Читать книгу Futurability - Franco "Bifo" Berardi - Страница 7

I’m not going to write about the future, again.

I’m not going to write about no-future, either.

I’ll write about the process of becoming other: vibration, selection, recombination, recomposition.

Possibility is content, potency is energy, and power is form.

I call possibility a content inscribed in the present constitution of the world (that is, the immanence of possibilities). Possibility is not one, it is always plural: the possibilities inscribed in the present composition of the world are not infinite, but many. The field of possibility is not infinite because the possible is limited by the inscribed impossibilities of the present. Nevertheless, it is plural, a field of bifurcations. When facing an alternative between different possibilities, the organism enters into vibration, then proceeds making a choice that corresponds to its potency.

I call potency the subjective energy that deploys the possibilities and actualizes them. Potency is the energy that transforms the possibilities into actualities.

I call power the selections (and the exclusions) that are implied in the structure of the present as a prescription: power is the selection and enforcement of one possibility among many, and simultaneously it is the exclusion (and invisibilization) of many other possibilities.

This selection can be described as gestalt (structuring form), and it acts as a paradigm. It may also be seen as a format, a model that we can implement only by complying with the code.

Possibility

In 1937 Henri Bergson published the article ‘Le possible et le réel’ (The Possible and the Real) in the Swedish magazine Nordisk Tidskrift. In this text, later included in the book La pensée et le mouvant, the French thinker answers the question: what is the meaning of the word ‘possibility’?

We call possible what is not impossible: obviously, this non-impossibility is the condition of its actualisation. But this possibility is not a degree of virtuality, is not ideal pre-existence … From this negative sense, we shift unconsciously to the positive sense of the word. In the first definition, possibility means absence of hindrance; but we are shifting now to the meaning: pre-existence in the form of an idea.¹

‘B is possible’ means that B is inscribed in A and nothing is preventing B from deploying from the present condition of A. Bergson speaks of pre-existence in the form of an idea, but I don’t want to use the word ‘idea’, preferring to say that a future state of being is possible when it is immanent or inscribed in the present constitution of the world. However, we should not forget that the present constitution of the world contains many different (conflicting) possibilities, not only one.

Extracting and implementing one of the many immanent futurabilities: this is the shift from possible to real. Futurability is a layer of possibility that may or may not develop into actuality.

Bergson writes:

Why is the Universe ordered? How can the rule impose itself on the irregularity, how can form impose itself on matter? … This problem vanishes as soon as we understand that the idea of disorder has sense in the sphere of human industry, in the sphere of fabrication, not in the field of creation. Disorder is simply an order that we do not seek.

We stare at the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, of flows, and seek for a possibility of order, a possible organization of chaotic material. We extract fragments from the magma then try to combine them, in an attempt to reverse entropy: intelligent life is this process of local, provisional reversal of entropy. Time is the dimension of decay and resistance, of dissolution and of recomposition. Time is the process of becoming other of every fragment in every other fragment, forever. Bergson defines the concept of possibility from the point of view of time: ‘Why does reality unfurl? How is it not unfurled? What purpose does time serve (I speak here of real, concrete time, and not of abstract time which is merely the fourth dimension of space)? Doesn’t the existence of time prove the indeterminacy of things? Isn’t time this very indeterminacy?’

The old philosophy, he says, was centred on Eternity: Immutable Categories of Being, Eternal Conjunction of Thought and Idea.

The moderns place themselves on a different ground. They do not treat time anymore as an intruder, a perturbation of Eternity. But they would like to reduce time to a mere appearance. The temporary is for them a confusion of Reason … Let’s forget about theories, let’s stick to the facts. They do not treat time anymore as an intruder, a perturbation of Eternity.

In the first place, Bergson defines the possible in a tautological way: possible is that which is not impossible. Possible is that which is not necessarily going to exist, and simultaneously is not necessarily going to be non-existing. In the second place, Bergson acknowledges this answer is an empty one; it says nothing about the content of the possibility itself. If we want to know more we have to understand what is happening in the empty space of non-impossibility and non-necessity.

