[D66] The Age of Disruption | lareviewofbooks.org

[A.OUT]

Daring to Hope for the Improbable: On Bernard Stiegler’s “The Age of
Disruption”
By
Leonid Bilmes
lareviewofbooks.org
10 min
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WHY IS POLITICAL HOPE becoming defunct in so many young people today?
This is the question Bernard Stiegler poses in his new book, The Age of
Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Early
on, he quotes the words of a teenager whose nihilistic outlook, he
claims, is representative of the zeitgeist of contemporary youth:

When I talk to young people of my generation […] they all say the same
thing: we no longer have the dream of starting a family, of having
children, or a trade, or ideals. […] All that is over and done with,
because we’re sure that we will be the last generation, or one of the
last, before the end.

These despairing words serve as a leitmotif to Stiegler’s fervent
deconstruction of economic, political, and spiritual malaise. He
dauntingly refers to the present’s “absence of epoch” — i.e., today’s
lack of any significant political ethos. This “absence of epoch,” during
a time of critical ecological changes, is why so many have been left
disaffected, fast becoming (in Stiegler’s heavily italicized prose) “mad
with sadness, mad with grief, mad with rage.”

Stiegler’s voice is by turns imperious, inveighing, confessional, and
compassionate. His philosophical analysis — when the rhetorical wind in
its sails slackens a bit — is intricate and brilliant, although grasping
it requires some knowledge of the rhizomatic conceptual network that
supports his argument, its tendrils often recognizable precisely by
their italicization.

Stiegler’s origins as a philosopher perhaps explain his sense of
urgency. In 1976, he tried to hold up a bank in Toulouse — his fourth
bank robbery — only to be arrested, tried, and (thanks to a good lawyer)
given a five­-year prison sentence. It was during this incarceration
that the erstwhile-jazz-café-owner-turned-bank-robber discovered
philosophy, subjecting himself to a strict daily regimen of reading and
writing (some of his notes from that period continue to feed into his
books to this day). Following his release from prison, Stiegler, with
the support of Jacques Derrida, began to teach philosophy. Thus was
launched the improbable career of one of the most influential European
philosophers of the 21st century.

Stiegler recounted his prison experience in his 2009 book Acting Out,
and in Age of Disruption he extensively revisits this conversion
narrative: an upward climb from physical and intellectual imprisonment
toward liberation. Quoting a beautiful phrase from a letter by Malcolm X
(who had a similar conversion experience), Stiegler observes that prison
gave him the “gift of Time.” He describes a typical day of study in his
cell: “In the morning I read, after a poem by Mallarmé, Husserl’s
Logical Investigations, and, in the evening, Proust’s In Search of Lost
Time.” The following morning, “after a cup of Ricoré chicory coffee and
a Gauloises cigarette,” he would “prepare a synthesis” of what he’d read
the day before. It was this monastic, autodidactic program that enabled
Stiegler to reach perhaps his most crucial insight — the discovery that
“reading [is] an interpretation by the reader of his or her own memory
through the interpretation of the text that he or she had read.”

That’s a simple enough idea on the surface, but it conceals depths of
implications. To understand why, we need to consider Stiegler’s
theorization of technics. In his ongoing project Technics and Time
(1994–), Stiegler lays the foundations for all the philosophical books
he has produced. He posits that technics (technology conceived in the
broadest terms, encompassing writing, art, clothing, tools, and
machines) is co-originary with Homo sapiens: what distinguishes our
species from other life forms is our reliance on constructed prostheses
for survival. Drawing on the work of paleoanthropologist André
Leroi-Gourhan and historian of technology Bertrand Gille, Stiegler
argues that tools are the material embodiments of past experience.
Building on this insight, and incorporating the perspectives of Martin
Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, as well as the views of influential but
little-known French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, Stiegler claims that
technics plays a constitutive role in the formation of subjectivity,
opening up — and, if badly used, also closing down — horizons of
possibility for individual and collective realization.

