NeuroWarfare
Brain as Battlespace
I am updating and refining information on my 2020 article and I discovered some new information by Stavroula Pabst from 2024. She cites Francois du Cluzel and Riley C. Murray among others. If I were writing the article today, I would include these sources in my bibliography found at the end of this page. But I would really like to follow up on what became of this DARPA project named “RadioBio.”
Here are some links to infomation discussed in the article:
Outstanding Critics of Tech - https://lemmy.world/c/critics_of_tech
The Body Electric by Robert O Becker - https://lemmy.world/post/15846553
Bioelectric medicine - https://lemmy.world/post/15743463
RADHAZ - https://lemmy.world/post/15885388
PEAR Lab - http://pearlab.icrl.org/
A Commanding Non-Presence:
the signs of technological totalitarianism
and the social impact of waveformed consciousness in the 21st century
by Michael Bradley Grotz
March 2020
Introduction
Surpassing the effect of the printing press in 15th century Europe or the dissemination of imperial writ in Asia, projections of sign in field form are the expression of the “Western fascination and drive to disembody the voice from its anatomical mechanisms” (Goodman, 2019: 70). The sentiment that arrived with the invention of the telegraph that “we are on the ‘border of a spiritual harvest because thought now travels by steam and magnetic wires’” is still with us today even if the technical means are much more advanced (Nobel, 1997: 94). This fascination with remote thought conveyed by machines is the focus of this thesis. Why is there a need for the embodied context of a word to be made scarce, as if the word is best made incorporeal, is best abstracted and stripped from bodies situated in definite places at certain times with particular histories?
Symbolic “activity without presence” has been expanding and developing since the advent of telecommunications (Goodman, 2019: 3). The auditory, electromagnetic, and other fields of (spooky) semio-action at a distance have been weaponized and communication militarized in ever more sophisticated and subtle ways. Steve Goodman and others have called the investigation of this post-Enlightenment turn in communication AUDINT, a portmanteau of auditory intelligence suggestive of the martial origins of the phenomenon (Goodman et al, 2012, 2019). Continuing the study that commenced with Sonic Warfare, Goodman and his colleagues take on the next generation of full spectrum dominance warefare, calling this the “Unsound.” The focus is on the marginalia of the sensory: the obliques, the subliminals in the communicable and comprehensible—what, if vision were applied in metaphor to hearing, would be the invisibles beyond utterance. The term Unsound “refers not only to what humans cannot hear, but also to non-cognitive, inhuman phenomena connected to the unknown, including the hum, hyperrhythmia, and auditory hallucinations” (Goodman, 2019: 1). However difficult to attribute, these phenomena are not arbitrary or incidental and thus “unsound aptly describes the colonization of inaudible frequencies by control” (Goodman, 2019: 191). Counterpart occlusion, the Undead “is a cipher . . . a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive” (Goodman, 2019: 1-2). Again, the prefix Un- denotes an agency, a controler, a field of action directed by a will: the kybernetes. Sound and death are free and known, spontaneous natural contingencies; unsound and undeath are unfree and unknown, determined and designed orchestrations.
The unsound:undead is the realm of the unlucky. The unlucky always carries with it the mutually exclusive ambiguity of chance and the contrivance, accident and curse. If the blade of Brutus had been invisible, if the fatal wound been inflicted with greater subtlety, the end of Caesar may have been considered “just” unlucky rather than conspiracy and betrayal. History may have recorded the suspicion of misfortune rather than the certainty of example. A fully scientific mystification, the subtlety of ephemeral waves is the ideal expression of the unlucky. The unsound:undead is unfortunate for the used and a fortune for hierarch superusers. Indeed, sovereignty can now be defined as that which “commands the waves of space” (Berardi, 2012: 93), the ubiquitous and invisible influence that determines the the luck or unluck of subjects.
The radiated word is the decontextualized word. It is a word become nameless, possessing one’s attention yet dispossessed of the other’s being: a commanding non-presence. It is to disembody the vocal chord, to depopulate the timbre of the living being who speaks. This is a drive to short circuit dialogue, to subtract a confrontable, conversable body, to un-face who we would face as if the sound of another’s voice in the absence of all except our face must mean that we are speaking/thinking for ourselves what we hear of the machines. Speaking what we hear: this is a will to ventriloquism. This drive of the disembodied voice extends beyond radio frequency broadcast into ever-expanding mobilizations of the sonic and electromagnetic spectra including modes of silent verbal and non-verbal indexicality in the remote activation of muscle fiber, ion channel, and action potentials of the body electric (Pall, 2013).
Quantum non-locality and ventriloquy are the premier idioms for this mode of communication. Since any difference noticed can serve as an index [Gal], these emergent methods of communication may be experienced as telethesia: “impressions transferred otherwise than through the recognized channels of sense” (Royle, 1991). What does this disembodied form of communication signify and what does it mean for and do to a society?
Many new technological innovations initially sound like science fiction, but then present fiction becomes future fact. What is important is the trajectory or arc of implication. In The Sound Sweep, J. G. Ballard predicts that ultrasound will form “a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes” (1985: 44). Gunther Anders writes that “futurological novelists” like Ballard are “historians turned towards the future” (2014: 307) and “the viscera that we have to learn how to read as predictive signs are not those of sacrificial animals, but those of machines” (2014: 306). The machines of today do not portend a future of liberty as our bodies are hacked and the lobes of our mind are redirected with neural links (Oohashi 2000).
Hertzian Machine Language and the Antenna Body
Before we begin an analysis of the social impact of these unsoud:undead technologies, or technologically mediated communications as a social force, an enumeration of several specific technologies, research programs, and their applications will make this topic of ostensible intangibles tangible and identifiable. However sophisticated, these technologies are not arcana. They are the everyday reality of the 21st century.
As we explore the dimensions of the extra-sonic, we should recognize the continuity between the force of sound and that of the unsound. Although it is true that compression waves (sound) and electromagnetic waves (radiation) are different phenomena of physics (unless we move to higher levels of unified theory), their effects and social impact are similar. These are disembodied forces that act on bodies and minds. For instance, we view sound as a “force” in society not only because it is a carrier of compelling symbolic articulations but also because sound acts on bodies; “before the activation of causal or semantic, that is, cognitive listening, the sonic is a phenomenon of contact and displays, through an array of autonomic responses, a whole spectrum of affective powers” (Goodman, 2012: 10). There is a continuum between sonic and spectral forces whose effects begin with autonomic, reflexive responses and end at intrusions upon executive cognitive function. Some nonlethal sonic weapons, for example, use modulations designed to target individuals “at frequencies near the resonance of human body parts” (Goodman, 2012: 109). Other research has developed a science of emotive resonators, “the neuroscience of the sonic activation of fear” where sound may become a ballistic threat as “‘affectiles’ (affect + projectile), or what William James refers to as pulsed vectors of feeling” (Goodman, 2012: 69, 83). This use of sound conveys meaning in non-verbal, visceral modes.