Let’s look at the evolution of a living organism. The field of possibility of the organism is included in its genetic code, but the code is not the history of the future. It rather opens a range of possible evolutions, and in this range many different pathways can be taken. Epigenesis (the process by which an organism develops out of its genetic code) constantly exposes the emerging organism to the environment, to the events occurring that the code cannot predict or preform. This field of possibility is not infinite, because it is limited by the genetic conditions inscribed in the code. But it is by no means reducible to merely a deterministic succession of predictable states. As the possible is plural, the environmental events in which the code develops select and shape one form among many.

Possibility is as the intensity of the tantric egg, before and during the process of differentiation: ‘What Spinoza calls singular essence, it seems to me, is an intensive quality, as if each one of us were defined by a kind of complex of intensities which refers to her/his essence, and also of relations which regulate the extended parts, the extensive parts.’²

In A Thousand Plateaus, the passage from possibility to actuality is described as a shift from the intensity of the egg to the deployment of gradients of differentiation, and finally to the full deployment of the extended body.

A Body without Organs is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the Body without Organs is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree – to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is non-stratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organisation of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it changes gradient. ‘No organ is constant as regards either function or position … sex organs sprout anywhere … rectums open, defecate and close … the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments.’ Tantric egg.³

The tantric egg contains uncountable inter-cellular concatenations – the web of possibility. The evolution of these concatenations from the state of virtuality to the state of deployed organism is the space of actualization of the possible. That which I call potency is the condition for this actualization: potency enables the shift from the zero-dimensionality of information to the multidimensionality of the body and of the event. Power, then, is the grid of selections that visualizes, emphasizes and implements one plan or consistence in which a possibility deploys itself, excluding any other possibility from the space of actualization.

The tantric egg is the magma of all possibilities, the chaotic content looking for a shape. The general intellect is the content, semio-capitalism is the gestalt, the generator of coded forms: paradigmatic capture.

Power is the subjection of possible content to a generative code.

The horizon of our time is marked by a dilemma: in the first scenario, the general intellect will unfold and develop according to the paradigmatic line of the semio-capitalist code. In the second scenario, the general intellect is combined into form according to a principle of autonomy and of non-dogmatic and useful knowledge.

Who will decide the outcome of this dilemma?

Who will decide the actualization of one possibility or another?

This is the issue that I’ll develop in the third and final part of this book.

In order to shift from virtuality to actuality, a possibility has to be embodied in a subject and this subject needs potency. How can a possibility be embodied in a subject? How can a subject have potency?

A possibility is embodied in a subject when the magma of possibility meets a concatenation that transforms the magma into intentional subjectivity.

Liberal democracy is the political concatenation that enables the subjectivation of the bourgeois class in the centuries of modernity. Communism is the concatenation that enables industrial workers to gather and fight for social rights.

What concatenation will enable the general intellect to emerge as a conscious force intended to dismantle and reprogram the world according to the concrete usefulness of knowledge?

Potency

Potency, then, is the condition that enables transformation – according to the will of a subject.

History is the space of the emergence of possibilities embodied in subjectivities endowed with potency.

Potency gives us the potential to be free and to transform the environment. On the other hand, power is the subjection of possibilities to a generative code.

Like evolution, history can also be seen as a succession of bifurcations and selections, but in the kingdom of history at each bifurcation consciousness plays a decisive role in the selection among conflicting possibilities.

In order to emerge from the chaotic vibrational dimension of possibility, a body needs potency. Potency is the energy that links a possibility inscribed in the present with its subject.

In order to turn that possibility into form, the subject with potency has to dispense with power that counters the expansion of a conflicting inscribed possibility. Contrary to the assumption of many Spinozian scholars (I’ll refer particularly to Toni Negri), potency is not infinite.

In many texts, particularly in his books The Savage Anomaly and Subversive Spinoza, Negri attributes to Spinoza the idea of an infinity of potency: ‘Being does not want to be subjected to a becoming that does not possess truth. Truth is said of being, truth is revolutionary, being is already revolution.’ ⁴ This sentence sounds strangely theological, and Negri is, actually, adamant in reclaiming the absolute nature of world. ‘The world is absolute. We are happily overwhelmed by this plenitude, we cannot help but associate ourselves with this abundant circularity of sense and existence … This point defines the second reason for Spinoza’s contemporaneity. He describes the world as absolute necessity, as presence of necessity.’ ⁵

The definition of the world as absolute necessity is the foundation of Negri’s strenuous refusal to acknowledge the limits of potency, and is also the foundation of his faith in the necessity of liberation. From an atheist point of view, I’m obliged to abandon the faith: I don’t think that liberation is necessary. Liberation is a possibility, and in our time at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems to be an unlikely one.

