Читать книгу Futurability - Franco "Bifo" Berardi - Страница 9

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

The Exorcism That Failed

I had trusted Obama. At the end of the summer of 2008, when the order of the world was shaking – the Bush wars were turning to catastrophe, and the big banks were collapsing – I thought that the new American president was heralding the emergence of a new possibility, a new future. I’m not so naïve as to believe in fairy tales, and I knew the cultural background of Barack Obama as that of a reasonable neoliberal who belongs to the privileged elite. But as I compared him with the ignorant, cynical clan of warmongers who had been in power before him, I thought that his ideas and his agenda were poised to open the way for a new age of peace and social justice.

The world had come to be acquainted with the young Obama in 2004, when he dared to say no to the Iraq War. His face, his nonchalant look, his alien beauty, his elegant multiracial lineaments made me think of a post-political leader, of an American intellectual announcing the post-national era, in which ethnic identities melt and give birth to a culturally global humanity.

Yes, a black president was a sign from above for someone who grew up in the ’60s like me. In the past century we, the good communists (yes, there are good communists; I met a lot of them), had tried to emancipate the world from violence, war, exploitation. Certainly, we did not succeed. The bad communists were unmistakably more influential than us.

We had not succeeded, this is true. The socialist way has been trashed by totalitarian Bolsheviks and by subservient social-democrats.

Now was it the turn for someone like Obama? Maybe so, I told myself.

The force of events seemed to be ripe; the first black president was in the right situation to be led to do what people like me have failed to do in the twentieth century.

War has proven to be a horrible thing that generates more horrors, a defeat for everybody. And Obama was fully accredited to say so, after saying no to the invasion of Iraq conceived by the Bush regime, unlike his opponent in the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who did not dare to reject the patriotic call. He seemed, therefore, in the position to prevent future wars.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the crisis of subprime mortgages, in my expectation, set the conditions for changing the regime of financial capitalism.

He came to the fore with the slogan ‘Yes We Can’, and this was not irrelevant. Why should a politician say that, ‘Yes We Can’? Is not America already the most powerful country in the world? Is not the president of the United States already the most powerful man on Earth? Is not politics the dimension in which power is exerted?

So why would he need to remind us that ‘Yes We Can’?

Those three words were not an obvious declaration at all. That was a very strong statement, evidence that the man was smart and had zeroed in on the true problem. Obama knew that Americans wanted to be reassured on this point: we can. We have power therefore we can. Despite everything, we can: we can come out of the spiral of war, we can close Guantanamo, we can cancel the barbaric legacy of the Bush years, we can thwart the invading power of finance, we can end the history of racism and violence of the American police.

Nowadays, as I write these lines, eight years have passed from the pledge that was as much an exorcism as a promise.

The exorcism has failed, the promise has not been kept.

‘By any objective measurement, his presidency has been perhaps the most consequential since Franklin Roosevelt’s time,’ wrote Timothy Egan.¹

‘To be fair’, wrote Paul Krugman,

Some widely predicted consequences of Obama’s re-election didn’t happen. Gasoline prices didn’t soar. Stocks didn’t plunge. The economy didn’t collapse, in fact the US economy has now added more than twice as many private-sector jobs under Obama that it did over the same period of George Bush administration, and the unemployment rate is a full point lower that the rate Mitt Romney promised to achieve by the end of 2016.²

Undeniably Obama has been the most consequential president of the United States for a long time. Nevertheless, war is scaling again, more dangerous and demented than ever. Guantanamo is still there, more shameful than ever. Weapons are still on sale in every American town, despite the rampages at Columbine, Newton, Aurora, and who knows how many more. Rates of polluting emissions are growing while climate change is far from receding and Americans do not seem prone to reduce energy consumption. And the American people are more intolerant than ever, more quick to hate. The American unconscious is raucously reacting to the scandal of a black president, and an obtuse, violent form of racism is spreading, while the number of black people killed by police has clearly shown that black lives do not matter so much. White middle-aged workers are swamped by unemployment and hyper-exploitation, by depression and by loneliness. Heroin is raging in rural areas and overdoses are killing more than ever.

