“Language requires that in order to speak of it, we solidify the mobility of reality, and that we substitute for the continuous the discontinuous, for the moving continuity a fixed discontinuity, for the living mobility dead immobility.”
Henri Bergson [2]
“The insertion of the algorithm into the semiotic process interrupts the continuum of semiosis and life.”
Franco “Bifo” Berardi [1]
Italian philosopher Franco Berardi informs us that post-industrial societies’ needs for immaterial labour have created a “cognetariat” whose minds and spirits have been co-opted into a bureaucratized system consisting of the reproduction of signs and codes [1]. Imagine a cloud of locusts descending upon us, with the locusts being the symbolic proliferations of this system. In this “semiosphere”, we are faced with a swarm of signs which subsumes us and which elides opportunities for sensuous engagement as our energies are instead directed to symbolizing, interpreting, and behaving in accordance with the significance of these signs—many of which loop emptily through each other. Our relationship to the world becomes hyper-mediated in a way that culture obscures from us, and subjectivity, in turn, becomes dysregulated. Berardi characterizes this as a pathology of the soul.
It is a pathology that is intensified through the misdirection of attention, particularly in technocapitalism’s attention economy where such misdirection is demanded in the push for economic growth. We are corralled into a state of constant consumption where having is prioritized over being such that the assumed security of having becomes the guarantor of being long past the point where such an assumption is justifiable. In fact, the only thing we truly guarantee in this dynamic is the erosion of being at the behest of having. What we are is ultimately all we have, but if we prioritize having over being and thus denigrate being to a mere function of having, we end up having much but being nothing, and so emptying this “having” of substance. Such is the triumph of quantitative over qualitative thinking and such is the dominant mode of contemporary existence—the pathology subsisting in the misapprehension that the dilution of being will somehow provide more of it. Rather, this dilution creates desire in self-lack, which is processed through consumerism into more “having”, perpetuating the cycle.
Berardi suggests that the way forward is to reclaim those aspects of ourselves that do not fit into the semiosphere—that defy its bureaucratic and consumptive logic. His focus on poetry and the body, or “poesis and rhythm” as he puts it, is central here. The acceleration of the mind to sync with the hyper-rhythm of technocapitalism ought be resisted, he advises, as it is not sustainable for beings of a sensuous nature. Instead, we ought opt for a different, healthier, and more sustainable rhythm that distances us from the destructive aspects of contemporary culture. We are encouraged to resist technocapitalism’s gravitational pull and to reclaim affect as a direct connection to physical reality.
Berardi’s emphasis on poetry and the body finds resonance in the thought of 18th century philosopher Friedrich Schiller. Schiller, in “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”, outlines a dialectic between the sensuous and formal drives, i.e. between our sensual and rational faculties [5]. He proposes “play” as a means to unite these faculties and suggests they cannot be separated in a happy and well-balanced individual [5]. For Schiller, aesthetic experience moulded by rational thought is where subjectivity is at its most harmonious and free, and his justifications for valuing sensuousness are becoming increasingly relevant.
Schiller considered sensuous consciousness to be inseparable from formal intelligence, and stressed the need to balance the two as one might balance two horses on the reins, lest either become unmoored [5]. What Schiller may not have considered but that, in our contemporary saturated semiospheres, is becoming ever more possible is the formal drive’s complete ungrounding. Not only does the proliferation of signs threaten to overwhelm us in our technologically driven semiosphere, but perhaps the instantiations of our formal drive, particularly considering recent developments in AI, may become entirely self-producing and flee beyond our reach.
The increasing dominance of AI in the production of signs, particularly in entertainment media, and our increasing passivity in the face of this, is accelerating the outsourcing of human capabilities to technology. And the race for AI supremacy as a means for both economic growth and global power may be pushing us towards an irreversible imbalance where the active creation of signification becomes monopolized by algorithmic processes and human cognition rooted in sensuousness irredeemably sidelined.
Under the pressure of technocapitalism, which corrals us further and further into a digital life to the neglect of alternatives, the semiosphere threatens to become all-consuming, and our direct unmediated relationships little more than a resource to be transformed and exploited for profit. And this does not require any conscious intent. All it requires is a system that binds us ever closer to its symbolic expanse and pushes us ever further from non-economically measurable and non-manipulable alternatives. What is being increasingly monetized in this process of technocapitalism is our ontological freedom itself in the name of the nominal freedom of consumer choice, and this puts under threat the very basis of human subjectivity.
