Orienting Care: Boris Groys,Philosophy of Care

Introduction

In an earlier book, Boris Groys outlined a notion of ‘antiphilosophy’, analogous to the ‘anti-art’ of Duchamp’s readymades. Instead of relying on the ‘exceptionalism’ of the philosophical ‘chosen few’ who experience a singular and extraordinary philosophical conversion of the gaze, antiphilosophy seeks ‘philosophical value’ through a recontextualization of ordinary practices. For Groys, antiphilosophy amounts to a ‘democratization’ of philosophy, but this ‘not only does not destroy philosophy as an institution but, rather, offers the only possible path for its survival’ (Groys, 2012: xiv). When in his latest work Groys turns to ‘care’, the title straightforwardly refers to ‘philosophy’, and the text contains no mention of antiphilosophy. At the same time, the shift from a traditional search for ‘truth’ to the problem of ‘health’ is again described as a democratization: Groys is thus continuing to describe how such a democratization is the only way for something like philosophy to make a difference to contemporary social existence. Groys again puts ordinary practices into the spotlight, but through a particular prism, ‘care’, enabling mundane questions to appear in a new light, where what is at stake is the survival not just of philosophy, but of individual and collective existence in general.

A good case can be made that Groys is right in claiming ‘care’ as the prism through which our current difficulties must be faced. Most straightforwardly, it is a question of what matters, how it matters, and the difference it makes, which is to say, the difference it makes to how we make decisions and how we select from among possible futures. It is the difference between the significant and the insignificant, and we might well think that care refers to the way in which we have to negotiate, navigate, articulate or compose our experience of the significant and the insignificant, in a world that seems increasingly to have lost the ability to locate what is really significant, or to care enough to prevent what ought to be significant from drifting back into insignificance. We could, we think, care more about the condition and fate of the biosphere, about the forces that seem to be tearing apart our polities, or intergenerational relationships, about the loss of historical memory . . . we could, but it seems ever more difficult to care enough to make a real difference, to differentiate ourselves from an overall tendency that seems, almost by design, to want us to drift into carelessness and negligence concerning the future. We seem to be losing the knowledge of how to take care, and the will and desire to do so.

But is care also a concept of which we should be suspicious? From the outset, Groys seems ambivalent, at least in the sense that, from the first paragraph, care is associated with Foucault’s characterization of the modern state as ‘biopolitical’:

In contemporary societies the most widespread mode of work is care work. The securing of human lives is regarded by our civilization as its supreme goal. Foucault was right when he described modern states as biopolitical. Their main function is to take care of the physical well-being of their populations. In this sense, medicine has taken the place of religion, and the hospital has replaced the Church. The body rather than the soul is the privileged object of institutionalized care: ‘health replaced salvation’. Physicians assumed the role of priests because they are supposed to know our bodies better than we do – much as the priests claimed to know our souls better than we did. (Groys, 2022: 1)

Care must be understood as not just a boon, but a danger: ‘the paradox of the biopolitical state: it has the goal to make us healthy but, actually, makes us sick’ (p. 23). The custodians, workers and institutions of care seem to embody a new form of power, and to force us to adopt their edicts and dogmas, standardizing and homogenizing individual and collective existence according to an imperative of health that is as unquestionable as once was the notion of God. Undoubtedly, there is a price to be paid for this election of a new class devoted to our corporeal well-being, and it is for this very reason that the therapeutics of care must become a question.

Moreover, Groys sees these organic bodies as doubled by ‘symbolic bodies’, composed of our cultural, historical and artifactual extensions, where these symbolic bodies find themselves the object of a ‘system of extended care’ that reproduces all of the forms of governmentality already applied to our biological or endosomatic organs, starting with our birth certificates and ending with our death certificates and the care given to our ‘symbolic corpses’ (p. 2). Conceiving ‘the self’ as the sum of these two bodies allows Groys to explore the tension between the limits of the care that this self can give to itself, and the care given to it from outside, from institutions and workers. Understanding the changing conception of the relation of self-care to care is a way of re-conceiving the history of the relationship between the individual and the collective, and between autonomy and dependence.

