Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual Bionote: Ekin Erkan is a Turkish post-continental philosopher and media theorist living in New York City, notable for developing Bernard Stiegler's work on "anti-entropy" and "psychopolitics," as well as their long-term research on François Laruelle's non-standard philosophy. Erkan's work examines the collective closure between neural networks, predictive processing, and perceptual faculties as they relate to machine intelligence and algorithmic governmentality. Erkan studied Film and Media as a graduate student and has a background in both analytic and continental philosophy. Erkan is currently a researcher with Bernard Stiegler and other researchers associated with the Institut de recherche et d'innovation, working on an ecological memorandum constructed on collective learning called Internation.World. Erkan is also pursuing postgraduate studies in Critical Philosophy at The New Centre for Research and Practice, researching under the tutelage of Reza Negarestani. Erkan is also a columnist and critic at the art and literature journal AEQAI, publishing monthly contributions on contemporary art and intermedia. Erkan's work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Cultural Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Chiasma: A Site for Thought, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Labyrinth: An International Journal for Philosophy, Value Theory and Sociocultural Hermeneutics, Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice, and Media Theory. The New Center for Research and Practice ee2447@columbia.edu Abstract: Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRiviére's article "Compression in Philosophy" seeks to pose François Laruelle's engagement with metaphysics against Bernard Stiegler's epistemological rendering of idealism. Identifying Laruelle as the theorist of genericity, through which mankind and the world are identified through an index of "opacity," the authors argue that Laruelle does away with all deleterious philosophical "data." Laruelle's generic immanence is posed against Stiegler's process of retention and discretization, as Galloway and LaRiviére argue that Stiegler's philosophy seeks to reveal an enchanted natural world through the development of noesis. By further developing Laruelle and Stiegler's Marxian projects, I seek to demonstrate the limits of this vantage of "compression." In turn, I also seek to create further bricolage between Laruelle and Stiegler while also further elaborating on their distinct engagement(s) with Marx, offering the mold of synthesis as an alternative to compression when considering Stiegler's work on transindividuation. In turn, this paper seeks to survey some of the contemporary theorists drawing from Stiegler (Yuk Hui, Alexander Wilson and Daniel Ross) and Laruelle (Anne-Françoise Schmidt, Gilles Grelet, Ray Brassier, Katerina Kolozova, John Ó Maoilearca and Jonathan Fardy) to examine political discourse regarding the posthuman and non-human, with a particular interest in Kolozova's unified theory of standard philosophy and Capital. Keywords: Laruelle, Stiegler, Deleuze, immanence, transcendental, idealism Introduction to Non-Marxism Within the nexus of contemporary philosophers who prioritize immanence Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Tristan Garcia, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, and Roberto Esposito there remains a certain tendency to retain the univocity of Spinoza, often filtered through the Deleuzian aperture of generic multiplicity. Consequently, these contemporaneous philosophers articulate immanence vis-à-vis the individual modes of material and political life as expressions of the same substance. This metaphysical typology of abstraction can be traced back to German idealism's emphasis on the relationship between cognition and deduction. Epitomized by Kant's "transcendental decision," or the ability to draw universal claims from particulars as the "engine" for ontogenesis, the transcendental configuration's confluence between Identity and Difference is rooted in Plato's breakage from Parmenides. Surveying the contemporary philosophical topology, we see that even in Meillassoux's arche-fossil sci49 Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol.16, No.1-2 / 2019 entific ontology where matter can be traced back to a primordial ontological order that emphatically discards the necessity of Kantian "correlationism" the ahistorical reliance on mathematics as an empty sign results in a series of philosophical "blind spots," with the most marked political predicament being a poverty towards the modes of production. In François Laruelle's "non-standard" philosophical method, however, we find something altogether more radical: an absolutely singular withdrawal from the metaphysical precept that separates the world into (often paradoxical) binarisms. Laruelle's method altogether rejects Being, described by Heidegger as the foundation for philosophy's "standard model" (Ereignis). In its univocity, Laruelle's immanence of the "One" radicalizes Spinoza's substance-monism of the mind; in turn, Laruelle's non-standard philosophical method challenges the Kantian thesis, whereby mind is not a "mirror" of the world, but, instead, mediates and restructures the passage of phenomena vis-à-vis its own internal structure. For Laruelle, the "Real as One" precedes the philosophical decision, as the Real is foreclosed to epistemic access. Therefore, philosophy is aligned with both "fictionalization" and fractured synthesis, as it cannot adequately conceptualize the univocity of the superposition of the Real without dividing it along terms of intelligibility Identity and Difference. Unlike the diffracted multiplicity of Deleuzian immanence, within Laruelle's plane of the Real, the "One," immanent to itself, cannot be divided (into the "two," or the riven relationship) it is solely on the plane of the transcendental that the Real can be divisible. The consequence of the Kantian transcendental decision, which Laruelle terms the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy, is that cognition is directed by the noumenal Real, which is removed from any possibility of cognition. Thus, under Kant's system and those of neo-Kantians such as Carnap, Sellers, Gadamer, Heidegger, and Reichenbach the "real world" is substantiated as "unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable."1 It is through cognition that the Kantian transcendental exacts its cardinal reign upon empirical knowledge, thereby predetermining the conditions of possibility. Following Laruelle, however, there is an idealist ideology that besmirches the Philosophical Decision, as it seeks to discover that 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. by R. J. Hollindale (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 20. which "is determinant of the Real"2 and, consequently, "hallucinates" material-idealist instantiations of the Real. Laruelle does not castigate the impulse of decisionism prima facie but, instead, uses non-philosophy to forward a pure decisionism that deters from making determinate distinctions regarding the uncovering of the Real. Thus, the "'principle' of non-Marxism is that theory contains an essential part of decisions, rightfully axiomatic (and) transcendental ... determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real."3 Laruelle's non-Marxism is an affront to the economy of transcendence that begins with Plato's Being (psychophysical/immaterial essence) and eidetic intelligibility (formal/material causation). Therefore, Laruelle's Real is idempotent. In Introduction to Non-Marxism, Laruelle demonstrates how thought submits to the Real (while not transforming it into a philosophical truth), describing how "capital in the totality of its philosophical functioning" produces an "economico-philosophical mixture" that concentrates and binds transcendence with "'alienation.'"4 For Laruelle, "[t]hat which Marx denounces as fetishism after a, perhaps, incomplete analysis of philosophy itself" can be projected "beyond the market," for "there is an over-fetishism which is not specially 'theological,' but is that of the philosophical."5 Drawing from Laruelle and further developing this position, philosopher Katerina Kolozova distinguishes the relationship between standard philosophy and capital, as they both operate through the acquisitive domain of appropriating materials. This position, of a unified theory of Capital and standard philosophy, was originally stoked by Gilles Grelet's work on "Proletarian Gnosis"6 but truly formulated by Katerina Kolozova in particular (and, subsequently, adopted by Laruellean scholars such as Jonathan Fardy). In Capitalism's Holocaust of Animals (2019), Kolozova describes the practice of the totality of "philosophical functioning" or "standard philosophy" as homologous to the ethos of capital. It is according to this account regarding the constitution of empirical mastery that Laruelle's Marxist verge reveals itself as a kind of "non-standard" critique, whereby non-philosophy is not mere2 François Laruelle, Introduction to Generic Sciences, trans. by Jeremy R. Smith (2019), 9. 3 François Laruelle, Introduction to Non-Marxism, trans. by Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, 2014), 85. 4 Ibid., 9. 5 Laruelle, Generic Sciences, 7. 6 Gilles Grelet, "Proletarian Gnosis," trans. by Anthony Paul Smith, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2014), 93-98. 50 Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual ly directed towards the dominion of the transcendental decision's relativization of the a priori, but, in turn, towards how philosophy has trans-historically constituted its own terms of capitalist alterity, "proper to mastery."7 In comparison to traditional Marxism, Laruelle's non-Marxist formulation is grounded by the principle of physicality being independent from representations therefore, "[t]he real is given in essentially passive experiences, and cannot ground a metaphysical and political activism or voluntarism [....] The real is not a vague instance, the jewel of ideology; it is 'individual' experiences."8 In Laruelle's "non-Marxist" system, humanity is conceived of as an "identity-in-the-last-instance," and as "one amongst many," through which the human becomes central, "as a category of contingency rather than an Absolute."9 In response to philosophy's possessive acquisition of the Real via its ethics of decisionism, Laruelle's ethico-political praxis emancipates raw materials and exchange-based economic practices from Standard Philosophy's possessive domination. Thus, contra Meillassoux and other speculative realists' flat ontologizing (e.g., Ian Hamilton Grant's generative program of emergence, whereby "speculation is entailed by natural productivity"),10 Laruelle's system is radical specifically because it is fundamentally materialist and historical. Following Marx's materialist formalism, within Laruelle's "Non-Marxist triptych"11 we can visually map the identification of "[s]pecific causality in class struggle" with the "empirical world" and the "ontological existentiality of terrestriality."12 In turn, Laruelle emancipates Marx from Marxism, unconfounding man from the subject (anthropos) and, thereby, establishes a unilateralizing presupposition of genericity. As we will further demonstrate by way of Katerina Kolozova and John Ó Maoilearca's contemporaneous work on Laruelle, this proves to be a most promising non-Marxist position for further 7 François Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy, trans. by Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, 2012), 239. 8 François Laruelle, A Biography of Ordinary Man, trans. by Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 144. 