Quantum Engagements

T.B. Zlsdorf et al. (Eds.)

2011, AKA Verlag Heidelberg

27

Distrust and the Pharmacology of

Transformational Technologies
Bernard STIEGLER
Institut de recherche et d'innovation
Centre Pompidou (bernard.stiegler@centrepompidou.fr)
Abstract: Today we face an enormous crisis of trust: a crisis of knowing, a
disorientation provoked by rapid scientific and technological change. Innovations
in applied quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, digital media, genetic engineering,
and other transformational technologies generate conditions of distrust insofar as
they challenge formerly secure modes of thought and constituted ways of life.
Such technologies are inherently pharmacologicalthat is, they possess the ambivalent qualities of the pharmakon, signifying both remedy and poison at the
same time, posing as much potential benefit as potential risk. In this chapter,
Bernard Stiegler examines the modalities of individuation, transindividuation, and
disindividuation (in Gilbert Simondons sense of these terms) that operate in our
new pharmacological age. He suggests that distrust indexes a denaturing or shortcircuiting of the processes of psychic and social individuation, the degree to which
they are adapted to or simply replaced by processes of technical individuation. To
overcome distrust and mend its disintegrating effects, then, scientific and cultural
institutions must establish a new relationship with the public, based not on conventional educational approaches but instead on collective elaboration of new types
of knowledgenew forms of becoming that engage and actively adopt the
pharmacological situation of transformational technologies. [Eds.]
Keywords: Distrust, transformational technologies, pharmakon, transindividuation

Ways of life were transformed in the twentieth century by the combined effects of, on
the one hand, the industrial production processes established during the preceding
centurywhich concretised what Max Weber and then the Frankfurt School described
as a rationalisation of the world, that is, the implementation of generalised
calculability emerging from the convergence of science and technics through industrial
researchand, on the other hand, the advent of the culture industries: cinema, radio,
and television. By conjoining Taylorist production and the mass media, the industrial
system imposed, at the end of the twentieth century, the consumerist model, and did so
on a planetary scale, thereby accomplishing what we refer to as globalisation.
The twenty-first century has already become the scene of new and even more vast
and profound transformations.
Technologies of inanimate matter and of organic matter entail radical transformations: the barrier that previously separated the genetic programme from experience has been breached, 1 and nanometric structures have become accessible at the
quantum scale of physical forcesthat is, on a scale where it is no longer possible to
1

This is the way that Franois Jacob summarised one scientific conclusion of the molecular theory of the
sexed living being: The genetic programme does not learn from experience (Jacob 1993, p. 3).

28

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

distinguish matter from form, and where there appear properties that do not exist at the
macroscopic scale. These evolutions, which are indissociably technological and scientific, and which emerge from physics and biology, are socialised in the form of technologies that are called transformational because they alter the structures and elementary properties of natural matterliving as well as inanimate.
Moreover, analogue information and communication technologies are giving way
to digital cognitive and cultural technologies, and these disrupt the culture industry
sector as a wholeand with it, the publishing and editing sectors, that is, everything
that together forms the material apparatus of the production of knowledge in its various
forms: scientific and academic knowledge as well as savoir-faire, know-how, savoirvivre, knowing how to live, and the political and moral knowledge that constitutes public opinion.
Numerous elements characteristic of the digital infrastructure constitute factors
that break with the culture industries, and, through them, with the whole model that
dominated the twentieth century.
I lack the time here to analyse these elements in detail. Yet one of these elements
must be underlined, one that has without doubt not yet been fully grasped: cognitive
and cultural technologies, in the age of information and communication technology,
effect a radical displacement of the technical knowledge that had been developed in the
industrial world. With digitalisation, this knowledge, which had been kept in the hands
of the professional classes, and thereby controlled by the economic world, migrates
toward the largest audiencesand in particular the younger generations.
It is a matter, then, of technical knowledge. Now, technical knowledge is never
self-sufficient. It must be prescribed through practical rules that involve other forms of
knowledge. This is the case because technological knowledge is pharmacological, that
is, it has the ambivalent structure of a pharmakon: it is always at once potentially beneficial and potentially harmful. 2 The following question therefore arises: under what
conditions can therapeutic knowledge be elaborated and transmitted, that is, knowledge
that cultivates curative capacities and that fights against the toxicity of technical
knowledge insofar as it is essentially pharmacological.
*
Cognitive and cultural technologies tend to become relational technologiesthrough
which new models of psychic and collective individuation are formed, to speak with

