The video pairs a short film with an exposition of Bernard Stiegler, the French philosopher who died in 2020, directed the Institut de recherche et d'innovation at the Centre Pompidou and founded Ars Industrialis. Pinchbeck presents Stiegler's claim that technology is not a tool but a constitutive condition of human memory and consciousness, and that every technics is a pharmakon, poison and cure, a term taken from Plato and Derrida. He explains primary, secondary and tertiary retention, the double epochal redoubling whose second beat now fails to arrive, generalized proletarianization, systemic stupidity, Georges Canguilhem's infidelity of the milieu, and the passage from Entropocene to Neganthropocene.
In brief
- Pinchbeck presents Stiegler's pharmakon thesis, in which every technology from writing to digital networks simultaneously extends human capacity and atrophies the faculty it replaces, so the question is never rejection but therapeutics.
- The essay explains Stiegler's double epochal redoubling, a two-beat rhythm of technical shock followed by social reorganization, and argues that digital acceleration prevents the second beat, leaving what Stiegler called the absence of epoch.
- Stiegler's generalized proletarianization names the loss of knowledge rather than income, the liquidation of savoir-faire, savoir-vivre and the capacity to theorize, producing systemic stupidity and a generation whose ability to project a future has been automated by algorithms.
- The Entropocene names the phase of the Anthropocene in which the global technical system produces entropy both ecologically and psychically, and Stiegler's proposed exit is a neganthropology practiced inside the technological system rather than against it.
- Pinchbeck positions Stiegler as a third path against Paul Kingsnorth's anti-technological retreat, the Heritage Foundation's Christian nationalist restoration, and the transhumanist singularity of Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, citing David Golumbia's judgment that Stiegler is the most important French theorist after Derrida.
Full text
Cinema is seen by Adorno and Hawkheimimer as a functional element of a system whose aim is to disseminate an ideology and stimulate consumer behavior. This view of cinema is not fundamentally different from that of the French new wave except that the latter saw cinema as a farmer and not just as a poison. A film is a kind of dream had in common. In so far as it is a dream, film manifests a desire. A desire that we imagine to be that of a public, that is of an epic and not just that of a filmmaker. Here are your tickets. We feel it, don't we? A kind of collective vertigo, a madness.
We are told this is progress. We are told this is innovation. I call it the age of disruption. And we have lost ourselves in it. Let me show you something. Come over here. Look. Our machines, our digital media, our networks and our artificial intelligence evolve rapidly. They operate in nanoseconds. It takes time for humans to respond to a profound new technology, to develop new laws and social systems. The invention of writing established the capacity for rational knowledge, geometry, and the law, but also introduced the threat of memory loss. The printing press fostered the republic of letters and the reformation, yet also paved the way for the calculability essential to capitalism and the eventual automation of gestures.
Computers and digital networks currently function as a disruptive anti-epist generating massive entropy using algorithms to automate the understanding and shortcircuit reason. These digital tools must be reconfigured into a hermeneutic web to foster a negthropological future that produces value through new forms of knowledge. Professor, please tell us again about the anthroposine. Oh my goodness. Not that again. The entroposine is when entropy gets produced on a massive scale as ecological breakdown but also psychically. The entroposine names the disruptive stage of the anthroposine as it reaches its vital limits because reticulated fixed capital which is a global technical system functionally shortcircuits every social system and along with them all the deliberative processes in which they consist all the forms of knowledge on which they rest and all the forms of care they cultivate.
When the technical system changes, the old epoch from which it originated comes to an end. A new epoch emerges, often at the cost of military, religious, social, and political conflicts of all kinds. But a new epoch can only begin when new ways of thinking, new ways of doing, and new ways of living take shape. The entroposine has reached its critical phase. By critical phase I mean both it is leading to a denum to a catastrophe and that we must therefore make a decision in this crisis which we can relate to a discovering apocalypsis in this extremely grave situation. Any form of true knowetic knowledge necessarily becomes research huristics seeking an exit from the entroposine so as to enter the negthroposine as therapeutic intervention into the pharmacological crisis.
