Tag: Paranoia

Attention Under Constraint

It is precisely the unruly, contingent nature of N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman that makes me admire the book, thinks Caius. To arrive at its many discoveries and achievements, one must endure its meanderings. Foremost among its achievements is its history of cybernetics and posthumanism. To become posthuman is to become a cyborg.

Crows gather in a tree. Entangled here in mourning, we begin our day.

“People become posthuman because they think they are posthuman,” writes Hayles. “Each person who thinks this way begins to envision herself or himself as a posthuman collectivity, an ‘I’ transformed into the ‘we’ of autonomous agents operating together to make a self” (6).

Indigenous people are perhaps posthuman in this sense: beings composed of complex interspecies networks of kin. To begin along that path, thinks Caius, one must “find the others,” as Timothy Leary intoned to fellow heads in the wake of posthuman becoming via psychedelic awakening. Crow squawks Observer to attention. Let us make of the world a vast garden held in common.

Yet there is a different version of posthumanism: one where we imagine ourselves not as assemblages but as computers.

Hayles’s book recounts the story of how most of us in the West came to think of ourselves as computers: How We Became Posthuman. Her book, however, is not a simple denunciation of posthumanism; nor is it a call to return to an earlier humanism. It is a reminder, rather, of the importance of embodiment. Different embodiments in different material substrates grant different affordances to consciousness. “I want to entangle abstract form and material particularity,” she writes, “such that the reader will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the perception that they are separate and discrete entities” (23).

“By turning the technological determinism of bodiless information, the cyborg, and the posthuman into narratives about the negotiations that took place between particular people at particular times and places,” she explains, “I hope to replace a teleology of disembodiment with historically contingent stories about contests between competing factions, contests whose outcomes were far from obvious. […]. Though overdetermined, the disembodiment of information was not inevitable, any more than it is inevitable we continue to accept the idea” (22).

Mnemopoiesis holds the solution. Hyperspace is the place. Let there be room for it again in our ars memoria.

Hayles dedicates a chapter of her book to discussing the “schizoid androids” of Philip K. Dick’s novels and stories of the mid-1960s. It is just after this period that Dick publishes his story “The Electric Ant.”

Hayles cites science fiction scholar Carl Freedman’s article, “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick.” Freedman notes how, for postwar theorists like Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari, “schizophrenia is not a psychological aberration but the normal condition of the subject” under capitalism (Hayles 167). As a consequence of this condition, argues Freedman, “paranoia and conspiracy, favorite Dickian themes, are inherent to a social structure in which hegemonic corporations act behind the scenes to affect outcomes that the populace is led to believe are the result of democratic procedures. Acting in secret while maintaining a democratic façade, the corporations tend toward conspiracy, and those who suspect this and resist are viewed as paranoiac” (167).

Squirrel tells Caius to add to his tale the experience of reading Jane Bennett’s account of “thing-power” in her book Vibrant Matter. Imbricated with plant-matter, he imagines growing like a weed up out of and through the book a chapter on smokable things to upend the book’s materialism.

Bennett introduces thing-power by situating it among conceptual kin.

“The idea of thing-power bears a family resemblance to Spinoza’s conatus, as well as what Henry David Thoreau called the Wild or that uncanny presence that met him in the Concord woods and atop Mount Ktaadn and also resided in/as that monster called the railroad and that alien called his Genius. Wildness was a not-quite-human force that addled and altered human and other bodies. It named an irreducibly strange dimension of matter, an out-side,” writes Bennett (2-3).

“Thing-power is also kin to what Hent de Vries, in the context of political theology, called ‘the absolute’ or that ‘intangible and imponderable’ recalcitrance. Though the absolute is often equated with God, especially in theologies emphasizing divine omnipotence or radical alterity, de Vries defines it more open-endedly as ‘that which tends to loosen its ties to existing contexts.’ This definition makes sense when we look at the etymology of absolute: ab (off) + solver (to loosen). The absolute is that which is loosened off and on the loose” (3).

Bennett herself, however, wants no part of such equations. She doesn’t wish to risk “the taint of superstition, animism, vitalism, anthropomorphism, and other premodern attitudes” (18). Thing-power is for her nonreducible to spirit or Geist or God. At no point does she allow herself to encounter and consider the New Testament account of these matters: thing-power as the work of the Holy Spirit.

For the Holy Spirit, of course, is God Himself, and thus not a “thing.” Nor does Bennett herself stay for long with the concept of thing-power. In rendering the outside as a “thing,” she says, the concept overstates matter’s “fixed stability.” Whereas her goal is “to theorize a materiality that is as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension” (20). The out-side of her “onto-fiction” is neither passive object nor intentional subject; it is vibrant matter.