Editors note: Throughout the chapter, Stiegler alludes to the work of Jacques Derrida, and in particular,
his account of the pharmacological dimensions of writingthe extent to which the history of occidental
thought has rendered the technics of writing as pharmakon, simultaneously remedy and poison. In
Platos Pharmacy, Derrida demonstrates the range of significations attending the term pharmakon in
Platos dialogues (especially Phaedrus, where Socrates designates the invention of writing as
pharmakon). Derrida argues that translational or philosophical efforts to favor or purge a particular signification of pharmakon actually do interpretive violence to what would otherwise remain undecidable
in Platos own text. The inherent undecidability and ambiguity of the pharmakon, according to Derrida,
threatens philosophical discourse from withinand especially any effort to attenuate its virulence
through the technics of writing itself (Derrida 1981).

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

29

the vocabulary of Gilbert Simondon.3 These new forms of individuation result in new
kinds of transindividuation processes. Now, it is precisely on the plane of transindividuation that a therapeutics proper to the pharmacology of an epoch can form and metastabilise.
Furthermore, relational digital technologies are in some way meta-pharmacological,
to the extent that they lead to the formalisation and industrial control of transindividuation processes themselves. They thereby raise completely new questions, and they must
be understood as transformational technologiesnot of matter but of that material
from which the social fabric is woven.
By individuating, that is, by becoming what they are, psychic individuals form a
collective individual, that is, a social individual. Knowledge is one such process, producing what Simondon called the transindividual. The transindividual is the set of significations characteristic of a collective individuation, in which these significations
metastabilise: that is, in which they are relatively stabilised, provisionally stabilised,
between equilibrium and disequilibrium, just as whirlpools form and disappear in the
flow of water.
Relational digital technologies are technologies of transindividuation, implemented
by social engineering, and the most visible face of these technologies are social networks, which are developing so rapidly that in a mere three years Facebook has become the third largest profane community in the world. A challenge is presented here
for everyone who still believes in the possibility of raising the individual and collective
individuation capacities of humankind: how can these networks be turned into new
spaces of knowledge rather than massive factors of psychic and collective disindividuationthat is, factors short-circuiting transindividuation processes?
This question is all the more urgent and complex as the transformative elements interact, since 2008, with a third factor, namely, the global economic crisis, with the result that the explosion of concerns about the environment combines with doubt about
the viability of consumerist capitalism and doubt about the capacity of public powers to
regulate ita disturbing process of demoralisation for which the culture industries,
themselves the organs par excellence of consumerism, bear overwhelming responsibility.
The contours of a great dilemma are thereby outlined, where the issue is to know
how, where and from whom the rules of socialisation of technical knowledge will
emerge, something that inextricably concerns transformational technologies as well as
cognitive and cultural technologies. For it is transformational technologies that cause
the effects of psychic and collective individuation to penetrate to the core of the elementary structures of inanimate and living matter.

Editors note: In the philosophy of Simondon, the human is a process of psychic and collective individuation; in other words, the individual subject is an effect rather than a foundation of individuation
(Simondon 1989a). Transindividuation is a social process that proceeds from the disindividuation of
psychic individuals, the subsiding of unique human subjectivities in the field of shared knowledge and
common culture. Transindividuation draws on preindividual potential to reconstitute the I and the
we in concert. Transindividuation is therefore the condition for social change. For Simondon, technics mediate between the preindividual and the transindividual (Simondon 1989b). Building off of
Simondon, Stieglers work has often emphasized that psychic individuation achieves collective individuation by interiorizing technical individuation (see Stiegler 1998, Stiegler 2009, and Stiegler 2010b).

