From Psychopower to Neuropower
p. 38-54
Texte intégral
1 For a number of years now, and in particular in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (Prendre soin, de la jeunesse et des générations 2008/2010), I have tried to show that during the twentieth century psychopower became the core of consumer capitalism, following the biopower that Foucault described as typical of modern societies and capitalist production.
2Now, however, we are beginning to see the development of neuropower. Neuropower will be based on combining digital automatisms and cerebral automatisms—via the neurosciences. More generally, a profound change in all the processes of transindividuation is taking place, through both digital technologies and neuromarketing, itself based on neuroeconomics, for which digital networks designed by social engineering could become the worldwide infrastructure.
3What I will try to show today is that the development of neuropower challenges us to transform this situation, by developing a new stage of the worldwide web, based on noetic transindividuation technologies, and to thereby constitute a new organology of knowledge.
4I should here define transindividuation. But to answer this question, we must first analyze what a psychical apparatus is.
5Though it undoubtedly takes root in the brain, a psychical apparatus is not reducible to the brain: it goes through a symbolic apparatus that is not only situated in the brain, but in society, that is, in those other brains with which this brain is in relation, these relations between brains forming an associated, dialogical and transindividual milieu at the core of which there lies a psychical apparatus, that is, a psychical potential for individuation—and when we say between these brains, this also means here: in or on what I call the tertiary retentions, that are technical supports of individual and collective memories, and that constitute every technical life-form (and I will explain later why it is necessary to qualify those retentions as tertiary).
6Psychical individuation is also and immediately collective individuation, as Simondon (L’individuation psychique et collective 1989) taught us, above all because psychical individuation always participates in a process of transindividuation—directly or indirectly—which itself always goes through a process of co-individuation.
7This co-individuation, which runs in the slightest dialogue, is always the learning, the apprenticeship of what is inherited by the group of psychical individuals, who thus individuate themselves collectively, and do so supported by tertiary retentions—the totality of which forms a pre-individual milieu common to all psychical individuals.
8 Ego is constituted through the internalization of relations that form through co-individuation processes that participate in transindividuation. This is what Freud meant when, in The Ego and the Id, he spoke of a precipitate or a sedimentation of the ego:
“the character of the ego is a precipitate [or sedimentation] of abandoned object-cathexes and […] it contains the history of those object-choices.” (Freud 1923, in James Strachey 1961)
9These relations are themselves conditioned by artefacts that support the symbolic milieus on the basis of which psychical individuals form their associated milieu through these tertiary retentions that constitute the world as world. And the first of these artefacts—which is thus the primordial pharmakon—is the transitional object: the blanket or the teddy bear.
10Frédéric Kaplan has recently shown that digital technologies make possible to intervene into transindividuation through linguistic capitalism.
11Twenty years after the web first appeared, a new process of transindividuation, assisted by networked computers that circulate information at the speed of light, continues to impose itself upon the hundreds of languages that constitute the semantic universe of humanity, through the combination of two algorithms which link advertising and linguistic engineering with the automated treatment of natural languages—and it is this combination that lies at the basis of the worldwide success of Google.
12Frédéric Kaplan has shown that this combination leads to the development of a form of linguistic capitalism whereby industrial society passes from an economy of attention to an economy of expression. Google is its worldwide model, and it operates by articulating two kinds of algorithms:
“one, which enables the retrieval of pages corresponding to certain words, made it popular; the other, which endows these words with a market value, has made it wealthy.” (Conference “Entretiens du Nouveau Monde Industriel,” Paris: Centre Pompidou, December 18st, 2012)
13The first algorithm, PageRank, “scans” the state of the transindividuation process as reflected in the relations between the sites of that symbolic milieu that is the web: literally this equates to a vast filing cabinet of web pages that calculates, for someone who is navigating it, the level of penetration of such and such a phrase within the framework that constitutes the digital symbolic milieu.
14The calculation involved here is that of a Markov chain, that is, a probabilistic process—as a result of this calculation, access is granted to pages according to their rank, thereby reinforcing these differences of rank: the performativity of search engines thereby tends to lead to the logic of the audimat.1
15The second algorithm is targeted at advertisers, and it works by auctioning words to those wanting to link to them—these are the famous “sponsored links” (or AdWords, the operation of which is performed by a linguistic robot).
