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

THE SOUL AT WORKSEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIESFROM ALIENATION TO AUTONOMY© 2009 by Semiotext(e) and Franco BerardiAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, Of otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.Published by Semiotext(e)2007 Wilshite Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057www.semiotexte.comFranco "Bifo" BerardiSpecial thanks to Andrew Drabkin, John Ebert, and Jason Smith.Cover art by lutta Koerher, Untitled, 2007.Preface by Jason SmithBlack and white photocopy, 8 1/2" X 11 ".Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY.Back Cover Photogtaphy by Simonetta CandolfiDesign by Hedi El KhoItiTranslated by Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina MecchiaISBN: 978- 1-58435-076-7Distributed by The MIT Ptess, Cambtidge, Mass. and London, EnglandPrinted in the United States of America

ContentsPreface by Jason Smith 9Introduction 211. Labor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 1960s272. The Soul at Work 743. The Poisoned Soul 1064. The Precarious Soul 184Conclusion 207Notes 223

PrefaceSoul on StrikeThe soul is the clinamen of the body. It is how it falls, and whatmakes it fall in with other bodies. The soul is its gravity. This tendencyfor certain bodies to fall in with others is what constitutes aworld. The materialist tradition represented by Epicurus andLucretius proposed a worldless time in which bodies rain downthrough the plumbless void, straight down and side-by-side, untila sudden, unpredictable deviation or swerve-clinamen-leansbodies toward one another, so that they come together in a lastingway. The soul does not lie beneath the skin. It is the angle of thisswerve and what then holds these bodies together. It spaces bodies,rather than hiding within them; it is among them, their consistency,the affinity they have for one another. It is what they share in common:neither a form, nor some thing, but a rhythm, a certain wayof vibrating, a resonance. Frequency, tuning or tone.To speak of a soul at work is to move the center of gravity incontemporary debates about cognitive capitalism. The soul is notsimply the capacity for abstraction, for the subsumption of theparticular. It is an aesthetic organ as well, the exposure of thoughtto the contractions and dilations of space, to the quickening andlapsing of time. To say the soul is put to work is to affirm that the \social brain or general intellect (to use two of Marx's phrases that9

10 / Tile Soul at Workhave some currency in rhese debares) is nor rhe primary source ofvalue in rhe productJ.on process. Rather the soul as a web ofattachments and tastes, attractions and inclinations. The soul is ot simply the seat of intellectual operations, but the affective andlibidinal forces that weave together a world: attentiveness, theability to address, care for and appeal to others. The contemporarysubject of cognitive capitalism-Bifo speaks of the cognitariat, butperhaps there are other names-is not simply a producer of know 1-edge and a manager of symbols. Capitalism is the mobilization ofa pathos and the organization of a mood; its subject, a field ofdesire, a point of inflexion for an impersonal affect that circulateslike 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 thisextinction of the possible. We no longer feel compelled to act, thatis, to be effective. Our passivity almost seems like a release, arefusal, a de-activation of a system of possibles that are not ours.The possible is seen for what it is: an imposition, smothering. Withthe eclipse of the possible, at the point zero of depressive lapse, weare at times seized by our own potentiality: a potency that, noIonin vectors of realization, washes back over us.Depression ccurs, Franco "Bifo" Berardi argues, when thespee and plexity of the flows of information overwhelm thecapacities of the "social brain)) to manage these flows, inducing apanic that concludes, shortly thereafter, with a depressive plunge.Depression is so widespread today, Bifo argues, because the contemporaryorganization of production of surplus-value is foundedon the phenomenon-the accumulation-of speed. In well-knownpages from the Grundrisse, Marx spoke of a tendency, a limit pointin the process of the valorization of capital: the impossible possibilitythat capital might circulate "without circulation time," at aninfinite velocity, such that the passage from one moment in thecirculation of capital to the next would take place at the "speed ofthought." Such a capital would return to itself even before takingleave of itself, passing through all of its phases in a processencountering no obstacles, in an ideal time without time-in theblinding flash of an instant without duration, a cycle contractinginto a point. No less an authority than Bill Gates restages this fantasy-alimit point of capital, toward which it strains, itsvanishing point-in his Business @ the Sp eed o/ Thought, cited byBifo as a contemporary formalization of this threshold, summoningthe possibility of the circulation of information that would,Gates fantasizes, OCCut as "quickly and naturally as thought in ahuman being."There is speed and there is speed. It is not simply the phenomenonof speed as such that plays the pathogenic role here. The socialfactoty is just as much governed by the destabilizing experience ofchanges in rhythms, differences in speeds, whiplash-like reorientationsimposed on a workforce that is flexible, precarious and permanentlyon-call-and equipped with the latest iPhone. This organizationof work, in which just-in-time production is ovetseen by a permanentlytemporary labor force, is mirrored in the form ofgovernance characteristic of democratic imperialism, sustained asit is by appeals to urgency, permanent mobilization, suspensions ofnorms: governance by crisis, rule by exception. It is impossible toseparate the spheres of the economy and the political these days. Ineach case, a managed disorder, the administration of chaos. Thesocial pacts and ptoductive truces of the old welfare states are gone.

Instability is now the order of the day. Disorder, a technique ofgovernment. Depression starts to look less like a drying up of desirerhan a stubborn, if painful, libidinal slowdown or sabotage, ademobilization. The soul on strike.The Soul at Work wants to answer this question: How did we getfrom the particular forms of workers' struggle in the 1960s, characterizedby widespread "estrangement" of workers from thecapitalist organization of production, to the situation today, inwhich work has become the central locus of psychic and emotionalinvestment, even as this new libidinal economy induces an entirerange of collective pathologies, from disorders of attention to newforms of dyslexia, from sudden panics to mass depression? How, inother words, have we passed from the social antagonisms of the1960s and 1970s, when worker power was paradoxically defined bya refusal of work, its autonomy from the capitalist valorizationprocess, and its own forms of organization-its defection fromfactory discipline-to the experience of the last two decades, wherework has become the core of our identity, no longer economicallyW. t1fnecessary, yet vital to the constitution.of the self? In short, fromfleeing work to identifying .Something happened in 1977. ifo hangs his story on thismutation. It's the year when e refusal of work reaches a feverpitch in the Italian autonomia movement, the year that the logic ofantagonism and worker neea$-what Mario Tronti called the"antagonistic will" of the proletariat-gives way to a logic of desire,in which social productivity can no longer be accounted for instrictly economic categories, and in which the insurrectionaryvectors no longer map onto the old imaginary of social war. Thecentrality of the category of worker needs in the struggles of the1960s primarily took two forms. In the sphere of consumption,there was the form of direct democracy known as "political"pricing, in which neighborhoods and entire sections of cities unilaterallyreduced the costs of goods and services such as housing,transportation and electricity, on the basis of a collective decisionthat refused any economic rationality in the determination ofprices. At the point of production, the primary lever of antagonismwas the wage struggle, in which worker power was exercised in arefusal to link wage levels to productivity, insisting the wage betreated as an "independent variable." The mutation represented bythe events of 1977, in which the logic of needs and antagonismgives way to desite and flight, is where The Soul at Work reallybegins. For what is at stake in its story is the aftermath of this massdefection from factory discipline, this unilateral withdrawal fromthe social pact drawn up by capital and its partners, the unions andthe worker parties, in view of "saving" the Italian economy after thewar. It asks: how has the sphere of desire, the field of the imaginaryand the affective, whose affirmation as the fundamental field of thepolitical once led to a collective abandonment of the sphere ofwork, been transformed into the privileged force in the contemporaryordet of work, the privileged moment in the production ofvalue? Desire braids together emotional, linguistic, cognitive andimaginary energies that affirmed themselves against the regime ofwork in the 1960s and 1970s, a refusal that is then paradoxicallyput to work by capital itself. This colonization of the soul and itsdesire-the entty of the soul itself into the production processspawnsparadoxical effects. It transforms labor-power into whatmanagerial theories call human capital, harnessing and putting towork not an abstract, general force of labor, but the particularity,the unique combination of psychic, cognitive and affective powers

fk';::I bring to the labor process. Because thl' s contemporary refor. fil1e::::iin which I ammost myselfons through the incitement of my specificlcreative:::powers, I expenence wor k as t h e segment of social lifemost fj ree, most capable of realizing my de ' .The Sou! at WOrk analyz es the contem orar d ' 'its" .." hSltes..cogn1t1ve p ase using a.met h 0 d It . calls compositionism . Th' IS1 0 to aVOl the.misconceptionsoinduced by theoperatsmo--worker' ls:--:-t o d escribe thecurrentspecificallyof Marxism h b .Italiane ot m hents and breaks.strictly h Thspeakinhthe h .oug19 60s and end; .: se f classlcal operaismo begins in the earlyWlt t e dlssolutlOn of the g Rterm lS used by B'£,use f" P y ynamlcs of capltal m( ithin which Bifo militated) in 1973, the lar:e'd:"%.eldWlt .ot;e OperaiotlOnlSt thought remains very active today, encompas=nCO l_range f etendencies represented by thinkers suchAasntonwPaol: V .Negrilrno,and M aur1Z10 " LOn th.azzarato. This traditionreeis1m b"foundedncated theoretical breakth h . .hthe primacy of wo r k er ' s struggles in theStudevelopment ofyo t ecapital thchang' mg composition of theforworking class,dec'ph 1as theenng 'keynovel forms of po 1" 1t1ca IandorganizationM 'andd " .action,rundriSSe) of the emergence of thed f h"generate:: , : o sna(n the Groug s. t e axIOm assertingrorm 0 wor er h h, epower t atdestroy the bases for 0. .t reatens torgantzmg Production to extortThe fi rst conceptsurplus-value .requires that every analysis of theturechofangmg 'capital bestrucerstood not on the basis of hund.t e contradictions oflnternalcapital itself. b .of..Ut'as a Certain, proresponse to1 andetananUseaggression: worker insubordination.alonerestructuration "on the part 0 f.capltaJ. ' This responseorganlc ' in which th ecomposition of capital-the ratio of fixedto variableID1tlatescapital-undergoes a mutation, induces a recomposltlOn of theinternal consistency of the working class. This axiom of the priorityof worker refusal required, in turn, the development of aphenomenology of proletarian experience. This phenomenologydescribed the changing internal composition of the various layersof the working class, identifYing emerging strata that would assumea dominant role in the immediate process of production: for example,the increasing importance of the mass worker in the Fordistfactory, after the hegemony of the skilled worker of earlier socialcompositions. On the basis of this analysis of the different strata ofthe working class, novel political forms of organization andaction-beyond the Leninist party and its revolutionary straregyadequateto this composition . Finally, the thesis on the "generalintellect," in which Marx sees the use of automation in the productionprocess reaching a moment when labor-time can no longerbe posited as the measure of value, implies both of the precedingconcepts: the move to an increasingly automated system of productionis seen as a response to worker struggles atound theworking day, while the positing of the intellect and knowledge as aproductive force implies a change within the composition of theworking class, with certain sectors (in Bifo's analysis, the cognitariat)emerging as the paradigmatic form of labor. Insofar as themethod of class composition is undertaken in view of seeking outnovel openings in the social war-its elevation to another level ofcomplexity and intensity-the specter of a labor process increasinglyfounded on the production and management of knowledgeinitiated, an erosion of the classical division of labor and its correspondingorganizational diagrams. Placing pressure on Marx'sanalysis of the general intellect allowed the militants of thecompositionist tradition to diagram a series of mutations in the14 I The Soul at WorkPreface: Soul on Strike / 15

dynamics of contemporary class antagonism. The collapse of thedistinction between conception and execution, between managingProduction and production itself, threatened to generalize the siteof conflict to SOciety as a whole, diminishing the absolute privilegeaccorded the factory as the unique point of production andexploitation.The Sou! at Work begins from these analytical premises. Usingthe thesis of the general intellect as a starting pOint to describe thedynamics of cognitive capital, it reformats this concept to includethe range of emotional, affective and aesthetic textures and experiencesthat are deployed in the contemporaIY experience of work,and gives it another name: soul. From there, The Sou! at Workexplains the emergence of the current regime of accumulation as areaction to the intensification of proletarian refilsal to work thatbegan in the 1960s and reached its peak-the point of mass defectionfrom the factories and the wage-relation_in 1977, with theproliferation of areas of autonomy and the supplanting of workerneeds with communist desire. And most importantly, it attempts todeCIpher the possible forms of politics opened by a new class compositionwhose paradigm is the cognitive worker. What mutationsin the forms and vectors of politics are implied by the definitiveimplosion of rhe Leninist schema of the Party and the revolutionarydestruction of the bourgeois state? In other words, what are possibilitiestheof communism today, in a POst-pOliticalwhen momentthedassical forms of organization and actionto an earhercorrespondingclass composition have withered away?We're starting to talk about communism again theseknowdays. Weyet whatdon'tit is, but it's what we want. The enigmatic final linesof The Sou! at Work ask us to contemplate the possibility of a. m that is no longer the "principle of a new totalization, "commun1Sbut an endless process of constituting poles of autonomy communicatingvia "therapeutic contagion." Politics, Bifo suggests, stillbelongs to the order of totality. Whether understood as the managementof social conflict through the mediation of the State and.the forms of juridical equivalence, or as the praCtIce of an Irreducibleantagonism, the political has always been wedded to thelogical and metaphysical categories of totality and negation. Communismmeans the withering away of the political. But thepost-political era opens not onto an administration of things, asEngels once dreamed, but to what is here daringly called therap y-that is, with the articulation of "happy singularizations" that defectfrom the metropolitan factory of unhappiness.The call-to-arms sounded by the Bolognese autonomo-punkjournal Aftraverso (founded by Bifo in 1975) was "the practice ofhappiness is subversive when it ' s collective." This call still resonates,however muffled. Today, we can add: happiness is collective onlywhen it produces singulatities. Bifo calls the contemporary organizationof production in which the soul and its affective, linguisticand cognitive powers are put to work the factoty of unhappinessbecause the primaty function of the work the post-Fordist factorycommands is not the creation of value but the fabrication of subjectivities-themodeling of psychic space and the induction ofpsychopathologies as a technique of control. In a phase of capitalistdevelopment in which the quantity of socially necessaty labor ISso insio-nificant that it can no longer seriously be considered thea.measure of value, the ghostly afterlife of the order of work IS anentirely political necessity. Work is a matter of discipline, the productionof dOCility. When work becomes the site of libidinal andnarcissistic investment, spinning a web of abjections and dependencies16/ The Sou! at \VorkPreface: Soul on Strike / 17

that exploits rather than represses desire-we become attached andbound to our own unhappiness."Happiness" is a fragile word. In a book he wrote about FelixGuattari, Bifo concedes that it can sound "corny and banal," towhich we might add rotten, having languished in the fetid mouthsof the planetary petit bourgeoisie long enough to be tainted for alltime. Our metaphysicians held it in contempt. Hegel identified itwith dumb immediaCy, blank as an empty page. Kant was equallyclear, founding his moral philosophy on the premise that it is betterto be worrhy of happiness than to be happy-ethics opens in thefault between the order of value and an order of affections structuredby aesthetic textures and the contingencies of space and time.Psychoanalysis taught us that happiness comes at a price: a tenunciationof drives, which, far from banishing them, makes them thatmuch nastier, turned back against us in the guise of guilt and cruelself-laceration. In the Grundrisse, Marx admonished Adam Smithfor confusing freedom with happiness and work with necessity, sacrificeand suffering. This is true, he thundered, only from theperspective of the current regime of work, wage-labor as "externallyforced labor." But if work is for us sacrifice, it can one day be "selfrealization)}the construction and mastery of one's own conditionsof existence, freedom as self-objectification, the making of a worldas the production of the self itself. In a society in which work is nolonger organized by a small clique which has monopolized themeans of production through violence, crime and economic reason,work will become seductive. Labor will be attractive, saysMarx following Fourier, because it is no longer work at all but itsnegation and overcoming, the accumulation of joy and the collectivecomposition of a commons. Such pleasure will not be meteplay or, God forbid, "fun," but what Marx calls "damned seriousness":e"R ally free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time preciselydamned seriousness the most intense exertion runthemostdrisse, p. 611; my italics).oles of autonomy whete what Marx calls the "individual's selfp'. "(G. .The task of the communism to come is the constitutIon ofI'.rea lzatlOn" and Bifo calls "happy singularizations" becom sharedpossibilities. The contempotary regime of work has produced aperfect inversion of the scenario Marx proJects-work has becomethe site of libidinal investment, but produces pathologies and.depression rather than the damned serious practice of happmess..The creation of zones of therapeutic contagion reqUlreS not only adefection from the atchaic form of the wage-in which we still pretendto measure value with the time of work-but undertaking alabot on ourselves, a working through of out attachment to work.The great epoch of the refusal of work requited that we go on theffensive against outselves, that the proletariat destroY·itself as ao f 'class, as labor-power. Today, we are told, this politicS 0 destructiOnis replaced by a therapy that is primarily aesthetic in nature: thecomposition of a refrain that constitutes a territory subtracted fromthe social factory and its temporalities and rhythms. For Marx, theprivileged example of really free working-happiness itself-is('composition," the construction of the communist score. Now eknow: the aesthetic paradigm of the communism to come Willconsist in the singularization and elaboration of forms-of-life, acommunism whose song will free the space in which it resonates,and spreads.- Jason Smith

Introduction"Those who maintain that the soul is incorporeal are talkingnonsense, because it would not be able to act upon or be actedupon if it were of such a nature; but in actuality both these jUnctionsare clearly distinguishable in the case of the soul. "- Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, par. 67'The soul I intend to discuss does not have much to do with thespirit. It is rather the vital breath that converts biological matterinto an animated body.I want to discuss the soul in a materialistic way. What the bodycan do, that is its soul, as Spinoza said.In order to describe the processes of subjection arising with theformation of industrial societies, Foucault tells the story of modernityas a disciplining of the body, building the institutions anddevices capable of subduing the body thtough the machines ofsocial production. Industrial exploitation deals with bodies, musclesand arms. Those bodies would not have any value if they weren'tanimated, mobile, intelligent, reactive.The rise of post-Fordist modes of production, which I will callSemiocapitalism, takes the mind, language and creativity as itsprimary tools for the production of value. In the sphere of digital21

.production, exploitation is exerted essentially on the semiotic fluxproduced by human time at work.It is in this sense that we speak of immaterial production. Languageand money are not at all metaphors, and yet they areItmatenal. They are nothing, and yet can do everything: they move,dIsplace, multiply, destroy. They are the soul of Semiocapital.If today we want to continue the genealogical work of MichelFoucault, we have to shift the focus of theoretical attention towardsthe automatisms of mental reactivity, language and imagination,and therefore towards the new forms of alienation and precariousnessof the mental work occurring in the Net.In this book I will examine anew the Marxist language whichwas domInant rn the 1960s, trying to reestablish its vitality withrespect to the languages of post-structuralism, schizoanalysis andcyberculture.Despite the fact that the term "soul" is never used in the languageof that hlstoncal period, I want to use it-metaphorically andeven a bit ionicaIlY-in order to rethink the core of many questInrefemng to the issue of alienation. In the Hegelian visionthiS Issue is defined by th l ' h' be re atlOns lp etween uman essenceand activity, while in the materialist vision of Italian Workerism(Operais "!o), alienation is defined as the relationship betweenhuman time and capitalist value, that is to say as the reification ofboth body and soul. In the Hegelian-Marxist tradition of the 20thCentury,the concept of "alienation" refers specifically to the rela­.tion eXIstIg betwee corporeality and human essence. For Hegel,the word alrenatlon (Entausserung) refers to the self becomingother, to the historical and mundane separation existing betweenthe Berng and the existent.hIn Marx, the concept of alienation signifies the split between lifeand labor, the split between the workers' physical activity and theirhumanity, their essence as humans. Young Marx, the author of theJ 844 Manuscripts who was the main reference for the radical philosophyof the 1960s, attributes a pivotal role to the notion of alienation.In Marx's parlance, as in Hegel before, alienation (Entausserung)and estrangement (Entfi'emdung) are two terms that define the sameprocess from twO different standpoints. The first one defines thesense of loss felt by consciousness when faced with an object in thecontext of capital's domination; the second term refers to the confrontationbetween the consciousness and the scene of exteriority,and to the creation of an autonomous consciousness based on therefusal of its own dependence on work.Italian Workerist thought overturned the vision of Marxismthat was dominant in those years: the working class is no longerconceived as a passive object of alienation, but instead as theactive subject of a refusal capable of building a community startingout from its estrangement ftom the interests of capitalistic society.Alienation is then considered not as the loss of humanauthenticity, but as estrangement from capitalistic interest, andtherefore as a necessary condition for the construction-in aspace estranged from and hostile to labor relations-of an ultimatelyhuman relationship.In the context of French Post-Structuralism, a similar overturningof the traditional vision of clinical alienation was findingits way: schizophrenia, considered by psychiatry only as the separationand loss of self-consciousness, is rethought by FelixGuattari in totally new terms. Schizophrenia is not the passiveeffect of a scission of consciousness, but rather a form of consciousnessthat is multiple, proliferating and nomadic.22 / The Soul at WorkIntroduction / 23

In this book I want to compare the conceptual framework of the'60s based' on the Hegelian concepts of Alienation and Totalizationto the conceptual framework of our present, which is based on theconcepts of biopolitics and of psychopathologies of desire.In the first part of the book I want to describe the relationshipbetween philosophy and theories of labor in the '60s. In the waveof a Hegelian Renaissance and the constitution of Critical Theory,industrial labor was seen ftom the point of view of alienation, andthe rebellion of industrial workers against exploitation was seen asthe beginning of a ptocess of disalienation.In the fo urth part of the book I will try to outline the effects of the'. atl'on of labor-especially of cognitive labor-and theprecanz .effects of the biopolitical subjugation of language and affecnons.In the conclusion, I will comment on the current collapse of theintegrated psycho-machinic organism that is the Global Econoy.The collapse of the Global Economy following the recent finanCIalcrack could be the opening of a new era of autonomy and emancipationfor the soul.In the second part of the book I will account for the progressivementalization of working processes, and the consequent enslavementof the soul. Putting the soul to work: this is the new form ofalienation. Out desiring energy is trapped in the trick of self-enterprise,our libidinal investments are regulated according toeconomic fules, our attention is captured in the precariousness ofvirtual networks: evety fragment of mental activity must be ttansformedinto capital. I will describe the channeling of Desire in theprocess of valorization and the psychopathological implications ofthe subjugation of the soul to work processes.In the third part I will retrace the evolution of several radical theories,from the idealistic concept of Alienation to the analyticalconcept of psychopathology. I will also compare the philosophy ofDesire (Deleuze and Guattari) with the philosophy of Simulation(Baudrillard), in order to underscore their differences but also theircomplementarity.

Labor and Alienation in the ohilosoohv of the 19608 /::;9The meaning of those movements was the emergence of a newhistorical alliance. It was an alliance between mass intellectual laborand the workers' refusal of industrial labor.Despite being deeply rooted in the history of the twentiethcentury, despite being ideologically animated by different schoolsof thought embedded in the twentieth century, 1968 marks thebeginning of the e 'f it from industrial societies, the beginning of aprocess leading to the disembodiment of the modern Nation-State.Workers and students: this binomial marks a new quality inthe composition of general social labor and implies the articulationof a new kind of innovative potentialiry with respect to20th-century history.The emergence of intellectual, technical and scientific labor is asign of the decade: the political power of the 1968 movementsderives from the students having become mass: they had become apart of the general social labot force characterized by a stronghomogeneity at a world level.In those same 1960s, the industrial working class showed agrowing estrangement towards the organization of labor, until thisestrangement became open insubordination and organized revolt.In some productive secrors, as for instance in the car productioncycle, labor had a mass depersonalized character: it is in these sectorsthat the refusal of work exploded more significantly. In the mid1970s the entire European car production cycle was stormed bywaves of workers' fights, sabotage and absenteeism, until a technologicalreorganization aimed at the reassertion of capitalist ruledefeated the worker's power. The technical restructuration impliedthe substitution of human labor with machines, the automation ofentire productive cycles and the subjugation of mental activity."Workers and students united in their fight" is perhaps the mostsignificant slogan of the so-called "Italian Red Biennium." In 1968and 1969 these words were shouted in thousands of rallies, meetings,strikes and demonstrations: they were much more than a politicaland ideological alliance or a superficial form of solidarity. Theywere the sign of the organic integration of labor and intelligence,they meant the conscious constitution of the general intellect thatMarx had discussed in his Grundrisse.The theoretical problems, the sociological imagination and thephilosophical critique articulated during those years are directlyimplied in the social and cultural developments of the students'movement-of its cultural and productive convergence with themovement based on the refusal of industrial labor.Italian neo-Marxism, often denominated "Workerism," is aschool of thought focused on the relation between working classstruggles and intellectual and technological transformations.The modern intellectualToday the word "intellectual" has lost much of the meaning it hadthroughout the twentieth century, when around this word coalescednot only issues of social knowledge, but also ethics andpolitics. In the second half of the twentieth century intellectuallabor completely changed its nature, having been progressivelyabsorbed into the domain of economic production. Once digitaltechnologies made the connection of individual fragments of cognitivelabor possible, the parceled intellectual labor was subjected tothe value production cycle. The ideological and political forms ofthe left wing, legacy of the 20th Century, have become inefficientin this new context.

contribution consists in the reformulation of the issue of politicalorganization in terms of sodal composition.Compositionism redefines the Leninist notion of the party ascollective intellectual, leaving behind the very notion of the intellectualwhile proposing a new reading of the Marxist notion of"general intellect." Marx had written of general intellect in a passageof his Grundrisse known as the "Fragment on the machines":"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electrictelegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of humanindustry: natural material transformed into organs of the humanwill over nature, or of human participation in nature [...). Theyare organs of the human brain, created by the human hand: thepower of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capitalindicates to what degree general social knowledge has becomea direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditionsof the process of social life itself have come under thecontrol of the general intellect and been transformed in accordancewith it. To what degree the powers of social productionhave been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but alsoas immediate organs of social practice, of the rcal life process.'"At the time of the communist revolutions, in the first part of the twentiethcentury, the Marxist-Leninist tradition ignored the concept ofgeneral intellect, therefore conceiving the intellectual function as exteriorityand as a political direction determined within the purely spiritualdomain of philosophy. Bur during the post-industrial transformationof production the general intellect emerged as a central productiveforce. At the end of the 20th century, thanks to digital technologiesand the constitution of a global telematic network, the general socialrocess is redefined as "general intellect," and the Leninist idea of theParry is forever put aside. Grarnsci's notion of the organic intellectualis also losing its concrete reference, since it is based on the intellectuals'attachment to an ideology, while nowadays what is important isthe creation of a new social sphere, that we might want to call "cognitariat,"representing the social subjectivity of the "general intellect."If we want to define the crux of today's mutations, we must focus onthe social function of cognitive labor. Intellectual labor is no longera social function separated from general labor, but it becomes atransversal function within the entire social process, it becomes thecreation of technical and linguistic interfaces ensuring the fluidityboth of the productive process and of social communication.Subjectivity and alienationIn the 1960s, we could find three tendencies within the field ofMarxist thought:The first emphasized the young Marx's thought, his humanisticvocation, and the issue of subjectivity: it underlined its continuitywith Hegel, specifically with his The Phenomenology of Spirit.The second focused mainly on Capital, and on Marx's workafter his epistemological rupture with Hegelianism: this tendencycan be linked to structuralism.The third tendency discovered and emphasized the importanceof Grundrisse, therefore the concept of composition and generalintellect, while maintaining conceptual links with phenomenology.Karl Marx's early works were published and distributed by theinstitutions assigned to their scholastic and dogmatic conservation

