Psychotechnology as Human Adaptation
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either. — Marshall McLuhan
When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal. — J. J. Abrams
When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunnaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak, so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind. — Hammurabi
This article is first in a series of articles on hyperreal psychotechnologies.
In this article, I introduce a paradigm that can focus on how humans create meaning.
- The second article applies this paradigm to today, in particular, April 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 and self-quarantining.
- The third article outlines what a successful creation of meaning requires.
Meaning today has failed to be created because the psychotechnologies we use have failed to align us in a coherent manner. Psychotechnology describes applications that directly manipulate our psychology, in particular our salience landscape. I use a very broad definition of the word psychotechnology.
Essentially, as we are capable of reasoning symbolically, we outstripped our biology’s ability to adapt when we began to alter our behavior due to our knowledge. To supplement these alterations, we turned to pscyhotechnology.
In the first section of this article, I describe how to consider psychotechnology. In the second section, I give examples of psychotechnology. This list is not exhaustive, but it illustrates how varied psychotechnology is. As symbolic creatures, nearly everything can influence our psychology. The focus of the second section is on how our behavior/organization is derived from how we see the meaning implicit in the interactions between the world and ourselves. The last section reiterates what we should take away from this lengthy article.
The purpose of this article is to show what psychotechnology is so that we can recognize it no matter what form we find it in. History is simply one way we can trace psychotechnology as it has and is operating today.
1 The Paradigm of Psychotechnology
Humans are unique because, in addition to our greater awareness, we are also able to selectively focus that awareness.
Our ability to focus is directly related to our experiencing everything in terms of symbols. We humans do not experience reality as it is. Instead, we see reality in terms of what things mean to us. Below is a fine video exploring how reality is understood in terms of meaning instead of in terms of what it is.
Understanding our sensory environment in terms of meaning is due to the fact that humans are creatures of symbolic reasoning. Symbolic reasoning is the ability to link meaning to arbitrary chunks of qualia and then to treat those links as symbolic chunks. One example of symbolic reasoning is the concept of a sign.
To consider a word as a sign requires splitting words into a signifier and a signified. A signifier is what indexes the sign. The signified is what is indexed by the signifier. A signifier of words includes a certain configuration of lines, sounds, and syntax, which is objective. A word’s signified is its concept, definition, or meaning, which is subjective. Signifiers are how we convey words to others so signifiers must be objective. Generalizing this model beyond words, the signifier can also be a sensory experience. For a hypothetical person, the smell of coffee is a signifier, while the signified is the meaning she associates with that smell (such as going to work in the morning). Note that the signified is often understood and communicated in terms of other signs.
The study of signs is called semiotics. Semiotics is a phenomenological study of cultural meaning, as it is framed by language and culture.
Post-structural psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva uses semiotics to explain how different people experience reality (including their bodily awareness). For Kristeva, semiotics can account for how people embody language differently.
To describe the basis for this embodiment, Kristeva borrows from Plato’s Timaeus the concept chora. Chora describes human awareness before our awareness is shaped by language and culture. Kristeva writes:
We differentiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulate from a disposition that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition, and gives rise to a geometry. Although our theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation that offers evidence, the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, partiality, and temporality. Our discourse — all discourse — moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitively posited: as a result, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it topology, but never give it axiomatic form.
Kristeva uses chora as a way of talking about how the energy of our awareness is focused through signs. For Kristeva, the semiotic body is a container of signification, how our cognitive awareness is linguistically and conceptually arranged.
Although Kristeva uses the semiotic body to talk about what is made salient, she is not the first or last to conceive of a paradigm to describe the formation of meaning within humans.
In the wonderful Youtube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke develops a paradigm we can use to understand why we share a crisis in meaning today. This paradigm centers on psychotechnology and salience landscapes. Explained by the scientists who developed the theory (the lab group of Lindsay M. Oberman, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (in collaboration with William Hirstein of Elmhurst College and Portia Iversen of Cure Autism Now, a nonprofit foundation based in Los Angeles)) in their article Broken Mirrors: A Theory of Autism, they write that a salience landscape is “a map that details the emotional significance of everything in the individuals' environment.” A salience landscape is essentially like Kristeva’s semiotic body, in that it is a configuration of significance/meaning qua semiotic links.
The configuration of one’s salience landscape pre-focuses our attention. A salience landscape is responsible for automatically picking out aspects of reality in preparation for certain meanings to be constructed.
A salience landscape is necessary for more efficient decision making. Vervaeke notes how developing a salience landscape is a current challenge for A.I. today. Because computer scientists have not yet developed a mechanism for salience landscaping, A.I. cannot properly formulate problems. Humans, however, formulate and solve problems on a daily basis.
Psychotechnology works directly on one’s salience landscape, by directing our attention to some aspects of reality instead of other aspects. If humans associate those aspects with some kind of signified, refocusing our attention can change the meaning of a situation.
Psychotechnologies are powerful. Altering one’s salience landscape will change how humans remember, how humans behave, and how humans understand.
In other words, psychotechnology can re-calibrate people’s cognition. This recalibration gives two benefits.
- psychotechnology can alter human coordination (so that access to resources can change)
- psychotechnology can allow us to create meaning (which could improve our ability to function in the world).
Vervaeke’s conjecture: The meaning crisis has its roots due to failed psychotechnology.
Most likely Vervaeke has a much more restrictive definition of what psychotechnology is than I (but I do not know). This paradigm I outline in this article between psychotechnology and salience landscapes has far-reaching consequences on how to consider human history, behavior, and meaning-making.
What follows in the next section, which is the majority of this article, is a list of some relationships between psychotechnology, technology, philosophy, history, and culture.
2 Models of Psychotechnology
A difficulty with assessing psychotechnology comes from a misunderstanding of what psychotechnology exactly is.
Often psychotechnology is considered as part of the general content from a historic and cultural context that is not psychotechnology. For instance, to assess Christianity in terms of claims about reality ignores the psychotechnology embedded within Christianity.
To see Christianity as a psychotechnology one must see how Christianity changes a person’s salience landscape.
One way to do find psychotechnology is to note how its impact on participants. For instance social stability, kindness towards others, and community are touted as some of the benefits of Christian practices. How exactly those effects are made salient to each person is how Christianity works as a psychotechnology.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive. Its arrangement highlights some features regarding psychotechnology and the manipulation of salience landscapes.
2.1 Agriculture and the formation of Axial Age Psychotechnologies
Philosopher Karl Jaspers nominalizes the Axial Age (about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE) as a period when new radical thinking emerged.
As noted by Vervaeke, radical Axial Age thinkers include Buddha, Jesus, and Socrates. These thinkers are still studied today as their psychotechnologies still offer people the ability to find wisdom and relevancy.
