An Introduction to Bernard Stiegler's Hangzhou Lectures, 2015-2019

1.    Introduction

The lectures given by Bernard Stiegler at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou from 2015 to 2019, before their unfortunate interruption by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and then their definitive termination as a result of the philosopher’s tragic death in August of that year, are reflective of his longstanding concern with the role of the artist in society in general and with the undermining of that role by the economic war that characterizes contemporary society in particular. For Stiegler, the artist is a leading vector, a tensor, of the dynamic process through which the individual and the collective unfold and compose, but this also means, through which is conducted the struggle against the inescapable tendency for this process to decompose. As a struggle, therefore, and beyond just the artist as a figure – a figure which arises at a particular moment and goes through various transformations corresponding to the epochal history of its tools, technics and technologies – the question of art, as a fight against a regressive tendency afflicting both individuals and groups, is inherently and fundamentally political. Faced with the threat of regression and decomposition, the philosophical task is to elaborate a critique of the current state of art capable of fostering its reinvention. Yet this will also require a reinvention of politics itself, recognizing that the heart of the political struggle today concerns the future of aesthetics and its technologies, and that the stakes of that struggle consist in the possibility or otherwise of fostering a belief, a spirit, an intelligence and a will capable of responding to the global and local challenges that with each passing day seem ever more urgent, unavoidable and inextricable.

More generally, then, the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics is for Stiegler not just one question among others. In fact, it is a question that arises from out of the very beginnings of human evolution, that assumes a particular form with the emergence of what could be called political civilization, and that becomes the key critical question in an age that he understands as one in which the industrial control of aesthetics functions to undermine the political relation as such. For Stiegler, in other words, any question about the future of politics, or indeed of social relationships in general, necessarily passes through the question of the future of aesthetics.

We are then obligated to ask how he understands this term, aesthetics, such that it can play such a fundamental role in the organization of the ways of life of the species of which we ourselves are members. And this will entail coming to understand that for Stiegler, what ties politics to aesthetics is the inextricable tie that also exists between technics and desire. Stiegler’s Hangzhou lectures can be understood as the elaboration of this knot of questions, and it is through the prism that this way of framing these questions affords that we will try to introduce something of his thought, focusing in particular on his two-volume Symbolic Misery (published in French in 2005). Coming after the three volumes of Technics and Time, which introduced the notion that man is invented by technics as much as the other way around (volume 1), the notion that technics is fundamentally the advent of a new kind of memory demanding a critique of phenomenology (volume 2), and the notion that the ‘cinematic’ character of consciousness as edited and post-produced equally demanded a critique of Kant on the grounds that technics amounts to a ‘fourth synthesis’ (volume 3), and coming after, as well, the events of 11 September 2001 that were broadcast worldwide live on television, convincing Stiegler of the urgent necessity of addressing questions of political economy in new terms, Symbolic Misery is the work in which these questions are most explicitly thematized in their specific relationship to art and aesthetics.

2.    The division of work and the necessity of participation

As a way of beginning to approach these issues, let us examine one of the many statements given by Stiegler that describe the way in which the emergence of the species Homo sapiens must be understood, not as a starting point of a long process of co-evolution, but as one of its outcomes, a process that Karl Marx would describe as the ‘production’ of human existence, that André Leroi-Gourhan would describe in terms of ‘exteriorization’, and that Alfred J. Lotka would describe as ‘exosomatic evolution’. Here, Stiegler focuses on one particular aspect of this outcome – the advent of a division of roles, or, as it is usually called, of a division of labour (but where ‘work’ would be a more suitable term):

Hominization, as the pursuit of life by means other than life, is the appearance of a form of communal existence where the distribution of roles is based not only on genetics but on individual fates [destins] (of existences and their ancestries, which is to say the past as it acts in them), establishing themselves in a history which is no longer that of a simple species. Hominization is the functional externalization of individual and singular experiences which are then transmitted to descendants, who are thus established as inheritors.[1]

In other words, at a certain point there appears a form of life that begins to work with non-biological matter, shaping it, with forelimbs that have lost their motor function to the advantage of an unpredetermined and open-ended fabricative function, into useful forms that we call tools, progressing to the point of using those tools for making other tools, and in so doing finding itself reshaped, in ways that require this form of life to organize itself socially – dividing society into parts into which different forms of work are shared out, in a way that can no longer be understood through the laws of biology alone. What makes it possible to undergo this division of work and distribution of roles is the fact that working with inanimate matter leaves traces in that matter, where these traces last, that is, form a record of the hands and tools that worked it, amounting to the constitution of a past for that species, an ongoing material record of lessons and experience of which later generations will be the heirs. Technics, Stiegler is saying, is above all a matter of the externalization of experience, and this externalization makes it possible not just to record experience, but to go back to it, to examine it, to accumulate it, to socialize it, to build upon it, to transform it, and for it, externalized experience, to rebound upon us, to come back, to haunt us, to either hold us back or project us forward, onto another stage.

One consequence of this division of roles is that the cohesion of the group is no longer something intrinsic to the species, and becomes instead a problem, and one whose solution involves a kind of projection – a projection of belief in a shared future. But can such a belief be generated and maintained if only a few or a portion are involved in its projection?

Now, it seems very likely that since the dawn of hominization, the collective individuation constitutive of a society has presupposed the participation of the all in the production of the one, or the whole. This is the fantasy and the fiction necessary for establishing the theatre of supposed unity we call ‘society’.[2]

From these few sentences alone, it is possible to see, first, how it is that aesthetics and politics are intrinsically tied together: the work that humans do with inanimate matter forms a record that: (1) means that these works constitute a kind of collective memory formed by what thus amount to retentional technologies, or mnemotechnologies; (2) leads to the division of society in ways necessitated by these technologies; (3) creates the problem of fostering a social cohesion capable of counteracting this division; and (4) requires these technologies themselves, as retentional, as the support of the essentially aesthetic production of a fantasy or a fiction through which it becomes possible to stage society as a theatre in whose future we find ourselves capable of believing. In the above quotation, he is saying that this belief is bound to collapse if only a particular part of society is involved in the production and manipulation of the symbols, or more importantly, if another part, and a large part, is excluded from the production of symbols, inherently both aesthetic and logical, upon which this belief and this theatre depend.

3.    Knowledge and desire

Although I have just referred to mnemotechnologies, in fact Stiegler distinguishes between various moments in the history of retentional technics: the moment when mnemotechnics first appears, the earliest evidence of which are the decorated caves of Chauvet, Lascaux and so on; the moment when writing first appears, and in particular the alphabetical writing associated with the advent in Greece of public law, citizenship, tragic theatre and the struggle of the philosopher against the sophists; and the moment when mnemotechnologies first appear, involving all of those machines that make possible both the industrial standardization of aesthetic and symbolic processes and the separation of the production of symbols from their consumption, as individuals come to be defined less as citizens belonging to a city or a state than simply consumers defined precisely by their loss of symbolic participation. Each of these stages is thus made possible by the particular character of the tools of exteriorization that dominate in each particular epoch, and there can be no adequate history of these epochs that does not take account of the unfolding of this technical history. From prehistoric painting to alphabetical writing to the gramophone to cinema to mass broadcast television and now to social networks operating on those handheld computers we call smartphones, a history unfolds that does not determine but decisively conditions the unfolding dynamic composition of psychosocial existence.

