Central to this mutation is the insertion of the electronic into the organic, the proliferation of artificial devices in the organic universe, in the body, in communication, and in society. Therefore, the relationship between consciousness and sensibility is transformed and the exchange of signs undergoes a process of increasing desensitization.
Conjunction is the meeting and fusion of rounded and irregular forms that infuse in a manner that is imprecise, unrepeatable, imperfect, and continuous. Connection is the punctual and repeatable interaction of algorithmic functions, straight lines and points that juxtapose perfectly and are inserted and removed in discrete modes of interaction. These discrete modes make different parts compatible to predetermined standards. The digitalization of communication processes leads, on one hand, to a sort of desensitization to the sinuous, to the continuous flows of slow becoming, and on the other hand, to becoming sensitive to the code, to sudden changes of states, and to the sequence of discrete signs.
Interpretation follows semantic criteria in the realm of conjunction: the meaning of the signs sent by the other as she enters into conjunction with you needs to be understood by tracing the intention, the context, the nuances, and the unsaid, if necessary. The interpretative criteria of the realm of connection on the other hand are purely syntactic. In connection, the interpreter must recognise a sequence and be able to perform the operation required by general syntax or the operating system; there is no room for margins of ambiguity in the exchange of messages, nor can the intention be shown by means of nuances.
This mutation produces painful effects in the conscious organism and we read them through the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic, depression, and a sort of suicidal epidemic are spreading. However, a purely psychopathological account fails to capture the question in its depth, because we are in fact confronted with the effort of the conscious organism to adapt to a changed environment, with a readjustment of the cognitive system to the technocommunicative environment. This generates pathologies of the psychic sphere and in social relations.
Aesthetic perception—here properly conceived of as the realm of sensibility and aesthesia—is directly involved in this transformation: in its attempt to efficiently interface with the connective environment, the conscious organism appears to increasingly inhibit what we call sensibility. By sensibility, I mean the faculty that enables human beings to interpret signs that are not verbal nor can be made so, the ability to understand what cannot be expressed in forms that have a finite syntax. This faculty reveals itself to be useless and even damaging in an integrated connective system. Sensibility slows down processes of interpretation and renders them aleatory and ambiguous, thus reducing the competitive efficiency of the semiotic agent.
The ethical realm where voluntary action is possible also plays an essential role in the reformatting of the cognitive system. Religious sociologists and journalists lament a sort of ethical lack of sensitivity and a general indifference in the behavior of the new generation. In many cases, they lament the decline of ideological values or community links. However, in order to understand the discomfort that invests the ethical and political realms, the emphasis needs to be placed on aesthetics. Ethical paralysis and the inability to ethically govern individual and collective life seem to stem from a discomfort in aesthesia—the perception of the other and the self.
The arts of the 1900s favored two utopic registers: the radical utopia of Mayakovsky and the functional utopia of the Bauhaus. The dystopian thread remained hidden in the folds of the artistic and literary imagination, in Fritz Lang, expressionism, and a kind of bitter paranoid surrealism from Salvador Dali to Philip K. Dick. In the second half of the twentieth century, the literary dystopias of Orwell, Burroughs and DeLillo flourished. Only today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, does dystopia take center stage and conquer the whole field of artistic imagination, thus drawing the narrative horizon of the century with no future. In the expression of contemporary poetry, in cinema, video-art, and novels, the marks of an epidemic of psychopathology proliferate.
In her videos, Eija-Liisa Ahtila—Wind, If 6 was 9, Anne, Aki and God—narrates the psychopathology of relations, the inability to touch and to be touched. In the film Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July tells the story of a video-artist who falls in love with a young man and of the difficulty of translating emotion into words and words into touch. Language is severed from affectivity. Language and sex diverge in everyday life. Sex is talked about everywhere, but sex never speaks. Pills accelerate erections because the time for caresses is limited.
A film by Jia Zhang-Ke, entitled Still Life and produced in Hong Kong in 2006, shows devastation unfolding. This film is extraordinarily beautiful and tells a simple story, with the background of a sad, desolate and devastated China, as both its scenery and its soul. The predominant color is a rotten, greyish, violet green. Huo Sanming returns to his place of birth in the hope of finding his wife and daughter, whom he had left years earlier to go and find work in a distant northern mine. His village, along the riverbank of the Yangtze, no longer exists. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam had erased many villages. Houses, people, and streets were covered by water. As the building of the dam proceeds, the destruction of villages continues and the water keeps rising. Huo Sanming arrives in this scenario of devastation and rising water and is unable to find his wife and daughter; so his search begins. He looks for them as groups of workers armed with their picks take walls down, as explosives demolish buildings in the urban center. After long searches, he finally finds his wife, she has aged and been sold by her brother to another man. They meet in the rooms of a building as it’s being demolished and talk about their daughter in whispers, with their heads down, against an alien architecture of bricks and iron arrayed against a shit-colored sky. In the last scene of Still Life, a tightrope walker walks on a rope from the roof of a house toward nothingness, against a background that recalls the dark surrealism of Dali’s bitter canvases. Still life is a lyrical account of Chinese capitalism, acted inside out, from the standpoint of submerged life.
In The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001) speaks of psychopharmacological adjustments as the corrections a humanity devastated by depression and anxiety uses to adjust to an existence of mandatory feigned happiness. Corrections are the adjustments to a volatile stock market to avoid losing private pension fund investments that might suddenly disappear. Franzen recounts the old age of a father and mother from the Midwest who have gone nuts as a result of decades of hyperlabor and conformism. Corrections are small and unstoppable slides toward the point of shutting down, the horror of old age in the civilization of competition; the horror of sexuality in the world of puritan efficiency.
Franzen digs deep into the folds of the American psyche and describes in minute detail the pulpifaction of the American brain: the depression and dementia resulting from a prolonged exposure to the psychic bombardment of stress from work; apathy, paranoia, puritan hypocrisy, and the pharmaceutical industry around them; the psychic unmaking of men encapsulated in the claustrophobic shell of economic hyperprotectionism; the infantilism of people who pretend to believe, or perhaps really believe, in the fulsome Christmas fairy tale of compassionately liberal cruelty. By the end of the long awaited Christmas dinner, as the psychopathic family happily gathers together, the father tries to commit suicide by shooting himself in the mouth. He isn’t successful.
Yakizakana no Uta, an animated film by Yusuke Sakamoto, starts with a fish in cellophane wrapping on a supermarket shelf. A boy grabs it and takes it to the till; he pays, leaves, puts it in the bicycle basket and cycles home. “Good morning Mr Student, I’m very happy to be with you. Don’t worry, I’m not a fish who complains,” the fish says while the student briskly pedals home. “It’s nice to make the acquaintance of a human being. You are extraordinary beings; you are almost the masters of the universe. Unfortunately you are not always peaceful, I would like to live in a peaceful world where everyone loves one another and even fish and humans shake hands. Oh it’s so nice to see the sunset, I like it ever so much,” the fish becomes emotional and jumps in the cellophane bag inside the basket. “I can hear the sound of a stream.… I love the sound of streams, it reminds me of something from my childhood.”