maks valenčič, psychotic accelerationism — review
in psychotic accelerationism, maks' ideas about politicizing imagination and the way representation influences perceived reality through symbolic authority are refreshing, but his concept of simulation has some unresolved tensions, his use of lacan and land aren't well read or even necessary, and his central concept "realism", albeit convincing, is caught up trying to be an ideological sentiment and a systemic critique at the same time. worst of all, the text moves from representation to world-creation without actually marking the transition, showing a fundamental instability between ontology and epistemology, that the concept of psychosis through the vr headset analogies, even if it wants to, can't just seemlessly leap towards intertwining, at least not without actually building the necessary steps to get there. since the text is short in size, the rest of this overview will simply deal with each of these segments individually, and reformulate a bunch of secondary materials that can aid in building the narrative that maks originally sets to construct by looking at land and lacan more closely.
it must also be noted that in this critical re-reading, maks doesnt ever directly make use of lacan or land, referencing the former only through a secondary reading of taheri, and the latter only either through secondary commentators such as bauer and garcia, or through youtube videos. this in itself doesn't prevent maks from using lacan's concepts without clarification that they are his transformation of these concepts, but him noting that such an occurance is happening helps clear up the stakes for readers as well. therefore, the critical reading that follows is not a rebuking of maks' theory on its own or even a rebuking of maks' comments necessarily, but serves more as a precise recalibration of the stakes, and a comparison between his statements and the primary literature.
lets start with how maks treats castration vs. how lacan treats it, how they can be reconcilled, whether maks is using lacan's thinking in the right direction, or whether he's sourcing it correctly or not. valencic argues that in neurosis, the subject accepts symbolic “castration,” meaning limits imposed by authority and social structures, where this acceptance embeds the subject within a stable reality and normative social order. its immediately clear that for maks, castration is about how norms and institutions reinforce a boundary around the space of the subject as a symbol for its own sovereignty and agency. maks makes this point explicitly "the best way to understand castration is as a form of localization, as a way to embed the subject in a pre-defined spatial configuration that becomes the setting within which they operate". this idea is powerful and has merit because of the way it redefines the local as something the subject carries over in its own object form, the auto-commodification of the subject as the battleground for spatial configurations in general, which is something that earlier thinkers of political subjectivity such as habermas thought of differently.
in the "structural transformation of the public sphere" the only spatializing metaphor you will find is in this pargraph [p.158] where the big h says "yet the tendency toward the destruction of the relationship between public and private spheres is to be observed not only where modern urban development favored this trend; it was the same elsewhere, where the existing architecture was, as it were, drowned by it [...] the resulting configuration does not afford a spatially protected private sphere, nor does it create free space for public contacts and communica tions that could bring private people together to form a public"
back in the 60s, political compromise was about how spatial organization was conceived of within civil orders, and whilst there definitely was a subjective principle, the contemporary condition where spatiality is fully configured around the subject as an exception or a zone of excluded-borrowed compromise of space rather than as a social planning that civil consensus is actually involved in didn't necessarily exist back then, even if certain ideas around subjectivity wagering with spatiality did exist. on the very next page, habermas shows us how subjectivity was seen as conditioned/encoded by certain spheres "what today, as the domain of leisure, is set off from an occupational sphere that has become autonomous, has the tendency to take the place of that kind of public sphere in the world of letters that at one time was the point of reference for a subjectivity shaped in t he bourgeois family's intimate sphere"
another thinker who treats subjectivity as either a political or an intimate compromise (to use a
freudianism) or a structural factor of existence itself rather than the newer idea exemplified by valencic that its a site of battle, was lacan himself, who conceived of castration as related to a necessary structuring limit of subjectivity rather than castration as somehow impacting the political-phenomenal ordering of the subject as contaminated or as a "surplus encoding". lacan writes in p.13 of seminar iii:
"what is involved in a hallucinatory phenomenon? this phenomenon has its own source in what we shall provisionally call the subject's history in the symbolic. i don't know whether i shall retain this combination of terms, because all history is by definition symbolic, but let's keep to this formula for the moment. the essential distinction is this - the origin of the neurotic repressed is not situated at the same level of history in the symbolic as that of the repressed involved in psychosis, even if there exists the closest of rela tions between their contents. this distinction alone provides a key that allows the problem to be raised in a much simpler fashion than up till now".