(mainly by the Institute for Marxism-Leninism) very late. Marx'sManuscripts of 1844 were published only in 1957, in Karl Mal'J(and Friedrich Engels' Werke, published by Dietz Verlag in Berlin.This work was considered a scandal, as the revelation of anotherMarx, different from the severe author of Capital. Economicaterialism was dilured by a consideration of the workers' subjectlVltythat was absent from the geometric Structure of Marx'smajor works.The atmosphere created in 1956 by the twentieth Congress ofCPUS opened the way to a revaluation of the currents of criticalMarxism, radical Hegelianism, and so-called humanistic Marxism.Beginning in the 1950s, Same had led a critical battle against"The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces,t h e more his production increases in power and extent. TheWOf k er becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more comrnod mes . , he produces . The devaluation of the human worldgrows 1 'n d,'rect proportion to the increase in value of the worldof things. [. . . J The worker is related to the product of labouras to an alien object. For it is clear that, according to thispremise, the more the worker exertS himself in his work, themore powerful the alien, objective world becomes which hebrings into being over against himself, the poorer he and hisinner world become, and the less they belong to him.'"dogmatism and determinism within Marxist studies, opening theway to a humanistic formulation and a revaluation of subjectivityagainst dialectic reductionism. Bur Sartre's philosophical point ofdeparture Was a radically anti-Hegelian existentialism.Even within the Hegelian dialectical field there had beeninstances in favor of a revaluation of subjectivity. The new interestin Hegel's thought, first in the 1920s, then through the srudies ofthe Frankfurt School and finally with the Hegel Renaissance of the1960s, led to the emergence of the issue of subjectivity and of thespecifically human Within the historical process.In order to understand the progressive emergence of the themeof subjectivity, we can start rereading Marx's early work, so relevantduring the 1960s in Marxist studies and, more generally, in theMarx's attention is focused on the anthropological consequences ofworking conditions within the structure of capitalistic production.What happens to the human being trapped in a wage-earning productiverelation? This is what essentially happens: the more thewage earner's energy is invested in productive activity, the moreslhe reinforces the power of the enemy, of capital, and the less isleft for oneself. In order to survive, in order to receive a wage,workers have to renOunce their humanity, the human investmentof their time and energies.The concept of alienation derives from Marx's ongoing meditationon the religion question and on the thought of LudwigFeuerbach:field of critical culture.At the center of young Marx's thought-and significantly atthe center also of the political and philosophical problems of the1960s-is the notion of alienation. Let's try to understand themeaning of this word:"It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, theless he retains within himself. The worker places his life inthe object; but now it nO longer belongs to him, but to theobject [ . .. J. What the product of his labour is, he is not.Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The36 I TrlB Sou) at Work

externalisation of the worker in his product means not onlythat his labour becomes an object, an external existence, butthat it exists outside him, independently of him and alien tohim, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power;that the life which he has bestowed on the object confrontshim as hostile and alien.'"In the social situation of the I 960s, with the full development ofindustrial societies, mature capitalism produced goods in growingquantities, created conditions of wealth for consumers, and keptrhe promise of a more satisfactory economic life for all. But thesatisfaction of economic needs was accompanied by a progressiveloss of life, of pleasute, of time for oneself. Millions of people wereexperiencing this in their life: the more powerful the economicmachine, the more the life of the worker becomes miserable. Thisawareness spread largely in those years and Marx's early works wereable to interpret it. The concept of alienation defines this thematicfield and it came to Marx from the Hegelian conceptualcontext, authorizing a Hegelian reading of the entire discourse.The thematic scenery we can perceive behind the Manuscriptsof 1844 is that of Hegelian idealism. And indeed, the discovery ofthis work in rhe 1960s was accompanied by the large diffusion ofthe critical thought of the Frankfurt School and of a humanism ofidealist derivation.The conceptual scheme of alienation is idealist in so far as itpresupposes human authenticity, an essence that has been lost,negated, taken away, suspended. Therefore communism is thoughtby the young Marx as the restoration of an authentically humanessence that was negated by the relation of capitalist production. Inother terms: the communist revolutionary process is conceived asthe restoratl nobliteratlon-'0 of an original identity whose perversion, temporary,, whose «alienation ) ) in other wordS-IS representedby the workers' present condition."Communism therefore as the complete return of man tohimself as a social (i.e., human) being-a return accomplishedconsciously and embracing the entire wealth of previousdevelopment. This communism, as fully developed naturalism,equals humanism, and as fully developed humanismequals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflictbetween man' and nature and between man and man-thetrue resolution of the strife between existence and essence,between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedomand necessity, between the individual and the species.Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knowsitsdf to be this solution,"6The ideological vice of the young Marx's formulation resides entirelyin this presupposition of a generic human essence whose negationwould be represented by the concrete history of the conditions ofthe working classes. But where does this presupposition find itsbasis, if not in rhe idealisric hypostasis of human essence? HereMarx's language reveals its conceptual continuity with Hegel's, andits persistence within the idealistic problematic.In order to better understand the idealistic function of theconcept of alienation, and the connected idealistic machineryrevolving around the notion of a generic human essence-and ofhistoric subjectivity-we need to refer to Hegel's work, to the verydynamic of the Hegelian language:.38 / The Soul at WorkLat)or and Alienation in the pt)ilosophy of the 19608 /39

"Over against the I as absttact being-for-itself, there standslikewise its inorganic nature, as being [seyena']. The I relatesitself negatively to it (its inorganic nature], and annuls it asthe unity of both-but in such a way that the I first shapesthat abstract being-for-itself as its Self, sees its Own form [init] and thus consumes itself as well. In the element of being assuch, the existence and range of natural needs is a multitudeof needs. The things serving ro satisfy those needs are workedup [verarbeitet] , their universal inner possibility posited[expressed] as Outer possibility, as form. This processing[Verarbeiten] of things is itself manysided, however; it is consciousnessmaking itself into a thing. But in the element ofuniversality, it is such that it becomes an abstract labor. Theneeds are many. The incorporation of their multiplicity in the1, i.e., labor, is an abstraction of universal models (Bilder), yet[it is] a self-propelling process of formation (Bilden)."7The alienated character of labor is linked here explicitly (even if ina very obscure, typically Hegelian language) to the becoming of theMind, and to the dialectic of being-for-itself and of being-for-theother.This way of thinking absorbs the entire (concrete, historical)dialectic oflabor and of capiralisric expropriation wirhin the idealisricdialectic of subject and substance. In Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit we read:"Further, the living Subsrance is being which is in truth Subject,or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as itis the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of itsself-othering with itself This Substance is, as Subject, puresimple negativity [ .. . J. Only this self-resroring sameness, Otthis reflection in otherness within itself-not an original orimmediate unity as such-is the True. It is the process of itsown becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal,having its end also as its beginning; and only by being workedout to its end, is it actual."sDespite his critique of idealist philosophy, in his Manuscripts of1844 Marx is still trapped in the Hegelian conceptual system,when he proposes to think of communism as "resolution of thestrife between existence and essence/) attributing a transcendentand eschatological character to communism, as if there were aradical beyond representing the truth to be realized outside thecontradictions of the existing. This theological vision of communismis not without consequences in the history of theworkers) movements.Alienation between history and ontologyThe great success known by critical theory, whose foundations canbe found in the pages of authors like Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse,can be understood in the context of this idealistic renaissance.The issue of alienation is at the core of the critical thought ofthe Frankfurt School, and also--although with a completely differentinflection-of the Existentialists' reflection, especially inJean Paul Same, although from different points of view. Referringto the twO most significant examples within existentialism andcritical thought, Same's and Marcuse's standpoints-though radicallydifferent-exist on the same terrain: the humanisticfoundations for the process of liberation from capitalism. Examiningthese divergent positions will allow us to get to the heart of the40 I The Soul at Won

matter that is important for us: the vitality of the philosophicalnotion of alienation and its exhaustion during the historical andpolitical battles of the 1960s. Alienation is considered by the existentialistformulations as an unavoidable and constitutive elementof the human condition, since otherness (condition of the socialrelation) and reification (condition of the productive relation) bothbecome an unwitting apologist fo r the status quo. Arguing asSarrIe 1d'd that men chose their fate, even if it was a hombleone, was monstrous [ ... J. To Marcuse, the entire project of an'existentialist' philosophy without an a priori idea of essence'bl ",was impOSSl e.imply a loss of self. In the social relation, in the presence of otherness,is implicit a certain form of alienation, of uneasiness. Lenferc'est les autres (Hell is other people), declares Existentialism. Theothers are the hell of alienation, independently from the social conditionwe are living in.Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School, on the other hand,share the belief that alienation is not ontologically identified withotherness and reification, but constitutes instead a historicallydetermined form, and therefore it is possible to overcome ithistorically.On this matter, in his book on the Frankfurt School entitledThe Dialectical Imagination, Marrin Jay wrote:"To Marcuse, Sarrre had erroneously made absurdity into anontological rather than a historical condition. As a result, hefell back into an idealistic internalization of freedom as somethingopposed to the outside, heteronomous world. Despitehis avowed revolutionary intentions, his politics and hisphilosophy were totally at odds. By locating freedom in thepour-soi could become en-soi (being-in-itself, or an-sieh),Same severed subjectivity from objectivity in a way thatdenied reconciliation even as a utopian possibility. Moreover,by overemphasizing the freedom of the subject and ignoringthe constraints produced by historical condition, Same hadIn Reason and Revolution, one of Herbert Marcuse's most importanttextS, we read:"The worker alienated from his product is at the same timealienated from himself. His labor itself becomes no longer hisown, and the fact that it becomes the property of anotherbespeaks an expropriation that touches the very essence ofman. Labor in its true form is a medium fo r man's true selffulfillment,for the full development of his potentialities.""Here Marcuse links two vety different topics as if they were thesame one: the development of potentialities (concretely detetminedin the social and technical histoty of the conflict between workersand capital) and human self-tealization..The first is a material and precise issue, while the second ISinstead a quintessentially idealistic, essentialist issue.On the conttary, according to what Sattre maintains in hisCritique of Dialectical Reason, alienation is nothing other than theintrinsic modality of a1terity, which is the constitutive form of thesocial relation and human condition.While Marcuse considets alienation as a historical form thatcould be ovetcome historically, Sartre wantS to ground anthropologicallythe historic condition itself: he locates history'santhtopological roots in scatcity and alterity.42 I The Soul 2.t WorkLabor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 1960s / 43

44 / The SoulLabor and Alienation in the philosophy of tile 19605 /45Sartre situates himself outside the Hegelian field, since hedoes not considet alienation to be an historical separationbetween existence and eSSence. This is why he does not conceivethe idea of an overcoming, of an exit from the anthropologicaldimensions of scarcity and alterity. He refuses the theologicalvision of communism that dialectic materialism had built.Scarcity, Sartte maintains, is anthropologically constitutive of thehistoric relation.Estrangement versus alienationThe philosophical style of ltalian Workerism-or, as I prefer to callit, Compositionism-beginning with Panzieri and Tronti's works,presents the issue of alienation in radically different terms thanthose of humanism, freeing itself from both the neo-Hegelian andFrankfurt School's vision and its existentialist Sartrian version.According to the humanistic vision, that had developed in oppositionto so-called diamat, the dialectic materialist dogmatism oforthodox Marxism-Leninism, alienation is the separation betweenhuman beings, the loss of human essence in historical existence.Compositionism, even if in complete agreement with the critiqueof the Stalinist diamat, dialectical and historicist dogmatism,does not anticipate any restoration of humanity, does not proclaimany human universality, and bases its understanding of humanityon class conflict.Compositionism overturns the issue implicit in the question ofalienation. It is precisely thanks to the radical inhumanity of theworkers' existence that a human collectivity can be founded, a communityno longer dependent on capital. It is indeed the estrangementof the workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation and itsrefusal, that are the bases fo r a human collectivity autonomousfrom capital.In the writings published in the magazines Classe op eraia(Working Class), and then in Potere operaio (Worker Power), theword "estrangement" replaces the word ('alienation '" whichinevitably alludes to a previous human essence, lost in the historicalprocess, waiting for a synthesis capable of reestablishing it, ofcalling it into being as a positivity. Lahar is no longer considered tobe the natural condition of human sociality, but a specific historicalcondition that needs to undergo a political critique. A critique of"laborism" was already present in Marx's early writings:"It [labour] is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but amere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character isclearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical orother compulsion exists, it is shunned like the plague. Externallabour, labout in which man alienates himself, is a labour ofself-sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character oflabour for the worker is demonstrated by the fact that itbelongs not to him but to another, and that in it he belongsnot to himself but to anothet. Just as in religion the spontaneousactivity of the human imagination, the human brain,and the human heart, detaches itself from the individual andreappears as the alien activity of a god or of a devil, so theactivity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. Itbelongs to another, it is a loss of his sele'llLabor is an activity estranged from the existence of the workers thatis imposed on evetyday life by the construction of disciplinarystructures created over the course of the entire histoty of modern

civilization. Only the estrangement from labor makes liberatorydynamics possible, shifting the flow of desire from (industrial) repetitiontowards (cognitive) difference. The concept of estrangementimplies an intentionality that is determined by an estranged behavior.capital.Estranged from what? From all forms of labor dependent onWorkers do not suffer from their alienation when they Cantransform it into active estrangement, that is to say, into refusal.r f humanity and not as the condition of those who are forcedIorm 0'to renounce their essential humanity.Trond writes of the working class as a "rude pagan race,"addressing Marcuse's idealism and the irrelevance of the humanisticand theological perspectives that it projects onto the reality ofproletarian social composition, its working conditions, but also onthe process of socialization and struggle that workers are able toeffectuate in metropolitan areas."The working dass confronts its own labor as capital, as a hostileforce, as an enemy-this is the pOint of departure not onlyfor the antagonism, but for the organization of the antagonism.If the alienation of the worker has any meaning, it is a highlyrevolutionary one. The organization of alienation: This is theonly possible direction in which the party can lead the spontaneityof the dass. The goal remains that of refusal, at a higherlevel: It becomes active and collective, a political refusal on amass scale, organized and planned. Hence, the immediate taskof working-class organization is to overcome passivity , ) 1 2The alienation Tronti discusses is not described in humanistic terms(loss of the human essence) but a condition of estrangement from themode of production and its rules, as refusal of work. The Workerist­Compositionist thinking style distinguishes itself for this overturningof humanistic connotations: what is seen by the negative thought ofhumanistic derivation as a sign of alienation, is seen by the Workerist­Compositionists as a sign of estrangement, a refusal to identifY withthe general interest of the capitalistic economy. That is to say, it is seenas the condition of those who rebel assuming their partial humanityas a point of strength, a premise of a higher social form, of a higherTronti and MarcuseIn one of his most influential books, One Dimensional Man, publishedin the U.S. in 1964, Herbert Marcuse foresees for the workingclass a destiny of integration into the capitalistic system. Consequently,he sees the necessity, for those willing to change the socialorder, of shifting their political attention towards the domain ofextra-productive marginalities and away from the direct domain ofthe productive relation. Marcuse's analysis had consistent effects onthe youth culture of the time, since it seemed to anticipate thestudent movements as a leading force of the anti-capitalistic strugglein order to replace an already integrated working class that is alreadyirretrievable for the purpose of revolutionary conflict."In Marcuse's book, the youth of 1968 fOund the topics andthe words needed to give definite form to an idea that hadalready been circulating in Europe for a while, but in a lessarticulate way. It was the idea that European societies, onlytwenty years after Fascism and war had ended, were alreadyblocked societies. [. . . J They were blocked even at the level ofhope for future changes, since youth considered the major46 / The Soul at WorkLabor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 1960s / 47

part of the working c I ass, WIt . h its.b 'representativeelong1Og topartie sthe traditional left, as being alreadyt he eXlSintegrated 'tmg 10social s ystem,,an d therefore noh'longerlStOtlcalcrediblesub" Jeer mcapa bl e of ' aimposing radical innovations. »13It was from the stu d ents, w h 0 were not involved 1n ' t h e process--or at leastproductivewh o t h oug h t so-that came changeth thate htheopeworking class had.fo rI 0St, Stnce .nomicism, improved.m I.unIOnIzation, eco_arena , conditlons andproduced anConsumerismeffect ofhadsocial int egratJon ' 1nto.theThis idea wacapitalistics I arge I ysystem.circulated ' in those y ears an d was students'part of theconsciousness.The working class has lost any ca paclty .to be caught as it is inautonomous,th e we b 0 f consumer SOc1ety: .t h us described MarcuseAmerican an d E uropean societies.wInhat the lastMarcusean I .forecasted in 1964 :a:: a period ofpeace, wheregrowingthesocialstudents would to act as thethreatenedbearers of ahumanistic conSCIOUsness. 'a YSlS,''A cmOrtable, smooth, reasonable, democraticpevalls 10unfreedomadvanced industrial civilization ' a tokenfllcal0 f tee h -progress."14Technical development.and the runCtIOna r . ISOCIalprinciplintegrationdwhose.e pro liCe aeff. ect 15 : h e cancellanon .ofpotentiallyconRictual andrevolutionaty d ynam1CS. The thensociety f illperceived as a.0 a uence washa rnesslng 0 f h uman authenticity."Th: new te hnolog ical work-world thus enforcesoaf t eweakeningnegatJve pOSition of the working class . ' th e I arrer nolonger appears to be the living contradiction to the establisheds o c iet y. (... J Domination is transfigured into administration."15Nowadays, a few decades later, we can see important elements ofprefiguration in Marcuse's discourse. The statement "domination istransfigured into administration" needs to be rethought in the newlight of the creation of a system of economical and financial automatismsapparently without alternatives. Rereading Marcuse could beuseful today, but in the 1960s the diffusion of his work had negativeconsequences, at least from the standpoint of Mario Tronti.First of all his thought separated in a mechanical way-in the sameway as the Leninist tradition-wage struggles, described as implicitlyeconomicist and integrated, and a true political revolutionary fight.Secondly it led to the exaltation of the separation of the srudentfigure from the cycle of capitalistic production.In the Workerist magazines of the 1960s, specifically in Quaderni rossi(Red Notebooks), Classe operaia (Working Class) and finally Potereoperaio (Workers' Power), the wage struggle is valorized as a politicalfight. The workers' movement is recognized as an a-ideologicalmovement able to destabilize the political equilibriums of capital.The fact that the workers' struggle focuses on the wage,according to the positions expressed in Potere operaio, does notmean that this Ilght is to be considered integrated and subaltern.On the contrary: everything depends on the way in which thewage struggle is conceived, organized and directed. If wages areconsidered as a variable dependant on capitalistic development, avariable that must be compatible with prollt, both on a Ilscal anda political level, then of course they are not a lever that couldoverturn or transform anything. But if wages are understood as48 / The SOUl at WorkLabor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 1960s I 49

political instruments of attack and radical redistribution of socialweal th, if wages are considered a factor in the conflict betweenwotkers and capital (at the level of the conflict on the exchangevalue of the use value of the labor force), then they end up becomingthe main instrument in a conflict in which economical and politicaldimensions are aggressively linked to the perspective of wotketautonomy from capitalistic development and hegemony,Workerisr theory refuses the notion of consumerism, since itconsiders the workers' consumption in a "pagan" and rude way asa form of appropriation destined to open a front line of radical andpolitical clash,As for the students and their movements, Workerist theoryanticipates an idea that will bear fruit some time later: srudents area section of social labor, they are labor in the making, a centralfactor in tbe change of capital's organic composition, Therefore thestudents' struggle is not celebrated as an ideological fight, and evenless as a substitute for the workers' fight, It is celebrated instead asspecific movement in a social sector internal to the dynamics ofproductive labor,While from Marcuse's perspective students were considered asagents of an action without causes or direct consequences at thelevel of social production, Workerist theory sees the students fromthe very beginning as part of the general labor force: labor force inprogress, expropriated of its knowledge just as much as workers areexpropriated of the products of their work.While humanistic theories, specifically Marcuse's, believe thatit is possible to judge the spontaneity of workers' behaviors in thename of a principle of human universality, or historical teleology,Tronti answers that there is no universal principle from whichworkers' behaviors derive, or accotding to which the workers', d d The workers' position is rather one ofcould be JU ge '.. n.,erneuc , h I ic and general interest, t'lng itself outSide t e ogSitUa,tI:an:gernerl"society,.;f eap,itail;stICd' he journal Classe operaia, wagesdevelopeIn the discoutse m'd d a political weapon, : th se that immediate classe senmconSI ere'bl with capitalist order,, t compau eis no, h odalbebaviot'th e Workerist v,,' £ unded on the idea that 10 t e s! SlO ! S ofi he workers' resistance to capital and theh mes rst is th I ' alP ro cess w at coth' el ( olitical apparatuses, tec no OglCk Every mg se pto worrefusal 'th I ' ns of fo rce between classes,models) depends on e re anoal' iSmStructurand Das Kapital, f both Marcuse's and Same'sk' t the centel a ,Marx'S early wor ! S a 'f h develop in ditectlOns. even 1 t ey1 meditation,anthropOloglca, I Marcuse starts from anI I pOSite reSU tS,Ibearing comp ete y opd h e re conceives the historicaf h ssence an t ererO0 t e eanthropology, a ne ated totaliry, while Sarrre startsProcess as the restorat wn of g'tyas the anthropologicaldd " ,I' henty an scaret ,from the con mon OJ a'd both the historical, b " he conSi ersPremise of histo n cal ecom1 gO 'd ' d to a failure from which'alas esnneand the existenn processesdf f sionaliry will be save ',only rhe moment 0 uk hiEr in Marxist srudles,) F Marx mar s a neW SLouis Althusser s orh rly works to stress, ' far away from t e ea,focusing ItS attennon' al b k h t brings Marx's theory-m, logIC rea t ainstead the epiSternOt h e'f' II in Capital-outsideM Xism and specl lca ymature arHegelian sphere,, I h major role, since it is notStructure then, not hiStory, pays t ea l that the process ofat the historical level, but at the srructur oneknowledge is founded,50 I The Soul at Work,h of the 19605 /51Labor and Alienation in the ph!iosoP Y

For Marx is a declaration of war against Marxist Humanism,at least against its idealistic implications. As a matter of factbook gets rid of any pretence of considering Marx's theoty assimple "overturning" of the Hegelian system.If we want to exit the Hegelian field of problems, we have tolet go of the dialectic, we have to abandon the idea of an originaltruth to he restored, both on the level of the self-realization of thespirit and of the self-assettion of radical Humanism.After For Marx Althusset published Reading Capital, a bookthat proposes a structuralist method aimed at understanding thecapitalistic process and stressing the deep connection existingbetween labor and knowledge.First of all, Althusser reproposes to keep some distance fromthe humanism of the young Marx:"The Young Marx of the J 844 Manuscripts tead the humanessence at sight, immediately, in the ttansparency of its alienation.Capital, on the contrary, exactly measures a distance andan internal dislocation (decalage) in the real, inscribed in itsstructure, a distance and a dislocation such as to make their owneffects themselves illegible [ . . . J the text of history is not a textin which a voice (the Logos) speaks, but the inaudible andillegible notation of the effects of a structure of structures.""The concept of alienation shows the process by which the identicalis restored. Against its grain, we can then clearly see the traces ofReason as it cleverly opens a way throughout the vicissitudes of history,as the history of the overturning of the alienated condition.Overturning, overcoming, making true: an entire litany ofHegelian terms that constantly refer to the possibility of readingThe oint is not that of overturning or overthroughreason. p. f the word aufhebung,. fi Hegehan sense 0co, !!l Hlg (in the specl c. pable of abolishing and> , a1" through a negatlon ca. dwhich means to re Ize. ) The point is conceiving action (anat the same time .Jtlaintaining.) as ptoduction, where ptoducing means:th etical practiceseoralso. i latent, but which really meansmanifest what s"Making. preexistinO' raw material the.(in ordet to gIve a pttansformmgd) something which in af obJ' ect adapted to an en ,form 0 an. »17sense already eXIStS..t the rocess of visually registeringAlthusser says, I noKnowledge,.P flex as Engel's vulgate of.f f us' It IS not a re ,.what comes m ront: ledge is the construction of an object:pretende . OWmaterialism"We must completely reorganize the idea we have of knowl-. hs of immediatebandon the murors mytedge, we must a. kn wledge as a productiond d' and conceIve 0 .vision an rea mg,b h 'sible as its invisible, tts[... J The invisible is defined Y t e VI.h . 'bl is not thererore sImpforbidden vision: t e mVlSI eh aria! metaphor) , theh . 'bl (to return to t e spoutside t e VIS! eh er darkness of excluciakn of exclusion-but t e znn '""outer r essd fi d by its sttUcture.. . s'lde the visible itself because e neston, IIIc.Iy what is. . 1 i the determined forro that cognitiveThe structure of the vlslb e d d properly epistemic con-. n1y to Its mo eS anproduction gIves not 0h ld that has been citcumsctlbe.d ely to t ewor .tenrs, but also an preCIsh f the visual field cuttingb h The metap or 0and made visible Y t ern.h issue of knowledgeh . 'ble world really allows us to grasp t eout t e viSl, theory .. h' his centtal to Althussersas productIOn w IC. d52 / The Soul at WorkI th 19608 153d "',en8.\lon 'In tIle philOSOphy 0 eLabor an H

To assert that knowledge needs to be understood as produc_tion is a statement rich wirh implications, not all of themdeveloped by Alrhusser. The first is a merely gnoseological impli_cation relative to the way the mind adapts to the world, makingit become the "world of the mind.""Ir is therefore a question of producing, in the precise .Sense ofthe word, which seems to SignifY making manifest what is latent,but which really means transforming (in order to give a preexistingraw material the form of an object adapted to an end),something which in a sense already exists, This production, inrhe double sense which gives the production operation thenecessary form of a circle, is the production of knowledge.""Here Alrhusser begins with Marx's refusal to confuse real objectsand the objects of knowledge (a confusion that instead intentionallyand explicitly dominates Hegel's theory).The cognitive object is the result of a specific and determinedactivity of production. The 1857 Introduction to Marx'sFoundations of the Critique of Political Economy (also known asGrundrisse) is the most important reference for anybody interestedin understanding how the concept of knowledge asproduction works:"It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete,with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, withe.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject ofthe entire social act of production. However, on doser examinationthis proves false. The population is an absrraction if I leaveOUt, for example, the classes of which it is composed. [ . .. J. Inthis way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as theproduct of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths,and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the merhod oftising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in whichthought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concretein the mind. But this is by no means the process by which theconcrete itself comes into being. [ . .. J. Therefore, to the kind ofconsciousness--and this is characteristic of the philosophicalconsciousness-for which conceptual thinking is the real humanbeing, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the onlyreality, the movement of the categories appears as the real act ofproduction-whicb only, unfortunately, receives a jolt from theoutside--whose product is the world; and-but this is again atautology-this is correct in so far as the concrete totality is atotality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product ofthinking and comprehending; but not in any way a product ofthe concept which thinks and generates itself outside or aboveobservation and conception; a product, rather, of the workingupof observation and conception into concepts. The totality asit appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of athinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way itcan, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical andmental appropriation of this world. The real subject retains itsautonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely aslong as the head's conduct is merely specularive, merely theoretical.Hence, in the theoretical method, toO, the subject, society,must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.""Here, condensed in surprising words, we find a double overturningof perspectives.54 / The Soul at Work

Th" "" .1 ,,+ \ I".First Marx asserts that the concrete is the product of an actiVityof abstraction. That is to say he asserts that whar we conceive asconcrete is nothing bur the activity of thinking the concrete, andtherefore an activity of the mind. At first glance this might appearto be an idealist way of reasoning. But this is not the case, sinceMarx is not talking of the relation between real and rational whenhe talks about .the concrete and the mind. What Marx defines asconcrete is the totality of the real as projection of mental activity.And what Marx calls a thinking mind is not the Kantian pure I, noreven the Hegelian Subject that becomes Spirit. The thinking mindMarx is talking about is that work which produces reality, that is tosay work as projection.At the same time, Matx adds that "the concrete subject" (historicaldata, material that is determined in the form of subject)remains firmly autonomous ourside the mind.The ontological priority of matter is not questioned by Marxhere; he wants to say instead that matter, in its becoming (biological,historical, relational), produces a projective activity, an activity ofthought secreting what we can call a concrete totality, that is to saya form of the world that does not pre-exist thinking productivity.The world is the psychodynamic intersection between all theinfinite projective levels activated by mental activity in its socialand historical determinations.AIthusser developed a theory that took the critique of historicismand the idealist claim for mental reproducibility of reality asits starting point. In this way, AIthusser let us see something alreadyimplicit in Marx's text: that the world is first of all a producedworld, the product of man's past labor as well as of past and presentmental activity.But there is another implication, only mentioned and not fullydeveloped by AIthusser, whose evident traces we nonetheless findmosr dearly in Marx's work, even in the same 1857 Introduction.This second implication concerns the productive character ofmental labor, that is to say the passage from the notion of abstractlabor to that of general intellect.What does "abstract labor" mean for Marx? With this expressionMarx refers to labor simply as producer of exchange value, andtherefore as pure distribution of time materialized in value. Thefact thar activity deployed in time produces objects possessing aconcrete usage is not at all interesting from capital's point of view.Capital is nor interesred in the facr thar the time invested in laborproduces beautiful shoes or pots to cook potatoes. Capital is interestedin producing an accumulation of capiral through theseobjects. Capital is interested in the production of abstract value. Tothis purpose, capital doesn'r need to mobilize specific and concreteabilities to create qualitatively useful objects, but an abstractdistribution of time without quality."Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposesa very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which nosingle one is any longer predominanr. As a rule, the most generalabstractions arise only in the midst of rhe richest possibleconcrete development, where one thing appears as commonto many, to all Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particularfo rm alone. On the other side, this abstraction of labour assuch is not merely the mental producr of a concrete totality oflabours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to afo rm of society in which individuals can with ease transferfrom one labour to another, and where rhe specific kind is amatter of chance for them, hence of indifference.""

