A world in which digital technology reduces all political problems to necessary, binary and non-dialectical calculations, without deliberations and without decisions produced by reflective judgments.
Our era is marked by an episteme of rupture, discontinuity, refusal of the universal, and by a certain return to identities and identity affirmations. Individuals are locked in psychaï and self-centered lifestyles, manifested, among other things, by narcissistic slogans and mottos proudly displayed on their clothes (1) ("because I'm worth it"; "do it yourself"; "be yourself"; etc.). The era is one of depression and withdrawal into oneself, which are not always based on a true self, because the latter is often burdened by these losses of semantic as well as ethical consistency.
This narcissism is not existentially chosen according to practices of truth and techniques of life (Hadot (2) or Foucault (3)) relevant to the autonomy of free and reflective subjects. On the contrary, these psychic structures are determined by artifacts linked to “machinations” or to societal processes relating to specific technostructures and biopolitics.
These subjects are, more or less consciously, self-centered and emptied of all poetry because there is a mutation or a change in the technostructure of the modes of production and the productive forces carrying them and instituting them as such: digital systematically installs a new relationship between subject and object, on the one hand, and between work, temporality, machine and productivity, on the other hand.
In post-industrial societies, consumerism becomes an end goal of productivist capitalism and a general, holistic mode of operation of the financialized economy in a world governed by algorithm calculators. The subject is then considered as a desiring machine (Deleuze and Guattari (4)) connected to mass consumption, and above all he is (the) product by a society of fictions and propaganda (Bernays (5)) aiming to automate his intimate life and his subjectivity.
From politics to calculation
Digital technology makes the idea of freedom disappear by reducing all political problems to necessary, binary and non-dialectical calculations, without deliberations and without decisions produced by reflective judgments since individuals then become operators and objects determined by algorithmic matrices reducible to matrices or analytical arborescences.
We can then try to understand where our democracy is going at this pace which exhausts the subjects from within by permanent solicitations from the presentist world of the media and the psychosocial control exercised by our metadata and the applications in action in our world of electronic surveillance.
Four legitimate questions can then arise:
Can critical thinking and freedom in democratic decision-making be delegated?
What vision of man and society is the basis for a conception that defines man by calculations and a chain of necessary reasons?
Are history, law, and the law soluble in a calculating rationality or in a mathesis universalis? Can civil society and the State be remarkable identities of a mathematical nature or must we introduce unnecessary historical elements (because they relate to the eventfulness specific to free causality) to understand contemporary identitarian and differentialist drifts?
Are we witnessing a redefinition of humanity (post-humanism, augmented man, process of desiring machine and cyborg, etc.) which obliges us to think of the present as a postmodernity abandoning the historical narrative and the progressive continuity of Western democracy, as was the case, for example – but not only in this systematic philosophy of history – in a Hegelian-Marxist perspective?
A hyper-liberal or even post-liberal era
The stakes are high: are our societies definitively anchored in an era of hyper-liberalism or even post-liberalism that can do without political deliberations and democratic decisions? Is this disruption without consequences for our freedoms and for the republican arrangement of our institutions? Does the notion of institution even still have a future? And, therefore, those of subject and collective, when the algorithm and story-telling now manage the passive desiring machines that are the subjects of post-modern Cities?
The risk is that the disappearance of politics and of policy as a critical philosophy of judgment brings with it an imperialism of the formal code to the detriment of language and thought, and therefore of the desire for meaning and humanism.
What then is the purpose of living together and being together today? This question will be worth addressing in order to avoid thinking that technology and science provide the adequate and irrefutable, if not definitive, answer to the fundamental questions that human beings ask themselves and must constantly ask themselves in order to become and remain human as much as possible, and that they must do so in light of the regulatory Idea that presides over their being in the world, with and for others, as much as for their ethopoietic improvement (6).
The problem of the meaning of living together
The negation of history and temporal meaning constitute the parameters of the era which paradoxically insists on innateness, naturalism, biodiversity, biopolitics, ecology, fashion, trendy, in, hip, etc., against the analysis of the complex determinations of history as a dialectical movement of the construction of identity as a logical product and reflexive concept.
Digital technology is currently characterized by the strength of algorithms that reduce the qualitative to the quantitative and thus allow an algebraic, and no longer symbolic, reading of reality, then reduced to abstract, simplified formal entities, allowing calculations and measurements for a rationality of understanding, proceeding by summative evaluations and by algebraic ratios of costs and losses from the point of view of an accounting calculability, framing the world as a chrematistic type economy.
