Note: This essay originally appeared in my chapbook from April 2022, THREE ESSAYS (for a poetics of psycho-materialism). Prior to posting it here, it has only been available in print and .pdf form. I am posting it primarily as a point of reference for future essays, and it has been lightly edited in places.
Psycho-materialism is a poetics attentive to the interpenetration of psyche and matter. As a theory, it grounds itself in an approach to history and materialism informed by Marx, and then works to take seriously Carl Jung’s statement that it is probable that “psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.”1 Similarly, it resonates with what poet Lisa Robertson has called “the imagination of matter.” And it finds precedent in André Breton, who sought a “modern materialism” which would “reconcile Engels and Freud”—that is, a materialism that accounts for psyche.
Psycho-materialism is not Surrealism, per se, but neither is it “against” Surrealism. It orients itself by seeing that the momentary, theoretical conjunction of Surrealism and Marxism—of the psycho-poetic and the historical-material—remains an open question. In this, it takes a cue from Sean Bonney’s “Notes on Militant Poetics,” where he writes, “André Breton’s insistence on the need to work out a combination of the insights of Rimbaud and Marx continues to be one of the most important ideas in the history of modernist poetics. It has yet to be satisfactorily achieved.” Psycho-materialism stands in the light of Bonney’s fundamental disappointment here while also (quixotically) working toward that elusive combination.
In what follows, I approach the subject from two angles: first, by examining what precisely is meant by "psyche,” showing its connection to matter, and positioning it in a 21st century context; and secondly, by describing psycho-materialism as a poetics, or at least an orientation toward the production of poetry—specifically leftist, anti-capitalist poetry. Ultimately, my position is that psyche is an urgent concern within 21st century leftist art. This is an age defined not only by what Bernard Stiegler and Byung-Chul Han have called, respectively, psycho-power and psychopolitics, but also this is the age of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, when psyche itself becomes open to extraction by capitalists through technological interface. However, to create an art adequate to the assault of 21st century psycho-politics, the psycho-materialist poem turns not toward spiritualism, symbols, and archetypes—nor toward a reductively anti-subjective materialism—but toward a field in which psyche and materiality interpenetrate. It brings the deforming and transforming powers of imagination into contact with historical conditions while seeking to explode the restricted, commodified forms of expression that continually reduce poetry and enable its assimilation by institutions bound to capital.2
Defining Psyche
The concept of psyche needs to be explained at some length. In part, this is due to its elusive nature; however, it is also due to the tendency for psyche to be 1) limited to a focus on the interior of the individual mind and 2) conflated with vaguely metaphysical or spiritual concerns. And because I am arguing for the importance of psyche to an anti-capitalist orientation and poetics, I need to spend some time correcting the misconception that a focus on psyche inevitably leads one into the suspect politics of mere individualism and/or ahistorical philosophizing. Against this, I want to show that the psychic perspective alters our sense of the individual and their relationship to the other, and that it has a close connection to materiality that reorients the very use of the word “psyche” itself.
Of course, when seeking a definition of “psyche,” one typically comes across some version of the following: that psyche is the totality of the human mind, both conscious and unconscious; that it exists as a complex of forces whose effects are seen in particularities of personality, emotion, behavior, thought, and perception; and that it is susceptible to pathological aberration. And all that is true, so far as it goes. However, I want to seriously complicate and enrich this rote definition, first by drawing on the work of post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman. For Hillman, psyche is, above all, an autonomous process of image formation and fantasy. As such, psyche is not an object so much as a highly reflexive process affecting every aspect of reality. For Hillman—as for Blake and Sufism, among other sources—an individual is as though inserted within psyche just as much as psyche is said to be within the person: thus, psyche both includes and exceeds the “I.” And as such, it alters the experience of the “I,” revealing one to oneself as—in addition to an embodied mind and a political subject—a process and product of image making. It touches the deepest, most intimate aspects of one’s life, and yet it is also a kind of portal out of oneself and into a fundamental strangeness—or recognition-in-strangeness—a space of metamorphosis and otherness.