LAhor and AlienAtion in the ohilosonrlV of lhfJ 19608 / 59We talk about abstract labor when rhe workers give their time forproducing value in conditions of complete indifference to rhe usefulquality of their product.The abstraction of labor, that is to say the ttansformation ofhuman activities into empty performances of abstract time, is progressively expanding to all possible forms of social activity. Thefinal point of this process is the subsumption of the productivelabor of mental activity itself the sphere of value-production, whichresults in its ultimate reduction and abstraction.This second implication present in Marx's Grundrisse (not onlyin the Introduction, but also in the section known as "Fragment ofmachines") becomes an essential element in the Workerist andCompositionist theories of the 1960s and 1970s. What finds itsgrounding here is the prefiguration of the most advanced tendenciesin the current modes of capitalist production: the subsumption ofmental labor within the productive process and the progressivereduction of mental labor to abstract labor, labor with no usefulquality and no meaning, mental time serving only for the productionof exchange value.General intellect and concrete totality in GrundrisseIn the 1960s, Critical Humanism (gravitating around the figutes ofMarcuse and Sartre) had found great energies in Marx's EarlyWritings. Human original authenticity was both the starting pointand the teleological meaning of revolutionary engagement.Althusser's structuralism is most of all an invitation to readCapital, since the structure of the productive process is considered theplace where a critical comprehension both of the existing world and ofthe revolutionaty process leading to its destruction is to be achieved.Italian Neo-Marxist Workerism inspired by Compositionismshifts attention to the Grundrisse, Marx's work first published inItaly in 1968. Social composition and the formation of revolutionarysubjectivity can be explained neither by the idealisthypostasis of a human narure to be realized through historicalaction nor by the analysis of the implicit contradiction in thestructure of productive relations. Neither the presupposition ofa humanity needing to be redeemed, nor the analysis of capitalare sufficient to understand what happens on the scene of 20thcenturyhistory, on the stage of working class struggles and ofcapital's restructuring.We need to adopt the point of view of labor in its mostadvanced manifestations, it is necessary to assume the standpoint ofthe refosal to work, in order to understand the dynamics both ofproductive transformation and of political revolt. When we dothat, we can finally see that social composition is in constant transformation,altering the productive, technological, economic andpolitical contexts. The motor of this constant transformation is thedynamic of subtraction of lived time from the wage-relation.Compositionist theory positions itself in an anti-Iaborist perspective:the Italian Neo-Marxists gathered around the journalClasse operaia (Working Class) intended to study the constirutionof autonomous collective activity, starting from the subtraction oflived time from labor, the refusal to work and the project of itsextinction.From the first page of Capital, Marx states that it is necessaryto differentiate between generic activity, where humans relate tonature and the society of other humans, and a specific form ofwage-earning labor, that is to say the lending of abstract time inexchange for a wage.

The refusal of work does not mean the erasure of activity,the valorization of human activities which have escapedlabor's domination.In Capital, Marx defines "abstract labor" in the following terms:"If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only oneproperty remaills, that of being products of labour. But eventhe product of labour has already been transformed in ourkrlOlled1;e.Abstraction, this centripetal and at the same time uni­f" traversing the modern period, reaches its perfection infying orce. . .al The labor of physical transformanon of matter hasthe digit era.. .become so abstract that it is now useless: machmes can replace itI Icomp ete y. At the same time, the subsumption of mental labor has.begun, an d with it the reduction of mental labor itself to anabstracted activity.hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we abstractalso from the material constituents and forms which make ita use-value. The useful character of the kinds of labourembodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearanceof the different concrete forms oflabour. They canno longer be distinguished, but are altogether reduced to theSame kind of Jabour, human Jabour in the abstract.""As an effect of capitalistic development, industrial labor loses anyrelation to the concrete character of activity, becoming purely rentedout time, objectified in products whose concrete and useful quality"Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scatteredamong the individual living workers at numerous points of themechanical system; subsumed under the total process of themachinety itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unityexists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active)machinety, which confronts his individual, inSignificant doingsas a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labour confrontsliving labour within the labour process irself as the powerwhich rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of livinglabour, is the form of capital."24does not have any interest other than that of enabling the exchangeand the accumulation of plus-value."Equality in the fuU sense between different kinds of JabourThe worker appears overwhelmed, reduced to a passive appendageproducing empty time, to a lifeless carcass. But then, immediately,the vision changes:can be arrived at only if we abstract from their reaJ inequality,if we reduce them to the characteristic they have incommon, that of being the expenditure of human Jabourpower,of human labour in the abstract.))23The industrial worker (and more generally, as a tendency, the entirecycle of social labor) is the bearer of a purely abstract and repetitive"The increase of the productive force of labour and the greatestpossible negation of necessary labour is the necessary tendencyof capital, as we have seen. The transformation of the means oflabour into machinery is the realization of this tendency. Inmachinery, objectified labour materially confronts liVing labouras a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latterunder itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real60 I The Soul at WorkLabor and A!ienation in the philosophy of the 19608 /61

production process itself; the relation of capital as value whichappropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing asmachinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the USevalue of capital to the use value of labour capacity; further, thevalue objectified in machinery appeats as a presupposition"Capital here-quite unintentionally-teduces human labout,expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will rednd tothe benefit of emancipated labour, and IS the condltlon of. .its emanCIpatlOn. " 26against which the value-creating power of the individual labourcapacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude."25Thanks to the accumulation of science and the general forces ofOcial intellect, Marx repeats, labor becomes superfluous. Capital,Its purest form, tends to eliminate human labor in its immediate,matenal form as much as possible, in order to replace it with the'The time of immediate labor becomes quantitatively irrelevant, ifd ro an elaborate automated system. The reduction ofcompareY labor time and therefore the progressive elimination ofnecessarworkers, is seen by Potere operaio as a jolly perspective: in Compo­.. I·St discourse it translates into trusting the auto-assertiveSltlOncapacities of rhe intellect against its capitalistic use.technological use of science. The development of this trend virtualltakes the productive global system out of the paradigmatic orbit;the modern capitalist system. A new paradigmatic system needs tobe found, if we Want to understand and, more importantly, liberatethe new constellation of human activity, technologies, interfacesand social interactions. But a paradigmatic shift has a differenttiming from that of the technological and productive potentialitiesof general intellect. It gets tangled in the slow time of culture, socialhabits, constituted identities, power relations and the dominanteconomic order. Capitalism, as a cultural and epistemic, as well aseconomic and social, system, semiotizes the machinic potentialitiesof the post-industrial system according to reductive paradigmatichnes. The heritage of the modern period, with all its industrialclanking as well as with the clanking of its mental habits and ofits aggressive and competitive imaginary, Weighs on the developmentof new perspectives as an insurmountable obstacle preventing''As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the greatwell-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to beits measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be themeasure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceasedto be the condition for the development of general wealth, justas the non-labour of the jew, for the development of the generalpowers of the human head. With that, production based onexchange value breaks down, and the direct, material productionprocess is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.The free development of individualities, and hence not thereduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour,but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour ofsociety to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic,scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time setfree, and with the means created, for all of them.""the deployment of a redistribution of wage-earning labor andits extension.The alliance between technological power and general socialknowledge meets the resistant power of the capitalist model, which62 I The Soul at WorkLabor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 19608 / 63

dominates the social, cnltural and psychological expectations of aproletarianized humanity.The economy, like a general semiotic cage, forbids the devel_opment of the potential still existing in the material andintellectual structure of technology. Let's return to Marx:"Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that itpresses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it positslabour time, on the other side, as sole measure and sourceof wealth. Hence it diminishes labour rime in the necessaryfo rm so as to increase it in the superfluous fo rm; henceposits the superfluous in growing measure as a conditionquestionof life or death-for the necessary. On the oneside, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and ofnature, as of social combination and of social intercourse,in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively)of the labour time employed on ir. On the otherside, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod forthe giant social forces thereby created, and to confine themwithin the limits required to maintain the already createdvalue as value."2SThese pages-read and valorized by the Compositionist theorists inthe same years that the Grundrisse began to be known in ltalydefinewith incredible lucidity the direction taken by thedevelopment of 20th-centuty social, political and economical histoty.The concept of abstract labor is the best possible introductionto an understanding of the digitalization of the productive processfirst made possible and finally generalized by the diffusion ofmicroelectronics.When Marx speaks of capital as a moving contradiction, heprefigures the astonishing history of the 20th century, when capitalitself destroyed the potentialities it had created within thetechnical domain because of the instinct to conserve its social andeconomic model. When he foretells the development of creative,artistic and scientific faculties, Marx anticipates the intellectualizationof labor nowadays characteristic of the post-fordist era.At a certain point in the development of the application ofintelligence to production, the capitalist model becomes a paradigmaticcage, constraining intelligence in the form of wages,discipline and dependence.The concept of paradigm was not available to Marx, whofound a surrogate for it with often ambiguous concepts of Hegelianderivation. The idea of a dialectical overcoming to be realizedthrough negation, or the overturning and liberation of a hiddennucleus, is also derivation of the Hegelian conceptual system.After the experience of the twentieth century, we understand verywell that modern history does not proceed towards a positive exitalong a dialectical path, and that there is no dialectical overcoming onthe horizon. Capital seems rather to be a pathogenic mechanism, asort of "double bind." Gregory Bateson" uses the concept of a doublebind in order to understand a paradoxical form of communication,where the relational context is contradicted by the meaning of communication.Double binds are contradictory injunctions: for instancethose orders, solicitations or requests where the enunciating subjectasks the message addressee one thing with words and another, contradictoryone, with gestures, affection and intonation. A double bindderives from juxtaposing two semiotic codes in a relational context orfrom the superposition of two different interpretive codes in the developmentof a unique process. On the historical level we can assert that

capital semiotizes the technological process according to a code (thatof economic valorization) rhat is inadequate to its material and socialmeaning. The social content of capitalist production contradicts itsown semiotic framework. Therefore it produces a system of misunderstandings,contradictory injunctions and perverse juxtapositions.Let's think of the so-called problem of unemployment, fo rinstance. In realiry, technological development tends to make manuallabor useless and its evaluation in terms of wages impossible. Butsince rhe relational context where rhis message and rhis process areinserted is that of capitalism, which is founded on wage-earningregulations and labor's centraliry, a double bind starts functioning.The concept of a double bind has nothing to do with dialectics.Double binds are resolved only when the relational context isredefined, starting from the level of enunciation.No total overturning is possible in the face of the capitalistdouble bind, since as a matter of fact there is no positive or negativetotaliry in the social history of capitalism.Hans-Jiirgen Krahl's theory: science, work and techniqueHans-Jiirgen Krahl died in a car accident one night in 1970.Though not even thirry, he was one of the most influential thinkersof the anti-authoritarian German movement. The movement hadexploded in the streets since 1967, when a young student aged 26,Behno Onesorg, was killed by the police during an anti-imperialistrally against the Persian Shah. After that other students rapidlyjOined the movement, fighting for the democratization of Germansociery, protesting against the Vietnam War and denouncing, withastonishing acrions of revolt, the mediatic overloading operated bythe newspapers belonging to the Springer group.From its origins, rhe German movement-rhen mainly organizedalong rhe lines of rhe SDS (Sozialisticher Deutscher Studentbund, GermallSocialisr Student League)-was attracted by two differenrhyporheses: rhe "organizational" and the "spontaneous." In the followingyears rhe first would be grouped in the Rote Zellen [RedCells] of Marxist-Leninisr inspiration, the second in the multiformexperiences of the yourh movements, rhe Jugendzentren and theAutonomen collectives.In rhe two years period before his death, Hans-Jurgen Krahl elaboratedthe general lines of a post-Leninist revolutionary rheory. In hisbook Konstitution und Klassenkampf" (Constitution and Class Struggle)he questions rhe possibility of reducing rhe new social composition ofintellectual labor to rhe political and organizational categories of rhetraditional workers' movements. His meditations start from theFrankfurt School rheories, specifically Adornds, developing rhem wirhrespect to rhe praxis of industrial alienated labor and anti-aurhoritarianstruggles. Krahl is rethinking rhe question of rhe relation betweensocial composition and avant-garde political organization. Leninanswered rhe question in the subjectivist and voluntaristic way thatwas to dominate the revolutionary landscape of the century, but inthe 1960s the movements had started looking for other solurions."The traditional theories of class consciousness, especially theones derived from Lenin. tend to separate class consciousnessfrom its economic elements. They neglect the meta-economic,constitutive role played by productive subjectivity in thecreation of wealth and civilization:'3!The analytical separation between the levels of the economy and ofconsciousness had a legitimate grounding in a time when productive

labor was structurally separated from intellectual labor, but itto lose its meaning once intellectual work has joined the processgeneral production in a constiturive way.Production is not to be considered a merely economicruled solely by the law of supply and demand; extra-economictors have their role in that process and they are all the morewhen the labor cyde is intellectualized. Social culture, ul1req,enimaginations, expecrations and disillusions, hatred and Wl1eUne.'all modifY the rhythm and the fluidity of the productive pre)ce,,,;Emotional, ideological, and linguistic domains conditionproductivity. This becomes dearer the more those same enlOt:iotlal,linguistic, and projective energies are involved in the processvalue production.Hans Jurgen Kralll succeeds in anticipating the i' , on()vativequality of the productive transformations characteristic of the lastdecades, the period that marks the exit from the industrial model.He anticipates this conceptually, following the abstract categoriesof critical Marxism."Working time remains the measure of value even when it nolonger includes the qualitative extension of production. Scienceand technology make possible the maximization of our laborcapacity, transforming it into a social combination that, in theCourse of the capitalist development of machinety, increasinglybecomes the main productive force."32In his "Theses on the General Relation Between the ScientificIntelligentSia and Proletarian Class Consciousness," published in1969, in the journal Sozialistische Korrespondenz-Injo, Kralllfocuses on the essential core of the movement's political problems.l -r" rh ,o ology is the central issue, understood as the determined formrelation between science and labor processes.((The technological translation of science into a system ofmechanisms constituring a fixed capital-which has beenSystematically implemented since the end of the nineteenthcentury-and the tendency towards automation have changedwhat Marx called the teal subsumption oflabor under capital . Thereal subsumption is different from a purely fotmal one because itmodifies qualitatively even the technological structure of theimmediate labor process. This happens through the systematicapplication of the social forces of production and the separationbetween labor and science. The labor process then, understood asthe organic exchange between man and nature. is socialized initsel£ One of the most remarkable traits of the teal subsurnptionof labor by capital is, as Marx said, 'the conscious applicationof science, which is a genetal product of social development, tothe immediate process of production.' Social combinationmakes production increasingly scientific, thereby constituting itas a totality, as a 'total' worker, but at the same time reducing theworking ability of the single individual to a simple moment:'"These analytical considetations necessarily led the young theoreticianto postulate the decisive issue capable of tadically questioning theorganizational modalities and the political projects of the twentiethcentury workers' movement: the anti-authoritarian groups in the1960s made them uncertain, but were not able to get rid of them."The absence of a reflection about the theoretical constructionof class consciousness as a non-empirical category [ . . . JI Rhm Rnrl AIi8n)tion in the Dhilosoohv of the 19608 I 69

Labor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 1960s J 71had the consequence, within the socialist movement, ofreducing the concept of class consciousness to its Leninistmeaning, which is inadequate to the metropolis."34Leninism, as a model of organization and way of understanding thetelation between social consciousness and the general labot processis incapable of reading the metropolitan condition.Leninism is based on the sepatation between the labor processand higher-level cognitive activities (that is to say consciousness).This separation is founded on proto-industtial wotk, since theworkers have knowledge of their own abilities, but no awateness ofthe cognitive system structuring society. The roots of this separationbecome more and more fragile when the mass wotkets, forcedinto an increasingly patceled and alienating wotk activity, developtheir sociality in a dimension that is immediately subversive andanti -capitalistic.Finally this sepatation has no furthet grounding when wediscuss the mental fotms of social labor, since when each intellectualizedoperator is the vehicle of a specific form of knowledge, slheperceives-although in a fragmented, confused and tormentedmanner-the social system of knowledge underlying the entiteproductive cycle.Digital PanlogismIn those same years, Marcuse was also addressing the issue of therelation between forms of thought and forms of social production.The productive finalization of technology ends up subjugatingthe thinking process from the standpoint of its own epistemologicalstructures."The feature of operationalism-to make the concept synonymOUSwith the corresponding set of operations-recurs in thelinguistic tendency 'to consider the names of rhings as beingindicative at the same time of their manner of functioning,and the names of properties and processes as symbolical ofthe apparatus used to detect or produce them' [4] This is technologicalreasoning, which tends "to identify things and theirfunctions)) (5) ."35Beginning with the idealistic frame pictured in works like Reason andRevolution and Hegels Ontology, which proposed a totmented vetsionof Hegelian thought focused on negativity, processuality andseparation, Marcuse writes in his One Dimensional Man:"The totalitarian universe of technological rationality is thelatest transmutation of the idea of Reason."36In Eros and CiviliZ4tion, a book published in Italy in 1967, Marcusedevelops a discourse on the Iiberatoty potentialities represented bytechnology, while in One Dimensional Man he denounces the reductionof these same potentialities by functionalism. Marcuse opposedthe dialectics of self-realizing reason to functionalist reductions. Hisposition remains an idealistic one, and there is no concrete referenceto social recomposition processes in his theory. He understands,nonetheless, an essential point of the late capitalist process: he seesthe tendency towards a total integration of Logos and productionthrough technology. At the horizon of the tendency described byMarcuse we find the digitalization of the world: digitalization as aparadoxical realization of Hegelian Panlogism in a non-dialectical,disempowered and pacified vetsion:

'"The incessant dynamic of technical progress has become permeatedwith political content, and the Logos of technics has beenmade into the Logos of continued servitude. The liberating forceof technology-the instrumentalization of things-turns intoa fetter of liberation; the instrumentalizatlon of man."37The use of algorithms in the productive processes, and theirmission through logical devices, isolates an operational kindrationality. But in this way the world is subsumed (o'{erturnir,gHegel) in a digital and logical reduction, and therefore trapped foreverin the capitalistic form embodied as technical Reason."Technology has become the great vehicle of reijication-reificationin its most mature and effective form."38We can say that the essential question for Hegelian theory is thereduction of reality to Logos and therefore the establishment ofthe Same, the abolition of every difference and the foundation ofIdentity. Throughout modern history we have witnessed a series ofattempts to restore Identity either through violence or homologation,whether by democratic or totalitarian regimes. Romanticismtries to retrace the path leading to an origin where the premise ofidentity can be rediscovered. Twentieth-centuty totalitarianismstems from this obsession. The ethnic totalitarianism of Fasciststates pretended to realize the Same on the basis of the myth of commonroots, while the totalitarian Communist state pretended torealize the Same through the realization of the historical ideal of asociety without differences.But the reality of differences could not be vanquished. Even ifreduced and oppressed they are always reborn in violent and resentfulr. al life people are dominated on the contraty by inessen-=. .. . al claims by nationalisms, regiOnalIsms an racIsms.and egotiStiC.Identity, t ,.d ·hough realizes itself on another level, that 0 Imor-fh h b·This level subsumes evety space of the uman a Itat,h hisrorical perception of time with a digital one. Theeplacmg t e .productlon 0a succeSSIon.f the Same is determined then as a program generatingd... of states that exclude the inessential by efinlng It.From this point of view, compnterized SOCIety can be nn erdas Panlogism realized.stoO.Cd• f . Il·Absolute Knowledge is materialized in the universe 0 Illte 1-gent mac meso 11h· "Totality is not History, but the virtual assemblagef he interconnections preprogrammed and predetermined by theo se of intelligent machines. Hegelian logic has thns beenumver . . .made true by computers, since today nothing is true If It IS not.regtstered by the universe of media machines. The tOtalIty generatedby computers has replaced Hegel's totality.. .We could even say that the global Net founds a TotalIty withoutTotalization.The matrix is replacing the event. This is the final point of modernRationalisierung.To be recognized in the networked universe one must becomecompatible with the generative logic of the matrix. What does notbelong to a codified domain is not socially recognizable or rele-I h h · t still existS in the domain of irrelevance, ofvant, a t aug 1dd. .d to VIOresiduality.It then reacts with rage an espalr, In or erlently reassert its existence.When Histoty becomes the development of Absolute ComputerizedKnowledge difference is not vanqUished, or resolved: Itbecomes residual, ineffectual, unrecognizable..

2Digital technologies open a completely new perspective for labor.First of all they transform the relation between conceiving and executing,and therefore the relation between the intellectual contents oflabor and its manual execution. Manual labor is generally executed byThe Soul at Workautomatically programmed machinery, while innovative labor, theone that effectively produces value, is mental labor. The materials tobe transformed are simulated by digital sequences. Productive laborDigital labor and abstractionToday, what does it mean to work? As a general tendency, work isperformed according to the same physical patterns: we all sit infront of a screen and move our fingers across a keyboard. We type.On the one hand, labor has become much more uniform froma physical and ergonomic point of view, but on the other it isbecoming much more differentiated and specialized with respect to'the contents that it develops. Architects, travel agents, softwaredevelopers and attorneys share the same physical gestures, butthey could never exchange jobs since each and every one of themdevelops a specific and local ability which cannot be transmitted tothose who do not share the same curricular preparation and are notfamiliar with the same complex cognitive contents.When labor had a substantially interchangeable and depersonalizedcharacter it was perceived as something fo reign. It wasmechanically imposed by a hierarchy, and represented anassigned task that was performed only in exchange for wages.The definition of dependent work and wage-earning was adequatefor this kind of social activity, which consisted in the selling ofone's time.(labor producing value) consists in enacting simulations later transferredto actual matter by computerized machines.The content of labor becomes mental, while at the same timethe limits of productive labor become uncertain. The notion ofproductiviry itself becomes undefined: the relation between timeand quantity of produced value is difficult to determine, since fora cognitive worker every hour is not the same from the standpointof produced value.The notion of abstraction and of abstract labor needs to beredefined. What does "abstract labor" mean in Marx's language? Itmeans the distribution of value-producing time regardless of itsquality, with no relation to the specific and concrete utility that theproduced objects might have. Industrial labor was generallyabstract since its specific quality and concrete utility was completelyirrelevant compared to its function of economic valorization. Canwe say that this abstract reduction is still active in the era of infoproduction?In a certain sense, yes, we can, and we can also say thatthis tendency is pushed to its extremes, since labor has lost anyresidual materiality and concreteness, and the productive activityonly exerts its powers on what is left: symbolic abstractions, bytesand digits, the different information elaborated by productiveactivity. We can say that the digitalization of the labor process hasmade any labor the same from an ergonomic and physical point of

view since we all do the same thing: we sit in front of a screen andwe type on a keyboard. Our activity is later transformed by a con_catenation of machines into an architectural project, a televisionscript, a surgical operation, the moving of forty metal boxes or arestaurants' provisioning.As we have already said, from a physical standpoint, there is nodifference between the labor performance of a travel agent, a technicianworking for an oil company or a writer of detective stories.But we can also say the opposite. Labat has become part of amental process, an elaboration of signs rich with knowledge. It hasbecome much more specific, much more specialized: attorneys andarchitects, computer technicians and mall vendors all sit in front ofthe same screen and type on the same keyboards: still, they couldnever trade places. The content of their elaborating activities iscompletely different and cannot be easily transmitted.On the other hand, also from a physical point of view, chemical,metal and mechanical workers do completely different jobs,but it takes only a few days for a metal or mechanical worker toacquire rhe operative knowledge necessaty to do the job of a workerin the chemical industry and vice versa. The more industriallabor is simplified, the more it becomes interchangeable.Human terminals perform the same physical gestures in frontof computers and they all connect to the universal machine ofelaboration and communication: yet the more their jobs are physicallysimplified, the less interchangeable their knowledge, abilitiesand performance. Digital labor manipulates absolute abstract signs,but its recombining function is more specific the more personalizedit gets, therefore ever less interchangeable. Consequently, high techworkers tend to consider labor as the most essential part in theirlives, the most specific and personalized.This is exactly the opposite of what happened with the industrialworker, for whom eight hours of wage labor were a sort oftemporaty death from which slhe could wal

78 1 The Soul at Worktheir labor to the creation implied by the word enterprise: on thecontrary, they tend to consider their labor, even if formally depen_dent, to be an enterprise where they can spend the best part of theirenergy, independently from the economic and juridical conditionin which it expresses itself.In order to understand this mutation in the perception of thenotion of enterprise, we need to consider a decisive factor: whileindustrial workers invested mechanical energies in their wageearningservices according to a depersonalized model of repetition,high tech workers invest their specific competences, their creative,innovative and communicative energies in the labor process; thatis, the best part of their intellectual capacities. As a consequence,enterprise (independently from the juridical relation between propertyand labor) tends to become the center towards which desire isfocused, the object of an investment that is not only economicalbut also psychological. Only if we consider this can we understandwhy in the last two decades disaffection and absenteeism havebecome a marginal phenomenon, while they had been the centralelement in social relations during the late-industrial period.In the 1980s (and even more, as we know, in the 1990s) theaverage labor time increased impressively. In the year 1996, theaverage worker invested in it 148 hours more than their colleaguesdid in 1973. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics thepercentage of individuals working more than 49 hours per weekgrew from 13% in 1976 to 19% in 1998. As for managers, it grewfrom 40% to 45%. The prevision that the development of computerizedtechnologies, favoring automation, would determine areduction of social labor time proved both true and false, but in theflnal analysis we have to consider it false. It is true indeed thatnecessary labor time decreases in the sphere of industrial production,and therefore it is true that a growing number of industrial jobs are.I. ted replaced by machines or transferred to areas of the worlde trntna Jwhere labor costs nothing and is not protected by unions. But it isalso true that the time apparendy freed by technology is in facttransro rmed into cyber time, a time of mental processing absorbedinto the infinite production processes of cyberspace.How is it possible to explain the workers' conversion fromCdisaffection to acceptance? Certainly, one of the reasons is thepolitical defeat suffered by the working class after the end of the1970s because of the technological restructuration, the consequentunemployment and the violent repression inflicted on the politicalavant-garde. But this is not enough.In order to understand the psycho-social change of attitudetowards labor, it is necessary to consider a decisive cultural transformation linked to the shift of the social core from the domain ofmanual labor to that of cognitive labor.What is happening in the domain of cognitive labor? Why doesthis new kind of worker value labor as the most interesting part ofhis or her life and therefore no longer opposes the prolongation ofthe working day but is actually ready to lengthen it out of personalchoice and will?To answer this question we need to consider several factors, someof which are difficult to analyze in this context. For instance in thelast decades urban and social communities progressively lost theirinterest, as they were reduced to containers empty of humanity andjoy in the relations they foster. Sexuality and conviviality have beentransformed into standardized mechanisms, homologated and commodified:an anxious need for identity progressively replaced thesingular pleasures of the body. Books like Mike Davis' City of Quartzand Ecology of Fear show that the quality of existence has affectively

Tile Soul at Work / 81and psychologically deteriorated, due to the rarefaction of COlnty"1niryties and the sterilizing obsession with securiry.It seems that ever less pleasure and reassuranCe can be foundhuman relations, in everyday life, in affectiviry and cuuunU illC:;('tion. A consequence of this loss of eros in everyday life isinvestment of desire in one's work, understood as the onlyproviding narcissist reinforcement to individuals used to perceivi'n

of relation to the world, time, and the body. The more timespend acquiring means for consumption, the less time we haveenjoy the world available to us. The more we invest our ne.rvo,us ·'energies in the acquisition of purchasing power, the less weinvest them in enjoying ourselves. It is around this issue-com_pletely ignored by economic discourse-that the questionhappiness and unhappiness in hyper-capitalistic societies is playedout today. In order to have more economic power (more money,more credit) it is necessary to devote more and more time tosocially homologated labor. This means though that it becomesnecessary to reduce rhe rime for joy and experience, in a word, forlife. Wealth understood as enjoymenr decreases proportionally tothe growth of wealth understood as economic accumulation, forthe simple reason that in rhe latter framework menral time is destinedto accumulation rather rhan enjoyment.On the other side, wealth understood as economic accumulationincreases in proportion with the reduction of the dispersive pleasure,causing the social nervous system to suffer contraction andstress, without which rhere cannot be any accumulation.But the two perspectives produce the same effect: the expansionof the economic domain coincides with a reduction of the eroticsphere. When things, bodies and signs become a part of thesemiotic model of rhe economy, wealth can only be experienced ina mediated, reflected and postponed way. As in an infinite play ofmirrors, what is really experienced is the production of scarcity andneed, compensated by a fast, guilty and neurotic consumptionbecause we can't wasre time; we need to get back to work. Thereforewealth is no longer the ability to enjoy things, bodies and signsin time, but the accelerating and expansive production of their loss,transformed in exchange value and anxiety.NoW we can finally answer the question: how did it happenthat work regained a cenrral place in social affectivity and why didsociety develop a new affection for work?One reason is well-known: in a situation of competition workersare obliged to accept this primordial blackmail: work as much aspossible or die. But there is another answer we ca give, concerningthe impoverishmenr of everyday life and the relatIon to others, theloss of eroticism in the communicative experience.The reasons behind the new love of working are to be foundnot only in a material impoverishment derived from the collapse ofsocial warranties, but also in the impoverishment of existence andcommunication. We renew our affection for wotk because economiesurvival becomes more difficult and daily life becomeslonely and tedious: metropolitan life becomes so sad that we mightas well sell it for money.Labor, communication, communityThe word "enterprise" that, in the industrial phase of capitalism,merely meanr a capitalist organization with economical finalities,like the developmenr of human labor and the accumulation ofvalue, now means something infinitely more complex. Regainingsomething of its original humanistic meaning, the word enterpriserefers to the responsible human initiative of transforming theworld, nature and ones very relation with others.Of course, the enterprise develops within the frame of thecapitalist economy and therefore its limits are the same as thosechatacterizing essential capitalist forms: exploitation, productionof scarcity, violent imposition, and rules founded on force. Butthere is an ambiguity that needs to be understood: enterprise is82 ; The Soul at Worl

subdued to capitalist rule, the two are not at all the same thing.desperate attempt to find freedom, humanity and happinessthe accumulation of value reigns rests on this potential ditter,enc:e.