Biosemiotics
Biosemiotics helps to give a basis for this dynamic as it unifies the study of sign processes (traditional semiotics) across abstract and physical realms. From a biosemiotic perspective, all life is contextualized in terms of codes and their function in the exchange and interpretation of units of meaning [3]. By positing a multi-level semiosis from the molecular to the cultural, it provides a framework to understand the mechanics of the proliferation of signs at different layers as well as their role in contextualizing subjectivity. Signs are seen as embodied, embedded, ecologically situated, and hierarchically differentiated, and sign systems across layers only inter-legible in their designation as sign systems from the point of view of the meta-system of subjectivity. So when one level, e.g. the symbolic, takes over and saturates a multi-level system, subjectivity is overloaded in its attempts to process this imbalanced density of signs and this incurs a loss of cross-layer semiotic homeostasis.
To express this idea using Schiller’s language, the sensate and the cognate are different layers of signification, and the play drive is subjectivity’s way of properly negotiating and integrating them. The subject is that form of active and self-aware cross-layer interpretability that makes this possible—the mode of organization and control of these layers. It is not the absolute creation of any one layer, but is transcendent of layers, and its interweaving capacity initiates transduction between layers, bio-affective, aesthetic, cognitive and symbolic. In this way, it is a locally negentropic and autopoietic (self-reproducing) potential for building structural harmony. It is locally negentropic in that it inheres lower entropy than its surrounds, and autopoietic in that its naturally emerging telos is self-reproduction through the processing of entropy into structure.
This process of structuring is necessary for the maintenance of human life, and its form and degree in some sense define quality of experience. Further, this form and degree inhere in its harmonic complexity which can be defined as the quantity of energy wrapped or enfolded into stable structures of the body and of consciousness, which in turn define the negentropic level at which these structures can sustainably express their autopoietic capacity. We define here harmonic sophistication of energy combinations (mirroring the physics of how energy is organized into atoms, molecules, and then higher level structures) in qualitative terms. And we posit that the human brain—in its creation of a self-consciousness that can harmonize with its environment and also be aware of that harmony—represents the highest potential level of harmonic integration of energy across biosemiotic layers.
We also posit substructures in the brain that may be turned on or off, integrated or separated, depending on the type of external stimuli the brain is exposed to. Bringing this all together, the human brain allows for the experience of quality in a way that no other object in the universe that we know of allows for. In addition to simple pleasure, we can experience a type of happiness and unification with our environment that is potentially unique. On the flip side, we also have more to lose given this reality, as the brain represents a target for abstract machines, e.g. culture and its nested systematized processes, to denature, deconstruct, or decompose in order to feed on the energy that the movement from a higher quality to a lower quality of structure releases. In this schema, structural integration of energetic potential into a stabilized whole—depending on its harmonics—can be considered as a means to define at the most basic level an abstract machine. And from that vantage point, we can view life in its broadest sense in terms of the composition and interrelation of such machines (modularity, functionality, virality, parasitism etc).
The elements of this framework are energy, structure, harmony, and quality, with consciousness as the highest level of structured harmony, i.e. the highest level of quality of arrangement of energy known. Energy is the base level substance; structure is its patterning into higher level substances; and harmonic structural sophistication defines the quality of this patterning of substances which can be built up of layers of interrelations. Quality at the highest layers—through the meta-structure of the human brain—is experienced as consciousness in its varying timbres, notes, moods, and saliences. And it is quality in its reflexive awareness as achieved through this structure that allows not only for meaning, value, and creativity, but for experience itself.
Of course, the metastructure of the brain can be further extended into social and cultural group metastructures and to the metastructure of humanity itself, with no structural layer being fully reducible but acting uniquely on its own layer with its own set of meaningful relationships of fact on that layer. There are physical, social and metaphysical facts that build on each other and may interrelate but are never fully transformable or intercomprehensible. A mood is not just a brain state, and so a comprehensive description of a brain state is not a comprehensive description of a mood, just as a comprehensive description of a physical place is not a comprehensive description of an institution located there, and a comprehensive physical description of a human being not a comprehensive description of a person.
Quality, Value, Meaning
Dovetailing with Robert Pirsig’s “Metaphysics of Quality”, we can envision structured harmonics / quality as the base level of reality [4]. For Pirsig, value inheres in the meaning of an object for its subject, and so joins subject and object phenomenologically into something that transcends both. In accordance with biosemiotic principles, we can analogise this idea with sign processes on all layers, such that an object has a meaning to a subject in the broadest sense of the term [3]. For example, protein synthesis by DNA results from the meaningfulness of the substrates on which nucleic acids act in order to produce proteins etc. And so Pirsig’s notion of value can be integrated with the processes of biosemiotic sign relation, production, and interpretation in the creation of meaning, with quality relating to the functional output of these processes.
