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D R E A M I N G  I N  T H E  D I G I T A L 
A G E :  T H O U G H T S  O N 
T H E  T E C H N O L O G I C A L 
P H A R M A K O N
 V i c t o r  J .  K r e b s
Technological evolution
The artefact is the mainspring of hominization, its condition, and its fate. 
(Bernard Stiegler)
Prelude
Whether it be in paintings, the written word, or cinematic images, 
through microscopes, telescopes, telephones, or televisions, technology 
has always been the means by which we articulate and give form to real-
ity. Digital technology is the most recent way of modulating and mak-
ing sense of what we experience, and it has brought, in its tow, the vir-
tual world, an unprecedented aesthetic and existential dimension that 
subverts our ways of seeing and perceiving and, hence, of what we con-
ceive as real and important. Moreover, the increasing intertwinement of 
natural and digital environments, the inexorable flow between virtual 
and real that we are experiencing in our present day-to-day, is literally 
transforming our human form of life and raising deep and urgent ethi-
cal, aesthetic, and religious questions for our posthuman condition.  
Now, as the Greek myth tells us, it is an archetypal feature of tech-
nology to possess us with the unconscious recklessness and irreverence 
of the titans. But it is also archetypal of technology to inspire us to po-
https://doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2023.404 Poligrafi, no. 109/110, vol. 28, 2023, pp. 59–82
P O L I G R A f I
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etic reverie, to dream beyond our limits, providing thus, also, the crea-
tive impetus that has sustained our engagement in the vital flow of the 
cosmos. Technology is a remedy to our original precariousness, but it is 
also a poison. As Bernard Stiegler puts it, “it is at once a human power 
[pouissance] and the power for humanity to destroy itself ”.1
The Greeks named this paradoxical condition the pharmakon.2 
Pharmacology and disavowal
At the very heart of human being resides the technological phar-
makon. It is perhaps our greatest power, though it also involves the 
risks and perils of its pharmacological nature. We are burdened by an 
impulse that can be both creative and self-destructive, but instead of 
acknowledging the paradox at the center of our being, and dealing with 
its complexity – especially when it shows its poisonous aspect – we nat-
urally tend to disavow and to polarize. As Stiegler points out, when the 
pharmakon reveals its toxicity, we immediately look for a pharmakos, a 
scapegoat, rather than collectively change our relationship towards the 
pharmakon.3
We are blessed with the theoretical capacity of reason but also bur-
dened by its dissociative power, and so, perennially haunted by its di-
chotomizing. We have learned to see (and can’t help seeing) everything 
in polarities: black or white, good or bad, male or female, homosexual 
1  Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 85.
2  Pharmakon (φάρμακον) referred for the Greeks to what was both a poison and a remedy. 
In Plato’s Dialogue on Phaedrus, Pharmakon is described as a drug containing both the power 
of the poison and the power of the remedy. Also, Pharmakos was a scapegoat, a slave, or a 
criminal, sometimes a foreigner, who was chosen to be expelled from the city and apparently 
beaten, stoned, or even executed in a sacrificial ritual to purify the city and protect it from any 
misfortune such as invasion, famine, war, or plague. In the 20th century, Jacques Derrida rein-
stated the double meaning of Pharmakon, which had tended to be polarized and separated in 
the tradition, in his idea of the binary oppositions that underpin the Western way of thinking. 
Bernard Stiegler makes the pharmakon central to his reflection on technology, advocating a 
pharmacological attitude whose main point is to hold the tension and realize that in consider-
ing technology we must keep in mind its irreducible ambivalence and paradoxical character.
3  Bernard Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology (Cambridge: Polity 
Press, 2013).
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or heterosexual, biological or cultural, human or machine? And when 
it comes to technology and nature, we are binary as well: it is either 
nature or technology, so we defend nature and scapegoat technology, or 
vice versa, ignoring that they are merely two inseparable aspects of the 
same phenomenon. for us humans, there is no nature preceding tech-
nology, and no technology that’s not already natural. As Daniel Ross 
writes, “history cannot be thought according to the idea that humanity 
is the ‘subject’ of this history and technology simply the object. When 
it comes to the relation between the human and the technical, the ‘who’ 
and the ‘what’ are in an undecidable relation”.4
We must deliberately begin to think of the relation between nature 
and technology as a complex and dynamic unity about which we need 
to acquire perspective, acknowledging the intrinsic relation of technol-
ogy, its nature, use, and purpose, with (our own) nature. This means, 
however, also acknowledging the fact that not only our ideals and as-
pirations but also our shadows are all projected on technology, so that 
unraveling its complexity is dealing with our own. 