The role of technics in human life is cemented by what Stiegler calls
“tertiary” memory. Here we return to the intimate kinship between the
interpretation of a text and an interpretation of one’s own memory,
Stiegler’s major insight from his time in prison. Technics, which makes
these forms of interpretation possible in the first place, acts as a
“third” memory for human beings because it encodes the past experience
of others, and thus always remains external to the subject. Nonhuman
life-forms have access to two kinds of memories: “primary memory,” or
genetic information inscribed in the DNA code, and “secondary memory,”
which is the acquired memory of an organism with a sufficiently complex
nervous system. While secondary memory accumulates over an organism’s
lifespan, it disappears with the death of the individual. Human beings,
uniquely among higher life-forms, are prosthetic organisms that pass on
their accumulated experience by means of exosomatic or “tertiary”
memory, in the form of tools (especially written language).

So how does all of this relate to our present politico-economic malaise?
Stiegler believes that digital technology, in the hands of technocrats
whom he calls “the new barbarians,” now threatens to dominate our
tertiary memory, leading to a historically unprecedented
“proletarianization” of the human mind. For Stiegler, the stakes today
are much higher than they were for Marx, from whom this term is derived:
proletarianization is no longer a threat posed to physical labor but to
the human spirit itself. This threat is realized as a collective loss of
hope.

A key text for Stiegler is, predictably, Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which has long remained
the flagship of critical theory. Adorno and Horkheimer anticipated a
rise in cultural “barbarism,” spearheaded by Hollywood cinema and the
so-called “culture industry.” Today, billions of people are reliant on
information technology that reduces culture to bite-sized chunks (the
thought-span of a Tweet), and which is used primarily for marketing
purposes by a monopoly of tech giants. Stiegler believes that such a
situation threatens to dissolve the social bonds that embed individuals
in collective forms of life. Most worrying of all, social networks are
becoming the main source of cultural memory for many people today;
Facebook’s “Post a Memory” feature, for instance, is one superficial
manifestation of the deeper long-term impact on subjectivity and identity.

The Age of Disruption attempts to unearth the historical and
philosophical roots of the current politico-economic sickness. Drawing
on Peter Sloterdijk’s In the World Interior of Capital (2013), Stiegler
argues that the risk-taking ethos of modern capitalism has created a
generalized spirit of “disinhibition” that is a threat to law, morality,
and governance. It is, in essence, a secular nihilism that Sloterdijk
found powerfully expressed in the “rational madness” of Raskolnikov in
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, who is willing to sacrifice others
in the pursuit of his own greatness. Closer to home, we can glimpse the
same overweening sociopathy in the likes of Bernie Madoff, Jordan
Belfort, and the crews of speculators who gave us the 2008 global market
meltdown. This nihilistic disinhibition is exacerbated by a second form
of secular madness Stiegler traces: the conviction that rationality
essentially consists of mathematical calculation. Ever since Descartes
and Leibniz, European civilization has been driven by a dream of a
mathesis universalis, the achievement of a hypothetical system of
thought and language modeled solely on mathematics. If this dream sounds
like ripe material for dystopian fiction, it is, for Stiegler, our very
own present.

The above summary cannot do full justice to Stiegler’s painstaking
deconstruction of the roots of “computational capitalism” — a phrase he
uses to join these two interrelated forms of rationalized madness.
Stiegler firmly believes that a distinction must always be upheld
between “authentic thinking” and “computational cognitivism” and that
today’s crisis lies in confusing the latter for the former: we have
entrusted our rationality to computational technologies that now
dominate everyday life, which is increasingly dependent on glowing
screens driven by algorithmic anticipations of their users’ preferences
and even writing habits (e.g., the repugnantly named “predictive text”
feature that awaits typed-in characters to regurgitate stock phrases).
Stiegler insists, however, that authentic thinking and calculative
thinking are not mutually exclusive; indeed, mathematical rationality is
one of our major prosthetic extensions. But the catastrophe of the
digital age is that the global economy, powered by computational
“reason” and driven by profit, is foreclosing the horizon of independent
reflection for the majority of our species, in so far as we remain
unaware that our thinking is so often being constricted by lines of code
intended to anticipate, and actively shape, consciousness itself. As
Stiegler’s translator, the philosopher and filmmaker Daniel Ross, puts
it, our so-called “post-truth” age is one “where calculation becomes so
hegemonic as to threaten the possibility of thinking itself.” [1]

One should not be misled into thinking that Stiegler is a philosophical
Luddite who seeks to do away with digital technology. Far from it: the
digital, like any technology, is double-edged, and is useful so long as
it remains merely a tool. While his book does not propose practical
solutions (Stiegler promises to address some of these in a future work),
it does seek to inspire a collective realization of the extent to which
future memory is currently being shaped by algorithmically determined
and profit-driven information flow. Stiegler asks us to consider how
much of our lives we wish to delegate to market-tailored computational
rationality.

