After the Future. Franco Bifo Berardi

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      I don’t intend to discuss the politics of Lenin’s fundamental choices. I’m interested in pointing out a relationship between Bolshevik voluntarism and the male inability to accept depression and transform it from within. Here lies the root of the subjectivist voluntarism that crippled social autonomy in the 1900s. Leninism’s intellectual decisions were so powerful because they papered over depression with an obsessive male voluntarism.

CONNECTION AND SENSIBILITY

      By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the long history of the artistic avant-garde was over. Beginning with Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and resulting in the Dadaist cry to “Abolish art, abolish everyday life, abolish the separation between art and everyday life,” the history of the avant-garde culminates in the gesture of 9/11. Stockhausen had the courage to say this, although many of us were thinking the same: it was the consumate work of art of the century with no future. The fusion of art and life (or death, what difference does it make?) is clearly visible in a form of action we might call “terrorizing suicide.” Let us take Pekka-Eric Auvinen as an example. The Finnish youngster turned up at his school with a machine gun, killing eight people, himself included. Printed on his T-shirt was the sentence: “Humanity is overrated.” Wasn’t his gesture pregnant with signs typical of the communicative action of the arts?

      Let me explain: I’m not inviting the young readers of this book to go to a crowded place with an explosive belt. I’m trying to say, pay attention: a gigantic wave of desperation could soon turn into a suicidal epidemic that will turn the first connective generation into a devastating psychic bomb.

      I don’t think this wave of suicides can be explained in terms of morality, family values, and the weak discourse conservative thought uses to account for the ethical drift produced by capitalism. To understand our contemporary form of ethical shipwreck, we need to reflect on the transformations of activity and labor, the subsumption of mental time under the competitive realm of productivity; we have to understand the mutation of the cognitive and psychosocial system.

      The context of my understanding of present historical and cultural dynamics is the transition from a realm of conjunction to one of connection, with a special focus on the emergence of the first connective generation, those who learn more words from a machine than a mother. In this transition, a mutation of the conscious organism is taking place: to render this organism compatible with a connective environment, our cognitive system needs to be reformatted. This appears to generate a dulling of the faculties of conjunction that had hitherto characterized the human condition.

      The realm of sensibility is involved in this ongoing process of cognitive reformatting. Aesthetic, ethical, and political thought is reshaping its observational standpoint and framework around the passage from a conjunctive to a connective form of human concatenation.

      Conjunction is becoming-other. In contrast, in connection each element remains distinct and interacts only functionally. Singularities change when they conjoin; they become something other than they were before their conjunction. Love changes the lover and a combination of a-signifying signs gives rise to the emergence of a meaning that hadn’t existed prior to it. Rather than a fusion of segments, connection entails a simple effect of machinic functionality. In order to connect, segments must be compatible and open to interfacing and interoperability. Connection requires these segments to be linguistically compatible. In fact the digital web spreads and expands by progressively reducing more and more elements to a format, a standard and a code that make different segments compatible.

      The segments that enter this rhizome belong to different realms of nature: they are electronic, semiotic, machinic, biological, and psychic; fibre optic circuits, mathematical abstractions, electromagnetic waves, human eyes, neurons, and synapses. The process whereby they become compatible traverses heterogeneous fields of being and folds them onto a principle of connectivity. The present mutation occurs in this transition from conjunction to connection, a paradigm of exchange between conscious organisms.

      Central to this mutation is the insertion of the electronic into the organic, the proliferation of artificial devices in the organic universe, in the body, in communication, and in society. Therefore, the relationship between consciousness and sensibility is transformed and the exchange of signs undergoes a process of increasing desensitization.

      Conjunction is the meeting and fusion of rounded and irregular forms that infuse in a manner that is imprecise, unrepeatable, imperfect, and continuous. Connection is the punctual and repeatable interaction of algorithmic functions, straight lines and points that juxtapose perfectly and are inserted and removed in discrete modes of interaction. These discrete modes make different parts compatible to predetermined standards. The digitalization of communication processes leads, on one hand, to a sort of desensitization to the sinuous, to the continuous flows of slow becoming, and on the other hand, to becoming sensitive to the code, to sudden changes of states, and to the sequence of discrete signs.

      Interpretation follows semantic criteria in the realm of conjunction: the meaning of the signs sent by the other as she enters into conjunction with you needs to be understood by tracing the intention, the context, the nuances, and the unsaid, if necessary. The interpretative criteria of the realm of connection on the other hand are purely syntactic. In connection, the interpreter must recognise a sequence and be able to perform the operation required by general syntax or the operating system; there is no room for margins of ambiguity in the exchange of messages, nor can the intention be shown by means of nuances.

      This mutation produces painful effects in the conscious organism and we read them through the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic, depression, and a sort of suicidal epidemic are spreading. However, a purely psychopathological account fails to capture the question in its depth, because we are in fact confronted with the effort of the conscious organism to adapt to a changed environment, with a readjustment of the cognitive system to the technocommunicative environment. This generates pathologies of the psychic sphere and in social relations.

      Aesthetic perception—here properly conceived of as the realm of sensibility and aesthesia—is directly involved in this transformation: in its attempt to efficiently interface with the connective environment, the conscious organism appears to increasingly inhibit what we call sensibility. By sensibility, I mean the faculty that enables human beings to interpret signs that are not verbal nor can be made so, the ability to understand what cannot be expressed in forms that have a finite syntax. This faculty reveals itself to be useless and even damaging in an integrated connective system. Sensibility slows down processes of interpretation and renders them aleatory and ambiguous, thus reducing the competitive efficiency of the semiotic agent.

      The ethical realm where voluntary action is possible also plays an essential role in the reformatting of the cognitive system. Religious sociologists and journalists lament a sort of ethical lack of sensitivity and a general indifference in the behavior of the new generation. In many cases, they lament the decline of ideological values or community links. However, in order to understand the discomfort that invests the ethical and political realms, the emphasis needs to be placed on aesthetics. Ethical paralysis and the inability to ethically govern individual and collective life seem to stem from a discomfort in aesthesia—the perception of the other and the self.

      The arts of the 1900s favored two utopic registers: the radical utopia of Mayakovsky and the functional utopia of the Bauhaus. The dystopian thread remained hidden in the folds of the artistic and literary imagination, in Fritz Lang, expressionism, and a kind of bitter paranoid surrealism from Salvador Dali to Philip K. Dick. In the second half of the twentieth century, the literary dystopias of Orwell, Burroughs and DeLillo flourished. Only today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, does dystopia take center stage and conquer the whole field of artistic imagination, thus drawing the narrative horizon СКАЧАТЬ