The Third Unconscious

The Psychosphere in the Viral Age

Franco Berardi

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839762543
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Unconscious knows no time, it has no before-and-after, it does not have a history of its own. Yet, it does not always remain the same. Different political and economic conditions transform the way in which the Unconscious emerges within the "psychosphere" of society. In the early 20th century, Freud characterized the Unconscious as the dark side of the well-order framework of Progress and Reason. At the end of the past century, Deleuze and Guattari described it as a laboratory: the magmatic force ceaselessly bringing to the fore new possibilities of imagination. Today, at a time of viral pandemics and in the midst of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism, the Unconscious has begun to emerge in yet another form. In this book, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi vividly portraits the form in which the Unconscious will make itself manifest for decades to come, and the challenges that it will pose to our possibilities of political action, poetic imagination, and therapy.

Part I

On the Threshold

1

Threshold/Poetry

A novel coauthored by William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick does not exist. The British director Ridley Scott mixed their literary destinies when he used the title of a short novel written by Burroughs – Blade Runner (a Movie), 1979 – as the title for Blade Runner (1982), based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).

The movie that constituted the pinnacle of aesthetic consciousness of the techno-cultural mutation underway in the 1980s emerged at the meeting point between Burroughs’s and Dick’s imaginations.

The topic of Burroughs’s short novel is that of a strange epidemic of contagious cancer. The setting is today’s world. After riots in 1984, at the end of the twentieth century a new disease emerges and rapidly begins to spread. This blitz-cancer is a fatal disease, but it is also capable of endowing its host (always a man, since women do not exist in Burroughs’s imaginary) with enormous sexual energy. Although medical institutions have forbidden its diffusion, the blitz-cancer circulates through the city in the hands of the blade runners, who carry it around alongside other drugs and antidotes. Burroughs’s Blade Runner was a delirious text, and despite the movie it still remains almost unknown to the general public.

This delirium also contained an intuition that was repro-posed in Burroughs’s Ah Pook Is Here (likewise published in 1979): language as a form of viral infection and the virus as the prime metaphor of that mutation which we call ‘culture’. Ah Pook ends with an apocalyptic vision.

In Burroughs, language may be seen as a virus that in ancient times stabilised itself inside the organism of the human animal, pervading it, mutating it, and transforming it into what it is now.

In The Ticket That Exploded he writes, ‘Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try to stop your internal sub-vocal discourse. Try to achieve even ten seconds of interior silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk … Language is a genetic defect with no immunology.’¹

The origins of culture, Burroughs says, can be found in an infection of the mind and of the environment. Then we may argue that the shift from nature to the cultural condition is enabled by a viral infection. This virus provoked a schizoid effect: an inclination to build fictitious universes that do not correspond to the immediate perceptual experience but convey a linguistic architecture of meaning whose foundation is nowhere to be found, because it is only the projection of a world of language on the screen of outer reality.

Also the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, in his 2013 book on negation, Saggio Sulla Negazione, suggests that language acted as the evolutionary jump that established the quest for meaning – thus setting in motion the endless chain of misunderstandings, contradictions, differentiations, conflicts and wars.²

Burroughs writes, ‘We have observed that most of the trouble in the world has been caused by ten to twenty percent of folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus. Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center.’³

And also:

In these caves the white settlers contracted a virus passed down along their cursed generations that was to make them what they are today a hideous threat to life on the planet. This virus this ancient parasite is what Freud calls the unconscious spawned in the caves of Europe on flesh already diseased from radiation. Anyone descended from this line is basically different from those who have not had the cave experience and contracted this deadly sickness that lives in your blood and bones and nerves that lives where you used to live before your ancestors crawled into their filthy caves. When they came out of the caves they couldn’t mind their own business. They had no business of their own to mind because they didn’t belong to themselves any more. They belonged to the virus. They had to kill torture conquer enslave degrade as a mad dog has to bite. At Hiroshima all was lost.⁴

Language is the viral agent that enables the schizophrenic separation of conscious experience from biological nature, while at the same time secreting the unconscious; that innermost, foreign subtalk which we can never fully master and that often takes the upper hand in our social behaviours.

