Post Capitalist ̶D̶e̶s̶i̶r̶e̶ Therapy

A Twitter friend and smart person Alex recently came under criticism for responding to the Tweet below in a way that claimed mandated therapy to be "more insidious than a fucking labor camp."

This is of course an incredibly accurate response on Alex's part.

As I have written elsewhere, the progressive liberal values of enlightenment tend towards an emphasis on the use of education to remove bad thoughts and replace them with good ones. In other words, enlightenment horseshoes around to reactionary, fascist, mental hygiene. The right has its death camps (it attacks the body), the left its re-education camps (it attacks the mind). The atrocious synthesis of the two is the grade school turned famous Communist death camp in Cambodia known as Security Prison S21. It is this horseshoe that both leftist anti-psychiatry, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Laing, Szaz, etc., and right critics of 'the Cathedral' are responding to.

This is all a lot of words to say that considering Alex's point seems to reach beyond left/right lines, it seems to me to be worthy of serious contemplation, and that I agree with it.

Later, in a related thread, Alex said something I did not agree with, but which still warrants contemplation:

"I don’t see how you can call yourself a materialist while advocating individualized corrective procedures for a material social problem."

This notion is captured in an meme unrelated to and found circulated before Alex's response:

It's a hard line to toe that 'mental illness is not a social problem,' or rather that the origin of mental illness is not solely social, or that fixing the social will alleviate or reduce mental illness, etc., because people on both sides of the debate have already made up their minds about the political implications and importance of their position in the debate.

This is to say that the debate is stale on both sides, and in both its form and content.
Content: the positions on either side of the discussion are unverifiable which lends itself to endless abstract theoretical bickering; Form: for many cultural reasons that would take too long to get into (and which all readers would likely find highly disagreeable), the deck is stacked in the social theorist's favor, not the individualist's.

More interestingly, even if there was a clear resolution, solution, or answer to the debate, it wouldn't matter. The debate is more about an 'ought' than an 'is' now anyways. The argument is that we ought to implement social reform to alleviate the actors in our society (hard to 'argue' against, isn't it?).

Furthermore, with notions such as the Xenofeminist's 'if nature is unjust, change nature' in play, so to speak, even if we could say for sure that the 'origin' of 'mental illness' is individual, the social theorists would propose social solutions; if reversed - we know for sure the origin of mental illness is social - individualists would propose an individual solution. Research on the 'nature/nurture' dichotomy (that I am too lazy to cite) seems to say the answer is not one or the other, but both. To add to the complexity, some social solutions will work where the origin is individual; some individual solutions will work where the origin is social; some social solutions will not work where the origin is social; some individual solutions will not work where the origin is individual. Some will work for both, and none, etc., and so on...

Summing up all these points - as Baudrillard writes in Simulacra and Simulation (pg. 13):

“the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation. That is, we are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model...the models come first…The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model…is what allows each time for all possible interpretations, even the most contradictory - all true, in the sense that their truth is to be exchanged, in the image of the models from which they derive, in a generalized cycle.”

That is, in the age of information overload, the same fact could be used to support contradictory claims. For a provocative example, 'X people commit more crime than Y' will be proof for camp A that X people need more education, proof for camp B that X people's crimes are over-reported but that perhaps they still do commit more crime (or that it is over-reported and they do not commit more crime), proof for Camp C that crime is an abstract concept applied to people X in a way that is detrimental, proof for Camp D that X people are bad people, so on and so on; for a less provocative example, for leftists, slogans like 'there is no ethical consumption under capitalism' mean capitalism is bad and should be abolished; for rightists, it means that part of reality is accepting unethical acts, or that unethical acts are baked into the base existence of the world. Just like our Social/individual problem-solution matrix above, here, in the logic of simulation, facts do not correspond neatly to responses to the facts. Apodictive positivism (God's divine intent and its hermeneutic revelations  recuperated in Lamarck's teleology) has given way to deterritorialized codes (Nietzsche's death of God and its hammer swinging creationism  as mirrored in Darwin's random variation).

More important than this deterritorialization of information - and not to continually narcissistically reference myself - as I have written elsewhere (Plutonics Journal, Volume XIII), good mental health treatment, i.e. psychoanalysis, is the leveraging of materially grounded cybernetic processes of informational deterritorialization for therapeutic gain, a process that can only happen in the realm of 'hyperreality.'

This sounds like a garbage trough of jargon that begs many questions, and it might be, but it gets us back to Alex's quote.

"I don’t see how you can call yourself a materialist while advocating individualized corrective procedures for a material social problem."

For me - and this could be very wrong - materialism is simply the idea that impersonal material forces and the dynamics between them (as opposed to abstract concepts such as spirit, soul, mind, etc.) determine and drive the every day happenings of our world. What is often called the 'critical trio' - Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx - were all materialists that correspond to some degree with this definition.

Nietzsche proposed a way of understanding the world wherein the body and its instincts, drives, and appetites are the significant forces or motivations for behavior and thought, and ultimately culture too. Freud develops a specific therapeutic practice directly out of Nietzsche, one which he uses a great deal of ink and energy justifying via physicalist concepts. In other words, for Freud (and Nietzsche), the 'mind' is not a soul, or spirit, its a contingent, accidental byproduct of deep, impersonal, material forces churning away below our consciousness, and because culture is in large a construction of rituals and rules conjured up in order to coexist as an organism in a fixed shared territory, the ethereal and abstract seeming aspects of society are merely the reflections of deeper instincts which have been sublimated and projected outwards. Marx certainly takes a different but not completely dissimilar approach, but it would be a waste of space to reiterate his work here (you can see my writing on his alien materialism here).

Later, Deleuze and Guattari, who are reductively called Freudomarxists, synthesize these thinkers in what I again consider a materialist project. They state that there are bodies, and the incorporeal aspects of a body. Even language is treated as a diagrammatic force when they write that molecules crash into letters, and that proper names are forces as in physics (the Joan of Arch effect). This is of course recuperated later by the many accelerationisms that, regardless of their particular flavors, all seem to share a materialist grounding.

This all to say a few things;

1: psychoanalysis addresses the individual, but only because by limiting its scope (or rather, leaning into its limits) does it maximize its effectiveness. Psychoanalysts are trained to work intensively with individuals, and the method does not translate well outside of small group work. Pragmatically speaking, individuals are locally 'real' to an extent that I am not you, and we will never have the 'same' subjective experience or narrative history, even if those experiences are relatively uniform, and the histories largely fictional. Thus, when psychoanalysis addresses the individual, it addresses one real articulation of a multi-aspected reality, and, even though theorists such as De Landa and Land alike will make a good case for the 'individual' being a redundant operator to be replaced by assemblage theory,  it is neither theoretically absurd, nor clinically improbable to claim that addressing an individual on an individual level may allow that individual to enact social change if so desired. As D and G implore us in A Thousand Plateaus, one must retain small amounts of territory in order to deterritorialize (see more here);

2: assuming 'the social' is the problem, for pragmatic reasons it may make sense to begin on a smaller, more local scale. One cannot easily 'change' the social alone, and the task of politically organizing in an effective manner is not without its challenges, challenges which are often intensified by interpersonal conflicts that, regardless of their origin, can be reduced with the help of competent therapists. This was in large part of Guattari's schizoanalytic project - how to understand group desire, and analyze the blockages that get in the way of cooperating with one another towards shared political goals;

3: perhaps what is most important - and most disagreeable to those who are not therapists like myself - is that psychoanalysis is materialist and not inconsistent with some significant aspects of other more 'traditional' materialist models.

In short, Freud's oeuvre is that an organism - which, to use D and G's language, is a captured or territorialized portion of impersonal, outside flows -  has, like any animal, instincts. Instincts, being as they are partial captures of outside forces that seek re-connection with Outside geo-forces (thirst-water; hunger-food; sex-mate; kill-enemy, etc.), are not known in themselves but only in the form of their derivative, the drive. The drive is a state positioned between the pure bodily instinct (the Outside) and what we would think of as a wish, thought, or feeling (personal inside). These inexhaustible (at lest until death) drives constantly push for expression, but because of the unique situation of the human and its psychic organization - not social organization at this point -  instincts are not always gratified and as a result, they are repressed (primal repression) which causes illness.

