! ! ! Bernard STIEGLER

TO LOVE,

! TO LOVE ONESELF,

! ! ! TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER:! ! ! From September 11 to April 21

Bertrand Augst translator

Aimer, s'aimer, nous aimer: Du 11 septembre au 21 avrilwas published in Paris by Galilée in 2003

! ! ! ! !

! ! ! ! Table of Contents

1. Narcissism and Insecurity2. Narcissistic Structure does have a History3. Narcissism, Consumption and Acting out4.The Articulation of I and the we5. The process of adoption and what we really want6. Calendarity, cardinality and fiction7. Desire and infinity8. “Fight!” : The end result of finality of consumption and the herd-society.9. “Family” and ruin10. Disappointment11. The destruction of time12. Industrial temporal objects13. The standardization of secondary retentions as reign of the symbolic misery14. The loss of symbolic participation as destruction of individuation and April 21 2002 ! in France15. The one where there no longer is a witness16. Repons--the object of worship17. The Global audience18. Narcissism, diachrony and incommensurability19. Disgusts and discredits20. Theater of individuation and man’s memories21. The absorbing of the it (the one)22. The struggle between the becoming and the future: to conjugate, disjunct, invent,! except oneself23. The problem of evil and the thought of tendencies24. A building site25. Singularity in the individuation process26. Milieux of the we27. The hope for a we28. To “colloque” in Cérisy. Metastabilization29. Das Mann30. Crash: September 11, March 26, April 2131. The “demonic,” critique of invention and struggle

2

1. NARCISSISM AND INSECURITY

As fantasmatically1 exploited as it might be, deliberately manipulated even, the violence and and insecurity in which we are living pertain above all else to a problem of narcissism and are thus the result of a loss of individuation. The narcissism involved understood as when a man like Richard Durn, murderer of a we--to murder a city council, official representation of a we--amounts in effect to murdering a we--suffered unbearably from not existing, not to have, according to him,, “the feeling of existing”2 : when he tried to look at himself in a mirror he only met an immense nothingness. This is what the publication of his intimate diary in Le Monde reveals. In it, Durn asserts that “he needs to do evil to, at least once in [his] life, have the sentiment of existing.”3

Richard Durn is suffering from a structural deprivation of his primordial narcissistic capacities.4 I call “primordial narcissism” the structure in the psyche which is necessary to its functioning, that part of the love of oneself which occasionally can become pathological but without which no capacity to love would be possible. Freud speaks of primary narcissism, but this expression does not correspond to what I am talking about: it designates infantile self-love, an early phase of sexuality. Freud also talks about secondary narcissism, which occurs at adulthood, but it is still not what I mean by primordial narcissism, which is very likely closer to what Lacan is referring to in his analysis of “the mirror phase.”

It turns out however that there is a primordial narcissism of the I as well as of the we: for the narcissism of the I to function, it must be able to project itself in the narcissism of a we. Unable to elaborate his narcissism, Richard Durn saw in the city council the reality of an alterity which made him suffer, which did not reflect any image, and he destroyed it.

2. NARCISSISTIC STRUCTURE DOES HAVE A HISTORY

Psychoanalysis’s most important theoretical progress was the application of the doctrine of the libido to the repressing self. This resulted in representing the self itself as a reservoir of libido called narcissistic whence libidinal investments in objects and in which these investments can be reintroduced.5

This is the Freudian energetics: the ego is an energetic process which has a potential. This potential circulates and it happens, when things don’t function properly, that narcissism generates narcissistic troubles. Freud provides a list: dementia praecox, paranoïa and melancholy. There are also narcissistic sufferings which are various forms of neuroses.

It is however in a very specific sense that we are in a period of great narcissistic suffering which is characterized particularly by by the suffering of a narcissism of the we, a kind of melancholy of the we. I am only able to be I insofar as I belong to a we. Thus, an I and an we are processes of individuation, they have a history. It is not so

3

much a history in the sense that everyone of we is a different history, but in the sense where the conditions of individuation of the we in the course of history are transformed.

At the beginning of he XXIth century, the conditions of individuation were different from those of the Vth c. B.C. (birth of the Greek City), which are themselves different from those of the CroMagnon time and still different from those of the primitive horde Freud is talking about in Totem and Tabu. There are conditions to individuation processes and their evolutions, passing from one stage of the individuation process of the us to another and, through it, of the I: the conditions of evolution of individuation are mnemotechnic or mnemotechnological and today we are experiencing tremendous suffering because of this individuation and this narcissism--a failure of the necessary primordial narcissism of the I and the we, and of the I in the we--insofar as the mnemotechnics and the mnemo-techno-logics which regulate any human individuation process have been transferred to the domain of industrial exploitation.

3. Narcissism, consumption and acting out

This industrial exploitation raises difficulties beyond what its resources allow. Today, insofar as we are Is, we are targeted as consumers. However, a consumer is not allowed to say I; a consumer is no longer an I or a we because he is reduced to be being a one.6 It is depersonalized, disembodied, by principle and structure. Consumption--as an era of a system pertaining to what I called the adoption process7 tends to cause the I and the we to become confused, to negate their differences and thus transform them into a one. The organization of consumption -- which consists in synchronizing the Is to the extent of nullifying their differences, because an I of a diachrony, because I can only say insofar as my time, your time--is what tends to nullify self love, self-esteem. As a matter of fact, if my singularity is nullified by the synchronization of my behavior, i.e. my consumption, with that of others, i.e. the consumption of others, which makes it possible to realize savings on an industrial scale, I am progressively nullified and through the progressive annulation of my I, I no longer love myself.

What we are talking about here is prospective.8 Prospective has to do with collective intelligence of the future and thus the problem of time. Human time, not that of the stars. Human time is related to the time of he stars but they are different times: the time of the stars is entropic, it is the physical future of the expanding universe. Human time is neguentropic in an extreme way9: it is not only the biological nature of living things which is neguentropic. In principle, its cultural structures also are. We’ll return to this point. To confuse the time of the stars and that of human beings is to reduce neguentropic time to entropic future, which is contradictory, unless one postulates the possibility “the end of time”-- i.e. the future which is far more complex than becoming and thus, also more fragile. The possibility of becoming is fragile: that’s why the end of the future is possible, far more probable than the end of end of becoming, This is because the future cannot be reduced to becoming (but must on the other hand negotiate with it) that it imperative to fight any form of scientism. Reducing becoming to the future would be the end of it, it would be “the end of time,” and that is possible.

4

Those who refuse to consider this eventuality do not know how to recognize what in the future constitutes the possibility of becoming without being confused with this future.

4. The articulation of the I and the we

Human time articulates the I and the we. I am human only insofar as I belong to a social group. The time of the I is nevertheless not the time of the we: it occurs within the we time, which is conditioned by by the times of the I constitute it. The difficulty lies in this tension: it is this complexity which renders difficult what is called collective intelligence--and which reason nevertheless a priori assume the possibility, the necessity even.

The issue of the articulation of the I and the we is overdetermined by that of technique. It always was, but earlier on it was not noticeable. It is in the XXth c. that it became noticeable, and especially in the XXth c. industrial objects appear, systematically produced as new objects intended to replace the former ones: this is what is called consumption. Right now, every day, hundreds of patents are given throughout the world which result in numerous new objects which need to be adopted or have been adopted.

Marketing, the media, the synchronizations of our behavior, which more or less artificially contribute to sustain consumption: they cause the adoption of a new tooth paste, a new soap, a new cell phone, a new optional standard (equipment) on cars. We must consume for the global we economic engine to operate. Psychological techniques are developed to make we adopt the new products because, a priori, we don’t want them. Spontaneously, societies have no desire for new products. As a general rule, they want to remain identical to themselves--and yet, they must transform themselves to survive.

Today, and this is a specific and specifically miserable feature of our epoch, the articulation of the I and the we is hegemonically ruled by this adoption imperative of the new in the consumption mode.! !5. The process of adoption and what we really want

The adoption of new products is bound to a general process of adoption in the core of which lies (what pertains) to the social. Adoption techniques like marketing can only develop because society is already a process of adoption, which as a general rule it forgets and conceals. Occasionally, it conceals it by burying in the mass graves of thousands, millions even, of individuals and by refusing to acknowledge that adoption is always present. Ernest Renan, Paul Valéry, Leroi-Gourhan, in particular have underlined the adoption process. In What is a Nation?, Ernest Renan explains that any society is made up of immigrants who are not part of the we as they arrive--so that one must say that the we literally does not exist. Leroy-Gourhan illustrated it with China: China was created by thousands of different ethnic groups who have shaped an we which never existed, but who, through the projection of this fantasmatic past, made possible the projection of a common future. Referring to the United States,

5

Tocqueville established that any society is crated in this fashion. However, this fictional creation must be concealed because I must believe in the belonging to this fantasmatic we of the past in order to join this past and make it my own.

