TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

What is tragic about choice is no longer fundamental if choice is no longer what establishes communication between an independent city and an independent individual as substances.

—Gilbert Simondon¹

Excess and disruption are different modes of systemic interferences, providing differing sets of axiological implications. This essay seeks to explore their tragic interface in the works of Bernard Stiegler to gain an ethical perspective of techno-logical normativity under the threat of societal and environmental collapse. By foregrounding Stiegler’s use of the concept of tragedy, the Nietzschean legacy in his work will be a central part of this exploration, given that disruption is perceived as a nihilism leading to the loss of individuation. In critically reconsidering the role of excess, Nietzsche’s late shift of the tragic antinomy of the individual and individuation towards that of reason and excess will be discussed in order to address the originary ambivalence of disruption. On the one hand, disruption is a necessary concept to consider totalizing tendencies of automation. On the other hand, its dissipative force needs to be questioned around discourses on normativity.

Disruption, as conceptualized by Bernard Stiegler, figures a dissipative process, a loss of individuation of a system of becoming that he describes as organological in the sense that is a dynamic interplay of psycho-social, technological and environmental processes. It is also a noetic approach dealing with the consequences of systemic thinking beyond mechanism.² Stiegler defines general organology as “a method of thinking […] where technical becoming must be thought via the concept of the technical system, as it adjusts and is adjusted to social systems, themselves constituted by psychic apparatuses.”³ The role of technology as condition and effect of thinking and acting should therefore be acknowledged as what Stiegler calls originary prostheticity: an originary technicity actively considered in the context of both psychic and collective becoming.⁴

Stiegler primarily foregrounds that algorithmic digital technologies produce a loss of psycho-social individuation by anticipating emotions and actions, therefore creating a loss of the possibility of organological normativity.⁵ In highlighting the loss of shared “desires, expectations, volitions and will,”⁶ Stiegler sees a young generation at risk, one that ceased believing in family constructs; in contributing to, and improving, a functioning political system; and in the purpose of its labor.⁷ He observes the decrease of choices for future generations, as disruption becomes apparent as “the final extremity of nihilism.”⁸ In several of his later publications, Stiegler refers to a fifteen-year-old person called Florian. They explain their experience of feeling confused and without orientation in a way that, according to Stiegler, marks the “loss of the feeling of existing, the loss of the possibility of expressing one’s will, the correlative loss of all reason for living and the subsequent loss of reason as such.”⁹ This, as Stiegler points out as a central thesis in many of his works, functions as the cause of madness as the greatest symptom of disruption.¹⁰

However, by encompassing a break, an interference, a gap, disruption may also provide a basis for thinking collectivity beyond collective purpose. In this context, disruption reveals its own pharmacology as a mode of thinking that has, finally, abandoned such a finalism that has become apparent as an important ideological cause of techno-capitalist productivity and its unipolar handling of values. Simondon for example finds a “divine finality”¹¹ to be an application of value to utility, as one which supposes an ideal of (cybernetic) complementarity achieved through “absolute and non-communal perfection.”¹² Disruption however encompasses the failure of placing higher (technological) achievements of humanity over individual desires. As such it bears critical potential in which the individual, according to Simondon, “instead of being as a substance or a precarious being aspiring to substantiality, is grasped as the singular point of an open infinity of relations.”¹³ In order to grasp this infinity of relations, the tragic relation of disruption and excess needs to be reconsidered.

What Stiegler therefore conceives as the “tragedy of disruption,”¹⁴ in which disruption itself provides the potential for profound change, “not just […] a new epoch, but […] a new era,”¹⁵ is that the nihil of disruption actually allows for new modes of social existences to emerge—such is the generative value of disruption and the important influence of Nietzsche in Stiegler’s work, who proposes to take on the former’s task of the “transvaluation of all values.”¹⁶ The latter’s “tragedy of disruption” emerges from digital proletarianization, creating a conflict between individual and collective identity, in which many are exposed to automatically produced content in which the algorithmic anticipation of choices results in the experience of a decrease of the possibility of choice due to a pharmacological ambivalence of these technologies.¹⁷ However, the critical ambivalence of disruption emerges by considering the limitation of tragic interference to be merely possible within the closed feedback loop of proletarianized individuals and algorithmic technologies.

As Ashley Woodward points out, tragedy in Nietzsche’s sense “thinks the co-constitution of forces or tendencies as a generative difference; that is, it thinks in terms of differential forces in productive relation, rather than opposition, where both are irreducibly necessary.”¹⁸ Additionally, Deleuze explains in Nietzsche and Philosophy that Nietzsche revisits the relation between Apollon and Dionysus in Ecce Homo, figuring that the veritable tragic relation is rather between Socrates and Dionysus, shifting the antinomy of individual and individuation toward that of reason and excess.¹⁹ As Tracy Colony argues in his critical reading of the influence of Nietzsche on Stiegler’s work, the “absence of a pure origin and the awareness of an originary excess as constitutive of identity is what tragedy was able to articulate prior to the attempted dissolution of these aporias in the categories of metaphysics.”²⁰ If there is no pure origin, there cannot be an imaginary of a pure end; and if there is an a priori of preindividual excess, there is always meaning somewhere.

