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ISSN: 1353-4645 (Print) 1460-700X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tpar20

Aesthesis and Nous: Technological Approaches

Sara Baranzoni

To cite this article: Sara Baranzoni (2017) Aesthesis and Nous: Technological Approaches,
Parallax, 23:2, 147-163, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2017.1299296

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1299296

Published online: 08 May 2017.

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parallax, 2017, Vol. 23, No. 2, 147–163, Nootechnics
https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1299296

Aesthesis and Nous: Technological Approaches

Sara Baranzoni

A Call for New Aesthetic Paradigms

The ongoing explosion of pervasive digital technologies and ubiquitous com-

puting is leading to radical changes in human experience. The pressure
exerted on and by the acceleration of technical mediation is creating a milieu
where, as Félix Guattari argued in the late 1980s, ‘the contents of subjectivity
have become increasingly dependent on a multitude of machinic systems’.1
Now integrated into cybernetic processes, bionic circuits, sensorial environ-
ments, and digital social networks, classical subjectivities and modes of indi-
viduation seem both preceded and surpassed to the extent that a complex
entanglement of the human and the technological is emerging, where cogni-
tive processes increasingly take place beyond what has always been conceived
as the monadic sphere of the subject. With new smart technologies, individu-
als find themselves plunged into hyperconnected environments and wrapped
in a cloud of data, where intelligence, cognition, and noetic processes seem
to be distributed among diverse vectors that could therefore be defined as
‘environmental’.2

All this raises the far older problem of the relationship between technology
and reason, and the more recent problem of the relationship between
human faculties, computation, and the digital. But this in turn implies the
need for profound reflection on the problem of mediation as such, for which
Guattari’s notion of a ‘post-media era’ remains suggestive.3 Guattari devoted
considerable attention to the impact of media technologies on the formation
of subjectivity, and, more than twenty years later, in a world that has since
undergone several extraordinary transformations, this discourse still contains
crucial insights into the contemporary technological condition. In Chaosmosis
in particular and in relation to the technological modification of experience,
Guattari highlights the tendency of new technologies to operate within a
field of action focused predominantly on sensibility prior to subjecthood. He
then invokes the construction of a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’,4 a project
dedicated to a ‘subjectivity to come’, re-singularized, and capable of a
re-appropriation of technologies, with the capacity to invent unprecedented
technological practices. ‘The aesthetic power of feeling’, he argues, occupies
‘a privileged position within the collective Assemblages of enunciation of our
era’,5 becoming the most necessary of forces, capable of reinventing

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147
 processes of individuation, after the segmentation and (in)dividualization of
individuals, effected by what Gilles Deleuze called ‘control societies’.6

In recent years, considerable research has been undertaken on the coupling

of aesthesis with the growth of computational technologies, and the impact
of this association on everyday life. This research intersects with philosophi-
cal approaches that traverse the fields of media and technology studies,
exploring the new conditions of existence and experience fostered by such
technologies.7 In general, they share an expanded understanding of aesthe-
sis, as perception by the senses, where sensibility would be a kind of percep-
tual awareness oriented through experience in an individuating manner that
goes beyond mere sensation. But the critical idea that sensibility has become
a ‘battleground’, on which a socio-political struggle of forces will and must
be played out, which was foreshadowed in Guattari’s writings and explicitly
advocated in the early 2000s by Bernard Stiegler,8 seems mostly to have
been left to one side, at least in the field of media studies. Yet, although
Deleuze and Guattari remain important references for this field, and
Stiegler’s reading of technology widely discussed, most thinkers in media
studies remain focused on the advantages and the empowering possibilities
afforded by new technologies. Stiegler’s symptomatological critique of the
threats brought by proletarianization, and by the neoliberal appropriation of
technological tendencies is often considered too ‘grim’.9

In fact, however, Stiegler’s approach is thoroughly and explicitly ‘pharmaco-

logical’, that is, founded in the notion that poisonous effects and potential
remedies (the two meanings of the ancient Greek term, pharmakon) are inex-
tricably and simultaneously entwined within one and the same technical
object.10 As is also well known, Stiegler understands human development
and culture in terms of ‘originary technicity’.11 This is not only a question of
the making of cultural products: for Stiegler, human evolution itself cannot
be grasped purely in biological terms, but rather involves an essential rela-
tion to ‘organized inorganic matter’ – his definition of ‘technics’.12 The latter
is for him the condition of life, but in a sense that is neither deterministic
nor unilateral: indeed, the process of exteriorization in artefacts is for Stieg-
ler inseparable from individuals and society, and technological development
should therefore be understood as articulated with individual faculties and
social organizations, within a process of co-operation and co-transformation
that he calls ‘general organology’.13 For Stiegler, technology is a lever for
and a spur to existence and knowledge, and not only what, from Plato to
contemporary industrial cultural production, ruins and disrupts human fac-
ulties. Despite the reality of such threats, a pharmacological perspective
insists that the remedy is already contained within the danger itself. In his
turn, Guattari seems to anticipate this perspective when he states: ‘Techno-
logical transformations oblige us to be aware of both universalising and
reductionist homogenisations of subjectivity and of a heterogenetic tendency,
that is to say, of a reinforcement of the heterogeneity and singularisation of
its components’.14 For Guattari, too, one-dimensional judgments of technical
evolution are impossible: ‘everything depends on its articulation within
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148
collective assemblages of enunciation’ – that is, in Stieglerian terms, on how
they are adopted in human creative practices.15

