The Logic of the Dividual

Or how to prove yourself worthy of a chameleon

On the Logic of the Dividual [Zur Logik des Divduums¹] was written in 2016, after Martin published Alles und Nichts² with Dirk Höfer and finished his science fiction novel Score in 2015.³ This was a very productive time for him as he’d turned his attention to writing a history of digitalisation series for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.⁴ It was also during this period that he began summarizing the first 30 years of his thinking in the Philosphie der Maschine⁵ as the first volume prelude to his Psychology of the Machine series. The leitmotif of the Dividual first appeared in Martin's 1994 in his first major book, the Metamorphosen,⁶ which was printed that same year. But by 2016, it’d relieved-out its urgency in his thinking, driven by the current rift in the Zeitgeist’s worldview that was increasingly shifting into the Digital Age. Here, he noted how geo-based dating applications coming into the world obliged each participant to present themselves as an avatar – a logic representing the crowning conclusion of a transformation from an offline to an online persona heralding the beginning of what we know as the Attention Economy. But because you must submit to a new, digital written order, there’s a deep narcissistic humiliation involved. The virtuoso of the past must realize his claim to uniqueness and integrity is no longer redeemable. Or as Leonard Cohen translated this in his wonderful line:

There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in…⁷

An observation that is nothing less than a call for a new enlightenment.

Hopkins Stanley

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Martin Burckhardt

The Logic of the Dividual

Eventually, the Avatar’s birth will be seen as a revolution of the self, similar to the cultural-historical transformation last seen in the Renaissance. Jakob Burckhardt, who is responsible for this epoch’s description, traced this caesura back to the Condottieri, those mercenary leaders of the 13^th and 14^th centuries who not only took control of the Italian cities which were disintegrating into class and aristocratic feuds but also developed a hitherto unrivaled virtuosity of personality. Of course, this artistic virtuosity fed less on storybooks and didactic texts than the vivid experiences of human abysmalness, making this term’s transformation most illuminating. Whereas Medieval virtutes⁸ stood for the Cardinal Virtues, the 15^thcentury virtù stood for of-being-otherwise, where the prerequisite virtuosity was an art of disguise rather than being morally virtuous – an exigence that Pico della Mirandola surprisingly associates with human dignity: »Who will not wonder at this chameleon of ours«?⁹ Historically, the discovery of freedom goes hand in hand with the collapse of medieval communities and the awareness that people's affairs do not follow a God-given order but are works of art—social sculptures that individuals are capable of shaping: the »State as a Work of Art,« as Jakob Burckhardt puts it. Of course, the glorifying view of the Renaissance man all too easily overlooks that this transformation by no means took place naturally. Quite the opposite: we’re dealing here with a large-scale epistemological shift that begins with the Universal Machine’s Wheelwork Automaton [Räderwerkautomaten] and, after various metamorphoses, takes on the form of the mental corset that’s been called the Code of Representation.¹⁰

Although this story belongs to the tempi passati, we can still discern something similar happening today. Because the figures of representation have now become as problematic as the virtutes of the Middle Ages, of which the fake CVs of our political virtuosos are only weak symptoms. Far more important is that where classical personality development has taught us the virtù of the virtuoso, spaces are now opening up that we perceive as virtual—no, even more than that, spaces that threaten to replace our virtuosos. And because this threat has already become a cliché, we counter it with a defensive spell in the form of the analog being's authenticity and genuineness: Unplugged! Of course, this apotheosis of nakedness can’t hide that the positive has long since joined the new power aggregate, that it operates in a state of networking and telepresence: Plugged in. It's precisely in this everyday involvement, which is hardly even noticed anymore, that this shift in the Language of Domination becomes apparent: from Representation to Simulation, from the Wheelwork [Räderwerk] to the computer’s digitalisation, from the economy of scarcity to information overkill.

A change in the Language of Domination doesn't necessarily mean this new thinking will be translated into our social institutions. Au contraire: just as the individual clings to his natural unamplified humanum, political structures cling to the traditional forms from which their legitimacy is derived: the code of representation. This is how it comes to a schism where grammar grows beyond semantics, the office-holder transcends its office, and the stratagem leaves every vestige of legitimacy behind. A conflict zone has opened up here, not unlike those fault lines in the late Medieval worldview insofar as where the new human makes itself felt primarily as a guerrilla and creative destroyer committed to privatizing the commonwealth. Disruption, or a form of new-age millenarianism, prioritizes liberation from the shackles of the past over a goal: the dissolution of boundaries, liberation from the constraints of society, and the relaxed atmosphere of the Pirate Bay.

