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The Body Machines
The third of three books in The Futurica Trilogy by Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist with the focus on the Internet age’s new, built-in, monist view of humans.
The Cartesian subject – which we intuitively perceive as so unproblematic, it is always there waiting for us when we wake up – is in itself a skilfully orchestrated illusion, a kind of cunning fraud of the brain and body (see The Body Machines) with the purpose of economising with precious resources and creating an illusory but functional model of life. But in a scientific sense there are only fields, particles, energies and relationships. The belief systems that we construct and utilise in order to be able to navigate at all a life that is constantly becoming increasingly complex are, if anything, historically determined narratives whose memetic survival is considerably more concerned with actual relevance, the attractiveness of the narrative and social arbitrariness than with any objective degree of truth in the dogmata themselves, to the extent that anything of this kind is even possible to document. Man is the animal that is constantly on the lookout for meaning, and in the absence of results creates for himself patterns in an overwhelming flow of information, fictives that will, as far as possible, elucidate the causative links of existence. And the meaning that we succeed in producing in one way or another, we ascribe mentally and socially to the great Other, the guarantor and ultimate originator of meaning, fully in line with the Cartesian view of thinking and the thinker who must exist since the thought exists.
In only a few decades, the revolution in communication technology has connected billions of people and the innumerable machines around them with each other, globally and in real time. The world was digitised, globalised, virtualised and became interactive. The inadequacy and unfitness of the Cartesian individual as a basic concept in the new cyber world has resulted in the individual dying – summarily dismissed by neurophysiology and research into consciousness (see The Body Machines) – and being replaced by the network as the fundamental metaphysical idea. The human being is transformed from an individual chained to his or her narcissistic ego to an open and mobile dividual in an all-encompassing, gigantic network that is acting more and more like a single emergent phenomenon, like a single, global, coherent agent. We call this agent, with its historically speaking divine proportions and characteristics, the Internet.
The netocratic dividual uses the enormous offering of new chemicals to constantly change his/her many personalities. This occurs in part as a late-capitalist adaptation strategy vis-à-vis the demands and expectations of one’s environment, and in part also as a subversive netocratic and revolutionary tactic to overthrow capitalism’s limited status quo. When the chemicals set the classical, genetic constants of intelligence, gender and sexual orientation in motion, the foundation of the stale myth of the sober individual (see The Body Machines) is demolished, and is therefore forced into a final hyperphase as an increasing consumtarian underclass phenomenon (see The Netocrats). The consumtarian therefore strives right to the very end to constantly try to improve him/herself, to invoke an allegedly genuine and underlying I-essence, accompanied by tabloid culture’s demands for consumption-generating frustration with the self. Career choice, gym sessions, fashion diets, partner hunting: all these are flagrant examples of vulgar hyperindividualism. On the other hand, the netocrat has long stopped believing in the coherent individual, and instead cultivates hundreds of different personalities within his/her new ideal dividual (see The Body Machines), often invoked and expedited by carefully designed chemical cocktails.
Kant’s idea of the mobilist noumenon as primary in relation to the eternalist phenomenon is fundamentally an idea of a transcendent God as a passive observer rather than an immanent God as an active participant in the Universe. Kant quite simply imagines that the noumenon is what God observes when the human being merely sees the phenomenon. But an object can reveal itself in innumerable different guises, of which the phenomenon that human perception generates is only one single phenomenon, and an external, divine observer is not needed either. Instead it is Niels Bohr’s phenomenon, the compact intertwining of the subject and the object, which is the primary starting point in the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism, rather than some kind of unattainable Ding an sich in the Kantian sense. A syntheist Ding an sich is quite simply the bringing together of the thousands of varying perspectives that one individual phenomenon invites. For perception does not distort reality, which Kant assumes. Perception merely provides both a necessary and intelligent priority for precisely that which is new and different in the information flow compared to earlier sensory impressions, so that a new and constantly minimally corrected eternalisation can occur in every individual moment (see The Body Machines). The evolutionarily developed balance between transcendental eternalisation and immanent mobility is merely a question of optimising survival possibilities. The information selectivity is quite simply an evolutionarily smart and beneficial phenomenological strategy. But it really says nothing ontologically about existence.
The Zizekian abjective subject is fundamentally internally divided. The split within the subject precedes and is also the prerequisite for the ensuing distinction between the subject and the object. The subject is thus a reaction against its own cause; its modus operandi is to constantly rework the constant failure of being its own substance. The subject is quite simply the product of its own failures. Above all it is a product of the failure of the mystery. Only through insight into this state of affairs – let us say obtained through the syntheist schizoanalysis (see The Body Machines) – is the subject’s understanding of and functional relation to the real enabled. In the schizoanalytical process, the syntheist agent gets the chance to construct an infinite number of credible dividual identities within one and the same body. But that which ties all these identities together into one big circle – and makes them one single cohesive agential phenomenon for itself – this is the gaping void in the middle of the circle, Zizek’s abjective subject, Atheos.
This means that syntheism liberates Man from anthropocentrism and internarcissism. That the individual human being is freed from the responsibility of being an individual and instead is being encouraged to be a dividual is something that syntheism regards as a kind of existential salvation. Dividualism colours every fibre of the syntheist agent. Man is not the centre of existence any more than the ego could be the centre of Man (since it does not exist – see The Body Machines). Obviously, humanity and its attributes have no primary status in the Universe. Civilisations have arisen as an emergent phenomenon on a planet after aeons of history without any people at all. They have also perished without the Universe taking the slightest bit of notice. Humanity is a phenomenon that has sprung from other intra-acting phenomena. Nor is any human being created by other humans. Biological parents do not create their offspring – despite the fact that they would like to believe that this is the case – but are rather tools for the Universe’s constant production of new organisms furnished with bodies, language, ideas, consciousnesses and subconsciousnesses.
