified by flows of information and aesthetic simulacra (Stiegler, 2013: 116). This affective intensification is critical as it marks the point of connection between the dynamics of memory Stiegler expounds in Technics and Time (1998, 2009a), and the fall in libidinal energy he presents in his later work as the determining limit of consumer capitalism. For given that the self (conceived as a psychical economy of drives, representations and sublimations) is dispersed across competing regimes of techno-mediatic exchange, its power to integrate its desire into the symbolic order of recognition (culture) is fundamentally threatened. And yet the virtual technology that constitutes this highly capitalized form of individualism is also the condition on which the experience of spirit, as the culture of noesis, can return to the collective life of humanity (Stiegler, 2013: 89).
For Stiegler, the individuation of Dasein is effected through a culture that differentiates the self as an organon of techno-prosthetic totality: the ego, in other words, is given its temporal–historical constitution through a medium that conducts and intensifies the experience of the present as constant disorientation. The integration of capital and desire that has been accomplished by prosthetic memory systems is, in essence, the revelation of Dasein’s pharmacological constitution; a default of being whose historical–organological sense of loss is so acute that Stiegler does not hesitate to call it spirit. This then is the conjunction/contradiction between Hegel and Freud that is at stake in his account of epiphylogenetic memory; for if it is the case that the subject of orthographic culture has been dispersed into the random vectors of accumulation, then we have no choice but to seek remission in the power of the ego to express its desire in techno-aesthetic solicitations of love, resistance, and care. This aporetic relationship is traced in Stiegler’s brief remarks on ‘Spirit, capitalism and superego’ (2006), where he challenges Marcuse’s attempt to separate the powers of technocratic capital from the originary pleasures of the human organism. In the end, the freedom of the organological ego emerges within the economy of life and death that is constituted through the technological systems of capital: and so if there is to be a relative autonomy of the self, which Freud (1954) identified with the cathectic functions of the superego, this must come from a certain power of self-composition in relation to the toxic proliferation of fetish objects (commodities, entrepreneurs, fascist saviours) (Stiegler, 2006: 37). This brings us back to the Freud–Hegel conjuncture, for the erotic phantasies that come to outplay the compulsive drives of networked capitalism, are expressions of love whose return is both without dialectical necessity and essentially related to the orthographic memory of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). This is the labour of spirit within the constantly accelerated time of informatic exchange; the chance of a new community that comes from the impending exhaustion of libidinal energy (Stiegler, 2013: 92–94).
Stiegler’s reading of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology (1954) maintains an ethic of sublimation that runs throughout his theory of the neurological foundation of consciousness: for it is the shaping of the libido through its attachment to goals that require the activity of judgement and intellect (art, literature, morality, love) that is the origin of social cathexis (Freud, 1954: 389–392). To put it slightly differently, the foundation of the superego is constituted through sublimation; the individual becomes more than the immediacy of its drives through its power to integrate them into the symbolic order of culture (Stiegler, 2013: 62). From this Freudian perspective we should regard the prosthetic intensification of biological drives as radically disrupting the temporal unity of experience, for the possibility of care (for oneself and for others) is constantly short-circuited by the urge to consume what is here, now, and ready to hand. For Stiegler, there is something unbearable about this life as it is stripped of the relationship to the infinite (the endlessly seductive idea, individual, or work of art) that is implicit in the human psychical apparatus. This technological disorientation is what marks the possibility of spirit; for it is in the aporetic relationship between prosthetic desire and the orthographic history of ethical life that the chance of reflexive individuation is given (p. 70). Thus, if we return to the vocabulary of Technics and Time, 2 (2009a), the crisis of experience that is the origin of Dasein’s being in the world reaches an absolute extreme within the networks of biopolitical capital: life becomes the labile gregariousness of work, sport, sex and shopping, and it is this prosaic determination of the soul that returns it to its essential default, to its being as noesis (Stiegler, 2013: 76–77).
There is a sense in which the matrix question that has emerged from Stiegler’s work concerns the libidinal conflict between two forms of messianism: the celebration of universal prosthesis that has become known as post-humanism and the rejection of technicity that is embedded in all forms of religious fundamentalism (pp. 106–109). The distribution of this conflict is highly complex as the pharmacological effects of globalization (instantaneous connection, plasticity of somatic desire, virtual memory supports, digital dementia) have transformed conventional oppositions between east and west, Islam and Christianity. The experience of disorientation has become endemic in the technological transmission of life, and is the central concern of debates about the human soul that are both culturally disparate and implicitly cosmopolitan. Thus, there is a sense in which it is the encounters between western technocracy and the value rapports of Asian cultures (from Islamic fundamentalism to Chinese market socialism) that constitute the horizon of Stiegler’s ‘new critique’ of political economy (pp. 89–90). The question of what constitutes a ‘life worth living’ is constantly intensified by the contretemps between absolute decadence and sacrificial obligation: it becomes a spectre that haunts the operational logic of growth and consumption through which the loss of libidinal energy has reached crisis point in western capitalist societies. If there is to be a new cosmopolitanism, therefore, this must take the form of a diachronic exchange among spiritual ideals that have been distributed and intensified through the expansion of global–techno–informatic capitalism. Or, to put it in the register Stiegler has developed in his later writings: the present catastrophe of speculative capital demands that we work towards an ‘economy of contribution’ in which labour would be freed from the logic of ‘ratio’ (the proletarianized infinite of production–consumption–production) to become constitutive of a sphere of exchange in which ‘otium’ (the philosophical and aesthetic labour of spirit) emerges as the global–universal good of prosthetic humanity (Stiegler, 2010: 65–66, 2013: 59–61). 3 For it is only through the constant re-thinking of such a transitional space, which is itself pharmacological, that the future of the planet is conceivable.