1141592

research-article2022
TCS0010.1177/02632764221141592Theory, Culture & SocietyRoss

Special Section: Bernard Stiegler and the Internation Project:

Computational Practices and Circumscribed Futures
Theory, Culture & Society
2022, Vol. 39(7-8) 49–70
The Pharmacology of the Gift: © The Author(s) 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764221141592
DOI: 10.1177/02632764221141592
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Daniel Ross
Independent Researcher

Abstract
Bernard Stiegler’s theoretical and practical Internation Project called for a refoundation
of theoretical computer science that would also put the fact of exchange back at
the centre of the conceptualization and organization of the economy. This can be
interpreted as a call to critique a form of capitalism that has arisen over the past 70
years through an ideology via which ‘information’ conjoins computation and economics
into what becomes an absolute market. But another history of exchange unfolds
contemporaneously with this ideology: that pursued in responses to Marcel Mauss’s
anthropology of the gift, by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Bataille and Maurice Godelier,
among others. Stiegler’s ‘neganthropology’ equally responds to and is informed by this
other history of the fact of exchange but, by looking at these works more closely, it
may be possible to pursue Stiegler’s project in fields such as kinship and sexuality, which
were not his direct concern.

Keywords
anthropology, computation, information, Marcel Mauss, philosophy, Bernard Stiegler,
structuralism

Refoundation
Bernard Stiegler left us with a task that it is up to us to interpret. Since 2012, he had
been calling for what, after Marcel Mauss, he called an ‘internation’, a new process
of collective individuation amounting to a transindividuation of nations beyond the
opposition between nationalism and internationalism (Stiegler, 2015a: ch. 8). For
Stiegler, it was crucial that any such large-scale macropolitical process arise from
new forms of research and new forms of medium-scale experimentation, and to this
end he called for an ‘academic internation’ (p. 180) involving a new global research
network organized according to contributory principles, facilitating such territorial

Corresponding author: Daniel Ross. Email: djrossmail@gmail.com

TCS Online Forum: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/
50 Theory, Culture & Society 39(7-8)

experiments and redefining social concepts from the standpoint of the exosomatic
(that is, not just endosomatic and negentropic, but technological and ‘neganthropic’)
struggle against entropy. As a way of fighting against forms of generalized and
‘anthropic’ disindividuation brought about by digital network technologies, and the
global economic war brought about by the idea of the absolute market, the aim of
such an internation would ultimately be to foster the conditions for new forms of
individuation to flourish, and for negotiations towards a new kind of economic peace
– in this way, the internation necessarily entailed a ‘new critique of political econ-
omy’ and a ‘reconsideration of economics [. . .], given that negative entropy, as well
as negative anthropy, or neganthropy, can occur only within localities’ (Stiegler,
2019: 9–10).
But in some of his last texts and communications, the need for such a critique, specific
to the age of the ubiquitous digital network, was posed by Stiegler (2020b) in a new way:
he called for a ‘refounding’ of informatique théorique – for a new theoretical science of
computation. His concern was not just with the facts and mechanics of computation, but
involved the whole place that computation occupies in the contemporary age. He argued
for ‘a new economic foundation’ stemming from his view that the rise of computation
over the last 70 years has fuelled the corresponding rise of a market in information,
premised on information as the economic ‘element’:

a new foundation of political economy on a technospheric scale [. . .] must be explored via a

re-evaluation of the role of computer science [informatique] and cognitivism in the neoliberal
apparatus, which has now become ultra-liberal and libertarian. (2020b: 68)

This new foundation involves inscribing all of the concepts of political economy into
the problematic of entropy, itself viewed from an exosomatic standpoint, which means
by starting from a reading of Alfred J. Lotka:

in the case of the noetic form of life, the question of anti-entropy must itself be transformed,
from the exosomatic standpoint developed by Lotka, into that of anti-anthropy, by reconsidering
the human fact from the perspective of a neganthropology. (2020b: 68)

This theoretical and refoundational task bequeathed to us by Stiegler must be undertaken

‘in the service of an anti-anthropic and neganthropological conception of the functions
of machinic and automated calculation in the reticulated societies of the technospheric
era’ (2020b: 68). For this, it is necessary to critique an ideological nexus that has devel-
oped over the past 70 years, linking computation and economics. The second half of the
20th century saw an interlinked rise of a concept of information simultaneously in an
approach to computation and an approach to economics. It was on the basis of something
called ‘information’ that the market was extended to all areas of life, and specifically by
understanding the market as a kind of information processor.
Beyond a critique of the links between neoliberalism and the history of computation
– pursued for example by Mirowski and Nik-Khah (2017) – where should we look to
find material with which to construct some new foundation, and what would it thereby
become possible to build? We will take as our opening clue the following statement:
Ross 51

When Georgescu-Roegen posits that we must read Schumpeter with Lotka, this means that we
must put back, at the centre of the observation, conceptualization and organization of the
economy, the fact of exchange, inasmuch as it is required by the exosomatic form of life.
(Stiegler, 2021: 288, translation modified)

We will pursue one particular path along which we believe this clue could be understood
as leading us, and suggest that almost all of the parameters of the questions confronting
us today can be seen as stemming from paths taken and not taken in one particular decade
of the 20th century. We will further suggest that the ongoing interpretation of the task left
to us by Stiegler involves developing this neganthropology by paying attention to the
links between economic and symbolic exchange as these have been considered in the
history of anthropology: it is no accident that the first thinker of the internation is also the
first thinker of ‘the gift’ (see also Ross, 2021: 209–13).

Schumpeter Must Be Read with Lotka

Schumpeter (2003) wrote in 1942 that capitalism’s successful history will eventually
end, due to its tendency to undermine the social institutions that are necessary for its own
protection (p. 61). Reading Schumpeter with Lotka means articulating this thesis from
the thinker of ‘creative destruction’ with Lotka’s 1945 account of the way in which
human development differs from biological development because the former involves
not just endosomatic evolution but exosomatic evolution, that is, the history of a form of
life that cannot exist without its profusion of inorganic but organized prostheses. Lotka
both builds upon and modifies Erwin Schrödinger’s 1943 account of the way in which
biological evolution can be conceived as a struggle against entropy (Schrödinger, 1992).
Focusing on exosomatic evolution makes a difference because it establishes that evo-
lutionary principles, which are essentially a matter of criteria for behavioural and evolu-
tionary selection, are changed or suspended by the advent of this bifurcation in
evolutionary history. Exosomatic evolution involves and requires different criteria and
methods of selection, which we call knowledge and which must be supplied by ‘adjus-
tors’, that is, by the very social institutions that Schumpeter argues are being destroyed
by capitalist innovation. Lotka (1945) argues that these adjustors and institutions now lag
so far behind prosthetic innovation as to have produced a situation that has turned from
ensuring the preservation of life to precipitating its destruction (pp. 192–3).
It is in this context that we must understand Stiegler’s call to put ‘the fact of exchange’
back at the centre of the observation, conceptualization and organization of the economy.
This ‘fact’ is required by a form of life producing and dependent upon organs that, as
detachable from the bodies that produce them, are therefore exchangeable. In particular,
exchange becomes necessary as a result of the divisions between localities, and divisions
between types of workers within localities, that arise as a result of exosomatization.
From the division of work comes the necessity of organizing the distribution of its pros-
theses and the products they in turn make possible, as well as requiring care to be taken
of this organization and its divisions, which is to say, requiring institutions and adjustors
– and the knowledge and participation that must be cultivated for these institutions and
adjustors through educational and aesthetic processes of all kinds.
52 Theory, Culture & Society 39(7-8)

