After the Future. Franco Bifo Berardi

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СКАЧАТЬ opens an issue of great importance today, in the age of intercultural planetary communication. Poetical and magical symbolism are both involved in the process of evocation that the word and the sign can produce. But we must reconsider the problem starting from a new datum, coming from electronic technology: the virtual reality machine, which involves the same problem posed by poetical and magical symbolism, that is, the problem of telepathic communication.

      Linguistic communication is made possible by signs conventionally and arbitrarily connected with meanings; here we speak of communication stimulating mental states corresponding to the image, to the emotion, to the concept that the sender wants to transmit. The production of technical tools for simulation, and especially of machines for virtual reality, puts the problem in a new light. We may label virtual reality any technology capable of directly transmitting impulses from one brain to another, in order to stimulate in the receiver brain a synaptic connection corresponding to a certain representation, to a certain configuration, image, concept, emotion. In a purely abstract way, we may say that virtual reality is the stimulation of a neuronic wave, structured following models that are intentional and isomorphic to the mental states corresponding to a certain experience. We can say that this technology is the most apt for a telepathic sort of communication. Jaron Lanier, who in the 1980s was the first creator of virtual reality machines, spoke in those years of postsymbolic communication. If you can provide a reality with virtual reality tools, and if you can share this reality with other persons, you no longer need to describe the world, because you can simply create this contingence, this coincidence; you don’t need to describe an action, you can create it.

      Starting from this premise, we can go back to the problem posed by Leibniz, the problem of characteristica universalis, i.e., in contemporary terms, the problem of a planetary language, of a language that should be able to connect people belonging to different cultural and linguistic traditions. Pierre Lévy (1991) has proposed in L’idéographie dynamique the idea of a communication technology he calls “dynamic ideography.” What does it mean, synthetically? Dynamic ideography is a communication technology that enables people to transmit mental states, images, emotions, concepts, sense configurations, without any conventional means. The transmission is made possible by a direct stimulation of the neurophysical connections corresponding to sense configurations. Dynamic ideography is a communication technology that can transfer, from one communicating person to another, the mental models involved in seeing a certain image, in experiencing a certain situation, in thinking a certain concept. It’s easy to see the relationship between virtual reality and dynamic ideography. Dynamic ideography is a technique that activates a sequence of virtual realities, corresponding to the contents that I want to send and communicate, an analogical tool of a global and synesthetic kind, directly acting on imagination.

      Imagination is an infinite variety of analogical combinatory items, an infinite variety of possibilities that the mind processes, starting from disposable engrams. Memory storage is limited, but the possibilities of rearranging the items stored in memory are not. The process of combining these analogical plastic items is called imagination. The theoretical and practical study of the Becoming of Imagination can be called psychedelics.

      “Psychedelics” is the possibility of manipulating and transforming mental activity through chemical, electrical, or other stimulation. Starting from the possibility of transmitting mental models, to stimulate synaptic waves corresponding to the mental states that we want to communicate, it is possible to share imaginary words, in mental co-evolution. On this basis, we can say that language itself is the transmission of signs intended to trigger in the mind of the receiver the building of mental models that correspond to the intentions of the sender.

      In the pages of Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984, 81) sees the world as “cyberspace”: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.”

      Cyberspace is a hypothesis of the world: Ontology and Gnoseology are on the same level of consistency, since Being is essentially a projection. “We are in a sort of cave, like Plato said, and they’re showing us endless funky films,” says Philip K. Dick (in Williams 1986, 72). We can think that reality is the infinite projection of endless movies on the screen of our brain. But, if we want to move from the hallucinatory to the real-world dimension, we simply must introduce the notion of communication, i.e. sharing the hallucination. Dick continues:

      If two people dream the same dream it ceases to be an illusion; the basic test that distinguishes reality from hallucination is the consensus gentium, that one other or several others see it too. This is idios kosmos, the private dream, opposed to the shared dream of us all, the koinos kosmos. What is new in our time is that we are beginning to see the plastic, trembling quality of the koinos kosmos—which scares us, its insubstantiality—and the more-than-mere-vapor quality of the hallucination. Like SF, a third reality is formed halfway between. (in Williams 1986, 170)

      The Hindus call it “Maya.” But the concept isn’t easy to understand in its deepest meaning. Maya is illusion because it has been torn from its living connections and is limited in time and space. The individuality and corporality of the unenlightened human being, trying to maintain and preserve its illusory selfhood, is Maya in this negative sense.

      The body of the Enlightened One is also Maya, but not in the negative sense, because it is the conscious creation of a mind that is free from illusion. Maya does not mean illusion, but something more: I would say that it means the projection of the world. The projection of the world can be frozen and become mere illusion, self-deception, if we think that the imagined world is independent from imagination, and if we think that the imaging self is independent from communication and from the becoming of the world. But Maya in itself means projecting action, the creation of the world. Thus Maya becomes the cause of illusion, but it is not illusion itself.

      We are witnessing a proliferation of technological tools for simulation. The social technology of communication is aimed at connecting the imaginations and projections of individuals and groups. This projection-web could be called Technomaya, neurotelematic network endlessly projecting a movie shared by all the conscious organisms who are connected. This techno-imagination, this mutual implication in the koinos kosmos, is socialization itself. Through the proliferation of machines for electronic, holographic, and programmed neurostimulation, we can enter the domain of Technomaya, because we can produce worlds of meaning, and we can transmit these worlds, triggering the imaginations of other people.

ACTIVISM

      Futurism and the avant-garde set themselves the task of violating rules. Deregulation was the legacy left by Rimbaud to the experimentation of the 1900s. Deregulation was also the rallying cry of the hypercapitalism of late modernity, paving the way for the development of semiocapital. In the totalitarian period of the external machine and mechanical speed, having previously used the state form to impose its rule on society, capitalism decided to do without state mediation as the techniques of recombination and the absolute speed of electronics made it possible for control to be interiorized. In the classical form of manufacturing capitalism, price, wages, and profit fluctuations were based on the relationship between necessary labor time and the determination of value. Following the introduction of microelectronic technologies and the resulting intellectualization of productive labor, the relationship between different magnitudes of value and different productive forces entered a period of indeterminacy. Deregulation, as launched by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, marked the end of the law of value and turned its demise into a political economy. In his major work, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard (1993a: 2) intuitively infers the overall direction of the development of the end of the millennium: “The reality principle corresponded to a certain stage of the law of value. Today, the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is СКАЧАТЬ