Franco Berardi (Bifo)
Fragile Psychosphere
Elephant
1977 was the year of juvenile suicide in Japan: the official figure was 784. However, the most dramatic aspect was that at the end of the summer holidays that year, between September and October, there was a whole series of child suicides in rapid succession – to be exact, thirteen, all primary school children. What caused the greatest disconcertment was not the gratuitousness, the incomprehensibility of the gesture, but rather the fact that in all cases, there was a lack of motive or reason for the act. There was a striking emptiness, incapacity on the part of the adults that lived with the child to foresee, understand or provide an explanation for what had happened.
Like in the manga comics, a mass phenomenon that made its first appearance in the second half of the seventies and that has been the main reading material of several generations of Japanese, the enemy is not evil, but dirt. Regarding the heroes of Japanese comics, Alessandro Gomarasca wrote the following, “cleaning, ridding the world of the waste of what is undefined, confusing, hairy and dusty, prepares the way for the digital and polishes surfaces smooth”. Erotic seduction gradually becomes detached from sexual contact until it becomes sheer aesthetic stimulation.
In 1983 a group of secondary school Japanese students murdered a group of elderly homeless in a park in Yokohama. When questioned, the teenagers did not give any explanation other than that the destitute that they had killed were obutsu, dirty and impure things”.
In Japan, as in Europe and in the U.S., 1977 is the year of passage beyond the sphere of modernity. The continuation and radicalisation of 68. But also the disenchantment and abandonment of the dialectic illusion contained in 68. In Europe, this passage is signalled on the sphere of philosophical thought by authors like Lyotard, Baudrillard, Virilio, Guattari, Deleuze, and on the sphere of political conscience by mass movements like the Italian creative autonomia or the London punk movement. In the United States, it takes the form of a movement of urban and musical transformation, manifested in the musical and artistic no wave. In Japan, the passage already appears without mediation, as an inexplicable monstrosity that quickly becomes everyday normality, the prevailing form of collective existence.
From 1977 onwards, the demise of the Western mind took a sneaking, subterranean, episodic course, but at the threshold of the millennium, it has taken on the rhythm of a precipice, a catastrophe that can no longer be contained. What the conscience of 77 had perceived as a danger and a possibility implicit in the acceleration of existential and productive rhythms, becomes daily news. Certain events have signalled this passage, becoming viruses, the carriers of information that reproduces, proliferates and infects the whole social organism. The exceptional occurrence of the Twin Towers collapsing amid a cloud of dust, following the deadly suicide of a group of nineteen young Muslims, is undoubtedly the most impressive, the image-event that spectacularly inaugurated the new times. But the Columbine killings, which took place a few years previously, reveal a message that is perhaps more alarming, because it speaks of everyday life, of the normality of America, of the normality of a humanity that has lost all touch with what used to be human and is fumbling around in the dark in search of some impossible reassurance, something to replace the emotions which it no longer knows.
Michael Moore dedicated to this fact a fascinating documentary of social analysis (Bowling for Columbine), describing what is immediately apparent, the sale of arms and the aggressiveness that feeds on fear. However, in his film Elephant, Gus Van Sant analyses this same episode from a deeper, more impalpable and hence more disturbing point of view. What has happened and what is happening in the minds of a generation coming of age at the turn of the millennium? What is the meaning of their psychic fragility and where can it lead to, when conjugated with a tremendous technical and destructive potential? The destructive technological hyper power and psychic fragility are the mix that defines the first video-electronic generation, particularly in its American variant.
In the first scene of the film, the drunken father takes his son to school in a car that he drives in fits and starts. The son treats him like a disabled person, a wretch, a failure that he has to look after to make sure he doesn't get into trouble. The actor in the father’s role is Timothy Bottoms, famous for having represented George W. Bush, with whom he shares a striking similarity, with the same tearful gaze of the incorrigible alcoholic. Does Van Sant mean to imply that the U.S. has got into a car whose driver is drunk? And what does Elephant mean? A gigantic Rorschach inkblot?
