Neuro-Aesthetics and the Unimaginable
Checkmate?
“The way in which, instead of relationships of interdependence, ever longer chains of dependence have been created over the course of our modernity does not reflect a dream of self-liberation, even if this dream has seduced those who have invented a thousand and one means of emancipating themselves from the “whims of nature.” Rather, it reflects an operation of mobilization, in the military sense. The ideal of mobilization is the possibility of defining soldiers as beings whose behavior should depend solely upon the orders they receive, communicated down a chain of command: a mobilized army must not let itself be slowed down by anything. That’s why mobilization is a correlate of anesthesia in relation to everything capable of disrupting discipline, everything that should not count. The substitution of relationships of interdependence with chains of dependence thus entails an entrenchment of the imagination, the dream of function without friction.”
—Isabelle Stengers, “We Are Divided,” e-flux Journal 114, December 2020
What do we see when we look at world evolution in the second year of the pandemic? In the first year we have experienced the effect of the privatization of everything. Since the years of Margaret Thatcher, privatization has been the unquestionable dogma of politics, of the economy, and of human culture as a whole. Following Thatcher’s declaration of war against public spending and social welfare, the health system has been subjected to neoliberal reform: investments for public hospitals have been cut, intensive therapy units have been slashed, the number of medics reduced, and so on. This is why the virus has been so deadly. Furthermore, public research was de-financed and public money diverted toward private research. Not only this has provoked a displacement of financial resources, but the privatization shift has marked an epistemological change in the organization of knowledge: profit has turned into the final criterion of scientific truth and of technical application of knowledge.
In the first period of the pandemic, many expected a shift away from the priority of profit, a redistribution of wealth, but notwithstanding the huge public money invested (or promised) to fund the recovery in Europe and in the United States, inequality is growing at different levels: among the poor and the rich in different countries, among the poor countries and the rich, and finally among those who control the distribution of vaccines and those who are postponed or excluded. The quick creation of the vaccine supply chain, and the prospect of the repetition of global vaccinations every twelve months or so, is deeply changing the daily business of life: a sort of sanitary militarisation is underway.
In the past century, social movements were able to stem the violence of exploitation and the predatory nature of capitalism: solidarity, resistance, insurrection have been able to stop the fury of capitalist devastation, to fuel autonomy, and to create spaces of egalitarian life and even of joy. But in the last decades, social subjectivity has been fragmented by precariousness and dazzled by media, and now is engaged in the elaboration of a multifarious trauma whose outcome is hard to predict. The coming psychosphere is enigmatic. The long-lasting suspension of social intercourse may deactivate imagination and disable the collective ability to rebel, organize, invent.
After five centuries of systematic exploitation of Nature, Nature is taking revenge. After decades of unbridled exploitation of the social brain, the social mind is going berserk: nationalism, racism, paranoid fascism are spreading as furious as fire in the forest. The long duel between social autonomy and domination seems bordering on checkmate.
Wait a minute. As you know, in the sphere of human experience there are two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those activities in which you must absolutely follow the rules because if you don’t follow the rules you are simply not playing the game. Think of chess: if you want to play chess you cannot move the rook the way you move the knight or vice versa, and when the king is in a certain position you can declare that the game is over. Infinite games also have rules, but players know that rules may be transgressed, exceeded, and changed. Think love, think war. In those games, rules do exist, but players know well that during the game they will be betrayed, skipped, and reinvented because this is the only way of continuing the game: evolving.
When we speak of cultural evolution we are not speaking of a finite game that may be won by a player and closed with a checkmate according to rules. Rules do exist, as we know: economic, political, proprietary rule. Mental rules, aesthetic rules. But human history is an infinite game: as long as the players are alive they can transgress rules. They can even change the playing field.
This is why we should not give up our radical refusal of the rules, of the laws, of the established order, of the prevailing cultural conformism. Even if depression is inevitable, even if global civil war is inevitable, even if environmental devastation is inevitable, even if in the coming time the extinction of humans is inevitable, we should never forget the suggestive sentence of a witty wise guy whose name I don’t remember, “the inevitable generally does not happen, because the unpredictable prevails instead.” What is unpredictable? Obviously, nobody can know. Maybe a scientific invention? Maybe a massive insurrection?