The Coalescence of an Ideology

Lotka’s article was published in the same year that Simon (1945) published Administrative
Behavior, which aimed at a scientific understanding of social and organizational behav-
iour, understanding decision as a matter of choices between alternatives in a way that the
author hoped would prove mathematizable. Also in 1945, von Neumann (1993) wrote
the ‘First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC’, using formal logic to define a binary com-
puter featuring stored memory and adjustable programs. It was also the year Hayek
(1948) published ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ (ch. 4), arguing that collective
human behaviour amounts to the operation of a giant information processor instantiated
by ‘the market’. Stiegler himself draws attention to the connection between Simon and
Hayek, arguing that they posited ‘that the market is a system of information, and that
everything that is good is calculable in terms of such information’:

Both Hayek and Simon, then, prescribed the notion of democracy as a space for free information
– but where such freedom actually means the freedom to reduce all reality to calculability, that
is, to subject all realization (all future) to the hegemonic law of the market and all knowledge
to this entropic condition. (Stiegler, 2020b: 73)

In 1948, Wiener (1961) published Cybernetics, laying the basis for a science of the
regulatory mechanisms common to animal and machine. In 1949, Shannon and Weaver
(1964) developed a mathematical theory of communication, concerned with efficiently
transmitting a signal along a wire, laying the foundations of information theory. The
same year saw the publication by Hebb (2002) of The Organization of Behavior, intro-
ducing the idea that neurons form an electrical network performing complex cognitive
operations, which he nonetheless considered fundamentally similar to computational
calculation. Lastly, in 1950 Wiener (1989) published The Human Use of Human Beings,
heralding a new but potentially dangerous wave of automation, argued in terms of his
own conception of the way in which both animal and machine, by operating with infor-
mation, counter the entropic tendency.
This constellation circumscribes a set of interrelated questions and approaches that
tend to reinforce one another. The concept of information shared between these elements
functions as the Trojan Horse of our contemporary ideology: from a conception of organ-
ization as a complex system of fundamentally logical choices between alternatives, and
a conception of computation as the technological formalization of the calculability of
such choices, an economics arises premised on eliminating everything running counter
to such a calculable psychosociology and attributes to the market itself, understood as a
highly complex network of not-necessarily-intelligent individual actors, the ability to
optimize the sum of choices made across a society. To this neoliberal dogma must then
be added the transhumanist ideology according to which this cognitivist association of
the functioning of brains and computers makes possible an automation of cognitive func-
tioning itself, in a manner that ultimately supersedes human capacities. For Stiegler, it is
these elements that make up the capitalist ‘episteme’:

a computational technology utterly homogeneous with a capitalism that subjects all those
exchanges in which psychic and social life consists to market calculations. This calculation,
Ross 53

which sets up reticulated artificial intelligence, is based on cognitivism as the general paradigm
of all forms of knowledge. (Stiegler, 2020b: 72)

This susceptibility of human minds to performative, algorithmic control refers, mainly,

not directly to the control of ‘logical choices between alternatives’ but rather to the
potential to apply mathematical calculations to the affects and desires that motivate such
choices. It becomes possible to imagine that these minds will ultimately prove unneces-
sary to the functioning of a technological organism that will achieve autonomy from such
minds, because the latter are, precisely, automatable. By automating noetic functioning,
however, this episteme becomes an anti-episteme.
What matters is not just ‘exosomatic exorganogenesis’ but ‘exomnesic exorganogen-
esis’ (2020b: 75). In other words, every artifact may function as a kind of external mem-
ory, but the question of exchange arises with the advent of artifacts that are retentional by
design, setting off the process of what Stiegler calls ‘grammatization’, the evolving his-
tory of the improbable ways by which temporal phenomena are spatialized and exterior-
ized. The improbable possibility of psychic and collective knowledge is maintained
through the struggle against erasure and forgetting – proletarianization. Informatique,
computer science, would be merely the final and broadest episode in this history of
grammatization, each chapter of which leads to evolutions in knowledge, but also in
proletarianization. Theoretical computer science has become, for Stiegler, a metaphysi-
cal ideology founded on a notion of information as calculable, and on the ability to in fact
apply calculability to all aspects of life (despite the latter being incalculable in principle)
via the absolute market. Whereas the struggle for knowledge would be neganthropic,
proletarianization – the loss of such knowledge – would be not just entropic but anthropic.
This brief enumeration of texts and events is enough to make clear why Stiegler called
for a wholly new kind of theoretical computer science and a new foundation of the
understanding of information. This ideological nexus of the mathematizability of indi-
vidual cognition and organizational behaviour – based on the purported affinity and anal-
ogy between brains and computers in terms of the processing of logical operations, the
attribution of superior computational functioning to a market kept as free as possible
from the social institutions that were hitherto conceived as its protective adjustors, and
the exploitation of this freedom in order to automate the desiring and reasoning minds of
which societies are composed – seems to amount to the fulfilment of Schumpeter’s
prophecy that capitalism, in effecting this elimination of social institutions, undermines
the conditions of its own existence. At the same time, it seems to fulfil Wiener’s (1989)
prophecy that forgetting the difference between ‘human’ minds (that is, exosomatized,
noetic minds) and those of insects or computers, a difference consisting in a vast capacity
of the former to acquire not just information but knowledge, is bound to lead to the ‘deg-
radation’ of this capacity and so to a ‘fascist ant-state with human material’ (p. 52).
This makes it possible to understand Stiegler’s (2021) claim that ‘theoretical computer
science claims to be able to impose itself as the law of all exchange’ (p. 287). Yet, again,
why must the ‘fact of exchange’ be put back at the centre of the conception and organiza-
tion of the economy? How was this fact displaced from this centre? For these questions,
we will need to reconstruct a different yet contemporaneous set of intellectual develop-
ments, a contemporaneousness whose reasons are no doubt more than just accidental.
54 Theory, Culture & Society 39(7-8)