Extrasonic spectra are utilized in a similar kinetic fashion. Pulsed Energy Projectiles (PEPS) act on nociceptors causing pain and triggering mental illness just as “beamed microwaves” are used to disrupt the nervous system and degrade the cognitive function of targets (Moreno, 2012: 155, 143). So as not to be deceived by the mystification of the unseen, we should regard wireless, incorporeal touch as touch nevertheless—kinetic—otherwise there would be effects without causes. Spectra are in direct contact with human viscera, a form of persuasion that would delight sophists and rhetoriticans. Holding a gun to the head can be very persuasive, better yet is an invisible field to the head (if the contrivance of a fabricated indicator was not enough). No argument is the point: reason confounded. Dialectic is disabled and an authoritarian will is unhinged from deliberation and made absolute. Through subtle machinations, reason is subverted. An inevitable trajectory can be inferred:
the drift of high technology toward the imperceptible is accompanied by the deployment of technical sensors that transduce vibration, consciously imperceptible to the body . . . [these are] Machines that “couple and decouple with our bodies without us knowing. Working on microscopic scales, often pathogenic, many electromagnetic fields interfere with the cellular structure of the body. Paranoia accompanies dealing with such Hertzian machines.” (Goodman, 2012: 188)
This paranoia results from our understanding that the autonomy of reason and of our bodies is no longer under our control. Our bodies and minds could follow another’s commands just as automatically as Volta’s frog legs reflexed to electric impulses rather than to a will to survive.
Always active yet unseen, the Hertzian machines know no dialectic, consider no diversity of thought, do not negotiate; the machine only obeys the signals of command and control and the human body is just another component in the assemblage. We find ourselves in a subordinate position, the position of prey or slave: either be useful or be destroyed. To speak of “communications” technologies is really to speak a misnomer. These technologies are in reality an infrastructure of one-sided signal processing where human autonomy is to be subtracted, freedom of expression reduced, and signal centralized. When analyzing communication technologies, we should consider
Anders’s elaborations on the ‘prejudicing role’ of technology (2017: 24), i.e. the fact that the apparatus is never neutral but that it always implies its use and that we, ‘irrespective of the political and economic system from within which we turn to it,’ are always-already shaped by it (2017:25), seem most relevant regarding the digital condition of the present. (Nosthoff and Maschewski, 2019: 79)
What became the internet, for example, began with ARPANET and implies the use of a distributed failsafe network in case of nuclear war. Such a network is the exact opposite of a free electronic frontier. It is absolute control even if the world is at an end (Scarry, 2014). Communication infrastructures like the internet are not communications in the sense of intercourse or free exchange. “Communications” are not a civil domain. They are derived from and continue the directives of war: either be commanded and controlled or be destroyed. What is at work in the Hertzian machines of the unsound is fundamentally what is at work in all telecommunications technologies: a “martial hauntology,” a “weaponization of vibration,” a “battlefield spectrality” (Goodman, 2019: xi).
One of the best known and publicized examples of the emergent communicable technologies is the Hyper Sonic Sound System (HSS). Utilizing ultrasound, HSS produces a result comparable to the Frey Effect where “human beings can ‘hear’ microwave energy” (Justesen, 1975: 395). These applications of physics can deliver cognitive information (hailing) and produce autonomic, non-verbal effects like burning, vertigo, nausea (Altmann, 2001: 179), other unpleasant sensations, and (with just the right frequency) excruciating pain. As for the cognitive effects, since “inner speech is an almost continuous aspect of self-presence” and because voice-to-skull energy can get inside our heads,
the HSS increases its cadence to orchestrate a surfeit of presence within the self. Anonymously supplementing the subject’s audible and inner articulations, the ultrasonic beam plants another third voice directly into the head, covertly disassociating it from its source; the resulting extension of one’s voice and more specifically, speech—especially when it is perceived as being disembodied—has the potential to create a debilitating range of corollary states, from fear and terror to insanity. (Goodman, 2019: 70)
This “electrophonic transduction” would override endogenous mental states, degrading cognitive function (Goodman, 2019: 93). Technology is, here, an enhancement like enhanced interrogation is an “enhancement.” Again, the over-simplistic dualism of the Cartesian mind-body split or the Hegelian spirit that would make a distinction between the psychological and the physical—mainly as an excuse to sidestep human rights litigation and any redress of grivence—is not in keeping with the reality. The brain is psychology and psychology is physical. Stress hormone cascades of glucocorticoids and other oxidative and disruptive chemical reactions take their toll on the body (Sapolsky, 2000) due to malign states of mind induced by psychological warfare techniques.
An individual’s identity becomes over-shocked with foreign object damage, proprioception and first-person intuition recognize and muster against the degrading text just as an immune response seeks to eliminate pathogens. An introjected, offensive text exceeds boundaries and inflames and fevers the mind. The hostile speech organ transplant is rejected. And what is said, as a text of control, dominates and does not console or council, seeks submission through degradation and does not illumine. Judge Schreber’s condition becomes the human condition, “God’s nerves” are the grid and communications infrastructure, and
ultrasonic beam technology either represents the final stages of schizophonia or, maybe more persuasively, it announces the evolution of new states of waveformed consciousness . . . we can no longer conceive of hearing voices as being the sole preserve of the religious, the chosen, and the insane. (Goodman 2019; 71)
This is why Toby Heys (2011: 14) speaks of the “antenna body,” recalling Makenzie Wark’s phrase that we no longer have roots “we have aerials.” The human body and mind have become waveformed; “magnetic field human body communication” (Park, 2015), “neurosignatures” (Giordano, 2014) or “brain prints,” and “wireless near infrared neural monitoring” are not only speculative (Moreno, 2012: 100).
As a public, our consciousness of the reality of these forces lags. We have still not shifted our paradigm of reality to the same degree as our perceptions of the possible adapted to the invention of the telephone, radio, and television. We no longer think of the telephone or photography as ghostly or supernatural, but initially we regarded it with superstition and incredulity. We are in a similar moment of re-schematizing what is within the realm of reality when it comes to today’s cutting edge.
ELFs, PEFs, and RadioBio
As is to be expected, much of this research and development are products of the “military-industrial-scientific” (or –academic) complex, to redeploy the confident pre-Killian Eisenhower phrase. The view of human bodies as shivering with the “xenosonic resonance of meat puppets” (Goodman, 2019: 2) finds its expression in a DOD document, the “Application of Biology to Defense Applications,” that pursues “technology to enable remote interrogation and control of biological systems at the system/organ/tissue/cellular/molecular levels” through the interface of biology and magnetics (Moreno, 2012: 100). In addition, continuing the legacy of ARPA program 562 (Walter Reed’s Pandora Project), DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office began a research program in 2017 called RadioBio that investigates “electromagnetic signaling in biosystems” and searches for “biosystem antennas.” As James C. Lin, a leader in this field writes, “the possibilities and potential applications in data transfer, information delivery, and communication for command and control are enormous, once the bioelectromagnetic mechanisms for weak cell-to-cell signaling and communication in living organism are harnessed” (2018: 49).