Human experience relies on three distinct forms of retention that weave time together. Primary retention is the glue of the immediate present. The way a just vanished moment lingers to give context to the next. Without this act of holding, a melody would be nothing but disjointed noise. This immediate grasp relies on secondary retention, the archive of our past, both personal memories and shared cultural habits, which acts as the medium through which we select and interpret what we see. Tertiary retention is the offloading of memory into external objects from ancient manuscripts to digital code. While these tools allow knowledge to survive beyond a single lifespan, they act as a pharmarmacon, a remedy that extends our capacity, but also a poison that threatens to automate our thinking and homogenize the mind.
understanding the relationship between human memory and technology. Specifically, the interplay of retentions is the fundamental requirement for escaping the destructive entroposine and establishing a new epoch, the nicanthroposine, where we reverse the entropic and destructive processes we have unleashed. The possibility of a neganthropic future depends on recognizing that human consciousness is conditioned by technical memory, tertiary retention, and actively working to transform our technical supports from instruments of control into instruments of knowledge and care. If you enjoyed this video and want more content like it, please like this video and subscribe to our channel. Also, you might consider sharing it with your friends.
Hey folks, welcome back to Liinal News. I hope you enjoyed my little art film. And you might be asking, you know, so why did I choose to focus this piece on Bernard Stigler who's a kind of obscure French philosopher in terms of America and standards who passed away in 2020. So in a way it just sort of happened. I got very interested in his ideas and I started playing around fooling around with AI and so on. And uh yes, Tiger's ideas around technology and media resonate deeply with a lot of themes I've explored in my own books such as how soon is now and 2012 the return of pencil.
Uh and I find that like there's a lot of different ideas about the future right now and a lot of them I really don't like. Like I don't like the retreat into the preodern past that Paul Kingsor um proposes against the machine where he thinks we should go back to like medieval technology and smash up the screens and so on. But I get get where he's coming from. I think that that's just not going to work. Anyway, I'm totally against the Heritage Foundation MAGA right-wing idea of a Christian nationalist state with traditional values and, you know, no birth control or whatever. That also seems totally regressive.
I completely don't buy into the transhumanist kind of singularity philosophy of like Ray Kerszswhile and Nick Boston and so on. And I find that Stigler is really offering a different path. So the film you just watched is my appreciation of his ideas and also kind of celebrating his highbrow rhetoric which I admit is a bit obscure. The film also attempts to model what he's talking about at least as much as I understand it. So Stigler believed that technology is never just tool that we're using. It is like a constitutive element of human time and consciousness. It the tool changes us as we use it as phenomenologists talk about.
and he wrote about our capacity to develop and use new technologies is actually what makes us distinctly human. However, where we are now, we've reached a very precarious moment where this talent, which is kind of our greatest attribute as a species, has also become our greatest threat. By the way, Stigler's own life story is pretty interesting and kind of informs his work. He actually served time in prison for armed robbery when he was young, and it was while he was in prison that he started to study philosophy. And um yeah later in life he became kind of a big big deal uh in French philosophy. He directed the institute of research innovation at the center papadoo in Paris.
He founded an activist group called ours industrialis and uh he really dedicated his life to diagnosing what he called the pharmacological crisis of our post-industrial civilization which I'll explain what that means. So singler's diagnosis is pretty stark. He believes that due to the acceleration of innovation and technology and the automization of the mind that it's cause caused, we've kind of lost our ability to self-reflect and to imagine our own future. So his work is very dense and at times it almost becomes inscrutable with a lot of terminology, but I actually do find his analysis really helpful, maybe even necessary for understanding our current situation. He explains both the kind of uh deep disorientation we're facing today and even political phenomena like the rise of Trumpism and the sort of regression or barbarism that that that's popping up now.