Atypically for a writer of contemporary philosophy, Stiegler does not
shirk from sharing his personal struggles: obsessions with death,
suicidal impulses, fears of madness. In this regard, his style closely
resembles the heavily italicized prose of Austrian writer Thomas
Bernhard. The following passage is from the opening of Bernhard’s 1982
novel, Wittgenstein’s Nephew (trans. David McLintock):

In 1967, one of the indefatigable nursing sisters in the Hermann
Pavilion on the Baumgartnerhöhe placed on my bed a copy of my newly
published book Gargoyles […] but I had not the strength to pick it up,
having just come round from a general anesthesia lasting several hours,
during which the doctors had cut open my neck and removed a fist-sized
tumor from my thorax. […] I developed a moonlike face, just as the
doctors had intended. During the ward round they would comment on my
moon face in their witty fashion, which made even me laugh, although
they had told me themselves that I had only weeks, or at best months, to
live.

And the following is one of several confessional admissions grafted onto
the rhizomatic network of Stiegler’s philosophical argument:

At the beginning of August [2014], finding myself increasingly obsessed
by death, that is, by what I projected as being my death, and by the
latter as my deliverance, waking up every night haunted by this suicidal
urge, I called, somewhat at random, this clinic where I had received
treatment. I asked for urgent help, seeming, so I thought, to be
suffering from some kind of early dementia …

Although the Bernhard passage comes from a novel, albeit an
autobiographical one, the comparison is suggestive. Stiegler confesses
to having tried and failed to write fiction during the first months of
his incarceration, producing “countless pages now lost, to tell a story
that never took any form other than the same fruitless effort to write.”
A sentence like this would be right at home in a Bernhard novel, and had
Stiegler been successful as a novelist, he might well have written the
sort of tortured monologue of obsessive phrases and motifs at which
Bernhard excelled. Indeed, Stiegler is drawn toward this kind of frantic
repetitiveness even in his philosophical exposition: the Arabic
invocation, “Inshallah,” is used several times, and words and phrases
such as “absence of epoch,” “madness,” “barbarians,” et cetera, recur
almost like chants. But this comparison also signals a key difference in
intention: while both writers often turn to thoughts of death and
endings, Stiegler, despite his proclivity for portentous clauses in
italics, remains committed to emerging out of (in his words) “the
mortiferous energy of despair that we are accumulating everywhere.” The
same cannot be said of Bernhard, whose outlook was willfully
mortiferous, as he might have put it.

Despite his urgent talk of apocalypse, chaos, and epochal endings,
despite the rampant italics of philosophical admonishment, his arguments
are enunciated by a humane and compassionate voice. As he confesses, he
often dictates his thoughts while cycling in the countryside, and his
wife, Caroline Stiegler, subsequently transcribes the recordings (I can
only assume all those italics are audible). Stiegler’s traversal of the
philosophical genealogies of Western rationality and madness, and his
urge to rethink their metastable composition in an all-too-rational
digital world devoted to the algorithmic reduction of all aspects of
existence, allows the presently unhoped-for to at least become
thinkable. What Stiegler hopes for most of all is to get his readers to
“dream again” — to become politically hopeful (without the scare
quotes). The last words may be left to Heraclitus: “One who does not
hope for the un-hoped for will not find it: it is undiscoverable so long
as it is inaccessible.”

Leonid Bilmes is a researcher and writer living in London.

[1] Ross has translated several of Stiegler’s more recent books, and his
introduction to an earlier collection of essays, The Neganthropocene
(2018), is outstandingly lucid and highly recommended for readers
wishing to get a firmer grasp of the context and philosophical lineage
of Stiegler’s thought. It is freely available through the Open
Humanities Press. His engrossing documentary, The Ister (2004),
co-directed with David Barison, features extensive interviews with
Stiegler introducing his key philosophical ideas.