A B C D

Anamnesis

Attention

E F G H

Grammatisation Hypnomnemata

I J K L
M N O P

Nootechnics Organology Protention

Pharmakon

Proletarization

Q R S T

Relational Technology Subsist, Exist, Consist Technologies of Self

Technologies of Mind

Techno Science

U V W XYZ
Anamnēsis, hypomnēsis (Memory)
The Greek pair of anamnesis and hypomnēsis helps examine the 1For Plato (Phaedrus, Mēno)
[operations of] memory. anamnesis was knowledge,
the act through which the soul
Anamnesis. From the Greek ana (lift) and mnēme (memory), this remembers and knows (the
term signifies reminiscence (also translated as recollection). There reminiscence of Ideas),
are two distinct dimensions of memory: the recording, which the whereas hypomnēsis refers to
Greeks called “mnesis” and the Latins “memoria”; and the memory aids and the external
remembering, which the Greeks called “anamnesis” and the Latins technics of memory (including
“reminiscientia.” Merely to record does not suffice; memory must writing!), which were not,
then accomplish a tracing back or return to what has been recorded. according to Plato, procedures
of knowledge but rather their
Hypomnēsis. This term refers to all the technics of memory: memory perversion (as with rhetoric
aids, [mnemonic] exercises and other “arts of memory,” as well as all and sophistry).
kinds of physical-media recordings – in other words, the
hypomnēmata. 2All of this is since well known
to philosophers: what opens
The condition of all living memory (anamnesis) is that it can be the Derridean problem in
projected outside of itself (hypomnesis, hypomnēmata) to surpass its Husserl is the thinking of the
finitude and to be fed and transmitted. In contrast to Plato,1we hypomnēsic genesis of
believe that there is no anamnesis without hypomnēsis2– that the geometric anamnesis.
externalization of memory is not the death of anamnesis, but rather
its very condition. These two types of memory must be distinguished, 3In our terms, the question
but not set in opposition. becomes how to think a
hypomnēsic recording in its
Mere recording is by itself a dead memory; and remembering, such correlation with an anamnesic
as is required for reading, for example, is typically an activity that recollection? Hence the
cannot be entirely delegated and set out under a technical form. At a challenge for the digital age is
time when (prostheticized) memory is definitively underway to to work on the hypomnēsic
change media and milieu, Ars Industralis tries to find a means to structures that arouse and
preserve a complementarity between the two faces of memory.3 promote (but do not replace)
anamnesis.
So where is memory lodged? The whole challenge is to no longer
answer “in the head.” At the end of the sixteenth century, in his 4 “Thoughts one keeps for
Iconologia devoted to images of the “things that are within man oneself get lost. And
himself and inseparable from him,” Cesare Ripa gives Memory a forgetting makes one see that
double face, with a pen in her right hand and a book in her left. So, ‘I,’ the Self, is… nobody!”(Paul
(individual and social) memory is not only in our brains but between Valéry, Collected Works of
them, in artifacts. Memory is not internal: rather, it is essentially a Paul Valéry, Volume 14:
process of exteriorization. Indeed, my memory is not strictly my Analects, trans. Stuart Gilbert,
memory.4 484). Paul Valéry clearly
understood that memory, the
“the power of absent things,”
makes the man, and that this
man is shut outside of himself.
“Man is a captive animal –
shut up outside of his cage –
in all he does he is ‘beside
himself’” (Paul Valéry,
Collected Works of Paul
Valéry, Volume 14: Analects,
trans. Stuart Gilbert, 68).