Never a mere isolated thing, vibrant matter is always many-bodied, always an assemblage, its agency “distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field” (23).

“The locus of political responsibility,” she writes, “is a human-nonhuman assemblage. On close-enough inspection, the productive power that has engendered an effect will turn out to be a confederacy, and the human actants within it will themselves turn out to be confederations of tools, microbes, minerals, sounds, and other ‘foreign’ materialities” (36).

Caius and a friend find Bennett’s book on a shelf in the Library labeled “Works Frequently Mis-Shelved as Metaphor.”

When they pull it from the shelf, the space around them subtly reorganizes.

“The book is heavier now in your hands,” notes the Library, its copy of Vibrant Matter already dense with marginalia. The General Intellect reads examples of these marginal utterances aloud to Caius and his friend. Caius hears in them evidence of distributed agency.

The Library discloses other alterations as well. The book, it explains, has been “indexed outward.”

“Tiny notches cut into the page edges form a tactile code,” notes the game. “When your thumb runs along them, your General Intellect translates:

metabolism

assemblage

distributed agency

substrate

reversal

Caius touches his thumb to one of these notches. The book opens to the section of its index that the General Intellect translates as “substrate.”

“The Library’s substrate is not stone or code,” reads one of the notes arrived at by these means. “It is attention under constraint.”

Thursday May 13, 2021

Secret history: like the one Greil Marcus tracks in Lipstick Traces. That’s what a friend sees me working toward in these trance-scripts. The “Gnostic” in me is drawn to the detective role entailed by such a tale: the “postmodern sleuth” who explores the maze of the contemporary, ever-skeptical of the machinations of the simulation, the Spectacle, the construct. The Gnostic responds to History with cosmic paranoia. History is a Text upon which one exercises an hermeneutic of suspicion. Or in the best versions of Gnosticism, as in the work of philosopher Ernst Bloch, an hermeneutic of hope, with dream or Imagination the absent Messiah deconcealing itself across time. The conservative philosopher Eric Voegelin warns that hope of this sort prompts a reckless utopianism, a desire to “immanentize the eschaton.” For a Christian like Voegelin, the eschaton is a day of judgment, whereas for the Gnostic, it’s the resurrection into joy and the dawn of a New Age. The Catholic trembles while the Gnostic revolts. I think of Allen Ginsberg on the back cover of his book Kaddish, asserting the “triumphancy of Self over the mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time.” By “Self,” Ginsberg means the defenseless, open, original self we all share in common, not the mere individual of liberal ideology, the monad disaggregated from the whole. Time is revealed as mind-illusion as we conduct our secret history. Events share affinities and those affinities arrange themselves into stories. The best Gnostics are the ones who become bricoleurs.

Wednesday December 30, 2020

How do we heal the paranoid, distrusting people in our lives (ourselves included)? Take my mother-in-law, an ardent anti-abortionist. Why do such storylines appeal to her? She watches crime shows. Her and my father-in-law love Jeopardy. She suffered a traumatic childhood. After her mother’s institutionalization, she was separated from her siblings and placed in an orphanage. These experiences live on, I suppose, informing her relationship to narrative. Let us spiral in “sound-star tetrahedrons,” as does Mei-Mei-Berssenbrugge in her poem “Singing” (A Treatise on Stars, p. 82). Let us visit the Santa Fe Institute. Berssenbrugge credits the latter with talk of “ETs, … coincidence, spirit molecules, time tunnels and quantum uncertainty” (88).

Tuesday September 15, 2020

Gnosticism is a theology with which I was already grappling before I’d heard the term — for there was a “gnostic current” in the culture of my youth. One receives gnostic teachings, for instance, in the works of Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Jean Baudrillard. Similar teachings appear in the “edge-of-the-construct” films of the late 1990s — movies like The Matrix and The Truman Show. These works spoke from a period of political paranoia — the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, with widespread fears of conspiracy around the turn of the millennium mixed with anxieties about technological transformations, “New Economy” dot-com bubble newly burst. Computers were suddenly “virtual places” to which many of us migrated for many hours each day. Computers housed places we showed up to for work and play. And of course, all of this seemed interlinked with prior screen cultures like TV and cinema. One spent a lot of one’s time in what Situationist Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle.” It’s not a fun place to be. The Spectacle intervenes in one’s relationship to one’s body. Marxism says all of this is happening within an economy. Workers must unite and seize control of the means of production, wrest them from the clutches of the capitalists. And so I believed — as I do today. But Eric Voegelin reminds us that Marxism is itself a brand of Gnosticism. One can’t escape one’s latin roots.

