In their 1972 opus, Anti-Oedipus, French intellectuals Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari took a sledgehammer to the most cherished principle of classic psychology, accusing its founder, Sigmund Freud, of gross anthropocentrism and of oedipalising his notion of an unconscious mind.
I had Deleuze-Guattari on my reading list for years but then I stopped being that fussed about capitalism as the reason everything was awful and they fell off the bottom.
However, that idea of machinic assemblages reminds me of Gurdjieff. One of his slogans was "man is a machine". You can't do anything - things happen to you and you react to them. He also put out this idea of man having numerous 'centres' - movement centre, emotional centre, intellectual centre, sexual centre etc - which operate independently of each other while drawing from the same energy source. Problems arise when one centre tries to do the work of another centre, e.g. when emotional centre tries to do the work of intellectual centre, or vice versa.
For Gurdjieff, the path to freedom (i.e. not being a machine) began with trying to "remember oneself". There is very little information to be found on what that meant practically. There are probably different optimal strategies for different people. But for me, it's come to mean trying to remain aware of my body as much as possible.
Context acts as a determining factor in these philosophies. Scientific reductionism and, the image of the machine, shall we say, as the Hegelian synthesis of capitalism and socialism, meant that they couldn’t see what you are describing. As science becomes more integrated with the whole body, and the marriage of capitalism and socialism fails at an accelerating rate, promising some new, not yet emergent organizing principle of society, the principle of freedom that you describe may be what will carry us through the epochal transition that we are in.
I had Deleuze-Guattari on my reading list for years but then I stopped being that fussed about capitalism as the reason everything was awful and they fell off the bottom.
However, that idea of machinic assemblages reminds me of Gurdjieff. One of his slogans was "man is a machine". You can't do anything - things happen to you and you react to them. He also put out this idea of man having numerous 'centres' - movement centre, emotional centre, intellectual centre, sexual centre etc - which operate independently of each other while drawing from the same energy source. Problems arise when one centre tries to do the work of another centre, e.g. when emotional centre tries to do the work of intellectual centre, or vice versa.
For Gurdjieff, the path to freedom (i.e. not being a machine) began with trying to "remember oneself". There is very little information to be found on what that meant practically. There are probably different optimal strategies for different people. But for me, it's come to mean trying to remain aware of my body as much as possible.
Context acts as a determining factor in these philosophies. Scientific reductionism and, the image of the machine, shall we say, as the Hegelian synthesis of capitalism and socialism, meant that they couldn’t see what you are describing. As science becomes more integrated with the whole body, and the marriage of capitalism and socialism fails at an accelerating rate, promising some new, not yet emergent organizing principle of society, the principle of freedom that you describe may be what will carry us through the epochal transition that we are in.