Criticizing those that think of technology as an external tool aimed 
at garnering power and control, Walter Benjamin contended that “tech-
nology is not [for] the mastery of nature, but of the relation between 
nature and man”.5 If technology is to be mastery over anything, 
[I]t would have to be over our relation to the world, over how to manage 
or live with the new nature that [technology] opens around us. [...] We should 
learn to see [...] technology as an event of life that speaks to (and from) the 
deepest levels of human consciousness. Understood in this way, any event in 
the world [...] insofar as it involves our technological presence in the world, 
becomes a sign from which to learn.6 
The polarization of technology and nature into which the world 
drifts more and more as we advance into this century – some trium-
4  Daniel Ross, “A Summary of Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The fault of 
Epimetheus,” Academia, August 23, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/20136235/A_Sum-
mary_of_Bernard_Stiegler_Technics_and_Time_1. 
5  Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 
104.
6  Richard frankel and Victor J. Krebs, Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and 
Psychoanalytic Investigations (London & New York: Routledge, 2022), 17.
P O L I G R A f I
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phantly hailing technology, others gloomily warning about the ap-
proaching doomsday – ignores the pharmacological facts and makes us 
victims of our own (in this case, digital) unconscious. What we need is 
rather to be awake and take these facts on. We need to learn to think 
pharmacologically and avow the underlying paradox.
That, of course, requires a radical change in attitude. We need to col-
lectively change our relation to the technological pharmakon. We must 
begin to see it not as something outside us, not as a tool external to us, 
but as something that grows out of the human psyche and demands, 
therefore, not just intellectual but also psychological acuity. Indeed, it 
demands a deliberate introversion and careful introspection. The mat-
ter is of fundamental import, for, “[A]t this moment when humanity’s 
power increases in an unprecedented and incalculable way, the world 
appears to be becoming more dehumanized, destructive, and denatu-
ralized [...] the question becomes, once again: What is the human?”7
Beyond binaries
Not so much a special type of animal, as a deficient god.  
(Daniel Ross)
Outside the familiar polarizing dualism, we might more accurately 
characterize the relationship between technology and nature as one not 
of interaction but of “intra-action”, adopting Karen Barad’s coinage. 
Whereas in “interaction” there are separate individual agencies that 
precede their encounter, “the notion of intra-action recognizes that dis-
tinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-
action.”8 Technology9 emerges simultaneously with human conscious-
7  Ross, “A Summary of Bernard Stiegler.” 
8  Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of 
Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), Kindle.
9  I am using ‘technics’ and ‘technology’ as synonyms here, though it is important to keep 
in mind that ‘technology’ refers to the “specific amalgamation of technics and the sciences in 
the modern period” (Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 280–81), while Stiegler uses ‘technics’ to 
refer to what he calls “organized inorganic matter.” for him, it is the preservation of epigenetic 
experience (epiphylogenesis) in technical objects, that marks the break with genetic evolution. 
As he puts it, as a ‘process of exteriorization,’ technics “is the pursuit of life by means other than 
life” (Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 17). 
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ness. According to Leroi-Gourhan, “it is the tool, that is tekhnē, that 
invents the human, not the human who invents the technical [...] the 
human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool, by be-
coming exteriorized techno-logically”:10 
Interior and exterior are consequently constituted in a movement that in-
vents both one and the other: a moment in which they invent each other re-
spectively, as if there were a technological maieutic of what is called humanity 
[... that] produces the illusion of succession.11 
Without technology, Stiegler adds, “there could be no mind, no 
recall, no memory of a past that one has not personally lived, no 
culture”.12 Technology, we could say, is the prosthesis of human con-
sciousness that externalizes and objectifies it, making us self-conscious 
and accessible to other consciousnesses. All technical or technological 
artifices have served from the beginning of human history as traces that 
help us construct a collective memory, an artificial past that is not one’s 
own but that must become one’s own, must be “inherited” as one’s own 
history. Whether those traces are tools, works of engineering, words 
written on tablets, creations of architecture and art, cinematic images, 
etc., these traces (of whatever nature they may be) serve our technical 
evolution. They function as material supports, mnemotechnics, upon 
which human consciousness and memory are extended beyond indi-
vidual experience. These mnemo-technical traces, or tertiary retentions 
(as Stiegler calls them, alluding to Husserl’s phenomenological analysis 
of temporal consciousness), include more than just technical artifacts. 
Stiegler thinks of them as an “associated milieu”,13 which comprises the 
entire human habitat, all the structures and dimensions that constitute 
our forms of life and provide human beings with the external organs 
needed for survival and evolution. As Sebastian Olma explains, we are 
talking of  an “‘organological’ infrastructure”, of objects, artifices, tools, 
10  Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 141.
11  Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 141.
12  Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 39.
13  Couze Venn, Roy Boyne, John W. P. Phillips, and Ryan Bishop, “Technics, Media, Te-
leology: Interview with Bernard Stiegler,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 7–8 (2007): 335, 
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407086403.
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64
but also social institutions through which human beings relate to them-
selves, each other and the world, thus making us who we are in the 
most basic sense.14
The technical form of life, as Stiegler points out:
[B]reaks with evolution as Darwin had taught us to understand it, for it 
changes the conditions in which life evolved prior to the rise of humankind, 
this promethean race. The moment the first tertiary retention was invented, 
be that a tool to carve stones or a brush to paint, a spear or the wheel, evolu-
tion no longer followed merely natural causality.15
This vision of the place of technology in human consciousness tears 
down the wall that splits technology and nature and stresses instead 
the original hybridity of our species. It stresses technology’s emergence 
from our very being, constituting it and everything that surrounds us. 
