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Throughout the twentieth century, the development of technologies—of what Walter Benjamin calls “mechanical reproducibility”—led to a generalized regression of the psychomotive knowledges that were characteristic of art amateurs. This regression was made possible by a machinic turn of sensibility that led to a proletarianization of the amateur so that the latter, having lost his or her knowledges, became a cultural consumer. These questions confront us today in a time in which a second machinic turn of sensibility is taking place. This second turn is made possible by digital technologies, through which just about anyone can access technologies of captivation, postproduction, indexation, diffusion, and promotion—technologies that were, until now, industrial functions that were hegemonically controlled by what I have called the psychopower of marketing and the culture industries. This new machinic turn of sensibility—which is no longer analog but digital—leads to a renaissance of the figure of the amateur, that is to say, to a reconstitution of libidinal energy which, after being systematically canalized and rerouted by consumerist organization, ends up putting in place an economy of drives, that is to say, a libidinal diseconomy.

This essay serves as an overview of Bernard Stiegler’s project by offering a critical examination of “(de)proletarianization” and the pharmakon as refracted through his writings on technics (tekhnē), and his commitment to associations such as Ars Industrialis. I argue that in approaching the relation between society and the technical system as the very question of the pharmakon (that which is both poisonous and curative), Stiegler’s work allows ethical questions to eschew sites of transcendental judgment as well as ethical absolutes in order to instead become questions of art—of ars and of tekhnē. I then proceed with the assertion that Stiegler recognizes in our postglobal society what he calls a state of generalized proletarianization, a state in which there is a loss of knowledge on the part of individuals and collectives in terms of both savoir-faire (know-how) and savoir-vivre (knowing how to live). I then establish that his work gestures toward a “system of care” intended to cultivate new modes of individual and collective existence through what he calls “nootechnologies,” or technologies of the spirit and mind. These technologies, however, bear within them the question of the pharmakon insofar as they are made manifest through hypomnemata, or pharmacological artificial memory supports. In order to better situate the political and ethical stakes of Stiegler’s thought of (de)proletarianization, the remainder of the essay reads several of Stiegler’s models (individuation, citizenship, memory, disorientation) alongside the work of his interlocuters including Derrida, Plato, Marx, Heidegger, and Blanchot.