The Psychotope
Machine. Collective. Unconscious
The following text appeared in German in Lettre International, No. 146, Autumn 2024. Since the Universal Machine and its Psychotope are such central leitmotifs to Burckhartdian thinking, we’ve translated the text for our English readers.
Hopkins Stanley
Martin Burckhardt
Blackbox Psychotope
Or: Why the Machine represents our unconscious
Immanuel Kant warned that we shouldn’t invent new words where language has no expressions for given concepts. This is, he says, a »childish effort« arising primarily from the desire »to distinguish oneself from the crowd, if not by new and true thoughts, yet by new patches on the old garment.«1 No doubt, coining a neologism gives its creator a sense of elation at having the power of definition. Still, such a speech act always runs the risk of adding just another bit of flatus to our general logorrhea. And because I've always remembered Kant's admonishment, it’s taken me a long time to fill my theoretical speechlessness with the term to which this essay is dedicated: the Psychotope.2 If we follow the language, the references are evident – after all, we’ve linked our biological and social environment with the topical. If such an externalization seems so obvious that biotope and sociotope have ensconced themselves in everyday language, it encounters an intellectual wall where the psyche comes into play. This is because we instinctively assume the psyche inherently resides within us – an inner world that – like the soul – can’t be decoupled from the person.
Internalization logic
Recalling that in ancient times, the psyche included not only the soul, heart, and mind – but also the breath may hint at a larger space of meaning – a psychic economy maintained by the metabolism. The assertion that a closed inner world is a comparatively new way of looking at things becomes apparent when considering the predecessor of the psyche in its Freudian provenance. So the psychiatrist Johann Christian Heinroth, in his Textbook of Disturbances of the Soul’s Life, published in 18183, spoke of a super-nos [Over-Us] as a space that overarches the soul life of the community. If we follow this line of thought, the idea of an outsourced psychic space becomes much more evident – a psychic economy that isn't a private matter, but – like money – something interpersonal. When Freud replaced Heinroth's Over-us with a Super-Ego [Über-Ich or Over-I], he privatized the concept – an isolation and containment measure that views the building's inhabitants primarily as individuals. It’s no coincidence that Freud conceived of his psychic apparatus as an autopoietic system, a device that functions like a super-historical perpetuum mobile out of itself. Following the genesis of this apparatus – and keeping in mind how the early Freud explained his design in his correspondence to Fliess – it becomes clear that this is a theoretical act of violence. Because while the assistant doctor at Vienna’s University Hospital was still grappling with nerves, physics, and electricity, he doubtless felt like a conquistador in his conquest of the unconscious. As he wrote to Fliess: »In this overthrow of all values, only the psychological has remained untouched.« Meanwhile, the basic concepts of his apparatus – such as resistance and charge – reveal the Freudian black box deeply intertwined with the history of electricity – a metaphysical battery that Freud repressed with great care.4 The advantage of this repression is now apparent. Once removed from its historical context, the psyche is transformed into a transhistorical, even ultimately metaphysical driving force [Triebwerk]. And because this battery is primordial – as a kind of black sun – every human being is equipped with such a projection apparatus. While this Freudian model may be outdated, its concept of a split-off psychic space has been passed on.5 Just because we've come to take the assumption of this head cinema‹for granted, the idea that the psyche could be something external rather than internal – nay, even more, that we could be dealing with a topology – feels counterintuitive. But, considering the extent to which the world of things influences our psyche – money, images, the media, our institutions – we might conclude that our mental apparatus results from an internalization logic: the translation of the outer world into an inner one. Even more critical than this memory, which inevitably adds a form of historicization, is the re-discovery of those institutions formatting the social psyche in their specific ways: Culture, Religion, Nation – all those formulas that, as soon as we attempt to decipher them, conceal their origins within exceedingly nebulous founding myths.