However, the history of societies of law is that of the liberation of humans from natural necessity. It is marked by the historical emancipation of physis by praxis: the progress of productive forces (Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, etc.) cannot be inseparable from the progress of technical, theoretical, practical reason and an anthropology of culture. However, ICT, NBIC and digital economies keep the mind in a present of calculation without temporality other than the present, decontextualized. The presentist world of digital is without chronological markers and without cultural singularities. It is precisely dematerialized and therefore essentialized in an abstract and undifferentiated way.
Digital technology and its societal derivatives (smartphones, applications, social networks, notifications, etc.) rivet the individual to the virtual image of a string of numbers (1 and/or 0) and to a narcissistic umbilical cord – that of the continuous notification of applications – which have an addictive role of emotional protection against the anxiety of living and a function of constant security through a performative well-being (producing dopamine and serotonin) which anchors the psyche, and this since early childhood, in a kind of continuous hallucination. This attachment produces depression when the individual leaves this virtual world. Hence the desocializations and the risks of isolation that then produce the games, applications, alerts and permanent monitoring of the digital world.
It is difficult to decenter psyches when they are dependent on digital flows. And even more so to demand attention and critical thinking with regard to external events from minds always occupied with themselves. The era experiences this disruption in the hyperactivism of children, the permanent and impulsive revolt of adolescents, the self-centered individualism of adults and the depression of elderly people at the end of their lives.
This malaise in society is a civilizational and political malaise. The confinement in and by oneself, the citadel of the soul imprisoned in itself, inhibits and prevents social and political links from constituting themselves as a collective carried by autonomous and responsible subjects. A democracy cannot exist in an atomized society of individuals separated from each other and living in a monadic world, in the sense of Leibniz, but without the pre-established harmony and the vinculum substantialis that he placed at the principle of the universal, regulating the monads between them in a link of co-belonging and mutual expression.
The question of the formation of critical judgment is essential for an authentic democracy: it is the meaning of the School in the Republic, and it was, among other things, the fight of Condorcet, taking up the program of the Enlightenment and the Encyclopedia in order to enlighten the human race through knowledge. There is naivety in the Enlightenment movement which articulated in a Platonic way eschatology and acquisition of knowledge in a vision of the conversion of the soul confronted with the Idea of the Good. We know that the Enlightenment had within it certain terrible, dangerous and murderous shadows; the history of the great conflicts of the previous century has shown us that knowledge is not always a guarantee of humanist virtues. However, we must not confuse knowing and knowing: it is by forgetting the phenomenology of reason in history that we lose the effective spirit of its logic of freedom in the making, and of the politics of truths and values that it seeks to universalize in a concrete way and not by abstract calculations of understanding, separated from the concrete life of individuals and societies.
Towards de-democratization
Our societies are experiencing technological and biopolitical transformations that subvert traditional historical and symbolic spaces (Lyotard (7) or Stiegler (8)); progress in medicine, robotization, molecular biology, and nanotechnologies poorly conceal the purposes of these new techniques. Also, we can ask ourselves the question of the end of Man or Humanity: what type of humanism is carried by hyper-connected democracies? And is there not an end of democracy in an automated society totally rationalized by algorithms and intelligent expert machines? It is not a question of castigating technology, material progress, modern and postmodern society, and of holding a technophobic position. But, rather, with patience, of questioning the disruptive meaning of augmented humanism: who today gives to connected and connected societies the tone and the anthropological canon that give it its meaning and its purposes? These are the GAFA and the banks that have been financialized for a very long time; and not the people and free minds. Because these formal, digitalized structures are not fundamentally oriented towards a good or a eudaemonistic improvement of humanity, but rather towards an increase in surplus values, towards total capitalism or maximum profit, without concern for the social, collective good, or a universalization of critical reason.
The risk is that the State, the law and the symbolic order will be for capital a source of brakes on this propensity to monopolize and a cause of various constraints inhibiting its unlimited appetite for voracity. Hence the need for education in the use of digital technology, education and training to be done, thought and provided by trainers other than the producers of ICT and sellers of educational software, or promoters of the uses of applications aimed at inducing consumerist addictions. It is necessary to rethink calculation, in the empirical and transcendental sense of the term, to prevent the thought that gives meaning to the humanist practice of political life on earth, from being reduced to an abstract economy of formal deductions of calculations of gains and losses evaluated by accounting understandings that do not take into account the rich socio-ethical determinations that make up humanity.
