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TEChnOLOgy And POLITICS: A RESPOnSE TO BERnARd STIEgLER

RIChARd BEARdSwORTh
RICHARD BEARDSwORTH IS PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AT THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS AND IS DIRECTOR OF ITS RESEARCH CENTER (INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND PUBLIC POLICY). HE wAS FOUNDER AND GENERAL EDITOR OF Tekhnema: Journal of PhilosoPhy and Technology (1993 2001) AND TRANSLATED B. STIEGLER IN THE 1990S. HIS FORTHCOMING BOOK cosmoPoliTanism and inTernaTional relaTions Theory IS PUBLISHED BY POLITY (2010).

ABSTRACT This paper considers Bernard Stieglers contribution to contemporary critical theory. Stieglers singular understanding of technology widens critical debate on the specificity of contemporary society and prolongs, in a novel manner, remaining commitments of recent French philosophy to the Marxist analysis of capitalism, underpinned by Freudian libidinal economy. I argue that the originality of Stieglers work lies in his understanding of retentional finitude: what he calls tertiary memory. This understanding provides him with critical purchase on contemporary capitalist forms. It has allowed him most recently to develop an embryonic critique of political economy, focused on technological and libidinal practices of consumerism. his technological analysis of contemporary

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DOI: 10.2752/175174310X12672016548289

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reality, buttressed by technological readings of Marx and Freud, are important in this context. I suggest, however, that neither reading is ultimately convincing for the critical-philosophical purpose in hand. For, they do not provide the non-technological detail and distinctions needed to further transformative reflection on our contemporary economic condition. Without such distinctions, Stieglers work simplifies complex modern society and ends up in an unmediated politics of education. The article expounds thereby the Janus-faced nature of Stieglers engagements: an excellent philosophical reflection on contemporary technology, on the one hand, a technologically determinist (and rather apocalyptic) analysis of the economy, society, and culture, on the other. KEYWORDS: technology, tertiary memory, political economy, libidinal economy, political regulation

Bernard Stiegler gives a radical account of technology that shifts the ground of recent critical theory in important ways. I wish in this paper to do two things: to show its importance and its limits. To this end, I begin by giving a brief account of Stieglers engagements and emphasize four major moves in this account that shifts critical theoretical debate from the 1990s. I then argue for the contemporary importance of political economy for critical thought and suggest that Stieglers recent re-writing of Marxs critique of political economy addresses this importance, but is misplaced given undue emphasis on the technological determinations of present capitalist forms. I suggest that this undue emphasis constitutes technological determinism and leads to a too totalizing and too bleak reading of capitalism. Stieglers re-writing of critical political economy is also grounded on Freudian libidinal economy (following Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Franois Lyotard), which the following section analyses. I suggest that this reading, while imaginative and provocative, is also technologically determinist: it runs the risk of a unilateral reading of affect in contemporary capitalist forms and thereby limits cultural play. Due to these two forms of technological determinism, I conclude that Stiegler offers us at one and the same time a ground-breaking philosophy of technology and a frozen notion of political possibility.
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ThE TEChnOLOgICAL ThESIS OF BERnARd STIEgLER

The initial singularity of Bernard Stieglers work is to be found in his gesture towards the work of Jacques Derrida. It takes the grammatology of archi-writing and develops this grammatology into a general philosophy of technology (see Stiegler 2001). This philosophy simultaneously radicalizes Husserlian phenomenology. It places the Husserlian analysis of temporal escstasis in a field of spatial materiality that is neither Heideggerian nor Derridean and allows for Simondontype theses on individuation processes to enter critical theory (see Stiegler 1994: 191279; 1998: 183276). In this interdisciplinary

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fieldwhich Stiegler has constituted with considerable intellectual flairthe condition of the epokhe, ecstasis, and/or trace becomes the technical support from out of which psychic and collective individuation proceeds. This condition, while structural to human finitude as such (what Stiegler calls the originary default of the human), is composed of nothing but the history of memory-supports that underlie hominization and civilizationthat is, the human animals increasingly complex adoption of its natural and technical environment. The industrial revolution and the capitalist organization of technology lead to the institution of the market economy and specific rules of valorization. From the above philosophical and genealogical perspective on technology and its constitutive role, the industrial supplement opens up a new epoch of human finitude.1 The specificity of this supplement only comes to the fore, however, in the last quarter of the twentieth century with the increasing convergence between objects of the mind and objects of production and consumptionwhat is called today cognitive, informational, or hyperindustrial capitalism. Now, for Stiegler, each epoch within the history of the supplement has required cultural and political appropriation in order for humans to redouble the movement of technicity as a movement of spirit.2 Monotheism represents, for example, the religious-political adoption of non-orthographic writing, and the theory and practice of the social contract presents a political incorporation of the printed, alphabetical word. For Stiegler, the hyperindustrial support requires, but awaits its own political adoption. It is therefore, and above all, due to present failure to adopt contemporary forms of technology that complex modern societies are becoming de-politicized. In much contemporary discourse, de-politicization ensues from economic and legal over-determinations of society. For Stiegler, conversely, these processes of depoliticization are at root a problem of radical technical change. In the history of the supplement (epiphylogenesis in Stieglerian terms) the technical novelty that contemporary humankind must address is the above convergence between processes of the mind and the logic of the market (cognitive capitalism). This stage of capitalism increasingly blocks individuation processes and stymies the possibility of a new form of spirit. Indeed, in supplanting traditional or familial markers of identification with the new technologies, the industrial supplement has come, during the last thirty years, to foster increasing disbelief, cynicism, resentment, and despair.3 For Stiegler, the political adoption of contemporary forms of capitalism constitutes, therefore, an urgent historical task. The present form of the technical supplement, together with the singularity of convergence that accompanies it, specify in turn the terms of this urgency. As I argued in several pieces in the mid-1990s, Bernard Stieglers philosophy of technology shifts the ground of critical theory in important ways (Beardsworth 1996a: 14557; see also 1995, 1998). I foreground what I still consider today the four most important.

