Bioaesthetics of Organ Multiplication
Foreword to Multiplication of Organs Manifesto (2025)
Multiplication of Organs Manifesto (2025), by Christian Nirvana Damato, was written, then metabolised, and then rewritten again, following the schizophrenic course of the last three years. This book began as a research and thesis project that I observed taking shape between 2021 and 2022, but it has been thoroughly refined or reconsidered through the observation of the outside world, through an infinite number of windows. To elaborate on this, I believe a premise is necessary: in 1995, Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corporation popularised windowed exploration through Windows 95, an interface that allowed the user to navigate the world wide web and at the same time manage and manipulate the information stored on the computer’s hard disk. Years later, under the exceptional conditions of Covid-19, the relationships between the operating system tabs overlapping on the surface of monitors, the architectural windows of living spaces, as well as the windows/frames of cinema/video redefined themselves as a new (and necessary) hierarchy of observation. Exploring the surrounding reality required not only an effort of trust, but a reflexive action on the openings, and glimpses, into the other-than-oneself.
Of course, it would be reductive to think that the pandemic, with its consequent restrictions on personal mobility, provoked a paradigm shift in the author, just as it would be erroneous to think that our current relationship with our digital counterparts should be exclusively ascribable to the acceleration and physical segregation imposed by the decrees for social distancing. But Multiplication of Organs Manifesto (MoO) is in all respects a chapter of bioaesthetics and biopolitics in which the environmental conditions (the exceptional political one of rigid and disciplinary governance of bodies) have acted as a counter-evidence to a path that, although it started earlier, has exploded with the abuse of the digital as a perceptual ‘organ’. The book, in fact, starts from a fundamental assumption, which is that of the inscription of aesthetic feeling into a globalising technical device that levels, contracts, channels and cages human sensibility. Obviously, the device referred to is the dual and infrastructural device of the digital. A technical, political and redundant machine that produces its own power through repetition. In MoO, the power of this bio-aesthetic device is phenomenologically indexed by describing and identifying the effects of multiplication in which the body, identity and desire are anaesthetised, and often polarised. The multiplication of which Christian Nirvana Damato speaks is an induced effect whose perceptual consequences are the result of the shrinking distance between the digital and real life, a paradoxically popular expression in infra-pandemic communication in which the adjective real obviously conflated with the real-digital. This multiplication has well-defined consequences, phenomena that go beyond the speculative optimism of Donna Haraway or the post-humanist option of Rosi Braidotti, although descending from it, aiming rather at the “redefinition of a post-technological organicity”, thus marking an evolving chapter of the surmodernity described by Marc Augè. Indeed, the MoO can be seen as an excess, something in which the surplus of time, space and individuality accumulate in the new body. In the book, the author is keen to emphasise that this multiplication has no connection with the post-apocalyptic spectacularity of David Cronenberg’s organs in Crimes of the future (2022) nor, I would add, of his modernist, dystopian version of the 1970s of the same name. This modernity, accelerated and multiple, acts by creating a continuous excess of events. These organs, set on a technological mitosis, abandon their receptive function of the contingent and open up to the outside, functioning in a bulimic mode. The book is therefore a path that, while focusing on the body-desire diptych, proposes itself as a methodological key to reading contemporaneity from its umpteenth modern acceleration curve. Obviously, at this point the question becomes: how do we identify the degree and manner of this MoO and what happens when we accept the inexorability of this multiplication? In this, the book is very clear, there is an MoO+ and an MoO-, a duality in power, in which acceleration corresponds to the positive degree, while subtraction would be an escapism or rather a return to life.
