On November 10th and 11th, 2012 I took part in the conference The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, organized by the California Institute of the Arts’ MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the West Hollywood Library in Los Angeles. This conference has been the first opportunity for exchange and cross-fertilization between the European theory of social composition and the Californian cultural landscape. Speakers included Jonathan Beller, Jodi Dean, Tiziana Terranova, Patricia Pisters, and Bruce Wexler. Arne De Boever, Warren Neidich, and Jason Smith organized, introduced, and moderated the event. The subject, the location, and the intellectual mixture evidenced by the list of speakers make this conference an important step in the creation of a philosophical and political awareness of the present crisis of capitalism and of the possible evolution of mental ecology. To my knowledge, this was the first time that the European methodology, which has been particularly focused on the problems of social subjectivation, was confronted with the Californian experience, and with the particular composition of labor that is peculiar to the land of Apple, Disney, and Google. Furthermore, the European philosophy focused on historical subjectivation met the Californian theoretical context, marked by a special attention to the implication of technology and the ecology of mind.

The conceptual innovation emerging from this conference is the following: when social recomposition meets neuroplasticity, the theoretical fields of neurology, ecology of the mind, and cyberculture are approaching those problematics that European thought has considered from the point of view of Ontology or the point of view of History.

Since the ‘60s the psychedelic experience and meditation on the altered states of mind encountered the mind-changing potencies of the high-tech industry. The Institute for Mental Research of Palo Alto, the works of Gregory Bateson and of Paul Watzlawick, the imagination of Philip K. Dick and the psychedelic politics of Timothy Leary marked a mentalist re-framing of the legacy of European philosophy and the condition for a re-conceptualization of social becoming.

In the last thirty years, a new economy and new technologies have found their cradle in California, nurturing a technomentalist culture and giving rise to a special brand of social Darwinism which is expressed well in books like Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control (1992).

The technical transformation implied in the process of globalization is changing the socio-cultural prospects so deeply that theoretical tools inherited from European critical theory no longer suffice for imagining the future of human evolution.This is why I think that the Los Angeles conference has displaced the object of socio-anthropological reflection, linking the conceptual sphere of social recomposition and psycho-subjectivation with the conceptual sphere of techno-mental evolution.

Global recession and the acceleration of the environmental decay seem to suggest that human evolution is over, unless society shifts from the present paradigm of economic growth and capital accumulation to a paradigm based on a different conception of wealth, so as to create a different set of collective expectations. However, such a shift is not in view at the present.

Sub-Individual and Super-collective:
Where Change Happens

The conceptual and practical sphere of modern politics has lost its ground. In the age that began with Machiavelli and culminated with Lenin, human will (embodied by the prince, the State, the Party) was able to reign over the chaotic variation of events and projects, and was able to submit individual interests and passions to the common goals of social order, economic growth and political progress.

The infinite proliferation of information flows unleashed by the accelerating network technology has made impossible the conscious elaboration of information by the individual mind, and the conscious coordination of individual agents of will. The loss of effectiveness of political action has to do with time: reason and will, the essential tools for political action, are unable to process in time and decide in time. The technical transformation has changed the conditions of mental activity and the forms of interaction between the individual and the collective sphere.

In the age of voluntary action that we call Modernity these two spheres—individual and collective—could be seen as distinct, externally linked, and interacting on the basis of an effective intentionality. Individual and collective organisms are composed of the same material substances and by the same unconscious motivations, so they are not distinct in their material composition; but in the past it was possible to describe separately the conscious acts of the individual and the effects that the individual intentionality was able to produce on the collective dimension. Now the distinction between individual and collective has been blurred.

