The Psyche and the Carrion: On the Logic of Drive and Subsumption

A genealogical preamble to the subsumption thesis

Any attempt at understanding the concept of subsumption or underscoring the significance of its function might sooner or later face a critical impasse in the absence of a historical account of the development of the concept. Such a genealogical preamble will allow us (1) to understand “neurocognitive subsumption” as a mode of real subsumption specific to an epochal phase of techno-capitalism; (2) to recognize—that is to say, cognize anew—the mode of real subsumption specific to our present epoch by reevaluating it against the backdrop of other forms of subsumption that have appeared historically in different guises; and, finally, (3) to establish a more explicit and nuanced link between psychological and cognitive aspects of capitalism and its mode of production—between neurocognitive subsumption and real subsumption as it is traditionally understood.

Logically and philosophically, subsumption has often described a dynamic relation whereby a group of particulars range under a universal, as in the case of humans, chimpanzees, and gibbons being subsumed under the order of primates. This subsumption is, however, not merely statically taxonomic, but dynamic at its heart. In all modes of subsumption, some particulars are brought into a specific relation to an external universal under which such particulars are subsumed and, in the process, give rise to a third way or thing. Yet insofar as such an external universal remains abstract throughout, its subsumption of the particulars in their concreteness leaves part of their concrete determinations always unaccounted for—never concretely recognized or dealt with. This thirst of the abstract universal to amass particulars under its reign, together with its entrenched indifference to the concrete determinations of particulars, is akin to an exercise of violence against the particulars wherein they are commandeered out of their concrete determinations and specificities towards an alien will (an abstract and external universalizing force). The name for such an act of possession and silent domination is subsumption.

For Marx, the process of subsumption becomes of fundamental concern since, “the production process of capital can only occur on the basis of the subsumption of the labor process under capital’s valorization process. In order to accumulate surplus value, and thus to valorize itself as capital, capital must subordinate the labor process to its own ends and, in so doing, transform it.”¹ Ultimately, the difference between formal subsumption and real subsumption, which is the starting point of this essay, comes down to the understanding that formal subsumption is formal since it does not involve the transformation of a particular labor process (hence, its formalness) whereas real subsumption coincides with the fact that when the formal subsumption finds a will—that is, an all-embracing causal power made of its technological developments and capacities—it makes changes in modes of productivity and labor. That concrete intervention in the modes of productivity and labor (social and intersubjective) is a precursor to the advent of psychic subsumption and, subsequently, neurocognitive subsumption—in which the violence of real subsumption first and foremost leaves its greatest and most explicit scars in the realm of neurocognitive and psychological intersubjectivity.

The aim of this text is precisely to address the sort of interventions an alien will (an instance of real subsumption) exercises to change and hijack the mode of cognitive labor: the sort of social relations that can be social, psychological, and cognitive—that is to say, the sum of intersubjective relations that determine the nature of objectivity. To this extent, my approach to neurocognitive subsumption is more of a historical one wherein the Marxian real subsumption in the realm of intersubjective relations makes its impact on the psychological panorama. This psychological panorama, which has been widely discussed in the early history of psychoanalysis, is of utmost importance to us. It is the missing link between Marx’s version of real subsumption and the neurocognitive subsumption peculiar to our epoch. To this end, I shall examine the concept of the alien will as a precursor to the thesis of neurocognitive subsumption, but also a link extended from the causal impetus of an external abstract universalizing alien will (dominating power) featured in the works of Hegel and Marx to Freud and Ferenczi. In that sense, we can say that the purported totalizing power of real, psychic, or neurocognitive subsumption is both a metaphysical scarecrow and a hypothetical threat. It is metaphysical insofar as any sort of achieved totality in the realm of capital or elsewhere will remain metaphysical, and hypothetical precisely because it is our duty as rational agents to assess the possible outcomes of such subsumption scenarios. That would be an exercise in positive and negative freedoms, freedom to do something and freedom from something, to deny the totalizing power of real subsumption in various guises and to mobilize the power of real subsumption as a hypothetical solution—a strategy—to cognize our relations with capital anew, theoretically and practically.

The Alien Will

This text is centered on one of the earliest concepts forged in the tradition of psychoanalysis that leads Sigmund Freud to develop his theory of the death drive. It is Sándor Ferenczi’s concept of the alien will, a manifestation of an intrusion so powerful that it pulverizes the psyche and, from psychic ashes, animates a walking corpse, eternally holding a grudge against its former psychic life while living in the shadows of rot and degradation.