Attention
Attention, retention, and protention form the life of consciousness. If [1] cf. Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of
"the chronological order" is that of the retention of the past , of the Access. The new culture of
attention to the present , and of the protention to come , the logical capitalism , La Découverte, 2005.
and phenomenological order (that is to say as it comes to
[2] cf. Katherine Hayles, Hyper
consciousness ) imposes to begin with the middle: by the attention,
and Deep Attention: the
which opens one to the other retention and protection. Generational Divide in Cognitive
Modes , 2007. It shows that
Attention is par excellence the modality of consciousness: "to be brains subjected to the rich media
conscious" is to be attentive. Attention is what constitutes the lose their deep attention in favor
objects of consciousness, even if all consciousness is not attentive - of hyper attention . Bernard
all attention being obviously conscious. The life of attention lies Stiegler criticizes this last
between the retentions (memory) and the protections (the project, expression by insisting on the fact
that it is more about alertness,
the expectation, the desire) that binds by being open to what
vigilance - or even "zapping" -
happens in the "now" since remember what has happened
than reflection or attention. The
(retention) and waiting for what is happening (protention). hyper-stimulation of attention
actually leads to an attention
Attention is not a reflex; in other words, attention is something that deficit.
forms and forms. The training of attention is always both psychic and
social, because the attention is at the same time psychological
attention , perceptive or cognitive ("to be attentive", vigilant,
concentrated) and social attention , practical or ethical ("to pay
attention "To take care): the attention which is the psychic faculty of
concentrating on an object, of giving oneself an object, is also the
social faculty of taking care of this object.

There are attention-capture techniques whose purpose is to train

attention (as well as the book), others whose purpose is to capture
and channel it - which leads to de-training, to exhaust and destroy it.
Attention is today being exploited industrially, where the valued "raw
material" - and the scarce resource - has become the consumer's
attention span [1] . Always more, and by all means, the advertising
industry is trying to capture our attention, and no one escapes this
cognitive and emotional saturation. It is now proven that the massive
use of the mass media from an early age leads to an " attention
deficit discord " [2]. The brain fed zapping loses the attention a little
like the one who eats in front of the television loses the taste of what
he eats - and sometimes loses the appetite, sometimes becomes
bulimic.
Grammatisation
Grammatisation [1] refers to the transformation of a temporal n Bernard Stiegler's term this
continuum into a spatial discrete (of grams): it is a process of term extends but diverts a
description, formalization and discretization of human behaviors concept of Sylvain Auroux
(see The technological
(calculations, languages and gestures) that allows their reproducibility; it
revolution of
is an abstraction of forms by the externalization of flows in "tertiary
grammatisation , Éd.Mardaga
retentions" (exported in our machines, our devices). 1994) - and echoes, of course,
the grammatology of
Grammatizing is therefore discretizing in order to reproduce. Will be Derrida. The term
named gram any discrete unit registered in a technical support of grammatization, in Sylvain
memory ( hypomnemata ). The grammatization process is the technical Auroux, names a revolution as
history of memory : it is the story of the supplement, as Jacques Derrida important as the birth of the
spoke of it, but as it consists in a discretization, a discrimination, an writing that precedes it (the