By reconsidering the meaning of excess alongside that of disruption, the following genealogy could be sketched out: both Nietzsche and Simondon refer to Anaximander’s apeiron, which Nietzsche figures to be das Unbestimmte (“the indefinite”)²¹ and Simondon redefines as the preindividual, which he also uses interchangeably with nature.²² Stiegler in turn applies the Simondonian concept of the preindividual, but only insofar as the “the funds [fonds] of an epoch (and more precisely what Simondon called its preindividual funds)”²³ are exhausted by disruption.²⁴ It appears that disruption itself, according to Stiegler, is precisely problematic because it cannot be undermined by excess. But then, by introducing the notion of the tragic, disruption becomes an ambiguity which also bears the potential for profound societal change in the same universal manner as in its dissipation, which Stiegler takes from Nietzsche:

Witnessing the sudden expansion of European capitalism in Germany, Britain and France, Nietzsche, who saw this degradation and its sudden acceleration, described it in terms of nihilism. We ourselves see this nihilism fulfilled and accomplished in the twenty-first century as disruption, via machinic calculability that today effects disinhibition in a thoroughly automatic way.²⁵

A potential problem evoked by Nietzsche’s philosophy is addressed by Simondon, who argues that it inherits the problem of complementarity, by arguing from the perspective of becoming in its entirety with the concept of eternal return.²⁶ However, there appears to be a necessary tension which enables the problematization of disruption and its effect on society in the first place.

It could be argued that Stiegler has the question of choice at heart of his texts, since computation and algorithmic technologies pose the problem of automatism as a lack of normativity, expressed by Stiegler as “automatic nihilism.”²⁷ Cécile Malaspina in this regard chooses to consider a more dynamic understanding of value by framing noise as a conceptualization of the preindividual, in which noise signifies not merely the state of the system’s interference, but further provides “ground for the emergence of form and its transformation,”²⁸ ultimately allowing “the greatest possible ‘freedom of choice.’”²⁹ For Malaspina, who draws on Shannon’s and Weaver’s concept of information entropy, noise signifies the excessiveness of information outside of a configuration of information as negentropy.³⁰ As de Jager observes by referring to Malaspina: “‘nowhere in the empirical world is a closed system realized in absolute terms,’ we are always bound to some degree of excess.”³¹ If there is no closed system, the notion of interference only makes sense to some extent. But simultaneously, interferences are only possible through open systems in the first place.³²

Stiegler’s analysis of a loss of reason encompasses the pharmacological dimension of disruptive nihilism itself, in which excess proves to be the duplicity of disruption. Reason, for Stiegler, is inevitably coupled with “desires, expectations, volitions and will” or what he calls “the loss of the feeling of existing, the loss of the possibility of expressing one’s will, the correlative loss of all reason for living and the subsequent loss of reason as such.”³³ However, Stiegler may not consider how reason as such could be inadequate to represent the experiences of generations deeply intertwined with algorithmic digital technologies. Family and gender constructs as well as political ideals may fall apart due to their lack of potential to represent algorithmic organological realities which reveal complex and cosmotechnical interfaces of economic and environmental realities. In his exploration of values, Simondon points out that it is actually the “universal will” of finalism, compensating all expressions of life under a universal purpose, which universalizes “the principle of sufficient reason.”³⁴ Stiegler however may have underestimated the ethical potential amidst the process of proletarianization emerging from many factors which disruption entails.

When considering the concept of tragedy to explain the relation of the axiology of excess and disruption, it could be argued that ethics are not destroyed alongside reason, but that they in fact can and should be reframed in different terms. For example, according to Matilde Marcolli’s anarcho-transhumanist examination of Nietzsche’s philosophy, “ethical values should stem from the affirmation of life and are not bound to the realm of rational analysis.”³⁵ Such affirmation requires a different set of values when thinking about interference. And Marcolli’s anarchist reading of transhumanism in fact is very different from Stiegler’s critical understanding of a kind of transhumanism, which he attaches to Google’s various projects which “[take] the statistical and probabilistic calculation of averages as its standard, and thereby in fact eliminates idiomatic linguistic difference, that is, diachronic and idiosyncratic variability.”³⁶ Such a transhumanism is involved in a hostility against the life that exists today, which is life in transition. The ambiguity in Stiegler’s work lies in how is critical approach is holding on to ideals of life which turn themselves against any potential desires of those of generations already intimately intertwined with algorithmic technologies.³⁷

The defiant potential of Stiegler’s solidarity with Florian’s generation is therefore under threat, as he focuses on the dissipative effects of algorithmic psycho-collective becoming. This becomes apparent when connecting Florian’s observations—“All that is over and done with, because we’re sure that we will be the last generation, or one of the last, before the end”³⁸—initially printed in 2006,³⁹ to more recent times. They prefigure the rhetoric which more radical climate protest groups would pick up during Covid around 2021, such as the organization Die Letzte Generation (“the last generation”), famous for its large-scale and controversial road and airport blockages across Germany, Austria and Italy.⁴⁰ Sadly, besides still hoping for political emergency reactions to the climate catastrophe, they also teach us the conduct of bearing, as physicist Carlo Rovelli frames it, the death of the collective in the same manner an individual bears the limitation of its own existence.⁴¹ The fact that we as individuals are eventually going to die has never been a sufficient reason for unethical behavior, and the same could be applied when facing the decease of societies as we know them.

It is therefore important to consider and explore the values which are carried—beyond any apparent subsequent loss of reason or meaning—by those collectives actively dealing with existential threats and dooming nihilism. Such a consideration also exceeds Stiegler’s enthusiasm for Greta Thunberg’s wakening call for emergency acting and thinking.⁴² As shown by the British organization Just Stop Oil, climate protests are continuing despite the lack of hope for success. On June 15, 2023, Just Stop Oil released a newsletter in which it condemned Britain’s increase of police security against climate protestors seemingly at the same time as scientists announced that the geological tipping point to prevent the irrevocable melting of glaciers and large ice masses had been crossed. Just Stop Oil wrote that “the government wants to remove all hope and break us apart because they know we cannot beat them as individuals. But, together, we have more strength than they are capable of understanding.”⁴³ There appears to be a collectivity beyond collective protention, beyond the necessity of shared desires and future prospects, showing that there can be ethical compassion based on affirmation rather than reason.

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