2023-09-03 05:57:17
Franco “Bifo” Berardi (1949) can well be characterized, albeit to a certain extent, as a left-wing philosopher, writer, and cultural critic. During the 1970s, more precisely until 1977, he was an active member of the Italian workers’ autonomy, a libertarian Marxist movement in which Antonio Negri, among others, also participated. In those years of militancy, Berardi founded magazines, created alternative radio stations and community TV channels, until he was arrested. After the repression once morest the autonomist movement, which put several of the militants in jail (among them Negri, accused of participating in the murder of the Christian Democrat deputy Aldo Moro), he settled in Paris, where he met Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault. . During the 1980s he lived in New York and San Francisco. In the 1990s he returned to Italy and in 2002 he created TV Orfeo, the first Italian community television.
A graduate in aesthetics, currently a professor of Social History of the Media at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts (Milan), Berardi has accompanied his extensive theoretical production with a permanent collaboration in alternative media, at least since he founded the magazine of autonomism A/Traverso. Since then he has developed an intense critical thought and studied the social and subjective transformations caused by the deployment of capitalism, particularly on the effects of the mass media on the social imaginary. Many of his books have been translated into Spanish, such as The Unhappiness Factory (Traficantes de Sueños, 2003), Post Alpha Generation (Tinta Limón, 2007), The Wise Man, the Merchant and the Warrior (Acuarela, 2007), Félix (Cactus, 2013) or Phenomenology of the end (Caja Negra, 2017). In his own way, in reality, Berardi has not stopped being a militant-philosopher (or a philosopher-militant) since the revolt of the 70s.
—Half a century once morest work, your last book published by Tinta Limón, is a compilation of texts that cover from 1970 to 2022. The least that can be said is that they reflect in a certain way, in that little more than half a century that has elapsed, the mutations and twists of late modernity and of his own thinking. How would you define, in perspective, that “certain way” in philosophical-political terms?
—It is not an easy question to answer, because it puts me in the condition of looking for a formula, a word, any locution, that can define a constant (or some constants) in my own journey. I can try to shuffle some conceptual keys that have served as a guide, for example, the word “transversality”, that is, a method for the creation of maps of subjectivity, which continually slides from politics to the unconscious, to aesthetics. . Secondly, the word “irony”, which has always seemed to me like an antidote once morest dogmatism and also like an existential and political escape line. Contrary to what Shakespeare claims, at one point in my life it occurred to me that maturity is a manifestation of conformist infantilism. Going from adolescence to extreme old age seemed to me, to a certain extent, a more interesting method than maturation, that is, conforming to the dominant rule, to the realism that prevents us from imagining.
—Félix Guattari’s ideas have influenced his conception of the subject, rather regarding the production of subjectivity, which is not the same thing. However, Guattari did not know the current formidable display of digital technologies.
—He did not know it but he imagined it, according to the method: “cartographier des contrades à venir” [mapeando los contrastes por venir]. The concept of the rhizome, which is central to Guattari’s thought no less than Deleuze’s, is an anticipated description of the telematic network. I think we should read Guattari as a creator of concepts that serve to anticipate the future world. The concepts that he elaborated were more cartographies of the process than liberation projects.
—Byung-Chul Han refers to neoliberalism as psychopolitics. Is only neoliberalism a psychopolitics?
—I have a lot of respect for the work of Byung-Chul Han although I think that the thesis of his book on psychopolitics is debatable. Of course, neoliberalism implies psychopolitics, but every socioeconomic system, every political organization, implies a psychopolitical dimension. The novelty of the psychopolitical performance of neoliberalism is important, and Han analyzes it very well in his book on psychopolitics: effects of acceleration, overload, anxiety, aggressive competition.
—Recently, Élisabeth Roudinesco published an article on the crisis of psychoanalysis in France. Has the time for schizoanalysis arrived?
—Sandor Ferenczi said in 1919 that psychoanalysis has the conceptual and therapeutic tools to act in conditions of individual neurosis, and that it does not have the conceptual and therapeutic tools to act in conditions of mass psychosis. Here lies the fundamental limit of Freudian thought. Schizoanalysis has been an attempt to advance in the direction of understanding contemporary psychosis, and has tried to open the door to a therapy that is not only restitution of the individual to the social norm, to rationality. Today many realize this limit. That does not mean that we have to forget regarding psychoanalysis. It means that we have to create forms of conceptual and therapeutic elaboration of the collective psychosis that manifests itself in war, in racism, in identity violence.
—And what regarding Marxism? Especially Marxist economism.
