Stiegler, Bernard. Acting Out. Trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan. Stanford University Press

review by Davin Heckman

in Reconstruction studies in contemporary culture

<1> The recent English-language translation of Bernard Stiegler’s Acting Out, at first glance, appears as a side note to his Technics and Time series (of which two volumes have been translated into English, three have been published in French, and two more are in the works). For readers unfamiliar with Stiegler’s work but who are looking to become familiar, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Empimetheus (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) is arguably the best place to begin, as it represents the most detailed discussion of “technics,” which is what Stiegler is known for. For those philosophers who might otherwise never read Stiegler, Acting Out should be approached as a brief introduction to his big ideas couched in more general reflections on the life of a philosopher. For those who are already reading Stiegler’s work, Acting Out is an indispensible supplement. Acting Out is a reprint of two shorter works: “How I Became a Philosopher” and “To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us: From September 11 to April 21,” the first a reflection on his transformation from convict to philosopher and the second a meditation on the relationship between “individuation,” love, and violence. For the sake of this review, I will address each section separately.

<2> To clarify my characterization of Acting Out, I can only describe my experience reading “How I Became a Philosopher.” On the one hand, the extremely personal nature of the narrative, describing the years in prison, makes for a compelling personal biographical note. Reading many of Stiegler’s key terms (like individuation, hypomnesis, and anamnesis) in relation to such personal experience provided me with new and concrete ways of understanding Stiegler’s work. Take for instance, the distinction between anamnesis and hypomnesis. From the root mnesis, we have one word which refers to “remembering” or “not forgetting,” anamnesis, and another word which refers to another kind of “remembering,” accomplished through artificial forms of memory (such as, writing), hypomnesis. Stiegler describes the interplay of anamnesis and hypomnesis in the context of self-education in philosophy while incarcerated. Cut off from society, he was forced into a new relationship with knowledge that came about through the application of ideas stored in the prison library alongside the social and material deprivations of his environment. In this autobiography, the present Stiegler recounts (anamnesis) the process of his own phenomenological experiments supplemented by philosophical texts (hypomnesis), and posits a process of individuation that cannot be extracted from the technical, and thus illustrates his ideas with an intimacy and personability that is absent from his more traditionally philosophical works. Adding to the fecundity of this encounter is the process of individuation which I undertook myself, while reading the essay. Reading the essay after working through his more dense texts provides a fantastic illustration of anamnesis or, as Stiegler puts it, “the hypomnesis, as that which gives place to anamnesis” (15). As I tried to understand, I found myself caught in the process of recognizing the interplay of memory, forgetting, and technics that is at play in being.

<3> Which brings me back to my original point: Had I read this piece before struggling with Technics and Time, 1, there would be nothing for me to remember, to recognize, and to know. I imagine that many of the ideas that are crucial to understanding Stiegler would have receded into the background, and what I would have taken away from the essay was simply an appreciation of how one man went from being a convict to a philosopher–which is an impressive story in its own right–but which isn’t the key contribution that this particular man makes to the field of philosophy.

<4> “To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us: From September 11 to April 21,” appears, at first, as something quite distinct from the earlier essay. Stiegler begins with a dedication to the constituents of the French far-right political party, The National Front, whose candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen placed second in the in the April 21, 2002 general election, assuring him a runoff against Jacques Chirac the following May 5th. And then proceeds to draw a line back to September 11, 2001, through Richard Durn’s March 26, 2002 killing spree in which he murdered eight members of the Nanterre city council.

<5> Stiegler unites these three events by beginning with a discussion of the type of incident which is quickly coming to characterize our era–the apolitical, apersonal, social massacre (like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Dunblane, Port Arthur, etc.) in which an individual or group of individuals decides to annihilate as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Referring specifically to Durn’s atrocity (incidentally, Durn was apparently most closely affiliated with France’s Green Party), Stiegler highlights the feelings of anomie that seem to permeate such acts. According to Durn’s own account, he killed “to have the feeling of existing” (qtd in Stiegler 39). From here, Stiegler moves towards a critique of a culture which increasingly casts individuals in the role on consumers who forge their relationship to the larger community through industrial media. In Stiegler’s assessment, this process frustrates the ability of individuals to engage in the construction of meaning in collaboration with a community of peers. The result is the “de-composition of idiomaticity and sign-making in general” (55). Hence, individuals feel “insignificant.” As such, they have no community with which and for which they can become significant. With no responsibility to the self or their communities, senseless acts of violence become possible.

