Franco Berardi Quotes

When dealing with a depression the problem is not to bring the depressed person back to his/her normality, to reintegrate behavior in the universal standards of normal social language. The goal is to change the focus of his/her depressive attention, to re-focalize, to deterritorialize the mind and the flow of expression. Depression is based on the stiffening of existential refrain, on the obsessive repetition of the stiffened refrain. The depressed person is unable to go out, to leave the repetitive refrain and s/he goes and goes again in the labyrinth. The goal of the schizoanalyst is to give him/her the possibility to see other landscapes, and to change the focus, to open some new ways of imagination.

Perhaps the answer is that it is necessary to slow down, finally giving up on economistic fanaticism and collectively rethink the true meaning of the word “wealth.” Wealth does not mean a person who owns a lot, but refers to someone who has enough time to enjoy what nature and human collaboration place within everyone’s reach. If the great majority of people could understand this basic notion, if they could be liberated from the competitive illusion that is impoverishing everyone’s life, the very foundations of capitalism, would start to crumble (p. 169).

Money is our shelter, the only way we have to access life. But at the same time, if you want money you have to renounce life.

In the wake of the Neoliberal proclamation of the end of class struggle, the only social categories remaining are winner and loser. No more capitalists and workers; no more exploiters and exploited. Either you are strong and smart, or you deserve your misery. The establishment of capitalist absolutism is based on the mass adhesion...to the philosophy of natural selection. The mass murderer is someone who believes in the right of the fittest and the strongest to win in the social game, but he also knows or senses that he is not the fittest or the strongest. So he opts for the only possible act of retaliation and self assertion: to kill and be killed.

The basic pathogenic picture emerging from the era of the first connective generation is characterized by the hypermobilizing of nervous energies, by informational overload, by a constant straining of our attention faculties. A particular aspect and an important consequence of this nervous hypermobilization is the rarity of bodily contact, the physical and psychical solitude of the infospheric individual.

Economics has to be replaced by a global science whose characteristics and field of inquiry are still unknown: a science that would be able to study the processes that form cyberspace, the global network of signs-commodities.

The idea of the future is central in the ideology and energy of the twentieth century, and in many ways it is mixed with the idea of utopia. Notwithstanding the horrors of the century, the utopian imagination never stopped giving new breath to the hope of a progressive future, until the high point of ’68, when the modern promise was supposedly on the brink of fulfilment.

The rules are not immutable, and there is no rule which forces us to comply with the rules. The legalist Left has never understood this. Fixed on the idea that it is necessary to comply with the rules, it has never known how to carry out confrontation on the new ground inaugurated by digital technologies and the globalized cycle of infolabor. The neoliberals have understood this very well and they have subverted the rules

Time is the dimension of decay and resistance, dissolution and of recomposition. Time is the process of becoming other of every fragment in every other fragment, forever.

Infolabor, the provision of time for the elaboration and recombination of segments of infocommodities, takes to the extreme the tendency, which Marx analyzed, for labor to become abstracted from concrete activity.

Nazism is essentially based on the negation of the human nature of the other, while Fascism is based on the aggressive inclusion of the other, and the punishment and extermination of those who refuse to be included.

Digital artisans, who during the 1990s felt like entrepreneurs of their own labor, slowly realized that they had been deceived, expropriated, and this created the conditions for a new consciousness among cognitive workers.

reality showed that the large command centers operate in a way that far from being libertarian, introduce technological automatisms, impose themselves with the power of the media or money, and finally shamelessly rob the mass of shareholders and cognitive laborers.

L’identità è lo strumento percettivo e concettuale che ci dà una possibilità di conoscenza, ma noi scambiamo questa conoscenza per un ri-conoscimento. Cosicché siamo condotti a credere di sapere già, di possedere una mappa. Questo può essere utile talvolta, ma è pericoloso scambiare la nostra mappa culturale per un territorio intimo dell’appartenenza. Se non avete una mappa vi perdete, ma perdersi è l’inizio di un processo di conoscenza, è la premessa per creare una mappa.

Every time political leaders of the world meet in those funny events called G8 or G20, the failure of political power—their lack of grasp on the future—becomes more evident. When they met in Sapporo, Hokkaido, in July 2008, and in L’Aquila in July 2009, the powerful men and women who lead the nations were supposed to make very important decisions about the crucial subject of climate change and its effects on the planetary ecosystem. But they were completely unable to say or do anything meaningful, so they have decided that, by 2050, toxic emissions will be reduced by half. How? Why? No answer. No political or technological action has been taken, no shorter deadline has been decided upon. Such a decision is like a shaman’s ritual, like a rain dance. The complexity of the problem exceeds world politicians’ powers of knowledge and influence. The future has escaped the grasp of political technique and everything has capsized, perhaps because of speed.

The process of decision making and projecting a future in which one future among many can be selected depends less and less on human will. We may call it the paradox of the decider: as the circulation of information becomes faster and more complex, the time available for the elaboration of relevant information becomes shorter. The more space taken by the available information, the less time there is for understanding and conscious choice. This is why the interdependence between data and decisions is more and more embedded in infomachinery, in technolinguistic interfaces. This is why the execution of the program is entrusted to automated procedures that human operators can neither change nor ignore. The machine pretends to be neutral, purely mathematical, but we know that its procedures are only the technical reification of social interests: profit, accumulation, competition—these are the criteria underlying the automatic procedures embedded in the machine. Human volition is reduced to a procedural pretense.

