Technoecologies of Sensation

10 Technoecologies of Sensation Luciana Parisi With the ingression of a digital architecture in cybernetic culture, media have ceased to be instruments of communication and have become part of an atmospheric grid of connections where distinct milieus adapt together as microclimates in complex weather systems. Whether you are at the airport, the shopping centre or the underground, a mediatic environment unfolds through innumerable resonances through audio-visual, video-telephonic mobile connections ready to envelop a technoculture addicted to constant feeling. This environment may not simply be explained in terms of infor­ mation overload where too many messages result in a paralysis of commu­ nication and sensibility. Rather, it may be that the symptoms of sensory overload in digital atmospheres offer some clues to the transformation of sensing modalities in cybercapitalist culture. Indeed, a rewiring of modes of feeling seems to be at the core of a new regime of cybernetic power no longer operating through perfectly integrated circuits of communication, but through a new interlocking of distinct milieus of information sensing. Such interlocking does not simply indicate a new calculation of sensory probabilities of communication, but rather seems to imply a radical reorgan­ ization of the velocities of information sensing resulting into an anticipation of feeling (that is, the feeling of feeling) or the sensation of preemption.1 This article argues that changes in technical machines are inseparable from changes in the material, cognitive, and affective capacities of a body to feel. It suggests that current modifications in cybernetic and bioinformatic machines of communication are leading to the formation of a technoecology of information sensing, implying a new level of relatedness between organic and inorganic milieus of transmission. In particular, the article will focus on the bionic tendencies of new media technologies, which involve not sim­ ply an extension of sensory perception but a mutation in sensations all together. Here sensation extends beyond sensory perception to expose a nonsensuous mode of feeling irreducible to the split between the mental and the physical, the rational and the sensible. 2 182

Technoecologies ofSensation 183 Machinic involution As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, the question of technology needs to be addressed in an anti-Aristotelian fashion. The technical machine needs to be rethought in terms of a more vague yet more real mechanosphere where machines are not subsets of technics. For Deleuze and Guattari, machines come first (A Thousand Plateaus 71). Against the Aristotelian tradition whereby techne teleologically creates that which does not exist in nature, Deleuze and Guattari pose us a Spinozian question: what can a machine do? Here it is no longer a question of looking for the creative action of humans on nature by attributing to techne the invention of artefacts. Rather, it is a matter of prioritizing a machinism in nature, not the optimal functioning of machines, but the breaking down, the anomalies and the escape route of social, aesthetic, technical, cultural machines. In contrast to structures or systems, constituted by elements meeting at a steady point, a machine cannot be divided into parts without changing its nature. Its components primarily enter additional compositions instigating continual irregularities, unexpected disjunctions at singular points. Deleuze and Guattari use Maturana and Varela's notion of autopoiesis to think of machines as animated processes of self-organization enjoying certain plas­ ticity in their intra-action with the outside. Yet their concept of machines goes further (Anti-Oedipus 42). What remains unique to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of machines is an amodal ontology that rejects at once mechanicism and vitalism: the reduction of machines to their constitutive parts or to the formed substance of life, bios. To think machinically is to engage with technical machines in terms of semi-concatenations of partial objects running through strata. It entails bringing abstract matter back into the analysis of information technologies and the networked body. So what counts as a machine? We have a machine each time there is an "ensemble of the interrelations of its components, independent of the components themselves" (Guattari "Machinic Heterogeneities" 41). Thus, a technical object is nothing outside the technological ensemble to which it belongs and from which it can mutate. Far from being a matrix of combinatorial codes, a machine is always already traversed by internal, external and associated milieus, regions of supra-action ready to give way to new protomachines: machines in potential, futurity-machines. There is a whole ecology of machines traversing substan­ tial scales: mental, natural, social, technical dimensions ceaselessly code drift, side-communicate across space and time. Whilst scrambling genea­ logical evolution, the routes from the simple to the complex based on hereditary filiation, machinic assemblages also add surplus values of code to connection, a viral hyperlink between micro and macro levels of organization resulting in involution or becoming (A Thousand Plateaus 238).

