HUMAN THOUGHT HAS ALWAYS been strangely attracted to oppositional pairs, like soul / body and form / materia, and to the eternal discussion of how one takes precedence over the other. This is how we perceive and orientate ourselves in reality. This applies particularly to human thought about human thought itself. Ever since antiquity and the very earliest philosophy, the human psyche has been contested territory, a central front in the historical battle between materialism and idealism.
The divided figure of thought itself is easy to comprehend. Aristotle described form as ‘that which makes something what it is’, whereas materia is ‘that which is potentially but not actually an individual object’. In other words, this is about two different dimensions of one and the same occurrence. The organism in general and the human being specifically is defined by its form, its innermost being, which in turn is another word for the soul. Bodily matters are therefore something completely separate from those of the soul; each is described with its own vocabulary, and treated with its own methodology. We might argue about whether one takes precedence over the other, and which perspective should be decisive, but the dichotomy itself is, for most people, undeniable and beyond all discussion.
The academic production of knowledge in our own age is no exception. Either/or is what counts. You either choose the natural sciences and stick to a strictly materialistic explanatory model where the psyche that is the object of study is a piece of stable bodily tissue, a brain whose functionality varies according to what hormones and other exotic chemicals are flowing through it at that moment. Or you choose an idealistic-analytical investigation of the psyche and stick to an appropriate explanatory model where the object of study is an endless and difficult to comprehend chain of fantastical constructions of a hypothetical complex of connected instances such as the superego, the subego, consciousness, subconsciousness, urges and desires. Representatives of the different fields of research imagine that they have very little to say to one another seeing as they are talking about such different things and use such different conceptual apparatus.
You might imagine that we choose to presume that there are fundamental obstacles of an ontological sort which make it by definition impossible to unite the psychological way of seeing things with the psychoanalytical. Or you could think that we choose to presume that recent explanatory models are so complicated that not even the most brilliant experts could hope to master and move between these two areas of research to any meaningful degree. But regardless of what your starting point is, the discourse itself does not permit any comparisons between – still less any partial combination of – these two areas of knowledge. Psychology finds itself in the less than glamorous role of a science with no philosophical ambitions, while psychoanalysis, after a long series of clinical setbacks, has been downgraded to the status of applied philosophy with no scientific credibility. This means that if you want to understand yourself and your psyche better, you have to choose between either a therapist or an analyst. You can't have them both at the same time. The fear of once again ending up in the nineteenth century's war of attrition between materialism and idealism has a solid hold over public discourse.
The price of the current ceasefire is that the underlying conflict remains unaddressed. A ceasefire, of course, should not be confused with the end of hostilities: oppositional positions are made permanent by being swept under the carpet. Consequently the psychological establishment regularly rejects all analytical explanatory models of the mechanisms of the psyche as nonsense and speculation with no foundation, while schools of psychoanalysis reject psychology's pretensions to universal applicability as naive and arrogant. One illustrative example of the latter is how Slavoj Zizek, one of the most renowned practitioners of contemporary psychoanalysis, has named one of his books after ‘the universal exception’. As a result, the Hegelian Zizek elevates the irritating little remnant that has never been caught by any scientific explanatory model – such as when psychology vainly attempts to offer a universal understanding of the human psyche – as the very raison d’être of psychoanalysis itself.
But if we choose to ignore academic disciplines for the time being, and instead look at the human psyche from an independent, third starting point, it turns out that a synthesis between psychology and psychoanalysis is entirely possible. In the same way as the conflict between materialism and idealism has reached a solution in other areas within philosophy, it is entirely possible to solve it even where the human psyche itself is concerned. In contradiction to the insistent claims of idealists, the psyche has no ontological or axiomatic special status. Ironically, we cannot achieve the sought-after synthesis by attacking or rejecting the advances of either psychology or psychoanalysis, but by employing exactly the opposite manoeuvre. By regarding psychology and psychoanalysis alike as principally complete disciplines, we can get past the artificial historical antagonism between them, and, in a philosophical sense, speculate our way towards a schizoanalytical rather than a psychological or psychoanalytical view of the human psyche.
