FRANCO BERARDI AND. PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE END. AND PHENOMENOLOGY [W]hat a vapidOF idea, the bookTHE as the image of ENDthe world. In truth, it is not enough to say, “Long live the multiple,” difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available – always n-1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n-1. – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari FRANCO BERARDI 3 And. Phenomenology of the end. Cognition and sensibility in the transition from conjunctive to connective mode of social communication Aalto University publication series DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS 139/2014 School of Arts, Design and Architecture Aalto ARTS Books Helsinki books.aalto.fi © Franco Berardi Graphic design: Érico Peretta Editorial Assistant: Isabela Sanches ISBN 978-952-60-5858-0 ISBN 978-952-60-5859-7 (pdf) ISSN-L 1799-4934 ISSN 1799-4934 ISSN 1799-4942 (pdf) Printed in Unigrafia, Finland 2014 6 AND. PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE END. INTRODUCTION 9 Concatenation conjunction connection PART I SENSIBILITY 29 Sensitive Info-sphere 49 Global skin: a trans–identitarian patchwork 91 Aesthetic genealogy of globalization PART II THE BODY OF THE GENERAL INTELLECT 117 Money, language and poetry 139 Avatars of the general intellect 165 The Swarm effect PART III SUBJECTIVATION 187 Social morphogenesis and neuro-plasticity 215 Transhuman 235 In the horizon of the mutation 259 BIBLIOGRAPHY 7 INTRODUCTION AND. PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE END. CONCATENATION CONJUNCTION CONNECTION A rhizome has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu), between things, inter-being, intermezzo. The tree is fil- iation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be”, but the fabric of the rhizome is the con- junction, “and… and… and…” This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be” […] to establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nul- lify endings and beginnings. —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari The metaphor rhizome In a rhizome there is no beginning and no end, according to Deleuze and Guattari, who propose to view reality as an infinite rhizome, an open concat- enation of and and and. This is why I’m writing this phenomenology of the end. There is no end. One may take this assertion as a source of endless despair, one may take this assertion as a source of endless hope. Both would be on a wrong path. Do not get me wrong, I don’t pretend to know what is good and what is bad. I am not hopeful. I’m not hopeless because phenomenology is an infinite task, so the phenomenology of the end is an interminable task. I decide to stop here because my life is not endless, and I’m approaching the end, but I know that I’m not stopping concatenating: and and and. Deleuze and Guattari wrote Rhizome, a short text later published as Introduction to Thousand Plateaux in 1977, the year of the premonition. In the year 1977 social movements, punk culture and the dystopian imag- ination of art and literature did foreshadow in many ways the mutation that we are now witnessing and living: a mutation that is investing the technolog- ical environment, social relations and culture. CONCATENATION CONJUNCTION CONNECTION 9 Rhizome is simultaneously the announcement of a transformation of reality and the premise to a new methodology of thought. A description of the chaotic deterritorialization following Modern Rationalism, and a meth- odology for the critique of deterritorialized capitalism. Actually the small text about rhizome foretold the dissolution of the political order inherited from Modernity, and the vanishing of the rational foundations of Western philosophy. At the same time, however, this text opened the way to a new methodology adopting concatenation rather than dialectical opposition as a model for the conceptualization of the cultural process and social becoming. Some decades after the publishing of Rhizome we understand now that the rhizomatic metaphor can be seen as a way of mapping the Neoliberal process of globalization, and the implied precarization of labor. Furthermore, the rhizomatic metaphore refers to the interminability of the philosophical task. Does the philosopher have a task? And what, in that case, is the phi- losopher’s task? Mapping the territory of the mutation, forging conceptual tools for orientation in the everchanging deterritorialising territory of the ongoing mutation, these are tasks for the philosopher in our times. Diacronic and Synchronic Phenomenology The rhizomatic methodology is shaping my approach to the subject of this research: the phenomenology of sensibility in the present age of cultural mutation and technological transformation. The transition from the alphabetical to the digital environment of the Infosphere marks a shift from the cognitive model of conjunctive concatena- tion to the model of connective concatenation. The text that I am here introducing is dedicated to the effects of this shift in the field of aesthetic sensibility and in the field of emotional sensitivity. This shift is diachronic as it happens as a transition and extends over the span of various human generations, transforming throughout time cognitive patterns, social behavior and psychological expectations. But I want to investi- gate as well the synchronic frame in which the shift happens: I want to describe composition, conflict and coevolution of different psycho-cultural regimes that simultaneously approach, collide, interweave in the process of globalization. 10 AND. PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE END. The first axis (diacronic, temporal) of the Phenomenology of Sensibility that I’m introducing here is the transition from the mechanic to the digital order, and the effects of this transition in the psychosphere. The second axis (synchronic, spatial) of this Phenomenology of Sensibility is the coevolution of different cultural regimes of subjectivation in the con- temporary sphere of globalization. During the last thirty years the shift from the mechanical to the digital technosphere has provoked a mutation in the texture of human experience, and in the fabric of the world itself. The conjunctive mode of social interaction, which was prevailing from the Neolithic Revolution, has been swiftly replaced by the connective mode that starts to prevail when the automating interfaces of the information machine pervade and innervate the linguistic sphere. I’ll try to describe the transition from the age of Industrial capitalism to the age of Semiocapitalism from the point of view of a shift from conjunction to connection as the dominant mode of social interaction. Sensibility and sensitivity are affected by the shift from the conjunctive mode to the connective mode, but the mutation takes different forms and intensities in the different geo-cultural areas of the world. So we have to retrace the general lines of an aesthetic genealogy of the present mutation. Sensibility will be the main field of my research: I’ll try to draw a phe- nomenological map of the global mutation investigating the aesthetic and the emotional side of sensibility. For this purpose I’ll try to retrace the effects that the shift from conjunc- tive to connective mode has produced in different geo-cultures.1 Finally I want to disclose that my research has no pretention of exhaustiv- ity, as we know that “phenomenology is an infinite task.” (Edmund Husserl) Sensibility and creation Emotion is concatenation of unconnected things, events, and perceptions. How does a concatenation become possible between things that have no con- nection? Are there filters and grids that make the human organism sensitive to the colour of autumn leaves, the tenderness of a gesture, the sound of a 1 The word geo-culture has been proposed by Irit Rogoff in an article titled Geo-cultures, circuits of art and globalization. In Open 2009, The Art Biennial as a Global Phenomenon. CONCATENATION CONJUNCTION CONNECTION 11 song? Are the parts that enter into a concatenation fragments of a mosaic whose unity has been lost? Should we perhaps reconstruct the design to which the fragments once belonged? Or should we rather avoid presuppos- ing a pre-existing design wherein segments are integrated and meaningful? When I speak of conjunctive concatenation I mean that no original design is to be restored: conjunction is a creative act because the conjoining act is able to create an infinite number of constellations without following the lines of a pre-conceived pattern, or an embedded program. At the beginning of the act of conjunction there is no design to fulfill, there is not a model at the origin of the process of emergence of the form, and beauty does not correspond to any hidden harmony embedded in the universal spirit or in the mind of god. Nor is there any code to comply with. Conjunctive concatenation is source of singularity: it is event, not struc- ture, and it is unrepeatable because it happens in a unique point in the net of space and time. “The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elabora- tion of the absolutely new.” (Bergson 1911, 7) According to Bergson “we perceive duration as a stream against which we cannot go”, a stream that we cannot go back up, and in this stream, in every instant new configurations of being come out of nothing. Sensibility is the faculty which makes possible to find the path which does not exist, the link between things that have no intrinsic or logical implica- tion.