184 DeleuzejGuattari & Ecology Each machinic level is then overpopulated by compossible machines: an open calculus of infinite series ruled by tendencies of convergence and divergences between a thousand worlds (Deleuze, The Fold 92). For Guattari, the series of machinic ensembles-energetic, semiotic, algorithmic, diagrammatic, social, neuronal, desiring-linking transver­ sally material, cognitive, affective, and social machines can be in direct contact with technical-experimental configurations giving rise to new proto-ontological, protoethical and protoesthetic transactions. From this standpoint, this article suggests that a new alliance between biological, neu­ ral and affective machines is directly connected to new technical configurations of information sensing coinciding with a new ontology of power. In particular, such an alliance is entangled with the technical applications of bionic technologies experimenting with visceral and neural sensations by assembling together neural, bacterial and silicon milieus of information sensing. This new level of machinic involution cannot but be felt by a body registering a new threshold of relatedness between organic and inorganic matter at the core of the mediatic atmospheres of an amodal power operating by the preemption of feeling. 3 Sensory feedback Deleuze and Guattari's notion of machinic involution helps us to rethink new media technologies neither in terms of form (technical medium) nor content (the code, the signifier), but as technoecologies ofsensation intersecting energetic, cognitive, affective capacities of feeling. Recently, it has been argued that new media are to be viewed as databanks of disorganized information, which is at each time framed by a centre of indeterminate perception-that is, my living body.4 Whilst the conception of media as databanks may be useful to an understanding of media as more than mere objects of communication, this argument, however, seems to overemphasize the transparency of subjective sensory perception-albeit indeterminate-by overlooking the levels of variation of the centre. Indeed, such a centre is less to be conceived as a constituted subject than a distributed superject laying out the nexus of variable percepts emerging from the folds of matter itself. 5 Here each milieu of information can apprehend itself whilst apperceiving its external variations.6 It would, then, be impossible to maintain that new media-information databanks-are enframed by my biological-lived-body since. the latter can only subsist in its intricacies with sub and super layers of percepts in matter that are not governed by an actualized point. Media technologies, and new media, have most often been discussed in terms of cybernetic feedbacks of information where a continuous adaptation between the inside and outside of the system, rather than the fixed positions of the subject and object, is privileged. When Norbert Wiener argued that

Technoecologies ofSensation 185 technical machines-as well as living systems-receive information through their kinesthetic organs, he also highlighted that modern automatic machines no longer function according to the logic of the clock, where future action is predetermined by past behaviors (21-22). Cybernetic automata "possess sense organs; that is, receptors for messages coming from the outside" (23) through which they adapt and adjust to contingent rather than expected conditions (23). The sensory calculation of past events enables the future tendency towards energy dissipation to become a probability. Hence uncertainties are turned in negentropic order, where past sensory experiences constitute the base of calculations for the future. Cybernetic media Thus, the cybernetic principles of media communication point out that sensory feedbacks regulate message patterns in analog and digital communication. As Kittler argues, all media, whether analog or digital, are information systems since they store, record and reproduce data for our sense perception (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter 34). Decoupling informa­ tion from digitality, Kittler suggests that modern mass media-telegraphy, telephony, radio, and television-already count as information systems. Unlike printing and writing, modern media are information systems since they "make use of physical processes which are faster than human perception and are only susceptible of formulation in the code of modern mathematics" (Kittler, "What's New about New Media?"). Yet modern media are to be distinguished from digital media, since the latter not only handle the transmission and storage of data but also control, through more sophisticated mathematical algorithms, the processing of commands. For Manovich, digital or new media also constitute, unlike analog media, an information database, which, like the computer, helps to discriminate, control and exploit the smallest variabilities, timetables and orientations (1999). As Kittler reminds us, this digital processing of commands involves the speeding-up of information rate, which erases all distinction between media and renders human perception obsolete (Gramophone 31). Unlike McLuhan, Kittler highlights that media are not simply extensions of the human senses. Media have a historicity of their own based on strategic feedbacks amongst themselves irreducible to sensory perception (Kittler 32). Whilst McLuhan affirms that each electronic medium coincides with bodily senses, for Kittler the digitalization of information has given way to a sort of "embryonic sack supplied through channels that serve the purpose of screening out the real background: noise, the night and the cold of an unlivable outside" (32). The mathematical catalyzer of digitalization, Kittler argues, not only excludes noise from binary calculation, but also renders physical sensing superfluous. Yet, Kittler's explanation of the progressive evolution of media towards digital nonhuman rates of probabilities seems to miss the direct