Last year, I gave here, at the Colloquium “Modernity: the new map of time,”10 the example of my own case saying : I am a French citizen, my children are French citizens, but our name is Stiegler, like my paternal grandfather and my maternal grandfather was called Trautmann. In other words, I acknowledge the “sans-culottes”11 as representative of my past, and this acknowledgment pertains to the we narcissism while my grandparents’ past is not that of the sans-culottes. My past, I adopted it by integrating paces of adoption, intended to have me adopt it--school and a number of structures: a common past, with you, who are French, that will allow me to construct with you an we projecting a future, allowing we to speak together of: “our future: we want this, we want that.”

Until recently, this adoption process of he past, which is artificial but which, because of that, enables me to adopt a future, was concealed. But the question of adoption is nevertheless raised more and more explicitly because of he industrial revolution as soon as new objects appear relentlessly, the framework of ordinary lie continues to transform itself. For social structures to absorb this ceaseless novelty, adoption techniques must be set up. The adoption problems presents itself as such and social organization becomes explicitly an adoption organization, in other words an organization of consumption.

6. Calendarity, cardinality and fiction

Adoption is what is assumed by /for the constitution of an we in general. An we is always constituted by a calendarity and a cardinality. To be able to say we, we must be able to share the same calendary system and the same cardinal system. If we cannot refer to the same calendar, i.e. if we don’t share a common time, and if we do not have a common representation of the spatial world in which we share common common orientation apparatuses--for example if we can’t read the street names, maps or direction signs--, we are foreigners. We can only feel familiar with a we if we share it. Today, however, calendarity and cardinality have moved under the control of cultural industries which have become global.

Calendarity regulates the rendez-vous of the we. Originally, Sunday is a sacred day for Christiendom which receives communion on the day of rest. Mass media turn it into a day for televisual rendez-vous. What is true of days is also true of hours. Today, everyone recognizes in what is called the 8:00 PM, the the time of television news. Nowadays, TF1, the [French] television channel has seen its stock fall because it bought the very expensive broadcasting rights for a soccer match and that Zinedine Zidane, the French team star which was expected to guarantee to the channel and its advertisers a record viewing audience, because of a wounded knee is not guaranteed to participate in this world match. Like any TV channel, TF1, finds its credit in its capacity to control calendarity... and the Soccer World Cup is a major world calendary

6

date. To be able to control the access of consumers on such a day constitutes a fundamental advantage: in principle, it provides very high audience ratings. But the fragility --if not its absurdity--of such a system is evident as it only takes in the weakness of soccer player’s knee to threaten it.

As they pass under the control of culture industries, the calendary and cardinal systems are in the process of crumbling--which provokes a loss of individuation because of the destruction of the primordial narcissism which it triggers. A calendary system and a cardinal system refer back to something which is computable-- and, there still exists forms of exploitation beyond what can be computed, exception, the unique event: the calendar refers back either to the divine or to the founding exceptional event of the political, or to both at the same time, in any case to an exceptional event which transcends the present. To belong to a group, one must be able to project an unity of that group which is always fictitious; a fiction which always narrates an exception. In order to say we I must fictionalize a past which is not mine and which enables me to fictionalize a future--that of my people, my relatives, my children and, fictionalize the future which I hope will gradually be yours.

7. Desire and infinity

This future which I fictionalize, i.e which I desire and fantasize, I very likely will never see it: it is very probable that it will never take place. However, I will need it that which will only occur on a fiction mode by the means of which I claim it nevertheless somehow will be in the guise of an absolute future: a future which will remain forever, a kind of pure future. For example, this fiction is called the Messiah. It is only possible in the infinite: it pertains of desire, of an individual desire, which as such is inseparable of a desire for the we and from we for a we, of he possibility of saying we; however desire is structurally granted in the infinite. Freud tells us, quite rightly, that libidinal energy is limited. However, for this limited libidinal energy to function, I need to fantasize12 that my energy is limitless. It ‘s only a fiction but without this fiction, there would not be any desire. What I love, I love without limits, unconditionally: I can only love it without limits [fantasmatically]. What I love, and the people I love, you, that is to say we, insofar as we are capable of creating a we, all that, I love, and I love them, and I love you, infinitely. I love infinitely. I can only love infinitely, as one say “in the infinitive.” Without that, no we is possible.

All this is only a fiction. There is neither infinite love nor we origin of the I which is not a fantasy. Let me repeat: without (i.e.without the original flaw which is the fiction of desire), we are impossible. We become, worse than ‘barbarians,” beasts, and, worse than beasts, a pure force of destruction: literally, we become diabolical. That is what the question of philia in The Nicomachean Ethics13. If I had time, I would show you how and why, following what I just stated, the us, as well as the I, must be capable of a primordial narcissism: how it needs for symbols, i.e. autoerotic fetishisms in which it

7

would be able to reflect itself, to dive into “as a primordial force [...] in a fiction development, forever irreducible.”14 Cardinality and calendarity are the framework of such fetishes.

8. “Fight!” : The end result of finality of consumption and the herd-society.

Contemporary world calendarity and cardinality, controlled by culture industries--not only television and radio, but also, the Internet and the integrated tete- communication systems of information and the audio-visual, product of the convergence of electronic technologies--constitute a system which operates according a finality determined by computation, i.e. according to a finite finality, and obviously exhaustible.

This system generates gregarious behaviors, and not, according to a legend, individual comportments. It is a blatant lie to say that we live in an individualistic society, an extraordinarily false lure, and the more extraordinary that no one seems to be aware of it, as if the effectiveness of the lie was proportional to its enormity, and as if the lie wasn’t anyone‘s deed in particular. We are living in a herd-society, as Nietzsche understood and anticipated it. Some, believe that this society is individualistic because, at the highest level of public and private responsibilities, but also in the smallest details adopted by the marketing process and the organization of consumption, selfishness has been extolled to the maximum level of life. But, individualism has nothing to do with this selfishness.Individualism is what seeks the blossoming of the individual, the latter always remaining and indissociably an I made up of I and a we, an I within a we or an us made up of Is, incarnated by Is. To contrast the individual and the collective is to transform individuation into social atomization that produces a gregarious herd. The violence I was speaking of earlier--the violence of those who have been called the “sauvageons” [literally “wild children”] for ex.--, is sparked off today by an hegemonic discourse according to which, life, i.e the struggle for life, where it is legitimate to say that one must get ahead by any means.” “Fight it out!” is such a viewpoint’s motto.

Such a pseudo-individualist discourse, degraded and humiliating--it’s the herd’s males who fight--, produces an ordinary ultra-selfish behavior which, combined with the loss of narcissism, i.e. the loss of the knowledge of limits, opens the door to all transgressions.

9. “Family” and ruin

Insofar as up until now, the calendary and cardinal system organized the memory of an event, since time immemorial, a founding fiction exceptional mirror of the absolute future, constituting itself an absolute past because it is mythical--, it is what enabled making familiarity possible, precisely, the constitution of an accord. Calendarity opens up familiarity-- philia, love, desire. As Vance Packard15 clearly showed, cultural industries seek to create such a familiarity of desire by capturing and funneling

8

consumers’ libidinal potential which make up audiences for advertisers hired by the producers of consumption objects. This ends up becoming an ensemble of totally integrated, where the symbolic mnemotechnic system, calendary and cardinal, combine with the technical system of production of consumption goods, material goods, fits in and submit itself to it. All this articulates itself into a single system in which the television “organ” is expected to merge with the “organ” of tele-action. Eventually, television will become an access point which will make it possible to order a product while watching and, by ordering that product, to trigger a control to restock which in turn will initiate the product manufacturing, etc. This television access point which I can use at home while watching TV to consume, I will also find it in my work place as a tool, for example, used to drive a production chain. From the point of view of the history of social structures, this evolution consists in an integration of the technical system of production and of the mnemotechnic system of division of calendarity and cardinality.

This integration constitutes a ruin of reciprocal narcissim of the I and of the we. This ruin consists in the organization of what I called an hyper-synchronization.16 It defines the rendez-vous of the we. A calendar is a synchronization device. A rendez-vous in a we synchrony does allow diachronic opportunities. On the other hand, the development of cultural industries leads to a hyper-synchronization which eliminates diachronization and, paradoxically, generates a hyper-synchronization--i.e. a break from the symbolic system, a disconnection from collective and individual times, a de-composition of both the diachronic and the synchronic. The destruction of collective life styles, for ex., causes a teenager who comes back home to his parents at 7:00pm helps himself from the refrigerator, his father does the same thing at 8:00pm and no one eats with anyone else--the only rendez-vous being eventually, the TV news. What regulates calendarity is no longer local, nor familial, national or religious, because it is no longer a we: it is the large consumption television system--system which, in Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, adapted from Bradbury’s novel, is precisely called: family.

However, right now there are tele-reality political programs or of “political reality” where, precisely, a politician is invited to spend some time in front of cameras, in a family:!! Wednesday, August 27, TF117on the occasion of the press conference of the Fall ! season, announced the launching of a new broadcast, “which will ! seek to bring ! together politicians and the citizen.” Provisionally called “36 hours”, this ! broadcast directed by Ruth Elkrief, aims to immerse a political man for two or ! three days in the private and professional life of a French family. This magazine ! is produced by the society 2P2L, which also produced “The Eyes in the Blues,” ! devoted to the the French soccer team in 1998.18!