Our evolution is not only biological but also technical, not just genetic 
but also memetic. It is the unfolding of a form of life “that is no longer 
just the endosomatic evolution of the biological life of the biosphere, 
but rather technical life, which produces organs that extend outside the 
body of the organism, without which the organism cannot survive.”16
Exosomatic evolution is the process whereby external technologies – 
such as writing tools, and digital media – become extensions of human 
cognition and memory, means by which we come to apprehend and 
constitute our world. Technological artifacts and systems become inte-
gral parts of our cognitive processes and affect how we experience and 
understand the world around us. They modulate our perceptions, shape 
our modes of thinking, and contribute to the formation of our identi-
ties. By storing and transmitting cultural and cognitive content across 
generations, they spatialize temporal consciousness, transforming the 
temporality of our memories and expectations into the spatiality of the 
14  Sebastian Olma, In Defence of Serendipity: For a Radical Politics of Innovation (New York: 
Random House, 2016), 115. 
15  Bernard Stiegler, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capi-
talism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 159.
16  Daniel Ross, Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps towards a Metacosmos (London: Open 
Humanities Press, 2021), 10.
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65
intersubjective, which enables their repetition and exteriorization”,17 
and the formation of collective experience and memory.
But in that new freedom we are confronted with the paradoxical na-
ture of technology that condemns us to the perennial risk of self-anni-
hilation epitomized by what Stiegler has called the fault of Epimetheus: 
a radical obliviousness at the core of our technological being, the cursed 
seed Prometheus planted in our hearts, that always comes to haunt 
us.18 Therein lies the pharmacological danger, whereby our evolution 
may turn against itself. Indeed, as Karen Barad observes, “the recent 
convergence of biotechnologies, information technologies, and nano-
technologies reconfigures the human and its others so rapidly that it is 
already overloading the circuits of the human imagination.”19
Dreaming
This world is but a canvas to our imagination. 
(Thoreau)
How the world is constituted and becomes an object of conscious-
ness and judgment is a fundamental problem that has occupied the 
human intellect from its origins. It must indeed be a mysterious power 
of the mind that is able to assemble, out of the perplexing array of sen-
sible stimuli, a meaningful unity before our awareness. for our whole 
philosophical tradition, since at least Aristotle, the imagination is at the 
root or base of all cognition. Kant (1787/1965) called that power the 
transcendental schematism or synthesis of the imagination, and described 
it as “an art, hidden in the depths of the human soul, whose true modes 
of action we shall only with difficulty discover and unveil”.20 How-
ever, in its tendency to over-intellectualize, Kant and the philosophi-
cal tradition disembody and subordinate the imagination to reason, 
demoting it to a lower kind of knowledge; hence, aesthetics is tradi-
17  Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 159.
18  Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1.
19  Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, location 716.
20  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Mac-
Millan, 1965), B180–B181.
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66
tionally seen as secondary to epistemology.21 But psychoanalysis rather 
delves into those hidden depths by introducing the unconscious and 
hence the body into the equation. Wilfred Bion’s theories of dreaming 
broaden the epistemological perspective and turn it around.22 Rather 
than making it derivative, Bion makes the imagination fundamental. 
And whereas for Kant, the imagination mediated between pure reason 
and sensible impressions (what he called intuitions), for Bion, the mat-
ter also involves the imaginative articulation of affect and emotion; in 
other words, not just of sense-perception and the understanding, but 
also the unconscious. Kant disavowed the emotional and unconscious 
dimension of experience, except perhaps to name it and then disinherit 
it as the noumena – the unknowable things-in-themselves. 
Bion ascribes the task of Kant’s transcendental imagination to what 
he calls the alpha function (or dream work alpha), which is not merely 
a symbolic processing – as one might expect from the work of the un-
derstanding – but an emotional and material metabolization. The al-
pha-function works on the raw (unmetabolized emotional) materials of 
experience (Bion’s ‘beta’ elements) by dreaming them. The alpha func-
tion constitutes what we could call with Stephen Asma “an embodied 
improvising imagination”,23 that transforms emotional experiences into 
assimilable (Bion’s ‘alpha’) elements, accessible to recall and synthesis, 
and capable of generating dream thoughts and/or unconscious phan-
tasies. Strung together and articulated, they become the precursors of 
memory, feelings, and thoughts-about-thoughts (cf. Grotstein).24
In bringing in dreaming, Bion provides psychoanalytic depth to the 
epistemological and transcendental understanding of experience articu-
21  It is, of course, not the entire philosophical tradition that falls into this category. One 
sometimes overemphasizes in order to bring out something that is otherwise taken for 
granted. It is fair, however, to take the main thrust of Western thought to have assumed the 
transcendental critique of knowledge developed by Kant; our generalized prejudice in favor of 
scientific rationalism resulting from it has had the effect we are outlining in what follows.