Wisdom requires flexibility in one’s salience landscape as conditions around us change so that what was relevant yesterday may no longer be tomorrow. Although all psychotechnologies including the ones offering wisdom have techniques that can be used to create rigid salience landscapes, we will refer to the psychotechnologies mentioned above as psychotechnologies of liberation.
Psychotechnologies promising liberation can only gain prominence in a world where people do not understand how to live with changes in reality. In other words, psychotechnologies of liberation address a lack of the general population’s ability to find relevancy. Thus the fact that these Axial Age psychotechnologies are still active today implies that the problems that psychotechnologies of liberation address are still problems now.
When humans lived as nomads, population size was probably limited to around the Dunbar number. However, when humans switched to agriculture, which is labor-intensive, people had to stick to the lands they developed. Additionally, successful agricultural practices led to population growth, in part to necessitating even more need for farmland.
Exposure to people far beyond the Dunbar number meant additional psychotechnology needed to be developed before empires could emerge.
The psychotechnologies that enabled empires are institutional psychotechnologies in that they allow institutions to form. Such psychotechnologies including writing, math/finance, culture, legalism/law, organized religion, and Statehood. These psychotechnologies still operate today. A later example of such psychotechnologies would also include Syncretism and Confucianism.
In other words, the transformation of loose bans of humans into farmers set the foundation for our current conceptualization of what it means to be a person, e.g., living in a nation with a bureaucratic hierarchy that is regulated with customs and laws.
Here is a list of books for further reading on the changes in salience landscapes for this interesting period.
- Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. This book assumes that human morality and ethics are resource-based. When attempting to describe human sexual practices, the assumption the authors make is that before agriculture, there was no hierarchy or monogamy as those were developed by agriculture-based humans. Sexual practices alter how natural selection selects. The authors claim that human organization and function changes the nature of evolution.
- Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans by Derek Bickerton. Bickerton provides a concise formulation for how language developed, as part of natural selection. He argues that natural selection also applies to animal behavior, not only to genes. Thus, how we choose to live and conduct ourselves ultimately becomes part of the mechanism of natural selection. Different from above, Bickerton’s focus is on language, not sexuality.
- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Jaynes argues that the current state of human consciousness did not exist before the Axial Age. He questions our interpretation of artifacts (literature and so on) from that time period, building a case for a very different way of sensemaking prior to the State/institutionally driven civilizations we see existing today. He argues that living in the large groups we do today requires a modern organization of the psyche, one that did not exist before agriculture was massively successful.
- The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain. Using the loose association between left and right brain as a stand-in for two rigidly defined salience landscapes, Shlain examines how reading as a psychotechnology changed how European civilization changed through the ages.
2.2 The Psychotechology of Presence
I call the psychotechnology developed by Christianity presence.
Peter Sloterjik in his book Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrosphereology points out that there is a fundamental difference between messengers and apostates. Messengers convey information from a source that is not present. Apostates, like Paul deliver information from a source that is present with the information. Sloterjik writes
The true emissary can evidently only represent the sovereign lord if they, as a bringer of signs, simultaneously share in the substance of their lord and create his real presence — just as Kierkegaard has Paul the Apostle express in a dialogue with a skeptic:
“you must consider what I [Paul] say has been entrusted to me by a revelation, so it is God himself or the Lord Jesus Christ who is speaking”
The psychotechnology of presence is further developed during the medieval ages.
Imagine you live during the medieval ages. In your daily life, you exist mostly in nature. You live in a wood or stone hut of sorts. One day you travel to a major city. On a Sunday you get to walk into a cathedral whose construction probably took more than a generation. In the stain glass windows, you see depictions of Christ and His Saints in various poses. In the massive cathedral, you see evidence on every surface markings signifying Christ’s narrative. The cathedral separates you from your normal environment. Inside the cathedral, you are bombarded with signs of Christ’s otherworldliness. The way the light plays, the sublime arches — this fantastic environment only serves to highlight the presence of an “otherworldliness”, the presence of God. The magnificent intensity of the cathedrals’ environment must be evidence of Christ.
This material magnificence reinforces how priests speaking for God, that is, during the ritual, churchgoers are in the literal presence of the creator of the Universe.
This sense of presence was first developed by ancient royalty before being adopted by early Christianity before it was then propagated back to the medieval nobility. Sloterdijk connects religion with nobility via the link of halos with authority. He writes
In classical thought, […], egotism was considered the first expression of what is harmful and evil, and its symptomatic emergencies were the loss of the servant’s willingness to serve and the self-interested distortion of the message by the messenger.
To adopt the same kind of authority, images medieval Europe nobility also depicted themselves with the same halo found on Christian figures.
Sloterdijk notes that this concept of presence later extends into Modernity. Interestingly, despite presence supporting authority for so long, into the Modern Age, the reproduction of presence elsewhere began to undercut authority. Sloterdijk explains this undercutting as a
postmetaphysical mode of space formation that, because of its insuppressible polycentrism, cut the ground from under all centrist and hierarchist phantasms […]. That is precisely why the Modern Age could be condemned by the conservatives as a revolt against the holy circle of monopoly communicators and as a loss of the center.
The construction of presence acts as a locus of authority, one that works to supplement some figures as more real than others. Loss in the modern age didn’t mean the loss of presence; but rather, the release of presence as more than just a way to mark central authority.
The western tradition of presence as meaning a centralized authority is eventually transposed from political and religious hierarchies into a conceptual presence. Ontotheology is later transposed into ontology as a metaphysics of presence. Ontology and the European tradition of philosophy are the secular heirs to this religious centering of authorial presence.
Fragmentation of the presence occurred in the modern era as modern technology was also able to construct presence in new media. In the mid-20th century, a post-structural philosopher, Jacques Derrida, in his book Of Grammatology noted how the metaphysics of presence, as a modality, was constructed by an idealized form of writing. Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence constructed in written texts logocentrism. Logocentricism is a wholly constructed exteriority that exists beyond signification yet, in as a convention of written text, assumes a socially constructed authority that signifies objectivity.
In some sense, the metaphysics of presence in texts is prior to and yet within the text itself while also being beyond signification. Writers who construct the metaphysics of presence do so to lend gravitas to their writing, as a supplement that imbues their text with authority.
I engage in logocentric constructions throughout this piece, to encourage your salience landscape to be more receptive to my message. If you are not familiar with long form articles, or if I do not meet certain criteria appropriately, you may find your salience landscape dismissing this article.
While I end this exploration by a “call-out” of the psychotechnology of presence, by talking about logocentricism, we will see presence later constructed by other media, such as for hyperconsumerism, as ways of marking access to sources of significance.
2.3 Psychotechnologies of Hyperreality
Hyperreality, coined in Simulation and Simulacra by Jean Baudrillard, is a condition whereby signification is divorced from reference. Hyperreality occurs when information and material technology has advanced to the point where humans can produce reproductions of events that did not occur.
