By Matt Bluemink.

‘The question today for me is not the end of capitalism or the return of the communist horizon. Today we have to create a new industrial model. This new industrial model will possibly produce a new political organization, and an economical organization which may not be capitalist.’

Bernard Stiegler, 2011

Positive Pharmacology – Recapturing Attention

As I have previously observed, in Bernard Stiegler’s view one of the most important (and ultimately negative) aspects of the so called ‘third industrial revolution’ is the ability of the techno-capitalist system to control the ‘libidinal energy’ of the consumer in order to facilitate the unrestrained growth of the culture and program industries. These industries essentially use the attention or the desire of the consumer as libidinal energy that fuels their respective industries, which in turn causes a loss of knowledge on a large scale; it assigns to the consumer the role which Marx designated the producer i.e. the proletariat. However, this loss of knowledge also constitutes a loss of attention, as is opined by Stiegler in What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology, ‘the loss of attention is a loss of the capacity to project into the long term (that is, to invest in objects of desire)’. In other words the degradation of attention at the hands of the culture industries leads to a degradation of the ability to form ‘long circuits’ of individuation; it becomes impossible for us to individuate ourselves (individually or collectively) as our attention is being wasted through the short-termist, profit driven nature of a contemporary capitalist society. Indeed contemporary capitalism is reliant on this consumption of attention; Johann Russouw summarises this point well in the introduction to Stiegler’s essay ‘Suffocated Desire’: ‘for Stiegler, attention is to the hyper-industrial economy what fossil fuels are to the industrial economy.’

Stiegler states that the essential problem with modern capitalism in comparison to pre-hyper-industrial capitalism, is that ‘This destruction of desire (which is also to say, of attention and care), which leads to a drive-based economy, that is an essentially destructive economy, is a new limit encountered by capitalism’. This new limit goes beyond the limits of the previous capitalist epochs and spreads its toxicity in such a way that the previous capitalist industry was not capable of: ‘a third limit is now imposing itself, deriving from the fact that the development of the industrial way of life inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has become toxic not only on the plane of minds and libido, but also on the geophysical and biological plane’. In other words, the negative influence of the industrial way of life has led to a globalised ‘attention deficit’ that has become so entrenched in the realm of both the individual and the collective human consciousness that it has started to affect the non-human biological realm. The industrialisation of our attention is therefore a problem that exceeds our own immediate experiences. The ‘short-circuits’ of disindividuation that are created are not sufficient to overcome this impending threat, we must instead look to the positive tendencies that the pharmacological nature of desire can produce, as Stiegler emphasises: ‘Pharmakon is at once what enables care to be taken and that of which care must be taken – in the sense that it is necessary to pay attention: its power is curative to the immeasurable extent.’

So to look at how exactly the pharmakon can become the cure to its own poison we must understand how the negative aspects of an economy run on capturing attention can be turned into positives; in other words we must see how an economy of consumption can be turned into one of contribution. Stiegler argues that ‘this third limit can only be overcome on the condition of inventing a way of life that constitutes a new way of taking care of the world, a new way of paying attention to it, through the invention of therapeutics’. However, this new way of paying attention to the world cannot simply abandon modern capitalist thinking (for to do so may lead to an even worse state of disorientation and disindividuation), instead it must alter the pharmacological tendency of desire towards positive, long termist, long-circuits of individuation in which the ‘I’ is not necessarily excluded from the ‘We’.

Stiegler maintains that although consumption leads libidinal energy to become a force that is self-destructive, the potentially infinite (i.e. renewable) nature of libidinal energy can in turn become a force for ‘taking care’, which is at the heart of what it means to economise. (As he states in his essay ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon’ that ‘In French as in English, attention is a word derived from the Latin attendere, “to shift one’s attention to” or “to take care.” The verb form has kept this sense in English: “to attend a patient” means to take care of his or her illness.’) Taking this into account, and drawing on Freud and Lyotard, Stiegler continues, ‘If consumption destroys its object, libido is on the contrary what takes care of its object. And this is why addressing the third limit of capitalism does not imply abandoning fossil energy but rather abandoning a drive-based economy and reconstituting libidinal energy which is a form of renewable energy – given that frequenting the objects of this energy causes it to increase’. In other words, whereas ‘frequenting’ consumption, as the object of libidinal energy has led consumption to increase at a never before seen rate, frequenting the positive aspects of the pharmakon can similarly lead us to recapturing our attention and thus focusing it towards a system of care through which our previous drive-based economy can be overturned.