10. Disappointment

9

Such hyper-synchronization generates a hyper-diachronization insofar as the hyper-symbols--synchronization is achieved by symbols--generate hyper-demons [hyper-diaboles] : from demonization, atomization, a complete de-liaison [unbinding]. This is because hypersynchronization causes a loss of libido in relation to the synchronization apparatus. This loss of libido, this dis-love, manifests itself in a paradoxical way in all the studies of the relationships between publics and their media. “I don’t believe it any more. I watch TV but I hate it: this is what people questioned answer. If people are asked what they think of TV1’s programs, most of the time they answer that they don’t like it, that Arte’s19 are better but nevertheless acknowledge watching TF1. Others say that nothing is any good, that Arte has become like the other TV stations but nevertheless confess that they do watch Arte and other stations.

Confronted with these apparent contradictions, symptoms of what I call ill-being (mal-être), analysts and experts usually do not understand much although it seems to me that the situation is fairly clear. For example, in order to keep with up with the political situation, to follow what is happening with the Front National20, one has to watch TV1. There is no choice. You don’t want to watch this station but you still have to do it. I do not mean that TF1 is responsible for the Front National; it is the ensemble of calendary ensemble made up of the program industries, of which TV1 is in France the main representative, which constitute a new organizational apparatus of the we, development of which is deceptive-- deceptiveness is a major and primary of this vote. Even if it is not the only one, it conditions all the others. Audiences created by the cultural industries do not constitute a we that produces philia that stimulates desire. Rather, if it does exist, this “we” would tend arouse hatred and disgust--and first of all, disgust with oneself. Who has not one day felt this self-loathing after indulging himself to watch television thinking all along that it would be better to do something else? It is in this sense that if we are still able to be we, it really only is by default.21

11. The destruction of time

The analysis hyper-synchronization and denouncing its devastating effects must not so seek to oppose synchrony to diachrony--and this is a matter of method. The terms I used, I, we, diachrony, synchrony designate entities that need to be differentiated without opposing them to each other, but as a combination.Language, for example, is a synchronic milieu (as Saussure taught us) within which diachrony exists. If I speak and you are listening to me, that’s because it’s because I am not in? synchrony with you; but if I am able to speak to you, it’s because my diachrony seeks synchronize itself with you. Language is the articulation of a diachrony and a synchrony, that is to say, the composition of two tendencies which are also forces, whose composition produces a dynamic process. A language dies when these tendencies decay. What I call the “becoming-demons” of symbols is the result of such decomposition.

We naturally tend to oppose things instead of combining them. However, beyond this bent of natural apparent common sense, it is the industrial exploitation of time, through

10

the cardinality and calendarity of cultural industries which tends to structurally and organically decompose the synchronic and the diachronic-- decomposition understood as something which has to do with necrosis. In order this industrial “calendarity” destroys time. Or to put it differently, the industrial exploitation of time (the time of consciousnesses become a market) is entropic: it eliminates the difference between becoming and the future.This is what produces a profound discomfort, a disgust, symptom, of the elimination of desire--what I called elsewhere a rout [“débandade.”]

12. Industrial temporal objects

In general, I am trying to reason in terms of tendencies, referring to Bergson, Freud and Nietzsche in particular. One must not oppose synchronic and diachronic, for the same reasons as those which make Freud posit that the pleasure principle is constituted by the reality principle, which is, at the outset, its “opposite.” The pleasure principle arises and dissipates in the reality principle, and these verbs indicate that a process is involved.

The destruction process of the synchronic and the diachronic, i.e. the de-composition of the I and the we (where the I and the we collapse) because of consumption-- that is to say the systematic exploitation of the manufacturing of instruments of demand for consumption-- results in the exhaustion of libidinal energy. When we are watching television, we are consuming an economic good which belongs to the class of what Husserl called temporal objects--in this case an industrial temporal object. Generally speaking, a temporal object is the object of temporal consciousness [consciousness of time] as it unfolds at the same time as the object whose consciousness it is :it is itself essentially temporal; it never stops flowing; like any temporal object, it has a beginning and an end, and between this beginning and this end, there is nothing but temporal flux (flow). However, when you, who are consciousness are watching a television show or a film, your duration of consciousness which occurs during the broadcast or the film, will adhere, attach, blend to, with, the temporal object which if the object of your consciousness. If it is a television broadcast (and not a VHS cassette), for example (the soccer world cup), hundreds of millions of people are watching it at the same time as you, and you synchronize yourself with all this consciouness, you are within the same consciousness of time.

However, this synchronization tends to oppose any possible diachronization.This is how the de-composition of the synchronic and the diachronic takes place. At this point, it is necessary to deepen the concept of temporal object to understand the specificity and power of industrial temporal objects and how they achieve the temporal synchronization of consciousness(es), which is to say an exhaustion of diachronicity and thus libidinal energy. Following Husserl, I am calling “temporal” any object whose flow coincides with the flux of consciousness of which it is the object, and which is itself essentially a flux, and does not come to be except through the passing of time, as passage itself. Melody is its paradigm. A temporal object is a fabric of retentions and protentions. But these protentional and retentional processes also intervene with the

11

temporality of consciousness in general--and by the same token temporal objects make it possible to modify the consciousness processes, and, up to a point, to influence, not to say to control these processes. It is in music that these processes are best formalized--military and religious functions, for example.

Within the “now” of a melody, in the present moment of a musical object unfolding, the note which is present can only be a note, and not only a sound, than if it retains within itself the preceding note which is still present and in turn retains in turn holds the one that precedes, and so forth. This primary retention, which belongs to the present of perception, must not be confused with the secondary retention which is the melody I may have heard yesterday, which I am able to hear again in my imagination thanks to my memory, and which is the past of my consciousness. Perception, says Husserl, must not be confused with imagination (secondary retention).

Before the invention of the phonograph, it was absolutely impossible to hear twice in a row the same melody. With that invention which I called tertiary retention (a prothesis for exteriorized memory), the repetition of an identical temporal object has become possible, which makes it easier to understand retentional processes. Because, the result is that same temporal object is produced twice in succession creates two different temporal phenomena, which means that primary retentions vary from one phenomenon to the next. The retentions from the first listening, become secondary, affect (intervene) the selection of primary retentions of the second listening (audition)-- this is true in general but the tertiary retention which the phonogram is makes it evident; furthermore, the temporal objects that have become tertiary, i.e. recorded and temporarily transformed into a signal that can be controlled and broadcast (phonograms, but also films and radio and television broadcasts) have become materialized time which overdetermines the relations (links, connections) between primary and secondary retentions in general, and thus makes it possible to control them.

More and more, such temporal industrial objects create rhythm and contrive [tramer] the flux (flow) of consciousness that we are. Furthermore, with the current technological mutations, we are moving from the industrial phase to what might be the hyperindustrial one, which integrates the world of culture and the intellect in its totality in the midst of a vast technoo-industrial system where the production apparatuses of material goods and those of production and broadcast of symbols and other “spiritual” nourishments have become identical. And once the TV set will have a terminal for teleaction, it will make it possible not only to watch programs but to trigger remote actions from such programs as purchasing, initiating production, and so many other functions of the global industrial production/consumption system.

13. The standardization of secondary retentions as reign of the symbolic misery

When 10 millions people are watching the same broadcast--the same audio-visual temporal object--they synchronize their flux. True, the selection criteria of these retentions are different. Thus, they do not perceive the same phenomenon: they don’t

12

all think the same thing from what they see. But if it is true that it is the secondary retentions which form the selection criteria in the primary retentions, the act that the same people watching the same broadcasts necessarily leads (causes) their “consciousnesses” to increasingly share identical secondary retentions and thus to select the same primary retentions; they end up being so well synchronized that they have lost their diachrony, i.e. their singularity--that is to say, their freedom, which always is their freedom to think.

The decomposition of the synchronic and the diachronic is that of idiomaticity and the signaling in general, of the signifier insofar as it is the non-signifier. Resulting in the loss of self-esteem (the self, during it synchrony, is no longer able to inspire itself from the desire for itself), the elimination of primordial narcissism allows all possible transgressions insofar as it is also the elimination of the we as such, becoming the gregarious one, the very same that produced the major political catastrophes of the XXth century. Richard Durn’s suffering was above all not to be able to signify.22 He wrote it in his diary, for him everything was meaningless (insignifiant) and himself was unable to signify.23 He was not able to participate in individuation. He cannot individuize himself because to individuize is to exist, experiencing the consistency of individuation, i.e. necessity and convergence of what and those who exist within the same process--which, nevertheless essentially manage , as projection of the future of the we and as one, difference an multiplicity. Thus, Richard Durn really met what must be called a-significance as limit of significance and as unbearable limit so much so that it led him to the murderous acting out. That is the consequence of the symbolic misery where the destruction of the signifier takes us--and to which in the end no one escapes: it weights or plays the part like a ghost, for ex. on so many dinner parties during which there is nothing else to say.