Clockwork
As it happened, the question that led me to the Psychotope – to the notion of an outsourced, topical unconscious – had nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of psychological inquiry. On the contrary: it was miles away from anything associated with the human psyche. Quite succinctly, it was: What is a computer? Mind you, the answer was far from self-evident. Once you start thinking of a computer as a tool designed for fulfilling a specific purpose – a firmly outlined in-order-to – you realize any attempt at finding a conclusive answer quickly becomes boundless. A computer can function as a typewriter, but just as easily, it can also be used to file a tax return or monitor a whale’s geopositional data or a Mars Rover’s sense of balance – Name it. And because this game can be played ad infinitum, we speak of a Universal Machine, a Machine that, unlike my brave little toaster, is a spiritual blueprint that can be used for everything imaginable. So it’s more of a workshop that, as an unfinished, transcendent space, constantly produces tools created in their image – not a tool. Using Latin terminology, the tool is the forma formata, a product; conversely, the workshop functions as a stage on which the imagination can run wild – making it a forma formans, a form-generating, morphogenetic form. Now, the appearance of such a Universal Machine raises the question of whether we're dealing with an unprecedented marvel or whether something like it has already existed in history. Naturally, the answer is yes. Like the computer, the Middle Ages wheelwork [Räderwerk] was a Universal Machine. While its presence was felt through windmills, water mills, and tidal mills as medieval power station technology, the Wheelwork Automaton [Räderwerkautomat] isn’t limited to this function. It can also be used in a precision mechanical way to control a group of figures in a cathedral portal – or a musical mechanism. If the idea of programmable time leads to polyphonic musical notation, then its most exquisite expression is the mechanical clock. According to this logic, time, space, and movement begin to be broken down into individual, programmable steps – a deconstructive measure that, when applied to society, brings about modularization, division of labor, and specialization. Because time no longer runs in the sand6, Universities are added to the Cathedrals soaring into the sky, creating what has been called the proto-capitalism of the Middle Ages. Insofar as this synchronized social machine is linked to a constant increase in rationalization, the elapsed time becomes translated into money: Time is Money – and with this promise of added value, interest is also brought up to speed. The birth of medieval proto-capitalism isn't just a rote process but also an introject taking hold of people's inner lives. The fact that, from then on, punctuality, tact, and temperament were preached and that all kinds of princely mirrors sketched out an ideal image of the soul conceived along the lines of the Wheelwork Automaton is striking proof of how a material order becomes innervated – giving rise to the social structure we’ve become accustomed to calling Capitalism. That this order didn't encompass the whole of Christendom, only taking root where Gothic Cathedrals, Universities, and Guilds sprang from the Wheelwork’s workshop – that is, in the space historians classify as International Gothic – demonstrates that this decisive engine can be traced back to the Wheelwork Automaton's Psychotope – indeed, that it, far more than anything else, formats intellectual space.
Thing without a Thinker
While told this way, this story may present itself as a logical, almost inevitable manifestation of a specific rationality. However, its narrative isn’t part of our historiographic canon. Au contraire! If we ask when and where the mechanical age began, we're not whisked away to the medieval Wheelwork Automaton Workshop – but confronted with the figure of Descartes. He's credited with manufacturing the mechanical worldview that's gone down in history as the Cartesian worldview. However, such a categorization is an embarrassment of the first order. Because inevitably, the viewer is forced to think of the 12th century automaton as a thing without a thinker: as a philosophus absconditus who is conspicuous in its absence; conversely, this can only lead to the unflattering conclusion that Descartes, as the supposed founding hero, must have been several centuries late. In any case, we have an intellectual gap in which a functional and widely used social engine reshaped medieval society without leaving any significant traces in the discourse. Its silence forces the viewer into the position of a psychoanalyst wanting to bring repressed memories back to light. And just as the psychoanalyst understands every narrative as a symptom of an unconscious, we're compelled not to take the discourse at face value but to question how it relates to the Machine. Piling up behind this historical psychoanalysis is undoubtedly the cardinal question of how it's even possible for a social engine formatting everyday life to be suppressed – and to such an extent that how the superstructure and substructure (to make use of Marxist constructs) are in a relationship to each other without calling it cognitive dissonance would be an understatement; indeed, it should be seen as a schism, if not schizophrenia. This schism is caused by the Wheelwork Automaton hitting the medieval worldview like a comet – a foreign body rocking the foundations of its cherished articles of faith. It's