The ghost of the machine: The relevance of material systems for psychology

Human exceptionalism: A motivated meta-theoretical assumption

Regardless of variation in emphasis and methodology, most current social theorizing assumes that things and persons, machines and subjects, materials and symbols are different from each other in some meaningful way. The classic Marxist distinction between society’s base and superstructure is an example. More recently, this dichotomizing tends to arise from an assumed “exceptionalism” of human cognitive faculties, especially language. Controversially, Esposito and Lazzarato argue that all these elements are composed of the same “stuff” and should be analyzed in similar ways.

Esposito (2015) offers a genealogical understanding of why these distinctions are so pervasive. Social thought and institutions dating to Greco-Roman law have been dominated by a tendency to divide persons from non-persons (things). In all societies those beings which qualify as persons are given special status and rights. Epistemologically, this pervasive social tendency results in personhood (or, as contemporary psychologists would say, “the self”) achieving the status of a foundational conceptual apparatus. Since before Descartes, postulates of human consciousness and selfhood have been the lenses through which social scientists have examined social relations.

Proclivities to normatively elevate the status of the person are a major, unseen contributor to psychology’s penchant for cognitive explicators (attitudes, language, norms, values, etc.). Yet equally significant is what Esposito calls the derealization of things. One of the pieces of intellectual baggage left by the Enlightenment is the conviction that things are forever filtered through human representation (Dreyfus & Taylor, 2015). This conviction places things at an epistemological remove, which results in their ontological violation when they are assimilated to the categories of scientific knowledge. Things are forever being abstracted from concrete contexts and material incarnations and assimilated to ideal types, whether Platonic essences or Kantian Dingen-an-sich (Esposito, 2015, p. 64).

Esposito (2015, pp. 74–81) notes that this approach still holds sway in contemporary theories that prioritize language and its contingent quality. Certainly, contemporary social constructionist (Gergen, 2009) and discursive (Billig, 2002) approaches in psychology go beyond mainstream cognitivism in important ways by denying the primacy of the self and illuminating the broader role of cultural ideologies in generating oppression. Indeed, Gergen’s (2009) insistence that language reifies binary categories complements Esposito’s genealogical approach to the person/thing division. Despite these advances, and despite rhetorical tactics intended to circumvent any ontological arguments, constructionism’s unyielding emphasis on language and relationality sets the terms of debate around the exceptionalism of humans (language) and the appropriate method for understanding it (discourse analysis or qualitative inquiry; e.g., Gergen, Josselson, & Freeman, 2015). Scholarly preoccupation with human communication tends to yield an overly optimistic attitude towards its potential for political transformation. In this connection, it is telling that although Gergen (1991) once advocated theorists to move “beyond the speakable to action” (p. 259), more recently (2009), he lauds the Internet’s capacity to build new relational networks in the global era.

Bypassing this preoccupation, Lazzarato (2015) insists that “language” can be found everywhere in the world—in DNA, in crystal formations, in animal gestures, in binary code. There is nothing inherently exceptional about human language. Yet this is not an argument for bio-chemical reductionism; far from it. Indeed, Esposito and Lazzarato encourage psychologists to expand their theoretical scope, to move beyond the person’s (dialogic) subjectivity and encompass their position in a broader network of human–machines systems.

Esposito (2015) emphasizes that the social consequences of the axiomatic fracture between persons and things are far more severe than the missteps of our science. All manner of violent acts, from everyday discrimination to labor exploitation to mass homicide, have been culturally facilitated by the reification of personhood and the corresponding reduction of persons to thingly or creaturely status. True, per the constructionists, language plays a pivotal role in such processes of depersonalization (Esposito, 2012). Yet scholarly and lay insistence on cordoning off humanity from the rest of materiality, via an emphasis on our exceptional cognitive faculties (including language), also contributes:

When reason alone distinguishes humans from their animal part, this can either be elevated to the superiority of personhood or reduced to the inferiority of thingness. What is missing in either case is the acknowledgment of a living body that coincides with neither one nor the other because it is endowed with a peculiar ontological consistency. (p. 56)

