I could never know to what degree I was the perpetrator, configuring the configurations around me, oh, the criminal keeps returning to the scene of the crime! When one considers what a great number of sounds, forms reach us at every moment of our existence … the swarm, the roar, the river … nothing is easier than to configure! Configure! For a split second this word took me by surprise like a wild beast in a dark forest, but it soon sank into the hurly-burly of the seven people sitting here, talking, eating, supper going on.9
‘De remi facemmo ala al folle volo’, says Ulysses in Canto XXVI of The Divine Comedy.
To the dawn
Our poop we turn’d, and for the witless flight
Made our oars wings, still gaining on the left.
The flight that leads to knowledge is foolish (witless), as it defies the established limits of reason.
The modern world comes out of the imprudence of the geographical explorations, from the desire to answer the question: where are the borders of the world?
The painful research of the picaresque swindler, who seeks to answer the unanswerable: who am I? Whence do I come?
The modern world results from the research of a non-theological order, and this research leads to the establishment of the bourgeois order whose measure (ratio) is time, labour and value accumulation.
This order was based on the semiotic organization and coding of the energies unchained by the explosion of the old Medieval theocratic order and by the enhancement of human experience that followed the technical innovations of printing books and traversing oceans. This order is the result of an act of nomination that gives meaning and scope to the evolving flows of information and discovery and technology.
Then entropy came and slowly dissolved that order: at the end of the capitalist cycle, the richness produced by labour is turned into misery and the freedom of knowledge is restricted by a new theology based on economic dogma. But the enforcement of dogma cannot replace the old bourgeois convention based on measure. When labour time and value start diverging, when the speed of info-stimulation is too fast for rational elaboration, then madness becomes the general language of the social system.
Capitalism is a dead dog, but society is unable to come out from under the rotting corpse, so the social mind is devoured by panic and furious impotence, until finally it turns to depression.
The social mind looks for a new form of semiotization which might better adapt to the mutating composition of the world, but the vibration of its creation takes the form of a spasm, a frantic painful jolt of the soul and body itself.
Signs of the spasm can be detected all around, and the reaction to it assumes a variety of paranoid guises: Donald Trump boasts about the past glory of America and of reclaiming the legal use of torture. The European Union is torn apart by financial absolutism and nationalist aggression, and is building concentration camps for migrants on the coasts of Turkey, Egypt and Libya. An army of Muslim zealots behead innocent people, for God’s sake. In the Philippines, a self-proclaimed murderer is elected president and calls for mass violence against social drop-outs.
Seventy years after Hitler’s defeat, Hitler is back, multiplied by a dozen imitators, some of them are endowed with nukes.
The contours of the social convention have been swept away and unfiltered flows of imagination invade the social mind. The schizo runs in many directions as she sees the horizon of possibility, but she is unable to give shape to her pursuit of this horizon, so it forever eludes her.
In the last decades, the social mind has been taken in by a vortex of bipolar disorders: a long succession of euphoria and sadness have led to the present secular stagnation and to a state of steady depression.
The horizon of possibility is perceived as an infinite sprawl of connecting, flashing points. This perception generates anxiety and panic: the paranoid obsession with order tries to reduce the horizon to repetition, belonging and identity.
Power is based on the hypostatization of the existing relations of potency, on the surreptitious absolutization of the necessity implied in the existing rapport de force. Force crystallizes in a paranoid fixation to re-compact the world through rituals of identification. The relative necessity of the rule is arbitrarily transformed into absolute necessity: absolute capitalism is based on this deceptive trick of logic. Accumulation, profit and growth are surreptitiously turned into natural laws, and the field of economics legitimises this deception.
When society enters a phase of crisis or approaches collapse, we can glimpse the horizon of possibility. This horizon itself is hard to distinguish, and the territory that borders this horizon is hard to describe or to map.
The horizon of possibility can be best described by the words of Ignacio Matte Blanco in defining the unconscious: ‘The unconscious deals with infinite sets that have not only the power of the enumerable but also that of the continuum.’10
The explosion of the semiotic sphere, the utter intensification of semiotic stimulation, has provoked simultaneously an enhancement of the horizon of possibility and a panic effect in the social neuro-system.
In this condition of panic, reason becomes unable to master the flow of events or to process the semio-stimulations released into the Infosphere. A schizophrenic mode spreads across the social mind, but this distress is double edged: it is painfully chaotic, but can also be seen as the vibration that precedes the emergence of a new cognitive rhythm.
According to D.E. Cameron, schizophrenia may be defined as an over-inclusive mode of interpretation.11 Schizophrenic thought, in fact, appears to ‘over include’ various irrelevant objects and environmental cues in the interpretation of an enunciation: the schizo seems to be unable to limit attention to task-relevant stimuli because of an excessive broadening of the meaning of signs and of events.
This is why Guattari sees the schizo as the bearer of paradigmatic change (of ‘chaosmosis’, in Guattari’s parlance). The schizo in fact is the person who has lost the ability to perceive the limits of metaphoric enunciation and tends therefore to take the metaphor as a description. The schizo, then, is the agent of a trans-rational experiment which may lead to the surfacing of an entirely new rhythm.
We may call this dimension ‘chaotic’ because it does not correspond to the existing laws of order, nevertheless the possible emerges from this sphere of chaos.
The intuition of an infinity of possibility is the source of contemporary panic, what can be described as a painful spasm. In Guattari, however, the spasm has a chaosmic side: from chaotic hyper-intensity, a new cosmos is poised to emerge.
In the first part of this book, I retrace the modern genealogy of the concept of potency, starting from the present condition of prevailing impotence of the action of men. I start from deciphering the meaning of Obama’s trajectory. With all his extraordinary intellectual and political capabilities (certainly superior to those of the average specimen of the US political class), he has attempted to demonstrate that reason and political skill have the potency to implement hope, and to heal the wounds of American society and of the world. The final lesson of this experience, however, is impotence. Impotence is the keyword of this book, because impotence is the shape that potency takes in the age of technical and geopolitical hyper-complexity.
The re-emerging cult of nation and ethnicity, as exposed by the ascent of Donald Trump and the proliferation of machofascist dictators worldwide, is the backlash of the perception of impotence. Violence is replacing political mediation because political reason is determined to be devoid of potency.
The white middle class is unable