Avatar

Here, the exotic figure of the Avatar signals that we're dealing with the collapse of a heteronomous order. Fittingly, Théophile Gautier's story of the Avatar¹¹ dates from 1853, the same period Irish mathematician Boole was writing his The Laws of Thought, declaring his intention of removing the representative from mathematics with digital logic.¹² Gautier's Avatar, on the other hand – an amusing comedy of mistaken identity in which the hero finds himself in the body of another through a magnetic mechanism – plays with the knowledge of a doctor who has spent a long time in India becoming familiar with the Hindu deity Vishnu’s hypostases, known as avatars. Insofar, as the Avatar can be read as a romanticized and bourgeoisified version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein monster [Monster], conjured from lightning in the scientist's laboratory. While these fantasy creations are certainly influenced by changes in the epistemological field, they still appear to be a form of exotic magic, a wonderful dissolution of boundaries following desires rather than serving to explore a new intellectual continent. Hence, the world of avatars belongs to an imaginary, ultimately noncommittal game world that doesn’t effect real life: Second Life.

This separation logic may be why we don't experience the revolution of the self that's unfolding before our eyes as such. Wherever the artificial paradises become a reality, they only bring forth the new in a hidden form. We shed our social dresses, freeing ourselves from the shackles that the world of representation imposes – but to what end? Only to don a disguise from the same world's costume closet: moi-même, larger than life! Here, we encounter a curiosity well-known from the history of media disruptions. So as Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin have already shown in their book L'Apparition du Livre,¹³ when printing conquered Europe, society reanimated the past above all – with the curious effect of how the 15th century became far more familiar with the Middle Ages than that period was with itself. Like Frankenstein's monster, sewn together from body parts, our contemporary identities are revenants in which a simulation logic marries nostalgic figures of longing. Thus, having become Modernity's king's child, we revel in yesterday's images while the Machine—driven by a code of simulation—carries us off into a new order. If Friedrich Schlegel saw the historian as a backward-looking prophet, then the Machine acts as a projector, realizing the dreams of a grandiose past—at the price of ensuring certainty about accessing this world. No, Don Quixoticism isn’t the privilege of a foolish age. Whereas the knight of the sorrowful countenance tilted at windmills he mistook for giants, we fight against an order governed not by living beings but by proliferating signs. And because simulation allows us many lives (as in fairy tales), we may think ourselves invulnerable, but in truth, we're being dismembered, granulated, atomized.

Me, Inc.

Heroism at a discount may prompt the Ego-Shooter while, behind the scenes, simulation's domination techniques introduce a form of subject formation bearing no relation to the promises of a central perspective space. While the image promises an aesthetic of uniqueness, this simulative movement has the opposite effect: the individual's decentering and transformation into a social animal. Why do we upload a selfie to social networks? Unlike the self-portrait, this act is no longer about self-exploration or even about the image. It now functions as a kind of life sign, as a pretext for securing the community's acclamation—Social feedback. The Selfie's at-hand ease is precisely a suggestion of a devaluation logic that kills the portrait through sheer mass. A paradoxical iconoclasm that’s brought about not by iconoclastic fury but by blind faith: more important, however, is how the self is no longer at home in itself but has become a decentralized entity, an electrified mass aligning itself with social channels. This transformation into a mass aggregate—or, depending on the case, a social animal—can already be observed on the threshold of modernity.¹⁴ It becomes architecture in Bentham's panopticon, which perhaps even more than Big Brother's surveillance technology, proves to be a cybernetic machine of self-discipline and socialization. If the prisoner behaves as if being observed even when the central tower is unmanned, transubstantiation occurs—he acts as if he were in the public eye. Conversely, the center begins to be abandoned; the connection points of the self are turned outward, which can be understood as organs of its self-consciousness. This transformation articulates not only a power structure but also an order of desire, which is a phenomenon made visible by social media, where the interplay of exposure and supervision coalesces into a second-order identity—thus, in this sense, the term Me-Inc. [Ich-AG]¹⁵ as bizarre as it may seem, is an apt characterization. In this logic, the ego is understood as a corporation of shares held by various stakeholders. And since share and equity certificate dividuation is a prerequisite here, the classical notion of the individual—as an indivisible unit—is nonsensical; it’s much more appropriate to speak of the dividual instead. Understanding itself as a communicative entity that’s also intended to yield social dividends, this being sees itself from the outset as divisible—as part of the commonplace domiciled in the field of communication. Naturally, this means parts of the personality cannot be expressed. Because insofar as when an individual changes into a speech act, he dissolves into performativity, where all the things that can't be conveyed become unspeakable: If you can't talk about it, you must remain silent about it.

