Bernard Stiegler's seminar first class, I have slightly modified title, not really changed but completed: From

multinational neuropower to the noopolitics of the internation. I want to put into tension not in opposition but in composition neuropower & noopolitics. Neuropower as practiced by multinationals, google, facebook. Noopolitics, a politics of the spirit, which would be supported by an "internation", this concept comes from Marcel Mauss, who presented it in 1920 to the Socialist International in the context of the creation of the Society of Nations to prevent war (discussed in Etats de Choc). On the subject of war given that we do not know where the crisis in Korea can lead, the noopolitics of the internation is a proposition for peace in the context of economic war because as I say in Etats de Choc if we do not make peace in the economic war we'll have a military war. In the last 2 years of this seminar we looked at the development of the digital tertiary retention in networks and and its effect on psychic collective & technical processes of individuation & so on transindividuation. The fundamental subject of this seminar is transindividuation. Transindividuation always comprises these 3 dimensions: psychic, technical & collective or social. Last year we saw how this passage to the digital tertiary retention, & to all the forms of tertiary retention in general, from the beginning of hominisation, because my theory is that hominisation is the tertiarisation of memory so that hominisation begins with the appearance of tertiary retentions which appear 2, 3, or perhaps even 4 million years ago. Last year we saw how this evolution constitutes a cooperation between brains, how the passage between psychic technical & collective individuation constitutes a cooperation between brains that are not only organic but organological. I'm not sure if I presented things in exactly these terms last year, especially the distinction between organic & organological, but I did so in a course I gave in Zurich last year on General Organology and in the book I will discuss later, Pharmacologie du Front National. What I tried to show last year is that the tertiary retentions and their interiorisation by noetic brains constitue the condition of constitution for what Sigmund Freud called the psychic apparatus. It is for that reason, as I said last year basing myself on Maryanne Wolf, that the psychic apparatus exceeds the brain. In no case can one reduce the psychic apparatus to the brain, or to what one can call the "cerebral". And when I say that, it is a reply to Catherine Malabou. Because Catherine Malabou maintains that on the basis of the neurosciences we can dilute or dissolve the psychic into what she calls cerebrality. I absolutely disagree with that point of view. The psychic apparatus is absolutely not the same as cerebrality. We are trying to think from this organological point of view insofar as it induces a pharmacological point of view. And that means 3 things: It means a lot of things, but it means principally 3 things that I'll be talking about in this seminar or that I have talked about in Pharmacologie du Front National. The first thing is that when one says that organology is a pharmacology then one poses that organology is indeterministic ie that organology is not a technical determinism & so is irreducible to any scientific discipline whatever. It cannot be biocentric, it cannot be neurocentric, it cannot be technocentric, it cannot be ecocentric, it is decentered & excentric & in saying this I am replying to Terence Blake's question because this is precisely what I think he has not at all understood in the book I wrote, even if I don't develop in the book what I have just said here. What I said here is founded on what I said just before, namely that individuation must always be thought of as 07:06 pm the fruit of a triple process: psychic, technical & social. & if it is for example social, the sciences of the brain cannot reduce the social. They, the sciences of the brain, must negotiate with the social, they must compose with the social, why? to produce a general organology. Yes, to create a general organology. We had a discussion last year with Riccardo last year about this expression, which dissatisfies him 08:39 pm but I maintain it, because if there is a general organology it's because there are also

specific organologies for example musical organology, a mathematical organology, etc and I will certainly talk about that in the seminar. Be that as it may, this triple process of individuation, 08:45 pm psychic, technical, and collective or social always opens up contradictory possibilities that enter into opposition with one another & which end up in the processes of transindividuation producing composition rather than opposition. In these processes possibles are negotiated and 08:51 pm are formed, not virtualities but possibilities and in these possibilities, by means of them, decisions are produced, which constitute what Deleuze called bifurcations. I think that this is what Deleuze talked about. & here what we are trying to do is to produce a theory of bifurcations. That was the first point. The second point is that if there is no determinism, neither psychic, nor technical, nor social. None of these spheres has a capacity of determination. On the other hand there exists in these three spheres psychic, technical and social, conditions of functioning. A condition is not at all a determination. But if one doesn't respect the condition the set up no longer works. And so it is an interplay of constraints which are not determinations but conditions, and these conditions are what I call, and I take these terms from Nietzsche, Freud, & Bergson, & behind them LeroiGourhan & Simondon, they are tendencies. And so organological theory is a theory of tendencies, and it is a specification of types of tendencies. For example, the tendencies which come into play at the psychic level, inside the psychic sphere, enter into composition, by negotiation, with other tendencies which function for example in the technical sphere, and which are not at all the same tendencies. And these enter into composition with the psychic sphere by passing via social tendencies. Typically, and this is very important for this seminar, the social tendencies are the diachronic & synchronic tendencies described by Saussure, & psychic individuation & social individuation in that they constitute the incarnation of the synchronic & the diachronic at the level of the psychic etc. It is across this interplay of forces, that intervene on 3 different planes, on each of these 3 planes there are 2 different types of tendency, so there are in all 6 different tendencies & 3 different interplays of force, but which compose with each other by means of processes of transduction. It is by means of these interplays of force that decisions are made. And these decisions are not at all the decisions of a psychic subject, they are not the decisions of a political subject because in any event the tertiary interventions are there which make something intervene which is neither psychic nor political or social, which is a retentional process. That is what we are going to study this year precisely and I am going to try to show you that to study it precisely we must return to Darwin, because what I am describing as processes of decision are what in Darwin are called processes of selection. What Darwin calls "natural" selction I claim is artificial selection, & more precisely retentional selection. I'll come back to that later. The fact that the decisions which are taken at the level of this triple systemicity by way of these tendencies, the fact that they are not determinations, is evidently what results from the fact that these tendencies always play out between 2 pharmacological possibilities: a possibility that tends to destroy the system in order to maintain it, typically that is what is happening now with the capitalist consumerist economy, ie to maintain its functioning consumerism accelerates its own destruction And it is condemned to destroy itself. The consumerist capitalist model will inevitably disappear, but not necessarily in favour of the the liberation of the forces of labour, it could be for the construction of a new fascism, for example, a techno-fascism. It's not necessarily good news, it's rather very bad news that the system is destroying itself & accelerating its destruction.while we do not see at all how it is going to produce something different. Whatever the case may be, this pharmacological interplay of tendencies engenders bifurcations, & these bifurcations are also events. They are what we call events, & in saying this I am pursuing a discussion that I had with Paolo last week, & that perhaps I will discuss later when I talk about symptomatology. The 3rd point induced by the question of pharmacology is that & here in saying this I am continuing almost directly that conversation with Paolo; The 3rd point is that through this

