Alien Logic
Alien Logic
Why it makes sense to take the universal machine as the unconscious
The following is the visualization of a lecture Martin gave on May 11, 2021, at Vienna's IWM, where he spent a few months as a fellow in the spring following the publication of the Philosophy of the Machine. Because this lecture is a tour de force pulling together his previous thinking as a prequel to his five-book series, the Psychology of the Machine1 – we’ve worked on the visual design of the lecture. We hope it helps the reader grasp the meaning of the Alien Logic and why it makes sense to take the Universal Machine as the unconscious, thoughts which Martin laid out in a Lettre article titled Blackbox Psychotope. For Martin, the Alien Logic lecture is the distillation of an over 30-year journey exploring the unknown continent beneath the Occidental Miracle—one that’s documented in his Philosophy of the Machine series, which is comprised of his first four major works2.
Hopkins Stanley
Martin Burckhardt
Alien Logic
The Universal Machine and the Psyche of the Social Apparatus
IWM, Vienna, May 11th, 2021
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Considering the talk's title, Alien Logic, I think the best I can do is to disappoint you thoroughly. When William Burroughs said: Language is a virus from outer space,3 I'd emphasize what interests me most is that which is extraterrestrial and alien in ourselves. Insofar as my perspective is somewhat anthropological in nature, I ask myself: what would the view of the present look like if you looked at it through the eyes of an anthropologist like Bronislaw Malinowski, who looked at his Trobrianders a good hundred years ago? He realized that, as an outsider, he could see through and analyze the economic system of this tribe, but his clear view remained closed to the people who were in it. And here lies my first disappointment. When I talk about an alien logic, I'm by no means referring to something completely unheard of and unprecedented, but to an insight that you’re all very familiar with: what we call system blindness.
I’d like to go further at this point and claim that the cause of our system blindness doesn't lie in our social systems' hypercomplexity but that we are unclear about our Social Engine [Gesellschaftstriebwerk]. When I mention a societal engine, you hear, in German at least, the notion of an unconscious as a psychic apparatus – or a psychic economy [Psychoökonomie4].
And it's true, you haven't misheard me; I’m deeply convinced that what we call Digitalisation represents a collective psychic unconscious: A Psychotope.
To prove this, I could present you with the Transhumanist’s fantasies of immortality or dissect German data protections' astonishing excesses. However, I'd lose sight of the clarity of my thoughts – despite the wealth of that material. More precisely: The brutality of my Alien Logic, which reads: the Machine is the unconscious.
So, how does one fall for such a thought? How does one conclude that the Machine is the unconscious? This idea has a long history – one that, in my case, has been reflected in a series of cultural and historical excursions – and books. However, the stumbling block that got me thinking was a simple child's question: What is a computer? Suppose you think of the computer as a tool or a medium designed to fulfill a specific purpose. In that case, you discover it quickly becomes shoreless, as a computer can be a typewriter. Still, I can just as easily use it to file a tax return – or to track a whale's or a Mars rover's geopositioning data. And because we could continue this game ad infinitum, we speak of a Universal Machine5 that can accomplish anything imaginable. Wouldn’t this mean we're not dealing so much with a tool as we are with a machine workshop? If we use Latin terminology, the tool would be understood as forma formata – and the workshop as forma formans, that is, as a shape-generating, morphogenetic form.
This problem of the Universal Machine was the starting point that made me drop all the tools that intellectual history had generously given me. If the concept of a tool becomes superfluous, then media theory can no longer be pursued – any more than you can philosophize with a hammer. So what to do? Naturally, the first question is: Has there ever been anything like this before? Does history provide us with an exemplary of another Universal Machine? The answer is yes, of course. Like the computer, the Wheelwork Automaton [Räderwerkautomaton6] of the Middle Ages is also a Universal Machine. You can use it as a power plant [Kraftwerk], as with water, wind, and tide mills. It can just as easily be used to automate a moving group of figures on a cathedral face – which is also an exemplar of an instrument of notation and control from which polyphonic music springs; and finally, it can be used as a mechanical clock that synchronizes social life. If you take this line of thought, the technological innovations emerging in the 12th and 13th centuries are almost self-explanatory: Division of labor, a Monetary Economy, and Interest. Or if we want to look at the corresponding psychological dimensions: Punctuality, Tact, and Precision.
