The Disaffected Individual in the Process of Psychic and

Collective Disindividuation

This text is an extract from the third chapter of Mécréance et Discrédit: Tome 2. Les
sociétés incontrôlables d'individus désaffectés (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2006),
published as a working paper for the Ars Industrialis seminar, “Suffering and
consumption,” 25 February 2006, translated by Patrick Crogan and Daniel Ross,
August 2006.

Bernard Stiegler

The Disaffected Individual in the Process of Psychic and Collective

Disindividuation

“One is not serious when one is seventeen.” Rimbaud

“Whoever wants to hang his dog pretends that he's angry.”

24. The Hypermarket

The political economy of spiritual value is that of the libidinal economy—where

value is in general only worth something for one who desires it. It is only worth
something inasmuch as it is inscribed in the circuit of desire, of one who only
desires what remains irreducibleto the commensurability of all values. In other
words, value is only worth something inasmuch as it evaluates what has no
price. It cannot, therefore, be completelycalculated: there is always a remainder,
which induces the movement of a différance, through which alone can be
produced the circulation of values, that is, their exchange—value is worth
something only to the extent that it is inscribed in the circuit of individuations
and transindividuations which can only individuate singularities.

But in the hyperindustrial political economy, value must be completely

calculable; which is to say, it is condemned to become valueless—such is its
nihilism. The problem is that it is the consumer who not only is devalued (for he
is evaluated, for example, by the calculation of his “life time value”) but who
equally is devalorized—or, more precisely, he is disindividuated. In such a
society—which liquidates desire, desire which is, however, energy, libidinal
energy—value is what annihilates itself and, with it, those who, evaluating it, are
themselves evaluated. This is why it is society as such which appears finally to its
members, themselves devalorized (and melancholic), as being without value—
and this is also why society fantasizes its “values” that much more noisily and
ostentatiously, “values” which are only deceptions, compensatory discourses,
and consolations. Such is the lot of a society which no longer loves itself.

The scene of this devalorizing devaluation is not simply the market: it's the
hypermarket, emblem of the hyperindustrial epoch, where markets, managed
“just in time” by barcodes and by purchasers endowed with credit and debit
cards, become commensurable. Such is the “Commercial Activity Zone” (ZAC) of
the Saint Maximin hypermarket, not far from Creil, built by the Eiffage
corporation—which has just purchased one of the roadworks companies recently
privatized by the French government—a ZAC where Patricia and Emmanuel
Cartier would pass Saturday afternoons with their children. Up until the day they
ended up deciding to kill these children, in order to lead them, their father
explained, toward a “better life”—a life after death, a life after this life which no
longer produced anything but despair, such despair that these parents were
driven to inject their children with fatal doses of insulin.

“We all had to die.” They intended to put an end to their days, “to depart for a
better world.” “For a long time we had this hope.” [Florence Aubenas, Liberation,
17 October 2005.]

They were great consumers. The prosecutor and children's rights

advocate, Madame Pelouse Laburthe
reproached Patricia and Emmanuel Cartier pell mell for smoking too much, for
letting their children drink too much Coca Cola, …for giving them too many video
games. [Florence Aubenas, Liberation, 17 October 2005.]

And then, crushed by debt—they held some fifteen credit cards—they decided, a
little like the parents of Petit Poucet abandoning their children in the forest, to
inject insulin into their little ones, then to commit suicide themselves: they were
hoping to find their children again in this “better world.” Only Alicia, who was 11
years old, died from the injection, after three weeks in a coma.

Does this mean that these parents no longer loved their children? Nothing is less
sure, except to say that everything was done to ensure that they would no
longer be able to love them, if it is true that to love, which is not a synonym
of to buy—although the hypermarkets want their customers to believe that if I
love, I buy, and that I only love to the extent that I buy, and that everything is
bought and sold; love, therefore, becomes only a sentiment—is a relation, a
fashion of being and of living with the one loved, and for them. To love is to
form the most exquisite savoir-vivre.

It is just such an exquisite relation that the mercantile organization of life

destroyed in the Cartier family. As I tried to show in the last chapter, children are
being progressively and tendentially deprived of the possibility of identifying
themselves through their parents; they are being deprived by the diversion of
their primary identifications toward industrial temporal objects, since their
secondary identifications (in exactly the same way as the secondary
identifications of their parents) are diverted, precisely with the goal of making
them adopt behaviour exclusively submitted to consumption (and each member
of the Cartier family had their own television). In the same way, and reciprocally,
parents—incited in this way to consume more and more by the combined power
of television, radio, newspapers, advertising campaigns, junk mail, editorials, and
political speeches, all speaking only of “boosting levels of consumption,” not to
mention the banks—find themselves expelled from a position where they could
love their children truly, practically, and socially. What results is an ill-love [mal-
aimer] of a terrifying ill-being [mal-être], which becomes, little by little,
a generalized unlove [désamour]—from which Claude Lévi-Strauss himself has
not escaped.
Our epoch does not love itself. And a world which does not love itself is a world
which does not believe in the world—we can only believe in what we love. It is
this situation which renders the atmosphere of this world so heavy, stifling and
anguished. The world of the hypermarket, which is the effective reality of the
hyperindustrial epoch, is, as the place of barcode readers and cash registers,
where “to love” must become synonymous with “to buy,” a world, in fact, where
one no longer loves. Mr and Mrs Cartier thought their children would be happier
if they bought them game consoles and televisions, but the more they bought
these things, the less happy their children were, and the more they were driven
to even greater expenditure, and the more they lost the very meaning of filial
and familial love—the more they were disaffected by the poison of
hyperconsumption. Since marrying and beginning a family in 1989, they were
inculcated into the belief—to their misery—that a good family, a normal family, is
a family which consumes, and that happiness lay in that direction.