It is abundantly clear that psychology and psychoanalysis use widely divergent conceptual apparatus. But are they actually talking about different things? Is not instead the case that the differences in their narratives are only a case of two different traditions, in the same way as a printer and a literary critic express themselves in different but equally valid ways about one and the same book? Because once souls hidden in glands and invisible spiritual ears and other supernatural nonsense have been swept aside, and when the most pretentious excesses have been removed from the conversation, we can see that each of them is trying, in an almost poetic way, to describe exactly the same causal processes.
We can express this synthetically by stating that a specific thought gives rise to a particular electrochemical pattern in the brain, which in turn causes a new thought, which gives rise to new electrochemical patterns, and so on, ad infinitum. Or we can turn the argument round and state that a particular electrochemical arrangement of patterns gives rise to a particular phantasm, which in turn nurtures an electrochemical modification in the brain, which nurtures a further modified phantasm, and so on. It makes no difference how we shuffle the pack, there is still no contradiction between the two. So, the human psyche is basically a question of the continual interaction between mental and electrochemical processes which take place in the human brain, which is interacting with the rest of the body and the world around it the whole time. Nothing precedes anything else in this endlessly complicated but nonetheless uniform process. One can be translated into the other, and vice versa.
But can it really be this simple? Yes, but the simplicity of this synthesis is also its difficulty, in the same way as the genial simplicity of Spinoza's seventeenth-century monism became the difficult trauma that western thought had to wrestle with for 400 years before the issue was disentangled by the post-structuralism of the late-twentieth century. When Spinoza kills the Soul and gives life to the Body, as constituting the Human Being in its totality, he is already encompassing the modernism that followed, with its focus on philosophical rationality and rationalist science as the superior opponents of, rather than the defenders of, superstitious religion with its collapsing power structure. In Spinoza's writings we can actually find the eternalistic view of the human psyche; all we have to do is project his 400-year-old monism onto the psychological and psychoanalytical processes, and we will soon see how they reinforce and clarify each other, rather than being contradictory. Spinoza beat all of his Enlightenment rivals. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all Spinozists today (rather than Cartesians). We are living in a Spinozist age, and all we have to do is find a common language for the disciplines.
The important thing is to understand that the pertaining dualism between psychology and psychoanalysis – like all other forms of dualism between materialism and idealism – does not, in contrast to accepted wisdom, have its roots in human fascination with the mysteries of existence. This is not, then, some sort of guessing game that arose around the primitivist campfire, as we have been encouraged to believe, in true historical romantic spirit. Instead this dualism, like all other ideologies, has its roots in the battle for power and survival. Organised religion's fascination with the mysteries of life is of considerably more recent vintage than the appearance of this dualism, and has in any case always been of secondary importance compared to the primary human occupation with power and survival.
The fact that this dualism became the ruling supra-ideological pattern of thought does not, therefore, mean that the nature of life is divided in two in any interesting sense. The reason is quite simply that dualism fulfilled its memetic Darwinian function by offering an adequate ideological frame for feudal society. Dualism was born at the same moment that nomadic, short-term-thinking hunters and gatherers needed to be tamed and re-educated as settled, long-term-thinking farmers. The established and necessary oppositional pair of good and evil needed to be complemented by a metaphysical explanatory model if it was to remain credible. It was in this context that the division between soul and body, between The Written and The Spoken, and thus between God and the World, showed itself to be the perfect meme. Naturally, this encompassed a dramatic narrative with the nobility on the side of good with God, the Soul and Writing, and the slaves on the side of evil, with the World, the Body and the Speech.
Because we have long since left feudal society behind, we need have no qualms about sweeping away the rotten remnants of the dualistic worldview and instead constructing a monistic synthesis between psychology and psychoanalysis which will be more credible and functional in today's informationalist society. One problem with which we are confronted is what terminology to use when the established concepts are so closely associated to either one or other of the two traditional disciplines which regard each other with mutual suspicion and hostility.
The Spinozist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari started to grapple with this question in the 1970s, when they began to develop a new synthetic model for the human psyche. They rejected both the psychological and psychoanalytical perspective – in a direct response aimed squarely at Sigmund Freud and his successor Jacques Lacan, the called their first joint work Anti-Oedipus (1972), in which they presented the thesis that the fundamental flaw of both systems is that they ultimately produce a reductive and domesticated idea of Humankind. The two disciplines could not see the necessity of the whole.
