Q&A #1 | @ MGLC Švicarija, Ljubljana
With Claire Elise, Christian Nirvana Damato, Maks Valenčič & Ivan Slijepčević
Transcription
Claire Elise: I initially anticipated that we might have more time for this [Q&A], but the talks have been really interesting and so we've allowed them to run as long as they need to, and so we are operating within a sort of small timeframe here, so I'm going to try my best to be succinct.
So, speaking now as the "lead editor" of Becoming Press, I wanted to just quickly make a reference to this discussion of psychosis, because one of the things that I like about working with psychoanalysts like Maks, for example, or Lucas Ferraço Nassif, and working with people that are dealing with somehow similar topics and a similar subject matter, like the other two, Christian and Ivan, who are with me today, is that — sometimes I think that these people can act as Becoming's analyst — because for a number of years I was operating under the assumption that our editorial line was self-explanatory, and that maybe it would be summarized in terms of what topics are we talking about — maybe it's materialism, maybe it's feminism, maybe it's these kinds of topics. But over the years, I've understood that it's not as obvious as it may seem to us, who are speaking from inside the project. So one of the things, especially about Maks' work, for example, that is really enriching to us as editors at Becoming Press, is that we understood through his language and through the language of neurosis and psychosis, that maybe the best way to summarize what we are doing at Becoming Press is establishing some kind of a psychotic position, as we feel that we have come from, or are speaking from, the outside of, or the in-between, institutions. Or we represent a kind of editorial line where people who are inside institutions say the things that they cannot say inside the institution. So for that reason, we are kind of personally interested in exploring the topic of psychosis, which comes up a lot in the first two talks today.
In terms of the overall editorial proposition of today's talks, the one that was closest to the theme of today's conference was probably the third one with Ivan — and I highly encourage you to come again tomorrow if you're interested in these kinds of topics, because I think that there's going to be a chance for a lot more elaboration on cyberspace/media theory more directly — but nonetheless, I'm going to start today by posing a question about psychosis: are there multiple camps here? Is there a difference in the position that has been taken by Christian, for example? Is there a difference with that and what is being said by Maks? Because on the one hand you have somebody who's talking about desire as computational, and then you have the whole discourse from Maks about neurosis and psychosis. Is neurotic subjectivity something that we evolved as a part of the negentropic computation of desire? Or put another way, can you have, Maks, "a society of psychotics"? Because you speak about psychosis as if it's people that are feeling excluded from society in some form. So there's a kind of interesting contradiction there that we could explore about a society being made up of psychotic subjectivities in that sense, or is there something about society itself that is inherently producing neurotic subjectivities?
Maks Valenčič: These are very excellent and difficult questions. Stability is really important for psychosis, because that has been like my proposition at the start, that accelerationism solved the problem of psychosis in psychoanalysis, because finally we have a blueprint for how this stability can be achieved, and this has been thought of most concretely within accelerationist thought — and we have this tradition that is kind of hard to capture, but for example, we have concepts like "spontaneous order." So it's order that emerges without any transcendent authority, or without any planning or things like that. So we have examples of how this can be achieved, and there's a whole tradition of thinkers that are operating within this kind of paradigm. But usually because we are so used to relating through this limit, or accepting a loss beforehand, we don't even experience this possibility, or that... it's hard, on a collective level, to reach that point where this kind of relation is possible. So this is maybe the hardest thing, because then... it's not that neurosis is necessarily based simply on this limit. Neurosis produces stability. That's why it can give a lot of things to a lot of people. That's why it's so successful at forcing people to participate through the neurotic way. And of course, in the psychotic alternative, there's the greater difficulty for stabilization. The interaction is more intense. So the probability that something will go wrong is greater. In the example of cults, let's say that they are like a collective that tries a different approach, but usually spectacularly fails and again becomes a warning sign. So this is the difficulty of approaching this kind of question.