9 Katerina Kolozova, Capitalism's Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 139. 10 Ian Hamilton Grant, "Presentation by Ian Hamilton Grant," Collapse, Vol. III: Unknown Deleuze [+Speculative Realism], ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), 343. 11 François Laruelle, Tetralogos: Un opéra de philosophies (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2019), 195. 12 Anne-Françoise Schmid, "The Tryptychs of Non-Philosophy," trans. by Joevenn Neo, paper presented at the conference "François Laruelle and Non-Standard Philosophy: The Path of Least Resistance" (Bruxelles: Maison des Sciences Humaines of the Université libre de Bruxelles, February 8-9, 2019). establishing an alternative to not only anti-humanism but also posthumanist/transhumanist discourse, proffering the non-human as the "science of man more universal than all philosophy."13 However, prior to this undertaking, I will further distinguish Laruelle's utopian non-Marxism alongside Bernard Stiegler's markedly communal and exchange-based project, which is carved along lines of epistemophilia and transindividuation. Rather than merely accentuate the distinction between the two philosophers, which I posit as purely methodological, I will seek to create propinquity between Stiegler and Laruelle by way of their political philosophies. With the exception of Alexander Galloway and Jason Lariviere's work on "philosophical compression"14 a project that seeks to set the two philosophers as entirely non-compliant and a sentence in Ian James' The Techniques of Thought,15 this endeavor has, hitherto, gone unendeavored. Bridging Laruelle and Stiegler Stiegler's engagement with the material conditions of contingency is related to the political embodiment of public powerlessness by way of the cosmological dimension of noesis, or the intellectual faculty of imagining alternative material world-conditions 13 François Laruelle, Théorie des étrangers: Science des hommes, démocratie, non-psychanalyse (Paris: Kimé, 1995), 110. 14 In Alexander Galloway and Jason Lariviere's work on philosophical compression, the authors delineate two distinct forms of metaphysical compression: "abstract compression" and "generic compression." They begin by examining the use of compression and decompression in media artefacts as it applies to informational richness or loss but seek to modify compression to examine how metaphysics recasts "philosophy as a kind of media theory." They define "abstract compression," which applies to Stiegler, as a philosophical position in which "compression is an undesirable by-product of the metaphysical contract." Galloway and Lariviere describe "generic compression" as a "slightly different position in which compression is a positive tactic of material indifference," with Laruelle's non-philosophy identified with "signal-processing," whereby immanence eliminates all superfluous "philosophical data." While both kinds of compression describe the deletion of "something, be it formal, material, auric, or essential," both modes apply deletion to distinct registers. The authors further qualify that while "abstract compression" assumes that "real phenomena appear as selective deletions of a superlative nature," "generic compression reveals the basic insufficiency and indistinction of the real phenomena of everyday life." Throughout the paper, I retain this vantage of compression, with "decompression" understood as a reversal of this deletion/discretization process, but also challenge the eliminative terms of this model chiefly that this description neither accounts for what becomes of "deleted" information nor for the generative or reproductive recursivity of the discretization process. See Jason Lariviere and Alexander Galloway, "Compression in Philosophy," boundary 2, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2017), 127-28. 15 James states that "the image of philosophy that Stiegler presents also, as it does with Laruelle, implies a thorough rethinking of the conditions of knowledge and a concomitant questioning of the distribution and interrelation of different modes of knowledge." See Ian James, The Techniques of Thought: Nancy, Laruelle, Malabou, and Stiegler after Naturalism (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 42. 51 Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol.16, No.1-2 / 2019 as it relates to technics. In order to better understand Stiegler's Marxism, which is explicitly concerned with today's capitalist subject, we must historically situate it alongside a tripartite mold. If, following the traditional Marxian framework, the subject (or "victim") of the first form of capitalist "proletarianization" was the producer then, in particular, it was epitomized by the industrial worker. If we consider virtualization as a topological configuration, then this moment was also accompanied by spatial privatization, as the means of work was configured via the factory, a "giant industrial 'workhouse,'" so disparate from other spaces of confluence that it was identified as a "House of Terror."16 Distinguished by the Decade of Prosperity and post-World War II economic expansion, the second epoch of proletarianization primarily concerned the consumer and, in particular, those members of the middle class who flocked to retail areas - "the department store and the supermarket, then the shopping center and the online retailer."17 The third moment, of "generalized proletarianization," colors today's epoch and is characterized by mass propagation, the rise of the amateur's unwittingly performed digital/immaterial cognitive labor and diffracted spatio-geographical distinction, such that this labor seeps into all annals of everyday life. Following the "first moment" railway networks/the steam engine and the "second" Taylor-Fordism, the oil and car industry this "third industrial revolution" is, specifically, that of the financialization of society and debt, the rise of cognitive capitalism and the information economy, which is often termed post-Fordism. Unlike the first two moments, "generalized proletarianization" does not demonstrate any radical historical breakage, but, instead, is better defined by the hybridization with, and intensification of, the previous two socio-historical modes. In his most recent work, Stiegler is particularly interested in digitality and "generalized proletarianization," or immaterial cognitive labor which he terms "psychopower" or "neuropower" as it is often performed on the internet, by way of metadata collection and self-annotating data aggregation by the "Internet of Things" (e.g., GPS tags, "smartwatches," mobile phones, embedded home automa16 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1999), 171. 17 Benoît Dillet, "Proletarianization, Deproletarianization, and the Rise of the Amateur," boundary 2, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2017), 86. tion systems). This widening of materiality, whereby "generalized proletarianization" is induced by our asymptotic movement towards transhumanism, captures the bind of φιλία (philia) and savoir-faire (or "know-how") under capitalism's ludic conditioning. Thus, this is why Lariviere and Galloway regard Stiegler as the philosopher of "decompression" par excellence Stiegler's understanding of capitalism, today, is in terms of the informatic compression of thought, nature and technology, with Stiegler's means of transcendence as determined through psychic individuation (decompression). This is cyclic, as the "decompression of consciousness through engagement with mnemotechnical devices" finds itself followed by an aporetic "[e]xpansion via psychic individuation," which "occurs, only to be reexteriorized, grammatized, and disindividuated again."18 However, here, too, we see a bridge between Stiegler and Laruelle's non-Marxism in Laruelle's non-Marxist system, the labor of the cognitariat falls within the domain of materialism, as "materialism is a style of identity" incorporating that which is "sensible and intuitive without practice," "practice without matter," and "material without form."19 Standard philosophy is exploitive through the exchange-based economy of acquisition. Since non-Marxism relates to immaterial cognitive labor, it is perhaps most lucidly exemplified in the realm of art. As Jonathan Fardy demonstrates, there is a distinct intersection between Laruellian non-aesthetics (which demonstrates how ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy is irreducible to any one of these categories) and non-Marxism via the labor of art. With "standard aesthetics" we see how art appropriates and extracts a "surplus value" in "the form of an increase in the cultural capital of standard philosophy."20 The labor of art its sensuous and intellectual (immaterial) work is exploited when it is turned into a subject of philosophy, which is diffracted, or "generalized," through the art-object's cultural reticulation, exacerbated by online circuits, whereby this perceptual-cognitive labor is generalized. Consequently, we can see how Stiegler's "generalized proletarianization" is undoubtedly concerned with the very same notion of philosophically-determined labor that is the object of Laruelle's non-Marxist conception of materiality. 18 Lariviere and Galloway, "Compression," 128-29. 19 Laruelle, Non-Marxism, 114. 20 Jonathan Fardy, Laruelle and Art: The Aesthetics of Non-Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 95. 52 Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual As Stiegler examines "generalization" as a consequence of becoming-subject vis-à-vis digitality, Kolozova and other Laruellian scholars' unified theory of philosophy and Capital is similarly concerned with "generalization." Ray Brassier associates Laruelle's "generalization" with the "radicalization" of entity and unity, or the "de-objectification" and "de-phenomenologization" of the singular through non-thetic universality. This allows for Laruelle to effect a "transcendental universalization of materialism," severing the idealist presumption of a link between entity and unity whether it be phonological, apperceptive, apophantic or apophatic by underdetermining empiricity.21 Thus, Stiegler and Laruelle both arrive at an immanently theoretical mode of phenomenality. Stiegler and Geistig: The Transdividual Considered As we closely examined Laruelle's non-philosophy and non-Marxism, let us, similarly, meticulously analyze Stiegler's work on transdividuation and its metaphysical suppositions. While Lariviere and Galloway use Stiegler's work to demonstrate "compression" and "decompression" as "two ways of defining representation,"22 they systematize Stiegler's process between dividuation and individuation as cyclic and exchange-driven. However, we can use synthesis as an alternative model to describe the recursive materialization of memory and material habit which is socialized as the integral element that eludes Lariviere and Galloway's critique. For Stiegler, material habit is a critical formation informing nature and all biological living systems but, also, some nonliving artefactual/technical systems that have a prosthetic relationship with organicity. This is why, according to Stiegler (though most clearly articulated by his protégée, Alexander Wilson), "material habit formation... is already protomnemotechnical."23 Following this functionalist and materialist account, habituation is what constitutes our experience of temporality as the accumulation and exteriorization of knowledge, with "knowledge" understood as the pre-exteriorized characteristic of technology.24 21 Ray Brassier, "Behold the Non-Rabbit: Kant, Quine, Laruelle," Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 12 (2001), 52. 