This proximity between the analyses of Guattari and Stiegler represents a

fertile terrain still insufficiently explored. What follows here will be inflected
in the direction of Stiegler’s philosophy, but in the hope of providing foun-
dational materials on which to build the new paradigm invoked by Guattari.
In particular, I will try to show not only that Stiegler’s arguments are some-
times strikingly close to Guattari’s, but also that his viewpoint, unlike some
recent media theory, enables a perspective on sensibility that we will define
as not only ecological but organological. At the same time, focus will be given
to how the war on sensibility, waged on and through perceptive abilities and
aesthetic regimes, is creating new images of thought and modifying the pos-
sibilities of thinking in a society characterized by ubiquitous computing and
the data economy. Hence this battle is not just political or economic, but a
struggle to control, through technological devices, codes and algorithms, our
very ability to perceive and the cognitive processes that organize and filter
perception. Our aim is to understand this aesthetic conditioning and thereby
to enable a reinvention of its destiny and practices.

To this end, we will examine several theories of mediation in which agency

is questioned or rethought as something other than just the prerogative of
an individual actor, and technology is seen as more than just a prosthetic
tool. We will attempt to understand aesthesis and thought, the relation of
these to practice, and their constitutive relation to technicity. And we will see
that each of these theories bears a different understanding of the ‘thinkable’,
the ‘knowable’ and the ‘sensible’.

Techno-Ecological Agencies and Beyond

The ideas of machinic ecology and fundamental technicity are not new to
critical thought. If the cybernetic dream of the 1950s has left a residue on the
contemporary imagination, it consists in the desire to stop thinking of the rela-
tion between the individual, the environment and technical objects in instru-
mental terms – or rather, the problem is not instrumentalization but the
reduction of instruments and environments to a means for the human. Indeed,
‘cybernetics intentionally blurred the boundaries between humans, animals,
and sophisticated technological objects, [and for this] it has often been accused
of reducing living beings to the mere interplay of mechanisms’.16 Cybernetics
has, indeed, always consisted in a rationalization and systematization of the
real, in order to minimize uncertainties and ‘to develop a universal theory of
regulation and control, applicable to economic as well as mental processes,
and to sociological as well as aesthetic phenomena’ – it is this that has led to
the success of behaviourism and the cognitive sciences.17 Yet, cybernetics has
also tried to draw automatic machines and organisms together, on the basis of
their shared capacity to respond to changing environments, treating them as
‘self-adapting systems’ operating through feedback loops.
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 To what degree this attitude entered into Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of
technology, that is, his account of the principle of individuation and mor-
phogenesis, is a matter for debate.18 For Simondon, individuation is an
always incomplete process, unfolding as the play of tendency and counter-
tendency maintaining a metastable equilibrium (relatively stable, which is to
say, relatively unstable) within which they compose, and thereby composing
not only living individuals, but also the relationship between individuals and
their milieu. Simondon also refers to the ‘pre-individual field’, a difficult
notion referring to something like a primitive condition, in which a complex
of heterogeneous forces charged with potentials can give rise to onto-genesis,
to a movement arising from an internal ‘dephasing’ – a movement through
which individuation gets going. This could, today, be understood as calling
for an ‘ecological thought’,19 given that, if what develops within the pre-indi-
vidual field are transductive relations, then this amounts to the proposition
that neither side can exist without the other.20

Stiegler has proposed an important extension and critique of this concept,

going beyond the idea of environmentality by providing an ‘artefactual re-
foundation’ for the pre-individual, that is, insisting on its prosthetic nature.21
Even if Simondon does theorize the morphogenesis or the individuation of
the technical object, Stiegler argues, he barely connects this to the process of
psychic and collective individuation.22 For Stiegler, technical evolution is pre-
cisely what ‘must be radicalized’, affirming that, qua tendency, it precedes
psycho-social individuation, and in this way overdetermines it. In other
words, Stiegler argues that we must recognize the technical character of the
pre-individual milieu: it is composed of artefacts that function as mnesic
exteriorizations, capable of transmitting the traces of lives led before ours
(and hence prior individuations). This both allows and transforms the condi-
tions of vital differentiation, giving rise to a new transductive relationship
between the psychic and the collective layers of individuation, that is, to pro-
cesses that are no longer just those of biological life. This is also to open
Simondon’s dephasing to a new temporality – one connected to the Der-
ridean concept of différance.23 In simpler terms, we are defined by our
objects and technologies, and it is through them that we can gather our past
and project ourselves towards a future, through a movement whereby an
exteriorized knowledge is re-appropriated, a movement that corresponds to
the ‘invention’ of the interior dimension.

