On the Amateur and the Critic and the Double Factoring of the Pandemic

This essay explores Bernard Stiegler’s reformulation of Kant’s aesthetics concerning his radical concept of the amateur vis-à-vis the critic. These conflicting agencies have staked out different modalities and forms of engagement and resistance against the broader historical background of what Stiegler calls the proletarianization of sensibility drawn from the experience of today’s algorithmic governance. COVID-19 has rendered this global technicalization of experience more insidious. Or, invoking Derrida, the grammatization of the subjects’ gestures and behavior, making their protentional capacity and their power to dream inoperable through pre-selected aprioris for social consumption, or worse, biopolitical control. Stiegler identifies the radical promise of exposing this techno-determinism with the amateur's unprincipledness, whose non-conformism, compared to the critic, the conventional expert, draws more from the autonomous function of art. In this context, the amateur aligns herself with the worker in terms of their capacity to dis-individuate from the manifold, leading to a common approach to the pharmacology of the Spirit. Pharmacology stands for the relative plasticity of a specific historical time, not without the pathogen that troubles its metastability – its openness to critique. Nonetheless, the task of unraveling this pathogenic content can no longer be assigned to the critical subject of reason © 2021 Virgilio A. Rivas