Futurability - Franco “Bifo” Berardi

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the text On Spinoza, Deleuze writes, ‘Affectus is the continuous variation of someone’s force of existing.’ This variation increases or diminishes the potency of the subject: sad passions and joyful passions are to be seen as the affecters, as the cause of this increase or diminishment. ‘Spinoza denounces a plot in the universe of those who are interested in affecting us with sad passions. The priest has need of the sadness of his subjects, he needs these subjects to feel themselves guilty … Inspiring sad passions is necessary for the exercise of power.’6

      To hold these sad passions should not be viewed as a sort of guilt, an error that must be emendated. Sad passions are not the effect of a misunderstanding, and they cannot be cancelled by force of will or by right consideration. As Deleuze points out, sad passions are the effect of an exercise of power.

      Power is the agency that reduces the field of possibility to a prescriptive order; power, therefore, is the actual source of sad passions, and their existence can be seen as an effect of the subjugation of the soul to the force of power. ‘Spinoza says that evil is a bad encounter. Encountering a body which mixes badly with your own.’ Bad encounters do happen, alas. Lots of them in these times. Quoting Spinoza, Negri writes:

      Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, nor do we enjoy it because we restrain our lists; on the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them. Spinoza overturns Hegelianism before it is born with the recognition of his own logical supremacy … and, in the productivity of reason, he anticipates the development of history overturning, therefore, the Hegelian affirmation of philosophy as a recording of a dissected and selected event, and therefore truly posing freedom at the basis of the event and history, rooting human power absolutely on the lower, productive border of existence. There is no distinction between phenomenological Erklarung and metaphysical Darstellung.7

      It’s hard not to see the analogy between the Spinozian pantheistic vision and the pan-logistic vision of Hegel. The difference, however, is crucial: in Hegel, infinity is the energy of the spiritual becoming; in Spinoza infinity is nature, and potency is the body.

      ‘What can a body do?’ asks Spinoza, a question intended to illuminate the excessive nature of the body, not to assert its boundless potency.

      However, no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension … Again, no one knows how or by what means the mind moves the body, nor how many various degrees of motion it can impart to the body, nor how quickly it can move it.8

      What can our body do nowadays?

      What can the social body do under the present condition of separation from the automated brain?

      Impotence in the issue that I will discuss in the first part of this book.

      Power

      At each historical bifurcation, the range of possibilities is limited by power and simultaneously opened by the emerging subjectivity. If the emerging subjectivity has potency (internal consistence and projecting energy), it can bring an invisible possibility into the space of visibility, and can give way to the actualization of that possibility.

      Morphogenesis is the emergence of a new form from a vibration, from the oscillation between different evolutions of the body of possibilities. The emerging form is contained as a possibility, but we can insert automated selections in the passage from an alternative to a solution. Automation is the replacement of human acts with machines as well as the submission of cognitive activity to logical and technological chains.

      This is exactly the origin of power: the insertion of automated selections into the social vibration.

      Automation is programmed by the human mind according to its projects, visions, ideologies, preconceptions: the automaton replicates the embedded intention and the established form of the relation.

      What is a form in relation to its content? And how does it happen that a new form can emerge? How do things generate things, and concepts generate concepts? And finally, more interesting: how do concepts generate things?

      Power can be defined as a form of engendered determinism.

      In fact, power takes the form of techno-linguistic automatisms shaping future behaviour: ‘If you don’t pay the rent, you’ll be automatically evicted from your apartment’, ‘If you don’t pay the fee, you’ll be automatically expelled from the university’, and so on. The execution of the eviction or the expulsion is not the act of a human agent that might be moved by compassion and change her mind. These consequences are implicit in the technical machine, as if they were logico-mathematical necessities. They are not, but the linguistic machine records behaviour and translates it into consequences: real events are activators of mathematical functions inscribed in the machine as logical necessities.

      Pre-emption prescribes in a deterministic way the future form of the organism by the insertion of biotechnical or techno-social mutations. Determinism is not only a (bad) philosophical methodology that describes the evolution in terms of causal implications, it is also a political strategy that aims to introduce causal chains in the world, and particularly in the social organism.

      The determinist strategy aims to subjugate the future, to constrain tendency into a prescribed pre-emptive model, and automate future behaviour.

      The effect produced by the chain of automatisms may be defined as a deterministic trap, a trap in which the possible is captured and reduced to mere probability, and the probable is enforced as necessary.

      This is the issue I will discuss in the second part of this book.

      Immanence Tendency and Paradigm

      Immanence is the quality of being inside the process, the intrinsicality or inherence of something to something.

      This book is about futurability, the multiplicity of immanent possible futures: becoming other which is already inscribed in the present.

      But if we assume that the future is necessarily inscribed in the present constitution of the world, we attribute a teleological meaning to the immanence, and inscription is turned into prescription.

      Teleology can be based on a deterministic interpretation of scientific causation, or a theological design of the history of the world that can be labelled pantheism: God is an immanent Prescriptor.

      A materialistic vision of immanence, on the contrary, is based on the persuasion that the present reality contains the future as a wide range of possibilities, and the selection of one possibility among many is not prescribed in a deterministic way in the process of morphogenesis. The future is inscribed in the present as a tendency that we can imagine: a sort of premonition, a vibrational movement of particles that are taken in an uncertain process of continuous recombination.

      Immanence does not imply a logical, necessary consequentiality: the present does not contain the future as a necessary linear deployment or consequential elaboration of implications that we can read in the current reality. Immanence means all the uncountable divergent and conflicting possibilities are inscribed in the present. The present state of the world can be described as the vibrational concurrence of many possibilities. How can chaotic vibration give birth to a particular event? How does it happen that among many possibilities of development, just one of them prevails?

      The future states of the social world are not the linear effect of political will, but the result of infinitely complex relations and conflicts and mediations. We call a heterogony (heterogenesis) of the ends the asymmetrical relation between projects and realizations, between will and historical composition of infinite concurring wills in the determination of an event.

      The relation between now and tomorrow, between the present state of the world and the future state of the world is not necessary (that is, necessitated). The present does not contain the future as a linear development. The emergence of a form among many possible forms is the – provisional and unstable – effect of a polarization, the fixation of a pattern.

      Tendency

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