Multiplication & Disappearance
Afterword to Multiplication of Organs Manifesto (2025)
A new disciplinary field is taking shape in the wake of the digital mutation which is provoking a dramatic mutation in the cognitive system, and particularly in the sphere of sensibility and emotion.
This new field may be provisionally labelled as dysphoric studies.
When Paul Preciado speaks of dysphoria, he is essentially referring to the destabilization of gender identity that redefines the sexual landscape of our times, yet the scope of this concept may be enhanced so as to include the widespread unease of contact, of bodily proxemic: the sentiment of being uneasy in our own skin, the aversion to being touched and to touch, the ensuing contact avoidance.
As the sensorial experience is more and more replaced by the techno-semiotic exchange, perception is reconfigured; desire itself is changing its nature, as well, through the hyper-semiotization of desire. The Freudian concept of sublimation must be rethought in this new light.
Freud defined sublimation as the shift of sexual energy towards semiotic exchange, the shift of erotic tension towards an object that is not sexual, but cultural, spiritual, scientific, in short a-carnal. Freudian sublimation implied a postponement or substitution of “real” pleasure with a pleasure that was essentially unreal.
However, we must ask ourselves: what is "real" in the sphere of desire?
The Freudian concept of sublimation is linked to a psychological framework in which "reality" is the physical world, the erotic body that we see, touch, caress, and which causes excitement, relaxation, orgasm and dissolution of the rigidity of personal identity: fusion.
Within that configuration of desire, "sublimation" meant shifting the desiring tension onto a level that is not that of carnality, but that of symbolization.
But a person who has been cognitively formed in the connective sphere since early childhood, is led to experience a mutation of the very perception of “reality".
The physical reality exists, but it is less and less the primary object of significant investment, and also of desiring investment. More and more of a cumbersome residue that we don’t really know what to do with.
What is real is not erotic carnality or physical contact, but the info-neural stimulus and the dopaminergic reaction to this stimulus.
The cycle of information-stimulation is not purely immaterial: it acts on the system of expectations and psychological rewards. The virtual experience becomes neurologically real: the information-stimulation acts as an activator of a dopaminergic reaction.
The neuro-cognitive conditions of emotion have changed to the point that the desire-pleasure cycle takes place largely in the space of neuro-semiotic stimulation.
Therefore we cannot understand (let alone judge) the current emotional experience on the basis of the socio-cultural conditions of the 20th century: the word sublimation in today’s psychosphere cannot be equated with sublimation in the era of Freud; which I call the era of the first Unconscious, or the era of neurosis.
This book has been conceived in the aftermath of the pandemic period, when the long-lasting process of cognitive experience and the mandatory practice of social distancing had installed a new regime of communication: dis-conjunction and hyper-connection.
The Italian edition of Damato’s book went to the bookstore just after the end of the pandemic trauma, and can be read as an insider’s description of the strange tunnel of loneliness and hyper-excitement that the generation of the author has undergone.
Under the enigmatic title Multiplication of Organs, Damato proposes a sort of reversal of the situation in which we have been all trapped during the pandemic lockdown. Instead of the mandatory suppression of physical encounters, let’s suppose that the authorities had suppressed the virtual contacts.
What if we found ourselves locked in our body and in our physical life? People get crazy if they are forbidden to enter the digital sphere, says Damato. The body is no more enough, because it is no more essential for communication, we may even assert that the body is an embarrassing surplus in communication, a mass that we would be pleased to get rid of.
Revising the expression “body without organs”, inherited by Deleuze & Guattari, Damato speaks of the “multiplication of organs” because, while obliged to renounce the sense of touch, to renounce the skin—which the most extended organ of perception of our body—we have been obliged to enhance the potency and the receptivity of the other organs of perception: sight, hearing, and intuition.
This is the field of investigation of Damato.
One may think that the history of the human culture is going to be enormously impoverished by the disappearance of the body, one may think that, on the contrary, human culture has been enriched by the renunciation of presence and physical contact.
It is not the intention of Damato to save this dilemma, his intention is rather to open a new field of investigation, and possibly to start a reflection on a more advanced dilemma: will the change of perception make possible the emergence of a new ontology, or is the disappearance of the body going to mark the final dissolution of human life itself?
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, March 2025