Past forms of technology were limited by the materials used. A sign of hyperreality is the ability to spoof past forms of technology. Baudrillard cites Disneyland, suburbia, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles as examples of hyperreality. In each, environments are made so as to provide an experience that suggests a logic independent of the actual history of those environments.
- Disneyland has worlds, like “Frontierland” which never existed. While “Frontierland” has markers of being in the frontier, such as the liberal use of wood, this use is part of a simulation. The entire arrangement of Frontierland as a coherency of the American West is a “mickey-moused-ified” experience.
- Likewise, suburbia is a “false community” in that it is a collection of strangers brought to a place to live a certain kind of consumer-driven lifestyle. Suburbia also has simulacra of being a community, such as town signs, white picket fences, and so on as part of its simulation of a small-town community.
- Las Vegas is a hyperreality where potentially each space offers its own dazzling difference. The textures and layouts within megacasinos are defamiliarizing so that patrons lose their sense of space and time. People can easily spend hours participating in the experiences offered by Las Vegas without realizing how long they did so. The mantra “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” is borne out as people are encouraged to indulge.
- Los Angeles, with Hollywood, is a mecca of created experiences. Charles Bukowski has noted that Los Angeles is less a city than a patchwork of neighborhoods each with its own cosmological center, simulations of communities from abroad, or simulations of futures that are “so Los Angeles”.
Hyperrealities are also not just limited to places. Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message”, while admittedly a mime meant to serve as a hook for McLuhan’s ideas, is essentially about how our sense of reality can mutate as media changes.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, McLuhan examines how movable print altered the salience landscape of modern man, by enabling further conceptions of technology (such as the assembly line) through the process of replicability.
The increased flow of printed material had two consequences. It has been noted often how the printing press:
- spread Protestantism faster by allowing copies of the bible to be printed in the local languages people spoke (instead of just Latin)
- fostered nationalism. For many intellectuals, seeing their local language in print lent a metaphysics of presence to their languages. The development of philology (the study of languages) eventually helped justify the legitimacy of ethnostates. Philology is what made Fredrick Nietzsche so different as a philosopher. He saw how the image of a human being was developed through philological practices. Nietzsche’s recognition of the justifications of nationalism as a psychotechnology led him to reject morality and social order as a natural construct. Nietzsche then developed the concept of the Ubermensch, which worked as an image for Nazi supermen. Despite Nietzsche’s best efforts, even as a storyteller, he could not develop a psychotechnology that could guarantee the destruction of the slave mentality he so rejected.
A more contemporaneous example of media relations influencing society is how social media and mobile phones flattened the existing human networks and social hierarchies into a common domain of interaction online. This flattening reassembled existing networks into novel collectives like Red Religion and Blue Church. Investigative journalist Jane Mayer in Dark Money: The Hidden History of Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right claims that Billionaire legacies from the Great Depression are behind the rise of the alt-right. Mayer writes that Billionaire funds were behind gerrymandering purple states into red ones, and passing Citizens United. Whether she is correct or not is not important. For the purpose of this article, Mayer corroborates that it is possible to use forms of media including social media to get their message across to voters in key areas.
Essentially hyperreality works because the media generate its significations that enforce meaning. In a sense, philosopher Roland Barthe developed semiotics as a way to examine consciousness, exactly the use Kristeva found for semiotics in her theory of psychoanalysis. The forms media replicates to us, like that of the standards of for sexy women, are psychotechnology in that the colonization of our salience landscape is re-made through the reproduction of symbols created from technological reproductions.
If any field of signification could be a hyperreality, if its value is independent of the values of its signified, so we can consider the financial markets, like that of derivatives, to be hyperreal. A lead software developer in the volatility trading, Elie Ayache in The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market argues that financial markets are of their own logic; that they deserve their own metaphysical category. The boogeyman for Ayache is probability as statistics, with its philosophical baggage, is limited in the values it can consider and its lack of ability to capture fundamentals shift that can occur between relationships of stocks at any given event. (A stock in the future may not exist anymore.)
A hyperreal financial market means that the logic of the finance market works on its own, having the potential to reestablish itself with any price change. This means that there is no base value from which to monitor any probable change in a stock’s price. We see this activity in the stock market currently, as stock fluctuations in a COVID-19 shutdown happen independently of anything the economy may be doing.
This independence from the reality of stock and derivative pricing is due in part, to the baselessness of the stock market. Tan Liu in his radical book The Ponzi Factor: The Simple Truth About Investment Profits calls the stock market a Ponzi scheme because the value of a stock is predicated on there being future buyers of the stock at those elevated values. We have all heard (or seen) that the stock market can fluctuate due to people’s emotions and the stories that create those emotions.
After all, the only reason why stock prices can madly fluctuate is that traded stock values are independent of both the earnings of a particular company and the value of being able to vote for the board of directors.
Thus, the prices on the stock market, like that of hyperreal signs, refer only to themselves, as signifiers of people’s willingness to buy stocks of given companies for particular prices. This willingness is often justified by the idea that companies can be bought and sold on the stock market when in fact companies can limitlessly issue stock certificates.
Stock is hyperreal in that it simulates ownership of a company when in fact stock bearers generally have no access to dividends nor can they take part in the management of the said company.
The presence of simulation often means hyperreality. If some of the signifiers around you operate according to their own logic, you might find yourself in a Kafkaesque maze with no sense of what is actual and what is a simulation. Artist and former situationist Guy Debord calls this condition the spectacle in his book The Society of the Spectacle. Here, spectacles are produced, with the effect that their presence realigns social relationships everywhere.
While hyperreality presents a simulated realism, the accuracy of that realism is another issue altogether. This topic of “realism” is one of the subjects of the article that follows the one you’re reading now.
2.4 Psychotechnologies of Broadcast: the Hyperrealities of Consumerism and Lifestyle
In A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Harry Crews describes a lost place, that of his childhood during The Great Depression in the Deep South. Despite history citing a loss of wealth, Crews describes a culture that existed as an organic unity with no sense of impoverishment. That culture had its own psychotechnology in how people embodied a place, in the rituals and accepted behaviors. Metonymically, their place is a configuration of feelings and meanings, a shared salience landscape. Eventually, that salience landscape was eradicated with the advent of 20th-century media technology, in particular, advertisement and consumerism. When you read the quote below, keep in mind that farm work is dangerous, even in the rural areas of the South. Crews records the seduction of America media thusly:
I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn’t have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and toes and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful. Their legs were straight and their heads were never bald and on their faces were looks of happiness, even joy, looks that I never saw much of in the faces of people around me.
