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After the Future. Franco Bifo Berardi
Читать онлайн.Название After the Future
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781849350600
Автор произведения Franco Bifo Berardi
Жанр Афоризмы и цитаты
Издательство Ingram
Khlebnikov had been influenced by Symbolist poetics before joining the Futurist movement in the roaring years of the Revolution. The affinities between Symbolism and Futurism are much more interesting than their differences. Khlebnikov, who loved to travel all around Russia by train, and who loved the archaic ways of life and magical-shamanistic practices of deep, traditional Russia, wanted to create a virtually planetary language, able to be understood beyond linguistic boundaries. He called this language Zaum. Angelo Maria Ripellino (1978, 93) points out that “Futurism has two faces. On one side, it emphasizes technology, skyscrapers, machines; on the other side, it’s moved by the troglodytes, the wild, caves, and the Stone Age; and so it opposes the sleep of a prelogic Asia to the modern European metropolitan frenzy.” Here we are on ambivalent ground, open on two different sides: Zaum is seduced by pre-symbolic forms of communication, the original protolinguistic vocality, the language of original emotions. But at the same time, it is predisposed to imagine the possibility of a postsymbolic communication, i.e., a telepathic technology; in that sense we see Symbolism and Futurism converging toward the imagined linguistic utopias, merging archaism and Futurism.
Khlebnikov is charmed by the enchanting virtues of sounds, by phonetic sorcellerie [witchcraft]:
Faith in witchery of phonemes, interest in the shamanic culture, research of a ritual language, this is the Symbolist influence: poetry is a magical action, and an oracular message. Many poems by Bal’mont, Bel’ij, Blok are conceived as means of magical action, similar to witches’ balms, animal brains, snake skin, Savina leaves and belladonna or datura and so on. (Ripellino 1978, 93)
Khlebnikov turns his back on the modern European world, notwithstanding his Futuristic flirtations, preferring eternal Asia, and he dives into the “etymological night,” into the deepness of a past that reaches toward imaginary origins. In this magical background he sees the possibility of a telepathic effect of transmitting meaning without the mediation of a conventional signifier, through the direct stimulation of neurological emotions corresponding to meaning.
Khlebnikov’s approach leads to presymbolic communication, but this must converge with postsymbolic research, which is our task today. Khlebnikov seems to be the point of connection between the two directions. The aim of his transmental language is to find a nonconventional dimension of communication through travel against the grain in the nocturnal territory of etymologies and origins; but now we progress toward the same end through the dangerous experimentation of telepathic techniques.
Symbolist research is explicitly tied to timeless mystical quests, because mysticism knows the way to nonconventional dimensions of communication. In Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, Lama Anagarika Govinda (1960, 17) says: “The essential nature of words is therefore neither exhausted by their present meaning, nor is their importance confined to their usefulness as transmitters of thoughts and ideas.” Anagarika Govinda is perfectly conscious of the fact that, in this regard, Buddhist symbolism has a deep similarity with poetical symbolism, and notes: “The magic which poetry exerts upon us, is due to this quality and the rhythm combined therewith … The birth of language was the birth of humanity. Each word was the sound-equivalent of an experience, connected with an internal or external stimulus” (1960, 17–18). The material consistency of the poetic sign (i.e. sound, rhythm, vibration) produces its efficiency and capability to create mental effects. Referring to the Tibetan tradition, Anagarika Govinda distinguishes between the word as shabda and the word as mantra. Shabda is the ordinary word composing common speech, the word that is able to carry signification through conventional understanding. Mantra, on the other hand, is the impulse that creates a mental image, the power to change mental states. “Mantra is a tool for thinking, a thing which creates a mental picture” (1960, 19). With sound, it calls forth its content into a state of immediate reality. Mantra is power, not merely speech, which the mind can contradict or evade. What mantra expresses by its sound exists, comes to pass. It is the peculiarity of the true poet that his word creates actuality, calls forth and unveils something real. Mantra is a force able to evoke images, to create and transmit mental states.
The characteristica universalis, as Leibniz calls it, or translinguistic symbolization, opens an issue of great importance today, in the age of intercultural planetary communication. Poetical and magical symbolism are both involved in the process of evocation that the word and the sign can produce. But we must reconsider the problem starting from a new datum, coming from electronic technology: the virtual reality machine, which involves the same problem posed by poetical and magical symbolism, that is, the problem of telepathic communication.
Linguistic communication is made possible by signs conventionally and arbitrarily connected with meanings; here we speak of communication stimulating mental states corresponding to the image, to the emotion, to the concept that the sender wants to transmit. The production of technical tools for simulation, and especially of machines for virtual reality, puts the problem in a new light. We may label virtual reality any technology capable of directly transmitting impulses from one brain to another, in order to stimulate in the receiver brain a synaptic connection corresponding to a certain representation, to a certain configuration, image, concept, emotion. In a purely abstract way, we may say that virtual reality is the stimulation of a neuronic wave, structured following models that are intentional and isomorphic to the mental states corresponding to a certain experience. We can say that this technology is the most apt for a telepathic sort of communication. Jaron Lanier, who in the 1980s was the first creator of virtual reality machines, spoke in those years of postsymbolic communication. If you can provide a reality with virtual reality tools, and if you can share this reality with other persons, you no longer need to describe the world, because you can simply create this contingence, this coincidence; you don’t need to describe an action, you can create it.
Starting from this premise, we can go back to the problem posed by Leibniz, the problem of characteristica universalis, i.e., in contemporary terms, the problem of a planetary language, of a language that should be able to connect people belonging to different cultural and linguistic traditions. Pierre Lévy (1991) has proposed in L’idéographie dynamique the idea of a communication technology he calls “dynamic ideography.” What does it mean, synthetically? Dynamic ideography is a communication technology that enables people to transmit mental states, images, emotions, concepts, sense configurations, without any conventional means. The transmission is made possible by a direct stimulation of the neurophysical connections corresponding to sense configurations. Dynamic ideography is a communication technology that can transfer, from one communicating person to another, the mental models involved in seeing a certain image, in experiencing a certain situation, in thinking a certain concept. It’s easy to see the relationship between virtual reality and dynamic ideography. Dynamic ideography is a technique that activates a sequence of virtual realities, corresponding to the contents that I want to send and communicate, an analogical tool of a global and synesthetic kind, directly acting on imagination.
Imagination is an infinite variety of analogical combinatory items, an infinite variety of possibilities that the mind processes, starting from disposable engrams. Memory storage is limited, but the possibilities of rearranging the items stored in memory are not. The process of combining these analogical plastic items is called imagination. The theoretical and practical study of the Becoming of Imagination can be called psychedelics.
“Psychedelics” is the possibility of manipulating and transforming mental activity through chemical, electrical, or other stimulation. Starting from the possibility of transmitting mental models, to stimulate synaptic waves corresponding to the mental states that we want