From the scientific perspective, the effects of the psycho-cognitive change to be faced by the first video electronic generation have been underestimated. Politics, in turn, ignores then or completely eliminates them, but if we are to understand something of what is going on in the society of the new millennium, we need to move our point of observation in this direction, towards the psychosphere. It is in the psychosphere that the effects of twenty years of “infovasion”, nervous overload, mass psychopharmacology, sedatives, stimulants and euphoriants, of the “fractalisation” of working and existential time, of the social insecurity that translates as fear, loneliness and terror, manifest themselves. Psycho time bombs have been exploding in the interrelated global Mind. Their effects are predictable.
In recent decades, the organism has been exposed to a growing number of neuro-mobilising stimuli. The acceleration and intensification of the nervous stimuli on the conscious organism seems to have thinned the cognitive film of what one might call sensitivity. The conscious organism has had to accelerate its cognitive, gestural, kinetic reactivity. The time available for responding to nervous stimuli has been drastically reduced. Perhaps this is why it seems that our empathic skills have been reduced. Symbolic exchange between human beings is processed without empathy, because it is no longer possible to perceive the other’s body. In order to be able to perceive the other as a sensorial body, time is required, time to caress and smell the other body. And there is no longer any time for empathy, because the infostimulation has become too intense.
How could this have happened? What is the cause of these empathy disorders, whose signals are so evident in everyday life and in the events that are amplified by the media? Could we suppose that there might be a direct relationship between the expansion of the Infosphere, the acceleration of the stimuli, of the nervous stimulations and the cognitive response times, and the crumbling of the sensory film that allows human beings to understand what may not be verbalised or reduced to codified signs?
Reducers of complexity, such as money, information, stereotypes, or digital network interfaces, have simplified the relationship with the other, but when the other appears in flesh and blood, we can no longer tolerate its presence, because it irritates our (in)sensitivity.
The video-electronic generation cannot bear underarm or pubic hair. In order that the corporeal surfaces may interconnect, they must be perfectly compatible. No superfluous hair. Smooth generation. Conjunction finds its channels through hairs and the imperfections of exchange. It is capable of analogical reading, and foreign bodies can understand each other even if they do not have an interfacing language.
The destruction of the interhuman sensory film has something to do with the techno-informational universe, but also with the capitalistic disciplining of corporeality. In the final phase of capitalist modernisation, the emancipation of women and their inclusion in production has caused an effect of rarefaction in the bodily and intellectual contact with the child. In the sphere of experience of the first video electronic generation, the mother has disappeared, or her presence has been reduced. The combined effect of the so-called emancipation of women (which in reality has been the subjection of women to the circuit of salaried production) and the dissemination of the television socialiser has something to do with the contemporary psycho-political catastrophe.
Another upheaval is in store for the next generation. In most of the world, there is a process underway which may have significant consequences for the future history of the world. Millions of women in poor countries are forced to leave their children to go to the West and look after the children of other mothers who are unable to look after their children because they are too busy working. What phantoms of frustration and violence will grow in the minds of the abandoned children? And what phantoms of fragile omnipotence in the minds of the Western children?
A people of hyper-armed children has invaded the world stage. They are destined to hurt each other a lot, as already happened in Vietnam, and perhaps even worse than that. Unfortunately, they also hurt us a lot too. We have seen this in the photographs that were taken at Abu Ghraib and the other infamous U.S. prisons.
It is with glacial tenderness that Gus Van Sant describes the neurotic mumbling, the anorexic hysterics and the relational incompetence of the adolescents in the Columbine generation (I am thinking about the splendidly bestial dialogue of the three girls in the dining-room, when they decide to go shopping after a hair-raising discussion on friendship and its duties and on the percentage of time to be set aside for their closest friends, minutely quantifying the percentages of affection). He tells us of and shows us shining waiting places, luminous corridors crossed by psychos. Bodies that having lost contact with their own soul, no longer know anything certain about their own corporeality.
Then it all happens, while the sky moves very fast, as always in Gus Van Sant's films. In the suspended light of an ordinary sunny day, the death-bringing suicides come. It all happens in a few dilated minutes recorded by the school’s closed circuit cameras, which can be watched again: adolescents hiding under the tables, crawling along the floor trying to avoid the bullets.
There is no tragedy, no outcry, the ambulances have not yet arrived. The immense sky changes colour. Dry, sparse shots.
Nothing like the terrified crowds we saw on Wall Street as the towers collapsed, but a quiet, peripheral, reproducible, replicable and contagious massacre.