After the rescue of the banking system, notwithstanding the rise in taxes on high incomes and the remarkable results in the creation of jobs, workers are still paid less and less in America, as they are everywhere in the Western world.

Every second day someone speaks of recovery and of job creation. The truth is unemployment is on the rise all over the world except in America, but in America labour is more and more precarious, less and less rewarded.

During the Obama presidency a new social movement emerged in America which peacefully occupied public spaces such as Zuccotti Park, in close proximity to the New York Stock Exchange, where they named themselves Occupy Wall Street. And there was no happy ending. Just one year after the occupation of Zuccotti Park, Hurricane Sandy whipped through Manhattan and devastated its poor residents and those of its neighbouring boroughs. Some Occupy Wall Street activists created Occupy Sandy, an effort to provide organized relief efforts, implying by their action that we have been left only catastrophes to occupy.

Today if you go to Zuccotti Park, beware of police: gatherings of more than three people are forbidden.

Everywhere social life is pillaged by those who hold the financial levers, wherever society is unable to defend itself against those who would pillage.

And identitarian aggression is spreading everywhere. White racism is clearly resurfacing in the US, where KKK-like aggressions against black people have become a daily litany.

I had trusted Obama, but now, as his second term expires, I’m sad to say that his performance has persuaded me that political hope is over. At a certain point, Obama changed his philosophy from the hopeful ‘Yes We Can’ of 2008 to a cynical ‘Don’t Do Anything Stupid’.

Okay, I told myself, ‘Don’t Do Anything Stupid’ is a pragmatic compromise considering the complexity of the contemporary world. Then, I witnessed the final sinking of his presidency when the Supreme Court rejected a plan to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and give them the right to work legally in the United States. And then, his administration’s unconscionable cooperation with the president of Mexico in the act of deporting Central American refugees.

Obama and Peña Nieto have cooperated for two years to intercept desperate Central American refugees in southern Mexico, long before they can reach the U.S. border. These refugees are then typically deported to their home countries – which can be a death sentence.

The American–Mexican collusion began in 2014 after a surge of Central Americans crossed into the U.S., including 50,000 unaccompanied children. Obama spoke with Peña Nieto ‘to develop concrete proposals’ to address the flow. This turned out to be a plan to intercept Central Americans near Mexico’s southern border and send them home. Washington committed $86 million to support the program. Although Obama portrayed his action as an effort to address a humanitarian crisis, he made the crisis worse. The old routes minors took across Mexico were perilous, but the new ones adopted to avoid checkpoints are even more dangerous.

The victims of this policy, deported in some cases to their deaths, are refugees like Carlos, a 13-year-old with a scar on his forehead from the time a gang member threw him to the ground in the course of executing his uncle.

In the last five years, Mexico and the U.S. have deported 800,000 people to Central America, including 40,000 children, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Last year, Mexico deported more than five times as many unaccompanied children as it had five years earlier, and the Obama administration heralds this as a success.³

Is my hero a coward? Is Obama a cynical and cruel careerist who gave away his principles and his moral values in exchange for his position? I don’t think so. Fundamentally, I think humiliation has made him desperate.

Fundamentally, I think that we have to meditate on his experience and acknowledge that democracy is over, that political hope is dead. Forever.

Writing and Surfing

I should not write as if I was surfing the wave of this age: it is too dangerous, and I know it. Nevertheless, I cannot renounce the pleasure (the ambiguous and self-defeating pleasure) of interpreting signs that are not yet detectable, and processes that are still deploying.

So, this book is an attempt to map the currents of tidal change.

We are shifting from the Age of Thatcher to the Age of Trump – this is my general interpretation of the present becoming of the world. An anti-global front of so-called populist regimes is taking shape in the Western world, in the space of the demographical and economic decline of the white race (when I employ this word, I know that it has no scientific foundation but I also know that it can act as a powerful political mythology). The election of Trump to the presidency of the United States is the point of no return in the worldwide conflict between capitalist globalism and reactionary anti-globalism.

