The Neganthropocene

Front matter

Bernard

Stiegler

THE NEGANTHROPOCENE

Introduction

5 Passages to the Act, Dialogical Interactions and Short-Circuits in Interactivity

6 Welcome to the Anthropocene: Text for an Encounter between Bernard Stiegler and Peter Sloterdijk

13 What is Called Caring?

Thinking Beyond the Anthropocene

List of Sources

Introduction

Reason is the special embodiment in us of the disciplined counter-agency which saves the world.

Alfred North Whitehead

Yet what needs doing, could he see his and his world’s true need, he could do, no one else so capable of it or so ready for it. He could. It’s a free country. But it will take a change of consciousness. So phenomenology becomes politics.

Stanley Cavell

To hear that somebody has ‘converted’ immediately brings to mind the idea that they have gone through some kind of ‘religious experience’ whose outcome was a change of faith, that is, a transformation or reorientation of belief. But from the outset, such a conversion also has its place in philosophy, marked initially by the experience of wonder that Socrates described as the first and only beginning for both philosophy and the philosopher,' even if today we can recognize Nietzsche’s foresight in calling for a philosophy that would begin not with wonder but with dread.” In truth, whether wonder or dread, such a beginning is not just an experience but an interruption of one way of seeing through which another way of seeing opens up: so it amounts to a conversion of the gaze. But such a transformation also sounds awfully like the starting point of that particular philosophy that is Husserlian phenomenology, which seeks a way into phenomena through an interruption of the ordinary that Husserl sometimes calls the ‘natural attitude’ — this phenomenology begins with an epokhé. Bernard Stiegler begins to philosophize, we would like to argue, thanks to just such a conversion of the gaze, and this inauguration is followed by two others, the third of which is expressed in the collected texts that compose this volume.

Long before the invention and institution of the university, philosophy was a way of approaching the question of how to live, a way that, if it does indeed arise from out of an individual experience of the extraordinary (or, rather, of the extraordinariness of the ordinary) that we could call ‘existential’, is nevertheless immediately drawn into the collective problem of how to live with others, which is to say in the city, the city as a problem, and a problem occurring, always, within the specificity and locality of a ‘here and now’: this is its epochality. If the condition of possibility of the first proto-human gatherings was the acquisition of fire that provided so many benefits so long as it was carefully tended, and the condition of possibility of sedentarization was the development of agriculture that promised to diminish the risks to subsistence so long as the grain and the cattle were carefully cultivated (with all the invocations of cosmic beneficence this required), the condition of possibility of the political city was, above all, the invention of alphabetical writing, which, so long as it was widely taught and learned, opened the possibility of a law that was public, deliberative and (thanks to its exactitude) interpretative — that is, requiring decision. Such an innovation opens, therefore, the possibility of deciding otherwise, of re-organizing collective existence within a particular locality, and thereby ‘spontaneously’ raises the question, which is to say the challenge and the problem, of the basis (that is, the reasons and motives) on which to do so. Hence: if it is true that questions become possible when they become necessary, then the necessity that led to the question of philosophy was, above all, that imposed by the city in crisis, and in strife — threatened with stasis.

Let us say, then, that the discipline of ‘philosophy’ — assuming that something more than nostalgia lies behind our desire to hold onto this name for what has mostly become either academic scholasticism or publishing fashion, hence without ruling out that something bearing this name may indeed have died yesterday or the day before, and yet recognizing that it may be in the encounter with its own exposed mortality that it will finally and for the first time have the opportunity to become what it promises to be (which may, who knows, require some other name than philosophy) — let us say that philosophy always involves, in one way or another, taking the measure of ‘today’, that is, of the epoch in which it is (almost always) written, so that, making an advance upon that epoch, and through the socialization of the ideas advanced by the writer and the desires they express, there is hope of fruitfully surpassing that epoch, or, in other words, of performatively and affirmatively contributing to the necessity of its individuation. But this is also to say that, in feeling the necessity of questions that may hitherto have remained generally opaque, the philosopher strives to make the difference through which this necessity becomes ours, and so contribute to the transformation of our shared milieu by making possible the adoption of an imagined but possible future, however improbable.