First of all these two dimensions interact at the level of sub-individuality. The word “individual” is designating something that does not actually exist. In Latin this word refers to something that cannot be divided, but individuals are actually composed of countless sub-individual substances and psycholinguistic flows, and the so called free will is only the effect of the changing elaboration of info-flows and of neuro-chemical flows. Therefore, as Gilbert Simondon has written in L’individuation psychique et collective “the individual is a system of individuation, a system which is individuating itself.”¹ The process of individuation is the continuous resolution of the never dissolved polarity between system and environment. The process of individuation starts from the pre-existing reality of the collective sphere, but the collective sphere has simultaneously to be considered as effect of the interaction between existing individuals.

Collective voices resonate in the individual Unconscious, and the collective sphere is the meeting point of uncountable individual voices resounding together. Coming from the social dimension and traversing the collective space, flows of information are acting at the level of sub-individuality. Furthermore individual and collective dimensions interact at the level of super-collectivity, where crowds and multitudes are involved in automatic chains of behavior, and driven by techno-linguistic dispositives. The swarm effect actually is the automation of individual behavior traversed and concatenated by techno-linguistic interfaces.

As Bruce Wexler recalled in his lecture at the Los Angeles conference, man is the animal who shapes the environment that shapes his brain.I will just point out that Infosphere is the environment where this mind-shaping occurs.

Connective Format and Social Mind

In the present digital Infosphere, the conscious activity is involved in super-individual connective concatenations. The connective concatenation shapes the Unconscious and the Imagination according to a discreet—versus continuous—modality of perception. Syntactic rules of semiotic exchange take the place of those semantic rules that were working in the dimension of conjunctive relation and analogical communication. Those who dwell in the digital global sphere cannot escape the implications of the connective concatenation if they want to interact in the collective sphere. So the individual has to comply with the rules of interaction of the collective, if he/she wants to produce effects in the collective dimension. This is why politics no longer works: because one cannot interact efficiently in the collective dimension if one has not previously accepted the rules of compliance that shape language, action and interpretation of signs. Social composition is reframed by the establishment of a connective format of interaction between humans.

In the industrial world the social brain is modeled by standardized acts of physical production, but the mental sphere is only partially involved in the process of standardization. The metal worker is obliged to move his muscles according to the rhythm of the assembly line, but his mind is relatively free. Cognitive capitalism is all about the standardization of the cognitive processes, and mental activity cannot be detached or diverted by the flow of information, as this flow is exactly the cognitive machine. Unconscious and imaginative processes are therefore influenced by the submission of cognitive behavior to the connective format.

In The Mind’s I, a book edited by Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hoefstadter and published in 1981, philosophers, psychologists, computer programmers and novelists were invited to investigate the interdependency between hardware and software of cognitive processes.The main question of the book may be expressed like this: what is the relation between neuro-physical composition of the brain and conscious self-perception of the thinking organism? What is the mind of my “self”, what is the “I” of my mind?

In that book, Dennet and Hoefstadter were investigating the effects of interaction processes on the individual brain. We should now reformulate this basic question at a different level: we should investigate the effects of the technical sphere of communication on the social mind, and of the Infosphere on the sub-individual dimension. Finally, we should understand how sub-individual flows are reshaping the collective space of sensibility. We should study the formation of the social mind from the point of view of the relation between sensibility and culture: the Mind’s we.

Structure and Machine

Neo-marxist Italian thinkers labeled as “operaisti” and post-structuralist French philosophers like Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and Foucault—notwithstanding the difference of their intellectual trajectories—have investigated a similar question: how the process of subjectivation develops, starting from the material layers of social existence: technology, language, affection. Thanks to the formulation of the concept of “composition” (class composition, social composition), Italian neo-marxism in the ‘60s directly questioned structuralist methodology: while structuralism is based on the notion that the subject’s evolution is governed by internal patterns, in a post-structuralist approach, social composition evolves due to the interference of external factors that enter the space of subjectivation. Not internal structures, but external machines shape molecular sub-individual flows, funneling them into the provisional ever-changing forms of sensibility.