Stiegler comes to these conclusions through an analysis of the economist Jeremy Rifkin who argues that we must ‘end the age of oil’ by essentially learning to develop a system in which the current stock of fossil fuels available to us must be utilised to their maximum potential, yet at the same time, as this energy resource is a finite commodity, we must also look to alternative processes of both production and consumption of energy (such as ‘those based on using hydrogen technology as a storage medium’. To Stiegler, Rifkin’s views, although potentially useful, are still stuck within the current paradigm of subsistence when they should be concerned instead with the energy of existence, which is to say, libidinal energy. What Rifkin essentially wants to argue is that the current crisis of energy is not fundamentally self-destructive, in fact it is fundamentally salvageable; through overcoming the current energy crisis via the development of ever more innovative energy and communication based technologies we can therefore overcome the third limit of capitalism.

Nonetheless, to Stiegler this is hugely problematic as it leads to the assumption that ‘all this will be possible without having to pose the question of libidinal energy, without taking into account this second limit that is in fact the truth of the third: the fact that the libido is being destroyed’. Conversely, what we must realise is that the libidinal drives that are being utilised as a source of energy are actually depriving us of our attention, which, in turn, makes us ‘incapable of taking care of [our] world’. What is needed, more than the desire to keep on living i.e. to subsist, is the desire to exist. We must reconfigure our current economic model away from, not only our current reliance on the consumption of fossil fuels, but also our current reliance on the consumption of attention that has led humanity into a disoriented, disindividuated state of subsistence without savoir-vivre knowledge.

The Internet – Embodiment of Transindivuation

Nonetheless, Stiegler still sees the importance of some of Rifkin’s work in that he places a large emphasis on the co-development of energy systems with digital information networks such as the internet: ‘What is extremely interesting is Rifkin’s proposition that energy systems and information or mnemotechnical systems co-develop, and that the most recent communication system, the internet, breaks precisely with the opposition between consumption and production, and therefore constitutes the possibility of implementing a new distributed and decentralized network of renewable energy in which everyone would be both producer and consumer’. What the internet provides, then, is the potential for a collective unity of psychic individuals that step beyond the hyper-industrial categories of proletarianised consumers and producers. It is their interconnected desires that have the potential to provide the libidinal energy that is necessary to counteract the negative tendencies of the pharmakon. The savoir-vivre knowledge that was lost through the hyper-industrialisation of culture therefore has the potential to be regained through the connections brought about by socio-digital network innovations.

In recent times, the massive drop in the cost of the production of electronic technologies has led to the cost of data transactions, and indeed replication of technical materials (both analogue and digital), to become progressively cheaper. This, in turn, has given contemporary society the ability to acquire what Stiegler calls ‘new practical competencies, but also analytical and reflexive competencies’, which are essentially the possibilities of the individual to develop skills, abilities or ‘functionalities’ (i.e. different modes of individuation) that had previously been limited to the realm of the professional. Indeed, in pre-internet society the freedom of the spread of information was far more limited according to the Marxist industrial division of labour e.g. the division between the professional and the non-professional; between master and apprentice; between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and so on. The difference that socio-digital technologies i.e. the internet, bring to the table is that they provide ‘a socialisation of innovation’ that is not limited by the opposition of production and consumption. Instead what we find are ‘social forms of apprenticeship that seem to be self-organising and elude the more usual process of socialising innovation referred to as ‘descending’ (steered by the research/development/marketing complex)’. Innovations no longer have the need to be reliant on the investments of descendent, ‘top down’ capitalist industrialised corporations. Instead, what appears to be happening is a transfiguration of ‘descending’ innovation to ‘bottom up’, ‘ascending’ innovation. What this means is that there is ‘a structural break with that organisation of social relations in the industrial world that operates according to the opposing couple, “production/consumption”’.

What is necessary, instead of opposing the bottom up/top down distinction, is therefore to create ‘systems for producing metadata that organize and create political technologies encouraging the emergence of psychic and collective individuation processes of a new kind’. They must be of a ‘new kind’ in that they must be based on, not just collaborative bottom up systems (that can be essentially top-downed by the culture industry), but genuinely representational methods through which the proper analysis and discussion of differing perspectives and arguments can be rooted, one that can go beyond the reach of the systemisation of the hyper-industrial, consumerist, capitalist epoch, in order to reach a new potentially post-consumerist epoch. This representation of differing interests can enable collective individuations to establish a new form of analytic critique through which the digital realm itself can start to become separated from the ever-lingering ghost of the hyper-industrial capitalist political economy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Bluemink is a philosophy graduate and English teacher from London. His main interests are the connections between philosophy, literature, technology and culture. In particular the phenomenology of memory and its relevance to contemporary capitalism. He spends too much time talking about Jorge Luis Borges and is the founder and editor of bluelabyrinths.com