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First, in Nietzschean vein, Stiegler sidesteps the totalistic Heideggerian gesture around technology by giving a dynamic and rich genealogical history of technical supports, one that allows one to understand carefully how humans appropriate technology for their own cultural ends. This genealogy sets up a differend between the philosophies of Derrida and Stiegler and goes on to place the latter outside the terms of deconstruction. Stieglers move remains an important reflection on, and conversation with, the work of Jacques Derrida in this respect. Indeed, when one considers the last decade of flagging critico-theoretical debate, Stieglers philosophy of technology can be considered to continue the legacy of recent French thought in a novel way. His interest for many in Anglo-American academia may lie here. Second, the originality of this critical philosophy of technology lies specifically, I suggest, in its exposition of tertiary memory. Husserlian phenomenology is concerned to show the way in which the temporal ecstases of past, present, and future are held together through retention and protention in order for there to be a past, a present, and a future in the first place. Stiegler argues that Husserl leaves out of this account the exteriorization of memory in technical supports. The point is not empirical, but structural. Although external memory supports are empirical derivatives of human memory, they constitute, from the first, the way in which we conceive the past, present, and future. Human animals, we are a priori addressed by technical supports (from birth, through education, to information-access, etc.). Stiegler calls this form of memory or retention tertiary memory. It follows empirico-historically primary perception in the present and secondary retention of the present as past; but it precedes both structurally. Whatever the epoch of civilization, the technical support constitutes, that is, a pre-given inscription of memory from out of which humans temporalize themselves and their world. This theoretical addition to Husserl inscribes modern phenomenology in a materialist history which, at one and the same time, undoes the quasi-formalism of the Derridean trace and, as we shall see, proposes a re-writing of Marxist themes compatible with cognitive capitalism. I consider this innovation both paramount and problematic. It provides a new technological determinism that considers technology radically constitutive of the human condition; at the same time it risks unilaterally reducing this condition to its technical supports. Third, Stieglers concern to place critical thought in the present is strong. While Stieglers formulations are often totalizing and apocalyptic, his sharp sense of political purpose remains important. After twenty years of post-structuralist reflection on the so-called withdrawal of the political, Stiegler was right, for example, to recall critical theorists from the 1990s onwards to the outstanding questions of politics: Who are we? and What do we want? His reminder was, for me, convincing because it was neither structurally prescriptive nor arbitrary. It followed immanently out of a reflective history of tertiary memory and a consequent analysis of the requirements of

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STIEgLER And MARx: ThE COnTEMPORARy QUESTIOn OF POLITICAL ECOnOMy

I argued above that Stieglers conceptualization of technology is made through a radicalization of the Husserlian understanding of retention and protention. Stiegler uncovers and focuses upon the specificity of tertiary retentions: the technical support constitutes a pre-phenomenal

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politico-cultural adoption. There is thus, for Stiegler, little need to suspend this we in indeterminate and self-conscious scare-quotes out of fear of a politics of identity. Read from the perspective of tertiary memory, contemporary history cannot bring necessary processes of identity-formation through technical supports to a postmodern end. As Stiegler rightly emphasizescontra deconstruction, in particular, and postmodernism, in generalpolitical appropriation and ownership constitute a condition of material processes of civilization. Stieglers philosophy of technology has, therefore, tabled in a singular manner how important, and how problematic, this we is today in a globalized world. The gap between globally organized technical supports and their political adoption may indeed be the political challenge of the future. However impractical this future seems, Stieglers philosophy of technology has shown, at most, the need for a global politics (although he has only addressed this politics in general terms) and, at least, the precariousness of recent distinctions between modernity and postmodernity. Fourth, and very briefly, Stieglers philosophy of technology has argued for reason and for institution at a moment in critical theory and postmodern debate when there remains a strong and debilitating suspicion of the dominating tendencies of post-Enlightenment reason and its institutions. His philosophy of technology argues well, I believe, for rationally substantive political invention in this intellectual context. These four traits have distinguished Stieglers work from recent critical theory and place it at the potential vanguard of contemporary explorations of critical political and cultural analysis. His philosophy of technology offers a rich terrain for interdisciplinary work between philosophy, politics, the arts, culture, and the economy. That said, there are important problems in Stieglers manner of understanding contemporary reality and political adoption. I believe it important to highlight them within the ongoing process of cultural translation of Stieglers work. I will address them through his reengagements with two thinkers: Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. For, the way in which his philosophy of technology interprets their legacy foregrounds the manner in which his understanding of reality must be in part contested. The next two sections focus on these interpretations and on the problems they throw up. While I am both critical of Stieglers technological determinism in the domains of the economic and the affective and suspicious of its consequences for his circumscription of political urgency, my positive sense of his intellectual innovativeness and political purpose remains outstanding.