186 DeleuzejGuattari & Ecology relation that technical machines have with energetic, mental and affective machines. In short, Kittler overlooks the machinic intricacies of the physical and nonphysical and opts for the binary opposition between the sensible and the rational, which explains the new media age as a disincarnated circuit of information bits. Yet, a machink view of new media implies not the ultimate evolution towards a digital matrix of perfect neuro-communication, but the viral intersection of digital computation with its own differential - analog calculus: the double transduction from analog waves to digital particles and back to the analog does not simply render the physical sensorium redundant but rather exposes the extrasensory· (sensuous and nonsensuous) capacities of a body to feel. Here, the digital dubbing of analog frequencies entails an amplification of the physical and the nonphysical at the threshold between micro and macro perceptions, whereby feeling cannot be disentangled from thinking (Murphie 199). Bioinformatic integration Yet, it has often been argued that the digitalization of physical systems-the binary codification of analog organisms-has been crucial for the applica­ tion of cybernetics to biology, developing into the technoscience of bioinformatics. Donna Haraway famously stated that integrated binary circuits neutralize the difference between humans, animals and machines (1991). Her view on the Integrated Circuit of Command and Control may be read together with Deleuze and Guattari's notion of societies of control, where the relation between humans and machines "is based on internal, mutual communication" (A Thousand Plateaus 458). Yet Haraway, contrary to Deleuze and Guattari's antipathy for the model of communication, does not challenge the metaphysics of the digital cyborg as the only possible field of corporeal politics. At the_ core of the cyborg, but also central to Kittler's conception of media, is a notion of information transmission derived from Shannon's theory of communication (Mathematical Theory of Communication). Here information patterns are individuated quantities integrating together all qualitative differences, where redundant patterns of information enable the- message to pass through all channels of transmission without change/ In bioinformatics, Shannon's theory is used to classify genetic informa­ tion into digital bits, to preserve genetic data transferred across media channels. Thacker, for example, argues that bioinformatics tends to isolate wet information from the sterile silicon bed so as to prevent mutation during the transmission through different channels (DNA in a plasmid and DNA in silicon) (Thacker 53). Yet, he suggests that this bioinformatic view of the relationship of genetic and silicon data is not based on a reduction of the genetic code to a string of Os and 1s, but to patterns of relationships across different material substrates: a cross-platform preservation of specific patterns according to a bio-logic that privileges the interaction between

Technoecologies ofSensation 187 components on a new nonbiological level (Thacker 54). If bioinformatic machines integrate biological and digital material substrates, what remains to be challenged, it will be pointed out here, is the ontological condition of such binary combinatorics. The question of information transmission, from analog to digital media, from genetic codes to digital databanks, is often problematically posed in terms of reproducibility-reproducing the same across different milieus­ and in terms of discrete codes opposed to continual waves, numbers opposed to qualities, technical to biological, information to sensation, culture to nature, mind to body. There are questions that encompass these problems at once: what does the movement of transmission entail? To what extent can information be disentangled from sensation? Recently, Brian Massumi argued that whilst the digital defines a set of actualities ready to be recombined, it is far from giving us the virtual (137-138). The virtual is of another nature from the digital. It is the abstract immanent phase space of each actuality and never exhausts itself in one realization or another. The virtual is a full body of vibratory activities remaining in potential, enfolding bodies of intensities, where particles annex to waves and waves split into particles. The analog, as Massumi suggests, is yet more inclined to part companionship with the field of the virtual. The analog expresses continual variations of the direction of the wave according to the pressures of its environment of action. However, the bioinformatics transduction of the biological into the digital realm of data points to a direct contact between a-signifying codes­ algorithms-and a-semiotic encodings-DNA-a machinic involution. The preservation of biological into digital data seems not simply to engender a nonbiological platform of interaction but, more importantly, an ontology of a-biological inevitabilities: an amodal activity inciting the biological and digital into a new machinic arrangement. This is when a transversal connection-a contagious surplus value of code-takes over the form and substance of content and expression of analog and digital media to unleash its proper force of invention raising from a changing relatedness between organic and inorganic layers in matter. Digital media do not use biological media as sources for a new bio-logic. There is no dialectical quarrel between these modes of transmission, only a viral transduction able to spin out microvariations during the transfer. It is then possible to rethink the analog-digital, biological-technical rela­ tion outside the ontology of the One. If there is a superiority of the analog, it will privilege neither phenomena of subjective perception nor those of objective transportation of the bio-logic to a digital level. Rather, it will affirm the tendency of binary systems to code drift, of numbered numbers to enter the fuzziness of numbering numbers, of atoms and molecules to unleash their own micropercepts, where information transmission coincides with rarified areas of vague sensations, with the velocities of felt-thought. Here units or

