Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment: Toward a Critical Politics of Re-Individuation

Abstract

Abstract Since the creation of Ars Industrialis in 2005, Bernard Stiegler has increasingly turned his focus toward the more directly political aspects of critical theory. While in his great, five-volume Technics and Time Stiegler concentrated on a radical reassessment of the role of technics in a post-phenomenological world, it has become impossible for him to avoid the contemporary implications of a history-less (and therefore uncritical) culture, the arrival of a hyper-technical age in which not only the very idea of hitory, but of the cultural values historicity provides, have been occluded. Stiegler's publications since 2005 have been preoccupied with the occlusion; his two most dynamic recent publications, Reenchanter le monde (2006) and Prendre soin (1) de la jeunesse et les generations (2008) are aimed directly at it.1 In these two works Stiegler lays out a politics of critique, not merely returning to an Enlightenment idea of critical rationality but accepting the current technological world for what it is and re-introducing the possibility of an anamnesis, a non-forgetting of the vital importance of critical engagement to any sustainable cultural environment. In so doing, Stkgler examines what he calls the 'telecracy,' agri-business, and the 'culture industry,' as well as the political process itself, showing how a new sense of 'grammatisation' can be employed to pull culture back from the brink of disintegration.My contribution will consist of translations of two sections of Reenchanter le monde, 'Grammatisation and Individuation Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow' and 'The Risk of Disindividuation as the Increase of Ignorance Rather Than Knowledge', making extensive critical commentary on Stiegler's project -'re-enchanting' the world requires new vigour, commitment, and critical literacy; I will compare the crissi of individuation Stiegler lays out as his 'next step' in the process of 're-enchantment', in Taking Care 1, of Youth and the Generations (which I have translated for Stanford University Press). In Reenchanter le monde Stiegler uses Gilbert Simondon's transduction and individuation, as well as his own Technics and Time, as critical frames; in Taking Care he shows how the urgent need for change is part of a larger discourse originating in the Kantian Enlightenment but being very much of our time. I will tie Stiegler's approaches in these two works together to show how he and Ars Industrialis are forging a critical politics vital to the twenty-first century.Keywords politics, critique, technics, Simondon, Ars Industrialis, telecracyEsprit does not exist without objective retentional media, and ... the history of this media is also the history of technics - today, of industry. Esprits future can exist only in a geopolitics of cultural technologies that would also be an ecological politics of the spirit/mind: any politics of consciousness (and what is politics if not, from beginning to end, a politics of consciousness?) is necessarily a politics of technics.Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 3'1ENCHANTMENT/DISENCHANTMENTSince the creation of Ars Industrialis in 2005,3 in both his longer and shorter works Bernard Stiegler has increasingly shifted his focus from the philosophical or socio-philosophical toward a number of more directly political aspects of critical theory and its application to contemporary cultural life. Whereas in his multi-volume works begun in the 1990s and the early 2000s4 Stiegler concentrates on a radical reassessment of the role of technics in a post-phenomenological world - indeed a world in which the very nature of the human is increasingly in question - he has more recently explored the implications of an increasingly history-less (and therefore uncritical) culture brought about by our collective immersion in time-suspending teletechnologies, and by the advent of a hyper-technical age in which not only the very idea of history (and its relation to the human), but of the cultural values predicated on that humano-historicity, have been and are increasingly being occluded. …