This history, however, becomes a real torment trying to reconcile it with the philosophical historiography that tells the mechanical age began in the 17th- century, which, of course, brings us an embarrassment of thinking of the 12th-century automaton as a thing without a thinker – or conversely, concluding that Descartes was late by several centuries. In any case, we have an intellectual gap where a widely used functional Social Drive [Gesellschaftstriebwerk] reshaped medieval society without leaving any significant discursive traces: Total amnesia. And it’s precisely the exploration of this Psychotopic collective unconscious that became my project. Sure, there are symptoms – but dealing with them puts you in the position of a psychoanalyst wanting to bring its repressed memories back into the light. And just as the psychoanalyst understands every narrative as a symptom of the unconscious, you're compelled to take the discourse not at face value but by questioning how it relates to the Machine as its unconscious. Although this walk into cultural history has occasionally felt like walking into a terra incognita, the Universal Machine's leitmotif seemed like an extremely reliable compass. However, the most extraordinary stimulus was the material itself acted as a resonating space – and the follow-up questions came naturally of their own accord. As an exemplar: In my study of the Middle Ages, I've realized that the Gothic Cathedral is where proto-Capitalism is articulated in its clearest form. This isn't reflected only in the fact that Gothic Cathedrals remained the largest buildings in Europe until well into the 19th century but also in their technological innovations – such as the ribbed vault and the modularization of their building components. At the same time, the organization of work changed with the division of labor, the emergence of guilds, and a monetary economy. It isn't by chance that Lynn White spoke of an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages. Not only are the marvels of this revolution, the Cathedrals themselves, all dedicated to Notre Dame, but it’s also how the intellectuals sang praises to the Virgin as the epitome of pure reason. So what could be more obvious than taking a much closer look at Marian devotion itself? And so you sit down and study the dogma of the Immaculate Conception – always with an eye as to what it might have to do with the Machine. And it’s not surprising that you don’t meet many like-minded people along the way, nor will you be surprised that asking this question alone was blasphemy for both church historians studying the dogma and for historians of technology – making it a double-blasphemy. That I tried it, all the same, was solely due to the academic obligations of a question, not to mention the significance of the mechané, which, as a spoiler alert, I won't reveal to you until after I reveal the surprise: The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is, in fact, the perfect machine, a flying machine with which pure reason has been able to shoot itself up into the sky7
This brings us back to the initial thesis that the Machine functions as an unconscious: as a forma formans, as a morphogenetic apparatus – and perhaps with thanks to the Mother of God, raising the question: What is a Machine anyway? Are we correct in our association of it with a material object? I would say no because, as digitalisation teaches, large parts of our machinery [Maschinenparks8] can become disembodied. Isn’t this the case with an algorithm that transforms human perceptions into a form that reliably identifies cats after metabolizing countless cat photos – which is also the process for producing the Attention Currency’s raw material for a platform like Facebook? In this sense, the image of a device-like monster machine can be dismissed as a historical obsession, obscuring that the Machine is, first and foremost, an intellectual concept – and a walk through history confirms this suspicion.
The Greeks spoke of a mechané long before it was linked to a material object. Similarly, technologia in the 3rd century BC doesn't refer to machinery or an arsenal but to the availability of rhetorical tools.9
The oldest material object we can associate with the Machine is the crane appearing in a 5th century BC Greek tragedy bringing a deity down onto the stage: the deus ex machina. With this theologoumenon, we're already reasonably attuned to what the journey into the Machine's prehistory will offer us. So let's look at the word itself: It derives from the Indo-European root *magh – which in the broadest sense covers the meaning of might and magic10. In this sense, mechané can be translated as cunning and deception of nature (which explains my passion for Blessed Mary’s maiden flight).
In short, the Machine is that which isn’t nature – a negation and a negative potency. Certainly, here, in a Hegelian manner, we could go into speculative figures of thought. Still, I'd like to show you – in a historical-materialist manner – the two twin Machines with which the Universal Machine's reign begins as Western Culture leaves the realms of magic behind. One is the Alphabet, while the other is the process of lost form. Referred to as lost-form casting, the lost-wax process, or cire perdu, this technique is the metallurgical practice that allowed the Cretans around 1500 BC to cast sculptures of their Zeus metallon (whom Mircea Eliade aptly characterizes as the first surviving male deity.) Of course, the fact that there is a connection between metallurgy and the Alphabet is not immediately obvious – but it can be easily illustrated in the briefest form by the myth of Kadmos, who brought the Alphabet to the Greeks and founded the first Polis. The story begins with Kadmos, tasked by his father Agenor to get his sister Europa, who Zeus abducted to Crete, back home to Phoenicia, which is where alphabetic characters, the phoinikoi, as Plato calls them, originated. He sets off with a cow westwards to the land of cattle, Boeotia, after being told he's to settle down where the cow thrusts her horns into the ground. When this happens – which you can interpret as a revolution of the sign when the Phoenician bull, the aleph, becomes the Greek alpha – a dragon emerges from a cave, and a battle ensues. Kadmos kills the dragon – and, at the command of Athena, sows its teeth into the earth. The fertile ground sprouts little iron men, warriors, who kill each other – until only five remain, the vowels of the Alphabet. Here, as in every myth, we have an intellectual overdetermination: first, we have the Alphabet; then we have metallurgy in the form of the iron men that spring from the earth; and finally, we have the general order of reproduction in the image of the dragon, and then in the form of the Phallic Bull. Obviously, the myth doesn’t lack clarity, and as an origin myth, it clearly indicates that the Machine has a fundamental role in the foundation of the Polis. It isn't just the human world affected by the Machine. An overthrow of the pantheon also accompanies the deception of nature as Zeus ascends as the father god, and at the same time, there's this strange phenomenon of double birth among his descendants. Take Athena. She is an offspring of Zeus and Metis, but as we know, Zeus devours his wife. Soon, he begins to suffer from a terrible headache as a form of male hysteria– after that, Hephaestus must deliver a head birth from his skull. And Athena springs forth in full armor. In short: logos spermatikos as generative abstraction has replaced Natural procreation. By which we have located, quite incidentally, the starting point of male domination, the patrix of the patriarchy: the Machine.
