The Neurotic Turn

The individual subject position makes absurd demands on people as Users, as quantified selves, as SysAdmins of their own psyche, and from this, paranoia and narcissism are two symptoms of the same disposition, two functions of the same mask. For one, the mask works to pluralize identity according to the subjective demands of the User position as composite alloy; for another, it defends against those same demands on behalf of the illusory integrity of a self-identity fracturing around its existential core (Bratton 2015: 362).

Although neurosis is understood as an “abnormal” condition, it is what we could call a realist disorder, insofar as it, unlike psychosis, does not suffer from delusions, or hallucinations. Neurosis is not reality distortion, but a so-called “inappropriate” response to reality and an inability to “properly” adapt to one’s environment.¹ It follows, then, that one cannot make an adequate account of neurotic responses without also effectively describing the condition of reality to which said “abnormal” responses correlate. Rising political, economic and climactic calamities, coupled with our (so-called) “alienated” dependence on communications technologies have typically been the causal targets in explaining the general increase in neurotic disorders (whether clinical or not, like anxiety and depression). While I do not disagree, these formulations often end in lamentation and fatalism (global civil war or suicide) — and, in offering up few (if any) viable social remedies to this plight, risk ramifying the “alternativeless” quality of our existing political (non-)imaginaries (Berardi 2016). Perhaps what these neurotic symptoms most tellingly reveal is not our inability to adapt to reality, but that neurosis is an expression of the existential and material strain in not wanting to adapt, yet not knowing how to materialize that conceptual refusal into gesture. When we reverse the problem of neurosis, not as that of the maladaption of the individual to reality, but of the maldaption of reality to the individual, we enter the political sphere, since the question becomes one concerning the transformation of given reality itself, which is never individual, but can only ever imply a collective question. Today that means coming to terms with complexity, irreducible as it is to the mechanics of causal immediacy, which poses a pragmatic, logical and ethical impediment to the assertion of a model of subjectivity politically actionable through sheer will, or strictly determined by first-person, phenomenological experience alone. This is not to disavow differential “human” experience, not in the least (our phenomenological interface is part of reality and must be incorporated as such). It is, however, to demand for an integrative subjectivity that can know beyond “sensory” immediacy, leveraging the abstract, non-linear causal dynamics active in shaping the world, a world where we can no longer conflate the flattened perception of a horizon at some vanishing point with its actuality, unlocatable as it is outside of the confines of our sensory apparatus. Until we are able to fashion different models of subjectivity untethered to the constraints of individual particularism, to take-in beyond what appears before us, our collective, futural imaginaries within complex reality (our global field condition of possibility) will remain stifled and atomized.

The transformation of reality isn’t something to be (only) done “out there” as if reality is merely a construction “for us” — it is equally bound to processes of self-transformation (something that also happens to us); manifest as a trialectics between ideality (concepts), materiality (gesture/instantiation) and reality (inscription). Any ambitious claim for an emancipatory politics commensurate with the affordances, risks and potentialities of our given historical situation cannot be conceived without a corresponding concept of what we are and, perhaps more importantly, where we stand as humans within reality (our generic situatedness). The diagram of “The Stack” (plotted by Benjamin Bratton) provides a useful scaffold from which to conceptualize such a representational situatedness — not because it is an exhaustive account of reality, but because of its focus on the consequences of planetary-scaled computation and the oft-diagnosed “culpability” of communications technology as the driver of our neuroses. Broadly speaking, The Stack is a complex, accidental megastructure composed of divergent species of machines (from energy grids to universal addressing systems, to nation-state geopolitical borders), operating through a nexus of hardware and software (Bratton 2015: 355). As a succinct, explanatory model, The Stack consists of six layers: the User, followed by the Interface, Address, City, Cloud and Earth layers in this hierarchical ordering. The user belongs to the category of agent, insofar as it initiates “chains of interaction (columns) up and down its layers, from Interface to Earth and back again” (Bratton 2015: 375), but crucially, this user-subject is not necessarily an individual human — it could be a molecule, a multiplicity of humans constitutive of a group, or the triggering of signals from a light receptor. This flattening of “user-subjects” is, no doubt, why we probably feel more often used by The Stack, than a contributor in its manifold operations. It is because of this, that although we may be collectively training or moulding dynamic systems bit by bit through our interactions, the unleashing of sheer outputs or signals pales in effective/influential comparison to the stakes involved in designing the systems of mediation through which those very signals are parsed, distributed, semantically organized, weighted and represented back to us. (We’ll return to this point shortly.)