The Airforce Research Lab’s Human Effects Directorate has also designed “brain-targeted, performance degrading techniques” in conjunction with the USAF Radio Frequency Bioeffects Division which develops “malign neruomodulators” and “advanced neuroweapons” (Moreno 2012; 178). The Department of Defense Multidisciplinary Research Program of the University Research Initiative (MURI) has produced Biological Detection Systems for Electromagnetic Signatures. The Air Force Office of Science and Research (AFOSR) has been working “on in-depth mechanistic research of the intersection of nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEF) with living organisms, and the development of targeted simulation procedures and processes” (Lin 2018; 51). Electromagnetic Environmental Effects (E3) and Electronic Warfare (EW) are certainly a domain of situational awareness for the military if not yet for civil society (Price, 2001; Knowles, 1996; Scarry, 1998).
Techniques of remote influence like the use of electromagnetic fields and psychological warfare have long been of interest to the Executive function in societies (the forcers: defense, law enforcement, intelligence community), those who possess the monopoly on violence. Augmenting structural violence, unattributable information operations, passive aggressive forms of violence, and information warfare (IW) are so successful because they remain unconfirmed, shrouded in the seemingly preposterous and plausible deniability. AUDINT references the work of Suzanne Treister as an example of a researcher who has mapped the “military-occult complex” (psi Ψ) that invented many of these more clandestine forms of violence (2019: 166). Considered are real programs, such as CIA’s Project Stargate and psychotronics research. The Macy Conferences on cybernetics and social psychology were also an important subject of her research (Treister 2007). Human beings are viewed as manipulable, completely malleable “amoebas” in which nothing inheres and it is only a question of designing the right cybernetic circuit for social control. Literally winning the hearts and minds; one day if not already, space-based masers ping (pang) sino-atrial nodes and pulse nervous ganglia.
Other scientists like Burris-Meyer who was under a Navy contract to investigate “the physiological and psychological effects of sound on men in warfare” are also a part of this history of waveform warfare (2019: 260). D. R. Hooker conducted research at Sandy Hook Naval Base examining the percussive effects of sound (2019: 266). Harvey Fletcher, working for Bell Labs, developed techniques for the Ghost Army, which was “the ultimate martial expression of Einstein’s theory of ‘spooky action at a distance’” (2019: 261).
Another leading researcher, Don R. Justesen (1975), explored the effect of microwaves on behavior for the VA Laboratories of Experimental Neuropsychology. At the time, sensors lacked sensitivity and pulse generators lacked field strength. This is no longer the case: “microwave signals are radiated by living things. . . Superconducting quantum interference detection (SQUID) techniques routinely detect magnetic signals from the brain, the heart, and other endogenous current sources” (Liboff, 2004: 46). It is completely legitimate to view “the living system as an electromagnetic entity, with the response of the system to a given electric or magnetic signal as an outcome expected on the basis of physical law” (Liboff, 2004: 42). In “A Human source for ELF magnetic perturbations,” Liboff (2016) writes that “endogenous weak extremely low frequency (ELF) magnetic fields are generated by ionic charge flows in axions, dendrites and synaptic transmitters.” We might wonder, then, how endogenous ELF is may be effected by powerful ELF arrays that exist in places like Clam Lake, WI and Jim Creek, WA to communicate with submarines worldwide. The scientific reality of detecting magnetic anomalies at great distances and the effect of electromagnetic fields on the human body cannot be dismissed (Harbinger 2016). Gamma oscillators in the brain and other “electromagnetic characteristics of living things may therefore allow for direct communication between individuals other than by means of the relatively recent evolutionary development of speech” (Liboff, 2004: 46).
Research in this domain of inquiry continues to advance. For example, Stefan Engström researches neuromagnetics and “magnetic field transduction in biological systems” (1999). Polina Anikeeva researches wireless magneto-thermal stimulation and the “remote neural excitation through the activation of the heat-sensitive capsaicin receptor TRPV1 by magnetic nanoparticles” (Rao, 2019). The bidirectional electromagnetic control of the hypothalamus and the potential of pulsed electromagnetic fields to cause venous thromboembolism has been documented by researchers such as Lui Huifeng. Electromagnetic fields act upon feratin, a paramagnetic protein. Fadel Adib utilizes radio reflectors to detect breathing and heart rate and even emotion can be recognized using wireless signals (2016). Neuroscientist Michael A. Wheeler has concluded that the magnetic control of the nervous system is not only theoretical.
Quantum effects also are just as much a reality in the brain as they are a reality in transistors. For example, the quantum and electromagnetic properties of cryptochromes may explain migratory avian spatial orientation and routing, as explored by the University of Illinois magnetic sensing theoretical and computational biophysics group. Experiments involving “low intensity radio frequency radiation” indicate that the “magnetic field would lead to modulation of the bird’s visual sense” and these same quantum pair effects on signaling proteins can also effect humans (2010). Researchers have also proposed that a solution to the hard problem of consciousness may be the properties of quantum entangled microtubules (Penrose and Hameroff, 1998). The IQOQI Zellinger group, active today, explores the intersection of quantum science and biology. A plethora of examples of this type of scientific research could be cited.
Vibration and Deprivatisation
Now that we have a sense of the history of sonic and electromagnetic communication research and development and are aware of a few of the current research endeavors underway, we have a context in which to apply the work of social theorists such as Günther Anders and Gilles Deleuze who have examined the nature of the conformist and control societies in which these telecommunication technologies have proliferated. In “The Obsolescence of Privacy,” Anders analyzes the “deprivation of freedom by acoustic means” (2017: 40). For our purposes, let “acoustic” stand for any waveform.
Like unexpected parts of our devices (Kuhn, 2003), our bodies emit compromising emanations. Like our ears without ear-lids, our emanating physiology remains unshielded. There is no emf shielding TEMPEST protocol for bodies and
vibrations always exceed the actual entities that emit them. Vibrating entities are always entities out of phase with themselves. A vibratory nexus exceeds and precedes the distinction between subject and object, constituting a mesh of relation in which discreet entities prehend each other’s vibrations. (Goodman, 2012: 82)
Interlacing subject and object, vibration is why “we no longer belong to ourselves once we are under electronic surveillance” (Anders, 2017: 40). To be a vibration supplanted by other vibrations is to cease to be a free person, a circumscribed integrity. The emissions of others bounce off us and change our position. The uncertainty principle could be reformulated: one must be unknown (private) in order to be oneself. This is because a sighted person is a hunted person, a tracked person, a compounded person with other persons on, particle bombarded:
the hunted man has to learn to interpret his own actions from the point of view of his predator. This internalization of the perspective of the other makes him develop an extreme prudence that at first takes the form of a paralyzing anxiety of a paranoid type: seeing himself in the third person, considering, with respect to each of his acts, how they might be used against him. (Chamayou, 2012: 70)
To be oneself becomes an escape from vibratory interception and thus “the art of escape is a semiotic art, an art of mastering the traces” (2012: 70). A trace is not only an opportunity for an enemy to lock on and attack, we are a target acquired and we are not ourselves with the tracers of the enemy on us. In today’s transparent world, we are “over-exposed smart bodies” (Kroker, 2004). There is no privacy safeguard for our body emanations. Our integument encapsulation is easily penetrated, easily violated. The internalization of others’ vibrations means that we cease to be our own causa sui (otherwise, why did our mind free itself from the limbic system and develop the frontal lobe). We cease to be self-determined, autonomous and free.
