The Political Economy of Transindividuality in Stiegler and Virno

chapter 3 The Hidden Abode of Individuation: The Political Economy of Transindividuality in Stiegler and Virno

In Chapter 2, I argued that Simondon’s work offered a new critical perspective on individuation, in some sense deploying an entire ontology and conceptual vocabulary against the priority attached to either the individual or to represent- ing society or nature as an individual. However, as I argued in that chapter, the promise of Simondon’s concept is marked by several conceptual blind spots not only with respect to his precursors, Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, but also more importantly with respect to the central problem of shifting transindividuality from an ontology of relations to a critical theory of political economy and social reality. It is for this reason that Simondon’s thought can be con- sidered less a fully developed theory of social relations, politics, or capital than itself a kind of pre-individual conceptual tool for individuating or develop- ing the idea. Two philosophers who have done the most to utilise Simondon’s vocabulary with respect to politics and the critique of political economy are Bernard Stiegler and Paolo Virno. Stiegler and Virno were briefly discussed in Chapter 2 in terms of their particular manner of ‘individuating’ Simondon, of resolving the particular tensions and relations. Stiegler sought to develop transindividuality into a theory of technology, or technicity, reading Simon- don’s later work into his early work and beyond to develop a theory of the fundamentally prosthetic nature of memory and individuation. In contrast to this, Virno reads transindividuality as the basis of a philosophical anthropo- logy framed between humanity’s generic capacities and their specific histor- ical articulation. While both of the readings will be revisited in what follows, what is at stake in this chapter is less how they read Simondon than how they use Simondon’s concepts to interpret the current conjuncture of contemporary capitalism. Stiegler and Simondon’s criticisms of capital separate according to the division Marx (and Hegel) posited between consumption and produc- tion as not only two different economic spheres, but two different individu- ations.

Transindividuation and the Becoming Proletarian of the Consumer: Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy opens with a claim about the status of political economy. Stiegler claims that ‘philosophy of our time has abandoned the project of a critique of political economy, and this constitutes a disastrous turn of events’.1 It is precisely this abandonment that Stiegler aims to rectify. However, Stiegler is not calling for a return to Marx in anything remotely resembling an orthodox form, and Stiegler’s work is as much a critique of Marxism as it is an engagement with the failings of contemporary philosophy. Stiegler’s understanding of the economy is less a matter of a base determining a philosophical superstructure than it is a matter of grasping a fundamental aspect of contemporary individuation. The economy does not constitute a base upon which a superstructure could be erected, but functions transversally, cutting through the entire relation of individual and collective identity. ‘Political economy is a way of organizing transindividuation not only at the level of symbolic exchange, but also at the level of the exchange of commodities’.2 In order to understand this it is necessary to recast our understanding of political economy, to rethink what is produced and circulated along with commodities and money.3 Stiegler’s redefinition of the relation between transindividuation and political economy is itself predicated on two transformations of Simondon’s conceptual articulation. First, Stiegler stresses the essentially temporal character of every transindividual individuation. Every individuation is a process, a move- ment from an initial metastable condition, defined by tensions and relations, towards a future, a future posited less as an endpoint than a telos. It is a process, as Simondon argued, but one framed between memory,the past, and the future. This process defines both the individuation of subjects and collectives, as well as their mutually constitutive intersection. Simondon argues that transindividuation can be grasped as the intersection of the temporality of the individual and the collective, the interweaving of the individual’s timeline, striving and goals, and that of society, its history and future.4 Transindividuation is inher-

1 Stiegler 2010b, p. 18. 2 Stiegler 2010b, p. 61. 3 Stiegler, like Simondon, understands Marx to articulate a theory of base and superstructure in which the former determines the latter, but he stresses that this division has become increasingly untenable in the age of contemporary, or hyperindustrial capitalism (Stiegler 2004a, p. 70). 4 Simondon 2005, p. 293.