After the Future Franco Berardi (“Bifo”) Edited by Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn Translated by Arianna Bove, Melinda Cooper, Erik Empson, Enrico, Giuseppina Mecchia, and Tiziana Terranova 1 Contents Preface: The Transversal Communism of Franco Berardi Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn Introduction 1. The Century that Trusted in the Future Futurism and the Reversal of the Future The Media Utopia of the Avant-Garde Zaum and Technomaya Activism Connection and Sensibility End of the Future Cursed Be the Prophet The Last Utopia Inversion of the Future 2. The Zero Zero Decade From Seattle to Copenhagen On the Brink of Disaster After the Dotcom Crash The Fuzzy Economy of Cognitive Labor Infolabor and Precarisation City of Panic 3. Baroque and Semiocapital Lumpen Italian Language and Poison The Italian Anomaly Shirkers Aleatory Value in Neo-Baroque Society Self Despise 4. Exhaustion and Subjectivity Precarious Future Exhaustion: Re-reading Baudrillard Necronomy Singularity Insurrection When Old People Fall in Love Happy End After Futurism Bibliography 2 Preface: The Transversal Communism of Franco Berardi Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn What happens to political thought, practice, and imagination when it loses hold on “the future”? It goes into crisis. The analytic, psychological, and libidinal structures of 20th century revolutionary politics were beholden to the temporal form of the future – it even gave the name to the first movement of the avant-garde: Futurism. The future was on the side of the revolution. It was a great and empowering myth, but few believe it any longer: the future is over. Its last vestiges were squandered in the schemes of a heavily futurized financial capitalism. This is Franco Berardi’s radical diagnosis here. It is a clinical diagnosis as much as it is a political one, for Berardi traces the symptoms of the end of the future across the social and corporeal body. Cognitive, affective, linguistic, semiotic, desiring, economic, organisational, mediatic processes are the matter of this assessment of the contemporary malaise. Symptoms not only point backwards to repressed contents, but lean into a post-future that is still finding a way to coalesce. Such symptoms are not very enjoyable. But the diagnosis is more radical than this. The point is not to revive the future in a new vanguard. The future was itself a highly suspect temporal form; for Berardi, the “imaginary effect” of the capitalist mode of production, with its expansive pursuit of surplus value. 1977 is the point things started to turn, the moment of the progressive dissolution of “the century that trusted in the future”. It is here identified in British punk, but also in the Italian “Movement of ’77” that Berardi is so closely associated with. Franco Berardi, or “Bifo”, is principally known to Anglo-American readers for his association with Operaismo (“workerism”) and the movement of Autonomia (“autonomy”). This current in Italian thought and extra- parliamentary politics came to prominence and considerable influence in the 1970s for its transformative approach to communist politics – placing workers’ needs, desires and organizational autonomies at the centre of political praxis – and for the wave of repression unleashed against it (Wright 2002). Since then, and under the rubric of “post-autonomism” and “post-workerism” – what Bifo prefers to call “compositionism” – this current has come to have considerable influence in activist circles, post-media cultures, and the university. Antonio Negri is, of course, the principle figure here, but it would be a great mistake to take his work as an emblem for the historical forms and contemporary parameters of this mode of thought and politics as a whole. A comrade with Negri, Raniero Panzieri, and Mario Tronti in the key workerist organisation, Potere Operaio, Bifo’s politics have continued to display the signs of the workerist current. This is not least in his insistence on engaging and researching the most contemporary technical and antagonistic 3 composition of any class formation, never falling back on a pre-constituted, identitarian understanding of political subjectivity. The deployment of the autonomist talisman of Marx’s concept of the “general intellect” is perhaps the enduring sign of this style of intellectual commitment in his work. But Bifo’s relation to the critical current of Operaismo is something of a zigzag, a transversal connection that is as much open to the outside of autonomist politics as it is an elaboration of it. This is no more apparent than in the Bologna collective A/Traverso (“In- between”) that Bifo helped establish in the mid-1970s, and in its associated independent radio station, Radio Alice. In these techno-cultural experiments in publishing, research, organization, and broadcasting, autonomist theses were enmeshed with pop-cultural styles, media capacities, the urban rebellions of proletarian youth, sexual politics, modernist poetics, and the conceptual innovations of poststructuralist thought, most especially those of Deleuze and Guattari. Shutdown by armed police for its contribution to the Bologna uprisings in the Spring of 1977, Radio Alice has entered into a certain mythology, one confirmed in the highly evocative film about Radio Alice, Lavorare con lentezza, in which Bifo has a cameo role as a Marxist lawyer. Bifo’s transversal politics, writing, and media practice has since developed through numerous organisational and media forms, as radio waves have been joined by digital technologies in the field of political composition – the movement of community television, Telestreet, and the Web forum, Rekombinant, are notable instances. But returning to the themes of this book, how are Bifo’s arguments different or transversal to the positions that have come to be associated with post-workerism? Bifo’s diagnosis is considerably darker than that of Hardt and Negri, as we can see with a comparison of Bifo’s position to the concept of “immaterial labor”. In the rise to prominence of the intellectual, semiotic, and affective content of work and its product, it is now well known that Hardt and Negri detect a tendency toward workers’ autonomy. Here, capital becomes a parasitic agent of capture external to the self-organization of labor. Bifo’s conclusions are rather different. The agential force in contemporary configurations of work is not labor, but most decidedly capital. In a dozen pages of the Grundrisse known by Operaismo as the “Fragment on Machines”, Marx (1973: 692) observed that the capitalist production mechanism is a “vast automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs”. Here, as he continues, Labour appears…merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system… whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. (Marx 1973: 693) 4 In After the Future, Bifo iterates Marx’s thesis in the radically new times of digital capitalism. And he finds that the “automaton” has multiplied its powers to disaggregate and orchestrate the parts or organs of labor; the whole psychosphere of the human being becomes subject to the movement of capital, now operating at digital speeds. With the networking powers of information and communications technology the capacities of capitalist work processes to orchestrate labor have not only been extended spatially, across the globe, but have intensified temporally also. Today’s firms do not purchase the worker as a whole, but a fragment of their activity, sensibility, attention, communicative capacity. One of Bifo’s most compelling contributions to the theory of “semiocapitalism” – capitalism that makes affects, attitudes, attributes and ideas directly productive without materializing them – is the cellularization of labor. As production becomes semiotic, cognitive workers are precariously employed – on occasional, contractual, temporary bases – and their work involves the elaboration of segments or “semiotic artefacts” that are highly abstract entities combined and recombined through an exploitative digital network only at the precise time they are required. The social field is “an ocean of valorizing cells convened in a cellular way and recombined by the subjectivity of capital”. These info-laborers are paid only for the moments when their time is made cellular, yet their entire days are subjected to this kind of production, “pulsating and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting”, Blackberries and mobiles ever ready. The psychic and somatic form of the human cannot take this, and as our cognitive, communicative, emotional capacities become subject to cellular fragmentation and recombination under the new machine-speed of information, we get sick. Depression, panic, unhappiness, anxiety, fear, terror – these are the affective conditions of contemporary labor, the “psycho- bombs” of cognitive capitalism, each, naturally, with their own psychopharmacology. Nonetheless, we actively submit ourselves to this regime; this is the perversity of contemporary culture. Of course, the vast majority has no choice – these are the structural conditions of work. But the progressive commercialization of culture, deadening of metropolitan life, loss of solidarity, and insidious dispersal of mechanisms of competition are such that we have come to fixate our desires on work. Even as it pushes human affective and cognitive capacities to breaking point, the