velocity in the relation between states and militaty blocs tnroUI;!1out.the modern period. But the velocity of class struggle, the warbetween working class and capital, was even more decisive. Digitaltechnology and the financial character of the world economy haveaccelerated the pace of capital transfers, of changes in the organiza_tion of work and the creation and dismantling of productivecenters all around the world. This acceletation obstructs the for_mation of communities in the places where capital starts theproductive process.While industrial labor did not imply communication and didnot attract desiring energies, the opposite can be said for cognitivelabor. Info-workers can sometimes be described as craftsmen, sincethey invest their knowledge and creativity in the process of ptoducingnetworks. Their energy is displaced from one point of theproductive network to rhe other: capturing fragments of informationin order to recombine them within a constantly changinggeneral frame.The investment of desire, which for the craftsman deeplyconnected to its local community and its needs used to have areassuring character, for me info-worker develops along very differentlines, producing anxiety, incertitude and constant change. Flexibilityis the necessity to displace, move, and constantly change perspec"tives. This is the double-sided fulcrum of desire and productivityfor the info-worker. Experience, knowledge and flux are at thesame time the constitutive aspects of existence and the context ofactive labor.Cognitive labor is essentially a labor of communication, thatis to say communication put to work. Ftom a certain point ofview, this could be seen as an entichment of experience. But it isalso (and this is generally the rule) an impoverishment, since'COJiIlnlUJlicatlon loses its character of gratuitous, pleasurable andcontact, becoming an economic necessity, a joyless fiction.Moreover, not all forms of work that could somehow bedefined as mental activities are linked to communication, inventionand creation. A characteristic aspect of info-labor is the factthat it cannot be reduced to any category, not even to deterritorializationor to autonomy or creativiry. The people who sit at theirterminals in front of a screen, repeating every day the same operationa thousand times, relate to their labor in a way similar toindustrial workers. What we need to understand, though, is thenew element, the fact that creative labor in the network circle isinfinitely flexible, it can be assembled and disassembled, and that itis precisely in this dismantling identification that we can find bothits desire and its anxiety. Within mental labor as a whole we needdistinguish properly cognitive labot, where intellectual energies areengaged in a constant creative deterritorialization, and mentallabor of a purely applicative kind, which is still prevalent quantitatively.Even within the mental labor cycle, we can distinguish brainworkers from chain workers. But I'll focus on the most innovativeand specific forms, since they represent the trend that is transforming the whole of social production.Cognitive labor in me networkIn order to understand the transformation that social perception oflabor underwent during the past few decades and how it determinedthe workers' condition of cultutal and psychologicaldependence, we need to analyze both the investments of desirewithin rhe domain of info production and the formal aspects oflabor relations.86 / The Soul at WorkThe SOUl at Work J 87

The digital transformation started two diffetent butprocesses. The first is the capture of work inside the netw()(k.is to say the coordination of different labot fragments in aflow of information and production made possible by digitalstructures. The second is the dissemination of the labotinto a multitude of productive islands formally autonomous,actually coordinated and ultimately dependent. As we havecognitive labot manifests itself as info labor, that is to say asinfinite recombination of a myriad information, availablea digital support. When cooperation means transferring, elabot'atand decoding digitalized information, it is evident that theworks as its natural frame.The function of command is no longer a hierarchicaltion, localized in the factory, but a transversal,function, permeating every fragment of labor time.The non-hierarchical character of networkbecomes dominant in the entire cycle of social labor. Thistributes to the representation of info-labor as an in,je)Jer,deJform of work. But this independence, as we have seen, is in factideological fiction, covering a new and growing form ofdency, although no longer in the previous formal hi,,,ar'chiciwhose command over the productive action was direct andtary. This new dependency is increasingly apparentautomatic fluidity of the network: we have a strict i' , nt,,,dep,enrlen.oof subjective fragments, all distinct but objectively de.perldenfrom a fluid process, from a chain of automatisms both extetl1aand internal to the labor process which regulate every g"'tUI'e;every productive parcel.Both simple executing workers and entrepreneurial man" gersshare the vivid perception that they depend on a constantbe interrupted and from which they cannot step backthe price of being marginalized. Control over the laboris no longer guaranteed by the hierarchy of bigger andbosses typical of the Taylorist factory, but it is incorporatedflux. Cellular phones are probably the technological devicesillustrate this kind of netwotk dependency. The cellularis left on by the great majority of info-workers even whenare not working. It has a major function in the organizationas self-enterprise that is formally autonomous but substandependent.The digital network is the sphere where theand temporal globalization of labor is made possible.labor is the endless recombination of a myriad of fragthatproduce, elaborate, distribute and decode signs andnformati,on:al units of all sorts. Labor is the cellular activity wherenetwork activates an endless recombination. Cellular phonesthe instruments making this recombination possible. EveryinhJ-,,'orllCer has the capacity to elaborate a specific semiotic segthatmust meet and match innumerable other semioticfragm.ents in order to compose the frame of a combinatory entitythat is info-commodity, Semiocapital.But for this combination to become possible, a single, infinitelyflexible (and constantly reactive to the calls of Semiocapital) productivesegment is not enough: a device is needed, capable ofthe single segments, constantly coordinating andlocalizing in real time the fragments of info production. Cellularphones, the most important article of consumption of the lastdecade, provide this very function at a mass level. Industrial workershad to spend eight hours daily in a specific place if they wanted toreceive their wage in exchange for productive gestures performedagain and again in a specific territory.88 / The Soul at WorkThe Soul at Work I 89

The mobility of the product was made possible by thebly line while workers had to remain motionless in spaceInfo-workers, instead, constantly move all along thebreadth and depth of cyberspace. They move to findelaborate experience, or simply to follow the paths oftence. But at every moment and place they are reachablebe called back to perform a productive function that willserted into the global cycle of production. In a certaincellular phones realize the dream of capital: that of ab:>orbin.!t epossible atom of time at the exact moment the productiveneeds it. In this way, workers offer their entire day to cat,itaHare paid only for the moments when their time is madeInfo-producers can be seen as neuro-workers. They preparenervous system as an active receiving terminal for as muchpossible. The entire lived day becomes subject to a semiotiction which becomes directly productive only when necessaty.But what emotional, psychological, and existential pricethe constant stress of our permanent cognitiveimply?The factory of unhappinessHappiness is not a matter of science, but of ideology. This isit should be addressed.Even if in the public discourse it is not possible toscientifically based and coherent discourse on happiness, weflows of communication built on the idea of happiness. Wethe circulation of fragmentaty and imaginary solicitationsare rarely justified or coherent, yet remain extremely effective.the 1990s, while the productive process was becoming lmmamlrhetoric was all focused on happiness: to be happy is'ble but almost mandatory. In order to reach thispOSS! ).have to follow certain rules and modes of behaViOr.the totalitarian and the democratic political discoursehappiness on the horizon of collective action. Totaliimposedmandatory behavior procedures and asked of itsto accept them enthusiastically, lest they be marginalizeders"cul:ea: slhe who's unhappy is a bad patriot and a badslhe is a saboteur, and so on and SO forth.lemocracy does not expect an enthusiastic consent. On thein a mature vision we conceive democracy as an endlessof a possible modus vivendi allowing individuals to identifYpersonal and public behaviors capable of capturing somehappiness.:a"italisrn is often (and with no reason) presented as thecompanion of democracy (while we know that insteadprospers in the shadow of far from democratic regimes),fact it is not tolerant at all, since it expects enthusiastic parina universal competition where it is impossible to winfully and convincingly deploying all of our energies.Totalitari'Lll regimes, like Nazism, Fascism and the authoritarianstates, denied freedom to their people in the name of aand homologated happiness, thereby producing ansadness.even the liberal economy, with the cult of profit and success'pre:senlted in a caricatured but persuasive manner in advertisingended up producing an unhappiness caused by constantl1lp" tition, defeat and guilt.In the 1990s the New Economy's ideology asserted that freeplay creates a maximum of happiness for humanity in90 I The Soul at WorkThe Soui at V\}ork 191

''genera!. In fact, one of New Econo my's effectsofwasideologicaltheand advertising messages, and theof advertising into a sort of paradigm ofpoliticaleconOmicaction.It is well known that the discourse oftheadvertisingcreation ofisimaginary models of happiness thatinvited to replicate. Advertising is a systematicillusions, and thereforePf

First of all, digital technology spread very quick! y,forming in many ways the modalities of productive JatlOt .'concatenations.Secondly, the hierarchical structure of the factory modelThe aspiration to self-realization became fundamentalreconstruction of a functioning social model perfectlydigital productive modalities. Social history can be seenuninterrupted story of the refusal of work and the re,:orLStrU(of the ptoductive system, where reciprocal tesistance andcoexist. In industrial societies capital and the workingcontradictory interests, but they also had a common intere.st.tradiction came from the fact that capital aimed to take fromlabor the greatest possible amount of labor time and value ,the workers' interest was instead that o f avoiding eXlploitatsaving rheir physical and intellectual energies for th,'m:sehres. Atsame time though, workers and capital both had anreducing necessary labor time, introducing productivetisms, machines and technologies. This is whar actuallyThe workers' struggle for power pushed capiral to useinstead of workets, exactly as Karl Marx had anticipatedGrundrisse. The introduction of microelectronic te

96 / The Soul at Workworkers felt exptopriated of their intellectuali ty, inclividu:uicreativity. In high tech production cognitive faculties are into work, and personal peculiarities seem to be valorized.The intellectualization of labor, a major effect of theand organizational transformation of the productive proc"ss',last two decades of the twentieth-centuty, opens cOlmplet,1 1perspecrives for self-realization. But it also opens a field ofnew energies to the valorization of capital. The workers'for industrial labor, based on a critique of hierarchy andtook energies away from capital, towards the end of thedesires were located outside capital, attracting forcesdistancing themselves from its domination. The exacthappened in the new info-productive reality of the newdesire called new energies towards the enterprise and seIt-nealizathrough work. No desire, no vitality seems to exist anymorethe economic enterprise, outside productive labor andCapital was able to renew its psychic, ideological andenergy, specifically thanks to the absorption of creativity, desire,individualistic, libertarian drives for self-realization.Prozac-economyIn the 1990s, the decade of the alliance between cognitivea reconstituting capital, financial flows generated by net tra1me;tladvertising cycle, venture capiral and retirement funds moved tocycle of virtual production, Cognitive labor could thereforeenterprise, entering the formation circuits of the Techno-Spheremedia-scape. Armies of creative engineers, of libertarian pf()gr.,mmC)and artists became the proletarians of intelligence, peopleowned nothing but their cognitive labor force and who couldon an economic and creative basis. In those years aal ' .batt e toO ,I k place between a diffuse, libertarian, equ Itanan"eJ',oC"V' 'ntelligence and the new economys oligopolies.The model of the network, the principle of product,inl enJinLgdiffuson of the dot. com enterprise also represented a redisofsocial revenue, conquering revenue for research andand open source took roots in society thanks to thebetween recombining capital and cognitive labor.aUiance of the 1990s happened under the sign of a neoideologythat glorified the market, describing it as a spacef erfect self-regulation. Perfect self-regulation, of course,o P l 'f.>.irytale since real economic play involves power re at1on,the mafia, theft and lies. Thus monopolies came to doml­. fo rmation technologies, the media system and all those otherIIId h " thewhere cognitive workers had investe t eir energls mof being able to constitute independent enterpnses. Thebetween coo-nitive labor and recombinatoty capiral endedh b · . "of the market to oligopolistic domination, andt e Sll mlSSIOn. .rnaLnitive labor was subjected to the decisions of rhe bIg finanClaldominating the world economy. In the year 2000, the stockecha" ge collapse determined a loss of energy in the innovativeand restored the domination of the old oil-based economy,JteilireLotirlg the world towards the meaningless horror of war.Competition has been the universal belief of the last ne-liberalist.,'delead,,,. In order to stimulate competition, a powerful m)ectlOn of'

Thf1 Soul at Work / 99inducing drugs, including neuro-programminggrowing part of Western societies, subjected to an UUlnt>ernmemal hyper-excitation to the point of collapse, evokedexorcism the urban legend of the millennium bug.phantasmatic threat dissolved, the real collapse came. Buteconomy's collective psyche had already reached its pointreturn. When in 1999 Alan Greenspan spoke of rheberance of the market," his words were more of a clinicalfinancial diagnosis. Exuberance was an effect of the rl"'M .::cthe over-exploitation of available mental energy, of a satur" ti(Jattention leading people to the limits of panic.Panic is the amicipation of a depressive breakdown, ofconfusion and disactivation.And finally the moment of rhe Prozac crash came.The beginning of the new millennium had glorifiedfusions: AOL and Time Warner united rheir temacles indiffusely infiltrate the global mind. Immediately after, thetelecommunication emerprises invested huge amounts of moneyUMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System). Thesethe last actions before the crash involving Worldcom, Enron,entire sectors of the net-economy. This crisis, which was only aanticipation of the 2008 final catastrophe, was the first m'lllifest" tiof the breakdown suffered by swarms of cognitive workers moremore affected by psychopathological syndromes and stress.Panic depressive syndrome and competitionIn his book La Fatigue d'etre soi, Alain Ehrenberg discussession as a social pathological syndrome, specifically dependingsituations characterized by competition.)epreSS1on begins to develop after the disciplinary behavioraland the rules of authority and conformity to therooLibi.tio,ns that assigned a destiny to social classes andcollapsed faced with the new norms pushing eacheveryone to individual action, forcing individuals tothemselves. Because of this new norm, the responofour lives is now fully assigned to each of us.lepl:ession then manifests itself as pathology of responsibility,'dolrnir,at

defeat, but the social norm cannot acknowledge thewithout questioning its own ideological fundaments,its own economic efficiency.The other side of the new economy is naturally the USestimulant or anti-depressive substances. This is a hidden,removed side, but absolutely decisive. How many,economy .operators, survive without Prozac, Zoloft or evenDependence on psychotropic substances, those onethe pharmacy and those one can buy on the street, is aelement of the psychopathologic economy.When economic competition is the dominantimperative of the social consortium, we can be positiveconditions fo r mass depression will. be produced. Thishappening under our eyes.Social psychologists have in fact remarked that two patholo1of great actuality in these last decades of liberalist hYiper-caplpanic and depression.Panic is a syndrome psychologists don't understandsince it seems to have occurred only rarely in the past.drome has been only recently diagnosed as aphenomenon, and it is hard to find its physical and ps)rchicr'but it is even harder to find an adequately effective th"tal'Y'it. I don't have rhe ambition to offer any solution to theic problem this syndrome poses. I'm just makingobservations on the meaning of panic. Panic is the feelingwhen, faced with the infinity of nature, we feelunable to receive in OUf consciollsness the infinite stirnul.uithe world produces in us. The etymology derives fromword pan, that means "everything existing": the godappeared bringing a sublime, devastating folly ov,,,,,kilne'ihis visit (see James Hillmann's An Essay on Pan). Butcan we explain the diffusion of this kind of syndrome inIs it possible to find any relation between it and the conitmanifests and spteads?social context is a competitive society where all energiesin order to prevail on the other. Survival is no longerreaching a position of sufficient preparation and abilities,constantly questioned: if one does not win, one can bein a few days or a few months.technological context is the constant acceleration of theof the global machine, a constant expansion of cyberspaceof the individual brain's limited capacities of elaboration.communicational context is that of an endless expansionInfosphere, which contains all the signals from which comandsurvival depend.this a very similar situation to the one pictured by theetymology of the word panic?lll" llJ"w

Collective panic generates phenomena such asaggressiveness against immigrants, senseless massdiums, as well as other, apparently normal behaviors,characterizing personal relations in the contemporaryThese behaviors cannot be corrected with thepolitical persuasion or judicial repression, becausenothing to do with politics and ideology but dependpsychopathology induced by the Infosphere's excess,stimulation and the endless cognitive stress affectingorganism and caused by permanent electrocution.Permanent electrocution is the normal conditionwhere network communicative technologies are used in arive social situation, projecting the. organism inhyper-fast flow of economically relevant signs.Once the organism gets overtaxed to an unbearablepanic crisis may lead to collapse, or the organismitself from the flow of communication, manifesting a SU(ldenloss of motivation called depression by psychologists.With depression we are affected first of all by a disinv('8ttlthe energy previously used in a narcissistic way. Once therealizes that it is unable to sustain futther competitiveit is a loser in the relation that was absorbing all of itswhat takes place is a SOrt of zero degree of the exchangebetween the conscious organism and its world.With depression we are always affected by a pre)ce,:s'motivation, originated by the loss of an object that usedfocus of narcissistic attention for the subject."The world doesn't mal,e sense anymore"-says thesince the object of his or her narcissistic passion ismight explain the diffusion of depression as a secondary(if compared to the primary one, which I believe to bein a sociery based on the principle of competition andwith the technological instruments necessary for theacceleration of the communication circles surroundingdescription of these two complementary syndromes can bein order to address the psycho-social framework constantlyand feeding the psychopathology of the present.aggressive young people addicted to amphetamines, ridingper_aoces,sorized cars and going to work ready to give their besttheir share in corporate earnings and to obtain theirapproval are all in the waiting room of panic. In the sameyounger skinhead brothers beat each other up everyin the soccer stadium, expressing a form of panic accumuweeklyduring their normal working week.;Pollitic:al culture refuses to acknowledge that the legal drugs oneat the pharmacy, a soutce of astonishing profits for RocheGlaxo, as well as the illegal ones, a source of profit for theare an essential factor (and in fact the most important one):ompetitive sociery.class and cognitariatis a realiry whose tangible physicaliry has been eliminated.gidThou,ght can well be recognized in the network world, whererelation to the other is artificially euphoric but substantially'exualiz" d as well.Thought is the a-critic exaltation of digital technologies.technologies are based on the loss of the physicaliry of the

world, on simulating algorithms capable of rqlrodu,cin":forms, except for only one quality: their tangible reality,form and therefore their caducity.Noah grouped in his ark all the creatures of the earth,to save them from the flood. Today in a similar way weour air-conditioned arks and float on the waves of thedeluge without losing contact with the cultural patrirnolmmulared by humanity, keeping linked to the other arks,same time, on the physical planet down there, barbarianswarm and make war.Those who can, isolate rhemselves in a pressurized andconnected capsule. They are physically removed from otherbeings (whose existence becomes a factor of insecurity), thoughtous, virtually present in any possible place according to theirThis schizophrenic geography needs indeed two difJerentlogues, two atlases describing supposedly separatecatalogue of the virtual class is sterilized. It proposes objectstemporality and physicality have constitutively been renlovecremoval of corporeality is a guarantee of endless happinessnaturally a frigid and false one, because it ignores, orremoves, corporeality: not only that of others, but even one) "negaring mental labor, sexuality and mental mortality.Ir is because of these considerations thar I see thenew notion, able to analyze the virtual class in corporeal,and social terms.The notion of virtual class stresses the socially undefined,character of rhe work flows produced by Semiocapital. Theclass is rhe class of those who do nOt identify with any class,they are not socially or materially structured: rheirdepends on the removal of their own social corporeality.seems to me an interesting and useful norion. Bur I'd likecomplementaty concept, capable of defining the (denied)the (avoided) sociality of the mental labor at work in'nd,uction of Semiocapital. Therefore I use the notion of theThe cognitariat is the semiotic labor flow, sociallyfragmented, as seen from the standpoint of its socialThe virtual class has no needs, bur the cognitariatvirtual class is not affected by the psychic stress deterbythe constant exploitation of attention. The cognitariat isThe virtual class cannot produce any conscious collectiveexcept as collective Intellect. The cognitariat can identifya conscious community.is evident that the word "cognitariat" includes two concepts:labor and proletariat.COI,nil'ariat is the social corporeality of cognitive labor. What iswithin the social definition of cognitive labor is preciselysexuality, mortal physicality, the unconscious.his most famous book, entitled Collective Intelligence1999), Pierre Levy proposes the notion of collective intel­Thanks to the digital network, he writes, the idea of alab(Jral:ive participation of all human intellects to the creation ofidle:cti',e intellect takes a concrete shape, and the creation of thewithin technological, digital and virtual conditions becomesBut the social existence of cognitive workers does notitself with the intellect: cognitive workers, in their concreteare bodies whose nerves become tense with constantand effort while their eyes are strained in the fixed connplati(mof a screen.T(18 Soul at Work 1 105

3The Poisoned SoulFrom incommunicability to over-communicationIn the critical language of the 1960s, the wordusually combined with the word "incommunicability."with these two words and almost half a centuty later, I willconducting my analysis of the mutations in the SO':lO-cu:!turalipsychological landscape.In the 1960s, industrial urban landscapes teptesentedground for a feeling of silent uneasiness and the rarefying;relational acts among human beings. Workers were forced toby the assembly line surrounded by a hellish metallic clankingit was impossible fot individuals to exchange a wotd, since thecomprehensible language was that of the machine. Thus theguage of things took the place of the symbolic exchange.communication seemed to fade away, while "the thing"every affective, linguistic and symbolic intetstice.These aspects of telational discomfort are well expressed byliterature of the industrial eta that in the 1960s tevealed itselfthe nouveau roman, or Michelangelo Antonioni ' s cinema. Inpost-industrial landscape of Semiocapitalism, relational dis,:olflt(is still a central element of the social scene, but it is thecompletely diffetent, even opposite, situation from the oneitac:terizlflg the decade of full industrial development.present emerging uneasiness originates from a situation ofnlftUnlC.MU'" overload, since we the assembly line, once linkingthrough the movements of a mechanical apparatus, havereplaced by the digital telecommunications netwotk, which linksthrough symbols. Productive life is overloaded with symbolsnot only have an opetational value, but also an affective,(mr.ncmal, imperative or dissuasive one. These signs cannot wotkunleashing chains of intetptetation, decoding, and conresponses.The constant mobilization of attention is essentialthe productive function: the energies engaged by the productiveare essentially creative, affective and communicational.Each producet of semiotic flows is also a consumer of them, anduser is part of the productive process: all exits are also an entry,every receiver is also a transmitter.We can have access to the modalities of digital telecommunicafromeverywhete and at all times, and in fact we have to, sinceis the only way to participate in the labor market. We can reachpoint in the world but, more importanriy, we can be reachedany point in the world. Under these conditions privacy and its: pr>ssilJilities are abolished, if we understand this word in its fullestme;mirlg and not only according to its specific juridical definition.we use the word privacy we normally refer to a space shelteredfrom the public eye, that is to say to the very possibility of per­MJ'UUl acts and exchanges that are purely private, not transparent.JUiridilcai rules are constantly devised in ordet to protect citizens'privacy, forgetting that privacy tepresents not only the right not tobe watched, but also the right to refuse to watch and to be continuallyexposed to watching and hearing what we would rather not106The Poisoned Soul 1107

see or hear. Advertising constantly violates this privacy,its visual and auditory messages in every inch of OUrand in every second of our time. The diffusion of screensspaces (railway stations, airports, city streets and sq,oaresintegral part of this abusive occupation of the public spaceprivate dimension of our sensibility.Everywhere, attention is under siege.Not silence but uninterrupte?- noise, not Antonioni'sbut a cognitive space overloaded with nervous incentives tois the alienation of our times.The notion of alienation (to be other than oneself) canfigured in different forms. In the industrial domain ititself as reification. We can then understand it accordingHegelian concept of "by itself," which indicates a loss ofbut also the dialectical condition of a negation leadingrestoration of the entire being of the Subject, since-let's not 'this-for Hegel "Being is the Subject" as full deploymentdialectic of the Absolute Spirit.In the young Marx's analysis that humanistic socialismto, the concept of alienation is linked to the critique ofcolnrrlo

"globalization" and "virtuality" can be considered thepresent times. Beyond any critical generalization andhumanistic philosophical liquidation of the entire field ofconnected to the word "alienation,)) it is necessary to re(lis(;ov."meaning and the historicity of these concepts in order tostand how they helped interpret that cultural "conjuncture,how they could help us understand the new (is ir really a newhuman condition of connective times.In his 1964 movie Red Desert, Antonioni captured thecoming from figurative art and the nouveau roman to rep'res,elit_rhrough background colors, pop-style Rat interiors andindustrial exteriors-a quality of experience where the warmthimmediacy of human relations were lost. Marriage crises, escap(, anadventure are simply occasions to describe a general cOlndiitie'n tmalaise inhabiting every relationship, and first of all the rel,.tie'n vlitthe self. This was the crisis that the Italian bourgeoisie was ex],eriien>:iniin those years: it prepared the atmosphere leading to the 1968a moment of liberation in which the new warmth of the COllectlvereplaced the coldness of private relations. Antonioni was the dir,ect()rwho best succeeded at representing a passage that is notrelated to culture and politics, but first of all to the sensibilityquality of emotions. Being close to the experience of pop art,nioni could express, in color and form, the Rattening of nuancesthe industrial homologation of different aspects of existence.This happens in a similar way in Persona, a 1966 film by Tn"m.,Bergman whose intentions were, however, completely different. Inthis extremely slow, dazzling black and white movie, the rarefYing ofcommunication becomes the stylistic cipher of the human ambiencethat was brewing in those yeats: later the new winds of warmthand eroticism brought by the students' revolt would finallythat entire emotional landscape. Silence and aphasia incan't be understood as mere signs of individual psyrepresentinginstead a historically and sociallyincommunicability. Bergman's silence and the sunny sitesNorthern seaside resort where the action takes place are thefor an emptiness that becomes loneliness, for thembridgea.ble distance between bodies.The concept of "alienation" waS at the core of the critical disrelatedto these two movies, extremely significant for thescene of that decade. In that context, alienation referred tosubmission of the person to the thing.At the peak of the industrial age the world of things was exploding:serial production generated infinite exemplars of standardized objects,and the assembly line as a productive technique subjugated humangestures to mechanical rhythms. The machine thus became an animatedobject while the body was turned into an inanimate one, separatedfrom any form of consciousness. At the same time mass consumptionserialized behaviors in relation to existing merchandises.Decades of serial reification inRuenced our perception to suchan extent that today we are no longer capable of realizing up towhich point the otherness of the thing transformed the world ofevety day experience, making us estranged from ourselves, if howeverwe admit that "ourselves" means anything at all.The Serpent's EggIn a 1977 movie entitled The Serpent's Egg, Ingmar Bergman tellsthe story of the rise of Nazism in 1920s Germany as if it were a(physical) poisoning of a (psychological) social space, an infiltrationof the milieu of relations and everyday life. Bergman, who oftenTill"! Pnisonfrl Soul I 111

112 / The Soul at Worktreated the theme of alienation as psychological suffering,silence of the soul and incommunicability, proposed here aalistic, almost chemical, explanation of the human degradatprocesses caused by Nazism.In this movie, alienation has nothing to do with humanit is a consequence of the toxic substance penetrating andthe air rhat the characters (Liv Ullmann and David \..,arra,dibreathe inside their tiny habitation.The Serpents Egg is not considered one of the Swedishbest films, yet in my opinion it is one of the most int:ertosting ones Ii-the perspective of his personal evolution and of the late-rno(!efln dtural process. This film opens the way to a new definitionunderstood as a psychological and linguistic process andredefining alienation as a material, chemical, or rather neuf()-chetnimutation. Social pathologies are first of all a communicationalorder. The critical notion of incommunicability marks afield of problems: the rarefaction of exchanges, uneasiness inrelations, and the actual pollution of the human interactionWirh The Serpents Egg Bergman thinks anew the vety qutosticmincommunicability: communication between Ullmann andis progressively poisoned, since a toxic substance penetrates theirlungs, and finally their brains. Thus (in a crowd scene filmed inhypnotic motion) the social body is transformed by Nazism into.amorphous mass, deprived of its own will and ready to be led.metaphor of psychological submission that we find in thispertinent far beyond the example of German Nazism: it canacrerize other processes of collective mental pollution, suchconsumerism, television commercials, the production of ag;gressiybehaviors, religious fundamentalisms and competitive cOnf()rnlisrn:metaphor of The Serpents Egg avoids the essentialist and idedefinitionsof the word that were prevalent during the 1960s,marked by the Hegelian Renaissance. This metaphor has to beinstead as the intuition of a psychological pathology'preaO:lllg on a social scale. The explicative utility of the notion ofIlielnat[on emerges once we extricate it from its properly HegelianWe can use it again, though, within a phenomenologicalpsychopathological context, in order to define the current sceneour own postindustrial times, when work-related disturbancesto immediately involve the domain of language and emotions,relations and communication.In that 1977 movie, Bergman talked about what was then thebut today, in the new millennium, is already the present. Thehas been brought daily into our homes, like a nerve gas,on our psychology, sensibility, and language: it is embodiedtelevision, advertising, endless info-productive stimulation, andcompetitive mobilization of the energies. Liberal economicspr()duced mutational effects in the organism: they are deeper thanproduced by Nazism, since they are active within the biologicaland cognitive texture of society, in its chemical composition, andon superficial forms of behavior.That same year, on December 25, Charlie Chaplin died, the manwith the derby hat, who told the story of the dehumanization ofmodern industrialism from the point of view of a humanity still capableof being human. There is no more room for kindness. SaturdayNight Fever came out in movie theatres that fall, introducing a newworking class, happily willing to be exploited during the entire week,order to excel in dancing with greased hair on Saturday nights.1977 is a turning point in the history of humanity; it is the yearwhen a post-human perspective takes shape. 1977 is a year charged