The body is thus a missing link in scholarship between persons and things. Yet this begs a pivotal question: How can the body be truly incorporated into our analyses and research? The common answer—reduction to biological and neurological mechanisms—does violence to the brain’s and body’s embeddedness in local ecologies (Fuchs, 2011; Gergen, 2010). So-called embodied cognition perspectives also fall short by focusing almost exclusively on how physiological experiences are assimilated to mental content and ultimately to language (for a critique, Pouw & de Jong, 2015). Despite recent rhetorical insistence on the importance of the body by social psychologists (e.g., Fredrickson, Hendler, Nilsen, O’Barr, & Robert, 2011), the “body” they study is generally the body as constructed by social categories and individual self-awareness. Indeed, far too often bringing “the body” into social research merely means paying attention to how people talk or write about their bodies, rather than how they move and feel in them.

Some contemporary trends in social constructionism (Shotter, 2014) and discursive psychology (Durrheim & Dixon, 2005) gesture towards a re-embedding of inquiry in lived bodily experience. Yet these perspectives neglect a very important sense in which the body is not only historically situated but technological (cf. Esposito, 2013). As Lazzarato (2015) observes, “today machines … are everywhere except in critical theory” (p. 91). The same could be said of embodied cognition and social constructionism in psychology, and the endless discussion of human actions, concepts, metaphors, language, and relationships. In a world dominated by the ubiquitous machines of capitalism, how can social scientists begin to theorize their significance?

Humans and machines in assembly

Lazzarato (2015, pp. 23–39) offers the helpful categories of social subjection and machinic enslavement. Social subjection is the typically studied process through which oppressive hierarchies are sustained in society at the level of culture; for example, through stereotypes in conventional language, consciously accessible ingroup biases, norms that bind the individual to conventional roles, all modes of social “reification” involving linguistic or cultural mediation. Machinic enslavement is a more insidious process of “invisible” social control. It operates through mechanisms that are not linguistic or cultural (as these are typically defined):

The productivity of capital depends, on the one hand, on the mobilization and assemblage of organs (the brain, hands, muscles, etc.) and human faculties (memory, perception, cognition, etc.) and, on the other hand, on the “intellectual” and physical performance of machines, protocols, organizations, software, or systems of signs, science, and so on. That is to say that productivity depends in large part on enslavement (and its diagrammatic functioning, which circumvents representation, consciousness, and language), in which, it must be emphasized, relations are not intersubjective, agents are not persons … [Forces of machinic enslavement] connect an organ, a system of perception, an intellectual activity, and so on, directly to a machine, procedures, and signs … Stock market indices, unemployment statistics, scientific diagrams and functions, and computer languages produce neither discourses nor narratives … [These forces] easily circumvent laws, conventions, and institutions. The most deterritorialized, like money and finance, are the most formidably efficient. (Lazzarato, 2015, pp. 40–41, 45)

One key reason why psychology has failed to address such enslavement is a pervasive tendency among both cognitivists and constructionists to conceptualize things or machines as “prostheses” or “exteriorizations” of persons. The computer, for example, is a tool which facilitates the “extension” of the mind into the environment. This approach maintains human exceptionalism and relegates machines to a subservient position. Instead, Lazzarato (2015) views machines as co-contributors (with persons) to “a coupling, an assemblage, an encounter, a connection, a capture … In a machine-centric world, in order to speak, see, smell, and act, we are of a piece with machines” (pp. 88, 91). This insight highlights the reality that we will not achieve a more just and manageable society simply by refining our methods of political communication, by homogenizing or diversifying our cultural perspectives. Rather, we must recognize our immersion in machinic assemblages, over which we must somehow take control.

