Modernity promises certainty: it professes to take that which had previously been hidden and demystify phenomenon through the application of generalized principals. To make sense of what may seem to be unrelated or disconnected, a researcher will “control” for certain variables. In doing so, they look to the commonalities between individual instances, allowing for the researcher to create connections between what may otherwise appear as unrelated events. To the untrained eye, the occurrence of a particular phenomenon may appear to be random or without cause. For the researcher, commonalities among a generalized set suggest a common point of origin or causal connection, allowing for the development of strategies to harness or securitize against specific instances of related phenomena.
Deluze argues the distinction between repetition and generality cannot be overstated. While generality allows us to exchange one term for another, repetition is never identical. Each repeating phenomenon is unique; no drop of water contains the exact form of that before it. The modern researcher will then take any particular instance within the repeating pattern that troubles the generalization the research intends to draw, and they will cut out those instances as if they were so much static. Many quantitative scholars have pointed out that within a disciplinary paradigm, there will often exist certain anomalies that trouble the paradigm of a particular research field. The typical response of a research community when presented with outliers is to erase them. Data points that contravene the general pattern are controlled for and subsequently removed from the final discussion.
Such manipulation of data has become accepted within science due to its usefulness in creating knowledge that is generally applicable. The general findings of studies allow for the development of technical and scientific cannon. Researchers build off studies with results that would have been not nearly as useful had the author not controlled for the variables. This methodology of modern research has undoubted utility within the context of developing physical sciences by the decoding of information that would otherwise appear to not be causally linked. However, the application of modern research methods to “social sciences,” or even the broader application to “political science,” and “economics,” reveal such disciplines to be epistemologically troubled. These disciplines reduce human behavior to data points and then control for the data points that trouble the general findings. Such acts serve to erase, not only the complexity of the individual, but entire subjectivities as well. In a musical piece, ignoring some of the notes will create a theme that is easier to perform but at the cost of its nuance. In the same manner, modern research of human and social interactions provides, at best, a rough and selective impression of what is occurring. In fact, replicability within social science research is so hard to perform due to the requirement for generalized results that Gelman and many others within social science fields have referred to it as a “crisis.”
Distinctions between the social and hard science disciplines are ultimately the product of mere abstraction. The epistemological trouble within the social field is not merely the result of improper methodology. The roots of this epistemological impasse are the very categories of inclusion and exclusion necessary to define human behavior as something that is not purely physical. Social machines are collections of biological machines are collections of molecular machines. It is not that human behavior is of a different substance than the behavior of molecular biology or the cosmos. It is more akin to the problem of the fish. We cannot make sense of the morass of social rules and logics we are immersed in. Thus, social science sits at a crossroads: the field is driven to decode the human psyche, but the drive forces the decoding back on itself. How would we make sense of the bare mechanical subject? How can a decoded society function if it uncovers the dirty secret: that there never was any “meaning” to social interaction, only function? For all their claims of ideological impartiality, the potential discoveries of human sciences come with too many entailments for modernists to fully wrestle with.
It is entirely fair to suggest that the logic behind the erasure of variables is symptomatic of the larger trends within the modernist project. It is no coincidence that the Bush and Obama State Departments listed civilians, even children, as “militants'' by nature of their general location and disposability. Nor is it coincidental that the modern economic subject is expected to act in a generally predictable and “rational” manner. Through colonial and neocolonial projects, the hegemonic narrative underlying consumer capitalism has served as a veritable bulldozer for difference. This narrative promises diversity and freedom, but within such parameters as to be almost meaningless. Choices of which name brands you purchase and who you sell your labor to can only be made so appealing. In terms of meaningful difference, the liberal democratic state demands assimilation. Your difference may only be cosmetic in nature. It will be branded dangerous insomuch as it cannot be generally commensurate to the ideals of Western Capitalism. The human social experience becomes shopping in a mall. For example, “Black is in,” means that our entertainment is now littered with the cosmetic relics of Africa and of Black culture, severed from their ideological context. Take the musical “Hamilton'' as an example. This performance is loved by its largely affluent audience for the bland retelling of an American founding narrative rooted in concepts of a white ethnostate, even as the same audience simultaneously enjoys an ensemble of performative diversity. Had “Hamilton'' been about the Haitian Revolution, or any other narrative that does not fit within the cannon of modernity, it would have likely been forgotten or hated despite its aesthetic.