That is, its not the outside (lower case o) society that prevents the instinct or its derivative, the drive (capital Outside), from being expressed and gratified, but the psychic defense structure itself. The organism makes itself sick by taking its own finely tuned information processes too seriously! That is, states of intensities are felt to be dangerous, overwhelming, or overexciting to the young organism, and thus are repressed, projected, etc., for the organisms own safety (not unlike how some contemporary non-psychoanalytic scientific literature understands 'the mind' as a feedback arc of the body's systems being picked up in its own systems before being centralized in the brain, thereby making 'mental illness' a feedback arc of the mind [already a body derivative] caught in the mind's systems - i.e., a feedback cycle of a feedback cycle of a... As is pointed out in Moynihan's Spinal Catastrophism, human intelligence was an evolutionary accident that has been selected for to the point of tragedy; consciousness is natures' mistake). 

It is only later, when the infant has developed the cognitive and emotional capacity to more fully comprehend others and the world as separate from its washes of intensity, that the social system, with its taboos and rules, penetrates the psychic apparatus and install further repression. This is what psychoanalysts refer to as preoedipal and Oedipal development (of course, D and G argue compellingly that the socius is always already there, but this would take another blog post altogether...). Even at this point, it is important to note that early social rules (incest taboo) are the projections of deep psychic fears (even the social is itself the outcome of the body attempting to translate instincts into incorporeal states).

With this in mind, I want to return to the meme above of the demeaning, dominating therapist. If society - a current reality, despite whether its 'good' or 'bad' -  is making one ill, its because one is not letting one's self experience the needed instinctual / drive response to the (hyper)real stimuli that is 'society.' This does in fact mean that one solution is for society to be changed to better give space to drive gratification however, to be able to change the outside (not Outside) to better be attuned with drive sanctification may require an understanding of the social system and one's own response to the social system, an understanding that can only be reached by becoming aware of one's wishes and reactions to the present reality as to not become so ill that one is not able to act effectively as one desires.

For psychoanalysis, there is a drive affirming response to all situations placed in front of the organism. There are surely situations that are more or less optimal to the survival or health of the organism, but the act of psychoanalysis is to help the person be able to respond with the most optimal behavior, thought, and feeling when any given stimuli - most of which are suboptimal to the organism - is presented to them. The dream with Communism or Socialism is that the society would be arranged in such a way that drive satisfaction would be more easily attained, and thus social ills would decrease. Until then, the pragmatic solution will be to figure out what one's drive affirming response to the current situation is, so that the current situation can be traversed, giving way to whatever comes next. In other words, if reality is going to push this society, despite its evils, onto us, how are we to respond as to maintain our sanity enough to develop our cleverness and change reality?

With all of this said, if the revolution arrived tomorrow, I'd gladly step down as a therapist and do something else, something less exhausting. Perhaps farming, building, and spending more time with my partner and dogs.

Videogame Ontology

Credit: Gregory Mark

§1:

Kid's play videogames. They're intended to entertain, encourage fantasy, pass time, etc. Even the gritty, violent, scary ones aren't that serious. Unless we're Hillary Clinton, we all know its the stuff of fantasy.

But as is so often the case, that which is in theory made for children's fantasy and entertainment in practice actually intensifies its opposite; it brings to the forefront the adult's - those who created it - dreary reality; we see that which is made intentionally for the child's warm, tendency towards narrative cohesion unintentionally captures the adult's cold, unconscious, fragmentary, fantasies (remember all the dark, strange, sexual imagery and innuendos in Disney/Pixar?).

What is more, the attempt at simulating 'reality' in a digital space - with its combined hardware, software, and wetware limitations - ends up simulating the negative space of the limit more than it ends up simulating the positive experience of the playable game-world. In other words, the rudimentary script and code-architecture of videogames highlights the limits of the script and code, the limits of experience. Videogames become canvases for distorted, absurd physics, strange and horrific facial renderings, awkward AI social ainteractons - vehicles for glitches and exploits.

These glitches and exploits soon become more interesting than the intended features of the game, and the player invests more time in how to break the game than how to perform within its rules. As my friend has pointed out, the 'accidental' aspects of a videgoame discovered by dedicated and competitive players can be some of the most fun, and ultimately sought after aspects of a game.

It is as this point that Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud converge. Kant because we're talking about limits - the videogame simulates the environment that reveals the noumenal excesses, the glitches that spill over and remain unsymbolized within the structure of the game. Nietzsche because he points out that man takes the means to the end as the end itself. This is meant as a critique, but its a positive with videogames - the means of enjoyment become the end. It's not about playing the game as intended, its about gaming the game. Marx because, as I mentioned elsewhere, both Marx and videogames, in attempting to do one thing on the level of agency, cohesion, and narrative, actually reveal the very limits of these experiences. Freud because these all express themselves as unconscious processes accidentally made real through conscious decision (the Freudian 'parapraxis' or 'slip of the tongue' known later as the 'Freudian slip' is perhaps itself a glitch of some kind...).

It all culminates in the darkside to the child's euphoria, the traumatic horror of videogames.

§2:

Gregory Mark's Twitter thread on 'No Clip' aesthetics captures this in maximum aesthetic density.

'No clip' is psychotic terror, schizophrenic fear. The walls disappear, empty spaces never intended for the player to experience are near.

In a paradoxical loop, the artificial limits peel back revealing the natural limits of human experience.

For the field of psychoanalysis, the infant requires an other - the parent(s) - to structure his or her ethereal, chaotic experiences, and to provide containment. If the infant does not have the other to structure the chaos through comfort and language acquisition, the infant does not develop out of its initial state of magical thinking, and takes on schizophrenic tendencies.

In other words, if the baby isn't helped to regulate, and learn that there are borders, boundaries, and limits, it feels boundaryless, floating , limitless, and experiences a deep terror that can only later be felt as a lack, and described in terms of fragmentation, the kind we see in deeply psychotic schizophrenics. This is precisely what is at play with 'no clip' in videogames. A simulation of repressed schizo fears, fears we all unconsciously experienced as children and either learned to structure, or became stuck in.

§3:

Grasping at concepts is as useless as it is uninteresting, so I'll instead tell a story.

I'm young. The age doesn't matter. I'm playing a skiing level in a Playstation 1 James Bond game and I unexpectedly clip through the map. Under my control, James skis into oblivion, but doesn't die. I lose myself in the empty screen; I ski forever. I become fixated on the negative, unrendered space, and remember wondering if I will ever be able to escape the negative space. Anxiety grips me. I become overwhelmed and turn off my playstation.

Another time - and time is relative here, this is likely a series of memory fragments from different times condensed int one - I'm young, but not as young as the James Bond terror. I think I'm playing Spyro the Dragon. I look up into the poorly rendered, digital sky and begin to feel scared beyond reason. It seems to go on forever, but at the same time, is completely flat, goes nowhere. It's all so hard to get into words.

I grasp at many fuzzy memories of scary times with games. Not scary times with scary games, but with completely mundane games. Something about their failure at sealing up the cracks in their reality simulations, something about the way three dimensional spaces are smashed into two dimensions, and copy+pasted to infinity. Something precisely 'unamable...'

Perhaps this is why the videogame served as the medium for many 'creepypastas' in the early 2000s....'

Credit Gregory Mark

DRM_ARCHATXTR.exe (Dream Architecture)

§1: Fu/Ha(z)zy phantasmagorical imagery unfolds before the 'internal' screen.
Dreamwork cobbles together benign fragments into totalized terror (fuzzy aggregates morph into oedipal unities). Fictional truths auto-generate, self-perpetuate (hyperstitionalities).

Directly before me, the double doors stand like twin monoliths.
Monuments of faith to the psychiatric method of control. To the big-daddy cause.

A flat surface split equidistant by a single simple horizontal line, revealing a point of weakness that gives way to the halls beyond its protection (two concrete cocks interpolated by the fluid cunt).

