Luciana Parisi and
Steve Goodman
MNEMONIC CONTROL
In William Gibson's 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, brand researcher
Cayce Pollard has a rare condition that allows her to spot poten
tially effective visual logos in the environment through the psycho
affective response of an allergic reaction.1 Her allergy provides her
with a sense of the future, a sense of the potent contagiousness of
visual information. But a brand is more than its sensory append
ages, more than its logo. It is the entirety of the intangible, virtual
world lurking behind any specific perceivable pattern. Cayce's ability
to anticipate which logos among many will be more successful in a
future branding campaign is only an instance of the power of brand
ing to establish a special relation with futurity. Logos are indeed
machines of prehension able to transduce the pure potential of a
brand into a real potentiality. The logo (not j ust visual, but sonic,
haptic, or olfactory) becomes a cipher for the brand, a password to
get through cognition, to access the realm of affective control in
which the future is preempted in the present.
This is a future that is installed every time you pass through
hyperbranded environments of consumption and zone-out into the
simultaneously stealthy and overloaded barrage of suggestion, as
sociation, and subliminal waves of affective capitalism. We are al
ready accustomed to marketing's harnessing the creative power of
the consumer, transforming the allegedly passive demographic into
a reservoir of innovation to be capitalized on. Lifestyle branding,
for instance, has defined itselfin terms of promoting individual ere-
ativity and autonomy to the point where the difference between the image
and reality collapses into the hyperbranding matrix.
For the postmodern critique of capitalism, the advent of the real sub
sumption of value (e. g. , the valorization of desire) has come to de.fine a world
governed by a machine of consumption able to incorporate all kinds of de
viations fro m the norm. Since all values are reducible to sign values, then, as
postmodern critique suggests, the realm of the simulacra engulfs all possi
bilities to break out of the dominance of optical capitalism. As opposed to
the critical impasse proposed by postmodern critique, the return to biopoli
tics has most recently meant the reacknowledgment of the productive force
behind the image. From terminal hyperreality to the more nuanced notion
of the multitude's autonomy within the context of cognitive capitalism, the
aesthetic creativity of the market has become the new site for the production
of surplus value. Here, living labor becomes machinic, consumers become
producers, and everyone designs their own products through self-organizing
networks of spontaneous creativity.
Yet this harnessing of aesthetic power exceeds cognitive networks. As
Gibson's example illustrates, power does not just operate across networks of
brains, but through affective networks that envelop sensations in addition to
cognition. Affective capitalism is a parasite on the feelings, movements, and
becomings of bodies, tapping into their virtuality by investing preemptively
in futurity. Possessed by seductive brand entities, you flip into autopilot, are
abducted from the present, are carried off by an array of prehensions outside
chronological time into a past not lived, a future not sensed . We term this
mode of affective programming "mnemonic control," a deployment of power
that exceeds current formulations of biopower.
Biopower refers to the practice of the modern state to regulate their sub
jects through what Michel Foucault describes as "an explosion of numerous
and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the con
trol of populations through the use of statistics and probabilities." 2 The dis
tinctive quality of the political technologies of biopower is that they allow
for the control of entire populations. Power becomes positive as opposed to
merely negative, preemptive instead of merely repressive.
Biopower has, to date, been about techniques of keeping populations
alive as a memory of life, recording that memory in a vast, cosmic archive
of mnemo-machinery, a resource to be capitalized, a weapon against an un
certain, indeterminate future. In this sense, biopower attempts to function
preemptively, to postpone the certainty of death. Biopolitical control, for
164
Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman
Antonio Negri, is the measure, the organization and the limit, of the time
of life. So it is not just social life itself that is at stake, but an ontology of
time, and thus an ontology of measure in relation to life. For Negri, bio
political production is open and implies a view toward an immeasurable, in
determinate fu ture, a political future to come.3 For Foucault, the productivity
of biopower is symptomatic of the ontopolitics of the modern state, a new,
architectonic, postsovereign, disciplinary mode of power, while for Giorgio
Agamben the power over life is the very motor of sovereignty, not just in the
modern context.4 1he ability to exercise total control, on life itself or bare life,
is defined by the state of exception or emergency. In the name of bare life 's
being under threat, sovereign power is both inside and outside the law. The
potential to be under threat j ustifies the state of exception or emergency, the
space of preemptive power or governmentality over life itself.
