Sound Research WIKINDX

   p. 6  

We need some ecological critique
"If we do not enact an ecological critique of the technologies and industries of the spirit, if we do not show that the unlimited exploitation of spirits as markets leads to a ruin comparable to that which the Soviet Union and the great capitalist countries have been able to create by exploiting territories or natural resources without any care to preserve their habitability to come – the future – then we move ineluctably toward a global social explosion, that is, toward absolute war."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:09

Comments:

Stiegler makes very clear that it is indeed the rich who are leading to this ruin.   Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:09

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 7  

Data economy, big data, abusing transindividual relations

"What is new is the systematic exploitation and physical reticulation of interindividual and transindividual relations – serving what is referred to today as the ‘data economy’, itself based on data-intensive computing, or ‘big data’, which has been presented as the ‘end of theory’. This amounts to the full realization of barbarism in Adorno and Horkheimer’s sense, but they could surely never have imagined how far this would extend onto the noetic plane."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:47

Comments:

Stiegler believes Adorno and Horkheimer failed to realise just how much this would affect intellectuality   Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:47

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 7  

Disruption - Brutal

"The automatic power of reticulated disintegration extends across the face of the earth through a process that has recently become known as disruption. Digital reticulation penetrates, invades, parasitizes and ultimately destroys social relations at lightning speed, and, in so doing, neutralizes and annihilates them from within, by outstripping, overtaking and engulfing them. Systemically exploiting the network effect, this automatic nihilism sterilizes and destroys local culture and social life like a neutron bomb: what it dis-integrates, it exploits, not only local equipment, infrastructure and heritage, abstracted from their socio-political regions and enlisted into the business models of the Big Four, but also psychosocial energies – both of individuals and of groups – which, however, are thereby depleted."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:52

Comments:

Stiegler does not like the tech bros...

This disruption destroys social relationships and communities, extract value from communities and their culture and generally exhaust people (The Docile Mind, Mark??) - leads to consumerism (not mentioned here specifically, but as a means of filling the existential holes), as well as collective alienation and cultural 'depletion'

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:52

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 7  

Data providers (cloud serfs) stripped of their own protentions. Algorithms intercept psychic protentions and define them for people with automatic protentions
"These individuals and groups are thus transformed into data-providers, de-formed and re-formed by ‘social’ networks operating according to new protocols of association. In this way, they find themselves disindividuated: their own data [données], which also amounts to what we call (in the language of the Husserlian phenomenology of time) retentions,25 enables them to be dispossessed of their own protentions – that is, their own desires, expectations, volitions, will and so on."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:09

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 8  

The will cant keep up with automatic protentions - erases chance of 'natural' human becoming
"Disruption renders will, wherever its source, obsolete in advance: it always arrives too late. What is thereby attained is an extreme stage of rationalization, forming a threshold, that is, a limit. What lies beyond this limit remains unknown: it destroys reason not only in the sense that rational knowledge finds itself eliminated by proletarianization, but in the sense that individuals and groups, losing the very possibility of existing (for their existence depends on being able to express their will), losing therefore all reason for living, become literally mad, and tend to despise life – their own and that of others. The result is the risk of a global social explosion consigning humanity to a nameless barbarism."

Continues...

The automatic protentions define our will and desires we have no chance to fight back
"Disruption moves quicker than any will, whether individual or collective, from consumers to ‘leaders’, whether political or economic.28 Just as it overtakes individuals via digital doubles or profiles on the basis of which it satisfies ‘desires’ they have most likely never expressed – but which are in reality herd-like substitutes depriving individuals of their own existence by always preceding their will, at the same time emptying them of meaning, while feeding the business models of the data economy – so too disruption outstrips and overtakes social organizations, but the latter recognize this only after the fact: always too late."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:04

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 8  

'Civilisational progress'
"When reason is lost, all those technological powers that we hold in our hands as ‘civilizational progress’ become weapons of destruction through which this ‘civilization’ reveals the barbarism it contains. This is the key pharmacological question to be addressed in the epoch of disruption."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:08

Comments:

'Civilisational progress' thus is reduced to mere technological advancements which doesn't affect actual human welfare. How we define progress is essential to society because it is the guiding light - this is exactly my view that Silicon Valley (or the rich) are very much in control of this 'narrative'. 

Stiegler here is not addressing this directly, it is my take-away. As I understand here, 'healing' the world is addressing these issues - for instance, the phone is really a weapon of mass surveillance.

