The Digitalisation of (Inter)Subjectivity

A Psy-critique of the Digital Death Drive

Jan De Vos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351682725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

This book explores the responsibility of psychological and neuropsychological perspectives in relation to the digitalisation of inter-subjectivity. It examines how integral their theories and models have been to the development of digital technologies, and by combining theoretical and critical work of leading thinkers, it is a new and highly original perspective on (inter)subjectivity in the digital era.

The book engages with artificial intelligence and cybernetics and the work of Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, Marvin Minsky, Gregory Bateson, and Warren McCulloch to demonstrate how their use of neuropsy-theories persists in contemporary digital culture. The author aims to trace a trajectory from psychologisation to neurologisation, and finally, to digitalisation, to make us question the digital future of humankind in relation to the idea of subjectivity, and the threat of the 'death-drive' inherent to digitality itself.

This volume is fascinating reading for students and researchers in the fields of critical psychology, neuroscience, education studies, philosophy, media studies, and other related areas.

PART 1

Introduction

1

The digital death drive

Introduction: what will become of us?

What will become of us? This is the question that humankind is forced to pose to itself when faced with events that have the potential to change both the world and ourselves. In such moments, one foresees that the world, oneself and, in some instances, humankind itself will never be the same afterwards.

Regardless of whether these major events—such as a global catastrophe, or, on a more personal level, losing one’s job and source of income—truly engender fundamental changes, the question of what will become of us nevertheless carries significant weight. Human beings have a strange capacity to reflect upon themselves as somehow being different or as being something else entirely. This raises the question of whether the human subject is ever simply what it is? Or, phrased otherwise, if to be human is to be able to imagine oneself as being different, then does this not signal that one never simply coincides with oneself, that one is always already other to oneself?

Consider, in this respect, the man or woman who strolls through the city streets in the early hours of the night. He or she encounters various scenes of everyday life through the illuminated windows of houses and apartments, and thinks to themselves, ‘this could be my house, my apartment, my wife, my husband, my children, my life, etc.’. Hence, in contradistinction to common-sense notions of identity that conceptualise it as a stable entity, human subjectivity, in fact, appears to be predicated precisely on our capacity to imagine ourselves as being somebody else. For example, what would my life have been like if I had been born a woman rather than a man, or vice versa, or any other alternative scenario one can imagine? How would my life had ended up if I belonged to this particular social class group, rather than this one, or if I lived in this or that region of the world? From this perspective, then, the human subject not simply is, but rather imagines its being, precisely through the act of imagining itself as different.

Indeed, even in the very moment that we whisper through bated breath, what will become of us?, we have already changed. This is because the very attempt to foresee forces and events over which we have no control necessarily presupposes picturing ourselves on the other side of them. Even when, or perhaps precisely when, one is not able to consider the consequences of an event—for example, I cannot imagine how I would cope with the loss of my father—one is already necessarily on the other side, inasmuch as one is already living with the thought of their dead father.¹

In this way, the question of what will become of us? might be the quintessential mode of what I am calling here subjective (self)interpellation.² That is, the exemplary interpellative call through which we subjectivise ourselves takes the form of us imagining the loss of our identity and being placed in a state of limbo: if this or that would happen then what would become of us? Confronted with, among other things, the (expected) death of our loved ones, one’s own ageing or impending death, along with the manifold potential major social, political, economic, and ecological shifts, leads us to experience a mode of desubjectivation. At the very least, when presented with cataclysmic events, which strike us as both inevitable and unthinkable, we know that in no way will things ever be the same and neither will we.

Today, the question of what will become of us? imposes itself most prominently vis-à-vis the so-called process of digitalisation. Digitalisation, so it has been argued, has the potential to engender truly fundamental change, both at the social and subjective levels. Undoubtedly, digitalisation has profoundly changed the spheres of production and consumption, governance and policing, as well as how we present ourselves to others (and ourselves) and interact with others (and ourselves). Moreover, digitalisation has been a key driver in globalisation; indeed, today’s global hyper-financialised economy would be unfathomable without the digital technology that makes it possible for money to produce more money through multiple automated transactions that are realised in fractions of a second. In this respect, it would appear that capitalism has finally managed to surpass both its material boundaries and the need for concrete people. While materiality and concrete people still play a predominant role in the new digital economy, I will argue over the course of this book that it is precisely digitalised subjectivity that ultimately serves the virtual process of money producing more money. That is to say, it is the commodification of subjectivity via digitalisation that constitutes the backbone of the new digital economy and its key processes of expropriation and alienation.