In the article “Machine et structure,” published in the magazine Change in the year 1971, Félix Guattari explains his break with Lacan and his will to go beyond the Freudian conception of psychoanalysis as a system of structures (mythological, symbolical):

We can say that the structure is positing its elements in a system of references connecting every element to other elements, in such a way that the structure itself can be referred to other structures as an element of a larger structure. The structural thought of totalization and de-totalizations is clasping the subject, because it is not accepting the idea of losing grip on the subject as far as it is not able to get it back within a new structure. The same does not apply to the machine, that is always excentric in relation to the subject. The subject is always elsewhere. Temporality gets into the machine in many ways and plays as an event. The emergence of the machine marks a break that is not homogeneous with the structural representation.²

A structure is a system of inner relations, of interactions governing the subject from inside. A machine, on the other hand, is an eccentric actor: it comes from outside and changes the framework in which the subject islocated so that the subject itself is changing its form.Therefore the machine jeopardizes the structural pattern, and provokes a displacement of the subject. While the structure is essentially morphostatic and territorializing, the machine is the factor of deterritorialization that leads to morphogenesis.

So the concept of machine (that simply means: whatever agent is working and producing effects) gives Guattari the possibility of replacing the structured subject with the vision of a process of subjectivation that is the effect of the action of machines.

Composition Consciousness and Subjectivation

The common ground of investigation of the aforementioned French and Italian authors can be found in these questions: what is the subjective side of the social becoming? How does it happen that social forces develop different forms of consciousness and conflicting intentions? The answer can be found in the word composition. The subjective side of social becoming is perpetually changing as it is the result of the never-ending transformation of the psychocultural composition of the collective brain, of the collective soul, of the collective Unconscious.

One can view the becoming of social subjectivity as a solution and mixture of various chemical substances melting together. Consciousness is the surface of the perpetual process of de-composition and recomposition that Félix Guattari names: subjectivation. And consciousness is also the ability to locate oneself in the map of compositional flows of information, desire, conflict… This is why I propose the word “compositionism” in order to encompass the two philosophical movements which flourished in Italy and in France in the era of ‘68 and have been producing long-lasting effects in contemporary philosophy less in Europe than elsewhere. Those philosophers retrace the process of subjectivation through a recognition of the perpetually changing composition of social life: cultural, economic, psychological and mythological streams enter in the same process of subjectivation.

The process of reproduction of social life involves the hard matter of the physical transformation of the environment, but also involves the soft side of intention, perception and imagination. We call this soft side of social becoming subjectivity, and we call subjectivation the process of decomposition and recomposition that leads to the evolution of subjectivity. In his last book, Chaosmosis, Guattari writes that “among the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin de millenaire, the question of subjectivity is now returning as a leitmotiv. All the disciplines will have to combine their creativity to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental implosion and chaosmic spasms looming on the horizon.”³ The word “spasm” is remarkable and unexpected. As far as I know (I may be wrong), this word cannot be found anywhere in previous books by Guattari, not in those he wrote alone and not in those he wrote with Deleuze. What is the meaning of the expression “chaosmic spasm”?

Spasm

In the medical lexicon a spasm is a sudden involuntary contraction of a muscle, which is generally painful. In the context of analysis of social subjectivation, I would say that the spasm is an excessive compulsive acceleration of the rhythm of the social organism, a sort of forced vibration of the rhythm of social communication.

A spasm is a painful vibration that forces the organism to an extreme mobilization of nerves and muscles. We should understand this acceleration and this painful vibration in the context of an environment that is the contemporary sphere of cognitive work and nervous exploitation. I call this environment semiocapitalism because the main source of production of value in this environment are semiotic tools: language is thus directly involved in the production and exchange of both material and immaterial goods. When cognitive energy becomes the main force of production, as capital valorization demands more and more productivity, the nervous system of the organism is subjected to accelerated exploitation in order to make possible productivity increase.