The Sears-Roebuck catalog was a shocking phenomenon when it was first released, changing the salience landscape of America as people began to associate products with elevated feelings. In a sense, the Sears-Roebuck catalog was the forerunner of modern lifestyle magazines which now feature ads for Gucci and D&G.
We can trace some of the philosophical descriptions from the work of Edward Bernays in the application of advertisement as psychotechnology.
This hyperconsumerism was first experienced in the 1920s when manufacturers utilized ads to sell the latest household gadget to a population already saturated with many latest gadgets. This consumerism was, later on, spread again in the United States as part of the post WW2 boom with the settling of populations into suburban households. Both consumer booms in the 1920s and in the 1950s kept the mass industries of the United States working. In the 1950s, additional fears of the Great Depression pushed policymakers into encouraging consumer spending. Families were urged to live in non-farm arrangements (like suburbs) so as to rely on the capitalist system to survive, developing the modern American financial economy.
The first real broadcast media was radio. Radio was quickly colonized by companies looking to sell ads to passive consumers. After syndication arose, allowing radio companies to sell air time to advertisers, groups in Europe began to use the radio to spread political messaging. In particular, the Nazis were successful at utilizing German public radio, which was started to provide social coherency for the Weimar Republic. Nationalism and advertisement work off the same media channel because radio works on one’s salience landscape regardless of the content it is disseminating. War of the Worlds radio broadcast is a classic example of how the form of expression, the conventions of radio used in the broadcast, determined the meaning of the content for those listening (more than the spoken disclaimers).
The success of hyperconsumerism is recorded by economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his book The Affluent Society. After World War II, the private sector began to outstrip the public sector in terms of wealth. This sign of wealth first emerges with the appearance of upper-class consumer items.
The creation of lifestyle as a modality of upper-class brand items is examined by Elizabeth Fraterrigo in Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America. Playboy magazine presented a sexually liberal lifestyle surrounded by fine commodities, like the latest stereo or flashy cars. As women gained independence, so men were also targeted as consumers. Playboy was an important outlet that promoted hyperconsumerism in the form of lifestyle. In a sense, sexy women attracted men to higher-end products, like cars, jazz, fine wine, and mansions. Playboy magazine was the first proto-Instagram feed, detailing one man’s lifestyle qua hyperconsumerism.
The formation of additional media channels carries with it an intensification of lifestyle as a goal because competition for consumers has additional venues to promote its brand of hyperconsumerism.
The rise of internet advertising came about when Carley Roney and David Liu create a website focused on first wedding planning. Their website, The Knot, pioneered selling ad space online. The intensity of American investment into weddings gave a website with an audience of those about to get married the opportunity to sell ads promoting the hyperconsumerism of weddings. This creation of virtual ad space is analogous to radio syndication and its sale of airtime.
Hyperreality is enabled when mechanical reproduction was made widely possible. In his groundbreaking essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written in the 1930s by Walter Benjamin, Benjamin examines the impact of reproducing art. While Benjamin argues that the reproduction of art destroys the aura of original artwork, he also argues that
Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.
Although Benjamin reserves the word aura for original works, he notes that reproduced works, like art (and especially film) can create their own kind of aura.
One way to note the presence of aura is the reaction of people seeing something they’ve only seen through reproductions. The first time I was at the Grand Canyon, I spent an hour sitting on a park bench listening. Many people arrived, responding to the enormity of the Grand Canyon by comparing its magnificence to a postcard. This is ironic because the postcards of the Grand Canyon are of the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is not based on a postcard of itself. In a world where mechanical reproduction can be the primary mode of experience, reproduced images can attain an aura more immediate than its original. What people meant was that the presence of the Grand Canyon was like that of the presence expressed by postcards. In that sense, the Mona Lisa isn’t primarily a painting, rather the Mona Lisa is primarily an icon, like the face of Marilyn Monroe — an expressive force on its own.
The majority of Benjamin’s essay focuses on how film is difficult for actors accustomed to plays, as the experience of film is only possible post-production. Unlike plays, the process of filming presents actors with scenes in sequences that do not preserve the veracity of the narrative. Films are entirely produced, media representations of events and phenomena which do not happen.
Rather, film, as a reproduction, creates its own simulacra for its own aura.
The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.
I connect Benjamin’s essay to lifestyle and consumerism because branding requires reproduction of aura as simulacra. Common manuals regarding social media insist that branding works given repeated exposures to targeted customers, which is the build-up of simulacra as a link to the desired signified of the brand.
The formation of hyperreality is only possible in a world that has mechanized reproduction available. When the technology to reproduce signs is widely available, so the bombardment of repeated exposures is possible, especially if that bombardment is disseminated from a central source. Repeated exposures reinforce the targeted association of emotions with products. While branding can be initially contextualized to give it an association, eventually the strength of the brand will recall the associated emotions. In this way, certain lifestyles come to be signified by the presence of certain consumerist items.
Lifestyles are literally hyperrealities. High-end fashion ads imply that the cost of access to such (produced) hyperrealities is dependent on their products. As Apple Inc. is a technology company, the success of Apple can be attributed to consumer’s willingness to pay a premium to gain access to Apple’s stylized presentation of information content. The success of Apple’s image is literally predicated on the fact that as a technology company, access to Apple’s proprietary networks means access to a lifestyle associated with Apple products.
All in all, while Apple Inc.’s success as the first trillion-dollar company occurs in a world post-broadcast media, the propagation of Apple as a brand is reliant on the formation of a hyperreality lifestyle built upon technologies first pioneered in the early 20th century. Media technologies are psychotechnologies.
Apple’s continued success relies on the media/hyperreality interactions afforded by Apple products. Note the two videos below. Despite the difference in media styles, the message stays constant.
The success of Apple depends on a conflation of the lifestyle afforded by media technology: Apple’s success, at least seen from their early advertisement is due to Apple’s exclusive access to hyperreality, first as one who creates and then later, as one who both consumes and creates while consuming.
Eventually, Apple ads, which are hyperreal in themselves, evolve by focusing our salience landscape in relation to Apple products as access to another world, a simulation of one’s self in that simulated bright new world.
In a real sense, Apple products appeal to a self-fulfilling loop, where participating in the hyperreal lifestyle is to be a consumer of that same lifestyle.
2.5 Soviet Communism as Hyperreality
This is an example of how a “false consciousness” created a real revolution, taken in large part from Guy Debord’s short masterpiece, The Society of the Spectacle.
The Bolsheviks implemented a mass education to help facilitate the communist revolution as there weren’t enough proletariats in Russia since most of the population were serfs.
As an aside, Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a Marxist manual for academics, carrying on the tradition of disseminating class consciousness.
Yet there’s a paradox here. Debord points out that no matter the industrial development of a country, the proletariat as a class doesn’t exist the way the bourgeois existed. Debord claims this is why Marxism did not happen in industrialized nations, despite the assumptions of the revolutionaries.
