“A Neutron Bomb of the Mind”, a Digression on Bernard Stiegler
|
This
liberating, but all-too-transitory moment we have just been celebrating in The
Brig[1] prophetically
confirms the ‘diagnosis’ that the French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, has
been making in numerous writings (for instance, recently in Aimer, Nous
Aimer), for a decade or so, of the malaise of our times: in a word, that
the destructiveness and self-destructiveness of humanity today rises out of
what he calls a “wounded narcissism”[2] (narcissisme
blessé), caused by a hyper-synchronization, resulting from our
technology, one that tends to level anything special or particular about us: a kind of neutron bomb
of the mind, leaving after its explosion an uninhabited matter and
corporeity, a sort of world of automatons. (La Technique et le temps, 3,
p. 119, my trans.). Reclaiming the
difference of our individuality, as “James Turner” does here, for example,
would constitute the only effective resistance, which Stiegler calls the
combat, against this devastating entropy.
It’s then a measure of just how threatening such claims ‘to be
someone’ are that the system then and there, and of course, even more so here
and now, quashes them and those who dare to make them as soon as they
surface... However
Stiegler would certainly not go along with my wishful thinking about
overpowering the guards[3]: such a proletarian
attack would smack, for him, at least in today’s political and cultural
climate, more of Nietzschen ‘ressentiment’ than Communist revolution.[4] Capitalist commercial, information,
communication and conditioning structures, for Stiegler, have destroyed the
Marxist two class or three class (owners of the means of production and those
who are obliged to sell their labor there) hierarchical paradigm; instead
Stiegler talks of a “generalized proletarianism.” As a result of the evolution (or
devolution!) of the combined and intertwined workings of capitalism,
technology and globalization we are now more or less well rewarded, or
‘paid-off’ servants of a world system that no one really owns; we all would
be today, in Malcolm X’s terms either “house niggers” or “field niggers”, the
former of course lamenting over the burning of their masters (who have now
become merely renters like the rest of us!) house, the latter rejoicing. Today, Stiegler would have it, there are no
more rulers and ruled, bosses and workers, owners and renters in our Brave
New World of synchronized media, machines, robotization, and automatons. So the prisoner attacking the guards would
be attacking themselves (as a matter of fact, in The Living Theatre
productions the guards and prisoners changed roles on different nights)[5]; what we need to do
instead is to educate the guards... One ‘fights back’, for Stiegler, moreover
not by Luddism, wrecking the machines that have ‘ruined’ us, but by using the
machinery of technology,[6] somehow, in such
innovative ways as to express ourselves as unique, irreplaceable individuals.[7] The struggle that matters, today, for him,
would be waged, then, ostensibly not by groups, and certainly not by classes
(since there is only one), but by these individuals, hopefully masses of us,
but each of us in our own (Leibnizian) monad of a universe, maybe like that
famous “society of porcupines” of Freud, where we associate for warmth and
security, but keep our distance with the pointy quills. The
problem, here, however, is that unless there are lots of ‘us’ who see things
this way, we would be too few to matter; and too many of us “house niggers”
consider ourselves the masters (what with our stock portfolios etc.); for
even assuming we’re all in the same proletarian boat today, there is no
question but that even for Stiegler, an overwhelming majority still
think they’re still on high dry ground or on some kind of better ship, maybe
even a luxury cruise; and, as a matter of fact, he admits finally the likely
hopelessness of his (our) position, addressing his reader pessimistically, if
not desperately, it seems to me, in an unusually frank (bewilderingly so, as
when we receive a confidence we don’t know quite what to do with or how to
think of!) recent apostrophe, in a section called depressingly “Crushing
Majority, Tiny Minority”, of a recent book: [The reader]
should not forget that, insofar as he is still has the capacity and the
desire to read a book like De la misère symbolique [this one], that he
represents a very small minority, and one very likely, unless something
really extraordinary happens, on its way to extinction. (p.159, my trans.) Such flattery as this
one cannot really enjoy! For it puts
that small section of the “generalized proletariat” who are not in a state of
false consciousness (Lukacs) or denial (Freud) of their situation (Sartre),
whether the obviously secularist Stiegler wants it that way or not, in the
place of a kind of mystic ‘remnant’ holding onto the faith while the (or at
least their) world is coming to an end; a test all the more, frustrating,
infinite and endless, since in this age of the Death of God (Nietzsche) no
afterlife or ‘other world’ can console us now… Stiegler’s
position relates to an ongoing controversy over just how obsolete ‘class
struggle’ now is. Derrida (with whom
Stiegler had been closely associated, even co-authoring a book with him[8]) declaring also
himself to be, in Specters of Marx, “suspicious of the simple
opposition of dominant and dominated” (p.55) had called, as a
matter of fact, for a “new international” (a subtitle of the book, even),
which would include people from all over and from all walks of life,
dispensing accordingly in its humanist universality with... the ultimate support
that would be the identity and the self-identity of a social class.... (ibid)
The New International will effectively
be ‘barely public’, without party, without country, without national
community...,without citizenship, without common belonging to a class
(p. 85).[9] This ‘revisionism’ (if
I may call it that, not necessarily pejoratively) of Derrida’s has been more
or less hotly contested, and certainly very much qualified for instance, in Ghostly
Demarcations [Verso, 1999], a collection of essays by a variety of
‘Marxist’ authors. Tom Lewis, for
example, will speak there of a working class that needs to be defined