We cannot predict the unpredictable and we cannot imagine the unimaginable, but we can perform acts of psychomancy. Psychomancy does not exist, as far as I know, but in my parlance it means the art of deciphering the imminent intersection between countless mental projections. So, let’s try to extract imagination of the unimaginable from the flows of the ongoing unconscious elaboration of the trauma.
The only thing that we know at the moment is that trauma is underway and elaboration of trauma is following. How can the trauma be elaborated? What kind of balance will the perturbed organism find?
Money
For instance, let’s look at the economy. Let’s try to imagine the future of production, exchange, consumption, and so on. Forecasts are unreliable because something crucial is missing: social subjectivity. The monetary institutions of the Western world are engaged to invest huge amounts of money for the recovery.
Through the recovery, the real nature of money is now in full display: money is an act of language and, in a certain way, one of the most effective acts of language that humans may utter. However, the performative effectiveness of an utterance (like money) does not only depend on the potency of the enunciator and the features of the enunciation. It also depends on the ability of the receiver to decode the message and to act in a consistent way. If the receiver is dead, or incapacitated, or deaf, the message will be unable to get the desired results.
Economists think that the cycle of accumulation is only determined by economic factors, and this is wrong. It also depends on subjective factors that enable or disable the cycle to function. Social subjectivity is one of these factors. In the 1920s, Western social subjectivity, although hit by blows much more serious than the COVID-19 pandemic (WWI and the Spanish flu pandemic that killed fifty million people worldwide), was able to react positively to the injection of money resulting from the German war reparations, the development of industrial technologies, and military investment. Yes, the roaring twenties led to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, but for some years the engine of capitalism had been reactivated. Is the subjectivity of the 2020s in a similar condition? Are social energy and cultural expectations prepared for a new leap in the never-ending progression of capitalism, as they were a hundred years ago?
This question cannot be answered by economists. They know little about the unpredictable oscillations of the unconscious and about the inmost motivations of people during and after the pandemic trauma. My point is that money is less and less fulfilling its performative task because the animated body that once upon a time was craving for more (more goods, more power, more sex) now is mutating in a way that hardly may be reduced to the acquisitive regime of desire. And also because something strange is happening to the act of comparing, counting, exchanging, and all those acts that presuppose the measurability of things in human terms. This is the point.
Remember Protagoras of Abdera: Man is the measure of all things. Well, this is over. Man is no longer the measure of all things because those things that are relevant nowadays are beyond or behind the reach of human measurement. Take the virus: the problem is that you cannot see it. Take global pollution: the problem is that you cannot deal with it. Take nuclear radiation: the problem is that you cannot keep it under control. There is no more measure, or rather: those processes that change life on the planet are less and less measurable, and even if you can measure them you cannot deal with them. You can invest as much money as you want, but you will not get free of the Fukushima fallout. It is with us forever—and we know that it’s just the beginning. A new Fukushima may happen even if you think that the new reactor is making you safe. You’ll never be safe because the dimension of the danger is out of the scope of human measurement. Take massive psychopathology: it is not something that you can deal with. You cannot even say: You are crazy. Maybe the crazy person is you. Who knows?
Some experts in economics say that secular stagnation is looming. Of course it is. We have already produced enough of everything. The problem is that the majority of those who dwell on the planet have nothing, and they will never get money as they are excluded from the circuit of money, but the minority of the humans who have money do not need anything more. The pandemic has brutally revealed that what we need cannot be bought with money and what we can buy with money we do not need anymore.
The economists say that the demand will rise as soon as the pandemic is over. Maybe. I suspect that this expectation is wrong because it does not consider an emerging psycho-anthropologic mutation. In the last 50 years, since Nixon declared that the fixed exchange system was replaced by a new regime based on freely floating fiat currencies, the financial sphere has become more and more independent from the sphere of production, distribution, and consumption. Finance, which once upon a time was a function of investment, turned into an independent sphere of purely speculative enrichment to the point that in the first decades of the twenty-first century, financial capitalism feeds itself on the destruction of the industrial infrastructure and of social services. Now, in the second year of the pandemic, while the numbers of unemployment are skyrocketing and salaries have reached the lowest point in 50 years, stock prices are jumping at unprecedented levels and the stock market is euphoric.
