On Automation and Free Time

The distinction between circulating capital and fixed capital can be traced to the French physiocrat François Quesnay, adopted by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In Capital II (Part II, chapter 10 and 11), Marx reproached Smith and Ricardo for confusing fixed capital and circulating capital with constant and variable capital. In Capital I (Part III, chapter 8), Marx used constant capital and variable capital to analyze the production of surplus value in terms of means of production and labor power. Fixed capital and circulating capital are two differentiated concepts which concern turnover time, i.e., the time taken for one complete circuit or circular movement of capital; fixed capital is durable investment like automatized machines whose value will not be fully consumed in the process of production; circulating capital is defined as materials of labor and wage. Ricardo’s confusion of the two leads to the weakness of his analysis: “The capital-value invested in materials of labor (raw and auxiliary materials) does not appear on either side. It disappears entirely. For it does not agree with the side of fixed capital, because its mode of circulation coincides entirely with that of the capital-value invested in labor-power. And on the other hand, it must not be placed on the side of circulating capital, because in that case the identification of the distinction between fixed and circulating capital with that of constant and variable capital, which had been carried over from Adam Smith and tacitly perpetuated, would abolish itself” (Capital II.XI.6). For a more detailed analysis, please see Ferdinado Meacci, “Different divisions of capital in Smith, Ricardo, and Marx,” Atlantic Economic Journal 17, no. 4 (December 1989), 13–21.

Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1993), 712.

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Part I (New York: International Publishers, 2004), 53.

Fourier elaborated on the concept of “play” when devising the phalanstère, a social and political system which is a sort of cooperative hotel that can accommodate four hundred families.

See Yuk Hui, “Modulation after Control,” New Formations 84–85, Special Issue on Societies of Control (Winter 2014–Summer 2015), 74–91; as well as Erich Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and General Ecology,” trans. Jeffrey Kirkwood, James Burton, and Maria Vlotides, in The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside, eds. Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 121–30.

“Working machine” is a term used by Marx himself, meaning tools; see “all fully developed machinery consists of three essentially different parts, the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and finally the tool or working machine.” Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, II, 9, 235, cited by A. Wendling, Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 137.

Marx, Grundrisse, 706: “They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.”

Marx himself even clearly pronounced this in The Poverties of Philosophy. Cited by Donald MacKenzie,“Marx and the Machine,” Technology and Culture 5, no. 3 (1984): 473: “The hand-mill gives you society with feudal lord, the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”

Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets technique (Paris: Aubier, 2012), 165.

Simondon further characterizes technical individuals as beings who possess an “associated milieu,” meaning that an exterior environment has become integrated to the extent that stability can be reinstated after disturbances.

The failure of sublimation leads to its opposite: desublimation, or more precisely, disindividuation. On this point we will encounter the differentiated understanding of the term “sublimation” in Freud, Jung, and Lacan.

In the sense that Hannah Arendt distinguishes “labor” from “work” in The Human Condition.

Gilbert Simondon, Sur la technique (Paris: PUF, 2013), 54.

Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets technique, 342.

I refer to this as “cosmic reality” in contrast to “technical reality.”

The principle thesis is L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Million, 1995).

Cited by Vincent Bontems, “Esclaves et machines, même combat,” Cahiers Simondon 5 (2013): 11.

For concrete examples of alternative models of social networks, see Yuk Hui, “Le concept de groupe dans les réseaux sociaux – éléments pour une mécanologie de la participation,” in La toile que nous voulons, ed. Bernard Stiegler (Paris: FYP Éditions, 2017), 167–87; as well as Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin, “Collective Individuation: The Future of the Social Web,” in Unlike Us Reader, ed. Geert Lovink (Amsterdam: INC, 2013), 103–16.

See Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy (London: Polity, 2009).

For Simondon, the term “disindividuation” doesn’t carry a negative meaning. It simply designates destructuralization as a necessary phase in the process of individuation.

Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (London: Verso, 2007), 32: “We have, in fact, to think of humanity as a transindividual reality and, ultimately, to think transindividuality as such.”

Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, 273.

Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets technique, 335. The French original: “L’objet technique pris selon son essence, c’est-à-dire l’objet technique en tant qu’il a été inventé, pensé et voulu, assumé par un sujet humain, devient le support et le symbole de cette relation que nous voudrions nommer transindividuelle.”

Ibid., 335–36.

Ibid., 342.

This is the starting point of my own work, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

See P. Musso, “Aux origines du concept moderne: corps et réseau dans la philosophie de Saint Simon,” Quaderni 3 (Winter 1987–88): 11–29.

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 64.

In L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Simondon proposes that “we can call this pre-individual reality nature.” Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 116.

This is demonstrative of the Kantian analytic, and in contradistinction to the synthetic of reason (Vernunft). For an elaboration of the relation between automation and the analytic faculty, see Bernard Stiegler, La société automatique (Paris: Fayard, 2015), 56.

A recent newspaper article suggested that Google should be regarded as the general intellect: Timo Daum, “Arbeiter, Automaten, Algorithmen,” Neues Deutschland, April 29, 2017.

This notion was also analyzed by Jean-François Lyotard, who named a 1985 museum exhibition he organized “Les Immatériaux” (“The Immaterials”).

Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 79.

Cathy O’Neil, “The Ivory Tower Can’t Keep Ignoring Tech,” New York Times, November 14, 2017.

We must mention that Jean-François Lyotard was very sharp and powerful in criticizing these oppositions in his The Postmodern Condition (1979), which is precisely a treatise on knowledge. He asserted that such “oppositional thinking … is no longer relevant for the societies with which we are concerned” and “is out of step with the most vital modes of postmodern knowledge.” Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 14–15.

I would like to further distinguish knowledge from capacity here. If by “capacity” we mean technical know-how such as setting up machines and repairing them, I envisage “knowledge” as an integrated understanding of engineering and the humanities that allows a wider participation in technological activities.