If the rise of a technical form of life – which could also be described as a form of life that knows, and which gives rise to Homo sapiens rather than the other way around – begins with the working of inanimate matter into tools, it does so because these tools make a difference in the struggle of life against entropy, the struggle to survive that characterizes all animate existence. In short, they change the relationship to the future. Furthermore, given that this production of tools involves forms of anticipation and planning not dictated by genetic programs, it follows that they require a changed, more open relationship to the future. Additionally, given that the evolution of these tools means that it will become necessary to learn more and more in order to know how to use these tools, it also becomes necessary to be willing to undergo a long process of maturation that we call education, in order to acquire the knowledge without which this technical form of life cannot survive. Finally, because this knowledge is local and idiomatic, the tools that it knows how to produce do not represent some universal objective notion of a tool, even if they are the expression of universal technical tendencies: as local and idiomatic, these tools, as what Leroi-Gourhan called technical facts, inevitably have an aesthetic aspect, arising from the singular idiomatic evolution that gave birth to them among this or that smaller or larger grouping.

In the case of animal species, the behavioural relationship to the future is governed by instinct. If the relationship to the future possessed by technical life is changed for the reasons we have just described, then we have to say that this is because it is no longer governed by instinct. It can no longer be governed by instinct, because technical life does not just live in a world, but rather produces that world, and this means, first, that it must know how to live in a world that is changing, and, second, that it must be capable of producing new things, that is, things that have never existed before, and which therefore cannot be anticipated by anything like an instinctual behavioural process, things which must first be dreamed up. It is because this technical form of life must be able to detach itself from instinctive aims, and because it must be capable of reattaching itself to the aim of producing what does not and never has existed, that Stiegler argues that, rather than being governed by instincts, technical life, life that knows, the form of life of the kinds of beings that we are ourselves, must necessarily be governed by drives, drives that can be detached from one object and reattached to another object, including to those objects that do not (yet) exist. It is the latter that constitute, strictly speaking, the objects of desire.

In order to do the work that defines the technical form of life, the drives must be directed to specific ends, satisfactions must be deferred, and investments must be made in non-immediate ends. This is why Stiegler writes:

Work, like consumption, is libido captured and channelled. Work in general is sublimation and the reality principle – and this includes, of course, artistic work.[3]

‘Libido’, in other words, does not mean, for Stiegler, anything like the ‘instinctive sexual energy’ possessed by an individual animal organism. Again, for the technical form of life that we constitute, it is never a question of instinct. Rather, libido implies a form of energy that exists, and can exist, only through its social circulation, through, that is, the circulation of that participation without which there can be no ‘social’. But the circuits through and along which this libidinal energy circulates are, then, symbolic circuits, and it is because desire is always, in one way or another, a matter of the production, exchange and circulation of such symbols, which are, as we have said, not just logical but aesthetic, sensible and material, that Stiegler also relates this circulation of libidinal energy to the economy described in anthropology since the time of Marcel Mauss as the circuit of gift and counter-gift.

4.    War and peace

If technical life requires the participation of all in the production of the sense of cohesion necessary for a belief in a common future, it is because this technical life, marked from the beginning by the division of roles, always risks collapsing, falling apart, descending into war, whether civil, intergroup or otherwise. The struggle against the threat of war does not replace the struggle for survival characteristic of biological life in general, because there is no escape from the latter, but it complicates it, doubles it as the risk of self-destruction. It necessitates another struggle, of a different kind:

this question of technics opens the question of politics as the attempt to pacify a conflict which, in life generally, is a ‘struggle for life’ and which, in the history of technical life itself, of ‘human’ life, is a war that mortals make with themselves.[4]

Technics, as that which brings the possibility of falling into violence and discord, is thus the source of the need for something else, a struggle for peace, or rather, for the pacification of those tendencies towards war and violence that perpetually threaten. Such a process of pacification is that for which politics always aims, and its necessity stems from the knowledge we acquire through experience of the fragility of peace, that is, the fragility of our ability to live together.

In the struggle against this tendency towards war and this fragility of peace, we require weapons. These weapons are those of socialization, and they cannot just be those of law, prohibition and policing, because this capacity to live well is also a question of the possession of a feeling that makes it possible – an affect that favours the prescriptive over the proscriptive, commonality over separation, friendship over enmity. Aristotle called this feeling philia, as what binds the political possibility of pacification, and Stiegler adds that what must accompany this feeling are two others, those of justice (dikē, or in other words, the feeling of the need to respond to injustice) and shame (aidōs, or in other words, the feeling of the need to respond with reserve to the recognition of my own finitude). But if living together and forming a ‘we’ necessarily involves a mutuality of feeling of this kind, then it is a question of sensibility, and the weapons of the sensible are inherently aesthetic. The particular economic war we face today is in this sense a new aesthetic war, because these aesthetic weapons have been seized by forces whose goal is not to foster philia, dikē or aidōs, nor to foster any investment in any (inexistent) object of desire whatsoever, but rather to ‘capture and channel’ libidinal circuits towards the short-term aims of consumerist behaviour and for the sake of the short-term aims of shareholder return.

The paradox or the aporia entailed by this situation would therefore be that consumerist capitalism both feeds on libidinal energy and depletes it, thereby undermining the very conditions of this economy itself, which proves in this way to be a diseconomy. For Stiegler, then, it is less a matter of conducting a war against capitalism than of waging an aesthetic war for desire. And since all the subjects and objects of knowledge are themselves objects of desire for what does not exist (but consists), this is equally an aesthetic war for knowledge, and against the stupidity that results from its destruction. Such a war is a struggle not just to ‘get one’s hands on the controls’, but to forge new weapons. But since, from the outset of hominization, the forging of such weapons has entailed the transformation of the hands and minds of those who wield them, it is inevitably the case that the transformation of the weapons of this aesthetic war equally implies the transformation of the way such weapons are utilized, which really means the transformation of those who wield them.

As Stiegler says at the beginning of the second volume of Symbolic Misery: ‘It is, in other words, to trans-form oneself, or to make of oneself just as much the theatre as the forge of the struggle.’[5] In calling us to make of ourselves both the theatre and the forge of the struggle for desire and knowledge in the aesthetic war to be conducted with the weapons of retentional technologies, Stiegler is putting on stage our individual and collective consciousness, and the battle for the future of the old and new spirits that haunt this consciousness. So phenomenology becomes politics.

