“This forked tongue, the twofold register of supernormal culture (im/material, supernatural-transcendent) is not unrelated to the double-bind of capitalist subjectivation described by Félix Guattari and Maurizio Lazzarato.12 According to these authors, in the capitalist socius, machinic slaving (the immanent harnessing of subpersonal cognitive mechanisms directly to technical machines) is invariably complemented by social subjection (the discursive reinstantiation of traditional models of subjecthood, individuation, and personal transcendence). That is to say, although the contemporary subject is addressed by its technological environment no longer as an individual but as a set of attention mechanisms and stimulus reflexes (a “dividual”), with technical machines and products informed by cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and digitally enabled captology (“attentionology”) selectively targeting reflex neural responses, the language of personal experience and transcendent selfhood remains prevalent, overcoding these molecular intrusions into the brain, reinscribing deterritorialized flows back into traditional and easily managed social forms. In fact it is the maintenance of the complementary functions of these two subjectivation processes that keeps capitalism in stable crisis. The autonomous and aspirational “person” must still be promoted as a figure of faith even while the products to which it aspires proceed to burrow under its skin. “Machinic slaving” proceeds here via the capture and recombination of internalized response patterns (emotions rather than motions) through habitual interactions with technically modulated sensory stimuli; but also through the production of new gestural cultures (in particular those associated with handheld devices) as means to satisfy them. (What is the “swipe” if not a manual servomechanism of capitalism?) The delivery of supernormal stimuli is crucial for the ratcheting of these circuitries into inescapable, socially distributed compulsions that operate below the level of the “subject” yet are continually reinscribed within the discourse of the self, of personal aspiration and satisfaction, and of social adequacy. Just as we are less than ourselves without makeup or stimulants, we no longer feel “connected” to others or even to ourselves unless the candy-colored icons at our fingertips are sprouting red buds to notify us of our existence, and the continual cascade of illuminated images and scanned headlines lifts us into a supernormal state of hyperwakefulness that stokes the pursuit of our goals and dreams.”
Hyperplastic-Supernormal by Robin Mackay