artefactphil

Excerpt from 12.2 ‘A neuroscientific brain/mind experiment’ in Chapter 12 ‘A subversive thought threatens’ of Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy. The book takes on several delusions bamboozling the degenerated modern mind, partly through the semi-divine Aiona, the main female character.

“Aiona’s wayward, still very much nascent ideas, especially the most radical one of an alternative, three-dimensional, or even four-dimensional time, could perhaps be thwarted and even snuffed out — nipped in the bud, as it were — by employing means from the latest advances in neuroscience. […]

[M]odern neuroscientific techniques could be employed to stifle a vigorous, maturing mind on the cusp of an alternative way of thinking and turn it round, thus furthering neurophilosophy’s secret ambition to eliminate the self. Her brain/mind had been infected somehow […]

The experiment would consist in showing how a brain/mind (Aiona’s) infected with highly dangerous thoughts that might just trigger a pandemic of irrationality could be brought under control through neuroscientific techniques based on neurophilosophical principles. If thoughts were caused by neural activity in the brain, then thoughts themselves could be read by decoding the neural signals. In the meantime computers were available that were up to the task of breaking the intricate code of neural signals to reveal the thought behind them. Enormous sums of money were required for such research, but it was readily available from angel investors (as Pleon Exia noted smilingly from above) who were especially interested in enhanced manipulative techniques for advertising. In this way, employing the new transceiver, it would be possible to receive and read Aiona’s very thoughts once they worked out how to intercept neural signals constantly emitted from her brain. But neurophilosophical principles allowed a further step to be taken: if the language of neural signals was understood well enough by the neuroscientists, they would be in a position to define the neural patterns that corresponded to a given thought. This amounted to deciphering the neural signals, to decoding them. If Aiona’s neural patterns (her brain-codes) were known and interpreted, that is, decoded, then a precise modification of the code itself would represent a different thought that could be uploaded to her brain using the transmitter to generate precisely this different thought in her conscious mind. The experimental design thus possessed its own cogency, at least for these A.I. researchers. […]

On the basis of a knowledge of these correspondences, Aiona’s very thinking, her ideas (as they were erroneously called), could be influenced, perhaps even controlled by transmitting the appropriate code to her brain. The main objective, however, would be to overwrite the dangerous thoughts arising from radical ideas in her mind with more innocuous ones in line with run-of-the-mill clichés of thinking. It was presupposed that her dangerous thoughts corresponded to certain neural traces in her material brain that could be obliterated by overwriting them with conventional patterns encoding conventional thoughts. In this way, not only would the status quo be secured, but Aiona herself would be able to lead a happier and more auspicious life because she would fit in better and come up against less resistance. […]”

Cyberskinning is a theme running throughout Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy. The theme of cyberskinning, in connection with the algorithmization of all movement in the world, is taken up and elaborated from many different angles.

Here is an excerpt from 5.1 Conundrums of the cyberworld:

“The electronic cyberskin grafted onto the bodies of the young at birth enabled them to live in the cyberworld continually via personal avatars that were algorithmized versions of themselves through which they had interchanges with other avatars. These sophisticated digitized self-representations were fully sensate, so that even smell, taste, touch, hot and cold, could be electronically shared. Unlike the mythological Hindu avatars of deities descended to Earth in an incarnate form, these digital avatars resulted quasi from the ascent of incarnate young humans to the cyberworld of digital entities and thus represented a deincarnation into pure binary code, as if this generation had been unknowingly wholly transmuted into a mathematized, logical form of existence for which their bodies remained merely a manipulable material substrate.

Especially the sense of cyber-touch enabled an unprecedented explosion of eroticism in the cyberworld among cyberskinned youngsters. Apart from hugging, cuddling and kissing, more erotic sensations through to sexual intercourse of all imaginable Kama Sutra kinds were also technically enabled, and promoted and monetized by cyber-porn sites. This posed an urgent dilemma for sexual morality, especially among the puritanical, due to cyber-promiscuity, under-aged sex, sexual acts such as cyber-buggery deemed perverse in certain societies and cultures, rampant cyber-harassment, in brief: there was a pandemic of unbridled cyber-lewdness in general, with many young children being groomed by adults for cyber-fucking of all imaginable kinds. Criminals had gotten in on the act. Adolescents were stretched beyond their limits by the boundless licentiousness.”