Deleuze and Guattari's solution was a new discipline, beyond the classical dualistic categories, a field of knowledge which, in true anarchistic spirit, they termed schizoanalysis. They claimed that if the fulfilment of capitalism had finally crushed the Cartesian ideal of an integrated individual as the centre of existence, then it made sense to declare both paternalistic psycholanalysis and naive and uncritical psychology dead, in order to start experimenting with a more comprehensive schizoanalytical model. Modern research into the brain ought not to be left out of the analysis, but instead placed at its very centre, steadily illuminated by critical analysis. Deleuze and Guattari thus replace the Cartesian idea, the Individual, with a schizoid and, in all senses, pluralistic being, which they call the Dividual. Schizoanalysis is the new arena in which psychology and psychoanalysis meet and combine, and where, thanks to the new dividualistic ideal, they can both be set aside. A hypothesis is no longer reinforced simply because both psychology and psychoanalysis nod their approval. In a globalised and multicultural society which communicates in all directions, more than this is required. We are living in a new paradigm which observes and understands Humankind in an entirely new way.
Let us look back through history for a moment: psychoanalysis is created by Freud and his disciples in the years around the turn of the last century. Freud's groundbreaking discovery is that the human psyche ought to be compared to an iceberg: consciousness makes up just the tiny proportion of the psyche that is clearly visible above the surface. Beneath the level of consciousness there are considerably larger and more important parts of the psyche, a turbulent whirlpool of desires and urges that govern our thoughts and ultimately even our actions. Freud calls this invisible and powerful combustion engine of the psyche The Unconscious.
Within schizoanalysis we use the more flexible term The Subconscious instead. The basic idea comes from Freud, but the concept of The Subconscious better illustrates how this great complex functions in relation to the small and marginal Conscious than Freud managed to illustrate. The relationship between the Conscious and what Freud tries to characterise as The Unconscious is of course not the pure dualism that he, typically for his age, presumes; instead, the Conscious and The Subconscious overlap and echo each other in the most sophisticated and intricate way. There is absolutely no clear boundary or dualism at all. Nonetheless, of course Freud's theories were groundbreaking, possibly even more revolutionary than he himself realised, and he was not a man overly afflicted by modesty. In other words: a lot of the explosive power of psychoanalysis has its roots in The Unconscious. Or rather: in The Subconscious.
It is in the nature of the beast that The Subconscious is not immediately visible to the investigative gaze of consciousness. But it constantly leaves subtle impressions in what we say and do, in expressions and behaviour that were not planned and which often surprise the person speaking or acting. And it speaks to us through dreams, where our secret desires find expression. Slavoj Zizek points out that Freud's dream analysis has interesting similarities with Karl Marx's analysis of commodity. Just as commodity reveals an underlying truth about the brutal dynamics of capitalism on closer inspection, so dreams often reveal – for someone with the necessary skill to conduct a proper interpretation – uncomfortable and shocking truths about the conflicts raging beneath the surface of consciousness.
It is important to remember that Freud's theories were seriously influenced by, and in practical terms a result of, the society and power structures that constituted the frame of his life and work. The Europe of the late-nineteenth century was as the zenith of industrialisation. The power, self-absorption and self-satisfaction of the urban bourgeiosie has never been as high as it was in Vienna at the turn of the last century. The patriarchal power-structure was regarded as an axiomatic, obvious fact of nature; there was great fascination for the apparently highly effective Napoleonic hierarchy as an organisational model. All important organisations – factories, schools, hospitals, bureaucracies and armies – were constructed with this hierarchical model in mind. The worldview rested upon an idea of a venerable, almost mystical, patriarchy at the top of a totalistic pyramid. The nation state was the basis for the production of social identity – citizens were genuinely prepared to die for their country – and its Napoleonic armies of universally conscripted soldiers marching in rigid formation, adorned with a strict hierarchy of officers, was seen as the guarantor of society's survival. The destructive efficiency of the burgeoning industrialism meant that the Factory replaced the old Palace as the social phallus: the signifier of the governing power structure around which the rest of society's activity was presumed to revolve.