The death drive as described by Freud is a generalized tendency, a series of circuitous paths—or in Freud’s term, Umwegen—by which the inorganic baits the organic. It is general because it is shared among all that lives. For the psyche, however, the death drive takes on a different connotation: it becomes the very infrastructure of the unconscious. A tendency that fights back against the conscious will to live in an almost Schopenhauerian titanic battle where the will to live is exposed for what it has always been: an inflection—rather than a reflection—upon death. Arthur Schopenhauer’s allegory of this tendency is the bulldog-ant. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer remarks:

But the bulldog-ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of this kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail in its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head: the battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This contest takes place every time the experiment is tried.²

Unlike the death drive, the alien will is not a general compulsion or tendency. It is, in fact, not even inexorable. The alien will is the register of a quotidian yet at the same time malevolent power that is bent on destruction precisely because it is the expression of a power that has gone unchecked, unmoderated, and unnoticed—as if it was something inevitable, something that is merely a part of the order of things. As such, the alien will is a possessive power. Yet unlike the demonic possession, where the demon flaunts its power by inflicting explicit pain and punishment on the agonized possessed person, the alien will is sinisterly subtle. It silently encroaches upon the will—whether as the rational will that is necessary for individuation or as the capacity for choice and the exercise of freedom. Its ultimate mission is to deprive the person of its will for the sake of mundane advantages. First by pretending that it is, in fact, part of the person’s will, part of its desires and goals. Once the encroachment phase is successfully accomplished, it then initiates a thoroughgoing destruction of the person’s psyche, step by step.

Every brick that is removed is replaced by a brick fabricated by the alien will. Once the reconstruction of the psyche according to the alien will is finished, once the ashes of the old psyche are given to the wind, the alien will begin to haunt the person, but not in an explicit form of pain infliction. The afflicted person wakes up like on any allegedly normal day and carries on a life that is supposedly their own. They do not question why they think X and not Y, have these choices and not others, live this way rather than another. It is all just part of reality and thus considered as the given, inevitable, and unquestionable. The afflicted person does not know that everything they think and do is the exercise of an alien will, that they are in a state of rot and once they are consumed, once they are merely an emptied husk, they will be left to die in agony in a cold and harsh reality, which is the revelation of having been possessed all along, having been expendable like a disposable razor throughout their entire life. There are nevertheless some signs that once in a while show up like cracks in the fabric of a given reality, as if the alien will has not managed to completely erase the traces of the old psyche. There are still voices from the original will making muffled screams beneath some shallow grave—all, however, in vain.

If we were to adopt another insect allegory for the concept of the alien will, it would be far more disquieting and far less conspicuous than the allegory of the bulldog-ant. What I have in mind is the parasitoid blue butterfly P. rebeli, notorious for its intricate social parasitism on a species of ants called Myrmica ants. The blue butterfly lays eggs close to the ant colony. Its broods discharge the same chemical signals by which ants distinguish their own. By mimicking the ants’ pheromones, the butterfly broods trick the ants into carrying them into their nest. Once they are in the nest and as they mature, by mimicking the acoustic signals the queen ant uses to mobilize worker ants to bring food to it, the butterfly larvae climb the social hierarchy of the ant colony. Associating the mimicked acoustic signal with their queen, the worker ants begin to bring food to the parasitoid larvae, in the process starving their queen—the only ant that can detect the larvae as aggressors—to death. However, for the Myrmica ants, the nightmare does not end here, for the oversaturation of pheromones as the result of the activity of both the ants and P. rebeli’s parasitism lures yet another parasitoid to the ant colony—the ichneumon wasp cited by Charles Darwin as evidence that shakes the very idea of a “beneficent and omnipotent God.”³ To live by an alien will is to live to be exploited at everyone’s whim.

