Pieter Lemmens

‘The art of living with ICTs ’ today not only means finding new ways to cope, interact and create new lifestyles on the basis of the new digital technologies individually, as ‘consumer-citizens’. It also means inventing new modes of living, producing and, not in the least place, struggling collectively, as workers and producers. As the so-called digital revolution unfolds in the context of a neoliberal cognitive and consumerist capitalism, its ‘innovations’ are predominantly employed to modulate and control both production processes and consumer behavior in view of the overall goal of extracting surplus value. Today, the digital networks overwhelmingly destroy social autonomy, instead engendering increasing social heteronomy and proletarianization. Yet it is these very networks themselves, as technical pharmaka in the sense of French ‘technophilosopher’ Bernard Stiegler, that can be employed as no other to struggle against this tendency. This paper briefly explores this possibility by reflecting upon current diagnoses of our ‘technological situation’ by some exemplary post-operaist Marxists from a Stieglerian, pharmacological perspective.

This article deals with the biotechnology revolution in agriculture and analyzes it in terms of Bernard Stiegler’s theory of techno-evolution and his thesis that technologies have an intrinsically pharmacological nature, meaning that they can be both supportive and destructive for sociotechnical practices based on them. Technological innovations always first disrupt existing sociotechnical practices, but are subsequently always appropriated by the social system to be turned into a new technical system upon which new sociotechnical practices are based. As constituted and conditioned by a technical system, human cultures are necessarily systems of care. Humans take care of themselves and the world through technologies. Agriculture is a very old system of care, stable for more than 10,000 years, but at the moment it is experiencing a profound rupture thanks to the invention of genetic engineering technologies, that promise to revolutionize it. However, their current deployment under capitalist conditions everywhere leads to processes of proletarianization, due to the fact that they enable the expropriation of farmers of the means of production, depriving them of the possibility of appropriating these new technologies and frustrating the invention of a new agricultural system of care. This has lead to a widespread rejection of the new technologies, which is a grave error though, as these technologies can become the basis of a new system of care. But only under the condition that they are wrought from corporate control and redeployed instead to initiate a process of deproletarianization. It is argued that current initiatives in open source and commons-based biotech are probably the most promising harbingers of such a process of deproletarianization

In 1999, Peter Sloterdijk gave a lecture on the future of humanism in which he 'unmasked' it as part of the ongoing process of self-domestication of the human animal by way of literary media, and speculated that, taking account of the steady decline of literary Bildung in our technocultures, genetic engineering might one day become the key anthropo-technology for the further domestication of mankind. This lecture evoked much controversy, especially in Germany, where Sloterdijk was accused by some journalists of having dangerous, nazi-eugenic sympathies, promoting the breeding of a new Herrenrasse. In this article, the author wants to show that these accusations are unjustified by putting his lecture in its proper context: Sloterdijk's project of a new, radical-historical anthropology. Sloterdijk develops there a view on the 'humanity of man' as the product of a biocultural process of self-domestication of our proto-hominid ancestors. It is this para-natural evolutionary process, that has taken place within self-enclosed, selfmade 'spheres' under the influence of operative and symbolic 'anthropo-technologies', which, according to Sloterdijk, should guide our thinking on the possible uses of biotechnology on humans. Only when we know what homo sapiens in fact is, i.e., only when we know how he was made, can we meaningfully begin to think about his possible alteration through genetic engineering. Also discussed is Sloterdijk's characterization of biotechnology as a homeotechnology