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

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