The Cartiers, who were condemned to ten to fifteen years in prison, are as much
victims as perpetrators. They were victims of the everyday despair of the
intoxicated consumer, victims who suddenly, here, passed to the act, into this
terrifying act of infanticide, because they were trapped by an economic misery
engendering symbolic misery. Perhaps it is necessary to condemn them. But
there is no doubt, in my view, that if it is true that one must condemn them,
nevertheless such a judgment must precisely analyze and detail the
circumstances attending the crime, and can only be just inasmuch as it also and
perhaps above all condemns the social organization capable of engendering such
a disgrace. But such an organization is that of a society itself infanticidal, a
society where childhood is in some way murdered in the womb.

25. Intoxication, disintoxication

Consumption is intoxication: this has today become obvious. And it is underlined

in an article written by Edouard Launet during the trial of Patricia and Emmanuel
Cartier. They lived close to
Saint Maximin…the largest commercial zone in Europe…at once El Dorado
andterrain vague, abundance and social misery. The market, nothing but the
market, and these little adrenaline rushes that come with the purchase of a
television or a sofa. [Edouard Launet, Liberation, 17 November 2005.]

…days before the drama of Clichy-sous-bois which triggered riots across France
lasting several weeks, in the Cora hypermarket, scene of a “huge social melting
pot” where theworking class people of Beauvais mix with the “comfortable”
Parisians, among them the Cartiers, who spend their weekends in their holiday
houses around Gouvieux and Chantilly, in this hypermarket where 40000 people
walk every day past the 48 cash registers and their barcode machines.

Jean-Pierre Coppin, head of store security, observes: “We know that we are
sitting on a pressure cooker.”

For the immediate consumption of life today provokes suffering and despair, to
the point where a profound malaise reigns henceforth in the society of
consumption. As I have already noted, a large study conducted by the Institute
IRI conjures the figure of the “anti-consumer,” within the proliferation of other
symptoms of this crisis of hyperindustrial civilization—including anti-advertising
and anti-consumption movements, and the decline of sales of brand-name
products, etc. I have often heard people reject these findings on the grounds
that in reality there has been no verifiable decline in overall consumption (even
though the IRI study was commenced following a reduction in sales of consumer
durables), and therefore that there is no real crisis, and that in fact anti-
consumers, that is, those who call themselves consumer malcontents, those who
purport to desire to live otherwise, often turn out to be among the largest
consumers—tantamount to hyperconsumers. It is thus then concluded that this
malaise, this evil development, is only an illusion.

Yet there is no contradiction in the fact that a hyperconsumer denounces

consumption, no more than in the responses to the study by Telerama
comparing the television habits of the French to the judgments they made about
programs, a study which revealed that if 53% of respondents considered
television programs to be detestable, most of them nonetheless watched these
programs which they thought so terrible. There is no contradiction here because
both cases concern addictive systems, and we know well that a system is
addictive precisely to the extent that one who is caught in the system denounces
it, and suffers that much more to the extent that he cannot escape it—this is the
well-known phenomenon of dependence.

The “adrenaline hit” that an important purchase procures is produced by the

addictive system of consumption, and the same thing goes for the tele-
spectators interrogated by Telerama, who condemn the programs and
nevertheless watch, like the heroin addict who, having arrived at the stage
where consuming a dose no longer procures anything except further suffering,
because the natural production of dopamine, seratonin and endorphins in his
brain has been blocked, finds only temporary relief in a supplementary
consumption of the cause of this suffering—an immediate consumption of life
which can only further aggravate the pain, until it is transformed into despair.
This is why, exactly like the tele-spectator who no longer likes his television
programs, if one asks an addict what he thinks of the toxic substance on which
he depends, he will speak the greatest ill, but if one asks him what he needs
right now, he will again and always reply: heroin.

Again and always: at least to the extent that he lacks the means to detox.

Televisual stupefaction, which in the beginning was the hashish of the poor,
replacing the opiate of the people, becomes a hard drug when, having destroyed
desire, it targets the drives—because the desire which balanced and linked them
has disappeared. This is the moment when one passes from cheerful
consumption, which believes in progress, to miserable consumption, where the
consumer feels he regresses and suffers from it. At this stage, consumption
releases more and more compulsive automatisms, and the consumer becomes
dependent on the consumption hit. He suffers, then, from a disindividuating
syndrome that he only manages to compensate for by intensifying his consumer
behaviour, which at the same time becomes pathological.

