Reviews

Proletarianisation isn’t working

Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society: The Future of Work, Volume 1, trans, Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).
341pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 1 50950 630 9 hb., 978 1 50950 631 6 pb.

Despairing over the conditions of living and work- Bernard Stiegler’s Automatic Society: The Future
ing in Foxconn’s ‘factory city’ in China, a total of of Work, the first volume in a projected series, is
14 workers leapt to their deaths from the rooftops addressed to the implications of this turn to auto-
of their plant in Longhua, Shenzhen in 2010. The mation; concerned with the disappearance of work
company’s stopgap response was to suspend nets (or at least of ‘employment’), but also with other,
between the plant’s buildings so as to frustrate the and equally troubling, consequences of automation.
efforts of the would-be suicides. Foxconn’s long term The algorithmic technics of contemporary capital-
solution, rather than improving the conditions of ism, the ascendency of ‘big data’ as a mechanism
workers, is to remove them from the equation. Hav- of control, capture and subjectivation, threaten, ac-
ing reached some kind of upper limit in the tolerance cording to Stiegler, human capacities for dreaming
levels of the human pysche they have moved to full and reflection, even for thought itself. The book
roboticisation. Aiming towards the complete auto- opens with a reference to Chris Anderson’s often
mation in the assembly of iPhones and other con- cited and tellingly titled essay ‘The End of Theory’.
sumer electronics, Foxconn, like other major manu- In this text, published in Wired in 2007, Anderson en-
facturers, have turned in their pursuit of optimal pro- thuses over the displacement of human knowledge by
ductivity to replacing workers with machines. computational information, as represented by the op-
Media reports on the ‘Rise of the Robots’ abound, erations of Google. As Stiegler elaborates:
as do warnings of job losses – projected at around
The automated ‘knowledge’ celebrated by Anderson
35% in the next 20 years for the UK, according to a
no longer needs to be thought. In the epoch of the
Deloitte and Oxford University study of 2014. The algorithmic implementation of applied mathemat-
effects of automation are, unsurprisingly, unequally ics in computerised machines, there is no longer any
distributed. That same report notes that ‘jobs paying need to think: thinking is concretised in the form
less than £30,000 a year are nearly five times more of algorithmic automatons that control data-capture
likely to be replaced by automation than jobs pay- systems and hence make it obsolete. As automatons,
these algorithms no longer require it in order to
ing over £100,000.’ Equally predictable is the op-
function – as if thinking had been proletarianised by
portunism of employers in using the threat of auto-
itself.
mation to suppress wage levels. In response to the
current campaign being fought for by workers at Mc- For Stiegler, typically, the threat of automation,
Donald’s for a minimum $15 per hour the company’s as it currently presents itself, is nothing less than
CEO, Ed Rensi, warned that this demand could only apocalyptic. Its four horsemen ­ heralds of the ‘be-
lead to greater automation. The Forbes article in coming computational’ of capitalism – are Google,
which this was reported argues that what those in- Apple, Facebook and Amazon. These are ‘literally dis-
volved in this campaign are ‘really demonstrating for entegrating the industrial societies that emerged from
is accelerating the date at which their job disappears the Aufklärung.’
to a machine.’ Stiegler draws substantially, though not uncritic-