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inscription of memory from out of which humans temporalize their world. This move reconfigures historical materialism. Marxs distinctionfound most succinctly in the German Ideologybetween modes of production and relations of production mis-recognizes, for Stiegler, three aspects of technology when considered as technical support. First, since technology is constitutive of hominization, it cannot constitute per se a means to a human end. The Marxist theory of production remains instrumentalist and humanist. As a result, Marxism may underestimate the difficulty of political adoption (or at least conceive of it in exclusively class terms). Second, the Marxist distinction between the matter of technology (modes of production) and the manner in which it is socially organized (the relations of production: most importantly, property relations) is superseded by the original conjuncture that the technical support provides between the individual and the collective (see particularly Stiegler 2006b: 4959). Technical supports, as historically mediated forms of memory and lifestyle, already determine terms of individual and collective processes of individuation prior to social relations of property. Third, and consequently, the Marxist distinction between modes of production and social relations of production does not grasp theoretically the fact that the history of production is at the same time a technical history of memory. It is this thinking of technical memory that allows one, however, to come to terms conceptually with the latest stage of capitalism: cognitive capitalism (see Stiegler 2009: esp. 46, 52). For, the latter emerges from the convergence between the objects of memory of the new technologies and the logic of the market. With this convergence, both individual memory and collective memory become increasingly subordinated to discrete terms of calculability, the rule of short-term consumerism, and lawless capitalist cynicism. The threat is, in Flauberts terms, an age of general stupidity (btise), but without the modernist relief of bourgeois art (see Stiegler 2008a: 612; 2009: 8492). My summary of the distinction between Marxist materialism and Stieglers materialism could be contested. It is certainly too starkly put. It nevertheless underscores, for me, the following. Stiegler reads political economy in terms of technology and the technical support. I suggest that, as a result: (1) a certain specificity of the economic is lost in the technological reading; and (2) this loss has important implications for how one conceives political adoption of contemporary capitalist forms. In his manifesto-like Pour une nouvelle critique de lconomie critique, Stiegler rightly laments the lack of economic thought in recent critical thought (2009: 289). Contemporary [critical] philosophy speaks little of the economy [. . .] as if still haunted by the supposed economism of Marxism (2009: 29). Stiegler does not look, however, to see how critical political economy may be evolving in the fields of international economics and politics in order to re-address the former from within critical thought. Rather, he emphasizes that the correct response to this absence in philosophical discourse consists in

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re-inventing Marxs critique of political economy through technology and a constitutive understanding of the technical support (2009: 21, 28, 31, 52). Despite the interest of Stieglers approach, this response avoids the important objects of political economy. Let me show, schematically, how and why. Stiegler holds to the Marxist theory of the tendential decline in the rate of profit. Marxs argument is well-known (see Marx 1976, Part 7, Chapter 25: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation). With an increase in fixed capital (technology), there is an increase in productivity (more units of x good produced per hour) and, over time, less hours of exploitable labor. Following the labor theory of value, Marx argues that, with fewer labor-hours, there is less exploitable surplus-value. Despite counter-acting measures (industrial reserve army, capitalist expansion, mergers, etc.), the rate of profit therefore decreases tendentially, until a systemic crisis either overthrows capitalist social relations or produces a new form of them. For Stiegler, twentieth-century capital accumulation (under conditions of the decline in the rate of profit) is increasingly organized through exploitation of the consumer (2009: 412). It is, therefore, less the producer than the consumer who is today alienated for the sake of capital accumulation. Indeed, Stiegler provocatively suggests that contemporary consumer society is made up of a generalized proletariat alienated from social determinations of life (2009: 48). This switch from the producer to the consumer is effected in the following terms. Capitalism counter-acts the decline in the rate of profit by relentlessly appropriating the contemporary externalization of (technical) memory. As a consequence, all forms of knowledge and memory become short-circuited by the contemporary generalisation of hypermnesic technologies (Stiegler 2009: 51). The nineteenth-century condition of the alienated laborer, unable to objectify himself in industrial technology, becomes that of the contemporary consumer expropriated from the possibility of digesting and synthesizing at leisure the market-led networks of discrete, digitalized memory (2009: 4551). For Stiegler, accordingly, the present financial and economic crises confirm that decline in the rate of profit has not been overcome (as neoliberals believe) and that the intense model of consumerism based on the hypermnesic technologies has critical limits: social disorientation and de-motivation (2009: 527). Against this general misery of spirit, technics becomes for Stiegler the major stake of political struggle (2009: 52). Marxist-inspired critique thereby regains its practical vocation as a critical philosophy of technology. It seeks to slow down and synthesize, for individual and collective process of individuation, the short-term horizon of contemporary technical supports. The (Greek) Platonic fear that memory is lost through its externalization upon supports has become, in other words, generalizable under conditions of cognitive capitalism (2009: 44). Much of this reconfiguration of Marx is dependent on Freudian libidinal economy. I will turn to it in the next section. First, I argue that