In his clinical diaries, Ferenczi on multiple occasions discusses the stages by which the alien will murders the psyche. In perturbing details, Ferenczi describes what happens to the structure of the ego once the alien will takes hold, first in the case of a patient who goes by the initials RN and then in a general description likening the incineration of the psyche to something more like a rotting black phoenix rising from the ashes of the old psyche. It is worth citing these passages in full:

This lavalike eruption came to an end in total “incineration,” a kind of lifelessness. But the life of the body, compelled as it was to breathe and pulsate, called back Orpha [what Ferenczi identifies as the organizing life instinct], who in despair had herself become inclined toward death. She managed, however, as if by a miracle, to get this being back on its feet, shattered as it was to its very atoms, and thus procured a sort of artificial psyche for this body forcibly brought back to life. From now on the “individuum,” superficially regarded, consists of the following parts: (a) uppermost level, a capable, active human being with a precisely—perhaps a little too precisely—regulated mechanism; (b) behind this, a being that does not wish to have anything more to do with life; (c) behind this murdered ego, the ashes of earlier mental sufferings, which are rekindled every night by the fire of suffering; (d) this suffering itself as a separate mass of affect, without content and unconscious, the remains of the actual person.⁴

Later, Ferenczi makes this observation:

The insane and evil will, after a maniacal outburst exceeding anything that had happened before, suddenly sobered and withdrew from the person it had occupied hitherto; and from now on it turns against the person in whom it had until now vegetated, as it were, in the form of a pure will to kill. The consequence is a tremendous void in the person who had become accustomed to having the alien will as a skeleton of his own person. As soon as the crazy person has made the decision to withdraw, the remaining part of the person finds himself in a state of insecurity resembling an earthquake. But at the moment of the attack, all illusion is destroyed, the sudden insight into this terrifying existence in the power of a madman cannot be accepted, and the state of being split that has existed up to now gives way to a state of complete dissolution. After that has run its course, as when fireworks have burnt themselves out, the entire sector of this experience disintegrates into a mass of atomized debris.⁵

What is noteworthy in these citations are the metaphors by which Ferenczi describes the alien will and the afflicted person: volcanoes, geological strata, and formations that bear the sign of deep Darwinian time. What we take as rock formations are, as a matter of fact, the product of churning indifferent processes of time that maintain a facade of ordinariness—or, more precisely, worldliness. Yet they are traces of numerous past extinctions, very much like forensic maps of past crimes that can be mistaken—as in these metaphors—as the inevitable order of reality, something from which we are all made and, therefore, not criminal or pathological in nature. The scale-sensitive vision of trauma where the causal mechanisms impinge upon the order of personhood is something that is shared by both Marx and Freud. The only difference between the two is that, for Marx, such mechanisms are social causes rather than neurological and/or psychic causes.

The Causal Confusion of Drives

All non-drive-like behaviors are subsumed under the death drive, or drive-like behaviors. In this sense, Freud provides a vision of complete psychic subsumption under the unconscious cosmological thanatropism, which is the psychological equivalence of the real subsumption of all social relations under capitalism’s mode of production. What sets the two apart is the nature of the subsuming mechanisms involved. What connects them is a genealogical interpretation of the physicalist thesis and Laplace’s demon (the idea that a system’s initial and boundary conditions in a complete sense causally determine its trajectories over time). Both the theses of psychological and real subsumption, however, suffer from a selective bias of the subsuming mechanisms or causes. The prognostic and therapeutic theses of both are predicated on their diagnoses of causes, but, insofar as the subsumption is full and complete, any form of diagnosis cannot be only a pathology of subsumption, it is also utterly arbitrary. The role of a psychoanalyst or an emancipatory revolutionary is reduced to a shaman curing the possessed. Cries of the afflicted are incantations whose meanings only the shaman can understand; their causes are ciphers that only the shaman can exorcise with no explanation to us outsiders as to the exact nature of these causes or how the psychoanalyst/shaman has associated one symptom with its causal undergirding.

More importantly, as Adolf Grünbaum has pointed out in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, this scenario ultimately leads to a confusion between the technical terms causes, motives, and reasons to the extent that the psychoanalytic explanation now avoids the talk of causes insofar as they give psychoanalysis the wrong impression of being a natural science. Instead, the psychological explanation resorts to the language of reasons and/or motives behind behaviors and actions. But in reality, these reasons are pseudo-reasons since they have already been subsumed under the general regime of the compulsive death drive as a causam finalem. To put it differently, the thanatropic subsumption results in at least six fundamental predicaments:

(1) The confoundment of the distinction between causes, reasons, and motives in their technical—that is, explicated—sense.

(2) The inclination to retain, at any cost, the status of psychoanalysis as a sovereign scientific discipline not reducible to natural physical sciences.