Hau, or the Spirit of Exchange

Exchange was initially raised as a fact by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1949, in The Elementary
Structures of Kinship (Lévi-Strauss, 1969), and then in 1950 in An Introduction to the
Work of Marcel Mauss (Lévi-Strauss, 1987). In 1949, Bataille (1991) published The
Accursed Share, his own attempt to rethink the notion of economy largely on the basis of
Mauss’s work. These texts respond to Mauss’s 1925 essay on the gift, written just a few
years after the texts on the internation that argue from an anthropological and political
perspective for a path beyond the opposition of nationalism and internationalism. The
Gift argues from an anthropological and political perspective for an understanding of the
diversity and wealth of economic behaviour that goes beyond the opposition of atomistic
calculation and altruistic gift-giving, because ‘it is not in the calculation of individual
needs that the method for an optimum economy is to be found’ (Mauss, 1990: 98). Mauss
argues for a renewed form of governance to counter the fact that, although ‘man [. . .]
has not been a machine for very long’, he has indeed been ‘made complicated by a cal-
culating machine’.
The Gift famously introduces a methodology centred on what Mauss calls ‘total social
facts’: the complexity of social phenomena must be understood in terms of the totality of
institutions and practices of a particular society; only through the concrete investigation
of this totality ‘lies the means of discovering new facts’ possessing the character of both
‘generality’ and ‘reality’ (1990: 102). In his introduction to Mauss, Lévi-Strauss con-
strues this as the problem of how to interpret reported ethnographic facts in a way that
combines perspectives internal and external to the locality under consideration:

When Mauss speaks of total social facts, he implies [. . .] that that easy and effective dichotomy
[between the observer and the observed] is denied to the sociologist [. . .]. An appropriate
understanding of a social fact requires that it be grasped totally, that is, from outside, like a
thing; but like a thing which comprises within itself the subjective understanding (conscious or
unconscious) that we would have of it, if [. . .] we were living the fact as indigenous people
instead of observing it as ethnographers. The problematic thing is to know how [. . .] to fulfil
that ambition, which does not consist only of grasping an object from outside and inside
simultaneously, but also requires much more; for the insider’s grasp [. . .] needs to be transposed
into the language of the outsider’s grasp. (Lévi-Strauss, 1987: 30–1)

With this statement of the epistemological and methodological problem of the anthropol-
ogy of the total social fact, Lévi-Strauss is already paving the way for the manoeuvre by
which this introduction to Mauss turns into an introduction to Lévi-Strauss’s own (struc-
tural) anthropology, as we shall see.
Mauss himself wishes to uncover a total social fact that exceeds or mediates the oppo-
sition between market calculation and the pure (incalculable) gift: the ‘fact’ under con-
sideration is therefore gift exchange: what motivates, not the gift itself, but the necessity
of its being returned? Mauss finds the explanation of this necessity in the Polynesian
concept of hau, the spirit in the thing that ‘wishes to return to its birthplace’ (1990: 15).
Beyond the materiality of the gift object, ‘the thing received is not inactive’ but is instead
‘invested with life’.
Stiegler invests in Mauss’s account of the spirit in the gift when, for example, he
insists that the weakness of our contemporary spirit is not an inevitability: ‘this spirit is
Ross 55

the fruit of an economy’ that must be made the object of a care, through which economic
models can be developed, ‘even if these always and necessarily extend beyond any
model and all economy, as with the economy of gift and counter-gift described by Mauss’
(Stiegler, 2011: 18). He describes the aesthetic capability of the noetic soul in terms of a
circuit of gift exchange:

Noetic sense is a circuit of gift and counter-gift, which is more sensational the more
extended it is. [. . .] Noetic perception is thus inscribed in an economy of gift and counter-
gift of singularities, which presupposes, like any economy, a living-knowledge established
by know-how – by an expertise or a tekhnē made up of endless apprenticeships. (Stiegler,
2015b: 33–4)

In other words, if an economy always postpones expenditure, and in that way saves what
it could expend, and does so in order to invest in what it economizes, then, for the noetic
soul, perception and sense are always already ‘economic’ in the sense that they pass
through an apprenticeship that amounts to a postponement forming the conditions of a
belief or a spirit without which investment would be impossible.
But as this living-knowledge requiring an apprenticeship, tekhnē involves both tech-
niques and participation, and what concerns Stiegler is the loss of participation. This loss
is a blockage in individuation, preventing ‘the circulation of affects on the circuit of gift
and counter-gift that is the exclamation of the noetic soul’ (2015b: 41). The question of
economies and economic models is thus established, via Mauss, as aesthetic, and there-
fore as the question of a political economy of aesthetic life:

A noetico-aesthetic situation is defined here as the realization of a circuit (of the sensible and
of desire) in the form of an exclamation that brings about a symbolic exchange – an exchange
that is the carrying out of individuation. This is not effective unless it is both psychic and
collective, according to a loop which was already established in the hau as analysed by Mauss.
(2015b: 62)

Stiegler (2013b) connects Husserl’s ‘objects invested with spirit’ to Mauss’s account of
‘objects invested with those spirits’ that ‘create intensities that Melanesians and Maoris
call mana and hau’ (p. 73). Not only is hau transmitted through exchanging gift objects,
but also, ‘only thus do they become objects’, creating obligations, beliefs in the necessity
of the ties created by returning gifts. At the same time, the spiritual misery of contempo-
rary existence cannot be ameliorated merely by returning to the economy of gift and
counter-gift characteristic of tribal societies, and is instead a question of an excess over
and above these circuits, which Stiegler describes precisely by invoking Bataille, for
whom the circuit of exchange is always initiated with an excessive expenditure:

In a political society, to struggle against spiritual misery consists in making spirit and its
incommensurable value the very heart of political economy, and a political economy inscribed
in a general economy that cannot be turned into the economy merely of gift and counter-gift.
(Stiegler, 2013a: 120)

What makes this economy general, for Stiegler, what relates it to the necessity of expend-
iture, is the fact that it is founded on a libidinal economy, within which circulates a libidi-
nal energy that can also be called spiritual.
56 Theory, Culture & Society 39(7-8)

A Source of Energy or an Additional Quantity?

What we would also like to show is that the circuit that Stiegler connects up here tends
to leap over the reception of Mauss’s essay in anthropology. The concept of hau, by
which Mauss strives to establish the total social fact of gift exchange, is the very concept
that Lévi-Strauss rejects as incapable of overcoming the opposition of inside and out-
side. It was by means of such an overcoming that Lévi-Strauss defined the methodology
of the total social fact, but he argues that hau cannot accomplish the transposition from
internal to external description:

Does this property exist objectively, like a physical property of the exchanged goods? Obviously
not. That would in any case be impossible, since the goods in question are not only physical
objects, but also dignities, responsibilities, privileges – whose sociological role is nonetheless
the same as that of material goods. So this property must be conceived in subjective terms. But
then we find ourselves faced with an alternative: either the property is nothing other than the
act of exchange itself as represented in indigenous thinking, in which case we are going round
in a circle, or else it is a power of a different nature, in which case the act of exchange becomes,
in relation to this power, a secondary phenomenon. (Lévi-Strauss, 1987: 46–7)