22  Wilfred Bion, Learning from Experience (London: Karnac Books, 1984).
23  Stephen Asma, The Evolution of Imagination (Chicago and London: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2017), 6.
24  James S. Grotstein, “Dreaming as a ‘curtain of illusion’: Revisiting the ‘royal road’ with 
Bion as our guide,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90, no. 4 (2009): 733–752, 
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00155.x.
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67
lated in Kant’s schematism, acknowledging the psychic complexity of 
the constitution of experience and highlighting the impact of uncon-
scious processes upon it. To dream is to work via the alpha function, 
from the formlessness of impressions, i.e., beta elements waiting for 
metabolization, to alpha elements. 
for Bion, dreaming happens not only during sleep but also while 
awake.25 Alpha elements cohere as they proliferate to form what Bion 
calls the contact-barrier, which serves as an ‘active and living filter’26, 
continuously in process of formation, that keeps reality separate from 
fantasy, consciousness from the unconscious, while at the same time 
connected, so that fantasy continues to nurture consciousness.
We dream, not just to protect sleep, but to be able to create a contact bar-
rier between the realms of consciousness and the unconscious. further, we 
dream – by day and by night – in order to transform (process) the moment-
to-moment flow of our experiences of ourselves and others. [...D]reaming is 
the obligatory beginning of thinking.27 
The alpha function contains in the unconscious those affective as-
pects of our experience that would interfere with our ability to distin-
guish reality from fantasy, grounding us thus in the actuality of the 
world (cf. Bion).28 But, at the same time that it guarantees their sepa-
rateness, it maintains the flowing interchange of consciousness and the 
unconscious, alphabetizing beta elements, from which it is then able to 
project and materialize the dreams out of which we construct reality. 
Like Hermes, the alpha function is a creator of new spaces; it gives 
form to the inchoateness of sensibility and draws a boundary between 
the formlessness of vital life and the new order of consciousness. While 
we sleep, dreaming performs an internal depth-processing of our dai-
ly experience, where the raw affective material is contained and then 
25  Wilfred Bion, Cogitations (London: Karnac Books, 1992), 43. 
26  Paulo Sandler, The Language of Bion: A Dictionary of Concepts (New York and London: 
Routledge, 2010), 158.
27  James S. Grotstein, “‘We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On’– Annotations on 
Dreams and Dreaming in Bion’s Works,” in Dreams in Group Psychotherapy: Theory and 
Technique, eds. Claudio Neri, Malcolm Pines, and Robi friedman (London and Philadelphia: 
Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002), 111. 
28  Bion, Learning from Experience, 15–16. 
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68
transformed into dream contents, into psychic events from which we 
are able then to construct the world. Dreaming thus lays down the 
ground for the constitution of external reality – not just its form but 
also its content, not just its epistemological structure, but also its psy-
chological texture. It therefore constitutes reality from a logic that is 
not only causal but also ludic and serendipitous, a logic that regulates 
the flow behind the spontaneity and surprise that allows for creativity 
to happen.
An organology of dreams
Bion’s alpha function, then, propels what Stiegler conceives as the 
exosomatic extension of human being, transforming the raw data of 
sensory experience into elements that are fit for thought. But, as we 
have seen, it is the technological artifacts, acting as tertiary retentions, 
that enable the transformation of the temporality of subjectivity into a 
public space of memories and expectations. It is the tertiary retentions 
that make possible the projection and adoption of collective dreams. 
In a general way, all technical production of the technical form of life, by 
the desiring and dreaming beings that we are, constitutes such a spatialization 
of experience and thereby also enables its inter-generational transmission.29 
Just as in Bion, with Stiegler we construct the world through our 
own projections and based on the memories of what we have previ-
ously perceived and processed, which alter, enrich, and deepen our 
perception with every new experience. But Stiegler stresses the fact 
that we cannot think of the process that is going on in the psyche un-
less we have already constructed an external prosthesis, which makes 
that thought possible. In the perception of any temporal object, it can 
never be purely or simply constituted by primary and secondary reten-
tions alone, but only through a process of imaginative selection made 
possible by an external memory (a tertiary retention). In other words, 
without the intervention of the imagination through a tertiary (exter-
nal) retention, we could not talk of primary and secondary retentions 
29  Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), 159. 
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because “it is not perception which makes possible memory and the ar-
tefact but the artefact that makes possible both primary and secondary 
retention.”30 In the flow of sensible perception, we notice something 
because we have retained previous impressions that now become the 
criteria by which we discriminate what we perceive. for example, when 
a background melody that has been playing without our barely notic-
ing it suddenly becomes more sharply noticeable because of a familiar 
melody, our attention has been called by our memory of that previous 
experience, which serves as criteria for selection (and determines our 
greater sensitivity) of the new experiences. Technological extensions, 
acting as tertiary retentions, analogously provide criteria whereby we 
constitute publicly shared experiences. 