188 Deleuze!Guattari & Ecology codes are neither logical nor organic, neither based upon pieces nor formed or prefigured by those units in the course of a logical development or of organic evolution (Deleuze, The Fold xiv). Units, codes are propagating ciphers, ensembles of contagious numbers turning the mathematics of probabilities into the infinitesimal potentials of feeling-thoughts. This is an incorporeal pack of information sensing housed by a body however small, however inorganic. At all levels of matter there is immaterial corporeality ready to entertain various degrees of togetherness beneath the unity of codes and organisms. The particle and the wave are together enveloped in the infinitesimal speeds of matter defining nanozones of feeling, adding new levels of physical and nonphysical perception, affection, and mentalities to the body. Bionic sensorium If we look at recent bionic technologies, such as neuromorphic chips, cochlear electronic implants, synthetic and engineered retinas, electronic tongues and extended limbs (see Geary), it remains difficult to hold onto a notion of information that preserves its instructions whilst passing through different milieus of transmission. Unlike the cyborg, bionic technologies highlight not the dematerialization of the body in information patterns, or the rematerialization of the biological in extrabiological context, but the biomathematical relatedness of distinct milieus of information, a nexus of felt relationality between inorganic and organic rates of sensing. Such biomathematical correlation has a long history and was first explored in the nineteenth century by D'Arcy Thompson, who explored the mathematico­ geometric continual variations between biological and mechanical forms.8 Such relatedness is synthesized by the biochip or BioMEMS (biological MicroElectroMechanical Systems) which, during the 1990s, replaced electronic transistors with small strands of bacterial DNA entrapped in silicon wafer that could be directly connected to the brain.9 Contrary to the bioinformatics of integrated codes, biochips such as in vivo blood pressure sensors (with wireless telemetry), DNA chips, in vivo drugs probes, cannot function without inciting an information trade between biomolecules, MEMS devices, and data signals. Here information is not transmitted between the environment, body and machines, but ah entire ecology of information sensing is at play in the movement of trans­ mission between channels. What is at stake here is the extrapolation of numbers from the unnatural conjunction between milieus of information sensing. This is not a recombination of probabilities, but, as Deleuze suggests, the packing together of extensions or intensive quantities (The Fold). The extension of feeling With bionics-a term coined by Clines and Klives in 1958-inforination sensing has entered the realm of corporeal prosthetics, where bodily parts

Technoecologies ofSensation 189 are not only extended but are themselves engineered to become semi­ biological, semi-mechanical and semi-electronic devices. Although biotech­ nology may be supplanted by nanodesign, combining genetic engineering with robotics, bionic technologies seem crucial for extracting sensing potentials below and above frequencies of habitual sensory perception. Indeed, bionic technologies seem to directly ingress sensuous and nonsen­ suous perception, or, as Whitehead remarks, perception of immediate presentation (sensory perception of the here and now) and perception of causal efficacy (thought perception of the there and then) (Process and Reality 180-181). Bionic technologies seem to directly connect with the causal field of sensation, accounting not simply for sensory-motor perception, but, more importantly, for the causal intricacies of the physical and the nonphysical, whereby thought itself is felt. Bionic technologies thus count neither as mechanical extension nor as digital dematerialization of the physical sensorium. Rather, the bionic sensorium is above all implicated in the machinic extension of the non­ physical and physical capacities of feeling, entailing the rearrangement of sensation at the shortest span of time. Thus, bionic technologies are not simply the sensory enhancement of cybernetic systems-media, humans, animals-but more importantly are in the process of constituting a verit­ able technoecology of sensation-a machinic intricacy of organic and inorganic milieu of information sensing preceding sensory perception, resulting in an inarticulate sensation, that is, an unframed feeling; This is not the emotional or the sensational, but, as Deleuze argues, a synthetic sensation rejecting all figurations and representations of sensing and directly acting "on the nervous system, the levels through which it passes, the domains it traverses" (Logic ofSensation 39). Technoecologies of sensation install themselves in the machinic field of code-drifting communication ready to engender surplus values of sensing at all scales of transmission. Here distinct information milieus combining at certain speeds add molecular zones of sensing to perception. For example, whilst until now artificial retinas used in the vision systems of robots or smart missiles have been based on silicon, researchers are developing a biochip that would use a protein found in bacteria as a digital storage medium.10 The protein, called bacteriorhodopsin, is photosensitive: it changes properties when exposed to laser beams of differing wavelengths. This protobacterial artificial retina, able to react in only a few microseconds to changes in light intensity, adds microdurations to optical perception. Whilst bionic technologies push neurosensorial perception towards microecologies of sensing, a new physiological resculpturing of technical machines is also coming into place. James Geary points out that, as biochips enable human bodies to enhance their senses, so computers are increasingly able to see, smell, taste and touch (3). Indeed, the new tendency towards biomechanics and nanotechnological engineering seems to emphasize the