Important for the discussion here, is that Bratton’s Stack foreshadows (and welcomes) what he calls a “Copernican trauma” (similar to the inhumanist labour for self-redefinition in the parlance of Reza Negarestani (2014)) wherein the human’s position within the megastructure is no longer the “radiant centre” of activity; and, moreover, where the human can no longer claim a monopoly on the faculty of intelligence (as Artificial General Intelligence stands to diversify what “intelligence” even means and what it can do). This is also a symptom of an even more general trauma mapped out by Hans Blumenberg, wherein any equation of visibility with reality is rendered dubious at best, revealing the gap between our biological perceptual faculties and our access to the scale of the universe — both unfathomably large and infinitesimally small (Veal 2009: 11). Although in such a megasystemic account it appears as if the aptitudes of the human are dramatically diminished or rendered negligible, we need to make a clear assertion: capacities are not reduced because of this decentred, non-radiant conception of the human (in the generic), but that this positional remapping is a powerfully necessary concept in order to reorient our perspectives and therefore our capacities (what we can do) in substantive and artificially egalitarian ways (since nature itself, is, brutally, never egalitarian). The Stack as a self-proclaimed “design brief” (presumably for us humans) echoes to a large degree the kind of self-understanding manifest in the Anthropocene: that we are simultaneously a Promethean animal able to alter geological/geophysical/geotemporal forces, while being utterly vulnerable/impotent in the face of the residual consequences of those very interventions. The Stack is a risky, volatile Pharmakon; it is (and can be) both a cure and malady. The Stack, however, is not magically immune or separated from the ideological nomos of our human biases (even if we are centrally deracinated within its systemic rationality) — quite the contrary. Nomoi are the conventions that precede official jurisprudence, naturalizations of assumptions that subtend the flourishing of common norms, so until we are able to intervene within the conceptual nomos of capitalism (premised on inequality and competition as a compass for orientation), The Stack will remain a tainted orchestration of that stagnating, unjust given.² The intervening in, and transformation of, this nomos is not only a geoeconomic³ design problem to serve and tend to the needs of the many (both humans and non-humans), but, isomorphically, it is a normative re-conditioning, predicated on our capacity (our not) to refashion ourselves in another image; an image that collapses the individuated figure/ground separations of a neoliberalist subjectivity and can strategize novel activity, rather, through our entanglement.

The scalar model of The Stack follows implicit cues from Wilfrid Sellars, who made it his philosophical project to tackle complexity (before it was actually a named science), of how “things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”, forming, in the end, a continuous world (Sellars 1991). “Things” here include items as varied as “numbers and duties”, “cabbages and kings”, “possibilities and finger snaps”, providing us, as Ray Brassier (2011) notes, with a vision that ought to “not only encompass but also to explain the intrication of conceptual ideality and physical reality”. While distinctions between things are made, they do not fall into mere dualisms, since it is precisely the labour of philosophy (in Sellars’ account) to integrate, that is, to articulate, the connections or continuums between those distinctions. (Just as in The Stack, where the focus is not just on discrete layers, but also on their interactions and co-relations.) The Stack forces us to confront two important points simultaneously: first, to integrate this Copernican trauma (a question of self-image); and second that we achieve some sort of cognitive traction on its “objecthood” in order to create a mental diagram of planetary computational reality today (real thingliness). It is because of this double demand impelled by The Stack that the distinction proffered by Sellars between the Manifest Image (how we see ourselves as human subjects in the world) and the Scientific Image (how we know ourselves as physical “things” in the world) is instructive. The task, to reiterate this point, lies not in maintaining that polarity, but rather in constructing a perspectival stereoscopy between these two modes — modes, furthermore, that fruitfully contaminate one another in potentially transformative ways (i.e. a mutated self-understanding will open up new territories for collective investigation and instrument-building (with science being a self-updating enterprise in its own right), which feed forward into novel self-understanding, and so on). Such feedback between ideality and reality functions not because “science” stands above in omniscient authority, guiding our naive self-conceptions, pointing us to the light, but because we are creatures who can grasp and be grasped by concepts. That is the constitutive parity between manifest and scientific images, that the functioning of concepts presupposes this bidirectional movement: we can use them, while they can remodel us (Brassier 2011: 7).

