spinoza, k-punk, neuropunk¹

Being a Spinozist is both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world.

Easy, because it is simply a matter of acting in such a way as to produce joyful encounters. Hard, because the defaults of the Human Operating System (OS) are, in one of nature’s most deliciously cruel tricks, set against this. The principal question which Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus set out to answer was deeply Spinozistic: “Why is it that people are so prepared to fight for their own servitude?” Meanwhile, Burroughs’ Spinozistic abstract model of addiction — i.e., very much NOT a metaphor, what could be more literal? — describes humanity’s enslavement to a vast immiserating machine whose interests are not its.

All of which, to come back to Radar_Anomalous’ Badiou-doubts² leads to another positive way in which we can wrest reason/rationality back from what Robin Undercurrent calls, hilariously, “boredom-mongering epistemonauts”. According to Spinoza, to be free is to act according to reason. To act according to reason is to act according to your own interests. Finally, however, we have to recognise that, on Spinoza’s account, the best interests of the human species coincide with becoming-inhuman.

Many of the problems with Human OS come from its inefficient bio/ neuro-packaging. By contrast with very simple organisms that are set up to be attracted to what is beneficial to them and to flee from what is hostile to them, human beings have a convoluted system for processing exogenous and endogenous stimuli, routed/rooted in the arborescent central nervous system running out of the spine and overseen by the brain. Actually, according to neurologists, the brain is in effect, three distinct brains — the “reptilian brain”, which is responsible for basic survival functions, such as breathing, sleeping, eating; the “mammalian brain”, which encompasses neural units associated with social emotions; and the “hominid” brain, which is unique to humans and includes much of our oversized cortex — the thin, folded, layer covering the brain that is responsible for such “higher” functions as language, consciousness and long-term planning. Neurology also gives a rigorously materialist account of the thanatoidal confusions between desire and prohibition that Lacan and Žižek have described.

Crucially for Burroughs’ analysis, it provides an account of why humans are so endemically prone to addictive behaviour. This is because there are actually two separate circuits, one for motivation and one liking. In the latter stages of addiction, you want to consume the drug, but it is improbable that you will also like jacking up. Add all this up, and you pretty much have a neuronic recipe for the unremitting misery, hatred and violence that have characterised human history. Nietzsche said that if animals could describe the human species they would call it “the sad creature”.

Yet, precisely because of this hideously collocated morbid assemblage, the human contains a potential for destratification which the functionally streamlined simple organism lacks. This is where Spinoza converges with cyberpunk, and hence with Deleuze and Guattari, cyberpunk’s main theoretical program. One of the consequences of Spinoza’s analysis, as I said before, is that human beings’ emotion-generating hardware can be understood using the same causal framework that is applied to the so-called natural world. In the twentieth century, cybernetics will make the same discovery.

But let’s dispense with one of the lazy, hazy assumptions we’re all prone to fall into whenever we hear the word “cybernetics”. Cybernetics does not only refer to technical machines. Wiener call it the study of control and communication in animals and machines (btw: why leave out plants?). Its principal discovery is “feedback” — a system’s capacity to reflect and act upon its own performance. So, as Luke and I were discussing the other day, the whole point of cybernetics is that nothing is “more cybernetic” than anything else. There are only systems with more or less feedback, and different types of feedback.³ So if the word “cybernetics” calls up only gleaming steel you have the wrong association.

If cyborgianism is oriented towards a maintenance and reproduction of the organism and its homeostatic control circuitries, Cyberpunk or k-punk (one of the motivations for the “k” btw is the origin of the word “cyber” in the Greek “kuber’) flees towards a cybernetics of organic disassembly. Again, let’s be clear here. You don’t disassemble the human organism by replacing its parts with metal or silicon components. (That’s why the term “cyborg” — or “cybernetic organism” is misleadingly redundant. All organisms are already cybernetic). What matters is the overall organisation of the parts. Do the parts operate as hierarchically organised and functionally-specified “organs” within a cybernegatively construed interiority or do they operate as deterritorialised potentials pulling from/towards the Outside?

This latter arrangement is what Deleluze and Guattari, following Artaud, designate as the Body without Organs. As Nick pointed out long ago, the BwO is an essentially Spinozist concept: “when it is a matter of the body without organs it is always a matter of Spinoza”.

One of the sublimely ruthless (=machinically efficient) aspects of the behaviour of Aliens, predators and shoggoths from which the organism recoils in horror is their readiness to ditch body parts when they are damaged or redundant. The BwO quickly dispenses with any features that either inhibit its flatlining slide towards the zero intensity of pure potentiality or which draw it back towards the closed-down depotentiation of the organism. (I have sometimes wondered about the k-punk potential of “If thine own eye offend thee, pluck it out.”) This, astonishingly perhaps, is Spinozist reason.

We can now see why becoming inhuman is in the best interests of humanity. The human organism is set up to produce misery. What we like may be damaging for us. What feels good may poison us.

The fascinatingly destratifying potential in neuroeconomics, then, lies in the possibility of using it against its ostensible purposes. As yet another of Kapital’s slave-programs, the purpose of neuroeconomics is to induce the kinds of idiot-repetition-compulsion Burroughs and Downham delineate. According to Rita Carter in Mapping the Mind, “where thought conflicts with emotion, the latter is designed by the neural circuitry in our brains to win”.⁴ The Spinozist body without organisation program is aimed at reversing this priority, providing abstract maps for imposing the goals of reason upon emotional default. So k-punk is also neuropunk: an intensive rewiring of humanity’s neural circuits.

Even if they have often repressed the knowledge, all cultures have understood that being a subject is to be a tortured monkey in hell, hence religion, shamanic practices, etc., geared towards the production of BwOs. Paradoxically, the ultimate interests of any body lie in having no particular interests at all — that is in identifying with the cosmos itself as the BwO, the Spinozist God, the Lemurian body of uttunul.

To get super-immanent, then, let’s think about blogging. As Undercurrent described it over on hyperstition, at its best, blogging can be a “participative molecular collective of truly K+ processes (i.e. buying materials to write about so other people reply and recommend other things which you then write about…)”.⁵ What has begun to emerge on the most destratifying elements of the blogosphere is a depersonalising, desubjectifying network producing more joyful encounters in a positive feedback process in which mammal-reptilian conflict defaults are disabled.

On the side of the BwO, everything is positive, so what use can be made of this animal-in-a-trap howl of outraged subjectivism? Well, at the moment, Marcello is functioning as a morbidly compelling example of how not to be a good Spinozist. Spinoza’s rigorous analysis of sorrow shows how the sad are typically not engaging directly and sensitively with the world but with their own frozen images (think of these as being like outdated data caches). Consider, if you can bear it, the way in which Marcello tilts at the windmills of his own phantasms in a flailing, pathetically resentful hunger for attention that is exemplary of how to produce sad encounters. It is a display of that Romantic fetishisation of self-destruction that, far from being subversive or transgressive, is the Human OS in person. (n.b. It is crucial to distinguish the intricate art of self-disassembly from the gruesome thanatropic processes of self-destruction.)

Still, in the words of Deleuze’s favourite Spinozist formula, no one knows what a body can do. Maybe there will come a time when even Marcello will join us in this only-just-beginning, inciting experiment in collective identity-shutdown. What reasonable person wouldn’t?