Things turn out this way because in hyperindustrial society, where everything
becomes a service—that is, marketed relations and objects of marketing—life has
been completelyreduced to consumption, and the effects of psychic
disindividuation completely rebound upon collective individuation, it being
understood that in the processes of psychic and collective individuation, psychic
individuation is only concretized as collective individuation and transindividuation,
the converse also being the case. When everything becomes a service,
transindividuation is completely short-circuited by marketing and advertising [la
publicité]. Public life is, then, destroyed: psychic and collective individuation
become collective disindividuation. There is no longer any us; there is only
the they, and the collective, whether it be familial, political, professional,
confessional, national, rational or universal, is no longer the bearer of any
horizon: it appears totally void of content, what is called, according to the
philosophers, kenosis, a term which also signifies that the universal is no longer
anything but the market and the technologies it spreads out over the entire
planet—to the point that the Republic, for example, or what pretends to replace
it, or bolster it, or reinvent it, for example Europe, is no longer loved or desired.

26. Disaffection

Hyperindustrial society is intoxicated, and the premier political question is that of

disintoxication. Intoxication is produced by phenomena of saturation, which
affect in particular higher functions of the nervous system: conception
(understanding), sensibility and imagination, that is, intellectual, aesthetic, and
affective life—spirit in all its dimensions. It is here that the source of all forms of
spiritual misery can be found. We can describe these as cognitive and affective
forms of saturation typical of hyperindustrial society.

Just as there is a cognitive saturation (we have observed for more than ten years
now the effects of “cognitive overflow syndrome,” which has the paradoxical
result—paradoxical, that is, for a narrowly informational conception of
cognition—that the more information is delivered to the cognitive subject, the
less he knows), there is also in effect an affective saturation. The phenomena of
cognitive and affective saturation engender individual and collective, neurological
and psychological [cerébrales et mentales], cognitive and
personality, congestion, which one could compare to the paradoxical effects of
urban congestion engendered by the excess of automobile traffic, of which
bottlenecks are the most banal experience, and where the automobile, thought
to facilitate mobility, produces on the contrary a noisy and polluting—that is,
toxic—slowing down and paralysis. In the same way as cognitive saturation
induces a loss of cognition, that is, a loss of knowledge, and a bewilderment of
minds [esprits], a stupidity of consciousnesses [consciences] more and more
mindless [inconscientes], affective saturation engenders ageneralized
disaffection.

Cognitive and affective saturation are therefore cases of a much larger

phenomenon of congestion, striking all hyperindustrial societies, from Los
Angeles to Tokyo and passing through Shanghai. When Claude Lévi-Strauss told
us to prepare ourselves to quit a world that he no longer loved, citing the
example of demographic explosion, he presented a case of this generalized
intoxication:

The human species lives under a sort of regime of internal poisoning.

In all these cases of congestion, humanity appears confronted by a phenomenon

of disassimilation, comparable to that which Freud described in protistas,
referring to the work of Woodruff:

[I]nfusoria die a natural death as a result of their own vital processes. […] An
infusorian, therefore, if it is left to itself, dies a natural death owing to its
incomplete voidance of the products of its own metabolism. (It may be that the
same incapacity is the ultimate cause of the death of all higher animals as well.)
[Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, p. 321.]

Moreover, and I shall return to this in the final chapter, the sclerosis that is able
to become the superego, as morality, can also engender such an auto-
intoxication. However, the intoxication produced by affective saturation (an
indubitable element at the origin of Patricia and Emmanuel Cartier's crime)
constitutes a case of congestion intrinsically more serious and worrying than all
the others: a congestion affecting the capacities for reflection and decision-
making in psychic and collective individuals, but also affecting their capacity to
love their neighbours as much as their own, their capacity to love them
effectively, practically, and socially, leading necessarily, by the same token, and
in the end, to the very serious phenomena of political hatred and violent conflicts
between social groups, ethnicities, nations, and religions. This renders properly
inconceivable any possible solutions to the other cases of congestion that
intoxicate all the dimensions of life on the entire planet.

Affective saturation results from the hypersolicitation of attentioni, and in

particular that of children, and aims, through the intermediary of industrial
temporal objects, to divert their libidoi from their spontaneous love objects
exclusively toward the objects of consumption, provoking an indifference toward
their parents and to everything around them, and provokes as well a generalized
apathy supercharged with menace—of which the monstrous heroes of Gus Van
Sant's Elephant are the symbols, or rather the “dia-boles.”