If so, what do we make of, say, the epoch of the last ten years? Surely the following five milestones, signposts, symptoms and tendencies would be among those requiring delineation and critique:

= on 26 September 2006, Facebook was made universally available, opening what was to become the age no longer just of the digital (with the integrated circuit dating from 1958 and the first CPU from 1971), or of the network (with the global opening of the World Wide Web in April 1993) but of the ‘social’ digital network, whose effects have thus far proven to be, paradoxically, overwhelmingly and literally anti-social (in spite and because of the relentless rise of its ‘popularity’), as well as, in a sense, anti-network, in that such networks largely consist in a systematic attempt to maintain users within an algorithmically-controlled and increasingly image-based ‘feed’, and to diminish interaction with a links-based internet*;

= on 29 June 2007, Apple launched its first iPhone, opening the age of the capacitive multi-touch ‘smartphone’, that is, of the ubiquitous, portable and permanently-connected input/output screen, which has become the two-way interface through which ‘users’ experience virtually all external events and their own (Facebook-mediated) lives, while simultaneously relaying the ‘data’ they produce through interacting with these touchable screens back to the algorithmic programs of the electronic Leviathan;

= by the end of 2007, the ‘subprime mortgage crisis’ in the United States had become manifest, exposing the corrupt character of financialization and the highly speculative character of ‘investment’, as well as the irrational reliance on automated high-speed trading, leading in September 2008 to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the unfolding of a global financial crisis whose causes were largely identifiable but proposed solutions for which were nonsystemic and in any case left unimplemented, resulting in worldwide economic stagnation (with the notable exceptions of Alphabet, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) combined with the continued risk of further bubbles and crises (such as in Greece);

= the disastrous foreign policy decisions of the United States going back to at least 1990, when George H. W. Bush launched Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and, after 9/11, to 2003, when George W. Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, would continue to unfold their ever-proliferating consequences, through the turmoil and contradictions of the Facebook-mediated ‘Arab Spring’ (beginning in late 2010) and the resulting turmoil and contradictions of the civil uprising in Syria (2011) that would lead to an extremely brutal civil war whose calamitous character would feed into the creation of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (adopting this name in April 2013), leading in turn to a long sequence of attacks using guns, bombs and vehicles as deadly weapons, including, among numerous others, the Charlie Hebdo shooting on 7 January 2015, the co-ordinated attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 and the Nice attack on 14 July 2016, along with all the turmoil and contradictions of the police, military and ‘security’ responses to this wave of terrorism;

= we have seen the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology (spearheaded by Alphabet) and robotic technology (exemplified by Amazon’s purchase of Kiva Systems in 2012, and subsequent cessation of all new customer contracts), leading to many predictions of a coming wave of automation that will lead to widespread job destruction no longer limited to manufacturing but instead extending to many other areas of employment, contributing to ‘disruptive’ ‘Uberization’ and potentially threatening the Fordist-Keynesian-welfare state compromise that has formed the crux of the redistribution process underpinning the consumerist, perpetual-growth macro-economic model that has reigned since the end of the Second World War.

Overarching all of these developments and tendencies, however, are two other challenges whose scale and profundity call out for a response, that is, for a theory and a practice capable of taking and assuming responsibility:

= there is the dawning awareness that industrialization in the nineteenth century and hyper-industrialization in the twentieth century has had numerous deleterious effects that are now being felt at the level of the biosphere itself, including (but not limited to) the crisis of climate change, leading to the proposal that we have entered into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene (whose adoption was recommended by the working group dedicated to this question on 29 August 2016), an epoch in which such anthropogenic effects would have become the major contributor to geophysical change, or, in other words, an epoch coincident with the ‘anthropization’ of the planet and its systems, while threatening, in its unsustainability, to lead to its eventual de-anthropization;

= there is, finally, all about us, evidence of a deterioration of political faith, belief, trust, hope and will, and a corresponding rise of a desperate, reactionary and xenophobic anti-politics all too willing to designate scapegoats and appeal at every opportunity to fear and stupidity, culminating (so far) in the election (on 8 November 2016) of a reality-TV huckster to the presidency of the United States of America and a growing understanding that a polity of performatively-generated filter bubbles, of ‘audiences’ rather than citizens, no longer conforms to the minimum requirements of ‘democracy’ understood as a representative system in which the power to make collective decisions resides in the demos — the so-called Trumpocene being, above all, a ‘post-democratic’ worldless world in which collective decision becomes strictly speaking impossible, because truth itself, losing its effective actuality, has somehow come to seem an irrelevant and obsolescent criterion.