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this reading of our contemporary condition is too Greek and misses the requirements of political economy as a result. (It is also suspect from a Derridean perspective since it increasingly understands the pharmakon of the new technologies in ambivalent, rather than aporetic terms, but I leave this appraisal to a deconstructionist.) As is well-known, classical political economy emerges as an autonomous object of study with the separation of the economy from the social whole under processes of modernization. Land, labor, and capital become commodities identified by their price on the market. Economics breaks out of the discipline of moral philosophy and, under the initial name of political economy, it becomes the science that studies general tendencies of individual and collective supply and demand, within the institution of the market, on the basis of explicit anthropological assumptions (rational agency, utilitarian understanding of preferences, etc.). This science has traversed so far three epochs: neoclassical, Keynesian and Neo-Keynesian, and neoliberal.4 We are undergoing today a fourth moment: a synthesis of neoliberal and Keynesian economics at the global level which will strive to regulate an increasingly integratedand therefore increasingly unstablefinancial and commercial world economy. Now, for Stiegler, the question of technics is a Greek question because the relation between the human and the technical is explicitly posed by the Greeks, and any thinking on technology necessarily works within this Greek framework.5 Whatever one makes of this thesis technologically speaking, the question of the modern and contemporary autonomy of the economic from the social whole is nevertheless not Greek. With the end of the Cold War, with increasing trans-border activity of capital, goods, and, to a much lesser extent, labor, capital comes to determine the terms in which the allocation of scarce resources is made. Capital becomes, that is, general, and there is for the foreseeable future no alternative to it.6 All human beings live within the system of capital, whatever the particular node they live on, or conjunction they make with it. This system is highly unstable and dissymmetrical with immense imbalances in equality, natural resource distribution, financial assets, and terms of trade. With no alternative to capital, a revolutionary politics is no longer tenable. The ethical question driving political innovation has, consequently, to be worked out in terms of universally coordinated, but locally determined equilibriums between growth, sustainability, and equity. Given economic interdependence and the necessity of large transfers of technology and wealth from the developed world to the developing world in the context of climate change, effective financial regulation, economic coordination, and staggered development present the right strategies to tame the excesses of neoliberal global capitalism. Whether these strategies are feasible or not is at present an open question given recent government failure to regulate risk-taking and the evident dilemma, for developing countries, between the need for curtailed energy use, on the one hand, and industrialization and exit from poverty, on the other.

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Now, whatever our answers to these large questions, the political question todaywho are we?can only be appraised if the political economy of a globalized world becomes the direct object of critical attention. Only by foregrounding this object and its dilemmas will one have any chance of critical purchase on the political challenges ahead. In this context, Stieglers foregrounding of technology to promote a new critique of political economy is decisive in purpose and tone, important in detail, but misplaced in general intent. Stiegler is right to stress again the pertinence of the economy for critical thought after the supposed economism of Marxism (2009: 29). His technologically trained focus on the alienated consumer is important within the cognitive dimension of contemporary capitalism and debt-led growth. But, if he is concerned to show, as a philosopher, the general lines of a re-invented critical political economy, his object and attention need to be much larger than his Greek framework affords. Since there is no systemic alternative to capitalism at this moment in history, the question of political economy is one of whether effective regulation of capitalism is possible or not for the world as a whole. In this regard, I fear that Stieglers rhetorical logic of excess testifies to a straightforward shift of Marxist terminology (from producer to consumer) rather than a reinvention of Marxisms object (political economy). I say this despite the deep interest in understanding cognitive capitalism and consumerism through Stieglers categories. To take a few examples from only the last pages of Pour une nouvelle critique de lconomie politique: we are witnessing the extreme disenchantment of the world (2009: 88), a generalized proletariat [of consumption] (89), the disappearance of the middle classes (89), the destruction of social association (87), and lawless and faithless elites of capitalism (88). This logic of excess ignores the need today to make small distinctions, under the canopy of political regulation, within the world as a whole. The art of politics today is the prudential art of making critical distinctions within an economy of the same. Critical philosophy may wish to eschew such distinctions, but it does so at its practical peril when there is no alternative to capitalism, and when, just as importantly, the mid-term horizon is global coordination of a world economy under circumstances of economic imbalance, energy-crisis, and poverty. The political questions today are therefore: what kind of regulation of capitalism is ethically and empirically appropriate?; at what level is it appropriate?; and what instance should and can decide?. These are vast and difficult questions for philosophy, political science, and economics: they will occupy minds and bodies for a long time to come. It is my belief that, within these questions and their distinctions, an engaged philosophy (which Stiegler rightly advocates) has an important role to play. A generalized technological reading of Marx creates in this context important cultural work; but it does not give itself the terms of a contemporary critique of political economy.