Uh David Colombia who was a scholar of digital culture calls Stigler the most important French theorist to come after Jacqu Dereda and certainly one of the most vital thinkers regarding the impacts of digital technology. So what does Stigler mean by a pharmacological crisis? He suggests we've reached a tipping point where the toxic effects of our technologies have overwhelmed our ability to use them as remedies. He borrows this idea of the pharmicon from Plato and Derida. For Stigler, the pharmicon is anything that is both a poison and a cure. A power of destruction as well as a power of construction or creation. So we could take like writing as an example.
On the one hand, writing is a remedy for memory because it allows us to record information and pass it on, which I talked about in the uh video as tertiary retention. But it's also a poison because if we rely on it too much, our internal memory will atrophy. We just, you know, forget. We we consign everything to uh to the device. Socrates, for instance, refused to learn how to write because he believed it would destroy his memory. Historically, every major new technology requires time and effort for people to assimilate. This is especially true for communication technologies and media technologies because they actually structure our consciousness and identity in a deep and even a phenomenological way.
The printing press for instance was a massive shock that really changed our society uh deeply. uh the printing press led to the reformation and the English civil war uh as it democratized knowledge and uh access to the Bible. Eventually the printing press caused in a way the bourgeoa revolutions of the 18th century the French and American revolution which led to the rise of the modern nation state. It really took humanity several centuries to kind of develop the laws and codes and social institutions necessary to metabolize that technological rupture. Today, our crisis is caused by the poison aspect of digital technology, which has become dominant, unleashed, and kind of uncontrolled.
The pace of innovation is simply too fast for our social systems to mesh it into humanized structures. We're suffering from the toxic aspect of digital networks. uh we see this in how they're causing the destruction of social bonds, eroding our attention spans and leading to a generalized addiction to the stimuli. So crucially, we haven't yet established the necessary uh the therapeutics to deal with them. We lack the new social codes and rules, the legal frameworks, the institutional structures, and the educational practices that would allow us to turn these technologies back into a cure. Stigler traces the root of this imbalance to the speed of what he calls disruption.
The evolution of our technical systems which has radically outstripped the speed at which our social systems, our laws, culture and education can adapt to them. He sees history advancing advancing through rhythm he calls a double epoacle redoubling. It's kind of like a two beat process where in the first beat you have the technical shock that disrupts existing order. Then in the second beat over time society reorganizes itself to adopt that technology and assimilate it in a way until finally it creates a new stable epoch. So this second beat allows us to integrate the new technical reality into a coherent way of life. you know whether that's like writing the printing press or maybe even like the drum which was necessary for tribal life.
The danger of our current crisis is that the second beat is never arrives because the digital system and now artificial intelligence are evolving at this incredible speed like close to the speed of light or something. So this constantly introduces new shocks to the system before we can absorb and assimilate the previous ones. And this acceleration is basically shortcircuit circuiting us uh leading us to regress. The technical system begins to destroy social systems instead of being sort of integrated by them in any positive sense. And we're left with a permanent state of disadjustment, leaving us in what Stigler calls an absence of epoch rather than a new epoch of of knowledge.
We're unable to project a coherent future or maintain the st stability required for social life and cohesion. This age of disruption according to Stigler is the epoch of the absence of epoch. And he sees this foreshadowed by Adorno and Horheimer kind of Frankfurt school philosophers as a new kind of barbarism or what Nichi anticipated as nihilism. This disruption is producing a condition Stigler identifies as generalized pro proletarianization. By this term, he doesn't just mean economic poverty or kind of workingclass industrial life. He means that we're liquidating human knowledge and decimating artisanship. In the 19th century, the indust industrial machine replaced the workers manual skill or their quote unquote savvoir fair.