Countless scholarly and popular works have already been written on all seven of these profound challenges. These are, once again: (1) the rise of social networks; (2) the growth of the ubiquitous interactive screen; (3) the global financial crisis as symptomatic of the tendency of investment to become increasingly short-term and speculative; (4) the proliferation of geopolitical crises, terrorism and related forms of individual and collective acting out; (5) automation as a threat to a consumerist macro-economic system founded on employment-based purchasing power; (6) the Anthropocene as an ‘existential threat’ to human existence and the biosphere; and (7) the unfurling of the consequences of industrially-generated populism, including the entrance into a so-called ‘post-truth’ age. Some of the books on these topics are undoubtedly fine works, indeed important ones. But, in relation to these challenges, two things are undeniable, and, in truth, at some level understood by everyone: on the one hand, these challenges all tend to combine and synergistically reinforce one another, in particular in terms of their destructive characteristics; on the other hand, they are all in contradiction with each other, so that a proposed solution to a problem associated with one of these challenges inevitably has the effect of antagonistically diminishing potential solutions to other challenges.

Does anyone really believe that it is possible to ‘solve’ the problems of climate change, habitat destruction and cultural destruction without addressing the consumerist basis of the present macro-economic system, or vice versa, or without addressing the way in which this system depletes the psychic energy required to find the collective will, belief, hope and reason to address this planetary challenge? Can this consumerism really survive the coming wave of automation that threatens to decimate its customer base and undermine the ‘consumer confidence’ that is fundamental to its perpetual growth requirements, themselves antithetical, once again, to the problems of biospherical preservation? How can the collective intelligence and will required to address these problems be found, when these are precisely what thousands of the world’s best engineers are working so hard to dismantle algorithmically and telecratically, in order to extract every possible cent from advertisers in their perpetual quest to hijack attention and seize control of behaviour? And, in a world where stupidity and madness seem to be systemically produced, and where economic desperation continues to force journalism to regress to the cheapest (in all senses of the word) forms of sensationalism, what hope is there of preventing the growth not just of terrorism, but of suicidal and homicidal behaviours of all kinds, in turn contributing to the rise of far right movements, as has been seen throughout the industrial democracies?

In short, all these problems amount to the eschatological questions that arise when a system reaches its limits. What do we mean by a system? Any system is a bounded (that is, limited) dynamic process that always arises from out of certain background conditions (from a preindividual milieu), in so doing achieving relative stability. But if it is bounded (marked by a boundary), for a system to maintain its relative stability (and therefore relative instability — ‘metastability’), it must nevertheless be open to exchanges that exceed those bounds, and that ‘feed’ the system: it is only through the economy of such circulations that it can remain within its limit conditions, whether the system is a spiral galaxy, a hurricane, a cell, an organ, an organism, an ecosystem or a technical infrastructure with its corresponding social and cultural systems. A closed system, cut off from any outside, is sure, sooner or later, to collapse. But an open system, too, insofar as it is dynamic, is only ever relatively stable, and once certain thresholds (limit conditions) are crossed, the system can only transform its character (becoming another system of a different kind) or fall apart — dis-integrate. When multiple limits are reached more or less simultaneously, the process through which a system either transforms or destroys itself can only be hastened and intensified (which does not mean that it cannot last a long time). It seems entirely justifiable to see the unfolding convergence of limits reached by the present technical, social and ecological systems as amounting to a systemic crisis equivalent to a Category 7 Shitstorm.

What task, then, falls to the philosopher who so measures the character of an epoch in crisis, other than to critique those limits in their synergistic and antagonistic convergence, either to try and illuminate the path that turns the system towards the least destructive and most beneficial phase-shift imaginable, or, if it is too late for the catastrophe to be averted, to provide resources to those who, coming after the apocalypse, have no choice but to forge something new from out of the ashes (assuming there is someone and not just ashes)? To raise such a question risks being accused of purveying unduly pessimistic prophecies of doom. Such accusations have for many years, of course, been levelled not at philosophers but at climatologists — by so-called climate ‘skeptics’ and ‘deniers’. That these deniers are indeed in denial, and that scientists are not simply melodramatic purveyors of mass hysteria, is a judgment we continue to make based on the continuing belief we are able to maintain in the ‘objectivity’ of the scientific research that lies behind the modelling of future scenarios.