differently now, because of the evolution of Capitalism, technology and the
nature of today’s ‘globalized’ labor market. For Lewis the working class
would thereby be expanding rather than contracting or becoming obsolete —for
instance, a working class should now include many if not most from minority
or oppressed groups that are now being heard from: Indeed, the overwhelming number of lesbians, bisexuals
and gays, Native American, Latinos, Asians and Blacks, as well as women with
jobs, belong to the working class. (Lewis, 151) Additionally the
division is not so clear-cut today between mental and manual labor, so that
the classic division of labor, roughly parallel to the dichotomy between
those who own (or work closely and identify with—management) the means of
production and those who are obliged to sell their labor there, would need to
be revised; this expanding ‘mental’ role for what are still proletarians has
amplified in some essential ways its power to attack Capital, and that
exponentially; now, for instance a single technology worker, turned radical
hacker might be able to damage a computer-based hegemony more effectively
than a thousand workers of the past could threaten the ownership of the means
of production! Or even on the
production line: Each individual blue collar worker who remains is now
ten, twenty, or even a hundred times more powerful in terms of the ability to
shut down production than each of the individual workers who were replaced by
the machines operated by the remaining worker. (Lewis, 151) Well, indeed,
the consequences of bypassing, transcending or otherwise dumping such red
threads and guiding concepts as class war and proletarian revolution have
been for the better part of a few centuries now do seem to have been a lapse
or fall into some kind fatalism or desperate mysticism of the self-elected
remnant—with Stiegler’s ambition, one which he just about admits is doomed,
to ‘fight’ for change through acts in which
individuals try to heal their wounded narcissism; as if the choice is
between mysticism and revolution, excluding any third. On the other hand, another kind of lapse
might well be into an abstract humanist idealism, insufficiently anchored in
the concrete struggles of the day and the working people who bear the brunt
of them, and pay the lion’s share of the price for them[10],
to make much of difference (to confront Derrida with one of his most
powerful words). Derrida’s appeal for
a ‘classless’ New Internationale, however intriguing and existentially
‘upbuilding’ (Kierkegaard’s word), doesn’t it rather beg the question, in the
tradition of an even more idealistic (though significantly, imaginary) forerunner,
Don Quixote, that classes let go of power without it having to be wrested
from them, and then guarded jealously by force of law, moral example, and
arms? Remember the ‘fate’ of the
whipped worker our Knight of the Sad Countenance had freed, who was in for an
even more savage beating once his liberator had ridden on... Anyway, unfortunately
or not, it’s as surely true today as when Hegel enunciated that tragic law
that we humans are so constituted that we cannot take anyone seriously, or be
so taken ourselves, who does not put their life on the line for their
beliefs.[11] This was indeed the very core of the Master-Slave
Dialectic, which Marx was to stand later and for later generations so
adroitly “on its head”, courtesy of the Silesian Weavers’ Revolt of 1844,
thereby creating with his fellow weaver-enthusiast, Engels, the
international Communist Revolution,
whose principles of Class War were to be inscribed in that “Declaration of
(Proletarian) Independence”, The Communist Manifesto, of 1848. Following Hegel (who was following
Aristotle) a master is a master because he is ready to give his life to
remain one: “live free or die” must always be his motto. On the other hand, what makes a slave a
slave is the choice of life, no matter how fettered and degraded, over death
or risking it.[12] The Silesian Weavers had risked (and of
course many paid with) their lives by attacking the masters (owners) of the
means of production, and refusing to be “bought” off or otherwise co-opted or
recuperated, had gone on to sack “their” warehouses and factories;
furthermore, in a moment dramatized so effectively in Hauptmann’s
naturalistic masterpiece, The Weavers, performed by Antoine André’s
Théâtre Libre, in a politically volatile Paris, in 1892, they showed
themselves fully ready to battle with the armies of Capital to protect their
nascent revolution. So alas, after all these millennia of
progress, from the Pyramids to the Internet, we have still only our lives to
give and to offer, and the price of freedom is still not gold, but blood.[13] Where, indeed, would Christianity be
without Jesus and the martyrs; Islam without Ali and his massacred followers;
the Labor movement without the “fusillés” of the Paris Commune and Sacco and
Vanzetti; the Palestinian cause without its countless resistance fighters; or
even Judaism today without the desperation of 17th century
messianic Sabbatianism, which drew half of European Jewry, leaving
everything, on the road to Jerusalem;[14]
or, closer to “home”, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; African-Americans without
Nat Turner and John Brown; or Civil Rights and racial equality without Martin
Luther King, Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks and Malcolm X; philosophy (or even
science) without Socrates, Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake, 1600) and
Spinoza; the hopes of prisoners (of all sorts) everywhere to be free men and
women, were it not for the “James Turners” who refuse to go on being merely
numbers? |
Also by Philip
Beitchman
William Burroughs'
Naked Lunch
Inter-zone.org = The Western Lands + Interzone Academy + Interzone Creations + Interzone Library + Rédacteurs Reporters
d'Interzone
+ La sémantique générale pour tous + B D d’Interzone + Interzone News
[1] Kenneth Brown’s play of 1964, performed by The Living Theatre, set in a military jail in Japan in 1947, based on the author’s experience there; the moment I’m talking about is when a prisoner violates the rule that they refer to themselves only by number by calling out his name, “James Turner”; after which he pays the price of his self-affirmation in being strapped to a stretcher and carted off to a mental ward...