However, a new tendency of control has increasingly oriented itself not
just to the deferral of death through an investment in living memory, stored
in humans or in machines, but also in the production of unlived memory, a
preemptive memory of the future that does not oppose, but rather allies itself
with, uncertainty and indeterminacy. What we call mnemonic control, there
fore, is a refined mode of preemptive power. This mode of power compels us
to interrogate the achronological nexus of past and future, and the complex
unfolding of time in the present. As part of preemptive cybernetic capital, a
memory of the future is not j ust some predictive simulation, but the invest
ment in future feedback, an investment in intuitive, prehensive anticipation,
part of a ceaseless betting on future desires.
In this article, we look at modes of power or preemptive power as investing
the dimensions of memory. F rom the interventions of branding into micro
cultural memory, to nanopolitical interventions into the molecular memory
of matter, we will map modes of control that go beyond the biopolitical en
gagement with genetic memory and the governance of the living, to point to
the virtual governance of the unlived. We think that current debates about the
persistence of biopower should be supplemented by a return to the intricate
speculative operation of preemptive power. Power no longer leaves the future
unoccupied and open. It does not merely operate on probabilities, the actual
forms of living that already exist in the present-past. Neither does power
merely regulate the living by maintaining bodies in a liminal state between
life and death. Instead, the concept of biopower should be confronted with
an ontology of unlife, where unlife denotes, in the words of the Cybernetic
Culture Research Unit, or c c Ru, the "autopropagating transmutation on the
Mnemonic Control
165
anorganic plane. Flatline culture." 5 Unlife tags the relational (dis)continuum
ontologically prior to the separation of the living from the nonliving, and
therefore engages with the reality of unlife, virtual entities and their active
agency within actual, living processes. As Science magazine noted in 2004,
and as has been acknowledged in molecular biology since the 1960s, "All life
forms are composed of molecules that are not themselves alive." 6
The mnemo-machinery of preemptive power is installed in ubiquitous
computation. By stringing together distributed digital storage devices across
the planet, designers have created a network of technical machines that have
become receptacles for human memory. The designed environment, with its
ports and connections, its mobile devices and wireless networks, its hubs
and hotspots, has become a mnemonic ecology. In this ecology, information
saturation and sensory overload are the norm - and a symptom is the gener
alized condition of time anomaly, generated by the swirling weather system
of looped media. This is the sphere of prosthetic memory, which leads some
to controversially suggest that in evolutionary terms, machines are currently
acquiring human memory, preserving it in nonliving, technical networks. Is
this merely the capitalist extraction of the surplus value of bodily potentials,
the reduction of life to bare life, whereby every extension of the human ner
vous system is used as an optimization toward the increased efficiency of
the system, freeing up time for even more lucrative consumption? (Free your
memory space, deliver your thoughts to the archives- data banks - and save
your life in insurance policies so that you can be whatever you want to be
now.) Despite its apparent success, such a biopolitical model only scratches
the surface in explaining how capitalism abducts memory. The symptom of
such abduction is affective overload, the generalized proclivity toward dis
traction and attention deficit disorder as cultural norm rather than psycho
pathology.