11 ' nlll \1with ominous signals: in Japan it is the year of youth784. An enormous scandal is provoked by a chainsuicides, thirteen in the month of October alone,tary school children. The generation born in the 1980sto be the first video-electronic generation, the first gellet:,t;educated in a milieu where mediatization prevails overform of relation wirh the human body. In the aestheticstyles of the following decades we witness a c1r:an.sin:g,bodying process. It is the beginning of a long processsterilization, whose effects transform the first vi

The Poisoned Soul / 1 17and sadness did not prevail.' Despite the machines' clanki.n.possible to discuss and start processes of autonomy andin Semiocapitalism, the soul itself is put to work. This istial point of the postindustrial transformation that wein the last decades of the twentieth-century.While this transformation was taking place,thought changed the terms of the question. The worddisappeared from the philosophical lexicon beginning in theand the historicist humanistic context where that word fla'" a,eqits meaning also disappeared. POst-structuralist theory hasquestion of alteriry within new conceptual parameters. NC'tion.'"desire," "discipline," "control" and ('biopolitics" haveHegelian and Marxist analytic notions. The question offotmations and independent social subjectiviry was posed inpletely new terms.In the following pages I will analyze these themes, beginninga meditation on some questions posed by authors who theorizeddesiring and disciplined body ar the end of the tw" nt.ietb'-cemuin particular, I will focus on Michel Foucault, Gilles DeleuzeFelix Guarrari, in addition to Jean Franl'ois Lyotard.But I will also cite another name, someone who had adifferent perspective on things within that changing context,focused on concepts such as "simulation,» "implosion" andstrophe": I mean Jean Baudrillard, who was openly pOI.emIe:towards philosophical positions predicated on desire. Inyears, that debate remained marginal within the prdlc)sophiciarena, but today we can see that its core is dense withand full of theoretical and political implications which arestunningly timely.devalues desire since it is the source of maya, the illusionin che form of the world. Even the stoics understood thatpurpose of philosophical action is to cut our dependencethe flow of emotions and desires.certainly respecr the superior wisdom capable of withdrawingthe flux of maya, suspending the addiction to passions' domi­The flowing of desire is a source of illusion, and the final goalis the interruption of such flows. Yet we need tokn

Desire is not a force but a field. It is the field wherestruggle takes place, or better an entangled nerwork ofconflicting forces. Desire is not a good boy, nor the positivehistory. Desire is the psychological field where lm:agliary.ideologies and economic interests are constantly clashing.an example, there is a Nazi form of desire.The field of desire is central in history, since within suchforces that are crucial for the formation of the collectivetherefore for the main axes of social progress, meet throllghposition and conflict.Desire judges History, but who judges desire?Ever since the corporations specializing in "irnalgin,eelrinlg"Disney, Murdoch, Mediaset, Mictosoft, Glaxo) took controldesiring field, violence and ignorance have been unleashed,the immaterial trenches of techno-slavery and mass conformThese forces have colonized the field of desire. This is why the .cultutal movements, like media-activism, emphasize theeffective action in the constitution of the desiring field.Limit, alterity, re-compositionWe can think of the other as a limit, or we can think of it inof (com)passion.Anti-Oedipus reminds us: je est un autre, "1 is an other,"that the question of the other cannot be posed in merelyterms, as relation of the individual with the individuals aroundAlterity is the pulsional, phantasmatic, imaginary flow WlillCIol ,places and transforms the very existence of subjectiVity. fllICUIXthe productive Unconscious. What is produced by the Uncollsciiitis a singular existence in its complex relation with the world. .. ,question of the limit, though, does not appear in Deleuze's.•'"' .., texts.Hegelian language the limit is understood as "alienation": thethe limit of the self, its diminishment and impoverishment.ilialectIC context alienation is the subject's limitation in its relatheother, or the perception of the other as limitation. Thedialectic attributes to the historical process the task andof overcoming the limit, and of realizing a totaliza-POS:,lV u," Jalterity is finally removed. But for us the limit is not aof potency. The relation to otherness is constitutive ofpsychological and social dynamics. It is structured throughforms, for reasons that change thtoughout histoty. Whatbe understood and analyzed is the way this relation haswhile we went beyond modernity.have seen already that the Workerist (Compositionist) criofthe dialectic abandoned the notion of alienation in favoridea of positive estrangement. In the context of WorkeristCompositionist theories, otherness is indeed acknowledged asbut also as the condition for an expansion of the power ofself, The limit is a condition for potency: this is the meaningrecomposition process. Social recomposition is the processwhich the relation to the other is linguistically, affectively,politically elaborated, then transformed into a consciousollt,ctJ.ve, an autonomous aggregate, a group in fusion, construcin its rebellion. Beginning with the awareness that the other islimitation of the existing organism, Italian CompositionistWorkeriSln asserted that this limitation does not involve a loss, anmpove"ishmtent: it opens instead the possibility of collective expebasedon conflict. The limit (which is not reducible to anylust,oftc:al synthesis) cannot be exhausted: this also means that the118 / The Soul at Work

pleasure of enjoying the other, who is at once limit andcannot be exhausted.In this way, once the field of dialectic materialismcism was abando ned, it began to be clear that thetransformation is much closer to the chemistry of gasesmechanics of sociology. There are no compact forces,jects that promote unequivocal wills. In fact there is noflows of imagination, depressions of the collectiveilluminations.There are abstract devices able to connect flows:mixers that cut, stir and combine flows and events.There is no subject opposing other subjects, but theflows of imagination, technology, desire: they can pn)dtlce Vconcealment, collective happiness or depression, wealthOn the other hand, the historical process is not afield where homogenous subjectivities are opposed, oridentifiable projects would be conflicting. It is rather aneous becoming where different segments are active:automation, panic psychosis, international financialidentitarian or competitive obsessions. Thesesegments neither sum up nor oppose each other: theycatenating relations that Guattari called "machinic arr'an.en(agencements) .At the beginning of the known history of WesternDemocrirus proposed a philosophical vision of a "c{lmIPositikind. There is no object, no existent, and no person:gates, temporary atomic compositions, figures that theperceives as stable but that are indeed mutational, transient,and indefinable.is in his [Democritus'l eyes an infinite multiplicity ofwhich are invisible because they are so small. Theyin vacuum. When they come into contact, they do nota unity, but by these meetings, uniting, they producelO".no'", and by separating they produce corruption.'"of. modern chemistry on one hand, and the most recenttheories on the other, confirm this hypothesis.shape of every object is the shape projected by the eye andperson's being is the temporary fixation of a relationalin which people define themselves, for a moment or forlife, always playing with an imponderable matter.the end of the history of Western thought (at the exactit starts coming out from itself), Deleuze and Guattarithe way to a new philosophy that we could name MolecularIn their philosophical landscape the image of the bodyorgans plays an important role.consider the concept of a body without organs from alttptlSitiionist point of view.body without organs is the process of reciprocal crossingeverything and everyone, the endless molecular flows fromomllosite body into another.is an orchid continuing to exist as a baboon, a bee, a rock,a cloud.is not "becoming," Felix Guattari says, but multiplebody without organs is the atemporal, extended substancebecomes temporal in its "becomings,)) and becomes temporarilyas an effect of chaosmotic cteation, emerging from chaos in120 I TI1e Soul al WorkThe Poisoned Soul / 121

order to give shape to an enunciation, a collecrive lOt'entionmovement, a paradigm, a world.Guattari's notion of "Chaosmosis" describes thisback to a chaos rendered consistent, become Thought,chaosmos. "3concatenations of sense within chaos:"I is an other, a mulripliciry of others, embodied at thesection of partial components of enunciation, O"'aclhing ,,all sides individuated identity and the organized body.cursor of chaosmosis never stops oscillating betweendiverse enunciative nuclei-not in order to totalizesynthesize them in a transcendent self, but in spite ofthing, to make a world of them.'"The events of the planet appear like stormy and inc:onlpt'eh"n,clouds. The history of late moderniry appears like a chaosevolutional lines are unforeseeable. But what is chaos?form of the world that is too complex to be grasped by thecategories available to humans.More sophisticated sensors are necessary in order to un',eC1;!aextremely complex phenomena and even more complex categc>rlinterpreting processes that seem fortuitous. Now an algorithmsuperior order is necessary. A chaosmotic concept, DeleuzeGuatrari would say, since chaosmosis refers to the process offacing from what appears like a chaos of a conceptual, formalparadigmatic order.''A concept is a set of inseparable variarions that is producedor constructed on a plane of immanence insofar as the lattercrosscuts rhe chaotic variabiliry and gives it consistency (reality)a concept is therefore a chaotic state par excellence; itncc,unter between Italian Autonomous theory (Compositionistand French desiring theory (Molecular Creativism) wasToClnut

1241 The Soul at WorkThe Poisoned Soul i 1 25substances, languor, expectations, and sensations. Socialis the manifestation of an extremely complicatedentered by the psychological, imaginary, and materialturing everyday experience.require just a little order to protect us from chaos.is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself,ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formes, already" Iby fo rgetlu ness."6Depression and chaosmosis:.qllestion "what is chaos?" is thus answered in the followingAt the same time we need to explain how it happened that, at apoint, sadness prevailed, and the fragile collective ar(:hi,:ecbhappiness collapsed.''Among the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin denaire, the question of subjectivity is now returningleitmotiv. It is not a natural given any more than air orHow do we produce it, capture it, enrich it, and pe.rman'ootllyreinvent it in a way that renders it compatible with unIverse,of mutant value? How do we work for its liberation, that is,its re-singularization?»5This is the question asked by Felix Guattari on the last pagelast book, which in 1992 just before his death on an Augustthat same year.The book he wrote previously, together with his ac(:onIpiice.,friend Gilles Deleuze, was titled Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?is Philosophy?} and had been published in 1991.Many are the common topics of these two books, but theimportant are the themes of chaos and old age: twodeeply connected, as we'll see. We can read in the conclusion ·What is Philosophy?:are infinite speeds that blend into the immobility of the,;cellorle" and silent nothingness they traverse, without naturethoug t.h "7is chaos when the world starts spinning too fast for our mind,appre,'ia,:e its forms and meaning. There is chaos once the flows areintense for our capacity to elaborate emotionally. Ovetwhelmedvelocity, the mind drifts towards panic, the uncontrolledbve:rsi(lD of psychic energies premise to a depressive deactivation." -,....In their introduction to What is Philosophy?, this fantastic andubook written on the verge of an abyss, Deleuze andwrote that the moment had come for thinking of old age.age opens the doors to a chaosmotic wisdom capable of elabotheinfinite velOcity of flows with the necessary slowness.Chaos "chaotizes," and infinitely decomposes any consistence:question of philosophy is to build levels of consistence withoutthe infinity from where thinking emerges. The chaos we areabout has an existence that is at once mental and physical.UNot only objective disconnections and disintegrations but animmense weariness results in sensations. which have nowbecome woolly, letting escape the elements and vibrations it

finds increasingly difficulr ro Contract. Old age is thisness: then, there is either a fall into mental chaos OUitside,plane of composition or a falling-back on ready-madeChaos is too complex an environment to be deciphel:e,schemes of interpretation we have at our disposal. It isment where the circularing flows are too fast for theelaborate them. Subjectivity or rather the process ofis constantly measuring itself against chaos. Subjectivityitself precisely in this constant relation to an infinitewhich the conscious organism derives the condition for theof a cosmos and of a provisory order, variable and singular.jectivity does not side with order, since this would paralyzeis an enemy, but also an ally."It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take placean affinity with the enemy,"9How is it possible to elaborate the infinite velocity of flowsbeing affected by the disaggregating effect of panic?artistic forms, and friendship are the transformers of velocityus to slowly elaborate what is infinitely fast without losing itscomplexity, without having to recall the Common places ofcommunication, and redundancy.The process of subjectivation creates simple semiotic,emotional and political concatenations through whichbecomes possible. For instance, art creates semiotic devicesof translating the infinite velocity of reality flows intorhythm of sensibility. Deleuze and Guattari define thesetranslators as "chao ids.))not chaos but a composirion of chaos that yields theor sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a.

anticipated that the earth would be populated bypeople; we know today that we won't go beyondmark. Births are decreasing in all cultural areas, withof the Islamic world.Tuned to the old age of the world, we can see OUrphers of chaos facing the dissolution of meaning.is the beginning of a meditation that Guattari lefi: uson the creation of a peculiar cosmos, that is to say, on aendlessly reconstituting itself beyond depression,beyond the dark (but also enlightening) experienceThe years following 1989-afi:er the sudden hopeworld peace, and the equally unexpected new apl'arjition'were years of dramatic, painful, obscure changes.massacres were looming on the horizon, while thecollapse announced the reemergence of nationalism, laterby Putin's figure. Islamic integralism and fanaticism starteditself as political identity for a decisive sector of theis a truth within depression. And in fact, as we have read,if the strUggle against chaos did not take place without anwirh the enemy." Depression is the vision of the abyssby the absence of meaning. Poetic and conceptuallike political creativiry, are the ways of chaosmotic cre­"the construction of bridges over the absence of meaning.the Earth. Mter the Rio De Janeiro Summit, where theof the United States, Mr. Bush senior, declared theof negotiating on the lifestyle of American citizens, ecc,lo1:ic"appeared as Our common perspective.In those years, Felix Guatrari recorded the ac.:urnuiiatingof barbarization, the re-emergence of fascism and thecapitalism brought with its victories.makes the existence of bridges possible: friendship, love,and revolt. Chaosmosis is a book attempting to traversethrollgh cosmic and creative bridges, practices (aesthetics,schizoanalysis, politics) that could make possible the,1IIariZ2ltion of chaos, that is to say the isolation of a specificover the endless and infinitely fast flow of things.The trajectory of conceptual creation was changing, itand recomposed itself follOWing new directions, oftenof the hOrizon, losing its meaning and recognizable forms.Depression. We don't find such a word in Guattari'sleft in the margins, as if it were an incompatible topiccreationist energy that animated his work, his researchexistence. If we pay carent! attention to the last chapter ofcollective book, Gilles and Felix are in fact analyzingconfusion and dark horizons: the emergence of chaos.: , ','I,ofirlite speeds are loaded with finite speeds, with a converofthe virtual into the possible, of the reversible into,iHeve,rsil,le, of the deferred into difference,»llis the creation of concepts, and concepts are chaoidsof isolating a singular cosmos, the modality of projectiveArt is instead the singular composition of chaosthe elaboration of forms, gestures, and environmentsa concrete presence in the space of communication,and projection.

With the expression '(aesthetic paradigm/' Guattariprivileged position that sensibility has gained in presentproductive and communicative relations lose their m'''er:i.trace their trajectories in the space of sensible projections.is the discipline through which the organism and itsbecome attuned. The tuning process is disturbed by theof infospheric stimuli and by semiotic inflation, theevery space of attention and consciousness. Art registersthis disturbance, but at the same time it looks for newmodalities of becoming, and aesthetics seems to be at thea diagnostic of the psychospheric pollurion and a therapyrelation between the organism and its world.Guattari establishes a privileged relation betweenpsychotherapeutic dimensions. The question of thebetween chaotic velocity and the singularity of lived timedecisive. In order to grasp temporal flows, the mind needsits own temporalities: these singular temporalities aremake orientation possible. The notion of refrain leads us toof the schizoanalytic vision: the refrain is the singularthe niche for individualizing the self where the creationbecomes possible.Philosophy, art and schizoanalysis are practices ofchaosmotic creation, that is to say they allow the confilUra!!constituting the map of an existence to emerge from theflux, like refrains. Bur these refrains can solidifY and mCJrplr isemiotic, ritual, sexual, ethnic, and political obsessions.On the one hand, the refrain protects the subjectchaos of the lnfosphere and the semiotic flows that carry himlike stormy winds. This is how, protected by refrains, it isto build one's own progression, the sphere of one's ownaffects and sharing. On the other hand, the refrain cancage, a rigid system for interpreting references and existhatare compulsively repetitive.intervenes precisely at these points of theneurotic hardening. Here analysis is no longer understoodof symptoms and the search for a latentfint' pJre-"xlstlllg the neurotic fixation. Analysis is the creationcenters of attention capable of producing a bifurcation, afrom the track, a rupture within the closed circuit ofrepetition able to inaugurate a new horizon of possibilitiesand experience.Cb,tOSlnosi's is situated within a specific historical dimension,mists and miasmas that began to spread at the beginning".177'"' and that today, fifteen years later, seem to have invadedspace of the atmosphere, infosphere and psychosphere.Ireathirtg has become difficult, almost impossible: as a matterone suffocates. One suffocates every day and the symptomsMr.oca.:ion are disseminated all along the paths of daily life andhigl,ways of planetary politics.chances for survival are few: we know it. There are no morewe can trust, no more destinations for us to reach. Ever sinceimtltation into semiocapitalism, capitalism has swallowed thelan,ee-" altte machine not only for the different fo rms of life, butof thought, imagination, and hope. There is no alternative to?, .I.hOuJd we then place old age at the center of our discourse, likeand Guattari did in their introduction to What is Philosoageis no longer a marginal and rare phenomenon, like itin the past when old people were considered to bring preciousllO)I,led.ge to rhe community. Senility is becoming the conditionThe Poisoned Soul /131

for the majority of a humanity deprived of the couragefuture, since the future has become an obscure andToday old age is becoming the average socialmajority, while at the same time it also becomes thebest expresses the metaphor of the energy loss affectingrace. Libidinal energy declines once the world becomeselaborated according to the slow timing of emotionsentropy dominates cerebral cells. The decline of libidinalentropy are two processes whose sense is in fuct the same.brain is decomposing as it does in Jonathan Franzen's TheAlzheimer's is becoming a meraphor for a future in whichuniversality of modern rationality. For the brains decomthebig Infosphere mixer, God seems to be the natural pathwhile of course it is instead the usual infernal trick.fundamentalism and the cult of putity now join withand depression to nourish ethnicism and nationalism.world landscape is becoming "Islamized" in various ways:becomes the dominant form of relation between indigroups.While the collective dimension is deprived of any:C01mlflg from desire and reduced to a skeleton of fear and necestoa group becomes compulsive and mandatory. Andis the last refuge for souls left without desire or autonomy.cult to remember the reason for things while the new via.eo-el,generations seem to be dragged by vortexes of panic untilinto the spiral of depression. The question of sensibilitywith politics: and not even the redefinition of an ethicaltive can set it aside. At the beginning of the new HHUCl[lmUlend of modernity is announcing itself as the end of Ourheritage. Hyper-capitalism is emancipating itself from itsherirage and irs so-called "values," but this unveils a terrible:without the heritage of Human ism and the Enlightenment,is a regime of pure, endless and inhuman violence.The mind is put to work in conditions of economictential precariousness. Living time is subjected to workfractal dispersion of borh consciousness and experience,the coherence of lived time to fragments. The ps:ycrlos]ph,,,,become the scene of a nightmare, and the relation betweenbeings is deprived of its humanisric surface. The body of theis no longer within the reach of an empathic perception:torture, and genocide become normal procedures forotherness in a-sympathetic conditions. The violent logic ofnarrow passage it is the very notion of ethical consciousness thatto be rethought. Ethical consciousness cannot be founded on theof Reason and Will-as during the modern period. Therationalism have been forever erased, and rationalism cannot",,,'UdIV' direction of the planetary humanism we must conceive.the ethical question is posed as a question of the soul,is to say of the sensibility animating the body, making it capableop"nirlg sympathetically towards the other. The chemical andsoul we are talking about is the field where a recompositioncan happen.new conceptualization of humanism must be founded on anparadigm, since it has to take root in sensibility. Theof modern ethics needs to be interpreted as a generalizeddisturbance, as the paralysis of empathy in the social,sydhosphere .. The acceleration of the mediasphere, the separationt.consc:iOllsDLeS! from the corporeal experience, the de-eroticization132 I The Soul at WorkThe Poisoned Soul / 133

of public spaces in the digital realm and the diffusiontive principles in every ftagment of social life: these atethe dis-empathy diffused in social action, of thecyclothymia, and the alternate waves of panic and deptessiopsychosphete. The aesthetic paradigm needs to be conside.tfoundation of psychoanalysis, as an ecological therapy forGuattari and Deleuze did not employ the vaguelytones r am using here, r know, yet r did not swear to befaithful to my two masters. Today, the rhetoric of ues:lre-_tlimportant and creative contribution that the authorsbrought to the movements of hope-seems exhaustedwaiting for a dimension and a movement capable of renlewintheir last two books, and in Chaosmosis in particular, thedesire seems already attenuated, if not silenced. Whatinstead is the awareness of the entropy of sense in exist':ntiialrience and historical perspective, the consciousnessaging and death. This is just what we need today: andepression that would not be depressing.Art as chaoidWithin Semiocapital, then, the production of value tendscide with semioric production. Pressed by economic cOlnp,,,jonce integrating it, the word "alienation" is replaced by,r.a'OdV>' of measuring the effects of exploitation on cognitivepaoic, anxiery, depression. The psychopathological lexicona way to diagnose the psychic disturbances affecting theeverywhere.is directly invested: this is why in Chaosmosis, hisGuattari places the aesthetic paradigm at the core of hisand political perspective.the word (aesthetic,» he refers to two different issues:and its modeling by imaginary machines, massthO,IO,IC> and mediatic projections. He also refers to artisticthe production of refrains, perceptive tunings of a pecukind,which are constantly on the run, and incessantlythemselves. This is why the possible (not exclusive),ra,petltlc function of signs, movements and words is founded ineaesth'''lc domain.ro this sphere we can understand illness, the inoculation of psyop'tth()genrcgerms on the part of the imaginary machine, butthe perspective of therapeutic action.Guattari says that art is a chaoid, a temporary organizer ofa fragile architect of shared happiness and a common map ofimaginary.Art is the process of producing refrains, the creation of tunedthe production of accelerated and proliferating signs ends uptioning like a pathogenic factor, congesting the collectivethat is becoming rhe primary object of exploiration.Mental alienation is no longer a metaphor, as it was 'the word "refrain/' Guattarl refers to rhythmic rituals,effilPotaryand singular projective structures that make harmony (orlish:arrr,ony) possible. This harmony (this disharmony) molds theindustrial epoch: it becomes, rather, a specific diagnosis. Psv'chc)o:is the word we can use to refer to the effects of themobilization of attention. Abstracred from the historicistThetefore the structures produced and determined by desirenot eternal, and they are not models preexisting the singular134 I The SOUl at WorkTr18 Poisoned Soul / 135

imagination: they are temporaty realizations ofallow those sharing a journey to recognize theitmeaning. The territory they cross does not preexistdesires. Rather, it is the map that secretes the territ

Therefore the therapeutic question can be described as theof the mind's obsessive clotting, the formation of desiringble of determining a deterriorialization of action, ofshiti:irl thefocus and determining the conditions for a collectiveThe passive estrangement named alienation, the "estrangement from the self, must then be overturned todelirious) creative, refocusing estrangement.For Guattari, psychological pain can be tied toa bsessive focalization.The infinite desiring energy is discharged throughrepetition and exhaust' itself in this repetitive inv·p."MAitherapeutic method adopted by schizoanalysis is thatfocalization and shift of attention. The creativity of theact consists in the capacity of finding a way to escape: acapable of prodUcing a deviation from the obsessive one.Once again therapy reveals its affinities with artisticIf desire is not dependent on structures, even less does itconsidered a natural phenomenon, an authentic ormanifestation. There is a naive reading of Guattari's andtheories, according to which desire would be a primalforce to which we need to return in order to find the AnA""" folion and autonomy. This is a simplifYing and misleadingDesire is not at all natural. Social desire (modeling,and recomposing the structures of collective life) isformed. It is the semiotic environment that modelscloud of signs surrounding the bodies, connoting spacesjecting ghosts. If we think of the function that ad'lert:isirlgthe production of contemporary desire, we easily realizeis nothing else but a contaminating field of batde.communication also works essentially on flows ofredirecting collective investments of desiring energy: theoverturning of the political front that took placein the 1980s and the sweeping victory of the capitalistafier years of social autonomy and workers' struggles canonly as the consequence of an extraordinary transforinthe collective investment of desire.Pri1rati.zat:iOll, competition, individualism-aren't these the conofa catastrophic overturning of the investments ofdesire? The loss of solidarity deprived workers of anyforce and created the conditions for the hyper-exploitationlabor, reducing the labor force to a condition ofslavery: couldn't this be the effect of a fantastic disrupperversionof collective desire?a long period of absolute domination by semiocapital,say of economic principles modeling the collectiveIlinati()ll, nuclei of acquisitional and competitive obsessionwithin the social Unconscious. The refrains circulatingsocial unconscious became rigid, congested, aggressiveterrified..Political action needs to be conceived first of all as a shift ininvestments of desire. The obsessive nuclei strarified inimagination produce parhologies: panic, depressionfatt:ention deficit disorders. These clots need to be dissolved,deterritorialized.is no possibility of political resistance to the absolureninati()n of Semiocapitalism, since its foundations are not exte­:, reslding neither in the military violence of the state, not in thecorporate abuse: they are incorporated in the pathogenicthat pervasively entered the collective unconscious.138 / The Soul at WorkThe Poisoned Soul / 139

Political action must happen therefore acCordi' ng toanalogous to therapeutic intervention. Political actionboth need to Start from the obsessive loci of desi reoto refocus our attention on deterritorializing pointsso that new investments of desire become Possible,be utonomous from competition} acquisition, possessi,accumulation.Debt, time, wealthThe postmodern dominatiun of capitalism is founded onof wealth, understood as cumulative possession. A Sp':cih,c.Iiwealth took control of the collective mind which values aC(:UnlUand the constant postponing of pleasurable enjoyment.of wealth (specific to the sad science of economics) transf"oninto lack, need and dependence. To this idea of wealth WeOppose anothet idea: wealth as time--time to enjoy, travel"and make love.Economic submission, producing need and lack,time dependent, transforming our "life into a m"anJing,lesstowards nothingness. Indebtedness is the basis for thisIn 2006, the book Generation Debt (subtitled: Whyterrible time to be young) was published in the United States. " "author, Anya Kamenetz considers a question that finally cameforefront of our collective attention in 2007, but has beenmental to capitalism for a long time: debt.Anya Kamenetz's analysis refers especially to youngtaking Out loans in order to study. For them, debt functionsa symbolic chain whose effects are mOre powerful than themetal chains formerly used in slavery.d I of sub)' ugation goes through a cycle of capture,newmo epsychological submission, financial trap and finally pureobligation to work.a middle class teenager in the United States, willing to.untVerSl 'ty education , in order to acquire the professional.that will allow him access to the job market. ThIS poorwho believed in the fairy tales of Neo-liberalism, reallythat he has the chance for achieving a guaranteed happy lifeto serious work and study.how can slhe pay a tuition of thousands of dollars a year,the expenses for room and board in a distant city? If yu werein a family of high finance rhieves, the only way IS to askloan from a bank. Like Faust on his way home one night, wholittle dog that followed him to his room and finally revealst: be Mephistopheles, so our young fellow meets a financialeraltor wo,rking for a bank that accords himlher a loan. Once youyour soul belongs to me, says Mephistopheles, forever. Ourfellow signs the loan, goes to university and graduates: afterhis/her life belongs to the bank. Sihe will have to startimmediately after graduation, in order to pay back aending amount of money, especially when the loan is madea variable rate of interest, constantly growing with the passagetime. Sihe will have to accept any condition of work, any"'P"VU""CH, any humiliation, in order to pay the loan whichher wherever slhe goes.Debt is the creation of obsessive refrains that are imposed oncollective mind. Refrains impose psychological miseryto the ghost of wealth, destroying time in order to transitinto economic value. The aesthetic therapy we need-anae,sm.etIc therapy that will be the politics of the times to come-140/ The SOUl at WOrKTtle PoisonGd Sou! / 141

consists in the creation of dissipating refrains caIJar>!e "ilight to another modality of wealth, understood as timeand enjoyment.The crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has opened athe vety idea of social relation as "debt" is now crumblingThe anti-capitalistic movement of the future won'tment of the poor, but of the wealthy. The real wealthywill be those who will succeed in creating forms ofconsumption, mental models of need reduction, habitatthe sharing of indispensable resources. This requires thedissipative wealth refrains, or of frugal and ascetic wealth.In the virtualized model of semiocapitalism, debtgeneral frame of investment, but it also became a cagetransforming desire into lack, need and dependency thatfor life.Finding a way out of such a dependency is a politicalrealization is not a task for politicians. It's a task forlating and orienting desire, and mixing libidinal flows.task for therapy, understood as a new focalization ofaw,ntioJa shifting of the investments of desiring energy.Desire and simulation: Wenders in TokyoIn 1983 Wim Wenders went to Tokyo with the idea ofdocumentary in homage ofYasujiro Ozu, the great directordied in 1962.Using his camera as a notebook, he marked hismeditations and emotions, narrating in black and white,old-fashioned journal, his discovery of a hyper-moderntitle of his movie is Tokyo-ga and it is considered one ofminor movies. It is not. It is instead from every point ofextremely important movie. From the perspective of thedirector's personal evolution, Tokyo-ga marks the passagedreamy, slow and nostalgic narration that characterized hisproduction-Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road {In theo/rime)-to his conflicted but fascinated use of electronic,ok)gies, like in his discombobulated but genial film Until theWorld.relation with Ozu's cinema is the filter through which Wentoget the sense of the ongoing mutation leading Japanese(but in fact global society) beyond humanistic and industrialtowards a dimension that cannot yet be named, butalready as post-humanistic and perhaps even post-human.Y",ujiro Ozu used technology as a support, a prolongation and"dlhi!;", for the human gaze and sensoty experience, as a powertowards emotional and conceptual projection. His camerapo"iti()ll"d in such a way that it exalted the centrality of human., .. ,.w .. '" all this happened in pre-war Japan, where the continuitytradition had not yet been interrupted.the sphere of the indefinable hyper-modernity that Wen­records as if he was sketching a map, we are witness to the.of the relationship between human intellect and''''"'E.I' between the human gaze and its electronic prosthesis.intellect is becoming little by little (or suddenly) part ofinlterc:onne,cted global Mind, and the human eye an internalof the video-reticular panopticon. From a philosophicalof view Tokyo-ga is an extraordinarily lucid summary,aware of the dissolution of the real caused by simulan"ch:niques.Simulation became the central word used in the142/ The Soul at Work

