Symbolic Misery, Volume 1

1. Symbolic Misery: The Core Crisis of Our Age

This misery is a disgrace, which has occasionally been experienced by the philosopher as 'one of the most powerful incentives towards philosophy, and what makes all philosophy political.'

A profound disgrace. Our current epoch is defined by a pervasive "symbolic misery," a deep-seated suffering that arises from the industrialization of the symbolic realm. This isn't merely an economic or social problem; it's a fundamental crisis of meaning and connection, where industrial technology has seized control of the very fabric of our shared symbols and experiences. This leads to a state where genuine experience is replaced by mere conditioning.

The shame of being human. This symbolic misery manifests as a profound "shame of being a man," a feeling of disgrace provoked by the erosion of our collective sensibility. When the symbolic is controlled and manipulated for economic ends, it strips individuals of their capacity for authentic engagement, leaving them disoriented and alienated. This internal suffering, though often unarticulated, is a powerful, albeit painful, catalyst for philosophical inquiry and political action.

A global affliction. The problem is not confined to specific demographics but spreads like a "leprosy" across society, affecting both the privileged and the marginalized. It's a global phenomenon where the mental, intellectual, affective, and aesthetic capacities of humanity are massively threatened. This widespread symbolic impoverishment is a direct consequence of the aesthetic war waged by the market, leading to humiliation and insult for the vast majority.

2. The Intertwined Fate of Aesthetics and Politics

The question of politics is a question of aesthetics and, vice versa, the question of aesthetics is a question of politics.

Politics as shared feeling. Politics, in its broadest sense, is fundamentally aesthetic. It concerns "aisthesis," or sensory perception, and the capacity for "feeling-together" or "sym-pathy." A political community is, at its core, a community of feeling, where individuals share a common aesthetic ground that enables them to live together, to love things together—landscapes, towns, objects, works, languages—and thereby to love themselves.

Catastrophic abandonment. The abandonment of the question of politics by the art-world, and conversely, the political world's relinquishment of aesthetics to the culture industry and the market, is catastrophic. This separation has allowed the systematic exploitation of sensibility, transforming the desiring body into a consuming body whose desire is ultimately ruined. Art's original engagement with the sensibility of the other is crucial for political life.

Building communal sensibility. True aesthetic experience, realized by art, aims at discovering new feelings and building a new communal sensibility. This process forms an "inquiring 'us'" of an aesthetic community to come. However, today's aesthetic conditioning by marketing largely supplants this investigative experience, leaving a significant portion of the population estranged from genuine aesthetic engagement and unable to "feel for what is happening."

3. Control Societies and the Industrialization of Consciousness

The sensible community is today entirely fabricated by the technologies of what Deleuze called 'control societies'; and it is essentially on this front that the international economic struggle is taking place.

Fabricated sensibility. In "control societies," the very fabric of our shared sensibility is manufactured by industrial technologies. This control extends to the technologies of "aisthesis," such as audiovisual and digital media, which modulate the conscious and unconscious rhythms of bodies and souls. This systematic manipulation is not merely a byproduct but the central arena of international economic struggle, where aesthetics becomes both theatre and weapon.

Consciousness as raw material. The twentieth century saw the rise of industries that made consciousness and spirit their "raw materials." To sell products, industries must speak to consciousnesses, which are seen as markets and the driving force behind consumption. This transforms consciousness into a "meta-market," a primary resource for accessing all other markets, leading to its systematic, worldwide exploitation by global groups controlling media like cinema, radio, and television.

The "life time value." Marketing has even invented the concept of "life time value," an economically calculable value of an individual's entire lifetime. This exemplifies the extent to which control societies aim to desingularize and disindividuate human existence. This systematic exploitation of sensitivity, driven by cultural capitalism, leads to the ruin of both body and soul, manifesting in widespread ill-being and disorientation.

4. The Ruin of Primordial Narcissism and Individuation

The resulting symbolic misery is also a libidinal and affective misery, which leads to the loss of what I call primordial narcissism, whereby individuals are stripped of their ability to form aesthetic attachments to singularities or singular objects.