Climate modelling is an example of a field of knowledge that involves analysis of converging limits, but where these are the limits that fall within the fields covered by the sciences dedicated to describing the conditions of geological, meteorological, oceanic and ecological systems — systems for which this objectivity remains best practice. If we are to understand the character of our epoch, however, we must indeed pursue an understanding of the limits of all these physical and biophysical systems, but, at the same time, we must also understand the converging technical, economic, social, cultural and psychological limits of the systems of human existence. Furthermore, the so-called Anthropocene, as a proposed geological epoch, is not just a question for geological science, but a challenge, even a disruption: if the established objective method for epochal division depends on the long timescales associated with stratigraphy, the rapidity of anthropized change since the advent of the industrial revolution upsets the very basis on which such determinations have hitherto been made.

In this situation, a synthesis of various scientifically objective fields of research cannot suffice: what is required exceeds the division and conflict of the faculties. Why? Because this convergence of limits involves the question, the stakes, the conditions, the categories and the future of knowledge as such — that is, the faculty of reason as such, or rather, in Whiteheadian rather than Kantian terms, the function of reason. What the crisis represented by this convergence requires, in other words, is a new critique, if not a hyper-critique: if the ‘post-truth’ age is one in which thinking itself is fundamentally challenged by the Anthropocene as Gestell taken to its limits, where calculation becomes so hegemonic as to threaten the possibility of thinking itself, then what this age amounts to is the challenge to think at the limits of the thinkable, and to care enough to do so.

The set of thirteen texts of which this book is composed trace a path pursued by Bernard Stiegler as he seeks to respond to the critical imperative arising from the systemic crisis of which these seven challenges are symptoms. Some words of introduction to this path are advisable, perhaps, because the early reception of the work of this French philosopher has too often tended, in the Anglophone world, to hastily presume Stiegler to be little more than an unfaithful acolyte of Jacques Derrida, one who, leavening his adoption of a deconstructive approach with an added dose of Leroi-Gourhan’s palaeo-archaeology, unduly circumscribes ‘différance’ onto a material, positivist and anthropocentric basis that Derrida’s supposedly richer account had always already exceeded. But in addition to misjudging Stiegler’s work, and being too willing to accept that the notion of the ‘quasi-transcendental’ is sufficient to secure the foundations and future of Derrida’s conceptual innovations, the possibility of such a (mis)reading stems from taking its first expression, in the first volume of Technics and Time, as an offshoot of Derrida’s work, rather than as a genuine confrontation. But by giving consideration to its much earlier provenance, it is possible to see how Stiegler’s philosophy is really against, but right up against, Derrida’s work — and also Heidegger’s.

More than one reason could be cited for the deficiencies of this (non)reception in the sphere of Anglophone philosophy. Technics and Time, 1, for example, resolutely ventured into fields and thinkers largely ignored by and uninteresting to this sphere, and did so precisely because, from the outset, Stiegler was concerned to take the measure of his ‘today’, and to exceed it in the direction of the future, as he indicated in the second paragraph of the introduction to the first part of that volume:

Today, we need to understand the process of technical evolution given that we are experiencing the deep opacity of contemporary technics; we do not immediately understand what is being played out in technics, nor what is being profoundly transformed therein, even though we unceasingly have to make decisions regarding technics, the consequences of which are felt to escape us more and more. [...] More profoundly, the question is to know if we can predict and, if possible, orient the evolution of technics, that is, of power (puissance). What power (pouvoir) do we have over power (puissance)?4

But this reference to puissance, mobilized in a description of the powerlessness attending what Heidegger called Gestell, itself serves, in hindsight, as a clue: for, despite the influence of Simondon’s anti- Aristotelianism, Stiegler’s thought in fact gets going through a consideration of the relationship of potential and act, and of the passage a lacte that would lead, much later, to the publication of the small work that would first describe Stiegler’s first ‘conversion of the gaze’.®

It was not until 2003, then, almost ten years after the publication of the first volume of Technics and Time and twenty years after this conversion took place (but he had already stated in the preface to Technics and Time, 1 that the ‘first delineations’ of that work had occurred ten years earlier®), that Stiegler first described its general conditions:

My incarceration in Saint Michel Prison, result of a passage to the act, will have been the suspension of my acts and the interruption of my actions: such is the function of prison. But interruption and suspension, which are also the beginning of philosophy (Socrates’ daimon is the one who interrupts), were for myself the occasion of a reflection on what the passage to the act is in general — and a recollection of all the acts that brought me there.’

