Fabulation in a Time of Algorithmic Ecology: Making the Future Possible Again

Daniel Smith reminds us that it was Nietzsche who first thought of philosophers and artists as “physiologists or symptomatologists, ‘physicians of culture’… for whom all phenomena are signs or symptoms that reflect a certain state of forces” (Smith, Critical, Clinical. In Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. Charles J. Stivale. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005, 204). Gilles Deleuze, a keen student of Nietzsche’s philosophy, takes up the notion of a philosophical symptomatology in his work too, notably in his essay, “Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty” (1967/1991), although symptomatology as philosophical method can be found throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre, the two volumes of both Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Cinema being exemplary. For Deleuze, symptomatology replaces the dialectic, “which all too readily perceives the link between opposites”, whereas Deleuze is interested in finding “truly differential mechanisms” (Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. Jean McNeil. Zone Books, 1991 [1967], 14). What interests Deleuze, perhaps perversely, is how symptom and invention-fabulation-operate together, differentially. However, writes Ronald Bogue, despite the fact that Deleuze proposes “to develop a political conception of Bergsonian fabulation, he was able to offer only cursory intimations of what such an idea might be before his death in 1995" (Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History, Edinburgh University Press, 2010, 14). Following Deleuze, we propose in this chapter a triadic method to engage critically with Félix Guattari’s concepts: machinic ecology and mechanosphere. The method can be described as symptomatology-problematic-fabulation, where the symptomatology aims to describe the set of symptoms; the problematic (problématique) sets out to accurately determine the differential mechanisms that mark the tension between the virtual and actual-at least as accurate as is speculatively possible; and fabulation describes the co-constitutive action of invention and therapy. Using this method, we look at hikikomori-or prolonged, acute social withdrawal-as one new symptom of the networked community and trace this etiologically to a new dimension of Guattari’s mechanosphere-what we call algorithmic ecology. Finally, we take seriously Deleuze’s salient reminder that, regardless of how hopeless things may seem, “there’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” [Deleuze. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59 (1992): 3-7], and use this to think about fabulation in technology, urban space and the networked community.