144 I Thp .':::;nl,1 r.:tt IMnrkThe Poisoned Soul / 145post-literate lexicon, beginning with the 1980s, whenelectronic technologies spread in every communicativein the production of worlds.Simulation produces emptiness, a real hole, the d"'"PlpeaJof sensihle tangibility, which is replaced by sensible vi":lIOl;this is already present in Wenders' Tokyo-ga (1983).Wenders describes Japan as the society where an artificialtion has occurred: life is nothing but a simulation effect.and foods are simulated, social relations themselves areWenders takes us with him to a factory of artificial food,pears and apples, meats and tropical fruits are perfectlyusing synthetic materials, in order to simulate teal food to bein metropolitan restaurants' windows. The director's ast:onishlat this banal reproduction gives to the movie a pathetic tone,provincial and nostalgic: the disappearance of food, replacedor plastic, generates nostalgic memories of a world whereauthentic, and we can perceive that, beginning with theseminuscule signals, the world has started to disappear.On the ramparts of a huge stadium, lonely white-cladhit a little white golf ball with their golf sticks: it makes aparabola in the air until it finally reaches the ground, minglinl, )thousands of others. An infinite expanse of isolatedunaware of each other's presence, and an infinite numbergolf balls. Then, Wenders takes us inside the long andlocales where pachinko is played by men of all ages, silent intheir machine. Withour ever talking or looking at eachall concentrate on pulling a lever that will send little metalmoving behind a sheet of glass.In Empire of Signs, a book devoted to his impressions ofto Japan, Roland Barthes had described pachinko with these"Pachinko is a slot machine. At the counter you buy a littlestock of what look like ball bearings: then, in front of themachine (a kind of vertical panel), with one hand you stuffeach ball into a hole, while with the other, by turning a flipper,yOU propel the ball through a series of baffles; if your initialdispatch is just right [ ... J the propelled ball releases a rain ofmore balls, which fall into your hand, and you have only tostart over again-unless you choose to exchange your winningsfor an absurd reward [ . . . J.The pachinko is a collective and solitary game. Themachines are set up in long roWSj each player standing infront of his panel plays for himself, without looking at hisneighbor, whom he nonetheless brushes with his elbow. Youhear only the balls whirring through their channels [ . .. J: theparlor is a hive or a factory-the players seem to be workingon an assembly line."15relates the massive diffusion of pachincko to the necessity of,pA" r;"a the psychological pressure caused by the post-war period,ilib,erating the collective mind from the haunting of a terrirying pasthad to be forgotten, erased, and removed. At the same time, asBarthes writes, pachincko reveals a society where people areindividualized, isolated, lonely, reduced to empty containersplc,du.cth'e time, deprived of their memoty and of any form ofexcept for the silent one of productivity.It is from within film histoty that Wenders tries to outline theGu'togr'apl,y of this mutational phase, and the hyper-modern (andpassage in store for the human race, involved in anthat human beings are also observing, spectators andat once, but finally spectators more than anything else.

146/ The Soul at WorkThen the direcror interviews rwo people that in thecollaborators of the great Ozu.Atsura, the camera opetator who had always workeddirector, shows in various touching sequences theniques elaborated during decades of collaboration. Hethat, since Ozu's death rwenty years earlier, he had notanyone else: he had not betrayed or switched to otherother forms of sensibility.Chishu Ryu, who played in all Ozu's films, on the Con"r.'on working. He must sadly admit though, that people Stopthe street, asking for his autograph, certainly not be(:au.se lplayed in Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story), but because hein the commercials for a brand of biscuits or toothpaste.With Chishu Ryu, Wenders then visits YasujiroWhile the camera films the black monolith under whichtor rests in peace, Wenders pronounces these words,to me could best introduce a meditation on the P",selot .humanistic, semiocapitalist hyper-moderniry:"Mu, The Void, it's He who reigns now."This is not the void that Zen Buddhism talks about, or aton Iy t hat.W.en d ers says: " now. "The void reigns now. Wenders wants to talk of presentin his nostalgic (heavenly nostalgic) film on Yasujiro Ozu.We're entering the civilization of emptiness: this is in myof Wenders' visit to Tokyo: the city that used to be Ozu's andbelongs to the Demiurge of simulation.Tokyo-ga was produced in 1983. The deep effects ofliberal economic turn on social culture were becoming evide!l!:). of the revolution Nixon had provoked rwelve years earlier whenro de-link the dollar from gold, abandoning the system ofexchange. The financial world fell into indeterminacy, whilel_liCleralisrn, imposing the hegemony of the financial cycle overh e(,onomic and social relations, brought ro every domain of existheawareness of the indeterminate, aleatory nature of reality ..relation berween sign and referent disappears: in economICthe relation berween financial sign and material referent (realidd,"cti'ion gold as the measure of financial evaluation) vanishes.and simulation: Baudrillard in America[icr1oel,ecl1:on.ic technologies make the miniaturization of circuitsand start the microelectronic revolution, whose effects weseen fully developed in the 1990s. Telematics, the new sciencemobile phones and informatics, the revolutionaryecnll1qllc to which Simon Nora and Alain Mine devoted a veryffiP()rtaJot book already in 1978, entitled The Computerization ofprepares for the explosion of the nerwork.In 1983, Jean Baudrillard wrote a text titled The Ecstasy of;omlm.'ni(:ation, for the volume The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Post­Mn,im,i"n. edited by Hal Foster and published by Bay Press."There is no longer any system of objects. My first book containsa critique of the object as obvious fact, substance, reality,use-value. There the object was taken as sign, bur as sign stillh eavy WIt . h meamng.. ))16the old world the Sign was understood as a bearer of meaning,the relation berween sign and meaning was guaranteed by the

external and objective existence of a referent. But thislogic is abandoned once we enter the domain of ge:nel:ali:zetetminacy. What guarantees the dollar's value once thegold is erased? What guarantees the value of a commodity,time of necessaty social labor can't be measured anymore?rial technologies transform the time of labor necessary togoods into an aleatory time. And what guarantees thesign once all signs transgress their codes, once the phantasltrlof the code becomes the code of phantasmagoria? Onlyantees the meaning of the monetary sign, as is demonstrateddespotic exercise of American hegemony. Deregulatiomean that sOciety is freed ftom all rules, not at all: it isimposition of monetary rule on all domains of humanmonetary rules are in fact the sign of a relationship based onviolence and military abuse.In those years the scene of realiry had been abandoned toscene of simulation. Cinema does not belong to this secondCinema belongs to the order of reproduction and expression,the order of simulation. In front of the camera there is (orbeen) a real object, a real person: the camera registered thatlight, body, those visible materials, reproducing them all onthis way conditions were created in order for the director tohimself in a purely Deleuzian and Spinozian sense: to giveamong the many infinite worlds that language can create.We enter the domain of simulacra when we move fromlogue film to the creation of synthetic images. The syntheticcan indeed be defined as a simulacrum, since it does not presu>'plany real object, any material light or protorype, but only thelighting of the digital (im)materialiry. Simulation is the ellnl111'.'referent which initiates a series of infinite semiotic replica­, without any foundation.is precisely this irresistible unfolding, this',eauerlCtrlg of things as though they had a meaning, when theygoverned only by arrificial montage and non-meaning.""replication develops language's power of simulation to itsDigital technology makes possible a process of infinite replicaofthe sign. The sign becomes a virus eating the realiry of itsRapidly, this process of de-signifYing replication of the signthe effect that Baudrillard calls the desert of the real.,"America is a giant hologram, in the sense that informationconcerning the whole is contained in each of its elements. Takethe tiniest little place in the desert, any old street in a Mid­West town, a parking lot, a Californian house, a Burger Kingor a Studebaker, and you have the whole of the US-South,North, East, or West."18concept of simulation introduces a new perspective within philodiscourse,a perspective that can be defined as disappearance.subtracted from the domain of alphabetic sequentialiry and prointothe domain of video-electronic replication, the sign?foliteraw endlessly, creating a second realiry, a synthetic domain thatup swaliowing the first world, the body, and nature.""'OnL,a, as Baudrillard sees it, is very different from the one seenDeleuze and Guattari. It is the land of extinction, where theup and embalmed corpse of realiry replaces life, and not the

country provided with infinite energy, producingendlessly reactivated.Welcome to the desert of the real.The way Baudrillard refers to schizophrenia is alsofrom the way Felix Guattari's schizoanalysis describes ittation of creativity. Baudrillard does not aSSOciatewith creative proliferation, but with terror.I am not saying this to establish who's right, thecrowd that declares the creative schizoid power Ot thebound traveler making phorographs in the silentlonger existing reaLThe point is not who's right or wrong. But it isretrace the processes occurring at the end of the lastconcepts that not only can describe, but also transfotmmean transform the world, but to transform the relationsingularities and world projections.The Baudrillard-FoucauIt debateIn the mid-1970s, the philosophical scene is cleared of itsheritage. The concept of alienation is abandoned, sincesocial practice has been turned into estrangement. Theof the productive routine has been turned into the refusaland sabotage, the loneliness of the individual at the assemblhas been transformed into subversive community andorganization. In the 1970s the bodies revolted forgettingbodies reclaimed their own spaces."The soul is the jail of the body," read a feminist signstreets of Bologna in 1977, a time when all thoughts andtions were written) screamed and exposed.years the question of subjectivity appears under a newis no longer any Subject (upokeimenos) charged withthe truth of histoty, but there are individuals meeting with;ineulariti,es. The historical (or narrative) agent is liberated fromhas no more blueprints to follow, no sCript to play.France, during the mid 1970s, a philosophical debate develinv,,,tlrtgissues left open and undefined by the collapse of thestructure and in particular the question of the formation ofsubj ect and power.debate placed lean Baudrillard on one side, and Michelaullt anLO the authors of Anti-Oedipus on the other. That debatea decisive philosophical passage.the side of Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, and also of their(among whom I humbly include myself), there has alwayscertain resistance to discuss the controversy with Baudrillard,had been one of those Parisian intellectual scuffles that it isthirty years later, I believe that it would be important tothe meaning of that debate, since today we might finditeI',m"nts that could be used for finding a new synthesis. Whatobject of the controversy?publishing his most important book, Symbolic Exchange andin 1977, Baudrillard published that same year a booklet titledFoucault. It is an attack on the theoty of power built by FoubutBaudrillard's real purpose was to critique the notion ofitself, and the molecular theoty of Deleuze and Guattari.Forget Foucault begins with an interpretation of Discipline andBaudrillard disagrees with Foucault's fundamental thesis inbook, and with his entire analysis of the genealogy of modernas repressive disciplining of corporeality.The Poisoned Soul 1151

"One could say a lot about the central thesis of thehas never been a repression of sex but on theinjunction against talking about it or vOicing it and asian to confess, to express, and to produce sex. Keptessiconly a trap and an alibi to hide assigning an entirethe sexual imperative."19Baudrillard's remarks were not directly rebuffed bymy thesis is that in some direct or indirect, explicit orFoucault later developed his theory taking these intoPerhaps Baudrillard's objections understood somethingmisunderstood the essential lesson of the "desiring"Baudrillard attacked Foucault's vision of the genealogy oforder to propose a critique of all the theories that indeveloped a social discoutse from libidinal economy andexpressivity. Thus he writes:"One can only be struck by the coincidence between thisversion of power and the new version of desire prc'po,sedDeleuze and Lyotard: but there, instead of a lack ortion, one finds the deployment and the positive disserninlaticof flows and intensities [ . .. J. Micro-desire (that of power)micro-politics (that of desire) literally mergemechanical confines: all that one has to do is minia.tUl:ize."":Is there any equivocation in Baudrillatd's critique of des:irirlgtiYes, there might be: Baudrillard's vision still refers to desire aswhile we have seen that desire needs to be understood as aYet this equivocatioll has its reasons, since this C'U"VC,'"in fact inscribed in Deleuze's and Guattari's work, andand Foucault's: most of all, this ambiguity is present in theculture that in those yeatS dominated the desiring discourse into develop a practical critique of late-modern, late-industrialstructures.today we ate at the end of that form of power, now we havea new era and a new dimension. Capitalism is becomingthe acceleration that desire had imposed on social expressivityincorporated by the capitalistic machine when it became a,t_rrtecrLani,c, digital machine.shift from mechanical to digital, from reproducible to simisthe shift from the limited to the viral dimension of power.Anti-Oedipus preached acceleration as an escape from capital's"Cours camarade, ie vieux monde est derriere tot21-we screamedThat was true as long as capital's velocity was the mechanoneof the assembly lines, railways and the printing press. Butmicroelectronic technologies equip capital with absolutein the real time of simulation, then acceleration becomesdomain of hyper-exploitation.This is not, let's state it clearly, a merely metaphotic discourse.about workers' struggles. As long as they happened in thefactOry, the acceleration in workers communication andplaced the ownet in a defensive position and was able tostructures of control. Slogans circulated rapidly amongin their factories and neighborhoods, allowing theseto become generalized.Microelectronic technologies have completely reversed this sitcapitalconquers the capacity for rapid deterritorialization,,a",Jetring production all over the globe, while the timing ofotganizations remains localized and slow as compared toone of capitalist globalization.152 I The Soul at WorkThe Poisoned Soul / 153

Baudrillard antlc'pates this trend with his intuitionabsolute velocity knocking down every fo rm of social CO'll nlution. On this intuition Baudrillard develops his theory,in Forget Foucault (and elsewhere), but he never reoeiv"dexplicit reply. Political intentions and discursive effects areBaudrillard's intention was denounced by the desiringdissuasive, since his vision destroys the possibility of eXl,eCltin,processes of subjectivation. Baudtillard, on his part, de.nolJncecdesiring vision as an ideological function of the new,capitalist mode of production."This compulsion towards liquidity, flow, and an acc:elerat.,dsituation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to theis the exact replica of the force which rules marketcapital musr circulate; gravity and any fixed point mustappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments muststop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction.is the form itself which the current realization of value takes. Iiis the form of capital, and sexuality as a catchword and ais the way it appears at the level of bodies.""Baudrillard's critique is not generous: the description of thetion in the forms of power and subjectivity is presented as ayet there is something true in his words. Within desiring th" ory, athe vast movement of thought that Ddeuze's, Guattari's andcault's books have produced, there is a rhetorical danger if it isunderstood that desire is a field and not a force.This is evident, for instance, in the empty use of the termtitude" by Negri and Hardt and many others in the last 10They speal, of the multitude as if it was a boundless positiveof liberty that cannot submit to domination in any way. Butin a booklet entitled In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities,"drilla•ea already demolished the subversive political use of theof multitude, showing its other side, that of the constitutiveof the masses."It has always been thought-this is the very ideology of ihemass me la-d· that it is the media which envelop the masses.The sectet of manipulation has been sought in a frantic semiologyof the mass media. But it has been overlooked, in ihisnaive logic of communication, that the masses are a strongermedium than all the media, that it is the formet who envelopand absotb the Iatter-ot at least there is no priority of oneover the other. The mass and the media are one single process.. hMass(age) .s t e message." 2 3the autonomous movement that had been reading passion­Deleuze's and Guattari's books since the 1970s, Baudrillatd'swas considered politically dissuasive: it seemed ro describe.sitluation without escapes, hopes for rebellion or possible ruptures.this wasn't true, and is still not true. Baudrillard did acknowlthedissuasive functioning of a civilization where events are;imlilatl,d and erased by simulation itself."Deterrence is a very peculiar form of action: it is what causessomething not to take place. It dominates the whole of our contemporaryperiod, which tends not so much to produce eventsas to cause something not to occur, while looking as though itis a historical event."24154 I The Soul at WorkThA PoisonAd Soul I 155

Moreover his theory revealed at this point an extremeof catastrophe, or rather the resource of a catastrophic"The masses [ . .. J haven't waited fo r future rev'oJultionsrheories which claim to 'liberate' them by a 'dialectical'ment. They know that there is no liberation, and that ais abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, byinto an excessive practice which is equivalent to aamortization. You want us to consume-O.K., let'salways more, and anything whatsoever; for any uselessabsurd purpose,"lSFar from sharing the cynicism spread throughout culture1980s and 1990s (the cynicism pervading the Frenchphilosophie-the New Philosophy-as well as theneoliberalism which followed the disillusion of the 1968all over Europe), Baudrillard proposes the strategy ofToday, thirty years later, it seems ro me that he was notat all.To the notion of desire Baudrillard opposes that di!;ap,pearaor rather the chain Simulation-Disappearance-Implosion.Simulation is the creation of ghosts without a Dt,est:m"nt of energy or matter. Lived experience is thus invadedpervasive proliferation of simulacra. Here we can see theof a pathology of desire, a sort of cancer reaching the veryof the libidinal experience. Libidinal energy is attacked by aof a parasitic type, as shown by the phenomenon of syn­.media pornography. "Libidinal parasites" is the formulationby Matteo Pasquinelli to define this disease in his book Animal(NAI Publishers, 2009).Anti-Oedipus postulated the idea that there is never toO muchine

The Poisoned Soul 1 159grand Rationalism'-'an innocent way of setting OUt inthinking from infinity,' which finds its most petfectiment in Spinozism."26And also:"God's absolute essence is the absolutely infinite pOwetexisting and acting; but we only assert this primary poweridentical to the essence of God/conditionally upon/anof formally or really distinct attributes. The power ofand acting is thus absolute formal essence."And there is more:"God understands and expresses himself objectively.""Yet all this talking about the infinite power of God tells usabout human expressive power, which is not infinite, orpsychological and physical energy that the human organismits disposal, which is not infinite either.presupposes instead that in any exchange there is a loss: this"o(luces entropy, a loss of otder and a dispersion of energy.hudrilllatd sees simulation as the infinite teplication of a virus thatdesiring enetgy to the point of exhaustion. A sort of semiinflationexplodes in the circuits of Out collective sensibility,."rc,dueing effects of mutation that run a pathological coutse: toosigns, too fast, and too chaotic. The sensible body is subjectedan acceleration that destroys every possibility of consciousde(:odific:ation and sensible perception.This is the objection that Baudrillard addtesses to the Anti-Oedipus.But isn't this what Deleuze and Guattari are ultimately saying inlast work? In their book on old age, written while they werethemselves, they ask what philosophy is about, and theythat philosophy is friendship, and (to use Buddhist language)the Great Compassion: it is the capacity to walk togetheralong the abyss of meaning gaping under out feet. In that last bookthe two schizo philosophers talk abour old age and schizo pain, andthe tOO qUick quickening of signs and ideas running away withoutever getting caught.The limited character of libidinal energy brings us back totheme of depression as collective phenomenon. The semioticeration and the proliferation of simulacra within the media.tizlexperience of society produce an effect of exhaustion in thetive libidinal energy, opening the way to a panic-depressivehis text on libidinal parasites, Pasquinelli raises the problemthetmodynamics of desire, formulating two different hYiPothei;e,One, inspired by the first law of thermodynamics, is the ideawithin libidinal exchange there is no loss, but a constant qu;mtiitylenergy. The other is based On the second law of th,,,rrlOdyn:unid"We require just a little order to protect us from chaos.Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself,than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, alreadyeroded by forgetfulness.""After Forget Foucault and the other texts of the mid 1970s, whereBaudrillard critiqued the theories of desire and Foucault's genealogyof power, were published, nobody responded to his objections,which seemed provocative or maybe dissuasive. Yet Baudrillard's

160 I The SOUl at WorkThA Pni.o::.nnAri :::inl JI 11 R1discourse still produced some effects, and I believe that inbook Deleuze and Guattad developed their thoughts at aimplicitly involved the meditation that Baudrillard hadI am not saying that they replied without namingeven that they were thinking of Baudrillard when theylast book. I am simply saying that Baudrillard's critiquesame direction of the shifting tones and positions that Werience reading What is Philosophy? after Anti-Oedipus.enough to say that Anti-Oedipus is a book of youth while,years later What is Philosophy? is a book of old age. It is noteither to say that one is a book of 1968 enthusiasm, anda book of the years when the barbarians had won again. It .sary to consider the conceptual shift that took place in thismuch more deeply.The entropy of libido that Pasquinelli discusses seems toin Deleuze's and Guattari's last book once, having ao'mOlott,certain Spinozian triumphalism, we can admit that libidinalis a limited resource.The disappearance (and the return) of the eventIn the mid-1970s, in the context of the radical culture, weopposite models of imagination at work. The schizo visionthat the proliferation of desire can endlessly erode all sU'uc[urecontrol. The implosive vision sees proliferation as the UU'U" UU •. de-realizing virus. Desire is only the effect of a seductionsubject is actually a hostage, a victim."The 'molecular revolution' only represents the final stage'libetation of energy' (or of proliferation of segments, etc) up.the infinitesimal boundaries of tbe field of expansion whichbeen that of our culture. The infinitesimal attempt ofsucceeding the infinite attempt of capital. The molecularsolution succeeding the molar investment of spaces andthe social. The final sparks of the explosive system, the finalattempt to still control an energy of confines, or to shrink theconfines of energy [ . . . J so as to save the principle of expansionand of liberation.""bjecthlity implodes and in its stead we find only the terror of a.tastro",he, or the catastrophe of terror. The proliferation of simuviruseshas swallowed the event. The infinite capacity of,pli,:atiion of the recombining simulator device erases the originalitythe event. What is left is suicide.Baudrillard had already been thinking about the issue of suiinhis 1976 book, where symbolic exchange was accompanieddeath."It is at least possible to find an even match to oppose thirdordersimulacra? Is there a theory or a practice which issubversive because it is more aleatory than the system itself, anindererminate subversion which would be to the order of thecode what the revolution was to the order of political economy?Can we fight DNA? Certainly not by means of the classstruggle. Perhaps simulacra of a higher logical (or illogical)order could be invented: beyond the current third order,beyond determinacy and indeterminacy. But would they stillbe simulacra? Perhaps death and death alone, the reversibilityof death, belongs to a higher order than the code.""

In those years Baudrillard talked abour the disap!,ea,.an,:eevent, eliminated by the seductive proliferation of sinnullatiolIllusion of the End, a book first published in 1992, is inallgUlta,a quote from Elias Canetti:'A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, historyno longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind su,ldenlleft reality; everything happening since then was sUpP()se

uildings, the spell of simulation also ended togethernite duplication effect whose metaphor had alreadyhis 1976 text on the Twin Towers, where they hadtowers of digital replication.The Spirit 0/ Terrorism is a text written imm"di'ltei'fmost spectacular terrorist attack in history. The wordassumes here a double meaning, a paradoxical chilta,cte:r,the spectacle is precisely the collapse of all spectacle, andsion provokes an explosion. Baudrillard's purpose incelebrate the return of the event beyond the cages of"With the attacks on the World Trade Center in Newmight even be said to have befote us the absolute'mother' of all events, the pure event uniting withinthe events that have never taken place."34The immense concenttation of decision-making powerplay by semiocapitalism already lends itself to catastJcophiciThat intolerable suicidal action unveiled the vanity ofnite srrength, confronting it with an form of escape rhatto zero, to its ashes.Death, suicide more precisely, is the unforeseeablerestores the chain of events. Since thar day suicide became;as the leading actor on the scene of third millenniummatter what other perspective we might decide to adopt totwentieth-first century history-capitalist dogma, tal.,a"c,despair-suicide is the truth hidden by official discourses,the rhetoric of unlimited growth and the rhetoric ofnational fundamentalism.day twelve young Arabs raised hell in Manhattan, immothemselvesin their airliners and launching the firstwar, suicide became the leading actor of world history.is not a new form of radical protest. In 1904, for instance,landed in Bali to subject the island to their colonialThe Hindu population, proud of its own diversiry in thefiercely opposed the Dutch invasion. Mter severalhad occurred, the Dutch were ready to attack Denpassarpalace. All dressed in white, the raja and his court movedthe Dutch until they were very close to theit invaders. All,follD'¥ing the king took out their swords and drove them intoenacting a ritual suicide that in Balinese language ispuputan. More than nine hundred men fell to the groundthe astonished eyes of the Dutch. The event's effect was trauforthe Dutch people's consciousness, beginning the processin the colonial polices of that country.was at the end of World War II that Japanese generals decidedsuicide as an atm of destruction and not simply as an ethicalTo resist the Americans, who by then were ptevailing, theyyoung aviation officers to launch themselves against thenavy. The word "kamikaze," meaning "divine wind,"synonymous with suicidal destructive fury. In her bookDiaries: Reflections o/Japanese Student Soldiers (Chicago,of Chicago Press, 2006), the Japanese researcher EmikolIernf'V proves that the young pilots were not at all enthuaboutthe destiny that had been assigned to them. ByIbHshing their letters, the author shows that in general the\Illilkazes were not consenting, and that the higher levels of164 I The Soul at WorkThe POisoned Soul I 165

hierarchy (none of whom was immolated) forced themwirh airplanes that only had enough fuel to reach theenemy ship), but nor ro return.What is the difference between those ordering athose ordering a regular bombing, between rhe sn.elkh sdesperare youths to blow themselves up in the middle ofand the U.S. general ordering airplane pilots to bombneighborhood?Aggressive suicide, therefore, is not a new ph,enOltlenlon,roday's context it is terribly more disturbing, not onlybody who is determined and prepared enough could haveinstruments of destruction and extermination, but alsomurderous suicide is no longer a rare marginal pblenOltlenlOnibecome a spreading manifestation of contemporary de"pair. ,origin of murderous suicides, as of any other form ofviolence, there is no political reason, or a su·at" gi.o-nnili:tatyition, but a form of pain that affects not only Islamicepidemic of unhappiness infecting the world in the epochtalism's triumph has generated a wave of aggressive suicide 'area of the globe.Advertising reasserts at every street corner, at everyday and night, the freedom of infinite consumption, theproperry and of vicrory through competition. In the 1990s,mobilized an immense intellectual, creative, and ps;,cb.o16energy in order ro start the valorization process of theintellectual network. But by imposing an unlimitedexploitation on the human mind, the productive accelerationthe conditions for an extraordinary psychological"Prozac culture" was another name for the emerging new:H'lUcire

10B / ThB So, II At WorkThe Poisoned Soul / 1 69minds on the same level. I am simply saying thatconvergent pathologies, two differentunbearable pain affecting both the hyper-stimulated anditive psychologies of those who see themselves as winners,rancorous ones of the humiliated.By reducing murderous suicide to political categories,only grasp its final manifestations, nOt its source. Thepain stemming from humiliation, despair, loss of hope inand a feeling of inadequacy and loneliness, and not theintentions of jihad, produces suicides. These feelingsonly to Chechnyan women whose husbands andkilled by Russian soldiers, nor do they belong only to Arabsubjected to Western violence as to an intolerableThese feelings of loneliness and loss of meaning areevery place where the triumph of capitalism has sut)iUl,ar,,life and emotions to the hellish rhythms of automated colnpetThe mass production of unhappiness is the topic of ourThe talk of the day is the extraordinary success of the Chtim:se',italist economy; meanwhile in 2007 rhe Central CommitteeCommunist Party had to deal with wide-spreadingChina's countryside.Until when will we be able to contain this phenomenon?when can we avoid that the rage and despair of one billionpeople will come and spoil the party of the three hundredintegrated ones? Suicidal terrorism is only one chapter intemporary epidemic, although the most explosive and "llgU.HIIt might happen in one's own tiny isolated room, or in theof a crowd at a subway station: suicide is not a response tocal motivations, but to pain, unhappiness and despair. Evercapital's triumph started eroding every domain of life andinvaded by competition, velocity and aggressiveness,tappin.ess has been spreading everywhere like a forest fire, andin areas dominated by Islamism. Now suicide is tendingthe first cause of death among youth everywhere. A fewago newspapers informed the public that there are traces ofin London's tap warer: 24 million British citizens consume2007 the newspaper China Today reported that despite thelI e'OO[IOn11C boom, two hundred thousand people commit suieveryyear, and the numbers are growing. In Japan there is a(karosht) referring to the kind of overwork able to push peotocommit suicide. East Japan Railways, one among rheJapanese railway companies, has taken the decision tobig mirrors all along Tokyo station platforms. The idea is todesperate people on the verge of suicide reconsider as they seereflected image.That doesn't seem like the best therapy.Is there any remedy to the wave of psychopathologies that seemshave submerged the world while smiling faces promise safety,warmth and success from advertising signboards? It may besocial issues can no longer receive answers from politics, andto be referred to psychotherapy. Perhaps the answer is that it isto slow down, finally giving up economistic fanaticism and511e,otiv'Cly rethink the true meaning of the word "wealth." Wealthnot mean a person who owns a lot, but refers to someone whoenough time to enjoy what nature and human collaborarionput within evetyone's reach. If the great majority of peopleunderstand this basic notion, if they could be liberated fromcompetitive illusion that is impoverishing evetybody's life, thefo undations of capitalism would Start to crumble.

