Week 5: The Age of Disruption — Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism

By Neal Thomas

The text that I’ve chosen to introduce is three chapters from the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s latest book, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Stiegler is deservedly well-known in post-Continental philosophy, and adjacently posthuman studies, for his rich and provocative accounts of technics as constitutive of human temporality. At base, he argues that “organised inorganic matter” is the ontological ground for human memory, and therefore that its arrangement into different systematic forms has deeply structured the epochs of human existence. On this understanding, he argues that our current civilization, with its continuing and intensifying global industrialization of memory via corporate media networks, is on the verge of a collapse from which it may not recover. It’s a nihilistic view to be sure, but one that I think can help us to diagnose some of the core features of our ontological and epistemological relationship to digital objects.

Elsewhere and in these chapters, Stiegler tends to assume familiarity with the conceptual apparatus developed in his core trilogy, Technics & Time. So it makes sense to start by briefly linking together some of its vocabulary, before turning to my own sense of its application to digital objects. Important precursor thinkers here include:

• Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological concepts of protention, retention, and the epoché, as well as Martin Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein, including his later work on the enframing relationship between technology and existence;
• Jacques Derrida’s work on grammatization, the trace, and the pharmakon;
• Archaeologist-anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s notion that human beings and matter are coupled together in an evolutionary, interior-exterior relation (taking the form of an ethnic milieu coupled to a technical milieu, the latter of which historically begins to separate more and more in abstraction from the former);
• Philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon’s notions of vital, collective-social, and psychic individuation, as they articulate to a core concept in his thinking about technics: concretization.

At the risk of collapsing some incredibly nuanced thinking and historical reflection, here’s a very basic thumbnail of Stiegler’s overall project. Husserl spoke in his phenomenology of two basic modalities of time, fixed and flowing, and he turned to melody to illustrate their knitting-together. For him, the experience of unified time involved retaining the immediately preceding — what just happened — in such a way as to anticipate what was yet to come, as is often our experience of music. Stiegler wants to ask: how can we see time’s succession, and our self-awareness as lived through it, in a new light, by understanding it to be determined not just by what Husserl called, in the abstract, ‘collective secondary retentions’, but rather according to what Stiegler calls tertiary retentions? For Husserl, collective secondary retentions meant memories inherited from previous generations, through tradition and institution; say, through education in the broadest sense of the word, or in the communications of parents to children. A question at the core of Stiegler’s work is to ask, shouldn’t we also include philosophical analysis of the memory strategies that come along with our collective and individual relationship to tools and technical systems?

Further, Stiegler wants us to appreciate that collective secondary retentions as they are supported by tertiary retentional strategies amount not only to a logic of remembrance (what he calls an ‘orthothesis’) but also a position of anticipation for what’s to come–Husserl’s protention, again reconstituted to better account for technology. Steigler reconfigures Husserl’s concept of the epokhé too, to include mnemotechnics and mnemotechnologies; specifically, their capacities for producing and organizing différance through inscription strategies, where these inevitably shift over long periods of time — inscription meaning primordial ‘marks’, and not just language. As an aside, Brian Cantwell Smith similarly insists that whatever we want computers and digital objects to do next will turn on their being seen most abstractly in terms of mark-making.

In AoD, epokhé denotes an ‘arrest’ or ‘interruption’ or ‘state of doubt’ — Husserl’s original sense of the term, meaning to bracket or suspend everyday judgment in order to achieve the phenomenological perspective — but ALSO a period of time or era. Epokhé should in other words be read as a historical change in ways of thinking, or in Heideggerean terms, as a shift in the historical relation that Dasein has with its being, in this case based in some technological upheaval or a change to knowledge systems. A useful example I landed on in my own mind here was Nick Couldry & Andreas Hepp’s work on historical waves of mediatization, where the mass digitization of societies provoked just such an upheaval or interruption, but also, the commencement of a new era that remains in reciprocal relation to other ones.