literacy or the written support
analysis and a decomposition of the flows. (which is not unrelated to
of the oral). This revolution
coding-decoding according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari).
leads to the description and
tooling of a language based
The grammatization process is not only about language (such as this on the two technologies that
typewriter that was the Greek city), but also gestures and behaviors are still today the pillars of
(such as the machine tool that emerges from the meeting between the our metalinguistic knowledge:
engineer James Watt and the entrepreneur Matthew grammar and
Boulton). Industrial machinery reproduces the gestures of work, as dictionary. Grammars and
printed writing reproduces speech in as many copies. This is the dictionaries are not mere
representations of the
nineteenth th century begins a new stage of grammatization: analog
languages that pre-existed
sound stage that will allow the XX thcentury the production and
them, but techniques that
reproduction of industrial temporal objects ( eg. the phonograph, the modify the spaces of
cinematograph). The sensible in all these forms becomes reproducible communication. For Sylvain
(Benjamin). The last stage of grammatisation is ours: its digital stage, Auroux,Scripture (writing), gr
which is also that of the hyperindustrial society where the exteriorization ammatization (science and
of the functions of reading and computation seems dissociated from the language
internalization that accompanied calculation and reading . technique), automation (com
puterization) are the three
essential stages in the
The concept of grammatisation defines and describes epochs and
formalization and outsourcing
techniques that appear but never disappear: in no case does computer
of human language. No more,
science make reading and writing disappear. On the contrary, it is an therefore, that we can not
archi-reading that changes the conditions of reading and writing. separate language from
technology (Leroi-Gourhan),
There are three discretizations : literal, analog and digital. They do not we can not separate
have the same modalities of socialization and do not produce the same linguistics from technology
epistemic effects. Typically, we do not do calculations on analog (Auroux).
grammarizations, while computing is done to make calculations,
http://arsindustrialis.org/voc
treatments. In the case of analog, the discretization is insensitive to the
abulaire-grammatisation-
recipient, while passing to the digital device, parts of the signal appear
techniques-de-reproduction
to me as discrete and manipulable, and that is what makes this possible.
what is called interactivity: I can act on information.
Hypnomnemata
Hypomnēmata, in a general sense, are the objects generated by 1 "Hupomnēmata, in the
hypomnēsis, that is to say, by the artificial and technical externalization technical sense, could be
of memory. Hypomnēmata are the artificial media of memory in all its account books, public
registers, or individual
forms: from prehistorically engraved bones to the MP3 player, passing
notebooks serving as memory
through the writing of the Bible, the printing press, photography, etc.
aids" (Foucault, “Self Writing"
(1983), in Ethics: Subjectivity
Hypomnēmata, in the strict sense, are techniques specifically invented and Truth, Ed. Paul Rabinow,
to enable the production and transmission of memory; they are 209).
externalized memory media that expand our neural memory. All
individuation is inseparable from the media of externalized memory. 2 Foucault, “Self Writing"
Television, radio, internet, as mnemonic technologies, are new forms of (1983), in Ethics: Subjectivity
hypomnēmata calling for new practices. and Truth, Ed. Paul Rabinow,
212.
To understand hypomnēsis is to understand that memory (individual
and social) is located not only in our brains but also between them, in
artifacts.

