In his Modern Man In Search of a Soul [1933], Carl Jung described the collective quality of humanity’s mental foundation. In early ‘oral’ cultures, humanity’s thinking was structured by myth and custom and the individual was perceived primarily as an integrated part of the collective. Likewise there was little distinction between this collective consciousness and the environment. “In the primitive world,” Jung wrote, “everything has psychic qualities.”[1] Human history then can be read as the history of the separation of the individual’s psyche from the world, a process that Jung has referred to as ‘individuation’. As the individual is articulated, the world simultaneously becomes demystified.
Scientific ways of describing the world have been very important in this process of individuation. If the goal is to understand the world in order to master and control it, it is obviously not useful to have this world populated by spirits. Or as Jung put it, “civilized man . . . must strip nature of psychic attributes in order to dominate it; to see his world objectively he must take back all of his archaic projections.”[2] Distinction between things is absolutely necessary for this sort of control, as is a clear set of reproducible laws. Thus it is imperative within the paradigm of science to distinguish between separate individuals, between individuals and the natural world, and also between elements in the natural world. The need for the natural world to follow reproducible rules implies that it cannot be inhabited by spirits. The individual thus becomes separated from the world and the world becomes demystified.
In addition to science as described by Jung, capitalism also requires that the individual be distinguishable from the collective and that the world be de-mystified. This was the point made by the sociologist Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and The “Spirit” of Capitalism [1904]. Protestantism, the technology of the printing press, and early capitalism put a new and universal emphasis upon the individual that had only been in its nascent stages in the humanism of the Renaissance. By printing the Bible in German, Luther put your relationship with God in your own hands. Simultaneously, mercantile capitalism created a new class of self-made elite – individuals who didn’t have to depend on the power of their family or tribe for power, but created it themselves.
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the invention of the printing press. In addition to further establishing the role of the individual in the cosmos, it was also being used to revolutionize the efficiency of accounting, creating, as the French economist Bernard Steigler has put it, “a new understanding of reason as ratio.”[3] This sort of capitalism also requires that the world be divided up into equal, quantifiable elements that can be valued according to the logic of production, distribution, and consumption. Together with science, capitalism aided by the printing press continued the demystification of the world.
In addition, the printing press also put a new emphasis upon the visual consumption of the written word. Words which had primarily been spoken, or at least when written had represented spoken words, suddenly stood on their own as visual symbols. This custom of reading words finally wrenched Western society from what had primarily been an oral culture into a visual culture. And with this emphasis on the eye comes an emphasis on the mind. A visual culture always privileges the mind over the body.[4]
A history emerges from all this, showing a transition from orality, collectivity, and mysticism to an ocular-centric society of individuals moving about in a de-mystified, measurable world. But, the industrial revolution created by our scientific discoveries actually caused disindividuation as the individual craftsman was reduced to a “unit of work”, as Steigler puts it.[5] And this does not stop at the factory door: “when proletarianism extends to ever-widening spheres of activity through progress in automated tasks, the result is psychic and collective disindividuation.”[6] The automation of tasks reversed the process of individuation, both in the factory and in the office. While this was the case, is it still true today?
For this electro-nomadic cyborg, standing in a room with a remote control in my hand, the remote control allows me to manifest change in the world with very little effort. It makes me very powerful. But does this make me more articulated from the world as an individual? Does the new technology render me more or less individuated? Despite my increased power as an individual, the tool still blends me with the world. Through my networks, as described by William Mitchell, I am linked to the rest of the world by a pseudo-telepathic connection. Being increasingly networked certainly feels like disindividuation. Through these networks, we are now capable of remembering things that we never experienced or learned. We can reason through a problem with the capacity of 3 billion minds. Technology like wikis and clusters of blogs make ‘truth’ a constantly negotiated thing – ‘communicative reason’ manifest. Our capacity to effect change increases drastically in size [in terms of physical geography]. And phenomenologically, we also increase drastically in size with our capacity to effect change.
Our new forms of technology are in fact creating a disindividuation, similar to that produced by the industrial revolution. But something else interesting is happening too: there is also a re-enchantment. As the vastness of the networks and the complexity of the technology move well beyond our capacity to understand, there is an unmistakable whiff of magic to it all. The way in which we discuss the technology implies a ghost in the machine, an assumption not far off from believing in sorcery. Children who have grown up with computers have actually been found to consistently describe computers as ‘sort-of’ alive.[7]
Technology seems to be causing a movement back towards collectivity and enchantment. It may also be leading us back to a new ‘orality’. The books and images of the ocular-centric culture that arguably reigned from the Enlightenment until now, encouraged a focused, precise gaze. The barrage of images that we are now producing and being confronted with, however, seem to be inspiring an unfocused, “participatory and empathetic gaze,” which allows us to cope.[8] In Juhani Pallasma’s view, this new “mode of looking” sees a “multiplicity of standpoints and perspectives, and is multiple, pluralistic, democratic, contextual, inclusionary, horizontal, and caring.”[9] This, paired with new interface systems that circumvent the eye such as haptics and EEG sensors, seems to indicate a retreat from the visual and the intellectual which has dominated culture for so long, giving the rest of the body a chance to assert itself.
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