“loko yosa darumayi yatha” (all the world is like a wooden doll in the hands of a master of puppets)
SRIMAD BHAGAVATAM, I-VII
Virtually we all belong to spaces of sensorial interactions, even without our consent. The fact that we are virtually active participants of a network of sensorial interactions makes life a constant challenge that humans in previous historical periods did not consciously experience. I am choosing the term “sensorial interactions” because it is through our senses that we are able to perform an impact in the virtual sphere. Over the last year, I have been obsessively pondering the reality of telepathy and the human behaviours that it produces, at both the individual and the collective levels. However, in order to think seriously about a theory of virtual social systems, it is necessary to focus on the implications that each of our senses force into our individual vital experience. Hearing, for instance, has a predominant role in a virtual sphere against the belief that virtual experiences are rooted in visual experiences. This indeed requires further exploration. For instance, if we are passively contemplating a crowded plaza where people transit carrying out their quotidian endeavours, without us being conscious, sound will have a more expansive impact in our vital experience than, for example, light. It can be a voice, the chirping of the pigeons ruminating in the plaza, or simply the drilling of the men working in the surroundings, but inevitably the chromatics of sound will alter our way of feeling and in consequence our reactions within the virtual sphere. To further explore what I mean with the predominant role of sound within the virtual sphere, I will share an experiment that I have been running in my mind/mindsets as the day begins to unravel once I have recovered the consciousness inherent to being awake.
***
EXPERIMENT
(based on a trained immersion in a sonic reality that invokes
passive/undesired
and
active/desired
forms of otherness)
Are you there? Can’t move my voice. The old man is dead. The child is crazy, he only shouts and cries. The She is not a she. The woman is older than her voice. Stop the birds. The lion can’t speak. Everyone wants to fall asleep. The street makes no sense. No one understands surrealism. That voice only complains about the aching body. I got no family. The cat is high. We promise it if that is what you really want, the android softly whispers. I hate music, the man next door attempts to shout with his dying voice. “Reading does not pay much,” the ignorant imagines that he is shouting as three nurses put him down to sleep. I will never be a man, if manhood is indeed feeling like a man, a crowd spits with hate towards my window while all I want is smoking. Those kids want to hear your stories from another world that you gathered while running next to Perseus. Please sing us a song, the lonely lover says. The monster wants to get back to me, a tiny voice makes its appearance as the drums of a metal song begin to shake the speakers. Covid lives in the subway, a high-pitched voice shouts attempting to sell hammers and miniature spelling manuals. Kill it!, begs the kitty. The crowd, nevertheless, always wants the same. What is that? A change while performing the same train of thoughts and sounds. Dough? Wool? Are you really a Muslim? Can’t get it, you are not really a Muslim, but the kindest and more generous people you have ever met are Arabs. We were generous in a very different way. I agree, but I constantly hear in mise-en-abyme: “take your filthy hands out of my desert.” Bring the rain here. When are they gonna accept that telepathy is really happening and I’m not crazy. They told me to do it, you were gonna finish with that heart. Can you feel a pain somewhere in your body? Great. Why don’t you upgrade the algorithms? Is Corona(virus) a hoax? Why did the Italian painter said, while the interviewer was attempting not to listen, that “they” are inducing irreversible mental patterns in the community? Who is the Invisible Militia? Did you really walk in the air? Did you really see those lights? Please do it again… Who are we? Why is Mercury so mean? How can I upgrade? Remember what they just said? That all the crowd really wants is… while performing the same… Is it really possible? Is the mind really more powerful than a blow? History constantly refutes that bullshit. Can we really defeat technology? We are in a virtual sphere of interactions, we are only incorporeal voices. I am still alive! Children… Poor children… Remember our voices (Indian accented voices, quite beautiful and also slowly breaking apart, then suddenly stopping). Is Silicon Valley already awake? Where is Adrian from? What is philosophy? Therefore I have been philosophizing often throughout the years. Stop these voices inside my head and my stomach! How can I do that without feeling much pain? Why do you dream so much with Tessa? How can you really disappear? “Get your filthy hands out of our desert.” “Bring in a different type of rain.” We are tired of these fonts. The bell suddenly rings. Time out. End of the experiment (note the progression of register, eloquence, and content). Postscript petitioned by a film fan: Can I avoid the fate of Léolo by Jean-Claude Lauzon? Will I ever endeavor the Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo by Manoel de Oliveira? Can Milena by Véra Belmont exist without Mahler’s fifth symphony? Is the shamanic strength of The Shout by Jerzy Skolimowski enough to recover her and kill the beast? And finally, when will we purge again? Can we at least listen to Identikit by Radiohead?