In Japan, where I find myself at this moment writing this chapter, the congested
reality of psychic and collective disindividuation leads to passages to the act,
televisual and criminal mimetisms, devoid of shame, that is, of affection (for
instance the two young Japanese criminals who, asked to say something by way
of repentance for the killing of their victims, respectively a 64 year-old woman
and some very young children from a primary school, replied that they felt no
regret), such as the hikikomori and the otaku, who constitute two typical cases
of disaffected youth, examples which have taken particularly worrying
proportions. It is believed there are more than one million hikikomori, hundreds
of thousands of whom have totally abandoned schooling, and are profoundly cut
off from the world, living a sort of social autism, shrivelled up in their domestic
and televisual milieui, and absolutely hermetic within a social milieu which is in
large part ruined:

His family life overwhelmed, Mr Okuyama, 56 years old, recounts: “We were
obliged to move last May, for it was becoming too dangerous to stay with my
son, due to his violence.” Despite the parents' willingness, communication is
quasi-absent. “I try to meet with him once a week to have a normal discussion,
but it's very difficult. He talks only in insults and unintelligible words,” explains
his father. “Also, I'm scared: he's twice as strong as me.”
[http://antithesis.club.fr]

For the most part totally cut off from the education system, it eventuates that
they pass to the act, supplying in this way the significant and disturbing format
of diverse items in Japanese newspapers:
In 2000 a 17 year-old boy who was living as a recluse for six months, having
been the victim of bullying and hazing at school, stopped a bus and with a
kitchen knife murdered a passenger.

Otaku is the term for young people who no longer live anywhere but in a closed,
virtual world of computer games and comics (the word otaku initially meant a
manga hero), in the interior of which alone they can encounter their kind: other
otaku, equally disaffected, that is, disindividuated psychically as much as
socially, or in other words perfectly indifferent to the world:

In his latest novel Kyosei Chu, a title that may be translated as The Daily Life of
the Worm, Ryu Murakami analyses which kind of adolescents refuse to confront
reality, constructing a purely fictional universe inspired by comics or animated
movies. It is a universe into which they enter thanks to more and more
sophisticated gadgets, with which Japanese industry saturates them. Unable to
communicate with others, these youth spend the best years of their lives in front
of a games console or computer, rarely going out. [Bruno Birolli, Le Nouvel
Observateur, Hors Série no. 41, 15 June 2000.]

Certain otaku practice a cult of objects, in particular, objects of consumption:

They organize their existence around a passion which they push to extremes.
This might be for an object: for instance the otaku who keeps in his room old
computers purchased over the internet, or the teenager who possesses several
hundred Chanel bags. Some of these bizarre cults pose a problem, like the one
which has subtly developed around Juyo, the spokesperson of the Aum sect,
guilty of the sarin gas attack which killed twelve people in the Tokyo metro in
May 1994.

We, city-dwellers (and we have all, or nearly all, become city-dwellers), suffer
from this psychic and collective congestion, and from the affective saturation
which disaffects us, slowly but ineluctably, from ourselves and our others,
disindividuating us psychically as much as collectively, distancing us from our
children, our friends, our loved ones and our neighbours, from our own [des
notres], all of whom are moving further and further away from us. And this
disaffects us from everything dear to us, everything which is given to us
by charis, by the grace of charisma, from the Greek kharis, and from a charisma
of the world from which proceeds all caritas, which is given to us and without
doubt from the beginning (primordially, from the outset) as ideas, ideals, and
sublimities. We, we others, we who feel ourselves being distanced from our own,
feel ourselves irresistibly condemned to live and think like pigs.

Those among us who still have the chance to live in the city centre, and not in
the outlying suburbs, try to survive spiritually by assiduously frequenting
museums, galleries, theatres, concert halls, art cinemas, etc. But such people
suffer from another ill: that of cultural consumption, where one must absorb
even more cultural merchandise, as if another form of addiction installs itself,
without ever being able to re-establish the slow time of a true artistic experience,
the time of the amateuri, which has been replaced by the consumer suffering
from a dazed cultural obesity.

When we have a chance to escape to the country—although we don't find this

on Saturday afternoons coming from Gouvieux or Chantilly, in the Cora
hypermarket of Saint Maximin, the largest ZAC in Europe, right next to the
beautiful abby of Royaumont—when we “resuscitate” in the country, therefore,
we suspend these innumerable, permanent and systematic affective solicitations
which characterize contemporary life, in which everything has become a service,
almost totally submitted to marketing, including “cultural” marketing. We return,
then, to the primary affective solicitations of the greenery, of flowers, animals,
the elements, solitude, of the village market, of silence and of slow time—
slowness and silence lost today: the absolutely incessant character of the
addressing of the senses, which has the goal, precisely, of never ceasing,
inducing a saturation which ends in the time of disaffection—and of
disaffectation.

This loss of consciousness [conscience] and affect, induced by cognitive and

affective saturation, constituting the appalling reality of spiritual misery, at the
very moment when the planet must confront and resolve so many difficulties,
characterize the lost spirit of capitalism. There are today disaffected beings like
there are re-purposed factories [usines désaffectées]: there are human
wastelands like there are industrial wastelands. Such is the redoubtable question
of the industrial ecology of the spirit. And such is the enormous challenge which
befalls us.

27. Disturbances

Beyond disaffection, which is the loss of psychic individuation, disaffectation is

the loss ofsocial individuation, which in the hyperindustrial epoch threatens
disturbed children, who are tending to become disaffected individuals. Now,
since the completion of a large study by INSERM, inspired by the American
classification of pathologies and by cognitive methods linking psychiatry,
psychology, epidemiology, and the cognitive, genetic, neurobiological and
ethological sciences, disturbed children fall under the nosological category of
“behavioural problems” [Report of INSERM: “Troubles des conduits chez l'enfant
et l'adolescent”].