16When Google transforms the linguistic processes of transindividuation, neuromarketing, by drawing on neurosciences and by concretizing the ideology of neuroeconomics, tries to systematically and directly intervene on the neuronal layers of transindividuation—that is, on the psychical internalization and externalization of transindividual units, and, through that, on their psychical individuation.
17In the years to come, we will see digital technologies and neuromarketing combine together. This combination will increasingly overdetermine all other human realities. It will therefore constitute a neuropower that, through the intermediary of digital retentional technology, will conjoin biopower and psychopower at the core of the cerebral organ itself.
18 To study this trend, its toxic threats, its curative possibilities, and the therapies that can and must be implemented, we must adopt an organological approach to the brain. And in order to do so, we must distinguish between what pertains to the ORGANIC dimension in the brain, and what pertains to the ORGANOLOGICAL dimension—i.e. what is not simply biological in a noetic brain and allows the building of a psychical apparatus.
19Contemporary neuroscience has shown that education is literally a culture of the brain—in the sense that one cultivates a garden, where in this case the seeds, plants, fertilizers and tools would be the collective retentions through which knowledge is constituted, and the tertiary retentions that form the organology of this knowledge, that is, intellectual technologies, in Jack Goody’s sense.
20Here I must to briefly explain what is meant by primary, secondary and tertiary retention.
21Let us take the example of a lecture I could give in front of an academic audience. My discourse, beginning around about 3: 30 p.m. and finishing at 4: 30 p.m., would be what Husserl called a temporal object: my speech flows; it is evanescent; it is constituted by its temporality. And this is even truer for a melody, the temporal object par excellence for Husserl.
22Everyone in the audience is listening but each and every one of them will hear something different: if, for example, I later asked people to write down what I said at the beginning of this lecture, none of the texts produced would be identical to the others—so everyone in the audience understood something different and unique in what I told them.
23It follows that it is the people in the audience who say what I am saying—not me. Each and every one of us—since this is true for me too— interprets what is said in terms of our past experience and expectations, which are concealed, and which enable us to understand and to attend to what is said: to attend ( “attendre” in French) is to be attentive.
24 To understand this, we must refer to the Husserlian concepts of retention and protention.
25When I give a lecture, what you hear in what I say is the result of a process of aggregation of what Husserl called primary retentions. Retention means that which is retained. We refer to primary retention if, having been present, and being retained into the present, it is essential to the constitution of an element of present perception without being itself present. Husserl’s example is the musical note of a melody that, no longer being actually present, nevertheless forms with the note currently played an interval—it is the interval between two sounds that establishes that these sounds are musical notes, and not just sonic frequencies.
26In the same way, the sentence I have just uttered cannot make sense without retaining the preceding sentence, just as the verb of this sentence cannot make sense without the subject of the sentence, or the object of the verb without the verb, and so on: these units of meaning are formed through aggregations of primary retentions. And these aggregations all aggregate with one another. This aggregation of aggregations forms the unity of a temporal object in Husserl’s sense—for example, the unity of a lecture, or the unity of a sonata.
27Husserl distinguishes primary retention from what he calls secondary retention. Secondary retentions are former primary retentions that now belong to the past, and that constitute the fabric of my memory. Now, through these secondary retentions, which are also associative filters—in Hume’s sense of association, but also in Kant’s sense, for whom associative processes are involved in the three syntheses of transcendental imagination—a process of primary aggregation is brought about, and this is why every occasion of this process is specific: it is why we do not retain everything and why we do not understand the same thing, for example, in what I am saying at this moment. And this shows that the process of aggregating primary retentions is in fact a primary selection of retentions carried out on the basis of secondary retentions that form the fabric of my past experience.
28Everyone hears something different in what I say because we are all aggregating primary retentions in different ways: this aggregation is a selection. This is not Husserl’s point of view in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928/1990). It is, however, a point of view that he came to adopt later, in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925/2006).
29My own thesis is that this selection is carried out on the basis of our secondary retentions, which themselves contain secondary protentions (expectations—and this is what Hume, too, tried to think with his concept of association). These secondary retentions are thus in some way charged with expectations, with what Husserl called protentions, which are energetic processes of attention in the same way neurons are charged with energy in Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology—these secondary retentions, thus charged, constitute the mnesic selection criteria for perception.
30This relation between perception and memory is to some extent what Bergson tried to describe in Matter and Memory (1896/1990).