<6> In addition to painting a compelling picture of the hopelessness that leads to the impotent rage underlying the events alluded to in the title, this essay also offers a procedural link from thought to action. At once, united with this philosopher as a we (we who share a common interest and understanding our social malaise), I found myself in dialogue with another individual (the two Is struggling over the supposed common interest and understanding), arriving again at an unstable concept of the we. From its melancholic dedication to its thought-provoking conclusion, the text is pervaded with a humane character that is immediately recognizable, but which also begs to be understood.

<7> Though I have elected to devote particular attention to these two essays as discrete entities, there is a larger purpose to their publication together under a single title, Acting Out. The dedication, which appears in the middle of the book, builds a bridge between the two essays. Stiegler’s willingness to feel for, even while rejecting their politics, those who voted for the National Front, suggests that he sees in his own passage from a disenchanted young radical to a convicted criminal, a reflection of the widespread malaise which infects the lives of xenophobic nationalists, terrorists, and killers like Durn. But here, also, is the kernel of hope which resides in the text, for it is this same capacity for “acting out” which also allows Stiegler, the convict, to become Stiegler, the philosopher. In fact, the title of the French edition, Passer `a l’acte, evokes the sense of transformation which takes place when one moves from thought into action, when one “becomes” what one had imagined [1]. Beyond the sort of banal attempts at “reform” that appear in popular culture (from the individual to the collective level), there exists the capacity for deep and radical change on the individual (I) and collective (we) levels.

<8> The difference between a volume like Technics and Time, 1 and an essay like “How I Became a Philosopher” are significant, one strives towards abstraction and universality and the other is rooted in biography, yet between the two we see the paradox of philosophy. Stiegler identifies this tension: “The existential dimension of all philosophy, without which philosophy would lose all credit and sink into scholastic chatter, must be analyzed through the question of the relation of the I and the we, in which consists the psychic and collective individuation” (3). Stiegler reiterates this claim with respect to Socrates’ death and its integral role in philosophy: “the philosophy of the philosopher only makes sense when it is illustrated through his way of life–that is, of dying” (7). In other words, the relation between theory and practice is twofold. Philosophy, which by its nature strives for an uncovering of universal knowledge, must engender appropriate action by its philosophers, or else it loses its credibility as truth. And, the philosopher who must first be true to him or herself, pursues this truth through “philosophy” because he or she must be able to discern this truth beyond the personal, or else it ceases to be knowledge.

<9> In this text, Stiegler presents a vision of philosophy that leads to action and action that leads to philosophy.

We would like begin to explore here certain affinities between what Gilles Deleuze refers to as Superfold and what Sri Aurobindo earlier in the 20th century called Supermind, while being especially mindful of their differences in epistemic and cultural setting. This introductory post includes definitions of fold and superfold from the Deleuze Dictionary by Simon Sullivan – with links to other interesting articles- as well as an excerpt from the appendix of his book on Foucault by Gilles Deleuze in which he elucidates the disappearance of man in the emergence of a new form of that is neither God nor man that emerges from the superfold. We begin with an excerpt from Debashish’s new forthcoming book on Sri Aurobindo’s The Record of Yoga.

1) By Debashish Banerji

(From his Forthcoming Book on The Record of Yoga)

Gilles Deleuze introduced the idea of the fold to theorize the integral relationship between the “inside” and the “outside” of living beings. Instead of seeing beings as autonomous, he views the collective reality of each type of being as a life on a fold of pure immanence. Such an “enfolded” existence implies an internalization by each “monad” of the cosmic entirety following specific principles which characterize the ontology of its type of experience. Subject and cosmos thus integrally exist in each other and the nexus of internal and external forces determines the universal reality of cosmos for the subject. The reconfiguration of this relationship between internal and external forces results in an “unfolding” and possible “refolding.” Existing unquestionably on a fold marks the existence of non-human beings, but humans are characterized by critical and creative subjectivity which allows them to “deterritorialize” the fixity of the relation between subject and fold. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this variously as “nomadology,” “lines of flight,” “becoming-other” and “making a body without organs.”

