Psycho-Power

Description

"Psycho-power is the systematic organisation of the capture of attention made possible by the psycho-technologies that have developed with the radio (1920), with television (1950) and with digital technologies (1990), spreading all over the planet through various forms of networks, and resulting in a constant industrial canalization of attention which has provoked recently a massive phenomenon of the destruction of this attention that American nosologists call attention deficit disorder. This destruction of attention is a particular case, and especially serious one, of the destruction of libidinal energy whereby the capitalist libidinal economy self-destructs." (http://www.arsindustrialis.org/node/2922)

Discussion

"Attention is the reality of individuationi in Gilbert Simondon’s sense of the terms: insofar as it is always both psychical and collective. Attention, which is the mental faculty of concentrating on an object, that is, of giving oneself an object, is also the social faculty of taking care of this object – as of another, or as the representative of another, as the object of the other: attention is also the name of civility as it is founded on philia, that is, on socialised libidinal energy. This is why the destruction of attention is both the destruction of the psychical apparatus and the destruction of the social apparatus (formed by collective individuation) to the extent that the later constitutes of system of care, given that to pay attention is also to take care. (It is also to watch out, which is taken up in the emphasis I will put on destruction.) Such a system of care is also a libidinal economy, wherein a psychical apparatus and a social apparatus hook up, whose destruction today is engendered by technological apparatuses. And we will see that they are in fact psychotechnological and sociotechnolgical apparatuses. In other words, we are confronted with a question stemming from what I call a general organology.

The major stake of attention deficit disorder and of everything stemming from the destructive effects of the exploitation of attention by psychopower is therefore the fragilisation of the infantile psychic apparatus and of sociability founded on philia. Now, this precocious liquidation of libidinal economy is also what destroys the industrial capitalism of investment: the organ of psychopower is marketing as the arm of a financialised capitalism become essentially speculative.

The gigantic financial crisis sending tremors all over the world is the disastrous result of the hegemony of the short term of which the destruction of attention is at once effect and cause. The loss of attention is a loss of capacities of projection into the long term (that is, of investment in objects of desire) which systemically effects the psychic apparatuses of consumers manipulated by psychopower as well as the manipulators themselves: the speculator is typically the person who pay no attention to the objects of his speculation, and who takes no care of them either.

The act of the speculator has effects on the multitude of consciousnesses that undergo, directly or indirectly, the effects of his speculation through the psychotechnological devices of attention capture. These consciousnesses are thus always a little more enclosed in the default of attention and care, that is, in the short term, which justifies a posteriori the act of the speculator: this act is performative in the sense Jean-François Lyotard lends to it in The Postmodern Condition. This is how a system of the short term gets established, along with the vicious circle of the destruction of attention.

This is the context in which the colossal environmental crisis rages on, having been promoted to first place in the world’s concerns (Besorgen) and the attention (Sorge) by the Nobel Academy, and whereby what is discovered and planetarily recognized as what I will later analyse as the third limit of capitalism, after the tendential drop in profit margins and the tendential drop in libidinal energy (resulting directly from the destruction of attention)." (http://www.arsindustrialis.org/node/2922)