1. The loss of reason

At 4:30 p.m. on 11 September 2001, I began delivering a lecture at the Université de technologie de Compiègne in which I introduced the theme of the industry of cultural goods, formulated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1944 in a text that, in 1947, became the chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment entitled ‘The Culture Industry’.¹ Their chapter described a profound and dangerous transformation of Western societies, and the key part played in it by this new industry. Its rise, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, would be accompanied by a ‘new kind of barbarism’,² caused by the inversion of the Enlightenment project that had laid the foundations of modernity.³

On 11 September 2001, between 4:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., I began explaining to my students that the world that took shape after the Second World War, a world that took the ‘American way of life’ as its model, a world globally ‘rationalized’ and ‘Westernized’, was, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, actually in the course of losing its reason. I emphasized the remarkable foresight of these two German philosophers: taking refuge from Nazism in the United States, they saw this ‘new kind of barbarism’ emerging even before the end of the Second World War, first in New York, and then in California.⁴ I then drew their attention to the following three points:

• in 1997, fifty years after the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, it was estimated that the world contained one billion television sets;
• on 3 April 1997, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that the federal government would in 2006 shut off the analogue frequencies that were currently being used by 3,800 American radio and television stations, all of whom were advised to switch to digital by 2003;⁵
• in the spring of 1997, Craig Mundie, then a senior vice-president at Microsoft (a company represented on the board of the FCC), declared during a European visit that his company, which at that time dominated the information industry (now called the digital industry), would launch a bid to dominate the multimedia business, taking advantage of the opportunity presented by the convergence of information, media and telecommunications technologies.

2. From the slums of Temara to the presidency of the Université de technologie de Compiègne

On 11 September 2001, at around 5:30 p.m., I explained to my UTC students that the one billion television sets that existed in 1997 had grown to cover almost the entire population of the planet, and that programmes are often watched by millions of viewers simultaneously. I offered the example that in the late 1980s, in a slum lying between Temara and Skhirat, south of Rabat, I had seen a crowd of parents and children watching, on a big screen, programmes produced by a recently-privatized French network.

I then invited these engineering students to reflect on what might be going on in the minds of these thousands of people dwelling under scraps of cardboard, sheet metal and recycled materials, who had gathered together at primetime to listen to Patrick Sébastien pour forth his nonsense.⁶ I asked them what could have been going through the minds of these children and their parents deprived of just about everything, confronted with the images of showbiz politics, with omnipresent advertising and with the rapid rise of ‘trash TV’.

It was then that the frightened face of the UTC general secretary appeared at the entrance of the auditorium and shouted to me: ‘Come quickly, something unbelievable is happening!’ Astonished and annoyed, I broke off my lecture and followed Luc Ziegler into the office of the university president, François Peccoud, who, eyes riveted to the screen, was beholding Manhattan’s Twin Towers ablaze.

On 11 September 2001, between 5:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m., we watched these images in the president’s office, as people undoubtedly did in Temara – which, since my visit in the late 1980s, had seen the arrival of satellite dishes.

In February 2014, according to the Moroccan newspaper Le Matin, this slum was still home to 34,091 people.⁷

3. From Richard Durn to Jean-Marie Le Pen: primordial narcissism of the I and reason for living

Six months and sixteen days later, on 27 March 2002, Richard Durn, ‘an environmental activist, former member of the Socialist Party before joining the Greens […], and also an activist in the League of Human Rights’,⁸ murdered eight members of the Nanterre city council and wounded nineteen others. The following day he committed suicide by leaping from a window at the police station where he was being questioned. Less than a month later, on 21 April, Jean-Marie Le Pen finished ahead of Lionel Jospin in the first round of the presidential election. On 5 May, Jacques Chirac was elected with 82.21 per cent of the vote.

After 11 September 2001 and 21 April 2002, I delivered two lectures at Cerisy-la-Salle, in the framework of two seminars organized by Édith Heurgon and Josée Landrieu.⁹ In the first lecture, I tried to understand what was at stake in the 9/11 event, and in the second, to imagine what could have being going through Durn’s mind on 27 March 2002. I argued that in our ‘epoch’, which should be understood as the fulfilment of the new barbarism anticipated by Adorno and Horkheimer, what is occurring amounts to a murderous dis-articulation of the I and the we.

