Organology and Decision: On the Politics of the Brain

In their relentless pursuit of calculability, automatic systems work to disable decision-making. Our “Automatic Age,” as French philosopher Bernard Stiegler called it, therefore poses two political challenges. First, by overtaking the political and legal sphere of the administrative state, automatic systems weaken its capacity to respond to novel or emergency conditions. Second, for democratic republics—and, indeed, for all communities—digital infrastructures and the economy of the screen subject individuals to normative operations, to automatisms driven largely by the logic of economic interest or ideology. Here again, decision-making in moments of genuine crisis, now within the public sphere, is disabled because thinking itself has been disabled through the constant production and regeneration of artificial norms. Linking these two spheres—the political and the individual—is not a straightforward task. Unlike traditional political philosophy, which sought to bring politics and citizens into alignment, contemporary philosophy must first address what Stiegler calls organology. No individual mind operates autonomously; rather, it is constituted through a multiplicity of systems: psychic systems (that is, biologically driven systems), social organizations, and, of course, technical systems and their supports. What Stiegler termed the “political alternative” of the contemporary moment is the crucial struggle against those tendencies within digital technologies that accelerate entropy—a “struggle against entropy” that resists the “automation of decision-making.”¹ As he noted, “failing the development of therapies and therapeutics, proletarianization has the effect of eliminating the possibility of decision, that is, of neganthropogenesis.”²

The individual is understood here as a site for a plurality of operations that are neither simultaneous nor fully congruent with one another. Likewise, the political is no longer defined by an assumed ethnic or other fixed identity but rather by a plurality of differences. In both spheres, the possibility of decision is increasingly disabled by the technical advance of digitalization. What, then, constitutes a political decision within this double register—that of the state as an organ of the community and that of the individual as a participant in the public sphere?

Perhaps the first truly modern definition of the political was provided by German philosopher Carl Schmitt. For Schmitt, people form numerous associations, each characterized by different degrees of intensity and different boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. This conception is, of course, broadly consistent with a general organology. What organology cannot easily explain, however, is the formation of a particular political body—a bounded entity. As social systems develop, Schmitt argues, a point is reached at which one form of life (or, in contemporary terms, a socio-technical network) becomes primary, and people become willing to kill and die for its preservation. The state emerges as the organ of the decision concerning the friend and the enemy. The logic of the political is therefore not merely a projection of the logic of a socio-technical system but rather an existential logic of survival. Moreover, the threat is not a natural “fact” but is always defined by the groups involved. It is therefore always a matter of decision: a response to a potential rupture and an anticipation of dissolution.³

Schmitt also emphasized the significance of decision within the state, arguing that the genuine sovereign figure, regardless of the form of polity, is the one who can decide on the exception. When the norms internal to a political body begin to fail or when contestation becomes too intense, the sovereign decides in favor of unity by acknowledging the inadequacy of existing norms and the necessity of new political modes of being.⁴ For Schmitt, forms of liberalism that deny the primacy of decision threaten this critical dimension of sovereignty within the modern state.⁵ Today, however, the threat to the political can be understood differently. It lies in the destruction of the conditions necessary for genuine decision through the expansion of digital infrastructures and the automatisms they generate within an increasingly planetary-scale system of integration. In this sense, the political challenge is no longer simply the contestation of sovereignty but the progressive erosion of the capacity for decision itself.

The organological approach cannot avoid another key dimension of the political: the inevitable conflict among individuals, social formations, and their place within the organization of the state. As Sigmund Freud argued in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), the enforcement of norms at any level necessarily generates forms of resistance, insofar as fundamental psychic processes are constrained by social regulation.⁷ Which is to say, the brain both is and is not merely a physiological system. Thought requires a brain, but the brain is not the origin of thought. As Stiegler writes, “As a noetic organ, the brain is, precisely, not one, since it passes through an organological ‘third’ that lies outside it, as culture collectively transindividuated and supported by those tertiary retentions of all kinds that haunt it.”⁸ If politics is a function of organology, then an organological analysis of the brain becomes a necessary condition for any future concept of the political.