Such a re-conception is necessary in an age where the distinction between the symbolic body and the organic body is being erased, as we become ever more tightly entwined with an internet that ‘functions as a medium of satisfaction of our most everyday and intimate needs and desires and, at the same time, as the medium of their inscription in digital memory’ (p. 9). It is as if our biology, itself increasingly subject to a reorganization of the organic, is being lost to us as almost our whole lives unfold before the screens of global digital networks, onto which we project preformatted versions of ourselves, leaving us confused about the relationship between care and self-care. Groys undertakes a kind of genealogy of this relationship, with the hope of opening up for it the possibility of a new future.

Genealogies of Care: From Socrates to Bataille and Caillois

Groys begins at the beginning: Socrates represents a shift ‘from care to self-care’ insofar as Socratic dialogue exposes collective knowledge to the non-knowledge at its origin, which necessitates a process of genuinely anamnesic introspection – care taken by the noetic soul of the truth, and through that of itself. But rather than this leading to a question of the localization of knowledge in the self-caring individual, for Plato (more than for Socrates) this leads to a politics, or an end of politics: governance by those deemed capable of self-care – philosopher-kings. The soul’s imprisonment in the weak and fallible body implies that ‘the philosophical care of truth presupposes removal of bodily desires, pragmatic calculations and personal obligations’ (p. 15), and, ultimately, that ‘here self-care is understood as an effect of institutional care, [. . .] subjected to the institutions of care’ (p. 16).

Groys reads Phenomenology of Spirit as embodying a contrary shift from self-care to care. Hegel represents the entrance of history into philosophy as a movement towards freedom, a series of dialectical negations through which the freedom of subjectivity becomes universal, reaching its terminus in the French Revolution. But what is terrifyingly exposed at the end of this movement itself proves to be negative: ‘it knows that it has to fear itself’, and so this revolution ‘ended with the negation of the negation, with the return of the individual to its particular place and its re-inscription into a system of government and administration’ (p. 21). Subjectivity, that is, self-care, returns to care, that is, governmental control, because what has been revealed by the moment of freedom is that what the self needs above all to be protected from is itself.

Unsurprisingly, Groys locates the refutation of this negation of negation in Nietzsche. Against the Platonic vision of the body as prison, against the Hegelian vision of the eventual freedom of the unbound subject as a source of terror and violence, the ‘great health’ of the Nietzschean body is ‘self-affirmative from the beginning’, an expression of vital energy directed as an attack on the environment. As such a self-assertion, the health at stake, here, derives not from institutional care, but from self-care. But as an assertion of self, it also represents ‘the birth of the ideology of creativity that still dominates the individual and social imagination of our time’ (p. 30). Beyond the health of the organic body, it is a question of the self’s creative productions – for example, the works of Nietzsche. The shift of the focus of self-care from ‘theoretical discussions’ to health may represent a ‘radical democratization of philosophy’ (p. 25), but Groys argues that Nietzsche ultimately still relies upon institutions of care as much as ever, given that all of those books and artifacts persist and are transmitted only under certain conditions – those of the institutions and archives of knowledge: ‘in reality the Übermensch still relies on the institutional care of symbolic bodies [. . .], a promise of über-survival, of after-life as a book, an artwork, as a memory of an extraordinary historic action’ (p. 34).