question of the play of tendencies and of the decisions that are taken, which are decisions that are induced systemically, but not deterministically, and neither psychologically nor politically, & which constitute events, then we must turn towards a question that is absolutely Deleuzian (because sometimes there are themes that are Deleuzian that I produce but that come from my own work and that later I find in Deleuze, by logical necessity. Here however is a thematics that is totally Deleuzian & that I owe to Deleuze, the theme of quasicausality. I read Logic of Sense a long time ago, 30 or 34 years ago, in fact I was in prison when I read Logic of Sense, & I think that it is reading Logic of Sense that permitted me to live in prison. Logic of Sense allowed me to live in prison and to adopt an ethics of prison. What I call an ethics of prison is one which permits me to cultivate a virtue, for me an ethics cultivates a virtue. So there are virtues everywhere, even in prison, I would say especially in prison, and to find that virtue you must adopt a "quasi-causal" logic. You know that Deleuze developped that basing himself on all sorts of writers, on many different writers in general, but more particularly on Joe Bousquet, who interests more particularly me for all sorts of reasons that we will come back to later. It is on the basis of this question, and naturally of other sources, Aristotle, Plato, Derrida, that I developped that way of thinking that I call the necessary default, the necessity of the default, the virtue of the default. A point that I develop in the book Pharmacologie du Front National is that if one brings to its point of radicality this quasi-causal logic that I develop to a large extent to re-think Marx's project getting out of Hegelianism and the dialectic, & entering inside Stoic logic, interpreting Marx with the Stoics, & not just with Hegel, which is not a way of rejecting Hegel by the way, because I don't reject Hegel. It is not my way of working to reject, or to accept. I take everything, everything that is good, and Hegel is good. But I think that we must take Marxism out of the negative, out of what Hegel called the negative, & we must make it, not Marxism but Marx's thought, enter a thought of the positivity and of the virtue of the techn, of techn and so of automatisation, proletarisation etc.and of their overcoming. It can seem shocking to talk about the virtue of proletarisation. What does proletarisation teach us? How can it be the bearer of a virtue? Well, proletarisation is an experience of stupidity. That's what Simone Weil said, & also Adam Smith, it's what is said by everyone who has lived through situations of proletarisation, & it has happened to me too, because I worked at a certain moment in working conditions of that type. A long time ago. It makes you stupid. Proletarised work makes you stupid, becuase it is mecanised work which has for aim to shortcircuit, literally, the noetic layers of the brain.and to make use of only the reflex automatisms, the systems of reflexes. I mention this because my pharmacological way of thinking, by means of quasi-causality, poses in principle that the origin of knowledge is stupidity. Stupidity is not at all the opposite of knowledge, but on the contrary its condition. The consequence of a radicalisation of pharmacology is to pose that stupidity is the condition of knowledge. In saying that I remind you this is what Nietzsche says, & Deleuze. Deleuze says it very clearly in Difference and Repetition: to think is to have the experience of stupidity. You must first have had the experience of stupidity & to have the experience of stupidity you must do stupid things. Stupidity is the condition of access to knowledge. What is important is not to never do anything stupid, but to draw the consequences from one's stupidities, which must be wise consequences. I must become the quasi-cause of my stupidity. That's the real problem. This is the only way to understand how knowledge can itself become stupid. Because in Etats de choc I made use of the problematic of Adorno & Horkheimer where they speak of the dialectic of Reason, or rather of the Enlightenment, and of a becoming rationalised of rationality, of the Reason of the 18th Century, and so what they described is how Reason becomes stupid, how rational knowledge becomes stupid.

But if rational knowledges can become stupid it is because they come from stupidity and they go back to it always. So this is the reason why, and I will speak about it later if I have the time, Aristotle says that only God enjoys the privilege of always being in act. Most of the time we are stupid. We function on, it's not at all a value-judgment to say that we are stupid, it's a description. We function in the modalities of reflex sytems. We have reflexes that are absolutely unreflexive, and most of the time we are like that. When we are driving our car for example otherwise we would have an accident. But also when we say hello to people, each time we have mastery of a technical set up it is because we have become stupid, we have submitted ourselves to the stupidity of the technical object. But this stupidity can give us access to new knowledge, to a new form of individuation.