Aecom panying this mnemo-technical ecology of prosthetic memory, the
contemporary crystallization of preemptive power sees an attempt to popu
late and program the unlived, that which has not yet happened, by actualiz
ing events instead of merely warding them off. Branding, in particular, crys
tallizes this mode of preemptive power in its active production of memories
of the future - memories that you haven't had yet, despite their seeming
familiar. Branding generates an atmosphere of time anomalies crowding the
mediatic sphere. The body feels the activated sensation as past. In its infi
nite differentiation of product ranges, branding plays with a combination
166 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman
of familiarity plus novelty, a past-futurity. New memories are installed that
you have not phenomenologically experienced in order to produce a certain
receptivity to brand triggers. No longer relying on lived bodily experience
actual sensory responses - brand memory implantation operates throu8h the
body that remembers a virtual sensation. In short-term intuition the future
yet to be formed is actively populating the sensations of the present, antici
pating what is to come, the feeling of what happens before its actualization.
No longer can memory be restricted to the psychological, even when ex
panded to include a whole culture (a collective unconscious), or to the fin ite
storage systems of hardware. Rather, we argue for a machinic conception of
memory that does not focus exclusively on technological or human memory.
Engaging with the contaBious virtual residue of memory allows us to tackle the
mode in which the mnemo-technics of capitalism invest in the unlived poten
tials of the body and implant future desires.
Here mnemonic control is about the power over futurity, which is seen as
the power to foreclose an uncertain, indeterminate future by producing it in
the present. The third wave of cybernetics highlights how futurity is always
already decisive of the conditions of the present. The actualization of poten
tiality or futurity cashes out the demarcation of the present as a sphere of
possibilities. This is the speculative probe of affective capitalism.
We argue that there are already new elements in this third wave at work
now, elements instantiated in some aspects of branding: the power to insti
gate unlived experiences or participations in the hyperstition of worlds that
do not actually exist, but are really effective. Mnemonic control here implies
the construction of memories for what has not been actually lived. 1his form
of mnemonic control can be understood in terms of deja vu, the installing
of a certain automation of response, where one does not have to elaborate,
or cognize, but affectively feel what does not physically exist. Branding, as a
mixture of the familiar and the unknown, is an example of control operating
as an addiction for an unlived future.
In these mnemonic dimensions of contemporary culture, a postcybernetic
concept of time challenges narrow concerns with life, identity, and history.
Instead, an analysis of memory within cybernetic cultures necessitates exam
ining nonhuman modes of remembering (e.g. , technical machines, cellular
automata, and autopoietic systems) , biologically based models of cultural
'
memory (e.g., memetics), and the different speeds of mnemonic function
(e.g., long-term and short-term memory). These analyses will be the starting
Mnemonic Control
167
point for an investigation of memory and preemptive power, via the achrono
logical nexus of past-present-future as discussed in the philosophies ofvirtu
ality and immediacy of Henri Bergson and Alfred N. Whitehead.
P R ECO G N I TION
It has been noted that reality has been transformed by waves of cybernetic
intervention, which layer up, their nuances coexisting and resonating in
complex ways. If biopower is entangled with the operative modalities of the
first two waves of cybernetic power, the model we are discussing is at the
threshold of a third, postcybernetic wave, where control operates virtually.
The first wave concerns the power to predict the future through probabilities.
Here memory is incarnated in the machine: the computer is able to incorpo
rate a finite quantity of data. 1be second wave deals with extended memory,
the cybernetic mind as the interaction between the inside and the outside, the
living and the nonliving, involving bodies, environments, technical objects,
and machines. Here mnemonic control operates through the possibility of
a collective intelligence, where humans and machines are mutually part of
a wider cognitive system forming what is termed the knowledge economy
of cognitive capitalism and its simulations. The third wave moves beyond
human-machine interaction and engages with the mechanisms of virtual
control, the control of the future, of the not yet experienced, of the unlived.
'Ibis power is not simply autopoietic - it does not merely refer to itself, but is
preindividual; it incorporates all potential individuations.
In this essay, we look at the transformation in cybernetic understandings
of memory as interventions in the ontological field of unlife, or the virtual.