5.    Aesthetic experience and the consistence of what does not exist

But why of all things do I say that this a question of phenomenology, how does this relate to the circuit of gift and counter-gift, and what does it have to do with, and what does it imply for, the figure and the role of the artist? Phenomenology is an approach to experience that tries to describe its fundamental character, and what is in question here is first of all the character of aesthetic experience, and then its function and its fate. What, then, do we mean by aesthetic experience? In the second volume of Symbolic Misery, Stiegler writes the following:

Aesthetic experience is a belief where a consistence is produced on the condition of a tenacity and an insistence (of the regard, hearing, the senses, flesh), constituted in practices which themselves call forth different kinds of knowledge, or technai, that may be know-how or living-knowledge.[6]

While we might without too much difficulty understand the idea that aesthetic experience involves the practical and knowledgeable production of belief (such is the operation of what Kant calls aesthetic or reflective judgment), the notion of ‘consistence’ is less obvious, and requires us to turn to a slightly earlier work, the first volume of the Disbelief and Discredit series, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies. In that book, too, Stiegler was concerned with the division of roles in society, and more specifically with how technics made possible production efficiencies enabling the formation of groups freed from the requirement to take part in subsistence activities, groups which thus possessed the time necessary for the cultivation of symbolic activities. In the monasteries of Christianity, this time free from the concern with subsistence possessed by the monks was called otium, in contrast to the negotium (origin of ‘negotiation’) that was the time of busy activity, of business. His argument in The Decadence of Industrial Democracies – via Benjamin Franklin’s ‘time is money’ and Max Weber’s reading of Franklin’s sermonizing as indicative of a new spirit, that of capitalism – is that capitalism arises as the colonization of the time of otium, or the folding of otium back into negotium, so that all of time must be viewed as at least potentially ‘productive’, or rather, available for forms of work that can be calculated and valued monetarily. And in the twentieth century, this will be extended to ‘leisure’ time, that is, the time of consumption, giving rise more specifically to consumer capitalism that colonizes all of time for the extraction of profit.

In arguing that the time of otium is time lifted out of the concerns of subsistence, Stiegler distinguishes this from the concerns of ex-istence, that is, forms of life lying outside of subsistence. But in fact, a fundamental tenet of Stieglerian thought is that all of technical life, human life, is ‘outside’, given that it is essentially exteriorized: it is this exteriorization, after all, that makes it necessarily symbolic, or as he also says, not just sensory but sensational, or ‘exclamatory’. Technical life exclaims its existence in a noetico-aesthetic act. If that is the case, then how is existential time, the time of ‘existence’, the time of otium, to be distinguished from the time of subsistence or negotium?

Somewhat counter-intuitively, perhaps, existence in this sense refers to those forms or aspects of life devoted to a plane other than that of what exists, a plane that we often think of as ‘higher’, for instance when we understand this as the plane of God, or of the ideas, and in particular of those highest ideas that the Greeks called beauty, justice and truth. But equally inexistent are all of the ideas, everything that we project and in which we believe, in one way or another, and in which we can believe insofar as these ideas consist, insofar as they have ‘consistence’:

In other words, it is not only God who, though not existing, consists. It is also art, justice, ideas in general. Justice certainly does not exist on Earth, and will never exist. Who, however, would dare to suggest that this idea does not consist, and does not merit being maintained, and even cultivated in young souls, whom one raises on this basis, precisely because justice does not exist? Who would dare to maintain that because, in fact, justice does not exist, we should therefore renounce the desire for justice? Ideas in general, and not only the idea of justice, whatever these ideas may be, do not exist: they are only made to consist.[7]

What does not exist may still, in some way, insist to us that we not abandon it, that we pursue it, cultivate it, believe in it, or act upon the basis of it. Because it does not exist, we may resist this tenacious insistence, and this inexistent object may resist our desire for it, in which case it both resists and insists – and it is for this reason that knowledge, as something more than just a calculation, is always mixed with and spurred by non-knowledge.

This manner of formulating the relationship between the existent and the inexistent, between what exists and the ideas, amounts to Stiegler’s way of escaping the oppositional logic of Western metaphysics (which is not to say that it is necessarily the case that only Western metaphysics is founded on such oppositions). That is why, if it is indeed a question of ‘another plane’, this plane itself must not be located in some existent realm apart that of the ‘ordinary’ world. Nevertheless, it is indeed the case that what is at stake here is an experience of something extra-ordinary, but this extra-ordinariness is what arises from the ordinary, as its consistence, and as a kind of mystery. Aesthetic experience, then, occurs through the mystagogical conjuring, via the artifactuality of art, of the extra-ordinary from out of the ordinary, through which an inexistent consistence is produced in which we find ourselves, in one way or another, and perhaps despite ourselves, believing. And this inexistence applies not just to ideas, but to ourselves (our being a consistent ‘ego’), and to the world as a whole and as such: our experience of the world as world (as Heidegger would say) has this same aesthetic character.

6.    Retention and protention

What makes aesthetic experience possible? In asking that question, we should not forget that Stiegler argues in ‘The Proletarianization of Sensibility’, a version of which becomes the first lecture he delivers at Hangzhou, that every field of knowledge starts from the unprovable, the improbable and the singular, or in other words from those mysteries that in formal or rational forms of knowledge we call axioms, into which we must be not educated but inducted, even if this induction is conducted on another basis and in another way than is the case for religious or aesthetic experience. It is here, with the recognition that in some way all experience has this aesthetic character, that the question of phenomenology, but also the circuit of gift and counter-gift, becomes unavoidable.

Stiegler’s way into the phenomenological question, which will for him be a technico-aesthetico-phenomenological question, is through Husserl’s investigation of the consciousness of time.[8] Husserl asks how we are able to experience duration by reflecting on a particular type of experience, that of what he calls a ‘temporal object’, an object the experience of which can occur only as a passing through time, the paradigmatic case of which is the melody. For Husserl, the very possibility of experiencing a temporal object shows that time is not a sequence of instants, but must rather be understood as the hanging on of what has just passed and the already holding out to what is just about to arrive, which he describes as the irreducibly retentional and protentional character of temporal experience. That ‘present’ experience is always inherently retentional, keeping with it what is already gone, is a form of retention that Husserl calls primary, to distinguish it from the secondary retention that we more usually call ‘memory’, in this way distinguishing the retentional character of the melody we are listening to right now from the melody we remember listening to yesterday. And in this primary retention, we already anticipate and conjoin to the next note as it comes, or even to the continuation of a single sound: without such auditory protention, it would not even be possible to experience the duration of a single tone, but which, in musical protention, through which we anticipate the continuation of the melody, we hear this sound, not just as a tone, but as a note.