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I end this section with one example of what kinds of matter need to be adopted, and how. There has been much talk recently of the regulation of financial offshore centers. Such talk, when coming from elite bodies in power, can serve as a smoke-screen to evade the major issue of imbalances within the world economy as a whole (particularly the northwestern problem of public and private debt). Worldwide coordinated investment in the real economy remains in this context an outstanding question. That said, the political regulation of these tax havens forms part of the ongoing struggle against international and national neoliberal practices, since it was financial offshore centers, starting with the Eurodollar markets, which helped promote capital mobility at the end of the 1970s.7 It is this capital mobility that ended the social democratic contract between capital and labor at the level of the nation-state and in the framework of the Bretton Woods international system of fixed exchange rates. It consequently paved the way for disembedded global capitalism, widespread debt-led growth, and, under worldwide conditions of financial contagion, massive social disorientation.8 The financial and economic crises of 200709 resulted from de-regulation of domestic and global assets (from mortgages to complex financial tools like swaps and derivatives). This de-regulation enabled financial capital accumulation from the 1970s onwards. It is now generally accepted that 60 percent of profits in the corporate sector have been finance-based in the last ten years (Brenner 2006: 293). To regulate offshore accounts in this context is therefore ideologically and structurally crucial for the political adoption of contemporary capitalism. For, owners of these accounts have fed the recent spiral of risk-taking (a half of global capital is estimated to lie in such accounts!), but they have continued to refuse the social costs of (their) national public life. The object of concern for critical political economy is consequently less the credit-card-consumer (and profits based on the capitalization of his or her external memory supports) than effective regulation of their economic causes. That said, how, in todays world economy, can one regulate these capital accounts? This is the urgent political question. To stop the businesses of nations moving large amounts of their capital offshore to avoid domestic taxation suggests either the necessity of global taxation or renewed domestic regulation of capital outflow (as in the 1960s and 1970s in embedded liberal states). The political cosmopolitan responseglobal regulations of all international capital flowsis certainly the best response theoretically since capital competition thrives on exceptions to legal norms. It is however institutionally impractical given the weak status of international rule. Nation-state fiscal policy is practical since it can block capital displacement to more competitive national markets. National monetary policy requires, however, clear leadership, democratic example, and effective bureaucratic surveillance (and in the case of the EU it is already not possible given the monetary sovereignty of the European Central Bank). And so forth. My point is this.

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These kinds of dilemmas immediately face any progressive thinking of political economy today: they require careful ethical and empirical exposition before one can make general critical claims. The regulation of financial offshore centers is actually one of the more simple problems of global cooperation to solve, although its structural effects will be deep concerning finance-led growth. How much more conceptual and empirical thinking is needed to work out market and government motivation for effective climate change mitigation; or to work out long-term the global imbalance between Chinese savings and US debt . . . Regarding these political dilemmas concerning effective regulation of global capital flows, I remain unconvinced that Stieglers philosophico-technical reading of the economy can (1) properly delimit the economic problems that need to be adopted; and (2) tease out the differences of approach required to adopt contemporary economic conditions effectively. Under the general conditions of a capitalist world economy, however, these differences constitute the very condition of more local social re-motivation (Stieglers very concern). Economic alienation from social life should consequently not be thought within the Greek framework of technology (however differentiated this framework is). Dis-embedded global capitalism requires a new international political theory of legitimate and effective regulation. The above economic alienation includes the convergence between consumerism and the logic of the market and the importance of adopting the new media and informational economies. Of these Stiegler speaks with originality and impressive intellectual force. However, technical supportsand their lack of present political adoptiondo not fundamentally determine our lack of a we. To argue so runs the risk of unilateral technological determinism. And this form of determinism ends up, ironically, missing its political end.