What does it mean when an artificial intelligence replaces the Natural procreative order? That is precisely what I alluded to in the title Alien Logic. Because here, figures of thought come into play for which we have no models in nature. Let's just take the letter alpha, which has been stripped of its bull shape: Once it's become an abstract, phonetic sign, we can indulge in the illusion that this sign has always existed and, therefore, represents something like an eternal truth. Plato demonstrates this magic trick in his Kratylos, where he devotes himself to the question of a divine original language. Although he concludes it’s no longer traceable from the Babylonian confusion of languages, humans still have the alphabetic letters. Since these represent something like divine DNA, the divine language can be restored.
Naturally, this is nothing but creative metaphysics: the conception of an uncreated, unchangeable Parmenidean being endowed with procreative power. Historically, the morphogenetic potency of the Alphabet is indeed enormous. Concepts like isomorphism, democracy, identity, causality, logic, and the like only make sense under the pretense of an alphabetic sign system that’s sunk into the unconscious.
Similarly, our legal institution presupposes the unquestionable authority of writing. What the classical philologists call the Greek miracle in great intellectual embarrassment is the incursion of that which is not of nature: the Machine, Alien Logic.11
Remarkable, however—and this brings us back to the beginning question of the Universal Machine and Digitalisation—is that this Social Drive, although a product of reason, could sink into the unconscious. But before we turn our attention to the question of the lost form, I want to try to get to the bottom of this riddle. Imagine you are a scholastic monk. Because the world of the educated is small, you will have heard that a famous scholastic has retrained the good Lord to be a clockmaker, while another has urged the world's princes to regard their own bodies as clockwork: an intricate structure needing to be kept in time. And, of course, in the Cathedral's shadow, you'll be confronted with the program of proto-capitalism: Time is Money is Time. In short, you will encounter this Machine with a mixture of fascination and repulsion. Why fascination? Because a new system of order is visible here. Repulsion? Because money, as a proliferating sign, announces a diabolical order breaking with everything you’ve ever believed in. You may have also heard the horrific story recounted by Caesarius of Heisterbach. Jutta von Frechen, a female usurer, is buried – and while the monk says the prayers to save her from purgatory, the corpse lies there quietly. But as soon as he has finished, the corpse lapses into this gesture of counting money and can only be brought back to a dead rest by the priest starting to pray again.12 If this episode of the twitching corpse shows us the caesura of the medieval automaton, it’s doubtful whether our monk will attribute the different manifestations to the same cause.
Since the Machine reveals itself in highly different forms – as a moral claim, as an economic ratio, and finally: as a symbolic form in which reason transfigures itself – it’s more likely our monk will perceive them as different things having nothing in common.
Thus, the clock and the magically moving figures may convince him of God's grandiosity, while he wants to let the usurer – in the most beautiful cognitive dissonance – burn in hellfire. However, as much as he twists and turns: our monk can’t escape the underlying forma formans. Just as interest gives rise to the proliferation of money, the Machine begins proliferating in uncanny ways, producing countless offspring. In trying to save his Christian worldview, our monk will have to make a series of compromises, bringing with them complicated follow-up problems. Take the sale of indulgences. It’s the Church's reaction to proto-Capitalism. Once the church understood the pointlessness of preaching against interest – which is nothing more than the mechanical clock’s promise of rationality – it moved quickly to rebuild heaven: With the Purgatory, a mezzanine was established between heaven and hell where usurers could work off their sins. Thus, the church had come to terms with the circumstances as it started selling the forgiveness of sins as checks of a sort, redeemable in Heaven’s Book of Mercies. À la Longue, however, this measure became a scandal, giving the Protestants cause to tear down such a babel of sin.