What Stiegler points out is that Husserl conducts this investigation at around the same time as the invention of the gramophone, that is, the invention of recorded sound, or what Stiegler will call the ‘industrial temporal object’. For the first time in history, it becomes possible for a listener to receive the exact same auditory input, the same data, or the same ‘given’, more than once, and then to compare the experiences produced by these separate but seemingly identical occasions. What such a comparison reveals is that each experience need not be identical at all, that the first time I listen to an album is not at all the same as the second time I listen to it. From this observation, he concludes that primary retention, which is to say the experience itself as it unfolds in the coinciding of the flow of the listener’s consciousness with the flow of the temporal object that is the recording (one could say that the consciousness of the listener adopts the flow of the melody), does not retain everything that is given, but is, instead, a selection from among possible retentions.

What matters for an understanding of what defines the particular character of any particular occasion, then, are the criteria by which this selection is made, consciously or unconsciously. Stiegler concludes that these criteria must be supplied by the accumulated stock of secondary retentions, that is, past primary retentions that remain in conscious or unconscious memory, and function as filters of new primary retentions as they pass through one’s perception. Temporal experience, which we ordinarily think of as the reception of the present, is therefore in fact more like a production, and in the cinematic sense: as a selection, it is edited; more than that, as a selection of primary retentions that in this way conditions experience in advance of having it, so to speak, we can also say that it is post-produced.

The story does not end there, however. It is equally the case that as primary retentions become secondary, and are fitted into the store of existing memory, they change the arrangement of the whole set of secondary retentions, either tending to reinforce existing arrangements (in which case they are ‘stereotypical’, in Stiegler’s terms) or tending to overthrow those arrangements and induce new ones (and so, ‘traumatypical’). There is therefore a dynamic relationship between primary and secondary, present and past, such that past experience is constantly shaping the character of present perception, which in turn is constantly reinforcing or rearranging the patterns of memory that constitute the store of accumulated experience. Furthermore, it is these retentional arrangements that configure protention, which means that every shift in such arrangements produces a change in the way in which that individual tends to formulate anticipations, expectations, hopes, fears, desires – all of the ways we have of relating to an open future, and where it is precisely through these ways that we protentionally open the future, and do so against its entropic tendency to close.

7.    The noetico-aesthetic situation: showing in order to see

Two further points must be added to this account of the phenomenology of retention and protention. The first is that secondary retentions can themselves be conditioned by what Stiegler calls tertiary retentions, referring to every kind of artifact insofar as it functions precisely as an exteriorized and artificial memory, and, again, this conditioning can occur in two ways: tertiary retentions may make it possible to overcome retentional finitude (for instance, by reading a written poem repeatedly so as to memorize it), making possible new interpretations and new thoughts; or they may become a crutch or a distraction that in fact undermines the possibility of remembering for oneself, and thus of thinking for oneself (as Socrates argued). It is this second possibility, conditioning aesthetic experience so as to undermine knowledge and desire rather than provoking it, that is today undertaken by marketing that makes use of powerful forms of audiovisual tertiary retention, but also, today, marries these with powerful forms of digital and network technology, algorithmically processing data by calculating probabilities at lightning speeds that literally outstrip the physiological operation of human circuits of desire and knowledge.

The second point that Stiegler insists must be added to the account of retention and protention consists in recognizing that the endpoint of the chain of reception is not the moment of apprehension of the ‘given’, and nor is it the moment where what is received stereotypically or traumatypically rearranges the assembled stock of past primary retentions as they become secondary. For in fact, Stiegler argues, there can be no completion of the circuit of perception for a noetic soul (in Aristotle’s terms in On the Soul, distinguishing this from the vegetative and sensible souls of plants and animals, respectively) unless what is received (and post-produced in the interpretive act of being received) culminates in an expression of what is received – or as Stiegler says, an ‘exclamation’, which necessarily means an exclamation made towards others:

A noetico-aesthetic situation is defined here as the realization of a circuit (of the sensible and of desire) in the form of an exclamation that brings about a symbolic exchange – an exchange that is the carrying out of individuation. This is not effective unless it is both psychic and collective, according to a loop which was already established in the hau as analysed by Mauss.[9]

At stake, here, is the distinction of the noetic soul, that is, for Stiegler, the soul of the kind of being that constitutes technical life, the form of life that knows. That distinction consists not just in the fact that it possesses the ‘advantage’ of knowledge, compared with the sensible soul of animals that relies only on perception and instinct: it is that it must know, it needs to go in pursuit of knowledge because of what it does not possess, failing which it cannot survive. The instinct possessed by sensible souls defines a sensorimotor loop from reception to reaction, a closed loop in which there is no need for the kinds of open knowledge possessed by noetic souls, even if such a sensible loop may indeed be modified in limited ways by the lessons of experience. In the case of noetic souls, the loop is open-ended, or in other words a spiral, which works its way outward from reception, not to reaction but to the expression of knowledge and desire that is action, an action that individuates this soul:

A soul can only be called noetic if it is ready, as a singular being itself, to receive the expression of this singularity – only to the extent, that is, that this receiving soul is able to singularize itself in turn, and thus transform itself (which is to say: individuate itself), in the circuit which now passes through it. This soul is only noetic to the extent that it is capable of returning what it receives, be that as a sensorimotor loop (which may be oculomotor) or as a Maori circuit of hau.[10]

What does it mean to say that a noetic soul must be ‘capable of returning what it receives’? It means that it only truly noetically receives what is given to it at those moments (moments which may well take time) when, through an artifactual process of exclamation, it dis-covers and thereby invents what it receives, as Stiegler had already explained via Paul Cézanne in Technics and Time, 2:

Cézanne suggests that we read nature such that we see only what we are capable of showing. His visions of Saint-Victoire are only ‘true’ when he can paint them; the mountain’s reality is this possibility.[11]

And as he emphasizes in ‘The Tongue of the Eye’, this necessity arises because it is only ever intermittently possible: if we have the possibility of elevating ourselves towards the fulfilment of this noetico-aesthetic circuit, it is only because we are perpetually falling back from this expressive possibility, which is to say, regressing from it, and which also means, the regression of the sensational character of noetic sensibility (sensational: that is, ‘an interpreted sensation’ that ‘is always a judgment’[12]). The open spiral can always collapse back into a closed loop. To be capable of returning what it receives, to find the truth in painting by showing it, ‘to show what I see in order to be able to see’[13], Cézanne’s noetic soul was compelled to do the work of painting:

Why did Cézanne strive so ardently to paint Mont Sainte Victoire? Because it did not appear to him: what he saw, when he looked at it, was that it tended to disappear and would not appear to him as long as it disappeared to him, if I may dare say so, which it did ceaselessly. He was obsessed, like most modern painters (without their necessarily being aware of it) by the becoming-invisible of the visible. Cézanne […] said that things to be seen must be shown – failing which they are lost sight of. They must be painted, or if one is not a painter one must certainly go to see them at the museum, and learn to look at the patterns [motifs] forming from that motif [motif] that Cézanne calls ‘Nature’. To go to the museum is to train [former] the eye to see and to trans-form itself in its visions.[14]

This possibility of training and forming – raising – the eye (that is, the organ of visual reception) through the action of the brush-equipped hand, and the collective character of this process, is what another modern painter, Edouard Manet, also indicates:

Manet, facing the rejection of his painting by the academicism of the Second Empire, said one day: ‘Their eye will yield’ [se fera]. This phrase came back to me one day when I visited the Prado Museum in Madrid – in that great collection of Western painting wherein one of its major traits is brought to view: we see Spanish painting develop between Islamic culture and what would become Flemish painting. At the Prado, we see the eye yield through space and time; we see it open, constitute itself, and deploy itself: we realize that the eye is a milieu.[15]

Only a critique of phenomenology from the perspective of tertiary retention can describe what it means to say that the noetic soul must be capable of returning what it receives (and must return it first of all in order to receive it), and how this necessarily entails a circuit of symbolic exchange amounting to the exchange of gift and counter-gift whose anthropological spirit Mauss discovers in the concept of hau.