Guattari always saw technology in general as a factor of enrichment, of mind enhancement and social liberation. But machines interweave and connect with capitalist exploitation, and this is producing an effect of subjection aimed to the continuous increase of productivity and exploitation.

Here comes the spasm: the spasm is the effect of the violent penetration of capitalist exploitation into the field of info-technologies, which are obviously acting on the sphere of cognition, of sensibility, and of the Unconscious itself. Sensibility is invested by info-acceleration, and the vibration induced by the acceleration of nervous exploitation is the spasm, the spasmic effect.

What should we do when we are in a situation of spasm?

Guattari is not using the word “spasm” in isolation. He says precisely: “chaosmic spasm.” Chaosmosis is the overcoming of the spasm, the relaxing of the spasmodic vibration. In the interaction between individual and collective sphere, in the link between individual neuro-activity and collective connective concatenation, the “mind’s we” is evolving. The neuro-plasticity of the sub-individual organism interacts with the rhythms of the super-collective automatisms of the swarm.

Chaosmose and Chaoide

Why does Guattari use the expression “chaosmic spasm”? Why can the spasm be seen as chaosmic? What is chaosmosis at the end of the day?

Chaosmosisis the creation of a new (more complex) order (syntony, and sympathy) out of the present chaos, which is an effect of the spasmodic acceleration of the surrounding semio-universe. Chaosmosis is the osmotic passage from a state of chaos to a new order. But here the word “order” does not have a normative meaning, nor an ontological meaning. Order is here to be intended as harmonic relation between mind and the semio-environment, and also as sharing of the same mindset. Sym-pathy, common perception. Chaos is an excess of speed of the Infosphere in relation to the ability
of elaboration of the brain.

In What is Philosophy?, which is a book about philosophy and about growing old as well, Deleuze and Guattari speak of the relation between chaos and the brain. “From Chaos to the Brain” is the title of the Conclusion of the book, and it begins with the following words:

We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infinite variabilities the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They are infinite speeds that blend into the immobility of the colorless and silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought. This is the instant of which we do not know whether it is too long or too short for time. We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas.⁴

The stream of consciousness is too slow to process the information that comes from the world of acceleration (info-technology multiplied by Semio-capitalist exploitation), so the world cannot be translated into Cosmos, mental order, syntony and sympathy. Here we are talking of something that has very little to do with politics and history, and much more with neuro-plasticity in the evolution of brain.

Not an acceleration of the rhythm of mental elaboration, but a reframing of the relation between infosphere and mind, a process of re-syntonization and re-focalization that cannot be pre-arranged by political will, but only prepared by a modeling of sensibility.

Chaosmosis is the shift from a rhythm of conscious elaboration to a new rhythm, adapt to elaborate what the previous rhythm could no more consciously process.

In order to define the shift from one rhythm to a different rhythm, from one refrain to an other refrain, Guattari proposed the concept of “chaoid.” Chaoid, in Guattari’s parlance, is a sort of de-multiplier—a device which reduces the scale of complexity (or the scale of dimension of speed…) of the environment, so that the operator can act consistently—, an agent of re-syntonization, a linguistic agent able to act as a refrain different from the spasmic refrain, and able to de-multiply the spasmodic rhythm. “The primary purpose of ecosophical cartography”, writes Guattari, “is thus not to signify and communicate but to produce assemblages of enunciation capable of capturing the points of singularity of a situation.”⁵

Neuroplasticity, Adaptation

I’m not talking about adaptation.The prevailing techniques of therapy are aimed to adapt the suffering organism to the social and technical environment. Psychopharmacology and psychiatric therapy aim to soften psychic suffering in order to normalize behavior and to reduce the existing subjectivity to the tasks of cognitive exploitation. Reprogramming is a technique of normalizing of the singularity, whose aim is the restoration of the neurotic subjection and suffering effectiveness in the process of neural exploitation and capital accumulation.