In the intimate relation with the other, ethical and moral values arise, respectively (see The Body Machines). The concepts ethics and morality originally had the same meaning: ethics comes from the Greek word ethos and morality comes from the Latin word morales, and both these terms can be translated as customs. But after Spinoza’s philosophical divide between ethics on the one hand and morality on the other in the 17th century, the concepts have come to have completely different meanings. Ethics thus concerns an attitude connected to an identity, confronted with a choice between different anticipated constructive or destructive effects of the contemplated intervention in a surmised course of events. Being an ethical being is to go through life with the right, and in all respects reasonable, intentions. Ethics thus concerns the right or wrong choice in relation to the actor herself. It is an internalised evaluation process. Being an ethical agent is to identify oneself with the intentions of the decisions one makes.
Free will is a dualist myth, which has been produced in order for us to be able to hold the soul responsible for the weak and dissolute body, which it is of course set to battle with in the eternal duel of dualism (see The Body Machines). On the other hand, we can speak of free choice in a contingently monist universe, with the quantity of different choices that are offered the body in every given situation. However, there is no such thing as a will that is free in the midst of this choosing, nor is there any agency of will where this illusory will could be given shelter and exercised. The will is nothing other than the status of the moment in the current tug-of-war between the desire and the drive, and since these dwell in the subconscious it is not possible to achieve any conscious balancing between them. There is thus no individual free will, but rather an endless plurality of wills, which hardly become fewer because the current situation offers so many different choices.
But when the individual no longer functions in a society built on networks, the Internet age’s netocracy seeks a new human ideal. One does this while the consumtariat also desperately seeks a new potential identity other than the tragic state of being the last individual. The new, attentionalist human ideal that appears is the dividual, the divisible rather than indivisible Man (see The Body Machines), a body experiencing pleasure, involved in constant networking with all interesting humans and machines in its surroundings. The dividual is a protean creature, powerfully coloured by schizoid creativity. If we study the netocratic categories more closely, we see how the concepts dividual and event interact in a clear quest to capture and strengthen the new attentionalist human ideal.
Once the foundation of self-love is laid, the syntheist agent is open and receptive to the process that is called transparency within the community. The purpose of transparentisation is to maximise openness within the congregation, to bring its members closer to each other, to allow intimacy to develop, so that the collective manifestation of Syntheos is realised. Religion is about bringing people together and giving them an emergent, collective identity that is greater than the dividuals separately and greater than the sum of all the dividuals together. This occurs, for example, through the establishment of sharing circles, where the agents bear witness to their innermost thoughts and experiences in front of each other. However it is of the utmost importance that the transparentisation – in the spirit of the French philosopher Michel Foucault – follows the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines) and therefore is carried out from the bottom up rather than from the top down; that is, it is those who are strongest, most powerful, those most established who open themselves up first before the community in a process where everyone shares more and more of their innermost emotions and thoughts for every round of the sharing circle.
The values and valuations of informationalism stem from what we call the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines). The network-dynamical effects must be the basis of the production of the values and valuations in a network society, where everything from physics and biology to artistic creation and religious practice is characterised by the obsession with intra-acting phenomena, and not least by their relations with each other. This is a world where everything is always at least two, as Friedrich Nietzsche expresses the matter, and often many times more than that. An agency for change in such a world is an extremely complex phenomenon in itself: multi-polar, multi-dimensional, multi-dependent and in all directions entangled with its environment. In a relationist society in a relationalist world, ethics must first be interactive and later also intra-acting.
Postmodernism is dominated by fear of conflict and its ideology, cultural relativism. In the furious animosity towards fixed values, cultural relativism still fixes a value in itself, namely the fixed value per se that all values are flexible. Thereby it immediately falls on its own sword (see The Body Machines). Cultural relativism is replaced in the information chaos of the Internet society by the search for qualitative intensities. All assertions are not as equally true or false. An assertion is strengthened intersubjectively and is accorded scientific credibility if it can be verified. It quite simply has a higher truth intensity than an unfounded fabrication. The energetic atheist Christopher Hitchens is quite right when he writes that what can be asserted without any evidence whatsoever also can be dismissed without evidence. The question is whether this truth intensity is a specific intensity (as though truth were a special spectrum within the intensity from the beginning), or a pure intensity (as though the intensity precedes the truth and the truth is derived temporarily from the intensity in its entirety as an ethical act). Is there any kind of objectively valid hierarchy between the various spectra within the intensity, or should the intensity be understood exactly as it is in its entirety?
An important component in all thinking around consciousness is the concept of intelligence. Intelligence, however, does not arise as a superfluous asset for the owner’s amusement, but as a necessary instrument of survival in a system that otherwise would not survive, at the same time as intelligence is attractive in itself and results in procreative advantages. Like everything else that develops in a Darwinian way, intelligence develops as both a mutation-conditioned response to harsh circumstances, and as a human equivalent to the tail feathers of the peacock (wisdom, talent and humour attract potential partners: see The Body Machines). This means, for example, that the idea of God as an intelligent being is absurd. An omnipotent creature, who does not need to risk bumping into any obstacles worth mentioning in his quest to get his own way – and this applies as we know to both the Abrahamic father gods and syntheism’s projected divinities – thus needs no intelligence. Omnipotence suffices perfectly well; it covers most things.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58