its important briefly to note that in lacan, hallucinations are not simply mistaken perceptions but signifiers that are literally returning in the real, which explains why voices often appear as authoritative speech. what the paragraph points to is the broader lacanian idea that psychosis is a structure, meaning a mode of relation to the symbolic, the real, jouissance, and language. this "mode of relation" is not about reality testing or about political normativity as an authoritarian model of reality (which sounds much more like what adorno would write about in minima moralia for example, the totalization of a political fascism that conquers every symbolic realm, or baudrillard that extends this principle into cybernetics, arguing in his later works such as the lucidity pact not for a hyperreal but an overreal, a realness of the real). in lacan, the key operator for understanding castration is foreclosure, not repression (whether that be extended into political-ideological or simply intimate grounds).
in neurosis, a signifier is repressed and returns in displaced form inside the symbolic network. in psychosis, the name-of-the-father is foreclosed, which means it was never properly inscribed in the symbolic in the first place. because that signifier is missing, the paternal metaphor cannot do its work of mediating desire, anchoring signification, and localizing jouissance. this also becomes clearer in another paragraph, page 17 from seminar xviii, where lacan says: "this is jouissance, and it is not that of the other, because there is no other of the other, in the symbolic, site of the other as such, there are no oppositions" [...] the jouissance of the other of the other is impossible for the simple reason that no such instance exists. all that remains, then, is what is produced in the field of the intersection of the circle of the symbolic and the circle of the imaginary: meaning". what valencic does is he takes this understanding of a mediation of desire and an anchoring of signification, and, through the concept of a sinthome and through a reading of taheri, argues "psychotics have this incredible need to correct something precisely because there’s an inherent flaw in the way the other functions for them. [...] by trying to fix their relationship with the other, psychotics have no other choice but to dream..."
valencic’s move is to transform the sinthome from a local structure of stabilization into a grand anti-realist program. he writes that the sinthome is “a very personal way for a psychotic subject to establish a negation,” which he turns into a politics of autonomous world-construction through dreaming. this on its own is acceptable, but not without the explicit notes that reframe him away from lacan's idea that the borromean knot is the intersection between the imaginary, real and symbolic realm, and that in lacan, the sinthome, even though maks correctly notes that lacan breaks with his own older idea that its a mere deficit, still nonetheless is a fourth knot in lacan, one that is supposed to tie the body-image, signifying order, and jouissance so that they dont "fly apart" as lacan says. seminar xxiii literally starts from the problem of what happens when this borromean linkage fails, and lacan's answer is more practical, he's trying to trace sinthome's through particular individuals like james joyce to discover how they create simualcrums of their own self-identity in order to cultivate a sense of meaning.
when lacan says that there is no meta-other in jouissance, what this means for him is that the normative order structuring reality itself is based on an abstract jurispridence that doesn't actually symbolically structure law, language or meaning for neurotics on a collective basis, but that, even if the representation of the world interferes with symbolic meaning making, the name-of-the-father is about the ways in which cruical self-making organizational principles are distorted, not about how the other is somehow fundamentally misconstrued by the psychotic. what lacan does argue however is that "because the name of the father is not symbolically inscribed, it cannot operate as a stabilizing function within the subject’s symbolic network. as a result, symbolic mediation fails at crucial points, leaving the subject without the symbolic resources necessary to negotiate certain experiences."
you can see still, though, that the language here is discretory rather than constructive, the name of the father, since as a phenomenological structure isnt able to mediate the symbolic layer, the identity of the subject itself falls apart. there is no "symbolically imposed normative order" interfering in the real in lacan because there is no normativity behind the symbolic layer to begin with, its ability to draw significance out of the imaginary and into the symbolic is itself a construct dependant on the subject's constructed meaning-identity correlation, one that lacan thinks is fixed through the sinthome. more specifically, its not that the identity itself depends on this for lacan, but that its a quilting construct that anchors the signifying chain, where, without it, signifiers drift and meaning cannot stabilize.