But the process of recomposition that I’m trying to outline here is a complex dynamics of mutual transformation of the social environment and individual minds. Neuroplasticity should not be conceived merely in the prospect of conciliating the activity of the individual brain with capitalist needs: biopolitical formatting and submission of the mind to the economic goals of cognitive capitalism. I’m not talking even about the deceptive pretention of “slowing” the infosphere, the nostalgia for a pre-connective environment, the re-humanization of techno-capitalism. The claim of reterritorialization and re-humanization is a reactionary utopia doomed to failure, and can only produce effects of aggressive identification. In order to escape the pathological effects of deterritorialization, people tend to desperately grasp aggressive forms of belonging: Volk, Nation, Race or Belief. Neither adaptation nor aggressive identification are what I’m looking for.

Modern culture has conceived change in terms of history, and action in terms of politics. I think we should focus on neuro-evolution and develop forms of action aimed to shape it. The main task we are facing now is to find ways to consciously interact with neural evolution, and de-activate those techno-automatisms that entangle the mind’s activity in the established frame of connective capitalism. We have to think in terms of meta-connectivity.

In the sphere of financial capitalism, the prevailing linguistic concatenations are producing a spasmogenic rhythm. The spasm is not only exploiting the work of men and women, not only submitting cognitive labor to the abstract acceleration of the info-machine, but is also destroying the organism’s sensibility, by submitting this sensibility to the stress of competition and acceleration. In Guattari’s parlance “chaoid” is a semiotic device that makes possible the disconnection from the pathogenic rhythm and the creation of a new concatenation between consciousness and Infosphere. Chaosmosis is the evolutionary process of recomposition that leads to the emergence of a new concatenation, and therefore to the possibility of a new sympathetic syntony of the molecules composing the social body and the flows circulating in the Infosphere.

The first step of this chaosmosis will be the disentanglement from the present stressing concatenation; the second will be the neural reframing of the relation with the infosphere. This is not a political project, as politics has broken down and is unable to deal with the process of meta-subjectivation that is implied in the chaosmosis. Guattari suggests that we must create chaoids for disentanglement, for prefiguration and re-syntonization. Chaoids have nothing to do with the sphere of will and political decision, they belong to the sphere of art, education, and therapy, where sensibility is shaped.

Paradigm Shift and Cultural Transition

During the transition from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism, human subjectivity is invested by the cognitive immaterialization of production, as the precarization and fractalization of labor are provoking a deep mutation of the psychosphere which resonates with the technological and cultural becoming. This mutation is not a linear process, as the different levels of human activity (cultural, psychological and neural) do not change in unison.

During the past decades, while the transition to cognitive capitalism was underway, many authors, from many different points of view, have spoken of a paradigm shift, showing how the paradigm is changing at the epistemological, technological and economic levels of social life.

A short reminder about the most important theorizations on this point may be useful.

In his most celebrated book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the epistemologist Thomas Kuhn defines the transition from an epistemological framework to a new one in terms of paradigm shift.

The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field’s most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications. During the transition period there will be a large but never complete overlap between the problems that can be solved by the old and by the new paradigm.⁶

The concept of paradigm shift has been essential in the analysis of the transformation that has invested every sphere of theory and social practice in the age of transition from the sequential to the simultaneous techno-sphere.

In the book Understanding Media, published in 1964, Marshall McLuhan already spoke of electric light as a medium which redefines the whole space of contents.

The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. […] For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs… As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.⁷

Electricity, then electronics: this is the technological background of the late modern transition that gives way to the general transformation of economy, social communication, and of culture.

In 1977, L’informatisation de la societé, a report commissioned by the President of the French Republic Valery Giscard D’Estaing, was published in Paris. In this book the sociologist Alain Minc and the engineer Simon Nora anticipated telematics, a major technological innovation proceeding from the intersection of telephone and computing, and predicted the coming crisis and deterioration of national sovereignty, as an effect of the globalization of political and economic information.

And Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave, first published in 1980, forecast the overall transformation of the social sphere, as an effect of the spread of the electronic technologies in daily life and the economy.

The Third Wave brings with it a genuinely new way of life based on diversified, renewable energy sources: on methods of production that make most factors assembly lines obsolete; on new not nuclear families; on a novel institution that may be called the electronic cottage; and on radically changed schools and corporations of the future. The emergent civilization writes a new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond standardization, synchronization and centralization, beyond the concentration of energy, money and power.⁸

The paradigm shift is also crossing the scientific and epistemological space. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard writes that “the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.”⁹ And in the field of science and epistemology, in fact, the mechanical paradigm that has prevailed in the centuries following the Newtonian revolution is now giving way to the paradigm of uncertainty outlined by Werner Heisenberg in 1959.¹⁰

But the paradigm shift has to be conceived as a tendency and a possibility, not as a necessary consequence determined by the change of social and technological environment, as the tendency and possibility that is implied in the environmental transformation is obstructed and hindered by the persistent force of the past. This is why the process of reconfiguring human subjectivity and the reconfiguration of the neuroplastic social brain are actually asymmetrical and asynchronous. Capitalism, as the general form of the economy, entangles and obstructs the potential developments of the social brain. If we want to understand this entanglement we have to retrace the history of present subjectivity, and we have to analyze the various layers of its becoming, the psychic, the cultural and the aesthetic.

Social Morphogenesis After the End Of Democracy

Morphogenesis is the process of becoming-form, and thanks to morphogenesis new forms come to being. This process can manifest itself as the effect of conscious and voluntary action of a subject generating new forms, or as self-organization of chaotic matter that cannot be governed by will or consciousness, spontaneous emergence of a form that finds a way towards a new order.

Do new social forms come into existence spontaneously, as an effect of a natural process that human beings are obliged to accept and to deal with? Or do they come into existence for a conscious act of will, as effect of a project, of a conflict, a political decision and action?

Obviously this dilemma is too simplistic, and things happen in different ways, spontaneity and will are confused, chance and intentions intermingle in the historical process. But I want to know if the process of change can be managed by deliberate human action in the present conditions of crisis. My question is: can the present agony of modern capitalism be consciously managed by political action, and turned into a new form of social existence?

Obviously political power has never been able to actually control the whole of social relationships, and Reason has never been able to reduce the infinite complexity of reality to knowledge, but in the Modern age it was possible to know and to control a relevant part of the social complexity, and Modernity can be seen in retrospect as an age of relative reducibility and governability of the social world: politics was the technique based on the ability to know what is relevant in the overall flow of information, and the art of predicting its becoming so, to govern the main events and trends.

The shift to the hyper-complex reality of the networked world has made impossible to understand and control the relevant flows of information circulating in the Infosphere and continuously stimulating the social brain. Therefore the old art of politics is showing itself more and more impotent to predict, reign and turn collective action towards a common goal. Consequently power is less and less reliant on the possibility of government, and is attempting to submit the flows of information, the intentions and actions of the social body to the model of governance.

Governance is the effect of the embedding of techno-linguistic automated devices in the continuum of social behavior and communication. Thanks to the automation of interconnected relations, organization and order are expected to emerge from the chaotic matter of social life: biology, media, technology, economic interests, affection, unconsciousness. Life, language, production are penetrated and interconnected by a dissemination of devices (dispositifs) aiming to submit the linguistic behavior to pre-conceived procedures and finalities, whose task is to make actions and enunciations predictable and manageable, and finally reducible to the overarching goal of capitalist accumulation and expansion.

In 1972 the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the sociologist Niklas Luhmann debated on the predictable effects of the evolution of media and of the expansion of social information.¹¹

Over-simplifying their complex arguments I will roughly synthesize like this: while the optimist rationalist Habermas believes that the enhancement of human communication is destined to consolidate democracy and improve daily life, Luhmann was expressing doubts on the positive effects of the expansion of the Infosphere, and conjectured that the expansion of the domain of information was destined to shift the emphasis from rational political decision towards administrative processes of differentiation. Democracy therefore is not reinforced, but endangered by the expansion of the Infosphere.