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:08

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 10  

Heidegger and existing
"Expressing this in the language of phenomenology, and returning to questions emerging from Martin Heidegger’s existential analytic, we could say that for Florian [Young man he uses to exemplify a loss of reason to live], no positive collective protention is possible: there is no protention other than the end of all protention, that is, the end of all dreams and any possibility of realizing them. Florian’s vision of the world and of his future is entirely subject to an absolutely negative protention: the complete disappearance of humankind."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:23

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 11  

Positive collective protentions
"It is impossible to live in a society without positive collective protentions, but the latter are the outcome of intergenerational and transgenerational transmission. Such protentions – which belong to what the Greeks in the age of Hesiod called elpis (ἐλπίς), a word that means expectation [attente], both as hope and as fear, and which is the condition of attention – are the boundaries and boundary markers of the care that must be taken of the world (κόσμος)."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:22

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 11  

What lead to automatic society
"These cardinalities and calendarities have been not only upset, but literally overturned by the advent of the culture industry, and yet more by digitalization as the convergence of telecommunications, the audiovisual and computing, a convergence that leads to reticulated, automatic society."

 

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:22

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 12  

Gestell is the human view of the world as imposed by technics ... clocks, etc.
"Today, the Christian calendar has been imposed throughout the entire world by all those clocks that synchronize every digital device – billions of devices, a huge number of which can be found in the pockets of terrestrial inhabitants connected by the industry of ‘cloud computing’, data centres, geostationary satellites and the algorithms of intensive computing, together forming what Heidegger called Gestell."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:24

Comments:

Gestell then is essentially like mecanisation - we become the machines by cirtue of our view of the world changing.

So a danger would be that our gestell becomes our conditions of constituting experience, and thus our way of becoming?

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:24

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 12  

Dasein - understanding a being has of their own there-being. Gilles technical system here is the system as a whole between humans and technology
"In a singular situation and by a path that I will retrace in summary in Chapter 5 [...] I came to the point of myself positing that what the philosophers call the epokhē – such that it lies at the origin of a conversion of the gaze, of a change in the way of thinking, and, through that, of a transformation of what Heidegger called ‘the understanding that there-being (Dasein) has of its being’ (which, as we will see, consists in the individual and collective production of ‘circuits of transindividuation’) – this philosophical and more generally noetic epokhē (produced by a new form of thinking in general) is always the outcome of a techno-logical upheaval, itself derived from what Bertrand Gille described as a change in the technical system."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:55

Comments:

An epoch changes how humanity sees the world they're in, and as such changes our Dasein, that is our own understanding of our own being. A technological upheaval then always leads to a change of how we think.   Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:55

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 13  

Everydayness is broken when the tool breaks, and the technical system reveals itself (Heidegger)
"What he [Heidegger] shows is that the facticity of the world and of the epoch in which it presents itself becomes obvious and inevitable when there is an interruption of the technical element. This occurs, for example, when a tool we are using becomes broken: what is thereby revealed is the fragility of the technical element."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:00

Comments:

It would then also be at this point that we can best see the world as a different technical system, if only briefly - We would then naturally see it through our eyes as they are configured by the current prevailing technical system, but it might still allow a sense of clarity...

More clearly - When people use LLMs a lot, they seem to speak very differently of not just LLMs but of the world. When they have to deal with issues or questions without their LLMs, they are faced not with a broken tool, but merely one that is inaccessible (so same result, they stand without it). It is in that moment perhaps they can see the different caused by the technical element and the technical system that they create together, but only when the tool is put away for an extended period will they know the true difference to their Dasein as brought about by their co-individuation.

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:00

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 13  

New epoch, new expectations then... how are they formed
"These new kinds of protention are new expressions of will, which we must understand here in the sense of the Greek βουλή (which is both the will of the citizen and that of the city), and constitute new forms of expectation (ἐλπίς) – that is, of desire and of the economy from which it stems: the libidinal economy, from which emerges, then, a new epoch. An epoch is always a specific configuration of the libidinal economy, organized around the ensemble of tertiary retentions (that is, around the technical supports of collective retention) that form, through their arrangement, a new technical system, which is always also a retentional system."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:21

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 13  

Change of technicsl system leads to new epoch which leads to consequences of various kinds, new ways of thinking, doing, and ultimately new protentions by reconfiguring the retentions of the past
"When a change of technical system occurs – in Bertrand Gille’s sense – the epoch from which it originated comes to an end: a new epoch emerges, generally at the cost of military, religious, social and political conflicts of all kinds. But the new epoch emerges only when – on the occasion of these conflicts, and due to the loss of the salience of the preceding epoch’s knowledge and powers of living, doing and conceiving – new ways of thinking, new ways of doing and new ways of living take shape, which are ‘new forms of life’ in Georges Canguilhem’s sense, on the basis of precursors reconfiguring the retentions inherited from the earlier epoch into so many new kinds of protention."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:21

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 14  

There is no current epoch

"In the contemporary epoch of the absence of epoch, the role of digital tertiary retentions in the intergenerational (non)relationship, and in the (non)formation of collective retentions and protentions, is both perfectly obvious and totally escapes comprehension – because there is no longer any adjustment between the new technical system and the social systems. Far from adjusting the social systems by reshaping them to suit a ‘new epoch’, the technical system short-circuits them and, ultimately, destroys them."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:20