Cybernetics is the study of systemic self-governance, the way systems, bio
logical, physical, mechanical, economic, religious, political , etc., regulate
themselves through feedback relationships. Changes in cybernetic thought
imply changes in strategies for the modulation of unlife, the current remit of
preemptive power.
We are interested in the relationship between control and memory within
contemporary cybernetic culture. By "cybernetic culture" we mean much
more than the typical 1990s orientation to technoculture (the study of the
Internet, identity, cyberspace, cyborgs, etc.). We refer instead to modes of
nonlinear feedback relation, affective transmission, and abstract culture
(transversal migration of processes across scale and milieu) . Cybernetic cul
ture therefore includes the affective ecologies of genetic (biotechnical) , pros
thetic (appendix), and mediatic (perceptive) memory.
168 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman
These cybernetic modalities of communication are not, in our view, deter
mined by the impact of technology, but rather the nexus of bodies and tech
nical machines, and the physical, biological, and cultural strata that transect
them. What defines cybernetic culture is therefore the agencies of matter
working through these nexuses, indicating the agencies of unlife, the power
of the not yet actual . We think that such agencies are neglected in current
formulations of biopower because of their relentless concern with life, the
forces of the living, and the survival of the human .
With the advent of cybernetics, the science of communication and control
of information in humans and machines, the mnemo-technics of capitalism
faced the problem of a past tending toward an uncertain future through an
irreversible arrow of time. Cybernetics, in its first wave, exposed the prob
lem of memory to the contingencies of learning future information that did
not match those of the past. Since future events were uncertain, cybernet
ics merely attempted to calculate future probabilities, based on past sensory
feedback stored in memory. Gregory Bateson's vision of the cybernetic mind,
however, was not limited to inbuilt instructions that reduce memory to physi
cal storage. Instead, memory was not stored but depended on positive feed
backs with the environment.7 Bateson's work marked an important turn in
cybernetic theory from the first to the second wave . Following Bateson's,
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's notion ofautopoiesis also argued
that the nervous system was not defined by input-output but was a unity
perturbed by interactions with the environment. Thus memory could not be
thought of as a static snapshot, isolated from the interaction of the brain
with the environment, but was always entangled in cognitive processes.8
Similarly, in memetic conceptions, memory is understood in the context of
cognitive evolution. This meme, for Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and
others, is the basic module of culture (the cultural equivalent of the gene),
and is subject to the abstract principles of evolution: selection, variation,
and adaptation. Memetics maps the transversal culture field of propagation
of contagious memories between humans and machines. For Robert Aunger,
memories are distributed across neural networks and are therefore always re
lational. These networks are thought to vary most importantly between long
term and short-term memory.
As with memetics 's extension of memory into the cultural field, contempo
rary neuroscientific research on the workings of memory has demonstrated
that states of mind are not in the head, because they are extended through
out the whole of the physical body and its environment. For Gerald Ende!Mnemonic Control 169
man, the relation between short-term and long-term memory is the relation
between perception and memory, where each new perception alters recollec
tions, by short-circuiting preexisting synaptic connections.9 For Andy Clarke,
a sort of intimacy between brain, body, and world defines an extended adap
tive system, where memory is the activity of an essentially situated brain: a
brain at home in its proper bodily, cultural, and environmental niche.10 In this
view, all bodies and media partake of the extended cognition of the mind.
These different approaches to memory reflect a series of mutations in
cybernetic strategies of mnemonic control. In first-wave cybernetics, con
trol operates through the mechanical regulation of input and output in which
the brain is a receptacle of memories. In second-wave cybernetics, mnemonic
control is deployed via the reproductive regulation ofliving systems in which
the unity of the brain is in contact with the environment via perturbation.