Hypomnēmata and writing of the self. Michel Foucault, reflecting on the

hypomnēmata understood as support media for memory,1thought of
them as the writing of the self, as a modality of the constitution of the
self. Without these hypomnēmata, there is a great risk of sinking into an
agitation of the mind and spirit, that is to say, into a flightiness of
attention, which prevents the mind and spirit from attuning themselves
properly. We see this today with channel-surfing. “The writing of
hupomnēmata,” writes Foucault, “resists this scattering by fixing
acquired elements, and by constituting a share of the past, as it were,
toward which it is always possible to turn back, to withdraw.”2
Nootechnics
technologies of spirit or mind; often construed as normatively positive.
Organology
This term is derived from the Greek organon, meaning tool or device.
1 Though the psychic
“General organology” is a method of analysis conjoining the history and apparatus is not reducible to
the becoming of physiological organs, artificial organs, and social the brain, since it also
requires technical organs,
organizations. It describes a transductive relation between three types
artificial objects supporting
of “organs”: physiological, technical, and social. The relationship is
symbolization (language, to
transductive to the extent that a variation in the terms of one type name one case).
always involves a variation in the terms of the other two types. A
physiological organ – including the brain, seat of the psychic apparatus1 2 Bertrand Gille shows that,
– does not change independently from technical and social organs. This starting from the industrial
way of thinking is inspired by Georges Canguilhem’s work in The Normal revolution, the dynamics of
and the Pathological. the technical system increases
In our day, constant organological transformation knows an and accelerates its
transformation such that the
unprecedented upheaval that we call hyper-maladjustment after the
primary function of
concept elaborated by Bertrand Gille.2 This results not only from the
government comes to be the
acceleration of technological change, but also from the neoliberal model regulation of the
that, since the “conservative revolution,” consists in replacing social maladjustment resulting
organizations and institutions with services that are themselves between technical and social
technological and fully subject to an economic system that has became systems.
entirely speculative. There is hyper-maladjustment when the artificial
organa forming the technical system short-circuit both the level of
organs and psychosomatic apparatuses (including genital organs and the
brain) and the level of social organizations. This is what leads to what we
call a generalized proletarianization.
Pharmakon
In ancient Greece, the term pharmakon designated at once the poison, the cure, 1The question of
and the scapegoat.1 pharmakon entered
into contemporary
philosophy with
All technical objects are pharmacological, at once poison and cure. The
Jacques Derrida’s
pharmakon is both what permits care-taking and what requires one to take care,
commentary on
in the sense that one must pay attention. It has medicinal power to the extent Phaedrus, in
that it is (and also isn’t) a destructive power. This is what characterizes “Plato’s Pharmacy,”
pharmacology as it tries to grasp, in the same gesture, both what endangers and in Dissemination
what saves. All technics is originarily and irreducibly ambivalent: alphabetical (University of
writing, for example, has been and still can be just as much an instrument of Chicago, 1981). The
emancipation as of alienation. If, to take another example, the internet can be pharmakon as
described as pharmacological, this is because it is at once a technological device writing (as
hypomnēsis) is
allowing user-participation and also an industrial system appropriating user data
where Plato fights
for submission to marketing regimes that are both omnipresent and individually
its poisonous and
traced and targeted through user-profiling technologies. artificial effects by
opposing it to
Pharmacology, understood in this very broad sense, studies organologically the anamnesis as the
effects brought about by technics and does so such that its socialization involves activity of “thinking
some prescriptions — that is to say, a system of shared and apportioned care, a for oneself.” Derrida
common ground of the economy in general, if is true that to economize means to shows that precisely
take care. More particularly, Ars Industrialis calls for a pharmacology of where Plato
opposes autonomy
attentiveness to the era of technologies of the mind and spirit.
and heteronomy,
they nonetheless co-
Both poison and cure, the pharmakon can also become a scapegoat for the compose
carelessness that does not know how to play a curative part and leaves it to themselves
poison the lives of the incurious — that is to say, those who do not know how to incessantly.
live pharmaco-logically. It can also lead, through its toxicity, to naming
scapegoats for the calamitous effects to which it can lead in situations of 2 Bateson, Gregory.
carelessness. The current mélange of industrial populism and all kinds of political
regressions proceeds entirely from this state of affairs – and it constitutes, 3 In the sense
proposed by Eloi
particularly in Western and Eastern Europe, but also (and above all) in France and
Laurent in Social-
Italy, a historic shame for those countries that were once cradles of great artistic,
écologie
scientific, philosophical and political cultures. (Flammarion, 2011).

In principle, a pharmakon must always be considered according to the three

senses of the word: as a poison, as a remedy, and as a scapegoat (an outlet). For
this reason, as Gregory Bateson has emphasized, the treatment program of
Alcoholics Anonymous always consists of first placing value on the necessarily
remedial (and beneficial) function of alcohol for the alcoholic before entering the
process of detoxification.2

That we should always consider any pharmakon proceeding first from the
perspective of a positive pharmacology, obviously does not mean that we should
not be allowed to prohibit one or another kind of pharmakon. A pharmakon can
have toxic effects such that its adoption by social systems, conditioned by given
geographical and biological systems,3 is not feasible, and such that its positive
implementation proves impossible. This is precisely the question posed by
nuclear power.