We find here something very similar to what Bion is after with 
dream-work alpha, although in a different register. In dreaming, as we 
have seen, we extract from the unconscious to create a narrative in our 
perception; beta elements are alphabetized in the unconscious and then 
released as the precursors of thoughts and feelings in consciousness, 
in terms of which we can categorize and then recognize what we per-
ceive. Bion supplements psychoanalytically our understanding of how 
the mind constitutes reality; Stiegler adds a technological dimension 
also absent from Kant and modern philosophers: the conception of 
technology as a necessary condition and extension of our cognitive ap-
paratus. Those technological extensions become “the vector of fantasies, 
hallucinations, collective retentions and pretensions of every kind,”31 which 
end up constituting every epoch according to its particular technologi-
cal advances. Perception is always imaginative projection, and tertiary 
retentions feed Bion’s alpha function like the images of the day feed the 
dream upon which, subsequently, imagination can work. Whether they 
help strengthen or weaken the contact barrier will determine whether 
the technological pharmakon is therapeutic or toxic.
30  Ben Roberts, “Cinema as Mnemotechnics: Bernard Stiegler and the Industrialisation of 
Memory,” Angelaki 11, no. 1 (2006): 55–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250600797864.
31  Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, 137. 
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Arche-cinema
Just as Derrida coined the term “arche-writing” to refer to a funda-
mental, originary form of writing that precedes and underlies any spe-
cific written or spoken language and encompasses the broader notion 
of trace, inscription, and the dissemination of meaning, Stiegler coins 
the concept of “arche-cinema” to refer to the foundational, primordial 
gesture of audiovisual inscription that constitutes the human mind. In 
fact, dreaming is, for Stiegler, the arche-cinema of the unconscious, 
so the structure of consciousness has always been engaged in cinema 
without knowing it.
[C]onsciousness is already cinematographic in its principles of selection 
for primary memories, a selection that relies on criteria furnished by the play 
of secondary memory and associated tertiary elements, the combination 
forming a montage through which a unified flux is constructed (as “stream 
of consciousness”), but which is identical in form to the cinematic flux of an 
actual film, as a temporal object and as the result of a constructed montage.32
Temporal and perceptual flows of all kinds are rendered discrete and 
reproducible through being spatialized (what Stiegler calls ‘grammati-
zation’), so we can take the history of human consciousness as a his-
tory conditioned by the sequence of tertiary retentions through the 
centuries. In fact, grammatization extends back in time to the ‘arche-
cinematic’ productions of “rupestral mnemo-technical supports, cave 
paintings, which constitute tertiary retentions that initiate a process by 
which the mental temporal flows experienced by the psychic individual 
are recorded, reproduced, discretized and spatialized”33. Starting with 
“the grammatization of the manual gestures of the worker or the crafts-
man that are spatialized in being programmed into the machinery of 
the industrial revolution, and finally to what is unfolding right now: 
the grammatization of ‘everything’ made possible by the inscription of 
binary code into central processing units composed of silicon.”34
32  Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 17–18. 
33  Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, 154. 
34  Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, 21.
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With the appearance of each tertiary retention, new regimes of in-
dividuation and new modes of collective consciousness result, leading 
to new attentional forms. With every fresh piece of experience, we add 
to the sum of the experiences we have had. These may be experiences 
that conform to our expectations and so reinforce them, adding to the 
sense of an individual’s and the collective’s stability. But there may be 
experiences that defy established expectations and therefore require that 
they be worked on. These experiences – that Bion considers beta ele-
ments – will be contained in the unconscious to be worked on by the 
alpha function, to eventually be projected as dreams and incorporated 
into consciousness.
Stiegler calls the experiences that conform to our expectations “stere-
otypical”, and those that defy established expectations – and must first 
be contained in the unconscious to be metabolized and made useful for 
thinking – “traumatypical” experiences:
Traumatypical experiences are diachronic rather than synchronic, inaugu-
rating an individuating movement rather than reinforcing apparent stability, 
and amount to the possibility of the experience of significance. The difference 
between the stereotypical and the traumatypical is the difference between ex-
perience of the same and experience of the other.35 
It is only insofar as tertiary retentions leave or open room for, rather 
than block, the traumatypes and their disruptions, that dreaming, and 
the transcendental imagination can operate to generate novelty and 
new life. In other words, the tertiary retentions can become therapeutic 
rather than toxic by leaving open the possibility of new ways of seeing, 
instead of perpetuating the sedimented concepts and expectations that 
numb the imagination and lead us into a zombie-like repetition of the 
same.
35  Daniel Ross, “Politics, Terror and Traumatypical Imagery,” in Trauma, History, Phi-
losophy, ed. Matthew Sharpe, Murray Noonan, and Jason freddi (Cambridge: Cambridge 
Scholars Publishing, 2007), 234. 
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Technological disruption
Digital Dreaming 
We are asleep. Our life is a dream. But we wake up, sometimes, just enough 
to know that we are dreaming.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Stiegler’s conception of exosomatic evolution and the role of tertiary 
retentions highlights the significant role of external technologies in the 
constitution of reality and hence, in the processes of individuation, per-
ception, cognition, and meaning making. It also raises important ques-
tions about the potential impact of technological mediation – especially 
considering its pharmacological nature – on our ability to distinguish 
reality from fantasy, truth from illusion, etc. freed from the safe causal-
ity of Darwinian evolution, our organological evolution opens us to 
the Pandora’s box of the technological pharmakon, which threatens us 
with titanic excess. Barad talks of the “overloading [of ] the circuits of 
the human imagination”,36 which is perhaps what may be seen behind 
the many sorts of social madness we are witnessing globally nowadays. 