It is hardly surprising that the Factory was also the ideal in Freud's ambitions for psychoanalysis: the Cartesian subject is the psyche's very own phallus, under which the other components of the psyche have to be organised in an effective hierarchical pyramid in order for balance and harmony to be achieved and maintained. The goal must be for the person under analysis to find their predetermined place in society, like an effective factory worker in a rapidly growing cosmopolitan city. Obviously the relationship of the person in question to the Father-figure must also be central to their understanding of themselves. The son is jealous of the Father and wishes to defeat and replace him. The Daughter wants most of all to please the Father because she is envious of him and other men for their possession of actual phalluses. The fact that men, in a corresponding fashion, are entirely capable of envying women their breasts and wombs is a thought that never seriously occurred to Freud. He believed that with this foundation in place, psychoanalysis had at its disposal all the necessary tools to maintain the natural power structure in its place. This was equally true within the psyche itself.
What made Freud an international megastar and spread his admittedly controversial theories across the whole of the western world was the way that they chimed with the fundamental values of the capitalist era. Psychoanalytical societies – often run like fanatical sects whose leaders were regarded as enlightened oracles – sprang up in major cities across the whole of the industrialised world. The most important explanation of the success of psychoanalysis was that it was launched as a powerful alternative to the religious institutions of the crumbling aristocracy. While the aristocrats were still confessing their sins to the local priest, the urban bourgeoisie was instead queuing enthusiastically for the couch of Freudian analysis. Analysts obeyed the same confidentiality as priests, of course; they were soon regarded as the confessors of secularised society.
Now the bourgeoisie was no longer obliged to pay any kind of lip service to a god it no longer believed in. You need not pray for forgiveness for sins for which you no longer felt any guilt. Instead your own personality, your Ego, was the centre of attention. This suited the individualistic bourgeoisie much better. No more talk about the keys to heaven and the blessedness of eternal life. On the analyst's couch, the narrative instead was all about personal development and a burning desire to achieve concrete progress, here and now, for your own benefit. With the onset of capitalism, faith in constant Progress had replaced the belief in an elusive Eternity as the metaphysical engine of society, a fact which was extremely beneficial to psychoanalysis. Analysts were richly rewarded, and soon comprised an acclaimed and well-integrated part of the very bourgeoisie that psychoanalysis originally set out to unmask. Psychoanalysis had thus been transformed into one more profit-maximising factory among many others in capitalist society. Soon Freud's disciples could boast of bulging bank accounts and social status.
Freud may have been regarded as unsettling and offensive by contemporary society, with his constant talk of sexuality and cultural unhappiness. Both his theories and his methods were regularly questioned by the medical and philosophical establishments. But his provocations were entirely in line with the way the age saw itself, and therefore never gave rise to any more serious reaction than a reflex gesture of annoyance. Even Freud himself moved in time to, and was a loyal servant of the system of which he was a part. No matter how much he might talk about the sordid and hidden underbelly of the bourgeoisie, the eventual result was, more than anything, a sophisticated form of entertainment for the moneyed classes. Like a talented ringmaster Freud tickled the bourgeoisie with metafantasies, fantasies about their own fantasies, to help the class in power to find itself as interesting as possible. Freud therefore did not permit any deviation from the fundamental requirement of the governing paradigm: the cultivation and maintenance of the patriarchal, Napoleonic hierarchy. Freudianism itself has no place outside the phallocentric worldview.
If the nineteenth century was the golden age of the bourgeoisie and Cartesianis, the twentieth century was a time of transition. Both world wars revealed the brutal underside of the hierarchical Factory as an idea, and the dream of the homogenous nation state as a secure home on earth. The concentration camps and the gulag archipelago showed that the Factory, not least when led by dysfunctional father figures like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, was better suited to creating a hell rather than a heaven on earth. The multiculturalism of American culture beckoned, giving rise to new ideals. The democratic and open society, built on solid judicial institutions, accessible to all, with all citizens equal in the eyes of the law, became the new universal norm. Factory workers won influence and the right to participate in decisions. Women made their concerted entry into the workplace. The colonies in Africa, Asia and South America freed themselves from the rapidly shrinking European empires. Ethnic and sexual minorities demanded and were granted more space and influence.