When I speak of an outsourced unconscious that we see articulating itself as a monetary economy, then as a demand for interest which becomes a final form of ecclesiastical sales of indulgences, we recognize a fundamental ratio in these mental derivatives – and the sum of all these derivatives forms the Psychotope. Now, the scholastic discourse, like our monk, may do its utmost to ignore it, but such denial of reality doesn’t last long because the Psychotope gains in importance with every business transaction as the clock ticks. And the more preaching and commerce diverge, the more the Psychotope must take the form of a social unconscious. Contrasting this unconscious with the Freudian psychic apparatus, the difference is noticeable, for there is neither time nor negation in the Freudian unconscious – hence, no ticking clock. Freud insists it is primarily the primal horde that’s at work here, while, on the other hand, in the Psychotope, we’re dealing with a historically mutable apparatus. But to understand it, you don't have to go back to the primal horde or imagine primal scenes such as patricide and the Oedipus complex, as an individual psychological approach is altogether out of place here. On the contrary, we need to realize how an alien logic for which nature provides us with no model is reflected in the collective psyche.
Accordingly, the mechanical unconscious also puts us in opposition to the exteriorization theory that anthropology has put forward. According to this theory, which goes back to André Leroi-Gourhan, every human tool is the externalization of an inherent human capacity. The hammer is to be understood as a strengthened fist, the book as a reified memory – and finally, the computer as an outsourced brain. Thus: Everything is predetermined in the natural world; there’s nothing new under the sun.
However, the alphabetic sign, carrying eternity within it, is as little predetermined in nature as the money sign generating added value on its own – or the computer's logic founded in George Boole's Laws of Thought.
And since I've mentioned it, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you of the digital world formula's strangeness. While it’s been forgotten, it provides the most striking exemplum of the mechané’s logic. Boole simply asks himself: What do zero and one have in common? You multiply a zero by itself – which always gives zero, and the same is true for one. If we formalize this, we get the formula of our digital adversary’s nature: x=xn.13 Translated into everyday language, we could say: ›I am a population of myself, a multiplicity, a threat of proliferation.‹ This may not apply to me as a natural person, but every digitized object can proliferate at the speed of light – for an infinity defying all natural laws. We must change our perspective if we want to understand what society is like in the digital Psychotope. Instead of starting from nature, we have to begin with the Machine – which in turn means unworldliness [Weltfremdheit]: alien logic. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy's famous quote: ›Ask not what the Machine can do for you, ask: What does it want from you?‹
If you ignore the Universal Machine – and instead try to philosophize with a hammer – you risk falling for self-deception. We don't even have to refer to the mistakes of Anthropology, Sociology, or Media theory here; we could just as easily walk into AI’s arcanum. Here, too, we are confronted with promises that seem religious, even chiliastic in origin. If we keep in mind that the forma formans implies a transcendency, this isn’t surprising. More peculiar, however, is the fact that the history of the computer – in a time obsessed with history – leads into a dark zone. Walking with the heroic figures of our computer culture, you’ll be confronted with puzzles that are, in terms of craziness, on par with the extraordinary cases of psychoanalysis. Take Ada Lovelace, the self-professed high priestess of the Machine, who asks Babbage to rig her brain so that she can generate programs according to the model of immaculate conception; or Alan Turing, who commits suicide Snow White-style, eating a poisoned apple. These aren’t individual extravagances but precursors of an order taking possession of society itself.
Any approach based on individual psychology is misleading here. It would be much more accurate to think of the Universal Machine as a collective destiny that takes on an almost overwhelming power of persuasion precisely in the sense that it determines our external world as a psychotope in the form of our objects of exchange, institutions, and formulas of belief, to the extent that the prehistory disappears into a black box as fantasies emerge from this magic Machine with increasing intensity.
If we go back to the beginning and consider the Machine as a symbolic form, deciphering the new Social Drive is comparatively simple. However, the more tools are added, and strange hybrid forms are created with the existing tools, the more complicated deconstructive decoding becomes. You can no longer see the forest for the trees. The system blindness simply stems from the abundance of tools burying the forma formans under itself. Like with a medieval palimpsest or a Wunderblock, whole layers of cover memories can be laid over it. The then repressed isn’t the one-time traumatic event that dates back to childhood, but rather a strange over-familiarity: a pattern as ubiquitous as the air that I breathe. This has already been achieved with the alphabetical letter almost uncannily. I was 35 years old when I stood in the parking lot of the State Library and opened the book bearing the beautiful title Sign and Design – with the promise in its subtitle to enlighten me on the psychogenetic sources of the Alphabet. And there I saw for the first time what a child could have seen – but what Wittgenstein, linguistics, functionalism, and structuralism had all failed to teach me – that the Aleph sign had once been an image: a Phallic Bull. That was when the State Library rose up behind me and flew away with all of its books inside.
