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As it turns out, our nonexistent democracies increasingly rely on automation, and more particularly the automation of psychopathology, in order to sustain the irreality necessary to their function. Psychopathology, in the modern sense, while an overly general term, most often results from some dissociation of sensibility, or in other words (a necessity, it seems), some slippage of the signifier from the signified. While this slippage was correcdy grasped by poststructuralism as characteristic of language's function generally, a historicization of these emerging insights into the ontological failure of language to image Being understands poststructuralism as itself an inflection point in which this generalized slippage intensifies. While the paradigms of reality and truth are irrevocably lost in the mid-twentieth-century West, one sees, retroactively, that the gradual intensification and awareness of this slippage was also the condition not only of structuralism but also of psychoanalysis in to to. Naturally, this view of signifiers slipping off of no longer fully presentable signifieds in accord with new organizational principles (drives, fetishes, desires, etc.) could be stretched back into historical time to explain the need for hermeneutical analysis (Marxism, psychoanalysis) as well as the opening of the space (gap) that will give rise to and be ramified by modern literature, abstraction, and visual culture. Here, however, I will be interested not in the formal characteristics of linguistic and identificatory dysfunction but instead in what I take to be the increasing automation of this dissociation of sensibility, that is, of psychopathology-an automation that tends to exceed its psychic dimensions while extensively developing the patho-logical dimensions.
The automation of pathologistics of attention can be and has been pursued from the standpoint of the experience of today's large-scale psychological afflictions (burn-out, depression, autism, sociopathology, etc.). However, my interest here will be less in the psychoanalytic aspects of the generalization "mental illness" in the twenty-first century and more in the infrastructure of the logistics of attention that organize psychopathology. As a mediological analysis would be aware, these logistics are not only internal to subjects but are also distributed throughout the mediatic and material forms of the socius itself. Thus, we shall turn to the "support, apparatus [and] procedure" of modes of transmission of meaning and the organization of attention-in short, to screens and, more particularly,...