30

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

*
The past decade could be characterised, in the scientific domain, in Europe in general
and France in particular, by the rejection of the possibilities opened by the technology
of genetically modified organismsnot to mention the debates generated by the spectacular advances in genetic engineering, gene therapies, fertilisation, etc. And as for the
prospects opened up by nanotechnology, these too provoke profound distrust.
The combination of this state of affairs with the global economic crisis raises in
completely new terms the question of trust at the core of that threefold process of psychic, social, and technical individuation in which consists what we call humanity. For it
is clear that under no circumstances, other than by leaving behind the democratic model,
will economic or political power be able to impose all those scientific, technological
and industrial developments that an increasing portion of the population rejects, given
that the economic systems that produce them have lost all political and moral credit, if
not also their fiduciary credit.
Faced with this distrust, which is most often understood as a resistance to innovation, the general response is usually a call for education [pdagogie]. Such a
response, however, is founded on a delusiona delusion that is all the greater when, as
so often, it is dressed up with all the techniques and weaponry that marketing has to
offer. This purported education is thereby inevitably transformed into a media campaign, and a campaign that in most cases is very mediocre and humiliating for those to
whom it is addressed, because it makes them feel they are being infantilised.
This education inevitably turns into a media operation for the following reason:
in order for there to be education in reality, it would be necessary to have knowledge;
not procedural and empirical knowledgefor example, knowing how to insert restriction enzymes into a molecular genetic structure; or knowing how to manipulate an
atom with a scanning tunnelling microscopebut knowledge in the sense defined by
Socrates: apodictic, theoretical, unified, non-contradictory, the fruit not only of induction, but of deduction, stabilising an agreement between pairs, that is, a process of scientific transindividuation, etc.
Such knowledge, however, is lacking. What one finds these days is, more than anything, non-knowledge. This is due not only to the speed of scientific and technological
development, but to the specifics of those contemporary forms of scientific knowledge
that radically bring into question the categories which, in the past, enabled a clear distinction between, for example, theoretical knowledge and empirical knowledge, that is,
a clear distinction between science and technology. And it is due as well, then, to the
fact that all frameworks of thinking are transformed by this new technicitywhich
amounts as well to a new pharmacological age.
The vast majority of individuals have never heard of the difference between apodictic knowledge and the know-how [savoir-faire] that this same population has still to
some extent managed to hold onto (though less and less often). These individuals, the
population that they form and the public opinion that thereby results, do, however,
know somethingthat is, they have an intuition (an intuition the components of which
are complex and do not arise at all spontaneously, and which therefore requires analysis)they know that something has radically changed in the scientific world, and that
since the industrialisation of the world, scientific change always results in changes in
society, even though the meaning and extent of the scientific changes occurring today
are not clear in anybody's mind: these changes pose an entirely new question for humanity.

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

31

Nothing has provoked more anxiety than the moment when, in this situation, the
population realises that the model of development and the way of thinking that were
dominant until that pointa developmental model which had dominated for decades,
and a way of thinking that had dominated for centuriesare no longer able to solve the
colossal problems already confronting us at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Consequently, in Europe in particular, and even more so in France, this population
no longer trusts the harbingers of new scientific paradigms, who are at the origin of
transformational technologies, and who, as its promoters, claim that these technologies
will contribute decisively to enabling humanity to find a way out of the impasse in
which it is currently caught.
It is in this way that there comes to be established a dialogue of the deaf.
*
If the question is in fact that of a threefold process of individuation concretised as
transindividuation, and if cultural and cognitive technologies now constitute relational
technologies of transindividuation, then it is necessary to turn to the radically unprecedented prospects that open up, at the same time:

for the elaboration and transmission of knowledgefor scientists and engineers as for schoolchildren and university students;
for public debate and the confrontation of ideas;
for the industrial model itself, where the logic of horizontal, diagonal and ascending innovation belonging to digital networks, together with the transferral
and dissemination of technical skills induced by digitalisation, profoundly
brings into question the opposition between production and consumption that
was the rule in the mass industrial societies typical of the twentieth century.4