Proletarization
Proletarization is, in a general way, what consists in depriving a subject [1]
(producer, consumer, designer) of his knowledge (know-how, savoir-vivre,
know how to conceive and theorize). [2] Catherine Distler,
"Global Networks and
Financial Markets:
Lessons from the 1987
Let us first recall that Marx does not say that the proletariat is the working Crash," Quaderni, 1990,
class: he says that the working class is the first class to be affected by vol. 12, No. 12, pp. 37-
proletarianization. The proletarians have not disappeared: proletarianization, 47.
ie the loss of knowledge, has on the contrary invaded "all layers of society" [1]
. Private to know, the proletarian is deprived of work, if it is true that to work [3] Paul Jorion,
is to individuate oneself by individuating one's work environment and by co-
individuating with colleagues of work, ie by forming with them an associated [4] If it is true that, as
Jacques Derrida has
medium. The proletarian is the employee of a dissociated environment . The
shown, the condition of
proletarian, says Simondon, is disindivided by the machine that has
what Plato calls the
grammatised and automated his knowledge. anamnesis - which, as
an activity of "thinking
During the XX th century, however, which is proletarianised is not only the for oneself", is the
expertise of the producer: this is also the etiquette of the consumer. The individualism by
consumer thus proletarianized does not produce his own modes of existence: excellence - is the
these are imposed on him by the marketing who has transformed his way of hypomnesis,
life into a user manual. constituted by the
hypomnemata resulting
from the process of
The crisis of 2008 has highlighted that it is also now the designers and
grammatisation, which
decision-makers who are proletarianized: automation resulting from "decision makes possible at the
support systems", such as computerized trading programs that unilaterally same time new forms of
grammarize the points of view economic and financial dominant (often deindividuation (of
reinforcing entropic processes - as had already been shown by a study of the proletarianization) and
stock market crisis of 1987 by Catherine Distler [2] , and as Paul Jorion new forms of
recently pointed out [3]- entropic processes which constitute the individuation (of
technological base of what was called "the unique thought"), generalize the knowledge). A new
practice of writing is the
situation which had settled with the nuclear computer systems, where the
pharmacological
political and military decision making, formalized in the apparatuses
condition of the
electronic monitoring, is bypassed by the performance of the computerized curative struggle
arsenal. against its toxic effects
- and it is implemented
That grammatization induces a proletarianization through the development of in the Academy of Plato
its successive stages is not a fatality: it is a pharmacological question, where ( See Leon Robin, Plato ,
the alternative comes from what we call positive pharmacology [4] . PUF, 192 ..., P. ...). The
Nowadays, this question arises with an absolutely new radicality precisely to first political task is to
define such
the extent that the proletarianization reaches each one of us, installing in
therapeutics - which are
each of us the ravaging effects of the "systemic stupidity", reaching all the
ways to train attention,
social functions, of the most humble to the most decisive. This is why we ie educational models.
make widespread deproletarization the fundamental issue of the contribution
economy.

The protention is the time of the desire or the time of the issue, which 6 ? On one hand it is not
involves the time of attention and time retentions (tertiary)6 . Protention is sustainable without
the desire (and expectation) of the future, it is what in the future constitutes attention to protention
"consistencies" on the
the possibility of the future - on the understanding that the future can not
other hand the
engage any future. For the coming to become consistent, we must at least
possibility
escape the short-termism that governs our world. This is the paradox: finance, of pro detention is pre-
which is originally the time for credit, is the organization of protests, today ceded by a prosthetic
accompanies a consumerist economy that destroys the very possibility of projection. In other
projecting itself into the future. words, it is because
man is defined by
his pharmakon techniqu
e that makes human
question, or better than
human is matter and
is put in question. On
this last point,
cf. Chap. 8: "The time of
the
question", in Bernard
Stiegler, What makes
life worth living. From
pharmacology ,
Flammarion, 2010.
Subsist, Exist, Consist
Through this triptych we can describe human life. In every society, there seems to exist
a great distribution of human activities according to whether they are subject to
subsistences or destined to existences, a distribution that echoes that between the
otium (plans of existence) and negotium (plans of subsistence). To the traditional
couple of subsistence and existence, we add a third term, that of consistence (that
which holds with).

- Subsistence is the immutable order of needs and the imperative of their satisfaction;
it is the imperative of survival. When human life is reduced to the pure necessity of
subsistence, it is pulled down to the level of needs and loses the sense of existence.
Such needs are now artificially produced through the power of marketing.