—What I can say is simple: without Marx I can understand almost nothing regarding contemporary capitalism. Of course, capitalism has mutated enormously. In any case, Marx is not concerned with the capitalism of his time, he is concerned with capitalism as a process of abstraction without limits. The abstraction process, the transformation of the useful into value, the submission of the useful activity to the accumulation of the abstract, all this continues to be the core of the story we are living. Marx did not deal with political strategies, nor did he write recipes for the restaurants of the future. Marx has described the process that continues to unfold, but he has not moved out of the growth paradigm. That was his limit. Can we repeat Marx at the time of the possibility of extinction of human civilization? In the era of climate change, of the psychic catastrophe that occurs on the horizon of extinction? Of course not. Marx is indispensable to understand how and why we have arrived at this point. Marxism does not serve to escape the consequences of the psychic and environmental collapse produced by unlimited growth. Beware: without Marx the whole speech turns into a moralistic lamentation. Marx cannot be forgotten.
—In one of the articles in “Half a century once morest work”, actually in several, the idea of a psychic collapse of the economy appears. Does this mean, among other things, that “homo economicus” fails under liberal, neoliberal or ordoliberal determinations?
Homo economicus is an unfortunate invention of bourgeois thought. Of course men calculate, of course there is an instinct of ownership, of course the market is a place where useful things circulate, of course there is an economy. Except that there is not only the economy, there is also desire, the desiring body. The economy thought that time can be calculated, mathematically identified, accumulated, exchanged. OK. That can happen, there is an economic dimension of time. But time is not only mathematics, it is also life. The lived time of which Eugene Minkowski speaks cannot be reduced to calculation. The economy is an important dimension of human culture and civilizing action. Very good. However, it cannot become the dominant sphere, it cannot reduce the world of life to its paradigm. It shouldn’t, but unfortunately it has. The economists, those technicians of the mathematical reduction of time, tried to reduce all human time to mathematics. Thus began the epistemic dictatorship that neoliberalism has imposed through the force of the State, through military violence. Neoliberal economism is a mental illness that prevents us from seeing how the planet is reduced to the interests of unlimited growth, to the interests of a social class obsessed with money.
—Now, regarding what you call “infosphere”, what is the difference with cyberspace? Does the first contain the second or vice versa?
“That’s a pretty subtle distinction, if you will. The infosphere is the sphere where the signs that stimulate the brain circulate, cyberspace is the way in which the collective brain receives and elaborates the signs-stimuli. The concept of cyberspace, which was first proposed by William Gibson in his novel Neuromance, refers to a dynamic of continuous interaction between the environment and the collective mind, a dynamic of subjectivity mutation, while the infosphere only refers to the “outer” dimension. ”, to the surrounding environment. I can also use a third word, “psychosphere”, to say how the evolution of the infosphere can produce effects of psychic mutation, exhaustion, suffering, and also healing.
—McLuhan said, long ago, that with electricity technologies the brain was extended. In your analysis of the psychic pathologies of the “digital being”, so to speak, it seems that you adhere to this theory but in a negative way.
—McLuhan’s thought constitutes the essential background of all contemporary reflections on the future of the media, and also to a certain extent on the future of the psycho-sphere. In his most important work, Understanding Media, from 1964, McLuhan recognizes that the change in communication technique produces a mutation effect in the forms of mental elaboration. Electricity, and also electronics, have produced an extension of the brain’s operability, not just an extension. Also a mutation. McLuhan writes that when communication goes from the alphabetic (sequential) format to the electronic (instantaneous) format, the modality of thought changes from a critical form (typical of modernity) to a neomythical form (typical of postmodernity). That means that it is not just an extension but a mutation. Whether it is good or bad is another matter. I don’t think contemporary mutation is univocally definable as bad. It is an ambivalent mutation that can evolve in one way and also in another.
—In your opinion, and excuse my sincerity, is the social or collective mind of the “global village”, going back to McLuhan’s utopia, rather crazy?
—First of all, if you will allow me, what is the global village today? Secondly, what does “crazy” mean? McLuhan’s definition in the 1960s was a very astute intuition that essentially referred to the infospherical dimension. The global village was, for McLuhan, the effect of sharing information, images, of participating in a semiotic continuum. This intuition is realized today through the global network. But when we talk regarding the collective mind we are talking regarding the effects that instantaneous global communication can produce (and does produce) in the cognitive activity, in the thought, in the emotionality of billions of human beings. From this point of view, the effects are not linear. On the contrary, the unification produced by the deterritorialization of the infosphere has produced effects of panic, of disorientation, which at the same time have unleashed movements of reactionary reterritorialization. The problem of identity (identity obsession, the desire for community in all its ambiguity) is presented here as one of the factors of the regressive and reactionary wave that we are facing in all parts of the world.
