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 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

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.