Let's finally return to the starting point of our story, to the temporal-rift [Zeitriss]14, from which the Alien Logic begins by demonstrating this using the exemplar of the story’s first Machine as an equally practical, theoretical, and psychological act. Let's put ourselves in a pre-alphabetic society, or rather, in the mind of a sculptor who imagines a sculpture of Zeus. Whereas a few centuries earlier, this man would have struggled with a tree, a stone, or a granite rock – now he can simply shape a wax sculpture with his bare hands. Then, the sculpture is covered in a layer of plaster after a few pipe forms are added to drain the wax. The plastered object is now held over a fire – to harden the plaster, and the wax melts away. We’re left with the sculpture's negative impression: the lost form, cire perdu. Moving on to the next step, it should become clear that we're not dealing with the work of an original genius but with a labor-intensive, highly collective affair. Now, it’s a task of smelting ore that, as people thought at the time, has been stolen from the Earth Mother. This requires sophisticated metallurgical techniques that require handling a container filled with molten metal well above 1000°. Because our metallurgical society has mastered this, they can pour the molten metal into the plaster mold’s pipes. Usually, the mold was buried in the ground – then excavated after the metal had cooled.
Before I question the spiritual implications of this process, I'd like to tell you about the birth myth attributed to the Cretan Zeus metallon. There, the goddess Rhea gives birth to the child Zeus on Mount Ida. The same kind of little iron men seen in the Kadmos myth assist in keeping the child safe from the devouring father Kronos' grasp by beating their shields wildly to drown out the mother and child’s cries. Little Zeus grows up in a cave on Mount Ida where he’s nourished with ambrosia and nectar and protected by sacred bees (remember wax for making the sacred lost-form matrix?) One day, some armed warriors meet to find out what’s going on in this magical cave during the great fire that breaks out yearly. After painting their faces with plaster (for protection from the sacred heat), they armor themselves with shields and set off. Upon reaching the cave, they’re swarmed by the sacred bees, which have mutated into killer bees. Just as they glimpse the cave, they transform into birds and ascend into the sky. And what do they see? The god in swaddling. This is the secret that the cave of birth reveals to their gaze. With the lost wax process in mind, it doesn't take much imagination to realize that the myth of Zeus’ birth is understood as the apotheosis of human artistry – as mechané, machine, and a fraudulent deception of nature. Insofar as it's only inevitable that subsequent deities, like Athena and Dionysus, are also conceived in variations on this myth15 (as exemplified in logos spermatikos.)
But before we get lost in mythological questions, let's clarify the structure of this labor process. With the process of the lost form, nature is annihilated; it's transformed – in its molten form – into a magmafied plastic offering no resistance whatsoever.
In fact, this metallurgical production process survived well into the 20th century; exemplars include the Rolls-Royce Spirit of Ecstasy as the finial adorning their radiators. Given this groundbreaking innovation, it's easy to understand that metallurgists have adopted a higher-quality method of reproduction – a world of artifice in which nature no longer hinders perfection.
If we imagine that every conceivable form can be turned out in this way, we can speak of an unleashing of our fantasies, a shift in emphasis from that of manufacturing to that of shaping.16 Nothingness has become a morphogenetic potency. Now, in the space of their imagination, humans no longer struggle with stupidly hammering matter but conceive of things for which there is no model in nature. Consequently, sculptures of gods that outlive their creators inspire the idea of Eternal Life – and it’s only inevitable that this god, unlike the male fertility deities before him, isn't killed but survives. Thus, the Zeus metallon gives rise to the phantasm of Metaphysics. And because the bull figure is considered offensive, we understand why the Minotaur, hidden in a labyrinth, must be removed from the World. Quoting Hegel, we could say that the Spirit of Negation makes itself felt here as abstraction makes its appearance. Curiously, it's this conviction of disaffiliation, indeed of unworldliness, that's when, in the ›blink of an eye‹ [Augenblick], the individual begins saying »I« with conviction, which is also the moment when an Absolute Spirit enters the world. Because the theoplastic is followed by the socioplastic, the development of archaic Greece displays an analogous course – and, as in the myth, the men begin arming themselves with bracers, greaves, helmets, and shields giving rise to the Hoplite spirit that characterizes the polis. These brotherhoods no longer marched separately but as one man: as a collective singular. If the Hoplite Phalanx, relieved-out from the Melting Pot, forms a socioplastic, the same Spirit can be observed affecting the individual warrior's psyche. Ernst Bethe tells of a Doric initiation rite predating our Honeymoon traditions. An older warrior comes to a family and presents them with a bull as an offering, and in return, he's given the son of the house. The two disappear into a cave, where the elder (the erastes) endows his lover (the eromenos) with the Hoplite's unique abilities. After two weeks, the boy, who has been transformed into a man and given a shield and spear, returns to the family. The cave where the initiation took place bears the inscription: Here is where X attended to Y. Now, this Cretan honeymoon is obviously a form of higher, social reproduction – and anticipates the idea of the gymnasium, where the concept of naked [gymnos] body’s complete physical and mental plasticity is realized. Perhaps here you begin to understand the connection between Corporeal Plasticity and the World of Signs – and why Socrates prides himself on educating his pupils to become living books or why Plato presents us with his allegory of the cave.