But, for me, there's also a computational element in psychosis, for sure. I also, like Christian, try to think through active inference, and this kind of predictive processing framework, for thinking through why there's this distinction within neurosis and psychosis in the first place, and how you could think of any kind of system that is faced with this question — it's not necessarily even about the human or the human subject, it's perhaps even more general. And there are these two pathways from which we can take some interesting examples and think through. But I have some more... I don't want to promote myself, but I kind of worked through this a bit already — if you want, you can find it.
Christian Nirvana Damato: I think that neurosis and psychosis are from the same root, in this desire for stability — the loss of stability. It is just two different ways, two different reactions that depend on the subject. I've tried to do this relation between the desire for stability and neurotic or psychotic subjectivity, where you can have both of them in a single subject consequently or simultaneously. And this is the type of subject that I've tried to narrate, or put it in a narrative way, not theoretically, in a text that I wrote for Venice last year for another conference. If I can try to read a little part — because I am bad with English, I lost my superpowers, that was the text before — I will try to start from Act III. I want to read something in the middle, and you can try to link it with my previous presentation. Act III is a conversation between Acceleration and Cynicism. Before I start — Prometheus, as I said before, is metaphorically all of us in the book, the subject itself. The rope on which life hangs is a theater of oscillating encounters.
Retrograde Prometheus: I see it, and I feel like I'm never running fast enough. There are people who don't need to stop, they can follow their passions without hindrance, without the contingency of money to earn a living. How can you accelerate when you have to stop in the repetitive acts of an alienating job? You tell me to accelerate, but who are you telling?
Acceleration: Prometheus, if you need to stop, that's your problem. My argument is universal, like chaos and the search for stability. You're turning it into a vulgar social issue... Capitalism should have taught you that by now. There's no need to stoop so low. If you need to stop, then you'll just have to run even faster. It's all up to you, and you alone.
I think that, for example, that shift from a desire for stability to the path of excess, with technological and statistical desire, with technology, the datafication of everything... Psychotics and neurotics, both of them, because the subject is obligated to run away and run with society at an inhuman temporality. So this temporality that is inhuman, and which is capitalist, brings the subject to take one of two paths, neurotic or psychotic — it depends on the subject, but I think that is a very social and political issue. And I think that in this way I can link my theory or my thinking to that of Maks.
Claire: I can speak again from the perspective of being the editor of Becoming Press, that when I'm speaking about the idea of psychosis, or of taking a psychotic position as a sort of editorial guideline — there are things that come up, and I should mention that we are hopefully planning to work with Maks in the future. So especially between Maks and Christian and Exocapitalism, some perspective came up, and actually was discussed in Venice last year and is kind of fresh in my mind: the big statement in Exocapitalism, which is one of the books that we published, by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo — one of the big statements in there can be aptly summarized in a direct quote: "The problem is us." And I know that this responds to a kind of position within critical theory that we are often sort of beguiled with, the accusation of "black-boxing" the enemy. And so we are often kind of externalizing the problem and sort of redirecting attention away from ourselves.
So in that sense, what I want to say is that one recurring theme that comes up in our titles, and in the future titles that we hope to publish, is something that we might see as a kind of classic psychotic position — that the psychotic is telling the neurotic, "the problem that we are facing is not actually me, or it's not actually outside of yourself. The problem is kind of coming from within." And this is certainly something that I find that Christian's work in Retrograde Prometheus frames in a very interesting way, because the beginning of this book is about evolutionary processes. So there's a sort of temptation to assume — and maybe it's the neurotic position that allows us to make this assumption — that: did we evolve neurosis as a way of producing societies?
Now, we already kind of addressed this a little bit in the last question, but I happen to remember a quote, or a passage, that Maks said last year, that highly relates to this problem of what we may call "molecular fascism," which is the idea that within each and every one of us who is objecting to fascist ways of organizing and fascist politics, there is a grain of it within us all that is preserving things. So I think I'm now interested to turn the question toward: we have this split between — you could argue that we have neurotic stability and a desire for neurotic stability, and then we have a desire for psychotic stability as well, which is something that maybe we didn't explore. And I think, would you agree that this is a kind of interesting way to reiterate this problem, or reiterate this claim, that there is a lot of internal work we need to do as progressive people, for lack of a better word, in terms of identifying within us this possibility to walk either the psychotic pathway or the neurotic pathway? Or — I suppose what I'm really interested in exploring is: what would psychotic stability look like? Perhaps we can elaborate a little bit on what a psychotic mode of stability would look like.
