The Age of Disruption

Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism

Bernard Stiegler

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509529278, 9781509529261
• eBook ISBN: 9781509529292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Half a century ago Adorno and Horkheimer argued, with great prescience, that our increasingly rationalized world was witnessing the emergence of a new kind of barbarism, thanks in part to the stultifying effects of the culture industries. What they could not foresee was that, with the digital revolution and the pervasive automation associated with it, the developments they had discerned would be greatly accentuated, giving rise to the loss of reason and to the loss of the reason for living. Individuals are now overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of digital information and the speed of digital flows, resulting in a kind of technological Wild West in which they find themselves increasingly powerless, driven by their lack of agency to the point of madness.

How can we find a way out of this situation? In this major new book, Bernard Stiegler argues that we must first acknowledge our era as one of fundamental disruption and detachment. We are living in an absence of epokh? in the philosophical sense, by which Stiegler means that we have lost our path of thinking and being. Weaving in powerful accounts from his own life story, including struggles with depression and time spent in prison, Stiegler calls for a new epokh? based on public power. We must forge new circuits of meaning outside of the established algorithmic routes. For only then will forms of thinking and life be able to arise that restore meaning and aspiration to the individual.

Concluding with a dialogue between Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in social and cultural theory, media and cultural studies, philosophy and the humanities generally.

Part One
The Epokhē of My LifePhilosophizing So as Not to Go Mad

1
Disruption: A ‘New Form of Barbarism’

1. The loss of reason

At 4:30 p.m. on 11 September 2001, I began delivering a lecture at the Université de technologie de Compiègne in which I introduced the theme of the industry of cultural goods, formulated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1944 in a text that, in 1947, became the chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment entitled ‘The Culture Industry’.¹ Their chapter described a profound and dangerous transformation of Western societies, and the key part played in it by this new industry. Its rise, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, would be accompanied by a ‘new kind of barbarism’,² caused by the inversion of the Enlightenment project that had laid the foundations of modernity.³

On 11 September 2001, between 4:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., I began explaining to my students that the world that took shape after the Second World War, a world that took the ‘American way of life’ as its model, a world globally ‘rationalized’ and ‘Westernized’, was, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, actually in the course of losing its reason. I emphasized the remarkable foresight of these two German philosophers: taking refuge from Nazism in the United States, they saw this ‘new kind of barbarism’ emerging even before the end of the Second World War, first in New York, and then in California.⁴ I then drew their attention to the following three points:

• in 1997, fifty years after the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, it was estimated that the world contained one billion television sets;
• on 3 April 1997, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that the federal government would in 2006 shut off the analogue frequencies that were currently being used by 3,800 American radio and television stations, all of whom were advised to switch to digital by 2003;⁵
• in the spring of 1997, Craig Mundie, then a senior vice-president at Microsoft (a company represented on the board of the FCC), declared during a European visit that his company, which at that time dominated the information industry (now called the digital industry), would launch a bid to dominate the multimedia business, taking advantage of the opportunity presented by the convergence of information, media and telecommunications technologies.

2. From the slums of Temara to the presidency of the Université de technologie de Compiègne

On 11 September 2001, at around 5:30 p.m., I explained to my UTC students that the one billion television sets that existed in 1997 had grown to cover almost the entire population of the planet, and that programmes are often watched by millions of viewers simultaneously. I offered the example that in the late 1980s, in a slum lying between Temara and Skhirat, south of Rabat, I had seen a crowd of parents and children watching, on a big screen, programmes produced by a recently-privatized French network.

I then invited these engineering students to reflect on what might be going on in the minds of these thousands of people dwelling under scraps of cardboard, sheet metal and recycled materials, who had gathered together at primetime to listen to Patrick Sébastien pour forth his nonsense.⁶ I asked them what could have been going through the minds of these children and their parents deprived of just about everything, confronted with the images of showbiz politics, with omnipresent advertising and with the rapid rise of ‘trash TV’.

It was then that the frightened face of the UTC general secretary appeared at the entrance of the auditorium and shouted to me: ‘Come quickly, something unbelievable is happening!’ Astonished and annoyed, I broke off my lecture and followed Luc Ziegler into the office of the university president, François Peccoud, who, eyes riveted to the screen, was beholding Manhattan’s Twin Towers ablaze.

On 11 September 2001, between 5:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m., we watched these images in the president’s office, as people undoubtedly did in Temara – which, since my visit in the late 1980s, had seen the arrival of satellite dishes.

In February 2014, according to the Moroccan newspaper Le Matin, this slum was still home to 34,091 people.⁷

3. From Richard Durn to Jean-Marie Le Pen: primordial narcissism of the I and reason for living

Six months and sixteen days later, on 27 March 2002, Richard Durn, ‘an environmental activist, former member of the Socialist Party before joining the Greens […], and also an activist in the League of Human Rights’,⁸ murdered eight members of the Nanterre city council and wounded nineteen others. The following day he committed suicide by leaping from a window at the police station where he was being questioned. Less than a month later, on 21 April, Jean-Marie Le Pen finished ahead of Lionel Jospin in the first round of the presidential election. On 5 May, Jacques Chirac was elected with 82.21 per cent of the vote.

After 11 September 2001 and 21 April 2002, I delivered two lectures at Cerisy-la-Salle, in the framework of two seminars organized by Édith Heurgon and Josée Landrieu.⁹ In the first lecture, I tried to understand what was at stake in the 9/11 event, and in the second, to imagine what could have being going through Durn’s mind on 27 March 2002. I argued that in our ‘epoch’, which should be understood as the fulfilment of the new barbarism anticipated by Adorno and Horkheimer, what is occurring amounts to a murderous dis-articulation of the I and the we.

We have now also passed through the crisis of 2008, and this epoch has shown itself for what it is: the epoch of the absence of epoch, the meaning of which will be clarified in what follows.

In pointing out, during my second lecture at Cerisy and after 21 April, that, three weeks before the massacre, Durn had written of having ‘lost the feeling of existing’, I tried to show that the processes of psychic and collective individuation¹⁰ characteristic of the life of the mind and spirit have slowly but surely been wiped out by the culture industries, now exclusively operating in the service of the market and the organization of consumption, and that the export of this state of affairs around the world was clearly one of the key factors lying behind the growth of Al-Qaeda.

In France itself, this situation was firmly entrenched in 1986, when François Mitterrand allowed the privatization of television, giving Silvio Berlusconi and Jérôme Seydoux the licence to operate a network that would be named La Cinq. Jacques Chirac and François Léotard, who would later demand that the Hersant group acquire a stake in La Cinq, would soon after arrange the privatization of TF1.¹¹ In competition with M6, which also appeared in 1987, TF1 quickly began to enter the path of systematically drive-based television, while La Cinq, which failed, ceased broadcasting in 1992.¹²

In 2003, I turned these two lectures into a book.¹³ I dedicated it to those who voted for the National Front, and I argued that Durn had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Part One: The Epokhē of My Life
• Part Two: Madness, Anthropocene, Disruption
• Part Three: Demoralization
• Conclusion: Let’s Make a Dream
• A Conversation about Christianity
• Index
• End User License Agreement