There are two cornerstones that provide the basis for public discourse regarding the human subject. The first of these concepts is essential human nature, and the second being mind-body duality. While these concepts no longer dominate the medical and scientific schools of thought, they permeate our popular culture, legal framework, and form the basis for a collective preconsciousness regarding ontology. These concepts facilitate a relationship with outside social expectations that seem intrinsic to our being: for example, the feelings of guilt that arises when we violate a code of ethics. It creates the impression of a constant war between the rational, immaterial essence that binds humanity, and the animalistic material tendencies that drive our base desires. Legal systems tend to dispense justice in this manner; assuming the responsible party will, at the very least, receive “justice” for allowing their lower nature to win out even if they do not reform. We are taught that “moral” or “successful” persons comprise individuals who can conquer these lesser parts of their nature.
Such beliefs represent a hegemonic understanding of “humanity” as something paradoxically intrinsic to humans and also something not all humans possess. There are those who have given into their bestial nature, thus forsaking the rationality that unites the rest of humanity. These creatures have, either explicitly or implicitly, been stripped of their human rights by the State due to their forfeiture or seeming inherent lack of human essence. Slave apologists and colonists have long relied on the argument that their slaves lacked the human essence necessary to receive the “rights” that authentic humans enjoy. Despite the importation of African women - some for the express purpose of sexual slavery, the early American colonies argued that it was the bestial and lascivious Black woman who entrapped men with her mystical and low nature. As a result, not a single instance of rape against a Black woman by a white man is found in the official records of the period. The concept of human rights, considered by many to be a linchpin of humane society, has from its inception been coded with exceptions to justify the raw use of power against the most vulnerable. The underlying understanding is that the “rational essence,” which should be understood here as a comprehension and acceptance of the dominant order, is what determines the humanity and rights of an organism. In other words, those who reject, or are ignorant of, the dominant morals and social norms are consequently subject to the raw power of “real humans.” This demystifies how the era of “natural human rights'' could also be the era of unspeakable colonial and mechanistic violence. The horrors of modern history are a product of, not in spite of, prevailing human rights philosophy.
It is this rights discourse that allows for the emergence of further biopolitical discourse. It is impossible to understand the underlying violence of rights discourse without considering the racial violence that underpins it. For the Locke or one of those who follow along this line, there exist bodies that deserve rights, and in contrast, the corporal flesh of the undeserving. Biopolitical logic underpins the manner by which power works behind the scenes. Rights discourse has become visage stretched tightly over the true nature of politics. The politics of the present is far more interested in quantifying and organizing flesh than qualifying and maintaing rights. Labor in a capitalist framework does not exist until bodies become fungible.
Despite the cultural reliance on the mind body duality and the essential human nature, these concepts do not illuminate experience in a manner that allows for the most efficient decoding of human behavior. Systems of power always look to decode because a decoded system can be securitized against, while an encoded system is unpredictable and always contains the potential for an unexpected threat. This is why the unpredictable is always associated with criminality or abrogation. An unpredictable subject does not go to work at the same time each day, nor does it act in a manner that can be easily anticipated.
The medical/capital (medcap) understanding of the human subject is more attuned to the varied and often unconscious aspects of human behavior. The field of psychology and the other social sciences are far more predictive of behavior than the mind body paradigm used in public discourse. While these fields may struggle to be predictive on an individual level, the application of psychology to mass marketing, profiling, and other forms of generalization have yielded practical results in understanding and manipulating human behavior. The scientific and medical gaze has stripped humans of phenomenology altogether by relying on purely mechanistic and observable findings to create an understanding of human consciousness.
The shift towards this medcap ontology is clearly visible in the manner by which institutions of power focus on the management of as opposed to the facilitation of desires. The chief effect of mass media is to condition the release of dopamine, serotonin, and other chemicals in the brain as to channel desire along predictable flows. As a result, human subjects must participate in the mechanisms of late modernity not only to avoid punishment, but also to temporarily satiate desire. When one considers the function of mass media, advertising, and public relations as a whole, they primarily perpetuate the continued existence of powers of the status quo by creating positive associations in those being interacted with.
The creation of corporate identity through branding is a further example of how medcap looks to route human desire along exploitable and predictable courses. The preexisting desire of subjects to connect with other subjects is highjacked by branding to create positive affects toward the company. The corporate machine applies strategies used by the national machine to take the affect we once reserved for other biological systems and reroute it toward corporate entities. The aim of a branding campaign is for the mere mention of a brand to elicit feelings of connection and desire. Marketing is not about informing potential clients, but creating a Pavlovian association that induces the audience to consume and produce on behalf of the company.
Those who reject or fail to find a place in this ordering are designated as ill. The concept of mental illness is a broad framework that takes many non-normative behaviors and categorizes them as deficiencies. In this way, the medcap ontology seeks not to destroy or merely subjugate the other, but as Foucault would describe the process, reform the human. With the right medication, conditioning, and messaging, a person may be induced to find a place within the “natural ordering” of the world, and thus regain their humanity. While such concepts were present in the minds of slavers and colonialists, often called the “civilizing” process, the new mechanistic description of humanity allowed for such ideas to be more practically implemented.
