After the Future. Franco Bifo Berardi

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      The whole system precipitates into indeterminacy as all correspondences between symbol and referent, simulation and event, value and labor time no longer hold. But isn’t this also what the avant-garde aspired to? Doesn’t experimental art wish to sever the link between symbol and referent? In saying this, I’m not accusing the avant-garde of being the cause of neoliberal economic deregulation. Rather, I’m suggesting that the anarchic utopia of the avant-garde was actualized and turned into its opposite the moment society internalized rules and capital was able to abdicate both juridical law and political rationality to abandon itself to the seeming anarchy of internalized automatisms, which is actually the most rigid form of totalitarianism.

      As industrial discipline dwindled, individuals found themselves in a state of ostensible freedom. No law forced them to put up with duties and dependence. Obligations became internalized and social control was exercised through a voluntary, albeit inevitable, subjugation to chains of automatisms.

      In a regime of aleatory and fluctuating values, precariousness became the generalized form of social relations, which deeply affected social composition and the psychic, relational and linguistic characters of a new generation as it entered the labor market. Rather than a particular form of productive relations, precariousness is the dark soul of the productive process. An uninterrupted flow of fractal and recombining infolabor circulates in the global web as the agent of universal valorization, yet its value is indeterminable. Connectivity and precariousness are two sides of the same coin: the flow of semiocapitalist production captures and connects cellularized fragments of depersonalized time; capital purchases fractals of human time and recombines them in the web. From the standpoint of capitalist valorization, this flow is uninterrupted and finds its unity in the object produced; however, from the standpoint of cognitive workers the supply of labor is fragmented: fractals of time and pulsating cells of labor are switched on and off in the large control room of global production. Therefore the supply of labor time can be disconnected from the physical and juridical person of the worker. Social labor time becomes an ocean of valorizing cells that can be summoned and recombined in accordance with the needs of capital.

      Let us return to the Futurist Manifesto. War and the contempt for women are the essential features of mobilization, which traverses the whole parable of historical vanguards. The Futurist ambition really consisted in mobilizing social energies toward the acceleration of the social machine’s productivity. Art aided the discourse of advertising as the latter fed into mobilization. When industrial capitalism transposed into the new form of semiocapitalism, it first and foremost mobilized the psychic energy of society, bending it to the drive of competition and cognitive productivity. The new economy of the 1990s was essentially a prozac economy, both neuromobilization and compulsory creativity.

      Paul Virilio has shown the connection between war and speed: in the modern forms of domination, the imposition of war onto the whole of social life is an implicit one precisely because economic competitiveness is war, and war and the economy share the common denominator of speed. As Walter Benjamin (1992, 234) writes: “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” The aestheticization of life is one aspect of this mobilization of social energies. The aestheticization of war is functional to the subjugation of everyday life to the rule of history. War forces the global masses to partake in the process of self-realization of the Hegelian Spirit, or, perhaps more realistically, to become part of capitalist global accumulation. Captured in the dynamics of war, everyday life is ready to be subjected to the unlimited rule of the commodity.

      From this standpoint, there is no difference between fascism, communism, and democracy: art functions as the element of aestheticization and mobilization of everyday life. Total mobilization is terror, and terror is the ideal condition for a full realization of the capitalist plan to mobilise psychic energy. The close relation between Futurism and advertising is an integral part of this process.

      In Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Gerald Raunig (2007) writes on the relationship between the artistic avant-garde and activism. His work provides a useful phenomenological account of the relation between art and political mobilization in the twentieth century, but it fails to grasp the absolute specificity of the current situation, that is, the crisis and exhaustion of all activism.

      The term “activism” became largely influential as a result of the antiglobalization movement, which used it to describe its political communication and the connection between art and communicative action. However, this definition is a mark of its attachment to the past and its inability to free itself from the conceptual frame of reference it inherited from the twentieth century. Should we not free ourselves from the thirst for activism that led the twentieth century to the point of catastrophe and war? Shouldn’t we set ourselves free from the repeated and failed attempt to act for the liberation of human energies from the rule of capital? Isn’t the path toward the autonomy of the social from economic and military mobilization only possible through a withdrawal into inactivity, silence, and passive sabotage?

      I believe that there is a profound relationship between the drive to activism and male depression in late modernity, which is most evident in the voluntarist and subjectivist organization of Leninism. Both from the standpoint of the history of the workers’ movement in the 1900s and from that of the strategic autonomy of society from capital, I’m convinced that the twentieth century would have been a better century had Lenin not existed. Lenin’s vision interprets a deep trend in the configuration of the psyche of modern masculinity. Male narcissism was confronted with the infinite power of capital and emerged from it frustrated, humiliated, and depressed. It seems to me that Lenin’s depression is a crucial element for understanding the role his thought played in the development of the politics of late modernity.

      I have read Hélène Carrère D’Encausse’s biography of Lenin. The author is a researcher of Georgian descent, who also published L’Empire éclaté, where she foresaw the collapse of the Soviet empire as an effect of the insurgence of Islamic fundamentalism. What interested me in Carrère D’Encausse’s biography of Lenin, more than the history of Lenin’s political activity, was his personal life, his fragile psyche, and his affectionate and intellectual relationships with the women close to him: his mother, his sister, Krupskaia, comrade and wife, who looked after him at times of acute psychological crises, and, finally, Inessa Armand, the perturbing, the unheimlich, the lover whom Lenin cut out, along with symphonic music, for softening his character.

      The psyche described in this biography is framed by depression, and Lenin’s most acute crises coincided with important political shifts in the revolutionary movement. As Carrère D’Encausse writes:

      Lenin used to invest everything he did with perseverance, tenaciousness and an exceptional concentration: such consistency, which he thought necessary in each of his efforts, put him in a position of great superiority over the people around him […]. This feature of his character often had negative effects. Exceedingly intensive efforts would tire him and wear down his already fragile nervous system. The first crisis dates back to 1902. (Carrère D’Encausse 1998, 78)

      These were the years of the Bolshevik turn, of What Is to Be Done? Krupskaia played a fundamental role in her comrade’s crisis: she intervened to filter his relations with the outside world, paid for his therapy and isolation in clinics in Switzerland and Finland. Lenin emerged from the 1902 crisis by writing What Is to Be Done? and engaging in the construction of a “nucleus of steel,” a block of will capable of breaking the weakest link in the (imperialist) chain. The second crisis came in 1914 at the height of the break up of the Second International and the split of the Communists. The third crisis, as you might guess, occurred in the spring of 1917. Krupskaia found a safe resort in Finland, where Lenin conceived The April Theses and decided to impose will on intelligence: a rupture that disregarded the deep dynamics of class struggle and forced onto them an external design. Intelligence is depressive, therefore, will is the only cure for the abyss: ignore but do not remove it. The abyss remained and subsequent СКАЧАТЬ