But let us return to the crucial question – the fact that Greek culture emerges under the sign of the Machine, as that which is not nature, that which goes beyond nature. So the lost form turns into negativity, turns into a utopian spirit. Only on this basis can society be understood as a work of art: a nomos that follows self-chosen laws. This is where the law of the Universal Machine reveals itself: it liberates forms that are not of this World. Given that a god’s sculpture is the first object of desire, it’s not surprising that the lost form is the gateway where metaphysics and religious monotheism come into being. Although one could easily draw a line to theology here, I would prefer to speak of allology – from allos17, meaning alien. In other words, it’s a doctrine of strangeness derived from something unnatural. When natural philosophers use the same word for the elements as they use for letters (stoichos, stoichea), they clearly strive to understand nature as machina mundi, as a system. And because this isn’t a matter of naturalism but of allology, the atomists aren’t afraid to declare their system of thought to be reality. And this says: there are only atoms and empty space.
If the process of the lost form and the Alphabet are so fundamental for the Greek World’s construction, how is it possible that this Social Engine [Gesellschaftstriebwerk] has been completely forgotten? This is precisely where the logic of the Universal Machine comes into play.
As I said, we’re dealing with a forma formans, a morphogenetic workshop that creates tools in its own image. Steve Jobs once expressed the power of emptiness in a wonderful remark: The computer is the solution; what we need is the problem. This reversal of causality, where the solution precedes the problem, dissolves the moment we imagine the Universal Machine as a space: a mental continent that only opens up in its entirety over a more extended period of time. This is precisely the metaphor we have in mind when discussing Digital Natives. But where can we place reason here? Because intellectuals often have narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence, they like to claim that they have things under control. However, this gesture of self-empowerment denies that you cannot control a space in which there is always something behind the scenes and where the future is open and transcendent. You're in it, but you can't control it.
Here is where the embarrassment returns, which had already been set in motion with the creation of the sculpture of the gods. How can you believe in a god that you created yourself?
I could have the idea of giving him different attributes tomorrow – or replacing him with my Maxi-Me without further ado.
Here, at the latest, it becomes clear why the first product of the Machine wasn't an ordinary object of utility but the deity that metallurgic practice elevated to a collective ego ideal. With this apotheosis, the metallurgist guild members could believe they had received their knowledge from a higher authority rather than making it themselves. This is the initial ground of the collective unconscious. It creates a superego with which the group identifies – and, in this way, obscures that we’re not dealing with divine metaphysics but with man's work. Even Gottlob Frege insists in his essay Der Gedanke [The Thought] that an idea belongs to a different sphere than a hammer. For a while, the individual creates facts with his hammer; the thought is conceived as a conceptio. The painter Sigmar Polke has made this clear in a beautiful picture title. There is a black triangle in the upper right corner of the painting – and the title reads: Higher beings ordered: paint upper right corner black!
The escape into metaphysics is undoubtedly a collective relief. In this way, the self-imposed rules are disguised with a numinous layer, which is an excellent way of compelling a larger group to behave in a certain way.
Therefore, the theoplastic can’t be separated from the socioplastic. But the Machine's apotheosis has the consequence of consigning its existence to a numinous darkness. Where the Machine constitutes a corresponding superego, a corresponding unconscious also emerges. To the extent the Machine releases secondary and tertiary formations into the World, it itself may become illegible, and its disappearance is observable in Philosophy, its derivative Sciences, and all of its other Social Institutions. Just as Plato remodeled the Alphabet into divine DNA but buried it beneath the table with his critique of scripture, the institutions also buried their prehistory beneath them.
If we pause at this point and compare this unconscious with its counterpart in psychoanalysis, it is clear that a great gulf opens, both in terms of desire and repression. Where Freud traces everything back to the same old story, Oedipus, patricide, and infantile sexuality, we're dealing with drives referring to a specific historical dispositive. This dispositive isn't stable and can undergo profound changes, which is why I chose the term Psychotope.
Let us take the desire of Metaphysics as an exemplum that emerged with the process of the lost form. Here, you can see precisely how it takes on greater and greater significance as the memory of the materiality of the process disappears.