For various reasons, the bourgeois existed prior to capitalism (as a class of professionals) before the French Revolution. Debord writes:
The real movement that transforms existing conditions has been the dominant social force since the bourgeoisie’s victory within the economic sphere, and this dominance became visible once that victory was translated onto the political plane. The development of productive forces shattered the old production relations, and all static order crumbled into dust. Everything that was absolute became historical.
As victors in the French Revolution, capitalism formed because capitalism is how the bourgeois best expresses itself.
In a weird way, Debord anticipates Francis Fukayama’s End of History and the Last Man whereby Fukayama thought humans could not move apart from capitalism so there would be no more history.
If psychotechnology as a relationship is how humans process and interact with the world and each other, then capitalism is not the end of history as what was done can be undone. New and different hyperrealities can and have also emerged.
The key as to why the proletariats are a “false consciousness” is that the bourgeois existed as a group outside of the medieval system (even while it co-existed with it) while
- the proletariat only exists in terms of capitalism, a commodification of labor into wage labor
- the proletariat is not a salience landscape that is absolute, as people also have a salience landscape as consumers (see the previous subsection).
Proletariats are defined in terms of those who have been commodified in the labor market. Yet actual people are not only proletariats. The consciousness of a proletariat is undone through the act of being a consumer. The relationship of being an object in the (labor) marketplace is countered with being a subject in the (commodities) marketplace.
Thus proletariats are split into different kinds of salience landscapes, unlike the bourgeois who, during the medieval ages, had the opportunity to exist as only subjects in the marketplace, deciding everything based on money (in business, on employees, on vacation, at the supermarket). The split of proletariats into consumers and proletariats is why there could never be a proletariat as a class to create a revolution since actual people’s consciousnesses are not formed into a proletariat salience landscapes. As explored in a previous subsection, people often willingly adopt/prefer a salience landscape molded by hyperconsumerism.
Hyperconsumerism is also why capitalism works as a salience landscape; it is a psychotechnology that maintains the bourgeoisie by maintaining a kind of proto-hyperreality (where the cost of things, as the meaning of something, is divorced from the actual value of those things).
In a strange way, the Bolsheviks performed the right behavior for inaccurate reasons.
The example of the Bolsheviks and the formation of the USSR shows that psychotechnology’s effectiveness in terms of instrumentalizing people is independent of the veracity of the contents of instrumentalization.
The Bolshevik’s acknowledgment that a proletariat had to be created is how a “false consciousness” created a real revolution.
In some sense, this model of education is the shadow lesson that the KGB are the rightful heirs. This can suggest why they invested so heavily into their forms of propaganda and misinformation. The KGB, like the CIA, are enforcers whose arsenal includes strategic applications of psychotechnology.
2.6 The Period Between the two World Wars is a Period where Different Salience Landscapes Struggle over Human Organization
The period Between Two Wars is the title of a history series on YouTube covering the period of history between the two World Wars. This period was tumultuous with many conflicts between nations and within the nations themselves.
World War I essentially finished what the French Revolution started, castrating Monarchical authority throughout Europe. This authority was replaced with two sources of conflict:
- the arbitrary carving of nations in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East into countries by the victors of War War I
- the belief that people should implement self-rule. This went so far as letting some populations decide which nation to be a part of.
What both ideas had in common was the concepts voiced by the French Revolution: that rational subjects should rule for themselves.
The end of the age of Monarchs revealed a patchwork of intermingled populations, some of which had coexisted peaceably for hundreds of years. Yet when self-sovereignty became the principle for how humans should justify authority, the patchwork of intermingled populations found themselves neighboring potential enemies.
Some examples of conflicted populations include areas in the Ottoman and Austrian-Hungarian Empires such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece/Turkey, and the Middle East. These areas did not function as independent nations prior to World War I, so it is understandable that conflict and fighting would arise as different sub-groups disagreed about how authority and resource distribution should be established. However, many areas that did function as independent nations prior to World War I were equally tumultuous as their populations also did not also agree on how authority and resource distribution should be established.
Disagreements over the form of government led to groups identifying as democracy, fascism, communism, anarchist. Disagreements over how wealth should be distributed included areas such as in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
There are also areas where conflict arose in terms of how governance should be where the populations (or a bureaucracy) caught wind of the European ideas of self-determination. These areas already had governments but include India, Japan, and China.
These conflicts often erupted into riots. Often democratic governments failed to reach a simple majority, stalling the government. In a few places, there was even genocide.
Essentially the justification that people should self-rule (without specifying the form of that self-rule) allowed groups, with very different salience landscapes for what authority, justice, and equality were, to emerge after the chaos of the First World War. Twenty-one years of chaos led the world from the First World War to the Second World War. In twenty-one years, the contender for controlling the world economy in World War I, Germany, reassembled under a dictator who then attempted to take over the world. That dictator’s dream was to impose his own brand of salience landscape, that of Nazi Germany, over the world leading to “the darkness of the second world war.”
The rise of Nazism with its ethnic overtones is attributable to the vulnerability of the human salience landscape to psychotechnology. Utilizing broadcast technology, Hitler and his oligarchy created their own “race consciousness” to mobilize Germany into conflict with all its neighbors.
Of course, Americans also utilized their own broadcast and media technologies from FDR’s fireside chats to comic books and newsreels. In fact, it was America’s strong newsprint and media world that fanned the flames, encouraging strong public opinions in favor of war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, flipping isolationism into American Imperialism.
In order for America to fight fascism, it had to uphold its own form of humanism, as a non-racial, non-class, humanism, even if it was centered on some ineffable quality of being American or free.
From the outbreak of WW2, the Cold War can also be seen as having its own unique psychotechnologies, although that may be mentioned later.
Keep in mind that as history is recorded, having different focuses on what “mattered” in nation-building is a matter of one’s salience landscape. After the fact, we can still apply different salient “filters” to this time period.
For instance, seen from the perspective of Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems Analysis, WW1 and WW2 were about the struggle of Germany attempting to become a world leader, first against the British and then against the Americans. Here, world leader means one who controls the economic and cultural reigns.
From the perspective of post-2016 election, we can see current struggles as characterized by trends from the 1920s-1940s as disagreements over ethnic, cultural, economic, religious, and political justifications intensify.
One possible take away from this brief exploration is that to stop social arrangements we do not like, we would need additional psychotechnology to break out of those salience landscapes. Ironically, breaking out of salience landscape formations requires believing that there is a reasonable road to goals (like peace and prosperity) that lay according to a different salience landscape. One example is cognitive scientist George Lakoff’s call for using linguistic cognition in American Democratic advertisements whereby Lakoff promotes a liberal Democratic view as the justification for a massive media campaign.
