poststructuralistvibes

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"This capturing and harnessing of libido can only be realized through a standardization of libidinal fluxes and flows, which is necessarily a *destruction* of these flows." - Stiegler.

My take: he"s referencing monetization of pleasure here (not necessarily just sex but any kind of enjoyment) and the scientific management/ assembly-line method that has made us so efficient in mass-producing cheap products bleeds over to what we actually want. If humans all want different things to give them pleasure, it's harder to monetize because each deviation has to be produced on a small scale, like the difference between staying in a family owned guesthouse vs. a Hyatt. There's a tide that pushes us towards the standardized pleasures because they're cheaper and easier for capitalism to produce. Not a conspiracy- it can happen without anyone planning it because all they're doing is following a common-sense monetary incentive. Example: pretend for a moment you have money to invest. If you're building an investment portfolio do you put your money in a large established company with a history or a small unproven one with a unique concept? Maybe a few of the latter, but if you're looking to have a solid footing in capitalism you'll use the former as your mainstays. Congrats, you just further standardized the libidinal economy.

Regarding the destruction piece, Stiegler goes on to point out "reason is reduced to a *ratio* no longer able to produce any motive: it has become irrational. "

If you're told what to want, you don't make a decision about it anymore. Can you truly then be considered to want that thing? No thought process, no emotional or physical will originating from you had any effect on the outcome. So the libidinal flow is destroyed. This is great for capitalism because they have a guaranteed predictable behavior they can account for to accurately predict what they need to produce.

Shoshanna Zuboff (Surveillance Capitalism) has a lot to say on the topic of behavioral modification for guaranteed outcomes, and the resulting destruction of free will.

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"What in France one calls the 'cultural exception' is the cloak concealing the depth of these questions." I guess he's talking about this:

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"Today, however, the function of the culture and programming industries is to take control of these processes constituting collective secondary retentions. [...] that is, to make every bit of collective secondary protention submit to the interests of investment. " -Bernard Stiegler

Collective secondary protention is a dense phrase. He takes a few pages to introduce and describe the concept, and I'm not going to pretend I fully understand it. That's why I do vibes and not essays or criticism. What I get from this is essentially commercial interests have slotted themselves into the niche where culture, values, and collective memory might have previously prevailed. On top of that foundational cultural starting point we still have our free will and our individual choices - Stiegler is not saying we're brainwashed - but I believe by secondary protention he means our underlying, nigh invisible assumptions about the world and how it works. As children, we might a few thousand years ago have learned more of those from our family, a few hundred years ago perhaps more from the church, and now perhaps more from youtube ads.

A nuance, for those into that kind of thing: what of those with families whose underlying culture and values are more detrimental or less healthy than those presented by the culture-industry substitutes? And of course, who decides what's more detrimental or less? (Hopefully you decide it for yourself). My point is it seems pretty important to have variety in one's diet when it comes to worldviews just as with everything else - and no, that's not meant to be an argument for centrism or for treating all opinions as being of equal value.

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Just as workers who submit to serving the mechanical tool lose their savoir-faire, and, through that, their individuality, finding themselves thereby reduced to the condition of the proletariat, so too consumers have today become standardized in their behaviors by the formatting and artificial fabrication of their desires they lose their savoir-vivre, that is, their possibilities of existence. - Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies

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Political laziness, laziness of the spirit and 'leisure society' ooh, I think I'm going to like this section

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Stiegler: ideas in general, and not only the idea of justice, whatever these ideas may be, do not exist: they are only made to consist.

Terry Pratchett: show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy [...] but people have got to believe that, or what's the point

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Consumerization as the next level of proletarianization. This speaks to me. It is still on the grammatization theme I think. You don't get to create, discover, explore, decide what you love. You get presented with a set of choices, the same choices as everyone else gets, then you pick one. Experiences as much predesigned as possible to avoid the unaccounted for. If it doesn't seem like enough? Better try to earn more dough so you can get the more expensive and therefore more unique small batch version. Fuck this I'm going to the neighbor's yard sale.

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Grammatization: a term that does a lot of heavy lifting and feels a bit buzz-wordy on the tongue, I have love-hate relationships with these types of terms that attempt to explain something there aren't other expressions for but do it in a way that's obtuse and can lead to someone just pretentiously using a big word to sound smart. What does it mean? I'm probably not smart enough to figure it out. But since any bum can have opinions online, it looks to me like it means taking things that had infinite possibilities and putting them on rails. Example: before grammatization you're an artist who creates unique works of weaving, and after grammatization you're a worker bee who pulls the lever to run the mechanical loom producing 20 identical shirts at once with pre-programmed shape, color, and size. But grammatization applies to other things. Before grammatization your life is for living. After, each second spent not earning money is wasted (Ben Franklin) because we cannot quantify limitless numinous qualitative potential, so being unquantifiable it must be worth nothing. We could write a journal of our own volition to turn our thoughts over in our heads and truly contemplate and understand things, but now we can have reproduced printed works of the words of numerous wise men - Jesus Himself even - so we should just read those, our own little thoughts don't matter so much. Of course all these examples are things that have surfaced in today's world as self-care, hobbies, living a good life. We craft things, make journals, practice mindfulness - but it's like a side thing, something you do when all the "important" stuff is done, something that isn't supposed to matter much except to you personally. This is the disconnect Stiegler seems to be drawing attention to here - grammatization seems to be articulating how we as a society have moved in such a quantitative direction that intangible value is pushed aside, leaving us with a vague sense of guilt, of smallness, of the tawdry and lurid, or at best of self-indulgence - if we dare to embrace something that does not directly impact and optimize some statistical number. A beloved character with a heart-wrenching story doesn't matter unless merchandise of them can be sold, a trip abroad should be treated as a refreshing vacation so you can come back and work harder (a sabbatical is unheard of!), a walk among beautiful trees and flowers only has value as exercise for the body - or if the beauty is considered it's only in terms of boosting your mental health so you can focus better - etc. It's not that we don't do these numinous fun senseless things, it's that everything in our society is built to either harness them for profit, or minimize them as useless. Their intrinsic value to us - our own intrinsic value of existence - is considered trash, excess, fluff, pointless. Pointless for whom?

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The third industrial revolution must be cultural, Bernard Stiegler wrote this in 2004. Where the FUCK were we?