Superlative Technocentricity as a Discourse Rather Than a Type

My friend Anne Corwin raises some good points in yesterday's lively Mundi Moot. I'm responding in a post, simply because there is so much material in the Comments at this point that I fear she and others might miss it otherwise.

Anne writes: [A]nyone who partakes in the overt, public amateur psychoanalysis of specific individuals must be wary of assuming that people are "off" in the particular ways that they might initially seem to be.

I definitely agree with you Anne, and I've learned a lot from reading your interventions concerning the neurotypicality assumptions in many technocentric discourses (and even more through the further explorations of disability studies provoked by my engagements with your work). These interventions struck a strong chord with me especially given my readings in the history of the (still ongoing) struggles of queer people for standing, and my awareness of the pathologizing vocabularies that enable authorities to violate free people in the name of science but in the interests of parochial moralizing.

But I do insist that one can engage in symptomatic analyses of historical, organizational, archetypal formations, and so on without engaging in armchair psychologizing of a kind that is meant to eventuate in clinical diagnoses of individuals, surely?

By the mid-twentieth century at the latest psychoanalysis had taken on the dimensions of a popular (indeed, possibly the primary) vocabulary through which millions expressed their moral philosophical convictions. And much of that discourse of the unconscious, neurosis, repression, projection, melancholy, authoritarian personality, inner child, True Belief, and on and on and on is the furthest thing from the kind of rigorous science (or recognizable orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis for that matter) that issues out in sound clinical diagnosis. Nevertheless, its power and breadth as a modern secular moral imaginary is unmistakable, and surely not merely to be decried always only as pseudoscience?

Look what Herbert Marcuse did with this philosophized Freud! And on and on and on. This is, by the way, such a strange place to find myself in, because -- like most people as deeply influenced by Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt as I have been, I would be regarded in my circles as a rather staunch critic of psychoanalysis, even if I will concede the force of especially some subversive feminist and postcolonial appropriations of psychoanalysis (Fanon, Butler, and so on).

I guess the long and the short of it is to say you should be wary of assuming that my own deployment of what might appear to be psychoanalytic categories here and there amounts to the proffering up of would-be clinical diagnoses of individual psychologies. In a way, this seems to me too close to the charge I hear interminably that my analyses ultimately devolve into ad hominem attacks.

Look, one deploys categories, one delineates mechanisms, one attends to associations (logical, causal, figurative, citational, genealogical, and so on), one discerns symptoms -- this is what thinking in a certain analytic register demands of us.

I'll grant that I can be bad-tempered and a tad acid-tongued, but none of that alters the fact that analysis is analysis, and struggling usefully to name things (however provisionally) is not reducible to name-calling, scouting for structural symptoms is not reducible to attributing malign intentions or pathologizing individual agents whose conduct invigorates the structure being so analyzed.

Often times people who feel unfairly maligned by my critiques of Superlative Technocentricity would do well to substitute for what they perceive as an accusation that "you are x" the comradely injunction, "dude, don't be that guy," or, even better, to substitute for what they perceive to be an accusation that "you are x" an expression of the worry that a social formation seems conducive to x, but as for those who individually invigorate while being invigorated through their participation in that social formation exhibiting x themselves, one must always insist, in the absence of actual evidence to the contrary, "if the shoe fits wear it."

Anne goes on to discuss the "particular civil-rights movement [that] is sometimes referred to as "neurodiversity". Neurodiversity is, in my mind, a recognition of the fact that there are multiple, yet equally valid, modes of cognition and perception within the population, and that much of the apparent strife experienced by autistic and other atypical persons is the direct or indirect result of bigotry and status-quo bias (rather than of intrinsic personal deficits).

I agree with Anne that this is an important civil rights movement, I agree with Anne's characterization of it here, and I agree with her diagnosis that bigotry rather than "personal deficit" accounts for much of the suffering experienced by neuro-atypical people in the world. I see all this as a crucial dimension of my own commitments to morphological freedom and prosthetic self-determination and my simple progressive Pro-Choice commitments.