Alexandre Kojève is a Nietzschean revision of Hegel focusing specifically on desire for the other’s desire – on recognition and fame. The master struggles to satisfy all of his desires, but in so doing ends up becoming dependent on the slaves and their work, eventually becoming a prisoner of ‘a world controlled by the work of others, by the work of slaves’ (p. 36). Even the philosopher is subject to this need for recognition, although the philosopher is neither master (because the philosopher works) nor slave (since the philosopher’s work aims to transform the world). The upshot, according to Kojève, is a world run by philosopher-administrators, but their success tends to eliminate collective memory, and with it everything singular (the feeling for and knowledge of art and history, for example), as significance is reduced to consumption: only the philosopher continues to work, taking care of memory beyond desire, but as a kind of ‘infinitely substitutable’ machine producing an eternal return of the same (p. 41).

In turn, Georges Bataille revises Kojève. Self-care again comes to the fore, with Bataille drawing attention to the singularity of desiring bodies, but their energy is understood no longer as rooted in vital sources (as Nietzsche thought), but instead in solar, cosmic, quasi-infinite abundance. In a democratized world, it is no longer possible for a master to win some aristocratic victory in the battle for recognition, but what this unconsumable abundance does make possible (and necessary) is an expenditure over and above the dictates of any economic imperative – a ‘glorious self-destruction’ (p. 43). We must expend a portion of our energies wastefully, luxuriously, but this accursed share cannot leave ‘great health’ untouched – the latter ‘becomes a kind of infection by the additional influx of nonhuman vital energies’ (p. 44). Bataille’s picture of the world is marked by a perpetual and unsolvable conflict between tendencies towards aggressive self-assertion and tendencies towards institutional care (p. 49). This is why Roger Caillois can be construed as a kind of counterpoint to Bataille: where Bataille sees this conflict as imposing the unavoidability of some kind of modern potlatch, Caillois perceives the risk it brings of ‘total war’, and consequently advocates a return to immunological care, to ‘certain protective measures – in order to avoid total infection and the death of everything living’ (p. 53).

From Todtnauberg to Zuckerberg

Groys himself accepts that, more than ever, the slave-product that is modern technology transforms the world, but concludes from this that the ‘will to power migrates’, as the masters of this new world ‘become the creatives who master the future’ (p. 57). In this age of the creative production of the world as picture, it is the audience who takes centre stage: mortals no longer live beneath the gaze of the immortals; instead, it is the ‘gaze of the public’ that has asserted its divine right of judgment (p. 60). Neither art nor artist are viewed as incomparable, and all that matters is the machine that repetitively generates new spectacles for a public that has become ‘supreme caretaker’ (pp. 62–3). But if this audience constitutes a people, it is one increasingly dependent on institutions of care, a ‘“decadent” public [. . .] domesticated by the biopolitical state’ (pp. 67–8), Groys states, commenting on the case of Wagner.

Care achieves a truly central place in Being and Time. Heidegger’s post-Husserlian phenomenological approach restages the relationship between self-care and care as the inseparability of Dasein and world, for a Dasein whose past runs ahead of it as the question of Dasein’s future – as the question of what it has to be. Inseparability does not mean indistinguishability, and it is when Dasein ‘begins to understand itself as a thing in the world and not as existing in-the-world’ that it loses itself in das Man, forgets its singularity, and the singularity of its world, and of its world (pp. 70–1). This singularity is a question of the individuation of a world on the basis of Dasein’s futural horizon, which is precisely a question of the distinction between besorgen and Sorge, where we can understand the latter as implying an economy of care, a saving up by temporally spacing out the busyness of concern: it is somewhat odd that Groys does not specifically address this distinction.

What is true of Dasein proves true for the artwork: in being reduced to a thing on a market, the work of art loses what for Heidegger gives it significance – its capacity to singularly unconceal, for a people, the worlding of its world (pp. 73–4). Groys sees this loss as deriving from a more general movement towards the ‘defunctionalization’ of art, which ceases to serve particular theologico-political ends and starts to be seen as existing for its own sake, beginning with the French Revolution that transformed the Louvre into a site for the presentation of ‘beautiful’ works, placed into the hands of a new caretaker, the curator, and continuing through the history of the avant-garde movements, themselves understood as a set of ongoing abstracting defunctionalizations (pp. 77–8).