Connective mutation
Elephant talks of a generation that is emotionally disturbed and incapable of connecting thought and action. It speaks of a cognitive mutation that is unfolding in the context of a transition in communication technology: the transition from conjunction to connection. The forms of conjunction are infinite and connection is one of these.
However, within the concept of “connecting”, there is an implicit specification: connexio implies the functionality of the materials being connected, a functional modelling that predisposes them to interfacing. Just as conjunction is equivalent to becoming something else, in connection each element remains different, although functionally interactive.
Conjunction is the meeting and fusion of rounded, irregular shapes that infiltrate in an imprecise, unrepeatable, imperfect, continuous manner. Connection is the punctual and repeatable interaction of algorithmic functions, of straight lines and dots that overlap perfectly, connecting and disconnecting themselves according to discrete modalities of interaction. Discrete modalities that establish compatibility between diverse parts according to predetermined standards.
The digitalisation of communicative processes produces a sort of desensitisation to the curve, to continuous, slowly-evolving processes, and a corresponding sensitisation to code, sudden changes of state and the succession of discrete signs.
The first video-electronic generation is undergoing a mutation and the social, political and technical future depends on the effects of this mutation. However, in the tradition of cognitive sciences, the idea of mutation is not acceptable, because the epistemological foundations of these sciences remain anchored to a premise of a structuralist nature. In fact, cognitivism considers the human mind to be a device that functions according to innate, unchangeable rules. In the field of cognitivism, the environment is the object of reflection and mental elaboration, but it cannot intervene in the rules by which the mind functions. For this reason, the notion of a dynamic interaction between mental activity and the environment in which minds enter into communication is inadmissible. The technical complexity of communication is incapable of modifying the modalities of cognition, although there are exceptions that depart from this founding principle. For example, Ulric Neisser in Cognition and Reality (1976) speaks of cognitive ecology and acknowledges the possibility of dynamic interaction between the environment in which the mind develops and its modes of functioning.
Acceleration, language, identity
By the concept of dispositif, Foucault defines the machinic concatenations which are able to externally predispose the linguistic, psychic and relational formations of conscious organisms in the modern age. By cabling we mean the insertion of dispositifs inside the biological, genetic and cognitive baggage in the age that comes after the end of modernity. The process of mutation that is underway and from which the first video-electronic generations are derived, can thus be described as the cabling of emerging subjectivities performed by techno-biological and techno-cognitive automatisms.
However, the cabling of the conscious organism is not deterministic in nature, it is not possible to foresee and determine exactly what the cognitive, psychic and social effect of the mutation underway will be.
The acceleration of the flow of information, the mass of information that we receive, decode, process, and must respond to in order to maintain the rhythm of economic, affective and existential exchanges, brings with it a crisis of the faculty of verbalisation that manifests itself in various forms: autism and the dizzying escalation of dyslexia in the youngest generations, particularly in the social and professional classes most involved in the new technologies of communication.
Digitalisation seems to open up a double movement of re-formatting. Verbal language is being replaced by forms of communication that are more rapid, more synthetic and more agile in carrying out different tasks simultaneously, according to the multitask method. However, the acceleration of impulses provokes stress in the physical organism and demands a psychotropic re-formatting of perception and cognitive interaction, through the use of psychopharmacological drugs or the pure and simple deactivation of empathy, which slows down the cognitive rhythm, and the attenuation of certain sensory levels such as smell and touch, which have already been redimensioned by the acceleration of writing.
In general terms, it may be said that the expansion of a specific cognitive function redefines cognition as a whole. The exposure of the conscious organism to the expansion of video-electronics amplifies competencies of a configurational type such as the ability to decode complex visual ensembles or to develop multiple processes of interaction on a simultaneous basis. But at the same time it redimensions other competencies, such as the ability to react emotionally to stimuli that are prolonged in time or the capacity to perceive temporal depth.
The modalities of memorization depend on the mind’s capacity to “store” information that has left a deep impression, was present over a long period of time or on a repetitive basis. Memorisation modifies the conscious organism and defines its identity, given that identity can be defined as a dynamic accumulation of the memory of the places and relations that define the continuity of an experience.
