Table of Contents

Title page

Epigraph

Notes

Introduction: Functional Stupidity, Entropy and Negentropy in the Anthropocene

1. What occurred between 23 June and 23 October 2008
2. Bottling Paris
3. What is hidden in France Ten Years From Now?
4. Entropy and negentropy in the Anthropocene
5. The completion of nihilism and the entry into the Neganthropocene
6. The question of fire and the advent of thermodynamics
7. The Anthropocene as a succession of technological shocks and the neganthropic role of knowledge
8. Smartification
9. The goal of the present work
Notes

1: The Industry of Traces and Automatized Artificial Crowds

10. The automatization of existences
11. The proletarianization of sensibility
12. The original artificiality of traces in noetic life
13. The industry of traces
14. Automatic decision-making, stupor, sideration – ‘net blues’
15. Ill-being and the goddess of intermittence
16. From control societies to full automatization (from Angela Merkel to the ‘bum on the corner’)
17. Crisis, metamorphosis, stupefaction
18. Pharmacology of ‘big data’
19. Ultra-liberalism as the dis-integration of individuals into ‘dividuals’
20. That by which the world holds
21. The automated capture of behavioural expressions as the automated formation of new kinds of ‘conventional crowds’
22. Pharmacology of associated milieus
Notes

2: States of Shock, States of Fact, States of Law

23. From the common origin of law and science to the ruin of theory
24. Phenomenotechnics, automatism and catastrophe
25. The duty of every non-inhuman being
26. The common obsolescence of the scientist and the soldier in the age of total automatization
27. The uselessness of knowledge and the obsolescence of taxonomy, hypotheses and experiments: the power of Google according to Chris Anderson
28. The computational becoming of language as the standardization of enormity
29. End of theory or new age of theories?
30. Technology, science, politics and dis-automatization
31. The ‘Robot Apocalypse’ and the true meaning of the revelations of Edward Snowden
32. What is to be done?
33. Supplementary invention
Notes

3: The Destruction of the Faculty of Dreaming

34. Full synchronization through ‘online correlates’
35. Accelerated transformations of calendarity by innovation in the service of 24/7 capitalism and the liquidation of intermittence
36. Intermittences of the improbable
37. Dream, fact and law
38. Confronting the power of totalization – the right and duty to dis-automatize by dreaming
39. The organological bases of sleep, dream and intermittence
40. The interpretation of dreams and organology
41. Against the ideological naturalization of technics and noesis
42. Pharmacology of functional integration
43. Transitions and phase shifts
44. Transition, dreaming and transindividuation – towards the Neganthropocene
45. Expression of tendencies and digital madness
46. Technical facts and the end of work
47. The quasi-causality of capital itself
Notes

4: Overtaken: The Automatic Generation of Protentions

48. Overproduction, anomie and neganthropy
49. The improbable, technics and time
50. The truth of the digital and its denial
51. Retentions, promises, protentions
52. Performativity in light-time as the flattening of the world
53. Algorithmic governance and digital territories
54. Algorithmic governmentality as anormative automatic transindividuation
55. Automatic immanence and the obsolescence of categories
56. Automatic government
57. The imperturbable power of algorithmic governmentality and the improbability of the default that is necessary in the incessant
58. Immanence and perturbation – eliminating failure
59. The epoch of the absence of epoch and the ill-educated boors that we are
60. (Dys)functional incapacitation and the legal vacuum
Notes

5: Within the Electronic Leviathan in Fact and in Law

61. Disparation and signification
62. Orders and disorders of magnitude
63. Information and knowledge
64. Everybody is Nobody: flatness and verticality in the electronic Leviathan
65. The macropolitics of relief
66. De-proletarianization as dis-automatization
67. Hermeneutics of the Leviathan
68. Organology of jurisprudence
69. Collective individuations, social systems and hermeneutic jurisprudence
70. From the semantic web to the hermeneutic web
71. Simondonian thought undone by its algorithmic concretization – where time is outstripped
72. The disparations of the improbable and their rhizomatic dissolution
73. The common, work and knowledge
Notes

6: On Available Time for the Coming Generation

74. Law, work, wages
75. The organology of proletarianization
76. The reinvention of work
77. Hands, works, brains
78. The fundamental contradiction of the left with respect to work, its status, its division and its time
79. Alienated labour and liberated work
80. Available time and free work
81. Free time, the third sector and the social economy
Notes

7: Energies and Potentials in the Twenty-First Century

82. Energy and power after the ‘death of God’
83. Against the omerta
84. Employment, knowledge, wealth
85. Otium, value and negentropy
86. The time of wealth
87. The decline of the division of labour
88. Ergology and energeia: work as noetic activity and the dual economy of energy
89. The new value of work as open science
90. The work of noesis and popular philosophy
91. Calculating power
92. Two forms of energy
93. Work and physics
94. Libidinal energy and care
Notes

8: Above and Beyond the Market

95. Organology of a positive right to interpretation
96. Above and beyond the market – honey and the income of noetic pollination
97. To subsist in order to exist through what consists
98. Organology of the Anthropocene and ‘opium of the people’
99. Contributory income for intermittence
100. Organology of speculation
101. Therapeutics as neganthropology
Notes

Conclusion: Noetic Pollination and the Neganthropocene

102. Summary traceology of the architect
103. Therapeutics as neganthropology
104. The noetic hive
105. Before the immense. The digital res publica and the editorial question
106. The new system of objects
107. Of what work consists in the Neganthropocene
108. Noetic intermittence and cosmic potlatch
Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Copyright page

First published in French as La Société automatique. 1. L’Avenir du travail, © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2015

This English edition © Polity Press, 2016

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0630-9

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0631-6 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Names: Stiegler, Bernard, author.

Title: Automatic society / Bernard Stiegler.

Other titles: Société automatique. English

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2016]– | “First published in [French] as La Société automatique.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Volume 1. The future of work –

Subjects: LCSH: Automation–Economic aspects. | Automation–Social aspects. | Technological innovations–Social aspects. | Technology and civilization–Philosophy.

Classification: LCC HD6331 .S73513 2016 (print) | LCC HD6331 (ebook) | DDC 338/.064–dc23

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Rational objectivity, technical objectivity and social objectivity are now tightly connected. To neglect one of these aspects of modern scientific culture is to enter the sphere of utopia.

Gaston Bachelard¹

We untiringly construct the world in order that the hidden dissolution, the universal corruption that governs what ‘is’ should be forgotten in favor of a clear and defined coherence of notions and objects, relations and forms – the work of tranquil man. A work that nothingness would be unable to infiltrate and where beautiful names – all names are beautiful – suffice to make us happy.

Maurice Blanchot²

These motors must be very different from all the others. It seems logical to suppose that Morel designed them so that no one who came to this island would be able to understand them. But the difficulty in running the green motors must stem from their basic difference from the other motors. As I do not understand any of them, this greater difficulty disappears. […] And what if Morel had thought to photograph the motors –

Adolfo Bioy Casares³