What is panic? We are told that psychiatrists recently discovered and named a new kind of disorder—they call it “Panic Disorder.” It seems that it’s something quite recent in the psychological self-perception of human beings. But what does panic mean? “Panic” used to be a nice word, and this is the sense in which the Swiss-American psychoanalyst James Hillman remembers it in his book on Pan. Pan was the god of nature and totality. In Greek mythology, Pan was the symbol of the relationship between man and nature. Nature is the overwhelming flow of reality, things, and information that surrounds us.

One part of the virtual class entered the technomilitary complex; another part (the large majority) was expelled from the industry and pushed to the margins of explicit proletarianization. On the cultural plane, the conditions for the formation of a social consciousness among the cognitariat are emerging, and this could be the most important phenomenon of the coming years, the solution to the disaster. Rather than a virtual class, I prefer to speak about a cognitive proletariat (“cognitariat”) in order to emphasize the material (I mean physical, psychological, neurological) disease of the workers involved in the net economy.

The libertarian and liberal ideology that dominated (American) cyberculture of the 1990s idealized the market by presenting it as a pure, almost mathematical environment. In this environment, as natural as the struggle for the survival of the fittest that makes evolution possible, labor would find the necessary means to valorize itself and become entrepreneurial. Once left to its own dynamic, the reticular economic system was destined to optimize economic gains for everyone, owners and workers alike—in part because the distinction between owners and workers would become increasingly imperceptible in the virtual productive circuit.

Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos. In After the Future, the Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi ties the defeat of labor movements in the eighties to rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor. Today, though, “‘we are all capitalists’…and therefore, we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.”14

To me, Fiverr is the ultimate expression of Franco Berardi’s “fractals of time and pulsating cells of labor.

We had to go through the dotcom purgatory, through the illusion of a fusion between labor and capitalist enterprise, and then through the effects of the dotcom crash, in order to see the problem of labor emerge in new terms as immaterial and cognitive.

Drucker remarks that the concept of intellectual property, which is a juridical concept at the root of classical economics and the capitalist system, no longer has any meaning in an age when the circulating commodity is information and the market is the infosphere: We have to rethink the whole concept of intellectual property, which was focused on the printed word. Perhaps within a few decades, the distinction between electronic transmissions and the printed word will have disappeared. The only solution may be a universal licensing system. Where you basically become a subscriber, and where it’s taken for granted that everything that is published is reproduced. In other words, if you don’t want everybody to know, don’t talk about it. (Ibid).

Money (i.e. economics) and the State (i.e. politics) are no longer able to govern or discipline the world of production, now that its center is not a de-brained force, a uniform and quantifiable time of manual work. That center is now occupied by mind flows, by the ethereal substance of intelligence, which eludes every measurement and cannot be subjected to any rule without inducing enormous pathologies and causing a truly maddening paralysis of cognition and affectivity.

The word “precariat” generally stands for work that no longer has fixed rules about labor relations, salary, or the length of the work day. However, if we analyze the past, we see that these rules functioned only for a limited period in the history of relations between labor and capital.

The free time gained through a century of workers’ struggle was progressively subsumed to the rule of profit and transformed into fragmented and diffused labor.

The profit economy has deeply permeated the epistemic structures and applications of these technologies, which contain an unprecedented capacity to mould and mutate the human genetic make-up (at the physical, psychic, and cognitive level). A real mutation began to modify the collective body in accordance with a paradigm dominated by the criterion of economic profit.

The whole group sustaining Bush was implicated in the failure of American capitalism. Bush’s power was founded on an alliance between old oil and the weapons economy, a failing and thieving lumpen-bourgeois class, and the private monopolies of information and communication, like Microsoft and Murdoch media.

Democracy in the Middle East would require the departure of Israeli forces from the occupied territories and the recognition of the political rights of the Kurdish people. It would also mean reducing the role of the large oil corporations that, for fifty years, have been robbing the resources of those countries, while influencing their political life in a direct and authoritarian manner—starting with the CIA-sponsored military coup against Premier Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953, after he tried to nationalize the Iranian oil industry.

It’s a strange word—“liberalism”—with which we identify the ideology prevalent in the posthuman transition to digital slavery. Liberty is its foundational myth, but the liberty of whom? The liberty of capital, certainly.

The horizon of our time is marked by the Fukushima event. Compared to the noisy catastrophes of the earthquake and the tsunami, Tokyo's silent apocalypse is more frightening and suggests a new framework of social expectation for daily life on the planet. The megalopolis is directly exposed to the Fukushima fallout, but life is proceeding almost normally. Only a few people have abandoned the city. Most citizens have stayed there, buying mineral water as they have always done, breathing with facemasks on their mouths as they have always done. A few cases of air and water contamination are denounced. Concerns about food safety have prompted US officials to halt the importation of certain foods from Japan. But the Fukushima effect does not imply a disruption of social life: poison has become a normal feature of daily life, the second nature we have to inhabit.

Colin Powell, some days after 9/11, spoke about the rumors that the intelligence services had received some information about bombings and hijackings of airplanes before September 11th. “Yes, it’s true”, he said, “Yes, it’s true, we have received information about something like this, we have received information about bombings and so on. But we always receive lots of information we are not able to process or even to see. We had too much of it, this is the problem. We have too much information.

The year when Charlie Chaplin died; the man with the bowler hat and the cane passed away. This was the year of the end of the twentieth century: the turning point of modernity

The end of Humanism stems from the power of Humanism itself.