Loss of self-love. Symbolic misery is fundamentally a libidinal and affective misery, culminating in the destruction of "primordial narcissism." This is the intimate capacity for individuals to form aesthetic attachments to unique objects and experiences, which is essential for self-love and self-knowledge. When this capacity is eroded, individuals lose their ability to love themselves, as self-love stems from an intimate knowledge of one's own singularity.

From singular to particular. The standardization inherent in industrial production transforms the singular into the particular. Standardized objects, marketed to "profiled" and categorized market segments, reduce unique individual relationships to mere particularisms. This process lays the groundwork for various communitarianisms, as the particularization of the singular is its annulment, its "liquidation in the flow of commodity-fetish."

Undifferentiated pasts. Audiovisual marketing techniques further exacerbate this loss by making individual pasts increasingly undifferentiated. As consciousnesses are constantly streamed with the same images and sounds, and led to consume the same objects, their personal histories become less distinct from others. This loss of singularity means individuals "lose myself as singularity," becoming unable to love themselves or form meaningful bonds.

5. Grammatization: The Technical Weapon of Control

The process of grammatization is the basis of political power understood as the control of the process of psychic and collective individuation.

Discretizing the continuous. Grammatization, as defined by Sylvain Auroux, is a techno-logical process of discretizing continuous phenomena to isolate fundamental components or "grammes." This process, which began with the alphabet, is the condition for all knowledge and language science, enabling the exteriorization and formalization of human experience. The hyper-industrial age represents the third technological revolution of grammatization, extending beyond language to encompass gestures, behaviors, and movements through sound and image.

Control of idioms and spirits. Grammatization serves as a weapon in the control of idioms and, through them, of human "spirits" or retentional activity. It transforms and individuates idioms, often by imposing external grammatical structures, as seen in the colonization of languages. This process forms the basis of political power, allowing for the control of psychic and collective individuation by dictating criteria of selection for particular retentional apparatuses.

Bio-power and calculation. The hyper-industrial stage of grammatization, characterized by generalized digitalization, extends this control to all spheres, constituting a new form of Foucault's "bio-power" that simultaneously controls consciousness, bodies, and the unconscious. This leads to an absorption of logic into logistics, reducing projection to mere calculation. While calculation can generate singularity, its takeover by capital accumulation becomes entropic, hindering genuine future-oriented projects and leading to a "war waged on spirits."

6. The Anthill Allegory: From Individuals to Reactive Agents

Human society would, through spatiotemporal symbolism, recover the organisation of the most perfect animal societies, those in which the individual exists only as a cell.

The "one" replaces the "we." The hyper-industrial age fosters a loss of individuation, where the "one" designates an annulment of constitutive differences between the "I" and the "we." This leads to an "idiomatic exhaustion" and a blocking of individuation, transforming individuals into "sheep-like, tribalized, particulars." This tendency is illustrated by the allegory of the anthill, where human society increasingly resembles a multi-agent system of "reactive agents."

Functionalized users. Networks, as the most advanced stage of the technical system, functionally integrate users into their associated environments. Through profiling, tele-action, and geo-localization, users become functional elements of the network, their individuation subjected to its concretization. This mirrors the anthill, where individual ants become specialized "cells" whose behaviors are determined by chemical messages (pheromones) and collective memory inscribed in the habitat.

Loss of diachronic power. Hyper-synchronization, driven by industrial temporal objects and real-time living, tends to eliminate the diachrony of the "we" and the consciousness of the "I." Individuals lose their memories and their capacity for singular, inventive, and unexpected behavior. This "becoming-reactive" means they are purely adaptive, deprived of the ability to invent against the necessity of adaptation. This "de-brained" state, where the central nervous system becomes superfluous, incubates destructive explosions, as individuals, remote-controlled and annulled, lash out.

7. Cinema's Dual Role: Weapon and Catharsis

Cinema is also, however, an art. I would like to show why this art has a very particular responsibility in the context of control societies: it is par excellence the aesthetic experience able to fight aesthetic conditioning on its own terrain.