The paleo-archaeological and historical record demonstrates that, at some point, human beings escaped natural determination and embarked upon a new mode of existence superimposed upon the biological: a political form of life that navigates the inevitable tensions between social modes of organization and the technical systems that enabled biological survival. An organological approach must therefore work against the dominant currents of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. It requires acknowledging that the human mind is never simply a product of the brain and its genetic inheritance. Rather, it is the site of the interaction of multiple systems—psychic, social, and technical—that often compete with one another even as they cooperate in maintaining the cohesion of social groups and the survival of biological individuals. As cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris states, “The human mind as an interactive, embodied, and distributed autonoetic system is neither restricted to nor can it be identified with the temporal and spatial boundaries of the brain within.”⁹

What marks the human condition is, so to speak, the “invasion” of alien thought into our own minds: the thought of others, preserved in technical forms of memory—writing, for example, or technical artifacts themselves—and reanimated within our own brains. Equally significant is the alien logic of cultural norms, which shape behavior in ways that secure the survival of social formations. Alongside these influences, the biological demands of the body invade the mind in the form of drives. The crucial point is that no overarching set of norms governs the interaction of these multiple systems as they are instantiated within the individual human mind and brain. Put differently, what we call “the mind” is the ongoing—and inevitably incomplete—attempt to bring a degree of unity to the plurality of systems operating within the individual. The mind is therefore not itself a unified entity governed by a stable set of norms. Rather, it is an evolving effort to negotiate the competing logics of survival generated by our biological, socio-political, and technical forms of life. The mind is both defined by these systems and resolutely not these systems.

This is why the mind can become the true site of crisis, of the unexpected, of the event. The mind has no norms of operation of its own; rather, it is the site for the determination and configuration of alien norms. It is neither a purely biological entity conditioned by history nor a purely historical construction shaped by biological imperatives. Instead, the mind appears in human existence as a novel entity in which technical organization, social organization, and organismic organization—each governed by its own logic and demands—meet and become mutually constitutive. As one early twentieth-century commentator observed, “the individual nervous system is in this way taken over by society.”¹⁰ More recently, the computer visionary Douglas Engelbart wrote: “What really runs our society is the central nervous system of each of its individuals.”¹¹ Stiegler formulates this relation in organological terms; “the psychic apparatus, which undoubtedly takes root in the brain, is not reducible to the brain: it passes through a symbolic apparatus that is not situated only in the brain, but in society, that is, in those other brains with which this brain is in relation.”¹²

But what, precisely, is the organological brain? In his early work, Stiegler followed archaeologist and anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, who argued that the human brain emerged through the evolutionary consequences of bipedalism and the liberation of the hand. Once freed, the hand was no longer constrained by the gestural programming specific to its prior functions and thus became available for entirely new—that is, nonnecessary—uses. In this account, Leroi-Gourhan often makes use of the concept of plasticity. Yet plasticity alone is insufficient. As Stiegler noted, even the earliest accidental flint tool is “mirrored” in the brain through its inherent plasticity. However, plasticity—and even the more radical notion of destructive plasticity—captures only one side of the equation. It fails to account for the crucial turn in human evolution: the invention of new gestural programs, or a new organization of the hand, which was subsequently extended outward from this “internal” alien prosthetic instrument to nature as a whole. This capacity for organization—the capacity for technicity and, ultimately, the ground of human noetic thought—remains occluded within theories of plasticity that tend to overlook forms of thinking that not only incorporate memory but also project themselves toward a future yet to come. This temporal arc is well known within phenomenology and appears prominently in the work of both Leroi-Gourhan and Stiegler under the concept of anticipation. Yet can anticipation simply be assumed to arise from the interiorization of the organized tool? How does the plastic mirroring of the brain actually produce active organization? In other words, how does reflection become invention?

Much of modern brain science has emphasized the extent to which minds and bodies are governed by automatism arising both from biological (genetic) inheritance and from processes of “learning.” Thinkers working from a more explicitly organological perspective have supplemented this account by emphasizing the incorporation of social and technical imperatives within the nervous system itself. As neuroscientist Bruce E. Wexler states, “human beings alter their environment that shapes their brain to a degree without precedent among animals. These human alterations in the shared social environment include physical structures, laws and other codes of behaviors, food and clothes, spoken and written language, and music and other arts.”¹³ This is the point that Stiegler emphasized throughout his work: the brain is literally cultivated by culture through the medium of technical artifacts,¹⁴ while those artifacts, in turn, shape the brain through processes of grammatization.¹⁵ For this reason, the brain cannot be understood as merely neuronal. Participation in a form of life presupposes a brain that has been, in a certain sense, “written” for this possibility of cooperation—that is, inscribed with capacities for the sharing of memory and experience. In general, what we call education can be understood as a process of “inscription” upon the brain through which particular automatisms are formed—patterns of behavior that enable both the survival of the group and the transmission of knowledge, most notably through language.

