From Nicholas Carr to Plato/From pharmacology to organology

7/30/2019 From Nicholas Carr to Plato/From pharmacology to organology

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Pharmakon.fr

Seminar 21-02-2012First class

From Nicholas Carr to PlatoFrom pharmacology to organology

(Translated by Terence Blake)

Reminder concerning last year

Last year we situated this seminar in the context of theindustrialisation of tertiary retentions (R3) so that the questionbecame, as query, via search engines or heuristic machines, anobject of economic exploitation founded on a new organology.

This organology will be the object of our research this year, andas such we will found it on a hermeneia of Plato, who we will

read on the basis of

1. the course on pharmakon.fr consecrated to the Republic,i.e. for this year to the Phaedrus (next year's course willbe entitled Republic 2),

2. the questions that Nicholas Carr poses in THE SHALLOWS

A few words on this book: Carr poses the problem ofintellectual technologies such that, in practicing them, he

experiences what in TAKING CARE I described as a diseconomyof attention, which is equally a libidinal diseconomy (but Carrdoes not see that).In doing this,

1. he refers to the Phaedrus, as well as to certaincommentators on Plato, in particular to Havelock and Ong,

2. he mobilises the new resources provided by the

neurosciences of reading to understand what the literalpharmakon does not only to the psychic apparatus, but to


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its cerebral support (and in passing he refers to Freud'sOutline of a Scientific Psychology, written in 1895, to whichwe will evidently return).

What Alain Giffard (I have sent you a text by him, which we willof course come back to later) has shown is that this double-sided economy of attention, of which Google is the principalrepresentative and which is thus also a diseconomy ofattention, is not the object, in THE SHALLOWS, of apharmacological approach: the book does not present itself as aresearch on the possibilities of elaborating a therapeutics of thispharmakon that is the digital writing constituted by theindustrial R3s of our time.

I insist here with you on the thesis that I am advancing hereonly in passing: the digital is the latest form of writing it ispart of the process of grammatisation and it is by taking upagain the question of writing (and of reading) at its root thatone can question the industrial R3.

Finally, this year I would like to show how and why apharmacolgy must be founded on a general organology: weshall see that this question can be posed on the basis of Plato

himself, and why here Nicholas Carr constitutes a valuableresource.

To carry out this programme during the next 8 classes,

1. we shall return to the Phaedrus and the stakes of what iselaborated there, and which will be fully deployed in theRepublic, namely the dialectic,

2. next we will read Nicholas Carr himself,

3. we will go further into these questions with Jacob vonUexkll: A Foray into the Worlds of Animals andHumans, and Bowlby Attachment and Loss, Winnicott,Freud and diverse other references.

We shall also see that Carr's approach lacks an inscription in thegeneral context of the industries of the capture of attentionwhich arose in the 20th Century. Their psychopathology, studiedby Zimmerman and Christakis, whose work is currently beingtaken up in various ways, for example in France with MichelDesmurget, must be included in our reflection.


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Now, for this class and no doubt for the next one, let us returnto Plato and to the end of the dialogue of the Phaedrus.

*

After Socrates emphasizes that he is in a delirium becauseof Phaedrus, which, he says, gives to his ideas a poetic cast,the dialogue turns to Lysias and his written discourse incomparison to that of Socrates.

Phaedrus informs us that in Athens at the end of the 5thCentury B.C., a politician (politikon) has accused Lysias ofbeing a logographon, a speech-writer or discourse-

monger.

A long exchange then takes place between Socrates andPhaedrus over the vices and the virtues of the practice ofwriting in the service of the preparation in advance ofwritten discourses, fruits of logography.

However, it must be emphasized here for Socrates, there canbe dignity in writing or in being a writer: speech

writers can write in vain, but some of them write advisedly,and this is why one must stipulate:

1. that the mere fact of writing speeches is notshameful (258d), and that the question is to knowwhat distinguishes writing well and writing badly(tou kalos te kai m graphein).

2. Further, Socrates adds that the question concerningwriting bears on speech equally:

Ugliness consists in not speaking (legein), in not writing (graphein)well. 258d.

On the other hand, Socrates does not confuse logographs andwriters, i.e. those who are worthy to write (axios einaisuggraphein).

In other words, if it is true that writing is apharmakon,


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. on the one hand speech is a pharmakon too to acertain extent (though differently from writing, and we willtry to understand how and why)

. on the other hand this pharmakon can and must bepositively practiced: we have to do here with a questionoftherapeutics. And it is precisely thus that the questionof thepharmakon, which comes after these considerations,is introduced.

I emphasize these points because a certain reception ofPlato'sPharmacyhas consisted in posing that Plato condemns writing.I myself for a long time considered that as established. Andmany readers of Derrida did the same including no doubtDerrida himself. But that is not really what happens. This iswhat Henry Joly maintains in Le renversement platonicien, aswell as Vicaire and others. And this is also the position that EricHavelock defends in Preface to Plato, where he goes muchfarther as Nicholas Carr insists, but according to me, and Ithink that Alain Giffard shares this point of view, withoutdrawing all the conclusions since Havelock, like Walter Ong,the author of Orality and literacy, the technologizing of theworld, sees in Plato a critique of poetry i.e. of the oral tradition,

and

a plea in favour of the new technology of writing, (88)

Further I myself maintained in last year's course devoted to theSymposium that Plato, between Meno and Phaedrus,breaks with the tragic age where poetry constitutes amnemotechnic and thus a hypomnsis which is supposed togive access to an anamnsis and when Socrates ironises over

the tekhn of the rhapsode Ion (dans Ion), these questions arealready in play.

The points of view of Havelock and Ong are in total oppositionto Derrida's reading of Plato. In fact I think that this subject isless clear than Carr implies, and that the critique of the oraltradition is not in itself a plea in favour of writing : it is inboth cases the calling into question of tekhn i.e. ofhypomnsis as against anamnsis, which is essentiallyimmunised.


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On the other hand, I tried to show last year and again this yearthat what is at stake here is the passage from a tragic, (i.e.also mystagogic) society,, to a metaphysical society, suchthat it poses in principle the possibility and the necessity of

breaking with mysteries and with stories in favour of ageneralisation of the teaching of all things, including of virtue,which radicaly contradicts the position of Socrates.

After this, it is not a question of pleading for the new technologyof writing against poetry, but of giving a new sense toanamnsis, and of opposing it to hypomnsis, poetryjust as much as writing proceeding, according to Plato,from hypomnsis, i.e. from tekhn. And tekhn must itselfbe put under the control of the dialectic, i.e.: of a logoswhich owes nothing to this tekhn but which, in providing itwith criteria which precede this technicity, i.e. thispharmacological condition, constitutes in a way itstherapeutic a priori.

I will try to show here:

. that there is no a priori therapeutic;

. that the philosopher cannot be a therapist, and that hemust be a pharmacologist;

. that as a citizen he is nevertheless a prescriber oftherapeutics, and that in this context he can and must puthis pharmacological critiques in the service public debateand of political life insofar as it consists essentially inproducing such therapeutics as are formalised by positivelaw and by rational sciences (which also think de jure,

i.e. in passing from fact to right) because conditioned by therespect of the criterium which, as experience of aletheia,assembles all the disciplines that form what is called,because of the very possibility of this assembly, universalknowledge.

Last year, in this seminar, I defended the thesis that all thesequestions arise in the context of a grammatisation of theGreek world. This is what Walter Ong calls thetechnologisation of the world. And I maintained that it is asa play of R3 that induces a new interplay between R1


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and R2 that writing brings to emergence the question ofaletheia as ultimate criterium in those operations ofselections that retentions and protentions always are the projection of a common horizon of protentions being

the fundamental question of the polis insofar that, as siteofGeschichte and ofHistorie, which Heidegger underlines in hisIntroduction to metaphysics, it has also become the locus ofdecision, i.e. ofkrisis and ofkrinein.

(It is because this critical dimension, in the historical sensewhich also designates a new and extraordinary modality ofpsychosocial individuation, is essential to this temporalitythat is historical society, that the moratorium on critiqueimposed by the PS will have been a huge caprice andone which concerns Deleuze just as much as Derrida.

To get rid of the question of critique, et reduce the concept ofcrisis to its ordinary acception so appreciated by themedia, is also to get rid of the question of krineininsofar as it is characteristic of historical time. Also, it isto pose as acquired the end of history I am thinkinghere of course of the debate opened on the basis of FrancisFukuyama's work. To contest Fukuyama's thesis, is thus to

reevaluate radically the very concept ofkrisis. And to thisday that remains to be done.)