Social sculpture

It would be naive to assume there's any way back—that the development of the dividual can be circumvented in any way. No, the dividual is a fact that's become articulated in all strata of society. Talking about human capital, like all the virtues Luc Boltanski and Éve Chiapello have identified as The New Spirit of Capitalism, brings up the image of a post-individualistic age. Where attention as the last remaining commodity becomes currency, the individual is transformed into an agent of him – or herself, and from then on, the aim isn’t only to produce new and ever more intelligent products but, more than anything, to produce oneself. And because every product has a minimal shelf life, it must be constantly overcome and annulled. In this sense, the demand for lifelong learning suspends any notion of perfectibility; art no longer consists of becoming a virtuoso mastering a particular area forever—but in the willingness to share the solutions found. This, however, turns individuation into dividuation, a continued, conscious process of division and dispossession.

One field where this is abundantly clear is software production, where the classic retention of ownership has long since become a stigma, as the monolithic and the proprietary are considered synonymous with a dying present. And why? Knowledge laid out as text or code can't be transferred to others, especially since any closed solution will only achieve a suboptimal complexity level that can't be measured against an open-source architecture. As a quasi-apocryphal Machine created beyond capitalistic commodity production, Linux became Capitalism's operating system, heralding the end of the classic property order. Behind this is the realization that an advanced undertaking is only good because it’s divisible and communicable—an insight that’s always been a part of science. Knowledge is communication – not something designed to last but to be superseded by a better solution. Consequently, in the Hegelian and Heideneggerian sense, self-abnegation and equanimity become cardinal virtues. It’s in such a context that the virtuoso insisting on an unmistakably idiosyncratic manner is as counterproductive as the knowledge or patent walls that commercial enterprises like Microsoft or Macintosh have built around their products—and, like the fortresses and fortifications of the Middle Ages, are doomed. Virtualization goes beyond the virtuoso – indeed, it is a form of transanthropological, transhuman thinking.

The Art of Escapology

The question is if bidding individuals and virtuosos farewell is such a bad thing. You don't have to go as far as Villem Flusser's recommendation of an ars moriendi for a dying Europe. After all, letting go of virtuosity also means relaxation. Because here, the individual regains a breadth of vision curtailed by specialization constraints of Representation. While networked individuals may lose their uniqueness, they gain something much more extraordinary in return: the World.With it, a repertoire of roles that run counter to the deformation professionelle, which conjures up as many world views as there are perspectives. In this multi-perspectivity, it becomes apparent that the emerging political order doesn't just heteronomously face the simulation of representation but can emulate it. This becomes clear in the proof of the existence of God that computer pioneer Charles Babbage formulated as the Wheelwork [Räderwerk] logic of the medieval watchmaker god. Here, God follows a particular order, for example, by counting from 1 to 1000. But suddenly, he changes the program and continues: 1000 ^⅓, 1000^⅔, and so on. According to Babbage, this ability to change programs is divine potential. Putting it more contemporarily, God is a DJ. If we transfer this divine privilege to the individual, the ability to change roles proves to be the decisive desideratum: the cut, the change of perspective, the leap into another world of thought. This is precisely what constitutes personality: I am another—I am the series of my transformations, the one who, in a state of controlled dispossession, can tell of my passage. This moment of individual boundary dissolution can be celebrated as a kind of liberation through networking, where every person is connected to the world's knowledge, able to navigate encyclopedias at the touch of a finger and absorb the work of entire collectives at the speed of light. Insofar as every transformation is also an appropriation, a movement towards the social collective person: the pluralis majestatis, a logic of abundance, digitalised communitarianism.