In the appendix of his book on Foucault, Deleuze relates Foucault’s prediction of the erasure of the human with Nietzsche’s supeman-making project and his own thinking about the fold. Making it an occasion to think of the future of human subjectivity, he develops here the idea of the superfold, as the fractal ground natural to superman. The superfold is neither a fold nor an unfolding in the sense in which Deleuze conceptualized internal-external relations in the human case. It is instead an ontology of immanence with a protean creativity capable of an “unlimited finite.” Superman represents the forces of subjective interiority which internalize the capacities of the superfold and give it monadic expression. Deleuze’s intuition of the superfold as the ontological future towards which the human moves is also related to the emergence of the technologies of molecular biology, silicon based information theory and new capacities of language use. All these technologies portend possibilities of deconstruction and creative reassemblage which approach the most basic building blocks of life (genetics), matter (information), and mind (signification/language).

An “unlimited finite” is a capacity characteristic of the fulfilled potency of what Deleuze calls transcendental empiricism, which could also be nominated as a divine materialism. It implies that every fine point in space and “moment” of time is a creative actualization of infinity. Superfold is the cosmic medium potent with such a possibility and superman is the individualized subjectivity which can express this capacity as its native mode of existence. Superfold contains the triple folds of genetic handling (life capacity), silicon and nanotechnological handling (material capacity) and  language handling (mental capacity). Superman for Deleuze, then, is the master of the triple folds of gene, silicon and language, the creative consciousness which can manipulate these forms of nature at its most basic level, manifesting infinity through their finite conditions of space-time expression. There is no habitual fixity to such a form of creative consciousness, or even if there is persistence of forms or logical development of forms, the ontology is one of pure freedom and the deployed will of omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience at play in the finite conditions of the cosmos.

Though expressed in material terms and related to contemporary technologies of unprecedented fundamental ubiquity, Deleuze’s superfold can well be thought of as close or analogous to Sri Aurobindo’s supermind, the medium which holds unity and infinity as its conscious properties everywhere and is the nexus between the infinite and the finite in its absolute immanence. So too, the relation between superfold and superman in Deleuze is analogous to the relation between supermind and superman in Sri Aurobindo, in that the latter term in each doublet represents the subject with interiority proper to the being and full creative expression of the capacities of the first term.

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Next: several interesting articles on related themes and links to articles by Simon Sullivan.

2) From: The Deleuze Dictionary

Definition: ‘Fold’

by Simon Sullivan (links)

Although appearing throughout Deleuze’s work, the fold is particularly mobilised in the books on Foucault and Leibniz. In each case then the fold is developed in relation to another’s work. We might even say that these books, like others Deleuze has written, involve a folding – or ‘doubling’ – of Deleuze’s own thought ‘into’ the thought of another. We might go further and say that thought itself, enigmatically, is a kind of fold – the folding inside of what Deleuze calls the ‘forces of the outside’.

Specifically the concept of the fold allows Deleuze to think creatively about the production of subjectivity, and ultimately about the possibilities for, and production of, ‘non-human’ forms of ‘subjectivity’. In fact on one level the fold is a critique of typical accounts of subjectivity – those that presume a simple interiority and exteriority (appearance and essence, or surface and depth) – for the fold announces that the inside is nothing more than a fold of the outside. Deleuze gives us Foucault’s vivid illustration of this relation – the Renaissance madman, who, in being put to sea in a ship becomes a passenger, or ‘prisoner’ in the interior of the exterior – the fold of the sea. In Deleuze’s account of Foucault this picture becomes increasingly complex. There is a variety of modalities of folds – from the fold of our material selves, our bodies – to the folding of time, or simply memory. Indeed subjectivity might be understood as precisely a topology of these different kinds of folds.

The fold in this sense is also the name for one’s relation to oneself (or, the affect of the self on the self). The Greeks were the first to discover, and deploy, this technique of folding, or of ‘self mastery’. They ‘invented’ subjectivation – the self-production of one’s subjectivity. Subsequent cultures have invented their own forms of subjectivation, their own kinds of foldings, for example Christianity, and of course it might be said that our own time has its own folds – or even that it requires new ones. This gives the fold an explicitly ethical dimension, but also a political one, for as Deleuze remarks the emergence of new kinds of struggle inevitably also involves the production of new kinds of subjectivity, new kinds of fold (Deleuze has in mind the uprisings of 1968).