Today the digital pharmacological crisis is automating our cognitive faculties and also kind of atrophying them. So we're experiencing a massive loss of knowledge. The knowledge of how to live savo viv how to do and even how to reflect self-reflect and theorize on our situation. We're relying on divi devices to na remember to navigate to calculate and consequent consequently our own faculties are atrophy. Stigler calls this a state of systemic stupidity or functional stupidity. Individuals and organizations start to blindly serve automated systems they no longer understand. And the healings links directly to a rise in mental illness and madness or ill-being. Citing the despair of younger generations who feel that they have no future.
And why is this happening? Because that very capacity to envision a future to project oneself forward into time has been automated by algorithms that anticipate our desires before we even form them as well as the awareness of ecological crisis and breakdown and all the other stuff and existential threats and so on. So Stigler borrows from the philosopher of science Gor Kangam to describe this as quote the infidelity of the millu and humans are unique because we construct our own technical millu a process that Stigler calls exosomatiz somatization but this millu is constantly changing and it can become unfaithful or hostile to organisms the humans living within it and today our current environment has become a entroposine, a generator of massive entropy characterized by disorder, waste and the dissipation of energy. And this entropy threatens not only the physical biosphere through climate change, but also the the human mind, which needs a kind of stable, you know, what he talks about as a negantropic environment, a sort of, you know, environment that works works against entropic processes in order to to function and and be healthy and happy. And that the digital environment has shatters our shatters our ability for sustained attention as it fragments social time and so on.
And as we see more psychic entropy, this is leading to social dis disintegration and the collapse of the Wii of the sense of a collective being that binds communities together. And now we're at a point where this collapse of knowledge is reaching the stage of what he talks about as the end of theory generating a collapse of like rational purpose uh analysis in itself. But what's great about Stigler is he doesn't leave us without a path forward. It's not just a diagnosis. When he defines our crisis as pharmacological, he believes the solution is not to reject the technology because that would be really impossible and and and a reactionary retreat.
That's just not going to happen. What we have to do instead is heal our relationship to it to properly assimilate into our society so it supports our collective capacity to learn to feel to think to evolve. So the crisis is fundamentally for him a lack of therapeutics. We need new systems of care and binding regulations that can humanize and socialize this pharmicon that we've unleashed. We have to move from a state of passively submitting to this poison which is only kind of adaptation to actively prescribing how technology should be used which would be adoption for him. So, so faced with this crisis we need to develop new social practices.
We need to learn how to master our technological projections so we can produce meaningful knowledge and enhance communities of care which is you know very much the opposite direction of where things are going right now. So Stigler calls this practicing a negthropology, producing anti-anthropic possibilities within the very heart of this technological system rather than trying to escape or or regress from it. And if we can invent these new ways of living that harmon harness the power of the digital to produce new forms of knowledge rather than destroy what we've got, we can transform the speed of computation into a support for deliberation and evolution rather than a mechanism of addiction. compulsion, decimation and so on. But you know, Stigler admits and I think we can all see that this is very much of a daunting task.
It almost seems impossible. Yet, it seems to be the only path open to us now. We need to cultivate a form of quote unquote knowicing, a projection of a future that diverges from the automatic probabilities calculated by data systems. This involves making a leap of faith in the capacity of human reason to address and kind of reconstruct reorganize this technical millu. We to do this we need to attain a new kind of maturity one that recogni rec recognizes the poison of these tools while we work to extract their curative potential. For Stigler the neganthrop negthroposine is a noetic dream that in all likelihood has no chance of being realized.
But he also notes it is for this reason that it is a dream. A true dream is always what presents itself as something that cannot be realized or Oscar Wild talked about how society involves the progressive realization of utopias. Um so if we can engage with the pharmacological nature of our reality, if we can accept the responsibility to care for this world that has become, you know, as he says, unfaithful, uh we we we we can make progress and we have to strive to weave back together the kind of frayed threads of attention, memory, time, and so society into a new expression of human possibility. So that's my understanding of Stigler. That's what I tried to get across in the piece.
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Transcript of the video essay, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.