Smart bodies and smart devices are perfect for subjugation. Smart is dominion. For this reason, exercises continue at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin to train soldiers for wireless warfare in the cities at “home-station training lanes.” When you are at home, your wireless signals at war. Wireless fields penetrate the walls of our domus and monitor our activities (Woodbridge and Chetty, 2012; Wei, 2015). The home was a space once protected by the Fourth Amendment. Abuses of writs of assistance, the lodging of occupying forces, and the violation of information and personal effects were causes of the American Revolution. Now, there can be no privacy at home because our personal identifying information remains unprotected, available for anyone with the right machines and code to take and use to harm us. The Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act of 1968 has “all but been abandoned” (Lin, 2018: 51). The Privacy Act of 1974 also remains unenforced, especially since unauthorized information gathering through super-sensory means is an imperceptible violation. Through wireless, everything becomes an “abhor-Apparat,” a bugging device, and “without realizing it, the de-privatised individual that has outsourced itself, recorded itself, quantified itself and thus given itself to the machine has also become an expropriated individual” (Muller, 2016: 156).
But “we are not just deprived of our freedom to live without being listened to,” writes Anders, we are also deprived of “the freedom of living without listening” (2017: 40). Not only can we not be continent with respect to our own vibrations, external vibrations impinge upon us. In the case of sound, noise is “not merely an irritant, it serves a function. It reverberates with the demand that we make our own contribution to our own de-privatisation. Noise is one of the main instruments of conformism” (2017: 40). To share the reverberation of noise in common is to be congruent, so conformed as to be interchangable, which means that “the congruists no longer possess real secret treasures or a psychic private property. . . . They now share their privata with the others, unconditionally” (2014: 103). Once the devaluation of one’s self becomes internalized, all is given up and “this readiness for exhibition which we have developed under ‘soft terrorism,’ that is, in conformist society, is in our view just as characteristic as the mania for self-incrimination on the part of those who live under the bloody version of terrorism” (2014: 103). This is because “the wall between our inner and outer worlds has fallen … the wall between ‘active’ and ‘passive,’ between ‘free’ and ‘unfree,’ and the abolition of this difference proceeds from the hegemony of passivity and non-freedom” (2014: 101). Barriers against trespass and perimeters of security are what make a self possible, define one’s properties of personality and
it would be absurd to continue to attribute to such a person, who has been transformed into or who has been rendered “without walls,” a “selfhood” or an internal life of his own. Since he is, without the slightest residue, identical with the material that has been instilled into him, only with reference to such a person is the formula that a materialist from the 19th century [Feuerbach] coined for man in general actually completely valid, that is: you are what you eat. (2014: 102)
The entire population is “supplied with a similar or even single identical material (by means of the radio, for example)” and this material is “socialized property” (2014: 102). We think of private property as an indispensable feature of our society when there is really nothing of the kind. De-privatisation is the key factor. In a capitalistic society, why is nothing private? If the society were individualistic or self-centered, why is the overwhelmingly dominant force communitarian? Where is the tension between individual and collective, private and community? Freedom is not at the center of our society; the conformed consensus, a machined and manufactured consent, is the prime ideal.
Remote Conformism
It is not only economic relations but noise that “was tasked to make us submissive, to enforce conformity and co-ordination (Gleichschaltung), and to de-privatise us” (2017: 40). Noise is the intrusive reverberation of non-self, that which deprives us of ourselves. The reverberation of noise is intrusive and extractive. Noise invades and loots us. This applies just as much to aural noise as to noise in the electromagnetic spectrum, such as when engineers speak of signal to noise ratios. Noise diminishes our own signal. Noise is any disturbance, any artificial discomfort and distraction to body and mind.
Noise “is turned into an instrument that has the function of preventing us from escaping and adopting paths of our own. It blocks the notorious path of ‘introversion’” (2017: 41). Internal discovery is not valued. One may never look within or listen within. Such contemplations are commonly viewed as “just philosophy” and are devalued as lapses in the pure utilitarianism of work and the standing reserve. However, “it may be that Marx’s famous eleventh thesis of Feuerbach—the central pillar of the revolutionary methodology of the last century simply need to be overturned”; what we need is not action but interpretation, “deciphering possibilities” (Berardi, 2019: 3). We are not only of value as machine components being used or to be used. We should ask what is the use of the use, if the work is good work, etc. There is a fundamental irrationality in utilitarianism and pragmatism; the means must obtain their end, but what decides what those ends are, what chooses among ends? If an arbitrary will chooses for us, we need not imagine. To imagine is to be oneself, which is not useful or most efficient to the purposes of another will. There is nothing impractical, however, about the contemplation of one’s conscience; “men have but to think,” writes Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man, “and they will neither act wrong nor be misled” (126).
As meat machines, there can be nothing imagined within and then actualized without, only the already decided can be our choice. It can only be the without that is within. Noise, in Anders, is active on a semantic level. Not only distracting, it is ideological noise, the noise of the dogmatic and domineering. We are “prevented from imagining that this world could be any different or that there might be other worlds” (2014; 137). We are “prevented from conceptualizing” alternatives to the noise we must hear and since “evil consists in thoughtlessness” (1961; 30), our thoughtless obedience is an enormity.
The opposite of this automation and thoughtlessness is imagination which makes social progress possible (Graeber 2011; Graeber 2015; 90-94). For example, consider how fossil fuel extraction used to be of great use and definitely was an aid to pragmatic ventures, but now divestment and sequestration are deemed the better choice. This redetermination of ends required (re)imagination. Although our technologies (and current energy regime) constrain and determine to a great extent the conditions of possibility of our mode of sociality, what must follow is
precisely not the unconditional surrender in the face of the technically constructed but rather the necessity of a constant confrontation with it, the testing of the human limits compared to the all-powerful machine. Such a method would, in the least, give rise to a widening of one’s own imaginary horizon . . . a ‘hyperextension (überdehnung)’ of the ‘habitual achievements of fantasy and emotion (gewohnten Phantasie- und Gefühlsleistungen).’ (Nosthoff and Maschewski, 2019: 88)
The elimination of imagination is the loss of species being, the “non-specificity” (Muller, 2016: 155) of human creativity, the loss of an “undetermined technical Einrichten” (Nosthoff and Maschewski, 2019: 87) and “the loss of an original undeterminedness reinforced by a determining technology is echoed by the existential—as Anders would claim, totalitarian—potential of current technical developments” (Nosthoff and Maschewski, 2019: 88).