14. The loss of symbolic participation as destruction of individuation and April 21 2002 in France

Leroi Gourhan developed a concept of participation loss--close to what I am describing here as a loss of individuation which consists in the loss of projection of narcissistic capacities, i.e libido--which would reach its limit with he calls the appearance of the mega-ethny. Mega-ethny and disappearance of esthetic participation which might correspond to an phenomenon of exteriorization and specialization of man’s symbolic faculties in the industrial apparatus are incomprehensible separately:

! ! Figuration seems [...] inseparable from social manifestations! ! which maintain technical permanence...

...that is to say, psychical and collective individuation of we as a process in the midst of which the I and the we individualize themselves equally, as we shall develop it in the second half.

! ! From this viewpoint, the figurative participation is coherent with the

13

! ! techno-economic characteristics of the group; figurative ! ! ! ! specialization, the separation between actors and spectators reach ! ! their highest level in modern masses where the majority of people ! ! doesn’t play much part as social extras but where through the ! ! channel of television, all manifestations of prestige are reduced to ! ! the state of pure spectacle.24

Yes, symbolic creativity is the condition of individuation as a circuit where individual memory, i.e psychical individuation, singular emphasis of idiomatic differentiation, depends on collective memory, that is to say collective individuation, which occurs as consistence of individual singularities--by the means of which collective individuation renews itself and goes on--and which is threatened in its very essence by specialization:

! ! It i obvious that the path followed by man towards a mega-ethnic ! ! group, a unit of earth measure like the “megadeath” which was ! ! invented to calculate the power of atomic weapons. The only thing ! ! worth investigating is therefore the means through which the !! zoological flux will continue to escape because, in final analysis, ! ! the problem is to maintain man in a sufficiently “sapient” situation to ! ! avoid a dehumanization that would become harmful to the output of ! ! the social machine. In other words, it is not unreasonable to wonder ! ! whether a new exteriorization is not happening which would be that ! ! of social symbolism. ! ! As a matter of fact, the process is already sufficiently advanced to ! ! allow us to see in what direction it is oriented... The treatment of ! ! time is easy to see where a few centers will process entirely ! ! automatically the totality of manufactured iron; it is already the case ! ! with oil where the development is not slowed down by the constraint ! ! of a large diversity of products. It is easy to foresee the time when ! ! States no longer will need to rely on the uncertain services of artillery ! ! but when masses of megadeaths will be dealt with indirectly from an ! ! electronic control board; its feasibility has already achieved.25

This is indeed how the Gulf war took place. The automatic treatment of production or of destruction affects today, as a process of exteriorization, the symbolic exchange in general, even if, Leroi-Gourhan writes, if its most vital focus seems irreducible, i.e. as constitution and stabilization of the family cell in its nuptial parade, guaranteeing the reproduction of the species which would still require individuals’ direct esthetic participation--insofar as their libido must act out in one way or another. in this instance:

! ! As far as the social is concerned, audio-visual techniques provide ! ! given their current imperfections, a very efficient relay. We still are in ! ! the midst of survival, and the city worker still leaves his vital itinerary ! ! to watch a (soccer) match, go fishing, watch a parade: he still has a

14

! ! life or relationships, limited, but which can extent to participating to ! ! the activity of a society. However, increasingly, his direct relationships, ! outside the vital circuit, are localized in adolescence and the pre-conjugal ! ! period where the direct participation is necessary to collective life. ! ! Short of attaining the the point which the most adapted for productivity ! ! domestic species have attained, artificial, it would appear that a minimum ! ! of social esthetics will continue to surround the years of sexual maturation. ! ! In insect societies, this period is the only one when, for the reproductive, a ! ! certain behavior independence takes place.26

It should be noted that this text was published in 1965, and that since, procreatic technologies have appeared the first in vitro fecundation having taken place in 1977. In the same way as sexual reproduction can hereafter become passive, in the highly complex esthetic sequence which preceded and followed it, with all the frustration potential that it foretells, the loss of esthetic participation, intellectual as well--as I have described it here the setting up of single secondary retentions--as corporal, carnal and manual, as analyzed by Leroi-Gourhan, leads to an desenzitization which is literally catastrophic:

! ! The loss of manual discovery, personal encounter between man and ! ! matter, at the artisanal level cut off one of the outcome of technical ! ! innovation of individual esthetic. Put differently, artistic vulgarization, ! ! enables masses passively over worldwide funds , but for art like ! ! adventure, Chinese painters and Mayans sculptures shrink like ! ! cow-boys and Zulus, because a minimum of participation is required ! ! to experience. The problem of the ratio of personal art is as important for ! ! the future of homo sapiens as that of his motor !degradation.27

“A minimum of participation is necessary to feel,” and the lack of sensibility induced by the global organization of consumption and the hyperschronization which constitutes it, as negation of any diachrony, produces an immense suffering at the threshold (limit) of what is bearable, a extraordinarily dangerousquasi-insensibility, a misery of meaning, an impossibility to sign-ify, that is to say to exist, which is the profound significance of the April 21 2002 vote in France-- but also of all the desperate acts throughout the world today, which finds its individual expression at the extreme loss of individuation in Roder Durn’s criminal act.

!

! ! ! ! ! ! II

15

! ! ! ! PART II

The destruction of the psychical and collective individuation process and the problem of evil

15. The one [le on] where there no longer is a witness

Culture industries are used to create markets. Temporal audio-visual objects make it possible to broadcast them and have masses adopt models of behavior through by adopting their new products. Marx already said: capitalism is essentially the creation of new needs. Today, this industrial manufacture of behaviors has become a real danger: it is an entropic process which raises issues of cultural ecology, like Jeremy Rifkin 28 or Naomi Klein29 show with other data. And André Gorz 30 reminded us recently, how Freud’s nephew, Edward Barnays, invented marketing as a technology of fantasy--which Vincent Packard understood in the 50s.

The industrial exploitation of the power of temporal objects will eventually drain desire from consciousness, based on singularity and narcissism as image of an otherness of the self. Such is the rout--the upcoming slowing down of consumption because of the consumer’s disgust. Disgust which is the destruction pure and simple of his taste. If I spend 52 minutes in front of a television program, my consciousness lived for 52 minutes within the time of the temporal object. At the movies, I am not in my seat in the theater, I am inside the screen. My consciousness takes place in the temporal object. I interiorize all these times as secondary retentions which I share with other spectators. But what is it that television uses in its program to serve as retentional criterion? It is always the same marketing agencies which define standards: the Loft of M6 has it homologue on TF1. This is why the diversification of offer, which in itself is an interesting fact, doesn’t much influence the dominant tendency.

Criteria implemented by the stations under the pressure of marketing are inevitably interiorized by the public. From the moment you temporally accept the same channel of event information past as all those who are watching these broadcasts--and with whom, without being aware of it, on singularly strange mode, you “have a date.” And the difference of analysis which was at the outset yours, in relation to your neighbors--because you didn’t have the same past as them--, slowly, and in an asymptoptic fashion, is reduced. Your past, support of your neguentropical singularity, becomes the same past of consciousness as that of those who one watching-- at the outset tends to cease to be an analysis.

Normally, if I witness an event taking place and that you see the same event, we have two different things in the same event. Let’s take the example of a traffic accident. There is one wounded and three witnesses; a car driver is blamed; the three witnesses give different versions of this same event. Spontaneously, one would tend to think that they saw different causalities of this event because they were not in the same location.

16

And it is probably true; but I really think that the difference of points of view is due to the fact that the witnesses do not have the same past and therefore do not see things in the same way--first of all because a past carries certain expectations, shapes horizons of expectations which are his own and which receives events and determines those to whom they happen to be sensitive to them. We perceive things because of a competence made up of memories and correlative expectations, retentions and protentions, “competence” which produce a performance, to speak like linguists, for example, that event which I saw and which will be verbalized for that reason fine.

However, if progressively, everything that is happening to my consciousness will be identical to what happens to my “neighbor’s,” asymptotically; very plainly, there no longer is any witness. The I is confounded with the we: they disappear into the one where there is no witness. This is how a televisual event can “virtualize” a Gulf war where there is no longer anyone to denounce the horror which is nevertheless taking place live. Such is the product of culture industries. And the same thing is true for the other stations, the ones you are not watching. All stations have the same sources and, increasingly, the same commentaries. There an entropic integration of the stations themselves for the same reason that cause the asymptotic elimination of the Is diachrony, of consciousnesses. Al this generates what has been called “unique (single) thought, to designate the elites’ thinking which is only the reflection, at the level of the so called elites, of a more global process where industrial underlying synchronization stops any diachronizing appropriation difference with what I am watching on television.

16. Repons--the object of worship

When I go to mass, the temple, the synagogue or the mosque, the officiating priestaddresses me as a singularity which is responsible of who it is. He attempts to place me in my responsibility, to diachronize me. From this point of view, worship, I theory, takes it for granted that, insofar as we synchronize ourselves, we are good and friendly to the extent that we set up our synchrony of principle that is to say those who are able to synchronize themselves diachronically usually are those who who are primordially diachronic. And the purpose of the synchronizing appointment (date) is to intensify diachrony, i.e. responsibility--I mean, the responsibility of a repons. The term “responsibility” is probably crude to characterize so many religious worship but I nevertheless believe that something like a repons, which is a music form, and as a server does answer for it--and any faithful must be such a server (besides Catholic liturgy)--, is the purpose of any worship: it is what Christianity calls conscience, one is in conscience, responsible for the other, alone, absolutely alone, before God.