Memetics and contemporary neuroscience go further in distributing mne
monic control around neural networks, both living and nonliving, in an ex
tended field of brains and media. Here we are facing a cognitive ecology of
mnemonic control. However, none of these orientations can account for
the affective production of memories. More recently, Antonio Damasio has
made an attempt to extend neuroscience into the affective domain of mem
ory. Memory, for him, depends on the state of the affected body.11 Mem
ory is not in the mind, but in the emotional experience of the body. Such
emotional memory provides evolutionary advantages since the experience
of danger serves to prevent-predict danger.12 The evolutionary advantage of
emotional memories involves foreseeing the future more than passively re
trieving the past. However, it may be argued that these neuro-affective con
ceptions of memory are still too dependent on models of probabilities in
which the future remains a statistical calculation based on past experience,
even when memory is given an affective dimension. What is needed is an en
gagement with virtual memory, the entanglement of the past and the future
in the present, the locus of preemptive power. Such temporalities can more
usefully be elucidated through the theories of Bergson and Whitehead.
P R E M O N IT I O N
For Bergson, memory is not primarily stored in the brain, b ut is housed by a
virtual field of action.13 In contrast to distinctions made in psychoanalysis,
he distinguishes between psychological memory (of the psyche) , habitual
memory (of the body) , and adds an ontological dimension to memory, pure,
virtual recollection. The lived body exists amid the virtual, nonliving aggre170 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman
gate as an image among many receiving and giving back movement. In short,
the brain does not exist without the images of the material world on which
it feeds.
Here the body is an indeterminate center of action and not the container of
memories.14 Bergson does not argue against realism and idealism. Nor does
he argue that matter can be reduced to the perception we have of it. Memo
ries, as images, are more than idealist representations and less than realist
things. Memories as such are present even when they are not perceived. De
spite the movement of images, the world remains in continual variation: "A
set of movement-images, a collection of lines or figures of light; a series of
blocs of space-time." 15
Thus, while memory is related to bodily and intellectual habits, it also
enjoys autonomy: a memory-image residing outside chronological time re
turns in perception. In this way, the past never passes but remains contem
poraneous with its present. The past stays in potential, continuously ready to
actualize its present. While indicating two different dimensions, the actual
is always accompanied by its double virtuality; perception and memory
present and past- are intrinsic to time or duration . In duration, the past
does not simply follow the present but coexists with it; it is continuous with
it. This is why, according to Bergson, we experience paramnesia, the illusion
ofdeja vu, false recognition, time anomalies, and memories of past-futurity.
What is left of memory when past-present chronology collapses?
The notion of deja vu in common E nglish and German usage is translated
from the French to mean the "already seen." The sensation that it usually tags
relates to an uncanny feeling of familiarity with something you should not or
could not be familiar with because you are experiencing it for the first time.
The concept of deja vu suggests a sense in which time has collapsed in onto
itself, perhaps where there is some kind of mnemonic haunting, or future
feedback effect. In the literature on deja vu , the sensation is often related to
a memory disorder known as paramnesia, in which there is some kind of illu
sion of remembering events while they are experienced for the first time (or
when the proper meaning of words cannot be remembered).
For Bergson, paramnesia is a disorder that explains that "there is a rec
ollection of the present, contemporaneous with the present itself." 16 Here
there is a sense of duration, where the past appears to be lodged between
two tendencies of the present, the one it once was and the actual one in re
lation to that which is now the past. As Deleuze puts it, "The present is the
actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image
M nemonic Control
171
in a mirror." 17 'lhe virtual plane of the past indeed indicates that the past and
the future are not separated but coexist in the present. This is not linear con
tinuity, where the past determines the present or the present cons tructs the
past. Each present perception stirs what lies in potential, the futurity of the
past, emerging again yet anew. The lived present, for Bergson, is a synthesizer
of the nonliving past and future contracted in microtemporality.
Whitehead also focused on the microtemporality of the immediate
present. Memories, for him, exist between the immediate past and the im
mediate future. Here the past does not determine the future but eats into it.