After the Treaty of Versailles, German society was suddenly impoverished and subjected to a long-lasting humiliation. In that situation, Hitler found his opportunity and his winning move consisted in urging Germans to identify as a superior race, not a humiliated class of exploited workers. This claim worked then and is working again now on a much larger scale: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Jarosław Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen and Boris Johnson, and many more small politicians of mediocre culture who smell the opportunity to win power by embodying the white race’s will to potency in the wake of its decline.

The racial call is getting stronger, so much so that Boris Johnson calls Obama ‘part-Kenyan’, and racial fear motivates the anti-migrant policy of the European Union. The emergent racism is a legacy of colonialism combined with the social defeat of the working class in the Western world.

Frightening as it may be, the trend that I detect in the present becoming of the world is the unification of a heterogeneous front of anti-global forces, the resurgence of national-socialism and a widespread reaction against the decline of the white race perceived as the effect of globalization. As the social reference of the reactionary fronts that are winning all over the world is the defeated white working class, I would rather speak of national-workerism.

Mario Tronti has labelled industrial workers a ‘rude pagan class’ that fights for material interests and not for rhetorical ideals. It is for the sake of material interests the rude class of industrial workers is now turning nationalist and racist, as it did in 1933. Trump has won because he represents a weapon in the hands of impoverished workers, and because the left has delivered them into the hands of financial capital otherwise weaponless. Unfortunately, this weapon will soon be turned against the workers themselves, and lead them towards racial warfare.

This Euro-American anti-global racist front is certainly the fruit of thirty years of neoliberal governance. But until yesterday, in Europe as in the United States the conservatives were globalist and neoliberal. No more.

The looming war is already being defined as fighting along three different fronts. The first front is the neoliberal power that is tightening its grip on governance, pursuing the agenda of austerity and privatization. The second front is the anti-global Trumpism based on white resentment and working-class despair. The third front, taking place largely backstage, is the growing necro-empire of terrorism, in all its different shapes of religious bigotry, national rage and economic strategy, that I identify as necro-capital.

I think that the War on Terror, whose main target is the global jihad, will sooner or later give way to the war between capitalist globalism and worldwide anti-global national-socialism (that may be named ‘Putin-Trumpism’).

Democracy Will Not Come Back

I do not identify impotence as powerlessness. Often when lacking power, people have been able to act autonomously, to create forms of self-organization and to subvert the established power. In this age of precariousness, powerless people have been unable to create effective forms of social autonomy, unable to implement voluntary change, unable to pursue change in a democratic way, because democracy is over.

One of the final nails in the coffin of democracy came in the summer of 2015, when the democratically elected, anti-austerity government of Greece was obliged to bend to financial blackmail. In the very place where democracy had been invented twenty-five centuries ago, democracy was suspended. Rather, what we in the European Union are facing is not merely provisional suspension of democracy, but the final replacement of politics with a system of techno-financial automatism.

Expecting the revivification of democracy and fighting for such a goal would be futile because the very conditions for the effectiveness of political reason (and particularly of democratic politics) have since dissolved. I’m not talking here of a political or a military defeat, or a battle that was lost. Many times in the course of modern history the good guys have been defeated; they have resisted, have recovered and, in the end, have achieved what they needed by playing and winning the democratic game. But I think that this will not happen again.

The systemic conditions for democracy have been cancelled by prevailing irreversible processes. Irreversible is the enslavement of immaterial labour because the global labour market requires boundless competition among workers and pre-emption of any social solidarity. Irreversible is the moral and psychological misery of a generation of children who have learned more words from an electronic screen than from a human voice. Irreversible is the melting of the Arctic ice, and irreversible is the spiral of economic competition and military aggression.

The conditions for democracy are two (at least): freedom and effectiveness of political volition. Both have been dismantled. Since language has been subjected to the rule of the technic, and techno-linguistic automatism has taken hold of social relations, freedom has become an empty word, and political action has grown ineffective and inconsequential. Hoping for the revivification of the values, principles and expectations of democracy is therefore a self-deception, because true decision has been absorbed by the connective machine, and popular rage has been organized instead by nationalist and racist parties.