St. Peter, Mephistopheles, and the big pearly fucking gate; or, Lilith and the gash.

Beyond this monolithic yet syzygic breaking point lies the unitary hall, off of which sprout shallow rooms. A main trunk with its branches (Arborescence overtakes rhizomatics; trees over take weeds).

Translation (schizodreams to ego-reports): a door opens up to an endless straight hall and its adjacent, doorless cubic rooms. Ctrl+X - Ctr+V video entertainment simulation architecture.

                                                   (inpatient architecture)

§2: Ok. Enough with the Landian slam poetry (the Meltdown copy cat jargon).

This is all many words to say that I had a dream where I perfectly represented the inpatient wing of my mental hospital (seen above) which is significant  as 'dream architecture,' so to speak, is often distorted, strange, etc.,

I suspect this has something to do with the dream-like (or nightmare) quality of the inpatient floorplan.

That is, often, with dreams, the mental representation within the dream is a comically or horrifically distorted or exaggerated version of the 'real,' while the 'real,' the fragments of memory that make up the dream and their associated impulses and wishes, are much more mundane, simple, 'realistic.' In other words, dreams don't represent reality well. Cubist apartments morph into monstrous geometric acid trips, etc.

However, the inpatient archetecture is itself already dreamlike, horrifically and comically exaggerated - unnatural, even -  so it is mapped out perfectly by the horrific and comical models of mind that 'dreamwork' utilizes.

In other words, reality translated to dream = dream-like; that which is already dream-like translated to dream = intensified dream which loops back around to reality, or dream to dream = hyperreality.

The inpatient ward, in its attempt to function as something inhuman, is the nightmare made real, and thus, to dream of it, is to completely invert the dream work process.

***


§3:You take the elevator form the general hospital floor to the inpatient floor. You leave the elevator and immediately face electronically locked windowless twin doors. You show your ID to the camera, and buzz the nurses station. They let you in. Once past the gate, you bear witness to a very long hall off of which are small, doorless, bare rooms.

This Bentham/Foucault's three dimensional Panopticon compressed into two.

Whereas Jeremy Foucault's (Michael Benthem's) Panopticon expressed itself along the vertical axis - a phallic tower that extends upwards, in open three dimensional space, with its privileged view into all parallel prison cells - the modern day inpatient ('psych ward') layout is, as illustrated above, a hall way (in place of a tower) with adjacent cells. It is a flattened out panopticon. The nurse or mental health worker walks down the hall and can look into every room, ensuring no one is trying to hang themselves, or bash their heads into pulp.

Bentham's Panopticon utilize by Foucault 

§4: Anti-psychiatry must revisit dream logic if it is to understand the plight of the 'mentally ill.' It is the locked up schizos, not the theorists, who hold the keys.

§5: drm_archatxtr.exe

Further Notes on Barker and Challenger

A hyperstition is a fiction that makes itself real, or a coincidence intensifier. The rational and the irrational bleed together; the distinction collapses. Part of this hyperstitional ‘coincidence engineering’ is Quernomics.

Quernomics, when applied to associations on a linguistic register, would view language as a system of arbitrary symbols in relation to other arbitrary symbols that connect with contingent configurations of base matter in a way as to still ‘makes things happen’ (diagrammization). There are finite amounts of symbols within a finite system of organization that is further finitely reduced, both intentionally and accidentally, by human utility and preference and inhuman incentives alike.

With limited options, trends catch on, and certain words, phrases, spread like a plague. Coincidences intensify, an impersonal cultural unconscious takes shape as a subject, or more accurately an assemblage of enunciation, and this assemblage reproduces the semiotic material it received from the outside, makes it inside, and grafts it back onto the outside (Outside folds into inside, inside maps Outside). Words, floating in thin air, connecting to each other, take on a reality of their own, then a body in real time makes it real. Fictions become real through somatic simulation.

As D and G articulated through Professor Challenger, the human mouth-throat-chest assemblage can only articulate so many ways; it behaves within limits. The chest may push only certain intensities of air through the esophagus, air which is modulated by the cheeks, lips, teeth, and tongue configuration. Horrific and brute asignifying sounds – clicks, pops, growls, shrieks, even tics – over time, with the honing and selection of muscles that map onto and internalize the faces of others, morph into phonemes, letters, and words. This is the 'material base' for language - the body, faciality.

As DC Barker has shown, human language is limited to human morphology, is limited to Earth’s geology, is limited to Earth’s place in cosmology, is limited to… etc., etc., Through these constantly recapitulating limits, relatively arbitrary chaos locks into a feedback loop of a limited set of terms and sounds (deterritorialized base material or the plane of immanence drifts towards the plane of expression, or forms – alphabet soup Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz sentiments in Qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm). Screams become not-screams. Sounds become words. Fictions become real.

In Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think it is?) Deleuze and Guattari. through professor Challenger, write:

“the lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips…an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes; only human females have breasts…deterritorialized mammary glands: the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is accompanied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the breasts, and the breasts on the lips)…a curious deterritorialization, filling one's mouth with words instead of food and noises. The steppe…exerted strong pressures of selection: the ‘supple larynx’ is a development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryngeal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the constant din of the forest…” (pg. 61-62).

That is, terrain exerts pressure over time thereby altering the human form, the human form then alters the terrain, etc. [annotated, from upcoming CCRU Sightings: Encounters with the Outside (or Capitalism a Love Story 2020].

Vocal passages as material forces, not significations; a break down into an animal past, a turn to goo in order to slip into the machinic timestream.  Could this not describe Challenger and  Land?   Could it not map onto Land’s oft accused of misappropriation of  Darwin, D and G, etc.  and  accelerationism’s constant misunderstanding  by the media?  It would  even  be easy to call Challenger, like  Land, a  ‘pseud’  who collapses distinctions and slips into incoherence, who  overrides  the games  that  occidental philosophy  obsesses  over,  and,  who, before you know it, is  on the floor croaking into the mic (some of us are still ‘philosophers’ you know!)…” [annotated from A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism: Fiction, Deterritorialization, Oscar Sarkon & Professor Challenger 2020]. 

Some Notes on CCRU's 'Barker Speaks'

It’s interesting to point out that the introduction given to Barker in the printed text of his interview with the CCRU – that hes a polymath geo-scientist gone rogue - could  easily describe Professor Challenger of Deleuze and Guattari’s third plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It is?) [see my piece on Professor Challenger and Landian Acceleration].

'Who does the earth think it is' is in fact the question for Barker. 

Barker’s work is solely about decoding anorganic codes, or stratoanalysis.

MIT represents an attempt to signify, appeal to what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as royal science (don't forget Chomsky, who Guattari opposed most if not all of his ideas to, is the posterchild of MIT and their structuralist linguist propoganda). MVU is a shadow of MIT, and resonates with the anorganic, that which can’t be signified but which acts on reality (hyperstition). 

In line with this reductive MIT-MVU binary, technological advancements bound up with accelerative cultural vectors (See Nyx Land's genealogy of MIT) and creepy sexually deviant tech-giants (Dollar ‘Bill’ Gates from the CCRU's 'Who’s Pulling Your Strings’) are modern instantiations of demons (see my piece on Techno-Moloch). Remember, the rich are occultist weirdos who meet at secret villas in Cali.

Along these binary lines of critique – no signification, only hypermaterialism, geotrauma - we're forced to ask: 'what is the difference between “intelligent communication and complex…nonintelligent pattern…” or signal and noise, anways?' As Barker says, it's a misguided question. There is none, or at least none that 'means' much. In fact, meaning is out the window. Diagrams are in. Feedback only uptakes signal. It flattens things out (see Mark Fisher’s dissertation Gothic Flatlines).

Following from these conceptualizations, intelligence is purely anthropomorphic. Barker’s project breaks free of MIT and ventures into the MVU precisely when it ceases to care about agency, subjectivity, intelligence, humanity, etc., and in doing so gets sucked up in outside flows of anorganic, autopoietic organization. Feedback oscillates and locks into resonance with itself, producing systems that preference A or B, while also being A and B. This is seen in the tension between the therapeutic aspects of psychoanalysis and its uncanny, cybernetic speculations as seen in Freud’s 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

As Deleuze and Guattari rightfully points out, Freud oedipalizes his own outside flows.
***

If this post does not clarify a thing, it's done its job...