Perhaps the clearest way of approaching psyche is to understand it as an expansive redefinition of what we mean by imagination. In fact, for Jung, “Image is psyche.” Following Jung, Hillman elaborates by writing that our world is mediated continually by images, and that nothing comes into consciousness that is not impacted by the shaping of imagination: “Every reality of whatever sort is first of all a fantasy image of the psyche”; “At the same time these images are in us we live in the midst of them.” This is not philosophical idealism, however; it is the recognition that imagination (i.e. “fantasy”) constitutes human experience in a fundamental way. Granted, we cannot simply replace reality with fantasy; rather, what facts are given to us by the real become the material of our fantasy: the two interweave continually such that everything is at least partly dream. Thus, when we talk about psyche, we are inevitably talking about things named in the rote definition above, but we are also talking about a reflexive, protean field of image formation that intersects with and shapes our experience of the material world.
For poets, though, this does not mean a reversion to Imagism, the Deep Image, or any other focus on image as mere physical description. Similarly, it is not meant to turn us back to the unconscious and hallucinated images of Surrealism. Rather, psycho-materialism seeks to reorient our awareness of imagination itself as fundamental to reality formation and thereby to explode the poet’s consciousness of their task as imaginative worker. Accordingly, a poet’s work is not to render space of beauty and aesthetic activity above or separate from the ravages of historical, material conditions, but to recognize that these conditions are themselves a process and product of imaginative activity (just as imagination is a product and process of materiality—the two intertwining endlessly). As such, we are walking through the fruits and ruins of a trans-personal, social, and material activity of poesis at all times. Once this is recognized, it is hard to content oneself with a poem that does not allow in as much as possible of the noise and activity of this inexhaustibly dreaming and destroying world. A psycho-material poem, then, is often a document of how it has been exceeded by its own awareness of this endless flux.
As indicated above, an important clarification is needed here to distinguish between the psychic and the spiritual. And while I may risk dwelling too long on the point, I do so because it has political implications. Again, I follow Hillman in much of this, who himself follows a variety of classical sources.3 He asserts that psyche has a much stronger affinity to matter than to spirit. In fact, he opposes spirit and psyche in a spatial metaphor wherein spirit belongs to the transcendent heights of the mountaintop, of the one who leaves earthly affairs behind (e.g. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra). By contrast, psyche stays closer to matter, to the valleys and lower places, where weather, familiarity, and use weave dream and imagination into all things. Whereas psyche’s closeness to matter results in its loving the unassimilable differences—allowing the particularities, deformities, and the colorations of material things to exist in imaginal constellations of meaning and feeling—spirit’s ultimate drive is transparency, presence, Oneness: the transcendence of the material world in a consummation of pure being. And as one might anticipate, given the right material conditions and ideology, the politics of this spiritual drive can become lethal.4
And here, on the question of death, is where I leave Hillman behind. Whereas he writes in purely psychological terms, my aim is to bring psyche into dialogue with historical and material conditions. It is one thing to recognize that psyche and spirit maintain an essential relationship to death, but quite another to note that death and violence are used every day to enforce the rule of capital. Whereas psyche maintains dialogue with death, and the dead themselves, as a power of imagination that deepens experience and brings dream and meaning5, the death wielded by capital—esp. by police, military, and fascists—acts as a kind of anti-psychic power: It reduces and controls the boundaries of the real, of the permissible and possible, and forecloses meaning and the autonomy of psyche by routing it into dead monuments, false spectacles, and a torrent of endless misinformation that degrades experience (while rendering it profitable). When capital polices the real, it polices interwoven powers of fantasy as well, and thus it enforces the reality of its own fantasy. And by abusing this intersection of the material world with the psychic—massaging and annihilating our perception in increasingly insidious ways—capitalism’s enforcement of the absolute substantiality of these fantasies has a power that far exceeds that of art. As such, imagination is continually weaponized against itself. And in the 21st century, this weaponization is on its way to being perfected.