17. The Global audience

Our mediatic “consciousness” is bombarded by culture industries, the press enterprises of which registered in what is called “media” are increasingly less and less differentiable--and the honor of the noble journalist profession will, in the future, be measured against its capacity to distance themselves from it. However, our consciences are in the same way bombarded insofar as their consciences of our body

17

and that our bodies consume. What is at stake, and that in order to achieve economies on an industrial scale which mass markets make possible, to synchronize the behavior of these bodies through consciousnesses which constitute an industrial material which is for sale as what Thierry Gaudin called “audiences”, more than fifteen years ago already. These audiences have a price: they constitute meta-markets. The market, tooth paste, cell phones, cars--goes through the meta-market of audiences. If you intend to launch a product on the market, the problem is less to have a good industrial production or a truly inventive product, than to have access to a market where you will be able to increase your profit margins thanks to measurable economies. [economies d’échelle]. The point is to obtain increasingly larger audiences because at the present stage of development of the economic war, it is necessary to seek global markets to pay off industrial investments and it is why calendarity becomes inexorably that of synchronous global systems. That is the historical significance of the soccer world Cup31 one of the first events truly global which, during the last decades became a typical event of the consumption apparatus, in the name of the ancient practice, eminent from the standpoint of primary narcissism of the we, that sport used to be long ago.

18. Narcissism, diachrony and incommensurability

The future of calendarity (and the wrecking of the press which let itself swallowed in it--of these organizations formerly devoted to the constitution of public opinion nowadays drawn in the “general public” manufactured by marketing) triggers a loss of desire insofar that desire rests on primordial narcissism while the one that rests on primordial diachrony (i.e. in principle, an elementary composition of time such that it cannot be reduced to the future--while at the same time having to count on it). I can only love myself insofar as I know, of an absolutely solid, absolutely singular--failing that, I either become anguished and finally desperate or join the herd. My time is absolutely unique, irreducible to others’ time. I may want fantasmatically that my time be reducible to that of others: I am looking originarily for the fusional element which I am fantasizing in an “oceanic”32 feeling as in the amorous delirium where, “contrary to what all my senses tell me, the lover will insist that the Me and the You a However this desire to return to a fusional milieu is grounded in my primordial narcissism, that is in my intimate knowledge that I am singular, that I am not the other. I am a-synchronized only in relation to the other--in diachrony, condition of harmony, like in music where it is necessary, in the modern meaning taken from counterpoint, several instruments or voices for that, and in the Greek sense of the term, several intervals form a mode. Consumption, on the contrary generates an arch-synchronization in which I am not--where I am no longer addressed as an I, but as a consumer, according to Benjamin Franklin’s view for whom the best indication of God, if not its representative, has become the dollar.34

It is therefore necessary to respect everyone, including the lowest of the lows, as long as he still has a penny in his pocket: as a consumer, he is entitled to respect. Of course, it is not in connection with consumption that Franklin declares that “time is money”--but about work as a requirement for financial gain. His sermons,present monetary pursuit a duty and, so to speak, the only one answering to God. However, since monetary gain is only possible if there is an exchange, i.e. a market, the limitless

18

intensification of gain (which in this instance is an index of God’s infinity) implies the limitless extension of markets, that is to say the similarly limitless intensification of consumption. One may then wonder if in Franklin’s world, if something or someone can exist and be valuable if it not measurable, commensurable, calculable, summable, i.e. synchronizable in its totality. God, however, is said to be essentially incommensurable and he is, as such, responsible server [le répondant] for the immeasurability of everything in his relationship to all. He is, in other words, the synchronic insofar as he answers to the diachronic.

19. Disgusts and discredits

The synchronization apparatus set in place by the culture industries, which tend to have consumption products adopted by an integrated marketing system, leads to a-synchronization, i.e. rout because of a loss of self-love and thus--the loss of love of everything and all, and therefore of any faith, and any credit--ruin, including financially, in the generalized reign of disgust, i.e. the diabolical.35 All this makes possible the mad cow disease and all the phenomena of rejection of consumer products: these processes are symptoms of a primordial suffering, so to speak--a suffering of the primordial narcissism--, which causes people not to want to consume and to use a number of alibis to justify this refusal to consume, alibis which correspond to obvious realities (prion is not a fantasy). This has to do with catastrophic phenomena, in the strict sense of the term: all at once, extremely dangerous rejection behaviors multiply, the proof that limitless consumption generates and equally limitless rejection of everything (but in a different relation to the limitless, which has to to with infinity) of consumption.

To this rejection and disgust with industrial society as consumer society corresponds the rejection of political representatives, who never stopped integrating the facts in renouncing the necessity of the requirement of a difference between facts and rights, by adapting their actions and inactions to the system’s constraints, fighting, for example, against price increases by a collusion with the marketing of large scale distribution, and also sinking in discredit.

20. Theater of individuation and man’s memories

In L’individuation psychique et collective36, Simondon shows that, for me, to individuize myself, it is necessary that my individuation be part of the collective indivuation process, i.e. of the we, where, as an I, I always find myself inscribed. I exist only in my group: my individuation is my group’s individuation--with which, nevertheless I am not confounded and, while, additionally, I may belong to several groups which may be in dys-harmony

This is what Jouvet37 says: “The same man can be simultaneously a good family man, a judge in a tribunal or a officer in the light infantry38, Catholic, Protestant or atheist, all that is a succession of characters but does not create a character. It is not possible to draw a line under these different activities and add them up. You agree? In this

19

character, there are continuity solution in order to go from the major in the light infantry to a communist, or MRP39, there are problems. We have a series of characters which do not connect and which, furthermore, have conflicts between them. The infantry major may have difficulties with the Catholics.40

At any time I can adopt personalities that may oppose each other and thus, I can oppose myself (to myself). The possibility of such a multi-identity, which intensifies the inadequacy of the I to itself, is due to the original fault which the primordial inadequacy as the originary fault of the individuation process; this fact is itself the origin of the initial situation of man’s adoption which consists in his technicity, the originary articulation with the prothesis (the technical object) which constitutes his primordial milieu as well as original fault. Humanization [hominisation], the appearance of human beings that we are, nous, “Man” (who repulses God)41 is that of a creature endowed not with two memories, as Weisman had identified the germen and the soma as two sources of memory which constitute a sexual human being, but three--the third memory being that of the technical milieu which is essential to this living creature. Since Weismann to date in molecular biology, it is accepted that a sexual living creature is made up of two memories, the memory of its species, which it replays every time it has a fecund sexual life and recombines chromosomes, shuffling the genetic patrimony of the species--and every living creature carries that memory--, and the nervous individual memory of this sexual creature. Animals have an individual memory, this is why it is possible to train them: chimpanzees, poodles, but also anilines, sea snails, Lymnaea; it is also possible to have them go through a training process through conditionings. There is a plasticity of animal memory and the more we deal with “superior” animals the more the plasticity of this memory is large. But from the aniline to the chimpanzee--the large monkey being the exterior limit--, the learning of he individual cannot be passed on the species. This is why there will not be inherited traits. The neguentropic power of non-human living creatures (le vivant) is due to the structural impermeability between genetic memory--the germen--and somatic memory, i.e. the individual nervous memory of each animal. The species evolves through aleatory recombining of chromosomes independently from the individuals goals ? of each animal, which creates the neguentropic rustling of life.

Nevertheless. millions of years ago, a living creature appeared which, to guaranty his viability, needs to use protheses. In Leroi-Gourhan words, it is Irene, without viable natural defenses. And it surrounds itself of manufactured objects--from chiseled (cut) silex to billions of manufactured consumer objects in billions of units by industrial mechanization in a way, the technological proliferation has now become more important than the biological proliferation.

This is the appearance of the third memory, which I call epiphylogenetic. Genetic memory that is transmitted from generation to generation combines itself with the epigenetic memory of individual experience, which, through objects will become transmissible. This third memory, is also that of the tiers, what must be called here, the it, condition and link of the I and the we. When I inherit an object, a facetted silex for example, I inherit through its instructions for use, gestures, motor behavior which

20

contributed to the production of that facetted silex. With the appearance of technical objects, a new layer of memory is constituted which makes it possible to transmit from generation to generation individual experience and to mutualize in the guise of what we call a we. What allowed me to tell you a while ago: “I, Bernard Stiegler, born of German parents, am nevertheless French this is only possible because I inherited traces of we.--for example, the sans-culottes42, everything which made up the fictional past of France-- which I appropriated, creating an artificial retentional milieu, a mnemonic milieu which I adopts and which allows to individualize myself in the we called France. Today, the question is to find out how the Europe we is created. Temporary and default answer: certainly not by reproducing the American we liquidating machine.

This tertiary memory as a third that is the it, that is to say, which sends us back to the absolute past towards which backed up memory takes us back as the immemorial itself, what Blanchot called “the frightful old” and that the Old Testament designates as the Eternal Father. The Book, as tertiary memory, is what validates (support) worship--with the rosary, which as Pascal notes, sustains faith. That is also credit.

