The Economy of Thought

There are a lot of different names for the state of the American economy today. Here are a few examples:

• The Attention Economy

• The Information Economy

• The Knowledge Economy

• Surveillance Capitalism

What I think unites these is that they are all centered on noology. One might ask: “What do people know? How do they learn it? What do they do with that knowledge?” And, in a capitalist economy, “how does one make a buck off of thinking?”

In order to properly understand this then, one must understand what it means to think. What is thought? (Here’s where my philosophy background comes in.)

Aristotle famously begins his Metaphysics with the line: “All men by nature desire to know.” This is fundamentally for him an empirical claim but he makes of it the principle of his philosophical system. Aristotle held that humans were the greatest animals and that their ultimate nature and the best thing they could do was to contemplate (to idly think) about the way that the world is. That way that the world is doesn’t change, and to philosophize was to think in such a way that one got as close as possible to the underlying way that the world is.

Christianity and Islam will take this up and transform it. In the stage of the age we now call “Modern” Rene Descartes will appeal to a “Philosopher’s God” to explain thought. For him everything given to us is open to skepticism, but God is necessarily good, beneficent and provides all of our “clear and distinct” ideas. Those ideas exist innately in the mind. No contact with the empirical world required. Because they are clear and distinct and guaranteed by God, they must be true.

Eventually Immanuel Kant comes along and he has other ideas. To think and to know, for him, involves processing the sensual encounter with phenomena and adequately representing them in the mind. This is done by means of various natural faculties working in harmony. These faculties each have certain ways they should work and a reasonable person is able to make them accord into a common sense so that an experienced phenomenon is reproduced in the mind as a representation. That is, for Kant, what it means for a subject to know an object.

This Kantian framework has a lot of influence, up to and including today. The development of the discipline of psychology sees challenges to the theory of the faculties, in the form of things like psychoanalysis, gestalt psychology, behaviorism, and information processing models. Eventually Gilles Deleuze enters the scene.

Deleuze dealt with thought a lot, most famously in his chapter The Image of Thought in Difference & Repetition and the Rhizome plateau in A Thousand Plateaus with Felix Guattari. For Deleuze the thinker doesn’t do so “naturally” nor do they have an inherent will or desire to seek the truth, and therefore the greatest threat to thought is not some outside force preventing them from achieving it (i.e. forcing them to err). Instead thought is a violence, an “involuntary movement” which is induced when the thinker confronts something that doesn’t make sense. They are then made to feel stupid, and that stupidity is the condition of possibility for the synthetic, creative act of thinking. By thinking one makes a new sense of things and produces knowledge for the subject and a new object which is true by its very fact of being.

There are a few things to note about Deleuze’s conception:

• Genuine thought produces something new that has practical effects: the subject is changed and so is the world. This is an instance of niche construction as described by Gary Tomlinson.

• Truth and error are displaced from their position of central importance. Thought, as a process, is part of the changing world and so there is no dualism which risks an infelicitous correlation between thought and world.

• The genuine threat to thought is that it cannot begin. In such a case the thinker doesn’t encounter something that interrupts its current way of being and makes it simply represent the status quo.

I follow Deleuze’s theory of the thought process. However, I think our circumstances have changed since he wrote his chapter on the Image of thought. In that text he criticized his predecessors for assuming that thinking is easy or comes naturally - and on that basis he held that it is a rare occurrence. And perhaps in the past it was. Great thinkers like Descartes, Kant, or even Deleuze would come up with a foundational idea, and then develop it and defend it for practically the rest of their lives. But it seems to me that most of us today are forced to think much more frequently; we often need to reassess and make sense anew.

This is what I’m getting at when I talk about noology as central to economic life today. I hold that we are called to attend to many more things than previously due to certain changes in our lifestyles, and those calls to attention effect continual learning and thinking. We’re continually forced to change against our will and to our detriment. I note that Deleuze himself drew attention to this in his Postscript on the Society of Control:

 Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training.

A few years ago L.M. Sacasas wrote a very interesting post in his newsletter The Convivial Society called The Pathologies of the Attention Economy. In it he uses Yves Citton’s 2021 book The Ecology of Attention as a catalyst for discussing attention and perception. Going back to the rise of industrialism and Gabriel Tarde in the 19th century and closing with concerns about Zoom School during the COVID lockdown, he traces how attention became a problem for “economic psychology” and was seen to become a scarce resource as the amount of information “grew” and thus was increasingly abundant.

Justin Smith-Ruiu’s The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is dwells on this same concern. He traces the way communication technologies have been changing our minds for much longer than we normally give them credit. (One charming example he discusses is theories of snail telegraphy which, incidentally, probably inspired the transponder snails of One Piece fame.) But he also notes a phase shift with recent technologies like social media platforms.

I cite these two not to identify them, but because they each give credence to the theory of thought offered by Deleuze and the idea that thinking in that Deleuzian sense have become more frequent than it had historically been. Things have changed: life has spend up, and we have digital computers to thank for this.

Previously things were much more “analog,” which in this case means that they were continuous on a scale commensurate with human subjectivity. This changed with military research and the development of things like cockpit flight simulators. The computing processes required to fake that required that they happen much more rapidly than analog computing could perform, at least at the time. According to Paul Edwards in The Close World that gave digital computers a chance. Previously they were deemed too fragile to ever overtake analog computing, but Jay Forrester’s Project Whirlwind proved feasible and gave it the funding needed to eventually become the methodological paradigm it is today. To bring this into contemporary times, this whole idea of things affecting us at the micro-logical level is discussed in great detail by Shane Denson in his book on “post-cinema,” Discorrelated Images.

It was the construction of such artificial structures that needed to immerse the subject and literally rattle it which, I think, is the condition that characterizes our age. As human engineering pushes humans beyond the customary scale of human subjectivity we need to think more to try to keep up. And then as more and more of our life becomes this great immersion our attention “becomes scarce” and we become terrain for competition between various agents of capital. We become surveilled so that businesses can come up with tactics for beating others to our subjectivity and therefore our time and therefore, in capital’s eyes, our money. We experience more and think in order to accommodate ourselves to that experience, the end result of which is knowledge. But it’s a provisional knowledge, and our state is ultimately one of modularity.

To wrap this up: Deleuze thought that thought was rare before because he didn’t think that human subjectivity just came about atemporally as Kant did (and he certainly didn’t agree with Hegel’s take on its historical development). Human subjectivity had a genesis ‘rooted’ in becoming. So what I’m proposing isn’t actually anything new: humans became and are in the midst of changing. All I’m trying to do, then, is to describe the context of our changing today. This is a work of transcendental empiricism.

If this is correct then perhaps we can do something with it. One can’t derive ought from is, but one can always ask if what is ought to be. Do we want to be shaken and stirred, sifted in a process of value extraction. I think that sounds awful, and it feels bad to boot. So I’m gonna see what I can do about that, and hope to work with some of you along the way.