Maks: You know, when I was thinking about this problem... Because both in neurosis and psychosis, there's never this full inscription. There's always, like, residual inscriptions, let's say, object a. But in neurosis, what's not inscribed is internally managed, whereas in psychosis it's perceived as something coming from the outside. And this has great implications for stability, because in psychosis, stability is gained by bringing the outside in, or letting the outside in, which is kind of a different path — a path that seems contradictory or simply wrong. This is why this accelerationist connection is quite important, because accelerationism is basically about gaining stability by intensification. And this whole procedure is like — you gain stability by finding out what's on the other side, like how your being is determined. And each determination is another insight into this determination, but also stabilization.
So, basically, through this gap in inscription, there's this alternative pathway that is available in psychosis and that is barred in neurosis, because in neurosis it is always perceived as being in turmoil. And we see that, on the general level, this questioning: "what does the other want?" or "what is lacking in me?" It's always this internal projection of finding things in the other. Whereas in psychosis it's different. It's experienced more enigmatically: "what is trying to form a connection with me?" or "what is not inscribed?" and so forth. So from this I made this distinction between neurosis and psychosis, as a distinction between sex and writing — because sex is basically this internal management, whereas writing is external, like what is not inscribed. And we have this clearly, for example, with Joyce being a very important figure for Lacan. This is the general direction that I'm thinking in.
Christian: Maybe I want to add just one thing, that is about psychosis being external. Linked with what I said before, in the presentation, in a sort of way — we are all obliged to be and to act in a psychotic way, because the fact is that our reality is a simulation, because we go through numbers, and through techno-capitalism. So to reach stability we have this contradiction, that we have to accelerate and intensify all our activities and efforts in everyday life, in each field. We deal with it and we also start to suffer, but also enjoy. And when we start to enjoy it, we unconsciously accept and marry these sort of practices. And I think that you recognize this is very, maybe, toxic, only when you go outside of yourself and try to see the things in the third person. Because when you are enjoying it in the first person, this psychotic activity, it doesn't matter, because you enjoy that you have a little satisfaction, a little dopaminergic — no? — reward. And so you enjoy it. So you can understand the toxic part of this psychotic intensification only when you go out of view and see yourself in the third person, and say, "oh, what the fuck?"
Claire: That makes me want to ask the question from this perspective: is there a relationship between narcissism and neurosis? Because there's a sense of me now wondering whether this kind of pleasure that you gain from imagining yourself from the outside all the time, in terms of a sense of assimilating to cultural norms and this kind of stuff — do you think there is a kind of relationship between neurosis and narcissism, which is another very Lacanian problem, that he's dealing with, for example?
Maks: I think that there is this relationship. Recently I read what Alireza Taheri, this Iranian psychoanalyst, has to say on it. And because self-preservation, as we established, is inherently neurotic — I mean, it generally is, in the way Christian describes it — but this necessity of self-preservation is inherently neurotic because neurotics... the other is integrated in neurosis, whereas in psychosis it is not. So when the other gets integrated, you cannot escape it. That's why, if you receive damage, you will cry. But in psychosis, if you receive damage, you don't cry, because you are not connected, or not forced into this interaction, into experiencing this kind of response. And because on a general level we sometimes forget, but it's not so self-evident that we should brush our teeth every night or things like that — you need to have this internal desire for not only self-preservation, but for attaining the image of yourself. And in psychosis, this image is much more unstable.
And the thing is that usually psychotics are the ones who are accused of narcissism. But this is misguided, because narcissism, or rather megalomania, that comes with psychosis, is precisely because the symbolic buffer is less established, and therefore this jouissance, this invasion from, let's say, what is not inscribed, is experienced so much more intensely. So the subject feels called to a greater extent, or experiences this interaction more intensely — that's why they'd be lacking the pathological choice, if they feel like they are actually chosen, or it leads to some delusional systematization. But on a more general basis, that's the distinction, and hopefully I made it clear.