[2] Stiegler will however go to great pains to stress that he is not trying to revive an “I” that would be distinct from society: before there can be a “me” there, of course, has to be an “us”, which “I” never come even close to getting clear of—even becoming a hermit presupposing a society that allows that choice, and from which to escape. For Stiegler, as for Marcuse before him, it’s a question of degree, of how much society can lift from the individual without damaging the me and itself. Marcuse, for example, talked frequently of ‘excess oppression”, in cardinal texts for the rebelling ‘60’s like One-Dimensional Man and An Essay on Liberation. Following Marcuse also, Stiegler would however regard many of the hedonistic ‘liberating’ ways of the Sixties as being rather a kind of “repressive desublimation” (Marcuse’s language), controlled and programmed leisure that reinforces the hegemony of the consumer society rather than constituting any authentic expression of the individual. Stiegler would therefore, I think, not demur from such denunciations of this style of permissiveness and self-indulgence as declaimed in Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, of 1979. The theme of an essay on Nietzsche’s influence on the arts, by Barbara Stiegler, included in the catalogue for a recent exhibition of “Dionysian art” (“Dionysiac”) at the Pompidou Museum in Paris, was similarly cautionary, in warning that artists who throw off all restraint are not being as faithful to Nietzsche as they think; for him the raw passionate, inchoate thrust of Dionysus needed to be balanced and limited by the forming and taming power of Apollonian reason.
[3] I was wondering what indeed “we” (prisoners all) had to lose but our chains, by trying to overpower the guards, who as a matter of fact we outnumber, as we always do...
[4] Curiously, Stiegler came up challenging private property in a rather direct way: before he became an illustrious French philosopher he had a little career going, in his youth, in crime (armed robbery, burglary etc.), as a consequence of which, in the illustrious footsteps of François Villon, the Marquis de Sade and Jean Genet before him, he had served time in prison...
[5] As told to my friend Lionel Bloom by Steven ben
[6] Stiegler has occupied a high administrative position in media matters in the French government; see note 9.
[7] Nor is Stiegler reviving the rampant ego-philosophy of Max Stirner, whose The Ego and His Own, of 1845, was very much in Marx’s way when he was in process, simultaneously, in formulating a social, therefore class-based revolutionary consciousness, turning for example vast swaths of The German Ideology, completed in 1846, into a debate with Stirner. This antinomy, between the individual and society, obviously too perpetual and undecidable to die, surfaces again quite centrally in Derrida’s Specters of Marx and the controversy that swirled around it too...
[8] Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews of The National Audiovisual Institute [of which Stiegler has been director].
[9] After the ibid, as cited in Lewis (p. 147), who is responsible for the emphasis.
[10] As in our volunteer army, where the poor (who else would join up?) die in the wars of the rich (why else would they start them?)...
[11] Phenomenology of Spirit (1805), p.114: “...it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won.” Relevant to what follows is the “Lordship and Bondage” section, pp. 111ff., ibid.
[12] The shame I talked of feeling (in a note my comments on the beatings of the prisoners in The Brig), as a boy, at my father ‘not fighting back’ when attacked by an angry neighbor, maybe arose out of an instinctive grasp of this ‘situation’ long before I had ever heard of any master-slave dialectic!
[13] Following Agamben on this point (Ce Qui Reste d’Auschwitz, passim), I quite agree that, after our last century or so of mass ‘exterminations’, this ‘tragic’ death or dramatic risk of it is ethically irrelevant, if not a piece of egregious effrontery: “The Greek hero has left us forever...after Auschwitz the tragic paradigm has become, for us, ethically useless” (p. 197, my trans.); however that which is ethically obsolete can still be politically and dialectically very powerful, even indispensible. I would exclude from this ‘dialectic’ those for whom their (own) life is manifestly not precious: suicide bombers, warlovers (à la Dr. Strangelove), daredevils (à la Evil Knievel, and myself on a bicycle [I’ve been told!]), and all those ‘addicted’ to self-destructive behaviour; my model for this type of sacrifice or risk of it, would be, as for Hegel, Antigone, who had everything to live for—for instance, a fiancé, who loved her so much he chose to die with her. Mine is not the ‘savage god’ who lusts for the blood of sacrifice; but the sorrowful one, who lamenting, accepts that ultimate gift from those who love in life, beyond its bare biological reality, even more what makes it worth living, in other words, honor.
[14] See my Alchemy of the Word, Cabala of the Renaissance (SUNY,
1998), passim; where my fundamental source is Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai
Sevi, Mystical Messiah (