This strict coupling, between the (psychic and collective) individual and its
milieu as the site of its originary artifacticity, brings ‘technics’ to the fore as a
relation that precedes its terms, in which we can recognize an active form of
agency, amounting to the essentially techno-logical ‘invention of the human’
and its culture via what Stiegler calls epiphylogenetic memory.24 He thereby
goes beyond the idea of an environmental agency, in the sense that agency
would be already diffused in the technical pre-individual field, from which
différance proceeds. But the logic and history of this différance, or of the inex-
tricably tied strands of technical, psychic, and collective individuation, is for
Stiegler something that can be perceived only in an après-coup, that is, after
Baranzoni
150
its concretization in an empirical supplement, the ‘spatialized temporal
object’. More broadly, every form of knowledge is, for Stiegler, characterized
by a kind of techno-logic, always operating in tandem with technical
memory-supports (hypomnemata), throughout every step of the individuation
process and its necessary but temporary reversals.

The Automatization of Sensibility

Since Kant, the discourse on sensibility has played a fundamental role in

establishing the legitimacy of human reason on the grounds of truth. The
Cartesian ‘image of thought’ – thinking as a faculty naturally tending to the
truth and driven by good sense – was still seen as founding the ‘condition of
possibility’ of any ‘objective’ knowledge of the world outside subjectivity.25
For Kant, this certainty of knowledge must be grounded in ourselves, but by
establishing a link between the external world of nature and the internal
world of self-consciousness, and hence the emergence of subjectivity would
be connected to the possibility of sensing and perceiving the world.26 Kant
conceives the imagination and the understanding as faculties that create
coherence from out of the multiplicity of sensuous intuitions organizing
them into ‘schemata’. This thought of schematization, of a universal ‘grid’ of
empirical categories capable of ‘making sense’ of particular sensuous entities
by subsuming them into a general concept, allowed a notion of reason to
emerge in which sensibility and understanding are conjoined through analy-
sis, and in which understanding and knowledge are connected – completing
the circle of reason – through synthesis.

Today, after the digital or computational turn,27 the relation between what is
sensed and its understanding, that is, its analysis, is becoming automatized
through the use of computational devices,28 and its power delegated to algo-
rithms capable of capturing data and applying formalized instructions that
go beyond any given experience. In fact, however, as Stiegler argues, this is
nothing new: it is precisely through operations conducted on symbolic exte-
riorizations (that is, mnemotechnical systems) that the production and forma-
tion of consciousness – and any other human rational faculty – is possible at
all.29 The automatization of these processes is only one of the techniques
commonly used in order to achieve an active noetic life, through which, for
instance, it becomes possible to execute mental analytical operations without
always needing to pass through a conscious noetic process. But the speed of
data and algorithmic correlation has increased the reliance on this possibility
of freeing brain-time via the automation of the phases of knowledge, to the
point that belief has arisen in the possibility of a new kind of hyper-powerful
thought, but one that, operating through automated correlations of digital
information, will no longer require the intervention and interpretation of
any human actor.30

The ways in which the collecting, processing, and structuring of data seem
to be replacing not only human reason but scientific theories, analyzing and
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151
 predicting phenomena ‘without having to consider either causes or inten-
tions’, has been explored by Antoinette Rouvroy in several works on ‘Big
Data ideology’.31 Human forms of knowing have long been seen as contain-
ing a fundamental weakness with respect to the ‘immediate truth’ of the
‘thing-in-itself’, and hence as requiring an ‘external guarantor’, a conviction
that can be found throughout the entire history of philosophy. The idea of
some powerful new ‘regime of truth’ emanating from data itself and
extracted by automatic data collection, therefore, for Rouvroy merely repre-
sents the last in a series of ideologies about truth, reality and knowledge.32 In
general, this ideology responds to the demand for the kind of absolute objec-
tivity that machines alone can provide, bypassing empirical experiments and
giving the impression that the uncertainty of subjective perception has been
neutralized in advance. Data, it suggests, thinks by itself: emanating directly
from the world and automatically meaningful, it relieves humankind of the
burden of interpreting and evaluating facts.

Unexplored heuristic possibilities would then seem to be inaugurated. As

Mark B. N. Hansen describes, the sensory and intelligent devices now perva-
sive in our lived environments capture experiential events directly at the
microtemporal and subperceptual dimensions of their operationality, without
necessarily being mediated and ‘approved’ by consciousness, somehow
expanding our experiential possibilities beyond perception.33 What is immedi-
ately striking in this discourse is its dual focus on mediation: on the one
hand, an idea of an immediate truth of data and its correlation; on the other
hand, the hyper-mediation inscribed in the desire for a total ‘rationalization’ or
‘machinization’ of human subjectivity, where noetic processes can be com-
pletely replaced by measurable information and secured in an objective,
rationalized, form.