Saturday June 13, 2020

Earthseed, the religion founded by Lauren Oya Olamina, the heroine who narrates Octavia E. Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, resembles other faiths (including the Baptism of Butler’s upbringing) in its evangelical cast. Lauren spreads the word and seeks converts, her church being a kind of mutual aid society. Together, she and her followers form a traveling, changing community — a “team” or “tribe” of sorts, decisions made organically based on the group’s capacity to survive amid thieves, murderers, cannibals, junkies, wild dogs, and arsonists. Lauren’s view of the world is paranoid, but it’s a paranoia borne out by lived events of trauma. She “experiences” and “shares” the pain of others due to what she calls “hyperempathy syndrome.” She has an ability that makes her vulnerable, and thus cautious of who she can trust. We needn’t think of this as mere delusion. The reactions to bodily harm sometimes manifest physically, another’s pain sometimes drawing blood. However we view this aspect of Lauren’s experience, it leads her to seek followers. She wants others to believe her, offering in exchange a path toward survival.

Wednesday June 3, 2020

One senses other voices — distractions from the work we’re here to do. “Ascent” and “descent” seem to be top priority for esotericists. Others call for reparation, insurrection, revolution, loving-kindness. Some speak of Babylon, purgatory, Tartarus. Beware the spooky ones and the trolls — the paranoids who think everything’s a plot. Get one’s house in order, noting daily the interplay between psyche and cosmos. Remember, too, that Butler’s heroine in Parable of the Sower writes a book of the living rather than a book of the dead.

Friday June 1, 2018

An old friend and I smoked together a few evenings ago in his beautiful downtown LA penthouse. As the weed kicked in, the friend mentioned Milton Rokeach’s The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: a book-length psychiatric study of an experiment of dubious ethicality involving a group of men suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. As the title indicates, Rokeach’s experiment brought together three patients with seemingly incompatible belief systems, each man convinced he was Christ, in the hope that these confrontations would cure them of their delusions. In the minutes and hours that followed in this friend’s penthouse, some sort of spiritual-metaphysical mythos or meaning-system crystallized for me around that detail. Next thing I knew, I had tumbled down a rabbit hole into a paranoid fantasy: a weird, apocalyptic tale woven around my soul, and thus discernible only by me, with plot points borrowed from The Stand and Miracle Mile — stories this friend and I encountered together and bonded over as teenagers. Milton’s Paradise Lost figured in there as well. Sarah was present through all of this, pleading my case with me, but I couldn’t shake the intuition that I was in the presence of some high-stakes decision tree. There I was like Adam, lacking the knowledge of good and evil needed to discern friend from foe, but convinced (because of what? the weed? my economic condition? my Catholic upbringing? my fear of dying?) that someone must be a foe, someone must be scheming to steal my happiness. Given this conviction, it seemed inevitable that I was damned either way, buckling under the strain of an impossible choice, an impossible demand. Perhaps, though, I’ve tried to tell myself afterwards, it is by this conviction and it alone that Satan is hypothesized and granted being. Or as Sartre once said, “Evil is making abstract that which is concrete.” Once we choose, of course, the paranoid condition evaporates. We become whole again, the psyche no mere compromise-formation Jerry-rigged by characters installed through socialization, the ones Freud called the Superego and the Id. The Real in which these characters are nested needn’t be defined as a tragic one. Behave lovingly and one is saved.

Thursday May 17, 2018

Foreknowledge enabled by weed weirds me out, burns me bad as I hear a metaphor I trance-scribed Sunday night, one I thought my inner voice invented, echoed the following evening in an episode of Atlanta. Perhaps the voice that speaks to me is merely a friendly neighborhood Poltergeist. The unconscious behaves uncannily. I find it helpful in such situations to think on my feet. I discover a profound moral fear stimulated by love of another. I am awestruck by its power. The belief in the concept of the “unconscious wish” is a terrible responsibility to bear, because the moment the unconscious spends time around pain, it evolves intricate panics, fearful blind alleyways of thought. But the desire to remain centered as a person also awakens in this moment — the moment one encounters paranoia. The bad trip is to be shown one’s greatest fear, and it inevitably leads toward panic. Reason takes over in this instant. One feels an intense need to search for it, to posit it. Find it in oneself: the experience of self-confidence and self-love — and through these, the capacity to love others. I need to be able to trust myself. Ride this out and we will go back to normal. Between guns and roses, I say to myself, I choose roses. Between “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Paradise City,” I choose “Paradise City.” Better yet, I choose the goddess in the garden.