Yet the noetic brain is not merely a site for the inscription of automatisms. Precisely because of the plurality of inscriptions—and the plurality of modes of inscription—the brain is also a site of différance. First, the noetic brain is always a living brain, activated by drives while simultaneously constituted through its relation to dead memory—that is, to technology. For Stiegler, noesis is a “circuit” between the living and the dead.¹⁶ This circuit ensures that the brain is never simply “one.” It is continually in motion, being written and rewritten while simultaneously subjected to new forms of writing as technologies evolve. The result is an ongoing process of disorganization and reorganization. As Stiegler writes, “the cerebral organic matter of the human brain has the precise characteristic of being constantly disorganized and reorganized by the practice of artificial organs composed of the organization of inorganic matter.”¹⁷ Second, the living brain remains capable of decision precisely because it is perpetually written and rewritten. The brain is an organ that functions only in relation to other organs, whether living or dead. As Stiegler puts it, the brain is “traversed, divided, thrown into movement and turmoil by opposing tendencies that may want to respond in opposing ways, and therefore to pose questions.”¹⁸ It is through this process of differentiation that decision becomes possible, because the system remains fundamentally open.¹⁹ As Stiegler argues:

The passage from psycho-biological automatic selection to its disautomatization as decision is possible only when organic organs combine with, and form a system with, the organological organs that are tertiary retentions, that is, with the epiphylogenetic supports of collective memory, opening up an interpretive play (différance) through which criteria of selection become criteria of decision, that is, of psychosocial individuation, and not just vital individuation.²⁰

For Stiegler, however, the industrialization of memory gives rise to what he calls the Automatic Society. By short-circuiting processes of individuation, which always unfold through states of différance, industrialized automatisms act directly upon the brain and nervous system on a massive scale, producing what he once described as a “monoculture of brains.” The effect is the production of closed systems that work against the radically open nature of the plastic brain, a brain capable of invention through disorganization.

1. Bernard Stiegler, “The Writing Screen,” in The Neganthropocene, ed. and trans. Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), 175.
2. Bernard Stiegler, “Organology of Limits and the Function of Reason,” in Nanjing Lectures, 2016–2019, ed. and trans. Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020), 63.
3. Carl Schmitt, La notion du politique; Théorie du partisan, trans. Marie-Louise Steinhauser (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 64–65, 75–76, 79.
4. Carl Schmitt, Théologie politique, 1922–1969, ed. and trans. Jean-Louis Schlegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).
5. Carl Schmitt, Parlementarisme et démocratie, ed. and trans. Jean-Louis Schlegel (Paris: Seuil, 1988).
7. Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1930).[/enote] Today, however, it is necessary to reconsider this condition through the lens of organology, for the human individual possesses no radical foundational identity. Rather, as a thinking, social, and technical being, the individual is constituted by a plurality of norms and forms of memory. Instead of returning to psychoanalysis and its now-dated categories, we must confront contemporary neuroscience—although without succumbing to what Bernard Stiegler called cognitivism. In other words, we must recognize that organology depends upon one singular organ: “we must adopt an organological approach to the brain.”⁶Bernard Stiegler, “From Psychopower to Neuropower,” in Nanjing Lectures, 182.
8. Stiegler, “Neuroscience, Neuroeconomics, Neuromarketing,” in Nanjing Lectures, 221.
9. Lambros Malafouris, “Metaplasticity and the Human Becoming: Principles of Neuroarchaeology,” Journal of Anthropological Sciences 88 (2010): 55.
10. Charles Hubbard Judd, The Psychology of Social Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 328.
11. Douglas C. Engelbart, Augmented Human Intellect Study (prepared for the Headquarters of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Washington, DC, 1961), 4.
12. Stiegler, “From Writing to Digital Writing,” in Nanjing Lectures, 197.
13. Bruce E. Wexler, Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 3.
14. See Stiegler, “From Psychopower to Neuropower,” 182.
15. Bernard Stiegler, “Désir et connaissance: Le mort saisi par le vif: Éléments pour une organologie de la libido,” La Deleuziana 6 (2017): 74.
16. Stiegler, “The Pharmacology of Technological Memory,” in Nanjing Lectures, 213.
17. Stiegler, “First Lecture: Introduction,” in Nanjing Lectures, 270.
18. Stiegler, “Neuroscience,” 221.
19. Bernard Stiegler, “The New Conflict of the Faculties and Functions: Quasi-Causality and Serendipity in the Anthropocene,” Qui Parle 26, no. 1 (2017): 88, 90.
20. Stiegler, “Organology of Limits,” 54.