These “behavioural problems” are systematically associated with attention

problems. For attention is also, as Rifkin underlined, the most extensively
researched merchandise—for example, by TF1 and its managing director Patrick
Le Lay, who explained moreover that attention, which consists of “available brain
time,” and which constitutes the quantifiable audiencei of television, is perfectly
controllable and controlled, thanks to the techniques of the audimat. It is

the only product in the world where one “knows” its clients down to the second,
after a delay of 24 hours. Each morning, we see in large scale the result of the
exploitation of viewing. [Les dirigeants face au changement, p. 93]

The disaffection produced by affective saturation, which is therefore also a

disaffectation, that is, the loss of recognizable social spaces and their
involvements, resulting from the loss of individuation which strikes the
disaffected individual, translated into the process of collective disindividuation, is
directly connected to the fact that the capturing of attention destroys it.
Attention means, equally, the quality of being attentive, which is social, and not
only psychological, and which is called, very precisely, shame, a meaning
particularly well preserved in the Spanish word vergüenza.
This destruction proceeds in this way because attention is what organizes and is
organized by retentions and protentions, but today these are massively and
incessantly controlled by the retentional and protentional processes of television.
From the childhood stage of primary identification to the secondary
identifications of the adult, these processes seek to substitute the secondary
collective retentions elaborated by the process of transindividuation (which is
nothing other than the vital process of psychic and collective individuation), with
secondary collective retentions entirely fabricated according to the results of
market studies and prescriptive marketing techniques, as much as by the
specifications of designers, stylists, developers and ergonomists, together
realizing the accelerated socialization of technological innovation.

This is why the study which invented this pathology of “behavioural problems”
(inspired by North American categorizations) is largely unreliable, to the extent
that it fatally neglects this fact: that attention has become a form of
merchandise. Moreover, “behavioural problems,” designating behaviour which
transgresses social rules, are considered mental problems accompanied by
various symptoms, in particular, attention deficit and “oppositional defiant
disorder.”

One of the psychiatric pathologies characterized by behavioural problems is

attention deficit disorder/hyperactivity, along with oppositional defiant disorder.

Children or adolescents suffering from these also frequently suffer from

depression and anxiety, and they progress easily to the act of suicide.

The study presumes to have identified a demonstrable, empirical, probability of

the appearance of a disorder in connection with the following factors:

Antecedent behavioural problems in other family members, criminality within the

family, very young mothers, substance abuse, etc…

Based on this,

the group of experts recommend the identification of families presenting these

risk factors in the course of the medical monitoring of pregnancy.
It also recommends

The development of an epidemiological study of a representative sample of

children and adolescents in France… [and] the undertaking of targeted studies of
populations at high risk (a history of imprisonment, children in special education,
indicated urban areas).

The real question concerns the destructive effects on psychic individuation as

much as on collective individuation, provoked by affective saturation and the
diverse forms of congestion which intoxicate contemporary society, in particular
television, which ravages the attentional faculties of children as much as of
adolescents and their parents, along with adults in general, and in particular
politicians—and no doubt also the INSERM researchers who themselves watch
television.

The study, which has as its point of departure cognitivist hypotheses granting an
essential role to genetics, and therefore to hereditary factors, is not ignorant of
the fact that it is necessary

to evaluate the specific role of both genetic and environmental susceptibility in

behavioural problems.

And while recommending research into “genetic vulnerability,” it also

recommends

the study of the influence of parental attitudes.

If what is not being suggested here is the sterilization of parents presenting risk
factors, we cannot, however, refrain from recalling that many states in the USA,
the country whose classification of mental diseases was clearly the inspiration of
this INSERM study, practised this kind of sterilization before the war, and that
this ceased only after the revelation of the Nazi horrors.
But above all, why not propose the study of the influence of television and of the
innumerable techniques of incitement to consumption which cause, precisely, the
affective saturation syndrome? Television does indeed receive a mention:

Recent studies confirm that the exposure to televisual violence from the age of 8
is highly predictive of aggressive behaviours in the long term. This relation holds
independently of the IQ and the socio-economic status of the subjects, and is
uniquely determined by the factor of violent scenes.

But the influence of television is not properly apprehended for what it is: as the
effect of an industrial temporal object which permits the capture of attention that
“the enemy of the beautiful” [l'ennemi du beau] calls “available brain time.” How
much credence should be given, then, to the psychopathological study which
pretends to describe the phenomena of loss of attention, but which itself gives
no attention to the techniques for capturing attention?

The question of the psychosocial environment is that of the process of psychic

and collective individuation, itself overdetermined by the process of technical
individuation, above all in that epoch when technics has largely become an
industrial system of cognitive and cultural technologies, that is, what I call along
with my associates at Ars Industrialis, “technologies of spirit.” It follows that the
dysfunction of the psychic, collective and social process of individuation must be
treated as a question of sociopathology rather thanpsychopathology.