In later chapters youth rebel against their encapsulation and incarceration in an artificial cyberworld steered solely by algorithms, targeting a huge U.S. corporation called Skin Corp. that makes both the operating system, Pores, and the corresponding hardware. Skin’s CEO is the world’s richest man. The cyberskinned are of necessity life-long subscribers to Skin’s hard- and software. Cyberskinned youths figure out ways of hacking their cyberskin through “blackheads” to discover and experience the would-be superseded natural world. Their sabotage launches the Anti-Cyberskin Action movement, that meets with savage resistance from Skin Corp. and governments.

We’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of arte-fact.org: 1996—2026.

The site presents a unique collection of phenomenological writings by Michael Eldred, along with many recordings of his philorock songs featuring pithy, philosophical lyrics.

Astrid Nettling uses the site for presenting her personal profile and for documenting the many radio programs she has made since 1994 for German national and regional radio, focusing on fundamental questions in philosophy, religion, literature and art.

With brief interspersed, seductive periods of prosperity, the state’s finances are always at the limit, immer am Anschlag. It seems like a law of nature. The bourgeois state is always under strain to balance its budget whilst fulfilling persistent political demands such as lower taxes and improved welfare benefits and education. In view of mounting national debt, the state may pursue an austerity policy (to the applause of capital) to lower inflation, to further ‘healthy economic growth’. But not only are the state’s finances always under strain. That’s only the start. Or only the consequence of something else.

Even those huge multinational corporations generating billions in revenues and profit are always at the limit, always under strain, under the watchful eye of the stock exchanges, to generate even more revenues and profit. Every capitalist enterprise, large, medium and small, is under unrelenting competitive pressure to produce ever more productively, i.e. to lower unit costs, as if running on the spot to survive. This unceasing pushing at the limits is sold to us as merely the flip side of improving, or at least maintaining, our standard of living (in the affluent, developed West, at least). Incessant technological progress (A.I. in the latest iteration) is represented ‘as’, i.e. in the shiny appearance of, improving our lives, even when, in the current phase of the gainful game, the struggle to earn income has shifted decisively in favour of the rich getting very much richer, and the rest being left behind with eroding material standards of living. This is portrayed in the media these days as a ‘cost of living crisis’, and nobody really knows why this has come upon us.

There are many ways of explaining how these socio-economic-political developments have come to pass over the past few decades. It is a story of politically mediated class struggle (whereby the term ‘class struggle’ is avoided). The stories are manifold and sheer infinite in their variety and ruthlessness. The question, however, is why finances in the broadest sense are always at the limit. Here it is useful to quote Karl Marx from near the end of his unfinished manuscript for the third volume of Kapital, summarizing in two “character traits” (MEW25:886) what his analysis of the essence (whatness) of capitalism has come up with:

“The second [character trait] especially characterizing the capitalist mode of production is the production of surplus value as direct purpose and determining motive for production. Capital produces essentially capital, and it / only does so insofar as it produces surplus value.” (MEW25:887f)

This quote, like all quotations taken from a connected conceptual work, falls short. Nevertheless, it formulates concisely what I call the law of valorization of thingified value which today reigns under the empirical surface as the global law of economic movement. It is the same law forcing enterprises to continually accelerate turnover and hence also the tempo of daily life. This law is obliterated by the dogma of economic growth, usually measured by GDP, to which all conventional politics and economics pay unquestioning obeisance.

Capital produces essentially itself, and it does so only by augmenting. This renders hopes of an eventually sustainable, circular economy an illusion. Capital does not produce for humankind (for the sake of improving its lot), nor for the Earth (for the sake of enhancing it as the place where we mortals dwell). These latter two are necessary only for the sake of exploitation, and what capital pays for them detracts from the surplus. Hence interminable struggle is at the heart of this principle of global movement; it is pernicious, deeply contradictory. On the surface of so-called civil society it casts all the players as competitors in the gainful game, and this is pronounced to be good as long as the game is played according to fair rules of play, over which there is inevitably also interminable struggle. The winners in the gainful game for income are generally satisfied; the losers not so much.

The many explanations of developments in the global capitalist economy over the past thirty or forty years remain empirical, appeasing the curiosity of those wanting to understand why all matters economic, both directly and indirectly, are always at the limit. The essential driver as such thus remains invisible; the formulation of a global law of movement in terms of valorizing thingified value seems quaintly philosophical, unscientific and of no practical-political consequence. The obfuscating forms of appearance of the law of valorization on the empirical surface remain infinitely variable, attracting more or less profound and well-researched historical explanations, including in-depth journalism, that, as empirical, must always miss the point even while intending to be critical.