The linguistic virus has a schimogenic effect because it ushers in a second world, diverging from what is immediately present: the cultural universe is a schism from nature, a creation that is intimately self-contradictory.

If Burroughs’s architecture is essentially schizophrenic, it is also perfectly complementary with the paranoid architecture of Philip Dick.

Burroughs imagines a dystopian metropolis of sickness and toxicity where couriers incessantly circulate drugs along the streets and along media channels, keeping the nervous system in a permanent state of excitement and fear: electronic adrenaline.

This Burroughsian nightmare sounds almost like a description of the planet after the end of the coronavirus pandemic and of the time of lockdowns: medicalisation of every fragment of the economic system and bankruptcy of the financial institutes and political institutions.

Any comeback to the normal world seems impossible, as we jump into a dimension where pandemic danger becomes the core of the economy and of political rule. Burroughs again: ‘I advance the theory that in the electronic revolution a virus is a very small unit of word and image … Unloosing this virus from the word could be more deadly than unleashing the power of the atom. Because all hate, all pain, all fear, all lust is contained in the word.’⁵

What can we expect after the spread of the virus and after the wide medicalisation of life? A planetary war among the big corporations of biological research and the political institutions, or the contrary, a holy alliance of biogenetic engineers and big finance?

Little by little, we are shifting from Burroughs’s exploded universe to the concentrationary universe of Philip Dick. The advertising system is in ruins because advertisement sells a world that is no longer accessible – consequently, techno-mediatic production migrates towards the creation of simulated stimulation machines. The synthetic techno-maya secretes a social life of its own: social distancing becomes the rule that commands a remote form of the economy and of the daily business of life.

The technology of virtual reality, first promoted in the 1980s by Jaron Lanier, then forgotten in the wake of the network euphoria, has been recently relaunched by Oculus Rift – and, in the near future, it may also stick its tentacles inside the global mind, injecting growing doses of Synaesthetic Simulated Life.

The 5G technology for cellular communication networks will multiply their transmission capacity so that individuals will be able to transfer more and more actions from the offline to the online dimension. At the same time, however, this enhancement of broadband connectivity will improve the performance of those devices for total control that are based on the (growing) amount of data extracted from the social environment.

Eventually, the recent lockdowns might appear as an early experimentation with a new form of life. A life in which bodily contact is reduced to a minimum, if it is not abolished, while centralised control on the activity of the individuals is established as a preventive measure against the spreading of pandemics – and therefore as a postponement of the impending extinction of humankind, or at least of human civilisations.

A crucial topic in Dick’s overwhelming and chaotic oeuvre is the threat of an invasion of the mental environment in which we dwell. Such invasion can be exogenous or endogenous: it can be provoked by external agents like the drug D in A Scanner Darkly or like the kipple that returns many times in Dick’s novels. It can also be generated inside the organic mind, like the psychosis that he often writes about.

Dick was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of nineteen, and the subject of psychosis is recurrent throughout his work.

In schizophrenia, the idios kosmos (private world) broadens enormously, to the point of integrating the system of relations and meanings of the koinos kosmos (shared world). The schizophrenic person recomposes the fragments of reality that belong to their mind, by creating their own principles of organisation.

The koinos kosmos is the world where we act and move every day (or: where we believe we are acting and moving). The sphere of social, economic affective exchanges that we call ‘reality’ can be distinguished from the idios kosmos that we create inside our mind and that from our mind is projected outside.

Some psychiatrists view schizophrenia as a form of over-inclusion within the signification process. When we open too many lines of semantic flight, when we attribute too many meanings to the signs that we receive, when the surrounding environment seems overloaded with messages that we must decode, our existence can turn difficult and painful and can grow so chaotic that our mind feels on the brink of explosion.

Somehow, however, mental activity itself could be considered as an invading agent, as an alien who is living within us. Ignorance – the fact that we do not know something that is concerning us in an extremely intimate way – can also be an invader.