The organological perspective considers how the arrangements of psy-
chic collective memories and expectations (retentions and protentions) 
generate specific future possibilities made possible by the artificial mne-
motechnical organs of each epoch – writing, analog media, digital im-
aging, etc. In other words, it can help us understand the constitution of 
the collective dreams (and nightmares) generated by the technological 
(tertiary) retentions. In particular, it helps us analyze and understand 
the paradigmatic forms of seeing, the horizons of expectation which 
mold the wills and desires of the culture in each new technological 
period. 
All tertiary retentions are memories of recorded experience, and 
they are part of the history of consciousness. They define the criteria 
by which consciousness assimilates and transindividuates in each era. 
We can trace the history of tertiary retentions, then, as the history of 
the collective dreams we construct in our exosomatic evolution, where 
36  Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 28.
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each new technological development inaugurates new ways of seeing, 
“new attentional forms”, “new empathic possibilities”,37 in other words: 
new realizations of our dreams. But that history of tertiary retentions 
advances also through crises, broken paradigms and periods of gen-
eralized confusion. The danger is that the traumatypical will not be 
allowed, and so will not give the alpha function the work it needs to 
do to construct the contact barrier that holds the distinction between 
illusion and reality.
That danger becomes marked by the technology of cinema and its 
digitalization. The structure of consciousness is, Stiegler (2011) argues, 
thoroughly cinematographic, for “it unfolds through a montage of 
temporal objects, objects constituted through their movement”.38 The 
cinematic image, because it so sharply reproduces the phenomenology 
of the human mind, manages to fuse our experiences with its techni-
cal register, our real memories with its virtual stories and memories, in 
ways that end up diffusing the boundary between real and imaginary, 
making the contact barrier that separates consciousness from the un-
conscious too porous, and so confusing the distinctions of fantasy and 
reality, confusing real desire with digital-virtual wishing, generating the 
whole post-truth phenomenon, fudging not only truth and falsehood, 
but also virtual and empirical temporality, dreams, and actual (or vir-
tual) experiences. 
The danger is found where the alphabetization of the beta elements 
(the projection of our dreams) is realized no longer by the alpha func-
tion, by the human (embodied and improvising) imagination, but di-
rectly by the technological tertiary retention operating in the form, for 
instance, of algorithmic automatization. When the schematization of 
the imagination is performed by algorithms and not by the spontane-
ous imagination of human agents, the understanding (as an analytical 
formalism) is split from reason (as the capacity for interpretation) (cf. 
Stiegler).39 In other words, reason finds itself degraded, turned into au- 
tomation by calculation, and, finally, into its destruction as a synthetic 
37  Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 156. 
38  Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 26. 
39  Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society, Volume 1: The Future of Work (Cambridge: Polity 
Press, 2016), Kindle, 53. 
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function (cf. Stiegler).40 And in the destruction of reason as a synthetic 
function, we may identify the symptoms of a compromised contact 
barrier, for it is in its preservation that the balance is kept that allows us 
to distinguish dream from fantasy and madness from sanity.
Dreaming Madness
When it is no longer the spontaneity coming from the unconscious 
(in the alphabetized beta elements) but from the data provided by the 
algorithm – already tied to specific interests that are stereotypical – the 
process of transindividuation and interiorization is short-circuited and, 
I would like to suggest, the contact barrier is compromised. Because of 
its ability to turn fantasies so easily into realities, especially due to its 
cinematic character, the digital easily smudges the line that separates 
them. Just think of how often we are no longer sure whether we have 
dreamt something, lived it empirically, or experienced it virtually.
Stiegler imagines consciousness as a “post-production center”: 
A control room assembling the montage, the staging, the realization, and 
the direction, of the flow of primary, secondary, and tertiary retentions, of 
which the unconscious, full of potential possibilities (including the specula-
tive), would be the producer. “Post-production” occurs when the “rushes” and 
the montage are out of sync: this is the phenomenon of the dream. Direct 
control occurs when consciousness “builds” such that it is “captured”: This is 
the waking state. Cinema is of the order of the dream.41 
Cinema is taking over the function of the dream. Instead of generat-
ing the contact barrier we are allowing it to be imposed from outside, 
by algorithms and cinematic representations that dissolve the separa-
tion between their productions and reality. Artificial dreams, in other 
words, are taking over and seeping into reality as unconscious beta ele-
ments. 
What Stiegler calls “the phenomenon of the dream” is what happens 
when the raw data of experience is out of sync with the “montage”, 
which is exactly what happens when the alpha function contains and 
40  Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 249.  
41  Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 28. 
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alphabetizes the beta elements, which are indeed raw data that are affec-
tively problematic and out of sync with the established in consciousness. 