Regardless, often people deeply embroiled in political fighting have rigid salience landscapes that do not allow validating alternate ways of making meaning.
Understanding that meaning is a matter of construction and that we have a choice in how we construct meaning, once we become aware of psychotechnology, is a major takeaway of this article.
2.7 The Psychotechology of Engineering and Technology
Marshall McLuhan’s claim that movable type was a precursor to the assembly line lies in his insistence that relationships engendered by media radically change the people’s salience landscape. McLuhan writes
Patrick Geddes said that the road destroyed the Greek city-state. But writing made the road possible, just as printing was later to pay for the roads of England and America. […] Swift silent reading came with the macadamized surfaces of the printed page. […] Ultimately the medieval clock made Newtonian physics possible. […] Moveable type was already the modern assembly line in embryo.
The consideration that print blocks are modular is of the same functional form as that of the assembly line’s treatment of products as modules.
With this thought, we can consider that a STEM-based training with some assumptions from the tradition of the Enlightenment a kind of psychotechnology.
In that sense, reductive forms of reasoning, like Boolean Algebra, Category Theory, or any of the hard sciences and engineering collectively formulate modalities of similar salience landscape training.
Interestingly, to encourage people to submit to this training, there is an aura constructed around the “genius” of these kinds of gurus. I refer to the narratives venerating people like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs.
These kinds of figures today are heroes. Some recent popular characters include Sherlock Holmes (the 2009 version had Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes), Rick of Rick and Morty, and Tony Stark/Iron Man of the Avengers Franchise.
At times this figure attains epic status as Tony Stark faces off a supervillain, Thanos. Or when Rick brings down the Galactic Federation. With Steve Jobs, we have the promise of super-wealth, and style.
Note that the stories above may appeal to a different kind of person than the other stereotype of the STEM nerd. Vinay Gupta in a recent podcast called Sci-Fi the culture of engineering. The popularity of stories about some technology will lead, thirty years later, to that technology being invented.
With video games, additional concepts and worldviews will also be realized when fans grow-up.
In this way, even our fiction can works as psychotechnology, changing how we see the world. When we are made aware of the possibility of some change, so we can find a way to make technology express that symbolized interaction into actuality.
Engineering and invention are, of course, different from a salience landscape better suited to the construction of symbolic theories and the elaboration of paradigms for new relationships of study. An expert engineer of salience landscapes would also need to think like a philosopher of science as salience landscapes have their own logic.
2.8 The Psychotechnology of American Humanism and Political Correctness
Political Activist, Caleb Maupin is a leftist. His activism is inspired by communist doctrine. In the video above, Maupin notes that the New Age Spiritualism left is a completely different beast from the left that came before it. Citing political writings of the 1930s and 1940s, Maupin asks rhetorically what Eastern philosophy or the New Age Spirituality has to do with Marxism. He cites Marilyn Ferguson’s book The Aquarian Conspiracy as providing the argument and evidence that the CIA is behind destroying the left by flooding it with nonsense.
Whether Maupin/Ferguson is correct or not about there being a conspiracy is not the focus of this article. The argument Maupin/Ferguson forwards is hinged on the idea that media can change one’s perception about what matters. Essentially, for the purposes of this article, this example is included because Maupin/Ferguson is accusing the CIA of instrumentalizing a hyperreality, what Maupin calls “The Synthetic Left”.
Recall example 2.5 about the “false consciousness” of the proletariat. The “Synthetic Left” is also a “false consciousness” if we accept Maupin’s suggestion that the true left is based on Marxist doctrine and science/technology — on things that are “real” (and not New Age-woo).
Note that the claims of Maupin run counter to claims of the stereotypical hippie, regarding what is real.
Often, appeals to reality are used to justify the legitimacy of a particular salience landscape. For example, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson argues that the reality of equal rights is exactly why the British Colonies should get to have their own government. He writes
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Whether/how Jefferson is right (or not) is not the point of this article. For the purposes of this article, Jefferson’s referral to the concept of Equal Rights being unalienable is what supports/justifies his argument that the British Colonies should have rights in the first place.
Of significance, this justification of equality is later echoed in favor of claims about Political Correctness and Identity Politics. Whether you agree with Political Correctness, Identity Politics. or not, to talk about these ideas, you need to refer to Equal Rights in some way.
Interestingly, despite the claim that Equal Rights is self-evident, the legal concept was still, historically, modified. To grant women the same legal equals as men, the 19th Amendment only needed to state one’s sex was not a justifiable condition to deny the application of Equal Rights. After the Civil War, the 14th and 15th Amendments were also passed, each granting the concept of Equal Rights to larger sets of people than were previously considered. Apparently Equal Rights is both universally self-evident and needing further elaboration.
Following the writings of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others, The Founding Fathers of the United States created a system of democratic government whose justification was on individuals having equal legal weight instead of a monarchial government whose king’s legal weight was granted (and thus justified) from God (over other people).
After the French Revolution dethroned France’s king, the same strategy of utilizing the self-evidence of reality was used to define citizenship and property laws. Interestingly Napoleon and Tallyrand also arguably built the first modern state bureaucracy, even utilizing statistics to justify policymaking (after all, what could be more real than statistics about who your people are?), in order to manage France’s growing Empire.
Ironically Napoleon justified his right to Emperorship on the authority of the French People to self govern.
What we see arising in politics at this time is the birth of the concept of secular humanism, causa sui.
Secular humanism is the idea that human beings derive their basic value without reference to God, religion, or a deity. Like ontology, secular humanism has older roots in a religious form. The older religions form is called humanism. Varieties of older forms of humanism centered on thinking that humans had their own value, justified through religion.
This is fine and dandy, although adherents of all forms of humanism make a basic error. Just as humanists claim that their theory about human beings is real, they understandably confuse their concept of being human with actual human beings. Of course, for many groups, including ones claiming democracy, out-groups were not considered human if they did not conform to in-group standards.
This is a common error, after all, people also mistake their image of an ideal spouse for their actual spouses. Where this becomes damaging is when actual humans are treated badly because they don’t conform to some ideal image of the way they are supposed to be.
For this reason, forms of humanism have not only justified concepts like Civil Rights and Affirmative Action but these forms have also been used to justify eugenics, genocide, segregation, slavery, immigration policy, and other kinds of laws about how to treat people. Ironically, having a form can be used to justify both oppression and liberation, often oppressing while justifying action through liberation.
The synthesis here is that human beings can be “formed” by our ideas of human beings. Two examples we’ve gone over include:
- Secular humanism — in terms of manufacturing ideal images of humans — has roots with the Enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau.
- Humanist philosophies function like the Code of Hammurabi, by focusing on people’s salience by focusing our attention on how people should be treated.