STIEgLER And FREUd: SUBLIMATIOn And dE-SUBLIMATIOn

In a move that has become a trait of critical French philosophy, Bernard Stiegler moves to Freudian libidinal economy to underpin his analysis of contemporary capitalism, specifically the displacement of alienation from the producer to the consumer. As we saw above in his general re-reading of Marx, cognitive capitalism distinguishes itself from previous capitalist forms through the convergence between objects of the mind and the short-term logic of the market. This convergence creates the general crisis of memory and poverty of spirit that marks our time. As is now clear, the convergence and its consequences call for a critico-technological response, which Stiegler advances through his re-writing of the German and French phenomenological traditions in the contemporary context of the new media (the hyperindustrial support). Through this convergence, capitalisms capture of energy for production and consumption becomes increasingly invasive and unilateral. Since human memory lies in the technical support, and since we temporalize ourselves from out of this support, our contemporary

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industrial condition affects the whole mindbody complex of the human (Stieglers current term for this is organology). Given, however, the rules of capital accumulation, decline in the rate of profit, and shortterm profit-motivation, cognitive capitalism so captures the energy of the consumer that it blocks the sublimating processes of energy that constitute, for depth psychology, the condition of work, art, family, love, and the social bond in general. Hence the importance of Freud to Stiegler, but, equally, the need to inscribe Freuds meta-psychological model of egosuperegoid within the technical history of tertiary memory, retention, and protention. For Stiegler, cognitive capitalism increasingly reduces desire to its constituent drives. Stiegler calls this reduction negative sublimation (2006a: 1638, 1734). It implies the break up of desire into its constituent elements of aggregation (the principle of life) and destruction (the death drive). This is a complex step in his technological critique of capitalism, and I do not have space here to develop it in full. I am also unsure that I could do so without a much deeper rehearsal of the Freudian problematic. Suffice it to say the following for my own argument. I refer to Pour une nouvelle critique de lconomie politique and Prendre soin de la jeunesse et des gnrations (Stiegler 2009, 2008a). Under the negentropic logic of capitalist profit and its use of the contemporary technologies, it is the young consumer who is targeted. Due to this targeting, s/he is losing her/his primary identifications. Hypermnesic technical supports (from television, through CDs to the Internet, all soon in the one support of the mobile phone) confuse generational roles and differences and are gradually replacing the care of parenthood, and its attendant authority and role-modeling, with a violent disorder of dispersed identifications without meaning or rhythm. This replacement and confusion is leadingamong the younger generations that temporalize out of the tertiary memory of the new technologiesto disintegration of the family intergenerational model, disaffection, and disindividuation. These generations lackin depth psychological termsa structuring superego to determine in their psychological apparatus the reality principle and conscience and, thereby, open up a human understanding of, and path to, law and justice. In other words, for Stiegler, cognitive capitalism attempts to control the id (2008a: 25) and displace primary identifications with our ascendants (2008a: 25, 31, 83) towards a new libidinal economy of commodity fetishism. The human apparatus (technico-psychological from the beginning given ephiphylogenesis) is fundamentally threatened. Now, for Stiegler, this threat is radically new within the technical history of memory. The legacy of transgenerational identifications between the unconscious and conscious (mediated by our superego) is today undermined by the specifically psychological nature of the new psychotechnologies (2008a: 31). As Stiegler neatly puts it, Foucauldian biopower is being supplemented by this new psychopower of normalization (2008a: 31). With this replacement of the superego, desire is broken down into

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its primary constituents: the principle of life, on the one hand, and the death drive, on the other. Stieglers negative sublimation focuses on the death drive: the psychopower of the new technologies destroys desire (2008a: 47) and, with the confusion of generations leads to nihilism (2008a: 47, 69, 79; compare also Stiegler 2006: 656: the over-turning of the order of generations [. . .] comes at the moment of [. . .] of the revelation of economic vanity, of increasingly despairing existences). Without the primary identifications with their parents, the young generations are also unable to envisage change since such identifications create the psychical framework within which we can alter our identities (2008a: 117). When the technical support becomes hyper-industrial, and cognitive capitalism comes to conjoin mind and matter, the concomitant displacements of desire risk, in other words, the very decomposition of desire. As a result, desire no longer projects itself out as the fulfillment of itself as a non-existent justice (to come).9 Due to this technological invasion of the id, public reason radically regresses (2008a: 47). What is required in response, for Stiegler, is a politics of adoption of our new technological environment that is centered on a re-founding of public education (2008a: 13743). The political struggle against cognitive capitalism becomes one of educating youth so that the young can begin to synthesize the deep attention-span of learning and critical reflection with the market-led hyper-attention of zapping (2008a: 13743). This politics of education would prevent present technological sophists from destroying the legacy of spirit (unconscious and conscious retention/protention), return the technological pharmakon to its proper ambivalence, and open up the future. As Stiegler rightly argues in the context of the Internet, we need to envisage new processes of transindividuation (2008a: 158). This overall argument on psychopower is dynamic, imaginative, and singular in its use of the French legacy of Freud. I will briefly pose some questions that rhyme with my larger observations concerning his re-writing of Marx. The question is again one of the specific autonomy of the domain under technological consideration and the political consequences of losing this autonomy theoretically. Just as Stiegler gives us a technological reading of political economy, so he also gives a technological reading of libidinal economy. (They are obviously one and the same reading given his synthesis of both to describe the specificity of cognitive capitalism; I have broken them down here for analytical purposes.) Since the 1990s Stiegler re-thinks the Freudian problematic through technics (see Stiegler 1996b). Technics constitutes the condition of sexuality qua desire. This critique of Freud inscribes the whole of the psychical apparatus within the technical history of epiphylogenesis. It is clear that human sexuality has both evolved and is altered through technical developments. Stiegler is right to insist, with the paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan and Gilles Simondon, that hominization is a technical process of evolution and psychic and collective individuation. That said, sexuality is not reducible to