The world of digital technology
Philosophy gives language a force that is not that of the formal code or the univocal language of geometry; indeed, it begins with dialogue and the exchange of reasons. It is not mystical, religious thought, nor even essentially a theology or wisdom: it is love of and for wisdom and the search for meaning and truths in and through language. In this sense, the politics of philosophy is essentially the exchange or pooling of reasons, the sharing of meaning and the sensible (Merleau-Ponty (9)). It is a question of knowing not who holds the truth by force, law, wealth, but by the exercise of reasoned judgment. Of course, I can convince by rhetoric and not use persuasion by the use of demonstrative reason, and thus create an illusion by deceiving the other if he is not vigilant, attentive, and coherent. "Let no one enter here unless he is a geometer!" means that to philosophize, it is essential to have a sense of logic, a memory of definitions recognized and constructed together, and skills of abstraction and deduction validated by the mathematician, skills which do not make the natural philosopher, unless we forget the work and asceticism which are at the origin – and always do the work – of philosophy.
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Peirce, for example, are authors who can be read as apologists for formalism and the universal characteristic, if we do not pay attention precisely to what they pose conceptually as a properly philosophical and ethical requirement at the origin of their formal grammar: they tell us that reason only has meaning in weaving together a city of philosophical citizens, of men enlightened on the theological-political nature of the best political regime and that thought is such only if it calls upon critical reason and reflexive judgment at the principle of each act of the life of the mind, as at the foundation of social, civil and political life.
From Hegel to Bataille (10), reason has undergone a dialectic of the self-movement of its recognition as well as its loss, in historical contexts where irrationalism tended to gain ground through a return to the "sciences" of nature in Romanticism and through recourse to a sovereignty of desire rejecting the work of reason in history. The loss of meaning and the destruction of rationality through the financialization of the economy: economism as thanatological consumerism. The risk of total evaluation lies in this deinstitutionalization of the collective and the withdrawal into permanent individuation and the depressive withdrawal from this collective anthropologically instituting our being and our becoming in the world and in ourselves. The danger is then to live outside the symbolic and outside of history. There is therefore an urgency to call upon the courage to know and the adventure of freedom of thought and of thinking which is the critical use of reason in all areas, and not the private and privative use of the right to think: we must not confuse the right of thought to know what it wants to think, and the duty of the enlightened scholar to give the public the fruits of his reflection without the internal constraint of cowardice or the fear of contravening an iniquitous order which keeps humanity in fear of autonomy, of freedom, and in the indignity of its moral and physical alienation.
Kant's text, mentioned at the beginning of this study, on the Enlightenment is still relevant today (Was ist Aufklärung?): there is a duty of courage in the audacity to dare to think in public, against oneself and one's time, in order to improve our autonomy and our dignity by considering our destination and our knowledge as public goods and not only as personal gifts or private property. Kant is indeed still relevant when he calls for a private and public use of critical reason.
Should we really be happy that we are still faced today with the problem encountered and posed by Kant in the 18th century?
Let us therefore resolutely make public use of reason while there is still time and while the new censorships do not again place us under the tutelage of a religion of obedience wanting the voluntary servitude of each person as a general principle of citizenship at the orders of the globalized market for all. It is more than necessary to make heard in the public space the philosophical reasons that are the foundations of our freedoms and that legitimize the informed quest for meaning in a world that demands that we not reduce it to a cost or to an accounting calculation.
To know is to remember that humanity is as much, if not more, the subject of its knowledge, as a simple object, for itself, for its present and for the invention of its future (11).
(1) We take the term here in the sense that Kant uses it in his text Was ist Aufklärung? (1794), namely a public use of reason for the purposes of information and the transmission of knowledge.
(2) Pierre Hadot, La philosophie comme éducation des adultes, éd. Vrin, Paris, 2019.
(3) Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce que la critique ? Follow by La critique de soi, éd. Vrin, Paris, 2015 ; Les aveux de la chair, éd. Gallimard, 2018.
(4) Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe, éd. Minuit, 1969 ; Mille plateaux, éd. Minuit, 1972.
(5) Edward Bernays, Propaganda, éd. Zones, Paris, 2007.
(6) Michel Foucault, L’origine de l’herméneutique de soi. Lectures given at Dartmouth College, 1980, éd. Vrin, Paris, 2013.
(7) Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne, éd. Minuit, 1979.
(8) Bernard Stiegler, Dans la disruption. Comment ne pas devenir fou ? followed by an interview on Christianity, éd. Babel, 2018.
(9) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens(1966), rééd. Gallimard, 1996.
(10) Salim Mokaddem, Bataille dans la philosophie L’héritage impossible, éd. PUL, Montpellier, 1996.
(11) Salim Mokaddem, Eduquer avec Platon, éd. Sos Education, coll. « Réfléchir », Paris, 2016.
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