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

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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..
Page 1 and 2: THE SOUL AT WORKSEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIG
Page 3 and 4: PrefaceSoul on StrikeThe soul is th
Page 5 and 6: Instability is now the order of the
Page 7 and 8: dynamics of contemporary class anta
Page 9 and 10: Introduction"Those who maintain tha
Page 11: In this book I want to compare the
Page 16 and 17: contribution consists in the reform
Page 18 and 19: externalisation of the worker in hi
Page 20 and 21: matter that is important for us: th
Page 22 and 23: civilization. Only the estrangement
Page 24 and 25: political instruments of attack and
Page 26 and 27: To assert that knowledge needs to b
Page 28 and 29: LAhor and AlienAtion in the ohiloso
Page 30 and 31: production process itself; the rela
Page 32 and 33: capital semiotizes the technologica
Page 36 and 37: 2Digital technologies open a comple
Page 38 and 39: 78 1 The Soul at Worktheir labor to
Page 40 and 41: of relation to the world, time, and
Page 42 and 43: velocity in the relation between st
Page 44 and 45: The mobility of the product was mad
Page 46 and 47: First of all, digital technology sp
Page 48 and 49: Thf1 Soul at Work / 99inducing drug
Page 50 and 51: Collective panic generates phenomen
Page 52 and 53: 3The Poisoned SoulFrom incommunicab
Page 54 and 55: "globalization" and "virtuality" ca
Page 56 and 57: 11 ' nlll \1with ominous signals: i
Page 58 and 59: Desire is not a force but a field.
Page 60 and 61: order to give shape to an enunciati
Page 62 and 63: finds increasingly difficulr ro Con
Page 64 and 65: With the expression '(aesthetic par
Page 66 and 67: of public spaces in the digital rea
Page 68 and 69: Therefore the therapeutic question
Page 70 and 71: consists in the creation of dissipa
Page 72 and 73: 146/ The Soul at WorkThen the direc
Page 74 and 75: country provided with infinite ener
Page 76 and 77: Baudrillard antlc'pates this trend
Page 78 and 79: The Poisoned Soul 1 159grand Ration
Page 80 and 81: In those years Baudrillard talked a
Page 82 and 83: hierarchy (none of whom was immolat
Page 84 and 85:
Pathogenic alterityIn his film Pers
Page 86 and 87:
174 I The Soul at WorkThe Poisonee)
Page 88 and 89:
Thp. PnisnnAri Soul /179"The real i
Page 90 and 91:
"The peculiarity of the schizophren
Page 92 and 93:
force is legitimated as the only ef
Page 94 and 95:
The Precarious Soul / 1 91economic
Page 96 and 97:
This idea was largely popular in cy
Page 98 and 99:
Isn't technology a factor of incred
Page 100 and 101:
had belonged individually to each a
Page 102 and 103:
genesis of the present depressionco
Page 104 and 105:
form of war and tax reductions for
Page 106 and 107:
dogma we must absolutely get rid of
Page 108 and 109:
Now what?The economic collapse cann
Page 110 and 111:
223NotesIntroduction1. The Philosop
Page 112 and 113:
Notes / 2273. The Poisoned Soul1. R
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Franco ''Bifo'' Berardi - The Soul at Work From Alienation to Autonomy

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