The psycho-cognitive constitution of the neo-humans (their cognitive hardware, I mean) cannot support the software of the past humanist culture, so words like ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘fraternity’ have lost their situational meaning.

Can the beginning of this mutation be precisely dated? Obviously not. However, I will arbitrarily assign to it the year 1977.

That same year many interesting things happened. In Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created the Apple trademark. In London, Sid Vicious cried ‘No Future’. In Italian cities, the last proletarian rebellion of the last century and the first precarious rebellion of the new century went on stage.

Since then we have witnessed something deeper than a change, a transformation or a revolution: we have witnessed a mutation of the molecular composition of the human and of the social organism. Technology has altered the composition of the chemical matter composing the atmosphere, of the semiotic substances composing the Infosphere, and finally of the psycho-cognitive modes of elaboration. This is why political reversibility is impossible, why voluntary action has turned impotent: volition has no bearing when facing irreversible processes.

Conscious volition cannot dismantle the heavy machines that have provoked these irreversible changes: mutation has perfused and rearranged the human mind, and has consequently disempowered consciousness, volition and action.

A sort of palsy has in this way taken possession of the conscious organism. Cognitive and emotional dissonance results from the inability of conscious behaviour to oppose evil. So, we sense our own impotence and are led to think that our suffering cannot be relieved by political projects, but only by psychopharmacology.

Imagination

What about our imagination of the future in this age of impotence?

Let us go to the movies. Dystopia has taken centre stage in show business: Hollywood blockbusters bring us a perception of the future which is simultaneously violent and depressing.

The Hunger Games series is one of the most impressive financial successes ever in cinema history. Young people are the bulk of the audience for the series, as they were for the books on which they are based. The future world they depict is ethically repugnant and intolerable for the human consciousness, so much so that a naïve viewer might interpret the film as a sort of radical political denunciation of social precariousness and of the violence provoked by the militarization of economic power. Nothing, however, is more removed from the intentions of its creators, and, more importantly, from the way the young moviegoers receive and decode its message. The teenager who goes to see the Hunger Games, precarious, unemployed, impoverished by the crisis as she may be, does not draw from the movie the conclusion that we should rebel and stop the barbaric transformation it imagines. In the film, there is, finally, a rebellion that occurs, but it is something sad and hopeless, whose outcome contradicts any idea of possible solidarity among the oppressed.

The young viewer does not draw the lesson that he should rebel against the current state of affairs, but rather is persuaded that the Hunger Games describes the world he will inhabit, in which everybody will be obliged to live in the near future. In this new world, only the winner can survive, and if one wants to win she must eliminate all the others, friends and foes.

Acts of solidarity may occur in the Hunger Games. For instance, the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, enters the violent contest in order to save her sister from a near-certain death. But this is the solidarity of despair, the solidarity of people who cannot even imagine a life of peace, let alone one of happiness.

The majority of video games teach the same lesson. Beyond their narrative content, sensorial stimulation is training young people to compete, to fight, to win or to disappear. The morals on which these video game are based is the idea that the machine is always winning, and only those who interrupt its rhythm can defeat competitors.

In real life, everybody is a competitor, and the lover on Sunday night may be a competitor on Monday morning.

The Hunger Games, not dissimilarly, mobilizes the ludic attention of the connective generation, but not for a persuasive or ideological function. Rather, they have a function of psycho-cognitive moulding: a plastic effect, not through moral content, but through nervous stimulation.

The psychology and the cognitive reactivity of the precarious generation is led to internalize the perception of social life as a field of war, a place where everybody is a winner or a loser, is eliminator or is eliminated, a space where solidarity and empathy are only dangerous distractions weakening the warrior that you are obliged to be.

Thought is a self-defeating act because thinking slows one’s reactions, and slowness makes you prey in the game in which every other player is also trying to eliminate you.