Stiegler also draws from Heidegger and Derrida the existential notion that any way of knowing through technics is always-already also a refusal to know — that is, a postponement of the singular and primordial knowledge of one’s death — understood as the knowledge of some default. In the sense of Derrida’s pharmakon, tertiary retention compensates for the default of retention, the loss of both memory and knowledge, while also accentuating the loss. This makes sense to me in the case of experiencing late-night anxious insomnia, both brought on and solved by endless scrolling through digital objects on YouTube or Twitter.

Shifting gears into the selected chapters, it’s on these terms that Stiegler diagnoses our 21st-century existence through the digital object as one of hypersynchronization, signaling for him a looming existential catastrophe of “the end of all protention” — and worse, the embrace of an “absolutely negative protention” (10). He sees this in the current generation of teenagers who seem to no longer have dreams, for example, and in the ‘functional stupidity’ of anti-democratic leaders on the march around the world. Living as I do in Canada, nearby to Toronto, his account of absolutely negative protention brought to mind an attack in April 2018, in which a member of the online ‘incel’ subculture killed ten people, and injured more than a dozen others, by running them down with a van on Toronto streets.

To read these horrifying circumstances through Stiegler is perhaps to say that the broad retentional-protentional relationships that we have with social technologies are now profoundly organizing (to repugnant effect in the case of incel groups) collective individuations that feel at once inevitable and aspirational. Collective individuation is a term used by Simondon to explain how the psychic limits of individuals extend themselves into sociality, by negotiating temporal frontiers between in-groups and out-groups, producing in them a sense of belonging. Social media’s tertiary retentional structures reinforce a particular, galvanizing past for incel groups, ‘flocking’ them together through an accumulation of retrievable and categorizable data objects, which help to maintain and amplify their perverse narrative that “attractive women have always rejected us,” while at the same time producing, Stiegler would say, a disindividuating future horizon of absolutely negative protention: “together we will rise up and either reconfigure society to our own fantasized ends of possessing the women we deserve, or go out in a blaze of glory trying.”

More broadly and over the longer term, when it comes to knowledge and memory technologies, Stiegler writes that

“An epoch configures the libidinal economy around tertiary retentions that form a technical system. A new epoch emerges when new forms of life emerge that supplant a prior epoch’s knowledge and powers of living, doing and conceiving. New ways of thinking, doing and living take shape, on the basis of precursors reconfiguring the retentions inherited from the earlier epoch into so many new kinds of protention” (13–14).

The problem is that our epoch is disruptive, because it gives no place to this second moment of new protentions, nor therefore to any thinking. Through our current approaches to the meaningfulness of digital objects, we have unwittingly given ourselves over to automatic protention, where behaviors as ways of living are replaced by automatisms and addictions. As Stiegler puts it, this “gives rise to only an absolute emptiness of thought, to a radical kenosis” (15); a term (used metaphorically here, obviously) to refer to the renunciation of divine nature by Christ, and by proxy, a renunciation of the productivity of thinking that any one of us could possibly change the world to match our hubris (21). The latter term Stiegler wields via Georges Bataille’s notion of the general economy, as having the crucial transcendental valence of risk and possibility. Steigler writes that digital tertiary retention is disruptive because it “takes control” of our hubris, especially its basis in the transgenerational and inter-group sharing of collective secondary retentions (Eg. “Together we can solve climate change, and usher in a new era!”), reconstituting them instead in the name of “ultra-libertarian capitalism” and its “devious storytelling of transhumanism” (21). Such a shadowy diagnosis of collective life lived under the terms of “dividuation” rather than individuation will be familiar to those who’ve encountered the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Putting Stiegler’s concerns into the Simondonian idiom that he sometimes shares with Deleuze and Guattari, social technologies have gone hypertelic as a result of their monopolistic commercialization; the latter being a moment where some technical object or ensemble becomes, as Simon Mills explains, “so closed as to be abstracted from both its genesis and any possibility of further functional development.” Stiegler’s solution is to say that we desperately need to reconstitute the automatic society by establishing a true economy of sharing, and that any possibility of this will turn on an improved technics that can reassert the organizing of functional sub-systems into a total functioning, conceived (again in Simondonian terms) as the improved concretization of social technologies as technical ensemble, so that it can once again operate in its milieu in an open way.