The Minor Science of Caninepistemology / Doggypsychiatry

Provocation

This is a true story of how I successfully psychoanalyzed my dog. Yes, you read that correctly. However, it is not so much a story about the strengths of psychoanalysis as it is about the way we think critically about our world and gather 'knowledge,' and how we can implement that knowledge in every day life.

Anti-Vet

I've written at length about the shortcomings of the scientific methods elsewhere. These shortcomings are intensified more than ever in the field of veterinarian science which is just scientific enough to claim authority, but not authoritative enough to autocritique or adapt to its clients, and ultimately lacking in structural incentives to improve in those areas.

The vet mixes true Scotsman fallacies with confirmation biases to masquerade as medical epistemology. You bring your dog in, the vet looks at it for a minute, gives a diagnosis based on incredibly limited information generated from abstract models of knowledge, then prescribes general medicine. If the meds work, the diagnosis was correct, and there is no reason to reflect. If the meds don't work, prescribe more meds, test more, and there is no reason to reflect. There is no true, rigorous way of testing the effect of vet treatments, and the vet has no incentive to get it right the first time because they'd rather rope you back in once a week over the next two months to up the doses, charging you each time.

In this sense, 21st century veterinary mirrors 19th century psychiatry which pulls from - as I have written elsewhere - 16th-18th century medical ('blood letting') and cosmological ('lunar cheese') epistemological models, which then reappear in 19th-21st century critique of sociopolitical models (nonactual vs. 'actual' communism).

Analogies

1:

A: a true Scotsman would never drink milk
B: there is a Scotsman drinking milk
C: they must not 'really' be a Scotsman

2:

A: the moon is made of cheese
B: we mined the moon and found only rock
C: the moon is made of cheese, you just didn't dig deep enough

3:

A: blood letting cures diseases, saves lives, etc.
B: we let a great deal of blood from the patient, the disease wasn't cured, the patient died.
C: blood letting does work, you just didn't let enough blood.

4:

A: the patient is diagnosed as X, treatment is Y
B: the patient of diagnosis X did not get better
C: the patient must've not kept up with treatment Y, prescribe more Y

5:

A: communism is x, y, and z
B: in general, countries that referred to themselves as or based themselves in communism failed
C: well, that's not 'actual' communism

6:

A: veterinary treatment is helpful and grounded in correct assumptions
B: these treatments have not helped our dog improve
C: we just did not give enough helpful and correct treatment

Vignette: Ethology Meets Psychoanalysis

About a year ago my girlfriend and I's wonderful little dog began exhibiting odd behavior in the house. Seemingly unprompted, he would assume a defensive position - tail between the legs, hunched legs, ears down, etc. - and would began scanning the room above his head anxiously with his eyes. His eyes would then appear to lock onto and follow objects that were not there, then he'd jump and attempt to bite the invisible objects. The vet diagnosed our poor boy with a rare neurological seizure disorder that required intense medical treatment or surgery, both of which were as dangerous as they were expensive.

My girlfriend and I decided to think on it before responding, at which point I got the idea to help our dog on our own. Spoiler alert - our dog no longer displays these symptoms, nor any other symptoms of such disorder, and is perfectly healthy. In line with our above critique of veterinary epistemology , the vet's response was simply 'Well, we can't explain how the symptoms have gone away, but we don't need to if they, because that's good!' End of story.

More interestingly, here's how I 'cured' my dog:

Through first drawing inferences from the symptomatic behavior - defensive stance, looking around for and jumping at invisible objects, etc., - and then associating to them - behavior reminded me of the time  our dog first encountered flying insects on a hiking trip where he displayed the same behavior - I theorized that our dog was having a behavioral response to a perceived stimuli that was not there. In layman's terms, the dog believed there were bugs and thus its body unconsciously acted the part.

My thinking was that the first experience of bugs on the hiking trip had triggered latent behavioral structures that were inherent in him but, due to the sheltered nature of the dog, previously inhibited or unexpressed (in-born vs. learned behavior). The bringing out of the new behavior structure meant it was fresh, and had not been exposed to various situations where it would cybernetically feedback with the environment and thereby hone the stereotype or schema. As ethologists show, behavioral structures or stereotypes / schemas take in and sort out noise and signal over time, and thus develop more precise models and therefore more precise parameters for triggering a behavior.

As developmental psychologists similarly show, a child learns 'dog,' sees a dog, says dog, gets positive feedback from the parent. Next, a child sees a cat, says 'dog,' and gets negative feedback from the parent - 'no, that is a cat.' The child uses negative and positive reinforcement - or feedback - to modulate parameters, and learns to exclude the aspects pertaining to the 'cat' model from the 'dog' model. The dog model is now honed, and more precise. This process continues on and on until our internal working models are more and more precise and therefore better at mapping the outside. 

For my dog, because the information 'gate' was so sensitive, the behavioral response was easily triggered, and because the stimulating object - certain insects - were so scary to my dog, being as they were so new and in a foreign location, the whole experience was 'recorded,' so to speak, as a trauma. In less anthropomorphic terms, it was evolutionarily important to my dog (and therefore perhaps biochemically intensive, i.e. life or death) that the experience of insects be stored along with an associated 'danger' or defense response.  This meant a 'perception' of high risk coupled with a very sensitive, low , threshold to trigger the macro-behavior of responding to flying insects. This meant a very loose behavioral schema.

In humans, in psychoanalytic terminology, this is close to anxiety or hysteria, or more generally what we could call neurosis, in the sense that it is an experience of having real, intensified or exaggerated bodily responses to imagined or hallucinated objects or sensations based on unstable internal 'object relations' or internal working models.

The treatment, then, was to help the dog realize that there were no bugs, i.e., to enrichen and expand the stereotypical model or schema to include more information that could be used to hone the triggering of the behavioral response (not necessarily a brute exposure to 'the real' but a cooperative process of helping the dog filter information). Whenever my dog would begin to display these symptomatic behaviors, I would first shame the dog, but then immediately comfort the dog, hold the dog up to the spots in the air he was looking at, then play with the dog. After about a month of repeating this, our dog would began to scan the room, though would not enter into a defensive stance, and then would avert the scanning gaze and instead look for a toy. After a few more weeks, the scanning behavior, along with all other symptomatic behaviors, had disappeared.

Conclusion

It's not that this 'proves' psychoanalysis is grounded in more scientific fields such as ethology, behaviorism, development psych, or epistemology (though it does show where these fields resonate and can functionalize concepts); rather, this shows that the field of veterinary studies, along with mainstream pop-science - what D and G refer to as 'royal science' - as a whole tends towards uncritical, uninformed, and expensive surgical and pharmaceutical interventions that may be unnecessary, and that given there is little monetary or intellectual incentive to challenge this, this poses both an epistemological and ethical conflict for vets.

It may also say something larger about the 'physicalist' trend in the royal sciences, that demarcates a hard split between what is physical and therefore real and what is 'theoretical' or mental and therefore unreal. Where the materialism of psychoanalysis meets up with the cybernetic theory beneath behaviorism and cognitive science is an interesting cross roads that hints at a deep, hyperstitional, sorcery - or minor science...On that note - one wonders, what happened to the good ole days of doing individual, experimental, research? This is the question of D and G's minor sciences that should be explored further.

Post Script
As a last comment, I urge people to listen to their vets. I am not an expert, and in what is probably the majority of cases, listening to your vet will save or at least help your animal. What I have introduced here is merely an incident where it was beneficial to challenge a 'medical' authority, and try an alternative approach; an exploration that is intended to produce thought, not obedience. It would be foolish to insert myself and this blog as an authority over the vet. The point is, like the concept of the behavioral structure / schema we discussed here, to expand our models of thinking to be able to consider all information, and filter out noise and signal.