In the technological age, defunctionalization becomes the rule, not just for artworks but for human beings. For Groys, this implies, somewhat paradoxically, that when the body no longer has a productive function, when it is no longer useful for work, it nevertheless remains an object of care from the modern, technological institutions devoted to care-work (pp. 82–3). To understand this new role, Groys turns to Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the productivity of ‘work’ and the unproductive character of the care-work of ‘labour’ that ‘leaves nothing behind’ (p. 85). However necessary to the functions of life such labour may be, to make this the hinge of life is to reduce life to the avoidance of death and pain.

This is, as such, to give up on self-care, to hand over one’s symbolic body to an institution that purports to know better than you how to take care of the susceptibility to pain to which the organic body is reduced. The private and the intimate become objects of institutional and public scrutiny, and social networks represent the most recent stage in this identification of the intimate with the mass, but where the self that one projects there, and which one finds projected back, has lost every singular aspect and becomes just one more calculable version of a human life insofar as it is presentable on an algorithmic platform, a calculability to which the individual adapts by measuring their self-presentation in terms of ‘likes’ (pp. 88–91).

Revolutionary Care

The final chapter asks how to ‘escape the necessity of self-presentation’, approaching this question via Alexander Bogdanov’s attempt to produce a very general account of the emergence of every kind and scale of organization – ‘tektology’ – and in particular his concepts of ‘egression’ and ‘degression’. Egression is the way in which organization emerges as a kind of burgeoning out from a nucleus, referring in the case of human existence to ‘all the traditional, centralized, authoritarian forms of social organization’. But with the introduction of machines, egression changes its order of magnitude, freeing this outwards movement from any ‘biological limitation’ whatsoever (p. 93).

The very success of this new, machinic step, however, gives rise to organizations too unwieldy to be handled through ‘chains of control’ emanating from the centre, instead requiring a ‘post-egressive organization [. . .] based on the principle of plasticity’, that is, on flexible control systems distributed throughout the organism. Becoming plastic is a way for large-scale egressions to maintain control, but it is something like the formation of soft tissue – inherently vulnerable. This leads to a counter-tendency whereby this organization reinforces itself by becoming ‘skeletal’ – this is what Bogdanov calls degressive organization, exemplified by clothing, vessels and containers, but also by symbols and words, which fix meanings and significances (p. 94). This skeletal character of degression should be understood first of all as temporal more than spatial: it is a question of controlling the flows of becoming, thought, meaning and so on, so that they possess a certain durability. But degression is spatial, too, in the sense that the written word is like a material vessel that durably preserves it beyond the retentional finitude of spoken language: writing to some extent retards linguistic drift, and gives it another character.

Groys describes a movement whereby the unfolding of new kinds of technological vessels for the containment (in both senses) of significance leads to a biopolitical and then algorithmic hegemony of care based on the elimination of the private and the intimate. We can now understand this movement as deriving from the unfolding of new forms of degressive organization, culminating, as we said, in the reign of digital social networks. It is a movement towards ossification, where it becomes increasingly difficult for new significance to emerge, cutting off the chance for new ways of taking care. As Groys points out, Bogdanov’s conclusion is that only ‘a highly centralized and truly egressive movement can break the conservative skeleton of democratic society and become truly emancipatory’ (p. 96).

What does this mean for Groys? Or for us? Groys identifies the rigidity and ossification of degression with ‘systems of protection, of care’, whereas egression, taken as that which breaks with these systems, names the possibility of new forms of self-care capable of ‘taking power’ over these systems, transforming them ‘in the interest of patients and their health’ – the next step of democratization. He ends the book by referring to Bogdanov’s experiments with blood transfusions, arising from an attempt to ‘combine the Communist promise to build on Earth a happy life for all’ with the cosmist-immortalist ‘promise to realize immortality and resurrection by technological means’ (p. 98). Referring also to a work of fiction by Bogdanov entitled ‘Immortality Day’, in which a thousand-year-old scientist who has perfected technology of this kind decides that his life can be given significance only by committing suicide, Groys concludes by reminding the reader that Bogdanov himself ‘lost his life in a truly egressive manner’ thanks to an experiment in which he exchanged blood with that of an ill student, ‘trying to heal a younger life by giving up an older one’ (p. 100).