The remodeling of our self-conception requires a collective subjectivity predicated not on atomized individuality, but on a common conceptual “openness”; for the Manifest image is the product of an aggregated human pursuit, belonging to no one in particular, but to everyone in general (a cousin of sorts of the General Intellect). Rather than thinking this “openness” as a mimicry of the kind of “openness” at work within a subsuming capitalist nomos (where “openness” simply equates with the opportunities associated with infinite economic expansion that is, in fact, strictly in fidelity to a closed logic from within — and thusly, not open at all); the transformative force of self-image remodeling is driven by an openness to a conceptual non-given, an immanent openness activated by the outside (Negarestani 2008: 197). Negarestani names this “radical openness” (a radical laceration or butchery); an openness that cannot be compelled by the triumph of human will, but an openness that can only operate through the seduction of the outside and learning how to become better targets for its force (Negarestani 2008: 199). Essentially what this self-transformation entails is an openness built on our collective ability to become prey to the foreign non-givenness of reality — to contingent xenoconcepts, and our capacity to be conceptually porous to them and grasped by them. Such an image of self-transformation defies the neoliberalist imperatives for individualism (which feeds directly into further economic commands for self-realization in the name of competitive advantage); with radical openness as a collective labour in becoming prey to the foreign, it is what we could call an “Alien Subjectivity”⁴ — a subjectivity not only responsive to our plastic socially-constructed reality for us, but also to the reality that is utterly indifferent (sometimes invariant) to us. It is important to note that this crucial “indifferent” or “invariant” reality is exactly what the “realism” connoted in conventional descriptions of neurosis leaves out, and is wholly unequipped to address.

In the minimum instance, we can say that the engineering of stereoscopy — the bidirectional functioning of concepts — is predicated on our capacity for an Alien Subjectivation, requiring a labour of integrative mediation (learning how to be “lacerated”, without being destroyed by it). How can we become better prey to xenoconcepts, to the non-given — an alienness that often cannot be parsed by unaided perceptual faculties alone, but that requires, nonetheless, think-ability; that demands a degree of cognitive access?

The short answer is the Interface. The Interface is a mediating tool for the seduction of the outside, affording us the capacity for alien subjectivation. In an era where politics, wholly trapped in an anthropocentric chauvinism, is no longer sufficient to the abstract, planetary-scaled demands we face, the Interface (beyond it’s limited signification in the realms of pure visuality, or screen design in software applications) offers a gateway to this complexity that requires a manner of cognitive and activity-based condensation. The power of the Interface is that it can both simplify complexity in a nontrivial way, offering reasoned accessibility to otherwise inaccessible objects and processes, while it simultaneously mediates functions, translations and produces effects through this designed filtration scaffold.⁵ It is in this expanded, generic description of the Interface where its alignment with perspectivalism comes into sharp congruency, and precisely why the argument for Alien Subjectivation finds pragmatic agency in this labour for mediation — it is what affords the “abduction of ourselves” by the outside, to what is not yet given, and what is epistemically mobile/ hypothetical (Mackay 2013).

Concepts and structures are constituted in the interface between us and the world, on that phenomenal veil over which we draw them in order to organize and make intelligible the world, by Mathematics. They originate on the regularities we ‘see’, as living and historical being, and develop along History, in intersubjectivity and language. The objectivity of Mathematics is in this process. (Longo 2001)