In the current situation, marked by the infinite expansion of the Infosphere—particularly of economic and financial information—rational elaboration and political decision are no more within the reach of individual or social organizations. Democracy, as a result, has been replaced by automatic procedures, by algorithms and devices for automatic selection and recombination whose general rationale is the replication of the capitalist form.

The efficiency of the rational will and political action depends on the possibility of processing the information flows and choosing the best options. When info-flows are too fast, too dense, too compressed for rational elaboration and decision on time, then what was called politics in the Modern age becomes unable to choose and consciously generate new forms.

Neither democracy nor authoritarian power seem able to process the infinite and hyper-accelerated flow of information, so morphogenesis can no more be a process of conscious decision and elaboration, and turns into a self-regulating effect of blind emergence. The info-networked Super-organism is evolving outside the sphere of human decision and knowledge, although its evolution is affecting the human environment—sometimes in a catastrophic way.

Capitalism as Double Bind

Slavoj Žižek says that the financial collapse is not the end of the world, just the end of capitalism that we can hardly imagine. He’s possibly right, but the problem is this: what if the semiotic model of capitalism—and particularly of financial capitalism—has become the only one grid of perception and interaction? What if the biopolitical model of capitalism has pervaded the very fabric of social reproduction?

“The organism which destroys its environment destroys itself,” Gregory Bateson said in a speech delivered at the Korzybski Memorial in the year 1970. And also he said:

If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the pre-cybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reduction ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us.¹²

Thirty years have gone, and we have not stopped thinking in Darwinian terms of competition, of survival of the fittest. Capitalism is agonizing, and the planet is dragged into the agony as well. Monetarism as autonomization of the monetary function can be considered as the capitalist attempt to escape or at least defer the final collapse of capitalism.

In order to prolong its agony capitalism is subjecting the social energy and particularly the general intellect. The relation between capital and general intellect (the living force of knowledge and the technological potency of labor) can be interpreted in terms of relation between the Form and the Content.

Just try to imagine this scenario, which is not so unlikely: the financial system of Europe totally crashes, national states stop paying wages to public workers, and all of a sudden money loses its grip on the social mind. Would our skills, our knowledge, our competences be cancelled by this sudden apocalyptic event? Not at all, of course.

We would be the same as we are now. Engineers would be able to build bridges, doctors would be able to heal sick people, and poets would be able to create their imaginary worlds. Exactly like now, and possibly better.

The crumbling of the form would not affect the content.

But the agony of the capitalist form, if protracted in time will slowly but steadily dismantle the social content, and it is already doing this. The de-financing and privatization of the public school, for instance, is going in this direction. The majority of the population is marginalized and mass de-schooling results. Private schools are reducing knowledge to the idolatry of the economic dogma, technical skills are separated from social understanding and science is separated from the humanities. This is the school reform that started in 1999 with the signature of the Bologna Chart—in actuality, it is the destruction of the legacy of the autonomy of knowledge, and of transdisciplinary research.

The form is destroying the content. The relation between the form and content sometimes becomes pathogenic, and starts producing what Gregory Bateson named double binds.

Bateson has described this process in his studies on the genesis of schizophrenia: the context is affecting the understanding of the message, in such a way that communication itself is jeopardized at the end, because the form of interaction (medium) changes the content, or perverts the understanding of the content (meaning).

The more serious and conspicuous degree of symptomatology is what is conventionally called schizophrenia. … The literal is confused with the metaphoric. Internal messages are confused with external. The trivial is confused with the vital. The originator of the message is confused with the recipient and the perceiver with the thing perceive.¹³

In situations like these the content has to be disentangled from the form, and a new form has to arise from the self-organization of the content.