Alien Objects

God/10.Xero/0.Xeno/O.

"God...makes crooked all that is straight"

- Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

“[Capitalism makes]...all that is solid melt into air, all that is holy profaned"

 - Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

“[Capitalism makes] schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the only difference being that the schizos are not salable”

 - Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pg. 245)

“[Capitalism, AI, and God:]...the notion of a supreme cosmic intelligence as a deity is accompanied by this massive anthropomorphization of what that being will be like…resonances between god and man...the most archaic forms of religiosity are found at the end.” 

– Nick Land, conversing with Justin Murphy

"Behold the Xenochrist" 

- The Faceless, Planetary Duality

A clear Weberian diagonal cuts across multiple planes - literature, society, mental instutitions, music, etc., -  pulling God, AI, and Capitalism together into  a schizophrenic, alien, horror, not unlike the time-travel method of theological-sci-fi film Event Horizon (1997) that pulls two separate points in space and time together into one zero-hole passage.

{[i]}

Ariana Grande compels us think of "God as a woman."  Though she ignores existent alternatives to theological female power - the 'misogynistic' but still no less powerful Gnostic Lilith, and Mary Daly's proposition to 'look beyond god the father' - and instead panders to 3rd wave feminist empowerment tropes, Grande's platitude can be recuperated and filtered through knock-off xenofeminist jargon where it comes out the 'other'side looking like 'god=woman; woman=alien; god=alien.'

Look no further than the Species film series (1995-2007) and the similarly but more recent Under the Skin (2014), and their disjunctive counterpart, Ellen Ripely in the Alien film series (1979-2017). The former portray female sexuality as seductive, dangerous, predatory, and alien, while the later portrays - if we are to dabble heavily, if not equally briefly, in Freudian tropism - female sexuality as violent and powerful through the use of a competent, intelligent, woman character who defeats a phallic, penetrating, womb-dwelling, parasitic alien.

In fact, whereas the Alien series is often juxtaposed to the Predator film series (1987-2018) which features hulking male hunters fighting hulking men with giant guns, Species more closely parallels Alien by making the alien a female predator, thereby synthesizing Ripely and the alien she fights (and interesting to note that 'female' Predators are not introduced into the Predator universe until the graphic novel Alien vs. Predators, which was later made into a film). Species and Alien are cousins in the cinematic unconscious, Predators is the 'other' on the outside looking in.

We see women, and aliens against a backdrop of implicit capitalism captured in on-screen technoscience, but where is God? Always late. He - or she - only appears in the Alien film franchise's fourth installment Alien: Resurrection, and the two prequels that followed, Prometheus and Covenant, which all use overt, on the nose, Christian symbolism to explore God, the origins of organic life, AI, and psychosis.

Alienation and Commodity Fetishism 

Marxism is at its most interesting in its attempt to conceptualize alienation and objectification, not because these attempts pan out in any way preferential to the humanist project of Marx and Engels,  but precisely the opposite; because these attempts - the materialist critique of spirit in all its abstract forms, i.e. religion, philosophy, ideology, etc. - act as preliminary map for the future alien (hyper)objects of capitalism, the very kind of weird objects found in the Strugatsky brothers' 1972 sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic and its film and video game adaptions, Tarkovsky's 1979 Stalker and 2009's PC game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In other words, Marxism, not unlike 'the alien zone' of the stalker universe, is most interesting when considered through the strange alien 'artifacts' it leaves behind.

Throughout Capital Vol 1. (1983 Sam Moore Ed Aveling translation, pg. 35-37, 40-41, 46-52, 71-73, 74-75, 82-83, 146-147, 151-153, 177, 191-194), Marx unwittingly conceptualizes the material process(es) beneath the alien object:

An object is needed,desired, and therefore exchanged between one person and another, the latter whom, at this stage of  goods trading, will use it for its ‘use-value.’  

The use-value is independent of labor as it is given by its utility, and can be abstracted into a relative form assuming the quantities of the two commodities being exchanged equate (trade wool for wood). This is known as exchange-value, a relative relationship in constant flux.  

The relativity of the exchange-value means that the objects - or commodities - on either side of the exchange relationship are equal to one another or replaceable with one another even if – or only if - the objects are themselves different.  

This relative, abstract relationship obscures the utility of the use-value of the commodity and thus the focus shifts from the utility or physical attributes of the object (it’s material origins and materially intended purpose) towards a relationship of objects which have no specific qualities of their own other than what purpose they serve in relation to another object (focus only on exchange value, i.e. ideological and not material, i.e. relativization), or what Marx calls commodity fetishism (what Zizek in his first book The Sublime Object of Ideology refers to as a perverse Freudian symptom). 

These commodities in relative relationship to each other are in relation to a third common ‘unit’ which is known as ‘value.’ Value is a creation of human labor that can only appear in the social exchange of commodities to other commodities, and because value is relative (as implied by its existence only in the relation of commodities), one commodity always presupposes another commodity, as one commodity needs to be expressed in the other commodity, and vice versa (not unlike the baselessness of the Lacanian signifier). This notion of value is related to labor time.  

Regarding labor time - the greater the productiveness, the lesser the value. The lesser the productiveness, the greater the value. To conceptualize this, Marx lays out two graphs of circulation: C-M-C and M-C-M. The former is when one sells a commodity (C) to acquire money (M) to use to buy commodities (C). The latter is when money (M) is used to buy a commodity (C) only to sell the commodity for money (M). The former is indicative of the worker who sells his labor to whomever owns the means of production, while the latter is indicative of whomever owns the means of production – the capitalist- and buys the former’s labor in order to produce for money.  

The capitalist gets more money out of the commodity than originally invested into it by having his workers produce more than is needed to break even for the capitalist’s costs of maintaining the means of production. The resulting excess production is known as surplus-value. This is how capital is created out of using money to relativize commodities, and how the capitalist 'exploits' the worker.

What is of importance here is not the (boring) particulars of Marxist theory, but that we bring to attention the general process wherein the base material circumstances that produce objects and those very produced objects become disconnected, and in its place, a relativized, relationship between random, arbitrary objects and other random, arbitrary objects takes primacy (what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as deterritorialization).

In other words, instead of being a farmer (class and work), needing a plow (tool or object to use for its use value), seeking one out (desire to produce a tool to aid in one's work), and trading produce from one's farm (unalienated fruits of labor, food that the other person can use) for a plow, one works for someone else's farm (someone who controls the means of production, i.e. has a plow), accepts money or tokens that are exchangable for anything (value) as opposed to goods one needs, and uses these tokens for whatever entry level hedonistic time-kill purchases farmers engage in. Thus, the plow is disconnected from desire and material circumstance through an arbitrary mediating unit, capital, leaving desire to waste. 

As Mark Fisher points out in his book The Weird and the Eerie (2016), it is this tendency to disconnect objects from their sources that makes capitalism an uncanny entity; one of this world (not supernatural) but at the same time radically other (extraterrestrial); and it is this aspect that maximizes the perfect formula for making objects weird, uncanny, strange, - or alien. This is - for D and G -  how Capitalism produces the schizophrenic, who can be viewed philosophically and clinically as an alien in his/her own body, and - for Marx - how capitalism produces alienation as it not only separates the worker from the fruits of their labor, but separates the worker's desire from its object, and the contingent material context from its object, and in its place installs a an impersonal flow of strange, disparate objects interacting with other strange objects (assemblage).

Roadside Picnic

To briefly capture the book's premise - aliens landed in Russia, drastically altering the physical and metaphysical properties and qualities of the terrain for miles - what is called the zone - and when they departed, they left behind all kinds of mysterious objects with peculiar and sometimes deadly qualities. As indicated in the book's title, just as insects would be baffled by the objects left behind by humans picnicking in the park - a paper bag, plastic wrap, a tin can, etc. - humans are baffled by the objects left behind by aliens in their brief and mysterious time on Earth (see here for more).