In this seminar, I would like to revisit all these questions but inintegrating, in the wake of Carr's book, The Shallows, thequestion ofpsychagogy as it has been constituted in our timeas the stake of a neuropwer and neuropolitics and in thecontext of an epistemic danger: neurocentrism. For in fact, welive in an epoch of the digital R3, which constitutes an

industrialpharmakon, and which is even at the heart ofindustrial development, and of the neurosciences suchas they open multiple and eminently pharmacologicalpossibilities, including those of a neuropower which canconstitute diverse types of therapeutics or of neglect.

(It is in this context that we should analyse the currentcontroversy over autism, and which opposes neurosciencesand psychanalysis which we may come back to later).


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But we are also going to see that it is possible to read thePhaedrus and the Republic from thispoint of view. Thiswill lead us to the necessity of apprehendingpharmacology on the basis of a general organology

where the cerebral organ of the CNS poses new questionswhich permit us also to reread Derrida's questionsdifferently perhaps than Derrida himself did.

This is also a way for me to tie in with my book Taking Care andwith the debate that I had opened with Foucault. In effect inthat work I underlined that the question of biopower and ofbiopolitics had to be enriched and transformed by integratingthe constitution of a psychopower and of a noopolitics suchas those the psychotechnologies, which became generalisedduring the 20th Century with the cultural industries and themass media, will have put at the heart of consumerism and soof capitalism, itself become from this fact intrinsically pulsional.

So it is neuropower and neuropolitics which tie these twoquestions together in that precisely we have seen that theymust be approached from both an organological and apharmacological point of view.

*

In this double question of pharmacology and of therapeutics, inthis dialogue as in the Gorgias, the stake is, precisely in thepassage that we are commenting, the relation to rhetoric but to which from now on must be opposed dialectics.

So far, I would say that we can find ourselves more or less inagreement with Plato: I believe in effect that we must

distinguish between practices of the pharmakon such asthose that exploit its toxic side, i.e.which lead for example tothe confusion of good and evil, which for us consists ineffectuating short-circuits in the TI (transindividuation,and others which, on the contrary, take care of theirinterlocutor.

There can be short-circuits in the TI only because a psychicindividuation is always a collective individuation. We could saythat individuation is good, and disindividuation is bad itbeing understood tnat disindividuation is that which cuts


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psychic individuation from collective individuation (this is whatSocrates says in the Gorgias): this is how one could attempt topose the question of good and evil differently. And we will returnto it no doubt. But we must add that there is a necessity for

disindividuation and that all this must be thought in the heartof a diffrance with an a where disindividuation can be amoment of individuation: such is always the pharmacologicalpoint of view where the poles which seem to be opposed inreality are ceaselessly composed. I spoke about this in my lastbook, and to reply to a question from Ludoovic Duhem. I alsospoke about it in Pharmacology of the question.

In the following passage of the dialogue of the Phaedrus, I canno longer agree with the progesssion of Plato's reasoning, whenhe posits that to practice writing, one must first haveestablished the truth of what will then be written, after thisestablishing. This is what Socratessays in 259e:

Does not the excellence of a discourse suppose (uparkhein), in thespirit of he who speaks, the knowledge of the truth about the questionto be dealt with ?

But consequently, that signifies as well that truth and its

consideration precede speech itself, if it is true that thequestion which concerns writing concerns equally speech.

The whole difficulty is there: it is thus that anamnesis isopposed to hypomnesis, and it is here that I consider thatPlato errs.

Here one must also speak of psychagogy. What is at stakehere? This is a question that we will pose perhaps to Ed Cohenby way of Foucault. Be that as it may, let us say now that it is to

be examined in terms of the question of the relationbetween R1, 2 and 3.


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Pharmakon.fr

Seminar 05-04-2012Second class


Reminders

The context is as for last year the industrialisaiton of R3s(tertiary retentions), the appearance of heuristic machines,automatisation and the short-circuits that it can engender.

The problem posed by Nicholas Carr is that of the negativelypharmacological character of the DR3 (digital tertiaryretention, but, as Alain Giffard emphasizes in the text that Idistributed, without envisaging a positivity of this pharmacology.

We aim on the contrary in this seminar to define the axioms andthe conditions of a pharmacological critique which, in a givenretentional situation, would permit us to project the paths of apositive pharmacology opening the therapeutic possibilities

of an epoch, i.e.: permitting us to accomplish what I have calledthe double epokhal redoubling i.e. to treat the short-circuits(the proceses of disindividuation), which are technologicalshocks, to turn them into new long circuits of TI(transindividuation), i.e. into heuristic shocks.

Such a pharmacology must be founded on a general organologywhich itself must be constituted in our time in the newneuroscientic context where it has become apparent that this

central organ, the brain, which is central because it is the organof all the organs, which remains to this day the indispensableand irreplacable organ of the organism, the organ of itsindividuation, in the case of the human brain, this organ of all theorgans thus constitutes above all a writing surface, a sort ofkhra; and we shall see with Maryanne Wolf how its thought,according to her, is constituted by the way in which in a sensethe brain writes and reads itself by projecting itself inartificial retentional organs by introjecting and projecting

tertiary retentions which constitute in a sense the carpet of R2s,or rather, the warp and woof on which these R2s constitutethe motifs, all of which form the fabric not only of the cerebral


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organ, but of the soul (and it is perhaps in this sense that weshould interpret certain consideraitons of the neurobiologist JDVincent, author ofBiologie des passions).

*

That the R3s (tertiary retentions) are the condition of thought,and in particular the LR3 (literal tertiary retention) as conditionofGreek thought (which Vernant highlighted in other terms), andso, ofWestern thought, i.e. of philosophy, this is what WalterOng affirmed in 1983 in the following terms:

In 2007, Maryanne Wolf takes up this subject from aneurophysiological point of view, and she does so by asking if theDR3 (digital tertiary retention) does not constitute in our time

something like our own proper destiny, like the proper orimproper destiny of our thought, that will have to be thoughtasand by means ofa new way of thinking (precisely in what I callthe DER (double epokhal redoubling), but with the very specificquestion of an increasing speed of the DR3, cf Etats de choc, aninvention which will itself transform not only humanconsciousness but also the unconscious, which it is perhapsdifficult to call simply human, propagating swarms of equally newsorts of unconsciousness.

Enquiring about what I call here the DR3 (digital tertiary retention),and that she calls the digital, she tries to establish a


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pharmcological balance-sheet, as we shall see,

. in posing that such a change modifies circuits, and moreprecisely destroys previous circuits,. asking what must be preserved of previous circuits and

how.

Ong does not pose this question in exactly these terms in 1983:speaking of computers, he does not see what Wolf will, namelythat their practice can and in a certain way must lead to theshort-circuiting of previously formed circuits :

Ong did not see that this pocket calculator can in effect createshort circuits (SCs), just as writing in Plato's time could create SCs what Socrates and Plato say is not just a fantasm. Carr, unlikeWalter Ong, feels it however, and in a way in both body and soul.

This is what we want to reinterpret here with Wolf, and from this

point of view, the subject of this seminar will be the relationbetween R3s and the neurosciences, on the basis of which Iwould like to reopen the dossier that Walter Ong describes inthese terms:


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This is for me precisely the work of the DER and of the criticaltransition which is constituted by it. These terms are those of a

pharmacology of the double epokhal redoubling, and makePlato and through him the whole of philosophy just such aredoubling of the shock of writing by a counter-shock -which is also at the heart of the speculativeproposition that isdiscussed in Etats de choc (but I will not talk to you here aboutHegel and his Phenomenology of Mind even though it alreadysketches out the questions that I raise with the R3s).

Ong poses these problems along with Havelock, and yet he does

not take into account the question of loss, as it is raised byWolf and Carr who raise it differently, as for Carr, there is noway out of this loss, which is not the case for Wolf.

*

Aspects of all these questions emerge in Phaedrus, via the theme ofmemory, which itself comes from the question of anamnesis whichappeared in Meno.

The way Plato will attempt to resolve the paradox he iscaught in namely that the soul having lost its memory, thismemory has become pharmacological, but, as such does notconstitute a veritable memory will consist in forging a newconception of dia-logic which will become dialectic in a newsense, i.e.: as dialectic put in the service of thesynchronisation of statements, and of the reduction ofdiachronicity, that is to say of their plurivocity and of theirambiguity.

So this dialectic will be defined as being that which precedeswriting de jure however if we follow the analyses of Maryanne


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Wolf, that which constitutes the very possibility of such adialectic, is precisely that the cerebral organ which supportsthe soul (i.e. for us after Freud the psychic apparatus) is putinto form and in a sense PRE-INDIVIDUATED by the formationin it of what MW calls a circuitry which introjects the

circuits that constitute those R3s that are for exampleletters.