Relatedly, if information theory and cybernetics have for some time now been framing our universe and civilization in the terms of entropy and negentropy, then at this apex moment of our relationship to digital systems, Stiegler argues that we must be prepared to set out new terms for what he analogizes as anthropy/neganthropy. He writes that, “Negentropy and the neganthropy that bifurcates from it provide us with access to the extra-ordinary, permitting us to invent life, within what we call nature and what we call culture… Neganthropological différance is not just reducible to the plane of subsistence that governs life in ‘nature’” (27).

In other words, we must take on board the idea that however we next frame reality through the concept of information, it will need to involve not just a vital relation to nature, but also a psychosocial, and ultimately ethical principle of neganthropic différance for us all. It’s my own view that industrial social platforms do produce a kind of neganthropic différance, but one that remains too beholden to certain historical paradigms of documentary classification and information retrieval in its metaphysics, not to mention being styled too much in terms of private cognition or neoliberal subjectivation, to serve as the basis for the contributory economy that Stiegler seeks.

Wrapping up, Stiegler’s work as it is lately framed in AoD remains fascinating to me, because he prosecutes both his philosophical frameworks and their political import directly at the level of technicity as it generates fields of signification. For him, these fields should be seen as producing rather than presuming a nature-culture divide, from out of which we articulate, as users of digital objects and designers of their principles of exchange, certain capacities for collective expression, affect, and normative judgment. I feel that he very cogently and powerfully argues that the historical forms of subject-object relationality achieved through technique collectively make us who we are. I find such a perspective useful for sidestepping certain depoliticizing phenomenological / social-constructivist currents that seem to have become dominant in the underpinnings of

1. “mainstream” sociology (whatever that means), with its continued circling of the antinomy of structure and agency;
2. popular narrations of everyday life with social technologies, which function at an apolitical level of interpersonal reflexivity, and are therefore wide open for capture in the ideological maw of surveillance capitalism;
3. the intellectual frameworks driving technology design itself, which out of pragmatic necessity are too quickly satisfied by glib answers concerning the nature and constitution of ‘the social’. Think for example of the ways that high-level discourse in information systems and human-computer interaction design mixes elements of Husserl and Heidegger in with second-order cybernetics and systems theory. Via people like Stiegler, in 2019 we can ask whether such approaches are at this point blunting, rather than fostering, the sheer transindividual possibilities of sociality, by way of their continued dogged hewing to radically decontextualized information-theoretical views of natural and social phenomena.

Of course, in terms of this last gripe I am not a system designer or computer programmer, so am hardly in a position to be making such high-flown complaints! I simply stake my hopes for the future on more sophisticated social-morphogenetic accounts, such as those provided by Simondon, or as ably described by Mark in an earlier post, Margaret Archer. My personal frustrations around the status of the digital object have lately meant stepping away from most traditions that assume from the start a kind of traditionally humanistic philosophical anthropology, in favor of a turn towards more organismic and ethological accounts of being, which have interesting things to say about the prior constitution of stable subject-object relations from out of our particular practices, and often inchoate collective desires and drives, as they circulate in and produce field-like relations. On this front, I find myself going back to books like Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, Mark Hansen’s Feed-Forward, and Alberto Toscano’s The Theatre of Production. To conclude in a rather gnomic way, from out of their perspectives, and deeply informed by Stiegler’s work too, in my view we need to be radically de-subtantializing and rendering more immanent what we mean by data, objects, and information, in order to better come to terms with what we will mean by relationality in the future context of digital objects.