The Psycho-political Moment
In 2016, the leader of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, asserted that we are living through the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Some have even deemed this “The Age of Imagination,” continuing a chronology running from the Agricultural to the Industrial and, later, Information ages. What this suggests, then, is that “imagination”—what we have called psyche—is a new source of productivity in an economy sensitized as never before to the minute fluctuations of individual psychology and physiology of users/consumers in the form of Data. As such, psyche has been directly drawn into history and being exploited for material ends in a uniquely targeted way.
Addressing this situation in his book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Byung-Chul Han has described this as a “psychic turn” in 21st century capitalism, wherein it “discovers the psyche as a productive force.” Following Bernard Stiegler, he even suggests a shift from Foucauldian biopower to what he calls “psychopower.” However, Han goes further than Stiegler in updating this process, recognizing that the primary material/economic engine of this shift is “Big Data,” with its appetite for complete knowledge of our desires, habits of communication, our range of affects, and how to manipulate each of these into profit. And this data is in fact a commodity we produce, for free, in an interface between technological powers of extraction and the most intimate aspects of our lives. As subjects in a technocratic data regime, we are compelled to discipline our synapses with various degrees of addiction, externalizing its labor as content and intel, rendering our subjectivity transparent to those who would control it. As Han writes, “This knowledge is knowledge for the sake of domination and control: it facilitates intervention in the psyche and allows influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level.” That is, under this influence, one does not have a position from which to critically reflect: it becomes the very conditions of reflection itself. The social, material poesis that is reality has always been controlled; however, it has not always been able to adapt in real time to whatever will be most profitable to the person staring at the screen—all while recording and documenting each moment.
Ultimately, such total mediatization under a psycho-political order seeks the total infiltration of imagination and dream. However, as threatening and outlandish as this may seem, it is not entirely new. After all, capitalism has inscribed itself in desire and dream life across multiple centuries, as Marx himself observed early on when describing commodity fetishism. More recently, Mark Fisher stated in Capitalist Realism, “[The] fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment.” Like Han, Fisher saw that, under capital, “Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic . . . As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems.” And at its most extreme, when imagination is literalized and framed technologically, and when our insertion into its media become the conditions of our participation in society—both at work and at home, in labor and recreation—we experience the destruction-via-commodification of the psychic perspective, turning it against itself as a form of control and extraction. Against this, psycho-materialism—as a recognition that psyche exists historically and materially, and as a drive to maintain psyche’s political and imaginative power in service of anti-capitalist liberation—is tasked with confronting our age’s attempted foreclosure of psyche in the ongoing domination of capitalism.
However, in this confrontation, we experience what Franco “Bifo” Berardi calls the “spasm.” In Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide—his analysis of violence as a reaction to the atomizing and desensitizing effects of neoliberalism—he writes that this spasm is “a double process of acceleration and exhaustion.” Like Han and Fisher, Berardi traces this in part to “the effect of a violent penetration of the capitalist exploitation into the field of info-technologies, involving the sphere of cognition, of sensibility, and the unconscious.” Berardi goes further:
The brain mutation that is underway can be described as a spasmodic attempt to cope with the surrounding chaotic infosphere and to reframe the relation between infosphere and brain. . . . Not only the psychic dimension of the unconscious is disturbed, but the fabric of the neural system itself is subjected to trauma, overload, disconnection.
It is as though we are experiencing collective psychic trauma under conditions of 21st century capitalism. And to be clear, this is not just about “Big Data.” Everything I have described above is conditioned profoundly by the reality of global pandemic, intensifying ecological catastrophe, the renewed prospect of nuclear war, unceasing carceral predation, resurgent fascism and white supremacy, the collapse of a coherent infosphere, the strengthening of borders against swelling populations of refugees, rising sea levels, and the steady drone of the sixth extinction. As such—under the power of psychopolitics, of capitalist realism, of the accelerated/exhausted age of spasm—we live in a fundamentally dangerous and destabilizing psychic situation. For anyone who wants to be awake to their historical moment, it is necessary to confront the violence of psychopower and the nightmarish reality it mediates, and yet total receptivity to this power is morally and emotionally unendurable. And so one modulates consciousness, thus running the risk of escapism, of defeat and capitulation. In this situation, when the psycho-material nexus of capitalism totally enfolds us, the distinction between poison and medicine, between health and illness, begin to blur. And it is here, in this poison space, that poetry has to work.