Dividuals and Co-mechanization
The conformist system is an Orwellian counterintuitive. It “is liberal not despite, but rather because of the fact that it is an integral system. And it is terrorist not despite, but rather because of the fact that it is gentle. And we are its victims not despite, but rather because of the fact that we are not aware of our slavery” (2014: 129). According to Anders, this oxymoronic and contradictory structure of society produces and is the result of dividuals, “those whose affects are totally divorced from the nature of their effects [their consequences]; those to whom it is not permitted to feel what they are doing” (2014: 122). Dividuals are without compassion or sympathy, are unwitting and alienated from their lifework. As dividuals, we have undergone “reverse coining” through our interactions with technology:
since there is no apparatus that does not totally change us . . . the coiner and the coined are interchangeable. If today there is someone who coins, it is not we who coin the machines, but to the contrary: it is the machines that coin us. We are transforming ourselves into their “imprints,” their “expression.” (2014: 304)
We have experienced “dehumanization without measure” (1968: 12). Coined by the machine, through “co-mechanization” we are “eliminated as human beings” (1968: 16). Our “machines take by conquest” so we live in an “empire of the machines” that is a “global machine” (1968: 16, 15). These machines “expel and eliminate like trash” anything that just will not do in the “thousand year Reich dreamed of by all machines” (1968: 16). Berardi (2019: 36), recalling Jaspers, writes that “the quintessential feature of Nazism” as a concept and universal phenomenon “is techno-totalitarianism” and a “full manifestation of the nature of Nazism might re-emerge as a consequence of the full implementation of technology.”
One of the most suppressed intellectual positions of our time is the rejection of technological neutrality. Once the husband of Hannah Arendt, Anders had every right to explore the origins of the “technological-totalitarian empire” (1968: 16). Is technological advancement really a force for good? Whatever one’s values or political ideology, technology is always recruited to serve one’s ends (e.g. project Cybersyn and the work of Stafford Beer). But is our form of technology precisely why we are afflicted with the harms we find in the world which our politics would remedy? [Langdon Winner]
Leibnizian Universals and the Subliminal
This “mechanized totalitiarianism” (1968: 17) takes away our freedom and debases our creative autonomy. How does this “co-mechanization” in a technological totalitarian society dispossess us of our autonomy? Direct force elicits an opposing reaction. Oblique, indirect force does not, since, under the threshold of corporal confrontation, it does not activate our defenses. Oblique forces are effective because, ultimately, “power is what you don’t have to do” (Graeber, 2015: 101). Direct force is not required. This is because “for conformist societies two distinctions lack validity . . . the distinction between explicit and implicit coercion” and “between assimilating and being assimilated” (2014: 94).
Conformist society is a somnolent, subliminal society. The automatism of the subliminal and the daylight of the conscious have merged. We are not conscious of our unconsciousness; we “do not realize that [our opinions] are supplied and molded” and this aspect of human psychology has been leveraged through
experiments with the so-called “subliminal” manipulation of man. . . . One is influenced by petites perceptions—to borrow a phrase from Leibniz—and with subliminal stimuli . . . the subliminal, which—as we said, it was Leibniz idea, conceived in connection with the ‘differential’—was inherited by Freud as a concept of the ‘unconscious’ . . . Later, in the hunt for the locus minoris resistentiae of the buyer they came up against his unconscious and set to work . . . The Leibnizian legacy has therefore attained the honor of being a psychotechnical con game to take advantage of the masses. (2014: 198-199)
Anders examines sirenic advertising where “to be = to be advertising-conscious” (2014: 110), [ ] which is reminiscent of Jarron Lanier’s (2014: ) concept of siren servers, the top information nodes of our society that determine all that will occur. The advert, the determining information, is a Leibnizian “universal grammar,” the “True Word” (Bakhtin, 1981: 271), the only word that gets all the attention, all the eyeballs—winner take all. [Bakhtin on Leibniz] The subliminal and universal mean that there is no autonomy or variation, no vital, creative activity. In the unimaginative world there is only one winner, all diversity is loser. The substrate mind is all humanity and there is no individuation apart from function and the division of labor. The individual objections of an Antigone, conscious and vital, are eliminated by the orchestrated mass unconscious, the universal hegemony of the Creons, the Eichmanns.
Anders describes advertising techniques of “hidden and subliminal persuasion” as “nonviolent aggression” (2014: 109) and concludes that “the methods of seduction will be all the more bloodless and humane, the more bloody and horrible are the goals and the risks we assimilate” (2014: 199). Even during the tranquility of “sleep,” the most bloodless and humane time of our days, “the technologists of the subliminal” intrude, what dreams may come (2014: 137). [ ] For, Anders writes in a recursive formula of positive feedback,
the more integral a power is, the more mute is its order. The more mute an order is, the more obvious is our obedience. The more obvious our obedience is, the more secure is our illusion of freedom. The more secure our illusion of freedom is, the more integral the power. (2014: 98)
[ ] We have become dividuals (cf. Deleuze, 1992: 5), automatic meat machines repeating an infinite loop. This is why thinkers like Wisenbaum (1976) differentiate between computer power and human reason. Human reason is generative in a way automatons are not. For the most part, we have minimized the qualitative difference between humans and machines in a conformist society and have forfeited the novelty of creation and discovery.
Same Difference and Tautological Exchange
Setting aside the trivialities and diversions, we are ideologically undifferentiated when it comes to what is at stake. The apparent non-conformist is just another identitarian conformity, since “a chorus of various voices, which proclaims in unison, ‘we are not conformists,’ confirms what it rejects by the way it rejects it,” just as in “cultural politics, the occupation of enemy positions is just as important as their ‘destruction’” (2014: 141-143). Protests and “happenings” are exploited by the establishment for the same reason (2014: 254-255).
When all is said and done, there is a coordinated consensus and so the “minimum of difference” between speakers to preform a dialogue
will no longer exist among the congruists, who will comprise the perfect conformist society of the future: in view of the fact that everyone will be supplied with the same things, everyone will know the same things, too. And this means that every listener will only be able to hear the same things that he would be able to say; and that he who speaks would only be able to say what anyone else can hear for themselves. (2014: 103-104)
Unsuited to democratic process, without the capacity for dialogue, we are trapped in a “collective monologue” (2014: 104). The “new function of speech” in conformist society is “a tautological exchange” and it is not even an exchange, it is a “declining schema of vivacity, that is, the illusion of an exchange” (2014: 104). Unpresent communications take the vivacity out of dialogic language and make it a one-way command line. There has been a neutralization of the difference between speaking and listening; ours is “speech that obeys what is heard (horiges Reden) . . . conformist speech has become a mere co-speaking of what is endlessly heard . . . man is now a being who speaks only because he is a being who listens” (2014: 197). Instead of creative beings, we have become a swarm of repetitions. We are no more than inductions of the hegemon signal; we only read the signs we never write ourselves.