190 DeleuzeiGuattari & Ecology sensitivities of mechanical and digital devices able to fuse more directly with the highly complex layers of biophysical responsiveness. Moving beyond the "yesjno" logic of conventional computers, Rosalind Picard argues for the need to include emotional responses in the designing of computers able to interact intelligently with humans.11 At the MIT "Affective Computing Lab," she has been involved in the designing of sensing devices (gloves, masks, sensor-laden jewelry and clothing) and wearable computers to give digital machines a new sense of physicality compared with the traditional box on a desk. Affective computers are outfitted with bionic senses: videocameras watch gestures and facial expressions, speech-recognition devices monitor voice intonation, and a network of biosensors-unobtrusive and lightweight computers that are embedded in everything from clothing to jewelry­ keep track of physiological signals such as pulse, respiration and skin conductivity. Picard's notion of the affective computer derives from the neurobiology of affect discussed by Antonio Damasio. Damasio argues that, thanks to the interplay of the brain's frontal lobe and limbic systems, our ability to reason depends in part on our ability to feel emotion (58). To explain emotion, Damasio, and indirectly Picard's Affective Computing, draw on the Spinozist notion of affect (Ethics II). In particular, Damasio uses Spinoza's concept of the mind as a "feeling brain," a brain that registers neural maps of somatic affective states (36). By analyzing neurological and chemical pathways, Damasio states that emotion and reason link neurologically (55). In strong resonance with William James, Damasio claims that emotions do not cause bodily symptoms but are caused by the symptoms: we do not cry because we are sad; we are sad because we cry (105). The emotional behavior comes first; conscious feelings are its later by-product. Damasio shows that, far from being intangible experiences as feelings are commonly thought, joy or sadness generates patterns of brain activity recognizably associated with each feeling. Despite engaging with the feeling of the mind, and thus linking sensation to thinking, it may still be difficult to suggest that these neurobiological reformulations of cognitivism provide a way to engage witli the affective dimensions of bionic machines. Picard's and Damasio's use of the Spinozist notion of affect seem not to fully follow its most crucial implication: that affect is neither in the feeling subject nor in the objective neural patterns recording emotions. Affect is above all a direct feeling of the virtual: the sensation of in,visible forces.. acting on a body; the abstract dimensions of sensation falling out of step from emotional responses and neural mapping. What comes first here is not the neural representation of the states of bodily feeling; but. the · direct inarticulate sensation of change: the arrest or snapshots of perpetual motion, the residual rhythm traversing the sensing-thinking regions of a body.

Technoecologies ofSensation 191 Affective transmission thus involves not a linear correspondence between sensory perception and mental states, qualified emotions and neural patterns, the sensible and the mental, but only an action at a distance connecting infinitesimal degrees of variations between distinct layers of information sensing: proprioception, exteroception and interoception (Massumi, Parables 58-62), including the rhythms of cells, molecules, atoms and elementary particles. This is not a sensation of different orders, but these are different orders of the same sensation: a polyrhythmical feeling of the resonances between distinct milieus of ._information sensing. Here sensation at a particular domain, order, world, enters in contact with virtual forces that exceed every domain and traverse them all. Symbiosensation Affective bionics, then, may entail that biochip sensors connect neural networks-the patterns of nerve cells that conduct chemical and electrical traffic inside our bodies-with the senses in a new way. Proprioception or kinesthetic sensibility-the feeling of movement in the muscles and ligaments of a body-is entangled with the tactile sensibility of the skin (exteroceptive sensations of the five senses) and the visceral sensibility of the guts (the interoceptive sensing gathering information from the senses immediately before getting to the brain) (58-62). Kinesthetic sensibility feels the movement of the body as if in strict resonance with the velocities of information sensing captured by the skin and the guts. Information travels through rates of sensibilities between proprioception, exteroception and interoception. The body registers the in-betweenness of these rates, which connects the action of anonymous forces upon a body with new sensations in the thinking-flesh. As bionic technologies intervene in milieus of information sensing, reconnecting through biochips, implants, neural networks to the sensing of movement or the sense of touch or hearing, what will a body be able to feel, which domains of sensation will it enter? Bionic technologies are described as a sort of neuroprosthetics where neurons are aided by bacterial and silicon transmitters to·feel at' faster rates, that is, feel more, feel before, to optimize all levels of- sensing. Yet bionic transmission seems to do more than that. Biochip technologies enter the relation between kinesthetic, synesthetic and visceral sensibilities through a symbiotic assemblage of silicon, neural and bacterial information sensing, giving rise to a sort of bionic sensorium ready to feel the infinitesimal proximities of organic and inorganic matter. From this standpoint, it is possible to suggest that bionic technologies do not just extend sensory-motor perception but confront abstract feeling or nonsensuous sensation spinning out of the feedback circuits of information sensing linking the velocities of bacterial communication with those of