Between the two world wars, and especially after the second, an important mutation took place (occurred) in the history of the mind, i.e. in the epiphylogenesis history, of the third, the it, and which is “the death of the it”, that Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche designate as the death of God: industry seizes what becomes a commodity, consciousness. Our consciousnesses. Our times of consciousness.

It might seem paradoxical to assert that consciousness is a commodity while it is “on the side” of the mind and not the body. Yet, the epiphylogenetic nature of human time directly affects consciousness, which is the very reality of human time. Consciousnesses are materially overdetermined and originirarily constituted by the fact that the flesh which incarnates and supports them is itself activated--i.e. moved-- and supported by the exteriorization process from which what I was describing as epiplyhlogenesis results, that is to say as the support from prothetic apparatus whose electronic controls of times of consciousness are the most recent. However, equally, a consciousness is essentially a memory (of the past), itself inscribed in an imagination (of the future). However, the epiphylogenic layer made up of technical objects is a retentional material which fundamentally affects retentional and protentional activity (i.e. the expectations phenomena, protentions, generated by retentions, “souvenirs” of consciousness

This is why, during the XXth c., the appearance of the mass media, retentional technologies, consciousness can be targeted and commercialized as an access route to the market. The market is essentially a mass of consciousnesses--inhabiting masses of bodies which consume. In order to launch a new tooth paste, one must go through merchants of time consciousness which the mass media are. TF1 sells consciousness time to advertising agencies the cost of which is easy to compute. Let’s assume that the net profit of one advertising hour on TF1, during prime time is 500,000 euros. If the station reaches an audience of 15 millions of consciousnesses during one hour, the price of one consciousness hour on this channel is 3 centimes something. That’s not

21

very expensive. It’s only when we are not watching TF1 that our consciousnesses are not worth much. When America on Line and Warner associate, it’s to get a better price per consciousness on a world market. This industrial fusion, which is also that of catalogues of programs, subscribers files, is intended to economize on a large scale, i.e. “ production gains ?” to reach daily and regularly non only dozen of millions of spectators but 200 s of millions of consciousnesses. The operation may fail--In this domain, the speculators’ delirium has never been greater in the history of industry. Nevertheless, this mimetic madness has causes because of the limits of the lasting process which I am attempting to identify here.

When the mass media targets consciousnesses as meta-markets, spectators made up the “raw material” for sale, while the clients are the advertising agents and through them, the industry insofar as it seeks to have some behaviors adopted. The “raw material” is what is called “the audience,” as a mass consciousness controlled by processes of signal broadcasts, i.e. raw materials incorporated by the so called “consciousnesses” (because the information is not “immaterial”: it is a state of transitory material)--which are mental states which in turn produce motor behaviors. When audiences of this type synchronized each other, they asymptotically tend to constitute no longer a we, but a one. I do not mean to say that television, when you (i.e. your consciousness) are watching it (and you necessarily watch with others, at the same time as others), leads you to think the same think as others. I mean that television is a process which tends to make you progressively conform to an average. From this average43, the difference between I and we is diluted to turn into a one, that is the loss of individuation of the I as well as of the we within which only it can individuize itself.

21. The absorbing of the it (the one)

Mnemotechnologies developed by cultural industries are merely the exploitation of this fact that memory is always artefactually produced. In the XXth c., memory is systematically industrially exploited because the markets are accessible through the intermediary of meta-market of consciousnesses.

This epiphylogenetic layer is what constitutes the time of consciousness. it is the milieu common to all consciousness which the industry gets hold of and exploits, which an absolute novelty. Until the XIXth c., there was an structural separation between, on the on the one hand, the world of producers, those who manufactured material goods and, on the other, those who were called clerks--religious or lay--, in charge of religious, juridical, political, cognitive, artistic matters, in short the “spiritual.” These were two separate worlds. Because of the integration of mnemotechnologies in the production sphere, which tends to guaranty the synchronization of production between production and consumption, to eliminate the latency period, to set production in motion just in time, these two worlds have combined. The it, the large third which constitutes authority as such, beyond the I and the we, was integrated and has become immanent, that is to say, in principle, dem-onic--total incommensurability, the transcendence of which, heretofore, was expressed until then by the clerks’ separation, being eliminated. This

22

incommensurable third, in Lacan’s language, will also be called the Big Other44 (already cause of infinite desire in Aristotle). As the third is being absorbed, rerouting begins--which is also the reign of the in-significant as it tends to become the a-signifier.45

If “God is dead” the “devil” is still very much alive. And it is what is left to think through--as what is contained in what remains, that is to say in the traces of the it become, dead, raw material of commensurable consciousnesses on the market.

22. The struggle between the becoming and the future: to conjugate, disjunct, invent, except oneself

The integration of technical systems to the mnemotechnical ones is a fact--avery long term process which it would be an illusion “to resist”. Leroi Gourhan sums up very well this trend in a concept which I adopt for my own use, the concept of exteriorization. This concept opens nevertheless alternate possibilities; it is not a bland determinism and , in this framework, raises questions about political economy which remain still poorly identified because is not able to distinguish what pertains to becoming , the process, from time: what we are doing with this process. This process however is what requires that we make choices, i.e. differences where, at first only a simple becoming is involved in a s simple elimination of differences of what I used to call hypersynchronization. The production of differences can only proceed from a critique of what in the process condemns the process itself.

Pragmatics which I can use to deal with these questions still assumes that conjunctions exist and that to act upon the real, it is necessary to take into account the conjunctivity of problems. A problem is never simply technical. It is also juridical, economic, sociological, psychological, etc.--in short it is anthropological. Even if technique is constitutive of anthropology and, in that sense, man is a prothetic living creature, he is not merely technique. If, one day, he becomes entirely technique, then he no longer will be what is called human being--a transformation perhaps already partially accomplished, a transformation of life in biotechnology. But then, for the process to continue, it will be necessary to find another support of diachronicity and desire than man: the question remains open.46 Whatever may be of this hypothesis, one must work with this problem of conjunctivity. Instead of thinking in terms of opposition, it is better to proceed through compositions. We have to negotiate, because this conjunctivity is criss-crossed with tendencies which pertain to what is called becoming. However to negotiate does not mean to renounce or to adapt. It is no more an issue of adapting or resisting: we have to invent. Such an invention can only a struggle which, itself, can only be a radical critique.

Becoming is a process we can never control. This is why contemporary philosophical discourse condemns Cartesian discourse of mastery. From the beginning of the XIXth c., or at least Nietzsche, modern thought begins to admit that becoming cannot be controlled. All one can do is negotiate with it, which is very different. Becoming is

23

movement that one must understand to inscribe in it eventually impulses, i.e. create disjunctions in it, on condition nevertheless not to seek to control its effects.

Reality is conjunctive, it is a complex in motion in which everyone seeks to find “points of reference”. Without us, this complex is nothing. Yet, we are in the dynamic inadequacy of this complex: insofar as we can say we, on condition that we might be able to say we, but that this we is precisely not a one, we stand if not in advance or behind in relation to this process, at least as what, in this process, is at the same time his advance and his delay. In that, we exceed this process, actually we are the exception which can destabilize it-- by means of disjunctions. That means that I decide, that I am eventually able of opposing myself to it, to temporarily “resist” it, on condition that my thinking is not based on simple oppositions and that, working with the process, I would be able to question at the same time because of invention capacities-- and actually much beyond my “resistance” capacities” I cannot resist while protesting: I have to have an understanding of it, i.e. be in excess and thus already be in the inventive advance.

Decisions have to be made, micro-decisions (for example do I purchase toothpaste x rather than y) and macro-decisions (do I vote for that presidential candidate, or do I decide to push the red button to destroy an entire people with the atomic bomb--or do I send the army to Iraq ). There are very tiny ones and there enormous ones, unthinkable. But choices always have to be made. Time, is the the issue of this choice, of deliberation and action.

23. The problem of evil and the thought of tendencies

For those unable to think in terms of tendencies, the question of evil is a dangerous question, a bad question; to a certain extent, it is evil itself, the bad question or the question raised by the someone Nietzsche considers a bad person.To think in terms of tendencies is to think that what one is fighting against is necessary. Which means that if one fights a tendency, insofar as it would tend to become hegemonic (and in fact any tendency tends towards hegemony against another hegemony), and if one counters it with another counter-tendency, one must know that the tendency one is fighting is the very condition of that tendency one is fighting for. Consequently, in no way can the tendency one is fighting against be eliminated, but one must work with the tendencies; from this standpoint, thinking with tendencies is what prevents us from seeing the adversary as an enemy who would be the cause of evil; the adversary is not an enemy which would be the cause of evil but what is caught in an hegemonic tendency and uses it as a vector, the spokesperson, and thus, most of the time, without having at all the impression of harboring bad intentions.

The difficulty with this type of reasoning and acting is that of course it seems to get back to the discourse about happy medium. Not that of Aristotle’s Ethics, but in modern language, the discourse of reformism and adaptation, the discourse which systematically ignores radical questions (which are the only genuine questions, those which produce major improvements, as Simondon puts it, while the reformist’s minor

24

improvements hide the necessity for “quantum leaps jumps” in the becoming that individuation is.