You are perhaps going to object that I am naturalising Derrida'sconcept of writing in the sense it seems to me that GeoffreyBennington for example could accuse me of this, and I would replyto such an objection: absolutely not! what I am speaking abouthere is not Derrida's architrace of course. However it certainly is astate of the elementary supplementarity in which consists

technical life, which is in no way a naturalisation of the trace, inthis case by neurophysiology, since it is on the contrary anartefactualisation of the brain, which is the only way toovercome the neurocentric point of view of behaviourismand to revisit Freudian thought and go a few steps beyondFreud but in recommencing from his own first steps,notably those contained in the outline of 1895.

However let us return to Plato: he does not reject writing, hewants to domesticate it by means of the dialectic, which is thusnot always already constituted by it. What I maintain here is thaton the contrary such a dialectic is always already scripturary, thatis to say supplementary: it does not proceed from being as itdefines itself in opposition to becoming. And here I am following inDerrida's wake. But

. on the one hand this supplementarity is not simply the architrace,but in fact a positively analysable trace, notably in our time in termsof the effects it has on the organ of all organs that is the brain,

which serves as physiological support for the psychic apparatus byinteriorising the technical and the social apparatuses, and only onthis condition,

. and on the other hand, I maintain while still adhering to Derrida'sheritage that what Plato wants here, i.e. to practice the

pharmakonpositively, that is to say to make the difference inthe diffrance between toxic and curative practices of thispharmakon, and without opposing these differences, we cannot

do away with them, even if it is precisely inversely to Plato bymaking pharmacology and the constant risk of its toxicity andthe ever possible reversal of all curativity into intoxication


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an irreducible condition, i.e.: where it is not a question ofreducing and of sublimating its negativity, but of reversing iteach time it is possible, by making of the defaulta necessity,and that by assemblages emerging in what I call the DER (doubleepokhal redoubling).

Plato denies this irreducibility of the pharmakon,, and that iswhy I do not believe, like Havelock and Ong, that

Plato pleads in favour of the new technology of writing

as Nicholas Carr says, paraphrasing them.

What Plato wants is to reappropriate anamnsis as it was whenit was the power and the knowledge of the poets, i.e. of the

oral tradition, which is in reality a tragic traditionoralising the retentional base of a society that was alreadyto a large extent literalised, in particular in the time of thePresocratics. Plato wants to reappropriate anamnsis then to theprofit of the dialecticians that philosophers are or shouldbe, the true philosophers, those who should direct thepoliteia, andin the aim of reducing the tekhn of the poets as well asthat of the sophists and of the artists: the goal is to breakwith the tragic, that is to say the pharmacological, age.

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Pharmakon.fr

Seminar 05-04-2012Second class (part 2)


It is necessary to discuss all these suggestions in terms R1, 2 and3 (primary, secondary, and tertiary retentions), but also in terms ofCR2, CP2, (collective secondary retentions and protentions), etc.

Ong describes grammatisation such as it comes to prevail in theGreek world (and begins much earlier) and continues with theindustrial R3s of our time:

The LR3 (literal tertiary retention) produces a new type of CR2and as well of PR2 (collective and psychic secondary retentions),but it also and first of all produces, in Socrates' opinion, SCs(short-circuits) in the souls and in the city (i.e. in what binds

together these souls).

These SCs, in particular via the sophists, prevent both the PIs(psychic individuations) if it is true that the PI of a citizen is that ofa soul which, being autonomous and isonomous, must think foritself while at the same time thinking with and for others (that isto say: justly, in justice, dik) and the CIs (collectiveindividuations), i.e. the formation of the true, just and beautifulcircuits of TI (transindividuation), the psychic individuation ofpolitical (collective) individuation, i.e. ITS DIACHRONISATION and itsSINGULARISATION (what I will also call its idiomatisation) posedas a right and as a duty which are the foundations of the


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polis.

My thesis on the Republic and on what is adumbrated in thePhaedrus is that against the sophistic manipulation, Platowants to pose another one which is evidently in his own eyes

not a manipulation, since his eyes blind themselves to what theyare doing in the very moment that they are doing it: Platomanipulates the comprehension of what was Socrates' dialogism,which he replaces with a dialectic which aims at imposing CR2sby means of a social and pedagogical organisation of thepolis eliminating the diachronic, i.e.: the defering (diffrant)of the R1, 2 et 3s which makes possible a new diacriticity.

We shall have to come back to this point as soon as possible, inquestioning the sense and examining the stakes of theprefix dia.

Before doing that I would like to

. resume my account of the 3 types of manipulation of thepsychic R (retentions) and P (protentions) made possible viathe R3s,

. tell you why we cannot be satisfied with the concepts of Derrida to

think these stakes.

On the basis of this we will read MW.

*

Last year I spoke of the CR2s which combine with PR2s andwith which further are formed traumatypes, which are onthe DIA- side, and stereotypes, which are on the SUN- (orSYN-) side, traumatypes and stereotypes which can themselves be

either psychic or collective. (For those who did not follow thisseminar, this refers to classes 6 and 7 of last year).

This year in the 5th class of Introduction to the Republic, Iattempted to show that one can utilise the CR2s and the R3s tomanipulate souls and I indicated that here it is always a matterof manipulating Traumatypes and Stereotypes, which is a form ofnegative psychagogy : by diffusing in a massive andsystematic manner certain types de retentions in the form of

discourses, music, films, images associated with texts, all forms ofmnesic traces mobilisable in a mise en scne etc. , it is possibleto induce certain types of expectations, i.e. of CP2s.


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In this case, it is a matter of writing in the brain bypracticing reinforcements by massive means of diffusion.These means are always more or less R3s. If I speak ofmise en scne, it is also because I want to emphasize in

passing that all this is very close to the arts of thespectacle, and that the reinforcement is all the moreeffective the stronger the impression.

I maintained that there are three main ways to manipulateminds i.e. to short-circuit the act of understanding byoneself, i.e. of entering into the cycle of an anamnsis, andon the basis of that, ofthinking for oneself:

1. The first consists in standardising all the R2s, in getting

everybody to adopt the same R2s, by producing CR2s (bymeans of events that is also one of the uses offestivals, commemorations, gatherings of crowds of allsorts etc. or through campaigns or broadcasts suchas I like Ike, which Jacobson discusses, etc.) whichtend to replace PR2s by propaganda or by conditioningin the strong sense, or byadvertising which is anotherform of conditioning, and which is a mise en scne ofthe world seen as merchandise.

Here we may note that in our time is developpingrapidly what is called neuromarketing, a componentof the neuro-economy (Paul W. Glimcher, Decisions, Uncertainty, and theBrain: The Science of Neuroeconomics) appele aussi beheviourial economics (cf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuRBf5_5Kbo) on the subject ofwhich a colloquium was recently held at Columbia.

Neuromarketing, we must emphasize, consists in

writing , so to say, directly in the lower layers of thebrain, ie in short-circuiting the cortical zones so as todirectly solicit the reptilian brain.

2. The second main way to manipulate minds passes through thetaking control of language i.e. of the processes oftransindividuation which metastabilise themselves in it byimplementing specific and systematic measures to thisend.

But we must indicate that every language activity tries toparticipate in the PTI (processes of transindividuation)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuRBf5_5Kbohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuRBf5_5Kbo


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of its language, and philosophers, poets, scientists, writersand politicians but also PARENTS (who are the first greatSCULPTORS OF THOSE YOUNG BRAINS THAT ARE THEIRCHILDREN), all are actively, AND EACH ON HIS OR HER OWNCIRCUITS OF TRANSINDIVIDUATION, animated by the aim of

taking part in these processes more or less locally. There ismanipulation when means of synchronisaiton areimplemented by SCs in the circuits of TI by which each of usfinds means of invidivuating himself or herself on the circuitsof TI by taking part in them . That is what Klemperer describesin the language of the 3rd Reich.

In the case of totalitarianism, as for example Lyotardarticulated it in reference to Zinoviev, it consists in replacing

the PR2s with CR2s that are so synchronised that theyhave become uninterpretable, and no longer allow anyindividuation at all, whether psychic or collective.

But it is also the question of neoliberal or ultraliberalNewspeak, as Eric Hazan has shown, and which I fearhas been either contaminated or recuperated by thediscourses of post-structuralism in all sorts of ways.And there is no doubt that the state of stupidity and offolly into which the world has fallen is largely caused bya regressive state of language induced by R3s whichalter it profoundly.