31But one should add that the interplay of secondary retentions forming my memory, that is, my past experience, which constitutes as such the filters created by this experience through which primary retentions are selected and collected in the present experience of perception— this interplay between secondary retention and primary retention is, then, conditioned and constituted by what I call tertiary retention, that is, organological mnesic processes, processes that are artificial, mnemotechnical and “hypomnesic” in Plato’s sense, supporting what Plato called anamnesic memory.
32Tertiary retention conditions primary and secondary retention in two ways:
- on the one hand, it is the condition of conservation of past collective experience—through things, which are always also traces of forms of life on the basis of which we learn to live: when entering the world, we inherit things that constitute it and which preserve the already-there, where the experience of preceding generations has accumulated—and through these things words are formed, which are artefacts like tools, works of art, customary rules, and so on;
- on the other hand, tertiary retention enables past experience to be objectively stabilized (forming what Hegel called the objective spirit) so that it can then be repeated—this repetition can produce a difference, that is, a variation at the core of which a temporal object, for example, can be spatialized. What I say to you orally is temporal, but you may write it down and turn it into a written thing, which we call a text, that is, a spatial object. Having been spatialized and textualized, this speech can be repeated, and deepened, and transformed through this repetition—and through this you may be trans-formed.
33Such a trans-formation does indeed alter the play of primary and secondary retentions, the former being what you select and accumulate in perception, and the latter being that through which you operate this selection. Consider again the example of a lecture. You write down what I say. Suppose that tonight or tomorrow you decide to re-read your written record of what I said. When you read what you have written (which is no longer a temporal object strictly speaking: it has become a spatial, textual object, an object that you re-temporalize by re-reading), you select new primary retentions, ones that you did not previously select: the repetition of the same therefore gives a difference. The same does not come back to the same: it gives the other— in this other, it is you who are altered.
34This alteration of the same is a modality of what Jacques Derrida called “différance”.
35Such a différance is produced, notably:
- Because, in the time between when I gave my speech and your re-reading of that textualized speech, you have yourself changed;
- Because you can repeat what is past through tertiary retention insofar as it is the spatial concretion of what was initially temporal.
36It might be objected that when you wrote down my speech, some elements were left out: you can only write down precisely whatever it was that constituted your primary retentions and, upon closer scrutiny, you are only able to write down a fraction of these retentions. This is not just because you don’t have time to get everything down: even if you did have the time, you would undoubtedly be unable to textualize everything that ultimately constitutes your listening. The latter is, in fact, in its becoming. And it is this becoming that constitutes what Derrida called différance.
37Suppose that you were able to take down what I say in shorthand, as was done, incidentally, with Husserl’s lectures, or again, suppose that you were able to record this lecture on tape and, via this recording, were able to listen again to the whole of the lecture. Such a recording would also be a spatial object—in another modality than for a textual object. Alphabetic text, shorthand and recording are types of tertiary retention. And each of these types generates a process of reading and a specific kind of différance, resulting in specific arrangements of primary and secondary retentions.
38Let us now return to the question of neuropower.
39Education amounts to a culture of the brain in the same sense that one cultivates a piece of land: the brain is cultivated through the mediation of tertiary retention insofar as it enables:
- primary retentions to be selected;
- psychic secondary retentions to be maintained and developed;
- collective secondary retentions to be maintained and developed—such as the words and groups of words which, as phrases and agreed upon formulations, constitute language: all of these linguistic units, whether simple or complex, were, once upon a time, first produced by an individual.
40Thus processes of transindividuation are constituted, on the basis of which every kind of knowledge is formed, connecting together the generations. If ethnographic collections from diverse cultures are preserved at University College, this is because they are evidence of forms of knowledge connecting the contemporary world to the ancient world, and, through this, to the archaic foundations of contemporary knowledge.
41Now, these forms of knowledge, which derive from transindividuation processes the genesis of which I have briefly described, form ensembles of collective secondary retentions, which themselves constitute attentional forms—that is, collective formations of attention. The collective formation or training of attention, which means, for example, that in Asia one is not attentive to the world or to others in the same way as in Europe, and that the type of attention found in Great Britain differs from what is found in France, these differences forming what is referred to as culture—all this is formed on the basis of collective secondary retentions.
42 For example, the group of words “collective secondary retention” was created by me—and you might circulate this phrase around you, that is, transindividuate it, and by so doing, you in fact create a collective secondary retention, one that is shared by a group that is itself in movement because it is a process of collective individuation.
43By forming this expression, “collective secondary retention”, I have myself taken up the expression “secondary retention” coined by Husserl. And in doing so, I have extended and individuated the legacy of what is called phenomenology.
