Megamachines, Forms of Reticulation and the Limits of Calculability

Abstract

Many works by those who wish to strike a pose as being at the forefront of thinking about theory, culture and society end with a gesture, more or less rhetorical, that consists, in one way or another, in calling for the new – whether in philosophy, or politics, or in some sense that exceeds these old terms altogether. Such a call is incontestably legitimate, because the reasons for it have become obvious to all: all of the old (Western) theoretical, cultural and social systems and understandings seem only to have brought us to a hypersystemic crisis. By ‘hyper-systemic’ is meant a convergence of crises, where numerous systems seem to be reaching their limits at the same time and in a mutually reinforcing way, and where the way out of this hyper-systemic crisis seems blocked from all sides. Given this crisis of crises, all of our old understandings seem to leave us floundering, if not directly responsible for this crisis, with no sight of any exit. But the problem is that this gesture, this call for the new, should not appear at the end of such a work, but at the beginning: the whole point is to know how to take real steps that can possibly increase our chances at actually happening upon new pathways, not simply to content ourselves with perpetually reiterating its necessity. In short, if there is such a hyper-crisis, then it requires a hyper-critique – a critique founded in the recognition that what also makes this crisis ‘hyper’ is the fact that there is a crisis in the very possibility of critique itself, and in the possibility for critique to serve its proper end: to make possible judgments and proposals, and, on those bases, actions. It is towards the elaboration of such a hyper-critique, and the proposals that should follow from it, that all of Bernard Stiegler’s work aimed, and this remained the case in one of his final works, ‘Elements of a New Economic Foundation Based on a New Foundation for Theoretical Computer Science’, the first part of which was published as ‘Noodiversity, Technodiversity’ (Stiegler, 2020: 67–80). What distinguishes Stiegler’s work is the depth and clarity with which he sees and describes the fundamental source of our contemporary hyper-crisis, and in what follows we will briefly outline the argument put forward in the first part of this work, the better to elucidate the second part presented here.