On this point I strongly recommend that you read FrdricKaplan (and I thank Lanval Montrouzeau who drew myattention to this text) on linguistic capitalism (cf alsohttp://fkaplan.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/google-et-le-capitalisme-linguistique/) of which Google is the leadingentreprise, though no doubt not the only agent all this arises

on the base of what Auroux called the language industriesalmost 30 years ago. I will come back to Google obviously tothe extent that the pharmacology of the industrial politicsof reading and of writing, i.e. ofenunciation (I take thisword in Foucault's sense) is for us the main stake of the epochof hermeneutics assisted by automatic means, and constitutesthe specific fabric of the linguistic PTI of our time.

More generally, if we return to our Platonic modes of

questioning, such procedures consist in short-circuiting theactivity of individuation of the soul by ensuring that, insuch short-circuits, in what I expect, it is not I who
http://fkaplan.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/google-et-le-capitalisme-linguistique/http://fkaplan.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/google-et-le-capitalisme-linguistique/http://fkaplan.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/google-et-le-capitalisme-linguistique/http://fkaplan.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/google-et-le-capitalisme-linguistique/


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expects: it is that which has been introduced into me asan expectation which is not mine every expectation ismade of traumatypes and of stereotypes which can be eithercollective or psychic and which are even doubtless always inarticulation with collective TTs (traumatypes) ie inscribed on

circuits of TI which link the intergenerational TTs.

3. In the first 2 cases, the R3s are obviously massively mobilised,but in the third way of inducing, of manipulating and ofcontroling expectations, the R3s proletarise the horizons ofexpectation by provoking short-circuits in the process ofpsychic individuation by functional displacements inthe GO (general organology), via defunctionalisationand refunctionalisation BETWEEN ORGANS AND

ORGANISATIONS, i.e.: by disindividuating the dia-logicalscene as scene of co-individuation via a disorganisation ofthe assemblage amongst themselves in the firstinstance of the cerebral organs supporting what Freudcalls psychic apparatuses and Plato calls souls: this isprecisely what Plato will have Socrates say in the Phaedrus,when he speaks of the use made of writing.

Question: what do the industries of the DR3 produce in theeconomies of individuation, of the libido, of expectation, ofattention, of transindividuation, as well as in the financial,the industrial economies etc., and if, as Carr maintains,obviously with a thousand reasons, they massively intoxicatethese economies, i.e. the relations between organs that areconstituted there, how is it possible to reverse this situation?

This is the stake of the discussion with Plato via Carr, Wolf, Ong,Derrida, etc. that we are going to try to conduct by looking at whathappens in the brain i.e. on the web where all that is

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Pharmakon.fr

Seminar 21-02-2012First class

From Nicholas Carr to PlatoFrom pharmacology to organology


Reminder concerning last year

Last year we situated this seminar in the context of theindustrialisation of tertiary retentions (R3) so that the questionbecame, as query, via search engines or heuristic machines, anobject of economic exploitation founded on a new organology.

This organology will be the object of our research this year, andas such we will found it on a hermeneia of Plato, who we will

read on the basis of

1. the course on pharmakon.fr consecrated to the Republic,i.e. for this year to the Phaedrus (next year's course willbe entitled Republic 2),

2. the questions that Nicholas Carr poses in THE SHALLOWS

A few words on this book: Carr poses the problem ofintellectual technologies such that, in practicing them, he

experiences what in TAKING CARE I described as a diseconomyof attention, which is equally a libidinal diseconomy (but Carrdoes not see that).In doing this,

1. he refers to the Phaedrus, as well as to certaincommentators on Plato, in particular to Havelock and Ong,

2. he mobilises the new resources provided by the

neurosciences of reading to understand what the literalpharmakon does not only to the psychic apparatus, but to


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its cerebral support (and in passing he refers to Freud'sOutline of a Scientific Psychology, written in 1895, to whichwe will evidently return).

What Alain Giffard (I have sent you a text by him, which we willof course come back to later) has shown is that this double-sided economy of attention, of which Google is the principalrepresentative and which is thus also a diseconomy ofattention, is not the object, in THE SHALLOWS, of apharmacological approach: the book does not present itself as aresearch on the possibilities of elaborating a therapeutics of thispharmakon that is the digital writing constituted by theindustrial R3s of our time.

I insist here with you on the thesis that I am advancing hereonly in passing: the digital is the latest form of writing it ispart of the process of grammatisation and it is by taking upagain the question of writing (and of reading) at its root thatone can question the industrial R3.

Finally, this year I would like to show how and why apharmacolgy must be founded on a general organology: weshall see that this question can be posed on the basis of Plato

himself, and why here Nicholas Carr constitutes a valuableresource.

To carry out this programme during the next 8 classes,

1. we shall return to the Phaedrus and the stakes of what iselaborated there, and which will be fully deployed in theRepublic, namely the dialectic,

2. next we will read Nicholas Carr himself,

3. we will go further into these questions with Jacob vonUexkll: A Foray into the Worlds of Animals andHumans, and Bowlby Attachment and Loss, Winnicott,Freud and diverse other references.

We shall also see that Carr's approach lacks an inscription in thegeneral context of the industries of the capture of attentionwhich arose in the 20th Century. Their psychopathology, studiedby Zimmerman and Christakis, whose work is currently beingtaken up in various ways, for example in France with MichelDesmurget, must be included in our reflection.


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Now, for this class and no doubt for the next one, let us returnto Plato and to the end of the dialogue of the Phaedrus.

*

After Socrates emphasizes that he is in a delirium becauseof Phaedrus, which, he says, gives to his ideas a poetic cast,the dialogue turns to Lysias and his written discourse incomparison to that of Socrates.

Phaedrus informs us that in Athens at the end of the 5thCentury B.C., a politician (politikon) has accused Lysias ofbeing a logographon, a speech-writer or discourse-

monger.

A long exchange then takes place between Socrates andPhaedrus over the vices and the virtues of the practice ofwriting in the service of the preparation in advance ofwritten discourses, fruits of logography.

However, it must be emphasized here for Socrates, there canbe dignity in writing or in being a writer: speech

writers can write in vain, but some of them write advisedly,and this is why one must stipulate:

1. that the mere fact of writing speeches is notshameful (258d), and that the question is to knowwhat distinguishes writing well and writing badly(tou kalos te kai m graphein).

2. Further, Socrates adds that the question concerningwriting bears on speech equally:

Ugliness consists in not speaking (legein), in not writing (graphein)well. 258d.

On the other hand, Socrates does not confuse logographs andwriters, i.e. those who are worthy to write (axios einaisuggraphein).

In other words, if it is true that writing is apharmakon,


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. on the one hand speech is a pharmakon too to acertain extent (though differently from writing, and we willtry to understand how and why)

. on the other hand this pharmakon can and must bepositively practiced: we have to do here with a questionoftherapeutics. And it is precisely thus that the questionof thepharmakon, which comes after these considerations,is introduced.

I emphasize these points because a certain reception ofPlato'sPharmacyhas consisted in posing that Plato condemns writing.I myself for a long time considered that as established. Andmany readers of Derrida did the same including no doubtDerrida himself. But that is not really what happens. This iswhat Henry Joly maintains in Le renversement platonicien, aswell as Vicaire and others. And this is also the position that EricHavelock defends in Preface to Plato, where he goes muchfarther as Nicholas Carr insists, but according to me, and Ithink that Alain Giffard shares this point of view, withoutdrawing all the conclusions since Havelock, like Walter Ong,the author of Orality and literacy, the technologizing of theworld, sees in Plato a critique of poetry i.e. of the oral tradition,

and

a plea in favour of the new technology of writing, (88)

Further I myself maintained in last year's course devoted to theSymposium that Plato, between Meno and Phaedrus,breaks with the tragic age where poetry constitutes amnemotechnic and thus a hypomnsis which is supposed togive access to an anamnsis and when Socrates ironises over

the tekhn of the rhapsode Ion (dans Ion), these questions arealready in play.

The points of view of Havelock and Ong are in total oppositionto Derrida's reading of Plato. In fact I think that this subject isless clear than Carr implies, and that the critique of the oraltradition is not in itself a plea in favour of writing : it is inboth cases the calling into question of tekhn i.e. ofhypomnsis as against anamnsis, which is essentiallyimmunised.


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On the other hand, I tried to show last year and again this yearthat what is at stake here is the passage from a tragic, (i.e.also mystagogic) society,, to a metaphysical society, suchthat it poses in principle the possibility and the necessity of

breaking with mysteries and with stories in favour of ageneralisation of the teaching of all things, including of virtue,which radicaly contradicts the position of Socrates.

After this, it is not a question of pleading for the new technologyof writing against poetry, but of giving a new sense toanamnsis, and of opposing it to hypomnsis, poetryjust as much as writing proceeding, according to Plato,from hypomnsis, i.e. from tekhn. And tekhn must itselfbe put under the control of the dialectic, i.e.: of a logoswhich owes nothing to this tekhn but which, in providing itwith criteria which precede this technicity, i.e. thispharmacological condition, constitutes in a way itstherapeutic a priori.