Engineering Computational Sensibilities

According to Hansen, today we are witnessing a fundamental transformation

wrought by our ‘smart’ technologies (which he calls ‘twenty-first century
media’): more and more diffused into our environments, they invade our
infrastructure, process our experiences, and form our background, but their
operations, as he puts it, ‘remain cognitively inscrutable to humans’.34 Unlike
previous forms of media, whose function remained prosthetic – that is,
directly tied to human faculties of perception and cognition as an ‘aid’ to the
recording, storing, and transmitting of information – twenty-first century
media enact a ‘radical pluralization’ and a ‘multi-scale heterogenesis of sensi-
bility’. Functioning through ‘sensors and other microtechnologies capable of
gathering data from experience’, but outside the scope of human modes of
awareness (consciousness, attention, perception, etc.), twenty-first century
media can process, work, and edit the very sensible continuum in which
experience occurs, applying to sensibility a sort of ‘mediatechnological engi-
neering’, that is, opening a new dimension of ‘sensory ecological’ experience

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that ‘as such’ we cannot capture, since it is situated ‘on scales and at sensory
thresholds that remain beyond our grasp’.35

A new openness thereby becomes possible, which no longer needs classical

human faculties, and which for Hansen represents an expansion of the possi-
bilities of experience precisely because this information does not require the
mediation and ‘approval’ of consciousness. But, as he hastens to add, having
continuous access to information and being connected with a data-intensive
environment are not the only possibilities for enhancement: a central charac-
teristic of the technical sensors now ubiquitous in our lived surroundings is
their ability to ‘feed-forward’ data into consciousness – and with a shorter
delay than the resolution time required for it to arise through ‘organic’ chan-
nels – thereby influencing and expanding our potential future agency in the
world. This fundamental separation of data-gathering from experience is in
his view what shapes the ‘precognitive vocation’ of such media, which, cap-
turing information about our actions or probable behaviour, are thus able to
predict future courses of action before we ourselves conceive them. As he
himself recognizes, ‘what independent access in this case affords is a capacity
to manipulate “forethought” as a technical variable’, to modulate our
affective, sensory, and perceptual experiences-to-come.36

All this comes at a cost. First, Hansen argues that we face a marginalization
of consciousness, replaced by a ‘worldly sensibility’ that he nevertheless
thinks amounts to an expansion of human sensory capacity – hence his idea
of a ‘non-perceptual sensation’, paraphrasing the Whiteheadian notion of
‘nonsensuous perception’.37 Second, just as the gathering of data about con-
sumer and user behaviour is being exploited by the logics of capitalism and
the market, so too ‘today’s culture industries can tap the bodily processes
leading to “foresight” ... because they are able, with the help of microcom-
puting sensors, to access the sensory output of these processes’, rendering
them operable and accessible.38 ‘Contemporary capitalist industries’, he con-
tinues, ‘are able to bypass consciousness – and thus to control individual
behaviour – precisely because of their capacity to exploit the massive acceler-
ation in the operationality of culture generated by massive-scale data gather-
ing and predictive analysis’.39 In short, they enter the temporal gap that
precedes consciousness, and operate before the formation of consciousness
itself, permitting ‘the industrial co-optation of sensibility’, which takes the
form of the extraction and exploitation of ‘data-value’ and the loss of control
over the behavioural data we produce.40

This technical capture of sensibility must, however, be understood in the

wake of what he defines as an ‘ecological pharmacology of twenty-first
century media’, which in Hansen’s view differs from the ‘prosthetic tradition
of pharmacology’ (referring to Stiegler).41 This means, for Hansen, that the
‘risks’ entailed by these developments can be ameliorated, but we should no
longer expect this to occur through ‘social media affordances’, or from better
services or security, as the culture industries promise: we should instead fight
to regain access to our data and some control over our future agency. Yet
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153
 Hansen does not believe that this will grant us control over the present of this
situation – in fact, we should abandon ‘any hope that we can operate … in
the operational present of sensibility’.42 And for Hansen this means we ought
give up all the habits we have developed through which we understand our
experiences, including the very notion that our experience can or should be
understandable.

Hansen recognizes the scale of this challenge but insists that, rather than
seeking any kind of lost (or post-)phenomenological interface, we should
concentrate on the expanded sensory contact made possible by the data of
technical sensibility. Data should be utilised to maximise our agency over the
future: the monopoly over data access must be wrested from the data indus-
try, however much it claims that its products improve life. He argues that
special media environments must be designed to be capable of informing us
about our own experience – information of a kind to which we have no
other conscious access. Such environments would utilise the same technical
means developed by the data industries, and feed this data forward into a
future experience of embodied consciousness. They ‘must, that is, develop
the potential for a mediological modulation of the domain of sensibility …
that would be “autonomous” from any direct connection to human affec-
tions, sensations, and perceptions and that would embrace the technicity
“essential” to its very mode of being’.43

Proletarianized Sensibilities

Through this process, a radical exteriority would take the place of conscious-
ness, an exteriority ‘that is radically disjunctive with phenomenological
modes of experience’, such as, Hansen argues, those ‘theorized by philoso-
phers from Plato via Hegel to Stiegler’.44 The fact that a re-interiorization of
this exteriority is not possible, but only a feed-forward, for Hansen excludes
any possible presence of an interface, a mediation connecting it with worldly
sensibility: in this way, exteriority acts directly on the realm of agency.