In such achronological causation, the future is active in the present, unfold
ing the process by which the past-present enters the present-future. White
head suggests that to prehend the transition between the immediate past and
the immediate future is the order of short-term intuition. This can be con
ceived as a time-span that lasts a second or fraction of a second and "which
lives actively in its antecedent world." 18 Prehensions are microtemporal mo
dalities of perception defining not only the conceptual feeling of past occa
sions in present experiences, but also the way the objective existence of the
present l ies in the future. Conceptual prehensions indicate not that the past
predicts the future, but that the future is anticipated in the present. As White
head argues, "Cut away the future, and the present collapses, emptied of its
proper content. Immediate existence requires the insertion of the future in
the crannies of the present." 19 Prehensions establish a causal relation be
tween the subject prehending and the external world at the moment of per
ception. Yet, causality here enters a multilayered architecture of durations,
where past, present, and future are temporal intricacies of the perishing and
onset of actual occasions.
To remember then entails a cyclical yet nonlinear dynamic whereby an
occasion of experience is initiated in the past, which is active in itself and ter
minated in the future, which is also active. Such an occasion itself starts as
an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future. 20 If the present
emerges from the past, it is at the same time immanent in the future. The re
enaction of the past passes through the acquisition of the new, the to be ac
complished, in the present, yet the content of the present remains the future.
Completion is also anticipation, anterior future: the present remains at once
occupied by the past and the future. Yet, this is not the cybernetic prediction
of probabilities, whereby future contingencies can be statistically calculated.
The memory of the past experience enables the system to learn, to accumu
late data, to be better equipped to face the probabilities of future experi172 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman
ence. Contrary to memories of past experience, prehensions tackle a universe
of microtemporalities , enabling the future not to be predicted by means of
probabilities but to actively occupy the present by means of immediacy. Such
a sense of present-futurity entails how uncertainties cannot be calculated in
advance, since they become certain in the immediacy of past-future in the
present.
Whitehead suggests that it is in short-term memory, short-term intuition,
where the sense of a present's immediate past and future returns, a sense of
invention inherent in the present.21 "In this sense, the future has objective
reality in the present . . . For it is inherent in the constitution of the immedi
ate, present actuality that a future will supersede it."22 Whitehead defines this
temporal immediacy as the enjoyment of the present: an open-ended enjoy
ment of reenaction and anticipation where the future enters the present once
the past has perished to allow futurity to populate the present anew. Preemp
tive power therefore operates precisely on this activity of the future in the
present.
M N E M O N IC F U T U RITY
The mnemo-technical ecology ofcybernetic culture is generally characterized
as an age of sampling, in which chronology is twisted from a straight line into
a loop. Electronic memories are plucked out of history, stored in machine
banks, to be mutated, to be rhythmically reassembled in any combination
digitally. Coded events leave sensory residues across distributed networks
of body-machines. M emories are genetically transported across species and
scales. Biological programming is folded into unintended host bodies , form
ing a mnemonic symbiosis. All these layers of memory are stratified into a ge
ology of achronological time. In this cybernetic culture, Deleuze argues after
William S. Burroughs, control operates through mediatic addiction in terms
of repetitive bodily habits.23 This does not stand for a kind of zombification
of the body as a result of dependence on the imperatives of the mediascape,
but rather describes the harnessed microactivation of what a body can do,
within the domain of demarcated, and relatively predetermined, possibility.
Contemporary branding culture, for example, sets out to distribute mem
ory implants, which provide the recipient with the sense of the already en
joyed, encouraging repeated consumption, a repetition of a memory the re
cipient hasn't had. The operation ofpower through branding seeks to remodel
long-term memory via a kind of time anomaly. Branding, when it occupies
the shortest possible time-spans, is a parasite on the dynamic of short-term
M nemonic Control
173
intuition - the coexistence of the past-present-future - ceaselessly affecting
long-term memory by instigating movement in the neurophysiological plas
ticity of the brain. Branding potentiates long-term memories through the
stirring of new synaptic connections, re-rerouting memories that are im
mediately familiar. Long-term memories are continuously reassembled in
nonlinear combinations by the immediacy of short-term memory.