I will try to show here:

. that there is no a priori therapeutic;

. that the philosopher cannot be a therapist, and that hemust be a pharmacologist;

. that as a citizen he is nevertheless a prescriber oftherapeutics, and that in this context he can and must puthis pharmacological critiques in the service public debateand of political life insofar as it consists essentially inproducing such therapeutics as are formalised by positivelaw and by rational sciences (which also think de jure,

i.e. in passing from fact to right) because conditioned by therespect of the criterium which, as experience of aletheia,assembles all the disciplines that form what is called,because of the very possibility of this assembly, universalknowledge.

Last year, in this seminar, I defended the thesis that all thesequestions arise in the context of a grammatisation of theGreek world. This is what Walter Ong calls thetechnologisation of the world. And I maintained that it is asa play of R3 that induces a new interplay between R1


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and R2 that writing brings to emergence the question ofaletheia as ultimate criterium in those operations ofselections that retentions and protentions always are the projection of a common horizon of protentions being

the fundamental question of the polis insofar that, as siteofGeschichte and ofHistorie, which Heidegger underlines in hisIntroduction to metaphysics, it has also become the locus ofdecision, i.e. ofkrisis and ofkrinein.

(It is because this critical dimension, in the historical sensewhich also designates a new and extraordinary modality ofpsychosocial individuation, is essential to this temporalitythat is historical society, that the moratorium on critiqueimposed by the PS will have been a huge caprice andone which concerns Deleuze just as much as Derrida.

To get rid of the question of critique, et reduce the concept ofcrisis to its ordinary acception so appreciated by themedia, is also to get rid of the question of krineininsofar as it is characteristic of historical time. Also, it isto pose as acquired the end of history I am thinkinghere of course of the debate opened on the basis of FrancisFukuyama's work. To contest Fukuyama's thesis, is thus to

reevaluate radically the very concept ofkrisis. And to thisday that remains to be done.)

In this seminar, I would like to revisit all these questions but inintegrating, in the wake of Carr's book, The Shallows, thequestion ofpsychagogy as it has been constituted in our timeas the stake of a neuropwer and neuropolitics and in thecontext of an epistemic danger: neurocentrism. For in fact, welive in an epoch of the digital R3, which constitutes an

industrialpharmakon, and which is even at the heart ofindustrial development, and of the neurosciences suchas they open multiple and eminently pharmacologicalpossibilities, including those of a neuropower which canconstitute diverse types of therapeutics or of neglect.

(It is in this context that we should analyse the currentcontroversy over autism, and which opposes neurosciencesand psychanalysis which we may come back to later).


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But we are also going to see that it is possible to read thePhaedrus and the Republic from thispoint of view. Thiswill lead us to the necessity of apprehendingpharmacology on the basis of a general organology

where the cerebral organ of the CNS poses new questionswhich permit us also to reread Derrida's questionsdifferently perhaps than Derrida himself did.

This is also a way for me to tie in with my book Taking Care andwith the debate that I had opened with Foucault. In effect inthat work I underlined that the question of biopower and ofbiopolitics had to be enriched and transformed by integratingthe constitution of a psychopower and of a noopolitics suchas those the psychotechnologies, which became generalisedduring the 20th Century with the cultural industries and themass media, will have put at the heart of consumerism and soof capitalism, itself become from this fact intrinsically pulsional.

So it is neuropower and neuropolitics which tie these twoquestions together in that precisely we have seen that theymust be approached from both an organological and apharmacological point of view.

*

In this double question of pharmacology and of therapeutics, inthis dialogue as in the Gorgias, the stake is, precisely in thepassage that we are commenting, the relation to rhetoric but to which from now on must be opposed dialectics.

So far, I would say that we can find ourselves more or less inagreement with Plato: I believe in effect that we must

distinguish between practices of the pharmakon such asthose that exploit its toxic side, i.e.which lead for example tothe confusion of good and evil, which for us consists ineffectuating short-circuits in the TI (transindividuation,and others which, on the contrary, take care of theirinterlocutor.

There can be short-circuits in the TI only because a psychicindividuation is always a collective individuation. We could saythat individuation is good, and disindividuation is bad itbeing understood tnat disindividuation is that which cuts


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psychic individuation from collective individuation (this is whatSocrates says in the Gorgias): this is how one could attempt topose the question of good and evil differently. And we will returnto it no doubt. But we must add that there is a necessity for

disindividuation and that all this must be thought in the heartof a diffrance with an a where disindividuation can be amoment of individuation: such is always the pharmacologicalpoint of view where the poles which seem to be opposed inreality are ceaselessly composed. I spoke about this in my lastbook, and to reply to a question from Ludoovic Duhem. I alsospoke about it in Pharmacology of the question.

In the following passage of the dialogue of the Phaedrus, I canno longer agree with the progesssion of Plato's reasoning, whenhe posits that to practice writing, one must first haveestablished the truth of what will then be written, after thisestablishing. This is what Socratessays in 259e:

Does not the excellence of a discourse suppose (uparkhein), in thespirit of he who speaks, the knowledge of the truth about the questionto be dealt with ?

But consequently, that signifies as well that truth and its

consideration precede speech itself, if it is true that thequestion which concerns writing concerns equally speech.

The whole difficulty is there: it is thus that anamnesis isopposed to hypomnesis, and it is here that I consider thatPlato errs.

Here one must also speak of psychagogy. What is at stakehere? This is a question that we will pose perhaps to Ed Cohenby way of Foucault. Be that as it may, let us say now that it is to

be examined in terms of the question of the relationbetween R1, 2 and 3.


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Pharmakon.fr Bernard Stiegler

Third class of seminar 2012 (part 2)

(translated by Terence Blake)

In the contemporary context, whose salient traits, forexample, can be described with Nicholas Carr and MaryanneWolf, on whose work he draws, we must rework this wholeconstruction. And we must do this while keeping in sight

the reversal operated by the REPUBLIC, and whatHeidegger says about it, namely that in it aletheiabecomes orthots : put all that back on the drawing board,which supposes that we get clear about the role of exactitudein the R3 (tertiary retentions) that I called orthothetic in

TECHNICS & TIME 2 (1), and to see why

1. that does not necessarily lead to a conception ofaletheia as orthots, and it can even lead to thecontrary, i.e. to aletheia as anamnsis not of the exact,but of the collective traumatypy which constitutesthe dia in individuation ,

2. that can also lead to this, and in this case, it isbecause the pharmakon, functioning as anautomaton, has in effect short-circuited the dia (i.e.also the two) in synchronising it, which the PHAEDRUSdenounces as a possibility exploited by the sophists withwriting, but that Plato puts to work as an anti-dialogic

dialectical possibility in the REPUBLIC.

Havelock, Ong et Carr under-estimate all these questions,whereas Wolf sets them to work in our time, and that is why weshall read her more closely a little later.

Heidegger himself neglects the orthetic characteristic ofwriting as origin of this exactitude that Plato in the allegory ofthe cave confuses with aletheia. In effect, I will soon maintain

that if Plato can fall prey to this confusion, it is because theexperience of aletheia supposes an orthothetic form of


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R3 in the sense in which I described the R3L (literal tertiaryretentions) as orthothetic in TT2.

*

We are not going to speak today, nor as a general rule in thisseminar, of the dialectic as such of the dialectic such as , inthe context of the eristic which characterises the city as aplace of the logicalpolemos which replaced the warriorpolemos, it is thought first of all on the basis ofdialogos.This happens in the VIIth century on the agora, then withSocrates in the Vth century as dialogos strictly speaking.

With Plato, and above all starting with the PHAEDRUSand with the REPUBLIC, this dialogos, which was asituation of elocution and of enunciation, i.e. of co-individuation, gives way to the dialectic as a method ofreasoning.

We are not going to analyse here what results from this,which is the dialectic as such, which in the REPUBLIC theallegory of the cave will attempt to found on orthots Iwill come back to that next year in the course , but we shall

work on that which from this angle is interesting inPHAEDRUS when it poses the question of a sort of directwriting in the soul, which will lead us to the questions oforganology that I announced.

Before starting on these questions as it were of writing oforgans, of organs of writing, and so ofreading of organsand oforgans of reading, I must however add some wordson the question of the dialectic as change in the status

of the two because the two is also an organologicalquestion the two of the dia-logue being moreover thatwhich couples two phonatory organs, and by means ofthem, two cerebral organs, and in them, two souls whichco-individuate themselves in ONE spirit, which is arevenance that the tragic poets already describe as areminiscence, an anamnsis in the sense that thisconcept has in the tragic society where it is central, asmnesic function of poetic orality (cf last year's course),

and all that (I mean the phonatory and cerebral organswhich couple and interlace in a dia-logue) supposes


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linguistic organs, etc.