22 Lariviere and Galloway, "Compression," 127. 23 Alexander Wilson, Aesthesis and Perceptronium: On the Entanglement of Sensation, Cognition, and Matter (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 151. 24 This is, also, quite similar to the position posed by Donna Haraway's oft-paraphrased claim that we have always been cyborgs, as materiality cannot be apportioned from the automaton of sense-production and signification. In a recent interview with Hari Kunzru, Haraway specified Drawing from Deleuze's "control society,"25 for Stiegler our epochal turn towards "dividuation" reduces the subject to data-capture, or total datafication, resulting in the ruination of both identity and collective bonds. Conceiving of a new era of "hyper-control," Stiegler has coined "psychopower," or "neuropower," as a more subtle and severe form of operational control than biopower, as it results in the destruction of libidinal energy alongside psychic and collective bonds. The "dividual" allots for projective derivation and, thus, introduces non-arbitrary subsidiary interpolation, consequently instrumentalized for extrapolation.26 In contrast to "dividuation," "individuation" is normatively positive as it permits for the discovery of subjectivity through collective bonds and contributory politics.27 For Stiegler, within our digital milieu, the possibility of collective individuation, or transindividuation, is formalized by the participatory horizon of existential protentional thought via creative constraints: with a marked interest in epistemophilia and the commons, Stiegler poses that certain kinds of technologically-directed "confrontations" can be hermeneutically staged, as it is φιλία that prompts the unconscious process of "becoming-produced" through assemblages and circuits. Qua Simondon, Stiegler's transindividual is psychosocial, for it is within our technical-artefactual "reality that the individuated being transports with him, this charge of being for future individuations."28 Transindividual memory transits across individuals and that we have not always been cyborgs, however, and that this is, in fact, historically situated: "the cyborg is not about all possible relationships between humans and technology it is in fact a very specifically historically located figure and practice and embodiment and form of hybridity between human beings and other kinds of actors, both machinic and animal and each other." However, as Katerina Kolozova demonstrates, and through both Stiegler and Laruelle, we can better illuminate how the issue of materiality and unification can still be understood trans-historically while emphasizing that these conditions have been exacerbated through industrialization. See Hari Kunzru, "Donna Haraway Interview Transcript (1996)," Hari Kunzru's Website (May 14, 2009). www.harikunzru.com/donna-haraway-interview-transcript-1996; see also Kolozova, Holocaust of Animals, 70. 25 Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control," in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 177-82. 26 As metadata is collected, it is structured into a ternate model: descriptive (keywords), structural (content) and administrative (file type/creation date). Metadata subtly determines one's online profiling, marketing, search engine optimization, and dynamically structured content, retrofitting a purposive world view. 27 "The heart of the contributory economy... also becomes the condition of transindividuation as the realization of a political noesis establishing a new epoch of political debate, giving rise to the emergence of new psychosocial individuations of citizenship and defining new democratic and republican rules and laws." Bernard Stiegler, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 195. 28 David Scott, Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Pres, 2014), 139. 53 Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol.16, No.1-2 / 2019 generations, engaging within the cross-generational social sphere of protosocial non-verbal encoding: it is this synthesis and its relationship with the transduction between the subject's elementary "vital" force and the collective that can serve as an alternative to Lariviere and Galloway's "decompression." While Lariviere and Galloway describe how Stiegler's conception of ludic capitalism, "in its current 'cognitive' or 'informatic' iteration, has compressed life itself in a way that is extremely lossy,"29 the aperture of synthesis provides for the unity of both loss and generation as not simply cyclic but, instead, also oriented alongside a historical continuum, disenthralling the experiencing subject from epistemic access to the full circuitry of their technical reality. While conceding to the Hegelian influence of reflexivity, through this vantage of Stiegler we can postulate the trans-historical processes of technicity in tandem with alienation we have always been cyborgs, albeit not always phenomenologically aware of it, as we previously considered ourselves more "in control" of our cyborg-ization. Stiegler's is an analysis of metaphysical interaction as it applies to the "concrete-abstract" conjugation defined by materiality as it is relationally conceived; Stiegler confronts what Brassier terms the challenge for materialism, by acknowledging the reality of abstraction (via technics) without conceding to the idealism that reality possesses "irreducible conceptual form."30 It is not that reality takes the form of technical artefacts Stiegler's materialism does not hypostatize a particular formal constitution of reality but instead that the artefactually-bound process of technesis gives a description of labor's subsumption through the logicization of social reality by value-form. Lariviere and Galloway's alternative model, the exchange between "compression" and "decompression," neglects the development of infinitude that informs the entirety of Stiegler's work on transindividuation, as it identifies proletarianization with a process of de-grammatization whereby φιλία and savoir-faire are neatly extricated, rather than further subsumed and synthesized within the circuit(s) of automatization that constitutes our post-biological "surplus of life."31 Stiegler's Marxian stance is an objective critique that 29 Lariviere and Galloway, "Compression," 131. 30 Ray Brassier, "Wandering Abstraction," Mute (February 13, 2014). www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction. 31 Stiegler's synthesis is more akin to Marx than Hegel, as, denuded of spiritual negation, technical life bears a constitutive "surplus" that extends beyond biological or teleologically-deoperates in advancing what Hegel saw as the exteriorization of the Spirit through geistig,32 which amounts to an "exo-psychic discernment"33 of discrete material elements. As Stiegler notes, he modulates Hegel's system by introducing an indissoluble play - "elements are discretized through the exteriorization and reproduction of living flows that is grammatization whether of bodily movements, gestures, speech, images, calculations or dreams."34 The imperishable endurance of these vestiges indicates something quite distinct from "individuation understood as an uncompressed process of becoming"35 because it also deals with their socialized synthesis. Further related to Hegel's grand synthesis of absolute knowledge under world spirit is Stiegler's concept of noetic dreaming, or the inspiration of the intellectual imagination that cannot be realized materially but subsists as an idea (and "[i]t is for that reason that it is a dream").36 We can consolidate Stiegler's nexus of "anti-entropy" or, as it is ecologically structured, "the Neganthropocene" as the ideal index of pure becoming in Hegel's pragmatic "world spirit" (weltgeist), which serves as a sociohistorical asymptote. Consequently, we see how Stiegler's conception of technics engages with Hegelian synthesis by countering entropic loss through idealist becoming negentropy is articulated through shared potentiality. Proceeding after philosophers of technology and general organology (such as Ernst Kapp and Georges Canguilhem), Stiegler identifies exosomatization (or the externalization of noesis) with Hegel: As Hegel taught in the nineteenth century at the moment when exosomatization suddenly accelerated into machinic becoming (the first steam termined ends but, also, circumvents the fallacy of Kant's noumenon (whereby there exists some radical "outsidedness" that cannot be recounted, as it is made artefactually manifest in Stiegler's system). 32 In place of "geistig," Stiegler uses noesis and trans-individuation to account for a functionalist and deprivatized account of mind; Stiegler's logic of externalization vis-à-vis technological supplement is based on synthesis with the World through socialization. Thus, Stiegler's identification of socialization with noesis maps on quite adeptly to Reza Negarestani's neo-rationalist account of Intelligence as socialized geistig. See Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019). 33 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 240. 34 Ibid. 35 Lariviere and Galloway, "Compression," 131. 36 Bernard Stiegler, The Automatic Society 1: The Future of Work, trans. by Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 427. 54 Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual engine arriving in Berlin in 1795), thereby inaugurating the Anthropocene era the life of the mind is the life of its exteriorization. Through exteriorization, the mind enters into a contradiction with itself that Hegel believed to be dialectical, leading to the great synthesis of absolute knowledge through which it would regain peace with itself.37 If Schelling's Naturphilosophie is a precursor to biological organicism, as Yuk Hui demonstrates,38 Hegel's determinate logic of becoming anticipates the machinic organicism of cybernetics second order cybernetics to be specific. For Hegel, nature is an "object of observing reason from the outset,"39 whereas for Schelling, nature is pre-consciously sensed and detected prior to becoming an object of reflection. Unlike Schelling's emphasis on an external force's giving form to nature's production, Hegel's departure from preformation towards immanent negativity re-introduces contingency into the system of nature. We can map this onto second-order cybernetics quite neatly as, for Hegel, there are two forms of contingency: 1) chaotic nature; 2) the logical category (of being). Following Stiegler, after the introducing of the steam engine, capitalism has become associated with revealing the materially transgressive principles of containment vis-à-vis technical archaeology, with automatization fomenting a process of growing anti-social disinhibition (or "disruption"). As Hegel's synthesis demonstrates the collapse of determinate distinctions between the negative whole and the Absolute, in this early moment of industrialization we find both forms of contingency involved in mutually entangled self-regulatory feedback qua nature. Following Stiegler, such processes of "trans-dividuation" are heightened by today's predictive processing algorithms that incorporate continuous computation and automatization vis-à-vis their neuro-inferential schema, as in the case of elastic graph-bunching facial recognition technologies (and other biometrics) as well as the outpouching of actuarial finance to High Frequency Trading (HFT) with AI. Drawing from Marx, Stiegler identifies the historical effectiveness of relations of 37 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 122. 38 Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). 