So if neither of the prevailing ontological frameworks provides both illuminating and life-affirming insights, how do we make sense of human societies and order understandings of personhood? Humans are varied assemblages that include complex, multilayered consciousnesses and physiologies. While there is often repetition from person to person, it is the variation between instances that allows for the most illuminating and life-affirming ontologies to emerge.. My contention is that the capacity to communicate difference, rather than any metaphysical essence, is what allows us to taxonomize different assemblages. The irony of capitalist individualism is its reliance on a particular “monad” that must be broadly identical in essence and must be equally accountable to the larger rules of the social. Individualism gives you the freedom to operate towards achieving a collective and limited interpretation of desire. Only when we consider that the Western individual is a semiotic phenomenon rather than a material one could we also consider movements beyond or away from it. Any categories we create through generalization, such as the designation “human”, will only be useful to a point. The difference between humans should be far more important to the researcher than the category of humanity itself. In considering variation, we push the limits of our generalizations and remain open to concepts that we might otherwise have controlled for.
Deluze’s work in Repetition and Difference is destabilizing. However, it is no less destabilizing than the world it inhabits. Perhaps from the rubble that was our collective understanding of humanity, human rights, and human laws we can discover positivity. The stable and dualistic self pushes other concepts of identity and the sel(ves) out of our daily lives. That is to say, even if one can comprehend an ontological alternative to the stable self, or abandon traditional concepts of stable ontology altogether as something impermanent, there will always be the necessity to suspend such ideas and communicate using the discourse outlined by dominant ideology. For example, if I refrained from speaking in terms of “I” or “myself,” I would lose my ability to interact with certain social mechanisms. In fact, written language contains limited tools for concisely communicating about the assemblages that constitute a temporal physiology as opposed to a permanent essence we refer to as “I” or “you.”
With their disregard toward the hegemony of present ontological ideas, the multifaceted and conflicted sel(ves) that Nietzsche, Deleuze, and others describe have been too alien and unsettling to occupy a central position in the greater public doxa. With that said, as the stable and familiar concepts of self have reverberated through populations; they create a continually uncertain and terrifying world. The price of remaining secure in the ontologies of the moment is that one must cut oneself off from any information that troubles the ontologies of mind/body and medcap. Some data is considered to be of significance and the rest is controlled for. The work of creating new models for semiotics is neither simple nor safe. Regardless, describing semiotics of difference is nonetheless a possible line for those marginalized by the modernist approach. More nuanced ontological ideas exist within many cultures not colonized by European thought. While it may appear futile to alter our sel(ves) conception, it is reassuring to consider that dominant ontological understandings are not the only ones that exist. Concepts discarded by colonial thinking serve as reminders that there are other ways of ordering and decoding reality.
It is here that I struggle with the structure of language. The most impactful poetry, according to Sartre, functions the appropriation of the colonizer’s language to resist colonialism. However, this text is far from poetry. I must concede that colonial thought unavoidably influences a systematic work such as this. Regardless, due to the nature of colonized language, I struggle to clarify what I mean to feel phenomenologically connected to the space around you. The deterritorialization of knowledge, particularly indigenous knowledge, means that while I attempt to draw from insight from outside of colonized spaces, the very syntax and vocabulary I invoke contains the entailments of colonization. In fact, if one searches uncolonized, the first definition they might see is, “a space not yet colonized.” This wording is not without significance. The colonizer sees colonization of all space not just as necessity, but also as inevitable. Many cultures enjoyed a direct symbiotic connection between the unique environment of their birth and their cultures’ very existence. The colonizing process has largely erased this connection. I may be from the Los Angeles area, but I have no connection with the geography beyond the structures that have colonized it. My mental map is not of the territory, but of a hyper territory imposed upon it. The Hollywood sign and Downtown exist as something incredibly temporal. Neither existed for the vast majority of the region’s history. The indigenous knowledge and symbiotic patterns of the rivers, flora, and fauna are largely lost to us and certainly not known by the vast majority of colonists and displaced migrants who live there. So when I say certain peoples see themselves as part of a larger spirit with the land, I must clarify that such words come with entire ideologies and other entailments lost in part on the colonized consciousness. Our myopic perspective in regards to the passage of time creates difficulty when attempting to comprehend how space is inhabited and how ideas come to their current condition. The evolution of concepts and space through the passage of time is the next step if we are to demystify the realities of our present moment.