Through this suspension and interruption of the world that the young Stiegler brought upon himself by acting out, he is led to the question of potential and act, and, more specifically, to Aristotle’s account of three kinds of souls — the vegetative, the sensitive and the noetic soul — and to the way in which, according to Aristotle, the sensitive soul is actually sensitive, and the noetic soul actually noetic, only intermittently, perpetually threatened, in other words, by the possibility of falling back.

Wherein lies the possibility of the soul’s elevation or regression, possibilities between which it consists in a kind of tension (that is, the tension of a struggle that he will come to understand as being between competing tendencies and counter-tendencies, and that equally amounts to the struggle to bind the drives, the struggle to sublimate broadly conceived)? What Stiegler learns from Aristotle is that the answer to this question has everything to do with the milieu of that soul: whether, as in the case of sight, it is a matter of the diaphanous membrane that opens up the possibility of colour and therefore of visual perception, or, in the case of the fish, of water. This milieu, as what is closest, all-pervasive and most intimate, is what is most difficult to apprehend. It is what, in the ordinariness of existence, is easiest to forget: this milieu may be that which potentially gives rise to questions, but its very transparency is, strangely, what gives these questions a paradoxical opacity whose overcoming requires a converted gaze.

Stiegler himself practised, in his cell, in the suspension of the world made possible and unavoidable by his incarceration, what for him became a necessity: a kind of phenomenological laboratory (doing so in ignorance of Husserlian philosophy) that amounted to a reflection on the world-as-milieu as if from outside (like water perceived intermittently from ‘above’ by a flying fish). Through this process of experimentation, brought about by a suspension and interruption, he was brought to ask: what is the intimate, all-too-easily forgotten milieu of the noetic soul? Thinking at first that it may have been language, he eventually concluded that it is, instead, much older, consisting in that exteriorized milieu in general which is the realm of technics as such. And, what is more, to the realization that, in the absence of the exterior milieu, his interior milieu (that is, his noetic soul, or, spelled otherwise, his psychic apparatus) consisted in nothing but the fabric of anamnesic memories woven and interwoven with the hymponesic traces left in and by artefacts (such as books) to which he continued to have limited access, forming an artificial memory and projective mechanism that would serve only to demonstrate, above all, the irreducibility of the exterior.

The noetic soul, the psychic apparatus, is, then, a struggle of tendencies and counter-tendencies playing out within and between the interior milieu that it ‘is’ and the exterior milieu without which it does not exist. And, since the exterior milieu, the technical milieu, cannot form without the noetic activity that made possible its invention, Stiegler concludes in Technics and Time that the origin of the distinction between interior and exterior can only ever be understood as a ‘default of origin’. Hence if, as the preface to Technics and Time, 1 states, the object of that work is ‘technics’, which will lead some to conclude that the author’s project to describe the ‘pursuit of life by means other than life’ amounts to an anthropocentrism premised on the exclusion of non-human tool use, what is really at stake with technics is the opening of a new process of conserving the past in the present: with the first inscriptions in matter of the gestures of the inscriber, there begins to unfold a history of ‘organized inorganic matter’ inaugurating an artificial selection process that ultimately tends to suspend processes of natural selection. This new retentional process, which is in some way the advent of new memory, grants access to the possibility of knowledge as such, because it opens up a transgenerational process collectively conserving, accumulating and hence perpetually stabilizing and transforming the lessons of individual experience. It is for this reason that the noetic soul, arising after the default of origin, is a struggle of tendencies: this soul’s potential for elevation depends on the desire to know, requiring the constant undertaking of practices of care and learning made possible by exteriorized memory, but perpetually threatened by the regressive possibilities of forgetting, barbarism, and, in general, of succumbing to the inhuman.