***
It is often inevitable to focus on the creaks that emerge within ourselves as we begin to rearticulate those voices that constantly attempt to inhabit all the free space in our mind/set/s. It could easily be that in prior times the volume of those voices was so low that they constantly passed unnoticed as sonic realities, but nonetheless they still performed an impact in our vital experience. Furthermore the somatosensory system constantly articulates waves of sound within our bodies, for this reason I will move on to address the sonic realities attached to coenaesthesia. According to the discipline of biological anthropology, coenaesthesia refers to the biological consciousness of being alive. Through the acquisition of the consciousness of having vital organs that perform directly and indirectly physiological functions we are able to experience life with an acute level of complexity, thus transforming our consciousness in ways that an isolated social interaction tends to simplify. By engaging in virtual social interactions, even if these are undesired, our persuasion of participating in a collective network of sensations makes us reject through subtle reactions the implications that coenaesthesia brings into our individual realm. It is through this individual and subtle set of rejections that we move from the individual to the collective experience of the virtual social sphere.
A virtual social sphere is a space of constant interactions and engagements between human and non-human bodies. In Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things (Duke UP, 2010), Jane Bennett advances a theory of “vital materiality” and goes on to analyse the role that elements such as stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash play in the configuration of events that affect the human and non-human bodies. Through the political and ecological interplay of these bodies, Bennett argues that materiality “is as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension… calling into mind a childhood sense of the world as filled with all sorts of animate beings, some human, some not, some organic, some not” (20). This theoretical approach that places materiality as a vital actant, leads to the communicative dimension that entangles the lives and afterlives of human and non-human bodies regardless of their specific atomic configuration. In relation to the various channels that organic and artificial forms of consciousness have created to allow the communication between human and non-human bodies, telepathy – in all its possible forms – has played a crucial role in the development of the virtual social sphere, and it also allows us to differentiate it from other social spaces that have been labelled as virtual, such as those created through the use of technological devices (I have mentioned in other texts some of the multiple uses of Android devices and Artificial Intelligence in the postmodern era). Telepathy itself is not a new technology, but it does reinforce the idea that our brain is one of the most powerful “Android” devices that we can possess as far as we are able to gain control over its power and energy. Without a brain and the energy that it infuses in our senses, a living being would not be able to enter a virtual social sphere. And even though the natural realm is the most complex biosystem on Earth to the extent of manifesting itself in ways that often go beyond our comprehension, a virtual social sphere (as a key feature of the Anthropocene) implies conscious brain activity and sensorial participation. Therefore, a virtual social system is a network of virtual social spheres. Within a community there are various virtual social spheres interacting with one another and producing and reproducing ways of feeling and sensorial behaviours.
It is paradoxical that even though our senses articulate the structure of coenaesthesia thanks to brain energy, we as humans still have little control over the ways in which we assimilate the reactions that our senses produce in our bodies. As we are able to gain consciousness and take control of our telepathic and sensorial behaviours in the virtual social sphere, which is where most of our life is happening (we all live in a virtual social sphere even without our consent as I mentioned at the beginning of this text), individual entities can allocate their energy in specific “tasks” in order to mobilize and, possibly, transform their reality. A virtual social system, moreover, is the theoretical organization of manifold virtual social spheres. As telepathy implies also a confusing level of anonymity, the organization of a virtual social system requires brain levels of coordination that surpass the abilities of an individual entity. The conclusion of this text, crafted for children, signals towards, on the one hand, the progressive acquisition of consciousness of the virtual social sphere/s where our life is happening, and, on the other, that without this consciousness we run the risk of being mobilized within a virtual social system that might, without our consent, play a negative effect within ourselves.
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