Is liberation inscribed in the absolute fabric of the world? Negri answers resoundingly: yes. But this leads to a fantastic obliteration of reality, and particularly gives way to a fantastic obliteration of the contemporary life of subjectivity. Liberation is not an absolute necessity, but a possibility that needs potency in order to be actualized. And sometimes we don’t have that potency.

All the rhetorical Viagra that might be provided by Negri’s reading of Spinoza is pointless when it comes to the political impotence of the contemporary subjectivity. The possibilities inscribed in social life and knowledge do not find a political concatenation, and sad passions obnubilate the possible. The genesis of such sad passions has to be understood without any hysterical denial. We must look the beast in the eyes if we want to find the way out.

In the text On Spinoza, Deleuze writes, ‘Affectus is the continuous variation of someone’s force of existing.’ This variation increases or diminishes the potency of the subject: sad passions and joyful passions are to be seen as the affecters, as the cause of this increase or diminishment. ‘Spinoza denounces a plot in the universe of those who are interested in affecting us with sad passions. The priest has need of the sadness of his subjects, he needs these subjects to feel themselves guilty … Inspiring sad passions is necessary for the exercise of power.’⁶

To hold these sad passions should not be viewed as a sort of guilt, an error that must be emendated. Sad passions are not the effect of a misunderstanding, and they cannot be cancelled by force of will or by right consideration. As Deleuze points out, sad passions are the effect of an exercise of power.

Power is the agency that reduces the field of possibility to a prescriptive order; power, therefore, is the actual source of sad passions, and their existence can be seen as an effect of the subjugation of the soul to the force of power. ‘Spinoza says that evil is a bad encounter. Encountering a body which mixes badly with your own.’ Bad encounters do happen, alas. Lots of them in these times. Quoting Spinoza, Negri writes:

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, nor do we enjoy it because we restrain our lists; on the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them. Spinoza overturns Hegelianism before it is born with the recognition of his own logical supremacy … and, in the productivity of reason, he anticipates the development of history overturning, therefore, the Hegelian affirmation of philosophy as a recording of a dissected and selected event, and therefore truly posing freedom at the basis of the event and history, rooting human power absolutely on the lower, productive border of existence. There is no distinction between phenomenological Erklarung and metaphysical Darstellung.⁷

It’s hard not to see the analogy between the Spinozian pantheistic vision and the pan-logistic vision of Hegel. The difference, however, is crucial: in Hegel, infinity is the energy of the spiritual becoming; in Spinoza infinity is nature, and potency is the body.

‘What can a body do?’ asks Spinoza, a question intended to illuminate the excessive nature of the body, not to assert its boundless potency.

However, no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension … Again, no one knows how or by what means the mind moves the body, nor how many various degrees of motion it can impart to the body, nor how quickly it can move it.⁸

What can our body do nowadays?

What can the social body do under the present condition of separation from the automated brain?

Impotence in the issue that I will discuss in the first part of this book.

Power

At each historical bifurcation, the range of possibilities is limited by power and simultaneously opened by the emerging subjectivity. If the emerging subjectivity has potency (internal consistence and projecting energy), it can bring an invisible possibility into the space of visibility, and can give way to the actualization of that possibility.

Morphogenesis is the emergence of a new form from a vibration, from the oscillation between different evolutions of the body of possibilities. The emerging form is contained as a possibility, but we can insert automated selections in the passage from an alternative to a solution. Automation is the replacement of human acts with machines as well as the submission of cognitive activity to logical and technological chains.

This is exactly the origin of power: the insertion of automated selections into the social vibration.

Automation is programmed by the human mind according to its projects, visions, ideologies, preconceptions: the automaton replicates the embedded intention and the established form of the relation.

What is a form in relation to its content? And how does it happen that a new form can emerge? How do things generate things, and concepts generate concepts? And finally, more interesting: how do concepts generate things?