The culture industries implemented an industrial organisation based on the dichotomy between production and consumption in the symbolic domain, and this led to the
destruction of the symbolic itself.5 A symbol is shared by partners who are, in turn, its
addressers and addressees, senders and recipients. Digital networks, which are intrinsically contributive, enable this opposition between production and consumption to be
overcome, and thus make possible the reconstitution of a genuine circuit of symbolic
exchangeeven though they also make it possible for transindividuation processes to
be industrially short-circuited.
What therefore becomes clear is that contributive reticularity, through global collaborative processes the best example of which is Wikipedia, re-engages a noninstitutional intellectual and encyclopaedic activity that had been thought to be in the
course of disappearingwhile at the same time the organisational and economic models of free software at the origin of this new type of collective individuation do not
cease to progress.
And yet, digital technologies have in fact resulted in the creation of new forms of
addiction, and new ways of capturing and harnessing attention, forms and ways that are
4

This point of view was developed in Stiegler, Giffard, and Faur 2009.

Regarding this topic, refer to the documentaries Le jeu de la mort (2010) and Le temps de cerveau disponible (2010); see also Zimmerman and Christakis 2005.

32

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

even more frightening than the industrial production of so-called available brain time
made possible by the programming industries.6 If it is true that collaborative possibilities engender a social inventiveness that is both clear and promising, then it is also true
that this is more often than not put to work in the service of new marketing strategies
founded on traceability and the exploitation of unprecedented forms of behavioural
manipulation, and in the service of herdishness and of archaisms specific to this digital
reticularity.
What is being repeated, then, is a scene of writing, where the question of the
pharmakon reappears in the digital stage of grammatisationthe first stage of which
was the alphabetic writing of Platos epoch. 7 Like every technique and every mnemotechnique, cultural and cognitive technologies are pharmaka: at once poisons and
remedies. Writing, says Socrates, is a poison in the hands of the Sophists, who make of
it a power to swindle and pervert the Athenian youth. Yet it is also the remedy to the
finite nature of memory, making possible geometry and the constitution of an ideal
communityof a geometrical we that makes possible the experience of the infinitely open character of rational thought.
It is this poison, which Plato practices abundantly in order to fight against it, that
allows the formation of the therapeutics in which this fight consists. Plato describes
philosophy as a medicine for the soul whose model is geometry (Let no one ignorant
of geometry enter here), insofar as it is the matrix of the apodictic mind or spirit, of
which writing is the origin, just as it is also the condition of juridical and political life,
given that laws do not found a state of rights except insofar as they are open to critique,
which is to say, insofar as they are public. Writing is equally the condition and the
origin of a Greek history and geography, of a Greek literature, etc.
*
From these considerations it must be concluded that digitalisationwhich also conditions the scanning tunnelling microscope, and even nanotechnologies in general
imposes on public authorities, academics, artists, and scientists the need for a genuine
re-foundation of the conditions of production, transmission and socialisation of
knowledge. Through the technologies of the spirit that these pharmaka essentially are,8
however poisonous they might potentially be, scientific, academic and cultural institutions must engage in a new relationship to the public founded not only on education,
6

For examples, see Hayles 2007, Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts 2010, Stiegler, Giffard, and Faur 2009,
and Stiegler 2010a.

Editors note: Stiegler refers here to Derridas notion of the scene of writing. For example, in Freud
and the Scene of Writing, Derrida shows how Freuds construction of the psyche as a surface of inscription performs the supplementation of psychic processes by technical apparatus, indicating the inseparability of memory and technics (Derrida 1978). On the concept of grammatisation as the exteriorization or outsourcing of memory and other human capacities through technical means, including systems of discrete marks, traces, grammatical rules, media forms, archival processes, formalisms, protocols, and so forthin other words, as the condition of their reproducibilitysee Auroux 1994 and
Stiegler 2010a. Stiegler examines the processes of grammatisation relative to contemporary technoscienceand nanotechnologies in particularin Stiegler 2006a.

See Stiegler and Ars Industrialis 2006.