I think that in order to explain this divergence between the sphere of money and the sphere of life we must come to terms with the idea that money has less and less to do with life. Once upon a time we could say that money and language have something in common, as both of them are nothing, but they move everything. No more. Money is not moving anymore because it is unable to buy what we need. Why so? Probably because what we need does not exist anymore. What about language?
Neuro-Aesthetic Shift
The pandemic has provoked the final jump beyond modernity and highlighted the vanishing of the potency of will. Niccolò Machiavelli and Francis Bacon may be seen as the harbingers of our modern times because they emphasized the relation between will and power. Machiavelli said that the will of the prince can submit the capricious Fortuna, the unpredictable variability of events. Bacon said that knowledge is the condition of the potency of will, but the potency of will was linked with the Protagoras measure. As long as man is the measure of all things, his will can decide the course of events, to a certain extent. So, the potency of will vanishes when the relevant events of world history escape the Protagoras measure. The proliferation of the virus and the irreversible toxic contamination of the physical and mental environment exceed both the scope of decision and the potency of will. This is why I expect nothing from politics now. The magniloquence of those who deem themselves as powerful men sounds ludicrous.
The arrogance of the past modern imperialist era now reveals itself as pretentious and empty. Like the bumptious ship captain who tries in vain to avoid a shipwreck when the sea storm rises too strong, so the political leaders of our time show their powerlessness when facing the waves of viral invasion, the clouds of nuclear radioactivity, and the flames of the changing world climate, not to mention the disturbances of the mental sphere. The ever-accelerating speed of the infosphere makes consistent government impossible and the social world oscillates between chaos and the automaton. Too fast and invasive has grown the info-nervous stimulation so the acts of decisions are subsumed by the linguistic machine: life is captured and subjected to automation. This is why the potency of will has dissipated and we feel impotent, almost overwhelmed.
You know what? We should forget about the cognitive faculty named will. We should rely on the faculties of sensibility in order to relate with the post-mechanical universe: smelling, sniffing, inhaling, eavesdropping, skimming, grazing, squinting, blinking, ogling, lightly touching, caressing. Like critters who try to map the alien planet in which we dwell, so too we should sensually harmonize with it. Aesthetics takes the place of ethics in this shift, and aesthetic tuning up and adjustment is slowly replacing political determination. This is how we may overcome the current apocalypses. Here the concept of neuro-aesthetics takes its relevance.
The virus has induced a mutation in the social organism and in the collective unconscious. Now the lines of subjectivation will depend on the elaboration of the pandemic trauma: phobic sensibilization to the body and to the other—imminent depression when skin, lips, and the overall sensorium are clouded by numbness and fear. In this trauma, new possibilities are concealed, hidden by the default mode network of our mind that results in the compulsive repetition of social behaviors and mental patterns. The impending mutation invests and disrupts the psycho-responsiveness embedded in the neurological system. Aesthetic sensibility is disturbed so aesthetic research is stimulated, and a neuro-aesthetic metamorphosis is put in motion.
Beauty
“Beauty is the destiny (Geschick) of the essence of truth,” writes Martin Heidegger, the brilliant forger, the hypocritical sycophant of Being. I think that the contrary is true: beauty is a destiny (although not the only one for sure) of the absence of truth, of the ineffability of Becoming. If truth did exist, if truth were achievable, we would not need beauty at all: we would contemplate the true, the eternal, the unmovable, and in it we would be absorbed by it forever. But there is no truth to defrost and to reveal. The apocalypse itself is revealing nothing but this: the absence of any secret. There is nothing to disclose. The enigmatic apocalypse does not unveil the truth, it astounds our minds. Habits of consciousness are interrupted with the infinite excess of beauty. We are dazzled by the narrowness of our time, of our potency to touch, to smell, to interpenetrate all the desired bodies that surround us. Beauty is this cruelty of the excess of pleasure that we cannot enjoy. Beauty is the passion of the excess of not knowing that we cannot know because there is nothing to know—only to imagine, guess, and conjecture. This act of imagination triggered by beauty is the condition of creation. “Exuberance is beauty,” according to William Blake, who also said that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Exuberance means energetic excess. However, I think that it also means: excess of meaning.
