A Review of Bernard Stiegler’s article “The Proletarianisation of Sensibility”

 

A Review of Bernard Stiegler’s article “The Proletarianisation of Sensibility”

Prepared by Dr Neil Peach

ABSTRACT

Stiegler’s article “The Proletarianisation of Sensibility” translated by Anne De Boever and published by Duke University in 2017  provides interesting insights into his analysis of the foundations of human sensibility as well as the epochal implications of developments in contemporary art in the 20th century. In essence,  Stiegler proposes that there is now a general regime of reproduction [incorporating both work and art]  comprising “a new totality of tertiary  retentions” and that contemporary artistic sensibility and aesthetics are constituent of a “general organology”. 

Stiegler’s overall philosophy often refers to the process of proletarianisation as the means through which humans lose knowledge. It can apply to all  areas of human activity - work, art, music, day-to-day encounters. It flows from mans’ tendency to employ technics and is one of the core constituents of Plato’s construction of the pharmakon. Pharmakon is the basis for ‘pharmacology’ which is a way of thinking and characterising the pattern of human life through time and technics. Imagine a wave pattern that undulates to illustrate the rhythm of human life as it encounters the positive and negative implications of technological development. One significant period and type of proletarianisation was started by  the industrial revolution and has caused many people to lose their knowledge of how to do certain types of work. It is a condition of the pharmakon that at the same time people lose work skills other people  gain different work skills. Pharmacology posits that the rhythm of these losses and gains is not a smooth one and epochs of human history emerge from this to-ing and fro-ing, as man seeks to respond to his own innovations.The wave patterns may at times look like a printout from a seismograph.

Notions of individuation and transindividuation come close to being forces that absorb and at times overcome the negative losses of knowledge. Life on earth is strongly characterised by individuals comprising populations within species. Individuation is the scene where the universal conditions of life encounter the singular instance of each species and each individual must then respond to sustain its existence. If the pressures of life are too great, the individual may not succeed [and individuation is thwarted]. Transindividuation represents the coevality and inter-connection of the  individual with its respective collective [its species society]  and with its related technical milieu [which, for man, is now active in major decisions in the everyday continuance of human life].  

Human memory, which is always present and available to an individual, has been externalised [by way of tertiary retentions]  into an enormous array of technologies. Compounding this externalisation of memory is that humans’ thought and activity  has also been exteriorised by way of a discretisation / grammatisation process. By breaking up patterns of movement and speech, and life in general, man has been able to replicate and automate core elements of our lives to machines. The scale of this machinic transfer is  increasing pressures on the   human way of life. As a result of our immersion with, and into technics, in the past couple of hundred years, Stiegler refers to the interactions between our body’s organs [including our  sensorimotor organs] and the machines and institutions man has made, as being an ‘organology’. At certain periods during this history Stiegler says  “The defunctionalisations and refunctionalisations that determine the rhythm of the organological genealogy of the sensible and what lies coiled up there - the intellect and the unity of its reasons, its motivations- have specific folds that create ruptures that are called epochs….”.  This overview provides a brief context for the issues raised by Stiegler in his article.  

FULL ARTICLE