192 Deleuze!Guattari & Ecology neural firing and silicon light-sensitive transfer. For bionic technologies to tac1cle the sensation of movement, sensory perception, and visceral sensibility it is not sufficient to reduce the transfer of information sensing to digital codes able to translate incompatible milieus into an'extra-biological platform of smooth communication. To grasp sensations, the unframed feeling-thought traversing a body prior to sensory-motor response, it is necessary that bionic machines enter in . contact 'with the abstract yt:t concrete dimension of "microperceptions occupying the rungs of interlocking strata before they move to the molar level . . ." (Massumi, Shock to Thought xxx). The problems that bionic technologies encounter are the infinitesimal percepts and affects proper to virtual matter out of which proprioceptive, extraceptive and introceptive sensations sprawl. The problem of how to make a body affected-how the infra-action between distinct milieus of information sensing generates certain sensations which determine sensory response at a particular moment-remains central to the tendency of biodigital technoecology to infinitesimally calculate the nonsensuous feelings of a body. The bionic assemblage of bacterial, neural and silicon velocities of sensing implies a new degree of variation in feeling directly experienced by a body, ready to perceive the smallest transitions in sensing. Call such a feeling symbiosensation: the felt experience of a nonsensuous relatedness between organic and inorganic matter, adding on a new gradient of feeling in the thinking-flesh. It would be misleading, however, to suppose that symbiosensation is caused by bionic technologies, since the affective relatedness between organic and inorganic matter precedes and exceeds the bifurcation between the natural and the artificial. Such relatedness indeed defines the felt experience of continual transition in the mechanosphere of sensations. Brian Massumi has discussed the way microlayers of perception-lying beneath the thresholds of consciousness-are felt experiences occurring at the shortest span of time, the incipient momentum of half a second too short to be c9nsciously registered yet long enough to be felt (Shock tv Thought 29). Here a body is a transducer: it captures the shortest degrees of change between distinct information milieus as sensations in the flesh. The body enters warps of time by feeling before sensory recognition, experiencing the anomaly of the deja sensed occurring at the intensive overloaded interval between what has been and what is yet to be felt, between past and future. In William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard, a professional "cool hunter," uses her allergy to trademarks to spot new trends, and advise . advertising agencies and marketers how best to commodify their products. Her allergy equips her body with nonsensuous sensibility, a subperception that is neither sensory nor mental, neither emotional nor cognitive, but affective in so fa'r as it captures the transition, the feeling of change between

Technoecologies ofSensation 193 the past and the future in the present. Whenever exposed to trademarks, her body transduces the nonsensuous feeling Of information variations in the brandscape into chemical .reactions for the logos in her flesh, resulting in allergic responses, such as fainting spells and sneezing fits. It is mesoperception, according to Massumi, to define the synthetic sensation of distinct velocities of sensing-prioprioceptive, exteroceptive, introceptive-entering in contact with the nonhuman forces that traverse them all (Parables 62). If mesoperception is the sensation of the amodal connection between distinct domains feeling the outside, then symbiosen­ sation is the machinogenesis of a novel relatedness between organic and inorganic milieus of information sensing: a concrescence, to borrow from Whitehead, the growing of "novel togetherness" of actual occasions (Process and Reality 21-22), the felt nexus of distinct societies or worlds across scales and milieus, adding new dimensions of nonphysical feeling to the body. Symbiosensation is not direct perception, but prehension. Whitehead uses. such a notion to reject representative perception or consciousness. Prehensions are feelings-at once conceptual and physical, nonsensuous and sensuous-experienced by a body entering slabs of duration by repeating the feeling of the past and anticipating the feeling of the future (Adventures ofldeas 192-193). Prehensive feeling or symbiosensation indeed implies a readiness to perceive, to anticipate the incipience of new kinesthetic, synesthetic, visceral sensations in the flesh. Symbiosensation marks the capacities of a body to protosense its molecular mutations, entering nonlinear durations. But when exactly do we have symbiosensation and how does it relate to the biodigital ecology of information sensing? Let us recapitulate. In the first place, symbiosensation accounts for how a body feels an expanded environment of bodies as if it were part of its spinal cord, its own kinesthetic movement. For example, the expanded proprioception proper to the autonomic functions of a body acting autonomously from visual perception: driving a car without looking at your feet, swimming without observing your arms, dancing without watching your steps. Machinic assemblages between organic and nonorganic milieus of information sensing engender an extended proprioceptive sensation whereby move­ ment or spatiotemporal orientations have become ecological. The kines­ thetic interdependence between milieus of information sensing entails environments of preinteraction, the feeling of movement before movement, the anticipation of the sensation of orientation triggered by the rhythms of autonomic responses. Far from defining a prosthetic extension of sensory­ motor perception, a machinic, ecological, conception of the sensation of movement, or proprioception, rather points to a nonsensuous perception of movement whereby an ecologically expanded body (an already bionic body) is ready to feel motion before the sensory perception of actual movement.

194 DeleuzejGuattari & Ecology In the second place, we have symbiosensation when a body feels the haptic contactedness in matter or synesthetic contiguity amongst distinct senses. Sensory perception-or . exteroception-defines the registering of , external stimuli through sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Yet the five senses, before becoming determinate by their specific channels of sensing, share a common field of forces impinging upon the skin first. This synesthetic condition is manifested, for example, by the overlapping of distinct senses. For example, the smelling of sounds, the shades of touch, the hearing of light, the taste of color and so on. What remains common to such conditions is that senses share a capacity of being affected or impinged upon by external forces-light, frequencies, pressures, and temperatures-running at certain speeds on a synesthetic skin. This entails a prior symbiotic connection between sensory organs: a link of an intensive nature trading the velocities of data through the surface of the skin, before reaching specific channels-organs of perception. This level of synesthetic symbiosensation entails less a mere physical sensing than an action at a distance between unarticulated sensations entertaining a continual skin relation that suspends the actualization of specific sensory qualities. Such synesthetic symbiosis indicates the diffused condition of a continual overlapping of information sensing in new media ecologiesP For example, take the synesthetic symbiosis of new media gathering together a multicapacity of sensing in one small gadget. Take the self-evident example of the mobile phone, a proto-machine par excellence, constantly adding new capacities for sensing by overlapping and thus suspending the sensory perception of hearing and seeing. Such condition of suspension, however, is not only derived from software able to smooth distinct milieus of information into the integrated circuit of perfect communication. Indeed, and more importantly, the continuous interruption of sensory perception also seems to derive from the soft design of these no longer media objects but rather mediatic objectiles: objects imbued with potentialities of coexten­ sion with all kinds of media, a membranic coexistence with compossible objects. These objectiles expose the limbo of the synesthetic condition of feeling enveloped by the coextensive skin of sensing objects. On such a membranic surface, the software potentialities for thinking are paralleled to the hardware potentialities for sensing, each time demanding a feeling of thought and a thought of feeling: a synesthetic experience prior to sensory perception. Rather than a multimedia} addition of actual sensory functions, such experience is entangled with the coextensive envelope of media objects, their folding together into the symbiotic architecture of feeling at the core of new media. Last but not least, symbiosensation is here used to define a direct nonsensory (nonsensuous) perception of enmeshing durations in a nexus of past-present-future. In particular, visceral sensibility immediately registers

Technoecologies ofSensation 195 excitation before being fully processed not only by the brain, but also by exteroceptive organs. Yet this internal sensibility is not of a constituted inside (for example, a self). Instead, such in-depth sensibility is proper to the involutionary foldings of matter: a proto-feeling preceding and exceeding the organization of information sensing into neurosensorial channels. What is peculiar to visceral sensibility is the catching of the passing of time. Hence it does not concern the feeling of the present, what lies now before the body, buf what passes through a body. Whitehead argues that the sense perception of the contemporary world is always accompanied by the percep­ tion of the withness of the body. "It is this withness that makes the body the starting point for our knowledge of the circumambient world. We find here our direct knowledge of causal efficacy" (Process and Reality 81). Such a feeling of causality or causal relations is a vague yet concrete extrasensory (intuitive) experience of worlds pressing against skins. According to Massumi, visceral sensation subtracts quality from sensory excitation (Parables 33). It envelops intensity, the polyrhythms of nonsensu­ ous perception. Thus, it acts in the interval between stimuli and response, the quantum leap before and after excitation, the low-frequency vibrations running beneath the flesh. This extrasensory experience of nonlinear, inten­ sive durations each time extends the realm of the lived body outside itself on the autoaffective plane of matter: the time-stuff of spatial abstraction (33). What visceral sensibilities grasp is a schizo-continuum in duration, aion time.B This entails the feeling of what happens that clashes with what has happened and what is about to happen; a sensibility towards incorporeal time, which Massumi defines in relation to the fear of whatever or whoever dominating the global political sphere in control societies (Politics ofEveryday Fear 6-9). Whilst fear is linked to the incumbent threat of the unknown, it is also defined as an impersonal sensation of anticipation calling forth future tendencies into present possibilities. Similarly, going back to the example of the mobile phone, the sensation of anticipation is here derived from the constant state of low-level awareness of being potentially contacted, a ceaseless awaiting for the arrival of the yet-to-be contact.14 Symbiosensation entails a visceral prehension of the speeds of time: the nonsensuous feeling of distinct temporal vectors leading to a feeling of anticipation or anterior future, where the past and the future ceaselessly rewind in the present. For example, the bionic sensorium enmeshing together media and bodies, bacterial, neural and silicon information sensing, involves the nonsensuous feeling of a new synthesis of time, the way sen­ sory perception indeed depends on the new level of causal relation between organic and nonorganic velocities of matter, where molecular bodies not only affect human experience but are in turn affected by it. Here a visceral sensation exposes the short-term intuition between what comes before and what comes after, a new level of extrasensory feeling of the vague yet concrete velocities of transmission added on by bionic machines.

196 DeleuzeiGuattari & Ecology Thus, whilst it can be argued that symbiosensation already points to the bionic quality of media ecologies here argued to imply that all sensorium depends on extrasensory feeling or sensory-perception or non-sensuous sensibility, it can be argued that bionic technologies rather mark a · new degree of conjunction between the organic and the inorganic, deploying a technoecology of sensation extending at all levels of matter. Here not only is linear evolution from the biological to the technical turned into a symbio­ genesis of bacterial, silicon and neural information sensing, but also the entire biostratum is exposed to abiotic sensibilities in matter, the nonsensu­ ous prehension of nonlived matter up to and including subatomic particles, which entails a radical modification of feeling. This is the sense in whiCh media technologies can be conceived with Deleuze and Guattari's notion of machinic involution: at the thresholds of prehension between the most minute and the most vast, the most ancient and the most advanced, the most vague and the most concrete, the growing together of all kinds of entities involves an ontomutation of matter resonating across organic and nonorganic feeling bodies. Although the bionic sensorium has not yet been actualized, the virtual action of symbiosensation is already an object of preemptive control. What is at stake here is the anticipation of nonsensuous variations entailing the way sensation becomes biodigitally linked to bacterial and silicon sensibilities in the biochip. How biochips will impact on gut feelings, the variable ratio between the senses, and proprioception, the feeling of an expanded movement, remains an open question. However, such a question may start to suggest that the expansion of a bionic architecture is inseparable from a technoecology of preemptive sensation, a readiness that an intricate nexus of-organic and nonorganic-bodies have, to perceive spatiotemporal activities before their sensory actualization. Yet there is more to this. Such technoecology involves a new ontogenetic phase transition of feeling arranged by the machinic involution of distinct milieus of information sensing. Here the intensifica­ tion of symbiotically enmeshed capacities of sensing across scales and vectors of evolution results in a preemptive technoecology of visceral control, governed not by an informational confusion of sensibility, but by an intuitive anterior decision taken by thinking-dancing nanoparticles, where the anticipation of sensations defines the causal relations of sensations yet to come. Deleuze and Guattari already envisaged the spatiotemporal sophistication of technical machines able to directly connect with virtual worlds of feeling-thoughts running beneath, above, and across the world of actual sensory perception. What remains to be added, however, is how machinic ecologies of sensation mayallow for the symbiotic invention ofmicrosocialities twisting the lines of preemptive sensation into a constructive protoethics of feeling.

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