The phenomenon to be explained, Lévi-Strauss says, is exchange, but this is heterogene-

ous and multi-faceted, and so, he concludes, Mauss falls upon hau as a ‘source of energy’
(1987: 46) through which the process is animated. But hau is nothing more than the
‘subjective’ indigenous (interior) explanation of a fact whose ‘objective’ (exterior) expla-
nation cannot consist in the tautological reiteration of what would amount to a supernatu-
ralism – Lévi-Strauss accusing Mauss of ‘mystification’ (p. 47).
Yet, rather than seeing the hermeneutic spiral implied by this epistemological ques-
tion, Lévi-Strauss’s rejection of this ‘additional quantity’ in fact amounts to a theoretical
regression, once again opposing the observer and the observed, the objective and the
subjective, in order to argue that Mauss stays on one side of these oppositions. This is
despite Lévi-Strauss having just proclaimed Mauss’s virtue as having seen that precisely
this opposition is ‘denied to the sociologist’. The indigenous explanation must, he says,
be ‘reduced by an objective critique’. It is by this manoeuvre that Lévi-Strauss insists on
the need to turn from conscious formulations to ‘unconscious mental structures’ (p. 49),
thereby founding structural anthropology on the insight that ‘the primary, fundamental
phenomenon is exchange itself’ (p. 47).
According to Lévi-Strauss, hau cannot possibly account for the whole fact of
exchange, because it is merely one part of this whole. So: when Stiegler talks about put-
ting the ‘fact of exchange’ back at the centre of the conceptualization and organization of
the economy, does this ‘fact’ refer to Mauss or to Lévi-Strauss? After all, Stiegler himself
seems to speak in a highly Lévi-Straussian tone when he evokes the tripartite division of
exchange:

Every economy is therefore a system of exchange, and, in the economies before history [. . .],
symbolic exchange, sexual exchange and the exchange of material goods (resulting from
exosomatization) are inseparable. There is no ‘economic system’ outside of the ‘symbolic
system’ that governs exchanges in their totality. (Stiegler, 2021: 288)
Ross 57

If we nevertheless conclude that Stiegler is referring to Mauss more than to Lévi-Strauss,

we must still know what is at stake in the choice between these alternatives. This means
paying attention to two issues: first, whether and how Lévi-Strauss’s critique of Mauss
in fact functioned as an obstacle to the critique of the ideology of information as that
which conjoins economic theory and computational theory; second, how the anthropol-
ogy of the ‘fact of exchange’ after Lévi-Strauss complicates the notion of a return to
Mauss.

Structural Anthropology, Cybernetics and Information

The first issue is perhaps obvious, but has received detailed examination on only a few
occasions, mostly long after the fact. Lévi-Strauss (1987) finds ‘cause to hope for the
progressive mathematisation of the field’, through which it will become possible to know
the ‘automatic laws’ regulating these ‘cycles of reciprocity’ (p. 43). Moreover, he fore-
sees the ‘application of mathematical reasoning to the study of communication’, result-
ing in a ‘vast science of communications’ (pp. 43–4) of which anthropology will be the
beneficiary and one of the branches, citing both Wiener and Shannon (p. 70, n. 13).
How was Lévi-Strauss able in 1950 to cite these texts from 1948 and 1949? As
Geoghegan (2011) points out, despite Shannon and Lévi-Strauss sharing neighbouring
Greenwich Village apartments, they never actually met during that period (p. 107). But
as Geoghegan also establishes, Lévi-Strauss’s friendship with Roman Jakobson in New
York was crucial to Lévi-Strauss falling under the spell of the dawning ideology of infor-
mation and computation, and led Warren Weaver to send him a copy of The Mathematical
Theory of Communication in early 1950 (p. 112; see also Dosse, 1997: ch. 8).
In 1949, Lévi-Strauss had already given a lecture disputing Wiener’s claim that the
social sciences lacked the kind of calculable data necessary for cybernetic analysis. This
lecture became the basis of the text published in 1951 as ‘Language and the Analysis of
Social Laws’, becoming the third chapter of Structural Anthropology. It argues that
Jakobson’s structural linguistics shows the way to mathematizing social phenomena,
giving the example of the circulation of women, which can be analysed in this way ‘only
by treating marriage regulations and kinship systems as a kind of language’ (Lévi-
Strauss, 1968: 61), where language must then itself be grasped as susceptible to mathe-
matical analysis. The notion that the economies of words, artifacts and women were all
susceptible to structural and ultimately mathematical analysis, and therefore computa-
tion by machines, had thus been adopted as a vision of this anthropology’s future as early
as 1949.
Is this appeal or attraction to cybernetic and informational approaches a symptom of
Lévi-Strauss’s own ideological mystification? While it may be that the relationship
between structural anthropology and cybernetics or information theory was rather
superficial and something of a failed encounter (Le Roux, 2009), it is also true that this
encounter yielded not inconsiderable consequences for ‘French theory’. The attraction
to these elements of ‘American science’ would continue to play out in semiotics and
other fields, in a way that became highly confused about precisely what could be
expected from social science in the age of computational technology. Geoghegan con-
cludes that French thinkers tended to detach themselves from the mythology of
58 Theory, Culture & Society 39(7-8)

cybernetics and information theory, while nevertheless drawing from it the basis for
another mythology:

they swapped the technocratic myth of society as machinery (and in want of improved
engineering) for a textocratic myth of writing, documentation, technical supplementation, and
code as the foundation of Western traditions. (Geoghegan, 2020: 72)

Furthermore, what fades from the view of ‘French theory’ during this period is economic
critique, and any significant attention to the deepening relationship between economics,
computation and marketing.

Alienable and Inalienable, Symbolic and Imaginary

With regard to the second issue – what happens to the anthropology of gift and counter-
gift after Lévi-Strauss – we will confine our examination to the work of Maurice
Godelier. We justify this by the fact that: (1) Stiegler was a reader of Godelier’s work,
in particular The Metamorphoses of Kinship, one major aspect of which was the elabo-
ration of a critique of Lévi-Strauss’s account of kinship as fundamentally a matter of the
exchange of women; (2) Godelier’s book on Mauss and gift exchange introduces many
of the questions that will be raised in another way in the book on kinship; and (3) a
critique of Godelier on these forms of exchange may well enrich any future
neganthropology.
In The Enigma of the Gift, Godelier begins by recollecting that The Elementary
Structures of Kinship already postulated that all of life is a matter of exchange, and that
kinship could be understood in terms of two postulates: (1) ‘that kinship is based on
exchange (the exchange of women by men)’; and (2) that ‘between the two components
of kinship – marriage and descent [respectively, the alliances made possible by the
exchange of sisters and daughters, and the reproduction of society by the raising of chil-
dren] – the former outweighs the latter and provides the keys for understanding the diver-
sity of kinship systems’ (Godelier, 1999: 19). In The Metamorphoses of Kinship, Godelier
convincingly demonstrates the inadequacy of these Lévi-Straussian postulates: the
reduction of kinship to the traffic in women is not supported by the diversity of systems;
Lévi-Strauss privileges alliance over descent merely to serve his goal of emphasizing the
synchronic over the diachronic in order to legitimate structuralism’s ‘objectivity’.
The Enigma of the Gift shows that, if Lévi-Strauss did accept exchange as the total
social fact, thereby associating himself with Mauss, his way of doing so nevertheless
‘completely disregarded’ a fundamental distinction made by Mauss between two domains
of social life:

the domain of alienable, exchangeable things and the domain of those inalienable things kept
out of exchange, each of which corresponds to different types of social relations at different
moments of the production and reproduction of society. (Godelier, 1999: 19)