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ally, from Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and paleo-ontologist André Leroi-Gourhan – for whom
the Ends of Sleep (2013) in his critique of the techno- the human is defined, as such, in terms of its ‘origin-
logically automated environments with which we are ary technicity’ – and his earlier synthesis of this with
now functionally integrated. Continuously hooked Derridean conceptions of ‘supplement’ and ‘gram-
up to these environments through portable and net- matisation’ in his Technics and Time 1: The Fault of
worked electronic devices, the subject subsists in a Epimetheus. Grammatisation, ‘consisting in the du-
state of unremitting connectivity, eliminating the plication and discretisation of mental experiences’,
time of sleep, dream and daydream. Deprived of the is a process conceived by Stiegler, following Der-
intermittences that might afford time and space for rida, as one in which human experience and know-
states of reverie, the human subject is also dispos- ledge are exteriorised and retained by technological
sessed of its capacity for the kind of thinking neces- means, including, but not limited to, those of writ-
sary to individual and social transformation: ‘The ing. Digital technology is understood, within this
dream that thinks leads to realisations … technical schema, as only the ‘most advanced stage’ of a pro-
inventions, artistic creations, political institutions’. cess essential to and inextricable from hominisation,
Antoinettte Rouvroy and Thomas Berns’s con- one ‘that goes back to at least the end of the Upper
ception of an ‘algorithmic governmentality’ per- Paleolithic’.
forms a similarly significant role for Stiegler in ar- These perspectives on technology and prolet-
ticulating his critique of automation. For Berns and arianisation enable a more nuanced and in some
Rouvroy, the automation of governance enabled by ways more radical take on the political economy of
big data obliterates the time and space of both polit- automation than is offered by many other critics of
ics and critique. In their 2013 essay ‘Algorithmic gov- its deleterious effects. Stiegler parts company with
ernmentality and prospects of emancipation’, they Crary, for example, over the issue of the relationship
argue that ‘legitimate authority has been displaced obtaining between capitalism and technology. For
and distributed into things, making it difficult to ap- Crary, television and related technologies are ‘part
prehend or to question since it is imposed in the of a larger strategy of power’, whereas, for Stiegler,
name of realism and loses its political visibility. Cri- capitalism is only ever the ‘quasi-case’ of technolo-
tique is paralysed because it seems to have been gical development that is to be properly understood
overtaken and rendered obsolete.’ Algorithmic gov- as ‘fundamentally accidental’. While acknowledging
ernmentality anticipates our every move, mapping that ‘there are strategies and programmes directing
out in advance an apolitical ideal of behaviour and and prescribing research and development’, those
perfomance – as exemplified in the ‘smart city’ – to devices which integrate us with Crary’s 24/7 capit-
which the subject must adapt and conform without alism are better conceived as appropriated by cap-
reflection. italism – an advantageous ‘windfall’ – rather than
In addition to recent conceptions of 24/7 cap- as resulting from some pre-planned strategy. This
italism and algorithmic governmentality, Stiegler’s point might be further debated, particularly given
critique of automation also takes in longer term that state investment of tax revenues in technolo-
perspectives with which readers of his substantial gical research and development is often ultimately
oeuvre will be familiar. He conceives of the ‘pro- employed in devices supposed, for example, to be en-
letarianisation of minds and spirits’ effected in con- tirely ‘Designed in California’ by Apple. Whatever
temporary processes of automation, for instance, as the intricacies of this particular debate, Stiegler’s
the final culmination of a process of rationalisation larger and effectively argued point is that the threat
originally identified by Weber, and by Adorno and of automation is not best described as a ‘rise of the
Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, as the robots’ but rather as the capture of technics by cap-
calculative instrumentalisation of reason within and italism within its ongoing project of rationalisation.
for capitalism. Stiegler also builds here upon his Stiegler’s account of technics as exteriorisation,
longstanding engagement with the thought of the as an apparatus of human retention, also challenges

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conceptions of technology as an always externally all kinds, which are formed during these practices.’
posited and invasive threat to an essentialised hu- On this basis, Stiegler is able to formulate an effect-
manity. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, for instance, in his ively critical response to a contemporary technics of
recent book And: Phenomenology of the End, ar- automation rather than simply denouncing its sup-
gues that the human subject is currently threatened posedly inhuman effects.
with ‘neurological mutation’; that there is underway Technics, then, is not itself the problem. What
an epochal shift in the very nature of the human is at issue for Stiegler is rather the proletarianisation
nervous system wrought by the rise of digital tech- of the relationship between technics and the sub-
nologies that now makes possible ‘the insertions of ject; the latter’s alienation from rather than its in-
neuro-linguistic memes and automatic devices in the vasion by processes of automation. When retention
sphere of cognition, social psyche and life forms.’ is digitised as data, as information algorithmically
processed and circulated, it is no longer available to
knowledge. Technics no longer serves as pharmakon.
It is taken out of circulation as a site of social and py-
schic investment to be instrumentalised, instead, as
the exclusive property of computational capitalism.
In escaping and outrunning human cognition, auto-
mation leads to the ‘disintegration of psychic and so-
cial individuals’.
As I have noted, the picture painted of the im-
plications of an ‘automatic society’ subsumed to the
rationalising and algorithimic logic of capitalism is
apocalyptic. Stiegler is, though, equally concerned
to grasp the possibilities of automation dialectically
so as to envisage some exit from his catastrophic
forecast. Whereas Berns and Rouvroy, for example,
tend to present their ‘algorithmic governmentality’
as a done deal, in which critique has already been
rendered impossible, Stiegler both insists on its pos-
sibility and demonstrates its necessity in Automatic
Society. We are, he argues, placed at a critical junc-
ture and his avowed purpose, rather than to para-
Through such insertions ‘history is replaced by the lyse thought through despair, is to ‘anticipate, de-
implementation of a technological model, format- scribe, alert, but also to propose’. ‘The question this
ted by the networked machine.’ Berardi’s lament period poses’, he notes, ‘is how to make an exit from
replays a longstanding trope in which newly intro- its own toxicity’. Stiegler’s exit strategy is through
duced media technologies – writing, the printing automation itself. Automation as pharmakon might
press, television, the internet, social media – are held be turned to curative rather than poisonous ends. It
to threaten the supposedly given nature of the hu- is through a return to Marx’s critique of the aliena-
man subject. What Berardi describes negatively as tion of wage labour that Stiegler pursues this possib-
the invasive and technological ‘reformatting’ of cog- ility here.
nition is, for Stiegler, necessarily fundamental, and Stiegler is not alone in observing that automa-
in some sense ‘natural’, to the human. ‘[S]ince the tion will likely render much current employment re-
beginning of hominisation’, he writes, ‘the practice dundant, but he is more original – while acknow-
of tools and instruments has disorganised and reor- ledging here his debt to André Gorz – in arguing that
ganised the brains, minds and spirits of workers … of we must not confuse employment with work in re-

RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.01 101

sponding to this. Employment, as wage labour, ne- Stiegler’s critique of automation is inarguably
cessarily implies proletarianisation and alienation, dialectical and, in its mobilisation of the pharmakon,
whereas for Marx, ‘work can be fulfilling only if it impeccably Derridean. Yet it leaves unanswered –
ceases to be wage labour and becomes free.’ The de- for the moment at least, pending a second volume –
fence of employment on the part of the left and la- the question of the means through which the trans-
bour unions is then castigated as a regressive posi- ition from employment to work might be effected.
tion that, while seeking to secure the ‘right to work’, This would surely require not only the powers of in-
only shores up capitalism through its calls for the dividual thought, knowledge, reflection and critique
maintenance of wage labour. Contrariwise, automa- that Stiegler himself affirms and demonstrates in
tion has the potential to finally release the subject Automatic Society, but also their collective practice
from the alienation of wage labour so as to engage and mobilisation. What is also passed over in Stie-
in unalienated work, properly understood as the pur- gler’s longer term perspectives is the issue of how
suit, practice and enjoyment of knowledge. What such collective practices, such as already exist, are
currently stands in the way of the realisation of ful- to respond to the more immediate and contempor-
filling work, aside from an outmoded defense of em- ary effects of automation, if not through the direct
ployment, Stiegler notes, is the capture of the ‘free contestation of the conditions and terms of employ-
time’ released from employment in consumption, ment and unemployment.
as forms of entertainment and distraction equally
devoid of knowledge or its real fulfilment. Douglas Spencer

Unlikely hegemons
Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Alresford:
Zero Books, 2017). 136pp., £9.99 pb., 978 1 78535 543 1

Kill All Normies sets out to provide an anatomy of On Nagle’s account, Tumblr-liberalism, a form
the internet spaces in which contemporary ‘culture of politics focusing on identities and their recogni-
wars’ are being fought out, and an account of how tion, mainly existed on social media before recently
the alt-right rose to prominence and power. It ex- breaking out into what she calls ‘campus wars’. For
amines the aesthetics of transgression, the symbi- some time now, a more general version of identity
osis of sadism and sentimentalism, and the effects politics has informed the prevailing world view of
of alienation in modern life which have been repro- professional strata and the liberal press; Tumblr-
duced and amplified by the internet. The text opens liberalism is not coextensive with this but rather a
with the hope and optimism surrounding the ‘hori- radicalised offshoot that grew online. But the inter-
zontal’, ‘networked’, ‘leaderless’ realm opened up by net is a diverse place and, less noticed until relat-
the internet, heralded by the 2011 Egyptian revolu- ively recently, on the message boards of 4chan and
tion (the so-called ‘Twitter revolution’) and the Oc- Men’s Rights Activism (MRA) groups, the alt-right
cupy movement, before moving on to puncture the was beginning to emerge. Both the alt-right and
resultant hubris and complacency. If we let a thou- Tumblr-liberalism are, Nagle argues, insular move-
sand flowers bloom, some of them are bound to go ments, possessing their own subcultural norms, their
rotten. It was a pervasive myth at the start of the ‘own vocabulary and style’, raising barriers of entry
decade that the methods of communication and or- in an effort to exclude the eponymous ‘normies’.
ganisation opened up by the internet were to the in- Both groups saw themselves as transgressing a main-
trinsic advantage of the left. Subsequent events have stream orthodoxy, of rebelling against the status quo
shown otherwise. by violating social norms. But the kind of transgres-

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