Pathogenic alterityIn his film Persona, Bergman treats the theme of alterityto existentialist categories: as malaise, but also as aestrangement and suspension of the communicative ""CU Il:S. 'beth Vogler is an actress who during a theater pe.rtorman,:.;talking completely, as if affected by a sudden illness, orDoctors visit her and their medical reports say that she'shealthy both physically and mentally. Yet Elisabeth keeps oncomplete silence. She's taken to a clinic, where Alma, ancomperent, brilliant and chatty nurse, takes care of her.women develop an intense relationship. In order to cotuplet.therapy, the nurse accompanies Elisabeth to a house by thetwo women start getting lost in each other, exchanging theirAlma speaks a lot, telling of experiences from her ser'tinlentaiJand past, while Elisabeth listens to her, apparently involved,her silence.In Latin the word persona refers to the "mask": Jungconsidering it the artificial personality adopted by lHtllVI.UU:consciously or unconsciously, even in contrast with theircharacters, in order to protect and defend themselves,the world that surrounds them in order ro adapt to it.Bergman sees the question of alterity through the schjzophI:e,figure of the split self, or of double personality. Thereforedefined through a game of isolation and enclosure. It is theof a repressive society that pushes for a compulsive delhni.tiohindividual masks. In the cultural context where Bergmanhis film, alienation is rhe metaphor for the relation betweenand soul: a repressive disappeatance of the soul.Forry years later, in a totally different context, Kim Ki Duka film that proposed the question of alterity as the game ofdentiti'''' proliferation and expressive excess. Time is the title of hisand it tells the story of changing one's physical mask thanksthe intervention of aesthetic surgery.Bergman's title Persona refers to a meditation on the identifYingKim Ki Duk works instead around the concept of multiandthe many masks that we can assume: that is to say theand proliferating mask. In the age of aestheticrhe multiplicity of masks does not only represent the postobe at once different agents of enunciation, but referspecitically to the opportunity of assuming different faces, changingphysical aspect, the place and modality of the enunciation.Time begins in front of the door of an Aesthetic Surgery Clinic,."'WhICh there are many in South Korea. Kim Ki Duk's film tells usstoty of a man and a woman. They make love and she tells himfear of being abandoned because he will end up falling in loveanother woman-I need to become another, in order for youfall in love with me: make love to me as if I were somebody else,me what you feel and think. Finally, obsessed by this thought,she decides to become another woman. She goes and sees a surgeon,asking him to change her face and features, so that she becomesunrecognizable. The surgeon advises her that her features are soand delicate that she has no reason to undergo surgety. Butshe insists; apparently in South Korea, sooner or later half of thewomen request plastic surgety to change their features. Meanwhile,the man is desperate because of the disappearance of his beloved. Helooks for her without success and finally thinks she will never comeback to him, until he meets another woman; we know she is hislover, who has become another woman. She seduces him, but the170 I The Soul at WorkTti8 PoisonecJ Soul I 171

young man's heart belongs to the other one, who hasAt this point she tells him the truth and he has aAs a revenge, the man goes to the same surgeon whofriend untecognizable, and he asks for the same tre'ltmeinobody will be able to recognize him anymore.Deep identity and the exterior physical aspect,and most of all the theme of alterity are the COloCeptula!this film. Kim Ki Duk's language is extremelyvery powerful, dramatic and emotionally in·vol.vh""scenes, as when the woman goes back to the A,,,tlletiicClinic, desperate for having become someone else,mask that is now her own face, transformed by the 'Ulcge()nis the infinite game of alterity: this is the startingdrama we've been told here."I want to be another since desire is a constant >!"IlU"gf.'object to another."Yet we can't underestimate the theme of simulation:surgery makes possible a shifting of the object, since it isproducing forms that are not copies of a prototype, butimages that have become embodied. Desire and SInlUllatlOplay their last, most desperate game since it takes place inbody where the soul has been captured.The virtually infinite multiplication of the object ofessential character of the pathologies of our times. It is noabsence, or repression, or the ptohibition of touchingThe Other proliferates as an unteachable and unlimitedconsumption, as the virtual substitute of a no longer pOlssib,lealterity. The Other becomes pornography, since it is alwaysto enjoyment as it becomes the object of an infiniteexhausts the limited libidinal energy of real human beings.century antiauthoritarian theories were directly or indiinfluencedby Freud's notion of repression, on which hehis Civilization and Its Discontents.is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization isup upon a renunciation of instinct) how much it presuppreciselythe non-satisfaction (by suppression ) repressionsome other means?) of powerful instincts. This 'culturaldominates the large fields of social relationships:,beltwe,en human beings. As we already know, it is the cause of .hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle.""to Freud, repression is an essential and constitutive aspectrelations. In the mid-twentieth century, between the 1930s1960s, European critical theories analyzed the relationbetween the anthropologic dimension of alienation and thedimension of liberation. Sanre's vision, as exposed in hisof Dialectical Reason (1964), is directly influenced bytheories, and recognizes the anthropologically constitutive,th,,,elore unavoidable, character of alienation. On the contrary,theory in its hisroricist and dialectic variants considersa historically determined phenomenon that can be overthroughthe abolition of capitalist social relations.In his 1929 essay, Freud anticipates this debate, criticizing theof dialectics:"The communists believe that they have found the path todelivetance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly172/ The Soul at Work1118 Poisoned Soul 1173

174 I The Soul at WorkThe Poisonee) Soul / 175good and is well-disposed to his neighbor; but theof private property has corrupted his nature [. .. J. Ifproperty were abolished, all wealth held in conlrnc>n,5evetyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it,hostility would disappear among men [ ... J. I have nowith any economic criticism of the communist system; Inot enquire into whether the abolition of private prt)pe.ttjexpedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognizepsychological premises on which the system is baseduntenable illusion."36According to Freud modern capitalism, as every civilfounded on a necessary repression of individual libido andlimating organization of the collective libido. This intuitionexpressed in many different ways in 20th-century thought.In the context of Freudian psychoanalysis, our "diiscclntelconstitutive and inevitable, and psychoanalytic theory offersthrough language and anamnesis, the neurotic forms that itprovoke. The philosophical culture of existentialistshares Freud's firm belief that constitutive alienation is unav(lid,and that libidinal drives are repressed.On the contrary, in the context of Marxist and antiallthtarian theories, repression needs to be considered as adetermined form that social action can eliminate byproductive and desiring energies already belonging to themovement of society.In both of these philosophic scenes however, the COtlCe])t.repression plays a fundamental role, since it explains thepathologies dealt with by psychoanalytic theory whilesame time elucidating the capitalistic social contradiction,ishm"n[ revolutionary movements want to make possible into overcome exploitation and alienation itself.is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization isup upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presuppreciselythe non-satisfuction (by suppression, repressionor some other means?) of powerful instincts." [FreudJ1960s and 1970s the concept of repression was left in theitk1:rolllla of political discourse. The political influence of desireemphasized in opposition to repressive mechanisms, but thisof thinking often ended up becoming a conceptual and polititrap.As for instance in 1977 Italy: after the wave of arreststhe February and March insurrections, the movementto call a September meeting in Bologna on the question of,p,,:ssi,)n. This was a conceptual mistake: choosing repression asmajor topic of discussion, we entered the narrative machine oflosing our capacity of imagining new forms of life, asymwithrespect to power and therefore independent from it.(",,, tile end of the twentieth century, the entire question of rep resseemsto vanish and relinquish the social scene. The dominantpattlO/C)gil" of our times are no longer neurotic, determined by a!'p""SiC)ll of libido, but rather schizo-pathologies, produced by theexpre,,;iv( explosion of the just do it.Stnlcture and desireantiaurhoritarian theories of the 1970s emerge from aFreudian conceprual domain even if they expand and overturn its

historical horizons, In Eros and CtZVzh'/'e time,' I' messZzatzonof the liberation of 'colle'Vl a,rq'sepresses'tec hcrlvenology'seros 'and knowl e d ge ' stheir full developmentpotentialitiesbut by. ' Cfltlca " subJectivi lprecisely by tymaking possible the fullandexprpr o d'Uctlve 'eSSlOnpotentialities ' th us 'fi ullcreating threalizationeof the pleasurecOlodi'tiollprinciple,The analysis of ,modern sOciety isdesCnptlOn of discipli nary InStruments 'tions andmod I'the public d' ,e 109 social. .lSCourse In apublrcatlOn ofrepressive wFoucault'say,1979 'dsemmarsevoted to(parti I"the Ib' h fb' , , cu at y1ft 0 ,opolmcs") hasofforcedFoucault'sus totheory frommovere presslve ' d"IOpO meal,sclpline tocontrolth edevices, Yet in his wor kso f modd ermty 'evoted to th e(specifically ' n M. dZ. , ,1 a ness andCmtc, DtsciplineCivilizatioandn,A Unts 'h) , 1ll ' h' IS ownwithinwaytheF IdomainOUcauoftth e "still,repressive ' " paradigm,Despite their open abandonment ofthethe F reudlan 'Anti-Oedipus, Deleuz e andomailld G uattan 'falso remain.0, problems h'delimited byhFreud ' ':'It n t es 1929 essa y , ,dzscontents, Desire is theCtVt/tzatzond nvmg "rorce cof thesociety andmovementindividualbothexpcnences, ' yet desirin g . .constantly withcreativitythe rehas topresslve ' warpmachineacesthatm evetycapitalisticcorner of existence and the ima ',Th e conceptgmatlon,0 f desire"cannot be flattenedrepressive"OUt 'k'1010ad , 0 n there,'dinttofthcontraty, indesire isAnti-Oedi iUSopposedtheto thatconceptof lack. The field 0 f Itical auphilosophy,producedon wh' IC h twentleth '(century p I" mis)-fortunes:Oltlcs b 'Iit is theUI tfield of d epen dL aceney,k' IS aand notspecificofproductaUtonlolI'Yof the economic regime , of re I" 19lOUSb' 1"I 'domination. Processes of erotic and political subjectivabefounded on lack, but on desire as creation,this point of view, Deleuze and Guattari let us undetstandrep,ression is nothing but a projection of desire, Desire is not theifestatiion of a structure but has the creative power to build astructures. Desire can stiffen structures, transforming them3oi)sessi1!e refrains, Desire sets traps for itself.in the analytical frameworks deriving from Foucault'sand Deleuze's and Guattarfs creationism prevails a visionas force, as the reemergence of repressed desirethe repressive social sublimation: an anti-repressive, or ratherexpressive vision.The relation between structure and desire is the turning pointGuattari's schizoanalytic theory, leading him outside of Lacanian?re'Idis;m"s influence, Desire cannot be understood through strucasa possible variant depending on invariable mathematicalCreative desire produces infinite structures, and amongthem even those functioning as apparatuses of tepression,in otder to really exit the Freudian framework, we need towait fo r Baudrillard, whose theories looked dissuasive to us inthose years, Jean Baudrillard draws a different landscape: in hisworks of the early 1970s (The System of Objects, The ConsumerSociety, "Requiem for the Media" and finally Forget Foucault)Baudrillard maintains that desire is the driving force of capital'sdevelopment and that the ideology of liberation corresponds tothe full domination of the commodity: the new imaginary dimensionis not repression, but simulation, proliferation of simulacra,seduction, Expressive excess is for Baudrillatd the essential core ofan overdose of reality,176/ The Sou! at Work

Thp. PnisnnAri Soul /179"The real is growing like the desert [ . . . J Illusion, dreams,madness and drugs, but also artifice and MUlUlacr'unl _tfwere realiry's natural predators. They have all lostthough struck down by some dark, incurable malady.""Baudrillard foresees the tendency that would becomethe next decades: in his analysis, simulation modifies thebetween subject and object, forcing the subject to accepttern position of the seduced. The active parry is not thethe object. Consequentially, the entire field of problemsalienation, repression, and discontent. In his latest yearsmuch quoted work on disciplinary societies and sociery ofDeleuze does seem to question Foucault's notion of dHlci[llinthe different theoretical architectures descending from it:to go in the direction that Baudrillard had followed since1970s. I am not interested in comparing the theory ofwith the theory of desire, even if one day this COJrnpansonneed to be developed. I am interested in the pSJ1ch.opath.olscene emerging in the years of passage from late industrialto semio-capitalism, that is to say a form of capitalismimmaterial labor and the explosion of the Infosphere.Overproduction is an immanent character of capitalisticduction, since the production of goods never correspondslogic of human beings' concrete needs, but to the abstractthe production of value. Yet in the domain of Sernitlcapir:alismspecific overproduction that occurs is a semiotic one: anexcess of signs circulating in the Infosphere. Individual andtive attention is saturated.With time, Baudrillard's intuition proved its relevance.dominant pathology of the future will not be produced by repr'essitinstead by the injunction to express, which will become aner:.m:ea obligation.we deal with the present malaise affecting the first connective:ner'atll)n, we are not in the conceptual domain described by FreudCivilization and Its Discontents. Freud's vision places repressionorigin of pathology: something is hidden from us, suppressedrepressed. Something is forbidden.Today it seems evident that seclusion is no longer at the originf pltth,ole'gy, but rather hyper-vision, the excess of visibiliry accomtheexplosion of Infosphere: the excess of info-nervousNot repression, but hyper-expressivity is the technologicalanthropological context framing our understanding ofpsychopathologies: ADD, dyslexia, panic. These patholoreferto a different way of elaborating the informationalyet they manifest themselves through pain, discomfort andI'd like to state here--even if this may seem superfluous-thatdiscourse has nothing to do with the reactionary and bigotedpre:tching about the bad results of permissive attitudes, and howthe repression of the good old days was both for the intelandfor social mores.We have seen then, how the dominant social psychopathology,id"nti:hed as neurosis and described as a consequence of repressiontoday needs to be described as a psychosis associated withdimension of action and an excess of energy and information.In his schizoanalytic work, Guattari focused on the possibiliry.v" cucmHH the relation between neurosis and psychosis, beginningthe methodological and cognitive role of schizophrenia. This

new definition had an extremely powerful political effect,semiotics of schizophreniawith the explosion of the neurotic limits that caj)i"diSimimposed on expression by forcing activity within the reF'ressiv,,]oflabor and subjugating desire ro disciplinary fo rmsBur the very schizomorphic pressure of the social m,)ve:m',nt.the expressive explosion of the social led to a me:tarno,rph.&,schizometamorphosis) of social languages, productivefinally of capitalist exploitation.The psychopathologies now spreading in the dailyfirst generations of the connective era cannot be unClerst')o

"The peculiarity of the schizophrenic is not thatmetaphors, but that he uses unlabeled metaphors.""In the universe of digital simulation the metaphor and theless and less distinct: the thing becomes metaphor and the m"tar>hthing. Representation teplaces life, and life tepresentation.flows and the circulation of goods overlap their codes, b«;onlinlpart of that same constellation defined by Baudrillatd asreal." Therefore the schizophrenic register becomes the"Fast delivery rates intimidate listeners [,. . J. There is evidencethat globalization has resulted in increased delivery tempos inareas of the world where Western broadcasting styles havereplaced traditional authoritative styles. In the former SovietUnion, fo r example, delivery as measured in syllables persecond has nearly doubled since the fall of communism fromthree to about six syllables per second (Robin, 1991). Casualcomparisons for news broadcasts in places such as the MiddleEast and China lead to similar conclusions.""interpretative code. The collective cognitive system loses itscompetence, which consisted in being able to distinguish thefalse value of enunciations sequentially presented to its more orconscious attention. In the proliferating universe of fastinterpretation occurs according to spirals of associations andnections without signification, and no longer accordingsequential lines.In an essay entitled "Learner-Based Listening and Techtlol,ogi,caAuthenticity," Richard Robin, a researcher at the George Washi'ngt,olUniversity, studies the effects produced in listening co>mp'ret,ensiotby an acceleration in vocal emission. Robin founds his researchthe calculation of how many syllables per second are uttered bytransmitter. The more accelerated the emission, the more syl!lablesare pronounced, the least successful is the lisrening coJmr>reiilettsitlnThe faster the emission, the less time is left for the listener'selaboration of the message. Emission's velocity and the quantitysemiotic impulses sent in a time unit are a function of theavailable to the receiver for elaborating consciously.According to Robin:Robin's remarks have stunningly interesting implications, helping usunderstand the passage from a form of authoritarian power of a'ersuasive" kind (as was the case of twentieth century totalitarianregimes) to a form of biopolitical power of a "pervasive" kind (as incontemporary Info-cracy). The first is based on consent: citizensneed to understand well the reaSOns of their President, General,Fahrer, Secretary or Duce. Only one source of information is authorized.Dissident voices are censured.The infocratic regime of Semiocapital founds instead its poweron overloading: accelerating semiotic flows which let sources ofinformation proliferate until they become the white noise of theindistinguishable, of the irrelevant, of the unintelligible.This is why we repeat that if in modern sociery the vastly prevalentpathology was repression-induced neurosis, today the most widelyspread pathologies assume a psychotic, panic-driven character. Thehyper-stimulation of attention reduces me capaciry for criticalsequential interpretation, but also the time available for the emotionalelaboration of the other, of his or her body and voice, thattries to be understood without ever succeeding.182 / Tile Soul at WorkThe Poisoned Soul I 183

4The Precarious SoulDeregulation and controlBaudrillard remarks that the word liberation has beenmeaning since power stopped being fo unded on the norm,diSciplinary regularion of bodies and of social, linguisticmoral relations, that is to say since the world was 'UDrrler!ect.1generalized indeterminacy.In rhe Fordist era, the fluctuations of prices, salaries, andWere fo unded on the relation between the time of sOcially nec:essarlabor and the determination of value. Wich the introduction·es",bli.sh"d in Bretton Woods in 1944. Since then, the Ameticanecclnomy was no longer subject to the control of economic laws (ifcontrol ever existed), and only relied on fo rce.American debt could grow indefinitely, since the debtor wasstronger than the creditor. Since then, the USA has maderest of the world pay for the ramping up of their war machine,and uses its war machine to threaten the rest of the world and forceit to pay. Far from being an objective science, economics revealeditself to be a modeling of social relations, an entetprise of violentcoercion, whose task is the imposition of arbitrary tules on socialactivities: competition, maximum profit, unlimited growth.In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard had an intuitionabout the general lines of the evolution characterizing the end of themillennium:"The reality principle corresponded to a certain stage of thelaw of value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy,and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality ofthe code and simulation,"lmicro-electronic technologies, and the consequent intell',ct,oal,iza;tion of productive labor, the relationships between existing unitsmeasure and the different productive forces entered a regimeindeterminacy. The deregulation launched by Margaret 1 n'''Clleland Ronald Reagan at the beginning of the 1980s is not theof such indeterminacy, but its political inscription. N,:olibelralism .registered the end of the rule of value, and made it into annomic policy. The decision that Richard Nixon made in 1971delink the dollar from gold gave American capitalism a pivotalwithin the global economy, freeing it from the constitutionalThe entire system fell inro indeterminacy, since the correspondencesbetween referent and sign, simulation and event, value and timeof labor were no longer guaranteed. The decision that inauguratedthe end of the dollar's convertibility inaugurated an aleatoryregime of fluctuating values. The rule of convertibility was dismissedaccording to an act of political will, while in rhose same1970s, the entire technical and organizational system ruled by themechanical paradigm, started to crumble.How is value established, then, within the aleatory regime offluctuating values? Through violence, swindling and lies. Brute184Tile Precarious Soul / 185

force is legitimated as the only effective SOurce of law. Thetegime of fluctuating values coincides with the dominationcism in public discourse and in the public soul.In ordet to understand the social effects of Neoliberaltion we have to understand the psychopathogenic effectsprecariousness of social relations produces on the individualcollective soul. Beginning with the 1970s, deregulationcentral role in the ideology of power, upsetting not only thetions between the economy and society, bur also the cO(ltd'inatecritical discourse. The word deregulation is false. It looks as ifitinated in the history of anti-systemic avant-gardes tolibertarian wind into the social sphere and hetalding theevery norm and constrictive rule. In realiry, the deregulatorythat accompany the victory of monetary neo-libetalismclearing away all rules, so that only the rules of the economicnate, uncontested. The only legitimate rule is now the strictest,most violent, the most cynical, the most irrational of all the rules:law of economic jungle.In the works that Foucault devoted to the genealogy ofpower formations, the key concept was discipline, understood asmodeling of the bodies in the Fordist context. In his eatIv '"ri,rim,,,,whete he studied the fo rmation of the modern disciplinarytures-mental hospitals, clinics, prisons-Foucault built a theorymodern power that included a theory of subject formation.Now that the despotic regime of liberalist detegulation hasdeveloped itself, the discourse Foucault developed in his earlyings needs to be updated. Foucault himself tealized it, as we canin The Birth of Biopolitics, the subsequently published fotm of1979 seminar at the College de France. Here Foucault tetraces\".l'olr

1 RR I Th;:::. :::'()I Ii ::It WmkTile Precarious Soul / 189enterprise principle to every space of human relations. l'rivatiza'tioland the fact that every fragment of the social sphere was reducedi;the entrepreneurial model freed economic dynamics from anybe they political, social, ethical, juridical, unionist or en·vir,onJme.ntalIn prior decades, these ties were able to shore up priYaltiZ

The Precarious Soul / 1 91economic model of supply and demand and lfiv'estln.costs-profit so as to make it a model of social relationsexistence itself, a form of telationship of the individualreduction of the idea of wealth to that of ownership. The ideawealth is separated from the pleasure of free enjoyment andto the accumulation of value.self, time, those around him, the group, and the familyThe return to the enterprise is therefore at once anpolicy or a policy of the economization of the entirefield, but at the same time a policy which presentsseeks to be a kind of Vitalpolitik with the function ofsating for what is cold, impassive, calculating, rational,mechanical in the strictly economic game of co,mF'etition,The reign of the enterprise is at once a political deregulationand an epistemic process of a new segmentation of time,tural expectations. In this sense it is a Vitalpolitik, a politicsa biopolitics.On a political leve!, the neoliberal victoty leads to thewhat Foucault defines:"a sort of economic tribunal that claims to assess go'vetnmem'action in strictly economic and market terms,"4Evety government choice, social initiative, form of culture,tion, innovation, is judged according to a unique criterion:economic competition and profitability. Evety discipline,edge, nuance of sensibility must conform to thatNeoliberalism represents an attempt to build the homo o,,'om1mian anthropological model incapable of distinguishing between 0own good and economic interest.At the origins of the liberalist vision there is a reductionhuman good (ethical and aesthetic good) to economic int,eres:t, :!leC

1 r::J? / ThA SOl Ii :::It INnrkTrie Precarious Soul / 193Ever since Fordist discipline was dissolved,themselves in a condition of apparent freedom. Nobody forcesto endure subjection and dependency. Coercion is insteadded in the technicalities of social relations, and control isthrough the voluntary yet inevitable submission to aautomatisms. In the U.S.A., the great majority of studentsobtain a loan in order to pay their courses and obtain aMeanwhile, the human machine is there, pulsating and available,like a brain-sprawl in waiting. The extension of time ismeticulously cellular: cells of productive time can be mobilized incasual and fragmentaty forms. The recombination ofthese fragments is automatically realized in the digital networks.The mobile phone makes possible the connection between theof semio-capital and the mobilization of the living labor ofdegree. The cost of tuition is so high that this loan becomes aden from which students can't free themselves for decades. Inway, the conditions for a new form of dependence are pr()du'ce(i'the lives of the new generations.The neoliberal values presented in the 1980s andvectors of independence and self-entrepreneurship, revealedselves to be manifestations of a new form of slavery producinginsecurity and most of all a psychological catastrophe. Theonce wandering and unpredictable, must now follow hlr,cti.onpaths in order to become compatible with the system of op

This idea was largely popular in cyber-culture during thehorizontal connection of networked systems gives humangence a superior power. Bur what is the principle that sernicltizes(power? And who really benefits from the empowering of thetive intelligence? In Out of Control, Kevin Kelly writes:''As very large webs penetrate the made world, we see theglimpses of what emerges from the net-machines that be(:omle .::alive, smart, and evolve-a neo-biological civilization. There isa sense in which a global mind also emerges in a networkculture. The global mind is the union of computer andnature-of telephones and human brains and more. It is avery large complexity of indeterminate shape governed byinvisible hand of its own.'"In Kelly's vision the obscure yet superior designs of the globalare manifested through automatic mechanisms of global inrera

has 'autonomic' systems, the operational processes that JUSthave to go on if the company is to sutvive [ . .. J. What has .been missing ate links between infotmation that tesemble theintetconnected neutons in the btain [ ... J You know you havebuilt an excellent digital netvous system when infotmationflows through your organization as quickly and naturally asthought in a human being and when you can use technologyto marshal and coordinate teams of people as quickly as youcan focus an individual on an issue. res business at the speedof thought.'"In the connected world, the retroactive loops of a general systenlS ;;theory is combined with the dynamic logic of biogenetics inpost-human vision of digital production. The model of bicl-into' 1;production imagined by Gates is the interface that will allowbodies to integrate with the digital circuit. Once it gets fully op,er." .. ;j:U;tive, the digital nervous system can be rapidly installed on aform of organization. Microsoft deals with products and services 'only apparently. In reality, it deals with a form of cybernetic oq(.nt