8.    Sublimation as expressive repression: the role of the artist in the binding of the drives

The appearance of the process of hominization, with which we began (‘began’ both as the ‘we’ who read this text and as the ‘we’ of technical life that we all form together), begins, as we also said, with ‘the relinquishment of the hand’s motor function to the benefit of a new fabricating function’. Stiegler goes on:

This is the appearance of work, which, as an economy of pleasure in the construction of reality or its invention, represents a rerouting of libidinal energy from sexual goals, and, in this, the birth of sublimation as both pleasure principle and its beyond.[16]

While in Freudian psychoanalysis sublimation and repression may be related but distinct concepts, Stiegler emphasizes the commonality of their mechanism, if not indeed their fundamental inseparability. Again: ‘the libido is not the sex drive but desire inasmuch as it is able to divert its energy to non-sexual objects[17]’, including both objects that exist and those that do not exist, but which may consist. Both sublimation and repression operate through a differing and deferral of the drives, hence a différance of the drives, which opens up and is opened up by the economy of pleasure in work as that which begins with the detachability of goals. This detachability is necessitated in order for the incipient noetic soul to be able to invest in its new fabricating function.

Moreover, work opens the space for the production of the sublime, because sublimation possesses an expressive aspect through which, for example, the artwork works. The deferral of pleasure implied in the creation of this economy of pleasure (to economize means to save, to save up, to not waste, even if the second law of thermodynamics also means that there is an ineliminable element of waste) means, however, that, despite this fundamental expressivity, sublimation can never be divorced from its repressive aspect – these are in fact two faces of a single process. All sublimation, in other words, all work, involves hard work, and sublimation is in that sense only a form of repression that is worth the effort, worth the pain, because it is also the pleasure that makes life worth living, because it is life for those noetic souls that separately and together make up technical life. It is on this basis that Stiegler lays out the question of the aesthetic and the political as the composition of three kinds of economy:

Sublimation implies repression. It is just as much the expressive elevation constitutive of the libido – characterized by the way in which it is able to detach itself from its sexual objects – as it is repression and the regressive processes that result from it as the domination of a symbolic system. In other words, sublimation is what makes possible both elevation and the fall, because it stems from a repression that must be analysed on three economic levels, which connects the three levels constitutive of general organology: political economy as the division of work and the organization of production; symbolic economy, which is connected to the preceding stage as an economy of gift and counter-gift; and libidinal economy, as the drive-based origin and the energetic source of the two preceding stages.[18]

It is here that we can begin to say something more about the role of the artist, and about Stiegler’s understanding of the need for a transformation of that role. From what we have said thus far, and even though we have not failed to emphasize its collective character, it might seem that the artist is simply an exemplarily and impressively expressive incarnation of the individual noetic soul’s need to exclaim itself symbolically in order to truly inhabit the noetico-aesthetic circuit that makes technical life worth the pain and effort of being lived. In short, it might seem that the artist as described in this way is nothing more than an expressive being who liberates himself or herself from the repressive aspects of the social sublimatory process, but does so, ultimately, in the name of his or her own (economy of) pleasure, or, at most, in the name of ‘art for art’, driven by a kind of excessive wildness to which the bulk of mass society have become immune. Is this not what makes it possible for Stiegler to state that ‘the very necessity of art’ derives from the diachronic potential of the undomesticated drives, and from the fact that art ‘alone can bind the savage drive from which it stems’?[19]

And yet Stiegler equally insists that, if the savage drives are indeed incapable of being domesticated, they are nevertheless capable of being tamed, which is the process of sublimation itself, and what the artist inhabits, and is haunted by, obsessed by, is the tension between the wild and the tame. What matters is that binding through which sublimation, taming what is savage and sexual in the drives, creates the opening for the sublime, and it is this tension that equally leads to and draws upon the tension between the individual and the collective, granting art its psychosocial power:

it is, however, the very necessity of art, which alone can bind the savage drive from which it stems, in the form of a desire that sublimates the drive and constitutes it as philia through the intermediary of works as retentions produced by social sculpture – this philia which is also what accompanies, along with the feelings of dikē and aidōs, the law sent by Zeus to the mortals in their struggle against the diabalein that threatens them.[20]

There is a sense in which the artist retains a more intimate relationship with the drives, and with that which, in the drives, means that technical life is never completely divorced from its most untamed sources. By keeping close to the source, the artist finds the force of an insistent (Dionysian) necessity, one that demands to be expressed in works, and yet, in order to produce works, this intimacy and tenacity demanding expression must also bind the drives, take as its object of desire what does not consist except at incalculable infinity, and do so, ultimately, as part of that (Apollonian) process of the cultivation of those feelings through which noetic souls are encouraged to live well together. And this is what the artist alone can do, according to Stiegler, against those unsociable tendencies that perpetually threaten all noetic souls, which he here refers to in terms of the diabalein that constantly accompanies the circuit of the symbolic, as that which tends to undo the symbolic, both by exhausting it and by traumatypically opening it up from the repression that inherently characterizes it insofar as it stems from a process of sublimation. As a Dionysian-Apollonian figure who embodies this diabalein at the same time as facilitating the (noetico-aesthetic) symbolic struggle against it, the artist has a duplicitous role in relation to the social or the political: exposing the savage drive that underlies an existing state of social synchronization, but also, and crucially, doing so in the name of a desire for a diachronic process constitutive of a new philia, a diachrony bearing the promise of a new synchrony.

9.    Collective secondary retention, horizons of expectation and the modern artist

To understand more deeply and analytically how this can be the case, we must add that there are not only secondary retentions, but collective secondary retentions. Secondary retentions become collective through social rituals and processes of education of all kinds, where groups come to hold in common all manner of memories, understandings, rules and knowledge, and where this sharing out of collective knowledge is most often produced through repetitive practices, from the recitation of multiplication tables to every kind of religious rite, organized according to calendars and produced through chants, readings, dances and so on. Understood in the broad terms upon which Stiegler insists, knowledge, whether the knowledge of how to make, how to live or conceptual and theoretical knowledge, is always a matter of the transindividuation of collective secondary retentions via such social and educational practices, processes that always operate through tertiary retentions and that alone make possible the transmission, cultivation and transformation of knowledge, of whatever kind.

