Franco ''Bifo'' Berardi - The Soul at Work From Alienation to Autonomy

10 / Tile Soul at Work
have some currency in rhese debares) is nor rhe primary source of
value in rhe productJ.on process. Rather the soul as a web of
attachments and tastes, attractions and inclinations. The soul is
ot simply the seat of intellectual operations, but the affective and
libidinal forces that weave together a world: attentiveness, the
ability to address, care for and appeal to others. The contemporary
subject of cognitive capitalism-Bifo speaks of the cognitariat, but
perhaps there are other names-is not simply a producer of know 1-
edge and a manager of symbols. Capitalism is the mobilization of
a pathos and the organization of a mood; its subject, a field of
desire, a point of inflexion for an impersonal affect that circulates
like a rumor. The cognitariat carries a virus.
The Soul at Work calls itself an experiment in "psychopathology,"
and it describes how something in the collective soul has seized up.
The world has become heavy, thick, opaque, intransigent. A little,
dark light shines through, though. Something opens up with this
extinction of the possible. We no longer feel compelled to act, that
is, to be effective. Our passivity almost seems like a release, a
refusal, a de-activation of a system of possibles that are not ours.
The possible is seen for what it is: an imposition, smothering. With
the eclipse of the possible, at the point zero of depressive lapse, we
are at times seized by our own potentiality: a potency that, no
Ion
in vectors of realization, washes back over us.
Depression ccurs, Franco "Bifo" Berardi argues, when the
spee and plexity of the flows of information overwhelm the
capacities of the "social brain)) to manage these flows, inducing a
panic that concludes, shortly thereafter, with a depressive plunge.
Depression is so widespread today, Bifo argues, because the contemporary
organization of production of surplus-value is founded
on the phenomenon-the accumulation-of speed. In well-known
pages from the Grundrisse, Marx spoke of a tendency, a limit point
in the process of the valorization of capital: the impossible possibility
that capital might circulate "without circulation time," at an
infinite velocity, such that the passage from one moment in the
circulation of capital to the next would take place at the "speed of
thought." Such a capital would return to itself even before taking
leave of itself, passing through all of its phases in a process
encountering no obstacles, in an ideal time without time-in the
blinding flash of an instant without duration, a cycle contracting
into a point. No less an authority than Bill Gates restages this fantasy-a
limit point of capital, toward which it strains, its
vanishing point-in his Business @ the Sp eed o/ Thought, cited by
Bifo as a contemporary formalization of this threshold, summoning
the possibility of the circulation of information that would,
Gates fantasizes, OCCut as "quickly and naturally as thought in a
human being."
There is speed and there is speed. It is not simply the phenomenon
of speed as such that plays the pathogenic role here. The social
factoty is just as much governed by the destabilizing experience of
changes in rhythms, differences in speeds, whiplash-like reorientations
imposed on a workforce that is flexible, precarious and permanently
on-call-and equipped with the latest iPhone. This organization
of work, in which just-in-time production is ovetseen by a permanently
temporary labor force, is mirrored in the form of
governance characteristic of democratic imperialism, sustained as
it is by appeals to urgency, permanent mobilization, suspensions of
norms: governance by crisis, rule by exception. It is impossible to
separate the spheres of the economy and the political these days. In
each case, a managed disorder, the administration of chaos. The
social pacts and ptoductive truces of the old welfare states are gone.