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

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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
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 34 and 35: Labor and Alienation in the philoso
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 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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