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 23  

Marketing (the rich) are in charge
"By massively modifying the processes by which collective secondary retentions are interiorized, where the latter are themselves methodically and industrially produced according to the dictates of the behavioural models conceived by marketing, the industry of cultural goods itself became the prescriber of the circuits of transindividuation constituting the ‘second epokhal moment’ of the techno-logical epokhē produced by the technical system based on analogue tertiary retention."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:10

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 26  

The digital retention too is a pharmakon. 
"What is massified today is no longer the criteriology by which primary retentions are selected, which was achieved by standardizing secondary retentions: it is the formation of circuits between secondary retentions via intensive computing, capable of treating gigabytes of data simultaneously, so as to extract statistical and entropic patterns that short-circuit all genuine circuits of transindividuation – where the latter would always be negentropic, that is, singular, and as such incalculable: intractable."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 08:16

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 27  

Loss of reason
"all singularities, all desires inasmuch as they constitute the negentropic capabilities of non-inhuman being qua Neganthropos. In losing these negentropic capabilities, non-inhuman being loses reason insofar as reason is, precisely, always and uniquely that which must not be lost in order to live, noetically, the consistence of existence."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:45

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 31  

Individual individuation requires a we
"Yet if we take Simondon seriously when he states that the psychic individual (the I) can individuate itself effectively only by participating in collective individuation (the we), then it is indeed necessary for there to be collective individuation, which can constitute itself only by distinguishing itself from other collective individuations, that is, through this collective identification that a we forms."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:44

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 32  

Google align with transhumanism, the massive fault of weapons of math destruction
"Google, inscribing all its projects into the context of transhumanism, which is ὕβρις par excellence, takes the statistical and probabilistic calculation of averages as its standard, and thereby in fact eliminates idiomatic linguistic difference, that is, diachronic and idiosyncratic variability. The digital reticulation of all noetic life hence becomes the new programme of artificial intelligence whose goal is to eliminate all (de)faults – starting with the (de)faults of language, that is, of speakers."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:06

Comments:

Algorithms bring everything towards an average. As we use tools based on these algorithms, we will see that same tendency towards the average for ourselves as we are mecanised (Simondon). I think it's across the board and not just language.   Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:06

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 32  

"It is from this tension between what is closest to me and what is contained there already as the most distant (in the experience of what Walter Benjamin called the ‘aura’), it is through that which is most idios (ἴδιος) in my idiom, that is, most neganthropic, and that I encounter in the idiomaticity of other idioms or other idiosyncrasies, responding in their idiolect to what is already contained in my idiom, and as the closest (and which is its default), it is only thus that psychic individuation is possible."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:43

Comments:

Psychic individuation is made possible by individuals with different idioms communicating through their own idiolect - in simpler terms we form our identities when we look outwarsd to others and encounter idiosyncracies. Idiosyncracies exist only through difference, and so it is this meeting of differences that allow us to develop ourselves and to make something from the collective memory or from somebody else a part of ourselves.

What is closest then are my thoughts, memory, my idiom or identity 

Most distant would be history, collective memory and culture from before - which is yet embedded within my own language and the tools I use

Stiegler here uses aura to explain this in terms of our identity - our most intimate sense of self still contains all that is distant to us.

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:43

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 32  

Language is the most important mark of our secondary and primary retentions from childhood - but it is our very being
"It is, however, by starting from this original proximity of my maternal (or paternal) facticity, of which language is the most remarkable mark, it is starting from this original proximity of my local culture, giving rise to the idiom that I embody not only by speaking but in everything, by ek-sisting, and that I try to be as an improbable singularity, it is only by starting from this proximity that I can begin to encounter this strange and therefore ‘foreign’ alterity, where I find the other in myself – what I have in the past referred to as myself-an-other [moi-l’autre] (beyond myself [moi-même]).45"

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:36

Comments:

Our 'other in myself' arises by learning fom others, but it can only arise out of our present self, which is a constitution of everything we have ever known until that point. This other in ourselves thus cannot without everything that comes before it. 

Seems very similar to Simondon's individuation - if it isn't pretty much an explanation of it.

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:36

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self

   p. 32  

Makes indirect (fairly direct) mention of silicon valley or tech bros 

"But to reason in this way is precisely not to submit to the disruption promoted by Californian ‘digital business’. For there is such a submission, not yet to come, as the poisonous fantasies distilled by a culture and a business of fear would have it, but rather right now, as resignation in the face of the diktat of ‘radical innovation’ in the service of the ‘ecosystem’ centred on Californian ‘digital business’."

  Added by: alexb44  28/09/2026, 07:07

Keywords:   Artificial Intelligence, Individuation, Philosophy, Philosophy of technology, Protention, Retention, Self