As a consequence, Freud's explanatory model for the functioning of the psyche looked increasingly tired. It was patched up and repaired feverishly within psychoanalytic sects. Conflicts between various groups were bitter and had brutal consequences, not entirely unlike the old European wars of religion. When psychoanalysis's most spectacular thinker, Jacques Lacan, arrived on the scene in the 1950s as one of the leading figures within French structuralism, there was practically nothing left of Freudianism but its name. Lacan sought to reach beyond the messages of industrialism and post-industrialism, stuck as they were in their own time, and concentrate instead on the more enduring aspects of the psyche. The increasingly silly dream interpretations and other nonsense were chucked out, the factory metaphor abandoned; Lacan was instead inspired by Hegel and Nietzsche. He concentrates on the timeless structures of the psyche, which he presents as complex but strikingly apposite mathemes in a new borderland between philosophy and science. Lacan made such an impression on contemporary philosophers that he was soon regarded as one of the twentieth century's great thinkers, in spite of the fact that he turned down social invitations from the academic establishment and stuck to his psychiatric clinics and the couch he used for consultations in his apartment in Paris.
One consequence of Lacan's growing popularity and influence was that he became persona non grata in Freudian circles. American Freudians in particular raged against this new French way of thinking, which they preferred to regard as continental sophistry. Lacanians were therefore forced to found their own school, which soon grew to become at least as strong as, and, above all, more influential, than the Freudian school. The definitive break from the Freudian line only came, however, when Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – two of the heroes of the French 1968 movement, the latter of whom had been one of Lacan's students – broke away from the whole concept of psychoanalysis in the 1970s. Instead of trying to patch up and repair the old Freudian model that was no longer functional, they unapologetically announced the birth of schizoanalysis, despite the fact they had not yet developed a complete model. According to Deleuze and Guattari, if the Cartesian subject has crashed to the ground in the turbulence of late-capitalism, there is no reason whatsoever to try to keep it alive on the analyst's couch.
Critical questions mounted up. Why retain the analyst's couch at all, when its main function had been to draw out the narcissistic perversions and desires of the increasingly marginalised bourgeoisie after expensive journeys down into the subconscious ? Lacan had amassed a small fortune from his sadistic analyst's sessions, still with the analyst in the role of axiomatic and infallible Patriarch, and lord of the masochistic client. Was it not the case that the analyst's couch itself, rather than the analysis, had become the focus of events, precisely because it was the analyst's couch that generated the capital and the status that the increasingly naive, lazy and corrupt psychoanalysts had come to desire? Didn't this new development demand a complete break, an entirely new school of analysis, a school that included a critical attitude to the current power structure? Wasn't it high time to get rid of the theoretical naivety and radicalise analysis in this crass and complex age?
Deleuze and Guattari believe that the new, increasingly interactive and multicultural society also needs a more radical explanatory model for the most basic functions of the psyche. A new self-image for humankind in an entirely new situation. The hypercapitalist state of globalised society no longer has anything in common with the Europe in which René Descartes formulated his individualistic philosophy in the 1600s, or with the Vienna where Freud sat and interpreted the bourgeoisie's dreams through the eyes of the patriarch in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Deleuze and Guattari are adamant that Oedipus has abdicated. As early as the 1950s, Lacan was talking about the retreat of the patriarchy from the social arena. As the dominance of the bourgeois nuclear family has declined, Oedipus has become less relevant. Deleuze and Guattari believe that they are completing the project that their mentor, Lacan, began, and they are doing so not by questioning Lacan's theories, but rather by placing analysis in a larger social context which had earlier been overshadowed.
This means that other forms of rebellion and the complexes connected to it are becoming relevant. As a result, Deleuze and Guattari are even attacking the very starting point of the capitalist worldview: the Cartesian subject. The permanent Ego as the centre of existence is an ideal that was created and nurtured in order to maximise the advance of capitalism, and ultimately in order to legitimise its claims to power. Capitalism produced the Cartesian subject, rather than the reverse. However the concept lacked both a scientific basis and, above all, relevance for the new interactive age, which instead finds itself in desperate need of a new, more creative and flexible subject. Lacan shows that the Cartesian subject is both empty and divided (and, precisely because of this, dearly cherished); Deleuze and Guattari want to go further and, taking Spinoza as their inspiration, construct an analysis from foundations other than the Ego. In tense expectation of a functional form of schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari see a world coloured by rapidly escalating neuroses and paranoid psychoses. There is absolutely no shortage of work for new schizoanalysts.
