Psychoanalysis, All too Human

Family failing of philosophers: All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human

We all know that historical consciousness starts in the beginning of the 19th century with Hegel, before strongly re-emphasized by Marx and Nietzsche in the late 19th century. But Hegel never got around to reading On the Origin of Species, which was published 28 years after his death. The stupid straightforward question I would like to pose is thus embarrassingly simple: what would Hegel have thought if he had had a chance to read it? What if he had books of Dawkins beside his collection of Thucydides lying on his bookshelf? Would he perhaps extrapolate his Phenomenology of Spirit to a Phenomenology of Species?

When did the self begin? When did the unconscious begin? When did Freudian triad and Lacanian Borommean rings begin? Psychoanalysis is bound to be hit by these questions, as new researches show mirror recognition in animals and robots, various perverse acts of animals (homosexuality, oral sex, prostitution, even necrophilia), beside older findings of animal dreams and stress disorders. While I am old enough to not entertain the possibility of psychoanalytic therapy for a poop-eating dog or your future Roomba, psychoanalysis for me has so much more to do than individual therapy and, as such, is the basis of my philosophical ontology.

A xenolinguistic psychoanalysis is thus only prudent considering the fact that we are currently in the midst of news about all the achievements of bioengineering and cybernetics (the Haylesian posthuman, the Mitchellian age of biocybernetic reproduction). Lacan was certainly aware of a historical sense of man, as were his intellectual contemporaries — but he was not, I would claim, at the very least, entertaining the possibility of a serious interrogation on Love and Sex with Robots. A recurring subject in my researches is thus an evolutionary Lacanian psychoanalysis by way of a deeper linguistic and communicational research in new realms — new media, psychedelics, animal communication, artificial intelligence, virtual sex….

As with Hegel and Nietzsche, we cannot forget that man has become. If we are to make a comprehensive cognitive mapping, we should avoid falling into the trap of non-historicity, or, in this posthuman age, the trap of non-evolutionarity. Modifying Nietzsche, I would claim that lack of evolutionary sense is the family failing of all psychoanalysts.

The Screen and the Prison: Lacan and Manovich on the Subject

Lev Manovich provided a great reading of the screen’s history in his The Language of New Media. There, Manovich presented an allegory of the screen with the prison (though he was not the first to make such an allegory) — Our mobile gaze has a cost of imprisoning our body within a position or contraptions of a device. However, if we are to ask the famous Bateson question “Is a blind man’s cane a part of him?” to this formulation, we get interesting results: if the answer is no, then that cane must also be a prison, since we are trapped in the contraptions of a cane, much as a car is a prison, much as the Manovichian idea that VR is a final form of the prison of the screen (“… we carry our prisons with us … the retina and the screen will merge.” p.114). If the answer is a posthuman nod of yes, then not only is a cane part of the blind man, the screen-retina part of the futuristic subject, but also the theater building is part of the spectator.

Thus we see a very interesting conflict of embodiment-imprisonment within our notion of the subject. And here Manovich’s study of the history of the screen plays a more pivotal role — as any good psychoanalytic film studies scholars would agree, a history of the screen is a history of the gaze, and a history of the gaze is a history of subjectivity (hence my studies of the monitor phase). Embodiment and imprisonment, it seems, has become two sides of the same coin. The augmented gaze of the screen is the freedom for which we pay. With Lev Manovich, the theories of Jacques Lacan is now subject to technological mutation.

The Monitor and the Screen: Lacan and Deleuze on the Cyborg

In my media studies, I tend to make quite a strong distinction between monitor and screen. The screen implies a cinematic experience, an experience of an observer fluid in embodiment but not in control of that embodiment, in the sense that we cannot choose whose gaze we are to adopt next. The (computer) monitor, on the other hand, implies choice in part of the observer. The gaze returned from the monitor is not only a gaze of the other as in cinema (read Slavoj Žižek’s film studies), but also a gaze of oneself through a kind of a mirror — an evolved mirror of the 21st century, as when one photographs oneself through web cams. However, again as with web cams, and with game avatars, etc, it is a strange mirror — one in which one’s reflection never returns the gaze, making one both a master and a slave of the Imaginary, a subject both perverse and divine.

Friedrich Kittler has observed the evolution of discourse networks and its relation to embodied action (see his essays on the typewriter). Katherine Hayles has also extrapolated media and information theories and theorized her flickering signifier concept. I would claim that a lot of this change come from our experience and interaction with the monitor as such, for, with Lacan, it is the primal misrecognition with the signifier of the self that generates a desiring decentered subject. Thus, I extrapolate from here the Lacanian mirror phase to include a second mirror phase, one I call the monitor phase.

Gilles Deleuze stated that the body is an avatar of the soul — does the very word he chose not ring very familiar in this Postmodern 2.0 society? Further along the Deleuzian line, I would claim that his perception of desiring-production is more relevant today than ever, where the de- and reterritorializations happen more in the realm of the virtual than the physical and the semiotic logic requires a computer/informational layer/s to be taken into mind. All in all, Body-without-Organs dynamics in the Web 2.0 sphere has to be interrogated more critically so as to better understand the workings of a (still?) schizophrenic system of digital capitalism. I would however reject the pseudo-Deleuzian notion that positions him as a prophet of an all-too-permissive capitalism in the name of multitude and so on, and instead would lean more towards his more (in the words of Žižek) “Guattarised” theories to engage in a politically-urgent dissection of digital capitalism.

I am planning to develop several theses on this extrapolation of Lacanian and Deleuzian concepts that take into mind a cyborg subject with posthuman subjectivity, and in turn should show why this gesture is, as I have always claimed, politically urgent. I would inform you when I get them out, but for now, feel free to comment and discuss.