“Today, it suffices to determine the channel—or the interface—through which one communicates in order to maintain control over that channel’s direction. Indeed, we have reached a point where even forms of resistance cause effects that are systemically productive, as long as they do not negate the circles of communication. . . . Participation . . . thereby reflects the ‘prejudicing role’ of technology in a highly atomistic manner—and yet, those channels of communication determine society as a whole.” (Nosthoff and Maschewski, 2019: 87)
Interpretation, Opinion, and Wave Submission
In our thoughtless repetition of the on-point Orwellian newspeak of the day, the difference between interpretation and factum in mass media has been neutralized (2014: 191). It is as if the reality of hermeneutics has ceased to exist. There is no such thing as interpretation. We have become the telegraphic mouthpieces of prejudices, mere “consumers of opinion” (2014: 192). The problem of opinion (doxa) “is like a game show where we are openly or implicitly asked to reiterate what everyone knows—what the survey says, what the majority believes, what amounts to common sense” (Flaxmann, 2011: 259). Ready-made, “opinions are supplied today” as fact and there is only the “non-existence of freedom to express one’s opinion” (2011: 193). The absence of a difference between “facts and their opinion” is an “abomination against freedom of thought” (2011: 194). The radiations of mass media supplies us with “a pre-interpreted world” which deprives us of the “freedom to imagine another world is possible” (2011: 195).
Communications technologies are “today’s secret dictators” (2014: 198). Technology is a dictator of whom we are not conscious:
As for those who are supplied or molded in this way, however, they no longer realize anything at all about their supplied and molded existence. They undoubtedly consider the points of view that have molded them to be their own points of view. And given that what is molded by way of this soft terrorism are not just their points of view, but that rather it is their souls that are throughly subjugated, in fact they feel free (and most often, unfortunately, even happy). It is not surprising that they—and here the falsehood of the situation reaches its culmination—consider those few people where really are free, and who manage to marshal the power to resist being molded, to be bona fide saboteurs of freedom and treat them as such. There has never before been a historical movement in which the principle of the counterrevolution, that is, the principle of getting the people to mobilize against themselves, has celebrated a triumph that even approaches the scale of the victory won by conformism under the flag of the freedom of those who have become un-free. (2014: 199)
The objective in a “monolithic society” such as our own is “to hold the single individual in an inescapable grip to force the individual to assume a communal way of being (Mitsein)” and this is achieved through “acoustic submission” (2017: 41). One could also speak of wave submission. Since “no quiet place remains,” the moment we “must hear” is the moment when we no longer have “any option other than belonging to this world and becoming obedient (gehorsam) or even being fully under its spell (hörig)” (2017: 41). These machines of sonic and electromagnetic noise are “machines of subjection” and “the acoustic realm is the realm of unfreedom. As hearing beings, we are unfree” (2017: 41). As physical, resonant beings, we are unfree in a world of constant irradiating noise. “Yes, incessant noise can prevent people from ever becoming themselves,” writes Anders, and “with this the conformist ideal of de-privatisation is achieved” as we are “caught in the web of sound” (2017: 41). We are finally caught in the web of all physics. Laplacian causality is too close to breaking down the last barriers in our understanding that divide free will from determinism. No ephemeral mortal can become themselves because the accumulated scientific knowledge of perduring society has the knowledge and power to determine individuals, who cease to be individuals and have become tokens of the collective type. There is a frequency following response that entrains the masses “because listening creates conformity” and we are bound “within a horizon that is traced by the acoustic leash” (2017: 42). We are Promethean animals with “unfelt chains” (Muller, 2016: 158), obedient dogs on a “leash” and indefinitely detained “tethered goats” (Priest and Arkin, 2011).
Immersed in the medium of noise, Anders realizes that “we had never truly ‘been outside’, we had never really been ‘free’” (2017: 42). Our sense of “self” is contingent upon our being connected to the external self. The “dynamic of activity without presence, of touching from a distance” of “alienating the auditory,” writes Goodman (2019: 3) “reveals the inhumanness of humanity, and the alienness within the human voice and thinking” (2019: 55). We do not know what freedom or being and thinking for ourselves means. To a certain extent, we have always been influenced by external mechanisms, being forever contingent. But our technologies have alienated us from ourselves to a entirely different degree. Now, we must superimpose with the broadcast, always echo and never depart from its perpetually iterated narrative in order to exist: “‘I am participating there, therefore I am here, therefore I am’” (Anders, 2017: 43).
The Ventriloquism of Order Words
Deleuze has also described control language, grand narration. Communications language “is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience” (Flaxmann, 2011: 199). This sort of “language is a virus,” it is a “new malady” that produces “‘the regular and predictable’ human. The virus is control, the “nature and transmission of order-words in a given social field” (2011: 201). Deleuze views “the nature of language as an ‘influencing machine’” (2011: 202). It is this drive to exert an influence from afar, for action at a distance: projectilism. Non-presence in other fields is a continuation of this nature. These propagating signals are Deleuzian “order-words” (Flaxmann, 2011: 199) of compression and electromagnetic waves propagating through diverse media in verbal and non-verbal modes. To return to HSS,
There is no picking and choosing of receivers on the basis of their religious beliefs, spiritual expectations, or “symptoms of psychic disorder.” There is simply an inaudible directive to channel the unreasonable murmurs of an unsound mind into the skull of a targeted body. Indeed, it could be said that the phantom connection of directional ultrasound refuses the history of perception and instead orchestrates a future of nonpresence. (Goodman, 2019: 72)
It does not matter who is listening. In fact, it is no longer a matter of listening but of being forced to hear, whoever you are and whatever your history of perception. Non-presence is the ultimate decontextualization, the ultimate forced universal. Perceptual history is deemed irrelevant, the future of the inserted non-present is all that matters. The unsound mind becomes all that is yet to come; the body is a place holder of the interjected directive. The characteristics of the audience are irrelevant; they will obey wherever they are and wherever they came from:
in an act of acoustic double-cross, the HyperSonic Sound System quietly mobilizes its position as a whispering parasite. Whilst its viral objective is the transmogrification and multiplication of the inner voice, its aim is to awaken a Siamese consciousness. (Goodman, 2019: 72)
This communication is a hijacking of autonomous processes with a “whispering parasite.” The consciousness produced is dual, “Siamese,” until this parasitic narration overwhelms and the host is totally converted. Reduplication will continue with virulence, a merciless automaticity, the ruthless impulse that consumes all to make its code the only survivor.
Control Mechanisms of the Panacousticon
Communication technologies are the principal means that produce this monolithic form of “technological totalitarian empire” (Anders, 1961: 16). This semiotic mode of “technological automatisms” (Berardi, 2019: 7)—with a trace of Frederic W. H. Meyers work on the subliminal—generates the symbolic activity without presence which is the prime mover of control societies.