What is crucial about such collective secondary retentions is that they also open up those horizons of expectation that are collective protentions, through which individuals and collectives orient their relationship to the future. They do so by conjuring ‘hallucinatory processes’, but such ‘hallucinations’ are not always just delusions or fictions: every relationship to what does not exist, including to what does not exist but consists, contains a hallucinatory aspect, and it is only through such processes that ‘existence distinguishes itself from and in subsistence’.[21] The truth has an irreducibly fictive aspect, and artistic truth in particular (but not only) is, in this sense, a question of the consistence of fiction. If collective secondary retentions bear horizons of shared expectation, it is because all experience of what does not exist but consists possesses this hallucinatory structure: there is no truth that does not pass through this ‘fictional’ aspect, which is precisely why it is always, in one way or another, a question of belief, and so of expectation.

Such shared horizons of expectation may be fostered by collective secondary retentions, generated by ritual and repetitive practices, but these retentions and these practices themselves always also depend on works and tertiary retentions that are produced in order to facilitate these functions. There is, then, a genealogy of the unfolding of the way in which aesthetic experience, conjured via aesthetic artifacts, organizes and reorganizes the libidinal economy of the sensible. In the Christian epoch of Western civilization, the socializing function of aesthetic experience operated largely through the decorative and ‘cultural’ aspects of art, but this is precisely what ‘comes to be abandoned by the art of the nineteenth century’, through a process that can be understood simultaneously as the Nietzschean death of God and the birth of modern art.[22] And this decorative and cultural function seems also to be what Soetsu Yanagi sought and saw in what he called ‘folk craft’ (mingei), hand-crafted works by anonymous artisans specific to their locality and which can be known and appreciated only through being the instruments of a practice.[23]

The notion of art for its own sake derives from the abandonment of this cultural function, but it does so at a very particular moment: at the moment when fabrication begins to be dominated by the industrial mode of production. In this way, modern art is a withdrawal from both a traditional conception of the artistic function and from that modern industrial form that replaces it, of which what Adorno called the culture industry is a key instance coming to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. Stiegler describes this as the ‘autonomization’ of the artistic sphere, occurring at the moment when capitalism begins to replace every form of artisanal production with industrial production, which it does by analysing the gestures of the tool-equipped hand in order to program them into the machines of the industrial factory. In other words, industrial production operates by subjecting artisanal production to calculation, and it is at this moment that the modern artist is born as the one who refuses to calculate. In this refusal, the modern artist invents another relationship to time, other than that of the traditional artisan, focused mainly on continuity with the past, and other than the industrial relation, which reduces time to calculability.

What calculation cannot calculate is the infinite, which is to say, the singular and the singularly improbable, which thus includes all those objects of desire that do not exist, but consist. For that reason, industrial production aims to eliminate the incalculable, or in other words, to reduce the singular to the particular. It perpetually aims to force the singular and therefore incalculable consistence of a local, diverse and meaningful cosmos to submit to a particularized yet universal universe of the existent, and in so doing to force the existence of singular noetic souls to submit to the calculable imperatives of subsistence (to the imperatives of the profit motive). The modern artist of the twentieth century played a kind of dual role in relation to this elimination, both as the incarnation of singularity (of the singularity of his or her desire) against the regression to the particular (which aims to reduce desire to drives by fixing it only on the existent aims of consumer objects), and as the representative of the search for new possibilities in the genealogy of the sensible:

So the artist becomes simultaneously the hyper-diachronized expression of the singularity that cannot be eliminated by the industrial apparatus for the synchronization of behaviours and sensibilities, and the individual research laboratory for an aesthetic research and development in which new forms are developed, where they are explored and invented so that they can be desingularized and transferred into the service of industrial aesthetics.[24]

Stiegler points to the Bauhaus as an exemplary case of this modernity of the artist, dreaming of another possibility for industrial aesthetics, of becoming another route of supply for industrial aesthetic objects. But, he concludes, this dream was possible (or possibly realizable) only before the rise of the culture industries of consumer capitalism (and, today, the rise of the algorithmic and probabilistic culture industries of platform capitalism):

This time has now lapsed. The particularization has become extreme and, in this way, incompatible with any kind of individuating singularity.[25]

And it lapses, too, because art almost immediately begins to calculate once more: as the art market, through which it becomes little more than an ‘intellectualized’ sclerotic outgrowth of the culture industry in general.

10. The artist as a tensor in psychosocial individuation

What role, then, is left to the artist today, if any? Is art exhausted? Do we face a death of art, which, more than an end of art, would correspond to the elimination of the very possibility of aesthetic experience in a worldless world in which singularity has suffered thoroughgoing desingularization as the improbable is everywhere reduced to the probable? To address these questions, we need to take one more look at Stiegler’s conception of the artist and the relationship of art to the processes of psychic, collective and technical individuation that characterize the technical life of the noetic souls that we hope intermittently to be and remain.

In Simondon’s account, a process of individuation arises from a fund or a background in which there is not yet any process of individuation, but which contains potentials for the germination of such a process. Simondon likens this to the potential for crystallization, emerging through the effect of a ‘germ’ that starts to catalyse the crystal if it happens to be present in a liquid that is ‘saturated’ with molecules bearing the potential for crystallization. Such is the ‘pre-individual ground’ of crystallization, which gets the ‘individuation’ of the crystal going. In the same way, scientists have long imagined that biological evolution, or what Simondon calls ‘vital individuation’, gets going through a similar catalytic process occurring in the so-called prehistoric ‘primordial soup’, a pre-individual ground saturated with non-living biomolecules bearing the potential for the individuation process of the vegetative and sensible souls of biological evolution. In both cases, it is only after the process begins that one can really distinguish the crystal or the organism, as processes of individuation, from the milieu in which the process occurs: it is for this reason that this fund or ground is ‘preindividual’. Moreover, in the case of vital individuation, once this process has gotten going, the dead remains of past organisms form the necromass, saturated with the potential to continue catalysing vegetative life and through that all the forms of animal life that feed on it or depend on it.

Stiegler’s entire philosophy could be understood as asking what constitutes the pre-individual fund that catalysed the opening of the psychic and collective individuation of noetic souls. His conclusion, which returns us to the starting point of this introduction, is that it is the whole set of tertiary retentions secreted in the process of hominization as every kind of artifact and every kind of work. Such artifacts and such works keep returning, keep tenaciously insisting, keep offering the possibility of new knowledge and new interpretations, and keep doing so precisely because they also keep resisting, keep holding back, never emptying out all their secrets, sheltering their mystery. In other words, together, the history of artifacts and works forms a pre-individual ground saturated with potentials, potentials which may become actualized through being frequented and practised, as long as noetic souls remain capable of receiving them and being catalysed by them. This catalysing process is transindividuation, operating through the collective secondary retentions that bear the horizons of expectation through which knowledge can be shared and transformed: ‘the acting out and the socialization of the pre-individual ground as a socialization of the psychic: it is the realization of sublimation’.[26] If collective secondary retentions bear shared horizons of expectation, it is because such collective secondary retentions catalyse and are catalysed by the whole set of artifacts and works that forms what Stiegler will later call the noetic necromass.