With this notion of a default of origin between the exterior and the interior, Stiegler will articulate his account (in Technics and Time, 1) of technical exteriorization as a ‘third kind of memory’ (in addition to genetic memory and nervous memory), that is, of the exterior milieu, with his critique and extension (in Technics and Time, 2) of Husserl’s account of the relationship between retention and perception, that is, of the interior milieu. For Husserl, striving to understand the phenomenal constitution of an experience of temporal continuity, the experience of objects in time (temporal objects such as a melody) cannot, strictly speaking, be composed of instants: the ‘instant’ just past must somehow be included in ‘present’ perception, and Husserl refers to this minimal form of inclusion as ‘primary retention’, just as he refers to ‘primary protention’ to refer to the minimal form of imagination involved in anticipating the next ‘instant’. But in Technics and Time, 2, Stiegler undertakes to show that, if the process of primary retention cannot retain the whole field of what is perceptually given, then the retentional operation amounts to a selection within a field of possibilities, and that this (mostly unconscious) selection must operate according to criteria, and that the criteria for this selection must derive from the set of past primary retentions that have since become secondary retentions (or what we ordinarily refer to as memories), that is, from my accumulated ‘experience’.

Where, then, Derrida deconstructs the Husserlian distinction between primary and secondary retention as amounting to two modifications of non-presence that cannot possibly be kept separate, Stiegler radicalizes it: Husserl may dismiss (until he eventually rethinks his entire project with ‘The Origin of Geometry’) imagistic artefacts such as busts or paintings as insignificant to the question of temporal perception on the grounds they make little or no difference to his account of primary and secondary retention and protention, but

Stiegler shows that, on the contrary, the protentional aspects of these ‘tertiary retentions’ make it possible to gain a certain amount of control over the play between them. And they do so in two distinct ways: through all the processes of the transmission, stabilization and transformation of information and knowledge that are the intergenerational processes of education and culture (what Stiegler calls ‘long circuits of transindividuation’); and through all those processes that make use of tertiary retention as a way of short-circuiting transindividuation, standardizing the retentional process in order to manipulate the protentional process (that is, processes of desire) and thereby turn consumer behaviour into something calculable.

The history of technical exteriorization amounts, then, to the history of tertiary retention, where this unfolds as a history of technical systems. Again, systems are never stable but only metastable: nevertheless, their systemic tendency, that is, their tendency to form a coherent, integrated whole in which all the parts are mutually interdependent, means that all this unfolds as the history of the epochs of tertiary retention, beginning with all those prehistoric tools that are retentional only in an accidental way (not designed to be memory systems), and passing through all those epochs of hypomnesic (that is, intentionally retentional) tertiary retention, from cave painting to ideographic writing, alphabetical writing, the printing press, the gramophone, radio, cinema, television and eventually digital tertiary retention. This opens the pathway that Stiegler pursues in Technics and Time, 3, where, through a critique and account of Simondon, he begins to describe this articulation between technical exteriorization and tertiary retention in terms of the relationship between the history of technical systems and the history of what Simondon calls psychic and collective individuation. For, if tertiary retentional innovation opens up the possibility of a succession of epochs, it does so only insofar as each of these innovations gives rise to new practices of these tertiary retentions, which are always practices of care.

This in turn leads, through a critique of the Critique of Pure Reason, to the argument that, if the transcendental schematism (that is, the capacity for imaginative projection to synthesize the data of intuition with the analysis of the understanding) has a tertiary retentional basis, then what Adorno and Horkheimer called the culture industry does not amount to a technological substitute for the schematism (since the latter has always been technological), but rather to its industrialization. What is really required, Stiegler argues in that volume, is an understanding of the specificity of the cinematic (and so televisual) epoch of tertiary retention, and the way it opens up new protentional possibilities, vast new forms of the elaboration and control of desire, that set in motion the adoptive processes that are consumerist capitalism and the American way of life. Now, all ways of life may amount to such adoptive processes (a fact exposed by the ‘law-making’ of Cleisthenes), but the relative stability of the technical system (that is, the slow pace of its transformation) meant that the Epimethean lag involved in responding to systemic changes did not threaten adoption itself. When, however, the technical system begins to change so rapidly that the adoptive processes of the social systems struggle to keep up, that is, to exceed technological transformations, and when the technoscientific industrialization of the imagination effected by the culture industry begins to short-circuit the inventive capacities of the psychic apparatuses of which society is composed — at that point adoption begins to be reduced to, and to regress towards, mere adaptation.