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

33

but on the contributive elaboration of a new type of knowledge. This presupposes the
parallel implementation of sites of construction to which the national and international public authorities must devote long-term investments.
The types of knowledge that metastabilise through transindividuation produce defined and conceptually grounded terms that constitute elements of knowledge but also
constitute the meta-categories through which an empirical domain is apprehended and
indexed. They are, in the final analysis, metadata, in the sense given to this word in
network computing in the 1990s: data that describes other data.
Humanity has been producing data about data since the Mesopotamian era (whereas the critical modality of metadata began in the Greek era). But with digitalisation, for
the first time in human history, metadata is produced through a bottom up and not a top
down process, resulting in metadata that makes it possible not only to navigate through
data, but also to link them and thus to trace within information the circuits that transform this information into knowledge. This constitutes the heart of that transindividuation process which is typical of the digital world, which affects and will affect more
and more both the elaboration of knowledge as well as the conditions for its socialisation and transmission.9
Transindividuation is always the result of semantic conflicts that lead to the metastabilisation of compromises, and where the bottom up and the top down, far from opposing each other, compose, thereby forming a resulting line, that is, a diagonal
which is no doubt related to what Deleuze and Guattari called a line of flight.10
The epistemic, political and economic stakes of the digitalisation to come rest on
the conception, development and mass socialisation of such production models of the
pistm founded on polemical annotation systems, through which the constituted (top
down) forms of knowledge are trans-formed into bottom up processes that nevertheless
nourish them in turnby providing the critical frameworks for public debate and critical confrontation, without which neither knowledge, nor culture, nor democracy could
exist.
The whole educational and academic apparatus (inspired in the West by Plato's
Academy) has been conceived on the basis of a therapeutics formed by the disciplines
of rational knowledge, aiming to make of that pharmakon that is writing the remedy of
its own poisonous effects. But it is, today, the digital domain that constitutes the
pharmakon, and which must be made the basis of the pistm of the twenty-first century.
*
It is in this context that the question of transformational technologies and nanotechnologies must be understood as new modalities of an individuation that is always at once
psychic, collective and technical.
The point of departure of Simondon's philosophy of individuation is the abandonment of the question of the individual, that is, of identity and essence; with consideration given instead to the question of process, that is, of individuation, of which the
individual is merely a transitory stage. It is a matter of reasoning genealogically rather
9

Regarding knowledge/skills as circuits of transindividuation, see Stiegler 2006b and Stiegler 2010a.

10

Editors note: On the concept of a line of flight, see Deleuze and Guattari 1987.

34

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

than ontologically. And this presupposes abandoning that metaphysical imagery opposing essence to accident and being to becoming; imagery which proposes that at the
origin of all knowledge there is a stage before the fallthat is, before the technical or
techno-logical disequilibrium of the world; a position the typical example of which is
Rousseaua stage where the identity of things in their true essence would coincide
with their nature.
Thinking in terms of individuation means giving up these ways of thinking in
physics as well as in anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
Physics has become the science of dynamic systems in the course of becoming: the
science of time as trans-formation of matter, where it is apparent that this transformation is always already more than material, what I have risked calling the science
of hypermatter: of a matter always already put into a form; matter as information contained within an energetic system that therefore dissolves the hylomorphic difference,
overcoming the opposition between form and matter, and with it, the opposition
between space and timecategories which are themselves formulated within a process
of which they are merely phases, like the individuation of the observer of a process, a
process which Simondon tries to think before his de-phasing, and as that which he calls
the pre-individual.
If there is a vein of Heideggerian thought to which I hold, it is that of the irreducibly situated character of our possibilities of knowing and learning. Everybody today
thinks of naturethat is, also, the object of physicsas a process rather than as a
state. In the past, everyone was in agreement in speaking of a state of nature as a pure
equilibrium that had been broken; a rupture lived and thought by an onto-theology.
This relationship between nature and culture, which Rousseau described in a particularly explicit way, this relationship between disequilibrium and equilibrium, dominated
almost all philosophical thought, under other names and in other forms, and did so right
up until the thermodynamic revolution.
This was also a metaphysical revolution insofar as it made clear there is a third
physical state, that of metastability, which greatly complicates the opposition between
nature and culture, and where psychosocial and thus technical individuation becomes a
specific regime of metastability in the course of nature, this latter henceforth conceived
as a process of unification and no longer as a pre-given identity.
*
To say that nature is a processa becomingdoes not mean there is no difference
between nature and culture, nor that culture is on its way to eliminating the naturalness
of nature: it means that their relationship is no longer one of opposition, but of compositionthat is, of the formation, within the natural processes that already belong to
becoming, of processes that we will here, to go too quickly, call cultural. Science and
technoscience are, among these processes, cases that change the course of psychosocial
individuation, and that constitute new forms (that is, also, new matters) of becoming,
forming (and materialising) within natural becoming by spacing and temporalising
themselves like local whirlpools within a cosmic river: like so many cultural, that is,
techno-logical, niches, which transform the regimes of metastability of these already
constituted and metastabilised whirlpools that we call natural phenomena, by creating
new processual localities.

