Pharmacology
Origin: Bernard Stiegler and Ars Industrialis, from the concept of pharmakon
Definition
Pharmacology is the analytical and practical approach that follows from the recognition of the pharmakon: since all technology is constitutively ambivalent (remedy and poison simultaneously), pharmacology is the art of working this ambivalence rather than denying it. It refuses technophilia (which sees only the remedy) and technophobia (which sees only the poison) in order to maintain a permanent critical tension.
A pharmacology of technology does not seek to neutralize its negative effects once and for all: it seeks to identify, in each situation and each use, the conditions that allow the remedy to prevail over the poison. These conditions are never definitively secured.
Christian Fauré sums up what is at stake in Ars Industrialis’s collective book on social networks:
La pharmacologie fait référence au pharmakon grec qui signifie tout autant poison que remède ; « c’est selon », comme on dit. Or, c’est ce « selon » qu’il s’agit à chaque fois d’expliciter dans les démarches pharmacologiques en acceptant d’accorder un statut particulier à cette ambivalence essentielle du pharmakon ; un statut qui va nous inciter à penser par compositions plutôt que par oppositions ; un statut qui nous autorise également à renvoyer dos à dos technophiles et technophobes qui partagent tout deux une vision duale et binaire des choses qui les oblige à penser par opposition. (Réseaux sociaux : Culture politique et ingénierie des réseaux sociaux, p.108)
My translation: “Pharmacology refers to the Greek pharmakon, which means poison as much as remedy; ‘it depends’, as the saying goes. Yet it is precisely this ‘depends’ that pharmacological approaches must make explicit each time, by agreeing to grant a particular status to this essential ambivalence of the pharmakon; a status that will lead us to think in terms of compositions rather than oppositions; a status that also allows us to dismiss both technophiles and technophobes, who share a dual and binary view of things that forces them to think in terms of opposition.”
In my writings
Pharmacology is the method that inspires Duality, my approach to technology, following the conception developed by Ars Industrialis, the international association for an industrial politics of the technologies of the spirit. It is the stance I try to maintain in this notebook: a permanent exercise in composition rather than a search for balance. Such a balance, if found, can only be fleeting and precarious, because the subjects evolve too quickly. It involves using generative AI while critiquing it, drawing benefits from it while documenting its effects of dispossession, consciously delegating certain tasks while actively cultivating the competencies at risk of erosion.
The “therapeutic practices” I describe are pharmacological gestures. They are not definitive solutions but permanent adjustments in a relationship with technology that remains fundamentally unstable.
Articles where this term is used
- Grammatize and observe.
- Knowing without doing. Doing without knowing.
- Ethics and compliance. Beyond the hype.