28. From psychopathology to sociopathology

That some psychopathological terrains are more fragile than others, and
therefore more sensitive and reactive to sociopathologies, is not in question. But
if it seems that new forms of pathology are appearing, as we saw for example in
Japan, this concept of new psychopathologies is denied by numerous
psychiatrists, on the basis that what is really in question here is
sociopathological—that is, it is question of political economy.

What's more, psychopathological fragility, as a default affecting one psyche, is

very often, if not always, what is originally—through compensatory processes at
once well known and intrinsically mysterious—derived from the most singular
individuations, and therefore the most precious for the life of the spirit, both on a
psychic and collective level. I have already shown how various handicaps were at
the origin of artistic genius, like the paralyzed fingers with which Django
Reinhardt invented modern guitar, or that of Joe Bousquet, who became a writer
through wanting to become his wound, or again, the anti-social characteristics
always qualifying the perversions of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and so many poets, not
to mention the madness of Hölderlin, Nerval, Artaud, Van Gogh, etc. And let's
add here the deafness of Thomas Edison.

The discourse of INSERM, completely ignoring these questions, rests on an

exclusively normative and hygenist conception of the neurological apparatus, as
much as of life in general, and human being in general, which does not seem to
take any account, moreover, of Canguilhem's analyses of the normal and the
pathological, and which does not see that it is the articulation between the
nervous, technical, and social systems which constitutes the total human fact,
that is, the real—hominization, which, since Leroi-Gourhan, can be understood as
technogenesis and sociogenesis. It is true that psychoanalysis has itself gravely
neglected these dimensions, without which there would be no psychogenesis,
which I have begun to analyse through the concept of a general organology, to
which I will return in the following chapter.

The INSERM inquiry does venture, however timidly, some perspectives on these
questions, when they emphasize that the primary question concerning the
genesis of the pathology is language, a question which should always also
include, more generally, all the circuits of symbolic exchange:

Inadequate linguistic development impedes the construction of healthy

sociability, limits the quality of communication and promotes the expression of
defensive reactions in the child.

The “group of experts” recommend, however, in their conclusions,

the development of new clinical trials, using various combinations of medication,

and new chemicals.
But to what end? Without, it seems, being able to recommend the use of
Ritalin—since that chemical which serves precisely to “take care of” American
children suffering from “behavioural problems” has become the object of an
infamous trial—for INSERM it is obviously about, on the one hand, instituting
diagnostic techniques aimed at categorizing and listing children as a
priori potentially “subject” to disorder and, on the other hand, about proposing
that the solution is a chemical straitjacket, that is, a technology of
pharmaceutical control, which both opens a new market, and avoids the question
of sociopathology, which is here the only genuine question.

29. Blaming parents and children is a smokescreen which dissimulates the

question of the industrial political economy and leads to the chemical straitjacket

This process of blaming parents and children enables them to be indicted, rather
than the shamelessness of society, a society which drives them mad and which
we no longer like, and in which we no longer like ourselves, in which disbelief,
discredit, cynicism, and stupidity reign. The behavioural disturbances induced by
generalized disindividuation are not provoked by genetic causes, even if they
obviously also possess genetic bases—no more nor less than some beneficial
chemicals which, crossing a certain threshold, suddenly become toxic. For the
genetic bases of irritability are the same as of sociability, and are more precisely
what Kant called unsocial sociability:

By antagonism, I mean in this context the unsocial sociability of men, that is,
their tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual
resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up. This propensity is
obviously rooted in human nature. Man has an inclination to live in society, since
hefeels in this state more than a man [this is my emphasis], that is, he feels able
to develop his natural capacities. But he also has a great tendency to live as an
individual, to isolate himself [in Japan: hikikomori], since he also encounters in
himself the unsocial characteristic of wanting to direct everything in accordance
with his own ideas. […] Nature should thus be thanked for fostering social
incompatibility, enviously competitive vanity, and insatiable desires for
possession or even power. Without these desires, all man's excellent natural
capacities would never be roused to develop. Man wishes concord, but nature,
knowing better what is good for his species, wishes discord. [Kant, Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, Fourth Proposition.]

This unsocial sociability is therefore the true eris:

In the same way, trees in a forest, by seeking to deprive each other of air and
sunlight, compel each other to find these by upward growth, so that they grow
beautiful and straight [...]. All the culture and art which adorn mankind and the
finest social order man creates are fruits of his unsociability. For it is compelled
by its own nature to discipline itself, and thus, by enforced art, to develop
completely the germs which nature implanted. [Fifth Proposition.]

Unsocial sociability is Kant's way of articulating the psychic and the collective as
a process of individuation which puts singularity—and the eris that this supposes
as emulation, that is, as elevation and transmission—in the heart of its dynamic.
So, it is this that the normalizations and classifications of the American-inspired
mental nosology wants to control, in order to reduce it to a behavioural model
entirely normalizable, that is, calculable.

Man—which is the present name of the processes of psychic and collective

individuation—is a being in becoming, that is, by default, and his defaults are
essential [il faut] to man's future, that is, as what constitutes his chances. Just
as in biological life, as we know, it is the mistakes in the replication of DNA which
allow evolution and the negentropic characteristics of the living.
Chemotherapeutic normalization wants to eliminate this essential default: it
seeks a faultless process. But such a process would be without desire, for the
object of desire is that which is lacking [fait defaut]. Now, a process without
desire is an irrational process, which leads to a society demotivated by chemical
straitjackets and electronic bracelets, or to a politics of terror, or, more likely, to
both at the same time. For these beings without desire see their drives loosen,
and society no longer knows how to contain them except by repression—except,
that is, through a regression which unchains these drives.