Christian: I agree, but I also think that sometimes it depends on the subject, because maybe there would also be narcissism, implicitly or potentially, narcissism repressed. But just because we have this computational subjectivity, we have inside the excessive part of this desire for stability that is always excess. And this excess also goes through this exosomaticization. So, with all the technological processes that could bring us to art in different ways, in many ways that are in line with techno-capitalism — the ways of acceleration and intensification, that is also intensification of self-representation, and all things in each field of life...
Claire: I want to direct my next question more to Ivan, and I want to also invite Christian and Maks to respond to Ivan's talk in a way. What happened before Ivan's talk, where it was largely about psychosis, neurosis and these kinds of topics around the subject that we're talking about now — I couldn't help but think, during Ivan's talk, that there was a sense that we might be able to understand what he's saying, or what he's presenting, through the same language of psychosis and neurosis. So, particularly when you were saying, for example, that "the fun has been lost" or "something has changed," it really made me think: are you suggesting that there is something inherent to the digital structures of the internet that produced something like a neurotic subjectivity? Because I also see that maybe the connection between the three talks today is that you were also sort of searching for something like a psychotic internet that you saw in, let's say, web 1 or web 1.5. Do you feel, for example, that these words psychosis and neurosis have a role in how you might think through the ideas that you're talking about today, about the way that digital structures produce or affect subjectivity?
Ivan: Well, yes and no. In the sense of... yes, of course, it is possible to draw the same through-line, I guess, even when it comes to thinking not just in terms of the social and psychological makeup of both a neurotic subject and a psychotic one, but also you can, I guess, make the same case that platforms can kind of fall — if we're limiting ourselves to these two categories, for instance, there's many more, obviously it's a spectrum, and I hate to use that word, but it's very much applicable here — what I would like to say is that the genesis of all of this didn't necessarily come out of that same register. Maybe I over-exemplified as to, you know, what the fun aspect is. Because fun, as a word — when you think about the concept of fun, it's very vague. It's very subjective. It's very psychotic. What this essentially means is that the conclusions we arrive at are more likely than not going to be just as vague as the premises we are setting.
I am definitely searching for something. I have no idea what this is, necessarily. I just know that certain types of... and even though there's obviously pitfalls to this that we've seen even within the offline political world, for instance, what I'm searching for is an alternative. And until that sort of alternative gets here, we can't really say for certain whether or not it's going to be good.
Claire: So if I now invite a follow-up, maybe from Maks, for example — because one thing that I was feeling, or thinking, during Ivan's last talk, was that we could think about, perhaps, the neuroticization of the internet playing into what you were talking about, in terms of the way that it has evolved and the way that the structures have developed. So maybe the question, relating back everything to cyberspace and to the internet, and that distinction — what effect does the internet have in terms of subjectivity, for you? And is the internet, or cyberspace, something of a useful tool for getting out of some of these neurotic states of subjectivity? Or is there something inherent to the current structure of the internet that it's just constantly reproducing something like a neurotic subjectivity?
Maks: I sympathize fully with what Ivan was proposing in the talk. I think that the idea of emancipation is basically synonymous with the internet, and it's really unfortunate that it has become lost to such an extent. So when we make this distinction between the internet and cyberspace, where cyberspace is this place that has been lost, and so on and so forth, and all of this "frontier," and all of the things that come with it — because the internet has so successfully penetrated our lives, it basically became a new layer through which we engage with the world. And what it led to is that, because this exit or breakthrough via cyberspace wasn't successful — it wasn't successful in producing actual material results, or it didn't have the impact that at some point it seemed like it would have — then the existing authorities, or the existing structures, just basically uploaded themselves online and became the grid through which the engagement is possible.