In a 1982 interview in which he discusses Rachael, the beautiful replicant of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dick suggests that Rachael is an android who does not know that she is.

The idea that all of us may be aliens without knowing it opens very large philosophical and psychological perspectives.

Since the human being is the product (cultural, technical, historical) of countless influences, impulses and implementations, we may infer that it is an android who wrongly believes itself to be a human. And also what is the meaning of this word: itself? What is this ‘self-ness’ if not the inner gaze of a biological organism that is technically and culturally modified so that it believes himself not to be an object but, simply, a ‘self’?

Just Imagine for a Moment

Just imagine for a moment if Burroughs and Dick had actually managed to write a novel together. I guess they would have described something similar to what we are going through right now in 2020 and 2021: the proliferation of a bio-info-psycho virus inside a society that is on the brink of an environmental, financial, but also psychic collapse.

Global society has not entered a difficult situation because of the explosion of the coronavirus epidemic. It was already on the edge of collapse. Let’s not forget that important point.

This is immediately clear, if we consider the environmental disasters that plagued the year 2019 alone: the gigantic fires of Australia, Siberia, California and Amazonia; the melting ice in Greenland and the broader Arctic; the foggy nightmare of Delhi; and the invasions of locusts in Africa are evidence that climate change is already deploying its deadly effects. The months immediately preceding the spread of the virus were also marked by a social spasm, a proliferation of huge demonstrations and riots from Hong Kong to Santiago, to Quito, Beirut, Paris, Barcelona and Tehran. The global economy was already miring in a long stagnation, counting for its survival on the ceaseless injection of financial investments, paid through the impoverishment of social life and infrastructures. A psychic collapse, too, was clearly perceivable in social and political behaviour, such as the revengeful choices of many electorates worldwide. The sense of an impending catastrophe was already palpable.

The artistic landscape of 2019, particularly in film, was punctuated by flashes of apocalyptic consciousness. Just before the explosion of the virus, the sensitive antennae of many artists were perceiving a sort of pathological vibration. Ken Loach’s movie Sorry We Missed You portrays working conditions in which a psychic collapse becomes inevitable. Todd Phillips’s Joker recounts the spread of mental suffering in a society that is prone to forms of psychotic rebellion. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite goes through the stages of a frantic struggle to survive, in a world where everybody fights everybody else, while every social stratum crushes and oppresses the strata below – until an epidemic of violence comes to destroy all kinds of hierarchy.

Society before the pandemic was already a collapsing society: it was at that point when a bio-semiotic agent came to bring about a major disruption, paralysis and silence.

This is how mutations happen: starting from events that are inconsistent and incompatible with the previous context and that cannot be interpreted in rational terms. Nonsignifying units of enunciation set in motion profound and irreversible changes that we cannot oppose, that politics cannot control, and that power has no weapons to destroy.

This mutation has in itself the elements of a novel by Philip Dick, but it deploys them along the conceptual lines of William Burroughs.

The virus acts as a recoder: first of all, it recodes the immune system of the individuals, and then of entire populations. But the virus’s operations overflow the biological sphere into the psycho-sphere, through the effects of fear and distancing. The virus transforms the reactions of a body to the body of the other, thus reframing the sexual unconscious.

We have already seen this process in the years of the immuno-deficiency syndrome that deeply affected the erotic sphere, but to a certain extent endangered the very dimension of social solidarity.

Finally, we have a media-spread of the virus: information is saturated by the epidemics; public attention is captured and totalised. But at the same time, a new sensibility can also emerge: the past is perceived in a different way, and the future is upturned. The past of perpetual connection will soon appear in our memory as a symptom of loneliness and anxiety, and the online dimension will be unconsciously internalised as a feature of sickness.

An Immense Schismogenetic Poem

This bio-info-psycho circuit must be processed and aesthetically elaborated to outline some cognitive modalities that might enable us to pass beyond the threshold where we find ourselves at present.

The threshold is a passage from light to darkness.

But it may be also a passage from darkness to light.

The threshold is the point where, according to Gregor...