Before starting on these questions of organologyproperly speaking, as I was saying, I still must say

something about the new dialectic which emerges out of thechange in the status of the two.

This non-socratic, because non-dialogic, dialectic will havehad an enormous destiny in philosophy, and a singulardestiny in industrial and capitalist societies, since it willbe developped as materialist dialectic in Marx, by way ofHegel, who passed by way of Kant with the question ofthe transcendental dialectic etc. introducing at theheart of the Hegelian dialectic, and by way of thespeculative proposition , a question of time which will alsobe an elimination of time i.e. of desire, and this magictrick accomplishes what is already at stake in the Republic.

*

In his new definition of the dialectic, Plato distinguishestwo moments in what he now presents as a dialecticalmethod:

. the moment ofsyn-thesis,

. the moment of analysis which is the dia-critical moment ofthe dialectic.

The word synthesis is in fact present in the Greek textof Plato, but analysis is not called analysis there, butinstead diairesis, as if, for the dia of dia-logos and for itsdiachrony, was substituted dia in the sense ofdiacritici.e. of decomposition by means of what is in fact ananalytic in the sense that this word will have with Aristotle,and which will return with Kant and then again with Heidegger,and each time of course with transformations.

The destiny of the prefix dia, in philosophy and in Westernthought in general is a fundamental question. It is the dia thatis found in devil (diable in French), and which leads toatomisation, to separation. But it is also that which produces

dia-critical separation, i.e. which permits one to isolate in and by the process of grammatisation as such, which


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itself ALSO permits synchronisation: dia is diabolicallypharmacological.

For the dia is also the diachronic in the sense of Saussure

or the dialogic in the sense of Bakhtin and of Socrates ,i.e. that which is produced with Socrates as a labour oftime and of memory: it is that which is produced asinvention, exhumation, unearthing, as access TO THEHIDDEN, TO THE LATENTTOALTHEIA.

My (organological and pharmacological) thesis is that thesemultiple senses of dia, which are made possible bygrammatisation inasmuch as each of its phases, at eachnew epoch of the process of grammatisation, provokesa DER (a double epochal redoubling) in the shock that thefirst redoubling constitutes, the diabolical atomisationdestroys the circuits and separates them, whereas thereconstitution of long circuits tends to produce newsynchronies, which themselves install a new diachrony, lessdiabolic, i.e. less atomising, and more individuating, thewhole leading towards a new metastable state , thesemultiple senses therefore are each time put back intoplay anew with each new mutation of grammatisation, i.e. at

the appeaance of a new form of analytic R3. And this newgame each time makes new figures of individuation and ofdisindividuation emerge.

We shall see that these new figures are also new cerebralorganisations , both technological and social.

This is precisely what Plato does not see, and it is evenwhat he absolutely excludes, what he does not want to hear

anything about, in particular when he says that trulythinking mustpreceedthe practice of writing.

The dia goes from dialogue to the devil (diable), by wayofdiacriticity which makes the dialectic thus understoodpossible i.e. as denegation of that which makes itpossible, BUT IT ALSO MAKES POSSIBLE THE NEW RGIME OFDIACHRONICITY THAT PLATO PRECISELY WANTS TO REDUCE tosubmit it to a TOTAL SYNCHRONISATION ordered by the

dialectic, and conducted under the auspices of philosophy.


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It is thus that therapeutics ceases to be a therapeia, and it is forthat reason that I claim in principle that thephilosopher mustnot be a therapist in this sense. He must be a therapist ofhimself, and act so as to encourage his patient auditors to

take care of themselves by themselves, as Kant says, buthe must not prescribe their care to others. On the other hand hemust practice critical pharmacology and propose fordebate the prescriptive possibilities of a positivepharmacology.

If nonetheless Plato abandons therapeia in the sense ofpimeleia, and with it the dialogical dialogos of the duel, it isbecause in these questions, it is a matter of the devil (diable),who will have a great destiny in the West, it is a matter of thediabolic, i.e. of the diabelein which is precisely theproblem of the REPUBLIC, that Plato would like toreduce by the dia of the dialectic become the dia ofanalysis and control, by the dia of discretisation and ofthe creation of a synchronic order that completelymasters the dia which is not possible.

*


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Pharmakon.fr - Bernard Stiegler

Fourth class of seminar 2012 part 1

17 mai 2012


At the end of the last class I said that if Plato abandonstherapeia in the sense of pimeleia, ie of tekhn tou biou,and thus the dialogical dialogos dialogique of the duel, it isbecause in these questions, it is a matter of the devil

(diable) who will have a great destiny in the West: it is a matterof the diabolic, i.e. of diabelein, which is precisely theproblem of the REPUBLIC.

The diabolic, i.e. also the diachronic, is what Plato wouldlike to reduce with the dia of the dialectic become the dia ofanalysis and control, by the dia of discretisation and of thecreation of a synchronic order mastering completely the dia which is not possible.

Last year I tried to show that Plato questions in the context of apreindividual retentional reserve which, being the object of acovert grammatisation, neither recognised nor seen, and evenless conceived as such, gives rise to questions is at the veryorigin of the question in the sense in which it presentsitselfas such in philosophy .

This grammatisation is not simply synchronising, but alsodiachronising, and it reactivates collective traumatypes

which trigger a diachronic tempest of which the politicalproblems of Athens are the effects (political problems at theheart of which Plato's family and Plato himself are implicated). Thisis what the REPUBLIC is engaged against.

*

These questions must be re-examined in our time, ie: in theage of a neuropower in the process of emerging: they mustbe re-examined by way of the question of neurology, and bytaking very seriously


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1. on the one hand what Plato says here about the soul:

But nobler far is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who, findinga congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants thereinwords which are able to help themselves and him who planted

them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which othersbrought up in different soils render immortal, making thepossessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness(PHAEDRUS, translation Benjamin Jowett).

Note that this text signifies that using the dialectic, ie a manner ofdialoguing as well as of writing that conforms to Socrates' previousprescriptions in the PHAEDRUS, when he said that one can speakwell or write well if one submits speaking as well as writing to thedialectic insofar as, as we saw in the last class, it is double bothanalysis and synthesis , one can and one must inscribe, ie plantand sow, make grow, in other words, directly in the soul, whichis a sort of garden, offertile terrain, where shoots are produced,where ideas grow, one can plant and harvest there somethingwhich, in reality, we shall now see, is literally a writing, iethe cultivation of a reading brain.

2. on the other hand and as a consequence, by taking seriouslywhat Nicholas Carr says and by basing ourselves on

Maryanne Wolf and on various specialists in readinganalysed from the point of view of the neurosciences:their analyses pose questions which belong to a generalorganology, by way of which and by which alone is it possibleto think a positive pharmacology.

This is why general organology is the principal subject ofthis seminar insofar as it tries to surmount the blockageproduced in the beginnings of the history of philosophy

(which thus became metaphysics) with the REPUBLIC,ie after the voyage to Sicily.

Positive pharmacology both is and is not the point of view ofPlato himself:

. it ishis point of view to the extent that he affirms that agood practice of writing is possible,

. it isn't to the extent that writing here is no longer apharmakon, a two-faced, double sided, being in anothersense than that which designates the economy of Google (but


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here we would need to produce a pharmacology of thisdouble-sided economy typical of the pre-contributivemodels created by Google and others perhaps we will returnto this subject in the Summer Academy with Alain Giffard): here,Plato considers writing as a technical means whose

poisonous side has been reduced by the dialectic , whichwas designed precisely for that and it is precisely for thatreason that it is a thought by oppositions.

Let us now read the beginning analyses of Maryanne Wolf; and letus see ON WHAT CONDITIONS this pharmacology is POSITIVEin what it first does to the brain, and how it can benonetheless negative, and even how and why it is always first ofall negative. We will thus add a counterpart to the thesis that I

developed in CE QUI FAIT QUE LA VIE VAUT LA PEINE D'ETRE VECUE(Flammarion, 2010) concerning the question of the question, ieconcerning the techno-logical calling into question, what I call thefirst blow of the double epokhal reversal, and which ETATS DE CHOC(Mille et une nuits, 2012) completed precisely by proposing aphilosophy of shock;

But we shall see in this week's class and this will also be thesubject of my interventions this year in the Summer Academy thatfrom now on, the shock strategy must be thought in termsof a general organology based on and by way of therecurrent states of shock, which are always translated atthe level of the CNS in particular of the neocortex. But in ourtime, this can be short-circuited, and that leads us to assert that

. a general organology must integrate the biological,geographical and geophysical systems in its investigationsat the moment of the passage to the limits described byMeadows, Passet, etc.