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

35

The question that obviously arises here is to know in what way natural science
remains a science if it no longer allows the possibility of thinking omnitemporalities, in
the sense that Husserl gave to this word. I believe, however, that these omnitemporalities become:

either the elements that maintain themselves as metastabilities within more recent metastabilities and that form them, overdetermine them, and assimilate
them;
or the regularities that condition all forms of metastabilities, and that constitute a sort of general systemic lawfulnessand far beyond what I call general
organology, the latter being very localised and limited to our very small noninhuman world.

Omnitemporalities are thus those granular or macro-systemic regularities that condition the viability of the individuation process to come [ venir]and not only
in becoming [en devenir].
Our future is conditioned by the capacity that we will have to select from among
compatible possiblesthat is, compossiblesand to do so with the pre-individual possibilities that we receive from the heart of nature, itself constituting a process in the
course of individuation, and within which our organisations, metastabilising our individuations, are the technologically concretised, that is, pharmaco-logically metastabilised, precarious localities.
Nature is an archi-process, and the metastable coherence of this archi-process conditions the pursuit of any individuation process whatsoever, as a dynamic unifying all
processes, whatever they may be, and that guarantees the preservation of its metastability against instability as well as against stability.
Physics has become a science of becoming and not of being, where the accident is
essentiallike noise. But the future [avenir] must be distinguished from becoming
[devenir]. And if we still need the science of physics, it is to enablebesides the industrial benefits which, in the contemporary context, can be expected from it, etc.in the
whirlpools of becoming, the sense of a future to be released, a sense of a future over
which we could have some control, as factors contributing to the naturation of artifices.
*
If technics can become our second nature, it is because the accomplishment of its
socialisation is its psychic and collective individuation: its adoption by psychic individuals and by the collective individuals that it constitutes precisely as such, and that in
turn individuates technics as a technical system constantly in the course of transformation.
This adoption is a naturation that increases the potential instability of nature
because it is an increase of negentropy that raises the differences in potentials and oversaturation phenomena, that is, it increases the possibilities both of individuation and
disindividuationof dis-integration. Nature, having itself become pharmacological
with the appearance of the technical form of life that we are and that we become, constitutes, for the pharmacological beings that we are in this processual nature, a criterion
of naturation.
What we call nature is an ideality (a physical ideality, which then became mathematical) and not a divinity (that is, a power). As such, nature is what is projected by a

