Automatic Society, Volume 1

The Future of Work

Bernard Stiegler, Daniel Ross

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781509506316, 9781509506309
• eBook ISBN: 9781509506347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In July 2014 the Belgian newspaper Le Soir claimed that France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland and the United States may lose between 43 and 50 per cent of their jobs within ten to fifteen years. Across the world, integrated automation, one key result of the so-called 'data economy', is leading to a drastic reduction in employment in all areas- from the legal profession to truck driving, from medicine to stevedoring.

In this first volume of a new series, the leading cultural theorist Bernard Stiegler advocates a radical solution to the crisis posed by automation and consumer capitalism more generally. He calls for a decoupling of the concept of 'labour' (meaningful, intellectual participation) from 'employment' (dehumanizing, banal work), with the ultimate aim of eradicating 'employment' altogether. By doing so, new and alternative economic models will arise, where individuals are no longer simply mined for labour, but also actively produce what they consume.

Building substantially on his existing theories and engaging with a wide range of figures- from Deleuze and Foucault to Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan- Automatic Society will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities, as well as anyone concerned with the central question of the future of work.

1
The Industry of Traces and Automatized Artificial Crowds

We might, then, also refer to a sort of panic that is on the verge of replacing the assurance we had of being able to conduct our affairs under the sign of freedom and reason.

Robert Musil¹

10. The automatization of existences

The rise of so-called ‘social’ digital networks brought with it a new kind of economy, based on personal data, cookies, metadata, tags and other tracking technologies through which is established what Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy have called algorithmic governmentality.² It was this context, too, that saw the rise of ‘big data’ – that is, those technologies connected to what is referred to as high-performance computing³ – which utilizes methods derived from applied mathematics, placing them in the service of automated calculation and forming the core of this algorithmic governmentality.

Digital tracking technologies are the most advanced stage of a process of grammatization that began at the end of the Upper Palaeolithic age, when humanity first learnt to discretize⁴ and reproduce, in traces of various kinds, the flux and flow running through it and that it generates: mental images (cave paintings), speech (writing), gestures (the automation of production), frequencies of sound and light (analogue recording technology) and now individual behaviour, social relations and transindividuation processes (algorithms of reticular writing).

These traces constitute hypomnesic tertiary retentions.⁵ Having become digital, they are today generated by interfaces, sensors and other devices, in the form of binary numbers and hence as calculable data, forming the base of an automatic society in which every dimension of life becomes a functional agent for an industrial economy that thereby becomes thoroughly hyper-industrial.

The outlines of the hyper-industrial epoch first appear when the analogue technologies of the mass media set up those modulation processes characteristic of what in 1990 Gilles Deleuze called ‘control societies’.⁶ But it is only when digital calculation integrates this modulation in the form of algorithmic governmentality⁷ that hyper-industrial society is fully accomplished as the automatization of existences.

11. The proletarianization of sensibility

With the conservative revolution and the neoliberal turn, the dissolution of everyday life as described by Henri Lefebvre⁸ (the analysis of which was taken up again by Guy Debord) leads in the last quarter of the twentieth century to the reign of symbolic misery:⁹ the analogue, audiovisual apparatus of the mass media is then essentially subjected to strategic marketing via the privatization of radio stations and television channels.

Symbolic misery results from the proletarianization of sensibility that commenced in the early twentieth century. This de-symbolization leads in a structural way to the destruction of desire, that is, to the ruin of libidinal economy. And it ultimately leads to the ruin of all economy whatsoever when, at the beginning of the 1980s, speculative marketing, under direct shareholder control, becomes hegemonic and systematically exploits the drives, which are thereby divested of all attachment.¹⁰

Symbolic misery follows from the mechanical turn of sensibility¹¹ that proletarianizes the sensible realm by subjecting symbolic life to the industrial organization of what then becomes ‘communication’ between, on the one hand, professional producers of symbols and, on the other hand, proletarianized and de-symbolized consumers, deprived of their life-knowledge. Individual and collective existences are thereby subjected to the permanent control of the mass media,¹² which short-circuits the processes of identification, idealization and transindividuation that would otherwise weave the thread of intergenerational relations and so form the fabric of desire by ‘binding’ the drives.¹³

Elementary savoir-vivre, elementary life-knowledge, is formed and transmitted through processes of identification, idealization and transindividuation, constituting the attentional forms¹⁴ that lie at the basis of any society. These forms metastabilize the psychosocial ability to bind the drives by diverting their goals towards social investments.

As the industrial deformations and diversions of attention that short-circuit these processes, the de-symbolization in which consists the symbolic misery imposed by consumer capitalism inevitably leads to the destruction of all investment, and to the subsequent annihilation of libidinal economy.¹⁵

The object in which desire invests is what libido economizes. The object is desired to the point of inverting the goals of the drives that support it¹⁶ only because, thus economized, that is, saved and retained, it no longer exists: it consists. And, as such, it is infinitized – that is, it exceeds all calculation.¹⁷ This is also the question of excess in the ‘general economy’ of Georges Bataille.

The simultaneous destruction of desire, of investment in its object and of the experience of its consistence results in the liquidation of all attachment and all fidelity – that is, of all confidence, without which no economy is possible – and ultimately of all belief, and therefore of all credit.¹⁸

12. The original artificiality of traces in noetic life

In 1905, Freud's investigation of fetishistic perversion led him to what he would later call the ‘libidinal economy’. Love, as everyone knows, is in the strictest and most immediate sense the experience of artifice: to fetishize the one we love is essential.¹⁹ When we cease to love someone we had formerly loved, the artificiality of the amorous situation falls back brutally into everyday ordinariness. Desire, as that which economizes its object, as what takes care of it by idealizing it and transindividuating it (by socializing it, that is, by making it an object of social relations), arises only with the artificialization of life – with what Georges Canguilhem described as technical life. This is why Pandora, the wife of Epimetheus, the ‘first woman’, that is, the first being to become an object of desire, is originally bejewelled.

Two or three million years ago, when life began to pass essentially through non-living artifice (which means that it cannot do without its prostheses, which is the hum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Functional Stupidity, Entropy and Negentropy in the Anthropocene
• 1: The Industry of Traces and Automatized Artificial Crowds
• 2: States of Shock, States of Fact, States of Law
• 3: The Destruction of the Faculty of Dreaming
• 4: Overtaken: The Automatic Generation of Protentions
• 5: Within the Electronic Leviathan in Fact and in Law
• 6: On Available Time for the Coming Generation
• 7: Energies and Potentials in the Twenty-First Century
• 8: Above and Beyond the Market
• Conclusion: Noetic Pollination and the Neganthropocene
• Index
• End User License Agreement