the restructuring of reality that psychosis is supposed to bring is itself not entirely clear. in lacan, castration is not basically realism; it is a symbolic operation, a “necessary structuring limit,” the renunciation of total satisfaction, and the subject’s submission to lack. it separates the child from the mother, installs mediation, and regulates jouissance through the symbolic order. so where maks recodes castration as forced adaptation to reality, lacan treats it as the condition under which desire, law, and subjectivity become possible at all. in maks, there is no parallel mechanism, because when he argues "landian accelerationism is thus an explicit attempt at testing reality by putting different cognitive models in direct confrontation and seeing which ones actually lead to a self-consistent simulation that can become a candidate for reality" and then argues through bach "the agent must take control of “dreaming the dream”, of its simulation of reality, which gives the agent as a simulated entity control over reality as the model in which the same simulated agent operates.", it isnt entirely clear how exactly reality-testing through cognitive models and simulations actually stabilize "reality" for the psychotic subject, since in lacan, the real is the trauma of something greater than can possibly be symbolized or expressed.
the very pass that goes from internal delusion (in lacan staged as an unaware external/imposing voice) -> external command of language -> restructuring of base reality through representations is a qualitative leap that for maks has no concurrent mechanism currently in his theory other than vr headsets, fully fledged "empathetic agi" and the idea that "the psychotic is left with no other choice but to build the dream other" which not only is exactly the opposite of what land and lacan argue is possible, but also seems incoherent with the base way in which psychosis itself operates. if anything, a far more sadistic but realistic idea is that psychotics are used purely to extract creative possibilities out of, but not to somehow "confirm/equalize/equillibriumize" these very same flows of desire. one possibility that maks could analyze is the idea of the viewing of tourettes as commands rather than accidental non-structural non-intentioned slip-ups (the way they appear to be excused in the neoliberal world, instead of maybe a freudian idea of a slip as structuring the unconscious more fundamentally)
in this case, maks' psychotic subject would now have two problems, the first being they would be put in a simulation where they still wouldnt be able to satisfy their jouissance, or may even have a harder time given that they'd be reality-testing in an enviornment meant to evade reality-testing (reality-testing being the split between the identity/experiences of a subject and the external world, not the seeking or self-confirmation of a political totality and its actual ability to influence experience or representation) and the second, they would still encounter the real as a surplus and as something untestable. look at the way maks speaks about the real "from interventions of realism that try to bring the psychotic down, i.e. into the real world, which is precisely something that isn’t operative for them in the first place." for maks, the real is the base reality, the one that is already encoded by laws and institutions, and not the grand encounter with the pre-symbolic, which means that when he speaks of a realism, he's speaking of a "currentism", something that can literally be spoken or worded away if it was reconstructed. this is in fact his strongest idea, he argues that new languages allow the creation of alternative world simulations, and that agents function inside the realities their languages generate.
yet its also the weakest point at the same time, because the idea about language singlehandedly generating alternative realities mixed in with an idea of dreaming simulations jumps from epistemology to ontology randomly. the problem is on two fronts, since the way that enlightenment civiliains perceived reality, albeit maybe cognitively fully dependant on representation, was also aesthetico-ontologically much different in ways irreconcilable with a pure epistemologization, and on another front, in maks own narrative, the ability to influence language clearly is already commanded by "realism" since it not only controls authority protocols and monopoly over allowed dreaming types (or being able to designate that you are dreaming at all as maks says), but over language construction itself. the idea of simulation also treats psychosis as a simulacrum that destroys not reality as an ideology but reality as a principle which actually pushes it into stricter governance rather than freedom the way valencic imagines it. not only does maks not have an answer to how a psychotic would be able to question reality within their own designated world without encountering a surplus of hallucinations and delusions anyways (which isnt a non-fixable problem, its simply one maks doesnt fix) but also, simulations themselves seem like fundamentally incoherent ways to make use of psychosis.
this is due to the way in which they are only an acceleration of an imposed world that is governered by rules that psychotics dont question but are essentially stuck in. this to some extent is a continuation of the "brain in a vat" dilemma except this time, the subject not only is aware of the vat, but also fundamentally at some point likely mistrusts the vat itself, not as a symbolic for political loss but as a literal existential qualifier. its the equivalent of becoming skeptical about one's own womb, and sounds like only one more stress that a psychotic person would have to encounter. maks believes that as a fundamental form of ideology, the entire world's political structuring is already contaminated by a normative order that represents a fundamental displacement of an individual's will to construct the world.
it must be importantly noted that maks does not envision his own theory through constraint at all, arguing "the aim is therefore not to collapse one’s own becoming and to trap oneself in a specific (environmental) configuration—in a setting from which one cannot extricate oneself, and thus, despite all contingency, to make of it a real pattern and something that has to be followed until the end. “life must never get caught in the trap it sets for itself” is the psychotic slogan". in a sense, maks point actually does stick here, because maks envisions reality itself as secondary to the spawned formation of it dictated by self-protected visionaries (psychotics) who accelerate not the state of the world but the state of the world.