[P]eople making the "neurodiversity is a brain-damage cult" accusations are very fond of taking autistic self-advocates' statements WAY out of context, of resorting to strawman attacks (e.g., "Neurodiversity advocates think autistic children should be able to run wild and do whatever they want without any parenting whatsoever!"), and of accusing self-advocates of really being "schizophrenic", delusional, liars, histrionic, borderline...you name it.

This is the main source of my uneasiness with slapping psychological labels on people...I've seen that technique used far too often to discredit people who are ethical and sincere, and I've seen the damage it can do.

I quite understand this point. Believe me, I've been on the receiving end of no small amount of pathologizing charges of this kind, not only for my queerness, but for my perverse and promiscuous queerness, but, you may well note, also from some Transhumanist-identified and Singularitarian-identified people eager to marginalize as inherently frivolous, dishonest, fraudulent, neurotic, over-sensitive, politically correct thought-policing, sentimentally emotionalist, over-reading and on and on and on my whole mode of thinking is as such. This is a road that goes at least both ways.

But I understand well enough not to assume that anybody who decries a formulation as "too flamboyant" is necessarily engaging in a homophobic attack, for example, and so too I try to understand the larger historical context (Snow's Two Cultures, for example) that drives the uneasiness of some participants in technocentric formations for "humanities" sensibilities. My snap reactions to such things are often defensive, but as a general matter I know it is best for all for us not to take such things too personally, even as we painstakingly explain how discourses function to systematically facilitate certain misperceptions, certain mis-prioritizations, certain misplaced interventions in ways that cause actual individual people to suffer unnecessarily and to no real purpose.

So, while I do think it's important to suss out people's motivations when there is reason to suspect them, merely accusing someone of sinister motivations doesn't mean that your critical work is "done", and that questioning this assessment is evidence of naivete or youthful idealism.

I know that this comment was not necessarily directed at me, but I do want to say that I personally have no trouble at all diagnosing social formations and public discourses as sinister, but I have the strongest possible hesitations about labeling individual people sinister. I believe that radical evil tends to be social, and that it is invigorated primarily by individuals who are more banal than sinister on the whole.

Both viciousness and virtuousness interest me most when they become social circles. Good and evil have always seemed to me deeply personal matters, playing out for the most part in a rather intimate sphere. Criminality is another matter altogether -- but I daresay you'll notice that I haven't accused even Singularitarians of that!

I know few of the people who invigorate the discourses and formations I critique well enough to venture to say whether or not I would think them sinister or wholesome. I've met Michael Anissimov a couple of times and I had a swell time in his company. I wouldn't say he was sinister or ill or whatever -- but I do think Singularitarianism remains an essentially religious, and hence properly a moral/esthetic rather than properly scientific or political or ethical discourse, and the organizations identified with that discourse have seemed to me distressingly expressive of fundamentalist modes of religiosity, and I worry enormously that this discourse and its institutional counterparts look to me to be an especially snug fit for neoliberal rationalizations that I oppose politically in the strongest possible terms. Explicit intentions and malign motives will not necessarily come into it -- any more than one necessarily actively intends or has thought through all the logical entailments of the propositions one affirms as true.

I am not pitching my critique at quite the level some people seem to think, and saying otherwise seems either to indicate a significant misunderstanding of the critique itself or to function as a way to trivialize a critique that is harder to answer on its own terms (I don't think the latter is what you are doing at all, just to be clear, Anne).

Therefore, if you're suggesting that maybe some "superlative" types are helping to perpetuate attitudes that promote genocide, bigotry, human rights abuses, etc., I'm not going to just dismiss that out of hand.

I will admit that I prefer to speak of Superlativity, or Superlative Technocentricity, over "Superlatives" and "Technocentrics." Incredibly enough, the whole business of turning to this term on my part was to avoid some of the hurt feelings that had arisen out of my longstanding anti-transhumanist critiques -- which were likewise reduced to name-calling by many who were made uncomfortable by them. I was initially moved to speak instead of Superlativity to circumvent this perception, which seemed to me to distract people from the force of my point. There simply aren't enough Singularitarians or Transhumanists in the world to exercise my worried imagination too much, except to the extent that they attract undue money and mediation, to the extent that they symptomize broader discursive tendencies, and especially to the extent that the latter articulates the former. The irrational exuberance of the 1990s digirati stood in a structurally symptomatic rather than logically identical relation to the Extropians, for example. It was as a symptomatic discourse rather than as an effective movement that Extropianism was most worthy of analysis in my view. The Critique of Superlativity (which subsumes Extropian-movement, as it happens) is much the same sort of thing.