And the point is that they should miss the point of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, which is not an economic theory (empirically verifiable or otherwise), but a critique of ideology, namely, of those more or less coherent, but tendentiously deceptive, sets of ideas presented in the plethora of economic theories that cover up the ugly truth of capitalism. As a critique of ideology, it inaugurates a fundamental, pre-political change of mind. Another cast of mind with respect to this thing called capitalism also sheds an alternative hermeneutic light on the phenomenon of freedom — but this light is shunned.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

An Invisible Global Social Value.

Three laws of movement (again).

Jürgen Habermas’ sprawling two-tome opus magnum, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Theory of Communicative Action), was published in 1981 by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt, immediately drawing a lot of attention in Germany, as well as more recently*). In the Summer Semester of 1982 I attended a seminar on this work held in the garden of the private home of Albrecht Wellmer in Alpenstraße, Constance. Wellmer had been appointed Ordinarius Professor at the University of Constance with the support of Habermas. At the time I was a post-graduate student in the alternative Sydney-Konstanz Project working toward reconstructing and extending Marx’s planned, but uncompleted, critical theory of bourgeois society,**) whose core was the Critique of Political Economy. This latter system-fragment encompasses three works by Marx: Die Grundrisse (a rough draft from 1857-1858 first published posthumously in 1941), Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1859) and the three-volume work, Das Kapital, of which Marx himself only published the first volume in two different editions (1863 and 1867).

The culmination of the first volume of Habermas’ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, which bears the title “Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung” (Rationality of Action and Social Rationality), is a chapter entitled “Von Lukács zu Adorno: Rationalisierung als Verdinglichung”. The hinge between “rationalization” and “thingification”***) is provided by hopping from Weber to Lukács, as if rationalization had something to do with thingification. The first volume’s subject, viz. rationalization, thus comes to a crescendo in Habermas’ critique of thingification as presented not so much by Marx, its originator, but by Lukács, Horkheimer and Adorno. It is therefore a reckoning of Habermas with his famous predecessors in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, itself a hybrid of philosophy and sociology. Habermas himself conceives himself as a sociologist working out an empirically based, critical theory of modern society. The prominence of whole series of sociologists’ names in Habermas’ discourse underscores that Habermas is not only at home in sociology, but is sceptical of any “ontological hopes” (TkH1:16) or “transcendental-philosophical hopes” (TkH1:16) of any a priori, i.e. pre-empirical, philosophical thinking.

In fact, Habermas does not ‘argue’ conceptually strictu sensu, but through a patchwork quilt of sociological concepts that he borrows from both well-known and lesser-known sociologists, without any proper grounding, coupling or embedding. These sociological concepts, including those key ones of rationalization and thingification, are interpreted as encapsulating historical (in this sense: empirical) developments and trends of one kind or another in modern societies. His understanding of dialectic is one of movement and counter-movement in historical developments as captured and encapsulated by empirical concepts, and not a dialectic of interconnected concepts, as initiated by Plato. This loose (some would say: sloppy) discursive style makes his theory at most plausible, suggestive, but non-binding. Mere references to authors are supposed to suffice in this rambling discourse. To think through the phenomena themselves closely would require another, more stringent and demanding approach altogether.

Habermas’ main witness for thingification is, somewhat surprisingly, not Marx, but Lukács. The extensive discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno follows later. Habermas says that “Lukács develops his concept of thingification from Marx’s analysis of the commodity-form; he refers to the famous passage in the first volume of Kapital where Marx describes the fetish-character of the commodity.” (TkH1:477) There follows the famous Marxian quote from Chapter 1, Section 4 (MEW23:86). Habermas then simplifies Marx’s formulation of commodity fetishism (which is not equivalent to thingification; cf. MEW25:838f on the “trinity” formula and MEW25:887 on the “regulation of the entire production by value”) to the “double-form of the commodity as use-value and exchange-value and the transformation of its natural form into the value-form with the aid of the Hegelian concept of abstraction, in which use-value and exchange-value relate to each other like essence and appearance”. (TkH1:477) This dubious and arbitrary assertion is entirely bogus, because the distinction between use-value and exchange-value can be seen already with a sound phenomenological eye, as did Aristotle already two millennia ago in his Politics (Book I ch. iii 1257a7–15). It nevertheless permits Habermas to dismiss any further consideration of value-form analysis, but not without inserting a cursory footnote to Hans-Georg Backhaus and others taking on the challenge of reconstructing Marx’s value-theory.****) Their work is declared useless, allegedly because “we cannot employ unreconstructed foundational concepts of the Hegelian Logic without further ado.” Habermas, of course, never attempts to interpret phenomena of essence and appearance (which does not have to rely on Hegel’s Logik and is phenomenologically easy), but remains content with shallow, empirical, sociological concepts.