A FOIA release from the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command acknowledges that it would be “psychologically devastating if someone suddenly heard ‘voices within one’s head’” (Friedman, 2006: 10) due to weaponized waveform technologies, which can also effect the corticospinal and corticobulbar pathways (2006: 8). These technologies produce “shattered subjectivities” and it is fair to say that the subjugated live in a “panacousticon” with “precarious and grievable lives” (2019: 287). Through the “interrogators acoustical interventions, the detainees are reduced to the conditions of bare life” and
the extraction of information is certainly not the aim of the interrogators’ sonic imperialism. Something else is at stake: a form of disciplining and punishment that is enacted for its own sake. Is this a version of Foucault’s panopticon? A “panacousticon” where unjustifiable revenge and retributive justice reign rhythmically, where music as a form of surveillance produces, to revise Foucault’s words, “an anxious awareness of hearing” and of being heard? In this panacousticon, music is put to another use; it creates a form of disease and anxiety for the humans who have ears to hear. (2019: 287)
We all have ears to hear. Technologies tend not to sequester; they become commercial, indispensable to civil society. In “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze revisits Foucault’s distinctions between “societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were . . . to tax rather than organize production, to rule over death rather than to administer over life” and today’s societies of control, in which corporations “impose a modulation” and where the “man of control is undulatory” (1992: 3, 4, 6). While “the old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines” involving energy, the societies of control operate with machines of another type, information machines, computers (1992: 6). Human beings are rendered as data waves. Instead of crude and brutal apparatus, the “control mechanism” becomes the “electronic collar” or “electronic card,” waveforms of code that determine the activities of bodies (1992: 7).
Sorcerer’s Temporality
Communication technology has modified our experience of time. Recalling Marshall McLuhan, Berardi observes that “as the media system shifts from the printed alphabetical technology of communication to the electronic networked one, mental elaboration moves from the mode of sequentiality to the mode of simultaneity” (Berardi, 2019: 125). Anders agrees that the goal of technological totalitarianism is simultaneity, the “elimination of time. The timeless society (rather than the classless society) is the hope of tomorrow” (2014: 244). Through technology, space and time have become “modes of absence” (2014: 253). Anders notices the differential between the timing circuits of our technologies and that of our biological clocks which exists because we have “not yet become ‘wireless’ (funkbar)” (2014: 248). Today, however, we have become closer to being wirelessly synchronized with machine time through the unsound.
Immediate satiation (but always within the designated parameters) is the objective and “the mediation of technology attempts to make mediation superfluous” through a “return to immediacy” (2014: 240). We experience a “forgetting of each passing moment” and live through an “unnoticed sequence of moments” (2014: 210) having become “ahistorical beings” (2014: 220). With instantaneous wireless and waveform technologies operating at the speed of light, “a pointillism of existence arises, from which all continuity is banished, because it is composed at each passing moment of new born offers that do not last longer than an instant” (2014: 249). All is fleeting. Unlike historical chronicles, the narrative changes in real time from moment to moment and no history endures. What does the elimination of time mean? Immediacy means that the present is always kept in isolation. The past does not inform us anew and nothing in the future can be discovered that is new. Immediacy means that the now is forever invariant and there is no alternative to this reputedly best of all possible worlds.
Ahistorical immediacy is security timing (and there is no need for security without manufacturing at least the appearance of insecurity). As Goodman observes, following Brian Massumi, “pre-emptive power seeks to colonize this activity of the future in the present” (2012: 153) and “preemptive security does not prevent but rather induces the event” (2012: 71). Security knows in advance the narrative it wants to happen and will make it work when the facts are inconsistent with the narrative. This is accomplished, in part, through “anamnesis, a semiotic effect, is often an involuntary revival of memory caused by listening and the evocative power of sounds” (2012: 151). A prime weapon of the preemptive garrison state is the earworm, “audio viruses” which produce the experience of deja entendu (2012: 149). The “future of sonic warfare is unsound,” writes Goodman, which has made this “holosonic control” possible (2012: 183). The future is controlled through semio-aural programming “not merely to haunt you with acousmatic or schizophonic voices detached from their source . . . . Holosonic control intervenes to catalyze memories from the future” which are “acoustic time anomalies, often resulting in symptoms of deja entedu, literally the already heard” (2014: 186). Massumi views “the body as transducer of affective tonality” (2012: 72) and “the sonic war over affective tonality escalates. But as Deleuze would remind us [in the Postscript on Societies of Control], ‘There is no need to fear or hope, but only to . . . [listen] . . . for new weapons’” (2012: 194). We “look for” weapons against the “new monster” of control (Deleuze, 1992: 4). But we can only listen to new weapons, the weapons used against singled-out, isolated individuals, since advanced technologies always surpass the individual’s capacity to produce and belong to the larger society. The control society, however, makes its pastoralist listening herd by means of a massive technological assemblage [Foucault], just as it is a reflex to keep an ear out waiting for the resolution of a melodic pattern, making what it predicts inevitable. Inflicting harm in the name of safety never fails. There is no hope nor is fear of any use, but “in the shock of our powerlessness, there is in a sense the power to give warning” (Anders, 1961: 9).
In the ahistoricity of technology, in the immediacy of machine time, we are possessed by “irrationalism” and lack all “fore-sight” with only a “momentary exigency” in which we ask “never what lies outside our task” (1961: 284, 285). We are “behaving irrationally . . . because we live in such a rational system” (1961: 286). We view “irrationality as morality” and “the absurd . . . is just the normal condition” (1961: 287). This leads to a cluster of interrelated concepts which Anders deploys to explain the relationship between these contradictions. First, what Muller (2016: 100) calls the Promethean Gradient, where
the even steeper and unsurmountable slope that separates “what we can make” (machen) from “what we can imagine” (vorstellen), “what we can do” (tun) from “what we can feel” (fuhlen), “what we can know” (wissen) from “what our conscience can register” (Gewissen). This gradient . . . is ultimately a manifestation of the growing “a-synchrony” of the lived experience of the body (Leib) and the machines (das Gerat) to which it is exposed.
In other words, “we are inverted Utopians: ‘while ordinary Utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize, we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing’” (Muller, 2016: 100). Another variation on this theme is illustrated by the metaphor of Goethe’s Sorcerers Apprentice: for we know not what we do. Anders (2014: 292) uses this story to reveal the irrationality of utilitarianism and pragmatism:
if we live in a world of total irrationality—and thus as sorcerer’s apprentices; if, imprudent and without foresight, we assign to our “broomsticks” the most outrageous “psychic” functions; if we are not fully aware of the fact that these “spirits,” once evoked, will never take us into account: then we are behaving irrationally not despite the fact that we live in a system with the most highly developed division of labor and extreme rationalization, but because we live in such a rational system.
These variations share in common an asynchrony and disjuncture between present and future, between the conceptualization of the current paradigm and imagination. We know not what we do to the future, we only know what we want in the present (even if we know not why we want it other than because the script of the past has already been stipulated). This state of affairs produces a characteristic temporal pattern in which what we want and will be is what we have heard before (deja entendu). Hear you later, as before; saying is hearing and was will be. Melodic imperialism: there is no other score.
But since we know not what we are doing, we only falsely know what we want to know. While everything is still changing we are frozen in a perpetual re-hearing of the script while the reality of the world keeps changing, widening the gap between the world and our image of it. Out of step, equilibria are suddenly punctuated with flash crashes and crises.