. the CNS becomes the manipulatable organ of a neuropower,which must lead us to pursue the analysis of the passage frombiopower to psychopower then to neuropower wherebio- and psycho-powers are synthetised in relation to apower over the organs and the organisations conferredby the generalised grammatisation which translatesitself as a generalised automatisation.

We shall see that all this leads to the central question ofautomatisation for which we shall reread Plato from this pointof view.


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*

Maryanne Wolf begins Proust and the squid by affirming that wewere never born to read. She shows that the appearance of

this invention of writing comes to be written or inscribed inthe brain itself, if one may say, and above all comes to modifyits functioning in a sense obviously different from what Platoimagines should be the writing directly in the soul of theprescriptions resulting from the new dialectic, in a sense which, as itis precisely formulated by Maryanne Wolf, renders this hopeperfectly illusory, except by submitting precisely this writingto this dialectic conceived as TECHNOLOGY OF GRAMMATISATIONOF NEURONALLIFE (WHICH TAKES ITSELF TO BE AN ONTOLOGY), ie:except by doing EXACTLY what he accuses the Sophists ofdoing, but with much more efficient means.

Before going further in this double reading in the soul accordingto Plato and in the brain according to Wolf(and also accordingto Dehaene who she relies on, as well as to Changeux who supportsDehaene), I would like to draw your attention to a question thatWolf does not pose, but that I will pose soon in reading Dehaene,who she cites in several places.

One must in effect pose here the question of the modification ofthe brain in two completely different senses:

. on the one hand, as organological transformation of the brainin the course of its corticalisation (2 million years) and asconstitution of the cortical zones and of the afferentsubcortical zones on the preindividual vital reserve of theprimary layers, including the reptilian brain,

. on the other hand, all that concerns what is called cerebralplasticity, insofar as it leads to the metastabilising of thecerebral organisations which are to that extent historicaland social.

In both cases, technology is at play in and with biology andneurology, but the two must not be confused, and above all, weshall see why, we must not avoid the immense question of theepistemology of life which is posed with the co-emergenceof the cortex and of the silex.


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Pharmakon.fr - Bernard Stiegler

Fourth class of seminar 2012 part 2

17 mai 2012


In highlighting the parallel between cortical evolution and lithicevolution, I maintained in TECHNICS AND TIME 1 that in thepaleolithic corticalisation, and during most of the processof hominisation, the brain was trans-formed by itsrelation to the matter it exteriorised itself into via its

handjust as much as it interiorised the hand, for when itshand works, what it inscribes in matter is inscribed alsoin its matter: in its grey matter, in its brain. And thisinduces a progressive exit from the situation describedby Darwin namely evolution according to the simpleconditions of the struggle for life.

The question of the soul, in that it is not reduced to the brain,no more than to being the animation of the animal or of theplant, is that of the passage from the struggle for life to thestruggle for existence, of which the struggle for recognitiondescribed by Hegel then by Kojve is one version, but whichthey do not manage to veritably think because they do notthink the consequences of the Hegelian thought ofexteriorisation as techno-logical and it is because shedoes not see this that Catherine Malabou does not draw all theconsequences of her own analyses.

When the cartography of the cortical zones seems

written, ie completed, technical objects play the rle ofepiphylogenetic memory, ie of vectors ofintergenerational transmissions which go beyond theCNS, so that the epiphylogenetic memory becomes theprincipal evolutive factor by way of the firstoccurrences of R3 (tertiary retentions) in the strongsense ie such that in their becoming they autonomisethemselves totally from the genetic drift.

With grammatisation properly speaking, which I thinkbegan in the Upper Paleolithic with the rupestral


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inscriptions (this is what I elaborated on in the W3C Summit inLyon) as spatialisations and materialisations of mentalcontent, something establishes itself which constitutesthe technological process of psychic and collective

individuation in which we recognize ourselves (thereason why we can say WE or US in looking at theseworks on this subject cf. TECHNICS AND TIME 3).

Today we see that functionnal neuro-imagery renders allthat observable, analysable, experimentable andtheorisable on a new basis and it is in this new contextthat we shall try to reply to the questions posed by Wolf, Carrand a few others concerning the double epokhal reversalprovoked by digital technologies.

*

Maryanne Wolf describes how the shock of writing totallyreorganised certain cerebral zones, in the first place of coursethose devoted to vision and the hand but also equally andobviously those for language (PROUST AND THE SQUID,p3):

This re-organisation is what in DE LA MISERE SYMBOLIQUE 2, Idescribed as a process of defunctionalisation and of


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refunctionalisation in the course of an organogenesis that Ipresented as well as a genealogy of the sensible, in thesense of both Nietzche and Foucault.

I must tell you that I inscribe all these questions in the horizonof what I call digital studies, which are in my opinion theepistemo-technological framework of the question posedby the neurophysiologist Maryanne Wolf since she saysthat she questions all that because of the technocerebralmutation which affects her children.

As we have just seen, to apprehend the effects of writing andmore generally of technology on cerebral evolution we shoulddistinguish two great types evolutions:

. properly neurophysiological evolutions whichparticipate for example in the opening of the corticalspectrum, as Leroi-Gourhan said,

. circuitry as Wolf calls it, insofar as it belongs to theformation and the metastabilsiation of knowledge bymeans of an organological assemblage such thatcircuits are formed linking psychic apparatuses (and

processes of individuation) to social apparatuses(and to collective individuations) by means oftechnical apparatuses (which are technicalindividuations), and this WITH THE AIM OFPRODUCING CIRCUITS OF TRANSINDIVIDUATON.

I remind you that I read the REPUBLIC as a grand discourseon transindividuation on a transindividuaton founded onthe short-circuit of the diachronic potentialities of noetic

souls.

The REPUBLIC is the result of the state of shock of amutation which was produced in the brains, and not onlyin the souls, and consequently, in the society whichleads to this reaction: it is a reactionarytext in this sense,but this reacticity (in the sense of Deleuze discussingNietzsche) is what is provoked by a neuropolitical mutation.

Similarly, it is in a context of radical transformation of the

conditions of production of the retentions, protentions and


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attentions which constitute the history of the processes ofadoption (or processes of individuation), and such that WEmay be passing from the literal R3 to the digital R3 (I donot say numrique, the usual French translation of digital,

so as not to reduce the digital to the question of number or ofnumeration, even if precisely this question must be posed:what is the place of numeration in the digital, from whatnew status of number does the digital proceed?), it is inthis context that Wolf poses all these questions, which worryher, and at the same time give her hope for her son and moregenerally for children (PROUST AND THE SQUID, p4):

The question, she says, is to know what it is important to

preserve to the extent that the adoption of a newcircuitry can lead to the destruction of preceedingcircuitries.

This constitutes very precisely a question of pharmacologysuch as can be posed by a general organology, ie by asystematc study of the relations between living, technical, andsocial organs and here we should read Canguilhem's LACONNAISSANCE DE LA VIE, but I don't have time to discuss it

here.


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Citing Joseph Epstein, Wolf gives us the scope of the question atstake by affirming that we, ie reading brains, or again thosethat I have elsewhere called the natives of the letter(and behind all the neuroscience of reading there is the

question of technological nativity which has not been posedand which leads to an organology of the intergenerationalwhich is of major importance for our time), we are what weread (and I will come back to this question in a future bookdevoted to The figure in the carpetby Henry James and to Theact of reading by Wolfgang Iser):


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Pharmakon.fr Bernard Stiegler

Fifth class of seminar 2012, part 130 May 2012


Reminders concerning the last class:

I.

. General organology is the principal subject of thisseminar in so far as it attempts to surmount theblockage produced in the history of the birth of

philosophy with the REPUBLIC, ie after the voyage toSicily.

. We are living through the passage from biopower andpsychopower to neuropower, by way of a power overthe organs and the organisations through a powerover the central organ ie the brain, which is madepossible by a GENERALISED GRAMMATISATION whichtranslates itself as a GENERALISED AUTOMATISATION => I

am going to develop this point before the end of thisseminar and during the summer academy. Here it isimportant to link the questions of neurology to thoseconcerning the digital:

The understanding of cerebral functioning and thecartography of the human spirit are progressing at thesame speed as the augmentation of our informaticcapabilities. (TOWARDS A BRAIN POLICE, LaurentAlexandre, le Monde 19-05-2012, my translation).