But what happens to memory when the flow of information explodes, expands enormously, besieges perception, occupies the whole of available mental time, accelerates and reduces the mind’s time of exposure to the single informational impression? What happens here is that the memory of the past thins out and the mass of present information tends to occupy the whole space of attention. The greater the density of the Infosphere, the scarcer is the time available for memorisation. The briefer the mind’s lapse of exposure to a single piece of information, the more tenuous will be the trace left by this information. Thus, mental activity tends to be compressed into the present, the depth of memory is reduced and thus the perception of the historical past and even of existential diachrony tends to disappear.
And if it’s true that identity is largely connected to what has been dynamically sedimented in personal memory (places, faces, expectations, hopes), it is possible to hypothesise that we are moving towards a progressive dis-identification, where organisms are increasingly recording a flow that unfolds in the present and leaves no deep imprint because of the rapidity with which it appears to the eye and sediments in memory.
The thickening of the infospheric crust and the increase in quantity and intensity of the incoming informational material thus produces the effect of a reduction of the sphere of singular memory. The things that an individual remembers (images, etc.) work towards the construction of an impersonal memory, homogenised, uniformly assimilated and thinly elaborated because the time of exposure is so fast it doesn’t allow for a deep personalisation.
Lived time
The mutation implies aspects of a pathological nature, which could be defined as mutational psychopathologies, particularly related to how lived time is processed. Eugene Minkowski was the first psychiatrist to study lived time and he had the intuition to consider mental suffering in terms of "lived time", i.e. the way in which we settle in the time of our lives, or cross it frenetically.
Eugene Minkowski does not speak of "time", but rather of "lived time". This emphasis clearly shows the influence of Bergson’s thought, which suggests that we think of time as “duration” and therefore as the projection of existential living.
One fundamental part of the psychopathology of our times may be considered to be a chronopathy. One disorder that is ever on the increase and which affects particularly children and the very young, is the Attention Deficit Disorder syndrome (ADD), which is manifested in the form of hypermobility, physical hyperactivity and the inability to focus the attention for more than a few seconds. In the U.S., almost five million children take a powerful psychostimulating drug called Ritalin to treat this type of disorder. The use of psychostimulants to cure an attention deficit in children is open to discussion. The therapeutic effects have not yet been proven and substances like Ritalin can create addiction and cause brain damage. However, this is not the question here; what I am interested in is to try to understand something more of the causes of this type of psycho-physical hyperactivity.
The speed of the infostimuli produces an effect of overstimulation on the organism and on conscience, and therefore it is legitimate to relate attention pathologies with this increase in the speed of the Infosphere, i.e. the environment in which the mind is formed. On the other hand, how could we imagine that the mediatisation of communication from the earliest stages of childhood would not produce effects involving affectivity, emotionality, language, imagination and even the modalities of memorisation and ultimately, the very perception of lived time?
Those entering the work process in the age of generalised connection are pure information processors. Their bodies are objects that have been forgotten. The contraction of terms and the acceleration of brain rhythms make the social and erotic perception of the other more fragile. Erotism is sublimated in the mystic ecstasy of competitiveness, efficiency, total quality. What will be the psychic effects of this mutation in the long term and what pathologies are already surfacing?
In The Attention Economy, Harvard, 2001, Davenport and Beck speak of a saturation of available time in work processes, and therefore of a lack of attention to what has to be done: these considerations are not limited to the sphere of work, but they affect the whole of digitalised society: on the other hand, the distinction between work time and free time is increasingly blurred, as is the distinction between working age and pre-working age. The workplace has also been extended to the sphere of general communication, from which it is indissociable and therefore it may be said that the young population in pre-working conditions is involved in similar processes to those that affect the adult population.
While cyberspace (i.e., the virtual dimension of the infoproductive interaction between communicative agents connected by means of the electronic network) is infinitely expandable, cybertime (i.e., the time of the conscious processing of signals by the human brain) is only expandable inasmuch as it is possible to accelerate the functioning of the human mind, the individual organic brain. Cyberspace expands at the infinite speed of a network that connects an infinite number of agents of enunciation according to lines that are infinitely complex and may not be reduced. Cybertime, on the other hand, may not expand on an unlimited basis, because it acts according to the modes and terms of organic matter. Cybertime is the name we have coined for the intensity of the experience by which the conscious organism can process the data surrounding it in Cyberspace. In fact, cybertime is the mental time of the experience that is lived, it is a slow assimilation of information, the time that is needed to process the signals coming from the environment around us and it functions according to modalities that are analogical, imprecise, ambiguous, sensual and partial. The incompatibility between cyberspace and cybertime is a decisive paradox in contemporary society. The time needed to examine information and process a coherent reaction is reduced until it disappears. The more the mass of information to be examined, processed and chosen expands, the more the attention time that is available is reduced.