Isn't technology a factor of incredible acceleration in theprocesses that in nature were so slow, and hasn't it nowtendency to accelerate up to the point of fully manifestingwithin one or two generations? Isn)t the mutation occurringour eyes spreading from the technological level ldigirali2:atj,on;.nectivity) to the social, cultural aesthetic,physiological one? Can't we see already in action the mUltatloIl. bemotional system, desiring regimes, territorial dislocations,of attention, memorization and imagination? Aren't weto perceive a possible psychological mutation in theinduced by biotechnology?Therefore it is true that the environment has a deternlilfunction on the choices made by human minds, yet UU'''''U,l mare part of the environment. For this reason, the cOllcl!usil)nsliberalist theory elaborated from the premises of socialfollow a pseudo-logic. It is true that biology dominatesaction, but human action also determines biology. Theto understand which choices (episremic, technologic andinstinctual and aesthetic) a conscious human mind willThe modeling of me soulModern society was founded on the perspectivegovernment over a world built on a human scale. Thisment must discipline bodies, communicational ... oo.:"'language. Discipline as Foucault suggested already in hisof Madness, implies the reduction of the world to reason,at the same time irrationality is confined, segregated,and medicalized. The development of the Fordist in

perceive them. Politics is weakened, since all that ispolitically visible has no value, it is pure "spectacle": whilede is what we can see, generative algorithms areDomination therefore shifts from the domain of bodily,cal and polirical disciplining to that of logical and pSJTcholc",or logical and biogenic automatisms. Not the body butbecomes the subject of techno-social domination. Capitalistization is supported essentially by theseautomatisms, diffused and connected at a general level inrive society, so that capitalist valorization becomes moreindependent from any conscious activity and the veryof human political action.The political extinction of the working class was not anda consequence of any struggle between political forces, or theof a social elimination. Workers continue to exist, but theiraction is no longer effective in relarion to the dominantthat are actually producing general social effects. Whatversibly changed on the scene of Semiocapital is the reinshbetween the human factor (the workers) and sites of controldecision. Control is no longer exerted on a macrosocial oric level, as bodily constriction. Control is exerted at an inv'isHll,irreversible level, a level that cannot be ruled, since itthrough the creation of linguistic and operative automatismsturing the way the technosphere functions.Control over the body is no longer exerted by molarnisms of constriction, but by micro machines thatincorporated into the organism throughmass communication and the predisposition of informaticsfaces. That means that control over the body is exerted bymodeling of the soul.lioiIlforma·tics ontologydella Mirandola was a humanist and philologist who, in 1486,a text entitled Oratio de dignitate hominis. Here I am quotinghis work:"Now the highest Father, God the master-builder, had, by thelaws of his secret wisdom, fabricated this house, this worldwhich we see, a vety superb temple of divinity. He hadadorned the super-celestial region with minds. He had animatedthe celestial globes with eternal souls; he had filled witha diverse throng of animals rhe cast-off and residual parts ofthe lower world. But, with the work finished, the Artisandesired that there be someone to reckon up the reason of sucha big work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its greatness.Accordingly, now that all things had been completed [ ... J, Helastly considered creating man. But there was nothing in thearchetypes from which He could mold a new sprout, nor anythingin His storehouse which He could bestow as a heritageupon a new son, nor was there an empty judiciary seat wherethis contemplator of the universe could sit. Everything wasfilled up; all things had been laid out in the highest, the lowest,and the middle orders. But it did not belong to thepaternal powet to have failed in the final parturition [ . . . J; itdid not belong to wisdom, in a case of necessity, to have beentossed back and forth through want of a plan; it did not belongto the loving-kindness which was going to praise divine liberalityin othets to be forced to condemn itself. Finally, the bestof wotkmen decided that that to which nothing of its very owncould be given should be, in composite fashion, whatsoever200 / Hle Soul at WorkThe Precarious Soul ! 201

had belonged individually to each and every thing.He took up man, a work of indeterminate form; and,him at the midpoint of the world, He spoke to him as(We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no formthy very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feelthine own, have as thine own, possess as thine Own thethe form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A ""me'll'nature in other creatures is confined within the laws .... ,""down by Us. In conformiry with thy free judgment, inhands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds;and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself. I have placedthee at the center of the world, that from rhere thou mayestmore conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in theworld. Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal norimmortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appOinted fo rbeing honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thoumayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer.Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which arebrutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul's reasoninto the higher natures which are divine,»)8Writing his speech on human digniry at the end of the fifteenthtury, Pico inaugurated the modern horizon: the exercise ofpower is not established by any archerype, norm or necessiry, sinceCreator did not determine in any way the path that slhe needsfollow. In those same years a newly Christianized Spain eXIJelled

ThR PrACf'lriolJ8 Soul / 205"More essential than instituting rules is that man findto his abode in the truth of Being [ . . . J, Thus languageonce the house of Being and the home of human beings.because language is the home of the essence of manhistorical mankind and human beings not be at home inlanguage, so that for them language becomes a mere corrtainlfor their sundry preoccupations."IOLanguage is the house of Being, but at the same timetells us that language belongs to technique: techniquear once its privileged object and the subject that produces,ciates, programs."The fundamental event of modernity is the conquest ofworld as picture. From now on the word 'picture' means:collective image of representing production [.. . J. For theof this battle of world views, and accordingly to its meaning,humanity sets in motion, with respect to everything, theunlimited process of calculation, planning, and breeding,Science as research is the indispensable form taken by thisself-establishment in the world; it is one of the pathwaysalong which, with a speed unrecognized by those who areinvolved, modernity races towards the fulfillment of itsessence."llBut who are they? They are human beings, little by littleAeoriv"a of the authority to rule the world, and replaced by theaUl:onratJ!srtlS which penetrate the world and redefine it. Heideggerthat human beings ("those involved") cannot recognize thespeed with which modernity races towards the fulfillment of its'essence, since this fulfillment is precisely the unawareness of human' h"im!S, their dependency on automatisms. Humans are less and lessof the process that they themselves initiated. Thanks to theirfreedom, born from the distance between Being and existent, andthe ontologically unprejudiced character of existence, humanitycame to the point of realizing a technical realm installed in theempty place of Being. The empty place of Being is thus filled by theperformative power of the technosphere, and the numeric conventionis transformed into an operational device.The end of Humanism stems from the power of Humanism itselfThe last words in this quote need some attention. Mer havingthat modernity is the conquest and submission of the worldpicture finally reduced to an integrated form, Heidegger comesthe conclusion that this process takes place at a speed un.re

genesis of the present depressioncollapse of the global economy can be read as the return of the soul.perfect machine of Neoliberal ideology, based on the rationalof economic factors, is fulling to bits because it was based onflawed assumption that the soul can be reduced to mere rationality.dark side of the soul-fear, anxiety, panic and depression-hassurfaced after looming for a decade in the shadow of thetouted victory and the promised eternity of capitalism.In this short conclusion I want to consider twO differentmeanilogs of the word depression.By this word we mean a special kind of mental suffering, butthe general shape of the global crisis that is darkening the historicalhorizon of our time. This is nor Simple wordplay, this is notonly a metaphor, but the interweaving and interacting of psychologicalflows and economic processes.In the year 2000 the American market experienced the effects of anoverproduction in the Info-economical field. After the dotcomcrash, and the breakdown of big corporations like WorldCom,Enron and so on, American capitalism changed the course of its

development, and the economy of virtual production gavethe war economy. Thanks to the war, the economy restarted,cost of labor continued to fall and the growth was in fact basedthe expansion of private and public debt. The overproductiondid not go away, and finally showed up again in 2008,subprime crisis triggered the most astounding of financial cr:ash.es;;The events of economic depression and of psychic dep[(sil)lhave to be understood in the same context: they are interrelatedonly because they are feeding off each other, but also becausechoanalytic theory has something to teach social thinkets,psychotherapy may suggest very useful methodssocial transformation.Neoliberal ideology is based on the idea that an economyconceived as a balanced system of rational expectations andrational investments. But in the social space not all expectationsrational, and not all investments are "economic}) in a m:athlenlatiicalscientific sense. Desire is involved in the process, and the unlCOIcscious is speaking behind the curtains of every investment scene,any act of consumption and economic exchange.This is why the supposedly perfect balance of the marketbecome a catastrophic mess.Euphoria, competition, and exuberance were all involved indynamics of the bull market years. Panic and depressiondenied, but they were always at work. Now they are te-surfacingdistutbing the normal flow of capitalist valorization.Semiocapitalism, the ptoduction and exchange of sernicltimatters, has always exploited the soul as both productive forcemarket place. But the soul is much more unptedictable thanmuscular workforce which was at work in the assembly line.In the years of the Prozac economy the soul was happy to beexploited. But this could not last forever. "Soul troubles" firstappeared in the last year of the dotcom decade, when a technoapocalypsewas announced undet the name of Millennium bug. Thesocial imagination was so full of apocalyptic expectations that themyth of a global techno-crash created a thrilling wave all around theworld. Nothing happened on Millennium night, but the globalpsyche teetered for a moment on the brink of the abyss.In those days, Alan Gteenspan was talking of irrational exuberance,in order to pinpoint the dangerous effects of emotional disturbancesin the field of the financial markets. But these disturbances were notan accident, a contingent temporary phenomenon: they were theeffect of the hyper-exploitation of our psychological energy: theywere collateral damage, the unavoidable consequence of the soul atwork. In reality, it is impossible to avoid the spreading of emotionaliry,it is impossible to avoid the effects of psychopathologieswhen the nervous energies of the cognitarian work force are submittedto unremitting info-stimulation.The fear of a depression materialized in the spring of 2000,when the virtual economy suddenly was jeopardized by the plungetaken by the high-tech stock market. The dotcom bubble burst andthe overall economy was so deeply shocked that rumors of depressionstarted to spread all around the world.But how do you treat a depression?Would you try to heal it with amphetamines, with a shocktherapyof stimulating psychotropic medicines? Only a foolishdoctor would do this, but unfortunately such a charactet reallyhappened to sit in the Oval Office of the White House, and anamphetamine therapy was ptescribed by George W Bush in the208 / 1he Soul at WorkConclusion I 209

form of war and tax reductions for the wealthy. Bush issuedinvitation to go shopping, and actually facilitated an unpt

212/ Tile Soul at WorkConclusion / 213Chaos (i.e. a degree of complexity which is beyond the dUlll tyO!human understanding) now rules the world. Chaos means awhich is too complex to be reduced to our current ;'.' dUlgn lS 'ljunderstanding. The capitalist paradigm can no longer be theversal rule of human activity.We should not look at the current recession only from annomic point of view. We must see it as an anthropological lurmr,gpoint that is going to change the distribution of world reSOUircesand of world power. The model based on growth has beeninteriorized, since it pervaded daily life, perception, needs,consumption styles. But growth is over and will never be back,only because people will never be able to pay for the debtmula ted duting the past three decades, but also becausephysical planetary resources are close to exhaustion and thebrain is on the verge of collapse.Catastrophe and morphogenesisThe process underway cannot be defined as a crisis. Crisis meansdestructuration and restructuration of an organism whichnonetheless able to keep its functional structure. I don't thinkwe will see any re-adjustment of the capitalist global structure.have entered a major process of catastrophic morphogenesis.capitalist paradigm, based On the connection between revenuework performance is unable to frame (semiotically and socially)present configuration of ilie general intellect.In the 1930s the opportunity for a New Deal tested onavailability of physical resources and in the possibility ofincreasin,gindividual demand and consumption. All that is over. The planetrunning out of natural resources and the world is heading tmvards.::an environmental catastrophe. The present economic dOwnturn andthe fall in oil prices ate feeding the depletion and exhaustion ofplanetary resources.At the same time we cannot predict any boom in individualconsumption, at least in the Western societies. So it is simply non­. sensical to expect an end to this crisis, or a new policy of fullemployment. Thete will be no full employment in the future.The crash in the global economy is not only an effect of thebursting of the financial bubble. It is also and primarily an effect ofme bursting of the work bubble. We have been working too muchduring the last five centuries, this is the simple truth. Working so muchhas implied an abandonment of vital social functions and a commodificationoflanguage, affections, teaching, therapy and self-cate.Society does not need more work, more jobs, more competition.On the contrary: we need a massive reduction in work-time, aprodigious liberation of life from the social factoty, in order toreweave the fabric of the social relation. Ending the connectionbetween work and revenue will enable a huge release of energy forsocial tasks that can no longer be conceived as a part of the economyand should once again become forms of life.As demand shrinks and factories close, people suffer from a lackof money and cannot buy what is needed for everyday life. This is avicious circle that the economists know very well but are completelyunable to break, because it is the double bind iliat the economy isdoomed to feed. The double bind of over-production cannot besolved by economic means, but only by an anthropological shift,by rhe abandonment of the economic framework of income inexchange for work. We have simultaneously an excess of value anda shrinking of demand. A redistribution of wealth is urgendy needed.The idea that income should be the reward for a performance is a

dogma we must absolutely get rid of. Every person has thereceive the amount of money that is needed for survival. Andhas nothing to do with this.Wages are not a natural given, but the product of acultural modeling of the social sphere: linking survival anddination to the process of exploitation was a necessity ofgrowth. Now we need to allow people to release their knowled.1?!intelligence, affects. This is today's wealth, not compulsivelabout. Until the majoriry of mankind is free from the conn,ectiiobetween income and work, misery and war will be the normsocial relationship.How to heal a depression?Although they seldom, if ever, used the "D" word, Felix Gllattaiand Gilles Deleuze say very interesting things on the subject inlast books, Chaosmosis, and What is philosophy? In the final chapterof What is philosophy? they speak of Chaos. Chaos, in theithas very much to do with the acceleration of the semiospherethe thickening of the info-crust. The acceletation of the sm:ro,lUc!Sing world of signs, symbols and info-stimulation is pnJdllcillg Ipat.ic,;as I have already said in the ptevious parts of this book. D"pt,essi6n.is the deactivation of desite after a panicked acceleration. Whenare no longer able to undetstand the flow of information stimuJar:;ing YOut brain, you tend to desert the field of COJmnlUllic:ltiC)n;.disabling any intellectual and psychological response. Let's goto a quote that we have already used:"Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself,than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, alreadyeroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we nolonger master. »,We should not see depression as a mere pathology, but also as a formof knowledge. James Hillman says that depression is a condirion inwhich the mind faces the knowledge of impermanence and death.Suffering, imperfection, seniliry, decomposition: this is the truththat you can see from a depressive point of view.In the introduction to What is philosophy? Ddeuze and Guattarispeak of friendship. They suggest that friendship is the way to overcomedepression, because friendship means sharing a sense, sharinga view and a common rhythm: a common reftain (ritournelle) inGuattari's parlance.In Chaosmosis Guattari speaks of the "heterogenetic comptehensionof subjectivity" :"Daniel Stern, in The Interpersonal World of the Infant, hasnotably explored the pre-verbal subjective formations ofinfants. He shows that there are not at all a matter of 'stages'in the Fteudian sense, but of levels of subjectivation whichmaintain themselves in parallel through life. He thus rejectsthe overrated psychogenesis of Freudian complexes, whichhave been presented as the structural 'Universals' of subjectivity.Furthermore he emphasizes the inhetently trans-subjectivecharacter of an infant's early experiences:J2The singularity of psychogenesis is central in Guattari's schizoanalyticvision. This implies also the singularity of thetherapeutic process.214/ Tile Soul at WorkConclusion I 215

"It's not simply a matter of remodeling a patient's subjectivity_as it existed before a psychotic crisis-but of a ptOduction suigenetis ... these complexes actually offet people diverse possibilitiesfor recomposing their existential corporeality, to getout of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain way to resingularizethemselves."3These few lines must be read, in my opinion, not only as achotherapeutic manifesto but also as a political one.The goal of schizoanalysis is not, in Guattati's wotds, to teinstallthe universal norm in the patient's behavior, but to sin.gu.lati";him/her, to help him/her becoming conscious of his or herence, to give him/her the ability to be in good stead with hisdifferent and his actual possibilities.When dealing wirh a depression the ptoblem is not to bringdepressed person back to normality, to reintegrate behavior inuniversal standards of normal social language. The goal is to ch'lllg.e 'the focus of his/her depressive attention, to re-focalize, to del:efl'itorializethe mind and the expressive flow. Depression is based onhardening of one's existential refrain, on its obsessive repetition. Thedepressed person is unable to go out, to leave the repetitive cp',,'n . ...and s/he keeps going back into the labyrinth.The goal of the schizoanalyst is to give him/her the possibilityof seeing other landscapes, to change focus, to open new pathsimagination.I see a similarity between this schizoanalytic wisdom and theKuhnian concept of paradigmatic shift which needs to occurscientific knowledge is taken inside a conundrum. In The Structure ja/Scientific Revolutions (1962) Kuhn defines a paradigm as "a constellationof beliefs shared by a group of people." A paradigm maytherefore be seen as a model which gives way to the understandingof a certain set of realities. A scientific revolution in Kuhn's vision isthe creation of a new model which firs the changing reality betterthan the previous epistemic models.The word "episteme" in the Greek language means to stand infront of something: the epistemic paradigm is a model that allowsus to face reality. A paradigm is a bridge which gives friends theability to traverse the abyss of non-being.Overcoming depression implies some simple steps: the deterritorializationof the obsessive refrain, the re-focalization and change ofthe landscape of desire, but also the creation of a new constellationof shared beliefs, the common perception of a new psychologicalenvironment and the construction of a new model of relationship.Deleuze and Guattari say that philosophy is the discipline thatinvolves creating concepts. In the same way, they argue that schizoanalysisis the discipline that involves creating percepts and affectsthrough the deterritorialization of obsessive frameworks.In the current situation, the schizoanalytic method should beapplied as political therapy: the Bipolar Economy is falling into adeep depression. What happened during the first decade of the centurycan be described in psychopathological terms, in terms of panicand depression. Panic happens when things start swirling aroundtoo quickly, when we can no longer grasp their meaning, their economicvalue in the competitive world of capitalist exchange. Panichappens when the speed and complexity of the surrounding flow ofinformation exceed the ability of the social brain to decode and predict.In this case desire withdraws its investments, and thiswithdrawal gives way to depression.Here we are, after the subprime crack and the following globalcollapse.216/ Tile Soul at WorkConclusion / 217

Now what?The economic collapse cannot be solved with the tools ofnomic thought, because economic conceptualization is in factproblem and not the solution.The strict correlation between income and labot, the tartatic.pursuit of growth, the dogmas of compatibility and cOlmpetiltiollSthese are the pathogenic features that our social culture must getof, if we want to come out of our depression. In the nc'mlin.nt)political discoutse, the overcoming of a depression means re';ta':tirtg.'the dynamics of growrh and consumption: this is what theyis possible, one that is not based on possession, but on enjoyment.I'm not thinking of an ascetic turn in the collective perception ofwealth. I think that sensual pleasure will always be the foundationof well-being. But what is pleasure? The disciplinary culture ofmodernity has equated pleasure and possessing. Economic thinkinghas created scarcity and has privatized social need, in order to makepossible the process of capitalist accumulation. Therein lies thesource of the current depression.The interminable process of therapy"recovery." But this will be impossible both because the colle,othre:.debt cannot be paid and because the planet cannot support a newphase of capitalist expansion. The economy of growth is itselfpoison. It cannot be the antidote.Over the last ten years, the French anthropologist SergeLatouche has been talking of dicroissance (Degrowth) as a politicalgoal. But now dicroissance is simply a fact: when the GrossNational Product is falling everywhere, entire sections of theindustrial system are crumbling and demand is plummeting, wecan say that degrowth is no longet a program for the future.Degrowth is here.The problem is that social culture is not ready for this, becauseOur social organization is based on the idea of the interminableexpansion of consumption, and the modern soul has been shapedby the concept of privatization and by the affects of an unendingincrease in consumption.The very notion of wealth has to be reconsidered: not only theconcept of wealth, but the perception of being rich. The identificationof wealth with purchasing power is deeply embedded in thesocial psyche and affectivity. But a different understanding of wealthWe should not expect a swift change in the social landscape, butrather the slow surfacing of new trends: communities will abandonthe field of the crumbling economy; more and more individuals willabandon their job searches and will start creating extra-economicnetworks of survival.The very perception of well being and of being rich will changein the direction of frugaliry and freedom.The de-privatization of services and goods will be made possibleby this much-needed cultural revolution. This will nothappen in a planned and uniform manner. It will be the effect ofthe withdrawal of Singular individuals and communities and ofthe creation of an economy based on the sharing of commonthings and services and on the liberation of time for culture, pleasureand affection.The identification of well-being with private property is sodeeply rooted that we cannot absolutely rule out the eventuality ofa barbarization of the human environment. But the task of thegeneral intellect is precisely this: to escape from paranoia, to createzones of human resistance, to experiment with autonomous forms218 ! The Sou) at WorkConclusion / 219

of production based on high-tech/low-energy models, topellate the people with a language that is more therapeutic thanpolitical.In the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and thesame. The people will feel hopeless and depressed and panicked,because they can't deal with the post-growth economy and theywill miss our dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will beto attend to these people and to rake care of their trauma shOWingthem the way to pursue the happy adaptation at hand. Our taskwill be the creation of social zones of human resistance, zones oftherapeutic contagion. Capitalism will not disappear from theglobal landscape, but it will lose its pervasive, paradigmatic role inour semiorization, it will become one of possible form of socialorganization. Communism will never be the principle of a newtotalization, but one of the possible forms of auronomy fromcapitalist rule.In the 1960s, Castoriadis and his friends published a magazinewhose title was: Socialism or Barbarism.Bur you will recall that in Rhizome, the introduction to A ThousandPlateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the disjunction(or. .. or. .. or) is precisely the dominant mode of Western Metaphysicsthat we are trying to forget. They oppose this disjunctivemodel with a conjunctive approach:logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations,nullifY endings and beginnings.'"The process of autonomy should not be seen as Aufhebung, but asTherapy. In this sense, it is neither totalizing and nor it is intendedto destroy and abolish the past.In a letter to his master, Sigmund Freud, the young psychoanalystFliess asked when it is possible to consider a therapy to be over andthe patient be told, "you are ok." Freud answered that the psychoanalysishas reached its goal when the person understands thattherapy is an interminable process.Autonomy is also a process without end."A rhizome has no beginning or end, bur it is always a middle,between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation,bur the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposesthe verb 'to be: but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction,'and ... and ... and ...' This conjunction carries enoughforce to shake and uproOt the verb 'to be' [... J to establish a220 ! The Soul at WorkConclusion I 221

223NotesIntroduction1. The Philosophy ofEpicurus, tra.nslated by Gorge K. Strodach, Evanston: NorthwesternUniversity Press (1963), pp. 128-129.1. Labor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 196051. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach in Karl Marx, (with Friederich Engels), The GermanIdeology, Prometheus Books: New Yotk, (1998), p. 574.2. Jean-Paul Sartre, ''A Plea for Intellectuals," translated by John Matthews, inBetween Existentialism and Marxism, New York: Pantheon, (1974), pp. 228-231.3. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse Edited and Translated by David Me LeHan, NewYotk: Hatper Totchbooks, (1972), p. 143.4. http://www .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 18441 manuscripts/labour.hrm.5. Ibid.6. Ibid.7. Hegel and the Human Spirit: a Translation of the lena Lectures on the Philosophy ofSp irit (1805-1806) with commentary by Leo Rauch, Detroit: Wayne State UniversityPress, (1983), p. 120.8. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miler, OxfordUniversity Ptess (1977), p. 10.

9. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. A History.oj ,'h , .a,:kJ'itrt SCi,oo,1 and"" l'lStictute ofSocial Research 1923-1950, Toronto, Little Brown & Company, (1973), p10. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of SocialLondon, New Yo rk: Oxford University Press, (1941), p. 277.11. http://W.iVW.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manusCriptslIabour.htm.27. Ibid. pp. 70S-706.28. Ibid. pp. 142-143.29. See Gregory Bateson "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," in Steps to an Ecologyof Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, andEp istemology, Chicago: University Of Chicago Press (1972).12. Mario Tronti, Opemi e capitale, Torino: Einaudi (1973), p. 261; "TheAgainst Labor," RadicalAmerica, Vo lume 6, number 3 (May-June 1972), pp.30. Hans ]i.irgen Krahl, Ko nstitution und Klassenkampf, Frankfurt: Neue Kritik,(1971).13. Luciano Gallina, No ta a L'uomo a una dimensione, To rino: Einaudi, (1967), 'po262, English version by the translator.31. Hans Jurgen Krahl, Konstitution und Klassenkampf, op . cit., p. 357, translatedby Giuseppina Mecchia, cfr. Franco Berardi (Bifo), "Technology and Knowledge ina Universe ofindetermination," SubStance, #112, Vol 36, no. 1, 2007.14. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man; Studies in the Ideology ofAdvancedIndustrial Society, Boston: Beacon Press (1966), p. 1.32. Ibid. p, 36S.IS. Ibid. pp. 31-32.33. Ibid. p. 36S.16. Louis Althusser [and] Etienne Balibar, Reading "Capital" translated [from theFrench] by Ben Brewster, London, NLB, (1 977), p. 17.17. Ibid. p. 34.18. Ibid. pp. 24-26.34. Ibid. p. 367.35. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man; Studies in the Ideology ofAdvancedIn dustrial Society, op. cit., pp. 86-87. Marcuse is quoting (cfr. footnotes 4 and5) Stanley Gerr, "Language and Science," in Philosophy of Science, April 1942,p. 156.19. Ibid. p. 34.36. Ibid. p. 123.20. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, op. cit., pp. 100-101.37. Ibid. p. lS9.21. Ibid., p. 104.38. Ibid. pp. 168-169.22. Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, translated by BenFowkes, London, Penguin, (1976), p. 128.23. Ibid. p. 166.2. The Soul at Wo rk1. Alain Ehrenberg. La fatigue d'erre soi: dipression et sociiti, Paris: Editions OdileJacob, (1998), p. la, English version by the translator.24. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, op. cit. p. 693.2. Ibid., p. 18, English version by the translator.2S. Ibid. pp. 693-694.26. Ibid. p. 701.Notes ! 225

Notes / 2273. The Poisoned Soul1. Robin, Leon, Greek Thought and the On'gins 0/ the Scientific Spirit, translatedfrom the new revised and corrected French edition by M. R. Dobie, New Yo rk:Russell & Russell, (1%7), p. 113.2. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, translated by PaulBrains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, (1995), p. 83.3. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, What is Philosoplry?Translated by Hugh To mlinsonand Graham Burchell. New Yo rk: Columbia University Press, (1994), p. 208.4. Unpublished in English. Selected essays from Psychanalyse et transversalit! (1972)and La revolution moUculaire (1977) have been published in Felix Guattari, MolecularRevolution: Psychiatry and Politics, translated by Rosemary Sheed, New York:Penguin, (1984).5. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, op. cit, p. 135.6. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, op. cit., p. 201.7. Ibid. p. 201.8. Ibid. pp. 213-214.9. Ibid. p. 203.10. Ibid. pp. 204-205.11. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, an Ethico-Aesthetic Pa radigm, op. cit, pp. 112-113.12. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, op. cit., p. 205.13. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, op. cit, pp. 10-1 1.Townsend, Wash: Bay Press, (1983), p. 126. Baudrillard refers here to his firstbook: Le Systeme des objects, Paris: Gallimard, (1%8).17. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, translated by Chris Turner, Cambridge:Polity Press (1994), p. 15.18. Jean Baudrillard, America, LondonNew Yo rk: Verso (1989), p. 29.19. Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, in Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault & ForgetBaudri/lard: an Interview with Sylvere Lotringer, New York, Semiotext(e),(1987), p. 17.20. Ibid. pp. 17-19.21. "Run comrade, (he old world Is behind you."22. Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, in Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault & ForgetBaudrillard: an interview with Sylvere Lotringer, op. cit., p. 25.23. Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow ofthe Silent Majorities, or, The End ofthe Social,and Other Essays, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston, NewYo rk: Semiorext(e) , (1983), p. 44.24. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion ofthe End, op. cit., p. 17.25. Jean BaudriHard, In the Shadow o/the Silent Majorities, or, The End ofthe Social,and Other Essays, op. cit., p. 46.26. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, translated by MartinJoughin, New York Zone Books, (1990), p. 28.27. Ibid. pp. 119-120.28. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattarl, What is Philosophy?, op. cit., p. 201.14. Ibid. p. 18.15. Roland Banhes, Empire o/Signs, translated by Richard Howard, New Yo rk: Hilland Wang, (1982), pp. 27-28.16. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy a/ Communication, translated by John Johnson, inThe Anti-Aesthetic, Essays in Post-Modern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, Port29. Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow 0/the Silent Majorities, or, The end ofthe Social,and Other Essays, op. cit., pp. 60-61.30, Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, translated by lain HamiltonGram, with an introduction by Mike Gane, London: Sage, (1993), p. 4.31. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, op. cit., p. 1.

32. Ibid. p. 19.33. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, op. cit., p.69.34. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, translated b ChriTurner. London, New York: Verso (2003), pp. 3-4.35. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents'translated from th e G ermanan d e d' !ted by James Strachey, New Yotk: w.w. Norton, (1962), p. 44,36. Ibid. p. 60.Ys7. Bill Gates with Collins Hemingway, Business @ the speed ofthought: using a digitalnervous system, New York, NY: Warner Books, (1999), pp. 23-38.8. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity ofMan and Other "WOrks, translated by Charles Glenn Wallis, with an introduction by Paul J.W Miller,Indianapolis: Bobbs-Metrill (1965), pp. 4-5.9. Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in ld. Basic Writings from Being andTime (1927) to The task of thinking (1964), with general introduction and introductionsto each selection by David Farrell Krell, New York: Harper & Row,(1977), p. 207.37. Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence ofEvil or the Lucidity Pact, translated by ChrisTurner, Oxford, New Yo rk : Berg, (2005), p. 27.38. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, op. cit., p. 201.10. Ibid., pp. 238-239.11. Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Tr ack, edited and translated by Julian Yo ungand Kenneth Haynes, New York: Cambridge University Press (2002), p. 71.39. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology o/Mind, New York: Ballantine (1972)p. 205.40. Ibid.41. Richard Robin, "Learner-based listening and technological authenticity" inLanguage Learning & Technology, vol. 11, nO 1, February, (2007), pp. 109-1 15.4. The Precarious Soul'Conclusion1. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, op. cit., p. 201.2. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, op. cit., p. 6.3. Ibid. pp. 6-7.4. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi.London and New Yo rk: Conrinuum, (2004), p. 25.1, Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, op. cit., p. 2.2. Michel Foucault, 1926-1984, The Birth o/Biopolities: Lectures at the College deFrance, 1978-79, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell.Basingstoke [England], New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2008), p. 317.3. Ibid, pp. 241-242.4. Ibid. p. 247.5. Kevin Kelly, Out of control: The New Biology ofMachines, Social Systems and theEconomic World. Addison Wesley (1994), p. 1.6. Eugene Thacker: "Networks, Swatms, Multitudes," CTHEORY (May 2004).Notes ! 229