The alpha function is what allows us to function in normal waking life, 
while at the same keeping contact with the “madness” of dreams – what 
Stiegler refers to as “the potential possibilities of the unconscious”42 – 
that generates creativity in their eventual exteriorization. 
The soundness of the digital depends on the preservation of the 
dreaming function, and hence in finding ways to generate the space 
where automatization is blocked and radical bifurcation can appear, 
where spontaneity irrupts and takes things in novel directions. The al-
gorithm makes all repetition repetition of the same, so leads to entropy. 
What we need is that repetition be a repetition of difference, which al-
ways involves an element of novelty, the radical bifurcation that makes 
it possible. Dreaming madness is involved where automatization takes 
over and any deviance from the (automatic) norm is blocked. Sponta-
neity dies, and the repetition of the same becomes our daily bread while 
the dreaming function wanes.
To the extent that the virtual world enters into an intense dynamic 
with empirical experience, we begin to dream more on our screens than 
psychically, more according to the images forwarded automatically by 
the algorithm than from our own experience. Digital dreaming, thus 
sequestered, does away with the hermetic play between consciousness 
and the unconscious where creativity and novelty may happen. Instead 
of the dream function piloted by the inner needs of individuals in their 
constitution with others of a human society, it is more and more over-
ridden by the algorithms that weave experience together into meaning-
ful bits according to values and interests that may come in tension with 
the collective welfare. 
We have always been surrounded by screens upon which we screen 
our projections (in the totem, the transitional object). As we have said, 
we constitute the world by projecting from the dream-work that arises 
from the spontaneity of the unconscious. But algorithms drastically 
affect our ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, truth from lies, 
madness from sanity, thus leading us into the labyrinths of post-truth, 
42  Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 28.
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conspiracy theories and, in general, the crises of conscience that we 
experience everywhere and at all levels in today’s world. Rather than 
metabolization, what we witness is psychic evacuation in the form of 
hallucinations, excessive projective identifications, manic defenses, and 
paranoid delusions. Words, too, become vehicles of evacuation rather 
than conveyers of meaning, as in bullying and trolling. It is because one 
cannot suffer one’s experience, that the resulting unmetabolized (beta) 
elements can only be dealt with by violent action toward the world and 
social madness. As Daniel Ross observes, it is “the negative pharma-
cological automatisms of the screen itself ”,43 which contribute signifi-
cantly to the feelings of generational abandonment, global negligence, 
and the impending, catastrophic ecological apocalypse that constitutes 
our present global social madness. 
Short-circuit
Adorno and Horkheimer argued that an era of barbarism had be-
gun when the culture industries took over the power of schematization 
that Kant had ascribed to the transcendental imagination. for them, 
the industrialization of the imagination constitutes a reification or “an 
alienating ‘thingification’ of knowing consciousness”44 (Stiegler (2016), 
p. 68). But, as we have seen, Stiegler argues that individual conscious-
ness is formed in and by circuits of intersubjectivity that already in-
clude the externalization of memory. Consciousness, in other words, is 
always already exteriorized into its technical supports. So, Adorno and 
Horkheimer failed to take into account that Kant’s syntheses presup-
pose what Stiegler calls the technological synthesis of the imagination, 
in other words, the tertiary retention.45 But this means that the tran-
scendental schematism of the imagination has always involved the tech-
nical, so not all exteriorization can be harmful. In fact, Stiegler argues,  
43  Daniel Ross, “for a Neganthropology of the Cinematic,” Academia, August 19, 2015, 
https://www.academia.edu/15142703/for_a_Neganthropology_of_the_Cinematic_2015/.
44  Stiegler, Automatic Society, 68. 
45  Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, 158.
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[T]hat the schematism, as projection by the transcendental imagination 
[…] presupposes schemas that are themselves constituted through tertiary re-
tention – and on the basis of sensorimotor schemas. The consequence of this 
point of view is that so-called ‘transcendental’ imagination presupposes a pri-
mordial exteriorization of memory and therefore of the imagination itself, that 
is, of anticipation and temporalization, such that, passing through artefactual 
schemas configured by technical organs as tertiary retention, it is supported 
by a spatialization.46
If the intersubjective constitution of individuals – through their in-
teractions with others, the collective processes, and their environment – 
arrives at a dynamic equilibrium, the tertiary retentions become a form 
of therapeutics rather than a poison. But the fact is that the tertiary 
retentions are now dominated by interests that tend to short-circuit 
that equilibrium:
The very heart of the issue of the culture industries is that they comprise an 
industrial, and thus systematic, implementation of new, technological tertiary 
retentions and through them, criteria of selection of a new kind, which are, 
as it happens, totally subjected to the logic of the marketplace, and thus to 
shareholders.47
The bogeyman, we could say, is not the digital technologies but the 
capitalism that controls them, which subjects the synthetic function of 
the imagination to the stupefying effect of homogenization, “radically 
alienating what should be the freely reasoning subject whom it subju-
gates – by de-subjectifying”.48 
The channelling of the drives through the application of mathematical 
algorithms to automatized social control can do nothing but push these drives 
to a highly dangerous level, by dis-integrating them [...] With the advent of re-
ticular reading and writing via networks made accessible to everyone through 
[...] the technologies of the world wide web, digital technologies have led 
hyper-industrial societies towards [...] the hyper-industrial age [that] becomes 
the era of systemic stupidity, which can also be called functional stupidity.49 
46  Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, 159. 