Power can be defined as a form of engendered determinism.

In fact, power takes the form of techno-linguistic automatisms shaping future behaviour: ‘If you don’t pay the rent, you’ll be automatically evicted from your apartment’, ‘If you don’t pay the fee, you’ll be automatically expelled from the university’, and so on. The execution of the eviction or the expulsion is not the act of a human agent that might be moved by compassion and change her mind. These consequences are implicit in the technical machine, as if they were logico-mathematical necessities. They are not, but the linguistic machine records behaviour and translates it into consequences: real events are activators of mathematical functions inscribed in the machine as logical necessities.

Pre-emption prescribes in a deterministic way the future form of the organism by the insertion of biotechnical or techno-social mutations. Determinism is not only a (bad) philosophical methodology that describes the evolution in terms of causal implications, it is also a political strategy that aims to introduce causal chains in the world, and particularly in the social organism.

The determinist strategy aims to subjugate the future, to constrain tendency into a prescribed pre-emptive model, and automate future behaviour.

The effect produced by the chain of automatisms may be defined as a deterministic trap, a trap in which the possible is captured and reduced to mere probability, and the probable is enforced as necessary.

This is the issue I will discuss in the second part of this book.

Immanence Tendency and Paradigm

Immanence is the quality of being inside the process, the intrinsicality or inherence of something to something.

This book is about futurability, the multiplicity of immanent possible futures: becoming other which is already inscribed in the present.

But if we assume that the future is necessarily inscribed in the present constitution of the world, we attribute a teleological meaning to the immanence, and inscription is turned into prescription.

Teleology can be based on a deterministic interpretation of scientific causation, or a theological design of the history of the world that can be labelled pantheism: God is an immanent Prescriptor.

A materialistic vision of immanence, on the contrary, is based on the persuasion that the present reality contains the future as a wide range of possibilities, and the selection of one possibility among many is not prescribed in a deterministic way in the process of morphogenesis. The future is inscribed in the present as a tendency that we can imagine: a sort of premonition, a vibrational movement of particles that are taken in an uncertain process of continuous recombination.

Immanence does not imply a logical, necessary consequentiality: the present does not contain the future as a necessary linear deployment or consequential elaboration of implications that we can read in the current reality. Immanence means all the uncountable divergent and conflicting possibilities are inscribed in the present. The present state of the world can be described as the vibrational concurrence of many possibilities. How can chaotic vibration give birth to a particular event? How does it happen that among many possibilities of development, just one of them prevails?

The future states of the social world are not the linear effect of political will, but the result of infinitely complex relations and conflicts and mediations. We call a heterogony (heterogenesis) of the ends the asymmetrical relation between projects and realizations, between will and historical composition of infinite concurring wills in the determination of an event.

The relation between now and tomorrow, between the present state of the world and the future state of the world is not necessary (that is, necessitated). The present does not contain the future as a linear development. The emergence of a form among many possible forms is the – provisional and unstable – effect of a polarization, the fixation of a pattern.

Tendency is movement in a given direction. The vibrational complexity of the world as potentiality can be interpreted in terms of coexisting and conflicting tendencies. Tendency is the possibility that seems to prevail at a given moment of the vibrational process that gives birth to the event.

At the highpoint of industrial modernity, the emancipation of social activity from salaried work was inscribed in the social concatenation, and particularly in the relation between the potency of the general intellect and the existing technology. The emancipation of human activity from capitalist exploitation was a possibility that could be viewed as a tendency. Communism was immanent in the technical composition of capital and also in the social consciousness.

Nevertheless, as we know, this possibility did not deploy into reality. The tendency towards the emancipation of human activity from capitalist exploitation (that I call ‘possible communism’) did not prevail.

The possibility of communism was obliterated by the event of the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing establishment of a dictatorship of the army and the state.

Indeed, the Leninist action broke the structural chain conceptualized by Marx. The event of the Russian Revolution, like the event of the Paris Commune, was not the necessary deployment of structural dynamics inscribed in the process of production. They were untimely events. But every event is untimely, as the event does not correspond to a chain of causation. The Russian Revolution acted as a violation or a refutation of the Marxist persuasion that socialist revolution would first begin in the most advanced industrial countries.