44Retentions generate protentions, that is, expectations. Collective secondary retentions produce collective secondary protentions. Primary retentions themselves generate primary protentions. Retentions and protentions bind together in attention, and the collective arrangements of retentions and protentions constitute the attentional forms that form knowledge of all kinds, but these may be placed into three categories: knowledge of how to do ( “savoir faire”), knowledge of how to live ( “savoir vivre”), and knowledge of how to think ( “savoir penser”).
45 When neurosciences make it possible to intervene directly into psychic and collective retentional and protentional processes at the neurochemical level, they enable the creation of industrial attentional processes, that is, they make it possible to control attention via the organology of industrial tertiary retention. And it is for this reason that, to the extent that political society is constituted by an attentional form elaborated according to the canon of reason, the regulation of the neuropower of marketing now constitutes a primary mission for education.
46In the age of neuromarketing and neuroeconomics, which are clearly heading towards a monoculture of brains that can be neurologically modified through neuronal psychotechnologies which, as we shall see, articulate biopsychic automatisms (or compulsions) with technological automatisms—in this age, a true politics must place neuroscientific research at the service of a noopolitics: at the service of what, with Ars Industrialis, I call an industrial politics of the fructification of spirit value ( “valeur esprit”).
47My thesis is that, contrary to such a politics, neuroeconomics is leading to the systematic organization of what Valéry described as a fall in spirit value. Neuroeconomics is a branch of the neurosciences that studies decision-making behavior on the basis of the work of Paul Glimcher. Glimcher is continuing the enterprise of American neoliberalism promoted by Theodor Schultz, in whose work there appears, in the wake of work undertaken by Lionel Robbins in the 1930s,2 the analysis of “human capital” that constitutes the economic subject such as it is conceived by Schultz and Gary Becker, with all its variants (consumers and producers, designers, investors, and entrepreneurs), and as ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’.
48On these bases, Glimcher defends a monist point of view, which aims to overcome the Cartesian opposition between reflexive behavior and reflective behavior. In his view, reflective behaviors are complex and highly elaborated forms of biological behavioral bases with which they do not break, and of which reflexive behaviors are elementary forms: like reflexive behaviors, reflective behaviors would be the result of more or less complex probabilistic processes—whereas Descartes opposed the determination of reflexive behavior to the indetermination of reflective behavior, that is, voluntary and free behavior.
49Here, as with Google’s automated transindividuation technologies, that operate across the planet at lightning speed, probabilities are at the heart of the cognitive models involved—and just like neuromarketing, which is currently being developed on the basis of the neurosciences and Glimcher’s neuroeconomics, the founders of Google are professionals when it comes to influencing decision-making (as was Edward Bernays).
50Now, I would like to address what seems to be the central question raised by all these theories by analyzing the discourse of Nicholas Carr against digital tertiary retention and its toxic effects—Carr seems to find inconceivable that the digital pharmakon could become curative and placed into the service of therapies that could heal the toxic effects produced not simply by the digital pharmakon but through the way in which it has been implemented by an economic and industrial model that has become massively toxic.
51In his criticism of internet technologies in general, and of Google in particular, denouncing what he describes as a sapping of human intelligence and memory by an artificial and digital intelligence and memory the toxicity of which derives from their speed, Nicholas Carr constantly refers to the results of neuroscientific research in order to question Google’s position. In so doing, he seems unaware that the practices of Google raise new issues for the sciences and philosophy, issues that complicate the dominant cognitive model and that could cause it to mutate, including and perhaps especially in the neurosciences.
52Despite its numerous valuable references to the work of neurophysiology and neuropsychology, showing the extent to which the plasticity of the cerebral organ is permanently reconfigured as a result of the artefacts belonging to this or that form of technical life, which seems less a matter of sculpting the brain than of gardening, Carr fails to see the fundamental issue raised by the practices of neuromarketing, namely:
- that the brain of the noetic soul, that is, the form of technical life (in Canguilhem’s sense), equipped with the capacity for reflective decision, is a dynamic system traversed by contradictory and functional tendencies that support different sub-organs and that rebound on the contradictory and functional social tendencies that constitute, in the social field, the bipolar dynamics of any transindividuation process; and
- that this cerebral organ of the noetic soul arranges these sub-organs with one another, through circuits of transindividuation that are not only cerebral and social but also artificial, that is, technical, because it is conditioned by the tertiary retentions that support it—Google being such an arrangement, completely new, socializing a tertiary retention that is itself very new, traversing the cerebral organs of two billion internet users at a speed close to that of light, and on a planetary scale, that is, on the totality of the ecosystem of the form of technical life and of cultures that have developed on the basis of a cerebral gardening that is currently hardly ecological at all.