With the value-form out of the way, Habermas can then note that Lukács himself is not content with adducing Marx’s famous commodity fetishism. “He is interested only in the thingification effect that arises to the degree in which the labour power of the producers becomes a commodity” (TkH1:478), citing Lukács (Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein 1968 S.274): “the separation of labour power from the workers’ personality, their transformation into a thing, into an object sold on the market” (thus confusing ‘verdinglichen’ with ‘verdingen’). With this gross misinterpretation of thingification, Lukács, along with those coming after him (Horkheimer, Adorno, Honneth), sabotages the possibility of ever conceptualizing the proper phenomenality of thingification via the value-form as it reigns in capitalism.

The concept of thingification is namely not restricted to the value-form of exchange-value nor to the wage-form under which workers’ labour power is subsumed when hiring it (not selling it outright) to functioning capital. The proper concept is not thingification in the vulgar sense of ‘reducing to a thing’, but thingified value, which has various forms or eidetic ‘looks’ in which it appears, starting with the commodity-form and the money-form.*****) Habermas wastes not a single word on the value-forms of wages, functioning capital, productive capital, fixed capital, circulating capital, etc. nor on those of interest (paid on loan capital) or ground-rent (flowing from leased landed property). And, beyond the capitalist economy, he has nothing to say about taxes as yet another form of thingified value that must be explicitly in view to conceptualize the modern (bourgeois-capitalist) state. Instead, he adopts a rough, intuitively ‘obvious’, concept of thingification (as subsumption of workers as ‘things’) and a couple of its value-forms without any regard to the phenomenon itself nor to how the various forms of thingified value constitute the load-bearing, interlocking, conceptual ‘infrastructure’ throughout the three volumes of Kapital. This is what is meant by material dialectic of the value-forms in the full sense (with ‘material’ here signifying ‘thingly’ and ‘forms’ signifying socio-ontological ‘ideas’). It does not suffice to simply pick juicy, evocative passages from Marx’s opus magnum and ignore the rest.

Habermas is not interested in thinking-through carefully in concepts, i.e. dialectical thinking, but is intent on laying out his borrowed-patchwork theory of communicative action, the latter figuring as the proposed panacea for instrumental rationality, in which modern human beings could come to a mutual understanding (Verständigung) through interaction, thus freeing “the communicatively structured areas of life [from their subjugation to] the imperatives of autonomous, formally organized systems of action”. (TkH1:8) Such hopes placed in communicative interaction must come to grief against, firstly, the inexorable global assertion of the pernicious principle of valorization of thingified value cycling incessantly through its multiple forms, inducing ruthless competition among all the players in the gainful game. Secondly, it comes to grief through the insinuation of the corrosive Medium of thingified value into even the most intimate niches of our life-worlds. To see that the Medium of thingified value is not fit for purpose as medium of sociation (Vergesellschaftungsmedium) for mortals on Earth however, requires first of all the phenomenological concept of thingified value itself. This is not to be had from Habermas.

Further reading: *) Stefan Breuer ‘Die Depotenzierung der Kritischen Theorie. Über Jürgen Habermas’ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns‘ Leviathan Vol. 10 Nr. 1 1982.
Axel Honneth Verdinglichung. Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2005.
Patrick Eiden-Offe Verdinglichung: Ein Begriffsschicksal Soziopolis 04.06.2021.

**) Critique of competitive freedom and the bourgeois-democratic state: Outline of a form-analytic extension of Marx’s uncompleted system 1984/2015. With an Appendix: ‘A Value-Form Analytic Reconstruction of Capital‘ by Michael Eldred, Marnie Hanlon, Lucia Kleiber and Mike Roth.

***) The usual English translation of Verdinglichung is ‘reification’, but I have come to prefer ‘thingification’ for its Germanic root.

****) Cf. H-G. Backhaus ‘Materialien zur Rekonstruktion der Marxschen Werttheorie’ 1, 2, 3 in Gesellschaft. Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie Nos. 1, 3, 11 1974, 1975, 1978 resp. (now in: H-G. Backhaus Dialektik der Wertform: Untersuchungen zur Marxschen Ökonomiekritik Ça ira, Freiburg i. Br. 1997).

*****) An Invisible Global Social Value.

Backhaus or Habermas?.

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking core phenomena of political philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.