We cannot explain why the debt created by a gift is not cancelled by a reciprocal
counter-gift unless we recognize that some things can be given and exchanged while
Ross 59

other things absolutely cannot be given. If reciprocity does not equal cancellation, it
is because there is something in those gifts that can be given that nevertheless ‘has
been given without really being “alienated” by the giver’ (Godelier, 1999: 42).
Something in the exchangeable, alienable object nevertheless participates in what is
inalienable, while those things that cannot be given participate in this inalienability in
a fuller way.
This means that the object is in a way both given and kept. A relationship is main-
tained between alienable objects and those objects that are absolutely inalienable: sacred
objects. These can never be given because they have a uniqueness (usually a product not
just of exceptional scarcity or beauty but of the singular work done on them, frequently
by ancestors lost in time) that situates them on another plane than exchangeable objects.
Sacred objects are those charged with the full weight of the imaginary significance of
that society, and exchangeable objects are able to participate in that significance, but only
partially and finitely.
Gift objects are neither sacred nor calculable, but nevertheless bear within them the
symbolic significance of the whole social imaginary:

Gift objects and valuables are caught, then, between two principles: between the inalienability
of sacred objects and the alienability of commercial objects. Like the former, they are
inalienable, and at the same time they are, like the latter, alienable. This [. . .] is because they
function both as substitutes for sacred objects and as substitutes for human beings. [. . .] It is
not simply, as Mauss said, [. . .] that ‘one gives oneself when one gives them’. In reality what
is present in the object, along with the owner, is the entire imaginary of society. (Godelier,
1999: 94–5)

Lévi-Strauss neglects the function of this ‘imaginary’. Godelier agrees with Lévi-Strauss
that Mauss erred in explaining the necessity of returning the gift via the imaginary mech-
anism associated with the notion of hau, but he disagrees with Lévi-Strauss’s conclusion,
which opposes the imaginary to the symbolic in order to privilege the latter. Godelier
insists that participants regard the exchanged gift as containing ‘something more than a
gift of oneself to the other’, that it must appear

as a medium, the possession of which, even if it is only temporary, is necessary if one is to

continue to exist, to produce or to reproduce social relations which enable individuals as well
as groups, clans, families, brotherhoods, secret societies, and so on to continue as part of their
society. [. . .] It must contain something more, something which seems to all members of
society to be indispensable to their existence and which must circulate among them in order
that each and all may go on living. (Godelier, 1999: 72)

On the one hand, gift objects are a medium for the circulation of value; on the other hand,
they participate in that which is beyond value – the criterion of all value beyond
calculability:

in order for there to be movement, exchange, there had to be things that were kept out of
exchange, stable points around which the rest – humans, goods, services – might revolve and
circulate. (Godelier, 1999: 166–7)
60 Theory, Culture & Society 39(7-8)

In Stiegler’s terms, they are what is kept out of circulation by the higher complex exor-
ganism that bestows upon such objects the sacred impossibility of giving them away.
In other words, every society is founded on exchange, but every society founds
exchange on something that precedes it, ‘in which exchange takes root’ (Godelier, 1999:
36). Stiegler argues in very similar terms when he asks what the basis of ‘wealth’ could
be for any sustainable economy in what seems to be today’s ‘anthropic’ Anthropocene:

Such an economy, however, is healthy – that is, sustainable (which always means relatively
sustainable) [. . .] – only if it contributes to the production of negentropy, which is to say
wealth, where the latter is not reducible to value. Wealth is what makes it possible to calculate
value, by providing the criteria for this calculation, but wealth itself has no price: it is
incalculable, and it is what must be preserved at any cost by any economy worthy of the name
– that is, any (relatively) sustainable economy. What we are here calling wealth is that which
produces negentropy – knowledge in all its forms. (Stiegler, 2018b: 178)

Stiegler’s ‘general economic’ conception of the necessity of calculation, but equally of

the necessity of the incalculable as that ‘in which exchange takes root’, can profit from
Godelier’s account of the way this relationship between the calculable and the incalcula-
ble corresponds to the ways traditional economies relate the alienable to the inalienable.
Godelier’s account of the necessity of work for the production of sacred objects ulti-
mately comes down to the necessity of forms of knowledge that have not been reduced
to information and thus cannot be priced on a market. But we should note that this foun-
dation of the economic in a knowledge beyond calculation also implies a relation of the
incalculable to something beyond knowledge:

There is the non-knowledge that lies beyond knowledge, that is, as its future, which has a
‘consistence’ that exceeds all knowledge because it is the knowledge of what does not exist, of
what has never existed, of what will never exist, being a promise of knowledge remaining
always yet to come, and belonging through projections to what Aristotle called the timiotata –
to what is most precious, to that which is priceless. (Stiegler, 2018a: 194)

That knowledge always has the structure of a promise is precisely what ties it – and what
obliges us to return – to the question of exchange, of gift and counter-gift, and of what
exceeds them.
For Godelier, every society is founded on two pillars: one involving exchanges and
contracts; the other exceeding the contractual. These correspond to the relationship
between the symbolic and the imaginary: there can be no symbolic circuit of gift and
counter-gift without the imaginary exclamation (in Stiegler’s terms) that sets this circuit
in motion, and which is renewed by this circuit. The exchange of alienable but meaning-
ful artifacts, then, is also the mechanism by which social relations are ‘amplified’, the
exclamatory process by which noetic souls effect changes of scale between the microcos-
mic and the macrocosmic:

Gift-exchange amplifies [the essence of social relations] because the belief that things are
endowed with a soul extends this form of relations beyond the boundaries of society, imposing
it on the whole cosmos, on all objects and all relations that exist in the universe. (Godelier,
1999: 105)
Ross 61

Gift exchange possesses amplificatory potential because the libidinal or spiritual energy
stored in the artifact releases energies far greater than this ‘additional quantity’ would
seem to allow. For Godelier, it is the faculty of the imagination that grants to inanimate
things the possibility that, as souls, they contain the principle of movement within them-
selves. That the economic system cannot be separated from the symbolic system, as
Stiegler states, also means that it cannot be separated from the entire ‘social imaginary’.
But as we will see, for Godelier it is only the psychosocial faculty of imagination that
grants this possibility – there is no thought of a ‘fourth (technical) synthesis’ (for which
Stiegler argues in Technics and Time, 3).