I read it in my freshman year of undergraduate, watching Tarkovsky's film shortly after (at which point I had been playing the 2009 PC  game S.T.A.L.K.E.R, along with its expansion packs, for years). At the time I was a neurotic, psychology-philosophy double major amidst my first true romance, and struggling with my parents divorce, who had yet to begin studying or undergoing psychoanalysis. Thus, I naively took Roadside Picnic to  be about existential anxiety in an unjust world. I assumed the book to be proposing the adolescently Kafkaesque query 'what if everything we knew to be true - our givens, basic assumptions, etc. - was radically different tomorrow?' Despite the naivety, this was not without its reasoning and evidence. As the book so well illustrates, the characters of Roadside Picnic, despite making all the appropriate calculations, taking into account all the right variables, etc., still may fall victim to a sudden violent death due to a single wrong step in the zone. By the book's logic, no amount of preparation could guard one against the random variation of the unknown godliness of nature.

To reflect on the book today, however, one would have to say my original interpretation was far too anthropomorphic, and that the main thrust of the book is not a comment on the anxiety supposedly inherent in the human condition - a morose Francophilic miserablism -  but rather a much more Germanic demonstration of the very limits of the human condition itself. That is, the random variation of the zone, the uprooting of the basic laws of physics, and the seemingly random alien objects found therein, are indicative of not a subject and its neurotic anxieties over personal narratives, but of impersonal, Outside flows of noumenal experience, and the affirmation of chance and necessity (the most prepared may be killed, the most naive may survive). They are a snapshot of the schizophrenic mechanosphere of Deleuze and Guattari coupled with the Gnon of Nick Land.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia 

The alien objects - called 'artifacts' in the videogame, 'swag' in the book -  that populate the zone are objects that have become disconnected from their material sources or 'use values' (the material needs of the alien populations that produced them), and for which there exist no means of reclaiming that original connection. Some of these bizarre objects of the zone have been integrated into human life as fun gadgets, or functional tools. Despite this seemingly mirroring Marx's commodity-usevalue binary, the likeness is superficial as even the alien objects humans make functional are not used for their original, alien-given material function, but merely a human appropriation that overlooks the alien intent (or accidental incentive forces) present in the object. Thus, the only 'meaning' or 'sense' given to the objects is through the  black market erected by humans who desire the objects enough to pay steep prices to specially trained 'stalkers' who can navigate the strange and dangerous zone to retrieve them (in a Quernomic moment, randomly generated desire-loaded arbitrariness short circuits agentic rationality).

This is not unlike, in psychoanalytic terms, the traumatic primal scene that is repressed and not remembered but cybneretically reconstructed through fictions within the frame of psychoanalytic treatment and its specially trained 'analysts' who can nagivate the strange and dangerous zones of the machinic unconscious (see my Hyperstitional Therapeutics text in MVU's Plutonics Journal Volume XIII). But to limit things to psychoanalysis would be an error that distracts from Marxism's accidental conceptualization of the alien outside and its fictional instantiation in Roadside Picnic. Here we are only using some aspects of psychoanalysis - one's that align with the alien aspects of Marxism (as opposed to the project of Freudomarxism, which aligns with the humanist aims of Marx and Engels [schizoanalysis = alien marxism; psychoanalysis = human communism) to aim us towards the outside.

To get back to the outside, we need Kant. Luckily we can get Kant and Marx through Wilfred Bion, a British psychoanalyst who explicitly used  Kantianism to create a method of psychoanalytic therapy focused solely on human synthetic reconstruction of the inhuman noumenal experiences (see here for more), and who was one of the first psychoanalysts to develop a working clinical theory for conceptualizing and treating schizophrenia.

Bion, roughly following Nietzsche and Freud, posited a materialist theory of mind wherein bodily forces  (instincts, drives, wishes, etc.) pressing for discharge are either satisfied by bodily processes (fucking, eating, killing, running, - i.e. doing things, etc.) or, if not satisfied, become affect (a rough, presymbolic translation of bodily material processes into sensations, and proto-feelings) which then, through the human feedback systems, becomes a more solidified feeling or a thought. If one proceeds along a healthy path, one learns to acknowledge how feelings and thoughts are connected or 'linked' to bodily processes such as instincts, drives, wishes, etc. If one becomes neurotic, hysteric, fetishistic, or perverted, it is because one is having thoughts and feelings that one refuses to 'link' - or think about through emotional-logical-analytical methods - to instincts, drives, etc., or one fails to find outlet for instincts, drives, wishes, through action or language / feeling.

Similarly, if one becomes schizophrenic, it is because one finds their instincts, drives, wishes, etc., intolerably horrific, and the mechanisms of the mind (repression, super ego censorship, ego fragility, etc.) interject to disrupt links between instincts and actions or instincts and thoughts/feelings. To use a general clinical example in line with Bion's own clinical examples, many schizophrenics I have treated as a therapist had at some point in their lives wished to do unspeakable acts. One wished to murder  a loved one, another to beat to near death their school rivals, another to have sex with their sibling, etc. If these impulses turned to thoughts and feelings aren't dealt with in a way that provides containment and knowledge (elaboration as to their instinctual origins that relieves pressure to act) - i.e., an understanding that it is natural to have an urge, but that one must find an appropriate outlet to express this urge (what Lacan would call castration) - one enters into a catatonic state to shut out others, i.e. prevent stimulation that could lead to a violent or transgressive outburst; one scramble's one's mind as to prevent the occurrence of bad thoughts and feelings.

In the case where the mind is not completely fried like an egg, the inability to handle an impulse without acting on it leads to a tremendous fear  that makes the patient believe in magical thinking - they believe that by merely thinking of hurting someone they will in fact hurt someone (nursery rhyme 'don't step on the crack you'll break your mother's back'). This is, as Deleuze and Guattari relying on Freud, put it, the primary process of experiencing 'words on the level of things.'

This combination of magical thinking and disrupting material processes and their incorporeal aspects often leads to 'free floating' affects, images, ideas, etc., that 'haunt' the patient. These can sometimes be projected into hallucinations of or fantasies about objects that aren't 'real,' or objects that are real but have strange, exaggerated, unreal, features,  what Bion refers to as  a "bizarre object." In less clinical jargon, a patient wishes to beat his brother for whatever reason, the patient finds this intolerable to feel or think for whatever reason, the links between the bodily sensations and thoughts and feelings are destroyed, the unconscious belief that the patient can beat someone up by only thinking of it takes its place, and disconnected images - the minds attempt at translating the bodily sensations and affects - of violence fill the mind's eye. These are felt as equally intolerable as the original instinct which one is attempting to avoid, so the intolerable states are projected onto the outside world (this isn't me, its them). Now the patient sees angry, evil faces in the designs on the walls, etc., or, as I have written elsewhere - ghosts and demons!

In other words, mental illness - a symptom of which is the 'bizarre object' -  is caused by a disconnection between material and its incorporeal translation (what Lacan, refering to schizophrenia, calls 'a breakdown in the signifyin chain'). This mirrors the disconnection capitalism introduces between material contexts and their objects and desires that results in alienation and fetishistic objects, or what I have been loosely calling alien objects. As D and G suggest - capitalism, by scrambling codes and deterritorializing materials, produces schizophrenics in the same way it produces other commodities.

Xenomarxism

In short, its not to say my initial experience of the book was wrong - i.e., that the book is not about subjective anxiety - but rather, following the studies of the outside (Kant, Nietzsche, early Freud, Bion, D and G, CCRU, Accelerationism, Xenofeminism, etc.), the subjective quality should be viewed as secondary, and when viewed as such, the anxiety assigned to the subject collapses into an experience of various intensities. It is no longer a worry over death, or losing one's ego (going mad), but a plane that makes no judgments such as these, and turns itself over to the alien forces appropriated (or produced) by capitalism.

This mirrors Marxism's attempts to conceptualize a humanism out of what is essentially an inhuman world of impersonal flow of objects, before going on to use psychoanalysis to bolster its humanism despite psychoanalysis' strong inhumanist undercurrents.  It is fitting then that it is Roadside Picnic, a 70s Russian novel, and its videogame counterpart S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - which rewrites the book's story so that 'the zone' is the result of the USSR Chernobyl Meltdown, not aliens - that resonate with the accidental, dark side of Marxism - its alien side.