It is only having laid out all of these elements that it becomes possible to understand what Stiegler means when he says that what the artist is, really, more than anything, is a noetic soul stretched out in tension between the individual and the collective, as that which and the one who draws on this noetic necromass, and who, through a process of sublimation producing the sublime, prepares the ground for psychic and collective individuations to come:

The artist is an exemplary figure of psychic and collective individuation, where an I is to be found only within a we and where a we is constituted simultaneously by the strained and oversaturated potential of the pre-individual ground presupposed by this process, and by the dia-chronies constitutive of the Is through which it is formed.[27]

An artist is a vortex of a particular kind in the flow: he is charged with a preparatory task with respect to the pre-individual ground of the Is and wes to come. And, at the same time, he is an operative of trans-individuation in the accessible pre-individual ground: he creates works, or artefacts, the fruits of general organology arising from the stratum formed here by tekhnē, which open up the future [l’à-venir] as the singularity of the indeterminate by accessing the repressed that incubates the potential of what Aristotle calls the noetic soul – as its intermittent possibility of acting out. Which is access to the savage.[28]

Because the pre-individual milieu is saturated, or rather oversaturated, it is strained, a potential that is pushing, tensing outwards, a richness and a wealth that insists. The artist is the one sensitively exposed to this tensed tenacity, the one who feels this strain, this tension, the one who loves and suffers (from) it, and the artist’s exemplarity stems from this being in tension between the psychic and the collective, a tension that makes him or her work. It is not that the artist is some unique specimen without relation to the rest of society, but that the artist, probably like the philosopher, is the one who, dedicating his or her time, actualizes a potential that is common to all, as Beuys implied with his claim that every man is an artist.[29] It is not that the artist is the cement that binds the individual and the collective: in being tensed, in being a tensor, the artist both conjoins and disjoins the individual and the collective, binding them while separating them as singular vortices within the collective vortex that is itself singular, improbable and fragile. Through an uncommon and not necessarily conscious sensitivity to its tensions and underlying currents, the artist facilitates the diachronization of the psychic and collective vortices of psychosocial individuation.

11.  Care given to depression

How does art bind those who are not artists, who do not produce but only receive and consume the work, or rather, invest in the work? What is the nature of this investment, and how does this reception and investment contribute to the production of philia, if society is inevitably filled with those who seldom have the chance to actualize their artistic potential? Noetic souls are constantly facing the risk of regressing, falling back from the elevation that they have only ever intermittently won, losing sight of the consistences towards which they thought they could aim their desire, and in so doing losing sight of themselves, of their own consistence. This regression induced by the prevailing of calculation and probability over singularity and the improbable in turn induces depression, the collapse of libidinal circuits and a loss of libidinal energy that accompanies the failure to find the knowledge or desire that make it possible to actualize the potential borne by our noetic souls.

Works of art, when they work, can in some way make it possible for me to re-adopt the consistence of my own existence, against the depressive consequences of this regressive tendency:

listening to a piece of music can here be almost like a miracle, […] the unhoped for that one must hope for, which brings me back to myself, but as an other: […] coming back to myself, but as the difference of my repetition, as though I have regained consciousness, but beyond and before my consciousness.[30]

This support that works contain the possibility of providing is necessary, ‘because the sensationally intellective noetic soul is only sometimes like this: when it experiences the extraordinary’.[31] And it is only through works, and through the tertiary retentions in which they consist, that the ordinary can open once again to the extraordinary, so long as we have continued to cultivate the desire and knowledge to remain receptive to them, so that they retain the possibility of liberating, traumatypically, those repressed potentials that are unconscious horizons of expectation – the expectation of the unexpected.

All of this is the case, not only individually but collectively, and it is here that the relationship between aesthetics and politics truly opens up. Taking Greek tragedy as emblematic, Stiegler sees this ancient art form, working with the then newly dominant mnemotechnics of alphabetical writing and for a newly literate public, as a struggle against these regressive tendencies, against the threats of collective violence and civil war. Tragedy strives to open a public stage, to stage a public scene of problems that must be turned into questions, and thus on the space of this stage to open the time for reflection, and it does so through the presentation of a conflict of characters, fictions whose truthful consistence the Athenian citizenry is called upon to compose – against the perpetual threat of decomposition:

In tragedy, the public space opens as a space of questions in which forces come together which do not oppose one another, but which compose, endlessly. This composition constitutes their play, and this play is the spectacle embodied by characters. But the exhibition of their sparring is also what combats their decomposition – and the tragedy is that this composition can lead to decomposition. The struggle against this decomposition is katharsis.[32]

Such a katharsis, however, which seems to imply a taming of the savage drive (even if it can never be completely domesticated), nevertheless does not quite amount to the calming of emotion, but almost to its opposite. But this ‘rising’ emotion is the affect that accompanies the striving for the plane of consistence, which is to say, of the extraordinary that consists through everything that ordinarily exists, an e-motion of ascent that works through the violent passions of regression and against the depressive collapse of those passions:

tragedy perhaps tends less to reduce the emotions than to arouse them, as though katharsis were less the purification of the passions than care given to depression – as a struggle against regression, which is also to say, against indifference, where difference is no longer made and does not take place.[33]

12. The art that it remains for us to invent

Yet, as we have seen, today’s dominant mnemotechnologies undermine rather than cultivate a public capable of access to the mystagogy of the extraordinary and the consistence of what does not exist. The time in which it was possible to believe in the artist as an expressive tensor of his own singularity and an experimenter preparing a new industrial aesthetics has lapsed, Stiegler declares, as we saw. It is for this reason that he turns repeatedly to the work of Joseph Beuys, for whom individuation involves the ‘hard work of remembrance’, for whom every man is an artist in potential, for whom the artist in actuality must foster a process of social sculpture that amounts to preparing the conditions for a genuine collective individuation process, and for whom it is the ‘duty of art’ to compose the images of Prometheus and Epimetheus so as to form an art that exceeds both traditional art and industrial production, ‘an art that it remains for us to invent’.

The noetico-aesthetic circuit cannot be fulfilled unless what is received is exclaimed, and exclaimed for others, who receive this exclamation in their own way and according to their own psychic individuation process. And this means that, in a way, it is not the artist who makes the work, but rather the artist’s public, who each make it in their own way. It is because and insofar as they make the work that they are a public composed of singular psychic individuation processes, and not just a market, nor even just an audience. Each of these receptions is singular precisely because of the singularity of each receiver’s own history of primary retentions and protentions becoming secondary (and which therefore become the criteria of selection for future primary retentions and protentions). Hence it is not just the artist who exclaims through the expression of his or her work, but also the recipient of this work, the public of this work: it is because of this entire chain of connection that the question of the noetico-aesthetic circuit of art is necessarily a collective and a political question, that is, a question of social sculpture.

