On Christmas Eve 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 read from the book of Genesis as they orbited the moon, marking the moment with Christian cosmogony. On the same trip, the astronaut William Anders captured “Earthrise,” an image of the earth from lunar orbit, often described as an image that inaugurated the new environmental movement. The mission to explore the moon thus became instead a dramatic “discovery” of the earth, a perfect parable of the Promethean, or better yet, the Faustian return to Man himself, encapsulating all the elements of the threat of self-annihilation. On earth, what was to bring endless energy brought nuclear annihilation, and the same fossil fuels that enabled the Apollo mission into space brought destruction to the earth’s atmosphere. But at that point, all that was solid melted into air.

If it is true that the individual is caught in a circle of continuous undulation between enslavement and liberation, trapped in the paradox of simultaneously being her own master and slave, can learning from the logic of the machine provide a path for a new, alien beginning? And if it is true that instrumentality as such has developed its own logic through the evolution of machine complexity, shouldn’t we attempt to think the instrumentality of the post-cybernetic individual beyond the dualities of means and ends?

1. Nervous Systems In 1882 Doctor Paul Emil Flechsig, a brain anatomist with no experience in clinical psychiatry, took up the directorship of the psychiatric clinic of the University Hospital in Leipzig. For German institutional psychiatry, the appointment decisively inaugurated a new episteme. In one move, the era of the soul ended and the era of the brain began. 1 Dr. Flechsig’s project linked neural activity to all of human behavior and thought, a reduction that persists in…