Labour and Work

Is Groys suggesting that Bogdanov’s commitment to experimental research dedicated to cosmism-immortalism can inspire a radical form of taking care of intergenerational difference today, or is he on the contrary ending his book on an ironic note, gesturing towards the absurd fate to which his genealogy of the tendencies of care and self-care seems inevitably to point? It is not quite clear, at least to this reader. One is reminded of the late artists Gins and Arakawa, whose worked was premised on a ‘procedural architecture’, made intentionally difficult for human beings to negotiate, with the aim, so they proclaimed, of provoking transformations of the ‘architectural body’, such that ‘organisms that person’ would become capable of responding to their injunction to decide ‘not to die’ (Gins and Arakawa, 2002). But it is also reminiscent of the belief of transhumanist billionaires that the ‘problem’ of mortality is technologically solvable: the cosmism has been ditched, perhaps, but does not the sacrifice of the old for the sake of the young that Bogdanov seems to exemplify for Groys also have something in common with the kind of faux-hyper-utilitarianism used by transhumanists to project their fantasies into a long-term future?

Irrespective of the precise tone of Philosophy of Care’s conclusion, perhaps the deeper issue concerns how exactly Groys is using this word, ‘care’. On the one hand, he is at pains to point out the conjunction of the two bodies, organic and symbolic, which makes possible the elaboration of a more general account of care that conjoins to (for example) the Heideggerian notion of care as naming the way in which the future matters to Dasein, that is, to mortals, who are neither beasts nor immortals. On the other hand, Groys both starts with biopolitical care and keeps coming back to the care given to or taken of the organic body, ending with the radical organic transfusion from the old to the young we have just discussed. It is as if there is a strategy being pursued by the author: to open up the question of care in a very general way, the better to view it, constantly, through the more restrictive viewpoint afforded by the question of the institutional biopolitics of health.

It is not as if this viewpoint placing the biopolitics of health on centre stage is unjustified. On the contrary, the ways in which organic health from birth to death is increasingly managed as a kind of medical conveyor belt – which, once you’re on it, after, for example, having acquired some chronic condition, is nearly impossible to get off, where all major choices are more or less uniformly predetermined, despite the universal doctrines of informed consent and patient-centred treatment – is absolutely worthy of question. Moreover, the medicalization of so many spheres of human life, from infertility and sexuality to stress, attention and conduct, which inevitably induce the development of new diagnostic apparatus, new therapeutic prescriptions, and new pharmaceutical regimes, seems eminently describable as a reaction to (and reinforcement of) a loss of the knowledge of how to live, and how to live well, both individually and collectively. This absolutely demands to be understood in terms of the conjunction of biopolitics, biotechnology, marketing and consumerism, amounting to an institution and market in ‘care’ that is the distorted outcome of the withering of the very basis of care, which is to say, desire and knowledge. If so, then what demands to be understood is this perversion of care undertaken in the name of care.