As for Deleuze’s Foucault, so for his Leibniz: the fold names the relationship – one entailing domination – of oneself to (and ‘over’) ones ‘self’. Indeed one’s subjectivity for Deleuze- Leibniz is a question of mastery – a kind of Nietzschean mastery – over the swarm of one’s being. This can be configured as a question of ownership, or of folding. To ‘have’ is to fold that which is outside inside. In the Leibniz book we are offered other diagrams of our subjectivity. For example the two floored baroque house. The lower floor, or the regime of matter, is in and of the world – receiving its imprint as it were. Here matter is folded in the manner of origami. Caverns containing other caverns, which contain still more caverns. The world is superabundant, like a lake teaming with fish, with smaller fish between these fish, and so on ad infinitum. There is no boundary between the organic and the inorganic here; each is folded into the other in a continuous ‘texturology’.

The upper chamber of the baroque house is closed in on itself, without window or opening. It ‘contains’ innate ideas, the folds of the soul – or what we might call, following Guattari, the incorporeal aspect of our subjectivity. And then there is the fold between these two floors. This latter fold is like one’s style in the world, or indeed the style of a work of art. It is in this sense that the upper chamber paradoxically ‘contains’ the whole world folded within itself. This world is one amongst many ‘possible worlds’ each as different as the beings that ‘express’ them. The world of a tick for example is different to that of a human, involving as it does just the perception of light, the smell of its prey and the tactile sensation of where best to burrow. This is not the tick’s representation of the world but the latter’s expression – or folding in – of it. As with the book on Foucault the later parts of the Leibniz book attend to future foldings. Deleuze calls attention to the possibility of a new kind of harmony – or fold – between the two floors of our subjectivity. This new kind of fold involves an opening up of the closed chamber of the upper floor and the concomitant affirmation of difference, contact and communication. We might say here, in an echo of the Foucault book, that these new foldings are simply the name for those new kinds of subjectivity that emerged in the 1960s – in the various experiments in communal living, drug use, and sexuality – as well as in the emergence of new prosthetic technologies.

References:
Deleuze, Gilles (1988), Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1993), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

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The Deleuze Dictionary: Excerpt from Fold+Art+Technology

by

Simon Sullivan

In his appendix to the book on Foucault Deleuze continues his meditation on the fold – but looks to the the future. If the fold is the operation proper to man, then the superfold is synonymous with the superman – understood as that which ‘frees life’ from within man. The superman is in charge of the animals (the capturing of codes), the rocks (the realm of the inorganic) – and the very being of language (the realm of affect ‘below’ signification). This new kind of fold no longer figures man as a limiting factor on the the infinite (the classical historical formation), nor positions him solely in relationship to the forces of finitude – life, labour and language (the formation of the nineteenth century). Rather, in this new kind of fold man is involved in what Deleuze terms an ‘unlimited finity’. It is a fold in which a ‘finite number of components produce an infinite number of combinations’. This is the difference and repetition of Deleuze – or what we might term his fractal ontology. We might also say that it is the radical discovery of ‘man’’s potential – the revolutionary activation of immanence.

This ‘superfold’ will however still involve relations with an outside. In fact, for Deleuze, it will be the result of three ‘future’ folds: the fold of molecular biology – or the discovery of the genetic code; the fold of silicon with carbon – or the emergence of third generation machines, cybernetics and information technology; and the folding of language – or the uncovering of a ‘strange language within language’, an atypical and asignifying form of expression that exists at the limits of language. As with the other two this is a fold that opens man out to that which is specifically non human – forces that can then be folded back ‘into’ himself to produce new modalities of being and new means of expression.
The first two folds above involve the utilisation of technology in the production of new kinds of life and new kinds of subjectivity. They might produce dissenting, politically radical subjects: Donna Harraway’s cyborgs or Hardt and Negri’s ‘New Barbarians’ for example. But they might equally produce simply ‘new’ commodified and alienated subjectivities – or even more deadly military assemblages. It is in this sense that the third fold above is crucial. It is a fold that breaks down – or deviates from – dominant signification, counteracts order words or simply foregrounds language – and life’s – affective, intensive, and inherently creative nature. This amounts to saying that the first two folds must themselves be stammered by the third.