To better understand this duality in potency, I would like to open a comparative analysis of two texts that reflect on the attainment of happiness at two different moments in modern Western history. The first is a text that has nothing to do with any process of MoO, but thinks about theoretical acquisition structures for the fulfilment of a condition of well-being. The second, on the other hand, embodies a kind of redemptive and desperate song in which, albeit implicitly, one senses the protagonist’s desire to move in the direction of what is referred to in this book as an MoO-. I thought of this extratemporal comparison all within the idea of the race for personal satisfaction, precisely to encapsulate and underline the differences in the complexity of the modern world. In both cases, the loneliness of the subjects, as well as the exaltation and fallaciousness of the bodies, play a fundamental role in temporal location. Loneliness, in fact, to different degrees and in different ways, remains a growing constant of industrial and post-industrial modernity. The two protagonists are in fact substantially alone, or rather, they are subjectivities that place their hope of emancipation in autonomy. Just before publishing L’Étranger (1942), Albert Camus had devoted himself to writing a novel that he never completed and that would be published posthumously in 1971 under the title La Mort Heureuse (The Happy Death). In the novel, Camus recounts the life of a clerk who commits an assassination, killing an infirm and wealthy gentleman from Algiers in order to free himself from the drudgery of work, dedicating himself to the pursuit of happiness. The novel actually deals with a number of issues in the form of reflection, mainly having to do with the dissatisfaction following the indeterminacy and possibilities of modern life. Camus, in fact, in addition to grappling with the material problems of the protagonist’s life, finds ample space to define some of the conditions of man confronted with personal and sentimental determination. The multidimensional complexity of the phases that characterise Camus’ narrative render in an aesthetic key the productive structures and infrastructures of that time. The protagonist’s feelings and life are defined in an accumulation that is liberation from material contingencies, the satisfaction of desires for discovery and the objectifying reduction of old social rituals (marriage). The condition of the absurd in Camus’ thought, in which the quest for self-sufficiency and happiness is thwarted by one or the many factors of life, does not include death, which in the case of Patrice Mersault comes as a result of a pneumatoracic collapse. Happy Death is the just fulfillment that releases the protagonist from the pains of the quest. We are happy when we manage the events of life, or when we accept the arrival of death.
In the second case we have a woman who has been overexposed to the media spectacle since her childhood. A person who has travelled her life and reached adulthood under media spectacle. This woman, confronted with existential reflections like Patrice Mersault, is unable to avoid dealing with her life except through the use of MoO. I am talking about Miley Cyrus, who, following her divorce from actor Liam Hemsworth, released the single Flowers (2023), a cry for independence, hailed as an emancipatory liberation, but which, when re-read through the categories of this book, seems to be yet another techno-trans-humanist chapter in the singer’s life. Miley Cyrus is one of the last—chronologically—of those subjectivities whose lives have been acquired and forged in the media disposition. This determined condition has actually grown in intensity with the passage of time and in relation to the increasing pervasive qualities of technology. If children like Shirley Temple or the army of little actors in Our Gang show how the cinema possessed and disposed of the image of these mostly anonymous performers in the entertainment factory, with television the path becomes serial and trans-media. Without wanting to stretch the ranks too far, it is evident that the careers and lives of actors who have transited under the power of the media have had devastating consequences. Characters such as Leonardo DiCaprio, active since childhood with Growing Pains (Parents in Blue Jeans), Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus herself, who grew up on Disney’s satellite TV, the one with The Mickey Mouse Club and the other with Hannah Montana—Miley’s real alter ego—are proof of a media conflict that thanks to digital is extending outside the channels of the star system. If DiCaprio has become his own meme with the infographic of his girlfriends’ constantly fixed age of under 25, for Britney 17 February 2007 was a sort of D-Day in which the letter D stands for discomfort: it was the day on which the singer was seen and followed by a crowd of cameras as she shaved her hair and attacked the queue of people enjoying the spectacle that came out of the screens to materialise in the streets of Los Angeles. Flowers, on the other hand, seems to be the present stage of a similar confusion to Britney’s, again Miley Cyrus mixing real life with spectacle, asking the latter to cathartically intervene on the former. After a period of tarnishing, the singer returns with a very well thought-out hit that exploits Hollywood iconography and the cult of her own body as the song’s video clip shows the singer in various physical exercises, precisely to relaunch herself. The self-sufficient loneliness of the woman who sings in the lyrics “I can buy myself flowers; Write my name in the sand; Talk to myself for hours”; testifies to how the ideology of the container body has reached a stage of maturity. Miley Cyrus’ MoO is the contemporary stage of satisfaction: the desiring voice that finds in the multiplication “I can take myself dancing; And I can hold my own hand” and culminates in the ultimate truth of the digital MoO with “I can love me better than you can”. In short, the message of the song, when applied to everyday life outside the star system, tells us that—even without the references to the Hollywood of Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) crossed with the scenarios of Mulholland Drive (2001) and La La Land (2016)—the multiplication of organs by digital perceptually activates a mechanism of illusory transposition. A path in which our lives can be littered with personal references in public broadcasts, a bit like Miley Cyrus strategically does. The result is to think of one’s existence by becoming entangled in the anaesthetising bio-aesthetics of organ multiplication.
In conclusion, years after Camus, redemption from anguish and the pursuit of happiness is postponed to an all-round hyper-performative super-body (in both the unproductive and productive domains), in which the multiplication of organs corresponds to the translation of the problem of satisfaction and desire towards a rule of signs in which (+) x (-) does not make (-), but only and always (+). In short, as Christian Nirvana Damato says, it is not the instrumental use of technology (Miley’s for instance) that will annihilate our desire, but rather its complete and continuous unproductive and ideological immersion.
Vincenzo Estremo, September 2023