The event and the structure cannot be described in terms of mutual necessary implications. The structure is not necessarily implying any event, and the event is not implied in the structure.

I call paradigmatic capture the reduction of the range of possibilities inscribed in the present to a pattern that acts as a formatting gestalt.

In fact, there is a conflict between emergent possibilities and the dominant paradigm. The paradigmatic capture blocks and forbids the deployment of the tendency and stiffens the vibration reducing the multiplicity of possibilities to a new (provisional, unstable) state of the world.

We may describe the relation between society and the development of technology in terms of possibility and paradigmatic capture. Knowledge, production and technology are linked in a vibrational field of possibilities. Technology is not a chain of logical implications, but a field of immanent conflicting possibilities. Electronic technology and digital networks since the beginning of their implementation enabled a process of transformation of social relations and production, open to divergent possible evolutions.

Digital technology and research in artificial intelligence are opening the door to a sort of automation of the future.

Statisticon: Inscription Prescription

In the infinity of time, an endless chain of bifurcations gives birth to vibrations, selection, emergence. At every instant, matter enters a vibrational state, oscillating between different possibilities until a new set emerges.

The emergence of consciousness is an effect of evolution, but it is also a jump into a reflective dimension: the dimension of choice. When the time of evolution is traversed by consciousness, then we speak of history.

At this point, such bifurcations are perceived as intentional selection between possibilities.

Human beings seem to have the peculiar ability of making conscious choices and selecting one possibility among many. Conscious choices are not (only) rational processes of calculation: they imply strategic decision, ethical judgement; they express aesthetic preferences and are influenced by flows of info-psycho-stimulation.

As the future is not prescribed, and the succession of now and tomorrow is not monolithic or determined, our task consists in distinguishing the layers of futurability that lie in the texture of the present reality and in the present consciousness.

Futurability can be traced in terms of absolute necessity, relative necessity or probability, tendency, impossibility and possibility.

Absolute necessity marks the logical enunciations that are true today and will also be true tomorrow, as they are functions inscribed in the human mind and do not imply any relation with external reality.

Kant distinguishes between synthetic and analytic sentences. Analytical sentences can be considered truisms because the content of the enunciation is implied in the subject. Analytical truth is therefore a necessity.

Relative necessity, on the other hand, is a concatenation of temporal events that is likely to imply a certain probability as well as a concatenation of states of being that are enforced both by law and by force.

‘If you don’t pay the rent, you will be evicted’ is a case of relatively necessary futurability. There is no logical necessity in the implication, but social relations are based on the enforcement of conventional rules. This enforcement may happen by force of violence, of agreement, or by force of automation.

In the computer of the real estate company, there are logical chains implying that the tenant who does not pay the rent will be expelled from the house. This implication, however, is neither logical nor natural, but is enforced by the automation of will, and by the automated transcription of a social rapport de force. Financial capitalism is bound up in techno-linguistic implications that pretend to be natural and logical. They are not. They are rather artificial reductions of the range of possibility to the narrow string of probability.

Pre-emption: Determinism as Strategy of Reduction

The predictive power of the contemporary global machine lies in the ability to routinely read big flows of data. The resulting statistical prediction, thanks to the introduction of the filter bubble, turns into prescription and the evacuation of subjectivity.

The techno-informational automatism that captures data from the living flow of social activity in order to adapt the articulations of the global machine to the expectations of the social organism, and in order to symmetrically adapt the expectations of the social organism to the articulations of the global machine, I’ll call, following Warren Neidich, the ‘Statisticon’.

The technique of customization that enables Google and other search engines to anticipate our requests, as well as to shape and control our desires, is called the ‘filter bubble’. The filter bubble is an example of what Warren Neidich calls the Statisticon: a reducer of future events into probability and predictability. Pre-emption is complementary to the statistical capture; pre-emptying the future means preventing future behaviour and emptying it of singularity.

In the dynamics of the Statisticon, the mirror acts as a generator that leads the machine to anticipate and pre-package social behaviour.

The Statisticon evolves together with the environment (in this case, social life), but the condition for this coevolution is the pre-inscribed structural homology that makes social interaction possible in the sphere of automated governance.