36

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

thinking and as such cultural being, as that which exceeds it and precedes it, that is,
which makes it possible; but such that this being itself anticipates the unity of its
thought and culture in the unity to come of a possible process of which this being is one
possible phase (this possibility constituting what Kant calls transcendental affinity). In
this way, natural ideality constitutes a criterion in the service of an individuation
process within a culture that is essentially pharmacological, that is, essentially contingent. Hence, a science of nature is a science of the convergence to come of individuations, but also of the possibility in the course of becoming of local disagreements that
are fatal to the idea of nature, that is, to the implementation of the criteria of convergence in which this possibility consists.
Naturation is a process of transindividuation that consists in a process of the adoption of technical individuation, that is, pharmacological individuation, the conditions of
psychic and collective individuation being thereby intensified and reinforced by technical individuation. On the other hand, denaturation short-circuits the processes of psychic and collective individuation, replacing them with processes of technical individuation. The name we give to the organisation of denaturing short-circuits is adaptation,
whereas we speak of adoption when it is a matter of naturing, an adoption that produces long-circuits within a process of transindividuation thereby connecting and
reconnecting the processes of psychic, collective and technical individuation, yet without ever confounding them.
It is necessary to reason within situations, and with forms of knowledge that are
irreducibly situated in a particular time, however omnitemporal the idealities aimed at
by such knowledge might be: our vision of the knowing process as well as the known
process can never be anything but retro-spective. When we are travelling along a certain path, then we can only look back at the beginning of the path from the vantage
point he have arrived at along it: the distance we have covered cannot be erased. We
are unable to see the beginning of the path except after having travelled a certain way
along it, and the fact of having travelled is irreversible. Yet, where have we been led in
relation to what I claim to be the central question of transindividuation? I would like to
finish by trying to describe what I believe to be our global situation from this point of
view.
*
Nanotechnology leads to two very different and yet indissociable kinds of questions,
each of which summon up two types of statement and two kinds of language that are
very noticeably different from each otherall of which necessarily results in confusions, misunderstandings and difficulties of many kinds.
This is all the more true given that science sees its practices and with them its own
language transformed in the context of this applied quantum mechanics (that is, nanotechnology) which causes the evolution of the language shared in common between
scientists, between disciplines and within disciplines, while on the other hand industry
sees its dominant models and the language corresponding to these models enter into
crisis.
Furthermore, these two languages, which are, on the one hand, that of industrial
innovation directed by strategic marketing, and, on the other, that of scientific research,
are thus confronted with the problem of their reciprocal translation in the face of a third
language, namely vulgate, vulgar speech.

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

37

By vulgate I mean the language that we all use to speak to one another. I make use
of this term in a way similar to that of Luther, who deploys it in his fight against the
papacy; against a certain conception of clergy and of the fidelity or trust that they are
supposed to inspire, and for the creation of a new intelligence of the faithful that itself
becomes the project of a new church, called the reformed church.
Something comparable is perhaps at stake with that lay clergythe scholars, those
who still affect the skhol and otiumthat the scientists of our day constitute.
We all speak the vulgate when we leave our so-called specialised idiomsand
by the latter I mean:

on the one hand, the idioms of the skhol and of otium, that is, those languages
of knowledge that only consider pure idealities, the objects of theoria, insofar
as they consider that which consists but does not exist, what Plato called the
ideas;
and, on the other hand, worldly language, which until recently was still related
to the vulgar, which is the world of negotium, such as these have been erected
in the sphere of management, share-holding, business, the sphere of permanent modernisation and innovation; all that which I have attempted to think as
a psychopower in relation to technopower and technocracy.

In the past, all those who were not in otium were, in one way or another, in
negotium, whether as merchants [ngociants], commercial operators, or as servants,
those who in French used to be called les manants, landowning peasants. But the consumerist organisation of capitalism has liquidated commerce, and replaced it with totally industrialised mass-market retailing.
All of us, when we speak the vulgar language of those who do not know, all of us
doubt. We doubt many things, but it is more than just a matter of doubt; more than
merely doubting, we are affected by a form of illness typical of our epoch, a serious
social malady, namely, distrust: we suspect that those we no longer trust must harbour
evil intentions. As consumers, we distrust producers and retailers, or even scientists,
that is, industrial designers. As producers we distrust managers. As scientists we distrust public and private authorities as well as citizens. As managers, stockholders or
entrepreneurs, we distrust researchers and their scholastic attitudes that make them
seem like sheltered beings.
*
We are split beings. To be split means to be, if not many, at least more than oneand
we are all more than one (as Simondon says about all individuation), and sometimes we
are even many at the same time. When we are not being many at once, we are so successively: we play various roles, with which we are more or less obviously involved in
each case. For example, we are cyclists and curse pedestrians, cars and buses. Then
when we get in our cars, we hurl insults at cyclists, bus drivers, and pedestrians, not to
mention motorcyclists.
We have many inclinations, some criminal and some tender; we have many
tendencies, some which raise us up and some which are regressive; many types of identification, with the transgression of the film noir bandit, and with the sublimation of the
positive hero, etc. And as all that is neither compatible nor reducible, we do not cease