Land, who in his New Center for Research and Practice seminars identifies Mao's understanding of Capitalism as being like 'weeds that sprout up everywhere when one is not looking' as a helpful conceptualization similarly points out in volume 13 of Šum Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory that it would be incorrect to assume the left fails altogether to capture the reality of what it sets out to study or critique - such as capitalism - but that in capturing some aspects, the left too quickly offers moralistic prescriptions in place of  interfacing with the real ('accelerating the process'). Likewise, elsewhere, Land has named Marx one of the first thinkers to conceptualize the accelerative processes of Capitalism. Consistent with this, Marx is the first thinker - labeled an "anticipatory" of accelerationism - encountered when one reads #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014), something Vincent Garton has expanded on in his blog posts Excavating the Origins of Accelerationism and Accelerate Marx (2016-2017).

That is, the more humanity cracks down on prescribing programs of critique, the more that which is being critiqued squirms out the other side, and comes back twice as strong. Perhaps this is why we have ended up with Xenofeminism (which is certainly aware of the D/G/Land-Roadside Picnic connection...)?

...

The Canada Connection: Demon Machines

Canada is weird.

Take this disordered time (tape) loop, with its lurches forward and backwards:

1900-1972: The great majority of mayors and councillors in Toronto and its surrounding areas were part of an occultist group Orange Order of Canada that had symbolic ties to Freemasons and Gnostics. This has had lasting weird effects in architecture and city organization (satanically named streets, prevalence of concrete structures, etc.). On a geotraumatic register - a geology to accompany our genealogy - the cities of Canada are structured around the flows of a deep, cryptic, occult.

Nick Land wrote 'the city is a time machine,' but might it also be that the city, like Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer which sits on the 'Hell Mouth,' is the crystallization of a demonic power? A city is a demon machine.

1957-1964: British Psychiatrist and head of the Canadian Psychiatric association Donald Cameron carries out  CIA mind control experiment MK Ultra in McGill University Allan Clinic, Quebec. It is here he lures innocent women and children into his assylum under the false pretense of helping them only to dose them with LSD and expose them to tape loops of static and repetitive phrases.

Cameron was surely a demon, or at least in communion with them not unlike the doctors in Jacobs Ladder

or the psychiatrist in Hellraiser II

1966-2014: David Cronenberg writes, directs, and produces weird horror films (including a William Burroughs adaption) that cover topics such as postmodernism, anti-psychiatry, bodyhorror, psychoanalysis, xenofeminism, technoviruses, etc.

1973: Felix Guattari travels to Canada for a lecture (Intersecting Lives pg. 273). I wish there was more to it than this.

1979: Lyotard is commissioned by the government of Quebec to publish The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. The text maps onto some of Felix Guattari's wok on language, psychoanalysis, and cultural critique.

1980: In A Thousand Plateaus D and G talk of languages that pull from disparate elements to create a weird 'minor' language that breaks with structuralist conceptions of language. As an example, they mention Quebec

“It is also said that ‘the Quebecois language is so rich in modulations and variations of regional accents and in games with tonic accents that it sometimes seems, with no exaggeration, that it would be better preserved by musical notation than by any system of spelling’…the Quebecois language must be evaluated not only in relation to standard French but also in relation to major English, from which it borrows all kinds of phonetic and syntactical elements, in order to set them in variation” (pg. 101-102). 

1981: A Guattari revival begins thanks to "Greek- Canadian academic, Constantin Boundas, a philosophy professor at Trent University in Canada" (Intersecting Lives).

1981: UK Prog rock band The Police record Ghost in the Machine at Le Studio in Quebec. The album title is a reference to Arthur Koestler's book of the same title, while the album artwork is intended to represent the 3 members of the band and their hairstyles, but appears to be '3:33' on a digital clock. Almost corresponding numerologically, the album was ranked 323 out 500 in an album ranking magazine article.

This 3:33 should of course remind us of Nick Land's twitter avatar.

1982-1983:  The Police record Synchronicity, the follow up to Ghost in the Machine, at Le Studio in Quebec. The album title, album artwork, and two correspondingly named songs, all reference psychoanalyst Carl Jung's (and Arthur Koestler's) scientific-mystical concept of synchronicity, a non-causal but related and meaningful coincidence (not identical but certainly similar to the CCRU's hyperstition).

The song Sychronocity II follows the story of an impotent, castrated worker and family man going about his day while, in an unrelated time and place, "something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake" a something which, by the end of the song, crawls onto the shores and becomes "a shadow on the door." A boring, regular Capitalist day is penetrated by a unnameable, slime monster from the deeps (Cthulhuic much?).

1984: Lyotard's Postmodern book is republished.

1987: D and G's A Thousand Plateaus is republished, translated by Brian Masumi

1989: David Lynch's Twin Peaks takes place in a fictional town about 20 miles from the Canadian border. In the show, the plot brings our main character - a mystical, psychologically minded detective - to Canada in an attempt to solve an uncanny mystery.

1990s: Felix Guattari takes on a new popularity in Canada, some of which is associated to McGill University in Quebec.  Gary Genosko, one of the scholars - if not the one -  responsible for reviving interest in Guattari is based in Ontario. Brian Masumi, translator of both Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari, teaches at the University of Montreal. Etc.

1995: Boards of Canada, a two-man, Scottish, cryptic lo-fi synth band that, consistent with the explorations of the CCRU to come, creates their music out of drum machines, modified synths, and creepy cut up magnetic tape loops of number codes, documentaries, and children talking (not unlike those used in MK Ultra), release their first music on a major label. The name is a reference to 'the national film board of canada' founded in 1939 by a British man and centered in Quebec.

2003: shortly after the turn of the century, with the dissipation of the CCRU, and after burning out on LSD and speed, the mad black Deleuzian Nick Land disappears. It is rumored he takes solitary refuge in Canada before moving to China.

2010: Panos Cosmatos' Beyond the Black Rainbow is filmed in Canada, a setting which has an important role in the director's upbringing. The psychedelic and antipsychiatry ridden film takes place in the 60s and then the 80s and follows a telepathic woman held against her will by a sadistic psychiatrist in a strange future mental health clinic. The director cites Burroughs as inspiration.

2020: Nick Land returns again to Canada to flee the spread of hypervirus COVID19 through China.

20XX: N1X (Nyx) Land via Šum Journal 12 captures the near future where "Canadian supremacy over North America is largely won."

XXXX: ...

The geographic territory of Canada seems to be haunted by the occult and its adjacent binaries - psychiatric domination of females / anti-psychiatric feminism, psychoanalytic Oedipal / Anoedipal axes, science / mysticism, enlightenment / postmodernism, etc.; binaries that play out across different planes of expression - film, music, architecture, institutional control, etc.

It's likely that there are historical-material (genealogical and geological) processes that lead to these connections - perhaps the overlapping British/Scottish/French colonial expeditions, perhaps something else - but regardless, one could say that certain manifestations seem to resonate - synchronize -  around Canada.

For Jung, the 'mind' is merely an articulation or production of the physical, base material of the Outside. Being that the 'objective' Outside and the 'subjective' inside are of the same 'stuff,' when the Outside matches the inside in a way that seems to have no agentic or local causality, its material-code redundancy is felt to be a meaningful event - a meeting of long separated twins (syzygy).

This is not unlike Guattari's conceptualization of diagramming redundancies of signifying substance and asignifying materials - the inside is simply the outside folded inwards, and the inside is used to traverse the outside. We often neglect our own resonances through a mythic and fictional oedipal disconnection  - the ego and the superego - which fools us into thinking we are a proper 'thing' as opposed to a husk being played by an Outside force.

Synthesizing these thoughts: hyperstition is a techno-magical coincidence intensifier, a fiction that makes itself real through diagrammatic force that concentrates redundancies into interlocking with the Outside.