39 Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Hegel in der Kritik zwischen Schelling und Marx (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014), 138. production with the infrastructural-causal model of superstructural relations, whereby the latter can be considered within the terrain of probabilistic "calculation(s)"40 that disrupt transindividuation. According to Stiegler, it is through the "science of technics" that capitalism is able to fundamentally damage the phenomenological vitality expressed as noetic dreaming, or "lived immanence."41 While Stiegler makes no explicit reference to noumena, or the "thing-initself," his engagement with disruption evinces "the reality principle," or the constitution of the real. For Stiegler, disruption "sets the real outside the law [loi] by realizing the real beyond any right [droit] through the creation of legal vacuums, which amount... to a de-realization of reality that leads to entropic decomposition."42 For Stiegler, the cerebral materiality that produces noetic activity is beyond full epistemic access, but our ontological conditioning reveals how it is artefactually mediated and processually unfolds. Unlike the quantum superposition of Laruelle's Real, for Stiegler the real (which is dynamic, as with Hegel's world-spirit) is identified with its effects particularly those meta-empirical artefactual traces produced between the noetic activity of consciousness and the retentional phenomenology of material immanence. As such, the exo-somatic artefacts of Capital bear the brunt of synthesizing technization with ontogenesis. Thus, Ian James befittingly terms Stiegler's Simondonian system "organological naturalism."43 For Stiegler, in order to uncover the socially constitutive role played by originary technics is to pose the question of technologically-mediated access to knowledge. Here, Ian James makes a shrewd connection between Stiegler and Laruelle: "[i]n this context, the image of philosophy that Stiegler presents also, as it does with Laruelle, implies a thorough rethinking of the conditions of knowledge and a concomitant questioning."44 Having now distinguished both Stiegler and Laruelle's ethico-political Marxist approaches and identified the Hegelian roots of Stiegler's system, let us return to Laruelle's non-philosophy. Moving forward, we shall further analyze Laruelle's non-Marxism through a historical frame, forming linkages and distinctions with Stiegler's account of lived material immanence as 40 Stiegler. The Age of Disruption, 202. 41 James, The Techniques of Thought, 217. 42 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 292. 43 James, Techniques of Thought, 212. 44 Ibid., 42. 55 Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol.16, No.1-2 / 2019 they appear. With this methodology in mind, we will consequently cull two contemporary Laruellian philosophers who have engaged with both non-Marxism and the issue of the post-human: Katerina Kolozova and John Ó Maoilearca. As much of Stiegler's recent literature problematizes posthumanism, transhumanism and the accelerationist project (particularly that of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams), this will probe distinct inquiries, while further scrutinizing the methodological fulcrum of compression and decompression. Superposition and the Real-as-Artefact [N]on-philosophy has two aspects. On the one hand, it reduces philosophy to a state of whatever material; on the other hand, it announces new positive rules (which are non-philosophical but deduced from vision-in-One) of the labor of this material. By presenting these rules without yet founding them, we are giving a very succinct and elementary idea of their founding, which is vision-in-One.45 Seeking to overcome the problems of metaphysics and empiricism, Kant's transcendental critique, as developed in The Critique of Pure Reason, seeks to evince how all "objects must conform to our cognition."46 With one swift move, Laruelle's univocal immanence superimposes the Kantian analytic a priori as noumenon. Termed "the Real as One," Laruelle's thesis of the Real is "determinant-in-the-last-instance," and, consequently, everything proceeds irreversibly from the a priori of the Real. This is a radical move as, even in the case of Deleuzian immanence, we can notice a tendency to reserve "difference" as an immanent noumenon that legitimizes the phenomenon of diversity and heterogenesis. Laruelle's superposition of identity with commonality reverses the classical metaphysical lineage that runs from Plato to Badiou, where the transcendental is upheld as a necessary precondition for grounding reality. Instead, Laruelle deprioritizes prioritization and asserts the "One" as an axiomatic. If philosophy has always used difference 45 François Laruelle, Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, trans. by Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, 2013), 11 46 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by John Miller Dow Meiklejohn (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2016) 21. and dualities as its fulcrum, Laruelle's determination-in-the-last-instance (DLI) allows for us to liberate the Real (which is identified with the One) from how it has historically been determined vis-à-vis being. As a theory of "minimal causation," the DLI signifies Laruelle's conviction that, although we are denied epistemic access to the Real, it is determinant of every instance and every thought immanent to it. Consequently, the Real is causal in the last instance but there is no way to trace this "last instance" back to its source the Real - "for the Real cannot be grasped in terms of what it is."47 In Introduction to Non-Marxism, Laruelle traces the DLI before Althusser, as it was "invented by Marx and Engels for historical materialism," while problematizing that Marx and Engels "did not give us the adequate conception of it, capable of producing all the simultaneously theoretical and critical effects possible for it."48 In turn, Laruelle modifies the DLI in order to make its "Marxist forms appear as simple symptoms or models of a more radical concept of causality."49 Laruelle's conception of the Real is (over)determinant "in the last instance" because it simply cannot be reduced to a philosophical determination (idealism, rationalism, materialism, etc.) or structure (historical, economic, and so on), yet it contains all such "effects" of the Real. However, as Jonathan Fardy notes, Laruelle is somewhat indebted to Althusser's theory of "symptomatic reading," as Laruelle argues that "philosophy symptomatically reduces the Real to an object that stands outside a subject,"50 as the philosophical decision determines what is determinant of the Real. Laruelle terms his non-philosophical foundation as a "matrix"51 outstripped of representational functions, as in the case of visual art, which functions as a metonymic index of visuality and perception. Detaching materiality from metaphoricity, Laruelle's engagement with perception is not directed by moving through appearance, or representation, but, instead, testing how perception is, in fact, a "mathematical mode of organization and a presentation of the data" that occurs through superpositioning "at least two heterogeneous, 47 Fardy, Laruelle and Art, 12. 48 Laruelle, Introduction to Non-Marxism, 41. 49 Ibid. 50 Fardy, Laruelle and Art, 146. 51 François Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, A Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. by Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, 2012), 4. 56 Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual conceptual, and artistic data."52 Superpositioning is critical to understanding Laruelle's Real, which is directly informed by quantum mechanics, and, most pointedly, from the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum behavior where observation, termed the "observer-effect," resolves the indeterminacy of atomic systems. Laruelle's "idempotent operation," or the principle of superposition, "produces the same result no matter how many times the original application."53 This is not to say that the generic frontier precludes heterogeneity (in fact, quite the opposite) but, instead, to avoid lapsing into problems that accompany what Nancy Cartwright, in her description of nomological machines, terms the "frame of theory." According to Cartwright's nomological machinery, laws are not all-encompassing structures of order and regularity (conforming to a "super-science") but, instead, exhibit themselves under certain conditions; accordingly, there are suppositions that elude testability. In conformity with Laruelle's Real, Cartwright remarks that "[r]eally powerful explanatory laws of the sort found in theoretical physics do not state the truth."54 As a philosopher of science who mends Cartwright's work on nomological machines with Laruelle's non-philosophy, Anne-Françoise Schmid's work on modeling also demonstrates how nonhierarchical heterogeneity and the disciplinary multiplicity of modeling are both placed in relation to and rendered contingent on Laruelle's Real. Laruelle introduces the term "philo-fiction" into his system, contending there is no way to study both atomic behavior and, in turn, the world without changing it in a non-trivial manner (or "philosophizing"). Thus, Laruelle opens the philosophical tableau to a kind of "gnostic vision." As Fardy remarks, "gnostic vision" is comparable to the mystic's vision, for it is neither true nor false but is "fictive for it envisions 'another knowledge' that cannot be assimilated by the frameworks of philosophical argument or scientific proof."55 Thus, Laruelle's "non-standard philosophy" accepts the impossibility of coming to terms with the full scope of the Real while offering a terrain of "irreducible" phenomenal content, where "determina52 Ibid. 53 François Laruelle, "A Science of [en] Christ," trans. by Aaron Riches, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2014), 28. 54 Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1983), 3. 55 Fardy, Laruelle and Art, 88. tion in the last instance" serves as the "specific individual causality of the One."56 Unlike Kant's juridico-rational deduction, Laruelle's "immediate givens" are simultaneously unreflective while fastened to transcendental experience: they are not intuitions, which are by definition always objective, but are laced by a kind of scientificism that concedes to an inherent imperfection. This is in agreement with Cartwright's description of science not as some unifying amalgam of top-down theories (a "pyramid") but, instead, a pluralist "patchwork." We can liken the conception of science's "written truths" to what Laruelle's Maoist student, Gilles Grelet, calls the "transactional arrangement," or a "bribe," "whereby where what is called truth is in reality the ideal all of this being just another name for lying."57 Similarly, Kolozova states that Laruelle's Real is "obstinately indifferent to the pretensions of language or thought, whereas language continues to unilaterally correlate with the real seeking to mediate it."58 Thus, this is the difference between Laruelle's correlation and Meillassoux's. Whereas Meillassoux's conception of correlation is based on an extension of subjectivity (whether it be freedom, will, or creativity), with an arche-fossil "ancestral time," or "hyperchaos" pre-dating ontologies of the human, Laruelle's conception of correlation is in direct opposition to Meillassoux's. For Meillassoux "hyperchaos" is time without becoming, or "the absolute absence of reason for any reality... the effective ability for every determined entity, whether it is an event, a thing, or a law, to appear and disappear with no reason for its being or non-being."59 As neatly described by what he calls "non-analysis" (or "dualysis"), Laruelle's correlation does not describe how thought seeks to correlate with the Real but, instead, how thought (and/or language) correlate and mediate the Real; as Laruelle's conception of correlation, "dualysis" is the unfettering of empirical naïvite.60 Laruelle (and post-Laruellians including Grelet, Fardy, Ó Maoilearca and Kolozova) advocate for a categorical withdrawal from the "impotence of thought" and its "infinite culpability."61 "Infinite 56 Laruelle, A Biography, 125. 