Given his notion of agency as at the same time diffused and impersonal, it is
perfectly understandable that Hansen wishes to avoid any dichotomy
between human agents and technical agents. He opts for the notion of an
ecological agency in which there is no longer any ‘possibility for an existen-
tial moment of self-recognition where one can modify one’s “precognized”
fate’, where the characters ‘“blindly” follow the rule furnished by the
machine’, and where ‘the “numbers” generated by the machine … never fail
to yield the desired goal’. But Hansen’s dream bears a worrying resemblance
to our almost achieved dystopia, where ‘sophistically cognitive agents whose
workings remain absolutely inscrutable to human beings’ can make decisions
without any need for residual subjectivity.45

As such, what Hansen imagines is hardly distinguishable from what

Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns have described as ‘algorithmic
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154
governmentality’: a form of governance that makes minimal use of norms,
requiring no political theory or interpretation of reality, operating with pro-
cesses of decision-making sheltered behind numbers and data, and by means
of a performative anticipation of behaviours.46 This implies not only an
almost exact calculability and predictability of behaviour, but the possibility
of a silently addressing it through the continuous anticipation made possible
by algorithmic models. There would be no more need to forbid or constrain:
this soft normativity would adapt to each new occurrence, recorded not as
an error but as a new statistical possibility to be immediately included in its
database. What matters is to reduce unpredictability, and hence to find the
right correlation. Thus arises the newest of disciplines, or the new cybernetic
dream: data behaviourism, which almost eliminates marginality and devia-
tion. Welcome to the most efficient and subtle updating of Deleuze’s control
society, where industrial policies combine with cultural industries utilizing
the most efficient aesthetic weapons. This is, in fact, not so far from a com-
pletion of neoliberal ideology, a dismissal of all orientations other than abso-
lute trust in ‘environmental laws’, which in this instance would be the laws of
market and industry – an effective reality that Stiegler has recognized as the
fulfilment of Nietzschean nihilism.47

Such a form of governmentality is no longer based on the singularity of indi-

viduals, but on the universality and particularity of profiles, erected on the
base of accumulated data. But while Hansen undoubtedly succeeds in diag-
nosing the fragmentation of what was once called subjectivity, or conscious-
ness, his claim that Stiegler’s philosophy contains some phenomenological
residue is unfounded: for Stiegler, consciousness is not at all the phe-
nomenological and unitarian supervisor at the origin of human experience,
as Hansen seems to think, but something that, as mentioned previously,
arrives only as an après coup, that is, after a process of exteriorization and
re-interiorization. Contrary to Hansen’s depiction, it thus dramatically changes
the form of its contents, making the difference, so to speak.48 And finally,
Hansen’s suggestion that we embrace the ever-intensifying accumulation of
data, through some kind of process of becoming worthy of one’s profile, material-
ized in the idea of a future self that would at the same time be built upon his
or her past retentions (data), no longer capable of acceding to any present of
noetic activity, and projected into a future with neither defects nor bad
habits, seems closer to a capitulation than a strategy by which to conduct the
battle of sensibility that undoubtedly looms on our collective horizon.

Furthermore, while for Hansen this war plays out between the ‘economic’
value of the data currently in the hands of the data industries and its rescue
by ‘us’, and mostly concerns an agency whose field is limited to the future,
for Stiegler, it is precisely ‘a matter of fighting against a process which is
nothing less than the attempt to eliminate the “spirit value”’.49 For Stiegler,
cultural capitalism’s attempt to increase the economic feedback of sensibility
represents one of its most dangerous threats. But he also stresses the need to
think this battle from an organological perspective, that is, a perspective
whereby artificial organs, social organizations, and the organs of the living
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 are all simultaneously and mutually at stake. If an economic war is being
waged on sensibility, this is not just a financial war, but a war of technical
development and psychic transformations.

Stiegler’s analysis of the culture industries is grounded in the understanding

that these industries appropriate the times of consciousness,50 and do so
through a particular correlation of the three stages of retentional time (which
he describes through a critical reading of Husserl51) with the libidinal time
of protentions. The latter is neither a representation of the future in terms of
affordances and agencies nor a computational calculation of behaviours that
would no longer be symbolic or meaningful but only a set of digital accumu-
lations.52 Protentions, on the contrary, are projections, expectations formed
precisely through the process of perceiving and understanding the world
through experience, and that are ex-pressed as desires and drives.

Stiegler shows how the culture industries exert a form of control over this
projective process, and how through the industrialization of image-produc-
tion the market can stimulate the production of industrialized aspirations.
He thus diagnoses a widespread situation of ‘symbolic misery’, commencing
early in the twentieth century and engendered by the subjection of sensitive
life to its industrial organization: a generalized proletarianization of sensibility
consisting in the loss of the ability to produce symbols.53 It is precisely such
symbolic production that is fundamental for the accomplishment of the noe-
tic circuit, which can differentiate itself or produce new processes of individ-
uation only through an exclamatory ‘acting out’ that gives sense to sensation
in the act of giving it back to others.54

Processes of individuation, as pharmacological, are always susceptible to peri-

ods of regression, but the loss of knowledge wrought by the current ‘hyper-
industrial libidinal economy’ threatens the very possibility of an exchange of
the gift and counter-gift of meaning. This is due not just to the possibility of
accessing and operating on conscious time in a surgical way, but also to the
weakening of processes of aesthetization, which, as the Italian philosopher
Pietro Montani has shown, and contrary to what Hansen seems to suggest,
thereby mostly become processes of an-aesthetization.55 The consumerist econ-
omy exploits technological development without reflection, and is interested
only in creating rapidly obsolescent standardized objects. As such, it tends to
approach aesthetic products by striving to functionalize and optimize the
dimensions of emotion and sensitivity. Consumerism almost always prefers to
reinforce disposability, rather than to encourage forms of attachment capable
of proliferating and intensifying emotional and cognitive processes.