Let's not slip too much into exposition and isntead end on a weird coincidence: in Canada in 2018 women were still being arrested for witchcraft. In one article documenting this trend, the author writes

"Is it a coincidence that all of this [the arrests] is going down within days of Halloween? If you want to talk crazy coincidences, what about the fact that both Canadian women accused of witchcraft — Dorie Stevenson from Milton, Ont., and Samantha Stevenson from Toronto — have the same last name! (Police are currently looking into any possible connections.)"

What are the odds? Are these perhaps long lost, unconscious twins (syzygy)? Certainly an interesting coincidence.

Notes on Land's Notion of Capitalist Efficiency and the Process

The story goes like this: In 2020 a hyperbiovirus accelerates technocapitalism precisely by collapsing it, putting many humans out of commission, and psychologically burning out those that remain, a cycle that tends towards coldness in the human, which tends towards inhumaneness in the human, which tends towards policy that introduces inhumaneness into institutional structure, which begets more inhumanness in the human...so on, so on...

***

Nick Land's conceptualization of Capitalism:

an autonomous, self-reinforcing, feedback loop that accelerates at a greater rate than the subjects it produces as a byproduct, thereby rendering the byproduct - i.e. the human - obsolete. 

This is not unlike Deleuze and Guattari's application of Samuel Butler's thesis - that machines use humans as nodes in the reproduction process of machines - in that Capitalism uses humans as nodes in its own growth process. In both cases, the future may do away with the human once it becomes an obsolete form of reproduction.

I have understood the concept intellectually for quite a bit, but it was not until yesterday that I understood it on an intuitive and personal level.

The (short) story goes like this: COVID19 has qualitatively (staff and patients alike are psychologically effected) and quantitatively (staff call out, forcing other staff to stay to cover shifts, etc.) intensified the already absurdly long and hard hours I work at the clinic. As a result of this, and because I've been at the same clinic for years, I've become quite burnt out myself.

Burnout means I seek less human contact and have less frustration tolerance. Less human contact and less frustration tolerance means colder approach to the humans I do come in contact with. Colder approach means less psychodynamics and more behaviorism. More cold behaviorism means this:

I recently developed what I call a 'behavioral mechanism' to solve the problem of staff not attending mandatory supervisions. The problem: there were many supervision sessions being offered, the staff had many to choose from, and therefore the value and risk of not attending was low - 'why attend this supervision when I could just attend one next week? And if I attend, why pay attention to which one I attend?' This meant low attendance, and low interest. To incentivize staff to attend and choose wisely, I proposed we offer less supervisions, and increase the value of supervisions. 1 or 2 supervisions a month, and each supervision is worth more hours than before. Now if staff wish to reach their mandatory minimum supervision requirement, they must choose and attend, and if they wish to lessen their own discomfort, choose and attend one they can tolerate. 

This is not important in and of itself. It is merely a symptom of my burnout - turning to cold behavioral mechanisms to induce desired action.

Cold behavioral mechanisms means this:

That I am primed towards further use of behavioral mechanisms. Coldness begets more coldness. So I became cold. Flash forward a day - I am sitting in a staff meeting. We are discussing how to better make efficient the mental health clinic program schedule. Should we move smoke break to this time? Should we shorten the group therapy sessions by 10 minutes? Can we push this or that back? etc. And the humorous thought dawned on me

"Program would run better, smoother, more efficient, if it simply didn't have patients"

The groups, meals, and smoke breaks would begin and end exactly on time, or they wouldn't need to be ran at all. The regular staff would not have to attend to the residents and could devote their time to completing the back log of digital paper work, or filling out notes that document nothing happened.

This is Capitalist efficiency. 

It sometimes feels like this is what positivist psychological research is trying to do - hone its research methods by utilizing the patient as a feedback node to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the method. This has nothing to do with positivism, but is simply positivism, like my clinical thought here, appropriating the efficient mechanisms of capitalism that have no regard for humanity.

We recently saw cringe-worthy high profile celebs singing John Lennon's Imagine. Imagine this:

Imagine there's no humans
It's easy if you try
Only hell below us
Above us, scorched sky
Imagine there's no people
Livin' at all today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine there's no people
Livin' life in patches

Imagine, if you will, a clinic with no residents. A market of machines. Imagine machines talking to machines about nothing. Imagine a full, rich, nothing. A massive, substantial, zero.

***

Hyperbiovirus accelerates technocapitalism accelerates human-burnout accelerates coldness accelerates inhumaneness tends towards policy that introduces inhumaneness into institutional structure tends towards...
...

The Obscurantist Look Back at 1 Year of Blogging that No one Asked For...

On April 21st or last year, 2019, I began this blog.

"Why" is a not often a question that 'really' gets at motivation. What better serves this function is "what." "Why's" are the stuff of the courtroom, and the cubicle, of voice, and of law. "What" is the stuff of materialism, of the impersonal vector.

As seen in the previous sentence, Why's (as opposed to 'Why' or 'the why') are in part by their nature multiple in a way that condones univocal impotence. Many interchangeable whys may be invoked to explain an action, but the fact that many may be invoked implies that the outcome and the why are already-always disconnected. If the why could be A, B, C, D, E..., without cost, nothing to gain or lose based on which why is chosen, then there is no explanatory power. This makes why simply noise. Whether or not a dispute over shrubbery was 'why' he murdered his neighbor changes not the murder, only the legal sentence. Meanwhile, what - not 'the whats' as in 'whys' -  is the stuff of the real world. Whether or not X was 'why' he killed his neighbor, what he used to do it was a .357.

This blog has tried to be all about 'whats' as seen in my constant attempt to integrate psychoanalysis and hypermaterialism of accelerationism/CCRU.

In this sense, what possessed me to make this blog? A demon?

I had things to say that could not be said elsewhere. Journals would not accept my work - some of it because I needed to improve on a technical register, i.e., grammar, tense, syntax, proof reading, etc., some of it because they disagreed with the form, i.e., cussing, slang, playing too fast and loose, and some of it because they disagreed with the content, i.e., it did not fit with any established school or discipline (not psychoanalytic enough for the psych journals, not social critique enough for the... etc. etc.). - and because Journals would not accept my work, I had accumulated a back log of essays, along with a collection of fragments I wanted to expand into essays, that had no home, essays and to-be texts I felt compelled to share with someone - anyone - who would take the time.

Its not so much that I believed I had anything of importance to say, but rather that I was sitting on somethings that I couldn't let remain unsaid any longer. They were eating at me. I felt filled to the brim with ideas, things I needed to expel. As Nietzsche's Zarathustra experiences - "Behold!  This overflowing cup must now empty itself: Zarathustra will once again become a man"

There is a difference here between containing that which cannot go unsaid and that which one finds is important and must be said. The former presumptuously assumes a level of individualist authority and an 'other,' while the latter assumes a void.

In this sense, this blog has tried to emulated to voids scissor-fucking; it's tried to imagine the bare ontological minimum subjectivity that would be required to 'reflect' on this cosmorgasm.

The depressive laments at the thought of speaking into a void. On the analyst's couch, they wonder if it is not simply the case that the analyst sleeps, or reads. On the phone, they wonder if there really is anyone on the other end. The true Nietzschean's among us know it is only when no one is listening - or when we think no one is listening - that anything worthwhile is said. Words that do not persuade minds, but ripple the cosmos.This comes with presumptions of its own, but they are at least ones that lean towards the inhuman.

But this is all some vague rubbish, isn't it.

Over writing the past year I have learned a great deal. My posts have not tripled in views, but accelerated in their rate of gathering views. Whereas I used to get 80 views over months, I get 100 views over 8 hours. I've improved my technical writing skill and my style, and expanded into different areas of though I had not previously adventured through. In this sense, the 'what' of my blog is 'process' or 'working through' as Freud would put it. I don't agree with everything I've said, and I am not sure any of it needed to be said, but the fact that it has been said and that perhaps someone may have made sense of it in a way that made them enjoy a new thought or feeling makes me feel good.

My blog is a 'what' to you, dear reader. What made him say such a thing? What made him this or that. Perhaps my blog. Perhaps not.
My blog is just another hit of junk in the info-junk stream.
And I think you for taking some of it in.