57 Grelet, "Proletarian Gnosis," 95. 58 Kolozova, Holocaust of Animals, 6. 59 Quentin Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, ed. by Anna Longo (Milan: Mimesis International, 2014), 258. 60 Laruelle, Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, 156. 61 François Laruelle, "Theorems on the Good News," Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Human57 Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol.16, No.1-2 / 2019 culpability" describes the complicit precarity of theoretical plentitude with counterfactual reflection and is the byproduct of what Laruelle discerns as philosophy's "impotence of thought,"62 as philosophy necessarily liquidates the plane of pure immanence by enacting the Decision, thereby introducing terms of difference. In Stiegler's literature, we see an equally definitive and seductive ontological problematization of Kant. Describing the contemporary social context, Stiegler demonstrates how we occupy a purely computational social epoch of desolate time and incommensurable tragedy. In the age of "digital natives," Stiegler argues that we are simply incapable of producing intergenerational and transgenerational collective anticipations, or "transindividuation," except in a purely negative context. For Stiegler, such a "negative teleology thereby reaches its end without purpose (and not that purposiveness without end that provides the motives of Kantian reason)."63 Steeped in Heidegger, Husserl, Simondon, Derrida and Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler's philosophical project has been devoted to uncovering technologically constituted temporalities that endure as ontological structures. While these temporalities are not perceptible and have heterogenous origins, they introduce a transcendent element that directly informs the socialization of truth, with truth's temporality occupying something akin to the scientific "simulation" and nonhierarchization we see in Schmid's modeling: science is pluralistic, conditional, and privy to nonepistemological (recursive) redescription. As Mercedes Bunz adeptly notes, Stiegler's ontological view can be seen as a prolonged critique of the Kantian definition of time as an inner form of intuition and, thus, as a category specific to the humanities64 or, in Laruellian parlance, the "philosophical decision." Following Laruelle, the "Philosophical Decision" is that which subordinates identity, or "the being of the 1," to intellect, or "the thinking of the 1 as equal to 1," such that "the being" and the "thinking of that being" are equipollent.65 If, according to Laruelle, the Real is beyond the brink of exteriority and, thus, it can solely be (replicated/ cloned as) the object of "fictionalization," for Stiegler, it is the techities, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2014), 42. 62 Ibid. 63 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 12. 64 Mercedes Bunz, Birgit Mara Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele (Eds.), Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary (Lüneberg: meson press, 2017), 203. 65 Anthony Paul Smith, François Laruelle's Principles of Non-Philosophy: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 74. nological artefact/technē that occupies the role of the philosophical decision. Through the reformulation of spectral value-exchange visà-vis what Kolozova terms "anthropocentric mythologemes,"66 we see the emergence of Stiegler's relationship as it relates to Laruelle's non-standard philosophy in how Stiegler regards technics as necessarily formalizing the exteriorization of difference and identity. In their own ways, Laruelle and Stiegler both problematize the performative philosophical decision, which enacts its own ontic limit conditions on that which is pre-symbolic and pre-linguistic. For Laruelle, it is the speech act that remains decisionist.67 For Stiegler, who is an unapologetic pupil of Derrida, it is the grammatization between exteriorization and the reproduction of "living flows," or history's making itself discrete (or materially manifest through artefacts), which determines culture whether these are bodily movements, gestures, speech, images, calculations or dreams.68 For Stiegler, grammatization is an ortho-graphic condition where the inaugurality of history is deferred, a synthesis which can be understood as temporality materially incarnate. Stiegler's artefactually-bound and trans-historical unfolding of grammatization proceeds from something akin to Laruellian superpositioning, as what pre-exists becomes non-trivially determined through language technesis is not solely "the faculty of dreaming" but, as Wilson further demonstrates, the very function of perception.69 For Stiegler, this pre-linguistic and pre-symbolic indeterminate flux is noesis, which is pure and unformulated capacity, or an "unforeseen situation"70 that is inchoate prior to observation. Following Stiegler, the moment that "analysis" or "critique" is culled into action is the moment of mental schematization, whereby consciousness projects its object this is what Daniel Ross and Stiegler term "arche-cinema."71 Not only is the dream the primordial form, the hydrous vat of morphological becoming, but it is also where we see Stiegler's instantiation of what Laruelle terms the "Philosophical Decision," as we see the introduction of "a bifurcation into a state of fact a state of 66 Kolozova, Holocaust of Animals, 25. 67 John Ò Maoilearca, All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 245. 68 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 240. 69 Wilson, Aesthesis and Perceptronium. 70 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 284. 71 Bernard Stiegler, "Organology of Dreams and Archi-Cinema," trans. by Daniel Ross, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. No. 47 (2014), 7-37. 58 Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual law being what produces a bifurcation starting from a state of fact, which thereby becomes lawfully and performatively regulated."72 Nonetheless, unlike Laruelle, Stiegler indicates some kind of ontic framework that is stilted on difference for, without cerebral materiality, there would be no such conditions for the performative philosophical decision of exosomatization. For Stiegler, superpositioning does not antedate noesis and, therefore, we can consider the brain as the artefactual nexus of epistemological discontinuity, from which all insurrectional flows disperse through the (mental) construction of arche-traces. For Stiegler, the pluralist realm of truths and scientific facticity is, indeed, a patchwork perhaps even one that stretches into infinitude but it is a Klein bottle that passes through the organon of perception, thus determined by the unfolding of encephalization and the conditions of observation. Contending with Laruelle's conception of the non-artefactual Real, Stiegler's system would have to make a necessary compromise and relinquish the brain as the ontogenetic site of the (mediated) Real, technically manifest. While Stiegler may, as Ian James states, be aptly categorized as a philosopher of material immanence, he does not commit to an antirealist critique of scientific objectivity the likes of Laruelle, as, for Stiegler, technicity is inseparable from this "discretizing" process. Laruellian non-philosophy is predicated on thinking the Real through a unilateral relation, due to the Real's indifference. While, for Laruelle, thought correlates with the Real, in Stiegler's onto-graphic philosophy we see a remnant of world-spirit's recurrent synthesis, the ushering of thought along the historical pull of technesis. Stiegler and the Posthuman ...it is through this such loop one that passes through exosomatization and which, as organogenesis, transforms, through the artificial organs that it generates, somatic and psychic organs and social organizations and only through this loop, that noesis properly speaking, that is, thinking, is constituted.73 Not only, as aforementioned, is Stiegler's theory of individuation highly indebted to Gilbert Simondon's psychosocial understand72 Ibid. 73 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 61. ing of pre-subjective affects but, also, to Andre Leroi-Gourhan's description of human history's dawn as the point of artificialization between humankind and technical artefacts, termed "hominization." Rather than the artefactual outthrust of Ernst Kapp's "organ projection" or Marshall McLuhan's theory of machines as the continuation of our central nervous system, Stiegler develops Alfred Lotka and Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen's bio-statistical description of exosomatization. This inflected process is bidirectional: the continuation of organogenesis is a characteristic of the evolution of life, both as ontogenesis and as phylogenesis. Exosomatization is an infrastructural configuration that is not only externalized outwards, through technics, but, in an inflected turn, commodifies the human capacity for reason and thought. If we describe this process through the aperture of externalization, then we must match it with a commensurate degree of inversion. In his work with Antoinette Rouvroy, we see Stiegler's most technically rigorous Marxian description of algorithmic governmentality, as the duo describe a turn away from "deductive logic," which we can associate with the database, towards "a purely inductive logic."74 While the two do not speak of any particular machines, this turn can be characterized by a rich array of case studies that cull probabilistic algorithmic technologies that are based on Hebbian learning. According to this model, recursive negative feedback functions as a new modal input for the instrumental relations between protocol and intermittent change-action.75 Recall Hebb's adage that "neurons that fire together, wire together" when neurons are activated together by the same stimulus, their connections are strengthened, eliciting new tangential vectors of integration and mechanism independency. One marked example of this inductive logic is AlphaGo, the Google DeepMind neural network that defeated both the world's highest-ranking Go player, Ke Jie, and 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol. This was achieved by AlphaGo's using "tree search" pattern recognition and machine learning to probabilistically account for simulative scenarios. By iteratively building partial search-inputs with which to update its "weights" or the de74 Antoinette Rouvroy and Bernard Stiegler, "The Digital Regime of Truth: From the Algorithmic Governmentality to a New Rule of Law," trans. by Anaïs Nony and Benoît Dillet, La Delueziana, Vol. 3 (2016), 7. 75 Joscha Bach, Principles of Synthetic Intelligence: Psi: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 232. 