therefore psychologically understandable that scholastics answered this horror vacui with their long silence. While people quickly became accustomed to the comforts of the Machine in everyday life, there was one aspect in which the new order's strangeness rose to the foreground – so much so that the cultivated ignorantia couldn't repress it. Interest, in particular, in which the Universal Machine's and the New Age's promise of transcendence was articulated, threw the scholastics into utter confusion. Following Aristotle's teachings, it was considered unnatural for a coin – that is, sterile wealth – to give birth to offspring of its own accord. So, everything was done to end the perversion of the autopoietic monetary symbol. But absurdly, the countermeasures taken against the alien Psychotope helped pave the way for its very order. The sale of indulgences encouraged the faithful to enter the psychic accounting system Max Weber later identified as Spiritual Capitalism. The fact that church fathers held they were serving God the Father rather than the perverted Mammon can't be rationally clarified on a discursive-rational level. Instead, it confronts the observer with a psychological abyss. Here, a difficulty lies in how double-talk's splitting phenomena confront us with the betrayal of reason. Behind the scenes, against the express will of all those involved, it forces people to work towards a certain Over-Us. And just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, any attempt at escaping the Universal Machine's Psychotope is doomed to failure. Because it only leads to you making a useful idiot of what you are fighting against.
Protean Unconscious
If the investigation of the Universal Machine demanded one thing, it was the willingness to engage with the underlying social engine, regardless of whatever pronouncements were made. The greatest challenge this presented was confronting a historically changeable space, revealing itself through various layers, overpainting, and covering memories. Because of this historicity, referring back to human nature as the primal horde within us – as Freud called it – doesn’t help. Indeed, it proves insufficient, if not counterproductive. Considering the Psychotope generates desires, dreams, and fantasies, which are as little natural as the subtleties of polyphony, it's a logical conclusion that any kind of recourse to an essentially anthropological endowment must necessarily miss the point. If the unconscious isn't a projection apparatus but composited by the psychic economy, it must be understood as a protean figure, a historically changeable variable determined by the prevailing social practices and institutions – essentially as an over-arching space between people. This insight, however, leads to a categorical shift. From now on, the focus is no longer on the individual psyche but on the space known as the interpersonal – which is shaped essentially by the prevailing Psychotope. Indeed, many so-called cultural, religious, or ethnic differences can be traced back to the fact that a society wasn't exposed to a certain Psychotope or its exposure was limited. Therefore, it's unsurprising that liquid time still prevailed in Japan before the Meiji Revolution – when punctuality could only be an empty phrase. Nor is it surprising that the Ottoman ruler Bayezid II – sensing the danger it posed – banned the reading of printed books, on pain of death, just as Greek Orthodox Christians were, in the 18th century, still debating whether the printing of books didn't represent a desacralization of the divine word. Attributing all of this to religion or culture in general terms ignores all evidence that these arguments were also voiced in Gothic Europe – but fell silent as we moved into the Wheelwork Automaton’s new Psychotope.
Mother of God Seminar
When I turned to the cultural history of the Universal Machine after my first book, which dealt with the medieval Wheelwork Automaton’s metempsychosis into the digital present, it was implicitly linked to the exploration of a collective unconscious, or more precisely: to the space I would call a Psychotope today. In a way, this journey into the past was comparable to an archaeological excavation, where the aim was removing all layers of meaning that obscure the matter at hand’s view – namely, all the classical layers of interpretation covered by time-honored terms such as Culture, Mentality, or Identity. If you take refuge in such final explanations, you quickly end up with supposed founding myths, which, as the case of Descartes should have shown, obstruct the view rather than contribute anything to Enlightenment once the blind spot is quickly identified. It involves following the self-declarations, proclamations, and articles of faith without losing sight of the underlying social engine. To give a particularly bizarre example of how an issue's view changes once you include the Psychotope in the equation, let's recap a little intellectual journey that emerged from the historical material itself. As an exemplary, in my extensive study of the Middle Ages, I had to struggle with the paradox of how the Gothic Cathedral was at the heart of wherever proto-capitalism articulated itself in its most explicit form – but that all these marvels were intended for Notre Dame: Our Lady. Now, it would have been easy to simply attribute this to the Age’s Zeitgeist, but what made me question this was how all the scholastics who emerged from the Cathedral schools – and later Universities – were also singing the praises of the Virgin Mary as the epitome of Pure Reason.