The agent of enunciation must use the language that the machine understands, in order for there to be effective communication. Once the agent of enunciation has accepted the format that makes interaction possible, the interaction can evolve, and the machine can adapt to the living organism insofar as the living organism has also adapted to the machine.

The statistical pre-emption implies two complementary actions: one is the recording of massive flows of data; the second is the adapting of the machine to the living environment and the reciprocal adaptation of the living, conscious organisms to the machine.

Large amounts of data give the machine its ability to adapt, while simultaneously the filter bubble induces the living, conscious organisms to comply with the expected responses of the machine.

Statistical pre-emption is the mode of functioning of governance, the contemporary form of political and economic power – a form of engendered determinism.

Pre-emption acts as a deterministic trap: the future of the organism can be altered through bio-technical or techno-social modifications. The possible is captured and reduced to mere probability, and the probable is enforced as necessary.

Nevertheless at the next bifurcation a new possibility surfaces, and the next bifurcation will be the following: a process of cognitive automation underway in our time. Will the general intellect (millions of cognitarians worldwide) find a body – an erotic, aesthetic and ethical body?

Futures are inscribed in the present as immanent possibilities, not as necessary developments of a code. Futurability refers to the multidimensionality of the future: in the present a plurality of futures is inscribed. Consciousness is one of the deciding factors in the selection between these possibilities, and consciousness is continuously changing in the flow of changing social composition.

A process of cognitive automation is underway in our time. Articulations of the global machine (interfaces, applications …) proliferate and insert themselves in the social mind. The conjunctive body and the conjunctive mind are penetrated by the architecture of overall connectivity.

A code is inscribed in the info-neural connection; as we face this process of cognitive wiring we are often led to think that there is no way out from a sort of neurototalitarianism in the making.

A way out from neuro-totalitarianism does exist as the conjunctive body of the general intellect is wider that the code embedded in it, and the dynamics of the general intellect may lead to unexpected deviations from the determinist replication of the coded actuation.

The present depression (both psychological and economic) obscures the consciousness that no determinist projection of the future is true. We feel trapped in the tangle of techno-linguistic automatisms: finance, global competition, military escalation. But the body of the general intellect (the social and erotic bodies of a million cognitarians) is richer than the connective brain. And the present reality is richer than the format imposed on it, as the multifold possibilities inscribed in the present have not been wholly cancelled, even if they may seem presently inert.

The possible is immanent, but it’s unable to develop into a process of actualization.

The inertia of the possibilities inscribed in the present composition of the social body is an effect of the impotence of subjectivity. During the last century, the social subjectivity of workers experienced forms of solidarity, autonomy and welfare – then at the end of the century it became disempowered so that it is now unable to express those potentialities which are present in the general intellect and in the body of social solidarity.

The possibility of emancipation of social time from the obligation of salaried work still exists: it is located in the cooperative knowledge of millions of cognitive workers, but this possibility cannot surface at the present because of the political impotence that in this book I want to describe, analyze and find a way to exceed.

The impotence of subjectivity is an effect of the total potency of power when it becomes independent from human will, decision and government – when it is inscribed in the automated texture of technique and of language.

Social Psycho-mancy and the Horizon of Possibility

The man thinks

The horse thinks

The sheep thinks

The cow thinks

The dog thinks

The fish doesn’t think.

The fish is mute, expressionless

because the fish knows.

Everything.

Iggy Pop and Goran Bregovic,

‘This Is a Film’

This book is an attempt to build a psycho-mantic map of social futurability: an inquiry (or divination) on the social becoming of the psychosphere.

From such a point of view we might see the lines of evolution issuing out from the present chaotic social mind’s vibration.

This chaotic vibration is quite visible at the present, in the full-fledged epidemics of aggressive madness that surround us: Daesh, Donald Trump, financial austeritarianism and resurgent national-socialism are signs of contemporary psychotic epidemics.

Every day we experience the sense that opposition to the mounting wave of racism, fanaticism and the ensuing violence is pointless. In fact, this wave is not a political decision, the result of ideological and strategic elaboration, but the effect of despair, the reaction to long-lasting humiliation. The perfect rationality of the abstract computational machine, the inescapability of financial violence has jeopardized the consciousness and sensibility of the social organism, and frustration has reduced the general ability to feel compassion and to act empathically.