59 Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol.16, No.1-2 / 2019 fault values of selection such neural nets are able to start at a root node and recursively create non-terminal values that are revised according to "backpropagation," or how simulated error scenarios unfold as reactive gradient of layering. These multilayer "feedforward" neural networks are based on the binary classification of perceptual negative feedback, which can be recounted to Frank Rosenblatt's 1957 "Perceptron," a rule-based conception of an algorithm that enables neurons to associatively learn and process discrete elements. The slippage between "perceptron" and "perception" is no coincidence: error-correction is accounted for in the same way that visual perception eliminates noise. Perception-based inductive learning marks a significant rift from the era of the database, where evaluation metrics could not deviate from a certain sample-proportion.76 While such cognitive architecture based on active inference and reinforcement through homeostatic balance marks our era's technological expropriation of sensorimotor perception and counterfactually rich simulative scenarios, Stiegler and Rouvroy also speak of a "post-statistical" and "post-actuarial" epoch "in which it is no longer about calculating probabilities but to account in advance for what escapes probability and thus the excess of the possible on the probable."77 Unlike David Roden's description of transhumanism, Stiegler and Rouvroy foresee a posthuman outpouching of interpretation and prediction, whereby neurocomputational architecture is able to actively retrofit causality alongside mean-values of incoming data that are precluded to human-statistical aggregation. Transhumanism emphasizes technological extension and libidinal maximization, as demonstrated by transhumanist NBIC fantasies of mind-uploading, life-prolonging and prosthetic extension. However, posthuman "machines" which are, truly, neither machines nor cyborgs are able to access the manifold quantum fold of superpositioning and confirm predictive enaction by collapsing this into top-down apperceptual content. The "post" in this conception of the "post-human" or Stiegler's "post-statistical"/"post-actuarial" rests upon this conceptual capability to operate in accord to phenomenological information that is occluded from our "human" ability to reflect on and make predictions according to embodied experience. 76 Bach, Principles, 224-240. 77 Rouvroy and Stiegler, "The Digital Regime," 9. Stiegler's use of "entropy" is not solely related to political idealism but also environmental denegation, as he recalls the entropic dissipation of resources in the era of the Anthropocene, or "Entropocene." As Wilson recalls, the crux of the "Entropocene" argument is that, as we see a quantum entanglement of integrated synthesis regarding neural nets and machine learning, an increase of integration/synthesis, or "mutual information" between an observed system (the given object of observation) and the environment system will follow. In turn, the entropy (or hidden information) of our world-system will exponentially decrease; this scenario implies the stratification of the emergent levels of material reality. Stiegler advocates for a re-appropriation of these technical systems so as to broaden flexibility and freedom in relation to these stratified causal constraints. This "negentropic," or more accurately "anti-entropic" (as Giuseppe Longo and Maël Montévil remind us) possibility locally resists and delays the incessant movement of the cosmos toward disintegration and entropy. This transpires in the portending of noetic dreaming, or the expansion of the pre-linguistic capacity for transindividuation but, also, in ecological action through environmental legislation. Anti-entropic activity, or the deferral of entropic activity, is Stiegler's definition for "life."78 "Anti-entropy" demonstrates one such further distinction between Stiegler's conception of the Real and Laruelle's. For Stiegler, the inchoate Real of pure potentiality occupies some kind of spatio-temporal limit-case, allowing it to veer towards expansion and multiplicity in the case of a negentropic future or, in the case of further environmental-technological entropy, the Real of "available energy" as it is further deprived. In Laruelle's non-philosophy, due to the pure terms of superposition, the Real is absolutely non-conceivable in schematic or spatial terms it has no directional flow or boundaries through which the real and the cosmos simplify the realizations of thought itself through the facticity of technics or energetic dissolution. What, then, distinguishes Stiegler's understanding of the constant and irrespective constitution of omnitemporal conditions in which the technical form of life is always materially directed vis-à-vis prosthesis from teleologically-orchestrated transhumanism? As 78 Bernard Stiegler, "Dreams and Nightmares: Beyond the Anthropocene Era," trans. by Daniel Ross, ALIENOCENE: Journal of the First Outernational, No. 5 (2019), 9. 60 Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual Yuk Hui notes, Stiegler's conception of technology is also a form of heredity, as it is subject to mutation and is passed to us as a culture.79 For Stiegler, contingency remains close to the spatialization of time and artistic creation by rendering the unexpected within epochal constraints. Technology, as such, consists of a means of living but is not handed to as eternal being rather, technology enjoinders, immediately, with the environment in a theory of evolution understood as a dialectical movement between adaptation and adoption. Technesis as transindividuation marks a synthesis of machines' becoming-organic rather than what transhumanist discourses emphasize, which are organs' becoming-synthetic. However, the contemporaneous locution of post-humanist discourse, which so often veers its transhumanist head, is intent on affirming what Roden terms as the "disconnection thesis." This "unbounded posthumanism" instantiates a disunion between diachronically emergent behaviors and properties, which occur as a result of temporally extended processes but cannot be inferred from the initial state of that process. The rift, therefore, is not a further demonstration of the bidirectional cognitive-technological relationship qua Stiegler. Rather, the posthuman moment is defined by machines' co-opting an apophatic "post-statistical" realizability by continually retrofitting unequivocal foresight. As Roden states, the "disconnection thesis" does not entail the rejection of anthropological essentialism but, instead, "renders any reference to essential human characteristics unnecessary."80 If our technological epoch of predictive processing algorithms and neural nets is based on perception, then the post-human moment will render any reference to perception obsolete. At this point, before we move on to a Laruellian-inspired terrain of the non-human as a political alternative to the posthuman project's technogenetic tyranny, let us underscore a distinction between posthumanism and transhumanism that is so often elided. The transhumanist itinerary is that of the perfection of human nature and the cultivation of human personal autonomy through technological means. Therefore, transhumanism "makes an eth79 Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, 207-11. 80 David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 114. ical claim to the effect that the technological enhancement of human capacities is a desirable aim."81 What Roden terms "speculative posthumanism" (SP), or just "posthumanism," does not make such normative claims or ethical commitments but, instead, criticizes all anthropocentric means of life, making a bold ontological claim about what technology can metaphysically allow. Eschewing machine-human couplings, the posthuman is based on pure difference. In short, posthumans are technologically engendered beings that no longer occupy familiar human morphologies. From discussions on post-capitalist automatization to discourse on Artificial Generalized Intelligence (AGI), this transhumanist "disconnection" privileges the automaton's making animality obsolete, usurping all recognizable retentional/protentional phenomenological distributions. As demonstrated by predictive processing algorithms and Bayesian neuro-inferential continuous computation, today's technologies are increasingly modelled after the psychic faculty and behavior learning's localist architecture. As in the case of elastic graph-bunching facial recognition technologies, High Frequency Trading (HFT) with AI, and neural networks like AlphaGo, associative memory structures and symbolic cognitive modeling are displacing the storage-and-retrieval model of the database. If AlphaGo and Bayesian neuro-inference can be considered "post-actuarial" or "post-statistical," as Stiegler insists, it is not because they escape the numeric directive of statistics but, instead, because they widen the aperture for statistics and introduce dynamicity into data-pooling. To call this "post-statistical" is provocative but, truly, this is unambiguously the domain of transhumanism. Terming this as "post-statistical" aptly breaks from our understanding of cognitive neuro-inferential technologies, whereby memory retrieval and elasticity is constitutive but, in turn, also overdetermines the functionalist channeling between a system and its environment, as if some extra-probabilistic synthesis could transpire between an AGI and its appropriated world-image. Within Stiegler's harrowing conception of a "post-actuarial" or "post-statistical" reality, the entropic declension of the human geistig is matched by a kind of transhuman Intelligence. Accordingly, Stiegler's negentropy assumes transhuman machines' penetrating the barricade of the Real, hereby departing significantly from Laruelle. 81 Ibid., 9. 61 Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol.16, No.1-2 / 2019 Lariviere and Galloway assert that Stiegler's pedagogical and phenomenological belief in the value of "revealing nature" allows us to escape from the transdividual circuitry of control by revealing the limits of the thinkable. By "nature" they recall the "uncompressed natural real" while setting aside Stiegler's historical distinctions, as revealed by his work with Rouvroy. The two discern that, for Stiegler, the real is "unknowable" and "technology is nature's compressor."82 Yet, if, for Stiegler, technesis is so widely diffracted that from mental imagination to artefactual reality, all is technological, do not Lariviere and Galloway inadvertently bridge Laruelle's Real with Stiegler's? For Stiegler, noesis is a technesis. Stiegler seeks to take into account what Heidegger overlooked in Being and Time: that Dasein always projects itself beyond its ends, and inhabits its own mortality only within the primordial projection of a continuation of the world after its own end ("in its beyond").83 Protention is, therefore, always bound to a structure which is that of a promise, and as such to a mutual engagement that infinitively exceeds the psychic individual.84 It is through this "loop" that Stiegler vies for a "noesis proper," or noesis that passes into actuality as entelekheia,85 or fulfilment. For Stiegler, the transcendental is rooted in "the dream realizing itself" vis-à-vis phenomenological time, or time lived within the specific mode of what Aristotle called the "noetic soul," as it is constituted and conditioned by technical exteriorization, resulting in a process of interiorization that exosomatizes existence.86 Exosomatization, as was originally shown by Lotka87 and Georgescu-Roegen,88 is the organogenesis of artefacts that constitute the underpinnings of knowledge. For Stiegler, organogenesis is the elaborating of technical instruments of emancipatory experiments and relational experiences among technical, physiological, and institutional organs. That which is organogenetic is pharmacological as human evolution is the result of an exosomatic (symbolic, recorded) organogenesis it is, in fact, what drives evolution (or organogenesis). 82 Lariviere and Galloway, "Compression," 132. 83 Ibid., 20. 84 Ibid., 21. 85 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 84. 86 Ibid., 61. 87 Alfred J. Lotka, Elements of Mathematical Biology (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications), 188. 