Futurability. Franco “Bifo” Berardi

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      Pre-emption: Determinism as Strategy of Reduction

      The predictive power of the contemporary global machine lies in the ability to routinely read big flows of data. The resulting statistical prediction, thanks to the introduction of the filter bubble, turns into prescription and the evacuation of subjectivity.

      The techno-informational automatism that captures data from the living flow of social activity in order to adapt the articulations of the global machine to the expectations of the social organism, and in order to symmetrically adapt the expectations of the social organism to the articulations of the global machine, I’ll call, following Warren Neidich, the ‘Statisticon’.

      The technique of customization that enables Google and other search engines to anticipate our requests, as well as to shape and control our desires, is called the ‘filter bubble’. The filter bubble is an example of what Warren Neidich calls the Statisticon: a reducer of future events into probability and predictability. Pre-emption is complementary to the statistical capture; pre-emptying the future means preventing future behaviour and emptying it of singularity.

      In the dynamics of the Statisticon, the mirror acts as a generator that leads the machine to anticipate and pre-package social behaviour.

      The Statisticon evolves together with the environment (in this case, social life), but the condition for this coevolution is the pre-inscribed structural homology that makes social interaction possible in the sphere of automated governance.

      The agent of enunciation must use the language that the machine understands, in order for there to be effective communication. Once the agent of enunciation has accepted the format that makes interaction possible, the interaction can evolve, and the machine can adapt to the living organism insofar as the living organism has also adapted to the machine.

      The statistical pre-emption implies two complementary actions: one is the recording of massive flows of data; the second is the adapting of the machine to the living environment and the reciprocal adaptation of the living, conscious organisms to the machine.

      Large amounts of data give the machine its ability to adapt, while simultaneously the filter bubble induces the living, conscious organisms to comply with the expected responses of the machine.

      Statistical pre-emption is the mode of functioning of governance, the contemporary form of political and economic power – a form of engendered determinism.

      Pre-emption acts as a deterministic trap: the future of the organism can be altered through bio-technical or techno-social modifications. The possible is captured and reduced to mere probability, and the probable is enforced as necessary.

      Nevertheless at the next bifurcation a new possibility surfaces, and the next bifurcation will be the following: a process of cognitive automation underway in our time. Will the general intellect (millions of cognitarians worldwide) find a body – an erotic, aesthetic and ethical body?

      Futures are inscribed in the present as immanent possibilities, not as necessary developments of a code. Futurability refers to the multidimensionality of the future: in the present a plurality of futures is inscribed. Consciousness is one of the deciding factors in the selection between these possibilities, and consciousness is continuously changing in the flow of changing social composition.

      A process of cognitive automation is underway in our time. Articulations of the global machine (interfaces, applications …) proliferate and insert themselves in the social mind. The conjunctive body and the conjunctive mind are penetrated by the architecture of overall connectivity.

      A code is inscribed in the info-neural connection; as we face this process of cognitive wiring we are often led to think that there is no way out from a sort of neurototalitarianism in the making.

      A way out from neuro-totalitarianism does exist as the conjunctive body of the general intellect is wider that the code embedded in it, and the dynamics of the general intellect may lead to unexpected deviations from the determinist replication of the coded actuation.

      The present depression (both psychological and economic) obscures the consciousness that no determinist projection of the future is true. We feel trapped in the tangle of techno-linguistic automatisms: finance, global competition, military escalation. But the body of the general intellect (the social and erotic bodies of a million cognitarians) is richer than the connective brain. And the present reality is richer than the format imposed on it, as the multifold possibilities inscribed in the present have not been wholly cancelled, even if they may seem presently inert.

      The possible is immanent, but it’s unable to develop into a process of actualization.

      The inertia of the possibilities inscribed in the present composition of the social body is an effect of the impotence of subjectivity. During the last century, the social subjectivity of workers experienced forms of solidarity, autonomy and welfare – then at the end of the century it became disempowered so that it is now unable to express those potentialities which are present in the general intellect and in the body of social solidarity.

      The possibility of emancipation of social time from the obligation of salaried work still exists: it is located in the cooperative knowledge of millions of cognitive workers, but this possibility cannot surface at the present because of the political impotence that in this book I want to describe, analyze and find a way to exceed.

      The impotence of subjectivity is an effect of the total potency of power when it becomes independent from human will, decision and government – when it is inscribed in the automated texture of technique and of language.

      Social Psycho-mancy and the Horizon of Possibility

       The man thinks

       The horse thinks

       The sheep thinks

       The cow thinks

       The dog thinks

      The fish doesn’t think.

       The fish is mute, expressionless

      because the fish knows.

      Everything.

      Iggy Pop and Goran Bregovic,

      ‘This Is a Film’

      This book is an attempt to build a psycho-mantic map of social futurability: an inquiry (or divination) on the social becoming of the psychosphere.

      From such a point of view we might see the lines of evolution issuing out from the present chaotic social mind’s vibration.

      This chaotic vibration is quite visible at the present, in the full-fledged epidemics of aggressive madness that surround us: Daesh, Donald Trump, financial austeritarianism and resurgent national-socialism are signs of contemporary psychotic epidemics.

      Every day we experience the sense that opposition to the mounting wave of racism, fanaticism and the ensuing violence is pointless. In fact, this wave is not a political decision, the result of ideological and strategic elaboration, but the effect of despair, the reaction to long-lasting humiliation. The perfect rationality of the abstract computational machine, the inescapability of financial violence has jeopardized the consciousness and sensibility of the social organism, СКАЧАТЬ