The dissemination of microelectronic technologies and digital forms of communication has changed the technological composition of the world, but the modalities of cognitive appropriation and psychic reactivity available to society and individuals do not adapt on a linear basis. Men and women continue to interact with the real world according to interpretative models and practical modalities that were produced during past history. No matter how the universe of texts continues to expand on an immense scale in the sphere of network information, the human mind continues to read according to sequential models, and therefore it continues to record, memorise, catalogue and select at a pace that was formed in the time in which the printed text was alphabetically predominant. The change in the technological and infospheric environment is much faster than the cultural change and especially so, than the cognitive change. For the young population, this passage is more easily determined in the form of a mutation. However, what are the effects of accelerating the pace of lived time? Beyond a certain limit, the acceleration of experience provokes a drop in the awareness of the stimuli and a loss of intensity that affects not only the sphere of sensitivity, but also the sphere of ethics. Cyberspace invades the sphere of sensitivity until it strangles it altogether. Sensitivity lies in time, and space has become too dense for organic time to be able to elaborate it satisfactorily.
In my opinion, it is at this intersection between electronic cyberspace and organic cybertime that lies the fundamental issue of the mutation that is underway, a mutation that is affecting individual organisms, entire peoples and the whole planet. Young people are naturally the ones that are most exposed to the effects of this mutation, because the invasive power of cyberspace has impacted on them to the full, and therefore, their potential to adapt cybertemporally (i.e. their cognitive, psychic and psychophysical systems) is subject to extreme solicitation. The fundamental problem is that the times of technological mutation are much faster than those of mental mutation, which means that the expansion of cyberspace is incommensurably faster than the capacity of the human brain to expand and adapt, i.e. what we may define as cybertime. We can increase the length of time an organism is exposed to information, but experience may not be intensified beyond a certain limit. This acceleration produces an impoverishment of experience, as we are exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that we cannot process according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge. The fields of relationality and conduct that require extended attention time, such as the fields of affectivity, erotism and deep understanding are disturbed and subjected to contraction. In these conditions of acceleration and informational overload, automatism tends to become the prevailing form of reaction to stimuli, as automatic reactions do not require reflection or conscious or emotional processing. They are standard reactions, implicit in the chain of actions and reactions that is predisposed by the homogenised Infosphere.
Cybertime, erotism, desensitisation
There is no doubt that the digitalisation of the communicative environment and even of the perceptive environment acts on the sensibility of human organisms. But how do we address this issue? What instruments of analysis, what criteria of evaluation allow us to speak of sensitivity, of taste, enjoyment and suffering, eroticism and sensuality? We have no other instrument but ourselves, our antennae, our bodies, our psychic and erotic reactivity. Moreover, the filter of the observer can have a distorting effect. And yet the feeling of rarefaction of contact, coldness and contraction are at the core of our contemporary pathologies, particularly evident in the younger generation. The sphere of eroticism is particularly prone to them.
After the end of the avant-gardes and their infiltration into the circuit of social communication, aesthetic stimulation in the form of advertising, television, design, packaging, web design etc. is increasingly widespread, pervasive, insistent, indissociable from the informational stimulation to which it has become complementary. The conscious-feeling organism is enveloped in a flux of signs that are not simply the bearers of information, but also factors of perceptive stimulation and excitation. According to Perniola, the history of aesthetics has been founded - until today, until yesterday - on the sensorial centrality of catharsis. In other times, the work of art created a wave of involvement and excitement that rushed forward towards a climax, a cathartic state of agitation comparable to orgasmic release. In its classical, as well as romantic and modern conceptions, beauty was identifiable with the moment of completion, an overcoming of the tension implicit in the relationship between the feeling organism and the world: catharsis, harmony, sublime detachment. Reaching harmony is an event that can be compared to orgasmic release following the excitement of contact between bodies. Muscular tension relaxes in the plenitude of pleasure. In the happy perception of one’s own body and the surrounding environment what is at play is an essential question, of rhythm, of time and of lived temporalities. And if, into the circle of excitement, we introduce an inorganic element such as electronics and impose an acceleration of stimuli and a contraction of the psychophysical reaction times, something will have changed in the organism and its forms of erotic reaction. Orgasm is replaced by a series of excitations without release. Orgasm is no longer the prelude to any accomplishment. Inconclusive excitation takes the place of orgasmic release. This is something like the feeling that is conveyed to us by digital art, the coldness of video art, the inconclusive cyclical nature of the work of Tinguely or the music of Philip Glass. Not only aesthetics but also eroticism seems to be implicated in this inorganic acceleration of the relationship between bodies. The video installation, The Wind (2002), by Eija Liisa Ahtila, consisting of three screens on which scenes of destruction, attempts at contact with the body of the other and devastating crises of solitude unfold, is the most direct inquiry I know of into a form of psychopathology that, at the beginning of the new millennium, is tending to become epidemic.