Although much of the discussion has emphasized a non-phenomenologically biased picture of subjectivation commensurate with planetary complexity, what the “Interface” as a form of perspectivalism offers is some contextual nuance to the discussion. With the dominance of the computational driver elucidated in The Stack, we ought not be so abrupt to succumb to the tendencies extrapolated from twentieth-century mathematics; tendencies that transformed computation from a creatively abstract capacity to a paradigmatic epistemic approach upon the natural sciences (where physical phenomena were conceived as wholly codeable in pure information packets (Longo 2011)), in the end constraining epistemic access to living, biophysical reality which is circumstantial and not purely axiomatic (Longo 2014). Much like the “continuum-building” work of Sellars, the reflections of Giuseppe Longo elaborate on the links between the innovative ability in formal mathematics to describe the universe (following a computational logic), and the ways in which our phenomenological relationship to space and time through our human perceptual apparatus conditions that very possibility for mathematical manipulation in the creation of new perspectives. Geometry organizes the relationships to our surroundings (Mackay 2013) (like the enactment of a derivative function in hunting prey in estimating a moving target) and, by extension, our capacity for instrumental activity (physical and cognitive) within space and time. (The mathematician Alexander Grothendieck went even further, having spoken to the “tyranny” of the consequences for the apprehension of space as something merely surrounding us, and its traditional theoretical articulation in Euclidean geometry (Grothendieck 1986).) In this view, the phenomenal-geometry nexus operates as a kind of nomos, an Interface as perspective-construction that shapes our relationship to field conditions where new possibilities for organization and activity can emerge. Since geometry has provided one of the most “stable reconstructions of space” in the human’s never-ending project to give it meaning, to give it access, to ask of its measureability, and to finally inquire as to how we may operate within it (Longo 2001), the creation of Alien Subjectivities is entirely interwoven with the rearticulation of our given geometric nomoi. This reformulation arrives not by demonizing fields of knowledge creation we deem as abstract and disconnected from us (nor by privileging them as authoritative guiding “truth-machines” either), but through the ways these abstractions nourish and are nourished by the instrumental possibilities afforded to us through a perspectival reinscription of the landscapes we co-inhabit.

If the sheer visibility, audibility and comprehensibility of the “User” (as subject) was the paramount political vehicle across centuries of thought (from Aristotle, to Arendt, to Rancière), today it is arguable that we are witnessing a shift in “layer” dynamics to the second order of “the Interface” as site of and for subjectivation. Complexity demands a subjectivation premised on a collective “becoming alien” through our shared capacities in the fabrication of alter-perspectives in order to “escape” (following Singleton 2013) our given geometries of relational possibility (where possibility is always a mode of constraint in both enabling and disabling senses). On a geopolitical level, our geometric possibilities remain entrenched in what we could call a “Westphalian Interface”, insofar as we have organized the Earth and its peoples into morsels of flattened territories, with each morsel being juridically sovereign (especially its legal exceptions). Bratton’s Stack (quite pointedly) demonstrates the limitation of this interfacial paradigm, citing both its structural inadequacies vis-à-vis planetary, extra-territorial/ multi-species crises, and due to issues of governance that are no longer containable by the nation-state model (i.e. the way Silicon Valley monopolies and their products interfere in previously state-regulated modes of information dissemination, as but one example). The Stack reveals an abutment of conflicting perspectival diagrams, incongruent schemata that cognitively impede the possibilities for a radical reorientation of planetary-scaled organizational and ethical operations. If Westphalian Interfaces have not only forged the definitions of political space, they have also shaped their content as a uniquely human domain of values and possible activity (Bratton 2015: 5), all the while instantiating us/them thresholds in the fabrication of distinct “we”s. The necessity for a post-Westphalian Interface is evidently pressing if we are to steer The Stack towards egalitarian ambitions, ambitions which are not only bound to geolegal re-engineering, but furthermore require buttressing by augmented modes of common identification and the power of abstraction required to forge new schemata of “we-ness”.

Even before the contemporary Stack had come into blooming techno-material existence, the globalizing logic of neoliberalism had already been introducing a conflicting extra-territorial diagram of its own. As we now witness the early stages of the ideological downfall of this logic for infinite market expansion (signaling the denaturalization of capitalist realism — a moment many of us have been clamouring for), rather than mobilizing this historical situation towards post-Westphalian hypotheses, we are seeing the exact opposite. Recent waves of populism are doubling down on this anachronistic Westphalian nomoi and, despite the affordances of a profoundly connected, interdependent and interwoven world, we are seeing its opposite played out through violently bounded isolationisms/essentialisms. With no other alternative Interface in mind to pilot our reality besides the Westphalian one, rather than overcoming the brutal inequalities of the neoliberal order (an only partially global order that took no responsibility in “serving” its global constituents), we are witnessing the emergence of what appears to be a far more ruthless order predicated on familiar localization, most often manifesting in highly finite us/them divisions. Before the possibility exists for an emancipatory “Stack-tocome”, before we can robustly speculate as to how better to instrumentalize our techno-material condition in just directions, the very alienation of existing us/them divisions (which limit perspectivalism and what we can collectively do) is fundamental; and is one instance of how this Copernican trauma can “grasp” us, provided we learn to seduce it accordingly. The permeation of this trauma upon our imaginaries, partly unleashed by the technological innovations of The Stack, crucially drives us towards cognitive and ethical innovations that constitute the latent, primary question of all politics, namely, who (and what) composes the “we”? The “we” is the necessary abstraction at the root of all politics, how we model its contours, how we diagram its site of activity, how we plot co-habitational geometries, these are simultaneously perspectival and political questions that historically persist. Despite the planetary-scale of twenty-first-century reality, these questions persevere, even if the historical condition of their questioning is radically different.