- The existence - the human fact of ex-sistere – of being thrown out of the self, of being
constituted outside of oneself and in a to-come – is what constitutes man as he exists
in and through the relation he maintains to his objects – not insofar as he needs, but
insofar as he desires. This desire is that of a singularity – and all existence is singular.

- Consistence designates the process through which human existence is driven and
trans-formed by its objects, where it projects what goes beyond itself, and which does
not exist but rather consists. It thus includes the object of one’s desire, which by
definition is the infinite except that the infinite does not exist; what exists must be
calculable in space and in time (in other words, what exists is the finite). Such infinites
include objects of idealization in all their forms: objects of love (my love), objects of
justice (the justice which no one can renounce on the pretext that it nowhere really
exists), and objects of truth (mathematical idealities).

Insofar as it is able to project onto some such plans of consistence, existence, which
Aristotle called the noetic soul, is driven by the process of a psychic individuation that
is always also a collective individuation. Consistence is what projects and crystallizes
the psychic in the social. Consistence tends to make all consistencies converge with
one single aim, and in this way it produces what Simondon called the transindividual –
which is to say, the signification shared by psychic individuals transindividuating in a
collective individuation.

The being-in-the-milieu that is man has this unique trait: an existence without
mnemotechnical support could not constitute its consistence. This milieu is
organological, which is to say also pharmacological: it is through its epiphylogenetic
organs and its hypomnēmata that the life of [animal] need becomes capable of
idealization.
Relational Technology
Relational technologies designate the set of technologies that not only put [things] into
relation, but equally also engram those relationships. As such, relational technologies
are a contemporary moment in the process of grammatization that consists in
discretizing the temporal flow – that is to say, that consists in spatializing time.
Following the grammatization of speech in writing, then the grammatization of the
gesture by the machine tool, social relations are now grammatized by relational
technologies.

Although social networking services (Facebook and Twitter are the best known, but
there are many others) are the most visible manifestation of relational technologies,
they are only part of a larger technological environment of the internet and the world
wide web, which form the associated technological environment for the development
of contributory logics.

Relational technologies are, above all else, industrial technologies of

transindividuation: they produce something of transindividuation in grammatizing the
relations themselves, and this grammatization overdetermines the composition of the
relations of individuals who are thereby co-individuated and socialized.

Generally, this grammatization, at this stage in the development of social networks and
digital relational technologies, is not yet a thematized and criticized – not yet an
adopted – object of collective individuation. Relational technologies make possible the
constitution of critical relational space and time (that is to say, of circuits of critical
transindividuation), but in the current state of their organization, they are instead (and
in very large part) uncritical devices. The gain generated by the grammatization of
relations themselves is placed exclusively in the service of the commercial interests of
companies that operate these networks, and against the existential interests of those
who form the reality of these networks – namely their members.

Like any pharmakon, relational technologies can just as easily produce short circuits as
long circuits in transindividuation. If the scope of these technologies is left to market
forces alone, then, induced by the will of the market into a very short term
“monetization” of the graph of social relations, it will necessarily produce a drastic
shortening in the circuits of transindividuation.

This is why it is necessary to have a politics to accompany relational technology.

Indeed, this is another name for the social rationale of Ars Industrialis – an “association
for the promotion of an industrial politics of technologies of the spirit.” It is a matter,
through this politics, of putting into place a true relational ecology – something that
involves a politics of the territorialization of relational technologies. It involves, in
other words, the design and arrangement of digital networks structurally constituted
by their global amplitude with local networks and georeferenced through wherever it
is that relational technologies are reinventing the processes of territorialized collective
individuation.
Retention
Retentions are what is held or collected by the consciousness. This term is borrowed
from Husserl; but tertiary retentions are peculiar to Bernard Stiegler's philosophy.

