ARTICOLI / 3 / Paolo Vignola /
The paper suggests to use Deleuzean and Nietzschean theory of “reactive and active forces” in order to improve Stiegler’s analysis of the Anthropocene and “algorithmic governmentality” (Rouvroy) as symptoms of contemporary nihilistic capitalism. Two books are therefore strategic: Genealogy of Morality and Also spoke Zarathustrustra, that the paper suggests to read in their digital actualization. From this point of view, algorithmic governmentality pre-configure the future of the individuals, tailoring it from their profiles, bypassing wishes and affects of their living present. Just like Nietzschean reactive forces, the ‘force’ of algorithmic government consists in separating subjects from their capacities of willing and of behaving in an active way, that is to say of individuating themselves. Another issue of algorithmic governmentality, essentially linked to the first one, is the ideology of “immediate real” that the paper attempts to deconstruct through Bachelard’s concept of phenomenotechnics. The paper therefore ends with another Bachelardian concept, i.e. the epistemological obstacle, and attempts to use it as the theoretical-ethical pivot able to describe Stiegler’s performative concepts of Neganthropocene and neganthropology.