This war has not been declared, and the actors are unaware of it. Yet it's taking place according to the motto: Imagine there's war, but nobody's going. To recognize the fighting, you must detach yourself from the reasons behind the combatants' actions and concentrate on the conflict's structure. Just as television makes the choreography of movements stand out when the sound is turned down, it becomes clear that the action's patterns follow precisely the same program. A decentralized order as a multitude is constantly being brought into position against the time-honored powerhouse of central perspective, where the conflict is stupendously monotonous, where ultimately, we're only dealing with variations on asymmetric warfare. On one side, we have the uninformed, land-bound, and backward representative of the old system – on the other, an opponent no longer bound by the rules of conventional warfare who changes his mask, position, and strategy depending on the situation. What complicates reading the battlefield is that fighting no longer occurs tangibly but—like the information wars of the present—in a highly abstract form. Just as money has detached itself from all materiality to become a free-floating sign, a discursivization of fighting’s means has taken place where words are now used as weapons. If we follow this dissimulation logic, it becomes clear that Civil Society's ideologemes—in their talk of direct Democracy, bottom-up logic, grassroots movements, or the like—are, above all, a sham, with the help of which the modern-day condottiere expropriates the Old World. In this sense, Neoliberalism's slogan, privatization of profits and socialization of losses, has long since been transformed into a social game form. If the State’s proceeds once held the community together, the aim now is to obtain its blessing without giving anything in return. However, here we encounter the paradox described by Jakob Burckhardt: such a logic of expropriation assumes that the Monster [Ungeheuer] we're trying to exploit continues to exist. Therefore, there's a great incentive to simulate the monster's continued existence. It's no coincidence the search for the lost homeland becomes the last haunting. Even those striving to restore former stability conditions are working towards the final decomposition of the representative order. Take as an exemplar the various populisms whose only aspiration lies in restoring that mental museum of local history and folklore [Heimatmuseum], which isn’t coincidentally imagined as an identitarian bloc. But how do they do that? By using the same media tools structured to dissect these very constructs. And because attention-seeking Twitterati ensconce themselves in their own amniotic filter bubble, the back of common sense is exposed to the cunning of reason, which is, in fact, a deceit [Hinterlist].¹⁶ If you read the signs, you will come across my simple yet abysmal formula: The individual is dead! Long live the dividual!

Translation: Martin Burckhardt and Hopkins Stanley

1. Burckhardt, M. – Zur Logik Des Dividuums, Tumult, Fall 2016, pp. 45-49.

2. Höfer, D. & Burckhardt, M. – Alles und Nichts:Ein Pandämonium digitaler Weltvernichtung, Berlin, 2015; translated into Englisch as All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse, trans. Erik Butler, MIT Press, Massachusetts, October 6^th, 2017.

3. Burckhardt, M. – Score, Munich, 2015.

4. Which would become the basis of Eine kurze Geschichte der Digitalisierung, published in 2018.

5. Burckhardt, M. – Philosophie der Maschine, Berlin, 2018.

6. Burckhardt, M. – Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung, Frankfurt/M, 1994

7. Cohen, L. – Anthem [Song, Stranger Music, Inc., 1992], on The Future, Columbia.

8. It’s illuminating to remember that virtue and virile come to us from the same Greek word, aretḗ [man or manliness], through the Latin vir, referring to a good man and citizen where it also becomes the virtuoso of being virtuous.

9. Pico della Mirandola, G – Oration on the Dignity of Man: A New Translation and Commentary, ed. F. Borghesi, M. Papio, & M Riva, Cambridge, 2012, p 124.

10. I’ve described this cultural history in detail elsewhere. See Burckhardt, M –Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung Frankfurt/M, 1994 and Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche. Frankfurt/M, 1999.

11. First published in 1856; translated into Englisch as Gautier, T. – Avatar, or The Double Transformation, New York, 1888.

12. Boole developed binary logic, in which every sign is deconstructed into the binary code of 0 and 1, into the logic of presence/absence, making it possible to jump from one number system to the next with an elegance similar to how punch cards made it possible to program Jacquard's loom. Desideratum was the constant changeability of the system – a requirement hindered by its mathematical representation.

13. See Febvre, L & Martin, H – L'apparition du livre, Paris 1958 [The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, London, 1976]

14. I've always used Abbé Nollet's 1746 experiment as a metaphorical starting point, where he wired 600 monks together in a circle several hundred meters wide – to find out how fast the electrical fluid, which had been discovered at the time and stored in a Leyden jar, moved. The answer: it moves at the speed of light. But more importantly, it turns the monks into an electrical mass aggregate, in which each individual twitches to the rhythm of the crowd.

15. Ich-AG, translated as Me Incorporated, was given a significant political interpretation in Germany around 2003. At the time, the Second Schröder Cabinet realized that social security regulations had the opposite effect of what they’d intended: generous unemployment insurance meant that many people ended up in long-term unemployment. A neoliberal counter-program was developed to counteract this, known as the Third Way. The Ich-AG was, therefore, an admonition that you had to nurture and cultivate your identity, like a CEO of a large company running his business.

16. Hinterlist, translated as an insidious kind of guile or deceit, is the Hegelian notion of the cunning of reason, which, In the Working Memory, we’ve referred to as the Economy of Rationality and, more specifically, as the computer’s rationality.

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