Bernard Stiegler's "Capitalism as Episteme and Entropocene" (Summary)

The evolution of capitalism in the twenty-first century confirms the hypotheses laid out by Karl Marx in the Grundrisse regarding automation, the evolution of the economic function of knowledge, and the corresponding transformations of value. However, decisive concepts were lacking in 1857 and until Engels' death, leading to the informational and computational transformations of technology dominating today's fixed capital. Capitalism is an epistēmē, materialized by the fixed capital of the reticulated apparatus of production that capitalism has become. This epistēmē hegemonically reconfigures every instrument of calculation, including statistics, measurement, simulation, modeling, observation, production, logistics, mobility, orientation, bibliometrics, scientometrics, marketing, and lifelogging. Information is the 'allagmatic' operator of this epistēmē, via computational technology that is perfectly homogenous with capitalism.

The cognitivist anti-epistēmē develops only by installing a process of generalized proletarianization. The correlationist mythology of 'big data' is a prime example of how ideology is being reshaped through the cognitivist paradigm and marketing. The anti-epistēmē of absolute non-knowledge concretely ties the latter to entropy, which leads to the collapse of wage labor and the destruction of knowledge.

Capitalism is confronted with the contradiction and entropic contraction that its computational development contains and continuously intensifies as a chaotic phase. A leap beyond this entropic situation is required to open up a new era, the 'Neganthropocene', which requires a complete redefinition of the relations between epistēmē and tekhnē, and the transformation of tekhnē into industrial technology.

The critique of computational proletarianization's absolute non-knowledge must be based on a critique of information theory, which has always defined information as a calculable signal. This conception of knowledge dissolves knowledge as it is irreducible to calculation. Knowledge is a generator of improbable, incalculable bifurcations, which is possible only in a universe in concrescence, where life creates localities that defer the rise of entropy qua increase of disorder. The struggle against anthropy must become the object of a neganthropology, based on rethinking the concepts of entropy, negentropy, and anti-entropy starting from the exosomatic perspective developed by Alfred Lotka in 1945. Overcoming the anthropic eschatological tendencies of computational, reticular capitalism requires the reconstitution of an epistēmē that would generate new forms of knowledge characteristic of neganthropology, constituting a set of therapeutic prescriptions and economic arrangements of new knowledge that aim to socialize the pharmaka that are mechanical, analogical, and digital tertiary retentions integrated by platform capitalism.

Digital becoming is a recent stage of gramatization that began in 1993 with the opening of the World Wide Web. This new associated milieu has two contradictory tendencies: contributory practices, which break with the structural and sequential opposition between design, production, and consumption, and technogeographic associated milieu, which reduces activities to an information chain capable of being treated algorithmically at near light speed. This process inverts the processes described in the preceding point as contributing practices.

The new pharmakon, the organization of fixed capital, becomes more complex and opaque as a large part of its apparatus comes to be privatized in the form of consumer items like smartphones. The Entropocene consists of planetary exorganisms that exist on the functional scale of the biosphere, and the pharmacological duplicity of fixed capital has become highly flexible and plastic.

The pharmakon is required by knowledge insofar as the latter must be exteriorized and spatialized through the work of a différance. This différance is noetic, mental, and temporal flows and fluxes, composed of primary and secondary retentions and protentions, are exteriorized, spatialized, and organized upstream and downstream of the process of interiorization in which knowledge consists.

if capitalism is possible, particularly in its industrial form, it must be able to adapt to the new pharmakon and the emergence of new forms of living labor.

Stiegler discusses the concept of cognitive capitalism, which aims to overcome the Entropocene by transforming economic functions through computational technologies. This process is based on four types of tertiary retentions: literal, mechanical, analog, and digital. The tertiarization of primary and secondary retentions leads to proletarianization, which destroys knowledge and transforms it into fixed capital. Cognitive capitalism bears these realities simultaneously, as digital tertiary retention constitutes the epistēmē of capital and capital as epistēmē. This digital tertiary retention is an anti-epistēmē, as it destroys knowledge and constitutes the most advanced stage of capitalism. However, the digital tertiary retention developed by capital is a pharmakon, with the potential to completely invert this state of fact through the establishment of a new state of economic law. This law is not required for social justice concerns but for the establishment of a new economic rationality that must lead to a revalorization of work and a revaluation of value. The text concludes by elaborating three points that open up a new economic perspective, not an exit from capitalism but an opening of another path within the Entropocene. This path is the Neganthropocene as a revolutionary project, prescribing terms for Chinese strategic policy in terms of Internet Plus, generalized automation, smart cities, and neganthropic industries within an economy of contribution founded on transitional investment towards the Neganthropocene.

Stiegler discusses the power of the negative, the proletariat, and the dialectic of master, Herren, and slave, arguing that these issues are misinterpreted by Marx and Marxism. The Knecht, who develops knowledge beyond the master, cannot be both a proletarian and a slave. Instead, the bourgeois form the bourgeoisie, which engenders industrial revolutions and the bourgeoisie as the revolutionary class. The author proposes de-proletarianization through contributory inversion, a quasicausal appropriation of the play of literal, mechanical, analogical, and digital hypomnesic tertiary retentions. This is a question of constituting a new age of noesis, which is the process of exosomatization of the functions and faculties of reason.

Organizing an economy based on de-proletarianization and contribution requires redeveloping data and network architectures that currently constitute platform capitalism. This requires analyzing Adam Smith, Andrew Ure, and Marx in terms of Alfred Lotka's perspective and redefining value to invest in the Neganthropocene on the basis of a new theory of knowledge. This involves reconstructing the architecture of academic organologies and focusing on the neganthropy of exosomatic organs.

The question of fixed capital and the general intellect in Marx's work is not adequately based on documentation or research due to his ignorance of tertiary retention. This leads him to a regression compared to his positions in The German Ideology. The question is not the power of the negative that the proletariat would embody, but the power of the positive that the pharmakon would contain as the possibility of a reversal opening up the formation of a communist economy. This is a question not of the power of the negative but of the inversion of the potentialities of fixed capital generating an opportunity for de-proletarianization. Cognitive capitalism requires and initiates a revolutionary movement of de-proletarianization, but it is not claimed as the objective of a new state of law. The epistēmē that is capitalism today is negative and constitutes an absolute non-knowledge, engendering the Entropocene qua Trumpocene. To de-proletarianize means to re-establish knowledge, which is always limited, multiple, distributed, and impure due to its neganthropological potentials.