Decadence of Industrial Democracies

Bernard Stiegler is one of the most original philosopherswriting today about new technologies and their implications forsocial, political and personal life. Drawing on sources rangingfrom Plato and Marx to Freud, Heidegger and Derrida, he develops ahighly original account of technology as grammatology, as atechnics of writing that constitutes our experience of time, memoryand desire, even of life itself. Society and our place within itare shaped by technical reproduction which can both expand andrestrict the horizons and possibilities of human agency andexperience.

In the three volumes of Disbelief and Discredit Stieglerargues that this process of technical reproduction has becomedangerously divorced from its role in the constitution of humanexperience. Radically challenging the optimistic view of newtechnologies as facilitators of learning and progress, he arguesnew marketing techniques shortcircuit thought and disenfranchiseconsumers, programming them to seek short-term gratification. Thesepractices of 'libidinal economics' have profoundconsequences for nature of human desire and they underpin thesocial and psychological malaise of contemporaty industrialsociety.

In this opening volume Stiegler argues that the industrial modelimplemented since the beginning of the twentieth century has becomeobsolete, leading capitalist democracies to an impasse. A sign ofthis impasse and of the decadence to which it leads is thebanalization of consumers who become ensnared in a perpetual cycleof consumption. This is the new proletarianization of thetechnologically infused, hyper-industrial capitalism of today. Itproduces a society cut off from its past and its future, stultifying human development and turning democracy into a farce inwhich disbelief and discredit inevitably arise.