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

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