In light of this, does this not mean that the aforesaid question of what will become of us? involves envisaging the end of the human subject as we know it? Has the anthropocenic age given way to the digicenic age, the age of coding? In this age, it is not the human being that is the measure of things, but rather codes and algorithms which propel, apparently autonomously, the course of things. Here, the question of what will become of us? takes the following forms: what will happen to us when the majority of work is performed by robots or by Artificial Intelligence (AI)? What will become of us as human subjects when our lives play out ever more in virtual environments? What will it mean when each and every one of us is directly connected (neurodigitally) not only with each other, but with everything (e.g. the so-called Internet of Things)? Will we be reduced to mere nodal points in the global network of the hypermarket?

A key question concerns whether these aforesaid issues should be the domain of psychologists (what does digitalisation do to the individual?), neuroscientists (what does digitalisation do to the brain?), or even for psychoanalysts, who might approach the matter from a more sophisticated perspective (e.g. conceptualising the subject as that which can imagine itself differently)? The problem with each of these three explanations, however, as I will argue in this book, is that they are incapable of mounting a neutral vantage point from which to view this issue. This is because, I would contend, the theories and models of psychology and neuroscience—and perhaps even psychoanalysis—already inform digital technologies. Hence, when considering the ways through which codes and algorithms have come to shape and model the new subjectivities and modes of sociality, one should look for the neuropsy-models and theories that are overtly and covertly utilised in the pre-formatting of (inter)subjectivity. Consequently, if at first glance the psy-sciences appear to offer explanations, this book argues that they are, in fact, integral to that which has to be explained.

Consider the title of a recent book by Stephens-Davidowitz (2017): ‘Everybody Lies. Big data, new data and what the Internet can tell us about who we really are’. If it is truly the case that Big Data can reveal the core of our personality, then would the Internet not be a treasure chest for psychologists? This is what Stephens-Davidowitz seems to imply: with the so-called data-trails people leave behind when surfing the Internet, he claims, for the first time we can really see ‘in the interior of people’ (cited in Illing, 2017). What Stephens-Davidowitz overlooks, however, is that psychology and its attendant concepts and methods do not enter the fold only at a subsequent moment (i.e. when researchers reveal the psychological truths and various idiosyncrasies hidden within people’s Internet search histories), but, rather, digital platforms like Google, Facebook, and others function fundamentally via heuristics that are informed by psychology. Indeed, Silicon Valley companies’ principal interest is to know who and what you are via your searches, clicks, likes, or, to use another term, via your desires. In this way, they proceed as if they were psychologists, or even psychoanalysts to be more precise, for whom subjectivity is almost entirely synonymous with desire. In this respect, is the Internet not then a psychologist? This appears to ever more be the case especially since the launch of the so-called interactive and participative Web 2.0, which, above all, serves as an amphitheatre for our psychological life, that is, our thoughts, images, emotions, memories… at the very moment that they present themselves. Perhaps the reader may recognise in the latter formulation the basic rule of psychoanalysis, namely, the principle of free association. Of course, while social media and the like do not allow indecent or explicit content, there are obviously other virtual places for that. At the very least, these digital and virtual spaces are designed to host the psychological, and, as such, it is no surprise, as Davidowitz implies, that it is the psychological which emerges out of the digital. Consequently, as this book will argue, the very theories and models that are used to explain the Internet are the very ones that were used to build and design it in the first place.