Sketching a Poetics
Fuck poems / and they are useful
—Amiri Baraka
Given the urgency of conditions, it might seem quaint—especially for an anti-capitalist—to limit oneself to a question of poetry. However, cultural production does have a place in struggle as well, and when trying to offer historical context for such production, it does no good to deny the extent of the emergency. Ultimately, in the global situation given to us in 2022, we are burdened with the very real prospect of a world without a future—or what amounts to the same thing: nightmare. And the nightmare state is, quite simply, a condition of psychic domination: the foreclosure of any participation in reflexive shaping of reality; everything reduced to a literal, closed narrative of destruction. Present already wherever there is war, devastation, and reduction of life to mere survival, this nightmare now flickers continually as the common horizon of twenty-first century psychic life.
Naturally, as stated, there is a powerful desire to escape and deny these conditions. And for poets of any political commitment, it becomes all too easy to content oneself with a poetics that has been divorced from our nightmarish conditions, to seek a space “above the fray,” a space of peace. And of course one needs peace too. Poetry as a practice of care, of quiet renewal and reflection—these too are necessary in their way. And I don’t want to prescribe one mode of writing as superior. However, I do want to assert that no poetics can sustain its vitality for long under 21st century conditions without at some point confronting the nightmare spasms of a threatened imagination—and I believe this is all the more crucial for leftist, anti-capitalist poets. Because only by confronting these very real conditions can imagination have any chance of resisting capital’s drive toward further psychic enclosure. One has to be honest about what is at stake, and in part this means admitting that poems are frequently irrelevant in the extreme. For what we are up against is reshaping the conditions of life on this planet. It is burrowing into psychic territory we have no adequate language for, and falling back into conventional modes of poetic articulation—and congratulating ourselves for poetry’s preservation of “empathy, compassion, humanity”—simply dodges the issue. Capitalist psychopower is rewriting you, and this means it is writing your poem, too. And so one has to ask: What is your poem saying in response? And can you take it seriously in light of these conditions?
As an act of writing back against this capitalist force of control and inscription—as a kind of counter-writing—psycho-materialism seeks to place imagination in a radical relation to the material world we inhabit, in all its damage, and to explore this dialectic. And I stress this dialectical quality here because a non-materialist, ahistorical poetics of psyche is nothing new. We have long seen how poets become trapped in a de-historicized realm of archetypes, of pastoral longings and nostalgic denials, and an aestheticism that is ultimately conservative if not reactionary. And the same is true for the inverse: a reductively realist, materialist poetics divorced from psyche inevitably becomes conservative and dogmatic (as do various forms of stridently anti-subjectivist poetics)6. Against all of these tendencies, psycho-materialism seeks to keep psyche and materiality in dialectical tension by 1) maintaining a consciousness of the world as given historically and materially, even when this involves damage; 2) experiencing and recording this engagement as a potent psychic event for the reader; and 3) exceeding and disrupting the closed reading experience that privileges (aesthetic, rhetorical, moral) resolution and unity in favor of continued tension and continued redirection to the world off the page. At the risk of being too prescriptive, I’ll say that this often involves disrupting unified voices and discourses by adding more layers and registers, more material in dialectical tension and collision. The language of astronomy and myth might sit right next to that of finance. Personal confession runs up against citation from unrelated news reports. And all of this disparate material is recorded as a process of psychic becoming—as language inhabiting the emergency.