Towards a Critique of Godelier

A Stieglerian perspective would reinscribe this description of the gift object as a sup-
port of the imaginary into a description of the gift object as a transitional and hyper-
material object bearing libidinal energy, through which it is capable of enchanting a
more-than-‘real’ cosmos. Lévi-Strauss accuses Mauss of adding a mystical and subjec-
tive ‘source of energy’ to explain the relationship of gift and counter-gift, and no doubt
he might level the same accusation at the notion of libidinal energy. But for Godelier,
this energy is produced by the imaginary of the entire society, and exceeds the opposi-
tion between the subjective and objective, or the individual and the collective, yet
requires objects onto which this energy can be projected and, through that, invested.
And for Stiegler, to say that the ‘source’ of the energy is the imaginary is not to say that
the energy itself is unreal – it is to say that this energy is, precisely, libidinal, and as
such irreducible either to thermodynamics or to biochemistry, precisely because the
imagination itself has technical conditions: libidinal energy must be conceived as
psycho-socio-technical.
Proletarianizing the imagination neutralizes the imaginative force that animates
exchange through the reference to something beyond it: it is precisely this cosmic sur-
reality that, as a ‘cosmic potlatch’ (Stiegler, 2016: 244–6; 2018a: 60–1), opens the circuit
of exchange that is always and necessarily premised on a libidinal source or a collective
spirit that does not move or circulate, but in which and through which the noetic soul
participates – and to which it contributes, in the production of circulation. It is precisely
here that Stiegler returns to hau:

the one who senses as a noetic soul gives sense to his sensations: he cannot receive and gather
(legein) the sensible except to the extent that he is able to give it a sense, and not only for
himself, but give it a sense for others – to give back to others the sense that he receives. This is
what Mauss described as the circuit of hau [. . .]. And it is why Leroi-Gourhan sets out the
hypothesis that one must participate in order to sense. (Stiegler, 2015b: 26)

The noetic soul is exclamatory because its sensing is never just a reception but a giving
back and a giving-more-than (hence a potlatch), always involved in a circuit extending
beyond itself and into and through objects invested with spirit – extending towards those
priceless timiotata that do not exist but ‘consist’ (in Stiegler’s terms), and to which noetic
souls only ever have intermittent access.
62 Theory, Culture & Society 39(7-8)

Can Godelier’s anthropology, then, be enlisted into Stiegler’s neganthropology? It is

worth taking note of what Stiegler says about Leroi-Gourhan in Symbolic Misery: Leroi-
Gourhan understands the need for the noetic soul to participate in the order of sense, and
that the mobility of this sense, which makes it into an exclamation rather than just a
reception, stems from the fact that there is always a circuit through the outside – through
the exteriorized object. An exclamation is always on the way to turning into a circulation,
through which this clamour becomes the institution of a symbolic circuit, a socialization
of significance, but where this social significance is always exposed to the risk of becom-
ing insignificant (empty ritual, stultified dogma, commodified information).
As the condition of the noetic soul, this circuit and the artifacts that support it are
therefore the condition of both the participation in the order of sense and the loss of this
participation. According to Stiegler, it is this pharmacology of the gift that Leroi-Gourhan
struggles to recognize in all its dimensions. Without it, we cannot understand the techni-
cal conditions of the contemporary loss of participation that is also and necessarily a
regression of the noetic soul itself:

Deprived of the exclamatory possibilities constitutive of gift and counter-gift (which is to say
hau as the circuit of the gift), the contemporary noetic soul suffers and regresses. Institutions
like schools were once dedicated to the formation of these noetic possibilities: they informed
and instituted a symbolic circuit which today has been short-circuited by the hyper-industrial
libidinal economy. (Stiegler, 2015b: 27)

A pharmacology of the gift necessarily passes through the consideration of the condi-
tions of exteriorization, which cannot be articulated ‘except through the consideration of
specificities brought about by the technical prostheses themselves: technical epochs con-
dition epochs of noetic sensibility’ (Stiegler, 2015b: 27).
Like Leroi-Gourhan, Godelier does not raise his analysis to the level of a pharmacol-
ogy in this sense: he cannot undertake an organological analysis of the duplicity of the
artifact. Three points:
1. Despite everything, the object invested with spirit is for Godelier always ultimately
of secondary importance. He repeatedly insists that ‘things do not move about of their
own accord’, and that it is always ‘the will of individuals and groups’ that is responsible
(Godelier, 1999: 102). Despite shifting emphasis from the symbolic to the imaginary,
Godelier is just as insistent as Lévi-Strauss that it is only the relationship between the
individual and the collective (referred to as ‘social relations’) to which all ‘objective’
explanation returns, and that, in this relationship, the object itself is only incidental,
never constitutive (or ‘destitutive’).
How this relationship is not only conditioned but produced by the character of
objects, by the epochs of technical individuation, by a dynamic between the psycho-
social and the technical, the who and the what, is not a question that arises for Godelier.
Attending to this ‘how’, and its relationship to the history of exchange, means recog-
nizing that what unfolds does so according to the history of grammatization, or in
other words, that artifacts are not just a product of ‘exosomatic exorganogenesis’ but
‘exomnesic exorganogenesis’ (Stiegler, 2020b: 75). But for Godelier, as for Lévi-
Strauss, it is always ‘society as a whole [. . .] that is the prime source, the origin’ of
the imaginary character of society: we may tend to ‘forget’ that ‘man’ is always the
Ross 63

origin, but for Godelier (1999) this is just a reflection of the fact that such forgetting
is constitutive of society, something that is ‘necessary in order to produce and to
reproduce society’ (p. 172).
2. For Godelier, insisting that humans must produce their world always means placing
the human back at the centre:

With respect to all of these systems, whether they are expressed as myths, religious dogmas, or
philosophical principles, the social sciences, by putting man in his place (which is not only that
of a being who lives in society but a being who produces society in order to live) exercise a
critical function. Everything that has been produced by man, everything which has sprung from
his practices and therefore from his mind, his psyche, must be returned to man, everything
which comes out of man but which comes to stand before him as an alien reality must go back
into him (Godelier, 1999: 199)

For Godelier, it is man who through producing society ends up ‘splitting’ himself
when, through his imagination, he attributes to objects characteristics that are really
those of his own soul, and through that imagines that he himself is deprived of those
characteristics. In thus splitting himself, he argues, humans mystify themselves and their
world, coming to believe that it is not they who are responsible and capable (for domes-
ticating plants and animals, making tools, etc.) but something external.
Yet what this position itself denies is that this capacity is and always has been depend-
ent on technical conditions: a matter not just of what tools make it possible to do but what
they make it possible to become, for better and for worse, as the never-yet-fulfilled prom-
ise of the human. At the centre is not ‘man’, but exorganic life – which always offsets the
‘human’ centre by situating it between the psychic, the collective and the technical.
Furthermore, not just the capacities but the incapacities of the noetic soul derive from
this tripartite and transductive relationship. It is not just that the simple exorganism ‘for-
gets’ its place but that it knows and forgets that this ‘place’ is, in fact, a tragic stage:
incapable of existing without what it produces, which thereby also produces it; always
de-centred between beasts and immortals.
3. When Godelier turns to contemporary industrial society, his conclusions are disap-
pointingly tepid, failing to reach the heart of the questions ultimately at stake in the ‘fact
of exchange’. At the end of The Metamorphoses of Kinship, Godelier misses an opportu-
nity to reflect on the profound transformations in familial relationships, courtship and
sexuality in contemporary Western society, preferring banal reassurances about adapta-
bility to the blended family. In The Enigma of the Gift, Godelier begins his final chapter
on the ‘dis-enchanted gift’ by recognizing, again, the necessity, in any society, of both a
‘domain of exchanges’ and a ‘domain in which individuals and groups carefully keep for
themselves, then transmit to their descendants or fellow-believers, things, narratives,
names, forms of thinking’ (1999: 200). It is the latter domain through which are formed
those ‘stable points’ that are ‘anchor points’ around which exchanges and identities are
constructed and developed. Yet Godelier cannot conceive the ultimate fate of these
anchor points when the medium of artifactual exchange ceases to be the technical milieu
of gift objects and becomes instead the technological milieu of machines, and eventually
of algorithmic computers distributed into all the hands and pockets of the hyper-consum-
ers of platform capitalism.
64 Theory, Culture & Society 39(7-8)