(3) The ejection of the talk of causes as real conditions from psychoanalysis because, insofar as causes are taken to be merely physical, they can endanger the scientific sovereignty of psychoanalysis as the science of motives or reasons behind neurotic behaviors. But such an assumption is based on a physicalist fallacy. The ontological status of causes is neutral. For a cause to be a cause, it does not have to be physical—it can be equally mental or psycho-physical. In other words, for X to have a causal relevance for the occurrence of Y, X neither needs to be physical or taken as what singularly brings about the occurrence of Y, but as “what makes a difference in the occurrence of Y or affects the incidence of Y.”⁶

(4) Having jettisoned causes, Freud’s version of psychoanalysis can now talk about reasons and motives instead, but only within the dominion of a final cause, which is the subsumption of non-drive-like behaviors under drive-like behaviors having a tendency towards Thanatos.

(5) Reasons and motives are now—according to (4)—all causes in disguise. They are not really reasons in a technical sense, but only in the loose sense that they are generic compelling manifestations of a final cause beckoning us to what is ordained.

(6) Having lost the exact distinctions between causes, reasons, and motives, every psychological explanation can now be either a physicalist explanation in a psychological disguise or an explanatory gerrymandering in favor of these reasons qua causes over other reasons. The genericity of the thanatropic subsumption effected by drive-like behaviors blinds the psychoanalyst with regard to the actual causes of a traumatic episode.

Unlike Freud’s desensitization of trauma through the generalized principle of the death drive, Ferenczi makes a far more radical claim: the worst traumas are not those that are part and parcel of an inevitable reality. In fact, a trauma that renders us like corpses is not caused by some mystical death drive, but by a mundane yet malevolent register of an oppression that keeps haunting us. Something that should be avoidable, but for some inexplicable reason is still there and despite all our efforts does not go away. The worst traumas are inflicted not by that which is inevitable, but by that which is avoidable yet dismissed as the reality of our world.

In this scenario, we disregard the alarming symptoms we may exhibit as normal, for we have become accustomed to an alien will. The suffocating feeling of helplessness, being disposed of, and not being heard that will eventually materialize are precisely the expressions of the fact that we have mistaken the sources of our traumas as parts of an ordinary reality that cannot be changed—because it is what it is. To that extent, we have no resolution other than a recourse to death or thanatropic fantasies. If we cannot tolerate it, then we should take our lives—the suicidal impulse or suicidal reason that Ferenczi describes as the moment when we notice our lifelong delusions. But this is a consciousness that does not necessarily lead to a disillusionment, only to more misery, because we fail to imagine another reality, a different choice, a different world. Disillusionment in the absence of an alternative to the logic of illusions will only lead to more pain. The suicidal reason only arises when reason denies its limitations, when it illusively sees itself as complete and immutable. When this illusion of wholeness and totality is punctured by the tiniest pinprick, the deluded reason recoils in horror. It denounces itself as a hysterical invention and begins to fantasize its death.

Understanding vs. Hypothesizing Pathologies of Subsumption

It is not hard to imagine how this trend will evolve and mutate hundreds of years from now. Having misunderstood the nature of reason, having mistaken its impersonality and unforeseeable trajectories as egotistic and teleological, having—through a physicalist dogma—flattened the difference between what is only phenomenal consciousness and the conceptual critical consciousness, we begin to make recipes for our lives as if they were spectacular forms of dying all along. We feel more psychologically at home to speculate about an incoming anti- or post-humanistic singularity in which an artificial intelligence can become a god or a rock, can be treated with the same values we attribute to minded life-forms, than thinking about what we can do to ourselves for a better here and now. Émile Zola’s last pages of La Bête humaine (1890) are prophetic visions of this future of humanity: two men, a serial killer and a husband, fight in the engine room; they both fall and are killed on the railway. The unattended train accelerates, passes like a phantom from one station to another, towards its demise, while the unsuspecting soldiers on the train sing merrily for the battle to come, not knowing that the fatal impact is imminent.

If we are indeed on Zola’s train, then we are indeed doomed. There is no reason to complain about the food or the hard beds. The question we are confronted with is: Why should we even think about our human misery, why should we even mention that we might have been abducted and molested by some alien will? Wouldn’t it be better, less painful, to just ignore these issues and live the life we thought was ours, the set of our conscious and examined choices and thoughts (even if they aren’t)? I don’t think Freud ever manages to answer this question coherently. His Schopenhauerian cosmic pessimism—which is a borderline mystical whitewash over the conditions of the possibility of trauma—does not allow him to even think about this question in earnest. In failing to answer this central question, Freud’s vision of psychoanalysis fails miserably. As long as we do not justify why life should be lived exploitation-free, we have no justification for how we console those who are living. Absent the former, the latter (that is, the psychoanalytical investigation) can indeed be another form of exploitation and trauma, another form of becoming unwilled corpses.