Not only are we able to do the perfectly sociable things, through genetic
irritability which is the molecular basis of unsocial sociability, but we can only do
the truly sociable things, that is, the individuating, inventive and civilized things,
on this basis. As for the pathological disturbances from which society suffers—a
society which in effect no longer loves itself and where stupidity reigns—these
are engendered by a system of which this behavioural therapeutics is an
element: this system is that of industrial populism which has made attention a
product that has lost all value, and which engenders in the same stroke
behaviours that are in effect socially non-attentive, on the part of disaffected
individuals, human wastelands in a general situation of symbolic, spiritual,
psychological, intellectual, economic and political misery.

It is fortunate for disturbed children that they do have their failings, their de-
faults. But the libido of these children, which is energetically constituted by these
same failings, is diverted from the love objects that their parents are, and more
generally from social objects—that is, from objects of the idealization and
sublimation of this love, as objects constitutive of collective individuation, for
example, objects of knowledge, or objects of law, as social concretizations in
default of justice which does not exist. The libido of these children, thus
diverted, then becomes dangerously impulsive and aggressive, and suffers
terribly from no longer eventuating in the love of parents or the world, as much
as the parents no longer come to love their children—they no longer have the
means.

These children demand, then, more game consoles, more television, more Coke,
more brand-name clothes and school items, and their parents, submitted to
this pressure to which the social apparatus is in totality henceforth submitted,
are deprived of their parental roles. It was in such circumstances that Patricia
and Emmanuel Cartier were able to pass to the act, taking their children with
them—in just the same way as the London suicide bombers took themselves to
be martyrs, affirming that there is a life after death, and that it is worth more
than this life of despair.

I claim that such circumstances powerfully attenuate the culpability of the

Cartiers, and I would add that in analyzing the conditions in which the
apparatuses for capturing attention and more generally inciting consumption
cause behavioural problems, including having led some parents to infanticide,
the question is not to attribute guilt, but to try to think from out of these
problems what there is of justice and injustice in the hyperindustrial epoch, and
from this to deduce some new political propositions with a future, that is, with
the capacity of opening a passage beyond the horizon of despair.

Children, adolescents and parents are seriously unbalanced in their relations,

that is, in their being. The passage from the psychic to the collective begins with
this relation, which is not therefore secondary but primordial, weaved into the
primary identification whereby the child, like his parents, is in a transductive
relation with his familiars. Currently, this relation is seriously perturbed by
industrial temporal objects capturing and diverting attention, profoundly
modifying the play of retentions and protentions, and above all producing
secondary collective retentions which short-circuit the work of transmission
between generations, work which is the only possibility of dialogue, including
and above all through the modes of opposition and provocation. These questions
constitute the problematic foundation of what I have called, in the preceding
chapter, the Antigone complex, signifying as well that these questions return to
the question of justice, law, and of the hyper-superegoistic desire of youth, a
desire which can turn, if it is mistreated, into a process of negative sublimation—
becoming, in some cases, a particularly dangerous, martyrological phantasm.

The control and channelling of primary and secondary processes of identification

reveals an obvious connection between the trial of the Cartiers and the tests
done on children accused of being disturbed—for it is indeed a trial which
determines them as diseased, just as we know that in the USA such children are
treated as diseased—children that we sacrifice in this way on the altar of
consumption, which is a scandal, a disgrace, and an infamy. For these ways of
treating them, answering to the common interests of the pharmaceutical
industry, television, and the hypermarkets—which a security chief assured us
that he knew to be “sitting on a pressure cooker”—is a way of making fall onto
the little shoulders of children the decadence of a society intoxicated by its
excretions and its products of disassimilation: a society sickened by an auto-
intoxication, amounting to a mental destruction and the ruin of the “spirit of
value” [“valeur esprit”—Valery, 1939].

The INSERM inquiry, which pretends to scientifically establish that these children
are pathologically disturbed and suffering an attention deficit, thus appears for
what it is: one more artifice concealing the fact that these children
are rendered disturbed by a society which has become profoundly pathological
and, through this, inevitably pathogenic. From this perspective, the results of the
inquiry are no doubt not false, but the premises through which these results are
interpreted certainly are—and the conclusion drawn from these results,
recommending chemical treatment for this social malaise, a diagnosis which is
clearly a scam, is catastrophic. It is that much more catastrophic to the extent
that it can only lead to a repetition of what has already occurred in the USA with
Ritalin.

30. Losses of attention—or toxicomania as social model

In the course of an action brought against the pharmaceutical industry, which

had put Ritalin on the market, the question of attention deficit became central,
and the pathology it was supposed to lead to in children and adolescents:

“We cannot continue to peddle psychotropics to our children, while at the same
time asking them to say no to drugs,” declared Andrew Waters, who accuses the
American Psychiatric Association of “having conspired to drive American youth to
the consumption of tranquilizers.”