Strangely enough, this Mariological furor wasn't limited to the Cathedrals but continued well into the Renaissance. Whenever there was a luxurious product or a revolution, such as the printing press, to celebrate, the Virgin Mary was never far away. So what could be more evident than looking at the veneration of Mary herself? So you sit down and study the Immaculate Conception’s dogma – always with an eye to what it might have to do with the Machine as a thoroughly material social engine. It isn’t surprising that such an endeavor amounts to an excursion into a terra incognita, at least not when you realize that most church historians studying the dogma would have interpreted the connection between the Mother of God and the Machine as blasphemy, just as you can’t imagine a historian of technology wanting to grapple with original sin. However, if we follow the basic meaning of mechane as the cheating on nature, we're inclined to understand Mary's ascension project as a Flying Machine of Thought because of its metaphor alone. Analyzing the dogma turned out to be a revelation, indeed an intellectual blueprint, which made it clear to me how the Wheelwork Automaton’s Psychotope had been able to assert itself in Gothic Europe. The story’s starting point was a taboo of thought: the deep-seated conviction that a god springing from a woman's womb must, for this reason, already be contaminated. To solve the womb problem, the church father Origen concluded that the conception of Jesus could only result from ear fertilization because the Son of Man was the descended Logos, in other words, divine breath. Once, after endless and extremely subtle debates, this opinion prevailed. From there, it wasn't far-fetched to conclude that the birth of the Son of Man could have also taken place in this way: As it goes into one ear, so it comes out of the other – which marks the basic meaning of what we've become accustomed to calling a seminar. In light of this prehistory, it’s easy to understand how Mary, as alma mater, became the pillar saint of the University and gave birth to a concept such as Pure Reason. Now, the Immaculate Conception’s dogma hadn’t been expressed just in the scholastic world – but also in everyday life. Not only were the mills, which had just been set in motion, used to produce paper to give the letters a flawless background on immaculate, white paper – but the idea of the Immaculate Conception also proved to be the midwife of mechanical writing, meaning the printing of books. Gutenberg's greatest achievement wasn’t using movable type for printing – as this technique was already common in 8th century Korea – instead, it solved the metallurgical problem of perfecting font production by creating a patrix made of hardened steel, which then produced matrices used to create lead type. Thus, the font's integrity was guaranteed through the Patrix-Matrix-Type logic – as the metallurgical Immaculate Conception – ensuring that Font-type wouldn't wear out and produce inferior printed products, characteristically considered macule in the printing industry. With this in mind, you understand how Mariology, or more precisely: the Immaculate Conception’s dogma, became the midwife of the Gutenberg galaxy – and why the 15th century celebrated the apotheosis of the reading Virgin in the form of the annunziatio image motif, varied in thousands of ways.
Alien Logic
We might say that the Psychotope represents a social space in which certain social practices are formed and crystallized. These, in turn, become introjects that penetrate people's minds, formatting their psyches so they can thrive in the collective psychic economy. Unquestionably, there's an inherently phantasmatic aspect to all of this – remember: the Universal Machine, as a sphere of the Imagination's power, spans a transcendental space – meaning the resulting social drive about something more than an arbitrary metric. Because the Psychotope – discernable as medieval mill technology – is based on an energetic artifice, a form of rationality is inherent in this space. And because this artifice repeatedly proves its superiority, it's unsurprising that a) the social drive derived from its Over-Us assumes a form of self-evidence, and b) it becomes a blueprint for social relations. What's decisive is that the reference point is no longer a concept of nature – however it may be conceived – but the Machine itself: an alien logic artificializing itself as a cunning, even a deception of nature. Accordingly, the Psychotope could be regarded as a form of allology, as Alien Logic, owing itself to a primal alienation relationship that's appreciated and desirably experienced.