In reality, nothing is more radical than a criticism which refuses to demonize one’s adversary, or the tendency, because the other side of the process thinking is irreducible of a tendency to another, is what makes it possible to to (re)com-pose tendencies in the individuation process, the exception: what is neither average nor adaptation, nor the mass, nor consensus. It is what puts the dissensus, the phase difference and unsuitability at the heart of becoming (as Simondon’s quantum leap theory has it) and its luck, what the ancient Greeks called the éris. Because the spirit of this éris, which designates stimulation and competition, which the consumption organization reduces to commensurability of all the diachronies, i.e. total calculability at the service of he greatest possible rentability, i.e. at the service of just in time and reactivity which carries with itself the tendency to hypersynchronization.

24. A building site

Communication and information networks which broadcast temporal and industrial objects constitute the infrastructure of hypersynchronization which breaks down the social fabric by confronting diachronization and synchronization, making the diachronization of consciousness impossible because of the mass retentional process.

However, a mutation has taken place in the network world since 1992 with the appearance of the Internet. This network of networks, unified by the TCP-IP norm, obviously changed the hand of the program industries’ organization. And there is no doubt that this transformation of industrial technology, thanks to digitization opens up new perspectives. These have to be systematically explored and set up a privileged battlefield and a social invention which could be extremely fruitful. I believe more than ever in the necessity to act in this domain.47

For all the criticism which must accompany invention, if it is possible--and, I repeat, it is only possible as a struggle at once economic, geopolitical and ecological (it is an ecology of milieux of the mind)-- this criticism must analyze in great detail the way in which, already, the break down which makes the technological mutation of digitization- imaginable and possible -as a possible way to un-massify the broadcast of information and industrial temporal objects--, has been invested and controlled by a retentional process in the service of consumption and hypersynchronization, strengthening further the latter against all appearance.

The problem of the network, as Jeremy Rifkin showed very well, is access. Filters is what is important. The search engines which make it possible to hierarchize information at the moment charge for what they reference. It’s always the issue of selection. The google search engine is a system which rests on audience rating. It offers what has been requested the most and systematically reinforces the social mimesis and the gregariousness of behaviors. User profiling is another access technique which consists in identifying your behavior searches to offer you the same thing before you had the

25

idea to look for it. If is not a programming of consciousnesses, it is a conditioning and reinforcement, in a Pavlovian sense of these terms. You are locked up in your synchronicity, you are prevented from changing, and through that, one seeks the effect of hyper-segmentation, which is a marketing identification strategy of ultra-precise niche-market. This is how behaviors are standardized as they are brought down to socio-professional categories or “tribes” identified by “tags” far more interesting for marketing than the political society.

The medias rely on industrial technique of exploitation of consciousness using retention criteria. This control of retentional apparatuses where consciousnesses are a market, where an hour of consciousness is worth the sum of the advertising revenue divided by the number of televiewers results in homogenizing the secondary retentions. And it is a major cause (not the only one) of what I call the ill-being. The control of retentions implies a loss of identity, i.e. difference. Nietzsche saw very clearly that loss of the capacity to produce a difference, and the tendency of unfairly called ”individualist” to deny exception. Our so called individualist societies are in reality perfectly gregarious.

25. Singularity in the individuation process

What Simondon calls the trans-individual is constituted by the epiphylogeneticdomain of technical objects of which I am an heir. Individuation is not individualization. Individualization is the result of individuation. The latter is the manner in which what is diverse (the multiple), as a general rule, asymptotically unifies itself invisibly. I tend to become indivisible but I never succeed. I tend to become myself--myself as indivisible as a pure entity--, but I never succeed because an individuation process can never succeed. Or, when it is completed, it cannot reach its goal: ended, it failed. An individuation process is that which cannot structurally complete itself unless it continues through a process of transmission in which this I which individualized itself and ended it--it is dead--can eventually become an individuation source for a new process of individuation of its heirs; for we, who inherit this I which individualized itself by default, ends by default.

In other words, any individuation process is dynamic proportionally to its own inadequacy (into itself)--which is the inscription of its diachrony in his synchrony. I aim to individualize myself to become invisible, however the asymptotical search of my indivisibility, I alter myself, I reveal myself other because I am inhabited by an inadequacy which is is my diachrony. I am always out of synch with myself; I never am in a pure present. I can only access this pure present when I’ll be dead--but it happens that when I’ll be dead, I no longer will be there and I therefore never will individuize myself properly speaking. On the other hand, being dead, I can become an ancestor that leaves traces, objects works behind--what II call my works doesn’t necessarily my complete works, which the library I bought may well be, the garden that I cultivated or any other thing; the objects in which or the phrases or the acts or gestures by the means of which, in one way or another, a little bit of my singularity is inscribed--”a little of my singularity” being the my inadequacy with myself, i.e. the group. Insofar as I belong to a group, in the group I am a singularity which feeds that group with alterity.

26

26. Milieux of the we

An individuation process always involves a tension harbored by a potential. Individuation, it is the syncrystallization of a fountain head (eau mère), a potential which is able to crystallize, to crystallize, take the form of crystal, with the difference that psychical and collective individuation ( the Is inside the we) is syncrystallization that fails structurally, there where crystal becomes a congealing, completely finished. Living beings are a crystal that is unable to crystalize, caught in a metastable equilibrium. The potential of the I and we is the legacy of this metastability (equilibrium at the limit of imbalance) which I inherit through traces. These traces are the monuments to the dead, the library here under lock, the castle of Cerisy as such, with its ghosts, a whole memory.48 It is also TF1. It is everything that transmits something memorable. And what is memorable I share it with others--more or less. Of course, I do not share with practicing muslims the space of Jerusalem in the same fashion as another muslim if I am a practicing jew from Israel. There are conflicts over the division, the legacy. There are locations in the possibility of appropriations of the pre-individual potential which open common spaces of individuation forming nous precisely.

Thus, the pre-individual epiphylogenetic milieu is the individuation theater Simondon49 is talking about. Thus individuation has a history. One does not individuize in the same way in the Australopthèque era as that of the Cro-Magnon man’s, or that of the Greek citizens and industrial revolution. And today, one does not individuize--in the hyper-industrial era--as at the time of the industrial revolution; the epiphylogenetic milieu is transformed and the conditions of individuation are transformed by the evolution of techniques.

27. The hope for a we

Nevertheless, for me to individualize, my individuation must participate to the individuation of the we to which I belong--and participate in this individuation. As I am speaking to you, I am in the process of individuizing myself; I say new things, even if they are not completely new; I already spoke of these issues right here50. But April 21 had not happened yet.

Now that it has happened, I reread my own pre-individual fund and I re-individuize it, at the very moment I am speaking to you; to individuize myself means to try to find the symbolic coherence of my speech. However, I never will only succeed in tendencially individuizing myself (to strengthen my individuation “potential” if I succeed in making you individuize with me. If my individuation is successful, it would have succeeded in you--but not at all in the same way; because what I am in the process of telling you, I hear and interpret something in the very place where you are hearing “SOMETHING else,” and that is why later on we may have a debate, hopefully successful, about the condition of a we; that we might be able to agree, in spite of this inadequacy and from that, about the fact that it is possible and necessary to say that yes, there is a future in this very inadequacy.

27

28. To "Coloque" in Cérisy. Metastabilization

Cérisy is a group. The aim of ten days in Cérisy is to obtain the means, with the use of an appropriate calendarity, the activation of a pre-individual fund that we share by individuizing psychically and collectively, with the conferences, to form such a group. It is precisely a metastable process in that it is not stable; if it were, it would be a crystal totally congealed without future or temporality; if it were totally unstable, it would cause the explosion of the group, atomization, pulverization, entropy, absolute imbalance. A group is always between balance and imbalance, neither balanced nor unbalanced, always on the verge of both equilibrium-- pure equilibrium is called pure synchrony, crystal is purely synchronic--and unbalance, i.e. pure diachrony--total atomization, perfect diabelen. Unbalance does exist in groups and is called madness. Madness is at the core of the individuation process. But it is an energy which must calendarized and cardinalized with precision to be channeled and form something like which creates movement without leading to disintegration. Metastability creates movement. Pure imbalance is the end of movement. Pure equilibrium is is stillness before movement (motion). Between them the fragile metastability takes place.

Calendary systems and cardinal systems are stabilizers used to create metastatics--techniques of time and space. They can be analyzed in a very precisely and historically: the appearance of the Egyptian calendar, or its conditions of appearance linked to conditions such as the Nile’s floods, primitive accumulations, things well known from archeologists. It is these technical concretions of the relationship between time and space through calendary and cardinal systems which allow the metastabilization of the madness potential which a group always harbors.