In tandem with Ferenczi’s thesis, my answer is that regardless of us being traumatized or not, regardless of us thinking our lives are rich and exploitation-free, we have a duty to hypothesize that our lives might not be rich, rewarding, healthy, and free from the most sinister and subtle expressions of exploitation. We must hypothesize that we might be, as a matter of objective fact, walking corpses—not persons whose lives should be treated with dignity here and now. As such, the psychoanalytic invocation of the unconscious drives or capitalism’s real subsumption should be regarded as a powerful hypothesis that must be posited and, correspondingly, investigated in favor of self-consciousness rather than as a mere term that only serves a mundane reality that is deemed to be a matter of fact and inescapable.

In hypothesizing the presence of some alien will in the realm of the unconscious, we are making a distinction between the order of thought and the order of a given nature that may seem unavoidable to us. Thinking—in the broadest, most rigorous, and consequential sense—does not concern itself with death. It only investigates death as a matter of fact, as something that can be thought of, but not something that should be brought to bear upon the axiological structure of thinking itself. Claiming the contrary is tantamount to confounding the distinction between living and thinking, a vitalist eschatological trope that is fully theological.

In other words, even if the fact of exploitation was part of the order of reality, thinking should dismiss it as the order of illusion. For thought, reality is not a given, it is something that is questioned and reinvented by thinking. To confound thinking with life such that an inevitable death that puts an end to life is taken for granted as a reality to which thought must conform is to undermine the ambitions of thought. To undermine the ambitions of thought is to undermine the dignity of all life, for only in virtue of thinking can we assert the richness and the value of all life and thus consider exploitation as something both against value and detrimental to life-forms. Life by itself does not give us any values; it does not even explain why exploitation in the broadest possible sense of the term should be obstructed. It is, as Schopenhauer has observed, as callous as the will to kill, the compulsion to murder the ego, to terminate any value that life might possibly have.

It is now rather obvious why I intimated earlier that the concept of the alien will properly speaking belongs to the realm of politics. Hypothesizing the presence of an alien will—a system of exploitation—even if we think we possess our own will, our own choices and thoughts, is the very first stage from which political investigation must start. Put differently, to postulate the possibility that we are animated by an alien will is the stepping stone for imagining a counterfactual life for everything that lives. Just like Ferenczi’s patients who took their lives at face value yet were animated corpses, we can never assume that our life is actually ours or that our most egalitarian maxims are not already seized by a system of exploitation. In postulating the reality of the unconscious, we do not advance a noumenal real as what humiliates thought or autonomy. Positing the reality of the unconscious as the possibility of causal mechanisms that can commandeer the order of thinking is a postulate of thought. All consciousness—in the sense of critical cognition—can already be a vassal for the order of causes. But to even reflect on this fact, to realize the absence of autonomy of mere consciousness, it’s possible enslavement, is something that can only be achieved by the system of conceptual self-consciousness: an experiment exercised by thought to abduce what may be outside of it.

If we do not question what we take as the reality of our world, we are living by an alien will. Wrestling ourselves from an alien will mean living differently. It means that we have postulated and built a different reality, insofar as we have questioned the integrity of our cherished reality, whether that of the ego or that of the social. The unconscious hypothesis—positing the reality of the alien will as that which allows us to live this way but not others—is, then, what enables us to think of a different life and reality. Without entertaining the possibility of a different reality or life, and without understanding the significance of the unconscious as that which empowers us to doubt our ordinary lives, we are indeed carrions, incapable of thinking and incapable of understanding what life could possibly be for us and others. In that case, the world we imagine is nothing but a mass grave in which echoes of muffled screams are never heard for they are mistaken as the voices of the dead who no longer have any business in the realm of life.

1. See “The History of Subsumption: The Period,” Endnotes 2, April 2010, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/2/en/endnotes-the-history-of-subsumption.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Word as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 147.
3. Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2 (New York: Appleton, 1898), 105.
4. Sándor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont, trans. Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 10.
5. Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, 82.
6. Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 72.