. We are trying to reread Plato from this point ofview, and I maintained in the preceding class that the attemptat the synchronisation of the city and the elimination of thediachronic by means of the diacritc, which is the central motif ofthe REPUBLIC, is illusory except by submitting preciselywriting to a dialectic conceived as a TECHNOLOGY OF THEPOWER TO WRITE DIRECTLY IN PEOPLE'S SOULS WHICH IS NOWPOSSIBLEBYMEANSOFTHEGRAMMATISATIONOFNEURONALLIFE.

On this point, cf Laurent Alexandre's article cited above:


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Tetraplegics can command a computer or a machine just bythinking, via a helmet which analyses brain waves.

the question as Laurent Alexandre presents it is completelypharmacological:

The technology will go beyond decoding brains: theirmanipulation seems limitless. Its regulation will not beconsensual: one can just as well affirm that the brain mustremain an inviolable sanctuary as promote neuro-reinforcingtechnologies to help underprivileged children.

But the scientific world as a general rule seems to

remain totally indifferent to this pharmacologicalquestion:

Finally, the editorialist of The Lancet, the prestigious medicalreview, worried not about the possible misuses of thesetechnologies of cerebral re-inforcement, but about theconditions for awarding bursaries to poor students to permitthem to have access to them.

Thus what is at stake is purely and simply the possibilityof modifying the memory of individuals and groups andin particular of eliminating the traumatypes, ie,according to me, the diachronising (and so diabolic inthis sense) factorsThe protection of cerebral integrity is going to becomeessential. It will be necessary to supervise mnesic modificationseven when they are done in the interest of the patient

and again:Should we have if it had been possible 1945 - suppressed thehorrible memories of the survivors of the Shoah? For the goodof the few deportees who survived maybe the answer is yes,but not for that of humanity, whose history would have beenfalsified. Biological and electronic transformations of the brain,virtual reality, manipulation of memories, form an explosivecocktail.

To return to Plato, isn't writing directly in souls with the

dialectic the perfect realisation of what Socratesreproached the Sophists with doing: short-circuiting the


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singularity of souls as the only possible point of originfor any knowledge whatsoever? And don't thesecontemporary programmes make this possible bothscientifically and industrially?

What I hold to in philosophy: this affirmation ofautonomy as thedfinition of thought, in the sense ofgiving oneself one's law knowing that the law SUPPOSES the pharmakon, ie itspublication, the technology of its writing inside as well asoutside, and we will have to come back to this question of theINSIDE OF THE LAW, ie ofthe writing of the self as inscriptionin oneself of what one writes outside of oneselfand of what iswritten outside of oneself.

II.

There is modification of the brain by technical individuationin two very different senses:

. on the one hand, as organological transformation of thebrain during its corticalisation (2 million years) and asconstitution of the cortical areas and of the afferentsubcortical zones on the preindividual vital reserve ofthe primary layers, including the reptilian brain,

. on the other hand, that which comes from what iscalled cerebral plasticity, such as it leads tometastabilising cerebral organisations which are inthat respect both historical and social.

III.

First question of organology of the central organ that isthe brain:

When the hand works, what it inscribes in matter isinscribed also in its matter: in its grey matter . And thehand is also that which holds the reed, the quill or thepen, types on a keyboard, touches an Ipod screen, etc.=> new questions of sensori-motricity in relation to vonUexkll

(Corrections: the epiphylogenetic memory becomes the

principal evolutionary factor by means of the firstoccurrences of tertiary retentions; writing totally


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reorganised certains cerebral areas, including of course in thefirst place those related to vision and to the hand but equallyand evidently those related to language)

. the circuitry relates to the formation and themetastabilsation of knowledges by an organologicalassemblage linking psychic, social and technicalapparatuses IN THE AIM OF PRODUCING CIRCUITS OFTRANSINDIVIDUATON.

TARDE , cooperation between brains

The REPUBLIC as a grand discourse on thetransindividuation provoked by a neuropolitical mutationduring which the natives de la lettre appear: this question oftechnological nativity leads to an organology of theintergenerational which makes Epstein say that

we are what we read

but this is perhaps no longer exactly what the youngergenerations would say but in what respect? In what way isreading a digital writing of a different order? The question would

then be to rethink education and instruction, ie the formationof the brain and its plasticity in the context of this new eraof writing, the formation of a digital reading brain, and not ofa digital brain which would no longer be a reading brain.Weakness Carr's discourse on this point. And this should bepresented explicitly as a neuropolitics.

*

That we are what we read is what for the last 30 years I havebeen trying to think (and, like Wolf, in reference to Proust) asthis structure in loops:


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and which is not only textual, but which is always more orless textual, ie participating in a HERMNEUTICALprocess that I represent like this:

IHere, I must be clear that if Derrida could talk of trace andof architrace, and if I have learnt so much from this point ofview (which is that of a quasi-transcendantalconsideration, however I refuse this very terminology,considering that it denotes a retreat before an obstacle even if I am not unaware of its phenomenologicalprovenance and necessity, but this phenomenology isprecisely that which does not, any more than Plato,think tertiary retention), if Derrida, therefore, could thusspeak of trace and of architrace, it is because he sees in aclairvoyant way, and starting out from Freud's Project, that inFreud's neurological questions , as in those of Husserlconcerning primary retention, or as well in the question of themystic pad, it is a question of a GENERAL TRACEOLOGY, if Imay say so where the trace is always a relation between

traces, ie a diffrance, ie also, I would say with Simondon, atransduction.

And this is also what forms the horizon of Derrida's ArchiveFever, which envisages possibility that the archiveological ortraceological becoming may lead to disrupting the psychicapparatus

Because if the upheavals in progress affected the very structures ofthe psychic apparatus, for example in their spatial architecture andin their economy of speed, in their processing of spacing and of

temporalization, it would no longer be a question of simplecontinuous progress in representation, in the representative value of


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the model, but rather of an entirely different logic. (Derrida, ArchiveFever: A Freudian Impression, p16, DIACRITICS, vol 25, No. 2, Summer 1995).For those with jstor access: http://www.jstor.org/stable/465144?origin=JSTOR-pdf

and not only the psychic apparatus but also psychanalysis itself

if it is true that it was itself conditoned by a certain state of thearchive:

Whether it is a question of the private or public life of Freud, of hispartners or of his inheritors, sometimes also of his patients, of thepersonal or scientific exchanges, of the letters, deliberations, orpolitico-institutional decisions, of the practices and of their rules (forexample, those of the so-called "analytic situation," the place andthe length of the sessions, association which is free, oral, in person,and in the presence of the analyst, without technical recording), inwhat way has the whole of this field been determined by a state ofthe technology of communication and of archivization (p17).

And which poses that every technoscience is above all a systemof archivation:

What is at issue here is nothing less than the future, if there is sucha thing: the future of psychoanalysis in its relationship to the futureof science. As techno-science, science, in its very movement, canonly consist in a transformation of the techniques of archivization, ofprinting, of inscription, of reproduction, of formalization, of ciphering,and of translating marks (p16).

So one sees how DERRIDA poses here the question ofhypomnesis today and how nearly twenty years ago heanticipated the questions of today. But on the one hand:

. he does not distinguish the tertiary retentions

. he does not pose that there would be a constitution of

desire by these tertiary retentions.

Thus what bothers me in ARCHIVE FEVER, where it is also aquestion of the devil:

We do not like to be reminded, Freud notes, of the undeniableexistence of an evil which seems to contradict the sovereigngoodness of God. But if this Devil - another proper name for thethree-named drive - seems, then, in the eyes of Christians, for"Christian science" (in English in the text), irreconcilable with God,

we see now that it can also exculpate God: evil for evil's sake,diabolical evil, the existence of the Devil can serve as an excuse


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(Entschuldigung) for God, because exterior to him, anarchic angeland dissident, in rebellion against him, just as, and this is thepolemical trait of analogy, the Jew can play the analogous role ofrelief or economic exoneration (die selbe okonomisch entlastendeRolle) assigned to him by the world of the Aryan ideal (p15).

is that the trace, which is not there constitutive of desireitselfis as well related unilaterally to the repetition compulsion:

if there is no archive without consignation in an external placewhich assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, ofreproduction, or of reimpression, then we must also remember thatrepetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetitioncompulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the

death drive. And thus from destruction (p14).

Related to the death drive itselfopposedto the principleof reality,

The death drive is not a principle. It even threatens everyprincipality, every archontic primacy, every archival desire. It is whatwe will call, later on, le mal d'archive, archive fever (p14).

Which is in my opinion unfaithful to the point of view of Freud

after 1920.

Also and in general, Derrida was unaware then of the detail ofwhat we now know, namely that the play of writings ofwhich the cerebral organ consists positively in itsrelations with the inorganic organs of writing leads totexts or tissues formed of neuronal relations whichconsist in chemical and electric exchanges.

The qu

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From Nicholas Carr to Plato/From pharmacology to organology

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