The historical transition from late-capitalism's highly effective, electronic one-way communications to informationalism's complex, digital interactivity as the dominant force of power- and identity-producing communication technology also means, ironically, that the new ideal for the psyche that is developing is the radical opposite of Freud's ideal. Metaphysical Progress is gone, as represented by the solid, cohesive Ego. In its place is the metaphysical Event, represented by the schizoid Dividual as the new ideal.
This dividual seeks out intensity and longs for abstract events. The Event is therefore replacing Progress as the metaphysical engine. For the interactive netocrat, this means that the more numerous, and the more exciting personalities which can be contained within one and the same nominal psyche, the stronger the identity and greater the creativity that the dividual – for good and ill – will be able to produce, experience, and represent in interactive society. The Dividual is thus striving to become an event itself; not a permanent event (like the Individual), but many different events in the plural, continually new intensities which come and go through the Dividual, a fluid self-image in a constantly changing world.
Like all the other patriarchal hierarchies of the capitalist era, psychoanalysis will not manage to survive the transition to informationalist society. The dark analyst's couch in a dusty study – with its obsolete connections to patriarchal oversight, libidinal submission and military metaphors – belong to an entirely different world than today's meritocratic and changeable network projects on the internet. The relationship between the fundamentally sadistic and moralising psychoanalyst and the masochistic patient is therefore undergoing a transformation. In its place, an ethical, equal relationship is gradually emerging between the analyst and patient, with the Event rather than Progress as the metaphysical horizon, and where Society is a common problem that both can and should be criticised, but which must nonetheless be dealt with. By proclaiming the arrival of schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari are declaring psychoanalysis dead and buried. As its replacement, they are launching a new philosophy for both the creative and critical understanding of the human psyche in the age of interactivity.
If the idea of a solid, permanent and substantial subject is dead, if the Ego has lost its soul and been reduced to an empty, linguistic convention, and if interactive society both facilitates and enforces the production of a torrent of other social identities in its place, we are forced to address the question of whether there is any cohesive ideal for all these personalities which have to be nurtured simultaneously? The subject is formed and maintained by the ongoing construction of a narrative about itself and its context. But how should the new dividual which is replacing the old individual compose itself? How much is possible? And what, of everything that is possible, is reasonable and functional?
We will find the answer by studying the boundary between the specific conditions of the new age and the constant conditions for our existence that are independent of forms of communication, in other words: the unavoidable genetic preconditions which arose in the bestial, pre-human state, and were later clarified during the primitivist era, where spoken language was the only form of language, and the nomadic tribe humankind's only social network. It turns out that informationalism has one important characteristic in common with the primitivist era, in the interactive nature of the dominant form of communication. Deleuze and Guattari therefore refer to the thinking of the new age as nomadic philosophy. Once again, it is movement rather than stability that is idealised in civilisation. Nietzsche's materialist revolt against Plato's dualism and the prioritising of the world of ideas are being fulfilled.
Whereas feudalism's written language and capitalism's printing presses and electronic mass media gave rise to vast concentrations of power around the institutions that produced, unquestioned, the pertaining truths, the onset of digital interactivity is facilitating an actual return to the multi-directional communication that was characteristic of primitivism, but on an entirely different scale. This explains why contemporary sociologists talk about a technological primitivism as one of the signifiers of the age of interactivity. New internet sociology is observing the rise and growth of virtual tribes, internet-based subcultures or global proportions, with immense powers of attraction, not least because of the their role as the centre of informationalism's production of identity. New interactive technologies are thus fulfilling an old utopian dream: the original and mythical tribe can be reinstated through new technology. But it is no longer gathered round a geographically specific campfire as it once was: instead its members are seeking out and finding one another in the virtual jungles and savannahs of informationalism.