Consciousness, in this view, comes to know itself both through an intrastructuring at a particular level of being and an interstructuring across levels of being that jointly form its self-comprehending meta-structure, which then experiences its internal and external aspects as varying degrees of quality. This amounts to a value-based metaphysics where experience can be situated in an alignment and harmonisation of layers of quality—from the atomic to molecular to biological to physiological to psychological to social. In more specific terms, the aligning of the drives and forces of lower biosemiotic layers towards stable structuring and harmonised sophistication at higher levels becomes the foundation of value and values.
And so we move towards an ontological value-based metaphysics involving: energy as base substrate; structure as patterning and modulation; harmony as relational coherence (internal and external); quality as the experiential aspect or feel of this structural instantiation; and agentic consciousness as the directed self-experience of freedom and responsibility—as capable of evaluation. And this positions human subjectivity as inescapably structurally self-responsible.
The ontology is the ethics here. The structure of subjectivity itself is what calls on the subject to care for subjectivity and its source in the interplay between the self and other. The nested layers contain irreducible truths that can yet be integrated—the superstructural reality of culture being the highest level of that truth and its destruction the highest danger.
Both biosemiotics and Pirsig therefore give us conceptual frameworks in which meaning, value, and quality are understood as traversing culture, personality, biology, and everything in between. Friedrich Schiller adds a philosophical grounding, or norm, related to the utilization of play that we can situate in that multi-layered framework as unificatory of those layers. And Berardi provides a warning about the proliferation of symbols in the semiosphere that alerts us to the importance of understanding the framework and acting on that understanding.
Conclusion
We return then to the solution earlier proposed, which is to resist the run-away symbolization of the semiosphere. And here we ought to note Berardi’s distinction between intelligence and consciousness. Intelligence (which can be artificial) “decides between decidables”, but consciousness “decides between undecidables” [1]. Berardi’s idea of poetry as resistance points to the importance of the ability to choose among undecidables as a way of using signs outside the closed bureaucratic mind loop. To heed this advice, we ought to make use of the sensuous to detoxify the semiosphere and to bring vibrancy and change to systems of exchange that, were they fully bureaucratized, would be fully algorithmic, frozen, and mere pathways of predetermined decidables.
In this respect, poetry or poetic thinking, action, speech, and rhythm is crucial because it represents a folding-in of signs towards the indeterminate sensual such that the sensual can be transmitted at distance and abstractly. This is a subversion of the pure abstraction of language whereby poetry’s semiotic doubleness employs the abstract machinery of language but folds into it affect, intuition, and sensuality. It opens gaps, deprograms us, and allows us to “breathe”, as Berardi puts it [1], in a system that is designed to mentally suffocate us. Poetic being, then, is the hinge: For Berardi, it is a form of refusal and “desertion” from the semiosphere; for Schiller, it activates the play drive and provides sensual protection against the runaway symbolization of formal thought. In biosemiotic terms, it is a way signs can integrate across layers and be infused with the forces of layers that are in their own terms illegible (the non-verbal biochemical exchange of signs that causes the experience of sensuousness is a code that is not directly translatable into words, but its presence can “bleed into” words in poetry); and in Prisig’s terms, it is being at the edge of quality.
There is a vibratory feeling to poetic action (speech, behaviour etc) that retextures the infosphere and humanizes it. And an appreciation of this is all the more necessary in our contemporary regimes, dominated as they are by machinic / algorithmic technologies. We retain, still, the possibility of creating layered meanings of semiotic salience that potentialize a structured dimensionality that is only actionable through freedom in human subjectivity, and which presents us with the kind of organizational responsibility for reality. Poetry is one tool that may help us to weave together layers in a functional interdimensionality in order to avoid the problem of any one layer hyper-symbolizing and causing an unsuturable break that fatally degrades our experiential potential.
Human free subjectivity is the only force that can purposefully integrate the biosemiotic layering from which it arises. And human freedom is the movement among layers and across individual and group selves needed to navigate and bind such layers in self-creation. This is poietical synthesis: poetry is its symbolic representation and the goal, structured interdimensionality. Poetry helps sustain harmonic complexity, and our freedom and our ethical responsibility are ontological imperatives. We are responsible to subjectivity to integrate and sustain its quality.
To slow down, breathe and resist the idea that technological progress is a good-in-itself, we must realize that—with our human capacities—we have all we need for satisfaction and happiness, provided we can show solidarity and strength in facing the threats the semiosphere presents. Positive action is possible insofar as and as long as we resist being processed into the bureaucratized mindset of the cognetariat.
The ultimate goal is to free sensuality through the play drive of poetic being and redirect technological advance to the aim of globally balancing this being so that we may direct our resources sustainably and intelligently and not to “intelligence” unmoored and abstracted from human reality.
Bibliography
- Berardi, Franco. Breathing:Chaos and Poetry. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2019.
- Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911), 165.
- Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. Edited by Donald Favareau. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008.
- Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York: HarperTorch, 1974.
- Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.