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technics. Human sexuality, together with the problematic of desire that it underpins, both transcends technological determination and is itself dependent on many variables. There are depth psychological constants (for example, the Oedipus complex) that determine the transgenerational legacy of the id beyond technical evolution. To argue otherwise (as Stiegler does; see 1996b) is not to engage with the autonomy of the depth psychological. What with the neurosciences penetration into the mindbody complex, we are probably only now beginning to understand this autonomy and multi-causality. Stiegler is therefore correct, following Herbert Marcuse, to place technics within the evolution of sexuality and the vagaries of desire. There would be no Oedipus complex, specific to human animals, without the technological evolution of the human. But he goes too far when he makes the relation between technics and desire one of unilateral determination. The above argument that the psychotechnologies are attempting to control the id, if not the psychical apparatus in general (2009: 31), is one consequence of this unilateral determination. This is another technologically determinist judgment. It makes a background condition (technology) into a radical determination of the psychic apparatus as a whole. Such determinism tempts Stiegler into arguing for a general crisis of spirit at the moment of cognitive capitalism. Let me recall in this context that, for Freud, sublimation (the turning of desire into law) constitutes a complex process that is dependent on many contingent factors. In distinction to all other animals, humans sublimate because they are diphasic: we undergo the latency period and, therefore, pubertydue, without doubt, to our technological specificity. As a result of this diphasic nature, the human animal turns its love of its protectors into an identification that, with the reversals of puberty, comes to structure and occupy the space of the superego. Identifying with our parents (and their parents, etc.) or taking distance from them constitutes, from the beginning, a complex process of love and hate that may lead, from puberty onwards, to too rigid a superego or too dissipated a one (or rather, to variations in-between). Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that it is very difficult to generalize with regard to this development. The absence of identifiable, recurrent, and protecting love can indeed create an uncoordinated psyche. It leads, in this case, to other forms of parental identification that are always ongoing in the infantile years precisely because the id transcends technically organized memory. Until the nuclear family is literally dissolved and not replaced by another form of social organization, we cannot consequently speak of a new generation that has lost its primary identifications and, therefore, following the Freudian logic of sublimation, lost a sense of the future, of law, and of justice. There are too many variables at play within the depth psychological dynamic of infantile protection and care for Stiegler to be so clear. Under new conditions of technology, one must be proactive and prudently regulate Internet flows (regarding collective security, obscenity, etc.). One must, however, wait to see what new forms of parenthood adopt the hyperindustrial support and what new

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forms of sublimation will come to structure the coming generations sense of conscience. These new forms may be weaker than either traditional or modern forms of the close social bond. But this cannot be a cause of excessive concernunless this polemical pitch is judged to be the right means to attract political concern and change public policy (and even here, I am unsure that it is). Ontologically speaking, these forms may lead to more innovative and creative behavior as much as to destructive and self-destructive behavior. I am arguing that we cannot know at this very early stage of our hyperindustrial age, although Stiegler is nevertheless right to call for critical synthesis. The political adoption of the hyperindustrial support will take timeas did monotheism to adopt non-orthographic writing and the social contract to adopt the alphabetical word. The above uncertainty regarding the direction of the contemporary technologyhuman symbiosis constitutes, in Stieglers terms, the ambivalence of technology. In Freudian terms, it is more simply the complexity of the human mindbody complex (on these themes, see Beardsworth 1996b). In these processes there is a constant dialectic between negative and positive sublimation: here, the reduction of law to capitalism on the one hand, and the embedding of capitalism within artistic and legal forms on the other. Stiegler cuts the knot of this ambivalence too quickly, or rather, generalizes too fast from almost exclusively French examples of de-sublimation (see Stiegler 2008a, esp. on the advertising techniques of Canal J.). Regarding Freud, I would argue, in sum, that Stiegler gives a strong, original reading of contemporary affective life through the bridging of technology and the psyche. Conversely, it is a technological re-reading of Freud that flattens out the vagaries of human affect and human conscience, preventing a nuanced, comparative account of the relation between contemporary consumerism and normative thought and behavior. As a result, public education may be posited too quickly by Stiegler as the right political response. This is not to deny the need for change in public education: far from it. The Internet clearly poses a problem. As the contemporary teacher knows, Internet-surfing produces a form of consciousness that is adept at copy and paste, but finds synthesis and judgment increasingly difficult. Stieglers politics of critical reflection, with its emphasis on the vital role of education, is in this sense persuasive. That said, I would wish to keep a sense of global perspective. As is well-known, use of the Internet was crucial to the election of Barack Obama: it helped create a cultural transformation that proved strong enough to shift the American political landscape to the center. The use of mobile phones has transformed the electoral process in West Africa. The Internet is, in other words, already highly creative politically. Education must certainly help to supplement this emerging creativity with the art of judgment. Obamas domestic fate regarding healthcare reform since the campaign has shown, at the same time, how powerful the traditional media remain in shaping political perception and interests.