In the Sophists, for example, you still find an awareness that their antilogike techné, the Art of Refutation, has something to do with the Alphabet. Thrasymachus, a proud alphabetic native, has his name spelled out on his tombstone: The name is Theta, Rho, Alpha, San, Ypsilon, My, Alpha, Chi, Ou, San, hometown Chalkedon, the craft [techné] Sophia. A generation later – with Plato – the memory of this is artfully disposed of. Instead, we are confronted with a metaphysical flying Machine waiting to take off. As a desiring Machine, metaphysical desire can only take off when you've freed yourself from the idea that this could have anything to do with lower craftsmanship.
It would be an entire lecture tracing the historical development from the process of the lost form to the Holy Scriptures – yet this line can be drawn. With great fascination, I devoted all of last summer to studying Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, so I can only refer you to the essay that appeared in Lettre18. What's particularly interesting in this context is how another culture reacts to the Alphabetic Psychotope. First of all, it should be mentioned that the Universal Machine has an inherent cosmopolitan, if not an imperialist dimension. This also applies incidentally to the digitization process that began with the Unix epoch in 1970 – which we've somewhat misleadingly labeled as Globalization. This clash of cultures – which, in the 2nd century BC, Judaism led to apocalyptic writing, the Maccabean revolt, and ultimately the sanctification of scripture – can be understood psychologically as identification with the enemy, as an introjection of the cosmopolitan Psychotope. It begins with confronting a superior force that's difficult to resist. Why? Because cosmopolitanism promises liberation from tribalistic borders while also making a highly seductive offer of Identity: that Art and Philosophy can train you to become a free citizen. While the upper classes enthusiastically accepted the offer, the more conservative lower classes experienced this order of desire intrusions as foreign domination. Psychologically, this is comparable to the contemporary split between the Somewheres and Anywheres described by David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere. The only chance to defend oneself against foreign domination is to deify the enemy as an introject while splitting off foreign, unwanted parts. The result is a split between symbolon and diabolon – or, from a historical perspective, the sanctification of scripture and the invention of the devil. Behind the scenes, however, the Greek Psychotope penetrates the Jewish, later the Christian concept of religion. God is turned into a philologist and devotes himself to the subtleties of logos-theology, or the Alien Logic, as I would say. But as we know, it’s the small print that always counts in the long run.
If I refer to Marcion, a Gnostic thinker of the 1st century AD, it's because his teaching is a grotesque radicalization of the material process that we have worked out in the lost form model. Like all the great Gnostics, Marcion thinks that the world, like all materiality in general, is the creation of a lower, diabolical deity. This creator of this world is now contrasted with an unknown, alien god who wants to redeem humanity from its prison, its senselessness, and its earthly hell. Consequently, Marcion claims that this God is an entity that no human being by nature can know anything about – that he reveals himself as an unworldly alien solely by his own decree. This radical reinterpretation, in which salvation can only come from God, can almost be read as an apotheosis of the lost form – except that what we have called allology has taken the form of theology. This fading out of the production process, this total amnesia of the mechané, is indispensable. If we were to admit human authorship, the projection of a heavenly Jerusalem, the certainty of salvation, and the hope of redemption would immediately collapse. Now, you might be tempted to think that we're dealing with a distant epoch with little to do with today's problems. However, after thirty years of study, the history of the Universal Machine has taught me that the respective historical psychotopes can produce surprising, even bizarre, results. This marriage of cognitive dissonance characterizes, in particular, those epochs at the breaking point of two thought continents – where an old order begins to dissolve, but a new order has not yet really taken root.
What does the discovery of the Psychotope mean for our present? Nothing else than reckoning with a collective unconscious mediated by a Universal Machine, followed by questioning the respective discourse on how it relates to social practices. This work is similar to psychoanalysis, except it doesn’t deal with the dream narratives of patients but with social institutions: Education, Law, sovereignty, gender roles, what counts as Truth, Art, Value, and the Ideal body. A problem here – and here, you're welcome to think of the twitching corpse – is that transitioning from one Universal Machine to another is a conflict of the first order. This seems to me the very signature of our present. Landing in the Digital Psychotope, our institutions, and discourses are remnants of a doomed world, the wreckage we use to stay afloat with our heads above water. At this point, I don't want to go into a critique of the present, but will content myself with the observation that we should look at the problems of the post-democratic, post-factual, post-atheistic world under the premise of our alien logic. This would be my offer: psychoanalysis of our institutions, informing you that we are part of a psychotope.
I thank you for your patience
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
See Burckhardt, M – Über dem Luftmeer: Unbehagen in der Moderne, Berlin, 2023, which is the first volume of this series.
These are Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung, Frankfurt/M, 1994; Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche, Frankfurt/M, 1999; Philosophie der Maschine, Berlin, 2018; and Die Scham der Philosophen, Berlin 2006.