What was to be calmed was ADD, that is, attention deficit disorder, and the
calming pills were methylphenidate, that is, Ritalin, a “chemical similar to
amphetamines.” Its range of possible prescription

had a definition so broad that any disturbed or slightly troubled child could be
included. Result: the number of prescriptions for Ritalin saw a growth rate of
600% between 1989 and 1996.

Coincidence: Ritalin is put on the market at the moment the Cartiers were
married. The guidelines for its recommended use are so broad that it can be
applied to all children who, in Europe, America, Japan, and soon China, are
becoming more and more disturbed, deficient in psychological terms as much as
they are non-attentive in social terms, stupefied by television, video games, and
other disorders, emerging from hypermarkets and hyperindustrial society, that is,
from the industrial populism which poisons the world.

How, then, can one not be troubled to see the “group of experts” recommend a
follow-up survey of “diagnosed” children, to be carried out by the nurses of the
PME and the PMI [small businesses and large businesses], and by
schoolteachers, educational specialists, etc.? For in the face of “pathologies,”
which also affect the nurses (for example Patricia Cartier, who was a nurse), as
much as the teachers and the parents of the children “diagnosed” as suffering
from behavioural problems (for example parental pathologies with names such
as credit, addictive consumption, the abandoning of one's children in front of the
television, etc.), how can we have confidence in the institutional structures of
this “survey of diagnosed children” to confront the difficulties of these children—
unless it is to make them take Ritalin, or a more recently authorized equivalent?

For Ritalin was recalled after a lawsuit—but only after it had done serious
damage. So that I'm clearly understood: we had confidence in Ritalin—and we
were wrong. Let us now carefully reflect, therefore, on this:

in certain American states, such as Virginia, North Carolina or Michigan, between

10 and 15 percent of school-age children swallow their obedience pills on a daily
basis, often after having been identified by their teachers, teachers who invited
the parents to a consultation. The chemical control of teenagers has thus
assumed alarming proportions. An Albany, NY couple had decided to interrupt,
provisionally, the treatment of their 7 year-old, who reacted badly. The parents
were denounced by social services as “negligent” and led before a judge. The
judge ordered a resumption of the treatment.

Can we have confidence in INSERM's recommendations for pharmaceutical and

institutional measures or, rather, is it not necessary to combat the real problem,
namely, the ecological disorder of the spirit in the epoch of cultural and cognitive
technologies, monopolized by industrial populism, to which it would be necessary
to oppose an industrial and political economy of the spirit, which is innovative,
and capable of bearing a future, of inaugurating a new age of psychic and
collective individuation, and concretizing, what's more, this knowledge society or
this information capitalism that so many of our leaders, or their advisors (such as
Denis Kessler), identify today as their goal—while always calling for a “re-
enchantment of the world”?

What INSERM recommends leads towards a functional articulation between

psychiatry and justice in order to manage the catastrophic ravages that the
society of control causes in parents and their children. So, what is this really
about? The relation between dike andaidos. To the loss of shame in the symbolic
apparatus, which has become diabolical, that is, a factor of social unravelling,
of diaballein, systematically feeding the regression consisting of the unchaining
of the drives, the study recommends the addition of a repressive system leading
to a pure and simple renunciation of the possibility of the superego: the medical
fraternity interiorizes here the possibility and the legality of the fact that society
would no longer be sociable at all, and that unsociability can no longer produce
any sociability, except by a chemical lobotomization of suffering singularities.

Now, this chemical control, which is a generalization of the utilization of addictive

systems, preconizes the youngest disturbed children as having already lost their
parents, that is, as having lost the possibility of primary identification, through
which their imago is formed. Evidently this installs a new vicious circle, which can
only produce a psychopathology leading directly to the catastrophe of a society
that has become absolutely uncontrollable. Such an absurd spiral installs itself, in
effect, when the children labelled disturbed, hyperactive, or suffering from an
attention deficient, with behavioural problems, and put on Ritalin, are seen as
strangers among us, and are

also treated with other psychotropics, such as Prozac or anxiolithics, to deal with
their respective problems. Last January (2000), two parents in Ohio launched an
action against Ciba-Geigy following the death of their 11 year-old daughter,
treated with Ritalin, and killed by cardiac arrest: the autopsy revealed a change
in the coronary blood vessels characteristic of cocaine addicts… Children treated
with Ritalin have three times the risk of becoming drug addicts.

Toxicomania is the secret model of social control which has renounced a psychic
and collective individuation that believes in the future of unsocial sociability.
Confronted by these conclusions, psychiatrist Peter Breggin, an expert witness in
the Dallas trial, affirmed that
There is no existing medical proof of attention deficit disorder: most children
treated with Ritalin exhibit perfectly normal behaviour…[These children] simply
need a little attention.

In other words, attention deficit comes from society, which, however, accuses
the children who suffer from it, to whom it is not attentive, and which, at the
same time, captures and channels their attention toward the objects of
consumption. The diagnosis is overwhelmingly clear. And it is frightening.