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Progressive liberal politics in one of the most technologically savvy of countries depends as much today on restructuring the power-bases of the traditional media as it does on providing an education in response to capitalist-led technological transformation of human memory. Stiegler would not disagree with this last point. As I said at the beginning of this paper, his political voluntarism was in the 1990s singular on the French theoretical continent. It means, to my mind, however, that philosophico-political reflection should consider the political adoption of technology at several levels of analysis and of policy, in a spirit of prudence, and with a sense of intellectual limits.

COnCLUSIOn
I have addressed the work of Stiegler through the names of Marx and Freud. In doing so, I have attempted to suggest that his work goes too quickly over what puts a break on the destructive side to capitalism. The future political project of democracy is, without doubt, to embed capitalism at the world level. And democratic freedom means that one must renounce gratifying ones immediate desires. This means political institution and self-restraint. Stiegler focuses rightly, and sometimes brilliantly, on the urgency of the political today, and on the importance of a political adoption of contemporary forms of industry within a general intellectual framework of retentional finitude. This latter framework of analysis is theoretically innovative and disciplinarily rich. Not to analyze the forms of institutional change at the appropriate level and not to give credit to the specificities of sublimation within capitalism tend, however, to make capitalisms field and dynamic too uniform, and Stieglers responses to it too unilateral and too general (if not, too French). As a result, his theoretical world turns too quickly, at the precise moment when a slower speed and a finer set of distinctions are needed. Not that there is not enormous danger in our present world, not that a sense of urgency is not vital. Our description of it requires, however, theoretical terms that exposit it in its complexity so that theory can provide, precisely, the occasion for suitable political adoption and decision.

ACknOwLEdgMEnTS
The original version of this article was made in the context of a roundtable with Bernard Stiegler, organized by Stephen Barker at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature 30th Anniversary Conference (June 2006, Freiburg University). A clear sense of the importance of political economy came out of our exchange. Stieglers recent Pour une nouvelle critique de lconomie politique (2009) constitutes, in part, an implicit response to my remarks, and I have had occasion to consider it in this revised version of my comments. I am indebted to the general editors and to the guest editor of this special issue of Cultural Politics on Bernard Stiegler for this opportunity. I am also very grateful to the editors and to an anonymous reviewer for their suggestive comments on earlier drafts.

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nOTES
1. See particularly Stiegler (1996a), chapters 2 and 3, Gense de la dsorientation (pp. 83116) and Lindustrialisation de la mmoire (pp. 119216). 2. This thesis, immanent to Stieglers work as a whole, comes to the fore in two recent volumes: Mcrance et Discrdit 1: La dcadence des dmocraties industrielles (2004) and Mcrance et Discrdit 2: Les socits incontrlables dindividus dsaffects (2006a). 3. The most virulent critique of global capitalism in these terms is to be found in Stiegler (2006b). 4. Out of an increasingly specialist literature on global political economy, see the important works by Eichengreen (1996), Bryant (1989), and Gilpin (2001). 5. This is one of the major theses of La technique et le temps as a whole, and is formulated in volume 1. 6. The problems of the planets ecosystem do not pose, for example, a radical challenge to the system of capitalism (allocation of resources under the principles of capital accumulation) at this stage of history. They demand major re-inflections, one which the market institution, together with appropriate regulatory bodies at public and private levels, will adapt to and put in place (carbon cap-and-trade and clean development mechanisms being the two major innovations that await global dissemination). Whether such adaptation is ecologically too late is not something that I have the technical knowledge to predict. These questions are of course huge and all-determining for future generations. Stieglers work on global capitalism has not focused on them, however. 7. I am grateful to my friend and colleague, Peter Hgel, for underscoring this point to me and for directing me to further literature. 8. On embedded capitalism, see Karl Polanyis now notorious The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944). On the move from embedded capitalism (the post World War Two Keynesian contract between labor and capital in the advanced democratic states) to unregulated or disembedded capitalism, see Desai (2002). For a contemporary reflection on the passage from unregulated global capitalism to global embedded capitalism, see Ruggie (2004). For post-1970s debt-led growth, see Brenner (2002, 2006) and Colin Crouchs magisterial Privatised Keynesianism: an unacknowledged policy regime (2009). 9. After recasting the Derridean trace in terms of tertiary retention, Stiegler here re-amalgamates his theory of technology with the Derridean and Levinasian themes of radical alterity qua justice. The re-amalgamation constitutes a powerful theoretical move based on the Lacanian problematic of desire. It lies at odds, however, with Stieglers initial concern to give a material history to the trace through the concept of tertiary memoryunless Stiegler makes more distinction within his own philosophy between the hyperethical and political adoption.

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