The Middle Ages are excellent exemplars for illustrating this. As early Capitalist society became organized according to the Wheelwork Automaton model, the principles inherent in the Machine became translated into the psychic economy, leading people to adapt to a psychic accounting system to which new and increasingly abstract activities were constantly added. If the Florentine textile industry already knew more than twenty different work steps in the 13th century, this specialization testifies to the functioning of an entire specialized trade according to the Wheelwork Automaton model – even if the activities’ origins and products aren’t visible. Nor are Letters of Indulgences seen as leading the believer into the abysses of psychic accounting – after all, the letter's buyers are primarily interested in using it – with its papal guarantee and serial number – to shorten their relatives' purgatorial time of torment for their usurious activities. In any case, we're dealing with the cunning of reason, which only furthers the progress of the Psychotope, even where it seems to be resisted. We can see the underlying social engine if we leave aside the theological quibbles, working instead on the discourse's structure. Accordingly, the developing medieval interest rate can be understood as a promise of added value, as a promise of the Machine's ratio being transferred into society, driving it to become ever more rational.
Eternal Life
If you follow this line of argument, you feel transported back to historical materialism’s heyday – the only difference being that Capital isn't the cause here but a symptom of its formation: Time is Money. Seen this way, medieval proto-Capitalism isn't an initial but a relatively late consequence of the change that occurred with the Universal Machine. That this intrinsic epistemological space must be understood as a psychological one has to do with a series of complicated follow-up questions arising from Nature – or rather: the Universal Machine's particular contradictory nature. The fact that the Universal Machine is phantasmatically cast is owed to its workshop character, which, as mentioned, revs up the Imagination’s power. Steve Jobs once summed this up very nicely: The computer is the solution; what we need is the problem. Not only did this promise of transcendence lead to the Middle Ages retraining god as a watchmaker and elevating values such as tact and punctuality to the rank of cardinal Capitalist virtues, but a similar development can also be observed in Modernity’s early days. Because no sooner had electricity been mastered than our contemporaries could indulge in Mesmerism’s delights – or allow themselves to be hypnotized by the supposedly magnetized Marquis de Puységur’s Magic Tree. While, as contemporaries, we might smile at all this, we're not immune to such misunderstandings either. If we attribute an artificial, transhumanist intelligence to digital logic instead of understanding it as a collective, statistically averaged mirror image, it's only because the Universal Machine's promise of transcendence has been overshadowed by the phantasmatic.
Because the Psychotope penetrates all areas of life, losing its reference to the original forma formans in its shape shifting into abstraction, the social drive – as a conditio sine qua non – may fall back into darkness or is overlaid by secondary symptoms. You can no longer see the forest for the trees. Here, the extent to which a social unconscious is involved can be demonstrated wherever, instead of a rational explanation, the assertion of a foundation myth is used. When the anthropologist Mary Douglas once astutely observed that institutions are answers to questions that are no longer remembered, it’s proof that a social foundation can be linked to fundamental forgetting. This alone explains why classicists invented fables about the Greek miracle, but hardly any of them took the effort to examine this world's genealogy more closely. Following this story, we're confronted with the birth of the concept that led me to formulate the Psychotope: what the Greeks called mechane as the cunning and defrauding of nature. Here, tracing the beginnings back to the metallurgical revolution of the Bronze Age, to the world of Zeus metallon, whose descendants all experience a double birth – a natural one, then a metallurgical one – we can follow how the energetic revolution translates into the world of Signs.7 At some point towards the end of the 8th century BC, the Alphabetic Engine was established – with it the coin and its nominal value. Because the agricultural deities had to make way for a new, symbolic order, the phallic godhead – the ox fetish – was banished from the aleph sign, leaving only words to remind us that money initially took the form of a meat sacrifice belonging to the sacred: an obolus is a spit and a drachma is a dozen of them. And because words, translated into metaphor, had a long resonance, even in the Athenian Polis, the tax collectors – the colacretes – were still referred to as thigh collectors. However, by the time of the Sophists, the origin of this psychic economy had already fallen into obscurity for understandable reasons. With the alphabetic signs, a metaphysical form enters the world, eclipsing all that nature has been able to provide in terms of enjoyment – and, according to the model of the perpetual Sign, A=A=A where even the