53An ecology of neuronal gardening should constitute the basis of a noopolitics: what Nicholas Carr describes is a genuine disaster for the ecology of mind or spirit, and many of the effects and facts that he writes about are real, and his analyses convincing. But his final conclusion, his general interpretation of these effects and these facts, is profoundly wrong. And it is also dangerous: he lends credence to the idea that it is impossible to struggle against the situation he is describing, and, in accordance with the ideologues of the conservative revolution, he postulates that there is therefore “no alternative”.
54Carr’s entire reasoning relies on close examination of his own experience and personal journey, and on his wide knowledge of scientific, technological and industrial literature. On this basis, he tries to demonstrate that noetic memory is living memory, and that there is no way to exteriorize it in the form of digital tertiary retention without damaging it.
55In a certain way, I say the same thing: noetic memory is pharmacological, and the pharmakon always involves some injury. But what I am also saying, contrary to Carr, is that this pharmacology is the condition of its individuation, and it always requires the invention of therapies, that is, of positive pharmacologies: this is so because for technical and noetic life, primary and secondary retentions (and the protentions they form) are always arranged via tertiary retentions, the latter always being pharmaka—which always create toxic processes, and which always require therapeutic prescriptions in order to struggle against their intrinsic toxicity.
56Because he does not see that digital retention raises the question of positive pharmacology, Carr does not say one word about the political issue this raises: the invention of therapies—that is, of prescriptions materialized as attentional forms, and sometimes set into law—is, precisely, what we call “politics”. And because he does not clearly frame the debate in these terms—which would be those of a public power assuming its noopolitical responsibilities in the face of the emergence of neuropower, which is also a generalized automation of behavior, expression and, as we shall see, “decision”, of which Google is one aspect—Carr finds himself entangled in a contradiction.
57In order to explain what he means by “deep attention”, which appears, he says, with the practice of deep reading, that is, with the alphabet, Carr refers to the work of Maryanne Wolf, who shows that the brain of deep attention—for the protection of which Carr militates against Google and the internet—is in fact a literate brain, a literary cerebral organ, what Wolf calls a reading brain, and what Walter Ong called a literate mind.3 This literate noetic brain literally accesses apodictic reasoning because by accessing the letter from apodictic reasoning it constitutes itself by the neuronal internalization of the grammatization of language “according to the letter”, a process of literary gardening that totally transformed speech, as Carr writes, paraphrasing Ong and Wolf:
“The Greek alphabet became the model for most subsequent Western alphabets […]. Its arrival marked the start of one of the most far-reaching revolutions in intellectual history […]. It was a revolution that would eventually change the lives, and the brains, of nearly everyone on earth.” (Carr 2009, 53, my emphasis)
“[T] he invention of a tool, the alphabet, […] would have profound consequences for our language and our minds.” (56)
58 Linguistic technology, therefore, literally changed the regimes of transindividuation. Today digital technology, through Google, is once again transforming language and modifying regimes of transindividuation. What, however, distinguishes these two types of modification? One would expect that Carr’s analysis would raise this question. But nowhere does he do so.
59During the epoch in which the alphabet appeared, the noetic brain individuated itself psychically and noetically by internalizing the stage of mnemotechnical individuation and grammatization constituted by alphabetic writing. And Wolf, building on the work of Stanislas Dehaene, shows that this resulted in cortical reorganization, that is, in the establishment of synaptogenetic processes literally inscribing the letter into the cerebral organ.
60The formation of such neuronal, internal circuits by the cerebral internalization of external and literal retentional circuits leads to the formation of circuits of transindividuation of a new type, which are those of knowledge of a new kind, as Carr highlights by quoting Ong, for whom alphabetization
“is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself.” The ability to write is “utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials”, Ong concluded. “Writing heightens consciousness.” (57, my emphasis)
61Drawing upon both Wolf ’s developmental neuropsychology and Ong’s theory of literacy (that deserves to be reread today, in the neuroscientific age, as does the work of Lev Vygotsky, Jack Goody, Mary Carruthers, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Friedrich Kittler, and many others), Carr refers to the fact that Socrates was opposed to the writing of the Sophists, and argues that digital technology again raises the Socratic issue of writing as pharmakon—a question that lies at the origin of philosophy.