Godelier recognizes that such anchor points are not in fact timeless, but subject to
change and destruction, not just by external forces but ‘from within the very modes of
life and thought they had anchored’ (1999: 200). In other words, the basis of the social
institutions and adjustors that ensure the stability of society may at times be undermined
by the forms of life that arise in that society itself. He understands what is implied by a
mode of life whose very form systematically undermines every anchor point. He under-
stands that an absolute market society, by destroying the capacity for a domain in which
things are kept out of exchange, thereby destroys its own conditions of existence, because
it destroys the possibility of resetting criteriological values that alone make possible a
symbolic economy of gift and counter-gift. But after surveying the contemporary scene,
Godelier offers only the half-hearted suggestion that ‘the institution of charitable giving
thus looks set for a comeback’ (p. 209).

Towards a Neganthropology of Exchange

We have drifted far from informatique théorique. Nevertheless, Stiegler’s question can-
not be separated from the issue he raises concerning the ‘fact of exchange’. This inextri-
cability lies in the fact that, here, ‘information’ is the name given to what bridges
computation and economics as these become detached and displaced from any relation-
ship to the circuit of gift and counter-gift, thanks to which it becomes possible for a
planetary-scale process of speculative disinvestment to inscribe irresponsibility into
algorithms. Like Simondon and Derrida, Stiegler sees in the concept of information a
kind of worrying divorce from the problem of ‘energetics’, but what Stiegler makes clear
is that the ‘energy’ involved here is libidinal, in a way that cannot be reduced to any kind
of opposition between matter and energy, instead calling for what Stiegler refers to as a
hyper-materialism.
It is also worth bearing in mind that this structurally irresponsible market of informa-
tion that has undermined the pharmacology of the gift also destroys the conditions of
familial, kinship, courtship and sexual exchanges of all kinds, including via the system-
atic application of algorithmic technologies to dating, hook-ups, fan culture and pornog-
raphy. Does Stieglerian neganthropology, which is neither a philosophy nor a science,
provide all of the tools and concepts that are necessary for understanding and responding
to this new great proliferation of forms of digitally grammatized proletarianization?
We would argue that the lack of concepts with which to treat this transformation of the
range and types of contemporary suffering stems to a significant degree from Lévi-
Strauss’s attempt to reduce the diversity of kinship and exchange systems to potentially
mathematizable structures founded on the twin postulates that kinship is fundamentally
an exchange of women by men and that alliance is more important than descent. Recall
that at this origin, in 1949, there lies a highly consequential gift and counter-gift: Lévi-
Strauss gives the manuscript of The Elementary Structures of Kinship to de Beauvoir
(2015), who in return both provides the book with a very favourable review and incor-
porates it into her own account of the division and exchange between the sexes in The
Second Sex (for example, de Beauvoir 1953: 96–7). Ever since, the concepts and
understandings underpinning ways of thinking and responding to contemporary prob-
lems of family, kinship, courtship and sexuality have been strongly conditioned by the
Ross 65

consequences of this gift and counter-gift. That Godelier convincingly demonstrates the
inadequacy of both these Lévi-Straussian postulates has consequences vastly exceeding
Godelier’s own conclusions: his own failure to analyse exchange and kinship in organo-
logical and pharmacological terms means that he lacks concepts with which to analyse
the present and future states of these phenomena.
In the final paragraph of his book on gift exchange, Godelier points out the absurdity
and impossibility of reducing all of human life to contractual exchange:

Can one imagine a child making a contract with its parents to be born? The idea is absurd. And
its absurdity shows that the first bond between humans, that of birth, is not negotiated between
the parties involved. And yet it is just such inescapable facts that our society tends to pass over
in silence. (Godelier, 1999: 210)

With this thought, which leads directly to a number of difficult questions concerning
intergenerational relations that recently seem to have become increasingly urgent, the
impossibility of separating questions of exchange from questions of kinship becomes
crystal clear, in a way that is absent in Lévi-Strauss.
In the final paragraph of Godelier’s book on kinship exchange, he wants to proclaim
that kinship will continue as long as we continue to be beings who must produce our own
world:

kinship relations and all of the representations (images, positive and/or negative values) that go
with them would be threatened with fossilization and, ultimately, disappearance, only if that
which is the distinctive feature of humankind were to disappear or be destroyed, that which
definitively separated humans from other primates, their natural cousins, namely: the fact that
humans not only live in society, but can and must produce society in order to live. (Godelier,
2011: 553)]

It is undeniably true that Anthropos must produce its world. But we must also reverse
the terms of Godelier’s argument: this production of society can and will be destroyed
if kinship relations are destroyed, because only through the wealth and diversity of such
intergenerational relations is it possible to cultivate the knowledge, rather than merely
the information, required in order to maintain and renew the wealth and diversity of the
institutions and adjustors without which society will be unsustainable and unbearable.
Godelier, too, knows that the question of this production and reproduction is, in some
way, always a matter of a cosmic potlatch, hence he also writes that

we are obliged to say that nowhere, in any society, do a man and a woman alone suffice to
make a child [. . .]. For this, other agents are needed, [. . .] who add what is lacking for the
foetus to become a child. What is lacking is what we customarily call a soul, a spirit, in
short a usually invisible component but one which is not necessarily immaterial. (Godelier,
2011: 299)

How should we imagine this intergenerational relationship that exceeds and precedes
every contract? How can we imagine this sur-real demand according to which produc-
ing a child always and everywhere requires something more than just a man and a
66 Theory, Culture & Society 39(7-8)

woman – something cosmic? And what do such imaginings have to do with our con-
temporary tendency to reduce everything to contracts and information calculable on a
market that may be factually ‘universal’ but anything but cosmological?