As social sculpture, Stiegler concludes, this would necessarily entail ‘just as much a reinvention of the question of politics, along with a political rearticulation of the question of art’.[34] If the question of politics remains the question of democracy (which is far from certain), in the sense that it is a question of the conditions capable of facilitating the kratos of the demos, this has to be understood in new terms, for it is only through the fruitfulness, integration and resilience of genuine noetic diversity (just as the health of an ecosystem depends on the fruitfulness, integration and resilience of its biodiversity) that it is possible to foster and cultivate new forms of knowledge and desire capable of generating belief and the possibility of making good collective decisions in the face of unprecedented threats stemming from our contemporary hyper-systemic crisis. In that sense, if it is a question of political reinvention, and if this remains in some sense a question of the renewal of democracy, then this can only be a question of what, in the twenty-first century, constitutes

real democracy, which is always the protection, not of the majority, nor for that matter of the minority (these are accounting concepts), but of diversity – which must be cultivated in each citizen, and as a potential for neganthropic and anti-anthropic resilience.[35]

In the final pages of the second volume of Symbolic Misery, reflecting upon the European and Western processes of collective individuation that seem to be headed into their twilight as they succumb to the hyper-industrial conditioning of the sensible and the destruction of singularity and diversity it brings with it, he clarifies from what provenance this improbable reinvention could possibly appear:

Such an invention is certainly beyond the public powers: it is a task for artists, scientists, philosophers, spirit workers and engineers – those designers of spiritual machines. It is time for the world of spirit, which has always been technical (but has only recently realized this), to become aware of the absolutely new problems proliferating as a new horizon of sublimation, where artists have a singular battle to fight.[36]

Only such a reinvention can fight the battle that is made necessary by the loss of symbolic participation, and, if this battle cannot be expected to be fought just by public powers (even if they remain necessary supporters and partners of the process), the duty to fight it does not lie only with those figures who seek to call themselves artists as representatives of the art ‘sphere’. The artist to come must necessarily transcend this division of spheres, because it is only through a reinvention of mnemotechnologies and of the practise of mnemotechnologies that there exists any chance for a renewal of participation. Without a reinvention of art and aesthetics that once again grants the possibility for the whole to participate in the production of collective belief in a collective future, which is to say, in the theatrical production of supposed unity-in-diversity, there will be no chance of stemming the headlong rush into regression that is today manifested everywhere in the madness of crowds, the resort to scapegoating and the ‘marriage of stupidity and resentment’.[37]

Stiegler’s project began by diagnosing Western metaphysics as afflicted by the originary repression of the place of technics in the form of life that knows. If he continued to believe in the possibility of a co- and re-invention of art and politics, it is because ‘the end of the process of psychic and collective individuation known as the “West” is also contemporary with the end of an organological concealment of organa as artefacts’ and the ‘permanent repression of the question of tekhnē’.[38] The question of tekhnē refers, we might say, to the convergence of the questions of art, knowledge and desire in their essential technicity. Art, its spirits and its works temporalize the symbolic by spacing it, that is, they diachronize our individual and collective relationship to the sensible, and do so through the production of those spatial artifacts that are paintings, sculptures, texts, theatres and so on. The second volume of Symbolic Misery ends as follows:

Which is why, just when the sensible has become the pre-eminent front in what, as an aesthetic war of an economic nature, is ultimately a temporal war (a confrontation of calculation and singularities in the epoch of mnemotechnologies integrated into production), artistic and spiritual questions have become questions of political economy. It is only by being aware of this, by being prepared in this way, that the struggle can begin.[39]

The lectures that form the first part of the 2015 Hangzhou lectures, and which begin with Marcel Duchamp’s engagement with the problem of art’s relationship to the industrial, were originally given at the California Institute of the Arts in 2011. The final lectures from 2019 turn to Anaximander, Sophocles, Nietzsche, Rilke and Heidegger to explore how the obsession of these thinkers with return and the eternal return stems from and feeds into their obsession with the open. Stiegler argues that what all of this ultimately reflects is the fact that what tekhnē really names is exosomatization as that which continuously and in ever new ways unconceals the mystery that it nevertheless remains as the peculiarly exosomatic struggle against entropy, and against its peculiarly exosomatic regressive tendency, which is anthropy. In this way, these lectures represent the final decade of Stiegler’s attempt to become aware, and to make us aware – as a disjunctive and conjunctive tensor and actuator, striving always to resolve this tension by catalysing a new collective process – of the way in which the sensible, which is to say the aesthetic, remains the pre-eminent front in the economic war that it remains our task to discover how to pacify, which is to say, transform, in the time we have remaining, and in the knowledge that we can do so only by simultaneously giving care to our own and each other’s depression.

[1] Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyper-Industrial Epoch, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), p. 6.
[2] Ibid., p. 7.
[3] Ibid., p. 9.
[4] Ibid., p. 10.
[5] Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2: The Katastrophē of the Sensible, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), p. 5.
[6] Ibid., p. 91.
[7] Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies: Disbelief and Discredit, Volume 1, trans. Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), p. 90.
[8] Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).
[9] Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, p. 61.
[10] Ibid., p. 66.
[11] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 132.
[12] Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, p. 107.
[13] Ibid., p. 109.
[14] Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Tongue of the Eye: What “Art History” Means’, trans. Thangam Ravindranathan and Bernard Geoghegan, in Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (eds), Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 228.
[15] Ibid., p. 231.
[16] Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, p. 124.
[17] Ibid., p. 120.
[18] Ibid., p. 117, translation modified.
[19] Ibid., p. 105.
[20] Ibid., translation modified.
[21] Ibid., p. 153.
[22] Ibid., p. 118.
[23] See Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things, trans. Michael Brase (London: Penguin, 2018).
[24] Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, p. 158.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid., p. 155.
[27] Ibid., p. 154.
[28] Ibid., p. 155.
[29] Ibid., p. 110. On the same question in relation to the philosopher, see Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross and Patrick Crogan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–3.
[30] Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, p. 164.
[31] Ibid., p. 165.
[32] Ibid., p. 167.
[33] Ibid., p. 171.
[34] Ibid., p. 91.
[35] Bernard Stiegler, ‘Noodiversity, Technodiversity: Elements of a New Economic Foundation Based on a New Foundation for Theoretical Computer Science’, trans. Daniel Ross, Angelaki 25:4 (2020), p. 73.
[36] Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, p. 174.
[37] Bernard Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals: Disbelief and Discredit, Volume 2, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge; Polity Press, 2013), pp. 21–22.
[38] Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2, p. 175.
[39] Ibid.