Kindle Notes & Highlights
From the point of view of a history of grammatisation, the Phaedrus anticipates questions which recur in Capital: questions to do with a political economy of memory.
The Phaedrus says that the memory can proletarianise itself [se prolétariser], that hypomnēsis, like exteriorisation, is a disindividuation, and that this question is political (which is thus a question of sophistry).
those hypomnēmata that are mnemotechnologies constitutes a loss of savoir-vivre, know-how a...
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hegemony that finance capitalism exercises over hypomnesic technologies, whereby these technologies are turned into technologies of retentional control...
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To individuate oneself is to individuate the group: it is to transindividuate it and to transindividuate oneself. And vice versa, not to have access to transindividuation, to lose t...
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is to disindividuate...
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Plato underlines—hypomnesic control à la lettre also allows “logography”: the ensemble of linguistic techniques which consist of manipulating opinion by pithanon (the art of persuasion), short-circuiting anamnēsis (which is transindividuation), and what Plato calls dialectics—which is above all a dialogue.
With the appearance of the first analogue recorders, the 19th century heralds the appearance of orthothetic mnemotechnological en-gramming devices.
These forms of analogue and numerical hypomnēmata raise once again the oldest questions of philosophy in a capitalist and free market context—which the mercantile activity of the Sophists no doubt anticipated—but where the industrial dimension introduces new questions. For industry is a new stage of grammatisation.
If literal hypomnēses controlled the intellectual functions of the mind from Antiquity onwards, and audio-visual hypomnēses control its sensible functions from the 20th century onwards, hypomnēses which control by reproducing the motor form [motoricité] of gesture appeared at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The control of work through a form of scientific organisation that depends on grammatisation is put forward by Taylor in his Principles of Scientific Management.
thought and a control of gestures by a type of orthothetic and mechanical tertiary retention. This constitutes a hypomnēsis of gesture through which the worker is transformed into a proletarian and deprived of his knowledge.
The analogue, and then numerical, devices that develop in the wake of industrial machinery and machine tools affect not only the methods of production but also those of consumption. A new stage in the exteriorisation of knowledge
process of generalised proletarianisation as lo...
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Literal grammatisation is placed at the service of conception, the grammatisation of gestures a...
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and the grammatisation of the senses at the servic...
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the body of the producer controlled by gesture or the body of the consumer controlled by sense—should
The process of individuation is the economy of what since Freud has been called desire: libidinal economy.
from the ideal of the ego and sublimation as powers of transformation of animal instincts, and in particular of the sex drive, into a power of individuation and spiritual transformation of the psychic and the collective by the constitution of a process of transindividuation that Aristotle was already calling “philia,” in other words, love.
politics of desire, that is to say, of a political economy of the unconscious.
The mimetic, gregarious and drive-led nature of consumer capitalism reactivates the technics of the Sophists at an incomparably more powerful and dangerous level, which is that of the veritable grammatisation of desire itself.
From this moment on, we must set up research programmes into the hypomnesic economy of desire that numerical media make possible: such forms of media are carriers of anamnesic as well as hypomnesic possibilities of individuation and transindividuation that are hitherto completely unknown. The task is to think these numerical hypomnēmata and the new forms of otium that can appear within them, and thus to found a new political economy of memory and desire.[32]
Jacques Derrida elsewhere terms a “prosthesis at the origin”—i.e. the “originary intrusion, the ageless intrusion of technics,”[41] as though in place of (or we might say, in anticipation of) a formalised agency vested in either a Cartesian cogito me cogitare rem or Hegelian Time and Spirit, as the essence of conscientia.
Subsequently for Marx, the machine no longer represents a counter- or post-humanistic development, but rather the very “essence” of humanism.
the three-fold relation of nature (the given status of man); reason (the deduced status of man); and technology (the produced status of man)—linked
as a “crisis” in the very logic of historical thesis, primordiality, causal agency and the ego cogito; a crisis once again signalled—within the ongoing critique of modernity—in the recursive trope of “the machine.”
As Ernst Cassirer discusses in his Essay on Man (1944): “Man’s claim to being the centre of the universe has lost its foundation. Man is placed in an infinite space in which his being seems to be a single and vanishing point. He is surrounded by a mute universe, by a world that is silent to his religious feeling and his deepest moral demands.”
Cassirer asserts, “always imply a theoretical, which means a symbolic, element.”[48] Furthermore: “It is symbolic thought which overcomes the natural inertia of man and endows him with a new ability, the ability to constantly reshape his human universe.”
this reshaping, expressed as the “discourse of man”
“Technology,” Heidegger famously argues, “is not equivalent to the essence of technology … Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it.”
in the sense of a radical disclosure of man’s technological situation.
As Bernard Stiegler has suggested in his on-going study La Technique et le temps (1994-),
“The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession.
The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory.”
supersession. It is, as Derrida and Stiegler argue, impossible for man to choose technology, as though technology existed in a merely objective relation to an already complete idea of the human.
But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automated system of machinery … set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.[76]
In this way Marx identifies the machine not as the instrumentality of humanity’s emancipation, but—expressed in more Heideggerian terms—as a mode of revealing of man’s “essential being.”
Man’s “freedom” is consequently not a freedom purchased by way of technology, or at the price of the replacement of man by the machine, but—at the risk of involving a metaphysical reduction—as a confrontation with the technological “essence” of the very condition for man’s being as such (“its conscious linkages”).
The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite.
Aristotle,
category of possibility
(that “which is capable either of being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made; for art [technē] is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity …”).
Indeed, the particular matrix of Gestell-technē-poiēsis in Heidegger’s analytic of technics,
Marx’s conception of temporality as discursive communication among agents—i.e. as a network, interface or mechanism for the circulation and re-distribution of value—according
the “essence” of being as perpetual becoming.
“singularity and generality of every ‘I,’” as Derrida says)
Stiegler
“access to the possible.”
In Marx’s schema, this mode of temporalisation is figured in the trope of “the machine” (“systemic in its performance,” as Paul de Man says, “but arbitrary in its principle, like a grammar”
“technology” constitutes—in however broad a sense—a “cultural system that reconstructs the entire social world as an object of control.”[115] Control in this sense is defined not as the instrumentalisation of a social destiny, but as emergent structures of organisation “programmed” by way of material constraint, or probability (as a calculus of the possible).