I have long wondered what the word beauty means. I may say that I am a professional in this investigation as I received a university degree in Aesthetics. Nevertheless, the more I have been investigating this subject the more I found myself far from an answer. I always had the impression that the very celebrated poem of the very celebrated poet John Keats that begins with the verse, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” is a little bit dull, inane. I tried to decipher the sense of these words, but could not. What does beauty have to do with joy? And why should the joy provoked by beauty last forever, as the insipid Englishman says?
The other verses are full of platitudes rich with plants, young and old trees, moon, sun, shady boon, and sheep. The eternal source of immortal fluid sprouting inside our souls sounds to my ears like a lie, because if I can say anything about beauty it is just this: beauty fades along time, and in the brief length of its appearance it gives us nothing. Dostoevsky said that only beauty will save us. His idea of beauty was a hysterical one and his paradise was perfect pain. What he was talking about was the exhalation that comes from suffering, because suffering is drawing us close to God. Bullshit. Adorno said that beauty is disappearing and we should engage in preserving it, but also this consideration does not persuade me. Beauty is overflowing in our sorrowful time. Beauty is flooding amidst the horrors of devastation that surround our bodies and our souls.
Throughout the twentieth century, a general aestheticization of the social experience was deployed: someone, somewhere suggested that beauty is digital perfection—think Steve Jobs. However, simultaneously the director Paolo Sorrentino suggests with the film The Great Beauty that beauty is indissociable from sadness and mixed with bitterness: the gloom of decomposing, slowly vanishing, up to the final terrific ascesis of becoming nothing. Beauty smells of senescence. In Sorrentino’s movie, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) declares from the beginning that the most essential aesthetic emotion for him is the smell of old people’s rooms. The perfect beauty is horrible, like the one hundred four-year-olds that “la Santa” shows off at the end of the movie.
In American Beauty, Sam Mendes has caught the ambiguous significance of beauty in the words of the young filmmaker Ricky (Wes Bentley) when he shows Jane what he considers the most beautiful thing he has filmed: a plastic bag, tossing in the wind in front of a wall: “I captured that moment and realized that there is an entire life behind things.” Ricky feels that “sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it . . . and my heart is going to cave in.” America is the most ugly and repulsive place that God conceived of in the whole universe, that’s for sure. Yet, beauty is the sensuous perception of the excess that simmers in the horror of life.
As we are looking for a line of escape from unhappiness in the wake of the pandemic breakdown, I see an emerging behavioral trend that may shape this evolution in a benign way. This trend is ambiguous: the psycho-deflation that we are experiencing for a long deal of time may lead to a long-lasting epidemic of depression, but it may also lead to the proliferation of migrant self-relying communities, to the conscious disengagement of small communities from the destiny of the decaying planet and from the sentiments of the majority of humankind unable to turn in the irreversible decline—high and low tech communities that stay interconnected but are prepared to remain in full isolation for long periods of time. The possible outcomes of the long oscillation that we experience during the elaboration of the trauma are unpredictable. Frugality may replace the craving for acquisition: the new generation is not refusing consumerism only for ideological reasons, but also because of a revulsion to all that plastic, all that meat, all that suffocating stuff. A sort of asceticism may emerge from the deflation, a slow rhythm of sensuousness, and the research of pleasure may become the psychedelic business of everybody: an orgiastic asceticism of precarious communities.
Random Sensitive Compass
After the great acceleration of the infosphere of late modern times, the human brain has grown unable to process the complexity of the world of its own making. The info-neural stimulation has grown too fast for conscious elaboration—and for emotional elaboration, too. This is why we entered into this dimension of chaos. The viral proliferation of sub-visible material particles has been the final step in the process of losing control. But simultaneously the cognitive automaton is giving birth to itself: self-construction of the global interconnection of intelligent artificial units and controlling devices. Automaton complementary to chaos.
The conscious sensitive organism is in a spasm: convulsion, breathlessness, hyper-excitement. Then psycho-deflation. Then what? The neuroplastic chaosmosis is underway. In the random search for the happy evolution beyond the present condition of pain, the compass is sensibility: neuro-aesthetic harmonization of the rhythm of breath. Now we are facing the neuroplastic dilemma: Is consciousness able to govern the re-shaping of consciousness itself?