What is this immersion like, and what are the consequences for individual psychology? According to Lazzarato (2015), machinic enslavement “takes over human beings ‘from the inside’” (p. 38), as “machines, objects, and signs … suggest, enable, solicit, prompt, encourage, and prohibit certain actions, thoughts, and affects or promote others” (p. 30). These seemingly abstract realities are in fact terribly concrete:

At the supermarket, I fight with the automatic check-out that is supposed to save me time, while I do the work, for free, of a clerk usually employed part-time. If I buy a plane or train ticket online, I avoid going to the station, but I must, however reluctantly, carry out unpaid “work” that increases the productivity of the train company or airline. My perception of the world is filtered through the images on television (3 hours 30 minutes per day on average), movies, the Internet, etc., etc. 99.9% of the music that we listen to is recorded and distributed by every kind of machine. Even at the local library the “loans and returns” are no longer handled by human beings but by machines. Humans are left to deal with the breakdowns and ensure that humans function correctly as component parts of the assemblage. (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 93)

The autonomous power of signs

Under capitalism, people function with and as machines; and, conversely, linguistic elements and symbols (e.g., complex financial indicators on Wall Street) enact material realities. Most cognitivists have been quite willing to accept the notion that people’s beliefs (however they are physically instantiated) affect reality—that what is real is real in its effects. Constructionism, for its part, has been largely built around this observation. Consider the following statements from social constructionist publications:

Meaning is information humanized … A meaning is grounded to the extent that it is mutually understood and accepted sufficiently for the present purpose by the participants of a particular joint activity. (Kashima, 2014, pp. 82–83)

Language … does not merely provide labels attached to our perceptual impressions. Language permits us to enter into the life of culture … uniquely human thinking requires words … All these matters are beyond the thinking capacity of wordless creatures. (Billig, 1999, pp. 46–49)

Objects are not just material “things” that exist in and of themselves … Human cultural histories are filled with a hyper-rich construction of such objects through abundant use of signs … Culture—in terms of semiotic mediators and meaningful action patterns—is the inherent core of human psychological functions, rather than an external causal entity that has “effects” on human emotion, cognition, and behavior. (Valsiner, 2009, pp. 5, 22)

Certainly, Lazzarato does not deny this mediational, contingent quality of language and culture, which is described ad nauseam by constructionists. Ironically, however, in their unyielding attention to human discourse, constructionists often fail to highlight the full power of human-created symbols and diagrams. Here Lazzarato takes a critical further step: in contemporary society, largely through technological advance, symbols fluidly and directly impact reality without requiring the mediator of discourse or collective belief. A computer glitch on Wall Street affects world finance not because we collectively believe that it does, but simply because it does. Lazzarato (2015) uses the term “power signs” to designate symbols and indices which have the power to alter reality:

In the trading room there are only diagrams, only curves traced by a worldwide computer network, which indicate the upward and downward movements of share prices … The sign flows circulating from computer to computer in real time constitute a reality that is as objective as material flows; they influence subjectivity and the functional links in the system which set share prices and act directly on the “real” economy … “power signs” do not represent, do not refer to an already constituted “dominant” reality, but simulate and pre-produce a reality that does not yet exist. (pp. 85–86, 96)

Computers and financial mechanisms do not control our lives because we collectively believe that they do, nor because we talk about them as if they do. If anything, they control our lives despite our belief that they do not and our linguistic inattention to their workings.

In short, the relationship between people and their language, on the one hand, and the economy and its machines, on the other, is not a dichotomy but rather an interpenetration and assembly. There is a common (cross-species, cross-entity) material “language” to the world which capitalism exploits. Mainstream cognitivist and embodied cognition perspectives fail to achieve their ontological, explanatory aims because they consistently ignore the extent to which humans operate with, through, and in machines, things, and physical environments. For the same reason, constructionists fail to achieve their pragmatic aims of fully understanding social oppression and liberating human potential. Despite a healthy avoidance of dualism, the constructionist project amounts in practice to an assimilation of the material world to a linguistic monism which reifies human exceptionalism (Slife & Richardson, 2011). For Esposito and Lazzarato, progress in anthropocentric science and philosophy can only begin with the reinsertion of the human into the common plane of the real from which we have so desperately (and falsely) convinced ourselves we were escaping.