Groys reads Hegel in terms of the master-slave dialectic, and the historical process by which the master becomes dependent on what the slave produces. But as Bernard Stiegler, points out, it is not slave labour that dooms the master to this loss of autonomy. Rather, it is work, insofar as this involves a pursuit of knowledge:

For to inherit the Hegelian dialectic is, for Marx, firstly to inherit the dialectic of master and slave – itself founded on the dialectic of the desire for recognition. Now, what leads to the dialectical inversion of the master by the slave, the latter having become ‘consciousness in itself and for itself’, is, in Hegel, the slave’s pursuit of knowledge. That is, the slave achieves this inversion by conquering determinations of the understanding, and through work, by putting technics to work – the worker (who is the slave) gives himself an art, that is, a form of knowledge and individuation, and ultimately a property, which is his individuation, that is, his existence recognized. (Stiegler, 2015: 125)

It is not a question of the slave but of the ‘bondsman’, who is, in fact, not just a labourer who toils with no chance for individuation, but a worker who, precisely, sets off a process of putting technology to work that becomes industrialization. This ‘slave’ who ends by imprisoning the master is in fact the bourgeoisie, and this imprisonment is initiated when the latter begins to acquire every kind of knowledge insofar as it can be turned into information capable of being programmed into machines. And it is this process that necessarily raises the question of how work – which is not labour precisely because it is a question of knowledge, and therefore individuation – can end up by destroying the knowledge possessed by workers themselves, a proletarianization that begins when the gestural knowledge of the tool-equipped weaver is transplanted into Jacquard’s loom. It is, however, possible to raise this question only on the condition of not confusing work and labour, which Groys does not distinguish (except in the Arendtian sense described above, which is something else again).

Already for Hegel, work is a question not just of knowledge but of desire, in the sense of holding immediate aims ‘in check, fleetingness staved off’, such that ‘work forms’: work is a ‘formative activity’ (Hegel, 1977: §195). Writing at the very dawn of industrialization, Hegel could not have conceived how ‘conquering determinations of the understanding’ could be the very thing that leads to proletarianization, ossifying what emerges egressively from the progress of spirit. But for Groys, the failure to distinguish the physico-chemical energy expended in the toil of the slave from the noetico-libidinal energy expended by the worker would not have been possible had his philosophy of care taken Stiegler into account, given that the question of the knowledge of care and taking care of knowledge are placed right at the heart of his work.

Defunctionalization and Refunctionalization

Had he done so, it would have been possible for Groys to say something more about the history of defunctionalizations to which he (rightly) draws attention. Defunctionalization is not just a question of decoupling an artifact or a way of life from the aims of life: it is also a way of opening life up to the adoption of new functions, and sometimes to a great multiplicity and diversity of functions. The evolution of Homo sapiens is understood by Leroi-Gourhan as commencing from a defunctionalization of the front feet that occurs with the conquest of the upright stance, giving rise to the hand that grasps – and that can therefore grasp, and make, tools (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 19) – exteriorizing a form of life that is therefore no longer just organic (no longer just an endosomatic body, whether simple, such as a single-celled bacterium, or complex, such as a multi-cellular organism), but what Stiegler calls exorganological.

The latter is composed, Stiegler argues, of perpetually unfinished processes of individuation at two orders of magnitude: the simple exorganism, consisting of the endosomatic organism together with its exosomatic organs (tools, prostheses), and the complex exorganism, consisting of collectivities of simple exorganisms, arranged as social organizations that take care of the simple exorganisms they contain and of the technical systems with which these individuals and collectives are articulated. From this perspective, defunctionalization is the very thing that opens the possibility of ‘putting technics to work’, with the tools of which (like fire) we will need to learn how to take care, lessons that will then need to be socialized (as intergenerational education). These tools with which we work knowledgably and carefully will eventually become the machines that still later will form the Gestell that puts us to work – or rather, unworks us, decommissioning us thanks to a process of generalized proletarianization depriving us of the possibility of taking care, including even of taking care of the machines and systems and economies with which our lives have become inextricably entangled.

The question of the defunctionalization of art is thus ultimately the question of its possible refunctionalization. This is not a question of the immortalism of the transhumanists, nor of the cosmists, nor even of the reversible destiny of Gins and Arakawa. Rather, it is the question of the possibility of drawing on the past history of putting technics to work as art, as individuation, in such a way that it can leap ahead of our degressive skeletal ossification at the hands of vastly powerful biopolitical and algorithmic processes that performatively pre-empt our capacity for conquering new determinations of the understanding, and therefore outstrip our capacity to utilize such determinations in the service of new processes of reason – that is, new processes of the composition of knowledge and desire.

