Futurability - Franco “Bifo” Berardi

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a given direction. The vibrational complexity of the world as potentiality can be interpreted in terms of coexisting and conflicting tendencies. Tendency is the possibility that seems to prevail at a given moment of the vibrational process that gives birth to the event.

      At the highpoint of industrial modernity, the emancipation of social activity from salaried work was inscribed in the social concatenation, and particularly in the relation between the potency of the general intellect and the existing technology. The emancipation of human activity from capitalist exploitation was a possibility that could be viewed as a tendency. Communism was immanent in the technical composition of capital and also in the social consciousness.

      Nevertheless, as we know, this possibility did not deploy into reality. The tendency towards the emancipation of human activity from capitalist exploitation (that I call ‘possible communism’) did not prevail.

      The possibility of communism was obliterated by the event of the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing establishment of a dictatorship of the army and the state.

      Indeed, the Leninist action broke the structural chain conceptualized by Marx. The event of the Russian Revolution, like the event of the Paris Commune, was not the necessary deployment of structural dynamics inscribed in the process of production. They were untimely events. But every event is untimely, as the event does not correspond to a chain of causation. The Russian Revolution acted as a violation or a refutation of the Marxist persuasion that socialist revolution would first begin in the most advanced industrial countries.

      The event and the structure cannot be described in terms of mutual necessary implications. The structure is not necessarily implying any event, and the event is not implied in the structure.

      I call paradigmatic capture the reduction of the range of possibilities inscribed in the present to a pattern that acts as a formatting gestalt.

      In fact, there is a conflict between emergent possibilities and the dominant paradigm. The paradigmatic capture blocks and forbids the deployment of the tendency and stiffens the vibration reducing the multiplicity of possibilities to a new (provisional, unstable) state of the world.

      We may describe the relation between society and the development of technology in terms of possibility and paradigmatic capture. Knowledge, production and technology are linked in a vibrational field of possibilities. Technology is not a chain of logical implications, but a field of immanent conflicting possibilities. Electronic technology and digital networks since the beginning of their implementation enabled a process of transformation of social relations and production, open to divergent possible evolutions.

      Digital technology and research in artificial intelligence are opening the door to a sort of automation of the future.

      Statisticon: Inscription Prescription

      In the infinity of time, an endless chain of bifurcations gives birth to vibrations, selection, emergence. At every instant, matter enters a vibrational state, oscillating between different possibilities until a new set emerges.

      The emergence of consciousness is an effect of evolution, but it is also a jump into a reflective dimension: the dimension of choice. When the time of evolution is traversed by consciousness, then we speak of history.

      At this point, such bifurcations are perceived as intentional selection between possibilities.

      Human beings seem to have the peculiar ability of making conscious choices and selecting one possibility among many. Conscious choices are not (only) rational processes of calculation: they imply strategic decision, ethical judgement; they express aesthetic preferences and are influenced by flows of info-psycho-stimulation.

      As the future is not prescribed, and the succession of now and tomorrow is not monolithic or determined, our task consists in distinguishing the layers of futurability that lie in the texture of the present reality and in the present consciousness.

      Futurability can be traced in terms of absolute necessity, relative necessity or probability, tendency, impossibility and possibility.

      Absolute necessity marks the logical enunciations that are true today and will also be true tomorrow, as they are functions inscribed in the human mind and do not imply any relation with external reality.

      Kant distinguishes between synthetic and analytic sentences. Analytical sentences can be considered truisms because the content of the enunciation is implied in the subject. Analytical truth is therefore a necessity.

      Relative necessity, on the other hand, is a concatenation of temporal events that is likely to imply a certain probability as well as a concatenation of states of being that are enforced both by law and by force.

      ‘If you don’t pay the rent, you will be evicted’ is a case of relatively necessary futurability. There is no logical necessity in the implication, but social relations are based on the enforcement of conventional rules. This enforcement may happen by force of violence, of agreement, or by force of automation.

      In the computer of the real estate company, there are logical chains implying that the tenant who does not pay the rent will be expelled from the house. This implication, however, is neither logical nor natural, but is enforced by the automation of will, and by the automated transcription of a social rapport de force. Financial capitalism is bound up in techno-linguistic implications that pretend to be natural and logical. They are not. They are rather artificial reductions of the range of possibility to the narrow string of probability.

      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

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