The Savage Mind Tamed, or Trained Like a Rose, in the

Psychosocial Garden
Stiegler (2022) states that, in this ‘new theoretical computer science’, the word ‘theoreti-
cal’ refers to the fact that a neganthropological computer science ‘states and corrects the
limits of a dynamic and open system tending to close’ (Stiegler, 2022). Exosomatic life
has always been, continues to be and will always be confronted with irreducible entropic
and anthropic tendencies, destroying the circulation of knowledge, affects, desire and
care. If something like a neganthropology is possible, it consists in theoretically, practi-
cally and technologically maintaining and renewing the struggle against these tendencies
– economizing them. This is also a struggle to retain an openness in the relationship
between the synchronic and the diachronic, ‘producing knowledge that is always at the
service of more or less centralizing and synchronizing yet metastable power, and, in this
way, more or less tolerant of diachronisms that always initially present themselves as
dysfunctions’ (Stiegler, 2022). Existing theoretical computer science is an ideology that
tends to eliminate this tolerance for diachronic potentials: the new theoretical computer
science for which Stiegler calls must thus be

based on the critique of the limits of today’s ‘reticular writing’ [and] therefore necessarily
consists in drawing the consequences of the limits of calculability when it is based on using
speed to eliminate localities and the singularities they contain. (Stiegler, 2022)

Today, in an Anthropocene intensified and accelerated by this ideological nexus, we

are confronted with the possible victory of these entropic and anthropic tendencies,
where this ‘victory’ would be that of a suicidal machine that degrades and eliminates
everything that has been psychosocially cultivated throughout the epochs of exomnesic
exorganogenesis. Stiegler’s call is therefore for ‘the elaboration of another paradigm,
not totally computational, of theoretical computer science’, which would be that of
‘limited calculability’, one that conceives ‘the incalculable as always local singularity’
(Stiegler, 2022).
In some of his last writings, Stiegler relates the neganthropological task faced by the
noetic and exosomatic beings that we hope to remain to what Joseph Beuys referred to as
the task of ‘social sculpture’. Stiegler conceives this less as sculpting than as gardening,
since the brains of neganthropological beings, and what lies between those brains, must
be ‘cultivated like gardens, and not simply “sculpted”’ (Stiegler, 2018a: 256). He argues
that ‘the philosopher and the artist today have the responsibility and the task of together
becoming the gardeners of biospheric locality’ (Stiegler, 2020a: 191). He even likens the
tool-equipped pruning that this gardening involves (195), which is to say all processes of
training and education, to the fact that synaptogenesis also requires cellular suicide in
order to carve out the folds of the cortical matter of ‘neuronal man’, since, according to
Changeux (1977), ‘to learn is to eliminate’ (ch. 6).
Ross 67

Stiegler knows, however, that this can never be just a neurological question. What’s
more, there are all kinds of gardens: rusticated, exotic, manicured and so on. It is not
simply a matter of divining the kind of garden most worth cultivating, since it is the idi-
omatic diversity and differentiation within and between noetic gardens that best ensures
the chances of new and improbable cross-fertilizations, a burgeoning that alone engen-
ders the economizing resilience that keeps these cultivated systems from closing. Yet in
every garden it is a matter of aiming towards the singularly best form of the relationship
between the domesticated and the wild, the tame and the savage, where neither of these
tendencies can be totally eliminated without producing an outcome that is either com-
pletely sterile or utterly unmanageable.
A lingering virtue of psychoanalysis is that it conceives the unconscious as the seat of
what, within our individual and collective desire, can never be fully controlled or domes-
ticated. This savage uncontrollability is absolutely necessary for the possibility of new
and improbable bifurcations, as Stiegler already says in Symbolic Misery when discuss-
ing what was then the relatively new form of digital publishing known as ‘blogging’:

The mistake with these things is to want to interpret them unilaterally: they are always bifacial.
Blogs are a sign of symbolic misery – a symptom of this misery – while, at the same time, they
bear witness to the vitality that the non-domesticable character of human desire (what I will
soon refer to as its savagery) always demonstrates, despite its misery and even because of it.
Faced with its domestication, savage desire invents new paths, which may clearly be
immediately recuperated by the domesticating apparatus: the savage may also be sheeplike, if
not domesticable. And so a struggle develops. (Stiegler, 2015b: 30)

This struggle is both technological and aesthetic, and it is a struggle between the wild and
the domesticated, or rather, the struggle for ‘that savage that cannot be domesticated but
which is tamed by the sublime’ (Stiegler, 2015b: 97). The utterly domesticated is the
death of desire, but tameness is the very question of desire, desire itself, as sublime. This
refers not just to sublimity in the Kantian sense, but also to sublimation in the Freudian
sense, as the différance of desire from drive, of desire as the organization of the drives.
Stiegler is utterly aware that, if this involves the libidinal economy, then it is also a ques-
tion that passes through the general economy of gift and counter-gift:

The fact that aesthetic and symbolic life is now hegemonically subjected to the interests of
industrial consumption must be placed at the very heart of artistic and political practice and
thought. This situation, which results from the new conditions of technological mediation, has
completely altered the libidinal economy – and, as a consequence, the situation of art itself, if it
is true that, as the sublimation of the savage, art is the clearest expression of the gift economy
that is the libidinal economy as an organization of sublimation. (Stiegler, 2015b: 112)

As we have seen, Stiegler insists on the need for contributory research and territorial
experimentation aimed at fostering an ‘internation’ capable of generating the conditions
of a new global economic peace. He maintains that the organization of such an interna-
tion must be based on what he calls a neganthropology, and that such a neganthropology
implies ‘refounding’ theoretical computer science on the idea of ‘limited calculability’,
which in turn implies a critique of political economy putting the ‘fact of exchange’ back
68 Theory, Culture & Society 39(7-8)

at the ‘at the centre of the observation, conceptualization and organization of the econ-
omy’. By way of an open conclusion, we contend that this task left to us by Stiegler could
be fertilized by staging a mutual, exorganological critique of: (1) Godelier’s ‘Proposals
for a Different Scenario’, in The Metamorphoses of Kinship, where the anthropologist
tries to reach back into the very dawn of exosomatic life in order to mount a more-than-
anthropological account of the origin of exosomatic sexuality and kinship and their rela-
tionship to exchange and economy; and (2) Stiegler’s ‘Freud’s Repression’, in Symbolic
Misery, where the neganthropologist tries to reach back into the very same dawn in order
to mount a more-than-psychological account of the origin of desire in its différance from
the drives, which is to say, the origin of libidinal economy. We believe that the route to
any coherent paradigm that would be ‘not totally computational’, and any such paradigm
capable of supporting and generating any lastingly sustainable ‘internation’ project,
depends on thinking and taking care of the sublimatory processes that distribute the aes-
thetic and participatory characteristics of the symbolic and sexual lives of exorganisms
between the poles of the wild and the tame, always at risk of regressing to unbound
savagery (war) or sterile domestication (life frozen into non-existence). For if the ques-
tion of the tool is always also the question of the weapon, then what is the meaning of
peace other than the perpetually tense struggle, within a technical milieu, for this psycho-
social metabolism composing the wild and the tame?

ORCID iD
Daniel Ross https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8607-235X

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Daniel Ross obtained his doctorate from Monash University in 2002 with a thesis on Martin
Heidegger. He is the author of Violent Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and
Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics (Open Humanities Press, 2021). He
has translated a dozen books by Bernard Stiegler, most recently the collective work composed and
edited by Stiegler and the Internation Collective, entitled Bifurcate: There Is No Alternative (Open
Humanities Press, 2021). He is also the co-director of the prize-winning film The Ister (2004).

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section on ‘Bernard
Stiegler and the Internation Project: Computational Practices and Circumscribed
Futures’, edited by Ryan Bishop.