This is the question of the possibility of a leap that makes possible a new orientation, in a situation of extreme disorientation resulting from the elimination of knowledge and desire. For we must be able to orient ourselves, if by orientation we mean settling into a viewpoint that is more than just ‘subjective’, but without claiming its universality. Such a necessarily local viewpoint is, alone, beyond the understanding, and therefore beyond calculation, what makes it possible to synthesize what we analyse, that is, to allow our analyses to crystallize into decisions that select from among possibilities. This is the care that must be taken by pharmacological beings, that is, by exorganological life that, constantly subject to new defunctionalizations, must perpetually retain the possibility of reorienting itself towards new futures. ‘Health’, in the sense of this term given to us by Georges Canguilhem, can well be understood as referring to this ‘normative’ capacity for perpetual re-adoption of new, local and temporary, but shared, norms (Canguilhem, 1991).

Such a re-adoption is possible only if there is a desire capable of aiming at the future, a desire that extends beyond the reign of, for example, consumerist and speculative drives devoted to the shortest possible term. It is possible only if fleetingness can be staved off, that is, only on the condition of forming an economy of care capable of fostering new processes of sublimation. Today’s primary problem is not repression, not the authoritarian trampling of the freedom of desire, but rather an immense regression, consisting of all of the desperation and reaction that arise from the proletarianization of every chance for sublimation, leaving the drives unbound. It may be, as Groys believes, that the ‘Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean celebration of vital forces and creativity was a reaction to standard bourgeois “reasonable” behaviour neglecting art, poetry and music as an unreasonable waste of energy and time’ (Groys, 2022: 61), but the bourgeoisie were also those who craved the status of aristocratic culture, and as a result tried to make this culture their own. No doubt this adoption or appropriation occurred mostly in the mode of the philistine, but, at the same time, the bourgeoisie would give birth to a great many of the most transformational artists of the 19th and 20th centuries – before all of that is swept away by a culture industry and then by algorithmic platforms. In short, the alleged repression that accompanies ‘bourgeois culture’ is in no way our principal enemy today.

Re-Orienting Care

The way Groys turns to Bogdanov is both highly interesting and potentially crucial to renewing a philosophy or antiphilosophy of care – but for reasons that perhaps go beyond Groys. Re-reading Bogdanov’s Essays in Tektology, and what he says about egression and degression, that is, centralized but vulnerable emergence and plastic but skeletal fixing, it is clear that for Bogdanov these are not opposing processes, but tendencies that it is up to us to compose:

Universal egression unfolds in a successive subordination of nature to mankind; universal degression secures each step of this process, determining and fixing it in space and time. The power of society over nature is real and firm only where everything is established and distributed in space and time; this is its first and basic fixing condition. (Bogdanov, 1980: 202)

Perhaps in this ‘subordination of nature to mankind’ we will today inevitably hear an echo of the Cartesian ‘master and possessor of nature’, and all it implies for us about the way the conquest of determinations of the understanding is the very thing that has brought our biosphere and our existence into their current parlous and perilous situation. Nevertheless, what Bogdanov tries to describe with this composition of egressive and degressive tendencies are, in fact, the conditions for the metastabilization (stability on the threshold of instability, and vice versa) of an orientation. He continues:

A newly discovered country is actually discovered inasmuch as there are determined its geographic coordinates, i.e., its location in space; a newly discovered planet – only when there are established its astronomic coordinates and the time of rotation in orbit; a machine can only be directed through a precise measurement and commensurability of its parts in space and of its speeds in time; any labour and any cognition – egressive, subordinating nature activities – learns on the same degressive ‘orientation’. In its conquering action mankind throws a spatial-time net on everything that is accessible to it, and the securing of each link in this net is a step to new victories. (Bogdanov, 1980: 202)

This is nothing other than the question of the way in which internal sense is articulated with external sense, via technical instruments, such as those of measurement, and the systems and symbols of such measurement, where this measurement is always finite.