We have now also passed through the crisis of 2008, and this epoch has shown itself for what it is: the epoch of the absence of epoch, the meaning of which will be clarified in what follows.

In pointing out, during my second lecture at Cerisy and after 21 April, that, three weeks before the massacre, Durn had written of having ‘lost the feeling of existing’, I tried to show that the processes of psychic and collective individuation¹⁰ characteristic of the life of the mind and spirit have slowly but surely been wiped out by the culture industries, now exclusively operating in the service of the market and the organization of consumption, and that the export of this state of affairs around the world was clearly one of the key factors lying behind the growth of Al-Qaeda.

In France itself, this situation was firmly entrenched in 1986, when François Mitterrand allowed the privatization of television, giving Silvio Berlusconi and Jérôme Seydoux the licence to operate a network that would be named La Cinq. Jacques Chirac and François Léotard, who would later demand that the Hersant group acquire a stake in La Cinq, would soon after arrange the privatization of TF1.¹¹ In competition with M6, which also appeared in 1987, TF1 quickly began to enter the path of systematically drive-based television, while La Cinq, which failed, ceased broadcasting in 1992.¹²

In 2003, I turned these two lectures into a book.¹³ I dedicated it to those who voted for the National Front, and I argued that Durn had been stripped of his ‘primordial narcissism’ by a process of the same kind as that implemented by the industry of cultural goods, which, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, destroys what, in Critique of Pure Reason, Kant called the transcendental imagination.¹⁴

The destruction of primordial narcissism leads to madness, that is, to the loss of reason, and, more precisely, to the loss of this reason for living that creates and gives the feeling of existing. This is why I stated in the conclusion of that book:

Today, this explosion is imminent. All of us now know it and fear it, but also repress it and deny it, and we do so in order to continue living with dignity [dignement]. This is, however, something that can no longer be repressed: in the stage we have now entered, this becomes, precisely, unworthy [indigne], and literally cowardly.

4. A ‘new kind of barbarism’ and algorithmic governmentality

The FCC’s announcement on 3 April 1997, followed by Craig Mundie’s European tour, was the beginning of a federal policy that would completely reshape the American audiovisual industry, through a process of digitalization¹⁶ giving a brand new twist to this ‘new kind of barbarism’. This FCC policy – coming after the World Wide Web entered the public domain on 30 April 1993 through a decision (made by Europeans) that gave the internet a completely new and revolutionary dimension, and after the Clinton government had granted tax exemptions to a set of businesses that would go on to become the ‘giants’ of the web – created the conditions for the rise, in the United States, of an industry that would be fully digital.

In this way, a path was laid out for what would become a new American hegemony – embodied by the Big Four: Amazon (created in 1993), Google (1997), Facebook (2004) and Apple.¹⁷ Between 2007 and 2015, Apple sold 700 million iPhones, around which 900,000 ‘apps’ were developed for sale on the App Store. In 1996 I was appointed deputy director general of the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) in charge of the innovation department, that is, of research, production, training and publishing. I closely followed the developments that led to the emergence of Google, and recommended that the government build a new audiovisual policy focused on the web.¹⁸ My recommendation was ignored and I resigned from the INA in 1999.

By completely reconfiguring telecommunications, and thereby constituting reticular society, the integration of the analogue communication industries, journalism and the editorial function in general into the digital information industries – of which the 1997 FCC decision was the first step¹⁹ – continued and radicalized the process that Adorno and Horkheimer had analysed in 1944. But, at the same, this reconfiguration introduced absolutely new factors.

This absolute novelty is what Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy are trying to think today with the concept of algorithmic governmentality.²⁰ What is new is the systematic exploitation and physical reticulation of interindividual and transindividual relations – serving what is referred to today as the ‘data economy’, itself based on data-intensive computing, or ‘big data’, which has been presented as the ‘end of theory’.²¹ This amounts to the full realization of barbarism in Adorno and Horkheimer’s sense, but they could surely never have imagined how far this would extend onto the noetic plane.