This legacy of continuity that is established is so hard to break through, because this is what neurosis does. It forces our participation in a certain way. And then each new iteration is just like closing in on the loop. So, for example, if you play basketball, you are, let's say, an all-star. And then after your career, you either become a coach, or a forecaster, or a host, or a news anchor, or whatever it is called. The existing structure just re-uploads itself perpetually. And if you want to say anything about the NBA, if you want to be a part of the narrative, you have to respect this kind of hierarchy, even though I can look for advanced statistics and have my beliefs that are potentially more well-founded than legendary NBA players. But it doesn't matter, because the grid is what's important: if you are outside the grid, speech is simply non-existent, it's censored.
And with this full transition to the digital, basically attention has become the new commodity, and that's why people simply want to see what they already want. Previously on the internet, we were shocked by encountering, let's say, weirdos, opinions that you didn't know about, and so on. Now we are just engaging in politics: "whose side is better?" or whether this person, who is already a millionaire, successfully destroyed the other one. So this whole alternative economy has been so fundamentally lost that it's basically impossible to establish this different connection that was previously there, precisely because there was no censorship, or no full appreciation of what the internet is — because, if we playfully use this psychosis/neurosis talk, of course a neurotic wouldn't know what the internet is about. Of course they wouldn't have a feel for the virtual capacity, but because it's generated billions of dollars, it led to upheavals in elections and so forth, and then, because this happens, by the tenth time, people come to terms with it: "okay, we have to buy Twitter." So you see.
Christian: Thank you. I will try to give another type of answer related to all of this. I think that, okay, with the internet or platforms and so on, we have a full spectrum of possibilities from neurosis to psychosis. You have all of these in this spectrum; you can stay in the middle and have some "neutral" way of approaching the internet, social networks and so on. But I think that, about emancipation, for example, it is very subjective. If I think about emancipation from my subjective point of view, I think that it could be elitist, because it's not a common way. For me, emancipation through the practice of TikTok influencing is not emancipation, but for another one, it could be. So it's very subjective. If we pose the critique about the position of every subject, it could also be elitist if we try to make it the single way of considering emancipation, and try to build an object for all subjects.
Claire: We are about to run out of time now, and I was supposed to now turn to the audience and actually inquire — did anybody have any questions that they would like to ask the panel?
Brandon: My question originally came after Christian's presentation, but I think it can be addressed by all of you — well, I wonder, if you believe in the inevitability of technological progress, if it's kind of like a preordained movement through human culture or human society? And whether or not capitalism and technology can be separated from one another, and there can be technological developments independent of capitalist logics?
Christian: From a class-struggle perspective, I think that we can have the possibility of developing technology from the bottom. In this time, technology is at the level that requires a lot of resources. At this level of progress, I think that technological progress is closely linked with capitalism. So what can we do? I'm very cynical about it, but, for example, I didn't say this in the presentation, but there is this part in the book where I say that Prometheus, metaphorically all of us, is not a biohacker. And I love biohacking, contemporary arts, I love it... But as a common person, for example, even me, who talks about technology, I am a shit programmer, I can't touch numbers. And so, we don't have the possibility, from a constructor perspective, to engage and reprogram at a high level new technologies that can be separated from capitalist technology. So I think that we have to try to use the tools that we have.
I participated a long time ago in a hackathon. There were a lot of theorists and theorist/programmers who presented a lot of tools to avoid hi-tech platforms or applications. And it's very interesting, because it's a practice that you can do from the bottom up. There's a little micro-community that can afford all this, but the whole of humanity cannot. It could be useful to try to use the tools that we have, that we can afford, and try to do something different.
Another concept that I'm conceptualizing right now, in my next research, is about atemporal technologies — that is, about surfacing the thinking around the fact that there would be no "high-level" technology... I try to produce a new technology, and this is, automatically, because it's new, considered better than an older technology. So if you can try to put all the tools and technologies at the same level, this could have a political shift, because you don't have anymore a linear notion of progress, that brings us to extinction. Think about the last Palantir manifesto. They say that the new deterrents will not be the nuclear bomb, nuclear programs, but AI and software. So you have this Promethean notion of linear progress: when you build higher technologies, you can build more, and have access to control, and so on. So this is also the main point regarding AI and so on. The point is that it's never about humans or social uses. It's about control. It's about deterrence and so on. I think that we have to create a little island that we could expand progressively.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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