Kant argues that our ability to orient ourselves in space depends on a feeling that we have, such as the feeling of the difference between left and right, which is a feeling that is both subjective and not just subjective – his point being that this idea can be extended to the question of orienting ourselves in thought (Kant, 1996: 8–10). As Derrida saw, the whole question of the distinction of ‘right’ from ‘fact’ stems from the possibility of this extension ‘beyond the sensory field and into the black night of the suprasensible’ (Derrida, 2011: 60). At stake here is the possibility of orienting oneself in this dark night, of finding a way to enter a psychosocial process that aims at an impossible unification of what flows through us, within us and between us. The notion of justice beyond the law, for example, is the question of this subjective principle of differentiation inasmuch as justice is what, without existing and without ever having existed, functions as a ‘compass’ (Stiegler, 2018: 244). Since this compass does not exist, it is a fiction, but a fiction we are obliged not to abandon, which is to say, of which we must take care:

The subjective principle of differentiation leads to the classification of fictions in order to orient them toward and from a literally functional supreme real, an apparition, what I have called a necessary and inevitable projection toward the unification of a flux, specifically the flux of a We that is somehow delegated through the universal and has an even larger sense here: the flux of the unity of the totality of phenomena in general. (Stiegler, 2011: 185)

For Stiegler, the conditions of this inexistent but consistent compass are exosomatic. Is this not precisely what Bogdanov describes with respect to a newly discovered country, when he refers to the necessity of the measurement of coordinates of time and space? It is what Stiegler refers to as calendarity (‘time, spanning the life of a society, inscribing “cosmic rhythms” in it through symbolic rituals: it is the calendar as such, but also the entire breadth of unique local events that make up the programmatics of behavior’) and cardinality (‘space, tracing out actual territorial limits and boundaries, circumscribing social and cultural representations and forming systems of orientation and navigational instruments’) (Stiegler, 2011: 120–1), where these are both the very means of colonial conquest and what, given that a ‘calendrical system and a cardinal system direct us to something beyond the calculable’, make possible ‘the projection of an always fictive unity’ (Stiegler, 2009: 46–7) of a group, of the possibility of referring to a We, including the We who inhabit the only known biosphere.

Today, all of these fictional fixings and projections have come unfixed, unmoored in the computational hegemony resulting from the developments made possible by the culture industry (the anti-culture industry), then by the effects of Moore’s Law (which claims to describe the technological progression of computational circuits) – itself another fiction, however industrially performative it may be – eventually giving rise to social networks (anti-social networks). But performativity is precisely the question: it is a question of the possibility of a new feeling through which we will have a chance at feeling our way into a future (Mules, 2023) – feeling digitally, no doubt, with those defunctionalized digits of ours that we use to touch and to count, and to recount, that is, to tell old and new stories. As a question of performativity, this can never be reduced to a question of conquering new determinations of the understanding, acquiring new facts. Instead, it is a matter of locating fictions in which it is possible to believe, such as the fiction that a rational miracle will make it possible to transform the biosphere without destroying it and ourselves (Stiegler, 2012). This is not a question of a transfusion by which we can save the young by sacrificing the old. But it is a question of a transubstantiation by which what has been carelessly allowed to sink into insignificance can turn out to have been, through a ritual yet to be devised and in a hindsight yet to come and with instruments yet to be fashioned, the buried compost that will allow us, by mixing it up and mixing it around (that is, by subjecting it to critique), to invest in the possibility of a path that had hitherto not been illuminated in this dark night. It may be literally impossible to believe in this possibility, and yet, what is called caring should above all be oriented towards taking very careful care of this precious impossibility.