Generation by Schism

What is Form (morphè)?

For Gestalt theory the brain perceives objects thanks to the existence of forms that are embedded in the perceptual constitution of the mind. As Gestalt, the Form is the condition for the differentiation of objects from the surrounding environment, and for the interpretation of their meaning.

But we can also say that Form is the semiotic pattern that our mind projects into the world, and the model for the production of external objects. In this sense Form can also be defined as a prototype, the original in-formation which shapes matter. By this point of view we can say that Form is a general semiotizer: the paradigm that makes possible the attribution of consistent meaning to phenomena that we experience as signs.

When Guattari speaks of chaosmic spasm he is saying that the general semiotizer is no longer able to semiotize, and the social mind is deprived of the ability to process information in a consistent way. The refrain is no longer able to resonate with the surrounding info-environment. This is the spasm. Then a process of re-syntonization begins, and Guattari names this process chaosmosis. In the chaosmotic process forms emerge from chaos by vibratory approximation to an order that is functional and aesthetic. Functional order makes possible the manipulation of objects, while aesthetic order enables the conjunction of objects in the sensibility and sensitivity of the living organism.

In certain cases, the form—as semiotic grid—can become a tangle, a generator of double binds. In these cases the Form (the Gestalt) is not helping to interpret and to handle the contents of the collective mind, but it is limiting the possibility of development of the matter-content and jeopardizing the concatenation of mind and Infosphere. When the Form starts to jeopardize and destroy the contents that are organized and in-formed by it (knowledge, skills, technology, social emotionality), then disentanglement is the only alternative to devastation and death. In our society Capital is the General Gestalt of our experience of production and circulation of things.

The authors who have been speaking of paradigm shifts have generally forgotten to say that this shift is not necessary nor linear. The paradigm shift is a tendency and a possibility, but in the process of social becoming this tendency and this possibility may be obstructed and hindered by the overwhelming force of the automatism implied in the past form of subjectivity. We have to be aware of this contradiction if we want to understand the real process of social morphogenesis, in the present time, and in the present conditions.

Capitalism, as the general form of the Economy is entangling the potential developments of the social brain, impeding and diverting the paradigm shift. If we want to understand this entanglement we have to retrace the history of the present subjectivity, analyzing the various layers of its becoming, the psychic, the cultural and the aesthetic too.

Bateson uses the word “schismogenesis” to describe the process of differentiation internal to human groups and the generation of new levels of anthropological integration. I want to use the same word—schismogenesis—in order to describe the separation that leads to the generation of new forms.

The generation of a Form that is more likely to foster the development of the potencies of the Content can only happen by dissociation, and disentanglement of the potentiality of the content from the entangling Form. Schismogenesis means therefore, in my intention, self-organization of the contents after their dissociation from the entangling Form, and proliferation by contagion (affective, informational, aesthetic contagion) of the new Form that is generated by the schism.

In our present condition a question arises: is disentanglement still possible, when the mind of the social organism has been deeply infected by the viral proliferation of double binds?

And also: what is the origin of the proliferation of double binds in the social mind?

The paradigm shift is a general tendency inscribed in the evolution of contents of knowledge, technology and social production, but this tendency is hindered by entangling forms, which act as a form of repetitive semiotizer generating double binds in the social mind.

In order to understand why the social mind is unable to free itself from these entangling forms of semiotization we have to analyze the cultural and psychological becoming of sensibility, and the infection of the social organism that is investing the sphere of sensibility.

1. Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 17.
2. Félix Guattari, “Machine et structure,” in Change, 12 (1971), 50.
3. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Baines and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 135.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatttari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), 201.
5. Guattari, Chaosmosis, 128.
6. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 85-6.
7. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), Introduction.
8. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980).
9. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984), 3.
10. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
11. Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971).
12. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 451, 462.
13. Ibid., 261.