Primary returns . They are what happens in the time of consciousness, what
consciousness retains in the "now passing", in the perceptual flow that supports
consciousness. For example, the primary retention is the presence of the note just spent
in a melody, which means that the current "mi" is not the same depending on whether
it is preceded by a "d" or a FA ".
Secondary retentions . Secondary retentions are old primary retentions (retained by
our consciousness) that have become memories . They belong to the imaginative
memory - I "go for" my memories - and no longer to the retention-perception, on which
they have an impact. Primary retentions are indeed selections because the flow of
consciousness that you are can not remember everything: what you remember is what
you are, but what you remember depends on what you have already remembered.
Tertiary retentions . They are the property of the human species. It is the hypomnesic
sedimentations that have accumulated over generations by spatialising and
materializing in a world of artifacts - "memory supports", that is to say, hypomnemata
- and which thus make it possible to process of psycho-socio-technical individuation.
Tertiary retentions overdetermine secondary retentions that overdetermine primary
retentions
Technologies of Self
What Michel Foucault called the care of the self (“epimeleia heautou” or “cura sui”) is 1The question
not a simple state of mind: it is what it is insofar as it is constituted by way of its of pharmakon
practices. The history of the Western technics of the self is structured by the process of entered into
contemporary
grammatization.
philosophy
with Jacques
Pierre Hadot critiques the traditional way Greek philosophers are read in order to bring Derrida’s
out some ideas or doctrines; he maintains, instead, that philosophy consists initially in commentary
a conversion into a form of life, into an art of life, based on the self working on itself by on Phaedrus,
way of a set of noetic (intellectual and spiritual) exercises. Philosophy itself would be in “Plato’s
such an exercise. Pharmacy,” in
Dissemination
Michel Foucault rediscovers the care of the self in working through what he calls “the (University of
Chicago,
hermeneutics of the subject” – namely, the relationship between subjectivity and
1981). The
truth. Foucault studies the “arts of self,” the “practice of the self,” and, explicitly, the
pharmakon
“technics of the self,” including the writing of the self. The practices of the self have as writing (as
certain characteristics. They must be repeated, regular, or even ritualized. They pertain hypomnēsis)
to some kind of training or exercise (“askēsis” or “exercitium”). They are enlightened is where Plato
by the care of the self in general, and by the orientation (the doctrine) belonging to the fights its
philosophical schools (to the Stoics or Epicureans, for example). poisonous
and artificial
Thus, Philo of Alexandria gave two lists of the technics of the self that bear the mark of effects by
opposing it to
Stoicism. The first includes searching, in-depth examination, reading, listening,
anamnesis as
attentiveness, self-mastery, and indifference to things that are indifferent. The second
the activity of
includes readings, meditations, the therapy of the passions, memories or reminders of “thinking for
what is good, self-mastery, and the performance of duties. From a practical point of oneself.”
view, intellectual exercises, such as listening, reading, and memorization, prepare the Derrida shows
meditation that deepens in its search and examination, and results in techniques of that precisely
self-mastery. where Plato
opposes
Attentiveness (“prosochē”) is both a general orientation of practices of the self and a autonomy
and
particular technique. Meditation plays a central role in the technics of the self. The
heteronomy,
Latin word meditatio translated melētē, which in Greek means care, the act of being
they
attentively occupied with someone or something; initially, it referred to an orator’s nonetheless
preparation. Meditation, most often associated with memorization, is the spiritual co-compose
exercise par excellence. themselves
incessantly.
Technics of the self constitute a critical tradition of attentiveness. Today, they allow
one to inquire into the type of attentiveness characteristic of a “majority opposed to 2 Bateson,
conditioning” – that is to say, opposed to the destruction of knowledge and work by Gregory.
employment and opposed to being formatted by psychopower. Ars Industrialis
3 In the sense
advances the position that digital technologies of the mind and spirit can and should
proposed by
be put in the service of the self. Cultural industries, the industries of programming, Eloi Laurent in
media, telecommunications, cultural and cognitive technologies – which are nothing Social-
other than hypomnēmata of our time – are thus to be evaluated in terms of their care écologie
of the self. The care of the self is not an egocentric tendency, as the contemporary (Flammarion,
ideology of “well-being” would have it (and all the more volubly as unease and “ill- 2011)
being” expand their dominion); rather, care of the self is always inscribed as a way of
taking care of youth and future generations. This evaluation of technologies of the
mind and spirit, including the digital, bears centrally on the relationship between
school and the technics of the self and of writing – for example, by way of the critique
of digital reading and the conditions of “industrial readings” [e.g. with the convergence
of Google and marketing], and by way of the reflections that Ars Industrialis shares
with the online journal Revue Skhole.fr.
Technologies of Mind
A set formed by the convergence of audiovisual broadcasting, telecommunications,
and IT. The submission of technologies of the mind and spirit solely to market criteria
maintains them in the function of “technologies of control.” Thus marketing has
become the science of societies of control.