38

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

composing. It is of course possible to ignore and deny this, and it is when we do so that
we repress things or become blindblind to the law of the pharmakon.
For example, we identify with scientific ideality. And then we realise that this does
not have the same allure that it once possessed, that its modes of socialisation, its
modes of public or private funding, then its modes of transmission, are now caught in
mechanisms that often prove to contradict this ideality. Thus we can be tempted to
identify with those who oppose so-called technoscientific activity; but also and at the
same stroke with what remains of idealisation: we are tempted to identify with those
who speak the vulgate, thereby opposing an economic activity without which this idealisation would no longer be possible, even though this economy seems to contradict this
very ideality.
We are disoriented, and we become distrusting, even of ourselves, which can lead
to depression, to extreme forms of melancholy, or to hysteria. The enormous crisis of
trust that undoubtedly characterises our epoch, an advanced age of nihilism, and that
the economic crisis of 2008 has in a way helped to install for a long time, is also an
immense crisis of the mind or spiritin the sense spoken of by Paul Valry.11 This
crisis encompasses all dimensions of the spirit: of everything that sublimates. This is all
the more impossible to ignore, given that nanotechnology has become one of the most
virulent focal points for the constantly suspicious [mfiants] and ever more distrustful
public, who can at times be very well organised and thus capable of providing welldocumented and carefully considered arguments against these technologies.
Yet it is absolutely necessary that this stage of distrust be overcome. It results from
a new stage of technology, one that becomes transformational, and that constitutes a
radically new pharmacological situation. In this situation, the translation into vulgar
speech of the questions of naturation and denaturation is crucial. To translate into the
vulgate does not mean to take an educational approach toward those supposedly
ignorant of scientific problems. On the contrary, it means creating conditions in order
that, in the context of transformational technologies of transindividuation, a new type
of psychic and collective individuation could emerge, constituting the basis of a process of the adoption of becoming, and fighting against every attempt to merely adapt
the psychic and the social to this technologysince the latter would lead inevitably to
denaturation, that is, to disintegration.
Translated by Daniel Ross

11

Editors note: Paul Valrys essay La Crise de lesprit was published first in English in 1919 as The
Crisis of the Mind (Valry 1962).

Bernard Stiegler / Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies

39

References
Auroux, S. (1994) La Rvolution technologique de la grammatisation, Lige: Mardaga.
Derrida, J. (1978) Freud and the Scene of Writing, in: Writing and Difference (trans. Bass, A.), Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 196-231.
Derrida, J. (1981) Plato's Pharmacy, in: Dissemination (trans. Johnson, B.), Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 61-171.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Massumi,
B.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hayles, N.K. (2007) Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes, Profession
2007, pp. 187-199.
Jacob, F. (1993) The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (trans. Spillmann, B.E.), New Jersey: Princeton
University Press.
Rideout, V., Foehr, U.G., and Roberts, D. F. (2010) Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-year-olds,
Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
Simondon, G. (1989a) Lindividuation psychique et collective, Paris: Aubier.
Simondon, G. (1989b) Du mode dexistence des objets techniques, Paris: Aubier.
Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (trans. Beardsworth, R., and Collins, G.),
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, B. (2006a) Nanomutations, Hypomnemata and Grammatisation, Ars Industrialisassociation internationale pour une politique industrielle des technologies de l'esprit, http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2937
(accessed 26 August 2011).
Stiegler, B. (2006b) La Tlcratie contre la dmocratie. Lettre ouverte aux reprsentants politiques, Paris:
Flammarion. 2006.
Stiegler, B. (2009) Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (trans. Barker, S.), Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Stiegler, B. (2010a) Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (trans. Barker, S.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, B. (2010b) Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (trans. Barker, S.),
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, B., and Ars Industrialis (2006) Renchanter le monde. La valeur desprit contre le populisme industriel, Paris: Flammarion.
Stiegler, B., Giffard, A., and Faur, C. (2009) Pour en finir avec la mcroissance. Quelques rflexions dArs,
Paris: Flammarion.
Valry, P. (1962) The Crisis of the Mind, in: The Collected Works of Paul Valry, vol. 10, History and Politics (trans. Folliot, D., and Matthews, J.), New York: Bollingen Foundation, pp. 23-36.
Zimmerman, F.J., and Christakis, D.A. (2005) Children's Television Viewing and Cognitive Outcomes: A
Longitudinal Analysis of National Data, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 159, pp. 619-625.