soul [psyche] can be granted eternal life. Insofar as the Psychotope promises immortality, it acts as an order of desire – it becomes understandable why monotheistic religions successfully fulfill this longing. Now, this doesn't only apply to religion but also the sphere of Pure Reason. Here, obscuring the origin – that is, its institutionalization – is the precondition for true belief in reason. Consequently, a thinker like Aristotle can claim that money is called nomisma because any value can be imprinted on the coin – an idea Marx will still cling to and which has been perpetuated – in the form of the arbitrary Sign – right up to the present day. If Adorno described the whole of society as a context of delusion, it can be more precisely said that collective forgetting works flawlessly because we're blessed with a social drive whose origins we needn’t be clear about, an Ascension Project that can be shot up to metaphysical heights, as the Greek philosophers or the Mariologists of Christianity have successfully demonstrated. These overpaintings make us forget – however momentously grand they may be – that we're by no means dealing with arbitrary Signs but with symptoms traceable back to our underlying Psychotope. This is the most remarkable naivety of Social Constructivism. Society isn't something that can be founded with the stroke of a pen but is deeply interwoven via the psychic economy as the Psychotope’s fundamental, which its respective Universal Machines span. And this order gravitates, as an introjected social drive, into the heads of its inhabitants. With this in the mind’s eye, it isn't surprising that the psychological imprint – or character – refers first and foremost to the stamp the Polis used to mint its coins.
Digital measurement
Talking about digital natives these days as that group of inhabitants who, by birth, are already inhabiting our time’s thought continent, we’re referring to nothing other than the Psychotope of the Digital Age. Of course, the certainty of arriving in a new world is insufficient in understanding how it will affect its inhabitants. It is worth remembering that before America was able to develop an awareness of itself, let alone trumpet a proud Declaration of Independence to the world, it too was the plaything of all foreign powers dominating its past – and it isn’t by any means clear what form this new thought continent will take. The only sure thing is that the digitalised ratio will be used; indeed, as it affects its inhabitants’ mental economy, it will inscribe itself into their psyche. And because this isn't implicitly self-evident, let alone a natural necessity, it's of the utmost urgency we become clear about this allological order – especially since its history stretches back to the eighteenth century.8 The main difficulty is that we can’t rely on our Neanderthal instincts. Indeed, our knowledge of the past is of little help in understanding the epistemic and psychological upheaval emerging with this new World. Just as a sense of rhythm, punctuality, and pleasures of polyphonic music owe their existence to the Middle Ages’ Wheelwork Automaton, many of the future's desires, virtues, and values will only emerge through our intimate contact with the new Universal Machine. Thus, disruption is the only thing that can be said with certainty – and, conversely, that the past’s representatives have little interest in losing their privileges. Structurally, we’re running into a monstrous value crisis. As much as we may resist it, we’re dealing with an irreversible movement – simply because the new social drive releases new desires and bears an energetic logic within it. Once every work that’s been digitalised enters the Museum of Labor – and can be accessed from any time and anywhere – the promise of the digitalised thought continent leaves everything that has been offered before behind: Anything, Anytime, Anywhere: x=xn.9
Indeed, this threat of rationality will alienate the world of digital natives from their ancestors who are still under Representation’s spell. Even if they – as Modernity's royal children – claim to be still analog and authentic, the assertion of past greatness (Great again!) will not save them from a historical fall. Here, what’s most treacherous is the ressentiment's spokespersons use the very media to which their resistance is directed exposing them as the scholastics revenants who, with their sermons against interest, construction of purgatory and sale of indulgences – spoke out primarily in favor of the psychological accounting of proto-Capitalism. But because, as Cartesian history teaches us, this world's genealogy has also fallen prey to historical obscurity – because remembering that an institution is the answer to a question that has been forgotten means we're dealing with a highly complicated and not altogether harmless situation. Historically, we find ourselves in the transitional state that Gramsci aptly called the interregnum as »that the old is dying and the new cannot be born...«10 If this assessment led the Italian thinker to the sinister conclusion: It is the time of monsters, this interpretation can be considered an omen of coming conflicts. The fact that the present circumstances are in the guise of the Post-everything, as the afterglow of a former order – indicates that a sense of loss prevails, while the new is perceived as a threat rather than a promise.