Technologies of the mind and spirit are now largely “technology R” – that is to say,
relational technologies.

We must fight against the false syllogism holding that, the mind and spirit being
intangible, technologies and industries operating there can only be virtual and devoid
of infrastructure (as if there could be an enterprise – even if only a service enterprise –
with no means of production).

Technologies of the mind and spirit must distinguish between:

Psychotechnologies and nootechnologies; only the second of these belong to the

technics of spirit that promote the culture and the value of mind and spirit.

Industrial politics of the mind and spirit. The mind, or spirit, is produced in a technical
milieu. Today, this milieu has totally mutated due to the spectacular development of
cognitive and cultural technologies, and its cultivation can no longer be left to a
financialized capitalism (that works for the short term), but must instead be taken up
and driven both by a public politics and by an industrial politics (that would work for
the long term).

Collaborative technologies of the mind and spirit obsolesce the division of labor and
social roles modeled on the opposition between production and consumption. They
are called upon to fundamentally alter the linear sequence: research / design /
development / marketing / distribution / consumption.
Techno Science
In historical terms, “technoscience” designates the epoch over the course of which
science became a function of the economy; in such an era, science is required by
industry.

In philosophical terms, “technoscience” designates the non-separation of science and

technics (which must, however, remain distinguished1). For science, it is no longer a
matter of describing that, which is, but of making happen that which will happen:
laboring to bring into the world its transformation. Nanoscience, for example, is
straightaway a nanotechnology where to know something is to form and fashion it.

The scientist, as a living man, is the ambivalence of his prosthesis, he is the deficiency
that calls for a supplement. Technoscience thus signifies that the milieu of science – in
the double sense of the Umwelt (milieu of life and of knowledge) and of the medium
(milieu as intermediary) – is technics, and that technics is not a set of tools for acting
upon nature, for the very reason that technics makes milieu. There is nothing to
measure without an instrument of measure; it is the work of measuring that creates—
and creates from the reality to be measured the sense and meaning of object. To
speak of “technical milieu” is to suffer a naive understanding of technics as a
instrument in the service of knowledge; it also runs counter to the idea of a science
emancipated from its prostheses, from its hypomnēmata – as it appeared to the eyes
of Husserl himself in The Origin of Geometry.2

Science has always presupposed a hypomnēsic technics, and has never been pure from
all technics, contrary to the usual claims in Plato and, after him, in the whole tradition
we call “metaphysics.” In our vocabulary, science is linked to a certain stage of
grammatization – that of the synthesis of logos by the letter. As for technoscience, as
the industrial age of science, it is tied to still further advances in grammatization – even
as it is somehow in itself the advancing of grammatization: one of the main activities of
contemporary science, after all, is precisely to grammatize. Indeed contemporary
science grammatizes even life itself: the sequencing of DNA, for example, is a process
of the grammatization of life. This poses the question of the status of technics in life
itself, and, in the first place, in the life of what we call non-inhuman being.