62For Socrates, who retells and resumes his account of the response of King Thamus to Theuth, who presented him with his invention,
“the written word is “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder [hypomnesis]. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance.” Those who rely on reading for their knowledge will “seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing.” They will be “filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom.” (54)
63Carr nevertheless does not pose the pharmacological issue in the strict sense, namely: that philosophy, by prescribing an appropriation of writing, constitutes therapies capable of turning poisons into remedies, and thus of nourishing the very principle of noetic individuation.
64Rather than taking on this ambiguity of writing, Carr turns to Eric Havelock’s argument that Plato chose writing over the oral tradition, over an orality that was Socrates’ choice. According to Socrates, Carr says, “writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, […] preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.” But:
“unlike the orator Socrates, Plato was a writer […]. In a famous and revealing passage at the end of The Republic […], Plato has Socrates go out of his way to attack “poetry”, declaring that he would ban poets from his perfect state.” (my emphasis)
To support this thesis, Carr here quotes Havelock and Ong:
“The “oral state of mind”, wrote [Havelock], was Plato’s “main enemy”. Implicit in Plato’s criticism of poetry was […] a defense of the new technology of writing […]. “Plato’s philosophically analytical thought”, writes Ong, “was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes.”
65Having thus shown, in relying above all on Havelock, Ong and Wolf, that reading and deep attention are historical noetic conquests conditioned by mnemotechnical conquests, which obviously means that the literate brain (that reading brain that is the noetic brain that founds the literate mind) is constituted by the technical internalization of the letter, which totally reconfigures cortical organization, as Wolf shows, passing by way of Dehaene and Vygotsky, in the context of the Internet, Google and digital retention—having shown all this, Carr nevertheless believes that we can and must oppose psychic memory and technical memory:
“Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory— the way it’s formed, maintained, connected, recalled—has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits—ones and zeros—that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between.” (190)
66Such a point of view, however, completely contradicts his defense of the role of writing in the formation of rational noesis—as if writing inscribed on paper, papyrus, parchment or marble was not itself something entirely different from that living memory contained in the cerebral organ (that was precisely Thamus’s objection to Theuth).
67At stake here is Carr’s failure to see the difference between the organic brain and the organological one—that is, the noetic one, reading brain, digital brain or another kind of noetic brain.
68What shall we do with neuroscience—if not a neurophilosophy committed to fighting neuropower and turning it into a noopower? What could be a noopower? It should be a political art of the polyculture of the kind of gardens brains are—through the pharmaka that contemporary digital tertiary retentions are. To think such a politics, we need what I call a general organology, opening the possibility of a positive pharmacology, that is a therapeutics of pharmaka. This therapeutics however should not be confused with Plato’s medicine, that is, dialectics. For dialectics aims at ridding writing and pharmaka in general from ambiguity, while noesis as therapeutics is a quasi causal logic of the pharmakon, in the sense of Deleuze referring to the Stoics, as well as in the sense of Foucault referring to Senecus’ practice of writing.
Notes de bas de page
1 What, in the world of television and advertising, is called the system of “ratings”. It is, however, not quite the same logic: most web pages are not designed specifically in order to receive a top ranking—even if it is true that some pages are designed to increase their ranking, and even if it is possible to take advantage of the system by diverting it to this end. But that is why Google is constantly updating the algorithm in order to try and minimize such possibilities, because this kind of manipulation diminishes the use value to be gained from scanning search-terms and increases the exchange value that accrues to advertisers as a result of such diversion.
2 Robbins describes economics as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses,” cited by Gary Becker, himself cited by Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Houndsmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 222.
3 “It was the technology of the book that made this “strange anomaly” in our psychological history possible. The brain of the book reader was more than a literate brain. It was a literary brain.” (Carr 2009, 65)
Auteur
-
Bernard Stiegler
A philosopher, holding a PhD from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is the Chairman of Ars Industrialis, Head of the Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation of Centre Georges Pompidou, Professor at Goldmiths College (University of London), at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne, and teaches at the École polytechnique de Zurich. He is the author of Technics and Time 1, 2 and 3 (1998-2009). His recent publications include Pour une nouvelle critique de l’économie politique (2009), Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue. De la pharmacologie (2010) and États de chocs (2012)
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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