If the design of things, particularly technology, is always a mirroring or extension of our particular predispositions, nomoi and biases, it follows then that the fashioning of emancipatory geopolitical schemata urged on by The Stack can only be conceived in parallel with an inhuman renovation upon our generic self-understanding that justly faces up to these biases. Models generate perspective, giving rise to possibilities for intervening in the world (Morrison and Morgan 1999), which is why a model for actionable subjectivity itself demands a similar renewal. To overcome the neurosis of complexity and not wanting to adapt to given reality, we must learn to be grasped by this Copernican blow, and in turn, learn how to grasp the new perspectives this re-situated landscape opens up; affording new gestures, concepts and sites for a synthetic politics to emerge.

Works Cited

Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. (2016). “The Coming Global Civil War: Is There Any Way Out?” e-flux Journal #69.

Brassier, Ray. (2011). “The View from Nowhere”, Identities: Journal of Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer 2011, 6-23.

Bratton, Benjamin H. (2015). The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Grothendieck, Alexander. (1986). Récoltes et Semailles, Part I: The Life of a Mathematician: Reflections and Bearing Witness, trans. Roy Lisker.

Longo, Giuseppe. (2001). “Space and Time in the Foundations of Mathematics, or some challenges in the interactions with other sciences”. American Mathematical Society/SMF Conference, Lyon, Jul. 2001. Accessible here: http://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo/files/PhilosophyAndCognition/space-time.pdf

—. (2014). “The Constitution of Meaning: From Mathematical Structures to Organisms (e ritorno).” Lecture at Morphing Castalia, Glass Bead Workshop. Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris. 3 Oct. 2014.

Mackay, Robin. (2013). “Perspective, Alienation, Escape: An Introduction”. Available at: https://www.urbanomic.com/document/perspective-alienation-escape-an-introduction/

Majaca, Antonia and Parisi, Luciana. (2016). “The Incomputable and Instrumental Possibility” in e-flux Journal #77.

Morrison, Margaret and Morgan, Mary S. (1999). “Models as Mediating Instruments”, in Models as Mediators - Perspectives on Natural and Social Science, eds. M. Morrison and M. S. Morgan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Negarestani, Reza. (2008). Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Melbourne: re.press.

—. (2014). “The Labor of the Inhuman”, in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Falmouth: Urbanomic.

Sellars, Wilfrid. (1991). “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, in Science, Perception and Reality. Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing.

Singleton, Benedict. (2013). “Maximum Jailbreak”, e-flux Journal #46.

Veal, Damien. (2009). “Editorial Introduction”, in Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, vol. V, ed. Damien Veal. Falmouth: Urbanomic

Notes

1 “Inappropriate” and “abnormal” are written in strong scare quotes since these very designations are determined by the same types of institutions that have once classified homosexuality a mental disorder not that long ago and have received countless legitimate criticisms of perpetuating cultural bias. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) for example, publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which sets disciplinary standards in the naming and diagnosing of mental disorders, with broad influence in the medical, pharmaceutical and health insurance industries.

2 For an account of The Stack in relation to the potential for an automated commons, see Tiziana Terranova. (2014). “Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common”, in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Falmouth: Urbanomic. 379-397.

3 Donna Haraway has questioned the use of the term “Anthropocene”, suggesting (among others) “Capitalocene” to more accurately address the geological effects of our particular economic paradigm. See: Donna Haraway. (2015). “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”. Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 159-165.

4 There is some sympathetic resonance with the concept of “alien becoming” (or xeno-genesis) outlined by Antonia Majaca and Luciana Parisi (drawing from the work of science-fiction writer Octavia Butler). “An alien beginning of the new subject calls for abduction, and for the generation of new hypotheses of instrumentality, one that acknowledges the history of techne whereby the machine has been able to elaborate strategies of autonomy from and through its own use” (Majaca and Parisi 2016).

5 Alexander Galloway even suggests the Interface is not a thing, but ought to be analyzed in its effective register. See Alexander Galloway. (2013). The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity Press.