The phallus and the production of identity always go hand in hand. Capitalism's social identities and ideals were consequently constructed from the factory floor, the academic titles of universities and the bureaucratic corridors of the nation state. Informationalism's identities are, in contrast, constructed out of the social roles of the virtual networks. The phallus of our age is therefore the Net, the metaphysical abstraction that our subconscious is constantly preparing itself for examination by. The Other is the playful identities that our own dividual identities communicate with. The Big Other is nothing more than the metaphysical abstraction itself, the Net.
By studying technological primitivism and the powerful elements of nomadic tribal life that we find on the internet, we can identify a new, functional norm for the human psyche for informationalism. It is hardly surprising that there turns out to be a recurrent universal formula with primitivistic origins. It is important to clarify here that we are not talking about a formula that is objectively true or applicable forever, in the scientific way that Freud liked to regard his psychoanalytical hypotheses. This is more a matter of a formula that is productive and functional for us in our time, a pragmatic starting point for the dividual ideals of schizoanalysis. This formula is known as the 12+1 model, and we shall be returning to that in the next chapter.
One dramatic consequence of the collapse of the modern project during the twentieth century was that the human psyche lost its presumed substance. Lacan's psychoanalytical theories denied the psyche its substance on the analytical plane: the Lacanian subject is a subject whose illusory quality, its fundamental emptiness, is also the very foundation of its existence. This is a question of a paradoxical subject which gains its substance precisely from its actual lack of substance. The recurrent attempt to give the Lacanian subject a substance is in itself its only substance. Thus, for Lacan, the Cartesian subject has fulfilled the development from the naive phase, through the cynical phase, to affirmative nihilism. The death of the subject is nothing to either shout about or to lament, naively or hypocritically, but rather a fundamental precondition for the creation of identity. This is in contrast to many of the postmodern theories that followed, with their misdirected criticism of the subject's Hegelian necessity in Lacan's theoretical construction.
Modern research into the brain has in a corresponding way eliminated the substance of the psyche not only on the analytical plane, but also the psychological: the psyche is reduced to processes of cause, effect and a minimal amount of coincidence, where the transition from one electrochemical complex to another encourages a psychic reaction that can largely be predicted in advance. Feelings that are linked in this way to other feelings create predictable patterns. It is in theory entirely possible to reduce the entire activity and expression of the psyche to complete chains of electrochemical-hormonal complexes, where complete determinism is avoided only because we have to take account of the unpredictability that is always present on the quantum physical level.
It is worth noting that it is the Cartesian subject that is dead and buried. Hegel's purely metaphysical subject from the nineteenth century is, on the other hand, still thriving within Lacanian analysis – because this subject requires neither dualism nor the pineal gland. The point is that the Ego's experience of itself as an ego does not disappear, however strong the sense of the ego's illusory character actually is. The reverse is in fact the case: the Hegelian subject, which thinks itself into being as its own self-reflecting necessity, and nothing more, and which only sees itself as a loop of thought without material foundation, is actually strengthened by the ultra-materialistic explanations of its existence.
The philosophers Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler have thus correctly identified the link between the Lacanian revolution and Hegel: Lacan completes the Hegelian revolution which was started in the nineteenth century, and places Hegel deservedly in the role of one of modernism's most prophetic thinkers. The door is actually open for a renaissance of romantic idealism: if we delve deep enough into consequential materialism, materia itself begins to dissolve into abstract patterns, a mysterious dance of particles in the great void. It is, then, important to remember that acceptance of the monistic worldview is not so much a question of materialism's victory over idealism, but rather merely of monism's victory over dualism, or, in other words: existence is merely one single substance, and we have the freedom to give this single substance whatever attributes we want, as long as we allow it to remain one and the same substance.
Admittedly, it is true that the chemical status of the brain at any given moment governs the experiences of the psyche, but it is equally true that these experiences in turn govern the chemical processes. We are talking about two sides of the same coin, two sides which it is as pointless as it is in principal impossible to separate or set in opposition to one another. All attempts at this have failed, like all attempts to erase the particular characteristics of the different sides and enforce an artificial uniformity. In the light of affirmative nihilism, the human psyche appears to be extremely paradoxical, but it is not a paradox that needs to be dealt with until it ceases to exist, either in the short or long term. Instead, it is the paradox that we recognise as the very foundation for our understanding of who we are and how we think and understand anything at all.