A Tragedy for the Human Civilization

According to Mario Tronti, one of the most important thinkers of Italian operaismo, ‘the workers’ defeat has been a tragedy for the human civilization.’⁴

In the short term, the fall of the communist project has provoked a global collapse of late modern welfare, but from the point of view of long-term evolution, it has opened the door to a wave of barbarianism that endangers modern humanism itself.

The short-term consequences are easy to identify: the working class has not disappeared after the defeat; far from it, the industrial army has expanded worldwide, as huge concentrations of industrial production have emerged in newly industrialized countries. But the working class has been dispossessed of any political force, and stripped of any tools for self-defence as it is now composed of temporary aggregations of precarious labourers who are not allowed to create a community of solidarity within a process of continuous deterritorialization.

In a very short space of time, industrial concentration can be displaced from one region of the world to another, and no union or political organization can effectively oppose this act of aggressive delocalization. Long-existing structures of solidarity can be dismantled overnight because of the deregulation that has dismantled any legal protection of the community, of the territory and of the workers.

Wage conditions are now unilaterally determined by capitalists: as a consequence, salaries have been halved in the last decades and the industrial system is regressing to proto-industrial conditions. More generally, the living conditions of society are rapidly deteriorating. Access to education, health care and leisure time were social rights won by unionized struggles: as a consequence of their political defeat, society is going back to a condition of misery and dependency, while mass ignorance is resurfacing.

It’s difficult to ignore this regression, but neoliberal applauders have an easy reply for those who, like me, lament the Western depression: they say that Chinese, Indonesian, and African workers now have the possibility of buying a car or a cell-phone. This is true.

They use their car to go to the factory; they use their cellphone to call their families when they are forced to migrate in search of a job. Those who get the opportunity to be exploited in an industrial factory have access to the sphere of consumption. However, if we look closer at the social evolution of the new proletarians, it’s easy to understand that when they were poor they were not so poor as they are now: deprived of their communities, divested of solidarity, stripped of leisure time and obliged to sustain fatigue, stress and competition.

On a global scale, the social condition has worsened enormously since the disappearnace of socialist hope, but the rise in exploitation and existential misery is not the only consequence of the defeat of the workers’ movement. The other consequence is war. War is expanding its hold on the lives of people: they are more and more wars of the poor against the poor, religious and ethnic wars fuelled by despair. The plague of nationalism is back, more and more dominating the life of populations, as an effect of the workers’ defeat and of the extinction of internationalism.

In the first years of the new century, a movement for peace spread worldwide: on 15 February 2003, millions of people marched against American aggression in Iraq. The day after this demonstration, the largest of all time, President Bush sarcastically announced, ‘I’m not going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon, in this case, the security of the people.’

We know what happened next. Bush had his war, he declared that it was an endless war, and now, more than ten years later, there is still no end in sight. That day exposed the fundamental weakness of the peace movement.

I marched with the peace movement on 15 February 2003, and I’ll march with pacifists any time they call. But I also know marching is useless: pacifism is the symptom and the measure of our impotence. In fact, only internationalism is the condition by which we can effectively pursue peace. Internationalism is not a disposition of the mind, not a will for peace or a refusal of war. It is something much deeper and much more concrete. It’s the consciousness that people worldwide have the same interests and the same motivation. Internationalism (as rhetorical as this may seem) is the solidarity of workers regardless of their nation, race or religion.

But the moment of internationalist consciousness is over. German workers are pitted against Greek workers, Turkish workers against Kurdish workers, and Sunni workers against Shiite workers. They have been obliged to forget about their shared reality as workers.

The workers’ defeat is a huge, historic tragedy, Tronti writes. According to him they ‘have lost because they have been unable to become the State.’

I think the contrary is true.

Communism turned into a totalitarian nightmare because Leninism pushed workers to take hold of the state, to identify with the socialist state, so the statalization of the working class has paralysed the social dynamics and has forced the autonomous process of social emancipation into a fixed political structure.