Madness? Although the genealogy of despair and aggression can be retraced to a social cause, I think that at the end of the day political reasoning is itself impotent. The only way to healing such emotional distress would be an emotional reactivation of the hidden potencies of the social organism: the Occupy! movement that deployed in 2011 has been the main attempt of our recent moment to summon all the energies of solidarity of which the social organism is capable. The outcome, however, of that movement was so poor that deception has destroyed any lingering sentiment of human solidarity, and the social organism is behaving like a beheaded body that still retains its physical energies but no longer possesses the ability to steer them in a reasonable direction.

I’m not sure that we can judge in psychopathological terms the dismantlement of modern social civilization. The economic interests of the corporations and the cynicism of politicians with no culture and no dignity have paved the way to the present explosion of madness.

Impotence is surely a symptom of disproportion: reason, that used to be the measure of the world (ratio), can no longer govern the hyper-complexity of the contemporary network of human relations.

This kind of disproportion may be labelled madness, in the sense of disorder, chaos, or mental mayhem. However, we must distinguish between different points of view when it comes to the definition of madness.

Is madness an exceptional occurrence that looms at the margins of the rational and reasonable daily business of life? Is it an inescapable disturbance of the ongoing conversation that holds society together?

If we reduce madness to a marginal, unavoidable disturbance that must be managed, that we have to placate and heal, we miss the point. Madness should not be seen as an accident to hide or to fix. Madness is the background of evolution, the chaotic matter that we are modelling and transforming into a provisional order.

Order means here a shared illusion of predictability, of regularity; a projective illusion that can hold for a short or a long period of time, a few minutes or perhaps centuries. An illusion that gives birth to what we call civilization.

We must distinguish two faces of madness: one is the factual meaninglessness of the world, the surrounding magma of matter, the uncontrollable proliferation of stimuli, the dazzling whirl of existence. This madness is the precondition of the creation of meaning: the groundless construction of knowledge, the invention of the world as a meaningful whole.

Then there is the subjective side of madness: the painful sentiment that things are flying away, the feeling of being overwhelmed by speed and noise and violence, of anxiety, panic, mental chaos.

Pain forces us to look for an order to the world that we cannot find, because it does not exist. Yet this craving for order does exist: it is the incentive to build a bridge across the abyss of entropy, a bridge between different singular minds. From this conjunction, the meaning of the world is evoked and enacted: shared semiosis, breathing in consonance.

The condition of the groundless construction of meaning is friendship. The only coherence of the world resides in sharing the act of projecting meaning: cooperation between agents of enunciation.

When friendship dissolves, when solidarity is banned and individuals stay alone and face the darkness of matter in isolation, then reality turns back into chaos and the coherence of the social environment is reduced to the enforcement of the obsessional act of identification.

There is something obsessional in this attempt to narrow the range of vibration out of which emerges possibility, and to reduce the unpredictability of future events.

I could never know to what degree I was the perpetrator, configuring the configurations around me, oh, the criminal keeps returning to the scene of the crime! When one considers what a great number of sounds, forms reach us at every moment of our existence … the swarm, the roar, the river … nothing is easier than to configure! Configure! For a split second this word took me by surprise like a wild beast in a dark forest, but it soon sank into the hurly-burly of the seven people sitting here, talking, eating, supper going on.⁹

‘De remi facemmo ala al folle volo’, says Ulysses in Canto XXVI of The Divine Comedy.

To the dawn

Our poop we turn’d, and for the witless flight

Made our oars wings, still gaining on the left.

The flight that leads to knowledge is foolish (witless), as it defies the established limits of reason.

The modern world comes out of the imprudence of the geographical explorations, from the desire to answer the question: where are the borders of the world?

The painful research of the picaresque swindler, who seeks to answer the unanswerable: who am I? Whence do I come?

The modern world results from the research of a non-theological order, and this research leads to the establishment of the bourgeois order whose measure (ratio) is time, labour and value accumulation.

This order was based on the semiotic organization and coding of the energies unchained by the explosion of the old Medieval theocratic order and by the enhancement of human experience that followed the technical innovations of printing books and traversing oceans. This order is the result of an act of nomination that gives meaning and scope to the evolving flows of information and discovery and technology.

