ABSTRACT
Our institutions, corporations and communities today abound in unadorned shamelessness in a manner not only public but political. In short, our relationship to the instrument is fundamentally a matter of knowledge and practice. The loss of such knowledge results in what Anders calls dehumanization, which is here another name for what Stiegler calls proletarianization, a loss of that knowledge on the basis of which behavioural bifurcations, that is, decisions, become possible. Biological automatisms and sociological automatisms are today all placed on 'one side' of a struggle, confronted with technological automatisms operating more rapidly and more powerfully than either nature or culture, overtaking them and outstripping them. The hyper-diachronization engendered by the hyper-synchronization of consumer capitalism is relatively new, but the possibility of such obstructions of the psycho-social individuation process is as old as the process itself. This amounts to the injunction to practise, thoughtfully and therapeutically, a positive pharmacology, as scientific wisdom of life tends always to do.