88 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971). Throughout his work, Stiegler (drawing from Husserl) speaks of retentions, whereby primary retentions are sense perceptions, secondary retentions are memories, and tertiary retentions are media (culture mnemonics). While Stiegler is indebted to Simondon, it is through Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness and Derridean grammatology that he transposes the logic of the supplement to transfigure "tertiary retentions" or those conditions of possibility that facilitate the interplay between primary retention and secondary retention. Thus, "digital tertiary retentions" are generated by the "conquest of space and time through its technicization,"89 which we are increasingly inching towards via governmental calculability. For Stiegler, "tertiary retentions," or media mnemonics (whether they be mechanic, analogue, or digital), introduce both emancipatory possibilities and newfound repressions. For instance, in addition to surveillance and meta-data capture, the internet allows for the possibility of open-source "free software," stimulating new subject positions.90 This dualism has guided much of Stiegler's work and his more recent application of Giuseppe Longo and Schrodinger's concept of "negentropy" to the Anthropocene, so as to inspire a media-ecological relationship birthed from the commons that can evade our bleak trajectory ("neganthropy"). If entropy indexes the material disappearance of ecological resources, "neganthropy" is always defined in relation to an observer, or "noetic freedom," allotting epistemic and epistemological transitions. Stiegler's Marxist conclusion is fairly utilitarian, as he ushers legislative and social "communing," as demonstrated by the various projects undertaken by the Institut de recherche et d'innovation (IRI) collective, with initiatives spearheaded by Stiegler, Giacomo Gilmozzi, Patrick Braouezec and a host of economists, philosophers, educators and political scientists. In addition to the Plain Commune experimental learning territory in Saint-Denis, based on open source technologies and an economy of contributive income based on the "collective capabilities" of self-governance, Stiegler has recently launched a macro-ecological United Nations initiative called Internation.World. The Internation.World collective will be present89 Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press), x. 90 Thomas Pringle, Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, Machine (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 40. 62 Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual ing a proposal at the United Nations 2020 World Summit that attempts to extend the contributory learning project to a global scale. Having examined how Stiegler seeks to evade the "entropic" transhumanist absorption of technicity, let us turn, once more, to Laruelle's non-philosophy. In particular, by examining contemporary Laruellians such as Kolozova and Ó Maoilearca, who have focused on discourses regarding the non-human and animality, we shall demonstrate how non-philosophy can radicalize the dyad of animality/automaton. This allows for a bridge from Stiegler's politically-directed communal projects to Laruelle's avowedly utopian thinking. Post-Laruellians and the Non-Human Antecedent to what Laurelle terms the philosophical decision, there exists a "radical dyad" of Thought and the Real that conveys an "unbridgeable fissure" between the two terms.91 In Capitalism's Holocaust of Animals, contemporary Laruellian and feminist philosopher Katerina Kolozova considers how Laruelle's radical dyad's "identity in the last instance" is determined by the concreteness of its constitution, or the material constitution of the "animal-machine" (or of "physicality-automaton").92 Kolozova's non-philosophical treatment of the human invites the use of the terms "non-human" and "inhuman," rather than the transhuman usurpation of technesis. As demonstrated by Kolozova's use of Laruelle's radical dyad, the "identity in the last instance" of the non-human is homologous to Donna Haraway's conception of cyborg and the inhuman. The non-human's "determination in the last instance" belongs to the category of the Real insofar as the Real is instantiated as a specific form of materiality. By liquidating philosophy of its anthropomorphic latticework qua Laruelle's methodological system, Kolozova attempts to reconcile the dyad that transhumanist literature has almost uniformly prefigured. As exemplified by Haraway's bifurcation between animality and the automaton, post-humanist literature insists upon a riven relation between technology on one node and animality on the other node of this dyad. It is this dyad that formulates the fundamental crux of Kolozova's most recent project, as 91 Katerina Kolozova, "Violence: The Indispensable Condition of the Law (And the Political)," Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2014), 109. 92 Kolozova, Holocaust of Animals, 11. she transcends Haraway's posthumanism, which urges that the subjugated bodies and "decentered selves" of post-humanist production ought to seize the ordinary means of capitalist militarism, as both the animal and the human have become inextricably hybridized via technological life. However, Kolozova's conception of the non-human as a kind of "radical decentering" is far more radical than Haraway's hybridization. Kolozova prompts a non-Euclidean, non-thetic transformation that grows from Laruelle's "non-Marxist" work, which critiques the decisional transcendental, a presupposition for hybridity, as both ancillary and subservient to the atavist underpinnings of subject-centered language. By advocating for a material theory of under-determining the human, Kolozova's unique conception of the "non-human" prompts a conception of intellectual and cognitive faculties as being involved in a complicit ascendency to the Real. If Laruelle's work on Marx offers us an altogether radical material praxis, is it not simply because it offers us a retreat from the traditional Marxist terms of mutual exchange and relational reciprocity, as Alexander Galloway contends.93 In addition to a complete evacuation from humanism as anthropocentric carnality, based on gestures of exchange and convertibility between the Real and thought, Laruelle's "non-Marxist" system conceives of humanity as an "identity-in-the-last-instance" that, coupled with our aforementioned description of "determination-in-the-last instance," demonstrates a kind of fundamentally materialist vulnerability, whereby the (non-)human becomes a category of contingency rather than some kind of Absolute. Unlike the transhumanist fetishization of the Übermensch-cumAGI, the cyborg presents Kolozova with a passage towards the non-human. Indeed, the non-human indexes a feminist figure that disrupts standard homologies of ontological exchange (e.g., marriage), but what is critical here is that there subsists a spectral "remainder" that escapes sense-conditioning and the teleological transhumanist purpose of "humanity transcending itself."94 Haraway's dyad between animal and machine is reproduced in Kolozova's system of the non-human, poised against the "automaton" 93 Alexander Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 27. 94 Kolozova, Holocaust of Animals, 12. 63 Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol.16, No.1-2 / 2019 of signification. Whereas Stiegler's conception of noesis attempts to arrive at the Real through thought (or, as Laruelle would term it, "philosophizing," proper), Kolozova furthers Laruelle's insistence upon thought as a mere "fictionalized" cloning of the Real. Recall that, for Stiegler, capitalist "proletarianization" describes a new precariat/cognitariat an order of "knowledge workers" who are mnemotechnically captured and industrially automated through noetic hymenoptera, or the exploitation of social corporeality through cognitive labor. For Stiegler, cognitive ergonomics comfortably seduce and produce the "perfect citizen consumer" who not only shops online but, simultaneously, produces meaningful metadata that is condensed into information and sold as a commodity. The first dimension, the proletarianization of the producer, directly draws from Marx; the worker's knowledge is inscribed in the machine, whereby specialization is reduced to a mere abstraction of activity. As the historical trajectory from the first moment of proletarianization to hyper-industrial postmodernity and "cognitive capitalism" evinces, for Stiegler it is the displacement of intellectual activity that binds noetic activity to Capital flow. These historical processes reveal how Stiegler's real functions, a recursive Spinozist causality establishing contingency between a living being and their milieu. Kolozova demonstrates how the purpose of Laruelle's "cloning" is not merely to demonstrate how the Real functions but, instead, to demonstrate how proletarianization is manifested through the seizure of abstract labor for wage labor. This is a point of collective closure between Stiegler and Laruelle's conception of proletarianization. However, as opposed to the auto-referential postulation of exchange-value, which determines the Marxist medium of relation, Laruelle's non-Marxist formulation is grounded by the principle of physicality being independent from representations. As demonstrated by the schematization of noesis vis-à-vis entropic and negentropic becoming, Stiegler's is bound to a representational sublation of the Real. Kolozova also further demonstrates how Laruelle uncovers that philosophy produces an amphibology, whereby sign, thought and truth are ceded as "indistinguishable from the real."95 The destruction of brute materiality the blighting of animality is the central fixture of Kolozova's metaphor of the rites of holocaustos, or, etymologically, the "burning of the dead animal."96 Where the enagismata, or ritual Greek offerings to the dead, were supplementary (e.g., the benefaction of milk, honey, wine or perfumes), the holocaustos serves as the foundation of logos, law and order in the polis through "[t] -he destruction of the physical body," thus ensuring the "immortal light of reason."97 The cycle of Capital invigorates the complete holocaust of all animality and material vestiges so as to insure that the absolute rule of "pure reason," or of "Absolute Spirit," finds its immaterial thrust in its perfected form: capitalism-as-philosophy. Kolozova identifies "pure value" with the sacrificial burnt body in the holocaustos, which represents the subordination of life to philosophy in the name of Reason and light.98 As Kolozova recounts, within this sacrificial Olympian ritual there subsists the preservation of life and reason, hiereia, which remains attached to the physical body as a transcendental product. Thus, the sacrificed burnt body is transformed into the transcendental. This "becoming" of "pure value" is the process of abstraction, whereby a signifying chain encloses around the processual accumulation of exchange and worth-accumulation. Radicalizing the dyad, Kolozova's work on Laruelle's "Vision-inOne" manifest as an indifferent determination that is not bound to human-psychological identification, but universal compossibility radicalizes philosophies of animality based on différance. Kolozova recognizes that the reduction of the animal as a general equivalent of the Real as in Haraway and Derrida's literature is the exact same reduction that is the foundational gesture of capitalist reciprocity, which "grounds and sustains patriarchy and heteronormative sexuality" as a "general equivalent... reified abstraction."99 In Stiegler's system, noesis is continually technically synthesized as an automata devoid of epiphenomenal sensoria, appropriated for framing truth claims by instantiating the real. 95 Ibid., 38. 