Thus, branding attempts to create a collectively felt aura that induces loy
alty through repetition. Of course, loyalty to a brand, the agency of the vir
tual corporate body, is simultaneously a mode of addiction. Branding installs
a web of associations and generates loops of libidinal investment. But as an
addiction, this double sward process is inadequately understood if conceived
of in terms of closed loops, or the locking down of behavior in a homeostatic
circuit whereby a chain of association becomes habit, and mainly moves from
short-term to long-term memory through reward. Positive feedback, the im
mediate transformation of virtual memory, is conspicuously omitted from
this picture.
Could it be that memory has always been synthetic, that its extension into
the networked cybernetics of media tic communication was actually invented
during the genesis of culture, as has been implied in evolutionary theories
of memetics? We propose, on the contrary, a cosmology of affective mem
ory in which the past does not precede, and the future does not succeed, the
present. The time-scrambling of Bergson and Whitehead suggests that, in a
specific sense, memories of the future are conceivable where they are either
intuitive or prehensive, as opposed to simply being knowledge of possible
futures. Affect is both the unfolding of the past into present experience and
the way this experience acts on the past to unravel a new future. This is key
to the programming of affective power and its investment in autonomic re
sponses. According to Massumi, these responses are not simply reducible to
habits, but are activations in which an unpredictable potential enters. In this
framework the preemptive foreclosure of potential is still productive. With
each occurrence, a body is transformed by the vague memory of the previous
instance and the anticipation of the next occasion. Memories affectively im
pinge on bodies' acting on bodies, in fields of speed and slowness, entering
into compositions and concrescences that activate potential in a rhythmic
virtual-actual oscillation, inventing process and processing invention. Every
actual body is shadowed by its virtual double. As do monads, each body has
it own singular, enfolded memory of matter ready to enter a new curvature
of time.
174 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman
This is how preemptive power operates within the dimension of mem
ory. We have attempted to describe the third-wave cybernetic conception of
memory as virtual body/matter in which the future is deeply implicated in
the present. Zooming into the microtemporal, affective dimension opens up
analysis of the always excessive potential trapped in autonomic response. The
hard-wiring is never devoid of disjunction. The capture of the past in memory,
the enfolding of sensation into the virtual body, is immediately the activation
of futurity in cybernetic capitalism.
Is it appropriate, however, to describe the mechanics of preemption
through the persistence of biopower, or has power's concern with virtuality,
futurity, and affectivity introduced elements that cannot adequately be ac
counted for in terms of a power over life?
Can power be reduced to biological forces, to the investment of power in
the potential of the living? We suggest not. Preemptive power exceeds the
bio-logic of control. If preemption inserts a temporal dimension into power,
then this dimension cannot be equated with the time of the living. The virtual
should not be equated with the potentially lived but is rather a pure potential
of which life potential is merely a subset. Mnemonic control, for us, does not,
in its harnessing of the not yet lived, merely constitute an imperialist exten
sion or annexing of power over life. The virtual as the realm of pure potential
objects can never be lived despite orchestrating the present preemptively as
present-futurity through the ingression of real potentialities in occasions of
experiences. It is in this sense that for us mnemonic control poses the prob
lem of power beyond biopower, and opens memory to the plane of unlife.
NOTES
1. Gibson, Pattern Recognition.
2. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139-40.
3. Negri, Timefor Revolution, 233.
4. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6-7.
5. C C RU, "Digital Hyperstition," Abstract Culture: Swarm 4 (1999).
6. Rasmussen et al. , "Evolution: Transitions from Nonliving to Living Matter," 963.
7. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
8. Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge.
9. Edelman and Tononi, Consciousness.
10. Andy Clarke, "Where Brain, Body and World Collide," 257-80.
11. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 179.
12. Ibid., 146-47.
13. Bergon, Matter and Memory.
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175