The standardization of industrial products thus corresponds to a synchro-

nization of individual retentions – leading to a loss of difference, and so of
individuation.56 This process is incessant: the more industrial objects are
standardized, the more the abilities to differentiate and pay attention decay.
The collection, classification and exploitation of data related to sensibility
made possible by code and software not only serves the user-profiling
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156
strategy of intensive marketing (as even Hansen asserts), but also builds new
classes of objects that function as ‘agents of standardization’, that is, of a fur-
ther ‘levelling’ and ‘anesthetising’ of sensibility, enabling and selecting only
elementary reactions that correspond to particular (market) profiles, thus
producing industrial aspirations and ‘desires’. Whilst consumers imagine
they are recognizing themselves as a community through some ‘inventive’
collective attitude towards an object, in fact this attitude is already inscribed
in the template of the object itself, and any genuine invention discouraged.
This ‘technical management of the process of anesthetization’ is also a prole-
tarianization of desire, by which it regresses to the drives, whose systematic
exploitation detaches individuals from things and expropriates them of their
power to decide.

Conclusion: New Aesthetics

While the Stieglerian critique may remind some readers of Adorno’s sweep-
ing denunciation of the culture industry, it should not be forgotten that what
Stiegler emphasizes above all is the pharmacological character of all technics.
Hence we should conclude by considering how positive pharmacological
practices may be derived from these very same technologies. But unlike
Hansen, for whom there is virtue in abandoning the perceptual and experi-
ential realm altogether, we argue that virtue can only consist in increasing
the potentials for, and the connections between, the thinkable, the knowable,
and the sensible.

Insight into such potentials may be gleaned from an examination of David

M. Berry’s concept of ‘enmediation’, a highly specific version of mediation
operating in computational contexts.57 Berry argues that contemporary
media do not merely update or replace previous media, as McLuhan’s idea
of ‘remediation’ suggests. For Berry, computational mediation must be
understood in terms of its specificity, which he locates in its ‘totality’: no
longer related to the idea of seeing ‘through a looking glass’, or to an acqui-
sition or passing through, or an ‘informational transfer’, total mediation is
more akin to a radical transformation of the enmediated form.58 This
amounts to a very particular and complex assemblage of human and non-
human, with its own life, memory and knowledge, and engendering an
increasing replacement (delegation) of real experience by a representation
supplied by code and software. For Berry, code and software have become
the condition of possibility for human living, not merely as functional mecha-
nisms, but as highly processual forms. ‘Social life’, for example, which is an
ancient form of mediation, is not what we experience today through new
social media, or recreate through these technologies: what Facebook, Twitter
and Instagram propose is rather an enmediation of sociality, that is, an expro-
priation that constitutes a radical new form, with its own specific modalities
and dynamics.59 As for sensibility, it is totally assumed within computational
environments, and this is why from Berry’s perspective we should refer to

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157
 new sensibilities, or to a computational aesthetics responding to other needs,
rather than to an ‘enhancement’ of the aesthetic faculty.60

If at first sight this might resemble Hansen’s view, the difference consists in
Berry’s critical account of the ‘disconnection’ between our physicality and
that of a world within which, as we have seen, computational capitalism
equips itself with new forms of penetrating power, and from out of which
new ideologies and utopian visions proliferate. Berry refers in particular to
the notion of ‘augmented humanity’, or humanity 2.0, the conviction
that human consciousness, having been put under the microscope of
computational devices, will be exposed as the mental weakling it is, desper-
ately in need of cognitive remediation via some kind of computational
manipulation – while in fact corporate capitalism can so easily divert this
‘help’ towards surveillance, control, and manipulation.61

This does not mean that for Berry blame lies only with computing: for
Berry, too, computation is a pharmakon.62 But if a cure is possible, for Berry
it resides in the possibility of a computational aesthetics within everyday life:
‘the cultural eruption of the grammatization of software logics’.63 That is to
say: this new aesthetic would be what allows computational patterns to rise
to the surface, making visible the unseen and little-understood logic of com-
putation, and opening onto a new ‘software-oriented culture’ that, in his
view, is very different from computational capitalism and that, in our view,
contains the germ of a response to the problem of the proletarianization of
sensibility.64 Rather than merely creating correlations within datasets, com-
putation ‘may [help to] seek digital or abductive explanations for certain kinds
of aesthetic’, that is, facilitate a mode of thinking that would not be just pas-
sive, automatic and repetitive.65 Instead, it would pass through attentive
observation and re-engage intellectual processes, ‘which also remain within
the purview of humans to seek to understand’.66