A double-edged sword. Cinematography, as a technology for the mechanical restitution of movement, became a major industrial weapon in the twentieth century, transforming the world into a market and controlling spectators' consciousness. Television, as an electronic development of cinema, further intensified this power. Yet, cinema is also an art form with a unique responsibility: it can be the aesthetic experience that combats the very aesthetic conditioning it helps to create.

The viewer as projector. Jean-Luc Godard argued that the viewer is the projector, actively projecting the image they see. An image only truly "arrives" if the viewer expects it, yet it must also surprise them. Cinema, at its best, enables the viewer to project this "expected unexpected," liberating unconscious desires and fostering a cathartic function. This projective power is crucial for forming a "we" as a liveable space of shared aesthetic experience.

Blinding images. However, the unbridled industrial exploitation of image technologies, particularly television, has led to the destruction of primordial narcissism, eradicating the very possibility of genuinely "seeing" images. By producing "blinding images," this exploitation destroys the viewer's power of projection, turning images into a "nightmare reality" where the symbolic is neutralized. Cinema's challenge is to reclaim its artistic, cathartic potential against this pervasive aesthetic conditioning.

8. The War of Time and the Liquidation of Desire

This kind of control inevitably leads to the liquidation of narcissism, or of the unconscious and of desire as a socialization of the drives. In other words, television inevitably leads to the explosion of the drives, or to acting out.

Annihilating diversity. Television, with its fixed-time broadcasts of industrial temporal objects, aims to synchronize individual temporalities of consciousness. This annihilates the diversity of individual secondary retentions, leading to a collapse of singular points of view and homogeneous criteria for selecting primary retentions. Marketing exploits this by controlling individual protentions, channeling them while exploiting the "archi-protentions" of our fundamental drives.

The collapse of desire. This systematic control, by eliminating the diachronicity of singular desire and its "unexpected" quality, inevitably leads to the liquidation of primordial narcissism. When consciousness is confined to the most impoverished modality of repetition compulsion, the unconscious and desire, as a socialization of drives, collapse. This leaves individuals unable to project themselves, leading to a profound sense of "untenable" existence.

Explosion of drives. The consequence of this liquidation of desire is the "explosion of the drives," or "acting out." When individuals are deprived of their singularity and their capacity for self-love, they may resort to strictly unpredictable and purely destructive behaviors. The 9/11 attacks are cited as a terrifying example of this "war of time," unleashed by the attempt to synchronize uncontrollable diachronies, ultimately leading to suicidal tendencies for the very market that depends on desire.

9. The Call for Friendship and Dialogue Amidst Misery

Refusing to speak to the National Front does not in any way mean refusing to speak to its voters. I would even say that addressing oneself principally to them, before anyone else is, in my eyes, the absolute priority, however unbearable the reality to which they bear witness might be - bear witness, that is, with their vote, as the only possibility for symbolic exchange that they have left, before the worst.

Friendship as a political imperative. In the face of widespread symbolic misery, particularly evident in the votes for extreme parties, it is an absolute priority to address these voters with "friendship" (philia). This is not an endorsement of their political choices but an acknowledgment of their suffering and their vote as a desperate form of symbolic exchange. Denying them this humanity risks pushing society towards civil war, or "stasis," a fate that obsessed the ancient Greeks.

Dialogue for public life. Philia, a familiarity and friendliness, is the essential condition for public life and genuine "dia-logue." This dialogue is not merely linguistic but a symbolic exchange, encompassing all labor and creative activity. It is the foundation for the public space's diachrony, its capacity for differentiation and becoming, preventing it from collapsing into a totalizing, undifferentiated "one."

Eris vs. Stasis. Political life is inherently characterized by "eris," a productive conflict or emulation from which the best emerges, as praised by Hesiod. This is distinct from "stasis," or civil war, which represents the breakdown of political pacification. The challenge is to maintain this dynamic discord, which is the very dynamism of Western psychic and collective individuation, against the Platonic tendency to annul conflict and control all affect, a tendency now realized in cultural capitalism.