47  Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 39. 
48  Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 37. 
49  Stiegler, Automatic Society, 23. 
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The issue is therefore more complicated than envisaged by Adorno 
and Horkheimer. They failed to see that the problem “is not exteriori-
zation, which has always already begun, but rather the short-circuit in 
that process of individuation that inevitably results from the hegem-
ony of de-symbolizing, disindividuating, and imagination-destroying 
cultural consumerism, because it reinforces stereotypes and represses 
traumatypes”.50 It is not so much that dreams have become more ho-
mogenized in their content due to the short-circuit phenomenon, but 
rather that the dreaming function as a whole is being affected in its 
metabolizing role, and hence affecting the capacity of human thought 
to occasion the radical bifurcation necessary for creativity. As Stiegler 
stresses, 
[A]s noetic individuals we are, in the first place, knowing beings, and there 
is no form of knowledge that is reducible to the computational treatment of 
information (which is only an extension of the analytical faculty of under-
standing without reason).51 
The algorithm, which gains more and more ground every day in 
constituting our reality, reinforces the synchronic stereotypes, especially 
through the audiovisual media that flood our digital consciousness and 
so mute the traumatypes that guarantee the continuous counterflow 
that makes change possible. Sequestered by the logic of the market and 
the imperialism of the algorithm, matters are certainly worsened in the 
digital era. 
These cognitive technologies (from the television to the telephone, includ-
ing the computer and GPS guidance systems) to which we confide a greater 
and greater part of our memory, cause us to lose an ever-greater part of our 
knowledge. [...O]ne must ask if the industrial and massive development of 
mnemotechnologies does not represent a structural loss of memory, or, more 
precisely, a displacement of this memory: a displacement whereby it can be-
come the object of a control of knowledge.52 
50  Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, 168.
51  Stiegler, Automatic Society, 146. 
52  Bernard Stiegler, “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis,” Ars Industrialis, accessed October 16, 
2023, https://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis.
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Equilibrium, sanity, depends on how the relevant technologies are 
assumed and practiced. Tertiary retentions (writing, analogue, and digi-
tal audiovisuals) and their exteriorizations can also open positive phar-
macological possibilities, capable of generating new attentional forms. 
The cinematic pharmakon as art, for example, is what makes it possible 
to struggle against the cinema as toxic pharmakon, which short-circuits 
the play of traumatypical secondary retentions and protentions by rein-
forcing their stereotypical secondary retentions and protentions.53
Coda
When Prometheus stole the fire of the gods for human beings, he 
planted a cyborg seed in our hearts that germinates in the virtuality of 
the mind and gives substance to the technological pharmakon, with 
which we are always in existential struggle. Though technology elevates 
us and puts us one foot on Olympus, we nonetheless live divided with-
in ourselves: half of us titans disavowing death and half of us mortal 
bodies hauling towards it. It is precisely around that struggle, watchful 
of its field of force, that we must guard against the perils of technology.
The virtual flow taken over by algorithmic clones is spectacularized. 
In the instantaneity and non-dilatory nature of the digital, there is no 
transitional state, no potential space where dreaming can do its task of 
weaving together the stash of yet unprocessed affections. It becomes 
nearly impossible today to distinguish – as the source of psychologi-
cal animation and meaning in our lives – the psyche from the digital. 
So, the digital becomes our sole source of psychic vitality, singularly 
generating novel pathways of spontaneity, passion, and meaning. But 
what feels so enlivening and exciting can suddenly mutate into psychic 
claustrophobia and deadness. 
While dreams function psychically to define the boundary between 
reality and fantasy, the digital – with what we may call its virtual dreams 
– is intervening at that boundary and affecting our ability to distinguish 
reality from fantasy. We open our computer and see images of war, hor-
ror, degrading sexual acts, etc. Their sheer volume and intensity clog up 
53  Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, 158. 
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the dreaming function, clog up the process of selection. We can go to 
sleep and ‘dream’, but no psychic work is happening, there is no pos-
sibility for mental renewal. In the breakdown of the digital, dreaming 
fails in its function of offering something regenerative space. Whereas 
with dreaming there is a replenishing cycle of falling asleep, dreaming, 
and then waking, that replenishment is foreign to the digital. And a 
person who cannot dream is unable to generate differentiable conscious 
and unconscious experience and, consequently, lives in a state of stupor 
and automatization, a psychic state where perceiving and hallucinat-
ing, external reality and internal reality are indistiguishable, where, in a 
sense, they cannot fall asleep nor wake up (cf. Ogden54).
In the digital era, we could conclude, Hermes is in danger of losing 
his wings.
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