Berry makes us focus once again on the ‘aesthetic power of feeling’. If what
Stiegler calls ‘digital tertiary retention’ has ‘enmediated’ this power, automa-
tizing its processes and transforming the perceived world into a vast dataset,
this fact should be subject to an analysis that neither falls into mindless
enthusiasm nor into blind distrust. Confronted with a massive increase in the
automation of sensibility, a corresponding therapeutic must be sought, not
by capitulating to the technological formatting of the faculties, but by har-
nessing automatization in the creation of new spaces and potentials for dis-
automatization. Such a therapeutic should focus on ways of enhancing and
creating skills in and through our experiences and activities. We must recog-
nise that there never was any ‘immediate’ perception: our apprehension of
the world around us has always been filtered through our acquired under-
standings, even at the level of the senses. Rather than abandoning some illu-
sory ‘direct perception’, what we require are thus new forms of educated
sensibility.

Baranzoni
158
Certainly, this has much in common with Stiegler’s idea of ‘deproletarianiza-
tion’, which describes processes that reverse that ‘loss of knowledge’ pro-
duced by the ‘de-capabilizing’ shock which each new technological invention
brings. If the knowledge underpinning our sensibility is being lost, then the
concept of deproletarianization allows us to understand that fostering forms
of care that would allow for the re-appropriation of such knowledge could
never be based on the abandonment of our originarily prosthetic condition.
But nor can it be based on some simpleminded reclaiming of propriety over
the data we produce, through which we would somehow be reimbursed for
agreeing to submit to the electronic Leviathan of algorithmic governmental-
ity. The Guattarian injunction to re-appropriate our technologies must
instead be seen as thrusting us towards a new technological engagement,
where the rich sensory possibilities they open up become opportunities to
redefine our aesthetic relationality and individuate our sensibility, and to do
so critically.

Only through a thoroughgoing understanding of automatization can deproletarian-

ization become possible, and the possibility of aesthetic experience regained.
By thinking sensibility as a process of education evolving with and thanks to
its technological surrounding, in a both an ecological and organological
sense, and by taking care of this process and adopting new practices rather
than adapting to its dictates, we will become capable of opening new paths
of individuation – or, as Guattari would have said, of operating a re-singular-
ization of subjectivities.67

Acknowledgement

The author would like to express sincere thanks to Daniel Ross for his careful assistance in
rendering this article into English.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes Guattari placed greater stock in the arts