In the Soviet empire, the result has been a miserable society and an authoritarian state: real communism has cancelled the possible communism that was inscribed in the social composition of work, and in the autonomy of the general intellect.

The Frigid Game

As connective engines are embedded in the general intellect, the social body is separated from its brain.

Subjected to the rules of work – precarious and fractured – cognitive activity becomes part of a process of cooperation that is disembodied and deterritorialized.

This is why the social body has lost contact with its brain: the production of knowledge and technology is deployed in a privatized corporate space which is disconnected from the needs of society, and responds only to economic requirements of profit maximization.

Disconnected from the body, the social brain becomes incapable of autonomy.

Disconnected from the brain, the social body becomes incapable of strategy or empathy.

Within the new dimension of networked production, the individual body is simultaneously exposed to constant intensification of neural stimulation, and insulated from the physical presence of others: everyone lives in the same condition of nervous electrostimulation. The hyper-stimulated body is simultaneously alone and hyper-connected: the more it is connected, the more it is alone.

The social corporeality, however, cannot be dissolved, so it resurfaces, de-cerebrated and disconnected from intellectual cooperation, unable to pursue a common strategy.

The technical subsumption of cognitive activity is based on the ability to capture attention.

At the end of the ’70s the first video games appeared on the market.

In the bars of Italian cities, electronic video games replaced the old mechanical pinball machines. Video games came in large metal boxes, with coloured screens where small green aliens invaded Earth and warriors in black responded with weapons flashing. Sooner or later the game ended and two fatal words appeared on the screen: game over.

In that kind of primordial video game, the machine always eventually won, regardless of the ability or speed of the player.

Machines playing against their human creators, and winning, as their human creator had built the game in such a way that the machine could not be defeated. Now we live in the world of embedded game over: the automaton is winning by design.

But who is the designer?

The designer is the recombinant force of millions of cognitarians who cooperate within the game, but remain alone outside the game.

They are cooperatively running the process of innovation, invention and implementation of knowledge, but they do not know each other. The cooperating brains have no collective body and the private bodies have no collective brain.

I remember those days when, in a bar in Naples, I played Last Safety for Alpha: the announcement of the future carried by the first generation of video games was fascinating and frightening as well.

Then came the time of impotence. The overall rhythm of information has accelerated. Those flows are perceived as neural stimuli by the conscious organism, while the sensory organism lives in a permanent state of nervous electrostimulation and bodily contraction.

As consciousness and emotion need time for personal elaboration, and as time is short, attention becomes disconnected from consciousness and from emotion. Herein originates the contemporary emotional distress.

Dyschronia: a malady of duration, a pathology of ‘lived time’.⁵

The epidemic of attention deficit disorder is a symptom of this dyschronia: children who grow up in the info-saturated space show signs of nervous hyper-motility. Only for instants can they focus on an object of attention. Their focus tends to shift too fast for learning, for expression, or for affection.

In a condition of hyper-stimulation, the cognitive organism cannot process the emotional content of the stimuli.

Sexual impotence has a similar aetiology.

Stimulation frequency and diffusion, the speed of exposure of the self to the erotic stimulus have accelerated to a point that it is more and more difficult to decode consciously emotional messages or to process them with the needed tenderness. Our time has grown short, narrow, contracted, so the stimulus hardly translates into desire, and desire hardly translates into conscious contact, and contact hardly translates into pleasure.

The sex-appeal of inorganic matter that electronics has inserted between bodies has resulted in a sort of widespread sexualization of the environment and in the physical isolation of the bodies.

The insertion of the inorganic (electronic) in communication among bodies acts as a disturbance. This is why pleasure seems to be replaced by adrenal discharge. The massive consumption of pharmacological products that prolong the male erection in absence of desire does not only happen among the elderly. There are reasons to think that, more than merely a physical problem, people who take erectile dysfunction pills do so for the psychological problem of time scarcity and emotional distress.