Throughout the circuits of social communication, the erotic object is multiplied to the point of becoming omnipresent. But excitation is no longer the prelude to any conclusion and multiplies desire to the point that it is shattered. The unlimited nature of cyberspace endows experience with a kind of inconclusiveness. Aggressiveness and exhaustion follow from this unlimited opening of the circuits of excitation. Isn’t this perhaps an explanation of the erotic anxiety that leads to diseroticisation and that mix of hypersexuality and asexuality that characterizes post-urban life? The city used to be the place where the human body encountered the human body, the site of the gaze, contact, slow emotion and pleasure. In the posturban dimension of the cyberspatial sprawl, contact seems to become impossible, replaced by precipitous forms of experience that overlap with commercialisation and violence. Slow emotion is rare and improbable, and the very slowness of emotion is transformed little by little into a commodity, an artificial condition that can be exchanged for money. Time is scarce, time is exchanged for money. Time, an indispensable dimension of pleasure, is cut into fragments that can no longer be enjoyed. Pleasure is replaced by excitation without release.
In the cultural phenomenology of late modernity, the mutation we are speaking of can be connected to the transition period that takes place between the sixties and seventies and the eighties and nineties. The years of hippy culture were centred around a project of eroticisation of the social, of universal contact between bodies. In the transition period that coincides with the introduction of electronic communication technologies into the social circuit, the punk phenomenon explodes. Punk cries out desperately against the rarefaction of contact, against the post-urban desert, and reacts with a kind of hysterical self-destructiveness. The transition towards the post-modern and hyper-technological dimension was registered by the new wave of the early eighties, which in its most extreme form defined itself as no wave. No Wave did not mean immobility or constant flow without undulation; on the contrary, it meant infinite fragmentation of the wave, it meant nano-wave, infinitesimal agitation of the musculature, subliminal, uncontrollable micro-excitation. Nervous breakdown. Between the seventies and eighties, the irruption of heroin into the existential experience of the post-urban transition was a part of this process of adaptation to a condition of excitation without release. Heroin allowed for de-branchement, the disconnection of the circuit of uninterrupted over-excitement, a kind of attenuation of tension. The collective organism of Western society looked for a slowing-down in the massive consumption of heroine, or else, in a complementary fashion, looked to cocaine as a way of keeping up with the pace. What was taking place here was the shift in infospheric speed that made it possible to subjugate human time to the regime of absolute and uninterrupted exploitation of the neuro-telematic network – the flexibilisation of work.
And then AIDS came along. There is no point in insisting on the emotional catastrophe that the Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome caused and will continue to cause, building up in the collective psyche and producing negative sensitisation and fear of contact. It is hard to fully assess the effects that fear of contagion has had on the forms of everyday life, but the culture shock produced by this epidemic has been sedimented in perception, in the desire of the generations that grow up in the awareness of the danger that lies in physical contact and erotism. The profound effects of AIDS are not yet measurable: AIDS, which was propagated in the mid-eighties, affected the psyche of a generation that had already been formed, modifying its existential horizons and cultural behaviour, without being able to act in the depths of expectations, in the desiring imaginary. In the generations that have been formed after that, however, AIDS appears as an element that is taken, acquired, like a deadly presence that connotes corporeality, sexuality and contact as danger and suggests that carnal contact be replaced by infostimulation.