The Body Language of the Present Sign
What is the alternative to the unpresent sign of command language? The language of intimacy. Action at the nearest and dearest instead of action at a distance. Close love, elective affinity, instead of distant expansionist force. A turn inward with infinite affirmation instead of outward-turning infinite strife. The language of “order-words” is a language of denying individual libidinal vitality, the language of the Religion of Technology in which the new priesthood of technocrats demands asceticism (Nobel, 1997: 85). Machines are not libidinal, not emotive, are unfree; true human communication is not forced, is libidinous, does feel.
Machine language is monistic, a tower of Babylon, striving for a world without women (Nobel, 1992), while natural language is diverse, expressing the variation of evolution. These are diametric movements in language. As Bakhtin writes in The Dialogic Imagination, the “centripetal forces” of language are “centralizing and unifying” and represent the “supplanting of languages, their enslavement, the process of illuminating them with the True Word” (1981: 271). But through the “centrifugal forces,” on the other hand, “decentralization and disunification go forward” and through this “no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face” (1981: 272, 273). The centrifugal is dialogized, characterized by historical heteroglossia, the diversity of languages. This is the “living word” which never relates to its object in “a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words” (1981: 276). This living word is the converse of the order-words of the unsoud:undead.
The ultimate expression of the living word is poetry. This is because, as Bakhtin writes, “the poet strips the word of others’ intentions” (1981: 297) and “as a result of this work—stripping all aspects of language of the intentions and accents of other people, destroying all traces of social heteroglossia and diversity of language—a tension-filled unity of language is achieved in the poetic work” (1981: 298). This unity of language in poetry is opposite the unity of the Leibnizian subliminal and universal control language. How? Because the vital, unified in a body, cannot be an abstract universal and must be a particular life, its own free creation.
In Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, Franco Berardi calls for the “poetical reactivation of the erotic body” (2019: 9). Poetry and love are centrifugal, producing a multiplicity of unities in the beloved rather than an enslaved, unified and centripetal language of Leibnizian “ferocious mathematization” (Berardi, 2012: 33). For a historical example, we might to to Edwin Black’s (2012) account in IBM and the Holocaust of the überficht of “massively organized information” about numbered people for social control. Our technological systems are “imposing mathematical causality” (2012: 34) on the human heart and mind, which are irreducible, precisely the vitality that must be controlled, reduced and made numeric for the inhuman calculus to function without “error,” without eros.
Berardi speaks of “neuro totalitarianism” which exhibits a “post-sexual culture” of a population suffering from “sexual anorexia” (2019: 63, 98, 108). This is also the view held by Wilhelm Reich, who found that many denizens of capitalism suffered from “sexual misery” and “sex starvation” (1971: 156, 9) due to the “lack of a love object” (1945: 115). Sexual repression is used by ruling class (1929: 101) to oppress the masses and some isolates are sexually sidelined their entire lives.
Sex and class intersect. Psychological imperatives operate on a sociological level also. And all is in the end semiotic. The language of order-words produces and is expressed by the inequality between classes and the sexes. The sex of our society is a misery due to our obedience to the patriarchal machine. Reich (1971: 91) maintains that the very origin of class division arises from the conflict between the sexes, following Engels’ and Morgan’s analysis in The Origin of the Family:
the conflict between man and wife created by the exclusive supremacy of men, a miniature picture of the contrasts and contradictions of society at large. Split by class-differences since the beginning of civilization, society has been unable to reconcile and overcome these antitheses. (1884: 39)
In the family, the man “is the bourgeois, the woman represents the proletariat,” while “real social equality” (1884: 43) can only be achieved through “sexlove” which “presupposes mutual love” (1884: 44). Dialogues held in as spirit of equality are a linguistic sexlove, in which no one is dominant or submissive but all are egalitarian. Master/slave and subject/object inequalities are the result of failed communication, preempted intercourse and dialogue between the sexes and the individuated. The machine is no partner for our intercourse.
Equalization is not divisive. Horizontal communications and relations do not devolve necessarily into chaos. A new principle of fidelity beyond obedience to the machine, what is a more real unity, emerges in this new organization. For this reason, in Sexuality and Class Struggle Reimut Reiche quotes Adorno:
loving means not allowing the directness of one’s own feelings to be interfered with by the ever present forces of mediation, of economy; fidelity mediates love to itself, and turns it into an obstinate force of resistance. A person can only be said to love if he has the strength to hold onto his love. (1968: 163)
Loving without interference, without mediation, is poetic communication, is a true emancipated dialogue, an answer to the “excessive mediation” (Anders, 1961: 14) that characterizes our inegalitarian, hierarchical communication technologies. The best response to the repression of universalist conform language is the fidelity of sexlove, resistance against interference. This interference, this repression, “posits its own destruction” (Reich, 1929: 31). As Thomas Paine wrote in The Rights of Man, the “cause of riots is the want of happiness” (134). No one can have happiness if love is repressed. No one can truly commune and communicate without the happiness of love. There is no dialogic speech without the liberty of creative intercourse.
All these malfunctions of machining humans can be remedied through other ways of organizing social life and communication. In The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality, Reich finds an alternative to our form of society in the sexual dignity of the Trobrianders (1971: 35, 37). Societies like the Trobrianders never developed a disembodied language of order-words propagated with incorporeal fields, but instead devoted their “sexually free” and “superior sexual culture” to a body language, choosing, rather, to speak with bodies and the intricacies of kinship (1966: 165). Anders writes that “the understanding of body language is simultaneously the understanding of the expression and of the effect” (2014: 307). Simultaneous, synchronous and conjoined, body language is completely unmediated. The life-giving centrifugal forces of poetry, the intimacy of (em)body language, is the alternative to the centripetal metanarration of order-words, an answer to the malignancy of the disembodied unsound:undead. Sexual and political congress are embodied languages, elective affinities, characterized by diversity of view, heteroglossia, and free and democratic society as opposed to the control language of disembodied order-words. Converely, holosonic control determines the future through the abstraction of universal unsound language, enacting the stasis of preemption, continuous interruptus.
These technologies of unequal communicative exchange are “machines hurtful to the commonality,” since no community can produce “human flourishing” without healthy individuation (Sale, 1996; Wright, 2010). What is now flourishing is not humanity but the inhuman machine. Berardi writes, “the brain has been objectified in the computational machine, then separated from the social body, so the social body seems unable to behave in a meaningful way” (2019: 20) and “the separation of the brain from the body is the overall effect of this double movement: the brain—the financial brain, the automated brain—is getting connected in a space that is increasingly secluded from the concrete life of the social body, and therefore inaccessible to the action of human beings” (2019: 41). What would reversing this separation mean? Cyborg union may be inherently doomed to failure. A more direct route is for human beings to return to humanity. Poetical body language is the only act that can break holosonic future control through the egalitarian affirmation of the embodied present, from which novelty and imagination derive, where ever-new beings are born.
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