Sexual inattention is a side effect of the wide process of the technical subjection of our attention span. The porno explosion, the massive consumption of pornographic images, is part of this cycle. We are exposed to a flow of erotic images, mixed in and among a flow of advertising, entertainment and so on. These flows are ceaselessly mobilizing our emotional and erotic reactivity. Our attention is under permanent demand, but is unable to focus on a particular object.

A sort of frigidity is simultaneously induced in the sensuous sphere by the permanent electrostimulation of the organism, by the insertion of electronic devices in the continuum of the bodily sphere. By frigid, I do not refer to anorgasmic behaviour or similar dysfunction of sexual pleasure: I refer to a widespread condition of anaesthesia following continuous tension, and a leaning towards depression.

In the book Impuissances, Yves Citton takes into account a wide range of French literary works that deal with sexual impotence. In the chapter ‘Le Fiasco’, Citton identifies the ‘cause’ of the défaillance (incapacity) as the excess of stimulation that the male subject is unable to master. ‘It is not a lack of attraction, but rather the excess of beauty by which the woman is perceived as untouchable.’⁶

Rhythm acceleration, stimulus intensification, hyperstimulation of the nervous system: this is a likely pathway to sexual failure. And in the context of patriarchal culture, which is the deep background of Western civilization – sex and social power are narrowly intertwined.

Grounding his identity on the arousing as a proof of existence, the male is condemned to reduce his self-assurance on something quite episodic … The self-reputation of the person who grounds identity on virility is obliged to assume a posture of Omnipotence.⁷

In many regards, impotence may be viewed as a problem of rhythm: the relation between embodied time and automated time intensifies. Because of hyper-stimulation, the investment in desire is increased, up to the point of exhaustion. Then the sensuous organism withdraws the investment in desire, and surfs the icy waves of the lake of frigidity.

The aestheticization of contemporary culture may be read as a symptom and a metaphor of frigidity: endless flight from one object of desire to another, overload of aesthetic stimulation, invasion of the public space by aesthetically arousing advertising.

In Carnage, the claustrophobic Roman Polanski movie, Kate Winslet’s character, Nancy Cowan, explains that her husband, a lawyer continuously answering calls on his smart phone, thinks every stimulation coming from a distant agent is more exciting and important than any stimulation coming from the living beings who dwell in his vicinity.

The present shifts away, impossible to touch or to savour, as the flows of neuro-stimulation push forward, towards a never-coming future. The emotion that comes from the near body is blurred by frantic impulses coming from afar, continuously reclaiming our attention.

Anaesthesia is the effect of sensory saturation and the path to an-empathy: the ethical catastrophe of our time is based on the inability to perceive the other as a sensible extension of one’s own sensibility.

The cognitive competence that we call sensibility has developed as the ability to decipher signs that do not belong to the verbal sphere. This competence is under threat as cognitive automatisms inscribed in the digital exchange (and reinforced by the economic code) tend to reduce the conscious elaboration to a succession of binary choices.

In psychopathological parlance, autistic persons do not have a ‘theory of the other’s mind’.⁸ When acting inside a network of automatic exchanges, it is not necessary to assume the existence of the other’s mind or to interpret signs as if they were from another conscious and sensitive organism. Within this context, signs need only be interpreted according to a finite computation of a discrete set of information. The other is only a simulated construction of the interaction between our mind and the machine. Compatibility replaces sensibility.

The connective biosphere is the smooth space where information, the now-universal substance of valorization, can easily flow. But in order to flow without obstruction, it is necessary to remove any impurity that may slow its path: namely, sensibility.

The connective paradigm (and the connective mode) infiltrates the deep fabric of the human biosphere, permeates the organism’s barriers, and something happens at the level of the process of individuation. The mutation invades the individual’s self-perception, and integrates it in the connective framework of the socio-technical continuum of the net.

The individual organism is cleared of any mark of singularity and transformed into a smooth surface, free of roughness, of irregularity, and therefore compliant with the linguistic machine, with the hub of techno-linguistic automatisms.

Connective individuation fractures cells of a process of modular recombination. The bio-informatic superorganism reads the event of language as a disturbance, and discards it as noise.