I have tried to be pretty scrupulous about critiquing Superlative Technocentricity as Discourse rather than Superlative Technocentrics as a Would-Be Bestiary of the Bad, but I know I have fallen into the habit of personalization too often, very often (to be fair to myself) directly as the result of getting caught up in give-and-take with people who are personalizing the critique themselves and engaging with it in these terms. I gain very little by this move, as far as I can see, and lose my own preferred focus, and so I am going to redouble my efforts on this score.

I have no doubt at all that those who feel unfairly maligned by my critiques will continue to accuse me of name-calling, but come what may returning to scrupulous interpersonal generality where the force of my critique is systemic rather than personal is in any case more clarifying for my ends (it is hard to avoid some measure of the personal when I am engaging in a rhetorical analysis in person with an author's individual argument, of course, but I doubt this is the sort of thing you are objecting to).

I really am incomparably more interested in Superlative Discourses and Superlative Formations than in "Superlative Types," whatever that would be, and my concern with evil and injustice is one that is less interested in "those [I] perceive as villainous," as you say, than in discourses and formations that enable and encourage bad behavior and bad effects.

By way of conclusion I want to turn very quickly to something Anne mentioned in passing near the beginning of her comment, about whether I might should have worries about being sued for libel.

If only someone would try -- I could pay off my student loans years in advance of schedule!

But to be serious, it seems to me that to a certain extent gossip, ridicule, parody, tenuous diagnoses of psychological, social, institutional, medical malaise and so on are all part and parcel of the ongoing messy public collective contentious effort of human beings to make sense of what is happening in the world and among their fellows, to reconcile their histories with their hopes.

Given the chilling effect of efforts to police or sue or pressure or taboo some expression (the secrecy of corporate-military formations, for example, the relentless PR policing of cults like Scientology, for example), I actually find it a bit ominous that the specter of the libel suit has appeared in my in-box on more than one occasion from people who feel maligned by my critiques of Superlative and Sub(cult)ural Technocentricity.

Only the iceberg tip of my intellectual life is visible online -- I devote most of my intellectual energies to my students and their work, to my lectures on critical theory and technodevelopmental deliberation, and so on. An enormous amount of my argumentative energy is also devoted to more mainstream democratic-left politics, and I daresay the things I say in my appalled contemplation of the Killer Clowns of the Bush Administration and the neoliberal/neoconservative corporate-militarist madhouse-slaughterhouse are incomparably more personalizing than anything I say about the few thousand marginal transhumanist-identified techno-enthusiasts I analyze in my critiques of Superlativity and so on.

Given this, I will say that it seems to me somewhat... indicative... that of all these intellectual contexts and in the face of all these modes of critique it is from the discursive knot of technocentricity alone that I receive accusations of fraud and intellectual dishonesty, occasional threats to sue, failures to distinguish critique from defamation, or to distinguish structural analysis from the attribution of conscious intentions (as though any close reader worth his salt thinks authorial intention is the most interesting thing to scout for in trying to think through the meanings available and at work in a text's dynamic course through the diversity of the world).

There are rich literatures available to which one can make sensible recourse to better understand that sort of thing, literatures documenting the authoritarian tendencies of ideological pan-movements, the dynamics of cult formations, the long history of reductionism mistaken for science, and so on. It would seem very strange indeed to suggest (and as a matter of fact I emphatically do not think Anne is making this suggestion, and I am not directing these final comments to her -- her raising of this worry triggered a broader concern I have had for a long time) that taking these literatures seriously earmarks one's interventions as always only a kind of name-calling or even libelous utterance.

To be blunt: Cults behave that way.

I make no accusations.

Just don't be that guy.

Or, you know, if the shoe fits. Wear it.