Reticulated society is based on smartphones and other embedded mobile devices (chips, sensors, GPS tags, cars, televisions,²² watches, clothing and other prostheses), but also on new fixed and mobile terminals (urban territory becoming the infrastructure and architecture of constant mobility and constant connectivity). As such, it contains unprecedented powers of automation and computation: it is literally faster than lightning – digital information circulates on fibre-optic cables at up to two thirds of light speed, quicker, then, than Zeus’ lightning bolt, which travels at only 100 million metres per second (one third of the speed of light). Automatic and reticulated society thereby becomes the global cause of a colossal social disintegration.

The automatic power of reticulated disintegration extends across the face of the earth through a process that has recently become known as disruption. Digital reticulation penetrates, invades, parasitizes and ultimately destroys social relations at lightning speed, and, in so doing, neutralizes and annihilates them from within, by outstripping, overtaking and engulfing them. Systemically exploiting the network effect, this automatic nihilism sterilizes and destroys local culture and social life like a neutron bomb: what it dis-integrates,²³ it exploits, not only local equipment, infrastructure and heritage, abstracted from their socio-political regions and enlisted into the business models of the Big Four,²⁴ but also psychosocial energies – both of individuals and of groups – which, however, are thereby depleted.

These individuals and groups are thus transformed into data-providers, de-formed and re-formed by ‘social’ networks operating according to new protocols of association. In this way, they find themselves disindividuated: their own data [données], which also amounts to what we call (in the language of the Husserlian phenomenology of time) retentions,²⁵ enables them to be dispossessed of their own protentions²⁶ – that is, their own desires, expectations, volitions, will and so on.

5. Always too late

‘Desires, expectations, volitions, will and so on’: everything that for individuals forms the horizon of their future, constituted by their protentions, is outstripped, overtaken and progressively replaced by automatic protentions that are produced by intensive computing systems operating between one and four million times quicker than the nervous systems of psychic individuals.²⁷

Disruption moves quicker than any will, whether individual or collective, from consumers to ‘leaders’, whether political or economic.²⁸ Just as it overtakes individuals via digital doubles or profiles on the basis of which it satisfies ‘desires’ they have most likely never expressed – but which are in reality herd-like substitutes depriving individuals of their own existence by always preceding their will, at the same time emptying them of meaning, while feeding the business models of the data economy – so too disruption outstrips and overtakes social organizations, but the latter recognize this only after the fact: always too late.

Disruption renders will, wherever its source, obsolete in advance: it always arrives too late. What is thereby attained is an extreme stage of rationalization, forming a threshold, that is, a limit. What lies beyond this limit remains unknown: it destroys reason not only in the sense that rational knowledge finds itself eliminated by proletarianization, but in the sense that individuals and groups, losing the very possibility of existing (for their existence depends on being able to express their will), losing therefore all reason for living, become literally mad, and tend to despise life – their own and that of others. The result is the risk of a global social explosion consigning humanity to a nameless barbarism.

In the epoch of reticulated and automated disruption, the ‘new kind of barbarism’ induced by the loss of the feeling of existing no longer involves only isolated and suicidal individuals, whether Richard Durn or Andreas Lubitz, who crashed his passenger-laden aircraft into a mountain, or the suicidal perpetrators of 9/11. On 22 December 2014, Sébastien Sarron drove his van into a crowd at the Christmas market in Nantes. When reason is lost, all those technological powers that we hold in our hands as ‘civilizational progress’ become weapons of destruction through which this ‘civilization’ reveals the barbarism it contains. This is the key pharmacological question to be addressed in the epoch of disruption.²⁹

The loss of the feeling of existing, the loss of the possibility of expressing one’s will, the correlative loss of all reason for living and the subsequent loss of reason as such, a loss that Chris Anderson glorifies as the ‘end of theory’, are what now strike entire groups and entire countries – and it is for this reason that the far right is on the rise around the world, and especially in Europe, which, since the tragedy of Greece and the massacres in France, is undergoing significant deterioration.

But these losses also and especially strike an entire generation: that of Florian. Florian is the name of a young man of fifteen, whose statements were published in L’Effondrement du temps: