TH12. Global Vertebral Telegraphy & Neural Neuzeit

If teeth are objectified hunger, and the steam engine a mechanization of musculoskeletal vivacity, then telegraphy is the organ of a globe become self-conscious. Such a view was already common by the 1870s, two decades after the first transatlantic cables had been laid. In 1877, Ernst Kapp (1808–1896) published his Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik, where he develops a theory of ‘organ projections’ (a concept that Alsberg inherited and borrowed) by claiming that technology is nothing but the eversion of the bodily functions of the human animal. Writing that ‘the comparison between the electrical telegraph and the nervous system is self-evident’, Kapp thereafter lists the many other anatomists of his time who had similarly noted how closely the global telegraph network resembles an extended nervous network of cerebrospinal arcs.1 As the influential physician Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) had stated in an 1871 lecture ‘On the Spinal Cord’: ‘the nerves are the cable installations of the animal body, just as you might call telegraph cables the nerves of humankind’.2 Kapp writes that, in global communications networks, humanity has produced for itself ‘an exact artificial reconstruction of the body’s own nervous system’ by laying a ‘branching electrical framework over the entire earth’.3 (Extending this to a yet wider scale, we note that Kapp’s Organprojektion is precisely the principle that influenced Acheropoulos’s conviction that ‘the laws of physics’ are themselves nothing but the externalized reflex arcs of some cosmic-scale alien tektology.) In support of his argument, Kapp pointed out that cross-sections of spinal cord nerves and telegraph cables—when placed side-by-side—unveil an uncanny identity in design.

Kapp, moreover, noticed that it is solely ‘through organ projection that we recognize the impulse human nature has to reflect itself in itself’.4 The human being knows itself in the special way it does because it everts itself so as to reflect itself back upon itself. It is the artefact of its own artifice. So, as Blumenberg and Alsberg hinted, we are our neural prostheses. And, just as the ‘eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things’,5 global humanity likewise only becomes truly self-conscious by mediating itself through some globally-inosculating neural prosthetic. The sentient animal already accomplishes this by collapsing into the neural reflexion of its own world, but by embarking upon a global-scale technogenic plexus evagination, the human reaches a new intensity of planetary autonoesis. Kapp, already in the 1870s, noticed the seemingly paradoxical fact that it is only our intussusception outwards that vouchsafes our intensified inwardness.

The telegraph, then, provides the global sensorium within which humanity can reflect itself unto itself, thus becoming aware of itself as a massified cosmopolitan community. From here, from this massification of history via neural transcontinental prostheses, come the world-shaking revolutions of a time of unceasing geopolitical upheaval and time-space compressions (in other words, ‘Neuzeit’ or ‘modernity’).6 It is only by assembling a planetary-scale brain that we began to think like a planet. Globalization, indeed, is nothing other than self-consciousness of globalization, so it should come as no surprise that it demands this encephalization of the planet. For as soon as one operates under nonlocal horizons, one cannot but become ever more deracinated in one’s actions. Becoming globally focalized can do nothing but facilitate more global focalizing: globalization is its own awareness of itself, and, since the brain is the organ of awareness, globalization demands a globe-brain. And the telegraphic planet-spine—inceptive of the modern subject’s distinctively multiscalar focalization—represents the outward concretization of this process. Communications networks are a megamachine for interoception ex situ. They generate for us our world-interior. Each undersea telegraph line is a moment in the externalization, or self-mediation, of Spirit. And when, in the late 1850s, the telegraph connected Ireland to Newfoundland, our nervous system became properly transatlantic. The movements of Spirit, that ‘old mole’ torquing through the crust, present to us nothing other than the moments of what Kapp calls a ‘Universal Telegraphics’—the assembly of a planetary-scale Spinal Surrogate, or, in Lawrence’s words, an extension of ‘vertebral telepathy’ into a ‘vertebral telegraphy’.7

In 1876, the year prior to Kapp’s disquisition upon Organprojektion, Engels had declared that the primal adoption of ‘more erect posture’ was ‘the decisive step in the transition from ape to man’8 because it freed up the hands for labour; and labour, in turn, promoted conditions that would promote further spinal erection. In this conception, labour and spinal erection cause each other: mutually bootstrapping, symbiotically and serially dragging one another into existence, to gradually converge on Homo economicus. From one perspective, uprightness first enables labour to invade reality; from another, labour value quite literally drags the ape upright, invading us with lowering time preference, riddling us with futurity. A symbiogenesis of sufficiencies. Yet, whilst Marxians from Engels to Bloch would celebrate this convergence upon the labouring ape, Elaine Morgan notes that of ‘all the man-hours lost to industry through various forms of illness, the highest percentage derives from our mode of locomotion’:

In a recent year in Britain, lower back pain occasioned the loss of nineteen million working days. In the United States it has been calculated that 70 per cent of American citizens are affected by it at some time in their lives.9

Certainly, as Ferenczi would point out, standing upright heralded no great boom in efficiency: it merely deflected our irrational desire for faecal mess into the grubby machinations of finance. Chiropraxis, on this view, is nothing but copropraxia. The symbiogenesis of labour must then be viewed with appropriate suspicion—as Burroughs reminds us, ‘[f]rom symbiosis to parasitism is a short step’.10 Binocular vision, opposable thumbs, and intrusive spinal uplift are all physiological symptoms of abstract labour’s retroparasitism: its teleo-economic lock-in as both drive and destiny of terrestrial history; a new self-intricating ‘sealed haven’ or entrapment to rival that of nervous enclosure.

Spinal Catastrophism’s conception of time is one essential to modernity itself. The lock-in of systems that cause their own furtherance and exaggeration (i.e. the globalized economic system unmasked by both Ferenczi and Bataille as an excrementitious end-unto-itself) creates a sense in which the future drags us towards it. The future is not passive, it actively creates its own emergence via such circular causality (when something causes itself to cause itself, time seems to flow backward). And the more the future flows backward towards us in this way, the more we feel that our present is in the grip of a past that is utterly retrograde. As soon as time begins to speed up, the future begins arriving early, which means that the past is felt—more and more—as inertial drag within the present. ‘Precocity’ can be defined only relative to ‘belatedness’. Thus, as modernity ripples outwards into the rolling revolutions of a time made continually anew, the ancient and outmoded and primal becomes increasingly resurgent and compulsively repetitious. Only when we became suitably modern—gathering enough momentum to see the past distinctly in the rear-view mirror—did the gothic begin to exert a considerable drag upon us. This seems paradoxical, but it is anything but. Only when we defined ourselves against the horrors of the past did the past become horrifying (and thus able to exert considerable psychic effect upon our present); so our realization of our distance from the archaeopsychic past is precisely the archaeopsychic past exerting its pull upon us. Kapp, indeed, anticipating Ballard’s suggestion of resonance between inner and outer space, noticed that, insofar as the modern technical world was a projection of our insides, one could perform an investigation of the human unconscious by analysing the geometries and designs of our technological landscape. Futurity’s bleeding industrial edge repeats an ancient drive. Time exhibits a lordotic curvature; modernity’s sense of chronology is one of whiplash. Ballard would have welcomed the thought and Lewis and Bloch no doubt would have hated it, but the regurgitation of the past—where the horsetails grow as high as palms—is internal to the modern rush. And it is no coincidence if it was just at the point when temporality began compressing and coiling in this way that a nascent psychiatry diagnosed the first illnesses of time. It is still accepted that schizophrenia affects time perception, so it is appropriate that discussion of schizophrenia—and, specifically, of schizophrenia as a malady of temporality—was so central to the genesis of modern psychiatrics.11