In the pages of Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984, 81) sees the world as “cyberspace”: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.”
Cyberspace is a hypothesis of the world: Ontology and Gnoseology are on the same level of consistency, since Being is essentially a projection. “We are in a sort of cave, like Plato said, and they’re showing us endless funky films,” says Philip K. Dick (in Williams 1986, 72). We can think that reality is the infinite projection of endless movies on the screen of our brain. But, if we want to move from the hallucinatory to the real-world dimension, we simply must introduce the notion of communication, i.e. sharing the hallucination. Dick continues:
If two people dream the same dream it ceases to be an illusion; the basic test that distinguishes reality from hallucination is the consensus gentium, that one other or several others see it too. This is idios kosmos, the private dream, opposed to the shared dream of us all, the koinos kosmos. What is new in our time is that we are beginning to see the plastic, trembling quality of the koinos kosmos—which scares us, its insubstantiality—and the more-than-mere-vapor quality of the hallucination. Like SF, a third reality is formed halfway between. (in Williams 1986, 170)
The Hindus call it “Maya.” But the concept isn’t easy to understand in its deepest meaning. Maya is illusion because it has been torn from its living connections and is limited in time and space. The individuality and corporality of the unenlightened human being, trying to maintain and preserve its illusory selfhood, is Maya in this negative sense.
The body of the Enlightened One is also Maya, but not in the negative sense, because it is the conscious creation of a mind that is free from illusion. Maya does not mean illusion, but something more: I would say that it means the projection of the world. The projection of the world can be frozen and become mere illusion, self-deception, if we think that the imagined world is independent from imagination, and if we think that the imaging self is independent from communication and from the becoming of the world. But Maya in itself means projecting action, the creation of the world. Thus Maya becomes the cause of illusion, but it is not illusion itself.
We are witnessing a proliferation of technological tools for simulation. The social technology of communication is aimed at connecting the imaginations and projections of individuals and groups. This projection-web could be called Technomaya, neurotelematic network endlessly projecting a movie shared by all the conscious organisms who are connected. This techno-imagination, this mutual implication in the koinos kosmos, is socialization itself. Through the proliferation of machines for electronic, holographic, and programmed neurostimulation, we can enter the domain of Technomaya, because we can produce worlds of meaning, and we can transmit these worlds, triggering the imaginations of other people.
Futurism and the avant-garde set themselves the task of violating rules. Deregulation was the legacy left by Rimbaud to the experimentation of the 1900s. Deregulation was also the rallying cry of the hypercapitalism of late modernity, paving the way for the development of semiocapital. In the totalitarian period of the external machine and mechanical speed, having previously used the state form to impose its rule on society, capitalism decided to do without state mediation as the techniques of recombination and the absolute speed of electronics made it possible for control to be interiorized. In the classical form of manufacturing capitalism, price, wages, and profit fluctuations were based on the relationship between necessary labor time and the determination of value. Following the introduction of microelectronic technologies and the resulting intellectualization of productive labor, the relationship between different magnitudes of value and different productive forces entered a period of indeterminacy. Deregulation, as launched by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, marked the end of the law of value and turned its demise into a political economy. In his major work, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard (1993a: 2) intuitively infers the overall direction of the development of the end of the millennium: “The reality principle corresponded to a certain stage of the law of value. Today, the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation.”
The whole system precipitates into indeterminacy as all correspondences between symbol and referent, simulation and event, value and labor time no longer hold. But isn’t this also what the avant-garde aspired to? Doesn’t experimental art wish to sever the link between symbol and referent? In saying this, I’m not accusing the avant-garde of being the cause of neoliberal economic deregulation. Rather, I’m suggesting that the anarchic utopia of the avant-garde was actualized and turned into its opposite the moment society internalized rules and capital was able to abdicate both juridical law and political rationality to abandon itself to the seeming anarchy of internalized automatisms, which is actually the most rigid form of totalitarianism.
As industrial discipline dwindled, individuals found themselves in a state of ostensible freedom. No law forced them to put up with duties and dependence. Obligations became internalized and social control was exercised through a voluntary, albeit inevitable, subjugation to chains of automatisms.
In a regime of aleatory and fluctuating values, precariousness became the generalized form of social relations, which deeply affected social composition and the psychic, relational and linguistic characters of a new generation as it entered the labor market. Rather than a particular form of productive relations, precariousness is the dark soul of the productive process. An uninterrupted flow of fractal and recombining infolabor circulates in the global web as the agent of universal valorization, yet its value is indeterminable. Connectivity and precariousness are two sides of the same coin: the flow of semiocapitalist production captures and connects cellularized fragments of depersonalized time; capital purchases fractals of human time and recombines them in the web. From the standpoint of capitalist valorization, this flow is uninterrupted and finds its unity in the object produced; however, from the standpoint of cognitive workers the supply of labor is fragmented: fractals of time and pulsating cells of labor are switched on and off in the large control room of global production. Therefore the supply of labor time can be disconnected from the physical and juridical person of the worker. Social labor time becomes an ocean of valorizing cells that can be summoned and recombined in accordance with the needs of capital.
Let us return to the Futurist Manifesto. War and the contempt for women are the essential features of mobilization, which traverses the whole parable of historical vanguards. The Futurist ambition really consisted in mobilizing social energies toward the acceleration of the social machine’s productivity. Art aided the discourse of advertising as the latter fed into mobilization. When industrial capitalism transposed into the new form of semiocapitalism, it first and foremost mobilized the psychic energy of society, bending it to the drive of competition and cognitive productivity. The new economy of the 1990s was essentially a prozac economy, both neuromobilization and compulsory creativity.
Paul Virilio has shown the connection between war and speed: in the modern forms of domination, the imposition of war onto the whole of social life is an implicit one precisely because economic competitiveness is war, and war and the economy share the common denominator of speed. As Walter Benjamin (1992, 234) writes: “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” The aestheticization of life is one aspect of this mobilization of social energies. The aestheticization of war is functional to the subjugation of everyday life to the rule of history. War forces the global masses to partake in the process of self-realization of the Hegelian Spirit, or, perhaps more realistically, to become part of capitalist global accumulation. Captured in the dynamics of war, everyday life is ready to be subjected to the unlimited rule of the commodity.
From this standpoint, there is no difference between fascism, communism, and