96 Ibid., vi, vii, 111. 97 Ibid., 111. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid., 147. 64 Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual Ó Maoilearca writes about how, rather than "reduce, replace, or eliminate"100 philosophical distinctions, Laruellian immanence subjugates and inverts Being to genericity, thus initiating a fully democratic revision whereby no one view is superior to, or transcends, the other. Unlike posthumanist theses that claim that humanity must move beyond contingency, Ó Maoilearca describes how "any Laruellian nonhumanism will always be much messier than this, resting a good deal more on a non-philosophical imperfectability than on man's approximation to the divine, the infinite, and the perfect."101 However, radicalizing Stiegler's constitution of noesis as technesis, we can say that we are always becoming trans-human, as mental apperception is a spatio-temporal relation that demonstrates how the human being is "the fact of technicity."102 If, for Stiegler, the process of socialization "clones" noesis through trans-generational technical circuits that instantiate the real, for Laruelle this is little more than another example of the Real as it anthropomorphizes Man, "philosomorphizing" both the Real and humanity after its own (dormant and noetic) image.103 Stiegler uses the category of the "non-inhuman" to describe the being that realizes itself through the precision of mechanics and, "realizing its dreams," as in materially producing them through artefacts, exosomatizes itself. Stiegler's theory of arche-cinema is based on Marc Azéma's work on Man as the animal who not only has "always 'dreamed'" but, in turn, whose "brain is a machine for producing images" that is "capable of projecting his inner 'cinema' outside himself."104 By realizing its dreams, the non-inhuman escapes its status as automata and becomes noetic. According to Stiegler, animality's organogenesis "completely escapes them,"105 and, consequently, Stiegler repeats the same move that Kolozova critiques in Haraway and Derrida as, for all three philosophers, animality simply becomes a stand-in for the instrumental capacity of Capital. In fact, Stiegler collapses animality with anoetic dreaming, whereby animality is pre-linguistic and pre-symbolic, unable to in100 Ó Maoilearca, All Thoughts, 11. 101 Ibid., 189. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 183. 104 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 90. 105 Ibid., 184. stantiate a typology of difference and precluded from conceiving of the world schematically.106 In turn, Stiegler "generalizes" animality, just as today's capitalism generalizes proletarianization. Conclusion Jason Lariviere and Alexander Galloway remark that [f]rom a position alongside philosophy, Laruelle's non-philosophy adopts a different kind of signal processing. Opacity becomes a general condition of the cosmos itself. ... Unlike Stiegler, who strives to reveal an enchanted, natural world through the development of the noetic organs, Laruelle remains encrypted within the radical immanence of generic being. All superfluous philosophical data has been deleted.107 However, this description of "generic being" enacts a capitalist fetishization of the Real and the One, which does not adhere to Laruelle's non-philosophical system, whereby there is no such generic being, as non-philosophy is predicated on liquidating Being, which is the amphibology of the Real and thought par excellence. The "generic science" of non-philosophy is generic and immanent insofar as it takes genericity as a starting point from which to rethink the aims and possibilities of philosophy. "Generic science" is the proper name for the non-philosophical cloning of standard philosophy and, consequently, this is by no means a "deletion" but a duplication; there is not a "loss" of data but, instead, a reconceptualization of (philosophical) data. Furthermore, Lariviere and Galloway remark that "Stiegler uses the term grammatization... to indicate how human experience is compressed into discrete units of mediation" and that Stiegler's argument about the materialization of diachronic memory as exteriorized technics, or "tertiary retentions," speaks to the "compressive 106 Stiegler's conception of animality as pre-exosomatic reduces the animal as an immaterial source exploitable for commodity-production. Were Stiegler to apply his own logic of exosomatization to animal case studies, however, he would see the fatuity of this distinction. This is demonstrated by the many animals that produce exo-somatic tools: just as orangutans use whistles to communicate and ward off predators, sea otters have been known to use stones to hammer abalone shells off of rocks so as to crack shells open; this is to say nothing of animals that have a mental conception of autonoetic conception, or an arche-cinema. 107 Lariviere and Galloway, "Compression," 140. 65 Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture / Vol.16, No.1-2 / 2019 power of grammatization to turn the theoretically infinite layers of experience into discrete, manageable, and archivable units."108 However, the very fact that there exists a pre-symbolic site that becomes mnemotechnical through the matrixial arche-cinema of the unconscious, in which the dream is the primordial form, demonstrates that human experience is not so "manageable." Processes of transdividuation elude us until they have already exacted their full force, temporally constituting themselves beyond Being. Elsewhere, Stiegler has remarked that "philosophy has repressed technics as an object of thought" and that "[t]echnics is the unthought."109 While technicity is appropriable, to cast technics under the spell of compression or decompression denies that machines are purely instrumental. In fact, even if today's machines cast an artificial cast so wide as to transfigure Arachnean linealities beyond our conceptual purview, Stiegler's technological inscription provides us with a way to trace the originary co-constitution of the human in parallel with the technical, providing us with a description whereby we can understand human thought's bind with consciousness under an emergent and entirely material dimension of synthesis. Synthesis, as an inflected process that affects both mind and body (or a "general organology"), offers the generative element prohibited by compression or decompression's ahistoricity. Furthermore, I have tried to demonstrate some linkages between Stiegler and Laruelle, although there are certainly others. Both philosophers, for instance, upbraid politics' insistence on "anthropo-logical difference."110 For Laruelle, this is a fetish of "[u] -nity par excellence the State and the other fetishes of political thought,"111 which is reflected by the fetish of a unitary philosophy that always appeals to some metaphysical and contaminative Other. Stiegler's rejection of "anthropo-logical difference" is in regards to the techno-fetishistic eschatology spurred by automation, as it draws from the superficial transhumanist impulse that seeks enhancement or augmentation,112 with the cultural industry able to short-circuit transindividuation vis-à-vis the manipulation 108 Ibid., 140, 128. 109 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 11. 110 Laruelle, A Biography, 5. 111 Ibid., 26. 112 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 296. of behavior by rendering it calculable/predictable (e.g., predictive processing and neuro-inferential Bayesian modeling). Both philosophers clearly censure the neolibertarian ethos of technological intensification, whether political, rhetorical, or technical. Both Stiegler and Laruelle's projects deal with the intimate dissection of unconscious drives. In Laruelle's case it is finitude that renders the drive autonomous, as finitude extracts the drive from the unconscious chain, remaining inherent to itself while preserving the "immediacy of acting."113 Consequently, we can only transform that which has a form through the continuous penetration of activity into raw material; the drive cannot form a body within the world, even if it does affect it.114 For Stiegler, this fetish is the result of the "unbinding of the drives," which are properly libidinal: the faculty of the drives is the phantasmatic faculty, or that which protains (anticipates), contained in the form of artefactual technicity.115 Granted, many of the differences between Laruelle and Stiegler's Marxism are spurred by the non-thetic vantage of non-philosophy's precluding the Decision. Alternatively, Stiegler's interest in trans-generational flows is determined by a kind of temporal unconscious decision-binding between humankind and its diachronic artefactual grammatization. As Laruelle's description of the drive is "non-positional," or that of "Non-thetic Transcendence,"116 it possesses a certain "correlate" of transcendence. However, Stiegler is much more concerned with using the drive as a cultural diagnostic. After all, where Laruelle is concerned with an ethical system that does not appeal to an Other, or authoritarian vectors, Stiegler is interested in the merge between humanity and its technical prostheses the artefactual point of contiguity between noetic activity and "becoming-Other." At its most radical dissimilarity, following Laruelle's non-Marxism, Stiegler's operation of philosophical conceptuality of noesis as arche-cinema does violence upon the real by spatially binding it. Furthermore, in Stiegler's system we see the trace of a kind of 113 Laruelle, A Biography, 201. 114 Ibid., 202. 115 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 82. 116 Ibid., 204. 66 Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual resulting "synthesis, fusion, or mixte"117 between transcendence and immanence, or exteriority and interiority, which prompts a transformation or appropriation. Similarly, this "co-constitution of the real in the form of known Being or existence" effectively enacts another kind of "violent alienation of the real from itself,"118 repeated in Stiegler's instrumental treatment of animality. Thus, in conclusion, Laruelle and Stiegler are not entirely in disagreement though they do occupy varied scalar intensities that can be more finely analyzed through the vantage of quantum superpositioning, the Real and, in Stiegler's case, synthesis. While compression and decompression certainly provides us with an interesting perspective with which to consider lossage as it is related to philosophical systematization, it seeks to asphyxiate an entire ontology within a rather limited straightjacket while denying any mutual territory between the two philosophers for instance, not only do both Laruelle and Stiegler unequivocally agree that the drive is performative but they also both problematize notions of the post-human. However, as post-Laruellians like Kolozova and Ó Maoilearca demonstrate, through Laruelle we may arrive at a more radical (non-Marxist) conception of the non-human. Nonetheless, this is not to suggest that Stiegler does not offer a Marxian material analysis: in fact, for those seeking pragmatic and enacted ethics, Stiegler is one of the foremost living philosophers who consistently supplements his philosophizing with variegated idealist sociopolitical projects. In moving forward and contending with our epoch's most pressing issues existential risk, ecological catastrophe, and the growing criticality of animal rights such philosophers provide us with means to generate and portend alternative models that call into question the all-subsuming portrait of unbounded posthumanism. 117 James, Techniques of Thought, 30. 118 Ibid.