1
Guattari, “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects,”
95.
2
See Hörl, “Le nouveau paradigme écolo-
gique,” 70.
3
The wish for such an epoch, character-
ized by a re-appropriation and re-singular-
ization of the use of media, was developed
by Guattari throughout the latter part of
his career.
4
See Guattari, Chaosmosis, 98. Clearly, ‘aes-
thetics’ does not refer here just to the arts,
or to artists as privileged actors in the
renovation of subjectivity, even though
than in other expressive languages that in
his view were more constrained by the
normalization and serialization imposed by
capitalism and its media.
5
Ibid., 101.
6
‘The numerical language of control is
made of codes that mark access to informa-
tion, or reject it. We no longer find our-
selves dealing with the mass/individual pair.
Individuals have become “dividuals,” and
masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.”’
Deleuze, “Postscript,” 5.
7
For an overview of this research, see
Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies.”
parallax
159
 8 25
Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, vols. 1 and 2.
9 26
For a reading of Stiegler in terms of
symptomatology, see Vignola, “Devenir dig-
nes du Pharmakon.”; Munster, An Aesthesia
of Networks, 131. For counter-examples, see
Luciana Parisi (“Instrumental Reason”) and
Tiziana Terranova (“Attention, Economy
and the Brain”).
10
For a deeper analysis of this pharmaco-
logical approach, see Stiegler, What Makes
Life Worth Living.
11
This assertion, which was inspired by
the French paleo-anthropologist André
Leroi-Gourhan, is discussed at length in his
first book: see Stiegler, Technics and Time 1.
12
Ibid.
13
This concept, sketched by Stiegler in the
two volumes of Symbolic Misery, is one of his
most powerful methodological tools.
14
Guattari, Chaosmosis, 5.
15
Ibid.
16
Bates, “Unity, Plasticity, Cathastrophe,”
32.
17
Texeira Pinto, “The Pigeon in the
Machine,” 30.
18
While many Simondonian scholars have
pointed to the specificity of Simondon’s
concept of the cybernetic, Jean-Hugues
Barthélémy has gone further in arguing
that Simondon developed a ‘Cybernétique
Universelle’ (Universal Cybernetics)
grounded in a profound reflection on the
question of ‘information’. See Barthélémy,
Simondon, and Hui, “Simondon et la ques-
tion de l’information.”
19
The question of ecology is already
linked to individuation in Guattari (see
Chaosmosis, 8), and this is also the direction
in which Erich Hörl tries to push Simon-
don. See Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies”
and “The Technological Condition.”
20
Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets
techniques, and L’individuation. For sum-
maries of Simondon’s vocabulary, see also
Barthélémy, “Glossary.”
21
Barthélémy and Bontems, “Philosophie
de la nature et artefact.” 4.
22
For a critique of this ‘fault’ of Simon-
don, see Stiegler, “Temps et individuation.”
23
Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 139–140.
24
For Stiegler, the inheritance from which
life is composed is not only biological (philo-
genetic), but also mnemo-technical (epige-
netic): that is, realized through technical
supports that create the conditions of cul-
ture in as much as they permit its transmis-
sion.
Baranzoni
160
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 129.
Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 2.
27
Berry, “The Computational Turn.”
28
Stiegler, Automatic Society, 27.
29
As shown in Stiegler, Technics and Time
3, the exteriorization and thus spatialization
of memory is precisely what inaugurates
the very process of individuation that con-
stitutes consciousness. Such an analysis was
already undertaken in Baranzoni, “Algo-
rithmic and Machinic An-Aestheticism,”
and some of the thoughts expressed here
are anticipated in that essay.
30
On this topic, an article published by
Wired Magazine Chief Editor Chris Ander-
son has been widely discussed. Anderson
states: ‘This is a world where massive
amounts of data and applied mathematics
replace every other tool … every theory of
human behaviour, from linguistics to sociol-
ogy. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psy-
chology. Who knows why people do what
they do? The point is they do it, and we
can track and measure it with unprece-
dented fidelity. With enough data, the
numbers speak for themselves’. Anderson,
“The End of Theory.”
31
Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique.”
32
This Foucauldian notion (see Foucault,
On the Government of the Living) has been
taken by Antoinette Rouvroy to describe
the ‘truth constriction’ of the new modes
of behaviour to which ‘algorithmic
governmentality’ seems to refer. See
Rouvroy and Stiegler, “Le régime de vérité
numérique.”
33
Hansen, Feed Forward.
34
Ibid., 64.
35
Ibid. ‘What accounts for the singularity
of contemporary media is not simply that
their data-driven operations bypass the
scope of consciousness, but that they impact
experience on a much broader basis than
consciousness’. Hansen, “The Operational
Present of Sensibility,” 39.
36
Hansen, “The Operational Present of
Sensibility,” 41.
37
Hansen, Feed Forward, 116–117.
38
Hansen, “The Operational Present of
Sensibility,” 41.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 44–45.
41
Ibid., 50. ‘Put schematically, we could
say that media pharmacology loses its pros-
thetic basis since the loss of our agency over
our own behavioural data is recompensed
by something that has no direct correlation
with it, namely, the affordances of social
media’, even if it is a false compensation.
Ibid., 44.
42
Ibid., 50. My emphasis.
43
Ibid., 52.
44
Ibid., 45.
45
Ibid., 50.
46
Rouvroy and Berns, “Gouvernemen-
talité algorithmique.”
47
Stiegler, Automatic Society.
48
Hansen, “The Operational Present of
Sensibility,” 45.
49
Stiegler, Symbolic Misery 2, 4.
50
Stiegler, Technics and Time 3.
51
Stiegler adds to the ‘primary’ and ‘sec-
ondary’ retentions described by Husserl
(where the former is the kind of perception
that we can have of a temporal object, and
the latter the way in which memory
remembers it) a ‘tertiary’ retention, which
is any support whatsoever for the prosthetic
exteriorisation of memory, that is, the spa-
tialized form of a temporal object. See
Stiegler, Technics and Time 3.
52
Rouvroy analyzes how this kind of fore-
casting responds to the wish to capture the
real in its entirety and totality, in Rouvroy,
“The End(s) of Critique.”
53
In addition to the Marxian concept,
which describes the expropriation of the
means of production as a damaging loss of
knowledge for workers, Stiegler analyzes
the ‘proletarianization of sensibility’ in
terms of establishing an opposition between
consumer and producer, causing for the
former a loss of the knowledge of how to
live, leading them to become incapable of
rendering sensible, of expressing, what they
perceive. See Stiegler, Symbolic Misery tome
1 and 2.
54
Stiegler, Symbolic Misery 2, 26.
55
Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità.
56
Stiegler, Technics and Time 3.
57
Berry, “Against Remediation,” 33.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid., 35.
60
Lev Manovich talks for instance of ‘info-
aesthetics’, referring to those cultural prac-
tices that try to respond to the new priori-
ties of ‘information society’: ‘Making sense
of information, working with information,
producing knowledge from information’.
Manovich, “The Shape of Information,” 2.
61
Berry, “Against Remediation.”
62
Berry, Critical Theory, 157.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid., 159.
65
Ibid.
66
Berry, “Against Remediation,” 34.
67
Guattari, Chaosmosis.

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Sara Baranzoni, PhD, was Research Fellow at the University of Bologna, Italy.
She is currently Prometeo Researcher at UArtes, Guayaquil, for the Secre-
tary of Education, Science, Innovation and Technology of Ecuador. She
collaborates with IRI/Paris and Digital Studies Network. She is co-founder of
La Deleuziana (Online Journal of Philosophy). She has published several
articles and translations on French Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology,
Media Studies and the Arts, and is editor of many collective publications
(books and journals). Email: sara.baranzoni@uartes.edu.ec

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