In this respect, one could go as far to say that it is precisely here that the virtual realm and virtuality will always elude our grasp and be ahead of us. For does not the very question of what will become of us if/when? itself not bear a structural resemblance to an algorithm? This is where neuropsy-models would be applied in order to compute the potential outcomes of the various mutations of subjectivity. Moreover, given that the act of imagining ourselves as different already touches upon the dimension of the virtual, one is rapidly and unnoticedly entering a hall of mirrors when one claims to have a vantage point, be it a psychological, neuroscientific, or a psychoanalytic one, from which to explain (the effects of) digitalisation.

Hence, in the remainder of this introductory chapter, I will outline the key themes of the book by delineating in greater detail the main pitfalls, which, I argue, lead to us getting prematurely lost in digitalisation by uncritically adopting a psy- or neuropsy-perspective on the matters at stake. At the very least, my contention is that psychologists, neuroscientists, and, for that matter, psychoanalysts should proceed tentatively and disentangle how their very own (neuro)psy-theories and models are reflected within digitalisation and digital technologies themselves. This is the purpose of this book, all the while fully acknowledging the stickiness of the terrain and the fact that one cannot not evade psychologising digital matters. This book adopts a (critical) psychoanalytic perspective to approach this issue, because, as I explain further in Chapter 3, one cannot circumvent psychoanalysis if one hopes to conduct a fundamental critique of psychology and psychologisation. Hence, psychoanalysis can be understood to be the via regia for any psy-critique of the digitalisation of (inter)subjectivity.

It is expedient to begin our journey here by turning to the words of digitalistas themselves, not because they (nor their neuropsy counterparts) necessarily have the right answers, but because their perspectives can help to hone our questions, or, to be more precise, their conceptions of the digital and the virtual help us to more accurately trace the contours of the aforementioned hall of mirrors. Our bad guide on this journey—one always needs bad guides who with their treacherous lamps illuminate above all their own problematic position—will be Elon Musk, as he is emblematic, or perhaps even symptomatic, of how the key question of what will become of us? is invariably misunderstood. More specifically, I would contend that both his vision of how the digital signals the death knell for humanity and his heroic plans to save us all from it are the exemplification of what I am designating in this book as the digital death drive, which, rather than leading to the death of humanity necessarily, turns us all into undead digital zombies.

Elon Musk’s digi-apocalypse

Elon Musk, the co-founder of, among other companies, PayPal and Tesla, perhaps more so than any public figure, has expressed his fears about AI and warned of ‘a fleet of artificial-intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind’ (Elon Musk cited in Vance, 2015, p. 3). Here, the question of what will become of us? reaches its ultimate expression: what will become of us when the digital threatens to finish off humanity.³

Even at this early stage, in order to understand what the digitalistas themselves overlook in their fascination with the end-of-the-human theme, we must draw upon psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud argues that human beings cannot think or even conceive of their own death, and that unconsciously everyone is convinced of their immortality (Freud, [1915]1957). One way to reformulate this point might be to say, if we cannot even imagine our own death, then perhaps the only way to deal with this is to ask ourselves: what will be of us when we are dead? It is precisely this that Elon Musk is unwittingly engaging in with his vision of a digi-apocalypse, which is merely another fantasy through which to think about humankind and its precarious existence.

However, it is important to follow the Freudian thesis to its logical end by supplementing it with the thought of Jacques Lacan, specifically his ruminations on the theme of death. Lacan (1981) tells us that we require the conviction that we are going to die in order to be able to live and to be present in the world (‘to be able to cope with this comedy’). Hence, Freud’s notion that we cannot imagine our own non-presence from a state of presence should be amended: in fact, it is only from a presupposed, imagined (and thus virtual) non-presence that we can think about and construct our presence. At the very least, this means that the question of our presence, our being here as it were, is an altogether problematic and convoluted issue. It is here that one can already surmise that psychoanalysis is not another form of psychology as it is sometimes mistaken to be; rather, psychoanalysis constitutes a radical critique of psychology (and psychologisation), in terms of its various conceptualis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Learning machines: digitalisation and its psy-antecedents
• Part 3 Educating the people: digital deadlocks
• Part 4 Conclusions
• Index