Ultimately, the psycho-materialist wants the poem to keep exploding into the world, even as it collides with the nightmare. There are powerful forces setting the stage for a reactionary poetics of denial, nostalgia, and evasion, as well as a poetics of diplomacy and convenient state fictions. The poetics I describe here is against all of this, and yet one may still ask: What good is it? Isn’t this all just poetic “doomer-ism”? By way of response, I’ll say that, in its process of psychic confrontation and transformation, this poetics could be described as what Felix Guattari called chaosmosis:7 it absorbs and digests chaos. More specifically, it absorbs the spasmodic psycho-material operations of technocratic capital and deploys them in new imaginative forms that expose, resist, and re-organize the psychic valence of these operations. According to Guattari, the individual elements effecting this process of chaosmosis are called chaoides: “The chaoide is full of chaos, receives and decodes the bad vibrations of the planetary spasm, but does not absorb the negative psychological effects of chaos, of surrounding aggressiveness, of fear” (Berardi). I think it is fair to say that psycho-material poetics is, in part, the production of such chaoides. It may seek to neutralize psychic apocalypse in a context of historical disruption, but in doing so it must behave apocalyptically. It wakes up into the nightmare in order to bring sanity, but it also must breathe the toxicity to do so. In this way, it is also a pharmakonic poetics: the poison mingles with the cure.
Of course, in an essay of this kind, a reader likely will expect textual examples. They will want names for marking out a new school or style of poetry. Put bluntly, I abhor this tendency in critical writing. I hate the limits of inclusion/exclusion around “schools” and generations, of the arbitrary demarcations of a “new thing,” and of the inevitable embarrassment it brings to all involved. All that is just publicity. If you want to know what this poetry looks like, you can write it. Psycho-materialism is not a model or a school but a vantage to be used. You don’t have to be your poem, you aren’t its brand name. There are things the poem knows as process, and communicates as product, that a your need to identify yourself with your poem’s voice may only distort. // Chemical productions in the synapse decay: your head is an exploded loop. (Taste of sulphur, of lead.) // “I” is just one available frequency. Sometimes a kaleidoscopic, delirious rant; sometimes a voice as lucid as a textbook. (Enclosures coaxed toward breakage, glitches nursed and weathered into music.) Material and historical signifiers bleed into imaginal or abstract ones. Juxtaposed citations, fictions, jokes. Polyvocality. “Here are the dead communes, here the retired black sites.” A pattern of accidents, an accidental pattern. “We lived through it over and over.” Montage, collage. Syntax as surgery. Language as mercury, // a poisonous material. And latent in each syllable are the tongues of the dead, their // teeth and nervous systems. Whose affects are fueled in mine, stopped in wonder, lighting up fugitive images, dissolving in faint spirals? An archive of spirals, a lineage of dreams, disguises, contradictions. “Here is SpaceX, Bolivia, apartheid, Mars.” Seven billion souls. Twenty billion times the sun. Permanent synchronicity. Cut-ups, collisions, blurs. Heteroglossia, layers that cannot be assimilated. There is no inside to pull from that isn’t already all around us. (A fly on a rifle in Yemen. Collider and array. Trained and funded by.) A soul of tantalum, of heartwood. Of bosons, workers, spectral factories. Dialectical images explode. Imagistic explosions cutting through a dialectic of psyche and material, of dream and economic production, of historical rupture, recovery, awakening, a zodiac of speeding scraps.
*
References
Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. Verso, 2015.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Zero Books, 2009.
“Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Wikipedia. Accessed March 25, 2022.
Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso, 2017.
Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld. Harper & Row, 1979.
-- Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper Perennial, 1975.
-- The Thought of the Heart. Spring Publications, 1993.
Jung, C.G. The Essential Jung, ed. Anthony Storr. Princeton UP, 1983.