yet, one subtle but important part of simulacrums is the way in which reality itself as it appears already fundamentally contains within it the abstraction of an "existential problem of origin/self-control", yet, simultaneously, the organic world, the way the world already manifests-for-us has a seeming lack of actively enforced boundaries or hard problems that we can clearly see are determined to be preventative rather than "undiscovered" (other than maybe infinity/scale itself, which we are still unsure of if its a feature or not), but furthermore, the identity of such a problem of "cultivating reality" can be reserved from the direction of identity-preservation (the natural order is confirmed to be itself is a clear paradigm), yet cannot be reversed backwards through what maks sees as "reality-deletion".
this is especially so, given that maks doesnt have a theory of origination or creative imagination as can be found maybe in bergson, no way to promise to us let alone prove that if we left this reality, our ability to shape it would accelerate it into positive equillibrium rather than into void death or complete loss. maks argues that selection mechanisms such as natural selection resemble symbolic castration in that they lock reality into its own self-model, but the ability to "tell" whether this is the case or not already proves that they dont have real (in the lacanian sense) domination of us. even if maks believes the lacanian real can be discovered or reconciled, it wouldnt be so obvious that it would appear in patterns we can clearly tell apart or already pre-emptively culturally ideologically pass from selecting to de-selecting towards depending on circumstance.
on a more positive note, something of great importance does arise in this essay, there is somewhere in here an idea that if actually mechanistically explained and speculated can be not only coherent but revolutionary, but it would require an abandonment of the idea of ideology as somehow both an empasse between the symbolic overdetermination of the normative socious and the structuring of the base reality as a fundamental mode of experience that surpasses symbolic reality and into a dissolution of identity-as-id (itself an idea already positioned in the identity-cancelling vision of schizophrenia from the inside-looking-out), that "the cancellation of reality" is not about governance (paradoxes of origination-control-simulacrums) at all but about, essentially, the idea that desires and identities themselves can swim psychotically in a mass of immediate determinations, that an acceleration of drives is itself literally an acceleration of the impulse behind a drive rather than what the drives encode or how they flow.
the idea is that, if reality is cancelled, everything, these "emphatic agi" that maks envisions, literally allow a "psychotic" to envision his own desire-impulse-delusion correlation, enact it, this enactment would be confirmed, then become base reality and then accelerate even faster, cancelling out the hallucination due to the cognitive rewiring of reality itself as imagined from within arises, and then propelling the next delusion forward even faster. however, this mode of unreality is itself a vision that does not solve normative encoding but only bypasses it entirely, where "making reality dissapear" is more about turning reality into mush than managing to fragment or reterritorialize or disperse or redirect the current ideological order into more imaginative realms. a similar idea noted in the synkar glossary is the concept of thymosis where a double-hallucination occurs on top of an existing psychotics vision, yet, this is seen as an unstable structure rather than a social equillibrium for reasons stated previously.
one interesting thing to note is that not only in lacan and freud but more broadly understood, the difference between delusion and construction is that delusion itself is already understood to be an attempt at restitution or rather a patch after symbolic failure rather than a genuine attempt at reconstructing reality. if maks wants to weaponize the psychotic against realism, broadly understood as a pattern of limitations, the psychotic himself would have to have the necessary augments or implants to surpass the fact that it is already not in his own will to actually encounter the symbolic break to begin with.
there is another dilemma also, the fact is that for the lacan-freud split, dreams actually are a way the neurotic subject processes symbolic foreclosures precisely so that they dont "materialize" in the mind of the psychotic. outside of their theory and in more general terms, this is in fact neuropsychologically not far off either in the most practical mechanical observations we can have about dreams, since they are quite literally simulations of bizarre occurances that need to be compartmentalized within our basic unconscious processing of them. there is therefore a big issue with conceptualizations of vr whatsoever, because it doesnt have a clear phenomenological lense through which to present itself, since dreams are structured realities meant to deal with the "waste products" of base living experience, and in opposite values, imaginations are "ultra-real" self-predicted manifestations. collapsing reality into dreaming itself makes no sense since one is only a latent product of the other, not just on the level of "being able to make it happen" but in the way of "constructing the way the dream domain occurs" which isnt conceptually impossible but is again, nowhere found in maks' writing.