Education alters one’s salience landscape, including how to be a person. This kind of education qua psychotechnology, propagated through academic institutions, continues today as a part of Humanities Departments. These institutions first started with philology departments looking to establish deep nationalist and ethnic histories (sometimes to justify some nationalistic agenda of ethnic right) by tracing linguistic lineage. What is ironic is that while Humanities, in particular English Departments, today have taken up causes for the Left and universalism, in the part, these same departments had historically been a bastion of providing traditionalism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism and exclusion. Left or right, essentially academia acts as a form of social engineering via education.
In a startling way, Maupin’s conspiracy theory timeline about the sudden transformation of the American left coincides with the Academic department’s historic transformation of their departments into a new left.
William V. Spanos explains this transformation in his book The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism. Spanos examines how humanism, nationalism, and education reach a crisis in the 1970s with the Vietnam war. Contrary to Maupin’s claims about a CIA conspiracy, Spanos sees education departments, especially ones in Berkeley and Havard at the forefront of setting the direction for American education in the late 60s and early 70s.
Spanos suggests that the spread of Marxism, as an educational instrument to foster revolution was swept up in the frenzy of the counter-cultural movement that emerged from the children who were too young to fight in World War Two and the t.v. generation of the baby-boomers. As Marxism sought to instrumentalize the hippies, so the hippies absorbed Marxist methodologies and focused them back on cultural liberation.
In some sense, Spanos takes the same approach as he utilizes post-structuralism as a way of reading the historic British/American national lineage of English Departments. Spanos questions whether or not the values of liberalism as a model of liberation for a salience landscape matched the values of a British/American salience landscape. Spano’s conclusion is that they do not. Nonetheless, Spanos also shows how intellectual and cultural leaders find ways to assert the same “self-evident” justifications given by secular humanism to also promote British/American culture. In one examination of I.A. Richard’s writing, Spanos sums up Richard’s entire book in this critique:
Understood in terms of its re-representational and assimilative imperatives, Richard’s “comprehensive synoptic view” becomes another historical supplement of panoptic perspective privileged in the West since Plato […] posited the memory as the agency of recovering prelapsarian realms of forms from fallen history, and of imposing the imperial will to power over the historicity of being. As the material extension of this synoptic view, the university Richards envisages for the post-World War II era becomes both a speculative instrument” for the fulfillment of Western Man’s perennial metaphysical (and patriarchial) dream of bringing order into the “chaos” of conflicting historical knowledge and a historically specific strategy to “defend” the common body of Western values against the “treat” of emergent sociopolitical alternatives, not least communism, that rough (Asian) beast slouching toward the West to be born.
This form of idealized being human who has universal and objective truth who must also, paradoxically have a specific ethnic identity is analogous to the contemporaneous philology departments during Richard’s time. How could Richard’s version of a universal ethnic truth be as self-evident as a universal Marxism or neo-liberal American Political Correctness? The answer is, self-evidence is self-evident only if you have the salience landscape for that form of answer.
From Spanos’ title you might get the sense that humanism and education end together, however, I have a more abstract definition of humanism. Given humanism as the conflation of human beings with images of being human, it is easy to see that Identity Politics and Political Correctness are also humanisms — perhaps a step towards realizing their own “French Revolution”, even if they have a strong American influence.
American influence is exactly how we can answer Maupin. “The Synthetic Left,” regardless of being a CIA plot, is Marxism in America being absorbed by American culture. The post World War II counter-culture is a wave of American hyperreality that reconfigured Marxist thought.
Recognizing the rise of new technologies like television and radio, a whole new generation of youth, the Baby-Boomers, got to see their nation through different lenses of television and decide what they liked or didn’t like about it. Essentially hyperreality provided enough of contrast at that young people had a reason to reject the entire system.
Eventually, this rebellion became further marginalized by hyperconsumerism as teenage rebellion began to appear in television as part of a “normal” phase of growing up. Apparently, even teenage angst could be absorbed by American hyperreality.
Marxism, despite its claim to ideological purity, could not stand against the rituals and pleasures of counter-culture. Whether the CIA was involved or not doesn’t matter. Historically, the hyperreality of counterculture successfully enveloped the energies of those critical of capitalism. Then counter-culture was also absorbed by American hyperreal hyperconsumerism.
2.9 The Psychotechnology of Narrative
Following the shift of education in the 1970s with influences from Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, there is a rise of critical theory in Humanities Departments.
As mentioned in the previous subsection, critical theory arose out of the use of Marxist cultural criticism’s method of analyzing artifacts of culture within a historic context. While Marxism did this to show how Marxist paradigms were primary causes for historic progress, critical theory used the same methods to show how oppression worked in other domains, such as feminism, or post-colonialism. Critical theorists worked within that rubric of cultural change, often with the goal of a better future. The movements that eventually took up the mantle of bringing about a better future were Political Correctness and Identity Politics.
What is salient in this examination isn’t the humanities but the nature of critical theory. Critical theory thrived in English departments because the Marxist method of cultural criticism allowed English Departments, primarily, to analyze narratives germane to American citizens. Within those narratives, there were ethnic writing, writing about minorities, writing about women, women's rights, and so on.
Narrative examinations yielded plenty of patterns to show systematic inequality. By working as archeologists, similar to the aesthetics of Nietzche (or Foucault), Freud, and Marx; cultural theorists could “uncover” truths that they can then attempt to change in the present world.
If you haven’t guessed it, yes narrative is also a psychotechnology. Critical theory worked to modify standards for narratives, and in that sense, critical theory only attained results when it modified one’s salience landscape.
Narratives work to establish what is both normal and unnormal.
For example, European style narratives are forms constructed around expressing a central conflict. Often these conflicts are about what is not normal. The implication in these conflicts is that once what is undesirable is excised so the universe of the narrative can become harmonious again.
There are many kinds of narrative structures. Interestingly, narratives can pass structures along. For instance, Marxism is a narrative. Marxism explains the increase of production and concentration of ownership is the only vehicle for historic progress so that once the distribution of wealth is fixed so there will be no more history.
Michel Foucault, on his deathbed, noted how this Marxist narrative is constructed in the form of Christianity with the International Communist revolution an analogy of the 2nd Coming of Christ whereby no more history is possible once this final event occurs. This latent expression of Christianity lets Marxism feel like a familiar story. Likewise, the narrative of Christ, in various forms (allegory, symbol, imagery), has also figured in plenty of fiction such as The Grapes of Wrath, The Matrix Trilogy, and Cool Hand Luke. By drawing parallels, narratives can trigger audiences and borrow/create meaning.