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From the Appendix of his book on Foucault by Gilles Deleuze:

“It is obvious that any form is precarious, since it depends on relations between forces and their mutations. We distort Nietzsche when we make him into a thinker who wrote about the death of God. It is Feuerbach who is the last thinker of the death of God; he shows that since God has never been anything but the unfold of man, man must fold and refold God. But for Nietzsche this is an old story , and as old stories tend to multiply their variants Nietzsche multiplies the versions of the death of God, all of them comic of humorous, as though they were variations on a given fact. But what interests him is the death of man. So long as God exists- that is, so long as the God-form functions-then man does not exist.

But when the Man-form appears, it does so only by already incorporating the death of man in at least thre ways. First, where can man find a guarantee of identity in the absence of God? Secondly by Man-form has itself been constituted only within the folds of infinitude; it places death within man(and has done so, as we have seen, less in the manner of Heidegger than in the manner of Bichat, who conceived of death in terms of “violent death”) Lastly, the forces of finitude themselves mean that man exists only through the dissemination of the various methods for organizing life, such as the dispersion of languages or the divergences in modes of production, which imply that the only critique of knowledge is an ontology of the annihilation of beings (not only palaeontology but ethnology)

What does Foucault mean when he says there is no point in crying over the death of man? In fact has this form been a good one? Has it helped to enrich or even preserve the forces within man, those living, speaking or working? Has it saved man from the violent death? The questions that continually returns is therefore the following: if the forces with man compose a form only by entering into a relation with forms from the outside, with what new forms will emerge that is neither God nor Man? This is the correct place for the problem which Nietzsche called “the superman”

It is a problem where we have to content ourselves with very tentative indications if we are not to descend to the level of cartoons. Foucault unlike Nietzsche, can only sketch in something embryonic and not yet functional. Nietzsche said that man imprisoned life, but the superman is what frees life within himself, to the benefit of another form, and so on. Foucault pro-offers a very peculiar piece of information: if it is true the 19^th century humanist linguistics was based on the dissemination of languages, as the condition for a “demotion of language” as an object, one repercussion was the less that literature took on a completely different function that consisted, on the contrary, in “regrouping” language and emphasizing a “being in language” beyond what it designates and signifies, beyond even the sounds. The peculiar thing is that Foucault, in his acute analysis of modern literature, here gives language a privilege which he refuses to grant to ife or labour: he believes that life and labour, despite a dispersion concomitant with that of language, did not lose the regrouping of their being. It seems to us, though, that when dispersed labour and life were each able to unify themselves only by somehow breaking free from economics or biology, just as language managed to regrouped itself only when literature broke free from linguistics.

Biology had taken a leap in molecular biology, or dispersed life regroup in the genetic code. Dispersed work had to regroup in third-generation machines, cybernetics and information technology. What would be the forces in play, with which forces within man would then enter into a relation? It would no longer involve raising to infinity or finitude but which a finite number of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations.  It would be neither the fold nor the unfold that would constitute the active mechanism but something like the “Superfold” as borne out by the folding proper to the chains of the genetic code, and the potential of silicon in third-generation machines, as well as by the contours of a sentence in modern literature, when literature “merely turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity.

This modern literature uncovers a “strange language within language” and, through an unlimited number of superimposed grammatical constructions, tends towards an atypical form of expression that marks the end of language as such (here we may cite such examples as Mallarme’s book, Perguy’s repetitions, Artaud’s breaths, the agrammaticality of Cummings, Burroughs and his cut-ups and fold-ins, as well as Roussel’s proliferations, Brisset’s derivations, Dada collage, and so on) And is this unlimited finity or superfold not what Nietzsche had already designated with the name of eternal return?

The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic compnents which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier. In each case we must study the operations of the superfold, of which the “double helix” is the best known example. What is the superman? It is the formal compound of the forces within man and these new forces. It is the form that results from a new relation between forces. Man tends to free life, labour and language within himself. The superman, in accordance with Rimbaud’s formula, is the man who is even in charge of the animals ( a code that can capture fragments from other codes, as in the new schemata of lateral or retrograde) It is man in charge of the very rocks, or inorganic matter ( the domain of silicon). It is man in charge of the being of language ( that formless, mute, unsignifying region where language can find its freedom even from whatever it has to say). As Foucault would say, the superman is much less than the disappearance of living men, and much more than a charge of concept: it is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its previous two forms.”