Then entropy came and slowly dissolved that order: at the end of the capitalist cycle, the richness produced by labour is turned into misery and the freedom of knowledge is restricted by a new theology based on economic dogma. But the enforcement of dogma cannot replace the old bourgeois convention based on measure. When labour time and value start diverging, when the speed of info-stimulation is too fast for rational elaboration, then madness becomes the general language of the social system.

Capitalism is a dead dog, but society is unable to come out from under the rotting corpse, so the social mind is devoured by panic and furious impotence, until finally it turns to depression.

The social mind looks for a new form of semiotization which might better adapt to the mutating composition of the world, but the vibration of its creation takes the form of a spasm, a frantic painful jolt of the soul and body itself.

Signs of the spasm can be detected all around, and the reaction to it assumes a variety of paranoid guises: Donald Trump boasts about the past glory of America and of reclaiming the legal use of torture. The European Union is torn apart by financial absolutism and nationalist aggression, and is building concentration camps for migrants on the coasts of Turkey, Egypt and Libya. An army of Muslim zealots behead innocent people, for God’s sake. In the Philippines, a self-proclaimed murderer is elected president and calls for mass violence against social drop-outs.

Seventy years after Hitler’s defeat, Hitler is back, multiplied by a dozen imitators, some of them are endowed with nukes.

The contours of the social convention have been swept away and unfiltered flows of imagination invade the social mind. The schizo runs in many directions as she sees the horizon of possibility, but she is unable to give shape to her pursuit of this horizon, so it forever eludes her.

In the last decades, the social mind has been taken in by a vortex of bipolar disorders: a long succession of euphoria and sadness have led to the present secular stagnation and to a state of steady depression.

The horizon of possibility is perceived as an infinite sprawl of connecting, flashing points. This perception generates anxiety and panic: the paranoid obsession with order tries to reduce the horizon to repetition, belonging and identity.

Power is based on the hypostatization of the existing relations of potency, on the surreptitious absolutization of the necessity implied in the existing rapport de force. Force crystallizes in a paranoid fixation to re-compact the world through rituals of identification. The relative necessity of the rule is arbitrarily transformed into absolute necessity: absolute capitalism is based on this deceptive trick of logic. Accumulation, profit and growth are surreptitiously turned into natural laws, and the field of economics legitimises this deception.

When society enters a phase of crisis or approaches collapse, we can glimpse the horizon of possibility. This horizon itself is hard to distinguish, and the territory that borders this horizon is hard to describe or to map.

The horizon of possibility can be best described by the words of Ignacio Matte Blanco in defining the unconscious: ‘The unconscious deals with infinite sets that have not only the power of the enumerable but also that of the continuum.’¹⁰

The explosion of the semiotic sphere, the utter intensification of semiotic stimulation, has provoked simultaneously an enhancement of the horizon of possibility and a panic effect in the social neuro-system.

In this condition of panic, reason becomes unable to master the flow of events or to process the semio-stimulations released into the Infosphere. A schizophrenic mode spreads across the social mind, but this distress is double edged: it is painfully chaotic, but can also be seen as the vibration that precedes the emergence of a new cognitive rhythm.

According to D.E. Cameron, schizophrenia may be defined as an over-inclusive mode of interpretation.¹¹ Schizophrenic thought, in fact, appears to ‘over include’ various irrelevant objects and environmental cues in the interpretation of an enunciation: the schizo seems to be unable to limit attention to task-relevant stimuli because of an excessive broadening of the meaning of signs and of events.

This is why Guattari sees the schizo as the bearer of paradigmatic change (of ‘chaosmosis’, in Guattari’s parlance). The schizo in fact is the person who has lost the ability to perceive the limits of metaphoric enunciation and tends therefore to take the metaphor as a description. The schizo, then, is the agent of a trans-rational experiment which may lead to the surfacing of an entirely new rhythm.

We may call this dimension ‘chaotic’ because it does not correspond to the existing laws of order, nevertheless the possible emerges from this sphere of chaos.

The intuition of an infinity of possibility is the source of contemporary panic, what can be described as a painful spasm. In Guattari, however, the spasm has a chaosmic side: from chaotic hyper-intensity, a new cosmos is poised to emerge.