After the Future - Franco Bifo Berardi

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Lenin or Mao (the “Mao-Dadaism” of Radio Alice signified something quite other than identification with China’s Great Helmsman). As shorthand for this critique, we would signal the affirmation and intensification—not refusal or overcoming—of work in the Soviet and Chinese regimes. But the problem that Bifo isolates in these pages is the subjective political model inherent to such orthodox communism, the “militant,” and its not so distant cousin, the “activist.”

      Activism, Bifo argues in these pages, is the narcissistic response of the subject to the infinite and invasive power of capital, a response that can only leave the activist frustrated, humiliated, and depressed. Bifo here locates this modern political configuration in Lenin, and makes a most heretical statement: “I am convinced that the twentieth century would have been a better century had Lenin not existed.” He arrives at this diagnosis through a reading of Lenin’s bouts of depression, but the condition is not exclusive to Lenin. Indeed, elsewhere Bifo identifies a similar fixation in Félix Guattari, a most surprising move, given the sophistication of Guattari’s schizoanalytic critique of authoritarian political subjectivation. Bifo developed his friendship with Guattari while in exile from Italy in the 1980s, a period that Guattari characterized as his “winter years,” the coincidence of personal depression and neoliberal reaction. Under these conditions, a certain political activism appeared central to Guattari, but not so to Bifo: “I remember that in the 1980s Félix often scolded me because I was no longer involved in some kind of political militancy.… For me, militant will and ideological action had become impotent” (Berardi 2008, 13). For Bifo, in times of reaction, of the evacuation of political creativity from the social field, activism becomes a desperate attempt to ward off depression. But it’s doomed to fail and, worse, to convert political innovation and sociality into its opposite, to “replace desire with duty”:

      Félix knew this, I am sure, but he never said this much, not even to himself, and this is why he went to all these meetings with people who didn’t appeal to him, talking about things that distracted him.… And here again is the root of depression, in this impotence of political will that we haven’t had the courage to admit. (Berardi 2008, 13)

      We would isolate two aspects of Bifo’s analysis of depression. It is a product of the “panic” induced by the sensory overload of digital capitalism, a condition of withdrawal, a disinvestment of energy from the competitive and narcissistic structures of the enterprise. And it’s also a result of the loss of political composition and antagonism: “depression is born out of the dispersion of the community’s immediacy. Autonomous and desiring politics was a proliferating community. When the proliferating power is lost, the social becomes the place of depression” (Berardi 2008, 13). In both manifestations, depression is a real historical experience, something that must be actively faced and engaged with—one cannot merely ward it off with appeals to militant voluntarism. We need to assess its contours, conditions, and products, to find an analytics of depression, and an adequate politics. And that is the goal of this book, a first step toward a politics after the future, and after the redundant analytic and subjective forms of which the future was made.

      Bifo makes use of many resources in this venture of diagnosis and escape, traversing the Futurist aesthetics of speed, the psychic corruption of Berlusconi’s mediatic empire, transrational language, senility, the dotcom bubble, the Copenhagen climate summit, the dynamics of semiocapitalism, and the possibilities of a Baroque modernity. This book begins and ends with a manifesto. The first, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, opened the century that trusted in the future. Written a century later, Bifo’s Manifesto of Post-Futurism, is a rather different entity, a love song to the “infinity of the present.” As the cognitariat reconnect with their bodies and collectivities and cast off the shackles of self-entrepreneurship, then song, poetry, and therapy freely mix into a cocktail that clears the head of any further illusions of the FUTURE.

      

      I WROTE THIS book in different moments and circumstances during the last decade. Its parts were therefore conceived and structured in different ways and with varying aims. Readers will not be surprised to find that these compositional features are expressed in the style of the different texts they encounter here. Recent events, like the student revolts in Athens, London, and Rome, the Arab insurrections of the first months of 2011, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, did not find a place in the book, but they are fully inscribed in its spirit and conception, and stand as a confirmation of the irreversible devastation of the modern values of social civilization that neoliberal dogmatism has provoked. Taken together, these processes of conception, structure, aim, and style have composed a book about the end of the future, immersed in the complex constellations of the present.

      In the first chapter—“The Century that Trusted in the Future”—I retrace the history of the imagination of “the future” over the twentieth century, from the enthusiastic expectations and proclamations of the Futurists to the punk announcement of “No Future.” This part, which I wrote in 2009, ranges from the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 to the digital Futurism of the Wired ideology that blossomed in the last decade of the twentieth century.

      If the first chapter follows a precise outline and was written in a consecutive period of time, the second is a constellation of articles and short essays that I published during the last ten years in the midst of the movement for global justice. These have appeared previously in Rekombinant. org, Generation Online, SubStance, and Occupied London.

      The third chapter is dedicated to the concept of semiocapitalism and to the emergence of a societal form where Baroque spirit, plebeian violence, and high-finance criminality commingle: Italy in the age of Berlusconi.

      The fourth chapter is focused on activism and current ideas about subjectivity. I try to answer the question: how can we imagine a future of conscious collective subjectivation? How will it be possible to create a collective consciousness in the age of precariousness and the fractalization of time? How will it be possible to practice social autonomy in a world where capitalism has instituted irreversible trends of destruction?

      The vertiginous zero zero decade has changed our views and our landscape in an astounding way. From the dotcom crash to September 11th 2001, from the criminal wars of the Bush administration to the near collapse of the global financial economy, the recent history of the world has been marked by shocking events and surprising reversals. For me, this decade, heralded by the uprising of Seattle, and initiated by the spreading of the counterglobalization movement, has been exciting, surprising and exhilarating—but it has finally turned sad.

      By the end of the decade, notwithstanding the victory of Barack Obama in the United States, the prospect was gloomy. Corporate capitalism and neoliberalism have produced lasting damage in the material structures of the world and in the social, cultural, and nervous systems of humankind. In the century’s last decade, a new movement emerged and grew fast and wide, questioning everywhere the power of capitalist corporations.

      I use the word “movement” to describe a collective displacing of bodies and minds, a changing of consciousness, habits, expectations. Movement means conscious change, change accompanied by collective consciousness and collective elaboration, and struggle. Conscious. Collective. Change. This is the meaning of “movement.”

      From Seattle 1999 to Genoa 2001 a movement tried to stop the capitalist devastation of the very conditions of civilized life. These were the stakes, no more, no less.

      Activists around the world had a simple message: if we don’t stop the machine of exploitation, debt, and compulsory consumption, human cohabitation on the planet will become dismal, or impossible.

      Well, ten years after Seattle, in the wake of the 2009 Copenhagen summit failure, we can state that those people were speaking the truth.

      The

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