Inertia of the Heart
If our present is haunted by the turmoil of Identity Politics, Apocalypticists, Culture Warriors, and vagrant ressentiment, we can discern this as the conceptless evidence of a deep value crisis. This is where everyone makes themselves heard, voicing their discomfort – and because identities have been gutted and institutions hollowed out, people no longer hesitate to take a stand for the past with all their might. You undoubtedly gain prestige by using social media with verve in the short term, while in the long term, you’ll be on the losing end because Representation’s World will make way for the Digital Psychotope. If we welcomed this change instead of condemning it, we'd no longer be struck by the incomprehensible placelessness of our phantom pain. We’d find a presence of mind in the relief of no longer talking about bygone founding myths of Europe, Christianity, Islam, and the Representation’s Logic as we deal with the urgency of how the new Universal Machine's logic affects our present, focusing on its Psychtope instead. This question’s fundamentally alien perspective can be illustrated by a small thought experiment: Years ago, if anyone had thought about what the Digital Age’s signature consists of, they’d inevitably have come across the Museum of Labor – from where it can be retrieved anytime, anywhere. Considering that the digitalised Age, following its formulation as x=xn, leaves the Economic scarcity dogma behind, it could be concluded that such a job, once done, is a beautiful gift to the world. Let's imagine the thoughts mentioned above: That every work, once digitalised, necessarily enters the Museum and if a head of government in the 1990s realized this. And because having been historically educated with the history of F. D. Roosevelt and the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, he would have decided to gather his country's intelligentsia to build a digitalised education system that, like a computer game, personally takes each child as we’re hoping our AI assistants will do. The astute reader might now frown and wonder why I have to make such a sinister comparison. The answer is that Vannevar Bush, the scientific coordinator of the Manhattan Project, was a computer scientist forced to deal with what he described as a nuclear headache – even though his main task was persuading various disciplines to work together. His insight resulted in the Memex apparatus as the blueprint for an information machine that became the Arpanet – the Internet's forerunner. As a pioneer of the Digital Psychotope, Vannevar Bush didn’t stop with this model but made a name for himself in the 1950s with a text entitled Science: The Endless Frontier that introduced the paradigm of our Information Society. Reading the history of the Manhattan Project against this background, the decisive factor wouldn't have been the desire for destruction – but the bodily foundation of a new kind of knowledge – and precisely this insight could inform our thought experiment's head of government decision. As at Los Alamos in the 1940s, a lot of scientists from all walks of life would come together in the agreement of programming the most intelligent, humane, and future-oriented education system – a synthesis of the arts transcending disciplinary boundaries that's only a pipe dream in today's fragmented scientific landscape. This shared task alone would have been a revolution. As American science philosopher Nicholas Murray Butler once remarked, »the specialist is one who knows more and more about less and less, until he know absolutely everything about nothing.«11 The targeted cooperation with colleagues from outside the field would have brought about a tremendous broadening of vision. Indeed, it would have made a new field of knowledge visible because the progressive fragmentation would have been replaced by new integrity, where, according to the beautiful line by Leonard Cohen, »There's a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light comes in«12 – the light enters where the cracks, gaps, and contradictions, open up between the knowledge disciplines. It’s against such a gifted integral view of the scientific landscape that the question could be posed about the nature of future knowledge’s most significant challenges – and what future tasks the coming generations will have to master. If this question alone had focused on the digital natives’ Psychotope, the follow-up question would have been to what extent virtuality influences our psyche, and that alone would have provided the key to the future.
