Posts tagged bifo
Posts tagged bifo
When we move onto the sphere of infolabor, there is no longer a need to buy a person for eight hours a day indefinitely. Capital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers.
Depersonalized time has become the real agent of valorization, and depersonalized time has neither any right, nor any demand. It can only be either available or unavailable, but this is purely theoretial because the physical body, despite not being a legally recognized person, still has to buy food and pay rent.
In industrial capitalism’s past, the working class could fight against a target that was precisely identified: the boss, the entrepreneur who owned material things like the factory and the products of his employee’s labor. Today, the boss has vanished. He is fragmented into billions of financial segments, disseminated into millions of financial agents scattered all around the world. The workers themselves are part of recombinant financial capital. They are expecting future revenues from their pension fund investments. They own stock options in the enterprise exploiting their labor. They are hooked up, like a fly in a spider web: if they move, they get strangled, but if they don’t move, the spider will suck their life from them. Society may rot, fall apart, agonize. It is not going to affect the political and economic stability of capitalism. What is called economic recovery is a new round of social devastation.
So the recession is over, capitalism is recovering. Nonetheless, unemployment is rising and misery is spreading. This means that financial capitalism is autonomous from society. Capitalism doesn’t need workers: it just needs cellular fractals of labor, underpaid, precarious, depersonalised. Fragments of impersonal nervous energy, recombined by the network. The crisis is going to push forward technological change and the substitution of human labor with machines. The employment rate is not going to rise in the future, and productivity will increase. A shrinking number of workers will be forced to work overtime to produce more and more.
The only relation between the State Communism imposed by the Leninist parties in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and the autonomous communism of the workers, is the violence systematically exerted by the first over the second, in order to subdue, discipline, and destroy it.
We can reach every point in the world but, more importantly, we can be reached at any point in the world. Privacy and its possibilities are abolished. Attention is under seige everywhere. Not silence but uninterrupted noise, not the red desert, but a cognitive space overcharged with nervous incentives to act: this is the alienation of our times…
To our co-dependent friendship based on a mutual love of cats, critical theory, and various strains of Marxism.
In the introduction to What is philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari speak of friendship. They suggest that friendship is the way to overcome depression, because friendship means sharing a sense, sharing a view and a common rhythm: a common refrain in Guattari’s parlance…
Depression is based on the hardening of one’s existential refrain, on its obsessive repetition. The depressed person is unable to go out, to leave the repetitive refrain and s/he keeps going back into the labyrinth
The goal of the schizoanalyst is to give him/her the possibility of seeing other landscapes, to change focus, to open new paths of imagination.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy”
To the fact that you have consistently, despite all of your personal problems, dragged me out of the labyrinth and been the best friend I could possibly ask for. I feel like if I gush anymore about how much you mean to me, it’ll end up coming across as sentimental and foolish rather than heartfelt. I know you hate your birthday and you hate this month, I’ll do my best to stop it from becoming a hardened refrain.
Kisses,
Franco Berardi Bifo at the Brera Academy, Milan
To me, the word insurrection means to rise up, it means to take on ourselves our dignity as human beings, as workers, as citizens in an uncompromising way. But it also means something else. It means to fully unfold the potency of the body and of collective knowledge, of society, of the net, of intelligence. To entirely unfold what we are, in a collective way. This is the point. Those who say that insurrection is a utopia are sometimes cynics, sometimes just idiots. Those who say that it is not possible to revolt, don’t take into account the fact that, to us, almost everything is possible. Only, this ‘almost everything’ is subjugated by the miserable obsession for profit and accumulation. The obsession for profit and accumulation led our country and all European countries to the verge of a terrifying catastrophe, into which we are now sinking, and we should realize we are already quite far into it. It is the catastrophe of barbarism and ignorance.
(full transcript at th-rough.eu)
Bifo,
Thank you for demonstrating that a well-dressed, soft spoken individual with severe emotional issues can sometimes be one of the only people in his age group with any goddamn sense. Also I love your glasses.
Kisses,
Patrick