A concept by William S. Burroughs originally from The Ticket that Exploded, which he further discussed in the German version of The Electronic Revolution [Die Elektronische Revolution – Electronic Revolution]. The quote goes like this: »The donar was released folk singer Logos — Uncontrolled flash bulbs popped — It is a grand feeling — Language of virus (which is these experiments) really necessary? Message of life written ‘We have come to eat’?? ––«. See Burroughs, W. – The Ticket that Exploded, London, 2010, p. 78.
This Psychoökonomie is not to be confused with Psychophysiological Economics, which focuses on consumer behavior – or Ökonomische Psychologie, which focuses on the nature of consumption and decision-making behavior in economic contexts. Instead, in its simplest form, it’s about the shared space between people that defines reality and formats our understanding of the world. It’s what Lacon referred to as the Field of the Real that provides the background of our mediality.
Martin initially discussed the leitmotif of the Universal Machine as a Social Engine in Die Universale Maschine (Merkur, No 501 12/1990); the Englisch translation is Emergence of the Psychotope (Ex nihilo, August 28, 2023); see Burckhardt, M. – Philosophie der Maschine, Berlin, 2018, for his mature thinking on it.
The Räderwerkautomat is the second Universal Machine and a central Burckhardtian leitmotif, which Martin begins elucidating in the first few pages of his Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung, as the Material and Social Engine of the Middle Ages. See also Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche; and Philosophie der Maschine.
Martin has traced this leitmotif across his major works. See Das Bild und der Spiegel in Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung; Muttergottes Weltmaschine in Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche; and Die Politik des Himmels in Philosophie der Maschine.
Maschinenparks translates as a ›park of machinery,‹ meaning a collection or assemblage of devices, tools, and instruments as a Workshop.
Incidentally, this also applies to Foucault's concept of a Dispositif, which refers to the structuration of language as a ›speech act‹ – which involves the ›hard power‹ of mastery and agency; while it may appear to share a certain affinity with the Psychotope, the latter is characterized by this lack of mastery and agency we refer to as ›soft power.‹
In Philosophie der Maschine, Martin further defines this as Power-Machine-Magic.
Martin describes this in much greater detail in Die Scham der Philosophen.
The story is recounted as follows: »And behold a devil moved her arms and hands, as though she was counting money. Gerlac was sent for to exorcise and prevent the devil from tormenting the body. This done the corpse became still, but when he broke off his adjuration, it began again, moving now the legs and now the hands.« Caesarius von Heisterbach – The Dialogue on Miracles (vol. 2), Ed. G.G. Coulton and Eileen Power, New York, 1929, p. 271.
See Burckhardt, M. & Höfer, D. – All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse, trans. Erik Butler, Cambridge, 2017.
This notion of a Zeitriss, or temporal-rift, is a leitmotif Martin has been relieving-out since his thinking’s beginning that’s essential in grasping the Psychotope. In essence, it’s what Hopkins sometimes calls Ein electrisch knisternden Zeitriss [an electrical crackling temporal rift] that Martin points out is telematic in its electrical crackling essence, which is the nature of the lost form. In its most basic form, it’s that moment we stumble over a scandalon in our everyday world that we can’t explain, either personally or en masse; a sudden moment of attention-grabbing that causes us to pause and notice how uncanny something is—it’s something that can’t be ignored – despite any attempts at ignorance, or making flimsy intellectual explanations, as its symptomatic of the Machine’s symbolic operating system (or Psychotope) which formats the ever-changing open future of our Social Drives. It’s also analogous to ›the cracks through which the light comes‹ in our personhood, of which the Psychotope is a current recoding of our Individual Identity into our Dividual Identity – and, as the lost form, never involves any notions of agency or mastership as its always softly-powered in its Psychotopic nature.
Logos spermatikos is the mythological origins of the Alien Logik understood here as the exiting of nature through the magmafying second birth of the lost form, which originally separates us as anthropo- [άνθρωπο-] from zoon [ζῷον], and then the civilized from barbarians.
Here, Martin traces our primordial experiences with fire’s transformational power through various cultish metallurgical practices coalescing in the process of lost wax casting as it moves through Greek pre-history and history as a reflexion of the melting and casting of forma formans/forma formata [form forming/formed form]; becoming the creatio ex nihilo extractive re-casting of the self outside of the natural world to dominate it by Einbildungkraft [Power of Imagination] as he describes in great detail in Philosophie der Maschine.
Allos [ἄλλος] is another of the same kind, compared to heteros [ἕτερος], which is another of a different kind. This comparison is referred to as the »Allos-Argument« in Biblical circles, as in John 14:16 or Galatians 2:4. Here, Martin uses allos to describe the difference stemming from sameness, as an alien logic from human imagination, not from some extraterrestrial source.
Burckhardt, M. – Apocalypse now!: Über die Mechanik endzeitlichen Denkens, Lettre, LI 131, Winter 2020.