For Jung, this bond between matter/psyche is illustrated in part by the phenomenon of synchronicity. This concept is important to the psycho-material perspective, but my attempts to discuss it within the essay proper only overwhelmed an already complicated text. For Jung, as discussed in On Synchronicity; Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and elsewhere, synchronicity is an “acausal connecting principle” that is witnessed in momentary convergences of interior psychic experience with events in the external world that seem to rhyme with uncanny precision, even dissolving the boundary between inner and outer. This is distinct from the mind causing the external event to converge, or vice versa, which would be more properly telekinetic and paranormal—or, alternatively, mere coincidence. For Jung, synchronicity was a cosmic fact, corroborating alchemical teachings of correspondence between the micro and macrocosm, the above and the below; it was a revelation of the simultaneous or inextricable natures of psyche and matter, showing that they somehow belonged the same intelligent medium. Ultimately, this suggests that matter is in some way psyche-delic: it bears or manifests psyche. Again, while it is only implied in the essay itself, synchronicity and its implications are foundational for a psycho-materialist view (even as it breaks from a Jungian paradigm).
Further, it is worth noting here that most Marxists who theorize psyche turn toward a Freudian lineage running through Lacan. My attention to Jung deviates considerably from this, though there is precedent, esp. in the work of Deleuze & Guattari. But again, I am not a Jungian and have no use for his personality theory, his gender binary, or his followers’ systematization of his thought.
This essay limits its focus to theoretical and aesthetic considerations. However, I take it as given that any aesthetic gesture can be appropriated and neutralized by capital. Thus, as I have addressed in other essays (e.g. “Poets Should Be Socialists” & “The Poet as Producer”; see also Poets Union website), theoretical and aesthetic innovations are not sufficient for grounding an anti-capitalist poetic practice. Equal attention needs to be given to the economic aspects of literary production.
Hillman himself follows the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino in much of this, who drew upon the classical triad of psyche (or soul), spirit, and body (or living matter). In this triad, each had its virtues and its distinct nature, but psyche stood in between the other two as a kind of phase space through which spiritual and material fluctuations manifested in image formation and pathology.
An important qualification is necessary here regarding psyche’s relationship 1) to spirit and 2) to the reactionary force of fascism—two concepts which frequently run together, albeit along mistaken routes. Regarding spirit, I tend to neglect its importance in this essay by focusing instead on the two other parts of the spirit-psyche-matter triad. However, this is not to deny spirit or be against all that is “spiritual,” and it is not to assert atheism. Spirit is simply a necessary aspect of human existence. The vitalizing power of spirit is noticeable in enthusiasm, inspiration, belief, etc. One can literally become dispirited, and capital often compels this state of deflation. So the need for spirit is not to be discounted.
Further, against all I am saying, one could argue that psyche—in its intimate connection with myth, pathology, and the unconscious—is more likely to function as a channel for reactionary than liberatory politics. And yes, fascist forces plug themselves into psyche’s channel with ease when material conditions are right. However, psyche itself is not reactionary. What is reactionary in this equation is the fascist’s reification of psyche’s productions: it locks imagination into icons, monuments, monolithic platitudes, sentimental myths, etc. And much of this depends on their fundamental drive away from matter and psyche toward spirit: toward a (mistaken, infantile) doctrine of purity, of the heights and of “greatness,” the fantasy of an idealized past. As such, fascists have only dead husks. And this is why they need violence: only blood can impart some semblance of vitality and life in their dead imaginary.
Regarding this connection between death and psyche, recall that the specters populating Hades were in fact called “psyches.” Further, Hillman writes, “The House of Hades is a psychological realm now, not an eschatological realm later . . . Hades’ realm is contiguous with life, touching it at all points, just below it, its shadow brother (Doppelgänger) giving to life its depth and psyche” (from The Dream and the Underworld).
I am thinking here not only of older theories of “socialist realism” but also 1) any poetics that would dismiss psyche as the concern of individualists and metaphysicians, and 2) the anti-subjectivism seen in various forms of “avant-garde” writing (e.g. Language and Conceptual writing). On the theoretical failures of anti-subjectivism, see Keston Sutherland’s “Theses on Anti-Subjectivist Dogma” in A Fiery Flying Roule (May 1st 2013).
I am indebted to Berardi for Felix Guattari’s idea of chaosmosis. He discusses the concept at some length in Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso 2015).