It is not hard to imagine stories with moral instruction, like Aesop’s Fables as psychotechnology as these seem fairly obvious as ways of connecting to young audiences. Nonetheless, any form of narrative is psychotechnology because the form of the psychotechnology — the way information is connected together — is what has effects on people’s awareness/salience landscape. Here are a few examples:
- As noted by Mary Catherine Bateson, Greek mythology for ancient Greeks served as a way of mapping natural phenomenon onto familial relationships. For instance, seasonal changes could be understood as a kind of split-marriage/custody of Persephone and Hades regarding an unhappy mother-in-law as Demeter, the Goddess of Harvest, and Grains. When it was time for Persephone to go back to Hades, her mother Demeter was sad, so it was also wintertime when there was no harvest available. The mythological family structure was a way for the ancient Greeks to understand the regularity of the seasons.
- Sigmund Freud utilized the Oedipus narrative in order to structure for how to deal with the unconscious. The Oedipus narrative lets us triangulate on (traumatic) events so that we can try to deal with them once we become aware of some irregularity there.
- Joseph Campbell extracts the hero’s journey as a monomyth — a way to understand one’s place in the universe. These stories involve imparting the protagonist a particular salience landscape so that they can gain wisdom as they navigate through deep evils and difficult moral quandaries.
- John Vervaeke has also noted how the Romantic movement presented itself as a psychotechnology in order to try and reconnect humans to back into the world. The stories and Romanticism’s ideas are based on a false dichotomy between rationalism and emotionality as a split within consciousness. The Romantic movement was a way to try to integrate that split so people could have access to the real world.
As narratives can work as psychotechnology so methods that analyze/explicate narratives are also psychotechnologies.
2.10 The Psychotechnology of Post-structuralism and Hermeneutics
Of unique mention, are also post-structuralism and hermeneutics.
These approaches are also forms of psychotechnology in that practitioners can gain a different salience landscape with repeated use. Such salience landscapes can help people realize the language games that people can find themselves stuck in.
In this sense, post-structuralism and hermeneutics can be used just as early Axial Age psychotechnologies, to gain (some) liberation. In particular, post-structuralism questioned the generally prescriptive and thus rigid modernist strategies of meaning formation. Some notable post-structuralist concepts include
- Jean Francois Lyotard’s grand narrative. By noting this prevailing structure, people can then make a choice as to whether to accept it or not
- Jacques Derrida’s metaphysics of presence, mentioned earlier, of which logocentricism is an example. This presence is a way of expressing content so the content appears to be objectively true. Logocentricism is a metaphysics of presence constructed in writing. By calling attention to these rhetorical and conceptual strategies, Derrida invites us to question texts instead of accepting them due to how they were written. (There is some parallel between logocentricism and Stephen Colbert’s truthiness, explored in the third article of this series.)
- Michel Foucault explored how legitimacy was constructed in many fields like biology, sanity, humanities, and sexuality. These classification schemas were often used to legitimize authority for prisons, (de)legitimatize human sexual interactions, and to justify political domination. As an example, of how Foucault relates Truth to power and social bureaucracy/hierarchy, click here.
- Paul Ricoeur explored how rhetorical structures created an internal logic that established legitimacy, such as history as a genre, or how metaphor operates as a fundamental building block for sensemaking.
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote their Schizophrenia and Capitalism series, which analyzed how capitalism, hyperconsumerism, and media created hyperrealities that fragmented how we operate and grasp the world. This approach will be explored later in this series, but this view releases us from the assumption that having an individual body means that your phenomenological experience is singular, centered, and in the image of Western European style subjectivity.
I engage in many of these approaches in order to make sense of psychotechnology.
2.11 Metabolic Psychotechnologies.
The majority of the psychotechnologies mentioned are sensory in nature, either involving words (sounds and sight) or media (sounds, sights, and touch).
In this subsection I want to give a few examples of psychotechnologies that work on our salience landscape that are based more in terms of our body’s metabolism.
Our limbic and parasympathetic nervous systems developed in order to maximize our ability to meet the demands of nature, as a matter of evolution and natural selection.
As the modern world developed faster than our genetics could adjust, our conscious awareness has taken up the mantle of adjusting our metabolic processes in order to meet the demands of today.
These metabolic psychotechnologies include more traditional forms like yoga, meditation, and fasting. I would also include general medical advice such as how we regulate sleep, the foods and vitamins we eat, and the amount of exercise we get as a very general kind of metabolic psychotechnology.
Extreme deprivation or indulgence can alter our salience landscape. In fact, athletes, artists, dancers, and musicians can purposefully alter their salience landscape so as to be intuned with nuances in their respective fields. This can include abstinence from sex and drugs or fasting.
Essentially if you change how your body works in order to optimize your mental processes, as with coffee, with legal or illegal drugs, regular exercise, or even by streaming music, you are working with psychotechnology.
This alteration of our reward architecture has a term: wireheading. Wireheading includes drinking caffeine in the morning or taking a sip of dessert wine after dinner as such drugs can put us in the mood to perform specific kinds of tasks, like that of work or socialization.
As of recent, there has been a huge rise in bio-hacking, as people instrumentalize their showers, their foods, and their metabolic routines in order to squeeze additional performance from their cognitive faculties.
Ultimately, all psychotechnologies are about enhancing performance. For some, such as with alcohol there is an obvious trade-off in some performance for other forms of performance. For all psychotechnologies, there is some give and take as considering matters one way can leave blindspots for considering matters in other ways. For example, developing a good salience landscape to play tennis will impede developing a salience landscape to play squash, even though both games appear similar.
This concludes our list, although this list is not exhaustive.
3 The Takeaway
In some sense, this entire article implements a psychotechnology, not on this list. The way this article is written has tropes and rhetorical structures adopted from Anglo-Saxon style essay writing. The titles, paragraphs, and so on draw your attention in a particular way to elucidate a kind of relationship between the described phenomenon.
Essentially, this article’s form, if successful, can function as a psychotechnology.
At this point, I want to draw your attention to the relationship between hyperreality, psychotechnology, and salience landscapes. Both psychotechnology and hyperreality are ways of modifying your salience landscape. Hyperrealities occur when humans can create sense impressions that can influence the user to induce a change in the user’s salience landscape.
With mobile technology and computers, the cost of creating and releasing signification into our shared hyperreality allows anyone to construct simulacra qua aura about anything, including products, brands, YouTube channels, and fictitious tv show characters.
Overt examples of hyperreality include VR environments. A subtle example of hyperreality includes the algorithms working the backend of a social media feed.
Regardless of the sophistication or overtness of signification, the impact of hyperreality on our salience landscape is key to understanding the context we are in.
How do we coexist with psychotechnology today? Our technology creates all kinds of arrangements, linking disparate phenomena together in unique ways. See the web series Black Mirror for some very uncomfortable linkages.
Consider how this mixture of psychotechnology simultaneously creates, promotes, destroys, and de-emphasizes meaning. What would be the end result? What should be the end result?
The next article in this series applies this paradigm to our present context: Hypersubjectivity in the Time of COVID-19.
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