—In a 2004 writing you say that the history of the 20th century is the history of the conflict and the alliance of three figures: the wise man, the warrior and the merchant. Haven’t you forgotten regarding the artist? Or is art dead?
—In this text I deal metaphorically with the different figures of modern capitalism, understood from the point of view of capturing knowledge. The producer of knowledge (the sage) finds himself in a pincer between economic exploitation (the merchant) and military submission (the warrior). The artist (I prefer to say the poet, I clarify) is located in another dimension, does not belong to the cycle of production-exploitation-submission. He belongs to another field, the field of cure, of therapy. When the capitalist subsumption of language and knowledge has stifled mental life, the poet (the artist if you prefer to say so) is the figure that allows a reactivation of breathing. The distinction between “artist” and “poet” may seem fussy but I can explain myself. The word “art”, in its modern history, has been identified many times with the market. poetry not
—There are those who believe that you are a pessimistic thinker, I don’t quite know why. Can you think of an idea that explains this effect?
—In my case, I have never understood very well what the words “pessimistic” and “optimistic” mean. I can understand the distinction between happy and unhappy, between happy and depressed. Now, what does the word “pessimist” mean? Someone who prophesies misfortune? Cassandra prophesied misfortunes and was right to prophesy them, because his prophecies always came true. The Trojans didn’t listen to her and said: that lady is too pessimistic, we didn’t listen to her. As we know, the horse entered the city of Troy and the bad prophecy came true. And why didn’t anyone listen to Cassandra’s prophecies? Because Cassandra was sad, she cried and screamed, and everyone thought she was depressed. Nobody listens to the depressed, they consider him a bit crazy, someone who has to go to the psychiatrist. I am very interested in the figure of the prophet, someone who says what is inscribed in the present as a trend. However, I do not like the figure of the sad prophet. The prophet has to be ironic, and possibly he has to be a jolly guy. Pessimistic, optimistic, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we should not depress the readers, we have to tell the readers: the world may be collapsing, but I want to live happily, I want my friends to live happy, I want everyone to live happy, a despite the collapse.
Nazism is everywhere
By Franco Berardi*
Past the threshold of the pandemic, the new panorama is the war that pits Nazism once morest Nazism. Günther Anders had foreshadowed in his writings of the 1960s (Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen) that the nihilistic charge of Nazism had not been exhausted with the defeat of Hitler, and that it would return to the world stage as a result of technical power, which provokes a feeling of humiliation of the human will, reduced to impotence.
We now see Nazism re-emerging as the psychopolitical form of the insane body of the white race reacting angrily to its relentless decline. The viral chaos has created the conditions for the formation of a global biopolitical infrastructure, but the perception of ungovernability is terrified by the chaotic proliferation of matter, which loses order, disintegrates and dies.
The western mind has removed death because it is not compatible with the obsession with the future. Removes senescence as it is not compatible with expansion. Now the aging (demographic, cultural and even economic) of the dominant cultures of the North of the world is presented as a specter that the white culture cannot even think regarding, much less accept. So here is the white brain (both Biden’s and Putin’s) going into a raging crisis of dementia. The wildest of all, Donald Trump, tells a truth that no one wants to hear: Putin is our best friend. Certainly he is a racist murderer, but we are no less. Biden represents the helpless anger felt by the elderly when they realize the decline in physical strength, psychic energy and mental efficiency. Now that depletion is at an advanced stage, extinction is the only reassuring prospect.
Will humanity be able to save itself from the exterminating violence of the insane brain of the dying Western, Russian, European and American civilization? Regardless of how the invasion of Ukraine evolves, whether it becomes a stable occupation of the territory (unlikely) or that it ends with a withdrawal of Russian troops following having carried out the destruction of the military apparatus that the Euro-Americans have provided in Kiev (likely ), the conflict cannot be resolved with the defeat of one or the other of the two former patriarchs. Neither one nor the other can agree to retire before winning. Therefore, this invasion seems to open a phase of war tending to be global (and potentially nuclear).
The question that currently appears unanswered relates to the non-Western world, which for centuries has suffered arrogance, violence, and exploitation by Europeans, Russians, and Americans. In the suicidal war that the West has waged once morest the other West, the first victims are those who have suffered the delusion of the two Wests, those who do not want any war, but must suffer the effects.
The final war once morest humanity has begun. The only thing we can do is ignore it, abandon it, collectively transform fear into thought and resign ourselves to the inevitable, because only then can the unpredictable happen in setbacks: peace, pleasure, life.
*Extracted from Half a century once morest work, Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2023.
1693721433
#Neoliberal #economism #mental #illness