Such an intellectual project is diametrically opposed to everything our educational policymakers have, in recent decades, put in place: Canonization and Modularization, where, in short, the administration of a knowledge continent already lost. Naturally, it could be argued that such a large-scale scientific project would have been a first-order economic burden. However, considering the Digital Psychotope’s fundamental laws – Anything, Anytime, Anywhere, x=xn – it's clear this is little more than a mere excuse. It’s nothing more than a data protection project where those involved weren't acting in the best interests of the digital natives entrusted to them – instead, they’re protecting themselves from the data, meaning the Digital Psychotope. Protecting the economic advantages promised by the inertia of the heart insofar as it allows traditional privileges to be defended may have had its part to play. De facto, getting involved in such a social education project would have been easy. Not only would such a project have been beneficial to the world's knowledge but also to the soul life of each individual, it would also have transformed the disruption of the digitalised age into a gift, no, even more, into a marvelous promise for the future. And this raises the question of why, instead of promoting the Psychotope of the Universal Machine, we've nurtured the monsters of the past. However, the only way to answer this question is to leave reason behind – and look into the Psychology of the Machine.
Translation: Hopkins Stanley / Martin Burckhardt
Kant. I. – Critique of Practical Reason, London 1901, p. 96.
The term, as I’ve later learned, had previously been used by the Viennese architect Richard Neutra, who, on the occasion of the 1962 Save Venice conference, said, »But what must never be forgotten is that Venice is a ›psychotop‹ – a place where you anchor your soul.» Time: October 26, 1962.
Heinroth, J.C. – Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens oder der Seelenstörungen und ihrer Behandlung. Leipzig 1818.
See Die Schwarze Sonne, where I wrote about the construction of the unconscious(chapter 9 in Burckhardt, M. – Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche, Frankfurt/M, 1999, pp. 271-295.) – »When the seventy-seven-year-old Freud in 1933, in his New Lectures for the Introduction to Psychoanalysis, presents his thinking about the unconscious in a condensed form; he indicates that he is not talking about a personal figure of thought, but about a timeless truth: ›There is nothing in the Id that could be equated with negation, nor does one perceive with surprise the exception to the philosopher's proposition that space and time are necessary forms of our psychic acts....‹«
The Super-nos, or Over-Us, precedes the Freudian Über-Ich [translates literally as the Over-I] that the English-speaking world understands as the Super-Ego. The critical point is that this collective becomes lost in the Freudian tradition.
The German phrase ›Sich im Sande verlaufen‹ has a double meaning: run into the sand and come to nothing. Here, where time was previously like the sand in an hourglass, it can now be stored and controlled.
The myth of Kadmos considered the Alphabet's bringer in ancient times, is a wonderful exemplar of this. Kadmos is commissioned by his father Agenor to bring his sister, who has been abducted to Crete by Zeus disguised as a bull, home to Phoenicia. Accompanied by a cow, he sets off with the task of settling down where the cow bores its horns into the ground. This happens when he arrives in Thebes, and Kadmos wrestles down a dragon, the Ouroboros, which is regarded as the embodiment of the natural principle. He sows the dragon's teeth into the earth; from this seed springs little iron men fighting each other until, in the end, only five remain: the vowels of the Alphabet, which has been transformed into a type wheel, a symbolic cycle. See Metempsychose der Zeichen (chapter 6 in, Burckhardt, M. – Philosophie der Maschine, Berlin, 2018.)
As someone who has taken the trouble to write a »Brief History of Digitalisation,« I can only say that the genealogy of this intellectual continent is still a void, that not even agents and advocates of the digitalised revolution have taken a historical look back – with lamentable results. See Burckhardt, M. – Eine kurze Geschichte der Digitalisierung, Munich, 2018.
The formula, which goes back to George Boole’s mathematical foundations of digital logic in his 1853 An Investigation into the Laws of Thought, expresses the peculiarity that a 0 multiplied by itself always results in 0, and 1 always in 1, ergo x=xn, what mathematicians call idempotence. Put more concretely: any object that's been digitized suffers from a suspicion or a promise of proliferation, whichever the case may be. See Burckhardt, M. & Höfer, D. – All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse, MIT Press, Massachusetts, October 6th, 2017.
See Gramsci, A. – State and Civil Society, in: Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London, 1999, p. 556. »The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.«
Butler, N.M. – 1928, Annual Report of the President and Treasurer to the Trustees with Accompanying Documents for the Year Ending June 30, 1927, Section: Annual Report of the President of Columbia University, November 7, 1927, Page 18, Columbia University, New York. (HathiTrust Full View)