29. Das Mann

For thousands of years, calendarity made it possible for me to belong to a webecause I share with other Is a common calendar which refers to moments such as prayer time, holidays, songs, fetishes in general, moments of concelebration not necessarily religious--and fetishes which will give a freudian as well as marxist connotation to the work fetish (Marx thinks about merchandise as essentially fetish). When they are integrated into an industrial epiphylogenetic apparatus or when there no longer is a distinction between the spiritual world of clerics and the world of production in the new world of consumption, calendary and cardinal apparatuses lose their efficiency; when I watch the Television news every day a the same time with roughly 15 millions people in France, a synchronization of Is occurs which is no longer the management of an I or an ensemble of Is within a we, but the confusion of the Is and the we in what a German called Das Mann: the one, himself having fallen into this one. Six years after having warned about the danger of das Mann, he wore the swastika on the reverse side of is Austrian jacket. I am citing this detail not to burden Heidegger’s memory, whose legacy and inadequacies are at the heart of these issues, but to remind us to be prudent and modest. It is not because one denounces the one that one is no

28

longer in danger to fall into it, and it is sometimes the contrary, as we often see today, in these times of reactivity.

30. Crash: September 11, March 26, April 21

The commodification of consciousness is essentially synchronic while you are listening to me because I am a diachronic consciousness--and I am only speaking to you because you are diachronic consciousness. You are only listening to me because you think that you do not know what I have to tell you; you are hoping that I am in a structural synchrony in relation to you (hoping all the same that I am promising you a future synchrony--but in the infinite), and If I am speaking to you, it is because I think that I have something to tell you. At the same time, I can speak to you because I think that a synchrony between us is possible, otherwise I would not say anything. This diachronic tension, which is the condition of an individuation of a we, i.e. a synchrony that is still to come, this inadequacy between I and the we, I propose that in the current era of the epiphylogenesis, i.e. of the industrial exploitation of mnemotechnic supports, it collapses. Consequently an absolute atomization occurs as suicidal behaviors--whether it is April 21, Oussamah Bin Laden, Richard Durn, George Bush or so many types of drug addictions.

Intelligence (l‘esprit) consists in states of matter: either faceted silex at the beginning of humanisation, or states of matter in the order of picot seconds when we are dealing with information. Information is not the immaterial but a flux of states of matter which circulate very rapidly, bombarding our consciousness and conditioning our mental states. If we do not perform an ecological criticism of technologies and industries of the mind, if we do not show that the unlimited exploitation of minds as markets leads to a collapse to those that the Soviet Union and the big capitalist countries did engender exploiting territories or natural resources without taking any care to preserve their future habitability--the future--, while we are inescapably moving towards a global social explosion, i.e an absolute war.

31. The “demonic,” critique of invention and struggle

We were already talking about these questions in Cérisy, right after September 11, a year ago, as probable. Since, April 21 took place, i.e. that the issue has become clearer. I fear that all this is only the beginning of a long and difficult path. On this path, before anything else one must struggle against the imminent possibility of the total atomization of the we, which is what happens because of the criticism of the mind today, and thus with an analysis of the conditions under which the metastability can become metastable again, i.e. not to fall in pure equilibrium or imbalance--which is he same thing: pure equilibrium leads to absolute imbalance--but produce movement again. Pure equilibrium is the loss of desire, the disintegration of the social. Such is the real “demonic” which conceals the demonization of so many so called “rogue States,” linked on an “evil axis.”

29

As to evil, like any denunciation of evil taking the place of thought, OUR renunciation, we, who are worried about the future of the we, our renunciation to criticism and invention, that is to struggle.

1 Used throughout this text in the Freudian sense, usually translated into French as “fantasme”.2 On March 26, 2002, Richard Durn murdered eight members of the city council of the city of Nanterre. Durn committed suicide March 28, 2008. One cannot help think about corporal Lortie’s crime in Canada, which has been analyzed by Pierre Legendre in Le Crime du caporal Lortie. Traité sur le père, Leçons VII. Paris: Fayard, 1989.3 Le Monde, April 10, 2002.4 On this question, from another viewpoint, Michel Schneider speaks of Durn’s “narcissism of death” in Esprit, May 2002, and in Le Monde, November 12, 2002. Vincent de Gaulejac has also given a very interesting communication analyzing Durn’s acting out at the colloquium “L’Individu hypermoderne,” September 8, 2003 at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce in Paris.5 Sigmund Freud.6 I developed this concept of the “one” in LaTechnique et le temps, 3. Le temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être (Paris, Galilée, 2001), p. 156. 7 Ibid., p. 138. The adoption process is consubstantial to the individuation process.8 Cf. p. 9, note 1.9 As it is beyond the negative entropic processes which according to Schrödinger and Brillouin characterize life putting neguentropy outside it, and as a characteristic of its vital milieu and which I called the epiphylogenetic memory in La technique et le Temps 1. La faute D’Epiméthée, op. cit., p. 151f and 183-5.10 Organized by François Archer and Francis Godard (Paris: L’Aube, 2003).11 The word "culottes" refers to the knee-breeches worn by gentlemen of the European upper-classes. Thus, those who did not have a “culotte” (i.e. sans) were, for the most part, members of the poorer classes and played a major role during the French Revolution of 1789. Translator’s note.12 The French term is “fantasmer,” in the Freudian sense of the term.13 Aristotle, Practices of Reason: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.14 Jacques Lacan, “Le State du miroir”, Ecrits 1 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), p. 60. English translation, "The Mirror Phase," 15 Vance Packard ( New York: Pocket Books, 1958).16 See, La Technique et le Temps, 317 French television channel 1.18 Le Monde, August, 29, 2003.19 Franco-german TV station broadcasting “cultural” programs and films some of which it also produces.20 Right wing French political party founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen.21 The question is then to examine the “original default” that constitutes the we.22 The Nanterre massacre refers to an act of mass murder that occurred on March 27, 2002, in the Nanterre commune of Paris, France. 33-year-old gunman Richard Durn opened fire at the end of a council meeting, resulting in the deaths of 8 councilors, and the injuries of 19 others.

30

Durn was interrogated at the police station at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, Paris, on March 28. After confessing, Durn committed suicide by throwing himself out of the fourth floor window.

Durn had sent a letter to a friend in which he explained his plan: "Because I have by my own will become a kind of living-dead, I have decided to end it all by killing a small local elite which is the symbol of, and who are the leaders and decision makers in, a city that I have always detested." He explained that he intended to kill the mayor, "and then as many people as possible [...] I will become a serial killer, a mad killer. Why? Because I am frustrated and I do not want to die alone, because I have had a shitty life. I want to feel powerful and free just once." Translator note23 On the question of the significant and the insignificant, see my Passer à l’acte [Acting out] (Paris, 2003), pp. 55-59.24 André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la Parole, vol. 3 (Paris, 1965), p. 197.25 Loc. cit.26 Ibid, p. 20027 Ibid., p. 201.28 Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the author of seventeen bestselling books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment.29 Naomi Klein (b. 8 May 1970, Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist well known for her political analyses of corporate globalization, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, published in 2007.30 André Gorz, L’Immatériel. Connaissance, valeur et capital. (Paris, 2003), p. 64f.31 The soccer World Cup was created in 1930 essentially as a sport event. However with the advent of television, it became a major vector of global calendarity at the service of consumption. The worldwide, annual business , is today over 200 billions Euros.32 See Sigmund Freud33 Sigmund Freud, M.34 See Max Weber.....35 In this context, one must meditate on this remark by Jean Paul II: “God no longer reveals, he seems to hide in his heaven, silent, almost disgusted by mankind’s actions.” See, Massimo Cacciari, La Republica, Dec. 12, 2002. I would like to thank Patrick Talbot for calling my attention and sending this article.36 Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1989.37 Louis Jouvet, (1887-1951), leading French actor, stage director and producer.38 A French army unit, light infantry.39 Mouvement Républicain Populaire, French centrist political party after WW II.40 Louis Jouvet, “Cours au Conservatoire national d’art dramatique, 1949-1951,” Revue de la société du théâtre.41 See supra, p. 60. 1 (adjust)42 Knee-breeches worn by upper class men. During the French Revolution, the volunteers were ill equipped and wore ordinary trousers (pantaloons), i..e. they didn’t have any “culottes”, hence sans-culottes.43

31

44 This of course an allusion to the Lacan’s small a.45 I distinguish in-significance from a-signifying in Passer à l’acte, op. it., pp. 52-66. See also, supra p. 43 (check English version) and La Technique et le temps, vol. 4, Symboles et diaboles, ou la guerre des esprits, forthcoming, Paris, Galillée.46 I dealt with it in :”Ce qui fait défaut,” Césure, Sept. 1995.47 I personally explored these questions when I was director at INA and at the Compiègne University, and I continued at IRCAM. See “the digitization of temporal objects,” in Cinéma et dernières technologies, INA/De Boeck University, 1998 and “Sociétés d’auteurs et sémantiques situés,” in Christian Jacob, ed. Des Alexandries 2, BNF, 2003.48 The conference from which this text is taken was originally given at the Château of Cerisy-la-Salle.49 Simondon did not claim the existence of the epiphylogenetic dimension of the pre-individual of psychical and collective individuation. On this point see B. Stiegler, “Technique and individuation in Simondon’s work,” in Futur antérieur, Spring 1994; presented in another version as “Temps, technique et individuation dans la pensée de Simondon,” Intellectica, 1999.50 September 2001, still in Cerisy, in the colloquium “Modernité: la nouvelle carte du temps,” directed by François Ascher and Francis Godard.

32